Conclusion

Summary

We have proposed in these pages to consider sacrificial violence as a singularity – in other words, as an object that eludes analysis and that can only be approached through examining the set of relations that are tied up in it.

We have seen how violence, in its exemplary form of sacrifice and in its generalised form of the ‘great sacrifice’ of war, is intertwined with social organisation. The latter is born of sacrifice in the myth of the first sacrifice. Reciprocally, for the royal sacrifice, each group assumes the function proper to its class, as created by this mythical account of the first sacrifice. This circular movement expresses a tautological ideology that posits sacrifice as the essence of organised life and, in return, sacralises its sacrificial reordering.

Through the consecration of the violence it operates within, sacrifice presents itself as a model of legitimate violence. This violence is openly exhibited and may be denied as violence or else declared necessary. This does not mean, however, that sacrifice represents a lesser violence aimed at containing generalised violence. On the contrary, it is magnified and propagated during the buffalo sacrifice. Nor does its legitimacy make it a violence that is not perceived as such, at least by some categories of people in the assembly. In the royal ceremony, at the same time as the sacrifice directs violence outside of the group, in the execution of the animal alter and then in the war which follows it, it also exerts violence within it, through a whole range of procedures that we have encountered throughout this text, such as by exclusion, victimisation or threat targeted at specific categories of people within the group. Sacrificial violence thus takes on a dual manifestation within the group from which it emanates – at once unifying and divisive, inclusive and exclusive, it is exerted upon the community, carving out its partitions only to unfold outside of them. It thus expresses social violence and political violence in the same movement, each containing the idiom of the other at its heart, recalling the sacrifice in ancient India, in which each constituent part contained the whole. In this manner, both social structure and political activity inter-construct each other through violence, which is itself conditioned by the form that sacrifice gives it.