I think I would like, therefore, to open the discussion by saying basically nothing, by simply opening the forum for whatever points of the text anyone wants to discuss. What strikes you?

First, since part of my job here is always to summarize, I think these two paragraphs from p. 124 pretty nicely sum up the chapter as a whole:

The two preceding series of discussions [first part of the chapter] suggest the same negative conclusion: whether we consider the sociology of collective memory of the phenomenology of individual memory, neither has any greater success than the other in deriving the apparent legitimacy of the adverse positions from the strong position each, respectively, holds: on one side, the cohesion of the states of consciousness of the individual ego; on the other, the capacity of collective entities to preserve and recall common memories. What is more, the attempts at derivation are not even symmetrical; this is why there appear to be no areas of overlap between a phenomenological derivation of collective memory and a sociological derivation of individual memory.

At the end of this inquiry into a major aporia of the problematic of memory, I propose [second part of the chapter] to explore the complementary resources contained within the two antogonistic approaches, resources masked, on the one hand, by the idealist prejudice of Husserlian phenomenology (at least in the published part of his work) and, on the other, the positivist prejudice of sociology in the glory of its youth. I will seek, first of all, to identify the linguistic region where the two discourses may be made to intersect.

It is this proposed second part of the chapter (rather short, really, since it is less than 10 pages long) that is the really remarkable part of this chapter, I think. Drawing on Strawson, of all people, Ricoeur dips back into Locke (whom he had investigated in some detail earlier in the chapter) in order to flesh out three propositions about the attribution of memory. Taken together, these three propositions support Ricoeur’s further suspension of any solution to the aporia of collective vs. personal memory, and they do so in two ways. On the one hand, they justify Ricoeur’s suggestion of working through two antithetically parallel disciplines: a phenomenology of society and a sociology grounded in phenomenology. On the other hand, Ricoeur fleshes out the three propositions in terms of Locke’s forensic reading of consciousness, and this calls for a prolongation of the aporia so that it can be explored the surfacing subject of testimony. Ricoeur makes quite clear that the whole of Section II of the book is going to open with this question of testimony.

Such, it seems, is the movement of the chapter, and the way it closes and yet leaves open the problematic of the entire first section of the book. What seems richest to me is this rereading of Locke that Ricoeur undertakes. But I won’t try to anticipate where it will go: I’m too fascinated to get ahead of myself irresponsibly on this one.

The most crucial moment of the chapter, it seems to me, is pp. 88-89, where Ricoeur allows the theme of justice at last into the project. Ricoeur sees “the duty of memory considered as the imperative of justice” (p. 88) as being a point of convergence for truth and praxis. This is, of course, the logic that underpins the whole of this first part of Memory, History, Forgetting: Ricoeur proceeds from the what of memory (truth), through the how of memory (praxis), toward the who of memory (a theme to be governed by the imperative of justice). The pathway Ricoeur has chosen is brilliant: in order to avoid the difficulties that would inevitably plague a project beginning with the question of the remembering subject or the remembering ego, Ricoeur has traced his way from the remembered through remembering to arrive at a rememberer that is defined in advance as oriented by the other (victim). An interesting strategy, to say the least.

The chapter as a whole, imposing praxis on the question of truth, thus doubles the first chapter’s sense of memory’s fragility: memory is not only endangered by its intertwining relationship with imagination, but also by its inevitably intersubjective setting. He introduces this intersubjectivity through the didactic situation, interestingly enough: the teacher requires memorization from the student. This opens quite early in the chapter onto the theme of abuse, but Ricoeur pushes it aside in order to take up at some length the history of ars memoriae, a fascinating history to say the least! But, as Yates’ final questions, quoted on page 65, make clear, memorization eventually began/begins (with hermetic science… with science generally?) to fail to disambiguate itself from imagination. The collapse of the boundary so necessary for the maintenance of a strong conception of truth, vital at the conclusion of chapter 1, summons Ricoeur to the task of delimiting the ars memoriae, and so he explains: “There are two ways to follow up on these primary considerations that reintroduce the idea of limit into a project that excludes it. . . . [T]he second is to take into consideration the abuses that are grafted onto its use, once this use becomes a form of manipulation under the guise of artificial memory.” (p. 67) Thus he returns—and at length—to the theme of abuse.

Abuse thus comes into Ricoeur’s argument twice, or rather, through a double move: it first imposes itself through the eminently intersubjective relation of teaching; second, it reemerges as the articulation of a (pragmatic) limit that reinforces the boundary between memory and imagination. This double move nicely parallels the superimposition of chapter 2 onto chapter 1: the intersubjectivity that characterizes the practice of memorization reinforces (perhaps secures) the defining limit of imagination (over against memory). It is evident, then, to me at least, that Ricoeur pragmatic concerns are not entirely a distraction or a disruption of the cognitive themes of chapter 1: they are the only means of maintaining the points gained in the course of the first chapter.

Ricoeur’s work here is thus characterized through and through—is it not?—by the understanding that the good secures the truth. He thus concludes his discussion of ideological manipulation of memory with these words from Todorov: “The work of the historian, like every work on the past, never consists solely in establishing the facts but also in choosing certain among them as being more salient and more significant than others, then placing them in relation to one another; now this work of selecting and combining is necessarily guided by the search, not for truth, but for the good.” (p. 86) I can’t help but wonder, then, whether Ricoeur ends up securing the point gained in his first chapter, or whether he all the more radically betrays it: truth is a function of justice for him, a relationism if not a relativism.

Does he not—at least to this point—thus remain Freudian, all too Freudian? History trumps memory—he argues through Pierre Nora at the end of the chapter—so soon as the subject’s (or community’s?) truth is constituted, a constitution accomplished in the process of analysis, indeed, of critical analysis.

Hmmm.

The comparison with Badiou is helpful here because it grounds a necessary defense and an important clarification. The defense first: because Ricoeur points, through his analysis of Bergson and Sartre primarily, to the unavoidable possibility of hallucination/hauntedness at the root of memory, he does not, for that reason, slide off into a kind of vague, fashionable postmodern position that denies (or redefines beyond recognition) anything like “truth.” And hence, the clarification: Ricoeur, having opened himself to the, let us say, realities of the postmodern condition, and having pressed right through the aporiae resultant therefrom, is able somehow to break with Cartesian thought without therefore sacrificing a robust sense of truth (and without having to root himself in a fully hollow subjectivity… though that should be little surprise after Oneself as Another).

These preliminaries, I think, make it possible to see much more clearly (at least for me) what Ricoeur is doing in the second half of this chapter. The theme that runs through the whole chapter—beginning with the analyses of Plato and Aristotle in last week’s section—is that of the presence of the absent. It is, of course, the very question of the what that makes this the theme throughout the chapter: the what of every memory is a present absent, is an absent that somehow presents itself. And this basic structure of the memory inevitably entangles it in the problematic of imagination (even of hallucination), since the imagined (the phantasy) is always also a present absent. The simplest way to summarize Ricoeur’s movements through the whole of the chapter, then, is this: he is trying to show how the absent present of imagination is at once distinct from and yet undeniably parallel to the absent present of memory, a distinction/parallel that is best (only?) articulatable with (ultimately quite brief) reference to the structure of fidelity, of fidelity in a “search for truth” (a “truth procedure”?).

Much can be said about the particularities of Ricoeur’s journey along this pathway… perhaps especially concerning his (fascinating) explanations/interpretations of Husserl (I am constantly amazed by the sheer massiveness of the Husserlian project… and I’ll confess that I greatly appreciate Marion’s rather straightforward roadmap for navigating one’s way through that massive project). But I will leave the details of the chapter for the discussion I hope to see follow. I shall myself be content with the above orientation, so far as this post goes.

On, then, to the how!

If I can get away with it, I’d like to begin with a word or two about why I said that the second problematic mentioned above might be said to be Lacanian. As I currently read him, Lacan’s aim was primarily to thematize the complex relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic (two registers that, for a Freudian, are obviously connected to the first problematic mentioned above as well, that of the split between memory and recollection). Lacan essentially accused psychology of failing to recognize this relationship, thus collapsing the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic, a distinction set in motion by the installment of symbolic language through the name-of-the-father (le nom du pere). The relationship between these two registers, as Lacan seems to understand them, is much like the relationship between imagination and memory as Ricoeur lays it out here: memory and imagination must be distinguished, but one must recognize even as this distinction is made that memory remains a kind of image-ing.

This distinction “and yet . . .” that Ricoeur points out right at the beginning of the book can be said to undergird all of his work: it is in fact this complex relationship between memory and imagination that essentially gives Ricoeur’s hermeneutics its shape (it seems to me that it is for this reason that Ricoeur found himself writing an almost systematic study of Freud). I would like, in light of these details, to suggest that Ricoeurian hermeneutics be seen as closely related to (perhaps even roughly equivalent to) Lacanian analysis: if the linguistic connection between Ricoeur’s “imagination” and Lacan’s “imaginary” is obvious, can I suggest that we find reason therein to cancel the apparent distance between Ricoeur’s “memory” and Lacan’s “symbolic” as manifest on the linguistic plane?

I’ll leave that issue there for now, but I raise it at this early point simply because I will likely return again and again to Lacan’s Freud over the course of our readings here.

The bulk of our reading this week is in the subsection “The Greek Heritage.” Ricoeur deals, of course, with two figures in continuity: Plato and Aristotle. With each of these figures, he first addresses himself to the texts on what might be called an exegetical level, and he subsequently takes up the same on what might be called a hermeneutical level. I’ll deal only with Ricoeur’s hermeneutical dealings (I could hardly have much to say on the exegetical level without doing far more study in preparation for our discussion!).

Ricoeur sees Plato as working up two aporiae, one far simpler (though not less important) than the other: first, Plato does not explicitly situate memory as a function of temporality (memory is thought in essentially atemporal terms); second, memory is defined according to a kind of mimetic theory (of truth). This latter point is spelled out at length on pages 12-13. It is of significance here that Ricoeur is drawing on the two dialogues with Theaetetus, since it is in one of them (the Theaetetus specifically) that Plato provides the definition of knowledge (as justified true belief): the “correspondence” theory of truth (if indeed that is what Plato intends to lay before his readers!) undergirds the mimetic model of memory, according to which a memory imitates an impression or trace.

This leads Ricoeur to work out a brief typology of the trace, one strikingly reminiscent of Derrida’s typology of the impression in Archive Fever (pp. 25-31): the trace as the written (Derrida says the “scriptural” or “typographic”); the trace as the experienced (Derrida says the “something else to be felt in anticipation”); and the trace as the corporeal (Derrida says the “circumcision”). (That Ricoeur here meets up with Derrida’s discussion of Freud is rather interesting in light of the above linkage between Ricoeur and Lacan.) For Ricoeur, these different uses of the word “trace” not only establish the aporiae Aristotle will have to follow out, but they also (particularly the last two: Ricoeur is content to separate to one side the written trace as what the historian deals with in the archives) point to “different readings of the body, of corporeality.” (p. 15)

The first full paragraph on page 17 contains Ricoeur’s discussion of Aristotle’s rigorous reemployment of Plato’s central terms. The importance of this reemployment is discussed fully, though, on pages 19-20: “By drawing a line in this way between the simple presence of memories and the act of recollection, Aristotle has preserved for all time a space for discussion worthy of the fundamental aporia brought to light by the Theaetetus, namely, the presence of the absent. . . . Aristotle has made great strides in the discussion by introducing the category of otherness into the very heart of the relation between the eikon, reinterpreted as an inscription, and the initial affection. Having done this, he begins to advance the concept of resemblance, which, moreover, had not been challenged.” This major advance, however, is not yet enough to press beyond the aporia introduced by the model of the imprint and its correlative mimesis: “But the paradoxes of the imprint will continue to reemerge, primarily with the question of the material causes of the anamnesis of memory, prior to its recall.”

In a word, Aristotle forces the aporiae of the trace as a problematic, forces one to grapple with the relationship between the false and the true in recollection. The way along the pathway is clarified, as well, in that for Aristotle, memory is always temporal, is always a function of the past.

And this nicely sets Ricoeur up for his preliminary phenomenology of memory . . .

Also, I’d like to post the proposed schedule (which can be revised as need be during the course of the discussions) for reading Memory, History, Forgetting. It is as follows (the date attached to each block is the date that a post on that particular block will be posted, discussion continuing as long as interest remains):

February 22nd: pp. 1-20

February 29th: pp. 21-55

March 7th: pp. 56-92

March 14th: pp. 93-132

March 21st: pp. 133-152

March 28th: pp. 153-181

April 4th: pp. 182-208

April 11th: pp. 209-233

April 18th: pp. 234-260

April 25th: pp. 261-280

May 2nd: pp. 281-304

May 9th: pp. 305-342

May 16th: pp. 343-381

May 23rd: pp. 382-411

May 30th: pp. 412-442

June 6th: pp. 443-469

June 13th: pp. 470-506

I anticipate very interesting discussions…

Let me begin by speaking with, or at least about, Cheryl. First: Cheryl, THANK YOU for introducing us to Girard. Very few times have I been so rewarded for pursuing another’s advice on whose books to read. That said, I’ll confess that I think you gave me the wrong impression in the beginning: I expected Girard to be saying something quite different from what, in the end, I’m convinced he’s saying. I’m not sure whether that wrong impression stems from a simple lack of comprehension on my part, a kind of complexity of communication that put some kind of a gap between us, or (if I won’t offend by suggesting it) a misunderstanding of Girard on your own part. What I’ll be doing, in part, then, in the following is asking you to let me know if we are reading Girard the same way. That is, when you read my summary of Girard’s approach to textuality below, could you provide some thoughts about whether you think Girard is saying what I think he’s saying, etc.? I’d much appreciate that.

Now, let me introduce my thoughts on Girard with a bit of narrative. I began reading The Scapegoat at about the same time I began reading John Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire. Of the two, I’ll confess that I was far more interested in Brooke’s book. That is, I was far more sympathetic, by nature, to the ideas I imagined would be presented in The Refiner’s Fire, mostly because I have had something of an abiding interest in the hermetic, and because I anticipated him outlining how the hermetic subculture of radical protestant belief opened the way for Mormonism’s remarkable success. On the other hand, I was almost hostile (as those participating early in the discussion will well remember!) to Girard from the beginning: I was, from the very start, made quite nervous by his explicit decision to do violence to texts, to transgress texts in the name of some kind of (essentially liberal) ethics. Thus I came to these projects with radically different expectations.

Because my little family moved from Washington to Oregon last August, both projects were disrupted for me, and both books sat on the shelf for a few months. I returned to The Scapegoat first, primarily because I had this blog hanging over my head. I only came back, in fact, to The Refiner’s Fire a month or so ago. Interestingly, as I’ve worked through both of these in greater detail and with more consistent attention over the past month or two, my expectations were frustrated on both accounts: whereas I expected Girard to work out a theory of transgressing scriptural texts, he turned out in the end to do precisely the opposite; and whereas I expected Brooke to lay out the possibility of thinking carefully about a “prepared people,” he rather filled three hundred pages with remarkably ignorant research and Brodie-like sensationalistic possibilities without ground. I finished reading both books yesterday, and my wife can tell you the difference in my final reactions: my frustration with Brooke made me swear off the New Mormon history for a few months, while my fascination with Girard was the subject of an hour and a half discussion while the kids played at the park.

Now, I bother to tell the above story for two reasons. First, I want to deter anyone and everyone from wasting their time with Brooke’s book. Second, I really, really want to highlight how much Girard has overturned my expectations! Girard’s work here is remarkably promising. So… on to the actual work of summary!

Girard is essentially a literary critic, but of a radical nature… if not of a radically Lacanian nature. (I wondered–and doubted–all through reading this book that he had been influenced by Lacan, but he makes it as clear as can be that he was on page 196.) There are, in both Girard’s and Lacan’s language (and this is something I pointed out in my very first post on Girard!) a threefold structure underlying the theory: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. While the first of these three “categories” has reference to actual human interaction, the other two have reference to kinds of writing. That is, there are imaginary texts and symbolic texts. (Imaginary, here, does not at all mean something like “non-existent,” but something like “of or pertaining to images.”) Each of these kinds of texts is an inscription of the Real or of reality, but they differ precisely in the way they inscribe reality. For Girard, the imaginary text inscribes reality in a persecutory way, while the symbolic text inscribes reality in a revelatory way.

The difficulty is that these two kinds of texts are both… texts. That is, they are both written, often with the same words, etc. And hence they are too easily confused. In fact, it is the way one sees the relationship between these two kinds of texts that defines one’s place in the grand scheme of things: if one confuses the two kinds of texts, one remains, essentially, in sin (a persecutor); if one distinguishes between the two kinds of texts and adheres faithfully to the work of the symbolic text, one receives, essentially, grace (and becomes a witness/martyr). The first of these two ways of understanding texts–the one that does not distinguish the imaginary from the symbolic–is what Lacan calls neurosis: the neurotic (I’ll say: natural, psychical, man) cannot see what is actually at work in the texts. The second of these two ways of understanding texts–the one that distinguishes the imaginary from the symbolic–is that of the person beyond neurosis, what I will agree with Girard in calling the person under the influence of the Spirit, the person who interprets (and preaches!) texts by the power of the Spirit.

How nicely this matches up with psychoanalysis is astounding. The neurotic/natural/psychical reader is little more than an automaton, determined by the political necessities of the scapegoat mechanism, thus entirely ruled over by the will of–Girard does not hesitate to say it–Satan. The spiritual reader has all freedom in reading, all freedom in acting because she can be true to the text as it actually is: she binds herself only to Christ’s revelation through the Spirit. Note, then, that the neurotic reader is essentially unconscious of the symbolic text, that is, of the scriptures (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”), and one must come under the sway of the text and the Spirit in order to be distracted from his neurosis.

Lining the scriptures up with the unconscious is of some importance, it seems to me, because, as Ricoeur constantly points out in his work on Freud, the unconscious is timeless, while history, culture, time, politics, and the like, are all a function of consciousness. Indeed, as Ricoeur makes clear, psychoanalysis forces one to understand history itself to be a kind of sorting out the forces of o/re-pression. This point has a nice echo in Girard: there is no history, so to speak, in scripture, only in imaginary texts. Really, it is the burden of the first half of the book to work out this history of texts: the downplaying of real violence in textual evolution is the very fabric of history and time. History is thus the slow becoming conscious of the unconscious texts of scripture. This theory of history–which Girard sums up under the title “History and the Paraclete”–deserves further attention.

What all of this amounts to, then, is a kind of theory of texts that divides writings up into the books of the dead and the book of life: imaginary texts are filled with magic and superstition, are false writings of wizards that peep and mutter, of incantations seeking after the sacralized dead, while symbolic texts are filled with the promise of life, are given to the law and to the testimony/martyrdom, are sealed up in their parabolic structure.

This seems to me to be the most promising Continental project of all (though of course it spills over into everyone else I’m reading and studying): to think about two kinds of text and how the radically faithful are interpreting them, in such a way as to reveal all the hidden works of darkness, to call all to repentance.

Now, let me get on the table my only hesitance with Girard (though I at first believed he was going to call for a transgression of scriptural texts, he does not): his constantly putting this revelatory preaching of the symbolic/scriptural texts in terms of ethics. How can he not see that ethics are always imaginary rather than symbolic? And yet, it is perhaps Girard himself who provides the key to sorting out this difficulty: there is a vestige, even in this powerful revealer of the scapegoat mechanism, of mimeticism in his mentioning ethics. Ethics, of course, always ties back to political discourse, to mimeticism, etc., though Girard seems to miss this point. The radical fidelity to the symbolic/scriptural text for which Girard calls likewise calls one beyond ethics, unless we are radically to change the meaning of ethics (something well worth doing! cf. Badiou’s Ethics). But if it is possible to transgress this point in Girard in the very name of Girard, can I say I really have any hesitance about his project?

A marvelous project. What else by him should I read?

I don’t know exactly what passage it was in this chapter that suddenly revealed this to me, but I was struck somewhere along the way by the idea of reading a parallel (or equation) between Girard’s mimesis and D&C 121:35: “And why are they not chosen? Because their hearts are set so much upon the things of this world, and aspire to the honors of men, that they do not learn this one lesson…” (notice that I’m limiting my quotation of the passage just to this heart-set/aspiration business for now). Regardless of what that one lesson is, what we’re being told here is that it is mimesis that keeps us from learning it, and I’m beginning to see how Girard can be taken as outlining the structure of the obstruction for us… in remarkable detail.

But there is a great deal more to this insight than at first appears. I’ve been almost constantly annoyed (as I’ve expressed again and again) by Girard’s rather cavalier treatment of Freud throughout the book: he insists on reducing Freud to a strawman fairly regularly. But my ongoing reading in Badiou’s work has given me, quite recently, another way to understand this constant reduction of Freud: Badiou gives psychoanalysis a kind of task within a broader (intellectual) division of labor, namely, the task of sorting out the meaning of (the genuine event of) love (eros), which is only one task among several others. This gives me an interesting way of reading Girard: he constantly ridicules Freud because he thinks there can be nothing but the task he sees before himself. He’s… paranoid… I suppose. That is, he’s not sure he can countenance any other kind of thinking than the one he is undertaking, and so he has got to throw out Freud with the assertion of his own project.

But the difficulty is this: Girard has a great deal in common with Lacan, not only terminologically, but thematically (right down to his concept of mimesis!). That is, Girard seems to me to be fundamentally Freudian. So…

What I’m seeing and not at all explaining well here is this: Girard might be taken as providing a careful analysis of just “half of things,” the other half being more explicitly the work of Freud, and Girard’s constant slandering of Freud is a consequence of a kind of jealousy/zeal (Girard wants to be able to command the whole project).

But let me put this all more clearly. I think there are two “halves” of a broader project here, though it is perhaps better to speak of a horizontality and a verticality that cross each other. Girard is explicating the horizontal: mimesis as (sibling) rivalry, etc. Freud, however, is explicating the vertical: the father/son relationship (if we stick most immediately with Freud, it unfortuantely remains patriarchal). It seems to me that Lacan has got both of these projects intertwined in his remarkable project, perhaps especially because he takes this all to the linguistic level.

So I want to group Girard under Lacan, as a kind of semi-Lacan, obsessed with half of the Lacanian project…

I have more to say on this, but have already butchered this much of it… so I’ll leave off for now.

The first of these is straightforward enough: Girard equates “revelation” with the message of the gospels. But then it is a revelation that purely textual and thus handed over to the whole world: “This is proof that revelation is making its way among us.” (p. 114) Very interesting. This is all the more important in that Girard sees revelation as provoking a crisis of interpretation: “From the anthropological perspective the essential characteristic of the revelation is the crisis it provokes in every representation of persecution from the standpoint of the persecutor.” (p. 114)

“Revolution” is used in two different ways that are fundamentally at odds. He refers to his own work as a revolution on page 114: “The experts see none of what we have been discussing . . . . This is always the case at the beginning of great revolutions.” But then he goes on to speak of “revolutionary” as the structural opposite of “conservative,” thus as meaning essentially “liberal.” (p. 115) That this is just an unfortunate equivocation is a real possibility, and one I’ll grant him in the name of the use he gives to the third term.

“Radicalism” appears as a feature of the evangelical message: “This is what constitutes the unparalleled radicalism of the revelation.” (p. 115) But this situates—or at least, ought to situate—Girard’s project in a diagonal (sorry, Robert) position to the dialectic of the world of politics (which he explicitly cites on that same page, in fact, in the very next sentence: “To understand it we must briefly evoke, in contrast, the political thought of the modern Western world”).

Hence, the three terms in relation to one another: the revelation of the gospels cuts across the dialectics of political economy, and it does so, as it inevitably it must, in a radical or revolutionary way. But then I’m still disturbed by the pairing up of liberalism with revolutionary thought: though the equation of terms occurs precisely when Girard is rejecting “revolutionary” politics right along with “conservative” politics, does it not signal that he somehow (unconsciously?) equates liberalism and his own project? In the end, I think this will be the inevitable conclusion to be drawn…

But let me get on with the text. The picture Girard presents in this chapter is actually quite straightforward. He divides all texts up into two groups, both with a particular relation to the scapegoat: either a text presents us the “scapegoat of the text” or it presents us the “scapegoat in the text.” (p. 119) The former category presents the scapegoat as guilty, hence, not as a scapegoat; the latter presents the scapegoat as innocent, hence, as a scapegoat. And this simple dichotomy covers the entire ground: “it provides me with a marvelous counterproof, the quickest, most intelligible, and surest means of sweeping away all the false ideas that are so abundant today, not only in the areas of mythology and religion but also in everything that involves interpretation.” (p. 124)

Girard is thus developing a full-blown hermeneutics, one that “provides” the critic with a taxonomy that totally represents the entirety of texts: all texts are generated by the crisis provoked by the real event of persecution. Hence, two provocations: first, the real persecution event provokes the writing of a text, from one of the two standpoints provided by Girard’s basic typology; second, the mere existence of the second of the two possible kinds of texts provokes the work of interpretation by conflicting fundamentally with the essential dissimulation that is at work in the first of the two possible kinds of texts. Two provocations, but a single dialectic: the real gives itself to two interweavings, one simply imaginary (the persecution text) and the other fully symbolic (the revelatory text). It is the conflation of these two types of text that is our “general cultural schizophrenia,” as Girard says. (p.121)

Now, I’ve begun to put this all in terms of Lacan (and I’m beginning to be convinced that Girard was versed in Lacan… I’ll have to look into that). But it seems to me that it comes shy of Lacan in a number of ways, though that is something I need to think about at much greater length. In the end, though, I think this will be the most fruitful way of approaching Girard.

In the meanwhile, there is something I’m not quite settled about here. There is something that just doesn’t seem right, though I can’t yet put my finger on it. Soon enough…

The overarching argument of the chapter can perhaps be summarized rather simply: “The Gospels do indeed center around the Passion of Christ, the same drama that is found in all world mythologies . . . . But this same drama is also needed to present the perspective of a victim dedicated to the rejection of the illusions of the persecutors. Thus the same drama is needed to give birth to the only text that can bring an end to all of mythology.” (p. 101) In a sense, this is a variation on something C. S. Lewis says in Surprised By Joy: the Gospel narratives in the New Testament bear every sign of world mythology (Jesus is the Corn God, etc.) except…

Much of this chapter is a fleshing out of this claim (though the last couple of pages of the chapter will make some startling steps forward beyond this claim in what is to me to the promising moment of this book so far). I don’t see any particular need to take up in any detail the way he does this fleshing out: it amounts to a clarification of the roles of the Old and New Testaments, but it seems sufficiently straightforward as it appears in the text.

Now, I want to accomplish two other things in this brief reflection. First, I want to get a few concerns on the table, what it is that makes me suspicious of this project. Second, I want to look at what Girard does at the conclusion of the chapter and how that makes me wonder whether all of my suspicions should not simply be thrown out the window. First, then, to the question of discomfort.

A sentence like the following makes me nervous, to say the least: “The scapegoat mechanism . . . becomes the most talked-about and well-known news.” (p. 108) It almost appears here that Girard equates the euangelion, the Gospel or Good News, with the recognition of the scapegoat. In the last analysis, I think that is precisely what Girard means to do. And that makes me quite nervous: is there not a kind of banalizing of the Gospel at work here, the assertion of a kind of almost vulgar equation of the Enlightenment and the Atonement? Several things in the chapter would seem to point in this curious direction. A good example is this: “Marxists, Nietzscheans, and Freudians for once all agree on this one point—that the Gospels are at fault.” (p. 109) Now, honestly, what kind of a statement is that? While there most certainly are Marxists and Nietzscheans and Freudians who see the Gospels as being at fault, it is hardly true that they “all agree” on such a point. Indeed, what seems to me to be so redemptive about what Girard does in the last couple of pages of this chapter are perhaps redemptive precisely because the project suddenly seems to become Lacanian, that is Freudian, Marxist, and Nietzschean, all in one move.

The clincher, of course, is this: “It becomes increasingly clear: after German idealism all the ups and downs of contemporary theory are no more than petty arguments meant to prevent the demystification of mythologies, new mechanisms for retarding the progress of biblical revelation.” (p. 110) On the one hand, this statement would seem to be simply wrong, especially in light of his indictment of the three “masters of suspicion”: it is precisely Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Nietzschean genealogical thought that has attempted to demystify all mythologies in the past two centuries. Now, it is not exactly so simple as that, because Girard might be here simply condemning what Terry Eagleton groups under the rather broad term “postmodernism”: (bad) pomos do their mystifying work all to often in the name of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and there is reason to think, of course, that it is only this that he is critiquing. But if so, it seems it would have been far more responsible of him to make that point quite clear.

Let me be quite clear myself: I don’t mean here just to accuse Girard of being irresponsible toward good Marxists, Freudians, and Nietzscheans. Rather, this irresponsibility is symptomatic—as any good Freudian/Marxist/Nietzschean might put it—of something still more disconcerting: the apparent plug here for German idealism! Girard unapologetically here calls for a return to German idealism, does he not? He calls for a return to Hegel. But let me be still more faithful to Girard’s text: by saying “German idealism” rather than “Hegelianism,” he seems to be pointing toward the broader (right) Hegelian project rather than to the rather difficult work of Hegel himself (which inevitably involves us in the broader thrust of Freudian, Marxist, and Nietzschean work anyway). What Girard calls for—let me at last be quite clear on this point–is thus a return to an absolute (the pun is intended and appropriate) marriage of the Enlightenment and the New Testament. Actually, “marriage” isn’t strong enough: he is equating them. Girard wants us to take up the right Hegelian project of the nineteenth century. I have so many qualms about that project that I can’t even begin to explain them here.

That equation, in a word, disturbs me.

But then what is Girard doing in these last couple of pages? He seems, quite suddenly, to offer a remarkably Freudian/Marxist/Nietzschean reading of a few key passages from the Passion narratives (and in this, at last, they “all agree”…). The brilliant move is this: “Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing” from Luke 23:34 is alerting the reader to the place of the unconscious! This absolutely amazing insight recasts the project of the Gospels as one of recasting the split subject, as forcing the mythological subject (the subject living in a world of myths… living politically, one could say) to come to be in a radically different way (radically; subjectively).

But then I have to ask this: does Girard not contradict himself here? Is this chapter not interwoven with two contradictory appeals, one to objectivity and one to subjectivity? I’ve got to think about this more.