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Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (SVMC)
Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 1: The Great Mediations of the Classical World
This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.
- GenresPhilosophyHistory
674 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2020
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November 8, 2023
For this book, Hans Castorp’s dream within “The Magic Mountain” is the pivot point as identified by Girard’s mimetic relations between violence and religion with some of Freud’s nonsense from “Totem and Taboos’ and Frazier’s “Golden Baugh” complex histories explained by present day experiences and Heidegger’s ground for being discoverable through a revealing of the uncovering (aletheia) and the mediation of the past through a Nietzschean lens of the meaning for the ‘death of god’ while preserving the sacrifices. Note, after I had read this book, I immediately re-read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” that short story does capture the big themes in this book.
The crisis in European thought is not the ontological difference between the thing and the thought as Husserl stated in his book and in some ways this book argues for. The crisis is that the world continues to support myths and continuously makes the not them in to others. It’s possible this book was only describing the world with how the world saw themselves, but the problem is if we use the immanent paradigms inherent within the structure that has created the crisis (Freud, Frazier, Nietzsche, Christians, Jews, Greek Myths…) that we never step away from the real crisis that is unfolding. Knowing the relationships and their origins by using their own paradigms reinforces the stupidity. The context of their creations indicates the stupidity of their meaning.
Jesus as quoted in the bible does that explicitly with ‘your either with me or against me.’ My tolerance for Christian (and Jewish) certainties becomes less as I’ve learned more and by mixing in the myths of the Greeks as foundational (ground) starting points doesn’t make the myth any less absurd than it was, Heidegger’s search for being led him to the origins and that doesn’t make them more worthwhile.
Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and “Will to Power” are my two least favorite of his books. They're the most quoted of Nietzsche’s books within this book (though I have no doubt that the author is an expert on Nietzsche overall). Frazier’s book makes a big mistake of taking the experience of the now and extrapolating it backwards to a ground and striping out all relevant context. Freud’s “Totem and Taboos” are the writings of a sick mind in search of an explanation for European culture. Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” is my favorite novel and to fully appreciate it one needs to read Mann’s “Reflections of non-Political Man,” since it shows an antithetical extreme side of Mann and his points made in "The Magic Mountain," also, I’ll note this author brings in Oswald Spengler as a legitimate thinker, at best you can say Spengler influenced other thinkers such as Heidegger and that becomes part of the problem such as when Heidegger never finds a ground until he becomes a Nazi. Read the short story “The Lottery” and learn how we sacrifice the other before we become whole.
The particular becoming part of the many and the double bind we are always part of such as does the soldier wearing the uniform make them a soldier or does the uniform need the soldier in order to have significance. Our meaning needs the whole for the particular to have relevance. The mediation needs a mediated and the author focuses on this as it applies to our Dionysian sacrifices through Christ and the death of God.
There is a crisis and MAGA is looking for scapegoats and doesn’t need to mediate through a Dionysius bacchanalia. I’ll probably read the second volume in this series, but at times I did find this book prolix when it didn’t need to be, and the overall theme doesn’t align with me, but I don’t mind being challenged and always like learning things I didn’t know about already.
The crisis in European thought is not the ontological difference between the thing and the thought as Husserl stated in his book and in some ways this book argues for. The crisis is that the world continues to support myths and continuously makes the not them in to others. It’s possible this book was only describing the world with how the world saw themselves, but the problem is if we use the immanent paradigms inherent within the structure that has created the crisis (Freud, Frazier, Nietzsche, Christians, Jews, Greek Myths…) that we never step away from the real crisis that is unfolding. Knowing the relationships and their origins by using their own paradigms reinforces the stupidity. The context of their creations indicates the stupidity of their meaning.
Jesus as quoted in the bible does that explicitly with ‘your either with me or against me.’ My tolerance for Christian (and Jewish) certainties becomes less as I’ve learned more and by mixing in the myths of the Greeks as foundational (ground) starting points doesn’t make the myth any less absurd than it was, Heidegger’s search for being led him to the origins and that doesn’t make them more worthwhile.
Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and “Will to Power” are my two least favorite of his books. They're the most quoted of Nietzsche’s books within this book (though I have no doubt that the author is an expert on Nietzsche overall). Frazier’s book makes a big mistake of taking the experience of the now and extrapolating it backwards to a ground and striping out all relevant context. Freud’s “Totem and Taboos” are the writings of a sick mind in search of an explanation for European culture. Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” is my favorite novel and to fully appreciate it one needs to read Mann’s “Reflections of non-Political Man,” since it shows an antithetical extreme side of Mann and his points made in "The Magic Mountain," also, I’ll note this author brings in Oswald Spengler as a legitimate thinker, at best you can say Spengler influenced other thinkers such as Heidegger and that becomes part of the problem such as when Heidegger never finds a ground until he becomes a Nazi. Read the short story “The Lottery” and learn how we sacrifice the other before we become whole.
The particular becoming part of the many and the double bind we are always part of such as does the soldier wearing the uniform make them a soldier or does the uniform need the soldier in order to have significance. Our meaning needs the whole for the particular to have relevance. The mediation needs a mediated and the author focuses on this as it applies to our Dionysian sacrifices through Christ and the death of God.
There is a crisis and MAGA is looking for scapegoats and doesn’t need to mediate through a Dionysius bacchanalia. I’ll probably read the second volume in this series, but at times I did find this book prolix when it didn’t need to be, and the overall theme doesn’t align with me, but I don’t mind being challenged and always like learning things I didn’t know about already.
Displaying 1 of 1 review