1.
Guillaume de Machaut and the Jews
2.
Archetypes of persecution
3.
What is a myth?
4.
Violence and Magic
5.
Teotihuacan
6.
Ases, Curetes, and Titans
7.
Sins of the Gods
8.
The Science of Myth
9.
The core of Jesus' passion as revealed in the Bible
10.
If only one person dies...
11.
The Beheading of John the Baptist
12.
Peter's denial
13.
The Demons of Gerasa
14.
Divided Satan
15.
History and the Holy Spirit

Translator's Note

A mechanism that replaces bad violence with good violence
This book is a Korean translation of René Girard's Le Bouc emissaire (Paris: Grasset, 1973).
The original starting point of Girard's research was literature.
In his first book, Romantic Falsehood and Novelistic Truth, he reveals the structure of human desire through the structure of the protagonist's desire, thereby building a bridge between literature and society.
But what guided him thereafter was a cultural anthropological interest in all human reality, which seemed far removed from the literary study limited to literary texts.


In 『La Violence et le Sacre』, Girard offers his characteristically detailed examination of the phenomenon of 'ritual sacrifice', the nature of which anthropologists have misunderstood.
The archetype of all religious and cultural activities is the 'scapegoat mechanism'.
The scapegoat mechanism, which substitutes all possible victims with one scapegoat, performs not only the economic function of replacing humans with animals, but also the religious function of preventing bad violence with good violence.
It is a means of purifying the violence of disaster by showing all the violent reactions to the victim whose path of revenge is blocked.
In this way, the scapegoat is not offered to a symbolic god, but to great violence.


All myths are “texts of persecution,” records of survivors.
If 『Violence and the Sacred』 was the first book of his anthropological interest, this book 『Scapegoat』 goes a step deeper and provides a more systematic analysis of the ‘scapegoat,’ which he viewed as the main concept of ‘basic anthropology’ in 『Violence and the Sacred』.
… In 『The Scapegoat』, Girard analyzes the scapegoat mechanism found in various myths and tales.
To say that myths and tales contain sacrificial rituals means that they originated after the sacrificial rituals took place, and ultimately, they are stories created or recorded by the 'survivors' who went through the sacrificial rituals.
The Roman founding myth is a story created by those on the good side of the myth (i.e., those who survived persecution), or at least contains their perspective.
Therefore, myths and tales are not value-neutral stories.


It is a record that contains the perspective of the survivors, that is, the persecutors, to be precise.
So Girard calls all these records “textes de persecution.”
In this way, finding traces of persecution in the records of persecution and reading them accurately becomes the true interpretation of such records, and this is precisely what Girard is doing.
In the latter part, Girard expands the scope of his analysis to include the Christian system, which suggests that the Bible also contains a scapegoat mechanism.

A provocative biblical interpretation from a whole new perspective
It is certainly not easy for Koreans, but it is even more difficult for most Westerners, to present a different opinion from the traditional interpretation of the Bible that is recognized as orthodox.
In that respect, we could consider Girard's "The Scapegoat" a new interpretation of the Bible.
The impression this book gives, attempting a different interpretation of the Bible, is daunting, even provocative.
… A deep understanding of Girard ultimately leads us toward a more accurate understanding of our reality, which can be confirmed in practice through the proliferation of research on Girard's theory, which is actively underway in the West.
Girard's theory has a wide range of applications.
In other words, it has fertility.
We must seek the cause in our deep understanding of his human 'desire'.
This is because the problem of human 'desire' is clearly included in some form at the foundation of all academic disciplines that deal with humans.
In fact, Girard's ambition is to dream of a 'grand theory' that can unite all human reality and theory.
Therefore, the fact that his theory can be applied to all fields can be said to be a result of the very reason for the theory's existence.