Violence and Resistance

Nathan Colborne is assistant professor of religions and cultures, Nipissing University, presents an overview of his article Violence and Resistance: Towards a Politics without a Scapegoat For René Girard, the cause of violence is deeper than the competition and conflict over scarce goods but emerges from the very structure of desire and the social mechanism that has developed to deal with it. The scapegoat mechanism both prevents the violence of the self's desire from destroying the entire community and conceals its own operation from the society that practises it. For this reason, attempts to eliminate or restrain violence that fail to come to terms with this mechanism and the genuine problem it addresses simply institutionalize scapegoating and extend its scope, perpetuating the very violence they seek to end. Girard exposes the workings of the scapegoat mechanism deep within the self in an attempt to overcome the violence that continues to haunt modern politics. I argue