On the Innocence of Guilty Scapegoats (a brief sketch)

This may be obvious to many. 

But it looks elusive to some who seem to find a perplexing conundrum at the heart of what we may call the ethics in René Girard. It is his thesis of the radical innocence of the victims of scapegoating, the claim he appears to espouse that “the victim is always innocent”. 

At first sight, this does not even look as a productive paradox, but outright empirically wrong. In what sense can one arrive to claim that a scapegoat is always innocent, even if the person is objectively, empirically responsible of an uncontroversial wrongdoing (say, a murder)? 

It seems to me that the crucial subtlety of Girard's claim is that in scapegoating the victim is always innocent. In other words, the point here is that even if the victim is objectively responsible of the deeds which cannot but be deemed wrong (say, a murder), he or she is innocent relative to the scapegoating: the wrong the mob is committing is to use that person to deflect and appease rivalries, to obtain a communion, to punish him or her for the purpose of bonding through the violence of all against one.

Indeed, the victim may well be, and perhaps often is, responsible of a specific wrongdoing, but he or she is nevertheless innocent of what he or she is implicitly accused of, of jeopardising the social fabric, and is innocent for what he or she is used for, for violent communion. Here we find a parallel with a Lacanian formula Slavoj Žižek has popularised: “even if the claim of a pathologically jealous husband, that his wife is cheating on him, is all true, his jealousy nonetheless remains pathological." The point Žižek is perpetually (perpetually, and perpetually, …) making is that the pathology does not reside, nor dissolve, in being objectively right, or wrong, on the empirically ascertainable fact of the husband’s wife cheating or not cheating on him; the pathological element resides, and persists, in the husband’s need for jealousy as the only way for him to sustain his identity (should we say desire? aren’t they the same thing?). So, we could paraphrase Lacan for our purposes and say that “when a person is scapegoated “for” his or her wrongdoing, he or she is still used for scapegoating, even if he or she is actually responsible for that wrongdoing”. (An even more radical stance would emerge by using "punished" and "punishing" instead of "scapegoated" and "scapegoating" in the previous sentence, hence questioning the legitimacy of any institution of punishment. Can there really exist punishment without scapegoating?)

There is one further possible surprising twist to all of this. If the scapegoating “serves the purpose” Girard told us to serve, then the victim itself is not really picked, singled out, because of his or her objective guilt, but rather to dispel rivalries and to bond. It is for this sometimes spasmodic, persistent “drives” to pacify mimetic crisis or mimetic miasma through a violent unanimity, that there is a victim picked. The designated victim may even not be really hated from the outset (think of cases of gratuitous bullying), the collective hatred perhaps develops mimetically later. If that is so, the Girardian formula "the victim is innocent" has a surprising counterpart: the persecutors are not individually "evil". Perhaps the true productive paradox in Girard is that that “evil” is a systemic, emergent phenomenon, showing up at the collective level, a genuine social fact. This paradox, a figure of méconnaissance, is that what we could naively and at first sight even consider a praiseworthy thrust – to appease rivalries, to dispel the miasma of mimetic crisis, to bond, to create group solidarity, to strive for affiliation, to seek a way to produce communal peace and social unity – that pushes us to turn to scapegoating. And if to have that we need a victim, then no matter his or her deeds, for that specific purpose truly “the victim is always innocent”.

I dared to talk of “ethics in Girard” at the beginning. Because, and this is highly speculative and half baked, perhaps from all this we could derive a sui generis categorical imperative. If there are systemic emergent phenomena I was hinting at earlier, twisting outcomes and intentions when shifting from the individual to the collective scale, a third possibility emerges between the consequentialist “do the right thing, no matter the reasons, as long as the consequences are good”, and the Kantian “do the right thing only for the right reason”. Because the holding of "right reasons" may itself have its reasons, right or wrong. So, that third way can be rendered as “hold the right reasons only for the right reason”, or perhaps more straightforwardly "be righteous only for the right reason". Although apparently highly abstract, such maxim can quickly turn into damning practical, given that one may hold, say, a right political stance (e.g. not racist, not homophobic, etc.), but still hold it for the purpose of, or using it for, scapegoating. There, no matter how uncontroversially responsible (say, for committing some wrongdoing) or wrong (say, for their racism, homophobia, etc.) these targets are, they nevertheless are innocent, because everybody is, as scapegoats.

I thank Paul Dumouchel for providing insights and comments on the draft of this brief note. The responsibility for possible errors or erroneous claims are of course exclusively mine.