Logic Of Sacrifice Research Articles

Sacrificing youth for a fabricated humanity: Governance, youth, and onto-theology in the cabin in the woods

This paper analyzes Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's recent film, Cabin in the Woods (2012), using Thomas J. Catlaw's Fabricating the People (2007), to illustrate the precarious position of youth at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author argues that just as the film requires young people to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity, recent political events ask young people to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of neo-liberalism. Throughout the film, youth refuse the sacrificial logic of the Director, choosing instead a “logic of subtraction.” While the film seemingly ends with the nihilistic end of the world, when viewed through the lens of Fabricating the People it may also offer a hopeful suggestion for how young people can resist and change oppressive systems of governance.

Oddments: The Rest of Deconstruction

Though Derrida had often appealed to the notion of le reste, in works ranging from Glas (1974) to Shibbloth (1986) to Cinders (1988), it was not until his 2002 essay Reste – le maître that he would devote an entire work to the topic. In this essay, I look at a few of Derrida's early attempts to think le reste, particularly in relationship to poetry in ‘Che cos'è la poesia?’ before concentrating on Reste – le maître. I show that it is only in this latter work that Derrida develops a full ‘theory’ of le reste as a ‘quasi-transcendental’ along the lines of différance or, indeed – and Derrida himself makes the comparison – the ‘Good beyond being’ in Plato and Plotinus. But it is also in this latter text that Derrida uses the notion of the reste to suggest a relationship, an analogy, between the logic of sacrifice and mastery in Western onto-theology and the logic of sacrifice and mastery in the Brahmin culture of India. As such, I suggest in conclusion, le reste is perhaps the most suggestive and the most powerful notion in all of Derrida's work for thinking today the relationship between deconstruction and the rest of the world.

The Sacrificial Logic of Cultic Meals in Antiquity

The Sacrificial Logic of Cultic Meals in Antiquity

The Invention of the Other, Ethics, and the Question of “Geopolitical Unconscious” in Contemporary Korean Films: Silmido, TaeGukGi: Brotherhood of War, and Shiri

By analysing Silmido (2003), TaeGukGi: Brotherhood of War (2004) and, finally, Shiri (1998), this paper discusses how each film works to respond to an encounter with the traumatic Other. The representation of the Other necessarily leads us to raise the issue of ethics. The term “ethics” here refers precisely to “ethics of the Real” (Zupan?i? 2000) in which the subject redefines the mode of being in this encounter with the traumatic Real, thus becoming a true subject. One of the prevailing tropes of contemporary Korean film is the way in which the protagonist’s suicide keeps utopian impulses permanently parenthesised through the logic of sacrifice. Silmido and TaeGukGi demonstrate this. In contrast, Shiri opens up the inherent contradictions of all such ideas by revealing that the female protagonist maintains fidelity towards her own “acts” without being drawn into the logic of sacrifice. In so doing, this film enables us to cognitively map out the “geopolitical unconscious” of South Korea, i.e., the unrepresentable totality of the current South Korean capitalist system.

After Alice After Cats in Derrida'sL'animal que donc je suis

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making.

L'esistenza insacrificabile come esigenza del pensiero

No longer induced to yet again develop a theory on sacrifice, being there other Sciences designated to do so, Philosophy in any case has to face the question that relates sacrifice to thought itself. In fact, ever since its beginning, Western thought seem strictly interrelated to a «sacrificial logic», of which frequently – as ever so often revealed – resents the fascination. In particular, Heidegger’s works produced between the 1930s and the 1940s show not so much a thematization of sacrifice, as evidenced in other thought experiences, rather than an ambivalent proximity between thought and sacrifice. The analysis of some Heideggerian passages evidentiates, on one side, the heavy «sacrificial» pall of his discourse, and on the other side its connection with freedom. Jean-Luc Nancy – stretching beyond Bataille, Hegel and Christianity, and even beyond Heidegger himself – has suggested an original reading of sacrificial logic in relation to the development of Western philosophy, based upon the sublation of finitude. Obsessed with the concept of accessing the Other, the Infinite, the Absolute, and with the willingness to found a fusional community, the thought succumbs to sacrifice itself, after having contributed to his spiritualisation and his dialectisation. In such way, thought is no longer free. So, reconsidering the concept of a «singular plural» finitude, around which his entire work rotates, Nancy affirms that existence is «unsacrificeable». But more than a predication of existence, it is a need of thought itself.

Expositions of Sacrificial Logic: Girard, Žižek, and Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men

Expositions of Sacrificial Logic: Girard, Žižek, and Cormac McCarthy's <i>No Country for Old Men</i>

Expositions of Sacrificial Logic: Girard, Žižek, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men

Expositions of Sacrificial LogicGirard, Žižek, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men Benjamin Barber (bio) Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and Joel and Ethan Coen’s film adaptation of the same name, deliver two separate critiques of sacrificial violence through their particular renderings of Carla Jean Moss’s death scene, as they correspond, respectively, to the theories of René Girard and Slavoj Žižek. In both film and novel, the chase narrative offers a concrete representation of runaway acquisitive mimesis engendering resentment and cathartic violence. This violence is symbolically manifest in the character of Anton Chigurh. An assassin whose killings often employ a ritual of chance, Chigurh is a symbol for both the violence foundational to culture and the fascinating draw such violence continues to have in contemporary culture. A comparison of the film and the novel versions of Carla Jean Moss’s conversation with her murderer illuminate the distinction between Girard and Žižek’s favored examples for the exposition of culture’s violent logic. In Things Hidden since the Foundation of The World, Girard finds the best expositors of sacrificial violence in Christ and the good harlot from “The Judgment of Solomon”1 and briefly considers Sophocles’s Antigone as a less effective exposition of the same violence. The discourse of the novel’s Carla Jean is virtually free [End Page 163] from mimetic rivalry, whereas the film’s Carla Jean more closely resembles Antigone’s heroic and rivalrous abstention. These correlations are interesting, since Žižek seizes upon Antigone’s abstention as the quintessential questioning of the sociosymbolic and its violent origins, which he and Girard trace to the ontological violence of Heidegger’s Heraclitean Logos. Ultimately, the comparison of the two versions of the murder scene point toward the divergence between Girard and Žižek’s view on how the violent foundations and workings of culture are best exposed. In Things Hidden, Girard states that Lacan’s abstraction of Freud’s thought to the realm of language further mystifies the best of Freud’s already myth-tainted insights.2 Thus, it may seem strange to draw together a committed Lacanian like Žižek and Girard for comparison. Despite his loyalty to Lacan, Žižek’s thought shares with Girard’s an interest in similar philosophical questions and cultural phenomena. Because of this, a fluency of dialogue is possible between Žižek and mimetic theory. For example, Žižek accepts Heidegger’s notion of ontological violence (Heraclitean Logos) as the foundation of the symbolic in the same way that Girard does in Things Hidden.3 Where Lacan claims that psychosis represents a foreclosure of the symbolic, Žižek recognizes envy and resentment as the impetus behind the death drive, which is an attempted escape from the sociosymbolic.4 A parallel exists between this formulation and mimetic theory’s supposition that resentment grows out of the subject’s lack of metaphysical being, which it subsequently pursues in the other. Girard posits this as the function of desire in Freud’s death drive.5 In the emphasis he places on envy, Žižek opens up parallels between his Lacanian reflections on the nature of desire and those of mimetic theory. Further, his assumption that violence is the basis for the emergence of culture forms, or the symbolic, closely resembles Girard’s own theory of origins. Žižek’s use of film and popular culture to explicate the movements of desire in Lacanian theory makes contemporary literature and film an ideal forum for comparing Žižek’s thought with mimetic theory, which itself claims to subsume the best of Freud and Lacan in its analysis of desire and violence. The chase plot of No Country for Old Men concretely illustrates the movement of interdividual desire toward violence, as schematized in mimetic theory. Llewelyn Moss finds $2 million in drug money. When he subsequently discovers that the money’s true owners have sent an assassin to retrieve it, he runs with money in hand. Anton Chigurh pursues and the two men become warring doubles.6 The triangular configuration of desire, as subject (Moss) and rival (Chigurh and the drug industry) pursue the [End Page...

“O Himmlisch Licht!”

In Godard's Le Mépris [Contempt, 1963], Fritz Lang, playing a fictional version of himself, evokes the complex relationship between cinema's future and the end of cinema by citing a famous verse from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, according to which what counts in respect of poetry is henceforth no longer the secret persistence of the gods, nor their covert proximity, but their enduring absence. This paper explores the implications of that insight as they come to affect first Godard's film, then the three films based on Hölderlin's works directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub between 1986 and 1992: Der Tod des Empedokles [The Death of Empedocles]; Schwarze Sünde [Black Sin]; and Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1948) [Sophocles’ Antigone Based on Hölderlin's Translation, as Adapted for the Stage by Brecht (published by Suhrkamp, 1948)]. At issue in all those films, and similarly in Straub and Huillet's 1974 film of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, is the tension between the project or dream of sacrifice as a form of fusional politico-religious redemption and its very impossibility as such, attributable (among others) to the necessary subordination of film to spatio-temporal differentiation and, by that token, to what is irreducible to the visible and the invisible alike. Through careful analysis of Huillet and Straub's filmmaking strategy, the paper examines both the aesthetic and political consequences of their interruption of the logic of sacrifice, and seeks to show how the future of cinema is not reducible to the aesthetics of the spectacular but is inseparable from the promise of that which, before or beyond spectacle, has not yet ever been seen before.

Woman, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Sympathy

In both Lu Xun’s “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (1948), a woman is made a sacrificial victim by her village community, one symbolically and one literally. Using the two stories as my cross-cultural examples, I ponder the connection between the failure of sympathy and patriarchal sacrificial logic, and ask what literature can do to help create the condition of possibility for moral agency.

Irreconcilable: Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin

Irreconcilable:Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin Rochelle Tobias (bio) Over the past thirty years Benjamin scholarship has convincingly shown the importance of Judaism for Benjamin's thought from the early writings on language to the later reflections on history, modernity, and urban life. The same strain is evident in Benjamin's critique of metaphysics, as exemplified in the Christian notion of grace. Benjamin dismisses the notion of the redemption of the individual from history and replaces it with the idea of the redemption of the historical past in a mystical now or punctual present.1 What has received surprisingly little attention is the impact of Judaism on Benjamin's reflections on aesthetics in essays like "Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin" and "Goethe's Elective Affinities," in which he grapples with the relation of art to life and the truth, or essence, of semblance (Schein). While Benjamin's thought need not be confined to religious or Judaic concerns, the reluctance of critics to identify Judaic elements in his aesthetic writings has reinforced an existing prejudice. According to this prejudice, Jewish art is based in the prohibition of graven images, [End Page 665] which amounts to saying that Jewish art consists in the dissolution of its images or the negation of its representations. Among the twentieth-century thinkers to adopt this position was Theodor Adorno, who made the biblical injunction against graven images into a defining feature of modern art.2 While Benjamin understood the limits of the aesthetic image, he did so within a broader frame. Art was not to be confused with religion or ethics, lest they both become myth. (I will elaborate on this point later.) In the essay on the Elective Affinities, he distinguishes between art and ethics in a startling way: by invoking the Jewish Day of Atonement (in German, der Versöhnungstag) to oppose the sacrificial logic of Goethe's text. According to this logic, the novel's heroine Ottilie must die to make up for the rift she causes in Eduard and Charlotte's marriage not through any deed, but her mere presence in the household. Benjamin emphasizes that Ottilie is not guilty of any misdeed, any trespass against the marriage since such conduct would automatically disqualify her death as a sacrifice. Rather she can expiate the sins of others only to the extent that she is not tainted by sin, like the Nazarene Jesus whom Benjamin refers to at the end of the essay.3 Benjamin readily admits that the framing of Ottilie's death as a sacrifice belongs to "the deepest intentions" (GS I: 140) of the novel. At the same time, he insists that there is another religious model at work in the Elective Affinities that requires neither sacrifice nor the negation of one's most ardent wishes. This model comes to the fore in the novella "The Marvelous Young Neighbors" embedded in the main text, which Benjamin [End Page 666] reads not only as an inversion of the novel's plot but also, and more importantly, as an inversion of the logic underlying it. The novella, like the novel, concerns two lovers who are drawn toward each other, although they have given their hand in marriage to someone else. (In the novel Charlotte and Eduard are married; in the novella the young girl is engaged to an older acquaintance.) But unlike the characters in the novel who passively endure rather than actively challenge their fate, the protagonists in the novella risk everything, including their life, to realize their love in this world instead of the next. They are willing, in other words, to sacrifice themselves, which makes the "wondrous" or "marvelous" outcome of their act of defiance all the more astonishing. Benjamin describes the marvel as follows: Weil nämlich wahre Versöhnung mit Gott keinem gelingt, der nicht in ihr—soviel an ihm ist—alles vernichtet, um erst vor Gottes versöhntem Antlitz es wieder erstanden zu finden, darum bezeichnet ein todesmutiger Sprung jenen Augenblick, da sie [die Liebenden der Novelle]—ein jeder ganz für sich allein vor Gott—um der Versöhnung willen sich einsetzen. Und in solcher Versöhnungsbereitschaft erst ausgesöhnt...

Genre, Gender, and Suicide Threats in Roman Comedy

Several frustrated lovers in Roman comedy threaten to kill themselves, but of course never act on their threats. In this paper, I first situate the parasuicidal amator within the literary tradition of Greek tragedy, its Roman adaptations, and the praetexta , and then ask how gendered connotations of suicide contribute to the humor of empty threats. Particularly poignant is comedy's relationship to the praetexta and the logic of sacrifice for the sake of collective values. When juxtaposed to heroic and manly acts of self-inflicted death, the comic lover's weakness comes into sharp focus.

Geoffrey Hill, René Girard, and the Logic of Sacrifice

Abstract According to René Girard, the logic of sacrifice is scapegoating, the logic of self-sacrifice is self-transcendency true or deviated. Ibsen completed his unfinished epic poem “Brand” by rewriting it as a dramatic poem; dramatization clarified the mutually complicit nature of Brand’s useless self-sacrifice to and by his community. Ibsen rewrote Brand with great speed and facility and, ten years later, perhaps with the lesson of Brand’s unnecessary self-sacrifice in mind, achieved that regularity of intense focus that produced a play every two years. Geoffrey Hill’s stage version completes the process of dramatizing Brand. By his own accounting in a 1979 interview Hill wrote his Brand with great speed and facility; ten years later, he began the current period of unrivalled periodic productivity.

Sacrifice No More

This article argues against understanding Christ’s death as sacrifice. Using the work of Jay, Stowers, and others, it describes the work of sacrifice in establishing a male-dominated hierarchical social order and the marginalization of women. It then considers the uses of sacrifice in the Second Testament and the warning passages in Hebrews reflecting the logic of sacrifice. It concludes with a few observations on sacrifice today.

NECROIDEALISM, OR THE SUBALTERN'S SACRIFICIAL DEATH

Dipesh Chakrabarty admits that the subaltern who wholly resists incorporation by dominant state forms is ‘an ideal figure,’ a utopian concept designating the limits of hegemonic thought. I wish to argue that such a utopian ideal may find its most convincing but problematic representation in the figure of the dead subaltern. In death, the subaltern is perfected as a concept so pure no living referent can contradict or complicate it. As in utopian thinking, it is the subaltern's non-existence that ensures the possibility of its conceptualization as a critical alternative to existing hegemonies. Through a reading of Ranajit Guha's essay ‘Chandra's Death’, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, I will show how the immortalization of the subaltern involves a troubling logic of sacrifice and necroidealization that replaces the messiness and ambiguity of struggle with the reassurance of an aestheticized political ideal.

Sacrifice, Individuation, and the Economies of Genomics

Even as the biotechnological and genomic revolutions have promised spectacular life-saving and life-extending drugs and therapies, social and cultural critics have highlighted injustices associated with contemporary systems of biocommerce, often drawing on concepts of "sacrifice" and "savagery" to highlight social and class inequities. While sympathetic to these critiques, Mitchell argues that the concept of sacrifice is a problematic means for addressing these inequities, for it binds critics to the Enlightenment logic of the systems of biocommerce that they question. After outlining the sacrificial logic of "innovation" that runs through public policy defenses of biocommerce, Mitchell turns to two cinematic depictions of biocommerce (Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) and Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil (2002)), as well as to philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon's concept of "individuation," to argue that these films outline an approach to biomedical innovation that allows us to think injustice beyond concepts of sacrifice.

Murder in the Theme Park: Evangelical Animals and the End of the World

In the cultural productions of contemporary Evangelical communities, a surfeit of cute—that is, infantilized and unthreatening—animal figures participate in and bolster a sacrificial logic of substitution that in turn underwrites a mode of violent apocalyptic thinking to which the secular public sphere is far from immune.

David Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: A Response

I dissent from Hart's project of a theological aesthetics by a hair's breadth: but that hair's breadth is tragedy. The Beauty of the Infinite is an excellent book, but it would be still better without its misinterpretations of tragedy. Nietzsche told us that ‘we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images’: that is, Attic tragedy arises from the clash of Dionysian music with Apollonian thought. Hart regards postmodernism as a story involving the clash of two ‘violences’ – the ‘chthonic and indiscriminate’ violence of Dionysus versus the ‘discriminating’ violence of Apollo. Nietzsche's sympathies lay with Dionysus: ‘Dionysus versus the “Crucified”: there you have the antithesis.’ Nietzsche once confessed that The Birth of Tragedy ‘smells offensively Hegelian’. Both Hegel and Nietzsche read tragedy differently from Aristotle, and from the anterior Western tradition. Nietzsche could equally have confided that his first book imposes a nineteenth-century taste for melodrama on the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The argument of this article is that Hart likewise misconstrues tragedy as melodrama. If, as Hart says, ‘Nietzsche had atrocious taste’, it is self-defeating for him to assume that Nietzsche had the last word on Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Hart takes the modern theologians at their word when they speak of ‘tragedy’. He spontaneously deprecates the use of what he calls tragedy and what most people can recognize as melodrama in the writings of theologians such as Robert Jenson, Donald MacKinnon and Nicholas Lash. He tells us that, ‘None of what I say … is intended as a rejection of tragedy as such … but only as a critique … of the sacrificial logic from which Attic tragedy … sprang and according to which … tragedy is still read’. But his misinterpretation and rejection of tragedy has a wider reference than the writings of Sophocles and Aeschylus and rebounds on his own theology.

The Final Logic of Sacrifice? Violence in German Prisoner of War Labor Companies in 1918

Until recently, the historiography of the First World War focused upon the intercombatant violence that occurred between opposing armed forces. Yet new work by historians has shown that the boundar...

Interrupting the Myth of the Partage: Reflections on Sovereignty and Sacrifice in the work of Nancy, Agamben and Derrida

Agamben traces the bio-political essence of modern politics to the non-sacrificial killing of Homo Sacer in Roman law. Nancy, on the other hand, links the history of Western politics to the fundamental logic of sacrifice in Western metaphysics. He nevertheless contemplates the possibility that Western societies may finally have arrived at the threshold of a non-sacrificial existence. Derrida seeks to resist the sacrificial logic of Western metaphysics and politics, but nevertheless appears to accept it as an irreducible fact of human co-existence. Unlike Nancy, he envisages no actual or actualised beyond beyond the realm of sacrificial metaphysics and politics. He thus can be said to interrupt Nancy’s ‘myth’ of a non-sacrificial partage. This article compares these three philosophical stances in the hope of throwing more light on the role of sacrifice in the law and politics of our time.