Cynthia L. Haven

This is a marvellous quote on many levels. First, on the level of reciprocity: when there is negative reciprocity between people, it doesn't become positive simply because they resolve to stop dealing with each other. That would be a victory for negative reciprocity—and, ultimately, for evil. Then, at the level of the fate of the world: Jesus says that Satan's kingdom cannot stand because it is divided against itself. Girard's reading of this kingdom is that it represents the worldly system in which violence against a common enemy, a scapegoat, is used to quell and expel the violence of the community. The Christian revelation—the revelation that Jesus, like all victims of this kind, is essentially innocent—undermined the mythical power of unanimous victimisation in our world. We can imagine that, without this revelation, from which the modern world unknowingly derives its principal ethical concern—the concern for victims—human groups might have annihilated one another by now. And so we have the modern world: a world that denounces totalitarianism, at least insofar as we are able to recognise it. Diverse ideas flourish. There is dialogue as well as freedom of speech; it's a messy world. But it is better than one in which humanity has annihilated itself or continues to generate, violently, the fragile peace of the world. The quote captures Girard's sentiment, which he expressed thus: “To have faith is to think that, in the final analysis, all of this has meaning; it's to have confidence not in history but in the Absolute. The chief enemy is nihilism... It's nihilism that we have to fight against if we want to fight for mankind, wouldn't you say?”

“...Peace on earth and so forth; everything is going to be fine. But the next minute, you know, Herod is killing all the babies in Bethlehem.” — René Girard, CBC

“By definition, we know only the scapegoats of others. We don't have any ourselves. That's why we love to talk about scapegoats. We live in a society where everybody talks about scapegoats and no one has any.” — René Girard, a talk given in Sonoma in 1991