Enjoyable talk. Girard said one shouldn’t see his theory as “everything in intellectual life”. He doesn’t pretend to have a theory of music or architecture, for instance, about which Roger Scruton writes so well.
Against the idea of aesthetic value as “subjective” Scruton always quoted Kant: ‘In matters of taste we are suitors for agreement.- taste inescapably mimetic.
I knew Scruton as a student at Birkbeck and liked him and admired him as a teacher, writer and thinker. As a relative know nothing I hesitate to contradict him, but as I see it he doesn’t do justice to Girard’s argument.
Reading his ‘Notes on Girard’ in ‘Soul of the World’ Scruton seems to miss Girard’s fundamental point about ‘misrecognition’, that having a scapegoat, by definition, is to be unaware of the fact.
Scruton:
**In a singular argument, Girard suggests that Jesus was the first scapegoat to understand the need for his own death and to forgive those who inflicted it. And in submitting to this, Girard argues, Jesus gave the best evidence, and perhaps the only possible evidence, of his divine nature. He was the Lamb of God, the innocent victim, and also Emmanuel, God among us, who came to release us from the violence that had hitherto been locked into the heart of our communities.14 On him all the sins of the world—sins of envy, rivalry, and malice—could be discharged, and he would accept the death that these states of mind are inwardly longing for. This mystical idea is celebrated in the Christian Eucharist, when the communicants rehearse the sacrifice of a God who took their sins upon himself, and so purchased their forgiveness.**
Doesn’t Girard continually cite Jesus in this context: “I come not to bring peace but a sword…”? That deprived of its sacrificial protection, the very unanimity that *is* the scapegoat mechanism, that which formerly *contained* violence, is bound to unleash it turning people against one another instead of joining the mob pile-on?
Only now, Girard adds, mimetic pile-ons will be in the name of the victim: because of Jesus, and in spite of the best efforts of neo-pagan ‘We wuz Kangz’ Teuton primitivist race idolaters at reversion, today we can only ‘scapegoat’ scapegoaters.
If I’m not mistaken, how can a thicko like me see that and these heavyweights, Scruton isn’t alone in misconstruing Girard, not?
In the same interview quoted above on Vimeo in French with English subtitles Girard says the scapegoat mechanism is not a theory but a universal fact. One could say the same of mimetic desire which he has compared, I forget where, with gravity: all-determining, *in* nothing.
Enjoyable talk. Girard said one shouldn’t see his theory as “everything in intellectual life”. He doesn’t pretend to have a theory of music or architecture, for instance, about which Roger Scruton writes so well.
Against the idea of aesthetic value as “subjective” Scruton always quoted Kant: ‘In matters of taste we are suitors for agreement.- taste inescapably mimetic.
I knew Scruton as a student at Birkbeck and liked him and admired him as a teacher, writer and thinker. As a relative know nothing I hesitate to contradict him, but as I see it he doesn’t do justice to Girard’s argument.
Reading his ‘Notes on Girard’ in ‘Soul of the World’ Scruton seems to miss Girard’s fundamental point about ‘misrecognition’, that having a scapegoat, by definition, is to be unaware of the fact.
Scruton:
**In a singular argument, Girard suggests that Jesus was the first scapegoat to understand the need for his own death and to forgive those who inflicted it. And in submitting to this, Girard argues, Jesus gave the best evidence, and perhaps the only possible evidence, of his divine nature. He was the Lamb of God, the innocent victim, and also Emmanuel, God among us, who came to release us from the violence that had hitherto been locked into the heart of our communities.14 On him all the sins of the world—sins of envy, rivalry, and malice—could be discharged, and he would accept the death that these states of mind are inwardly longing for. This mystical idea is celebrated in the Christian Eucharist, when the communicants rehearse the sacrifice of a God who took their sins upon himself, and so purchased their forgiveness.**
Doesn’t Girard continually cite Jesus in this context: “I come not to bring peace but a sword…”? That deprived of its sacrificial protection, the very unanimity that *is* the scapegoat mechanism, that which formerly *contained* violence, is bound to unleash it turning people against one another instead of joining the mob pile-on?
Only now, Girard adds, mimetic pile-ons will be in the name of the victim: because of Jesus, and in spite of the best efforts of neo-pagan ‘We wuz Kangz’ Teuton primitivist race idolaters at reversion, today we can only ‘scapegoat’ scapegoaters.
If I’m not mistaken, how can a thicko like me see that and these heavyweights, Scruton isn’t alone in misconstruing Girard, not?
In the same interview quoted above on Vimeo in French with English subtitles Girard says the scapegoat mechanism is not a theory but a universal fact. One could say the same of mimetic desire which he has compared, I forget where, with gravity: all-determining, *in* nothing.