René Girard’s Mimetic Desire and Scapegoat Theory Explained

This article explores the theories of René Girard, particularly his structuralist approach to understanding human desire, conflict, and the foundations of culture. It begins by contextualizing Girard's work within the intellectual landscape of the 20th century, drawing parallels and distinctions with structuralism, Marxism, and Freudian thought.

Girard's Intellectual Context and the Seduction of Totality

The author recounts a personal experience as an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1990s, where Girard taught. At that time, Girard's seminars had a "cult-like feeling" due to the pre-internet era, attracting students from around the world. Girard's theories offered a comprehensive system that purported to explain everything, much like Marxism did for earlier generations. This "totality" was deeply seductive, revealing "hidden secrets of the world" and providing a new lens through which to understand human existence.

Girard's thought is presented as emerging from a dialogue with Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralism. The core idea of structuralism, which Girard largely accepts, is that meaning is not inherent but relational and context-dependent. Words, for instance, signify because of their relationship to other words within a system. This relational meaning, while stable within a synchronic system, raises the question of whether there's a meaningful reality anterior to the structure itself.

Structuralism and the Relational Nature of Meaning

For structuralists like Lévi-Strauss, culture is a system of signs analogous to language. Everything, from myths and kinship systems to food preparation, can be understood through the lens of how language functions. Meaning is not produced by an individual subject; rather, "myths think themselves through people." This decentering of the individual subject means that agency resides in the structure itself, not in individual consciousness.

Girard's Break from Lévi-Strauss: The Search for Anterior Reality

Girard, while starting from structuralist premises, ultimately breaks from Lévi-Strauss. He criticizes Lévi-Strauss for remaining at a superficial level, analyzing signs without penetrating to an "anterior reality" or the "thing itself" (Ding an sich). Girard seeks to go beyond the phenomenon to understand the deeper questions of human existence, much like Heidegger's critique of Husserl. He believes Lévi-Strauss's focus on "man as such" rather than "actual men" misses the core of human experience.

Girard's longing is to transcend form and get back to substance, to analyze structure and then delve beneath it to address the "destiny and fate of man." He is concerned about the postmodernist premise that there might be no such thing as a subject, and he aims to uncover the "real human signifies beneath the play of signifiers."

Girard's Two-Part Model: Mimetic Desire and the Scapegoat

Girard's theory is presented as a two-part model:

Part 1: Mimetic Desire

The first part focuses on imitation, specifically the mimetic nature of desire. Girard argues that desire is not intrinsic or self-generated; instead, it is an imitation of the desire of others. This is illustrated with a triangular model:

• Object: The desired item.
• Subject: The individual who desires.
• Model/Mediator: Another subject whose desire for the object is imitated by the first subject.

Desire, in this model, originates not in the subject or the object, but through the imitation of the model/mediator. The object's significance is secondary; the momentum of desire comes from the relationship between the subject and the mediator. This concept is exemplified by children wanting the toy another child possesses, regardless of other available toys.

This mimetic desire can escalate into mimetic rivalry, especially when the desired object is finite. If unchecked, this rivalry can further escalate into mimetic violence.

A key concept here is the scandal, where the mediator, initially admired, becomes an obstacle and is therefore hated. This creates a "sadomasochistic relationship" between the subject and the mediator, analogous to Hegel's master-slave dialectic.

Girard introduces the distinction between internal and external mediation:

• External Mediation: Occurs when there is significant social distance between the subject and the mediator (e.g., a 2-year-old and a 10-year-old). This distance acts as a constraint on mimetic conflict.
• Internal Mediation: Occurs when boundaries between subject and mediator are blurred, and there is little social distance (e.g., two 2-year-olds). This allows mimetic rivalry to escalate into violence without inhibition.

The decline of traditional social hierarchies and increased social mobility, for instance, can lead to more uninhibited mimetic conflict because the social distinctions that once restrained rivalry are eroded. When differences are effaced, reciprocal violence intensifies, further erasing distinctions. This "absence of differentiation" is always a crisis for Girard, as differentiation is the "culture-supporting skeleton" that holds society together.

Part 2: The Scapegoat Mechanism

The second, more "trippy" part of the model, deals with substitution and the scapegoat. Girard posits that the crisis of mimetic violence is resolved through the expulsion or sacrifice of a scapegoat, also called a "surrogate victim."

This scapegoat mechanism works by diverting the attention of all parties from their mutual conflict and uniting them against a single victim. This act of collective violence against the scapegoat acts as a "cleansing mechanism," restoring order. Historical examples include the burning of witches, lynchings, and Stalinist show trials, where a mob coalesces against a perceived enemy.

For Girard, solidarity requires an enemy. The collective anger and rivalry are projected onto the scapegoat, who becomes a symbolic enemy. This is not just about destruction but also a "cleansing impulse," where society purges itself of what it perceives as the source of its violence and disorder.

Girard emphasizes the "innocence of the victims" and the "collective polarization in opposition to them." The persecutors, caught in their own logic, see themselves as passive and reactive, believing the scapegoat is the sole cause of all problems. This projection of causality onto the scapegoat is a "fundamental misattribution."

The victim's murder brings peace, leading to the retrospective attribution that the victim's existence must have caused the initial turmoil. This is what Girard calls double transference: the scapegoat is seen as both the cause of chaos and the cause of order. The Greek word pharmakos, meaning both poison and remedy, encapsulates this dual role.

The victim, though arbitrarily chosen, acquires a "mystical potency" and is transformed into the Sacred (with a capital S). This "making the victim a god" is the mob's projection of magical qualities onto the victim, obscuring its own violence. The Sacred, in Girard's view, is "the sum of human assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis."

Culture as a Product of Sacrifice

Girard argues that violence, after passing through the victim, returns to the mob in the form of culture. Three main aspects of culture sustain the order founded on this murder:

1. Prohibition: Normative and negatively prescriptive rules designed to prevent mimetic conflict. They maintain distinctions between categories (sacred/profane, social classes) and control objects that cannot be divided peacefully.
2. Ritual: Positive counterparts to prohibitions, reenacting the original scapegoat sacrifice in a controlled manner. Rituals reinforce the legitimacy of past sacrifices and the cultural order derived from them.
3. Myth: For Girard, myths are not just stories but the narratives of the scapegoat's murder told from the perspective of the murderers. They serve to justify and sanctify the violence as necessary for societal order. Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Girard believes there is always a "real victim beneath the myth," and by inverting the myth, one can access this truth.

The Reality Reference: Identifying with the Victim

Girard's ultimate point is that the "reality reference" always lies with the victim. To deconstruct myth and uncover truth, one must tell and grasp the story from the victim's point of view.

As a deeply Catholic thinker, Girard sees Christianity as a radical break from this tradition. The Christian narrative, by telling the story of Jesus's murder from the perspective of the murdered, identifies with the victim. This is not about God's absence but about acknowledging that "we have killed him."

Girard offers a hopeful path forward, unlike Freud. While human beings are fundamentally irrational and their motives hidden, there is a way to move beyond sacrifice and reach truth: by identifying with the victim.