Bouvard on Victimary Logic and Antisemitism

Eric Gans wrote a lot about the victimary and then he wrote a lot about antisemitism but I don't recall him ever suggesting that in any victimary system of thought the Jews will ultimately be placed at the center (and that antisemitism will hence become overtly victimary).

@truepeers Did he ever write it? I could be forgetting.

@truepeers That's ok--even if he said this here or there I think I'm right in saying he didn't foreground it. And if I'm wrong about that, I'm quite willing to credit him with the observation.

@truepeers Has he extended that taboo to the moral model? I don't recall seeing it. Surely he doesn't think there's a taboo on "do unto others..." But the victimary is still left out here--I don't think you could say there's been a taboo on that.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers Here I would recommend familiarizing yourself with Girard's view of the matter--we're not talking about ideas here.

@truepeers In this case, though, there would have to be a taboo on everything he says, so why single out these things in particular?

@Imperius__13 When do you think Jews reduced social reality to oppressors and victims?

@truepeers @Imperius__13 For Girard, and I think Gans agrees, Christianity is a turning point because prior to Christianity arbitrary victimization is justified. Christianity exposes this as a result of internal mimetic rivalry.

@truepeers @Imperius__13 There are problems with Gans's argument here, and I'll be coming back to this. He had a more complex version at first, which involved the Jews not accepting later iterations, but he dropped that, so it's not clear why a nonbeliever would resent the Jewish discovery of monotheism

@truepeers Yes, but there's a circularity here which one might be excused for not wanting to enter.

@truepeers @Imperius__13 However conscious it was, my guess is he backed off because it put the spotlight on Christianity.

@truepeers @Imperius__13 The problem is treating it as a cognitive advance rather than the discovery that the mob is wrong. God=the mob is wrong, the victim is vindicated. For Girard the Hebrew bible was already there.

@truepeers @Imperius__13 Yes but it’s not just one God bigger and stronger than the others were thought to be.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers Repudiating scapegoating is an uprooting of ritual, which is not an idea.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers Repudiating the chaos by selecting a victim who is treated as its cause is one kind of ritual--Christianity (and to a great extent, Judaism) repudiates that kind of ritual.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers I wanted to use as strong a word for marking the repudiation as I could. For Girard, it's a complete turnaround from the entire history of human ritual and sociality.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers You can also get away with a lot by claiming that all claims that a god is false are just a way of getting away with something.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers Magic has nothing to do with it, and you can see you're not explaining anything here. The claim is that Jesus's death exposed the lie behind scapegoating, that the victim is guilty or, at least, responsible. This is the revelation.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers I've laid out the Girardian argument, so there's not much more to say. You could follow up on that if you're interested. In my view "transportation and media technologies" explains exactly nothing. And if you think N. Europeans didn't take Christianity seriously, OK.

@truepeers @Imperius__13 But I would agree that Jewish and then Christian monotheism deny all other authority. Why that means "ideology," I don't know.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers Nothing in Christian scripture, as a far as I know involves coercion; that the Roman Emperor, Church and European kings turned it into an instrument of coercion is another matter. This, of course, made it difficult for temporal powers to claim to represent the faith.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers The Christian revelation claims to be true--for Girard, first of all, for anthropological reasons. That doesn't seem to interest you, and maybe there's no reason why it should. But everything else is irrelevant here.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers True, there's no need to talk about any of this.

@Imperius__13 @truepeers For Girard, the question is: what is a particular community sacrificing? How does it show its devotion to God or gods?

@Imperius__13 Not that I know. What did the German pagans sacrifice?

@Imperius__13 So, they must die in war?

@Imperius__13 The question is whether killing is ritualized.

@Imperius__13 Giving a reason is not exactly ritualizing it--the more of a testable process in terms of deciding whom to kill, the less it's a ritual--you're not purging sins, or atoning for anything.

@Imperius__13 Yes, but in a juridical order, the court system is an extension of ritual--that mediates the killing and ensures the killing isn't an arbitrary lynching.

@Imperius__13 I've never thought that imperative culture was the end--we have declaratives. Yes, the chief executive is the final judge but monarchies can be sacrificial orders or not. Orders based on sacrificial killings can be functional but the sacrificial logic eventually is exposed.

@Imperius__13 Yes, there is the "de" and "re" you refer to. Christianity did that in a particular way.