폭력의 기원: 르네 지라르의 희생양과조르조 아감벤의 호모 사케르

Abstract

The question of what is the origin of violence can be replaced by that of why violence takes place. The concept of violence has a broad range of meanings, but ironically through asking the origin of violence, I think, we could access the most precious characteristics of violence. The difference of perspectives between Hobbes and Girard about the origin of violence could be said as big as that between the modern and the contemporary. For Girard, violence makes function of establishing foundation of a community through sacrificing one, while for Hobbes, the establishing power is necessary to prevent violence in the state of nature. Contrary to Hobbes who emphasizes violence that originally exists in individual relation itself, Girard moves the focus of the origin of violence into the relation between a group and an individual, which he considers the most serious violence. Although Girard provides us a useful concept to re-view our civilization, his concept, ‘scapegoat,’ seems a little teleological in that the violence for the scapegoat is a substitutive violence in order to eliminate other violences occurred inside the community. Such a characteristics is also the limit of this concept for applying to violent conditions or phenomena these days. For these days we can see many violences not to sacrifice one for the benefit of a society, but just to expose a life to the danger of violence. The concept of Agamben, Homo sacer, provides more convincing idea about the origin of violence: sacratio that is not consecration but is exposure to violence in the most profane and banal ways. Homo sacer is a bare life of double exception that may be killed but not sacrificed, not in the humane world nor in the divine world. The origin of violence that we can understand through Agamben’s concept, Homo Sacer, belongs not anymore only to the order of temporality, but to virtuality that might be realized in the juridical world, at any moment.