Law presupposes itself. Law therefore aspires to the unattainable condition of having a single meaning. In the absence of such final clarity, the law asks—more modestly—not to be doubted too often. It is right, therefore, that the same word, law, should rule society and nature. It makes no difference if those rules relate to a divine commandment or a statistical frequency: they are rules all the same, to which the world, generally speaking, adheres. Those rules make it possible, almost always, to live together: the law, today, makes no claim to offer us more than that.

The isolation operated by knowledge on the given repeats society’s act of sampling nature, in order to establish itself: a transition from continuous to discrete, which is necessary to establish differences—and above all the difference from nature itself. The sacrificial offering is that surplus that has to be cut away, expelled, celebrated, burned: otherwise society would return to coincide with nature. That surplus is the disorder and the succession of murders, prior to the law, but it is also everything that exists before society, and secretly nourishes it—it is Varuṇa’s “hidden ocean,” without which social order would dry up and turn to dust.³⁰⁸

This question always arises: how to use the surplus part, that part which, when added to society, would produce nature—but a nature many times over, whether infernal or paradisiacal.

Sacrifice is also a lengthy stratagem for expelling the sacred. There was a moment when living without the sacred seemed like a perfect, light, desirable condition.

To become divine or to expel the sacred: this is the oscillation, the weft of sacrifice: communion, expulsion.

Our position of reversed divinity in relation to experiment: like the gods with sacrificial offerings, we inhale the smoke, allowing the bodies to be destroyed. Today, the smoke of the sacrifice has become numbers, experimental procedures.

There are two ways of substitution: by convention (murder); by correspondence (sacrifice) of substances. Correspondence kills the substituent; convention kills the substituted. Correspondence presupposes that the substituent continues to live in the substituted, insofar as both are fragments of the “resonant substance” from which the world is created, from which it is made—and their positions are reversible: anyone, at any time, can replace another as the victim of the sacrifice, since natural death does not exist: every death is a sacrifice.³⁰⁹

Convention cancels out the given, insofar as it transposes into signs those properties of the given (and those alone) that it wishes to represent. Birth of the formal system.

Sacrifice sometimes involves the killing of a single being; convention leaves apparently intact the given that it represents. But the killing is implicit in its rule: the moment will come when whole communities will be part of the discarded reality that has been killed off by convention.

Between the opaque tranquillity of the profane and the limpid calm of the divine, the intermediate zone is sacred. It is the zone of blood, of danger, a magnet for violence. When Diomedes hurls the javelin at Aphrodite, it is not blood that spurts from the wound above the wrist, but the mysterious íchor, lymph, a word of unknown etymology: the gods, says Homer, “do not eat bread, do not drink dark wine, / since they have no blood and are called immortal.”³¹⁰ Plutarch notes: “By this he means that food is not just a means of living, but of dying.”³¹¹ Food, blood, and death are bound together in the same circle.