Girard’s theory concerns the psychology and historical ‘coming to consciousness’ of the scapegoat. These blogs review Girard inspired works with concepts in An Archaeology of the Fall in mind.
[Here is the mantra:
The good ones are victims of the bad ones.
The (representatives of the) good ones must identify and destroy the bad ones.
Do you want me to say it again and again and again and … ?]
[If you sample American headlines for the year 2013, you might ask yourself:
What do Paula Dean and George Zimmerman have in common?
ThinkProgressive_TV incessantly recounts a stereotypical battle between the good victims and the bad exploiters, involving some great and powerful person (often gifted with incredible immaterial attributes) coming to the assistance of a victim (who must be good because, by definition, victims are never bad).]
Summary of text [comment] page 72
[The previous blog brings me to Rene Girard, an insightful theorist who focused on the importance of scapegoats in our current Lebenswelt.
According to the intersecting nested forms underlying the message of the word ‘religion’, scapegoats trigger a projection, a thinkanti-object.
Who accuses?
The golden calves cultivate thinkpro-object. They point their well-manicured fingers.
The golden calves are always prepared to project thinkanti-object onto someone when disorder threatens.
This helps to explain why the selection of scapegoats appears almost random.]
[The televisionaires speak their truth to you, little viewers with golden ornaments.
You cannot talk back, so the television will speak for you. Mainstream TV will portray a character, a victim, some poor trifle that stands for you, the true victim, who cannot talk back to the television. You will feel sympathy for this pathetic creature because you identify with the victim.
You are the victim of the televisionaries, but you do not know it. You only see what is in front of you. You only see images on a screen.
I will consider ‘the so-called truths that they broadcast’, which Christ called a lie, in the next blog.]
[In addition, one views the adoration of individuals who adhere to Progressive thinkpro-object. Media folk throw garlands before celebrity elites. Their elites express consciencepro-object.
I call these adored people: golden calves.
Like the famous Biblical golden calf, these celebrities thrive on small ornaments donated by little people. Their tokens are melted and poured into liberal causes by Progressive clerics. Celebrities, especially celebrity politicians, are mouthpieces of Progressive Cults.
‘The unreal agape of the golden calves’ accompanies ‘the unreal loathing of the scapegoats’. The scapegoats are projections of thinkProgressive_TV‘s fevered imaginations.
The televisionaries love their gods and hate their fellow humans.]
[This twisted triangle discloses an unreal love.
This unreal love satisfies the viewer’s dispositions and bears false witness to the golden calf’s true intent.
The former’s conscience is not free, it accepts delusion.
The latter’s conscience is not free, it presents delusion.
Only a free conscience is open to real love.]
What have I learned from Alberg’s slim volume?
Both Nietzsche and Rousseau constructed symbolic orders that turned hearts to stone.
Dante pointed to the symbolic order of the Christ.
Jesus, along with the prophets, constructed the first symbolic order from the perspective of the victim.
Flannery O’Connor wrote from the point of view of the victim; that is, the corpse. In doing so, she portrayed the Nothing at the heart of symbolic orders manufactured after the Fall.
Each symbolic order relies on mimesisconstrained.
Mimesisunconstrained re-enacts mimesisconstrained in scandalous and problematic ways.
If “scandal” fascinates on the surface and blocks the path to deeper understanding, then “scandal” it is. If “forgiveness” removes the block of “scandal”, then “forgiveness” it must be.
Discovery is located where scandals lurk.
That brings me to the last author examined by Alberg.
Flannery O’Connor, unlike all the other authors, wrote with a dead hand.
Everything in her books and stories rings with the voice of a corpse, telling of the social construction that destroyed her, and revealing almost nothing about the symbolic order that supported the sinful social construction.
She forces the reader to say, “You do not make sense. Could you explain to me what you are writing in my own symbolic order?”, before realizing that she is only a corpse, a person who could never hold your symbolic order, because if she did, your symbolic order would construct a bureaucratic machine that would kill her.
She will never explain her writing in your symbolic order.
Consequently, many readers want to strangle her.
In our evolutionary history, the “object that brought everyone into relation” existed in the realm of possibility, the realm where contradictions are allowed, the realm where everyone could both compete and get along.
Now, as soon as someone puts a formulation, some key component of a symbolic order, into the hollow space of “where the object is supposed to go”, the “object” becomes like a “thing” that we can want because we sense that others want it as well.
What a powerful and alluring thing this “object” is. We expect that others are willing to sacrifice everything for this “object”. We can back up that expectation with sovereign power. Sovereign power creates the corpse.
And sovereign power is scandalized by its mute testimonial.
All the planners and all the king’s ‘men’ posit the “subject” as the “one who is willing to sacrifice everything for the ‘object’ that brings everyone (in the realm) into organization”.
Does this not sound like mimesisconstrained in its formulation and like mimesisunconstrained in its misrecognition of the “object”?
