Why Marxism and Christianity need each other (Part 2): René Girard and the implications for capitalism and communism

The following text continues the investigation begun in: Why Marxism and Christianity need each other (Part 1): René Girard and the implications for capitalism and communism

Capitalism and the scapegoat mechanism

What, then, can Marxism learn from Girard? First of all, his theory reinforces – from a different perspective – the critique of capitalism as an inherently unjust system. Complementary to the Marxist focus on economic exploitation in capitalism, Girard can be used to expose capitalism's inherent xenophobic violence (as I noted above, Girard's explanation might be taken to complement the traditional Marxist explanation of racism as capital's strategy to undermine solidarity among workers). Indeed, Girard's theory shows us why such violence must reach its peak in capitalism – ie. why Auschwitz occurred and why it must keep on occurring in one form or another as long as capitalism exists. Here the crucial point is the similarity remarked above between capitalist society and the first mimetic 'community' based on what Žižek termed the vanishing mediator between nature and culture: both are characterized by intense envy, rivalry and the mimesis of a-social behavioural patterns in general. This suggests that, as a socio-economic system, capitalism constantly regresses to the anarchic state of the vanishing mediator, constantly undoing the social order, hence also constantly in need of new sacrificial victims in order to restore that social order. What causes this constant regression into anarchy is capitalism's constitutive competitive individualism. In the spheres of both production and consumption, this competitive individualism constitutes the motor behind capitalist productivity. In the sphere of production, capital produces competing individuals by substituting the cash nexus for traditional social relations (eg. feudalism, village life, the family), thereby forcing individuals to compete on the labour market and participate in the exploitation of labour by capital (since capital = private property of the means of production). This productive moment of capitalism is then complemented by the competitive individualism inherent in consumerism, where what Girard calls “acquisitive mimesis” seems to reach its peak.

Branding: Aura in the age of mass production

At first sight, however, capitalism's mass production for mass consumption (“Fordism”) might seem to defuse Girard's claim that acquisitive mimesis must lead to conflict. As we have seen, his claim turns on the assumption that different individuals cannot possess the same object, so that those desiring that object must necessarily come into conflict. Mass production may seem to forestall that conclusion. For if the 'same' commodity is mass produced, thereby loosing its uniqueness, then 'shared' private possession of the 'same' object does seem to be possible after all (as if capitalism were an individualistic communism). Here the apologist of capitalism could – for once – invoke support from Walter Benjamin's claim that the work of art has lost its aura in the age of its mass production. This loss of aura might be taken to indicate the defusement of the conflict that acquisitive mimesis threatens to cause, since – as we have seen – it is this conflict which according to Girard imbues the desired object with a kind of magical value. Thus the loss of aura noted by Benjamin might be taken to exonerate capitalism, clearing it of the charge that it produces mimetic rivalry and hence sacrificial victims.

Of course, this is a capitalist pipe dream. We all know that mass production has not robbed the commodity of its magical aura, as is witnessed by the exchange value that branding adds to commodities (if two pairs of shoes are exactly identical, except for the fact that one pair belongs to Nike, then that pair will be more valuable). Hence, mass production might defuse mimetic conflict, but branding reinstores it, since it creates a hierarchy of values among commodities, thereby creating relative scarcity and hence mimetic conflict. Indeed, Girard allows us to understand why and how branding works. The extra value of branded commodities is no inherent value, it is what Marx would call a fetishistic projection: it is the magical aura attributed to the commodity by the very consumers who compete over it because of its supposedly magical aura. This is obviously also the reason why branding was invented by capital in the first place, that is, to counter the pacifying effect that mass production has on the conflictuality of acquisitive mimesis. It is the same reason why product differentiation was invented, the constant creation of hierarchical differences within the same brand. In this way capitalism creates ever new desires, ever new rounds of acquisitive mimesis and competition, rivalry, envy and conflict. It is thus also in the moment of consumption that capitalism constantly regresses to the state of the vanishing mediator between nature and culture, constantly dissolving the community in competitive individualism, the war of all against all. Thatcher, the queen of neoliberalism, captured this truth of capitalism perfectly when she made her famous claim that there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals.

The eternal return of the vanishing mediator in capitalism
Capitalism thrives on this regression. Competing capitals must accumulate or perish, hence they must constantly increase competition both on the labour market (thereby lowering the price of labour) and in the sphere of commodity consumption. Hence the fact that the scapegoating mechanism is more important for capitalism than for any other social order. As a form of society, capitalism is inherently contradictory: it must dissolve the social order in order to further competition, but at the same time it must save the social order if it is not to destroy itself by degenerating into complete anarchy, the Hobbesian war of all against all. Thus, as Žižek (2006: 266) says, the condition of the possibility of capitalism is the very condition of its impossibility (which, so we might add, is the precisely condition of the vanishing mediator between nature and culture). Capitalism's amazing potential for exponential growth lies exactly  in this “condition of (im)possibility”, that is, in its capacity to unleash the dynamic of competition by dissolving its own social order. The scapegoating mechanism, then, is constantly required to save capitalism from itself, to restore the social order that it constantly destroys.

In that sense we can say that capitalism stages an eternal return of the vanishing mediator, constantly regressing to the anarchic stage between nature and culture, constantly requiring sacrificial victims to let the vanishing mediator vanish and reinstall culture. This eternal return of the vanishing mediator is essentially related to that other 'eternal return' in capitalism, the return on investment, the circular movement of capital in it's self-accumulation. For it is capital's drive toward accumulation which causes the constant dissolution of society and hence the constant need for sacrificial victims. The more intense capital's accumulation becomes, then, the more society is in need of scapegoats. Hence the fact that the scapegoat mechanism reaches its peak in capitalism. So if Christianity – as Girard says – is fundamentally the rejection of the scapegoating mechanism, then (post)modern Christianity should first and foremost be the rejection of capitalism. Christians, that is, should make common cause with Marxism.

The messianism of Marxism

But does the inverse hold as well? Should Marxists make common cause with Christianity? In one sense, of course, this is a moot question, since from its inception Marxism has had deep affinities with Judeo-Christian messianism. Some interpreters point to Marx's Jewish ancestry as the unacknowledged source of this messianism (his mother's family produced many rabbi's), but it seems more likely that Christian messianism reached Marx through Hegel, who was a profoundly Christian thinker. Be that as it may, the parallels between Marxism and messianism have been noted many times before, both by the religious friends of Marxism and by its enemies, who see in this the proof that Marxism is an irrational and hence dangerous faith rather than the atheistic science which it has claimed to be. For example, as Robert Tucker (one of the religious friends) writes in his widely read book Philosophy and myth in Karl Marx:

“Like the Christian religious system [...], Marxism views all existence under the aspect of history; it fundamentally tells a story that has a beginning, middle, and end... For Marx, the drama of mankind's historical existence is framed by a temporalized pre-history at one end (primitive communism) and a temporalized post-history at the other (future communism). Communism lost and communism regained – such is the plot of world history as he expounds it. Between the one and the other intervenes a series of world-periods stamped with a fundamental antagonism... And just as Augustine portrays the present as the last of the historical world-periods before the Judgment, so Marx finds that the present bourgeois epoch is the 'closing chapter of the pre-historic stage of human society', the time of the deepest suffering, and the prelude to the final revolution... Thirdly, there is far more than a formal analogy here. For deeply embedded in Marxism is a theme that corresponds to the master-theme of salvation of the soul in the Christian theology of history. Marx, of course, does not use the word 'salvation'. Yet, he has the concept of a total regeneration of man.” (Tucker 2001 [1961]: 22-25)

The proletariat as secular Christ

What is especially significant in this context is the analogy drawn between the suffering of the proletariat and the soteriological suffering of the sacrificial victim in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Wackenheim (1963), for example, points specifically to Isaiah's suffering servant as the model for the proletariat as conceived by Marx – and given the fact that Marx attended Bruno Bauer's lectures on Isaiah in 1839, this particular influence on Marx's conception of the proletariat seems quite plausible (Manuel 1997: 8). Other theorists, however, point rather to Christ as Marx's main model for the proletariat. Thus, for example, Michel Henry:

“As has been rightly said: the proletariat is Christ. The proletariat is the one [...] who must go to the very limit of suffering and of evil, to the sacrifice of his being, giving his sweat and blood and ultimately his very life, in order to reach – through this complete self-annihilation, through this self-negation which is a negation of life – the true life which leaves all finiteness and all particularity behind, which is complete life and salvation itself.” (Henry 1983: 74)

What seems to be specifically Christian about this conception of the proletariat is the theme of kenosis, that is, of God's emptying himself in Christ, shedding his divine nature in becoming human and then even shedding his humanity by dying on the Cross. As Henry points out – in line with the above remark about Hegel's influence on Marx – the Christian theme of kenosis reached Marx through Hegel, who coined his concept of alienating externalization on Luther's translation of kenosis as Entäusserung (externalization). Hence, insofar as the soteriological function of the proletariat turns on the complete alienation of its humanity, Marx's conception of the proletariat seems indeed to be Christian rather than Judaic. This focus on the proletariat's loss of humanity, and the redemption brought about by that loss, is especially clear in the famous Introduction to Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844), which was the very first text in which Marx conceived of the proletariat as the revolutionary class that will overthrow capitalism. I quote the relevant passage in extenso, since it ties together a number of themes that relate directly to the Girardian problematic of the scapegoating mechanism and the way it functions in capitalism:

Soviet kitsch by N. Khukov

For Marx the proletariat is “a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular injustice, but the injustice as such is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only the human, title […]; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man.” (Marx 1844)

Already by itself this is an extraordinary passage, but when read in the light of Girard it becomes especially instructive. What is so interesting about it is that here the Girardian theme of the scapegoat appears in tandem with the theme of the proletariat, both as exploited labour power and as the secular Christ whose suffering performs a soteriological function. The theme of the scapegoat is easily recognizable in the first sentence, when Marx conceives of the proletariat as “a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society”. In other words, the proletariat is the 'internal outsider' of capitalism, included through its exclusion, by law part of the citizenry yet also criminalized as a “social problem” due to its poverty, unruliness, squalid living conditions, alcoholism etc. Here we have to remind ourselves of Girard's claim that the scapegoating mechanism requires internal outsiders, whose deviating appearance marks them as potential sacrificial victims. Indeed, the sacrificial victim is the internal outsider par excellence, since his exclusion  constitutes society as such.

Surplus value and sacrifice: The proletariat's double function

What this suggests, then, is that the proletariat performs a double function in capitalism. On the one hand, there is the well known function exposed by Marxism, the economic function of the proletariat as exploited labour power, the source of surplus value. On the other hand, however, there is the function exposed by Girard, that of the sacrificial victim whose death reconciles the social order to itself. Contrary to Marxism, then, we should not see the scapegoating mechanism as limited to instances of racism or sexism as these undermine workers' solidarity. Rather we should see the proletariat in its entirety as the sacrificial victim whose exclusion reconciles the social order of capitalism. In other words: the proletariat is the (eternally returning) vanishing mediator of capitalist society (corresponding to the eternal return of capital in its self-accumulation). This poses the interesting question what the precise relation is between these two functions of the proletariat, being both sacrificial victim and the source of surplus value. Is the relation between these two functions external, such that the relative outsider's position of the proletariat as society's scapegoat also happens to render it vulnerable to exploitation, being forced to sell its labour power and thus become the source of the surplus value on which capital feeds? Or is this rather an internal relation, such that the social effect of the sacrificial victim (the mythical institution of community) enters into the very essence of what surplus value is? I will not deal with this issue now, however, since it requires an investigation of its own (I hope to investigate Marx's labour theory of value from the perspective of Girard's theory in one of the future posts on this blog).

The “injustice as such” in the light of Girard
Thus Marx's characterization of the proletariat as “a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society” fits Girard's theory of the scapegoat perfectly. But how does the rest of the above passage from the Introduction hold up in the light of Girard? Here I would like to argue that a Girardian interpretation of the proletariat as conceived by Marx allows us to develop a new and informative interpretation of Marx's claim about the proletariat's “universal suffering” and the fact that “it claims no particular right because no particular injustice, but the injustice as such is perpetuated against it”.

For Marx, this “injustice as such” is not just the economic exploitation of the proletariat (which in itself is a mere “particular injustice”, however grave), but its dehumanization, its kenosis in alienation, such that the “species being” of its humanity appears as an alien force in capital as it commands all the powers of collective human labour. As I already noted, however, insofar as Marxism relies on man's natural sociality – the human “species being” – it commits the inverse mistake that liberalism makes when it relies on the fiction of man's natural individualism. The crucial turn in human evolution was precisely the loss of such innate sociality, which was replaced by the artificial sociality of culture. Thus the special nature of the human “species being” consists in the fact that it no longer has a species being. What makes us human is precisely our alienation from humanity. The vanishing mediator between (human) nature and culture is this constitutive alienation. Thus the “injustice as such” can no longer be interpreted in terms of proletariat's alienation from its own humanity. The same holds for the universality that Marx sees in the proletariat's suffering: this universality can no longer be understood as pertaining to some general essence of humankind.

Marxist imitatio Christi

This does not mean, however, that Marxian notions like “injustice as such” and “universal suffering” make no sense anymore. Girard allows us to interpret such notions in a new and indeed more convincing way. The “injustice as such” can now be taken to mean the fate of the sacrificial victim, whose exclusion constitutes the universality of society as such (what Girard calls “unanimity-minus-one”). This fate is the “injustice as such” because – as constitutive of the social order – the injustice perpetrated against the sacrificial victim cannot be addressed within the social order: it remains strictly unthinkable within society's mythology (and the legal system is part of that mythology). As the victim of injustice, the sacrificial victim has no 'official' name: he only appears in a mythically distorted way, as the ambiguously divine root of evil/goodness, but not as the innocent victim he really is (compare Lacan on the real as the excluded of the imaginary order). Hence the fact that the fate of the proletariat – its exclusion as internal outsider – must remain invisible from the vantage point of capitalist society. Marxism is necessary to make the proletariat visible, to give it a name and a voice.

Marxism, then, is a form of imitatio Christi, the mimetic following of Christ. Just as Christ substituted himself for all the victims of the scapegoating mechanism, so the Marxist substitutes himself for the proletariat, turning its messianic suffering – the suffering of Isaiah's Servant of the Lord – into a self-conscious role, a messianic mission. The sacrifice of the proletariat is thus transformed into a voluntary self-sacrifice in name of the Revolution, to save the proletariat from the cross of capital. Marxism must constantly renew this self-sacrifice. Without it, communism degenerates into just another social order, based on sacrificial victims. The anti-Semitism and show trials in Stalinist communism have taught as that much.

References

-Henry, Michel (1983 [1976]), Marx: A philosophy of human reality. Bloomington: Indiana University.

-Manuel, Frank E. (1997), A requiem for Karl Marx. Cambridge, Mass & London: Harvard University Press.

-Marx, Karl (1844), “A Critique to the Contribution of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction”, this text can be found online: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

-Tucker, Robert C. (2001 [1961]), Philosophy and myth in Karl Marx. New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers.

-Wackenheim (1963), La Faillite de la religion d'après Karl Marx. Paris.m

Žižek, Slavoj (2006), The parallax view. Cambridge, Mass & London: MIT Press.

Why Marxism and Christianity need each other (Part 1): René Girard and the implications for capitalism and communism

Recently I have been reading and thinking about René Girard and the philosophical import of Christianity for the issues of community, communication and social mediation. Girard advocates a by now quite famous anthropological interpretation of Christianity as the religion in which the violent foundations of culture (the scapegoating mechanism) as such are exposed and which – through the death of Christ – offers a way out of this violence. It struck me that his insights allow us to take a fresh and informative look at the ills of capitalism, the possibility of communism and the relevance of Christianity in this matter. In the following post I would like to share some of these thoughts, with a view to the renewal of Marxism through the spirit of Christianity. In the process I will also comment on the parallels between Girard's views and the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, partly in order to show the fruitfulness of Girard's approach for post-structuralism, partly to prepare for the encounter of Girard's views with some Lacanian-Marxist ideas from Žižek. Due to its length, I have decided to split this text in half; the next half will be posted in about a week on this blog. The first part introduces Girard's theory and then applies it to the issues of capitalism and communism. The second part deals specifically with Marxism and what it can learn from Girard.

René Girard

The mimetic nature of desire

For Girard, the violence inherent in every form of human collectivity (with the exception of the ideal Christian community, which may however never have actually existed) stems from the constitutive importance of mimesis (mimicry, imitation) for all human learning and hence culture. Girard came to this anthropology of mimesis in a rather odd way, namely through his initial study of literature (1961), the findings of which he then generalized to the field of human culture as such. Especially important for Girard in this regard was Shakespeare. For Girard, the Shakespearean drama depicts a universe ruled by the “fire of envy”, where individuals continually infect each other – through some mimetic plague – with their violent desire for power and lust. What Girard learned from Shakespeare is that human desire is always based on imitating a model, someone who we wish to be. We want what the other wants. Thus Girard speaks of “acquisitive mimesis” as the source of desire, which is therefore always triangular. Our desire for an object (1) is always aroused by an other (2) who directs our attention to that particular object (3). It is the other's desire that makes the object desirable. As shall be clear to readers familiar with Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Girard's theory of the mimetic nature of desire is quite close to these theories, although he does not refer them (compare Hegel on the struggle for recognition and especially Lacan on the narcissistic constitution of the ego through the imaginary mirroring of others – also like Lacan, Girard stresses that human desire is essentially based on a lack inside the subject).

Envy, rivalry, conflict, disillusion

Girard's crucial point is that the mimetic, triangular nature of desire necessarily leads to rivalry and conflict with the model and others who follow the same model. “Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on one single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it.” (Girard 1995: 145) Hence the model, whose desire for an object makes the latter desirable for us, thereby becomes an obstacle, standing between us and the object, blocking the way towards our full satisfaction, which therefore takes on a mythical aura. “If only we had what the other has, then we would be complete...” Envy and rivalry thus invest the object with a value beyond its physical characteristics. In this way the object achieves a certain 'metaphysical' status (compare Marx on the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of the commodity). When the object is finally obtained, disillusion is of course inevitable, since the object turns out to be not magical at all, but 'just another object', incapable of filling the lack that motivates human desire. Hence we turn to other objects, that is to say, to other models showing us what to desire. And so the circus of human desire continues, through ever new rounds of mimesis, envy, rivalry, conflict, exalted expectation and disillusion. Girard stresses the volatile nature of this situation and how easy it can degenerate further into a spiral of reciprocal violence. For, or so the subject thinks, if I can get rid of the other, I shall be able to acquire the magical object. But, of course, the other thinks the same about me. In this way Girard's theory of the mimetic nature of desire backs up the Hobbesian hypothesis of the “war of all against all” as mankind's natural state.

The beginning of civilization according to Kubrick

The rise of the scapegoating mechanism

Thus the mimetic basis of human behaviour implies not just the imitation of desire and culture but also of violence, which thereby becomes intensified to the point of threatening the very culture that mimesis aims to install. Once our primate ancestors acquired the trick of mimesis that set them on the road to culture, the challenge became controlling the violence that accompanies acquisitive mimesis. This challenge is especially pressing because mankind seems to lack – as Girard indicates, again in line with psychoanalysis – the protection offered by instinctive “braking mechanisms against violence” which are found among animals, ensuring that “animals of the same species never fight to the death” (Girard 1995: 221 – note: the latter is not entirely true, since some apes do kill within their own species, but Girard’s general point seems convincing). So what is the solution offered by human culture to the problem of reciprocal violence? Girard's answer is that the problem produced its own solution in the form of the victims of the violence, whose deaths offered moments of order and peace in what was otherwise a social chaos of rivalry and conflict. As Depoortere describes this hypothetical situation which must, according to Girard, have happened countless of times among our primitive ancestors:

“Time after time, the same happens. There is total disorder, a lot of aggression and violence; and suddenly, suddenly someone is killed. Violence stops, and everybody comes to take a look at the deceased. They form a circle. Suddenly, disorder disappears and an ordered structure comes into being: a circle around the deceased. Moreover, disorder and violence do not return immediately. The circle dissolves, and the apes take up again their daily routine. Rest has come back in the group.” (Depoortere 2008: 41)

Thus the victim forms – quite literally – the centre of social order, the pacified “circle around the deceased”. After numerous repetitions of similar crises of spiralling mimetic violence and its resolution through the death of a victim, our hominid ancestors began to recognize the pattern: killing an individual puts a stop to crises and creates social order. In this way the scapegoating mechanism was born – the mechanism which according to Girard forms the basis of every human collectivity. Gradually that mechanism became ritualized in the first forms of human culture. Our ancestors learned to anticipate the crises, no longer waiting passively for mimetic violence to engulf the fragile social order: instead, they started to simulate such crises and then kill a victim to prevent the crisis from actually occurring. Thus the ritualized feast came into being, in which the crisis is enacted and concluded through ritual sacrifice. Communal unity is therefore always – in Girard's poignant phrase – “unanimity-minus-one”.

Myth and the ambiguity of the victim
Girard describes myth informatively as the perspective of the community insofar as it is depends on the scapegoat mechanism (compare Lacan on the imaginary order as founded on the exclusion of the real). Girard: “Myths incorporate the point of view of the community that has been reconciled to itself by the collective murder and is unanimously convinced that this event was a legitimate and sacred action...” (Girard 1987: 148) Hence in myth the sacrificial victim occupies the central position, being both its source and the primal object of its narratives and rituals. As Girard stresses, the scapegoating mechanism turns the victim into an essentially ambiguous figure, who appears mythically as both good and evil – an ambiguity increased by the fact that the community will generally select as victims those who are already on the fringes of the community: the potential victims might look different, have a physical impairment, perhaps they are loners without a family, perhaps they speak differently or come from another ethnic origin. The point is that the very 'strangeness' of an individual makes him stand out from the crowd, thereby automatically drawing attention to himself, being an easy target for the scapegoating mechanism. Moreover, by targeting a relative stranger, the community circumvents the problems that might arise when someone is targeted who is an obvious member of the community, for in that case a new round of reciprocal violence might arise (his family might protest against his murder, for example). In order for the scapegoating mechanism to function properly, then, the community must harbour – indeed: produce – 'internal outsiders' whose difference marks them as potential sacrificial victims. In this way Girard explains the constitutive importance of xenophobia for every community (the exception, again, is the ideal Christian community).

Aztec sacrifice

Thus in the communal mythology the deviating appearance of the victim fuses with his ambiguous character as the sacrificial foundation of the community. On the one hand, since with his death the violence stops, the victim is held to be responsible for that violence, becoming the mythical cause of the mimetic crisis, the principle of evil that must be eradicated if social order is to return. On the other hand, the victim is also the one who through his death delivers the community from violence, appearing as its rescuer, the source of goodness. Thus the phenomenon of taboo is instituted, pertaining to some deviating part of the community which is excluded, forbidden to its members – an exclusion that constitutes the community as such, delineating its limits. As Jan Populier describes this constitutive exclusion of the sacrificial victim: “Being the embodiment of all evil, violence and disorder, his return to society must be prevented at all costs... As the embodiment of all goodness, peace and order, however, he must also remain present in society.” (Populier 1994: 23 – my translation, PS) The sacrificial victim, then, is both inside and outside the community, present through his absence, forming the living centre of the community through his death. In that sense the community is de-centred, having its inner essence outside of itself. Thus the scapegoat becomes in the communal mythology a supernatural being who decides on peace and violence, order and disorder. As the source of violence, he should be feared; as the source of peace, he should be worshipped. In this way, according to Girard, the mythical notion of the divine was born. All gods and goddesses derive from this mythologization of the sacrificial victims produced by the scapegoating mechanism. (And here the Freudian analogy is obviously the killing of the father by the primal horde, by which the Law became installed, backed by a mythologization of the killed father as the ancestral god.)

The desacralization of violence in Judaism

How does Christianity enter this picture, according to Girard? As a religion, Christianity is on the one hand heir to the mythical imagination that accompanies the scapegoating mechanism. At the same time, however, Christianity is the religion in which this mythology and the scapegoating mechanism as such are exposed and overcome (at least idealiter). Christ's message is basically that we must relinquish violence as the basis of community and instead turn to love, letting himself be crucified in order to expose the injustice of the scapegoating mechanism, offering himself as the final victim, exonerating all future victims. For Girard, Christianity is in this regard the final step in the long history of demythologization and desacralization of violence that characterizes Judaism as such (compare Levinas' interpretation of Judaism as a rejection of the mythical totalization of the other). According to Girard, the Hebrew Bible tells the story of the gradual exit from mythical religion. The rejection of sacred violence as the basis of myth is already apparent in Genesis with the story of Cain and Abel. At first sight, this story is as mythological as, for instance, the story of Remus and Romulus: one brother kills the other whereby a civilization is founded. But whereas in the Roman myth the murder of Remus is considered justified and Romulus becomes the founding father of Rome, in the book of Genesis Cain's act is unambiguously condemned as an unjustified and vulgar murder and it is rather the innocent victim Abel who indirectly becomes the founding father of a just community (Girard 1987: 146-7). Girard sees this Judaic critique of the mythology of the scapegoating mechanism culminating Isaiah's Song of the Servant of the Lord, which already points towards the Crucifixion. Here are three revealing verses from Isaiah (53:3-5):

“He was despised and rejected by others;

a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;

and as one from whom others hide their faces

he was despised, and we held him of no account

Surely he has born our infirmities

and carried our diseases;

yet we accounted him stricken,

struck down by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,

crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

and by his bruises we are healed.”

This fragment begins by describing the Servant of the Lord as the ideal sacrificial victim, selected on the basis of his ugliness and deviating physical appearance (“acquainted with infirmity”). The fragment clearly describes the social reconciliation effected by the scapegoating mechanism (“the punishment that made us whole”). But rather than share in the mythological reversal of the gruesome truth, portraying the victim as guilty and the murderous community as justified, Isaiah stresses the victim's innocence and the community's injustice towards him (“he was wounded for our transgressions”, “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter”, “by  a perversion of justice he was taken away”, “although he had done no violence” – 53: 5-9). As Girard notes, however, although Isaiah goes a long way in exposing the scapegoating mechanism, the desacralization of violence is not fully completed. In Isaiah the victim's sacrifice still remains divinely ordained (“the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”, “it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain” – 53: 6, 10). Thus the injustice of the community becomes the injustice of God himself, who remains the God of irrational wrath and continues to require the atoning sacrifice of innocent victims. In the Hebrew Bible, Girard concludes, God remains contaminated by sacred violence (Girard 1987: 154-7 – and here one would like to say: indeed, just look at how Israel treats the Palestinians).

Christ’s exposition of the scapegoating mechanism
The desacralization of violence – and one could even say: desacralization as such – is only completed in the New Testament, according to Girard. He refers in particular to Christ’s command to love one’s enemy, the identification of God with love and the denial of God's responsibility for illness and catastrophes, which are no longer taken to be manifestations of divine wrath (Girard 1987: 182-3). Of course, the sacrifice of Christ is still divinely ordained and in that sense there is a residue of sacred violence in Christianity. But the crucial point is that Christ = God, who therefore ordained his own death, exiting from this world in order to free it from sacred violence. In contrast to what many believers and non-believers think, the Gospels do not interpret Jesus' death in terms of God's requirement of bloody sacrifice as atonement for human sinfulness (see Depoortere 2008: 47). This interpretation, which remains within the mythical logic of sacrifice, is a later invention, when Christ's original message was forgotten and Christianity relapsed into mythology, partly because of the Church's collaboration with State power under Constantine (thus turning into Christendom, with its imperial aspirations). The point of Christ's death was not to atone for human sin but to reveal the injustice of the scapegoating mechanism, thereby making possible a radically different, non-violent community. But already in Christ's lifetime, this message was not grasped. According to Girard, his listeners were so blinded by their mimetic attachment to violence that they simply could not understand him. As a result, the direct and 'easy' way out of violence – ie. following the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount – failed. Therefore, as Girard writes, it became “necessary to turn to the indirect way, the one that has to bypass the consent of all mankind and instead pass through the Crucifixion” (Girard 1987: 202). The Crucifixion became necessary as a form of teaching by illustration. 

Detail from The Lamb of God by the Van Eyck brothers

The Crucifixion was the inevitable outcome of the ruling logic of mimetic violence and its sacrificial dissolution. Once Christ's message – the rejection of the scapegoating mechanism in favour of love – had been turned down, he was bound to become the victim of that logic (Girard 1987: 208). In a world dominated by violence one can only survive by becoming an accessory to violence. As the Gospel stresses, however, Christ was without violence (echoing Isaiah on the innocence of the sacrificial victim, “like a lamb led to the slaughter”), hence he could only fall prey to it. Thus he exposed the functioning of the scapegoating mechanism. Because he was emphatically without violence, it is clear that he could not be guilty and that his death was an injustice. Thus the Crucifixion revealed “what has been hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35), that is to say, since the foundation of human civilization through the original sacrifice of an innocent victim.

Girard as a theorist of capitalism?

So how does all of this relate to the issues of capitalism and communism? As a way into this matter, note that Girard's theory of the mimetic source of desire and reciprocal violence seems vulnerable to an objection when we use it to understand capitalism. At first sight, of course, Girard's theory seems to fit capitalism perfectly. His description of the triangular nature of desire (model, desire, object), of “acquisitive mimesis” and the envious rivalry it leads to, investing the desired object with a magical aura – don't we recognize here capitalism's “possessive individualism” (MacIntyre) and the consumerist quest to share in the magical lifestyle of celebrities, whose 'sidereal' aura reflects on the products we buy, especially if our neighbours already bought them? The suspicion, however, is that Girard's theory of desire fits capitalism rather too well. The suspicion, in other words, is that Girard did not construct a universal and timeless anthropology that explains human culture as such and hence also capitalism, but that rather the reverse is the case: his theory seems to have been conceived first on the basis of capitalism and then generalized to the rest of human history and culture. It seems no coincidence that Girard first developed his theory of desire in his work on Shakespeare, for according to many sociologists of literature the Shakespearian drama (like the Hobbesian “war of all against all”) – focusing on the contagious effects of desire and rivalry and the resulting excesses of violence – reflects the competitive nature of bourgeois society and capitalist economy as they began to emerge in the early modern times in which Shakespeare lived.

Liberalism's ideal man: Robinson Cusoe

Consider, for example, Girard's claim that acquisitive mimesis necessarily leads to conflict because individuals cannot possess the same object. This might seem to be the most obvious thing, but when we reflect on it the question arises: But why can't they share the desired object? Why must possession necessarily be individual, that is, private property, as Girard seems to presuppose? Why rule out the possibility of joint possession, that is, communism? Thus we may raise the same objection to Girard that Marx raised against the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and with them against the entire ideology of liberalism), namely that they mistook the individualism of modern bourgeois society for a universal and timeless human trait, ignoring the fact that such individualism was an effect of capital (the cash nexus intervening in traditional social relations) rather than vice versa. Thereby they furnished an ideological justification for capitalism as a natural system, corresponding to man's innate desire for individual liberty – what Marx in the Grundrisse called the “phantasielosen Einbildungen der 18.-Jahrhundert-Robinsonaden”. 

Communism instead of Christianity?
Of course, the case of Girard's seemingly individualistic theory of desire is different, since if anything he cannot be accused of justifying capitalist desire – on the contrary: his entire theory is an indictment of such desire (and in that sense one can say that Girard has a tendency toward communism). Nevertheless, the point remains that his critique of mimetic desire seems predicated on individualist assumptions, reflecting not a timeless human nature but rather a social structure peculiar to a very specific historical epoch. This threatens to bring down the entire edifice of Girard's innovative interpretation of Christianity. Although this objection does not affect the efficacy of Girard's critique of mimetic desire, it does seem to limit the scope of that critique to capitalist society, to the competitive and consumerist individualism which Girard seems to capture so well. Thus his work can be read as giving one particular explanation why capitalism requires xenophobia, namely as the scapegoating mechanism necessary to restore the social order as it is threatened by the reciprocal envy and violence of the acquisitive mimesis generated by capitalist consumerism (and this explanation might be taken to complement the traditional Marxist explanation of racism as capital's strategy to undermine solidarity among workers). But precisely insofar as Girard's theory remains limited to capitalist individualism, his appeal to Christianity as the only way out of mimetic violence seems no longer necessary. The mimetic nature of desire still stands, but envy and rivalry seem no longer inevitable when we replace individualism with a communitarian vision of man as an essentially social being – a “species being” (Gattungswesen) as Marx says following Feuerbach – whose “I” is from the outset secondary to the “We” of communal life. For insofar as people can share, can have things in common, there is no reason why mimetic desire must lead to conflict. Instead of the religious detour through Christianity, then, the secular turn to communism seems to suffice to overcome the scapegoating mechanism and bring about a just and non-violent society.

The problem of community

Yet Girard cannot be get rid off that easily. Although there is some truth to the claim that Girard modelled his theory of desire on capitalist individualism (especially in light of the importance of Shakespeare for the formation of his theory), there is nevertheless a sense in which Girard does succeed to transcend those historical limitations and to formulate ideas with a universal, anthropological reach. After all, the entire point of his theory is to explain the possibility of community as such. In criticizing Girard, then, we may not simply presuppose the possibility of community as an unproblematic given, as the above objection to Girard does. Such a critique is circular: the unproblematic community, to which we appeal in order to obviate Girard's apparent individualism, is precisely what he contests. In particular we may not presuppose some natural, innate sociality in man, as an evolutionary extension of the instinctive herd mentality of our primate ancestors (and insofar as Marxism presupposes such natural sociality – what Marx calls man's “species being” – it commits the inverse mistake that liberalism makes when it relies on the fiction of man's natural individualism). Here we must stress, with psychoanalysis, that human beings have lost such instincts, so that human community is primarily cultural (based on laws, prohibitions, signification etc.) rather than natural. It is precisely this transition from nature to culture – from the primitive herd to human community based on what Lacan calls “the Law” – that Girard wants to explain. Just as Freud explained this transition in terms of the primordial killing of the father by the primitive horde, so Girard explains it in terms of mimesis and sacrificial killing. Girard's particular strength here is that his theory allows us to explain why man is deficient in his natural instincts, namely, because man is primarily a learning animal, whose instincts have been replaced with the capacity for mimesis as the basis of human culture (and this fundamental importance of imitation for human development has been corroborated by much recent research in disciplines like neuroscience, evolutionary anthropology, primatology and memetics – for a good overview, see Depoortere 2011).

The sacrificial victim as vanishing mediator

To the extent then that mimesis took over from instinct, to that same extent man's natural sociality (the herd mentality) was lost and mimesis had to make up for that loss by creating the unnatural sociality called culture. Thus mimesis works on the basis of what Žižek has termed the vanishing mediator between nature and culture:

Slavoj  Žižek   

“How do we pass from “natural” to “symbolic” environs? This passage is not direct, one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of “vanishing mediator,” which is neither Nature nor Culture – this In-between is not the spark of logos magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his supplementary virtual symbolic environs, but precisely something which, although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be “repressed” by logos […]. It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the “birth of man” are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a “being of language,” bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly “perverted,” “denaturalized”, “derailed” nature which is not yet culture.” (Žižek 1997)

Hence, what our proto-human ancestors imitated were evolutionary useful behavioural patterns within a broader context of “perverted nature”, characterized by the loss of social instincts. It seems clear that in such post-natural and pre-cultural anarchy mimesis must have involved the copying of violent and generally a-social behaviours. Thus we can understand Girard's claim that the mimetic nature of desire necessarily leads to a spiralling reciprocal violence, insofar as that desire is primarily anarchic, the desire of the unruly vanishing mediator between nature and culture. The first community made possible by mimesis, then, is the unstable 'community' of envy, rivalry, competition and violence (and here, again, we recognize capitalist society, which raises the interesting question how capitalism relates to the vanishing mediator between nature and culture). It is here, as Girard points out, that the scapegoating mechanism must intervene, deflecting the reciprocal violence on 'internal outsiders', thus stabilizing the community. In a sense, then, the sacrificial victim allows the vanishing mediator to realize its destiny – that is to say: to truly vanish and give way to human community governed by the Law. The violence of the vanishing mediator is both projected and exerted on the sacrificial victim, who thereby – through an expiating substitution – becomes the vanishing mediator of human community. Or in Christian terms: the vanishing mediator is incarnated by the sacrificial victim produced by the scapegoating mechanism.

The next part of this essay investigates the lessons that can be drawn from Girard for Marxism:Why Marxism and Christianity need each other (Part 2): René Girard and the implications for capitalism and communism

References

-Depoortere, Frederiek (2008), Christ in postmodern philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard and Slavoj Žižek. London: T&T Clark.

-Girard, René (1961), Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset.

-(1995 [1972]), Violence and the sacred. London: The Athlone Press.

-(1987 [1978]), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. London: The Athlone Press.

-Populier, Jan (1994), God heeft echt bestaan: Met René Girard naar een nieuw mens- en wereldbeeld. Tielt: Lannoo.

-Žižek, Slavoj (1997), “Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan”. To my knowledge the English version of this essay has only been published online by www.lacan.com. The complete url is: http://www.lacan.com/zizforest.html A Dutch translation of this text can be found in: Žižek, Slavoj (1997), Het subject en zijn onbehagen: vijf essays over psychoanalyse en het cartesiaanse cogito. Amsterdam: Boom.

The vanishing mediator in ancient dialectic: Aristotle on middle term and topos

The term “vanishing mediator” was first coined by the literary critic and Marxist-Lacanian theoretician Frederick Jameson and then adopted and greatly expanded by Slavoj Žižek who also employed the term in a Marxist-Lacanian context. Thanks to the popularity of Žižek the term “vanishing mediator” then became salonfähig in postmodern and Lacanian circles. What is generally overlooked, therefore, is the fact that the concept (if not the term) of the vanishing mediator is much older, dating back to the beginnings of Western philosophy – to the logic of Aristotle, at least. The same holds, of course, for the philosophical (i.e. dialectical) problematic of mediation in general, which derives from the mediating role of the middle term in Aristotle’s syllogisms. The middle term (meson) is the mediator, first, between the two premises and, second, between the premises and the conclusion. Thus in the following syllogism:

“Every human is mortal
Socrates is a human
Therefore Socrates is mortal”

the term “human” is the middle term mediating between “Socrates” and “mortal” (each of which Aristotle calls an “extreme”, akron). The middle term allowes the extremes to be linked in the conclusion. Note that the middle term itself does not appear in the conclusion. It is in fact common knowledge in Aristotelian syllogistics that middle terms never appear in the conclusions they make possible by mediating between the premises: middle terms disappear once they have fulfilled their mediating function. Hence the fact that the middle term is traditionally also known as the “silent term”. It is clear that this is the classic paradigm of what became known as the vanishing mediator. From Aristotle the thematic of the mediating middle term then found its way in Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics of mediation. Thus in Hegel the vanishing role of the middle term returns in his notion of “mediated immediacy”, which is the synthesis of opposites between which the mediator has disappeared. There is no doubt that the Marxist thinker Jameson drew on this paradigm when he coined the term “vanishing mediator”, applying the dialectical notion of the middle term in a Lacanian context.

Middle terms and topoi as reminders of original sacrifice
Why is this important, apart from the need to correct a one-sideness in the current Žižekian use of the term “vanishing mediator”? It is important because it greatly enhances our insight into the intersubjective nature of the vanishing mediator. It reinforces the insight that the vanishing mediator should first and foremost be understood in the context of dialogical interaction, as the medium making such interaction possible. Why? Because Aristotelian syllogistics was originally developed in the context of Socratic and Platonic dialogue. The middle term was the conceptual medium that allowed the participants in dialogue to resolve their conflict. The middle term makes consensus possible and thereafter disappears from the agreed upon conclusion. This intersubjective nature of the vanishing mediator becomes especially clear in the thematic of Aristotle’s notion of topos (place), which points to an older, oral tradition of collective memory embodied in ‘common’ places. As I will argue below, Aristotle saw the topoi as sources of middle terms that resolve intersubjective dispute. The disappearance of the middle term in the course of the syllogism thus mirrors a more fundamental vanishing mediator, marked by the burial place of the original sacrificial victim (or victims) whose murder was the original foundation of the community (as elaborated by theorists like Freud and Girad – see below). These burial places were the original common places (topoi koinoi) on which collective memory – and hence the role of middle terms in public disputes – was based.

Middle terms in Aristotle’s logic
First, however, I will clarify the dialogical origin of the middle term by taking a closer look at the development of Aristotelian syllogistics. Aristotle’s work on logic consists of six books, collectively known as The Organon. Of these six books, three are about syllogistic logic proper:

(1) Topics, dealing with the dialectical syllogism, i.e. the syllogism as it is used in intersubjective discussion;
(2) Posterior Analytics, dealing with the apodictically certain syllogism, starting from self-evident premises;
(3) Prior Analytics, dealing with the syllogism in general and the different figures of the syllogism.

It is an established philological fact that chronologically the Topics came first. In the epilogue to the Topics Aristotle writes that this is the first book on logic instead of mere rhetoric (so not just his first book about logic, but the very first in Greek philosophy up till then). This is remarkable, since Aristotle starts the Topics by stating a much more practical, less theoretical aim, namely, to develop a rhetorical method for resolving disputes with a clear distinction between the roles of questioner and respondent. This was in fact the formal setting for Socratic dialogue, the use of intersubjective discussion as a privileged road to philosophic education and truth, as practiced in Plato’s Academy and later in the Lyceum of Aristotle himself. Aristotle speaks of “mental gymnastics” in this regard (101a 28). Somehow, then, this practical enterprise issued in the much more formal and theoretical result of syllogistic logic. It is clear then that Aristotle discovered syllogistic logic in the context of Socratic and Platonic dialogue (see Kapp 1965).

Kapp: “Wir wissen aus gewissen Abschnitten in den späteren Schriften Platons, dass in Wirklichkeit Platon der Erfinder des Begriffs der geistigen Gymnastik war, und dass er deren Praxis in seine Schule, die ursprüngliche “Akademie”, einführte, als Pflichtfach zur Vorbereitung zukünftigen Philosophen. Was Aristoteles zum Besten seiner eigenen Schule dieser erzieherischen Praxis hinzufügte, war eine systematische Einführung: die Topik. So kam es, [...] dass der usprüngliche Gegenstand der Logik der “dialektische Syllogismus” war, der Syllogismus, der sich im Gespräch entwickelt.” (1965: 23)

A detail from Raphael's School of Athens

As the vanishing mediator making resolution of intersubjective dispute possible, the middle term must – more than the other terms involved in the dispute – express or symbolize shared knowledge or belief, since it forms the conceptual bridge between the different (terms used by the) disputants. In Aristotle, however, this privileged social nature of the middle term is not so obvious. This is due to the fact that Aristotle (like Plato before him) thought and worked in the transition from oral to literary culture in ancient Greece. With Socrates, who didn’t write books, philosophy was still a basically oral and social affair, taking place in dialogue. This focus on dialogue was obviously crucial to Plato as well, the only and crucial difference being that Plato also wrote dialogues. In contrast to oral culture, which is basically intersubjective, the writing and reading of books promotes a more individualistic mode of thought, the self-sufficient engagement of a thinker with his own private thoughts as these are reflected or stimulated by words on a page. Thus Plato could define thinking as “the silent conversation of the soul with itself (Theaetetus 189e4-190a7). Aristotle took this transition from oral to literary culture a step further, dropping even the literary form of dialogue in favour of scientific discourse. As as result, the privileged intersubjective nature of the middle term gradually disappeared from sight in Aristotelian thought. This is especially clear in the Topics, which – as we have seen – starts out as a practical guide for dialogical dispute but which concludes by presenting syllogistics as a more or less formal logic of which the validity is independent from the intersubjective context of dialogue. This loss of the intersubjective context also becomes clear in Aristotle’s treatment of the topoi as sources of middle terms.

Topoi as collective meta-beliefs
It is of course to the topoi that the Topics owes its title. Yet precisely what Aristotle meant by a topos (place, location) is not so clear and has been a matter of dispute for centuries. Although he lists around a hundred of topoi in the Topics, he nowhere provides something approaching a definition (he is a bit – but not much – clearer in the Rhetoric). What is clear is that most Aristotelian topoi are general rules or instructions saying that a conclusion of a certain form can be derived from premises of a certain form (which is in line with the original practical intention of the Topics as a guide for dialogical dispute). As such the topoi are means for finding the proper middle term that will decide a given dispute (see Slomkowski 1997). For example, if a speaker aims to convince his audience of the proposition that “monkeys cannot laugh”, a typical Aristotelian topos would be the advice to determine whether the contrary (i.e. the ability to cry) can be said of monkeys. Aristotle: “For having shown that the thing in question will not admit of the contrary of the accident asserted, we shall have shown that the accident neither belongs nor can possibly belong”. (Topics, book II, chapter 7) This topos would then enable the following syllogism:

Monkeys cannot cry.
If something cannot cry, it cannot laugh either.
Hence, monkeys cannot laugh.

The above topos thus leads to the middle term “cannot cry” as the conceptual bridge between “monkeys” and “cannot laugh”. If succesful, the notion of crying appeals to beliefs common to the speaker and his opponent and audience, beliefs to the effect that monkeys do not cry and hence do not laugh either (although it may look as if they do). It is this commonality of the beliefs connected to the middle term that makes the latter succesful in enabling a syllogism that will convince all the disputants. Thus the topoi are sources of common beliefs that can be used to bring dialogical disputes to a satisfying conclusion. As such, the topoi could be defined as collective meta-beliefs or abstract schemes of common knowledge, pointing to the appropriate collective first-order beliefs and corresponding middle terms.

The spatiality of topoi
Undoubtedly, this analysis of the topoi as collective meta-beliefs will make them even more mysterious. What is the psychological and epistemological nature of these meta-beliefs? How do they differ from the first-order beliefs to which they point? Aristotle does not answer these questions. He merely lists the topoi without explaining what a topos is. But we can achieve some clarity here by focusing on a related problem, namely:  Why does Aristotle call these meta-beliefs “topoi” (places, locations)? What is the spatial nature – in any – of the collective meta-beliefs? This question has deluded scholars for a long time. It is now generally accepted, however, that Aristotle’s use of “topos” is derived from an older tradition, the ancient art of memory known as the method of loci (also called “the memory palace” and “the mental walk”). This link to an older tradition is in line with the fact that “topos” is not defined in the Topics. Apparently Aristotle assumed familiarity with the term among his readers. As Robin Smith – one of the first to sysematically develop this view – writes in the commentary to his authoritative translation of the Topics: “Now, there is good evidence that Aristotle’s dialectical method drew on mnemonic systems in use during his time. These systems appear to have been based on the memorization of a series of images of actual locations (e.g. houses along a street) in a fixed order; items to be memorized were then superimposed on these images, making it possible to recall them”. (Smith in Aristotle 1997: xxvii)

The memory palace
In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of for example a building (or village or landscape), associating different items of information to the different locations in the building, such that the items of information can be easily retrieved from memory by making a ‘mental walk’ through the building. The building, which can be either reall or imaginary, is then the topos (place) utilized in memory retrieval. This technique is still in use and its efficiency has been confirmed by psychologistst and neuroscientists. Many winners of memory contests claim to use this technique in order to recall historical facts, faces, names, numbers etc. A famous example is provided by the Greek poet Simonides (c. 556 BC-468 BC) who was lucky enough to walk out of a banquet just before the building collapsed: the ravaged bodies of the dead were unrecognizable, but Simonides could remember all the faces by remembering the seating arrangements at the banquet. Thus he put to use the mnemonic technique he normally used when reciting long poems.

In the Topics Aristotle clearly alludes to this technique: “For just as in the art of remembering, the mere mention of the places instantly makes us recall the things, so these will make us more apt at deductions (Topics 163b28–32; Aristotle also alludes to this technique in On the soul 427b18–20, On Memory 452a12–16, and On Dreams 458b20–22). However, although his term “topos” derived from this older mnemonic technique, it is clear that the spatial aspects of this technique were all but gone in Aristotle’s treatment of the topoi. In the Topics he merely lists many more or less abstract logical suggestions (such as the one cited above) listed under general headings like “from contraries”, “from similarities”, “from more and less” etc. This loss of the spatial aspect of the topoi in Aristotle is most probably due to the fact, mentioned above, that his thought toke place in the transtion from oral to literary culture. The method of loci is typical of oral culture, where the absence of writing forced people to commit huge amounts of information to memory. Instead of reading a book to retrieve information, they ‘read’ a real or imagined spatial structure like a landscape as a code for the information they needed (and this notion of reading a landscape for example is reminiscent of Derrida’s notion of archi-writing). For Aristotle, then, who wrote and read books, the spatial aspects of memorization became less and less relevant.

Topoi as ‘burial places’: Girard and Freud on original sacrifice
For a proper understanding of the vanishing mediator, it is nevertheless important to keep the originally spatial and social nature of the topoi in mind. Above I defined the Aristotelian topos as a source of shared beliefs connected to middle terms capable of functioning as vanishing mediators in syllogisms, bringing dialogical disputes to a close. I referred to the topoi as collective meta-beliefs or schemes of common knowledge. Taking the originally spatial nature of the topoi in account, it becomes clear that the original topoi – as these functioned in oral culture in general and intersubjective discussion in particular – must have been real historical places with special (and possibly mythical) significance for the community in question. In short: the first commonplaces must have been real common places (topoi koinoi). The mere mention of such a common place triggered in the audience a host of shared beliefs capable of bridging the conceptual gap between the disputants.

Why do some places function as such common places, associated with the collective meta- beliefs of a community? This is something I want to investigate further, but for now I want to suggest that this is where the broader psychoanalytical meaning of the notion of vanishing mediator comes to the fore. The original common places where the ‘burial places’ of the sacrificed vanishing mediator. Following thinkers like Freud and René Girard, we can see communities as founded on sacrifice. To begin with Girard: according to his theory, the beginnings of human society are based on the religious transformation of mimetic violence into the collective sacrifice of a scapegoat. Before the beginning of humanity, according to Girard, hominids copied one another’s violence in a frenzy of mimetic retaliation that can best be described as the violence of all against all. At some point, instead of being directed at everyone in general and no one in particular, this violence became focused on a specific victim, who was marked out by some kind of distinctiveness or weakness. In the collective murder of this victim, or scapegoat, the violence of all against all was brought to a halt as the first community was united by its murder of the victim. In Girard's theory, this distinction between the victim and the community stands at the origin community.

A similar theory has been proposed by Freud. In Totem and Taboo (1913), he proposed that human societies were initially organized much like those of great apes, with one dominant male (the primal father) monopolizing the females. Freud suggested that eventually the displaced sons of the primal father banded together and killed their oppressive patriarch – however, this act proved deeply traumatic. According to Freud, remorse over the deed produced the first sensation of guilt, and the primal father became internalized as the prohibiting super-ego. The guilty males, united by their murder of the patriarch, formed the first community. The primal father is later manifested in the omnipotent figure of “God the father”, in the deified kings of ancient civilizations, and in the charismatic patriarchal leaders of more recent history.

    Etruscan mural of human sacrifice

Between mother and child: On the necessary monstrosity of the placenta

Luce Irigaray writes: “One of the distinctive features of the female body is its toleration of the other’s growth within itself without incurring illness or death for either one of the living organisms.” (Irigaray 1993, Je, tu, nous, p.45)

The “illness or death” to which Irrigaray refers, concern the biological hazards of pregnancy. These hazards flow from the fact that the genetic identity between fetus and mother is only fifty percent; for the other half, of course, the fetus is genetically identical to the father. From an immunological point of view, this means that the fetus is half foreign to the mother. As such, there is a real danger of the fetus being rejected by the immune system of the maternal body – rejected as an intruder, a Fremdkörper that must be disposed off in order to restore the integrity of the maternal body. Such an immunological counter reaction is always a real risk during organ transplantations. Hence the attempt to find donors (preferably nearest relatives) who are genetically as close as possible to the receiving patient. But even then there remains the danger of a counter reaction by the body, because – apart from identical twins – not even siblings share all their genes. Hence also the fact that during organ transplantation medicines are used that suppress the immune system. This, however, creates a second danger, since it makes the patient extremely susceptible to infections. Yet in pregnancy we have this intrusion of a semi-stranger in the maternal body without any immunological problems! Thus pregnancy can be defined as a miracously succesful case of transplantation. In that sense there is indeed, as Irigaray says, a maternal “toleration of the other's growth within itself”.

The placenta as mediator between mother and fetus

But this toleration – this sacrifice – should not be understood as a simple surrender of the maternal body to the biological threats presented by the fetus (such a surrender would of course be illogical from an evolutionary point of view: if the mother becomes ill and dies, the fetus dies as well). The toleration by the mother’s body consists rather in the fact that it renounces the immediate relationship with the fetus and allows this relationship to be mediated by a third, the placenta, which is related both to the mother through the uterine wall and to the fetus through the umbilical cord. The placenta can play this intermediating role thanks to its special anatomic status as a hybrid, a fusion of fetal and maternal tissues. From a biological viewpoint, the placenta is a synthesis of mother and fetus – a synthesis, however, which is relatively independent of both, since it functions as an external and independent organ. In one sense, the placenta is an organ belonging to both mother and fetus; in another sense, it belongs to neither, since it is literraly placed between them. It is this hybrid nature that enables the placenta to act as a filter and sluice between the separate blood circulations of mother and fetus (hence mother and fetus can have different blood types – a transfusion of foreign blood is normally extremely dangerous).

The sacrificial third of tertium non datur
At the same time, however, this hybrid nature of the placenta seals its fate as a vanishing mediator – that is to say: its fate as waste, as the material leftover of the process of pregnancy and birth. There is a certain logic to this discarding of the placenta. The purpose of pregnancy is, after all, the production of child and mother as separate, autonomous beings.

In light of that purpose, the placenta must appear as an (onto)logical monstrosity, a mythical Chimera, an incarnate contradiction that threatens the logical consistency of reality itself. This monstrosity appears concretely and strikingly in the bloody and shapeless mass which is the afterbirth. This grotesque mass cannot not be a skandalon (Greek for obstacle) for the tertium non datur of normal reality where the binary logic of A or not-A prevails: each being is one or the other, but not something in-between. Contrary to this binary logic, the placenta says insolently: tertium datur, there is a third between mother and fetus. Hence the placenta must disappear, must be buried or simply thrown away, in order to restore the logical consistency of our familiar reality. As the medium between mother and fetus, the placenta must have this monstrous character of being in-between, this incestuous fusion of fetal and maternal tissues (and in that sense, one can ask if not every medium of communication necessarily shares in this monstrosity). But for the very same reason, the placenta must necessarily disappear in the mutual mediation of mother and child as separate beings. In this mediation, the placenta is the vanishing mediator. Thus the “loss of the middle” – so deplored by conservatives – has here a positive function, constitutive of reality as such.