Scapegoating

“The Gospel narratives reveal that sacrality is created through victimization. In The Scapegoat , Girard distinguishes two basic hermeneutic modes. On the one hand is the mythic mode, which begins by demonizing the other as the prelude to sacrificial violence, and which ends by sacralizing or deifying the scapegoat victim. The mythic mode displaces human…”

“For Gans, indeed, scapegoating and human sacrifice is introduced much later, in the wake of the organization of communities around the so-called “Big Man,” who centralizes the distribution of resources. Once the origin of goods is centralized, in other words, so can be the origin of contagion. The Big Man both defers violence by deflecting resentments…”

“Against this backdrop, then, are we invited to engage with Michael Jackson, away from the usual tabloid gossip which often finds itself on either side of the divide, lauding the sorrows of Michael’s childhood when publicly expedient or crucifying him to no end and in equal measure— selling us commercially estheticized versions of either his resentment or…”

“The most important argument for mimetic theorists who wish to challenge liberalism to make, in fact, is that nothing in the condition of the powerless triggers scapegoating tendencies; quite to the contrary, it is always those who have or are believed to have “too much” power who are scapegoated. Even when we can observe instances of scapegoating targeting…”

“Third, while all scapegoating, or violent centralizing, obfuscates and produces regrettable actions, the most dangerous violent centralizing, the type to which all others tend, is that of the occupant of the social center: the usurpatory motives we might attribute to the occupant of the center, motives which serve as an anchor giving pattern to facts and…”

“I’ll repeat the moral-political difference that follows here. Rather than, as we imagine ourselves doing on the Big Scene, expelling the tyrant (and his supporters and instruments) in the name of the exemplary (scapegoated) victim, we instead refrain from scapegoating (we learn to detect signs of accelerating convergent attention) because scapegoating is…”

“Because the term “scapegoating” presupposes a higher level of consciousness on the part of its user than in those engaged in the act it describes, it forecloses ethical reasoning; any pretext furnished by the participants is invalid on its face, an example of bad faith or méconnaissance . It is the postmodern, post-Holocaust intuition of the inherent…”

“Scapegoating or “emissary victimage” is the defining operation of René Girard’s originary scene. The proto-human group, caught up in the violent chaos of “mimetic crisis,” finds unanimity by directing its aggression against a single, marginal individual; his death ends the crisis and he is subsequently venerated as the bringer of peace. Although my own…”

“Sacrificial ritual and “scapegoating” in general focus the energy of this resentment on targets whose destruction does not endanger the social order as a whole. Between societies, war often serves the function of directing resentment away from the social order; if the ideal “scapegoat” is one whose destruction does not damage this order, then a fortiori…”

“In a prehuman hierarchy, the participants’ hostility, which we should not yet call resentment, would be directed at those higher in the pecking order. These animal societies permit the one-on-one externalization of aggression, either in an actual fight for supremacy or in a gesture of ritualized submission. What is specific to human resentment is its…”