Logic Of Sacrifice Research Articles

“Going to the Father” Sacrificially

Abstract This article contends that John portrays not only Jesus’s death but his entire progression to the Father (that is, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension) sacrificially. Discussions of Jesus’s sacrifice in John have tended to focus on Jesus’s death. Such an emphasis on death, however, coheres neither with the way John presents Jesus’s crucifixion and ascension as a singular action nor with how most ancient persons understood ritual sacrifice. It is more likely that John and his ancient audiences would have been attuned to the sacrificial connotations not only of Jesus’s death but of his arrest, trial, burial, resurrection, and ascension. By adjusting the hermeneutical category of sacrifice to agree with ancient understandings of the ritual act and its instantiations on Yom Kippur and Passover, this article traces the sacrificial logic running through John’s passion and resurrection narratives. It then concludes by demonstrating the significant social and theological implications of Jesus’s sacrifice in the Gospel of John.

World, war, zoo: zoo-break narratives in a biopolitical frame

ABSTRACT This article explores the implications of the recent proliferation of ‘zoo-break’ narratives in relation to the discourse on the Anthropocene and the figure of the sacrifice zone in particular. Taking the zoo cage as a manifestation of what Agamben calls the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of zoē within bíos, and hence of the sacrificial logic that constitutes the human subject at the expense of the animal, the article explores how in these ‘zoo-break’ narratives, the biopolitical framework breaks down, and how they lay bare the sacrificial logic of human exceptionalism. Focusing especially on the figure of the zoo-in-wartime, the article investigates how this sacrificial logic operates and asks how we might reframe these zoo-break narratives as productive sites for representing and reflecting on history and violence in a more-than-human sense. The article concludes by arguing that the figure of the zoo-in-wartime can also be read as a ‘frame of war’ (Butler) in which both human and nonhuman lives become grievable, but only if we engage in a mode of reading that resists the instrumentalising, extractivist logic of the sacrifice zone.

Ghosts in the urban sacrifice zone: (De)colonial relationality in Global North imaginaries

ABSTRACT The abandonment of urban areas in anticipation of climate change constitutes a kind of ghosting: a veil is drawn that divides spaces of being (that are valued and preserved) from spaces of non-being (that are deemed expendable and ‘dead’). These spaces of non-being can be understood as the ‘sacrifice zones’ of a capitalist worldview that orders the world through simplified dualistic categories. Opposed to this sacrificial logic, David Farrier has proposed a relational way of thinking that haunts the dualisms of capitalist modernity via spectres of human-nonhuman entanglement. Building on existing work from decolonial and Black studies, this paper extends understandings of such entanglements by exposing how they are tied up with racial and colonial logics. It does so by focusing on two Anthropocene imaginaries that ‘open up’ the city as a place haunted by complex relationality. First, my reading of Jan van Aken’s ‘Proximale Falanx’ (2019) shows how its portrayal of a submerged Amsterdam can be read as an Anthropocene imaginary of relationality but is also haunted by colonial paradigms. Second, my reading of Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) expands this narrow understanding of the climate crisis by articulating decolonial ways of being in New York City.

Love in the sacrifice zone: queer ecopoetics in the Appalachian Mountains

ABSTRACT This article explores how queer environmental art and poetry challenge the dominant sacrificial logic of the Anthropocene, which treats the Earth and its human and nonhuman inhabitants as objects of extraction, consumption, and disposal. It examines ecosexual performance as a poetic opposition to the extractive worldview, fostering a more capacious understanding of the connections that bind together bodies, places, and environments in times of systemic ecological crisis. Drawing on recent studies in queer ecopoetics and environmental affect, the article contends that ecosexuality, as a queer environmentalism and an embodied form of poiesis, constitutes a ‘diffractive’ ecological poetics vital for overcoming the affective impasse that obstructs robust environmental action. Through an analysis of artworks by Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, the article demonstrates how ecosexual poetics recalibrate prevailing affective registers and responses to environmental sacrifice zones, reintroducing ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity to counteract the simplifying logic of extraction. The analysis is framed by a reading of Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead (1938) as a hitherto unrecognised literary precedent for today's queer ecopoetics. Consequently, the conclusion calls for an ecocritical revaluation of Rukeyser’s work as a profoundly queer articulation of the affective relations that emerge in the wake of industrial devastation.

The Deadly Intersections of COVID‐19: Race, States, Inequalities and Global Society edited by SuneraThobani, Bristol University Press, 2022, 176 pp., $83.95 (hardback).

The Deadly Intersections of COVID‐19: Race, States, Inequalities and Global Society edited by SuneraThobani, Bristol University Press, 2022, 176 pp., $83.95 (hardback).

Law and Sacrifice in Kafka and His Readers

Abstract Victims of an uncanny legal system pervade Kafka’s writings. Whether the representation of the law in these works implies a sacrificial logic depends significantly on the meaning assigned to Kafka’s idea of the law. Despite the innumerable interpretations of Kafka’s law-related texts it remains uncertain whether the law in his works is to be understood primarily in juridical, social, and political terms or in metaphysical, theological, and religious ones. This uncertainty, besides eliciting myriad, sometimes contradictory, interpretations, has inspired numerous views, themselves often disparate and conflicting, about the relationship between law and sacrifice in Kafka’s works. The present article explores this relationship and how it has been regarded by some of his most important interpreters.

“All the Rest Is Commentary …”: Being for the Other as the Way to Break the Sacrificial Logic

Abstract Feminist criticism recognises two rival sacrifices in the Western philosophical- theological tradition: the motherly sacrifice of childbirth and the near-sacrifice of Isaac (the so-called Akedah; Gen 22). In this paper, I investigate both sacrifices as a self-emptying and transformative process that aims to offer oneself in the place of the other. The argument proceeds in three steps: first, I present the self-sacrifice of childbirth as the moment of identity split and the “being for the other”; second, I interpret Gen 22 as a self-sacrifice (“Here I am”; Gen 22:1c) which calls to responsibility as a possible route to non-sacrificial relations; finally, I question the essentialism that accompanies the Akedah and childbirth in order to liberate both from gender stereotypes and to present them as two different forms of self-sacrifice which seek to break the sacrificial logic of our Western society.

“How Does Nature Deify Us”

“How Does Nature Deify Us”

On “Finishing”

ABSTRACTThis visual memoir probes the tensions and contradictions that inflect the commodity‐based relationship between a farmer and his cattle on an Irish farm. A methodological exploration of how to attend to the politics of care that animate multispecies relationships on the farm, this article examines relations of intimacy, care, and contradiction materialized in the structural manipulation of bodies for economic purposes. The attentive focus on the everyday encounters between John and his cattle unearths how affective and conflicting multispecies entanglements mediate the farming of animals for food through rhythms of care, the spirit of the gift, and the logic of sacrifice.

The Speed of Crisis: Slow Violence, Accelerationism, and the Politics of the Emergency Brake

This paper traces the history of accelerationism as a political philosophy, from its inception at Warwick University to its deployment by avowed white supremacists. Probing its philosophical commitment to a both a deterministic philosophy of history and a sacrificial logic of politics, I argue that even the initial elaborations of (non-race-based) accelerationism contained the seed of its development into violent white supremacy. The conclusion assesses a politics of deceleration as a strategy for countering accelerationism, ultimately arguing for the superiority of a Benjaminian politics of the emergency brake.

Justicia: notas al margen de la obra de Friedrich Dürrenmatt (con especial referencia a la novela “Die Panne”)

Considering the capacity of literature in relation to the projection of legal meaning to feed the involuntary memory of law, the present work proposes a reflection around the idea of justice as brought by Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s narrative, with the intention of demonstrating how his works offer an image of real justice alien to the legal canon, but no less true for that. In this sense, the paper analyzes the main works by Dürrenmat that approach the theme of justice, paying special attention A Dangerous Game, a story in which, through the allegory of a dinner, the organic trace and the ancient logic of sacrifice that characterize the modern judicial system.

Fall and rise of King Oedipus

This essay is placed within a continuing debate on the appropriateness of a Christian deployment of tragedy. According David Bentley Hart, tragedy legitimates a sacrificial and scapegoating logic that is in contradiction with the Christian gospel. It promotes exclusion and therefore is imaginatively and metaphysically conservative in its import. In the ensuing argument, I hope to show through one example how even Greek tragedy can resist some of these claims. Drawing on the seminal work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, I argue that Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, firstly, demonstrates the inability of nomos to grasp the exception of Oedipus, and that this might constitute a critique rather than a simple legitimation of the civic order. Secondly, the narrative arc of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus point towards incorporation rather than final exclusion, and that his apotheosis could be read as resisting deleterious tropes of a final holocaust of the tragic figure. In the final section, drawing on Rowan Williams, I discuss the problems associated with literary Christologies in general, and whether it could be theologically feasible to talk about the Theban cycle as exhibiting a ‘proto-Christology’.

The dubious logic of sacrifice: motherhood, crisis, and social reproduction in Advantageous (2015)

ABSTRACT A number of independent science fiction films released since the Great Recession feature relatively unexceptional protagonists in dystopian scenarios, thereby shifting the conventional focus of the genre from heroic action to small-scale personal and domestic dramas. This article argues that by juxtaposing issues of broader environmental degradation with more intimate private narratives of social reproduction, such films point to the limits of neoliberal austerity discourses that have become increasingly dominant since the 2008 economic crisis. Among these is Advantageous (dir./co-writ. Jennifer Phang, 2015), about the struggles of a middle-aged single mother, Gwen Koh (Jacqueline Kim, also co-writ.), to raise her young daughter Jules in a technocratic society characterized by rampant unemployment, feminist backlash, environmental ruin, and socioeconomic stratification. Using a blend of close textual analysis, genre study, and cultural critique, I argue that Phang’s film offers a timely vision of the ways in which mothers can be compelled to make drastic sacrifices for the upward mobility of their children. In combining the domestic tropes of maternal melodrama with the macroscopic concerns of dystopian science fiction, Advantageous makes openings for an immanent critique of the strivings of virtuous neoliberal subjects in the face of eviscerated notions of social solidarity and collective purpose.

Vampiric love: Autoimmunization, Romanticism and sacrifice in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu

ABSTRACT This article proposes the concept of vampiric love as love of the dreaded thing. Through an analysis of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu, I show how vampiric love is love turned back on itself to threaten the communal bond with its own excess. Through an act of sacrifice, catastrophe is averted and the community saved in leaping from dread to love. Drawing on Derrida’s idea of autoimmunization as well as Hägglund’s idea of secular love, the article examines vampiric love as an autoimmunization of the biopolitical community – an attack upon itself – that exposes the communal organism to death and chance as salvation from dread. The autoimmune process is traced back to Romantic yearning for impossibly lost love and its flipside in Gothic dread in Polidori’s 1819 short story The Vampyre , where the outlines of the autoimmune process can be clearly seen. Employing Kierkegaard’s concept of dread, I undertake an analysis of the sacrificial logic at work in Nosferatu, where dread must be passed through in an awakening of the spirit to possibility; a process enfolded into the performativity of the film itself in an autoimmune attack on its own formal system.

A(M)other Logic (of Love): Languaging the Corporeal Culture of Placental-Chimeric-Maternal Relations

Western culture as it was being established in ancient Greek civilization was erected on a faulty foundation in which consciousness was (in)formed by a series of oppositions housed in hierarchical binaries – nature vs. culture, body vs. mind, feminine vs. masculine, etc. Such bifurcated consciousness poses one aspect of the oppositional pair against the other, rather than as different and non-oppositional poles of a bi-unity. In this system, the body, nature, and the feminine were considered secondary to mind, culture, and the masculine. The maternal-feminine in this system was reduced to mere body and nature and was posed as that against which the (male) philosopher had to assert himself as an autonomous and transcendent subject. Hence, we could say that any alternative logic that would understand the maternal-feminine on its own terms was foreclosed and muted. As a result, the maternal-feminine was discursively rendered as the denigrated other of a faulty hierarchical binary logic. This logic has resulted in a mutilation of the capacity for loving relations with the (m)other, the model for all future loving relations. Due to her erasure as a subject in her own right, she was not able to provide a generative limit; an alternative, to what has become a sacrificial logic (of love). Through languaging of the corporeal culture embodied in both placental-chimeric-maternal relations, and differences in engendering between males and females, a path is opened for a(m)other logic (of love) to emerge as difference-in-relation.

On the Sacrificial Logic of Mass Shootings As Systemically Necessary Cultural Trauma

Mass shootings constitute a recurrent and most violent phenomenon in the U.S. and elsewhere. This paper challenges the ready-made, solipsistically contained metanarratives on offer by mainstream media and formal institutions with regard to the psychological antecedents of the perpetrating social actors, while theorizing mass shootings as acts of violence that are systemically inscribed in the foundations of communities. These foundations abide by the logic of sacrifice which is propagated in instances of collective traumatism. It is argued that the cultural trauma that emanates from events of mass shootings, inasmuch as the commemorative events that are performed on regular occasions, constitute re-enactments of the death drive that sustains communities. The cultural analytic deploys against a CDA reading of longitudinal studies on mass shootings, coupled with psychoanalytic discourse analysis, prior to submitting mass shootings to a deconstructive line of reasoning as systemically necessary transcendental violence. Ultimately, it is shown that the intertextual institutional chain that informs the mediatized representation of this social phenomenon merely attains to obliterate and, hence, to propagate cultural traumatism and the sacrificial logic that underpins it. The terms micrometanarrative, parafunction and expropriating ipseity are introduced and operationalized in this context.

The Charisma of Central Banking: From Sacrifice to Rituals

The article adopts the approach of the cultural study of law as developed mostly (but not exclusively) by Paul Kahn in order to explain the potential for charisma of contemporary central banks. The analysis focuses on the European Central Bank (ECB) and on Draghi's famous statement: 'we will do whatever it takes to save the Euro'. The study of the ECB's intervention shows the constitutional role of central banking, but it also sheds interesting light on the cultural study of law. While Kahn argues that the logic of sacrifice is at the core of the formation of constitutional orders because it bridges the sacred with the ordinary, the secret of central banking's success seems to revolve around the deployment of the logic of rituals.

Ídolos y sacrificios, un Girard olvidado

<p>Más allá de los clichés y de las simplificaciones que se aplican a la obra de René Girard, este trabajo reivindica el carácter crítico, independiente y complejo de su pensamiento. Un año después de su muerte y en el 25o aniversario de su diálogo con teólogos de la liberación, volvemos nuestra atención a las memorias de este encuentro. Se trata de una muestra de la riqueza y de los matices de su pensamiento, ejemplificados en su perspectiva respecto a la Pasión, antes considerada como una narración anti-sacrificial y después revalorada como sacrificio, a pesar de lo cual Girard mantiene su propia denuncia de las lógicas del sacrificio, generadoras de víctimas de la pobreza, la exclusión y la indiferencia, de acuerdo con los teólogos del encuentro.</p><p> </p>

Religion of the Finite Life? Messianicity and the Right to Live in Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminar

ABSTRACTDerrida’s The Death Penalty seminar puts capital punishment and the sovereign violence that administers it into the very center of the deconstructive enterprise. My essay emphasizes this connection, by arguing that the positive – messianic – stake of deconstruction is the philosophical defense of the finite life. In order to prove that, I will first focus on Derrida’s notion of life as elaborated in his late writings, most of all “Faith and Knowledge,” then link it with his interpretation of Khora as the horizontal republic of the living, and finally, apply these concepts to my reading of The Death Penalty seminars, in which they will resurface as Derrida’s fundamental confrontation with philosophy as the “discipline of death” to be counteracted only by the literary intervention of writers. I will claim that the gist of this intervention consists in arresting the sacrificial logic which life brings on itself while attempting to preserve itself, i.e., the aporetic logic of auto/immunity.

Animal Rights Theory, Animal Welfarism and the ˜'New Welfarist' Amalgamation: A Critical Perspective

Adherents of the 'new welfarist' approach advocate welfare reforms as essential short-term steps en route to the ultimate ideal of animal rights. A critical engagement with the ideological underpinnings of animal welfare theory and animal rights theory illustrates the contrasting moral spaces that the animal occupies in these theories and that the 'new welfarist' approach is philosophically unsound in assuming that these approaches are ideologically compatible. Karin van Marle's '˜jursiprudence of slowness' and Jacques Derrida's exposition of the sacrificial logic underlying Western culture's exclusion of animals from the 'thou shalt not kill' proscription provides a framework within which to illustrate and engage with the ideological purlieu that separates these theories.