From Sacred Cosmic Entropy to Biopolitics: Rearticulating the Sacred through the State and Economy

This paper argues, following Bataille, that there is a deep relationship between sacrifice and the constitution of the domain of the sacred. This logic, we argue, derives from the structure of the cosmos itself, which produces a sense of the sacred through continual sacrifice and destruction via a general economy of entropy. We contrast this way of producing the sacred with a different impersonal political form of sacrifice that grounds what Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call biopolitics, a logic of restricted economy that manifests through both the state and the economy. We argue that whereas the sacred in Bataille works through a direct relational encounter with death, intimacy, and the immanence of general economy, biopolitics works by displacing the death and intimacy inherent to sacrifice to the domain of the profane, generating a boundary between the human and the non-human that is built upon the sacrifice of ecological life and the racialized body. This biopolitical sacrifice props up Man as a restricted (rather than general) economy of the sacred.