@lukeburgis 5/ This introduces genuinely novel powers that have no prior place in the world's causal economy, judging both our social arrangements and our theological language, radically reordering practice and theory. Life and doctrine become grist for transfiguration, not rival claimants.
@Plough end/ What we call 'populist escalation' is captivity accelerating: a crisis of desire. A polity habituated to scapegoating cannot self-redeem by technique. The Paraclete universalizes that unveiling in history. A reconciliatory mimesis interrupts, rather than “wins,” escalation.
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end/ Girard, of course, thought humanity so deeply habituated into patterns of escalating violence, and the scapegoat mechanism to be so perfectly self-justifying, that he concluded some form of concrete, transcendent intervention necessary for world redemption and salvation. 1/ Essentially eschatological, his later work. On one hand, he identifies our crazed, self-justifying lurch into total cataclysm: on the other, echoing Holderlin, "Danger itself invites the rescuing power", transcendent intervention as humanity's only realistic hope of survival. The ‘sacred violence’ at the heart of all “the kingdoms of this world” is no longer distinguishable from the counter-violence it opposes. The reciprocities of violence and counter-violence threaten to spin completely out of control. 6/ “People all over the world are employing intellectual, moral, and rhetorical ingenuity in an effort to endow the violence they favor with culture-founding authority, and all over the world they are failing” - Gil Bailie 7/ As such, “The idea of ‘limitless’ violence, suddenly looms up before us,” notes Girard. “For the first time,” he says, humanity faces “a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence.” 8/ More convinced than ever that reading Girard is a good starting point for reflecting on the circumstances we find ourselves in. Apt. His concern, he said, not religion, but its anthropology and, as such, the staggering features of Jesus' murder ultimately revealing the only way out of a revolving hall of projections, our "automatic, unconscious, ingrained and mimetic" escalating war of all against all. Quote tweet: Eliot: “Prophesy to the wind to the wind only for only The wind will listen.” The mimetic escalation of 'war of all against all' exponentiated to the planetary level? A global mob of False Deliverers offering up gathering points for national anguish? Why now? Girard, apt. Reciprocal action, mimesis, is both responsible for escalation and deescalation depending on what actions are being imitated. The reason that people fight more and more is that there is a truth approaching against which their violence reacts. Panic in the system. In the Christian world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims and whose return is heralded by the very effects of the escalation to extremes. What will he declare? That we have gone crazy, that the adulthood of humanity, which he announced through the cross, is a failure. Postponing reconciliation always causes violence to increase. We have to think of reconciliation not as a consequence but as the reverse of the escalation to extremes. We have to at all costs avoid thinking of war as a passage towards reconciliation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst.” René Girard
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