The World of René Girard: Interviews (Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture) 1611864860, 9781611864861

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The World of René Girard

studies in violence, mimesis, and culture S E R I E S E D I TO R

William A. Johnsen

The Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture Series examines issues related to the nexus of violence and religion in the genesis and maintenance of culture. It furthers the agenda of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, an international association that draws inspiration from René Girard’s mimetic hypothesis on the relationship between violence and religion, elaborated in a stunning series of books he has written over the last forty years. Readers interested in this area of research can also look to the association’s journal, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. A D V I S O RY B O A R D

René Girard†, Stanford University Andrew McKenna, Loyola University of Chicago

Raymund Schwager†, University of Innsbruck James Williams, Syracuse University

E D I TO R I A L B O A R D

Rebecca Adams, Independent Scholar Jeremiah L. Alberg, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan Mark Anspach, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris Pierpaolo Antonello, University of Cambridge Ann Astell, University of Notre Dame Cesáreo Bandera, University of North Carolina Maria Stella Barberi, Università di Messina Alexei Bodrov, St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute, Moscow João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Benoît Chantre, L’Association Recherches Mimétiques Diana Culbertson, Kent State University Paul Dumouchel, Ritsumeikan University Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Stanford University, École Polytechnique Giuseppe Fornari, Università degli studi di Verona Eric Gans, University of California, Los Angeles

Sandor Goodhart, Purdue University Robert Hamerton-Kelly†, Stanford University Hans Jensen, Aarhus University, Denmark Mark Juergensmeyer, University of California, Santa Barbara Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Shaw University Michael Kirwan, SJ, Heythrop College, University of London Paisley Livingston, Lingnan University, Hong Kong Charles Mabee, Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit Józef Niewiadomski, Universität Innsbruck Wolfgang Palaver, Universität Innsbruck Ángel Jorge Barahona Plaza, Universidad Francisco de Vitoria Martha Reineke, University of Northern Iowa Tobin Siebers†, University of Michigan Thee Smith, Emory University Mark Wallace, Swarthmore College Eugene Webb, University of Washington

The World of René Girard Interviews

Nadine Dormoy Translated by William A. Johnsen

Michigan State University Press  ·  East Lansing

Copyright © 2024 by Nadine Dormoy; L’univers de René Girard: Entretiens © by Nadine Dormoy,​ originally published by Orizons; translation by William A. Johnsen

p Michigan State University Press East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5245

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Girard, René, 1923–2015, interviewee. | Dormoy, Nadine, interviewer. | Johnsen, William A., translator. Title: The world of René Girard : interviews / Nadine Dormoy; translated by William A. Johnsen. Other titles: Univers de René Girard. English Description: East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, [2024] | Series: Studies in violence, mimesis, and culture | Translation of: L’univers de René Girard. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023031589 | ISBN 9781611864861 (paper) | ISBN 9781609177560 (PDF) | ISBN 9781628955194 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Girard, René, 1923–2015—Interviews. | Philosophers—France—Interviews. | Mimesis in literature. Classification: LCC B2430.G494 A513 2024 | DDC 194—dc23/eng/20230719 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023031589

Cover design by David Drummond, Salamander Design, www.salamanderhill.com. Cover: Portrait of René Girard, April 1982. Credit: © Louis Monier. All rights reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images.

Visit Michigan State University Press at msupress.org

Contents

vii translator’s note, William A. Johnsen ix a preliminary note xi prologue 1 chapter 1. In the Shadow of the Palais des Papes 11 chapter 2. America as a Mirror 25 chapter 3. The Sacred, the Religious, and the Biblical 57 chapter 4. The King and the Orphan 93 chapter 5. The Infernal Triangle 125 chapter 6. Socio-economic Emergences 149 chapter 7. France and Its Myths 173 notes

Translator’s Note William A. Johnsen

I am grateful to Nadine Dormoy for conducting and finally publishing in 2018 at Orizons Press in Paris these important and spirited interviews from 1988, conducted at a consequential time in René Girard’s career, just after a decade of colloquia masterminded by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, with major intellectual figures in neuroscience, physics, psychology, economics on self-organizing systems matching and estimating each other’s work. We hear Girard carefully monitoring his own relation to these ideas that “came to him” (as we can say in English to indicate a plural inspiration from inside and outside the author), his scruple against offering opinions that do not emerge directly from this core understanding of how mimetic behavior can lead to violent rivalry. But he is surprised to be asked when Dormoy queries him whether he believes that positive reciprocity can exist, answering firmly that spouses, family, and good friends can offer reciprocity without rivalry. I am grateful to Jørgen Jørgensen for making me aware of this book and urging me to publish a translation. I am especially grateful to Andrew McKenna for looking over my shoulder to keep me from errors, a French professor whose English is better than mine. The felicities in English are therefore probably his; the errors are certainly mine alone. Finally I am

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Translator’s Note

grateful to Michigan State University for its continued support, and the staff at Michigan State University Press for their unfailing, collegial participation over twenty years for this project of making Girard’s ideas better known.

A Preliminary Note

Teaching French in an American university in the immediate postwar period was a marvelous adventure for me, and, of course, for René Girard. I had the chance to meet him a few years later. Girard changed jobs several times and traveled extensively across the United States, while I settled in New York. Nevertheless, his books, always published in French, were well known to French teachers in America. In particular his first work, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel), struck a chord with us.1 He was distinguished by his great originality, and even his revolutionary side, at a time when Roland Barthes occupied everyone’s mind. The book struck me so deeply that I quickly requested an interview, which was published in the journal of French teachers in America, the French Review.2 It was my first meeting with René Girard who, originally from the South (Midi) of France, had never felt at home in Paris, and whose dream was to settle in California. Many years later, when he was definitely settled at Stanford University, it was decided that I would spend a week on campus in order to carry out a series of interviews intended to constitute a book. This took place in 1988. The book was not published, and only part of it was

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A Preliminary Note

included in a book of interviews entitled À chacun sa France.3 However, the ideas of René Girard and his method of analysis, across several disciplines, have lost none of their topicality or originality. It is time that these interviews were presented in their entirety and in their context, that of the 1980s in the United States.

Prologue

The life and work of René Girard are closely linked and constitute a true novel of initiation. In the 1940s, a young provincial of uncertain ambition decided to leave for the United States after having lived four years of the Occupation in a state of forced hibernation. Paris inspiring in the young Southerner a strong aversion because of its gray skies and its food restrictions, the American dream had gradually materialized after the entry into the war of the United States. The young man was fortunate, as he would later discover, to be almost entirely self-taught, having prepared alone, for health reasons, for the baccalaureate and then for the entrance examination to the École des Chartes. Despite his apparent indifference, he was a hard worker who knew Latin and the history of the Middle Ages very well. Arrived in the United States at the age of twenty-four years, he was immediately plunged into a total change of scenery in the heart of the Midwest, where a job as a teaching assistant in French awaited him. Having no literary training, the mission of teaching French and literature presented itself as a real challenge. So he got down to reading the works on the syllabus and thinking about how to present them to the students. Having no method or preconceived ideas, he developed an analysis based on his scientific training and lived experience. This soon convinced him that there was a strong discrepancy between the usual way of discussing novels and psychological reality. His years of reflection in contact with students inspired him to write his first important work, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit,

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Prologue

Desire, and the Novel), published in 1961. It was a success, and it encouraged him to continue his research on human behavior. His career was launched and progressed steadily through successive moves that gave him the opportunity to know many regions across the United States. He first left the Middle West for the South, at a time when segregation was still rampant. Then it was New England, and then near the Canadian border at Buffalo, close to Niagara Falls. He finally reached his promised land, California, at Stanford University, where he settled permanently. He was then able to develop his field of investigation as he pleased, and was able to teach in four different departments: French, Comparative Literature, English, and History of Religions. He discovered the world of Protestant theology, and worked intensively on the Bible. In the English department he was able to share his passion for the work of Shakespeare. His major work, La violence et sacré, published in 1972 (Violence and the Sacred, 1977), highlights the role of mimetic desire and the scapegoat in human relationships. He establishes the origin for his theory in the Bible and considers that Christianity offers an answer to the fundamental violence of mimetic desire. Unclassifiable and in perpetual evolution, the theory of mimetic doubles remains the anchor of his research. It is obvious that only the American university, both decentralized and endowed with marvelous libraries, could make possible a career like his, first anchored in rigorous scientific training in France. René Girard was the child of a dual culture whose richness he knew how to exploit with the enthusiasm and perseverance of a pioneer.

CHAPTER 1

In the Shadow of the Palais des Papes

ND

You were born in Avignon in 1923. Can you tell us a bit about the Avignon of your childhood?

RG

I was born on December 25, 1923. The Avignon of my childhood? It’s curious, I had a very happy childhood, I have very good memories of it, it’s fundamental in my life. However, my best childhood memories are not at all in Avignon, but in Auvergne, in Viverois, in the Puy de Dôme, 25 kilometers from Ambert, exactly. This is where we spent the summer holidays. My childhood memories are therefore centered on Viverois. I have the whole map of the country in my head; these are the landscapes that I prefer. Part of my father’s family came from there, while my mother was further south.

ND

How do you see your family in retrospect?

RG

It was a bourgeois family. My father was curator of the museum and library of Avignon. I belong to the French intellectual bourgeoisie with a view even more pessimistic than the average of this class, partly for economic reasons perhaps. My parents’ social situation was declining rather than improving, because my maternal grandfather was a small industrialist who had sold everything before losing his money in Russian loans and other similar investments. My father 1

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Chapter One

was an average civil servant; therefore, I lived as a child with an awareness of economic hardship perhaps. It wasn’t serious enough to affect my view of things, and my childhood has always remained a kind of refuge for me. There was a whole series of children’s books that I cared about and that I still keep today, for example the Comtesse de Ségur. I need to feel surrounded by childhood memories. ND

Do you also like Jules Verne?

RG

I admire them both. I find the eternal fuss about colonialist Jules Verne and the sadomasochism of Madame de Ségur insufferable. I learned a lot from both of them; there is a self-taught side to me even as I studied at the Lycée d’Avignon, at the École des Chartes, and at Indiana University. It turns out that I never felt like I learned much from my teachers, probably my fault. On the other hand, I remember very well the moment when I discovered that I could read, by reading a child’s version of Le roman de Renard. I still have this book, and it is one of the very strong memories of my childhood. The discovery I made at that moment foreshadows, it seems to me, all my subsequent intellectual experiences. The sudden, surprising discovery that where there was no meaning anywhere, suddenly there was meaning everywhere. It is the illumination of a whole, the structural side of the experience that leaves me with a very clear memory. It was a real enchantment, but not magic, completely intelligible, rational, like a superior relationship that is established and will never disappoint or betray.

ND

And Avignon itself ?

RG

What can I say about Avignon? Vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie of Avignon, I doubtless felt a certain antipathy. This feeling came in part from my mother. My father was professionally an intellectual, since he had written a book on Avignon and he remained curator of the Palais des Papes all his life, so this antipathy for the Avignon bourgeoisie came to me in part from my mother, because it was she, in fact, who was the intellectual of the family. There was in her a kind of enthusiasm for things of the mind. She was certainly dissatisfied

In the Shadow of the Palais des Papes

3

on a certain level, because she would have liked to have a professional or intellectual vocation. ND

Teach, perhaps?

RG

Maybe. There was a creative side to her. She also had some very strong opinions, and I certainly have inherited some of them. My first intellectual experience was reading Proust. I was not precocious, and I remember having difficulty reading Proust. However, I came across things there that struck me. My own experience was miraculously restored to me. I was amazed to discover that literature could be like that, rather than something like a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, as the Surrealists would have it. We could say that this was my first real reading. But I was considered old-fashioned, and I dared not speak of Proust.

ND

This happened during the war?

RG

Before and during the war, around 1939 to 1941, between my fifteenth and sixteenth years. I was a good student at first, then I was very rowdy and I was expelled from high school, which I didn’t like. Finding myself expelled, I was forced to work alone. I prepared for my baccalaureate, and then the entrance exam for the École des Chartes, because I could work alone.

ND

Was it easier to prepare for the École des Chartes competition on your own than for the École Normale Supérieure?

RG

That’s it.

ND

How did you experience the war?

RG

My father was a radical-socialist, atheist, while my mother was both conservative and pacifist.

ND Catholic? RG

Yes. Her family was one of those families from the South where there are traditionally the Reds and the Whites, the Action Française

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tendency, etc., and it happened that in 1938–39 she had two sons who could be mobilized. ND

You and your brother?

RG

Me and my brother who was three years older than I. So she was terrified, which made her pacifist and she viewed the Munich agreement of 1938 favorably. But immediately after the armistice, on the contrary, the whole family suddenly became Gaullist.

ND

Not Petainist at all?

RG

Not Petainist at all. Gaullist but, I hasten to add, of a passive Gaullism. I was really a Gaullist, and I have always remained so. My parents as well.

ND

You were in the unoccupied zone, the one we called the NONO (Free) zone.

RG

At first, it was the Italians who arrived, then the Germans. They occupied several hotels in the city. But when I arrived in Paris, I was horrified. Paris displeased me so much, and we ate so badly there. It was in 1943. We saw far fewer Germans in Paris than in Avignon. Nevertheless, Paris terrified me, and I found the École des Chartes boring. The positivism that reigned there was as foreign to me intellectually as Surrealism.

ND

Did you talk a lot about politics at home?

RG

We talked a lot about politics, yes. My father had a lot of political sense. He had foreseen defeat. His common sense told him that the Second World War was not going to be decided in France.

ND

You told me that, in high school, there was no antagonism between Gaullist students and those who claimed to be for Pétain.

RG

I remember a boy who was a militiaman. He was a right-wing Parisian exile. We thought he was crazy, that he was wrong, but we were

In the Shadow of the Palais des Papes

5

still friends with him. A kind of Southern camaraderie, which I remember with great pleasure, transcended all divisions. ND

How did you prepare for these competitions, and was it easy to work alone at home?

RG

You had to know the history of the Middle Ages perfectly, and then you had to do a lot of Latin, because there were themes to compose and translation tests without a dictionary. They were the main assignments, easy for me because I had an excellent memory at that time. Of course, there was also a French test.

ND

Are you passionate about the Middle Ages?

RG

The Middle Ages interested me, but not the atmosphere of the École des Chartes. I rediscovered my old hostility toward school, multiplied by the difficulties of existence, far from my family, in the Paris of the Occupation. I was a very bad student, I was very bored, and material difficulties were mind numbing. In short, I did very badly at the École des Chartes. For years, I felt a kind of antipathy to Paris. I remember that arriving by train at the Gare de Lyon was heartbreaking. This anxiety only completely disappeared ten years ago.

ND

How were you housed?

RG

At first, I was alone in a hotel, which was particularly obnoxious. Later, thanks to some friends, I managed to move in with the Marist Fathers on the Rue de Vaugirard, a student residence that no longer exists. I think François Mauriac had been there. It was Father O’Reilly, director of ocean anthropology at the Musée de l’Homme, who was the director. I remember at that time I was anticlerical and unbelieving. I didn’t like being in a Catholic boarding school at all. But the Marists were favorable to de Gaulle and the Resistance. We were Anglophile and Americanophile there. There was also in the young people of the time a kind of myth of America, which played a big

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role. Yves Berger, also a former student of the Lycée d’Avignon, but younger than I, has written a great deal about this American myth during the Occupation. We saw America as the only salvation. We wanted to go there. ND

That’s what you did, ultimately. But at the time, it must have been more of a dream.

RG

It was a dream, and, at the same time, it was very realistic. I was at the foot of Mt. Ventoux at the time of the Liberation, and when we saw the Americans arriving, in a way everything happened as expected. The Americans were very close to what we had imagined.

ND

There was no disappointment, and you have no tragic memories of this period?

RG

There was the bombing of Avignon. A failed American bombardment left nine hundred dead in Avignon. But that didn’t really make people angry. It was the railway line that was targeted, but the bombs fell two hundred meters further away in the suburbs. I was in Paris when I heard about these nine hundred dead, and I knew it was in my family’s neighborhood. A huge shell fell in our garden. We came close to tragedy several times, but it didn’t quite touch us. You can’t say that I really suffered from the war. I was not mobilized, I was not called up for compulsory labor in Germany, and I was not mobilized after the Liberation either, for lack of equipment. My military experience is limited to a few weeks in the Vichy youth camps. It was in 1942, before I fell ill. I had been discharged thanks to my brother, a medical student, who gave me drugs that caused heart irregularities. I had decided that, if I couldn’t leave legally, I would leave illegally.

ND

During the war, were you aware of the prevailing anti-Semitism?

RG

Yes. In my milieu, that didn’t exist at all on my father’s side, but it did on my mother’s side. I must admit that there was a kind of cultural anti-Semitism. I only understood later the terrible responsibility of those who gave in to this kind of victimization process.

In the Shadow of the Palais des Papes

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ND

Was there any question of responsibility in the defeat? Did they say “it’s the fault of the Popular Front”?

RG

My father was attached to republican institutions, but, at the same time, he was aware of the shortcomings and weaknesses of the Third Republic. He had no faith in Daladier, as Daladier was a local, and the idea that Daladier could be a strongman seemed rather comical. As for my mother, she was very opposed to Léon Blum and the Popular Front.

ND

What did people think of Pétain?

RG

We said at the beginning that it was a necessary evil, but soon afterward we said: “he is going too far, he is not able to resist German pressure, and too blinded by vanity to see the abyss it is heading for. There is only hope on the side of de Gaulle and the Allies.” This was in the fall of 1940. Despite some people’s lack of interest in politics, the armistice and the defeat were obviously a tremendous shock. We experienced restrictions, but we were still privileged. Life in Avignon never became horrible, with the exception of the bombings of 1944. There were quite a few scathing remarks about the failings of the Third Republic. My father, who had predicted the defeat, was as frowned upon by the Resistance fighters as by the Pétainists, and he had the impression that his lucidity always did him a disservice. There was a fundamental pessimism on both sides of my family, and I’m obviously the heir to it.

ND

Were you inspired by any of your teachers?

RG

I have very few memories of this kind. I remember a fourth grade teacher who was famous because he published a short biography of Anatole France. But I can’t say that any of them played a role in my life. Besides, in high school, I didn’t really read the great classics. I was fairly uneducated when I prepared for the École des Chartes, and it was only later, in America, that I caught up a bit. In a way, this was an advantage, because I never acquired the intellectual habits of my generation. Later, when I found myself at Indiana University,

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having to teach Balzac and Stendhal, I wondered what I could say to my students. That’s how my first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, got written. ND

You searched . . .

RG

I searched and found something that obviously had nothing to do with traditional criticism. I had no philosophical training either.

ND

To come back to the war, how do you situate it in your own vision of history, in your personal schema?

RG

A new threshold for violence has been crossed. What is amazing is that during the Second World War so few people saw that former limits to it were being crossed. We were at the end of history, facing total destruction. One could imagine the whole of World War II going in this direction. And at the same time, it’s something that had been in the works for centuries, and that humanist thought did not foresee. Today what holds men together again is a form of the sacred, because violence only appears in the form of the sacred. Men cannot look it in the face, recognize our own violence in it.

ND

The sacred seems to have taken refuge in nuclear armaments?

RG

That’s it. But the kinds of tension that caused the Second World War are still very present everywhere: social tensions, intellectual tensions, nationalist tensions, it doesn’t matter which, they are always the mimetic doubles.

ND

The United States and Russia?

RG

Now, between the United States and Russia, things are starting to take a good turn. But that does not prevent the psychological tensions between mimetic doubles from being present everywhere. And the tendency to scapegoat the double is still there.

ND

We find this pattern in all the separatist movements, in Corsica for example?

In the Shadow of the Palais des Papes

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RG

There is always something legitimate in the claims, but none that justify the use of violence. These are forms that fall short of absolute violence; they are, so to speak, small usable forms of violence. It is also the refusal of the universal.

ND

You left France in 1947. Do you consider this emigration as a consequence of the war?

RG

It was a consequence of the war, yes.

ND

You entered the École des Chartes in 1943, you interrupted your studies because of the onset of tuberculosis, and you obtained your diploma as an archivist paleographer in 1947. Your thesis was on “Private Life in Avignon in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century.”

RG

In fact, it drew on the documents of notaries from the archives of Avignon. There were often inventories of families concerning the dowry of a young woman or of an inheritance. It was very instructive because there were descriptions of objects, and you could draw conclusions about people’s lifestyles.

ND

Was it difficult to decipher?

RG

Much less than at the École des Chartes, no doubt because I had gotten used to it. The city was governed at the time by a papal legate. It was a papal territory, but they spoke mainly French there. The most difficult thing to decipher is the Gothic cursive, which was used especially in the north of France. In the South, we moved more quickly to italics, which is much easier to decipher.

ND

Did your father encourage you in this kind of research?

RG

Yes, he helped me a lot.

ND

Were you impressed by the Palais des Papes, were you proud?

RG

Living forever in the shadow of the palace, I was barely aware of its existence. It began to impress me in 1947, precisely, when we

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organized an exhibition of paintings with friends who were close to René Char. I then saw Avignon through the eyes of people from elsewhere. It was the first time that Picasso exhibited in Avignon. Christian Zervos organized the exhibition, and it was he, in fact, who created the Festival d’Avignon. ND

How did it happen?

RG

Zervos wanted to hold a major exhibition of paintings from the École de Paris. Twelve great painters: Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Léger, and others. It happened in 1947, the year I left for the United States. Braque and Picasso were present. To attract crowds to Avignon, Zervos, who was an extraordinary old Greek, a genius art dealer, said to Jean Vilar: “You always wanted to do open-air theater, in a historic setting, well, here is the great court of the Palais des Papes.” Very few people know that the Festival d’Avignon was Zervos’s idea. We had great fun. Suddenly we found ourselves in an environment of celebrities, of actresses. We went to pick up the paintings in Picasso’s studio on the Quai des Grands Augustins. It was a total life change.

ND

How did you come to the United States?

RG

At the École des Chartes, I had seen a notice announcing a position as an assistant to teach French in the United States. I applied, got accepted, and that’s how I went to Indiana University.

ND

What were your impressions?

RG

It was an extraordinary change of scenery. I first arrived in New York. There, I had another prospect which was to work at the United Nations library. But it seemed too much like the École des Chartes, so I went to Indiana. I went to the end of the world, in short, for the same reasons that kept me from leaving my home immediately after my baccalaureate. I remember waking up after a night on the single-track railroad straight through Indianapolis, with gigantic corn stalks on both sides as far as the eye could see, without a single hill in sight. The Middle West, in 1947, was really very far from the Avignon and Viverois of my childhood!

CHAPTER 2

America as a Mirror

RG

I remember that when I woke up in the early morning on the train, in the middle of this immense plain of the Middle West, in the middle of a cornfield, I suddenly experienced a total change of scenery!

ND

Was the Indiana campus very different from what it is today?

RG

I don’t think it was much different. A little smaller no doubt. It has grown a lot since then, but it was already one of the great Midwest universities. When I arrived, I suffered a real cultural shock.

ND

You must have found the teacher–student relationship much more relaxed than in France.

RG

I was only twenty-three years old, I had an assistant position, and I considered my students more like friends. At the same time, I was pursuing a doctorate in history, but with the same aplomb, the same indifference as during my studies in France.

ND

How did you choose your subject?

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RG

I was already a historian, and I thought that knowing the Middle Ages well, I would be well advised to look into modern history. I chose to study the way in which the American press had reported on the Giraud–de Gaulle affair. I had had the good idea to get in touch with the French embassy. The press services of the embassy sent me a mass of press clippings which were in their archives. This greatly facilitated my research for the thesis.

ND

The United States had supported Giraud against de Gaulle.

RG

Yes, and there’s a lot to be said about that. In fact, Roosevelt and New Deal circles should have been sympathetic to de Gaulle. But they were turned against him by certain French emigrants, like Saint-John Perse, for example. Perse (real name Alexis Léger) hated de Gaulle for reasons that dated back to family feuds at the Quai d’Orsay. Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s entourage, and especially secretary of state Cordel Hull and the State Department itself, were extremely conservative. Hull, in particular, was a Southerner whose point of view was so narrow and diplomatically conventional that for him the only legal government of France was that of Pétain. If there had been an adroit secretary of state, Franco-American relations would have been very different. It was a stupid misunderstanding. On the other hand, Eisenhower, although not a genius, immediately understood in 1944 that it was necessary to negotiate with de Gaulle. It was he who imposed it by declaring that in France everyone was Gaullist. He was on the ground; he saw the situation. Not to ally with de Gaulle, at that time, was precisely to play the game of the Gaullists. The State Department didn’t understand anything. But Eisenhower prevailed.

ND

We see, even today, that American diplomacy is systematically wary of all those who have alliances on the left, isn’t it?

RG

It’s true, there are many such diplomatic mistakes today. The United States could side with people and then make them enemies, absurdly. I believe this is because they do not have sufficient confidence in themselves, so they underestimate the power and the formidable influence that they actually possess. The State Department, at that

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time, took de Gaulle for a leftist. De Gaulle actually maneuvered very well; he showed extraordinary political acumen. And he always showed personal gratitude to Eisenhower. He attended his funeral. ND

The title of your thesis was The American Opinion on France. How had this public opinion reacted?

RG

Above all, I don’t think it interested the average American. One was aware of the defeat, of the Resistance, and concluded that France was, as a whole, pro-American and anti-German. That was true, but I was struck when I arrived in the United States by the extraordinary ignorance of Americans about everything that was happening abroad. Crossing the United States by rail in 1947, it was easy to realize that it was a country very closed in on itself.

ND

On your side, how did you react? Did you really feel cut off from the world?

RG

I focused on the university. What aroused my admiration was the library. It was already immense, magnificent, and I learned to use it. So began for me a period of education. I was not used to reading poetry at the time, and now I was immersed in it. One of the first articles I published was about Saint-John Perse. At first, I couldn’t decipher it. Then suddenly, I understood the kind of effect he was looking for, a generalized exoticism. I remember that it came all of a sudden, a bit like the way I had learned to read what I was assigned to teach: Balzac, Stendhal, Proust. I also discovered The Voices of Silence (Les voix du silence). Generally speaking, I didn’t like Malraux, whom I found cold. But that book filled me with admiration, especially for the relationship that Malraux brought out between the influence of primitive art, the masks, and the Second World War. This apocalyptic side of Malraux, the connection he makes between modern art and violence, marked me very strongly. Malraux taught me at that time a certain critical vision. For example in his reading of three works by El Greco where we have the three Christs chasing the merchants from the temple. It shows that the first work remains quite conventional, that the

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second is already more in the manner of Greco, and that the third is the extreme Greco. Malraux’s analysis has deeply influenced me, but it remains linked to a notion of subjective difference that has become foreign to me. ND

You already had a multidisciplinary approach. Did you approach philosophy next?

RG

I was working on laughter. Certain anthropological aspects of laughter theory interested me. I remember that I had sent my text to Merleau-Ponty. He never answered me. In a way, I understand it very well, but I was very disappointed. That was the period when I was reading Merleau-Ponty and the French philosophers. But I still found something unsatisfactory in this philosophy.

ND

When you wrote Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, you were no longer at Bryn Mawr. Were you at Johns Hopkins?

RG

I write very slowly, and I am unable to tell you in which year I wrote such and such a chapter. The book came out in 1961. I finished the manuscript in 1960, and I had been at Johns Hopkins since 1957.

ND

Which author did you start with?

RG

I started with Proust and Stendhal. I had not yet understood mimetic desire. The essential thing is to discover that, in order to understand the mimetic phenomenon, you must realize that imitation often brings on conflict. This is fundamental. As far as French literature is concerned, Proust and Stendhal were the first. But what really triggered my theory was Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband and The Curious Impertinent of Cervantes. I suddenly discovered that the same structure was involved. I knew Freud well enough at the time, and in particular his article on Dostoevsky, to see that latent homosexuality was not a sufficient explanation. I also saw that the structure was linked to snobbery and vanity.

ND

You think that Dostoevsky knew Cervantes’s tale?

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RG

No. He had a very wrong idea of Cervantes; he had a romantic reading of Don Quixote, and he never understood how much Cervantes resembled him. As far as I know, this story already appears in Herodotus. It is the story of a king whose close friend is his captain of the guards. One day, he said to him: “My wife is so beautiful. I would like you to see her. Here’s what you can do: You’ll hide behind this screen. She’ll come in. She’ll undress, and when you see her, you’ll leave.” So this is what happens. The woman arrives, undresses, gets into bed with her husband. The next day, she calls the captain of the guards. Without her husband telling her anything, she saw everything, understood everything. So she said to the captain: “You saw me undressed, so I am dishonored. There are now only two possible solutions; either I have you killed, or you kill my husband and I marry you.” The captain thinks for a moment, then he decides to kill the husband, and he marries the woman. It is the foundation of the dynasty. It’s told in ten lines in Herodotus. But this husband who needs to show his wife off to prove that she is beautiful, and who destroys himself, I wonder if Shakespeare had heard of it.

ND

It’s a phenomenon that shows up more or less openly in everyday life, but which is magnified to the point of caricature in these writers.

RG

Exactly, it’s caricatural. We also see it in Molière’s The School for Wives (L’Ecole des femmes). Arnolphe never ceases to boast that he will never be cuckolded, but he always introduces his rival to his home. Do not believe that it is a coincidence, or just a joke. It is because he has the desire to boast, to prove that he is triumphing over fate. His desire for self-sufficiency destroys his self-sufficiency.

ND

You published Violence and the Sacred while you were at Johns Hopkins?1

RG

No, I was in Buffalo in 1972. At Johns Hopkins I was department chair for a while, then I published an article on Camus, then there

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was a symposium in 1966. I was quite involved in university life. This was when the French and Italian Department at Johns Hopkins was ranked third in the United States. It was a very small department, but we were proud of what we were doing. We were one of the very good departments at Hopkins. ND

Were your students strong enough to understand what you were doing? I assume you had graduate and postgraduate students and PhD candidates?

RG

Certainly, but I nevertheless encountered resistance. Mimetic desire was shocking. Since then, the term has spread; many people use this expression. It was thanks to a colleague, Eugenio Donato, that I became interested in anthropology. He was also a French teacher, and he was reading Lévi-Strauss. He was a structuralist. He told me that there was extraordinary material there for mimetic analysis, and he was right, but it took me years to follow his advice. He spoke to me about this around 1960, and it was only five years later that I took a serious interest in anthropology.

ND

Are you completely self-taught on the subject?

RG

Of course. Anthropology hardly existed as a science, it seemed only storytelling. There was no fixed vocabulary. My initiation into anthropology was quite simple, and it was an intense pleasure for me, exactly as my friend had predicted. The structures of mimetic desire crystallize perfectly in such readings.

ND

When did you find enough consistent elements to give your theory solid support?

RG

Such things always go their own way. I cannot give you an exact date, but the thesis of the emissary victim must have been clarified between 1967 and 1970, and by a complicated path. I could see clearly that the Bible spoke of the same things but from a radically different point of view, which is not a negation or any dialectical reversal, but I could see that the relationships in the Bible were at

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once the same and totally different from those among primitive peoples and all other societies. At the beginning, I could not explain this difference, namely that the latter is the reflection of the victim phenomenon and the former the revelation of this same phenomenon. There was the link. In all the mythical texts and derivatives of the myth, the scapegoat structures the text, whereas in the biblical texts it becomes the theme, it appears in the text that it no longer structures. An essential injustice is still prevalent: these biblical texts are accused of being contaminated by what they speak of, without seeing that the truly contaminated are precisely those who do not speak of it because they are fully immersed in it. Because from the moment you talk about a phenomenon, you are accused of being complicit to it. In reality, you are not complicit insofar as, precisely, you speak of it. I think, therefore, that everything that is said against Christianity and against Judaism in our world makes a scapegoat of whoever reveals the scapegoat. There exists a banal interpretation of anti-Semitism, and what Sartre says about it is correct, but in reality it is the revealer of the scapegoat phenomenon who himself becomes the scapegoat. There is something of that in the history of anti-Semitism, which carries a deep theological meaning. AntiSemitism is no accident. It has a historical meaning, a theological meaning. Scapegoating Jews is exactly the opposite of the correct interpretation of Christianity. This is what makes Christ the fundamental scapegoat. You don’t fight anti-Semitism by saying that Christ didn’t die on the cross, killed by Jews. To fight anti-Semitism is to say that anti-Semitism itself is the same as crucifixion, it is to crucify the Jewish people. Either the cross puts an end to the scapegoat phenomenon, or it is the sign of the most total incomprehension, since before Christ this phenomenon was not revealed. ND

Don’t you think that to mix anthropology and religion is to risk contradiction?

RG

No. If anthropology exists, if it deals with the comparison of cultures with each other. This is only possible, in my opinion, in societies which raise the question of the role of the victim in this same

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society. There is no anthropology anywhere else. But the difference in approaches is not necessarily a source of truth. ND

Scapegoats exist in all societies.

RG

Of course. But the longer they exist, the less we know. And if we continue to make scapegoats, the evil is even more serious.

ND

But we know about scapegoating, consequently the phenomenon takes on different and divergent forms among us.

RG

We try to make as few casualties as possible. We don’t always kill them, and that is already a big step forward.

ND

Between 1972 and 1976, you were an adviser to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is a cultural foundation. You were then a professor in Buffalo, New York. The NEH plays an important role in cultural life in the United States.

RG

Yes. It is the first government foundation created to help finance the arts and letters. It dates from Kennedy, or perhaps from his successor Johnson. We thought at the beginning that this initiative would have no future, but this organization still exists. Its role is to read applicants’ requests for financial support. Several of us formed a jury and chose the best. There were a lot of candidates, and this work was very tiring. Fortunately, this only happened once a year, in August. Above all, we judged the quality of the writing, the originality of the project, its novelty, and the background of the candidate. It was necessary on the one hand to give an opportunity to those who had not yet received any help, and on the other hand not to deny support to those who were likely to do a better job.

ND

Among the grants available to researchers in the human sciences, there are others, even more prestigious, awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation. You got one yourself.

RG

Yes. I got two Guggenheim scholarships.

ND

You weren’t particularly happy in Buffalo?

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RG

We stayed there from 1968 to ’74. There was something very nice about this university, the old campus of the SUNY system (State University of New York, or SUNY Buffalo) that Governor Rockefeller had decided to transform. He had invested considerable funds. There was a large English department there, which was the driving force behind the entire Arts and Letters section. We were very modern; we taught all kinds of new theories. Some students were on drugs or were a little crazy. It was the late sixties. There were also some very talented people. As the French department was outdated, cramped, dissatisfied with the reforms, and without imagination, I preferred to associate myself with the English department. I am very proud to have been invited there, and I must say that I found a more welcoming university community there than anywhere else. It was the good side of the “sixties.” It also happened that, at the time of the riots, I was not there. I had a chair and the title of university professor and academically it was a delightful place. But the climate of this region is punishing. Being from the South of France, I was initially attracted by the Canadian winter. We had a very nice house in the pines, which we loved a lot, but after a few years I couldn’t stand the endless winters any longer. We left the year before the huge snowstorm and cold snap that was talked about around the world, and which claimed several lives.

ND

Buffalo is not far, in fact, from the Canadian border, from Toronto.

RG

Many Buffalo residents go to Toronto often. But we liked to take our visitors to admire the nearby Niagara Falls. I remember Lucien Goldmann who came to see us and whom we brought to the Canadian side, because it is more beautiful. We crossed the famous Peace Bridge, which separates the two countries.

ND

Today, here you are at Stanford. It looks like a huge botanical garden, and the climate is mild.

RG

I had always wanted to live in California. On the Atlantic coast the summers are abominably hot, the winters are terrible, it’s a continental climate, although here you can live outside almost all year round.

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ND

You hold a chair created by Andrew B. Hammond. It is a title of honor.

RG

Yes, there are various chairs which are founded on donations made to the university by patrons. Andrew B. Hammond, who is now dead, was a lovely man. He had inherited a fortune amassed by his family in the lumber trade and railroads, like the Stanford family. He himself, however, was a simple teacher in a school in Santa Barbara. He was perfectly familiar with nineteenth-century French opera, and he lamented not seeing them performed any more. No one suspected that he was the heir to a great fortune. He was very modest, as Americans often are. He had funded this chair to the university in honor of his grandfather, in order to encourage French studies. He had an extremely touching love and knowledge of French. But the head of our department had to fight to keep the chair to be really reserved for French, because obviously other departments would have liked to take it over. I was the first to occupy it.

ND

I have often noticed that in the United States French studies occupy a whole imaginary space and respond to some students’ deep need, perhaps, for a change of scenery, for a dream.

RG

That’s very often the case, and I’ve met people like Hammond as well in the South.

ND

They are almost French mystics.

RG

Yes, they are mystics for France.

ND

How do you explain that?

RG

I believe that French brings something that is completely lacking in America. A certain attitude toward life.

ND

What do you think of this place where you are now?

RG

It seems to me that Europe has a completely mythological image of Stanford. American universities all have periods of great notoriety and great prosperity. The success of Stanford is the consequence of

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the success of Silicon Valley. Hewlett and Packard were students at Stanford, so Stanford played a role in computer history. We also see here Japanese tourists who seem to be on a pilgrimage, who take pictures of everything, and who seem to know lots of things about the place that I don’t know myself. The square of buildings around which the campus has developed, “the Quadrangle” is just a hundred years old. We have just celebrated the centenary of the founding of the university. Initially, it was a science and technology school. Literary studies occupy relatively more space at Berkeley and at UCLA. At Stanford, they are making an effort in this direction, but there is not the same tradition here as there. The campus was built on land donated by the Stanford family. ND

You are unique in that you straddle several departments.

RG

That’s right. I am in three departments at the same time, in French, in comparative literature, and in history of religions. This happened two or three years ago.

ND

Do you teach theology?

RG

No. But I can say that I’m interested in religion more than anyone here. Because the department of history of religions is actually a department of philosophy. There are scholars of Eastern religions, but no one teaches the New Testament.

ND

Don’t you rather teach the Bible as a whole?

RG

Yes. In fact, I never repeat the same course; some are exclusively on the Bible.

ND

Do graduate students write dissertations or theses with you on the subjects that are dear to you?

RG

Yes, literature theses, but above all interdisciplinary theses: comparative literature, or anthropology literature. For example, I am currently directing a thesis on violence and the sacred in Athalie.

ND

What do you think of the role of intellectuals in the United States?

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RG

In my opinion, this role is quite important, but in very limited circles.

ND

It seems to me that American campuses are privileged territories, with their own life. You have found there a favorable climate for research, almost ideal working conditions, and financial resources due to patronage, from which Europe has also benefited.

RG

After the war, the American university provided very substantial direct financial aid to European universities, and indirect aid represented by the five hundred American libraries which buy scholarly works throughout the world. To this must be added all sorts of other financial means to help students and researchers in the form of scholarships, teacher exchanges, a prodigious number of research centers, foundations, learned institutions. What ultimately matters in the United States is the freedom and flexibility of the system both intellectually and financially. In my opinion, the autonomy of universities in France has not been achieved because, despite declarations and good intentions, the government has never dared to give the only autonomy that matters, financial autonomy. Decentralization cannot exist without financial decentralization becoming part of our practice.

ND

What we want to avoid in France is the inequality of diplomas. We want to maintain state diplomas which guarantee the same quality everywhere.

RG

Here, diplomas from less highly rated establishments are not necessarily disadvantaged. On the other hand, each university is made up of departments at different levels of excellence. In the most prestigious universities, there can be bad departments. The reverse is also true, there are excellent departments in modest colleges. There is a constant stimulation, a dynamic atmosphere which encourages ambition. This is especially true in science. So it seems to me that the advantages of this system outweigh the disadvantages. They give everyone a maximum of chances according to their abilities.

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ND

What are the links between Stanford and the Center for Research in Applied Epistemology (CREA)?

RG

There is a student program that has been running for years in Paris, and we would like to continue to strengthen the ties that exist between Stanford and CREA. We have already invited Jean-Pierre Dupuy; we have organized conferences in which CREA members have taken part. In the French department, we have created an interdisciplinary group, which is directly associated with CREA. Our goal is to create increasingly close links in both research and teaching.

ND

How was the group formed at Stanford?

RG

You know that I became a teacher by chance, because I had the opportunity to come to the United States. It so happens that my work, which was oriented toward literature, finds itself within a body of interdisciplinary research. There has been convergence between my work and that of a number of researchers in other disciplines. Today, there is a research enterprise of which the victimary mechanism is one of the poles. CREA is a group that includes various tendencies. Imitation is one of its interests. This development took place in a way independently of me. And in CREA, I have as much to learn as to give.

CHAPTER 3

The Sacred, the Religious, and the Biblical

ND

What does Providence mean for you?

RG

Providence has nothing to do with fate or with chance. It is a matter of faith. Christian theology tells us that God is not indifferent to the world, that he is not absent from the world. Christianity never ceases to affirm that God acts in the world. This does not mean that it is God who causes the earthquakes or the accidents. God is incomprehensible and we must accept that we do not fully understand this.

ND

This is Job’s position.

RG

You mean Job’s last position?

ND

Yes, chapter 42 of the book of Job in which he accepts the decisions of the Eternal without understanding them.

RG

In my opinion, we use Job to raise certain questions that are not really present in Job. I see Job from the anthropological point of view. I see above all that he is a victim of his people. 25

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ND In Job: The Victim of His People (La route antique des hommes perv-

ers),1 you overturn all the received ideas about Job.

RG

What I’m saying is that the book of Job is entirely a text about violence and the sacred. It is a text that refutes the false conceptions that one can have of God. What is authentically Judeo-Christian plays almost no role in Job. It is rather a denunciation of the bad sacred. The error of the exegetes of Job is to believe that it is the “good” sacred. The dialogues of Job are a very old text, and what they depict is Job as a victim of violence, and of the sacred. In the text, one wants to make him a scapegoat, maybe a little god, Who knows? And Job replies, “I don’t accept that!”

ND

It’s still God who decided to take away all the wealth he had before?

RG

No, not at all! All this was added afterward. The prologue, which makes Job a private individual whose wealth is taken away, has nothing to do with the dialogues that follow. In my opinion, the prologue was written much later. It transforms Job into a private person in a society like ours, who is unhappy, to whom misfortunes happen. But the dialogues have nothing to do with that. They present a man who was the god of his society, a king before whom everyone bowed. Suddenly, he turns into an emissary victim. What I’m saying is that this text is extraordinary because it shows the victim speaking in a way that we find in the Psalms. Those who came later did not understand this extraordinary text, but they understood all the same that it was very important. It is already very beautiful. They lived in a universe where the private individual already played a much greater role, and they invented the prologue. In my opinion, the prologue has no relation to what is spoken of in the book of Job, and those who pose the question of the problem of evil base it only on the prologue and the epilogue. Our view of Job is completely distorted by the first chapter. However, my book is about the dialogues, exclusively. My book depicts a tragedy in which Oedipus, instead of saying “yes, I am guilty, you are right,” says “no,

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I am not guilty and you are wrong. You are making a scapegoat out of me.” ND

You cannot accuse theologians of never having read the dialogues!

RG

Theologians and scholars say things about Job that have little to do with most people’s idea of him. Besides, I don’t speak as a theologian, but as an anthropologist. This is no doubt why my book breaks with a whole tradition that relates to Job, and that consists in presenting God as someone cruel and unjust who inflicts arbitrary punishments. I refute this view of God. It is not God who causes the misfortunes of Job; it is men. But I believe that even if twenty-five books came out after mine, people would still see Job through the lens of the fourteen lines of the prologue.

ND

Is your interpretation that subversive?

RG

I simply think that what I am saying is incomprehensible apart from the theory of the emissary victim. And the only way to understand it otherwise is to place it on the level of private morality. Now, Job’s friends are there to curse him as violently as in the most primitive culture. He replies: “I was the god and now you are making me a victim.” The stories of lost cows, camels, and children have nothing to do with this fundamental truth.

ND

Why was something added to the original text?

RG

I asked myself the question, and I believe that this text was so incomprehensible, so brilliant! Imagine this Oedipus who would say: “Your accusation of parricide and incest is an invention. For my part, I refuse to be your scapegoat!” It’s truly unthinkable, but that’s how I see Job. Because this text is still in the Bible. Even if we do not understand it, it deserves to be in the Bible, because it is one of the greatest texts that contribute to the defeat of violence and the sacred. It is to tragedy that we must contrast it, and see that a tragedy has never created a victim like Job and given him a voice.

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ND

But Oedipus is accused of very specific crimes, while the accusations against Job are very vague.

RG

He is accused of something much more modern. He is accused of having oppressed the people. He is like the president of the United States in his disaster phase. He was an idol, and he becomes the public enemy. At that time, the consequences were much more serious. They would rather resemble the Russia of Stalin’s time.

ND

So, we don’t come out alive.

RG

We don’t come out alive. The house of the wicked is razed to the ground, covered with brimstone, and there is nothing left of it.

ND

How is it, under these conditions, that Job is rehabilitated?

RG

The end is as wrong as the beginning. It is an interpretation that developed in the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages had seen Job as a sort of rebel against God.

ND

In the last chapter, Job accepts the punishment that God sent him, without understanding it, because God is unfathomable. But he submits to it in dust and ashes. It is following this that God recognizes in Job a faithful servant; he restores him to his first state, and he even grants him double of all that he had possessed.

RG

In my opinion, those who wrote this last part of the book of Job had the intuition that there was in this text something extraordinary. The only way to find an explanation for this type of text which unveils the relationship of the people with its victim, when it is not understood, is to interpret it as you say. We are dealing in the dialogues with the fact that Job is excluded, despised, rejected by all. He is a chief who has become an object of hatred for his people. That’s why I compare him to Oedipus. Everyone is against him, but there is no question of the wealth he would have lost or regained. This aspect is that of the modern bourgeois who has lost on the Stock Exchange and who wonders why God sends such a punishment for him. In my opinion, these comments were added to dress up the dialogues, to give them

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a plausible interpretation, when in fact they were not understood at all. Even today, we continue to discuss individualistic morality when faced by texts that speak of something quite different. This is because, fundamentally, the problem of the emissary victim is not interesting. The summaries that have been made of my text reflect this attitude constantly. However, I have explained my point of view as clearly as possible. ND

Do you feel that your thought is being misinterpreted?

RG

I am often uncomfortable with summaries of my work, especially the way the term scapegoat is used. We are absolutely in the myth, and it is particularly abominable. Summaries, of course, are essential, and one can try to do them as correctly as possible, but the interest of my thesis does not lie in the summaries that can be made of them. The interest is the effects that we can discover when we try to think about royalty starting with the victim. These effects of meaning disappear completely in summaries. Very few people, moreover, are interested in the logical efficiency of ideas, in what I will call strong modes of thought. There is a kind of force at the level of certain institutions; the comparison of the institutions shows that they can have a common genesis starting from certain bifurcations. It is very difficult to interest people in this, to make people feel that suddenly certain gaps are abolished. I told you about my first intellectual experience, which was learning to read. I had the same impression about anthropology; suddenly everything became clear, there was a kind of key that opens a box. What I find very regrettable is hearing people say “it’s good” or “it’s wrong,” without ever wondering if that key would fit in the lock. I haven’t met many people who really discuss the need to do a kind of genealogy of anthropological concepts. It’s very theoretical, but I think it would be of extraordinary interest. For example people say to me: “you remove the sacrifice of Christianity, but it’s extraordinary!” I say, “What is sacrifice?” but nobody reflected on the fact that we don’t know, in truth, what it is. We have not reflected on the difference between the sacrifice of the Aztecs and the sacrifice of Christ. In fact, you read every day in

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the newspapers that it’s the same thing, that there is no difference between the point of view of the victim and the point of view of the persecutors. In a detective novel, we understand that difference, but in anthropology we no longer understand it. We therefore use words like “sacrifice” in believing that we know what they mean, and that they only have one meaning. From that, we say to ourselves that sacrifice is needed here or there as if it were a kind of magic potion that we can add or remove at will. But there is not enough reflection about what it means. ND

The words “scapegoat” and “sacrifice” are common vocabulary.

RG

There needs to be a full analysis of the term “scapegoat.” It is the modern translation, in French, of the text of Leviticus in Latin. Leviticus describes the rite of Yom Kippur, where one of two goats is sent into the desert. It is extraordinary that later this word took on the meaning of a collective victim who takes on the sins of another. It is not by chance that we find this in the Bible. The Bible conveys knowledge here. The Western world thus discovers that we can agree with each other in opposition to victims unjustly accused, to pretend to solve problems which have no connection with them. Well, I say it’s one of the greatest conquests in the history of knowledge. This is overused at the journalistic level, but it must be seen that all conceptions of human rights are based on the fact that we are able to think of society as unjust when it condemns someone. The apparent beauty of primitive societies, in my opinion, is the same as the beauty of animal societies, i.e., the scapegoat mechanism works so well that there is simply retribution: the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished. Because they are killed, we know they are wicked, and because they are wicked, we know they are killed. It is the system of retribution. For the problem of evil to appear, the problem of social evil, we must stop believing in the virtues of retribution. That’s what Job tries to tell his friends: “Just because you all agree against me doesn’t mean you have to be right.” No sacred text has ever been able to say this outside the Bible, and I insist a lot

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on this. It has penetrated our societies, and it is penetrating more and more. The term “scapegoat” only appears in dictionaries from the fifteenth or sixteenth century, that is to say, when the hunting of witches ceased. ND

Is this how the modern era is defined?

RG

It’s the beginning of the modern era, for better and for worse. Voltaire is right up to a certain point to advocate tolerance in opposition to a Church that was persecuting, because to understand the term “scapegoat,” for Christianity to be truly effective, it must be able to turn against those who wrongly accuse. This is where we see that Christianity is really effective, since it is no longer linked to ethnic or party adherences, and that it even works against those who take its name in vain. The word “scapegoat” is therefore very important. I tried to avoid it in Violence and the Sacred, because of all the misunderstandings about it. But it is interesting that it is the Jewish rite that gave us the meaning of this expression. In other words, the first rite understood in this way was the rite of the Jewish scapegoat. In the nineteenth century, ethnology knew that there were rites of scapegoats everywhere. But perhaps it would be better to use the term “pharmakos.”

ND

It’s the same word as “pharmacist.”

RG

Yes, it’s the same word because the drug has a sacred connotation, and it can be beneficial or harmful. But ethnologists accuse me of being ethnocentric because I use “Western” terms like “scapegoat.” However, I say that only the Western world is able to see that we make victims wrongfully. And we don’t want to hear that. To the extent that developing peoples say to the West “you have scapegoated us,” they are right, but they are at the same time vindicating Christian principles against those who have misused them. They need, however, to be aware that it is not from their own culture that they borrow this accusation. It’s not Western culture either. It is in the biblical text. In the end, to say that the Judeo-Christian text is

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Western is nonsense. It does not belong to any people in particular. What is fundamental is to see that behind the expression “scapegoat” there is real knowledge, a true comprehension. We live in a time when we have understood this, and this is very beautiful and very powerful that all the recognized origins of institutions are lies. Many people imagine that my theory is a little story that would give a new interpretation of origins. As such, it has no interest. Its only interest is its effectiveness at the level of anthropology. That is to say if it succeeds in making intelligible, in a coherent system, a whole series of phenomena. It’s the only thing that matters, but it needs to be looked at seriously. I think one day it will be. It already is by people like Lucien Scubla and Mark Anspach, but it’s a tiny group. As matters stand at present, I would say that this is where to locate the crisis of anthropology. I would say that the crisis of anthropology is here. Anthropology understands that all the notions it believed to be solid have dissolved. It is impossible for us to use the old vocabulary, because we know that it means nothing; it is completely impressionistic. ND

Don’t you think that one of the causes of the rejection of your ideas by some is your Christian commitment? It sounds like you’re putting faith before science.

RG

Of course. But there are also those who accused me of hiding my faith before I even became a Christian.

ND

You had a late conversion?

RG Yes. ND

You didn’t consider yourself a Christian when you started your work?

RG

No. It is all the more important for me to say this because my conversion is in a way the fruit of my anthropological vision. This is not entirely true, but at the same time the two approaches are inseparable. It all happened all at once. I truly had the impression of a

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unique intuition that I can date: 1959. This is the fundamental date. Because when I started Deceit, Desire, and the Novel,2 the victim was not yet present, but the idea of conversion at the conclusion of the novel struck me in a very strong way. ND

It was not, with Stendhal or Proust, religious conversions.

RG

Exactly, that’s what makes them even more interesting. But we cannot make an absolute break between religious and nonreligious conversion. And besides, there are conversions elsewhere than in Christianity.

ND

Your conclusion on Proust’s Time Regained is absolutely visionary. You can feel the breath of inspiration there.

RG

Anyway, I thought through a lot of things while I was writing this. It was a major change in my life.

ND

And you chose Catholicism.

RG

Catholicism chose me too, because I returned to the religion of my childhood, and at the same time I immediately felt that, contrary to what many people of the Church think, my discovery is extraordinary in that it brings back the classic forms of dogma in another form. It embraces them all: the Incarnation, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the non-sacrificial reading of Christianity. This reading worries many people; there are Christians who see it as a kind of gnosis. For my part, I have always experienced this as a reintegration into complete orthodoxy. I’m not a heretic at all.

ND

It seems to me, however, that Christians, like anthropologists, and for different reasons, readily consider you as such.

RG

My success comes from being considered a heretic. But the reaction of Christians has improved in recent years. There is something rather revolutionary in what I have done, so it is normal for theologians to be a little flabbergasted. There are a lot of ideas that are quite unexpected, and even at times I didn’t know where I was going.

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But I knew all the same that I was guided by an intuition which was a global approach, and I have always experienced this as a return to orthodoxy. I’m talking about the big Christian churches; in a way, I’m very ecumenical. I think that unity can be achieved around the nonsacrificial reading of the Gospel. In time, Protestants and Catholics will understand that they fought for nonsense. At present, extraordinary work is being done on Paul. It shows that Paul’s problems with Judaism and the Law stem from his seeing the Law as responsible for the Cross. It is not so much about faith and works, but about the persecuted victim. This is the Protestant version, which is the work of an American here at Stanford, Robert Hamilton-Kelly. He revealed a lot of things to me, because not only do Catholics have a problem with the entire Bible, having never read it much, but there is an extraordinary Protestant accent in the Epistles to the Romans and the Epistles to the Galatians, and it runs extremely deep. If you look at the early Church, the real Paul, in a way, that’s already Protestantism. But it is a Protestantism that bowed to Peter because, even if Paul knew that Peter was much less intelligent than him, he went to Jerusalem all the same, he made an act of submission. He disagreed with Peter from time to time, but he remained subject to him, because the number one apostle, Christ said, it is Peter. ND

Protestants and Catholics diverge the most about the interpretation that should be given to the role of Peter. It is certain that at the Synod of Jerusalem a certain authority was recognized in Peter, but it was James who presided, and the word “submission” was never used.

RG

Paul, who was Protestant in so many ways, was still Catholic in that he recognized the authority of Peter. Paul’s spiritual power was absolutely prodigious, and it was thanks to this that the nascent Christianity was able to preserve its unity, when there were so many tensions. This is the magnificent aspect of Christianity.

ND

At the time, Peter did not wear a crown; he was not surrounded by all the hierarchy that characterized Roman Catholicism. Is it by imitation that the pope wanted to compete with the monarchs?

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RG

Doubtless it was the era that wanted that. And the pope would not have had a voice on the international stage if he hadn’t owned territory. You always have to place yourself in the context of the times. Luther, for example, is also very marked by his time. There is a blatant anti-Semitism in him.

ND

It is less marked with Calvin, perhaps because he traveled more and knew cultures other than his own.

RG

Today we can say that there are as many Catholic reflexes among Protestants as there are Protestant reflexes among Catholics. But there are all the same differences of emphasis and thought vis-à-vis the tradition which are not totally insignificant. The non-sacrificial reading of Christianity would make it possible to energize them, to place them in a historical perspective, we would no longer think of them in a fixed way. So I think this approach is very important for ecumenism. But it will take a long time, and it will only happen when many theologians understand this. The way people react is also very complicated. There are those who see my work as a war machine against the Church, and then there are conservatives who see it as the destruction of Christianity. We can therefore never predict the reactions.

ND

To be very clear, it should perhaps be pointed out that by “nonsacrificial” you mean “non-penitential.” This puts you at odds with both conservatives and leftist Catholics.

RG

Precisely because their quarrels make no sense, they are completely overwhelmed. What is terrible today in progressivism as in fundamentalism is that the questions raised are no longer religious at all. Fundamentalism clings to rites, and God knows how personally I love the Gregorian service, but the Gregorian is not the Church. Handel and Bach are not bad either. It has nothing to do with the vulgarity of current music. Anyway, the Church has the right to change the liturgy, even if it is wrong in its practical application. That is not the point, and arguing about it is almost as absurd as

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saying that Cardinal Lustiger cannot be a Christian because he is a Jew! ND

What is shocking, for certain Christians, is precisely the non-sacrificial interpretation of the Passion.

RG

If you look at the Gospels, there is sacrificial language in the way that the language of the whole world has been sacrificial, whence the words like Passion, Redemption, ransom. But if you look closely at Paul’s texts, you will find that he always avoids the word sacrifice. He prefers to speak of a work of grace, a work of peace, a work of redemption. And Christ himself never used the word sacrifice. It is still important. There is no sacrificial theory of Christianity. Moreover, it is thanks to the non-sacrificial reading that one attach to the Cross what Christian theology wants to attach there. What is at issue is that a sacrificial reading amounts to explaining why the father demands the death of the son. What must be shown is that the father never demanded the death of the son. The father asks all men to stop fighting. To the extent that men continue in their mimetic entanglements there will be victims. What Jesus does is to propose that men renounce their violence. Men don’t, so we face the same dilemma. Given this situation, Christ is the one who says: I would rather die than participate in the persecution of others. If I made a mistake in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde),3 it was because I was too negative about Hebrews. The Epistle to the Hebrews refers to the Psalm which says: “you wanted neither sacrifice nor holocaust, so I said, here I come.” The Epistle to the Hebrews attributes these words to Jesus, which means: “you told men to be reconciled without sacrifice.” But if men do not, I am still bound by this requirement, and therefore I will be all the more exposed as I am faithful to it. If men continue to fight in a world where one has decided to renounce sacrificial practices, it is quite obvious that whoever remains faithful to this word will be killed. To say that Jesus is the Word of God is to say that this Word, which has nothing to do with violence, which is love between men, cannot live on this earth. Insofar as it is on this earth, either it becomes an accomplice

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of the sacrifice, and is therefore no longer the Word of God, or else it will have to accept being killed. But to speak of self-sacrifice, to use the same word for the Aztecs or the cannibals who grow cereals with human sacrifice, is an extravagant idea. It should then be recognized that all of human history passes through a complete reversal of the meaning given to the word sacrifice. What makes Christianity the pinnacle of religious experience is being able to say this. Christ is not the one who sacrifices, but the one who is actually sacrificed. All the sacrificial symbolism is there. I believe it is Elie Wiesel who sees Christianity as a regression from the sacrifice of Abraham. For Abraham, the human victim is replaced by an animal. We are no longer going to sacrifice our son, we are going to sacrifice sheep, but we persist in spite of everything in war and violence. Wiesel’s error is to believe that the sacrifice of Christ is a return to the previous state without seeing that there is an overcoming, in a form which once again becomes that of the founding victim. Because Christ speaks of it, the founding victim is revealed at the same time. There are four texts which say the same thing, which show the unanimity of the group which is completely misguided. ND

How do you interpret chapter 10 of the Gospel according to Matthew, where Jesus says: “Do not believe that I have come to bring peace on earth; I’ve not come to bring peace but the sword, for I have come to bring division between the man and his father,” etc.

RG

Jesus speaks at the level of history, as an introduction to what this extraordinary truth will produce. He says, “I am the peace that passes human understanding,” it is true. But he also says: I am going to be the cause of this lack of differentiation because men are going to misunderstand my message. It is going to insert itself in an ambiguous way into ignorance, since men refuse to understand it. He will insert himself through violence. The violence will not come from him; it is the men who will make it a cause of violence. Herod, on hearing of the Gospel, orders the massacre. One could therefore accuse the Gospel of being the cause. But this is false, the Gospel

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only shows the different responses of men to its message. The world is Herod. ND

God knew in advance what was going to happen.

RG

Yes. He knew it in advance, but he leaves the responsibility to men. The apocalyptic texts are related to this. Because this is an apocalyptic text. In the Gospel of John, it is even clearer, because each time Christ speaks, it is said that his listeners were divided and began to argue. He carried the quarrel everywhere. The extraordinary mystery is that the most innocent truth, this little child who has just been born, becomes a subject of discord and violence. However, the truth itself is completely innocent. But ultimately, if Satan’s kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot endure. In a way, there is therefore no more choice. Sacrifice no longer works. What Christ also tells us is that the destruction of the sacrificial system hardly needs Christianity to come to an end. It could be done otherwise, but in a purely negative way. Christianity is inserted there, perhaps, only to accelerate this evolution. It offers us the possibility of getting out of violence.

ND

You have made your position clear. You can’t be accused of ambiguity, as was the case with Things Hidden.

RG

I have been accused, I know, of hiding my game, of dissimulating my Christianity in Violence and the Sacred.4 But this book was such a leap forward from Deceit, Desire, and the Novel that I couldn’t talk about Christianity. I wasn’t ready; I hadn’t finished my work on it. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel appeared in 1961, Violence and the Sacred in 1972. This shows that it took more than ten years to write this book, and even with all that time I recognize that it is poorly presented. I was trying to forge a language capable of saying a whole set of very complex things, and obviously I didn’t succeed.

ND

It seems to me, however, that in Violence and the Sacred, there are passages of extraordinary force that are understandable even to those who have never read anything in the field of anthropology.

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RG

At the time, I was restrained by a certain reticence. I felt how daring my thesis was, and I knew that I would be criticized for entering areas that were not my specialty. But in reality it means nothing at all, because the intuition is one. It opens a certain field; it must be allowed to run and spread like a prairie fire. To stop it arbitrarily here or there is absurd, because the barriers between the different fields of investigation mean nothing. We must therefore take this intuition as a whole, and see what happens to it. If I had to say how I position myself today, I would say that I feel on the side of the pope against the fundamentalists on the one hand, and against the progressives on the other. I feel in solidarity with Cardinal Lustiger, even though he wrote in his last book that my thesis was theologically absurd.

ND

One would have thought that he would be particularly sensitive to the way in which you integrate the Old Testament into your system of thought.

RG

Yes, but at the same time what is admirable about Lustiger is his traditional priest side, in the most Catholic sense of the term, his loyalty to the Church. He naturally rejects a thesis like mine because we tried to make him say that Christianity was in continuity with Judaism, on the pretext that he is a converted Jew. However, Lustiger is Catholic through and through! He has a sense of Catholic orthodoxy found in very few priests. In other times I might have said otherwise, but today all orthodoxy has crumbled. And here we have this converted Jew, this magnificent archbishop of Paris, who affirms aloud the old truths of Catholicism, who repeats them to those Parisians who do not want to hear anything. Yet Parisians love him, he has great popularity.

ND

In France, there are fewer and fewer people who identify as Christians, who are practicing.

RG

That’s a good thing, because it shows that the prophecies are coming true. Paul had predicted that men, in contact with the truth, would be transformed into poisonous serpents . . . before the end of time.

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ND

Some Christian movements are on the rise. The Baptists for example.

RG

I must say that I have a real admiration for the great Protestant traditions of Bible exegesis. The Baptist movement is doing great things in Russia, for example. It is also very successful in South America and the southern United States with immigrant populations to whom it provides a rallying point, a welcoming structure, in regions where they feel isolated. These immigrants come from societies where there is still a community life, it is a necessity for them. However, Catholics are not up to this requirement. In the United States, Baptist churches, many of which are black, have a long tradition. I also see how Jehovah’s Witnesses help certain communities. As for the Mormons, I don’t have much sympathy for their beliefs, but they must be respected, because all the communities play a nonnegligible social role. They are accused of being totalitarian. Above all, I believe that they simply have a desire to remain faithful to who they are, in the face of a world that terrifies them.

ND

Can we say that the French seventeenth century is the rejection of the biblical, insofar as it is a return to Greco-Latin antiquity?

RG

It is difficult to see Bossuet and Pascal as anti-biblical. But it’s true of salon life, of many aspects of the Counter-Reformation. I think here is the problem of the rival doubles. Returns to antiquity always have an anti-biblical side. Within the Reformation, there are also certain theologians who have a preference for the Old Testament which is exercised to the detriment of pure evangelism. There would be symmetrical phenomena there. What is most important is that the period between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times is an essential period in relation to sacrifice. This is the moment when certain phenomena of scapegoating and collective violence are clearly revealed, in a very specific framework which is that of the witch hunt. Elizabeth of England’s successor James I, believed in witches. Shakespeare is a contemporary of that society, and his art consists in playing on the sacrificial tendencies of his

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public. He plays it in a rather cynical way, because he does not seek to moralize or educate the public. He has no ideology to defend. ND

It’s the opposite of committed literature, to use a neologism.

RG

It’s the opposite, yes. The only play where there is a force of commitment is Hamlet. There is a play within the play which is a substitute for action, and which above all expresses an attitude of ressentiment. The genius of Shakespeare is that this does not prevent him from approaching certain sacred texts, and thus being everything for everyone. This means that if you operate at the level of the scapegoat, you take the Merchant of Venice as your scapegoat. If you’ve demystified the system, Shakespeare is your accomplice, and he laughs with you at those who need scapegoats. But the work will always conform to what you demand of it. This is the greatness of the theater, in my opinion. We can affirm this without agreeing with those who say that language means nothing. Language always means something. It shows us victims, and, at the same time, it condemns them. The scene of Shylock’s trial in The Merchant of Venice is a masterful demonstration of this. This creates a prodigious suspense that the staging should make visible. Shakespeare’s theatrical art has not yet been really highlighted on this level: the way in which he mocks the mechanism of the scapegoat that he himself created.

ND

What he is really saying is that the Christians of Venice are exactly like Shylock, only more hypocritical. They deny it, but they care about money just as much as he does.

RG

That’s it. But neither should it be interpreted as anti-Christianity. It could be a much deeper Christian spirit that points to Christianity’s failure in the face of anti-Semitism. Shakespeare shows us characters who constantly cry “mercy,” who claim compassion while they are immersed in financial or erotico-financial traffic. He shows us what is really perverse in Venice; it is this bad use of Christianity. I conclude that Shakespeare must be a radical

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Christian. To see the failure of Christianity at this level can only be fundamentally Christian. Shakespeare is accused of being reactionary, but when Shylock talks about slavery, we can see that here is where Shakespeare is revolutionary. To understand his political attitude, which seems cynical to some; you almost have to think of Pascal. Pascal refers to the cognizant, to the semi-skilled, he places them on several levels, like Shakespeare. To be able to do this, one must comprehend the mechanism of the scapegoat. Shakespeare makes caricatures, knowing full well that those looking for scapegoats will not discover the caricatural side of the characters. There are forms of exaggeration that the theater requires and which are not possible in the novel. ND

Isn’t Montaigne the common point between Shakespeare and Pascal?

RG

Yes, because Pascal is nourished by Montaigne, and Shakespeare too. It represents what announces the modern spirit at its deepest.

ND

You have attacked modern criticism a great deal, and above all structuralist criticism with regard to its interpretation of Shakespeare at the level of language.

RG

Current criticism tends to reduce everything to language and to say that there is an infinity of possible interpretations, and in particular that all interpretations of The Merchant of Venice are justified. In other words, for this criticism, believing in the villainy of the victim or revealing the mechanism of the scapegoat, is the same thing. There are people who tell you that everything is susceptible to all interpretations, that objectivity does not exist. I have met American students who were in classes where Robert Faurisson’s denial of the concentration camps was presented from this angle. They were told “we only have texts, but texts can say anything”! All my work on the texts of persecution is a war machine against this type of nihilism. If we had adopted this kind of attitude about the wars of religion, we would never have gone beyond the stage of

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hunting down heretics. The witch hunt becomes an interpretation like any other, which is like Mircea Eliade talking about cannibalism or other practices of such and such a tribe. I find that insane. For it is to abandon what is most valuable in Western civilization. It discovers the victims, and even if it continues to victimize, it at least knows that we must stop doing it. It would like not to. And if it is accused of doing so, it is on the basis of principles that it has revealed itself. This is a requirement that only exists in our world, which is unthinkable elsewhere. In The Suppliants by Aeschylus, for example, you are told about the victims, but it is only a question of taking revenge. This is not about exposing the lie of the persecution. This is what Nietzscheism conceals, because it tells you: “there is no defense of victims except that which is a lie.” Why? Out of resentment. If culture is structured around the phenomenon of victimhood when it is concealed, revealing it is not without consequences. ND

This revelation, you find it especially in the texts of persecution, and it is the subject of your book The Scapegoat (Le bouc émissaire).5 What was your approach?

RG

What happens is that we look at texts which are in fact mythical with a fresh eye, a critical eye that ends up demystifying them. But what is absurd is that we refuse to make the same critical reading of the Oedipus myth, which is nonetheless the same.

ND

How do you explain this?

RG

I think it’s a reaction against the Judeo-Christian spirit. If we allowed ourselves to see that the pagan religion is of the same nature as the texts of persecution, that is to say based on the sacrifice of certain victims, we would realize that it is a question of something similar to the witch hunts that flourished in the sixteenth century. All romantic neo-primitivism would collapse at once. Because witchcraft is not a system of magical practices, it is a system of accusation. When you’re faced with problems, you say, “there’s some magic in this,” and

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you destroy someone. Witchcraft is not beautiful; it is a universe in which the hunt for witches has never ceased. Ethnologists who blame the Western world for unmasking witchcraft find it perfectly admirable to justify the Aztec civilization which systematically killed twenty thousand people a year. It was their culture, so it was good. If such acts take place in the Western world, it is rightly considered abominable. So there are double standards. ND

Isn’t it normal that we are more severe toward ourselves since we proclaimed the Rights of Man?

RG

Yes, we have to apply a stricter rule to ourselves. But that is not the question. It would rather be a question of not applying rules to others, and of judging ourselves in relation to our Christian principles, which we do not respect, and which are not recognized by the judges themselves. The conclusion is that we do not see the extraordinary force of the Judeo-Christian Revelation about the emissary victim. But that’s where it comes from.

ND

In the end, you defend Western culture?

RG

No. But I say that it can only be indicted on the basis of Christianity. Any accusation made from civilizations that are based on cruelty to human beings, however hidden, is necessarily false. Blaming the Western world is legitimate, but only Christ has the right to do so.

ND

Above all, we can be accused of hypocrisy, since Christianity preached one thing and did something else.

RG

All the same, we have stopped hunting witches in the West. We are the only civilization to have done this. You also have to see that there has been real progress, and that’s the good side of the eighteenth century. To say on the one hand that the eighteenth century is the most beautiful, the best, the strongest is as false as to say that it was as immoral as the Aztecs. Neither of these statements is valid. There is an operation of the Christian text which has been accomplished little by little through the intermediary of a whole series of authors, and we always ignore these results, so as not to see what they really

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are. We always manage to falsify them, to hide the presence of fundamental texts. ND

We also forget that in the “good” eighteenth century, Protestants rowed in the galleys, and that the king’s dragoons massacred the Cévennes resistance fighters. The scapegoats have been numerous, and it is the freethinkers who have debunked them.

RG

No. Because the Age of Enlightenment only half-demystified them. It did it in the name of “topinambin” cannibalism, as if it were superior. This is what Voltaire does, in a sense, when he speaks of the “noble savage.”

ND

But Voltaire did not believe in the noble savage at all! He explained it to Rousseau.

RG

Why does the eighteenth century believe it has to put noble savages everywhere, even if it doesn’t believe in them? Even those who don’t believe in them need to stage them. The fundamental texts of anti-persecution are never manifest, they act in a concealed way, in obscurity.

ND

The Declaration of the Rights of Man is even inspired by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, among others. So they incorporated that.

RG

It happened in ignorance, and this ignorance will mean that there will continue to be scapegoats. This is what today authors like Foucault are revealing about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are mainly right. The process always begins again insofar as its true source is not comprehended.

ND

What role do you attribute to Kant in this process?

RG

Kant is in some ways the forerunner of modern anti-metaphysical thought. Kant can be used in several ways. On the one hand, he veers toward contemporary nihilism, toward Nietzsche and Heidegger, but on the other hand we can see in him the Protestant

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Christian who recognizes that man is alone, without resources, obliged to rely on faith. It is therefore ambiguous. I see in him an effort to integrate the Protestantism of the Enlightenment with the consequence of a certain nihilism. However, he has an extraordinary concern for morality, which is very different from Voltaire. ND

But Voltaire had a great concern for morality! In the name of which he defended the victims, Jean Calas and the others?

RG

He created other scapegoats, which indirectly led to the Reign of Terror. Because the discovery of the scapegoats does not allow anyone to rely on it to bring charges.

ND

But he mainly attacked fanaticism, intolerance. If he had been able to foresee the fanaticism of the Jacobins, he would certainly have condemned it.

RG

Voltaire is still looking for culprits. He is interested in the culprits more than the victims.

ND

Which culprits? The State, Justice, the Church?

RG

He defends the institutions, that’s for sure, so I wouldn’t want to make Voltaire a scapegoat. But I think his humanism remains narrow, insofar as the phenomena he discovers, he limits to a sector very close to himself without situating them in their true context. So, in a certain way, it does as much harm as good. As soon as one defends only one side of the question against the other, one does not see the whole. There is always a counterpart. Today we perceive the shortcomings of this eighteenth-century humanism, which leads us to treat this era as a scapegoat. What must be said is that man is so made that he will always be able to put the best things at the service of evil. The better these things become, the truer the great scholastic adage becomes: “corruptio boni pessima,” that is, “the corruption of the best is the worst.” This amounts to saying that the more truth there is in the world, the more that truth is corrupted. The representation of truth in the form of a helpless little child is extremely profound, because we can always take advantage of the

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truth to end up in a lie. This is how we must interpret original sin: man cannot tolerate the truth. He must get rid of it or corrupt it. ND

What is original sin?

RG

It is the system of mimetic desire, the sequence of imitations. It is Eve who listens to the serpent, and then it is Adam who listened to Eve. But all interpretations of original sin as sexuality or as the main responsibility of women are false. Eve finds herself at the center of a chain of mimetic desire. When God asks Adam what happened, he replies: it’s not me, it’s her. When he addresses Eve, she replies: it is the serpent.

ND

And the snake, how do you explain it?

RG

In my opinion, the serpent represents the serpentine character of mimetic desire. This means that the chain that begins with Adam and Eve will go on forever. The snake is the folds of mimetic desire. Like all great symbols, it has neither beginning nor end.

ND

But if the serpent is the devil, he was nevertheless created by God. Is he a fallen angel?

RG

You pose the problem in terms of an overly rationalistic theology.

ND

This is current theology.

RG

Yes, and in a way it has its virtues. But here it must be challenged.

ND

It is all the same the one that has been conveyed by the Church for centuries!

RG

What the Church conveyed does not interest me. What interests me is the text. The Church and the Christians convey what they can. Once again, it is necessary to clearly distinguish the sociological point of view, I almost want to say ethico-sociological, which accuses Western civilization, which it is obliged to do in relation to other societies. There is no other point of reference; there is no absolute. Now, we can show that with all its cruelties Western

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society has produced something radical, quite different from primitive societies. We can say this without making a reactionary defense of our society. Basically, we judge in relation to a Christian text that is never mentioned, according to moral and religious requirements that we do not talk about. This is why we are hypocritical on all sides. ND

Christianity, of course, has exercised such a vast influence for centuries that it has inspired movements which do not necessarily refer to it, and even challenge it.

RG

Humans are capable of taking the truth and turning it into the worst of lies. This means that Christianity is established in the world, in a way, as a power of corruption. But the fact that it is caught up in evil has no importance in the absolute. It’s the fault of humans, whereas the text is always right. I will go further. I will say that theology is also right. We can say that it is right without denying all its consequences. It is absolutely necessary to give up seeing religion in terms of social utility. Mixing sociology and religion is a radically false point of view. Christianity is not made to help humans live; it is not a recipe for life. Either it’s the truth or it’s nothing at all.

ND

This clarification is very important, because many wonder why you are so little interested in movements that seek to implement, in society, a certain ideal stemming from Christianity. Must Christianity necessarily remain outside the world?

RG

No. We can do certain things to improve the world. It also happens that those who make the most virtuous seeming statements are also the most abominable characters. On one level, all of this doesn’t matter. From the philosophical point of view, what is needed is to maintain a certain relationship to the truth. What I am saying is that the Christian text is not involved in the bad use that is made of it. The fact that Christianity was introduced into history and that it gave rise to bad uses is the responsibility of humans. There is certainly a higher good behind all this, and which is essential. I place

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myself within the point of view of a radical Christianity, and not of anything else. ND

So we can’t really influence the course of things.

RG

I think we constantly influence it. What I am reacting against is today’s progressive Christianity, which seems to me as false, in its relation to the Christian text, as repressive Christianity. These are doubles.

ND

You said though that if we’ve stopped burning witches, that’s great progress, even if we did it for the wrong reasons.

RG

I don’t think we did it for the wrong reasons. This has often been justified by a humanist pride, which is what is wrong with the philosophy of the Enlightenment. We are thought to be indebted to human reason, when it is not that at all. In reality, it is the work of the Christian text, which paradoxically allows man to rebel against Christian Revelation, that is to say against the bad uses that have been made of it, and which immediately precede it. In my view the Middle Ages are no more to be revered or condemned than subsequent eras. Humans manage, if I may say, as they can. In some ways they are more barbaric than others, in other ways more innocent. Today, this constant crusade against the Crusades is truly childish. Of course, the Crusades are, up to a certain point, the extension of Germanic barbarism, but they were a stage. This does not mean that we have a Hegelian vision of history. I am against the Crusades, but I find it rather deplorable that the Christian universe is being prosecuted, even the Christian sacrificial universe, in the name of an ideal that is repudiated. It was respected as much as possible. Obviously one could do little, the Middle Ages having few lights. But with the higher lights that we have, we often do worse. We always repeat ourselves in relation to our predecessors, and we deserve the condemnation of Jesus: “You killed all the prophets and you are much worse than your ancestors, because you condemn your ancestors while being similar to them.”

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ND

Can we say that today mimetic entanglements have taken hold between men and women?

RG

Yes, it’s internal mediation. The Gospel had announced that we would set men against women, etc. There have been periods in history when this type of confrontation has occurred, but it has never reached the current level. What is terrible is that women were treated, not as scapegoats, but as inferiors.

ND

You recognize that feminism has its raison d’être.

RG

Of course, but what worries me about Western society is its profoundly anti-religious character. For example, the fact of not wanting to recognize what the cult of the Virgin represents.

ND

The cult of the Virgin values virginity on the one hand and motherhood on the other, while ignoring femininity.

RG

Personally, I protest, because this highlighting of sex raises very serious questions. Generally, when one glorifies the woman, as sexualized, one falls into the primitive rites where there are sexualized prostitutes, and where the woman is nothing other than an object. All this seems to me extremely dangerous for women. As soon as sex is glorified, woman becomes an object. The idea of woman as a subject and as a sexual being at the same time is such a recent and Western notion that one cannot deny the fact that it is thanks to the Virgin. The Virgin is a thoroughgoing subject. What is fundamental in the Gospel is Mary’s response to the message: “Let it be done according to your will.” She says, “I am the handmaid of the Lord.” She doesn’t say it specifically as a woman; she says it as a human being. In contrast, Herod says: “Here is a new king, he must be killed!” The Virgin is the positive response to God’s message, the total absence of publicity, of posing. She answers as a human being, and at the same time, she is undoubtedly a woman. The role of the Virgin appears before the birth of Christ in the Gospels, so it is not correct to think that she is present only as a mother. What matters is the acceptance of the message. She is in contrast to Zechariah who, when told that his wife is going to give birth, absolutely refuses to

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believe it. He is punished by losing the use of speech until the birth of John the Baptist. The Virgin is the one who says “yes” to the message of God. That’s all, and that’s huge, because that’s the only thing that matters. She is the only human being in the Gospels who does not hesitate, unlike Peter. What is needed is to resist being influenced by the lowest medieval interpretations, and to concentrate on the essential, which is in the texts. ND

Do you think God has a purpose for mankind?

RG

Yes, but not on the sociological level, on the level of social utopias, bright tomorrows, etc. Not at all. I think that God is interested in the salvation of humans, that he is always interested in it, that he is a party to this affair. God can intervene at the right moment in the life of humans to reveal certain things to them, to give them a better chance of salvation, to give a divine helping hand. There are interventions from God, signs in individual lives. That I believe in personally, I believe in the catechism, I bow down, I accept Catholicism as a whole.

ND

Do you ask yourself the question of knowing what are the criteria of salvation?

RG

I don’t know. The catechism does not exclude universal salvation, and it does not exclude Hell. Christianity does not need to take a position on this. We do not know what is reserved for the elect. We do not know what is reserved for the others. The various opinions that one can have on this are bound to be ridiculous.

ND

And in terms of faith?

RG

On the level of faith, I accept the catechism as it is. The great councils are the Trinity. They are the Incarnation. They are the inner workings of Christianity as a machine of salvation in the world. For the rest, we don’t know what is for the elect, what is for the damned, or if there will be any damned. We don’t know what Hell means.

ND

We know quite well what it is on earth.

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RG

Precisely, if it is on earth, it is because it exists. At every moment we go to Hell for the reasons that the religious texts say. One cannot at the same time accuse Christianity of wanting to recover everyone and of speaking of Hell. What does the concept of Hell mean? This means that for Christianity salvation is not guaranteed. So Christianity does not receive everyone. Beyond that, there is nothing to say. I adore Dante, but he is not for our time. Our Christianity is both exactly the same, dogmatically, and far removed from this type of thinking. I think that one can be totally orthodox and accept all dogmas without entering into rationalist modes of thought, which moreover exclude faith from the outset. It may be that the Catholic Church has exaggerated in rationalist definitions, that the Greek Orthodox Church is right to reproach her for it. But to see this in a historical way is not to indict the Church, it is not to fall into dissolving progressivism. Today, the important thing is to escape the latter.

ND

What do you call dissolving progressivism?

RG

Humanitarianism, socialism. The Church is always three centuries behind, she is in the process of inventing communism, the first Marx. At a time when we are witnessing the total bankruptcy of communism in Russia, in China, priests are in the process of inventing theological communism!

ND

However, French Catholicism has clearly taken a turn to the right.

RG

Yes, because the pope took matters into his own hands, and he was right.

ND

How exactly do you define a primitive society?

RG

We can call a primitive society a society in which an individual cannot be right against the State. We live in a society that invented the individual. The individual exists from the moment one can, in a certain way, oppose society without being immediately liquidated. In my opinion, it is the Christian text which has caused this evolution.

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This fundamental personage who serves as a model, as we have said, is the just man wrongly condemned; it is the text of the Gospels. It is already mentioned in the Old Testament, but the basis is found in the Passion of Christ. The text of the Gospels is surrounded by an enormous accumulation of dross: for example, all that Nietzsche calls resentment is a usurpation of this victim position. But this usurpation itself testifies to the truth of the phenomenon. Given what man is, distortions are inevitable, but they must not be confused with the very essence of this event. That, in my opinion, is the Nietzschean attitude toward the religious. Everyone, in a certain sense, is more or less Nietzschean in this matter, because one seeks to escape this immense thing expressed by this sentence of the Gospel: “And on this generation, will fall all the prophets who have been killed since the beginning of the world.” ND

I would like to recall the exact quotation found in the Gospel according to Matthew, in chapter 23: “I send you prophets, wise men and scribes. You will kill and crucify some, you will beat others with rods, so that the innocent blood shed on the earth may fall on you, from the blood of Abel the righteous to the blood of Zechariah . . . it will fall on this generation.”

RG

It’s not at all a vengeful curse; it’s a repercussion in the sense that men will understand what they are. We seek to escape it in every way by seeing ourselves as the victims, and others as the persecutors. It’s true in politics. It’s true in morality. It’s true in everyday discourse. But it must also be said that in society, the functioning of religion is not at the level of belief.

ND

So we are wrong to think that situating oneself in relation to the religious is a question of believing or not believing?

RG

Of course. This is why we do not understand primitive societies. In these societies, it is a question of rites. It is a question of doing. In our societies, on the other hand, what matters is the victim, of course. We must reread the so-called curses against the Pharisees,

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which are always turned against Christianity, and which constitute the fundamental text on the question. If there has been an essential contribution on the level of exegesis, it is that which has shown that these texts speak of it and address our era in a very direct way. ND

Doesn’t the condition of man imply that everyone is both victim and executioner, even without knowing it?

RG

Yes. Because only God is interested in humans. Humans are only interested in themselves; they are totally indifferent toward others. Now, indifference is itself persecutory, in a way.

ND

Not everyone is indifferent.

RG

You are right, not everyone is indifferent. I am always too pessimistic. I am fundamentally a satirical, tragic thinker.

ND

You think that man is not made for happiness?

RG

It seems paradoxical, but prosperity does not succeed in humans. They are always looking for the ideal state, the ideal society, and, of course, you have to have the best possible government. But looking closely, we see that a state that functions well, where life is easy, is favorable to the average population, but is not favorable, on the other hand, to the blossoming of genius. Man is made in such a way that, if we give him advantages, he will lose on the other hand. The balance may be illusory. In reality, it is impossible to give man what he asks for, that is to say a perfectly settled existence on earth, where everything always goes well. It is the metaphysics of the tourist who wants the perfect hotel, an unpolluted sea, impeccable public transport, extremely fast planes, etc. He will never have that, because tourism itself destroys its own object. Consequently, I believe that it is always necessary to start from what is evil in the human being, in the individual who always looks for scapegoats. Sometimes they are political, sometimes they are elsewhere, but today, the scapegoat par excellence is God himself. It is moreover in the order of things. It is the culminating Revelation. Thus God becomes the only scapegoat. Some regret not being believers in order to make him a better

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scapegoat. Because if God does not exist, it is difficult to continue to rebel against the previous illusion of God’s existence. ND

Today, in our relations with the Muslim world, aren’t we reaping what we have sown, in a perfectly mimetic reversal?

RG

Of course, we reap what we sow. But what we have sown is not as Christians, but precisely because we have not lived up to the Christian text. This does not give us the right to condemn our ancestors, or else we condemn ourselves, which is the ever-repeated Gospel word.

ND

However, Christianity is obviously not practicable at the level of a state.

RG

It is not practicable, indeed, at the level of a state. There is a very profound text by Simone Weil about the adulterous woman. Christ says that whoever believes himself to be without sin can cast the first stone at her. According to Simone Weil, and in my opinion she goes too far, if the people had thrown stones, Christ would have thrown them too. This would have shown, according to her, that he was absolutely not ready to receive this message. It’s a bit excessive, but I understand very well what she meant, because Judaic stoning was certainly an improvement over other killing practices that preceded it.

ND

Does the Rushdie affair inspire you with a comment?

RG

That should wake Christianity up. Because in the Christian world, well before Voltaire, to attack the Christian, to satirize Christianity, is to ensure a publicity success. But Islam is not there yet. In twentieth-century Islam, it is much more dangerous to practice satire than in the eighteenth century in the country of Voltaire. One gained not only an enormous fortune but also an immense fame by publishing the kind of writing which Mr. Rushdie attempted. Some have attempted to draw a parallel with Protestant fundamentalists in the United States. But they do not condemn anyone to death! They only ask that their beliefs be respected, even when they are

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in favor of the death penalty. They claim it for criminals, not for writers. This shows how far one can fall into exaggeration. There are two weights and two measures, because we are ready to excuse everything from those who are not Christians. This is what must also be said about the Rushdie affair. Here, we are not in the eighteenth century, but in the fourteenth, which creates an enormous difference. Now, it is not to Rousseau or to Marx that we owe this, for already in the seventeenth century this kind of condemnation was no longer practiced. ND

How is it, in your opinion, that Christianity led to secularism? Does it carry a ferment of perpetual mutation?

RG

It’s not just the principle of “give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” It is the idea that Satan is the prince of this world, and that absolute separation between religion and the state is essential. This separation is clearly affirmed in the Gospel.

ND

We have taken twenty centuries to establish this separation.

RG

We can’t say: “establish.” There is a slow penetration of the Gospel text into history, but at the same time, it turns against Revelation, in a way.

ND

Is it a kind of self-destruction?

RG

Everyone was responsible. The bearers of Revelation have disfigured it by their sins. Those who heard it also disfigured it. However, this Revelation continues to act since we live this separation that the Chinese themselves claim. What is happening in China is nothing else. Malraux said: “Communism is Christianity.” Today’s communism is even more Christian since everywhere it calls for the separation of religion and politics. It rises up against state idolatry. This can only be explained by the vast activity of the Christian text which makes it possible to better recognize the victims.

CHAPTER 4

The King and the Orphan

ND

You don’t like to talk politics, and yet everything you say has consequences for the way in which we can envisage life in the city. Don’t you think that there are choices to be made, and that you make them every day, as a citizen?

RG

I have two answers. I know that in my intellectual work I have an intuition for what it is worth, which I am developing. There are times when I’m sure I’m speaking from it. There are times when I’m less sure, and then there are times when I’m not sure at all! I have an opinion like everyone else, but I don’t trust my opinions when it comes to politics. I don’t like to talk about subjects that are not dictated to me directly by the intuition that guides my work. I would not want opinions beyond my intuition to reflect on it, harm it, or damage it. Everyone already knows what I am talking about. But many, many people prefer not to know that they know. And we live in a world where everyone wants you to believe they’re on the victim’s side. This world in which there is no more political action except in a form of propaganda, in which everyone seeks to represent themselves as a victim in the face of the persecutors. 57

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One can therefore seek to transform one’s cause from persecutor to persecuted. And nothing is more difficult than knowing who the real victims are. When we act in the world, we expose ourselves to not seeing certain counterparts as victims. As Dumouchel would say, all you have to do is turn your attention to something to deny it to something else. Attention is already sacrificial. ND

You spoke of this with regard to astronomy, which was the first science, because it allowed us to clearly discern the field of investigation.

RG

Culture is differentiating. The basis of science is knowing how to distinguish things from each other.

ND

You spoke of a modern lack of differentiation, which too often consists in giving the same value to all opinions, to all behaviors, to all choices. However, there are objective victims, everyone knows it, even if we prefer, as you say, not to know it.

RG

We have taken the precaution of saying that there are real victims, and we must not, as Nietzsche had done, in the name of resentment and manipulation, deny the phenomenon of victimhood. But in reality, things are always very complicated. It is not easy to talk about it categorically.

ND

To come back to anthropology, the victim par excellence is often the orphan. He is, so to speak, the antithesis of the king, or the other face of the king. This is what you explain in Job: The Victim of His People, but it is also a figure of the modern man who wants to be king, and who finds himself an orphan.

RG

The orphan is the sacrificial victim for very obvious reasons. He has no parents to protect him, and, by sacrificing him, one does not expose oneself to revenge. He is therefore marginalized from the start. But, curiously, this marginalization is found at what appears to be the other extreme: the most privileged position, that of the king. We can say that the position of the potential victim and that of the chosen one come together. This is particularly clear in the book of

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Job, but it is also the case in all the great sacred texts. In our time, it no longer functions on the anthropological level, but it has spread in such a way that it has become the condition of modern man. Every modern man, in a certain way, is an emissary victim, and at the same time royal, consequently threatened with what is sometimes called the manic depressive condition, the first being that of the king, the second being that of the emissary victim. The mimetic vision leads not only to eliminating the frontiers between the pathological and the normal but also to showing that the pathological contains a truth that the so-called normal does not want to see. This seems to me to be of primary importance for understanding the evolution toward modern culture. For example, in literature, instead of Goethe and Schiller, today the emphasis is on Hölderlin. Instead of Hugo, Vigny, Lamartine, we are interested in Nerval. This phenomenon is found at all levels of culture. A reinterpretation of the past is taking place in the light of modern psychology. It can be said that, in the modern personality, the so-called liberated man is confronted not only with the right but also with the duty to be the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the god of this world. This inevitably leads him to loneliness and the feeling of being an orphan. ND

This corresponds to Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man,” which you analyzed so well in Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, and who said: “I am alone, and they are all together!”1

RG

The underground man is completely orphaned. And today we can say that man is becoming more and more sociologically an orphan. One of the main tragedies of our society is the loneliness of the elderly. The marriage no longer lasts, many children lose interest in their parents, so we understand that there is a nostalgia for the extended family. This principle of the extended family exists in Africa, and it can be very bad for economic efficiency, but once an individual works, he often provides for the subsistence of a large number of people who are more or less close relatives. There is a family solidarity, which is an extension of the family as we conceive it. What is regrettable is that we refuse to recognize that certain

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cultural traditions can be contrary to economic efficiency, but offer very valid compensations, as is the case in Africa. We cannot at the same time want to be competitive vis-à-vis the Japanese, and enjoy the family protection that exists in Africa. It must be honestly recognized that economic efficiency, as the Protestant ethic conceived it, has trade-offs which lead to human loneliness. ND

Tocqueville had already noticed it, and you underline it in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. I read for example: “Why are men not happy in the modern world?”2 Because they are obstacles for each other. Did Tocqueville really use this expression?

RG

He doesn’t exactly use this vocabulary, but I tried to show that, in the second part of his Democracy in America, he had actually sensed that. I make a connection between Stendhal and Tocqueville, because this connection is essential. Many of Tocqueville’s intuitions are close to those of Stendhal, even if Stendhal had a feeling of repulsion toward Tocqueville, because he frequented the aristocratic circles of the July Monarchy. What Tocqueville sees is a decentered universe in which men spend their time observing each other. In reality, the monarchy no longer exists, and it is the world of the media that begins.

ND

I quote here Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: “The monarchy no longer exists, the novelist insists at length on this truth in the last part of Lucien Leuwen. Castle pomp does not turn the head of a positiveminded banker. The real power is elsewhere. And this false king Louis-Philippe plays on the stock exchange, thus making himself a supreme forfeiture, the rival of his own subjects.”3

RG

This is what Tocqueville also recognizes. It creates a new type of character, a new type of relationship to the community, a new type of company, a new type of loneliness. This also has unfavorable consequences for certain forms of intellectual life.

ND

This is where imitation comes in again: the more people resemble each other, the more they try to distinguish themselves from their neighbors. This is what interests you.

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RG

They seek to distinguish themselves through consumption, through fashion. They multiply luxury products as a means of surpassing rivals. On the one hand, we claim equality, and on the other hand, we consider it unbearable. Those who find the differences the most scandalous are often those who secretly seek them the most. This is very Proustian. Proust saw very clearly that the true mark of snobbery in Legrandin is that he is against snobs. This mimetic circularity is recognized by most of the great psychologists, like Nietzsche, but they are often victims of it themselves.

ND

When you say: “The being who prevents us from satisfying a desire that he himself has aroused is really an object of hatred,” are you obviously thinking of the war between the snobs? Does this amount to the “double bind,” to the trap from which one cannot escape?

RG

Absolutely. This expression was coined by Bateson and the Palo Alto School. There is also the Palo Alto Mental Institute where Paul Watzlawick works, the author of Pragmatics of Human Communication, translated into French under the title Logique de la communication. An American pointed out to me, parenthetically, that translating “pragmatics” by “logic” was very characteristic of the French spirit. Watzlawick is a collaborator of Bateson who is primarily interested in psychotherapy. He tries to help patients who are victims of these double binds that are obviously contradictory. For me, the “double bind” is original sin. We want to show off our desire, if only to reinforce it, and we always say: “imitate me/don’t imitate me.” We show what we have to be able to prevent others from acquiring. The desire for the life of others is a form of mimetic desire par excellence. Ostentatious possession has always existed, and this is where, in my opinion, Freudianism is wrong, because it does not see that it is a question of a logic of behavior so simple that it is not necessary to explain it by unconscious phenomena. It’s a completely innocent attitude, which consists in sharing one’s desire with a friend, but this innocence is tempting and it ends precisely in explaining original sin, which is wonderful! For me, the notion of original sin is not at all a perverse notion that only serves to make

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us feel guilty. It’s just the fact that we forcefully step on each other’s toes, and I can say that’s the sin. ND

We are therefore condemned to it definitively. But today there is nothing obscure or hidden about this situation. There are entire segments of the population, even entire foreign populations, in front of whom we exhibit our wealth, knowing very well that it is not for them. Can we not manage to recognize the dramatic consequences of this mechanism, which is really very simple and which has no real religious significance?

RG

Maybe. But in any case, it shows how false and artificial Freud’s vision is, especially when it comes to the family. Insofar as the parents are real parents, the family environment is precisely where one can boast of one’s successes without danger. Of course, one must be wary of the jealousy of brothers and sisters, but father and mother rejoice in the successes of their children. Of course, today internal mediation is creeping in everywhere. Now, internal mediation is absolute solitude.

ND

It’s about this that Lucien Scubla brings up jealousy, no longer of the son for the father, but of the father for the son, that can be very true, especially of the mother for the daughter.

RG

The end of taboos, and in particular family taboos, means the end of guarantees. The arbitrary character of parents’ love for their children is precisely the absolute guarantee. Love does not depend on merits. It is comparable to God’s love for humans. It is completely unconditional. If on one side it seems rigid and oppressive, the other side is positive. What is essential is to see all the possibilities and not lock yourself into a single logic. There is nothing that cannot be transformed into its opposite, or that is not already its opposite from the point of view of the person looking from the outside. By suppressing all the rules, that is to say all the protections, the individual finds himself like a snail without a shell, left to himself, and naked.

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ND

Nietzsche wrote in The Twilight of the Idols “Even the bravest of us seldom has the courage for what he really knows. Once and for all, there are things I refuse to know, wisdom also draws limits to knowledge.”

RG

For Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and I agree with him, there would be a subtext, which, according to philosophers, always somewhat works against its authors. There would be a kind of mimetic unconscious under the Freudian text. In the last texts of Freud, there are major anthropological intuitions, which are incomplete and which contradict certain foundations of psychoanalysis. I’m talking about Totem and Taboo and of Moses and Monotheism. What makes Freud’s founding murder something very imperfect is the assertion that it is unique. Before human history, a single father would have been killed, and all religions remember that father. But if you study Moses and Monotheism, he makes you understand that in reality Moses also was killed. Freud thus resembles Saint Augustine who declares that Romulus and Remus repeat the situation of Abel and Cain.

ND

Does the Old Testament allow us to affirm that Moses was sacrificed?

RG

No. But there are traditions within biblical studies that claim that Moses, like the founding father, was killed. This is obviously very important, because in all traditions there is some ambiguity. Thus Livy reports Remus’s death as having been natural, and then adds that certain sorrowing spirits claim that he was killed. It therefore appears that, around the great founders of religions, there are always evocations of collective murder. This is obviously one of the reasons why I formulated my thesis. By postulating the murder of Moses, without knowing that it was the same for many others, Freud totally upsets the thesis of Totem and Taboo on the assassination of the sole founding father. Critics therefore have the right to draw a parallel between Abel and Cain, Romulus and Remus, Moses, Zarathustra, and the others.

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ND

This is true intertextuality.

RG

This is true intertextuality, and I also have the right to add that I read the same kind of hypothesis in Mircea Eliade, and identical rumors in Euripides. If you take all these texts at the same time, ethnologists will tell you that we cannot take this type of hypothesis seriously. It is obvious that one cannot rely seriously on any of the traditions taken individually, but when there is an accumulation of rumors, when one discovers fifty, one hundred, two hundred of them, does it not end up by making sense? We are told that each society is unique, but how can we stop there when we find identical phenomena everywhere? I am accused of practicing ethnocentrism, but under these conditions no progress is possible!

ND

Yet, here is the real structuralism. I always thought it should be intertextual and intercultural.

RG

Of course! It is structuralism without borders.

ND

You often refer to Greek tragedy.

RG

At the time when I was writing Job, I had begun a study of the trilogy of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Someone had reproached me for not giving him the place he deserved in Things Hidden. It was very fair. Aeschylus represents the tragedies of revenge; it is a cycle of revenge. For example, the Erinyes declare that hatred is the greatest cement of societies, that there is no stronger bond within cities than hating together. It’s extraordinary. On the other hand, we also find in the mouth of Antigone this marvelous affirmation: “I was not born to share hatred, but love.”

ND

In this regard, can you explain the transformation of the Erinyes into Eumenides?

RG

It is obviously fundamental. It must first be understood that the Valkyries are exactly the same characters as the Erinyes. They kill and then transport the dead to Valhalla. Why do they turn into Eumenides? In Aeschylus, this transformation has a very particular

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meaning, since it is the renunciation of collective murder. In reality, Aeschylus speaks of the transition from one type of society to another. It is the time of the war with the Persians that puts an end to the internal wars and that will focus violence toward the external enemy. Aeschylus fully understands this. It gives the transformation of the Erinyes into Eumenides a very particular form, because it is the feminization of the group of lynchers in collective violence, which is a foundational ritual. So as soon as the victim is killed, they turn into Eumenides, like the bad scapegoat turns into a favorable deity. In other words, the Eumenides embody the order of the city instead of embodying the disorder of the sacrificial crisis. The victimary thesis explains why this is so. What struck me in Aeschylus was the tragic symmetry and the mechanism of the scapegoat, for example in Agamemnon. The murder of Agamemnon is not enough to reconcile the city, since the violence returns. In this case, the founding murder fails completely. This is the tragedy. They no longer succeed in making the founding murder an effective means of reconciliation. Then, they refuse the founding murder and decide to save Orestes. They give up revenge for the death of Agamemnon. But it is interesting that it is the goddess who makes the difference, because there are the same number of voices on each side. The fact that she tipped the scales in favor of Orestes shows that she is the victim, in a way. This shows that it is always the religious symbolism that works. All these texts are anti-sacrificial, and at the same time, it is clear that war is a form of sacrifice. But they are going to look for the victims outside, and that marks an important development. ND

Don’t you think that Giraudoux, in all his plays, but especially in Tiger at the Gates (La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu), took up all these themes with great force and, so to speak, demonstrated the mimetic phenomenon, including even the effect of chance?

RG

Certainly, but above all, I think he was very influenced by Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

ND

This is a play you often refer to.

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Yes, because this play represents the mimetic dynamics at all levels. Helen of Troy is obviously the object of mimetic desire par excellence. The Trojans want to keep her because the Greeks claim her, and vice versa. In the play, the dialogues relate to the purely mimetic value of human character, then inside the two groups there are also mimetic debates. There are mimetic struggles among the Greeks because Achilles does not want to make war, and among the Trojans between those who want to continue the war and those who want to stop it. On the other hand, the loves of Troilus and Cressida are encouraged by Pandarus, who announces to Cressida that Helen of Troy, that is to say the star par excellence, is in love with Troilus. In other words, he advertises Helen. Then there’s a whole game between Troilus and Cressida. She decides not to give herself to Troilus to make sure he won’t break away from her. She says so at the start, then she gives herself to him despite everything, and the next day he is already tired of her and is preparing to join his brothers on the battlefield. At this point, we see that Cressida will be exchanged for a Trojan warrior and that she is going to go to the Greeks. Troilus is very happy with this decision, because he will be able to cross the enemy lines to go see her and keep her as his mistress, while she will not have the freedom to come and disturb him. He therefore advises her to obey. She laments and complains of being handed over, alone and defenseless, to those she calls “the merry Greeks.” It was a proverbial expression in Elizabethan times which meant “the jolly fellows,” the men who love women. And suddenly, Troilus sees them as rivals, he worries, he wonders if Cressida will be faithful to him. And she notices that the love, which had grown cold after having been satisfied, is suddenly reborn under the influence of jealousy. This is a phenomenon that no one seems to have noticed. In my opinion, Troilus and Cressida should be called “school for whores.” Cressida gave herself to Troilus out of real desire. She is much more sincere than he is. He abandons her as soon as he possesses her and returns only because of rivals. Passing through the Greeks, she will give herself to Diomedes, which will allow her to hold Troilus at her mercy. He is taught to play the mimetic game. What we don’t see is that

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Troilus is another Pandarus. Anglo-Saxon criticism, as conventional as possible, and abominably sexist, wanted to make Troilus the good hero as opposed to the bad Cressida, because Troilus is never carnally unfaithful, whereas Cressida is. But in reality, Troilus is the first to be unfaithful, and Cressida is like him. It is therefore, in my opinion, one of those magnificent Shakespearean situations where the author respects for the simple-minded the cliché of the faithful Troilus and the infidel Cressida, but at the same time, he offers another reading, which shows that true fidelity is on Cressida’s side, since it was Troilus who carried her into the arms of another. Feminists should have discovered this game Shakespeare plays. The most extraordinary thing is that the unity of the play is made around a political plot. Achilles is extremely narcissistic, and he doesn’t want to fight because he has more prestige than Agamemnon. He mocks the general staff, and Ulysses therefore decides to put him back in his place. Now, it turns out that Hector has issued a challenge to single combat against the best of the Greeks. He decides to choose Ajax instead of choosing Achilles, which will make Achilles jealous. One of two things, either Ajax will win against Hector, which will be perfect, or else Achilles will always be there, ready to intervene. The main thing was to hurt his self-esteem by giving him a rival. This plan fails. Hector and Ajax discover family ties after a few insignificant battles, and they reconcile. So they have to start over. Ulysses then decides to play the false indifference: all the Greeks will parade in front of Achilles’s tent pretending not to notice him, whereas previously all showed him the greatest reverence. Achilles is humiliated, and his narcissism deflates. What you have to understand is that the two political tactics are those of Cressida, but reversed. The unity of the play is in these four figures: false indifference, then rival, then rival first, then false indifference. Shakespeare says on this occasion that politics and love are of the same nature. It’s always a mimetic game, and the victory is with the one who unmasks the narcissism of the other. As far as I know, this interpretation has never been made. Only the mimetic phenomenon can account for the structure of the play.

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ND In The Iliad, aren’t Hector and Achilles doubles? RG

The Iliad is, of course, full of mimetic elements, as are tragedies, and we obviously witness the death of Hector following his singular combat with Achilles. But what Shakespeare sees is that behind the epic there are collective murders, and he makes Hector’s death a collective murder. Achilles orders the Myrmidons, who are male Erinyes, to kill the unarmed Hector. It is a collective assassination. Why does Shakespeare allow himself to change The Iliad to make Hector’s death something truly despicable? One has the impression that he wanted to show a dishonorable murder in a parody play where all acts are dishonorable.

ND

But the murder of Hector, whatever the circumstances, is not a founding murder?

RG

No, no more than the murder of Agamemnon. Most founding murders are not successful. Likewise, in Antigone, Creon’s decision not to bury Polynices is a failed founding murder. The murder of Antigone is also the opposite of a success. Creon tries to end the fight, and he fails. In my opinion, the tragedy is the unresolved sacrificial crisis, or the founding murder that fails, which is the same thing. If the founding murder is successful, the story tells it differently since the victim, after having been brutally murdered, is transformed into a divinity.

ND

You wrote in The Scapegoat: “The crowd always tends toward persecution, because the natural causes of what troubles it, of what transforms it into a ‘turba,’ cannot interest it. The crowd, by definition, seeks action, but it cannot act on natural causes. It is therefore looking for an accessible cause that satisfies its appetite for violence. The members of a mob are always potential persecutors because they dream of purging the community of the impure elements that corrupt it, of the traitors who subvert it. There is only military or partisan mobilization, in other words, against an enemy already designated, who will soon be so if he is not yet, by the crowd itself. However, the scapegoat is not always chosen completely at random.”4

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RG

The one who is most exposed is the one who is outside of society, while being totally part of it. At both ends are the proletarian and the king. It is always the highest placed in society, or the poorest. In general, the person who finds himself isolated from the majority group is the preferential victim, but the fact of being the preferential victim is not fundamental. What is fundamental is “anyone.” It may very well happen that, even in the presence of a lame person, it is not the lame person who will be chosen. We do not really choose the scapegoat. It is imitation that chooses him. The truth of the sacred is to say: “We have been the plaything of something.” It is much stronger than trying to specify or codify imitation. If you specify it, you are already differentiating it, so you are unable to show the genesis of the difference. In fact, the mechanism almost never works absolutely, but we have to think of it as such in order to be able to think of all the possible cases. What I want to underline is that the victim’s preferential sign is the differential outside the system, it is not simply the difference. All culture is nothing but differences. What people cannot tolerate is difference outside the differential system. In other words, it is a difference that is not part of their system of differences. For example, an individual with two horns on his forehead would be subject to a serious form of discrimination, because that is a category that does not exist. The monster is the nonsystem creature. This is what cannot be classified and that we have to point out. In the very word monster, we see the victim mechanism being elaborated. The monster becomes a category unto itself: it is the passage from the undifferentiated to the difference. The emissary victim is always some sort of elusive monster who becomes a god. Why are gods monsters? Because they are always victims.

ND

The word monster itself is from the same family as the verb to show, “demonstrare” in Latin.

RG

Yes. It’s the one we point the finger at. Often the gods are monstrous animals. At the start, it is outside of all meaning, then it is the one that “signifies.” It becomes the absolute signifier. This is what is extraordinary, the whole mechanism manifests itself here.

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ND

Your approach being entirely multidisciplinary, it is clear that your point of view can only be global. How can you prove its worth on all counts at once?

RG

I must admit that my project goes far beyond the field in which I was trained, namely literary criticism. I realize that, for many people, this defect is prohibitive. It is natural to seek to place mimetic phenomena in a very clearly delimited field of theoretical references. As far as I know, each of my reviewers believed they had found the best field of references. I myself sometimes fall into this trap. First there was the neo-Marxist and Lukácsian temptation represented by Lucien Goldmann. For him, the mimetic desire was the monopoly of a specific literary genre, the novel, which corresponded to a certain social milieu of a very precise period. Then came the psychoanalytical temptation, which presented itself in the orthodox Freudian form, or in its Lacanian version. For the orthodox Freudian, it is possible to attribute mimetic phenomena both to the Oedipus complex and to narcissism. I was never told how.

ND

But don’t you consider “the capture by the imagination” of which Lacan speaks and which would be provoked by “the mirror stage” as in reality very close to the mimesis of appropriation?

RG

Lacan makes a distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. The symbolic would be the province of language and would be outside the imaginary. The imaginary, on the other hand, would always be the struggle of doubles, which is constantly devalued. Doubles would not really be part of the essence of psychic life. I do not accept this distinction at all, because in the struggles of doubles, which naturally have imaginary aspects, the symbolic is at stake. It is the doubles who are the victim.

ND

Can you now clarify your position vis-à-vis Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe?

RG

Lacoue-Labarthe represents what I would call the post-structuralist temptation expressed in the journal Typographie. I noticed first of

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all that this author did not correctly appreciate what separates me from Plato. In my opinion, the principal weakness of Plato is that he never mentioned the domain of application in which imitation is an inevitable cause of conflict, namely appropriation. No one has ever commented on this shortcoming, and everyone imitates the Platonic concept of imitation. This is very serious, because we have never understood that imitation can be a terrible threat to harmony and even for the existence of societies. It is all the more astonishing that Plato never spoke of it and that mimetic phenomena inspired him with as much dread as the primitives. Now, mimetic rivalry finds its origin in an object that is disputed and not in the Hegelian “desire for recognition,” which has always seemed to me quite secondary. At this first stage, the word “desire” is not appropriate. It is simply a matter of realizing that, when two hands reach for the same object, conflict is inevitable. To be convinced of this, it suffices to observe that mimetic rivalry is not specific to humanity. It exists in animals, and even the disappearance of the object of the conflict (for example, the escape of the female) does not stop the fight. But sooner or later the fight stops, and the loser makes an act of submission to the winner. From this moment, the conquered animal will take the conqueror for leader and for model in all things, except appropriation. Unlike animals, humans fight to the death. To explain this by a stronger instinct of violence, while the instinct of preservation of the species prevents animals from exterminating themselves, seems to me absurd. It seems to me more logical to postulate as a hypothesis that, the human brain being more developed, it is also more apt for imitation, therefore for mimicry, which has fatal consequences. In other words, violence and murder are only the consequence of the propagating mimetic process, a process which must have provoked, at the time of hominization, conflicts such that the community was destroyed. The appearance of increasingly complex societies on the symbolic level probably corresponds to a slow reconstitution of communities after the violent disappearance of those that preceded them. If we analyze the taboos and rites of primitive religions, we

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find that anything that can provoke mimetic conflict is strictly forbidden. The rites are there to remind us of the fatal spiral that the taboos aim to avoid. This is why we have always had great difficulty, until now, in explaining why the rites correspond, most often, to acts prohibited in everyday life. We understand that the community that has been saved by a scapegoat repeats in the form of a rite the process that saved it. But to be effective, reconciliation and appeasement must not be perceived as mimetic phenomena. The only effective scapegoats are those we do not recognize as such. To come back to humanization, if there is mimetic conflict even before the appearance of man, how can we say that mimesis does not precede any form of representation? If the mimetic conflict takes place “before” language, it also occurs “after,” in the sense that it can destroy any cultural system. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and poststructuralism see mimesis as a factor of oscillation, but that is not enough. They never manage to see the other side of mimesis, that is to say the beneficial element, as perceived by religions. They fail to see that the mimetic process can also play a crucial role in the birth and stabilization of cultural differences. If one examines religious structures closely, one could imagine that the mimetic escalation must constantly lead human communities to the point of no return. However, it just so happens that the opposite is happening, and that is the signal for renewal. ND

What you are explaining is the pacifying and founding value of human sacrifice. This is a difficult notion to accept.

RG

My research on mimetic phenomena in literature and other texts made me discover the victim phenomenon. I realize now that the anthropology based on this mechanism is the first to deny the metaphysical postulate of the specificity of man, which we still find in Marx and in Freud, without however falling into the error of the ethnologists who purely and simply assimilate man to animal. Mimetic phenomena show the commonalities that exist between man and animal and, at the same time, allow them to be concretely distinguished from each other, so that analogies and differences can

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be explained perfectly. I do not consider my discoveries as entirely personal. It seems to me that they had been in the air for quite some time, and, if I had not pursued them, someone else would have. Be that as it may, I consider this new interpretation to be one of the consequences of the complete disintegration of the sacrificial protections that our era has the misfortune, as well as the privilege, of witnessing. ND

In his articles on Symbolic Thought, which can be found in the volume Structural Anthropology (Anthropologie Structurale), Claude Lévi-Strauss considers that, from the biological point of view, the origin of symbolic thought is a real problem, but that it can never be explained in the absence of historical data.

RG

As far as I’m concerned, I’m not trying to invent any historical explanation. I am simply saying that the forms of religious expression that ethnology rejects as having no meaning, could be the vestiges of a mimetic crisis followed by a restructuring thanks to an emissary victim. If you examine this hypothesis with regard to myths and ritual manifestations throughout the world, you will realize that the innumerable possible combinations that one can expect from it ultimately correspond to one other. My thesis is only based on a hypothesis, but it becomes unavoidable when we can offer an increasingly large number of examples where it works. It is not a question of a historical account, which would be transmitted during the centuries of evolution, but rather to prove the effectiveness of the victim phenomenon. How could I not draw the necessary conclusion from this, since its effects are still verified today insofar as psychoanalysts still do not realize that the accusations of parricide and incest brought against Oedipus are typical, universal cases of what the scapegoats have always been accused of ?

ND

How do you explain that anthropology has lost interest in such a constant and robust phenomenon?

RG

It is certain that most anthropologists, starting with Frazer, but also Evans-Pritchard, Dumézil, and Lévi-Strauss, turn their backs on it. I believe it’s because the nihilistic attitude that is in vogue today

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is based on a purely philosophical notion of truth. All recognized methodologies, such as structuralism, postulate from the outset the notion of truth. The human sciences continue to claim a direct and immediate mastery of an evidence, which is the epistemological form of what Derrida calls “the metaphysics of presence.” This Malthusian ideal leads to the conclusion that we have reached the end of knowledge today. All that remains of our intellectual activity is to solemnly bury “Western philosophy.” For my part, I take the opposite side. When the failure of all dogmatic methods is recognized, we can enter a new and fruitful stage in the study of humankind. In other words, we are entering the era of hypotheses. From now on, knowledge can no longer be the result of empirical observations or phenomenological intuitions; there will only be hypotheses, and the theory of the emissary victim is an example of this. For dogmatists, the discrepancy between the facts and the victim hypothesis is enough to discredit it. It is accused of implausibility. But all the scientific hypotheses that produced results were implausible, to the point that the researcher himself could not trace every step of his discovery. Only dogmatic methods can describe to you exactly the order to follow. This is why Michel Serres is right to say that dogmatic methods will never discover anything new. Claude Lévi-Strauss qualifies scientific thought as “the thought of engineers.” He should add that engineers work on hypotheses inspired by pure science. So, far from announcing the end of the knowledge that dogmatists take for granted, the space that separates the hypothesis from verifiable facts is precisely the terrain on which verifications can take place. Of course, the victim mechanism is very different from religious practices that we know, whether it is a question of a certain sacrificial rite or of a sacred monarchy, but these differences precisely make it possible to verify cases as varied as possible. If we can follow the process in one case, then in another, then in a third, a fourth, a fifth, etc., the hypothesis will become irrefutable. In Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, I showed that it was at the heart of primitive religion. But no one studies the facts that I have endeavored to bring to light. People pass from my scientific work to what they consider to be my ideological and religious biases, and they deduce

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that the latter dictated the former. I realize that the misunderstanding is inevitable and that it may continue for some time yet, but not very long, as further research continues. As the sacrificial resources of our society are depleted, and the myths upon which our societies are based continue to disintegrate, the overall approach I am trying to articulate will emerge in all its coherence. If I am right about the victimary process, if it not only explains mythology and rites but also the process of hominization, the consequences will upset our interpretation not only of ancient rites but also of modern society. I may not have the opportunity to complete my research myself, but there are already signs that the scientific study of humankind is about to see the light of day. It sounds absurd, given the intellectual climate in which we live, but that climate has changed in the past, and it will change in the future. This change will also influence our judgment of the great men of science, Freud in particular. We will attach less importance to the Freud of linguistics and psychoanalysis, and we will be especially interested in the later Freud, a magnificent author and totally unknown, the author of Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism. I am convinced that the victim hypothesis represents a higher stage in the process undertaken by Freud in his work on the founding murder. He himself considered this discovery the most important of all. We will realize that this is always what happens when a discipline still in its infancy crosses the threshold that places it in the domain of hypothesis. No philosophical objection can minimize the importance of this threshold to be crossed, and it would be illogical to renounce the notion of “science” on the pretext that, in the case which concerns us, the consequences will be absolutely unforeseeable and above all incompatible with the narrowest scientific ideology concerning man as the object of science. But there are past examples of equally unexpected reversals. ND

As an anthropologist, you have analyzed the evolutions and profound mutations at the level of ancient civilizations. But today?

RG

In scientific theories, what causes us to move from one scientific paradigm to another is that, in a given system, we realize that certain

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things do not work. A scientific hypothesis remains solid as long as we succeed in annexing what does not work into what works. It is at the moment when we can no longer do this that the fertile research begins. So we’re going to establish a new theory to integrate what didn’t work. For example, in the discovery of radium, radium exhibited properties that traditional physics could not explain. This is how modern atomic physics was born. A theory is threatened when certain phenomena cannot be integrated. There are those who strive to make them work within the system, and sometimes they succeed. But the great intellectual adventure consists in saying that the theory is false. Another solution will have to be found that will take new phenomena into account. For example, Mircea Eliade talks about the difference between farmers and hunters. Farmers think that to grow sweet potatoes you have to kill people, while hunters on the contrary ask forgiveness from the animals they kill. There is therefore an extraordinary progress between these two attitudes. What is marvelous is that in both cases, among farmers as among hunters, the economic life depends on something that is recognized as murder. In the case of human sacrifices, it is real murder, but since the hunters ask forgiveness from the victims, it is because they consider the hunt itself to be murder. So there is something in common between the two. They can only be opposed on the basis of what they have in common. This is where anthropology should ask how it is that farmers and hunters are both alike and different. There is a moral opposition, since faced with two forms of murder, one human and the other animal, it is from the animal that we ask forgiveness. There are human sacrifices where the victim is asked for forgiveness. We ask his forgiveness because we want him both alive and dead. This is where the transition from victim to king takes place. ND

Do you feel any affinity with Mircea Eliade?

RG

There are similarities, and there are many differences. But he is a serious person that I appreciate. He has the qualities of a nineteenthcentury intellectual.

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ND

A kind of encyclopedic intellectual?

RG

Yes. He is an immense worker, admirable in a way. Obviously, there are interpretations in his work that I am unable to discuss. He truly has universal knowledge. There is no one today to have this type of culture.

ND

He was also a very tolerant person. He could accommodate almost any interpretation of culture.

RG

That’s what I don’t like about him. It is too syncretic. He accepts all forms of the sacred. In a certain sense, I accept them too, but differently. However, his thought was very useful for me to reflect on the scapegoat. We find in him stories of extraordinary myths; for example, this hero who breaks everything around him because he was stung by a wasp. Reading this story, I immediately thought that it was a question of finding an excuse for the destructive role of the victim. Because ultimately this hero is himself a victim. Stung by a wasp, he becomes furious.

ND

Is that an excuse to destroy him?

RG

Certainly. This must be a late-appearing theme in anthropological works, but to compare them one would need a whole series of such accounts. This is the kind of thinking that interests me. It is elements like this that should make it possible to systematize a thought.

ND

You don’t consider yourself to be tolerant?

RG

I do not consider myself to be tolerant insofar as we live in a world where the notion of tolerance has become stronger than the notion of truth. It is fashionable to say that there is no truth, that there are no differences, or rather that there are differences everywhere but they are equal. I don’t believe that at all. The current differentialism seems to me to be without value. Even Foucault, who launched this idea, came back to talk about difference. This is part of today’s nihilism. In the last years of his life, Foucault was tired of hearing this. Personally, I believe that the Hebrew and Gospel texts have a power

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of truth that outweighs all others. It is fundamental for me, because it is this light that allows us to interpret other religions. ND

You wrote about Freud, in Violence and the Sacred, that Freud’s thought is too important to be left to psychoanalysis.

RG

In my opinion, the best attitude toward Freudianism is to recognize its contribution in a certain number of fields, which are limited. Freudianism is primarily concerned with libidinal questions and the first stages of life. I think that Freud exaggerates their importance, or rather that he always tries to devalue the main character in the psychic theater, namely the mimetic rival. There is therefore in Freudianism something essentially mystifying in the sense that it allows you to forget your rival. It places you in rivalry with your father, who may have been dead for ten years, which makes it possible to hide the professional rival or the romantic one. Of course, it must be recognized that the Oedipus complex, or certain aspects of the Oedipus complex, can be reinterpreted in mimetic terms. There is a lot of work to be done in that reinterpretation, which is not done. Because certain aspects of Freud’s theory, in particular on the role of the mother, are completely contrary to mimetic behavior. I’m very interested in Shakespeare because psychoanalysis has done a lot of damage to literary studies, and specifically to tragedy. Far from being dominated by the father, the tragedy is linked to the disappearance of the father, to the betrayal of the father, to the fact that the father is no longer a father but a kind of brother. In Shakespeare, we see lovers who attribute to their father, in a totally satirical way, the responsibility for all sorts of things. We see that Shakespeare lived in a patriarchal system, but a disintegrating patriarchal system. Everything psychoanalysis has said about Shakespeare is therefore wrong, in my opinion. What enlightened me the most about the error of Freudian pansexualism, and about that of Lévi-Strauss, is the fact that there are societies where what is called totemism is practiced. Within a group, we never marry the women of our same group. This is called exogamy, and it also concerns married women; since they belong to the group by marriage, they are subject to the same prohibition. Now if you look at how certain food taboos

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operate in Australian societies, you will find that the same rule exists. Some groups specialize in gathering or hunting certain foods, and if they provide them, they are not allowed to eat them. They consume the food that other groups provide them, just as everything that we handle, everything that is too close to us is taboo. How to explain that societies have come to invent such extravagant rules? Animals, we know, never do that. On the contrary, they always get as close to each other as possible. That the members of a group systematically do not eat the game they kill, turn away from the women around them, do not bury their dead themselves, in short, always exchange what is closest to them, this becomes very easy to understand. This is overwhelming proof, it seems to me, of the mimetic process. Because the dead, the women, the food, then appear in what they have in common, namely that they are sources of conflict. The culture therefore seeks to avoid the causes of conflict, that is what taboos mean. We see here how the mimetic conflict itself can be the engine of this type of culture. If we compare the objects of taboos, we see that it is unthinkable to imagine another explanation. A structuralism that emphasizes exchange for exchange’s sake as gratuitous action without demonstrable reason is nonsense. Freud explains it by sex, but then, why the exchange of burial services? As for food, when it is scarce, it is quite obvious that men can fight to obtain it. But here, everything fits. Anthropological reasoning consists precisely in asking how these things are possible together. Rules like these did not fall from the sky, for no reason. They must be explained by something fundamentally human. Neither sexuality, nor economics, nor fear of the dead will explain it. Only a certain type of conflict, mimetic conflict, can explain that what counts is not the objects, but always the rivalry they trigger. ND

This reasoning is so clear that ethnologists should recognize its logic!

RG

Intellectual pleasure is being able to develop a line of reasoning that holds up. It is always the problem of emergence: the light illuminates where everything seemed dark and inexplicable. Suddenly,

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a structure appears. It is not a question of knowing if it is true, it is a question of saying: do you have a better explanation for these apparently heterogeneous phenomena? Not only can the mimetic principle explain these taboos, but it can explain hundreds of other mechanisms that otherwise appear entirely gratuitous. Once again, it is not a question of knowing if this pleases such and such, if it goes in the direction of Marxism or against it, because that is not the question! Those who say that thinking is not a spontaneous and happy exercise, but always inspired by ideological or economic considerations, are killing, in a way, intellectual life. What I really like about Jean-Pierre Dupuy is that he seeks to see if this principle is applicable to the economic field, to the scientific field, therefore, to make it appear in such a way as to be able to observe results. It’s the smart way to advance knowledge. ND

Dupuy echoes your concerns when he writes: “The cataclysmic violence of the conflicts of our time hides the nullity of what is at stake.”5

RG

Even the religious elements are only a pretext, because deep down few people really believe in them. The Islamic renaissance is a complex subject, but it has an element of Westernization. The antiWesternism of the Islamic renaissance is essentially Western, insofar as it parallels the valorization, in the West, of Eastern religions and philosophy. In reality, our universe becomes more and more unitary, and instead we are looking for points of support to differentiate ourselves.

ND

Isn’t Islamic culture, in a certain way, trying to defend itself against the mimetic contagion that the West has brought to it, by relying, precisely, on its own religious tradition?

RG

Of course, but when you need to defend yourself against mimetic contagion, the means you use are also mimetic. Islam is a huge religion, with sacred texts of great depth, but the warlike use that is made of them obviously includes mimetic elements.

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On these subjects, one must read V. S. Naipaul, who is an extraordinary writer, originally from Trinidad. He is English-educated, completely Westernized, writes beautiful English, and not only has written novels but also engages with actual facts that show the mimicry of the Third World in relation to the West. Given who he is, he can do it, but he still raises quite a bit of hostility. However, he is dealing with an immense and essential subject for our time. This shows that Proustian snobbery functions today on a totally planetary level. He found a novelistic subject that is truly of our time, while making it work as novelists have always done. There is something implacable in his analysis. Naturally, a Westerner could not say what he says, because one does not wish to further weaken those who are in a position of weakness. It is up to one of their own to analyze the situation, as he has done, both from the inside and from the outside. But this is a subject that needs to be carefully handled, because confronting humans with their own mimicry can plunge them into a certain trauma. They have to discover it little by little, and we have to leave them with their myths. In the end, I must confess that I don’t know what the best attitude is. ND

I find it interesting that Jean-Pierre Dupuy asks himself roughly the same question about the economy. He declares that “the victim mechanism, and not mimesis, cannot know itself without annihilating itself. But mimesis, and the acquisitive and conflictual mimesis that proceeds from it, is an indelible property of the species, and even of higher mammals, probably linked to the characteristics of their brains and their ability to learn. It is not the knowledge that we have of it that can allow us to escape completely from the servitudes that it imposes.”6

RG

The victim mechanism, and this is why it is demonic, as soon as you project the light on it, slips, disappears, and passes elsewhere. It is susceptible to displacement, substitution, transformation. It is therefore not contradictory to say that the light destroys it, and

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that at the same time it is indestructible at the human level. I don’t think, like Socrates, that knowing yourself is enough to be saved. But Socrates was still right insofar as where the light is shed, the mechanism no longer works as before. We currently live in a world where these movements have become fundamental. This is why there are only ever second-degree victims. The persecutor always poses as a victim, the victim passes for the executioner, and so on. Obviously, we must not forget the first degree, the existence of real victims. Nietzsche’s immense mistake is to believe that everything is ressentiment in Christianity. He sees the victimary mechanism, and he takes its side. He says it is good for society that there are victims. It is when he goes so far as to say that, for me, that he is a Nazi. It is wrong to say that Nietzsche has nothing to do with totalitarianism. As soon as one wants to scandalize others, and God knows if I participate in this company, we become sacrificial in a way, because we do violence to the truth too. It is very difficult not to do violence to truth in language. We must always take into account the fact that there is a counterpart to everything that we say. This does not mean that one should avoid all taking of positions. When it comes to choosing, and to choose the lesser evil, one must know that there is no non-sacrificial policy. The policy is, in effect, eminently sacrificial, insofar as it seeks to cause as few casualties as possible. The ideal of democracy, it is obviously that no one die. ND

Sacrifice only works at the symbolic level?

RG

Our world no longer accepts that certain advantages are acquired at the cost of victims, if we know in advance that there must be some. It is the Christian influence that makes us not accept it morally. It does not depend on faith, nor even on the spread of the Gospel, it is the result of an evolution.

ND

Don’t we know full well that technological transformations, and in particular pollution, nuclear fallout, not to mention accidents at work or on the road, will have their victims?

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RG

Of course. We accept it vaguely without anyone being specifically named. At the same time, there is a certain hypocrisy there. The random nature of the risk is eminently sacrificial, insofar as one never knows who will be the victims. If one becomes specific, if one designates the victim or victims, there is a phenomenon of rejection. When there is uncertainty, we accept it without thinking too much about it. When people condemned to death were executed by shooting, there was always among the weapons used a rifle loaded with blanks. This way, no one could know in advance who would shoot blanks. Everyone was like that in some way, both guilty and innocent. There was another rule of capital executions in certain cases, where if the executioner missed his shot, it didn’t start again. The fact that this principle exists in certain societies is very significant.

ND

It makes killing random.

RG

It makes murder less inevitable, perhaps less a “murder” in the minds of those who commit it. The phenomenon should be studied very closely, because if it does not change much in practice, on the symbolic level it is very interesting.

ND In L’Enfer des choses, Jean-Pierre Dupuy takes you to task about your

interpretation of the imitation of Jesus Christ who, for you, “is one with knowledge and reason, and represents the most extreme form of external mediation. Now, it is precisely the passage from the most violent forms of reciprocal mediation to this external mediation that poses a problem and remains inconceivable.”7 And further: “it is when the mimicry is most unleashed that it is the most difficult, and not the easiest, to get out of its grip. It is when they are on the verge of extermination that rivals are least able to set rules of the game that protect them from collective suicide. Regulation is not available amid evidence of immanent catastrophe.”8

RG

Imitation of Jesus Christ is not external mediation. Here, Jesus Christ is a brother. If Paul, following Jesus Christ, says “imitate me,”

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it is because he is not going to make any gesture of appropriation. There is no danger or hindrance, because it is a gift. ND

But if we admit that Jesus is both man and God, how could he not come under external mediation?

RG

The dogma of the Incarnation tells us that Jesus is absolutely man as he is absolutely God. He really is a man first. This is why we no longer have to deal with the old religions, which depend on external mediation. This is the great distinction that should be made between the Eternal Father, who is transcendent, and Christ who, in a certain way, is always there, among us, as our brother. He does not tell us to imitate him as a model, or to see in him a paternal image, in the Freudian sense. This imitation does not arouse violence. It is not at all because it is external. It is because its mode of life and action in the world has nothing to do with appropriation. What Christianity says is that we must imitate each other in accordance with the rules of the Kingdom. Do to others not what they do to you, but what you would like them to do for you.

ND

According to you, the mimetic nature of man does not render him incapable of acting according to the rules of the Kingdom?

RG

Of course, and besides, it happens all the time. We have real friendships, with which we feel safe, and in relation to which there is no rivalry, no appropriation. He who has no friends of this quality is very unhappy.

ND

You have nevertheless shown that the need to share everything between friends can turn into rivalry.

RG

It is true that the perfect friendship is not always easy. Take for example camaraderie in France. In high school camaraderie, everyone forgives each other everything, and Americans faced with this phenomenon immediately think of homosexuality. That’s not it at all. But camaraderie has a scapegoat side, because it works against authority, against teachers. It’s a military-style camaraderie, and anyone who’s been through the military knows how strong it is. It is

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also linked to death with which all are threatened, therefore, you find yourself in a perfect union. What the rule of the Kingdom requires is that this type of fellowship exists without any sacrificial element, that is, it is not based on hostility against anyone. What is needed is for humans to manage to behave in the best way of which they are capable thanks to the rites, but this time without these rites. ND

However, you have demystified love, even in characters who seemed models of disinterestedness, as in Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde.

RG

Why did I write about them? I demystified these characters in literature because they are extremely mimetic, and these authors write because they may have been traumatized by betrayals from very close people. This is certainly what happened to Shakespeare, who suffered from the internal betrayal that friendship can become. But betrayal is not mandatory. Love is learned too, and true love will not be mimetic. The great evil that romanticism has done is to base love on myths of sexuality, charm, beauty, which run counter to true harmony. In successful marriages, a form of love develops that is of the same quality as maternal love. It is the one where the success of one is the success of the other, where the happiness of one is the happiness of the other, in other words, where there is neither appropriation nor rivalry. This love can come against the world and in that sense be sacrificial, but it is not inevitable. There are balanced people who usually manage to live without mimetic rivalry vis-à-vis their children, their friends, their spouse.

ND

Isn’t that exactly the distinction that the classics made between love and passion? Passion being mimetic by definition leads to destruction and death, while true love, as presented by Molière, for example, is always disinterested. You have, moreover, clearly shown that it is the romantics who have deified passion.

RG

This is the distinction between Eros and agape which dates back to antiquity. Anders Nygren points out that the word agape is used in the New Testament to designate Christian love, as opposed to

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Eros. Nygren has been much criticized on this point, in my opinion unfairly. For his interpretation seems to me correct up to a certain point. On the other hand, the romantic myth causes confusion between the two. He tries to believe that the conflict does not exist. ND

Can we go back to the double bind, Bateson’s “double bind,” that is to say the double contradictory imperative that serves as the title of your book in English To Double Business Bound?9

RG

This double imperative is found constantly in Shakespeare. We can come back to As You Like It, a pastoral play in which, in principle, there is no mimetic desire. Yet the female character, Rosalind, falls in love with Orlando because he wins a fight. And she tells her friend Celia not to hate him because of it. The other cries out, and Rosalind asks her: “Do you love him because I love him?” So if Celia fell in love with Orlando to please Rosalind, she would become her enemy, but if she doesn’t fall in love with him, she somehow ceases to be her friend. Because two friends should like the same things. It’s the Shakespearean double bind. In Bateson, it is different, because Bateson does not see it in the mother. The mother imposes contradictory double imperatives on her daughter when, on the one hand, she pushes her away, and, on the other hand, she calls her and demands her love. I interpret it as meaning “imitate me if you love me, but, if you love me, you then become my rival, so don’t imitate me.”

ND

This is the model-obstacle problem.

RG

The interest of the model-obstacle is that the more there is a model, the more there is an obstacle. It’s a vicious circle. What is marvelously well depicted in Shakespeare is the fact that man’s main enemy is not the forbidden, but precisely the double bind. In other words, it is the reverse of Freud. The real obstacles are internal to the group of partners who act on each other. To accuse the father, or any external obstacle, is to accuse the external mediation, which no longer exists. It is fundamental for our time. We live in a time when taboos, prohibitions, or external obstacles are blamed, in short the previous generation, whereas it is always the mimetic double that we have to deal with. It is by eliminating the prohibition that we see

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the mimetic double appear. By refusing to see it, we incriminate the scapegoat more and more. In business or in love, men always have rivalry issues. There is always someone who betrays you. If you go to see your psychoanalyst, he only talks to you about your parents, and for him these problems do not exist. Psychoanalysis cannot answer, in particular, the question of knowing why desire dies when it is satisfied. Freud cannot explain this. He is too traditional, too romantic. For him, desire is a continuum. He cannot account for the instability of desire. Greek comedies already made parents responsible for the misdeeds that children inflicted on each other. Shakespeare, on the other hand, creates a type of unconventional comedy where he places the parents at the start, and the Shakespearean truth is always the truth of desire. Shakespeare is always subversive of our myths. In 1968 we thought we discovered that taboos were bad, but in 1890 we had already incriminated taboos. In 1596, it was already the same thing. Because Shakespeare tells us that the patriarchal system does not exist and that the children are the masters, while blaming their parents. Evidently Shakespeare’s time was more like ours than certain intervening periods. In our time, we blame it on Puritanism. In 1890, there were forms of hypocrisy, forms of discourse, but at the same time beneath all this, the reality was different. Today desire is more and more oppressed as it is liberated, because it literally oppresses itself; it is caught in this slipknot which is, moreover, mentioned in the Bible. The scandal as presented in the Bible is this circularity of desire. ND

Could this be the key to our misfortunes?

RG

Of course. Today, the most urgent thing for humans in terms of mental health is to see the circularity in which they are locked up. But they can only see this circularity from an awareness of their own lie, which is more difficult to do than what psychoanalysis suggests to do. Psychoanalysis constantly sends you back to your parents, to your childhood. It only speaks of the past, never of present events. We minimize the role of our current rival. I am not saying that our mother and our father are not very important, because they have

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contributed to giving our desires a certain form which we tend to repeat, but emphasizing family structures as the foundations of desire is not to be taken seriously. ND

As far as you are concerned, you practice intertextuality, but the whole question is to know what definition is given to it.

RG

Exactly. I do, in fact, practice intertextuality. I even say that it is necessary to put in parallel the myths, the tragic texts, and the modern texts. This intertextuality gives itself a very precise goal. It looks for signs of imitation, signs of victimization, of substitution.

ND

How does substitution work?

RG

Substitution is nothing more than replacing one victim with another. The sacrifice by itself introduces the principle of substitution, since if the god really asks us to repeat a certain act, or if we wish to reproduce this act, we are indeed obliged to look for a substitute victim. From the moment the principle of substitution exists, it is quite obvious that it is likely to be extended. The system is therefore always inclined to drift toward very different meanings, according to the objects to which it is applied, according to the systems which lead to institutions: education, funerals, marriage, rites of initiation, sacrifices, royalty, festivals, priestly institutions.

ND

There are fewer rites today.

RG

Today, we practice these rites less and less. Everything is deritualized, but this has been going on for a long time. In fact, Christianity, even at the time when it imposed the most rites, could not compare with the ritual ceremonies of the primitive systems. In certain primitive religions, the rite is much more than the rite. It is truly the culture: all the techniques are part of the rite, all have a religious meaning.

ND

Since there is no society without rites, ours have therefore been transferred elsewhere?

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RG

We are in a state of advanced deritualization. This does not mean that no ritual element remains. But Christianity destroys myths, since it destroys the traditional sacred.

ND

According to you, Christianity is destroying the traditional sacred?

RG Certainly. ND

Including the sacred which had been instituted by the Church?

RG

Insofar as some of these rites were related to the traditional sacred, you have to take them with a lot of caution. What the Christian world evacuates is the religion of violence and the sacred. The Christian text proclaims this suppression. The more it is understood, the more we move toward the evacuation of violence and the sacred. It takes place in misunderstanding, like the evacuation of Christianity itself. There are several levels. There is always a Christianity that deviates toward certain forms of transcendence that are effectively violence and the sacred.

ND

You spoke somewhere of a book by Max Weber entitled Ancient Judaism. What can we learn from it?

RG

Under the influence of Nietzsche, Max Weber sees that Judaism, like Christianity, always places itself on the side of the victims. He gives a purely social and sociological interpretation of this. He explains that the Jewish state not having much success has come to side with the victims. He devalues this attitude insofar as he thinks this position is only good for those who have failed to position themselves as persecutors. This point of view does not stand up since, by definition, imperialisms always end up failing. Russian imperialism is still there, but certainly not for very long.

ND

There are all the same empires that have lasted a few centuries.

RG

Maybe, but if Max Weber’s reasoning is valid, everyone, sooner or later, should end up on the side of the victims. Now, only the Bible,

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that is to say the Jews, have ever been able to say that. Consequently, to denigrate this attitude from the outset by saying that it is for lack of being a persecutor that one defends the persecuted does not make sense scientifically. Rather, it is resentment in the style of Nietzsche. All failed imperialisms should have invented the same thing, but they did not. So there must be another reason. One cannot consider what the Jewish people have in common with so many others, namely failed imperialism, as the cause of what is unique about them. It wouldn’t make sense. ND

Why is it that today it is the secular state, the state without God, which takes the side of the victim?

RG

This is a rather complex question. In my opinion, these are parodic forms that turn against other victims. I wouldn’t say like Foucault that everything is bad in today’s world, I would rather say: yes, what you say is fundamentally true, but there is something sinister in the way everyone today identifies with the victims.

ND

Because it’s hypocrisy?

RG

We can’t say that. The theme of the right is that anything said in favor of victims is hypocrisy. For the left, to put oneself in the shoes of the victims is to represent true Christianity. There is true and false in both statements. I would like to think about this question by transcending politics. We see that politics is dominated by this dilemma: because humans always have a slightly perverse mind, they manage to use facts in a selfish way. But that’s no reason to deny the facts. That there are hypocrites on the side of the victims for the wrong reasons does not mean that our world defends the victims only out of hypocrisy. No extreme position is possible, thinkable, or acceptable to me.

ND

However, we are always someone’s victim. You also said that it is better to give for the wrong reasons than not to give at all.

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RG

This is absolutely fundamental. I consider Shakespeare to be the first to have understood this. But Nietzsche saw it too. Why is the ancient world not on the side of the victims? It does not know it. It was necessary that someone say it first. Judaism said it first. Christianity said so too. In our world, the problem of victims is fundamental, and it must be understood that no society in the history of humanity has done this. It started in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What’s happening today is that it’s the wicked who are the persecutors of the victims. There are, so to speak, not people who are villains in themselves. We define villains in terms of their victims.

ND

From a certain point of view, the orphan has become the king?

RG

From a certain point of view, yes.

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ND

Your work in the anthropological field is intended to be a logical, scientific process that consequently leads to knowledge?

RG

Absolutely. I believe in the logical, systematic method that leads to knowledge.

ND

According to you, the values conveyed by the Bible are coming back to us through the Third World. At the same time, the West is strongly attracted by Eastern religions. How do you analyze this?

RG

I think it’s a need to escape from the specific Western way of thinking. They are, in fact, modes of romantic escape. We are still in the romantic age, but our romanticism is often degraded. I appreciated Lukács’s books which talked about this. He made some very interesting remarks on the impoverishment of modern culture. This is evident in very stripped-down artistic forms, in a theater like that of Beckett or Ionesco where few words are spoken, where the characters hardly communicate.

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ND

Georges Lukács especially studied the situation of the novel.

RG

I don’t have much to say about his theory of the novel. Lukács’s most interesting work, in my opinion, is The Destruction of Reason. This is where he talks about the impoverishment of modern thought. Everywhere that he is critical of modernism interests me very much.

ND

He analyzes the fact that, in the modern novel, the subject has become an object for itself. It is withdrawal into oneself, the absence of the Other. It evokes a soul in search of itself.

RG

I consider that such literature is a form of religious impoverishment. Literature, in general, and poetry, in particular, are metaphors for the religious. This appears very clearly in certain great modern writers like Nerval or Proust. In the absence of religion, religious metaphors take over. What is called pure literature is the religious, which ceases to be the subject, which becomes metaphorical, which is marginalized, but which is always there. If it ceases to be present, literature disappears.

ND

According to Lukács, this quest of the soul, which sets off in search of its own essence, would have something “demonic” about it.

RG

The word “demonic” is very striking. It shows how great writers use religious vocabulary. It seems to me that, in order to denounce certain forms of modernism, Lukács never ceases to show their idolatrous character. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, you spoke of deviated transcendence, which corresponds to internal mediation.

ND In

RG

I spoke of deviated transcendence and vertical transcendence. In reality, the term “deviated” is not exact, because the primitive transcendence, the original transcendence, is that of the primitive sacred, that of the victim. What I called deviated transcendence at the time is what remains in us of the primitive sacred. It’s theologically deviated, but it’s the only one that humans know. It is both first in the order of the human, since humanity began there, but it is second if

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we consider the biblical as the alpha and the omega. So there is a complex relationship between the two, which I didn’t study at all in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. ND

You no longer reason in terms of metaphysical desire?

RG

Yes. But what I call metaphysical desire is what goes toward the primitive sacred, which tends to deify the Other. At the level of daily life in modern society, it remains linked to low, para-religious forms, which in primitive societies produce veritable divinities. The God of the Bible and the God of Christians, in a way, is separate from all of that. However, we must not necessarily condemn mimetic desire, metaphysical desire, because men are obliged to make mistakes. If it did not exist, there would perhaps be complete apathy.

ND

Doesn’t metaphysical desire manifest itself above all in romanticism?

RG

Romanticism continues and leads to neo-primitivism, to forms of modernism, to anthropological discoveries, to a sort of resacralization of the primitive.

ND

Is it the search for a new transcendence?

RG

I think so. These are crises that will lead us to deepen our relationship to the biblical. There is always a tendency to begin by taking the wrong road.

ND

Can we return to the biblical without going through Christianity? I mean Christianity as it has hitherto existed.

RG

The strength of Protestantism, or of Jansenism, or of the harshest forms of transcendence, is that they mark in an absolute way the separation between the two transcendences of which we have just spoken. On the other hand, the strength of Catholicism is its indulgence, is its way of saying that humans are constantly making mistakes and that error is also a means of knowledge.

ND

Does freedom exist?

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RG

I think freedom exists. We are obliged to think about the freedom of humans. But I think we can also think of divine omnipotence. The impossibility of thinking both at the same time on the logical plane is of no importance. It only shows that human logic is deficient, but we know that today. To be modern, precisely, is to accept this and to understand that there are separate sectors, even in science, which do not communicate.

ND

Can we objectify the mimetic relationship up to a certain point?

RG

Mimetic relationships are extremely difficult to objectify. To really understand them is to understand how closely they relate to each other. The real science in human relations is perhaps to go beyond a certain form of objectivism, without getting lost in subjectivism. It is a question of going beyond this in a reading of the relationships with the Other that tries to decipher the dynamic process such as desire; the runaway of desire; the passage of the individual to double, triple, quadruple, the crowd, then the victim; the lack of differentiation; the return to desire, in short, the whole cycle.

ND

You explained in Things Hidden that modern society places more and more individuals, from their earliest childhood, in the impasse of the mimetic “double bind,” that is to say in a dead-end mechanism.

RG

This is the problem of alienation, which the Marxists pose at the level of society and that the Freudians pose at the level of sexuality. For my part, I redefine it mimetically. The more the “I” is unleashed, the more it aspires to self-sufficiency, the more it is doomed to seek this self-sufficiency in an external model. The model and the obstacle merge, the whole mimetic system is there. I was very struck by the way in which Camus in The Stranger took an interest in Dostoevsky, when he understood that the character of Meursault was basically very proud. Kierkegaard wrote, in The Concept of Anxiety, very profound things on the subject of pride. He spoke of the anguish, which does not manifest itself externally. In other words, it is not necessary to have particular causes of alienation; the

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natural imperialism of the self is enough to provoke it: the greater the desire to crown oneself, the more the crown will appear on the head of another. We can also say that the formula of Leviticus “love your neighbor as yourself ” must be understood in both senses of the word. You will not love your neighbor less than yourself, but you will not love him more than yourself. You need a balance. If one is convinced that others enjoy happiness, success, everything to which one aspires oneself, one believes oneself to be uniquely cursed. This is why original sin is very useful psychologically: if it is really understood, it cuts at the root of those false illusions that are the main source of all kinds of psychic misfortunes, namely, the adoration of the Other, which is both a model and an obstacle. The only models that are not at the same time obstacles are transcendent models, external mediators. ND

One has the impression that this psychological degradation that you analyzed, in Things Hidden ten years ago, took place before our eyes as leading to the absolute alienated nation of the skinheads of Los Angeles, who are also beginning to be emulated elsewhere.

RG

It goes back to what I was saying: our society is driven either to holiness or to total destruction.

ND

The skinheads have chosen total destruction, including themselves, because they mutually exterminate one another, knowing that their days are numbered.

RG

There may be a bit of theater in there.

ND

There is certainly theater, but they still killed hundreds of people. Hostage-taking is also theater.

RG

These forms of escalation of violence are very serious signs of cultural breakdown. It is absolute indifference. There is no longer any cultural order. There must be a permanent state of exasperation, which causes extreme psychological regressions. There is no doubt that we are witnessing a phenomenon of urban degradation that tends to worsen.

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ND

Some forms of social degradation had already been foreseen, even experienced, by writers like Artaud, Genet, Beckett . . .

RG

I think Artaud’s theater is full of lessons about this. In particular, his text on the theater and the plague presents itself as a return to violence and the sacred. The plague expresses the double pathological and mimetic contagion. The metaphor of the plague plays a prodigious role throughout his theater. It portrays mimetic contagion as it appeared in the myth: it merges with pathological contagion. The great modern text that reveals mimetic contagion as pathological is that of Artaud. The theater, in a way, is the plague. The theater of cruelty is the opposite of catharsis. It is the project of spreading the plague rather than expelling it. It is the modern madness that desires sacrificial crisis, destruction, and that can no longer tolerate itself. Artaud was seriously ill.

ND

And Jean Genet?

RG

Jean Genet is really an extreme case. Something is happening at the historical level, because its forms of mimicry take on an absolutely caricatural character. The Maids (Les bonnes) and Deathwatch (Haute surveillance) are truly mind-blowing. We realize that this is going toward the diabolical, toward the primitive sacred. We are very close to theology. If it represents our society, it’s really worrying. But I think there is good use to be made of Jean Genet, who is undoubtedly a great writer because he rediscovers the sacred at the level of human relationships. To say that he is a poet is to say that. Everything becomes so obvious in his work that it is blinding. That it is written in our time is perhaps the sign of an end to the race.

ND

So it’s the death drive, the attraction of suicide.

RG

I’m afraid so. Everything we admire most in our time, everything we bring back to life from the past, the great German madmen like Kleist, for example, reappears in Artaud. Today we choose Nerval against the Romantics—Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Musset, who were counterparts to the classical quartet Racine, Molière, La Fontaine, Boileau. We choose Nerval, we choose Hölderlin, we have a strong penchant for madness.

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We are currently on the level of madness, in a significant but ambiguous way, because we are always trying to go beyond the violence and the sacred. But it is still a very dangerous step since it leads to totalitarian madness. We can clearly see the totalitarian madness in Artaud’s theater: instead of having a single victim, he wants to kill everyone. To obtain a catharsis, it is necessary to kill three-quarters of the population. It’s completely insane. Modern art tends to glorify violence, massacre. We justify this kind of overbidding in the name of art; we pretend not to want it in reality, but the two are getting closer and closer. ND

When we judge a major criminal or terrorists for heinous acts, we feel that the reaction among some is mixed. There is horror, and at the same time fascination, almost admiration.

RG

It’s true, because we are again mimics at the level of real violence. Is it a temporary crisis or a major crime in our society? I think you have to seriously ask yourself this question. Even those who affirm that there is no longer any aesthetics, and who want to eliminate the boundary between the theater and the spectator, precisely take refuge behind aesthetics when they are reproached for being accomplices of violence in the city. They do exactly what the Surrealists did, who systematically advocated the most spectacular antisocial gestures and who, confronted with the police, took refuge behind the total immunity of the poet. It is the lack of seriousness of the modern intellectual, both disquieting and reassuring. Today, there is a kind of nostalgia for violence and the sacred.

ND

To restore the sacred through sacrificial one-upmanship?

RG

We don’t say it like that, but we see that humanism is outdated. Above all, we don’t want to look at the Judeo-Christian side. The real threat is there. Modern aesthetic forms, the glorification of violence, the sexual attitudes closest to violence, totalitarian temptations, all of this is linked. In my opinion, it must be said, there is a farcical side that can turn into tragedy.

ND

And isn’t the literature of the absurd a staging of a lack of differentiation?

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RG

It is, in fact, to stage the lack of differentiation and give it a philosophical meaning. Personally, I am a realist in philosophy. I don’t believe in the absurd at all, nor in current nihilism, and at the same time I think that there are extremely profound things in these movements, insofar as they question the outdated forms of meaning of Western humanism. But to find the meaning behind it, there is, in my opinion, only the non-sacrificial and the Christian message. If we do not want it, we will necessarily go toward the worst, that is to say, toward forms of regression of the “violence and sacred” type.

ND

Is it a return to the primitive?

RG

You can’t really go back to the primitive. Wanting that is the very definition of totalitarianism. It can even take more aberrant forms than in the past, because I don’t think we are at all done with totalitarian practices. With humanist optimism, with the awareness of its weaknesses, we find ourselves increasingly faced with a formidable dilemma. This can be sensed in people like Michel Foucault who fought for human rights without really believing in them since he had no philosophical bases. Now, if you don’t believe in humanism, if you don’t believe in religion either, why not be for cruelty? Why wouldn’t the most admirable gesture be, perhaps, for a statesman dying of cancer and who would be in possession of the hydrogen bomb, to blow up the planet, since we don’t feel responsible for anything to anyone? When we are able to blow up the planet, we also have philosophers who tell you that we would have the right to do it. It’s quite worrying. Today I consider that all the justifications of religion are true, even that of Voltaire. “If God didn’t exist, we would have to invent him.” To prevent humanity from using the hydrogen bomb.

ND

Isn’t this a perfect example of a phenomenon that cannot be analyzed without resorting to imitation?

RG

Imitation is not enough. Insofar as the hydrogen bomb keeps the antagonists at bay, it plays the role of a violent god. It keeps the peace

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by threat. But insofar as it is not used, there is also an enormous part of rationality. There is an awareness of the reciprocity of vengeance that has nothing sacred, nothing irrational. It cannot therefore be explained solely by the sacred nor solely by rationality. It’s most interesting. At the same time, we must recognize that it is a phenomenon for which we do not have the necessary vocabulary. This intermediate state between the rational and the irrational would be worth studying for its own sake. It shows, in my opinion, a historical evolution which would require a more effective vocabulary. It would also be dangerous to try to apprehend the modern world without taking into account this anthropological past of violence and the sacred. ND In Things Hidden, you spoke of a subject that seems completely new

to me, namely the role of sacrifice in psychotherapy.

RG

We have already seen that mimesis is sacrificial, that it blurs the distinction between the pathological and the normal. Pathological problems are always sacrificial crises at the level of the individual. We see it clearly in Shakespeare: if I no longer love Desdemona, chaos is back. It is an extraordinary sentence! “Chaos has come again!” He speaks of chaos in the sense of cosmic chaos. We can see that Shakespeare is one of those who best understood the psyche of the individual. In Julius Caesar we see Brutus joining the conspiracy against Caesar. He then explains in a short monologue his internal contradictions, the fight he is waging against himself. And he compares this internal upheaval to an uprising of the people against the state. There are four or five magnificent verses on this interior insurrection, which marks an entry into the sacrificial crisis. It is a state of splitting, of inner revenge. We therefore find at the level of psychotherapy all the elements that we have spoken about in relation to society. What constantly strikes me in Shakespeare is the parallel he draws between the disorder of the individual and the disorder of society. Certain states described by Virginia Woolf in The Waves are exactly of the same order. There is a character [Rhoda] who represents Virginia Woolf herself, a character who moreover

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commits suicide as Virginia Woolf will do, taken by images of collective murder of which he is the victim. This is very striking to me because Doctor Henri Grivois, who is at the Hôtel-Dieu at the head of a psychiatric emergency service, has done interviews with patients who are in a nascent pathological state. When the psychotic state is crystallized, and often psychiatry contributes to it, the patient discovers particular enemies, he rationalizes his anxiety, whereas the illness in its incipient state allows us to see that the subject perceives the whole world as an enemy. He is aware of being isolated in a hostile world and of the fantasy character of his fears. Dr. Grivois finds that, when he talks to these subjects, they are surprised that someone understands what they are feeling, because they have never met anyone who understands this state of mind. As far as psychiatry is concerned, my personal tendency would be to put human relations in the foreground. The individual who has psychic disorders sees human relationships as degraded. He is in a state of mimetic revenge against all of humanity. This is perhaps the reason that makes Hamlet look mad, even in the eyes of his mother. The theater represents phenomena in an extremely sensitive way, which have their share of truth and which the normal state does not see. We must consider madness, not on the same footing as the normal state, but rather as visionary, which is very enriching for literature. The great writers of the modern world are sometimes people close to madness. Yet they have perfectly philosophical intuitions. ND

You once said that Proust was superior to Freud in the field of psychological knowledge.

RG

Proust is superior to Freud in handling certain human relationships. He sees things that Freud does not see. Freud takes seriously the false autonomy of the coquette; he sees in it a specifically feminine phenomenon. Proust and Shakespeare understand very well that the so-called self-sufficiency of the characters who are displayed as independent, and who are not necessarily women, is only nourished by the admiring desire that Freud has for him. The latter

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believes that this narcissism is solid, but the great writers know that it is something very fragile that can collapse from one moment to another. The narcissistic being believes in his autonomy insofar as others nourish him with their desire. ND

You were led to write a book on Shakespeare. Why?

RG

Shakespeare is astonishing, perhaps my strongest literary experience. It was in Buffalo, in 1970, when I was in the English department, that I discovered it. One of my colleagues, C. L. Barber, was a great American Shakespearean, author of a book on the comedies of Shakespeare, titled Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies. He had organized a small symposium, and he spoke of ritual in Shakespeare, as it appears, for example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I saw this play performed on television when I had just understood the aspects of violence and the sacred in it. The piece was well acted, in a very classical way, and that was a revelation for me.

ND

It was quite a spectacular return to literature.

RG

My book was dictated by literary reasons, yes. I wanted to show the power of mimetic desire in literature and the effectiveness of a systematic theory to deal with literary aspects in Shakespeare that had never before been approached. Criticism never speaks of what is essential in comedies and tragedies, namely human relationships. It never speaks of conflicts, of falling in love. However, they have been treated by Shakespeare as mechanisms from which he takes a certain distance, an ironic attitude, even. I had the opportunity in this book of dealing with the whole field of possible hypotheses, of making a systematic development of them. Some of Shakespeare’s plays are inspired by his discovery of mimetic desire. Of course, he has a prodigious dramatic sense, but his discoveries become more and more complex over the course of writing the plays. What interests me is the evolution of the mimetic desire, which is only sketched out in the first plays and which becomes more complicated and which ends in the expulsion and the founding murder in Julius Caesar and in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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ND

You are the only one to have underlined the importance of what you call the “Shakespearean doubles”?

RG

A few articles on Shakespeare’s mimicry have been published in recent years. We can therefore say that my book is both revolutionary and not revolutionary at all. For example, in The Tempest, Prospero and his brother the Duke find themselves in competition for power. But in principle, they love each other; they share everything. But suddenly the desire for exclusive possession, which however is not the desire for property as it is described in Rousseau, triggers the tragedy. If he doesn’t like the same as me, he’s not my friend, but, if he wants the same as me, he’s my enemy. There is no solution; it’s the absolute double bind.

ND

What are the consequences?

RG

There are three possible developments. There is the desire that becomes perverse, that enjoys its own misfortune; this is moreover how I would define perversion. There is a desire that goes toward death, or else there are forms of comedy in which one sees only the ridiculousness of certain situations. In As You Like It, we see an unfailing friendship turn into absolute rivalry, fierce hatred, because of a woman. No one is responsible, and that’s how Shakespeare sees original sin. It has nothing to do with the idea that we hurt ourselves. The more intimate friends are, the more their friendship turns into its opposite, without anyone wanting it. It is prodigious as a definition of original sin. We see that Shakespeare is haunted by this theme, both in comedy and in tragedy. It is a mystery of existence that can turn either into farce or death.

ND

You don’t like linguistics as such, but isn’t it the best way to reveal hidden signifiers?

RG

Linguistics fails to recognize that language is fundamentally the expression of desire.

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ND

The poet, the writer, also manipulates mimetic desire. So he puts himself in the position of the emissary victim?

RG

Of course. He is the scapegoat since he manipulates mimetic desire and the audience would get mad at him if they understood what he is saying. Only those who agree with him will understand, so he is in God’s position. We will understand it to the extent that we deserve to understand it.

ND

Isn’t that the role of every writer since he exposes himself in the public square, reveals something, and then finds himself at the mercy of those who read him?

RG

Naturally, and this is particularly sensitive for the theatrical writer. He is at the mercy of the slightest hazard during the performance. The smallest detail can turn a success into a flop or a flop into a success. Shakespeare has an almost obsessive awareness that the crowd can react in one way or another, condemn or praise without reason. It is the actor, the director, here, who speaks. All of this plays a huge role in Shakespeare. He knows perfectly well that, if the play does not succeed, he will be the scapegoat. And yet, in his time, he did not play the role of idol, which is that of the actor today. Shakespeare said that our world is a theatrical world; all the world’s a stage, where everyone plays their role. Theater is always the play within the play.

ND

In your article on Hamlet,1 you emphasize the importance of the play within the play, at a time when Hamlet is still hesitant with regard to revenge.

RG

Hamlet, in a way, is Shakespeare. Hamlet sees what Shakespeare sees, namely the endless cycle of revenge. He sees that his father was a murderer; he sees that Claudius killed his father, that he himself is going to kill Claudius, and that his role must be that of a link in an endless chain. In a way, it robs him of his identity. This makes him the double of his father, who is himself the double of Claudius. He sees the vanity of revenge, the kind of undifferentiation it creates, and that’s what restrains his arm for the duration of the play.

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ND

What about his relationship with Ophelia? Is Ophelia, in your opinion, an emissary victim?

RG

She is an emissary victim, but at the same time I think she is very mimetic. If you see that her admiration for Hamlet is inspired by the fact that he is admired by the whole court, you see that she allows herself to be influenced by prestige, by fashion. Of course, she is above all a victim of her father, who does not hesitate to sacrifice his daughter for political reasons. Hamlet also sacrifices her, because he reads through her the mimicry of the whole society, and this mimicry, he feels it in himself. It is a corrupt world in which there is no direct action, where the opinion of others is all-powerful. In a way, this world evokes the milieu of the media world. Each acts according to the effect each will produce on the others. Polonius, for example, when talking to the king, is very keen for his daughter to marry Hamlet, the heir to the throne. He is the first to give a sexual interpretation of Hamlet. Shakespeare, here, is the precursor of Freud, but instead of speaking of the mother, he speaks of the psyche.

ND

Ophelia and Hamlet’s mother are doubles for Hamlet?

RG

Yes. There is moreover, in my opinion, an element of doubles between all the protagonists in relation to each other.

ND

Ophelia’s sacrifice would be a kind of transfer?

RG

In my opinion, Hamlet sacrifices Ophelia because the revenge relationship is mimetic and because Ophelia, in a way, embodies mimetism. There is a weariness in Hamlet, which is also that of Shakespeare.

ND

But Ophelia is innocent?

RG

I’m not sure she’s innocent. Hamlet sees her as completely worldly and therefore as theatrical as the others.

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ND

In your opinion, why is she going mad?

RG

I think that, again, it works on two levels. There is a romantic reading that accepts Desdemona or Ophelia as absolutely pure and as total victims, and there is another reading, more disquieting, where Ophelia is a victim because Hamlet cannot play the game of love with her, any more than he can play the game of revenge against Claudius. It is already modern nihilism, which expresses itself in the character of Hamlet in the most complete and profound way. It’s the same in Romeo and Juliet. Romeo says at the start of the play “all I ask is a night of love,” but Friar Lawrence warns him that such violent pleasures call for a violent end. I believe that Shakespeare sees very well that mimetic desire leads to death.

ND

There is all the same a difference between Ophelia, who commits suicide, and Desdemona, who is murdered.

RG

Basically, it’s the same thing. Desdemona prepares herself as if for a sacrifice. She does not try to escape. Why did she desire Othello? For the horrible stories he told. At the beginning of the play, she listens behind the door when her father quickly calls on Othello. For her, Othello is exoticism, but an exoticism of violence. She herself is a sort of Bovary. The play is frightful, because it’s one of the cruelest plays about desire. Desdemona participates in Othello’s desire. Othello wants a Venetian for the same reason Desdemona wants Othello. There is a desire for adventure and a desire for death in both. It’s a pretty terrifying play, but I think there are similarities between Desdemona and Ophelia. Ophelia is steeped in literature; she is false to the core, but, of course, Shakespeare does not see this the way Flaubert does.

ND

Yet, Flaubert identifies with Madame Bovary, while Shakespeare does not identify with Ophelia all the same?

RG

In this play, all the characters are so much the doubles of each other that it is impossible to decide. Hamlet is fascinated by Laertes

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because he is everything Hamlet is not. But he becomes enough of a mimetic model for Hamlet to get into the game. There is an absolutely comic passage where he tells Laertes that he can do anything, eat a crocodile, or drink poison, and that he, Hamlet, would be able to do the same. That’s where Gertrude says he’s crazy. It is better that the public does not really understand what he is revealing. This happens at the time of Ophelia’s burial, and what is extraordinary about Laertes is that he sincerely mourns Ophelia, so that he would be able to kill three hundred people for the honor of the family. Hamlet does not understand all this. He draws his sword, and he kills Laertes. Men’s suicidal behavior involves weapons. ND

Obviously, if we consider Ophelia as a double of Hamlet, the end by suicide represents one of the possible outcomes for Hamlet himself, and indeed he hesitated.

RG

What is prodigious in the play is that, apart from the main characters, there are secondary characters who are caricatures, such as Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern, for example.

ND

Wasn’t Hamlet afraid of becoming exactly like his father if he married Ophelia, who was exactly like his mother?

RG

That’s it. Revenge and Ophelia are part of the trap in which he feels caught. The lack of differentiation of the mimetic crisis continues to function inexorably. What is very striking are the scenes where he watches the army of Fortinbras who goes to Poland to fight for a cause that has no value, or that of the actor who is able to really cry, while Hamlet feels unable to cry. This is where he wonders why he is such a bad actor. He’s a bad actor who can’t play any more plays, that’s obvious. The greatness of Hamlet is that there is an actor there who, for five acts, does not manage to play his part. We have a caricature of the “revenge tragedy.” In the classic genre of revenge tragedy, we know that revenge will be fulfilled in the fifth act. But how do you fill in the first four? He’s tired. He’s had enough. Everything is predictable. Everything is written in advance.

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ND

You spoke of theater as a modern phenomenon, in the sense that everything becomes theater. Everything becomes a spectacle. Everything is done under the gaze of others.

RG

Yes. For Shakespeare, the whole world is a stage and we are all actors: “all the world a stage.” We always play a role vis- à-vis the other. In the theater, the mediator is not only a model, we also want him to be an imitator. There is always a theatrical situation right from the start within human relationships. This is what Shakespeare sees. But as of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s perspective changes. He realizes that instead of bringing out the mimicry, he must both make it manifest and hide it. That’s what I’m trying to show.

ND

Your title is quite provocative.

RG

Yes. “A theater of envy” insists on the word “envy” in the English sense of the term, which is very strong, and which is also intended to shock the reader. It is the only word in everyday language that really implies the mimetic structure.

ND

This evokes Max Scheler’s trilogy: envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred.

RG

Yes, but “envy” is the best word. It evokes the gaze; it’s very Shakespearean. And the expressions “envious desire,” “envious pride” are everywhere in Shakespeare. Moreover, the true etymology of the word “envy,” in Latin “invidere,” means to look in the neighbor’s yard.

ND

Doesn’t that also mean “to hate”?

RG

Of course. “Invidia” means hate. In English, the meaning is particularly strong. I wanted to show that it is an analysis of Shakespeare in which bad human relationships play an essential role. There are a lot of expulsions in his theater, a lot of sacrifices, and in my opinion Shakespeare is very clearly aware that the one and the other are linked. We also find in him the notion of “conspiracy,”

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for example in Julius Caesar. The recruitment of the conspirators is entirely mimetic. Brutus sees the murder of Caesar as a sacrifice modeled on the expulsion of Tarquin by Brutus, founder of the Roman republic. He states that his ancestors drove Tarquin out of Rome and that he will drive Caesar out in the same way. But the operation did not succeed. In my opinion, there is therefore a whole theory of sacrificial murder and founding murder in Julius Caesar. ND

Does the subject of Racine and Shakespeare inspire a comment in you? You wrote about Racine.

RG

The tragic inspiration in Racine and in Shakespeare is obviously very different. I would say that the Shakespearean world is much more pathological. Shakespeare never wrote pure tragedies because with him human relationships always tend to turn into a kind of complicity of desire. But what is fundamental in tragedy are the doubles. From this point of view, the tragic inspiration is the same in the two writers. The difference is that the French classical spirit seeks to clothe the tragic conflict with intellectual causes, to insist on honor and glory. We could do that with Shakespeare in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. There you find the conflict of love versus friendship. But love and friendship are completely intertwined there. To separate them is to destroy the tragedy. Tragic characters are always doubles who have a community of desires, while trying to mask them with rational differences. Criticism always intellectualizes works, and English criticism reproaches the French for being too intellectual. But what does this same critic do about Shakespeare? S/he never sees the doubles; no one seems to understand that it is the imitation of desire that is responsible for the conflicts. In comedy, only the gaze changes and ridicules the doubles instead of taking them tragically. The principle is the same. The Litigants (Les plaideurs) works in a way like Andromaque. What is special about Racine is that, taking into account the pedantic rules to which he was subjected, he was obliged to condense to the extreme situations that Shakespeare displays with a

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wealth of detail and a freedom of language impossible to imagine in seventeenth-century France. We can talk about the purity of form in Racine. In Shakespeare, we find dozens of expressions such as “love by hearsay,” literally love by “hear-say,” which reveals the presence of mimicry. There are Proustian subtleties in Shakespeare. ND

You spoke of the pedantry that surrounded Racine. I assume you are referring to the rules of classicism. Now these rules of Aristotle, if they forbade violent action on the stage, in no way prevented a subtle analysis of the violence of characters.

RG

What French classicism forbade was the mixture of the tragic and the comic. It is very serious, because if you look closely at Shakespeare, there is always comedy in him.

ND

Even in the darkest, bloodiest tragedies?

RG

Certainly. I think, for example, that we could do an interpretation of King Lear that would be comic throughout. The two sisters are comical in their mimetic rivalry with each other, and in a sense Lear is comical, too. It is he who has made them what they are, since he claims their mimetic desire from the start and puts them in competition with each other.

ND

Is it a caricature?

RG

This is the caricature of Shakespeare by Shakespeare himself. He does this at a time when he is tired, it seems to me, of writing tragedies. He wants to write The Winter’s Tale. Racine can’t write this kind of play, that’s obvious. Some don’t like King Lear, because they find the play too much a caricature. Indeed, it is.

ND

Racine was very limited in terms of vocabulary by the need to use only the noble style. This requires brevity.

RG

I think French has extraordinary versatility. Words can mean a dozen different things depending on how they are used, while English has

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a wealth of vocabulary that allows you to vary the images, to find the right word. But it seems to me that Shakespeare’s style has it both ways. English allows such freedom that it can transform words, change syntax, in short allow itself all language games. It was common to say that Shakespearean freedom leads to chaos. For me, on the contrary, Shakespeare was very organized around a simple structure, which is mimetic. What I’m trying to show is that disorder is fundamental in Shakespeare. The error of critics is not to see that disorder creates forms. With Shakespeare, we are always on the way to absolute chaos, all metaphors go toward the monstrous, toward forms of disorder. ND

Does Racine not manage, in his own way, to describe the monstrous?

RG

I believe that the tragic inspiration is one and that the great writers succeed in one way or another in expressing fundamental truths. For example, Racine describes the race and death of Hippolyte, who is killed by horses, according to the classical rules. The disorder, the chaos are rendered in an orderly, concise manner, in very few verses. By contrast, Shakespeare will have impressionistic or picaresque puns. In the second scene of Hamlet, it is about the telescoping of time. Gertrude remarries without respecting the proper deadlines, while she is still in mourning for her first husband. Claudius tries to say both things at the same time: mourning and celebration. He has one eye sad and the other happy. The actor playing this scene must start squinting. All the features of his face are deformed; he turns into a monster. What is monstrous is this: the telescoping of time and differences. There are also preparations for war during which the Danes no longer know the difference between Sunday and the days of the week, no longer know how to distinguish day from night. All aspects of time are disrupted. It is extraordinarily modern.

ND

You say that in Shakespeare love is always mimetic. But in Romeo and Juliet it is really love at first sight?

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RG

In my opinion, it is mimetic. Juliet says to Romeo: “You kiss by th’ book.” She finds this admirable.

ND

But in English “by the book” means “in a beautiful way” or “according to the rules.”

RG

I think there is an ambiguity in this expression. It means “according to the books” or “as in the books.” When Romeo announces to Friar Lawrence that he has changed lovers, Lawrence does not take him seriously. Romeo explains to him that the difference between these two women is that one does not lend herself to his desire and the other does. It’s a teenager who talks, but a teenager who wants to move from literature to reality.

ND

Why choose this one rather than another?

RG

I think Juliet appeals to him because she represents the exoticism of the Capulets. She is banned. But in the scene with Friar Lawrence, Romeo’s mask falls off. He explains why he preferred Rosalyn: because she refused herself. The friar replies that Rosalyn understands very well what kind of boy she has to deal with. She is suspicious. While Juliet is both naive and nourished by literature. She reads novels. I would also add that on closer inspection the language of love between Romeo and Juliet is also full of ambiguity. Normally, there should be no coquetry or double game between them. However, an ambivalent language, both of love and of hatred, exists between them, under the pretext that he is a Montague and that she is a Capulet. The secret is revealed in passages, in my opinion quite parodic, which explain that the Capulets and the Montagues are absolutely necessary to allow the use of amorous rhetoric. I think it’s very conscious on Shakespeare’s part. There is a passage where Romeo has just killed Tybalt, Juliet’s brother. The latter launches into a prodigious tirade in which she calls him a dragon, stating that she loathes him. The nurse takes this seriously and believes that Romeo is no longer loved. At that moment, Juliet turns, furious against the nurse, showing that her

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vengeful speech was purely rhetorical. It’s a deeply insane comic scene. In my opinion, Romeo and Juliet do not represent pure and perfect love as one says. Mimetic desire is here as well. ND

What analogies do you see between Montaigne and Shakespeare?

RG

I think Shakespeare adored Montaigne, that he had read him very well and that he shared with him a great skepticism vis-à-vis the world. But Montaigne retired to his home very quietly after the death of La Boétie, and he broke off all relations with men. Consequently, he lacks the immense Shakespearean realm of human relationships.

ND

Those who think that the social order has no chance of improving always find a quote from Shakespeare to support their basic pessimism. He seems to deeply despise men, and especially women.

RG

He evolved at the end of his career. I see The Winter’s Tale as a conversion piece. At first I thought there was no conversion, in the sense that I spoke about it in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Now I believe there is, and it is The Winter’s Tale, which is about Hermione’s resurrection. I think there is perhaps a very deep sense of guilt in Shakespeare about the women in his life.

ND

He seems obsessed with women.

RG

In his last pieces, he has changed a lot. From Cordelia in King Lear onward, there is always a positive female character. In The Winter’s Tale, Pauline and Hermione are completely positive. It seems to me that Shakespeare was extremely jealous. He was not homosexual but bisexual, so he was just as jealous of men as of women. In my opinion, it is impossible to understand him without bisexuality. His sonnets are addressed to men and women at the same time. He actually lived in a triangle of jealousy that inspired his work.

ND

This must have made him particularly sensitive to the phenomena of persecution.

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RG

We have further proof of this by the way he talks about Joan of Arc. Traditional commentators have criticized Shakespeare for calling Joan of Arc a witch, just as English propaganda did. Now, all of a sudden, we witness an extraordinary scene, quite short, in which Joan of Arc becomes the mistress of events. There is a reversal, which is something Shakespeare likes to do. He gives the floor to the scapegoat, and suddenly the victim turns out to be a completely different character. He creates this situation in Henry VI, but, of course, much more clearly in the case of Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice, since the play is entirely constructed on the principle of reciprocity. Shakespeare does this in such a way that the public, who take the scapegoat seriously, see nothing but fire. In the case of Richard III, his character remains negative, but at times he is the only moral man in the play. He sees that his wives are worse than he. This is not misogyny, because Shakespeare does not differentiate between men and women on this point. But he always shows that he understands the scapegoat phenomenon. If he understands this, he will never be able to take sides, or adopt a Manichaean position. He takes sides against the scapegoat system, while using it theatrically. It must be remembered that the Elizabethan theater brought together very different audiences. There were a few clever people, whom the author might know personally, who knew what he was really thinking. But he was obliged to write plays that appealed to the general public, therefore riddled with scapegoats. He always does both at the same time, like some film directors do. He pushes this double technique to a point that does not exist in French theater, because our classical theater is not made to address one voice to an audience, and another to a different audience. Now, Shakespeare is always double-minded.

ND

This exists in Molière. Don’t you think that in The Misanthrope, for example, there are two different voices?

RG

The Misanthrope is a play that I admire enormously, and which can be read on various levels, yes.

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ND

Molière has clearly shown the double character of Alceste.

RG

At the start of the play, Philinte paints a somewhat simplistic portrait of him, but then Célimène paints an extraordinary portrait of him. For me, the most beautiful passage is when she defines him as having a spirit of contradiction: “Must Monsieur always contradict?” He really is the typical French intellectual. This is what Molière wrote best. What is also essential is that Célimène recognizes that, if she were old, she would be prudish like Arsinoé. This proves that at certain times Molière goes beyond the point of view of the characters and shows the strategic positions that the characters adopt one by one in relation to others, as Shakespeare does. When one is only concerned with characters, one does not understand how Célimène can say that at fifty she would be a prude, and that if Arsinoé were twenty she would not speak as she speaks. The Misanthrope himself is a concealed coquette. My thesis is that basically Alceste looks a lot like Célimène, and that’s why he accuses her so violently. He puts himself under the obligation to compete with the little marquises, and at the same time he speaks as a committed philosopher who condemns the vices of the world. He invents romance. But Molière shows us in advance that this is a lying and false attitude.

ND

Isn’t there also a certain syndrome of the eternal husband in Alceste? Why did you choose Célimène, who is rightly desired by everyone, and who is the most inclined to deceive him?

RG

It’s fundamental, and it’s effectively the same structure as The Eternal Husband.

ND

Molière saw that. Maybe he experienced it too?

RG

Of course. The end of The Misanthrope is something prodigious. Salon life requires certain compromises; it does not allow a romantic attitude, like that of Alceste. There should therefore be no lounges. From the moment there are Alcestes, we go toward a wild romanticism!

ND

Is it therefore the praise of hypocrisy?

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RG

Maybe a little. Look at Alceste’s anger when he realizes that we are portraying absentees and making fun of them? It’s a parlor game, but it’s only a game, because those who aren’t there know very well that we’re doing their portraits and in turn they’ll do the portraits of the absent ones. At the end of the day, it’s not that important; it’s not that serious. Sure, that’s hypocrisy, but doesn’t Alceste replace it with meanness that’s worse? He makes a very severe portrait of everyone in front of them. That is to say that he transforms into open struggle what was only the homage of vice to virtue. From the moment we openly wage war on each other, there is no longer a living room. Alceste therefore opens romantic hostilities, proclaiming himself the best, more moral than the others.

ND

And by adopting the role of victim. But there were still salons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

RG

A certain living-room life remains. But we come rather to Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire). This is what Molière predicts.

ND

Shakespeare was extremely skeptical of the world. So there is no trace, in him, of romanticism?

RG

I believe that there is above all in Shakespeare a satire avant la lettre of the theatre engagée. He knew that art could be used for reasons of resentment and personal morality. He showed it in Hamlet. When he plays the play within the play to castigate Claudius, Claudius and Gertrude stand up, indignant. The great success for a playwright is to get the public indignant, to leave the room. The public knows it; the public plays the same game, so everyone is looking for someone who wants to be scandalized to please those who know not to be scandalized. Today, we have fallen into a kind of academicism, the academicism of the rebellion, the academicism of the antihero, and so on. The old academicism had at least the advantage of requiring hard work, technical skills, a talent for imitation. Even the bad paintings of the Impressionist era are infinitely superior to the bad paintings

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and bad plays of late modernism. What we call postmodernism has been playing on threadbare mechanisms for forty years. We are living in this domain at the lowest of epochs. But people are starting to realize that the notion of avant-garde is the most backward thing there is. ND

Rousseau condemned the theater, but he is one of the writers you don’t like. Yet you cite it in connection with Julien Sorel, who appears to be a perfect example of mimetic behavior.

RG

There is one fundamental thing in Rousseau; it is that he is the inventor of the character who poses as a victim. It is prodigious. Moreover, Michel Serres spoke very well about that. Rousseau has spent his entire career in the role of the victim. Now, the place of the victim in literature, in society, is all about romanticism. Rousseau is the brilliant initiator, and at the same time unbearable, intolerable, paranoid, megalomaniac, flattered by everyone, and seeing persecution everywhere.

ND

As an individual he was insufferable, but as a writer . . .

RG

He was awesome. He is a magnificent writer, who handles the language superbly.

ND

Émile must have interested you.

RG

I have a professor friend in Baltimore who studied Émile mimetically. Letter to M. D’Alembert on Spectacles (Lettre sur les spectacles) is also extraordinary. Rousseau is a capital writer on the mimetic level. I haven’t had time to do it, but Rousseau should be studied closely from this point of view. His attitude toward the theater is much deeper, much truer than that of the defenders of spectacle. Moreover, when one is obliged to defend the theater, it is because it is dead. Shakespeare too believed that the theater exerted a bad influence on the public. When we are no longer afraid of the theater,

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when it has become a kind of false mass, it is because in reality there is no more theater. It’s when everyone goes to the theater that it no longer exists. ND

Is this the current situation?

RG

Yes. Everyone speaks well of the theater; it’s a bad sign. On the other hand, we say a lot of bad things about television. But if it is unbearable in many ways, I imagine that it conveys a small embryo of life. You have to look for it on television.

ND

Because we don’t trust it?

RG

We fear the bad influence it can have, while saying that the theater has no influence on anyone, that’s obvious. Intellectuals are always behind the times with respect to reality. They converted to the cinema the day the cinema died. When they are unanimous in favor of something, we can be sure that it is something dying.

ND

To come back to Rousseau, when he says that he is the only judge of what is good and what is bad, that his conscience is his only guide, he is extremely modern.

RG

Yes. All the fundamental positions of modernism are found in Rousseau. We can even say in the process that he invented anthropology.

ND

When he refers to the natural man?

RG

Of course, when he tries to place man in a framework that is no longer just that of Greek and Roman antiquity. He is a fundamental thinker, very false, and at the same time crucial. Moreover, an interesting thing happened among the deconstructionists who experienced a Rousseauist phase. This is what Derrida calls the logic of the supplement. This logic is linked to the phenomenon of victimhood. It is always Rousseau’s individualism, which he cannot get rid of and which comes back to haunt the one who says: “my conscience is the only judge.” The logic of the supplement is always a

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bit like the bankruptcy of Rousseau’s self-sufficiency; it’s always also the real victim, not Rousseau, but the one he victimizes to be able to proclaim himself as victim. ND

Jean Genet did the same thing.

RG

With him, mimicry goes as far as caricature. I was especially interested in Deathwatch. The characters are two minor delinquents who play the role of doubles and who are fascinated by a third whom they consider to be a great leader because he is condemned to death. He represents death, and therefore he represents violence and the sacred. On a symbolic level, it is an unheard-of text. With Genet, what is striking is the brutality of the return to violence and the sacred. There is the role of delinquency, the role of homosexuality, the vision of virility. The violence of the offender is both evil and beneficial. In The Screens (Les paravents), there is theater within the theater. Generally speaking, there are many Shakespearean elements in Genet. There could be a reading à la Genet, violent, homosexual, of Shakespeare. To play Shakespeare as if it were Genet would in a certain way bring it to the taste of our day. What is important is to think about the role of delinquency, which is always a return to violence and the sacred in our world.

ND

Can we say, in this case, that Genet is the modern writer of violence and the sacred?

RG

Absolutely. There are similarities with Artaud, but in a different genre.

ND

What do you think of Sartre’s interpretation?

RG

He interested me a lot. Sartre is the father of a form of criticism, which is not a psychoanalysis of the author, but a sort of psychoanalysis of the work, of the author’s project. Sartre sees in Genet the one who owns the condemnation that his adoptive parents imposed on him. He had to be a thief because he trusted the opinion of those who had immense authority over him. He had no choice but

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to become “the thief.” It would be wrong to say that it was programmed, because with Sartre everything is always taken up by his argument about freedom. But he had no other possible plan, since he was told he was a thief. He therefore played this role, which his freedom demanded. It is a fine example of what Sartre means by freedom. Others would see it as determinism. But in fact, the individual is forced to program himself. To create oneself a thief and to glorify the thief is, in a certain way, to regain freedom with what is imposed on him. It is perhaps the aspect of Sartre that is the most valuable. This allows us to understand a certain psychopathology, the influence that men have on each other. How to be what you are forced to be is what Nietzsche called “amor fati.” But Sartre always looks for the avenues to freedom. The notion of the thief that emerges from Genet’s work is certainly not the one his adoptive parents were thinking of. From the moment he assumes the notion of thief, he creates himself a thief, and that becomes something quite different. ND

Wasn’t it also necessary that he expel this state of thief by transposing it into the literary work?

RG

Yes, he must expel him insofar as he hates himself as a thief. He assumes, he claims the project as condemnation. He assumes it as a scapegoat in violence and the sacred, seeking to deify himself.

ND

His role as a writer therefore consists in being both the persecutor and victim.

RG

That’s it.

ND

About Flaubert, now, it seems to me that you spoke less about him than about Stendhal.

RG

I adore Flaubert, and I talked about him a bit in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Madame Bovary is one of the great figures of imitative behavior. For someone like Jules de Gauthier to be able to write a book entitled Le Bovarisme, he had to feel that the character of

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Emma Bovary was saying something essential about modern culture. And in Salammbô, the scenes of the human sacrifice to the god Moloch are quite extraordinary. This remains very valid today, because contrary to popular belief, as much was known about Carthage in the nineteenth century as today. Flaubert says remarkable things about bourgeois France in the nineteenth century. However, he does not develop the entire mimetic cycle in the manner of Shakespeare, Molière, or Racine. Flaubert is not a tragic writer, nor is he a comic writer. ND And Bouvard and Pécuchet? RG

I love Bouvard and Pécuchet. What is sublime there, which was involuntary with Flaubert, is that a century later, it becomes poetic, even if Flaubert wanted to make an anti-poetic work par excellence. There is a certain poetry from the French provinces, even if today we are obliged to read Flaubert with a certain irony. He had a kind of bourgeois hatred of the bourgeois which made him a little myopic. He was at the same time such an artist, and he described so accurately what he saw that his works retrospectively acquire a poetic quality. The result is magnificent, because in a way he had counted on it. From a distance, there is an impressionist side to him. He saw modern turmoil and stupidity, but we see through him something of the past. In other words, we are much more Flaubertians than Flaubert.

ND

Didn’t Flaubert create Emma to drive out of himself the romanticism he hated?

RG

Certainly. He makes the romantic in him drink the cyanide. It is therefore a resurrection as a novel.

ND

“A Simple Heart” could be an example of conversion from the point of view of the victim?

RG

What is grandiose in “A Simple Heart” is that the will to demystify does not go as far as satire. But to take a close look at the problem

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of the emissary victim in Flaubert, we must take the mythical text that he himself chose, “The Legend of Saint Julien the Hospitaller.” The characters are animals who are all in the position of victims facing their ex-tormentor, but they are spared. It is a late text, but, even when the novelist renews himself, he always returns to certain fundamental themes. Here, Flaubert repeated important things for him, but in a different way. ND

Shakespeare and Flaubert have in common a fundamental, almost apocalyptic pessimism.

RG

The temperament of the depressing depressive is the recurrent state of the artist. He sees the crisis of his society; he reacts in a necessarily exaggerated way. However, on the level of society, he says fundamental things that the prevailing optimism completely denies. Tragic thought is always in excess, but this excess is necessary to rectify universal apathy. It has a prophetic side, because it consists in seeing that if relations among humans continue to be what they are, everything will fall apart. These truths are becoming evident today. In reality, there are no more prophets since Christ, because he explained everything; everything was settled in absolute terms. In the relativity we live in, we seek to reinvent what is already there, already resolved.

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Socio-economic Emergences

ND

In a book entitled La violence de la monnaie, which explicitly refers to your work, Michel Aglietta and André Orléan present money as the modern culmination of the scapegoat, insofar as, according to them, “essential violence is transformed under monetary constraint.”1 What do you think?

RG

The role of money as a scapegoat is not specific to the modern world. What Aglietta and Orléan say, very rightly, is that monetary currency comes from the victim. In other words, all institutions come from the victim: the theater, the king, education, the legal system, funerals, war, hunting, etc. What interests me above all is that they demonstrate that the currency also comes from the victim. Archaeology has uncovered increasingly significant signs that money was invented to exchange victims and to be substituted for them. I remember a very interesting lecture by Michel Foucault on this subject in Buffalo. In other words, the apparent common sense that money was invented as a result of barter and the exchange of commodities is nonsense. Everything comes from religion. The earliest coins found in graves are victim surrogates. What we need to know is that the systems of differentiation, of signs of discrimination that 125

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make up man’s intelligence and make him capable of acting on the world, are always linked to sacrifice. This is what the authors help to make clear. I always think of the demonstration of the anthropological value of the thesis of the emissary victim as the founder of culture. Money therefore works in a critical way. The authors demonstrate that the lack of differentiation of financial powers in our world functions as a sacrificial crisis. That’s what I find quite fascinating. We are perpetually in a sacrificial crisis. However, we should not draw the conclusion that we must go back, to the gold standard, for example. We can clearly see what makes the gold standard attractive; it is to have an exchange value that would not be as fluid, as elusive, as undifferentiated as it is. But this evolution which means that we do more and more without gold, causes gold to lose its mythical value, its role which would be essentially money. ND

We are used to considering exchange as a form of peaceful relationship. However, the authors do not see this as a renunciation of violence.

RG

The problem that is never posed is that of knowing how it is that the small groups that live together do not make war on each other as a general rule. This is not self-evident, and I see in the victim process, of course, the engine of the exchange. After the sacrifice of the scapegoat, everyone is so terrified at the prospect of further violence that no one touches anything that is too close. It is there that the exchange intervenes in its sacrificial principle. We’ll look for victims outside. First of all, victims are exchanged in order to avoid victimization phenomena within the group. So the exchange begins with the exchange of victims. The goal of ritual warfare is always to obtain prisoners, that is, sacrificial objects. That is exchange. Aglietta and Orléan are interested in the mimetic cycle at work in the capitalist economy, which has made money a new modelobstacle, or a new idol. Capitalism represents forms of competition that can unfold without causing open conflict. The consequences

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are sometimes tragic, but they do not destroy society. What is fundamental in modern society is that it can tolerate a degree of competition that primitive societies could not experience without destroying themselves. At the level of society, that is the efficiency of capitalism. This competition is not Christian, but what is Christian are the limits it imposes on itself. It is still limited by a system that has made men decide not to see recourse to violence in situations that would normally trigger it. ND

When you say violence, you mean murder.

RG

That’s it. When one speaks of the violence of capitalism, one is right, but all the same it is not the same thing as murder.

ND

Aglietta recognizes that money prevents the unleashing of the crisis, but he adds that the legitimacy of money is the fruit of unanimous violence.

RG

I agree. He talks about violence and the sacred. But in our world, which has been nurtured by Christianity for centuries, there are also elements that are linked to the consciousness of the common interest, undoubtedly. On the monetary level, there are forms of collaboration between governments that were not conceivable or possible before. What I’m saying is that whenever there’s widespread violence, of course, it’s in everyone’s interest for it to cease.

ND

Capitalism would be a phenomenon by which Western society would have channeled its potential for destruction toward something diffuse and controlled, namely economic mimicry.

RG

The industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century appears both as a mystery and as a necessity of history. But when the wealthy donate to the community, it seems to me that this is a way of correcting the indifference that people show to one another on an individual level. It is the Protestant ethic that wanted to create a counterpart to the harshness of economic institutions, and that

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felt responsible for those left behind. I admire that very much, and I think it is important to remember the importance of giving. Of course, we can never do enough, but it is wrong to say that nothing is being done. ND

According to André Orléan, the mimesis of appropriation develops to the detriment of the mimesis of exclusion, which produces the phenomenon of scarcity. The problem shifts, but the violence is still there.

RG

For me, what is extraordinary in our world is that men all want the same thing, and that technology, like a good fairy, fulfills their desires. She offers everyone the same thing, or equivalent objects. Jean-Pierre Dupuy rightly says that the consumer society has to some extent appeased the conflicts aroused by the mimesis of appropriation, precisely by the abundance of accessible objects. At the same time, it must renew itself, invent new objects of desire.

ND

You are talking about the book by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Paul Dumouchel, L’Enfer des choses: René Girard et la logique de l’économie.2 Precisely, in the chapter entitled “The Ambivalence of Scarcity,” Dumouchel writes that “violence and the economic order are indistinguishable,” and also that it is scarcity that “puts our conflicts at the service of the economic order.”3

RG

Economists are wrong to reify, to value scarcity, and from this point of view Dumouchel is entirely right. However, there is also an objective scarcity, and the thesis should not be presented in such a way that one imagines the economy as entirely detached from the needs of humanity in food and other commodities that one can say are irreducible. Both objective needs and mimetic data should be taken into account. Dumouchel rightly criticizes current economics, which does excellent mathematics but does not see the shortcomings of its theory of economic choice. It is necessary to take into account irrational elements, fads and fears, which, in a prodigiously rich and complex economy, play a decisive role. It suffices, for example, for a notable woman in a small provincial town to launch a

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fashion or to wear luxury clothes so that about forty notable women are immediately seized with a mimetic frenzy. Suddenly the percentage of sales of luxury women’s clothing will increase compared to an equivalent city elsewhere. This happens without any economic rationality. However, the current economy cannot take into account this type of reflex, which is reproduced naturally, on a very large scale. Around the end of the year celebrations, the frenzy of shopping becomes such that it comes to its own asceticism. Shortages are artificially created on certain items, such as games or toys that are in high demand. We create a false scarcity that stimulates the customer because buying is now part of the culture; it is part of the social status. High culture tends to disappear, while everything becomes culture in a certain way. Everything acquires a mimetic value. ND

Even in the most prosperous countries, there is a whole category of people who don’t even have what is necessary, while others don’t know what to invent to find something new, to be at the forefront of fashion.

RG

There are of course irreducible needs, but I would say that in our society we have acquired a relative consensus on what is essential, not only in terms of food but also in terms of hygiene, housing, education. The nobility of our society is that it broadens the notion of need. Today what is established as the poverty line in the United States has no objective value. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars a year, I believe, for a family of four. It is quite obvious that at the level of the conservation of life, by feeding yourself on very cheap products, you can feed ten people for $500 per month. But the American society says $11,400 a year is barely enough, given the cost of living in the United States. This sum is a kind of moral requirement. A lower figure is unacceptable. There is a mimetic aspect, assuredly, in this consensus, since in the history of humanity most humans have never enjoyed such a standard of living, but this mimetic effect can be clearly claimed and justified openly.

ND

In the Middle Ages, there was, morally, no shame in being poor. Today it is a sign of absolute dereliction. Today, the poor feel

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persecuted. Aren’t they the latest avatar of the scapegoat phenomenon? RG

Yes, it’s a phenomenon of public opinion, but it’s not enough to condemn our society. For today there are people who live in unhappiness and resentment with a standard of living that most humans in all of human history would have envied them. We cannot condemn young people who feel inferior to the standards of our society, but we cannot condemn society in a radical way because it allows or creates this situation. It is all the same superior to what human history has known.

ND

There is a psychological element at play. You can feel inferior to someone, even if that doesn’t mean misery. The system works in such a way that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

RG

It’s true, and it’s a serious problem, but the traditional societies have never asked themselves this type of question and have never been bothered by inequalities.

ND

Today, people claim respect and dignity, because we keep talking to them about equality. They refuse indifference and contempt, even in abundance. Aren’t we like the aristocrats of the ancien régime who said “if they don’t have bread, let them eat brioche,” with all the haughtiness that implies?

RG

That’s absolutely true. However, things are happening. For example, Japan, which is becoming very rich, has always lived inwardly. However, its attitude has changed, and it has released more funds than those of the United States for aid to developing countries. This is the first time this has happened. That they feel obliged, in Japan, to do this shows that we live in a world that no longer bears any relation to what Asia was fifty years ago. The idea of financial aid to other countries would have been inconceivable.

ND

Your vision is always very global and based on the long term, but today bringing aid to countries that cannot pay their debts and that are on the verge of bankruptcy—isn’t this in the interest of the

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creditors themselves? It would be less a question of morality than of self-interest rightly understood, or even of commercial necessity. RG

Of course, but the immediate motivations don’t matter. I would say it’s comparable to nuclear deterrence. You shouldn’t ask too much of humans. It is both a selfish reasoning and an altruistic reasoning; it is already significant. It’s already a totally different world from the Mongol Empire in China. I am not a moralist. I speak from the anthropological point of view. I fully agree that our world is far from doing enough, that perhaps even it will self-destruct, but we must not forget that if we can be indignant and find injustice scandalous, that is already considerable progress. We deem this indignation insufficient, and we are right on the level of action, but it is natural for man to lose interest in other peoples. Nor should we disdain the notion of individual charity, because to invent charity is already in a certain way to institutionalize it. The Middle Ages created the hospitals, and this was a move toward the betterment of the modern world. We tend to look at this evolution in reverse and to judge according to the values of our time. Historically, this is nonsense. We must try to evaluate each era in its historical context.

ND

Jean-Pierre Dupuy considers that you are defending the status quo, and he adds: “I fear that it is too easy to use Girard’s work in the sense that he himself seems to designate. It is too tempting to use it to denigrate the liberation movements through which individuals, groups and peoples throughout the world intend to declare and enforce their autonomy, their individuality and their difference.”4

RG

He is referring to Things Hidden, an entirely theoretical book, which offers no precept for action, no direct application.

ND

Jean-Pierre Dupuy does not speak only of this book in particular, he refers to all of your work. It is logical that those who have been convinced by your demonstrations on the nature of violence seek out concrete solutions to them, and above all perhaps a more effective way of tackling the immense problems of our time. Are meditation

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and even the faith that is yours sufficient in the face of the children of the Third World who are dying of starvation and abuse? RG

I would say that the two attitudes are not mutually exclusive. But my books do not focus on the question of concrete action. In politics, situations are so mobile that I see no point in taking sides. For me, humans are constantly confronted with concrete decisions, and I don’t feel competent to criticize their decisions. I only ask that people take responsibility when they act. The concrete is always too complex for us to be able to take sides about it on the basis of theoretical considerations, however necessary they may be.

ND

You insisted that we owe our notion of justice to the Bible. You have explained elsewhere that the Old and New Testaments have so influenced the world for more than a thousand years that even peoples who have not been directly penetrated by biblical culture refer to them without knowing it when they come, rightly, to reproach our injustice toward them. So there are just behaviors and unjust behaviors.

RG

Absolutely. That said, there are many people who give themselves a good conscience in political action when they are simply motivated by ambition. I don’t believe that there are many political ambitions and actions in the world that are pure. We encounter so many mystifications in this area that it is good to be vigilant, especially when we know that they can take the most contradictory forms. I don’t see around me many politicians who do anything but obey mimetic motivations. That said, I don’t want to stigmatize politics too much. Above all, I believe that humans must recognize what they are. The same is true for writing. It is not because a writer writes out of ambition that his work should be totally challenged. A politician acts out of ambition. In other professions one seeks to earn money, as much money as possible; therefore, one must realize once and for all that no one has absolute moral authority to judge from above the fray.

ND

Doesn’t this apparent modesty have the consequence of encouraging the ambient cynicism, which systematically seeks perverse motives behind the most justified acts?

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RG

Maybe. This is why, as much as mimetic analysis is essential to the analysis of collective behavior and cultural mechanisms, it is just as perilous if it is used as a weapon against such and such an individual in particular, in other words, if one puts it at the service of one’s own mimetic desire. It is, of course, of all the temptations, the most irresistible. Our society is so complex that the type of analysis it requires does not yet exist. That is why I content myself with studying the ancients and the primitive. This, of course, has to do with our world, and that’s what the public is interested in. But I’m always embarrassed when people ask me what to do in such and such a concrete situation. I can only give a personal opinion, which may not be worth anything in four or five days. I also want to say that I speak out against certain circles that seek to make Christianity a servant of the social order. To say that all society is based on violence is to destroy this kind of agreement that a certain conservative Christianity seeks to perpetuate between “the saber and the aspergillum”5. But I can also be interpreted as a liberal thinker insofar as I say that equality is lack of differentiation. We can therefore find a justification of differences or hierarchies. I will say, in the end, that my position is essentially moderate because I see that the changes take place rather quickly and that those who want to accelerate the movement too much have motivations that are not far from resentment. We are caught in a whirlwind of transformations over which we have little control and which we must try to manage as little as possible. This is why it is difficult for me to say that I am right or left. When I find myself in a right-wing environment, my reactions are rather left- wing. Naturally, one can accuse me of having fabricated a system that allows me to contradict everyone, which makes me an incorrigible French intellectual! I recognize that I succeed above all as an old intellectual in my milieu, so that I cannot follow Dupuy in his concern for political commitment.

ND

Dupuy, however, has perfectly assimilated your system. What he suggests is an “epistemology of the in-between, a thought of human mediation, both communication and obstacle, neither totally transparent nor totally opaque . . . the paradoxical third included in our

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universe, the paradox accepted, contemplated, without destroying it.”6 RG

You have to see what world we live in. To say that we are going to restore the differences is perhaps a bit of an illusion. Above all, what must not be done is to weaken the differences that still exist. Even the demystifying itself, in such an approach, which consists in rethinking everything, is often, in my opinion, extraordinarily perverse. In the name of truth, we find ourselves in a desert. There is a phrase by Stendhal that I find admirable: “We don’t go back in the order of the passions.” We cannot go back and recreate the differences to escape the modern lack of differentiation. All we can do is respect the differences that exist.

ND

It would be a question, precisely, of valuing the differences, even the obstacles, so that an effort is necessary to touch the Other, instead of imagining wrongly that it is enough to press a button. You have shown very well that the greater the indifference, the stronger the mimesis, and therefore the more violence becomes generalized.

RG

Valuing obstacles is a two-edged sword. It is quite obvious that one can create antagonisms, which one did not suspect. That said, I am completely in favor of Dupuy’s work on self-reference and selforganization, which moreover brought together a lot of people in Cerisy at the time of the colloquium on self-organization.7

ND

Is it a way of recovering the mediation for something beneficial?

RG

Exactly. However, this type of intellectual activism seems a bit abstract to me, and it is difficult for me to take part in it personally.

ND

There has been a lot of talk about Ivan Illich on this subject. What is your attitude toward it? Is there a connection between your system of thought and the “necessary positive synergy between heteronomy and autonomy” that it recommends?8

RG

I find elements of analysis in Illich that seem extremely interesting to me, but I also observe traces of romanticism. Illich is a sociologist

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who thinks above all about action in the world, whereas I am a theoretician. The consequences to be drawn from my work? I don’t see why it should be up to me to do it. I think it can only be done at the level of concrete situations. However, there is no concrete situation in Dupuy’s book. I recognize its value and interest, and I also find in it an influence of social Christianity, which is a movement in which I feel at home, among friends who understand me, whom I appreciate very much. From my point of view, perhaps they secularize themselves a bit too much. Because my approach, on the contrary, consists in recognizing more and more the existence of original sin, which means that I hesitate less and less to oppose myself to the slogans of the time. Instead of seeing the evil in institutions, I see it in human relationships, which are becoming more and more formidable. What is most interesting for me in Dupuy and Dumouchel’s book is that it seeks to make the mimetic idea “work.” It emphasizes certain logical articulations of this process. He does it in a more scientific style, less literary than mine, more rigorous too, and that’s what I appreciate. ND

Dumouchel directly addresses the problem of scarcity and violence: “the law of scarcity is the primary constraint of economic systems, the fundamental economic fact, yet an explanation of violence by scarcity has an almost mathematical evidence.”9

RG

It would be a way of hiding the violence behind a so-called objective concept. It’s an attack on the liberal economy. It must be recognized that there is some truth in this reasoning.

ND

His reasoning is entirely based on your demonstration of crowd movements which are unpredictable. He writes, for example, “violence and economic order are indistinguishable. An identical situation founds both. The original situation supposed to establish the economy is undecidable, from it violence can arise just as easily as the economy. The paradox of the economy is that it is incapable of differentiating itself from violence.”10

RG

What is extraordinary in modern society, precisely, is that it allows positive mimetic rivalries. These have made it possible to obtain

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an abundance never known before. So, in modern abundance, not everything is bad. ND

Dumouchel retorts that “envy and covetousness come highly recommendable because they are the motors of economic activity, and the economy . . . becomes a morality higher than morality.”11 How can you stigmatize mimicry in certain relatively harmless areas and not in the crucial area of the economy?

RG

Phenomena in which evil is linked to good, where there is an ambiguity between good and evil, are in fact a product of Christianity. Generally speaking, on the scale of several centuries.

ND

We can say that most men no longer live with the sole concern of feeding themselves, that there has been progress.

RG

Wealth is scandalous for many reasons, but the situation of the poorest has improved all the same. I’m not saying this to defend the system, but because the facts are there. Are the statistics that are published ideological? I do not know. It is obvious that communism, with all its faults, succeeded in eradicating famine from a number of regions of the world. Today, if we place ourselves face to face with collectivism and liberalism, I believe that we cannot escape a sort of compromise, since the USSR and certain countries of Eastern Europe have liberalized. The way in which Dumouchel explains how scarcity took hold in England in the eighteenth century is admirable, and I agree with his analysis. But I also believe that it is very difficult for us to judge past societies, and we should not idealize them. I think it would be enough to go back to the fourteenth century, if only for a few moments, to make us appreciate the benefits of the current abundance. Because famines existed, the plague existed, and witches were burned. This society also produced its outcasts. We are therefore criticized for the injustices of our world, but we cannot wish to go back. Even in Russia, the situation is better today than in the last century.

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ND

I quote Dumouchel: “In a world where relations between rivals are characterized by a relative absence of overt violence, the conclusion of the conflicts generated by the mimesis of appropriation will more often consist of a material loss than in physical violence. It is, then, the refusal of the third party to help and support the loser that will sanction his failure and transform it into a real killing, much more than the blows dealt him by the winner.”12

RG

This is what is most interesting in Dumouchel, this analysis of the mimetic tension, which comes to such a degree that it creates indifference. I would simply have questions about the degree of social integration of previous societies. Moreover, everything Dumouchel describes as happening in the eighteenth century is already present in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. But personally I always come back to religion because, in my opinion, the only reason to act to save the world from definitive extinction is to be found outside this world. I find Malraux’s famous phrase absolutely true: “the twentieth century will be religious or it will not be.” Each passing day makes it more evident.

ND

Should we not also be particularly vigilant on this subject and ensure that fanatics of all stripes do not destroy the freedoms so dearly acquired?

RG

The great mystery about the religious is this: The great religious traditions are all respectable. They are the source of great works of art, a fact that allows us to cling to what is highest in a cultural tradition, but, to the extent that they allow us to identify with a culture, they cause maximum differentiation from other cultures. In other words, the highest values of each culture are also what is most particular about them. What is highest and greatest is also what is most opposed to neighboring traditions. It is therefore too easy to explain the conflicts by fanaticism. What gives meaning to life in each of these religious traditions is also what isolates them from the others.

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ND

This amounts to saying that religion, like any other cultural manifestation, is human and plays the double role of both beneficent and maleficent scapegoat.

RG

The summits of these different religious traditions cannot come together by their own means. I will be accused of Christian imperialism, and I cannot deny it, since I say that only Christianity can recognize the proper value of cultures and religions without opposing them. Christianity sees them as the foundations from which the cross takes on its full meaning. We must not forget that it was Christianity that invented the distinction between the political and the religious. Humanity is hundreds of thousands of years old, and this discovery has never been made before, even though it took several centuries for it to become a reality.

ND

Didn’t you say that all human institutions come from religion?

RG

I say indeed that their genesis is religious, but also that their secularization is an extremely important historical phenomenon. I am not saying that there is no difference between a modern university and an ancient initiation rite; I am simply saying that, in the modern university, there are vestiges of the initiation rites, and if we remove them, they will reappear in one form or another.

ND

Dumouchel defines the modern world as levels of balance that are accompanied by ever more intense rivalries. I quote: “The individual consequence of mimetic desire, of the aggravation of rivalries is envy, jealousy, impotent hatred, resentment. . . . It is also wealth and abundance, real or desired. .  .  . It is also the misery and the abandonment of each one to his own fate.”13

RG

I consider that Dupuy and Dumouchel have contributed something very important to mimetic theory by showing that economic equilibrium is a factor of stability at the heart of the crisis. This is called mass production: as many people as possible can afford

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exactly the same thing. Consumption replaces, in a way, circus games among the Romans. It’s not very brilliant, but it’s progress all the same. ND

The victim mechanism is found in L’Enfer des choses.

RG

Dupuy sees the strong and fundamental aspects of the system. He corrected many false notions on the economy, because he has a logical mind, well versed in all forms of mathematical reasoning. In L’Enfer des choses, he interpreted mimetic configurations as creations of forms. Let’s look, for example, at what he calls pseudo-narcissism. We see human relationships like the Valenod–Rênal rivalry in The Red and the Black. Julien as object of desire acquires a real value from a double error. Rênal believes that Valenod wants to hire Julien as his children’s tutor, and Valenod starts looking for him because Rênal is looking for him. In terms of economic genesis, it is a good example of an object of speculation. It is misleading to say that it is a subjective phenomenon. It is neither objective nor subjective, but intersubjective. Intersubjective forms have their own stability. They are not eternal; they are fragile, but they exist.

ND

Alceste and Célimène, in The Misanthrope, belong to the same phenomenon.

RG

Of course. Célimène needs the adulation of all the young people around her, because it is the necessary condition of the love she has for herself.

ND

That also explains the masochism of Alceste, because he is part of the same system.

RG

That’s why in a way they are doubles, and the situation could very well be reversed. What Molière does not show, and what Shakespeare does, are the reversals of situation.

ND

We can imagine that, when Alceste decides to go and isolate himself in the desert, Célimène falls in love with him. This is what happens in

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Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s famous novel in verse. Eugene falls in love with Tatyana, whom he has always rejected, when she is married and no longer thinks of him. RG

Pushkin is an extraordinary writer for mimetism. Eugene Onegin is a very great work.

ND

In economics as in psychology, we see that situations can change completely, very quickly. We are immersed in instability.

RG

The important thing is to understand the system. We must recognize the fact that we cannot predict certain events. It can be demonstrated scientifically that it is impossible to predict them.

ND

Is this also true for physics?

RG

Yes, and that’s why we invited Prigogine to Stanford. Prigogine speaks of open thermo-dynamic systems. They are forms of equilibrium that emerge from disorder. We cannot predict what will come of it, because it is linked to randomness. In other words, we cannot predict whether a victim system at the start will end up in a monarchical system, or to an Aztec-type sacrificial system, or whether it’s going to turn into theater or some other derived form. It is absolutely impossible to predict in advance. The only thing we can predict is that we will end up with one of these forms. He speaks of bifurcation. The bifurcation is the moment when one moves toward one or the other solution. Prigogine demonstrated this with a very simple experiment. We take a group of ants on the one hand and something they like to eat on the other, and between the two we place a board in which we have made two holes. Ants have two strictly identical access paths to reach food. At the beginning, the two holes are used by a certain number of ants, but from a certain moment, the mass of ants will choose one of the holes rather than the other, without any causal relation. There is no reason for ants to go to one hole rather than the other. In other words, the equilibrium can emerge from any given factor.

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ND

Is it the “Panurge’s sheep” phenomenon?

RG

Panurge’s sheep are a good example of a scapegoat. And there is still a “sheep of Panurge” phenomenon that works. But in Prigogine’s experiments, the beauty of the demonstration is that there is no motivation, no reason for one path to predominate. As long as we have not understood this type of arbitrariness, we have not understood the victimary system. However, what interests Prigogine, Dupuy, and others in the scapegoat system is that it functions according to another logic that is non-deterministic. It is also called “order by noise” or “order by disorder.” Personally, I have no doubt this type of research is connected to mine. This phenomenon is appearing everywhere. Recently, an article about this appeared in the New York Times about the weather. Some try to think of the formation of time from emergences, because we also call these phenomena without a cause emergences. But we cannot speak of effects, because there is no cause.

ND

This research correlates with your own.

RG

I have seen many objections to the principle of mimesis saying that it was a vicious circle, that I saw imitation everywhere. And now people like Dupuy sweep away all these criticisms by showing that it is about a system of emergences, that it is these research groups, which are interesting by delivering us from determinism. This confirms that human relationships function as emergences. Of course, Prigogine’s research appears at a particular moment. It is very important for the history of thought that, in the human sciences or in the hard sciences, the same modes of thought appear at the same time; it is exciting! My link with Jean-Pierre Dupuy, with Michel Serres, with Henri Atlan, is obvious and shows that we have a common way of understanding this type of thought. It is obviously very controversial. In the sciences, the Prigogine scheme is as controversial as mine in the human sciences. But at present, without crediting European antecedents, this same approach is making a prodigious breakthrough among American researchers.

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ND

In other words, they do not recognize the paternity of this discovery, its real authors, in Europe.

RG

I’ve seen articles in Newsweek and Time and elsewhere where Prigogine wasn’t even quoted. As for me, obviously they don’t know me since I work outside the field of science, but on the side of human sciences. But when I started, I imagined that ethnologists would react, if not positively, at least by examining and discussing the system. Not at all! They initially challenge it without looking at it. They are unable to see that there is a principle of logic here that cannot be thought of empirically. They fail to understand that genetic thought could exist and that principles outside of direct observation could have value. They remain at the level of a rather vulgar positivism. They observe, and they record the observations. Take the Mythologies of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and look at the index: the word “violence” is not there. We find there, so to speak, no mention of religion; there are only alternating outcomes of duels of differential oppositions. Obviously, they exist, but their interest seems very limited to me.

ND

In Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s book, Ordres et Désordres, we read: “To know is not to recognize, but to be born together, that is to say to create. In the environment, there is initially, for the self-organizing system, only chaos. Not chaos per se, only for the system. The astonishing thing is that this latter will imprint its own form on it and thereby give it meaning, at least partially. Henri Atlan has devoted many works to it, and Edgar Morin takes up the essential ideas of this transmutation of disorder into order, of the unorganized into meaning.”14

RG

That’s an excellent quote, and I would like to underline the word “self-organization,” which is the expression of Dupuy. On a theoretical level, I owe a great deal to those whose names have been cited. In France, in particular, they conferred on me a kind of intellectual legitimacy while literary and anthropological circles called me a joker. Meeting them was therefore very important to me. The astonishing thing is that there has been more interested in my work among economists than among ethnologists.

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ND

Maybe economists are more open, more realistic.

RG

There are above all particular moments of possibility within disciplines. I arrived at a time when ethnology was in a state of theoretical instability on the one hand, and, on the other, a kind of differentialist anti-intellectualism prevailed that was quite hostile to Western anthropology. This consists of saying that only cultures themselves have the right to speak for themselves. There is a certain spirit of 1968, of which Lucien Goldmann was moreover a partisan, which represented a kind of scuttling of Western ethnology. But Goldmann had foreseen that the revolutionary aspirations of Parisian students in 1968 would have certain adverse effects on intellectual life. He had foretold a certain intellectual terrorism, the consequence of which would be that a certain number of people would no longer dare to think what they think, or to say what they think. I was very struck by what he told me, and what followed proved him right. I would go so far as to say that Soviet-style jargon has taken hold in three-quarters of the universities. This represents a problem, but it is not excessively serious, because we live in such a pluralistic universe that ideas still manage to emerge, to be heard, to circulate. But there are parts of the university that function like crowds, mimetic crowds. That is to say that one is influenced there by fashion and by the lowest sociological and media pressures. We might say that we lived for fifty years in France at a time when the Marxist majority imposed its point of view. Malraux, for example. He was adored by the Marxists, but when he left them, he had to die to regain his rightful place.

ND

In recent years, you have held a certain number of symposiums on the emergences of which you spoke earlier. What was the success?

RG

In 1981, we had the very successful Disorder and Order symposium,15 attended by five or six Nobel Prize winners: Prigogine, Castoriadis, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who contributed a great deal to its organization, Michel Serres. There was also Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Prize in Physics, and also an Italian Nobel Prize winner. Another symposium, entitled Origins,16 was also very successful last year. Last May, it was

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the Paradoxes of Self-Reference, self-reference being linked to selforganization and phenomena of emergence.17 This happened under the aegis of the interdisciplinary program that we created two years ago here at Stanford. But the first symposium, that of 1981, took place under the aegis of my department. ND

It is quite extraordinary to have succeeded in organizing a symposium of this type in a French department.

RG

It was the time when the symposiums attracted people from all over the world. Jonas Salk was there too. He is the inventor of the polio vaccine. He is not really part of these research groups, or these movements of thought, but he is very Francophile.

ND

Were the speeches and debates held in French?

RG

They took place half in French and half in English, with simultaneous translation. We had invited Michel Albert, Raymond Barre’s economist, someone who straddles the line between the right and the left. He’s an absolutely delightful man whom I met when my book Things Hidden came out. He told me something that no one else had told me, which was extraordinarily true, and which gave me infinite pleasure, and that is that the most important chapter of that book is the one on the judgment of Solomon. This struck me all the more since this reading of the judgment of Solomon is a question that I had worked on for years. What fascinated me were the two doubles, and the fact that it was an anti-sacrificial reading par excellence. It is about the woman who refuses the sacrifice. It is from here that the non-sacrificial interpretation of Christ’s death becomes understandable. Splitting the child in two, reconciling the two women by giving them each half as if to eat, that is sacrifice. The one who chooses the death of the child so that her rival does not have it is totally mimetic. In other words, her rival is more important than what is at stake in the dispute. Now, the solution proposed by Solomon, which consists in cutting the child in two, is the sacrificial solution. Can we use the same word to designate the sacrifice of the

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child, which is violent and sacred, and to designate the sacrifice of the mother who says: “may the child live, even if my rival must keep it”? And can we say, like the psychoanalyst, that this is masochism? The figura Christi, in this text, is not Solomon, of course, as the Middle Ages believed, but the prostitute who sacrificed herself to save the child. This story contains all the essentials. It is a prodigious text, which surpasses all the others. The admirable thing about the Bible is that it speaks from texts like this. There are two definitions of sacrifice here. Between the sacrifice of the bad prostitute and that of the good prostitute, there is the whole of human history. Every detail of this text sheds light on a prodigious truth. These two women are doubles, and it is not really known which is the mother by blood. But the real mother is the one who is ready to give up the child in order that it may live. It also has a meaning at the level of education, at the level of psychology, and beyond that, it is the image of Christ who would rather die than kill. ND

I imagine that you intend to continue your work on the theme of sacrifice?

RG

Yes. I must take up the whole question of sacrifice in relation to Christianity and in relation to the great Eastern religions.18 Hinduism will play an important role. Among the Hindus, there is a great reflection on sacrifice, which is very particular, which does not exist in the Western world, and which is very mysterious. It treats the sacrifice almost as if it were a physical entity. And at the same time, there are doubles. There is expulsion. There is a very deep knowledge of sacrificial mechanisms. I will work on this in relation to Christianity. Then there is the anti-sacrifice of the great Hindu mysticism, which refuses all violence. But it is a mysticism that abandons the world, that tries to escape from life. I think it’s very different from the Bible, the New Testament, the idea that men have to transcend sacrifice in a way. The East never says that. The East says to us: “leave the world.”

ND

You also spoke of the doctrine of karma, on the universal sequence of causes and effects.

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RG

This is the sacrificial cycle. It is also the eternal return of Nietzsche, and even well before him, of Empedocles. It is a vision according to which the cultural orders wear out in disorder and are reformed thanks to the emissary victim. It is certain that karma is full of profound truths. But what characterizes the Bible, in my opinion, and especially the New Testament, is that we always return to a collective death and that we relive it in order to go beyond it. This is unthinkable for Eastern religions, because they always seek to withdraw from violence. This means that there is always a kind of indifference to the Other. While prophetic Judaism and Christianity say: “It is better to be sacrificed than to sacrifice the Other,” but one cannot leave the world, one cannot turn one’s back on the problem. The East does not see things like that. It only tries to get out of the world. But today, in a world where man is capable of destroying himself, everyone knows that apocalyptic thought has something to do with what is most real and most terrible among us. If we read the Gospels, they tell us that we are responsible before God for what happens in the world. In the Parables, it is always the departure of the father who will return one day to demand accountability. It should not be placed at the level of Heaven or Hell. Today, apocalyptic thinking is still present insofar as Christianity is the only one capable of integrating the threats that weigh on the world and, at the same time, of making us capable of action to ward off these threats. One cannot do this in the total absence of meaning. The total life of the world and our personal life become one and the same. Most humans just think the world will last as long as their own lives, and the rest is none of their business. Only, today, the religious, and the religious of the Christian type, can change the course of things.

ND

We come back to the problem of the freedom/truth relationship.

RG

I believe there is absolute truth and relative truths. There is also absolute freedom and relative freedoms. We cannot speak of freedom only as Sartre does, of a freedom of the gaze, to make sense. This seems excessive, or rather not Catholic enough, from my point of

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view. I think condemning the world should be avoided because such condemnation is always very proud. It is necessary to see at what point the world is powerless, is weak, to see how Revelation is constantly betrayed there. It must also be understood that the Christian failure is more serious than the Judaic failure that preceded it. This is not a reason to condemn the world; it is a reason to condemn ourselves. We have no right to put ourselves in God’s place. God knows, however, that I tend to do it myself. It is the permanent temptation of the writer who gives lessons to everyone. I would like not to give any, but how does one avoid this pitfall?

CHAPTER 7

France and Its Myths

ND

Does the French Revolution inspire you to comment on it in terms of mimesis? I know you are interested in symbols and you are interested in the sacred king. According to you, what is the role of the king in the French monarchy, and what is the meaning of parricide?

RG

You say parricide, but we could rather say “murder of the king.” We must not forget that the founding murder makes the father, and not the father who makes the founding murder. However, Louis XVI did not play the paternal role at all. He was too young, too soft to be a father figure. For me, everything comes from the victim; the king comes from the victim, so no need to go through the father.

ND

In our particular case, Louis XVI was first king, then victim. How do you interpret it?

RG

In mimetic theory, you always have to put everything upside down. So let’s start by asking “what is a king?” It is wrong to speak of a sacred king (roi sacré), because it gives the impression that the king comes first and the sacred second. It’s not at all the case. The sacred

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creates the king, because, once again, what is a king? It is a victim who is sacrificed and who, in certain circumstances, takes power. We are afraid of this victim even before killing him. This victim that we want to recreate is a complex phenomenon. The sacrifice develops toward royalty when the power of the victim, before his death, is stronger than death. In other words, the king is a victim who invents power by not dying and by being worshiped alive. What personally interests me is the genesis of the office of king. ND

Is this how the monarchy was born in France?

RG

Of course not. In France, the monarchy arrived as the heir to all sorts of events. It must be said that in the Middle Ages appear certain sacred characters, victims, from royalty. But generally speaking, French royalty is already a derivative. In Egypt, on the other hand, there are undoubtedly kings sacrificed at the origin of the birth of the state. But the king’s sacrifice must have ceased in Egypt thousands of years ago. What matters is that as the king gains more power, he is killed less and less. The French monarchy is interesting in that it was already almost completely desacralized, despite the king’s coronation in Reims. It had lost all its strength, and the sacred didn’t really come back with the guillotine. At the same time, the king’s sacrifice was not enough since there was no return to the sacred monarchy.

ND

The death of the king was intended to found the republic. Which was more important, the murder of the king or the murder of Robespierre?

RG

I would say both. It’s a bit like Brutus and Caesar. The one that should be studied closely is Saint-Just. Saint-Just saw the king’s death as the foundation of the republic, but maybe he was wrong. Because we are in the Christian world, and sacrifice doesn’t really work anymore. Consequently, on this level, it is much less interesting to speak of the French monarchy than to speak of the kings of Babylon! In our world, nothing works the same way anymore. What

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was left of sacred monarchy only came to light when the incest accusation against the queen came up. With the accusation of incest against Marie-Antoinette, and on the other hand the king’s brother, Philippe Egalité, who plays the role of the murderer, we find ourselves in the world of Oedipus. We see very well here the way in which a myth can be created. There would have been sacred monarchy again if this event had been interpreted entirely on a mythical level, if an oral tradition had created a myth from these characters, instead of seeing the events reported by nineteenth-century historians. ND

Parricide and incest have always been considered crimes par excellence, absolute crimes, why?

RG

These are the crimes that have the most destructive effect on the very essence of society. These are crimes against the family, crimes which cause the lack of differentiation. In Oedipus the King, they are defined as the mixture of fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters. They are not defined as they would be today, but as undifferentiation, which is very revealing. The accusation of parricide and incest falls on the person considered responsible for the lack of differentiation in the community. It is therefore one of the typical accusations addressed to the scapegoat.

ND

How is it that these two crimes, which are characteristic of mythology, are found in Freud?

RG

This is a very interesting question. One would be tempted to say that this is a sort of return to the primitive. This reappearing accusation dates back to the dawn of time. But we must think in a scientific perspective that does not formulate accusation. The Oedipus complex is, in my opinion, what is most false in Freud. But we could show that in our time, all the themes of violence and the sacred reappear, generally in a mystified way. True sacred foundations are not made by the guillotine, preceded by judgment. I can only say that the writing of history misses something important when it does not see that the accusation of

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incest is part of a symbolic ensemble which comes from another source. What is certain is that we would be just as much mistaken in giving an interpretation drawn purely from the logic of the sacred monarchy as when we find it solely on a historical plane. Of the sacred, we only have vestiges left. ND

There was a sacrifice all the same, with the idea of putting an end to the monarchical regime definitively. Now, precisely, there has been a return of the Bourbons. Would the restoration have been avoided if the king had been spared?

RG

Most likely. The superiority of the Anglo-Saxon system over ours is that it did without a founder.

ND

England has however killed one of its kings.

RG

In the seventeenth century, yes. But by bringing back the sacred in 1792, we resurrected the monarchy, and we brought about the restoration. And yet, we haven’t really founded democracy, because we can no longer found anything through violence.

ND

Did not the revolution mark the beginning of the modern era by eliminating, in particular, the external mediation linked to the king, that is to say, by putting the king in the same rank before the law as any citizen?

RG

The modern era is, among other things, compulsory military service, levied en masse, general mobilization. This is why, if we are seeking to detect the presence of symbolic elements of this type, they must also be interpreted with great caution.

ND

Could we, today in France, assume the revolution as it is, as we accept our parents as they are, without falling into ideological confrontation?

RG

I think, of course, that we must accept the French Revolution, while condemning its excesses. It seems to me that statesmen like de Gaulle and Mitterrand have done a lot to bring people together, to create a new image of France.

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This right–left confrontation as it existed in the nineteenth century was truly appalling. This was due to the revolution. Today, the right and the left do not agree on economic questions, on the taxes of the rich, on the problems of poverty, but that is no longer inexpiable. The sanctity of the American Constitution makes the French smile a little, but I find this Constitution superior to the preceding ones. ND

Don’t you think that this sanctification of a Constitution now more than two centuries old makes the United States an extremely conservative country despite its modernity?

RG

I consider the American Constitution to represent, from a certain point of view, the best of the eighteenth century, in particular for the separation of powers. It must also be noted that this is the anchor of American society. It is above all the symbol of unity for immigrants from all over the world. It plays an essential assimilating role on the symbolic level, which the founding fathers had probably not foreseen. In France, the levity with which it is evoked, after the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth Republic, the possibility of a Sixth Republic, and why not a Seventh or an Eighth, seems odious to those who have experienced the consequences of political instability during the rise of Nazism, who have experienced defeat and the occupation. Nations have their specific vices: in the United States it is the mania of firearms; in France it is the automobile and the changing of the constitution.

ND

How do you analyze the sacrificial elements of history?

RG

I would like to do a sacrificial history. But instead of being of long duration, it would be of an even greater duration. There is a book that talks about just that, written by an author who is also an Italian publisher, Roberto Calasso, of the Adelphi Press of Milan. His book appeared in a French edition, and I did a television show with him. It is a sacrificial interpretation of history, especially the history of France, starting with Talleyrand and the revolution. He interprets the story there as a kind of outburst. It is an extremely curious work that should be read: it opens up historical,

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literary, and sociological perspectives. His vision of sacrifice is close to mine. He was influenced by my work. He also devotes a few pages to me; however, his interpretation is not entirely the same as mine. The title is The Ruin of Kasch.1 According to him, I have a modern demystifying side and at the same time a traditionalist, syncretic, religious, pre-Christian approach, which is not his. He does not see the role of Christianity as I see it. He thinks that our world is completely out of order without finding any redemptive compensation for this situation. I am looking for meaning in history. For me, the current mess also has a positive meaning. ND

And this kingdom of Kasch?

RG

It is an oriental, sacrificial kingdom, in which the king is killed. The kingdom is replaced by another sacrificial system. What interests me is that this work presents every form of thought, of differentiation, of calculation, as sacrificial. For my part, I note that this notion of mimesis and sacrifice is in the process of penetrating very deeply into Western consciousness.

ND

You are among those who think that the English constitutional monarchy could have been a model for France. But today, nationalism is an outdated notion, and the English have a long way to go to renounce this nationalism.

RG

There is a success story in modern English history that is not ours; it must be recognized. It is therefore normal that there should be resistance to Europe in England. The British found themselves very small in their islands. They experienced a kind of immense defeat within the victory, which is the weight of current history. But when they look back to their past, they are proud. I don’t justify their ill will when it comes to the European Union, but I understand that they have more to defend than Germany, Italy, or even France.

ND

De Gaulle also left us a romantic image of France.

RG

During the Resistance, this vision was beneficial, because it was necessary to free the French from the complex into which the Second

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World War and the Fourth Republic had plunged them. We must not forget that the Fourth Republic had to come to beg for money from the Americans, ten years after the war! ND

In your opinion, who is de Gaulle’s heir today? Is it Jacques Chirac?

RG

No, I think in a way it’s François Mitterrand. Because it has the legitimacy, because the French people decided it. De Gaulle’s heir is necessarily the president of the republic. There is also the fact that his approach is one of appeasement and reason. I was favorable to Pierre Mendès-France, and to de Gaulle, basically, for the same reasons.

ND

Don’t you think that one of the great successes of our republic is less political than intellectual? Our intellectual life is a product of the republic and the secular public school system.

RG

Of course. I am not at all opposed to secularization, to the democratization of education. The public school, the university, the grandes écoles have been great successes. Even today, what France possesses that is most precious is its intellectual life. Not only is it very much alive, but there is an audience to take an interest in it, thirty to forty thousand people to buy the books that matter. This was already true in the nineteenth century, at a time when the intellectual life of Germany was completely entrenched in the universities. In France, there used to be the court and the city; today there is the university and the city, counting here France as a whole, because the provinces are more attentive than Paris. It is a very precious thing, unique in the world, and efforts should be made to conserve this public audience, to keep it alive. Its goodwill should not be abused too much. Let’s face it, it’s the French bourgeoisie—this bourgeoisie so vilified by the writers of the last two centuries—who conveys the ideas. If it completely ceases to exist, French writers will realize that it had merits. For this enlightened bourgeoisie transcends ideological divisions. The reading public is neither right nor left. It is quite simply the French intellectual public. There is a Parisian life that seems to

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me to exist insofar as it offers a rallying point to this public. People say a lot of bad things about television, and I myself say a lot of bad things about it, but it can play a beneficial role. The fact that a show like Apostrophes exists, even if all those who appear there are not quality writers, made the Americans say, “Only the French can make a television program about literature a success with seven million viewers.” ND

It’s not possible in the United States?

RG

It’s not possible. This public does not exist in America. Even McNeil and Lehrer, who offer a program on PBS, the cultivated channel, do not manage to present book reviews regularly. The literary public does not exist there, and there cannot be an intellectual life, it seems to me, when there is no public to be interested in it. This public need not necessarily be an elite, but it must be large enough.

ND

Yet there are many academics, in Germany as in the United States.

RG

In my opinion, the major defect of American-style specialization is that specialists remain confined to specialties that have no real existence in terms of thought. It is a question of cutting into edible pieces the enormous university research. The result is that we mostly read mediocre books. The choice is so small that, statistically, it is impossible to read good books. What is most lacking in the United States is the literature of ideas. There is also a kind of cultural ethnocentrism, which seems very dangerous to me. Recently it was discovered that seven out of ten Americans cannot locate the Soviet Union on a map, one out of ten Americans cannot locate the United States. In matters of geography, the ignorance is truly incredible. It even seems that children no longer know how to read the time on a dial, because of digital watches. There are also signs of cultural collapse. It is true that this is said of each new generation. But I think there is still cause for concern.

ND

Today, in the field of technology, France is one of the most advanced countries in the world, but the average American is not aware of it.

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RG

They don’t recognize France, that’s for sure. I remember saying to someone one day that the invention of radial tires was due to Michelin, which incidentally became the first tire manufacturer in the world. He laughed in my face, finding the idea that a Frenchman could have invented such a thing extraordinarily comical. He didn’t believe it.

ND

Most Americans believe that the fastest train in the world is Japanese. Very few know, or want to know, that it’s the TGV.

RG

The TGV is a great success, but because the French are too obsessed with technological success, it’s the only thing that matters to them now. I don’t like the spirit of extreme competition of the technocrats either.

ND

Aren’t we in full mimetic mode, obsessed with the American model?

RG

Americans have never learned to sell abroad, which causes them enormous problems. They are as provincial as the French on the international market. The American market itself is big enough for them to think they can make do with it. But today they’ve lost a lot of their industries to the Japanese, to the Koreans, and maybe they’re losing the computers.

ND

Bad relations among humans, the impossibility for them to get along, that’s how you define original sin. Should we read Genesis from a purely metaphorical point of view?

RG

No, but you have to read together, as a whole, the early chapters, including Abel and Cain. In my view, Cain and Abel are the culmination of original sin.

ND

It therefore leads to murder.

RG

It leads to murder.

ND

The original sin is the fact that men kill each other. Therefore, it is not sexuality as such.

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RG

No. Eve is the vehicle of desire for Adam, as the serpent is the vehicle of desire for Eve. Sexuality is present in the sentence “and they perceived that they were naked,” but this is a consequence of sin, not sin itself. I think it is a mistake to oversimplify Saint Augustine who decreed that the original sin was sensuality. His text is much more complicated than that. Moreover, sensuality is not the subject of taboos only in the Western world, or in the Christian world. Primitive societies are actually much more repressive. Why are there prohibitions attached to sexuality? Quite simply because men kill each other because of it. Women can die giving birth; men kill themselves because of women. Religions tell much more truth about sexuality than anything that can be told in our time. All religious taboos reveal truths to us about sexuality, truths that, moreover, reappear at every moment. There are natural phenomena. There are laws. There are also diseases. If we break certain rules, if we behave in a certain way, we will have to pay the price. Drugs, unconstrained sexuality, all of this comes at a cost. Whether we believe in it or not, the laws of nature reappear on their own. This is not at all to say that it is a punishment from God, but if we are talking about natural laws, let us recognize them as they are. They were established by God, of course, but it is much better to say that biological sequences which favor the cultivation of microbes than saying that God is responsible, that He punishes, chastises those who break his laws. Current culture denounces all forms of self-control; as soon as it comes to discipline we shout “taboo,” “puritanism.” However, we are in a world where it is enough to press a button to start an atomic war. Self-control has never been more necessary. This is no doubt why there is a double standard in the United States. Television, which in the name of sexual liberation offers pornography to everyone, is ready to pillory a presidential candidate who dances too intimately with a lady. You see the aberration in which we live here. From the moment America loses its morality, it demands it of its presidents. They are a kind of scapegoat. American presidents are heroes for the first two years in office and victims for the next two years. In France, we use the expression “state of grace,” which is the opposite of the scapegoat.

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ND

The state of grace does not last more than a few months. This privilege is temporary.

RG

To understand the sacred king, just look at what happens in politics, and how politicians wear themselves out. The phenomena of sacred royalty, which seem very mysterious to us, are only much more accentuated forms of what we know from our politicians.

ND

Why did the Church, for long centuries, have to preach chastity, to present the body and sexuality as diabolical? It was the other extreme.

RG

This has nothing to do with Christianity proper. There were periods of puritanism, which were due to other causes. Often these periods follow times of great laxity. In France, we experienced a period of puritanism under the Third Republic, which was utterly secular. At the same time, the period we are living through will no doubt be followed by a new movement of puritanism. To say that it is the Church which imposed it is ridiculous, it is the absolute scapegoat. I protest against these extreme historical simplifications. But, even in the most puritanical periods of our history, we have never had anything comparable to the sexual taboos of primitive societies. I am not, by the way, a partisan of a puritanical society, but I would like to say something in defense of chastity. Today we attack people who inflict hardships on themselves in the name of God and transcendence, while we see women suffering, getting sick by depriving themselves of food out of absolute vanity, out of mimetic contagion.2 Many men and women impose appalling regimes on themselves, which are a veritable Hell, immanently, out of concern for public opinion, out of fascination with others. Dostoevsky is the first modern writer to have described the little young man who, out of Napoleonic ambition, Julien Sorel–style, makes more delirious forms of asceticism than those of the monks of the Middle Ages.

ND

We invent new forms of ascetic life that are based on . . .

RG

. . . madness! On mimetic desire, on the desire to please.

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ND

Is this a kind of mysticism in reverse?

RG

I think that today we are experiencing the collapse of this sort of sexual obsession which has lasted since Saint Augustine and which was relayed by Freud. This is a very interesting turn; for what is collapsing is both the illusion that the evil in man is sexuality, and the other illusion that evil is the repression of sexuality. Neither are true. First, sexuality has never been repressed in the Christian world as much as is said. To realize this, it suffices to compare it to Islam. Feminists would like to be anti-Christian, but they see clearly that, when faced with Islam, they inevitably find themselves on the side of our world. Our world exaggerated the superiority of the West; in the seventeenth century, it prided itself on it as if it were solely responsible for it, and it was wrong. But today we do the opposite, and we are even more wrong. It is quite obvious that the imitation of the West by the whole world is not wrong. As soon as so-called primitive peoples are put in the presence of Christianity, the typewriter, the bicycle, they know very well that it is better than what they have. To tell them that it is much worse is precisely to despise them, because we too cannot do without these things. They do not belong to us. The fact that the West is several centuries ahead or that it was by chance for several centuries the bearer of a Revelation, which it ceaselessly betrays and from which it benefits at the same time, is insignificant. What we should say to these peoples is not to do what we are doing, while recognizing that what we bring is nonetheless extraordinary. Besides, they are too intelligent not to know it. Even Islam today does not repudiate the world. Technology increases the power of humans; it is neither good nor bad. But if human freedom misuses it, it has consequences as terrible as they are beneficial. The primitive blacksmiths were considered as sacred, because they held both good and evil. Today we have the same illusion about computers. Computers are inherently neither good nor bad, but their users bear a heavy responsibility. Similarly, heroin and cocaine are not inherently bad. It is consumption that is bad. The problem is that these truths were undoubtedly badly formulated, because they were lived in terror, sacred terror.

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ND

Nature is coming back in force, through ecology.

RG

No doubt. But the ecological movements tend to sanctify nature, to make of it a kind of goddess, while humans would be monsters who violate it. The Bible is perfectly right to say to humans “nature is yours, you can dispose of it for yourselves since it belongs to God.”

ND

But humanity is part of nature, we cannot live without it. Shouldn’t we respect it, feel solidarity with our environment?

RG

Of course, but it is also true to say that humans are the master of nature. They have the right to make dams on the rivers.

ND

There are dams that cause ecological and sometimes human disasters.

RG

Because humans exercise their authority over nature in an insane way. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to want to return to the natural life of the Indians of the Middle West plateaus.

ND

The Greens never said that.

RG

There is a certain ecological mystique that says it in a certain way. The truth is that given the density of the earth’s population, the only way humanity has in order to cope is to use technology intelligently for the salvation of the planet.

ND

Use the technology, for example, to produce ozone?

RG Maybe. ND

According to you, the sacred, which can no longer be expressed directly in religion, finds a roundabout way of manifesting itself in various cultural forms.

RG

This is precisely the importance of the role of Péguy in France. He embodied the reconciliation between the religious and the secular, at the level of education and culture. Péguy is both the teaching spirit and the Catholic faith. He therefore plays a very important role in the movement of social Christianity in the twentieth century. He is

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the symbol of a France that would have gone beyond the struggle between clericals and anticlericals, issuing in a Dreyfusard, tolerant, social France. This social Catholicism played an important role because it produced writers like Maritain, Claudel, Mauriac. Among French intellectuals, if there is a group that has escaped totalitarian temptations, from both sides, it is this one. The others have all been tempted, either by communism or by National Socialism. They, on the other hand, have been absolutely intransigent to both sides. Obviously, Claudel wrote a particularly unsavory ode in honor of Pétain, because he wanted to have one of his plays performed. However, when we read Claudel’s diary, we realize that he remained faithful to his masters of the Third Republic. He defended them, while deploring the mess of the times. Intellectuals like Mauriac, Bernanos, Maritain, remained French to the core, they were never seduced by Hitler or Stalin. There is only this group, and no one says so. One of my American Catholic colleagues told me that during his youth, Catholicism, for him, meant France, and in particular Catholic intellectual life. Because American Catholicism was at a very mediocre intellectual level, and the efforts it made to rise were due to the French model: Maritain, Gilson, Bernanos. Maritain’s action was anti–Action Française, it was an effort to democratize the Catholic movement. However, in the way history is written today, there is no longer any mention of these influences. After the war, we witnessed a collapse of this influence because Catholicism was divided between the progressives, who were ready to sell off everything, and the fundamentalists, tense with an astonishing rigidity of spirit, so much so that the whole great Catholic social movement has fallen away. ND

Anglo-Saxon countries have begun to impose their values, which are predominantly Protestant.

RG

We must adapt Catholicism to the modern city, and do so in a democratic spirit.

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ND

Along with the authors you have just mentioned, do you have a particular admiration for Simone Weil?

RG

I discovered her quite recently, and I realized that she had had a lot more influence on me than I had thought. She had great intuitions about violence, for example, about The Iliad. She emphasizes the symmetry of roles: those who triumph are ruthless with the vanquished, then the vanquished triumph and are in turn ruthless with those who mistreated them. Simone Weil has masterfully demonstrated the cycle of revenge, its circular nature. And what interests me even more about her is all that she could sense about the persecution/scapegoat phenomenon. I rediscovered that when I reread it, and I think, in retrospect, it must have influenced me. She says things like, “When I have a headache, I want to smack people in front of me on the forehead.” There are quite frightening expressions in her, but she exhibits an extraordinary psychological power. When Simone Weil was in Germany, in 1935, she said: “If I were part of the German youth, I would be afraid of letting myself be carried away.” She talks about crowd mimesis with great perception.

ND

She is someone who cannot be classified, who was an extraordinary intellectual.

RG

In my opinion, she had a far greater importance than the reputation she was given. Obviously, she died very young, and her image is that of an école normalienne, pupil of Alain,3 the very type of the French intellectual. She angered many Jewish thinkers with her misconception of the Old Testament, so much so that she was accused of antiSemitism. She was never anti-Semitic, of course.

ND

She was interested in Greek thought.

RG

Her reading of The Iliad is a very great text in which she analyzes violence, which always goes in the direction of the scapegoat. There are remarks of the same type, but brief, in Waiting on God and in

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Gravity and Grace. This last work was published by her friends after her death, with notes that remained unfinished. But what strikes me as scandalous is that the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which publishes so many mediocre authors, has not found a way to publish an edition of the complete works of Simone Weil, this deep, original, little-known thinker, of whom France can be proud. ND

She was never baptized, but she came to Christianity in much the same way as you.

RG

Do you know what converted her? Not completely, but she was seized with great religious emotion while listening to the Gregorian music from the Abbey of Solesmes. Me too, I love Gregorian, and that’s one of the reasons that prompted me to read Simone Weil.

ND

How can we listen to Gregorian music in the United States?

RG

We are extraordinarily lucky to have here at Stanford a Gregorian Mass, which has existed since 1963. It does not take place directly on campus, but at the Newman Club, which is the association of Catholic students. There is a music teacher there, William Mahrt, who takes care of this with fantastic devotion. At first, I wondered why so many students attend. I thought it corresponded to a course in the music department. Not at all, the students do not get any credits or money. It is purely selfless work. Rehearsals require several hours a week, especially for the polyphonic choirs of the sixteenth century. Obviously, the talents are not always extraordinary, but the result is still incredible. However, I must say that the Diocese of San José, a neighbor of Stanford, takes a very dim view of this.

ND

Because it goes against Vatican II?

RG

Not at all, but there is a whole group of clergy who hate their own tradition, who hate Latin, and therefore the Gregorian Mass. For my part, I am totally opposed to Archbishop Lefebvre, but it must be clearly seen that a certain clergy, under the pretext of progressivism, has produced a generation of culturally underdeveloped

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people. The old liturgy was never banned, but it was the clergy themselves who insisted on abolishing it. I’ll give you an example: during my recent trip to France, we made the trip to the South by car as always, passing through Chartres and Bourges. I found the liturgy abominable, a real catastrophe. In Bourges, we arrive in the middle of a first communion. There was an amplified guitar that made cacophonous sounds. So I tell myself that here in Palo Alto, we are very lucky to be able to listen to this extraordinary music, but, I repeat, the bishop of San José sees this as subversive. ND

How do you explain this unexpected reversal of the Catholic Church, usually so attached to traditions?

RG

It did not know how to make changes when it should have made them, and today, at the end of the twentieth century, it is reinventing what liberal Protestantism had succeeded at much better at the beginning of the nineteenth. Regarding Archbishop Lefebvre, I had the impression that he was on the verge of reaching an agreement with the Vatican, and that if it did not take place, it was for political reasons. He and his associates love their role as stars. They are taken in by what they condemn, the spirit of publicity, the media, the desire to be noticed. The pope had made extraordinary concessions; he had left him total independence, but from the moment he rejoined the Church, no one would have spoken of him anymore. I even think that Monseigneur Lefebvre had personally signed an agreement, but that his entourage did not want it, for fear of returning to nothingness. Now, either there is a Catholic Church or there isn’t. That on which he insists so much is that of the CounterReformation, that of the Council of Trent, that of the last century. The tradition of the Church is broader than that. She has every right to change the liturgy. She allowed a lot of bad liturgy, but we can’t take away her right. Everything was messed up all of a sudden, and in my opinion, it was a mistake, because the liturgy is about duration, continuity. Perhaps it was not necessary to change it, but, on the other hand, there are reforms made by Vatican II that were perfectly justified. For example, the Bible was read too little, because

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Catholicism still had a kind of fear of the Bible that dated back to the Inquisition. Unfortunately, as when a bowl suddenly tips over, the whole clergy has completely lost control. In the end, I fully understand that people are revolted by what the new liturgy has introduced, but that is no excuse for what the fundamentalists have done. ND

All hierarchies are contested today. Everyone, as you said yourself, assumes the right to make judgments, to set themselves up as judges. Don’t you think that on this subject Camus was particularly clearsighted in prosecuting bad judges?

RG

Camus evolved on this subject, but, when he was writing The Fall, he was passing judgment on his own successive attitudes. He then recognized that at the time of The Stranger he was insufferably proud. Meursault is characteristic both of the young Camus and of those juvenile delinquents who refused to take an interest in anything. This is a phenomenon that Dostoevsky had already pointed out in The Idiot, for example. In The Fall, Camus recognizes that his role as a penitent judge put him in an ideal situation. He defended the victims of society, that is to say the “good” criminals. In reality, he spoke for himself, creating characters who had the right to place themselves above society. In doing so, he earned money and honors. At the end of his life, he came to recognize that his moral position was unbearably self-righteous. I think it’s really very beautiful of him, and that our time needs to hear this message. The Fall is not an indictment of the profession of lawyers; it would rather be an indictment of the profession of writer. But it shows above all that there is no comfortable position for the writer. We can never say we are right. It’s very Protestant, in a way, because the great Protestant spirit is to say, “Don’t think you’re justified once and for all.” It has a deeply religious meaning, even if Camus didn’t think of it. But he certainly thought about it. In my opinion, he belongs in the realm of the best Protestantism. He understood that there is no moral rest, no certainty of being among the righteous. Of course, we are all, in some way, judging everyone. However, no one should judge anyone.

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Sartre immediately saw that this also concerned him. By declaring that Camus made his self-criticism in The Fall, and by affirming that it was his greatest book, Sartre demonstrated that he too was a great person. He recognized the greatness of Camus, now admired around the world. ND

What students don’t always understand is the end of The Stranger. Why does Meursault want to be accompanied to the guillotine by the hatred of the crowd?

RG

This is where he spills the beans. He is not that indifferent.

ND

What he would have wanted is love. But he calls for hatred. For you, this is the truest part of the novel, since you wrote: “Many readers rightly believe that this conclusion rings truer than the rest of the novel,”4 and you add later “The Stranger reflects the view of the world of the juvenile delinquent with uneven perfection precisely because the book is unaware of reflecting anything except, of course, the innocence of its hero and the iniquity of its judges.”5

RG

From the moment one realizes that there are forms of counterimitation that are in reality imitation, one enters into a thought that seems paradoxical and that functions by antithesis. In reality, these are not real antitheses. Mimicry creates imbalances everywhere. Dumouchel proposed a very interesting notion, which is the notion of indifference, this other side of mimicry. The mimetic desire concentrates on one point and is indifferent to everything else. This is one of the cruelties of our society.

ND

Aren’t we returning to a sort of primitive attitude that doesn’t feel sorry for the fate of the victims, because it no longer sees them?

RG

In a way, that’s a very fair statement. We are threatened with regression to violence to recreate the sacred. These regressions are all the more formidable as they are made on a basis of power, which is also a consequence of the Judeo-Christian penetration in our world. This regression can be compared to an individual who drives while

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drunk but who, instead of driving a two horsepower Citroen, pilots a Boeing 747. Our world is coming back to that. Very often, the phenomena are no worse than in the past, but their consequences are tenfold. We must also recognize that there is an innocence about primitive societies in certain forms of cruelty, which are due to ignorance. On the other hand, with us, we must speak of guilt insofar as we know what we are doing. Often it is the most indifferent who moan the most about the victims. Baudelaire is the first to have understood this. He has a prodigiously ironic formula: “Exterminate the poor!” ND

To scandalize the bourgeois! He also, like Camus, took the side of the “good criminal,” since in his poem, “Abel and Cain,” he takes up the cause of Cain.

RG

Very often Baudelaire, in a few dazzling sentences, expressed the best of Nietzsche, without having the worst.

ND

Isn’t that his romantic side?

RG

Baudelaire is romantic when he wants, knowing it, by a literary process, but there are always ironic undercurrents in him of which a certain romanticism is completely incapable. Nothing is ever simple with Baudelaire, because he is always criticizing his own attitudes, as Shakespeare did. He presents the scapegoat both by knowing it and by denouncing it. When he says “exterminate the poor!” it’s actually so that the naive take him for someone insensitive. What he is saying in this sentence is that we live in such an unbearable world that the only way to denounce false shepherds is to say such things.

ND

Baudelaire, like Camus, denounces the indifference of the modern world.

RG

The reaction of the modern individual to indifference is to say “I am being persecuted.” In The Stranger Meursault is a victim of the indifference of society and that is why he considers himself persecuted. He says: “I am called a murderer when I am not.” The novel

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is entirely based on that. It transforms the indifference of society into persecution. The proof that the novel is based on a lie is that Camus is still obliged, to be realistic, to make Meursault a murderer. If Meursault were a mediocre boy who drinks coffee with milk and spends his time at the swimming pool, he would never come to trial; we cannot be made to believe that. Society is guilty of indifference, but it is not guilty of persecution, as they say. Therefore, one can recognize an open-book case of paranoia in the plot of The Stranger. ND

Meursault is remarkably premonitory of the evolution of the youth left behind. To take refuge behind a false indifference is to respond to the indifference of society.

RG

It’s an attitude of revenge. Since Meursault only exists in Camus’s imagination, it is Camus himself who interprets society’s indifference as persecution. Which is wrong.

ND

It should be noted that the very name of Meursault means “die stupid,” that is to say die for nothing.

RG

You have to discover the structure of victimhood, sacrifice, present in The Stranger in order to produce a good critique of it.

ND

You attach great importance to biography in your critical approach.

RG

But let’s make a distinction! You always have to start from the work, that’s for sure. From a certain point of view, we only really know the works, and the silver lining of modern criticism lies in recognizing this fact. One cannot explain works by biography, as was done in the past. But the excesses of modern criticism, particularly AngloSaxon, consist in saying that works can tell us nothing about their authors. James Joyce certainly didn’t believe that. And if you read Dostoevsky’s letters, you realize that they are too similar to novels written during a terrible period in his life for there not to be any connection. We therefore have the right to examine certain biographical elements in relation to the work, it being understood, of course, that the work is the starting point. The reverse is never true.

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ND

The studies of Charles Mauron are very enlightening in this regard, particularly on Racine.

RG

Mauron was the first to look for recurrences from one work to another, significant recurrences on a psychological level. To tell the truth, it is too psychoanalytical for my liking, but the recurring themes throughout a work are one of the fundamental aspects of criticism today. The relationship between one and the other is the story of the work. When we look at the last years of Camus, the ordeal that the Algerian affair was for him, when he suddenly felt cut off from his roots, we say to ourselves that there must be a connection between that and The Fall. He must have had a feeling of his own fall, because he must have felt that he had lived in good conscience, in the wrong sense of term, throughout his life.

ND

Concerning the war in Algeria, he is certainly not the only one, but the dilemma, for him, was more heartbreaking than for others.

RG

This is why one must read The Stranger in the light of The Fall, which gives it much more profound meaning.

ND

To end these interviews, let’s talk a little more in detail about youth. What do you think schools can do to prepare young people for working life? Is it necessary, despite everything, to return to the teaching of literature, history, philosophy?

RG

I have always preferred the great classics. I have never accepted the idea that teaching the classics is necessarily synonymous with a reactionary ideology. I think the current trend in teaching is harmful, because if you replace the great classic works by texts written in the last ten years, there is a good chance that they will turn out to be absolute failures. Statistically, it is inevitable. My favorite subject is Greek and Roman literature, so I believe in it.

ND

It is still taught in the United States, in the major universities.

RG

However, apart from the major universities, the American decentralization produces a lot of diplomas of bad quality.

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ND

In your opinion, which model should be chosen?

RG

It is better to choose decentralization, because centralization is no longer a guarantee of quality. However, cultural phenomena are vast, elusive; certain forms of culture are disappearing very quickly, and they will no longer be transmitted. Is this decadence permanent, or will it open up new horizons? I do not know. If I were minister of National Education, my tendency would be rather to be conservative, in the sense of preserving the essential values.

ND

You mean keeping the École des Chartes, the École Normale Supérieure, the Polytechnique, the École Normale d’Administration . . .

RG

The ENA is prodigiously important. It was Pompidou who was the promoter. He thought that, at a time when National Education was in the process of disintegrating, it was necessary to fall back on the grandes écoles. What is serious, however, in France is that there are not enough second chances, or possibilities of catching up. This also has an advantage, of course. The system of senior French civil servants is still efficient, and it is among the best thanks to centralization. In the United States, we would not be able to create a system of administration like the one in France. It would also be much more risky because the danger of corruption would be too great. If you think about it, the civil service in France is honest. It is one of the rare countries where this is the case. It’s a very closed system that excludes a lot of people. It owes its qualities to its faults. Depending on temperament, we can think that we are currently experiencing a change that will lead to something else, or believe that we have entered a phase of Roman Empire–style decadence. As to myself, I change my mind on this subject from one day to another. Many factors of our time do not correspond to the decadence of the Romans. It may be something much more terrible, but it is not the same thing. It seems to me that all countries are going to look more and more like America, in the sense that there is a huge international migration going on, and that the real problem will be to ensure that civilization continues uninterrupted. Educational problems are of capital importance today. You know that I have always had great

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admiration for de Gaulle. However, I do not believe his ideas at all. I think that today nationalism is over. If there weren’t the question of languages, I don’t see what could stop the unification of the planet. I consider that Jacques Delors is perfectly right: the unification of Europe in 1992 will be a big undertaking. Exciting things are going to happen.

Notes

A PRELIMINARY NOTE

1.

René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1961); translated as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).

2.

Nadine Dormoy Savage, “Conversation avec René Girard,” The French Review 56 (5), 1983, 711–19.

3.

Nadine Dormoy and Liliane Lazar, À chacun sa France: Une certaine idée l’Homme (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 103–19.

CHAPTER 2. AMERICA AS A MIRROR

1.

René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972); translated as Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

CHAPTER 3. THE SACRED, THE RELIGIOUS, AND THE BIBLICAL

1.

René Girard, La route antique des hommes pervers (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1985); translated as Job: The Victim of His People (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).

2.

René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1961); translated as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).

3.

René Girard, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Bernard Grasset,

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Notes

1978); translated as Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). 4.

René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972); translated as Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

5.

René Girard, Le bouc émissaire (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1982); translated as The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

CHAPTER 4. THE KING AND THE ORPHAN

1.

René Girard, Critique dans un souterrain (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1976), 35–111; originally published as Dostoievski: du double à unité (Paris: Plon, 1963); translated in Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, translated by James A. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012).

2.

René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1961), 121; translated as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 115.

3. Girard, Mensonge romantique, 124; Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 119. 4.

René Girard, Le bouc émissaire (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1982), 28; translated as The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 16.

5.

Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses: René Girard et la logique de l’économie (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1979), 76.

6.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 121.

7.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 122.

8.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 122, n2.

9.

René Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

CHAPTER 5. THE INFERNAL TRIANGLE

1.

René Girard, “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge” (Stanford, CA: Department of French and Italian, Stanford University, 1984), 159–200.

CHAPTER 6. SOCIO-ECONOMIC EMERGENCES

1.

Michel Aglietta and André Orléan, La violence et la monnaie (Paris: Presses universitaires des France, 1982), 45.

2.

Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1979).

Notes

175

3.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 150; Paul Dumouchel, The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 14.

4.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 128.

5.

Roughly, “the army and the Church,” a formulation generally attributed in France to the former Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929).

6.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 132.

7.

Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Colloque de Cerisy: L’auto-organisation; De la physique au politique (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1983).

8.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Ordres et Désordres: Enquête sur un nouveau paradigme (Paris: Editions des Seuil, 1982), 42.

9.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 138; Dumouchel, The Ambivalence of Scarcity, 4.

10.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 143; Dumouchel, The Ambivalence of Scarcity, 8.

11.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 141; Dumouchel, The Ambivalence of Scarcity, 7.

12.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 202; Dumouchel, The Ambivalence of Scarcity, 52.

13.

Dumouchel and Dupuy, L’Enfer des choses, 204; Dumouchel, The Ambivalence of Scarcity, 54.

14. Dupuy, Ordres et Désordres, 231. 15.

Paisley Livingston, ed., Disorder and Order: Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1984).

16.

Francisco Varela and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, eds., Understanding Origins: Contemporary Views on the Origins of Life, Mind and Society (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).

17.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, ed., “Paradox of Self-Reference in the Humanities, Law, and the Social Sciences,” in Stanford Literature Review, vol. 7 (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1990).

18.

See René Girard, Le sacrifice (Paris: Bibliothèque national de France, 2003); translated as Sacrifice (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011).

CHAPTER 7. FRANCE AND ITS MYTHS

1.

Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

2.

René Girard, Anorexie et désir mimétique (Paris: Editions de L’Herne, 2008);

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translated as Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). 3.

Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868–1951).

4.

René Girard, Critique dans un souterrain (Lausanne: L’Age D’Homme, 1976), 138. “Camus’s Stranger Retried” was written in English, first published in PMLA 79 (December 1964): 519–33, and can be found in “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 9–35.

5. Girard, Critique dans un souterrain, 139.