Girard aspires not so much to the rigor of the sociological workshop as to the evangelical text. All of his work can be read as a dazzling commentary on the works of Caiaphas: “Expedit vobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo, et non tota gens pereat” (“It is more to your interest that one man should die for the people, and not the whole nation be destroyed”).²⁹⁶ Caiaphas here is the politician: “no one has done better than he in politics.”²⁹⁷ And his lucidity points to the unspoken foundation that we come across in every society: “This is the terrible paradox of desires in men.²⁹⁸ They can never agree on the preservation of their object; but they can always agree on its destruction; they never reach agreement with each other except at the expense of a victim.” This mechanism, for Girard, is the mechanism of sacrifice: but, strangely, it is never so obvious as in modern society, which has so proudly distanced itself from sacrifice. To find a perfect “persecutory text,” Girard has to refer to a passage against the Jews in Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement du Roi de Navarre. This is to be explained, according to Girard, with the progressive action of evangelical truth against sacrifice, which first allows the horrible reality of the scapegoat to emerge, and finally ensures that it is generally condemned over the course of time, as anti-Semitism is today. In this tortuous Enlightenment vision, however, Girard’s main weaknesses become apparent: persecution has never, in fact, become so widespread as in the modern West, which ignores sacrifice and regards it as a superstition. The expulsion of the sacred, which belongs to the sacrifice, now becomes spring-cleaning, physiological evacuation. The Jews are foul insects that have to be swept out from healthy Germanic living rooms. People talk about Stalin’s “purges”: millions of alleged opponents are sent off to labor camps. The fact that the communis opinio condemns anti-Semitism and persecution in general is a derisive corollary of the fact that persecution itself—for every kind of reason: race, public order, religion, terrorism—has become the lingua franca of world politics. If the truth about sacrifice is able to describe the extermination of the Jews as a “holocaust” without even recognizing that the word is a technical term of Jewish sacrifice, then that truth resembles anti-Christian parody rather than the word of Christ. And yet Girard’s hypothesis touches upon a truth that no anthropologist has ever considered; it touches the open wound of sacrifice, it poses the most critical and ever-elusive question: “Who will sacrifice whom?” We know from Sahagún, from the oracle of Delphi, and from Baudelaire, that in the perfect sacrifice “there must be consent and joy on the part of the victim.”^{299, 300} But we cannot fail to notice the Tyrrhenian amphora that depicts the sacrifice of Polyxena. The young girl is stretched like a rolled-up carpet and held under the arms of three warriors, who are holding her respectively at the height of her ankles, knees, and chest. Dressed in helmets and greaves, all three are seen in sharp profile. Neoptolemus, also wearing a helmet and greaves, plunges a large blade into Polyxena’s throat with his right hand, while he clasps her head with his left, so as to lift her head and better expose her throat. Her blood spurts onto the altar. Diomedes watches from behind Neoptolemus, holding a lance. Another figure looks away.