{"id":2014,"date":"2010-06-28T23:20:45","date_gmt":"2010-06-29T06:20:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/?p=2014"},"modified":"2010-06-28T23:20:45","modified_gmt":"2010-06-29T06:20:45","slug":"we-are-stuck-in-the-middle-of-history-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/2010\/06\/28\/we-are-stuck-in-the-middle-of-history-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"We are stuck in the middle of history ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

You cannot view [history] from above or get an eagle-eye view of the events. I myself though that was possible when I was writing Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978), in which I imagined Christianity provided the point of view from which we could judge violence. However, there is neither non-sacrificial space, nor “true history”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll admit that when I read Things Hidden I found his passages on the “non-sacrificial” view of history completely confusing. It is pleasant to discover that he has now thrown most of this out.<\/p>\n

I reread my analysis of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, which was my last “modern” and “anti-Christian” argument. The criticism of an “historical Christianity” and argument in favor of a kind of “essential Christianity,” which I thought I had grasped in a Hegelian manner,m was absurd. On the contrary, we have to think of Christianity as essentially historical, and Clausewitz helps us do so. Solomon’s judgment explains everything on this score: there is the sacrifice of the other, and self-sacrifice; archaic sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. However, it is all sacrifice.<\/p>\n

We are immersed in mimetism and have to find a way around the pitfalls of our desire, which is always desire for what the other possesses. I repeat, absolute knowledge is not possible. We are forced to remain at the heart of history and to act at the heart of violence because we are always gaining a better understanding of its mechanisms. Will we ever be able to elude them? I doubt it.<\/p>\n

-Rene Girard, Battling to the End, p.35<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You cannot view [history] from above or get an eagle-eye view of the events. I myself though that was possible when I was writing Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978), in which I imagined Christianity provided the point of view from which we could judge violence. However, there is neither non-sacrificial space, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “We are stuck in the middle of history ourselves”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2014"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2017,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions\/2017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}