Girard/Derrida: Difference on Difference

There are a few pages among the books and articles published by René Girard in which he evokes Jacques Derrida, for instance in Violence and the Sacred (on the Pharmakos and the Pharmakon) or even in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (in particular on deconstruction); yet, unless I am mistaken, there is nothing in Derrida about Girard.

At the 1966 symposium in Baltimore, it must be acknowledged that neither Girard nor Derrida commented on the other's intervention. Basically, they do not engage in any discussion during the event (even if it is believed that Derrida was invited at the explicit suggestion of Girard).

Nevertheless, the object of my intervention will not be a close examination of the fragile and tenuous traces of a dialogue or a confrontation which we know never effectively took place (at least according to the public documents available to us).

In a no doubt somewhat cavalier manner, I would like to try to suggest the mirror effect that may, under a certain angle, appear between two gestures of contemporary thought, seized in the vivacity of their movement; I would like to try to show how much the proximities (often disquieting) and the gaps—abyssal—which let themselves be read between the two, intersect where the decisive issues reside, not only to increase intelligibility for these two thoughts, but mainly and above all to bring out the very thing that is thought, the very thing that is thought more than ever in the urgency of our present situation.

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It is primarily the question of the difference about the notion of difference itself that I would like to bring forth concerning the connections between Girard and Derrida.

The status of difference in Girard appears to me to be marked by the following traits (as seen essentially in Violence and the Sacred).

One can distinguish at least two figures for violence (which are two ways of losing difference) amidst the Girardian analyses: first, the figure of "indifferentiation" (also translated as "undifferentiation" or "nondifference")¹—which leads to, second, the figure of mimetic rivalry. Therefore it is always a matter of—going past what Girard calls the "sacrificial crisis"²—reestablishing the "good" difference: I shall here call "good difference" the "internal difference," that which sufficiently differentiates a society in its immanence so that, within it, its constituting elements can be articulated. But in no case is this "good difference," for Girard, about an opening towards the Completely Other (Emmanuel Levinas) or towards the "différance" (Derrida), towards a non-recoverable difference. One might even suppose that he considers such difference as being close to "indifferentiation" ("too much difference" would become "no difference"). And one may note in passing that one can find in Levinas support for this diagnosis even if, precisely, in Levinas, it would be of an admittedly ambivalent complicity, but in the end positive: here I think of the proximity between the notion of "Illeity" (l'Illéité; also translated as "He-ness"³) and that of the "there is" (l'Il y a) in Levinasian descriptions.

In many ways, in Girard, the expulsion of the scapegoat—then the ritual, then the continuation of the Sacred into culture—reestablishes the "good difference" within the group by marking, by cutting through the difference, with a pure exteriority (an exteriority "expelled," the expulsion producing or reassuring the purity of each of the two terms).

As for Derrida? Among the traits of signification of the notion of "différance" (cf. Writing and Difference)—we find this one: difference differs incessantly from itself, so that there is no pure difference. It is paradoxically by radicalizing the very notion of difference that Derrida comes to sustain that there is no pure difference, clearly defined, well cut out: every difference will be, will already have been, differentiated from itself. This is not without implication when it comes to the comparative statuses of the intact, the pure, on the one hand, and the contamination, on the other, in his thought.⁴ More precisely, if difference is difference, then...