G IRARD'S study of Salome, "Scandal and the Dance: Salome in the Gospel of Mark," is a retelling of the biblical story. But the "vision" which his narrative creates is not, as he would have it, "new and more detached," but is rather a type of ideological backformation. In etymology, backformation is a word derived from another but appearing to be the root of the original. In Girard, the Salome reading is an attempt to have the reader recognize in himself a past desire, one which Girard will argue is at the root of all human response. This complex reinterpretation of a biblical text functions through a psychic flashback: Girard's text accomplishes the erasure of rivalry through sacrifice: "A single head may suffice, therefore, to appease the universal perturbation. Order is restored." By forcing the reader into identifying with "the mimetic contagion of collective murder," thus with those who were spectators to the crime, Girard grants to the reader a sense of commonality which we might in more general terms label "human nature." Sartre points out that a belief in human nature is a determinism which allows for the avoidance of