René Girard: Enlightenment->Disenchantment?/Religion->Violence?

René Girard: Enlightenment->Disenchantment?/Religion->Violence?

Edoardo Tortarolo 1

Violence and the Sacred in a Post-Secular Age: Challenges and Future

Perspectives of Historical Theory, International Conference, Adam

Mickiewicz University at Poznan, Poland

Friday, March 8th, 2013


Edoardo Tortarolo

The international discussion on the Enlightenment has been recently rekindled, among the

others, by the three-volume, 3000 pages long investigation of J. Israel. This paper will briefly

present some of the issues raised by Israel’s contentions and will place them in the framework

provided by the present discussion on religion, secularization, and disenchantment of the

world culminating in the claim that we are living in a post-secular age. Special attention will

be devoted by René Girard’s contributions to this set of questions, especially in his Violence

and the Sacred.


Edoardo Tortarolo 2

The kind invitation to this workshop on Rene Girard gives me the most welcome opportunity

to focus on two quite different and contrasting approaches to the issue of how we best

investigate religious beliefs in history and of what we make of the modern wish to do away

with religion as such. In what follows I will firstly focus on Rene Girard’s book on Violence

and the sacred, then I will briefly analyse the three-volume, 3000 pages long investigation of

J. Israel on the Enlightenment and thirdly compare some of their thoughts with the approach

taken by the Nobel Prize winner psychologist Kahneman especially in his opus magnum

Thinking slow and fast.

Just to be crystal clear from the beginning: I am fully aware that these are heterogeneous

approaches, reflecting different sources and different ways of construing their empirical

evidence. The point I make is that it may be worthwhile to interrogate these works in order to

have these contrasting views interact. In fact, each of these works refers to the past as a

crucial repository of notions and experiences for future and hopefully better, more humane

action. None of them rejects the past per se as useless.

Very much like Israel and Kahneman, Girard has a problem with violence in human society.

In his Violence and the sacred, violence plays a much more crucial role than the sacred and

the set of rites that define the sacred and that is defined as religion. In fact violence is a part of

human nature that can and must be domesticated, but is not to be eliminated from the human

existence. Since 1972, when the book was first published, Girard has changed his mind on the

sense and origin of religion and has turned to a far more objectified notion of religion,

claiming that Roman Catholicism is the religious belief that will save the world from nihilism.

This turn may have been implicit in his 1972 book, but I could not see any evidence of a

necessary development in that direction. In Violence and the sacred there is no trace of an

essentialist notion of religion. But religion is necessary to dismantle the potential threat

violence always poses to any community. To make the connection between violence and the

sacred Girard needs a fundamental notion that makes his whole argument possible. Mimetic


Edoardo Tortarolo 3

desire is the crucial notion. It is the crucial notion first because it is the most original

contribution that Girard has made to anthropological and historiographic discussions, second

because it is deeply counterintuitive. What is counterintuitive about Girard’s mimetic desire is

that it turns the traditional idea of desire upside down: according to Girard, we do not desire a

commodity, territory, a person, because of its intrinsic value for our life, but we desire a

commodity, territory, a person or whatever because we see another person desiring that. The

intrinsic value of what desire pushes us to put our hands on is irrelevant. The notion of

mimetic desire is crucial because it explains why violence is everywhere and must be

restrained. “Violence has an extraordinary mimetic efficacy”1 (52 trad. it). If violence is

absent, then we must look for the mechanism that prevented it from running havoc in society.

The mechanism Girard intends to praise is sacrifice: sacrifice is the way you cheat violence,

temporarily of course, as violence cannot be suppressed for good. By sacrificing a member of

the society as a scapegoat, society provides its own survival and does not dig the hole of

disintegration where it would inevitably fall. Scapegoats are not utterly different from the rest

of society that will profit from their sacrifice; they do not embody the principle of absolute

otherness. On the contrary, it is a member of the community that takes upon herself or himself

the task of representing the guilty and replace her or him and save society from the unending

process of revenge that would take place. As already mentioned, there are quite a few fields in

which this interaction between violence, sacred and sacrifice is apparent in Girard’s view:

first and foremost the literary expression of the founding sacrifice, that resonates in Greek

tragedy, in psychoanalysis, and in all forms of religion.

It is clear that Girard has no interest for the search of developments in the past. He is

interested in the break that creates two different sets of societal balances: before the founding

sacrifice, in which violence is unchecked and threatening all members and after the founding

1 La violence a des effets mimétiques extraordinaires, tantot directs et positifs, tantot indirects et négatifs (or. Fr. 52)


Edoardo Tortarolo 4

sacrifice that puts an end to endemic violence. There are two different sorts of time

frameworks: the first one is the undifferentiated time of violence, the second one is the

differentiated time of the post-sacrifice society, where the actual development is provided for

by the memory of the sacrifice and by religion’s effort to keep society alive. History seems to

be the time in which the memory of the founding sacrifice is worked out, recalled and

transformed by religion. But the memory of the founding sacrifice is always present no matter

how disguised and disfigured.

If this is a correct reconstruction of Girard’s perspective, some remarks are appropriate that

might be of interest to historians.

Girard provides a master narrative for the interpretation of THE human history: there is such a

thing as one history, indeed, as it is based on one single never ending logic, but it is

chronologically fragmented, as the break creating history is never final. The shift from history

to non-history, in which violence is unbridled, is possible and would reset the course of

human societies every time it happens. So you have on the same chronological and logical

level the Greek antiquity, still relatively close to the break, and a variety of 20th century

societies which anthropologists believed to be extremely rudimentary and prey of endemic

violence. So Girard’s task seems to be to view History with a capital H as a process involving

indeed all humans and human societies but rejecting any Hegelian 19th-century vision of a

single process. Those who are in history can easily fall into the non-history of indiscriminate

and undifferentiated violence. The tupinamba society is just around the corner, waiting for us

to merge into it because the tupinamba violence is within us, not outside us. I would like to

raise three points from the historian’s point of view. They will make the transition to the

discussion of the two alternative views by Israel and Kahneman possible.

The first point regards the paucity of historical arguments, examples and issues that Girard is

ready to take into account for or against his perspective. This is somewhat perplexing as

Girard has interesting things to say about the role of violence in society after the founding


Edoardo Tortarolo 5

tragedy has taken place and societies are living in history, backed by religious rituals. When

Girard referred to parallels between different sorts of societies sharing the same basic

processes, his references are scarce and unfocused. One example: “The ideology of ritual

cannibalism brings to mind the nationalistic myths of our own modern world. … A sacrificial

cult based on war and the reciprocal murder of prisoners is not substantially different from the

19th century nationalistic myths with their concept of an “hereditary enemy”. To insist on the

differences between two myths of this type is in effect to succumb to the mystique of the

myths themselves, to turn away from the identical reality residing at the center of each. In

both instances the basic function of foreign wars, and of the more or less spectacular rites that

generally accompany them, is to avert the threat of internal dissension by adopting a form of

violence that can be openly endorsed and fervently acted upon by all” (294). To wage war

against a competitor (possibly, a weaker one, otherwise the strategy backfires immediately) is

definitely a ubiquitous decision making process. But exactly the analysis of what is different

between the tupinamba society and say, France under Napoleon III in the last years of his rule

or Argentina in 1982, should underscore the differences in order to focus on the common

elements, while Girard tends to overemphasize the alleged a priori common core and ignore

even the possibility of variants. Not without some contradictions that spring to the eye of the

historically minded reader. An example is one of the very few statements made by Girard in

this book on the current state of affairs in the second half of the 20th century. “To date,

Western society has escaped the most catastrophic form of basic violence, the violence that is

capable of annihilating society” (273). In fact, this sounds weird in the aftermath of WWII

and even more weird considering the violence unleashed with the most catastrophic

consequences by governments against their own citizens that led to exactly the consequence

that Girard dreads most, that is the dissolution of all society ties through indiscriminate

violence. This remark gives the opportunity to deal with the second point playing a paramount

importance in Girard’s analysis. Religion is the pivot of all human existence. “The presence


Edoardo Tortarolo 6

of a religious element at the source of all human societies is indubitable; yet, of all social

institutions, religion is the only one to which science has been unable to attribute a genuine

objective, a real function. I contend that the objective of ritual is the proper re-enactment of

the surrogate-victim mechanism; its function is to perpetuate or renew the effects of this

mechanism; that is to keep violence outside the community” (98 ingl, 135 trad it). Religion

plays the same role that Hobbes assigns to the Leviathan. Violence means the collapse of any

future perspective and a present steeped in anguish. Angst is for Hobbes the only reason why

men give up their liberty to establish an absolute government, Angst is dispelled according to

Girard thanks to the sacrifice of a scapegoat and religious rituals remind and at the same time

obliterate the blood that founded society. Girard’s hypothetical account of the origins of

society bears other similarities to Hobbes, the most evident being the notion that human

nature is based on desire. To Hobbes man is a creature beset by desire, a stream of desire that

ends only in death2. Desire is to Hobbes the source of all knowledge in the state of nature:

“Whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth, he shall thereby read and

know, what are the thoughts and passions of all other men”3. To Girard men do not even have

to make the effort at introspection: looking around, watching what the father and brother do is

enough to start desiring and resorting to violence to contrast their desire. In this pessimistic

(or depending on your mood, just realistic) view of life, Girard’s religion is constantly

challenged as Hobbes’s Leviathan is. Both Girard’s religion and Hobbes’ Leviathan (that

includes religion) are caught in the paradox of being the saving grace for all men and the

target of their resentment. And both Hobbes and Girard cannot explain why history is the

constant struggle to reject the founding act of civilised and pacified society: the sacrifice of

the scapegoat, the creation of the “earthly God”, who has unchecked authority. If Girard is, as

I suspect, a modern Hobbes in disguise, it might be interesting to briefly comment on Girard’s

2 Mark Lilla, Stillborn God, 2007, p. 81. 3 Leviathan, XI, par. 2.


Edoardo Tortarolo 7

opinions on the Enlightenment interpretation of religion. Let’s start from what Girard has to

say about the function of religion: “Religion, then, is far from ‘useless’. It humanizes

violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it

into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites

appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanour. Religious misinterpretation

is a truly constructive force, for it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his

existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis as it actually took place. To think

religiously is to envision the city’s destiny in terms of that violence whose mastery over man

increases as man believes he has gained mastery over it” (191 ed it; 143 ed ingl). Religion is

not the same as Christianity, as it is not the same as Catholicism. Girard has recently changed

his mind on that. But in Violence and the Sacred religion as such is not specified as a

particular confession. So we can assume that religion as such is a control device necessary to

civilise unruly mankind. The Enlightenment project, whether political or intellectual, argues

the other way around, obviously. It is religion that has unleashed violence and violence is the

consequence of religion, according to the Enlightenment project. As a collective endeavour

the Enlightenment project has a variety of expressions that do not fit exactly into this

paradigm. But most thinkers of the European Enlightenment would have agreed that the link

between religion and violence, which they recognized, was the problem, not the solution, even

if the solution could be found within the framework of a deistic belief in a universal,

benevolent, compassionate and unspecified God accessible to everyone. Girard has not

expressed himself in detail on the meaning of the big obstacle that his vision of the

relationship between violence and religion has to face. Secularisation in the political sphere

and atheism in the intellectual sphere have marked the development of western societies since

the 18th century. Their persistence contradicts his vision or at least calls into doubt its

foundations. The only clear allusion to the Enlightenment I found in Violence and the Sacred

refers to “modern philosophers [who] attribute the origin of society to a ‘social contract’,


Edoardo Tortarolo 8

either implicit or explicit, rooted in ‘reason’, ‘good sense’, ‘mutual self-interest’ and so forth.

They are incapable of grasping the essence of religion and attributing to it a real function.

This incapacity is mythic in character, since it perpetuates the religion’s own

misapprehensions in regard to violence” (273-4, it 359). One of the major late 19th century

heirs to the Enlightenment project, Siegmund Freud, gets a similar treatment in two chapters

of Violence and the Sacred, devoted respectively to the Oedipus complex and Totem and

Taboo. The counter-Enlightenment deserves indeed more praise than reproach as in the case

of Joseph de Maistre, whose St Petersburg Dialogues are considered insightful investigations

on the sacrifice. The irony is that upon a closer look Girard shares with the project of the

Enlightenment (and with Freud) a discourse in which readers frequently encounter

expressions like “uncovering the hidden causes” etc that are frequent and characteristic of the

Enlightenment texts. But he applies this discourse to reinstall religion as a technology more

appropriate to accomplish the process of self-restraining human nature than the abolition of

religion as such. For simplicity’s sake let’s consider Kant’s dictum that “the Enlightenment is

the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make

use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-

incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage

to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! [dare to be wise] Have courage to make

use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment”. All components of this

definition are to be found in Girard, but for the final outcome of the historical process as he

envisages it. To Girard History should lead to the renewed appreciation of religion as the only

way to emancipate men from their subjection to violence, while the Enlightenment project

(including probably Kant himself) saw religions as instruments of oppression. Both views are,

borrowing and Peirce’s and Rorty’s terminology, non tychistic visions of history, as they

“extrapolate from the past to future”4. Girard like the Enlightenment projects knows the

4 Richard Rorty, The Continuity Between the Enlightenment and ‚Postmodernism’, in What’s Left of


Edoardo Tortarolo 9

hidden design of History and is committed to unveil it for the sake of humanity. This is a way

in which he sets himself apart from the anti-scientific tradition since Romanticism and

manipulates the scientific approach to reinstate religion as the truth of humanity. By so doing

Girard also marks his distance from the ideological discourse of the Enlightenment project

that implies that religion is unacceptable to the extent that it (still) incorporates, venerates and

keeps alive violence. If at all, the Enlightenment project would accept a religion of humanity

that suppresses the need of scapegoats for ever. From that perspective the Enlightenment

project has conceived the possibility projected into the future of the transformation of

humanity from a violence-addicted species to a peaceful community of reasonable persons

that are or can be religious only in their private sphere. Exactly the opposite of what Girard’s

purports to achieve: through scientific Enlightenment towards the pre-Enlightenment notion

of religion as the cathartic and saving collective ritual.

This shows how paradoxical Girard’s argument in the Violence and the sacred is: definitely

and deeply anti-secular while claiming to be as scientific as the Enlightenment project claims

to be. However, the methodological move that supports Girard’s claim comes from the

Enlightenment project and is based in it, while parting from it as soon as it comes to view the

future as a meaningful process. This leads my reading of the Violence and the Sacred

compare it to the culmination of the Enlightenment project and its scientific claims in the late

20th century. Cognitive sciences concentrate on many issues that Girard and the

Enlightenment have investigated. The new edge to those cognitive sciences that I am a bit

familiar with is methodological. The impact of cognitive sciences and new mathematical

approaches on historical disciplines should be the topic of a whole workshop and I am not

making any claim to do justice to their complexity and ambiguities in the next 3 minutes. But

Enlightenment. A Postmodern Question . Edited by Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2001, 19-36, quotation 30.


Edoardo Tortarolo 10

one point is important. Girard focuses on two relevant questions that has been raised as parts

of the Enlightenment projects and that are on the agenda of the cognitive sciences. With these

two examples I will conclude my paper.

In 1991 Daniel Gilbert published an essay on How Mental Systems believe5. He revised the

early modern discussion on the difference between believing and merely understanding.

Spinoza and Descartes famously solved the question in opposing ways. According to

Descartes when one is presented with an idea, he or she will assess its merit and subsequently

choose to accept or reject it, after having comprehended that idea. Spinoza gives an

alternative solution that became the core of the Enlightenment project. According to Spinoza

the acceptance of an idea is part of the automatic comprehension of that idea and makes it

possible; the rejection of an idea that one has accepted automatically occurs after a painful

assessment of its merit. It is the critical attitude that has inspired the Enlightenment project. It

implies also that what has been accepted lingers on in the mind despite its rejection.

Dispelling untrue ideas is more difficult and takes much more energy than sticking to the first

impression. Kahneman has based his investigation on the empirical verification of this

principle. Thinking fast is the most natural way to accept everything at face value, while

thinking slow is the painful, never ending and excruciating supervision of are dearest

persuasions. Where does Girard stand on this? My guess would be would he is a Spinozist

aiming at the great restoration of religion after its dismissal in the secular and indeed

Spinozist modernity. The mimetic appropriation of behaviour is the moral equivalent of the

automatic acceptance of the principle: What you see is what there is.

The second point relates to the apocalyptic strand in Girard’s view of history. His view of the

future as necessarily doomed to catastrophe is related to the role that violence plays. As men

do not recognise the threat posed by their wrong ideas about religion, a catastrophe will let

indiscriminate violence start a new sequence in a cyclical succession of epochs. In suggesting

5 American Psychologist, 46, n. 2 (1991), 107-119.


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this form of philosophy of history Girard rejoins the idea put forward by Benoit Mandelbrot,

the inventor of fractals, that non Gaussian distribution of events is a more accurate way to

depict reality than incremental and orderly accumulation. The outburst of violence will sooner

or later cancel civilization and history can be viewed as a non Gaussian distribution of

individual decisions that tips off the scales of civilization. Girard does indeed believe in

redemption, not in health: but unlike the conventional reactionaries of the ilk of de maistre

and de bonald whom he moderately agrees with, he is against tradition, for critical thinking

and believes in religious black swans that will make good life possible again. A radical and

disquieting message.

René Girard: Enlightenment->Disenchantment?/Religion->Violence?

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