ABSTRACT
To what extent does the idea of sacrifice remain relevant to law in a modern, civil society? The rise of a modern society is most often described as a continuing process of de-sacralization, i.e. a transformation of a religious view on and celebration of a sacred world into a differentiated rational organization of a secular world. Drawing on the work of Moshe Halbertal in his book On Sacrifice and Maurice Blanchot’s essay “Literature and the Right to Death,” the argument developed in this chapter consists of introducing the notion of imagination: the sacrificial logic that can be detected in modern society reveals the new importance imagination has gained in the modern condition with regard to the sacred. In modern society, the sacred can no longer count as the core relation, whether personal or impersonal, to a transcendent common God and is no longer the objective content of a religious belief, in which and by which society is constituted as a unity, but it therefore did not disappear from relations concerning the individual confronted with questions about meaning, belonging, separation, desire, and identity. In traditional societies, these questions are answered to a large extent by shared beliefs which relate the human to the transcendent. In modern society, however, these shared beliefs have disappeared and the sacred has freed itself from the common manifestations by which society celebrates its religious view of the world. However, in the relations of the individual to the world, a certain presence of the sacred survives.
