SACRIFICE AND THE SUBLIME: ENCOUNTERING “NOTHING” IN THE

POLITICAL

What does it mean for the living when they saw tens of thousands of people dying en

massé? Death is the main concept that the philosophy has endured, revolved around and used

as a limit to understand human experience for quite some time now. Death and birth are the

main events that delimits the life. There is the inextinguishable need and necessity that we

have to talk about death if we would like to talk about life one day. Death and birth are the

“limit events” as one might say, the events that we witness or experience as we die or we

witness somebody else’s death.

After tens of thousands of deaths many of whom are considered “martyrs” and

“sacrifices” for the continuity of the unity of the nation or struggle in ongoing wars all around

the world, there is also a undeniable need for radical reinterpretation (or resurgence) of

sacrifice. This call also includes philosophy whose components has been never too shy about

talking the reality of the experience of death.

Because of this urgent call, I aim to look at the theme of sacrifice that is permeating

our democratic societies through the lens of “politics of nothing” that posits the moment of

political on a certain groundlessness, on a “ground without ground”. Thinking the sacrifice

and death as the moment of a rupture, I start by discussing the great thinker of sacrifice and

“nothing” Georges Bataille. Bataillean sacrifice and sovereignty brings forth a re-evaluation

of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “inoperative community” that is the the community of “finite beings”.

Death as the marker of the “finitude” is the moment that one leaves and enters into a

discussion of the political although it sounds like a paradox. This paradox stems from the

constitutive moment of the community for Nancy which is the moment of “someone else’s

death”. Facing such an abyss is definitely an experience of the sublime. Through a discussion

of sacrificial act as the sublime, I hope to differentiate between (seeing someone else’s) death
as the experience of the sublime and its representation as (Freudian) sublimation in the

political act. What would follow is a discussion of sacrificial political act in all its sublimity

and productivity which is a productivity that “almost” cancels out itself and becomes a

“gesture”. In other words, encountering a nothingness and its political productivity which

presents itself to us as an “gesture” and a politics that prioritizes “means without an end”, a

non-utilitarian realignment of our political capabilities.

Georges Bataille: Sacrifice and Sovereignty as “Nothing”

Death in the form of sacrifice has always been linked to the experience of religion.

The ancient human sacrifices of the Aztecs or the modern non-human sacrifices of our

contemporary age has always been closely linked to what is sacred. From this point of view,

Bataille’s arguments on sacrifice makes much more sense. At this point, it is crucial to point

out that the sacrifice in our discussion is in modern terms. This means that the

victim/sacrificer dichotomy is not fully at work at here. It is the (self-)sacrifice of the victim

that makes the “victim” status semi-redundant at the “moment” of dissent. What I will

mention points to the fact that Bataille’s arguments about sacrifice, gift-giving and religion is

relevant in our daily understanding of sacrifice as an act of dissent.

While sacrifice is always closely linked to “sacred”, this is because Bataille

differentiates between “the world of things” and “the world of intimacy”. The world of things,

as the name suggests, is the world that man becomes another thing among things through his

labor. Because of the continuous labor of man on earth, the gates of “divine order” has been

closed shut to him. Yet, he remembers it and longs for it. That is the point of sacrifice: making

possible of the contamination between the divine and the “real order” which is the place of the

world of things (Bataille, 1988).

 This is why “sacrifice destroys which it consecrates” according to Bataille. It is

consecrated at the moment of the sacrifice and cannot be brought back to the real order, the

world of things. It is at the moment of this failure of restoration that sacrifice takes its ritual

form: it fails to restore the divine order onto the real, yet it is the useless and careless

expenditure; expenditure of life that makes it sacred (Bataille, 1988).

The glory of the sacrifice originates from its being “beyond calculation” and

“measureless expenditure of energy” (Bataille, 1988). It is its lack of concern for the future

that sacrificial victim creates a rupture at the world of profane. It is through this opening of

intimacy created by victim that the living are changed.

The first volume of Bataille’s “Accursed Share” and his discussion of his theory of

“general economy” is vital for a discussion of his dictum in the third volume of the same

work: “Sovereignty is NOTHING” (Bataille, 1993). Sovereignty is the moment or event that

ruptures ordinary state of things. As it is such an event, it disrupts and plunges the subject into

nothing and breaks its coherence. Sacrifice as a political act would make a perfect example of

such an act that creates a rupture in the order of things. The time-space of the event is the

moment of a “momentary glance” into the ontological status of politics as nothing. Yet, one

cannot see it as a point in a linear succession of time. Such a schematization would only be

possible after the event, as the sovereign event of sacrifice is a suspension of the regular flow

time. At this point, it resembles Walter Benjamin’s jetztzeit in not belonging to the

“homogenous ruling time” (Benjamin, xxxx). As it doesn’t belong the “homogenous ruling

time”, it is also beyond the realm of any kind of knowledge. Since “it is always servile to

employ the present time for the sake of the future, it is always sovereign to enjoy the present

time without having anything else in view but present time” (Bataille, 1991).

As such, Bataillean sovereign moment is the moment that escapes any signification. It

is the moment of “groundless of ground actualized” whose actualization is “nothing” as a

concept (Marchart, 2007). As Jean-Luc Nancy suggests “Bataille is nothing but a protest

against the signification of its own discourse” (Nancy, xxxx). This means that Bataille’s

attack on bourgeois “longing for security, its unrevolutonary nature and its abhorrance of

transcendence” has to stay on a level somehow paradoxical (Wolin, 1996). But Bataille never

rejects this paradox: “The paradox of my attitude requires that I show the absurdity of the

system each thing serves, in which nothing is sovereign (…) that is to say in sum that we need

sovereign values, hence that is to say it is useful to have useless values” (Bataille, 1991;

Monagle and Vardoufakis, 2012).

Hence, Bataille is the first one to admit the productivity of non-productivity (or vice

versa) of his philosophy. Death, an event so singular, remains an attempt to bring back the

divine order into profane. It has to remain a “simulation” as the sublation of death and

sacrifice onto a higher plane necessarily fails. The ecstatic and aesthetic community of

Bataille has to be dramatically rethought according to Nancy who is an avid reader and critic

of Bataille’s thought.

Nancy: Death, Philosophy and Community

“No one can both know and not be destroyed, no one can both consume and increase

wealth” Bataille (1988) claims. This impossibility shows that one cannot reach the

“communion”, the possibility of community from the world of profane and from the order of

things. Discourses of sacrifice always points to this possibility of a “communion” that its

enunciation is deployed as an attempt to restoring “the final knowledge” which is necessarily

destroyed at the same time (Bataille, 1988). The predicament of the living is unsurmountable:

the impossible communion touches me and eludes me at the moment of loss and absence

which is the moment of other’s death (Blanchot, 1988).

 Nancy claims that there is two possible outcomes of the death and sacrifice in the

discussion of a community: The first is the “possibility of communion” when a “collectivity”

tries to make death “a work or its property in the sense that would find its meaning a value or

cause transcending the individual” (Nancy, 1991). As a result, death itself becomes a work,

namely “a work of death”. This is a direct criticism of Nancy towards Bataille: as both of

them accepts the “impossibility of communion” that is death’s sublation into a higher plane or

totality, Nancy argues that Bataille’s “simulations” of this sublation still takes place in the

primacy of sacrifice in Bataille’s understanding of community (Nancy, 1991).

The “fully realized”, complete nature of death in this regard, “the community of death”

is the death of community for Nancy (1991). The logic of salvation through death which is

ever dominant in “communion” closes off the “exposure” of death to the living that is

constitutive of the possibility of community. It is because when the “communion” is claimed

to be achieved, it is found to be nowhere similar to Bataille’s futile attempt at “final

knowledge” through sacrifice. Hence, it is a “simulation” while it is a “work of death” in

Nancy’s parlance. I can only mention a banner in Istanbul I saw after the 15th July coup

attempt in Turkey when 250 people died overnight and became “martyrs”: “Oh the air is

relished with the scent of the Heaven”.

As useful as it can be to use the discourses of martyrdom and sacrifice especially when

someone faces the destruction of seeing other people’s deaths through acts of violence, one, at

a certain point, faces a limit where the “radical meaningless of death” exposes itself to the

living (Nancy, 1991). This radical meaningless of death would render inoperative any

discourse of martial glory as the living are the ones who should go through the experience of

seeing someone’s else’s death. “The mute conversation which, holding the hand of “another

who dies”, “I” keep up with him, I didn’t keep up simply to help him die, but to share the

solitude of the event which seems to be the possibility that is most his own and his
unshareable possession in that it disposses him absolutely” (Blanchot, 1988). In the words of

Blanchot (1988), this is how “death presents itself” when we see someone else’s death. It is a

“transgression” at the moment that we realize it is not our death. “Impossibility of

representing its meaning” does away with any clear self-presence of death and “exposes us to

our finitude” (Nancy, 1991).

Nancy’s work on death and community displays the abyss that we face when we

encounter the death of others. Yet in its relationship with the political, Nancy’s offer to us is a

rather “philosophizing”. Nancy claims that “philosphical politics regularly proceeds according

to the surreptitious appeal to a metaphysics of the one-origin, (…) a politics of exclusivity and

a correlative exclusion – of a class, of an order, of an community – the point of which is to

end up with a ‘people’, in the ‘base’ sense of the term (Nancy, xxxx). While this criticism

definitely holds some value, one can claim that political philosophy has to grapple with the

instituting events of the political as well as the “withdrawal” of the political (Marchart, 2007).

Facing Sacrifice and Death: Sublime and Sublimation

As a result, Nancy’s reading of Bataillean sacrifice and death remains to be

supplemented in a number of ways for a better understanding of the place of sacrifice in our

political communities. Seeing someone else’s death is the domain of “unspeakable” and

“unutterable”. As an ecstatic experience, seeing someone else’s death dismantles the function

of the senses. On the other hand, coming terms with such an experience through the faculties

of reason also proves difficult, if not impossible. This is why we should reflect on the

relationship between the “sublime” and sacrifice.

Kantian sublime is the strong emotion that emanates from pain. The feeling of sublime

originates in the subject when “a conflict between the faculty to conceive of something and

the faculty to ‘present’ something” develops. Sublime sentiment emanates when these
faculties break down. It occurs “when the imagination fails to present an object which might,

if only, in principle, come to match a concept” (Lyotard, xxxx).

This is why the unrepresentable is Sublime and Sublime is unrepresentable. Infinity as

such is an example of this unrepresentability: we can conceive of the infinitely Beautiful and

infinitely Great, yet we are not able to show a presentation of such an Idea. Sacrificial act and

death evokes the feelings of sublime in this way: as they are conceived yet they are also

unrepresentable when they resist categorization. Seeing somebody plunge oneself into a

sacrificial act will impress our cognitive faculties in a way that only avoids representation.

“This incommensurability of reality to concept” is what infects our political imagination

today in the guise of politically motivated act. Kant himself argues that “every affect of

courageous sort (that is, which arouses the consciousness of our Powers to overcome any

resistance) is aesthetically sublime” (Kant, xxxx). “Seeing someone else’s death” as a sublime

event is akin to Bataillean sacrifice that resists the “final knowledge” and Nancy’s claim that

death presents itself to the living as a “radical meaninglessness”. “Seeing someone else’s

death” as the constitutive of community points out the “groundlessness of the ground” of the

political.

It is this aspect of being left alive and “seeing someone else’s death” that we have to

take issue with today’s discourses on sacrifice. Someone else’s death is a transgression, yet it

is not a transgression that creates a new order of meaning that could possibly be appropriated

as a work or property by the community which in turn would create a Subject. It is not the

fusion that is created or about to be created in the death of the Other, because it resists any

attempt to create any kind of knowledge. The aesthetic experience of sacrifice and “seeing

someone else’s death” is facing the “nothing” in this sense as it resists “sublimation” that

would create a new meaning.

 In the opposite of accepting political sacrifice and its sublime quality would be

Freudian sublimation. An elevation of sacrifice to a means for end is what we usually confront

in our contemporary societies. In such cases, sacrifice is employed to signify the ideal, the

God or the nation. Yet this elevation of sacrifice into sublimation is a “working” of political

deaths one should reject. It is the creation and imaginary self-representation of an Absolute

Community to use Nancy’s parlance.

Sacrifice as facing directly the “groundlessness of the ground” of the political is

related to the Kantian sublime rather than Freudian sublimation. One should claim the

sublimity of the sacrificial act to resist making of death a “work”. Sublimity doesn’t give

itself as a means towards an end whether it be political or another. I argue that to claim the

sacrificial political act in its sublimity is to prioritize a politics of “means without end” and

non-utilitarian realignment of political capacities.

Means without End

How does such a prioritizating of a politics of “means without end” can be

accomplished? In the face of a political sacrificial act, we tend to reject the sublime properties

of the event even though we experience it firsthand. We strive to make a knowledge our of the

rupture and that’s why such an effort fails to deliver the final knowledge to us, as we try to

bridge the gap “between cognitive, ethical and political discourses, thus opening the way to a

unity of experience” (Lyotard, xxxx). Yet, this effort fails repeatedly as we can see it in our

daily political discourses on political (self-)sacrifice. One can claim that such a repetitive

game of try and fail is necessary in the face of trauma that is inflicted on the society by acts of

political violence and sacrifice. Such an effort would be akin to what Kant calls “subjective

purposiveness” or the purposiveness that faculty of minds understand what is “beautiful”.

 Widely used slogan “Martyrs Never Die” in the on-going civil war in Turkey could be

an example of such an instrumental reasoning. The sheer fact that it is a “slogan” that is

chanted at the demonstrations of both sides of the civil conflict displays its failure at uttering

the unutterable and signifying the unsignifyable. As the slogan signifies the “infinite

communion” of living and the dead, it defers the coming of the “Absolute Community” that it

claims to represent indefinitely.

As a result, one should look at other directions for a non-utilitarian understanding of

sacrifice in its sublimity. Such an effort would be the same as asking what turns a fact into

event. Giorgio Agamben answers this question as “gesture”. We accept that production/work

as the submission of a means to an end. Yet gesture is defined by Agamben as follows: “If

producing is a means in view of an end and praxis is an end without means, the gesture then

breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyzes morality and presents

instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason,

ends” (Agamben, 2000).

Overcoming both the distinction between praxis and poeisis and also means and end,

gesture becomes the “communication of a communicability”. On the other hand,

“communication of communicability” has “nothing to say” and “is always a gag on the proper

sense of the term” (Agamben, 2000). This definition of a gesture proximates the

“unutterability” of the sublime act of sacrifice.

Neither praxis nor poiesis, Gerere –from which “gesture” is derived– means “to bear”,

“to carry”, but also, “to show”, “to reveal”, “to perform the function”, “to administer an

office” (Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1968: 762). In this sense, the gesture reveals the suspension

of the relationship between means and ends.

 In Lieu of Conclusion

In this paper, I looked at some of the possibilities that may result in our encounter

between sacrifice and the political. But the problem is far from being solved. Especially when

one considers modernity’s obsession with utility and productivity, our predicament takes upon

another level of difficulty in giving definitive answers to these questions about life, death and

the political.

In an age when capitalism can offer a perverted version of sublime in the shape of

commodities, what does it entail to talk about political act of sacrifice as a sublime act? One

can answer this question with such an answer: to begin with, it at least shows that the mere

survival, in and of itself, is not enough. Modernity, in its newest and heightened version of

“commodity fetishism”, does not really substitute the sublime properties of the courageous

acts that Kant talks about. This does not mean that would-be dissenters should be part of a

“cult of death”. Yet, it shows that the capitalist modernity’s aversion to sacrifice in and

productivity is challenged in ways that it did not imagine. Agamben’s concept of “interruption

of pure productivity” still entails the way that dissenters act in face of the constituted power

(Agamben, 2000). But Agamben misses another aspect of the issue as he overemphasizes the

content in survival of “bare life”. Self-destructive acts of sacrifice can also be seen as a

resistence to “being reduced” bare life, not necessarily resistance “of” bare life (Bargu, xxxx).

In his beautiful description of “swerving of atoms”, Lucretius argues that if atoms does

not swerve even a tiny bit, they would fall like drops of rain. In that case “nature would have

produced anything” (Lucretius, xxxx). The sacrificial act as it faces “nothingness”, the

“groundlessness of ground” is such a “gesture” as it delivers the “communication of

communicability”. The non-utilitarian realignment of our political capabilities would be to

reclaim the “silent” nature of this communication and its radical contingency: the contingency

of the political.