As Satan Falls: Rene Girard and the Mystery of Paying Attention

[Music] this is the comments on it it falls to me to do a kind of a quickie number on Gerard's ideas because not everybody here is a sorority so I'm going to scroll to a number of slides very quickly with some images the images will give you the structures and triangles and by the way I make no proprietary claims on this presentation if they have any questions and questions that don't get posed or whatever send an email I'll tell you the whole catastrophe work on yourself a lot of it is borrowed material any now so the blurb reads about picking up in the middle Courtney Girard saw Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning he was anticipating the effect of his death and resurrection on cultural the cultural forms and practices that have protected me that asterisk is that all cultural forms and practices including university life and places things like the Roman Catholic Church our sacrificial and human institutions are born as scapegoating ho ho net counts home of the killer is homology OSIS he's also homo the Medicus the violence of all is resolved when it turns on the violence of all against one and that you have this hateful and quickly because I'm literature so we quibble on the word imaginative reading marriage excuse me I'm sorry interactional and contemporary especially contemporary reading of literary masterpieces and she talks about how Girard anticipated the present moment and serves as a prophetic voice I just topped off an essay on the prophetic in Abraham Lincoln in great literary works are telling us our story and they have in their greatness they have that prophetic dimension I quote briefly a very well-known and write justifiably known passage from which are this loss from Yeats second coming the turning and turning the widening gyre the Falcon cannot hear the falconer Things Fall Apart the centre cannot hold mere anarchy is loosed upon the world the blood-dimmed tide the blood didn't use me the blood did time is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned the last the best lack all conviction conviction and while the worst are full of passionate intensity that's where we are there's no doubt about and you can sort of fill in with everything you see in the media I'm gonna talk about flow there there was an item evidently in first thing somebody said I'm tired of hearing about the fact is we hadn't got to the depths of all those works we haven't got to the really prophetic power of the but what I used to be is the Catholic imagination among non Catholic writers so I'm gonna dwell on flow bear but I have a short list I can rap out to you particularly interested rather like who doesn't believe in God doesn't believe in anything it makes a religion of literature and he knows that it's a god that fails and I'll do an exercise in close reading because that's what I learned to do with Gerard at Hopkins so the dimension of Gerard for contemporary times to respond to that let's say the theme that Suzanne is brought forward which he talks about the present moment dressed for battle in to the end it's a book on clothes events and it's a book about the acceleration it's the widening enjoy the acceleration of violence through history you see and the China is a wonderful figure you see if you've got a ball bearing and going around at the bottom of the gyre let's go to a certain speed in order to complete that arc towards the top it's going fast as hell and that's where we are going I'm sorry you know it sounds so dire but this is the apocalyptic dimension of historical reality I lead to others to talk about the eschatological one and Dorota the wonderful statement is that all great art is incarnation and I asked him what he meant by that and didn't get a very clear idea so it did my own homework on it and for the Catholic imagination but I've come up with this at the very least the Catholic no Maxie eye is incarnation that means it's embodied it's impressed it's visceral it's physically grounded in and I put Falkner at the head because his three heirs are Flannery O'Connor Toni Morrison about whom he said here because they've been sessions on them and Cormac McCarthy all three Catholics who is that pakka lipstick vision requires no explanation if you've read blood meridian and toni morrison is the one who says well I'll go on with my blurb here that in those writings you made a tree line you here Gorge you're going a river esteemed a table chairs the house of fiction comes because of Balzac since Paul sacked the house of fiction comes furnished and Balzac of course is a monarchia he's a Catholic monarchist so world is concerned about the peculiar literary style and you know where did the where do they get those toys McCarthy Morrison and O'Connor they get them from forward it's not the same style but it's a style that stands out and hits you right in the face from the get-go and that has to do with a way of seeing the world as the world as something out there it's in front of you and an incarnation and creating that's it all those authors beginning with for their have indulge in the grotesque you know which something goes horrible and laughable at the same time you had a good taste in that last night if you went to the play in the theater because the the comic dimension of of O'Connor really came out you know these last lights there aren't ours but irony and the comic revealing the thing that all these authors have in common with form and with flow bear is you have empathy and irony working back and forth and strolling around each other's George says about a great novelist a great novelist loves his characters he doesn't judge them and O'Connor we know she doesn't judge judge forget this plenty of judgment going on she they don't need you see Flannery O'Connor to add to it and the been a theory 101 the famous statement there's box knows many things the hedgehog one big one well Gerard has one idea the great minds have one idea new gravity Darwin natural selection Girard mediation modeling imitation and it leads him to his next great insight drawn from Heraclitus quote war strife Hamas is the father and king of all some he has made gods some men some slaves some free which means that all social differences issue from violence man's problem is it's not how to deal with the violence of nature the biggest threat to human life is you period so we get not we get through the great writers we don't get the New Yorkers cartoon of the individual those blue lines if they're visible is my you know wreath rising up so that we aren't we are and we don't boots that we cannot we are being tugged and pulled on all sides by others a models the social other society markets advertising etc that's pretty obvious and so these images speak for themselves that the desire for any object is mediated by a model a model which is proliferated in in the media and desire obviously needs a model to fasten on an object and we see this in the playground but we also see it in the halls of power in the cards of power and in military conflict and this is an image which requires no explanation whatsoever it's when I cribbed from my nephew Stephen McKenna who has been picking up on Gerrard and doing wonderful work with it in the media so you go from this image in the playground to this and it's particularly interesting because the formal difference the different review in the black and white squares it's a purely formal has a lot to say about racism in this country because there are no whites and there are no blacks whiteness is something over it against blackness and the over against phenomenon is evidence in this New Yorker cartoon the caption reads so there's more to being a than just being an empty blood right the answer is no the answer is no we need enemies in order to consolidate our identity identity as a function of group identity I'm quoting this wonderful book Jonathan Sacks it does a memetic reading of Genesis it's all about sibling rivalry and the basic organization of culture is a circle which is convened around a center according to Durkheim but that center is occupied by the sacrificial victim by the enemy and the expulsion of the enemy precisely brings about collaboration cooperation solidarity community so I get to float there because he doesn't he wrote this story toward the end of his life you see two images he purchased a stuffed pirate and my point about this is that he purchased this parrot to write this about a woman whose last love is this parrot so much she loves that she has it you know stuff and he put any we just watch think about he put himself in the place of this poor peasant illiterate woman attention contemplation meditation reflection attention is a form of Prayer according to see motivate and flow there is absolutely proof of that so he purchased this stuff parenting and contemplated late to get into the story of felicity she's illiterate uneducated she's totally guileless house servant whose story is one long street of decomposition of losses she loses her parents she loses her betrothed the children in her charge as a domestic servant both of them one dies one moves away she looked at her cherished nephew dies for mistress dies her parents so she has it stuffed and it's resurrection you see it's a parody of the reservation that the taxidermist you know your pet it rots in the image in on the right hand side of my screen see the rot in it rots a pace with her loss of sight and hearing so you have a total wrong the dryer is winding down rather than speeding up she has only known disappointment and unlike most she has grown the better for it she's okay simple heart and that was the first of three stories by flow bear the first one having to do with the the decapitation of John the Baptist is told in dick and realist narrative second with the life of San Julian in the Hacienda ghost Atelier as he says at the end as told in the windows of Rouen Cathedral you have to imagine what it took attic floor there just look at those windows look at it and take a look how do you get legend out of that you just keep looking you keep looking because again the church is precisely the Bible of the litter illiterate in the Middle Ages so we get to prove it and I highlighted the asterisk a few uh telling statements she's taking her charges Virginia to her communion catechism lessons and the priest gave a short account in the sacred history she thought she saw the Paradise to tell you double skipping lines here then she wept listening to the passion she's in the Catholic imagination is empathic and at the same time critical ironical and comical that's how you get seven gothic that's how you get the grotesque this is free indirect discourse this is her entering into the narrative that she's hearing why had they crucified him this one who loved the children said the multitudes cured the blind and had them and had desired and his gentleness to be born amid the poor and the dung of the stable then goes on to say that well as so the seat I'd harvest says she know all about that she was born a peasant and then the next asteroid says she had trouble imagining or the lamp love for the Lamb of God the doves because of the Holy Spirit so she lives the dose she had trouble imagining its person the Holy Spirit for it was not only a bird but beside that a fire and other times of dress and I don't have my students say okay somebody draw a broom okay you're next you drugged up you can do it over okay now draw breath it's in this but you know it's there and the breath flow bears fascination is it's pardon person with this idea of literary inspiration and I convinced that this is a story that obviously it's a great literary work because it is he engages the author's ambition three minutes okay three minutes with the with inspiration in nineteenth-century place the idea replaced the image of the hero and the sake with the genius Victor Hugo two hundred thousand people those people and the the genius doesn't really believe in his inspiration he's really good at so he keeps working at this is cool bidding against somebody points out that you know he wrote a paragraph today is that much the other paragraphs concerned her total misunderstanding of dogmas they make no sense to her and as a cradle Catholics of the fifties I can guarantee you that's a that's a valid experience a whole paragraph on her kind hardness she after her she lost other people she took in Polish refugees she took in the and stuff like that she came but her thing was with the Holy Spirit it's the last thing in her life was her parents and she observed in a sort of cartoonish image of you know there's John Baptist business baptizing Jesus and there's that the bird there and she would pray looking at that image trying to figure out what is the Holy Spirit and then she looked at the parrot so when she dies her last moments all right there's a liturgy of Corpus Christi going on that side and she and as your vapor rosen's with his room she opened her mouth inhaling a mystic sensuality Catholic imagination her lips smiled the beats for heart slowed down grew fainter and softer like a fountain giving out like an echo dying away this the rhythm fountain echo and when she excelled her last breath she thought she saw in the opening heavens I jog antic parrot hovering over there that's a delusion elucidation and it's funny and it's ironic and it said and it's very touching because this is a life saved you see and Flo Bears was fascinated by religion couldn't believe a word of it but also couldn't accept any of the day that any of the repetition and the bromides in the clichés and stereotypes were passing over dinner tables conversation public fora and especially the media you see and the holy spirit became a symbol of literary creation okay time's up thank you well well I'm also planning for bear you know I mean to read in French I mean the prose is just there are lyrical flights and as a work of art because one set is just you know writing and riffing in crazy J Henry James Senate seat over there so did George Eliot the idea the novel could be a work of art so it had to be like just as good as those competent features does this thing work what this way this is good know how last August America watched in horror a shooting spree killed 27 people in El Paso that Tino's had been targeted was shot followed a few hours later another shooter this time in Dayton Ohio killed nine before he was caught the initial assumption was that a racist anti-immigrant outlook few of those events but the second killer turned out instead to be Pro Satan left-winger anti Trump supporter of Elizabeth Warren easy narratives were upended and the Ohio police admitted that they were stumped about motives but there was indeed a pattern and it was this one imitation the Dayton shooter had been following Texas events liking several comments about the carnage on Twitter so anything done like this margin is it better if I go like this okay should I start over again did you hear the first part okay how it's turned over again okay same words in August America watched in horror as the shooting spree killed 22 people in El Paso Latinos had been targeted but more shocked followed a few hours later another shooter this time in Dayton killed nine before he was caught the initial assumption was it was a racist anti-immigrant outlook fueling both events but the second killer turned out to be Pro Satan left-winger anti Trump supporter of Elizabeth Warren so the easy narratives were upended and the Ohio police admitted that they were stumped about the motives but there was an indeed a pattern and it was a Girardi in one imitation the Dayton student shooter had been following Texas events liking several comments about the carnage on Twitter and he long been fascinated by shooting sprees that storyline however was less appealing and indicted no political faction rather it pointed to a welter of social and cultural factors inflamed by the media which in the era of Facebook and Twitter is all of us Rene Girard wrote that human behavior is driven by imitation we are after all social creatures we want what others want desire is not there for individual but social those have colonized our desire long before we know we have it all desire is desire for being Rene said and it's one of my favorite statements from him because we long for what we lack and we imagine it in others the pursuit of the desired object is us a metaphysical quest to fill a hole within ourselves because we glorify and idealize the other so we attempt to imitate them we want what they want because we hope to acquire their be believing that if we get the same lover or spouse the same job drive the same car or read the same novel we will somehow acquire their admired essence and resemble them it's the relationship of a relic to a saint is Gerard wrote yet the phantom being that you covet the seeds as you pursue it and the chase becomes frustrating and futile Gerard read ancient and modern texts in court over 19th century anthropology but in the end the most overlooked takeaway is this it's not just that mankind is mimetic it's that you I it's that we are persecutors while we are imagining ourselves to be victims every single day the place to verify his theories is not in Mesopotamia or ancient Greece but in your own heart and conscience what can we do about the predicament we face Rene suggested personal sanctity I'd like to review his major concepts will be familiar to some of you but by no means all Girard overturned three widespread assumptions about the nature of desire and violence first that our desire is authentic in our own second that we fight from our differences rather on our sameness and third that religion is the cause of violence rather than an archaic solution for controlling violence within a society can you still hear me the idea of mimesis is hardly foreign to the social sciences today but no one had made it a linchpin in the theory of human competition and violence as Gerard did beginning in the 1950s Boyden marks were an error one suppose sex to be the building block of human behavior neither saw economics is fundamental but the true key is mimetic desire which precedes and drives both imitation steers our sexual longing in economic trends it's why we are driven to enroll our child in a posh school our imagined need for the newest iPhone I wish to be five pounds slimmer when Apple invents a new gem crack we you must get it to be you know up to date and chic like the other trendsetters and there's no problem they manufacture these things by the zillions problems arise where scarcity imposes limits or when we eyes something that cannot be shared or that the possessor has no wish to share an inheritance a wife a presidency hence Gerrard claimed that pneumatic desire is not only the reason that we love or the way that we love it's the reason we fight two hands that reach towards the same object will ultimately clench into fists whatever two or three people want soon everyone will want the medic desire spreads contagiously as people converge on the same person position or possession is the answer to a prayer the solution to a problem Dante's Florence Shakespeare's Verona Black Friday in any major city on one level is the same story imitation puts us in direct competition with the person we adore the rival rival will ultimately come to hate and worship who responds by defending his or her turf his competition intensifies the rivals copy each other more and more even if they're only copying the reflected image of the south of themselves that they see in the other the foes become more and more alike as they use the same tactics exchanged the same insults vie for the same status symbols or curry favor from those they see as above themselves over time this object becomes secondary irrelevant the rivals are now cest with each other and their fight becomes an end in itself bystanders are drawn into taking sides in the medic conformity with their admired friends neighbors and colleagues thus the conflict can envelop a whole society with cycles of retaliatory and therefore imitative violence and one-upsmanship look at our political campaigns eventually one group or individual is seen as responsible for the contagion generally someone who is an outsider or a marginalized group of people who cannot or will not retaliate an outsider will not inspire a revenge or retaliation or an active and so is positioned to end the escalating cycles of a part of or piezos the scapegoat is killed exiled or otherwise gotten rid of and that act in itself has enormous social power in its performance and in its consequences it unites the warring factions and releases an enormous social tension restoring harmony among individuals and within the community the power to bring either peace and harmony or war and violence to a society was once seen as supernatural and it still has an archaic allure today and we deify and worship our assassinated presidents prime ministers and monarchs even if we despise them when they live Girard argues that the archaic religious sacrifice was no more than this the ritual reenactment that the scapegoats killing bringing unity and the act of murder and invoking the mysterious powers that preempted social etiquette Astra flee before didn't think of Shirley Jackson's the lottery but we've had two world wars in the last century and now we taught her on the edge of nuclear disaster and in the era of the internet social contagion spreads it in a way that was unimaginable even a few years ago and his death in the 2015 Renee was just beginning to see the consequences of our feverish contagious social media where we are free to vent our side our unconsidered selves on more and more platforms we dismiss our daily defamations is harmless but they are not primarily because it changes us the mob has an attraction and magnetism and gains more power with each person who joins it and all must join it or they will be scapegoated themselves it's one of those cases if you do not howl with the wolves the wolves will certainly howl for you whether engaged murder daxing or defamation the crowd demands unanimity so that no one is responsible because everyone is no one after all likes to throw the first stone ranae put it this way in the passage that's haunting and I find myself citing more and more and I quote him but we must see that there is no possible compromise between killing and being killed for all violence to be destroyed it would be sufficient for all mankind to decide to decide to abide by this rule if all mankind offered the other cheek no cheek would be struck if all men love their enemies there would be no more enemies but if they drop away at the decisive moment what is going to happen to the one person who does not drop away for him the word of life will be changed into the word of death it is absolute fidelity to the principle defined in his own preaching that condemns Jesus there is no other cause for his death than the love of one's neighbor lived to the very end was an infinitely intelligent grasp of the constraints it imposes that passage is almost incomprehensible in its implications yet around the world many Christians are facing that every single day Gerard often pointed out the word sacrifice changed with the Christian era in the past it always signaled the killing of others for propitious you makes you know sacrifice of the gun in the last two millennia however has come to mean a sacrifice of oneself something in oneself while Abel's blood cried out from the earth for vengeance on his murderer Jesus's blood cries out to God for mercy on us all yeah that's a major paradigm shift for humanity and one of each of us has to reckon with but our urges today are still sacrificial in the archaic sense we long to rid our society of the right wings of the left-wingers the immigrant to the nativists the Palestinians our exit tears of the ADF but in the high-tech Information Age we can no longer claim innocence after a century of genocides and ethnic cleansing we cannot pretend we do not know what may happen when we demonize individuals and groups and long to rid ourselves of them Gerard emphasized forgiveness and reconciliation and certainly part of the Catholic imagination to me includes how we create ourselves in the public sphere in an environment where hatred is spill publicly every day without so much as a nod to conscious people bond through gratuitous and often defamatory insults and as Gerard predicted we resemble our enemies more and more all the while protesting our absolute difference increasingly we don't care what kind of people we've become people even say Gerard's words to reinforce their political commitments and prejudices without seeing his work as a critique of precisely those kinds of commitments in evolution of desire I described a non-violent movement that devolved to blame accusations scapegoating and explosions the problem is more moral indignation leads us to replicate the behavior that aroused the indignation in the first place and so it's morally newest the more outraged the less likely it will lead to real change and the more likely it will lead to violence it tends to give the outraged permission to commit or condone the acts that are just like the ones that caused the indignation in the first place but forgiveness is the opposite of vengeance it puts an end to the consequence of the change in chain of events freeing everyone from the whole process Christ exhorted has to forgive our enemies even love them and it either means everyone or it means nothing it extends to the hundreds of young men two years two years ago in Charlottesville who helped tiki torches and raise their arms in a Nazi salute apparently celebrating a system of ideas it has been thoroughly discredited resulting in the death of a young woman who was killed when an enraged man drove into the crowd what are the odds of these fellows who've been closeted white supremacists all along waiting waiting for their moment in the Sun waiting for a lapse in political correctness to throw off there and in the middle let me offer a more likely scenario in regions of the country where jobs are menial and few and unions no longer guarantee a living wage those who are despised and living precariously you've wanted social recognition for years they have now found a way to get our attention since they could not get our respect as nomadic creatures we seek the eyes of others for their validation if we cannot get their approval we will revel in their fear which is simply a different kind of validation a validation of power and efficacy we have not lost a tendency to scapegoat and it can still unify us the term white nationalists has been bandied about so profligate later that's become meaningless except to stigmatize and create a stampede of persecution we have sucked in the gyre of a panicking witch-hunt for the targeted defenders the effects are immediate during a hot summer in a land where guns carry a long history and a singular thank-you mystique which is itself a memetic phenomenon our relationship to guns look at the movies where heroes have packed heat since the days of John Wayne how do we get out of that we still trust our weaponry to historic revolt resolve conflict even the conflict was in and every few weeks somehow listen takes acts out that fantasy in our streets and our supermarkets or in our schools Gerard concluded we must face our neighbors and declare unconditional peace even if we are provoked challenged we must give up violence once and for all because the universal forgiveness while there is still time those are the closing words of the scapegoat but what does that action of forgiveness actually mean how does one forgive Isis how do we even forgive the guy who's trolling us on Twitter or the guy that kept you off in traffic we're just beginning these explorations but at the very least it means we must let go of the who started it mindset and walk towards a different kind of future [Applause] [Applause] okay good morning thank you for coming out so early to a panel on Renee's yards thought I'm gonna have to bend over even further I fear so one of the things I've been fascinated in in my own research over the last several years is the work of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben an Italian thinker and one of the ideas that deeply fascinates me and his work is his concept of what he calls absolute profanation and he says one of the main tasks that humanity faces in the upcoming decades is to render profane the things we had once deemed to be sacred because that form of psychology that it surrounds so many of our institutions and organizations but also notions of human being are traversed by a ceaseless tension that really is predicated upon sacrifice this is a God been talking and he's making no reference to someone like Girard though I've asked him about Girard and he said he's not opposed to Gerard's thesis but I find it interesting that his notion of profanation or return to common use of what had once been deemed sacred is his solution to removing what he calls the theological signatures the grounded natural laws and visions of the humanity human being that's his solution to ending the violence that permeates our world it's interesting too because the philosophers the voyages Yakka very colorful character has responded to a Gambon by basically saying at what point does the quest for absolute profanation return to the zero ground of what we consider the sacred to be but of course I got man says nothing about what that may look like and jejak says nothing about what that could look like and we're left in an empty space of negativity where nothing appears no content simply the eradication of everything that we once had deemed to be sacred and everything we thought had undergirded the institutions and identities that were so important to us and I take that as a starting point for my reflection on the work of Rene Girard for several reasons one of which being the common question posed to Girard even by your guardians of what comes in the wake of memetic desire if all we do is imitate each other and that perpetuates the violence we do to each other in the acts of scapegoating what is the world supposed to look like in the absence of memetic contagion and I think along with that the criticism that's also put to Girard is your analysis merely a negative critique that removes all institutions and leaves nothing in its wake and he's of course ER or joined together and separably so it's in this context that I find it helpful to recall something like John Milbank's critique of Girard but Gerard's thought is an entirely negative Enterprise focus on eradicating the false secret from our world by exposing the single victim mechanism and making it inoperative without suggesting anything to take its place of course for Milbank this is a threat to the church itself Gerard's project by this count and this is Milbank's word but it's his word from nearly everybody is a nihilistic project providing the possible end of most institutions and traditions in our world without conceiving of what a truly just order might look like every order is consequently subject to a deconstruction based on its inherently violent proclivities but what remains to be built once the false sacred has been removed in other words what place is there for the sacred in our world if our time is mainly spent on the removal of the false forms of psychology how are we to recognize something like a sacramental nature of existence when we need to spend most of our time trying to diffuse and disengage the violent mechanisms that have sustained human existence and certainly have stead of sustained which is being for so many millennia now this leads in the the work of another Italian philosopher Johnny Vaught mo to a particular cannot accreting of Christian truth claims but lead him to formulate what he calls nihilism as a postmodern Christianity but the loss of the sacred the death of God and Nietzsche's work and so much else we associate with modern critiques of religion actually leads to a different or alternate form of religiosity very provocatively he calls this nihilism as the most likely or probable form of religiosity in our epoch within his claim of a weak theology as you can imagine is mainly just the destruction of false idols and false forms of divinity the apparent destruction of traditional religious structures seems to be the end of religion as we've known it and certainly parallels movements on secularism and atheism in our world today though it's also he wagers as I think jejak speculated on McGann band's work the beginning of an authentic experience of the grounds of the sacred though such a thing could and even should perhaps never be clearly defined or made into a normative proposition maybe we should shy away from trying to make institutions out of these inclinations but then of course what does that look like how do you represent such a thing do we not have structures and institutions we need for social welfare well B in fact isn't that the nature of language itself which is often a violence and reductive institution but vitamin recognizes the difficulty of this but also suggests in the context of Christianity to be sure quote this also makes problematic the positive aspects of Christianity mainly its institutional expression and church's dogmas authorities and disciplines but might not these very complexities or even more an active contestation of institutions dogmas and churches be exactly what Christianity needs today in court now this of course is exactly what Orthodox religious persons fear I would say it's certainly what Milbank was afraid of yet I would argue is this not precisely where we need to formulate something like this is my my wager here something like a philosophy of love which sounds so idealistic in Utopia and I realize that and yet we all know love to be real and true and it does exist though it's almost impossible to formulate as a normative order but a philosophy of love that's perhaps indistinguishable from the sacramental experience of grace whatever such a thing may or may not be right so then what does all the talk of nihilism in the death of God amidst any possible recovery of a Content less sacred II have to do is you're already in thought so I would argue to trying to envision a world beyond mimetic desire is neither a holding a nihilistic nor a wholly utopian affair though I do think it bears shades of both to be sure it inevitably has to it's perhaps to be understood as the domain of a self-sacrificing love that is illuminated best through negative acts through the removal of what is not love the Christian narrative makes clear that love is made possible as an opening to vulnerability as an endlessly kanata giving that empties the one who loves the one who loves pours themselves out to the point of rendering themselves subject to abuse deception or becoming the possession of another but this does not stop love from making such gestures like it falls right into the mimetic trap as Jacques Lacan once famously quipped in his seminar and love when love comes up against hate love allows hate to win this is simply the nature of love though certainly humans frequently attempt to conceal and distort this reality and attempt to render ourselves less vulnerable to others less likely to be scapegoated or to fuel and just sorry or to fuel the fires of my medicine such concealment however is done at the cost of losing the experience of love itself something incredibly difficult to describe if not impossible more recently Simon Mays conclusion regarding love which shares with another philosopher of love Harry Frankfurt is that love is not dependent on a particular moral or institutional code so an insight that allows me to consider a wholly secular approach to loving even as he's able at the same time to make sense then of why Humanity has historically identified the powers of love with the existence of a higher being the deity who is or two typifies love stands outside of any moral or institutional order guaranteeing its existence as the sovereign who says it may be but not being identified with the order itself love it seems escapes every order or system that we could fabricate it is thus more of home in the discourse of mystics attempting to reach outward toward it and complete unknowing than it is in the hands of an overly scrupulous religious zealot in Frankfurt's words quote the function of love is not to make people good its function is just to make their lives meaningful and that's to help make their lives in a way that in a way that was good for them to live whatever one constructs later on whatever moral system or institutional tradition love stands always outside and beyond these ever Meteor structures maintain its within itself a latent force capable of destroying each and every human achievement but of course love destroys these things only so that it may get closer to loving what lays beyond all these representations that we might put in its path so the typical speech of lovers of I wish I could express to you how I how I love you but my words fail to adequately convey it becomes the very precondition of an authentic act of loving love yearns to touch what cannot be said or seen again putting us in close proximity to traditional conceptualizations of the Divine Being it's helpful to imagine divine beings in this regard and especially the act of trying to relate to them the traditional domain of prayer because love is given in such a way that one does not accept or so was right when does not expect reciprocation thus once again breaking down a memetic barrier in fact one may not even hear a voice speaking back to it after it is given the severing the ties of established relations between burst persons as both Simon may and agama have noted Kierkegaard had also once noted the same thing in the act of loving those who are deceased as this is the greatest act of love he thought since one loves but cannot be loved in return once again severing the possibilities for my medicine everything is given and nothing is presumed to be given back what may considers is both the command of and yet the freedom within the act of loving for may this passionate search for the ultimate ground of our being whether religious and nature or secular it matters little at this point is the purpose of human life and the grounds for the establishment of being what takes place in a non reciprocating intimacy without relations as a Godman calls it is what Kierkegaard called the most unselfish the freest the most faithful love it's a love that preserves the mystery of the other who cannot ever fully be known and certainly cannot be possessed such a love as Lucy Aragon RA has described it is what protects the obscurity and the silence that the other remains for me is that which aids in discovery in proximity this posits love in a gunman's language and it's interesting that after his big homeless otter series dealing with violence and sacrifice he turns to love in the final volume this posits love as an inappropriate object that can only be shared something for common use but not to be possessed it's what lies beyond the mimetic to share what is ultimately in appropriable that is love there are of course and I think in a guardian context we have to be attentive to this dynamic there are of course deep political implications for seeing love in this way as Simon Critchley asserts concerning the anarchy of love quote the only proof of immortality is the act of love the daring that attempts to extend beyond oneself by annihilating oneself to project onto something that exceeds one's power of projection to love is to give what one does not have and to receive that over which one has no power the point is not to kill others but to kill oneself in order that a transformed relation to others becomes possible some new way of conceiving the common and being with others again to allow love into one's life and into the construction of their very beings to allow anarchy at times to run riot its deconstructive force moving past and through whatever established relations and structures had guided one previously the self is undone in the face of what can only appear as a nihilistic force a negative force bent on the destruction of everything that one had thought they could hold dear before hand but this anarchical power is also the mystical yearning for a force that can remake us at the same time even if such a were making lies entirely beyond the scope of what one can imagine so you're left like as you're already in saying I don't know what comes after I don't know what takes place next I only know what needs to go away as we see repeatedly embody most thought there's an absolute Canosa staking place that seems to defy anything like a pure resurrection asking us to consider whether we can or even should want to escape representation and it's reductive violence's in other words is the goal of a nihilistic apophatic thought a complete and perhaps unrealistic non-violence which cannot really be embodied certainly not those of us who use language to tango with love is to contemplate however one's demise a small death that is also an ecstatic Union we're taken out of ourselves in the next stasis an almost loss of consciousness at the same moment we are profoundly united in and love but how are we to imagine this in practical concrete real terms that's always the question answering this much as contemplating a world without mimetic contagion is a decidedly idealistic even utopian goal one brought about through perhaps nihilistic means and yet we know love to exist beyond the violent mechanisms of our world was not the essential message that Christianity among other religions had sought to lift up above all else if mais suggestion regarding the secular nature of love bears any weight that we might be able to see how something like a sacramental and kanata Club is not only not afraid to lose the moral institutional and religious orders that had seemed to sustain it it's actually compelled at times to renounce them and even perhaps to see their end or betray them so that something truly sacred might appear that we cannot name it though in the end even the duality of the sacred and the profane disappears and we're left with only what lies before our eyes asking us to love it and expecting nothing in return it's in this sense that we might begin to understand how religion may actually empty itself cannot achlys accra mentally to the point of ceasing to exist allowing a secular space to flourish and align us perhaps to take theology seriously for the first time as the grounds of human existence even and especially when God has appeared to have left the picture perhaps this was what many years ago Heidegger had referred to as the twist in the historical narrative of metaphysics a radical transformation and distortion of it's very contents through the events that transpire within being itself [Applause] [Music] presentation is there okay we can do that all right that's all right thank you you can see many theories applications across disciplines here from literature to social commentary to theology we can take questions on any of those subjects or anything else that's coming to mind if you've had a burning question about mimetic theory and want to ask it to someone this is the time I have a burning question so go ahead yes the question is to - Colby about explaining his statement that languages in many ways of violence construct yeah that's a great question the the way I'm referring to it is that language represents a system of reductive representations I mean it is a system of reductive representations every time you formulate something into words you are being reductive of the experience itself and in presenting that even if it's what Jacques Derrida called a bloodless violence you're still reducing the fullness of whatever complexity you're facing so you could say whatever form of life or existence presents itself to you to reduce it to the extremely narrow confines of language is to do some harm to it when I teach students I often talk about how you know when I was young we took standardized testing it said are you are you white or are you black or are you other you know and everyone else felt left out and there was a process of scapegoating at work to fit a certain you know matrix of representations beforehand and now we have you know a hundred different ethnicities possible and yet some Smallman already saying I'm I'm being left out of that and there's never going to be a full you know exhaustive list there will always be some reduction taking place that excludes someone else it's the nature of language you could say it's the nature of logic you read Heidegger seminars on logic it's it's like greedy sounds weird it's a greeting as your art and a different key logic itself the order of Reason the way we construct thought is always an exclusive process so we will posit an order that leaves out something so the precondition of whatever order we have established is that something gets left out and excluded so how do you deal with those exclusions becomes very crucial here does the language or whatever symbolic system you work with seek to you know to be open to recalling those things that have excluded or does it seek to repress them violently like the way Paul record talks about history and memory or do you allow those things to come back into view every language will be reductive but does it pay attention to the areas of violence it does or doesn't choose not to so as I was referring to something like Spinoza or lightness you can tell all determination is negation there - Ronnie an insight to that question is that we always we always look for the least violent component of any system the blame the violence of it and the whole deconstructive critique of the violence of language dimande Leda that's a blonde that's a totally blind I mean therefore we're talking about the logos see if we're talking about the Catholic imagination we're talking about the Word of God and the Incarnation and you think of the Mystics they're trying to find a language for something which they feel very powerfully which they know is true in Rome so get off the violent language that's over thank you and by the way we have great literature we still think that's a good idea to have around that is language brought to it's possible perfection it's possible profession but to use I got bonds friends about it truly just society I go back to Rambo now this young wise you see sailor pinky lens did get a failure the vision of justice is the prison of God alone we try to create justice and paraphrasing just yet so you want justice go to help because that's where you find it etc but we have great writers and we have better the writing the true of the vision is a wonderful example of the question what is God doing in the midst of our violence structures and God is not against them in any way it's to be against them is to be part of them and so the question that we always ask at our conference is around theological questions is how is God building something up in the midst of what is already here that will someday blossom and become the here so that that is the great question of how to live our faith in the midst of that which is apparently not being fully not fully embodying what God's desires are at the moment so other other questions other topics yes the problem is created by ministers but now we're talking about having to destroy that kind of that structure or pass beyond that structure you know what to find you know further solution to it and that seems to me for making an assumption about human nature changing in some way because presumably those institutions must develop to deal with those things were response to fundamental human need has that fundamental human need change and so why is it part of some kind of progressive or degenerative process yeah where are we going panelists all we can respond more precisely to this with the language of profanation desacralization disenchantment and things like that but of course it's both the where the thing is I mean I don't know how to that question of true progress we have technologies we have modern medicine we have vaccinations etc and then we have these things are still in contest with our weaponry and our consumerism but I don't think there's any change in you in nature what you what culture has you see the whole world is Western now and and what and the drive of Western is recovery has been clear is precisely 2d institutionalize and so we're attacking institutions both from the left and the right and then of course what happens they're very is running away they're they're left and right only attacking each other forget the institutions and then you're in the Maelstrom but the human nature has not changed it is simply reached its you know apex of possibilities or negativities that's Mike you know sort of Girardi and answer Rene didn't talk about it as much but he did talk about good nemesis and positive and in fact if they're going to be at notre Dom on Monday I'm gonna be keeping a talk talking about good mimesis and that I haven't I would rather quote Rene frankly than quote myself Rene said he's a few quotes that I'm gonna be saying in Monday when they wrote whenever you have that desire I would say that really active positive desire for the other other there is some kind of divine grace present if we deny this we move into some form of optimistic humanism kindness escalates and turns into what we call love which obviously animals don't have but it escalates the other way too and it turns into deadly violence which animals don't have either but whether you exchange compliments niceties greetings or insinuation and difference meanness bullets atom bombs it's always in exchange you give to the other guy what he's giving to you or you tried to do so I would say the mimetic desire even when bad is intrinsically good in the sense that far from being merely imitative in a small sense it's the opening out of oneself yes extreme openness it is everything it could be murders it can be rivalries but it is also the basis of heroism and devotion to others and everything and occasionally Rene would speak about flipping the switch on mimesis one example he used was a woman taken in adultery but there's a whole mob and everybody's wondering what Jesus is scribbling on the I mean it's been whole things written about why was he scribbling on the ground when they says he was buying time there's a mob there they're ready to go just lets you know take a breath and then he says let him without sin cast the first stone and everyone says you know modern say ah that means all of them were doing stuff to they hand it off with but he says no it's that nobody wants to be the first rather than be the first they would not rather throw the stone at all it can only happen when you can deny responsibility so what happens they all kind of look at each other and they begin shuffling off the oldest goes the eldest goes first an elder of this village and then they all kind of go down to the last one that would be an example of reversing the process of mimesis so it can be done but it takes courage and obviously it tastes it takes risk on oneself yeah the question of time is a big one in mimetic theory and I want I would love to recommend a book by James Allison if you're not familiar with his work he's a theologian working with mimetic theory and he has a book called raising Abel which is I forgot the subtitle but I think it's something I mean from the hoc elliptic to the eschatological imagination and the question is that once Jesus resurrected and ascended into heaven he gave us a story whose ending is not known yet so how do you live in a space where the ending which is normally defined by death exclusion inhibit finiteness is now open and no one knows the end and it won't have anything to do with death that's the subject of his book and I think it's a wonderful meditation on that that question about where are we going yeah I think we have time for another question yes oh I was just my pitch was drawn to a recent article that winning awards in the Science Association public policy team they asked six thousand respondents in Denmark to save a series of statements and near Times reported on this the responses to the creative savings particular Saturday the paper says 24 percent agreed to society should be burned to the ground or to encourage the political and social institutions a half L thinking just up in Auburn in forty percent also agreed that quote problems in our social institutions we need to wear but I just worry immediate necessary they worried that we'll always wear some other negative so he's wondering um that's a very very good question to continuously ask and in some ways I feel like what I want to say ties into the question you're asking a moment ago about the anxieties that sometimes are generated when we think where is this all going is it having somewhere positive somewhere negative do I need to posture you know reactively defensively conservatively to preserve what seems like it may be lost the institution's government's traditions or do i champion their destruction in the hopes that something better may come but know that history teaches us of course that something far far worse may come in the absence of these institutions and structures and that's that's the trick right so I often turn to there's a series of writings I love you know the philosopher Theodor Adorno when 1968-1969 came around and student protests were sweeping Europe and the West he was often encouraged to protest and do something radical and he said this is above all this is the time to stop and think and that's been echoed by jejak and ona gamba and others today philosophers who appear to be completely ivory tower you know people in a sense but yet what they're suggesting is very very important we have to find a way to preserve a space for reflection or for thought in the midst of all action because any cry for action and for practical means in the midst of what appear to be crisis moments can actually be quite detrimental if we don't take the time to stop and think about what we're actually doing now that sounds again very idealistic like okay so what do we say to these people who think that we should just burn government's down we should tell them they're encourage them to stop and think but what I what I mean by that there was something that I think could be much more practically applicable which is to develop self reflexive or self critical mechanisms in the midst of institutions so for a gamma ban this means how do you begin to contemplate anti-constitutional elements within the Constitution itself and one of the things he proposes is some like he calls it the it's based on a platonic idea of the nocturnal Council in an institution of some kind of council that exists to only repeal things to only act negatively as a critical and self-reflexive structure within the heart of a governmental apparatus so you can imagine this as an anti Congress that only exists to repeal laws that defines to be unjust but not to bring any new ones into legislation it's an intriguing idea right like how do we begin to to think of a space that allows us to do the negative work the destructive work that needs to be done as part of the daily operations of the institution itself so not just censoring that which we deemed to be on Orthodox or heretical like the CBF from the Catholic Church but actively a space that wants to get self-critical about the institution that does exist and allow for creative thinking to dwell in that space so to take those anarchic thinkers those radicals and protestors and say how can that be part of the institution so if not just a co-opted er to domesticate it but to allow some an anarchic element ation to run as a normal part of its operation and I think that's more the direction we have to head in one codon Jonathan Sachs says Israel is the only nation to create a national literature of self-criticism he's talking about the narratives and the prophets etc I we already we have models for them they're biblical just an impression I actually have a vibe my own voice impairment is not but my voice is getting worse today and it's all these eyes on me you know and I was just thinking of your questions all the eyes of others 6,000 people say this and therefore nobody wants to be an orphan that's the essence cinematic Theory nobody wants to be alone nobody wants to say something against the mob I think we have to confront that fear there is no hope we have to be willing to be the one voice that flips the switch [Applause]

Channel: Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage

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Id: -AP0zN_Nu54

Length: 73min 41sec (4421 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 11 2019