Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2

Sacrifice as a Mythologeme; or, the Aesthetics/Ethics of the Unrepresentable

Agamben’s use of Foucault’s work is intriguing in at least two respects. First, he sees sovereignty as residing in the relation of what he calls “ban”: “He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable… . The originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment. The matchless potentiality of the nomos, its originary ‘force of law,’ is that it holds life in its ban by abandoning it” (29). This emphasis on ban suggests that Agamben’s understanding of power is, unlike Foucault’s, essentially negative and prohibitive in orientation. Whereas Foucault’s major intervention has been to shift this traditional understanding of power to the positive, indeed enabling and progressive, capacities in which power thrives in modernity, for Agamben power remains the power to taboo, exclude, withhold, and annihilate (despite his nuanced articulation of the paradox between exception and rule). [3] Hence his pronouncement, on a universal scale:

By its definitive tone—“Everywhere on earth,” “All societies and all cultures today”—this passage not only reinforces the negative and prohibitive notion of power but also asserts that such power applies in all societies and all cultures regardless of their actual systems of government (and, by implication, regardless of their histories of political evolution). As is the case throughout his book, Agamben names this power “law” (in a move that goes in the opposite direction from Foucault’s explicit warning that law is an inadequate model with which to deal with questions of power). [4] Agamben holds that power-as-law is facing a legitimacy crisis because its basis is increasingly revealed to be “nothing.” For him, however, this nothingness, which may be understood as the non-existence of any concrete justification/grounding for whatever happens to rule, is, precisely, the heart of the matter, the truth about politics based on law. Accordingly, the “nihilism” we are experiencing everywhere today is simply the “coming to light”—the deconstructing illumination, shall we say—of this fundamentally vacuous “structure of the sovereign relation.”

Second, in keeping with his formulation of power as ban, Agamben’s argument also seems to overlook—inevitably perhaps—the attempt Foucault made at historicizing. For Foucault, biopolitics, with its dedication to the proliferation of apparatuses for the management of bodies, took shape as the older notion of sovereignty premised on the power to kill evolved into more “lenient” and “gentle” forms of governance in the modern period. As in the case of his other studies of the processes of institutionalization and socialization of the modern subject, Foucault’s overall intellectual interest in biopolitics was directed, to invoke his memorable phrase, at “the entry of life into history” (History of Sexuality, I 141). Agamben’s emphasis is quite different—and contrary: he is interested rather in articulating the meanings of a modern and contemporary Western world in which bare life, even when reduced to seemingly mere biological existence, is nonetheless entirely enmeshed in sovereign power—a world in which, in other words, biological survival itself must be recognized as always already political—political as defined in the aforementioned terms of a definitive nihilism. (He therefore holds that there is no outside to the law.) In order to argue this absolute—and thus timeless—relationship between sovereign power and bare life, Agamben must of necessity sidestep the historicity of the transition (from premodern to modern times) that Foucault clearly introduced into his argument. And, because sovereignty (power as ban) remains the only viable form of agency Agamben envisages, bare life itself, instead of being historicized, is implicitly eroticized by him in the form of an obscene spectacle, in which the subject that matters is not only one that has been totally crossed out (violated) but also one that has been crossed out (violated) by denudation.

Even if Foucault’s mode of historicizing is considered questionable (a point that can certainly be made), it seems to me that Agamben’s argument of a continuous biopolitics that runs, conceptually, from European antiquity to European modernity, culminating in the catastrophe of the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s and 1940s, has still fundamentally neglected the critical dimension of Foucault’s work that foregrounds the supremacy of life as the biopolitical imperative in the modern age. It is in this sense of a coercive imperative to live/stay alive that Foucault’s work resonates most readily with the high tech, medical, and political manipulations of contemporary human existence, from the ostracism and incarceration of the insane and the criminal, to the surveillance of sexual practices, to the ever-generative forms of discipline and production of docile subjects in our civil institutions. In the twenty-first century, as such manipulations of human existence are brought to unprecedented levels of sophistication and efficiency through intersecting global networks of communications and trafficking, Foucault’s point that biopolitics is a matter of governing the living, of regulating/normalizing how populations should live, remains incontrovertibly on the mark. For Agamben, on the other hand, the coercive imperative at stake is a matter of extermination: his transformation of Foucault’s biopolitics into a thanatopolitics in this regard is justified by his primary example of the Nazi camps. In the finality of the slaughter of the Jews, the Gypsies, the communists, and the homosexuals, as well as the euthanasia imposed on those who were mentally deficient or physically handicapped, there is, he suggests, little leeway for considering life other than as “bare”—stripped of all supplemental attributes that would render it “more” human. His real point, however, is that even such bare, reduced life, life shorn of all human decency, needs to be returned and restored to its due human connection, a connection that he reiterates as fundamentally juridico-political, in the double sense of law-cum-violence and law-cum-nothingness. [5]

Being aware of the fact that his subject of study can easily—indeed has often been—approached through the notion of sacrifice, Agamben takes pains to distance his own argument from such sacrificial logic. Referring to the sacred as a “mythologeme” that originated from William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889) and passed quickly into French sociology, Agamben rejects the sacrificial logic on account of its imputed ambivalence—that is, its capacity for holding together and making interchangeable two opposed categories, the holy and the profane. This is a capacity that fascinated thinkers from Sigmund Freud and Marcel Mauss to Émile Benveniste, Émile Durkheim, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Precisely what these thinkers considered to be the attractive conceptual resilience of the sacred—its potential for a certain duplicity, for shuttling back and forth between the polarities of high and low, consecrated and filthy—becomes for Agamben a kind of “veil,” an “aura” whose spell needs to be broken: “The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term ‘Holocaust’ was, from this perspective, an irresponsible historiographical blindness… . The truth—which is difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils—is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice,’ which is to say, as bare life” (114).

Its morally austere nature notwithstanding, this argument leaves open an important question: what if the notion of sacrifice is subscribed and adhered to by the victims and their community, as an inalienable part of their belief? In other words, what if sacrifice is part of an effort to (re)imagine and (re)narrativize an otherwise lost, because inaccessible, past—a collective, retrospective striving for coherence? True, such striving often leads to the (problematic) monumentalization of catastrophes, but on the basis of what moral authority should such striving be invalidated and repudiated? Another well-known example from Judeo-Christian history may help clarify the problem at stake: to the Roman officials in occupied Judea, the execution of a political dissenter such as Jesus, too, probably meant little more than the routine extermination of “lice,” but for the followers of Christianity, that execution (together with the its horrendous instrument, the cross) has carried a definitive symbolic significance of sacrifice over the centuries. [6] For these followers, it is the subject that bears the cross, rather than the subject that has been crossed out, that remains ever noteworthy.

Agamben’s critique of the sacrificial logic can, of course, be seen as an eminently post-Enlightenment, secularist gesture. To this extent, his question “In what, then, does the sacredness of the sacred man consist?” is a rhetorical one (72). The answer is obvious: such sacredness consists not in any (residual) religious sense of the sacred but rather in the inextricable link between sovereign power and human existence. Just as this link manifests itself in bare life—the “life that may be killed but not sacrificed” (a phrase Agamben repeats numerous times in his book)—so too would sovereignty become groundless were it not for the existence of such bare life and its potential to be killed (114). At the same time, as more and more people get killed in our contemporary world without reason, justification, or representation—as the lives of the innocent pile up like wreckage against the precarious grounds of sovereignty—the sovereign relation itself is increasingly exposed for what it is: an arbitrary configuration of power that has immense potential for abuse and that has, indeed, been thoroughly abused.

The ambivalence of sacrifice is unacceptable in Agamben’s analysis because for him, ultimately, there can be no room to imagine—to imagine, for instance, that the victims were sacrificed for some transcendent purpose or meaning. Nor is there room to imagine a kind of politics that would involve a struggle for hegemony in the form of a resistant or antagonistic confrontation with tyrannical dominance. All relations of substitution and exchange—and by implication all possibilities of redemption understood in a broad sense—came to a halt with the acts of cruelty (and exercise of sovereign power) in the camps, rendering the ambivalence inherent to the sacrificial logic an illusion and a lie.

This said, there is a further dimension embedded in Agamben’s rejection of sacrifice that is worth considering, perhaps less for the reasons he offers (on secularist moral grounds) than for the affinity that sacrifice shares with another order of thinking—mimesis. In this light, Agamben’s emphasis on the absolute finality of the Nazis’ thanatopolitics may be seen to have its precedents in a well-known (though debatable) aesthetic/ethic approach to the Holocaust, whereby, notwithstanding the representational materialities and mimetic effects involved, the artist or critic insists that the Holocaust is unrepresentable. One thinks, for instance, of documentary film classics such as Alain Resnais’s “Nuit et Brouillard” (“Night and Fog”) and Claude Lanzman’s “Shoah,” in which the historical weight of the catastrophe is “shown” or given to us through the muteness of the most ordinary of scenes, such as a lush green landscape or a decrepit empty building, even as the directors emphasize how difficult—or impossible—it is to represent the enormity of what happened. In this kind of aesthetic/ethical approach, the most natural or unadorned sight (much like Agamben’s “bare life”) is understood not only as that which has been divested of all cultural accoutrements but also as that which, in its so-called nothingness, reveals the basic, yet utterly ruthless and nihilistic, reality of a juridico-political relation. [7] It is in this connection—what may be termed an anti-mimetic aesthetics and ethics—that I believe Agamben’s stringent critique of the notion of sacrifice with regard to the Holocaust should finally be grasped: recast in terms of mimesis-as-representation, this critique would seem akin to none other than the familiar assertion that the Holocaust is an unrepresentable—that is to say, inimitable and intransmissible—experience. [8]

Ironically, such a critique of sacrifice is, in the end, operating fully within the bounds of sacrificial logic, the logic that something must be forfeited or cast off. This sacrificial logic is, of course, also a version of the notion of ban that Agamben stresses as essential to the way juridical power functions. By prohibiting the sacrificial logic, therefore, Agamben has in effect taken on himself the capacity for banning (a particular form of ban), and put himself in the place of the (arbitrary?) sovereign, ruling against the nobody who wants to hold on to the myth of sacrifice in his/her history.

What Follows (or Remains after) Sacrifice: Mimesis as Substitute

Appearing as it does in the context of contemporary political philosophy debates, Agamben’s anti-sacrificial, anti-mimetic aesthetics/ethics resonates with certain strands of what may be schematically called poststructuralist theoretical thinking. For some time now, since the arrival of poststructuralism in the mid-twentieth century, mimesis has been viewed in some contemporary theoretical sectors with suspicion and disdain, as the legacy of a rigid and conservative representational politics with its demand for realism—that is, for the reproduction, in art or literature, of a replica of what supposedly exists beforehand. As Martin Jay writes: “For … theorists normally labeled, for better or worse, poststructuralist, a conventional aesthetic privileging of mimesis or what is taken to be its synonym, imitation, is an ideologically suspect recirculation of the ready-made, a false belief in the fixity of meaning and the possibility of achieving full presence, a language game that fails to see itself as such.” [9] This anti-mimetic stance notwithstanding, one notices, on reflection, a curious paradox embedded in poststructuralist maneuvers in general: even as the mimetic is distrusted as an ideology of mechanical duplication, copying, and re-presentation (one that assumes the presence of some original determinant), poststructuralist theory nonetheless tends to depend for its deconstructive work on acts of substitution, alternation, and differentiation—acts that, in the terms of our present discussion, may in fact be seen as part and parcel of the entwined logics of sacrifice and mimesis.

This close kinship between sacrifice and mimesis informs the arguments of some of the authors who have had the strongest influences on poststructuralist writing. In his well-known theory of the gift, for instance, Marcel Mauss dispels the idea of the free, innocent gift by shifting attention to relations of exchange and reciprocity as the rationale behind gift-giving: understood precisely, the giving of a gift, as Mauss argues, always carries with it the significance of a gesture of retaliation—of a return of something. Similarly, by introducing the distinction between the penis and the phallus in his semiotic rewriting of Freud’s discussions of anatomical differences, Jacques Lacan clarifies the indispensable exchange principle that underpins Freud’s argument about sociality: in order to be socially acceptable, an individual must learn to give up, to trade in as it were, his own solipsistic or narcissistic pleasures. Closer to our time, in her theory about the social origins of gender, Judith Butler, too, confirms the function of exchange in the construction of an intimate part of our identities—the way we go about picking our objects of desire. Butler argues that gendered identities, in particular for those who “are” or who think of themselves as heterosexual, are a matter of learning to relinquish the type of love object that is socially prohibited (as for instance a person of the same sex as oneself). Gender is haunted by melancholy because, whether or not one is conscious of it, it is a matter of negotiating and performing the effects of a pre-mandated and internalized loss.

I have brought up these few examples of influential frames of thought simply as a quick reminder of the indispensability in representational politics of the mutuality of loss and gain, and of surrender and redemption—a mutuality that, I would contend, may be reconceptualized as the twin logics of sacrifice and mimesis. To this extent, I’d like to speculate that mimesis has retained its relevance to this day less because of its persistence as imitative representation (which no doubt remains the case in many circles) than because of its potency as part of an inescapable structural relation—the relation of exchange and substitution, absence and presence, disappearance and appearance, and so forth, without which the acts of thinking and writing would simply be impossible. Understood in these terms (and not merely in terms of a secondary duplication of a primary event), the mimetic-as-representation, even when it takes the positivistic form of appearing as/like something else, should be described more precisely as the accessible portion of a certain foregone transaction, a transaction, moreover, during which something was for one reason or another lost, given up, or surrendered—in other words, sacrificed. Rather than being a static replication or re-presentation of a preexisting plenitude, mimesis, one may argue, is the sign that remains—in the form of a literal being-there, an externalization and an exhibition—in the aftermath of a process of sacrifice, whether or not the sacrifice has been witnessed or apprehended as such. Mimesis is the (visibly or sensorially accessible) substitute that follows, that bears the effects of (an invisible or illegible) sacrifice.

Reformulated in this manner, sacrifice and mimesis would seem a double epistemic passage underlying all acts of signification, a passage that tends to become acute in contexts of dominance and subordination, in which loss and gain are existentially palpable phenomena impinging on individual and group identity formation. Is this perhaps the reason mimesis has figured so prominently in scenarios which carry the charge of victimization (and by implication, the charge of voluntary or involuntary sacrifice)? I am thinking, for instance, of the scenarios of patriarchy and colonialism, in which the status of those whose lives are compromised and demeaned has been explored, often, via the tropes of mimesis.

As I mentioned, biopolitics, as Foucault discusses it, is not necessarily or exclusively about the mandating of death but more often than not takes the coercive form of an imperative to stay alive. Would adhering to Foucault’s conceptualization (with its emphasis on life) bring about an alternative understanding of the implications of Agamben’s discussion, by allowing us to localize the latter as simply one possible method of theorizing victimhood—a method in which the anti-mimetic resistance to sacrifice (and with it, representation) amounts to a particular aesthetics/ethics, based implicitly on a specific way of (re)distributing the sensible? [10] Conversely, in other scenarios of violence—such as patriarchy and colonialism—in which the goal has not been extermination tout court but rather the multifaceted governance and subjection of live bodies, what would happen to the logic of sacrifice—discredited in no uncertain terms by Agamben—and with it the mimetic?

Mimesis as a Coping Mechanism and Survival Tactic

Luce Irigaray, for instance, has offered a well-known reappraisal of femininity by distinguishing between two forms of mimesis—the productive and the recuperative. Putting it in deliberately simple terms, she writes: “there is mimesis as production, which would lie more in the realm of music, and there is the mimesis that would be already caught up in a process of imitation, specularization, adequation, and reproduction” (131). Referring to the latter kind of mimesis as “masquerade,” Irigaray allows for the recognition of femininity as a type of social sacrifice, whereupon women must imitate or reproduce—at their own peril—the feminine norms that have been prescribed in advance by patriarchal mores:

At the same time, Irigaray asserts that the mimetic also contains the possibility of a different relation, one in which women, precisely because they understand what has been prescribed for them, may set out consciously to perform these prescriptions in such ways as to turn them into subversive acts. She calls this kind of mimesis “mimicry”:

This association of the mimetic with feminist cunning and, in particular, with a playful, self-conscious repetition, made to resemble and conjure the normative image of femininity yet simultaneously undermining this image from within, is perhaps one of the most important instances in contemporary thought in which mimesis is attributed with the potential to exceed, rather than simply to compensate for, the sacrifice which precedes it. This potential enables mimesis to take on the value of a type of behavior—a camouflage conformism—which, even if it does not exactly set women free, allows them (to imagine) a utopian space/time of alterity from within the bounds of patriarchal subordination.

In the discussions of colonized existence, mimesis has likewise played a significant role in theorists’ attempts to configure a breathing space for those who have been subjected to injustice. In the contexts in which cross-cultural encounters entail the imposition and enforcement of one group’s (typically, Westerners’) superiority over another (typically, the “natives” of African, Asian, American, Australian, and New Zealand cultures), mimesis is a routine rite of initiation: those from the so-called “inferior” group, the colonized or semi-colonized, are bound to want to imitate their “superior” aggressors as part of their strategy for social survival and advancement. Under these circumstances, the question is how agency can be assessed: must agency be understood to lie only with the so-called original (the “superior” group, the one being imitated), or can it also be understood to reside in the act of imitation—in those who imitate? What kind of agency?

As I have discussed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, various levels of mimesis traverse this kind of situation. I will concentrate on two here. A first level, probably the most obvious, is a direct legacy of Western imperialism and colonialism of the past few hundred years—the mimesis with the white man as the original. The logistics involved are time-proven: the white colonizer, his language, and his culture stand as the model against which the colonized is judged; the colonized must try her best to become like her master even when knowing full well that her efforts at emulation will be deemed less than satisfactory. As I have noted, the values involved—“superior” and “inferior”—are hierarchically determined and tend to work in one direction only: the “original,” so to speak, exists as the authentic standard by which the imitator is judged but not vice versa. The colonized subject, condemned to a permanent inferiority complex, must nonetheless try, in vain, to become that from which she has been excluded in an a priori manner. Try as she may, she will always remain a poor copy; yet even as she continues to be debased, she has no choice but to continue to mimic.

At a second level, as theorists no longer feel comfortable dismissing the colonized as merely inadequate, mimesis takes on a more complex set of connotations. As exemplified by the work of scholars such as Homi Bhabha, who follow the rationale of Frantz Fanon’s impassioned arguments about black subjectivity in works such as The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, one important feature of the colonized’s subjectivity that was previously ignored—the ambivalent, contradictory emotions embedded in her identitarian plight—now assumes center stage. As Fanon writes, for the person of color (in his case, the black man) “there is only one destiny. And that is white.” With insight and foresight, he also suggests that “only a psychological interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex” (Black Skin, White Masks, 10). Fanon’s critical contributions to the dissection of colonized subjectivity are summarized by Bhabha in this manner: in Fanon’s work, Bhabha tells us, “The ambivalent identification of the racist world … turns on the idea of man as his alienated image; not Self and Other but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity” (Location of Culture 40, 44).

In psychological terms, what Bhabha, taking the lead from Fanon, introduces to the colonial scenario is desire (and its irrational, often unconscious, modes of working). As in the case of Irigaray’s endeavor to reclaim femininity for women, desire in this instance serves as the very grounds on which to reappraise the value of dominated subjecthood. Instead of being written off as the inferior partner in an asymmetrical historical encounter with the West, the colonized is now understood, with much more suppleness and sympathy, in terms of a desire to be white that exists concurrently with the shame and resentment accompanying the inferior position to which she has been socially, culturally, and racially consigned. Between the (positive) condition of wanting to imitate the white man and the (negative) condition of self-loathing and self-abatement, lies what may be seen as an entire range of epistemic and representational possibilities, possibilities that infinitely enrich the theorization of postcolonial subjectivities. Whereas at the first level of mimesis, relations between the colonizer and the colonized remain immobilized in a static hierarchy, the introduction of desire transforms the entire question of mimesis into a fluid, because vacillating, structure, in which the entangled feelings of wanting at once to imitate the colonizer and to eliminate him become the basis for a new kind of analysis, with the tormented psychic interiority of the colonized as its center. Much like Irigaray’s mimicry, the colonized’s desire here makes way for a flexible, because mobile, framework for imagining alterity from within subordination.

By focusing on the colonized person as an indeterminate, internally divided subject, a subject that is not self-identical, Bhabha and the critics influenced by him thus enable what may be called a poststructuralist redemption of colonial victimhood that is thoroughly humanistic in implications: it is the failure, the incompleteness or incomplete-ability of the mimetic attempt (a point on which the second level of mimesis in fact concurs with the first) that makes the nonwhite subject theoretically interesting—indeed salvageable (one might say, in the aftermath of colonial sacrifice). Consciously or unbeknownst to herself, and oscillating between black and white, the subjectivity of the colonized is now dispersed, pluralized and multiplied across the many possible circuits of desire. No longer rigidly polarized/dichotomized against each other, black and white can now be considered as mutually constituted and mutually constituting. The question remains as to how this liberalist rendering of victimhood can ultimately distinguish itself from the productivity of colonial power. In both cases, it would seem, it is the ambivalences, the contradictions, and the fissures, always already inherent to the act of articulation, that are considered to contain the potential for opening things up, so to speak. How to draw the line in between? Or—to push Bhabha’s reasoning to its limit—is that not so important?

Concomitant with the issue of mimesis in these gendered and racial scenarios of violence, then, reemerges in a different guise exactly the problematic of sacrifice at which Agamben has directed his skepticism. Recast in sacrificial terms, the paradigm shift that poststructuralist feminist and postcolonial criticism has brought about is none other than a suspension, and thus a revaluation, of the substantiality and non-negotiability of victimhood through behavioral and psychic buoyancy—playful mimicry and fluctuating desire—so that, even if it seems degrading and humiliating (involving the sacrificing of one’s autonomy and dignity), the very act of imitating one’s victimizer may yet be an aperture to a different kind of future. Mimesis amounts in these cases to a creative repackaging and repurposing of the givens of dominated existence for survival—in a situation that is not about to improve any time soon.

On balance, much as this survival kit of mimetic tricks (with mimesis either as subversive performativity or as ambivalent desiring) has been greatly influential in contemporary cultural criticism, as a coping mechanism it still by and large leaves in place the inequities of the situation—one that remains governed by man or the white man as the original, with the important proviso that the playful imitation by women or the not-quite-right imitation by colonized subjects is now deemed, at least by some, to be equally deserving of critical attention. Insofar as it is a coping mechanism, moreover, mimesis seems to have retained the quality of a secondary phenomenon whose raison d’être is derived from something external to itself. Although what is at issue is no longer so-called art’s imitation of life, the fact that mimetic behavior and psychology are construed as a response, a reaction to fraught ideological conditions suggests that mimesis continues to be accorded a subaltern and instrumentalist status. Obviously, this conclusion is not very satisfying.

Mimesis as Originary Force, and a Different Hypothesis about Victimhood

A useful, if controversial, interlocutor at this juncture is René Girard, whose work offers many remarkable insights into the bondage between sacrifice and mimesis. Given that Girard has explicitly referred to the double meanings of the Latin word sacer, which, as he points out, has been translated alternately as “sacred” and as “accursed,” and that he, like Agamben, is clearly skeptical of the ambivalence of the sacred as disseminated by French sociology, the absence of any reference to Girard’s work in Agamben’s book is conspicuous. [11] Can this be because, as I have been suggesting, a rejection of sacrifice (as in Agamben’s case) is not only a rejection of sacrifice but in essence amounts to a rejection also of mimesis, the very basis of Girard’s theory?

Like many mid- to late twentieth-century thinkers, Girard too has been influenced by Freud, and the psychological vocabulary of desire is eminently present in his readings. His understanding of desire is, however, quite unique. For Girard, desire is not some kind of original human nature which for historical or cultural reasons (such as patriarchy or colonialism) adapts itself into a desire for something (such as a desire to imitate). Instead, desire is always learned, and can be borrowed and transferred. Rather than the commonsensical question “What does X want?”, then, Girard asks: how does X come to “want” this or that? As he has famously argued, the answer to this latter question is mimesis: to desire means not simply to desire an object but also to imitate a model’s way of desiring. In this manner, the model one tries to imitate inevitably becomes a rival:

In his classic Violence and the Sacred, Girard illustrates his bold argument by providing readings of numerous texts, often from myths, classical Greek tragedies, psychoanalysis, and anthropological studies of tribal beliefs and practices, but his reading of Freud’s Oedipus complex offers perhaps the most economical example of his logic. Girard traces the shadowy presence of a mimetic understanding in Freud’s description of the little boy’s desire for his mother. As Freud points out, this desire has something to do with the boy’s special interest in his father, to grow like and be like him, and take his place everywhere. His cathexis to his mother, then, can be seen as an effect of a primarily mimetic impulse to identify with his father; only thus, Girard writes, does it make sense to see the father, who is the boy’s model, become a rival, a hindrance, and a nuisance standing in the way of the boy’s attainment of gratification. Notwithstanding his own intuition of the potential held open by mimetic desire, Freud, however, according to Girard, turned aside and erased the effects of mimetic desire from his construction of the Oedipus complex so as to preserve the complex’s purity and validity:

What sets Girard’s conception of mimesis apart from many of his contemporaries’, therefore, is the epistemic status he grants it: mimesis is an originary force rather than a secondary phenomenon whose rationale/justification comes from somewhere else. [12] This conception has the advantage of freeing us from the common tendency to fixate on a predetermined object as the source of desire (as is the case, arguably, of Fanon’s and Bhabha’s ruminations, in which whiteness exists as the object to which the black man becomes cathected in imitation). By making mimesis the first term, Girard shifts the emphasis away from the conventional assumption of desire as natural, autonomous, or originating: instead, desire itself is now understood as the outcome of human social interaction. Mimesis, in turn, is no longer simply a derivative or instrumental act in response to a situation in which those who are underprivileged, envious, or malcontent find themselves obligated to copy whatever preexists them as “normal” and “superior.” With desire detached from all predetermined objects, the mimetic process is here allowed to stand as a power dynamic, one that fuels, to return to Foucault’s term, the biopolitics of inter-subjective relations. Following Girard, one may go so far as to claim that mimesis is what activates the act of desiring; it is what gives desire its direction and trajectory as well as its objects.

This all-pervasive, mediating presence of mimesis means that to desire is, behaviorally speaking, to compete with a rival in a vicious circle of reciprocal violence, in which the antagonists become increasingly indistinguishable from each other—become what Girard calls “monstrous doubles.” The only way in which the circle can be broken is through sacrifice—that is, through an artificial process in which someone who is, like everyone else, a member of the community becomes chosen as a scapegoat—and expelled as a surrogate victim. Herein lies the crucial aspect of Girard’s theory: “Social coexistence,” he writes, “would be impossible if no surrogate victim existed, if violence persisted beyond a certain threshold and failed to be transmuted into culture. It is only at this point that the vicious circle of reciprocal violence, wholly destructive in nature, is replaced by the vicious circle of ritual violence, creative and protective in nature” (144).

This point, very much resonant with Freud’s arguments about human group behavior in works such as Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents (and to some extent Moses and Monotheism), is reiterated by Girard in a succinct recapitulation of mimetic desire:

For Girard, the sacrifice that is collectively ordained and practiced is thus (the violence of) mimetic desire ritualized. Practices of culture such as art, literature, and religion are all instances of such “ritualized mimesis”—that is, a substitute violence—designed to enable human society to proceed against the blind destructiveness of the primal “conflictual mimesis.” Girard speaks often of “a fundamental truth about violence”: “if left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into ‘proper’ channels” (10).

Girard’s two-pronged formulation of mimesis—as both nature (constant, primal antagonism among human beings) and culture (collective, artificial ritual) and thus irreducible to either—whose violence must be understood dialectically, as both internal and external, both pernicious and beneficial, may be one reason his thesis has not exactly been taken up with enthusiasm in the more left-leaning varieties of contemporary cultural criticism. More specifically, Girard’s assertion of mimesis as an absolute/universal condition, an assertion that goes hand in hand with his refusal to account for violence by confining it within domains of cultural difference/particularism—such as religious fanaticism, nationalism, communism, patriarchy, Eurocentricity, U.S. imperialism, and so forth—would obviously disturb those who believe in adhering to the supposedly tolerant, neoliberalist, and multiculturalist habits of thought. And since Girard’s frame of reference is literary, mythological, and religious rather than empirical or scientific, the validity held by his conception of mimesis in various disciplines, even those with obvious social and historical import, will likely have to remain a matter of conjecture and debate. [13]

Nevertheless, because it recognizes the unavoidability and universality of violence, Girard’s hypothesis ironically implies a basic, incontrovertible evenness and equality among human beings that tends to be absent in other formulations. In the feminist and postcolonialist writings discussed above, for instance, in which it is typically the disparity between those with power and those deprived of it that provokes theorization, mimesis tends to be pursued, more or less, as just a means of addressing—that is, compensating, displacing, complexifying, and, it is hoped, transforming—such a disparity (and the sacrifices it has exacted). Girard’s emphasis is decidedly different—and clearly un-Rousseauian and non-utopian at that. In his hands, mimesis (in the raw, primal form) involves rather the possibility, through an act of doubling, of leveling with the rival, in a world in which a “self” as such is never alone (or sui generis) but always defined socially and antagonistically in relation to others, in a generalized state of competition. Hence the key to this form of mimesis is reciprocity—the “gift” of an eye for the returned “gift” of an eye, ad infinitum—in a kind of undifferentiated repetition that may go on forever. If the violence thus generated is circular, it is also a violence that renders the antagonists structurally on a par with—indeed resembling and becoming indistinguishable from—one another. But this situation of equality, in which every person is literally like the other, is in fact a lethal situation to which human society cannot afford to return (or so it has convinced itself). Such equality, Girard implies, is the source of our greatest terror because anyone at any moment can find himself or herself the target of irrational violence and persecution.

Meanwhile, when mimesis is (re)enacted as cultural ritual, Girard, by highlighting the indispensable role played by the victim—be it the surrogate victim who is sacrificed on behalf (or in substitution) of the entire group or the ritual victim who is sacrificed in imitation (or in substitution) of the surrogate victim—also offers a distinctly divergent way of thinking about victimhood. To put it bluntly, for Girard victimhood is more a matter of structural and social necessity—for the purification of pollution, and the restoration of peace and order—than one of humanistic moral concern. The victim is the means with which a community interrupts the otherwise unstoppable circle of (mimetic) violence through a representative act of exclusion and expulsion. Often selected randomly, the victim is sacrificed not because he is weak or inferior (or strong and superior), but paradoxically because he is like us, because he resembles the community of those who would otherwise be engaged in an endless frenzy of retaliations. His (lone) alienation and expulsion are thus the substitute offered in exchange for the preservation of the group as a whole—a substitute that serves in effect as a protective shield against the threat of immolation posed by the group’s own propensity toward mimetic contagion and annihilation.

Questions

In an age in which the phenomenon of homo sacer, of which Agamben has so solemnly reminded us, seems to multiply daily across the globe with the glaringly unconstrained proliferation of state violence and abuse of power, a consideration of sacrifice and mimesis—what I have been suggesting as a conjoined epistemic passage—would seem more than timely. The ramifications involved are immense and clearly beyond the scope of one essay. In lieu of a conclusion, let me offer a brief summary of the issues raised so far, in the form of questions.

Whereas Agamben (implicitly) argues victimhood in terms of bare life, which is the residue or remainder of an utterly inequitable juridico-political relation between sovereign power and those it kills (in an increasingly arbitrary fashion)—a relation that renders mimesis altogether irrelevant because there is no room for confrontation and resistance; and whereas Irigaray, Fanon, and Bhabha alert us to the depths of ambiguity, neurosis, and perversion that define the mimetic acts of underprivileged victims, Girard challenges us instead to think of victims not simply as victims but rather as the bearers of a systemic function. And, rather than speaking against violence as the unfortunate moral outcome of human social interaction, Girard gives us a dialectics of violence, one that understands violence (or mimetic desire) both as a fundamental antagonism that defines every confrontation among human individuals, and as what constitutes cultural processes of reenactment that are aimed at warding off the original violence. As a result, he has also offered what might be called a dialectics of victimhood, wherein victimhood has no intrinsic quality to it but can be both horrendous and redemptive. Like sacrificial violence, sacrificial victims are surrogates, substitutes, or stand-ins whose destruction helps save others (like them) from some larger horror.

If, for the sake of speculative discussion, we were to disregard Agamben’s dismissal of the sacrificial logic and rethink the Nazi camps in terms of Girard’s interpretation of sacrifice and mimesis, two very hard—and for some undoubtedly scandalous—sets of questions would probably arise.

First: could the extremism of the Nazi state apparatus be understood as a form of originary violence, a primal mimetic desire that had somehow been allowed to run amok? (Did the Germans not, in a mimetic manner, consider the Jews their competitors—their rivals? Did they not, against their own denunciatory proclamations, actually want to become [like] the Jews—take the Jews’ place everywhere—by appropriating all that the Jews possessed? Could their violence have been reciprocated?) Second: alternatively, could such extremism be seen as a cultural process of ritualized violence/mimesis wherein those who were reduced to bare life in the camps could be considered surrogate/ritual victims? To follow Girard’s logic to its deeply unsettling conclusions, if the Jews, the Gypsies, and other exterminated groups were surrogate/ritual victims, does it mean that genocide, however reprehensible it is on ethical grounds, should nonetheless be understood as a sacrificial ritual, a cultural process—not unlike an extreme form of performance art, a theater of cruelty, or an obscene reality show—whose purpose is to forestall a worse form of disaster?

But what could possibly have been a worse form of disaster than the Nazis’ willful murderous efforts, and what larger horror could they be preventing?—the disaster and horror of being victimized themselves, of being reduced to bare life, of having their own group unity disintegrate in the potentially unstoppable spread of mimetic violence: in other words, the disaster and horror of losing their monopoly on violence and with it their claim to (the Aryan) difference. It would be unthinkable for “the Germans” to become like everyone else. The status of the victim, structurally indispensable in Girard’s formulations, must thus be further specified as the externalization—the banishment (to use a term that recalls Agamben’s notion of ban) to the outside, in the form of a guilty adversary—of a group’s capacity for self-destruction. As a crowd whose members imitate each other’s behavior, the group derives an important benefit from the unanimous—that is, mimetically induced—hatred for the victim: this hatred unifies the members and creates the community. As “surrogate,” therefore, the victim is simultaneously the symptom of a group’s fundamental lack of cohesion—its fundamental non-identity with itself. As Girard writes in his study of The Book of Job: “In a world controlled by mimetic desire … the appetite for violence may grow and may be ultimately satisfied at that moment when the global tendency to uniformity focuses the mimetic substitutions and polarizations on some victim or other, or perhaps not so randomly but on a victim who is more vulnerable because of his visibility, one who is somehow predestined by the exceptional position he holds in the community—someone like Job.” [14]

On the other hand, if, in light of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, any rationalization of victimhood as such must be deemed outrageous regardless of how sympathetic the critic might be with the victims—and this is certainly the point of Agamben’s fundamental expulsion (sacrifice) of the sacrificial logic—does it mean that mimesis, whether imagined as nature, as culture, or as both, must also be thoroughly expunged—banned, banished, abandoned—as a concept because it is simply too perilous to think with, because it is bound to lead to conclusions that will be found without/outside moral compunctions? Yet what is the defense of moral compunction—to return again to Girard’s logic—if not precisely a collectively ordained exercise of violence aimed at preserving our social order from crumbling—a ritualized mimesis, no less? Would not the expunging of mimesis turn it precisely into a symptom about us as a community, in the aforementioned terms?

Interestingly, this is also the point at which Girard’s seemingly amoral, religion-oriented argument of mimetic violence comes closest to Agamben’s nihilistic, atheist understanding of law and power. As the fundamental vacuity of the sovereign relation is exposed by the increasingly arbitrary abuses by those in power, what is so-called law is revealing itself—and here is the logical transition from Agamben into Girard—to be nothing more than a collectively ordained exercise of violence, intended once upon a time to preserve the social equilibrium, perhaps, but now functioning as nothing more than a frenzied killing machine. Despite his adherence to the need for moral compunctions in his (anti-sacrificial and anti-mimetic) approach to the concentration camps, Agamben’s bleak depictions of political-power-gone-berserk the world over suggest that his grasp of the unmitigated, and perhaps intractable, actuality of human violence (defined by Girard as mimetic) is, in the end, not that distant from Girard’s.

One final question and speculation: insofar as any discussion of them seems ineluctably to arrive at these formidable—and terrifying—questions of freedom, violence, moral constraints, community, and boundaries-setting, are not sacrifice and mimesis perhaps the “surrogate victims” and “ritual victims” par excellence in the domain of representational politics today?