The One by Whom Scandal Comes

Chapter 5. Scandal and Conversion

57 CHAPTER 5 Scandal and Conversion MARIA STELLA BARBERI: Following the gospel revelation, then, human violence was unmasked and became a manifest danger, threatening to bring us down, to lay us low. This, I take it, is what you mean by the notion of scandal—the stone, or obstacle, on which the sinner stumbles—which you sometimes identify with Satan, and which in any case is essential to the development of your argument. RENÉ GIRARD: Yes, the gospel text explicitly likens Satan and scandal when Jesus admonishes Peter, saying “Get behind me, Satan” (Vade retro Satana, in the Vulgate), because you stand in my way: “You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” (Matthew 16:23). Moreover, Jesus, as a scapegoat, perceived himself to be a hindrance to those who witnessed the crucifixion. MSB: In an earlier book you dedicated an entire chapter to the theme of skándalon.1 Scandal, the most typical of mimetic relations, glorifies the ambivalent character—both attraction and rejection—of human desire. And since scandal causes those who are caught up in it to stumble, always 58 Chapter Five on the same obstacle, its obsessive repetition ends up propagating itself, like a real contagion. My question is this: doesn’t thinking of scandal as a stumbling block, as a forbidden object or something to be gotten around, require that a person distance himself from his model—his objectal model? RG: Lacan uses the word “objectal,” it seems to me. Psychoanalysts have always used it, I believe— MSB: I’m a Lacanian without knowing it! Let me rephrase my question. In view of the prohibition against provoking scandal laid down by Judaism—a prohibitiontowhichyouascribethecharacterof“juridicaltranscendence”— how did Christianity take the stone that the builders rejected and make it into a building block, a cornerstone?2 RG: This is very clear in Dostoevsky. One can even read Dostoevsky’s novels in this light. At the beginning there is always a scandal between the characters ; then the great main scene opens with a collective scandal—in Demons, for example, the party given by the governor’s wife, a snob who surrounds herself with all the revolutionaries. The chief senses of the word “scandal” dominate the text, each in its own place, until the Crucifixion. MSB: One thinks also, in The Idiot, of the scene of Prince Myshkin’s epileptic seizure and fainting. RG: Yes, this tendency to collective frenzy is quite astonishing— MSB: A frenzy that often is the sign that something has changed. RG: In Demons, Stepan Trofimovich is scandalous for taking part in the revolutionary conspiracy, and when he leaves the town a conversion occurs. This is both the height of disorder and a conversion, though of course at another level than the founding frenzy of archaic societies. MSB: Might that be an example of the gospel conversion you mentioned, in whichthestoneonwhichthesinnerstumblesisconvertedintoacornerstone? Scandal and Conversion 59 RG: Yes—but since the cornerstone is the Cross, my chapter on scandal shouldn’t come at the end of the book! I realized this too late, and didn’t have time to put the chapter in its proper place. MSB: The theme of the closing chapter of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World became the theme of the first chapter of I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. RG: This spiral structure is a constant feature of my work. Lately, whenever someone asks me what I’m doing, I say that I’m trying to write Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World in reverse, beginning with the omega and not with the alpha, since the omega is the key to everything. MSB: And so do we know in advance what the theme of your next work will be? RG: I’m coming back to the archaic, to the sacralization of scapegoats. Judaism , by “dedivinizing” victims and “devictimizing” God, imposed separation and absolute transcendence. In Christianity, God is once again a victim. He is a divine victim. It is therefore unsurprising that for Judaism, as well as for Islam, Christianity should appear as a regression, a return to mythology. In reality this is not at all true, since the victim is innocent, whereas in myths the victim is always guilty in one way or another. It is in this sense, I think, that the dogma of the Incarnation must be interpreted. It is not a case of dogma divinizing a man. The...