Though its coinage can be traced back to a sixteenth-century translation of Leviticus, the term scapegoat has enjoyed a long and varied history of both scholarly and everyday uses. While WilliamTyndale employed it to describe one of two goats chosen by lot to escape the Day of Atonement sacrifices with its life, the expression was soon far more widely used to name victims of false accusation and unwarranted punishment. As such, the scapegoat figures prominently in contemporary theories of violence, from its elevation by Frazer to a ritual category in his ethnological opus "The Golden Bough...

Jeremiah Alberg s fascinating book explores a phenomenon almost every news reader has experienced: the curious tendency to skim over dispatches from war zones, political battlefields, and economic centers, only to be drawn in by headlines announcing a late-breaking scandal. Rationally we would agree that the former are of more significance and importance, but they do not pique our curiosity in quite the same way. The affective reaction to scandal is one both of interest and of embarrassment or anger at the interest. The reader is at the same time attracted to and repulsed by it. "Beneath the...

A systematic introduction into the mimetic theory of the French-American literary theorist and philosophical anthropologist Rene Girard, this essential text explains its three main pillars (mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and the Biblical -difference-) with the help of examples from literature and philosophy. This book also offers an overview of Rene Girard's life and work, showing how much mimetic theory results from existential and spiritual insights into one's own mimetic entanglements. Furthermore it examines the broader implications of Girard's theories, from the mimetic aspect...