/lit/ - Literature

>>9676469
Nice link. It took me all of about eighteen seconds to find this:

>Gans presupposes the anthropological model of Rene Girard, for whom the mimetic character of humans (and first of all the advanced hominids who were our immediate predecessors) means that deadly conflict is endemic to the human condition. If I imitate you, I learn to desire through you—I want what you want. Sooner or later I will want the very thing you possess, or reach for, right now, and from being my model you become my obstacle and therefore rival. For Girard, humanity emerged in a collective event in which the mimetic rivalry of the members of the group issued in a mimetic crisis, a collective violent melee, which is resolved by one of the members being singled out by the group and becoming the target of its collective violence. This scapegoat is both victim and god, the latter because he has “saved” the community, which resumes normal cooperative behavior once the crisis has been “resolved.” Girard sees the entire subsequent history of human ritual and reiterations of this original scapegoating event, until the logic of scapegoating is exposed and overturned in Jesus’s self-sacrifice. Gans’s criticism of Girard’s account is based on his observation that without language there is no way for the original event to become meaningful to the group...

Throne and Altar!
>he said, swearingly

Welp, guess that's it for the rest of my weekend. Be back after I've digested this, hopefully wiser and less unhinged. Praises be to /lit/