René Girard’s theory is a complete repudiation of the metaphysical project, connected as it is to an inherent violence, while William Desmond sees metaphysics as “a living option.”[1] There are levels of agreement between Desmond and Girard, in their assessment of the value of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and their portrayal of a “despairing” way toward God, and it is no huge task to touch on some of these agreements (as I do below), but it may be necessary to also bring out the differences, so as to emphasize the strength of each. Girard draws out the absolute difference between Christ the Logos and the human logos, recognizing that the reification and attachment to the word or language per se stands over and against the divine Word. The lie and the violence of the satan are completely opposed by Christ. Desmond does not so much disagree with the critique of metaphysics, provided by Girard and others, but this is not the end of the story for him. In fact, his theory might be seen as giving priority to a Word, before the word, which accounts for human failure and its movements within a larger ontological frame.
Girard Against Metaphysics
Girard recounts and agrees with Martin Heidegger’s tracing of Greek metaphysics into an originary violence, locating essential being (phusis) in logos, and raises the question as to how this unfolds into being (see my blog here). “Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming.”[2] Girard explains how and why the pursuit of being, the metaphysical enterprise, is violent. Human being and speaking, along with any theology or philosophy that has girded itself with the Greek philosophical understanding, has a hidden and necessary violence at its origins. This is the charge Anthony Bartlett, a contemporary Girardian, levels at the Thomistic understanding of God (along with Anselm or any theology which would employ Greek philosophical thought). As first cause of everything (being), according to Bartlett, “God here reinforces a hierarchical order of origin, authority, and, necessary, violence.”[3]
In Bartlett’s recounting of the story, the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and John Deely, converge on the notion that “being,” which cannot be posited apart from its apprehension in language, already contains the antagonistic otherness of the sign (see here and here) . There is no being apart from its sign, and the sign contains or sets forth meaning in its separateness from the biological world. Both being and the sign refer to an extended, infinite, otherness. “The world itself is the ‘other,’ rendered present in a sign, yet strange, infinite, congenitally open itself, by virtue of the mysterious, ‘nihilating’ event of the sacred.”[4] In Girard’s terms, the original murder is hidden in the sign as that which is negated, and this compelling emptiness or otherness requires another sign, so that the signifying chain covers over the original absence (murder), as in Derrida’s “deferral” of meaning (to define one word requires a multiplicity of words – ad infinitum), or Heidegger’s and Hegel’s nothingness (the other over and against which all else, something, derives its meaning). To imagine God on the basis of the sign of being is to project violent mimetic desire and sacrifice onto God. There is no possibility for a Christian to think of God rightly, according to Girard, through a metaphysical understanding.
Desmond’s Reworking of Metaphysics
Desmond defines his entire project as the development of metaphysics: “Being and the Between asks: What does it mean to be? Ethics and the Between asks: What does it mean to be good? God and the Between asks: What does it mean to be divine or God? As the metaphysics of the first work points further to the ethical philosophy of the second, God and the Between represents the philosophy of God continuous with both the metaphysics of the first work and ethics of the second.”[5] Desmond is not unaware of the Girardian critique and is intimately familiar with the postmodern critique of metaphysics, but his is a reworking and perhaps a redefinition of this philosophical and theological enterprise. Chris Simpson summarizes the different approach Desmond takes:
For Desmond, metaphysics is not in the business of providing the assurances of a pure access to reality—it entails perplexity, disquiet, struggle, strain and failure. Metaxological metaphysics is a discourse of and in the middle—it does not overestimate its grasp by envisioning an escape from the middle to gain a view from nowhere. Instead of nailing things down, metaphysics is an attending to astonishment and perplexities that rupture and constitute a breakdown—a self debunking—of thought’s claims of self-sufficiency and absolute self-certain knowing. Metaphysics is an “interpretive fidelity” to and a mindfulness of the emergent happenings in the middle, the between—to the “finite facts” on the surface of life—a being attentive to the community of being’s plurality of others in interrelation.[6]
This is not the metaphysics which presided prior to the Girardian and postmodern critique, but it is a reworked and reevaluated understanding that accords with that critique.
The Theological Import of Metaphysics
Karl Barth’s notion that “the analogia entis (the analogy of being) is the invention of the antichrist,” may be inaccurate in the details but also an apt description of the metaphysical pursuit as it actually unfolded. Barth was surveying the consequences of metaphysics in Nazi Germany, and had a sharp appreciation for the difference between the human logos and the divine Logos as the mediating reality. Add to Barth’s understanding the Girardian insight, and it becomes clear why a certain naïve understanding of metaphysics can be literally assigned to the satan (the scandalan, in Girard’s explanation). In a Girardian explanation, entry into language is through the scapegoating mechanism (a lying violence), so to imagine that Christ can be understood as aligning with or analogous to human religion, philosophy, or culture, would mean, as Heidegger recognized and agreed, that the Logos of Christ is in servitude to the human logos.
Heidegger chooses Hitler over Christ because he understood the human logos, as portrayed by Heraclitus is the by-product of war and violence. According to Girard, “Heidegger obviously means there to be a difference between the violence of the Greek Logos and the violence he attributes to the Johannine Logos. He sees the former as a violence committed by free men, while the second is a violence visited upon slaves.”[7] As I have previously explained (here), it is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role (“the violence visited upon slaves”) to the Greek Logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[8] In the end, according to Girard’s reading of Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition other than the Johannine Logos is subservient to and a development of the Greek understanding.
Heidegger is a sophisticated reader of metaphysical development, recognizing in his historical and philosophical analysis what Girard would uncover in his anthropological and literary analysis. In his examination of being, Heidegger concludes that the primary recognition in Dasein of “being there” is that language precedes or speaks the human, meaning the provenance of language is determinant of its speakers. “Language speaks” and this being in language is primary.[9] What is shown in language is a “relatedness backward or forward.”[10] Metaphysics is letting this being in language show itself, and what it shows is the implication of language in violence and death. To not take this history into account, to not assign a specific role, as Girard does, to Christ uncovering of this violent logos, is in danger of mistaking the devil for God. This form of the analogia entis is indeed, of the antichrist. The postmodern critique of metaphysics is not only deserved but necessary, but is it possible that the problem is not in metaphysics per se? Is there a taking into account the Girardian and postmodern critique, simultaneously incorporating metaphysical failure, into a more holistic understanding?
Desmond’s Philosophical Theology
Desmond is not working from a Girardian form of Christocentrism, in which Christ alone uncovers the violence of the scapegoat, but he does see the Christian task as one of uncovering counterfeits or doubles which parody or counterfeit the God-man (on a broader scale), but these counterfeits are subtly interwoven with the human circumstance. It is not that human desire is the origin of this circumstance, but its perversion and misconstrual. Through a close reading of Hegel and Nietzsche he demonstrates how in our self-antagonism we project our image onto God. “God as our own beyond is the source of the devaluation of the earth and ourselves.”[11] This God needs to be displaced, if true humanity is to be recovered, but this can also be described as part of the metaphysical task. Desmond takes account of the failure of a form of metaphysics and aims to point out the goodness of being and the wonder of creation. A failed metaphysics would evacuate the world of wonder, but Desmond seeks to show why this is a stunted form of reality. Man may be fallen, evil may be present, but this is not the primary reality of being. There is a “too-muchness” to being that needs to be allowed for. “Rather we begin to ‘know’ the absolute, in a knowing that does not know, just when we understand that there is nothing more necessary for philosophy than that it should just so go beyond itself, without immanent reserve, without reserving the divine for its own immanence – in an agapeic exceeding of mindfulness beyond thought thinking itself.”[12] There must be a thinking out of philosophy in light of faith, rather than an abandonment of either faith or philosophy, and Desmond sees his work as renewing entry into this key crossing.
Desmond wants to put religion and philosophy into dialogue, opening up the possibility of a renewed speculative theology and philosophy. To close up philosophical shop due to its failure, is to give way to an immanent frame, but Desmond seeks a renewal of thinking and openly acknowledges his theological indebtedness. “There is a porosity between religion and philosophy, not a rigid separation, and communications can carry or be received from both sides. . . . We find vigor for it because we are first invigorated. The promise of being religious is recurrently resurrected because it is constitutive of what we are, what we are given to be, and what we are to be.”[13]
The Convergence of Girard and Desmond
As Ryan Duns explains, Desmond and Girard are on a parallel path, offering a despairing way to God: “we learn to discern within faith’s ‘withdrawing roar’ not God’s absence but a gathering silence testifying to God’s presence.”[14] Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics acknowledges God’s presence, even in the dialectical drive to univocity through equivocity. That is, he is completing or building upon the Hegelian project: “the metaxological sense is an Aufhebung of the other three senses, preserving the truth of each way as it attempts to give a fuller account of what it means ‘to be.’”[15] As I previously summed it up (here), Desmond’s four ways might be read as the passage from fall to redemption in which the human failure is the attempt to be their own origin (univocity) through an implicit and denied plurality or difference (equivocity), and this fall into metaphysical striving (dialectics) is the common human passage toward realizing the fulness of personhood (in the metaxological).
In Pauline terms, the law is simultaneously necessary and it is necessary that its punishing effects be suspended (Aufhebung). There is something necessary in the passage from the first Adam to the Second, with the first not simply a negation but providing for recognition of Christ. In a Girardian sense, language may only be acquired through the deception of the scapegoat, but this logos establishes recognition of the Logos that is Christ. For Desmond, metaphysics (of the metaxological kind) is necessary to describe “the ontological stage on which life’s play unfolds.”[16] There is a “primal ethos” which is given through creation and then the “reconfigured” shaping of that ethos or givenness. “In every era, however, we exert ourselves as we mold and shape our ethos. The resultant “reconfigured ethos” describes how the effects of our self-assertion either remain true to the primal ethos or distort it.”[17]
Desmond is attuned to the subtleties of this reshaping – in the modern reconfiguration there is a “devaluing objectification of being” and “subjectification of value.”[18] The interplay of the ethos of the age and philosophy converge in the emptying out of being, evacuating its value and astonishing goodness. In both Girard and Desmond, the emptying out is itself a revelation. “The nihil’s purgation clears the cataracts from our eyes and we behold not an alternative reality but reality alternatively, as replete with God’s presence. We encounter the divine not by being freed from the finite (Plato and Aurelius) but by glimpsing the infinite disclosed within it.”[19] Girard’s theory is a counsel in despair, pointing to the singular revelation of Christ, but Desmond’s may be an even broader despair but also a pointer to all of creation illuminated by God’s goodness and grandeur.
Before one did not see, but now one begins to see; begins to see because a light that one cannot command is coming up and coming over one. One is being lighted; one is not enlightened, one is being enlightened. We are recipients of something that we cannot entirely specify or pin down. It stuns us into silence. The seeds of a metanoetics are being sown. A new noesis: a new mindfulness that does not know what it knows, and yet it knows that the same things will no longer be the same.[20]
An Appreciation of the Difference Between Desmond and Girard
It is not that this broad enlightenment is absent from Girard, in his exposure of myth and the uncovering of sacrificial violence, but Desmond shows how even failure is temporary and points beyond itself, while the Girardian appreciation of the Gospel shows how the world is disfigured by sacrificial violence and how it can be delivered through gospel peace. Strangely, my own work might seem to favor the focus on Girardian deception, the lie that is at the heart of violent culture and religion, which is a necessary lie for Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, but before the lie there must be the truth. Girard brings out the sharp distinction between the human logos and the divine Word, showing how the human error is to reify and absolutize this word, while Desmond seems to emphasize that what precedes and accounts for the human logos is the Divine Logos. The distinction between the two may not be as sharp in Desmond, but Desmond’s work calls upon this resource of the Word, beyond being and beyond knowing, providing for both fall and redemption.
[1] William Desmond, God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) xi.
[2] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 160.
[3] Anthony Bartlett, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard (Cascade Books, 2020) 91.
[4] Bartlett, 97.
[5] God and the Between, xi.
[6] Christopher Ben Simpson, Divine Hyperbolics: Desmond, Religion, Metaphysics and the Postmodern (Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2008) 108.
[7] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 266.
[8] Things Hidden, 265.
[9] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 28.
[10] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans., Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 207
[11] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 203.
[12] God and the Between, xii.
[13] God and the Between, xii.
[14] Ryan Duns, “’In Despair, Despair Not’ : Ways to God for a Secular Age” in Theological Studies (2020, Vol. 81(2) 348 –369) 350.
[15] Duns, 352.
[16] Duns, 352.
[17] Duns, 352.
[18] William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 41 Cited in Duns,
[19] Duns, 355.
[20] William Desmond, “Godsends: On the Surprise of Revelation,” Ephemerides Theologiae Lovanienses 92, no. 1 (2016): 7–28 at 28. Cited in Duns, 366.