The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

The Self and Other People

187 The Self and Other People Reading Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation with René Girard and Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas . . . talks of the defenseless face of the other which shows itself to us in a way we can’t avoid. When we recognize this face, it makes us a captive. This face is the face of the scapegoat, the victim, helpless and without possibility of escape. —Roel Kaptein1 Part One: Conflict Resolution, Girard, and Levinas One of the “hot” topics in conflict resolution studies over the past thirty years or so has been the introduction of the idea of reconciliation.2 The idea behind it is that the resolution of conflict remains temporary as long as we focus exclusively upon the symptomatic issues at hand and that only if we step back and look more broadly at the people involved and the larger contexts in which they live and work can it be made permanent—and thus something like reconciliation becomes possible. In this expanding contextual understanding, the work of René Girard has assumed special importance. Why? Girard posits that all culture operates in effect as a management The Self and Other People 188 The Prophetic Law system for mimetic desire, a system sustained by what he calls the scapegoat mechanism, a system in which a victim arbitrarily chosen and sacrificially removed from the community in a veritable lynching is understood to be at the origin of all social distinction, founded as such distinction is upon the difference between the sacred and violence. The sacred and violence for Girard are one and the same. The sacred is violence effectively removed from the community, and violence is the sacred deviated from its segregated transcendent status and come down into the city to wreak havoc among its citizenry. If the system is effectively maintained, the originating violence is reenacted periodically in the form of commemorative ritual, and the result is the regeneration of the sacred. If the system is not maintained, the result is violence, which is to say, difference gone wrong, distinction gone awry, asserted in the extreme in its inefficacy. Untouched by the outside world, archaic communities, as Girard tells the story, sustained their existence for thousands of years within this cycle of difference, difference gone wrong (or sacrificial crisis), paroxysmal exclusionary behavior (or surrogate victimage ), and new differentiation (and commemorative reenactment). With the advent of the “modern” world some twenty-five hundred years ago (and for whatever reason), these sacrificial systems were threatened and the ones that survived were the ones that effectively developed a means of living more or less without sacrificial victims in the traditional sense. It is not hard to imagine how or why conflict resolution theorists would be interested in these ideas and identify in this account of sacrificial violence and its mechanism a useful model. Here, for example, is how Roel Kaptein explains Girard: Our culture increasingly gives us the impression that we are atomized individuals, responsible for and to ourselves and free to do what we want. Inevitably in this situation, everybody and everything else become tools which we can use to reach our own goals. Others get in the way between us and our goals. When we see other people scapegoating and blaming others, we despise it. However, in despising and loathing it we actually prove that we are not free of it ourselves. Instead we show that we know all about it. Nevertheless , we continue to scapegoat and blame others, over and over again, without ever acknowledging what we are doing. Even while we are doing The Self and Other People 189 it, we remain absolutely certain that we ourselves are not scapegoating. We are sure that we are simply right! Given this situation, everything which is in this enchiridion, indeed even everything which we learn from the gospel can be used to play the game of scapegoating, the game of culture, better. We can become even cleverer hypocrites, thinking ourselves superior. There is only one possibility of escape from this cycle; to recognize the scapegoating mechanism operatingthroughus.Weknowthattimeandagainwearemadescapegoats ourselves. We fight to escape this predicament by scapegoating others. The alternative, a wholly different possibility, is to find the freedom to let it be. We can stop the fighting and so be free at last. How do we go about this? How can we find a way to this possibility? Emmanuel Levinas, the great Jewish thinker, talks of the defenseless face...