FOUR

Sketch of a Phenomenological
Concept of Sacrifice

I. THE APORIA OF SACRIFICE

Strictly speaking, we should not begin with sacrifice, at least in the sense of a noun, or of a substantive, because sacrifice (sacrificium) always results from the action of a verb, of the verb “to make” (sacrum facere): a sacrifice appears once an agent has rendered something sacred, has set it apart from the profane and thereby consecrated it. Moreover, sacrum facere gave us sacrifiement in Old French, which states more clearly the process of rendering something sacred than the result of this process. The question of sacrifice concerns, then, first and above all the act of making something sacred and of wresting it from the profane (the act opposed to that of profanation), an act of which sacrifice is only a result that it limits itself to recording, without explaining it. This clarification nevertheless raises a difficulty: how can we conceive the transition between two terms, the profane and the sacred, while their very distinction becomes, in the epoch of nihilism in which we live, indistinct and confused, if not completely obscured? It is as if the “death of God,” and above all what has provoked it—the realization that the highest values consist only in the valuation that confirms them, and thus are only worth what our valuations are worth—have abolished any difference between the sacred and the profane, and thereby any possibility of crossing over it by a sacrifiement (or on the contrary, by a profanation). Would not sacrifice disappear along with the sacred that is disappearing?

However, this is not the whole story. We still have a common, if not entirely vernacular, sense of sacrifice: sacrificing is equivalent to destroying; or, more precisely, to destroying what should not be destroyed, at least according to the normal practices of daily life, namely, the useful and the functional. In effect, beings understood as that which I make use of (zuhanden beings in Heidegger’s distinction) are defined by the finality that links them not only to other ready-to-hand beings but ultimately to my own intention, which gathers the subordinated finalities of these beings into a network of finalities, all oriented toward myself as the center of a surrounding world. This being, not only useful but ready-to-hand (usuel, zuhanden), refers to me, and, in so doing, becomes for me my own world: it is good insofar as it is mine, it is a good insofar as it is my good. As a result, doing away with it would amount to my doing away with myself; and if, taking a step further in the negation, I were to destroy it, then I would also destroy myself. Such destruction of property as such, and even as my property—thus this destruction of myself—has not disappeared in our own time, and is still designated as sacrifice. Even daily, we are subject to its paroxysm in the form of terrorism. Both common usage and the media rely on the semantics of sacrifice in order to qualify terrorist acts: the terrorist, it is said, sacrifices himself for his cause, or else, he sacrifices the lives of his random victims in order to draw attention to this very cause. Such terms, as approximate and thus misleading as they may be, nevertheless retain some relevance because pure violence, without any moral or even political justification, in its stupidity and its barbarism, in fact elicits a paralyzing dread before an act that in principle is alien to the world of living beings or the community of reasonable people and obeys the logic, absurd to us, of another world which moreover denies and annihilates our own. Terrorism abolishes property, innocent people, and the terrorist himself, because it accomplishes first and radically the destruction of all beings as useful and functional, and the destruction for us of the organization of the world itself in terms of ends and accomplishment. Thus destroyed, the everyday thing (l’usuel) becomes the sacred insofar as it no longer belongs to the world in which we can live, and in which it is our purpose or intention to live in the normality of the profane. Now, if we grant that terror under its polymorphous though faceless figures remains today our ultimate experience of the sacred, and that this figure of the sacred, as debased as it proves to be, nevertheless allows us a common concept of sacrifice, then what makes a profane thing sacred, the sacrifiement, consists in its destruction. The terrorist produces the sacred (under the figure of absurd horror) by destroying life, including his own.1 The process that makes the profane sacred entails the destruction of the thing thus sacrificed.2 One access to sacrifice thus remains available to us to the extent that the experience of terrorism guarantees us the experience of the destruction of property as such, and thus of the world as ours.

Nevertheless, this first result, by providing us an indisputable because perfectly negative access to the sacred and to the sacrifiement, only reinforces the aporia. For the point is not merely to deplore the fact that destruction is the only remaining figure of sacrifice today, but above all to ascertain the extent to which, even in this form, its intelligibility remains problematic. How, indeed, does destroying something contribute to making it sacred? What does sacrifice do if all it does is undo? What can it consecrate if it limits itself to annihilating? To what or to whom can it give, since it nullifies the content of any gift and nullifies itself as possible giver? The definition of sacrifice as the destruction of a good as such not only explains nothing of sacrifice but could actually explain its opposite—the self-appropriation of autarchy. Indeed, the wise and the strong want to rid themselves of a possession by destroying it and thereby becoming free of it; they alone can do this and they prove it to themselves by surviving what they destroy in themselves: in making a sacrifice of other goods (by ascesis, renunciation, mutilation, and so forth), they demonstrate their autarchy to others; or rather they prove at least to themselves their autonomy and ataraxy. Sacrifice thus becomes the auto-celebration of the ascetic ideal, in which the ego attains a kind of causa sui by no longer owing anything to anyone, not even its own person to the world. Sacrifice, understood as the destruction of a good, can be inverted into a construction of the self, which sacrifices nothing of its own, only the world to itself.

II. SACRIFICE ACCORDING TO EXCHANGE

Thus we must give up on defining sacrifice only by the destruction of a possession. In fact, it becomes possible to speak of sacrifice only if one introduces a third term, beyond the destroyer and the good destroyed—precisely the third, the other. Even in the most banal understanding of sacrifice, for example the sacrifice of a pawn or a piece in chess, the other already appears, even if only in the most basic guise of the mimetic rival, the alter ego, my opponent: even if, in making this supposed gift to my opponent, my purpose is simply to strengthen my position, it is my position vis-à-vis him, and I sacrifice this piece to him. In short, my sacrifice always assumes the other as its horizon of possibility. Thus it is the other that determines the destruction of a good, either because he benefits from it as its new recipient (I transfer it to him while mourning its loss), or because he shares its loss with me as my rival (I give it up in order to deprive him of it, in order to strengthen my position).

In this new sense, where it occurs within the horizon of the other, does sacrifice become more intelligible than in the previous case, where it is pure and simple destruction of a good? Undoubtedly, because we notice immediately that it is in fact no longer simply a matter of destruction, but also of privation (with destruction, but also sometimes without). And this obtains on both sides of the alternative. On the one hand, I deprive myself of a good, because I can do without it, and in this way assure my autonomy (autarchy, ataraxy, etc.); in other words, I deprive myself of a good precisely in order to prove to myself that it has only a minor importance and that I remain myself even without it; hence by losing a possession that is other than me, I gain a more perfect possession of myself. On the other hand, I deprive myself of a good, not because I would simply destroy it, but because by destroying it or by making it unavailable to me, I want to divest myself of it to the point that, by this definitive loss, another might possibly appropriate it in my stead; in fact, I display this good I have renounced so that it may become available for the other to appropriate it. Nevertheless, these two situations clearly differ. In the first case, it is indeed enough for me to deprive myself of a good (to the extent that I myself survive), in order to prove its dispensable character and in this way demonstrate my autarchy: the sacrifice is accomplished perfectly by itself. The second case is rather different: admittedly, I manage to deprive myself of a good (I indeed sacrifice it) but this renunciation is not as such sufficient for some other to take possession of that of which I have nevertheless deprived myself; the sacrifice remains unfinished: my renunciation only allowed for the display of the good, which, though made available, still remains in escheat at this point in the process: less given than just given up. For even when I divest myself of a good, whether or not the other takes possession of it is not up to me; that depends only on the other. By my decision alone, the sacrifice can thus only be accomplished halfway; its realization does not derive from my simple act of dispossession, but awaits the other’s acceptance, and thus depends upon another decision, on an other decision, come from elsewhere. I can at best act as if my dispossession were equivalent to a taking possession by the other, but I can neither assure that nor assume it. Dispossession cannot anticipate reception because the other’s acceptance can come only from the other himself, and thus by definition escapes me. Sacrifice involves my dispossession, but my dispossession is not enough for a sacrifice, which only acceptance by the other can ratify. If we assume that giving up is enough to begin the sacrifice, accomplishing it as a gift is contingent upon its acceptance by the other. There is nothing optional or secondary about this discrepancy which defines and marks the irreducible distance between me and the other, such that neither I nor the other can abolish it. Even when offered (or rather: precisely because offered), it is part of the definition of sacrifice that it can nevertheless be refused and disdained by the other—in this specifically lies the other’s role. Thus, even if defined within the horizon of the other, the destruction or disappropriation of a good is not enough to account fully for the possibility of sacrifice.

Yet it happens that the most current explanation of sacrifice, produced by sociology and the sociology of religion in particular, presupposes exactly the opposite: that my dispossession of a good is enough for the effective accomplishment of a sacrifice. Sacrifice would consist in effecting the loss of a good (by destruction or by devolution) for the benefit of an other (divine or mortal, most often superior hierarchically), such that he accepts it and consequently renders a counter-gift to the one who initiated the sacrifice—with this reciprocity constituting the decisive presupposition. Obviously, the realization of the sacrifice by its initiator does not imply and does not at all guarantee the acceptance of the good that has been ceded, and still less, the reciprocity of a counter-gift. Nevertheless, this interpretation of sacrifice imposes itself, perpetuates itself, and prevails, even today. How does it manage to do so? By assuming what it cannot prove, to wit, that the acceptance and the counter-gift always (or at least in the majority of cases, as the standard situation) follow from the dispossession (with or without destruction). But, once again, how does this presupposition legitimate itself? By implicitly basing the entire explanation of sacrifice on the model of exchange.3 Moreover, in the majority of cases, we find the three terms gift, exchange, and sacrifice equated, or even substituted without distinction for one another. Just as the gift consists in giving up a possession in order to obligate the other to give back a counter-gift (do ut des), and just as exchange implies that every good that passes from the one to the other is compensated by a good (or a sum of money) passing from the other to the one, in like fashion, the sacrificer (the sacrificing agent) abandons a good (by dispossession, of exposure or destruction), so that the supposedly superior other (divine or mortal) will accept it, and in so doing, enter into a contractual relation, and, by contract, return a good (real or symbolic). In the three cases, under the imprecise (and confused) names of gift, exchange, and sacrifice, the same economy of contract obtains: I bind myself to you by abandoning a possession, therefore you bind yourself to me by accepting it, therefore you owe me an equivalent item in return. Henceforth, sacrifice does not destroy any more than the gift gives up, because both work to establish exchange; or rather, where sacrifice destroys and the gift cedes, both operate thereby to establish the economy of reciprocity.

We must conclude that destruction or dispossession and the horizon of the other still do not allow us to determine a concept of sacrifice, but only lead us to assimilate it with exchange in the same confusion that undermines the notion of the gift. In this context, at best, one would call sacrifice the imprudence of an incomplete exchange where a gift is given up without knowing whether an acceptance will ratify it, while at worst, sacrifice would be the illusion of a contractual arrangement that no one would ever have entered into with the one who is making the sacrifice. Unless it were a matter of simple deception, of the other or of oneself, claiming to give up unconditionally, hoping all the while, secretly or unconsciously, to receive a hundredfold what one loses only once. It would be better instead to consider the very term sacrifice an impropriety, an empty or contradictory concept, and apply to sacrifice the contradiction that Derrida deplored in the gift: “The truth of the gift [. . .] suffices to annul the gift. The truth of the gift is equivalent to the non-gift or to the non-truth of the gift.”4 We can thus say that the truth of sacrifice culminates in exchange, that is to say, in the non-truth of sacrifice, since it should consist precisely of a relinquishing without return; it also ends in the truth of the non-gift par excellence, that is to say, the confirmation that whenever one believes he speaks of, and makes, a sacrifice, one still hopes for an exchange and a return that would be all the more profitable, since one claimed to have lost everything.

III. THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE GIFT

Nevertheless, a way could be opened through the aporia itself, and thanks to it. More precisely, the extension of the aporia of the gift to sacrifice might already indicate another path—by making us think sacrifice precisely in its relation to the gift. We would then no longer only think of it as the dispossession (yea the destruction) of a good within the horizon of the other, but also as a moment of the more comprehensive phenomenon of the gift. For the phenomenon of the gift at the outset manifests much more than exchange: as we have attempted to demonstrate elsewhere, the gift can and thus must be separated from exchange, by letting its natural meaning reduce to givenness. For, while the economy (of exchange) denatures the gift, if reduced to givenness, the gift excepts itself from the economy, by freeing itself from the rules of exchange. The gift in effect proves able to accomplish itself, even and especially, by reducing each of the terms of exchange: without a giver (donateur), or indeed without a recipient (donataire)—thus freeing itself without reciprocity—and even without a thing given—thus freeing itself from a logic of equality.5 As reduced to the givenness in it, the gift is accomplished in an unconditioned immanence, which not only owes nothing to exchange, but dissolves its conditions of possibility. The gift so reduced performs itself with an unconditioned freedom—it never lacks anything that would prohibit it from giving itself, because, even without invoking the terms of the exchange, it still shows itself, even all the more so. But if the gift proves unconditioned in this way, would it not offer sacrifice its most appropriate site, since sacrifice claims precisely (though without at this juncture justifying its claim) to give and to give up without condition? In this hypothesis, the solution to the aporia of sacrifice would come from the answer to the aporia of the gift—from the reduction of the gift to givenness. We will need then to proceed to a reduction of sacrifice to givenness in order to formulate sacrifice, as one of its moments, in terms of the phenomenon of the reduced gift.

Where, then, does the most evident aporia arise when the phenomenon of a gift unfolds? Precisely at the moment when the given gift appears. For when what the giver gives (a thing, a being, a piece of information [une donnée], a present, etc.) comes into full light, the gift as such inevitably starts to become obscured, and then to disappear. Indeed, the gift given, which takes on the consistency of the thing and of a being, occupies the center of the phenomenal stage, so as to conceal or even exclude everything else. Everything else, that is to say first of all the giver: for the giver disappears in his own gift: on the one hand, he must indeed give something, whatever may be the actual status of this something (a simple sign of good will or a real gift in itself, useful or useless, precious or trivial, inaugural or reciprocal, etc.); otherwise he would not appear at all as a giver giving. But, precisely to the extent that he gives his gift truly and irrevocably, the giver allows his given gift to separate itself from him, and assert itself as such, autonomous and thus available to the recipient, who appropriates it. The gift not only becomes a phenomenon independent of the phenomenon of the giver, but it excludes him, either by consigning him to the phenomenal background, or by obscuring him completely. This disappearance of the giver does not result from any recalcitrance on the part of the recipient, but from the very definition of the gift given; it is not ingratitude that causes the exclusion of the giver, yet this exclusion ultimately results by virtue of the very phenomenality of the gift given, in itself exclusive and appropriating. The giver must disappear (or at least his obviousness [évidence] must diminish and his presence withdraw) in order for the gift given to appear (or at least for its presence [évidence] to increase and for it to announce itself in the foreground). Otherwise, the gift given would not only not appear as such; it would not be truly given at all: its recipient would not dare to approach it or to extend his hand, or even to claim himself the recipient, because the tutelary and overhanging presence of the giver would still cast a shadow of possession over it. The recipient cannot take the gift given for his own, so long as he still sees in it the face and the power of its previous owner. The owner must withdraw from the giver, so that the gift can start to appear as given; but ultimately, the giver must disappear completely for the gift to appear as given definitively, that is to say, given up, abandoned.

And there is more. In effect, just as the gift appears only if the giver disappears, the gift thus abandoned ends by masking in itself not only the giver but the very process of the gift. If a gift appears as truly given only from the moment the giver yields it, the abandoning is reversed: the gift given appears because it, in turn, abandons its giver. But a gift without relation to any giver no longer bears the mark of any process of givenness, and thus appears as alien to what is given in it. Paradoxically, a gift truly given disappears as given, too. It appears henceforth only as a found object: a thing, a being or an object, which is found there, in front of me, by chance and without reason, such that I may wonder what status I should grant it: is it here in its own right (like a piece of fruit fallen from a tree), by the voluntary intention of an other (like an installation in a museum, a sign at the edge of the road, etc.), by involuntary accident (like a possession lost by its distracted owner, or stolen from him), or even possibly placed here by an anonymous giver, either for the benefit of some unspecified beneficiary (like the emergency phones on the side of a freeway), or for the benefit of an identified recipient, in which case it could be intended for an other, or for me? The gift-character of the found object is thus no longer self-evident; it is only one hypothesis among others, and not the least plausible. In the extreme, if my hermeneutic does not allow me (or does not wish) to recognize the gift as given, the gift as such disappears completely. What is specific to the gift—once we grant that it implies relinquishment in order to appear—thus consists in disappearing as given, and in allowing nothing more to appear than the neutral and anonymous presence, left without any origin, of a thing, of a being, or of an object, coming only from itself, never from elsewhere—nor originating from a giver or from a process of giving. The major aporia of the gift derives from this paradox: the gift given can appear only by erasing in its phenomenon its giver, the process of its gift, and, ultimately, its entire gift-character.

Two examples unambiguously confirm this paradox. First, the one in which Saint Augustine analyses the case of “a fiancé who gives a ring to his betrothed; but she loves the ring thus received more than the fiancé who gave it to her. Wouldn’t we consider her adulterous in the very gift made to her by her fiancé, even while she loves what her fiancé has given her? Certainly, she loved what her fiancé gave her, but if she were to say: ‘This ring is enough for me, now I don’t want to see his face again,’ what would she be? Who would not detest this lunacy? Who would not accuse her of adultery? You love gold instead of your husband, you love the ring instead of your fiancé; if you truly have in mind to love the ring in place of your fiancé and have no intention of seeing him, the deposit that he gave you as the token of his love would become the sign of your loathing.”6 Of course, in the case of this caricatured ingratitude, the issue for the theologian is to condemn the sin in general, as the attitude that leads us to love the gifts of God while rejecting God himself, who gives them to us. But the phenomenological description of the gift remains no less pertinent here: the betrothed first sees the fiancé, the giver, then the gift, the ring; the fiancé intended of course that, by seeing the gift (the ring), the betrothed would not stop seeing his face, the face of the giver. He reckoned to benefit from a phenomenal structure of reference (Hinweis): the phenomenon of the ring offering its own visibility and, moreover, conferring it to the (absent) visibility of the giver, who, by this indication, would benefit from a second-degree visibility, by association. In this way, the giver, invisible as such, gives being to the visible gift, but in return the visible gift gives him a visibility by proxy. Yet this exchange (the gift of being for the given exchanged for the gift of appearing for the giver) is not phenomenally valid: in fact, the betrothed sees and wants to see only the ring, and not, by indication and reference, the facies sponsi, the face of the giver. The gift given, as such and at the outset (the ring), monopolizes all of the visibility and condemns the giver to disappear from the visible stage. Henceforth, not only does the fiancé/giver no longer enter the phenomenon of the gift, but the gift-character of the given is erased: the ring becomes the possession of the betrothed, who sees nothing more than herself in it, possessing it. Along with the giver, the gift itself disappears.

In an entirely different context, but along the same descriptive line, and in describing the es gibt, such that it determines the appearance of time and being (for neither one nor the other are, so that with respect to them it is necessary to say es gibt, it gives), Heidegger insists on the phenomenal characteristic of the gift, which gives (itself) in this it gives: “The latter [es gibt] withdraws in favor of the gift [zugünsten der Gabe] which It gives [. . .]. A giving [Geben] which gives only its gift [nur seine Gabe gibt], but in the giving holds itself back and withdraws [zurückhält und entzieht], such a giving we call sending [das Schicken].”7 We understand that the giving can precisely not give itself, more exactly cannot give itself in person, precisely because it gives its gift (the gift given), makes it appear as such, and in order to arrive at this, must not only remain in the background but must withdraw itself from visibility. The es gibt, because it gives (and dispenses) being as much as time, neither can nor should give itself. The giving gives only the given, it never gives itself. The giving cannot return on itself in a donum sui, as causa sui in metaphysics claims to do. Can we advance in the understanding of this fundamental impossibility? Possibly, by considering difference as such, namely, the difference that Heidegger in this case no longer calls ontological (ontologische Differenz), but the different from the same, the differentiation (der Unterschieden aus dem Selben, der Unter-Schied). What differs here is called the unique Austrag, the accord, which unfolds at once as being and as a being, which are both given in the same gesture, but precisely not in a similar posture: “Being shows itself as the unconcealing coming-over [zeigt sich als die entbergende Überkommnis]. Beings as such appear in the manner of the arrival that keeps itself concealed in unconcealedness [erscheint in der Weise der in die Unverborgenheit sich bergenden Ankunft]. [. . .] The difference of being and beings, as the differentiation of coming-over and arrival [Unter-schied von Überkommnis und Ankunft], is the accord [Austrag] of the two in unconcealing keeping in concealment.”8 In fact, nothing is clearer than this phenomenological description of the es gibt: when it is given, or more precisely when it gives (understood in the trivial sense: when it functions, it works, it performs), the being arrives in visibility because it occupies and seizes visibility entirely (just as the arrival, Ankunft, of a train, precisely in the banal sense of the term, fills the station and focuses every gaze upon it). But beings can neither unleash nor prompt the visibility that they appropriate in this way: only being can open and uncover it, because it alone consists precisely in this display, because it alone comes from a coming-over (Überkommnis), opening the site that an arrival (Ankunft) will eventually occupy. This arrival receives its site, but by occupying it, it masks it and also renders invisible the coming-over that had opened it. By occupying the entire stage, beings make this very scene invisible. Being thus disappears in the visibility (l’évidence) of the being whose arrival covers up its nevertheless unconcealing coming-over. The being thus hides being from view by a phenomenological necessity which attests that being never shows itself without a being nor, moreover, as a being, as Sein und Zeit has already repeated with decisive insistence. The process of the givenness of the giving thus reproduces, here ontologically, in the agreement of being and the being according to the es gibt, the aporia of the gift in general, which Saint Augustine had described in a theological context.

It is characteristic of the gift given that it spontaneously conceals the givenness in it; thus a characteristic of the phenomenon of the gift is that it masks itself. Is it possible to locate the phenomenon of sacrifice within the essential aporia of the phenomenality of the gift? And, in being articulated there, might the phenomenon of sacrifice even allow us to solve the aporia of the gift?

IV. THE LIFTING OF THE GIVEN AND THE RELIEVING OF THE GIFT

By virtue of its visibility, the given constitutes an obstacle to that which makes this very visibility possible. What then makes the visibility of the gift possible, if not the process of givenness, whereby the giver turns the gift over as given, by handing it over in its autonomous visibility?

We should here note carefully that the gift given does not mask only (or even first of all) the giver, as an effect is detached from its efficient cause, or as the beneficiary of a favor refuses out of ingratitude to recognize it. The gift given masks the very process of giving givenness, a process in which the giver participates without constituting it intrinsically (he can even recuse himself without the process of giving being suspended). For, as we noted above, a gift (reduced) can remain perfectly possible and complete even with an anonymous or uncertain giver, or indeed without any confirmed giver. In fact, at issue here is one of the cardinal figures of the reduction of the gift to givenness. The question thus does not consist in reverting from the given to the giver, but in letting appear even in the gift ultimately given (in a being arrived in its arrival [arrivage, Ankunft] the advancing process of its coming-over, which delivers its visibility by giving it to the gift, or, more generally, the very coming-over that delivers the gift phenomenally (the Überkommnis that unconceals the visible). At issue would be the suspending of the gift given, so that it would allow the process of its givenness, namely, the given character of the gift (its given-ness [donnéïté], to translate Gegebenheit literally), to appear in its own mode, instead of crushing it in the fall from the given into a pure and simple found object. So it is not a question of suppressing the gift given, for the benefit of the giver, but of making this gift transparent anew in its own process of givenness by letting its giver eventually appear there, and, first and always, by allowing to appear the coming-over that delivers the gift into the visible. At stake here is the phenomenality of this very return: to return to the gift given the phenomenality of its return, of the return that inscribes it through givenness in its visibility as gift coming from somewhere other than itself. The gift appears as such—in other words, as arriving from somewhere other than itself—only if it appears in such a way that it ceaselessly refers to this elsewhere that gives it, and from which it finds itself given to view.

That the gift given allows the return from which it proceeds to appear: this defines the signification and the phenomenological function of sacrifice—such is, at least, our hypothesis. To sacrifice does not signify to relinquish a good (by destruction or dispossession), even if this relinquishing were possibly for the other’s benefit; rather, it consists in making appear the referral from which it proceeds, by reversing it (by making it return) toward the elsewhere, whose intrinsic, irrevocable, and permanent mark it bears insofar as it is a gift given.9 Henceforth, sacrifice presupposes a gift already given, the point of which is neither destruction, its undoing, nor even its transfer to another owner, but, instead, its return to the givenness from which it proceeds, and whose mark it should always bear. Sacrifice gives the gift back to the givenness from which it proceeds, by returning it to the very return that originally constitutes it. Sacrifice does not separate itself from the gift but dwells in it totally. It manifests this by returning to the gift its givenness because it repeats the gift on the basis of its origin. The formula that perfectly captures the conditions of possibility of the gift is found in a verse from the Septuagint, —“all things are yours and it is by taking from among what is yours that we have given you gifts” (1 Chron. 29:14). To make a gift by taking from among gifts already given in order to re-give it; to “second” a gift from the first gift itself, to make a gift by reversing the first gift toward the one who gives it, and thus to make it appear through and through as a given arising from elsewhere—this is what accurately defines sacrifice, which consists in making visible the gift as given according to the coming-over of givenness. At issue is absolutely not a counter-gift, as if the giver needed either to recover his due (in the manner of an exchange), or to receive a supplementary tribute (gratitude as a symbolic compensation); rather, the point is the recognition of the gift as such, by repeating in reverse the process of givenness, and by reintegrating the gift to it, wresting it from its factual fall back to the rank (without givenness) of found object, non-given, un-given, in the end, to make visible not only the given but the process of givenness itself (as coming-over, Überkommnis), which would otherwise be left unnoticed, as if excluded from all phenomenality.

Sacrifice does not return the given to the giver by depriving the recipient (donataire) of the gift: it renders givenness visible by re-giving the gift. Sacrifice effects the redounding (la redondance) of the gift. As a result, sacrifice loses nothing, above all not the gift that it re-gives; on the contrary, it wins—it wins the gift, which it keeps all the more that it makes it appear for the first time as such, as a gift given, finally safeguarded in its givenness (given-ness, Gegebenheit). Sacrifice wins, but without even having to play the game of “loser wins” (as in the so-called pure love of God), as if it were necessary to lose much in order to win still more by retribution. Sacrifice wins by re-giving (redondance): it conquers the true phenomenon of the gift by restoring to it, through the act of re-giving, the phenomenality of givenness. Sacrifice re-gives the gift starting with the recipient and makes the gift appear as such in the light of its givenness and, sometimes, for the glory of the giver. In this, it corresponds to forgiveness (le pardon): forgiveness re-gives the gift as well, but starting from the giver, who confirms it in the light of givenness for the salvation of the recipient. Forgiveness and sacrifice correspond to one another in this way, so as to make the phenomenality of givenness appear by the double redounding of the gift, beginning either from the recipient, or from the giver.

V. THE CONFIRMATION OF ABRAHAM

Thus we have determined sacrifice according to its phenomenality by inscribing it within the framework of a phenomenology of the gift: its function is to make appear what the gift, once given, never fails to cover over and hide—the process of givenness itself—such that on the basis of a review of this process, the giver eventually becomes visible again as well. Can we confirm this determination of sacrifice by a significant example? Certainly, if we consider the episode of the sacrifice of Abraham, or rather of the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, related in Genesis 22:1–19. Without glossing over its radically theological status (indeed, how could one do so?), we shall sketch an interpretation of it first according to the principle of the phenomenality of sacrifice.

Certainly, there is a sacrifice involved, specified as such: “[O]ffer [your son Isaac . . .] as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you” (22:2)—but it is a sacrifice that precisely does not take place, at least if one confines oneself to the common determination of sacrifice (a destruction or dispossession allowing an exchange within the framework of a contract). Understanding this sacrifice presupposes, paradoxically, understanding why Isaac has not been sacrificed (“Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son,” 22:13). Or more precisely, it involves understanding why, while there was no sacrifice following the common understanding (no destruction of Isaac), there was indeed, according to the biblical account, fulfilment of the obligation toward God, since God acknowledges: “[N]ow I know that you fear God” (22:12). Now this is possible only if we grant that this account does not follow the common determination of sacrifice, but instead follows its phenomenological concept—that of sacrifice conceived on the basis of the gift, and of the gift reduced to givenness. It is here that we must therefore locate the concept. A first moment seems evident: God demands of Abraham a sacrifice, and even a consuming sacrifice (where the victim is consumed in fire, leaving nothing to share between God, the priest, and the one offering, in contrast to other forms of sacrifices). This demand of sacrifice falls upon Isaac, the one and only son of Abraham. Do we have here a sacrifice according to the common concept? Precisely not, because God asks nothing out of the ordinary of Abraham, nor does he enter into any contractual agreement with him; he simply and justifiably takes back Isaac, who already belongs to him, and even doubly so. First, quite obviously, because all first-borns belong to God by right: “The first-born of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do likewise with your oxen and with your sheep; seven days it shall be with its dam; on the eighth day you shall give it to me” (Exod. 22:29–30). Or again: “Consecrate to me all the first-born; whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine” (Exod. 13:2). The question consists only in knowing what this belonging and this consecration really imply. The answer varies, from actual putting to death (in the case of the plague on the firstborn of Egypt, Exod. 12:29–30), to the ritual sacrifice of animals in the Temple, right up to the redemption of the firstborn of Israel, prescribed explicitly by God (Exod. 13:11–15, 34:19; Num. 18:14), who forbids human sacrifices.10 In this sense, Isaac belongs first to God, before belonging to his father (Abraham), in the same way as any other firstborn, of Israel or of any other people.

God has nevertheless another right of possession over Isaac, radical in another way: Isaac in effect does not belong to Abraham, who could not, neither he, nor his wife, on their own, engender him (“Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; and it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women,” Gen. 18:11). Thus, Isaac belongs from the beginning and as a miracle to God alone: “Nothing, neither word nor deed, remains impossible for God. At the same season next year, I will return to your home and Sarah will have a son.”11 And in fact, “The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised. And Sarah conceived, and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him” (21:1–2). Thus, by right, Isaac, child of the promise through divine omnipotence, comes to Abraham only as a pure gift, unexpected because beyond every hope, incommensurate with what Abraham would have possessed or engendered himself. But this gift nevertheless disappears as soon as Isaac appears as such, that is to say, as the son of Abraham, or more precisely, as the one whom Abraham claims as his son: “Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore to him, Isaac. [. . .] And the child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned” (21:3, 8). And for her part, Sarah, too, appropriates Isaac as her son (“I have borne him a son in his old age!” 21:7), since she drives out as a competitor the other son, natural born, whom Abraham had had with Hagar (21:9–14). And the call that God addresses to Abraham aims only to denounce explicitly this improper appropriation: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you cherish”—because Isaac precisely is not the possession of Abraham, who therefore must not cherish him as such. The demand for a sacrifice opposes to this illegitimate appropriation, which cancels the gift given in a possession, the most original right of the giver to have his gift acknowledged as a gift given, which is to say, simply acknowledged as an always provisional, transferable, and alienable usufruct: “Go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (22:2). Abraham hears himself asked not so much to kill his son, to lose him and return possession of him to God (according to the common concept of the gift), as, first and foremost, to give back to him his status as gift, precisely to return him to his status as gift given by reducing him (leading him back) to givenness.

And Abraham accomplishes this reduction in the most explicit and clear manner imaginable. Isaac, who reasons according to the common concept of the gift, of course notices that his father does not have (that is to say, does not possess) any possession available to sacrifice (to destroy and to exchange in the framework of a contract): “[W]here is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (22:7). Abraham, who already reasons according to the phenomenological concept of sacrifice, as gift given reduced to givenness, answers that “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering” (22:8)—which means that God decides everything, including what one will offer him, and thus that neither Abraham, nor even Isaac, will be able to give anything to God, except what God, himself and in the first place, has already given to them; in a word, this means that every gift made to God comes first from God as a gift given to us. The place of sacrifice is thus called “God provides” (22:14). It should be pointed out here that the Hebrew says yir’eh (from the root r’h, to see, to foresee, to provide), but that the Septuagint first understands, for the name Abraham attaches to the mountain, God saw, (second aorist of ), and then, for the name that it later retains, , God appears (passive aorist of ). Thus, it is as if the fact that God sees and provides, and therefore quite clearly gives the offering of the sacrifice, or put another way, gives the gift to give, that is, makes the gift appear as such, given by the giver—were equivalent to the appearing of the giver, to the fact that God gives himself to seeing. So God gives himself to be seen as he gives originally, as he shows that every gift comes from him. He appears as the giver that the gifts manifest by referring to him as their origin and provenance.

Abraham, and he alone (not Isaac), sees in this way that God alone gives the gift of the burnt offering, such that God subsequently appears to him. But he had already recognized God as the giver of gifts from the moment that he had finally agreed to recognize Isaac as for him the principal among the gifts given by God, and thus due to God. So it is no longer important that Abraham kill, eliminate, and exchange his son for God’s benefit in order to accomplish the sacrifice demanded (according to the common concept of sacrifice); rather, it matters exclusively (according to the phenomenological concept of the gift) that he acknowledge his son as a gift, that he accomplish this recognition of the gift by giving it back to its giver, and, thus, that he let God appear through his gift, rightly recognized as a gift given. God clearly understands it as such since he spares Isaac. It is important to note that to the extent that he restrains Abraham from killing Isaac, God specifically does not refuse his sacrifice, but nullifies only the putting to death, because the putting to death does not belong to the essence of sacrifice: the actual death of Isaac would have ratified only sacrifice in its common concept (destruction, dispossession, exchange, and contract). In fact, God lets Abraham go right to the end of sacrifice, but understood in the sense of its phenomenological concept: the recognition of Isaac as a gift received from God and due to God. And in order to recognize it, one need only acknowledge Abraham’s loss of Isaac, a recognition accomplished perfectly without his being put to death, and from the moment he is accepted as a boundless gift: “The angel said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me’ ” (22:12). By refusing to let Isaac be put to death, God does not thereby refuse to acknowledge the gift offered by Abraham; he accepts the sacrifice all the more, understood this time in the strict phenomenological sense. By sparing Isaac, henceforth recognized (by Abraham) as a gift (from God), God re-gives Isaac to him, gives him a second time, presenting a gift by a redounding (don par une redondance), which consecrates it definitively as a gift henceforth held in common and, ultimately, transparently between the giver and the recipient. The sacrifice redoubles the gift and confirms it as such for the first time.12

VI. SACRIFICE IN TRUTH

Thus sacrifice requires neither destruction, nor restitution, nor even exchange, much less a contract, because its basis is not the economy (which dispenses with the gift), but the gift itself, whose aporia it endeavors to work through. For the function of sacrifice is only to allow the recognition of the giver and, through him, the entire process of givenness, by reducing the given. In this sense, sacrifice can be understood as a destruction, but a destruction taken in the sense of Abbau, of the deconstruction that frees by putting into the light of day what accumulation had covered up. Sacrifice destroys the given, by clearing it away in order to uncover that which had made it visible and possible—the advance of givenness itself. This deconstructive and uncovering destruction can thus be better named a reduction: the bracketing of the gift given allows the giver’s gesture to rise again to the visible, makes the recipient recover the posture of reception, and above all gives movement back to the coming-over of givenness in each of the three terms involved (giver, recipient, and gift given). Sacrifice is a redounding of the gift originating with the recipient (just as forgiveness [le pardon] consists of the redounding of the gift from the giver). In this way one succeeds in raising the epistemological obstacle of an economic conception of sacrifice by recognizing that “to sacrifice is not to kill, but to abandon and to give” (Bataille),13 to the point that it becomes possible to conceive, as Levinas puts it, an “approach of the Infinite through sacrifice.”14 It constitutes an approach to the infinite because the reduction of the ever-finite given opens the only royal way toward the illumination of a possible infinite—not a being, even one that is given, and even less a necessarily determined and possessable object, but the process of an arrival (une advenue), always come from elsewhere and, for that very reason, inalienable and unavailable. Unless the very access to being depends on sacrifice, if, like Patočka (and doubtless in opposition to Heidegger), one decides to think the es gibt resolutely, on the basis of givenness, such that givenness requires sacrifice, but also alone renders sacrifice intelligible: “In sacrifice, es gibt being: here Being already ‘gives’ itself to us, not in a refusal but explicitly. To be sure, only a man capable of experiencing, in something so apparently negative, the coming of Being, only as he begins to sense that this lack opens access to what is richest, to that which bestows everything and presents all as gift to all, only then can he begin to experience this favor.”15 Which can finally be transposed into theological terms, for it may be that Saint Augustine says nothing different when he defines sacrifices as “opera [. . .] misericordiae, sive in nos ipsos, sive in proximos, quae referuntur ad Deum [works of mercy shown to ourselves or to our neighbours, and done with reference to God].”16