Ermeneutica: ancora pensiero sacrificale? Heidegger, Derrida e Ricoeur secondo il pensiero di René Girard

In the last few years, we have witnessed in Italy an increasing attention towards the thought and works of Rene Girard. There is reason to be satisfied of such attention, because for too long Girard had remained, in the context of Italian academia, if not a stranger certainly a thinker who was not very much considered. Another reason of satisfaction, for those who had previously researched Girard’s thought, derives from the perspective from which his thought has been approached. In fact, too often Girard has been considered a “failed anthropologist”, or at best an eclectic scholar, maybe original but not very stimulating from a philosophical point of view. Several studies, more or less recent, by Italian researchers have now demonstrated that the Girardian perspective is full of hints precisely from a philosophical point of view. The principles on which Girard’s mimetic theory is grounded are well-known, and it is appropriate to repeat them here only in their briefest form. The thesis Girard argues for is subtle and original: desire is never authentic, but always copied from others. Therefore, sooner or later it is inevitable for human beings to come into conflict with each others, and that such conflicts increasingly becomes undifferentiated violence, from which the community can get out only by finding a renovated unity against a scapegoat, that is, a sacrificial victim to which the responsibility of the crisis is attributed. If everybody, including the victim, become convinced of that responsibility, peace is effectively restored and, as a consequence, the scapegoat (together with everything which is related to it) will become sacred. Rituals, therefore, are nothing but the attempt to repeat the expulsion, that is, the sacrifice, avoiding, however, the critical phase, that is, the violence that provoked it in the first place. Girard comes to claim that hominization itself, that is, the source of differentiation between humans and animals, derives from mimetic desire, and from the violence and sacrificial expulsions that derive from it. Cultures and sacred texts of any time in history are, therefore, grounded on sacrifice, with a peculiar exception: some books of the Old Testament and the Gospels. Jesus rejects the lie of the persecutors (that is, the point of view according to which the victim is really guilty) and reveals the truth of the victim: he accepts death, but proclaims himself, and with himself all the victims, innocent. Therefore, if any human civilisation has always lived in the lie of the persecutors, the truth of the victim cannot have a human origin: Christ’s revelation has, therefore, a divine origin.