Abstract
The threat of vengeance is the ever-present backdrop to the mimetic theory of religion. “In the final analysis,” affirms René Girard, “the sole purpose of religion is to prevent the recurrence of reciprocal violence.” In this article, we successively examine three different approaches to limiting the scope of reciprocal violence: preventing vengeance outright (the logic of sacrifice); prescribing and regulating vengeance (the vindicatory system); and escaping vengeance by establishing relations of positive reciprocity (the logic of the gift).
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Further Reading
Anspach, Mark R. “Violence Against Violence: Islam in Comparative Context.” In Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World, edited by Mark Juergensmeyer, 9–29. London: Frank Cass, 1992.
———. ed. Vengeance. Special issue, Stanford French Review (vol. 16, no. 1), 1992.
———. Vengeance in Reverse: The Tangled Loops of Violence, Myth, and Madness. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017.
Clastres, Pierre. Archeology of Violence. New edition. Translated by Jeanine Herman. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010.
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. “Totalization and Misrecognition.” Translated by Mark R. Anspach. In Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard, edited by Paul Dumouchel, 75–100. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Jacoby, Susan. Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Revised edition. Translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Scubla, Lucien. “Vindicatory System, Sacrificial System: From Opposition to Reconciliation.” Stanford French Review 16.1 (1992): 55–76.
Simonse, Simon. Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan. Revised edition. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2017.
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Anspach, M.R. (2017). Vengeance and the Gift. In: Alison, J., Palaver, W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53825-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53825-3_8
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