The Discursive and Narrative Foundations of Scandal

That scandal as a social phenomenon has escaped systematic treatment in the human sciences is undoubtedly due to its protean nature.¹ Since it appears indiscriminately in areas as different as religion, politics, finance, and the media, one may be forgiven for hesitating between numerous disciplinary affiliations and theoretical preferences. There is, however, a property that is common to all forms of scandal and that fully conveys its human significance—its peculiar relationship with language. Such, then, is the contention of this paper: that scandal asserts itself fundamentally in the way that it is named. From this vantage point, three kinds of analysis suggest themselves. One could begin by pointing to the micro-linguistic traits of scandal, at the level of the phonological (voice intensity), the graphical (exclamation marks), or the syntactical (presentational constructions such as "It's a ..." and "What a ..."). Or one could examine scandal from the broader perspective of speech act theory in which the focus lies on the language-driven relationships between the accuser, the accused, and the rest of society. Finally, and most tellingly, one could situate scandal within the macro-linguistic domain of narrative, thereby setting out the temporal and logical structures it generates. To offer the broadest overview of the workings of scandal, the paper will cover all of the above aspects of scandal's relationship to language, gradually shifting its perspective from the micro- to the macro-linguistic. In the process, it will return constantly to the historically rich and suggestive concept of mimesis, which, following the writings of René Girard, attains a broader anthropological significance as a specific mode of interaction between language, representation, and violence.

The Origins of Scandal

The word derives from the ancient Greek skandalon, which originally meant a trap or a snare for the enemy. It retains this meaning in the Greek version of the Bible, where it refers also to a stumbling block that obstructs the path of the faithful and causes them to fall before reaching their destination in God. In the Bible, skandalon takes different forms, ranging from the sculptured idols worshiped by the Jews to living beings such as the tempter on the mountain before whose persuasive powers Christ reacts with violent indignation: "Away from me, Satan" (Matt. 4:8-10). In other areas of religious doctrine, scandal may be a person, an object, a word, or an image that incites men and women to transgress God's law. Their common trait is their power of corruption, and by extension the hostile reactions to which they give rise.

The following verses of the Bible encapsulate the different aspects of scandal we are trying to disentangle here.

And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to sin! Such things must come, but woe to the man through whom they come! If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.

(Matt. 18:5-9)

The mention of the innocence of children in the above passage highlights, by contrast, the perils of scandal as a corrupting force, the implication being that scandal, as the material cause of evil, takes many forms and that extreme vigilance is necessary to detect it before the whole community is destroyed.

In his exposition of scandal in the Old and New Testaments, René Girard conceives it as an "obsessional obstacle" that captures human desire, thus severing desire from its true...