The Upaniṣads are insatiable in attributing sacrifice to everything—to breathing, eating, lovemaking, speech, gesture—since sacrifice is the only form in the veins of the body that responds to life, that follows it in its movements, whether involuntary or arbitrary, unceasingly. The form of the sacrifice is latent in the existence of the blood: it is life that is renewed, but for a certain time, an uninterrupted and short-lived construction. It is life, but it can never achieve the endless duration of the clear lymph that circulates in the gods. In the same way that blood is nourished every day by unknown victims, so life in general requires that murderous construction that is repeated every day in front of the sacrificial post.

A young girl with turgid, prominent lips sank into a peat bog in Schleswig-Holstein. There she was exhumed, whole. Her tight skin, like ancient leather, gave her a Hamitic look. Her shaved head lay in profile, her eyes covered by a blindfold, and between the index and middle finger of her right hand she held a birch stick. Thus she was left to drown in the marsh, around two thousand years ago. Was she blindfolded like Eros because love is higher than intellect?

Job and Arjuna have two fundamental questions for the divinity: the first is about being killed, the second about killing. The divine answer, in both cases, is overwhelming and evasive. In both cases it is not an explanation, but a mighty cosmic epiphany. There is no precise answer. They are two ultimate questions, which require an answer nothing less than the whole. The Leviathan, which “makes the deep water boil like a cauldron”; and Kṛṣṇa, “like a mass of fire darting flames on every side.”^{312, 313}

Sacrifice gives a canonical, repeatable form to a pair of gestures: giving and taking. All the meanings of those two actions, without which communication—and therefore society—does not exist, are contained in sacrifice. And what could exist without those simultaneous gestures? Survival—if it could consist only in taking. But here the primordial connection emerges: there can be no taking without giving, since it is promised that for every giving there will also be a taking. The distant that prevails over the proximate, and the mediated over the immediate, are the assumption of every culture. Those who take and do not give are destroying something that may never come back. Someone who kills the stag during a hunt will never see the stag reappear. Someone who harvests the fruits of the earth may never see them grow again. The first pact, the first giving and taking, is with nature, with the animal, with vegetation—and, behind these, with the powers they embody. That which offers itself to be taken by us demands to be given to that which has offered it to us: the acceptance of this nexus is the basis for the sacrificial life, the ceremonial approach to existence. The pathos of this act is the recognition that at the center of every giving and taking there is a killing. That which we take is killed or uprooted by us. That which we give cannot be any less. It would imply, therefore, that we, too, must kill ourselves. But this would interrupt the flow of exchanges. And this is where substitution—the vast sacrificial trick—emerges. Sacrificing something that stands for something else sets in motion the very machinery of language and of algebra, conquering digitality. The deception by which the creature with its throat slit on the altar can be a substitute and not the thing itself provokes an enormous growth in power, such that its extension will cancel out all consciousness of the need for sacrificial giving. Pure exchange, which provides a systematic basis for substitution, gradually eradicates uniqueness, which is a reminder of the primordial victim. The world, in the end, will be inhabited only by substitutes, therefore by victims who do not know they are victims, since the irreplaceable priest who raises the blade over them has no name and no form.