With our investigations of Bataille and Agamben on violence and the image in the background, the aim of this chapter is to show the connection in René Girard's work between violence, origin and victim. In pursuing this trajectory, what remains to be seen is the extent to which Girard's approach to violence compares with that of Bataille and Agamben. ‘Victim’ for Girard means ‘scapegoat’, which in turn means the victim arbitrarily selected, and the injustice that this implies. Unlike Agamben for whom there is effectively no victim at the origin, and rather than being in the victim's place (Bataille), Girard offers a justification for modern society's movement away from the scapegoat mechanism. Although the latter can still make itself felt in various – and maybe unavoidable – ways, this, he maintains, is in no sense to be encouraged. How then does our author arrive at his position of denouncing the scapegoat mechanism?

Girard partly follows the Freudian thesis of a link between violence and the origin (the original event founding society) and the idea that this origin reverberates throughout secular, empirical history. How and why is this connection made?

The Origin of Society: Derrida on the Origin

The origin of human cultural, social and biological life – or life, tout court – is a theme in the research of disciplines such as prehistory, archaeology, biology, physics and astrophysics (cf. origin of the universe). Girard says on numerous occasions that he works within a ‘scientific’ framework – a framework, Jacques Derrida argues, that is constituted by writing, understood in the broader sense as exteriority. Is he, then, to be denied the legitimacy of a pursuit of origin because, philosophically, this is open to question? As Varela and Dupuy put it in the introduction to the book they edited on origins, Girard's approach ‘does not hesitate to confront the question of the origins of the sacred and, through it, the origin of all social and cultural institutions’ (Varela and Dupuy 1992: 6). Given that the most influential, if not most important, critique of the notion of origin derives from Derrida's early work, Of Grammatology (2016), it is appropriate to return to this text in order to establish whether Girard's theory of society and culture can survive Derrida's deconstruction of ‘origin’.