Author: staceymeeker

Readers of these Chronicles know that I have often spoken about the victimary nature of the postmodern era. No doubt victimary tendencies were present from the outset. The birth of the human, according to GA’s originary hypothesis, was marked by a denial of the absolute nature of pecking-order hierarchy and the institution of fundamental reciprocal equality under a communal sacred authority. It is inherent in the human condition that any hint of another’s advantage arouses resentment, which is nothing other than the feeling of being a victim. That since WWII these resentful tendencies have become the dominant ones is nonetheless a radical historical change. From providing a correction to the self-enhancing nature of firstness they come to deny its legitimacy altogether.

It is not easy to explain to those of younger generations that in the pre-Holocaust era the victim’s role was typically stigmatized. Indeed, when the term “Holocaust” came into common usage in the 1970s, thirty years after the events, it marked the beginning of a new era in which victimhood acquired a privileged, not to say sacred status. Quite a contrast from the contemptuous description of the Jewish victims in the immediate postwar years as “going to their death without a fight like sheep led to slaughter,” etc.

Since that time, the persecutor-victim relation, always an essential element of Christianity and already of Judaism (remember the prophets’ tirades about the “widow and orphan”), has become the dominant paradigm in social relations, steadily winning each of its battles against the “normal,” at first, against open injustice and prejudice (Civil Rights), then against the presumed residues of past injustice and in favor of groups who for whatever reason do less well than others (Affirmative Action), then for marginal stigmatized groups even in the face of age-old and apparently biologically based custom (gay liberation and marriage). I used the term victimary thinking to refer to this trend. But a few months ago I was struck by the stronger term coined by Adam Katz: victimocracy. The 2008 election of our first—literally—African-American president (who had to be a Democrat—Colin Powell would not have produced this effect), also not coincidentally the most “academic” president since Woodrow Wilson, had been touted as ushering in a new post-racial era. Might this not signal the “millennial” overcoming of the victimary that I had erroneously seen as arriving in the wake of 9/11? But it now seems that this proof that the American public is less racially prejudiced than in the past must be seen less as a sign of the end of racism, than, ironically enough, a signal to the victimary world to step up its campaigns, not merely out of cynical calculation but with the intuition that this election was not a demonstration that American society no longer has victims but that now the victims are in charge.

Of course, if you will pardon the obvious pun, such matters are too complex to be understood in simple terms of black and white. But Adam’s blog makes a point worth pondering. The Obama administration would seem to mark an at least tentative tipping point where victimary tendencies whose more radical expressions had been confined to universities, journalism, and the media have become mainstream and have pushed the “old normal” into a defensive posture. The victims are no longer trying to “win a place at the table”; they have done away with the table. The erstwhile “majority” term “white male” has begun to bear a certain stigma, an extension of the one attached to “dead white males” in the university setting. The decline of Europe and the withdrawal of the US from a self-confidently dominant position in world affairs are both cause and effect of this development, one that Obama’s foreign policy very much reflects, but they are only corollaries of the key event of the last half of the 20^th century.

Crucial is the failure of a great historical experiment: the fall of the Soviet Union gave the civilized world convincing proof that we can no longer look forward to “socialism” in any form to resolve the “contradictions” of “capitalism” and restore in utopian terms our originary equality. But to acknowledge that we are not working toward a final egalitarian paradise, that we have come to the end of eschatology (which is really the point of Francis Fukuyama’s oft-misunderstood thesis), is to accept that victims will always be with us. This allows historical victimology to evolve into post-historical, anthropological victimocracy.

The basis of post-Holocaust victimary thought had first appeared to be that domination on the Nazi-Jew model must be abolished as the mark of the oppressor, leaving only a “Rawlsian” residue of authority that is beneficial to the society as a whole. But if domination can never be abolished, then it must be controlled, morally, culturally, and to the maximum extent politically (if not fully economically) by the victims themselves and their agents. In victimocracy, domination by and/or for victims will always remain necessary. This is no longer simple reversal, using coercion punctually to right some wrong—as Affirmative Action was supposed to do. Now the coercion is exercised on a quasi-permanent basis by those whose power comes from their ability to designate themselves and/or their allies as victims, and whose status depends on being able to condemn and punish, but never of course to end, victimage.

As day to day relationships between “minorities” and the majority population have generally improved (and Obama’s election has certainly contributed to this), the political class and victimary ideologues continue to complain of racism and oppression. The society’s institutions are increasingly focused on the victimary as the dominant moral priority. Objective criteria that respect the principle of firstness (meritocracy, competence, the work ethic) are rejected as biased if their application shows “disparate impact” on identifiable victim groups. Whole areas of scholarship such as “critical race theory” have grown up to track “micro-aggressions” and other non-obvious traces of victimization that must be demonstrated to permit continuation of the moral and material privileges of victimary status. In a world where we no longer expect moral reciprocity to be ever achieved, the victim’s role is that of a non-agent whom the agent’s firstness necessarily exploits and injures unless his actions are uniquely geared to promoting the victim’s interests.

The term “minority” has become a code word for the favorable moral status accorded to those recognized as victims and by extension, those whose efforts are devoted to them. There is no incentive to join the “majority” or “mainstream” when this involves not merely loss of affirmative action-like privileges (which may be considerable) but of the immense prestige of moral innocence. If human firstness is fundamentally evil, then there is a considerable premium on being able to describe oneself as its passive victim; such persons are alone of moral value, and are encouraged to consider themselves entitled to whatever compensation can be given them.

Inequality will always be with us, hence it will always have to be denounced, and its “Rawlsian” justification as making everyone better off, although implicit in the “social contract,” becomes less salient than the denunciation that perpetuates, sincerely or hypocritically, its bad conscience. That this denunciation goes hand in hand with an outrageous culture of bling, of billionaires buying up real estate, even governing major cities (Bloomberg) and countries (Berlusconi), merely adds a demonstration, so far from everyday life as to generate less rather than more resentment, of the eternal necessity of inequality and hence of the victimary. Victimocracy as a worldly religion has taken over from Hegel’s old idea of religion as the “inverted world” in which worldly injustices are resolved. In the absence of an apocalyptic ideology such as Marxism (or Islamism, for that matter, which may perhaps best be understood as the only militant eschatology remaining as a rival to more sophisticated, “civilized” victimocracy), maintaining the salience and legitimacy of victimary resentment can begin to be understood as the reflection of a permanent human condition.

To give an example close to home of a benign but real form of victimocracy: a few years ago the UCLA French department hired a prominent scholar of French literature outside of France (Francophonie) to both chair the department and develop a specialty that had been neglected and unstaffed for several years. She brought in a second specialist, the field expanded, and now we have 4.5 specialists in Francophone literature out of 12 faculty (there are no more than 2 in any other specialty). More significantly, 75% or more of our entering graduate students choose Francophone literature as their specialty; postcolonial studies have a cachet (and a presumed advantage in the job market) that is rivaled only by other victim-oriented studies such as that of gender. Rare is the student who, as was universal up to fifteen or twenty years ago, enters the department because she (occasionally, he) is interested in a particular “century” of French literature. It is striking, and I think exemplary in an increasingly victimocratic world, how quickly la Francophonie, which is objectively a modest component of a millennium-old transnational literature, went from being respected as a field worthy of interest in itself to a hegemonic domain that has largely reduced the others to ancillary status. Similar (although generally less radical) developments have transformed other formerly “Eurocentric” departments—and those that cannot do so (such as our local Germanic department) risk being decimated.

Another Chronicle would be required to do justice to the extension of victimocracy to the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Many environmentalists dogmatically oppose the use of fossil fuels and any form of “development.” The logic behind such beliefs, leaving aside the undecided question of “global warming” (now referred to euphemistically as “climate change”), is that we must not make irreversible changes in the environment however far off their effects might be. The planet and “Nature” as a whole present a permanent victimary obstacle to human activity. In principle human inequalities had been justified by the principle of firstness: that hierarchical superiority leads to an ultimate sharing of the advantages it procures, the model of reciprocal exchange being always the ultimate basis of human morality. The human model is one of indefinite advance, although not necessarily of visible “progress.” The victimary model, in contrast, sees all action as ultimately zero-sum: exploitation and domination. In this perspective, for which the only moral actions are those that undo previous actions, the exploitation of nature, as exemplified by the extraction of energy from the earth, is the very model of evil, since however much of the natural resource there remains, what has been extracted can never be returned. If the 1970s were haunted by the Club of Rome’s apocalyptic—and wildly inaccurate—predictions of early resource exhaustion, today it is the principle that matters. It sometimes even seems that the humanity-nature paradigm, where agency is unproblematically on one side only and the “victim” is wholly passive and innocent, has replaced the Nazi-Jew paradigm of the earlier phase of the postmodern. The Jews were agents deprived of agency; victims today tend to be assimilated to nature, or to small children, as though they lack (mature) agency altogether.

Today the extraction of the energy needed to run the economy is increasingly stigmatized and restricted in the “blue” parts of the country, leaving “red” states such as North Dakota to profit from the great energy boom recently made available to the US by fracking. This gives partial confirmation to what I understand to be Adam’s thinking on the matter: that the victimary cannot be overcome on its own terrain, which is now increasingly that of all “official” discourse, and that only withdrawal into local, more or less autonomous (if not autarkic) communities can permit the continued flourishing of the economic and technical activities that maintain modern prosperity. North Dakota would be in this perspective a living example; presumably those engaged in mining are not overly concerned with victimary niceties.

Yet such largely male communities are not complete social orders either. Can the emergence of “pockets of resistance” to victimary values be a significant source of renewal? Victimocracy still “works,” after all, otherwise we could not continue implementing it. Can anything less than a catastrophe force the US and the “West” to defend the superiority of its values—or demonstrate to its detriment that this superiority is no longer real?

A powerful argument in favor of affirmative action is that most jobs can be done more or less satisfactorily by people far from the most competent or highly qualified. The question is how much relative inefficiency a society can tolerate for the sake of maintaining its victimary focus. Is the decline of whole areas of the humanities a permanent damage to civilization? or does it just signify an ironically indirect return to the old standard, where a small educated elite have a deep knowledge of the “classics,” however defined, and the mass, who used to be frankly illiterate but who now attend on the average “some college,” acquire a smattering of “classical” and somewhat more victimary knowledge about literature and the arts. Only History, in deciding among our various social experiments, can provide, not always at the pace we would like, practical answers to such questions.

My final point may seem in partial contradiction to what proceeds, but the central ethical principle of GA as a “scenic” anthropology (as distinct from its theory of morality) is that in theoretical reflection we should have more confidence in the collective human scene than in our personal version of it. Morality is one, but if everyone’s morality derives from the same source, there can be no self-justifying moral positions. Victimocracy involves a great deal of nonsense, but as Voltaireans are happy to tell us, all religions and comparable belief systems contain similar irrationalities, which reflect the contrast between the urgency of establishing collective standards and the impossibility of determining to general satisfaction the “best” standard (a phenomenon well known to users of keyboards and Microsoft Word).

The victimary denies the virtues of human firstness, in its extreme forms denies even the moral value of the existence of humanity, the scourge of Gaia. And yet we still have Art, in an undiminished variety of forms. Our attempt to persuade others of what our esthetic sense tells us is beautiful drives creativity in all the arts, from the most vulgar to the most sublime. Popular culture thrives on victimary works, a still-popular archetype for which is the 19th century melodrama where the invincible hero defends widow, orphan, and (pretty) maiden from the depredations of the mustachioed villain (who today usually works for a “corporation”). But, outside of the airy and already strangely archaic pronouncements of “French theory” about such things as the “scriptable” text, is there truly a victimary esthetic?

Art cannot exist without the affirmation of its firstness, its unique local superiority to other claims on our attention. The humblest YouTube video and Instagram photograph pay homage to the principle of firstness, which is inherent in art because it is inherent in the scenic nature of human shared attention and the culture that emerged from it. Once we remind ourselves of the constancy of the human throughout its various avatars, we can allow ourselves the faith that victimocracy is not a simple denial of human creativity but ultimately a means, however apparently perverse, of stimulating it. We can only hope that its excesses do not provoke one of those catastrophes that have so often ended the great cultural enterprises of the past.

There is a time in life, which one might call “retirement,” when one is no longer willing or able to maintain one’s commitment to a “profession,” however defined, so that one can no longer communicate responsibly with the other members of that profession, and must consequently withdraw at least partially from the scene and limit oneself to such retrospective activities as writing memoirs or offering “quaint” reactions to the modern world from one who (like my old friend S) never learned to use a computer, or (like me) finds the very idea of “social media” an abomination.

I’m not sure if I’ve reached the retirement stage on all fronts, but I will admit that one aspect of GA is designed to limit the need for “professional” updating, not just for me personally, but for culture as a whole. A culture, or as Durkheim called it, a “society,” needs to have a sense of itself that does not depend on the latest discovery of the neurology lab. Does a society need an anthropological theory? Well, yes, in the sense that we must have some ideas in common about what we have become uncomfortable calling “human nature.” Because of the way professions operate in our culture, we expect that the “experts” on neurology, evolution, and related “life sciences” will provide new ideas about how our neurons and the rest function, and that it is exclusively in the development of these ideas that our fundamental self-understanding will be modified. Thus our background anthropology (BA) is designed to accommodate what might be called the Scientific American world of discovery in this area, just as it does, non-controversially, that of the discoveries of physics and chemistry and astronomy. The problem that GA poses is that it does not accept BA, in which it sees a systematic distortion of our self-understanding. The fact that all the “expert” discoveries of the past decades have only confirmed GA’s fundamental intuition: that the human is qualitatively different from other species, who can’t “learn language” in any meaningful sense, while their own “languages” are signal systems incomparable to human language, suggests at the very least that there is more to GA than BA seems to think.

In my talk at the forthcoming GASC, I will take up a recent attempt by a philosopher to rethink some of these questions, which I call anthropological but which he situates in the traditional metaphysical categories of “cognition” and “value.” In this Chronicle I would like to focus on the heart of my argument, which is not really new but which, before being at a stage of my career where I was obliged to think of “retirement,” I had not previously put in such sharp terms. And one might say that the sharpness of terms, when one is attempting to propose a “new way of thinking,” is of considerable importance.

One of the fundamental tenets (if such a word isn’t too rigorous in this context) of BA is the so-called mind-body (sometimes mind-brain) distinction: that there is something called “consciousness” that is different from material reality and that is therefore the basis of an informal dualism that “professional philosophers” argue about more rigorously, to wit, as to whether this naive dualism is “real” (dualism) or can through unspecified “scientific” operations be reduced to a single category (monism), generally speaking the material (materialism). The now all-but-forgotten Marxist “dialectical materialism” reflected the late-19th century atmosphere in which Marx operated, when Hippolyte Taine was famous for the phrase Le vice et la vertu sont des produits comme le vitriol et le sucre [Vice and virtue are products like sulfuric acid and sugar.] In reaction to this was born “phenomenology,” which tried to avoid the mind-body dichotomy by just talking about the “contents” (phenomena) of the mind.

Where does GA stand with respect to the mind-body dichotomy? As an old Girardian—as I get older I feel less and less obligation to distance myself from my teacher; history will measure our respective contributions, but as it progresses it seems to me that our branch of thinking is ever less “mainstream,” and that one important function of GA is to keep the “other” Girardians aware of the danger of backsliding into BA and its banalities—I have always had a healthy skepticism about the relevance of “philosophical” distinctions. But one can’t simply ignore them. Here then is a “sharper” statement of what I think GA’s position on the mind-body problem should be: that there isn’t one, that the real dichotomy is elsewhere, where I have for thirty years said it was, not between “mind” and “body” but between the world and language, or more broadly, representation.

Let me put this more provocatively. I see no reason to deny that animals have “consciousness.” Nor is it necessary to insist that animal consciousness lacks “qualia” or that it either does or does not differ essentially from the recursivity found in robots. But I see no problem in animal consciousness, any more than in the origin of life, for the usual Darwinian explanation of how it evolved. There is no mystery, and if Darwinian evolution is somehow inadequate to explain it (although I fail to see how it can be challenged without any semblance of a testable theory to oppose to it; and please don’t talk to me about “intelligent design”!), then it is not especially inadequate for “consciousness” as opposed to any other characteristic of living beings. If “qualia” is the problem, then any creature with some kind of brain poses a problem. How does an amoeba feel when you prick it? What is the quality of its pain? How does an earthworm feel pleasure? We find life too short to reflect on such questions. The only qualia that are of real interest to us are human qualia. And why, pray tell, is this? Might it not be because we, unlike our animal friends, have language, which is to say, we can talk about qualia?

Philosophers-metaphysicians deal with all such matters in terms of a human atomism where the only interaction of importance starts with a single human mind, who may then be forced to recognize “other minds,” but who is never theorized as once upon a time having been obliged to get together with these “other minds,” even before they were “minds” in the human sense, in a hypothesis about how they began to communicate via representations. If, instead, these philosophers accepted a form of originary hypothesis then… they would no longer be philosophers, that is, metaphysicians for whom language is an unproblematic given, but (generative) anthropologists. But no doubt it is a good thing that there not be too many generative anthropologists in the world.

All the problems associated with “consciousness” are reflections of the human propensity to use representations. But not because representations are a sign of the need for a new theory of cosmic evolution to replace Darwin’s, whose inadequacy to “explain” the human I have been talking about for some time without ever suggesting that we need to redo cosmology to allow for the possibility of “thinking beings” or whatever we are supposed to be. Good old Darwinian evolution is all we need, so long as we take into account that the human emerges in a different way from biological characteristics, and that there is no sense in seeking in mutations, as incredibly enough some philosophers still seem to do, the explanation of the origin of language (“Johnny has the language gene! He can talk! But the only other person around here with the gene is a girl in the next village, so we’re arranging for them to marry…”).

It is amazing both how easily the originary hypothesis simplifies these questions and how reluctant the BA-philosophizing world is to entertain it as a possibility. “Consciousness” is part of culture, but only at the level where we can communicate via shared representations, which are not first of all about the world, but about sharing sacred interdictions that prevent us from killing each other. But in the same way that we can share our sense of the object’s significance/desirability/danger/holiness, we can share information about it, situating it on the “other scene” of the declarative sentence or proposition. Here the philosopher feels at home; we are engaged in cognitive activity, and, as they say, about the rest we, or they, should shut up. Wittgenstein was indeed more aware than his successors of the limits of metaphysics, which he tested with his—essentially imperative—word-games, but he would never have thought to situate such games in a hypothetical history of human emergence.

But although we easily communicate about “objective” qualities, we cannot communicate “subjective” ones, and this leads to much agonizing over the “private” nature of consciousness. All it means, it seems to me, is that we are able to communicate “socially valuable” information, which consequently appears “objective” and independent of our internal scene of representation. “The cat is on the mat” is part of the world’s state of affairs, and its reproduction on our internal scene and in language seems therefore unproblematic. But when it comes to “qualia,” we have sensations that we discover we cannot communicate using language, since saying “I see red,” or “I feel pain” conveys no information to the hearer about the quality of these experiences. I want to somehow tell you how it feels to see red; I might try some kind of synesthesia: red is like the sound of a trumpet, or the smell of… God knows what. But clearly that just leads to infinite regress. Ergo, I declare that my “qualia” of seeing red or feeling pain are irreducible to the material reality of my nerve endings, which are in my body, whereas my mind, etc., etc.

But this “private” area of consciousness that seems so precious is obviously an artifact of language. Animals have internal scenes of a kind, but they do not permit of representation and therefore cannot lead to a prise de conscience of the existence of consciousness. Or in other words, you only know you’re conscious because your possession of language makes you aware of being aware of sensations that are not exhausted by the words that designate them, whether it be the sensations of pain, of perception, of pleasure… We realize we can talk about them and communicate them by analogy to others, but that their “personal” or “subjective” content cannot be transmitted by language—although the attempt to convey my “qualia” may inspire poetry, music, even, who knows, mathematics. It is this awareness that gives us the sense that our qualia are something other than “material” reality, although the very scene of consciousness is a derivative of the human scene. Animals are “conscious,” but they are not conscious that they’re conscious, since that would require them to represent their consciousness, that is, to have the equivalent of human language. Which, as GA has always known, they do not.

We may think of the scene of consciousness, which today is perhaps more easily figured as the screen of consciousness, as a means of combining one’s perceptions and knowledge of one’s environment in order to more efficiently make decisions about it necessary to life, or we might say, conducive to reproductive fitness. The problem of whether robots can be made/taught to “think” like humans is a deep one, and I am not ready to say that the robotic simulation of human thought is inconceivable, but as a believer in the necessity of an originary hypothesis, my point is that robots, lacking humanity’s originary scene, cannot “think like humans” unless they can acquire a history similar to that of humans. But I see no problem whatever with robots “thinking like animals,” which in many ways they do already.

The current debate about whether such things as “qualia” and “values” cast doubt on the materialist genesis of life and humanity only demonstrates the extraordinary poverty of “philosophical” thought in our era, a proposition I intend to defend more concretely in June. In my view, the specific nature of human genesis and development involves no contradiction with Darwinian evolution, merely an understanding that the human and its scene-event configuration is simply of a different nature, either an “emergent” one, or if you prefer, one that demonstrates the existence of a sacred coexistent with the human, whether transcendent or immanent but in any case constituent.

The point is not, as some on the “right” would like to think, that the weakness of the materialist Darwinian approach to human genesis “supports” the existence of God, any more than it supports creationism or intelligent design. These “God-of-the-gaps” arguments are pathetic. The “existence of God” in the mouths and minds of the philosophers is as impoverished a concept as that of the elephant that isn’t standing by the door or the collection of rabbit parts, far less rich than that of the cat on the mat. Once one realizes that the human can only come into existence not through genetic mutation but as a communal phenomenon, then one understands that such a thing as “values,” which Kant understood as essentially linked to human interaction, cannot even begin to be understood by the “introspection” of such ideas as, “Causing pain to a sentient being is wrong in itself…” One may well have such convictions, and I am the last to tell people to abandon them. But to make such introspection the basis of a “philosophical” discussion is a demonstration of the decline of this great enterprise since the pre-Socratics first thought of it as a discovery procedure for solutions to the ethical problems of the polis. If I have a conviction that something is wrong, and especially if I am not willing to “materialize” it by reducing it in terms of evolutionary psychology to an “adaptive” certitude that will somehow make my DNA more likely to survive, then I should be asking where such a conviction comes from, and how it is related to the fact that we express it in language and that creatures without language are unable to express such convictions.

Of course if “language” is just a convenient shorthand to use in “expressing” our inner truth-convictions that otherwise exist independently of language, then there’s no need to meditate on the curious fact that language and morality go together. Durkheim never quite says this, nor Girard either, but I submit that it is strongly implicit in their understanding of the human social order, and that GA’s distillation of this relationship in the originary hypothesis is the natural conclusion of the process.

And if the universe must indeed contain something other than matter/energy to give rise to my qualia and my values, why not remark on the fact that, yes, the universe does contain things other than matter: they are called signs. A bird can “see red,” but only humans can say, “red.” This is the new category of being that the universe has to be able to generate. But it seems to me that the originary hypothesis does that job quite simply, and although it no doubt presupposes that the universe from the beginning had the potential to generate signs, I fail to see in what sense this is a useful subject for speculation. I am a greater admirer than most of the difference between humans and the rest of the universe, but I’m not so infatuated that I think that the invention of the sign cannot be explained from within the world that already generated life. It is in my mind a terrible violation of parsimony to retrodict the capacity for language (“mind”) all the way back to the big bang, any more than the capacity for producing Justin Bieber.

And with that, I rest my case. See you in June!

Although the details are still being worked out, I am currently in the process of retiring from UCLA. This does not mean the end of my intellectual activity; in fact I have never published so much (five books since 2007, not counting a good deal of “creative writing”). But it is a sign that I’m getting on, and now that I have in principle taught my last courses at UCLA, this seems a good moment to take stock of the situation and to offer some words of encouragement to those who share my faith in the not-always-realized potential of GA.

As I have pointed out recently in A New Way of Thinking (Davies Group, 2011) and The Girardian Origins of GA (Imitatio, 2012), GA does not pretend to be an empirical science; its central originary hypothesis is explicitly humanistic rather than natural-scientific. The forthcoming GASC, to be held at UCLA in June, will have as its theme “Putting the Human back in the Humanities.” To defend GA is perforce to address this crucial issue.

The substance of GA’s claim of minimalism is that it offers a more parsimonious way of understanding the human and its unity than empirical natural science, yet does not require the credo quia absurdum of religion. The originary hypothesis has the advantage of putting at the base of the human the scenic nature of human culture and of the forms of representation, language in the first place, that depend on it. Just as the scene postulates a configurational discontinuity irreducible to its components and their local interactions, so does its historical emergence require a temporal discontinuity that reflects the non-gradual emergence of the human in an event. Events are not reducible to the happenings of either the purely physical “natural” world or the pre-human life world. Scene and event are inseparable; things that happen on scenes are events, and events happen only on scenes (which by no means denies the possible complexity of the individual instantiations of either term). Because of its necessarily interactive nature, the existence of a scenic event is not empirically verifiable through “factual” measurements of its constituents. It can only be grasped by an intuition of the whole as, essentially, a human phenomenon. It is this I mean when I call ours a humanistic hypothesis.

All religions embody in some form the scenic-evenemential intuition that is the basis of GA. But the Judeo-Christian tradition (at least) eventually engenders an “Enlightenment” that rejects in the name of humanism and science all intuitions (“revelations”) that cannot be instantiated empirically. Yet as I showed in The Scenic Imagination, Enlightenment thinkers from Hobbes to John Rawls have continued to think in (hypothetical rather than religio-dogmatic) scenic terms. These thinkers have formulated, as does GA, scenic hypotheses such as the “social contract” for human society and humanity itself. Such hypotheses construct an unprovable but “heuristic” hypothesis, as opposed both to the abstraction of philosophical first principles and the in medias res of the social sciences. The specific difference of GA is that its hypothetical scenario is not conceived as a fictional “thought experiment” but a first principle of anthropological thought. That is, the originary hypothesis is a hypothetical event that one must nevertheless consider as actually having taken place, or to put it more parsimoniously, whose non-reality we must never rely on. This is what makes GA indeed a “new way of thinking,” heir to, but not reducible to, the “social contract” theories to which Girard, for one, would like to reduce it. The roots of the hypothesis may be traced both through Girard to Durkheim’s “sociological” sacred-concept as well as to Derrida’s post-Nietzschean critique of phenomenological immediacy.

GA’s insistence on the reality of its hypothetical event hits a raw nerve, seeming to many an essentially religious gesture, which only means that religion still understands the human better than either natural science or “enlightened” philosophy. For without event-temporality, one has no way of understanding the scenic nature of the human. The social scientist, whether or not he sees scenes, has no category of human ontology into which to put them; they are at best the terrain for the activities of an Erving Goffman or a Harold Garfinkel, who examine the scenic as an occasional component of the human rather than its universal foundation.

My friends, I am getting on. If you are persuaded by the scenic-evenemential originary hypothesis, it will be up to you, and in not so many years, to you alone, to spread its “gospel” to the world. The heuristic advantage of scenic thinking is that it is intuitively simple. To the extent that my own speculations in this domain are useful, it is not as products of my individual “genius,” but because they display a theoretically backed confidence in the scenic imagination that we all share. To think about the phenomena of human culture in terms of an originary scenario sharpens the mind. As I have claimed, and I see no reason to retract this claim, we can and in principle must be able to situate in our hypothetical scene of origin all the essential characteristics of the human: ethics, art, religion, and of course, language.

The originary hypothesis may be “new,” but it is not obscure or difficult; on the contrary, it suffices to open oneself to it to find it intuitively obvious. No doubt the ease with which we adopt it suggests to professional philosophers that it is trivial and absurd, but that should tell us that it is functionally true. What indeed do “professional” philosophers offer to replace the originary hypothesis? In dealing with language and “mind” they always begin from abstract “principles,” never facing up to the necessity that the scenic be born on a scene, that the event be born in an event. As second-generation Girardians, we should accept Girard’s most central intuition; that we can know human reality, that the fundamental intuitions it provides us need be treated with caution but not with unreasoning suspicion. At the same time, we should recognize (as Andrew McKenna has noted) that the “deconstructive” impulse to defer the violence of the scenic is motivated by the same considerations as our hypothesis. Our greater “violence” than Derrida et cie. in conceiving the reality of the scene reflects our sharper, more concrete understanding of deferral in its relation to real human violence and its fundamental place in language and all forms of representation.

My recent Chronicles on Baudelaire are small samples of the kind of analysis that can be done in specific cultural domains, as are, on a larger scale, virtually all the scholarly articles we publish in Anthropoetics. Today the audience for (sometimes over-) subtle deconstructions of the cultural has all but disappeared, and the victimary is no longer sought in textual nuances but in overt revelations and denunciations of oppression. Thus the criterion of the human is reduced in a far less nuanced manner than in early postmodernism to the imposition of victimage; the humanizing passage from immanence to transcendence, from the “horizontal” to the “vertical,” is caricatured as the imposition of the tyranny of “culture” on the innocent non-hierarchy of “nature.” Whence the need is all the greater for a universal anthropology that respects the indispensable virtues of human firstness while acknowledging the resentment it generates.

We can say that the greatness of a “humanist” creation, whether a text, a body of work by an author or composer, a painting, or a work of philosophy, is a measure of how powerfully and critically it realizes the human scenic imagination in embodying an articulated vision of the scene of culture and of the interplay between its horizontal-appetitive and transcendental-representational components.

As for Baudelaire, whose poetic genius is as graspable today as it was in his own time, few artists have had a clearer sense of the “artificiality” of the cultural, not in the decadent Oscar Wilde sense (to which Baudelaire nonetheless contributed the founding impetus and into which he often, ironically, allowed himself to descend) but as our central cultural intuition: that the world of signs exists to redeem—to preserve from violence—the appetitive one, which human mimesis makes incapable of surviving on its own.

A simple aside from Baudelaire’s late fragmentary autobiographical work Mon coeur mis à nu (My Heart Laid Open, lit. “made naked”) reveals a sensitivity to the form-content sign-world distinction one seeks in vain in the works of nineteenth-century philosophers:

Toute idée est, par elle-même, douée d’une vie immortelle, comme une personne.

Car la forme créée, même par l’homme, est immortelle. Car la forme est indépendante de la matière, et ce ne sont pas les molécules qui constituent la forme.

[Every idea is, in itself, possessed of an immortal life, like a person.

For form created, even by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter, and it is not molecules that constitute form.]

That Baudelaire’s first example of “form” is an idea makes clear that his model is that of representation, that the form not created by man is one (we conceive of as) created by God.

A poet who understands that an idea is “immortal” is not necessarily a great poet, but to be a great poet one must have an intuitive grasp of the virtual immortality of the uses of language by which one seeks to defer our “natural” tendency to self-destruction.

Since not everyone is a literary scholar, I invite the reader to perform a more straightforward theoretical test, inspired by a recent reading assignment. Here are a couple of quotes taken from the recent David Macey translation of Marcel Fournier’s 2007 maxi-biography, Emile Durkheim (Polity, 2013):

. . . society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is in action only if the individuals who comprise it are assembled and acting in common. It is through common action that society becomes conscious and affirms itself; society is above all else active cooperation . . . Thus it is action that dominates religious life, for the very reason that society is its source. (p. 625)

Above and beyond all the dogmas and all the denominations, there exists a source of religious life as old as humanity and which can never run dry: it is the one which results from the fusion of consciences, of their communion in a common set of ideas, of the morally invigorating and stimulating influence that every community of men imposes on its members. (p. 656)

In these passages, on the one hand, religion is fundamentally common action, and on the other, it is the product of the fusion of consciences, that is, of faculties of ideation that commune “in a common set of ideas.” Both of these statements, which in no way contradict each other, display Durkheim’s fundamental anthropological intuition that “society” is more than just a system of organization, that it subsists as a unifying model (as a rule, as “the sacred”) within the minds of its individual members. But to define the connection between “common action” and “a common set of ideas” in these two passages merely as “society” is to fetishize the latter concept as a merely virtual explanatory source for both action and thought. The originary hypothesis articulates the connection between formal and institutional representation, ideas and rites, and other complementary ways of reproducing and reinforcing the originary production of the sign. Durkheim’s ideas “validate” GA as much as ours do his; these theories, with Girard in between to supply the crucial element of mimetic violence as the negative driving force for hominization, are indeed mutually self-reinforcing.

I am certain that a more thorough analysis would only confirm these impressions. Indeed, a GA study of Durkheim would be most valuable. As the founder (in France, at least) of theoretical-empirical social science, Durkheim was constantly faced with problems of method. Society had to be understood through the analysis of facts, but human “facts” cannot be dealt with as though they were data from the natural world. From the division of labor through suicide to the “elementary forms” of religion, Durkheim was guided by the intuition of a social totality present in some form to the members of society that was the self-reflective source of the theories by which he attempted to explain these “facts.” What led him to the study of religion was his increasing realization that the social order was most powerfully grasped in its “primitive” form as embodied in the “actions” and “ideas” referred to in the quotes above. Or in a word, that analysis of “elementary” social forms was an empirical substitute for an originary hypothesis, which he considered speculative and hence “unscientific.” What the originary hypothesis does for Durkheim, and by extension for the theoretical foundation of the social sciences, is to provide a model of the human scene that clarifies what these “elementary” societies and our own have in common: the necessity of deferring mimetic violence through representation.

I hope those working in the vast space between Baudelaire and Durkheim are able to put GA to good use!

As we all know, there is no sufficient explanation for the success of a work of art; given any explanation, we could always construct a work that satisfies the terms of the explanation and yet does not produce in us the “esthetic effect.” Yet we also recognize that some explanations are more powerful than others. In the previous Chronicle I tried to show how a line of Baudelaire operated paradoxically to invert phonetically the “loss” referred to semiotically, reinforcing the poem’s ironic effect and suggesting that the real “loss” is not in nature but in the poet-dandy’s posture of despair—all the more despairing for its posturing. In that case such an analysis might suffice, given that the poem as a whole (“Le goût du néant”) is a series of increasingly intense variants on the theme of the poet’s alienation from the world, leading to his final request to be carried off in an avalanche. But in Baudelaire’s richer poems the articulation of the parts cannot be understood without examining the whole.

To take a relatively simple “unhappy” case, in the first of the “Spleen” poems, “La cloche fêlée” [the cracked bell] (called simply “Spleen” in the first edition), the poet begins in his room on a winter night, telling us it is amer et doux [bittersweet] to listen by the fire to his old memories float up (les souvenirs lointains lentement se lever [far-off memories slowly rising]) to the sound of churchbells heard through the mist. The reference to sound leads to the image of a “well-throated” bell that is compared to a faithful old soldier on watch standing in his tent, the form of which is similar to that of a bell.

But the now personified evocation of the bell as heard by the apparently easeful poet provokes in the tercets a comparison with his own voice and its source, his “cracked” soul. Moi, mon âme est fêlée [I, my soul is cracked] abruptly opposes the two elements, bells and listener, that coexisted in bittersweet comfort in the quatrains. From this point of departure, the faithful old soldier who figured the bell is replaced by a wounded one who agonizes near a “lake of blood” under a pile of corpses, Et qui meurt sans bouger dans d’immenses efforts [and who dies without moving in (i.e., despite) immense effort]–the sensation we know from nightmares of trying and failing to move.

Thus the apparently benign comparison between the bell and the soldier, by its unexpected application to the poet who synecdochically inserts his own voice into a scene in which he was peacefully hearing the voice of another and enjoying its incitation of his own memories—the “l”‘s of les souvenirs lointains lentement se lever accentuating the liquid facility of the operation—turns a comfortable winter (of life?) scene into a nightmare of stifled movement and death. Here it is not simply a phonetic reality such as adorable-odeur that guarantees the poem’s irony, but the parallel between the agreeable/nightmarish images of soldiery and the poet’s passive/active use of his voice. As often in Baudelaire, starting with “Au lecteur,” the production of poetry is problematized as a competitive move against the voices that already exist in the society, and which, in this poem at least, seem to satisfy its cultural needs. Since at the beginning the poet is not in tension with his environment but in bittersweet harmony, the only explanation for the open contrast between himself and the churchbell-soldier is the poetry itself, the fact that the personage in the poem is also the poet, so that the pleasure of hearing memories rise up within his mind suggests to him that if he can evoke his memories in a poem in the context of the bells, he should be able to “populate the cold night air” (peupler l’air froid des nuits) with them on his own.

For the lyric “I” is always a poet, not a fictional character, who always has the possibility—in the broadest sense, the necessity— of crossing the barrier to the world of creation. But by the same token, he is susceptible to punishment for his pride. In this particular context, which suggests that of a healthy religious culture, he seems to embody the familiar romantic topos of the enfeebled modern in comparison with the denizen of the healthy medieval religion (cf. “Le mauvais moine”). This need not be understood as a judgment on the historical viability of religion in 1850s France. It suffices that the bells embody even nostalgically a stable social tradition analogous to the old soldier, perhaps no longer much good for fighting, but whose loyalty suffices to suggest a harmonious social order—and consequently to convey to the poet that his own poetry is endangered by his alienation from this tradition. Yet it is the striking final image of the poet’s suffering from the inability to express himself that is itself the ultimate poetic expression. The shift from happiness to unhappiness is also the esthetic conquest of the poem, an effect no doubt achieved with a lighter touch by the laments of “Le goût du nèant,” where the poet’s self-denying pose is not placed in competition with an established ritual order.

If “La cloche” is an “unhappy” poem, how do we account for its success in evoking the nightmare of non-creativity? Can a poet without falling not simply into hypocrisy but a blindness unredeemable by irony complain of his failure to communicate while succeeding in communicating this very failure to the reader? Already we note the precedence of “amer” to “doux” in the first line. The experience of a multiplicity of memories in the absence of any conceivable discourse about them is a constant component of Baudelairean Spleen; we will examine in a moment “Spleen II”, J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans [I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old]. The key moment of reversal in “La cloche” is the second quatrain, when the plural-singular relationship between the poet and the bells (carillons) becomes a rivalry between the (implicit) poet and a single bell (la cloche au gosier vigoureux [the vigorous-throated bell]) who then is personified as the old soldier, leading directly to the unfavorable comparison in the tercets. There is no effort to connect the two soldier figures directly; the first is evoked by the tent-like appearance of the bell, not by its sound, whereas the second returns to the more fundamental comparison with the soul and its voice.

What guarantees the poem here is not linguistic harmony but the “lived” power of the figure that seems taken from a horror film, with the lake of blood adding a fantastic detail. The poet has made clear not only that this is a comparison but that it applies only souvent [often]. These concessions to reality, however, only accentuate the power of the final image to efface any such logical considerations. Baudelaire’s metaphors/comparisons rebel against the tenor-vehicle opposition, not because (as often in Mallarmé) their syntax or narrative structure is ambiguous, but because we become interested in these “vehicles” as new foci of thought that take the place of the nominal “tenors” by demonstrating a greater affinity for the moral point at issue. In coldly rational terms, we are talking about a voice that “often sounds like” the death-rattle of the soldier in question. But it is impossible to read the last lines thinking about the poet’s voice (which we already understand metaphorically as referring to his writing); we think about the struggles of the dying soldier, and experience this nightmare as the expression of the poet’s mon âme est fêlée.

A perhaps yet more striking example is found two poems later in “Spleen II”:

Un vieux meuble à tiroirs encombré de bilans,
De vers, de billets doux, de procès, de romances,
Avec de lourds cheveux roulés dans des quittances,
Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau.

An old desk/chest of drawers encumbered with balance-sheets,
poetry, love-notes, lawsuits, romances
with thick hanks of hair rolled up in bill-receipts
hides fewer secrets than my sad brain

Is the point really that his triste cerveau contains more secrets than this unforgettable piece of furniture, or simply to imagine the latter, with its “Balzacian” intertwining of romance and venality, woman’s hair and paid-up bills, as a figure of the (poet’s) mind? These passages may be said to illustrate the figure of hyperbole (the subject of an ancient article, “Hyperbole et ironie,” Poétique 24, Fall 1975), but their recourse to what pseudo-Longinus would call “the sublime” tells us that we are no longer in the well-imaged territory of romantic descriptivism. The poet’s voice in “La cloche fêlée,” “souvent” or not, is realized in the final image—in a way, incidentally, that his memories are not in Spleen II, which after this wonderful beginning ends rather lamely with the figure of a “granite” Sphinx in the desert. Some of Baudelaire’s greatest poems (e.g., “Le cygne”) end badly, given the impossibility of finding a still stronger figure to follow up on a previous powerful configuration (which in “Le cygne” makes us await the appearance of the title character until the sentiment of exile has passed from Andromache to the poet’s own “exile” from pre-Haussmann Paris). In “Spleen II” the images of containers, from the desk to a cemetery to a boudoir, fade out, as it were, as the poet’s brain is increasingly defined by a tender nostalgia for its contents. Once this happens, the poem starts over but can only end on dandy’s ill humor and a hint that poetry is a swan song—a figure more positive, but far more anodyne, than a death rattle! What works or doesn’t work in Baudelaire’s poetry is neither the meaning of the words nor their magical/musical effect, but their effectiveness in evoking a state of being-in-the-world.

Not all the Fleurs describe unhappy relationships between the poet and the world, not even ironically. There are some happy moments, as well as many poems that content themselves with an object-world and do not explicitly double back on themselves. My favorite “happy” poem is “Le balcon,” no doubt because it makes such good use of the “objective correlative” supplied by the balcony itself as a space intermediary between the inner and outer worlds, the apartment and the cosmos, and hence a “metaphor,” for lack of a better term, for poetry, culture, language itself, by means of which we do not simply communicate one to one but first to the sacred center of the community as a whole and only subsequently in intimacy.

“Le balcon” establishes from the beginning a complementary parallel between inside and outside: Tu te rappeleras la beauté des caresses / La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs [you will recall the beauty of our caresses / the sweetness of the hearth and the charm of the evenings], then in the second stanza: Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon / Et le soirs au balcon, voilés de vapeurs roses [the evenings lit by the warmth of the coals / and the evenings on the balcony, veiled in pink vapors/haze]. In the latter pair, the poet creates an equilibrium between two types of illumination, l’ardeur du charbon and the vapeurs roses, that adds an element of contrast to La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs. Then in the third stanza, with Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirées [how beautiful are the suns on warm evenings], the poet refers to “suns” of warm evenings, not sunsets, which he opposes to the intimacy of imagining he can smell his partner’s blood (Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang [I thought I was smelling the perfume of your blood].) One imagines that he avoids the “bloody” sunset to concentrate on the smell of blood in the boudoir, but I think we should still assume that the objective correlative of soleils here is indeed setting suns, and that this is a shorthand rather than a fantasy of nocturnal solar light. Which is to say that there is just a hint of a demonstration of poetic arbitrariness, not simply in choosing soleils  but in showing that he has chosen them, leaving the sun’s image vague so that we can imagine the other’s blood, which, we should note, he claims neither to have seen nor even smelled, merely that he “believed” he did.

Like all Baudelaire’s best poems, “Le balcon” reaches a climax where, in this “happy” case, the linguistic sign (signifier) is pushed to its limit in harmony, rather than in ironic tension, with its meaning (signified): La nuit s’épaississait ainsi qu’une cloison [The night thickened like a partition]. The use of the repeated “s’s” (plus the “widening” of -it [i] to –ait [ɛ]) to convey the thickening of the night make this one of B’s most masterful lines. The balcony reaches its limit as an interface between interior and exterior when the “thickening” cuts off the balcony’s openness to the exterior to create a perfect intimacy between the couple, at the same time allowing the poem to reveal this intimacy to the public without violating it, since it is that of the all-pervading nuit.

It is only after this that the poet openly asserts his mastery: Je sais l’art d’évoquer les minutes heureuses [I know the art of evoking happy minutes], and even expresses in conclusion the rhetorical hope that these moments may be reborn like the sun after their passage through the “gulf” of death. Baudelaire in his best poems never uses rhetorical expressions of desire without a prior guarantee of mastery over language. For all poetry is rhetoric, and the degree to which it succeeds in perpetuating our desire to transcend time is measured by its effectiveness in making the material of language appear to abolish and reconstitute itself as the necessary expression of its content, matter magically endowed with meaning through its intimacy with the sacred center of all desire.

* * *

Like its predecessor, this Chronicle  is dedicated to Carolyn, Cristina, Dorthea, Hope, Louise, and Nanar, the students in my just-concluded seminar on Hugo’s Les contemplations and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal.

There are several watersheds in human history, although I do not think very many. I tried to give an account of the watersheds of Western civilization from an “esthetic” point of view (today I would say, “scenic”) in Originary Thinking. The idea of describing Western history as a series of “esthetics” or differently structured relationships between individuals and their cultural scene facilitates understanding of the historical evolution of art and of the human community that realizes itself in it. Once we understand that this evolution is not driven by a desire, let alone a need to “improve” on earlier works, but by the evolution of the “civilized” human social order toward greater complexity and self-awareness, we free ourselves from the idea of “progress” in art that goes back well before Darwin to the Renaissance and the querelle des anciens et des modernes.

Of the several watersheds in human scenicity that these esthetics embody, the one that has most intrigued me since the beginning of my studies is that of the 1848 revolutions and their aftermath. This historical moment is often described, I think misleadingly, as a transition from the (early bourgeois) romantic era to modernity. I think the post-1848 era has an ethos and esthetic of its own that we may call postromanticism. The modernist esthetic, a product of the early 20th century, is much more assertive and anarchistic, much more like a new romanticism in fact, corresponding in the political sphere to a new (Marxist and fascist) anti-bourgeois revolutionary era.

The postromantic transition, more clearly marked in France than elsewhere as a result of its decisively disillusioning political revelations, is exemplified on the esthetic front by a novelist and a poet, Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire, born in the same year (1821), and arguably the century’s most influential creators in their respective fields. Both also published their most important works in the same year (1857), and as a result were pursued in court for outrage aux moeurs, although Flaubert, whose scandal was less flamboyant, was acquitted.

Since as a student I was more comfortable with prose than poetry (which was a genuine specialty in those days), I wrote my dissertation on Flaubert. Entitled The Discovery of Illusion, it was a study of Flaubert’s posthumously published early writings. These works, mostly school assignments written between the ages of 15 and 17, displayed in hyperbolic form the romantic themes of the misunderstood hero, a helpless giant in a world of pygmies, victim of a cruel father (and older brother) but beloved of his mother, played out in a context that one need not be a Freudian to recognize as the bourgeois “family drama.” As a result, if not a logical consequence of this early activity, by the time Flaubert was ready to write real novels, he had exhausted the narrative-dramatic formulae that operated in the world of Balzac and Stendhal, and after painful hesitation he was obliged to create the new, postromantic form of narrative exemplified by Madame Bovary, certainly the most influential European novel of the 19th century.

I have remained a “Flaubertian,” sharing the true Flaubertian’s preference for the author’s less popular but certainly greater 1869 novel L’éducation sentimentale (a preference shared by Proust, if not by Nathalie Sarraute who, I fear, did not understand the novel’s point). But over the years I have been increasingly drawn to Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du mal have been as influential in the poetic sphere as Madame Bovary in that of narrative.

It is fairly simple to understand how Flaubert transforms romantic narrative. The key term of “free indirect discourse” exemplifies a technique that lets the “inauthentic,” illusory language of the character replace the all-knowing word of the Balzacian or Stendhalian novelist. The reader no longer has a sure guide to the objective significance of the heroine’s desires in the broader scheme of things; the narrative universe is held together by the “novelist,” but no longer by the “narrator,” who with few exceptions lets his characters live and die in “their own” language, a mimetic jargon of pseudo-romantic empathy, whether that of the sentimental novels Emma read as a girl in her convent school, Rodolphe’s cynical discourse of “romantic” seduction, or the mealy-mouthed political discourses at the Agricultural Fair that Flaubert alternates with Rodolphe’s blandishments in his most brilliant scene. This kind of “realism” sets artistic achievement outside the realm of worldly desire; the novelist no longer expresses himself as a superior, transcendent but still recognizably human ego, but as one who renounces his own language of desire to construct a work from the illusory languages of others, implying that this extra-worldly praxis is the only path to salvation: l’art pour l’art.

Baudelaire’s contribution to the postromantic universe is much harder to grasp. The more obvious aspects of his work, those most scandalously present in his own time, reflect his origins in le bas-romantisme, the “low” romanticism common in the 1840s, when French romanticism, itself a late development in continental terms, was already over 20 years old and forced new, younger writers into paradoxical positions. That the principle of romanticism is that the Self suffices as the repository of the public scene of representation does not make any less true Girard’s critique that human desire is in the first place mimetic. If their post-revolutionary historical situation allowed the first-generation romantics, without even asserting their uniqueness, to simply affirm their desires as a new source of meaning, those who followed found it increasingly difficult to avoid repeating the tropes of their predecessors. Years ago I wrote a book on Alfred de Musset, born in 1810, like Gautier and Nerval a member of the “second generation” after Hugo and the others, who found a narrow and temporary path to a kind of literary salvation by a highly self-conscious theatrical splitting of the “free” romantic self into the naive-romantic lover and the cynical libertine who can only act in the world by taking on voluntarily the lover’s limitations. But by the 1840s there was no more room for such maneuvers. Baudelaire, like Flaubert, would come into his own only with the 1848 revolution, whose failure revealed for all to see the failure of the romantic politics of compassion, and hence of the “Hugolian” principle of romantic literature, in which a dominant consciousness organizes the world and guides our sympathies while arousing no essential conflict with the subjectivities of his readers.

In “Baudelaire et la douleur de la signification,” published as a chapter in my 1974 Essais d’esthétique paradoxale, I attempted to construct a model of the evolution of 19th century French poetry. Romantic poetry is based on the poet’s confidence in language to depict a shared universe and to transmit “authentic” feelings; a romantic poem, as a rule, paints a coherent picture within which all its elements are integrated. The romantic poet, like Victor Hugo in the preface to Les contemplations, could claim “when I speak of me, I speak of you . . . [you are] mad to think that I am not you.” I called this, in Saussurean terms, the “utopia of the signified.” Because all speakers of a language understand the meanings (signifieds) of the signs of language (signifiers), their very use in the public language of poetry creates a poetic utopia where we all share each other’s feelings in a celebration of communal unity. It is not altogether an exaggeration to speak of the first (February) phase of the 1848 revolution as the political expression of this attitude: Alphonse de Lamartine, the inaugurator of French poetic romanticism, was the Second Republic’s first president, and Victor Hugo, the romantic movement’s leader since the late 1820s, a major parliamentary figure.

If the romantic poet thought that egos could interact without rivalry, the poets who followed Baudelaire, whose poetics I called “the utopia of the signifier,” tended toward impersonality, as exemplified in Stéphane Mallarmé’s later poetry, from which the first person has been all but expelled. As opposed to Hugo’s idea that he was given language to express his own thoughts and feelings as exemplarily equivalent to everyone else’s, Mallarmé insisted on a “death” of the self that would “give a purer sense to the words of the tribe.” The signifier was to be purified of the ego’s narrow application of it to the contents of his own experience and would thus retrieve its true collective function. This is anything but absurd in the context of generative anthropology. On the contrary, if language originates as the deferral/sacralization of a common desire, the search for a pre-egoistic vision embodied in language itself is indeed a kind of discovery principle, and in Mallarmé’s empty rooms and post-mortem seascapes we have a glimpse of a kind of anthropogenic poetry. It is a poetry that seeks through the effort to eliminate all prior content from the poet’s scenic imagination the invariant tropes most fundamental to this scene: the shipwreck/drowned siren of “A la nue accablante tu,” the raped/sacrificed nixe of “Ses purs ongles,” the “might have been born” self in the parental bed of “Une dentelle s’abolit.”

Yet if Hugo strikes us as hubristic in his easy assimilation of others’ feelings to his own, Mallarmé is equally so in claiming to expel his own ego from his poetic universe. As my terminology was meant to suggest, the poetics of both are equally utopian in their dismissal of the “original sin” of the desiring self. Hugo embodies the romantic hubris that would lead to the failure of the Second Republic and the hard rule of Napoleon III; Mallarmé reflects the tranquillity of the Third Republic and of the European Belle Epoque that could begin to grasp originary violence (“nature red in tooth and claw”) but not anticipate the human violence of the twentieth century.

From the utopia of the signified to the utopia of the signifier, from Hugo’s I, which is everywhere, to Mallarmé’s, which is nowhere, the transformation is clear enough. Yet Baudelaire, on whose example the later generation depended, was of all poets the most sharply aware of the tension, moral as well as simply “esthetic,” inherent in using (impersonal, immortal) language to share (personal, mortal) representations with one’s reader, and hence of the lyric’s potential for staging the problematic relationship between egos in the modern, “secular” world.

This is made explicit from the start in “Au lecteur,” the liminal poem of Les fleurs, which ends with the archetypal Baudelairean line “Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère” [hypocritical reader, my fellow, my brother]. From the perspective of the first person plural (Baudelaire is the only poet of the century to regularly say “we”; he will again use “we” exclusively in the final poem of the collection, its longest, “Le voyage”), “Au lecteur” describes our fallen state and above all our susceptibility to ennui, which is in this context a cultural disponibilité, the state in which we read (write?) poetry as what Pascal called a divertissement to distract from our fallen condition.

To understand Baudelaire we must understand his continued attachment to the bas-romantisme of his origins, shared with others of his “late” generation. Flaubert occupied a different place in this generation; as a fils de famille not aristocratic/fallen but simply bourgeois, he had no use for the Bohemia that Baudelaire, always in debt and disgrace, frequented and cultivated. In political terms, this means that Flaubert could deal with the romantic illusions that he attributed to his characters through a wholly distanced and ironized nostalgia. Flaubert’s passage to the postromantic took the form of a conversion. The transition from the first (1849) Tentation de Saint Antoine to Madame Bovary reflected a fairly straightforward suppression of his earlier tendencies to romantic self-indulgence. In contrast, Baudelaire never simply denied romanticism but worked through it to a new state. This never-completed dialectic retained an extreme tension that in the best poems was realized in a synthesis of experience and language. With the partial exception of certain early works that embody the superficial Bohemian faith in the lower classes, each poem of Les fleurs begins anew from a bas-romantique desire that knows itself to be guilt-laden and “late,” lacking in the pseudo-excuse of newness. The writer addresses his hypocrite lecteur as one who is not seeking à la Hugo the assimilation of the latter’s cultural energy. This might be said to be nothing but a ploy to dominate all the more, but it is earned through the admission of our shared guilt in indulging our desiring imagination, and above all by the poet’s implied promise that the beauty of his language will both oblige us to share his desire and purify it of any narrow egoism.

The Fleurs cannot usefully be discussed as a whole beyond what we may call their overall intention, to extract “flowers” from the “evil” of mortal life. It is a collection of poems, some of which are masterpieces, but all of which benefit from their place in the work’s biographical architecture and from our knowledge that Les fleurs is not a collection among others but the poet’s life-work. (To quote the author’s most celebrated statement about Les fleurs, written to his financial guardian Ancelle on February 18, 1866, barely a year before his death: “Need I tell you that in this horrible book I have put all my heart, all my tenderness, all my religion (falsified), all my hatred?”) To understand Baudelaire’s poetics we must examine the individual poems, bearing in mind that the pathos that attends their multiplicity is diminished, if not eliminated, by their collocation. In contrast with Hugo’s long poems destined to serve as metaphysical syntheses (leading him to produce vast unfinished volumes, La fin de Satan, Dieu…) but whose very proliferation shows the poet’s inability to “conclude” (“Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre” is only one of several 700+ line poems in Les contemplations), Baudelaire’s concluding “Le voyage” doesn’t seek a cosmic synthesis, but remains credibly within the autobiographical arc of Les fleurs, ending with death and the exhortation to go beyond it to seek the new in the unknown (“Au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau“).

Many, perhaps most of Baudelaire’s poems leave an impression of either banality or excessive horror, reflecting the bas-romantique origins he rarely lets us forget. Yet his best poetry achieves a level of integration found nowhere else. As in all good poetry, but I think in his case more so, language seems to reinvent itself on the originary scene of deferred desire. In order to create meaning, as at the origin, one must need it as an antidote against potentially conflictive desire. This creation in Baudelaire’s case is explicitly understood as guilt-inducing, since it forces the poet’s object of desire on the reader, whose hypocrisy is expected to enjoy this as an entertainment, a kind of literary pornography. Beyond the few openly pornographic or titillating poems, six of which were condemned in 1857, are many others that emphasize horror and violence, even necrophilia (“Une martyre”). But these illustrate Baudelaire’s esthetic only superficially, extracting beauty from le mal, whereas his best poems construct an esthetic correlative of the historical situation to which the poet bears witness.

Leaving the analysis of complete poems for the second part of this essay, I will conclude this Chronicle by examining a single line of Baudelaire’s poetry. For the genius of poetry lies in the details of language, and no one has shown himself capable of more beautiful poetic lines than Baudelaire.

My favorite example, perhaps Baudelaire’s best, is found in “Le goût du néant” [The taste for nothingness]. After telling us that “l’amour n’a plus de goût, non plus que la dispute” [love has no more savor, nor does argument] we find the line:

Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur! [the adorable spring has lost its odor!]

The consonantal harmony of this line is remarkable. The consonants of “le Printempsadorable” reappear in reduced form in “perdu son odeur,” save that if “perdu” repeats the consonants of “printemps,” the “t” becoming softened to “d” (while the “z” of “[z]adorable” is devoiced to the “s” of “son”); “adorable” loses its ending in becoming “odeur,” thus embodying the loss of the the adorable quality of the odor itself in the very word that designates it. This self-referential, paradoxical irony reflects the interactive meaning of the line in the “conversation” between poet and reader. Although the loss is stated objectively, it is clearly meant as subjective: spring has lost its odor for me. “Adorable” spring, once a source of romantic idealization and mock-adoration, is now odorless, adorable no longer. Among other evidence, the poet’s self-description as boudeur [sulking] in the preceding line makes clear that this is a voluntary role rather than a truly pathetic one. Yet the physical loss of sounds that illustrates the loss of adorable/odor makes it impossible to dismiss the explicit declaration of Spring’s loss of odor as a mere attitude.

The postromantic here goes beyond the bas-romantique, who would have had us share pathos rather than irony. Can we cry for the sulking poet-dandy? Yet we cannot mock him either, since the strength of the line, quite simply, its beauty, is its demonstration of the reality of his loss. This is in miniature an example of la douleur de la signification. Baudelaire is neither painting a picture of horrors nor letting the words themselves become the picture. The words guarantee their meaning as signifiers that “lose” their substance in becoming the word (odeur) that denotes what was lost, in contrast with the “beautiful” but ultimately empty word “adorable.” The romantic subjectivity that would impose the adorable quality of the spring suffers a loss that is “objective” only in the substance of the poem itself—a substance chosen by the poet, which therefore in worldly terms appears necessarily willful and ironic, as its location in the domain of Spleen suggests. This is no longer straight romantic pathos, but nor is it Verlainean complicity à la “Il pleure dans mon coeur” or “Les sanglots longs…,” where the language simply conforms to the poetic subject’s pathos at the expense of its “objectve” meaning (what else are “sanglots longs des violons de l’automne” [long sobs of the violins of autumn] other than an “impersonal” use of language that imposes on natural reality the poet’s subjective sentiments?)

In a follow-up Chronicle I will attempt to deal with Baudelaire’s poetics on the scale of the individual poem, choosing one “happy” and one “unhappy” example—and noting that in Baudelaire’s poetry the question of the subject’s happiness in the poetic world he creates is, in contrast with that of either the romantic (who, however existentially sad, is always happy qua poet) or the symbolist (for whom poetic creation transcends the mortal human condition), is not merely exemplified but constructed by the poem itself. The line we analyzed above, for example, is part of an “unhappy” (Spleen) poem, albeit one of the most overtly ironic or (as some say) “comical.” The spring’s loss of its odor is preliminary to the poet’s terminal request “Avalanche, veux-tu m’emporter dans ta chute?” [avalanche, will you take me along in your fall?], where the hyperbole of the violence requested entails the ironic conclusion that it is posturing and therefore reflects less suffering than it pretends.

This constant ironic avowal of hypocrisy and manipulation is unique to Baudelaire, and uniquely problematizes the poet’s and his readers’ mutual hypocrisy. But the beauty of poetry’s embodiment of this paradoxical situation is also unique to Baudelaire, one might say because only he needs such beauty in order to realize his poetical gageure of extracting flowers from evil—in the Jansenist sense of evil banality—Les fleurs du mal.

* * *

This Chronicle (and, hopefully, its sequel) is dedicated to Carolyn, Cristina, Dorthea, Hope, Louise, and Nanar, the students in my just-concluded seminar on Hugo’s Les contemplations and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal.

In order to emphasize the sacredness of the words of language, beginning with the first, I have adopted the custom of speaking of the originary sign, the key innovation of the hypothetical originary scene, as the name-of-God. The sign is a gesture of representation, but calling it the name-of-God reminds us that the deferral of appropriation may just as easily be seen as an act of worship, a sign of respect to the “numinous” quality of the central desire-object that is in our anthropological analysis the product of the desires of the group.

The first sign is ostensive; its point is to defer the object’s presence to the appetites of the signers. Yet once the sign becomes associated with the object in the originary event, the sign becomes undecidably a vocative-imperative call as well as a designation; the sort of pointing movement we can imagine the originary sign to be “communicates” indifferently to the others and to the object itself, all of which are potential sources of danger, the situation of deferred desire in which the participants find themselves.

And following the schema of The Origin of Language, this imperative “call” will evoke in reply a declarative sentence as soon as the idea of a direct response by the designee is removed from the realm of possibility, so that the word/name/noun designating the object can only function in a predication that tells us something about it in a “fictive” world constructed in language.

How are these linguistic relationships to the central object related to religion? We can make very schematically—or to put it more flatteringly, parsimoniously—the following rapprochements:

1. Name-of-God as an Imperative-vocative, like a real name = “paganism”
2. Name-of-God as a Declarative (“I am/will be that/what I am/will be”) = Judaism
3. Name-of-God as the name of a (divine/human) person, Jesus = Christianity

I define “paganism” here as the worship of a “named” God, one who as God may be called on by name for help in a crisis. The association of paganism with polytheism can be retained if we include in it “henotheism,” or the worship of one god but in the “pagan” mode, as in effect the local divinity of a powerful nation. Akhenaton could enforce henotheism in Egypt, but a tribe like the Hebrews could not insist that our god is the one real god in a world of more powerful entities unless it renounced the specificity of the naming-relation, that is, adopted true monotheism.

The refusal of a vocative name as well as of the sacrificial animal/feast that we see in the Exodus 3 “burning bush” scene is a passage to a higher level of universality. The point is not to claim that “our” Hebrew god is the only god, but that our understanding of God as expressed in our rites and litanies is that God is unique and universal. It is the uniqueness of the Hebrew idea of god that gives rise to the sense of chosenness.

As the configuration of the Exodus scene suggests, the signifier-name is no longer understood as a source of power for the believer. Rather than Moses evoking God, it is God’s voice that calls to Moses from the sacred locus. The permanence of this represented locus guarantees the permanent meaning of the sign, but God’s name as given is not a source of evocative power but a reminder of God’s permanent presence in the underlying configuration, which is in essence communal.

If paganism is a religion of the signifier, relying on the coercive collective power behind the sign-name as evidenced in the originary event, monotheism/Judaism gives the center itself an existence not merely chronologically but ontologically prior to the sign, and consequently independent of its evocations. The “objective” nature of the declarative reflects the sacred signified’s independence from the signifier. Before the sign there was the sacred object of desire, and once there is the sign, what it signifies is no longer a specific object but the unique subsistent source of the sacred. This One God is a subject of language more unambiguously than the “pagan” god designated by the sign/name, a God who speaks first and refuses to give a name in the normal sense. Moses’ desire to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt requires that he conceive the source of the community’s unity (and ultimately of its language and rituals by which its communal values are communicated) as a subject, but if it is a subject, it is the unique subject, since the configuration of center and periphery is that of all human communities. This is the great intuition, or revelation, of monotheism.

The Jewish model maintains the desire for a name and its deferral/disappointment, which is surely the psychological atmosphere of the conversation in Exodus 3. For there is an unresolved tension between the abstract configuration and the abstract declarative “name” it receives, and the specific rites and customs that this configuration has given rise to in the community of the Hebrews. The intuition that there is only one way in which the sacred could have arisen (the anthropological basis of the monotheistic intuition) cannot provide a basis for a specific set of customs. The Law that is the Hebrews’ guarantee of the universality of their intuition is too clearly bound up with the history of their specific community to apply to all, even if the One God is the God of all. The rite of circumcision is the physical guarantee of this exclusivity. Or in other terms, Jewish firstness is not merely a historical accident, it is inevitably perpetuated by the religion itself.

The Christian gesture in its simplest (but not its earliest) form is the transparent equation of God with the sign (“In the beginning was the logos“). This radical identification of the Son with the sign obscures the scene of language on which the sign originally appeared. Where in the Hebrew Bible God creates by means of (human) language (“Let there be light!”), Christianity makes God himself the sign; taking originary language further away from humanity defers firstness and brings peace.

In Science and Faith, I chose Saul’s revelation on the road to Damascus as the originary moment of Christianity, the originary model of the worship of Christ as divine. This scene, like that of Moses in Exodus, is not collective but individual. But Moses hears God’s word in the ritual context of the “burning bush,” a reminder of the originary event, whereas Saul/Paul’s celestial vision of Jesus is expressly cut off from any earthly context. As I observed in Science and Faith, Saul learns that he has unwittingly served to consecrate Jesus’ divine status by persecuting his followers, and more generally, that all humanity has participated in the Crucifixion and by that very fact consecrates Jesus’ divinity. But whereas John’s logos, which belongs to a generation later than Paul’s vision, equates Jesus with the sign, the only sign available to the persecutor is a gesture of aggression, from pointing at the victim (and thereby bringing him to the hostile attention of others) to striking or lapidating him. There is no “good sign,” and to the extent that emitting the sign is always to some extent an act of firstness, that is, a voluntary act that goes beyond a mere mimetic reflex, as we saw in the previous Chronicle, it is always in the Christian context to be deferred. Yet the violence of human language and action only proves all the more Jesus’ divinity, and prepares us for the conversion in which we, in GA terms, sacrifice our firstness to Christ. If we let Him always be first, violence will be deferred forever and disappear.

Thus both Judaism and Christianity express in different degrees a mistrust of language as a collective phenomenon, the easy assent to which is characteristic of “paganism” and risks leading to the forgetting of the sign’s originary purpose: the deferral of violence.

Simple assent to the sign makes its emission appear a magical act that seems to embody divine power to transfigure the originary breakdown of order into its sparagmatic resolution in a common feast. The Jewish solution is to leave the signified without a nominal signifier, requiring the renunciation of a name by which the sacred can be evoked. But the Christian objection to this solution is that for this solution to operate, the ritual center must remain as the mark of the sacred, and with it, the community’s laws and customs, which are in tension with the universality of One God. The Christian solution is to do away with the (Saussurean) sign altogether, to equate its “meaning” with the Other toward whom we must renounce all acts of firstness, including the collective participation in the originary “aborted gesture.”

That Christianity suspects such gestures of being mere avatars of acts of aggression, Girard’s radical Christianity makes obvious: the Girardian originary scene is not a renunciation but a paroxysm of aggression in which the gesture is not aborted but acted out. Deferral remains the key to the originary scene in Girard as well as in GA, but it is a deferral of the appetitive (alimentary) to the benefit of the aggressive, Eros to the benefit of Thanatos.

This méconnaissance is already implicit in the Jewish méconnaissance of the absence of a “name.” But the absence of a name, as Jews are continually reminded in every situation of prayer, is a call to respect the inhabitant of a higher sphere, which anthropologically (but not theologically) is the sphere of the sign. In Christianity there is no such ontological split; what is required is love not as community but as communion, the taking-into-oneself of the Other, with Jesus the one-who-can-be-taken-in, eaten as it were without violence, the one with whom we share the renunciation of firstness which Girard is radical enough to equate with méconnaissance. The world of the sacred and of human relations that is assimilated to it is thus, as we saw in the preceding Chronicle, “monistic,” leaving the natural world aside while we “reconcile ourselves with our brother.”

How does this discussion help clarify the always delicate question of determining where anthropology ends and where religion begins?

• The “pagan” finds the power of the sign in the formal specificity of the sign, name or “magical” gesture; this makes understanding its originary anthropological configuration impossible, since the sign appears to be a supernatural gift.
• The Jew finds the power of the sign in the entire originary configuration that God’s declarative name connotes; God is who/what defines his/its own permanence through language. But is the source of the human a permanent Subject or, ultimately, just a configuration? Can the “permanence” of human historical memory be understood as the residue of a continually manifested configuration without conceiving it as a Subject?
• The Christian sees this dichotomy as painful and artificial; a person is an Other like ourselves and therefore we too are persons. We cannot know a God who cannot/does not incarnate himself as a person. What defers violence is not a sign but the Other who is himself a sign. The configuration that preserves humanity is not that of the human but of the divine Word, the Word that relieves us of our need for aggression, for firstness, as does Jesus’ (written and spoken) language at the stoning of the “woman taken in adultery.”

Once more, a brief suggestion concerning Islam. The uncreated sacred text is, unlike the Tanakh or the New Testament, explicitly not the product of a divine will analogous to that of a human subject. The very ordering of the suras in the Koran by length attests to the absence of “organic” analogy between Allah and us. I somehow doubt that in Islamic schools of interpretation one finds examples of the kind of “arguing with God” that is common in Talmudic schools. One is merely seeking to make clear what one is to submit to; there is no human-like Subject to dialogue with. But I am sure that these questions have been taken up within the Islamic tradition in far more sophisticated ways than I can speculate on here.

In the preceding Chronicle, I attempted a schematic originary analysis of the three Abrahamic religions. Here I would like to focus on the distinction between the Jewish and Christian modes of generating meaning, what might be called their “sacred epistemology.” In this regard, we may say that Christianity is monist, understanding what is significant to the human on the basis of a single “substance,” which Girard calls mimetic desire, understanding it not as a relation to an object but as a relation among humans. Judaism, in contrast, is dualist, maintaining the absolute otherness of the human and divine.

Three historical moments are of particular significance:

1. Girard’s proto-originary hypothesis and that proposed by GA;

2. the fundamental revelations of Judaism and Christianity (as per Science and Faith);

3. and, more speculatively: Jewish and Christian visions of state and community in the victimary era of postmodernity.

The categories of monism and dualism as used here designate not natural but sacred and ultimately anthropological ontologies, systems of human ethics rather than theories of the cosmos. My point in opposing them is to clarify the fundamental attitudes that underlie Christianity and Judaism, respectively. These differences of attitude, which cannot be simply confirmed by observing outside reality, constitute the long-term bets on what really matters that are constitutive of the great religions.

The “monism” I refer to here in relation to Christianity is not in conflict with the doctrine of the Trinity. On the contrary, the inclusion within the sacred of both the transcendent “Father” and the incarnate “Son,” as well as the “Spirit” that mediates between the two, is a way of coming to terms with an ethic exclusively focused on human interaction, whether violent or loving, at the expense of humanity’s dependency on the natural world.

In GA’s originary hypothesis, the crisis that leads to the breakdown of the animal pecking-order hierarchy and its resolution via the emission of the sign reflects the dependence of the protohuman community on critical elements of food supply and their distribution. The old animal hierarchy was a means for assuring the orderly distribution of scarce goods, of which large food animals were the most critical. To derive the sign from an “aborted gesture of appropriation” reflects a dualistic view of the human universe; signs are needed to avert human conflict over scarce items in the natural world. The otherness of the original sacred object is derived from its otherness as a material object of desire; the prior existence of appetite, eliciting among higher animals goal-directed behavior involving intelligence, self-control, etc., provides the seed of the dichotomy that eventuates in significance. In this model, the passage from appetitive action to its transcendence in the “aborted gesture” that becomes the sign is not spontaneous or “mechanical” but involves a conscious initiative that begins with the “first” and spreads through the group.

In contrast, Girard’s emissary murder takes place within a group of proto-humans and remains within that group, with no relationship to any appetitive object in the outside world. Whether the crisis be triggered by a plague or natural disaster, or as in GA’s originary hypothesis, by the presence of a highly desirable appetitive object, the process of emissary victimage necessarily involves a turning away from the original positively or negatively valued object to concentrate on the fundamentally imaginary obstacle to it created by the emissary victim.

This monist model generates difference through suppression: the binary zero emerges from the annihilation of the one. In Des choses cachées…, Girard criticizes Lévi-Strauss’ myth analyses in Le totémisme aujourd’hui for their failure to focus on the human violence that produces this “suppression.” But in effect his analysis differs from that of Lévi-Strauss only in its addition of a practical motivation: mimetic violence directed against the arbitrarily chosen victim. It remains the case that it is the killing that permits a new duality between two states of Being(s), the unanimous multitude and the unique victim, which will become the equivalent of Durkheim’s opposition between the profane and the sacred. No doubt the unique significance of the victim can be projected back onto his life, and his death figured in the mythical narration by a more transcendent symbolism, such as flying off into the heavens, but it is only through his disappearance from the world and passage to an elsewhere accessible only through memory that the victim becomes a sacred sign, a Word.

To bridge the gap between the emissary murder and the Crucifixion of the revealer of the victim’s hitherto hidden arbitrariness requires an infinite leap from anonymity to sacred uniqueness. On the one hand, the victim is arbitrarily chosen, unique only qua victim; on the other, he is the Word, the Son of God. These alternatives correspond, in Girard’s perspective, to the two chief moments of human history. The first (which presumably takes place over an indefinite period) is the origin of the human out of a long series of mimetic crises resolved by emissary murders. The second is Jesus’ definitive revelation of the arbitrary nature of the sacred created through emissary murder in the course of this process of origin. In neither case is there any essential dealing with the natural world outside the human community. And not coincidentally, the understanding of the process that Jesus reveals and that is prefigured in the Old Testament is never shown as emerging from within the emissary process itself.

In Exodus 3, Moses encounters the “burning bush,” a sacrificial fire that is not cooking anything but that indicates the presence of God. The One God who gives his name as a declarative sentence (“I am that/what I am”) in the act that may be said to figure the theological origin of monotheism is also the God of a sacrifice that can do without a (nourishing) victim, whose identification is with the sacrificial scene itself, independently of its nutritive function. This is the transcendence of the pagan “superstition” that makes possession of the sign itself tantamount to power over the material world. Pre-Exodic gods have names like the mortals who are named for them and are thus potential addressees of a vocative/imperative. The subsistence of the name-of-God outside the scene embodies a “forgetting” of the act of communal reciprocity in which it was first established, a forgetting that accompanies the usurpation of the sacred center by big-men and eventually by emperors and kings, who usurp along with central power the divine status that made it possible: the pharaoh or Roman emperor “becomes a god.”

The Mosaic revelation is a return to the essential moment of the originary act of signification, which even if focused on an edible animal is qua sign directed at its abstract signified. To convert the appetitive gesture into a sign is not simply to renounce its object on a practical level, but to recognize that what one is pointing to is the shared “meaning” of the object, which is independent of the latter’s worldly presence, for the moment inaccessible. If indeed the sign designates/represents the object as the sacred Other, it should not be able to call to it across the sacred-profane divide. No doubt this divide will be breached in the sparagmos where the sacrificial meal is the gift of the sacred center, and which will provide the model for virtually all sacrificial ceremonies. But to understand the sign qua sign is to recognize its independence from this breach, its dependence on the separation of signs from things. In the Exodus scene, this understanding is figured explicitly by God’s declarative name “I am that/what I am.” God speaks to Moses in a transcendent, “Biblical” universe but cannot be called on within the world, just as the signifier cannot “call” its signified into existential being.

The social-religious background for this revelation remains obscure, but Seth Saunders’ The Invention of Hebrew (Illinois 2009) offers the beginning of an explanation in the Hebrews’ breakthrough in writing down, in a newly standardized alphabetic script accessible to an increasingly literate public, communal litanies, laws, and legends, and presumably reciting and performing them. The Jews as the “people of the Book” were the first to experience God’s universality through his relationship with his people, unmediated by king or emperor, and given permanent presence in the common medium of alphabetic writing. Which is to say that the medium refreshed the people’s intuition of the originary communal nature of sacred language as a return from its usurpation by monarchs. Moses is not given special possession of God’s name, but knowledge of the absence of a name in the normal sense, whence the need for a common faith in God independent of the evocation of his presence. In linguistic terms, God’s presence to Moses is one that can be spoken of in a declarative proposition, but not pointed to in an ostensive.

Like Abraham, Moses is chosen, or in worldly terms, he is first, the leader. This role is reproduced on a national scale in the priority of the Hebrew/Jewish people with respect to other peoples (“light unto the nations”). As we saw in the previous Chronicle, this potentially conflictive but historically inevitable attribute of firstness is rejected by Christianity. Jesus’ words, like God’s in Exodus, are heard by his human disciples, of whom Peter is the “first.” But Peter’s firstness is no more a sign of chosenness than would have been that of the first man to cast a stone at the adulteress. It is no accident that Peter is singled out as the one who thrice denies Jesus.

At the Last Supper, Jesus nourishes his disciples with his body and blood that is also bread and wine. The miracle of transubstantiation demonstrates that the appetitive world is ultimately subordinate to the Word and obeys it, which, translated into anthropological terms, is a way of saying that if we can solve the problems of human mimetic violence, those of the material-appetitive world will take care of themselves. This stands in contrast to the absence of the sacrificial victim in Moses’ scene and the substitution of the sentence for the Name of God; any material satisfaction must be obtained outside the sacred scene of communion.

God’s revelation to Moses of his name/sentence is also a declaration of permanent presence: I shall be with you. No doubt God is portrayed as granting the Hebrews a good deal of material aid in helping them to escape the Egyptian yoke. Girard rightly contrasts the worldly power of the Old Testament God to the non-interventionism of the God of the Gospels, who “lets his rain fall on the just as on the unjust.” No doubt the abstract spirit of universal monotheism is better served by radical monism than by a dualism that remains open to the remains of pagan “magical thought.” But the assertion of God’s material aid reflects a dualism within which the material world retains significance. To abandon “to Caesar” the problems of social and material organization is to risk losing contact with the scenic, communal nature of the social order.

The monistic restriction of the sacred to the world of human interaction that “brackets” the outside world takes for granted the success of human social and material organization once internal harmony has been assured through the deferral of mimetic violence. This is, in its most general terms, the Christian world-view that has uniquely permitted the West to engage in the free exploration of nature, unrestricted by the kinds of laws that might encumber a dualistic system such as Judaism. Science and the Enlightenment are products of Christian monism.

But the problems of today’s “global” world seem to suggest that a new attention should be paid to communal specificity, lest the peoples of the world be forced to choose between the West’s self-deprecating universalism and the rival universalism of Sharia. The exclusively internal human focus of the Christian and post-Christian West has led since the Holocaust to an increasing concentration on the victimary (Girard’s souci des victimes). On the local level, this may come into conflict with the practical operations of social organization. If intergroup harmony (“diversity”) requires “affirmative action” for certain groups, the selection of participants in a project may be less effective than if they were chosen on the basis of an objective examination. More troublingly, victimary monism provokes the West’s familiar oikophobia, the sense of guilt for its scientific and economic firstness in relation to the rest of the world that focuses on the situations of human abuse and on the hypocrisy of attempts at “enlightenment” in the colonial era. No realistic alternative model of cultural transmission is provided; we are simply invited to judge the evil of what actually occurred by the ideal criterion of the moral model of human equality.

Clearly for many, Islam, the religion of “submission,” offers a viable alternative to these modern modes of thought. In the terms of this Chronicle, Islam is neither dualist nor monist but zero-dimensional, since it does not derive the truths of the Koran as revealed to The Prophet from any scene of human interaction. The truth has existed from all eternity, and the only scene relevant to us is that of its transmission; even to think of its creation is inconceivable. Yet Islam has not yet shown itself compatible with the ethical, material, and intellectual advances that Christian monism has brought about.

Christianity reproaches Judaism with its particularism, its valorization of its own specific nation and laws, although the God it has discovered/invented is truly universal. In turn, Judaism reproaches Christianity with using the moral model of human reciprocity as a universal formula, forgetting that human equality is realized within the scenic confines of a specific community. The “cultural” equality of ritual is actuated only within the community that performs the ritual.

As human beings, we are all equally children of Christ, and imitators of Christ. But when we face worldly problems that neither sacred or Satanic unanimity can resolve, we face them as members of particular communities, and the initiatives of firstness are our only recourse. In an era when the privilege of the victim, with its roots in Christian monism, increasingly trumps traditional communal norms by means of the dogma, encouraged by worldwide electronic instantaneity, that the only legitimate scene any longer is that of the abstract “world community,” we might do well to take another look at the “Jewish” model embodied in Israel as a “traditional” nation-state, as proposed in Daniel Gordis’ recent against-the-grain The Promise of Israel (Wiley, 2012). Firstness, Jewish and other, is not something the human world can dispense with. If a “world community” is one day to exist, it must be brought into being; we cannot rely on its virtual existence.*

Rather than despair of the impossibility of resolving the choice of dualism or monism, I think the emergence of GA, along with the continued relevance of Girard’s thought, offers a new framework within which the problems of the post-WWII world can at last be productively discussed. GA as a “new way of thinking” can help us think through the problems of postmodernity.

*Thanks to Adam Katz for making some of these points in our recent correspondence.