Violence and the Sacred

Girard, René

doi:10.56021/9780801819636

Cited by 1,194 publications

(28 citation statements)

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“…They risk life and limb to jointly create a sacralized edifice through whose flue they will crawl with evanescent presents they have effortfully created for people they do not like in the hope that their offering will draw disparate households together. Ritual and symbolic annihilation of the personal averts annihilation of the communal, straight out of Girard (1977). The existing social order is challenged by donors actively joining their gifts with others to transmute otherness, to loosen the sectarian constriction ethnocultural tradition enforces on their communities.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This experience was heightened by the cocreative character of ritual action. The violence and danger inherent in sacrifice (Girard, 1977), the visceral creative destruction so foreign to everyday experience in most societies, canalized in the immolationist character of the ritual, produced a chain reaction that drew ever more participants into its orbit. The social levelling and time sensitivity of the cocreation process generated a sense of urgency that permeated the event.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The draw of traumatic artifacts through the chimney continues the co-creative process; the stronger the draft, the greater the number of gifts sent into circulation. The semiotic intensity and prestational passion of participant engagement create a momentum all their own, inspiring imitation (Bataille, 1989;Girard, 1977;Sherry, 1983). The experience of sharing and appreciation begins in the fire box (Bey, 2011;Giesler, 2006).…”

Section: Consumer Research On Sacrificementioning

confidence: 99%

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A terrible beauty is burned: gifts, sacrifice and community in Northern Ireland

Downey

Sherry

2023

QMR

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Purpose Sacrifice, integral to gift giving, remains unexplored and undertheorized in marketing. This paper aims to address this shortfall by analyzing the dynamics of sacrifice and theorizing how it serves as an engine of the gift chimney. Design/methodology/approach The ethnographic investigation of public ceremonial gift giving in sectarian Northern Ireland describes and interprets the complex nature of the gift. Findings The authors show that sacrifice is a plausible mechanism of the gift chimney and that the co-occurrence of monadic, dyadic and systemic giving in the same ritual acts as an accelerant. Social implications The authors analyze how public ceremonial gift giving induces sectarian communities to risk convocation, enabling them to exorcize trauma sustained at one another’s hands and to build a platform for future cross-community cohesion in a context of ineffective institutional efforts. Originality/value Sacrifice propels circulation of the gift, creating a social bond between antagonists whose ethos of mutuality depends upon ritualized reciprocal recognition of entangled loss.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Consumer Research On Sacrificementioning

confidence: 99%

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A terrible beauty is burned: gifts, sacrifice and community in Northern Ireland

Downey

Sherry

2023

QMR

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“…The resulting widespread imitation may lead to a mimetic crisis, which is characterised by a lack of differentiation within the community, as everyone imitates everybody else. 13 Mimetic crises are also characterised by excessive, non-discriminate violence, as people exchange reciprocal blows with one another. 14 Mimetic theorists call this form of reciprocal imitation 'mimetic violence'.…”

Section: The Exodus As a Mimetic Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

A Mimetic Reading of the Passover

BDSc

2022

The Heythrop Journal

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The use of sacrificial animal blood in the Hebrew Bible has generated much discussion. While various scholars have attempted to explain the significance of these blood rites, each of these attempts has proved problematic. The current paper employs mimetic theory to develop a more robust and plausible model for exploring biblical animal sacrifice. Using the Passover ritual as a model, I develop a model of sacrificial blood rites as pantomimes of mimetic violence. These pantomimes re-create a violent yet transformative crisis from the community's collective memory. Such rituals allow the community to enter into and reexperience the cleansing violence of a mimetic crisis, albeit in a more controlled manner. Through these pantomimes, the community attempts to appease the primitive sacred's blood lust and re-discover the divine blessing secured through the original crisis. This model may prove helpful when applied to more opaque examples of biblical blood manipulation.

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“…Nietzsche does not offer a detailed account of how this migration took place, and whether he gave it any thought is speculative on my part. René Girard's Violence and the Sacred with its description of mimetic desires and the scapegoat mechanism is a useful example of what such an account might include (see Girard, 1977).…”

Section: Concept Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Renunciation Paradox: an Analysis of Vulnerability and Intimacy in Nietzsche’s Anti-Humanism

Lukits

2021

Philosophia

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Nietzsche's texts contain a puzzle about the role of vulnerability in the creation of intimacy and its function on behalf of human flourishing. I describe the interpretive puzzle and its prima facie paradoxical aspects. On the one hand, there are texts in which Nietzsche expresses a longing for intimacy and other texts where he furnishes details about the possibility of intimacy between equals. On the other hand, Nietzsche is severely critical of certain types of intimacy (especially ones requiring vulnerability and authenticity) and advocates for a pathos of distance in human relationships. I claim that Nietzschean intimacy is not an inherently paradoxical concept. A proper understanding of Nietzsche's anti-humanism provides the resources to resolve the paradox and to use the solution of the puzzle to illuminate Nietzsche's insights about human psychology.

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Violence and the Sacred

Cited by 1,194 publications

References 0 publications

A terrible beauty is burned: gifts, sacrifice and community in Northern Ireland

A terrible beauty is burned: gifts, sacrifice and community in Northern Ireland

A Mimetic Reading of the Passover

The Renunciation Paradox: an Analysis of Vulnerability and Intimacy in Nietzsche’s Anti-Humanism

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