The Sacred Machine: Sacrifice, Scapegoating, and the Making of Innocence

The previous entry ended when the rule became rite and this entry begins with an imperative—the rite requiring a body.

Communal disorder is difficult to discern and map out, because it rarely possesses a single face. Rivalries multiply; grievances imitate one another; fear passes from person to person; each accusation produces a counteraccusation. The community experiences the resulting opacity as intolerable—not only because the opacity is painful, but also because it can no longer tell a coherent story about why it suffers. Violence as a source of collective antagonism is everywhere … therefore it is nowhere. No one can master it within a coherent narrative because everyone is implicated in its circulation.

René Girard’s account of the social necessity of sacrificial crisis/violence begins from this point of impossibility, or powerlessness to identify and narrativize the source of collective antagonism. Girard theorizes this point as the moment when desire becomes mimetic: People learn what to want from one another, compete for the same objects and forms of recognition defined by society as worth competing for, and end up resembling the rivals they oppose. Differences that ordinarily organize social life begin to collapse as everyone is desiring and competing for the same things (mimetic desire). The antagonists become doubles, each convinced that the other introduced the violence both are repeating. At this point, argument cannot restore order, because argument itself has entered the chain of competitive imitation and is quickly converted into antagonism and polarization. The crisis does not merely need narrative explanation. It demands a safety valve.

Enter the scapegoat. Diffuse antagonisms within a collectivity are redirected toward a target on whom the group can agree. The decisive transformation is not from falsehood to truth but from reciprocal violence to unanimous violence. Once everyone strikes in the same direction, the community rediscovers a distinction it had lost: we are here and the cause of our disorder is there. The target’s expulsion, degradation, or destruction may be followed by an unmistakable cathartic calm. But the calm does not prove the accusation. It proves only that collective violence has ceased circulating within the group because it has been concentrated upon someone the group can attack together (Girard, Violence and the Sacred).

This is the sacred machine—the apparatus that sacrifices the excluded other for the sake of collective cohesion—operating at its most efficient. It converts conflict into consensus without resolving the causes of antagonism within a collective formation that can only find unity and consensual action through negativity (identifying the vilified other as the source of the collective crisis). It produces social difference by selecting a human being to bear the undifferentiated violence of the whole. The victim becomes a border drawn in flesh: everything dangerous, contaminating, or shameful is placed on one side; everyone permitted to condemn is gathered on the other.

The wonder of sacrificial violence—miraculous in its unifying agency—is therefore political rather than divine. It changes many enemies into one crowd.

The selection of a victim is contingent, but it is not simply random. “Anyone will do” is too easy—and theoretically misleading when we try to grasp the social workings of sacrificial violence.

Scapegoats tend to subject who occupy narrative positions that make swift exclusion and persecution possible. They may be strangers, newcomers, dissidents, immigrants, people marked by real or imagined difference; or they may be compromised insiders who are near enough to represent the community and exposed enough in their difference to be abandoned by it. Power also matters. A target must be consequential enough to absorb the crisis, yet insufficiently protected to return the group to reciprocal conflict. Ultimately, there is one fundamental element in this targeting process. The mechanism of identifying a scapegoat is arbitrary in the stricter sense developed throughout these notes: the violence exceeds anything the selected person can be shown to have done, while the selection is governed by the persecutors’ need rather than by the victim’s guilt.

Guilt is then constructed—manufactured retrospectively. The accusation does not follow proof; proof is reorganized around the accusation. Ambiguous gestures become symptoms. Difference becomes intention. Misfortune becomes evidence that the chosen person has contaminated the group. The victim is no longer someone who may have committed a particular act. The victim becomes the meaning of the crisis itself. This totalization is indispensable to the sacrificial machine—the scapegoat factory. A limited accusation might require evidence, proportion, competing interpretations, and an end to punishment. A sacrificial accusation cannot tolerate such limits. It must convert the person’s entire existence into a field of univocal culpability. The selected other is treacherous not in one action but in essence; dangerous not under specified conditions but by nature; guilty not of an offense but of being the kind of being around whom all forms of offense can be imagined.

Girard’s seminal insight is that the subsequent peace reverses the sign without freeing the victim. The same figure first blamed for possessing extraordinary powers of contamination may later be credited with extraordinary powers of cure. Once the victim’s removal appears to restore order, the persecuted person becomes sacred: cursed because the crisis was attributed to them, powerful and pharmakonic because their destruction seems to have “cured” it. Myth preserves the group’s innocence by narrating persecution from the persecutors’ point of view. The victim appears guilty enough to deserve destruction and potent enough to have delivered peace (Girard, The Scapegoat).

The machine that constructs sacrificial violence thus performs a double fabrication. It manufactures the victim’s guilt and the community’s innocence in the same movement. Whatever the group cannot acknowledge as its own—envy and Schadenfreude, rivalry, panic, aggression, failure—is deposited in the selected person and then attacked as foreign matter. The victim becomes guilty of carrying whatever the community has placed there. Everyone else experiences the relief of purification.

Innocence, under these conditions, is not the absence of violence. It is violence successfully exteriorized.

Girard explains why collective violence can pacify a crisis. He does not, however, dissect the pleasure that gathers around the victim. If order were the only aim, cruelty should stop when order returns. Yet persecution has a recurrent tendency to continue beyond its announced function and become estheticized, theatricalized, into a passional mise-en-scène. The accusation proliferates; the humiliation becomes ceremonial; spectators demand exposure, confession, and visible abasement; punishment must be shared, photographed, repeated, and remembered. The target is not merely removed from a position of influence or held responsible for a demonstrable act. The target is made available for enjoyment.

This is where Sade re-enters Girard’s sacred scene. Sacrifice gives violence a reason: the victim must die so the community may live. The question of the Sadean subject, however, begins at the point where that reason alone no longer accounts for the intensity and extensive theatricality of scapegoating. What satisfaction is being produced by the gratuitous increment—the insult after exclusion, the spectacle after judgment, the second punishment after the first has already achieved its stated purpose? Necessity may explain the boundary. It cannot explain the festival at the boundary (Sade, 120 journées 9).

These questionings matter because modern scapegoating rarely presents itself as sacrifice. It speaks the languages of security, administration, ethic, hygiene, professional standards, or public protection. None of those vocabularies is inherently persecutory, much less sacred. Each may name real obligations. The sacrificial mutation occurs when a particular remedy becomes a total story about a person, a group, or a population; when the urge to punish turns into contagion; when the practical result becomes inseparable from the pleasure of making someone carry the identity of the danger—the load of negativity.

The forms of modern scapegoating vary and should not be declared historically equivalent. A hostile workplace, a family’s designated failure, an online dogpile, an anti-immigrant panic (in the name of hygiene, order, or the preservation of the “secular tradition”), and a state campaign of persecution do not possess the same scale, stakes, or consequences. They can nevertheless display a comparable mechanism: a group discovers that agreement is easier when directed against someone; accusation becomes a password of belonging; hesitation or inertia appear as complicity; and the victim’s suffering reassures participants that they stand on the side of order.

The most intoxicating moment is often not punishment itself but unanimity. People who could not agree on what they value discover that they can agree on whom they reject. Their hostility acquires the warmth of fellowship. Cruelty passes from hand to hand as proof of membership, each participant borrowing innocence from the condemnation of the next.

This is the collective jouissance produced by the sacred machine: not private sadism alone, but the collective pleasure of feeling safe and empowered as one contemplates the scene where the collective We emerges through the production and theatrical mise-en-scène of a Them. The Passion of the scapegoat as spectacle jouissif.

To expose scapegoating is not to prohibit accusation, responsibility, or punishment. That sentimental conclusion would abandon actual victims and confuse ethical judgment with moral paralysis.

Accountability and sacrifice have different forms. Accountability isolates and analyzes an act; scapegoating totalizes a person. Accountability asks for evidence; scapegoating treats suspicion as sufficient proof. Accountability remains proportional and revisable; scapegoating escalates until the target embodies everything that is consuming the group from within like a cancer. Accountability can survive dissent; scapegoating demands unanimity. Accountability seeks redress; scapegoating seeks cathartic purgation—and therefore produces a surplus of humiliation long after redress has been achieved.

The distinction is never guaranteed by the righteousness of a cause. A justified demand can acquire a sacrificial supplement. A necessary institution can learn to nourish itself on the visible degradation of those it disciplines. A community genuinely harmed can still convert one offender into the metaphysical source of harms that preceded and will outlive that person. The ethical task is not to refuse judgment, but to keep judgment from becoming theater and sacrificial altar.

Several questions interrupt the mechanism. What precise act is being judged? What evidence would disconfirm the accusation? Does the proposed response repair the harm, or merely exhibit the target’s pain? Who gains solidarity, authority, or pleasure from the spectacle? What conflict within the group disappears from view when attention converges on this body? And crucially: can the community still recognize the accused as a person whose responsibility, however serious, will never exhaust or remedy the bane of collective envy—their infinite capacity for mimetic antagonism?

These questions do not certify innocence in advance. They prevent the community from using the excluded other to certify its own. No group becomes innocent by concentrating its violence, and no peace becomes just merely because its victim is weak enough to leave the remaining members undivided.

Scapegoating and its sacred machine—the mechanism of sacrificial violence—conceal this truth by making its result appear providential. Collective discord and disorder preceded the victim; order was restored as soon as the victim was identified; therefore the victim caused the disorder. But sequence is not guilt, unanimity is not truth, and calm is not justice. The peace produced by persecution is morally compromised precisely because the community purchases coherence with a life it has first rewritten as an explanation.

Nor does the purchase remain final. If the group’s antagonisms have been displaced rather than resolved, the recovered harmony must eventually fail. The old envies and rivalries return. A new contagious wave of mimetic violence appears. Another body is asked to carry the disorder. Sacrifice becomes repetition, and repetition begins to detach itself even from the pleasure of peace.

The next entry asks why the sacrificial machine starts all over again after it has already achieved its purpose (isolating the scapegoated other).