Psychotic Structure and Girard's Doubles

Our vocabulary is inadequate because we are operating-and how could it be otherwise?-in a culture, in an "order," in a time which are necessarily post-sacrificial. When we speak, or more simply, as soon as we exist, the founding sacrifice is always already there. This inadequacy is manifested in the necessity we encounter of designating everything that existed previously-everything belonging to the pre-sacrificial time-by pejorative or negative words: non-culture, disorder. Rene Girard's fundamental insight is precisely that this pre-sacrificial time is not at all "destructured," does not correspond to just any dissolution of cultural structure of the type that we are familiar with, and still less to an absence of structure. Quite to the contrary, we now know that the pre-cultural and pre-sacrificial "disorder" possesses it own clearly defined structure which is paradoxically grounded in absolute symmetry. This mimetic symmetry, giving rise to disorder and violence, animated with movements of perpetual imbalancing, is stabilized by the mechanism of scapegoating-time To of culture, degree Do of the structure. The culture which comes into being through this mechanism will have a structure based upon asymmetry and differences. Again paradoxically, this asymmetry and these differences constitute what we call cultural order.