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  • Violence Has Its ReasonsGirard and Bataille
  • Anthony D. Traylor (bio)

Ritualistic Sacrifice

Nested within Violence and the Sacred1 is an isolated and brief allusion to Georges Bataille whom Girard credits—despite the former’s predilection for all things decadent—with having not overlooked the true nature of prohibition as holding back the tide of violence and consequently responsible for establishing and maintaining the social tranquility necessary for the rise of civilization. Considering that both thinkers discern a deep affinity between violence and the sacred, this remark furnishes us with an open invitation to probe more deeply Bataille’s longstanding interest in religion, specifically, his meditations on the transgression or suspension of prohibition carried out, most paradigmatically, in ritualistic sacrifice and the sacred realm to which such acts of transgression supposedly once granted us access. In the first part of this article, I will attempt to demonstrate that Bataille’s analysis of sacrifice may represent an important supplement—if not indeed an alternative—to the Girardian thesis that the scapegoat mechanism effectively solves the riddle concerning the goal of ritualistic slaughter. More specifically, a confrontation with Bataille may reveal a dimension of violence and hence of the [End Page 131] sacred that is sought after for its own sake and not as a tactical reflex designed to restore communal peace.

Girard’s scapegoat hypothesis depicts ritualistic sacrifice as the restaging of a historically real event whereby a community unanimously gathers around and rallies against an arbitrarily selected victim, upon whom the sum total of societal agitation is concentrated, and who consequently serves as the ill-fated target of the virulent and lethal hysteria of the persecutors. The cathartic discharge proceeding from this collective lynching is mistakenly attributed to some unforeseen benign aspect of the victim who is posthumously credited with reconciling the once warring members of society and as a result is treated to mythic deification. Thus, for Girard, the experience of the sacred can be traced back to the chain of events leading up to and culminating in the victim’s death. Ritualistic sacrifice is nothing other than a reflexive and stylized reenactment of this original singling out of a scapegoat. Accordingly, sacrificial violence can be interpreted as the attempt to replicate the conditions proven by past experience to be effective in generating communal harmony and renewal.

Conspicuous in Girard’s account here is the fact that the energy released in the sacrificial act gets straightaway siphoned off and harnessed for the sake of the collective good (peaceful reconciliation). This reading, however, appears to ignore the possibility of a significance to the sacrificial event itself, aside from any societal benefit arising in the wake of the cathartic effect. To see exactly why Girard eschews this notion of sacrifice, it may be instructive to consider the 1977 essay “Differentiation and Reciprocity in Lévi-Strauss and Contemporary Theory,”2 where Girard takes issue with the structuralist claim that ritual (unlike myth) embodies a “perverse nostalgia for the immediate.” Rejecting a metaphysical dualism that pits a realm of “undifferentiation” (that which ritual strives to access in its quest for the “real”) against a realm of “differentiation” (the stuff of myth and discursive thought), Girard highlights the fact that both ritual and myth exhibit traits of differentiation as well as undifferentiation (e.g., baptismal rites and flood myths). Girard is particularly troubled by what he sees as structualism’s failure to account for how the realm of undifferentiated immediacy gets “carved up” into the differences they so greatly prize. Reluctant as he is to embrace this so-called undifferentiation, Lévi-Strauss is inevitably drawn to the opposite end of the spectrum and becomes entangled in a metaphysical/linguistic antirealism, a philosophic position that, in Girard’s words, tends to degenerate into the kind of relativistic free-for-all plaguing the contemporary intellectual scene. Crucial for Girard then [End Page 132] is that we abandon this metaphysical antithesis altogether and acknowledge that ritual is not invested in undifferentiation for its own sake, but that it constitutes an essential albeit “preliminary” moment subordinate to the goal of “(re)differentiation.” In short, instead of abandoning us to some Heraclitean flux, ritual strategically enacts...

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