Discourses of Violence (Girard)

[Emil Niculescu]

Quoting "Paul B. Gallagher" <paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM>:
Hello Paul,

I find Girard's theory very interesting and worth reading. You write that
"Voluntary sacrifices for a cause can be a wonderful gift, but
> compulsory sacrifices are criminal acts of theft or murder. Anyone 
> with even a cursory knowledge of Russian history should understand 
> that." I don't think that the Russian or whatever community performs 
> the sacred wants to admit that they are involved in deliberate and 
> compulsory acts of murder. That's a totally different issue. What 
> Girard is trying to say that the act of transcendence and the sacred 
> always has some sort of violence attached to it. It's hard to think 
> of examples when this is not the case.

However, I have a bit of reservation in using Girard because surely there must
be more specific ways in which we can read Babel and "ritual." A more 
important
question would be: What is the function of Babel's text in the Russian 
readerly
community of the time? The answer will surely be that, yes, we can find
Girardian violence there as we can find it anywhere in Western culture. But
does that really illuminate Babel for the context it was created? I don't have
the answer. I wish to be illuminated myself.

Best,
Emil Niculescu
Yale
>> Bob, I was referring to Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred, which
>> argues that violence is an essential manifestation of the sacred, a
>> way traditional societies achieve transcendence, and that this
>> violence is often expressed through sacrifice. The sacrifice of
>> victims/scapegoats purifies the community and, just as importantly,
>> unifies it.  Think of Pavlichenko's apprehension of life, "really
>> getting to know it," through trampling his master, or Lyutov's 
>> sacrifice of the goose, the cossacks sitting like heathen idols,
>> their invitation to Lyutov at the end and so on. But please look at
>> the Girard book rather than going by my superficial summary.
>
> I certainly don't pretend to be an expert on Girard's book or his 
> theses (I haven't read them), but the views described above seem 
> thoroughly misguided. In some Western societies, violence against 
> outsiders has been used as a unifying force, but it has always led to 
> the destruction of the warmonger and much of his society; similarly, 
> dictators who repress their own people through violence achieve no 
> purification except to the extent that they provoke the development 
> of a unified opposition to their crimes.
>
> Voluntary sacrifices for a cause can be a wonderful gift, but 
> compulsory sacrifices are criminal acts of theft or murder. Anyone 
> with even a cursory knowledge of Russian history should understand 
> that. And anyone familiar with the recent history of the Roman 
> Catholic Church will know that there is nothing sacred in the 
> violence perpetrated against these innocent children.
>
> -- 
> War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
> --
> Paul B. Gallagher
> pbg translations, inc.
> "Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
> http://pbg-translations.com
>
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