Violence and the return of the religious
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Violence and the return of the religious James Mensch1
Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Rene´ Girard speaks of the return of the religious as a ‘‘return of the sacred… in the form of violence.’’ This violence was inherent in the original ‘‘sacrificial system,’’ which deflected communal violence onto the victim. In this article, I argue that there is a double return of the sacred. With the collapse of the original sacrificial system, the sacred first reappears in the legal order. When this loses its binding claim, it reappears in the political order. Here, my claim will be that Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political is not simply structurally similar to Girard’s conception of the sacrificial system. It is actually a manifestation of this. In this political return of the religious, the religious and the political systems are conflated. What prevents us from seeing this is the self-concealment that is essential to the sacrificial act, a self-concealment that also characterizes its twofold return. Keywords Violence Religion Sacrifice The political Rene´ Girard Carl Schmitt
The debates on the return of the religious have a curious quality. It is not as if, viewed on a global scale, religions had departed and are now, somehow, returning. The puzzlement is rather, Why has the force behind them not disappeared? Why has it not succumbed to the various critiques—particularly those of science— directed against it? Nietzsche, for example, expressed the impact that Darwin’s Descent of Man had on contemporary culture by writing, ‘‘Formerly one tried to
& James Mensch [email protected] 1
Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, U Krˇ´ızˇe 661/8, 158 00 Prague 5-Jinonice, Czech Republic
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J. Mensch
get a feel for the majesty of human beings by pointing backward toward their divine descent, this has now become a forbidden path, because before its gate stands the ape.’’1 Given this dismissal of the Biblical standpoint, what is behind the persistence of the ‘‘religions of the book’’? What have such critiques missed? With these questions comes the suspicion that we do not understand the religious or the sacred, that it is somehow outside or beyond the division between the rational and the irrational. As such, it cannot be dismissed by calling it ‘‘irrational.’’ But, if it is not some error that can be corrected by providing the correct information, what, in fact, is it? A look at the hermeneutical context of the discussions regarding the return is instructive. The context is that of the violence perpetrated in religion’s name. Since the World Trade Center attacks, such violence has been prominent in the news. It appears in the accounts of the ShiaSunni conflicts that continue to consume the Middle East, the Isis inspired attacks in the West, the ongoing sectarian tensions that mark the Hindu–Muslim divide, and the Burmese Buddhists’ ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingyas. In the West, such cases recall the religious wars that consumed Europe at the end of t
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