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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
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Warning.
The following is an unadulterated, unusually concentrated intellectual discussion.
It should be avoided by anyone who does not have a very high tolerance for thinking.
If you have an aversion to the exchange of ideas, if you're deficient in curiosity,
if you suffer from common American anti-intellectualism, then please tune out now.
This show promotes the narcotic of intelligent conversation.
It takes us into the garden and seats us at the banquet table of ideas,
where we feast on the bread of angels.
Clear and distinct thinking, intuitive analysis, and an enriched use of English.
We bring them all to bear on the pursuit of self-knowledge, so be warned.
We don't dumb things down around here.
We ratchet up and let it rip.
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Bonjour l'isamie.
I'm pleased to report that yesterday the fall schedule of KZSU was unveiled.
And that entitled opinions has a fixed time slot for the rest of this quarter.
Tuesday's five to six.
So tune in every week on Tuesday at five for a feast of ideas and talk about literature.
Namo profetain patriasua, no one is a prophet in his own country.
That is largely true, I suppose, but it doesn't apply to this program.
The prophets on this show are mostly our own Stanford faculty and colleagues.
They have as much to say about literature and ideas as anyone anywhere.
I recognize his remarkable achievements by inducting him into the French Academy,
Le Cade Mifrances, which is the highest honor of French intellectual can receive in France.
I've said it before and I will say it again, Professor G. Rad's appointment to the Echemifrances,
means that Stanford's Department of French and Italian has not only one but two so-called immortals among its faculty.
We have a couple of weeks ago where we talked about your theory of a medic desire.
We've deliberately limited our discussion last time to the medic desire as you saw it at work in European fiction and in Shakespeare.
We held off for this second installment of our conversation.
The remarkable sort of turn that your career took after that first book,
you went into either to unexplored territories for you, which was in religious studies and in anthropology.
In fact, your career is quite unusual and exceptional, where a literary scholar through the study of literature stumbles upon an insight into the medic desire that then you subsequently brought into these other spheres and began to
plummet the depths of how the medic desire becomes an organizing principle of societies as a whole and especially for religions, primitive religions.
I suppose we should begin with your concept of religion.
I think it's fair to say that for you religion is not a collection of beliefs or creeds or that explanations of the world and the mystery of the cosmos.
But rather it's a set of practices first and foremost.
And ritual is very important in the sense that it is understood by all archaic people as something indispensable to the survival and well-being of the community.
And of course the main, the only type of ritual is sacrifice, violent sacrifice, the killing of a victim.
The only kind of ritual is sacrifice. That's not true. Of course, because the original type of ritual is the killing of a victim by a priest in the presence of the entire community.
The cornerstone of your theory of the foundation of rituals that it entails the scapegoating of a victim by a collective.
Can you say how you went from a medic desire?
Well, what we found last time, the main thing in a way, is that the medic desire, when it spreads, spreads violence with itself, conflict among people,
rivalry, because it means that people all desire the same thing. Now, how far can that go? There are signs that communities are subject, okay, communities, but even modern communities, all communities.
Our subject to disturbances, which tend to spread to the entire community, contaciously through a form of a medic desire. If you have two people who desire the same thing, you will soon have three. When you have three, they contaminate the rest of the community faster and faster.
Now, before you're going to have a disturbance of that entire community, and as they become contaminated with the medic desire, the differences which separate them, the fact that there are barriers to the type of intercourse that we medic desire produces, these collapse, and therefore you go toward what I call inimetic crisis.
The moment when everybody at the same time is fighting over something, the same object, even if that object disappears, they will go on fighting, because they will become obsessed with each other.
And as that conflict rose, it threatens to destroy the whole community. Therefore, at that point, the part of my theory, which is most of a conjecture, is really that precise point, what happens to end that sort of crisis.
And my answer to this is that at some point there is a contamination on a victim, one particular victim. One particular victim seems to more and more people to be responsible for the whole trouble. In other words, the mimetic contagion moves from desire to a specific victim.
And there will be more technical on it and on give the detail of this, but it would not be interesting. When this happens, everybody is going to become hostile to that victim. And ultimately, that victim is going to be, there is the only technical term exist in English lynching.
The victim of a single victim will cause the community to be reconciled against that victim. Therefore, that victim is hated as if it were responsible for the trouble. But immediately after, if the trouble ends there, that victim will be worshipped as the one who is all that conflict.
If you, the main characteristic of an archaic God or even ancient God is that it is both bad and good, and that duality is extremely important. Is it signed that behind that victim, there is the quote unquote scapegoat of that community. In other words, the victim universally chosen, who in fact is not really responsible for anything, but is chosen by the mimetic contagion.
And therefore he is perceived first as guilty and then as a Savior, a God.
How does a natural disaster like a plague, unleash this memetic contagion among a community?
Well, because it causes here we have lots of descriptions, ancient and modern and many
people if you read descriptions of plagues in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance you will
see that many people understand that scapegoat phenomena are connected with this phenomenon.
Of course, as long as the real plague is going on, escape goat is not going to solve
the problem.
But the problem that it will solve is the total disunion disruption of the community,
which is caused by the memetic belief of everybody that everybody else is responsible.
So if we're talking about religion that arises out of these practices, I take it that
you believe that whatever creeds or beliefs religion sponsors or gives rise to really
come after the fact of these acts.
And you want really to commit yourself to, in a literal way, in a literal way to the actual
practice of a lynching or escape goat as being the foundation for archaic religions.
And now we're not talking about some archaic religions.
You hold this as a universal.
Of course, what is universally observed is that sacrifice is the main religious institution
of all archaic religion.
One has never really found a religion without sacrifice.
What is sacrifice now?
Sacrifice is not what I just described.
What I just described, the actual escape goat phenomenon is the foundation of sacrifice.
When a community is reconciled by escape goat, it's very happy at first.
But it very quickly discovers that rivalries reappear.
And then what is it going to do?
It's going to remember that that single victim destroyed the fighting, brought back the
peace.
So what a community is doing, what all communities do, is to pick a victim and kill that
victim in the same way that this first victim was killed.
So this would be the introduction of the ritualization of violence.
That's right.
You see the thing which amazes anthropologists about ritualization of violence is that sacrifices
are usually preceded by a free fall in which the entire community becomes disrupted.
So they don't understand why in order to stop this option, you should go into greater
disruption.
But what you do is to imitate the whole process of crisis and resolution.
And this is what ritual is.
And indeed it works.
It works in terms of restoring an order to a period of time.
Of restorative in order.
The order which was created by the original escape.
What evidence do you rely on in order to argue for the fact that prior to the institution
of ritual there was a, there's lynching?
Well, the order is ritual and myth.
Because if you look at myths seriously, you will see that you always have a story of some
kind of scandal who disrupts the community, who is punished by the entire community.
And after that turns out to be a god.
Now if you assume this is the misunderstanding of the process which creates the community.
Now where is the misunderstanding in the order that are told about it?
No, it's in the fact that the people believe that the victim is really guilty.
What is characteristic of sacrificial societies is that they believe that the god is really
as much as a good god, he, that god who can and does disrupt the community in order to
punish the community and then save it through his own action.
If we were to take an example here.
Here, there's a distinction now between myth and ritual.
Ritual is a set of practices that we've just described.
Myth I take it to be a recounting in another mode of events that have their foundation
in ritual.
And your theory of myth is very interesting to me because it suggests that myths, archaic
myths above all.
They reveal the mechanisms you're talking about on the one hand, but they camouflage them
on the other.
Yes, don't reveal it because if they had revealed it, they must reveal it at least
to the extent that you're able to deduce the existence of these mechanisms through your
reading of myth.
Well, you can see that the more myth you take as examples, the more you realize that
you always have the same thing.
Now in Greece, the most revealing system of myth, you know, accumulation of myth is a
Dionysiac cycle because in the Dionysiac cycle you have a lynching each time.
And what is amazing is not really the fact that I noticed this, is the fact that no one
noticed it before.
And that religious system which would be entirely based on a bunch of myth at the center
of which there is a lynching.
The lynching becomes the most important factor which should be taken into account by the
interpreters.
And never was because our society is very reluctant to think that there might be something
in human beings which would fundamentally lead to violence.
And this is what indeed this myth demonstrates.
That societies have a tendency to go wrong when you have more and more mimetic rivalry.
That is why all rules of societies are an effort to prevent mimetic rivalry.
If you look at primitive communities, why do they have such complicated marriage rules?
In order to prevent the people who would fight about the same women to gather on these
women and decide them together.
If brother incest is always forbidden, it's because it would lead to a battle between these
brothers.
So whereas human being animals in general would tend to go to the easiest way to get something.
Human beings always take the distant way.
They always go get their wives as far as possible.
They get their food separately.
They must not eat together so that they won't fight about the food.
And this is true of everything.
I'd like to get clear about myth whether it's because you begin with a theory about the
foundations of ritual that you're able to read the myths the way you read them, or is it
by reading the myths that you come to the conclusion that is a great coding ritual is
always somewhere hidden behind the stories.
So inevitably it's a little bit of both.
They started to discover prehistoric remnants of animals which were very, very, very thanks
to the Darwinian theory.
But not before.
You have to have a theory in order to verify it and you have to have that verification also.
But it's a dual process.
How did you come to your theory in the first place?
The fact that I read at the same time a large part of the entire body of the findings by
the British anthropologist in English colonies, you know, you find that religious phenomena
are the same everywhere.
And that theories in a way have not recognized it.
They are the same everywhere and they use the same vocabulary, but they have to repeat
the same thing about phenomena which repeat themselves constantly, but there is no way
to theorize them.
So I'm absolutely convinced that there must be a correct theory of these facts.
I like the idea that there's a correct theory of certain facts, but let me read you something
that you said in an interview you gave with diacritics a while ago where you're talking
about myth and you say it is true that many interpretations of the same mythical text
are possible, but they are all false.
One interpretation alone is true.
The one that reveals the structuring power of the persecutor's standpoint to which all
the others remain blind.
Now, would you say in retrospect that you overstated the case there?
The case is overstated if the evidence that goes with it is not mentioned, which is the
case now, you see what I mean?
You have to see the evidence.
I mean the reversal to understand that in order to have escape goat phenomenon in a text,
a real one, no escape goat must be mentioned because people must believe in the guilt of
the victim.
And at the same time the god being escape goat, this victim is both escape very bad and very
good.
How can you make sense out of that continuously without something like escape goat phenomenon?
How could not the view of the sacrificial crisis in which everybody is against everybody else?
If ultimately be solvable through this principle of the single escape goat, which in memetic
desire, you know, memetic desire spreads around in diverse ways until it gets all people
together in fighting in a situation of conflict.
But the only way to solve this type of conflict is through a single victim.
When a single victim is possible because at that point everybody is doing the same thing,
everybody therefore it is always possible.
You see, I could reply with a question, do you believe that escape goats in our society?
If they escape goats in our society, it's obvious that in an archaic society, this escape
goats will be total victims, will be killed.
Well, one can admit that, but let's say a common-sensical reading of mythology.
For example, Ovid's metamorphosis is a text that we teach a lot and that is a compendium
of all sorts of different kinds of things.
Yeah, but it's a compendium, but without the end, generally, because over it is doing
something very literary and very different from Emiv.
He's collecting them for their picturesqueness.
He's very popular with us precisely because it takes the teeth out of them and turns
them into stories.
So thanks to people like Ovid, we can say that myth are nothing but stories.
So the myths that you have in mind are which ones are they particularly the archaic myths,
the oldest ones?
Sure, if you look at really archaic countries, we don't have too many myths because
it's very difficult for westerners in the 19th century to obtain from the natives that
they would tell their myth in an intelligible way.
But there were people who were extremely gifted for that and we have enough myth to understand
that the escaped countries, they are all misunderstood escaped countries.
Let's take one myth.
The adipism myth was huge for Freud.
He built a whole theory of the unconscious on it.
You have your own reading of a myth like that.
You know, as a matter of fact, that reading was discovered before me.
It was now a renaming scapes me, but I sure there was a French woman, I think, in the
20s who had exactly the same theory and all scholars said to her they were believers in
text, you know, like alliterae critics and they said, but there is absolutely no evidence
in the adipism myth that adipus is escaped good, is an innocent victim and she didn't
know how to answer.
He should have answered his precisely part of the evidence that the evidence is not there
in that case.
Well, yeah.
But at the same time, it is the perfect mimetic crisis situation that you were describing
earlier.
There's a plague going on and it is described in the pagerty.
So do you think behind the adipism myth, the original, the archaic one, that there was
a sacred kingship?
Of course.
There was probably also a sacred kingship.
You know, in the sacred kingship, the king was a god.
Therefore, you had to be guilty like a god.
You had to commit incest and plieside, you had to commit all sorts of crimes.
We saw with our own eyes at the beginning of colonization, you know, that there were sacred
kingships in Africa, which were just like the adipus myth, because when you appointed the king,
you know, you had him commit incest with his sister, always mother.
And he was told you had to do it.
You had to do it in order to scare his own people into believing that he was both a dangerous
man and a savior for the reasons that mythical heroes are.
Well here, when gets a sense of how then the, you bring a very special hermeneutic
to bear on the ancient texts and the archaic myths that we're dealing with.
We're on the one hand, there are distortions of some originary event.
On the other hand, they have power to reveal what's at work in there.
And I take it that the archaic societies that were founded on this connection between violence
and the sacred in here, you know, I'm using the title of your book violence and the sacred,
where you see violence as the inextricable forms of the sacred that they come together in a way
that actually enables societies to survive these crises.
And by committing measured ritualized acts of violence, they preserve the collective from devouring
cannibalized things.
And the proof that it works is that even someone is intelligent and as modern in many ways
as Aristotle thought that the Tajik hero who was killed at the end was guilty, was a
fundamentally guilty, you know, the word ha'martia indicates that mythical guilt, which no
one has ever identified with a which is the guilt of edipus.
So if we take this concept of amartia or guilt connected to myth and move our discussion
now to the Hebrew Bible, you have an understanding of the Hebrew Bible as the beginning
of a demystification of myth and the violent origins of the sacred that are in there in
myth and that therefore it's already starting to do the work of hermeneutics.
Do I understand you correctly when I say that you read the Hebrew Bible as a-
The fundamental text from that point of view in the Jewish Bible is of course in the
part of the prophet Isaiah which is called the Second Isaiah which is much later than the
first and in there there are the famous songs of the Saphrag servant.
The Saphrag servant is very good prophet, very weak and at the same time he is described
at the type of people who is always unpopular, it is a society that people turn against without
reason and finally he is killed by the whole people in a kind of lynching which has been
seen as a matter of fact as a model for the Christian passion.
Other people will say rightly that it's not a model but it is the same process.
It is I think the overturning in mythology, the discovery of what mythology is about.
For the first time in mythical text instead of being treated like in myth in other words
being read by people who don't understand that the victim is guilty therefore is innocent,
therefore represent that victim is guilty, that victim is represented as hated by the whole
people and nevertheless killed by people who make a mistake.
Because in the Gospels you know when Jesus says forgive them or Lord for they know not what
they do, we have to take these words literally they are not words of pity, words of being
nice, you know to these poor befuddled people and so forth, they are the actual revelation
of the thing.
These people really believe the guilty, Peter too when he talks to the crowd and Joseph
says you are not as guilty as now you are going to think before you felt you were innocent
because your victim was guilty, now you are going to think your guilty but this happens
all the time and you are not as guilty as you think but you must change your behavior,
you must no longer get together against victims the way you have done in the past.
We are entering a new world in which this type of truth will be visible, it will be a much
more difficult world but it will be much better.
Yeah I want to talk about the Christian scriptures shortly but first two myths, two stories
from the Hebrew Bible, the sacrifice of Isaac, they are going back, the suffering servant
of course.
Yes, I would like to talk a little bit about that as well as the story of Joseph.
Well the thing which is interesting in the Bible is that we are always going towards less
violence, less archaic stuff, the beginning of the Bible is very archaic and the background
is one of child sacrifice unquestionably.
Therefore this child sacrifice is still there in the sense that Abraham hears the call.
My reading is not at all like Jack God who thinks that God is playing some kind of trick
on the father in order to test his obedience, that is an incredibly modern reading which has
no relationship with the archaic text.
In the archaic text, every we know now that human sacrifice sacrifice of the first born,
especially, was much more white, well there was quite a bit by the way in North and South
America.
You see, so it is a very important phenomenon and there we see it in a case of Isaac.
So what the story is a fantastic thing, it is the only document in the world which documents
the shift from human sacrifice of the first born to animal sacrifice because Isaac is
finally replaced and this is presented as a divine action.
This is the whole movement of the Bible is toward that, to reveal the guilt of sacrifice
and replace it either with a lesser victim or with no victim at all.
Can an animal play the role of escape code?
An animal to a certain extent can play the role of escape code, we can still see in our
world the employee who goes to his job and who is mistreated by his boss, he is so afraid
to lose his job that he will do nothing but when he gets back home, if he is really mad,
he will kick the dog, if he even more mad, he will slap his child and if he is really
insanely mad, he will hurt his wife.
And the sacrificial instinct is so visible in us that as we see this, you know, it makes
us laugh in a way but it is the kind of sinister laugh.
And the sacrificial hierarchies of the archaic world are present in our psychology and they
are of course the reactions to anger.
So you think we can fall back at any moment into these kind of archaic forms of behavior?
We still have quite a bit.
Every time even when you break a plate or when you are really going back to sacrifice.
What about the story of Joseph in the Bible?
There is this one of the most magnificent stories because there you see Joseph is escape
built.
Can you tell our listeners, by the way, are there any listeners out there?
Is there anyone out there?
Anyone in there?
Not if you can hear me.
I see a multitude transported in joy.
We do have listeners, I can hear them now.
No, yes, I'm sure.
So the story of Joseph is fascinating because anyway, it's the...
Hidden scapegoat because it's a scapegoat of the community.
You have so many brothers that it's like a community and you have twelve brothers and
one of them is hated by all the other ones.
So you must not try to explain that hatred.
It's enough to say his father likes him because he's better because he's more intelligent
than his brother because he dominates them.
So they all get together in order to get rid of him.
They try to kill him but finally one of the twelve Judah who is a little more humane than
his brother say, "Let's sell him into slavery."
And they send him to Egypt and in Egypt pretty much the same thing happens to him because
he's so full of talent, he's a bright young Jewish boy that becomes very powerful in
the household where he is sent as a slave, which is the household of Potiphar who is a great
civil servant of Pharaoh.
And one fine day because he's handsome and nice, lady Potiphar, the wife of Potiphar,
tries to make love to him.
And she fails because he's completely faithful to his master.
But when she denounces him as having tried to make love to him, he's sent to jail.
Therefore he becomes a scapegoat a second time.
And there he's saved by the fact that like in Ephesians anyway, he's a kind of prophet.
He can foretell the future.
He has two dreams in which he reveals that there will be a great famine to the two
Pharaoh.
And therefore Pharaoh appoints him as the Prime Minister of Egypt.
And during the seven years in which there is a lot of food, he gathers that food.
And after that time people come from all over the Middle East in order to get to be saved
by him.
And among these people who show up twice in a row, there is the brothers of, he recognizes
them.
Joseph recognizes them.
But they don't recognize him because he's dressed like an Egyptian.
He's an incredibly powerful man.
You see, and he puts them to escape God's test.
He says he wants to keep the youngest one, the last one, the one who is equivalent to him,
who is an invention.
And he slanders Benjamin.
He says that Benjamin has stolen his cup.
And then finally what happens, Judah, you know, who already more or less saved Joseph says
I cannot stand it.
And I'm going to stand in the place of my brother.
You keep me.
And you let Benjamin go.
Go.
Because if Benjamin doesn't go back, our old father Jacob will die.
And there he so touched Joseph is so touched that he forgives all his brothers.
In that story, you're having a way to all movement of the Bible toward the revelation
of the scapegoat and the giving of oneself as escape God in order to reveal the system,
to reveal the truth, to abolish the scapegoat system.
This one of the most beautiful stories ever written and in which the whole spirit of Judaism
and Christianity is present.
That's why from a technical viewpoint, the Christians say it's a perfect prophecy of the death
of Jesus.
We're talking to Hanizirah, we're going to be right back.
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Yeah, that's a good cause.
Now I want to move to the modern era, but before that, a word or two about the role of the
Christian scriptures and your thinking.
Is it fair to say that for you read the Christian scriptures as not just a halfway revelation,
but a full revelation of the scapegoat mechanism of ancient religions?
Through the lynching, scapegoat of Jesus, you have finally the open revelation of this
but the violent word of the Bible.
Let me give an example because very often it's a reading of Jewish Bible passages of the Psalms,
just before his passion, Jesus asks, "The people with him, why don't you explain to me this sentence,
you know, this sentence which is in Psalm 118, I think, the stone that the builders rejected
has begun the keystone."
Now tell me that the scapegoat is not the foundation of society because obviously that sentence
is about that.
You know, and the people who listen to Jesus never answer his question, and theologians
are lost in all sorts of Greek stuff and they've never answered this question since.
Ask a theology in what that sentence means, just like Jesus did.
The stone that the builders rejected has become the keystone.
Or ask a theology in why in the gospel of John, Kiaffa says, "It is better that one
man dies and the whole people be saved."
And this is regarded as a prophetic line.
Why if the scapegoat is not important to human culture and religion?
And the Bible is full of things like that.
The great parables, the parable of the murderous winemakers for instance, is nothing but
that.
You know, the winemakers, the master of the vineyard always send messengers to them and
they kill them and say, "After we kill them, we'll be the masters of our own world.
We'll be our own foundation."
You know, in Orthodox Christian theology, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is perceived
to have redemptive value.
I take it for you.
It's not so much the redemption that takes place on the cross, but rather a revelation of
the scandal, the scandal, the scandal on the scandal.
How do you answer the theologians who say, "Where is the salvation of the salvation?"
Yeah, but let them tell me where the salvation is.
I believe that just as they do, but they have not yet explained it.
And what you're talking about is really the theory of St. Anson.
You know, in the 12th century, St. Paul as well.
I know that St. Paul never does it in the same way.
You know, as a matter of fact, if you look at the church, the church has darkness, plenty
of darkness, but there is no official theory of redemption of how the cross works.
So you're allowed to make guesses and try to understand it.
But of course, I see what can be understood is the human side of it.
You see what I mean?
But I do not deny that I don't deal with theology.
Ideal with the anthropology of religion.
And I think that the fault of both theologians and anthropologists is that they haven't
seen that they are talking about the same thing in different languages.
A huge jump forward, we don't have all that much time left.
Frederick Nietzsche in the 19th century marks a huge sort of shift in Western culture, especially
with his war that he waged against Christianity.
And writing a book called The Antichrist, for example, and his whole denunciation of Christianity
as a religion for the slave religion founded on resentment and frustration.
You have worked a lot on Nietzsche and you have a very interesting relationship to him
because for you, he's not just wrong or mad in his insights.
But there's, he saw a lot there that you think needs to be rescued, but perhaps in a way
that there was an ultimate blind spot for his career.
He's sworn that in some ways he's right.
And what was he talking about?
He's saying he's saying he's saying he's saying he's saying he's right.
Trust one year because he's before his death.
Now that we have the complete works of Nietzsche, thanks to the Italian.
Colleen Montinari.
We have a text of Nietzsche, you know, which we have only one version of this very often
in the, and this text says, "dionesses and Jesus, same death, same collective death."
The difference is that Dionysus does not accept sacrifice.
Oh no, that Jesus, that Christianity does not accept sacrifice, doesn't want anyone to
die.
Whereas Dionysus accepts it.
Therefore Dionysus is his life, you know.
Dionysus, what do you should say if he were really honest?
You would say Dionysus is the crowd I'm talking about.
Dionysus is the lynching of that crowd, which makes it the religion of the slaves by excellence.
We know very well that in a way it's a destruction of the most ancient social system that
revived or invented Dionysus.
Dionysus is Parxelon's the religion of the crowd, you know, and Nietzsche inverted that
because he hated so much Christianity, but that hatred was so close to that profound love
that he's always talking about the right subjects.
Very often he's inverting a solution, which is completely obvious.
And look today, there are very few people who are Christian.
Christianity has never been the religion of the elite as much as it is today, especially
in Europe.
There are very few people who dare default Christianity.
And Christianity is in a way of religion of the people refuse that lynching crowd that
ultimately Nietzsche accepts and glorifies.
When he collapsed and turned and he wrote a number of brilliantly lucid but mad letters
and some of them he signed Dionysus, others he signed the crucified.
Yeah, what does that tell you?
I think that there it's very important.
It has to be analyzed in detail.
But I think it's finally the collapse of his system because he instead has been trying
to build up that difference in favor of Dionysus.
And now at the end it collapses completely.
And both have become equivalent, but Nietzsche cannot stand it and literally falls into
the hands of the living God, which is a very dangerous fate as the Jews well knew.
You see, he deep down, I feel Nietzsche is saved because he thinks beyond his lucid thought.
And the moment he does that is precisely when he can sign either way.
In other words, his whole world collapses.
One could see that the entire effort of his life was to demonstrate the superiority of Dionysus
over Christ.
And at that moment I would say it collapses.
In 1966, another German thinker Heidegger gave an interview to the German weekly magazine
Der Spiegel where he was asked about his politics and his view of modern technology and so-called
modern nihilism, the forces of nihilism.
That's a word that's also dear to you as well as although you understand it in a very different
way than Heidegger did.
And the interviewers at a certain point ask him, "Well, what can the philosophers do in order
to offset nihilism or do something about the destructive forces of technology and to
re-humanize politics and the world and so forth?"
And Heidegger answers that there's nothing that the philosophers can do.
There's nothing anyone can do.
Only a God.
And what precisely the modern world is not going to produce is a new God.
What Heidegger asserts in that way, he asserts in a way that the great succession of
archaic gods was not destroyed by Judaism and Christianity.
In other words, was not revealed as the lie that it is.
And if it were not revealed, indeed there could be new archaic gods and that's what Heidegger
was talking about.
If there cannot be an archaic god, it means we are deprived of sacrifices.
It means we are threatened if we continue to be as violent as we are by the destruction
of the world.
For you, that's a good thing.
It's not a question, a good thing, but the Christian and Jewish documents always contain
apocalyptic material, which is not about the destruction of the world by God as the fundamentalists
believe, but the destruction of the world by human beings themselves.
If you read the great apocalyptic chapters of the Gospels, which are much more important
than the apocalypse of John, which are part of the main revelation, you will see that it's
always a world which becomes more and more violent, which finally destroys itself, and not
the responsibility of God as we hear today.
For these texts should be revived.
It is a great lack, a fault of the churches that they don't talk about them.
Two questions then, if Heidegger is wrong to say only a god can save us, your answer is
that only we can save ourselves.
Only we can save ourselves.
It's very much more of a humanist than he is.
And what prescriptions do you put forward for this sort of self-help by which we can
know?
They'll come to our own rescue.
The one which is at the beginning of the Gospel, which is non-retaliation, which is peace.
If you don't have sacrifices to return peace to you, you have to do it by yourself.
And we know what the recipe is.
It's a very difficult one.
It's non-retaliation.
It's the rules defined by the four gods, by the three synoptic Gospels, as the rules of the
kingdom of God.
The other part of Heidegger's dictum, only a god can save us, is that we live in a world
which is completely desacralized, and that some dimension of the holy would be brought forth
by such a god.
So do you think that human beings are would be comfortable enough within themselves in living
in a world which had no dimension of the sacred, no dimension of the holy.
Because is there a possible sacred without violence, the contamination of violence in it?
"I prefer not to use the word sacred."
My answer to your question is yes.
And this real divineness, this real holiness, will come out of desacralization itself.
The sacralization for which Heidegger is asking is a return to the archaic.
And he knows that himself, therefore he knows fully that it's impossible.
The modern is not bad as Heidegger thinks.
The modern is made bad by the badness of an end.
But in itself, it is a good thing.
It is a good development.
It is more intelligence to man, more humanness, you know, because in spite of all the
bad aspects of the world, it is also true that our world is the best the world has ever
known.
In many ways.
Therefore it is this world which must be saved.
And it can be saved as you just said, only by human beings, getting along together.
Well, that's easy to say, but when it is easy to do.
But again, even power breaks is not going to happen.
What sort of recipes does one concretely speaking put forward to any recipe?
There cannot be any recipe because this is the reason why the gospels begin with the kingdom
of God, the offer of the kingdom of God, and the attempt to convince human beings that
they should reframe from retaliation.
Is the Christian gospel essential to your notion of human beings being able to come to their
own rescue or can one arrive at the same result independently of that particular body of text?
I think that body of text includes the Jewish Bible and the prophets and the Christian
gospels, which are truly indispensable.
What we need is to complete the theological reading within a topological reading that would
make it intelligible on the human plane.
It's very difficult because people are not interested in it because people are trying to fight
it back.
I think in my view that the unconscious is there, the real defense mechanisms, the rejection
of an awareness of our own violence, especially in terms of national international intercourse,
where the other nation is always available for insults and vilification and scapegoating.
This is true in all countries still today.
This is probably the most essential thing.
The experience of international life today shows this to us absolutely marvelously.
I mean, France today, I have to treat the rakas if it were the fault of every American.
I mean, America today, I have to treat every French man as if he were a traitor to America
as if being a traitor to America were significant in France.
Last week we had Dan Edlstein on the program.
We were talking about the Enlightenment, this hugely complex phenomenon that we call
the Enlightenment.
I don't recall you giving any particular sustained attention to that, except for various
authors.
Do you see the Enlightenment as growing out of the tradition that we've been talking about?
Yes, of course.
I think it's a complex question.
I think in the Enlightenment people understand many things about Christianity which are not
specifically religious.
Are just good human relations.
And they are convinced that they will be able to establish these relationships simply because
human beings are good, quote unquote.
You know, human beings have good will, quote unquote.
And that is the reason we don't read anthropology as it really is today.
Because we believe that the Enlightenment to discovery of the goodness of man must take
place against religion which has been an obstacle to it.
In reality, it's the action of religion which made it possible to reach the Enlightenment.
Therefore this action seems unnecessary and indeed it is in a way necessary.
We understand today that sacrifice is crazy to have substitute victims.
You know, it can't believe in them.
Therefore the Enlightenment is to see human beings don't need that.
And the people who are in the
people who are in the world are in the world.
And they don't understand the way they have reached that point in a way because the action
of sacrifice has made them very slowly better and they should indeed get rid of sacrifice,
but not in a spirit of anti-religion because there is a huge illusion about their own goodness.
Yeah, I'm reminded of something Vico says in his new science, 18th century work where he's
quoting Polybius who said if there were more philosophers in the world we would not need
religion.
Vico says if there had not been religion in the world there would have been no common
wealth and if there were no common wealth there would have been no philosophers.
But here here is about the Enlightenment if it's the case that we have to come to our
own rescue that human beings are the perpetrators of the woes of the social and existential
woes that befall us.
The Enlightenment in many ways was a call to this sort of self-responsibility.
Sure, sure.
Yes, and this is good.
You know when there is no doubt that Voltaire was right when he said that the persecution
of Calas, there was more Christians than his Christian opponents.
There is no denying of that and indeed all the churches have reached that point.
Therefore what we must be very careful of is not to think in terms of shut and open categories.
You see what I mean?
History is a very difficult discipline.
Hane has been a very fascinating discussion and it is to be continued.
Let me tell our listeners that next week we are going to shift gears a little bit.
We are going to have Professor Eddy Zebitt, Boi on the program where we are going to be
talking about Francophone literature, literature written in French, in non-French countries,
Africa, the Caribbean and so forth.
So you are going to want to tune into that next week Tuesday at 5 p.m.
Thanks also to our production assistant David Lumusz who has been helping out and Hane, thanks
a lot.
Thank you.
We will continue this and join us see you next week.
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