Below is a summary of the recording. I’ll probably write an essay after reading the papers of the presenters, as I’m most likely misrepresenting their ideas. While a conference is great for sparking real-time dialogue and unexpected connections, its pace often means complex arguments get only sketched out. The video is a first attempt—I look forward to correcting myself once I’ve had a chance to read the presenters’ full texts.
Hello. I’m speaking from the Australian Catholic University campus in Rome, where I’m attending the 2025 Colloquium on Violence and Religion, a René Girard conference. This brief response engages with three presentations:
Jeff McNeil, who sought common ground between Girard’s scapegoat mechanism and the work of Georges Bataille.
Jan Hresko, who attempted a parallel dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas and Jan Sokol.
Emilio Moreno Villanueva, who classified Girard’s theory as essentially functionalist.
In a forthcoming paper for Contagion, I outline eleven theories of sacrifice—especially why ritual sacrifice is ubiquitous across premodern societies. I group these theories into three explanatory types:
Theories of Origin (Darwinian)
Ritual sacrifice emerges as a survival mechanism. Societies that developed the scapegoat mechanism escaped cycles of internal violence and thus endured, while those that did not were eliminated.Theories of Function
These explain why sacrifice continued to be practiced after it emerged. For instance, sacrificial rites are thought to preserve social cohesion by reaffirming communal bonds (my understanding of Bataille via McNeil), reinforcing political authority (as in Graeber and Sahlins’s analysis of kingship), or memorializing a foundational event (Girard’s explanation).Theories of Meaning (Semiotic)
Contemporary anthropology often emphasizes ritual’s meaning to practitioners. From a Girardian perspective, Christ’s revelation—and its echoes in the Hebrew Scriptures—transforms the semiotic content of sacrifice, which seem to be quite aligned with Levinas’s and Sokol’s reflections on Jewish and Christian sacrificial symbolism (based on what I understand from Hresko).
Reconciling Girard’s insights with those of Bataille, Levinas, or Sokol requires first asking: which level of explanation are we comparing? Girard’s Darwinian account of the origin of ritual sacrifice need not be pitted against functionalist or semiotic readings—each addresses a different question. While each cultural practice might have multiple functions and meanings, some explanations might be wrong, especially those that attempt to be scientific, like Girard’s theory of the origin of ritual sacrifice. Gaining clarity starts by answering: what kind of explanation is this?
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