I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

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144 145 it and cannot represent it precisely because they are based on it, because the victim mechanism is their generating principle. These texts are the myths. The exegetes are dupes of the modern bias of concluding too quickly that texts dealing with collective violence are violent texts whose violence we have the duty to denounce. Under the influence of the Nietzsche tradition (see chapter 14), our bias tends to function on the principle of "no smoke without fire." This is as mys- tifying as can be in the subject concerning us here. The exegetes treat the Judeo-Christian revelation as a kind of Freudian or Niet- zschean symptom in the sense of the "slave morality." They see the revelation of the victim mechanism as the leveling effect of social resentment, for example. They never wonder whether by chance this revelation may be justified. Only wherever it is not represented can mimetic snowballing play a generative role due to the very fact that it is not represented, that it misunderstands itself. As soon as mimetic contagion has taken over the community, its members are possessed by it. Violent contagion speaks for them; mimetic violence pronounces the guilt of the victim and the innocence of the persecutors. The community no longer speaks; the speaker is rather the one the Gospels name as the accuser, <strong>Satan</strong>. Pseudoscientific exegetes don't see that the biblical basis of Ju- daism and Christianity transmits the first revelatory and liberating representations regarding violence. Violence has always existed, but until the biblical revelation it remained concealed in the infra- structure of mythology. Under the influence of Nietzsche and Freud, our contemporaries go and find in these texts, whose referentiality is denied without the least proof, various indications of a "persecution complex" with which Judaism and Christianity as a whole are alleged to be afflicted. Mythology, on the other hand, is held to be exempt from this complex. The proof that all this is absurd is the superb indifference, the regal contempt, that mythology shows toward any suggestion of possible violence of the strong against the weak, of those in the majority against the minority, of the healthy against the ill, of the normal against the abnormal, of the native against the foreigners, and so on. Modern confidence in the myths is even stranger in our day when our contemporaries are terribly suspicious regarding their own soci- ety. They see hidden victims everywhere except where they really are, in the myths that they never look at with a critical eye. Contemporary thinkers, still under Nietzschean influence, have the habit of seeing the myths as kindly texts, sympathetic, cheer- ful, and lively. Mythology is regarded as superior in every way to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, which are dominated, not by a legitimate concern for justice and truth, but by morbid suspicion. Most intellectuals in the present world seem to adopt this perspective. What sells this view is the apparent absence of unjust violence in the myths or the aesthetic transformation of violent deeds. By contrast, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures come across as so obsessed with persecutions that their relationship to them must at least suggest their own guilt. To grasp this misunderstanding in its enormity, we must see it in light of a case of unjust condem- nation of a victim. My example is the famous Dreyfus case, an affair so thoroughly clarified that it now eliminates any possibility of misunderstanding. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Cap- tain Dreyfus, condemned for a crime he had not committed, was serving his sentence, there were, on one side, the "anti-Dreyfus" people, who were numerous and perfectly serene and satisfied, for they had their collective victim, and they congratulated themselves on seeing him justly punished. On the other side were the defenders of Dreyfus, very, very few at first. For a long time people viewed them as obvious traitors or professional malcontents, always occupied with chewing over all sorts of grievances and suspicions whose real basis no one around them could see. Critics looked for the motives of their behavior in personal morbidity or political prejudices. In fact, anti-Dreyfusism was a true myth, a false accusation that the accusers confused with truth. Mimetic contagion maintained a
146 147 contagion so kindled by anti-Semitic prejudice that no disclosure of the real facts of the case during these years succeeded in shaking it. Those who celebrate the "innocence" of the myths, their joy in life, and their healthy outlook and who put all that in opposition to the sickly suspicion of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels commit a grave error. It is the same error, in my view, as those who opted for anti-Dreyfusism against Dreyfusism. One writer and poet of that period, Charles Peguy (1873-1914), perceived the analogy with the Passion of Christ. If the supporters of Dreyfus had not fought for their point of view, if they had not suffered (at least some of them) for the truth, if they had admitted, as have some in our day, that to believe there is such a thing as truth is the fundamental sin—then Dreyfus would never have been vindicated, and the lie would have won the victory. If we admire the myths that don't detect the innocent victims in their own stories and condemn the Bible because it does, then we relapse into the illusion of the anti-Dreyfus majority, which re- fused to consider the possibility of a judicial error. Through much struggle and suffering the supporters of Dreyfus achieved a triumph for a truth as absolute, intransigent, and dogmatic as Joseph's in his opposition to mythological violence. THE VICTIM MECHANISM is not a literary theme like many others; it is a principle of illusion. As such, it cannot appear at all in the texts it controls. If this mechanism appears explicitly as a principle of illusion, as it does in the Old Testament and New Testament, it does not dominate them in the sense that it dominates texts where it remains invisible, unsuspected, as in the myths. No text can illuminate the process of mimetic snowballing on which it is based; no text can have its basis in the violent contagion it illuminates. Thus we must guard against confusing the question of the victim of the unanimous crowd with what the literary critic talks about, namely, a theme or motif that we ascribe to a writer when it shows up in his or her writings, and that we don't ascribe, of course, if it does not show up. It is easy to recognize this error, but it is even easier not to recognize it, and as a rule, it goes unrecognized. Hardly anyone suspects that if the myths never speak of arbitrary violence, this could be because they unknowingly reflect the virulence of a persecution that does not recognize its victims anywhere but sees them as justly ex- pelled culprits—victims like Oedipus, for example, who are supposed to have "really" committed parricide and incest. It is mimetic contagion that completely determines the contents of mythology. The myths are so much in its thrall that they cannot suspect their own subjection. No text can make allusion to the principle of illusion that governs it. To be a victim of illusion is to take it for true, so it means one is unable to express it as such, as illusion. By being the first to point out persecutory illusion, the Bible initiates a revolution that, through Christianity, spreads little by little to all humanity without being really understood by those whose profession and pride are to under- stand everything. This is one of the reasons, I believe, Jesus speaks the literal truth when he exclaims: "I thank you, Father... that you have hidden these things from the wise and clever and revealed them to babes" (Matt. 11:25). The necessary condition enabling the single victim mechanism to dominate a text is that it does not appear as an explicit theme. And vice versa: a victim mechanism cannot dominate a text—the Gospels—in which it explicitly appears. This involves a paradox that forces us to see our dreadful blindness to the greatness of the Passion accounts. It is always the individual or the revelatory text that is taken to be responsible for the inexcusable violence it re- veals. We tend, in short, to hold the messenger responsible for the unpleasantness of the message, as Cleopatra does in Shakespeare s play. The specific character of myths is to hide their own violence. It is the character of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures to reveal the same violence and to suffer the consequences in the eyes of blind humanity. The principle of illusion or victim mechanism cannot appear in broad daylight without losing its structuring power. In order to be
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