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The subject mimics the model, and both desire the object. Subject and model thus form a rivalry which eventually leads to the scapegoat mechanism. The scapegoat mechanism has one requirement for it to be effective in restoring the peace; all participants in the removal of the scapegoat must genuinely believe that he is guilty.
Girard's work focused on the sources of human violence in mimetic (unconsciously imitative) desire and the centrality of religion in the formation of culture through the management of violence (the single-victim mechanism or scapegoat effect), but the scope of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion's interest has expanded beyond violence to ...
René Girard’s Mimetic Theory and its Contribution to the Study of Religion and Violence, Special issue of the Journal of Religion and Violence, (Volume 1, Issue 2, 2013). Girard, René, and Sandor Goodhart. For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009. Golsan, Richard J. (1993).
This reversal of the scapegoat mechanism by Jesus is central to Girard's entire reading of Christianity, and this reversal is on display in this story as well. Contrasting the self-destruction of the herd of pigs with the typical motif of an individual evil-doer being pushed over a cliff by an undifferentiated mob (cf. Luke 4:29), Girard comments:
He credited Girard with providing interesting discussions of Biblical stories, Greek myths and rituals, taboos, and the fears aroused by twins. He praised Girard's discussion of the "predicament of a modern society that seeks ever greater numbers of sacrificial victims in a desperate attempt to restore the efficacy of a lost sense of ritual".
More recently, both Daniel Ogden, The Crooked Kings of Ancient Greece (1997) and Todd Compton, Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero (2006) examine poet pharmakoi. Compton surveys important poets who were exiled, executed or suffered unjust trials, either in history, legend or Greek or Indo-European myth .
Mormon literary critic Eugene England analyzes the incident through the writings of French critic Rene Girard, who analyzed the figure of the scapegoat in ancient narratives. England sees the spirit's justification for the killing of Laban--"it is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief"—as ...
Hamerton-Kelly's work was not limited to pastoral study; his interest in religious violence led him to the work of fellow Stanford professor René Girard, where he became an advocate for Girard's theory of mimetic desire, in which imitation of others is the source of all human conflict, with conflict resolved through the use of a scapegoat and ...