Battling to the End by René Girard | Notes & Summary

Introduction

Christianity is a demystifying force. It exposes the injustice of the scapegoating mechanism that has brought peace in times of social disorder. In fact, it is the only means by which we know how to bring peace. By revealing that the scapegoat is actually innocent, Christianity robs this sacrificial tool away from us. It is therefore good in the absolute, since it is just, but bad in the relative, since we have no way to contain social disorder, society becomes more and more chaotic and violent. 

Before, the scapegoating mechanism was able to produce order through the deified victim. Violence brought about order by producing the sacred. Now, “violence, which produced the sacred, no longer produces anything but itself”. That is to say, people still have the urge to use violence to resolve violence and disorder but the mechanism no longer works. We recognize the innocence of the victim and therefore violence no longer produces the sacred. It simply just produces itself reciprocally. This impotent sacred is satan. “Satan thus becomes the name of a sacred that is revealed and utterly devalued through Christ’s intervention”.

In Things Hidden satan is the victimize mechanism. Here, there is an added qualification of impotence. 

Girard believes we are now living in a time where this mechanism has become so weak that we officially have no means to contain violence. War is no longer “an institution [that operates by predictable, controllable rationality], which goes hand in hand with conscription and total mobilization”. War, controlled war, can no longer contain violence. It was Clausewitz who recognized this fact in on war. He discusses war as a form of duel, as an escalation to the extremes. Yet, due to his rationalism, he couldn’t draw this out to its ultimate conclusion: apocalypse. Instead, he would argue that there are still restraining forces within society that could contain war. This book is “finishing” Clausewitz in two senses of the word: 1. By fully developing the escalation of extremes to its ultimate form which is apocalypse. 2. Showing that the Duel is the fundamental mechanism which underlies all of social behavior nowadays, not just war. 

Girard believes that the solution to our problem revolves around: imitating christ, identifying/loving others, and renouncing violence and retaliation. 

I think that Christ alone allows us to face this reality without sinking into madness. 

We can escape mimetism only by understanding the laws that govern it. Only by understanding the dangers of imitation can we conceive of authentic identification with the Other.

…

To make the Revelation wholly good, and not threatening at all, humans have only to adopt the behavior recommended by Christ: abstain completely from retaliation, and renounce the escalation to extremes.

He is not optimistic about our chances however: 

However, violence is a terrible adversary, especially since it always wins … We are thus more at war than ever, at a time when war itself no longer exists. We have to fight a violence that can no longer be controlled or mastered. Yet what if triumph were not the most important thing? What if the battle were worth more than the victory?

…

The primacy of victory is the triumph of the weak. The primacy of battle, by contrast, is the prelude to the only conversion that matters. This is the heroic attitude that we have sought to redefine. It alone can link violence and reconciliation, or, more precisely, make tangible both the possibility of the end of the world and reconciliation among all members of humanity. We cannot escape this ambivalence. More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.

Violence always wins because you can choose to not participate and be killed or participate and perpetuate the violence. He seems to suggest that the first option is the right one and the heroic one. The fruits of victory, at best, is for the weak to triumphant the cost of succumbing to violence by participating in it, but the battle itself presents us with a genuine choice to renounce violence, to “convert”. 

Chapter 1: Escalation towards extremes

War is nothing but a Duel on a Larger Scale

Clausewitz is such an important interlocutor for Girard because the former enables him to articulate his anthropological, sociological and religious theories in history. Clausewitz forcefully applies Girard’s ideas to history in general and war in particular. 

At its very core, war is nothing but a duel: not the one of classic westerns but of two enemies, not holding anything back, exchanging blows until death.  

I shall not begin by expounding a pedantic, literary definition of war, but go straight to the heart of the matter, to the duel. War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. Countless duels go to make up war, but a picture of it as a whole can be formed by imagining a pair of wrestlers. Each tries through physical force to compel the other to do his will; his immediate aim is to throw his opponent in order to make him incapable of further resistance. War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.

The nature of war, contrary to what the Chinese advise, is therefore not to seek the most peaceful resolution but to subjugate the enemy with force: 

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.

In war, this exchange of force escalates towards extremes simply because he who does not reciprocate with addition will lose:  

The thesis, then, must be repeated: war is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.

But Clausewitz quickly concedes that this is not how real wars play out. This total war is merely a “logical fantasy”. Raymond Aron, Clausewitz’s interpreter, interpreted this divide between the real and the theoretical is one between fact and fiction, casting the latter to the ranks of a merely useful thought experiment. He believed that there were fundamental forces in and around war which deescalated it. Girard disagrees. He believes that the relation between real controlled war and theoretical total war was more factual. Real wars did trend towards theoretical war and it is simply specific circumstances that prevented it from escalating. Real war would become theoretical war if:

(a) war were a wholly isolated act, occurring suddenly and not produced by previous events in the political world; (b) it consisted of a single decisive act or a set of simultaneous ones; (c) the decision achieved was complete and perfect in itself, uninfluenced by any previous estimate of the political situation it would bring about.

(a) and (c) are political frictions against escalation. We both have an idea of how much the opponent should be punished before entering into the war, we are also conscious of how certain actions in war would effect politics in the future. It would be both unfounded as well as disastrous politically to nuke a neighbor over a border dispute. (b) is the technological frictions against escalation. Its hard to mobilize troops. Navigate terrain, build factories, etc. 

These frictions, combined with the human tendency against making the extreme effort and instead “to plead that a decision may be possible later on” are the brakes of war. And if these specific actions are imitated, it would deescalate the war.

But these breaks aren’t invincible. Technological development, such as the nuclear bomb, have made it possible to deploy all forces at once. Politics also follows war: civilian sentiments are led by war. “Passions do indeed rule the world.” This is made clear by Napoleon’s total ability for conscription.  

Reciprocal Action and the Mimetic Principle

Reciprocal action, mimesis, is both responsible for escalation and deescalation depending on what actions are being imitated:

It is therefore true that reciprocal action both provokes and suspends the trend to extremes. It provokes it when both adversaries behave in the same way, and respond immediately by each modeling his tactics, strategy and policy on those of the other. By contrast, if each is speculating on the intentions of the other, advancing, withdrawing, hesitating, taking into account time, space, fog, fatigue and all the constant interactions that define real war, reciprocal action then suspends the trend to extremes. Individuals are always interacting with one another, both within an army (which explains Clausewitz’s long analyses defining the qualities of a war leader, to which we will return below), and of course between opposing armies. Reciprocal action can thus be a source of both undifferentiation and of differences, a path to war and a road to peace. If it provokes and accelerates the trend to extremes, the “friction” of space and time disappear, and the situation strangely resembles what I call the “sacrificial crisis” in my theory of archaic societies. If, on the contrary, reciprocal action suspends the trend to extremes, it aims to produce meaning and new differences.

But the societal conditions today render that most reciprocal action escalates violence. For example, in a gentlemen’s war there are fools and codes of honor that if imitated could lead to deescalation. The more rational a war becomes the more it is about doing anything one can to subjugate the enemy, the more the actions are less governed by ritual and trends towards escalation towards the extremes. 

Attack and Defense: Suspended Polarity

Girard wants to show that in contemporary society there is no longer any genuine peace, as brought about by the scapegoating of old but only suspended victories: a temporary victory of a stronger over a weaker that produces the illusion of peace. The danger of these suspended victories are that they lead to greater violence in the future. Temporary deescalation prepares rivals for future escalation. 

Suspension is only temporary because of the primacy of the defensive side over the attacking side: 

The defender is thus the one who begins and finishes the war. By the nature of its fortresses, armies and command, the defending side determines what the attack will be. It has the choice of terrain and the support of the people, and benefits from the fatigue experienced by the attacking side, whose initial momentum gradually weakens. Finally, it decides when to counter- attack. It thus controls the game, in accordance with the rule that it is always easier to keep than to take. From this we can conclude that the concept of defense encompasses that of attack, and that it is the most apt to make real war consistent with the concept of war.  

The defensive side is primary in two ways: first, it dictates the rules of war by choosing when to engage; second, according to the asymmetry of defense and attack, it is the one who benefits from violence and war. The defense wants war, the offense wants peace. Because of this suspended victories are only temporary. Much like a seesaw, as soon as one rival comes on top int he offense he loses the advantaged position. 

Not only does the defense have the means of violence it also feels justified to do so. We always interpret ourselves as the ones reacting and the others as the initiators:

The aggressor has always already been attacked. Why are relations of rivalry never seen as symmetrical? Because people always have the impression that the other is the first to attack, that they are never the ones who begin, though in a way they are always the ones. Individualism is a formidable lie. We make others understand that we recognize the signs of aggressiveness which they manifest, and they in turn interpret our posture as aggression. 

Because the defense is in a position to benefit from violence and feels justified in wielding violence, suspended victories only set up the stage for more violence back and forth. Note how long reciprocity can take between nations: 

And history did not take long to prove Clausewitz right. It was because he was “responding” to the humiliations inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles and the occupation of Rhineland that Hitler was able to mobilize a whole people. Likewise, it was because he was “responding” to the German invasion that Stalin achieved a decisive victory over Hitler. It was because he was “responding” to the United States that Bin Laden planned 9/11 and subsequent events. The primacy of a defensive position is consistent with the appearance in a conflict of the principle of reciprocity as a suspended polarity in the sense that victory will not be immediate, but will be total later.

The reason that this is unique to modernity is because warring rivals in antiquity always had the sacrifice of an innocent victim to resort to to bring about true peace. “Today, [suspension] is of a piece with the escalation to extremes because there can no longer be unanimity about the guilt of victims”. 

Modern society, by removing sacrifice also removed any hope for lasting peace: “He still had a foot in the time of eighteenth century wars, but the accelerated era was also already there, and Clausewitz was one of the first to see it, at a time when suspended conflicts no longer dissimulated the underlying principle of reciprocity. Violence is never lost on violence. It cannot be eliminated. This is the fundamental reality that we need to understand”.

As a result, modernity never lives in true peace but only suspension: “Humans are thus always immersed in order and disorder, in war and peace. It is becoming more and more difficult to draw a line between the two realities that, until the French Revolution, were codified and ritualized”.

Girard talks about three types of polarities. The first polarity is the superficial one of the temporary polarity between victor and loser, attacker and defender. The second polarity is the sacrificial polarity of all turned against one in sacrifice. The third polarity is the apocalyptic polarity of society trending from peace to chaos. His claim is that the superficial polarity merely hides the apocalyptic polarity because we can no longer produce the sacrificial polarity. “This is why we must always see reciprocity behind alternation, ‘absolute war’ behind ‘real war’”.

It is a good time to clarify what suspension leads to deescalation and which doesn’t. In the previous section, Girard articulates that the suspension which leads to deescalation is when friction causes both sides to reciprocate in disarmament. Whereas the suspension which causes escalation is temporary victory.  

War of Extermination

There are four loosely connected topics of discussion in this section. 

First, conflict resolution of America in the Middle East is failing because it uses violence which only accelerates the escalation towards extremes. Not only does America and the west at large face threats in the Middle East but also, Girard argues prophetically, China: “The exchange of attacks and American “interventions” can only accelerate, as each side responds to the other. Violence will continue on its way. A conflict between the United States and China will follow: everything is in place, though it will not necessarily occur on the military level at first”.

What is more worrying is that Girard seems to suggest that as violence is losing its effectiveness in founding, we have not renounced it. We have not even used it in hopes that it will bring about peace. He seems to suggest we use violence deliberately to cause violence and suffering: “once unbridled, the principle of reciprocity no longer plays the unconscious role it used to play. Do we not now destroy simply to destroy? Violence now seems deliberate, and the escalation to extremes is served by science and politics”. One possible explanation is that wars start from rational self-interest and then it leads into these wars of extermination where the end is to kill the hated enemy.

Second, Girard presents an anthropological reading of original sin: “original sin is vengeance, never-ending vengeance. It begins with the murder of the rival. Religion is what enables us to live with original sin, which is why a society without religion will destroy itself”. This is why Christianity exposes original sin because it robs us from the myths and archaic religions that hide and diffuse it. 

Third, only a group can found institutions. Girard, brings in Pascal to critique individualism: 

We absolutely need Pascal. He saw and immediately understood the “abysses” of foundation. He considered Descartes to be “useless and uncertain” precisely because he thought he could base something on the cogito and “deduce” the heavens and stars. Yet no one ever begins anything, except by grace. To sin means to think that one can begin something oneself. We never start anything; we always respond. The other has always decided for me and forces me to answer. The group always decides for the individual. This is the law of religion. What is “modern” exists only in the obstinate rejection of this obvious social truth, in clinging to its individualism.

Peace occurs in sacrifice when we all imitate each others’ accusation of the victim. Ritual is a repetition of this founding murder. And ritual becomes canonized in institutions: 

Rituals then repeat the initial sacrifice (the first victim leads to substitute victims: children, men, animals, various offerings), and repetition of rituals gives birth to institutions, which are the only means that humanity has found to postpone the apocalypse. This is why peaceful mimesis is possible only in the framework of an established institution that was founded long before. It is based on learning and maintaining cultural codes.

The idea is that we can only bring about true peace if everyone agrees on the guilt of the victim with absolute certainty. And this absolute certainty is only possible individually if we look around and see everyone else is also absolutely certain. This is why institutions can only be maintained as a group, institutions are fundamentally unjust. Gradually we can gain confidence by referencing our actions to the group and to the past (think about the importance of a first case of its kind in America’s judicial system). Culture however, as is evident in the west, is being criticized and challenged more than it has ever been. It is because the foundations of culture are always unjust and violent. The role of an institution is to make us forget this violence and injustice:  

Foundation is never a solitary action; it is always done with others. This is the rule of unanimity, and this unanimity is violent. An institution’s role is to make us to forget this. Pascal saw this clearly when he evoked the ruse of the “honest man” defending the “greatness of establishment.”

Conversely, we should distrust any opinion held in absolute consensus by a group: “This is why in one of his Talmudic readings Levinas says that if everyone agrees that an accused should be convicted, then he should be released right away, for he must be innocent”.

Fourth, our times is especially dangerous because not only do we not have the cultural guards against violence but our material environment has become more conducive to it. In terms we have developed already: both the political and technological frictions of violence have diminished. He compares how the spread of bird flu shows how undifferentiated we actually are: 

It is a pandemic that could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in a few days, and is a phenomenon typical of the undifferentiation now coursing across the planet. 

…

Pandemics tell us something about human relations, which can now be reduced to what might be called “global trade.” Clausewitz glimpses this when he says that there are no differences in nature, only in degree, between trade and war. It is no accident that terrorist acts often take place in trains and planes.

His call to action is thus unsurprising: 

It is thus urgent to develop strategies to deal with this unpredictable violence that no institution today can control. However, the strategies can no longer be military or political. A new ethic is required in this time of catastrophe; catastrophe urgently has to be integrated into rational thought.

Chapter 2: Clausewitz and Hegel

The Duel and Alternation of Opposites

Girard confesses that what he is opposing is Hegelianism, specifically the structure of the dialectic, rather than Hegel’s specific thoughts. “I am probably opposing Hegelianism, much more than Hegel himself”.

Both Hegel and Girard believes that history unfolds through revelation: “Indeed, for him there was only one Incarnation: that of God in history. According to him, only that “divine mediation” has made the emergence of true rationality possible”. The fundamental mechanism of the dialectic is about securing transcendence once one has exposed oneself to an alien other: “All of Hegel’s dialectic is therefore based on the Revelation. Here too we have to leave behind the sempiternal schema of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” Hegelian dialectic has little to do with that. It went from the Spirit to alienation, and then out of alienation through a transcendence or elevation (Aufhebung) that is the reconciliation of the two opposing terms. Dialectic presents a position, then the “negation” of that position, and finally a “negation of the negation.” To open up to the other, to get outside of oneself through alienation, is to prepare a return to oneself that provides true access to the real, access to real rationality free of any subjectivity”.

This led Hegel to conclude that, in anticipation of the universal state, war is a necessary process that must be worked through to develop history: “Hegel thought that churches had failed to regulate the interplay of human will, so he assigned the task to the State, the “concrete universal” that has nothing to do with specific states. The rational universality of the State is supposed to become a worldwide organization, but in the meantime individual states will continue to wage war. The series of wars is an essential contingency of history”.

Girard agrees that thesis and antithesis is the fundamental mechanism of historical development: “Dialectic is not first and foremost the reconciliation of humans with one another; it is simply the same thing as the duel, the struggle for recognition, and the ‘opposing identities’”. But he disagrees that it leads to synthesis instead of the escalation to extremes:

However, what Hegel did not see, and this is where I come to your question, is that the oscillation of contradictory positions, which become equivalent, can very well go to extremes. Adversaries can very well become hostile, and alternation can lead to reciprocity.

One contributor to why these thinkers may disagree upon the outcome of the duel they have both identified is that Hegel believes the duel is caused by a desire for the desire of others ie. recognition. Whereas Girard thinks the duel is motivated by a desire for what the other possesses. Hegel’s duel will be much less violent because the opponent has to be kept alive for recognition. 

Clausewitz is on the side of Girard here with his analysis of the escalation to extremes. Hegel believed that every duel led to a greater synthesis and universality. Society got better and better as the actual became rational. The hero is one who rejects personal interests for the sake of the universal. Clausewitz on the other hand, feared the convergence of the actual, real war to abstract, total war. 

Hegel spoke of the passage from individual interest to the universal: the individual must realize himself in the universality of the State. In this respect, he gave war a special role: it brings back into the whole of the nation those who had become separated because they had been focusing on their private interest. Through war, the State reminds individuals from time to time of the need to sacrifice individual interest and merge it back into the universal. The hero appears as Spirit by denying biology. This is the foundation of law, which is based on heroic, dis- interested attitudes. Hegel describes the unity of the private and the public, of the real and thought, in the “concrete universal” of a State that has to go beyond the contingencies of war. Law is the objectivized universal for which we should be ready to sacrifice our lives. It creates peoples as “ethical wholes” that are opposed to other “ethical wholes.” In contrast, Clausewitz thought in terms of greater or smaller separations and gaps between real wars and the concept of war… Hegel saw [Napolean] as an incarnation of the Spirit, but Clausewitz saw him as a “god of war” to whom we must respond.

By reading Clausewitz’s interpretation of the duel, Girard rejects Hegelianism: 

 This is why it is useful to read Hegel and Clausewitz together. It is immediately clear that the unity of the real and the concept lead to peace, according to Hegel, but to the trend to extremes according to Clausewitz. The latter lived in military circles; Hegel never participated in a military operation.

Two Conceptions of History

War was a scary, uncontrollable monster for Clausewitz, but it was a necessity for the Hegelian Dialectic to progress: 

While war was an ideal for Clausewitz, it was a necessity for Hegel, who considered it important to distinguish “true history” from “apparent history.” True history flows from the sacrifice of individuals. Sacrificed individuals contribute to the coming of the Spirit in the form of law. For Clausewitz, by contrast, apparent history and its reciprocal engine are the only reality.

The hero in war is also portrayed differently between these two authors. For Hegel, the hero is one who gains spiritual transcendence and embodies the spirit instead of their immediate interests. For Clausewitz, the hero is simply one who masters mimesis and operates within the mechanism. The hero is without for the former and within the latter:

His rationality is thus ambivalent. He had a very cold way of viewing war as a more intense form of trade, whereas Hegel spoke of it as self-sacrifice, and as heroic, reasoned transcendence of private interest. Hegel considered that the death of a hero contributes to the advent of the Spirit: by putting his life at stake, a hero tears himself away from his own natural and animal nature. His sacrifice makes him spiritual. This is how reason tricks conflict, which can never smother it. In contrast, Clausewitz did not see the military hero as having this spiritual nature at all. For Clausewitz, a military hero is one who manages to rise above the contingencies and the many influences to which armies are subject … Thus, for Clausewitz, military heroism is less transcendence than aggravated mimetism. For example, a counter-attack is much more effective if it is a surprise or if it includes an innovation within the codified behavior of the two armies that are spying on, studying and measuring each other. A good general cold-bloodedly dominates such situations of extreme reciprocity, but he is nonetheless not for all that autonomous. The more completely he masters his defensive strategy, the more he is controlled by violence and contributes to the escalation to extremes.

Girard now believes that there is no non-sacrificial space. Hegel is too abstract and idealistic, Clausewitz is real. He goes as far as to reject his main theory of Christianity in book 2 of Things Hidden:

You cannot view it from above or get an eagle-eye view of the events. I myself thought that was possible when I was writing Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, in which I imagined Christianity provided the point of view from which we could judge violence. However, there is neither non-sacrificial space, nor “true history.”

…

I reread my analysis of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, which was my last “modern” and “anti-Christian” argument. The criticism of an “historical Christianity” and argument in favor of a kind of “essential Christianity,” which I thought I had grasped in a Hegelian manner, was absurd. On the contrary, we have to think of Christianity as essentially historical, and Clausewitz helps us do so. Solomon’s judgment explains everything on this score: there is the sacrifice of the other, and self-sacrifice; archaic sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. However, it is all sacrifice. We are immersed in mimetism and have to find a way around the pitfalls of our desire, which is always desire for what the other possesses. I repeat, absolute knowledge is not possible. We are forced to remain at the heart of history and to act at the heart of violence because we are always gaining a better understanding of its mechanisms. Will we ever be able to elude them? I doubt it.

He believes that whatever solution there is must operate within the bounds of and within mimesis, but is pessimistic that we will be able to arrive at it. Clausewitz also arrives at this apocalyptic conclusion but he hides it under enlightenment rationality. But even in his defense that policy can contain war, he concedes that politics will be affected by war: 

When whole communities go to war—whole peoples, and especially civilized peoples—the reason always lies in some political situation, and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy. Were it a complete, untrammeled, absolute manifestation of violence (as the pure concept would require), war would of its own independent will usurp the place of policy the moment policy had brought it into being; it would then drive policy out of office and rule by the laws of its own nature, very much like a mine that can explode only in the manner or direction predetermined by the setting. This, in fact, is the view that has been taken of the matter whenever some discord between policy and the conduct of war has stimulated theoretical distinctions of this kind. But in reality things are different, and this view is thoroughly mistaken. In reality war, as has been shown, is not like that. Its violence is not of the kind that explodes in a single discharge.... That, however, does not imply that the political aim is a tyrant. It must adapt itself to its chosen means, a process which can radically change it; yet the political aim remains the first consideration. Policy, then, will permeate all military operations, and, in so far as their violent nature will admit, it will have a continuous influence on them.

Read in the light of this passage, Clausewitz’s most famous claim that war is but the continuation of politics seems to mean that war can be interpreted by politics. 

But this position can be disproved through an immanent critique within Clausewitz’s own text. He believed that the more political (the more ideological, the more interests are at stake, the more hatred) the war the less politics will actually be involved in a war. Think America’s entrance into WW2 after Pearl Harbor: the country was enraged and unified, as a result the military rather than politics was center stage in the war. In this type of war, politics is actually used by and commanded by war. However, the less political (the less the hatred, the fewer the interests at stake) the war the more politics rather than the military will determine its progression. Think the Vietnam war. In this type of war politics controls war.

The more powerful and inspiring the motives for war, the more they affect the belligerent nations and the fiercer the tensions that precede the outbreak, the closer will war approach its abstract concept, the more important will be the destruction of the enemy, the more closely will the military aims and the political objects of war coincide, and the more military and less political will war appear to be. On the other hand, the less intense the motives, the less will the military element’s natural tendency to violence coincide with political directives. As a result, war will be driven further from its natural course, the political object will be more and more at variance with the aim of ideal war, and the conflict will seem increasingly political in character.

We have increasingly witnessed more and more political and ideological wars which shows that politics and rationality can no longer contain violence. This, in addition to our impotent sacrificial rituals is why politics can no longer contain war: the passions override rationality.  

Clearly, what he saw here was what a century later would be called “ideological wars.” Leninism was nothing more than a form of military Hegelianism, to use Raymond Aron’s expression, an absolute war dictated by the meaning of history and involving the extermination of “class enemies” both within and without. This is how history makes its violent return. Unable to resist, reason gives it means to proceed by justifying it … Clausewitz told us in his way that reason is no longer at work in history. Everywhere, politics, science and religion have used ideology to mask a duel that is becoming global. They have simply provided themes and justifications for the principle of reciprocity. 

In short, Clausewitz’s realism helps us reject Hegelian idealism:

In short, Clausewitz’s treatise constantly shows that we must not believe in the “true history” that Hegel sees growing behind the ups and downs of “apparent history,” or the history that positivists describe as a national necessity or as progress. The real principle that is latent behind the alternating victories and defeats, behind the “philosophical trend,” behind the “pure logic” and “nature” of war is not a ruse of reason, but the duel … The fight to the death is thus much more than a simple desire for recognition. It is not a master-slave dialectic, but a merciless battle between twins.

Girard ends the discussion by suggesting that China is another response from the East, in addition to Islam. This goes to show how long the periods of suspended polarity truly can be: the last three centuries, according to Girard, China has been on the losing defensive side waiting for its opportunity to regain primacy. China and the US are fighting because they are so similar. Furthermore, the Chinese are effective because they understand, much like the Clausewitzian hero, that one must operate within mimesis:

Everyone now knows that the looming conflict between the United States and China, for example, has nothing to do with a “clash of civilizations,” despite what some might try to tell us. We always try to see differences where in fact there are none. In fact, the dispute is between two forms of capitalism that are becoming more and more similar, except that the Chinese, who have an ancient military culture, have been theorizing for three thousand years about how to use the adversary’s strength against him. The Chinese thus feel less attraction for the Western model but imitate it more in order to triumph over it. Their policy is thus perhaps all the more dangerous in that it understands and masters mimetism. In this sense, Islamist terrorism is only a sign of a much more formidable response by the East to the West.

This is also an example of how countries behave like egos and experience mimetic rivalries:

The Chinese will not stop; they want to beat the Americans; they want there to be more cars in China than in the United States. We always want to be better than the one we see as our model: we’ve heard that tune before. This is the insurmountable horizon of our history, which puts the Islamic attacks somewhat into perspective. 

An Impossible Reconciliation

Identity + affirmation of identity. 

We are introduced to a core concept that is paramount to reconciliation: identity. Identity is the fact of equality and similarity between all humans:

Yet, with Hegel, we have seen that the spectacle of identity can lead to philosophical knowledge, and to knowledge of equality and fraternity. We thus have to try to think about identity in a different way, in terms of reverse mimetism, positive imitation. 

It seems that identity has two manifestations: actualization and realization. The actualization of identity occurs when differences such as hierarchy is being torn down, when we objectively become more similar. The realization of identity occurs when we realize the truth of identity, when we subjectively percieve each other as more similar. Of course, the actualization of identity does not necessarily lead to its realization if we erect false differences. Actualization is a necessary but not sufficient condition for realization. Both its realization and actualization are first affirmed by Girard as a necessary condition for the Kingdom:

We have to affirm that modern wisdom, in so far as it aspires to non-conflicting identity, is heir to prophetic hope, the vision of universal uniformity as the imminence of harmony and peace. Enlightenment thought about equality, democracy and revolution is essentially non-Greek and Jewish in origin since it is based on the ultimate vision of identity, fraternity. We deem it messianic thought, in the sense that it is through the trials of history and through their movements that the hope of fraternity shines. It is a mistake to say that this is an imaginary “dream” or an evasion. This vision of identity is an essential product of Western history repeating myths, in other words, penetrating into places where difference oscillates and where distinctions are lost in conflict. This vision of a new order is based on the nothingness that separates foes, or certain categories of adversaries, the nothingness that must necessarily unite individuals.

But he then goes on to criticize identity from two ways: realizing identity is a necessary but not sufficient condition to bring about the Kingdom and our current ways of realizing identity is misguided. 

This faith in the necessary reconciliation of men is what shocks me most today. I was a victim of it, in a way, and my book Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World expressed the confidence that universal knowledge of violence would suffice. I no longer believe that for the reasons I have just explained and which I did not see at the time.

Here Girard rejects his previous position that the realization of violence and therefore of identity is enough to reconcile mankind. I believe that what Girard thinks is a sufficient condition for reconciliation is the renouncing of reciprocity. So, in a way, he is saying that the realization of identity is not sufficient to renounce reciprocity when in cycles of violence. Perhaps he thinks that 1. our passions rule over our reason so knowledge alone is not enough to dictate action 2. the logic of reciprocal violence is to kill or be killed, it is strong enough to override knowledge 3. the mimetic drive to hurt one’s enemies is too strong 4. there are two many pressures to reinstate false differences and repress the realization of identity. The actualization of identity is necessary but not sufficient for the realization of identity which is necessary but not sufficient for reconciliation and the Kingdom. 

Girard’s second critique is of the means to realize identity. Modern post-Hegelian thought operates under the false assumption that the actualization of identity, the removal of any objective difference such as class, will naturally lead to the realization of identity, the reconciliation of mankind. As a result they seek to actualize identity by leveling differences through violence. Their logic is that peace (realization) lies at the end of violence (actualization):

It is because he believed in humanity that Hegel thought that there would be a virtually automatic reconciliation of all people. However, it was on the basis of violence as a fundamental part of history. Since it affirmed that human conflict is positive, his dialectic was a phase in the philosophical and spiritual rise of violence in the modern world. Indeed, it was by criticizing Hegelian idealism that Marx urged people to take ownership of this violence. Lenin later reproached Marx for not being violent enough. Violence thus increasingly came to be seen as indispensable to the advent of peace among humans. 

…

Likewise, modern forms of wisdom have not wanted to give up seeing bad reciprocity as the precursor of good reciprocity. However, this alibi of the last remaining obstacle to be overcome before reconciliation, this means of postponing universal peace, has necessarily made violence grow. More violence is always needed before reconciliation. Auschwitz and Hiroshima have reminded us of this.

The drive to actualize identity by violent removal of differences often leads to totalitarianism:

They have discovered that there are differences where we had thought they had disappeared: cultural and not natural differences, differences that can be eliminated, for example, historical, educational, social, economic, family and psychological differences. Elimination of these differences has long been seen as a condition for the new order. If the identity that is immediately noticeable around us is not a source of harmony, it is because it is superficial, false. It has to be replaced with a more real form of identity. This Promethean task, which requires always more violence, has contributed to the rise of totalitarianism.

This is bound to fail because violence can never eliminate violence. Even when it seems that a group has achieved peace through violence over another group, it is only a suspended violence.

We now know that suspending violence, failing to renounce it straight away, always makes it grow. Violence can never reduce violence. Yet humans continue to refuse to see the catastrophe that they are preparing by always introducing new differences and new conflicts. 

While Hegelianism believes the escalation to extremes leads to reconciliation, Girard argues that it is the opposite of reconciliation. The actualization of identity by whatever means possible does not guarantee its realization. We are living in an ambivalent age because the actualization of identity, the removal of barriers, has lead to greater mimetic rivalries and made the realization of identity more distant than it ever was. 

We have to think of reconciliation not as a consequence but as the reverse of the escalation to extremes. It is a real possibility, but no one wants to see it. The Kingdom is already here, but human violence will increasingly mask it. This is the paradox of our world.

Girard’s thinking navigates between two extremes: 1. The belief that the actualization of identity by whatever violent means possible (the human level) will lead to reconciliation. 2. The belief that the actualization of identity is entirely bad and only causes chaos and therefore we must reinstate oppressive differences. Instead, the actualization of identity is both the necessary condition for reconciliation and the Kingdom as well as apocalypse:

Apocalyptic thought is thus contrary to the wisdom that believes that peaceful identity and fraternity is accessible on the purely human level. It is also contrary to all the reactionary forms of thought that want to restore differences and see identity as only a form of destructive uniformity or leveling conformity. Apocalyptic thought recognizes the source of conflict in identity, but it also sees in it the hidden presence of the thought of “the neighbor as yourself” which can certainly not triumph, but is secretly active, secretly dominant under the sound and fury on the surface. Peaceful identity lies at the heart of violent identity as its most secret possibility. This is the secret strength of eschatology.  

It is precisely the fact that throughout history, identity has been gradually realized that we are in an increased state of chaos. The sameness and likeness, the nothingness between adversaries, is precisely what created the conditions for conflict in the first place. 

When there is no longer anything separating enemy brothers and everything tells them to unite, since their very lives depend on the union, neither intellectual obviousness nor appeals to common sense, to reason or to logic are of any use. There will be no peace because war is fed precisely by the nothing that alone remains between the adversaries and that is nourished by their very identity. 

We are at a point of paradox: “The future of the world is out of our control, and yet it is in our hands: this is something to think about“. Girard’s God is not an intervening one, whatever happens solely results from human action. History is “in our hands”. But the logic of reciprocity takes a life of its own. History is “out of our control”. 

Girard’s pessimism is fully audible in this section: 

The only thing that I, personally, can still do is always return to the Revelation in the New Testament.

…

We must thus make decisive choices: there will soon be no institutions, rituals or “differences” for regulating our behavior. We have to destroy one another or love one another, and humanity, we fear, will prefer to destroy itself. 

…

BC: You are leaning toward the worst, though it seems that you are always hesitating and sometimes that you still believe in the Kingdom. Why do you think that the “epiphany of identity” necessarily has to take an apocalyptic turn?

RG: Because the Gospels say so and because the fact has become so obvious that it is becoming impossible not to put the cards on the table now. The absolute new is the Second Coming, in other words, the apocalypse. Christ’s triumph will take place in a beyond of which we can describe neither the time nor place. However, the devastation will be all on our side: the apocalyptic texts speak of a war among people, not of a war of God against humans. The apocalypse has to be taken out of fundamentalist hands. The disaster is thus insignificant in relation to its certainty. It concerns only humanity, in a certain sense, and takes nothing from the reality of the beyond.

…

BC: The law of the escalation to extremes is thus inevitable?

RG: A close reading of Clausewitz’s text will gradually show this. 

This section and chapter ends with a discussion of Hegel's misinterpretation of the Christian god as a dominating and violent one which, in turn, reads Christianity as myth. This is an understandable mistake given Christian similarity to myth but there is one key difference: a "dominating God is the one that is incarnated in paternal, hierarchical difference". That is to say he is involved and makes his appearance felt. But the Christian God "who arises with the consenting scapegoat is a perfectly unknown god; he is the one that is the most outside yet also the most inside common humanity. He is the most divine and the most human".

This withdrawal is central to Christianity: "Christ warns us in turn about the dangers of the Antichrists, in other words, those who want to be imitated. The aspect of Christ that has to be imitated is his withdrawal. Hölderlin made this dramatic discovery. This is why in the Bible we never find a fight to the death like that of the prophets of Thebes, for example, Tiresias and Oedipus. A fight to the death is impossible because in the Bible the point is precisely to give up claims to difference … An unambiguous answer is now possible to the question of what distinguishes true prophecy from false: true prophetic words are rooted in the truth of the consenting scapegoat. The consenting scapegoat does not claim to incarnate that truth; he says that truth is other and that it is more specifically there, out- side of the system. However, the prophet is not the truth, for otherwise other “prophets” would want to seize it. The prophet bears witness to it, announces it, precedes it and in a sense follows it". Withdrawal is central because it prevents these mimetic rivalries which lead to violence. If a prophet claimed he possessed the truth then it opens up himself to be a model-obstacle. 

Chapter 3: Duel and Reciprocity

A Remarkable Trinity 

Clausewitz introduces a final conception of war: it is a “remarkable trinity” of the passions introduced by the public, the calculation and randomness introduced by commanders, and the intelligence introduced by politics. “This is the result he was hoping for as he tried to hide the duel behind a rational definition of war. Thus, the ruler would “control” the strategist, who would in turn “control” public sentiment”. If the duel is the theoretical abstract conception of war, the remarkable trinity is meant to be how war actually works. 

Clausewitz took the existence of “armed observation”, the deescalation of war, as a sign that war in the form of the duel was contained by something logical and rational. Girard has already shown that both escalation and deescalation are a result of reciprocal action. The latter occurs when rivals imitate each other’s withdrawals when it came to political and technological frictions. Thus politics never did control war. It was always the duel, the law of reciprocal actions, that was the hidden logic operating behind it:

However, our reading of the text challenges the notion of policy having primacy over war, and instead promotes the idea of there being only one reality to consider here: reciprocal action. Clausewitz would like to have us believe that the clash between two states sometimes takes on a warlike aspect, such as when it provokes armed conflict, but sometimes a political aspect, such as when the clash is suspended by backing down to armed observation.

The duel is a spatial/momentary conception of war: in one momentary slice, space contained all the forces between two rivals that could theoretically be unleashed at once. The remarkable trinity is in fact more realistic. Not because it operates on a logic that is distinct from the duel but because it situates the duel in time. The goal is still the exchange of force, what leads it is still the chaos of the public and commanders and not the order of politics. All that politics contributes is to prepare the best time to strike:

In order to understand reciprocity, we have to go from the simultaneity of objects in space to the succession of events in time. We thus go from the first to the second definition of war: a duel is an immediate confrontation between two armies, a combat, a fight to the death; the “remarkable trinity” is control of the duel by the government, and thus the power to suspend the conflict in order to render it more decisive.

Girard draws an equivalency: “Duel, reciprocal action and the escalation to extremes thus end up as equivalent. They correspond precisely to what I call undifferentiation“. Specifically this undifferentiation comes from a collapse of ritual. “When rituals, the “brakes” applied to reciprocity, disintegrate, we leave the sequence of peaceful exchange and enter into violent, undifferentiated simultaneity, in other words, we enter into what is proper to the sacrificial realm”. 

Girard now invites us to use Clausewitz’s insights for sociological analysis. This is valid because everyday life has become more violent and conforms to the logic of reciprocal action:

While Clausewitz talked to us only about war, we would now like to make him speak about society. This will warp his thought in a way, but it will be done consciously. Our desire to do this comes simply from the fact that we are in a world that is more positively violent than his was, and where some of his observations on the military have become observations about the world in general. 

War and Exchange 

War is the hidden structure behind all social phenomena because all social phenomena, trade included, is governed based on reciprocal action. To see this in trade we need to trace its origins. 

Girard paints two distinct eras/types of exchange and trade: gift-giving and money-facilitated. In the first era exchange was about people giving gifts and a counter-gift separated by a long interval in between. This period was integral because it prevented the exchange relationship, which was always imbalanced, from escalating to extremes. This long interval hid the fact that the gift you are currently receiving is reciprocal to the one you recieved a long time ago, preventing you from drawing direct comparisons and reading hostility into it:

Indeed, the gift I receive is never equal to the one I have given: it is worth either more or less, depending on the case. However, no one will notice if the counter-gift does not come right away. If, on the other hand, it comes too soon, it can lead to retaliation owing to what was initially only a misunderstanding, a poor interpretation. One of the individuals will provide an excessive reaction to the presumed hostility of the other, thereby very quickly transforming “good reciprocity” into “bad reciprocity,” and concord into discord. Sometimes people even kill each other to get rid of bad reciprocity. This is why the rules of exchange are so complex: their purpose is to dissimulate reciprocity, the “supreme law” of the duel, which will always reappear.

The era of money enables a more rapid form of trade. Money saves traders from reciprocity: 

In this respect, money is a crucial discovery: it is a neutral means of exchanging. You bake a baguette, I buy it right away for what we consider to be the market price, and we are no longer bound up with each other. The business is finished. I do not have to give you a counter-gift and we both go home happy

…

We therefore have to consider money’s tendency toward neutrality as an essential discovery in the history of human relations: up to a certain point, money makes it possible to avoid the counter-gift, in other words, to avoid comparison and the return of reciprocity.

Money is like a decisive (not suspended but total) victory in war which ends all reciprocity. In another sense, money is like the sacrificial victim that brings about reconciliation to the group. It is a ritual repetition of the founding expulsion: 

What symbolizes the link among people and prevents them from “coming to blows” also has a sacred origin: money replaces the victim on whose head people used to find reconciliation.

But money is not a perfect solution because it relies on the integrity of the institution of trade whether that is a contract, a trade agreement, etc. Think about the opium wars where trade remained peaceful only up until the point where the institution of free trade was respected. Trade, whether it is gift-giving or money-mediated, operates fundamentally on reciprocal actions:

We exchange goods so as not to exchange blows, but trading goods always contains a memory of trading blows. Exchange, whether commercial or bellicose, is an institution, in other words, a form of protection, a simple means. If the institution is seen as an end, we fall back into violent reciprocity. 

These reciprocal actions escalate into conflict unless certain ritualized institutions add friction to the imitation and introduce difference. That is to say, certain reciprocal actions which cause friction and difference, if imitated, lead to peace whereas acquisitive reciprocal actions lead to violence. At the end of the day, it is not whether rationality can contain trade or war but that rationality itself is a form of reciprocal action. Rationality and conflict, be it in trade or war, are all based off of reciprocal actions it is simply the type of reciprocal action that determines its effect. Whether politics can contain war or the rational part of trade can contain the emotional side is all about what type of reciprocal action the current cultural and technological atmosphere produces. Girard is arguing that throughout history we are witnessing a decrease in the conditions which cause reciprocity to lead to peace (cultural/political and technological friction) and an increase in the conditions which cause reciprocity to lead to conflict.

Thus trade is a form of war in four senses of the term “war”.

First and foremost, trade and all of human social interactions for that matter operate solely under reciprocal action. Rationalism is an illusion: merely reciprocal action as produced by certain conditions. 

Second, since trade is dominated by reciprocal action, trade can quickly transform into real physical war. In the era of money, it is only when exchange is not as intense and ritualized institutions can still contain them does trade actually help to prevent war:

In a way, trade is constant low-intensity war, while war is more or less controlled by politics and most often intermittent. When it becomes continuous, we escalate towards extremes. Trade thus has all the features of war: if smooth settlement of exchanges degenerates into furious competition, a trade war can become a real war … Therefore, can trade control war, as many optimistic free marketers think? Perhaps, up to a certain point, so long as we remain within a reasonable form of capitalism.

Girard provides a historical example:

When one nation does not manage to win a contest, it quickly tends to blame its failure on unfair competition. Protectionism is a sign that competition can degenerate into military conflict. Clausewitz was obviously thinking about Napoleon’s growing hatred of England: it was for commercial stakes, which was the form the war took with England, that he drenched Europe in blood. In their ferocity, the Napoleonic Wars revealed the violence inherent to commercial competition. Those wars were to trade what the principle of reciprocity is to exchange.

Third, trade much like war is about using force to bend the opponent to do one’s will. Certainly, the outcome can be more positive sum, but trade is pursued not because it is more rational or humanistic but because it is a more effective means of getting what one wants:

From this point of view, it is not by chance that the European aristocracy went into business once heroes and warriors went out of style … France fell behind England very quickly: Louis XIV still had imperial goals in Europe when England was already conquering the world much more efficiently. Trade is a formidable form of war, especially since it results in fewer dead. 

Lastly, since it is almost impossible for any traditional physical war to achieve total victory over the opponent without risking self-annihilation, trade may become the arena for a modern form of war:

Trade can transform very quickly into war, and today, since traditional war is no longer available as “cash payment,” trade can become the trend to extremes. From this point of view, we can reasonably fear a major clash between China and the United States in coming decades. 

The logic of Prohibitions 

Girard takes us on a detour to explain the importance and origins of myths and prohibitions. This is one of the best summaries of his anthropology:

We can thus conclude from this that hominization began when such internal rivalries became strong enough to break animal dominance networks and unleashed contagious vengeance. Humanity was able to be born and survive at the same time only because religious prohibitions emerged early enough to counter the danger of self-destruction. But how did the prohibitions emerge? Foundation myths (or myths of origin) are the only things that explain this. In general, they usually begin with a story about a huge crisis symbolized in some way: in the myth of Oedipus it is a plague epidemic, in others it is a drought or flood, or even a cannibal monster that was devouring a city’s youth. Behind these themes there is a breakdown of social ties, what Hobbes called the “war of all against all.

…

What happened? As soon as the agitation “undifferentiated” all members of the society, imitation became stronger than ever, but functioned differently and had different effects. When the group became a crowd, imitation itself tended to reunite it, substitutions occurred, and the violence converged onto increasingly fewer adversaries until it focused on only one. People then discovered the cause of the trouble and they finally rushed as a single body to lynch its now universal enemy. The same mimetic energy that caused growing disorder so long as there were enough rivals to oppose one another finally brought the whole community together against the scapegoat, and thereby caused peace to return.

…

The result was so sudden and unexpected that the reconciled people saw it as a supernatural gift, and the only one who could have filled the role of the gift giver was the victim of the unanimous lynching: the scapegoat chosen unconsciously by the mimetism of the lynchers. The scapegoat thus re-united the group. This is why many victims are described as “foreign visitors.” Primitive communities were probably very isolated from one another, and a visit by a stranger probably caused great curiosity mixed with fear. A single unexpected action by the stranger could cause unpredictable panic and turn the visitor into a new god. Every lynching resulting from a mimetic crisis thus gave birth to a new god. Every time a conflict later erupted in the community, the past crisis would be remembered and all contact with the individuals involved would be prohibited. If violence returned, it would be interpreted as caused by the god’s anger. Only the god’s prestige thus permitted the appearance of permanent prohibitions that were gradually turned into a system that was more or less consistent and sustainable.

…

Religious prohibitions surely checked huge escalations of violence. However, the fear they inspire fades, and when that happens their ability to prevent transgressions also fades. Yet the purpose of prohibitions and ritual sacrifices was to calm the god’s anger, in other words, to keep violence out of the group. I think that the two great institutions of archaic religion, namely prohibitions and sacrifice, have played an essential role in the passage from pre-human to human societies, precisely by preventing hominids from destroying themselves. Archaic systems must also have been reborn from their ashes from time to time owing to their inability to eliminate violent reciprocity once and for all. We know this thanks to the penetrating intuitions of Greek and Indian religions.

 What is most interesting in this quote is that the prestige of gods is what sustained rituals and prohibitions.

 The Christian revelation robbed these mythical elements away from our toolbox: 

 The Biblical and Christian tradition was the first to upset the supremacy of the crowd, to see violent unanimity from the other side, and to pinpoint the principle of reciprocity. Christ, the last prophet, then places humanity before a terrible alternative: either continue to refuse to see that the duel is the underlying structure of all human activities, or escape from that hidden logic by means of a better one, that of love, of positive reciprocity. In this respect, it is striking to see how closely negative and positive reciprocity resemble each other: almost the same form of undifferentiation is involved in both cases, but what is at stake is the salvation of the world. This is the real paradox that we have to try to understand, for from now on it will not be the scapegoat who is judged guilty, but humanity itself, by history. We are thus entering into an eschatological perspective.

What is profoundly interesting is that Christianity, by being such a successful force that reveals truth, destroys itself. In the age of rationalism, which Christ is responsible for, no one takes apocalypse seriously anymore. This quote is extremely revealing why certain Christians are so deeply engaged with the world: every action contributes to the outcome of whether we end up in the Kingdom or apocalypse:

I am convinced that it is because Christians have gradually lost the sense of eschatology that they have ceased to influence the course of events. It was probably beginning with Hiroshima that the idea of the apocalypse completely disappeared from the Christian mind: Western Christians, French Catholics in particular, stopped talking about the apocalypse just when the abstract became real, when reality began to match the concept.

The End of Rules 

The destruction of the political/cultural frictions within war, ie. the rules of war, combined with the removal of technological frictions have turned war into its pure theoretical form of the escalation to the extremes. As wars become more rational they conform closer to their theoretical form: the extermination of the enemy. The loss of the rules of war and a growing hatred for the enemy grow together. The loss of the rules of war create a constant state of animosity: “The loss of the rules of war leaves us facing the terrible alternative between attacking and defending, aggression and response to aggression, which are one and the same thing”. This animosity, a desire to gain victory over the rival, in turn, makes us further ignore the rules of war: “he primacy of victory, raised to the status of a rule, becomes overarching, and in the background there is deep disdain for the adversary, who finally has to be slaughtered. This attitude authorizes us to flout all the rules of honor”. Even though they are symbiotic it is the loss of the rules that occur first due to the Christian revelation. For example, we can imagine that the rule of war to respect burial rites as displayed in the Illiad which could’ve but did not facilitate peace is, after the Christian revelation, deemed superfluous and counterproductive to the real aims of war. 

Schmitt identified the first signs of the loss of the rules of war in the Spanish partisans: a group of secret civilian soldiers who fought against Napoleon, their occupier. It is this irregular group who gave up all respect for the laws of war and just focused on the extermination of the enemy. Napoloeon’s “regular” army was forced to respond to this by becoming equally ruthless:

Thus, terrorism would have its roots in the Revolutionary Wars, of which Napoleon’s “regular” army was the ultimate transformation. “Irregular” war was a contemporary of “regular” war, and they strengthen each other mutually so as to finally become equivalent … This is the real structure of reciprocity, which is all the more terrible when the response is postponed. We are witnessing a fundamental breakdown in the law of exchange.

Today, we are witnessing a world with terrorism, unpredictable bursts of violence that clearly is not governed by law, but also state level actors who do not respect law. Violence has freed itself from law and has become ubiquitous:

 We have indeed entered into an era of ubiquitous, unpredictable hostility in which the adversaries despise and seek to annihilate each other. Bush and Bin Laden, the Palestinians and the Israelis, the Russians and the Chechnyans, the Indians and the Pakistanis: the conflicts are all the same. The fact that we speak of “rogue states” proves how far we have left behind the codification of inter-state war. Under the guise of maintaining international security, the Bush administration has done as it pleased in Afghanistan, as the Russians did in Chechnya. In return, there are Islamist attacks everywhere. The ignominy of Guantanamo, the inhumane American camp for presumed terrorists who are suspected of having ties with Al Qaeda, demonstrates the contempt for the laws of war. Classical war, which included respect for the rights of prisoners, no longer exists. It remained to some extent in the conflicts of the twentieth century, when war still resembled a kind of contract. 

What we see today is an end of war, an end of violence being able to be contained by ritualistic institutions: 

In a way, we could thus say that there are fewer wars today than before. We could even say that there are no wars at all, since the institution is dead and has been replaced by unpredictable outbreaks of violence … We have to understand that the unpredictability of violence is what is new: political rationality, the latest form of ancient rituals, has failed. We have entered a world of pure reciprocity, the one of which Clausewitz glimpsed the warlike face, but which could also show the opposite countenance.

One thinker who successfully diagnosed the problem was Schmitt. 

Carl Schmitt saw this when he spoke of a “theologization” of war in which the enemy becomes an Evil that has to be eradicated. His efforts to establish a legal framework for war were directly related to this observation. In order to prevent violence from spreading madly, there have to be legal limits. Carl Schmitt thus thought that the legal construction of designated enemies would represent progress.

…

However, he believed that this intermediary status could be governed legally. He thought that the partisan was the symbol of a new legal-political framework that put an end to classical law and urgently called for a new legal definition of “friend” and “enemy.”

While his diagnosis was correct, his prescriptions were less than satisfactory. A legal definition of the state to define friend and enemy simply has no hold over violence in this day and age of ubiquitous violence. “It is a little like the idea of establishing a social contract when everyone is fighting. The social contract is obviously false because it is when it is needed that it cannot be made”.

In this, Schmitt misunderstood the conditions of modern war. He did not see what was at stake in nuclear deterrence, for example. Everything that worked on that principle has, since 1945, operated like a kind of agreement between mafia families rather than like something ruled by law. In other words, nothing has been legalized; nothing has gone through the United Nations. In order for deterrence to work, there had to be no meddling, so it was a kind of mafia system … He did not see that democratic, suicidal terrorism would prevent any containment of war. 

The logic of violence operates upon different rules than it did in the past. War has always been reciprocal, they never were contained by rationality but by the prestige of ritual institutions which caused a peaceful reciprocity. That prestige has faded now with Christianity.

We continue to think about the acceleration of contemporary conflicts as if they followed the same rules of logic as they did in the past. People still use the rationalist reading of Clausewitz, with its refusal to see the imminence of the duel. Today we are heading toward a form of war so radical that it is impossible to talk about it without making it sound hyper-tragic or hyper-comical, so unlimited that it can no longer be taken seriously. Bush is a caricature of the warmongering violence of which Americans are capable outside of the framework of any political reason, and Bin Laden and his imitators respond in an equally “sovereign” manner. 

A Return to the Simple Life? 

Clausewitz was a theorist not a philosopher. He sought to understand the duel not to transcend it but to win at it. Therefore we need to turn to other thinkers to help us think about plausible ways out of reciprocity.  

Action always takes precedence over speculation. In his thought, there is a theory of war, but not a philosophy of war. Conceptualizing the duel should entail trying to control it, but Clausewitz sought to serve it. This is what I see in this letter, in which he is supposed to be talking about his “religious feelings.” Thus he could not have helped us explain what is beyond the duel and that I call “good transcendence,” though he told us a lot about bad transcendence. Clausewitz’s god is the “god of war.” 

We are introduced to a few thinkers who all are unsatisfactory. Levinas understands the escalations of extremes but is focused on differences and discontinuity whereas Girard’s theory focuses on continuity. Bergson realized that there existed both a dimension of passion as well as hate in rivalry but he never took it to an apocalyptic dimension. He believed it would oscillate between two extremes. Peguy realized catastrophe but resorted to a passive belief in providence. 

Girard reminds us again that history is fully in our hands, God does not intervene: “Since I am apocalyptic, I reject any belief in providentialism. We have to fight to the end, even when we think it is ‘vain.’”

Chapter 4: The Duel and the Sacred 

The Two Ages of War 

There are two types of war. Wars of adversity has rules, codes, and rituals. Rivals in them seek to gain honor. Wars of hostility on the other hand aren’t governed by any rules. Rivals seek to completely dominate and exterminate the other. It is like object-competition and mimetic rivalries in a sense. The former is about obtaining an object in accordance to rules of conduct while the latter is about one’s relative position to a rival. The Gospels seem to advise, before the arrival of the Kingdom, that wars should always be fought with honor, with respect directed to your enemies.

Our discussion about Clausewitz sheds new light on another precept in the Gospels: “Love your enemies.” Once we have acknowledged that the Kingdom program has not been realized, this precept no longer means “make your enemies into friends,” which becomes the implicit rule of pacifism, but “respect rules of honor if you have to fight.” This is quite different. We can therefore see the distinction between a principle of adversariality and one of hostility. Hostility seeks to triumph over the opponent. By contrast, adversariality presupposes an honorable fight.

With these two species of war, comes two species of heroism:

There is a species of war that is a struggle for honor, and a completely different species that is a fight for domination. The former originates in the duel. It is the duel. The latter is not and does not have the same origin. It is even everything that is most foreign to the duel, to codification, and to honor. However, it is not at all foreign to heroism.

…

This passage is relevant because Péguy came to the same conclusions as we do, first when he distinguished two opposing notions of war, and second because he defined two forms of heroism: one oriented towards the “grandiose” nature of the escalation to extremes, and another that tries to control that outbreak of violence and to neutralize war. The former fails to describe the duel; the latter conceives of it in a radical way. 

Honor is an important political/cultural friction: recall how Caesar rejected the Gulls help in crossing rivers. It is also heavily linked with archaic religions and rituals: in the Iliad, we often here heroes say “Zeus granted him honor/glory…” The loss of honor as an institution results from the Christian revelation and is responsible for the acceleration of war: 

The difference between the two forms of heroism is thus essential because it explains two periods of war: the age of adversariality and the age of hostility. Understood as an escalation to extremes, all codes of war implode in the duel, leading to the era in which we live today, that of unpredictable worldwide violence.

A Warlike Religion 

This section contains two discussions, one on the war between violence and truth and the other on Clausewitz’s conception of the military genius. 

History is animated by a battle between truth, the revelation of the innocence of the scapegoat, and violence between humans. Interestingly, in this war, truth grows alongside violence. Violence only provides more examples of truth. Truth only robs away sacrificial resources that lead to more violence:

It is a strange and tedious war when violence attempts to vanquish truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken truth, and only serve to give it fresh vigor. All the lights of truth cannot arrest violence, and only serve to exasperate it.

…

Here, Pascal was clearly describing a manifestation of truth that would be contemporary with the escalation to extremes. Note that he no longer said “war,” but “violence.” This is already apocalyptic thought.

Truth is on the defensive in the sense that the defense can choose the battlefield. Likewise, truth can dictate what act of violence and what violent institution to expose as illegitimate. Truth wants war because truth only produces more war. Violence wants peace because sacrificial violence brings peace. But there is another sense in which this is true: truth wants change and “war” to eat away the grips of violence. Violence on the other hand wants peace to preserve its status quo:

Truth is in a defensive position, in the Clausewitzian sense. It is thus the one that wants war. Violence reacts to truth, and it is thus the one that wants peace. Yet it knows very well that it will never have peace again because its mechanisms have been revealed. This is the true and only duel that runs through all of human history, to the point that we cannot say which opponent will win. Only an act of faith enables Pascal to say that “violence has only a certain course to run, limited by the appointment of Heaven.” But will truth triumph in this world? Nothing could be less certain.

We now move on to discussion of the military genius. What is most fascinating about Clausewitz is his inability to develop the duel to its logical conclusions. “The inability to think about violent reciprocity is specifically what intrigues me about Clausewitz”. His enlightenment rationality prevented him from drawing the apocalyptic conclusion. Instead, he aimed to control war through this idea of a brilliant commander. This genius is supposed to be immersed in but not controlled by the remarkable trinity:

But now we can see that what Clausewitz called “military genius,” the topic of Chapter 3 of Book 1, seems to perform a threefold synthesis of emotions, calculation and wisdom, and incarnates a kind of resistance to the mimetic principle that eliminates everything. The genius is a temporary brake on the principle of undifferentiation.

…

The ardor of his spirit must rekindle the flame of purpose in all others; his inward fire must revive their hope. Only to the extent that he can do this will he retain his hold on his men and keep control. Once that hold is lost, once his own courage can no longer revive the courage of his men, the mass will drag him down to the brutish world where danger is shirked and shame is unknown. Such are the burdens in battle that the commander’s courage and strength of will must overcome if he hopes to achieve outstanding success.

…

A military genius is one who knows how to respond, and who is thus immersed in mimetism, but at the same time able to channel the unpredictable, contagious currents that result in panic or obedience. A military genius is not alone; he is always in the midst of others, in the world of the reciprocity of war.

Prussian Resentment

Clausewitz was the embodiment of the more general Prussian attitude towards France: resentment and worship at the same time. He was extremely fearful of France and wished that they had done more to contain her powers. But within this fear, lied a deep admiration: 

But what is the result of this moderation? It is that France, though defeated and disarmed, will never cease to have at her disposal the means which guarantee her autonomy and independence.

…

His obsession with the French threat and his fear that France, which he both admired and hated, would one day regain its “autonomy” and “independence” are perfectly consistent with what I call underground psychology in my books. The subject demands autonomy only because he thinks that the model he has chosen is autonomous or could become so. 

The Military Genius and the Superman 

Clausewitz saw believed that there was a truth within violence or, more accurately, the experience of violence provided the combatant with some revelation of truth, it made him complete. And this truth is accessed at the pinnacle of the escalation towards extremes in the decisive battle in the duel. As a result, he loathed any indirect strategies and always wanted to escalate towards the duel:

For him, peace is to war what strategy is to tactics, and what a firefight is to hand-to-hand combat. The “decision” becomes clearer each time, as if you were adjusting the focus on a cam- era. In a way, in relation to strategy, politics is nothing but talk. However, strategy is in turn only discourse in relationship to tactics. Within tactics, fighting with firearms is always less decisive than hand-to-hand combat. We are thus nearing the heart of violence, which is murder. There is a truth about violence, and that truth is unveiled in the primacy of combat.

Girard claims that Clausewitz had the intuition of sacrifice. That humanity is born from violence. And it is this same intuition that led him to seek humanity again in violence:

What would such an intuition mean except that it is war that makes the man? History constantly shows this. Clausewitz clearly glimpsed this fundamental aspect of violence. Just as comparison of archaic societies leads to the conclusion that humanity springs from sacrifice, Clausewitz observes that man returns to sacrifice, in a way, but for reasons he considers essential. He is not thinking about Christianity at all. The military superman is finally nothing more than an attempt to regenerate, to correct humanity to prevent it from falling back into the “brutish world.”

This intuition would preface the totalitarian regimes to come who believed that a higher state of man lied behind violence:

Totalitarianism soon emerged as a powerful form of nihilism, an impulse to take decadence to the furthest extreme so that, out of that dissolution, a superior form of humanity would emerge. RG: Indeed, by resorting to force, humanity would obtain an identity that was more real.

The discussion moves to Nietzsche who “takes his cue from [Clausewitz] when he describes the virility and courage of the superman. However, what was strictly military in Clausewitz’s case took on metaphysical aspects in Nietzsche’s”. Nietzsche realized that there is a powerful undermining force of all religions but specifically of Christianity that had been operating:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?

But then he wants to create a new set of values from sacrificial resources that are no longer there:

What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

The problem with Nietzsche is that he recognizes Christianity as an undermining force, an undermining force so strong that it caused its own death, but refuses to acknowledge this undermining. And instead aims to build a value system off of these unstable foundations: 

Nietzsche’s entire tragedy is to have seen but to have not wished to understand the undermining performed by the Bible. Violence no longer has any meaning. Yet Nietzsche tried to reinvest it with meaning by betting on Dionysus. In this there is a terrible tragedy, a desire for the Absolute from which Nietzsche was not able to extricate himself.

In this way, Nietzsche and Clausewitz and their solutions, the Ubermensch and the military genius, are structurally similar. Nietzsche saw that the sacred was impotent in his death of God just as Clausewitz saw it in the increasing inability for rationality to contain violence. Instead of rejecting this imperfect sacred, Nietzsche aimed to further develop it through a new set of values just as Clausewitz sought truth in this new more intense form of war:

We have discussed the underground passion that motivated Clausewitz. However, he did not sink into despair because there was the army, that aristocratic model, that outlet that Nietzsche was lacking. Nietzsche was totally involved in what was supposed to be the creation of values, a re-invented aristocracy—which was in reality the abyss of a will to power. Clausewitz is much cooler. Without really thinking about it consciously, he glimpsed the corrupted sacred that remains in violence and war, and he made that sacred into something transcendent, an ideal to be achieved.

The Enemy Facing Me

This section begins with a Girardian reading of Levina’s Totality and Infinity which concerned with man’s escape from totality. Totality is taken as everything that hides reciprocity: exchange, institutions, trade, rituals, etc… It is all the sacrificial mechanisms that keep our world secure:

In my mind, totality is actually myth, but also the regulated system of exchange, everything that hides reciprocity. “Escaping totality” thus means two things for me: either regressing into the chaos of undifferentiated violence or taking a leap into the harmonious community of “others as others.”

The duel in the abstract and war in the concrete are means by which one can escape this totality. Because reciprocity is revealed in the duel. And with the revelation of reciprocity comes the possibility of recognizing our sameness with the enemy Other. And it is through this enemy Other that we realize reciprocity and the falseness of all the institutions surrounding us in totality. War is a means by which we escape totality because it reveals reciprocity:

War is no longer man’s essence. Man escapes that reductionist essence in his relationship to the Other, who is already the living enemy facing him:

Only beings capable of war can rise to peace. ... In war, beings refuse to belong to a totality, refuse community, refuse law ... They affirm themselves as transcending the totality, each identifying itself not by its place in the whole, but by its self.

…

Levinas saw the duel, like love, as an escape from totality that we absolutely need. However, it is in the sense that it explodes totality.

We must not descend back into Hegelian error and believe that reconciliation lied after war. Levina’s position is that reconciliation was a possibility in war:

We have to at all costs avoid thinking of war as a passage towards reconciliation. In our critique of Hegel and his dialectic, we saw that such a passage was impossible. Postponing reconciliation always causes violence to increase. Levinas does not say that such a passage is possible. He says that outside of totality, there is war and love. We are faced with this alternative more than ever. 

Girard’s point is that to recognize our sameness we need to be undifferentiated: 

You are saying that the truth about combat, and the truth about violence is undifferentiation. In order to identify a real difference, or to make identity itself a difference, we thus have to pass through undifferentiation.

But reconciliation is not a guarantee in undifferentiation because there is an innate refusal for us to see difference: 

It is because adversaries do not want to see their growing resemblance that they embark on a escalation to extremes. They will fight to the death so as not to see that they are similar, and thus they will achieve the peace of the graveyard.

Girard’s interlocutor provides a plausible path towards reconciliation in the duel as Levinas has suggested. Girard believes that it is out of one’s control, it requires both sides synchronous actions, and most importantly we need to have external meditated models. This is the first part where distance becomes important. Distance is important because mimetic rivals perceive absolute difference within the rivalries, it is only when they are looking from the outside, from a place of distance, can they perceive sameness:

However, if they recognize that they are similar, if they identify themselves with each other, the veil of the Same will fall and reveal the Other, the vulnerability of his face. I can lower my guard before the otherness of the person I am facing. Confrontation is not inevitable.

RG: What you are calling identification would be resistance to imitation, a rediscovered distance. You are being very optimistic. Lowering your guard before the sudden epiphany of the face of the other supposes that you can resist the irresistible attraction of the “same” that the “other” incarnated only a few instants before. It supposes that we both become “others” at the same time. This process is possible, but it is not under our control. We are immersed in mimetism. Some are lucky enough to have had good models and to have been educated in the possibility of taking distance. Others have had the bad luck to have had poor models. We do not have the power to decide; the models make the decisions for us. One can be destroyed by one’s model: imitation is always what makes us fail in identification. It is as if there was fatalism in our violent proximity to the other.

…

The escalation to extremes is an irreversible law. It is because we are irresistibly drawn to one another that we can no longer go from war to reconciliation.

…

The event you are suggesting is thus rare, and presupposes an education based on solid, transcendent models, what I call external mediation. We should keep in mind that it also corresponds to a period of war that is now obsolete. Given the increase in undifferentiation at the planetary level and our entrance into an era of internal mediation, I have reasons to doubt that this paradigm can be generalized. The escalation to extremes is an irreversible law. It is because we are irresistibly drawn to one another that we can no longer go from war to reconciliation. Of course, brotherhood would consist in acknowledging that we are all similar. If we were not so mimetic, we could even do without violence. However, the problem is once again that mimetism defines humans. We have to have the courage to look squarely at this aspect of reality.

The importance of distance makes us reject the model of the hero. The hero is one who masters mimesis of men, he uses internal mediation, much like Clausewitz did with Napoleon, to uncover brilliant strategies. Yet the saint is one who also uses mimesis, but imitates a distant external model. The first can only lead to more violence because you are too close within the scene to see difference. Only the second one can reconciliation stand. 

When Levinas wrote that the process of escaping totality also has to be thought of as a passage from the sacred to the saintly, from reciprocity to relationships (in other words, religion), he was at the crux of our discussion of the transformation of heroism into saintliness.

We must be saints instead of heroes, we must worship the withdrawn God:

This paradox corresponds to reality, but Nietzsche was wrong to reject it. Christianity invites us to imitate a God who is perfectly good. It teaches us that if we do not do so, we will expose ourselves to the worst. There is no solution to mimetism aside from a good model.  

“Violence is one with the god’s proximity”. A god’s proximity to us reveals our proximity to violence in three ways. First, if a god is close, that is to say myths claims he walks among us like the Greek gods, or his birth is fresh in memory, that means that the society we live in is one where sacrificial resources are still active. We still produce god from sacrifice. Thus we are a violent society. Second, the proximity of violence also means that the sacrifice and a new god is near. Third, if a god is close then that means the models we imitate must also be close, there is no beyond and transcendent models to imitate. We imitate each other instead and begin reciprocity which leads to violence. Dionysus who symbolized a god mixing amongst men, brought about mimetic contagion. Only if the god whom we imitate is far do we not imitate those around us and see sameness instead of radical difference from the perspective of the distant god. The proximity of god is responsible for both the actualization of and alleviation of violence.

Yet the Greeks never suggested we imitate the gods. They always say that Dionysus should be kept at a distance and that one should never go close to him. Christ alone is approachable from this point of view. The Greeks had no model of transcendence to imitate. That was their problem, and it is the problem of archaic religions. For them, absolute violence is good only in cathartic memory, in sacrificial repetition. However, in a world where the founding murder has disappeared, we have no choice but to imitate Christ, imitate him to the letter, do everything he says to do. The Passion reveals both mimetism and the only way to remedy it.  

…

Christ restores the distance with the sacred, whereas reciprocity brings us closer to one another to produce the corrupt sacred, which is violence. In primitive societies, violence is one with the god’s proximity. Gods no longer appear today because violence no longer has an outlet; it is deprived of scapegoats (those divinized victims) and is bound to escalate. Hölderlin was the only one at the time of Hegel and Clausewitz to have understood the danger of proximity among humans. Indeed, the Greeks had a name for the god who mixed with men, the god of reciprocity, of mimetic doubles and contagious madness: Dionysus. That is the name the Greeks gave to the fear they felt when the god was too close.

The Apocalyptic Turn 

The theme of this section is that Christ through the cross has destroyed all foundations for institutions in the world. And we are witnessing that collapse. 

Christ exasperated mimetic rivalries. He agreed to be their victim in order to reveal mimetic rivalries to the eyes of all. He caused them to appear everywhere: in the society, in families. There is no totality that does not run the risk of being affected by the doubling that used to be contained by sacrifice.

The uniqueness of Christ is that he was divine before becoming sacred. He was a God who volunteered as scapegoat to reveal the mechanism:

It is no longer men who create gods, but God who has come to take the place of the victim. The prophets and psalms prepared this fundamental interpretation of the coming of God, who is simply one with the cross. Here, the victim is divine before becoming sacred.

Before, society truly operated in circular time, there would be calamity, people would sacrifice and then the sacrifice would be repeated again and again in ritual until the next calamity, ad infinitum. But Christ, by taking away our sacrificial resources, turned history into linear time:

The linear time that Christ forced us to adopt makes the eternal return of the gods impossible, and thus also any reconciliation on the head of innocent victims. Deprived of sacrifice, we are faced with an inescapable alternative: either we acknowledge the truth of Christianity, or we contribute to the escalation to extremes by rejecting Revelation.

We do not acknowledge this escalation to extremes and our false differences because that would be equivalent to admitting guilt and responsibility into this escalation: 

To acknowledge this truth is to complete what Clausewitz was unable, or did not want, to finish: it is to say that the escalation to extremes is the appearance that truth now takes when it shows itself to humanity. Since each of us is responsible for the escalation, we naturally do not want to recognize this reality.

Christ will return to judge us. Historical Christianity has already failed already. Humanity is failing the test:

This is why we should not waste time on the duel, but see it as a clear sign of what is coming to fulfillment. The reason that people fight more and more is that there is a truth approaching against which their violence reacts. The Christ is the Other who is coming and who, in his very vulnerability, arouses panic in the system. In small archaic societies, the Other was the stranger who brings disorder, and who always ends up as the scapegoat. In the Christian world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims and whose return is heralded by the very effects of the escalation to extremes. What will he declare? That we have gone crazy, that the adulthood of humanity, which he announced through the cross, is a failure.

…

No one wants to see or understand that Christ’s “return,” in the implacable logic of the apocalypse, is simply the same thing as the end of the world.

To reiterate from last section, the only hope we have is to operate within mimesis and establish distance and then identify with the warring enemy:

To convert is to take distance from that corrupted sacred, but it does not mean escaping from mimetism. We have just understood that the process supposes a passage from imitation to identification, the re-establishment of distance within mimetism itself.  

This matter can no longer be served by law. All institutions will soon become impotent: 

The discussion about the duel was thus necessary, even by default. Carl Schmitt’s great mistake, though his reading of Clausewitz was very pro- found, was perhaps to have believed in the fecundity of violence, whether it is founding or instituted, war or law.

RG: But Schmitt is interesting to study for this very reason. We have seen that his legal construction of the enemy was obsolete with respect to what was emerging behind the general principle of hostility. It was impossible to redefine law based on violence when widespread destruction of all foundations was already underway. Clausewitz was announcing the end of Europe. We see him predicting Hitler, Stalin and all the rest, which is now nothing, the American non-thought in the West. Today we are truly facing nothingness. On the political level, on the literary level, on every level. You will see; it is happening little by little.

…

But are we still in a world where force can yield to law? This is precisely what I doubt. Law itself is finished. It is failing everywhere, and even excellent jurists, whom I know well, no longer believe in it. They see that it is collapsing, crumbling. Pascal already no longer believed in it. All of my intuitions are really anthropological in the sense that I see law as springing from sacrifice in a manner that is very concrete and not philosophical at all. I see this emergence of law in my readings in anthropology, in monographs on archaic tribes, where its arrival was felt. I see it emerge in Leviticus, in the verse on capital punishment, which concerns nothing other than stoning to death. This is the birth of law. Violence produced law, which is still, like sacrifice, a lesser form of violence. This may be the only thing that human society is capable of. Yet one day this dike will also break.

It may be hard to see how institutions derive from sacrifice. I think two things can be said. First, all institutions are founded upon sacrifice which is an expulsion of the old system: democracy expelled the monarchy, the court expelled the furies in the Oresteia etc. And all institutional power comes from the prestige of that expulsion and the sacredity of it. Second, the institutions which are built to control violence (so law and politics rather than charity and education) are still built off of sacrifice. In law, we rarely consider the social economic conditions that produced the murderer (we increasingly do because of Christianity) and the logic is very much find someone to blame and expel from society. Politics is about the friend-enemy distinction and finding a group that is responsible. 

Because of Christianity which showed the illegitimacy of sacrifice, our institutions have had to hide their sacrifice more and more to become more nuanced, abstracted, rational, and objective to avoid guilt. But because of this these institutions are less cathartic and do not have the same peace-bringing response that the old ones do. Furthermore, our cultural rejection of sacrifice is ahead of our institutions adaption of sacrifice so not only are their verdicts less cathartic but we also believe them less.  

TLDR: we are all violent and mimetic, we are always all responsible for a disaster. Institutions are designed to hide that. But we have begun to realize their injustice and institutions are thus crumbling. It would be much more cathartic if we attributed absolute evil to a person, but now we are beginning to recognize our interdependence, specifically, interdependence in violence. 

Chapter 5: Holderin's Sorrow

The Two Circles of the Gospels

This section contains three interconnected discussions. 

The first revolves around reason.

His first claim is that reality does operate under logic but it is not the logic of rationality. In other words, human interactions are not governed by rational decision making rooted from first principle ends but reciprocity. How does he explain the perceived rationality of the past few centuries where there are league of nations and rule of law etc? He either wants to say that yes we do have an independent rational capacity but it is extremely weak and no match for our mimetic urges. Or he would say that that our very capacity to reason is reciprocal, it is a type of mimetic action: we only do it when others do. HIs discussion on politics and war seem to favor this latter reading. It’s not that politics which operated under a different logic of rationality fails to contain war now but that politics never did contain war they both operate on the same logic of reciprocity. A good example is how Caesar broke the rule of law and, imitating him, the entire republic collapsed. Girard wants to show that human reality is not governed by rational calculation but reciprocal action:

Reality is not rational, but religious. This is what the Gospels tell us. This is at the heart of history’s contradictions, in the interactions that people weave with one another, in their relations, which are always threatened by reciprocity.

His second point is that reason is an institution of myth and is religious in nature. Reason, at least in the west, gained its divinity, its current sacrosanct by blaming all ills onto religion in general and Christianity in particular. From this expulsion, reason gained a degree of prestige that is unchallenged. We now believe that through reason alone can we bring peace just as we thought sacrifice could in archaic times:

It will perhaps have been our last mythology. We “believed” in reason, as people used to believe in the gods.

Of course, because the foundations of all institutions, including reason, is violent and violence has lost its founding power, reason is starting to lose its authority to. All institutions are crumbling: we now see critiques of how our logic is uniquely Western and not universal. (In the broadest sense possible, all institutions are necessarily founded on sacrifice because they had to displace an older institution that operated the same function. They always blamed the previous institution and scapegoat to an unjustified manner e.g. reason and its “killing of God“)

BC: What you are saying is that violence no longer has the capacity to produce law?

RG: That’s right.

BC: That it is incapable of producing truth, of producing reason?

The second revolves around hope. 

Girard discusses how the apocalypse precedes the passion in the Gospels. His claim is that there are two “passions” one on the cross and the other at the second coming at the end of time: 

There is an initial circle, which is Christ’s life and ends with the Passion. There is a second circle, which is human history and ends with the apocalypse. The second circle is contained in the first. Human history, undermined by a destructive principle, an escalation to extremes that now threatens the whole world, becomes a prelude to the Passion. What could be suggested by this structure if not Christ’s return at the end of history?

Between these two manifestations of Christ is our age where God is no longer present but neither is our sacrificial resources for peace. Humanity is driven to utter chaos:

Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, “I am the Messiah!” and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

…

Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. But anyone who endures to the end will be saved.

…

And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come.

…

What is Christ announcing in this passage from Matthew? That the escalation to extremes (note the mimetic doubles: “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom”) will make “the love of many . . . grow cold.” Thus, Providence cannot be tied to secular history, as Clausewitz wrote to his wife. Pascal was right: there is a reciprocal intensification of violence and truth, and it now appears before our eyes, or at least before the eyes of a small number, those whose love has not grown cold.

 This is an age that will be dominated by false prophets. False prophets are ones who claim to posses God or truth. This is dangerous because they invite imitation:

The false prophets are the ones who claim to “have god,” to speak in his name and are therefore to be imitated. It is impossible not to think of the mimetic struggle between Oedipus and Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. At the time of the Greeks, violent reciprocity indicates the imminence of the god, in other words, the violent sacred. What each is trying to snatch away from the other was the divinity that he claimed to have, and the more they fight, the nearer that divinity approaches, until it is tangible in the destruction threatening the group. Everyone is a false prophet at the end of the sacrificial crisis; in other words, everyone is possessed, inhabited by the god. The fascination specific to the sacred is one and the same as the contagion of violence.

This is like a removal of toddler wheels, humanity is forced to mature and complete the process of humanization without resorting to sacrifice:

Christ will have tried to bring humanity into adulthood, but humanity will have refused. I am using the future perfect on purpose because there is a deep failure in all this.

… 

This is why eschatology is simply the obverse of scientific reality when we look at things from a Darwinian perspective. It is because humanity was incomplete, because it was resorting to the falsehood of sacrifice, that Christ came to complete its “hominization.” 

Girard almost implies that we will, with absolute certainty, fail at this task of maturity. And here is where Girard seems to deposit his hope into divine intervention, that somehow, magically we will be reconciled through the return of Christ: 

The relevance of the apocalyptic texts is therefore absolutely striking when we finally accept their meaning. They say paradoxically that Christ will only return when there is no hope that evangelical revelation will be able to eliminate violence, once humanity realizes that it has failed. 

The apocalyptic spirit has this profound belief that Christ will return at the end. It is not up to us. 

There is nothing nihilistic about the apocalyptic spirit: it can make sense of the trend toward the worst only from within the framework of very profound hope. However, that hope cannot do without eschatology.

The third revolves around a normative solution, although it is unclear why a normative solution is needed given that disaster will bring about the second coming. 

Girard believes that violence renounced only on one side is vain and useless but unilateral renunciation is impossible:

Of course, but individual resistance to the escalation to extremes is essentially vain. The only way it might work is if it were collective, if all people stood “hand in hand,” as the song goes. We have to give up this happy automatic escape, which underlies every form of humanism.

He continues to say two things about a way out. 1. We can only interact with the divine (by divine here it is important to note he means transcendence, an escape from violence, rather than the sacred which is a production of violence) if we are distant from the other humans who cause violence. This can only be done by imitating a model who is also distant, Jesus. 2. Jesus is both close and distant at the same time. Perhaps this is because he was here and now has withdrawn? 

We now have to go further and say two things: one can enter into relations with the divine only from a distance and through a mediator: Jesus Christ. This contains the whole paradox that we have to deal with. It contains the new rationality that mimetic theory seeks to promote. It proclaims itself to be apocalyptic reasoning because it takes the divine seriously. In order to escape negative imitation, the reciprocity that brought people closer to the sacred, we have to accept the idea that only positive imitation will place us at the correct distance from the divine.

…

The imitation of Christ provides the proximity that places us at a distance. It is not the Father whom we should imitate, but his Son, who has withdrawn with his Father. His absence is the very ordeal that we have to go through. This is when, and only when, the religious should no longer be frightening, and the escalation to extremes could turn into its opposite. Such a reversal is nothing more than the advent of the Kingdom. What form will that advent take? We cannot imagine it. We will be able to do so only if we abandon all our old rationalist reflexes. Therefore, once again, everything depends on the meaning we give to religion.

“Near is/ And Difficult to Grasp, the God”

Holderlin and his contemporaries Nietzsche, Hegel, Schelling all have felt the absence of God. For the latter group the solution is to reintroduce the Greek gods, specifically Dionysus. “We so often hear that the great multitude should have a sensual religion. Not only the great multitude, but even philosophy needs it”. But Holderlin had the intuition that Dionysius was no longer possible after Christ, “the One who raises up the divine hidden in all religions, who frees holiness from the sacred”. “Mimetic theory has allowed us to conclude that the purpose of the Incarnation was to finish all religions, whose sacrificial crutches had become ineffective”. Dionysius no longer exists. To want to return to Dionysius is impossible, it will only lead to further violence. “To bet on Dionysius is to believe in the fertility of violence, while today we can see it as essentially destructive“.  

Holderin realized and embodied the symptom of his age: bipolarity. Because the transcendent Christian God had gone and people's models were internally mediation of other men:

Everything he said about the oscillation of his relations with those close to him is impressive. From his adolescence on he suffered the agony of “bipolarity,” the melancholic shift from one extreme to the other. He himself told Suzette Gontard that the oscillation was related to “insatiable ambition.” He had to be Schelling or nothing: this was the cruel alternative facing him, for he felt in his bones that the world had become completely unstable. In a world where we are each judged by our friends and loved ones, serene models no longer have any meaning. Meditation has been interiorized: the models are there, within reach. They invade me for an instant and I think I can dominate them, but then they escape and it is they who dominate me. I am always too far from or too close to them. This is the implacable law of mimetism.

…

By contrast, Hölderlin saw his final withdrawal as the only means of ceasing to oscillate between self-glorification and self-repudiation, the only means of overcoming that torture. He finds Christ in a more heroic and saintly manner than through becoming a clergyman, as his mother had wished when he was a student. He passes through the hell of bipolarity, the never-ending come-and-go of mimetic desire that makes us feel like we are everything when the “god is near,” and like nothing when the god moves away. Christ escapes, and allows us to escape, this alternation of the pendulum; he never becomes a rival for Hölderlin.

The solutions of his contemporaries, to bring back Dionysus, could only lead to disaster. Any God that walked among us that could be grasped and appropriated made the person doing the grasping a viable candidate for mimetic rivalry. e.g. jealousy from other females when their acquaintance mates with an Olympian.

The presence of the divine grows as the divine withdraws: it is the withdrawal that saves, not the promiscuity. Hölderlin immediately understood that divine promiscuity can be only catastrophic. God’s withdrawal is thus the passage in Jesus Christ from reciprocity to relationship, from proximity to distance. This is the poet’s basic intuition, which he discovered just when he began his own withdrawal. A god that one can appropriate is a god that destroys. 

The only thing left to do is for Holderlin to imitate a God that has withdrawn. Christ is near in the sense that his presence can be felt through his love or reading the Bible. Christ is difficult to grasp because, unlike the Greek gods, his presence does not lie in his proximity. He has withdrawn and no longer intervenes with human affair. Where mimetic rivalries increase, the truth of Christ, the innocence of the scapegoat, also become relevant:

Near is

And difficult to grasp, the God.

But where danger threatens

That which saves from it also grows.

Holderin’s imitates Christ for four major reasons. The first reason is that Christ establishes a healthy distance between him and God. The last three is that Christ helps him establish a healthy distance between him and other humans. 

First, Christ, when compared to the likes of Dionysus, will not enter rivalry with Holderlin because he is distant. He can still be imitated and his presence can still be felt in the Bible, but no one can “grasp him”. Christ will not enter into rivalry with Holderlin nor will Christ cause Holderlin to enter into rivalry with others. 

Christ escapes, and allows us to escape, this alternation of the pendulum; he never becomes a rival for Hölderlin. 

Second, because Christ is so distant he does not imitate any worldly person. HIs withdrawal, specifically his refusal to imitate men, deserves to be imitated.

Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the “withdrawal relationship” that links him with his Father

…

That saves is the understanding that there is only one good distance: the imitation of Christ in order to avoid the imitation of men.

Third, Christ at the moment when he could become the model of everyone, his resurrection, chose to withdrawal. He does not want to be everyone’s rival par excellence. Therefore, what must also be imitated in Christ is, paradoxically, his desire not to be imitated. 

He withdraws at the very point when he could dominate.

…

To imitate Christ is to refuse to impose oneself as a model and to always efface oneself before others. To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated.

Fourth, to imitate Christ is to see all other humans through Christ and through His love. This enables to identify with the other and care for them and love them as sons in Christ without descending into rivalry. 

Christ is the only one who immediately places us at the right distance. He is simultaneously “near and difficult to grasp.” His presence is not proximity. Christ teaches us to look at the other by identifying ourselves with Him, which prevents us from oscillating between too great proximity to and too great distance from the other whom we imitate. If we were to identify with the other, we would be imitating him in an intelligent manner.

All of this is to prevent rivalry. Girard operates under the idea that as soon as we get to close, as soon as we begin to imitate it is no longer in our control to not go into rivalry:

Imitating Christ thus means thwarting all rivalry, taking distance from the divine by giving it the Father’s face: we are brothers “in” Christ … The relationship [of love] sanctifies while reciprocity sacralizes by creating ties that are too strong. 

The second, third, and fourth reasons are enough to prevent all forms of imitation with men by not imitating and not making oneself imitatable. For Holderlin, this meant literally retreating into a tower for 40 years. Here we see the true pessimism of Girard. In a way he has given up that humanity can be reconciled by itself. That we are doomed and the only thing one can wish for is individual salvation. His prescription, by recommending we become not imitatable ipso facto limits this to an individual prescription. It can never spread. In the last section he noted that individual renunciation is vain while collective renunciation of violence is improbable. He thus resorts to individual salvation. 

This solution we have ended on is highly unsatisfactory. 1. This individualistic solution will never achieve a “positive contagion“. 2. It thwarts the other good of demythologization: creativity and innovation. 3. It does not actualize universal identification and positive mimesis. 4. For those who subscribe to Girard’s theory’s but do not have faith in Christianity, this is a disastrous solution because the world will descend into chaos. In Girard’s mind the moment of Chaos is the moment the second coming will occur and Jesus will award all the Holderlins left. But for someone who does not share these believes it means the utter destruction of the human race.

Rational Models and Mimetic Models

Girard confirms that our world is both the best and the worst its ever been. The former is true not only in the sense that there is the greatest possibility for reconciliation but also the greatest actuality of love:  

That ideal is not mine. Up to a certain point, we might be in a state of positive undifferentiation, in other words, identified with others. This is Christian love, and it exists in our world. It is even very active. It saves many people, works in hospitals, and even operates in some forms of research. Without this love, the world would have exploded long ago. We should not say that there are no legitimate, healthy political actions. However, politics is in itself powerless to control the rise of negative undifferentiation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst; this is what being in an eschatological time means. Our world is both the worst it has ever been, and the best. It is said that more victims are killed, but we also have to admit that more are saved than ever before. Everything is increasing. Revelation has freed possibilities, some of which are marvelous and others dreadful.

We are introduced to the rational model which is to imitate a model and be able to switch one’s attention at will. It is the ability to shift models. Rational models were possible in the age of transcendence, of external meditation but not in our age:

The rational model tries to oppose the mimetic model, which is always stuck on a single figure who has become a rival or an obstacle. The rational model cannot thwart mimetism. Mimetism’s law is implacable, as Clausewitz constantly reminds us. The distinction between the two models shows that we have definitely gone beyond external mediation and entered internal mediation.  

The rational model is a prerequisite for identification. Makes sense, in order to love everyone you need to be able to direct your attention to them. The rational model is not only a thing of the past but what we can expect in the Kingdom:

However, the rational model is not outdated. It allows us to think about what lies beyond the duel, which I call the Kingdom. 

Furthermore, the heroic tendency is a type of mimetic model, and is caused by having too many heroes as models as a child. In adulthood, one cannot escape the allure of any heroic models nearby:

What I would like to call heroic temptation is a form of hypnosis, of mimetic obstruction, of fixation on a model: a blockage of the identification process that, in order to function, should move very freely from one model to the next. The movement is natural if one has met the right models during one’s formative years. It is not at all so if one has missed the crucial stages. This is a true misfortune that no psychoanalysis or psychotherapy can ever change. Clausewitz was a standard bearer when he was years old. He was too immersed in the culture of heroism to be able to resist the magnetism of the Napoleonic model after Jena.

In the age of internal mediation, Girard believes that no rational models can prevail. We can no longer begin imitating and hope to not fall into mimetic rivalry:

Given the inevitability of mimetic models, it seems very difficult to describe a model that would remain rational. From this point of view, it is vain to try to imagine infallible procedures to prevent us from succumbing to imitation….. Given the extent of its growing control, escaping from mimetism is something only geniuses and saints can do.

Identification requires empathy and rational models, both love and distance. 

Excessive empathy is mimetic, but excessive indifference just as much. Identification with the other has to be envisaged as a means of correcting our mimetic tendencies. Mimetism brings me too close to or too far from the other. Identification makes it possible to see the other from the right distance. 

The distance is a distance where no imitation is possible however:

It is up to us to re-establish transcendence by resisting the irresistible attraction that others exercise upon us, and that always leads to violent reciprocity. Hölderlin was sublime in this respect. The ceremonious way that he received visitors in the tower in Tübingen consisted precisely in putting them at the right distance. To imitate Christ by keeping the other at the right distance is to escape the mimetic whirlpool: no longer imitate in order to no longer be imitated. 

This is why Girard said that knowledge of similarity is not enough. Clearly, in the middle of heated battle, the knowledge of reciprocity is not likely to change anything. Only love for the other through Christ and a distance through withdrawal is enough to renounce reciprocity. Distance and the refusal to imitate brings us just far enough to the other. Love brings us just close enough to the other.

Chapter 6-8

Chapters 6-8 have been skipped in this summary. In my first read through, it became clear that the most important parts of this book lied in 1-4 (historical application of mimetic theory and articulation of the apocalypse through Clausewitz) and chapter 5 (the solution). Chapter 6 "Clausewitz and Napoleon" details how Clausewitz mimetic rivalry and fixation upon Napoleon gave him a privileged position to articulate his theory. Chapter 7 "France and Germany" is an investigation of mimesis in the two societies. Chapter 8 "The Pope and Emperor" is an apology of the institutions of the Catholic church

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