Religion

ISSN: 0048-721X (Print) 1096-1151 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrel20

Can We Survive Our Origins? Readings in Rene

Girard’s Theory of Violence and the Sacred, edited
by Pierpaolo Antonello and Paul Gifford, East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015,
xliii + 343 pp. ISBN 978-61186-149-5, US$29.95
(paperback)

Daniel Liechty

To cite this article: Daniel Liechty (2016): Can We Survive Our Origins? Readings in Rene
Girard’s Theory of Violence and the Sacred, edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Paul Gifford,
East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015, xliii + 343 pp. ISBN 978-61186-149-5, US
$29.95 (paperback), Religion, DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2016.1209035

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2016.1209035

Published online: 25 Jul 2016.

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 Religion, 2016

Book Review

Can We Survive Our Origins? Readings in Rene Girard’s Theory of Violence and
the Sacred, edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Paul Gifford, East Lansing: Michi-
gan State University Press, 2015, xliii + 343 pp. ISBN 978-61186-149-5, US$29.95
(paperback).
Downloaded by [Professor Liechty Daniel] at 17:14 25 July 2016

In 2007, French literary critic Rene Girard published a book, Achever Clausewitz. In
the form of a dialogue with colleague Benoit Chantre, Girard presented an original
interpretation of Carl von Clausewitz, rooted in Girard’s own anthropological phil-
osophy on human violence. This book was translated and published in America in
2010 under the more apocalyptic-sounding title, Battling to the End. As Girard is
now past his 90th year, it is surely one of his final statements (Note: Girard died
in November 2015).
Over the past 50 years, Girard has presented and elaborated on a picture of
human motivation centered on what he called mimetic desire. That is, human
desire is fundamentally imitative in character. We want something, we value it,
mainly because we see that someone else wants it and values it. This basic
concept explains much of what we see in human behavior, particularly in the
context of modern, acquisitive, advertisement-driven consumer capitalism. Over
the decades Girard built up a complex speculative anthropology based on this
idea, placing the heightened human imitative ability at the center of hominization
itself. It is what makes us human, providing the spark in the evolutionary process
that finally resulted in our own separate species among other similar hominid
species. In short, it is the spark that underlies the emergence of language, and
through language eventually of culture itself. Homo sapiens sapiens is a species
whose development is impacted not just by natural (physical, genetic, environ-
mental) evolution, but equally by cultural evolution. This is what makes us who
we are.
Girard’s theory of just how imitation provided the mechanism for the creation of
culture as he has worked and reworked it is quite involved. Additionally, it is not
always clear on specific points, if he were presenting a work of imagination (just-so
stories) or suggesting that things actually happened historically in the way he out-
lined them. For purposes of this review, we focus only on what Girard saw as the
most vexing problem of our origins, specifically, how we learned to control internal
species violence such that larger groups of people could live together in relative
peace long enough for the elemental aspects of language and culture to emerge
and take root. The cycles of mimetic competition, conflict, violence, and revenge
would spin out of control were there not some mechanism for calming an inflamed
situation and returning to a state of peaceful cooperation. Evolutionary
 2 Book Review

anthropologists since Darwin have recognized the problem, and it remains one of
the unsolved mysteries of species history.
Girard suggested that what made the emergence of culture possible is that our
early ancestors, at perhaps a late stage in the hominization process but not yet
fully human, landed on the mechanism of ‘scapegoating,’ transferring all of the
boiling violent and counter-violent energies onto one figure, who is then killed,
thus at least momentarily breaking that cycle of violence and returning the commu-
nity to a state of cooperation. Such sacrificial scapegoating may have occurred ran-
domly, but as it eventually became ritualized and chock full of symbolic meanings,
it could be controlled by associating it with festivals, phases of the moon, and other
associations so that it needed to be performed on a more routinized basis. As
people ruminated on the process, the victim would be seen both as the source of
the discord, but also as the bringer of peace, and be both demonized and deified
as a supernatural being. In any case, Girard makes the point that at the heart of
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culture, religion, and civilization is an act of violent murder, which to this day
can be discerned between the lines of ancient and modern founding myths, scrip-
tures, legal codes, and communal rituals of many kinds. This sacrificial violence at
the core of civilization is the element of Girardian theory that has entered into the
established assumptions of a number of fields and disciplines in the social and pol-
itical sciences.
The standard interpretation of Clausewitz is that he made a clear distinction
between Absolute or Total War, and Real or Actual War. Total War is war without
limits, perhaps akin to Hobbes’s war of all against all which characterizes the
absence of civilization. It is war without established rules or regulations. Total
War, according to the standard interpretation, is a mental construct, not the
Actual War we find in real political history. Actual War is fundamentally limited
by political goals, ethics of conduct in conflict, acknowledged separations
between combatants and civilians, and so on. Because Clausewitz emphasized
war as an extension of politics, he is generally read as an advocate of such limits
on warfare.
Girard noticed something, however, that is usually not highlighted in the stan-
dard Clausewitz interpretation. As Clausewitz outlined the spirals of warfare
between the Germans and the French, and especially the conquests of Napoleon
across Europe, what he was actually writing about was the steady erosion of the
customs, rules, ethics, and distinctions of Real War, that Real War is increasingly
veering toward the armed anarchy of Total War. We have been experiencing this
slide toward Total War through the 19th, 20th, and now the 21st centuries, with
no discernable force or mechanism on the horizon for turning this around. This
wakes us up to the concept that the apocalyptic ‘end times’ conflagrations envi-
sioned in many religious and political prophecies is not down the road at all, but
something we have already become engaged in, a total conflagration in slow
motion, if you will.
If the control of violence is the foundational root of civilization, how did we get
into this mess? Girard suggested that for the controlling sacrificial mechanism to
work, for the civil order it establishes to have legitimacy, it is essential that
people perceive the victim, the scapegoat, to be guilty of producing the violent con-
flict preceding the sacrifice. The process of peace being achieved by violent sacri-
fice, Girard said, was the logical end of the Primitive Sacred. This logic of the
Primitive Sacred worked adequately in ancient times, but was dealt a major
 Book Review 3

blow when the Christian foundational myth insisted on the innocence of the sacri-
ficial victim. Although it took many different lines of narrative to try to accommo-
date itself to the ancient world, the one thing that all versions of the Christian
narrative agreed upon was that THIS victim was not executed as a just sacrifice
for his misdeeds. This was a clear case of all of the institutions of the state, religion,
and the law (principalities and powers) working as they were intended to, in the
sadistic sacrifice of a completely innocent victim.
This exposed as a great lie, a massive hoax, the idea of peace through sacrificial
violence that is the glue holding civilization together. The spell of the logic of the
Primitive Sacred was broken in the Christian founding narrative of the execution
of Christ. Christianity eventually became, post-Constantine, the religion of the
empire and spent enormous energies in creating versions of the Christian narrative
that supported or at least were compatible with the logic of the Primitive Sacred.
Yet in a real sense, the damage was done, the cat was out of the bag, the forces
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of justice through violence were exposed, and the glue that holds civilization
together, the claim that might makes right, has been ebbing out of the structural
joints of civilization ever since. The logic of the Primitive Sacred no longer works
to control human violence, and the violence spirals even further out of control as
we jump to revenge the ‘innocent victims’ of past sacrificial violence perpetrated
in the name of civilization. The momentum of the ebbing may be impacted by his-
torical events, but the direction undermining civilization is unmistakable. Since the
Enlightenment this momentum has been radically accelerated by more general
doubts about the veracity of the sacred and supernatural in general, sparked by
capitalism and the spread of the scientific-materialist worldview. Clearly, the apoc-
alyptic hint in the translated title of Girard’s Clausewitz book is well deserved.
Rene Girard has had an amazingly broad and deep impact on work being done
in many areas of the humanities and the social and political sciences. If a thinker of
such influence publishes a mature work strongly implying that our slide into post-
Civilization may be irreversible, that we are floundering madly in a whirlpool
already heading down the drain of history, that our species may well simply be
doomed, it is bound to create a major stir. And so it has, one result of which is
the book under review here. Between 2010 and 2013, a number of interdisciplinary
conferences and colloquia were held at Cambridge and Stanford Universities, in
which Girard scholars from many fields assessed these implications, evaluated
current and near-future events in light of Girard’s work, searched for points of
light that Girard might have overlooked allowing more optimistic possibilities,
and so on. The best of these contributions are gathered in the volume under
review here, as well as a companion volume, How We Became Human, by the
same editors and appearing simultaneously in the Michigan State University
series, Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture.
The 15-chapter book is divided into four sections, with each organized around
general topics pertaining to the investigation of human violence. In addition to
all of the background material presented above, these essays focus most broadly
on the relationship between violence and religion. This is, needless to say, a press-
ing issue in our time, and many would say that violence is simply innate to human
nature. Does religion aggravate violence, even stand as a major cause of violence?
While Girard’s theory puts violence at the core of civilization, it should be noted
that violence is a social consequence of our mimetic desire. The theory does not
posit that violence is innate, only that given our disposition toward envy of what
 4 Book Review

others have/desire, violence tends to occur under most common social conditions.
But might there be social arrangements that would ameliorate violence? If the logic
of the Primitive Sacred no longer is effective in controlling violence, what might be
a modern equivalent? A number of essays look at these issues from different angles,
and while these authors by no means walk in lock step, there is much worth
considering.
A number of the essays converge on the question of whether, in fact, civilization
is breaking down, and if so, how much is the loss of the logic of Primitive Sacred to
blame for this. Is the demythologizing of the Primitive Sacred necessarily a bad
thing, or might it open the doors finally for true human community? A number
of these authors agree with Girard that survival and salvation have become inse-
parable concepts – that if we are to survive, it will come about only as we are
able to move beyond our attachments to redemptive violence in an embrace of
the enemy that does not presume the exclusion and sacrifice of a third party. The
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nonviolent, non-exclusionary embrace of enemies is, in fact, what many of these

writers (and Girard himself, at least sometimes) actually mean by true Christianity
and Christian ethics and salvation. Is that a new religious narrative powerful
enough to repair and replace the myths of redemptive violence and the logic of
the Primitive Sacred?
These and other issues of similar importance are the center of discussions rep-
resented in this collection of essays. Unavoidably, there is a measure of repetition
throughout the chapters, but on the whole these writers (and the editors!) have
done a great job of focusing their essays and keeping their discussions on track.
A number of times in reading an essay, questions or further issues that popped
up in my mind were treated in the very next essay. This makes the collection
quite exciting reading! The writing is accessible, though few would characterize
this book as a whole as easy reading. But it is absolutely essential reading for
those working in areas in which Girard and his theories receive attention and
will reward any reader whose interests correspond to topics covered in this journal.

Daniel Liechty
Illinois State University, USA
dliecht@ilstu.edu
© 2016, Daniel Liechty
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2016.1209035