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1 CHAPTER 1 A First Overview: Here and Now MICHEL TREGUER: René, even though it may not be a very logical starting point,before laying outyourthoughtin amore organizedway, Iwouldlike to begin here and now, in the present moment in which our lives are immersed, and which, for some time now, we have seen unfurling before our eyes like a film in fast-forward. I want to do this in order to give the reader a glimpse of the immense range of applications and the tremendous interpretive power of your theory, and in order to familiarize the reader with the language we’ll be speaking. Which in turn leads me to sum up in a few sentences the essential tenets of your thesis. You can correct me as we go along! Every human group is subject to mechanisms of what you call mimetic desire, of imitation and reciprocal jealousy, which are ineluctable sources of violence. We each desire what others desire, and then imitate their way of desiring, and so forth. From time to time, in a more or less cyclical way, the fever of this inexorable competition culminates in a crisis that threatens the group’s cohesion. This observation, which might seem merely anecdotal at first glance, is in truth the foundation of an extraordinarily powerful and farreaching explanatory principle that makes it possible to shed light on nearly all individual and collective behavior, from domestic squabbles to large-scale historical phenomena, from the dawn of humanity to the current era. 2 Chapter One The first societies resolved these recurrent “mimetic crises” by imputing to a victim—a scapegoat—the sins of the group and sacrificing it. Then, gradually, simulacra replaced the real murders: thus were born the rites of the primitive pagan religions, as well as the myths assigned the task of legitimizing them by linking them to the sacred horror of the group’s origins. In other words, all human cultures are founded on murder. The initiation of children cemented these closed systems and perpetuated the power of the adults. You think the Christian message, as it appears in the Gospels, marks an absolute break with these “eternal returns,” the true beginning of a true humanity. Jesus is the first and the only one to say of myths and rituals: “These are lies, the victims were innocent. Stop envying and opposing one another, because that’s the source of all evil. Love one another. Children of all nations, emancipate yourselves: your fathers are liars.” In saying this, of course, he proclaims the existence of human rights, which we still hear about from time to time today, and which are thus essentially “the rights of the victims to ask for reparations from their persecutors.” How does that sound to you? RENÉ GIRARD: Fine, except when you say “your fathers are liars.” Christ wouldn’t have spoken like that. The rather facile condemnation of fathers was already widespread in his time, and he denounced it. He corrected the Pharisees, who said: “If we had lived at the time of our fathers, we would not have joined them in killing the prophets.” The ones who talk like that are the most likely to get caught up in future mimetic escalations. The feeling of superiority they experience with respect to the past is itself a form of mimetic violence very similar to the one they think they’ve left behind them. I’d like to draw particular attention to the fact that the crystallization of the group’s tensions at the expense of a victim is an unconscious process. The best proof of this is that if you asked everyone today, all over France: “Do the people around you take out their frustrations on scapegoats?” everyone would answer in the affirmative; but if you then asked the same people: “And do you have scapegoats?” everyone would answer in the negative. To become Christian is, fundamentally, to perceive that it isn’t just others who have scapegoats. And note that the two greatest Christians, the founders of the Church, Peter and Paul, were two converted persecutors. Before their conversion, they, too, thought that they didn’t have any scapegoats. A First Overview 3 Another point. Rituals aren’t only, as is sometimes said, mere pantomimes of reconciliation, a sort of harmless “happening” by which the group’s members give recognition to one another and strengthen their feelings of belonging. We’re talking about human culture at its strongest and most powerful...

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