The French philosopher René Girard created one of the most striking and controversial cultural concepts of our era. The scapegoat theory, which he first formulated in Violence and the Sacred (UFO, 2010), reduces the history of religion, anthropology, and psychology to the same denominator. And that denominator is violence.
The French philosopher René Girard created one of the most striking and controversial cultural concepts of our era. The scapegoat theory, which he first formulated in Violence and the Sacred (UFO, 2010), reduces the history of religion, anthropology, and psychology to the same denominator. And that denominator is violence. According to Girard, all primitive societies once went through spontaneous collective murders, which were preceded by crises and disasters. The killing of the scapegoat releases mob aggression, brings the community together, and ends this crisis. The pretexts and reasons justifying this violence change, but the essence remains: the group shifts the blame and shifts the aggression onto its marginalized members. Any team — from a school class to an entire country — continues to use the «scapegoat» mechanism. Is the human community capable of realizing the deceitful nature of this mechanism and abandoning it? Girard, a philosopher provocateur, an honorary doctor of several European universities, and a member of the French Academy, continues to look for an answer to this question. Still causing indignant responses from specialists in all areas of the humanities — from sociology to folklore, from cultural anthropology to literary criticism.
Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 336 p.