Modernity and mimetic desire: A critique of René Girard
2022; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8675.12640
ISSN1467-8675
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
ResumoLe temps et la force des choses ont tout simplifié sur cette terre, et après quelques milliers d'années, le monde, d'abord si confus, si divers, si inconnu, si hostile à lui-même, s'est ramassé peu à peu et organisé de telle sorte, que le philosophe qui spécule sur son avenir peut et doit le chercher tout entier dans celui de cette civilisation dominante dont Paris, Londres et Berlin sont les foyers. La connaissance du secret de l'histoire ne donne pas celle de ses voies. Among the emblematic voices of the 20th century we count René Girard. With the unrelenting force of a prophet, he expressed the sense of spiritual crisis that defined his time, and like the prophets, he carried a stern message. From studies of archaic myths, he conjured up a world teetering on the brink of disaster, riveted by mimetic violence from which only the sacrifice of an innocent victim—Christ—could bring release. Violence and faith are inextricably linked in Girard's work. They require, and repel, one another. Each interpellates an aspect of modernity. To find out how, we shall examine the entanglements between mimetic desire and sovereignty, arguably the defining feature of political modernity. In seeking a confrontation with sovereignty, we want to move beyond the conventional, and sterile, opposition between the subject and the state, the political form that has grown up around sovereignty. Our aims are twofold: we want to explore the role of mimetic exchange in the workings of sovereign power. We shall show that, by forming a relief around sovereign power, mimetic theory brings into sharper focus the way sovereignty connected with those it governed, and so sheds light on why it was, and why it ceased to be, such a successful format of government. But the confrontation with sovereignty also provides us with an opportunity to interrogate mimetic theory as to its political rationality. This, in turn, enables us to say something about the rise, in 20th-century philosophy, of themes like sacrificial violence and sacred life, and of a certain type of paganism. To uncover the ways in which modern society governed the formation and release of mimetic desire, we shall ask a question Girard does not ask: how did modern society manage to ward off mimetic crisis? Given the viral nature of mimetic contagion, what enabled modern society to defer the moment when rivalry spills over into violence? Girard notes that the states of Europe maintained relative stability on the continent from the Vienna Congress to the First World War (Girard, 2010, p. 9), but because he saw society as poised on the brink of crisis, he did not enquire into the means of its deferral. He did not consider the strategies that thinkers of the sovereign state (Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel) developed for the purposes of managing mimetic desire. Knowing how mimetic desire was dealt with in the sovereign state allows us to locate the moment at which mimetic exchange becomes mimetic crisis, and to grasp the implications of this moment for political life. In the first part, we examine how Girard situates his mimetic theory in relation to modernity. This is significant because modernity serves an essentially negative function for Girard. It is a slumber we must awake from. Girard wants to tear us away from the Hegelian notion of a reconciliation through the state, to which he opposes the ultimate experience of "how Christ suffered in his flesh" (Girard, 2010, p. 29). To find out how the sovereign state attenuated this corporeal aspect of Christian faith, we examine how sovereignty dealt with Revelation, a topic that has been abundantly researched of late (Bain, 2020; Newman, 2019; Paipais, 2020), including in a Girardian vein (Cerella, 2020). Contrary to what Girard tells us, Hegelian reconciliation is not arrived at by denying or turning a blind eye to transcendence. As we shall see, Hegel's notion of a humankind that is reconciled in and through subjection to the state involves a practice going back to Hobbes of substituting a replacement object for God, with the effect of blocking the spread of mimetic contagion by placing at the heart of society a political object of desire—the sovereign—that deflects rivalry. In the second part, we examine why this practice ceased to be operative. Our analysis shall show that the escalation of mimetic conflict went hand in hand with the supersession of sovereignty by formations better able to solicit existential commitment, above all, the nation. To shed light on this destitution of sovereignty, we turn to the work of Friedrich Julius Stahl, a 19th-century philosopher whose theory of state would form the constitutional chassis of the German Empire. On the basis of a critique of Hegel's philosophy that in many respects anticipates Girard's critique, Stahl ushers in a new configuration of political space, with momentous consequences for the flow of mimetic desire in society. The first and second parts treat different aspects of how modernity articulates itself around mimetic exchange. In the third and final part, we inverse the perspective to uncover the intuition of modernity that is at the heart of Girard's work. We follow him as he engages with the global crises that afflict the 20th century, especially the Cold War, the crisis that most immediately frames his work. Girard struggles to find his bearings in this unbounded space where mimetic rivalry rages but where violence does not follow suit. To find out what gives rise to this disorientation, we situate his reading of the Cold War in relation to two interventions that navigate the same space: Carl Schmitt's reflections on the rise of the partisan and the analysis by Frantz Fanon of the anticolonial struggle in Algeria. The proximity of Girard's theory to one intervention, and the distance to another, allows us to identify temporal and spatial coordinates for the experience of ultimate exposure around which Girard develops his mimetic theory. This experience may constitute an absolute beyond which we cannot go, but as we shall see, the modernity it maps onto has perhaps had its time. For Stendhal as for Hegel the reign of individual violence is over; it must make way for something else. Hegel relied on logic and historical reflection to determine that something else. […] But the novelist mistrusts logical deductions. He looks around him and within himself. He finds nothing to indicate that the famous reconciliation is just around the corner. Stendhalian vanity, Proustian snobbism, and the Dostoyevskian underground are the new forms assumed by the struggle of consciousnesses in a world from which physical and, depending on circumstance, economic violence is absent. Force is merely the crudest weapons available to the consciousnesses drawn up against each other and consumed by their own nothingness (Girard, 1990, pp. 142–143; translation amended). Girard shall not waiver in his assessment of Hegel. Returning to the question decades later, he recognizes the element of tragedy in Hegel's philosophy, but notes that he abandons Christian anthropology "along the way" for the comforts of knowing that humankind can be reconciled in the here and now, through subjection to the State (Girard, 2010, p. 29). This Hegel could only do by turning a blind eye to the destructive power of mimetic rivalry. By dint of that blindness, he persuaded himself that violence could be stabilized in a social hierarchy, and redeemed in a theodicy that unfolds as a history of the State. To Girard, Hegel's belief in reconciliation is just that a belief that ultimately bespeaks a lack of depth. Girard does not enquire into its enabling historico-political conditions, and as Hegel stands in for all of modernity, the confrontation with him dispenses Girard from reaching further back. In fairness, there are indications that Girard is aware that earlier movements in modernity might be relevant to his concerns. Thus, he points to the affinity between his mimetic theory and Hobbes' conception of social life, noting that the limiting case from which Hobbes departs—the state of nature with its war of all against all—is exemplary of a society in the grips of mimetic crisis (Girard, 2001, pp. 8, 24). This intuition is borne out by Hobbes' text. Its description of social interaction within the commonwealth makes reference to the same mechanisms that stoke mimetic rivalry in archaic society. Social life, as it is presented in Chapter 11 of the Leviathan, is an incessant competition for "riches, honor, command, or other power" that might at any moment spill over into violence. Hobbes' analysis closely anticipates Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry.11 On the relationship between Girard and Hobbes, see Palaver (2013, pp. 99, 170–172, 225–226). Indeed, in describing the "secret hatred" disguised as love we feel when receiving benefits that we cannot requite from someone whom we consider as our equal (Hobbes, 1994, pp. 58–59), Hobbes comes tantalizingly close to Girard's idea of a model-obstacle. Girard does not develop these structural parallels about which we shall have more to say. But he does skirt the question as he comes to the end of his enquiry into the place of violence in archaic society. In conclusion, he asks how the victimage mechanism carries over into monarchy, the institution that will define the early modern age, to which he responds by distinguishing between two types of society: societies in which a central power strongly marked by its ritualistic origins incorporates a reference to foundational violence, and societies where no trace of violence is retained. In "the first type of societies, and for reasons that escape us, society in its entirety tends to converge around a more or less permanent representative of the original victim, a representative in whose hands is concentrated a power that is political as much as it is religious" (Girard, 1977, p. 458). Girard speculates that what is at stake has implications beyond the institution of monarchy, and that it engages the concept of sovereignty, but perhaps sensing that he has come up against a limit to mimetic theory, he does not probe the distinction, which bears directly on the specificity of political modernity. And as the power, so also the honour of the sovereign ought to be greater than that of any or all the subjects. For in the sovereignty is the fountain of hounour. The dignities of lord, earl, duke, and prince are his creatures. As in the presence of the master, the servants are equal, and without any honour at all, so are the subjects in the presence of the sovereign. And though they shine, some more, some less, when they are out of his sight, yet in his presence they shine no more than the stars in [the] presence of the sun (Hobbes, 1994, p. 117). What is the basis of imitating Jesus? It cannot be his ways of being or his personal habits: imitation is never about that in the Gospels. Neither does Jesus propose an ascetic rule of life in the sense of Thomas à Kempis and his celebrated Imitation of Christ, as admirable as that work may be. What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble God the Father as much as possible (Girard, 2001, p. 13). Girard struggles to pinpoint what it is about Christ that stops mimetic exchange from developing into rivalry. Defining the imitation Christi by what it is not, he excludes, without explanation, imitation that would revolve around the emulation/appropriation of a way of being, or of a specific way of life. In trying to be like Jesus, we imitate a desire that cannot be satisfied; Jesus may be of the Father, but cannot become him. Resemblance, not identity. This is an exact structural parallel to the situation of the sovereign, whose body is a transient vehicle for a power that emanates from a locus that he could never come to occupy or possess. The mimetic dynamics that Girard outlines in the above passage is arguably more true, because more revealing, of the sovereign than it is of Christ. It shows how Christ could remain untouched by mimetic conflict, a condition of moving beyond it. In relation to the sovereign, it shows how a power that is monstrous by nature can be endowed with humanity, and how a political object of desire that diffuses mimetic rivalry can be kept at the heart of society. The duality inherent in the figure of Christ—man–God—is replicated, and concretized, in the contradiction between the transgenerational institution that is the monarchy and the mortal body of the individual that incarnates it at a given time, as exemplified in a succession of royal penitents who, like Christ on the Cross, toiled to render themselves worthy of their august, divinely ordained office.22 On this point, see Kantorowicz (1957, pp. 44–50). Hobbes references the idea of the king's two bodies in Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student on the Common Laws of England (Hobbes, 1970, p. 160). The homology between the sovereign and Christ is the key to understanding how the sovereign state could ward off mimetic crisis for as long as it did. Given Girard's insights into the affinity between the monarch and the sacrificial victims of archaic society, we might have expected him to pick up on the power of modern political society to modulate/metabolize mimetic desire. He does not. His inattention to the way social order mimics aspects of transcendence leads him to overlook a series of social inhibitors of desire that nestled in the political theology underpinning the rise of the sovereign state. For reasons we have touched on, Hobbes' main concern is to reserve the authoritative interpretation of Holy Scripture for the sovereign. As God does not speak directly to man anymore, enthusiasm, the capacity to act as the mouthpiece of God that at one time made the prophets the leaders of Israel, can no longer serve as a means of arriving at "the rules and precepts necessary to the knowledge of our duty both to God and man" (Hobbes, 1994, p. 249; cf. p. 44). Determining what these rules and precepts are falls to the sovereign, or, rather, to the universities that he controls, and in this task they rely not on inspiration but on "wise and learned interpretation and careful ratiocination."33 John Locke adopts the same strategy. He dismisses enthusiasm, the "Conceits of a warmed or over-weening Brain" that wants to set up "immediate" Revelation, and insists that we should only receive "attested Revelation," so Revelation that is socially mediated (Locke, 2011, pp. 698–699, 704). Enthusiasm is first and foremost a question of who gets to wield the power of religion in society, but it is also about desire. Hobbes sees enthusiasm as an instance of madness, which he defines as having "some imagination of such predominance above all the rest that we have no passion but from it" (Hobbes, 1969, p. 51; cf. Hobbes, 1994, p. 41).44 On Hobbes' conception of madness, see Weber (2007, pp. 107–118). On the positive function that madness and inspiration fulfilled in Renaissance political theory, see Ciliberto (2019, pp. 205–211). Madness is desire that fixates on an object. For having tied his theory to the fiction of a state where one desire drowns out all other considerations, Hobbes cannot unpack the implication of madness, desire, and social life. But it is significant that, in speaking of enthusiasm, he should omit any reference to faith or to privileged access to God. As Hobbes employs the term, enthusiasm is merely a misuse of language, "the insignificant speeches of madmen" (Hobbes, 1994, p. 44; cf. p. 69). When someone claims "that God spake in them," this is not a manifestation of transcendence that undercuts the social hierarchy; it is simply a failure to act in conformity with the standards of social behavior, and should be addressed as such. In taking enthusiasm back to madness, that is, the fixation of desire, Hobbes showed the way. Spinoza and Hegel both pick up on the idea that desire must be kept liquid at all times. In his Ethics, Spinoza proposes to address the pathology through regulatory behavioral interventions that dissociate affect from the thought of an external object upon which it could fixate (Spinoza, 1985, pp. 598–599, cf. p. 600–601).55 On this point, see Moreau (2006a, pp. 124–125). On the regulation of affect in Spinoza, see Moreau (2006b, p. 149). In Hegel's theory of state, intervention is not the work of the individual but of market society. The liquefaction of desire happens in and through a market-driven proliferation and satisfaction of needs that he ties explicitly to imitation (Hegel, 1991, p. 230). What Girard diagnoses as Hegel's naïve optimism about human nature, his blue-eyed confidence that man's propensity to violence can be redeemed depends on a social dispositif that operates to keep desire liquid. Despite its claim to have internalized every possible future, Hegel's philosophy, and the world it gave expression to, was more precarious than Girard realized. The way it unraveled is key to understanding the spread of mimetic contagion in modern society. To this question, we now turn. Hegel's philosophy has died many times over. Attention usually focuses on the death it suffers at the hands of his two most formidable opponents: Marx and Kierkegaard, who would, each in his own way, stretch Hegelian dialectics beyond its breaking point to open up a passage into a promised land. Here, we shall be concerned with a death that plays out somewhere between the extremes of Marx and Kierkegaard, in the work of 19th-century political philosopher Friedrich Julius Stahl. Like Marx, Stahl wants to find the "real basis" (tatsächlichen Grund) that underpins every system of philosophy (Stahl, 1847, p. 5). Like Kierkegaard, he protests the foreclosure of transcendence in Hegel's philosophy. As we trace the stages in Stahl's confrontation with Hegel, we see how mimetic conflict comes to take over political life. We also see how other semantic formations edge out sovereignty. Today, Stahl is remembered as the chief ideologue of the Prussian restoration (Füßl, 1988, pp. 32–33, 356; Grosser, 1963, pp. 82–83, 124–125; von Oertzen, 1974, p. 74). In 1840, after years of considerable hardship at the universities of Erlangen and Würzburg, he was appointed to the chair of natural and ecclesiastic law at the University of Berlin, at the express wish of the very conservative Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and would rise to become one of the monarch's most trusted advisers. His appointment signaled a changing of the guards. Not only was Stahl a former student of Schelling, by then Hegel's most intransigent adversary, but the man he replaced was none other than Eduard Gans, Hegel's closest collaborator at the Berlin University who would edit his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The significance of the event was not lost on his contemporaries. Heinrich von Treitschke notes that as Stahl began his inaugural lecture on November 23, 1840, the Hegelians who had gathered in large numbers gave him a "tumultuous" reception (von Treitschke, 1914, V, p. 55). Antipathy was not all on one side. In the preface to the 1830 Philosophie des Rechts, the first edition of his work, Stahl left no doubt as to how he felt about Hegel's philosophy: "From the beginning I was utterly convinced of its un-truth but could not find the root of its error … It repelled me, but I found myself constantly returning to it until I had acquired the means of overcoming it" (Stahl, 1830, p. v). What Stahl reacts against, and wants to overcome, is reason celebrating itself as absolute knowledge. To Hegel's all-knowing philosophy, he opposes that which God reveals to man in creation: personality, action, and liberty, which, in Hegel's system are dissolved in the monotony of being (Stahl, 1830, pp. 397–398). Blindness to divine creation also vitiates Hegel's theory of state. Stahl credits him with defending the dignity of the state against liberalism, but takes him to task for being "ultra-governmental" (Stahl, 1830, pp. 466–467). What Stahl objects to is not the constitutional preeminence of government, which he would later theorize in his 1845 monograph on the monarchic principle, which would form the blueprint of German public law until the First World War. The object of reproach is the symbolic usurpation by the monarch of the place of the divine, which has the effect of making the divine internal to the state: "The error of Hegel's doctrine is to posit the state as an end in itself, not merely as a support of man's higher ethical existence, a substitute and an instrument for the coming of the eternal kingdom" (Stahl, 1837, p. 20). Stahl opposes Hegel's ultra-governmentalism because it leaves nothing outside the state for man to aspire to. The liberty of man exhausts itself within the state. Stahl wants to impress on the individual that, in addition to his civil liberty, he carries within himself a non-civil liberty that transcends the state in the direction of the divine. Hegel's error was to have believed that his system offered the individual all the resources needed to develop his innermost being, or, to use Stahl's preferred term, his personality (Stahl, 1830, p. 456). This critique anticipates aspects of Girard's critique, but there are significant differences we need to get clear about. Girard opposes individual and state in a manner that is politically indeterminate for being so closely tied to the individual. What singularizes Girard's individual is innocence. This allows him to take all sacrificial rites back to the same formula. Rites stabilize a difference between the two faces of the sacred—the maleficent and the benevolent—but while they do so in very different ways, the differences are ultimately immaterial as all rites proceed on the supposition of the victim's guilt. Only Christ is innocent (Girard, 1977, pp. 454–456). His innocence is the powder that shall explode the archaic world. As a sacrificial victim, Christ is of the archaic world, but his Coming signals the end of the myth that sustained it. Christ teaches peace, but he brings war, as Girard never tires of reminding us. It is the belligerency of Christian faith that Hegel does not see, or does not want to see, which explains that while his philosophy has tragic aspects, it does not have "catastrophic" ones (Girard, 2010, p. 29). Where Girard searches for a way to release the tension between the individual and society, Stahl insists that they, or rather the spheres to which they belong, form an ensemble. Arguing not from Revelation, but from God's power, Stahl tells us that the subjective and the subjective sphere both express aspects of divine creation (Stahl, 1837, p. 131). Man belongs to a higher realm, and his affiliation grounds the rights that he enjoys as an individual. The state must acknowledge the rights of the individual, at the same time as it must impress on him that he is God's subject (Stahl, 1837, p. 66–68; cf. p. 73). Like the Hobbesian sovereign, Stahl's monarch is king by the grace of God, but where the Hobbesian sovereign stands in for God, Stahl is adamant that the monarch must not usurp the image of God; the monarch must not appear "as if he were an image (Sinnbild) of God, [as if he were] God on Earth in the place of God" (Stahl, 1837, pp. 98–99). This would be blasphemy, double blasphemy in fact, as it would entail worshipping an idol, and honoring that which is not deserving of it. We would celebrate that which pertains to the monarch's office as well as that which pertains to his person. We would honor "not only [his] private life, as we must, but even the trivial, indeed unworthy aspects of that life, as if they too were elevated by being associated with the divine office of the king" (Stahl, 1837, p. 99). Stahl's reservations about what is, and what is not, fit for representation refer back to a paradigmatic shift of political theology. In saying that the monarch must not stand in for God, or assume his likeness, Stahl is saying that the monarch can no longer block the subject's view of God. As we have seen, the majestic presence of Stahl's monarch serves to remind the subject of a subjection to God that goes deeper than his civil subjection. The vertical line that, in Hobbes' political theory, connects subject, sovereign, and God is broken in and through the horizontal displacement of God who, in this new configuration, must be at all times visible above the monarch. What emerges is a triangle, Girard's spatial model of the mimetic relationship (Girard, 1990, pp. 24, 29). Here, the monarch continues to occupy a position between subject and God, but the way he channels desire is very different from the imitatio Christi of the kings of the early modern age. There, the hiatus between the two bodies of the king recalled the dichotomy between God's infinite power and the frailty of the human vessel in which divinity was made flesh. That dichotomy has no place in Stahl's work. In honoring the monarch, it would be "morally reprehensible" (Uebel) to honor "not man but man's frailty" (Stahl, 1837, p. 99). We already intuit that the type of mimetic desire that Girard associated with the figure of Christ will not be operative here. This is not a monarch who struggles to carry the burdens of his divinely ordained office, in imitation of Christ on the Cross. On the contrary, it is a monarch who executes his office fully and completely, to the point that his power radiates from the position he occupies within the constitution. Stahl describes how the monarch looms over his subjects, imposing the majesty of his presence upon them. Even more important is the change in the concepts by which Stahl qualifies monarchic power. From Hobbes onward, the monarch was the carrier of sovereignty. Sovereignty defined his power, and until the middle of the 1840s, it is the concept Stahl shall use. Called to intervene more directly in politics, he discovers that sovereignty cannot deliver what is needed. It merely lays down a distribution of power within a political space, reserving power for the sovereign person, but does not tell us anything about the extent to which that person dominates the political space. To capture this aspect of power Stahl introduces a new principle that is to take over from sovereignty: "The sovereignty of the king is a pure, unmediated concept of law; the monarchic principle, on the contrary, denotes an actual position (tatsächliche Stellung)" (Stahl, 1837, pp. 75–76; Stahl, 1845, p. 12). The monarchic principle states that where the constitution contains no express provisions, the will of the monarch is the law. Monarchic power is the default setting of the constitution. So was sovereignty, but sovereignty operated at a distance, whereas the monarchic principle operates on a sliding scale. "It goes without saying," Stahl notes, "that not only can the monarchic principle be implemented in different ways, it can also determine the constitution to a higher or smaller degree" (Stahl, 1845, p. 28). What this means is that the monarch should determine political life to the highest possible degree; indeed, he must dominate it. This imperative belongs to a different political universe than the quasi-sacred, and indistinct, space of Hobbesian sovereignty, which instantiates the same relationship in the same way, irrespective of where it is instantiated from. In contrast, the monarchic principle designates the way the monarch actually impacts political life in a given setting. Here, power is apprehended not under its most general aspect, as a necessary constituent of a polity or as a relation between man and God, but concretely, in the way it determines social and political life.66 Between Hobbes and Stahl falls the French Revolution, in which a king is dethroned and executed. This is of course a key point chain in the process we are tracing. However, the uncertainty among the revolutionaries about whether citizen Capet could be put on trial illustrates, if anything, the persistence of a sacral aura even in this revolutionary moment. The concreteness of the monarchic principle is tied to two singular entities: the monarch and the constitution within which he governs. On the side of the monarch, singularity extends to his private life. On the side of the constitution, it attaches to the existing constitutional arrangements that circumscribe the monarch's power. The singular terms require and consummate each other: the framing of monarchic power by a constitution that has grown organically over time means that, in exercising his constitutional powers, the monarch expresses the history of his people. At the same time, the foregrounding of the monarch opens a conduit through which the social totality can interpellate its members who answer the address by accepting a historical condition as the how of their innermost being.77 This interpellation of the individual marks a point of contention between Stahl and the Historical School of Law, the teachings of which linked the genesis of law to impersonal social forces that crystallize as custom. Despite his adhesion to the school, which he credits with articulating the "basic philosophical truth" that history recounts the acts of God (Stahl, 1847, p. 578), Stahl takes its members to task for neglecting divine agency in their accounts. The complexity of the monarch's position as an intermediary between, on the one hand, man and God and, on the other, custom and will is lost on Chris Thornhill whose commitment to Luhmanian systems theory blinds him to what is going on in Stahl's work. To be sure, Stahl deals in paradoxes, but he is not "desperately" deploying "even the most implausible paradoxes" to cover up the contingent nature of legal order, something he would never think to deny; his work is not an "absurdly knowledgeable moment in European political t
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