UB-INNSBRUCK FAKULTATSBIBLIOTHEK THEOLOGIE Z3 CONTAGIO^ 100 010 VOLUME 10 SPRING 2003 EDITOR ANDREW MCKENNA LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ADVISORY EDITORS RENFI GIRARD, STANFORD UNIVERSITY RAYMUND SCHWAGER, UNIVERSITAT INNSBRUCK JAMES WILLIAMS, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY EDITORIAL BOARD REBECCA ADAMS CHERYL K3RK-DUGGAN UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME MEREDITH COLLEGE MARK ANSPACH PAISLEY LIVINGSTON llCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE, PARIS MCGILL UNIVERSITY CESAREO BANDERA CHARLES MABEE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA ECUMENICAL THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, DETROIT DIANA CULBERTSON KENT STATE UNIVERSITY JOZEF NIEWIADOMSKI THEOLOGISCHE HOCHSCHULE, LINZ JEAN-PIERRE DUPUY STANFORD UNIVERSITY, JICOLE POLYTECHNIQUE SUSAN NOWAK SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PAUL DUMOUCHEL UNIVERSITE DU QUEBEC A MONTREAL WOLFGANG PALAVER UNIVERSITAT INNSBRUCK ERIC GANS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES MARTHA REINEKE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN IOWA SANDOR GOODHART WHITMAN COLLEGE TOB1N SIEBERS UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ROBERT HAMERTON-KELLY STANFORD UNIVERSITY THEE SMITH EMORY UNIVERSITY HANS JENSEN AARHUS UNIVERSITY, DENMARK MARK WALLACE SWARTHMORE COLLEGE MARK JUERGENSMEYER UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, EUGENE WEBB SANTA BARBARA UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON Rates for the annual issue of Contagion are: individuals $10.00; institutions $32. The editors invite submission of manuscripts dealing with the theory or practical application of the mimetic model in anthropology, economics, literature, philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology, and cultural studies. Essays should conform to the conventions of The Chicago Manual of Style and should not exceed a length of 7,500 words including notes and bibliography. Accepted manuscripts will require final sub- mission on disk written with an IBM compatible program. Please address correspondence to Andrew McKenna, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Loyola University, Chicago, IL 60626. Tel: 773-508-2850; Fax: 773-508-2893; Email: [email protected]. Member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals CELJ © 1996 Colloquium on Violence and Religion at Stanford ISSN 1075-7201 Cover illustration: Goya, El sueno de la razon produce momtruos (Los Caprichos, #43) Volume 10 CONTENTS Spring 2003 The Ontological Obsessions of Radical Thought Stephen Gardner On the Rationality of Sacrifice Jean-Pierre Dupuy 23 Ransom's God Without Thunder. Remythologizing Violence and Poeticizing the Sacred Gary M. Ciuba 40 "Murther, By a Specious Name": Absalom andAchitophel's Poetics of Sacrificial Surrogacy Gary Ernst 61 Iconoclasm in the Old and New Testaments . .. 83 Peter Goldman The Place of Rene Girard in Contemporary Philosophy Guy Vanheeswijck 95 Rene Girard and the Legacy of Alexandre Kojeve . 111 George Erving Mimesis and Scapegoating in the Works of Hobbes, Rousseau, and 126 Kant Wolfgang Palaver Indifference and Envy: The Anthropological Analysis of Modern 149 Economy Paul Dumoucnel Complex Systems, Imitation, and Mythical Explanations 161 Antonio Machuco Rosa Notes on Contributors 182 UB INNSBRUCK + C122598307 Editor's Note As has been past practice, the editors of Contagion continue to select for referee process papers from the annual meetings of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. The present volume contains some of the proceedings from the 2001 Colloquium in Antwerp on "Mimetic Theory and the History of Philosophy," as well as from the 2002 Colloquium at Purdue University on "Judaism, Christianity, and the Ancient world: Mimesis, Sacrifice, and Scripture." The volume also contains articles submitted directly to the journal for consideration. We continue to welcome manuscripts from authors in all academic disciplines and fields of professional activity which bear on Rene Girard's mimetic model of human behavior and cultural organization. Future volumes will also include a section for Notes and Comments, allowing for responses to previous essays and discussion of texts and issues relating to interests of the Colloquium. We wish again to express our thanks to Patricia Clemente, Administrative Secretary of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola University Chicago, for her resourceful vigilance in seeing the journal through to its timely production. THE ONTOLOGICAL OBSESSIONS OF RADICAL THOUGHT1 Stephen Gardner University ofTulsa Rather than make an inventory of this hodgepodge of dead ideas, we should take as our starting point the passions that fueled it. Francois Furet (4) Any synthesis is incomplete which ends in an object or an abstract concept and not a living relationship between two individuals. Rene Girard (Deceit 178) arl Marx offers two observations which I take as the point of ^departure for a critique of the anti-liberal historicism in thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Marx himself. The first is that the modern project of emancipation presupposes that "man is the supreme being for man," and the second is that modern equality gives rise to its own type of relations of/^equality, indeed of "master and slave." I will not interpret these observations as Marx himself did, in economic terms. Instead, I use them as clues to uncover the kind of human relation implicit in but also hidden by the ontology of freedom on which radical historicism rests. By ontology of freedom, I mean the view that "being" is historical and grounded in radical freedom or contingency. For this theory, history is a process of creation ex nihilo, a power traditionally reserved for God. Such a theory is advanced in different forms by Heidegger, Nietzsche, 11 thank the Earhart Foundation and the University ofTulsa for their support for the project of which this is a part. I also thank Jim Williams and Jake Howland their comments. 2 The Ontological Obsessions of Radical Thought and Marx, as the key to a radical critique of bourgeois society. Thus the ontological obsessions of anti-bourgeois ire. I suggest that the fascination of the radical critique of bourgeois society with historical "being" reflects the transformation of human relations by "equality of conditions," in the sense of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French sociologist and student of the democratic soul.2 As modern equality subverts the old orthodoxies, human beings tend to seek their gods in each other, as models of "freedom." And so there arises a "master-slave" psychology from the impact of equality, legitimized by romanticism and the modern cult of Eros. This, I suspect, is the effectual truth of freedom in Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Marx.3 Rene Girard offers a classic description of this psychology in his analysis of the modern novel, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, to which I am indebted throughout this paper. As regards that book, my general thesis—applicable not only to Marx but also to Heidegger and Nietzsche—may be stated as follows.4 Girard's analysis of the literary characters Don Quixote, Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Raskolnikov, and others is in effect a devastating if indirect critique of modern radical thought, or the pursuit of radical freedom. Modern novels, he argues, tend to divide into two types: either "romantic" or "romanesque." The latter reveal the romantic illusions of the modern psyche, rather than merely reflect them like the former. "Romanesque" novelists such as Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Proust are great because they uncover the human relations behind romantic passions and the theories that legitimate them. The "romanesque" novel is a Socratic labor of self- knowledge in which the author emancipates himself from his own past romantic illusions. In effect, it exposes the fictions associated with the modem novel itself. The "romantic" novel, to the contrary, abandons self- 1 By "equality of conditions" is meant the de-legitimation of accidents of birth such as aristocratic lineage (or today race, gender, or ethnicity) as limits on one's social ambition or destiny. It is equivalent to the rise of vocational choice. •' For a development of this theme in the context of early modern thought (Descartes to Hegel) as an indirect critique of the radical critics from Marx to Heidegger and after, see Stephen Gardner, Myths of Freedom: Equality, Modern Thought, and Philosophical Radicalism. 4 Cesareo Bandera, in The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary Fiction, also makes a "mimetic" critique of Marx, stressing his work as seeking to restore a sacrificial mythology as the bond of society, an attempt at the basis of totalitarian- ism (see his Appendix). The Ontological Obsessions of Radical Thought 3 knowledge for the platonic pursuit of "authentic being."5 It offers us "romantic heroes," models like Quixote's Amadis of Gaul—fictions endowed with the patina of reality by awakening our desires. This distinction can be applied to the cycle of radical thinkers. If the "romanesque" novel is genuinely philosophical because it debunks the "literary" illusions of modern desire, radical philosophy is to the contrary a kind of "romantic" literature, because it is enthralled by those illusions. Its seminal thinkers reenact the same passions as their opposite numbers in fiction, but in the "literary" framework of a dramatic theory of history. So radical thought is really a kind of "novel" in Girard's sense—a "romantic" novel. It feeds the passions with myths of freedom. Moreover, the thinker not only writes this novel, but scripts himself the central role within it, the hero of history.6 3 In Socrates, the primary stress in philosophy is on self-knowledge; with Plato, this morphs into the erotic pursuit of "being." Philosophy