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

Leonhard Praeg    

Our complex, dynamical vulnerability

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Abstract

I take as point of departure the intellectual debate that marked the publication of Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1972). The phenomenology of religion that emerged in the 1920’s was heavily indebted to Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1923) which ontologized the sacred by postulating it as an objective reality and, with that, our religious attitude as an a priori response to that reality. Here, the violence of sacrifice assumes the form of a dialogue, a do ut des or “I give in order that you may give”. Contrary to this history and phenomenology of religion was the human sciences approach represented by, among other, Girard for whom religion emerged as solution to the specific social problem of mimetic violence. The primal community founded the genealogy of the divine when it 1) accidentally discovered the victimage mechanism and 2) divinised the first victim as destroyer/redeemer. Religion emerged as the combination of ritual (which encourages imitation of the redemptive behaviour of the first victim), taboos (which prohibit imitation of his destructive behaviour) and myth (as the retrospective justification of criminal violence as necessary sacrifice). Here, then, is a wholly immanent description of the need and emergence of violence and the sacred (I shall leave aside the interpretation of the Christina Gospel). We have to ask ourselves: what do we have to assume about society or social interaction – even in the rudimentary instance of a primal community qua model of social interaction - in order to justify or legitimate such a description of both society and religion as essentially emergent phenomena?

            I shall argue that Girard’s description operationalises a view of society as complex dynamical system. To illustrate what I mean I shall illustrate how the centre pillar of Girard’s theory -mimetic desire and the resolution of its implicit violence through the victimage mechanism - can be read in complexity terms. In such a reading the intensification of mimetic rivalry equates a collapse into sameness, an obliteration of the very differences that constitutes the identities of those involved in mimetic interaction. The moment of sacrificial expulsion marks at once the collapse and re-generation of the social as system of differences. This much is given to us in the trajectory that traces the decline of the social from the crisis of degree to its rejuvenation through an act of generative scapegoating. The resulting harmony is, I believe, another way of describing the embrace of difference, once again, as constitutive of the social. Viewed as such, the description essentially resembles the functioning of complex dynamical systems and how the collapse and regeneration of differences constitute a self-regulatory mechanism through which such systems remain, necessarily, far from equilibrium. What is the point of translating Girard’s theory in complexity terms? 

Well, once we have agreement on the fact that Girard’s model can essentially be described in complex dynamical terms – and it is a moot point whether we are using complexity to model his account of the origin or whether, despite his modernist ambitions, Girard only really offers us a model of the origin in what appears to be complexity terms – other, less obvious but useful implications follow that address the issue of sameness and difference of concern to this conference.

            The main gist to be explored here is that in a complex dynamical system difference (along with dissipative dependence) is not a problem to be overcome but a condition for the viability of the system. A text like Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism acknowledges that hospitality, generosity and tolerance are constitutive of the idea of cosmopolitanism but not that it may be constitutive of being human. Much contemporary, continental philosophy is reluctant to make that ontological claim yet this is exactly what complexity encourages us to do. It suggests that vulnerability is included in the very a priori structure of the self-and social identities conceived as “complex, dissipative structures”. It is not something we have to make peace with, learn to accommodate or embrace as a useful ideology for a cosmopolitan existence. On the contrary, vulnerability is the very condition for the possibility of human existence and, in its manifestation as difference, a condition for the possibility of the social. Is this just another way of naturalising violence as self-regulatory mechanism? I don’t think so – because the cycle of destruction and regeneration described by Girard and mapped here in complexity terms is perhaps function of a fundamental misapprehension – not of the scapegoat mechanism but of the constitutive function of vulnerability.