There would be no nation until and unless the divine appeared. That appearance of the divine, however, would consume the very being of the profane, i.e., the son. A nation begins only with a sacred foundation.

This is the meaning of sacrifice—a making sacred through destruction of finite form. This is the paradox of the sacred: we must destroy to create, die to live. Our politics has followed this paradox from the beginning: We maintain the nation by sacrificing the sons.

Terrible as sacrifice may be, it is the point to which reference is made in understanding all that happens thereafter. This is true not only for individuals, but for entire societies.

The ages of American political life are marked by the violence that founds the meaning of this world: the Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War—and perhaps now the war on terror.

The imaginary construction of political sacrifice means that those who carry out these violent acts have to believe that the nation is at risk, and that they too are willing to sacrifice themselves.

Sacrifice is an act of transubstantiation by which a “mere” thing loses its finite character and becomes a site for the manifestation of the sacred. Thus, one participates in the sovereign not through consent but through self-sacrifice.

Without a willingness to suffer pain and even to give up one’s life, there is no participation in the sovereign. There can be a politics of rights, a politics of management of the economic order and of the body’s well-being, but there is nothing in this that rises beyond the horizon of the body’s own finite character.

The sovereign that moves citizens to acts of sacrifice is not of this world at all. Sovereignty signifies the sacred foundation of the community. The citizen understands that for sake of the sovereign he can be asked to suffer pain, and that under some circumstances the state can make an unanswerable demand upon his or her life— unanswerable because it is beyond the capacity of any proposition to comprehend. Argument ends, but the act remains. So it is with all faith in an ultimate meaning. Today, in the West, only politics can make that claim upon a life.

As long as it can do so, we are in the presence of a sovereign power. The willingness to sacrifice for the creation and maintenance of political meanings always appears inconceivable to those outside of the community. We find it incomprehensible that Palestinians would be willing to blow themselves up for the maintenance of a political identity. But the suicide bomber is not different in kind from the Israeli soldier. Both know that political identity is a matter of life and death.

Both sides in this conflict wonder at the capacity of the other to kill and be killed. Both sides try to apply a moral measure to the behavior of the other. In this, they each suffer from the same misunderstanding. Citizens sacrifice themselves and their children not because it is morally correct but because it is politically necessary. This a necessity, however, that can be measured only from within the political world of meaning.

The willingness to kill and be killed distinguishes the political as a distinct symbolic domain. The objects that call forth the reciprocal violence of sacrifice are as arbitrary as the objects in which the premoderns located the sacred. This does not mean we should be indifferent to differences among these objects, but only that there is no neutral position from within which to assess their political meanings.

Neutrality is no more possible here than it is with respect to sacred objects or practices. Political beliefs speak to a particular community; they do not offer a universal, normative measure. Friends and enemies speak the same language but the referents of their words are entirely different. In this sense, they speak right past one another.

The test of Abraham’s faith was belief in the paradox that in order to found a nation, he had to sacrifice his only legitimate son. There would be no nation until and unless the divine appeared. That appearance of the divine, however, would consume the very being of the profane, i.e., the son. The nation becomes possible not as a familial project of labor in either of its generative senses.

Political killing is always the reciprocal side of a willingness to be killed. Without that reciprocity, killing is just crime and personal pathology—of which there is no doubt plenty—passing for the political. Under conditions of belief in reciprocity, however, even repressive violence can appear as a form of sacred violence. For this reason, those involved will always try to resurrect the moment as foundational in their own lives and in the history of the nation.

For the sake of the deathless sovereign, politics creates a world of killing and being killed, of reciprocal acts of sacrifice. This is a world of ultimate meaning as compelling as those of any religious faith. But precisely because it is a violent world, the line between sacrifice and coercion can dissolve for the actor himself.

Practically, we see this in the institution of conscription: conscription is not exactly coercion—it is not the same as impressment in a foreign service—but it becomes increasingly coercive as faith in the transcendent meaning of the polity fails. The ultimate failure is when the conscript sees himself as just another victim of the state’s violence.

The victim knows that he may be brought to suffer terrible pain or death, that his body will be forced to bear a political meaning with which he does not agree and in which he has no faith. In politics, killing is always linked to the perception of a threat of being killed.

That means that every participant can appear to himself as a victim. Without faith in the sovereign, sacrifice becomes victimhood and injury becomes torture. The war-wounded veteran is likely to resist this reading of his own body. He will insist that the missing leg is a mark of his own participation in the sovereign. But that faith is vulnerable, and when it collapses he becomes in his own eyes, another victim.

The experience in the trenches of the First World War, for example, comes to appear to many as nothing other than a torturous mauling and destruction of bodies—a task well beyond the capacity of labor to justify or repair.

For the soldier who has lost faith in the sovereign character of a politics of sacrifice, war becomes a scene of horrendous torture: broken bodies, pain and death. Once a family loses this faith in the sovereign, it will only see the state conscripting and killing its loved ones. This is an entirely familiar phenomenon.

The sacred loses its power and we are left with the tortured body—a residue of politics when faith in the sovereign has disappeared. Wilfred Owen captures this residue of the dying body when he writes: “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?” Not sacrifice, but slaughter; not the transcendence of the merely human, but the evil of the loss of the human. To those who do not hear God, Abraham’s action must have looked like a bizarre torture of his son.

A secular age looks back at the wars of religion and sees in them a great evil: bodies were destroyed for “no real reason.” All the suffering and destruction to what end? Similarly, we look at the tortured destruction of witches and heretics as a kind of madness producing great evil. Once faith is gone, we are left with only tortured and maimed bodies. So we are beginning to see our own political past.

We do not see political martyrs, but senseless suffering. No longer understanding the sacred character of the political, we see only the tortured bodies of the victims. We can no longer distinguish clearly between friends and enemies among those broken bodies.

Do we not all die the same death? We see a field of arbitrary death and destruction that contributes nothing to the well-being that we would place at the heart of the contemporary political narrative. Our customs of war—humanitarian law—may harden us to some forms of destruction over others. But once we lose faith in the ultimate value of politics, there is no particular reason to prefer the killing of young men over others.

Or, I should say, this is what we might begin to see—or even hope to see—but still not quite yet. The politics of the sublime, of the sacred character of the nation, recedes but is not yet gone. The counternarrative persists. The popular sovereign remains a brooding presence capable of enthralling the nation. It remains a hungry god and we remain willing to feed it our children. We react in only half-forgotten ways to the attack of September 11.

We appeal again to the old language of sacrifice. We fail to see the tortured bodies of the victims of our actions as we pursue the Western politics of sacrifice, of killing and being killed, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. We see instead the self-sacrifice of our own citizens as they affirm in and through their own lives the ultimate meaning of the popular sovereign. We continue to distinguish friend from enemy.

Torture and sacrifice are reciprocal images of each other. More than that, they reside in the very same act. This ambiguity of man’s body—tortured and divine—is the imagery of the Cross. If we could always tell the difference between sacrifice and torture, then we would have no trouble distinguishing love from evil.

In politics, however, killing and being killed are so inextricably linked that we cannot tell them apart. Our own history of violence appears to us as a sacred history of sacrifice. It does not appear that way to others, who see only the destruction and pain, not the promise of the sacred.