From here:

The supreme paradox of the Gospels is that the revelation should never happen. And therefore Plato's work is not a revelation of the scapegoat mechanism since philosophy is immune to it.

RG: The idea of grace in Christianity or Judaism is precisely that the truth cannot be known by human means because it is always buried by the mechanism of Satan. What is the idea of Satan? How can Satan cast out Satan? Satan casts out Satan through the unanimity of scapegoating, which forces absolutely everybody not to see the victim as the scapegoat any more but as the weird combination of guilt and salvation that a primitive god is. Whereas, in Judaism and Christianity, you have a totally different type of God who is not dependent on the victimage mechanism.

Q: Here the positions of the victimizer and the object of desire and rejection, the victim, are rather clearly defined and stable. This does not seem to be the case in internal mediation, where we can no longer distinguish between victim and pursuer.

RG: Right, it is a circle. Internal mediation implies what I call double mediation; in other words, the model becomes the imitator of his imitator and the imitator becomes his model of its model; that's what mimetic escalation is. It is a storage of violent energy which tends towards explosion and this explosion takes place all the time, of course. In order for this violence to be deferred, there must be a collective transference against a collective victim that can be completely arbitrary and against whom all tensions are projected, the scapegoat. If all believe in its guilt, the destruction of that victim will leave the community without an enemy. It is this state of being without an enemy, attributed to the victim, which brings about the mystery of the sacred. Because the scapegoat embodies all evil and the next second, it embodies all good, so the sacred would be there and the sacred would be the first to be represented, after a long apprenticeship with prohibitions and rituals.

Q: Earlier, you mentioned religion as the most important means for the deferral of violence. One can say that the market system, as it is defined in GA, assumes many of the functions of religion in regard to the deferral of violence. What is your opinion in regard to the market's capacity of replacing religion?

RG: The market and the multiplication of goods should be regarded as part of the sacrificial mechanism. In other words, the message of mimetic rivalry is that we all want the same things, and the market allows us to have the same things. So, the market can be considered a religion, I would say a substitute religion, but one should not overdo it because in its best aspects, the market is not rationally intelligible. But you could say that there are no victims in the market, there are only beneficiaries. People make money, people consume and exchange and so forth but this is not necessarily sacrificial. First, this is questionable; there are many losers, many victims. Second, the market is to a certain degree like all sacrificial means and the proof is that it has a limited life span.

Consider for example the people who, at the end of the war would devote their entire activity, their energy to the possession of washing machines, dishwashers, or automobiles-- they are no longer satisfied with that, they take it for granted. The market is ignorant as to what we really want or need. Nowadays you hear for example that we need computers, we are not even sure that computers can satisfy our desire in as wide a way as other things but the computers kept the economy going, at least for a while. Therefore the market maybe is more self-sustaining than many other systems but it is not completely so: its efficiency participates in historicity. And there is also a mimetic escalation which has counterproductive effects for the ecology and all sorts of things. So, I would agree to a certain extent with a positive view of the market but I would say in many respects it's the same old thing and that there is no absolute solution to the problem of man who, however unfashionable it may be to say at this time, yearns for the absolute.

Q: At least in principle, the market system implicitly has faith in its endless capability of deferral ....

RG: .... of renewal

Q: .... of renewal and deferring the potential violence inherent in mimetic desire.

RG: Yes, at the same time, I don't want to be too pessimistic, but, at this very moment, there are some disturbing aspects in the down-sizing mania, for instance, which bring out the negative aspects of mimetic rivalry. It seems to me that the market, fundamentally, like all modern institutions, is a complex combination of an archaic sacrificial basis combined with aspects of Jewish-Christian revelation and, as you say, its better than anything we had before, and I don't want to sell it short. But at the same time, it constantly gives signs of crisis. So far it has had the ability to renew itself but it has also had moments of great crises which have led to monstrous events. One can see that the totalitarian crises of the 30s and 40s and the whole communist system were in a way problems caused by a collapse of the market and these problems are still with us. Therefore, without denying the theoretical capacity of the market to renew itself, we can have serious doubts about the ease with which it will do it...

Read the whole thing.

For a dissenting take on the necessity of scapegoating, see here.

Relatedly, from here:

The afterword to Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media is a sophisticated theoretical entry, "Sacrificial Violence and Postmodern Ideology," in which Sharrett attempts to resituate sacrifice as a mode of defining and explaining violence in popular culture. Revisiting Rene Girard's theories, he questions the appropriateness of the structural process of ritual sacrifice to contemporary models of identity and culture. The issue Sharrett poses by rethinking Girard's work is not whether contemporary culture continues to feature sacrifice and scapegoating. Clearly, the straightforward structural employment of these forms and processes seems insistent and undeniable. The issue, rather, is whether ubiquitous media representations of bloodletting remain connected to shared myths that still shape and define the society and the viewer's place in it, or whether the myths have been destroyed, individuals diminished, and the society depoliticized, leaving popular narratives of sacrifice empty and defined only by their value as commodities...

Bataille is important to Sharrett because, without the critical lens he offers, violence in postmodern cinema loses depth or the meaning accrued through traditional relations to the real world. Even the most graphic instance of filmic violence potentially becomes like any other image, homogenized and emptied of meaning or seeming originality. National myths or cultural codes of representation are eroded and other substantive meanings largely evacuated, leaving only the images themselves. For, indeed, as films have become largely self-referential commodities, the concern is that they are increasingly intended for the spectator's consumption, regardless of "content." Attempts to critique this process, like Oliver Stone's excessive use of media pastiche in Natural Born Killers or Errol Morris's elevation of formal "documentary" qualities as subject for inquiry in The Thin Blue Line, largely fail, as these texts, also, are emptied of meaning by the very forms they employ. More routine examples of violence in contemporary action films merely rework and recirculate self-consciously spectacular images that affirm, in their familiarity, the conservative status quo.

More substantially yet, and along lines Agamben might well appreciate:

In defending the European Spirit, Valéry does not speak in the name of Europe alone, but on behalf of humanity in general.  The rhetorical maneuver by which European man can come to stand for humanity in general (and viceversa) Derrida discerns as the paradox of exemplarity:  an inscription of “the universal in the proper body of a singularity” (Other Heading 72).  This resourceful figure serves to resolve a series of exemplary antinomies for Valéry.  The paradox explains, for example, how cosmopolitanism can go hand-in-hand with nationalism, or how the sense of being French can coincide with the feeling of universality.  Far from simply dismissing this paradox as a logical aberration that mistakenly (and arrogantly) conflates the local with the universal, Derrida insists that it belongs to the structure of any identity claim.  “No cultural identity presents itself as the opaque body of an untranslatable idiom, but always, on the contrary, as the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular, the unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man” (Other Heading 73).  Without this paradoxical exemplification of the universal in one’s very singularity, any individual, national, or transnational subject risks stiffening into a nonrelational self.  This is why Derrida does not oppose Valéry’s Eurocentrism by simply championing in its stead non-European and minoritarian cultures, selfidentical differences. Paradoxically, the colonizing and universalizing impetus of European culture can only be dismantled by escalating its paradoxical exemplarity, or rather, its exemplary paradoxicality.  This requires bringing the paradox past the point of its capacity to resolve contradictions, to the point, therefore, of a contradictory and double injunction.  On the one hand, the rethinking of European cultural identity must respect “differences, idioms, minorities, singularities,” and not least of all, the non-identity or difference with itself that forms the basis for any relationality, identity, and culture.  On the other hand, it is necessary to guard “the universality of formal law, the desire for translation, agreement and univocity, the law of the majority, opposition to racism, nationalism, and xenophobia” (Other Heading 78)....

This last part deserves to be unpacked a little, I think...to avoid either the usual complete neglecting or conflation of one of these movements into the other (with all the glib dismissal this then permits) or for that matter the reduction to the merely banal (ditto)...What in fact Derrida is arguing (or at least, I should say, arguing in Chang and Benjamin's reading), is that the linguistic operation by which Valéry comes to substitute European man for all of humanity is, at least on a formal linguistic level, indispensable.

I am curious what people make of this.  That is, there seems to me something of an interpretive leap (namely, inspired by Agamben) at work in moving from the desciption of any claim to essence or identity, to the prescription of a "relational self."  I'm wondering if Derrida would have followed that prescription, with at least its potential echoes of a unified subject-self, that far.  Granted, I may be entirely wrong about this.  The word "paradox," for instance, would seem to imply that this tension (or more strongly, contradiction) between the singular and the universal is in fact sometimes and by bare necessity at rest (or that it oscillates in a manner subject to dialectical laws, or something like the event).  I wonder about this because if the authors are correct, then those forever taunting deconstruction as some sort of cheaply nihilist presciption for the dissolution of the self might then have even less hot air to stand upon.  And yet the thinking of the double injunction in the way Derrida sometimes construes it would seem, in its most strict moment, to almost prevent this relationality (much less "identity", or "culture").   But, moving on.

There follows what I sometimes prefer to call a brief note to aspiring neoLeninists:

When Derrida evokes the duty in his reading of Marx to “quit the terrain of philosophy as ontology” (“Marx & Sons” 213), his point-of departure is the shudder of unease that past and future provoke in the present.  In a later reflection on the premises of Specters of Marx he defines the book’s central question as follows:  “Is what has come down to us from Marx, or will yet come down to us, a political philosophy?  A political philosophy qua ontology?” (“Marx & Sons” 214).  In contrast to the urge, exemplified by certain Marxist thinkers, to read Marx ontologically, interpreting the rubrics of “class,” “the Party,” “dialectical materialism,” “use value,” and so forth, as firmly established, unshakable categories (an approach shared by those who would consign these notions to a concluded and superseded era of the past), Derrida attempts to take up Marx’s work “in conformity with the concept of inheritance,” which he defines through the lens of spectrality:  …one must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most “living” part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition of life and death. This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. (Specters 54)  The conception of inheritance that frames Derrida’s reclamation of the legacy of Marx is not conducive merely to reproducing Marx’s ideas as a stable framework or ontological system. It is not possible, Derrida argues, to take possession of an inheritance as if it were already complete and did not need to be actively re-appropriated and transformed. ...

Most interesting (not to mention, difficult to acknowledge) of all, perhaps

If the New International calls for new forms of counter-collectivity
in this time of “wears and tears” – a radical enlightenment, an
oppositional public sphere, an alter-globalization (“altermondialisation”) – then it does so only on the condition of possibility it shares with globalization itself:  the “instantaneous” dislocations of the “living present” effected by the advent of “real time” broadcasts and virtual technologies [...]

For Derrida, spectrality is as determinate as a voice on the telephone or an image on a TV screen that insist they are “live.”  These transmissions make present here and now something taking place elsewhere. But, at the same time, they are ghostly duplications of actuality that separate the “living present” from itself, virtualizing and mediatizing it, in essence “spectralizing” it.  Though we would dispute Spivak’s casual remark that, “For [Derrida] hi-tech is all good, and only the media, albeit broadly defined,  is ‘technologically invasive,” it suggests a useful schematization of his dense comments on the subject (“Ghostwriting” 68).  On the one hand, Derrida insists on breaking down teletechnology as an instrument of capital.  Less than ever can we consider radio, television, fax, e-mail, the Internet, simply as conduits of “information” or “communication.     Rather they are crucial relays of globalization – and not just circuits for the consumption of commodities – but also machines that shape value, social relations, and our experience of time and place.  Derrida is especially incisive in describing television’s domination of the public sphere: its invisible and highly filtered construction of actuality (“artifactuality”), the linguistic and cultural homogenization of network programming (“homohegemony”), the “spontaneous[. . .] ethnocentricity” of the news, the violently restrictive and artificial conditions of televised discussion or debate.   Just as he argued against conceding to the decisionist urgency and unicity of the “day” that informs journalistic discourse, Derrida calls for intellectuals to resist the temporal constraints imposed upon their televisual interventions. Such resistance entails puncturing the inexorable rhythm of broadcast time, whether through visible and audible silence or the invention of new rhythms of response....

With that in mind, at this point I am simply going to continue to let the authors speak for themselves, as it makes for superb reading (of which frankly, those unaffiliated with any institution should not readily be deprived; if there are any complaints, I will gladly and promptly reconsider.)

Derrida depicts the spectral encounter with the recorded image of the other in a remarkable recollection of his own experience appearing in a scene of the film Ghostdance with the actress Pascale Ogier. In the scene, he asks her, “Do you believe in ghosts?” and she replies, “Yes, now I do, yes.” Three years after he acted out this scene with her, Pascale Ogier had died, and he watched the film again:  “Suddenly I saw Pascale’s face, which I knew was a dead woman’s face, come onto the screen.  She answered my question: ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Practically looking me in the eye, she said it to me again, on the big screen: ‘Yes, now I do, yes’” (Derrida and Stiegler 120).  Derrida discerns the pathos of this
situation in every confrontation with the recorded image.  The technological capture of the “living present” reveals the living dead at its heart.  On television, the temporal disjunction is all the more fundamental for being instantaneously erased.  As with Derrida’s “face-to-face” encounter with the ghost of Pascale Ogier, the supposed spectacular relation produced by televisual technology is reversed: the viewer is transfixed by the “visored” gaze of the ghostly image, watched instead of watching.

Our blindness as “spectators” is a situation of heteronomy parallel to the situation of inheritance as a relation to an anterior other.  According to Derrida, the spectral gaze of recorded images can greet us with the force of law.  In order to explain more fully this injunctive power, he augments Roland Barthes  conception of the “reality effect” of the photographic image.  For Barthes, the affective power of the photograph lies in its indexical capture of the living thing. Through the inscription of light, every photograph preserves an “emanation” of its object.  Derrida goes a step further:   If the “reality effect” is ineluctable, it is not simply because there is something real that is undecomposable, or not synthesizable, some “thing” that was there. It is because there is something other that watches or concerns me. . . . I have an even greater sense of the “real” when what is photographed is a face or a gaze, although in some ways a mountain can be at least as “real.”  The “reality effect” stems here from the irreducible alterity of another origin of the world.  It is another origin of the world. (Derrida and Stiegler 123)

This notion of “another origin of the world” underscores the democratic possibilities of virtual technologies.  Unlike some dystopic media theorists, Derrida does not associate the heteronomy of the teletechnological “gaze” solely with its menacing surveillance potential, though he recognizes this as an inherent threat.  For him, the scopic dissymmetry, the “visor effect” of spectral images, demands due regard for the absent and the dead.  The structure of anachronistic surveillance does not disable our ethico-political vigilance, but rather enables it: “my freedom springs from the condition of this responsibility which is born of heteronomy in the eyes of the other, in the other’s sight.  This gaze is spectrality itself” (Derrida and Stiegler 122).

The sense that freedom might emerge from being caught in an invisible gaze, from being blind before “another origin of the world,” played a significant role in Derrida’s search for an “other heading” of Europe.  Certainly, he placed himself “in the eyes of the other” when he turned to Marx as an untimely means of breaking with the new world order.  Derrida was convinced that, in the age of telematic spectrality, the unaccomplished inheritance of Europe calls for a responsibility before a world that Europe cannot fully “see” or apprehend.

-Ross Benjamin and Heesok Chang SubStance #110, Vol. 35, no. 2, 2006

 

I wonder if anyone else has had this particular experience, one this thought of the gaze as spectrality calls to my mind.  One stands transfixed before an especially charismatic speaker, say.  Usually, in my experience, he is wearing sunglasses (in response to which I always tend to fixate on the mouth; so much so that I am paralyzed nearly speechless).  Or, as David Foster Wallace once iconically described something very similar, as a child held hostage by the ghost of the unblinking eye of a suddenly blackened television screen, its momentary residual trace of light and threat from vague corneal memory lingering ever-so-briefly and sinisterly on the darkened screen.  A primal scene, of sorts.  What was that phrase, again? 

"Stiffening...into a nonrelational self."

It detracts little from Derrida's analysis of the spectral image to point out that the ghost of Hamlet's father actually wears his visor up, as Horatio at first insists and Hamlet later himself  recognizes (indeed, Derrida himself recognizes this explicitly, on page eight of the English translation).  If what was once a close-reading sometimes becomes a somewhat indulgent metaphor, well then metaphors are after all–though it pains conservatives everywhere to admit as much–often no less "real", that is to say present for being metaphors.