Apocalyptic Intimations (Daft 3 Revision)

Draft Paper (Long Version Porto 3)

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Apocalyptic Intimations:

René Girard and the End of Utopia

The despair of this man . . . often bordered

on insanity; according to his philosophy of

history, the victory of evil is self-evident and

natural, and only a miracle of God could

avert it.

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology1

What Carl Schmitt said of his soul brother Juan Donoso Cortés, the 19th century

theorist of dictatorship, might apply equally well to René Girard. The politics of the

French-American anthropologist of historical doom are of course diametrically opposite

those of rightists and monarchists such as Schmitt or Donoso Cortés. Girard’s view of

history, though, derives from the same mythical rationalist roots evinced by the great

Catholic reactionaries of the Counter-Enlightenment. Echoing St. Paul’s image of the

Katechon, the great plug or “restrainer” (evidently equated with the Roman Empire or

Emperor), he rejects the Enlightenment view of natural human goodness or perfectibility.

Human passion is inherently jealous, envious, and violent, if not held in check and

redirected by power garbed in authority and hierarchy. That demands violence no less

real and bloody for being symbolic, ritual, and surgically applied. The only thing that can

prevent human societies from spontaneously combusting into all-consuming orgies of

violence is a sliding scale of repression and catharsis, a mechanics of social order

designed to maintain equilibrium, modulating potentially explosive social pressures by


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calibrated discharges of violence. The rise of equality signals the breakdown of order

simply, not just the end of the “old” order. Given the intrinsic violence of human desire,

the end of hierarchy can only lead to the triumph of conflict over cooperation, the

breakdown of social order. The anthropology that underwrites the reactionary theory of

dictatorship crystallized by 1848 is also in essence Girard’s, though obviously he rejects

dictatorship as an effective substitute for the older regime of religious authority.1 The

reactionary quest for salvation in repressive violence shows just how hopeless it was in

terms of resisting the tide of history.

Girard thinks the Katechon only really works when it is unconscious and

instinctive, in “sacrificial religion”; when it becomes conscious, illuminated by the

Enlightenment or Christian revelation, it breaks down into ineffectual scapegoating, from

pogroms to the fruitless ideological battles and civil wars of modern “politics.” By

elevating this social hydraulics to a political methodology, the great reactionaries

unwittingly declare its bankruptcy. When Schmitt asserts that all modern political

concepts are theological notions in disguise, he essentially confirms Girard’s reduction of

religion to politics, instead of affording it an antidote. In arguing for the theological

nature of politics Schmitt moves away from traditional (Christian) theology. The

1 There is a kind of Nietzschean radicality or ruthlessness to Girard’s theory of desire under conditions of democratization that sets it apart from Alexis de Tocqueville’s similar, but far more moderate and ‘politic,’ vision of the march of modern equality. Girard’s own unsparing critique of Nietzsche—in effect the quintessential incarnation of modern mimetic (“romantic”) desire plying its way towards madness—may obscure just how much closer his view of modernity is to the German nemesis of Christianity than to the moderate Catholic sociologist of aristocratic and democratic man. One of the important aspects to come out of his critique of Nietzsche is the mechanical dimension of mimetic desire, both theorized and enacted by the German philosophy on his view. The gist of this article turns on demonstrating how Nietzsche’s very theorization of desire entails the working out of desire to its insane and suicidal conclusions. Thus Nietzsche becomes the emblem of modernity.


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secularization hypothesis is itself an act of secularization. The attempt to recover religion

or its authoritative mechanisms philosophically, say by dictatorship or political

decisionism, suggests (as least to Girard) its irreversible historical breakdown. That is

the Girardian dilemma, about which there will be more to say below. Girard distills the

sociological heart of the reactionary view of politics and religion a step further by

reducing politics to violence, and by the same token, religion to politics. Religion in the

strict sense is a function of social order by subtle violence, symbolic and ritualized, the

breakdown of which is called ‘politics’ in the modern sense, where the utilitarian physics

of power is laid bare for what it is. Far from being its essence, Girard implies,

Christianity in the tradition de Maistre inaugurates is a reactionary lie, but it is all the

more sociologically true for being one. Christianity destroys that formula by exposing

it—by revealing religion as politics, and politics as violence. Once this genie is out of the

bottle, there is no putting him back. That is the dilemma of the modern age, for Girard:

It has freed us from the politics of religion only to fall prey to the religion of politics. It

has exposed the political violence at the heart of and hidden by religion, especially that of

classical Christianity itself in the figure of the Holy Roman Empire. And so it has given

birth to politics in the disenchanted and de-mystified, realistic and Machiavellian, but

also potentially rational and moral, legal and just sense—only to find, though, that

without the moral force of religion, the essentially instinctive and habitual piety of the

sacred, it cannot make that politics work. Politics works only to the extent it is embedded

in religion, as in a hidden system of tacit boundaries and borders that operate on the

habitual and reflexive level, “spontaneously.” Precisely this is what modern

Enlightenment—in essence, modern politics—removes, and thus renders politics itself


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increasingly powerless to contain social violence within manageable limits. What makes

this vision so compelling, whatever its own hidden dogmatic props, is that is captures the

profoundly centrifugal dynamic of modern life, in terms that are essentially conservative

without signing up with that as a political ideology, or denying the justice of equality.

But if Girard rejects reactionary utopianism, that is not because he is less but

because he is even more apocalyptic in his anticipations than that. If he is anti-utopian, it

is paradoxically because he is the purest utopian, one for whom perfection is both

theoretically real and practically impossible. Apocalypse follows from the impossibility

of utopia, its inevitable failure—only a realized social perfection, society as a church of

near-perfect Christians, could stave off the catastrophe of the end. The terms of John’s

Revelation are here seemingly reversed: The impossibility of the Kingdom renders the

end of history inevitable. (To be sure, a new heaven, a new earth, a new Jerusalem and

Christ’s millennial kingdom could still follow the Girardian destruction of the world, but

Girard’s anthropology of history has nothing to say about that.) In as much as utopianism

defines modernity (to follow John Gray2) on the social-political level, Girard’s thought

thus expresses an impasse in the modern, its inherent utopianism, which (as Gray also

argues) ultimately derives from original (early) Christian eschatology. My aim is not to

examine modernity from a Girardian point of view, but rather to see Girard within the

frame of a cultural crisis of modernity, a “culture war” if you will, that it produces but

cannot resolve, and which leads to the end, not of history, civilization, or the human race,

let alone life on this planet, but of modernity, the heir of Christendom. Girard belongs to

this crisis, even as he describes it. He sheds light on it more as an active participant than

2 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, 1st American ed. (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2007).


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as a critic, in as much as the religiously apocalyptic dimension of his critique of

modernity uncritically reflects the dogmas that implicitly direct his thought.

Obviously, this vision of politics assumes an unhappy anthropology, reminiscent

of ancient mythologies depicting order out of chaos, echoed in Biblical terms, which

never completely succeed in dispelling the pagan background. The natural condition of

humanity is chaos, a Hobbesian war of all against all whose natural tendency is

escalation, and the function of politics and religion is to keep a lid on it. The spirit of

sovereign power moves over these turbulent waters and separates them into differences

and law, as in the order of creation in Genesis. But inevitably there is a regression, a

violation that undoes this effect. In Christian context, this propensity for violence entails,

presupposes, and proves original sin, indeed in the Catholic cases here a particularly

strong version of it, for which uncontrollable violence erupts in the absence of the

sovereign counter-violence of law. Adam’s fall perverts all of nature not just humanity;

it brings death, suffering, and violence into the world. These things are not indigenous to

evolutionary nature but the wages of sin. In the story of Genesis, order precedes the Fall,

but in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, on the Rightists’ telling, the Fall entails a

restoration of order, a new order replacing the one poisoned by Adam and Eve, based on

sacrifice. Sovereign power now returns as violence, too, yet also as an act of mercy, a

gift of divine love to fallen humanity. It restores a kind of order if not the original one,

consecrated by St. Paul.

It is worth recalling this here because Girard retrieves (he believes) the

anthropological truth buried in the myth of original sin, especially as conceived by the

reactionaries, in order to dispense with that myth and replace it with a simple


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anthropology of violence as a quasi-Hegelian force of ‘negativity’ that creates and

eventually destroys history and culture. Girard may be a Christian (if a heterodox one)

but he is no more a theologian than he is a philosopher; he is adamantly an

anthropologist, from which the human must be accounted for solely in terms of its own

evolutionary and historical origins and demise. He can have no theory of original sin,

any such theory being incompatible with an anthropological approach in principle,

despite attempts to assert the contrary. Those who have argued that Girardian “violence”

is not to be equated with original sin are to that extent right. His relation to the

reactionary Enlightenment is one of inversion, somewhat as Marx inverted Hegel: He

believes he stands it back on its anthropological feet, by extricating it from its theological

or theological-political embedding, a kind of ideological optical illusion by which it

stands on its head.

Let us spell out this contrast in more detail. On the Counter-Enlightenment view,

the Fall leaves human desire sufficiently depraved that only supernatural spiritual

authority invested with the temporal sword can keep it in check. This is not—and cannot

be—rational or just (in an Enlightenment sense), but its not being so is paradoxically

essential to its spiritual integrity. (One can see why these thinkers were fascinated with

Hegel and Hobbes.) The justice of order is its higher injustice, a ‘logical’ compensation

or retribution for a universal sin that provokes order in the first place. It may be said that

original sin is a propensity to sin, not actual sin, though it is a propensity that virtually no

one can resist in the long run. But that is too facile. Human beings on the theory of

original sin are born (but for Adam and Eve) into a primal rebellion against God as real

as any act and the source of all acts. Even crying babies are rebellious sinners. Original


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sin precedes and legitimizes the arbitrariness of order, whose justice is the violence or

arbitrariness with which violence and arbitrariness are themselves suppressed, as if to

manifest their intrinsic nullity. Political legitimacy demands arbitrary power just because

it is arbitrariness that constitutes legitimacy as a reflex against arbitrariness. That is its

condition and essence, its righteous answer to original sin. Original sin, or original

violence if you prefer, confers on order its right to arbitrariness, as a weapon against

arbitrariness itself. It cannot be rationally justified because to justify it would rob it of its

sovereignty, its ability to ground all other rational justifications. It is only within this

framework that reason could afford any justifications. The mythic framework of original

sin just is, a primary and irreducible social fact of spiritual social authority.3

Social order can only exists as the ‘negation of a negation’ in a world predicated

on original sin. Social order is violence brought to the point of self-annihilation,

liquidating itself into peace. That is what is called “sacrifice,” violence against violence,

the arbitrary suppression of arbitrariness. One may think of Hegel’s retributive theory of

punishment, in which the violence of punishment (say hanging) expresses the “essence”

of the crime (murder), which it brings to accomplishment in an act of self-judgment and

self-liquidation. It is a form of the cunning of reason. In Hegel’s theory of right, of

course, justice is based on assignable guilt, a specific criminal act, not universal guilt.

But the dialectical logic on which it rests recalls the more primitive and original level of

religious sacrifice, where the tables of justice are turned. On this level, it is not the guilty

who are punished but the innocent, as Joseph de Maistre pointed out. If guilt is born

3 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Pub., 2006). Pages 68-70 nicely lay out the Catholic reactionaries’ appropriation of positivism in their view of sacrificial order.


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equally by all if by any, then only the most pure victims can serve as compensation to the

offended divinity. Original guilt expiates itself by ritually destroying the most innocent

as a blood offering. On this model everyone is born a criminal seeking to break out of

prison.

Original sin and sacrifice are thus mutual implicates if not in a sense the same, or

flip sides of the same coin. The theology of original sin is the natural culmination (and

explanans) of the sacrificial roots of human history itself, on de Maistre’s view. It brings

to articulate expression the instinct buried in the religious ritual, the felt sense of

universal guilt. All sacrificial systems implicitly attest to it by their very existence.

Conversely, sacrifice is the necessary complement of original sin, and a theology based

on original sin must culminate ultimately in a single all-embracing act of sacrifice, God’s

own sacrifice of his Son. The most massive sacrifice is also the greatest gift, one that

humanity could never produce on its own. On this view, Christ lays the definitive

foundation of social order and the church affords arbitrary power with its consecrating

authority. The Holy Roman Empire thus supplies the matrix of culture in Western

Christendom, not only after the fall of ancient Rome (when it finally came into its own as

the origin of a new political culture, in the medieval period), but even well into the 20th

century, when it served reactionary thinkers as a kind of ideological touchstone.

So it is difficult if not impossible to achieve social peace without altar, throne, and

not least, executioner—religion and sovereign power wedded in the sword. Law must be

imposed from above; order is repression through a holy matrimony of love and terror;

and punishment dispenses an economy of compensation keeping the cosmos in balance.


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Joseph de Maistre originally epitomizes the moral mechanics of this trinity of order in

this well-known passage:

And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner; he is

the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible

agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones

topple, and society disappears. God, who is the author of sovereignty, is the

author also of chastisement: he has built our world on these two poles; For

Jehovah is the master of the two poles, and on these he makes the world turn.2

The executioner foundationally effectuates the whole. The executioner is not the soldier,

who is part of constituted order and whose violence is often itself criminal. The violence

of the executioner is inherently pure or purifying. It is basic and generative, religious not

political. In sovereign power, religion and blood meet and sustain each other; it is that

mixture of the sacred with the sharp edge of order that makes the latter what it is. Where

there is no blood, there is no religion, nor sacred order either.

De Maistre is not just stating a long-standing conviction of Christianity that goes

back to St. Paul, who declared the sword divinely instituted. There is a modern stress

that the sword be sacralized to be effective—and that the sword is equally essential to the

sacred. This one could not find in Paul, for whom Roman imperium was a secular force,

first amongst the other “powers and principalities,” well before Christendom itself

became a “power and principality,” albeit a new kind in which temporal order regenerates

itself through sacred blood. The model for this regime became (broadly) the empire after

Constantine and especially after the triumph of Nicene Christianity, its theological


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complement.4 The Holy Roman Empire was not just a political myth of the medieval

world; it was the framework for political thought and institutions down to the

Reformation, and, as we see in the Counter-Enlightenment, even well after. This myth

really comes into its own precisely in the medieval world, after the disappearance of the

original Roman Empire, because then it proceeds to create political institutions afresh (is

also with the remnants and ruins of the old) within definitively Christian culture.5 If it

was a myth it was one that existed in reality as historical order constituted by the idea and

faith in that order, not just by an imperial unity of law and force.

What the Counter-Enlightenment evidently added to (or extracted from) this

‘Augustinian’ or rather post-Augustinian picture (in the context of post-Revolutionary

class war) is a modern sociology and anthropology of politics in the guise of “political

theology.” Theorists in this modern vein had to contend (as prior generations of

Christians did not) with the de-sacralizing onslaught of the Enlightenment. They were

spiritually closer in some ways to those Roman pagans who attacked Christianity as

responsible for the weakening of the Empire. Refugees and exiles, they washed up on the

shores of emergent democracy from the traumatic disintegration of medieval

Christendom, culminating in the French Revolution. For them the experience of

modernity is apocalyptic, a crisis of civilization with ‘man in history’ in the dock. Even

the Revolution seemed to be divine justice, a scourge modernity brought upon itself.3

4 For the coincidence of the triumph of Trinitarianism, the Romanization of Christianity, and the Christianization of the Empire, see the popular history of Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ's Divinity in the Last Days of Rome, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1999). 5 See both Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). And Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Vorlesungen ÜBer Die Philosophie Der Geschichte, Hegel's Werke (Berlin,: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot, 1837).


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Their politics is not just directly theological but involves a reflective meta-politics of the

sociological dynamics of order; it stresses the political function of theology, and it is

profoundly historical. Robbing the Enlightenment of its claim to the teleology of history,

they set up a counter-history, in which Catholic order or its model of authoritarian or

even dictatorial sovereignty signifies “progress” instead. In refuting Enlightenment

utopianism (the impossible ambition to base polity on reason or progress, or justice and

law, in defiance of the irrational bonds of society) they create another one, equally

ideological, under the auspices of Catholic authoritarianism and later of the various

fascisms.

This Counter-Enlightenment point of view would not be possible without the

Enlightenment, but neither would it be felt necessary. It is so to say a self-refutation of

the Enlightenment—a reasoned defense of non-rational authority, a refutation of any

authority based solely on reason—in which sociological demands of order justify

religion, as much as religion justifies order. It is impossible to disentangle the political

motive from this theology. Even though human beings are social by nature, in the

absence of supernatural authority, community brings out the worst in them. And there

can be no transcendental anchorage, a divine reference outside the system, unless there is

a living element within it that links the two levels. That is the sacrificial victim or his

analogues and relatives, such as the King or the priest. In de Maistre’s account, the

executioner is also such a sacred individual, a boundary figure (as the mere soldier is

not), both human and non-human, inside and outside human community. He is unlike the

others in a particularly terrifying but still holy way. Where the executioner resides, all

others move away. Alone in the midst of society, he is revered with holy fear. In a


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sacred exchange, he assumes the anathema of his victims (criminals whom he punishes)

as he renders them in judgment to God. In a certain sense he saves them by taking their

sins upon himself. The executioner incarnates Christ, because he sacrifices himself—

puts himself outside of the community, isolates himself within it—in a drama welding the

community, a sacrificial exchange of punishment. For punishment is a ritual on this

view, a social drama that knits a community together in holy terror and divine love. This

lucid defense of mystery or rather of mystification as the mantle of authority is uncannily

akin to that of the Grand Inquisitor in Ivan Karamazov’s tale.4

Girard of course does not approve of this; at odds with dominant Christian tradition,

he rejects the divine institution of the sword asserted by Paul. If there is any political

sentiment consistently characterizing his thought, it is neither conservatism nor

progressivism but suspicion of politics as such.5 Practically, though, he asserts the

effectual truth of the Counter-Enlightenment insight, for him too, the fatal reality of the

human condition. The breakdown of medieval order exposes the anthropological need of

authority all the more sharply in the crisis of its collapse and the impossibility of

restoring it. Girard’s visceral repudiation of the Grand Inquisitor (whom Schmitt

endorses6) is not a repudiation of the Inquisitor’s view of politics so much as of politics

itself, hopelessly tainted by the Gospels’ Caiaphas (“Better one man, etc.”). From

Girard’s point of view, de Maistre and his descendants would remake Christianity as if

Christ’s Passion were itself the ultimate sacrificial founding of social order, not its

overcoming. The Inquisitor was right (for the reactionaries) to have him immolated

again, not just to save that sacred economy from his return but to reenact its original

ground. For Girard, though, the Christ who says nothing whatsoever to the Inquisitor is


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the true Christ.7 He makes no attempt to reply or refute. He doesn’t have to; the Inquisitor

himself in effect admits the futility of his efforts in the long run, by the very arguments

that justify him in the short term. An order that rests on sacrificial violence may certainly

work up to a point, but in the end it is mortal, like everything else. When the masses lose

their sense of mystery, sacraments, and authority, all hell will break loose, sooner or later,

and the man of insatiable spite will emerge from Underground to destroy the Crystal

Palace of the Enlightenment once and for all. Dostoyevsky predicted it in the rise of

messianic leftism in The Demons and other novels. There is one insight, though, the

Inquisitor displays missing in the Catholic reactionaries: The “freedom” Christ offers can

only have “cannibalistic” consequences. If Girard rejects the politics of the Inquisitor, he

agrees with Dostoyevsky’s fictional Torquemada on one decisive point: “the divine

Incarnation has made everything worse.” For Girard, Christ leads ultimately to the

Crystal Palace of democratic modernity, and (thence) to the cannibalism of the

triumphant race of subterranean men who cannot live up to the demands of pure love.

Not, however, through any fault of His own. Contrary to the Inquisitor, so much the

worse for man that he cannot live up to the pure freedom of Christ. Rejecting the Catholic

Right’s drift towards dictatorship in the 19th and 20th centuries, Girard still shares their

radical repudiation of democratic politics, in the sense best exemplified by Raymond

Aron in the aftermath of WWII against the Red peace. For Aron, democratic politics was

a lucky, skin-of-the-teeth escape from the apocalyptic ideologies of the prior century and

a half. For Girard, it was the real beginning of the end.

One may now begin to understand Girard’s complicated relation to the reactionary

Enlightenment to which he is so close, yet so far away. In recovering the anthropology of


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violence embedded in original sin and its sacrificial religions, including (if not especially)

Christianity, Girard fuses the Enlightenment and its reactionary discontents, bringing this

story of utopian doubles to completion, where each species (rationalist and irrationalist)

refutes itself even as it refutes the other. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The

vision of reversing the drift of democracy by religious violence and dictatorial discretion

is as hopeless as the attempt to save modernity from itself by means of ‘politics’ in the

liberal democratic sense. The demolition of original sin does not liberate politics from

the regime of violence as demolish politics too as incorrigibly linked to that regime. The

rise of politics in the modern (liberal democratic) sense (a political order founded

precisely in ‘politics’ rather than on religion or authority, on law rather than on cosmic or

supernatural justice) reflects the de-mythologizing of the religious order and religious

politics inscribed in the ‘Holy’ Roman Empire. For all of its secularism, western liberal

democracy should probably be seen as an iteration of the mythology underwriting the so-

called Holy Roman Empire, as least in some of its moral self-images. The history of the

latter works out its own deconstruction through the breakdown of its institutions in

tandem with the emergence of irreducible antinomies in its theology.6 This is the story of

the rise of modernity. The reactionaries reinvent Christianity as a modern ideology

wedded to political violence for the maintenance of a certain modern order on its way out

for the sake of something more modern. For the monarchy overthrown by the French

Revolution, the Old Regime, was already thoroughly modern and bourgeois, wedded as

6 See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Levi’s gives the most complete picture of the relation of history, institutions, and theology in this story of the emergence of modernity.


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much to emergent capitalism and the modern sovereign state, as to prerogatives of the

aristocratic class and the feudality. In basing political order on the theology of original

sin and its inevitable complement, sacrifice, they are in effect turning theology into

politics and ideology—a fate awaiting liberal theologians (mutatis mutandis) as much as

conservative ones.

* * *

What are we to make of René Girard’s notorious attempt to resurrect Christian

apocalyptic in the mantle of the human sciences, a kind of fundamentalism for

intellectuals? Not biblically literal, to be sure, but one that nonetheless envisions a

catastrophic end of history, of civilization, and of humanity itself. Girard resurrects two

core features of Christian apocalyptic: Armageddon, the symbolic place of a decisive

battle between good and evil at the end of history, consuming the world without

remainder; and Revelation, the return of Christ in glory defeating the Anti-Christ and

Satan once and for all, in an altogether new Jerusalem, descending from heaven to earth

in the dream of John. Girard insists that these features be deduced from a “scientific”

(neither dogmatic nor literalist) point of view, an “anthropological” analysis of the

evolutionary origins of history and humanity. Christ, Christianity, and Christendom are

historical agencies, actors or forces competing against others but ultimately pushing

history inexorably to its conclusion, the unraveling of sacrificial order, which in the long

runs escalates violence to the point of civilizational self-immolation—not despite

progress but because of it. It is progress itself that brings on the apocalypse. His theories

of ritualized scapegoating mythically disguised as sacrifice and of desire as imitation that

on a purely immanent (inter-personal) level tends to degenerate into mortal conflict,


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afford him the ostensibly Archimedean leverage with which to cast modernity as the end

of history in the Christian sense of a terminal working out in salvation or damnation.

Apocalypse neatly ties everything into a narrative whole. In the end, humanity must

succumb to the violence of its beginnings.

Both socially and personally, mimetic desire is already for Girard apocalyptic; it

leads either to conversion or to perdition.8 This insistence is a constant of his thought.

Announced at the beginning in his first work, on the modern novel, the last chapters read

like an unrelenting rationalism hovering over the insanity of a dialectical breakdown.

One is not sure which of the two is the madder, the observed or the observer. Sacrifice—

“religion” in the original sense—is an evolutionary strategy saving the human species

from an internecine proclivity to violence that would have destroyed it were it not

contained. It is destined to fail in the long run, though, precisely to the degree it works,

creating culture and history, a space of revelation in which its own workings will be

exposed and rendered powerless, its spell irreparably broken by the judicial murder of

Christ. The turning point of history, the political lynching of God on the Cross, strips

humanity—the collective mechanism of mimetic desire—of its only strategic defense

against itself. On Girard’s reading, the Passion of Christ is essentially a political story,

but one robbing politics of its mythical covers, what we today might call its ideological

disguises. It reveals the essence of sacrificial religion as politics, and of politics as

scapegoating. That, too, is a formulaic constant of Girard’s thought. Once this secret has

leaked, sacrificial institutions must eventually crumble away, at first slowly then with

increasing acceleration, leading into the modern saeculum of human dignity,

individualism, rights, science, technology, markets, law, party politics, and popular


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government—all, according to Girard, from the Cross-inspired recognition of the

innocence of the sacrificial victim, the arbitrariness of the mechanisms of social “order.”

Ethically, this is a revolutionary advance. The bitter paradox, though, is that violence

increases, 9 thanks to the simultaneous emancipation of mimetic desire from traditional

religious constraints by the advance of modern equality, which Søren Kierkegaard

described as the “negatively unifying principle” of modern life (that is, envy).10 Justice

and cynicism, conscience and cruelty, flow from the same revelation of the sacrificial

rationale—in fact, of reason itself. The very moralization of life in the modern period

invites the return of the war of all against all, the chaotic origins from which sacrifice

ostensibly afforded an exit. It promises personal freedom but delivers the herd mentality

and the mob logic of the media (already well described by Kierkegaard). It boasts of a

more just social contract but in the same degree generates a world of vanity and envy

seething with rancor. It abolishes estates and replaces them with classes; then it abolishes

classes and replaces them with elites and the ordinary. Thus its catastrophic periods,

rhythms of peace and prosperity alternating with social explosions in which each

successive episode is worse than the last, since it came to maturity (after the French

Revolution) with WWI.

That leaves humanity with starkly alternative imperatives: Either transform itself

collectively into a peaceable kingdom by universal conversion, or be done in by universal

mimetic violence. Given the power of modern technologies, even the slightest remnant

of resentment carries a catastrophic potential. And given globalization, a war of all

against all threatens to engulf the planet. All the dividing lines between inner and outer,

higher and lower, dissolves. The combination of high technology, egalitarian


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resentments, diminishing resources, and environmental distress, create the conditions for

a perfect apocalyptic storm. The drift of actual history seems to be irresistibly

approximating the mad visions of the biblical imagination. Real and metaphorical senses

of apocalypse seem to be converging asymptotically.7

With Pascalian or Rousseauvan paradox, the eruption of moral consciousness and

sensitivity of conscience in history entails or reflects an actual worsening of human

character, a fall within the Fall, so to say. This regime of morality/violence or law/desire

is more moral, just, and rational, than any prior, but also more cynical, calculative, and

cruel. Amplified by technology, democratic resentments are destined to spiral out of

control. Still, modern politics is a consequence ultimately of Christian de-

mythologization and de-sacralization. As Kierkegaard argued too, there is an

eschatological meaning hidden in the nihilism of its effects. The leveling mechanism (or

in Girard’s terms, destruction of differences) in the modern public forces the individual

back upon himself, to confront the truth of his own existence (or not), a position of

absolute choice, salvation or damnation, decision or no decision, desire or its

renunciation, Christ or the crucifixion of mimesis.

To Girard, this confirms the dream at Patmos nearly two millennia ago. Girard’s

anthropological theory of history underwrites what is perhaps the central ethical

innovation of Christianity, absolute decision. The finality of the disintegrative teleology

of history demands total renunciation of violence, of the lex talionis, and so of politics.

7 Failure to distinguish real and metaphorical sense of apocalyptic is typical of Girard and Girardians and introduces a serious confusion in his work. A metaphorical sense of apocalyptic possibilities is not only compatible with a sense of the value of the political, but is probably indispensable to it. The real (literal, e.g., fundamentalist) sense of apocalypse though completely undermines politics and abandons it as hopeless.


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For there is no politics in any real sense without the possibility of violence—retribution

and retaliation, coercion and discipline. Apocalypse entails cosmic choice, between two

and only two absolutely exclusive alternatives. The battle between ultimately

superhuman forces of good and evil is really a crisis of freedom or mechanism, imitatio

Christi or mimetic desire, to determine the fate of the world and man. This impossible

choice between choice or no choice, freedom or mechanism, crystalizes the totalizing

decision, the world-shattering all-or-nothing of biblical monotheism. This is not a choice

between empirical alternatives but one that transcends all natural and social horizons, a

choice of choice itself, a will to will. The concept of “will” in this transcendental sense is

uniquely biblical if not indeed uniquely (or especially) Christian. All middle ground

vanishes. Decision cannot appeal to reason. Christ comes with a sword because he cuts

the world in two, and ne’er the twain shall meet. There is only one God; he is known

only by revelation, supernaturally and superrationally; all others must be dispatched to

perdition with their idolaters in train; and this God is the sole reality of absolute freedom.

By the same token, revealed monotheism has historicity embedded in it a priori. It is a

theology of history and a historical theology, a myth of the revelation of God in time in,

to, and through the agency of the elect. Biblical theology is, in essence, philosophy of

history avant la letter. Eschatology is the story in which absolute good definitively

defeats evil, effortlessly too since it defeats evil through the latter’s own self-immolation,

and the true revelation defeats, converts, or destroys all deniers by its mere Word.

Girard’s account is adamantly, even fanatically biblical in this sense. His entire work is a

theodicy aimed at conversion. He completes the liquidation of theology into philosophy

of history. The meaning of the world and its temporality reduces to this either/or.


20

Outside of fundamentalists and evangelicals, contemporary Christianity has all but given

up on this core inspiration. The mere utterance of the Word spells the death of death, the

self-immolation of the wicked in the second death, or the salvation of the saved. This is

the logos already of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, in which mimetic desire makes its

own apocalypse by the suicidal torments of its self-revelation. Christ with his promise of

freedom rises like incense over this self-immolation, only beyond human reach, in order

to behold perdition in divine majesty. Girard seems to capture this schizophrenic

moment with the insanely driving logic of his style. It verbally emulates the mechanistic

ineluctability of mimetic desire, demonstrating its terminal end with our without

conversion.

Thanks to the modern age, the only thing that can forestall the self-destruction of

the species, Girard avers, is wholesale conversion to non-violence. The either/or

Christianity imposes guarantees perdition, though, since humanity can never decide so

decisively for or against violence or peace, the City of Man or the City of God. It is

subject literally to a “mechanism,” Girard insists, a blind and irresistible, impersonal

process that rules the world. Radical decision judges the entire world, not part of it from

within it; it must stand outside of it, and so can only condemn it. (Forcibly reasserting

Christianity, Girard reverses Nietzsche’s argument against judging the world from

outside it in Twilight of the Idols.) The real world is always peace and violence, unable to

disentangle them, except perhaps in the most extreme boundary cases. The very

application of categories such as peace or violence to worldly phenomena is inherently

ambiguous and confused, relative and perspectival. That is not to say avoidable. But

violence versus non-violence is a pure logical opposition (non-violence is not a positive


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phenomenon but a logical marker) that real phenomena elude because they are always

both positive (not logically reducible) and, by that very fact, ‘logically’ contaminated.

Logic brings mental focus on one aspect or another of phenomena but it cannot be

‘ontologized’ into the essence of phenomena (pace Hegel and Plato). The determinacy of

phenomena can never be reduced to or equated with logical negation (a point that used to

be made against Hegel and before him was already made by Kant against the

Leibnitzians). Peace (on the other hand) and violence are in themselves relative to each

other. Girard may recognize this, but it does not soften his remorseless dialectic.

Because it is just this contamination in reality he objects to, the ambiguity of the world.

That provokes in him an intolerable ambivalence.11 He demands a world in which there is

no admixture at all, as if pure violence and pure peace were metaphysical realities at war

with each other from before the beginning of time but needed to be pulled apart like

schoolyard brawlers. John Milbank’s antithesis of an “ontology of peace” and an

“ontology of war” appeals to romanticism12; Girard’s is more simply and originally

Gnostic and Manichean. His thrust is to disentangle peace and violence, violence and

non-violence, alas not possible without the destruction of the world, because the world is

precisely their confusion. It is an attempt to restore the sacred as the “holy,” a totalizing

difference that the human-historical “sacred” could never actually accomplish. In the

Durkheimian tradition Girard initially follows, the sacred is at once the distinction itself

between the sacred and the profane as a whole and (also) a part within the distinction. Its

unity is irrational by the standards of ordinary logic, which tries to grapple with it by

rationalizing it as “dialectic” or irrationally essentializing it as “Dionysian.” In Durkheim

it periodically needs to rejuvenate itself by a quasi-dialectical “effervescence” in which


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the sacred is suspended or violated (by a kind of calculated chaos, a sacred transgression)

in order to be confirmed (akin to Nietzsche’s orgy). It is the imminent self-division of a

social (thus relative) whole. In the “holy,” however, the sacred achieves rational

perfection, as if pure logical negation and pure positivity somehow utterly converged in

something altogether beyond the world and its confusions. The contrary of the holy is

not the profane but (ultimately) the damned. The holy is the sacred reacting hysterically

against its own illogic. But it is a holy fool’s errand, because the concept of

violence/non-violence applied to human phenomena prior to ethics and law, culture and

history, is undecidable in principle. Or decidable nearly any way you please, and

therefore divisive and violent. It is not possible to say what peace or violence might be in

a purely “ontological” sense—any more than one can say, for example, what would be

the Kingdom of Ends in Kant, if it were realized, or the Empire of Freedom in Marx. Or,

as Gillian Rose argued against Girard, violence enters into love too.13 Nothing shows this

better than Girard’s own equivocations on the mundane subjects of politics and war, in

which he often displays a sensible realism his pacifism doesn’t support. In the absence of

universal conversion, he admits, even pacifism may feed violence rather than deter it.14

Peace may itself be a provocation to war (consider, for example, the contemporary case

of Putin, for whom the greatest provocation is no provocation, as the Economist rightly

pointed out). Girard’s Gnosticism serves, though, to underscore how the very shape of

the specifically Christian bid—yea, yea, or nay, nay (Matt 5:36), all or nothing—damns

humanity, always inevitably trapped in the middle. Critics such as Hans Blumenberg

argue Christianity never truly overcame Gnosticism, its single most important rival.

Whatever the limitations of Blumenberg’s account of the collapse of classical


23

Christianity and the emergence of modernity, this offers a way to understand Girard’s

work.15 Girard’s Gnostic dimension serves to bring out what conventional Christianity

might prefer to ignore—not just the decisionistic element, but its practical impossibility.

It is also that which Christianity never overcame (in its own self), despite its material and

intellectual warfare against it (as an external enemy, a “heresy.”

* * *

Contrary to his purpose, Girard’s thesis suggests a reversibility 8in which

modernity is not so much an apocalyptic vindication of Christianity, as an apocalypse of

(Western) Christianity itself. Even on Girardian grounds, we may ask if the ostensibly

apocalyptic dimensions of modernity confirm Christian revelation, as Girard argues, or if

they are historical effects of Christianity itself as the ordering principle of a culture or

civilization, a consequence of its own internal volatility and rupture. Extending the

arguments and analyses of Blumenberg and others,16 Michael Gillespie has argued that

the breakdown of its theological antinomies in the late Middle Ages gave birth to secular

modernity, which however was able neither to escape nor to resolve the contradictions

whence it arose.17 Gillespie, one might say, reconciles the Hegelian thesis of modernity

as the “positive” realization of Western Christianity with Blumenberg’s of modernity as a

breakout or breakaway from Christianity’s insoluble contradictions, into a quite new kind

of culture, using elements of but ultimately despite the detritus of the old.18 But Gillespie

can only do so at the expense of Christianity. (In my view, this is the only historically

defensible way to parse this issue, though it requires a sociological dimension. It is not

8 The notion of reversibility is deployed by Milbank against secularist theorists to demonstrate their theological underpinnings. But reversibility is also by its very nature—reversible.


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just or primarily a question of the interpretation of texts or ideas.) Despite his own

convictions, there is nothing in Girard’s argument that enables us to decide these

differences, Christian apocalypse or apocalypse of Christianity, or even to preclude that

they might both be somehow true. (Paradoxically, Girard argues the truth of Christ and

the failure of Christendom entail each other—that Christ can precisely not be the

principle of a “Christian culture” which none the less is doomed to arise anyway).19 The

Girardian account (perhaps we should say the Girardian method) lends itself equally well

to either of these seemingly exclusive sets of alternatives, if we shift our angle of vision,

as with a lenticular image. Girard’s Christian apologetics effortlessly morph into a

radical critique of Christianity that could solace any secularist. Perhaps, then, instead of

seeing modernity as Girard would like us to see it, we should see Girard in terms of

modernity, and modernity as a continuation of a crisis of Christendom whose medieval

precursor naturally gave birth to it, even if it was a terribly difficult birth. The modern

“break” with Christianity is its actualization. The self-affirmation of the secular world

disintegrates itself in turn through the attempt to realize “cosmopolitan” humanity,

humanity as a single moral order, an integral whole under a single law. This creates a

deadly competition of political monotheisms, such as the new and old regimes of the 19th

century, liberalism and communism in the 20th, and in the 21st the West and the rest,

especially Islam, whose umma has its own “cosmopolitan” ambitions. The drive of its

disintegration is not purely theological categories of free will and divine omnipotence,

grace and pre-destination, and the like (as the writers named above argue), though of

course these are indispensable. Rather it is the notion of the victimary. That is what

Girard contributes to this issue, when he claims that the essence of Christianity is


25

“victimary revelation,” revelation of the innocence of sacrificial victims and

substitutionary scapegoats. The concept of the victimary works itself out in the negative

cultural dialectics of Enlightenment, in Christian universalism, and ultimately in the logic

of monotheism. Identifying the revolutionary heart of Christianity as victimary

revelation, Girard ironically follows Nietzsche, but believes he can finish him off by

driving him mad as a Dionysian. It is equally ironic that the category of the victim as the

trump category of politics and social ethics cannot but have a radically disintegrative,

polarizing, violent effect.

We shall return to the victimary; in any case, there is something at least

metaphorically “apocalyptic” about modernity. It might be the fatality of the West,

though, not of the world as such, however global its implications might be. The modern

imperative to dominate nature and subdue the race to a single moral idea, a single

“humanity”—“universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose” in Kant’s phrase—owes to

a Christian genome, even if it radicalizes that idea by way of secularization. The

principal source of modern utopianism and of the idea of progress, John Gray points out,

is the Christian belief in the ultimate defeat of evil at the end of history.20 The demand

that global humanity be integrated into a single community united by the special

revelation of the one true God effectively terminates in the self-destruction of

universalism, as Girard in effect shows, a global war of Islam and the West, the last forms

of monotheistic universalism standing. In this conflict, Christianity finds itself on the

side of the secular as its true ecclesia; Islam on the side of a recrudescence of the sacred

in quasi- or pseudo-biblical terms. In Islam, the sacred and the universal directly

coincide, as if a crude philosophical universalism were clothed in archaic law, or the


26

Girardian-Durkheimian “sacred.”21 Out of sync with contemporary European political

correctness, Girard rejects the notion that Islam is a genuinely “Abrahamic” religion (in

the sense of the “Abrahamic revolution” against sacrifice), rather than a recrudescence of

the sacred under robes borrowed from Judaism and Christianity. He seems to suggest

mimetic if not indeed Oedipal rivalry with its parent religions, Judaism and Christianity;

but he fails to question whether this tendency towards antagonisms is not the logic of

monotheism itself, which in Islam achieves a certain transparency elsewhere somewhat

obscured.22 (Of course, it is not just or even primarily that Islam not finds itself in some

areas at least in conflict with liberal modernity; the antagonist element in Islam seems

most evident in its war with itself, the unmatched brutality of Islamic terrorism against

other Moslems. All politics is local, as Tip O’Niell used to say—something philosophers

of history and strategic visionaries alike often lose sight of.)

Let us sum this up as follows, admittedly crudely and schematically. Christianity

insists that the truth of the sacred is the universal (which must be rescued from the sacred,

the mythos of sacrifice), in effect the cosmopolitan humanity of the Enlightenment; Islam

to the contrary insists that the truth of the universal is the sacred, the particularity of a

special law revealed in effect only to its inventor. Dissolving the particularism of its

Jewish origins, at least in the West Christianity with its reflective theological dimension

inevitably moves (dialectically, through its antinomies) towards secular universalism, the

Enlightenment. This is only an ambiguous improvement, as modernity only sharpens the

theological antimonies of Christianity without resolving them. Islam moves in exactly

the opposite direction, reinserting global pretensions back into the particularism of a

special, indeed geographically and linguistically centered, revelation. This is a rivalry


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that can only disintegrate the West, though, because its very universalism (in rational,

moral, and legal terms) makes it impossible for it to deal (internally or externally) with its

fraternal monotheistic enemy, Islam. It cannot admit that Islam is simply incompatible as

a way of life inassimilable to Western modernity without abjuring its most basic values,

though that very resistance to liberalism virtually defines it as a religion. There is a kind

of equality in Islam but it is not a liberal democratic one, based on “natural rights,” but

based on common obedience, “submission.” Neither can Western universalism admit

that its own secularizing impetus, destructive of culture as it is, breaking down all

differences and “sacred” boundaries, spontaneously provokes the reaction of the sacred,

an indigenous reflex of every society, and of individual psychology too. The reaction of

the sacred arises from the inherently local nature of all human life. No one can live on

the level of cosmopolitan humanity, except perhaps EU administrators. It is the localism

of life that asserts itself through the reflex of the sacred, the resistance, if you will, to the

central power of the modern state and its pursuit of universality through administrative

bureaucracy and regulation decried by conservatives such as Tocqueville and Jacob

Burckhardt. Globalism cannot but exacerbate the tensions between localism and

“universal humanity.” For the sacred is the basis of the social bond, always local and

particular, not morality or justice, and abstract universalism cannot but attack real social

bonds, in order to replace them with purely ideological or legal ones. Alternately and

equally absurdly, Christian secularism invites Islam to modernize or liberalize by

insulting it, or, contrarily, insists that Islam be protected from the inevitable contumelies

of modern Western societies, in order to pursue its (the West’s) faux ecumenical goal of

(as it were) stealthily assimilating it to Western ways, killing it softly, seducing it to give


28

up its own distinctive way of life, so anathema to Western liberals. Liberal ecumenism is

as hypocritical and devious as it is inevitable and necessary. Either way, modernity

simply cannot accept the irreducible difference of Islam, any more than Islam can accept

modernity. Recognition of irreducible difference, though—the inassimilability of Islam

and the West, in either direction, and thus a state of potential but not necessarily actual

“enmity” or war—may well be the condition of peaceful relations. The irony is that

“cosmopolitan” humanity is more likely to occur in the “sacred” community of the global

umma, as opposed to the global neo-liberalism that Christianity (including Girard’s) has

become. Islam is capable of a brutal honesty in its sacred cruelty that remnant

Christendom is not. It knows how to draw lines, lay down prohibitions. Girard’s thought

is trapped in this dilemma and cannot solve it, despite his ambivalence about

ambivalence. But who can? This is the dilemma of the West generally, a particular

culture predicated on the denial of particularity, a culture whose particularity is,

impossibly, its universality. Girard makes it transparent, even though—or perhaps just

because—he is captive to it. The distinctive universalism of modernity, Christian or

Enlightenment (and they are finally joined at the hip), makes it impossible for it to have a

clear relation to Islam, the insider/outsider (the Ishmael) throwing everything for a loop.

This is not like the Cold War rivalry preceding the current binary logic, because both

Marxist and Liberal universalism belonged to the same Enlightenment dispensation, and

it was possible clearly to assert the superiority of one to the other based on common

Enlightenment denominators. In the case of Islam and the West, we have a split in which

the only common ground is revealed monotheism itself, the demand for universal


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integration on the basis of a historically special revelation. That can only produce

insoluble rivalry, the only solution to it being to live within boundaries.

* * *

The flip side of the view that order depends on sacrifice is that justice and

enlightened reason, however true, are not only not social bonds but actively weaken the

social bond, intensifying social conflict and even the breakdown of society. This may be

the single most important error of the Enlightenment, the naïve assumptions that justice

brings forth peace, reason brings forth consensus, and equality brings forth fraternal

sympathy. Moreover, morality, justice, and law come into being only through their

opposites, the most cruelly arbitrary violence. The Girardian opus is caught in this

antinomy, too, the most unrelenting moral severity versus the immoral historical

conditions of morality itself.23 Culture can never get over the scandal of its origins.

Justice and truth in excess must undermine order as much as their complete absence does.

Girard expresses a crisis in modern conscience even more acutely than the existentialists

of the 50s and 60s who declared rhetorically, “Who can judge?” For Girard, this question

is anything but liberating. Enlightenment universalism supplies the noose by which

modernity closes the circle and strangles itself in existentialist ethics, post-modernism,

political correctness, “diversity,” and the like. There are three critical thresholds since

the end of WWII and above all the revelation of the Holocaust. That event (the first

threshold) was ‘eschatological,’ not in the sense that it signified the end of the world, but

the world, especially the West, coming face to face with judgment. The West was forced

to come to terms with its own history, America especially in the Civil Rights movement

and Europe in the dismantling of its colonial empires, not to mention the Holocaust itself,


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the greatest symbol of evil in history, even though communism was equally murderous,

equally evil in deed. The impact of the Holocaust inaugurated the age of the victim,

which became the foundational category of contemporary politics, and increasingly of

ethics too, by the end of the 60s. This was the second threshold. Nearly every major

political battle since has sought to claim the mantle of victimhood. Identity politics, now

regnant, is its final heir—the return of the sacred (the local, the particular) in the heart of

the universal. At the same time, though, the intersection of ethics and politics in the

victimary quickly degenerated into the victimological, not the same as the victimary, as

victimhood itself (real or imagined) acquired a coveted aura and offered new disguises

for victimization—not actual victimhood, needless to say, but the status of being

recognized as a victim, as moral leverage against others. (Though in some cases the

pursuit of victimary status really does become a masochistic courting of victimhood

itself.) It is the last refuge of the sacred in the West, nearly the only place today from

which one can presume to sit in judgment, or at least get away with it, while not being

subject to judgment oneself. The tables are turned; the persecuted became the

persecutors, the hunter the hunted, the victimary a status of political privilege. Judgment

has become the ultimate form of moral inequality—the victim can judge, but not the

victimizer. Hence the importance of the trinity “race, class, and gender.” The cruel

orgies of victimology are the ultimate Dionysian ritual, which ends with the sparagmos of

the victim of the maddened victims. Public discourse, politics, media, entertainment, and

educational institutions in the West have been consumed with litigating past injustices,

real and imagined, or present in the light of the past, ever since this threshold (the second)

was decisively crossed in the Sixties. It is an insoluble situation. In the third threshold,


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finally, politics disintegrates into “culture war,” which in principle is non-negotiable

(unlike ordinary politics, where nearly everything is negotiable), bringing us to the

polarization and impasse at which we now find ourselves. I will return to this.

Girard, of course, rejects victimology in the name of the authentically victimary.

His work reflects this whole latter movement from a position that is profoundly critical of

its decay into the victimological. But he also traces the victimary (in scandalous defiance

of political correctness) positively back to Christianity. Its decay into the victimological

is ultimately a scourge of Christ. The inherent relativity and indeterminacy of the notion

of the victim renders it intrinsically polarizing. Bruce Chilton chides Girard for

attempting to base an ethics on something as indefinite and equivocal as the concept of

the victim, and he is right, but modern culture itself is based on this notion, which Girard

merely theorizes back to its Christian origins.24 It is the very relativity of the notion of

the victimary as the basis of a culture that destabilizes it into fraternal enemies, political

polarities that defy mediation. The distinction between victim and victimizer breaks

down, and as it does, the polarities become sharper. Imaginary (or exaggerated) victims

eclipse real ones. Victimary revelation splits modern culture irreparably into fraternal

enemies, the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular, the archaic and the

progressive—that is, into “culture wars,” politics that defy compromise or reconciliation

and so serve to paralyze or even shatter the political system. No culture can be unified on

the basis of “respect for victims” alone, and the tenuous peace between rivals (like the

sacred and the profane) on which modernity depends goes to pieces. It is difficult to

determine whether Girard sees this critically or (perversely) welcomes it as Christian

progress.


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If we follow Gray, Enlightenment utopianism owes ultimately to Christianity, to

the apocalyptic conviction that evil can be definitively defeated. Even “moderately”

progressive modernity assumes the impossible, not just the revolutionary extremisms of

fascism and communism. Its utopianisms, laissez-fair and socialist, liberal and

traditionalist, neo-liberal, neo-conservative, and pacifist, have crumbled or crashed one

after another, hollowed themselves out as ideologies. Or rather, they have revealed

themselves to be ideologies, belief systems one clings to in the fear they are false, rather

than authentic philosophies. The West has run out of ideologies to sustain its historical

vision of itself, its confidence in the future as the truth of the present. In Girardian terms,

“culture” (the secularized expression of “religion”) is an evolutionary dead-end, finally,

because it fails to deliver on its promise to master nature or to remake society according

to an idea. Yet he deconstructs the utopian pursuit of the impossible into self-

annihilation, without actually abandoning it. Like the romantic mentality he so

effectively criticizes (only Hegel rivals Girard as a critic of romanticism), utopia

validates itself by its own failure. It interprets its own failures as vindication; nothing

refutes it; in fact it needs failure to validate itself; success is its worst nightmare. Or, in

simpler terms, the perfect is the enemy of the good.25 Girard destroys and realizes

utopianism by pulling it back to its Christian provenance. Only in his dispensation, the

inevitable failure to defeat evil and supersede violence entails destruction of the world—

vindicating Christ if not humanity.

The insolubility of this impasse in culture not only rules, it constitutes Girard’s

work. He not only thinks this impasse; he exemplifies it in his own person, his

intellectual personality, so profoundly ambivalent, whenever he ventures beyond the


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narrow circle of his theory to interpret historical and political reality. Girard condemns

modernity both for pursuing the impossible and for failing to achieve it. Those who read

his work seeking a solution to his frustrating ambivalences miss the point. It is a mistake

to think one can resolve them by discovering in him a liberal or conservative, or a social

democrat or neo-liberal, a neo-conservative or a paleo. He is all of these and none of

them. He declares the end of utopia not in the name of a kind of realism (like Gray), but

to the contrary, by pushing secular utopianism to annihilate itself in the notion of a

kingdom of non-violence, not of this world. For him, the failure of utopia justifies God

and condemns the world. In the end, though, he offers no reason why this is not just an

epitaph of the West.

Stephen Gardner

Associate Professor of Philosophy

The University of Tulsa

800 South Tucker Drive

Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA 74104

1-918-631-2820

[email protected]


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Endnotes Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,

2010. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

1983. Chilton, Bruce. Abraham's Curse: Child Sacrifice in the Legacies of the West. 1st ed.

New York: Doubleday, 2008. Gillespie, Michael Allen. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2008. Gray, John. Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. 1st American ed.

New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2007. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Vorlesungen ÜBer

Die Philosophie Der Geschichte. Hegel's Werke. Berlin,: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot, 1837.

Levi, Anthony. Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Maistre, Joseph Marie. Considerations on France. Translated by Richard Lebrun. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Manent, Pierre. An Intellectual History of Liberalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Pub., 2006.

———. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Cambridge, Mass., USA: B. Blackwell, 1991.

Palaver, Wolfgang. René Girard's Mimetic Theory. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.

Pippin, Robert B. Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Rubenstein, Richard E. When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ's Divinity in the Last Days of Rome. 1st ed. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1999.

1 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 58. 2 Joseph Marie Maistre, The Works of Joseph De Maistre, trans. Jack Lively (New York,: Schocken Books, 1971), 192. Also quoted by Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard's Mimetic Theory (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). 284. See also 281 f. for Girard’s partial agreement with Schmitt et al. 3 Joseph Marie Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard Lebrun (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 4 One is also reminded, too, of Kafka’s remarkable story, The Penal Colony, a fictional deconstruction (literally) of just this sort of modernizing attempt to restore lost order.


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5 René Girard and Benoît Chantre, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). 6 The affinity between de Maistre and his descendants (especially Schmitt) and the Inquisitor have often been noted. Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 7. 7 René Girard and James G. Williams, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky (New York: Crossroad Pub., 1997), 61 ff.. 8 As Mathias Moosbrugger points out in his paper, “--”. --The basis of this dichotomy of is the view of it as a “mechanism,” a point on which Girard is quite emphatic. Girard refuses to treat desire in terms of its intentionality, the linear arrow pointing to its objects. Rather he treats it as a blind reflex, the machine in the ghost of intentionality. In this he follows Freud, though in a spirit of rationalism. Even so, he cannot disentangle intentionality from this mechanism, because it is a relation between individuals who must recognize each other as such, not merely a robotic groping after objects. Freud’s materialism is more consistent, because by treating desire individualistically as somatic instinct, he acknowledges the determinism of biochemistry. 9 The perception of an increase of violence in the modern world has been effectively debunked by the Harvard evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). 10 Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age: A Literary Review (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 81. 11 At the start of Violence and the Sacred, Girard mocks the fetish of “ambivalence,” the Freudian(esque) category, in the academic cults of the time. No doubt this has some justice, but this very revealing all the same, because Girard himself is an ambivalent combination of ambivalence and anti-ambivalence, which I believe is key to the tenor and structure of his work. On some level, he viscerally rejects ambivalence—as I have been arguing—yet in a way that somehow seems to recreate it amplified and aggravated. He himself is perhaps the best example of moral and intellectual ambivalence in post-War thought. Indeed in him it reaches a critical point, nor is it resolved. 12 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, Mass., USA: B. Blackwell, 1991). 13 Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992), 147 ff. 14 As he points out in Battling to the End. 15 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. 16 Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis. 17 Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity. 18 The highly original neo-Hegelian Robert Pippin also moves in this direction, too. Robert B. Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 19 As he says in Evolution and Conversion. 20 John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, 1st American ed. (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2007).


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21 See Alain Besançon’s article, “What Kind of Religion is Islam?” in Commentary, April 2004. 22 As described, for example, by Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). 23 Building on Pierre Manent, Peter Paik has commented on this aspect of Girard very insightfully in “Apocalypse of the Therapeutic: The Cabin in the Woods and the Death of Mimetic Desire.” 24 Bruce Chilton, Abraham's Curse: Child Sacrifice in the Legacies of the West, 1st ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2008). 25 As my friend Jacob Howland would put it.

Apocalyptic Intimations (Daft 3 Revision)

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