Spare a Thought for the Hangman: The Apocalypse of Rene Girard

This final chapter offers a critical appraisal of Girard’s theory of meconnaissance, Christianity, and the apocalypse resulting in a comprehensive demystification of the demystifiers of the scapegoat. It also adopts a more openly speculative approach toward current issues in the rising order of techno-information society. The chapter criticizes Girard’s naively realist and wholly unproven assumption that the demystification of the scapegoat will result in the invalidation of the sacrificial mechanism. It argues instead that that a new form of political religion is currently evolving that seeks to resurrect the scapegoating process through the return to the Hellenic practice of double-mindedness, the relativization of knowledge and speech creating an epistemic ambiguity concerning the nature and value of the neo-sacralization of the victim. The inversion of Christianity’s inversion of pagan sacrifice underlines the cultural hegemony of a new form of sacrificial reason, victimology, in which the neo-sacred victim will be empowered to persecute a new population of scapegoats—the persecutors of the neo-sacred victims who are now the new persecutors.