Jim's examples illustrate this very point. In contrast to Jenny's dream of vengeance, these gestures of love involve representation not as already constituted in words but as a primal act of designation. The makers of these gestures could not have expressed their love in words. Such an act is not a use of language but a founding of language. To make the comparison in more rigorous terms, we may say that love is to the ostensive as resentment is to the declarative .
Love defines a new significance, whereas resentment is parasitic on an old one.
The point above about sacrifice reminds us of Girard's insistence that the Crucifixion is not a sacrifice but the demystification of all sacrifice. We should not conceive of God as a father sacrificing his son for the benefit of mankind. But neither should we see the latter as a passive victim of human violence. Jesus on the cross figures the founding paradox of the human. On the one hand, he is wholly a man, suffering as one who cannot help but suffer.