Bulletin 70 – December 2021

A properly political concept coincided with the annexations and consolidations of imperial sovereignties of larger states. In Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria, we find a cosmically inflected nationalism imbued with notions of divine monarchy. Israel can be located within and then increasingly without and over against these imperial governing structures. Out of Israel’s experience of emancipation, it engages in a kind of “theoclasm” (123), its God being incommensurate with the cosmos and political authority; this divinity is totally and Absolutely Other than the others in ancient pantheons. This experience generates a “monotheism of truth” (123), whereby the other gods do not compete with Yahweh because they do not exist: “The divine is emancipated from its symbiotic attachment to the cosmos, society, and fate, and turns to face the world as a sovereign power” (124). Israel spells out its identity in terms of fidelity/adultery or loyalty/treason with respect to commandments of a unique Lawgiver. Whence Israel’s fierce iconoclasm, its anti-idolatry: its utterly transcendent god is not available to representation. For Assmann this is Judaism’s critical and emancipatory thrust, for it liberates humanity from “its embeddedness in the world and its political, natural, and cultural powers” (151-52). In its desacralization of nature, it sets history on a path to secularism, to what Marcel Gauchet has labeled the “disenchantment of the world,” favoring the emergence of Christianity as “the religion of the exit from religion.”

The defeat of Israel’s monarchial aspirations and the consequent experience of exile give rise to the prophetic tradition of self-blame, to a self-critique of disloyalty. With an ethical vision confidently rooted in hieratic, absolute transcendence, Haw writes, “No other society took the literature of dissent and placed so much of it into a sacred text, which in turn provided the blueprint for religious and social life” (167). This dovetails with Jonathan Sacks’ close reading of Genesis (Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence), which argues that Israel is the only culture in its socio-political environment to generate a relentless literature of self-criticism. This critical attention is enacted not merely for the sake of cultic integrity. Israel’s unique identity is forged around the central and abiding role it assigns to justice, which is defined by an emphatic, ardent concern for the unprotected: widows, orphans, the poor, aliens. It is this concern for victims that Girard has made the cornerstone of his anthropology. In the light of the “theologized justice” (167) of their ritual, psalmic, and especially prophetic tradition, “only in the context of a religion in which God appears as both lawgiver and judge does the thought first become thinkable that man’s judgment and God’s can diverge significantly” (167). All human institutions, all certitudes, are subordinated to the valences of the Law.

The experience of defeat and exile of this eventually stateless people occasioned “the replacement of human kingship with a scriptural and interpretive tradition” that Haw, citing Voegelin here, handily describes as its “portable fatherland in the Torah” (170). It is here that we find the origins of manifold biblical hermeneutics, a life based on canonical scriptures and their ongoing clarification—and here too, I submit, we find the origin of literary criticism, which, as of the Renaissance, focused on masterpieces for what became the secular canon of culturally authoritative texts, which at their best, according to Girard, collaborate with biblical revelation, alerting us to what we don’t know about ourselves.

Haw’s recourse to Assmann directs us to something else that is afoot in Israel’s experience of trauma: questioning its identity and its destiny in terms of forgetfulness/idolatry vs. remembering/fidelity, a properly historical consciousness emerges that the West has made its own—for good and for ill, the latter especially for non-Western populations. But the ill we assign today is weighed in the scale of biblical ethics. Memory is endowed not only with a moral component but with a cognitive aspiration that we are still struggling with. As Haw states it, “This maturation of monotheism understands existence as marked by a perpetually unresolved tension, an incompatibility that never achieves final release” (182).

We still live within that tension. In Israel this takes the form of apocalyptic literature that it has bequeathed to Christian scriptures, prophesying the sense of an end time, a kingdom yet to come, of a last judgment which to date remains suspended, deferred, but ever imminent. What he calls “messianic patience” (152) in this state of suspension is urged upon the faithful, but no less so an ethical and moral vigilance, whose exercise is summarized in the apocalyptic parable of the sheep and the goats (Mt 25.31-46): “This parable prophesies that no one within history understands or can lay final claim to their relationship to the victim, who thereby haunts us, world without end. True revelation unveils our opacity” (244). Self-congratulatory complacency is inapposite to a self-consciously historical culture, which requires a sense of the contingency and fallibility of our institutions and our participation within or against them; and per Mouffe, it requires relinquishing claims of liberal democracy to an absolute monopoly on social foundations. Haw states that for Israel, “everyone is responsible for remembering and keeping the oath of the people” (176), which is as true today as it was then, as it alerts us to the ethical imperative of memory, of historical truth, and above all of self-implication for the suffering of the world. As Israel ponders its historical experience, memory is not congruent with resentful nostalgia; its epistemics focus as sharply on betrayals as on travails.

As a captive people, Israel goes deeper into its concern for victims; exercising its superb moral imagination, it extends it chosen-ness to the lot of the Suffering Servant in Second Isaiah, and in pointed detail. In a stunning role reversal, a leadership role and moral exemplarity is assigned to the lowest of the low, one “despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and accustomed to grief.” Drawing on various commentators, Haw summarizes: “a once enthroned Yahweh now turns homeless and sub-sovereign…True kingly power is invested not in any exalted royalty but instead in the humbled, beaten, and despised” (175). The later Jewish sect centered on Christ crucified affirms and clarifies what is suggested in Isaiah, and as already explicit in “the Mosaic distinction between divinities who oversee empires and one who suffers under them” (186). “The true judge,” he writes, “renders a verdict not from on high but from below. As the Son of Man” (215).

Irony is the master trope in biblical revelation. Haw relays Mark Smith’s astute reading of the passion in Mark’s gospel as parody of the Roman, Caesarian triumph rituals of his day: the gathering of the Praetorian guard, the purple robe, the crown, the crowd’s acclamation, with a slave carrying the sacrificial ax along with the bull or slaves to be sacrificed in place of Caesar. All this leading to the Capitolium, the “head hill,” which in Mark is “the place of the skull.” Linking Mount Sinai to Golgotha, Haw describes Christ’s death as “anti-sacrifice that dissolves all forms of belonging from which conflicts stem” (193). This is not merely a moral denunciation but “an ontological claim on the nature of politics, desire, and human organization” (219). 

This is, more concretely, a properly anthropological claim about social foundations, about the pathology of identity and belonging as fashioned over against those whom it excludes, its scapegoats.  It is about crowd dynamics: “We naturally worship falsely: the entire political realm knows not what it does” (218).  In Girard’s telling, these dying words issued from the cross apply to virtually every human institution, religious, economic, juridical, political, broadly sociological, and pedagogical, which unthinkingly seek their conservation by various forms of othering, even by sacrificing some of their members. Haw mentions the pedophile cover-ups, where respectability, reputation, overshadow truth, suffering. It is a scandal that exhibits the originary sin of every corporatocracy, their properly sacrificial politics in obeisance to the Caiphas principle unveiled in John 11:50. I underlined “unthinkingly” because we are dealing with structural dynamics of mimesis, not conscious decisions; mimetic modeling and crowd behavior precede and override decisions we proudly claim as our own. That goes for every nationalism and indeed every -ism, including a militant ethno-biblicism, which has aught to do with rabbi Paul’s panoramic conception of “a new creation…the Israel of God” (Gal. 6:16).

Here I would venture a side bar, as I extrapolate from Haw’s probing analyses. Leviticus displays a “ring composition,” wherein the whole is implied in each of its parts, as we find in many psalms, in the creation narrative. This work is already attuned to Girard’s sociological insights with its ritual prescriptions of guilt and sin offerings for those who “sin unintentionally.”  It’s a good bet that this idea covers the vast majority of our offenses, our trespasses, as they issue from mimetic interaction, whence the inherent need for unceasing repentance in human affairs, for Atonement. This is Israel’s most important feast because it understands something about us interdividuals that we are least disposed to acknowledge, namely a self-implication in practices we deplore, owing, as Haw writes, “to a blindness in our desires and perceptions anterior to our cognition” (228). The prayer that Jesus prescribes to his followers further underlines the interactional dimension of offense, interlacing God’s clemency with the forgiveness we exercise towards others. Haw does not bring up this linkage, but it is one of the rewards of his perspicuous analyses that such interconnections and the overall integrity between first and second testaments come to light, along with Girard’s anthropological asseverations about biblical revelation. 

In his biblical commentary, Haw provides the useful expression “mythospeculation” (201), which does not refer to humanists’ inchoate reflections on storytelling, but rather to the way in which social organization and human interaction are deeply probed by certain biblical narratives. Not all these stories pass the value test of pluralism (e.g., the massacres, the ritualized stoning) cherished by modern liberal democracies, but there is plenty of evidence that these Enlightenment values themselves have been fashioned over time in Christianity’s paradoxical “exit from religion.” Haw brings up the writings of Rodney Stark in this matter, but Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism provides more ample and detailed verification. Haw’s recourse to Mouffe’s internal critique of liberal democracy provides a course correction for “inescapable” political engagement. 

Writing out his own exit from radical politics and poetry in “A Season in Hell,” Rimbaud opined that “the vision of justice is the privilege of God alone.”  This does not imply that we cease to work for it, but that, broadcasting unique claims to its possession, we not kill for it. Ezra Pound famously claimed that “poetry is news that stays news.” This goes double for our entwined testaments that have at once founded Western culture and unceasingly urge critical attention to its depredations, especially since our technology and market-driven commerce has saturated the globe with energies and rivalries that threaten human survival. 

Visitors to the U.N. are greeted at the entrance by stone tablets engraved with the prophetic vision of a world where “swords are beat into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks.” Haw deftly summarizes Girard’s mimetic hypothesis of human cultural origins as “a unifying kind of imitation, where a group coheres through sharing conflict against a scapegoat, all against one” (46). Haw’s astute research and lucid reasoning address a reality wherein there is no rational, responsible choice, for “the nations” as for each and every one, between the mimetic propulsions of hubris and biblically inspired humility and sharing otherwise, which is to say, following Haw, Other wise.

Mimetic theory changes the game because “the imitation of desire of others is the cause of many of international politics’ most persistent problems” (xiv). Conspicuously, Troy notes, the research today on revolutions and identity politics reinforces the claims of mimetic theory. Examples like continuing nationalism, political religion, intra group violence, longing for nuclear weapons, diplomatic aspirations of non-state actors, and other societal changes, similarly, are all “outcomes beyond actors’ will only to survive” (xiv). Mimetic theory has seen some uptake by International Relations but still struggles to find resonance, which shouldn’t surprise us: mimetic theory challenges core assumptions such as the autonomy of the individual and a clear-cut distinction between the religious and the secular realm. Mimetic theory has also met with resistance—some say an allergy—because Girard’s ideas constitute in large measure a Christian anthropology. 

Nonetheless, as Troy writes, the situation for International Relations is untenable because as a field it “does not merely need more and better facts. In today’s world the social sciences, and International Relations in particular, probably have as many facts and data available as ever before.”  What’s needed is critical engagement with theory, questioning existing structures and orders, and moving “beyond a mere problem-solving approach of research puzzles in International Relations” (2). Allies in Troy’s effort here are the realists who are keen “not to mistake increases in methodological precision for increases in genuine understanding” (2).

One of the various ways Troy makes in-roads for his case is by emphasizing the difference between needs (e.g. for survival) and desires (e.g. for recognition). If politics, as commonly assumed, were only really about the negotiation of the shortage of goods and about institutions and individual choice, “there would be no need for political science, and politics would be much more peaceful.” Consequently, it is the explanation of violence, Troy notes, that makes mimetic theory alluring for International Relations. In cases of civil war, particularly, like that of the Rwandan genocide, mimetic theory’s relevance is obvious. In this context Girard’s account of the scapegoat mechanism becomes especially compelling, as does his late-career argument about the world today being in a “state of constant competition, due to mimetic rivalry on a planetary scale” (13). From here, Troy links to Morgenthau’s observation that the state indeed operates in a religious sense, at least that “it has become a ‘mortal God’” that “actually delimits the manifestations of the individual desire for power” (16). 

Another approach Troy takes in establishing a realist mimetic perspective on International Relations is by looking at the importance of reconciliation efforts in international politics—especially their relative success. Political, social science has had to be especially liberal (i.e. generous) to accept reconciliation as a political concept because it is essentially a theological concept—requiring a sense of moral obligation and forgiveness—and even a sacrament in Catholic terms. After surveying famous examples like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the post-genocide efforts in Rwanda, Troy notes the urgent, widespread need for reconciliation efforts—given the fractious nature of regional and intranational politics today—as well as the undeniable conclusion reached in adopting these measures: that we are all interdependent because interdividual. The moral obligations and relentless negotiations about these obligations during the Covid-19 pandemic are surely among the latest examples.

Perhaps the most engaging section of Troy’s book is a personal example of an inspiring model in politics: the case of Swedish diplomat and former-U.N. secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-1961)—an example, as Tory writes, of how “diplomatic theory and practice can be informed and enriched by experimenting with spirituality” (42). This is a chapter in many ways at the heart of Troy’s work, containing numerous insights into the ways that the religious intersects and overlaps with politics. Troy notes that shortly before his death, Hammarskjöld had started translating Martin Buber’s I and Thou and had agreed with his mentor Buber “that a separation of politics and spirit was a sin against the spirit as well as a sin against politics” (16). Hammarskjöld was also well aware of the classical mystical dictum, which can already be found in Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi: “‘If you rely on yourself alone, nothing is accomplished; but if you rely on God, heaven’s grace redeems you’” (44). Accordingly, his sense of vocation and political service overlapped. He regarded the United Nations as a kind of mission, a new element in international affairs, and not surprisingly also thought of the secretary-general as a secular pope. Necessarily, the U.N. stands outside all confessions, but “it is nonetheless an instrument of faith” (56). Religion, in sum, is not merely a parallel perspective but “cannot be distinguished from the political sphere. Eric Voegelin acknowledged this by recognizing if the political community loses its summum bonum—an orientation toward the transcendental instead of a summum malum—only passionate fear for a violent death will control human action and ends in aggressive overcoming of the Other” (52).

In reaching his conclusions, Troy surveys the manifold political conditions that mimetic theory increasingly helps us understand. As globalization has meant increasing sameness, for example, we have seen the counter-intuitive movements of nationalists and separatists. As a globalized McWorld has increased, so has a globalized Jihad. In recognizing the prevalence of violence not only between states but primarily within them, and that the political has no fixed interest and derives from individuals, Troy concludes that there is no difference between domestic and international politics. Mimetism is a condition that needs to be recognized as affecting us all, in many different contexts. Politics in realist terms is therefore “not only about the last questions of how a perfect society would or should look like. Rather, it is about the day-to-day practice of living a good life despite all compromises one might have to make” (67). In mimetic terms, “simply being aware of what others desire is where it all starts” (68). This means not only being aware of what celebrities desire but what our neighbors desire. “The less distance there is, the more complicated it gets to find a distinction. International politics, after all, affects our daily life because it is about our daily life around the world” (68).

The four dimensions Ayyash surveys are instrumental, linguistic, mimetic, and transcendental violence. From the start, he critiques the instrumentalist perspective of a range of thinkers, most notably Hannah Arendt, for both subordinating “violence to something greater that explains it… or some conception of the political,” which has the effect of “directing the analytical gaze away from violence,” and succumbing to “an unstable and untenable analytical distinction between so-called productive and destructive violence” (20). Such a view fails to apprehend how “violence appears in various and diverse forms within and through everyday social relations” beyond state politics (35). Ayyash’s next section draws extensively upon the work of anthropologist Veena Das to illustrate how the lines dividing the violence of the founding of the state and the maintenance of law become blurred not only during moments of crisis, but throughout everyday life. This violence remains unspeakable, allowing “dominant social and political forces [to] make use of the symbolic source material of violence in order to saturate the vacuum created by silence with their self-interested talking points” (80). 

In his third section, Ayyah draws upon the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer and, of course, René Girard to explicate the mimetic dimension of violence, drawing home the point that acts of violence do not represent the breakdown of a dialogue between parties but, instead, “the emergence of a specific form of dialogue under the subject matter of violence: a violent dialogue that creates a violent communion between participants” (94). That is to say, violence produces “certain important transformations of the protagonists’ positions on the subject matter over which they fight—transformations that are then carried into and indeed can come to constitute the very interaction and relationship between the protagonists” (108). Ayyash goes beyond Girard to examine how the two parties in a conflict can come to constitute more than enemy siblings—indeed, they can become “irrevocably co-constitutive of one another” (127), with antagonist persons or cultures engaging in a fusion that must remain hidden to themselves in order to allow the violence to continue, as with such longstanding conflicts as Israel-Palestine, or even such paradigms as the ostensible division between civilization and barbarism so often advanced by Western thinkers. 

Next, Ayyash attempts to grapple with transcendental violence, or violence “the thing itself,” pursued into “the very dimension where it cannot ever be directly seen but is observable through its effects” (169). It is this dimension of violence that has challenged the best efforts of peacekeepers across the globe and through time for reasons spelled out thusly:

Through violence, not only are instrumental goals achieved, but postures are made and remade, communicated and formative of a communion between the sides as enemy-siblings. To change the postures of this violent communication, no political process that simply proclaims to counter violence can succeed—what is needed first and foremost is a deeper understanding of these postures, of the violence they continuously (re)create and that constantly (re)creates them. (177)

To illustrate this truth, Ayyash offers a final chapter that applies his four-dimensional conception to the case of Israel and Palestine through a dialogical analysis of the works of Israeli historian Benny Morris and Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, especially in how they represent the identities of victim and persecutor. As Ayyash demonstrates, Morris adheres to the official Israeli narrative of settlement so as to maintain the identity of Israel as the only “righteous victim” in the conflict: “The expelled Palestinian, even though a victim, must therefore be continuously expelled so as to ensure the existence of the righteous victim” (200). And thus does Israeli Jewish identity become co-constitutive with Palestinian identity. For Said, not only can victim and persecutor trade places through history, but the written text itself “can also be turned into a persecutor, even when it is avowedly written to account for the victim, or written for the sake of the victim, or even written by the victim. The worlds of victim and persecutor are not far apart but are indeed interwoven” (209). 

A back-cover blurb by the French sociologist Michel Wieviorka praises Ayyash for “organizing dialogues between different theories of violence, rather than proposing his own.” There is much to be said for this. The field of genocide studies, for example, has been rather flush with competing definitions of genocide amid pretty widespread dissatisfaction with the one in actual legal force—the definition contained within the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. But sometimes, new ground can be broken simply by competently putting different definitions or theories in dialogue with one another, especially as they pertain to a subject like violence, which has been the object of voluminous meditation across a range of academic disciplines. 

However, there are also pitfalls to such an approach. Guiding the reader through such diverse works in order to showcase how they can inform one another requires a narrative skill that centers the possibility of the reader’s unfamiliarity with at least some of the material under analysis; one must therefore illuminate for the novice while not being so tedious as to lose the expert. This skill is necessary when drawing upon primary sources in the construction of one’s theoretical perspective, as with, for example, Girard’s employment of Greek mythology and philosophy in Violence and the Sacred. But this skill is all the more urgent when it comes to putting theories themselves in conversation with one another, for the greater abstraction of theoretical writing raises the challenge of making one’s own work narratively compelling. Putting theories in conversation without grounding them in some manner risks producing such sentences as: “…Gadamer does not believe that to counter Hegel’s projection of thought toward absolute knowledge, one needs to return to a pre-given, fixed universality or essence (à la Husserl and Dilthey), nor can we use as our ground Yorck’s attempt to affirm Hegel’s correlation between life and self-consciousness while avoiding Hegel’s metaphysicizing of life (since Yorck’s attempt was never completed)” (98). Ayyash emphasizes the fact that his dialogic analysis draws from a range of disciplines—anthropology, sociology, philosophy, etc.—but he does very little to make this text welcoming to readers from within those disciplines, readers who may possess a more focused intellectual background. 

The historian studying lynching or the sociologist researching gang violence may well conclude, from such passages, that this book is not for them, which would be a genuine shame, for there is much to recommend A Hermeneutics of Violence. The strongest parts of his volume are his examination of the shortcomings inherent to the instrumentalist idea of violence and his expansion of Girard’s mimetic theory using the works of Paul Gilroy and Michael Taussig, among others. In particular, one must praise Ayyash for drawing together a wide range of material, especially those sources not typically consulted by students of violence, such as the works of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, which he employs to provide some valuable insight into the transcendental dimension of violence. There is a wealth of intellectual stimulation here despite Ayyash’s occasional narrative opacity and encumbering of references. A Hermeneutics of Violence can serve as a model for moving beyond disciplinary structures and into a greater engagement with the reality of violence, even if that reality itself proves perpetually evasive.

In view of today’s main challenges Illich’s critical philosophy of technology is most important. For this he turns to the medieval ages and especially to Hugh of St. Victor—one of his favorite authors—to illuminate the difference between an age of tools and our age of systems. Modernity lost the distance that is necessary to see technologies as means toward ends. Without distance humans become slaves of their own products and are no longer able to set limits to technologies. Illich’s turn to Hugh of St. Victor does not mean that he thinks that we can return to the past. His looking back tries to discover roads not taken in order to respond to the challenges of today. His philosophy of technology recommends a Christian askesis that he defines as “the acquisition of the habits that foster contemplation” or “conversion to God’s human face” (418). Such an askesis could provide an attitude that helps to set limits and knows what is enough.

Readers of this Bulletin are probably not so much interested in the work of Illich as such but how it relates to Girard’s mimetic theory. Cayley is able to show us connections between these two thinkers because he not only interviewed Illich several times but also broadcasted an excellent five-hour interview series with René Girard. Unfortunately, there are only a very few explicit references to Girard in this book on Illich. He sees in Girard a companion of Illich in their recognition that today Christianity is criticized with the help of Christian insights. They also share an interest in the apocalyptic stage of our times and in their interpretation of the Antichrist.

There is, however, a close affinity with mimetic theory in Illich’s work that is not explicitly mentioned. Illich frequently addressed scarcity as the modern predicament, the “anchoring myth of modernity” (18). Contrary to Marx, Illich views the modern creation of scarcity as the source of alienation and also as the root of our economic and ecological problems. Cayley summarizes the modern myth of scarcity in the following way: “Scarcity, as a postulate, produces plenty by assuming its opposite. Behind our backs, so to speak, it turns the base metal of envy, desire, and mutual indifference into the gold of abundance and social peace” (186). These promises do not become true. The release of envy does not create harmony but incites competition and resentment. It is not by chance that Illich comes so close to Girard in this regard. He was influenced by L’enfer des choses, the book by Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy—an early collaborator of Illich—that applied Girard’s mimetic theory to the field of critical economics already in 1979. Illich refers in Shadow Work (1980) as well as in Gender (1982) to the book of Dumouchel and Dupuy. Both these books document Illich’s wish to write a history of scarcity. Unfortunately, he could not finish this project. One of the reasons for this was the harsh criticism that his book Gender received from feminists. Cayley’s book tries to convince his readers that Illich’s reflections were misunderstood. Cayley claims that by writing his book he discovered Illich as a “philosopher of complementarity” (450). Complementarity is also at the center of Illich’s view of gender because he realized that “vernacular cultures”—a term frequently used by Illich—saw women and men complementing each other to contain envy, competition, and resentment. This is in tension, of course, with the modern emphasis on the equality between women and men. Illich, however, is not against equality as such but distinguishes between different types of it depending on their destructiveness:

“Illich speaks loudly against equality as sameness. But he also speaks loudly for equality in its sense of equity, arguing that most women suffer irremediable disadvantages in a realm of universal circulation and competition. The two points are connected. Illich claims that idealizing equality may allow some women to rise to new heights of wealth and influence but that it will hurt many more – by lowering the status of every form of sustenance that occurs outside the cash nexus in which equality finds its measure, by fostering an illusory sense of opportunity, and by inviting those who fail to seize these imaginary opportunities to blame themselves. His analysis of feminism, in this respect, took the same form as his analysis of every other modern institution that he explored—it incites envy and delivers frustration. Only by reversing economic growth, unbuilding the global megalith, and restoring the human scale will the majority of women regain their dignity, he says, because only then will the contribution of those who have been shunted aside in the rat race begin to matter. This is the sole sense in which Illich speaks against equality: equality-as-justice, he says, cannot be achieved without a firm rejection of equality-as-sameness.” (239-240)

Illich’s book was rejected in the early 1980s. I am not sure if Cayley will succeed in his attempt to rehabilitate Illich’s reflections on gender because the problem is difficult to solve. The traditional submission of women went along with the vernacular complementarity. How can we preserve the advantages of complementarity without a hierarchical relation between men and women? The whole problem finds an interesting parallel in Gandhi’s dealing with the Indian caste system. This parallel is not by chance because as Cayley rightly claims there are “many affinities” between Gandhi and Illich (87). Gandhi recognized in the traditional Vedic division of society into four classes (varnas) a bulwark against the dangers of envious comparisons. He wanted to avoid “all unworthy competition” and did not identify the varnas with the caste system because he strongly insisted on the equality of all human beings: “Assumption of superiority by any person over any other is a sin against God and man. Thus caste, in so far as it connotes distinctions in status, is an evil.” There remains an ongoing discussion about Gandhi’s attempt to support the traditional varnas without hierarchical caste relations. Illich’s view of gender faces a similar dilemma. It is definitely important to understand the value of vernacular attempts to contain envious competition. Our modern world will definitely benefit from investigating these traditional means against destructive envy. These means, however, are no longer able to solve our own struggles with competition. We have to deal with it in a world of equality that requires new ways to respond to the challenges of mimetic desire.

There is one topic in Illich’s work that I find disturbing and that became even more so during the pandemic if we see how the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben—the editor of Illich’s works in Italian—and David Cayley himself reflected on the Covid-19 crisis. Illich was very critical of the modern emphasis on life. The title of the respective chapter in Cayley’s book, “To Hell with Life,” quotes a provocative thesis by Illich who criticized a modern idolatry of life. Illich was certainly right that “those who hope to gain immortality as cyborgs or who have had themselves cryogenically preserved in anticipation of later medical resurrection” are fetishizing life (327). But can Illich’s “theology of death” provide a proper orientation? I strongly doubt it. I see two nearly incompatible claims in Illich’s approach to life and death. On the one hand he seems so occupied with death as the giver of “meaning to life” that he sounds like a representative of the sacred of early religions before the biblical religions emphasized the holiness of life (314-315). On the other hand, he represents a very modern accent on freedom by claiming that it is of utmost importance that people have “the possibility of actively dying their own death” (319). The second claim is expressed in a letter to Benedictine nuns in which he deals with excesses of life-prolongation that put many people in a state of “undead” (324). Again, Illich highlights with his intervention the counterproductivity of good intentions. He comes, however, close to endorsing euthanasia (but without using this term) in his claim that death has to be a “personal act” (322). Illich frequently questions the modern demand to control every aspect of life and there are very good reasons for doing that. To insist, however, that dying must be an active personal act comes very close to keeping death—one of the “existential uncontrollabilities of life” (Hartmut Rosa)—under control. Cayley’s comment helps to put this letter in perspective because Illich does not come up with it as a general rule for responding to this modern challenge but expresses mainly his spirit of friendship that he prefers to modern technological care.

Cayley claims that “Illich’s theology of death was entirely orthodox and deeply rooted in biblical and patristic sources” (319). Illich is close to a theology of death that we can find in religious traditions still today. But is he really representing a biblical perspective? Is not the Hebrew Bible a manifestation of a “God of the living” as Jesus himself maintained (Mt 22:32)? The writer Eli Wiesel summarizes in his book Open Heart the Jewish perspective in the following way: “We sanctify life, not death. […] Of course, we must accept the idea—the reality—that every man is mortal. But Jewish law teaches us that death is not meant to guide us; it is life that will show us the way.” Reflecting on the Akeda he criticized a sacrificial type of Christianity that sees in the threatened Isaac a prefiguration of Jesus’ crucifixion and concluded that “for the Jew, all truth must spring from life, never from death” (Messengers of God 1977, 90). Girard justly opposed Wiesel for this portrayal of Christianity because his Christian understanding of sacrifice does not deviate from the Jewish emphasis on the holiness of life. Girard calls death in Violence and the Sacred “the worst form of violence” (32). In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World he deconstructs the worship of death that characterizes so many (early) religions by showing how the scapegoat mechanism turns the death of the victim into a spring of life. The violent sacred causes people to view death “as if it were productive of life”, a view that Girard recognizes as idolatry: “death is once again covertly deified” (82). It is along this line of thinking that Girard prefers the Judgement of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible to Sophocles’ Antigone. Whereas Antigone dies for her dead brother the good harlot risks her life for the living child. “The Gospels clearly define what makes the tragic text somewhat inferior to the biblical texts when they say: Leave the dead to bury their dead.” (Things, 245; quoting Mt 8:22). Cayley refers to this provocative saying of Jesus but does not relate it to Illich’s reflections on death (36). Illich’s theology of death misses the crucial difference between the tragic and the biblical text. This becomes especially visible in  Agamben’s application of Illich’s view of death, which resulted in a harsh critique of the Catholic Church and Pope Francis for agreeing to measures taken against the spread of Covid-19. Agamben refers to Illich in his claim that “from Antigone to today” it had never happened before that “cadavers should be burned without a funeral […] solely in the name of a risk”. Today we know that so far the virus has killed more than five million people. Even when Agamben wrote this text in April 2020, Italy had already been severely hit by the pandemic. From the perspective of the holiness of life it makes sense to protect living people from being infected by the virus. It remains a sacrificial attitude to prefer funeral rites to the health and safety of living people. I think that we have to move beyond Illich’s theology of death by aiming for a theology of life that does not neglect the reality of death but believes in the God of life who will finally destroy death, who is “the last enemy” (1 Cor 15:26). Illich rejected views that see death as an enemy. This is again an attitude that is closer to tragic thinking than to the biblical spirit. His theology of death was more concerned with the ars moriendi—the art of dying—than with resurrection. Dietrich Bonhoeffer—Cayley mentions many affinities between the Protestant theologian and Illich—was very clear about the difference between the art of dying and faith in the resurrection: “We’re more concerned to get over the act of dying than to overcome death. Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as ‘the last enemy’ (I Cor. 15.26). There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection. It’s not from ars moriendi, the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ, that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world” (Letters and Papers from Prison). I am not sure how Illich would have responded to this insight of Bonhoeffer’s. It could be that he would have agreed because his work is not a systematic theology but the result of his many engagements with challenges our modern world has faced. He responded to a world that is out of balance in a necessarily unbalanced way. David Cayley frequently stresses in his book that Illich was “a proscriptive rather than a prescriptive thinker”. This is an important qualification that should never get out of sight if one reads Illich’s work. His emphasis on the counterproductivity of good intentions remains a valid warning for our times. It would, however, be very dangerous to turn these warnings into prescriptions. Agamben’s essays on the pandemic succumb to this mistake and hurt the legacy of Illich. David Cayley partly fell into the same trap in his blogs on the Covid-19 crisis. His book about Illich, however, will remain a highly valuable guide to this important work.