Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Throw a piece of bread off the wharf and immediately seagulls swarm the morsel. Mimesis works. What makes human mimesis different? The difference is difference itself: i.e. , the arbitrariness of the relation between imitated gesture and the object it “points” to ( cf. my dog and the roast beef). In the originary scene, this gesture has to be motivated appetitively, just as in the case of all other animals. If it isn’t, then we are attributing to the scene a transcendental motivation that does not yet exist. But the end result of the originary scene–if it is truly originary–is not just another swarming around an appetitive object, but the designation of it as something other–the appetitive mimetic gesture becomes a gesture of designation, separating sign from object, periphery from center, human community from sacrificial other. By the way, I included the victim in my account of Gans as a pedagogical concession. The violence of the originary scene–the sparagmos–is in the first place an act of designating the object as central, which is to say, as different from the human periphery. This is the originary transcendental separation between (peripheral) human and (central) god. It is an unverifiable empirical matter whether this object is a conspecific or (as seems more likely) a nonconspecific game animal. What is important is the separation between center and periphery. The ensuing sparagmos is the “honor” paid to the god for having “created” this originary separation between sacred center and profane periphery.”

— Eric Gans, Sparagmos! A Dialogue on Girard and Gans · Spring 2005 · Anthropoetics