Mary Worth & French Post-Modernism: 10/23/21

"Contemporary thought is in chaos, as it must be when progress is real. Where it still survives, it displays pathological symptoms. Thought, in fact, is caught up in a circle, the very circle drawn for us by Euripidean tragedy. In striving to escape from the circle, thought only enters more deeply into it, and as the radius of the circle shrinks, thought moves ever faster, spinning itself into an obsession.

[...]

Nothing now exists to interfere with a full revelation of violence--not even violence itself, which men and its own extraordinary growth have combined to deprive of that freedom of moment that formerly assured the efficiency of the generative mechanism and the repression of the truth. The trap that the Western Oedipus has set for himself will snap closed at the precise moment when the quest is finished, for trap and quest, here again, are one and the same thing.

Today the reign of violence is made manifest. It assumes the awesome and horrific form of technological weaponry. These weapons, as the 'experts' blandly inform us, are what is keeping the whole world more or less in line. The idea of 'limitless' violence, long scorned by sophisticated Westerners, suddenly looms up before us. Absolute vengeance, formerly the prerogative of the gods, now returns, precisely weighed and calibrated, on the wings of science. And it is this force, we are told, that prevents the first planetary society, the society that already encompasses or will encompass the whole of humanity, from destroying itself.

It seems increasingly clear that the pressure of violence or the insistence of truth (for whom man acts as a kind of torchbearer) has forced modern man to come face to face with this same violence or truth. For the first time he is confronted with a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence."

-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred