René Girard - Violence and the Sacred

Interesting fragments  about circles of violence, from René Girards influential book Violence and the Sacred (1972).

“The fear generated by the kill-or-be-killed syndrome, the tendency to “anticipate” violence by lashing the first (akin to our contemporary concept of “preventative war”) cannot be explained in purely psychological terms. The notion of a sacrificial crisis is designed to dissipate the psychological illusion; even in those instances when Henry borrows the language of psychology, it is clear that he does not share the illusion. In a universe both deprived of any transcendental code of justice and exposed to violence, everybody has reason to fear the worst. The difference between a projection of one’s own paranoia and an objective evaluation of circumstances has been worn away.” (p. 54.)

“The mechanism of reciprocal violence can be described as a vicious circle. Once a community enters the circle, it is unable to extricate itself. We can define this circle in terms of vengeance and reprisals, and we can offer diverse psychological descriptions of the reactions. As long as a working capital of accumulated hatred and suspicion exists at the center of the community, it will continue to increase no matter what men do. Each person prepares himself for the probable aggression of his neighbors and interprets his neighbor’s preparations as confirmations of the latter’s aggressiveness. In more general terms, the mimetic character of violence is so intense that once violence is installed in a community, it cannot burn itself out.

To escape from the circle it is first necessary to remove from the scene all those forms of violence that tend to become self-propagating and to spawn new, imitative forms.

When a community succeeds in convincing itself that one alone of its numbers is responsible for the violent mimesis besetting it; when it is able to view this member as the single “polluted” enemy who is contaminating the rest; and when the citizens are truly unanimous in this conviction – then the belief becomes reality, for there will no longer exist elsewhere in the community a form of violence to be followed or opposed, which is to say, imitated and propagated. In destroying the surrogate victim, men believe that they are ridding themselves of some present ill. And indeed they are, for they are effectively doing away with those forms of violence that beguile the imagination and provoke emulation.” (p. 81, 82)

Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.