When Descartes speaks about the negligible, we know that this is the victim: the part cut away from order, condemned now not to exist, killed without being given. Simone Weil wrote: “… the notion of negligible marks the transition from finite to infinite.”²⁷⁶

The roar of applause covers the cries of the victim. When the celebrity or the politician is murdered for being “too famous,” the assassin is described as mad. But his madness reveals the origin of the applause.

The thorn of the sacrifice is the choice of the victim. The Vedic network of correspondences embraces everything and connects everything with everything: countless texts repeat that the officiant is the victim, just as the bricks of the altar are intense thought. But at the end of the ceremony, the officiant returns home, while the victim remains dead on the altar. That which is killed in the victim is irreplaceable, unique: that fading singularity that slips through the mesh of correspondences, that small wrinkle around the eyes of the Tollund Man, hanged thousands of years ago and preserved intact in the blue clay of Denmark. Iphigenia, offered as a sacrifice in Aulis (a fresco at Pompey shows her being dragged to the altar, her breasts exposed and arms raised heavenward, the knife of the sacrifice already visible above her), ends up as a priestess in Tauris: in the myth, the victim who has a name becomes wrapped by the divinity in a cloud of euphemism to heal the incurable wound. Here, too, the immense lucidity of the myth is apparent: the knowledge that no theology, no connexio can ever heal the killing. With those victims who become stars in the sky, or those whom the gods carry off to heaven or save at the last moment, myth gives way to fairy tale, as in its beginning and its end: once upon a time is followed, all of a sudden, by and they all lived happily ever after. When no god carries it up into his cloud, that single body is left slaughtered on the altar, unmentioned but implicit, and discernible in the crystalline air of exemplary gestures.

The theory of sacrifice makes all repeatable and reversible acts—breathing, lovemaking, music—revolve around two irreversible acts: eating and killing. These are the two acts in which the arrow of time inflicts a wound that never heals. Around that wound, the cosmic curtain now rises, the vast fabric that connects everything with everything, that repeats everything in everything. But its secret is that small rip at its center: the open wound in the victim, life with no palpable return. The perception of the irreversibility of time, which in the ancient world is the esoteric of the esoteric, the secret of the secret, the ultimate tremendum, becomes most obvious and widespread in the new world. Once again the world without gods turns out to be the world of compulsory esotericism.

Law and Order

It is significant that we talk about law and order—it’s not enough to say just “law” or just “order.” Indeed, order does not repeat, does not embody, the sense of law. Order is what law cannot achieve alone. Order is law plus sacrifice, the perpetual surplus, the perpetual extra that has to be destroyed for order to exist. The world cannot live with law alone: it requires an order that law, by itself, is incapable of giving. The world needs to destroy something to make order: and it must destroy it outside the law—in pleasure, in hatred, in indifference.