Expositions of Sacrificial Logic: Girard, Žižek, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s film adaptation of the same name, deliver two separate critiques of sacrificial violence through their particular renderings of Carla Jean Moss’s death scene, as they correspond, respectively, to the theories of René Girard and Slavoj Žižek. In both film and novel, the chase narrative offers a concrete representation of runaway acquisitive mimesis engendering resentment and cathartic violence. This violence is symbolically manifest in the character of Anton Chigurh. An assassin whose killings often employ a ritual of chance, Chigurh is a symbol for both the violence foundational to culture and the fascinating draw such violence continues to have in contemporary culture. A comparison of the film and the novel versions of Carla Jean Moss’s conversation with her murderer illuminate the distinction between Girard and Žižek’s favored examples for the exposition of culture’s violent logic. In Things Hidden since the Foundation of The World, Girard finds the best expositors of sacrificial violence in Christ and the good harlot from “The Judgment of Solomon”¹ and briefly considers Sophocles’s Antigone as a less effective exposition of the same violence. The discourse of the novel’s Carla Jean is virtually free from mimetic rivalry, whereas the film’s Carla Jean more closely resembles Antigone’s heroic and rivalrous abstention. These correlations are interesting, since Žižek seizes upon Antigone’s abstention as the quintessential questioning of the sociosymbolic and its violent origins, which he and Girard trace to the ontological violence of Heidegger’s Heraclitean Logos. Ultimately, the comparison of the two versions of the murder scene point toward the divergence between Girard and Žižek’s view on how the violent foundations and workings of culture are best exposed.

In Things Hidden, Girard states that Lacan’s abstraction of Freud’s thought to the realm of language further mystifies the best of Freud’s already myth-tainted insights.² Thus, it may seem strange to draw together a committed Lacanian like Žižek and Girard for comparison. Despite his loyalty to Lacan, Žižek’s thought shares with Girard’s an interest in similar philosophical questions and cultural phenomena. Because of this, a fluency of dialogue is possible between Žižek and mimetic theory. For example, Žižek accepts Heidegger’s notion of ontological violence (Heraclitean Logos) as the foundation of the symbolic in the same way that Girard does in Things Hidden.³ Where Lacan claims that psychosis represents a foreclosure of the symbolic, Žižek recognizes envy and resentment as the impetus behind the death drive, which is an attempted escape from the sociosymbolic.⁴ A parallel exists between this formulation and mimetic theory’s supposition that resentment grows out of the subject’s lack of metaphysical being, which it subsequently pursues in the other. Girard posits this as the function of desire in Freud’s death drive.⁵ In the emphasis he places on envy, Žižek opens up parallels between his Lacanian reflections on the nature of desire and those of mimetic theory. Further, his assumption that violence is the basis for the emergence of culture forms, or the symbolic, closely resembles Girard’s own theory of origins. Žižek’s use of film and popular culture to explicate the movements of desire in Lacanian theory makes contemporary literature and film an ideal forum for comparing Žižek’s thought with mimetic theory, which itself claims to subsume the best of Freud and Lacan in its analysis of desire and violence.

The chase plot of No Country for Old Men concretely illustrates the movement of interdividual desire toward violence, as schematized in mimetic theory. Llewelyn Moss finds $2 million in drug money. When he subsequently discovers that the money’s true owners have sent an assassin to retrieve it, he runs with money in hand. Anton Chigurh pursues and the two men become warring doubles.⁶ The triangular configuration of desire, as subject (Moss) and rival (Chigurh and the drug industry) pursue the [End Page...