Austerity’s shared sacrifice redirects public rage away from banks.

Evidence

Might interpellation by the call to sacrifice repress political dissension or uprising? Alternatively, perhaps “shared sacrifice” inverts while sustaining the general logic that Girard outlines: instead of preserving the community through sacrifice of a victim outside of it, the whole community is called to sacrifice in order to save particular elements within it. Thus, for example, rage appropriately directed at investment banks is redirected into a call for shared sacrifice undertaken by their victims. This would seem to be exactly the logic that Occupy was seeking to expose and reverse in its attempt to hold the banks, rather than the people, responsible for creating an unsustainable debt-based economy. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 429

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘inverted Girard’ insight parallels how moral panics displace underlying social grievances onto displaced targets — connects to Cohen’s moral panic framework in the reader’s corpus. — connects to: Bailing out bankers while imposing austerity damaged faith in politicians — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 392; Austerity transforms neoliberal rationality from freedom toward sacrifice. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 135; European austerity is a bait-and-switch to save banks from themselves without admitting it — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 208 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Austerity calls for sacrifice to the economy as an unreturned offering. #expands (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 426
• Austerity frames national crisis as requiring patriotic individual sacrifice in frugality and labor #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 803
• European austerity is a bait-and-switch to save banks from themselves without admitting it #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 208
• Austerity transforms neoliberal rationality from freedom toward sacrifice. #expands (0.78) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 135
• Austerity’s three pressures function to foreclose the imagination of alternatives. #complicates (0.78) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 156
• Austere economies structurally disempower those who would protest austerity #expands (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1541