Misrecognition: the distorted perception that causes communities caught in mimetic crisis to misidentify the true cause of their problems.
Méconnaissance is a French term that Girard uses to describe the fundamental misrecognition at the heart of the scapegoat mechanism. It means something like misrecognition, miscognition, or willful blindness — a distortion of perception that prevents communities from seeing clearly what they are doing when they scapegoat a victim.
The word is deliberately hard to translate, and Girard used the French term because no English equivalent captures all its dimensions.
The scapegoat mechanism only works if the community genuinely believes the victim is guilty. If they knew the victim was innocent — if they recognized their own collective violence for what it was — the mechanism would lose its power to restore order.
Méconnaissance is the cognitive condition that allows the scapegoat mechanism to function. The community must sincerely perceive the victim as the cause of their troubles. Their misrecognition is not strategic or hypocritical: it is structural. The mimetic contagion that has gripped them distorts their perception so that a single person or group appears to be the source of the crisis.
Girard argued that the Judeo-Christian scriptures progressively expose méconnaissance. Job insists on his innocence in the face of community accusations. The Psalms defend the persecuted victim. The Gospels tell the story of an innocent victim and insist on it explicitly.
This revelation undermines méconnaissance — once we know the mechanism, we can no longer fully believe in the victim’s guilt. This is why, for Girard, the spread of Christianity correlates historically with the increasing visibility of victims and victim rights — and also with increasingly unstable scapegoating (since the mechanism no longer fully convinces).
Méconnaissance is visible in any scapegoating event: the genuine belief that the designated victim — the cancelled person, the political enemy, the ethnic minority — is truly responsible for the community’s problems. The conviction feels absolutely real. That is the point: méconnaissance is not performed; it is experienced.
The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life
The landmark accessible account of Girard's theory of mimetic desire. Translated into twenty languages.
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