René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique

of Historical Reason
Limiting Politics to Make Way for Faith

Stephen L. Gardner
University of Tulsa, Oklahoma

The ancien régime is the hidden defect of the modern state.1

— Karl Marx

B
attling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre is René Girard’s most
ambitious book since Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World,2
and it is bound to be his most provocative, too.3 That will be partly (but
not only) because it is his most expressly Catholic, a defense of Catholicity as
the true bearer of the “idea” or “meaning” of Europe, especially as articulated
by Benedict XVI in his controversial speech at Regensburg defending the ratio-
nality of Christianity (aimed at both Islam and Protestantism). Only after the
European devastations and criminal complicities of the last century could this
idea fully appear, Girard suggests, or the Catholic Church assume its proper
“autonomy” in the political structure of Europe. Girard is convinced that the
future of Europe—if it has a future—lies with a regenerate Church. And he
is convinced that the future of history—if it has a future—lies with the “idea
of Europe,” the “identity of humanity,” as embodied in the Church. Tragically

Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 18, 2011, pp. 1–22. ISSN 1075-7201.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

1
2 Stephen L. Gardner

short of this idea in its own history, it was as if it were for Europe to arrive at
it providentially. The calling of Europe, author of two world wars, totalitarian
twins, and the Holocaust, is to witness revelation. Thanks to its historic suicide
in the mid-twentieth century, paradoxically, it is a light unto the nations within
the larger apocalyptic drift of global modernity. In the history of Europe, we are
vouchsafed a terrifying glimpse of the future of humanity.
Battling to the End describes an end of history in a rather different sense
than that proclaimed in recent decades by American triumphalists. Instead of
being taken as a salutary warning against the part-Jacobin, part-Napoleonic
revolutionary idea, the collapse of the Soviet Union led some romantic enthu-
siasts of liberal democracy (including assorted “Trotskyite rascals,” to borrow
Girard’s apt phrase) to conclude that America’s moral superiority, borne by
military power, could be aggressively used to produce radical progress in other
countries—as if liberal democracy could succeed in nation-building with
military means where the Reds had failed. War could impart something of
the constitutional genius of the city on the hill to cultures that bred the most
troublesome regimes in the world, assuming they could breed any regime at all,
once the enemy was killed and the good news proclaimed. Intoxicated by their
own brand of holy war, evangelical Americanists are hopelessly convinced of its
efficacy in achieving political objectives.
There is, though, precious little to show for all the wars that have been
fought by America since 1945, if not since the Spanish-American War, once the
actual cost (immediate or long-term) has been subtracted. Imperial evangelists
are today’s “Clausewitzians,” but only in a conventional sense of that moniker
that Girard sets out to overturn—those who believe that (as the Prussian
general and theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz famously said), “war is the
continuation of politics by other means”—that war, in other words, accom-
plishes politics, sustains politics, founds politics, and, conversely, is limited
and regulated by it. Historically, this is surely true; but there’s the rub accord-
ing to Girard. As professor of international relations at Boston University and
retired army colonel Andrew Bacevich recently pointed out, “Permanent war
has become the de facto policy of the United States—even as it has become
apparent that war does not provide a plausible antidote to the problems fac-
ing the United States.”4 The reliance on military means increases, paradoxically,
as their political effectiveness radically declines. Somehow there is a fatality in
this, the compulsive disorder of a nation in decline. Decadence, Nietzsche said
(and who would know better than he did?), was the inability to say no. War has
become a reflexive reaction of policy, which neither party appears able to resist,
though it seems to produce inconclusive results at best.
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 3

Ironically, today’s faux Clausewitzeans have lost sight of a critical Clause-

witzean distinction (insisted upon by Raymond Aron)5 between the military
objective and the political end, parallel to the distinction between tactics and
strategy and the basis of it. In effect, they have replaced politics with war, the
end with the means, as if that afforded a certainty that in reality it no longer
does. The larger political aims that war is supposed to serve—assuming it is not
an end in itself—are eclipsed by military objectives. Or they are temporized
indefinitely, as in the phrase “the war on terror,” which dissolves any definable
political end into an abstraction. This inversion of ends and means is a sign that
partners to conflict have become obsessed with each other, losing sight of the
reasons that led them to fight. Ironically, this is already the heart of the Bol-
shevik appropriation of Clausewitz, which set the model for Nazism as well.
Under the guise of recognizing the fundamentally political character of war (the
creator of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, was fond of quoting Clausewitz’s most
famous sentence), Leninists in fact assimilated politics to war, as if “politics
were war by other means.” (They did something similar with Machiavelli, allow-
ing the ends to be collapsed into the means, ultimately the pursuit of absolute
power or total victory.) In this view, war is implicitly the fundamental structure
of humanity, so the state of war must be either interminable or an “escalation
to extremes” that aims finally at the annihilation of all potential rivals. In the
last century, this was realized in the ideological myth of “class war” and its Nazi
double, eliminationist anti-Semitism. The totalitarians affirmed the potential
of “absolute war” that Clausewitz, as political thinker, had sought to resist. In
effect, though, Girard is suggesting that the extremists were more faithful to
the principle of modernity identified by Clausewitz (though not to Clausewitz
himself) than their liberal Cold War adversaries such as Raymond Aron. For
the latter, the general’s great achievement was his later recognition that war is
essentially political and that politics serves to keep the “escalation to extremes”
within limits. For Girard, to the contrary, Clausewitz’s great insight was his
early notion of the structure of war as a “duel,” a structure of mimetic desire in
everything but name, whose internal logic broke down all limits in a relentless
battle to the end. This, for Girard, discloses the real dynamic of modernity, and
the futility of controlling it politically, in the last analysis. In this book, Girard
proposes that it is Clausewitz—not G. W. F. Hegel, the philosophical apostle
of “reconciliation”—who discerned the proper reality of the modern world,
though it would take a century and half of European history to vindicate him.
The Prussian general, military theorist, and thinker of war is the central fore-
ground character of Girard’s narrative, his foil to the Hegelian dream of the “end
of history” in the rational state.
4 Stephen L. Gardner

The French-American anthropologist of religion here brings to full expres-

sion the deeply apocalyptic bent of his thought, there from the start in his Pas-
calian sensibility. Two of his most central claims are the end of war and the end
of politics as effective institutions for the management of violence. War, which
underwrites politics, is for Girard a religious institution founded in certain ritu-
als and prohibitions, like any other religious institution. These myths and ritual
limits make its effectiveness possible as a way of resolving conflicts and main-
taining order. By demythologizing war, though, the modern Enlightenment
destroys these foundations. In effect, it abolishes war as a religious institution,
a process that crosses a critical threshold in the military model of Napoleon,
as his jealous enemy and theoretician, Carl von Clausewitz, perceived. Simi-
larly, the rationalization of political institutions by modern liberalism tends
to demythologize the religious conditions (the rituals and instinctive respect
for limits) necessary to make them work. The rationalization of war as politics
by Clausewitz and the corresponding rationalization of politics as war signal
in effect the end of both war and politics as institutions by the destruction of
their efficacious (because tacit) limits. What results is not peace, however, but
a rising tide of violence that has lost its effectiveness to achieve political results.
The less effective it is, the more it must increase; loss of power only aggravates it.
Clausewitz calls this an “escalation to extremes,” rooted in the pure, unmediated
reciprocity of the duel. It is the logical heart of his concept of war, which for
Girard puts its finger on the heart of modernity simply. If the history of Europe
is an indication, the trajectory of modernity is bound in the last analysis to be
determined by this law of inverse proportion.
So the Apocalypse is upon us, Girard boldly claims—the completion of
Revelation at the end of history by the destruction of the world. Instead of
explaining this in terms of dogmatic literalism, though, he attempts to develop,
within the framework of the human sciences, a “fundamental anthropology” of
the primal origin and ultimate disintegration of institutions, culture, and his-
tory itself. Anthropology is “fundamental” for Girard because its core questions
go to the radical origin of “humanity” as such, and to its terminal end, or that of
“culture” or “religion” as the generative institution in which it comes to be. Its
origin is radical, because it is only conceivable as a leap beyond nature yet within
nature, from evolutionary biology to the cultural or symbolic order in which the
“human” properly exists, in the honorific sense.6 The “philosophies” of history
(from Hegel to Martin Heidegger) cautiously remain within the “hermeneutic
circle” of culture (or language, signs, or texts) and decline to raise the question
of the possibility of history or culture themselves in a founding sense. Trapped
in the modern dichotomy of “nature versus culture,” the latter functions for
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 5

them as a cordon sanitaire preventing the key anthropological questions from

being asked. Philosophy of history in Hegel, Marx, and later “Continentalist”
thinkers thus abandons the question of the origin of history or humanity in a
radical sense, since history is for them the a priori horizon within which alone
philosophical questions can be posed. While philosophy of history may begin
(in part) with anthropology (in Kant or Hegel), it ends by repudiating it (in
Heidegger and poststructuralism). The anthropological question of the origin
of humanity, though, is definitive for religion, in a double sense. First, it is pre-
cisely a question asked and answered by religion (not philosophy) in myths;
religion goes where philosophers dare not venture. And, Girard would add, it is
an anthropological question of the origin of religion and its myths too. Religious
myths of the origin of men and gods contain the answer to their own implied
question, in the origin of the myths themselves, which they intimate without
completely revealing. This is an event, not so much in history as constitutive of
history, where culture erupts in the midst of nature. Girard recovers this event
by arguing that human sacrifice (as a social mechanism of ritual scapegoating)
is the primeval institution of religion and the generative source of myths, ritu-
als, laws, and language, the moment of transition from nature to culture. This
is the plane of existence within which humanity as such properly exists. The
origin of the myths of the origin of man is itself the key to the origin of man.
Compared with what is usually understood by “field anthropology,”
though, “fundamental anthropology” is a meta-anthropology, and bears
some comparison to Totem and Taboo both in content (as a story of primeval
sacrifice) and in method (as a narrative recasting of the results of twentieth-
century anthropology). On Girard’s theory, speculatively constructed out of
modern anthropology, critical mythology, and literature, history breaks down
with the demise of “sacred order” (to borrow Philip Rieff ’s term), its point of
origin. The rise and fall of the “sacred” (of ritual, prohibition, myth, religion,
order) marks the absolute beginning and terminal end of history, its mortality.
The key to the end of history is hidden in the sacrificial secrets of its beginning,
“things hidden since the foundation of the world.” As Girard sees it, apoca-
lypse occurs through the self-destruction of the human world—not God’s
war against a humanity captive to Satan, as imagined by fundamentalists, but
humanity’s war against itself, which religion, in the original, archaic sense, can
no longer contain. This crisis signals an inability to resolve conflicts politically
and so to contain violence within limits—that is, it signals the end of effective
politics and of war as its guarantor. Fundamentalists are obtuse to the possibil-
ity that humanity is entirely capable of destroying itself without God’s help,
though perhaps with theirs.
6 Stephen L. Gardner

In Girard’s telling, modernity as a whole is the final movement of apoca-

lyptic revelation—the disclosure of the truth of Christ through the self-annihi-
lation of the regime of violence. The regime of violence is not just a condition
of human creation but also a condition of the creation of the human. Human
history is a mortal thing; based on violence and its capacity to partition and
order itself, its productivity is real but limited. Sacrifice or religion enables a
community to found seemingly inviolable distinctions between individual and
collective violence—the bad violence and the good, the capricious and the nec-
essary. Eventually, though, the clock runs out. Violence is creative only so long
as its creativity is unconscious, disguised in myths and rituals. Scapegoating,
that time-tested reflex of social self-defense, no longer works—thanks to the
Gospels, which rob us of our sacrificial myths and religious lies. Christianity in
history, though, cannot but make things worse. Christ’s Passion debunks victi-
mage, making it sufficiently transparent as to be perpetrated only in bad con-
science. Even so, historical Christianity reverts to religion, to what it originally
destroyed, and even turns victimology into new forms of victimage.7 When
he links this disintegrative movement to the dream sequences of the Book of
Revelation, Girard implies that Christianity has an intuition of its own impact
on history, as destroying-by-exposing the sacrificial origins of human institu-
tions. These can only function if they function in darkness; Christianity makes
this impossible by revealing sacrifice for what it is. The result, paradoxically,
is a desperate grasping for new forms of sacrifice, a new cult of violence, not
infrequently in the name of Christ Himself. This pattern is only intensified in
the post-Christian age.
Strictly, scapegoating (conventionally understood) is not so much the
source of sacrificial rituals, which emerge spontaneously and reflexively from a
pre-moral, pre-cultural “state of nature” in Girard’s narrative, as it is a consequence
of sacrifice, and especially of its breakdown. Though Girard does not clarify this,
even violence—in any sense implying a moral content—is a consequence of
sacrifice, not its origin. Prior to the emergence of culture, in which hominids are
not yet genuinely human, it is does not seem meaningful to describe violence
in moral, that is, human terms. And once culture does exist, violence assumes
powers, creative as well as destructive, that it did not have as mere brutality in
animal nature. Culture morally changes the nature of the force or violence that
generates it. The cause is altered by its effect, or even constituted by it. Historical
time (as Hegel and Freud understood) is not natural time; it is retroactive. As
the force of the sacred, violence proper probably cannot exist prior to the sacred
itself. If it is a phenomenon of the sacred, though, in the purest, most arbitrary
and destructive sense, violence seems to appear especially when the sacred has
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 7

broken down, in its aftermath, as a futile attempt to restore it. Scapegoating

intensifies as a desperate attempt to restore or revert to sacrifice, after it has lost
its religious effectiveness; it is sacrifice with a bad conscience. The veil is at least
half-torn. As Girard argues in The Scapegoat, the most vicious anti-Semitic myths
and pogroms arose as medieval Christianity was beginning to lose its sacrificial
innocence.8 This was the augur of the modern age.
The rise of victimology and the explosion of scapegoating in modern
culture are kin, if not identical. Both are functions of the logic of scandal and
resentment, set free by the rise of democracy. Nietzsche famously equated the
(historical) Christian with the quintessential man of resentment and thus with
anti-Christ (while seeing Christ himself as the antithesis of resentment).9 The
man of resentment’s supreme issue is today’s egalitarian fanatic or angry populist
or jihadist. For the German philosopher, this was mainly a phenomenon of the
Left, expressing the spiritual crisis of modern man, bereft of traditional order
and religion but unable to bear the burdens of freedom. The history Girard tells,
though, implies (again, without being explicit) that it is equally a phenomenon
of the Right. This applies not just to the reactionary nationalisms of the last
century but also to contemporary Americanist Christianity, which stokes the
recrudescence of archaic resentments. Reciting Tocqueville, conservative ideo-
logues lecture on about how the tutelary despotism of democracy, threatening
to undermine robust self-reliance, thrives on the democratic individual’s sense
of vulnerability, his natural tendency to seek a paternal (or rather maternal)
prop in the state. But those same conservatives identify with American military
prestige and empire (always portrayed as attacked or insulted). This evinces
something comparable, the insatiably aggrieved cultural inferiority complexes
of those who endlessly blame “elitists” for their troubles. Their identification
with Washington’s power of retaliation is scarcely concealed behind the asser-
tions of American moral superiority and exceptionalism. More deeply, though,
while the “culture of transgression” (as Philip Rieff called it) arose on the Left,
it now supplies the Right with its underlying appeal. The pendulum of scandal
swings from Left to Right. If the Left feeds a culture of entitled dependency and
“white guilt,”10 the Right feeds one of angry resentment. At the critical moment,
though, it is the Right that plays the role of scourge, handily beating the Left at
its own victimary game. The legitimation of resentment may originally occur
through the Left, as Nietzsche thought, but it is consummated on the Right: that
is the lesson of modern history, illustrated by the rise of the extreme Right in
Europe in the interwar period. Girard does not examine this expressly, but this,
as I will suggest below, fills out his apocalyptic of the political self-destruction
of modern nations. Just as in horror movies, the apocalypse happens through
8 Stephen L. Gardner

the return of the archaic to avenge the violation of limits in a kind of orgy of
violation.
As Eric Gans has shown, the rise of victimology and its forms is the deci-
sive cultural event of the last century and the moral idiom of our time, emerging
from the disintegration of historical Christianity under the weight of the Holo-
caust, the civil rights battles of the 1960s, and women’s equality.11 To Girard,
this signifies not just a reversal of sacrifice and its hierarchies, though, but an
unraveling of history. In the age of victimology, scapegoating loses whatever
historical efficacy it might have had. Victimology does not rehabilitate history’s
victims so much as authorize their retaliation and justify their resentments,
ratcheting up social tensions. It does not free genuine victims from the moral
and psychic toll of being victims, but imprisons them all the more unbreakably
in the fetters of their resentments. Instead of dampening the spirals of victimary
resentment, victimology escalates them and inspires new victimizations, as
in the purge trials of political correctness. Even the victimizer (real or imag-
ined) contagiously picks up the spirit of victimology, when he observes how
“empowering” it is to be a victim. He jealously envies his erstwhile mark. And so
victimology robs sacrificial order of its efficacy, as victims (real and imaginary)
demand satisfaction. Every act of scapegoating creates as many divisions as it
heals. The scapegoater always feels that he is the victim, and as the perpetual
object of accusation, he may be. Ironically, today the home of victimology is
Fox News, and its heart resides in the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin. Every
trope introduced by the Left affords only a temporary triumph, as the Right
mimics it with a political effectiveness of which the Left can only dream. The
game of victimology may have been invented by the Left, but almost invariably
it is the Right that proves to be its master, to the Left’s disarmed surprise.
What is lost in these postmodern ideological duels, according to Girard, is
that no one is any longer in a position to accuse, for the destruction of sacrificial
victimage in Christ also properly reveals that guilt is universal. There are no
privileged victims, and the distinction between victims and victimizers col-
lapses. No one can claim any special authority, the unassailable moral sover-
eignty of the pure victim, by which to accuse and stand in judgment. Under
these conditions, pursuit of justice to the end can only lead back to the war of
all against all, until scripture’s “last penny” of sin debt is paid off. For human
justice inevitably rests on unjust (sacrificial) foundations. To have one’s histori-
cal injuries acknowledged and rectified is dicier than apologists of Enlighten-
ment equity thought. Pure justice does not ensure peace; it makes it impossible.
Human freedom—the freedom Girard sees exemplified in Dostoyevsky’s
Christ—demands that one abandon the crutch of victimology and by the same
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 9

token forego the right of retaliation. Christ demolishes all sacrificial ethics (vic-
timology included) once and for all, and is thus effectively beyond good and
evil in any conventional sense (something that Nietzsche could only imagine).
He is free from resentment and so from the need to punish or judge. He is not a
slave of wounded pride, as in the conventional theology (Anselm’s) of Christ’s
sacrifice as compensation for man’s undischargeable debt for having infinitely
offended the Father. On this reading, Christ on the Day of Judgment might not
judge so much as explain, explain to the sinner how he has (alas) judged him-
self. Christ’s freedom is so liberating it is typically experienced by human beings
as an impossible burden or a profound threat. Human beings take comfort in
their sense of injury, and Christ robs them of that. Inevitably, freedom scarcely
dampens (rather it enflames) the jealous rush to claim victimary status, the key
to ideological advantage in the contemporary age. That is the sole remaining
justification of new acts of violence, ostensibly the only consolation available
to modern man. The victimary idiom of modern morality has left political life
paralyzed, less and less able to mediate social conflicts.
The age of democracy is the final threshold in the history of the economy of
carnage. The age of modern war is a product of the demythologizing of Christi-
anity, according to Girard, by the truth of Christian revelation itself. It is history
catching up with the significance of a revelation that occurred a millennium and
three-quarters earlier. In being grasped rationally, sacrifice is demythologized,
but in being demythologized, it is uncannily robbed of its power. This is the
paradox of Enlightenment. Yet war does not and cannot cease to exist. In the age
of democracy, as Clausewitz’s analysis unwittingly attests, war unleashes a logic
of the duel, a mechanism of reciprocity, that sucks all combatants into its vortex
and finally leads to everyone’s defeat. It is a contradictory, demonic, terrifying
logic in which victory itself spells defeat, in which to win is ultimately to lose.
Girard poignantly uses his own experience of the “strange defeat” of France in
1940—an event that Americans have rarely been able to comprehend—to dem-
onstrate this infernal dialectic. Napoleon’s victory over Prussia in 1806 laid the
ground for Germany’s victory over France in 1940, and by the same token, for
the destruction of Germany too. Victory is but a prelude to defeat. War does not
lead to peace but only to more war, and so, instead of being a stabilizing power,
it is destabilizing. Instead of creating order—which it has done in the past—it
now tends to aggravate disorder.
Europe enters this phase with the Napoleonic Wars, unleashing an internal
“rate of acceleration” of history with national rivalries as if they were uncon-
trolled personal ones—in Girardian terms, a “sacrificial” or “mimetic crisis” that
today is of truly global proportions. Mass mobilization, industry, propaganda,
10 Stephen L. Gardner

nationalist myths, advanced technology, all tend to a democratization of vio-

lence that robs it of its generative power or political efficacy, even as it dimin-
ishes its technical limits. Democracy has the same effect in war as everywhere
else: as it levels, it also volatilizes. Ostensibly, the modern age brings war
under the rule of enlightened reason and thus harnesses it to politics, binding
it to limitable ends. The actual experience of Europe in the twentieth century,
though, has been just the opposite. As the ends and means of war have become
more “rational” or political, they have also become far more destructive, with
lesser gain for exponentially greater costs. If the end of war is peace, it seems
the less able to deliver the goods, despite its greater force and organization,
without exacting an unacceptable price. If war has not lost its efficacy, as Paul
Dumouchel says, its cost is one that many nations are no longer willing to pay.
Ironically, the moral, political, and legal limits Western policymakers now put
on the use of military force sometimes has the effect of increasing its lethality
while robbing it of effectiveness.12
To Girard, the logic of Christianity entails that the only escape from a
global catastrophe of absolute war (of the sort that the European “world wars”
of the twentieth century seem to prefigure) would be wholesale conversion. His
work has long prophesied a catastrophic “mimetic crisis” as the end of history,
a kind of return or collapse of history or humanity back into its chaotic, archaic
beginnings in hominid pre-humanity. In this vision, history ends in a war of
all against all, as the democratic emancipation of “mimetic desire” sparks an
uncontrollable “escalation to extremes” on a global scale. The core analytical
concept of Girard’s work is the notion that the definingly human phenomenon
of desire is essentially reciprocal and imitative, not a natural relation of desire
to object but of desire to desire and of individual to individual, by way of imita-
tion or “mimesis.” On this view, desire is not only essentially social and inter-
personal; it is also geared toward rivalry, conflict, and violence. As individuals
take their desires from each other, they become jealous enemies. Girard is the
only thinker to have fully recognized the violence of desire or the teleology of
violence embedded in the dynamic of imitation. The problem of every social
order is to channel and limit desires so that conflict is kept manageable; this
is accomplished (though not consciously intended) by religion and its rituals,
and by hierarchy. These are weakened or undone by the rise of democracy or
equality. And today, the expansive economic dynamism of the West cannot but
bring the whole world into the orbit of what one might call democratic desire,
mimetic desire emancipated from traditional moral and religious constraints
by the ideological triumph of equality. It is within this global regime that Islam
appears as modernity’s fraternal enemy.
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 11

Unless the necessity of wholesale conversion is accepted, for Girard, the

apocalyptic dimension of Christianity is effectively erased. If this necessity is
accepted, though, apocalypse is inevitable, as prophesied in the Book of Rev-
elation (if not exactly in the way it is allegorically envisioned there), since the
wholesale conversion of the human race is not going to happen. What Girard
seems to have in mind is this. Though there is nothing to make it impossible
in principle, the inevitability of that which need not happen is the heart of
prophetic history and of Christian revelation. The Apocalypse is propheti-
cally certain because it is unpredictable, an effect of human freedom, which
paradoxically generates a “mechanism” immanently, through the reciprocity of
human wills. Free will in Girard’s account, I suggest, is neither biological nor
metaphysical but a creature of culture. Human beings acquire “freedom” or
“will” when they are capable of relating to each other as individuals, as humans
in the honorific sense. An individual is “free” or has a “will” only because he
or she is intrinsically bound to and penetrated by the “will” of others who are
in the same position. To be free or have a will is to be related to the will or
freedom of others, and vice versa. Willing, in other words, is reciprocity in a
network of reciprocities. Instead of a singular “individual” as in the myths of
modern freedom and classical metaphysics, Girard elsewhere asserts that the
human being is “inter-dividual.” Freedom is a trait of the “inter-dividual,” not
the pure (atomic) individual of liberal or metaphysical tradition. The self itself
is a kind of social bond, not just an atom that needs to be pressed together with
other atoms by some mechanical force. The self is always internally bound to
the selves of others, and vice versa. This possibility of relations is achieved with
the emergence of language and religion, a cultural or symbolic order above
and beyond biological evolution. This event is a sudden transition from homi-
nids to humans in the honorific sense. The crux of this leap beyond yet within
biological nature is, according to Girard, sacrifice, which appears as a reflexive
response to mimetic crisis in a primal horde. Sacrifice and the scapegoating
mechanism make up the core synthetic concepts of his work. Culture or the
order of religion afford the plane of existence beyond nature on which humans
can relate to each other as such, and as individuals, and so as “free.” But because
it is inherently reciprocal, social, reflexive, and symbolic or cultural, “freedom”
generates a “mechanism” in which it is trapped. Freedom is possible only in
reciprocity, yet reciprocity, ironically, robs it of efficacy.
One might understand this in terms of the (at bottom, Calvinistic) doc-
trine of the will in Blaise Pascal, Girard’s patron thinker. Or, as Luther might
put it, human will by virtue of its “freedom” is ridden by only one of two rid-
ers, either Satan or God. Left to itself, human reciprocity (or desire) inevitably
12 Stephen L. Gardner

tends toward violence, conflict, and escalation. In the form of religion, culture
intervenes (by a spontaneous reflex of collective violence, like an “invisible
hand” or the “cunning of reason”) to impose limits on this and on itself, but in
the end is undone, partly by its own success, partly by the Cross. (On this view,
it is unclear that the event of the Cross is really a supernatural one. The theo-
logical and the anthropological meanings of the Passion are never fully brought
together by Girard.) Girard’s theory of desire is Pascalian rather than Augustin-
ian; there is no obvious intrinsically positive component in desire, which oper-
ates alternately like a mechanism and like game-theoretical probability.13 Desire
on these terms is both free and determined, since we pursue what we want,
but our wantings are a “machine” (in Pascal’s word), the working of an indiffer-
ent mechanism. Desire is not to be reoriented toward a true good—for there
are no intrinsically good objects of desire for Girard—but simply abandoned,
renounced. In this construction, it appears, the aim of Christianity seems to be
not to restore to man a humanity tarnished and damaged but not completely
lost by the Fall, but to free him from his humanity, lost completely in the Fall and
as such depraved, for a higher condition altogether. (Man, in Pascal’s descrip-
tion, is like a “dethroned king,” or a “god” who has lost his divinity and become
“absurd.”) This is a major problem for Girard’s theory, making it difficult to give
concrete meaning to his insistence upon the possibility of a “good mimesis,” an
elusive Grail of his thought.14
Girard links this model of apocalypse (as mimetic crisis) to Carl von
Clausewitz, in what is a highly unconventional reading of his masterwork, On
War.15 In effect, Girard’s interpretation of the great theorist of total war is a view
of modernity in which the rise of democracy or equality catastrophically erodes
the power of institutions and religion, until they are unable to afford effective
order any more between nations. Politically, the main accent in Girard’s book is
on international relations and war between nations and between national and
non-national global forces, such as modern nations and Islam. In particular,
Girard takes the Franco-Prussian rivalry crystallized in the Napoleonic wars as
his central historical frame of reference. Probably we ought to look, though, for
the genome of apocalypse equally in the internal relations of the modern nation,
as well as in those with its external rivals, whether national or non-national,
for the secret of the disintegrative dialectic of modernity. And we ought to
look for a single polarity that transcends the political “inside” and “outside” of
the modern nation as well as the relation of “the West and the rest,” in Roger
Scruton’s phrase. This, I suggest, is the rivalry between the modern and the
archaic, the secular and the sacred, that is constitutive of modernity itself, not
just a recrudescence of the primitive past, as in Freud’s notion of the “uncanny.”
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 13

This antithesis pervades Girard’s analysis, but he does not isolate it as a form of
mimetic rivalry in its own right.
Paradoxically, the reflex of the sacred is intensified, not diminished, by
modern “progress”—but in a way in which it is also corrupted, debased into
a “modernized” form. And this by both wings. The cultural Left reenacts the
sacred in the very rituals by which it desecrates it, for example, while the sacred
of the Right is contaminated by many of the forms of modernity that it rebels
against. Today, though, it is mainly the Left that is puritanical, while the Right is
transgressive—one is reminded of Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred
as law and the sacred as a privileged violation of law in which the group experi-
ences itself as such. The sacred recurs in modernity but without the sacrificial
“innocence” that for Girard is the hallmark of its authenticity. In that sense, post-
modernists inspired by Freud have some right: the archaic or primeval power of
the sacred resurrects itself in popular culture from the dead as a kind of monster,
an “alien” or “thing,” such as the “living dead” or the “undead,” or perhaps a Con-
federate vampire. These myths of popular culture evince a fear of social collapse
in contemporary life, provoked by insatiable desecration of the sacred. They are
not cinematic conceits of the mechanistic Trieb of instinct (as Slavoj Žižek would
have it), but a crisis in the economy of social order, a breakdown beyond repair
in the enforced peace between the profane and the sacred, the modern and the
archaic, on which the prosperity of the modern is predicated.
In the age of global democracy, cultural or religious restraints on violent
reciprocity are progressively diminished, and the irresistible logic of human
self-assertion cannot but amplify violence and its mechanisms. In particular, the
fraternal enmity at the heart of modernity intensifies—the battle of the modern
itself and its doppelgänger, an archaic reflex of the “sacred,” the “natural reli-
gion” of social man, so to say. It is the ultimate rivalry between the first- and the
second-born. For social order spontaneously defends itself against the assaults
of modern individualism. The only real antidote to the fatality of this conflict
would be a religiously motivated return to reason, that is, natural limits and above
all self-limitation. Hence Benedict in Girard’s narrative. To this Girard only
adds: and a rationally motivated return to religion (in a Christian, not sacrificial
sense). This is where the human sciences or “fundamental anthropology” come
into play, as understood by Girard.
What propels this institutional disintegration, according to Girard, is ulti-
mately the cataclysm of the Cross, which exposed “things hidden since the foun-
dation of the world”: Human order maintains itself through arbitrary violence,
the blood of innocent victims paying off the sins-debts of the guilty, disguised as
ritual sacrifice and myth; it can never completely escape its violent origins and
14 Stephen L. Gardner

reverts to them in times of crisis. Thanks to the Passion of Christ, this archaic
reflex of sacrifice and scapegoating no longer avails. According to Girard, the
Cross reverses history, and disastrously from a purely human point of view. The
Passion reveals the secret of human order and so accelerates the decomposition
of institutions, eroding the cultural dams erected to contain human violence.
Revelation arrives at the expense of human lies—lies that, Nietzsche and Pascal
suggested, human order could not do without. Pascal, though, unlike Nietzsche,
believed that the truth will out through the very violence that tries to deny it.
Human institutions are ultimately doomed because their myths cannot last; their
violence actually serves to reveal truth despite itself. Paradoxically, on this view,
justice undermines social order the more consistently or purely it is demanded.
In itself, justice is not a social bond. Social order requires a compromise of jus-
tice and injustice. The perfectly just social order is the least possible for human
beings. In spite of their undoubted enlightenment, modern institutions cannot
but regress to such myths and rituals, or whatever vestiges of them they can
regress to, as they desperately seek to maintain order. Social instinct reaches for
the archaic as one might reach for one’s gun, the more powerless archaic origins
actually become. What ensues, then, is not a peaceable kingdom of man but an
uncontrollable intensification of violence as it loses its power to maintain order.
The archaic today cannot tame violence any more; it can only aggravate it. And
yet without the sacred, there is no social order. Typically, the archaic impulse
exhibits a certain fascination with violence itself, as the generative force of the
sacred. Alas, the moment violence is recognized to be the generative power of
the sacred order, it loses that power. Sacrificial religion cannot exist any longer
except in “corrupted” forms, such as those of radical ideology or religious funda-
mentalism, which make a cult of violence itself. Instead of stalling the apocalypse,
they are central motors in its acceleration.
Christianity is thus responsible for the end of the world but not culpable,
and responsible just because it is not culpable. Christianity may be forgiving, on
Girard’s reading, but it is not compromising. Human institutions are destroyed
by the moral rigor unleashed by the God who died on the Cross. It is justice
itself that destroys social order, like an avenging angel of the Lord. It is not sim-
ply that social order always involves a degree of injustice (for which we may be
forgiven) but that justice itself revealed in the innocence of the Lamb of God
destroys any possible human foundation of social order and actively unravels it.
Only authentic (if not perfect) Christians can make modern order work; only
they may claim, if not every virtue, at least an adequate degree of forgiveness for
their absence. It is precisely the superior justice of the modern world (that is,
liberal democracy) that condemns it to destruction.
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 15

• • •
In making this argument, Girard sometimes gives the impression (probably
false) of an exclusive choice between faith and politics—as if the only way to
avoid the decline of political institutions (inevitably depending on violence)
were to abandon them and withdraw into the Church. Many conservative read-
ers will find his ostensible rejection of politics and war—represented in the
book by the giant figure of Raymond Aron, the Cold War thinker of politics, as
the only alternative to total war in the modern world—not just unacceptable
but perverse, especially for a Christian. The apocalyptic thinker walks a difficult
tightrope; he runs the risk of seeming to contribute to the phenomena he is
divining. Though beyond this world, however, he is still in it. A prudent avoid-
ance of unnecessary, unjust, disproportionate, or counterproductive wars is not
the same as a pacifist rejection of war itself, in principle. Recognition that wars
rarely (almost never) accomplish the aims that motivate them is not pacifism.
Girard seems to gesture toward the latter without actually endorsing it, though,
leaving readers confused about the precise significance of his two claims or their
practical implications. By the same token, Girard’s admirable nonpartisanship
does not demand a renunciation of politics. If these institutions are in decline or
even collapsing, we are by no means exempt from their exigencies and obliga-
tions, a fact to which Girard also nods, if without enthusiasm. Here, we might
say, is the problem of the book, which is that of Girard himself: He sometimes
seems temperamentally inclined to cloak himself in a position (like pacifism
or estrangement from politics) that in his intellectual conscience, theoretical
principles, practical judgment, and heart of hearts he knows cannot be.
On the other hand, many of his disciples on the Left will be offended by his
refusal to embrace pacifism, his sensibly conservative politics, his political real-
ism, and, perhaps especially, his rejection of Islam, a religion he bluntly describes
as “archaic” in this book (today an actionable offense in parts of Europe and
North America, where criticism of Islam is a crime). With this characterization,
Girard tacitly rejects the claim that Islam is legitimately “Abrahamic.” This is
more than just a curmudgeonly refusal to play along with the ecumenical delu-
sions that now reign in Europe and on the Left on both sides of the Atlantic,
which has adopted Islam as its latest victimary pet. It belongs to the core of
this onion of a book, which has to do in large part with the intensification of the
“sacred” or the “archaic,” spontaneous religious reflexes of social man, as part
and parcel of the modern world.16 This is not just a “return of the repressed,” an
aesthetic toy of postmodernists. Globally, it is now Islam that is the Old Regime
of the modern world. The significance of this needs to be understood, though,
16 Stephen L. Gardner

not simply globally (between the West and the rest) but within the political
economy of the Western nations themselves. This, however, seems to be a blind
spot in Girard’s analysis.
These are two sides of Girard’s critique of modernity: what Paul Dumouchel
calls the obsolescence of war (which will please the Left but without compre-
hension—as Dumouchel says, the obsolescence of war is what should really
frighten us),17 and the characterization of Islam in terms of an archaic notion of
the “sacred” demolished by Biblical tradition (which will please the Right, also
without comprehension). But the two sides are not well integrated, and they
are perhaps even opposed in exposition (though not necessarily so). This fact
intimates what I suspect is the real issue in this book. In relation to Islam, Girard
evinces the cultural and political rivalry of archaic and modern within the mod-
ern order itself. This is not just a global polarity, though, but also a cultural and
political one within modern nations. In America, it appears in the “culture wars,”
particularly as they take on political form. This is not, as the emancipatory Left
is wont to do, to tar cultural conservatism with the brush of Islam, but to suggest
that both, in different ways, evince the deeper anthropological difference of the
“sacred” in tension with modern secularity. The “sacred” is a social reflex rooted
in the human condition, not just a crotchet of the primitives. It is not just the
condition, it is the rationale of social order, the common sense of a divine will
whose mysterious gift of being confers meaning on existence, obedience and
receptivity toward whom is the condition of all significance in life. The proper
awe that sets this being apart and protects it is founded in prohibition. As Philip
Rieff suggested, the denial and renunciation of human desire epitomized in the
Law is its greatest gift; it is the condition of all desire that is legitimate and—not
least—actually satisfiable, achievable.18 The distinction between the sacred and
the profane is the founding difference of social order and the generative content
of culture. Though critical of Islam as archaic or sacrificial, Girard has elsewhere
noted that Islam still has a sense of the centrality of prohibition, of divine com-
mandment as a founding condition of human community. This is precisely
what modernity attacks, the sense of limits, boundaries, the untouchable—the
“sacred” in Durkheim’s sense—that opens up access to the higher, the divine.
Modernity makes a Faustian bargain, exchanging the satisfaction of desire for
its infinity. Modern libertarianism, Left or Right, has little or no appreciation
that this, prohibition, is the secret spring of life. Not surprisingly, Islam, archaic
as it is, has a vital potency to regenerate itself that post-Christendom has long
since lost. All the latter sees in prohibitions are the negatives, the superstitious
taboos, “primitivism” in contrast to liberal rationalism. Reducing everything to
economics, it creates a cultural system of expanding desires aspiring to infinity.
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 17

(The Right, too, has bought into this utopia of consumption.) But such illimit-
able desires can “satisfy” themselves only by destroying, attacking what has been
handed down, and even by cannibalizing themselves, in an orgy of desecration.
Attacking the sacred is finally the only content left to democratic desire. This,
Roger Scruton suggests, is why so much of modern culture is devoted to ritual
and often collective acts of sacrilege and defilement—as if a community could
be founded on the collective sacrifice of the principle of community itself.
This polarity of archaic and modern is constitutive of the “modern constitu-
tion” (borrowing a phrase from Bruno Latour).19 But in the context of Europe,
and in particular the Franco-German rivalry between 1806 and 1945, to which
Girard applies his “Clausewitzean” analysis, he accounts for the apocalyptic
strain only in terms of the relatively pure structure of mimetic desire, evinced in
the Clausewitzean notion of the “escalation to extremes” and the logical (but
not necessarily real) structure of war as a “duel.” In terms of Girard’s own ear-
lier work, Clausewitz reenacts the same kind of “metaphysical desire” as Julien
Sorel, the endlessly vexed, jealous character in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.
In his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard brilliantly analyzes this pro-
pensity of egalitarian man for obsession with his neighbor, using the mirror of
the great modern novels.20 Sorel is so fixated on the “being” of others, typically
his social superiors, as if they had robbed him of his by their sheer presence,
that he turns every relationship into a bitter rivalry, an endless psychological
battle, in the process degrading his own nobility of nature. On Girard’s read-
ing, Clausewitz is similarly obsessed with Napoleon, who becomes virtually a
personal rival (though at a distance), yet this very fascination enabled him to
decipher the modern meaning of war as mimetic rivalry and mimesis as war.
Clausewitz, Girard notes, even regarded economic exchange, commerce, as a
mode of war or conflict (a view that Girard endorses). This is the genie let out of
the bottle by the rise of democracy, the emancipation of “mimetic desire” from
traditional constraints, pure mimetic rivalry, moving inevitably toward Clause-
witz’s absolute war, nations like individuals striving to annihilate each other in
obsessive mutual hatred.
Both of these matrices (mimetic rivalry and the sacred-and-profane) of
modern conflict are real enough, but they need to be brought together, more
closely than Girard does. This may be accomplished in terms of the original
anthropological and sociological notions of the sacred and the archaic. Girard’s
anthropology downplays the sociological dimension; it occurs in the beginning
and the end but not so much in the middle (as it does for Durkheim, for whom
the problem is just the reverse). But the antagonism of the sacred and secularity
is the internal “law” of democratic culture. It not only spans the international
18 Stephen L. Gardner

and national frames of Girard’s reference but also illuminates the domestic tra-
jectory, the politics of modern nations. The sacred is above all local.
Mimetic rivalry tends to a kind of demonic formalism, in which the origi-
nal motivations are lost in violent mutual obsessions, which take on a life of
their own. Modern market economies evolve out of this formalism, containing
mimetic rivalries by turning them to productive ends. Capitalism turns their
potential violence to good account; it converts phenomena normally a threat
to social order into an engine of prosperity. But by the same token, it creates a
new kind of society, a market society not founded in religion or hierarchy but
in commodity production and exchange and consumerism. And these directly
attack the sacred forms of social order; they propel a cultural revolution more
profound than any political or economic revolution could possibly be. Tradi-
tional mores eventually turn to dust under their impact. Desecration is good
business. Popular culture, which drives the economy as a whole by producing
desires, awakens them by constantly assaulting what already exists. But this
reorganization of human relations along purely economic lines seems to work
only as long as prosperity can outrun the dissolution of the social bond (that
is, sacred differences). When it runs out, there may be hell to pay. So the reso-
lution of mimetic rivalries among individuals within civil society by means of
economy plants the seed of a deeper, less easily mediated rivalry, between that
society itself and sacred order. Though Girard does not have that much to say
about it explicitly, the translation of violence into productive economic forms
by capitalism seems to drive the tension between sacred and profane to the
breaking point. The strange equalitarianism of the market is a powerful means
to mediate the mimetic conflicts of democracy, but it does so in the end at great
cost to social order. This seems to be the primary internal crisis of modern
societies. It is here that the formal structure of mimetic rivalries and the dif-
ference of sacred and profane as a whole meet. In modern society, the profane
inevitably challenges the sacred and the two become enemies.
In Girard’s view, form eclipses content in the mimetic rivalries of demo-
cratic man. This may be replicated on the inter-national level, as nations are often
like egos writ large. But it is not enough to diagnose modernity. Rivalry always
has a social as well as a personal dimension; it presupposes culture, a context.
The defining structure of all culture, if we follow Durkheim (and Girard), is
the alterity of sacred and profane, the mother lode of social difference as such.
Politically and culturally, mimetic rivalry is always structured by content, too. It
is not simply pure form, pure violence. Content may be discerned in the enmity
of France and Germany (and of the other European “great powers” whose
rivalries transformed World War I from diplomatic crisis to “hyperbolic war,” in
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 19

Aron’s phrase), as if these were “profane” and “sacred” nations. This distinction
is intrinsic to the political constitution of the modern nation itself, especially
in the divide into Right and Left. That is a political refraction of the original
difference of sacred and profane—the party of the sacred and the party of the
profane, so to say. Of course it is not so simple, but this is a starting point. The
political economy of the modern nation does not eliminate this sacred-profane
distinction, as Enlightenment would like to believe, but pits its poles against
each other, minimally, in endless adversarial negotiation, threatening to break
down into actual war. In the nineteenth century, the party of laissez faire was
the radical party, but, as Marx bitterly complained, at the end of the day the
bourgeoisie would always revert to the political remnants of the Old Regime,
not simply to protect its earnings from the rising proletariat (as Marx believed)
but because even laissez faire capitalism needs a viable social order and thus a
sense of the sacred, the inviolable. The political structure (the development of
political parties and constitutional representative forms) is the means to medi-
ate this conflict. It keeps it tenable, preventing it from destroying itself. It is the
breakdown of this oscillating balance of opposites—when healthy a relative
rather than absolute opposition—within European nations between the wars
that made the last world war inevitable. This is what Raymond Aron argued,
though on a political rather than an anthropological level.21
It would be far too simplistic simply to identify the political distinction
(Left and Right) with the anthropological one (profane and sacred). Bolshe-
viks and Nazis, for example, were both “archaic” and “modern” at once. When
the cultural divide becomes a direct political battle, the difference itself is
corrupted. This is a difference that politics cannot resolve, and when it is too
closely identified with the political rivals, politics breaks down. The aim of poli-
tics in Aron’s philosophical sense is to forestall this from happening, if it can, in
part by recognizing the difference between politics and culture and the limits of
politics. The confusion and breakdown of the anthropological distinction both
drove and doomed the totalitarian parties. When the distinction itself collapses,
it threatens to become intolerably intense, alternating to the point of political
madness, as modern and archaic reflexes exchange with delirious rapidity. The
function of politics is to prevent this impasse from being reached. But it may
not succeed, for the simple reason that politics is subject to forces and powers
behind, beneath, and beyond it. This is the great discovery of modern sociology
(and Aron was a sociologist). Politics is an attempt to influence what ultimately
cannot be controlled—to have a salutary effect in the face of the “terrifying
providence” (Tocqueville) of modern democracy. Girard does not adequately
tie the “culture wars,” the conflicts of modern equality and sacred order, to the
20 Stephen L. Gardner

basic mimetic matrix of modernity itself. Not that he doesn’t see this; he clearly
does. But he portrays the apocalyptic breakdown of modern order as a simple
triumph of the mimetic mechanism over everything else. What really motivates
this catastrophe, though, is the investment of conflict with the significance of
the sacred and the profane.
Girard (like the late Philip Rieff ) is a thinker of the conservative dilemma,
how to inhabit an order in process of decomposition, even self-destruction. If sacred
order really is in crisis, as the conservative temperament maintains, then that
situation by definition puts the conservative into an existential bind. Order-in-
decline is the paradoxical condition of the modern world, which can neither
accept nor reject the sacred entirely. Order in process of decay cannot be
restored by force or political fiat or by Machiavellian means. That is the source
of totalitarianism in the last century, the violent effort to impose a sense of
community that had ceased to exist in reality. This is partly the error of those
conservatives who were misguidedly drawn into European fascism in the 1920s
and 1930s, without understanding that fascism is anything but conservative.

NOTES

1. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New
York: Norton, 1978), 56.
2. René Girard, with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, Things Hidden since the Foun-
dation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1987). Originally published in French, 1978.
3. This essay is one part of a two-part analysis and criticism of Girard’s thesis on Clausewitz.
For the second part, which deals at length with Girard and Raymond Aron and offers a
criticism of Girard’s theory of desire, see Society 47, no. 5 (September 2010): 452–460. The
two essays may be read independently.
4. “Disputations: Root Causes,” The New Republic online, http://www.tnr.com/article/world/
76410/disputations-root-causes (accessed October 29, 2009). This is a subject of Bacevich’s
new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (Henry Holt and Co., New
York, 2010).
5. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz, Philosopher of War, 1st Touchstone ed. (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1986). For a treatment of Aron and Clausewitz in connection with Girard, see
note 3 above.
6. For a discussion of this, see René Girard, João Cezar de Castro Rocha, and Pierpaolo
Antonello, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: T and T
Clark, 2007).
7. Christian anti-Semitism, for example, typically cast itself as the victim, as in the blood
libel.
René Girard’s Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason 21

8. René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Y. Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1986). Originally published in French, 1982.
9. See Nietzsche’s description of Christ in The Anti-Christ: The Twilight of the Idols and The
Anti-Christ: Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (New York: Penguin, 1990).
10. See Eric Gans, “White Guilt, Past and Future,” Anthropoetics 12, no. 2 , issn 1083-7264 (Fall
2006/Winter 2007). Accessed 11/13/2010, http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/Ap1202/wg
.htm.
11. See Katz, “Introduction,” in Adam Katz, ed., The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal
for Humanistic Inquiry, Critical Studies in the Humanities (Aurora, CO: Davies Group
Publishers, 2007).
12. Despite its duty to do so, the American army was unwilling to shoot looters in the Iraq
War, as Dumouchel points out, which produced the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure
and many more casualties, not to mention civil war. This moral nicety did not boost regard
for the American army. A gaggle of looters executed in the public square would have done
more for “nation-building.” The moral conscience of Western nations after the experiences
of World War II and Vietnam makes any other strategy impossible, though.
13. For Augustine, “concupiscence” may be fallen but still has some orientation to the good,
and there are good as well as bad forms of desire. Early Protestantism denies this, amputat-
ing love of the good from concupiscence, leaving only desire itself without any inherent
object, or the “will in bondage,” in Luther’s sense. Sometimes Girard is linked to Augus-
tine, but he seems closer to Pascal, whose view of will is close to Protestantism. Though
Pascal’s formulations are sometimes ambiguous, on the whole he seems to equate desire
simply with vanity and pride. See Blaise Pascal and A. J. Krailsheimer, Pensées (London:
Penguin Books, 1995). For the Calvinistic affinities of Pascal’s theology and anthropology,
see Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on
the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
14. See Petra Steinmar-Pösel, “Original Sin, Grace, and Positive Mimesis,” Contagion 14 (2007):
1–12, for a discussion of the problem of positive mimesis in Girard. This is a vexed issue, as
there are occasional gestures in the direction of a good desire (mimetic or not?) as well
as good mimesis. But, as I argue at greater length in my second essay (see note 3 above),
Girard seems mostly to endorse Pascal’s modernist view of the essentially imaginary nature
of desire. It is telling that Steinmar-Pösel states at the end of her essay, “To explain positive
mimesis we need to have recourse to theological categories”—that is, to traditional theo-
logical categories, such as original sin, grace, and the imago Dei. This suggests (to me) that
there may be an impasse between the Catholic Girard and the Protestant (or if you prefer,
Pascalian) Girard, and between a traditionalist Girard and a modernist Girard.
15. Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Edited and translated by Michael Eliot Howard and Peter
Paret. With introductory essays by Michael Eliot Howard, Peter Paret, and Bernard Bro-
die; with a commentary by Bernard Brodie. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984).
16. The locus classicus of terms like the sacred and the archaic is Emile Durkheim and Karen
E. Fields, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995). Girard’s
theory may be read as a critical development of the Durkheimian theory that the polarity
of the sacred and the profane is the constitutive structure of social order.
17. Dumouchel made this comment and previously cited at the COV&R panel dedicated to
“Battling to the End” at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, November
22 Stephen L. Gardner

7–10, 2009, Montreal.

18. Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us, 1st ed.
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).
19. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993) Chapter 2: “Constitution,” pages 13–48. Latour casts this constitution in terms of
“nature versus culture” (rather than in the socio-anthropological terms of the sacred and
the profane).
20. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans.
Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965).
21. Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War, 1st ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954).
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