All Desire is a Desire for Being, page 16
One recognizes here something of the fascination that the head of the antagonist, a member of some neighboring tribe ritually designated by the cultural order as the enemy, exercises on certain primitives. Primitives sometimes subject these heads to a treatment that renders them incorruptible and diminishes their size, transforming them into a type of fetish. This refinement is analogous to Salome’s horrible desire.
It is not without cause that the head on the platter crowns and concludes the dance of Salome. The two elements of the narrative explain each other. John, we learn, has become the scandal of Salome; now the dancer and the power of her art succeed in making John’s head the scandal of every spectator. This gives pleasure not to Herod alone, but to all of his guests. They all react in the same way, and the king expresses the sentiments of all when he offers Salome half of his kingdom. They are on the verge of being possessed by Salome, on the verge of a collective trance, and in their collective name Herod implores her to make that possession more complete. When you have great possessions you become identical with them, and when you offer them to a dancer, it means you want to be possessed by her.
The platter under John’s head symbolizes the dance; it is an artist’s idea, as I have suggested, but is it really original? If you look closely, its apparent originality dissolves, giving way once again to mimicry.
When Herodias, in answer to Salome, says, ‘the head of John the Baptist,’ she probably does not allude to decapitation. In Greek, as in English, to demand someone’s head is to demand his death. Period. The head is a figure of speech that consists in taking the part for the whole. Rhetoricians call this a ‘metonymy.’ The text had already mentioned Herodias’s hatred in a neutral language which suggested no fetishism of her enemy’s head: ‘And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him.’
Even if Herodias intended to suggest the type of death she wished for the prophet when she mentioned his head, it still might not mean that she wanted to hold that head in her hands, that she desired the physical object. Even in countries where beheading is practiced, to demand someone’s head must be interpreted rhetorically, and Salome takes her mother literally. She does not do so intentionally – she has not yet learned to distinguish words from things. She does not recognize the metonymy.
The platter must be less original than it appears. To contemplate the beheading of John the Baptist is one thing; to physically hold his head in one’s hands is another. The second eventuality poses a practical problem that Salome solves in the most practical manner. The best place for a freshly severed head is some kind of platter. The head on the platter is not really an esthetic idea; it is not even an idea. It is a commonsense reaction to the misinterpreted command of Herodias. Salome takes her mother’s words so literally that she misunderstands the message. She seems perverse and sadistic, and perhaps she is, but it is the same as being merely childish. Anyway, whatever she is psychologically does not really matter. It cannot fail to boil down to some overly literal form of imitation. If you interpret too literally, you will misinterpret through sheer avoidance of interpretation. Excessive concern for accuracy must invariably result in an inaccurate translation. What seems most ‘creative’ in Salome, most ‘innovative,’ as we love to say, is the very reverse. It is exclusively mimetic, mechanical, and truly hypnotic in its submission to the model that inspired it.
I am not saying this to depreciate the art of Salome. Contrary to what our exhausted avant-garde believes, all great artistic ideas are of this type – narrowly, myopically imitative. Tradition knew this, and it spoke of art in terms of mimesis, the Greek word for imitation. The modern striving for originality at all costs has reached an impasse. The greatest efforts today lead to insignificant obscenities. To discourage imitation is to drive it underground toward stylistic preciosity and ideological fads. We should not renounce the notion of mimesis but make it broad enough to include desire – or it is desire, perhaps, that should be broadened to include mimesis. By separating mimesis and desire in order to distinguish and protect order from disorder, Plato and his followers mutilated both, and we remain the prisoners of a mutilation that generates all the false dichotomies in our system of knowledge: between the esthetic, for instance, and the ethical or the psychological.
The dance does not abolish but exacerbates desire; it accelerates mimetic contagion and substitutions. We are prevented from dancing by our physical inadequacy, of course, but even more by the dreadful intertwining of our desires. Each of us is a Herodias, afflicted with some importunate prophet. The entanglements of desire are different with each and every one; each and every one has his own model-obstacle system, but the mechanism of scandal is always identical; this identity makes substitutions possible. Like all ritual arts, dance is a mimed drama that turns the participants, and even mere spectators, into a single whole; and the unity of this whole, the participation of all, is strengthened by the designation of a single enemy whose head everybody now demands: the head of John the Baptist.
To say that the dance pleases not only Herod but all his guests is to say that, by the end of the dance, all are possessed by the desire of Salome. In the head of John the Baptist, they identify not her scandal alone, nor scandal in general – that does not exist – but each his own scandal. The collective ‘yes!’ to the beheading is more than polite acquiescence. Salome’s passion has become the passion of all, and they all demand that John’s head be produced ‘immediately, with haste.’ Mimicry once more. The power of the dance resembles that of the shaman who exorcizes the evil demon or the noxious substance that has invaded his patients’ bodies. They had been possessed by some tormentor, and the dance liberates them through another possession. The dancer can make the lame and the hunchback dance because her dance exorcizes the demon that was in them. She performs a collective act of revenge. By espousing the violent desire of Salome and her mother, all the participants vicariously satisfy their own desire. It is not Hegelian ‘negativity’ nor the Freudian unconscious that guarantees the symbolicity of the prophet’s head, but the mimetic contagion of collective murder.
The beheading of John the Baptist results from a process of scapegoating that owes its distinctive character to mimetic desire, to the same force, therefore, that caused the earlier cleavages and fragmentations. The narration coincides with a mimetic crisis that concludes and resolves itself with the execution of the prophet. There is an element of randomness in the process, and it is clearly illustrated by the ‘What shall I ask?’ of Salome. The choice of the victim comes last, after the dance, at the moment when the already mimetic desire of Herodias transmits itself mimetically to her daughter, who, mimetically too, retransmits it to her admirers, and finally to Herod.
Beyond a certain threshold of excitement, almost any human group will focus on almost any victim. Mimetic desire spreads as it exacerbates. Its evolution is a shift from the private to the public sphere, from duality to multiplicity, from the individual to the mob. Like the Passion of Jesus, the passion of John the Baptist illustrates the birth of mimetic desire, its development, and finally its paroxysm and resolution in unanimous scapegoating. Salome’s question, ‘What shall I ask?’ marks the beginning of Salome’s desire and also its end, since it refers to a victim and reveals that, at that instant, designated by Herodias or perhaps by anybody else, any victim will do.
Mimetic desires cannot fail to oppose each other as long as they focus upon the same object, upon the same living being whose life they want to spare in order to appropriate that being – as did Herod with John when he locked him in prison: mimetic desires are irreconcilable at first, and they gradually disrupt the entire community. Only when they have reached the stage of fascinated hatred can they be reconciled in the destruction of some common object. The dreadful paradox of these desires is that they can make peace with each other only at the expense of some victim.
Herod’s final decision is not the independent act of a sovereign; it, too, is the fruit of mimetic suggestion. Only he can ratify a death sentence, but, like Pilate’s sentence against Jesus a little later, this one is not really the sovereign’s sentence. Herod is subjugated by the formidable mimetic pressure that emanates from his guests.
When he learns that the dancer demands the head of John, ‘the king was exceedingly sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests, he did not want to break his word to her.’ Like Herod, the guests, being pleased, want to please the dancer, and they do not have the same reason as Herod to deny her request. John means nothing to them. At the crucial moment, therefore, the guests provide a decisive supplement of mimetic energy. Mimetic influence depends on the number, the quality, and the intensity of those who exert that influence. Mark carefully points out that the guests are numerous and influential: they comprise the entire elite of the kingdom, ‘courtiers and officers and the leading men of Galilee.’
In a mimetic crisis, cultural institutions dissolve and are returned to the mob. This is what happens here to the kingship of Herod, in an attenuated form. The ultimate source of all sovereignty is the mimetic unanimity of the mob. At the height of a mimetic crisis, a single head can suffice to appease the universal perturbation. Concrete objects have disappeared. Nothing is left except for all the desires crisscrossing each other. A single head may suffice, therefore, to appease the universal perturbation. Order is restored.
Widespread scandal precluded the satisfaction of all desires and troubled all relationships, but now scandal, the inert and docile object that circulates on Salome’s platter like a thing offered, has become a bond of sociability. It has power to reconcile, both as a terrifying spectacle and as an object of exchange: ‘And immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard and gave orders to bring his head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl; and the girl gave it to her mother.’
When I emphasize mimetic desire everywhere, do I not minimize the effective manipulation of people and circumstances by Herodias in her power struggle with her husband? To arrive at her end, Herodias makes use of certain circumstances and customs: ‘But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and the leading men of Galilee.’ Herod’s birthday, the assembling of important officials, the banquet, the dance itself: these are, in effect, institutions that Herodias succeeds in utilizing against John. Behind this power is a knowledge which makes it possible, a knowledge of the effectiveness of ritual.
The opportune day, Herod’s birthday, is a holiday that returns each year on a fixed date. All important people assemble, festive activities take place. A banquet is held, a dance is performed. These activities are certainly not ‘religious,’ but they derive from ritual. They resemble the rites of primitive cultures that often culminate in the ritual immolation of an animal or even a human sacrifice. All the data in our text can be read in a ritual and sacrificial key. Herodias succeeds in harnessing against her enemy certain forces that belong to ritual.
The climactic moments in our story can be read in a ritual key. But is this a new direction, different from the one I have taken? I do not think so. I have tried to show, in my work, that ritual is the reenactment of a mimetic crisis that was spontaneously resolved by the unanimous destruction of an arbitrary victim, a victim selected by mimetic desire itself when it tends to polarize on a so-called scapegoat at the height of the mimetic conflict brought about by mimetic desire itself. The whole sequence is religiously reenacted in ritual because the mimetic scapegoat mechanism constitutes an effective resolution of the crisis. That is the reason why primitive people resort to sacrificial ritual when confronted by a real or imaginary threat to the stability of their cultural order. Especially when they feel menaced by real mimetic discord, men resort to the ritual mimicry of that discord, not for its own sake but for the sake of the doubly vicarious sacrificial conclusion that might reconcile them once again and bring back the peace at the expense of a new victim. Ritual introduces nothing really new, nothing absolutely specific into the picture.
Ritual activity is intended as a protection against mimetic conflict primarily, but it acts indirectly and paradoxically. Far from trying to oppose that desire directly, in the sense that taboos and prohibitions do, it encourages, irritates, and accelerates the mimetic interplay with the purpose of channeling it in the direction of the designated victim, the victim sacrificed to the peace and harmony of the entire community.
There is no structural difference between ritual, properly speaking, and the natural, spontaneous course of the mimetic crisis. Thus a ritual dimension can be incorporated into the text of Mark with the greatest of ease. It is already built into it, so to speak. Far from running counter to the general course of events, the maneuver of Herodias, like all successful maneuvers, does nothing but reinforce and exploit that course to the detriment of the prophet.
This does not mean that everything is the same and that I confuse the sinister plot of Herodias with authentic ritual. The latter reenacts a former mimetic crisis and stirs up a partly artificial one, so to speak, in a spirit of religious and social collaboration. The scapegoat mechanism is reactivated in order to reconcile the entire community, rather than aimed against any particular victim. Even in the most savage rituals, the accent is on the positive. This is precisely why the historical evolution of ritual runs invariably toward an attenuation and even an elimination of religious violence.
Institutions like banquets and the dance are examples of this attenuation. Even the most diluted rituals, however, retain an affinity for collective violence. After eating and drinking, a crowd asks for something more, something extraordinary, an exciting spectacle, erotic or violent, or better still, both simultaneously. Herodias knows this: she knows how to make institutions derived from ritual help her murderous scheme. Being more interested in the death of her enemy than in the welfare of the community, she perverts the ritual function. Just as Herod’s role runs parallel to that of Pilate in the Passion, hers is somewhat reminiscent of Caiaphas, who also perverts religious power. This perversion amounts to a return of ritual mimesis to its original virulence and violence. Herodias brings sacrifice back to its origin in collective victimization. Like the Passion itself, the story of John reveals that origin. The two gospel narratives are not myths but revelations of the scapegoat mechanism responsible for mythical representation. The prince and principal of this world is Satan, who is an imitator and a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44).
All modes of art are aspects of ritual made relatively autonomous by the ‘esthetic’ perspective. Dance cannot appear as a specific activity until the corporal and gestural aspects of the mimetic sequence have become distinguished from the aspects that turn into singing, or into the drama. All the traditional arts emerge from ritual. That is why they traditionally consist of a crisis that resolves itself in the contemplation of a victim whose ordeal and death reflect the transcendence of a superhuman order. Art is neither a meditation on death in general nor an ‘esthetic experience’ that would be truly independent. Philosophers and estheticians miss a point that is powerfully made by our gospel narrative because it is the very opposite of a pious tribute to the dance; it does not misrepresent or prettify the violent aspects of the dance.
There is a popular legend regarding the death of Salome. She was skating on the ice and she lost her balance; her neck hit upon a sharp edge in a sheet of ice, and in the fall, her head was severed from her body.
This legend confirms the association between the dance and sacrificial death in the popular mind. A successful dance puts the mimetic power in the hands of the dancer, who channels it in the direction of her choice, whereas an unsuccessful dance, the loss of balance on the ice, turns the dancer herself into a victim. The artist, the political leader, the master of ritual either stay on top and dominate the mimetic forces they unleash or they fail. They lose control and they become the victims. Salome seems to be alone in that legend, but she is not – the ice is a mirror and an image of the mimetic double.
Being one with the intersubjective process of mimetic desire in its progress toward a sacrificial denouement, our text is one with the dance. Even though he barely mentions it and above all does not attempt to describe it, Mark says a lot, even about dancing itself, because he necessarily espouses the movement of the dance as he unravels his mimetic sequence of mimetic rivalry, conflict, and sacrificial resolution. This sequence cannot fail to resemble some kind of ballet: each dancer in turn occupies the foreground, then rejoins the others in order to play his or her part in the unanimous paroxysm of sacrifice.
In the Western world, the arts of language tend to rebel against their sacrificial origin and function, often with paradoxical results. There is a close but highly complex relationship between this rebellion and the biblical and Christian impregnation of our culture. It is probable, even certain, that some analogous rebellion is taking place in the dance; many choreographers and dancers must consciously reject rather than unconsciously deny the collective and violent roots of their art. This is another story, however, quite different from the story of Salome. Dancers perhaps have the right gestures for it, but I am not sure we have the right language. The old words cannot do, and the new ones are not yet invented.
Peter’s Denial and the Question of Mimesis
For the first time in the history of theorizing about literature and art, certain traditional notions have lost their prestige. Mimesis is one. Our modern idea of esthetic creation as mimesis, as a process of imitation, goes back to Aristotle who really borrowed it from Plato, although in Plato esthetic mimesis has negative connotations which we do not really understand.
Until recently mimesis has remained the imperial concept, the number one signifier of Western literary theory. But its signification, the meaning we attach to the term, has undergone strange metamorphoses. In Aristotle, mimesis is essentially dramatic and theatrical; the actor is a mime who imitates an action. During the Renaissance and after, Western writers felt inferior to their Greek and Roman predecessors and they exhorted each other to imitate them. A little later they became less modest and they decided they needed no intermediaries to imitate nature, meaning human nature. The concept of nature was gradually broadened and, in the nineteenth century, it turned into ‘the whole of reality’ – whatever that means. A vast middle-class audience demanded an art that would mirror its own perception of the world, its preoccupation with material objects, inseparable from the esthetics of realism and naturalism. Writers should aim at ‘a faithful representation of reality.’
