Abstract
The sociological importance attributed to ‘the sacred’ has varied historically as theorists have sought to explain the relationship between religion and early capitalism, the rise of twentieth-century secularization processes, the profusion of nationalism in post-Soviet societies, and the recent global upsurge in religious movements. Paradoxically, however, sociology’s concern with the social significance of the sacred has not been accompanied by commensurate interest in those contrasting and varied sacrificial processes implicated in creating the sacred. This paper suggests that this imbalance limits our understanding of the relationship between the sacred, religion and society, and makes it difficult to assess the contemporary relevance of classical writings on the subject. Specifically, it hinders our knowledge of why certain phenomena become sacred, and in so doing limits our appreciation of how societies develop cultural priorities, of how they stimulate individuals to become certain types of social subjects, and of the risks and opportunities that arise in milieux characterized by shrinking or expanding prospects for creating sacred phenomena. This is because sacrifice (sacer facere), ‘the making of sacred things’, constitutes a crucial mediator of these phenomena; illuminating the nature and consequences of specific modalities of sacred rituals, actions and objects, and revealing much about their location within or dislocation from particular social milieux, identities and religions. Our argument progresses by viewing sacrifice as an example of what Mauss refers to as a ‘total social fact’, and by engaging with the writings of Bataille, Girard and Simmel; three figures to have made important, sociologically underexplored, contributions to the subject. In so doing, we aim to lay the foundations for a sociology of the contemporary nature and function of sacrifice, suggesting it should be a core issue for twenty-first-century sociology.
The sociological importance attributed to ‘the sacred’ has waxed and waned throughout the discipline’s history. Identified as one of sociology’s ‘unit ideas’, and the concept most suggestive of sociology’s unique role in the nineteenth century (Nisbet, 1993: 221), its significance has varied as successive generations of theorists have sought to explain the relationship between religion and early capitalism, the rise of twentieth century secularization processes, the profusion of nationalism in post-Soviet societies, and the contemporary global resurgence of religion (Beckford, 2003; Berger, 2001; Beyer, 1994; Riesbrodt, 2001; Robertson, 1992). The varied prominence, incarnations and consequences of sacred phenomena within these explanations re-emphasize the importance of Durkheim’s (1995) argument that the relationship between the ‘sacred’, ‘society’ and ‘religion’ is not necessarily coterminous, but potentially multi-dimensional and fluctuating. The precise nature of this relationship in contemporary sociology, however, remains unclear. Indeed, critics have suggested that the deployment of expansive and often vague notions of the sacred has simply redefined a wide range of social phenomena – ranging from religious terrorism to contemporary consumerism – rather than enhanced our understanding of them (Beckford, 2003: 204; Bruce, 2002: 199–203).
The source of this vagueness can be traced to the discipline’s general approach to the subject: while sociology has acknowledged that sacred phenomena perform key functions in society, it has devoted less attention to the processes through which the sacred is made. Durkheim’s (1995: 44) identification of ‘setting apart’ the sacred from the profane as key to collective life – through a process involving collective, effervescent energies that can assume beneficial and violent forms – suggests a fundamental role for the sacred. So too does Weber’s (1964a: 358–360) identification of charisma as a collectively recognized quality of personality, whereby an individual is invested with a ‘superhuman’ authority over others. More contemporarily, the importance of the sacred underpins Parsons’s (1978, 1991) view of the translation of the Protestant ethic into ‘worldly instrumental individualism’, and Luhmann’s (2000) suggestion that religiosity facilitates a reflective space that can be used to direct social system evolution (Mellor and Shilling, 2010). However, none of these accounts dissects the making of the sacred. Parsons and Luhmann focus on the social functions of sacred values, rather than their creation; Weber is ambiguous about how attributions of special powers ‘stick’ to individuals; while even Durkheim is vague about the processes that circulate within the contagious emotional energies through which the sacred emerges.
Etymologically, this failure to examine the processes involved in constructing sacred phenomena is also a failure to examine the processes involved in sacrifice (sacer facer or ‘making the sacred’). Thus, while Mizruchi (1998: 22–23) argues that sacrifice is ‘the privileged act’ in classical sociology, the necessary foundation for social order, sociologists have usually assumed that the concept was too reflective of Christian presumptions to be useful (Bloch, 1992: 27ff.; Detienne and Vernant, 1998: 35; Milbank, 1996). This argument overlooks how productive analysing this link to Christianity can be, as demonstrated by Bellah’s (1967) analysis of civil religion in America; one of the few influential sociological contributions to explore the centrality of a Christian model of sacrifice to the development of a social system. It also indicates an unwillingness to look beyond Christian views of sacrifice: non-Christian notions of sacrifice are ubiquitous in and outside the West, and ethnographers suggest that social forms recognizable as sacrifice are present in almost every cultural context (de Heusch, 1985: 23; Milbank, 1996: 54; Mizruchi, 1998). Futhermore, if contrasting modalities of sacrifice create particular forms of the sacred, then we need to examine these modalities if we are to understand the relationship between the sacred, society and religion. In the absence of such investigation, there remains a lacuna at the heart of classical and contemporary uses of ‘the sacred’.
Sociology’s marginalization of how things get made sacred has left a problematic legacy. This has, firstly, placed obstacles in the way of understanding how and when ‘making things sacred’ converges with, or diverges from, formal religion. Religions incorporate specific forms of the sacred at their core, but how, for example, do we account for those types of sacrifice excluded from and forbidden by a religion? Second, and relatedly, this marginalization of the concept also makes it difficult to judge whether classical analyses of the sacred – conducted in times and places which may or may not have been characterized by similar processes of sacrifice – continue to illuminate the contemporary era. Confining discussion to the existence of sacred phenomena leaves too much unsaid in the absence of analyses about how particular types of sacrifice emerge and persist in specific societal contexts. Finally, and perhaps of most general sociological relevance, this neglect of the sacred hinders our understanding of why certain phenomena rather than others become sacred, and in so doing limits our sociological appreciation of how societies develop cultural priorities, of how societies stimulate individuals to become certain types of social subjects, and of the risks and opportunities that arise in milieux characterized by shrinking or expanding prospects for creating sacred objects, values and identities. Sociology has suggested that the sacred is relevant to each of these phenomena, but often leaves us wondering about the precise processes involved in the construction of specific forms of the sacred.
In seeking to address this problem and re-establish the importance of sacrifice to the discipline, we take our definition of the term from the Durkheimian model offered by Hubert and Mauss (1964): sacrifice involves a setting apart from and giving up of something by which that something is made sacred (Halbwachs, 1930: 475–477; Strenski, 2003: 8). Following Mauss (1990: 3–4, 102), we also view sacrifice as a ‘total social fact’, simultaneously ‘religious, juridical, and moral’ and economic, relating to ‘politics and the family’, cutting across ‘different institutions, values and actions’, and ‘penetrat[ing] every aspect’ of the ‘social system’ (Gofman, 1998: 67; see also Meštrović, 1987). In investigating further the idea of sacrifice as a ‘total’ fact, however, we engage with Bataille, Girard and Simmel, examining the implications of their analyses for the development of the contemporary era and exploring the vital role of sacrifice in mediating religion and society.
The forms of sacrifice
We analyse the forms of sacrifice in the writings of Bataille, Girard and Simmel because these theorists have developed powerful accounts that remain underexplored within the discipline. Taken together, and despite theoretical differences and incommensurabilities, they can be seen as analysing distinctive yet coexisting modes of sacrifice in the contemporary world, enabling us to identify common features amongst apparently disparate phenomena. In this context, we devote most attention to the positive potential of their writings. Bataille and Girard are often associated with cultural theory, more than sociology, while Simmel is best known for analysing interaction, the metropolis and the money economy, rather than the theory of sacrifice underpinning these phenomena (Altman, 1903). Marginalized though these writings may have been, Bataille, Girard and Simmel enable us to lay the foundations for establishing sacrifice as a key sociological issue: each emphasizes its socially foundational nature, its historically variable relationship to religion, and the risks and opportunities associated with its modern fate. They also locate sacrifice at the heart of their accounts of modernity: Bataille and Simmel lament its diminution, while Girard’s conception focuses upon its threats to peaceful coexistence, but each highlights how specific types of sacrifice steer societies and social subjects as a result of their association with particular values and practices. They also provide us with distinctive views of its ‘total’ character: while Bataille and Girard maintain strong links with the Durkheimian tradition, Simmel explores sacrifice from the German tradition’s methodological focus on the individual (Levine, 1995). While significantly different from Durkheim’s macrosociological orientation, the conception of sacrifice underpinning Simmel’s view of individual renunciation as part of self-cultivation still associates ‘setting apart’ with a ‘making special’ that enables comparisons as well as contrasts to be made with these other views. Finally, the differences dividing these thinkers, particularly with regard to the social outcomes of their models of sacrifice, suggest alternate avenues for future research.
Sacrifice as expenditure
We begin with Bataille’s conception of sacrifice as expenditure. Bataille suggests that expenditure produces sacred phenomena, and is possible and necessary because collectivities and individuals exist within a broader ‘general economy’ of surplus. This builds on Durkheim’s (1995) writings in two ways. It associates the sacred with a socially creative, but also potentially violent, energy unleashed through sacrificial expenditures, and it identifies ‘pure’ forms of this energy in ‘primitive’ cultures that contrast with the ‘de-virilized’ world of modernity (Hollier, 1988; Mauss, 1990). Thus, Bataille (1989: 33, 43, 56) identifies in pre-modern religions and cultures a process of making the sacred that establishes sacrifice as the fundamental social act, while he is also strongly opposed to what he sees as the Christian deconstruction of ‘primitive’ sacrifice in modernity.
This account of sacrifice not only polarizes Christianity and the sacred (Bataille, 1989: 89; see Žižek, 2000, 2002), but also locates the ‘general economy’ of surplus in a ‘pagan’ ecological vision of the need to balance natural and social energies through processes of expenditure: the outpouring of solar power from the sun and the energy inherent in life’s basic chemical reactions ‘reveals’, for Bataille, that the generation and expenditure of surplus are universal and key to understanding social and individual life. Surplus can stimulate economic growth (excess energy enables people to work) or be consumed in organistic development (energy can be consumed in the process of growth). If it cannot be absorbed, however, this ‘accursed share… must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’ (Bataille, 1988: 21). This presents societies and individuals with opportunities and problems.
In the case of societies, the expenditure or sacrifice of surplus energy and other resources creates opportunities for making the sacred by enabling collectivities to pursue goals transcendent of material necessity, to produce and steer a culture on the basis of values irreducible to the economic. Disposal is here devoted to the cultivation of non-utilitarian objectives prized by the community: sacrifice not only facilitates the emergence of values but also makes values possible. Conversely, the potential problems posed by surplus are illustrated by the modern Western preoccupation with productivity, a preoccupation that renders invalid sacrificial wastage. This weakens normative consensus by reducing the space available for steering societies in the direction of sacred values; unchecked, this surplus also risks being used for destructive consequences, as in the case of violent conflict and war (Bataille, 1988).
In the case of individuals, surplus poses problems because of ‘human exceptionalism’ (Bataille, 1989). Non-human organisms expend surplus energy in a process of unreflective immanence: energy is accumulated and spent without thought. Life is problematized for humans, however, because their appropriation of nature results in a growing awareness of differentiation and alienation from their surroundings (Bataille, 1989: 23–24, 41; 1988: 57). This estrangement means individuals suffer a growing gap between their original existence and present condition; a gap that provokes a ‘search’ for ‘lost intimacy’ (Bataille, 1988: 57; 1989: 41). In this context, the sacrificial expenditure of surplus provides individuals with the opportunity of living meaningfully by removing the subjects/objects to be disposed of from instrumental subordination, and disbursing them in rituals directed towards ‘ultimate concerns’. This sacrifice restores ‘to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane’, reinvests life with meaning, reinvigorates social subjectivities, and enables individuals to experience intimacy with the ‘profound immanence’ of ‘all that is’ (Bataille, 1988: 55–56; 1989: 43–44).
Bataille (1988: 46) explores various ways that societies and individuals ‘make things sacred’ through ritual expenditures, but his best-known illustration involves the human sacrifices of the Aztecs. Human sacrifice disposes of a surplus (prisoners) that would otherwise cause problems of societal accommodation and cultural assimilation, and proceeds via a ritually established link between this world and the supernatural world. Once chosen, sacrificial victims become ‘the accursed share, destined for violent consumption’, but this curse proceeds by removing its victims from the profane ‘order of things’ and placing them in temporary intimacy with their sacrificers (Bataille, 1988: 59). Aztecs feast and dance with their victims, as a result of their exalted status as mediators between life and death, before killing them. From a utilitarian perspective, this luxurious expenditure makes no sense, but its very luxuriousness enables the Aztecs to commune with death by experiencing its proximity to vital life: to achieve social identities founded upon an intimacy with existence and non-existence.
The violence underpinning this expenditure also informs Bataille’s accounts of making things sacred in potlatch and in the case of Islamic expansionism. In potlatch, practised widely within and outside Aztec society, the utility of goods is destroyed – they are annihilated as ‘things’ – when exchanged as ‘gifts’, though their sacrifice binds individuals into tight webs of social obligations deemed sacred (Bataille, 1988: 65). In the case of Islam, Bataille (1988: 89) argues that it was ‘open from the start to an apparently unlimited increase of power’ through its energetic expenditures of ‘violence turned against the infidel enemy’. Islam directed surplus towards growth, while geographical constraints on the accumulation of excess were deferred by expansion through conquest and conversion (Bataille, 1988: 89). In terms of the religious subjectivities of individuals, Islam promoted ritual practices – such as fasting during Ramadan, the pilgrimage to Mecca and the obligation of jihad – that managed the discharge of energies in accordance with the demands of religious purity, linking this-worldly action to transcendent principles and stimulating the emergence of specific social as well as religious identities (Bataille, 1988: 87).
These sacrificial expenditures are ‘complementary form[s] of an institution’ the significance of which subsists in withdrawing ‘wealth from [the profane sphere of] productive consumption’, enabling collectivities and individuals to develop direction and meaning via the creation of sacred values and experiences (Bataille, 1988: 75–76). Societally, human sacrifice, gifts and religious expenditures structure economic exchange and steer the development of society on the basis of transcendent principles. Individually, contractual relations and calculations of profit/loss are anathema to social identities within these sacrificial systems. Instead, social subjects develop through participation in exchanges linking natural and supernatural realms of existence: exchanges that may involve material goods, but occur on the basis of norms that supersede material necessity. On both societal and individual levels, it is not just the existence of things set apart from the profane world that is important sociologically, but the precise manner in which sacralization occurs: diverse processes of making things sacred cultivate very different forms of society, and very different social subjects. For example, the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, on the one hand, and the fasting and charitable giving involved in certain forms of religious observance, on the other, involve very different activities and can steer collectivities in quite distinctive directions.
The importance of making things sacred is illustrated further by Bataille (1995) in the case of social systems threatened by an absence of sacrifice; those ‘monstrous disorders’ that prioritize expenditures of energy for production. Engaging with Weber, Bataille (1988: 127, 133) traces these disorders to Protestantism’s destruction of ‘the sacred world, the world of non-productive consumption’; a destruction effected through an ascetic religious purity that ‘handed the earth over to the men of production, the bourgeoisie’. Once condemned to the servitude implied by the doctrine of predestination, and the absolute separation of earth from heaven, ‘the world of things (the world of modern industry) could develop of itself, without any further thoughts of the absent God’ (Bataille, 1988: 136). Capitalism carries to an extreme the rupture of societies and individuals from any relation of immanence they had with the world, whilst also blocking opportunities for transcendence, by reducing ‘what is human to the condition of a thing (a commodity)’ and by provoking a sacrificial crisis, through the exclusion of unproductive value-creating and meaning-making expenditures (Bataille, 1988: 129, original emphasis).
Bataille’s account of sacrifice criticizes modernity and the Christian religion he believes shaped it: the ‘de-virilization’ of modernity arises from the absence of the (pagan) sacred, and can only be resolved through sacrifice. In this context, it is notable that, in the 1930s, Bataille’s ‘secret’ group, Acéphale, which aimed to ‘unleash’ the sacred in modernity, was to be initiated with a human sacrifice, with orgiastic excess preceding collective murder (Richardson, 1994; Richman, 2003). The very idea of human sacrifice appears shocking to modern sensibilities, but its continued relevance is suggested by the Palestinian ‘suicide bombers’ discussed by Strenski (2003); social actors who challenge the modern social order, in Israel, through the violent expenditure of human life (see also Abufarha, 2009). For Strenski (2003: 19, 26), ‘sacrifice’ rather than ‘suicide’ best captures the actions of these bombers: they ‘become holy’ within their community through the sacrifice of themselves and their victims, while their actions possess the character of ‘total social facts’ rather than just strategic acts (as evident in the sacralization of the sites of their violence, the circulation of heroic stories about their lives, the offerings given to their bereaved families, the commemoration of them in prayer and the revitalization of their communities in the face of conflict). The existence of violent sacrifice, together with its implication in the steering of values for both future ‘martyrs’ and the communities in which they live, suggests the continuing sociological significance of Bataille’s writings on the subject.
Sacrifice as scapegoating
The second form of sacrifice we explore is Girard’s analysis of violent scapegoating. Like Bataille, his account develops via an explication of ‘pagan’ myths, religions and cultures. Girard similarly suggests that there are certain inherent human characteristics that engender sacrificial forms of violence (forms that shape the social orders in which they occur), and also associates modernity with a Christian influence that has undermined the significance of sacrifice. In contrast to Bataille, however, Girard does not valorize pagan sacrifice as the answer to modernity’s ills, but stresses the importance of Christianity in protecting modernity from descent into the sacrificial violence of the sacred.
According to Girard, the ‘pagan’ method of making things sacred is found in societies that survive and develop through the hydraulic displacement of conflict. It proceeds via the misrecognitions that occur when intra-group tensions are attributed ‘to scapegoats both within and without’, and culminates in the violent expulsion or destruction of these innocent victims (Girard, 1987: 123). This sacrificial scapegoating expels conflict from societies, but does so by encouraging social subjects to relate to each other through mutual identifications that have at their centre envy and blame. As Girard (1987: 152) argues, sacrificial victimization enables societies and individuals to deal with tensions by blaming their problems on others, instead of confronting the sources of conflicts, via an ‘infinite play of substitutions, modifications, subtle transformations and wily inversions’. Perhaps the major reason scapegoating is so resilient, however, is that it creates grounds for its own justification: the profound emotions it stimulates and releases provide a basis for sacred myths and legends that validate victimization.
We explicate Girard’s account of sacrifice by looking firstly at the reasons for the pervasiveness of scapegoating, and then at the specific character in which it makes things sacred. Firstly, sacrificial scapegoating is widespread because it is rooted in a fundamental social emotion, mimetic desire. Mimetic desire is stimulated by interacting with others, and sustains culture. As Girard (1978: 7) argues, if people did not want to copy the gestures, actions and values of others, ‘culture would vanish’. Mimetic desire does not stop at imitation, however, but often develops into coveting what others have, and desiring what they desire; cravings that can result in social identities predicated upon rivalry and ‘vengeful imitation’ (Girard, 1978: 11; 1987: 51; see also Kirwan, 2004: 41). In an analysis that utilizes Durkheim’s (1995) vision of the contagious quality of virulent forms of the sacred, Girard (1995: 28) argues that such violence is ‘eminently communicable’, ‘contaminating’ those encountering it, and too easily resulting in a ‘floodtide’ of destruction engulfing individuals and communities.
The organization of society is, however, key to whether and how mimesis escalates into violence. The ‘reciprocal borrowing of desires’ under conditions of relative social equality may ‘ensure the development of mimetic rivalries’, but imitative desire can be managed through external authority (Girard, 1995: 28). Prohibitions against copying the gestures or words of privileged others, or sumptuary laws, operate in this way (Girard, 1978: 10). So do religious taboos and myths that regulate contact with mimetically desired objects (Durkheim, 1995). Historically, though, the most effective ‘solution’ to mimetic violence involves scapegoating: ‘the opposition of everyone against everyone’ that can result from mimesis ‘is replaced by’ the development of a culture that encourages ‘the opposition of all against one’ (Girard, 1978: 24; 1995: 13–15; Kirwan, 2004: 38). Generalized resentment against others is dissolved through the projection of envy, discontent and aggression onto a single victim – who is ‘generally destroyed and always expelled from the community’ – and society is ‘felt to be free of infection’ (Girard, 1995: 266)
For Girard, the sacrificial mechanism creates space for the sacred through the astonishing re-establishment of social order that it effects, a healing restoration of unity between individuals, and through the dramatic contrast it creates between the building and release of mimetic hatred. Here, peace is re-established, ‘as if miraculously’, and this is ‘magnified by the fact that the suddenly regained unity appears to be the result of the intervention of a supernatural power’ (Girard, 1987: 69). Having been blamed for creating conflict, the scapegoat is now attributed with the miraculous power of stopping conflict (Girard, 1987: 69; 1995: 31). The sacrifice of the surrogate victim thus results in ‘religious awe’; an awe that has historically formed the basis for cultural and religious myths based on the idea that the victim is sacrificed ‘so that the entire community threatened by the same fate’ can be reborn (Girard, 1995: 255). Reiterated in various forms, the scapegoat as ‘god, ancestor or mythic hero’ first sows the seeds of violence, and then ‘dies’ or ‘selects a victim to die in his stead. In so doing he bestows a new life on men’ (Girard, 1995: 255). Just as sacrifice as expenditure creates space for the sacred in Bataille’s work, sacrifice as scapegoating allows the sacred to emerge for Girard; a form of the sacred reflected in religious myths that provide a symbolic direction for the steering of these social orders and a validation of the vengeful subjectivities that project tensions onto others.
These two features of Girard’s work explain why sacrifice reproduces societies, and how individuals experience as sacred the displaced emotions and violence that occur during expulsion or destruction. As such, they reveal how sacrifice presents societies with opportunities for reproduction and individuals with the opportunity of constructing meanings based upon the lives and deaths of scapegoats. This way of making things sacred is, however, deeply problematic. Based on misrepresentation, in which desire ‘mistakes its own projections for reality’, scapegoating involves an ‘innocent party’; a situation exemplified in the Book of Job (Girard, 1987: 5, 64). For the scapegoating mechanism to work and re-establish order, moreover, the prosecutors must be ignorant of their victim’s innocence, and ‘the mimetic pull which draws them together to eliminate the victim’ (Kirwan, 2004: 68). They must also be ignorant of the reason behind the choice of their scapegoat: the scapegoat must be similar enough to those who exercise this choice to be a plausible offender, yet distinct enough to enable the violence to be expelled with them. In short, the surrogate must be a ‘monstrous double’ able to constitute a link and a barrier between the community and the sacred (Girard, 1995: 272). While ‘monstrous’ orders signify for Bataille the dangerous absence of sacrifice, ‘monstrous doubles’ signify for Girard the destructive violence of the sacred.
Girard provides the most Janus-faced form of ‘making the sacred’ examined in this article. Sacrifice is violent and destructive (resulting in the expulsion/death of the sacrificial subject), cathartic and productive (resulting in a restoration of social cohesion and distinctive personal identities). There is no easy resolution to this misrecognition and victimization, moreover, as societies and subjects that develop by displacing conflict remain protected only while the foundations of these sacred projections remain hidden (Girard, 1995: 135). The risks of revealing this misrepresentation, of driving ‘the monster from its secret lair’, can provoke a sacrificial crisis in which the absence of scapegoats results in perpetual, escalating violence: the distinction between impure ‘intra-communal’ and ‘purifying sacrificial violence’ collapses, and ‘impure, contagious reciprocal violence spreads throughout the community’ (Girard, 1995: 49, 135, 267).
In terms of its contemporary relevance, Girard’s analysis assumes a new dimension viewed in the context of his identification of Christianity as the religion that shaped modern Western culture. Despite the risks of exposing the misrecognition in sacrifice, Girard argues that Christianity, in doing just that, is unique amongst religions. New Testament writings indicate many examples where Jesus reveals and disrupts the sacrificial pattern, such as in the near stoning to death of the woman taken in adultery. Furthermore, while Jesus, as a sacrificial victim murdered by the mob only to reveal his divinity, is the quintessential scapegoat figure, the New Testament is written by the victim’s followers, who reveal the collective violence and misrepresentation of Jesus (in contrast to other religious myths that conceal the reality of sacrificial murder) (Girard, 2001: 56). In holding up Jesus as the model worthy of mimesis, the New Testament is therefore radically anti-sacrificial, in the ‘pagan’ sense of the term. Nevertheless, it also introduces a new model of sacrifice centred on ‘renunciation’, which Girard defines as movement towards freedom from the collective mimesis that leads towards violence (Girard, 2001: 13).
In the Western cultural context shaped by Christianity, then, sacrifice becomes a personal disposition, rather than a ritual act, yet retains its ‘total’ character as a normative standard meant to traverse all dimensions of society (Girard, 1995). Even within this context, however, and particularly where Christianity’s cultural influence wanes, the potentially violent consequences of mimetic contagion mean that the reappearance of sacrifice remains possible; a possibility recognized by the question, raised by Girard’s followers, ‘Must there be scapegoats?’ (Schwager, 1987).
This question assumed heightened importance after 9/11, which Girard (2008) analysed as an example of mimetic hatred expressed towards the West. Similarly, Alison (2004) highlights the dangers of Ground Zero becoming a ‘sacred space’ symbolizing the need for vengeance; dangers illustrated by the controversy over the proposed building of an Islamic community centre and mosque in the vicinity. Aside from such dramatic events, however, Mizruchi’s (1998: 28) account of the deeply ‘entrenched’ nature of (‘pagan’) sacrifice in Western culture, literature, art and politics lends more support to Girard’s vision of the congruence between certain human propensities and sacrificial rites. These examples warn of the continued relevance of scapegoating mechanisms – as ‘total’ facts that steer societies and impart meanings to social subjects – and of the hugely destructive contemporary potential of this type of sacralization. One of the key themes in the debate stimulated by Huntington’s (1996) clash of civilizations’ thesis, indeed, was the issue of whether there existed religiously informed social orders that were sufficiently coherent to warrant discussion of an escalating spiral of violent scapegoating (for example, Arjomand, 2004; Mayer, 1994; Qureshi and Sells, 2003).
Sacrifice as transcendent exchange
Simmel’s conception of sacrifice as transcendent exchange constitutes a third form of making things sacred. Bataille suggests pagan sacrifices revitalize culture, while Girard repudiates these as collective murders veiled by religious myths. Simmel (1997a, 1997b), in contrast, is uninterested in ‘pagan’ sacrificial rites, though his model of sacrifice is arguably implicitly Christian in that it is centred on the pattern of freedom through renunciation identified by Girard. In common with Bataille and Girard, however, Simmel’s vision of modernity displays a certain sense of tragedy, loss and danger.
For Simmel, the sacred is produced by individuals ‘giving up’ something of themselves, or objects they own, in exchanges that are transcendent rather than merely utilitarian in that they involve resources and capacities enabling people to secure but also ‘go beyond’ mere existence (Simmel, 1971a: 48, 1990: 85; 1971b: 353). Thus, sacrifice as transcendent exchange is not only (1) a precondition for existence and (2) a stimulant to interpersonal economic exchanges, but assumes its fullest form as (3) the key means through which individuals can cultivate what Simmel refers to as their ‘soul’, or unique personality. It is worth expanding briefly on each of these.
The most basic dimension of sacrifice involves human exchanges of energy and time in acquiring subsistence and shelter, to both secure and provide a basis for reaching beyond basic survival (Simmel, 1990). Individuals must give up something of themselves in order to work on and gain resources from their natural environment, an exchange often requiring cooperation with others. Sacrifice is also implicated in general interpersonal trades, constituting a motor for systems of formalized economic exchange. Scarcity requires that goods, services and opportunities ‘have to be paid for by the patience of waiting, the effort of searching, the exertion of labour, the renunciation of other things in demand’ (Simmel, 1990: 88, 93); a renunciation requiring individual involvement in relations of economic exchange with others. Objects have contrasting values for the purposes of individual development, and the possibility of exchange can enhance the sum of desire fulfilled (Altman, 1903: 49; Simmel, 1990: 78).
This mention of individual development brings us to the third element of sacrificial exchange, and the one most expressive of Christian influence: its potential for developing the soul or unique personality of the individual. Simmel (1997a: 182; 1990: 17; 2011: 13) argues that we have the need to go beyond ourselves in an attempt to cultivate the core of our self. As Levine (1971: xix) notes, cultivation involves ‘developing a state of being’ which ‘would not come about naturally’, but for which one has ‘a natural propensity’, by utilizing external objects ‘relevant to and [that can be] integrated into’ our core, and involves sacrifices. In order to act in a manner we consider moral, for example, we may have to accept ‘the sacrifice of lower and yet very tempting goods’, yet Simmel (1990: 88) suggests such action is all the more satisfying for such avoidance and ‘adds’ depth to the coherent self.
Simmel’s (1971b: 368) conception of sacrifice as transcendent exchange involves a ‘breaking through’ of life’s currently encountered limits en route to the achievement of coherence at higher levels. As the example of economic exchange highlights, sacrifice not only allows individuals to develop as individuals – a form of social subjecthood that has arguably become increasingly valued in modernity – but also establishes social links that can become systematized into set social forms. Forms are crystallized patterns of interaction, including relations of economic exchange, in which the vital contents of personality (including gratitude and erotic, caring and religious impulses) can find expression. As such, sacrifice presents individuals and societies with major opportunities for development. The ability of people to make sacrifices appropriate to their personal development depends upon the continued existence of suitable forms, however, yet these are not guaranteed. ‘Sociability’, for example, provides opportunities for individual interaction, yet is characterized by conventions that tend to reduce intellectual exchanges to the ‘lowest common denominator’ (Simmel, 1971c). Indeed, Simmel (1971d: 337) argues that a general ossification of modern forms has made it increasingly difficult to make sacrificial exchanges in line with the values steering personal development, and has reduced the extent to which societies can be steered by values irreducible to rational calculation.
Simmel’s account of this dominance of ‘objective’ forms over ‘subjective’ aspirations provides a twist on his endorsement of the economy as a means of sacrificial exchange, an enhancer of value and a facilitator of individual development; a twist associated with the rise to dominance of the money economy. Positively, the abstraction of economic relations associated with the pervasiveness of money liberates individuals from traditional obligations that limited personal development. Negatively, money reduces ‘qualitative values to quantitative terms’, stimulating cynicism, a blasé indifference toward values and an inability to experience life as meaningful (Simmel, 1971d: 327–330; 1990: 256). By becoming the measure of everything, money makes it difficult for individuals to develop personalities through economic exchanges (Simmel, 1971e: 180; 1990: 296, 327).
In Simmel’s modernity, then, the life-enhancing functioning of sacrifice withers in an objectivized culture and economy. Individually, it becomes increasingly difficult to remain faithful to one’s soul or core personality, while societies dominated by these developments stagnate and become vulnerable to radical movements promising to revitalize human experience (Simmel, 1990: 338, 484; 2011). As with Bataille, so with Simmel can we see the importance of sacrifice as a total fact not only in its presence, but also in its absence: its diminution in the face of rationalization in the modern era signals a sacrificial crisis prompted by a yearning for transcendence that threatens to make existentially irrelevant society’s existing avenues of action (Simmel, 2011).
Sacrificial diversity and complexity
Bataille, Girard and Simmel each stress the socially foundational nature of sacrifice (as a phenomenon affecting how societies and individuals develop on the basis of ‘sacred’ norms and values transcendent of utilitarian calculations), and demonstrate why sacrifice should be central to sociology. In so doing, each also shows the importance of sacrifice to one of the primary problems facing the discipline, the ‘problem of order’ (Wrong, 1994). This problem has been addressed in various ways, but sociology has generally argued that social cohesion cannot be explained by the imposition of totalitarian force, or the outcome of rational, self-interested individual actions, but is dependent instead upon the emergence of shared (often sacred) values (Levine, 1995).
The salience of this problem of order explains why classical sociology attributed such importance to the existence of the sacred as an expression and consolidator of shared values (and its specific manifestation in religion), and why sociologists still identify its influence in areas such as nationalism and sport, and in the recent global upsurge of religion (Berger, 1999; Habermas, 2008, 2010; Robbins, 2004). Focusing on what is already sacred, however, scrutinizes the outcomes of processes involved in making things sacred. This is the context in which Bataille, Girard and Simmel address a lacuna in the discipline by exploring how societies create core values. For each, sacrifice is a total social fact, the influence of which stretches across society, organizing and making meaningful to individuals the ‘ultimate’ matters of life and death, the finite and the infinite, though they illuminate the variability evident within it. In contrast to Durkheim (1995), for example, who presupposes one universal set of processes through which the sacred emerges and finds expression, their work suggests that the modalities through which societies create sacred things is crucial: different ways of making things sacred result in societies that value and encourage different types of social subjects. Thus, sacrifice variously establishes an experiential connection between finite life and the infinite cosmos (Bataille), translates destruction and victimage into religious awe (Girard), and allows individuals to develop authentic individuality (Simmel). Making things sacred can involve a violent renunciation of utility (Bataille), an emotional surrender to mimetic desires involving envy, aggression and self-deception (Girard), and a commitment to cultivating the soul/personality (Simmel). Recognizing these distinct modalities of sacrifice does not mean that we have to choose between them as mutually exclusive alternatives, moreover, but we can recognize them as ways of making the sacred that can coexist within and between societies.
These forms of making the sacred have hugely different implications: eliding their differences renounces the opportunity of understanding them sociologically. In terms of the relationship between the sacred and religion, for example, both Bataille and Girard polarize ‘pagan’ and Christian forms of religion in their analyses of sacrifice, and identify an anti-sacrificial impulse in Christianity that steered the development of modern Western culture. In his later work, Girard acknowledges a distinctively Christian pattern of sacrifice, but this is, in Simmel’s terms, a quality of personality rather than a collective rite. Indeed, Simmel’s (1997a: 190) account of sacrifice in relation to the development of personality (an account in which giving things up bestows value on the renouncer, thus reversing the Durkheimian focus that highlights the things set apart as sacred) explicitly identifies Christianity as ‘the most magnificent attempt’ to nurture this historically. These differences in how the sacred gets made inform distinct accounts of the links between modern life, sacrificial crises and the possible resurgence of the sacred.
Sacrificial crises and the return of the sacred in modernity
Bataille, Girard and Simmel argue that modern societies and individuals confront sacrificial crises, but conceptualize them differently. Bataille’s ‘pagan’ model of sacrificial expenditure (as facilitative of societal equilibrium and ‘transcendent’ experiences of escape from the world of ‘utility’) informs his portrayal of modern sacrificial crisis, and his focus on the return of the sacred as the means for resolving this crisis. For Girard, in contrast, the return of the sacred is symptomatic of modernity’s sacrificial crisis, not a vehicle of resolution: the marginalization of Christianity within Western culture risks reviving mimetic contagion. Simmel’s vision of sacrificial crisis shares Bataille’s sensitivity to the alienating effects of modernity manifest through the marginalization of sacrifice, but, for him, this is sacrifice in an individualized, partially secularized Christian form. He does not anticipate the return of the sacred akin to Bataille’s vision: if the sacrificial crisis were to be resolved, it would take the form of a revitalization of sacrifice more akin to the Christian trajectory Girard identifies with Western modernity, albeit one that ultimately facilitates individual development beyond any pre-set notion of individuality (Simmel, 2011).
In this context, questions concerning the ‘return of the sacred’, and debates about secularization and the global resurgence of religion, assume a more complex character than in contemporary sociological discourse: we have to ask which forms of the sacred we’re talking about, and whether we should speak of a transformation rather than a return of the sacred. In terms of the latter, while Simmel draws on Christianity, his concern with the thirst left by the paucity of opportunities for transcendent exchange says much not only about the acceleration of fashion and mania for novelty in consumer culture, but also about the growth in new religious movements, New Age spiritualism and the resurgence of conventional religion (Heelas and Woodhead, 2004; Luckmann, 1967; Lynch, 2007; Robbins, 2004; Simmel, 1971f, 2011). For Simmel, the more money levels everything, ‘the more passionately the doors of that region are guarded which still remains the stronghold of our soul and where we still feel it our duty to oppose all mercinariness’ (Altman, 1903: 62): what survives is a religious ‘yearning’, at the core of our personality (Simmel, 1997b: 9–11; 2011). Thus, Simmel enables us to see how the ‘sacrificial crisis’ within modernity may stimulate new forms or movements congruent with the restoration of vibrant experience to the individual (Lynch, 2007), while also perhaps having something to say about those increasing numbers of people who have in recent years engaged in a considered and deliberative return to religious ‘fundamentals’ as a way of maintaining their faith and identity in a fast-changing world (Eade, 2010; Hervieu-Léger, 2000; Mahmood, 2005).
The return of the sacred in Bataille’s thought is entirely different. As noted earlier, Bataille identifies as sacrificial the disposal of ‘surpluses’ that would cause problems of societal accommodation and cultural assimilation: sacrifice maintains balance. In this context, Bataille enables us to explore a differently conceptualized series of sacrificial crises in the current era. First, the loss of human balance is evident in Bataille’s (1988: 189) judgement that the cause of individual estrangement in modernity lies in the rupture from immanence and the loss of intimacy with the world brought about by objectifying nature. This sacrificial logic is exemplified by contemporary ecological views that contrast the disassociation of the sacred from nature in the Judeo-Christian tradition to the ‘primal’ sacred operating in harmony with nature (Szersynski, 2005). Second, the imbalance between traditional and modern societies is evident in the disruptive impact that globalization and rapid social change have exerted on traditional cultures; a disruption associated with an urge for violent sacrifice in the form of racism, xenophobia, anti-Westernism and recourse to religious and political fundamentalism (Žižek, 2008: 70). Third, the loss of balance between traditional religions and modernity resonates with the dilemmas faced by Eastern religions of ‘world adjustment’, explored by Weber (1964b), in confronting rational capitalism (Gelber, 2007; Lizhu. 2003), and raises questions regarding the future viability of sacred immanence.
Imbalances may provoke sacrificial crises for Bataille, but Girard (1987) identifies the sacrificial constitution of ‘balance’ as perpetuating such crises (albeit while regulating and temporarily dampening violent impulses). It is in this context that Girard (1987: 116) highlights the futility of religious and nationalist attempts to visit ‘greater and ever more destructive quantities of violence on an enemy’ in an attempt to ‘get even’. Far from disappearing in modernity, however, opportunities for sacrificial violence show no sign of abating, and threaten to overcome the Christian influences and associated judicial systems that sought to constrain them (Girard, 1995: 31; see Abufarha, 2009; Juergensmeyer, 2000). The removal of law from the sacred, which follows from Christianity, facilitates the emergence of modern legal systems that divorce punishment from the self-reinforcing cycles of violence central to scapegoating (Girard, 1995: 307, 31), but debates about a ‘clash of civilizations’ suggest there exists real threats to this, not because such clashes represent confrontations between clearly defined civilizational ‘blocs’, but because they exemplify the resurgence of divergent models of sacrifice that may escalate patterns of scapegoating, victimization and violence (Huntington, 1996; Jenkins, 1992; Juergensmeyer, 2000; Nazir-Ali, 2006).
Conclusion
This paper began by problematizing sociology’s use of ‘the sacred’. We suggested that neither its status as a ‘unit idea’ within the discipline, nor the contemporary relevance of classical analyses of the sacred, had been established satisfactorily. We also argued that its variable, evolving relationship with ‘religion’ had been explored insufficiently, and that marginalizing the processes that make things sacred limits our appreciation of how societies develop prized cultural priorities, of how they stimulate individuals to become certain types of social subjects, and of the risks and opportunities that arise in milieux characterized by shrinking or expanding prospects for creating sacred phenomena. We then suggested that developing a sociological account of the nature and function of sacrifice (the ways in which the sacred is made) could help overcome these problems, and pursued this by interrogating Bataille’s, Girard’s and Simmel’s theories of sacrifice. In conclusion, we make the following points.
First, while we have been concerned to highlight the positive utility of Bataille’s, Girard’s and Simmel’s analyses for understanding how the sacred is made, it is worthwhile noting that each is characterized by residual categories (facts or observations that cannot be explained by the main ‘positively defined categories’ of their approach [Parsons, 1968: 17]) and other difficulties. The methodological collectivism informing Bataille’s focus on the ‘useless’ expenditure of excess, for example, is a rather blunt tool for dealing with the contrasting forms and motivations that may actually steer the sacrifices of individuals. Similarly, Girard’s concentration on scapegoating imposes one particular model as the dominant maker of sacred things onto a phenomenon that may in actuality assume a far greater variety of disparate forms. In addition, Girard relies for the workings of scapegoating upon an assumption of collective cultural myopia and false consciousness in which individuals and groups are unable to appreciate the real reasons behind their actions. Finally, while Simmel’s methodological focus on individuals and interaction may address some of these blindspots, it reduces sacrifice to a matter of self-cultivation in which the personality strives to make itself sacred through the giving up of non-authentic avenues of action. Moreover, given that Bataille, Girard and Simmel all impart a certain foundationalism to sacrifice – as something that exists as an inherent potentiality of societies and/or individuals – studies interested in dissecting the historical emergence, generation and subjugation of sacrifice across specific social contexts need to look elsewhere to supplement their work. In the case of its subjugation by law, for example, Agamben (1998) has made the interesting suggestion that modernity is predicated increasingly on the category of ‘bare life’, wherein individuals may be killed yet, having been excluded from political conceptions of the good and proper life, cannot be sacrificed. If there are difficulties with these conceptions of sacrifice, however, this should not be allowed to obscure their strengths or the extent to which they can be employed productively within contemporary social analysis. The utility of Bataille’s, Girard’s and Simmel’s work is evident in the second and remaining points we make by way of conclusion to this paper.
Second, then, these thinkers follow Hubert and Mauss (1964) in equating sacrifice with a setting apart and giving up of something by which that something is made sacred, but also help us recognize that sacrifice not only consolidates groups and individuals (albeit, perhaps, in opposition to other collectivities and personalities), but also remains relevant to modernity as it ‘steers’ the development of social values and individual identities along contrasting ‘directional logics’ (Durkheim, 1973, 1995; Weber 1991a, 1991b). Each also stresses sacrifice’s foundational, enduring importance as a total social fact. This importance is re-emphasized by Mizruchi’s (1998: 23) argument that classical sociological assumptions about the centrality of sacrifice to social order were part of a broader cultural recognition of its significance in art, literature, politics and science: across these different areas, the ‘social’ was defined by ‘what is given up in order to reproduce it’. Such explicit recognition of the importance of sacrifice, by Durkheim and others, became marginalized in sociology, even if it retained a powerful, subterranean presence within Western culture and society (Mizruchi, 1998: 6, original emphasis). Bataille, Girard and Simmel return sacrifice to the centre of sociology’s analysis of social order, making the implicit explicit.
Third, their respective views of sacrifice highlight the complex, variable and dynamic forces underpinning how things are made sacred. Bataille and Girard focus initially on a collective ‘pagan’ model of sacrifice, centred on the expenditure of violent energies, and both see it as oppositional to, and in active conflict with, the individualized Christian sacrificial model that shaped Western modernity. Simmel’s account of sacrifice develops in the context of this Christian model, though he sees it as threatened by the instrumentalized values of contemporary capitalism. This polarization of ‘pagan’ and Christian models is oversimplistic (and Girard repeatedly notes Christian examples of sacrificial scapegoating that it is meant to repudiate), but suggests contemporary sociology needs to recognize the relationship between the sacred and religion as complex and evolving. Violent expenditure and individual renunciation are not incompatible; the latter can involve the former, but generally entail very different dynamics.
Fourth, and relatedly, a sufficiently nuanced sociological focus on sacrifice can illuminate significant trends and competing ‘directional logics’ in the contemporary era. Touching upon terrorism, religious and ethnic violence, ecological movements and the sacralization of self-realization and personal development set against the rationalism of modern Western culture, we have noted that divergent and often competing models of sacrifice underpin many of the conflicts and tensions facing societies today. The continued tendency for groups to shift blame for internal problems on to others, the dominance of a capitalist ideology that invalidates non-productive expenditures of excess, and the search by many for forms appropriate to the expression of life’s vitalism indicate the urgency of engaging sociologically with sacrifice in the twenty-first century. The various processes involved in sacrificial expenditure, scapegoating and the renunciations involved in self-cultivation entail different modes of value orientation for societies and the individuals who inhabit them. In short, Bataille, Girard and Simmel not only provide us with ample evidence that classical, and classically influenced, analyses of the sacred remain relevant to our understanding of contemporary society, but also provide important foundations for a sociology of sacrifice today, opening up new avenues of research wherein investigation of divergent ways of ‘making things sacred’ becomes a core issue for sociology.