"Blood sacrifice is a primitive nation. We define as primitive those processes that construct the social from the body. Since every society constructs itself from the body of its members, every society is primitive. What is the distinction between our society and those that seem different enough to be labeled primitive? The crucial comparison is the relative prevalence of practices in which the body is immediately present and directly observed, and those of disembodied or textual practices in which the body is not only removed, but denied by active effacement."