The modern age is based on the shortsighted assumption that law and order are synonyms, that we talk about “law and order” as a high-sounding pleonasm that conjures deeper respect. Destruction gathers its force in darkness, concentrates itself, adjusts itself, in proportion to the law that would seek to deny it, and it does so for the very reason that it no longer has a recognized existence. The vaster and more diversified the law, the more devastating the destruction that eludes it. Every war breaks out to establish the order that law could never establish. The Marxist idea of revolution acknowledges this impotence of the law and at the same time it seizes the entire apparatus of sacrifice, exploiting it to establish an order that denies the foundation of sacrifice.

The impotence of the law stems from its incapacity to deal with surplus. Law presupposes a single undivided subject, sacrifice presupposes a dual subject: the sacrificer and the victim. And the surplus is the victim. Therefore, law is always the exoteric of the sacrifice.

Surplus value, the modern name for the accursed share, and the starting point for the Marxist attack on capital, becomes the object of a dispute that can only be resolved by revolutionary violence, once it is recognized that the law is unable to deal with surplus. Surplus value is the object of the sacrifice, which a new priestly sect wants to manage in a new way. But Marxist priests—like the haruspices of ancient Rome—agree with their enemies in denying that the dispute is about the object of the sacrifice. They talk about private and public ownership, about fair distribution of resources. They deny that surplus, before belonging to the oppressors and the oppressed, belongs to nature, the modern name for the Other.

Surplus is the excess of nature over culture, that part of nature that culture finds itself having to gamble with, consume, destroy, dedicate. In dealing with such excess, every culture defines its own physiognomy. Law tends toward monotony; its variations are scant in comparison with the sumptuous variety of forms. And the forms are the gamut of sacrificial games.

Sacrifice is inscribed in our physiology: any order—biological and social—is founded on an expulsion, on a quantity of burned-up energy, because order has to be smaller than the material that it orders. The only order without visible expulsion would be analogous to that of plant life: a culture that manages to subsist without founding itself on difference, and therefore without founding itself: a culture indistinguishable from the rustling of a tree.

Every sacrifice is the recognition of an Other. The West, after all its acts of emancipation, can recognize nothing other than itself. Its paralysis, hidden behind the mass of standard procedures, follows from no longer knowing to whom to give itself. The gods have fallen, but the hypostases have not: so the world ends up following that awkward, sinister march that Max Stirner had described: for Reason, for Liberty, for Humanity, for the Cause. But awakening from such hypostases is bitter, more so than from any other superstition.