In the last chapter I elaborated the interaction within the play between the representations of desire and language. In this chapter I examine first some connections which the play makes between desire and violence by means of a significant cluster of images; I proceed to an analysis of some of the play's structuring movements, along the lines suggested by the work on violence undertaken by Girard.

Girard is one of this century's influential theoreticians of violence and its place within culture. His work remains controversial, important for many but vitiated for others by two aspects; its insistence on positing a historical, but necessarily irretrievable, origin for the patterns and systems that it investigates, and its sweeping claims to be a theory of the foundations of all culture, without reference to specific time and place. This a historical transcendence can be seen to be necessary to a theory of violence that is first and foremost the theory of a concealment of violence, and of a denial that is systematically enacted by all cultural forms and representations. The theory claims to make visible this invisibility of violence. Similarly, the theory's cross-cultural claims are explicable and again, perhaps even necessary, because it takes as its ground of enquiry a state characterised as pre-cultural and pre-historical. But these transcendental aspects of Girard's work do not mean that we cannot use it to investigate specific cultures and their products. Some classicists have already appropriated Girard's work as a theory of representations of violence, primarily a literary theory, and the present chapter is conceived as an attempt in a similar vein.