Girard Digest 17: The Mimetic Crisis
Mar. 27th, 2019 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinThis is hardly worth being an entry at all, but I'm going to start using a term I haven't properly introduced yet, so I'm taking time out to do that now.
Mimetic crisis is how Girard refers to the escalation of violence in a population as mimetic rivalries intensify, and people imitate and one-up each other's violence. It's the thunderhead full of static electricity looking for somewhere to ground. Once contagion starts, and one animosity snowballs, the scapegoat emerges and the tensions of a community align.
The mimetic crisis is a perilous, unpredictable, chaotic cloud of undirected energy, in which anyone could be a victim. This is a dangerous state for any society to find itself in, and there will be forces at play to get out of it as soon as possible, either by defusing it with ritual (something I will get into later) or nominating a scapegoat before the natural process of alignment finds one organically.
Right, got it? Soup of angry bad energy, you want to hit someone, casting around for an acceptable target = mimetic crisis. Let's go.
Chapter 18: The Divinization of the Scapegoat
Mimetic crisis is how Girard refers to the escalation of violence in a population as mimetic rivalries intensify, and people imitate and one-up each other's violence. It's the thunderhead full of static electricity looking for somewhere to ground. Once contagion starts, and one animosity snowballs, the scapegoat emerges and the tensions of a community align.
The mimetic crisis is a perilous, unpredictable, chaotic cloud of undirected energy, in which anyone could be a victim. This is a dangerous state for any society to find itself in, and there will be forces at play to get out of it as soon as possible, either by defusing it with ritual (something I will get into later) or nominating a scapegoat before the natural process of alignment finds one organically.
Right, got it? Soup of angry bad energy, you want to hit someone, casting around for an acceptable target = mimetic crisis. Let's go.
Chapter 18: The Divinization of the Scapegoat
