RENE GIRARD AND MIMETIC DESIRE

The following is the introduction to my own book, “Rene Girard and COVID-19: Satan, Capitalism, Apocalypse.” The book can be ordered here.

INTRODUCTION

We live in an age of cyber-bullying, unmasking, and digital harassment from unnamed avatars: computational images of subjectivity that cruise the surface of the global network looking for their next victim. We live in an age of frantic capitalist productivity, technological overdetermination, and a planetary system of corporate power that is turning much of the world’s population, billions of human beings, into a fragmented collage of helpless victims; victimized by the gestating power of algorithms, automation, and surveillance.(1)

In other words, we live in a Satanic Age.

But what exactly do I mean by that word? Do I mean that we live in an age in which a red demon with a pitchfork is now in command of the global economy, or perhaps that we exist in a society of Satan worshippers?(2)

For Rene Girard, Satan is not a demon or really something that can be “worshipped” in a religious sense;(3) rather, it is the incredible fact that Satan can most appropriately be described as the “Being with no being.” For Girard, Satan can be articulated as something like the archetypal narcissist, the Being that has no being of his own, so he must utilize, he must “possess” the being of the Other: he must find his next victim.

The victim is the key piece of Girard’s anthropology of archaic societies. The victim is sacred. The victim is essential. The victim is the telos of the entire process of desire — the point where all surplus mimetic desire eventually leads to as a point of discharge.(4)

It is the sacrifice of the victim that restores order. It is the sacrifice of the victim that brings peace. It is the sacrifice of the victim that ultimately exhausts the buildup of socialized desire threatening to consume the community into an undifferentiated chaos.(5)

Satan is the virtual agency that structures the process of human desire that culminates in sacrifice of one kind or another. To be even more precise: Satan is nothing but this very process.(6)

He is the one who oversees the process of mimetic desire(7) to the point where it needs a victim to be exhausted of itself.

(NO) SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

One of the great songs in the history of rock n’roll is Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones. Of course, like most people, I have heard this song countless times in my life. And, like most people, I always enjoyed the seductive rhythm of the song — Wyman’s bass, Charlie Watts’ steady hand on the drums, Richards’ always understated but powerful guitar riffs — and would usually happily turn the volume up on the radio whenever I would happen to hear it. But there was also a feeling of angst that accompanied this song, a subtle sense of discomfort in that I knew this song was ultimately about Satan; the Prince of Darkness of this world. Perhaps my Irish-Catholic background may have naturally resisted fully embracing a song that dealt with such taboo matters. But, regardless of whether I was able to hear the song without a slight sense of discomfort, what I can say for certain is that I never truly listened to the song until after I had encountered the work of Rene Girard.

It is said that this song was partially inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita,(8) the great literary work of the 20th century that deals with the ever-present influence of Satanic power upon humanity. Even though Girard’s extensive writing on the topic of Satan followed the release of this song, one cannot help but wonder how Jagger and Richards were able to lyrically express some of the core concepts of Girard’s anthropology regarding the question of Satan. Perhaps they were able to enunciate such concepts because these concepts are not strictly in the ownership of Girard. As Girard himself has noted time and time again, his work is ultimately that of a discovery,(9) the uncovering of something fundamental to the question of humanity that has always-already been there, ever-present right under our noses that we had never been able to fully grasp.

Perhaps Jagger and Richards were, like Girard, also able to tap into and express these obfuscated elements buried somewhere deep within our collective psyche, “Things hidden since the foundation of the world,” in a way that flanks some of Girard’s most important breakthroughs.

Let us now move to an analysis of several key points in this classic song for the purpose of uncovering and articulating some of Rene Girard’s core insights regarding the operation of Satan within human community and global society at large:

Please allow me to introduce myself

I’m a man of wealth and taste

I’ve been around for a long, long year

Stole many a man’s soul to waste

And I was ‘round when Jesus Christ

Had his moment of doubt and pain

Made damn sure that Pilate

Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guess my name

But what’s puzzling you

Is the nature of my game

I stuck around St. Petersburg

When I saw it was a time for a change

Killed the czar and his ministers

Anastasia screamed in vain

I rode a tank

Held a general’s rank

When the blitzkrieg raged

And the bodies stank

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guess my name, oh yeah

Ah, what’s puzzling you

Is the nature of my game, oh yeah

I watched with glee

While your kings and queens

Fought for ten decades

For the gods they made.

I shouted out

Who killed the Kennedys?

When after all

It was you and me

Let me please introduce myself

I’m a man of wealth and taste

And I laid traps for troubadours

Who get killed before they reached Bombay

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah

But what’s puzzling you

Is the nature of my game, oh yeah, get down, baby

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah

But what’s confusing you

Is just the nature of my game

Just as every cop is a criminal

And all the sinners saints

As heads is tails

Just call me Lucifer

’Cause I’m in need of some restraint

So if you meet me

Have some courtesy

Have some sympathy, and some taste

Use all your well-learned politeness

Or I’ll lay your soul to waste, mm yeah

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guessed my name.

But what’s puzzling you

Is the nature of my game, mm mean it, get down

Woo, who

Oh yeah, get on down

Oh yeah

Aah yeah

Tell me baby, what’s my name?

Tell me honey, can ya guess my name?

Tell me baby, what’s my name?

I tell you one time, you’re to blame

What’s my name

Tell me, baby, what’s my name?

Tell me, sweetie, what’s my name?(10)

The first stanza of the song deals with two separate but critically related features of Satan. In the first two lines we have a brief introduction, “Please allow me to introduce myself,” and then an immediate assertion of the relation between Satan and material power, “I’m a man of wealth and taste.” This primal element of Satanic power, the fact that Satan is the Prince of this world, the fact that is he most associated with the various features of terrestrial or material power that emerge from the effect of mimetic desire, is of course expressed most famously in the Gospel of Matthew (4:8–10) when Christ is tempted in the desert:

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if You will bow down and worship me.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Go away, Satan! For it is written: ‘You must worship the Lord your God, and you must serve Him only.’

The temptation of Christ in the desert juxtaposes the qualitative difference between material power and spiritual power; between the power of mimetic desire (the force responsible for the various structures that breed oppression, greed, and violence) and the spiritual forces of forgiveness, grace, and radical equality.

Thomas Hobbes, who himself grappled with similar questions throughout his work, noted that all of the various manifestations of material wealth ultimately reduce to the “desire of power.” In Girardian terms, we could reinterpret Hobbes words as the “desire of the Other’s power”:

The passions that most of all cause the difference of wit, are principally, the more or less desire of power, of riches, of knowledge, and of honour. All which may be reduced to the first, that is, desire of power. For riches, knowledge, and honour, are but several sorts of power.(11)

In other words, the desire of and for power has an inherent intersubjective function: we don’t desire power in a pure abstract sense, what we really desire is the power we perceive and experience being wielded by the Other, the power we encounter that is operative in the social field. And this is precisely what Satan continually seduces the world with: the potential to acquire the power and desire of the Other, thus leading to a spiral of destructive and violent intersubjective rivalries that become embedded into sociopolitical reality.

In the next two lines of the first stanza we find a rather casual references to his temporal longevity, “I’ve been around for a long, long year,” and then a line referencing his basic mission upon the Earthly plane, “Stole many a man’s soul to waste.” When reading the words of Satan in these two lines — even if channeled by Jagger/Richards after a night of debauchery in 1960s London — we again come to crucial elements of Girard’s biblical anthropology. Since, for Girard, Satan is best understood as a generative process of mimetic or reflexive desire that causes progressive cultural instability before culminating in an act of sacrifice,(12) the assertion, “I’ve been around for a long, long year” is an understatement to say the least. Satan — the very process of human desire becoming entangled and then untangled, ad infinitum — is a generative feature of the human subject and human community.

And, furthermore, to be captured by the desiring machinery of Satan (something that all of us have experienced multiple times to one degree or another), is precisely the experience of losing the boundaries and integrity of our very soul, our subjectivity and internal processes, and thus being swept away by the socialized desire that surrounds and ultimately engulfs us. This is where the line, “Stole many a man’s soul to waste” is precisely correct in identifying the “nature of the game” of Satan: to take our soul captive as we are caught up in the process of mimetic desire; to have us “possessed” by the desire of the Other even as we think we are acting from our own agency.

In the second stanza, we immediately find another critical piece of Girard’s thought, a piece that will be explored at length throughout this book. What we discover here, buried in the text, is not only the dramatic historical encounter between Jesus Christ and Satan 2000 years ago — an encounter that will radically transform the world and re-polarize the very course of Western history — but also the open admission of “making damn sure” Pilate would sanction the victimization and sacrifice of Christ to satiate the mimetic desire of the Palestinian crowd that demanded his crucifixion.

In the Gospel of John (11:8–10), we are given direct insight into the structural unfolding of the victimization process:

Therefore many of the Jews who came to Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in Him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.

So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, “What are we going to do since this man does many signs. If we let him continue in this way, everyone will believe in Him! Then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”

One of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all! You are not considering that it is to your advantage that one man should die for the people rather than the whole nation perish.”

Caiaphas, who will soon become the loudest voice in convincing the vacillating Pilate to allow the crucifixion of Jesus to proceed, expresses in the most succinct and direct way possible what we are really dealing with when he says, “You are not considering that it is to your advantage that one man should die for the people rather than the whole nation perish.” What Caiaphas is ultimately saying is that the intersubjective and sociopolitical disruption of Palestine must be re-channeled onto another source to save the nation from internal disintegration. That other source is none other than the sacrificial victim.

Before I continue here, I want to echo a point of Girard and make it absolutely clear that Caiaphas did not make these remarks “because he was Jewish” — a typical trope of Christian anti-Semitism — he rather he made them because he was a human being. That is to say, he made them because he was expressing a generative feature of the desiring process in its universal dimension.(13) He was expressing the core logic of sacrifice, which is the fact that a victim is able to temporarily discharge all of the tensions, resentments, and frustrations circulating within a community through his or her sacrifice. Caiaphas was perhaps morally wrong for making such a statement; his insight, on the other hand, could not be more anthropologically precise.

For Rene Girard, early human society emerges after the spontaneous discovery of sacrifice as having both a highly cathartic and uniting effect upon our ancient ancestors somewhere along the line in their long and strenuous passage towards hominization.(14) In perhaps a freak occurrence, a freak occurrence that seems to have taken place in various locations across the planet, what ancient humans discovered is that when a group of humans selected a singular victim amongst themselves, an individual they could all unite against and discharge all of their built-up negative feelings and aggressive emotions in the sacrificial act, it had a calming, structuring effect upon those who partook in the violent exercise. They discovered that it forged social bonds and the violent action brought the disparate and fragmented group towards a common purpose.(15) Not only does this exercise — selecting a victim amongst the group — save the group from an all-out Hobbesian war in which everyone becomes a potential victim against everyone else, but it quite literally becomes the catalyst for the origin of human society. And, furthermore, what is also discovered in the elemental sacrificial act is none other than the transcendent realm itself, the sacred, a realm that is intimately linked to violence:

My theory depends on a number of basic premises. Even if innumerable

intermediary stages exist between the spontaneous outbursts of violence

and its religious imitations, even if it is only these imitations that come to

our notice, I want to stress that these imitations had their origin in a real

event. The actuality of this event, over and above its existence in rite and

record, must be kept in mind. We must also take care not to restrict this

event to any one context, any one dominant intellectual framework,

whether semantic or symbolic, which lacks a firm basis in reality. The

event should be viewed as an absolute beginning, signifying the passage

from nonhuman to human, as well as a relative beginning for the societies

in question.(16)

Christians often cannot help but to find Caiaphas’ open call to sacrifice Jesus Christ, a global messenger of peace, forgiveness, and love somewhat horrifying. But yet, after coming to a fuller understanding of the structural process that is being disclosed in the Gospel accounts, we see that Caiaphas is expressing something so fundamental, not just to the particular Jewish community of which he is part, but to the origin of human societies across the world: when a community is threatened by an uncontrollable crisis, when a community is on the verge of sociopolitical upheaval and self-destruction, a real possibility that the Pharisees considered could follow from the radical teaching of Jesus Christ, a victim — “one man die for the people” — must be selected so to save the community from itself. (17)

Since Satan is not a being unto himself, but rather the name of a structural process that speaks through certain individuals that it “possesses” during the course of the process, we can see the line — “made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed his fate” — takes on a whole new dimension of meaning that we had never quite seen before: Pilate, although a powerful Roman governor in his own right, was nevertheless momentarily “possessed” by this anthropological process of desire and victimization so to preserve the peace of a community he governed and was ultimately responsible for. The fact that Pilate himself actually resisted his own possession by this process and yet still allowed it to proceed in the form of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ only further discloses its true power.(18)

Next, we have the chorus, lines repeated throughout the course of the song, in which Satan tells us he is both formally pleased to make our acquaintance, “Pleased to meet you,” and then inquires if we know “the nature of his game.” I find this text to be remarkable on many levels. The first level is how Jagger and Richards allude to one of the most difficult concepts in Girard’s entire body of work, which is that central to the operative logic of Satan is a constant process of “exteriorization” — an uncomfortable idea articulated in a strange question posed in the Gospel of Mark when Christ asks, “How can Satan cast out Satan?”(19)

This perplexing question regarding the “nature of the game” is almost mocked by Satan in the lyrics of the song; in the way the question is posed in such a nonchalant way. And it is mocked precisely for the fact that the human subject and human community are still unable to come to terms with the material fact of this “game,” its generative and historical effect upon global society, and the absolute necessity to somehow escape from its twisted logic as we now head directly towards an explosive, multi-faceted planetary crisis in the 21st century.

Satan poses the question — do we even understand his game, the most serious game in the history of human civilization — in such a casual and spontaneous way precisely because that is how we experience it. We do not know, we are rarely if ever conscious, of the interrelated mechanisms of mimetic desire, scandal, scapegoating, and sacrifice as of yet; we cannot see how these elements are inscribed into the very heart of our psyche, our relationships, and even the abstract sociopolitical structures that govern us. We experience “the nature of the game” as being completely natural only because we are not yet fully conscious and knowledgeable of its true dimensions.

Next, we have a stanza that bears witness to the opportunism of Satan in his constant desire to force the human subject into his chaotic, violent process; how he constantly plays both sides of the fence in his quest to entangle the human subject in mimetic rivalry. On one hand Satan seems to be a communist revolutionary, a 20th century Bolshevik somewhere in the ranks of Lenin and Trotsky during the Russian Revolution when he claims that he, “killed the Czar and his ministers.”

But then, incredibly, in the following lines, he is in the middle of World War II experiencing the power of the German blitzkrieg, “I rode a tank, held a general’s rank, when the blitzkrieg raged.” What is so fascinating and unnerving here is that we don’t exactly know what side he is on in his obtuse recollection: is he part of the American forces fighting against fascism and the blitzkrieg, is he part of the Russian army defending its western border from the Nazi invasion, or is he part of the Nazi military machine itself?

The answer of course is that he is everywhere, he is on all sides. He is the shadowy agent in the background directing the structural process of mimetic desire, conflict, and war(20) as such.(21)

He seduces us constantly so we can model our desires upon the Other in ever new and innovative ways, and then, as the process accelerates, he sits back and watches as the intersubjective and sociopolitical strife, conflict, and violence follow from the incapacity of our built-up desire to be properly exhausted; to be properly discharged in constructive and life-affirming ways versus destructive and sacrificial ones.

Although part of the basic thesis of this book is to demonstrate the relationship between the structural process of Satan and the present state of 21st century globalized capitalism, it should be noted, as the above stanza correctly expresses, that Satan is a meta-structuring principal itself. Surely, the Stalin show trials of 1930’s Moscow and the killing fields in Cambodia during the 1970s are certainly “Satanic” in the way that I will use this concept throughout what follows. Meaning, hypothetically, any ideology or sociopolitical system — no matter how humane or just its stated goals or principals are at the outset — can easily descend into a dynamic that is consumed by Satanic logic; can easily descend into the grip of mimetic conflict, surplus desire, and ultimately a sacrificial crisis of one kind or another.

The point I will make here is that 21st century global capitalism — after its long historical run from the mills in northern England and Lowell, Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, diamond mines in the Congo, the Shanghai stock exchange and Tik Tok videos — is beginning to function in a way that is explicitly and dangerously “Satanic.” The integration of computational power and global markets is forcing the human race into a spiraling dynamic of mimetic competition, mimetic rivalry, and a truly shocking surplus of undigested socialized desire that is going to eventually lead to a global sacrificial crisis of some kind or another.(22) In the meantime, Satan will play both sides, actually he will play all available sides in this unfolding human drama, and continue to stoke the flames of mindless competition, pathological productivity, and capitalist mimesis:

Nearly two thirds of people in leading Western European countries would consider augmenting the human body with technology to improve their lives, mostly to improve health, according to research commissioned by Kaspersky.

As humanity journeys further into a technological revolution that its leaders say will change every aspect of our lives, opportunities abound to transform the ways our bodies operate from guarding against cancer to turbo-charging the brain.

The Opinium Research survey of 14,500 people in 16 countries including Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain showed that 63% of people would consider augmenting their bodies to improve them, though the results varied across Europe.(23)

What the above passage speaks to is not so much that people will integrate technology into their body simply “to improve their health,” but rather the fact that people will integrate technology into their body because they perceive other people desiring this technology to improve their own health. The mimetic effect, the turning on of our own desire through the Other, is what ultimately drives a process like capitalism and all of the innovation and productivity that accompanies its historical movement across the planet.

In the next stanza, again, a faithful reader of Girard cannot help but to be genuinely shocked at these lines and their proximity to a formal Giradian analysis of violence, sacrifice, and Satan. When Jagger sings the final lines of the verse, “For the gods they made,” what Jagger notes is not the standard liberal critique of religion: that men invent their own gods for whatever reason to cope with their cosmic alienation here on Planet Earth. For Girard, the making of gods, the making of the sacred, first emerges in human history with the discovery of sacrifice; how a singular victim whose collective murder by a community undergoing an existential crisis is miraculously able to bring peace to the community and somehow relieve the built-up tension of mimetic desire.(24) The violent release of energy re-directed towards the sacrificial victim in lieu of continually spreading within the community itself, coupled with the sudden transformation of the community’s social substance from a warlike state to a state of catharsis and peace, is what produces the transcendent realm. That is to say, what it produces is precisely “the gods” in the sense that the sacrificed victim becomes a god him or herself.(25)

And now we come to perhaps the most consequential stanza of the song, worth noting again in full because of its lucid disclosure of Satanic power and logic:

Just as every cop is a criminal

And all the sinners saints

As heads is tails

Just call me Lucifer

’Cause I’m in need of some restraint(26)

What this stanza refers to is not simply the straightforward idea that every human being has multiple facets to his or her personality, that all symbolic identities are ultimately incomplete and paradoxical, “All the sinners are saints.” This, of course, is a basic cornerstone of human wisdom and is, generally speaking, a true statement. But Satan often uses statements of truth and benevolent ideas as a trojan horse to deceive people of his true sacrificial intentions.(27)

A “sacrificial crisis,” to employ the terminology of Rene Girard, occurs when a community, or an entire planetary society as in our case, is faced with self-destruction from the build-up of mimetic desire. Sociopolitical order is threatened, cultural stability is washed away, and a general crisis emerges to a point that the population demands a “scapegoat” to assign blame for the metastasizing instability. We see such a process in very clear terms when Nazi Germany, facing their own “sacrificial crisis,” formally assigned Jews as the cause of their own internal dysfunction and began to engage in systematic sacrificial violence against the Jewish population.

But what ultimately denotes a sacrificial crisis is that it is a crisis of “Sameness.” It is a crisis when all cultural distinctions, all symbolic identities, and the very psychic boundaries of individuals are threatened with obliteration; threatened by the growing power of mimetic desire: unchecked mimetic desire erodes all boundaries, borders, and edges that allow for differentiation to be properly expressed.(28)

As the above lyrics correctly express, the work of Satan is ultimately to destroy the distinction between sinner and saint, cop and criminal, heads and tails, etc. through the release of desire into a social field that is unable to contain it by any political or cultural mechanisms. And when this happens to a point that the very order of a society is threatened, when all distinctions are on the verge of collapse, the sacrificial victim is introduced as the “element of difference”(29) to restore order; to break the pandemic of growing Sameness brought forth by the unregulated surplus of mimetic desire.

To apply a Girardian analysis to Nazi Germany, as Germany felt their nation and culture were losing their identity in the context of Europe’s rapid modernization, the Jews precisely represented this “element of difference” introduced by the Nazis to break the spell of encroaching “Sameness.” This was Satanic logic at its most evil and destructive.

And this is precisely why, at the end of the stanza, Satan remarks, “Cause I’m in need of some restraint.” If Satan is the name for a structural process, a process intent on the eroding of psychic, cultural, and political boundaries to allow the current of mimetic desire to flow freely and consume a society to the point of destruction, he must “restrain himself” or else the process will eventually self-destruct beyond repair. And he restrains himself precisely through the mechanism of victimization: sacrifice is the “element of difference” introduced into the social equation so to suspend the contagion of mimetic desire and thus stop the social destruction. And then, at a later date, Satan is able to re-start the process all over again.

To conclude the song, Jagger sings in almost a trance-like state, speaking the initial greeting, “Pleased to meet you,” and then continually inquiring whether or not we have come to understand, “his name” — do we even know who or what we are actually dealing with? But then, suddenly, this trance-like choral repetition is interrupted one final time when a completely new line is introduced, “I tell you one time, you’re to blame.”

In his book I See Satan fall Like Lighting, Rene Girard comments on the fundamental relationship between Satan and accusation, the very fact that Satan is the “accuser” of humanity:

In the Gospel of John the name given to this Spirit admirably describes the power that tears the disciples away from this all-powerful contagion: the Paraclete. I have commented on this term in other essays, but its importance for what I am doing in this book is so great that I must return to it. The principal meaning of pacrakletos is “lawyer for the defense,” “defender of the accused.” In place of looking for periphrases and loopholes to avoid this translation, we should prefer it to all others and marvel at its relevance. We should take with utmost seriousness the idea that the Spirit enlightens the persecutors concerning their acts of persecution. The Spirit discloses to individuals the literal truth of what Jesus said during his crucifix-ion: “They don’t know what they are doing.” We should also think of the God whom Job calls “my defender.”

The birth of Christianity is a victory of the Paraclete over his opposite, Satan, whose name originally means “accuser before a tribunal,” that is, the one responsible for proving the guilt of the defendants. That is one of the reasons why the Gospels hold Satan responsible for all mythology. The Passion accounts are attributed to the spiritual power that defends victims unjustly accused. This corresponds marvelously to the human content of the revelation, to the extent that violent contagion permits it to be understood.(30)

From here, we can now move to Girard’s unique interpretation of Christianity and how it juxtaposes itself against both mythology and Satan.

RENE GIRARD AND THE PARADOXICAL EFFECT OF CHRISTIANITY

On the surface, Christianity seems to be nothing but a new iteration of archaic religion and myth rooted in the logic of sacrifice: the sacrificed individual-victim by the greater community, Jesus Christ, retroactively becomes a God after his sacrifice and resurrection.(31) But, for Girard, the exact opposite is true. What Christianity is for Rene Girard is rather that of an “anti-myth,” in the sense that it unmasks the basic structure of sacrificial violence; it lays bare the interrelated forces of mimetic desire, sacrifice, and even to an extent the violent origins of the human race itself: Christianity reveals what myth obfuscates.(32)(33) And this is why Christianity could be said, simultaneously, to be the most peaceful and violent force ever unleashed on the population of Planet Earth.

The peace of Christianity comes not only from the spiritual wisdom of Jesus Christ and the radical peace brought forth by the Holy Spirit, but also from the anthropological knowledge that is disclosed by both the Gospel accounts and the writings of Saint Paul: the formal mechanism of Satanic power as the generative principal of human community, the highly contagious and imitative nature of human desire, and the role of sacrificial logic in the organization of society:

I will open my mouth in parables.

I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.

Whereas the violence unleashed by Christianity in Western society and then throughout the world is paradoxically a result of that very same revelation, perhaps best expressed in a passage from the Gospel of Matthew (10:34–36) when Jesus says:

Don’t assume that I came to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.

Could Jesus Christ, an individual bearing witness to a universal message of peace and reconciliation really be advocating for direct intersubjective violence between family members? Was his mission to poison households and communities for the purpose of creating strife?

In order to read this provocative passage with Rene Girard, we must grasp the fact that Jesus is not speaking directly to family members, but rather to the web of sacrificial relations looming in the background. If our family members and the community we live in are de facto controlled by hierarchical, violent systems implicitly structured by sacrificial logic, then our mission, for Christ, is to subtract ourselves from this very matrix of intersubjectivity: it is in this very self-subtraction that will cause the familial conflict and turn family members against each other. In other words, Jesus is not calling for direct conflict against those closest to us, he is rather calling us to recognize the conflict is already there and to remove ourselves from its social logic. Girard speaks directly to this Bible passage when he claims that

it is the deprivation of victim mechanisms and its terrible consequences that he talks about when he presents the future of the evangelized world in terms of conflict between persons who are most closely related.(34)

The contemporary philosopher and psychoanalyst Slajov Zizek also makes note of both the dangerous and emancipatory implications that are contained in this disturbing Gospel account:

This is the Jesus Christ who says, amongst other things, ‘I bring [a] sword not peace, if you don’t hate your mother, your father, you are not my follower.’ Of course it does not mean you should actively hate your parents. I think that family relations stand here for hierarchical social relations. The message of Christ is, I have died, but my death itself is good news. It means you are alone, left to your freedom, be in the Holy Ghost, which is just the community of believers. It is wrong to think that the Second Coming will be that Christ as a figure will return somehow. Christ is already here when believers form an emancipatory collective.(35)

The violence precipitated by the Christian vision thus stems from the slow and steady undermining of all the sacrificial-hierarchical mechanisms that have held society in place through the various “scapegoat” strategies (such as slavery, feudalism, and now global capitalism in the 21st century) and the inability of the human subject to cope with the radical implications of the “Kingdom of God” that was announced in Palestine 2000 years ago: the announcement of a world free from mimetic rivalry and the various sacrificial-hierarchical models put in place throughout history to both contain this latent violence and put it into the service of material power.

Rene Girard expresses this paradox in the following passage:

If you look at the Gospel text in the light of what we are talking about, you have texts like, “I bring a sword, not peace,” “I will separate the father from his son, the daughter from her mother, the mother-in law from her daughter-in-law.” It is there in the Gospels, but people forget about it because it is so scary. And it is the announcement of a world which will be no longer protected by sacrificial protections. I would say that today the Christian world is a world where the sacrificial protections collapse more and more … I would say we have to bring these texts back and disagree with the theologians who tell us the apocalypse was a big mistake, that it was borrowed from the Jews and so forth. Not at all. It came from the profound insight that Christianity uproots culture in terms of sacrifice, and therefore delivers the world to the powers of destruction, if it doesn’t choose Christian love.(36)

What this means for 21st century global society is so profound, but yet so elementary, that it is hard to fully comprehend. We are living through a time period where the dam of human desire — the all-encompassing capitalist competition, the daily onslaught of envy and jealously precipitated by the global advertising industry and the social media apparatus, and a general approach towards life that is now a cross between “keeping up with the Joneses” and “survival of the fittest algorithm” — is now breaking completely open from the combinatory effect of computational power becoming synchronized with global markets. When facing our social media feeds what we discover is that there are no longer any cultural or political mechanisms to protect us from the Other’s desire, because such protections have been progressively undermined by the “Satanic” nature of global capitalism and networked technologies.(37)

We are now left with a situation that the late British writer Mark Fisher termed “Capitalist Realism,”(38) a progressively Hobbesian world of every man for himself in which all cultural and social protections once instituted to protect society from mimetic conflict are progressively undermined for the logic of direct market mediation and the technological forms that structures it.

In other words, we live in a Satanic age.

To read the rest of “Rene Girard and COVID-19,” please visit the Amazon link where you can purchase a copy.

NOTES

1. Zuboff, S. (2015). Big other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Journal of Information Technolog y, 30(1), 75–89.
2. One of the central premises of the conspiracy group Q-Anon is actually the fact that the world is controlled by a ring of Satan worshippers. This is very different from the way Girard uses the concept of Satan in his work. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
3. Of course, there are in fact worshippers of Satan and even churches set up in which Satan is the central deity. Again, this is a different way in which Girard employs the concept of Satan.
4. Girard, R. (2005). Violence and the sacred. London: Continuum. pg. 143
5. Girard, R. (2001). I see Satan fall like lightning. New York: Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. See Chapter 2, “The Cycle of Mimetic Violence.”
6. ibid. pg. 70
7. For Girard, mimetic desire, a term that will be used throughout this book, is the signature feature of a human being, it is in many ways what makes us human. Mimetic desire is the basic idea that our desire is a reflexive phenomenon, in the sense that our desires are only copies of what we see in others rather than emerging from our own psychic architecture. The root of the word mimetic is from the Latin, “mimus” — to imitate.
8. Carrettiero, J. (2016, December 09). How Did Bulgakov inspire Rolling Stones? Retrieved January 12, 2021, from https://lidenz.ru/bulgakov-and-a-sympathy-for-the-devil/
9. See interview, “Rene Girard Interviews1.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m3x3pWTBHs
10. The Rolling Stones. Lyrics to Sympathy for the Devil. Decca. Lyrics accessed from, https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/3137188/Flashpoint/Sympathy+for+the+Devil
11. Quoted from, Hamerton-Kelly, R., Girard, R., Niewiadomski, J., Palaver, W., Lawrence, F., Ranieri, J. Thiel, P., Rossbach, S. (2007) Politics and apocalypse. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition. pg. 195
12. Girard, R. (2001). I see Satan fall like lightning. New York: Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. pgs. 32–33
13. ibid. pgs. 25–26
14. Haw, C. (2017) Human Evolution and the Single Victim Mechanism: Locating Girard’s Hominization Hypothesis through Literature Survey. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. 24(1) pgs.191–216
15. Girard, R. (2005). Violence and the sacred. London: Continuum. pg. 98 Girard posits that the selection of a victim has a cathartic effect as well as a narrative effect, “I began by remarking on the cathartic function of sacrifice, and went on to define the sacrificial crisis as the loss of this function, as well as of all cultural distinctions. If the unanimous violence directed against the surrogate victim succeeds in bringing this crisis to an end, clearly this violence must be at the origin of a new sacrificial system.”
16. ibid. pg. 326
17. ibid. pg. 331
18. Girard, R. (2001). I see Satan fall like lightning. New York: Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. pgs. 26–27
19. ibid. pgs. 33–38
20. We could characterize war as a “collective sacrifice.” Unable to resolve the build-up of mimetic desire, war is the inevitable consequence, or sacrificial ends, of a mimetic crisis.
21. Girard, R. (2001). I see Satan fall like lightning. New York: Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. pgs. 42–43
22. Cayley, D., Girard, R., Goodhart, S., Alison, J., Bailie, G., Hamerton-Kelly, R., & Dumouchel, P. (2019). The ideas of René Girard: An anthropology of religion and violence. Independently published. Kindle Edition. Location 499–515. This concept, “sacrificial crisis” will be used through the book. In short, for Girard, a sacrificial crisis occurs when the very mechanism of sacrifice fails; when it is no longer efficient in protecting the community from violence.
23. Faulconbridge, G. (2020, September 17). The future is cyborg: Kaspersky study finds support for human augmentation. Retrieved January 12, 2021, from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2680KP
24. Girard, R. (2005). Violence and the sacred. London: Continuum. pg. 335 “The modern mind still cannot bring itself to acknowledge the basic principle behind that mechanism which, in a single decisive movement, curtails reciprocal violence and imposes structure on the community.”
25. ibid. 264–266
26. The Rolling Stones. Lyrics to Sympathy for the Devil. Decca. Lyrics accessed from, https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/3137188/Flashpoint/Sympathy+for+the+Devil
27. Girard, R. (2001). I see Satan fall like lightning. New York: Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. pg. 41. Girard states here, “The devil is obviously untruthful, for if the persecutors under-stood the truth, the innocence of their victim, they could no longer get rid of their own violence at this victim’s expense. The single victim mechanism only functions by means of the ignorance of those who keep it working. They believe they are supporting the truth when they are really living a lie.”
28. Girard, R. (2005). Violence and the sacred. London: Continuum. pgs. 54–55
29. ibid. pg. 28 Girard states here, regarding sacrificial logic, “Primitive peoples try to break the symmetry of reprisal by addressing themselves directly to the question of form. Unlike us, they perceive recurrent patterns, and they attempt to halt this recurrence by introducing something different into the picture.”
30. Girard, R. (2001). I see Satan fall like lightning. New York: Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. Loc. 2970–2977
31. This is an extremely popular interpretation of Christianity, further popularized throughout online and digital culture by the documentary film “Zeitgeist.” See, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlKqGeKVOik
32. Girard, R. (2001). I see Satan fall like lightning. New York: Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. pg. 66
33. Hamerton-Kelly, R., Girard, R., Niewiadomski, J., Palaver, W., Lawrence, F., Ranieri, J. Thiel, P., Rossbach, S. (2007) Politics and apocalypse. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition. pgs. 210–211 Regarding the primal function of myth, Peter Thiel states in his essay, “That murder is the secret origin of all religious and political institutions, and is remembered and transfigured in the form of myth. The scapegoat, perceived as the primal source of conflict and disorder, had to die for there to be peace. By violence, violence was brought to an end and society was born. But because society rests on the belief in its own order and justice, the founding act of violence must be concealed — by the myth that the slain victim was really guilty. Thus, violence is lodged at the heart of society; myth is merely discourse ephemeral to violence. Myth sacralizes the violence of the founding murder: myth tells us that the violence was justified because the victim really was guilty and, at least in the context of archaic cultures, truly was powerful. Myth transfigures the murdered scapegoats into gods, and religious rituals reenact the founding murder through the sacrifice of human or animal substitutes, thereby creating a kind of peace that is always mixed with a certain amount of violence.”
34. Girard, R. (2001). I see Satan fall like lightning. New York: Orbis Books. Kindle Edition. pg. 159
35. Fiennes, S. (Director). (2012). The Perverts Guide to Ideology [Video file]. Greece: Zeitgeist Films.
36. Cayley, D., Girard, R., Goodhart, S., Alison, J., Bailie, G., Hamerton-Kelly, R., & Dumouchel, P. (2019). The ideas of René Girard: An anthropology of religion and violence. Independently published. Kindle Edition. Loc. 1393–1402
37. It is important to note that, in my own interpretation of the “sacrificial crisis” now upon us, it is being activated in two ways. The first way is how I have mentioned above, the continued integration of global capitalism and computational power, forces that are obliterating difference and Otherness across the planet for the purpose of more optimized exchange and surveillance. But the second way paradoxically comes from the Christian revelation itself, in the sense that Christianity also undermines the hierarchical, sacrificial structures as well, but for the purpose of reconciliation and consciousness raising regarding the roots of mimetic desire, not to become part of the operation of something like global capitalism.
38. See, Fisher, M. (2008). Capitalist realism: Is there any alternative? Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books.