ABSTRACT
In a review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell observes, “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.” This chapter argues that whenever the notion of “self-sacrifice” is invoked, particularly within the context of political discourse, it invariably implies not the radical giving of oneself, but rather the sacrifice of something or more often someone else. Through a discussion of the sacrificial dilemma portrayed in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice, it is argued that the intermittent demand for sacrifice emerges from the necessity to found or re-found a symbolic basis upon which to constitute “the people” and that such a founding of a political community is necessarily sacrificial. The sacrificial logic that is implicated in the founding of political community is elucidated through a discussion of the work of Claude Lefort and Giorgio Agamben. Following anthropological theories of sacrifice offered in the work of William Robertson Smith, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, as well as René Girard, a distinction between two basic types of sacrifice—sacrifices of communion and expiatory sacrifices—may be observed. The differences between the kinds of sacrifice demanded by populist and fascist politics and those demanded by political liberals center on this crucial distinction. This chapter concludes by arguing that a political liberal politics of the gift may be capable of extracting itself from the archaic violence of the sacred by distancing itself from the urge to definitively name and fix its own foundations.
