Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay)

Author(s): REY CHOW

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Representations, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 131-149
Published by: University of California Press
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REY CHOW

Sacrice, Mimesis, and

the Theorizing of Victimhood
(A Speculative Essay)
I Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
Giorgio Agamben brings attention to the notion of biopolitics as expounded by
Michel Foucault in the rst volume of The History of Sexuality and elsewhere, to argue
an originarily juridico-political basis for the relationship between sovereign power
and naked human existence, what Agamben refers to as bare life.1 This basis,
understood by Agamben as the near indistinguishability or irreducible connection
between law and violence, is also described by him as the single real content of
law.2 Few readers, I suspect, would detect in Agambens work any substantial link
to the subject of mimesis. In the context of the twentieth century, it would certainly
seem more logical to explore such a link in more well-known classics on art, literature, representation, and cultural politicsfor instance, in Walter Benjamins discussion of technical reproducibility, which destroys auratic distance and enables the
replication of things on an unprecedented scale; Erich Auerbachs ruminations on
the historically evolving relationship among ction, temporality, and humanity;
Foucaults description of the decline of languages capacity for corresponding to
the worlds plenitude; or Edward W. Saids criticism of the ideologically suspect,
fantastical caricatures of the East by Western scribes, artists, and imperialists alike.3
My own indebtedness to all these studies notwithstanding, what interests me about
mimesis is a specic problem, namely, the manner in which mimesis has gured
in certain kinds of theorizing about victimhood and what may be loosely termed
subordinated or stigmatized existence.4 In order to follow the conceptual paths
around this problem, it is necessary, I have noticed, to push against the limits of
what is accepted as commonsensical thinking (humanistic, moral, or ethical). This
essay is, essentially, an attempt at such following and pushinghence its speculative, rather than conclusive, nature.
Since he has not discussed mimesis per se, the relevance of Agambens book is,
as I will go on to show, surprising and convoluted: it lies dormant in a part of his
This essay is an attempt to identify and elaborate the inextricable mutual implications between mimesis and sacrice in considerations of victimhood (understood as dominated or stigmatized existence), especially as found in prominent examples of contemporary cultural theory. The authors discussed
include Giorgio Agamben, Luce Irigaray, Homi Bhabha, and Rene Girard. / R 94.
Spring 2006 2006 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 07346018, electronic ISSN 1533
855X, pages 13149. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
content to the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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131

argument that, with a kind of suggestiveness that can only result from the kinship of
ideas, alerts me to what Id like to argue as mimesis conceptual double or conjoined
twinsacrice.
Sacrice as a Mythologeme;
or, the Aesthetics
of the Unrepresentable

Agambens use of Foucaults work is intriguing in at least two respects.

First, Agamben sees sovereignty as residing in the relation of what he calls ban:
He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indierent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the
threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. . . .
The originary relation of law to life is not application but Abandonment. The matchless
potentiality of the nomos, its originary force of law, is that it holds life in its ban by
abandoning it.5 This emphasis on ban suggests that Agambens understanding
of power is, unlike Foucaults, essentially negative and prohibitive in orientation.
Whereas Foucaults major contribution has been to shift this conventional understanding of power to the positive, indeed enabling and progressive, capacities in
which power thrives, power remains for Agamben (despite his nuanced articulation
of the paradox between exception and rule) the power to taboo, exclude, and annihilate. Hence his pronouncement, on a universal scale:
Everywhere on earth men live today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained
solely as the zero point of their own content, and that include men within them in the
form of a pure relation of abandonment. All societies and all cultures today (it does not
matter whether they are democratic or totalitarian, conservative or progressive) have entered into a legitimation crisis in which law (we mean by this term the entire text of tradition
in its regulative form, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christian dogma
or the profane nomos) is in force as the pure Nothing of Revelation. But this is precisely
the structure of the sovereign relation, and the nihilism in which we are living is, from this
perspective, nothing other than the coming to light of this relation as such.6

By its denitive toneEverywhere on earth, All societies and all cultures

todaythis passage not only reinforces the negative and prohibitive notion of
power but also asserts that such power applies in all societies and all cultures regardless of their actual systems of government (and, by implication, regardless of their
histories of political evolution). As is the case throughout his book, Agamben names
this power law, which he says is facing a legitimacy crisis because its basis is increasingly revealed to be nothing. For him, however, this nothingness, which may
be understood as the nonexistence of any concrete justication/grounding for
whatever happens to rule, is, precisely, the heart of the matter, the truth about politics based on law. Accordingly, the nihilism we are experiencing everywhere to-

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day is simply the coming to lightthe deconstructing illumination, shall we

sayof this fundamentally vacuous structure of the sovereign relation.
Second, in keeping with his formulation of power as ban, Agambens argument
also seems to overlookinevitably perhapsthe attempt Foucault made at historicizing. For Foucault, biopolitics, with its dedication to the proliferation of apparatuses for the management of bodies, took shape as the older notion of sovereignty
premised on the power to kill evolved into more lenient and gentle forms of
governance in the modern period. As in the case of his other studies of the multifarious processes of institutionalization and socialization of the modern subject, Foucaults overall intellectual interest in biopolitics was directed, to invoke his memorable phrase, at the entry of life into history.7 Agambens emphasis is quite
dierentand contrary: he is interested rather in articulating the meanings of a
modern and contemporary Western world in which bare life, even when reduced to
seemingly mere biological existence, is nonetheless entirely enmeshed in sovereign
powera world in which, in other words, biological survival itself must be recognized as always already politicalpolitical as dened in the aforementioned terms
of a denitive nihilism. (He therefore holds that there is no outside to the law.) In
order to argue this absoluteand thus timelessrelationship between sovereign
power and bare life, Agamben must of necessity sidestep the historicity of the transition (from premodern to modern times) that Foucault clearly introduced into his
argument.
Even if Foucaults mode of historicizing is considered questionable (a point that
can certainly be made), it seems to me that Agambens argument of a continuous
biopolitics that runs, conceptually, from European antiquity to European modernity, culminating in the catastrophe of the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s
and 1940s, has still fundamentally neglected the critical dimension of Foucaults
work that foregrounds the supremacy of life as the biopolitical imperative in the
modern age. It is in this sense of a coercion to live/stay alive that Foucaults work
resonates most readily with the high tech, medical, and political manipulations of
contemporary human existence, from the ostracization and incarceration of the
insane and the criminal, to the surveillance of sexual practices, to the evergenerative forms of discipline and production of docile subjects in our civil institutions. For Agamben, on the other hand, coercion is really a matter of extermination:
his transformation of Foucaults biopolitics into a thanatopolitics in this regard is
justied by his primary example of the Nazi camps. In the nality of the slaughter
of the Jews, the Gypsies, the communists, and the homosexuals, as well as the euthanizing of those who were mentally decient or physically handicapped, there is,
he suggests, little leeway for considering life other than as barestripped of all
supplemental attributes that would render it more human. His real point, however, is that even such bare, stripped life, life shorn of all human decency, needs to
be returned and restored to its due human connection, a connection that he reiter-

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ates as fundamentally juridico-political, in the double sense of law-cum-violence

and law-cum-nothingness.
Being aware of the fact that his subject of study can easilyindeed has often
beenapproached through the notion of sacrice, Agamben takes pains to distance his own argument from such sacricial logic. Referring to the sacred as a
mythologeme that originated from William Robertson Smiths Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889) and passed quickly into French sociology, Agamben rejects
the sacricial logic on account of its imputed ambivalencethat is, its capacity for
holding together and making interchangeable two opposed categories, the holy and
the profane. This is a capacity that fascinated thinkers from Sigmund Freud and
Marcel Mauss to Emile Benveniste, Emile Durkheim, and Claude Levi-Strauss.
Precisely what these thinkers considered to be the attractive conceptual plasticity
of the sacredits potential for shuttling between high and low, consecrated and
lthybecomes for Agamben a kind of veil, an aura whose spell needs to be
broken: The wish to lend a sacricial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means
of the term Holocaust was, from this perspective, an irresponsible historiographical blindness. . . . The truthwhich is dicult for the victims to face, but which
we must have the courage not to cover with sacricial veilsis that the Jews were
exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, as lice, which is to say, as bare life.8 Its compelling nature notwithstanding, this argument leaves open an important question: what if the notion of sacrice
is subscribed and adhered to by the victims and their community, as an inalienable
part of their belief ? Another well-known example from Judeo-Christian culture
may help clarify the problem at stake: to the Roman ocials in occupied Judea, for
instance, the execution of a political dissenter such as Jesus, too, probably meant
little more than the routine extermination of lice, but for the followers of Christianity, that execution (together with its horrendous instrument, the cross) has carried a denitive symbolic signicance of sacrice over the centuries.9
Agambens critique of the sacricial logic can, of course, be seen as an eminently post-Enlightenment, secularist gesture. To this extent, his question In what,
then, does the sacredness of the sacred man consist? is a rhetorical one.10 The
answer is obvious: such sacredness consists not in any (residual) religious sense of
the sacred but rather in the inextricable link between sovereign power and human
existence. Just as this link manifests itself in bare lifethe life that may be killed
but not sacriced (a phrase Agamben repeats numerous times throughout his
book)so too would sovereignty become groundless were it not for the existence
of such bare life and its potential to be killed.11 At the same time, as more and more
people get killed in our contemporary world without reason or justicationas
innocent human lives pile up like wreckage against the precarious grounds of sovereigntythe sovereign relation itself is increasingly being exposed for what it is: an
arbitrary conguration of power that has immense potential for abuse and that has,
indeed, been thoroughly abused.

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The ambivalence of sacrice is unacceptable in Agambens analysis because for

him, ultimately, there can be no room to imagineto imagine, for instance, that
the victims were sacriced for some transcendent purpose or meaning. Nor is there
room to imagine a kind of politics that would involve a struggle for hegemony in
the form of a resistant or antagonistic confrontation with tyrannical dominance.
All relations of substitution and exchangeand by implication all possibilities of
redemption understood in a broad sensecame to a halt with the acts of cruelty
(and exercise of sovereign power) in the camps, rendering the ambivalence inherent
to the sacricial logic an illusion and a lie.
This said, there is a further dimension embedded in Agambens rejection of
sacrice that is worth considering, perhaps less for the reasons he explicitly oers
(on secularist moral grounds) than for the anity that sacrice shares with another
order of thinkingmimesis. In this light, Agambens emphasis on the absolute nality of the Nazis thanatopolitics may be seen to have its precedents in a wellknown (though very debatable) aesthetic approach to the Holocaust, whereby, notwithstanding the representational materialities and mimetic eects involved, the
artist or critic insists that the Holocaust is unrepresentable. One thinks, for instance,
of documentary lm classics such as Alain Resnaiss Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog)
and Claude Lanzmanns Shoah, in which the historical weight of the catastrophe is
shown or given to us through the muteness of the most ordinary of scenes, such
as a lush green landscape or a decrepit empty building, even as the directors emphasize how dicultor impossibleit is to represent the enormity of what happened. In this kind of aesthetic approach, the most natural or unadorned sight
(much like Agambens bare life) is understood not only as that which has been
stripped of all cultural accoutrements but also as that which, in its so-called nothingness, reveals the basic, yet utterly ruthless and nihilistic, reality of a juridicopolitical relation.12 It is in this connectionwhat may be termed an antimimetic
ethicsthat I believe Agambens stringent critique of the notion of sacrice with
regard to the Holocaust should nally be grasped: recast in terms of mimesisas-representation, this critique would seem akin to none other than the familiar
assertion that the Holocaust is an unrepresentablethat is to say, inimitable and
intransmissibleexperience.13
Ironically, of course, such a critique of sacrice is, in the end, operating fully
within the bounds of sacricial logic, the logic that something must be forfeited or
cast o.

What Follows (or Remains After)

Sacrice: Mimesis as Substitute

Appearing as it does in the context of contemporary political philosophy

debates, Agambens antisacricial, antimimetic ethics is resonant with certain
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strands of what may be schematically called poststructuralist theoretical thinking.

For some time now, since the arrival of poststructuralism in the mid-twentieth century, mimesis has been viewed in some contemporary theoretical sectors with suspicion and disdain, as the legacy of a rigid and conservative representational politics
with its demand for realismthat is, for the reproduction, in art or literature, of a
replica of what supposedly exists beforehand. As Martin Jay writes: For . . . theorists normally labeled, for better or worse, poststructuralist, a conventional aesthetic privileging of mimesis or what is taken to be its synonym, imitation, is an
ideologically suspect recirculation of the ready-made, a false belief in the xity of
meaning and the possibility of achieving full presence, a language game that fails
to see itself as such.14 This antimimetic stance notwithstanding, one notices, on
reection, a curious paradox embedded in poststructuralist maneuvers in general:
even as the mimetic is distrusted as an ideology of mechanical duplication, copying,
and re-presentation (one that assumes the presence of some original determinant),
poststructuralist theory nonetheless tends to depend for its deconstructive work on
acts of substitution, alternation, and dierentiationacts that, in the terms of our
present discussion, may in fact be seen as part and parcel of the entwined logics of
sacrice and mimesis.
This close kinship between sacrice and mimesis informs the arguments of
some of the authors who have had the strongest inuences on poststructuralist writing. In his well-known theory of the gift, for instance, Marcel Mauss dispels the
idea of the free, innocent gift by shifting attention to relations of exchange and
reciprocity as the rationale behind gift-giving: understood precisely, the giving of
a gift, as Mauss argues, always carries with it the signicance of a gesture of retaliationof a return of something. Similarly, by introducing the distinction between
the penis and the phallus in his semiotic rewriting of Freuds discussions of anatomical dierences, Jacques Lacan claries the indispensable exchange principle that
underpins Freuds argument about sociality: in order to be socially acceptable, an
individual must learn to give up, to trade in as it were, his own solipsistic or narcissistic pleasures. Closer to our time, in her theory about the social origins of gender,
Judith Butler, too, conrms the function of exchange in the construction of an intimate part of our identitiesthe way we go about picking our objects of desire.
Butler argues that gendered identities, in particular for those who are or who
think of themselves as heterosexual, are a matter of learning to relinquish the type
of love object that is socially prohibited (as for instance a person of the same sex as
oneself ). Gender is haunted by melancholy because, whether or not one is conscious
of it, it is a matter of negotiating and performing the eects of a premandated and
internalized loss.
I have brought up these few examples of inuential frames of thought simply
as a quick reminder of the indispensability in representational politics of the mutuality of loss and gain, and of surrender and redemptiona mutuality that, I would
contend, may be reconceptualized as the twin logics of sacrice and mimesis. To

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this extent, Id like to speculate that mimesis has retained its relevance to this day
less because of its persistence as imitative representation (which no doubt remains
the case in many circles) than because of its potency as part of an inescapable structural relationthe relation of exchange and substitution, absence and presence,
disappearance and appearance, and so forth, without which the acts of thinking
and writing would simply be impossible. Understood in these terms (and not merely
in terms of a secondary duplication of a primary event), the mimetic-as-representation, even when it takes the positivistic form of appearing as/like something else,
should be described more precisely as the accessible portion of a certain foregone
transaction, a transaction, moreover, during which something was for one reason or
another lost, given up, or surrenderedin other words, sacriced. Rather than being a static replication or re-presentation of a preexisting plenitude, mimesis, one
may argue, is the sign that remainsin the form of a literal being-there, an externalization and an exhibitionin the aftermath of a process of sacrice, whether or
not the sacrice has been witnessed or apprehended as such. Mimesis is the (visibly
or sensorially available) substitute that follows, that bears the eects of (an invisible
or illegible) sacrice.
Reformulated in this manner, sacrice and mimesis would seem a double epistemic passage underlying all acts of signication, a passage that tends to become
acute in contexts of dominance and subordination, in which loss and gain are existentially palpable phenomena impinging on individual and group identity formation. Is this perhaps the reason mimesis has gured so prominently in scenarios
that carry the charge of victimization (and by implication, the charge of voluntary
or involuntary sacrice)? I am thinking, for instance, of the scenarios of patriarchy
and colonialism, in which the status of those whose lives are compromised and
demeaned has been explored, often via the tropes of mimesis.
As I mentioned, biopolitics, as Foucault discusses it, is not necessarily or exclusively about the mandating of death, but more often than not it takes the coercive
form of an imperative to stay alive. Would adhering to Foucaults conceptualization
(with its emphasis on life) bring about an alternative understanding of the implications of Agambens discussion, by allowing us to localize the latter as simply one
viable contemporary way of theorizing victimhood? Conversely, in other scenarios
of violencesuch as patriarchy and colonialismin which the goal has not been
extermination tout court but rather the multifaceted governance and subjection of
live bodies, what would happen to the logic of sacricediscredited in no uncertain terms by Agambenand with it the mimetic?
Mimesis as a Coping Mechanism
and Survival Tactic

Luce Irigaray, for instance, has oered a well-known reappraisal of femininity by distinguishing between two forms of mimesisthe productive and the
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recuperative. Putting it in deliberately simple terms, she writes: there is mimesis as

production, which would lie more in the realm of music, and there is the mimesis
that would be already caught up in a process of imitation, specularization, adequation,
and reproduction.15 Referring to the latter kind of mimesis as masquerade, Irigaray allows for the recognition of femininity as a type of social sacrice, whereupon
women must imitate or reproduceat their own perilthe feminine norms that
have been prescribed in advance by patriarchal mores:
I think the masquerade has to be understood as what women do in order to recuperate
some element of desire, to participate in mens desire, but at the price of renouncing their
own. In the masquerade, they submit to the dominant economy of desire in an attempt to
remain on the market in spite of everything. But they are there as objects for sexual enjoyment, not as those who enjoy.
What do I mean by masquerade? In particular, what Freud calls femininity. The
belief, for example, that it is necessary to become a woman, a normal one at that, whereas
a man is a man from the outset.16

At the same time, Irigaray asserts that the mimetic also contains the possibility
of a dierent relation, one in which women, precisely because they understand what
has been prescribed for them, may set out consciously to perform these prescriptions
in such ways as to turn them into subversive acts. She calls this kind of mimesis
mimicry:
. . . mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an armation, and thus to begin to thwart it. . . .
To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation
by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself
. . . to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make
visible, by an eect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible . . . to
unveil the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply
resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere.17

This association of the mimetic with feminist cunning and, in particular, with
a playful, self-conscious repetition, made to resemble and conjure the normative
image of femininity yet simultaneously undermining this image from within, is
perhaps one of the most important instances in contemporary thought in which
mimesis is credited with the potential to exceed, rather than simply to compensate
for, the sacrice that precedes it. This potential enables mimesis to take on the value
of a type of behaviora camouage conformismthat, even if it does not exactly
set women free, allows them (to imagine) a utopian space/time of alterity from
within the bounds of patriarchal subordination.
In the discussions of colonized existence, mimesis has likewise played a signicant role in theorists attempts to congure a breathing space for those who have
been subjected to injustice. In the contexts in which cross-cultural encounters entail
the imposition and enforcement of one groups (typically, Westerners) superiority
over another (typically, the natives of African, Asian, American, Australian, and

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New Zealand cultures), mimesis is a routine rite of initiation: those from the socalled inferior group, the colonized or semicolonized, are bound to want to imitate their superior aggressors as part of their strategy for social survival and advancement. Under these circumstances, the question is how agency can be assessed:
must agency be understood to lie only with the so-called original (the superior
group, the one being imitated), or can it also be understood to reside in the act of
imitationin those who imitate? What kind of agency?
As I have discussed elsewhere, various levels of mimesis traverse this kind of
situation.18 I will concentrate on two here. A rst level, probably the most obvious,
is a direct legacy of Western imperialism and colonialism of the past few hundred
yearsthe mimesis with the white man as the original. The logistics involved are
time-proven: the white colonizer, his language, and his culture stand as the model
against which the colonized is judged; the colonized must try her best to become
like her master even when knowing full well that her eorts at emulation will be
deemed less than satisfactory. As I noted, the values involvedsuperior and inferiorare hierarchically determined and tend to work in one direction only: the
original, so to speak, exists as the authentic standard by which the imitator is
judged, but not vice versa. The colonized subject, condemned to a permanent inferiority complex, must nonetheless try, in vain, to become that from which she has
been excluded in an a priori manner. Try as she may, she will always remain a poor
copy; yet even as she continues to be debased, she has no choice but to continue
to mimic.
At a second level, as theorists no longer feel comfortable dismissing the colonized as merely inadequate, mimesis takes on a more complex set of connotations.
As exemplied by the work of scholars such as Homi Bhabha, who follow the rationale of Frantz Fanons impassioned arguments about black subjectivity in works
such as The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, one important feature
of the colonizeds subjectivity that was previously ignoredthe ambivalent, contradictory emotions embedded in her identitarian plightnow assumes center stage.
As Fanon writes, for the person of color (in his case, the black man) there is only
one destiny. And that is white. With insight and foresight, he also suggests that
only a psychological interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies
of aect that are responsible for the structure of the complex.19 Fanons critical
contributions to the dissection of colonized subjectivity are summarized by Bhabha
in this manner: in Fanons work, Bhabha tells us, The ambivalent identication
of the racist world . . . turns on the idea of man as his alienated image; not Self and
Other but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity.20
In psychological terms, what Bhabha, taking the lead from Fanon, introduces
to the colonial scenario is desire (and its irrational, often unconscious, modes of
working). As in the case of Irigarays endeavor to reclaim femininity for women,
desire in this instance serves as the very ground on which to reappraise the value
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of dominated subjecthood. Instead of being written o as the inferior partner in

an asymmetrical historical encounter with the West, the colonized is now understood, with much more suppleness and sympathy, in terms of a desire to be white
that exists concurrently with the shame and resentment accompanying the inferior
position to which she has been socially, culturally, and racially consigned. Between
the (positive) condition of wanting to imitate the white man and the (negative) condition of self-loathing and self-abatement, lies what may be seen as an entire range
of epistemic and representational possibilities, possibilities that innitely enrich the
theorization of postcolonial subjectivities. Whereas at the rst level of mimesis, relations between the colonizer and the colonized remain immobilized in a static hierarchy, the introduction of desire transforms the entire question of mimesis into a
uid, because vacillating, structure, in which the thoroughly entangled feelings of
wanting at once to imitate the colonizer and to eliminate him become the basis for
a new kind of analysis, with the tormented psychic interiority of the colonized as
its center. Much like Irigarays self-conscious mimicry, the colonizeds desire here
makes way for a resilient, because mobile, framework for imagining alterity from
within subordination.
By focusing on the colonized person as an indeterminate, internally divided
subject, a subject that is not self-identical, Bhabha and the critics inuenced by him
thus enable what may be called a poststructuralist redemption of colonial victimhood that is thoroughly humanistic in implications: it is the failure, the incompleteness or incompleteability of the mimetic attempt (a point on which the second
level of mimesis in fact concurs with the rst) that makes the nonwhite subject theoretically interestingindeed salvageable (one might say, in the aftermath of colonial sacrice). Consciously or unbeknownst to herself, and vacillating between black
and white, the subjectivity of the colonized is now dispersed, pluralized, and
multiplied across the many possible paths of desire. No longer rigidly polarized/
dichotomized against each other, black and white can now be considered as mutually constituted and mutually constituting. The question remains as to how this
very generous and liberalist rendering of victimhood can ultimately distinguish itself from the productivity of colonial power. In both cases, it would seem, it is the
ambivalences, the contradictions, and the ssures, always already inherent in the
act of articulation, that are considered to contain the potential for opening things
up, so to speak. How to draw the line in between? Oris that not so critical?
Concomitant with the issue of mimesis in these gendered and racial scenarios
of violence, then, reemerges in a dierent guise exactly the problematic of sacrice
at which Agamben has directed his skepticism. Recast in sacricial terms, the paradigm shift that poststructuralist feminist and postcolonial criticism has brought
about is none other than a suspensionand thus a revaluationof the nality and
nonnegotiability of victimhood through behavioral and psychic exibilityplayful
mimicry and destabilized desireso that, even if it seems degrading and humiliating (involving the sacricing of ones autonomy and dignity), the very act of imitat-

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ing ones victimizer may yet be an aperture to a dierent kind of future. Mimesis
amounts in these cases to a creative repackaging of the givens of dominated existence in exchange for survivalin a situation that is not about to improve any
time soon.
On balance, much as this survival kit of mimesisas subversive performances; as ambivalent desireshas been inuential in contemporary cultural criticism, as a coping mechanism it still by and large leaves in place the inequities of
the situationone that remains governed by man or the white man as the original,
with the important dierence that the playful imitation by women or the incomplete imitation by colonized subjects is now deemed equally worthy of critical attention. Insofar as it is a coping mechanism, moreover, mimesis seems to have retained
the quality of a secondary phenomenon whose raison detre is derived from something external to itself. Although what is at issue is no longer so-called arts imitation
of life, the fact that mimetic behavior and psychology are construed as a response,
a reaction to fraught ideological conditions suggests that mimesis continues to be
accorded an instrumentalist status. Obviously, this conclusion is not very satisfying.
Mimesis as Originary Force,
and a Different Hypothesis
About Victimhood

A useful, if controversial, interlocutor at this juncture is Rene Girard,

whose work oers many remarkable insights into the bondage between sacrice
and mimesis.21 Given that Girard has explicitly referred to the double meanings of
the Latin word sacer, which, as he points out, has been translated alternately as
sacred and as accursed; and that he, like Agamben, is clearly skeptical about
the ambivalence of the sacred as disseminated by French sociology, the absence of
any reference to Girards work in Agambens book is conspicuous.22 Can this be
because, as I have been suggesting, a rejection of sacrice (as in Agambens case) is
not only a rejection of sacrice but also in essence a rejection of mimesis, the very
basis of Girards theory?
Like many mid- to late-twentieth-century thinkers, Girard too has been inuenced by Freud, and the psychological vocabulary of desire is eminently present in
his readings. His understanding of desire is, however, quite unique. For Girard,
desire is not some kind of original human nature that for historical or cultural
reasons (such as patriarchy or colonialism) adapts itself into a desire for something
(such as a desire to imitate). Instead, desire is always learned, and can be borrowed
and transferred. Rather than the commonsensical question What does X want?
then, Girard asks: how does X come to want this or that? As he has famously
argued, the answer to this latter question is mimesis: to desire means not simply to
desire an object but also to imitate a models way of desiring. In this manner, the
model one tries to imitate inevitably becomes a rival:
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Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object;
rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts
the subject to the desirability of the object. The rival, then, serves as a model for the subject,
not only in regard to such secondary matters as style and opinions but also, and more essentially, in regard to desires.23

In his classic Violence and the Sacred, Girard illustrates his bold argument by providing readings of numerous texts, often from myths, classical Greek tragedies, psychoanalysis, and anthropological studies of tribal beliefs and practices, but his reading of Freuds Oedipus complex oers perhaps the most economical example of his
logic. Girard traces the shadowy presence of a mimetic understanding in Freuds
description of the little boys desire for his mother. As Freud points out, this desire
has something to do with the boys special interest in his father, to grow like and
be like him, and take his place everywhere. His cathexis to his mother, then, can
be seen as an eect of a primarily mimetic impulse to identify with his father; only
thus, Girard writes, does it make sense to see the father, who is the boys model,
become a rival, a hindrance, and a nuisance standing in the way of the boys attainment of gratication. However, notwithstanding his own intuition of the potential
held open by mimetic desire, Freud, according to Girard, turned aside and erased
the eects of mimetic desire from his construction of the Oedipus complex so as to
preserve the Oedipus complexs purity and validity:
Although traces of the mimetic conception are scattered through Freuds work, this conception never assumes a dominant role. It runs counter to the Freudian insistence on a desire
that is fundamentally directed toward an object; that is, sexual desire for the mother. When
the tension between these opposing tendencies becomes too great, both Freud and his disciples seem to resolve it in favor of the object-desire.24

What sets Girards conception of mimesis apart from many of his contemporaries, therefore, is the epistemic status he grants it: mimesis is an originary force
rather than a secondary phenomenon whose rationale/justication comes from
somewhere else.25 This conception has the advantage of freeing us from the common tendency to xate on a predetermined object as the source of desire (as is the
case, arguably, of Fanons and Bhabhas ruminations, in which whiteness exists as
the object to which the black man becomes cathected in imitation).26 By making
mimesis the rst term, Girard shifts the emphasis away from the conventional assumption of desire as natural, autonomous, or originating: instead, desire itself is
now understood as the outcome of human interaction. Mimesis, in turn, is no
longer simply a derivative or instrumental act in response to a situation in which
those who are underprivileged, envious, or malcontent nd themselves obligated
to copy whatever preexists them as normal and superior. With desire detached
from all predetermined objects, the mimetic process is here allowed to stand as a
power dynamic, one that engineers, to return to Foucaults term, the biopolitics of
intersubjective relations. Following Girard, one may go so far as to claim that mi-

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mesis is what animates and energizes the act of desiring; it is what gives desire its
direction and trajectory as well as its objects.
This all-pervasive, mediating presence of mimesis means that to desire is, behaviorally speaking, to compete with a rival in a vicious circle of reciprocal violence,
in which the antagonists become increasingly indistinguishable from each other
become what Girard calls monstrous doubles. The only way in which the circle
can be broken is through sacricethat is, through an articial process in which
someone who is, like everyone else, a member of the community becomes chosen
as a scapegoatand expelled as a surrogate victim. Herein lies the crucial aspect
of Girards theory: Social coexistence, he writes, would be impossible if no surrogate victim existed, if violence persisted beyond a certain threshold and failed to
be transmuted into culture. It is only at this point that the vicious circle of reciprocal
violence, wholly destructive in nature, is replaced by the vicious circle of ritual violence, creative and protective in nature.27 This point, very much resonant with
Freuds arguments about human group behavior in Totem and Taboo and Civilization
and Its Discontents (and to some extent Moses and Monotheism), is reiterated in a succinct recapitulation of mimetic desire:
Mimetic desire is simply a term more comprehensive than violence for religious pollution. As
the catalyst for the sacricial crisis, it would eventually destroy the entire community if the
surrogate victim were not at hand to halt the process and the ritualized mimesis were not
at hand to keep the conictual mimesis from beginning afresh. . . . By channeling its energies into ritual forms and activities sanctioned by ritual, the cultural order prevents multiple
desires from converging on the same object.28

For Girard, the sacrice that is collectively ordained and practiced is thus (the violence of ) mimetic desire ritualized. Practices of culture such as art, literature, and
religion are all part and parcel of such ritualized mimesisthat is, a substitute
violencedesigned to enable human society to proceed against the blind destructiveness of the primal conictual mimesis. Girard speaks often of a fundamental
truth about violence: if left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overows its connes and oods the surrounding area. The role of sacrice is to stem
this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into proper
channels.29
Girards two-pronged formulation of mimesisas both nature (constant, primal antagonism among human beings) and culture (collective, articial ritual)
whose violence must be understood dialectically, as both internal and external,
both pernicious and benecialmay be the reason his thesis has not exactly been
taken up with popular enthusiasm in the more liberalist-leaning varieties of contemporary cultural criticism. Since Girards frame of reference is literary, mythological, and religious rather than empirical or scientic, the validity held by his
conception of mimesis in various disciplines, even those with obvious social and
historical import, will likely remain a matter of conjecture and debate.30 However,
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because it recognizes the unavoidability and universality of violence, Girards hypothesis ironically implies a basic, incontrovertible evenness and equality among
human beings that is absent in other formulations. In the feminist and postcolonialist writings I have discussed, for instance, in which it is typically the disparity
between those with power and those deprived of it that provokes theorization, mimesis tends to be pursued, more or less, as just a means of addressingthat is,
compensating, displacing, complexifying, and, one hopes, transformingsuch a
disparity (and the sacrices it has entailed). Girards emphasis is decidedly dierentand clearly un-Rousseauian and nonutopian at that. In his hands, mimesis
(at the raw, natural level) involves rather the possibility, through an act of doubling,
of leveling with the rival, in a world in which a self as such is never alone but always
dened socially and antagonistically in relation to others, in a generalized state of
competition. Hence the key at this level of mimesis is reciprocitythe gift of an
eye for the returned gift of an eye, ad innitumin a kind of undierentiated
repetition that may go on forever. If the violence thus generated is circular, it is
also a violence that renders the antagonists structurally on a par withindeed
resembling and becoming indistinguishable fromone another. But this situation
of equality, in which every person is literally like the other, is in fact a lethal situation to which human society cannot aord to return (or so it has convinced itself ).
Such equality, Girard implies, is the source of our greatest terror because anyone
at any moment may nd himself or herself the target of irrational violence and
persecution.
Meanwhile, when mimesis is (re)enacted as cultural ritual, Girard, by highlighting the indispensable role played by the victimbe it the surrogate victim who
is sacriced on behalf (or in substitution) of the entire group or the ritual victim
who is sacriced in imitation (or in substitution) of the surrogate victimalso oers
a distinctly divergent way of thinking about victimhood.31 To put it bluntly, for
Girard, victimhood is more a matter of structural and social necessityfor the
purication of pollution, and the restoration of peace and orderthan one of humanistic moral concern. The victim is the very means by which a community interrupts the otherwise unstoppable circle of (mimetic) violence through a representative act of exclusion and expulsion. Often selected randomly, the victim is sacriced
not because he is weak or inferior (or strong and superior), but paradoxically because he is like us, because he resembles the community of those who would otherwise be engaged in an endless frenzy of retaliations. His (lone) alienation and expulsion are thus the substitute oered in exchange for the preservation of the group as
a wholea substitute that serves in eect as a protective shield against the threat
of immolation posed by the groups own propensity toward mimetic contagion
and annihilation.

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Questions

In an age in which the phenomenon of homo sacer, of which Agamben

has so forcefully reminded us, seems to multiply daily across the globe with the
glaringly unconstrained proliferation of state violence and abuse of power, a consideration of sacrice and mimesiswhat I have been suggesting as a conjoined epistemic passagewould seem more than timely. The ramications involved are immense and clearly beyond the scope of one essay. In lieu of a conclusion, then, what
Id like to oer is a brief summary of the issues raised so far, in the form of questions.
Whereas Agamben (implicitly) argues victimhood in terms of bare life, which
is the residue or remainder of an utterly inequitable juridico-political relation between sovereign power and those it kills (in an increasingly arbitrary fashion)a
relation that renders mimesis altogether irrelevant because there is no room for
confrontation and resistance; and whereas Irigaray, Fanon, and Bhabha alert us to
the depths of ambiguity, neurosis, and perversion that dene the mimetic acts of
underprivileged victims, Girard challenges us instead to think of victims not as
victims tout simple but rather as the bearers of a systemic function. And, rather than
speaking against violence as the unfortunate moral outcome of human social interaction, Girard gives us a dialectics of violence, one that understands violence (or
mimetic desire) both as a fundamental antagonism that denes every confrontation among human individuals and as what constitutes cultural processes of reenactment that are aimed at warding o the original violence. As a result, he has also
oered what might be called a dialectics of victimhood, wherein victimhood has
no intrinsic quality to it but can be both horrendous and redemptive. Like sacricial
violence, sacricial victims are surrogates, substitutes, or stand-ins whose destruction helps save others (like them) from some larger horror.
If, for the sake of speculative discussion, we were to disregard Agambens dismissal of the sacricial logic and rethink the Nazi camps in terms of Girards interpretation of sacrice and mimesis, two very hardand for some, undoubtedly
scandaloussets of questions would probably arise.
First: could the extremism of the Nazi state apparatus be understood as a form
of originary violence, a primal mimetic desire that had somehow been allowed to
run amok? (Did the Germans not, in a mimetic manner, consider the Jews their
competitorstheir rivals? Did they not, against their own denunciatory proclamations, actually want to become [like] the Jewstake the Jews place everywhere
by appropriating all that the Jews possessed? Could their violence have been reciprocated?) Second: alternatively, could such extremism be seen as a cultural process
of ritualized violence/mimesis wherein those who were reduced to bare life in the
camps could be considered surrogate/ritual victims? To follow Girards logic to its
deeply unsettling conclusions, if the Jews, the Gypsies, and other exterminated
groups were surrogate/ritual victims, does it mean that genocide, however repreSacrice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood

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hensible it is on ethical grounds, should nonetheless be understood as a sacricial

ritual, a cultural process whose purpose is to forestall a worse form of disaster?
But what could possibly have been a worse form of disaster than the Nazis
willful murderous eorts, and what larger horror could they be preventing?the
disaster and horror of being victimized themselves, of being reduced to bare life, of
having their own group unity disintegrate in the potentially unstoppable spread of
mimetic violence: in other words, the disaster and horror of losing their monopoly
on violence and with it their claim to the Aryan dierence. It would be unthinkable for the Germans to become like everyone else. The status of the victim, structurally indispensable in Girards formulations, must thus be further specied as
the externalizationthe banishment (to use a term that recalls Agambens notion of
ban) to the outside, in the form of a guilty adversaryof a groups capacity for selfdestruction. As a crowd whose members imitate each others behavior, the group
derives an important benet from the unanimousthat is, mimetically induced
hatred for the victim: this hatred unies the members and creates the community.
As surrogate, therefore, the victim is simultaneously the symptom of a groups fundamental lack of cohesionits fundamental nonidentity with itself. As Girard
writes in his study of The Book of Job: In a world controlled by mimetic desire . . .
the appetite for violence may grow and may be ultimately satised at that moment
when the global tendency to uniformity focuses the mimetic substitutions and polarizations on some victim or other, or perhaps not so randomly but on a victim
who is more vulnerable because of his visibility, one who is somehow predestined
by the exceptional position he holds in the communitysomeone like Job.32
On the other hand, if, in light of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, any
rationalization of victimhood as such must be deemed outrageous regardless of how
sympathetic the critic might be with the victimsand this is certainly the point of
Agambens fundamental expulsion (sacrice) of the sacricial logicdoes it mean
that mimesis, whether imagined as nature, as culture, or as both, must also be thoroughly expungedbanned, abandonedas a concept because it is simply too perilous to think with, because it is bound to lead to conclusions that will be found
without/outside moral compunctions? Yet what is the defense of moral compunctionsto return again to Girards logicif not precisely a collectively ordained
exercise of violence aimed at preserving our social order from crumblinga ritualized mimesis, no less? Would not the expunging of mimesis turn it precisely into a
symptom about us as a community, in the aforementioned terms?
Interestingly, this is also the point at which Girards seemingly amoral,
religion-oriented argument of mimetic violence comes closest to Agambens nihilist, atheist understanding of law and power. As the fundamental vacuity of the
sovereign relation is exposed by the increasingly arbitrary abuses by those in power,
what is so-called law is revealing itselfand here is the logical transition from
Agamben into Girardto be nothing more than a collectively ordained exercise
of violence, intended once upon a time to preserve the social equilibrium, perhaps,

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but now functioning as nothing more than a frenzied killing machine. Despite his
adherence to the need for moral compunctions in his (antisacricial and antimimetic) approach to the concentration camps, Agambens bleak depictions of
political-power-gone-berserk the world over suggest that his grasp of the unmitigated, and perhaps intractable, actuality of human violence (dened by Girard as
mimetic) is, in the end, not that distant from Girards.
One nal question and speculation: insofar as any discussion about them seems
ineluctably to arrive at these formidableand terrifyingquestions of freedom,
violence, moral constraints, community, and boundary-setting, are not sacrice
and mimesis perhaps the surrogate victims and ritual victims par excellence in
the domain of representational politics today?

No t e s

1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, 1998); see in particular part 2, chaps. 13.
2. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 65. He is discussing Walter Benjamins essay Critique of
Violence.
3. See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
[1936], in Illuminations, ed. with intro. by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York, 1968), 21751; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1953; reprint, Princeton, 2003); Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London,
1970); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
4. For an exploration of this problem in the contemporary politics of ethnicity, see my
The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 2002), in particular chaps. 2
and 3.
5. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 29; emphases his.
6. Ibid., 51.
7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York, 1980), 141.
8. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 114; my emphases.
9. For this interesting point, I am indebted to Yuan-horng Chu, Dusk or Dawn: On
Agamben Painted Exceptional Rule [sic], Wenhua yanjiu/Router: A Journal of Cultural
Studies 1 (September 2005): 197219; see in particular 21112. I should add that I am
aware of the fact that the historical circumstances surrounding Jesus disappearance/
death are a subject of great dispute among scholars; the point here is simply that being
killed may hold very dierentyet perhaps equally validmeanings for the victims
(and their community) from the intentions harbored by the perpetrators of killing.
However, this possible dierence does not seem to matter in Agambens argument.
10. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 72.
11. See the cited phrase in ibid., 114.
12. I should make clear that I do not at all nd this aesthetic approach (which insists on

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13.

14.

15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.

22.

23.
24.
25.

26.

27.
28.

148

the unrepresentability of the Holocaust) persuasiveespecially when the medium in

question is a visual one such as lm. However, for reasons of space, I will have to leave
a detailed discussion of this issue for another occasion.
Agambens reections on the testimonies about Auschwitz are similar: he holds that
survivors bore witness to something to which it is impossible to bear witness. See Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New
York, 1999).
Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst, 1998), 120. For examples
of French writings that elaborate the theatrical dimensions of mimesis in complex manners, see the collection Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor, 1997).
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke
(Ithaca, 1985), 131; emphases Irigarays.
Ibid., 13334; emphasis Irigarays.
Ibid., 76; emphasis Irigarays.
See the extended discussion in Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
95127.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York,
1967), 10; my emphasis.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), 40, 44.
Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977). For related interest, see also Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (1965; reprint, Baltimore, 1976), and To Double Business
Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore, 1978).
See Girard on the word sacer in Violence and the Sacred, 257; see also his discussions on
26365; 298. Regarding the ambivalence of the sacred, Girard puts it in this manner
at the very beginning of his book: Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill
himbut the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed. Here is a circular line
of reasoning that at a somewhat later date would be dignied by the sonorous term
ambivalence. Persuasive and authoritative as that term still appears, it has been so extraordinarily abused in our century that perhaps we may now recognize how little light
it sheds on the subject of sacrice. Certainly it provides no real explanation. When we
speak of ambivalence, we are only pointing out a problem that remains to be solved
(1; emphasis his).
Ibid., 145; emphasis his.
Ibid., 169. Girard goes on to show how Freud, once he succeeded in establishing the
Oedipus complex, allowed the mimetic to return in his formulation of the superego.
For this reason, Girards thesis has been critiqued by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe as a
type of foundationalist or essentialist thinking (that seeks to reveal the foundational or
essential violence of sociality); see Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy,
Politics, intro. Jacques Derrida, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 101
30. Unlike Girard, however, Lacoue-Labarthe does not simultaneously deal with
sacrice.
As Girard writes: A radically mimetic conception of desire oers a novel approach to
psychiatric theory, one as far removed from the Freudian unconscious as it is from any
philosophy of consciousness camouaged as an existential psychoanalysis; Violence and
the Sacred, 177.
Ibid., 144.
Ibid., 14849; emphases his.

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29. Ibid., 10.

30. He puts it this way: The apparition of the monstrous double cannot be veried empirically; nor for that matter can the body of phenomena that forms the basis for any primitive religion. Despite the texts cited above the monstrous double remains a hypothetical
creation, as do the other phenomena associated with the mechanism that determines
the choice of surrogate victim. The validity of the hypothesis is conrmed, however, by
the vast number of mythological, ritualistic, philosophical, and literary motifs that it
is able to explain, as well as by the quality of the explanations, by the coherence it
imposes on phenomena that until now appeared isolated and obscure; ibid., 164.
31. See his interesting explanations in chaps. 3 and 4, esp. 1012.
32. Rene Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Stanford, 1987), 65.
See also his essay Job as Failed Scapegoat, in The Voice from the Whirlwind: Interpreting
The Book of Job, ed. Leo G. Perdue and W. Clark Gilpin (Nashville, 1992), 185207.
Girards analysis of the problem of evilthe problem that has preoccupied generations
of interpreters of The Book of Jobparallels his critique of the object-centered understanding of desire. In discussing the enigmathe whyof Jobs unjust suering, he
shifts the emphasis from the canonical hermeneutics about divine providence to a reading of the mimetic contagion of collective human behavior. Because, rather than simply
accepting his persecution by his community, Job fervently protests against the absurdity of such persecution, Girard sees his story as a text that consciously reveals or demythologizes the scapegoat/victimage mechanism. He also suggests that Job is a preguration of Jesus.

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