World Futures, 62: 561–575, 2006

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN 0260-4027 print / 1556-1844 online
DOI: 10.1080/02604020600948834

TRAPS FOR SACRIFICE: BATESON’S SCHIZOPHRENIC

AND GIRARD’S SCAPEGOAT

SERGIO MANGHI
Dipartimento di Studi Politici e Sociali, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parma, Italy

John Perceval (1803–1876), who suffered from schizophrenia, published two

books on his experience, in 1836 and 1840. More than a century later, the anthro-
pologist Gregory Bateson discovered in Perceval’s memoirs a lucid anticipation of
his own theories on schizophrenia. To Bateson, Perceval describes the interactive
patterns between himself, his family, and the hospital psychiatrists, as examples
of “double bind” interactions, in which he played the role of a “sacrificial vic-
tim.” The article underlines the strong convergence between Bateson’s theory of
schizophrenia and René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. In the anthropological
theory of Girard, the sacrificial ceremonies are the main way of constructing so-
cial order. In that perspective, the schizophenic can be considered as a particular
example of a scapegoat, that is, as an important figure in social life, and not as a
mere phenomenon of psychopathology. This theoretical convergence is remark-
able, in particular, because both anthropologists explain the sacrificial processes
through a theory of social life based on the idea that the main unit of analysis is not
the individual, but the interactive dynamic as a whole: patterns of relationships,
to Bateson; reciprocal imitation (mymesis), to Girard.

KEYWORDS: Bateson, Girard, relationship, scapegoat.

I am certain that nothing more will suffocate my rhyme

the silence I have kept shut for years in my throat
like a trap for sacrifice,
thus the time has come to sing
a valedictory to the past.
—Alda Merini (1991)

Lecture given at the International meeting “La natura sistemica dell’uomo. Il pensiero
di Gregory Bateson a cento anni dalla nascita,” October 22–23, 2004, Turin, Italy. English
translation by Elena Campari.
Address correspondence to Sergio Manghi, Dipartimento di Studi Politici e Sociali,
Università degli Studi di Parma, Borgo Carissimi 10, 43100 Parma, Italy. E-mail: sergio.
manghi@unipr.it

561
562 SERGIO MANGHI

THE GRASS, THE CRAB AND THE SCHIZOPHRENIC

In June 1980, Gregory Bateson gave the inaugural lecture for the Lindisfarne
Fellows. It was a recorded speech because his disease was so advanced that he was
bedridden: “a survey”—he stated—“of almost everything I’ve done in my life.
A survey of a direction in which I have tried always to be moving, though that
direction, of course, gets redefined and redefined from project to project” (Bateson,
1991, p. 235). In particular, he returned to a strange play on words to which he
had dedicated his attention in the mid-1950s (now in Bateson, 1972, p. 205). The
so-called syllogism in grass:

Grass dies.
Men die.
Men are grass. (Bateson, 1991, p. 240)

In fact, the title of Bateson’s speech was Men are grass. It might well be a line
in a poem. But it is not. The entire syllogism was produced by a schizophrenic.
On the other hand, the misunderstanding can easily be explained: poets and
schizophrenics, Bateson underlines, share the tendency to express themselves
through metaphors, and “men are grass” is, indeed, a metaphor. However, Bateson
insists, metaphors are not just similes—of the type: men are like grass, given that
they share a certain aspect (bilateral symmetry in the case of a blade of grass, for
instance, or the process of being born, growing, and dying, or any other aspect
an observer may wish to point out). Metaphors lead us beyond the “controlled”
threshold of mere simile (Tamburini, 1966). They call into play more mysterious
mental processes that, in order to function in their specificity, need to imply a sort
of identity between the “things” that are being compared. In short, they require con-
siderable cognitive rashness, as poets and poetry readers well know. They impose
a certain credulity: the verb to be, connecting grass and men in the aforementioned
syllogism, involves the interlocutors much more intimately than if it were kept
under control by the word like. Indeed, in the field of poetry writing, even the word
like is taken as not obstructing, but rather favoring that very credulity: “like a trap
for sacrifice,” in Alda Merini’s beautiful line of verse (1991), communicates ideas
and sensations that would be quite different if the function of like was to arouse
our suspicion toward the seduction of metaphor. In other words, to remind us that
only a diligent prose version of the poem can reveal its true meaning.
Metaphor can reach the extreme limit and completely annul the like, giving
us perfect credulity, one might say, which is totally heedless of the limit-passage
between the literal and the metaphoric, which poets and poetry readers never cease
to scrutinize or to visit intermittently out of the corner of their eyes. It is, indeed,
the state of perfect credulity of the schizophrenic delirium. But beware: it is also
the state of perfect credulity to which (hopefully, in his case) the catholic believer
accedes, for whom the bread is the body of Christ—and not like the body of Christ,
in the manner of mere similitude. It is, more generally, the state of credulity that is
required in order to experience the so-called sacrament, a uniquely pregnant type
of metaphor that flashes out to the bizarre world of us human creatures, the only
 BATESON’S SCHIZOPHRENIC AND GIRARD’S SCAPEGOAT 563

genetically visionary ones on the planet, the reflection of the innocence, of the
immediacy and grace we are used to detecting in the other creatures. Bateson’s
choice to place the figure of the schizophrenic at the heart of such a remarkably
biographical speech is in itself significant. It tells us, first of all, how fascinated
he was, not only intellectually, by the schizophrenic experience: he even reveals
a certain complacency when, in that same speech, he reports that a reviewer had
actually accused him of thinking—most inappropriately, for a scientist—in terms
of syllogisms in grass (“Well, I had to agree that this is the way I think”: Bateson,
1991, p. 240). But the choice to make the figure of the schizophrenic the focus
of his speech also tells us something else: it tells us what explicative value he
attributed, as a scientist, to that figure.
The fact is that, for Bateson, that strange nonlinear logic, which we habitu-
ally acknowledge in the metaphors of the poet, of the schizophrenic, and of the
believer, has a reach that goes well beyond our habitual gaze. For Bateson, even
before characterizing the experience of the speaking animal, that strange logic
characterizes the evolutionary and connective logic of the living universe, what
we usually call biological evolution (Manghi, 2002), and what Bateson condensed
into the term Creatura in an important piece of writing from the 1960s (cf. “Form,
Substance, and Difference,” now in 1972, pp. 448–465). As he would have writ-
ten later: “Metaphor runs right through Creatura” (in Bateson and Bateson, 1987,
p. 28).
For Bateson, the creatural universe was an immense, uninterrupted “mental pro-
cess,” of which the speaking animal was but an emergence, albeit very peculiar,
with his religious or nonreligious beliefs, his poems, and his follies: not separable
from his more literally prosaic works because, despite the apparent clarity of the
literal–metaphoric dualism, or of the prose–poetry dualism, “all verbal commu-
nication necessarily contains metaphor” (Bateson and Bateson, 1987). In other
words, as Nietzsche stated: our non-metaphorical words are simply words whose
metaphorical origin we have forgotten.
The sub-title of his speech Men are grass, was, significantly, The metaphor
and the world of mental process. And in the conclusion Bateson pointed out that
the metaphorical–literary difference only appeared very recently in the history
of the living, through the verbal language that is typical of our species. Thus, it
was reasonable to suppose that up until then the “mental process” had worked
on the basis of the “illogical” grammar that surfaces in the language of poets
and of schizophrenics. An evolutionary grammar built on those strange nonverbal
metaphors that are formal living analogies; in other words homologies, such as
those highlighted in the comparison between grass and man. Bateson wrote that a
hundred thousand years ago there were no syllogisms like those his severe reviewer
believed legitimate, but only syllogisms in grass:

. . . and still the organisms got along all right. They managed to organize them-
selves in their embriology to have two eyes, one on each side of a nose. They
managed to organize themselves in their evolution. So there were shared predi-
cates between the horse and the man, which zoologists call today homology. And
it became evident that metaphor was not just pretty poetry, it was not either good
564 SERGIO MANGHI

or bad logic, but was in fact the logic upon which the biological world had been
built, the main characteristic and organizing glue of this world of mental process
which I have been trying to sketch for you in some way or another. (Bateson,
1991, p. 241)

Here, however, we shall not go into Bateson’s heterodox theory of evolution

as a mental process. We shall, instead, deal with a very peculiar human event:
the story of a schizophrenic who lived in the early 1800s, that is, at the dawn of
psychiatric science. And we shall discuss the explicative criteria used by Bateson
to analyze that event in the early 1960s in the 1900s, and compare them to those
used by the French anthropologist René Girard in the past 30 years to analyze the
figure of the scapegoat. However, dealing with Bateson’s analysis of schizophrenia
without underlining the crucial role played by the figure of the schizophrenic in
Bateson’s work in general would mean giving a misleading and reductive view of
it, which is why I believe it was useful to dwell preliminarily on the enigma of the
syllogisms in grass. Indeed, it is not by chance that Bateson’s fine question on the
“pattern which connects,” a question that is often and rightly quoted to point out
the originality of Bateson’s singular way of thinking, ends with the evocation of
the schizophrenic:
What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and
all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba
in one direction and to the back-word schizophrenic in another? (Bateson, 2002,
p. 7)

THE EXEMPLARY HISTORY OF JOHN PERCEVAL

It is well known that Bateson dedicated numerous, original studies in the 1950s
and 1960s to schizophrenic communication focussing on the notion of double bind
(cf. Bateson, 1972, part III). Those studies gave rise to a variegated galaxy of ther-
apeutic schools characterized by the attention paid to familiar communicative
processes rather than to the individual characteristics of so-called schizophrenic
subjects. In those studies, the language used by Bateson does not actually present
numerous links to the wider ecological, epistemological, and anthropological prob-
lems mentioned earlier. The language is mainly anchored to the key words of
formal communication—paradoxes, double binds, contexts, genetics, metaphors,
meanings, messages, injunctions, logical levels, communicative meta-levels, and
so on.
Anyone wishing to read those studies ignoring the echo of the fine question
on the pattern that connects, and on the place held by the speaking, believing,
poeticizing, and delirious animal in the wider creatural universe, could do so
without great difficulty, shall we say—and, in fact, it has happened and still does,
in the field of various therapeutic schools that aim to derive a technique rather
than an epistemology from those studies. Here, we wish to broaden the perturbing
effects of that suggestive echo. We will do so by starting with one of Bateson’s lesser
known studies on schizophrenia, which we believe is well suited to our purpose. It
is not included in the studies contained in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, mentioned
 BATESON’S SCHIZOPHRENIC AND GIRARD’S SCAPEGOAT 565

earlier. It is the Introduction to the publication Perceval’s Narrative, edited in 1961

by Bateson himself (here: 2nd ed., 1962a).
The book is the autobiography of a fecund schizophrenic, John T. Perceval, who
lived in the early 1800s, and abounds in complex theoretical reflections. The author
narrates that he experienced the psychosis and recovered, and gives his peculiar
explanations regarding the nature of that psychosis and his recovery. Bateson’s
introduction to Perceval’s book provides an admiring comment to those peculiar
explanations.
The reason for Bateson’s admiring tone is that he saw in Perceval’s memoirs
a theoretical rigorousness worth noting, which was much more than biographical
testimony, however rich. In addition, he saw Perceval as an ante litteram precursor
of the theory he had been working on for some years: the theory of double bind.
In short, he saw Perceval as a precursor—between William Blake and Sigmund
Freud—of the idea that psychosis is an experience of a relational as well as social
nature, both internal and external, like all human communicative processes. It was
never merely an intra-individual experience as was commonly believed in those
years and is still believed today, by us modern Westerners.
Bateson believed that Perceval has clearly described, naturally with hindsight,
how at a certain point in the psychotic event he started to glimpse the possibility
of getting out of the absurd cul-de-sac. And Bateson believed that he managed
to achieve the description by understanding the exact network of the relational,
communicative, social fabric of the foolish interactive process of which he was an
active part. As Bateson wrote, Perceval had angrily “begun to realize the nature
of the system that surrounded and controlled him” (1962b, p. xiii). And at the
same time he painfully started to grasp and hold firmly a distinct, crucial piece of
information in the changing flow of the delirium: the stabilizing role he had given
himself, in syntony with the others, in the wider system.
In other words, Perceval succeeded in describing how he became aware that
by accepting the label of mad, and by behaving consequently, he reassured both
family and physicians. And, of course, various “inner voices,” mostly of a religious
nature—first of all, the Holy Ghost, legitimated by Perceval’s adherence to a certain
Evangelical church, the Irvingites. By accepting the label of mad, someone who
was inadequate to correspond to the moral and affective expectations of others,
by behaving consequently, was confirming others in their self-esteem. In this way,
paradoxically, and coming full circle, he was reassuring himself. In other words, he
was achieving a comforting feeling that he was dealing with people who were self-
confident, devoid of uncertainties, reliable. The feeling that he could trust people
who were affectively, morally, and scientifically competent. Or, at least, that is
what he was trying to do: with disastrous results, because the more he confirmed
the others, the more he himself was disconfirmed.
It is from that moment, when Perceval started to perceive, painfully, the inti-
mately social nature of the delirious system of which he was a part, and his own
active role in stabilizing that very system, that the progressive achievement of a
happier life than his previous one started for him. Even happier than the life he
led before the psychosis: and it is this result that led Bateson to formulate a rather
perplexing question, at least as far as our common sense is concerned: the question
566 SERGIO MANGHI

was whether the psychosis can be seen, first of all, as a path to self-recovery and
not as a disease. Seen as a necessary therapeutic path in a double-binding commu-
nicative context. Curative, albeit very painful for all those who are not part of the
nightmare: a “curative nightmare,” Bateson calls it. Where the symptom is never
only defense against the illness, but an attack against the illness:

It is one thing to see the symptom as a part of a defense mechanism; it is quite

another to conceive that the body or the mind contains, in some form, such
wisdom that can create that attack upon itself that will lead to a later resolution
of the pathology. (Bateson, 1962b, p. xii)

THE SECRET HEART OF THE SACRED

In this case, Bateson’s argument aims first of all to prove that, as I said earlier,
Perceval was a precursor of the formal double bind theory. Very skilful at describing
the social, and, at the same time, paradoxical nature of the relations that connected
him to his relatives, on the one hand, and to his physicians, on the other.
Nevertheless, I cannot not remark how important passages in this speech make
use of metaphors that go beyond the language used to speak of the communicative
process as it is formally intended, metaphors drawn from religious anthropologic
language: initiation ceremonies, death-and-rebirth, sacrifice, and yet others. Suffice
it to read the following extracts (the italics are mine), taken from the last pages of
Bateson’s essay:

Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course

as an initiation ceremony—a death and rebirth—into which the novice may have
been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstances, but which
in its course is largely steered by endogenous processes. (Bateson, 1962b, p. xiv)

In almost every such family, it is possible to recognize that the psychotic individual
has the funcion of a necessary sacrifice. (Bateson, 1962b, p. xvii)

. . . the patient’s love for his parents enforces upon him a deep secrecy regarding
the sacrificial nature of his behavior. (Bateson, 1962b, p. xiii)

Before the psychosis his exactitude was his self-sacrificing mode. During psy-
chosis, he passes through the phase of bitterness, where the violence takes the
place of the former precision.
We may suppose that this code of concealment and sacrifice was in many ways
uncomfortable and that his groping after evangelical religion was both a quest for
some escape and a cleaning to whatever would support his careful uprightness.
(Bateson, 1962b, p. xix)

To evaluate a psychosis is perhaps impossible. Conventionally, schizophrenia is

regarded as a disease [. . .] in this introductory essay I have suggested that the
psychosis is more like some vast and painful initiatory ceremony conducted by
the self. (Bateson, 1962b)
 BATESON’S SCHIZOPHRENIC AND GIRARD’S SCAPEGOAT 567

We could reduce these metaphorical fragments to mere verbal artifice in order

to add a colorful touch to the speech, as many scientists believe to be allowed—
including, presumably, the reviewer of Bateson’s work, mentioned in the intro-
ductory remarks. After all, we are fully aware that many years previously Bateson
had studied sacred ceremonies in New Guinea and in Bali. We might therefore
neutralize our amazement at this incursion of anthropologic–religious metaphors
in a piece of work of a psychiatric nature, and justify it as aiming at illustrat-
ing more effectively certain concepts that were still at an intuitive level while
waiting to be subsequently reclaimed and made literal. Thus, the incursion would
only regard the argumentative form and would not touch on the substance of the
issue.
But after what we have stated about the value the metaphor has in Bateson’s
thinking, this would, I believe, be a misinterpretation of Bateson’s text. Even more
so, I shall add, if we read again those clues dating back to 1961, retrospectively,
in the light of Bateson’s reflections in the following years. Those contained in
the “ecological” reflection on the bond between form and substance (cf. “Form,
Substance, and Difference,” cited earlier). Those of the pattern which connects
(Bateson, 1979), mentioned earlier. And above all those present in his lively interest
in the sacred, as shown in the notes Bateson was working on with his daughter
Mary Catherine in the last months of his life, in view of a publication written
as co-authors. The notes were subsequently published, thanks to his daughter,
several years after his death, and called Angel’s Fear. Toward an Epistemology of
the Sacred (Bateson and Bateson, 1987; cf. Bateson, 1988). They show that the
interest for the sacred went beyond the disciplinary borders of anthropology, as
it had been studied in the 1920s and 1930s, and related to the research carried
out in the 1960s and 1970s on the ecology of the creatural universe and the place
assigned in this universe to the human creature, with his wonders and follies (cf.
Manghi, in press, chap. I).
In the light of these subsequent developments, the metaphorical fragments left
by the incursion of anthropologic–religious jargon in an essay of a psychiatric
nature may be interpreted, in a slightly strained way, as something more and
something different than mere verbal artifice. They may more profitably be inter-
preted as embryonic elements of a scientific theory of schizophrenia that does not
entrust the pertinence of the theme only to psychiatric language, but rather to a new
type of language, which still needs to be constructed—the “ecologic” language on
which Bateson worked intensely, in particular starting from the second half of the
1960s.
Indeed, this hypothesis is supported by considering the context of scientific re-
flections and controversies of those years, which urged Bateson to publish Perce-
val’s memoirs: the context that rapidly saw the affirmation of theories and systemic-
relational therapies inspired by the notion of double bind, which he had decisively
helped to set up, but also the context of his open polemic toward the formalistic
closure of the speech on schizophrenia that that rapid affirmation had brought with
it, thanks to the work by his colleagues in Palo Alto (cf. Berger, 1978). It is in this
context that my strained interpretation appears reasonable, and perhaps no longer
strained.
568 SERGIO MANGHI

Bateson’s conjecture that psychosis was to be looked at rather as a mysterious

self-sacrificing ceremony than as a disease, cannot therefore be easily reduced to
mere verbal artifice in which the anthropological–religious language becomes an
idiom. As Bertrando writes: “In Perceval, Bateson finds an exemplary case which
helps him free himself of psychiatry” (2005, p. 377).
The fecundity of those anthropological–religious fragments may be better lit
up, to use the terminology adopted in the essay on Perceval, if we see them as a
symptom: in other words, an attack. An attack from the inside to a context perceived
as problematic. Thus, an ambivalent sign: on the one hand, a hint that “something
is wrong,” and on the other a hint of promising new ideas in gestation—one might
say: of a possible process of self-healing. An attack to the technicist limits Bateson
identified in the epistemological and operative criteria of family therapies at that
time. And a signal, at the same time, of the growing tension in broadening the
context of meanings within which the question on schizophrenic communication
could be placed. Broadening it to include that most secret heart of our social and
cultural dynamics: the sacred. The unspeakable feeling of being part of living,
human contexts that are larger and more mysterious.
In this sense, the sacred is no longer the name of anthropological themes (maybe
anthropological instead of psychiatric). But the name of a challenge as well. A
challenge to experiment subtle, complex epistemological learning: learning at once
cognitive and emotional, which can legitimate as pertaining to the scientific dis-
course, together with the analytical and formal languages (psychiatric, anthro-
pological or yet others), the aesthetic–religious languages that scientists mostly
believe to be extraneous and harmful to the clarity of the scientific enterprise—
systemic wisdom, responsivity to the pattern that connects, the aesthetics of being
alive, to use some of Bateson’s formulas (Manghi, 2000).

THE PRE-EMINENCE OF RELATIONS: BATESON AND GIRARD

Thus, for Bateson, Perceval is at once the victim and the master of ceremonies
of a sacrificial rite. An initiation rite that may or may not be successful. In other
words, Perceval was not only aware of the formal regularities of communication,
like a good scientific observer. He was also aware of the secrets of the sacrificial
ceremony, like a good priest or shaman. He had access to knowledge that was
far more ancient and subtle than scientific knowledge: ceremonial and sacrificial
knowledge, in fact. Perceval was aware of the oldest and most powerful recipe
human beings have ever devised, according to the anthropologist René Girard,
to obtain order from disorder. To interrupt the escalation of misunderstandings,
of disqualifications and of the violence unleashed by our recurrent relational,
communicative, and social crises. This recipe is called sacrificing a victim. The
lamb taking away the sins of the world.
As we have seen, Perceval, with his self-sacrifice, became the guarantor and
custodian of a social order that was in crisis: of a complex social system that
included the family, the influential social institution Medicine, and other broader
symbolic contexts I shall not go into here for lack of space: suffice it to point
out that John Perceval was one of twelve children (six sons and six daughters)
 BATESON’S SCHIZOPHRENIC AND GIRARD’S SCAPEGOAT 569

whose father, a British prime minister, was shot at and killed by a madman in front
of the House of Commons (cf. in this regard Bertrando’s acute considerations,
2005).
In short, Perceval’s self-sacrifice simply outlined a clear, distinct difference
where everything risked being lost in chaos, without any of the subjects involved
being aware of it: the difference between normality and folly, considered as a
dualistic difference (aut-aut). Through an active, unconscious acceptance of this
difference as a vital foundation for the survival of the entire system, Perceval
stemmed the widespread indifferentiation. That ominous spread of the grey area,
as Primo Levi called it, where persecutors and victims become stickily indistin-
guishable (cf. Levi, 1986).
The flight from the “trap for sacrifice” in which Perceval was caught was not
achieved, however, by refusing his role as master of ceremonies in the name of
behavior based on self-awareness and rational self-determination (as at times he
seems to believe, forgetting that he was speaking “with hindsight”), but rather by
a rigorous interpretation of that role, which activated his unconscious, aesthetic–
religious knowledge. The knowledge that in Bateson’s text appears also through
the musical metaphor of “orchestration”:

By mysterious unconscious processes, then, Perceval was able to orchestrate

his own psychotic experience to enforce his own passage through psychosis.
(Bateson, 1962b, p. xii)

The schizophrenic Perceval thus exhibits a “systemic wisdom,” to use Bateson’s

subsequent term, precious not only for those dealing with schizophrenia, strictly
speaking, but for us all. Wisdom that can help us understand better the ways in
which we human beings bestow order through subtly unconscious processes to
our interactions, to our emotions, to our coexistence. To our agreements as well
as to our disagreements. To our interpersonal, family, and social affairs in general.
Always tempted by the shortcut of finding a scapegoat, a victim.
This general anthropological range of the figure of the schizophrenic emerges
with greater clarity, therefore, if we broaden the question, or as Bateson liked to
say, “view our follies in a wider perspective.” In other words, if we ask ourselves
what a sacrificial victim is, in a more general sense. A scapegoat. A question to
which René Girard more than any other has devoted his attention for decades,
exploring rites and myths from all over the world, as well as texts from the biblical
tradition (Girard, 1978, 2000, 2003, 2004).
So we shall now stop to look schematically at Girard’s figure of the scape-
goat. Yet we do not believe this means straying from Bateson’s epistemology
(cf. also Simonse, 1995). In fact, Girard places at the base of his analyses the
notion of double bind, as systematically as Bateson does. And his sensitivity
to relations intended as base units in social dynamics—Girard even coined a
special term to distance himself from epistemological individualism: “interdivid-
ual psychology”—presents strong affinities with Bateson’s. The following quotes
by the two scholars, although evidently different in the language used, do not
require any comments on their manifest affinity, with reference to their relational
570 SERGIO MANGHI

sensitivity:

. . .“dependency” or “aggressiveness” or “pride”, and so on. All such words have

their roots in what happens between persons, not in something-or-other inside a
person. [. . .] I will get nowhere by explaining prideful behavior, for example, by
referring to an individual’s “pride.” Nor can you explain aggression by referring to
instinctive (or even learned) “aggressiveness.” Such an explanation, which shifts
attention from the interpersonal field to a factitious inner tendency, principle,
instinct or whatnot, is, I suggest, very great nonsense which only hides the real
questions. (Bateson, 2002, pp. 124–125)

When most of us modern westerners thinks of desire in general, or in particular

of his own individual desire, he firmly believes he has chosen it autonomously,
without any outside interference. We agree with those who trace the roots of
desire in the Self, in the subject, in the Ego, in the famous “depth of subjectivity,”
obviously always believed to be “unfathomable.” (Girard, 2004, p. 26)

The more intense that desire is, the more it seems ours. But this experience is
deceitful. (Girard, 2004, p. 25)

Learning the contexts of life is a matter that has to be discussed, not internally,
but as a matter of external relationship between two creatures. (Bateson, 2002,
p. 124)

Over the past forty years I have developed a concept of desire which is closer
to that of the Brahmana than to western concepts: it is the mimetic concept of
desire. [. . .] desire is a social phenomenon which originates from an existing
desire, the desire of the majority, for instance, or that of an individual we take as
a model, without even realising it, because we admire him, because we all admire
him . . . (Girard, 2004, p. 25)

Love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. [. . .] these abstractions [are]
referring to patterns of relationships. (Bateson, 1972, p. 140)

The double imitation [reciprocal] is the indestructible base of human relationships.

(Girard, 2000, p. 18)

The relationship comes first; it precedes. (Bateson, 2002, p. 124)

FROM BATESON TO GIRARD

In Bateson’s ecological language: the relationship comes first. And in Girard’s
mimetic language: reciprocal imitation is the indestructible base of human rela-
tions. The unit of measurement, in both cases, is not the individual. The creatural
dance of the pattern that connects, at the level of specifically human communica-
tive events, is a co-evolutionary dance made up of uninterrupted reciprocal signals.
Reciprocity without any net, or rather without basically solid fixed points, in other
words, which can be compared to those that regulate the structure, physiology,
and behavior of blades of grass, of lobsters, and of other non-human creatures. In
 BATESON’S SCHIZOPHRENIC AND GIRARD’S SCAPEGOAT 571

the communicative human actions these stabilizing fixed points need constantly to
be reconstructed and constantly to obtain consent, symbolic legitimacy. Men are
grass, but special grass: grass that can go mad.
That can experience, in fact, schizophrenia. Grass constantly at risk of los-
ing its contours, or, at the other extreme, of making them become too rigid.
The contours of the difference oneself–other, oneself–others, we–they; of the
difference literal–metaphoric, prosaic–poetic, reality–illusion; of the difference
map–territory, name–thing, sign–meaning. . . . The contours of any “difference
that makes a difference,” to use another well-known expression of Bateson’s. The
risk of getting lost is always present, even where the dance of relations has not
fallen into the psychotic form. Acutely present, in particular, in our present “liquid”
modernity (cf. Bauman, 2000; Manghi, 2005).
The deeper we move into our fateful interiority, the more we encounter not
a well-certified and well-contoured Self, but a relationship. A relationship with
the other and the others, others to whom we intimately belong, whether we like
it or not. Even the most miraculous of the others: friendship, love, ecstasy. But
also the most disturbing of the “others,” the most enigmatic and perturbing: folly;
even violence, as Bateson recalls when speaking of Perceval. Where differences,
instead of being reciprocally recognized, plunge into the anguish of the grey area.
It is not a beautiful dance. It is at the same time a beautiful and terrible dance.
The terrible side of our interactions has been perceived for millennia to be
so threatening that it has creatively given rise to sophisticated architectures of
taboos, rites, and myths, which were given the task of setting up fixed points—
differences, frames, hierarchies. Entrusted with the task of protecting us against
the risk of seeing close up the absence of a “solid” foundation in our interactions.
From the risk of plunging into the vertigo of violent and mad reciprocities. Without
those fixed points human groups would never have been able simply to survive, to
sustain themselves, to evolve. In good and, obviously, in evil.
In particular, according to Girard, we have created that fixed point that originates
magically from the cathartic sacrifice of the scapegoat. As Freud (1913) had intuited
in Totem and Taboo. And as Nietzsche (1882) had intuited in the famous fragment
of The Gay Science on the death of God. As Bateson intuited, more than one and
a half centuries ago John Perceval had shown how well he knew the rules of this
ancient ceremony of the founding of the social order.
Sacrifice converts a scenario of dis-orderly symmetrical reciprocities from a
threatening crescendo—a schismogenetic scenario, Bateson would say—into an
orderly social scenario. No longer stickily, violently grey. Ordered by the reassuring
geometry of all-against-one, a geometry that is no longer symmetrical–horizontal
(like the dominating one in the previous dis-order), but complementary–vertical.
Girard believes that there has always been a tight knot tying the institution of
the sacred, the sacrificial ceremony and symbolic order together. A knot we are
constantly tempted to return to, to tighten when any relational, communicative,
social crisis loosens it until it risks being undermined—loosening all links. It is the
knot, we could say the bind (according to Girard a double bind, in good as in evil)
that, as indifferentiation spreads, both real or expected, holds firmly a difference
that, for the whole community, makes a difference.
572 SERGIO MANGHI

An effective knot, we should remember, that is aesthetically fascinating, se-

ductive and dazzling, as are the ceremonial liturgies in any place and any time.
Moreover: a divinely fascinating knot:

We should not forget that the victim himself is always seen as a divinity or substi-
tute for divinity, given that his death brings peace once again. And consequently
he is considered sacred. (Girard, 2003, pp. 90–91)

THE GOSPELS, A RELATIONAL SOCIOLOGY?

Today, unlike what has happened for millennia, we dare to overlook the deep of
the grey area. The absence of foundation of our social interactions. We dare to
try to see relationships. Relationships that we are a dancing part of, for better or
worse. And in this, as we know, Bateson the explorer is our Maestro:

Gregory Bateson has been blessed, and cursed, with a mind that sees through
things to a world of pattern and form that lies beyond. (Keesing, 1974, p. 370)

By overlooking self-reflexively the mirror of the dances of which we are part,

we also dare imagine a new world, as yet unthought of, and to conciliate one
another. A fixed point that need no longer rest on sacrificial victims. On the logic
of third one out. After all, this is what we have tried to obtain by inventing human
rights, politics, freedom to criticize. And female freedom, perhaps the most radical
and unthought of challenge to the violence of the sacred.
We are still at the beginning, and we would do well to admit preliminarily that
we do not yet know what we are doing. That we do not know quite what this thing
is that we are alluding to with words such as democratic cohabitation, liberty,
equality, justice. . . . But now we can no longer avert our eyes from the abyss. We
can no longer look away from the eyes of the victim, ignore the warning let he who
is without sin cast the first stone. We can no longer avoid recognizing ourselves
in the gaze of the victim, real or potential, and at the same time in that of the
persecutor, which has obviously become no less ubiquitous than that of the victim
as the grey area has spread (Manghi, 1999–2000; 2001):

Many signs appear to indicate that the time has come to explore the space that
separates (not only in the Lager!) the victims from the persecutors [. . .]. Only a
schematic rhetoric can claim that that space is still empty. (Levi, 1986, p. 27)

Only if we succeed in recognizing ourselves in that gaze can we hope, like

Perceval, to learn that subtle knowledge of our interactive dances, which can
help us to become reconciliated without the short cut of the scapegoat. To find
another way of knowing and knowing each other. Another religion. Another
beauty.
Girard diverges slightly from Bateson’s analysis of the sacred here (a difference
I shall not dwell on for lack of time: cf. Manghi, 2004a, chap. 3)—Girard believes
that this “victim” sensitivity of ours is based on anthropological assumptions and
 BATESON’S SCHIZOPHRENIC AND GIRARD’S SCAPEGOAT 573

on common sense that we cannot but call Christian, as the distinguished Italian
philosopher Benedetto Croce stated. Assumptions anticipated by significant en-
lightenment preceding Christianity, of course. In particular Greek and obviously
Hebrew. And Girard’s last essay, which we have quoted from, is dedicated to the
subtle mimetic and sacrificial knowledge contained in the Indian Veda. But it is in
the Gospel, in the morals of slaves, as Nietzsche disdainfully called it, that is, in
the religion of the victims, that Girard grasps the most explicit revelation of the
things hidden since the foundation of the world, as Christ stated, and which Girard
uses as a title for his well-known work: the revelation of the sacrificial solution
that we have unconsciously cultivated for millennia as if it were an insuperable
natural mechanism.
It is only in the Gospel, Girard believes, that—and here I am translating into my
own words—a completely relational sociology of human interactions emerges. A
sociology in which all that we do is done by ourselves, and not individually but
through interaction. Without sure foundations, once the deepest foundation has
been removed, that is, the difference that more than any other has long made a
difference: the sacral foundation of the victim. Not natural factors, divine will,
structures, or systems “upstream” from our gestures, but we ourselves, we pro-
cure the good and the evil that we do to ourselves. We ourselves, the most fragile
of terrestrial creatures, the most exposed to the destructive risk of dis-identity.
We ourselves, through the vertiginous dance of losing ourselves and finding our-
selves again one in the other, one against the other, one through the other. A
dance that is always tempted by exclusive, marginalizing, violent stabilizing short
cuts.
These are also the hidden things that Perceval discovers. And it is not by chance
that his leaving the black and white universe of the paranoid, his new tolerance of
doubt, of uncertainty and of ambivalence (Manghi, 2004b), all coincide with his
adherence to—that can only be called Christian—a culture of the victims, of the
vanquished, of the last:

I open my mouth for the dumb; and let it be recollected, that I write in defence of
youth and old age, of female delicacy, modesty, and tenderness, not only of man
and of manhood. (Perceval, in Bateson, 1962a, p. 4)

RETURN TO BATESON
Let us now briefly conclude. By passing through Girard’s analysis, the Batesonian
problem of the schizophrenic has broadened. It has become the problem of the
scapegoat. Of our age-old tendency to build traps for sacrifice. In other words,
of a basic mechanism of human cultures, concealed till recently by fascinating
rites and by seductive mythological justifications, often masked by the best of
intentions. Like purifying the world of evildoers. But also like healing a pathology,
as Perceval warns us, and Bateson confirms, bringing to light a deep analogy
between the psychiatry of the early 1800s and the contemporary one (cf. Bertrando,
2005).
574 SERGIO MANGHI

That inexhaustible question we started with might now be re-written as follows:

What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and
all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba
in one direction and to the back-word scapegoat in another?

The Batesonian figure of the schizophrenic thus appears to be even more preg-
nant, I believe. And Perceval’s reasons even more stringent. I would like to say
more topical, in these times of growing uncertainty, of great fears, of new terrify-
ing violence, in the large world as in our small daily affairs. And we feel that the
beautiful question regarding the pattern that connects has become more suggestive.
But apart from more suggestive, this question now sounds to our ears more
disenchanted at the same time. Although it does not cease, on the one hand, to
invite to the aesthetics of recognizing oneself in the beauty of all living creatures,
right to the mysterious excess of imagination of the schizophrenic, this question
now invites us with greater clarity, on the other hand, to not avert our eyes from
that dark clot that is thickening around the interactive and symbolic event we call
schizophrenia. Not to avert our eyes from the age-old sacrificial scenario of which
that clot reminds us all. To be able to read in the gaze of each victim the things of
our cohabitation that we have kept hidden since the foundation of the world. And,
like Perceval, to be able to draw from it the knowledge required for a nonviolent
coexistence of our differences.
In this challenge, at once inseparably scientific, political, aesthetic, and re-
ligious, the ecology of mind, the subtle learning to recognize oneself in one’s
relation even with the most mysterious of others, remains, I believe, one of the
most extraordinary opportunities we have at our disposal of “seeing our own follies
in wider perspective” (Bateson, 1972, p. 477; cf. Manghi, 2001).

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