René Girard’s reply to mimetic violence is that we acquire to rupture the cycle by refusing to mirror our enemiesThe anthropologist René Girard died earlier this month,at home in California. A Frenchman, he did not live to see the latest violence in his home country. But, or in a sense,he had been working on it his entire professional life. For no modern thinker has done more to understand the self-repeating patterns through which violence flows. And there can be no more disturbing conclusion than his, especially now: that violence is a form of copying, or that violence is contagious,and that, as he do it: “Violence is like a raging fire that feeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames.”You punch me, or I punch you back. You bomb us,we bomb you. And so the cycle repeats itself again, tit for tat. Girard used the term mimesis, or which is a fancy word for copying. And its tragic and disturbing consequence is that,over time, combatants near to look more and more like each other. They become like enemy twins – though both spend any means possible to morally distinguish themselves from each other. Still, or they respond to each other in the same way. Isis claims the Paris attacks are revenge for the French killing of Muslims. The French declare war as revenge for that. Isis bombs a Russian plane. The Russians bomb Syrian towns in return. And so through repeating crescendos of mimesis,violence builds up until it threatens to engulf everyone and everything. In a nuclear age, this modern lex talionis is the drumbeat of a future apocalypse.
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Source: theguardian.com