Rene Girard makes me angry

Rene Girard makes me angry. But, despite the violence he does to me (his denial of my belief that humans can be at peace), I will not fight him. I have no desire to kill him, or to do a violence in return. Because I have choice.
The lack of agency of the members of the societies Girard discusses is perhaps the most disturbing part of Violence and the Sacred for me. Not even "we moderns" seem to have a choice: if someone hurts us, we hurt them back in an escalating violence. The idea of a restorative justice isn't even argued against--he just doesn't seem to think that forgiveness is an issue.
Which is strange, since he eventually argues that Christianity illuminates the scapegoat mechanism; if Christ's really really senseless death on the cross shows us that our sense of justice is a mess, that we in fact need scapegoats, then doesn't the rest of the story also show us that revenge is not a natural law? Not only did the resurected Jesus (real or metaphorical, doesn't matter!) not take revenge, he didn't encourage his disciples to revenge either. And despite being more powerful than Goku, Vegeta and Gohan combined, Jesus didn't try to do a "violence for good" and overthrow a Roman empire in favor of a peaceful Utopia. Instead of deposing of the king (*cough* Saddam *cough*) to establish a better place, Jesus chose to leave things alone. And he made his disciples choose peace as well--no nighttime raids, no attempt to assassinate various leaders. Just a quiet symbolic action, through a small social movement. Letters, gospels, stories. Narrative. Channeling the revenge drive into positive, non violent action.
But Girard ignores this part, the part covered in Acts (how appropriate that most of the Acts of the appostles were symbolic! Speeches! Sermons! And the occasional healing!) Instead, he focses on the illumination of the mechanism itself. In Girard's Christianity, the religion acts like other rites, holding together a community through ritualistically killing someone on whom all the sins are dumped. The end. The (Western) world, now aware of its own ritual tendencies and their symbolism, can safely move into the atheistic modernity he describes in his progress narrative.
Which makes sense, probably, to those who see us in an atheistic modern world. It probably even makes sense to some Christians, those who, like my father, believe that humankind is evil and will always war with itself. Sure, we need scapegoats. Sure, we need a binary opposition to displace the anger, frustration, aggression.
But that's not what the gospel story says, and, as we said in Sandy's class, that's not even what Shakespeare's tragedies are saying. While Greek tragedies and stories from "primitive" societies focus on the fatalistic nature of violence (that it is fated), both the gospels and Shakespeare (and dystopias, by the way), emphasize choice. Shakespeare probably couldn't have made his plays as exciting without a prior Christianity which emphasizes individual decisions to follow Christ. To choose is to act against fate; sorry Calvinists.
Once we recognize the desire for violence within us, once we recognize that it is, as Girard and others say, almost part of our nature, then we can choose. Blessed are the peacemakers only makes sense if we can choose peace--why bless them if it isn't possible? Why bless someone for something they have no control over? We choose peace, we choose forgiveness, we choose to be meek. We choose to defer to the Other our own desires.
I'm not sure Girard would disagree with me; he'd probably say that I'm thinking of individuals (psychology) while he thinks of communities (sociology). He'd tell me that individuals can choose forgiveness, but for a community--a whole which is entirely different from any and all of its parts, the infinite within the finite--such action is not possible. He'd point to failed Utopian communities. He'd point to the way the early church couldn't hold its communistic tendencies.
And he wouldn't be wrong. I don't think there can be a utopia on earth. (See, Dad, I'm not the idealist you think I am). I think, however, a community can be held together by a ritual other than scapegoating, other than reciprocal violence. It would require a rare set of individuals who all defer to the Other, a group who are all self-reflexive in their daily practices in the public domain, and a group willing to admit its failures of true communual action. As Ursula K LeGuin says, the only possible Utopia is a place that is never stable, always being revised, renewed, upset by revolution. And the revolution does not have to be violent, unless we want to claim that all change is a violence. (not sure how I feel about that claim).
Confession and forgiveness. This is what the literature of the Christian Bible shows us. Symbolic action, not slicing off some guy's ear. Resist the desire to resist.
This is, of course, not postmodern. It's not Foucauldian, it's not even Marxist. It has no place in the academy, especially an academy that claims to have progressed past Christianity. An academy that pretends to be utopian in its desires for a critical pedagogy based in logos.
Again, I quote Fox Mulder. Again, I quote Madeline L'Engle. "I want to believe." "It's okay, I believe enough for the both of us."

Now, some Bus Poetry (written on the bus, that is)
Aphorisms in 3/4 time
Revision is division multiplied
One is that single slash
against zero
which pierces through the tempering of disgust


Amerique du Nord
Rumpled flag in the window
Everywhere there's too much
iconography
Who knows what beast it summons
Whose reign it marks to come?

C'est interdit
Single masks cannot cover the cries,
the rage of the strange we can't avoid
Beauty rests but it doesn't elide
the name of the Age just come undone

Mythemic
If not for the fantasy afforded by myths, how would we play out the faster moments to enjoy? They're not now for learning, but for reforming writer and written. They're mutable, but only can be morphed into each other, strangled hybrids of Oedipus and Juliet. This Juliet has no guide for the dark light carnival.

Apophis [laugh, Dana, Laugh!]

White metal
blade the flame
to inhale what
should have stayed veiled
Grease and smoke
too fast eyes
unlawful system to be
unyoked.