Girard applies Durkheim’s axiom strictly (perhaps he is the first to do so), which he describes as “the greatest anthropological intuition of our time.”³⁰⁷ Indeed, the cloud of religion shrouds the social nexus in its crucial points: but for Girard it is as though the cloud had emerged from those points. Certain elementary factors—the irreversibility of time, death, hunger, desirability—therefore remain untouched by that violent interpenetration between the social and the religious. They are the ultimate things: Girard seeks only to transform them into products of the mimetic conflict that leads to the violence of the sacrifice. And yet, even in a society removed from the deception of sacrifice, these things would remain intact. Girard can use his hypothesis to explain the cyclical nature of time, but not its irreversibility; he can explain murder, but not death; he can explain the conflict of mimetic desires, but not the existence of desire. Let us then reverse the axiom, let us say: the social is the religious. Every point of the social nexus can then be traced to a single area of the cloud of religion, inhabited by powers with which the social nexus wanted in some way to deal: the art of compromise, of giving and taking, of sacrifice. Here again, as always, the question is whether or not to recognize those powers: Ockham’s razor has cut out every name from the place inhabited by thousands and thousands of Vedic gods. But though the gods and their names have gone, the cloud remains. The cloud is the unknown god.

What Descartes terms negligible is the sacred: that share which is accursed, abandoned, uncontrollable. A safe area has now been created where work can be carried on undisturbed: sacrificial practices have been replaced by laboratory conditions. But the significance of ritual conduct has been upended: sacrificial gestures sought to deal with the sacred, to handle it cautiously; laboratory procedures tend to expunge it. Artificial and sterile hands move about in the glass cabinet: they collect the stiff corpse of the animal, beneath the clinical light, and they take it to the garbage bin. If a laboratory explodes, the memory of sacrifice is revived. The accident in a nuclear power plant today is a pure ritual expectation: eyes are fixed on the moment when the contagion will once again spread.

Thanks to the sacrifice, an area was set aside outside the sacrificial circle, where it was possible to live, to work, without being struck down, destroyed: for harm and destruction occur only in the other area, in that sacred area closed off within the circle.

What used to be called magic is the small part of magic that is left as soon as the foundation of its action—sacrifice—has been removed from it.

Magic is resonant thought. Sacrifice presupposes this universal resonance. This is why the outcome of the sacrifice is always uncertain: it is a perpetual ordeal, where forces clash like sounds. And no one is able to mark out the extent of a power, since its ramifications are endless. No one knows where a power ends, in the same way that no one can follow all the harmonics of a sound.