Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Book I: Fundamental Anthropology

The Victimage Mechanism as the Basis of Religion

Girard argues that all religion originates in a primal ‘victimage mechanism’ in which mimetic rivalry within a community is resolved by the collective murder of a surrogate victim, whose death is then sacralized — forming the hidden foundation of culture, ritual, and prohibition.

• Mimetic or ‘acquisitive’ mimesis — the imitation of another’s desire for an object — inevitably generates rivalry, because two individuals cannot simultaneously possess the same object without conflict.
  • Unlike simple behavioral imitation, acquisitive mimesis targets the model’s desire itself, making the model simultaneously a rival.
  • Aristotle’s observation that humans are more imitative than other animals is the anthropological premise from which the entire analysis departs.
• Mimetic rivalry escalates across a community through contagion, eventually threatening social dissolution — a crisis resolved only when collective violence converges on a single surrogate victim whose death or expulsion restores peace.
  • As rivalry spreads, the original object of contention loses importance; what matters is the antagonistic relationship itself, not what triggered it.
  • The surrogate victim is chosen not for genuine guilt but because it serves as a focal point that can absorb and redirect collective aggression.
• Religious prohibition functions primarily to prevent the imitation of rivalrous behaviors — especially acquisition of the same objects — rather than to encode arbitrary taboos, revealing the deep connection between mimesis and the sacred.
  • Prohibitions consistently target the behaviors most likely to ignite mimetic rivalry: touching, taking, looking at objects or persons that belong to another.
  • The sacred aura surrounding prohibitions is a secondary encoding of the original terror generated by undifferentiated mimetic conflict.
• Ritual is the controlled re-enactment of the founding collective murder, designed to reproduce the peace that followed the original victimization — making sacrifice the central institution of archaic religion.
  • Ritual prescribes ‘imperative mimesis’: participants must imitate the founding violence precisely so that the pacifying result is reproduced.
  • The victim sacrificed in ritual is always a substitute for the original surrogate victim, chosen by markers of similarity or difference that link it to the founding event.
• The victimage mechanism generates a complete theory of religion: the murdered victim becomes divine because it is simultaneously responsible for the community’s crisis and for its resolution, making the sacred itself a product of collective misrecognition.
  • The unanimous violence directed at the victim transforms it into a god — both monstrous and beneficial — because the community attributes both the disorder and its sudden end to the victim’s supernatural power.
  • This misrecognition is not conscious deception but a structural feature of the mechanism: the community genuinely cannot see that its own violence, not the victim’s guilt, produced the peace.

The Development of Culture and Institutions

Girard traces the victimage mechanism as the generative source of all major human institutions — kingship, animal domestication, sexual prohibitions, funeral rites — showing how each can be understood as a variant elaboration of the founding murder and its ritualized repetition.

• Sacred kingship arises when a community institutionalizes the role of the surrogate victim by selecting a living individual who will eventually be sacrificed, granting him absolute power in the interim as a way of concentrating and controlling mimetic rivalry.
  • The king’s sacred status and his ultimate sacrificial death are two sides of the same logic: he embodies the victim’s dual nature as both polluted and holy.
  • Central political power in archaic societies can thus be read as a ritual elaboration of the victimage mechanism rather than a purely utilitarian arrangement.
• Ritual variants across cultures are not arbitrary but reflect the polyvalence inherent in the victimage mechanism, which can be elaborated differently depending on which aspect of the founding event — the victim’s guilt, the community’s unanimity, or the resulting peace — is emphasized.
  • Apparent contradictions between rituals (e.g., some that require strict purity, others that require deliberate pollution) are resolved when seen as alternate encodings of the same founding structure.
  • Specific institutions such as oracles, priestly castes, and festival cycles each preserve a distinct functional moment of the original victimage sequence.
• Animal domestication and ritual hunting both derive from the victimage mechanism: early humans ritualized their relationship to animals that had served as surrogate victims, gradually bringing certain species under controlled proximity as a permanent sacrificial resource.
  • The earliest domesticated animals are precisely those most commonly found in sacrificial contexts, suggesting that domestication followed from ritual rather than from purely economic calculation.
  • Ritual hunting retains explicit mimetic and sacrificial elements — formal apologies, prescribed methods, communal consumption — that mark the hunted animal as a surrogate victim.
• Sexual prohibitions and exogamy rules are best understood not as incest taboos in the Freudian sense but as anti-mimetic regulations designed to prevent the rivalries that arise when members of the same group compete for the same sexual partners.
  • The logic of exchange (giving women to another group and receiving women from it) is an institutionalized displacement of mimetic rivalry outward — it transforms potential rivals into allies.
  • This reframes Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis of kinship: the principle of exchange is not a positive cultural achievement but a defensive institutionalization against mimetic violence.
• Funeral rites institutionalize the community’s need to manage the contagious violence that a death unleashes, transforming the corpse — which concentrates the community’s fear of undifferentiation — into a sacred object subject to controlled ritual handling.
  • The dead person resembles the surrogate victim: both are ambiguously inside and outside the community, both are sources of pollution and potential sacrality.
  • Mourning practices across cultures follow the logic of the victimage mechanism — isolating the dangerous contagion, performing collective solidarity, and finally reintegrating the community after a prescribed period.

The Process of Hominization

Girard proposes that the victimage mechanism is not merely a product of human culture but its very engine: the capacity for collective murder mediated by a surrogate victim is what differentiated proto-human groups from other primates, producing language, the sacred, and cultural order simultaneously.

• Ethology shows that animal dominance hierarchies normally contain mimetic rivalry within species-specific ‘appeasement’ behaviors, but the human capacity for open-ended imitation overwhelmed these biological brakes, producing a crisis that only the victimage mechanism could resolve.
  • Unlike other primates, proto-human groups lacked fixed instinctual inhibitors strong enough to prevent lethal mimetic escalation, making them uniquely vulnerable to internal collective violence.
  • The victimage mechanism filled the role that instinct plays in animals: providing a reliable, repeatable way to stop mimetic contagion and restore order.
• The founding murder produced the first genuine sign — the victim’s body — which simultaneously stood for the crisis, its resolution, and the community’s collective experience, making the victimage mechanism the origin of human symbolic and linguistic capacity.
  • The corpse of the surrogate victim is the original ’transcendental signifier’: a single object that concentrates and resolves the community’s entire field of meaning.
  • Language and ritual co-originate in this moment: both are ways of re-presenting the founding event in order to reproduce its pacifying effect.
• Girard’s account of hominization challenges both Darwinian gradualism and structuralist accounts of culture by insisting that a specific mechanism — collective violence resolved by unanimous victimization — is the singular event-type that bootstrapped human culture from animal sociality.
  • This is not a claim about a single historical event but about a recurring type of event that, once it began to be ritualized, could be indefinitely repeated and elaborated into full cultural complexity.
  • The theory bridges ethology and ethnology by explaining why human culture universally features sacrifice, prohibition, and ritual without requiring independent parallel evolution in each group.

Myth: The Invisibility of the Founding Murder

Myths systematically conceal the founding murder at their core by transforming the collective violence against the victim into a story that either demonizes the victim to justify the violence or presents the victim’s death as a divine self-sacrifice — making the victimage mechanism structurally invisible within mythological narrative.

• The defining characteristic of myth is the radical elimination of the founding murder from its own narrative: myths either omit the collective killing entirely or reframe it so that the community’s violence appears as divine justice or cosmic necessity.
  • This concealment is not a secondary distortion added to an originally transparent account; it is constitutive of myth as a genre — myth is precisely the encoding that makes the victimage mechanism unreadable.
  • The difference between myth and the modern ’text of persecution’ (such as a medieval pogrom account) is not one of degree but of the degree of credulity: myth fully endorses the persecutors’ perspective.
• Myths encode victims through a double semantic movement: negative connotation (the victim is monstrous, polluted, guilty of transgression) followed by positive connotation (the victim becomes divine, beneficent, the source of cultural order), both of which serve to justify and sacralize the collective murder.
  • The victim’s ‘guilt’ in myth always takes the form of violating the community’s most fundamental distinctions — patricide, incest, impiety — which are precisely the transgressions that would provoke universal condemnation and justify unanimous violence.
  • After the murder, the same victim is worshipped as a god, revealing that positive and negative sacrality are two faces of the same structural position.
• Surrogate victims in myth are frequently marked by physical signs — lameness, blindness, unusual beauty or ugliness, marginal social status — that identify them as appropriate scapegoats by signaling their difference from the norm without making their selection appear arbitrary.
  • Oedipus’s swollen foot (his name’s meaning), his status as a foundling, and his eventual exile are all physical and social markers of victimary selection, not incidental narrative details.
  • These ‘signs of the surrogate victim’ recur cross-culturally, constituting a recognizable typology of mythological scapegoat figures.

Texts of Persecution

By analyzing medieval persecution texts — accounts of pogroms and witch trials written from the persecutors’ perspective — Girard demonstrates that modern readers can decode the victimage mechanism embedded in them, and argues that this same decoding capacity, now applied to myth, is the distinctive achievement of Western modernity and ultimately of the Judaeo-Christian revelation.

• Medieval persecution texts such as Guillaume de Machaut’s account of Jewish poisoning of wells during the Black Death are structurally identical to myths: they present a community in crisis, identify a marginal victim bearing stereotypical marks of guilt, and describe collective violence against that victim as justified — but modern readers immediately recognize the innocence of the victims.
  • The persecutors genuinely believed their accusations; the distortion is not cynical propaganda but sincere collective misrecognition identical in structure to mythological belief.
  • The modern reader’s ability to see through the text — to recognize that Jews did not poison wells — is a historical achievement, not a natural cognitive capacity; it required a long cultural process of demystification.
• The word ‘scapegoat’ has a double semantic sense — referring both to the ritual mechanism (the Hebrew Yom Kippur goat sent into the desert bearing communal sins) and to any unjust collective victimization — and this doubling is itself evidence that Western culture has developed an awareness of the victimage mechanism unavailable to cultures still fully enclosed within it.
  • The emergence of the term as a social critique (calling out someone as a ‘scapegoat’) presupposes the victim’s innocence — a presupposition that mythological cultures structurally could not make.
  • Girard locates the source of this demystifying awareness in the biblical texts, particularly the Gospels, which side with the victim rather than the persecuting community.
• The historical emergence of the victimage mechanism into cultural visibility — the capacity to recognize and name scapegoating — is not a product of Enlightenment rationalism alone but ultimately traces to the Judaeo-Christian scriptural tradition, which Girard will analyze in Book II.
  • Rationalist demystification of persecution is itself parasitic on a prior moral commitment to the victim’s innocence that comes from the biblical tradition, even when the rationalist is unaware of this debt.
  • This claim sets up the book’s central argument: that the Gospels contain the first fully explicit revelation of the founding murder, making them the decisive anthropological document of human history.

Book II: The Judaeo-Christian Scriptures

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Girard argues that the Judaeo-Christian scriptures uniquely subvert the mythological system they superficially resemble by progressively taking the side of the victim against the persecuting community, culminating in the Gospel texts which explicitly reveal the founding murder as the hidden basis of all human culture and religion.

• The early books of the Bible contain all three moments of the victimage mechanism—mimetic crisis, collective violence, and the founding of cultural order—but unlike world mythology, they consistently subvert the logic of the mechanism by presenting the victim as innocent and the community as guilty.
  • The story of Cain presents the founding murder in classic form but with a crucial inversion: where Roman mythology justifies Romulus’s killing of Remus as necessary for the city’s foundation, Genesis unambiguously condemns Cain while still registering the founding effects of the murder.
  • The story of Joseph is a deliberate rewriting of a pre-existing mythology: where the original myth would have presented Joseph’s brothers as passive victims of a threatening hero who is justly expelled, Genesis presents Joseph as the falsely accused innocent victim of collective jealousy, and the accusation by Potiphar’s wife as straightforwardly false.
  • Max Weber recognized the Bible’s tendency to take the victim’s side but explained it sociologically as a cultural bias arising from Jewish historical suffering, thereby missing its universal significance for understanding the founding mechanism of all religion.
• The Prophets progressively subvert all three pillars of primitive religion—myth, sacrifice, and obsessive legal differentiation—by returning attention to the founding mechanism and revealing that all prohibitions reduce to the single imperative of loving one’s neighbor, which means avoiding mimetic rivalry.
  • The four Songs of the Servant of Yahweh in Second Isaiah constitute the most explicit pre-Gospel description of the victimage mechanism: the Servant takes on the community’s violence, is marked with the signs of social rejection, is falsely accused, and is killed—with the text explicitly affirming his innocence and implicitly denying God’s direct responsibility.
  • The ambiguity about Yahweh’s role in the Servant’s death (‘it was the will of the Lord to bruise him’) represents the limit of the Old Testament’s deconstruction—the New Testament removes this ambiguity by placing responsibility entirely on human collective violence.
• The Curses against the Pharisees in Matthew and Luke reveal that all murders ‘from the foundation of the world’ (apo kataboles kosmou) constitute a single series of founding murders, and that Jesus’ contemporaries who claim to condemn their fathers’ violence while preparing new violence structurally repeat the same misrecognition that has governed humanity since Cain.
  • The phrase ‘from the foundation of the world’ (apo kataboles kosmou) implies that the world’s order is constituted by violence—kataboles denotes the onset of a crisis whose resolution establishes order, not a serene creation ex nihilo.
  • The sons who build tombs for the prophets their fathers killed believe they demonstrate independence from their fathers’ violence; paradoxically, the very act of condemnation reproduces the fathers’ logic—excluding from themselves the responsibility for violence they attribute to others.
• The Gospel of John identifies Satan not with a personal supernatural entity but with the founding mechanism itself—‘a murderer from the beginning’ and ’the father of lies’—because collective murder is the origin of both the lie that covered it and all subsequent cultural lies that maintain human communities in misrecognition of their own violence.
  • Satan as ’the prince of this world’ (princeps hujus mundi) means that the mimetic mechanism of collective violence is the actual structural principle of all human societies, not a marginal phenomenon but the foundation that religious and political orders are built upon and built to conceal.
  • Satan is also the skandalon—the stumbling block, the mimetic model-become-rival that lies across our path—linking the metaphysics of evil directly to Girard’s psychology of mimetic desire.
• The Passion is simultaneously a historical event, a reproduction of the founding mechanism in its most archetypal form, and the revelation that subverts all future founding murders: unlike myth, the Gospel narrative places responsibility for the collective violence squarely on the murderers rather than attributing it to the victim’s guilt.
  • Frazer’s attempt to explain the Passion as a historical instance of saturnalian ritual (comparing it to the mock king of the Sacaea) mistakes the nature of the analogy: the Passion resembles all rituals not because it was one of them but because all rituals are diluted reproductions of the spontaneous collective murder the Passion makes fully visible.
  • The Martyrdom of Stephen in Acts reproduces the structure of the Curses-and-Passion sequence in compact form: Stephen’s speech reveals the founding murder, his audience stops their ears to avoid hearing it, and then immediately lynches him—confirming through action the truth of what words alone could not make audible.
  • The ‘stone rejected by the builders’ of Psalm 118, cited by Jesus, is the formula for the founding mechanism’s reversal: the rejected scapegoat has always been the hidden cornerstone of culture, and making this visible is what makes possible a genuinely different kind of order.
• The Christian tradition’s restriction of the Gospel’s universal revelation of founding violence to an accusation against Judaism is itself a structural repetition of the founding mechanism—a new scapegoating that confirms the truth of what it claims to supersede, demonstrating that no tradition is immune from the misrecognition the Gospels expose.
  • Anti-Semitic Christianity says, in structural parallel to the Pharisees: ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have killed Jesus’—thereby reproducing exactly the pattern Jesus condemned, now directed at a new victim category.
  • The contemporary tendency to condemn the Gospel texts themselves as responsible for religious violence is the final irony: the text that reveals the scapegoat mechanism is itself made into a scapegoat, blamed for the violence it was designed to expose.

A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text

The Gospels do not present the death of Jesus as a sacrifice but as a revelation of the founding murder; a non-sacrificial reading exposes the sacrificial interpretation as a misunderstanding, and articulates how the Kingdom of God, the Crucifixion, and the Apocalypse form a coherent logic rooted in non-violence.

• The Gospels consistently reject sacrifice as a religious category, with Jesus explicitly countering ritualism by quoting Hosea — ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’ — and subordinating altar offerings to reconciliation between brothers.
  • Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13) is invoked by Jesus against Pharisaic ritualism.
  • Matthew 5:23-24 commands leaving one’s offering at the altar to be reconciled with a brother first, making human reconciliation prior to ritual.
• No Gospel text defines the death of Jesus as a sacrifice in any accepted theological sense (expiation, substitution, etc.); the sacrificial interpretation of the Passion is a historically necessary but fundamentally mistaken reading that perpetuates the founding mechanism it should have annihilated.
  • Girard argues that the sacrificial reading allowed Christendom to function as a culture for fifteen to twenty centuries by re-founding it on mythological forms — using a misunderstanding of the very text that should have dissolved such forms.
  • The medieval theological conclusion that the Father demanded the Son’s sacrifice as revenge for injured honor is described as the single claim most responsible for discrediting Christianity in the modern world.
• The God of the Gospels is radically non-violent — making his sun rise on evil and good alike — and any attribution of violence to the Father rests on projecting human sacrificial logic onto the deity.
  • Matthew 5:43-45 is identified as the foundational text: God treats enemies and friends with equal benevolence, which is incompatible with a deity who requires blood revenge.
  • The Gospels explicitly deny that God is responsible for infirmities, illnesses, and catastrophes — stripping the deity of the primitive religious role of polarizing everything humans cannot master.
• The apocalyptic violence predicted in the Gospels is always attributed to human agency, never to God; the Gospels desacralize Old Testament apocalyptic imagery by using explicit simile (‘as it was in the days of Noah’) to signal metaphorical borrowing and to emphasize the non-miraculous, human origin of catastrophe.
  • Luke 17:26-30 uses ‘as’ and ’likewise as’ to frame Noah and Lot comparisons as explicit analogies, not literal divine interventions.
  • The ‘powers of the heavens’ that are shaken (Luke 21:25-26) are not the true God but the cultural-religious powers rooted in the founding murder — what Paul calls principalities and dominions.
  • Matthew’s version of the parable of the murderous tenants (21:40-41) has Jesus’ audience supply the violent conclusion themselves, showing that the violence is projected by humans onto God, not commanded by God.
• The Pauline doctrine in Colossians — that the Cross disarmed principalities and powers and made a public example of them — provides a non-sacrificial explanation of the Crucifixion’s efficacy: Christ’s death works not as ritual expiation but as the definitive exposure and dissolution of the victimage mechanism.
  • Colossians 2:13-15 is read as describing how the Cross dissolves the ‘bond that stood against us’ — human culture’s terrifying reflection of its own violence — by publicly revealing the founding murder.
  • 1 Corinthians 2:8 — ‘None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’ — shows that the powers were undone precisely because they resorted again to the founding mechanism, this time with full exposure.
  • “Origen’s Commentary on John describes Christ’s birth as weakening the powers and cancelling out their magic, which Girard reads as an early patristic recognition of the demystifying function of the Incarnation.” —Origen
• The logic connecting the preaching of the Kingdom of God to the Apocalypse is not psychological bitterness but structural necessity: if Jesus’ audience accepts the Kingdom (unconditional renunciation of violence), there is no Crucifixion or Apocalypse; their refusal makes both inevitable by leaving violence without a cathartic outlet.
  • Girard identifies the Kingdom of God as the complete elimination of vengeance and reprisal — the substitution of unconditional love for the mimetic cycle of reciprocal violence.
  • The two-part structure of Matthew — Kingdom preaching followed by Apocalypse — is explained by the negative event between them: the failure of the preaching due to the indifference and hostility of its audience.
  • Albert Schweitzer is credited with re-emphasizing the apocalyptic theme against nineteenth-century liberal humanist readings of Jesus, but criticized for declaring it unintelligible to modern conditions.
• The death of Jesus is not caused by the Father’s demand for sacrifice but by the absolute fidelity of Jesus to the rule of non-violence in a world governed by violence — making his death the direct, inevitable consequence of love of neighbor lived to its end.
  • Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13) is cited as the Gospel’s own non-sacrificial explanation of Jesus’ death.
  • Girard argues that if all humans simultaneously adopted the rule of the Kingdom, no cheeks would be struck; but since others refuse, the one person who does not refuse becomes the inevitable victim.
  • The Father does not demand sacrifice; responsibility for the death rests entirely on humanity, which could not be reconciled without killing — and even the death of the just no longer had the power to reconcile after the Gospel’s revelation.
• The divinity of Christ is not a theological excess but the only logically adequate response to the Gospel text: Jesus is the only human being who achieved humanity in perfect form by remaining entirely outside the founding murder, making him simultaneously the fullest expression of humanity and of divinity.
  • Girard argues that the theology of the Incarnation adheres rigorously to the logic implicit in the text and only becomes intelligible within a non-sacrificial rather than sacrificial reading.
  • The non-sacrificial reading does not reduce Christianity to humanism; rather, it shows divine transcendence to be so close — concealed behind transcendent violence — that it was never suspected.
  • To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had absolutely transcended mankind up to that point.
• The virgin birth, far from being naive mythology, conveys a message precisely opposite to mythological divine-rape narratives: the complete absence of sexual violence and mimetic rivalry in the Annunciation signals that Jesus is born entirely outside the founding murder and the cycle of violence-born-of-violence.
  • In myths like Zeus and Semele (birth of Dionysus), divine copulation always involves violence — the god bearing down like a beast upon a victim. The virgin birth contains none of these elements.
  • “Nietzsche’s shame at finding an ‘Amphitryon story’ in the Gospels (The Anti-Christ) is cited as revealing the double standard of modernity, which celebrates Dionysiac violence in Greek myth while despising its absence in the Christian text.” —Nietzsche
  • The theme of the virgin birth is homologous with Paul’s concept of Christ as the second Adam — both assert that Christ stands entirely outside the vicious circle of original sin, i.e., complicity with violence.

The Sacrificial Reading and Historical Christianity

The sacrificial interpretation of the Passion, derived primarily from the Epistle to the Hebrews, is a historically necessary but fundamentally mistaken reading that allowed Christianity to found a culture while concealing the Gospel’s radical revelation; this reading perpetuated persecution, anti-Semitism, and the scapegoat mechanism it should have dissolved.

• The sacrificial reading of Christianity is not a marginal error but the basis on which historical Christendom was built; by refounding culture on a misunderstood version of the text that should have dissolved all cultural founding mechanisms, Christianity paradoxically repeated the sacrificial logic of every previous culture.
  • The sacrificial reading ‘reinserts violence into the conception of the divine,’ which has consequences for the entire system — reducing mankind’s universal responsibility for Christ’s death and enabling particularization that leads to scapegoating the Jews.
  • Girard notes that Paul’s statement in Romans 2:1 — ‘In passing judgement upon him you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things’ — applies to Christians who condemned Jews while repeating their errors.
• The Epistle to the Hebrews, whose canonical status was long disputed, is the primary source of the sacrificial interpretation; it defines Christ’s death by analogy with Old Testament sacrifice, preserving formal continuity with sacrificial religion while claiming a unique, perfect, and final sacrifice.
  • The Epistle argues that Christ’s blood accomplishes once for all what animal sacrifices could not — but defines this difference entirely within sacrificial categories, never examining the essential nature of sacrifice itself.
  • Hebrews 9:22-26 and 10:11-14 are identified as the key locus of this sacrificial theology, which Girard argues is closer in spirit to the Songs of the Servant in Second Isaiah than to the Gospels.
  • Modern anti-Christian demystification — from comparative anthropology to Nietzsche — only works against the Epistle to the Hebrews and its readings, not against the Gospels themselves; both camps are therefore locked in a dispute between doubles.
• The Judgement of Solomon provides a paradigmatic Old Testament illustration of the difference between sacrificial and non-sacrificial conduct: the false mother’s willingness to divide the child is the logic of mimetic desire consummated, while the true mother’s renunciation cannot be described as self-sacrifice without distorting its meaning.
  • Both women are described as harlots and referred to only as ‘one woman’ and ’the other woman,’ signaling their status as undifferentiated doubles engaged in mimetic rivalry.
  • The false mother accepts division of the child — preferring that neither possess it rather than concede to her rival — which is the pure logic of mimetic desire: the object no longer matters, only the fascination with the hated model.
  • Calling the true mother’s conduct ‘self-sacrifice’ misrepresents it by foregrounding renunciation and death rather than her positive orientation toward the living child — the sacrificial vocabulary always emphasizes the values of the bad mother.
• Christ’s conduct in the Passion parallels the true mother in the Judgement of Solomon: he agrees to die so that humanity may live, not out of masochism or obedience to an irrational sacrificial demand, but out of absolute fidelity to the non-violent Word — the only response that does not kill.
  • Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13) is the Gospel’s own non-sacrificial formulation, emphasizing positive love rather than the negative category of self-sacrifice.
  • Girard identifies Judah’s offer to substitute himself for Benjamin in the Joseph story as another Old Testament prefiguration of Christ — choosing to be killed rather than kill, breaking out of the circle of murder.
• Antigone, like the true mother in the Judgement of Solomon, is a figura Christi in the ancient world: she refuses the mythological falsehood by asserting that the doubles are identical and must be treated the same — but the Gospel surpasses tragedy because it is oriented toward the living rather than the already dead.
  • Simone Weil identified Antigone as the most perfect figura Christi of antiquity, citing the line: ‘Not to hate together but to love together was I born’ — which states the founding truth that the City of Man is built on hating together.
  • Girard criticizes Simone Weil for ignoring the Old Testament under the influence of hellenizing humanist teachers like Alain, who instilled a ‘sacred horror’ of the Bible in modern French intellectual culture.
  • Jesus’ command ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead’ (Matthew 8:22) is cited as the Gospel’s criterion for why the Old Testament texts surpass Sophocles: biblical non-sacrificial conduct is oriented toward life, not the burial rites of the dead.
• The semiotic analysis of the Passion (e.g., Louis Marin’s ‘semiotics of the traitor’ focusing on Judas) reproduces the sacrificial reading in a new scientific guise: it imposes a folktale schema of hero/traitor/punishment on a text that explicitly subverts that schema.
  • Matthew 26:55-56 has Jesus explicitly set aside the categories of betrayal and conspiracy — ‘Day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me’ — rendering Judas’s role structurally marginal.
  • The crucial difference between Judas and Peter lies not in the betrayal but in Judas’s inability to return to Jesus — his despair that he alone is responsible — which is the exact opposite error to Peter’s pride in claiming he alone would never betray.
  • Girard argues that semiotic analysis is most effective not on the Gospel text itself but on medieval Passion plays like Oberammergau, where the sacrificial reading had already imposed a folktale structure on the narrative.
• Historical Christianity’s course — gradual loosening of legal constraints, increasing disintegration of cultural formations — follows the same pattern as all sacrificial cultures; but the Gospel’s subversive truth, covered by the sacrificial reading, is a living principle beneath the crumbling envelope of Christendom.
  • The sacrificial reading was historically inevitable: pagan peoples who had not been prepared by the Old Testament could only receive Christianity through the sacrificial veil, which allowed it to function as a founding element of culture.
  • Modern atheism, which attacks sacrificial Christianity, is merely the reversal of that Christianity and helps perpetuate it — both camps share the sacrificial definition as the final meaning of the Christian text.
  • What is dying today is the sacrificial concept of divinity preserved by medieval and modern theology — not the Father of Jesus — and this death is necessary for the Gospels to rise again as the newest and liveliest thing humanity has encountered.
• The present global situation of nuclear deterrence is the objective correlate of the Gospel’s apocalyptic predictions: for the first time, violence can no longer be cycled through the scapegoat mechanism to produce cultural order, and humanity faces the starkest possible choice between the rule of the Kingdom and total self-destruction.
  • Nuclear weapons are named after the most violent deities of Greek mythology — Titan, Poseidon, Saturn — demonstrating an unconscious recognition that ultimate violence has taken the place of the sacred as humanity’s protector.
  • Raymond Aron’s sober claim that nuclear armaments alone maintain world peace is cited as an unwitting repetition of the primitive logic of the scapegoat: violence prevents violence from breaking out.
  • Rudolf Bultmann’s proposal to demythologize and excise the Apocalypse as an old Jewish superstition is criticized as another sacrificial amputation — possible only because Bultmann, like Schweitzer, still read apocalyptic violence as divine rather than human.

The Logos of Heraclitus and the Logos of John

The Heraclitean Logos and the Johannine Logos are fundamentally different: the former is the violent, sacred principle that holds cultural opposites together through expulsion, while the latter is the non-violent Word that is perpetually expelled by the world — a distinction that Western philosophy, including Heidegger, has systematically failed to make.

• Western philosophy since the Middle Ages has systematically assimilated the Johannine Logos to the Heraclitean Logos, treating them as variants of the same rational-divine principle; this assimilation is not an accident but the philosophical expression of the sacrificial reading.
  • Christian philosophers treated Greek philosophers as precursors of Johannine thought, drawing a new line of prophets within Greek culture; post-Christians reversed the priority, claiming the Johannine Logos was merely borrowed from Greece.
  • A modern theologian quoted by Heidegger defines the relationship as: ‘The real appearance of truth in the form of the God-man set the seal on the Greeks’ philosophical insight concerning the rule of the logos over all existence.’
• Heidegger’s analysis of the Heraclitean Logos correctly identifies its constitutive violence — showing that it holds opposites together through force — but then incorrectly attributes a parallel (though differently characterized) violence to the Johannine Logos, depriving himself of the means to distinguish the two.
  • Heidegger argues that the Johannine Logos, via the Septuagint rendering of logos as God’s commandment (the Decalogue), represents the interiorized tyranny of a divine master over human slaves — an extension of the Hegelian master-slave reading of Yahweh.
  • By inserting violence into both types of Logos — as free violence in the Greek case and enslaving violence in the Jewish-Christian case — Heidegger transforms what should be an absolute distinction into a rivalry between doubles.
  • Girard credits Heidegger with showing that all Western thought, even when labeled Christian, has been Greek: ‘Heidegger makes the final gesture that disencumbers Western thought of all pseudo-Christian residues’ — but this very gesture confirms the perpetual expulsion of the Johannine Logos.
• The Prologue to the Gospel of John defines the Johannine Logos precisely through its perpetual expulsion: ’the world knew him not,’ ‘his own people received him not’ — making expulsion constitutive of the Logos of love rather than the Logos of violence, which founds culture through expulsion.
  • John 1:4-5 and 1:10-11 repeat three times in a few lines the essential point — the Logos came into the world and was not received — but all commentators have missed that expulsion is the defining feature of the Johannine Logos.
  • The Heraclitean Logos is the Logos of expulsion that produces culture by expelling the scapegoat; the Johannine Logos is the Logos that is expelled and thereby reveals the truth of that founding violence.
  • The Prologue to John repeats and rectifies the first sentence of Genesis: where Genesis shows God expelling mankind to found culture, John shows mankind expelling God — the same structure with the direction of violence reversed.
• The Gospel’s epistemology of love — expressed in 1 John — holds that only love reveals the truth about violence, because hatred and mimetic rivalry generate the illusions of the doubles; all purely intellectual demystification remains caught within the spirit of revenge and recrimination.
  • 1 John 2:10-11 states: ‘He who loves his brother abides in the light… but he who hates his brother is in the darkness and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.’
  • “Nietzsche’s counter-claim in The Anti-Christ — ‘Love is the state in which man sees things most of all as they are not’ — is identified as the logically coherent position of someone who has chosen Dionysus over the Crucified and therefore cannot see how collective violence is glossed over in Greek myth.” —Nietzsche
  • All modern grand theories (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) offer selective condemnations of victimage processes directed against their own rival doubles, perpetuating the sacrificial system while appearing to expose it.

Book III: Interdividual Psychology

Mimetic Desire

Desire is the mimetic crisis in endemic rather than epidemic form — what happens to human relationships when the founding violence of the scapegoat mechanism loses its cathartic power; it escalates through object rivalry into metaphysical desire by a process of positive feedback in which the model’s resistance transfigures the object into an absolute.

• Human desire is not a metaphysically unique faculty but a relatively distinctive phenomenon that emerges when mimetic interference with needs and appetites crosses a threshold of intensity — enabled by the same mimetic capacity that underlies all cultural apprenticeship.
  • Girard insists that desire must not be granted the absolute distinctiveness psychoanalysis gives it; it is continuous with animal mimesis but only becomes ‘desire’ properly speaking when mimetic effects are combined with the wholesale re-processing of symbols characteristic of hominization.
  • The same mimetic capacity that makes cultural apprenticeship and education possible also generates rivalry: a child cannot objectively distinguish between forms of behavior that are good to imitate and those that generate conflict, because no systematic distinction is available.
• The mimetic double bind is universal: the model simultaneously communicates ‘imitate me’ (in the role of model) and ‘do not imitate me’ (in the role of rival), yet this contradiction is never acknowledged — leaving the disciple to interpret the hostility that results from too-successful imitation as a personal condemnation.
  • A master welcomes disciples but turns to jealousy and hostility when a disciple threatens to surpass him — the disciple, unable to see the mimetic source of the hostility, tends to blame himself and credit the model with justified superiority.
  • Gregory Bateson’s double bind theory of schizophrenia — where a mother sends contradictory messages of warmth and coldness — is related to the mimetic double bind, though Bateson limits his analysis to communication theory without reaching the victimage mechanism.
  • Modern education worsens this problem: instead of using prohibitions and initiation rites to distribute mimetic energy, it glorifies the natural spontaneity of desire, which is a purely mythological notion.
• Bateson’s cybernetic concept of positive feedback (runaway escalation) and his collaborators’ work on dysfunctional family systems both independently converge on the victimage mechanism as the solution to mimetic escalation — but neither framework reaches the full anthropological significance of that mechanism.
  • Paul Watzlawick and collaborators at Palo Alto, extending Bateson’s communication theory to the pragmatics of small groups, found that dysfunctional systems unconsciously restore equilibrium by forming a common front against one member — who is then held responsible for the group’s dysfunction.
  • Their analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a sacrificial drama is noted as an interesting literary application, but their framework remains confined to small modern groups and does not reach the cultural and religious dimensions of the victimage mechanism.
• Through positive feedback, rivalry transfigures the object of desire into something metaphysical: the model’s resistance increases the object’s value, which increases the model’s prestige, which intensifies desire — until the object represents the total difference between the model’s fullness of being and the subject’s nothingness.
  • Legal prohibitions address everyone equally and do not suggest personal inferiority; but the prohibition created by mimetic rivalry is always addressed to a particular individual, who tends to interpret it as a personal condemnation — leading to a vicious circle of self-blame and intensified imitation.
  • The threshold of desire properly speaking coincides with the threshold of the unreal — when the object can no longer be possessed without disillusionment, because the metaphysical aspiration it embodies exceeds any real possession.
  • Victory over the rival only speeds degeneration: possession is so disabusing that the subject blames the object and the model, then seeks a new model and a new object that will resist him more effectively — the pursuit of failure becomes increasingly expert.
• Desire is endemic rather than epidemic in the modern world because the Judaeo-Christian revelation has progressively dissolved the cathartic resources of the founding violence — leaving the mimetic crisis to be lived out individually, in a permanently unresolved form that lacks both the rapid paroxysm and the reconciliatory resolution of primitive sacrificial crises.
  • Modern liberation ideologies compound the problem: by removing external prohibitions (which were inert and equal for all), they replace them with the active, mobile obstacle of the mimetic rival — who is personally motivated to obstruct and well equipped to do so.
  • Girard refuses both the reactionary position (desire must be constrained) and the revolutionary position (desire must be liberated): the former is impossible once cultural forms begin dissolving, and the latter only intensifies mimetic rivalry while claiming to eliminate it.
  • Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud each offer their own scapegoats (the bourgeoisie, slave morality, the father/law) — their collective effect prepares the omnipresent revelation of the victim even as each individually delays it.

Desire without Object

When mimetic rivalry intensifies, subject and model become indistinguishable ‘doubles’—each imitating the other’s desire and violence—leading to a collapse of all difference, and this structure of doubles underlies psychotic experience, hypnosis, possession, and the disappearance of the object from desire.

• Mimetic desire spreads contagiously until model and disciple exchange roles: the model imitates his own desire through the disciple’s imitation, making each simultaneously model and rival to the other, dissolving all real difference into what Girard calls ’the relationship of doubles.’
  • “In rivalry, everyone occupies all positions one after another and then simultaneously, and there are no longer any distinct positions.” —René Girard
  • Everything that one partner to violence experiences, thinks, or carries into action will sooner or later be observable in the other partner—there is nothing that can be said of one that must not be said of all.
• Girard’s ‘doubles’ are real individuals locked in reciprocal violence whose behavior becomes increasingly identical, contrasting with the Romantic and psychoanalytic use of ‘double’ as a hallucinatory mirror image or ghost—which Girard argues is a secondary mystification of the real mimetic structure.
  • Hoffmann, Rank, and Freud treat the double as illusory—a weak reflection or hallucinatory ghost—whereas Girard insists the hallucinatory double can be traced back to real mimetic relationships of physical and social conflict.
  • When mimetic rivalry has undifferentiated all relationships, not the double but difference is a hallucination—the madman sees double because he is too close to the truth.
• Proust’s depiction of desire illustrates the structure of doubles better than psychoanalytic theory: the ‘surprises’ of desire are always the same and predictable, since the will to absorb the other and the will to differ from the other are fundamentally identical drives that produce reciprocity.
  • From Proust’s Balbec boardwalk scene: all the holiday-makers pretend not to see each other out of disdain, yet covertly watch each other out of fear of collision, and as a result they do bump into each other—each is mutually the object of the same secret attention veiled under apparent disdain.
  • Proust demonstrates that desire is not as interesting or limitless as it pretends—its surprises are always the same, always predictable, and always work against desire’s own interests.
• Manic-depressive illness and cyclothymia are intelligible as the internalization of mimetic rivalry’s oscillations: the subject rises when the rival falls and falls when the rival rises, producing the alternating phases of mania and depression that psychiatry treats as autonomous symptoms without recognizing their relational basis.
  • Psychiatry regards the sick person as a monad and does not attach sufficient weight to the foundational character of relationships with the other—the oscillating violence is real for the patient but invisible to the outside observer.
  • The manic-depressive has a particularly acute awareness of radical dependence on others’ judgments and the mimetic, contagious nature of those relationships, and lives through the inevitable lack of certainty with tragic intensity.
  • Professions most susceptible to these psychopathological states are those most directly dependent on collective judgment in its most brutal and arbitrary forms—politicians, actors, playwrights, writers.
• Psychosis occurs when the object entirely disappears from desire and only the mimetic double-bind with the model-obstacle remains—madness is the most distinctively human state because it carries to an extreme the mimetic tendency that most separates humans from animals, which can never fully detach appetite from instinctual objects.
  • Being rational is a matter of having objects and being busy with them; being mad is a matter of letting oneself be taken over completely by the mimetic models, fulfilling the deepest calling of desire.
  • Psychotic structure is a structure of symmetry and absolute undifferentiation—a return to the pre-sacrificial, pre-cultural state—while cultural reason is founded on asymmetry and difference introduced by the scapegoat mechanism.
• Hypnosis is a ‘precipitate’ of mimetic desire in which the subject adopts peaceful, non-rivalrous mimesis of the hypnotist’s desire—demonstrating experimentally that mimetic mechanisms can produce physiological and psychosomatic changes—and hypnosis, hysteria, and possession represent different stages of the same mimetic process.
  • In hypnosis, the model directly reveals what he requires of the subject without ambiguity—what Bernheim calls suggestion—and the subject who complies enters a state of peaceful mimesis without rivalry since the model invites copying of a desire that does not bear on an object belonging to the model.
  • The concept of the unconscious in both Freud and Janet originates with hypnosis and therefore with the interdividual mimetic relationship—transference in psychoanalysis is identical with the ‘fluid’ of the magnetizers from Mesmer onward.
  • Hypnosis is much more therapeutically effective with children than adults because children have a greater aptitude for peaceful mimesis—taking a model who is not simultaneously an obstacle.

Mimesis and Sexuality

What psychiatry labels masochism, sadism, and homosexuality are not autonomous instincts or perversions but predictable stages of intensifying mimetic rivalry in which sexual appetite becomes inflected toward the model-obstacle rather than the object, making the theatrical and erotic dimensions of these phenomena fully intelligible without invoking separate drives.

• What psychiatry labels ‘masochism’ is not a desire for failure or suffering in itself but a rational—if false—strategic conclusion drawn by desire from repeated experience: that only insurmountable obstacles and invincible rivals can generate truly valuable objects, so desire comes to seek the most formidable resistance as a precondition of any future desire.
  • Desire refuses to understand why the model changes into an obstacle, but it sees clearly that this change always takes place—rather than concluding it imitates others’ desires, it decides that only objects that cannot be possessed are worth desiring.
  • The label ‘masochism’ implies a direct aim for what is initially no more than the inevitable consequence of desire—it muddies the exceptional clarity of the phenomenon and prevents recognition of its mimetic source.
• Theatrical or ‘secondary’ masochism—in which the subject requires staged violence or humiliation from a partner to achieve sexual satisfaction—is mimesis in the second degree: the sexual appetite has become detached from the object and attached to the model-rival’s violence, which the subject now reproduces theatrically because no arousal is possible without recreating the whole mimetic structure.
  • What Freud terms ‘primary masochism’ is in fact none other than conflictual mimesis after the point when it sees in the most insurmountable rival the model for the most stunning success—secondary masochism is merely the theatrical representation of this, drawing sexual pleasure in its wake.
  • Sadism is the symmetrical theatre of the same structure: the subject plays the role of the persecutor-model rather than the victim, imitating not the desire of the model but the model himself in respect of his violent opposition to all the subject’s aspirations.
• At least one form of homosexuality is genetically intelligible as the complete transfer of sexual appetite from the heterosexual object of rivalry onto the rival himself, as mimetic rivalry intensifies to the point where the rival absorbs all the subject’s attention—making all sexual rivalry structurally homosexual regardless of the biological sex of the participants.
  • Among certain primates, a defeated male places himself in a position of homosexual availability toward his victor as a gesture of submission—suggesting that when mimetic rivalry reaches paroxysm, even animal appetite is briefly inflected toward the rival, though animal mimetism is not intense enough to make this permanent.
  • “A homosexual patient told Oughourlian: ‘Take my word for it—homosexuality is wanting to be what the other is’—expressing the mimetic genesis directly.” —Patient quoted by Oughourlian
  • Proust is correct, in his dispute with Gide, to reject the notion of essential homosexual difference—the same mimetic structure generates both homosexual and heterosexual desire depending only on which participant occupies the model-rival position.
• Freud’s observation of morbid jealousy, masochism, and ’excessive tenderness for the rival in love’ in Dostoevsky are three descriptions of the same mimetic process—the subject always generates triangular rivalry by imitating a pre-existing desire, not by repeating an Oedipal family pattern—and Dostoevsky’s novel ‘The Eternal Husband’ demonstrates this more clearly than Freud’s analysis of it.
  • In ‘The Eternal Husband,’ Troussotsky brings his rival Veltchaninov to meet his new fiancée not to lose her, but so that Veltchaninov’s desire will ratify and enhance the value of his choice—yet the result is predictably catastrophic because mimetic logic cannot be controlled.
  • The concept of ’latent homosexuality’ is mythological: it presupposes an intrinsic homosexual force crouching in the unconscious waiting to emerge, when in fact the ambivalent fascination with the rival is fully explained by the intensification of mimetic rivalry without any supplementary instinct.
• The mimetic principle dissolves the Platonic essences of psychiatric classification—masochism, sadism, homosexuality, paranoia, jealousy—by showing that these are not separate instincts or diseases but successive stages of a single continuous process in which desire detaches from the object and attaches to the model-obstacle.
  • To isolate illnesses from one another is by definition to extract them arbitrarily from the continuing process of which they are merely separate stages—the dynamic continuity is what classic psychiatry cannot see because it thinks in static, fixed descriptions.
  • Instincts, drives, fetishized sexuality, characters, symptoms—all are false essences being deconstructed, merely Platonic ideas in the process of disappearing.

Psychoanalytic Mythology

Freud’s Oedipus complex and narcissism are Platonic mythological constructs that fail to resolve the problems they were invented to solve—particularly the reproduction of triangular rivalry and the unity of desire—because Freud never discovered mimetic desire, the only principle that can account for how rivalry is generated, intensified, and repeated.

• The Oedipus complex is Freud’s Platonic solution to the problem of triangular rivalry: lacking the mimetic principle, he automatically sought an archetypal triangle of which all later triangles are reproductions, and only the family triangle possessed the stability, universality, and chronological precedence required to play this foundational role.
  • Freud did not base the Oedipus complex on observations of children but on triangular relationships in mental patients and literary works like Dostoevsky’s—his instinct to find a unitary explanation was correct, but his Platonic habit of mind led him to an archetype rather than a mechanism.
  • Mimetic desire and the Oedipus complex are mutually exclusive: for Freud, desire for the mother is intrinsic and cannot be derived from imitating another’s desire, and the father appears first as rival and incarnation of the law, never as a model whose desire the son copies.
• The Oedipal scheme cannot explain how triangular rivalry reproduces itself, because the model and the obstacle are treated as separate principles—the father as model for identification, and as rival only accidentally through legal ownership of the mother—whereas the mimetic principle explains reproduction automatically: to desire mimetically is already to generate a rival.
  • The only infallible way of producing triangular rivalry is to imitate a pre-existing desire—to never desire any woman except when designated by the desire of another. This is how the ambivalence Freud observes came into being, and it eliminates the need for a separate death instinct.
  • Either you bring rivalry into being through mimetic desire and get rid of the false Oedipus hypothesis, or you remain faithful to the Oedipus complex and come up against the insoluble problem of repetition—Oedipal relationships are inert and cannot generate positive feedback.
• Freud’s invention of the ‘abnormal Oedipus complex’ featuring the son’s passive homosexual desire for the father reveals his inability to account for intensifying ambivalence within a fixed archetypal scheme: the growing fascination with the rival that mimetic intensification naturally produces is instead explained as a pre-formed homosexual instinct.
  • What obviously strikes Freud in increasing rivalry is a growing fascination with the rival—this can and must derive from the mimetic process itself, but because Freud does not see this, he concludes he is dealing with a separate homosexual factor that could not be anticipated from more ordinary ambivalence.
  • The ‘bisexuelle Anlage’ (fundamental bisexuality) is only invoked to tone down the too-absolute cleavage between heterosexuality and homosexuality that the abnormal Oedipus creates—it is not a profound insight but a corrective device that still cannot restore the continuity only mimesis provides.
• Freud’s theory of narcissism in ‘Zur Einführung des Narzissmus’ is a mystification of mimetic desire: what he describes as the ‘intact narcissism’ of certain women that fascinates object-directed men is not a real psychological state but the mirage produced by the model-obstacle’s resistance—the coquette’s apparent self-sufficiency is a strategy that feeds on the admiration it attracts.
  • The coquette knows more about desire than Freud does: she knows desire attracts desire, so to be desired one must convince others that one desires oneself. Freud misinterprets as objective description the trap into which he has fallen.
  • Freud’s text reveals his own mimetic desire: his ‘Es ist als ob’ (it is as if) we envied intact narcissism betrays his unwillingness to admit that this is exactly what is happening—that the narcissistic phantom is what all desire seeks.
  • Belief in the intact narcissism of the other is the phantasm of desire par excellence—it is the last glimmering of the sacred, comparable to Polynesian mana: just as mana accumulates around the chief, libido appears to accumulate around the narcissistic person, drawing everyone else’s desires toward them.
• Proust’s description of the ’little band’ of girls at Balbec uses all the same metaphors Freud applies to narcissism—animal, child, criminal, humorist—but Proust knows that their apparent self-sufficiency is a mirage produced by his own desire, not an objective psychological state, making him a more accurate analyst of desire than Freud.
  • Proust’s narrator knows that the transcendence and self-sufficiency he perceives in the girls evaporate once he makes their acquaintance—their fascination depends entirely on inaccessibility, and once Albertine becomes his, desire only revives through jealousy.
  • Proust demonstrates that there is no desire except desire for absolute difference, and that the subject always lacks this difference absolutely—whereas Freud posits two separate types of desire (narcissistic and object-directed) when there is only one mimetic desire that looks different from different angles.
• The demystificatory urge that drives modern intellectual culture—the compulsion to expose the illusions of others and prove no values remain intact—is itself a product of advanced mimetic desire: desire that has given up ontological illusions resents those who still appear to hold them and seeks to destroy their apparent self-sufficiency.
  • The desire to enlighten or demystify is a way of ensuring that the illusions of the past are nowhere to be found and that everyone shares equally in universal deprivation—this aligns demystificatory desire with revolutionary movements that end up uniformly oppressive.
  • Freud’s moralistic condemnation of narcissism as infantile and inferior—while simultaneously groveling before it—reveals the resentment invariably inspired by the mimetic model and obstacle, which plays a greater part in our intellectual world than it did in Freud’s.

Beyond Scandal

Girard contrasts Proust’s early narcissistic novel Jean Santeuil with the mature A la recherche to demonstrate that genuine literary insight requires a conversion away from mimetic self-deception; he then analyzes the Gospel concept of the skandalon as the precise psychological category for the mimetic obstacle, showing it surpasses both Freudian and structuralist frameworks.

• Proust’s Jean Santeuil exemplifies Freudian intact narcissism — its hero occupies the privileged centre of all social scenes, with desire never escaping beyond a charmed circle of self-admiration — whereas A la recherche structurally reverses this by placing the narrator outside the box of aristocratic self-sufficiency, looking in with fascination.
  • In the Jean Santeuil theatre scene, an ex-King of Portugal rearranges the hero’s tie in public admiration; in the corresponding A la recherche scene, the narrator is lost in the crowd gazing at the aristocrats’ box, unable to gain access.
  • All the attitudes presented in Jean Santeuil as the authentic expression of narcissistic subjectivity are reclassified in A la recherche among the various strategies of mimetic desire in its confrontations with symmetrical obstacles.
  • Some critics greeted Jean Santeuil as a more healthy and spontaneous Proust with whom everyone could identify — precisely because it flatters the reader’s own narcissistic self-image.
• Freud’s concept of narcissism uncritically accepts the Romantic and Symbolist aesthetic of the artist’s ego as the origin of all spiritual richness, failing to see that this narcissistic self-advertisement is itself a mimetic strategy designed to attract the desire of an audience.
  • Like many people of his time, Freud takes at face value what many artists have been repeating about themselves since the beginning of the nineteenth century — the narcissistic claim to inexhaustible ego-richness.
  • To lay claim to an ego of inexhaustible richness is to invite others to make it the object of their desire; by implication, the ego is too self-sufficient to desire them itself — which is precisely the mimetic trap.
• Between Jean Santeuil and A la recherche, Proust underwent a complete revolution in self-understanding — a conversion experience structurally identical to religious conversion — that Girard identifies as the necessary precondition for any great literary work that genuinely reveals mimetic desire.
  • Proust describes just such an experience in Le Temps retrouvé, attributing to it his capacity to write A la recherche du temps perdu.
  • This experience is not reserved exclusively for great writers; it may actually be less common among writers than among others, and sometimes it deters a writer from literary activity entirely rather than producing a higher form of literature.
  • The conversion experience always retains the form of the great religious experiences across all religions — it is always a question of breaking out of mimetic desire with its perpetual states of crisis.
• Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis fails because, like Freud, it cannot think through the reciprocal dependence between differential structural order and the undifferentiated symmetry of doubles — the mirror stage is simply a naive resurgence of the myth of Narcissus rather than a genuine explanatory principle.
  • The Lacanian definition of psychosis as ‘foreclosure of the symbolic’ fails to explain why, for over a century, great cultural discoveries have been made by individuals who frequently ended up threatened by psychosis — if psychosis were simply a deficit of the stabilizing element, this correlation would be inexplicable.
  • The psychotic goes furthest in objectifying what people have never been able to objectify because he strives, in his metaphysical hubris, to incarnate the stabilizing element within himself — and seeing it as incarnated by the other, the double: Hölderlin sees the god of poetry take the form of Schiller, Nietzsche sees Wagner as the true incarnation of Dionysus.
  • The structuralist reading brings out some of Freud’s intuitions but only insofar as they fit the principle of a static differential order, sacrificing everything in Freud that relates to mimetic game and the scapegoat mechanism.
• Freud’s analysis of the Fort/Da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle comes very close to the scapegoat mechanism by linking imitation, substitution, and a spirit of revenge against the absent mother — but structuralism seizes only the logical/linguistic aspect while suppressing the mimetic and sacrificial dimensions Freud himself identified.
  • “Freud interprets the child throwing the reel away as a veritable sacrificial expulsion motivated by revenge toward the absent mother: ‘Throwing away the object so that it was gone might satisfy an impulse of the child’s, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him.’” —Sigmund Freud
  • “Freud connects the Fort/Da game to the art of drama and Aristotelian catharsis — ‘artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults… do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable’ — linking individual play to ritual expulsion.” —Sigmund Freud
  • Whether the child invented the game or took it up from adult suggestion, Freud says it makes no essential difference for the game’s affective value — but for Girard this question is decisive, since it determines whether symbolism arises through imitation.
• Freud’s death instinct is merely a fantasy invented to explain worsening repetition compulsion that psychoanalysis cannot account for; the mimetic principle provides a unified explanation — desire escalates toward the most resistant obstacle, making death the apparent goal without any separate instinct being required.
  • Freud honestly describes individuals whose human relationships all have the same outcome — the benefactor abandoned in anger, the man whose friendships always end in betrayal, the lover each of whose affairs passes through the same phases — and admits psychoanalysis cannot fully explain this compulsion.
  • Mimetic desire thinks it always chooses the most life-affirming path, whereas in actuality it turns increasingly toward the obstacle — toward sterility and death — because only what seems implacably indifferent or hostile can awaken this desire.
  • Freud introduces distinctions between the pleasure principle and death principle where there should be unity, because he does not see that both are two partial and imperfectly understood effects of one and the same cause: mimetic desire.
• The Gospel concept of the skandalon — the obstacle/model of mimetic rivalry — is the most precise psychological category for understanding mimetic desire, surpassing both psychoanalysis and structuralism because it names the dynamic of fascination-through-obstruction without mythologizing it.
  • The skandalon (from the root skadzo, ‘I limp’) is never a material object in the Gospels — it is always someone else, or myself to the extent I am alienated from others — denoting the model who works counter to the disciple’s undertakings and thereby becomes an inexhaustible source of morbid fascination.
  • When Peter protests against Jesus’s announcement of the Passion, Jesus calls him Satan: skandalon ei emou (‘You are a scandal to me’) — because Peter’s human perspective makes him see only the obstacle, not the redemptive meaning, and Satan is the mimetic model and obstacle par excellence.
  • The exclusive insistence on the sexual interpretation of scandal — from Origen to contemporary religious Puritanism and psychoanalysis alike — is simply the latest version of the mimetic process, fetishizing the obstacle by interpreting it in an excessively unilateral sexual fashion.
• The cornerstone/stone of stumbling connection in scripture is not verbal coincidence but reveals the deepest logic of the gospel: the founding victim — the stone the builders rejected — is simultaneously the foundation of all culture and the supreme skandalon for those who refuse to recognize the scapegoat mechanism.
  • The entire edifice of culture rests on the cornerstone that is the stone the builders rejected — Christ is that stone in visible form, which is why there can be no victim who is not Christ, and no one can come to the aid of a victim without coming to the aid of Christ.
  • The Cross is the supreme scandal not because divine majesty succumbs to inglorious punishment — similar things are found in most religions — but because the Gospels make a more radical revelation: they unveil the founding mechanism of all worldly prestige, all forms of sacredness, and all forms of cultural meaning.
  • The Gospels recommend imitating the sole model who never runs the danger of being transformed into a fascinating rival: ‘He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.’

To Conclude…

Girard argues that the scapegoat hypothesis has scientific status as a hypothesis analogous to Darwin’s, that genuine knowledge of mimetic desire requires something like religious conversion, and that the Judaeo-Christian text — uniquely revealing the founding victim — is now readable in its non-sacrificial form precisely because historical violence has made its warnings undeniable.

• Girard’s hypothesis about the founding victim and scapegoat mechanism has genuine scientific status — comparable to Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis — because it is not directly accessible to empirical or phenomenological intuition and must be tested by confronting widely disparate bodies of data.
  • The scientific spirit is a crafty kind of humility that agrees to depart from the data and look far afield for what it has not discovered near at hand — in contrast to the philosophical spirit, which insists on seizing its object directly without intermediaries.
  • Most critics bring forward dogmatic and theoretical objections to the hypothesis rather than asking the scientific question ‘Does it work?’ — proof that the metaphysics of presence still dominates the human sciences.
  • Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind defines scientific thought through the figure of the engineer working at the level of application, ignoring that real scientific thought arises from pure research and the formulation of hypotheses.
• Real knowledge of mimetic desire cannot be secured by any purely intellectual process; it requires a shattering of everything structured by mimetic desire — the ego, personality, temperament — in an experience that formally resembles religious conversion across all traditions.
  • Intellection can achieve only displacement and substitution, though these may give individuals the sense of having achieved victory over mimetic desire — but for there to be even the slightest degree of progress, the victimage delusion must be vanquished on the most intimate level of experience.
  • Even in the investigation of nature, the great minds who have effected the most decisive intellectual breakthroughs have apparently passed from one mental universe to another — something subsequent observers regularly describe as mystical.
• The Judaeo-Christian text is now becoming readable in its authentic non-sacrificial form not because of any privileged interpretive stance but because the historical process of violence — set in motion indirectly by the gospel text itself — has progressively exhausted the sacrificial readings and made the text’s warnings about violence undeniable.
  • The detection of the scapegoat mechanism taking place now has no need to rely on a privileged relationship to the text — the intermediary is history, which was indirectly set off on its course by the gospel text; thanks to the steady disintegration of sacrificial Christianity, the authentic reading comes more and more into prominence.
  • All the critical and destructive bodies of thought of the past two centuries — from Hegel to Freud to Nietzsche — have pointed toward the revelation of the founding mechanism without taking it to a conclusion, each denouncing specific forms of persecution while perpetuating others.
  • Legions of intellectuals devoted themselves to exposing complicity with one form of totalitarian oppression but are now shown to have been in complicity with another — the symmetry of doubles once again dominating recent intellectual history.
• The non-sacrificial reading of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures and the scapegoat hypothesis together provide the only framework capable of confronting the apocalyptic dimension of the present — including nuclear rivalry and totalitarianism — without either hysterical resignation or naive optimism.
  • Michel Serres demonstrated that the modern practice of science and technology is centred upon death — everything is organized for the benefit of death and leads toward death — yet Freud’s death instinct, like the ethologists’ aggression instinct, only naturalizes this tendency and removes the possibility of human responsibility.
  • Present-day thought condemning humanity to nonsense and nothingness at the very moment they have achieved the means of annihilation, entrusting the future to individuals guided only by desires and death instincts, is not a reassuring prospect.
  • A new kind of humanity is in process of gestation — both very similar to and very different from the one featured in Utopian dreams — and the most radical perspective on cultural history turns out to be the only tolerant and favourable one, as far removed as possible from the scorched-earth policy Western intellectuals have practiced for a century.
• The Talmudic principle that unanimity in accusation is itself grounds for suspicion — and Maimonides’s view of sacrifice as a temporary concession to human weakness rather than a divine institution — testify to a non-sacrificial inspiration that has always been preserved within Judaism and points toward the same anti-sacrificial logic as the Gospel.
  • According to the well-known Talmudic principle quoted by Levinas and Neher, any accused person whose judges combine unanimity against him ought to be released straight away — unanimity in accusation is in itself a cause for suspicion, suggesting the accused is innocent.
  • Maimonides argued that sacrifice is not an eternal institution God genuinely wished to found but a temporary crutch made necessary by the weakness of humankind — an imperfect means that humanity must eventually do without.
• Present-day scepticism and nihilism about meaning — the ‘castration of the signified’ — is itself a new Puritanism more deadening than the sexual Puritanism it replaced, and can only be overcome by relating all texts to one another without exception rather than stopping at a privileged few.
  • People are always on the lookout to catch their neighbours red-handed in believing something or other — a Puritanism of meaning that kills all it touches and spreads the most deadening boredom even in the newest situations.
  • “Girard concludes: ‘I hold that truth is not an empty word, or a mere effect as people say nowadays. I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth.’” —René Girard
  • The vision closes with Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones — all that is needed is the breath of the Spirit to recreate meaning stage by stage, relating all the texts to one another without exception.