It is significant that we talk about law and order—it’s not enough to say just “law” or just “order.” Indeed, order does not repeat, does not embody, the sense of law. Order is what law cannot achieve alone. Order is law plus sacrifice, the perpetual surplus, the perpetual extra that has to be destroyed for order to exist. The world cannot live with law alone: it requires an order that law, by itself, is incapable of giving. The world needs to destroy something to make order: and it must destroy it outside the law—in pleasure, in hatred, in indifference.
The modern age is based on the shortsighted assumption that law and order are synonyms, that we talk about “law and order” as a high-sounding pleonasm that conjures deeper respect. Destruction gathers its force in darkness, concentrates itself, adjusts itself, in proportion to the law that would seek to deny it, and it does so for the very reason that it no longer has a recognized existence. The vaster and more diversified the law, the more devastating the destruction that eludes it. Every war breaks out to establish the order that law could never establish. The Marxist idea of revolution acknowledges this impotence of the law and at the same time it seizes the entire apparatus of sacrifice, exploiting it to establish an order that denies the foundation of sacrifice.
The impotence of the law stems from its incapacity to deal with surplus. Law presupposes a single undivided subject, sacrifice presupposes a dual subject: the sacrificer and the victim. And the surplus is the victim. Therefore, law is always the exoteric of the sacrifice.
Surplus value, the modern name for the accursed share, and the starting point for the Marxist attack on capital, becomes the object of a dispute that can only be resolved by revolutionary violence, once it is recognized that the law is unable to deal with surplus. Surplus value is the object of the sacrifice, which a new priestly sect wants to manage in a new way. But Marxist priests—like the haruspices of ancient Rome—agree with their enemies in denying that the dispute is about the object of the sacrifice. They talk about private and public ownership, about fair distribution of resources. They deny that surplus, before belonging to the oppressors and the oppressed, belongs to nature, the modern name for the Other.
Surplus is the excess of nature over culture, that part of nature that culture finds itself having to gamble with, consume, destroy, dedicate. In dealing with such excess, every culture defines its own physiognomy. Law tends toward monotony; its variations are scant in comparison with the sumptuous variety of forms. And the forms are the gamut of sacrificial games.
Sacrifice is inscribed in our physiology: any order—biological and social—is founded on an expulsion, on a quantity of burned-up energy, because order has to be smaller than the material that it orders. The only order without visible expulsion would be analogous to that of plant life: a culture that manages to subsist without founding itself on difference, and therefore without founding itself: a culture indistinguishable from the rustling of a tree.
Every sacrifice is the recognition of an Other. The West, after all its acts of emancipation, can recognize nothing other than itself. Its paralysis, hidden behind the mass of standard procedures, follows from no longer knowing to whom to give itself. The gods have fallen, but the hypostases have not: so the world ends up following that awkward, sinister march that Max Stirner had described: for Reason, for Liberty, for Humanity, for the Cause. But awakening from such hypostases is bitter, more so than from any other superstition.
The Upaniṣads require the destruction to be carried out at the moment of maximum consciousness. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Arjuna receives the revelation from Kṛṣṇa at the moment when he is about to kill his kinsmen on the battlefield. The secular world turns its eyes away from destruction. And it keeps destruction out of sight, like the bombed city kept away from the eyes of the pilot who drops the bomb—and is already flying far away.
Porphyry is the perfect Western saṃnyāsin. He is familiar with sacrifice, its secrets, its unspeakableness. But he is gripped by a sort of nausea in front of “the impurity that comes from flesh and blood,” in front of the vapors of immolated souls. The world, for him, is “sorcery” (goḗteuma), a potion that dulls the mind. He has only one desire: to wake up, and to remain in wakefulness, to break the bonds of the sorceress, to become an apostate from the world, therefore to detach himself from it, since “detachment” is apóstasis.
“Detachment can be achieved with violence … But, for example with sentient things, an object snatched away with violence carries with it some part or trace of that from which it has been detached.” Clean detachment, without residue, is achieved however by constantly averting the mind from the impure objects, which is reminiscent of uninterrupted prayer. Porphyry is speaking here as an observer of the psyche, using words that have an affinity with those of the great Buddhist masters and with the hermits of the Thebaid—similar to the exchanges of correspondence between seventeenth-century scientists. But he chooses a wonderfully urbane path of detachment, a pool of silence in the metropolis, an existence recognizable from the outside by no indication other than sobriety and clarity. He performs only a “sacrifice of thought” (noerà thysía), presenting himself to the god “in a white garment and with a pure impassive soul and a light body, not burdened by essences or passions of the soul taken from other beings.” In the pagan twilight, Porphyry is a man who is tired of ritual, fumigations, spells, not because he questions their power, but precisely because he is familiar with such power—and he knows that it would bind him even more to the demons of the world. Like the saṃnyāsin in the forest, Porphyry hides away in the imperial city. “We who each day train ourselves to die to others,” he writes, using the verb apothnḗskein with the dative, in a construction unknown to his teachers, but which we find in Paul (“dead to the law,” “dead to sin”), who was the most philosophical of the Jews, in whom Porphyry recognized a “lineage of philosophers.”
The gods whom Porphyry worships look more to the “conduct of the sacrificers than the abundance of the things sacrificed.” As for the object of the sacrifice, for them “the most excellent offering is a pure intellect and an impassive soul.” Here, as already in India, the sacrifice tends to withdraw into the invisible. No external signs make it possible to know what is happening in the sacrificer, apart from a small gesture that Porphyry compares with those required by good manners: “The honors that we reserve for the gods should be likened to those that are rendered to good men when we stand to allow them to sit in the best places, and should not be likened to the payment of taxes.” This reference to good manners toward the gods is the last, sublime pagan message.
Sacrifice creates the strongest link between society and what lies outside it. But the sacred margin of contact with the outside world—the geometric locus where the sacrifice takes place—also permits the existence of an internal, profane area in pectore, which can now grow without being threatened at any moment by the sacred. In the destruction—even only of herbs—the guilt on which culture is established is affirmed: its detachment, its isolation from everything else, insofar as it isolates a thing-victim and expels it. By dedicating the victim to something other than itself, society recognizes its own dependence upon that from which it has detached itself. And at the same time it holds the outside world at a distance, offering it the victim rather than itself. This is the act of reverence. This is the cunning trick of enlightenment. At first, they are inseparable. The ploy is wrapped in reverence, and it works as a slow corrosive, like the poison (German: Gift) in the gift. As a Gift-gift.
In Guénon’s formulation, the sacrifice reflects (and therefore inverts) the solve et coagula of origin: that which was divided in the creation is now joined back together. “The essential purpose of sacrifice is to ‘unite that which has been separated,’ therefore—so far as man is concerned—to reunite ‘I’ to the ‘Self.’” Hence the coniunctio, the hierogamy, which is interwoven with the acts of the sacrifice: the ritual foundation of interweaving Eros and Thanatos. Hence the smell of slaughter that is the aura of sex. But how can an act of violent expulsion and destruction be an act of reunion, of restitution? In killing the victim, culture violently detaches itself from the thing, it severs a tie that binds it to the whole. But, by dedicating the victim to the divinity, culture rejoins the thing destroyed—as a representative of culture itself—to the whole. Here, in this pendular movement, lies the double aspect of sacrifice. And the difference is determined by the point at which the movement is halted: whether at the center within society or the center outside it. In the Vedic texts, the answer is clear: the center into which the sacrifice flows lies outside society. The sacrificial vessel sets out from the formless and profane existence of the yajamāna (the “sacrificer”), who is the patron and beneficiary of the ceremony; during the ritual actions it sails through the treacherous waters and currents of the sacred, which is made there; finally it delivers the victim to the divine ocean, which reabsorbs him, in the same way that ātman absorbs jīvātman, in the same way that the Self absorbs the I. Then the sacrificer returns to his life. A murderous eros, an amorous killing, the archetype of every journey.
Porphyry, in De abstinentia, discusses whether or not nómos (law) extends to animals. Nómos does not, in fact, extend to the whole of nature, but is founded on a separation between one sphere where it rules (society) and one sphere abandoned to whim (animals, along with nature). Law cannot therefore support universal interdependence: its application involves the severing of links that the law itself does not set down. Where the law has not spoken, chance rules. Chance means anything whatsoever. Where the law has not spoken, anything whatsoever can rule.
The law falls silent when it reaches the lavish margin of society, its superabundance: it is the area where animals are killed, silently, unmentioned by the law. It is the sacrificial band that girds society, its infula.
From the Laws of Manu: “The householder has five instruments of murder: the hearth, the pestle, the broom, the mortar, and the water jug. In order to atone for all these offenses, the great sages have established five great sacrifices that the householder must perform every year. The teaching [of the Vedas] is the sacrifice to brahman, the offering of food and water is the sacrifice to the ancestors, the offering [of food] in the air and on the ground is the sacrifice to the ghosts. As for the offering to men, this is hospitality. He who never fails, so far as possible, to perform these five great sacrifices, even if he remains inside his house, is not tainted by the sin of murder.” The delicacy of the Vedic sages: the five murder weapons are household items: the broom, the water jug. This is to show that murder involves the simplest, everyday, unconscious acts. A room is swept, and a victim is strangled: the connexio makes one act resonate with the other.
That we are made of ātman and jīvātman, of a “Self” and an “I” (following Guénon’s translation), which are coexistent and mutually dependent, was a truth once again perceived in the Western hermetic tradition—every alchemical operari implies it—and eventually in German romanticism, in the interplay of Doubles. But the official course of philosophy, that sequence from Locke to Hume to Kant that we find in the textbooks, had always sought to erase any duality from the mind and tended to reduce each individual to a position of central command, whose reliability had yet to be established. The task of patiently inspecting the joints, undertaken by Kant, finally led to those joints being smashed apart by Nietzsche and his hammer. Instead of the individual there was now a yawning cavity. Crossing it, like the backs of dolphins, were dark beings, momentary impulses. Meanwhile, science agreed to transform itself once and for all into a prosthesis, a device to be attached during laboratory hours to a subject who, otherwise, acted as a good citizen of the realm of Public Opinion. And yet, within that same strict epistemological plan, devoted to Ockham and to the eradication of all superfluity, the original duality of the subject would once again emerge: in the last years of the nineteenth century, when discussion began about the paradoxes of set theory, another line started to emerge, which would lead to Gödel, and from there would branch out in every direction: a sign of a final corruption, of a now proven inadequacy of every discourse that did not include discourse about itself. And it was precisely here, in the duality between a discourse that has a referent and one that has itself as a referent, that the two birds of the Upaniṣads reappeared, the ātman and the jīvātman—and at the very center of science, as at the center of Vedic ritual, once again there was the exchange of looks between the two birds, perched on the same branch on the vast tree of life.
The eternal return shifts the cycle beyond the Zodiac; a vision tinged with anguish, in the perception of the colossal numbers that now invade the empty spaces between the stars. Auguste Blanqui imprisoned at Clairvaux: “At night, clinging to the bars of his cell, he conversed with the stars.” Impossible experience of full pure unrelated fragmentation. Now the ring, which was decorated with the beasts of the Zodiac, expands immeasurably and is encrusted with cosmic dust.
“A lowering of the head”—the final gesture in the face of life’s adversities, according to the oracle, was the gesture that the sheep had to make before being sacrificed: “You are forbidden to slay the sturdy race of sheep, O Theopropides. But if the animal agrees by lowering its head to the purifying water, I say, O Episcopus, that it is right to sacrifice it.”
Ahnungslos, “unperceiving”: this wonderful German word indicates the condition into which history has tortuously led the West. To be born “unperceiving,” with no traces of guilt or grace, is the original modern status, that forlorn claim to free oneself from the world that lurks hidden behind the bench of a workshop or laboratory, behind a school desk or a bank counter. At its origin, as always, lies a detail of sacrificial practice. “If one consecrates, it is to desecrate better,” the Ancestors said. The world weighed horribly upon everything, everything had too much meaning, every tiny object contained too much power. An undeclared dream began to take shape: that the finest thing was to become lighter, to rid oneself of the world. To do so, one had to concentrate the sacred in a victim—and kill it. After, all that was left was to return to heady banality, profane at last. The possibility of letting one’s thinking become empty, arbitrary, and wandering was the only Siren the pure Westerner has obeyed. All the others he has deceived—and not even with too much effort.
In the tangled web of sacrifice, the Westerner chose one single thread—that of expelling the sacred through the killing of the sacrificial victim—and he sought to separate it from all the others. He felt no great regret about no longer eating the sacred, in absorbing a tolerable part of the source of all power, of the inexhaustible soma. Home cooking was enough for him—or, at most, a banquet among friends, spiced with the gossip of some courtesans. But there remained something dark and disturbing about those sacrificial practices: the impurity, prior to concentrating itself entirely on the victim, was in the subject himself, in the sacrificer—and it was weighing down his life, which tried now to be simply transparent and cruel. At the end of a long, dark process, sacrifice was transformed into judicial trial. With the advent of law, guilt, which belongs to the sacrifice, and primarily to the sacrificer, is shifted at the outset onto the victim alone: he will no longer be called the victim, but the culprit. The law severs the connection between guilt and the process of life (“la vie étant coupable,” life being guilty, as Joseph de Maistre would one day say): in the judicial process, guilt is extraneous to the law—it waits only to be stabbed by the law. Between Oedipus Rex and the Gospels, sacrifice has completed its transformation into a trial. It is now for the law to establish the choice of victim. But the only trial that is wholly effective, insofar as it frees itself from the sacred, is the trial in which the innocent is convicted. Here it is shown how the law has always been, and will always be, overwhelmed by something previous and more powerful. Pilate washes his hands, since he realizes that the law is powerless to absolve. Christ is not condemned by the law, but by the impotence of the law. Those who condemn him are the crowd, together with its priests.
The sacred is concentrated in the victim, it is canceled out in the victim, and it emanates from the victim. The sacred must however be killed, since it terrifies: its everlasting contagion makes life impossible. The only other possibility—the modern invention—is where the sacred is not perceived. The sacred is either terrifying or it goes unnoticed. But the situation in which it goes unnoticed produces once again, in reverse, the situation of primal terror. Something common, ubiquitous, that drives people to kill with little or no reason, to inflict ruthless tortures, on themselves, on anyone.
The peculiarly modern form of sacrifice is a vast industrial undertaking that shuns the name and memory of sacrifice. There is talk of whole classes to be eliminated, or otherwise of those inevitable dropouts who each day are cast out of the social mechanism. But they are always events strictly belonging to society. Likewise people still anoint divine beings, arrange them on furs, gird them with flowers and white bands, before an invisible knife crashes down upon them. Astral archons appearing as young women arrested while stealing from department stores or choked by barbiturates.
For Vedic India, I and Self, jīvātman and ātman, were like the sacrificial post (yūpa) and the victim that was tied to it. “Closer to you than your jugular vein,” says the god to the mystic, since he is the knife that has severed that vein.
Nature is a haunted house—but
Art—a House that tries to be haunted.
Emily
“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.” Art, which is elusive by its very nature, can only be given a genetic definition—and this one by Theodor Adorno is perhaps the most beautiful. To ignore the magical compulsions that sacrifice demands is not just a stratagem of reason, which rids itself of the powers. It is also a gesture that opens up an entirely new dimension—it provides the opportunity to play with sacrificial objects, with the flotsam and jetsam that the world of magic has abandoned on the shores of the psyche. All the characteristics of art, from its pervasive ambiguity to its cathartic purpose as revealed by the naturalist Aristotle, to its “disinterestedness” as formulated by Kant, are remnants of sacrifice. Beckett’s “dire cela, sans savoir quoi,” “say it, not knowing what,” resounds with the original operari that was the sacrifice itself. Whereas the “sans savoir quoi” evokes the powers that have been canceled out, which operate anonymously, in obscurity. This is the peculiarity of the West: not that it has discovered Beauty, but that it has let it slip into a state of suspension, it has slackened the noose around the victim’s neck. Escaping from the “lie of being truth” also means escaping from truth itself, from its suffocation. This leads to the implacable hostility of art to every social order, which incorporates each time a claim to truth. In art, the voice that speaks is that of the victim who has escaped in extremis, and forever, from being killed, when ritual had already let everything sacred flow back into that killing. Art has a light step because it roams in the forest. Now the altar is empty.
In a totally secular society, such as France at the end of the nineteenth century, with its pompous instituteurs of free thinking, eager to demolish Gothic chapels and establish secular morality, the insight of Émile Durkheim was inevitable: that the religious is the social. No one before him, or in any other place, could have formulated with that peremptory sternness, with that École Normale zest, an axiom that implies the total reabsorption of the cloud of divinity into the Great Animal of Plato and Simone Weil. Durkheim came from a family of rabbis—he is a dry Jew, who never went back into the water after the crossing of the Red Sea. The sea, for him, does not exist—society has absorbed it. On the other hand, the brightest anthropologists of his school, Marcel Mauss and Marcel Granet, were wonderfully damp. The “total social facts” they described, sometimes with visionary precision, were the first proper portrayals of ancient societies as places in which cosmic exchanges took place. “Alors que tout est en nuances…,” “Everything being a question of nuances…,” was the secret motto of Mauss—and of Granet. While J. G. Frazer, in another cabinet on the other side of the English Channel, was clothing human origins with a grand series of “ready-made suits” (Dumézil), Mauss was weighing every detail of the etiquette of people he would never see with the same obsessive and insatiable eye that Saint-Simon had for court etiquette.
The conclusions eventually reached by Mauss and Granet go contrary to those put forward by Durkheim. But Durkheim’s axiom—“the religious is the social”—is one of those false principles that reveal a looming truth. Only another kind of genius, that of René Girard, would succeed in pushing the analysis as far as the savage end that Durkheim had not foreseen in his axiom. Girard is one of the last surviving “hedgehogs,” to use the term that Isaiah Berlin had subtly drawn from the verse of Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The “one big thing” that Girard knows has a name: scapegoat. For Girard, all theological speculations about sacrifice, that whole part of the sacrificial conundrum that does not lead straight to the scapegoat, are priestly attempts to hide the terrible truth. Thus he accepts, though with heroic intelligence, the West’s meanest game—that of “demystifying,” “demythifying,” “demasking,” before being initiated into the mystery of the mask. But if his sarcasm and his fury do no harm to the Vedic sages, they reach modern anthropologists with appropriate vehemence. It is not the Vedas that are unmasked here, but the euphemistic corporate circumlocutions used by science to cover up continual murder, perpetual bloodshed. Anthropologists have become devoted to social functionality and seem more and more to display a prudery akin to those Victorians who did all they could to avoid any reference to feet and legs. Girard repeatedly hurls at them “Molière’s immortal words: ‘Ah! in what gallant terms these things are put.’”
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”). Caiaphas here is the politician: “no one has done better than he in politics.” And his lucidity points to the unspoken foundation that we come across in every society: “This is the terrible paradox of desires in men. 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.” 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.
No theological speculation can blot out this scene. And this scene is not enough to blot out theological speculation, as Girard would like to do. On this, as often happens for the ultimate things, almost everything is said in a story by Chuang-tzu: “The priest of the sacrifice approached the fence in his ceremonial dress and spoke to the pigs as follows: ‘Why do you detest being taken to your death? I will fatten you up for three months; as for me, for ten days I will mortify myself and for three days I will fast. Then white grass mats will be rolled out for you and your limbs will be laid on carved trays. What more do you want?’ Then he thought what the pigs would have preferred and he said: ‘They prefer to be fed on husks and bran and to remain in their sty.’”
Girard traces back, as far as its origins, the delirium that Western man first unleashes and then, with a credulous shudder, takes as being true: the autonomy of society, its claim to relate only to itself, to express everything in relation to itself—and therefore also to consider the victims sacrificed to the stars as mere sops for the stability of the group. For Girard, it is as though the sun, the moon, fire, plague, and wind existed only as a way of covering up some kind of social tension. This odd claim is the same as in Marx, who suggested that the water from the waterfall “has no value” since it is not produced by labor. That assumption, that nothing existed before being put into place by the whim of thought, is the awkward, imperious Setzen of the mind. Happily, the world is not like this. And Girard carries out a violent extrapolation to get to the heart of the violence: its victim is silent nonhuman reality. But there is a sense, however, in which the world was like this: the sense in which that claim about society’s sovereign isolation, which would not be declared for several thousand years, appears to have existed, in latent form, from the very beginning. Girard assumes that in the beginning there was not death, but a murder—and more precisely, a lynching. But, before the lynching, there is hunger: “for hunger is death.” Death and murder are joined together in hunger. The impossibility of survival without eating, therefore without killing—since even cutting down a plant means killing—is the sentence delivered by Zeus in response to Prometheus’s sacrificial deceit: the gods, having been tricked, will have only the “white bones” and the smoke from the meat, while the humans, in choosing the succulent meat, will inherit hunger, and therefore death. This primordial event is the foundation of sacrifice, the inescapable ṛta. In offering the sacrifice, we accept—though behind the trick of substitution, which keeps us temporarily alive—that one day we will be devoured, if not by humans then by those gods who are the invisible guests at the banquet: “killing always means killed oneself.” This perfect superimposition of sacrifice onto a cosmic physiology is seen by Girard as a mere deceit, for he is not prepared to turn his attention away from social physiology for a single moment—and therefore he does not perceive the power of social physiology as so overwhelming, above all because it gradually appropriates the cosmic physiology until it entirely absorbs it within itself. But Girard’s passionate bias is most valuable: it reminds us that, from the beginning, sacrifice has also helped society to cast off the sacred, which would otherwise have paralyzed it. Following this single thread, we move smoothly from prehistory to today—and this might give the false impression that the key to the enigma, the missing building block, has been found. In fact, this only explains the sacrificial stratagem, the small shiny stone set in the throat of the t’ao t’ieh, the composite beast of the origins. From there, in a logical sequence, we head toward that day when it was thought that the danger of the sacred was no longer so deadly. There was a time when the consul Paulus Aemilius, with transparent Roman cynicism, stated that sacrifice was no longer needed to increase the fortunes of the Republic. It was now enough for these fortunes to remain unchanged, just as they were. The Romans themselves would take care to increase them. After this, all that remained was to forget the sacrifice. Everything, with time, becomes superstition—and thus, as Baudelaire wrote, “the depository of all truths.”
Girard applies Durkheim’s axiom strictly (perhaps he is the first to do so), which he describes as “the greatest anthropological intuition of our time.” Indeed, the cloud of religion shrouds the social nexus in its crucial points: but for Girard it is as though the cloud had emerged from those points. Certain elementary factors—the irreversibility of time, death, hunger, desirability—therefore remain untouched by that violent interpenetration between the social and the religious. They are the ultimate things: Girard seeks only to transform them into products of the mimetic conflict that leads to the violence of the sacrifice. And yet, even in a society removed from the deception of sacrifice, these things would remain intact. Girard can use his hypothesis to explain the cyclical nature of time, but not its irreversibility; he can explain murder, but not death; he can explain the conflict of mimetic desires, but not the existence of desire. Let us then reverse the axiom, let us say: the social is the religious. Every point of the social nexus can then be traced to a single area of the cloud of religion, inhabited by powers with which the social nexus wanted in some way to deal: the art of compromise, of giving and taking, of sacrifice. Here again, as always, the question is whether or not to recognize those powers: Ockham’s razor has cut out every name from the place inhabited by thousands and thousands of Vedic gods. But though the gods and their names have gone, the cloud remains. The cloud is the unknown god.
What Descartes terms negligible is the sacred: that share which is accursed, abandoned, uncontrollable. A safe area has now been created where work can be carried on undisturbed: sacrificial practices have been replaced by laboratory conditions. But the significance of ritual conduct has been upended: sacrificial gestures sought to deal with the sacred, to handle it cautiously; laboratory procedures tend to expunge it. Artificial and sterile hands move about in the glass cabinet: they collect the stiff corpse of the animal, beneath the clinical light, and they take it to the garbage bin. If a laboratory explodes, the memory of sacrifice is revived. The accident in a nuclear power plant today is a pure ritual expectation: eyes are fixed on the moment when the contagion will once again spread.
Thanks to the sacrifice, an area was set aside outside the sacrificial circle, where it was possible to live, to work, without being struck down, destroyed: for harm and destruction occur only in the other area, in that sacred area closed off within the circle.
What used to be called magic is the small part of magic that is left as soon as the foundation of its action—sacrifice—has been removed from it.
Magic is resonant thought. Sacrifice presupposes this universal resonance. This is why the outcome of the sacrifice is always uncertain: it is a perpetual ordeal, where forces clash like sounds. And no one is able to mark out the extent of a power, since its ramifications are endless. No one knows where a power ends, in the same way that no one can follow all the harmonics of a sound.
Law presupposes itself. Law therefore aspires to the unattainable condition of having a single meaning. In the absence of such final clarity, the law asks—more modestly—not to be doubted too often. It is right, therefore, that the same word, law, should rule society and nature. It makes no difference if those rules relate to a divine commandment or a statistical frequency: they are rules all the same, to which the world, generally speaking, adheres. Those rules make it possible, almost always, to live together: the law, today, makes no claim to offer us more than that.
The isolation operated by knowledge on the given repeats society’s act of sampling nature, in order to establish itself: a transition from continuous to discrete, which is necessary to establish differences—and above all the difference from nature itself. The sacrificial offering is that surplus that has to be cut away, expelled, celebrated, burned: otherwise society would return to coincide with nature. That surplus is the disorder and the succession of murders, prior to the law, but it is also everything that exists before society, and secretly nourishes it—it is Varuṇa’s “hidden ocean,” without which social order would dry up and turn to dust.
This question always arises: how to use the surplus part, that part which, when added to society, would produce nature—but a nature many times over, whether infernal or paradisiacal.
Sacrifice is also a lengthy stratagem for expelling the sacred. There was a moment when living without the sacred seemed like a perfect, light, desirable condition.
To become divine or to expel the sacred: this is the oscillation, the weft of sacrifice: communion, expulsion.
Our position of reversed divinity in relation to experiment: like the gods with sacrificial offerings, we inhale the smoke, allowing the bodies to be destroyed. Today, the smoke of the sacrifice has become numbers, experimental procedures.
There are two ways of substitution: by convention (murder); by correspondence (sacrifice) of substances. Correspondence kills the substituent; convention kills the substituted. Correspondence presupposes that the substituent continues to live in the substituted, insofar as both are fragments of the “resonant substance” from which the world is created, from which it is made—and their positions are reversible: anyone, at any time, can replace another as the victim of the sacrifice, since natural death does not exist: every death is a sacrifice.
Convention cancels out the given, insofar as it transposes into signs those properties of the given (and those alone) that it wishes to represent. Birth of the formal system.
Sacrifice sometimes involves the killing of a single being; convention leaves apparently intact the given that it represents. But the killing is implicit in its rule: the moment will come when whole communities will be part of the discarded reality that has been killed off by convention.
Between the opaque tranquillity of the profane and the limpid calm of the divine, the intermediate zone is sacred. It is the zone of blood, of danger, a magnet for violence. When Diomedes hurls the javelin at Aphrodite, it is not blood that spurts from the wound above the wrist, but the mysterious íchor, lymph, a word of unknown etymology: the gods, says Homer, “do not eat bread, do not drink dark wine, / since they have no blood and are called immortal.” Plutarch notes: “By this he means that food is not just a means of living, but of dying.” Food, blood, and death are bound together in the same circle.
The Upaniṣads are insatiable in attributing sacrifice to everything—to breathing, eating, lovemaking, speech, gesture—since sacrifice is the only form in the veins of the body that responds to life, that follows it in its movements, whether involuntary or arbitrary, unceasingly. The form of the sacrifice is latent in the existence of the blood: it is life that is renewed, but for a certain time, an uninterrupted and short-lived construction. It is life, but it can never achieve the endless duration of the clear lymph that circulates in the gods. In the same way that blood is nourished every day by unknown victims, so life in general requires that murderous construction that is repeated every day in front of the sacrificial post.
A young girl with turgid, prominent lips sank into a peat bog in Schleswig-Holstein. There she was exhumed, whole. Her tight skin, like ancient leather, gave her a Hamitic look. Her shaved head lay in profile, her eyes covered by a blindfold, and between the index and middle finger of her right hand she held a birch stick. Thus she was left to drown in the marsh, around two thousand years ago. Was she blindfolded like Eros because love is higher than intellect?
Job and Arjuna have two fundamental questions for the divinity: the first is about being killed, the second about killing. The divine answer, in both cases, is overwhelming and evasive. In both cases it is not an explanation, but a mighty cosmic epiphany. There is no precise answer. They are two ultimate questions, which require an answer nothing less than the whole. The Leviathan, which “makes the deep water boil like a cauldron”; and Kṛṣṇa, “like a mass of fire darting flames on every side.”
Sacrifice gives a canonical, repeatable form to a pair of gestures: giving and taking. All the meanings of those two actions, without which communication—and therefore society—does not exist, are contained in sacrifice. And what could exist without those simultaneous gestures? Survival—if it could consist only in taking. But here the primordial connection emerges: there can be no taking without giving, since it is promised that for every giving there will also be a taking. The distant that prevails over the proximate, and the mediated over the immediate, are the assumption of every culture. Those who take and do not give are destroying something that may never come back. Someone who kills the stag during a hunt will never see the stag reappear. Someone who harvests the fruits of the earth may never see them grow again. The first pact, the first giving and taking, is with nature, with the animal, with vegetation—and, behind these, with the powers they embody. That which offers itself to be taken by us demands to be given to that which has offered it to us: the acceptance of this nexus is the basis for the sacrificial life, the ceremonial approach to existence. The pathos of this act is the recognition that at the center of every giving and taking there is a killing. That which we take is killed or uprooted by us. That which we give cannot be any less. It would imply, therefore, that we, too, must kill ourselves. But this would interrupt the flow of exchanges. And this is where substitution—the vast sacrificial trick—emerges. Sacrificing something that stands for something else sets in motion the very machinery of language and of algebra, conquering digitality. The deception by which the creature with its throat slit on the altar can be a substitute and not the thing itself provokes an enormous growth in power, such that its extension will cancel out all consciousness of the need for sacrificial giving. Pure exchange, which provides a systematic basis for substitution, gradually eradicates uniqueness, which is a reminder of the primordial victim. The world, in the end, will be inhabited only by substitutes, therefore by victims who do not know they are victims, since the irreplaceable priest who raises the blade over them has no name and no form.
Apart from clear-thinking believers, who are an embattled minority, the world is inhabited by those who follow family beliefs or who have no beliefs at all—the moderns, those who feel bound for some reason to deny the existence of anything supernatural. These include the harshest bigots. But here we also encounter the individual most peculiar to this moment: the one who belongs to no confession, nor even to any secular bigotry (belief in science, in socialism, in the individual, in the free market, in the proletariat, in progress). So what does he think? Here, once again, there is a clear distinction between those who use sacrificial categories and those who reject them. Nietzsche speaks from the outset in sacrificial terms, following Dionysus, his god; Rudolf Carnap speaks like those many who regard sacrifice as a superstition, insofar as it is eminently unverifiable; Freud wants to reveal the originating sacrifice; Jung wants the sacrifice to be performed. Literature doesn’t even need to talk about sacrifice. In one of its forms—that’s to say, absolute literature (a genealogy of decadence: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Gottfried Benn; or Flaubert, Proust)—writing takes on the features of a sacrificial offering, which implies a certain destruction of the author.
German romanticism marks the reawakening of sacrifice. The dark, the impure, the uncontrolled; the landscape; the incongruous, the somnambulistic, the sentimental, the foreboding, the passionate: whatever might, with some awkward speculation, be called Negative was its terrain, where the intoxication of double meanings is once more to be found, each time invigorating and destructive, just as it had been a long time ago around the sacrificial post. But no one can now assume the role of officiant, or of sacrificer: in the absence of a ritual, of an order, the only role left is that of the victim, who wanders the forest, prey to Rudra, waiting for his fatal arrows. This is the consumption that kills Novalis and Keats. For Hölderlin, Rudra is Apollo, who strikes him down in Bordeaux. When, with Rimbaud, the writer becomes officially maudit, it is already time for a change, time to go selling weapons in Harar. The victim discovers sadly that the world has already prepared an archaic niche for him. He must now return to the forest. In the city, he will be anonymous, barely visible, he will write business letters in English, he will sit in a café after office hours: the forest is Pessoa’s trunk, crammed full of names.
For the experimental society to stand up and speak, it certainly didn’t have to wait for Lenin, even less for Hitler—both epigones who merely found themselves with enough resources to implement the reformative visions of so many of their predecessors. The cold and inventive face of experimental society—its technological face—is scornfully silent, anonymous, and concerns itself above all with establishing new practices in factories, offices, banks, and in the rural areas. Its other face, which is garrulous and scheming, finds its original tone in the voices of the provincial Jacobins. This is what a Monsieur Leclerc, representative of the Lyon committee of Jacobins in Paris, had to say on May 12, 1793: “We have to establish Machiavellianism among the people; we have to wipe out all that is impure from the whole surface of France.” Monsieur Baudot addressed the Jacobins of Strasbourg on 19 Frimaire, Year II: “Those who are selfish, shortsighted enemies of liberty, the enemies of all nature, must not be counted among our children. Aren’t they perhaps in the same situation as all those who oppose the public good or who simply play no part in creating it? Let us destroy them entirely … Even if they were a million, shouldn’t we perhaps sacrifice the twenty-fourth part of ourselves to destroy a canker that could infect the rest of the body?” But these voices still tremble with indignation. They don’t have the purity of those concerned only with the future good, like Monsieur d’Antonelle, who felt that “to construct the republic it was necessary to establish approximate equality of ownership and, for this end, to kill off one-third of the population.” This sober extermination of “one-third of the population,” so that, at long last, money and property ownership would no longer be so unequal, but sensibly distributed, was intended to root out all possibility of overweening luxury, of cocottes, of gambling, of vast empty spaces, as well as condemning all dissipation of esprit, whose essence was contrary to republican virtue. This obscure proposal, in its clear phrasing, in its eagerness for mediocrity, expresses an idea to which just one detail would later be added, for variety and spice: the specification of the Jews, or kulaks, or class enemies in general, as the prime candidates to form part of that “third of the population.” Burckhardt saw the proposals of the provincial Jacobins as “the most intimate core of the Revolution,” and noted: “Here the new France can clearly be discerned. Its proponents do not aim toward socialism or communism, through which they would obtain only an average universal misery and equality of benefits (whereas they sought equality of rights, with the secret qualification that the others would later be crushed). Instead, they want new private property, distributed in more or less uniform fashion, but in abundant measure. And in order for those chosen few to be well off, a great mass of people must die. The goal is modern French well-being.” From his observatory in Basle, illuminated by hatred, Burckhardt had recognized the numbing well-being of capital and the punishing misery of socialism as being stars in the same constellation.
Primordial faith, that faith to which all other faiths can be traced, is the assertion of the “nusquam interrupta connexio,” of universal interdependence. The choice to recognize it, though not necessarily the claim to know it. The other possibility, that of denying it, makes it possible to believe only in what we choose, in what we wish to choose. Here there is no meaning—the meaning is given each time. And, just as it is given, so is it taken away.
The powers find many images in which to manifest themselves—the tree, the rose, the lotus, the pomegranate, all the forms of nature. Connexio, on the other hand, needs an action, a process in order to manifest itself: it needs the sacrifice. And this is the only adequate action for so much: for it contains death, and in that death there is killing, violence, and the life that flows. Sacrifice is the action in which the process of everything is summed up.
“Orate sine intermissione” (“Pray continually”): these words of Paul stand at the threshold of linear time: a line where chasms open, as in the succession of real numbers along the straight line. Nothing is less uniform than linear time: marking emptiness and fullness, momentary unrelated ignition, conflict of incompatibles, the double life of the discrete and the continuous. Yet it is not defined by these characters, but by its inability to turn back on itself, its nonperiodicity. This makes it possible to think of an action that occurs “sine intermissione”—uninterrupted prayer. Once, prayer had its specific moments. Now the writing in the sky no longer states what is the right moment, prior to which the action would be sacrilege. Now the moment is always right and always wrong. The only solution is a perpetual action: “Orate sine intermissione.”
The ceremony of sacrifice is introduced and accompanied by songs, words, gestures, all prescribed in meticulous detail. But everything proceeds toward a center that is close to silence, an inarticulate murmur (anirukta), grains of sand of inexhaustible life, around the moment of immolation. Those present now avert their gaze and murmur the final formulas. All that can be distinguished is the neutral, sober voice of the priest who indicates the killing actions to the sacrificer. “Agone?” (“Shall I act?”) asks the victimarius or popa (the executioner). That question, those crude Roman words, recall the ancient awareness that every action is a killing. When the priest gave his approval, the victimarius pushed in the knife. In India, it was preferred not to see the blood: a noose was used to strangle the victim.
The extinction of the sacrifice. The victim gradually loses its power: there is a detachment from the animal, it is no longer considered sufficiently close that it can substitute for us; there is a rejection of the human victim, who is now protected by the law. The last victim will therefore be a god who is condemned to death by the law.
The pre-Christian past is all a long process of euphemization, edulcoration of sacrifice. With Christ, sacrifice all of a sudden rediscovers its crudeness, it once again becomes a lynching—and at the same time the cycle of sacrifice is closed, since no sacrifice can follow that of Christ, except as a continual commemoration of that sacrifice—the Mass, which insists on avoiding the shedding of blood (“incruente immolatur”). More than the act of equating a piece of bread and a few sips of wine with the body and blood of the god/victim, what marks an insurmountable break with the past is the fact that animals will no longer be killed on altars, there will be no further attempt to drive out evil “sanguine taurorum et hircorum” (“with the blood of bulls and goats”). With the Christian era, the ritual of bloodshed disappears: a prelude to the disappearance of ritual itself. The following step demands a secular version of sacrifice: regicide, twice over, with Charles I, then Louis XVI. Here, too, a single irreversible fact, the killing of that victim, is enough to herald an age in which neither have goats to be slaughtered on altars nor have beheaded kings to be commemorated. Then the word sacrifice returns in triumph in August 1914. It is no longer a single wretched individual—an entire generation of nameless young men is raised to the nobility of victim and buried in ditches, which are now trenches.