Rene Harrison abstract

Mimetic theory currently offers competing models of the originary scenegenetic theories of cultural reproduction. We must be explicit in our identification of the unit of reproduction in order to comprehend the specifically anthropological foundations which teleologically determine what may be selected as fit for cultural survival.

My paper examines the conflict between ethics and politics that are latent in the models of Eric Gans, René Girard and Adam Katz. I argue that each model has theological affinities with the three great Abrahamic religions: Gans with Judaism and Zionism; Girard with Catholic Christianity; Katz with a certain Islam. The conflict between moral symmetry and ethical asymmetry is fundamental to each models unexamined premises. Through a close examination of these premises the theomorphic and anthropomorphic dimensions of ethics and politics are clarified. Finally, an improved understanding of the Abrahamic views on the face of Man and God will clarify differing views on tolerance and vulnerability in the theological politics of each tradition.

The so-called war on terror, I argue, is a simulation projected and defined through the originary modeling of firstness in terms of land, religion and civilization. This perpetual war without end is mirrored in what John Milbank noted to be mimetic theorys assumption of an ontology of violence which perpetuates a false image of God. I explore how the Levinasian phenomenology of ethics provides a necessary background for problamatising, if not resolving, the alternative ethico-politico platforms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Similarly, a Voegelinian political history of the three religions, while revealing divergences from scriptural sanctions, can nevertheless be unfolded from the latent theomorphic and anthropological views on tolerance, vulnerability and the face of Man and God. Most strikingly, the divine as that which shapes the human can be conceived either as an ethical vulnerability through the face of the other the dignity of God - or through the political rejection of the dignity of the other by an anthropomorphic imminentizing of the divine.

I suggest that the psychology of projection has hampered mimetic theorys ability to conceive of the ethico-politico as a theomorphic ordering of politics through a dialectic of divine vulnerability as redemptive. In this light, the Derridian and Gansian emphasis on the performative force of law through a charnivorous rupture with animality partakes of theological voluntarism and nominalism. The aesthetic vs. the anesthetic centrality of the sacred, which differs among the Abrahamic religions and the three mimetic theories affects the analogical patterning of ethical asymmetry upon political symmetry and produces totalizing and violent representations of the other.

SITEMAP Girard Studiekring

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