Sacrifice displaces a community’s internal violence onto an outside victim.

Evidence

René Girard, drawing on the work of Samuel Leinhardt and Victor Turner, develops and transforms this point by emphasizing what the victim does for the community: sacrifice, Girard writes, is a “deliberate act of collective substitution performed at the expense of the victim and absorbing all the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community.” Girard here lays groundwork for his renowned notion of “scapegoating”: “the victim is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered through the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.” — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 428

Categorization

• DEFINE: Presents Girard’s scapegoating mechanism as a portable framework for reading political sacrifice.
• XREF: connects to: Anthropologists hold that destruction of the victim defines sacrifice — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 734; Scapegoating follows an ancient ritual template of gendered communal sacrifice. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 374

Broader Connections

• Scapegoating follows an ancient ritual template of gendered communal sacrifice. #corroborates (0.82) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 374