RENE GIRAR is « a French-bom literary critic, anthropologist,
and theologian. Elected to the Académie française in 2005, he is
the AHthor of such books as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel,
Violence and che Sacred, and To Double Business Bound. This
essay is adapted from Achever Clausewitz, forthcoming in
William A Johnsen 's English translation as Battling to the End:
Politics, Wai; and Apocalypseyrom Michigan State University Press.
M y work has often been presented as a discussion
of archaic religion through comparative
anthropology. Its goal is to shed light on the
process of homimzation: the fascinating passage from
animality to humanity that occurred thousands of
years ago.
In all of this, my hypothesis has concerned mimesis'.
Because humans imitate one another, they have had to
find a means of dealing with contagious similarity,
which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance
of their society. The mechanism by which they have
done that is sacrifice, which reintroduces difference
into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble
everyone else.
What this means is that humanity results from sacrifice;
we are the children of religion. What I call (after
Freud) the "founding murder"—the immolation of a
sacrificial victim who is both guilty of disorder and able
to restore order—is constantly reenacted in the rituals
at the origin of our institutions. Since the dawn of
humanity, millions of innocent victims have been killed
in this way to enable their fellow humans to live together
or at least not to destroy one another.
This is the implacable log^c of the sacred, which
myths dissimulate less and less as humans become
increasingly self-aware. The decisive point in this evolution
is Christian revelation. Rituals had slowly educated
humans; after Christianity, they had to do without
Christianity, in other words, demystifies religion.
And yet, démystification, which is good in the
absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were
not prepared to shoulder its consequences. We are not
Christian enough.
The paradox can be put in a different way: Christianity
is the only religion that has foreseen its own failure.
This prescience is known as the apocalypse.
Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of
God is most forceftil, repudiating mistakes that are
entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less
inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence.
The longer we persist in our error, the stronger
God's voice will emerge from the devastation. This is
why no one wants to read the apocalyptic texts that
abound in the synoptic gospels and Pauline epistles.
This is also why no one wants to recognize that these
texts rise up before us because we have disregarded the
Book of Revelation. Once in our history the truth
about the identity of all humans was spoken, and no
one wanted to hear it; instead we hang ever more frantically
onto our false differences.
Two world wars, the invention of the atomic bomb,
and all the rest of the modem horrors have not sufficed
to convince humanity, and Christians above all, that the
apocalyptic tejcts might concern the disaster that is
underway. Violence has been unleashed across the
whole world, and our paradox is this: By getting closer
to Alpha, we are going toward Omega; by better
understanding the origin, we can see every day a little
better that the origin is coming closer. Our fetters were
put in place by the foxmding murder and unshackled
by the Passion—with the result of liberating planetwide
violence.
17
18 FIRST THINGS
We cannot refasten the bindings because we now
know that the scapegoats of sacrifice are innocent.
Christ's Passion unveiled the sacrificial origin of
humanity once and for all. It dismantled the sacred and
revealed its violence. And yet, the Passion freed violence
at the same time that it freed holiness. The modem
form of the sacred is thus not a return to some
archaic form. It is a sacred that has been satanized by
the awareness we have of it, and it indicates, through its
excesses, the imminence of the Second Coming.
War, Heraclitus wrote, "is father of all and
king of all." That law of human reladons
was reformulated, a few years after
Napoleon's fall, in an office of the Berlin Military
Academy. And the reformulation took the shape of a
trend to extremes, the inability of politics to contain the
reciprocal increase of violence. Its author, Carl von
Clausewitz (1780-1831 ), left his book unfinished when
he died, but it is perhaps the greatest text ever written
on war: a treadse that the English, Germans, French,
Italians, Russians, and Chinese have read and reread
from the end of the nineteenth century undl the present
day.
Clausewitz's On War claims to be a work on strategy.
It discusses what was at the time the most recent
example of the trend to extremes, which had occurred,
as always, unbeknownst to those involved. Clausewitz
spoke to us about his specialty as if it were not related
to everything else that was going on around it, and the
result has implications far beyond his discourse. He
formulated and helped identify what might be called
Prussianism in its most disturbing form, without considering
the consequences of what he had identified.
Ours is the first society that knows it can completely
destroy itself. Yet we lack the belief that could bear
up under this knowledge. It is not theologians who set
us on the track of the new rationality; that was done by
a man who died in 1831 at the age of fifty-one. He was
a military theorist whom France, England, and the
Soviet Union detested, a feisty writer who left no one
indifferent. His actual theses have no future. Yet there
is a subcurrent running beneath them that needs to be
read aloud, for it can reveal a hidden reality.
It would be hypocritical to see On War as only a
technical book. What happens when we reach the
extremes that Clausewitz glimpses before hiding them
behind his strategic considerations? He does not tell us.
This is the quesdon we have to ask today. Clausewitz
had a stunning intuidon about history's suddenly
accelerated course, but he immediately disguised it and
tried to give his book the tone of a technical, scholarly
treatise. We therefore have to complete Clausewitz by
taking up the route he interrupted and following it to
the end. Completing the interpretadon of On War is to
say that its meaning is religious and that only a religious
interpretation has a chance of reaching what is essendal
in it. Through Clausewitz's text, the relevance of the
apocalypdc texts becomes apparent with greater force.
We must not turn the author of On War into a
scapegoat, as did, in their dme, Stalin and one of
Clausewitz's most famous commentators, Liddell
Hart. We shall also not be content with the dmidity
with which Raymond Aron tried to rehabilitate him.
The reason the text is not yet fully understood is perhaps
because it has been attacked and defended too
often. It is as if we have not yet wanted to understand
the central intuidon that it seeks to hide.
This constant denial is interesting. Clausewitz was
possessed, like all the great writers, by resentment. It
was because he wanted to be more radonal than the
strategists who preceded him that he suddenly put his
finger on an aspect of reality that is absolutely irradonal.
Then he retreated and tried to shut his eyes.
Clausewitz conceived relations among men as
mimedc, in spite of his philosophical approach being
that of Enlightenment radonalism. He provided all the
means for showing that the world is tending more and
more to extremes, and yet his imagination always
thwarted and limited his intuitions. Clausewitz and his
commentators are hampered by their rationalism. This
is as good a proof as any that a different kind of radonality
is needed to understand the reality of what he
glimpsed.
Durch diese Wechselwirkung wieder das Streben
nach dem Äußersten, he wrote in his first chapter: "War
is an act of violence, which in its applicadon knows no
bounds; as one dictates the law to the other, there arises
a sort of reciprocal acdon, which, in the concepdon,
must lead to an extreme." Without realizing it, Clausewitz
discovered not only the apocalypdc formula but
also that it is bound up with mimedc rivalry. Where can
this truth be understood in a w^orld that continues to
close its eyes to the incalculable consequences of
mimetic rivalry? Not only was Clausewitz right, in
opposidon to Hegel and all modem wisdom, but what
he was right about has terrible implications for humanity.
This warmonger alone saw certain things.
Christ allows us to face this reality without sinking
into madness. The apocalypse does not announce the
end of the world; it creates hope. If we suddenly see
reality, we do not experience the absolute despair of an
unthinking modernity but rediscover a world where
things have meaning. Hope is possible only if we dare
to think about the danger at hand, but this requires
opposing both nihilists, for whom everything is only
language, and pragmadc realists, who reject the idea
that intelligence can attain truth: heads of state.
AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2009 19
bankers, and soldiers who claim to be saving us when
in fact they are plunging us deeper into devastation
each day.
By accepting to be crucified, Christ brought to light
what had been "hidden since the foundation of the
world"—the foundation itself, the unanimous murder
that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the
Cross. In order to function, archaic religions need to
hide their founding murder, which was being repeated
continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting
human societies from their own violence. By revealing
the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance
and superstition that are indispensable to such
religions. It thus made possible an advance in knowledge
that was until then unimaginable.
Freed of sacrificial constraints, the human mind
invented science, technology, and all the best and worst
of culture. Our civilization is the most creative and
powerful ever known, but also the most fragile and
threatened because it no longer has the safety rails of
archaic religion. Without sacrifice in the broad sense, it
could destroy itself if it does not take care, which clearly
it is not doing.
Was Paul a megalomaniac when he said in the First
Letter to the Corinthians that "none of the rulers of
this age understood this; for if they had, they would not
have crucified the Lord of Glory"? I do not think so.
The rulers of the age, and all that Paul calls powers and
principalities, were state structures based on the founding
murder, which was effective because hidden. In the
context, the leading power was the Roman Empire,
which was essentially evil in the absolute but indispensable
in the relative—and better than the total
destruction about which the Christian revelation
warns us. Once again, this does not mean that Christian
revelation is bad. It is wholly good, but we are
unable to come to terms with it.
A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe
in its guilt. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that
we have one. Learning that we have a scapegoat is to
lose it forever and to expose ourselves to mimetic conflicts
with no possible resolution. This is the implacable
law of the trend to extremes. The protective system of
scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives
as they reveal Jesus' innocence and, litde by litde,
that of all analogous victims. The process of education
away from violent sacrifice thus got underway, but
it moved very slowly, making advances that were
almost always unconscious. It is only today that it has
had increasingly remarkable results in terms of our
comfort—and at the same time proved ever more dangerous
for the future of life on Earth.
To make the revelation wholly good and not threatening
at all, humans have only to adopt the behavior
recommended by Christ: Abstain completely from
retaliation and renounce the trend to extremes. Indeed,
if the trend to extremes continues, it will lead straight to
the extinction of all life on the planet. This is the possibility
that Raymond Aron glimpsed when reading
Clausewitz. He then wrote an impressive work to
expel apocalyptic logic from his mind and persuade
himself at all costs that the worst could be avoided, that
deterrence would always triumph. This budding religious
clairvoyance is superior to what most people are
capable of, but insufficient. We have to take the interpretation
of the text further. The interpretation has to
hefmished.
Since the beginning of the "novelistic conversion"
in my 1961 study Deceit, Desire, and the Novel,
all of my books have been more or less explicit
apologies of Christianity. Christianity is a founding
murder in reverse, which illuminates what has to
remain hidden to produce ritual, sacrificial religions.
Paul compared it to food for adults, in contrast with
food for children, which is what archaic religions
were. Nietzsche himself sometimes had intuitions of
this kind regarding the Greeks' "infantile" character.
To make the situation even more perverse, however,
Christian revelation is the paradoxical victim of the
knowledge that it provides. Absurdly, it is conflated
with myth, which it clearly is not, and doubly misunderstood
by both its enemies and partisans, who tend
to confuse it with one of the archaic religions that it
demystifies. Yet all démystification comes from Christianity.
Even better: The only true religion is the one
that demystifies archaic religions.
Christ came to take the victim's place. He placed
himself at the heart of the system to reveal its hidden
workings. The second Adam, to use St. Paul's expression,
revealed to us how the first came to be. The Passion
teaches us that humanity results from sacrifice, is
born with religion. Only religion has been able to contain
the conflicts that would have otherwise destroyed
the first groups of humans. Mimetic theory does not
seek to demonstrate that myth is null but to shed light
on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity
between the Passion and archaic religion. Christ's
divinity, which precedes the Crucifixion, introduces a
radical rupture from the archaic, but Christ's resurrection
is in complete continuity with all forms of religion
that preceded it. The w^ay out of archaic religion comes
at this price. A good theory about humanity must be
based on a good theory about God.
People in the process of being educated, who are
not yet fully human, can become so only by measuring
themselves against the divine, and there comes a
time when God can reveal himself fully to them. It is
20 FIRST THINGS
understandable that Christ frightened the apostles. He
is also, however, the only model, the one that places
man at just the right distance from the divine. Christ
came to reveal that his kingdom was not of this world
but that humans, once they have understood the
mechanisms of their own violence, can have an accurate
intuition of what is beyond it. We can all participate
in the divinity of Chnst so long as we renounce
our own violence.
And yet, we now know, in part thanks to Clausewitz,
that humans will not renounce it. The paradox is
thus that we are starting to grasp the gospel message at
the moment when the trend to extremes is becoming
the unique law of history.
Christian revelation has confirmed all religions in
its relation to the divine that is rejected by the modern
world. It confirms what religions have glimpsed. In a
way, it is because Christ accepted the mold of false resurrections
that he is truly risen. The beneficiaries of
archaic resurrections that reestablished peace and
order were in a real relation to the divine. There was
something Christian in all myths. By revealing the victims'
innocence, however, the Passion makes positive
what was still negative in myths: We now know that
victims are never guilty. Satan thus becomes the name
of a sacred that is revealed and devalued through
Christ's intervention.
At present, the Wise and the discerning (which I
suppose now refers to academics) are furiously redoubling
their attacks on Christianity and once again congratulating
themselves on its forthcoming demise.
These unfortunates do not see that their skepticism
itself is a byproduct of Christian religion. While it is
good to get rid of the sacrificial idiocies of the past in
order to accelerate progress, eliminating obstacles to
humanity's forward march and facilitating the invention
and production of what will make our lives more
prosperous and comfortable (at least in the West), it is
nonetheless true that sacrificial stupidity w^as also what
prevented us from perfecting ways of killing one
another.
Paradoxically, stupid sacrifice is what we are most
in need of at present. Few Christians stul talk about
the apocalypse, and they usually have a completely
mythological conception of it. They think that the violence
of the end of time will come from God himself.
They cannot do without a cruel God. Strangely, they
do not see that the violence we ourselves are in the
process of amassing and that is looming over our own
heads is entirely sufficient to trigger the worst. They
have no sense of humor.
Violence is a terrible adversary, since it always
wins. Desiring war can thus become a spiritual attitude.
We have to fight a violence that can no longer be
controlled or mastered. More than ever, I am convinced
that history has meaning, and that its meaning
is terrifying.
In fact, the apocalyptic moment serves as a link
between Clausewitz's treatise and considerations
on the destiny of Europe. If we take to its logical
conclusion our analysis of a new global escalation of
extremes, we have to consider the complete novelty of
the situation since September 11, 2001. Terrorism has
again raised the level of violence up a notch. It is one of
the last métastases of the cancer that has torn the Western
world apart. Terrorism is the vanguard of a general
revenge against the West's wealth. It is a very violent
and unpredictable revival of conquest, which is all the
more terrifying because it has encountered America
along the way.
In this sense, everyone knows that the future of the
idea of Europe, and thus also the Christian truth running
through it, will be played out in South America,
India, and China as well as in Europe. Europe has been
playing a role analogous to Italy's during the wars of
the sixteenth century, except worse. It has been the battlefield
of the entire world. Europe is a tired continent
that no longer puts up much resistance to terrorism.
This explains the stunning nature of the attacks, which
are often carried out by people on the inside. Resistance
is all the more complex because the terrorists are close
to us, beside us. The actions are completely unpredictable.
The very idea of sleeper cells corroborates
everything we have said about the violent mechanisms
by which cultures mediate themselves: the identity
between people that can suddenly take a turn for the
worst.
Atta, the leader of the September 11 group who
piloted one of the four airplanes, was the son of a middle-
class Egyptian family. It is staggering to think that,
during the three last days before the attack, he spent his
nights in bars with his accomplices. There is something
mysterious and intriguing in this. Who asks about the
souls of those men? Who were they and what were
their motivations? What did Islam mean to them?
What does it mean to kill oneself for that cause?
We are witnessing a new stage in the escalation to
extremes. Terrorists have conveyed the message that
they are ready to wait, that their notion of time is not
ours. This is a clear sign of the return to the archaic, a
return to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries,
which is significant in itself. But who is paying attention
to this significance? Who is taking its measure? Is
that the job of the ministry of foreign affairs? We have
to expect a lot of unexpected things in the future. We
are going to witness things that will certainly be worse.
Yet people will remain deaf.
AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2009 21
On September 11, people were shaken, but they
quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness,
which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could
feel that something was happening. Then a blanket of
silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety.
Western rationalism operates like a myth: We always
work harder to avoid seeing the catastrophe. We neither
can nor want to see violence as it is. The only way
we will be able to meet the terrorist challenge is by radically
changing the way we think. Yet, the clearer it is
what is happening, the stronger our refusal to acknowledge
it. This historical configuration is so new that we
do not know how to deal with it. It is precisely a
modality of what Pascal saw: the war between violence
and truth. Think about the inadequacy of our recent
avant-gardes who preached the nonexistence of the
real.
We have to think about time in such a way that the
Batde of Poitiers and the Crusades are much closer to
us than the French Revolution and the industrialization
of the Second Empire in France. The points of
view of Westem countries are at most unimportant
background features for Islamists. They think of the
Westem world as having to be Islamicized as quickly as
possible. Analysts tend to say that this is the attitude of
isolated minorities cut off from the reality in their
countries. They may be so with respect to action, of
course, but with respect to thought? Despite everything,
does such thinking not contain something essentially
Islamic? This is a question that we have to have
the courage to ask, even diough it is a given that terrorism
is a bmtal action that hijacks religious codes for its
own purposes. It would not have taken such a hold on
people's minds if it did not bring up to date something
that has always been present in Islam. To the great surprise
of our secular republicans, religious thought is
stul very much alive in Islam. It cannot be denied that
some of Muhammad's theses are active in today's
world.
What we are witnessing with Islam, however, is
nonetheless much more than a return of conquest; it is
what has been rising ever since the French Revolution,
after the communist period that acted as an intermediary.
Indeed, Leninism had some of these features, but
what it lacked was religion. Our new escalation to
extremes is thus able to use all components: culture,
fashion, political theory, theology, ideology, and religion.
What drives history is not what seems essential in
the eyes of Western rationalists.
If we had said in the 1980s that Islamism would
play the role it plays today, people would have thought
we were crazy. Yet the ideology promoted by Stalin
already contained parareligious components that foreshadowed
the increasingly radical contamination that
has occurred over time. We therefore have to radically
change the way we think and try to understand the situation
without any presuppositions and using all the
resources available from the study of Islam.
The work to be done is immense. Personally, I have
the impression that this religion has used the Bible as a
support to rebuild an archaic religion that is more powerful
than all the others. It threatens to become an apocalyptic
tool, the new face of the escalation to extremes.
Even though there are no longer any archaic religions,
it is as if a new one had arisen built on the back of the
Bible, a slighdy transformed Bible. It would be an
archaic religion strengthened by aspects of the Bible
and Christianity. Archaic religion collapsed in the face
of Judeo-Christian revelation, but Islam resists. While
Christianity eliminates sacrifice wherever it gains a
foothold, Islam seems in many respects to situate itself
prior to that rejection.
Of course, there is resentment in its attitude to
Judeo-Chrisdanity and the West, but it is also
a new religion. Historians of religion, and even
anthropologists, have to show how and why it
emerged. Indeed, some aspects of this religion contain a
relation to violence that we do not understand and that
is all the more worrying for that reason. For us, it makes
no sense to be ready to pay with one's life for the pleasure
of seeing the other die. We do not know whether
such phenomena belong to a special psychology or not.
We are thus facing complete failure; we cannot talk
about it, and we cannot document the situation because
terrorism is something new that exploits Islamic codes
but does not at all belong to classical Islamic theory.
Today's terrorism is new, even from an Islamic point of
view. It is a modern effort to counter the most powerful
and refined tool of the Western world: technology.
It counters technology in a way that we do not understand
and that classical Islam may not understand
either.
Clausewitz is easier to integrate into a historical
development. He gives us the intellectual tools to
understand the violent escalation. But where do we
find such ideas in Islam? Modern resentment never
leads all the way to suicide. Thus, we do not have the
analogical structures that could help us understand. I
am not saying that they are not possible, that they will
not appear, but I admit my inability to grasp them. This
is why our explanations often belong to the province of
fraudulent propaganda against Muslims.
We do not experience this reality; we have no intimate,
spiritual, phenomenological contact with it. Terrorism
is a superior form of violence, and it asserts that
it will win. There is no indication, however, that the
work that remains to be done to free the Qur'an from
22 FIRST THINGS
its caricatures will have any influence on terrorism
itself, which is both linked to Islam and different from
it. We can thus put forward the tentative hypothesis
that the escalation to extremes now uses Islam as it once
used Napoleonism and Pangermanism. Terrorism is
fearsome in that it knows how to use the most deadly
technology outside of any military institution. Clausewitzian
war is an analogy that can make only imperfect
sense of terrorism, but it certainly does foreshadow it.
In my 1972 book Violence and the Sacred, I borrowed
the idea from the Qur'an that the ram that
saved Isaac from being sacnficed was the same one
that was sent to Abel so that he would not have to kill
his brother: proof that in the Qur'an sacrifice is also
interpreted as a means of combating violence. From
this, we can draw the conclusion that the Qur'an contains
understanding of things that secular mentality
cannot fathom: that sacrifice prevents vengeance, for
example. Yet, this topic has disappeared from Islam,
just as it has disappeared in Western thought. The paradox
that we thus have to deal with is that Islam is closer
to us today than to the world of Homer. Clausewitz
allowed us to glimpse this, through what we have called
his warlike religion, in which we have seen the emergence
of something both very new and very primitive.
Islamism, likewise, is a kind of event internal to the
development of technology. We have to be able to
think about both Islamism and the escalation to
extremes at the same time; we need to understand the
complex relations between these two realities.
The unity of Christianity in the Middle Ages resulted
in the Crusades, which were permitted by the papacy.
And yet, the Crusades are not as important as Islam
thinks. The Crusades were an archaic regression without
consequences for the essence of Christianity.
Christ died everywhere and for everyone. Seeing Jews
and Christians as falsifiers is more irremediable. It
allows Muslims to eliminate all serious discussion, all
comparison among the three religions. It amounts to
not wanting to see what is at stake in the prophetic tradition.
Why has Christian revelation been subject to
the most hostile and ferocious possible criticism for
centuries, but not Islam? There is an abdication of reason
here. In some respects, it resembles the aporia of
pacifism, which can be a strong encouragement for
aggression. The Qur'an would thus benefit from being
studied in the same way that Jewish and Christian texts
have been studied. I think that a comparative approach
would reveal that it contains no real awareness of collective
murder.
By contrast, there is a Christian awareness of such
murder. The two greatest conversions, those of Peter
and Paul, are analogous: They are one with the awareness
of having participated in a collective murder. Paul
was there when Stephen was stoned to death. His
departure for Damascus immediately followed that
murder, which must have affected him terribly. Christians
understand that the Passion has rendered coUective
murder inoperative. This is why, far from reducing
violence, the Passion aggravates it.
Islamism seems to have understood this very
quickly, but in the sense of jihad. There are forms of
acceleration in history that are self-perpetuating. We
have the impression that today's terrorism is somehow
the heir of totalitarianism, that terrorism and totalitarianism
contain similar forms of thought and ingrained
habits. One of the possible threads of this continuity is
the construction of a Napoleonic model by a Prussian
general.
The model was later taken up by Lenin and Mao
Zedong (referenced by al-Qaeda). Clausewitz's bril-
Uance lies in his having unknowingly anticipated a law
that has become worldwide. The Cold War is over,
and now we are in a hot war, given the hundreds, and
tomorrow perhaps the thousands, of victims every
day in the Middle East.
The trend toward the apocalypse is humanity's
greatest feat. The more probable this achievement
becomes, the less we talk about it. I have
come to a crucial point: that of a profession of faith,
more than a strategic treatise, unless both are mysteriously
equivalent, in the essential war that truth wages
against violence. I have always been utterly convinced
that violence belongs to a form of corrupted sacred,
intensified by Christ's action when he placed himself
at the heart of the sacrificial system. Satan is the other
name of the escalation to extremes. The Passion has
radically altered the archaic world. Satanic violence has
long reacted against this holiness, which is an essential
transformation of ancient religion.
It is thus that God revealed himself in his Son, that
religion was confirmed once and for all, thereby
changing the course of human history. Inversely, the
escalation to extremes reveals the power of this divine
intervention. Divinity has appeared and it is more reliable
than all the earlier theophanies, but no one wants
to see it.
Humanity is more than ever the author of its own
fall because it has become able to destroy its world.
With respect to Christianity, this is not just an ordinary
moral condemnation but an unavoidable anthropological
observation. Therefore we have to awaken
our sleeping consciences. To seek to comfort is always
to contribute to the worst. ED
