Discourses of Violence (Girard)

[Mark Leiderman]

Quoting Emil Niculescu <emil.niculescu at YALE.EDU>:

> 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


Far from being an expert in Girard too, I’d like to add that Girard goes far
beyond Western religious tradition and bases his argument on the
anthropological data from around the world while applying his conclusions to
Western cultural models mainly: from Christ to Dostoevsky. His “Violence and
the Sacred” focuses on the process of scapegoating as a means to overcome what
he calls a "sacrificial crises", or the collapse of societal order – something
very similar to the state of a revolution, especially Russian. The application
of this model to Babel makes, in my mind, perfect sense since it explains
seemingly unmotivated acts of violence performed by the Cossacks as rituals of
scapegoating that they intuitively reproduce (or recreate) for the overcoming
of chaos and formation ad hoc of a new societal order.  In my view and – and I
believe, in Rima Salys' too - this approach does illuminate Babel's stories as
a discovery of a deeply archaic and ritualistic nature of a newly-born soviet
communality. At least for me, reading of Babel’s stories through  Girard’s
models sometimes exposes the symbolic meaning of hardly noticeable, seemingly
realistic, details, and this new angle can drastically shift the
interpretation of the entire story. From my experience, such stories
as “Salt”, “A Letter”, “My  First Goose”, “The Son of the Rabbi”, and of
course “Pavlichenko’s Life Story” (mentioned by Rima) produce especially
interesting and multi-voiced resonance with Girard’s theories.

With best regards,
Mark Lipovetsky



> >> 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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*******************************************************************************
Mark Lipovetsky [Leiderman]
Associate Professor of Russian Studies and Comparative Literature,
Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures,
CU-Boulder, UCB 276, Boulder CO 80309
Fax: (303)492-5376
Tel: 303-492-7957

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