/lit/ - Literature

>>11438476
>So now we can commit violence, all we have to do is ask God for forgiveness afterwards, even zizek at his most hyperbolic would not sign off on this, and neither would girard. but welcome to the exciting world of ideology. if you massacre a village in eastern europe or wherever and afterwards convince yourself that god spoke to you in advance or forgave you afterwards, there's nothing a literary critic at stanford can really do about it, except to refuse to valorize it. you can ask god for forgiveness and tell yourself you've received it, but when it comes to justifying this conclusion you will probably have a hard time selling RG on it.

girard knows full well that the gospels alone cannot really *prevent* violence in the future from happening. it's why he refers to it as a contagion or a disease. wars escalate, and yet they do so because they are irrationally rational, or rationally irrational. that's why it's better not to have them break out in the first place. invariably they do. but that's also why he takes an interest in the causes of them and in particularly the retroactive judgments we make on or about them, and it is why he is not a hegelian, for example. i like hegel but girard's position on him makes sense.

>We can have our violence and then literally eat the victim atoning for it afterwards (Eucharist.)
okay, but we draw a distinction between eating a symbolic object - the Eucharist - and turning a human being into a symbolic object and then eating them, yes? i'm not even going to deny that the same process - symbolic objectification - is at work in both cases, but clearly there is a crucial difference here: one of these two things is a biscuit.

>>11438531
i understand what you're saying, i'm just trying to raise the concept of a distinction between sacrifice as the discharge of aggression as it is directed against the enemy, and sacrifice as scapegoating (consumption of the child). there are two interlinked notions of sacrifice here, but girard was open to both of these concepts, and in this case they will reciprocally determine each other. in order to win the war, there must be sacrifices; and we sacrifice in order to fulfill the higher purposes of the war.

there's also no necessary argument being made here against ritual in and of itself either. far from it. rituals are great. there are peaceful rituals no doubt, rituals for all kinds of things. ask pic rel. and indeed, conflict breaks out when ritual orders collapse. what patches things up again - not always, but in extremes - is collective violence, the interior workings of ideology and mimetic crowd rule. it happens 'naturally,' maybe more 'naturally' than anything. but it doesn't change what it is or the function that it serves.

rituals are fine in and of themselves. and there are even token forms of sacrifice that are possible - you can burn an effigy, for instance. these aren't things that would make the sun come out for girard, but you get the idea.