Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Roberto farneti

On Discord, Justice, and “What There Is”. A Girardian Perspective on Conflict Resolution

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According to a canonical story, discord and animosity among humans arise when more people strive to attain some non divisible goods. Peter Wallensteen has proposed “a complete definition of a conflict as a social situation in which a minimum of two actors (parties) strive to acquire at the same moment in time an available set of scarce resources” (Wallensteen 2002: 16; italics original). Conflict also arises when some individuals dictate rules concerning the distribution of objects which benefit only a limited number of individuals.[1] Discord, though, can arise out of diversity in people’s beliefs and practices or, within the same group, when some people make mistakes as to the estimate of the things that attract them. Hence “we assess a conflict and evaluate a case or the worth of an item differently because of differing perceptions” (Menkel-Meadow 2005: 27). If we take this conventional perspective on the causes of discord, then, when it comes to the issue of conflict resolution, we sense the relevance of Hegel’s view that the settlement of all “civil suits” requires “a third judgement which is disinterested in the thing,” namely, in what is deemed valuable by all parties involved in the suit (Hegel 1990: § 413; italics added).

In the following I shall argue that the theories of justice that underlie current discussion over conflict resolution bear upon a specific ontology, namely, an underlying pattern of assumptions on the ontological quality and status of some things.[2] I shall argue that by sticking to a classical ontology (or serious ontology, as in Heil 2003), namely to a view that alleges that discord arises over the possession of things that “are there,” current theories on conflict resolution doom themselves to failure. They, in fact, seem unable to acknowledge the underlying pattern of “ontological commitments” (Quine 1953) which characterizes a significant subset of cases of discord.

The very word ‘ontology’ may sound a bit puzzling, especially when it comes to such practical issues as, for instance, conflict resolution, and one might get the impression that the argument is getting too abstract and needlessly speculative. It is not.[3] The couching of issues of conflict resolution in ontological terms may help, in my view, to tease out the mechanisms by which “civil suits” are settled. If conflict arises over the appropriation of some stakes that ultimately constitute reasons for action, a fair (i.e. ‘just’) settlement of such stakes, however partial, may satisfy the contenders.[4] Here, those who have a stake in the suit are seen as being committed to facts to which they ascribe, in Joseph Raz’s words, a “good making quality” (Raz 1999: 23). This means that they can articulate the facts that prompted their actions in terms that signal the scope of their commitment to those facts. Thus, ontology and the theories guiding a fair resolution of conflicts are seen as bearing intimate relations and, admittedly, major concerns of justice guide the policies of “truth commissions and fact-finding bodies” (Long and Brecke 2003: 69; italics added).

The ambition of this article is to show that the issue of “what there is” must be addressed so far as conflict between individuals or groups is likely to arise over the description of facts whose very ‘existence’ may be questionable. Furthermore, the resorting to ontology may help to understand how a workable theory of conflict resolution may benefit from descriptions of the origin of human discord that deviate from our “classical approach.”[5] I shall focus attention on that major section of human discord on which the grip of a general conception of justice hinging on the pronouncement of a third party “disinterested in the thing” seems to be somehow looser. Indeed, the conventional approach does not seem to account for a blind spot in the area of human discord, in which conflict does not arise over the appropriation of existing goods. Rather, it is discord itself that prompts the stakes, in the sense that such stakes end up functioning as ‘rationalizers’ in the development of contentious issues. In this sense, the mutual signalling (blaming, scolding, etc.) that eventuates in open manifestations of hostility expresses the depth of the agents’ appreciation for the thing at stake. Such signalling expresses the “ontological commitments” to things or facts whose existence is somehow functional to the discord itself. Here, while an entirely new level of reality is created, in which anonymous objects are turned into bones of contention, animosity and discord are thereby fuelled. In the following I shall make a case for the non-existence of such objects. I shall show that such objects do no have an existence separate from the commitments and investments people make as soon as they start to look at their rivals as enemies.  

1. Conflict-resolution and theories of justice

We saw that discord manifests itself when individual purposes conflict, when, for instance, the supply of goods is insufficient to satisfy the wishes and expectations of all parties. A case in point was made by Thomas Hobbes in De Cive i 6, where he claimed that “the most frequent reasons why men desire to hurt each other, ariseth hence, that many men at the same time have an Appetite to the same thing [quod multi simul eandem rem appetant]; which yet very often they can neither enjoy in common, nor yet divide it.”[6] A similar formulation of the same approach is in John Milton’s Paradise Lost ii 30-32, where Satan himself states that: “[…] where there is then no good/For Which to strive, no strife can grow up there/From faction.” This way to put things, to be sure, entails a tight connection between violence and injustice, insofar as violence arises when people experience difficulties in the allocation and distribution of goods. It seems likely that this way of thinking originated in Plato, who maintained that “it’s over the gaining of wealth that all wars take place” (Phaedo 66d).

Emphasis on fair distribution of goods has been of pivotal significance in the philosophical agenda of the West, to the extent that a just arrangement of goods and rewards among the members of a group was seen as a desirable alternative to indiscriminate destruction of life and property. As sources of grievances have often been “associated with structural injustice,” in the shape of power imbalances and inequitable social and economic relations, western political philosophy has held the theory of justice to be the only possible means to build a well-ordered society (Jeong 1999). Thus, a mechanism of conflict resolution grounded on a major concern for justice seems to refer “to the creation of independent procedures in which the parties can have confidence” (Wallensteen 2002: 38). Throughout western thought the theme of justice, “the law of dividing” (Canetti 1994: 107), has consistently concerned the fair distribution of available goods and the ensuing construction of road maps leading, possibly, to a successful exhaustion of the contentious process.

It is commonly argued that major political evils, such as unjust wars, oppression, etc., are the product of lapses in the correct functioning of political justice. And such evils, accordingly, could be virtually eliminated by following just (namely, publicly justified) social policies. The focus, and trust, of contemporary normative political theory lie in fact on viable political institutions and theories of justice, and current theories of conflict resolution seem to presuppose the quite optimistic view that there are no actual “limits of reconciliation.” John Rawls has pointed to two such ‘limits,’ namely fundamentalism and the sense of spiritual emptiness that might ensue from a political situation in which people have a decent share of material gains but feel dispossessed of what really matters to them as persons. Rawls understands that people might feel empty if their institutions ignore their ideals, their beliefs about good life and society, and stresses the function of a liberal education, aimed at raising people who can eventually manage to not politicize those beliefs, namely, pervert and diminish them “for ideological ends” (Rawls 1999: 127). Rawls believes that once just political institutions manage to work out viable strategies of redistribution of wealth, then, in Milton ’s words, “no strife can grow up there.”

According to this view, by lapsing from their correct functioning, social institutions that are made just by people’s assent and commitment to fairness in the ongoing process of designing social arrangements, open up areas of tension among some people and give way to fatal forms of social unrest. Think of Arendt’s idea that “only when our sense of justice is offended do we react with rage” (Arendt 1970: 64). According to Arendt, violence springs from a flaw in the logical machinery behind the allocation of goods. Violence may be removed from human relations by means of a simple strategic intervention, an operation of distributive justice aimed at dissecting an object whose integrity is maintained by extant protectionist measures that prevent others from enjoying it “in common.”

The idea that only justice may provide a workable foothold for social policies aimed at securing order and stability is age-old, and though it dates back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle (and Cicero, who claimed that “if we would have violence abolished, law must prevail, that is, the administration of justice”[7]), it has been re-worked a number of times in the course of the intellectual history of the West. If we look at the writings of one of the canonical figures of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, we find that “in many cases, an individual, in pursuing a legitimate object, necessarily and therefore legitimately causes pain or loss to others, or intercepts a good which they had a reasonable hope of obtaining” (Mill 1982: 163). In the same page of his essay On Liberty Mill charges “bad social institutions” of being unable to prevent the outburst of discord among humans: social institutions are designed to prevent people from pursuing goods which “they can neither enjoy in common, nor yet divide,” hence, sound social institutions are likely to succeed in preventing the outbreak of discord over the appropriation of goods.

This standard view on conflict resolution appears to be endorsed by major international political agencies as well as by various existing commissions of conflict prevention. All these agencies, in their routinary pronouncements, insistently refer to such obstacles to the global achievement of an enduring peace as resurgent economic nationalism and protectionism. Governments and international agencies are far more capable today then ever before of facilitating cooperation among different groups through communication and regulation, but a slight lapse from a just set of arrangements in international disputes may lead to a vicious allocation of resources, and hence pave the way to a “road […] to conflict and violence and war.”[8] The clearest statement of the idea that conflict prevention resides in the ability to allocate goods and fairly deal out the stakes has been given by the philosopher Diogenes Laertius, who settled the issue by stating that “natural justice is a symbol or expression of expediency, to prevent one man from harming or being harmed by another” (Diogenes Laertius 1995: 674).

The idea that human discord can be virtually eradicated by means of well-arranged and well-designed social institutions has been targeted, and in some fashion mocked, by people who alleged that this “is the lesson liberalism is pledged never to learn because underlying liberal thought is the assumption that, given world enough and time (and so long as embarrassing ‘outlaws’ have been discounted in advance), difference and conflict can always be resolved by rational deliberation” (Fish 1997: 392). According to ‘liberalism,’ given people’s rational nature, any conflict can be settled by means of a fair arrangement of some ‘stakes’ that constitute, as I stated above, reasons for action. A situation in which the stakes are arranged and assigned in fair shares among people is acknowledged and valued by all: in Rawls’ words, people “give reasons for their beliefs and conduct before one another confident that this avowed reckoning itself will strengthen and not weaken public understanding” (Rawls 1993: 68; italics added). A reason-laden discourse in which the social bond gets strengthened is a discourse in which the people involved express satisfaction and recognition of the general rules by which the stakes are assigned. And yet, the same discourse can create gaps among people if they think that they are being treated badly or unfairly by their fellow citizens and social institutions. In a situation in which people have “conflicting views about aspects of the world,” this mutual reckoning is hardly likely to set up a universal currency in which a disinterested third party “can assess the goods that are distributed in society” (Williams 2002: 220).

People engage in the “inferential game” of giving and asking for reasons in order to assess the impact of “what there is” on the ways they conduct their lives.[9] Hence, they endeavour to create a ground for further interaction and exploration, a common platform of discussion and decision-making by which new modalities of stake-setting are established. Here, the mutual reckoning in which people have engaged is effective in so far as each individual commits herself to a ‘standard’ ontology. A bias in one’s commitments is likely to result in the evaluative mistakes people sometimes make, although such mistakes can be easily amended by interventions of sound social institutions, which play the role of a third party disinterested “in the thing.” To put it more succinctly, institutions arbitrate people’s rational commitments when those commitments clash.

Rational deliberation leads to the strengthening of the social bond when people know their best interests and can ideally converge on a set of general assumptions on the stake’s intrinsic value. They have a clear understanding of what there is and the decisions they make are made according to feed-back and information processes by which people form consistent ideas on what there is. A difficulty arises when people’s reasons for action are guided by commitments to facts that are apparently “not there.” This case, that in some characteristic respects defies the classical approach, will be examined in the following.  

2. No stake “for which to strive”

To believe that justice could prevent people from harming each other means to subscribe to a view in which “facts of the world” function as rational incentives for action. If the self-interested pursuit of those facts is driven by correct information and feedback, just institutions provide then a stable and reliable vantage point by which the parties can discern a fair and unbiased assessment of the value of the stakes involved in the social transactions. The western conviction that neutralization of conflict is best achieved through the equitable distribution of goods throws a thick veil over the disconcerting nature of that extreme form of violence that arises in the absence of goods “for which to strive.”

Objections to the classical approach seek to explain how it is that one acts in a certain way, even though there is no ‘fact of the world’ that may account for the action.This kind of explanation, however, seems to be offered by disciplines that quite rarely cut across the paths of those academic reserves in which discussion on conflict resolution takes place on a more routinary basis. By using different sets of concepts, other disciplines have hinted at alternative ways of understanding people’s rational nature. One of the ambitions of this article is to show that if a characteristic mark of good science is its willingness “to challenge its assumptions based on findings in other scientific fields” (Long and Brecke 2003: 158), then, the science of conflict resolution has a stake in becoming the field of tension and contamination among other non strictly cognate disciplines.

The alternative approach I shall focus on in the following has been worked out by the anthropologist René Girard. His theory of “mimetic desire” indeed involves a powerful conceptual shift of perspective in current theorizing about the springs of human discord. Girard’s life-long speculation on scapegoating dynamics, his commitment to detect patterns of scapegoating in myth and literature, has yielded valuable insights into the nature of human agency and rationality. It has contributed, in some important respects, to the relativization of the canonical account which alleges that human beings, if rational, are actively responsive to the reasons they are occasionally bound to face.

Girard collects various pieces of evidence from literature and the study of archaic religion and puts forward a hermeneutical model applicable to a number of everyday life situations. According to Girard, if one exposes the very notion of desire—as it has been handed over to us by a tradition that goes back to Plato—to this particular hermeneutical model, one can observe the inherent symmetry in the human relationships in which desires impinge on the relational dynamics among humans. Girard has very much emphasized this relational and alterocentric origin of the ensuing discord. He, in fact, is committed to finding a way around the western (Platonic-Aristotelian) model of “unsupported” or “celibate desire,” namely, a desire which is centred on the subject. In doing so he opens up the existence of an awkward nucleus of truth that the Platonic tradition has disguised ever since.

Girard seeks to deconstruct this tradition by revealing “the way most men are” (i.e. desire) (Girard 1991: 219), which is not the egocentric way we usually assume them to be in our mistaken belief that every conflict that arises within a human community is a conflict between subjects desirous of appropriating goods, but which is nonetheless rational. “The mimetic process detaches desire from any predetermined object” (Girard 1977: 180). Some authors, characteristically representative of what he calls the “tragic tradition,” notably Shakespeare, have managed to shift the generative nucleus of desire from the heart of modern subjectivity to the relationship between subjects. Such authors have replaced the egocentric concept that reigns in the West with the ‘alterocentric’ concept, in this way undermining the classical model, which explained human agency by means of people’s rational responsiveness to facts of the world that they treat as reasons.

Now, if the classical approach envisaged a ‘solitary’ agent and a limited set of goods, the alternative approach envisages only the existence of rivals. The scene in which rivalry and violence arise is therefore a scene without objects. Shakespeare, according to Girard, has revealed the purely ideological nature of the desire centred on the subject. Girard tells us that “this weakness of individual desire—of single and unsupported desire, celibate desire—reappears constantly in Shakespeare” (Girard 1991: 133). Shakespeare’s dramaturgy serves the surprising purpose of revealing the existence of a desire that, unlike the desire codified by the western tradition, does not pursue an external good but seizes upon the desire of the mimetic rival. The rival imitates this desire and, in turn, its desire is imitated by the subject. This “suggested desire,” or “emulous desire,” derives from a well-known sentiment: envy, the secret catalyst for a type of conflict that does not necessarily occur in conditions of scarcity.[10]

Girard strips the ‘object’ of the western privilege that made it the simple and absolute desideratum, and introduces accordingly the figure of the rival. Girard’s primary task is “to define the rival’s position within the system to which he belongs, in relation to both subject and object. The rival desires the same object as the subject, and to assert the primacy of the rival can lead only to one conclusion:  rivalry doesn’t arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it” (Girard 1977: 145). The crisis that results from this surplus of reciprocal rivalry triggers actions aimed at the destruction of the mimetic adversary. But what happens is that we are so steeped in the classical model, and so wedded to the classical belief that “we cannot have a desire except for a reason” (Raz 1999: 73)[11] that the mimetic and non-object-oriented factor in the origin of the crisis has always escaped our notice. This is especially true of those areas of philosophical focus which failed from the start to acknowledge the origins of discord and violence. Moreover, the system that has for centuries ensured the endurance of the classical approach enjoys strong protections. In Girard’s opinion, it is an illusion to think that the West will one day wake up persuaded that the core of the convictions which have constituted the foundations of its most cherished moral and political institutions has eventually fractured and that lengthy cracks extend along its surface. Moreover, “this reversal seems unthinkable only because the existing situation, once solidified, shapes reality in such a persuasive way that it seems to possess the attributes of a natural phenomenon” (Girard 1991: 101).

The knowledge of a radical alternative to the classical approach inevitably introduces an uncomfortable ‘truth’ that, in turn, generates an element of anxiety. Only with some difficulty can we place this truth among the most intimate anti-tragic convictions of our western tradition: namely, that anti-mimetic humanism has located conflictual rivalry at the bottom of our social institutions, where it can neither be seen nor do any harm. This mimetic rivalry, as Girard puts the case, “is the scandal of human relations that most of us elude because it offends our optimistic view of those relations” (Girard 1991: 18). We are accustomed to thinking of mimetic material (the alterocentric dynamics of desiring) as being “inert.” Thus, we find natural anything that fits perfectly with the reassuring ideologies in which our anti-tragic world is steeped. By obeying the common sense that imposes a reassuring model of subjectivity, we are able to retain, though at great cost, that idea of identity to which our mental habits and social institutions cling.

The conflict that comes from the alterocentric dynamic of desire is not aimed at the appropriation of an object that all contenders wish to possess; in fact, the presence of a desired object is of secondary relevance. Conflict, in its most original and devastating form, is a variable which outstrips the impulse aimed at acquiring external goods; it is generated in that elsewhere of inter-individual relations where there is no possibility of agreement. It is evident that here we are faced with the glaring absurdity of a certain type of human discord, to a situation in which “violence operates without a reason” (Girard 1977, 46).

The world described by the “tragic” authors (Shakespeare, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Kafka, etc.) allows us to visualize a dimension of human relationships that was censured by the classical approach. If weshift the attention to the mimetic elsewhere of our anti-tragic world, to the secret dimension of rivalry and mimesis, here it is not true that “all wars” are fought over the appropriation of goods. Here, in fact, there are no valuable objects, only “rivals.” If we foreswear our ancient fealty to the classical approach and open our minds to a different evaluation of the problem, we see the extant ontological inventory change before us, for the ‘object’ cannot suffice to explain the intensity of the conflict: “one can remove the object and the rivalry will continue” (Girard 1994: 90; italics added). Therefore, the actions generated from this rivalry, the actions of the rivals, are said to be “without reason.” Rivals, though, are still driven by desires that constitute reasons for actions, but these desires bear on facts that do not register with the ordinary ‘currency’ by which distributive justice “can assess the goods that are distributed in society.”

Admittedly, Girard’s theory is less a technique aimed at guiding policies than a thoughtful attempt to show that discord is prior to people’s commitments to what there is. Girard maintains that people may not have a full understanding of what they are doing, for their reason to act, and hence to engage in rivalry, is, according to their viable rationalizations, the object itself. But here there is no object! What “is there” is rather a workable excuse that provides reasons for discord. The reason-laden discourse of the rivals is packed with claims of desirability and entitlement, although there is no-thing out there sustaining the rationalizations of the rivals. Removing the object is in fact no guarantee that violence will be expelled from the system. It is rather a particular brand of liberal naivety that leads one to believe that, once the reasons for violence are removed, the system will open onto an everlasting epoch of tranquillity. In reality, human hatred is not simply the effect of unequal allocation of goods, for a given system of rivalry will always generate additional hatred, which cannot be reabsorbed by merely invoking tried and tested models of distributive justice meant to redistribute the stakes.

Our most persistent illusion, then, would be this: that, by compulsively recognizing that there are rational subjects behind every violent action, we think we can influence their reasoning by means of public actions that we believe capable of perfecting their knowledge of the allegedly intrinsic value of the goods at stake through the elimination of ‘mistakes,’ making their reasons more transparent to their objectives. We do not understand that their action is without a reason because the war they are fighting is not in the slightest (necessarily) aimed at pursuing goods.  

3. Social ontologies

When we think about our attitude to discord, we somehow wonder if it is always undesirable, or how should it be contained, or channeled. Should it be tackled via market forces, education, regulation, or the criminal law? These questions, I believe, should be addressed not by yielding large generalizations, but by preparing the ground for more sensitive and detailed research of the manifestations and effects of discord, which could be helpful in policy formation. The merit of Girard’s model resides in its radical questioning of the foundational assumptions that lie at the core of the classical approach. If we assume that human discord does not arise out of people’s self-interested concerns for material gains, then, we seem to open up a new dimension of human agency, in which the sources of discord can no longer be traced to the motives of the people involved and discord itself thus becomes impervious to the justice-centered perspective favored, and fostered, by the classical approach.

In Rawls’s case the potential rivalry between individuals and groups can be easily dissipated through a process of mutual recognition that unfolds within the framework of just institutions. In the scenario opened by Girard, in place of the thing responsible for the discord, we find an empty space—a carefully dissembled absence. Hence, the ontology that underlies the conflicts arising out of mimetic impulses suggests that there is nothing out there, and thus the friction between the parties gets started in an ontological vacuum.

Once we abandon the approach by which people’s actions are deemed to be manifestations of their thoughtful responsiveness to facts of the world, we are bound to open up a different perspective on the causes of discord. Such causes are not to be looked for in the defective functioning of institutions allegedly “disinterested in the thing.” Girard’s perspective illuminates a dim portion of human agency by showing the contingency of the alleged causes of discord: in showing the alterocentric dynamic of contentious processes, he undermines the set of assumptions to which “the ad causam, the accusation” holds to (Girard 1989: 109).

In current discussions about conflict resolution the ordinary framework of reference is the classical one, which can be traced back to the tradition detailed in section 2, for which the only workable way out of a deadlock in which discord and disagreement are unceasing is to refer to a “third party” disinterested in the thing. Here, the assumption is the one stressed by Arendt, that rage arises only when people’s sense of justice is hurt. Hence, the current practice of devising policies to resolve conflict is, as I argued above, typically ‘justice-centred.’ Recognizably, after 9/11, two discourses were contending in the media forums to explain the terrorist attacks and, possibly, justify what turned out to be a short-noticed American retaliation: the classical framework on the one hand and, on the other, what I would call the discourse of insanity, that is, an explanation of the terrorist attack as based on mere irrational beliefs and principles. However, in the midst of talks and surveys concerning the reasons and causes of the attacks, a third view appeared to make its way shyly through the media debates. Eighteen days after the terrorist strike, in The Guardian of 29 September 2001, Arundhati Roy pointed out that once a war begins, it is bound to “develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own.” Here, admittedly, a widespread sense of loss, despair, and resentment that the war unleashed grew despite people’s actual responsiveness to facts of the world. Roy captured the single moment of frenzy and scare in which the entire world got caught after 9/11 and pointed to the lack of states or facts that could function as workable reasons for actions. Roy argued that once the logic of war has taken over, then “we’ll lose sight of why it’s being fought in the first place”  ( Roy 2001: 29). In some very important respects, the logic of human discord can hardly be dug out with the blunt tools of the ontologies embedded in our ready-to-use theories of justice. In the ontological vacuum in which rivalry operates, the conflict is bound to develop a momentum and logic of its own; even though there is nothing for which to strive, the rivals set out making commitments to what there is by means of a system of reference to things whose actuality depends on the representational efficacy of their discourses and imaginaries. The existence of the thing is indeed a variable that depends on the network of commitments the contenders have made, on their ability to identify the good-making qualities that prompt them to act in a certain way.

David Weissman has made the ontological claim that “every thing is constituted of its properties” (Weissman 2000: 25). Such a claim presupposes that the ascription of properties, as in the reason-laden discourse in which the rivals are engaged, entails the making of the thing. Indeed, we can hardly ascribe an ontological dignity to things that lack any property, given that it is only by means of its properties that we can assert that an object is. One may come up with an ontology of objects without properties, and allege that there are things out there, though the extant cultures and languages do not have words to characterize their properties. Interestingly, such ontology would not commit people to act, given that it is only in view of the good-making properties of things that we set out acting. The case of mimetic desire is a case in which people find themselves in a ‘vacuum of properties’ and nonetheless make commitments to some supposedly existent things. What people do is to blame their target of resentment and indignation, which may further be subject to “avoidance, reproach, scolding, denunciation, remonstration, and (at the limit) punishment” (Wallace 1998: 54). Through avoiding, scolding, denouncing, etc., people work out public standards of evaluation by which their commitments to a given set of things are being articulated. It is by signalling scold and reproach that people articulate the properties of the things at stake: it is on occasion of these special symbolic transactions that such things come into being and gain the status of ‘stakes’ in the conflict.

A basic fact about the rational choice paradigm in the social sciences is that “humans apply universal, general, reasoning rules to all problems in making choices in their current environment, including interpreting and acting on signals in reaching a negotiated settlement of conflicts” (Long and Brecke 2003, 3). But “interpreting and acting on signals” entails the exchange of crucial pieces of ontological information on “what there is.” And it is through such an exchange that the parties deflate their commitments and come to acknowledge that ‘there is nothing’ out there. We know that the mutually avowed reckoning to which individuals commit themselves consists of ontological stipulations by which they manage to create or sustain a universe of negotiable objects that qualify for customary strategies of redistribution and dissection. A Girardian perspective suggests that the rivals’ chances to reach a settlement over the goods “for which” they have been striving are contingent on their ability to deflate the ontologies that sustained their mutual animosity. The opening up of a new perspective on the origin of discord may press social actors into designing workable strategies of convergence into a more inclusive vision of reality, in which they can see that their goals are compatible, and the extant resources ultimately amenable to ‘fair’ distribution.

4. Phobic imaginaries

The opening up of transformative possibilities, the movement toward conflict de-escalation, the process of deflating one’s ontological commitments, depend on people’s ability to develop special perceptions about themselves. This psychological aspect is relevant to the case made in this article to the extent that the setting of delusional ontologies is buttressed by deep-seated fluxes of resentment and animosity that flow from collective recollections of enmity.[12] Thus, the shift advocated in this article, from a classical view of how discord comes about to a Girardian perspective, entails a further shift from justice-centred strategies of peace-making to practices centred on deep-rooted psychological habits that feed on culture, the group’s self-image, representations of its history, etc. The “alterocentric” approach to conflict-resolution psychologizes the causes of discord inasmuch as it relocates them from the external space of facts of the world, in which discord is said to arise, to the internal space inhabited by images of the enemy. Hence the alternative approach refuses to consider conflict-resolution as a mainly technical problem and focuses on the psychological sources of animosity and discord, by showing that facts and issues of contention are less the cause of conflict than the signs of some internal institutional or personal problem. Admittedly, institutions designed to disinterestedly distribute the stakes among the parties are hardly likely to be able to identify the dynamics reflecting the psychological shifts and fluctuations in the agents’ preferences. Discord entails the manufacturing of new patterns of reality, the drawing of new ontological inventories that guide people’s commitments and allegiances. Emphasis on culture and group-psychology may help to uncover these subliminal trends whereby the group’s perception of what “there is” deviates from shared recognitional standards, and new facts for which to strive show up in the psychological set of each party.

In his genealogy of hatred the German historian Jan Assmann has shown how a disturbing memory might worm its way into the habits and rituals of a group and work on a subliminal level. Assmann maintains that the proliferation of enemies might be the result of a “pathology of memory” which might be treated by intervening on those symbolic areas in which phobic impulses are rationalized. Assmann has shown that the century just behind us bore witness to the worst excesses of collective psychosis and has stressed the need “to trace this history [of psychosis] back to its origin, with the hope that this anamnesis and ‘working-through’ may contribute to a better understanding and an overcoming of the dynamics behind the development of cultural or religious abomination” (Assmann 1997: 44). Assmann’s insight into the subliminal causes of a particular kind of hatred is supported by a powerful genetic account and some alarming evidence that it is in the disturbing intimacy with myths and memories that hatred among humans aligns. Jacques Sémelin has described the psychological attitude of the authors of ethnic massacres (notably Germans, Serbs, and Hutus), stressing its primitivist and archaic outlook. This attitude is rooted in a social imaginary of omnipotence and glory that coagulates individual anxieties against the fabricated image of the enemy.[13]

Some significant advances in conflict resolution could be made once the actors involved come to agree that any project of social stabilization must entail the dismissal of images of the ‘enemy’ which sustain fears and hostility. Such socio-psychological process of de-escalation must therefore focus attention “on cognitive functions, information processing and image building” (Jeong 1999: 19). The reason why people get entrapped in their delusional ontologies is that they keenly harbour a hideous image of the enemy: an image they cultivate and hand over to future generations. As it has been argued, “murderous animosities, fuelled by memories of injustice and vengeance” (Judt 2005: 666) can take over a group of people or a whole nation. Human discord, when escalating, is bound to open up a space for the return of other knowledges, other untimely pasts, and it is by intervening in this space of representation of the other that discord might be effectively neutralized. Interventions, then, should be directed to what has been described as the “public cognitive scene” (Neier 1990) in which impulses to inflict harm “without a reason” are likely to arise.[14]

Shifting attention from the theoretical canon of “celibate desire” to a mimetic scenario in which rivalries are ontologically prior to the subjects’ desires for something that “is there” might help policy-makers to devise new strategies of peace-making without resorting to an object-centred approach (see Neier 1990: 32 ff.). The ‘classical’ question: “are there outside incentives for pursuing these actions” leading to conflict (Wallensteen 2002: 44) should be replaced or integrated with the question ‘are there ingrained facts of the mind’ by which people or groups feel repelled from other people or groups identified as enemies? By focusing on the limitations of the classical approach one can contemplate a different understanding of how conflict among humans might be handled. A reappraisal of the classical approach that lays bare its functional limitations would eventually reveal that discord cannot be easily removed by recourse to a rational neutralizer, and that the use of arbiters and negotiators to try and find some platform for non-partisan cooperation on which the parties might meet is a logical consequence of a persistent philosophical illusion. The classical approach looms not only behind the speeches of the mouthpieces of states and international political agencies but also in the widespread metaphor of the fireman running to put out a fire. The same approach underlies those views alleging that the stake all nations of the world have in estab­lishing a very different type of world-order depends on the possibility “to readily and reliably police those who would wage war” (Boehm 2003: 204). This is not to say that the classical approach can be simply dismissed, or that mimetic dynamics can be detected whenever human beings show conflictive dispositions. This article, in fact, does not aim to offer a workable recipe for managing or overcoming conflict between groups. The overall picture I have outlined is, to be sure, schematic and fragmentary. It offers only an embryonic clue as to how a certain perspective on human discord can become, through more extensive research, a valuable underpinning of more effective strategies of peace-making.

Once we abandon the distinctive externalism of standard conflict-resolution approaches and look with interest at Girard’s revolutionary approach, we are bound to shift the sources of human discord into a psychological realm that turns out to be typically insensitive to the implementation of just arrangements and a fair allocation of the stakes at hand. A new approach to conflict resolution, therefore, will seek to combine the achievement of Girard’s theory with a renovated attention for the elementary features of human psyche.

A massive compound of hatred ‘without a reason’ seems to have acquired such intensity and sedimentation that it appears to stretch across a broad political spectrum unacknowledged. Hatred hides itself in the world and scrupulously conceals its roots, and the only chance we have to break loose its grip is by fulfilling the very nature of human rationality, namely, its open-endedness, the idea that we have “thoughts about our thoughts, and thoughts about our thoughts about our thoughts” (Pinker 2002: 336). By thinking reflectively on our own thoughts, possibly questioning the assumptions sustaining the ideas and views by which we make sense of the world, we would not run the risk of overestimating the extent to which we know what we are doing. If, as Girard has pointed out, dynamics of scapegoating end up becoming “more and more effective as there is less and less knowledge, less awareness of it as a collective delusion” (Girard 1987: 84), then, by becoming more and more aware of our disposition to delusional habits (i.e. by having critical thoughts about our thoughts) we can hope to succeed in the difficult task of relinquishing our devious ontological commitments and reach a more accomplished sense of possibility about our actual chances to live in peace.  

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