Violence and forgiveness: from one mimesis to another
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Violence and forgiveness: from one mimesis to another Jean‑Luc Marion1,2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract René Girard’s breakthrough consists in uncovering the mechanism of violence, namely the mimesis and rivalry it permits. Yet, mimetic violence still leaves the very origin of evil and murder unquestioned. Here Lévinas plays (or should play) a decisive role: the call to murder only becomes possible as one of the versions of the call of the face, the call of the other. This is what Girard should have taken up in order to clarify his final allusions to a “good mimesis”—this other, properly Christic, possibility of the call of the face. Keywords Violence · Evil · Forgiveness · Mimesis · Sacrifice
1 Evil and violence: Girard’s breakthrough We can evaluate the level of seriousness of thinking—and especially of philosophical thinking—by the extent to which it allows us to comprehend evil. And how could we fail to notice that most often philosophy avoids what is serious about evil by reducing it to some already well-known alternative or one that could easily become so. Accordingly, one could reduce evil to a defect of conscience: an evil person is ignorant; virtue can be taught; it would be enough to know good motives rationally in order to act well. Or to a weakness of the will: the objects of desire tempt the will that deviates from the true good, yet I know nevertheless what that good is and I would prefer it if I could; thus radical evil is actually not radical, for the will is not truly evil [diabolique]. Or one reduces evil to nothingness: just a privation of being, for it seems evident that everything that is as such must already be good; evil This is a revised translation of “Violence et pardon: Girard, Levinas et au-delà,” first published in French language in J.-L. Marion, Figures de phénoménologie, Paris: Vrin 2015, second edition. * Jean‑Luc Marion [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Académie française, 23, quai de Conti, 75270 Paris, France
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Divinity School, Swift Hall, The University of Chicago, 1025 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
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becomes the reasonable price and the necessary mark of finitude. Or evil can also be reduced to the negative: this essential element of the concept and of predication indicates the sacrifice that the mind pays for securing its grasp of effective reality. Finally, the most daring and also most convenient hypothesis is always possible: to deny the very difference between good and evil. Yet, here the difficulty is strengthened by being displaced, because one would have to achieve in practice the ethical indifference that the theory would demand. By contrast, one must acknowledge René Girard as a thinker of evil as such, or, more precisely, of evil in its first empirical manifestation as violence. Violence, as one person attacking another, as the primitive or initial physical violence; the kind of violence that punishes the mind through the suffering of the flesh, the kind that slays, shatters, crushes, breaks and finally ki
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