An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely
recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional
views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. In
its scope and itnerest it can be compared with Freud's "Totem and
Taboo," the subtext Girard refutes with polemic daring, vast
erudition, and a persuasiveness that leaves the reader compelled to
respond, one way or another.
This is the single fullest summation of Girard's ideas to date, the
book by which they will stand or fall. In a dialogue with two
psychiatrists (Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort), Girard
probes an encyclopedic array of topics, ranging across the entire
spectrum of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cultural production.
Girard's point o departure is what he calles "mimesis," the
conflict that arises when human rivals compete to differentiate
themselves from each other, yet succeed only in becoming more and
more alike. At certain points in the life of a society, according
to Girard, this mimetic conflict erupts into a crisis in which all
difference dissolves in indiscriminate violence. In primitive
societies, such crises were resolved by the "scapegoating
mechanism," in which the community, en masse, turned on an
unpremeditated victim. The repression of this collective murder and
its repetition in ritual sacrifice then formed the foundations of
both religion and the restored social order.
How does Christianity, at once the most "sacrificial" of religions
and a faith with a non-violent ideology, fit into this scheme?
Girard grants Freud's point, in "Totem and Taboo," that
Christianity is similar to primitive religion, but only to refute
Freud--if Christ is sacrificed, Girard argues, it is not becuase
God willed it, but becaus ehuman beings "wanted" it.
The book is not merely, or perhaps not mainly, biblical exegesis,
for within its scope fall some of the most vexing problems of
social history--the paradox that violance has social efficacy, the
function of the scapegoat, the mechanism of anti-semitism.
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