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A Seal Pressed in the Hot Wax of Vengeance: A Girardian Understanding of Expressive Punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

John Steele
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Expressive punishment is popular at the voting booth and in academic journals. Yet concerns remain about expressive punishment's pathological tendencies.

The work of René Girard explains the popularity of expressive punishment and diagnoses its pathology. Girard's analysis of violence, including the lawful violence categorized as punishment, is religious, anthropological, and literary. He posits that the mimetic and conflictual nature of human desire creates crises of undifferentiated violence that are resolved by “sacred violence.” Violence becomes sacred when it regenerates lost meaning, binds the community, and provides a temporary peace. Archaic religion, with its prohibitions, rituals, and myths, was a social mechanism for pragmatically managing that violence. Viewing the legal system as the heir to that tradition, that is, viewing law as our modern social technology of violence, illuminates the practice of expressive punishment.

Before turning to Girard's thought, I will survey some legal scholarship to develop a broad outline of the nature of expressive punishment. Then I will make an inductive argument, following Girard, that expressive punishment is a morally problematic mechanism for both controlling and dispensing sacred violence. Finally, I will explore some implications of that argument.

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Articles
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Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , 2001 , pp. 35 - 68
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Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2001

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References

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19. Id. at 44. Durkheim declares that only primitive societies punish the passive instruments of crime, but that concept is familiar to golfers everywhere and has recently been re-affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in a forfeiture case. Bennis v. Mich., 517 U.S. 1163 (1996) (in challenge to Michigan forfeiture law applied to automobile wherein driver solicited prostitution, the Court upheld the abatement of the nuisance (i.e., the automobile itself), quoting The Palmyra, 12 Wheat. 1, 14 (1827)Google Scholar as holding that “The thing is here primarily considered the offender, or rather the offense is attached primarily to the thing.”)

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46. Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 129-130.

47. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 10; Hammerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 31.

48. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 15.

49. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, supra n. 45, at 15-17.

50. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra, n. 45, at 143-149; Williams, supra n. 45, at 291-292 (glossary's definition of “Model/Mediator”).

51. Id.

52. Girard, Things Hidden, supra n. 45, at 416-431; Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 21 (“Etymologically the scandal is that which causes one to stumble. In its developed meaning, the stumbling block is the hindrance that one loves, the obstacle that gives painful purpose to one's ever-frustrated and thus ever-renewed desire.”).

53. Williams, supra n. 45, at ch. 5, The Goodness of Mimetic Desire, taken from Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation with Rene Girard, in 25 Religion & Literature No. 2, 9–33 (1993)Google Scholar. This aspect of Girard's thought is explored by Adams, Rebecca in “Loving Mimesis and Girard's ‘Scapegoat of the Text’: A Creative Reassessment of Mimetic Desire” in Violence Renounced: Rene Girard, Biblical Studies, and Peacemaking (Swartley, Willard M. ed., Pandora Press 2000)Google Scholar.

54. Williams, supra n. 45, at 64.

55. This point is important, because some of Girard's critics believe, mistakenly, that his theories are too fixated on violence. For example, in critiquing Girard's focus on violence, Susan L. Mizruchi states that “the universal constant is not the need or desire to release aggressive impulses, but rather the intent to discover kin, to confirm the likeness (or, if myriad reasons preclude that, the antithetical difference) of the other.” Mizruchi, Susan L., The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory 64 (Princeton U. Press 1998)Google Scholar. “Thus, at every place in his analysis where Girard writes ‘violence,’ [Mizruchi] would write kindred.’” Id. at 64. But, Girard begins his theory with imitation before violence escalates, and Mizruchi's emphasis on the universal search for interpersonal “likeness” corroborates rather than refutes Girard's concept of mimetic desire and identification. Moreover, Girard does indeed address the positive possibilities of mimetic processes. See supra, nn. 53-55 & accompanying text. On the other hand, for criticism that Girard's theories ignore the “most compelling record available” of the reality of sacred violence, i.e., the Mesoamerican record, see Carrasco, David, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization 3, 7–8, 56, 192–193 (Beacon Press 1999)Google Scholar.

56. Girard, Deceipt, Desire, and the Novel, supra n. 45, at 9.

57. Livingston, Paisley, What is Mimetic Desire?, 7 Phil. Psychol. No. 3, 291, 305 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (exploring the meaning of Girard's “mimetic desire” and emphasizing the role of the subject's “tutelary beliefs” in the importance of the model).

58. Hammerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 21.

59. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, l. 832 (Smith, Herbert Weir trans., Harv. U. Press 1926)Google Scholar. (“For few there are.among men in whom it is inborn to admire without envy a friend's good fortune”).

60. Kerrigan, John, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon 6 (Oxford U. Press 1996)Google Scholar.

61. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 8.

62. Id. at 257.

63. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 26; Girard, Things Hidden, supra n. 45, at 28.

64. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 28.

65. Girard, Things Hidden, supra n. 45, at 52; Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 26. Hence the sacred is “the sum of human assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis.” Girard, Things Hidden, supra n. 45, at 42.

66. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 257.

67. Id. at 12.

68. Id. at 5.

69. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 38.

70. Gebauer, Gunter & Wulf, Christoph, Mimesis 261–262 (Reneau, Don trans., U. Cal. Press 1995)Google Scholar (analyzing Girard's treatment of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex).

71. See e.g. Girard, Things Hidden, supra n. 45, at 51-52 (analyzing kingship inauguration rituals).

72. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 23 (italics in the original).

73. Hammerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 29.

74. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 14.

75. Id. at 8.

76. Id. (italics in the original).

77. Id. at 22.

78. Id. at 22; see Minow, Martha, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness 124 (Beacon Press 1998)Google Scholar (commenting on the perception that, following the Rwandan genocide, “the trials themselves were revenge.”).

79. Hammerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 32-33.

80. Id. at 34.

81. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 15.

82. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 164; Hammerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 2.

83. See generally Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, supra n. 45.

84. Gen 3:5 (R.S.V.).

85. Wisdom 2:23-24 (Harper Study Bible).

86. Gen 4:7.

87. Gen 4:15.

88. This motif of rivalry between twins or brothers, resulting in murder and the founding of the city, recurs repeatedly throughout Indo-European mythology. Mallory, J.P., In Search of the Indo-Europeans 140 (Thamas, & Hudson, 1989)Google Scholar. See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra, n. 45, at 61-62 (discussion of fraternal strife in myth) and 56-58 (discussion of traditional cultures' fear of twins).

89. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 146.

90. Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 192–194 (U. Cal. Press 1985)Google Scholar. As Robert Hamerton-Kelly points out, Marx realized that “the intrinsic value of a stock or property is negligible compared to the exchange value” dictated by the market, meaning that the market “is a network of bondage to one another's imagined likes and dislikes, an essentially fantastic web of servitude to the phantoms of desire.” Hammerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, supra n. 45, at 23. See Le Bon, infra n. 102, at 121-122 (discussing contagious power of advertisements).

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92. Id. at 146.

93. Id. at 35, 110.

94. Id. at 126.

95. See Case, Karl E. & Fair, Ray C., Economics ch. 23 (6th ed., Prentice Hall 2001)Google Scholar.

96. Dworkin notes that the liberal tradition “supposes that political decisions must be, so far as possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or what gives value to life.” Dworkin, Ronald, Liberalism, in Public and Private Morality 113, 127 (Hampshire, Stuart ed., Cambridge U. Press 1978)Google Scholar. Likewise, microeconomic theory traditionally tended to take desires as exogenous givens. Becker, Gary S., Accounting for Tastes 3–4 (Harv. U. Press 1996)Google Scholar (“The economist's normal approach to analyzing consumption and leisure choices assumes that individuals maximize utility with preferences that depend at any moment only on the goods and services they consume at that time. These preferences are assume to be independent of both past and future consumption, and of the behavior of everyone else.”) Becker's ground breaking accounting of consumer desire repeatedly invokes aspects of mimetic desire. He posits that consumers maximize “social capital,” by “often choos[ing] restaurants, neighborhoods, schools, books to read, political opinions, food or leisure activities with an eye to pleasing peers and others in their social network.” Id. at 12; posits that “style is social rivalry,” (id. at 46); and posits that “a person's demand [can] depend on the demands of others.” (Id. at 202).

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98. Id. at 266.

99. Id. at 266-274.

100. See supra, nn. 53-58 & accompanying text.

101. See e.g., Levy & Nail, supra n. 97, at 244 (witch trials), 239 (panics), & 264 (riots).

102. Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd (A Study of the Popular Mind) (2d. ed., Cherokee Publg. Co. 1982)Google Scholar.

103. Levy & Nail, supra n. 97, at 238.

104. Le Bon, supra n. 102, at 122-123.

105. Id.

106. Id. at Book III, Chapter III (criminal juries) & Book III, Chapter V (parliamentary assemblies).

107. See generally Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at ch. 2, the Sacrificial Crisis.

108. Girard, The Scapegoat, supra n. 45, at 12; Burkert, Walter, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions 52–53 (Harv. U. Press 1996)Google Scholar (sacrifices made to avert storms, plagues or flooding) & 108-113 (to avert disease, bad weather, or military disaster); Parker, Robert, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion 24–25 (Clarendon Press Oxford 1983)Google Scholar; Joshua 7 (elaborate accusation and scapegoating ritual following military defeat).

109. Bartlett, John, Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases and Proverbs traced to their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature 779 (Beck, Emily Morison ed., 15th ed., Little, Brown & Co. 1980)Google Scholar (citing variations of this proverb spanning the Book of Proverbs to the speeches of Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

110. Jonah 1-2. In the European witch-hunts, a typical accusation against witches in coastal towns involved the sinking of ships. Briggs, Robin, Witches & Neighbors 54–55 (Penguin Books 1996)Google Scholar.

111. Briggs, supra n. 110, at 40, 44-45, 91.

112. Crossing, Border, The New Republic Online [www.thenewrepublic.com/073001/editorial073001.html) (07 30, 2001)Google Scholar.

113. Matsuda, Mari J., Where Is Your Body 178–179, n. 4 (Beacon Press 1996)Google Scholar.

114. Allen, Danielle S., Democratic Dis-ease: Of Anger and the Troubling Nature of Punishment, in The Passions of Law (Bandes, Susan A. ed., N.Y.U. Press 1999)Google Scholar.

115. Id. at 192.

116. Id. at 194.

117. Id. at 194-195.

118. Id. at 205.

119. Id. at 194.

120. Id. at 194 (“communal disease”), 195-197.

121. Id. at 198.

122. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 49.

123. Id. at 40 (emphasis in original).

124. Id.

125. Id.

126. Id. at 49.

127. Nicholson, Keith D., Comment: Would You Like More Salt with that Wound? Post-Sentence Victim Allocution in Texas 26 St. Mary's L. J. 1103, 1104 (1995)Google Scholar.

128. Wisdom 14:22–26 (N.R.S.V. 1993)Google Scholar.

129. Girard, The Scapegoat, supra n. 45, at 13.

130. President Jimmy Carter's so-called “malaise speech,” delivered during the uncertainties of the oil shortages, was a spectacular failure because it invoked the rhetoric of mimetic crisis, but he blamed the public for a having a “crisis of confidence.” Contrast that with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's upbeat admonition, delivered at a time of great uncertainties, that the only thing the public had to fear was fear. The tell-tale signs of the deliberate rhetorical invocation of a mimetic crisis are important to identify, because so much criminal legislation is driven by electoral politics in which such invocations are commonplace.

131. Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power 75–80 (Stewart, Carol trans., The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1962)Google Scholar (discussing the fitting metaphor of “fire” for the crowd). In general, much of Canetti's masterwork, Crowds and Power, brims with insights similar to Girard's, although Canetti's exposition is less rigorous and more poetic.

132. Governor George W. Bush (Texas), Twanna M. Powell Lecture Series, Texas A. & M. U. (Apr. 6, 1998).

133. Williams, supra n. 45, at 15.

134. That question—How Can Satan Cast Out Satan?—is the title of an essay reprinted as Chapter 13, id.

135. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 12-13.

136. Girard, The Scapegoat, supra n. 45, at 21.

137. See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 12.

138. Girard, The Scapegoat, supra n. 45, at 18-19.

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141. Williams, supra n. 45, at 271.

142. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 309-318; Williams, supra n. 45, at 23-24.

143. Josephus, , Jewish Antiquities 9.208, n. 283 (Whiston, William trans. & ed., John E. Beardsley 1895)Google Scholar. See also Burkert, supra n. 108, at 108-113 (ritual and atonements made to alleviate “present sufferings”).

144. Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, supra n. 45, at 78.

145. Jonah 1:7.

146. Joshua 1.

147. Job 6:27; Euripides, , Iphigeneia in Aulis, 1195Google Scholar; Pausanias, , Description of Greece 4.9.5Google Scholar.

148. Exod 28:30.

149. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 311-315.

150. Pizzi, William T., Trials Without Truth: Why Our System of Criminal Trials Has Become an Expensive Failure and What We Need to Do to Rebuild It 74–75 (N.Y.U. Press 1999)Google Scholar (citing “rolling the dice” analogies in U.S. v. Ruiz, 47 F.3d 452, 455 (1st Cir. 1995) & U.S. v. Gramves, 98 F.3d 258, 260 (7th Cir. 1996)).

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152. Galanter & Luban, supra n. 33, at 1447-1448.

153. Supra n. 38.

154. Furman v. Ga., 408 U.S. 238, 293 (1972) (concurring in the Court's judgment).

155. Id. at 309-310.

156. Nussbaum, Martha C., “Secret Sewers of Vice”: Disgust, Bodies, and the Law, in The Passions of Law (Bandes, Susan A. ed., N.Y.U. Press 1999)Google Scholar.

157. Id. at 25.

158. Id. at 29.

159. Nussbaum at 44-49 (discussing sodomy).

160. Duncan, Martha Grace, In Slime and Darkness: The Metaphor of Filth in Criminal Justice, 68 Tul. L. Rev. 725 (1994)Google Scholar.

161. Id. at 757 (emphasis added).

162. Id. at 729, 798. See Duncan, Martha Grace, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment (N.Y.U. Press 1996)Google Scholar.

163. Duncan, In Slime and Darkness, supra n. 160, at 753.

164. Durkheim, supra n. 11, at 40 (“In other words, we should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends that consciousness. We do not condemn it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it”).

165. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 15.

166. Tonry, Michael, Rethinking Unthinkable Punishment Policies in America, 46 Ucla L. Rev. 1751, 1787 (1999)Google Scholar.

167. Simon, Jonathan & Spaulding, Christian, Tokens of Our Esteem: Aggravating Factors in the Era of Dergulated Death Penalties, in The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture 109 (Sarat, A. ed., Oxford U. Press 1999)Google Scholar.

168. Girard, The Scapegoat, supra n. 45, at 20.

169. Id. at 15.

170. Briggs, supra n. 110, at 40, 44-45, 91.

171. Bonner, Stephen Eric, A Rumor about the Jews 22–23 (St. Martin's Press 2000)Google Scholar (fabricated protocols about Jewish control over the press) & 26-27 (fabricated protocols about Jewish control over education).

172. Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 636, 645, 652 (1995).

173. Id. at 645. At the risk of sounding flippant when I am making a serious point, I venture the opinion that, metaphorically, Justice Scalia is living in the thrall of Satan. I mean that Justice Scalia's jurisprudence is marked by an unreflective urge to use “good violence” to chase out “bad violence” (using Satan to cast out Satan), which creates a social order based upon lies. See Gey, supra n. 36. By “Satan,” Girard means “the mimetic process seen as a whole; that is why he [Satan] is the source not merely of rivalry and disorder but of all the form of lying order inside which humanity lives.” Girard, Things Hidden, supra n. 45, at 162.

174. Cal. Penal Code §§ 667(b)-(i) (enacted by the Legislature); § 1170.12 (adopted by voter initiative).

175. Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act of 1998 (Proposition 21 on the March 7, 2000 California statewide ballot).

176. Kahan, Dan M., Unthinkable Misrepresentations: A Response For Tonry, 46 Ucla L. Rev. 1933, 1935Google Scholar (resort to “stubborn pubic vengefulness” formulas is simplistic and does not help find solutions).

177. Simon, William H., The Practice of Justice: A Theory of Lawyers' Ethics 168 (Harv. U. Press 1998)Google Scholar.

178. Tonry, supra n. 166, at 1781.

179. Id. at 1781-1786.

180. Id.

181. In contrast, in some people's democracies, defense counsel's role is to assist the prosecution. Freedman, Monroe H., Understanding Lawyer's Ethics 15–16 (Matthew Bender 1970)Google Scholar.

182. Mark Baker, D.A.: Prosecutors in their own Words 28 (Simon & Schuster 1999)Google Scholar (prosecutor commenting that child sexual abuse cases “prosecute themselves,” and wondering in hindsight how many of those claims were true); Paul, & Eberle, Shirley, The Abuse of Innocence (The MacMartin Preschool Trial) (Prometheus Books 1993)Google Scholar.

183. Baker, supra n. 182, at 28-29.

184. Rabinowitz, Dorothy, From the Mouths of Babes to a Jail Cell, Harper's Magazine, 05 1990Google Scholar (concerning the infamous accusation and prosecution of Kelly Michaels for alleged sexual assault).

185. N.J. v. Michaels, 264 N.J. Super. 579 (1993).

186. Farrell, Harry, Swift Justice (Murder and Vengeance in a California Town) 8, 18 (St. Martins Press 1992)Google Scholar.

187. Id. at 229, 233.

188. Id. at 242.

189. Id. at 241.

190. A lynching at the hands of the jeering mob is not the only mode by which the crowd participates in sacred violence. As Mitchell B. Merback explains in his The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel (U. Chi. Press 1999)Google Scholar, in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, the local citizenry would in many cases treat the condemned with “the utmost dignity and respect,” thereby facilitating a “good death” that “lift[ed] the miasma”—the “taint of corruption and infamy” the crime had wrought upon the social body. (id. at 145-146). When the condemned was penitent, his sacredness was acknowledged. The crowd would believe that the condemned became a “holy victim” who had the power to intercede in heaven on behalf of those he had wronged. (Id. at 152.) Quoting Richard van Dũlman, Merbeck “concludes that the condemned ‘might become an object of envy for others and be celebrated as heroic or as a martyr.’” (Id. at 152-153.)

191. In many creation myths, violence creates the founding order out of primordial chaos. In the common myths of cosmic battle, an upstart group of gods (a mob) slays a primordial god, such as the sea. In the Enuma Elish, the very carcass of the slain monster, the Leviathan, became the structural foundation of heaven and earth. Although traces of the cosmic battle have been “banished from Genesis with extreme care,” scattered references to the myth remain in the Jewish scriptures. Sarna, Nahum M., Understanding Genesis 22 (Schocken Books 1966)Google Scholar. (See e.g. Isaiah 17:12-14; 27:1; 51:9; Gen 49:25; Deut 33:13; Habakkuk 3:10; Psalms 74:12-18.) In other creation myths, the progenitors of mankind were twin brothers (rivalrous doubles), one of whom was “sacrificed and carved up by his brother to produce mankind.” Mallory, J.P., In Search of the Indo-Europeans 140 (Thames & Hudson 1989)Google Scholar.

192. Telpner, Brian J., Student Author, Constructing Safe Communities: Megan's Laws and the Purposes of Punishment, 85 Geo. L. J. 2039 (1997)Google Scholar, nn. 5-13 (cataloging “Megan's Laws” in various states).

193. Id. at 2068.

194. Id. at 2067 (citing Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 182 (Alan Sheridan trans., Knopf 1995).

195. Id. at 2067.

196. Garland, David, Punishment and Culture: The Symbolic Dimension of Criminal Justice, in 11 Studies in Law, Politics and Society 195 (1991)Google Scholar. This point is discussed in Sarat, Austin, Capital Punishment as a Legal, Political and Cultural Fact: An Introduction, in The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture 9 (Sarat, A. ed., Oxford U. Press 1999)Google Scholar.

197. Garland, supra n. 196, at 193.

198. Connolly, William E., The Will, Capital Punishment, and Cultural War, in The Kilting State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture 197–199 (Sarat, A. ed., Oxford U. Press 1999)Google Scholar.

199. Jeffrie G. Murphy makes a related point when he argues that retributivism entails systematic self-deception about our motives in punishing. Murphy, Jeffrie G., Moral Epistemology, the Retributive Emotions, and the “Clumsy Moral Philosophy “ of Christ, in The Passions of Law (Bandes, Susan A. ed., N.Y.U. Press 1999)Google Scholar.

200. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 197.

201. Buhrer-Thiery, Genevieve, “Just Anger” or “Vengeful Anger”? The Punishment of Blinding in the Early Medieval West, in Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotions in the Middle Ages 91 (Rosenwien, Barbara H. ed., Cornell U. Press 1998)Google Scholar.

202. Tison v. Arizona, 481 U.S. 137 (1987).

203. Culbert, Jennifer L., Beyond Intention: A Critique of the “Normal” Criminal Agency, Responsibility, and Punishment in American Death Penalty Jurisprudence, in The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture 220 (Sarat, A. ed., Oxford U. Press 1999)Google Scholar.

204. Id. at 210, 221.

205. Dimock, Wai Chee, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy 135 (U. Cal. Press 1996)Google Scholar. Dimock perceptively contrasts the law's seemingly symmetrical weighing of act and punishment with literature's textualized consideration of the asymmetries and residues that law fails to recognize. For example, regarding James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer, Dimock writes that “what is dispensed here, then, turns out to be a rather disconcerting kind of justice, intensely retributive, to be sure, but also hopelessly overwrought, hopelessly asymmetrical to its object, unnerving in its excess, and unedifying in its residue.” Id. at 55. Dimock's insight identifies the interpretive violence of the law, as revealed in certain literature. Literature that exposes that lie would be, in Girardian terms, “non-mythic.” In contrast, when literature portrays the law's text as perfectly commensurate, symmetrical, and without residue, the literature, like the legal text itself, is “mythic.”

206. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, supra n. 45, at 92 (emphasis in original).

207. Williams, supra n. 45, at 198 (discussing mimetic rivalry as an occasion of sin).

208. For a defenses of expressive (denunciatory) punishment that I find to be insufficiently aware of its pathological tendencies, see Stephen, supra, nn. 3-4; Rychlak, Ronald J., Society's Moral Right to Punish: A Further Exploration of the Denunciation Theory of Punishment, 65 Tul. L. Rev. 299 (1990)Google Scholar; and Telpner, supra, n. 192. For articles that capture a sense of those pathologies and which could benefit from Girardian insights and analytical frameworks, see Nicholson, supra, n. 127; Dripps, supra, n. 38; Steiker, supra n. 28; Tonry, supra, n. 166. Perhaps the most notable commentator on expressive punishments has been Dan Kahan. Michael Tonry stridently attacks Dan Kahan's articles on expressive punishment, accusing Kahan of embracing “unthinkable” punishments. (See Tonry, supra n. 166.) Kahan stridently denies Tonry's accusation. (See Kahan, supra n. 176.) I think that the better reading is that Kahan mostly evades the topic of the pathologies of expressive punishment.