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

“I Am Joseph”

3 “I Am Joseph” Judaism, Anti-Idolatry, and the Prophetic Law II est juif et donc, dans son milieu et sa culture, il entend ce qu’il doit entendre, qu’il faut arrêter le sacrifice, qu’il faut un substitut. —Michel Serres1 I n 1973, Eric Gans wrote that René Girard’s research in anthropology seemed to offer an “Archimedean point” from which the human sciences could one day be rethought.2 Gans may have underestimated the case. For what has occurred since Girard began writing in the early 1960s is a veritable explosion of interest in his work in all major fields of Western inquiry. By the end of the 1970s, Girardian thinking had gained a foothold in literary studies, classical studies, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and religious studies.3 More recently, the “mimetic hypothesis” has begun to be extended to fields less commonly associated with the human sciences, fields such as economics and political science, and most recently the hard sciences of physics and biology .4 If the number and kind of conferences held recently in this country and abroad around Girard’s work can be taken as an index to this growing interest , it may not be much longer before we discover in this thought a model for talking responsibly about the conditions for both the humanities and the Judaism, Anti-Idolatry, and the Prophetic Law 4 The Prophetic Law sciences, a basis for understanding in the most fundamental way the order of behavior and of knowledge in human communities.5 My own contribution to this burgeoning Girardian project—both here and elsewhere—will assume the following form. Rather than summarize Girard’s ideas (there are already excellent accounts of his work) or “apply” them within my own fields, I would like in the first place to highlight certain aspects of his thinking that I think have been insufficiently emphasized, aspects that I call the “prophetic.” And in the second I would like to undertake what I deem to be the next step of this research: to begin to uncover the roots of the Christian revelation which is of such importance for Girard in the source of all prophetic thinking in our culture which is the Hebrew Bible. For that part of my presentation in the present context I will turn to certain texts at the conclusion of Genesis, texts concerning the story of Joseph and his brothers. Part One René Girard’s work offers us neither more nor less than a theory of order and disorder in human communities. Emerging as it did from the intellectual climate of structuralism and post-structuralism in the late 1960s and early 1970s in this country, Girard’s thinking undertook to deal with the one problem evaded by the proponents both of textuality and of power—the problem of the sacred, a problem, I suggest, that comprehends each of these other two discussions and goes beyond them. In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961), Girard proposed that desire is rooted neither in objects nor in subjects but in the deliberate appropriation by subjects of the objects of others.6 The simplicity and elegance of this theory should not blind us to the enormity of its explanatory power. In a series of readings of five major European novelists (Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Proust), Girard was able to show that the discovery of the imitative or mimetic nature of desire (in contrast to the romantic belief that desire is original or originary) structures the major fiction of these writers and makes available to us, if we would but read that fiction in context of their total output, an autocriticism of the writer’s own emergence from the underground prison of romantic belief. Judaism, Anti-Idolatry, and the Prophetic Law 5 InLaviolenceetlesacré(1972),Girardgeneralizedhistheoryofmediated desire to the level of cultural order at large.7 What is the function of religion at the level of real human relations, he asked. We have long had available to us imaginary theories of sacrifice—such as the kind Frazer and others in the nineteenth century proposed. More recently, with the advent of structural linguistics and structural anthropology, we have tried to explain religion from within a network of social differences or symbolic exchanges—à la Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. What Girard suggests in their place is a theory of human community that would account for behavior at the level of the real. Religion, Girard suggests, has the function of keeping violence...