The Child of Fortune: Envy and the Constitution of the Social Space

In this paper, we will sketch out a simple scheme to evaluate different ways in which Western society has coped with the momentous and hidden problem of envy; afterward, we will consider the consequences for the constitution of the social space that these changes entail. We will argue that envy, when considered as a primal feeling, can shed light on René Girard’s notion of metaphysical desire and on diasparagmos rituals. Then, taking into account Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s endogenous fixed point thesis—concerning the constitution of autotranscendent social structures that configure themselves around an attractor, a fixed point, revealed to be a product of the process of constitution, an effect and not a cause—we will consider envy as the main feedback in the system. Starting from this theoretical scenario, we will envisage three steps—on a line sketched according to mimetic theory—marked by the particular conditions and role of the feedback. We will show what kind of balance was guaranteed to Athens (taken as an exemplar archaic society, starting from its self-representation as given by Sophocles in Oedipus the King) by the complementary rituals of pharmakos and ostrakos; what equilibrium was offered to Christian medieval social structures by the doctrine of the deadly sins; and, finally, we will take a look at our own secularized society. Our aim is to apply René Girard’s theory systematically, to show how the philosophy of history that we can infer from his works can help us to detect a curious and at the same time quite dramatic change as far as the homeostatic equilibrium of our society is concerned. Thanks to this exercise, we will be able to show how the transcendental social space—by which we mean the region of possible outcomes, in terms of constraints and possibilities, of a human life in a social context—is constituted through the victimage mechanism as defined by Girard and how this constitution is affected by the performative unveiling of the mechanism itself.

“Oedipus is the child of Fortune, the man of spectacular highs and lows.”

—René Girard, Oedipus Unbound.¹

Following up on a footnote in Violence and the Sacred,² where Girard takes into account Jean-Pierre Vernant’s famous study of Oedipus the King,³ we will argue that in Girard’s own formulation, mimetic theory misses a chance to extend its scope. In his reading of Vernant’s paper, Girard only refers to the interpretation of Oedipus’s mythical crimes in terms of the loss of differences, but he does not focus on the hypothesis of the symmetrical relation between the rites of pharmakos and the procedure of ostracism. Focusing on the violent victimage resolution, he doesn’t seem to notice that the violent killing—being just one of its possible epiphenomena—embodies a logic of discrimination that determines the boundaries, that is to say the constraints and the possibilities, of the community. Vernant’s interpretation of the specular rituals of ostrakos and pharmakos is open to be recast through Dupuy’s formalization of the victimage mechanism: the victim of the lynching, the common antagonist, occupies at the bottom the place that the ostracized occupies at the top. Both are endogenous fixed points; that is to say, both are individuated by the mechanism of the mimetic convergence: the one that the community hates and the one that it envies. So, if the victimage mechanism offers the city its differential structure, through this double mechanism the polis also finds its limits. This can help us define other issues raised by the same logic and describe in a quite precise way a specific set of consequences of the Christian unveiling of the victimage mechanism for the structure and the limits of the social space.

To approach the core question of our hypothesis, let us go back to the first book in which Girard unveils the mimetic mediations of desire to explain the preponderance of envy in modern society. In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel,⁴ Girard argues that desire is fundamentally triangular, that one never desires an object...