Review of Flesh Becomes Word: A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea by David Dawson

Dawson's fine book shows how the logic of sacrifice in Western Christian theories of atonement intersects with the emergence of the modern political meaning of the term" scapegoat" during the Calvinist Reformation. This argument, though, does not so much confirm as give grounds for criticizing Girard's claim that sacrifice is undone by the Cross, and suggests (contrary to intent) more that the "scapegoat" in the modern sense arises with modern democratic politics, than that modern politics arises from the revelation of the sacrificial victim as a scapegoat by Christianity, à la Girard.

2014

This article provides an overview of René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire, scapegoat mechanism and biblical demystification. It also attempts to explain the basic notions of his anthropology and to contextualize them in relation to the conceptions of philosophers like Freud, Durkheim and Nietzsche. The paper starts with an introduction to the widely discussed problem of mimetic desire. It sees Girard’s mimetic theory as a theory of conflict. Then, it analyzes how violence emerges through mimetic rivalry. From that point, the essay moves to discuss the scapegoat mechanism and the relation between violence and the sacred in archaic societies. Finally, it examines the conception of Judeo-Christian demystification of mimesis and surrogate victim.

Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 2020

Compelling voices charge that the theological notion of “sacrifice” valorizes suffering and fosters a culture of violence by the claim that Christ’s death on the Cross paid for human sins. Beneath the ‘sacred’ violence of sacrifice, René Girard discerns a concealed scapegoat-murder driven by a distortion of human desire that itself must lead to human self-annihilation. I here ask: can one speak safely of sacrifice; and can human beings somehow cease to practice the sacrifice that must otherwise destroy them? Drawing on Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604), I propose an understanding of sacrifice that both distinguishes Christian sacrifice from sacred violence and accounts for how to overcome the roots of the sacred violence identified by Girard. I make four claims: First, Girard recognizes two kinds of sacrifice—one, the scapegoat murder, overcomes community rivalries by unanimous imitation of an accuser, shifting blame onto a third party who is collectively murdered; the other sort of sacrifice practices renunciation and forgiveness in imitation of God. These I respectively designate the “Satanic” (Girard’s term) and the “theomimetic” (mine). Second, I analyze the intrinsic instability that keeps the Satanic from sustaining the societal order and unity that it promises. Third, by a constructive reading of Gregory the Great, I posit that satanic sacrifice overlooks and indeed exacerbates the root of human covetousness—a failure to love. Fourth, Gregory’s teaching on the imitation of Christ enables us to expand on Girard’s account of the theo¬mimetic sacrifice of renunciation, to clarify how this latter might not only oppose but also systematically subvert the Satanic by healing the disorder out of which mimetic rivalry and scapegoating first take their rise. https://doi.org/10.14321/contagion.27.2020.0177 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/contagion.27.2020.0177 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757320 https://philpapers.org/rec/WALTSA-15

Journal of religion in Africa, 2002

2015

Princeton Theological Monograph Series, 219, 2017

The Bible and Critical Theory, 2006