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189 C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N D e t o u r a n d S a c r i f i c e : I v a n I l l i c h a n d R e n é G i r a r d Jean-Pierre Dupuy I have been privileged in my life to encounter two great thinkers, whose thinking is at once powerfully analytic and powerfully prophetic. It seemed clear that both of them were saying things that were profound and true, and yet their messages appeared to be perfectly contradictory. On one side: Ivan Illich, with his radical critique of industrial society. On the other side: René Girard, with his fundamental anthropology, which, for perhaps the first time in the history of the human sciences, proposes a convincing (and earthshaking) answer to the question that should be their central question: what is the sacred, and how may we account for the fact that modern society is, of all human societies, the only one that does not rest on the sacred?1 At the end of his book Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Girard writes: What is important above all is to realize that there are no recipes. . . . Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured—our need is to escape from meaninglessness . . . . I hold that truth is not an empty word, or a mere “effect” as people say nowadays. I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth. . . . I always cherished the hope that meaning and life were one.2 Attacking the skepticism, relativism, and nihilism that characterize current thought, he claims: “As for the unprecedented events that we are witnessing—the grouping of the whole of mankind into a single society, which proceeds apace—there is nothing to be said, nothing definite or even relevant.” He points out: “No one takes the trouble to reflect uncompromisingly about the enigma of a historical situation that is without precedent: the death of all cultures.”3 Illich and Girard agree on at least one point concerning the meaning of our current situation, of the crisis that we are experiencing: this meaning represents a direction leading us to a point that we sense is suspended between two extremes, a new Eden or a destructive apocalypse. This direction is like the direction of a panicked stampede. Nobody can escape this great moment of globalization, of world economic growth. Like Alexis de Tocqueville before them, Illich and Girard are convinced that only the language of religion is capable of conveying an adequate notion of the force covertly at work in modernity. Writing about the unparalleled development of what he called the “equality of conditions,” Tocqueville wrote: this movement “is a providential fact, it displays the principal features of such a fact: it is universal, it is durable, it evades day after day the power of humankind; all events, like all human beings, serve its development.” All human beings, and he specified: both “the ones who have fought for it” and “the very ones who have declared themselves to be its enemies.”4 Where Illich and Girard diverge radically is on the type of religious language that it is appropriate to deploy. For Illich, a former clergyman who went on to become one of the Church’s most vehement critics, it is the language of the sacred, meaning that of primitive religion. For Girard, a theorist of the sacred, it is that of the Gospels. This double irony is but one of the paradoxes of the intellectual adventure that I am relating. Illich and Girard barely know each other’s work. Neither of them has been influenced by the other. It is through those who, like me, have believed they could discern words of truth in the writings of both authors, that their works, in the end more complementary than contradictory, have been able to enter into synergy. Since this is not the place for me to recount my own intellectual journey, I will limit myself to summarizing what I have drawn from both of them in such a way to bring fully to light the challenge that each constitutes for the other. SACRIFICE AND THE LOGIC OF THE DETOUR Illich has given us a powerfully original critique of the industrial mode of production . What defines industrialization, according to Illich...

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