To conclude this study, I endeavour to address certain questions and issues that I see arising from the foregoing chapters. Indeed, in crystallising issues deriving from the thought of Bataille, Agamben and Girard on violence and the image the key differences between the thinkers will become evident. For instance, Bataille's dualism directly clashes with Agamben's total opposition to dualistic thought, an opposition that might be partly explained by the thinker's adherence to a modal ontology, given that with the latter the being of an entity is inseparable from its mode. In other words, there is no opposition between an entity and its mode of being in the world.

For his part, Girard, like Bataille, is on the side of the victim and claims that in the wake of Christ's Crucifixion modern judicial institutions are, at least potentially, the victim's latter-day protectors. This, however, is far from being adequately explained; nor is the history of the law brought into the picture. Indeed, our defender of the victim leaves much to be desired when it comes to documenting the evolution of jurisprudence and how the law might have, over two millennia, acted as a bulwark against the scapegoat mechanism. The task at hand is not easy here. For if society is effectively founded in injustice (killing of a scapegoat), the law, as a rectification of, and protection from, injustice, has been made to appear very much wanting. This is so in the work of the thinkers germane to this study, namely, in Agamben, Benjamin and Derrida. However, law, rather than taking an explicitly ‘victim’ approach, aligns itself with justice. And it is the latter, Derrida has endeavoured to show, that is difficult, if not impossible to achieve. Or, indeed, as we shall see below, Derrida argues that justice and an experience of the impossible are inseparable (1990: 947).

From Girard's perspective, through the law the community takes responsibility for violence, whereas, with the societies based on the scapegoat mechanism, the community puts responsibility for the violence onto the surrogate victim. To a large extent, throughout the preceding chapters violence has been human violence, and, specifically, that of the killing, maiming or infliction of pain on one or more humans by other humans. Animal violence and the violence of nature have not been part of the story.