Sacrifice, The Sacred, and Its Political Remainders

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.

“A paschal banquet in which Christ is consumed.” This description of the Mass, drawn from the Vatican II constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, holds in tension the ideas of feast and sacrifice that are central to Catholic Eucharistic theology. In the postconciliar Church, particularly in elite Catholic culture, this tension has fissured into competing “horizontal” and “vertical" theological perspectives, each carrying divergent ecclesiological and political commitments. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, this paper examines how the routine celebration of the Eucharist in the contemporary United States generates an excess that overflows, but also reinforces, the restricted economies through which it is interpreted. Bataille’s framework of general economy, I argue, illuminates what theological discourse struggles to name: that both camps draw on the same sovereign expenditure, and that their conflict depends on that shared foundation remaining unacknowledged.

The Pacific Northwest “potlatch” cultures were found by Boas, Mauss, and Bataille to engage in profligate “waste” and “destruction” of wealth, from the viewpoint of our capitalist addiction to production and accumulation. The sacrificial, feasting, and shamanistic cultures of Bronze Age China shared this ethos of excessive ritual expenditures. These acts of celebratory consumption and destruction of wealth are now greatly diminished in the age of modern capitalist self-discipline and utilitarian harnessing of labor for endless production, utility, and efficiency. In contemporary China, despite the state developmentalism and capitalism, surprisingly, one finds that the spirit of wasteful consumption and sacrifice to the gods is still alive. The sun, noted Bataille in The History of Religion, showers all life on Earth with its inexhaustible energy. In the Age of the Anthropocene, can we tap into this abundant solar energy and sparks of archaic effervescence, for a flourishing and renewable planetary life? 

Poststructuralist ethnology in Lowland South America can be said, without exaggeration, to be founded on the twin rejections of “sacrifice” and “gift exchange.” These concepts are not merely considered empirically absent; they are taken to express logics of hierarchy that are actively refused. By contrast, anthropologists of Mesoamerica see in sacrifice the foundation for the unification of political and cosmic authority. In this presentation, I take up Amerindian sacrifice alternately as a political remainder and as a political concept. Beginning with Pierre Clastres' argument that Amerindian political hierarchy historically emerges from religion, I then compare the religious and political dimensions of captive-taking in South America and Mesoamerica. Beneath superficial similarities in the killing of war captives lie different political functions and religious leadership, such that sacrifice operates as a plastic political technology for organizing the relation between cosmology, violence, and sovereignty, working with and against state formations.

This paper asks how the inauguration of the Khalsa, a sacred military-spiritual order in the Sikh tradition, can be understood from the standpoint of human sacrifice. Conventional approaches construe this order from the standpoint of identity, as if the purpose of its institution were to create a distinct sense of self. However, a concern with identity violates other commitments to ego-loss that are replete in the tradition. This paper instead argues that a logic of sacrifice better voices a key aspect of this military-spiritual order — a psycho-social transformation of self. In doing so, this paper turns to the sacrality of sacrifice for a more ethically rich engagement with Sikh thought, tradition, and religion.

This presentation examines local and national contexts of an attempted bombing in a diverse town in western Kansas just before the 2016 presidential election. The would-be bombers, calling themselves “the Crusaders,” targeted Somali refugees who worked in Garden City’s meatpacking plants in a plan modeled after the Oklahoma City bombing. Arguing that their efforts were response to candidate Donald Trump’s call for patriots to defend their homeland, they attempted to appeal to jurors’ sense that everyday people should be applauded—or at least forgiven—for caring about the threat at Muslim immigrants played to national security. This presentation examines the larger context of their planned attack, including Garden City’s history as a place that both welcomes and exploits refugees from US foreign wars, from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror, and larger anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies, rhetoric, and religious teachings circulating in western Kansas and other rural areas.