The Appropriation of Sacrifice.

7.1

Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais brings individual dignity into painful proximity to political powerlessness. In the medieval account, six leading citizens offer themselves to Edward III to spare the besieged city, approaching in a solemn formation with the keys to its gates and ropes around their necks. Sacrifice and public humiliation coincide as their assumption of collective responsibility takes a punishing rather than a fulfilling form. Their divergent gestures express courage, anguish, hesitation, and resolve without coalescing into a sustaining social bond, since their solidarity with the people does not become a shared capacity to challenge the authority to which they both remain subordinate. While they undertake an extraordinary act of courage, willingly risking their lives for others, none has power over the terms of the encounter. Their distinct consciences remain exposed in gestures of private ordeal, suspended between shared commitment and resignation, for what fails to emerge from their coming together is a force capable of contesting the coercion that demands their sacrifice. Even the possibility of martyrdom, which may endure in collective memory as a resource for resistance, is interrupted by a Queen’s plea on their behalf, granting them sovereign mercy while leaving intact the authority that wishes to rule their lives. Suspended between individual moral acts and their transformation into a shared political capacity, the sculpture suggests an allegory of Western liberalism’s insufficiencies, where personal courage, dignity and conscience receive full expression yet do not congeal into a power capable of altering their subordination. As each figure acquires moral status, even the spectator’s sympathy is led into this impasse, prompted to recognize the suffering of the noblemen and admire their sacrifice while the authority that enslaves them is left undisturbed.

While Rodin’s differentiation of the figures preserves their entitative irreducibility, the burgher’s solidarity is a relational object constrained by the other relational object of sovereign authority. The intention of the six men and the people for whom they act develops within the conditions prescribed by the sovereign, who decides that their courage must pass through humiliation and dictates that their responsibility manifest as surrender. In the ritual field, the encounter is organized in advance so that the burgher’s gestures and whatever individual weight they carry are received within a prescribed political interpretation. The appropriation of the ritual field occurs when relations operate through the entities involved while bypassing their capacity to affect the outcome of those relations. Thus, the burghers run through the demand for surrender, the offering of sacrifice, the Queen's intercession, and the granting of sovereign mercy. Rodin exposes what this circuit bypasses with the heavy bodies, emphatic hands, and divergent gestures that persist through the political transaction and public ceremony. But they also reveal that sacrifice becomes loss when it is barred from participating in the possibilities it ushers. Hence, the humiliation of the burghers is not the inevitable truth of sacrifice but the imposed form it must pass through. While no sacrifice can occur without some form of loss, it is not necessarily personal and individual. The collective can also initiate a sacrifice that need not be understood as personal diminishment but can become an expenditure through which a shared world opens beyond its existing limits. A collective can relinquish resources, privileges, and exclusive claims over its future. It might devote a surplus to a celebration, make a space available to strangers, or surrender an exclusive entitlement so that others can participate. While these acts have costs, they open up the possibility of encounters that could not have been available within the previous arrangement. Sacrifice can also become a source of nourishment, a locus of participation, and the renewal of shared life. For this to happen, all participants must sit at the same ontological table to share an existential course, not unlike the communal meal of Langar, ritualized by its Sikh practitioners, in which attendees sit at an equal level on the floor to eat the same food prepared in the same pots. This also separates sacrifice from contrition, which presupposes a fault to be acknowledged or repaired. Expenditure can proceed from abundance, attachment, celebration, or the desire to encounter something beyond oneself. Otherness must be able to affect the encounter, and this is crucial to how sacrifice can open the ritual field, relinquishing the claim to determine in advance what the encounter must yield. Entitative objects then engage in bringing relational objects into play without becoming absorbed by them, sharing losses that are real but also the possibilities that none of the participants could have produced on their own.

7.2

Sacrifice can be defined as a consequential relinquishment through which entitative objects enable, sustain, and transform relational objects without an assured equivalent return. The resources or capacities that are genuinely given up, including exclusive access and control over the outcome, constitute a loss that alters the possibilities of a shared relation. Something is irreversibly relinquished at the passage between entitative and relational objects, surrendered or placed beyond assured recovery so that a relation may emerge, endure, or change. It constitutes a loss that can be rewarding when it opens the relation to possibilities its participants cannot determine in advance.

Animistic sensibility offers helpful clues to comprehend sacrifice outside the register of private property. The first evidence established by its attribution of sentience to its co-existing beings is that exclusive ownership is replaced by the givenness of a realm already populated by responsive others. Here, sacrifice becomes intelligible as an expenditure within a shared world rather than being measured solely as a subtraction from individual holdings. The corollary evidence is that the collective extends well beyond the human community to include the other beings that participate in its ecosphere. In this expanded field, sacrifice opens towards otherness as relations remain answerable to the beings whose losses sustain the sacrificial deed’s outcome, making the relinquishment bring about new encounters in the form of a rebirth or a repartition of the actors that make up the extended community.

An animistic apprehension of sacrifice is not meant to diffuse the experiential impact of loss, which remains situated and real, but rather shows that its significance is not confined to personal deprivation. In a world marked by the deeds of illustrious achievers, martyrdom persists as a powerful act that recuperates loss in an archetypal memory which persists beyond the individual. A notable death can become a point through which dispersed people recognize an obligation, remember a struggle, or acquire the strength to act together, while remaining attached to a particular name, a singular life, and a specific injustice. The way a singular loss becomes collectively generative echoes the totemic ordering of hybrid beings according to their commonalities but also suggests a more demanding form of collective sacrifice, in which the group cannot proceed by having one member pay the price so that everyone else remains unchanged. Warding off its conversion into scapegoating, sacrifice becomes a rite of the open passage between entitative and relational objects.

7.3

Entitative objects cannot affect each other without relational ones, but they can hide behind a shield of relations as in the moat-protected fortress of a vainglorious army. Relational objects, however, can only simulate an entity since their irreducibility rests on a different order and operates at another frequency. The correspondences between them do not imply symmetry, in the sense that the terms of an equation cannot be reversed without altering its very nature. Entitative objects generate relational ones, but relational objects do not in themselves give birth to an entity. Yet under certain circumstances, they can cluster together and, abstracted from their provenance, emulate the depth and stature of a presumably uncontested entity. Based on a distortion that can easily veer into monstrosity, a cluster of relations can radiate with the royal claim of the divine right to rule, and conspire to personify the sovereign entity, assuming its hegemonic role of legislating the character of the relational objects that buffer entities. A horror-tinged inflection of awareness emerges when a configuration of relations claims the authority to determine the entitative objects they mediate. Their organization acquires the cold detachment that makes responsibility difficult to locate and contest, as the configuration acts with the apparent unity of a person while dispersing accountability across its relations. Universalizing the principle that anyone can be a criminal given the right circumstances, the ghost entity seems everywhere in its effects but nowhere to be encountered. This pathology affecting relational objects constitutes a parasitic hijacking of the ritual field, in which entities are denied the possibility of appearing as anything beyond the relations imposed upon them. The relational cluster enforces its center of gravity, enforcing lines of influence the way the cosmogonies of the celebrity and the politician send their acolytes to orbit a star-studded, utopian entity that guarantees fulfillment. Such a simulated entity can command money, labor, allegiance, and violence, like the corporation that demands the surrender of its employees to survive, or the single-willed nation that, regardless of its indigenous plurality, appears as an entity whose injured dignity makes it distinguish legitimate lives from threats to its integrity. A similar aggregate of relational objects may dictate how a family’s honor becomes more important than its members, or how the financial market gets personified as an unquestionable arbiter. At its logical end is the imperial civilization that appoints itself as the measure of humanity. The original provenance of relational objects disappears under the fake entity’s claim to universal standing, as a worker’s refusal becomes disloyalty, dissent is treated as treason, and resistance is issued the flat label of terrorism. The same applies to the circuitous logic and self-sealing argumentation that makes the charge of antisemitism the favorite tool of Zionism, endowing its supporters with the ability to lead their detractors into an epistemic trap. The nationalist and political movement that supports the development and protection of a Jewish Nation in Palestine is a particularly malignant relational object that seeks to rally its subjects around the fictional entity of Israel. The ethnic nationalist movement that emerged in the late 19th century dovetails with the supremacist presumptions of Western empire that treat divergences from its sovereign model as candidates for conversion, if not outright elimination. The entitative fiction of the ancestral nation inhabits a body that requires permanent purification, rallying a hostage population to internalize the manufactured personification, and casting those who do not embody its authenticity as undesirable contaminants. No genuine entity requires so much relational activity to legitimate its being as Zionism does, unless it is precisely one that, in step with the betrayal of its founder, is established on an autonomous complex of exceptionalist relations.

7.4

The connotations of sacrifice may be steeped in cultural atavisms, but while the US empire is engaged in its perpetual wars, rearing its ugly head in a staggering denial of defeat against Iran, the emblematic and rapacious eagle displays a pheasant tail that fans the ninety-nine flavors of deceit. The antonyms of sacrifice add up to a long list that include self-indulgence, egoism, narcissism, acquisition and accumulation, exploitation, self-preservation, and entitlement. Sacrifice does not flourish in the greenhouse of liberalism, which is fundamentally rooted in the primacy of individual freedom. Treated as a temporary necessity fulfilled by paying taxes or rationing resources during a pandemic, the transformative dimension of the votive act of giving is flattened into a utilitarian framework that answers to a ledger of opportunity. For the emancipated subject of Western civilization, the liberal individual is the right measure between martyrdom and hubris, in a scene that props a posthuman augmented reality against the bokeh of an obscurantist backdrop. But for the social contract to be more than a tourist map of the ritual field, entitative responsibility cannot be deferred to relational objects, nor can the latter bypass the entities they correspond to. Alas, the inversion of the expenditure that opens beings to a shared world is especially evident in the economic backbone of contemporary societies. Usury is an example of a recuperative demand that intercepts the passage from the agony of personal loss to the selfless opening to others. What is extended must return augmented, binding the recipient to the giver’s accumulation. With the reversal of the sacrificial capacity to go out on a limb, also comes a redistribution of blame and responsibility that makes scapegoating appear as an almost innocuous act of discernment. The remainders of the preferential shares are taken for granted, if not outright demonized, in a social contract that stigmatizes the stranger, the migrant, and the refugee. Those compelled to bear the losses are made to seem responsible for them. The capacity of an entity to give beyond itself is then recruited into a circuit of relational objects that replace the opening onto otherness with an apparatus that fuels the repetition of an imposed identity, whose interference tinges the ritual field with dissonance and the possibility of unrestricted horror. Powerful but nefarious actors act through the abstractions of the economy, contract, or system while vulnerable populations answer with their bodies, freedom of movement, and right to exist. 3 years after October 7, Israel is still conducting its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, further leveling south Lebanon, despite the sustained outrage of the international community, largely because what makes it structurally possible is as fatally simple as the pernicious operation of self-serving systems, including competitive branding, merchandising, and manipulative market tactics. Alternatively, sacrifice, no matter how much personal loss it entails, can be a bridge to otherness that reinstates the irreducibility of entities through their losses, preventing relational objects from the snare of a circuitous tautology, lest such a persuasion take its expansionism to the dead-end certainty of its erosion and demise.

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