Interesting but I think recent history has proven Girard more correct than not and that the decline of Christianity has resulted in a reinvigoration of the scapegoat mechanism. The work of Bataille in The Accursed Share also validates a lot of Girard’s premises. Regarding his supposed ruse, I read Girard as another misrash on the Gospels, a tradition from which the Gospels themselves are a part, so I do not find this reading persuasive. Hermeneutics itself, as Kermode shows, resides in this hidden space, where exegesis lives in a state oscillating between insiders and outsiders. Jesus’ parables are also themselves examples.
> In other words, the impunity of the West, its unending capacity to invent from within a relentless dissolution of differences, far from getting its origins in a non-knowledge, comes from this: that the West chose to control the mechanism of the victim, which from there cannot be said to be surrogate, i. e. a scapegoat, and René Girard did not see that this control, this power, as it engages the future, is the most effective of knowledge.
Given the state of the West in 2025, this aged badly. This, to which the above responded, did not age at all:
“Modern Western society, however, can be described in terms of an exceptionally far-ranging and drawn-out critical cycle. The very essence of modern society might be said to be its ability to sustain the possibility for new discoveries in the midst of an ever-worsening sacrificial crisis—not, to be sure, without many signs of anxiety and stress.
I wonder if it's fair to say that in Girard’s theory, Christ’s sacrifice saved men not from sin but from only from guilt?
Guilt is better than scapegoating by murder.
Interesting angle of attack - not sure if it lands if you consider that Girard is only wrong about one thing, Christianity itself.
Good read and a good service provided, thanks for doing it!
Exactly
Thank you!!!
thank you!!
Interesting but I think recent history has proven Girard more correct than not and that the decline of Christianity has resulted in a reinvigoration of the scapegoat mechanism. The work of Bataille in The Accursed Share also validates a lot of Girard’s premises. Regarding his supposed ruse, I read Girard as another misrash on the Gospels, a tradition from which the Gospels themselves are a part, so I do not find this reading persuasive. Hermeneutics itself, as Kermode shows, resides in this hidden space, where exegesis lives in a state oscillating between insiders and outsiders. Jesus’ parables are also themselves examples.
> In other words, the impunity of the West, its unending capacity to invent from within a relentless dissolution of differences, far from getting its origins in a non-knowledge, comes from this: that the West chose to control the mechanism of the victim, which from there cannot be said to be surrogate, i. e. a scapegoat, and René Girard did not see that this control, this power, as it engages the future, is the most effective of knowledge.
Given the state of the West in 2025, this aged badly. This, to which the above responded, did not age at all:
“Modern Western society, however, can be described in terms of an exceptionally far-ranging and drawn-out critical cycle. The very essence of modern society might be said to be its ability to sustain the possibility for new discoveries in the midst of an ever-worsening sacrificial crisis—not, to be sure, without many signs of anxiety and stress.