Boska przemoc. Wokół kozła ofiarnego René Girarda
Streszczenie
Girard indicates an ancient text which we perfectly know as one
of the books of the Holy Scripture - the Book of Job. He presents the
ominous face of the sacred, the idea of a divinity, in the name of which a
scapegoat can be selected and executed. Job for Girard is an
unsuccessful scapegoat, i.e. the one that has not accepted his fault. Had
Job not rebel against the social intentions, today he would be an
example of another subject of collective violence which brought unity to
its community.
The theory of Girard, who is of the opinion that each culture is
based on founding murder and secondary sacralisation of the victim is
particularly popular today, in the age of the problem of terrorism. Slavoj
Žižek, commenting Benjamin, takes up this thread we are interested in.
This theological dimension is divine violence, understood as
intervention of a transcendent justice. Such an interpretation of
religiously motivated terrorism is so far from Benjamin’s divine justice,
that Žižek does not continue this thread. However, the person who does
this is Płuciennik, who stresses that terrorists’ motivation has
iconoclastic dimension. He notices that there is a strong current in the
contemporary intellectual landscape, which refers to apocalyptic
thinking, connected with retribution theology.