Notes
121 Notes Introduction 1. Mark Danner, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (New York: Nation Books, 2009). 2. Plato, The Republic of Plato, 2nd ed., trans. Alan Bloom, book4, 439e–440a (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 119, translation modified. 3. “Plato—Leontius’ Corpses” in Harper’s Magazine, an online commentary on Scott Horton’s interview with Mark Danner. 4. I do not mean to set up some dichotomy here by which seeing becomes associated with being scandalized and listening with getting beneath the surface. For an example of how listening can entrap one in scandal, see Augustine’s description of Alyppius’s being drawn into the scandal of the gladiatorial games in Confessions, book 6, vii. 5. Perhaps the most accessible introduction to Girard’s notion of scandal is in the opening chapters of I See Satan Fall like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001). One can also profitably consult James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1998), 140–46, and Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 209–12. 6. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). “Romantic lie” is a translation of the first words of the original title: Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. He explains it on pages 15–17, especially in the footnote on pages 16–17. 7. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). The comparison appears in the essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (278–93). 122 Notes 8. Ibid., 292. Kevin Hart gives a good analysis of Derrida’s take on this comparison and its influence on later interpreters. See his The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 117–27. Chapter 1. The Language of Scandal and the Scandal of Language 1. Stanley Rosen in his commentary on the Republic explains: “Socrates claims that the story shows that anger (tēn orgēn: the attribute of spiritedness) can make war against desires as one thing opposed to another single thing.” Plato’s Republic: A Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 155. 2. See Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 457n30. 3. The standard work on scandal remains Gustav Stählin’s Skandalon: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines biblischen Begriffs, Beiträge zur Förderung christlicher Theologie; 2. Reihe, 24. Bd. (Gütersloh, Germany: C. Bertelsmann, 1930). He also wrote the article on “Scandal” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1971), 347ff. 4. For a journalistic excursion through the subject of scandal, see Laura Kipnis, How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior (New York: H. Holt, 2010). For a view from sociology see Ari Adut, On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5. Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Picador, 2000), 153. 6. Ibid., 155. 7. Ibid., 153–54. 8. Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), 23–24. This story is analyzed by Walker Percy in The Message in the Bottle and by Ernst Cassirer in An Essay on Man. 9. This phenomenon is analyzed by René Girard in his first major work, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). 10. Ingmar Bergman’s Persona remains one of the most powerful artistic representations of this experience. 11. Bernard Lonergan is very helpful on the “principle of the empty head” in Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 12. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 105. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (London: Athlone Press, 1987) , 100 (hereafter cited parenthetically as TH). 16. This is not an idiosyncratic interpretation. See William Franke, Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosure of Poetic Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 139. Franke is commenting on Gian Balsamo’s work on Christian epic poetry that is carried out in light of Nietzsche’s discovery of archaic religious rites beneath the forms of Attic tragedy...
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