A Philosophical and Political Interpretation of Girard's Violence and the Sacred. Its Impact on Latin American Anthropology

Abstract

This article explores a three plateaus interpretation of Girard's thesis that sacrifice is at the root of all societies, expressed in his Violence and the Sacred. The first one highlights the contradiction inherent in the social nature of mankind, because it has to build a civilization and a ritual to give effect to such violence in a socially accepted way and keeping it in some way hidden in its crudest form. The second emphasizes the ritual instance as a violent competition mechanism that silences original violence throughout the ritual inherent to economic and political institutions such as the current capitalism. The third, examines how, as capitalism established its ritual sacrifice in the economic struggle for job success, communism sought an external enemy –another scapegoat–which would unify socialist republics against it. In both, as in every society, the exercise of sacred violence is performed by an authorized representative with a preventive and punitive intention. The problem appears when sacred violence does not break the cycle of violence but restarts it, thus giving rise to a recurrent sacrificial crisis leading society to its self-destruction.