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Date Posted: 14:43:15 02/15/08 Fri
Author: Hwaet!
Subject: Demystification vs. Ignorance--Which would Girard choose?

1) In The Scapegoat Ch 7, Girard says, “Plato, like all Puritans, misses the goal, which is to reveal the mechanism of the victim and the demystification of the representations of persecution” (81). In other words, if he wants readers to be morally improved, Plato should focus on exposing the violence behind the myth, not on writing violence out of the myth, and not on discarding the myth (along with any hidden truths about violence it contains). I agree with Girard; this is a great way to read literature, and it can reveal awful truths about ourselves that we would otherwise have overlooked.

2) But in Violence and the Sacred Ch 5 (on Dionysus), Girard says that if demystification “takes up arms against a certain type of violence, it may well bring about another, undoubtedly more destructive type” (137) In other words, as we have now heard a thousand times, if a culture becomes conscious that its sacrificial victim is arbitrary, then the ritual loses its effectiveness to prevent violence, because what was thought to be a cure is now seen to be hocus pocus: “the ritual sacrifices lose their force; their potency is no longer recognized by the entire community. Each member tries to correct the situation individually [as a vigilante] and none succeeds” (135).

I do not say that Girard contradicts himself, because he hasn’t really taken a stance on which of these societies he would prefer: 1) a demystifying one that reveals violence but in so doing risks greater violence, or 2) an ignorant society that is peaceful except for during rituals, and perhaps peaceful even then, if the ignorant society’s ritual has degraded (or progressed?) into festival.

Clearly, if a demystifying society (such as our own) has a sovereign judicial system in place, Girard would prefer it to both of these (Violence and the Sacred pp 20-24). But neither of the above schemes necessitates such a judicial system, so what Girard would say in the case of a judicial system does not help here.

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