A sacrificial politics is not one in which I get something in return for offering up my life. Rather, sacrifice is a means of consecrating, of participating in the sacred. A sacrificial politics is one in which the violent destruction of the self is the realization of the transcendent character of the sovereign. The infinite value of the sovereign displaces the finite value of the individual. 

The sovereign is born in a sacrificial shedding of blood that marks a new appearance of the sacred. One knows that the popular sovereign is present not by counting the numbers in the crowds but by witnessing acts of sacrifice.

The power of the sovereign is that of taking possession of the body of the citizen, emptying it of any meaning that it may have previously represented, and claiming it entirely. That claim takes the twofold form of killing and being killed.

Traditionally, the power of a god was displayed in its capacity to destroy. Sovereign violence perpetuates this elemental form of the sacred. Terrorist violence, no less than lawful forms of combat, is an insistence that others see the same presence of the sacred.

Sovereign and sacrifice form a linked pair: sacrifice is the transformation of the finite self into an expression of the infinite value of the sovereign, and sovereignty comes into existence only through the sacrificial destruction of the finite body.

The subject, or bearer, of sovereignty in the West has moved from God to monarch to the people. The point, however, is always the same. The sovereign is the source of meaning: it is not a means to any end apart from itself. It reveals itself in the act of sacrifice. Terror and torture are contemporary forms of killing and being killed in the political-theological space of sovereignty.

The war on terror is a confrontation between two political-theological constructions of meaning, only one of which is Western but both of which operate on the same ground of sacrificial violence. Once politics enters the domain of sacred violence, conflict takes the form of each side seeking to prove the other an idolater--that is, a worshiper of false gods, which means a worshiper of nothing at all.

The body of the enemy must be read as a sacrifice for our god alone. In the classical tradition, defeat was the moment at which all the men were killed, the women and children sold into slavery, and the city razed. A people are literally destroyed to prove the emptiness of their faith. Today we call that practice genocide.

The sacred erupts into political life in the same way that the sacred appears elsewhere--as if from nowhere. It cannot be explained as the consequence of a chain of causation that is either temporal or spatial.” It is just the other way around: the sacred creates the borders of time and space. There is no polity without a homeland and no homeland without a founding narrative.

This space is sanctified by the appearance of the sacred, which is preserved in memory by the national narrative. Political space, like national history, is created through the willingness to sacrifice. It reaches just as far as it has been or will be defended as a matter of life and death.

The Vietnam veteran is finally silenced when he is memorialized as himself a sacrificial patriot. He moves from victim/murderer to the citizen/soldier linked in the great chain of national martyrdom. He moves out of the street and back into the cabined space of the memorial—quite literally onto the Mall.

He is silenced by his own sainthood. The Vietnam veteran's accusation that the state is an instrument of torture and murder becomes a dim political memory that can no longer be spoken and of which we do not want to be reminded--as John Kerry discovered when he threatened once again to disrupt the narrative of citizen sacrifice with the cry of victimization.

All citizen-soldiers know a deeply disturbing truth: that in the face of death there is a certain homogeneity of fear, that all men can feel abandoned by their god-religious or political-on the battlefield. One does not need to be a combatant to know this to be true. Only with the structured performance of memorialization does death turn securely to sacrifice and fear to faith. These are meanings, after all, that must be secured for the survivors.

Warfare can be sustained only as long as there is a perception of an enemy. Without that perception, killing will be seen as murder and injury will not be seen as sacrifice. However, once there is a reciprocal perception of an enemy, once sovereign existence and the presence of the sacred is at stake, wars are won by eliminating the conditions under which sacrifice will continue.

This means to destroy the faith in the alien sovereign. That act of destruction is exactly the experience of degradation. This is what combatants do. Without achieving this end, the destruction of war is no more meaningful than that of a natural disaster. It is only injury to be repaired as quickly as possible.