Bulletin 82 – November 2024

By spurring individuals to outdo each other in generosity, gift exchange gives premodern societies a way to channel antagonisms and rivalry into positive reciprocity (see Mark R. Anspach, Vengeance in Reverse: The Tangled Loops of Violence, Myth, and Madness, and my contribution to the Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion, Vengeance and the Gift). So it is, Mauss concludes, that “the clan, the tribe, and the peoples have learned—as, tomorrow, in our so-called civilized world, classes and nations and individuals too will have to learn—how to confront one another without massacring each other, and to give to each other without sacrificing themselves to the other” (p. 197).

The MAUSS is still going strong today. It is itself a convivial group that, like COV&R, is unusual not only in being interdisciplinary but in bringing together individuals from both inside and outside academia. In addition to its semiannual journal in French, the Revue du MAUSS, now edited by Philippe Chanial, the organization recently inaugurated an annual electronic journal in English, MAUSS International. Meanwhile, Caillé launched the parallel Convivialist movement in an effort to translate the MAUSS’s theoretical ideas into more concrete political form.

The first Convivialist Manifesto, subtitled A Declaration of Interdependence, was originally published in French in 2013. Echoing Marcel Mauss, it defines convivialism as “a mode of living together (con-vivere) that values human relationships and cooperation and enables us to challenge one another without resorting to mutual slaughter.” The manifesto is noteworthy in its realistic approach to conflict: “To try to build a society where there is no conflict between groups and individuals would be not just delusory but disastrous. Conflict is a necessary and natural part of every society” (p. 25).

A healthy society must “foster an attitude of cooperative openness to the other” and accommodate diversity while insuring that “this plurality does not turn into a war of all against all.” The objective is to “make conflict a force for life rather than a force for death” and “turn rivalry into a means of cooperation, a weapon with which to ward off violence” (ibid.).

By the same token, a healthy society must “satisfy each individual’s desire for recognition” while preventing that desire “from degenerating into excess and hubris” (ibid.). Does this mean that the good convivial citizen must lead a subdued, sober, quiet little life, doggedly avoiding every form of excess? No, responds François Gauthier in a special issue of the Revue du MAUSS entitled “Demain, un monde convivialiste.” The agonistic dimensions of politics, sports and culture are “fundamental ritualities through which excess may be expressed” (Gauthier, “Réguler l’hubris: Quelle hubris?” in Revue du MAUSS 57 [2021], p. 57).

Like conflict, hubris is “necessary and constitutive, but its manifestations must be submitted in the last analysis to the principle of conviviality”: they must promote the social bond (Gauthier, p. 58). As Frank Adloff notes in his introduction to the manifesto (p. 7), the theme of regulating hubris goes back to Ivan Illich’s 1973 book Tools for Conviviality. For Illich, a convivial society is one that imposes constraints on the technological and institutional tools we use so that they work for us rather than making us work for them.

The foregoing quotes will be resonant for many COV&R members. They may serve to introduce the following excerpts from the Second Convivialist Manifesto (2020). Subtitled Towards a Post-Neoliberal World, this new document was originally published in French and signed by some 300 intellectuals from 33 different countries. (The Convivialism website features links to the second manifesto in French, English, German, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese and Arabic.) The reproduction of parts of the manifesto here does not imply endorsement, nor do the excerpts chosen fully encapsulate the text as a whole. Rather, these passages tackle questions of special interest to COV&R in a way that may offer a welcome stimulus to our own thinking.

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The Second Convivialist Manifesto (excerpts)

This text is reprinted under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). It is drawn from the abridged English version published in the open-access journal Civic Sociology 1, 1 (2020).

Because everyone is called upon to express their singular individuality, it is normal for humans to be in opposition with each other. But it is only legitimate for them to do so as long as this does not endanger the framework of common humanity [“there exists only one humanity”], common sociality [“human beings are social beings”], and common naturality [“humans do not live outside nature”] that makes rivalry fertile and not destructive. Politics inspired by convivialism is therefore politics that allows human beings to differentiate themselves by engaging in peaceful and deliberative rivalry for the common good…

The first condition for rivalry to serve the common good is that it be devoid of desire for omnipotence, excess, hubris (and a fortiori pleonexia, the desire to possess ever more). On this condition, it becomes rivalry to cooperate better…

All [modern political] ideologies, to varying degrees, share the same limitation: because they assume that humans are first and foremost (if not exclusively) needy beings, they deduce that the cause of the conflict between them is material scarcity. 

And there is, of course, some truth in that. But this need is inseparable from the desire for recognition. While all the material needs of infants deprived of their mothers can be met, if they do not also receive love, if they are not recognized in their uniqueness, they will die or fail to develop.

Hoping to satisfy all needs is a recipe for disappointment simply because a need is always recharged and sharpened by desire. If this desire is not both satisfied (by affection, respect, or esteem) and limited by prohibitions that prevent it from degenerating into hubris, then needs become insatiable, whatever the level of wealth reached.

By reducing the political problem to the satisfaction of needs, and in particular material needs, the classical discourses of democratic modernity are proving to be constitutively incapable of addressing the crucial problem of humanity. A problem that is both psychological and political, individual and collective. At the collective level, these classical discourses are lost because they are unable to answer the question of how to limit the aspiration to the omnipotence of the “Great Ones,” “who wish to command and oppress” (to paraphrase Machiavelli); how to control the hubris inherent in human desire when nothing channels it. The hubris of the Greats can trigger by mimicry and envy that of the “Little Ones,” or their resentment.

It can now be said with certainty that to satisfy needs made insatiable by unlimited desire, it has been necessary to form a “master and possessor” relationship with nature, and abandon the former relationship of gift/counter-gift with it, a reciprocal relationship in which one cannot take without giving back, even if only symbolically. But nature has its limits, and these have clearly been reached by now. Nature has already given (or, rather, let be taken) a good part of what can be given without return. And without receiving the attention she deserves, Gaia takes revenge. Hence, as political ecology has long made clear, we need to affirm through the principle of common naturality that our fate is linked to nature’s destiny, that we are interdependent, and that by exhausting nature, it is our very survival that we are gravely endangering. To be sure, political ecology has become the fifth and most recent discourse of modernity. Whilst the most precious, perhaps, it nevertheless still lacks the ability to specify its relationship to our inherited ideologies.

The metaprinciple of hubris control, so well highlighted by the ancient Greeks, formulates the central problem that humanity must now tackle resolutely. Unless humanity agrees on a virtue for which it is worthwhile to restrain the potential limitlessness of desire, and concur on how to run it out of steam, humanity will perish. Indeed, the primary social and political role of religions has been precisely that: to curb the desire of omnipotence, of the “Great” and the “Little,” by trying to subject everyone to a transcendental law, to heteronomy, by allowing hopes of reward—for those who could resist insatiable desire—or threatening those who would yield to it with afterlife punishment.

The problem with the discourses of modern democracy is that they are unable to block limitless desire. Their greatness resided in the promise of emancipation—in other words, in the affirmation that individuation, subjectification, becoming a subject are possibilities offered to all. Yes, they say, it is possible, necessary, desirable to “get out of the state of minority,” out of heteronomy, and to free oneself from the domination of the Great Ones. Yet most often, in the final analysis, these discourses hardly manage to conceptualise emancipation as different from surrender to an attitude resembling the hubris of the Great, each reproducing it in their own creed, in a way that everyone ceases to be servant and all become masters. This does not solve the hubris problem at all. Neither collectively nor individually.

How, then, to convince “modern” nonbelievers—especially when they no longer believe in “secular religions,” like communism, the republic, socialism, progress, and so on—to renounce the hubris, the infantile desire for omnipotence, if they no longer expect any reward or fear any punishment in the afterlife? Why, in the name of what, should they give up their desire to dominate those they have the power to dominate? The answer is that by violating the principles of common humanity, common sociality, common naturality, legitimate individuation for all, and creative opposition, they endanger the very survival of humanity and expose themselves to legitimate anger and contempt and stigma from all. This just anger must not be transformed into hatred and resentment, lest a toxic hubris be overtaken by an even more devastating one.

Under the reign of neoliberalism and rentier and speculative capitalism, the only outlasting value has been market wealth. In the dominant thought, only those who gain access to the power of money are considered worthy of recognition. This has replaced mutual trust with mutual distrust. On the contrary, in a convivial society, the actions that will be valued first and foremost are those that ensure respect for the principle of common humanity, contribute to more harmonious social relations, preserve the natural environment, and are deployed in art, science, technology, sport, democratic inventiveness, convivial attitudes, etc. Convivialism is above all a movement to invalidate that dominant value that prevails today.

For what is to be seen is “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, / Nor have entered into the heart of man.” What is to be seen is the apocalypse.

Day 1. Tuesday, October 29

On Tuesday afternoon the first meteorological alerts began to arrive from the different services and civil authorities in Valencia. In Xàtiva and Alzira classes are suspended, something that is usual, because every year the phenomenon that today we call DANA (a Spanish acronym for high-altitude isolated depression) occurs, but here it has always been called “Gota Fría,” and that every year causes incidents of varying severity. Nobody could imagine what was going to happen. We all act by inertia—mimetic inertia. As I am from Madrid, every year I joke about how nervous Valencians get about “four drops”. I was going to regret those words. Others lock themselves in panic and the more practical ones take the car out of the garage so that, if the water comes in—it does sometimes, 20 or 40 centimeters at most—they don’t get stained. They park them outside, in the higher parts of the city, on bridges, etc. It’s time to go home, after work, classes at the university or shopping at the malls. During all the previous day and this very day it has rained heavily in Valencia and surroundings, but right now it is not raining. We continue our activities normally. Around 5:21 pm, the first problems begin in the subway, and a former student, who was attending a conference on philosophy and cinema at our university, and whom I had not seen for some time, decides to return home before the end of the last lecture. He wants to bring another colleague to his home by car, because they have read on the net that the subway is not working. With a new car that he will lose forever in a few hours in order to save his life. We get home and start listening to the news, but we are not yet able, even seeing images, to imagine the worst that was already happening.

Day 2. Wednesday, October 30

Classes are not going to be suspended until 3:00 pm. We have needed almost 24 hours to assimilate what they tell us. What the witnesses tell us through the images they send us. In a society of instant and image, it is incredible how long it has taken us to respond. In downtown Valencia, just 10 minutes by car from the disaster, nothing has happened. And we act as if nothing had happened, mimetically. We continue with the conference in spite of everything. Although things have already started to happen, we know about them from those who survived, so there are still no victims, only survivors.

Early this morning a colleague went to pick up our former student by motorcycle. He was in a basket pavilion where he was taken by the security forces at 7 am. He has hardly slept and has put on some dry socks that they have given him, but he is still dressed in the same clothes and the same sneakers, which have mud on them. We look at them when he shows them to us. We see without seeing. And we hear without hearing what he tells us. We reflect on the dilemmas—save the car or save his life. He tells us that a woman has stayed in the car. He himself has hesitated: it is only three weeks since he bought it. He walks to a bridge to escape the water current and there a bus driver makes all the passengers get off to go home himself and leave them there. While we are processing all this, we talk about Wim Wenders, Aki Kaurismaki, John Ford, Jean Renoir, Yasujirō Ozu, or Terrence Malick, and the philosophers Stanley Cavell, Gabriel Marcel, or Josep Maria Esquirol. In our questions and interventions, the Event slowly (too slowly!) creeps in. After lunch, a colleague told me that the grandmother of another colleague had passed away. The story is like a horror movie: she was ill and bedridden, the caregivers had raised the bed as much as they could and left to get help that would arrive too late. The horror, the catastrophe, the apocalypse, is revealed in its first form, that of evil, and it does so in images that we have not yet seen—or that we have seen little, as if looking away: the images of the imagination, the images painted in our minds by the words of the survivors, of the witnesses. At the end of the conference, not knowing what to do, we go to dinner. It will be a soup that will later have a bitter aftertaste—not like the soup that Levinas or Esquirol talk about, the one we share at the table with our friends; but like the one from Elie Wiesel’s prison camp, a bitter soup that others, the victims and survivors, will not be able to eat or taste. We speak of projects for the future, of the hope of the hopeless, of the society of the dispossessed and the “on the margins” of Alice Rohrwacher’s films. Without knowing it, the project is taking shape less than 10 minutes away by car, a desolate, macabre, deadly shape.

Day 3. Thursday, October 31

Classes at the university are cancelled all day. The first volunteers begin to arrive and with them come the stories. It is true that we receive terrible images on our smartphones, but it is as if the saturation of images and the adiophorization of evil—of which Bauman speaks—have anesthetized us. They are too similar to other moral evils, those of the war in Gaza or the devastated cities of Ukraine. As if there were an echo between the two images, something secretly connecting them. This day the images have multiplied, but so have the stories. Even though we live in an image culture, we need those images to have meaning—or more meaning than the tourist meaning with which we seem to look at pictures of atrocities or victims, as Susan Sontag pointed out. We need someone to tell us that this image is true, to place it in a network of meanings, in a constellation of meaning, a sort of profane illumination, in Benjamin’s words.

It is at this moment that the first interpretations of these images begin to be produced, to be used in the political arena by those most responsible for the management of the catastrophe: the abandoned cars, piled one on top of the other by the force of the flood, the streets full of mud and dragged objects. Everything begins to form part of the scenery that the media are going to set up so that it reaches everywhere. As always, reality will surpass fiction, not only because the smell will be a slap in the face that wakes us all up from the hallucinated contemplation of the images, but also because we will never be able to separate those images from the people who tell us about them: Juani, Ana, José, Pepe, Lucía, Joan….

In the afternoon we went for a walk with the children and met several families. Nothing is normal, knowing what is happening 10 minutes away by car. We look around us and, by inertia, we continue to act the same way—we go for a walk with the kids, we have a beer, we make plans. But there’s a dissonant note, as if something has happened that we can’t ignore anymore. We begin to feel the guilt of the innocent—we have done nothing, but we are not doing anything either. We are a community of guilty people— just like the community of culprits the Dardenne brothers talk about. In order to found a community of hopefuls it will take just one more day, a second apocalypse, a second revelation. We decided to organize ourselves to go in the morning. We act out of inertia, but sometimes inertia cracks and we let something different, something new break through. We act against inertia, and this also has a mimetic dimension.

A family with children dressed up to celebrate Halloween passes by. We unload our anger on them, we make them guilty: how dare they celebrate, it’s not even a holiday that makes sense to us? That new thing that had begun to form in our way of looking is now looking for culprits to unload on. Someone has to pay for this feeling of impotence and guilt, for so much confusion: let’s make a bonfire to light the way. If necessary, let us burn someone in it. Even if we have to burn also that new thing that was being born in us to get us out of our mimetic inertia.

Day 4. Friday, November 1, All Saints’ Day

We leave at 7 am to avoid traffic jams and to be allowed to pass. We are nervous, we are going to an unknown area. We have seen hundreds of images, but we know that between the image and the experience there is a leap. When we arrive, it is like entering into a Martian space, a space of war, like those spaces in the films of Alice Rohrwacher or Andrei Tarkovski. We look at reality as we look at photos or cinema, a reality already represented. But what we see exceeds and remains small, it is real and unreal. The work is mechanical: removing the mud from the houses, from the churches, from the streets. Opening garages with what you have at hand, a sledgehammer, kicking, with levers, to see if there is someone, to be able to remove the water, the mud, the slime.

The smell when we lift a piece of furniture, with the mud stagnating underneath, hits us and we throw our heads back and cover our faces. We don’t know it yet—we don’t know anything! —but soon we will know that it is due to the decomposition of microorganisms in the stagnant water and, in the worst case, the decomposition of corpses. We still don’t see anyone wearing masks because no one has told them to. We will feel irresponsible for having gone, for having hindered the work of the professionals. They will put fear in our bodies for wanting to go to help the other, the one who has lost everything. For having had an experience of charity, of tzedekah (צְדָקָה), for comforting the orphan, the poor, the stranger and the widow. The belt of towns surrounding Valencia, Catarroja, Massanasa, Alfafar, Sedaví, Albal, Paiporta, Picanya, and others, is working class and migrant, although there are also people with money, who are lifelong locals. Small and medium-sized companies. In general, humble and ordinary people.

Here is the second apocalypse, the second revelation: love is in the heart of man, waterlogged and muddy like the houses we enter asking if we can help. On occasions like this, the good struggles to come out and push us to do the right thing, without looking at what consequences it may have for us, without interest. There is an impressive mimetic pull: from Valencia thousands of people cross the new riverbed to reach the hell of Paiporta, of Catarroja, of Alfafar. The bridge they cross has been baptized in the media as the bridge of hope; others call it the bridge of solidarity. Those of us who, cynical like me, have a certain allergy to the masses, those of us who find it difficult to accept masses of any kind, cannot help but be suspicious of their motives. From the gesture of sanctity of a few—those who decided that there was a lot more to do with heroic passion and burning with charity—those of us who were disoriented have gone out to meet the needy. 

At 12 noon the movement of people in the main avenue of Catarroja is too much: we have been five hours almost without stopping even to drink water—we are afraid of running out of it and, worse, leaving the survivors without it. It is overwhelming. Some people take pictures. I have decided to take only a few. I send them by e-mail to a friend, to a colleague who doesn’t know I live in Valencia, to my wife, to my brothers. But I feel bad about doing it. I do not want the image, what I am seeing, to be re-signified, to become a totem and a grail, a sign and a token of new violence. I am not a professional photographer, it is not my job. But even so I have to resist the temptation to take pictures, to do photographic tourism. I am outraged, although I understand the impulse, to see people taking pictures. I think I’m touching on something essential here: why does it outrage me or why, at the very least, do I see it as problematic? With what intention do I take the photo, what do I send it for, to whom do I send it? The factors of reuse and re-signification of the images are there: these images remind me of the images of war, of the flood of ’57 (but colored), of the movies. Juani crying disconsolately at the door of her house reminds me of the images of the mother, of pity, of despair, of the victims: a silent cry. But this pain is concrete, it is real, for me, for Juani, for Joan, for Albert, for Maria. The dimension of this pain, of these losses, is unimaginable. I have tried to calculate the number of streets, the blocks, the houses in each street, in each block, in each affected city. I lose count almost always at the beginning. Somewhere I have read that the number of people affected by the DANA is more than two and a half million people. We don’t know yet, because there is no coverage and we can’t look at the networks, that the number of bodies recovered has been increasing during the day. There will be almost 200 by the end of the day. The obsession with data, with numbers, feeds new fears and new panics. Always after the event, the data come to put fear in our bodies, to scare us, to immobilize us. COVID-19 has been a school of learning statistics for everyone. A few days later, today, when I have not been able to go to help because in the Valencia that has been saved we are working, I will ask those who have been able to go for Juani.

It is getting late and we think of leaving before nightfall, before there is a traffic jam. Thank God we are pulled out of these extemporaneous and bizarre, bourgeois considerations by the soldiers who have just arrived on the fourth day, at last. They are received with joy, but also with indignation. They will prefer not to say anything, they follow orders. A friend whose son is in the army says they have been ready since Wednesday. Here there will be another reason for controversy, there already is, because one and the other will accuse each other of having prevented the sending of troops. There is an army of useless and inexperienced volunteers when the first soldiers arrive. They approach and ask for our help to move the remains of the collapsed wall of a school away from the road. It’s 5:30 pm, and our conversations are full of criticism of the politicians, the perfect scapegoats for everything that has happened, because they are objectively guilty, we say. We don’t know yet that in a couple of days they will be about to be lynched. 

It takes us two hours to drive home. The queue is enormous: people in cars returning; people walking and carrying water bottles and bags of food, shovels and brooms, cleaning products, diapers; a human river of seven kilometers, those that separate us from the capital.

Day 5. Saturday, November 2, All Souls’ Day

I wake up late and I don’t know if I will go; my friends have already left. They call me to go to pick up material from a chemical company in the north of Valencia, in Honda, and we go to get PPE, shovels, brooms, and water boots. We also take a hydraulic pump. There we meet other workers who have gone to get material to go to other places. They all have stories to tell: the daughter of one of them, a high-performance athlete, has been locked up for two days in the sports center where she lived, unable to contact anyone. She is a teenager. Another tells me that his friend has lost everything; he has a bar and the flood has taken everything inside. All the stories are similar in one thing at the moment: no one is afraid to go to help, no one is really looking for culprits—because they are there, at hand, in the news. Responding to the call of another and not thinking about one’s own safety. This simple act of holiness. Soon enough it will be said that they were foolish, reckless, that they disobeyed. Many will do so out of mimetic inertia, but even that mimetic gesture reflects the first heroic act of the one who went without asking to give aid before the institutions. Along the way we talk about logistics, about what should have been done, about possibilities. Everyone is right and everyone is wrong. We arrived at dusk, dressed in PPE, boots, gloves and mask. And we set about pumping water out of a basement. The firemen have left us a very powerful one until morning, we have to take advantage of it. It’s getting dark fast. The light has returned to some houses – those that have received the visit of fellow electricians who have checked the installation and have made repairs – but not to the street lamps. In the square a police car stands guard to prevent theft and looting, and other cars patrol the streets. On the third day a friend from another town had told me that no one had been there and that they were hiding at home because they were afraid to go out. Others tell me similar stories. We all know many people who are in danger and in need, how do we choose? Who do we help first? These kinds of dilemmas are the ones I pose to my students in ethics class, the mental experiments. They are of no use, in the here and now. It is night and the landscape looks more like a stage than ever and I take a picture: a powerful spotlight illuminates the cars that have been pulled off the streets to gain access to the houses. An anchorwoman is ready to go live on the evening news. It’s early for Spanish time, but it seems much later. Someone at home will be watching this same thing I’m watching now, without seeing what I’m seeing.

The pumps get stuck and we spend all night unclogging them and moving them around, carefully because the roof is falling down. The policemen come to greet us. They are from another city, another place, they have just arrived. They don’t believe what they see, the situation, nothing. They don’t see what their eyes see or they don’t want to believe it or see it, but they see it and open their eyes wide. They are afraid, they are in a neighborhood they don’t know, in a city they don’t know, in a situation they have never faced. But they stay at their post all night until the shift arrives.

I write to Curtis, asking him if I can send him a text for the Bulletin. There is another apocalypse, besides the catastrophe, besides charity: it is that of the witness, that of the one who testifies to what he has seen, what he sees and what he will see. I have just written to an Italian professor, who asked me if we were well, that this is terrible, but that in the midst of the horror—and there is always a greater horror that not everyone is allowed to see—shines the gesture of the one who stays and remains at the side of the victims in spite of everything.

Day 6. Sunday, November 3

In the morning comes the new shift of volunteers. There is almost no water left in the basement, but two of the four pumps have broken. What is left will have to be taken out by hand, bucket by bucket. They take the broom, like St. Martin de Porres, the saint of the day, and start cleaning the mud they already cleaned yesterday. They do it with joy. We rouse ourselves and leave. I take a picture just before I leave of something that was hidden under the water in one of the rooms we have cleaned. It is the third picture I take.

I get home, shower and disinfect and, like the previous days, we put the clothes in the wash to remove the mud. The washing machine is going to jam. Seeing the sunrise has been impressive. With the day came floods of volunteers who do not get tired. Back home, I think: “I have a dry and clean house and a family waiting for me, all safe and secure.” A certain shame, a feeling of guilt that won’t go away, lurks and waits for us to let our guard down to paralyze us.

I sleep until I don’t know what time, and when I wake up the President of the Government, the President of the Generalitat and the King of Spain are visiting Paiporta. I wake up as if a mimetic angel had whispered to me “wake up and look”. They are about to lynch them. The President of the Government, Pedro Sanchez, is leaving in an official car. They have thrown reeds and mud at them, sticks that are reeds, that fill everything, carried by the flood from the ravines. Reeds that we have used to remove the mud and unblock the drains —Reeds and mud is the title of a novel by the Valencian naturalist writer Blasco Ibáñez, they are important symbols of Valencia. The King stays and approaches to talk to those who insult him. Then will come the interpretations: that they should not have visited Paiporta, that the President recommended him not to make the visit, that it was a way to provoke, that there is no dialogue with the violent, that they were ultras groups that want to discredit the government. It is incredible how the information machines take an image and distort it, how they make images speak to say such different things. I see a man who has been called a murderer, who has had mud and sticks thrown at him, running away. I see another man who has been called a murderer, who has had mud and sticks thrown at him, who has stayed to talk. I see his wife, Queen Letizia, crying as she wipes the mud off her face. I wonder if they are thinking about the images they are generating when they talk to those who rebuke them, when they embrace, when they are rejected, when they take the hands of those who rebuke them. The image machine is going to gobble up hundreds of photos and videos. I don’t think I care what they say. Those of us who have read Girard know what happens to kings in crises. Rulers are lynched. The lynch mob was activated in Paiporta in a few seconds. The gesture of one of them was enough. To deactivate it, it was enough the gesture of another one, who stayed to speak. It doesn’t matter what he said, nor with whom he spoke. We have all been moved by something in this image. Later we will make the image say other things, but sometimes, just sometimes, an image makes us say or feel or think the right thing. It moves us, it invites us to follow a new inertia that breaks with other inertias that are as old as man, that of reproach and revenge, that which generates the community of the guilty. A certain hope is born in us. Although we resist, we do not want to abandon ourselves to it, it is crazy. Small circles form around the one who has remained, and he addresses each other, creating, I would like to think, communities of the hopeful. The mud of the media will reduce everything to the usual war between good guys and bad guys, but I only see people talking, disagreeing, looking at each other and listening to each other and hugging and crying together. They are images that remind me of other images, emblems of reconciliation and forgiveness, icons of love and charity.

In the flood there has been a revelation. The Apocalypse of John reveals the Lamb, who is Love. The caritas, the agape, has been revealed in the small: in the muddy boots; in the walks along the destroyed roads carrying mops, buckets, jugs of water and food; in every embrace and in all the shared tears. Death has pronounced itself tyrannically, with an unbearable roar, but it has received a hidden, silent response from people who walk and come to the margins of the city. The last word is not theirs, although it seems so in these hours of weeping, mourning, and desolation. It belongs to Love. And the waters cannot drown it.

In the hall of Juani’s house there is an umbrella stand with many umbrellas and a bottle of bleach, all covered by mud. I couldn’t help taking that image with my smartphone, it was the first picture I took. There is something in those objects that catches me: it is the protection, the everyday of cleaning, of going out when it rains and your grandmother telling you to take the umbrella, of cleaning every morning the floor of your house, so that it is clean and ready to welcome visitors. The mud covers everything and renders them useless. The hospitality has become impossible, the hospites arrives and receives those who receive and does not end up reaching this present that cannot be assumed. The house has become uninhabitable. But only man is capable of inhabiting the inhospitable, of making the desolation welcoming. Juani will receive us tomorrow, Monday, and she will cry because no one has been to see her for two days. Her daughter is with her. We go in to help her get rid of everything, her kitchen, her rooms, her memories. The umbrellas are still there, with the bleach; or not, they have already been cleaned and the bleach has been used. Twenty young people have come in to help her. She cries inconsolably—who knows if so much pain and so much love is bearable. In spite of everything, her image at the door of the house, saying goodbye gratefully, full of mud, will stay with me for a long time.

I finish these reflections on Tuesday, November 5. Yesterday I could not go. Life goes on, my students need to be consoled as well, many have been affected and we have to see how to continue with classes. I have to resist the temptation to feel guilty or ashamed. In the program I run, with students from the USA, we have to make decisions quickly: how the teachers are doing, how we will continue with the classes, what actions we can take. Soon it will be Thanksgiving. We would like to go and celebrate it there, and have the students be the waiters at a banquet in the midst of chaos, like the end of a Kusturica movie. It’s a sentimental and perhaps a bit sappy image. The future is uncertain. As Esquirol says at the beginning of La resistencia íntima and in La penúltima bondad, in the face of the desolation and nihilism of the images we have seen and which have engulfed us, we have the hope of being able to share, on the margins of the city, bread and soup, with those who have nothing, and that this soup tastes good.

I have used the first person plural to include all those who were with me. This is an account, or rather, a relación of the disaster. I don’t pretend to explain what happened, but to narrate what we lived through before forgetting it. There are disguised quotations from people who have told me their stories, from books I was reading or that came to my discourse summoned (Esquirol, Villoro, Levinas, Benjamin, Mayorga, Paul of Tarsus, John of Patmos, Sontag). Images say a lot, but they must be made to say, because they reveal and veil at the same time. Seeing without seeing and hearing without hearing is the most frequent thing. It is essential to stop and look carefully and listen calmly. To look at the apocalypse face to face and see, at last, the other who suffers beside me and has asked me for help.

Porque lo que hay que ver es “lo que ni el ojo vio, ni el oído oyó, ni al corazón del hombre llegó”. Lo que hay que ver es el apocalipsis.

Día 1. Martes, 29 de octubre

El martes por la tarde comenzaron a llegar las primeras alertas meteorológicas por parte de los distintas servicios y responsables civiles en Valencia. En Xàtiva y Alzira se suspenden las clases, algo que es habitual, porque todos los años se produce el fenómeno que hoy llamamos DANA, pero aquí se ha llamado siempre “Gota Fría,” y que todos los años provoca incidentes de distinta gravedad. Nadie podía imaginar qué iba a suceder. Todos actuamos por inercia—inercia mimética. Como yo soy de Madrid, todo los años bromeo sobre lo nerviosos que se ponen los valencianos por “cuatro gotas”. Me iba a arrepentir de esas palabras. Otros se encierran presa del pánico y los más prácticos sacan el coche del garaje para que, si entra el agua—lo hace en ocasiones, 20 o 40 centímetros a lo sumo—no se manchen. Los aparcan fuera, en las partes altas de la ciudad, en puentes, etc. Es la hora del regreso a casa, tras el trabajo, las clases en la universidad o las compras en los centros comerciales. Durante todo el día anterior y este día ha llovido con intensidad en Valencia y alrededores, pero ahora mismo no llueve. Seguimos nuestras actividades con normalidad. Sobre las 17:21 horas comienzan los primeros problemas en el metro y un antiguo alumno, que estaba asistiendo a un congreso de Filosofía y cine en nuestra universidad, y al que hacía tiempo que no veía, decide volver a su casa antes de que termine la última conferencia. Quiere acercar a otro compañero a su casa en coche, porque han leído en las redes que el metro no funciona. En un coche nuevo que perderá para siempre en unas horas para poder salvar la vida. Llegamos a casa y empezamos a oír las noticias, pero no somos capaces aún, ni viendo imágenes, de imaginarnos lo peor que ya estaba sucediendo. 

Día 2. Miércoles, 30 de octubre

Las clases no se van a suspender hasta las 15 horas. Hemos necesitado casi 24 horas para asimilar lo que nos cuentan. Lo que nos cuentan los testigos a través de las imágenes que nos mandan. En una sociedad del instante y de la imagen es increíble lo que hemos tardado en responder. En Valencia centro, a solo 10 minutos en coche del desastre, no ha sucedido nada. Y actuamos como si no hubiera sucedido nada, miméticamente. Seguimos con el congreso a pesar de todo. Aunque ya han empezado a suceder cosas, las sabemos por los que sobreviven, de modo que aún no hay víctimas, solo supervivientes. 

Esta mañana bien pronto un compañero ha ido a buscar en moto a nuestro antiguo estudiante. Estaba en un pabellón deportivo a donde le han conducido las fuerzas de seguridad a las 7 am. Casi no ha dormido y se ha puesto unos calcetines secos que le han dado, pero sigue vestido con la misma ropa y las mismas deportivas, que tienen barro. Las miramos cuando nos las enseña. Vemos sin ver. Y oímos sin oír lo que nos cuenta. Reflexionamos sobre los dilemas—salvar el coche o salvar la vida—. Nos cuenta que una mujer se ha quedado en el coche. Él mismo ha dudado: solo hace 3 semanas que lo compró. Camina hacia un puente para huir de la corriente de agua y allí un conductor de autobús de línea hace bajar a todos los pasajeros para irse a casa él mismo y dejarlos allí. Mientras vamos procesando todo esto, hablamos de Wim Wenders, de Aki Kaurismaki, de John Ford, de Jean Renoir, de Yasujirō Ozu o de Terrence Malick, y de los filósofos Stanley Cavell, Gabriel Marcel o Josep Maria Esquirol. En nuestras preguntas e intervenciones se va colando, lentamente (¡demasiado lentamente!) el Evento. Después de comer un compañero me dice que ha fallecido la abuela de otra compañera. El relato es de película de terror: estaba enferma y en cama, las cuidadoras han elevado la cama todo lo que han podido y se han ido a buscar una ayuda que llegaría demasiado tarde. El horror, la catástrofe, el apocalipsis, se va revelando en su primera forma, la del mal, y lo hace en imágenes que no hemos visto aún—o que hemos visto poco, como apartando la mirada—: las imágenes de la imaginación, las imágenes que han pintado en nuestra mente las palabras de los supervivientes, de los testigos. Al acabar el congreso, sin saber qué hacer, vamos a cenar. Será una sopa que después tendrá un regusto amargo—no como la sopa de la que hablan Levinas o Esquirol, la que compartimos en la mesa con nuestros amigos; sino como la del campo de prisioneros de Elie Wiesel, un sopa amarga que otros, las víctimas y supervivientes, no van a poder tomar ni degustar—. Hablamos de proyectos de futuro, de la esperanza de los sin esperanza, de la sociedad de los desposeídos y de los “al margen” de las películas de Alice Rohrwacher. Sin saberlo, el proyecto toma forma a menos de 10 minutos en coche, una forma desoladora, macabra, mortal. 

Día 3. Jueves 31 de octubre

Se anulan las clases en la universidad todo el día. Los primeros voluntarios comienzan a llegar y con ellos llegan los relatos. Es cierto que recibimos imágenes terribles en nuestros móviles, pero es como si la saturación de las imágenes y la adioforización del mal—de la que habla Bauman—nos hubieran anestesiado. Se parecen demasiado a otro males morales, los de la guerra en Gaza o las ciudades devastadas de Ucrania. Como si hubiera un eco entre ambas imágenes, algo que secretamente las conectara. Este día las imágenes se han multiplicado, pero también los relatos. A pesar de que vivimos en una cultura de la imagen, necesitamos que esas imágenes tengan significado—o un significado más que el turístico con el que parece que contemplamos las fotos de atrocidades o de víctimas, como señaló Susan Sontag—. Necesitamos que alguien nos diga que esa imagen es cierta, que nos la sitúe en una red de significaciones, en una constelación de sentido, una suerte de iluminación profana, en palabras de Benjamin. 

Es en este momento en el que empiezan a producirse las primeras interpretaciones de esas imágenes, que empiezan a utilizar en la arena política los máximos responsables de la gestión de la catástrofe: los coches abandonados, apilados unos sobre otros por la fuerza del aluvión, las calles llenas de lodo y de objetos arrastrados. Todo empieza a formar parte del escenario que los medios van a montar para que llegue a todas partes. Como siempre, la realidad va a superar a la ficción, no solo porque el olor será una bofetada que nos despierte a todos de la contemplación alucinada de las imágenes, sino porque esas imágenes no las podremos separar nunca de las personas que nos las cuenten: Juani, Ana, José, Pepe, Lucía, Joan…. 

Por la tarde bajamos a pasear con los niños y nos encontramos a varias familias. Nada es normal, sabiendo lo que está pasando a 10 minutos en coche. Miramos a nuestro alrededor y, por inercia, seguimos actuando igual—salimos a pasear con los niños, nos tomamos una cerveza, hacemos planes—. Pero hay como una nota disonante, como si hubiera pasado algo que no pudiéramos ignorar ya. Empezamos a sentir la culpa de los inocentes—no hemos hecho nada, pero tampoco estamos haciendo nada—. Somos una comunidad de culpables —como aquella de la que hablan los hermanos Dardenne—. Para poder fundar una comunidad de esperanzados va a hacer falta solo un día más, un segundo apocalipsis, una segunda revelación. Las víctimas hoy son más de 90. Decidimos organizarnos para ir por la mañana. Actuamos por inercia, pero, a veces, la inercia se rompe y dejamos que se abra paso algo distinto, nuevo. Actuamos contra la inercia, y eso tiene, también, una dimensión mimética. 

Pasa una familia con niños disfrazados para celebrar Halloween. Descargamos sobre ellos nuestra ira, los hacemos culpables: cómo se atreven a celebrar, ni siquiera es una fiesta que tenga sentido para nosotros… Eso nuevo que había empezado a formarse en nuestra forma de mirar busca ahora culpables sobre los que descargarse. Alguien tiene que pagar por este sentimiento de impotencia y culpa, por tanta confusión: hagamos una hoguera con la que iluminar el camino. Si hace falta, quememos a alguien en ella. Aunque tengamos que quemar también aquello nuevo que estaba naciendo en nosotros para sacarnos de nuestra inercia mimética. 

Día 4. Viernes, 1 de noviembre, día de Todos los Santos

Salimos a las 7 am para evitar atascos y para que nos dejen pasar. Estamos nerviosos, vamos a una zona desconocida. Hemos visto cientos de imágenes, pero sabemos que entre la imagen y la experiencia hay un salto. Cuando llegamos es como entrar en un espacio marciano, de guerra, como esos espacios de las películas de Alice Rohrwacher o de Andrei Tarkovski. Miramos la realidad como miramos las fotos o el cine, una realidad ya representada. Pero lo que vemos excede y se queda pequeño, es real e irreal. El trabajo es mecánico: sacar el fango de las casas, de las iglesias, de las calles. Abrir garajes con lo que tienes a mano, una maza, a patadas, con palancas, para ver si hay alguien, para poder sacar el agua, el lodo, el fango. 

El olor cuando levantamos un mueble, con el barro estancado abajo, nos golpea y echamos la cabeza atrás y nos tapamos la cara. No lo sabemos aún—¡no sabemos nada!—pero pronto sabremos que se debe a la descomposición de microorganismos en el agua estancada y, en el peor de los casos, a la descomposición de cadáveres. No vemos aún a nadie con mascarillas porque nadie se lo ha dicho. Nos sentiremos irresponsables por haber ido, por haber entorpecido las labores de los profesionales. Nos meterán el miedo en el cuerpo por querer ir a ayudar al otro, al que ha perdido todo. Por haber tenido una experiencia de caridad, de tzedeká (צְדָקָה), por consolar al huérfano, al pobre, al extranjero y a la viuda. El cinturón de ciudades que rodea Valencia, Catarroja, Massanasa, Alfafar, Sedaví, Albal, Paiporta, Picanya, y otras, es de clase obrera y migrante, aunque hay también gente con dinero, que es de allí de toda la vida. Pequeñas y medianas empresas. En general, gente humilde y sencilla. 

He aquí el segundo apocalipsis, la segunda revelación: el amor está en el corazón del hombre anegado y enlodado como las casas a las que entramos preguntando si podemos ayudar. En ocasiones como esta, lucha el bien por salir y empujarnos a hacer lo correcto, sin mirar qué consecuencias pueda tener para nosotros, sin interés. Hay un tirón mimético impresionante: desde Valencia miles de personas cruzan el nuevo cauce del río para llegar al infierno de Paiporta, de Catarroja, de Alfafar. El puente que cruzan se ha bautizado en los medios como el puente de la esperanza; otros lo llaman el puente de la solidaridad. Los que, como yo, cínicos, tenemos una cierta alergia a las masas, los que con dificultad aceptamos masas de cualquier signo, no podemos evitar sospechar de sus motivos. Del gesto de santidad de unos pocos—los que decidieron que no había nada más que hacer con pasión heroica y abrasados por la caridad—, muchos—los que estábamos desorientados—hemos salido al encuentro del necesitado. 

A las 12 del mediodía el trasiego de gentes en la avenida principal de Catarroja es demasiado: llevamos 5 horas casi sin parar ni para beber agua—nos da miedo quedarnos sin ella y, peor, dejar sin ella a los supervivientes—. Es abrumador. Algunos hacen fotos. Yo he decidido tomar solo algunas. Las mando por correo a algún amigo, a algún colega que no sabe que vivo en Valencia, a mi mujer, a mis hermanos. Pero me siento mal por hacerlo. No quiero que la imagen, que lo que estoy viendo, se resignifique, que se convierta en tótem y grial, en santo y seña de nuevas violencias. Yo no soy fotógrafo profesional, no es mi trabajo. Pero incluso así tengo que resistir la tentación de hacer fotos, de hacer turismo fotográfico. Me indigna, aunque comprendo el impulso, ver gente tomando fotos. Creo que aquí toco algo esencial: ¿por qué me indigna o por qué, cuanto menos, lo veo problemático? ¿Con qué intención tomo la foto, para qué la envío, a quién se la envío? Los factores de reutilización y de resignificación de las imágenes están ahí: estas imágenes me recuerdan a las imágenes de guerra, a las de la riada del 57—pero coloreadas—, a las películas. Juani llorando desconsolada en la puerta de su casa me recuerda a las imágenes de la madre, de la piedad, de la desesperación, de las víctimas: un llanto silencioso. Pero este dolor es concreto, es real, para mí, para Juani, para Joan, para Albert, para María. La dimensión de este dolor, de estas pérdidas, es inimaginable. He probado a contar las calles, las manzanas, las casa en cada calle, en cada manzana, en cada ciudad afectada. Pierdo la cuenta casi siempre al principio. En algún sitio he leído que la cifra de afectados por la DANA es de más de dos millones y medio de personas. Aún no sabemos, porque no hay cobertura y no podemos mirar las redes, que la cifra de cadáveres recuperados ha ido aumentando durante el día. Serán ya casi 200 al final de la jornada. La obsesión por los datos, por los números, alimenta nuevos miedos y nuevos pánicos. Siempre después del Evento llegan los datos a meternos el miedo en el cuerpo, a asustarnos, a inmovilizarnos. La COVID-19 ha sido una escuela de aprendizaje de estadísticas para todos. Varios días después, hoy, cuando no haya podido ir a ayudar porque en la Valencia que se ha salvado se trabaja, preguntaré a los que sí han podido ir por Juani. 

Se hace tarde y pensamos en irnos antes de que anochezca, antes de que haya atasco. Gracias a Dios nos sacan de estas consideraciones extemporáneas y bizarras, burguesas, los soldados que acaban de llegan el cuarto día, por fin. Se les recibe con alegría, pero con indignación también. Ellos van a preferir no decir nada, cumplen órdenes. Un amigo cuyo hijo está en el ejército dice que llevan preparados desde el miércoles. Aquí habrá otro motivo de polémica, lo hay ya, porque unos y otros se acusarán de haber impedido el envío de efectivos. Hay un ejército de voluntarios inútiles e inexpertos cuando llegan los primeros soldados. Se acercan y nos piden ayuda para apartar de la carretera los restos del muro derruido de una escuela. Son las 17:30, se cuelan en nuestras conversaciones las críticas a los políticos, chivos expiatorios perfectos de todo lo que ha pasado, porque son objetivamente culpables, decimos. No sabemos aún que en un par de días van a estar a punto de ser linchados. 

Tardamos dos horas en volver a casa en coche. La cola es enorme: gente en coche volviendo; gente caminando y llevando garrafas de agua y bolsas de comida, palas y escobas, productos de limpieza, pañales; un río humano de siete kilómetros, los que nos separan de la capital. 

Día 5. Sábado, 2 de noviembre, día de difuntos

Me levanto tarde y no sé si iré, mis amigos han salido ya. Me llaman para ir a buscar material a una empresa de químicos en el norte de Valencia, en Honda, y vamos a por EPIS, palas, escobas y botas de agua. También nos llevamos una bomba hidráulica. Allí nos encontramos con otros trabajadores que han ido a buscar material para ir a otros lugares. Todos tienen historias que contar: la hija de unos de ellos, deportista de alto rendimiento, se ha quedado dos días encerrada en el centro deportivo donde vivía, incomunicada. Es una adolescente. Otro me cuenta que su amigo lo ha perdido todo, tiene un bar y la riada se lo ha llevado todo lo que había dentro. Todas las historias se parecen en una cosa en este momento: nadie tiene miedo a ir a ayudar, nadie busca realmente culpables—porque están ahí, a mano, en las noticias—. Responder a la llamada del otro y no pensar en la propia seguridad. Este simple acto de santidad. Muy pronto se dirá que fueron insensatos, imprudentes, que desobedecieron. Muchos lo harán por la inercia mimética, pero hasta ese gesto mimético refleja el primer acto heroico del que fue sin preguntar a dar auxilio antes que las instituciones. Por el camino hablamos de la logística, de lo que debería haberse hecho, de las posibilidades. Todos tienen razón y todos se han equivocado. Llegamos al anochecer, nos vestimos con el EPI y con las botas, guantes y mascarilla. Y nos ponemos a bombear agua de un sótano. Los bomberos nos han dejado una muy potente hasta la mañana, hay que aprovechar. Se hace de noche rápido y se hace el silencio y la oscuridad. Ha vuelto la luz a algunas casas—las que han recibido la visita de electricistas amigos que han revisado la instalación y han hecho reparaciones—, pero no a las farolas. En la plaza un coche de policía hace guardia para evitar robos y saqueos, y otros coches patrullan haciendo la ronda. El tercer día una amiga de otro pueblo me había contado que no había ido nadie y que ellos estaban escondidos en casa porque tenían miedo a salir. Otros me cuentan historias similares. Todos conocemos todos a mucha gente que está en peligro y en necesidad, ¿cómo elegir? ¿A quién socorremos primero? Este tipo de dilemas son los que planteo a mis estudiantes en clase de ética, los experimentos mentales. No sirven de nada, en el aquí y ahora. Es de noche y el paisaje parece más que nunca un escenario y tomo una foto: un foco potente ilumina los coches que se han ido sacando de las calles para poder acceder a las viviendas. Una presentadora está lista para entrar en directo en las noticias de la noche. Es pronto para el horario español, pero parece mucho más tarde. Alguien en su casa estará viendo esto mismo que yo veo ahora, sin ver lo que yo veo. 

Las bombas se atascan y pasamos toda la noche desatascándolas y cambiándolas de lugar, con cuidado porque el techo está cayéndose. Los policías vienen a saludarnos. Son de otra ciudad, de otro lugar, acaban de llegar. No dan crédito a lo que ven, a la situación, a nada. No ven lo que sus ojos ven o no quieren creerlo ni verlo, pero lo ven y abren mucho los ojos. Tienen miedo, están en un barrio que no conocen, en una ciudad que no conocen, en una situación a la que nunca se han enfrentado. Pero permanecen en su puesto toda la noche hasta que llega el relevo. 

Escribo a Curtis, le digo que si puedo mandarle un texto para el Bulletin. Hay otro apocalipsis, además de la catástrofe, además de la caridad: es el del testigo, el del que da testimonio de lo que ha visto, de lo que ve y de lo que verá. Acabo de escribir a una profesora italiana, que me preguntaba si estábamos bien, que esto es terrible, pero que en medio del horror—y siempre hay un horror mayor que no a todos le es concedido ver—brilla el gesto del que se queda y permanece al lado de las víctimas a pesar de todo. 

Día 6. Domingo, 3 noviembre

Por la mañana viene el nuevo turno de voluntarios. Casi no queda agua en el sótano, pero se han roto dos de las cuatro bombas. Lo que queda habrá que sacarlo a mano, capazo a capazo. Cogen la escoba, como San Martín de Porres, santo del día, y se ponen a limpiar el barro que ya limpiaron ayer. Lo hacen con alegría. Nos desperezamos y nos vamos. Hago una foto justo antes de irme de algo que estaba escondido bajo el agua en una de las habitaciones que hemos limpiado. Es la tercera foto que tomo. 

Llego a casa, me ducho y me desinfecto y, como los días anteriores, ponemos la ropa a lavar para quitar el barro. La lavadora se va a atascar. Haber visto amanecer ha sido impresionante. Con el día han llegado riadas de voluntarios que no se cansan. De vuelta a casa, pienso: “tengo una casa seca y limpia y una familia que me espera, todo a salvo y seguro”. Una cierta vergüenza, un sentimiento de culpa que no se termina de ir, nos acecha y espera a que bajemos la guardia para paralizarnos. 

Duermo hasta no sé qué hora y cuando me despierto el Presidente del Gobierno, el President de la Generalitat y el Rey de España están visitando Paiporta; me despierto como si un ángel mimético me hubiera susurrado “despierta y mira”. Están a punto de lincharlos. El Presidente del Gobierno, Pedro Sánchez se va en un coche oficial. Les han tirado cañas y barro, palos que son juncos, que lo llenan todo, llevados por la riada desde los barrancos. Cañas que hemos utilizado para remover el fango y desempozar los desagües—Cañas y barro es el título de una novela del escritor naturalista valenciano Blasco Ibáñez, son símbolos importantes de Valencia—. El Rey se queda y se acerca a hablar con los que le insultan. Luego vendrán las interpretaciones: que no tenían que haber visitado Paiporta, que el Presidente le recomendó no realizar la visita, que era una forma de provocar, que no hay que dialogar con los violentos, que fueron grupos ultras que quieren desacreditar al gobierno. Es increíble cómo las maquinarias informativas toman una imagen y la deforman, cómo hacen hablar a las imágenes para decir cosas tan distintas. Veo a un hombre al que le han llamado asesino, al que le han arrojado barro y palos que huye. Veo a otro hombre al que han llamado asesino, al que le han arrojado barro y palos que se ha quedado a hablar. Veo a su mujer, le Reina Letizia, que llora mientras se aparta el fango de la cara. Me preguntó si están pensando en las imágenes que están generando cuando hablan con los que les increpan, cuando abrazan, cuando son rechazados, cuando toman las manos de los que les increpan. La maquinaria de la imagen va a deglutir cientos de fotos y vídeos. Creo que no me importa qué digan. A los que hemos leído a Girard sabemos qué les pasa a los reyes en las crisis. Los gobernantes son linchados. La masa linchadora se activó en Paiporta en unos segundos. Bastó el gesto de uno de ellos. Para desactivarla bastó el gesto de otro, que se quedó a hablar. No importa lo que dijo, ni con quién habló. A todos nos ha conmovido algo en esta imagen. Luego haremos que la imagen diga otras cosas, pero a veces, solo a veces, una imagen nos hace decir o sentir o pensar lo correcto. Nos con-mueve, nos invita a seguir una nueva inercia que rompa con otras inercias que son viejas como el hombre, la del reproche y la venganza, la que genera la comunidad de los culpables. Nace en nosotros una cierta esperanza, aunque nos resistimos, no queremos abandonarnos a ella, es de locos. En torno al que se ha quedado se forman pequeños círculos, y él se dirige a unos y otros, creando, quiero pensar, comunidades de esperanzados. El fango de las redes lo reducirá todo a la guerra de siempre entre buenos y malos, pero yo solo veo a personas que hablan, que disienten, que se miran y se escuchan y se abrazan y lloran juntas. Son imágenes que me recuerdan a otras imágenes, los emblemas de la reconciliación y el perdón, los iconos del amor y la caridad. 

En la riada se ha dado una revelación. El Apocalipsis de Juan revela al Cordero, que es el Amor. La caritas, el agapé, se ha revelado en lo pequeño: en las botas embarradas; en las caminatas por las carreteras destruidas llevando fregonas, cubos, garrafas de agua y alimentos; en cada abrazo y en todas las lágrimas compartidas. La muerte se ha pronunciado tiránicamente, con un estruendo insoportable, pero ha recibido una respuesta escondida, silenciosa, de gente que camina y acude a los márgenes de la ciudad. La última palabra no es suya, aunque lo parezca en estas horas de llanto, luto y desolación. Es del Amor. Y las aguas no lo pueden anegar.

En el recibidor de la casa de Juani hay un paragüero con muchos paraguas y una garrafa de lejía, cubierto todo por el lodo. No pude evitar tomar esa imagen con mi móvil, fue la primera foto que hice. Hay algo en esos objetos que me atrapa: es la protección, lo cotidiano de la limpieza, de salir cuando llueve y que tu abuela te diga que cojas el paraguas, de limpiar cada mañana el piso de tu casa, para que esté limpio y listo para acoger a las visitas. El lodo lo cubre todo y los deja inservibles. La acogida se ha vuelto imposible, el hospites llega y recibe a quien recibe y no termina de llegar a este presente que no puede asumir. La casa se ha hecho inhabitable. Pero solo el hombre es capaz de habitar lo inhóspito, de hacer acogedora la desolación. Juani nos va a recibir mañana, lunes, y va a llorar porque en dos días no ha ido nadie a verla. Su hija está con ella. Entramos a ayudarla a que se deshaga de todo, su cocina, sus habitaciones, sus recuerdos. Los paraguas siguen allí, con la lejía; o no, ya los han limpiado y la lejía ha sido usada. Han entrado veinte jóvenes a ayudarla. Llora desconsolada, quién sabe si tanto dolor y tanto amor es soportable. A pesar de todo, su imagen en la puerta de la casa, despidiéndose agradecida, llena de barro, me va a acompañar durante mucho tiempo. 

Termino estas reflexiones el martes 5 de noviembre. Ayer no pude ir. La vida continúa, mis estudiantes necesitan ser consolados también, muchos han sido afectados y tenemos que ver cómo continuar con las clases. Tengo que resistir a la tentación de sentirme culpable o de sentir vergüenza. En el programa que dirijo, con estudiantes de USA, tenemos que tomar decisiones rápidamente: saber cómo están los profesores, cómo continuaremos con las clases, qué acciones podemos llevar a cabo. Pronto será Thanksgiving. Querríamos ir a celebrarlo allí, y que los estudiantes sean los camareros en un banquete en medio del caos, como el final de una película de Kusturica. Es una imagen sentimental y tal vez un poco ñoña. El futuro es incierto. Como dice Esquirol al comienzo de La resistencia íntima y en La penúltima bondad, frente a la desolación y el nihilismo de las imágenes que hemos visto y que nos han engullido, tenemos la esperanza de poder compartir, en los márgenes de la ciudad, el pan y la sopa, con quien no tiene nada, y que esta sopa sepa bien. 

He utilizado la primera persona del plural para incluir a todos lo que estaban conmigo. Esto es un relato, o más bien, una relación del desastre. No pretendo explicar lo que ha pasado, sino narrar lo que hemos vivido antes de olvidarlo. Hay citas encubiertas de personas que me han contado sus historias, de libros que estaba leyendo o que venían a mi discurso convocados (Esquirol, Villoro, Levinas, Benjamin, Mayorga, Pablo de Tarso, Juan de Patmos, Sontag). Las imágenes dicen mucho, pero hay que hacerlas decir, porque revelan y velan al mismo tiempo. Ver sin ver y oír sin oír es lo más frecuente. Detenernos para mirar con atención y escuchar con calma es fundamental. Mirar el apocalipsis cara a cara y ver, por fin, al otro que sufre a mi lado y me ha pedido ayuda. 

We owe to Weber the widely discussed notion of “disenchantment,” the evacuation of mysterious, supernatural powers inhabiting the cosmos, and Cavanaugh detects the ambiguities and hesitancies in Weber’s own Enlightenment purview, noting the porosity, the fragility, of secular/sacred binaries. In effect, he is deftly performing a species of deconstruction (a word he never uses) that probes false dichotomies, illusory differences, and groundless antitheses, whereby Derridians write of the “theo-logo-centrism” inhabiting our conceptual systems. Cavanaugh never resorts to labels; he is aiming at clarity, not the eye-catching cleverness that bestrides much academic prose. He appropriately draws attention to Marx’s satire of “commodity fetish,” where he famously gibes that “it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (310). In Marx’s best writing, metaphor is not rhetorical but hermeneutic, which is generally the case for literary masterpieces. Like Marx, Cavanaugh is spelling out what is “unthought” in all the texts he discusses, ever widening and deepening the reader’s understanding of idolatry among us.  We can be grateful, too, for his judicious unpacking of the gnomic terminology of Jean-Luc Marion, an effort that gratifies the kind of request that Byron makes in Don Juan about the metaphysics of Coleridge, to wit: “Explaining metaphysics to the nation. / I wish he would explain the explanation.”

Cavanaugh is duly critical of nationalism, a no-brainer in its sacrificial proclivities against peoples flagged as other. In so doing, he demurs from an argument for the need of “strong gods” that we find in the pages of First Things, the conservative Catholic monthly that bills itself as “America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion and Public Life.” He coolly observes that the author “knows better than to attempt to provide biblical warrants for such an identification, for there are none” (270). In fact Saint Paul is archly opposed to theo-power politics: “God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, / and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, / those who count for nothing” (1Cor 1:27-29; see also 2Cor 12:8-10). Nationalism is narcissism democratized. Here as elsewhere, Cavanaugh unveils continuities between ancient and modernist practices, dovetailing with Girard’s historical outlook as that of a “continuist,” as he states in Battling to the End. For all that, Cavanaugh’s thinking is not reductionist in challenging antinomies, but expansive, widening and deepening our historical consciousness, awakened first by ancient Israel as indivisible from our ethical horizon.

Consumerism, like all idolatries, has its own sacrificial modalities via the “deskilling” of human workers in service to mass production and market expansion, via outsourcing manufacture for cheaper labor, all with the goal of fueling the narcissistic satisfactions of acquisition. This effectively results in the “white noise” evoked in Don DeLillo’s novel by that name, whose closing scene in the filmic version hilariously musicalizes an inane saturnalia of redundant commodities in our big box stores. I cite this to emphasize that Cavanaugh has not only history but our best writers (and film directors: Fellini, Buñuel, Hitchcock…) on his side, which accounts for Girard’s appeal to many humanists: “white noise” is a telling metaphor for the unlocalizable, anonymous—or uncanny, an ersatz of the sacred—buzz in our casual shopping mall and online shopping habituations. On this score, the reader should be reminded of Cavanaugh’s reading of “homo amans” in Augustine as now beholden to market ideology’s postulate of its “invisible hand,” itself a figure of providential agency whereby human accountability is effaced. Augustine distinguishes between “temporal and eternal things,” observing that the former “is loved more before we have it, and it begins to grow worthless when we gain it” (175). Or, as Shakespeare puts it, “Sweets grown common lose their dear delights” (Sonnet 106). For shoppers, the hollow satisfaction of this gain does not most often result in seeking after anything beyond it, but after more and more of the same, a feedback looping of Sisyphean futility

“We worship badly,” Cavanaugh remarks (1, 5), evoking our “need to worship,” indeed our  “inherent need to worship”: “human beings have an inherent need to worship, one that is often misdirected” (153). Girard’s mimetic theory goes a layer deeper here: the engine of misdirection is the contagion of others’ motivations and desires propelling those we fancy as our own, issuing in crowd behaviors of all sorts that outperform individual agency, which is why Girard labels us as “interdividuals.” Far from being inherent, worship is a product of sacrificial scenarios, where the mimetic, reciprocal violence of all against all is finally economized, compacted, condensed into the violence of all against one, whose victim is worshipped as the fearful cause of violence while its death is experienced as its most welcome, providential termination. What is worshipped is our own violence that is fraudulently outsourced to the sacred. Sacrificial rituals recur and expand in efforts to reestablish social order. The violence inhering in nationalism is heir to this pattern, convening a people over against others. The only thing that is inherent in humans is desire, whose runaway, contagious mimetics make their home in violence, abhorred away, worshipped at home. In sum, homo sapiens sapiens “knows not what he does”; homo religiosus, homo liturgicus (religious man, liturgical man whose work is to worship) in Cavanaugh’s frequent mention, is homo necans (man the killer, following the book of that title by Walter Burkert), a pathology of desire as homo mimeticus at very our worst.

Another opaque notion in this book is “the reality of sin” (356, 389) which needs to be viewed as a misdirection of desire, and which Genesis divulges compactly. The “fall of humans” is seeded by a rivalry with their creator in eating the forbidden fruit and thereby grasping at knowledge of good and evil on our own: “You will be like gods,” Eve is told by the underhanded, sidewinding serpent, a good metaphor of misdirection. That same envy, the decalogue’s tenth, last, final word on our outlawry, is replicated in our first parents’ children:  Cain, alleged as the builder of cities, of properly social order, commits the first murder in envious rivalry with his brother Abel for God’s favor. St. Paul warns against the “sins of the flesh,” which standard exegesis identifies as the social world, bound together by bad imitation, to which he opposes the imitation of Christ: “I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son” (Gal. 2.20). The Hebrew word for what we causally label as sin is, in Robert Alter’s masterful translations, “offense,” “transgression,” “crimes,” highlighting not its intrapsychic but its interactional dispositions. Israel’s and Christianity’s Lord of Creation is by right reason offended when we overstep our neighbor’s prerogatives as well His own, which are indelibly the same.  Cavanaugh frequently avails himself of the very biblical difference, often overlooked by Girardians, between grasping and receiving. 

Such lexical discrepancies regarding mimetic theory as I’ve indicated pale beside the virtual collaborations between Girard’s work and Cavanaugh’s own, as exhibited in his several books on religion and violence, and on self-deceptions driving our confusions about them. Their singular achievements are mutually confirmative as they illuminate the dark corners of our modernity, of “things hidden,” per Girard, “since the foundation of the world.”  French and English share an adage about such concurrences in truth-saying: “les grands esprits se rencontrent”; great minds think alike. 

Dupuy has done everyone a great service with this book in offering a template for “thinking the unthinkable.” The subject of nuclear warfare is said to be unthinkable particularly for the erasure of human history, the absolute nothingness, that could ensue—but also, more immediately, for reasons pertaining, for instance, to our inability, or disinclination, to make sense of numbers of deaths in the hundreds of millions, or to determine the imperceptible effects of a catastrophe suffered by a large number of people. And while nuclear deterrence is, of course, not in itself “unthinkable,” the thinking on this subject—as regards, for instance, the supposedly rational strategy of escalating to de-escalate—is nonetheless shown to be fundamentally inadequate. From a meticulous review of the literature, Dupuy arrives at the conclusion that there is “no argument that does not provide support for a contrary argument . . . no line of reasoning that does not take the form of a paradox” (98).

The product of years of reflection, this book is informed by a wide array of mainly American sources in political theory, military strategy, and philosophy. It is also openly inspired by the work of René Girard, which Dupuy first encountered in the 1970s. Of particular importance for Dupuy’s analysis of nuclear warfare is the mechanism of self-externalization of violence theorized by Girard in Violence and the Sacred: the mechanism by which violence is able to transcend and regulate itself, originally through sacrifice, and later in the form of society’s main institutions, including religion, government, and war: “There is no better framework for thinking about the ultimate stage of violence represented by MAD,” Dupuy writes, “in which violence is concerned with nothing but itself” (135). Deterrence, in which the threat of war replaces actual war, is similarly compared to rituals of archaic societies, which, according to Girard, imitate the very violence they wish to avert. And Dupuy also shares with Girard a fundamental concern about the ways in which violence may escape our control and manipulate us according to its own laws.

In his final book, Battling to the End, Girard chillingly declared that violence in our time could no longer be held in check, and that, in this sense, the apocalypse had begun. The War That Must Not Occur offers us a glimmer of hope in the face of the apocalypse.

Thomas Ryba tackles Girard’s vaunted kinship with Augustine, noting the proximity of both thinkers on what Augustine calls the “ontological hunger” of desire, which evinces as strong a predilection to idolatry as that predilection is itself foredoomed to nothingness, though for reasons having to do in Augustine with desire’s attachment to objects unworthy of love and in Girard with the structural dynamics of triangulated desire and interdividual psychology. Girard’s refusal to theorize “the first cause” of this disorder frames Ryba’s deliberations on original sin, which makes a late appearance in Girard’s body of work thanks to the growing influence of Raymond Schwager. If, as Ryba maintains, Girard came to see “mimetic desire as the original sin,” and despite the fact that both he and Augustine diagnose a state of universal contagion, the fact remains that its spread advances by sharply divergent, if not strictly incompatible, modes of transmission in their respective bodies of work. For the task of identifying affinities linking Girard to Augustine, Ryba’s dexterous command of the source material proves invaluable, just as it permits us to see where these affinities reach their end. If, despite differences, Augustine and Girard remain compatible, is their work also in some sense complementary?

In Christine Orsini’s essay, Pascal finds common ground with Girard on the question of divertissement or diversion—less a case of attention deflected, than an existential condition, which Orsini equates to metaphysical desire and its impossible demand for the Being of the other. The “diverted” person “turns away” from himself to escape knowledge of his own wretchedness, fixating instead on human models in an idolatrous manner, which leads to desire’s frustration. All this one finds in Pascal. Orsini adds that the two thinkers are united by their “Christian cynicism” toward all forms of political institution. She reads Pascal’s withering quip that Plato and Aristotle wrote about politics “to provide rules for a madhouse” as an adumbration of arbitrary violence codified into law, applied to stem the tide of fratricidal aggression.

Three essays collected here provide a critical service to readers on the lookout for Girardian conjunctions in the voluminous writings of Kierkegaard, Schelling, and Spinoza, philosophers of whom Girard said little, if anything. Of the three, Stéphane Vinolo’s essay on Spinoza is the most forcefully argued, perhaps not least because no single reference to the Dutch philosopher appears in Girard’s work, and this despite the fact that both thinkers share the strong intuition of “a counterproductive process in which claims for difference and originality stem from imitation and reinforce imitation.” Spinoza’s extreme rationalism makes for a somewhat choppy if revealing comparison with Girard on the conflictual dynamism of imitated desire and the origins of culture, which both writers theorize, if they also arrive at widely discrepant conclusions about the possibility of a political solution.

Tania Checchi’s essay on Schelling underscores the latter’s reflection on evil as a function of desire qua “unhinged longing” and its hidden link to historical Revelation; if desire begins as incognizant striving, it gradually becomes aware of itself as that in which history commences. Both Schelling and Girard share a teleology of coming to know in time what begins in a state of uncomprehending struggle, and both see that origin as recapitulated in the Passion, which reveals what lay hidden at the start. The assembly of relevant material for readerly reflection is priceless, especially given the anti-metaphysical stalwartness of Girard’s thought, by which Shelling’s mystagogic genius is little constrained, making Checchi’s guidance to the place of hidden rapport between the two indispensable. 

The search for anticipations of mimetic theory succeeds especially well in Charles Bellinger’s essay on Kierkegaard, another philosopher about whom Girard made only “passing comments.” Bellinger’s collocation of material from both thinkers brings their kinship as critics of modernity and its pathologies into focus. Points of comparison on acquisitive mimesis and its psychosocial complications are striking and easier to see once Bellinger rids us of the false notion that Kierkegaardian subjecthood is a species of “atomistic individuality,” something that would be hard to square with Girard’s interdividual psychology. As it turns out, the convergence of both thinkers here is significant on imitated desire, the unconscious character of persecutory violence, the loss of the self in the crowd, and the epistemological specificity of conversion. Revealing excerpts from Bellinger’s personal correspondence with Girard close out the essay.

The piece on Tocqueville by Jean-Marc Bourdin looks for affinities with Girard’s thought in what the political theorist calls the “equality of positions” in democracy—of rights and aspirations—an equality that paradoxically conduces to rivalry by exacerbating the demand for equality, and this to the precise degree that equality advances, a dynamic Bourdin correctly identifies with what Girard calls internal mediation. Tocqueville and Girard, each in his own way, link the intensification of egalitarian claims to appropriative mimesis and “illusive aspirations” to difference, and both theorize “the evolution of human societies.” Bourdin notes in this context Girard’s encomium of Tocqueville as the first to ascertain the role of the monarch qua sacrificial victim, going on to argue that mimetic theory entails an implicitly political stance toward democratic societies as incubators of internal mediation par excellence. 

Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s piece on Adam Smith stands out for its resistance to Girard’s “metaphor of the triangle” to illustrate the genesis of desire in preference to the Girardian figures of “double mediation” and “pseudonarcissism,” each of which Dupuy primordializes to spectacular effect. “If mimesis is universal,” he writes, “the triangle cannot be the originating figure.” This qualification allows him to mount a solution to one of the more storied problems in the history of ideas bearing on an apparent inconsistency between two works—Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its insistence on the fundamental role of sympathy in human relations, and The Wealth of Nations, which emphasizes self-love—both foundational to the science of economics. The inconsistency resolves under Dupuy’s expert guidance, which reveals Smithian sympathy as always already doubly-mediated, showing, too, that self-love, as aboriginally copied from the admiring gaze of others, is quintessentially pseudonarcissistic. Far from incompatible with sympathy, self-love is shown to be “a reflexive modality” of sympathy, which is not itself a desire, but “an operator that bears on desires,” and thus, too, only “another name for” what Girard calls mimesis. As such, Smithian sympathy both inclines to envy and stands opposed to it or, as Dupuy says, “sympathy ‘contains’ envy in both senses of the word,” i.e., inclusion/restriction. Recall here Dupuy’s seminal work on economic activity as a perpetuation of the sacred—in the sense that it, too, “contains” violence through violence—for an appreciation of why Smith’s work matters to Girardian studies. Dupuy’s usual rigor makes this one of the more limpid and galvanizing essays in the collection. 

As things turn out, Machiavelli is another thinker about whom Girard wrote nothing, despite what Harald Wydra modestly terms “elective affinities” uniting their bodies of work. It is of use to see them both here as “thinkers of violence,” without regard to their contrasting orientations—statecraft and scientific interpretation respectively. Wydra discovers in the work of the political philosopher a “mimetic anthropology” where prerational “desire, imitation and sacrifice” are emphasized over self-possessed rational action, as constitutive of political order, which is itself “a condition of the economy of violence.” This is an extraordinarily far-sighted assessment for the age in which Machiavelli lived. He is clearly working with a keen sense of the ways in which desire provokes reciprocation, leading to conflict, which then produces undifferentiation, the foundering of hierarchies, and a call for acts of sacrificial violence. 

For Wolfgang Palaver, it is Hobbes’ status as a “thinker of crisis” that puts him in the ambit of Girard’s reflection on social violence. Perhaps most importantly, Hobbes envisions the state of nature as a state of “Warre,” necessitating the imposition of political order, which he thinks is concluded by contractual agreement. If Girard’s criticism of Hobbes’ rationalism is not unwarranted here, Palaver is quick to note a Hobbesian intimation of the need for “sacred oaths rooted in the scapegoat mechanism” to fortify the primordial institution of civil society, alongside a number of items from his teaching on sovereignty that bear comparison with Girard’s scapegoat-king. In the last analysis, a darkly pessimistic strain tells Hobbes’ apocalypticism from Girard’s expectation of apocalyptic hope; here, Palaver reprises Voegelin’s contention that Hobbes’ “ontology of violence” is what comes of foreclosing transcendent aspiration, of denying the possibility that we might take the summum bonum — “eternal peace in God”—for an extramundane object of longing over conflict-abetting terrestrial goods and prizes.

The anthology is further enriched by two incisive essays on Rousseau and Kant by Jeremiah Alberg, who convincingly equates amour-propre with mimetic desire and its tendency to spiraling violence, adducing the Discourse on Inequality to show that Rousseau fully anticipates the pharmacologic use of violence as well. The most intriguing claim Alberg presses is for Rousseau’s scandalized fascination with Christ, whom he installs “at the very center of his system without ever mentioning his name,” as the one whose refusal to “give in to scandal” entails that he be scandalously “betrayed and killed.” There can be no accommodation of this antinomic figure, since he reveals Rousseau’s thought as divided against itself, and even from his readers for whom he makes himself an object of scandal (qua onanist, say) and a model of scandalized exception-taking. In his second essay, Alberg reminds us that Kant’s “awareness of the crisis of reason,” and the entirety of his critical enterprise, sprang from an encounter with the writings of Rousseau, who refuses the collapse of us-them distinctions on which his scandalized outlook depends, a collapse the figure of Christ epitomizes. This imparts to Kant’s thought a taint of rivalrous imitation, installing the always already sacrificial demand for catharsis at the heart of the critical project. Alberg treats the antinomies of pure reason as embodying scandal’s deadlock (i.e., the simultaneity of attraction and repulsion), which is as compelling an attempt as I’ve found anywhere to take seriously Girard’s contention for the origin of consciousness in an act of violent expulsion that must accordingly structure thought from its least reflective inclination to the outer limits of reason in contemplation of itself.

Among the most stirring essays here are two by co-editor Andreas Wilmes, whose piece on Hegel continues the important work of mapping Girard’s relationship with a philosopher to whom some think he remains sizably indebted, as to the French Hegelianism of Kojève. Wilmes’ contribution makes for a nuanced appreciation of all the ways Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” and “unhappy consciousness” fail to capture the gravity of the “ontological sickness” with which mimetic desire is infected. Rooted as it is in the conscious self-possession of contradistinguished rivals with diametric aims, Hegel’s “struggle for recognition” misses the abyssal implications of interdividual psychology for human rivalry, whose mimetic dynamism liquefies the rationalistic categories and staged formality of the contest he envisions. More striking yet is Wilmes’ contention for the incommensurability of Hegel’s conceptual logic, with its foundational laws of identity and noncontradiction, and the “logic of desire” which, inclining to a rivalry for Being that symmetrizes, routinely flouts these constraints. Wilmes’ treatment in this context of Girard’s appeal to Clausewitz’s “absolute war” as limitless escalation is superb, as is the chapter on Girard himself, which concludes the volume with a roundup of philosophical topoi and major names with whom Girard is conspicuously associated—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida. 

Here, Wilmes takes up Girard’s mention of “what philosophers call ‘the closure of representation,’” which is itself engendered by an “ungraspable lie” and as such impenetrable from within: “Each of us lives in a cultural system,” Girard writes, “like a fish in a bowl,” inside of a system that “is always closed, in a certain sense, by victims” (Girard, When These Things Begin, 3). As the unitary generator of representation in all its countervailing diversity, the victim mechanism remains concealed. This is one way of getting at Girard’s claim for the continuity between “the polemics of philosophy” and “the violence of mythology”: as discursive traditions, myth and philosophy may be formally discriminable, but as systems of representation they differ only to the degree to which the violence that structures them is either conspicuously misrepresented, as it is in the text of myth, or philosophically whitewashed, denied. If the inaugural move of the philosophical tradition is a restriction of violence to the economy of a text that subtilizes and conceals its presence, this move is not without cost to the logical coherence of the discourse, which presupposes foundational distinctions, laws. But, then, violence is an un-differentiator that de-structures everything it touches—even and especially these. The telltale sign of its presence is the entanglement of myth’s narrative sequence and philosophy’s argumentative consecution. What Derrida shows us is the violence entangling philosophic discourse as the logique du supplément, a “logic” of conceptual interpenetration and nonidentical iterability that muddles semantic delimitations on which a ratiocinative tradition depends for its very coherence. Wilmes rightly identifies the operation of this logique with Girard’s “logic of desire,” which provokes conflicts similarly marked by runaway doubling and the merger of stable identities.  

Let me end by returning to the closure of representation by violence, which breaks the logical coherence of whatever is being represented. If Girard exceeds the deconstructor in his willingness to move past the text and its sacrificial indications to the bloodied altar, how is his, too, not just another representation, and as such compromised by the violence representation always entails? Here we come to a parting of the ways. For Derrida, representations conceal the derangement of meaning their closure invariably produces, infinitely postponing any decision between them. For Girard, alternatively, it is the advent of the gospel text that, as a kind of deconstructed myth, permits us to see through its cracks to the violence beneath the surface, to the violence that structures not just mythic representation but philosophical representation, too, regarded “as a direct extension of the structures of the sacred.” On this reckoning, Derrida becomes the unwitting agent of all the gospel text sets in motion as deconstructed myth, as the primordial deconstructive reading, which in turn enables every other. What he remains unwilling to credit is an event long past (not deferred as an “impossible possibility” to the avenir of a justice to come), an event of textual inscription disclosing the power of violence to misrepresent, one whose historical fallout plainly defies enclosure, proofed as it is against totalization for as long as the ages run (Derrida, 450-455).

Except where indicated, all citations are taken from the volume under review.

Works Cited 

Adams, Rebecca, and René Girard. “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation with René Girard.” Religion and Literature 25, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 9-33.

Bertonneau, Thomas F. “The Logic of the Undecideable: An Interview with René Girard.” Paroles gelees 5, no. 1 (1987): 1-24.

Derrida, Jacques. “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 2 (2007): 441-61.

Girard, René. Resurrection from the Underground: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Translated by James G. Williams. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012.

———. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

———. When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Triguer. Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014.

Manent, Pierre. “René Girard’s Lesson of Darkness.” Commentaire 5, no. 19 (Autumn 1982): 457-463.

Alterity unfolds with early chapters expounding on the concept of “otherness” and ways in which the human being defines itself in relationship to “the other.” In the first half of the book, Oughourlian supplies a summary of Girardian insights into mimetic desire; readers less familiar with his earlier works will find themselves sufficiently orientated to the theory. In later chapters, he provides examples of the application of Girardian theory to problems ranging from anxiety, depression, guilt, and envy, to related somatic or behavioral symptoms.

Through case examples, Oughourlian illustrates his technique for assisting patients to acknowledge how rivalry is wreaking havoc on their mental and emotional wellbeing. He then describes a method for empowering patients to select more suitable models—and in some cases more adaptive rivalries—to help free themselves from compulsive competitions and hopeless struggles. Readers will appreciate the transcribed dialogues between Oughourlian and his patients which provide concrete examples of questions, suggestions, and recommendations to help patients become “unstuck” and perceive a wider range of options.

The field of modern psychiatry is self-admittedly steeped in individualistic epistemology. Oughourlian’s approach represents a refreshing counterbalance by shifting our attention away from the individual to the relationship. Nevertheless, the influence of traditional gender normativity is visible in his descriptions of male and female patients and literary characters. Passages in which Oughourlian references historical ideas related to hierarchy—for instance a treatise on what he refers to as the “malady of equality” [translated from French] (12)—may benefit from a feminist and non-Western dialogue partner. To suggest that, within intractably hierarchical societies, individuals assigned a lower social rank are liberated from envy or distress because advancement is impossible may seem to readers akin to justifying oppression because the oppressed person “appears content”; in reality, an authentic feedback loop may be what has been rendered impossible.

One of the most helpful insights from Alterity, from the perspective of neuroscience, may be the observation that symptoms of distress often emerge because a person is deprived of the possibility of fighting or fleeing a dangerous situation. Oughourlian would offer us the hope that, by assisting a patient (or ourselves) to perceive where such a possibility to fight or flee exists and act on it responsibly, we might find our symptoms relieved. Furthermore, readers will likely feel appreciation for Oughourlian’s persistent benevolent posture toward the patients he endeavors to help. Throughout his writings, readers get a sense of his respect for human autonomy and reverence for the complexity of human relationships, which translates into compassionate treatment of suffering.

The combination of Oughourlian’s explanation of mimetic theory and breakdown of his therapeutic technique makes Alterity a unique contribution to both Girardian literature and clinical scholarship. Oughourlian’s overall premise is that human suffering is often less a function of “what” is happening in our lives and more a function of “how” we are operating inside our relationship with people and situations. He urges us to recognize when a beloved model has fallen off the pedestal and become a rival or obstacle; this is when symptoms of distress will predictably emerge. Oughourlian encourages us to be optimistic about our ability to gain insight into our toxic rivalries and choose more constructive ways of relating to our desires. In doing so, he inspires us to hope that seemingly immovable human suffering may be a portal to individual wellness within a web of satisfying human relationships.

The central chapter, on Christology, begins with mirror neurons and introduces mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism before turning to the story of Christ and the importance of forgiveness. While moving quickly, it also offers some new angles, particularly its reframing of scapegoating as the “Triangle of Punishment,” which suggests how victimage dynamics get replicated in many ordinary interpersonal contexts where the harms often go unnoticed—and how forgiveness is the key remedy.

Because mimetic theory explains human relationality on a scientific basis, it makes it more possible to conceive the historical impact of the life of Christ on a human, horizontal level, in parallel with the usual religious language. I think of this as Christ initiating a new pattern of relationship, a model of communion in confession and forgiveness rather than individuals and collectives formed in rivalry, blame, and violence—a model that deepens and universalizes the affectionate bonds of family and friendship into the imitation of loving self-sacrifice. The Brain and the Spirit takes such a perspective to another, neurological level. The advent of Christ can be seen to change the brains of his friends (as St. David consistently calls them) in ways prepared for by Hebrew scripture and history and carried forward by what the New Testament speaks of as the movement of the Spirit.

The book exudes hope that we are still just beginning to live into the salvation—that is, the psychological and social healing—revealed in Christ. A postscript speaks of this as an epiphany, but this conclusion risks underselling the book’s contribution (and slipping into the misconception of Girardian atonement theology as gnostic). For St. David treats Christian revelation as precisely not just a theological idea to be affirmed or even an intellectual insight to be applied. Thinking of Christ’s words in Luke 17:19, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well,” St. David writes: “From here, I had a new question—could faith and trust be the same thing neurobiologically? If so, then I thought ‘saved by faith’ appeared less as a cognitive decision to believe, and more the response of the nervous system to an authentic face-to-face encounter with a trustworthy person perceived accurately” (117). Thus, accurate understanding of Jesus is crucial, but only the beginning. 

St. David offers her book, on the final page, as a contribution to “discerning potential steps forward and practices that might support the life, relationality, kindness, creativity, and access to joy rendered possible by trust” (171). The term “positive mimesis” often used to identify the opposite of violent mimesis tends to be a blank waiting to be filled in. Terms like “loving mimesis” in the work Rebecca Adams, Vern Neufeld Redekop, Anthony Bartlett, and others have served to fill this blank. By starting with brain science, St. David expands this vocabulary still further and grounds it in embodied reality so that positive mimesis seems more of a presence of which violence is the absence, a presence whose irruption into our impoverished reality we are still in the process of witnessing.