For the Vedic seers, sacrifice coincided with the uninterrupted construction of the world. Its basis was desire, its purpose the fruit of desire. The actions were linked together in a cosmic game of giving and receiving. The crudely legal Roman concept of do ut des had its counterpart here in the dadāmi te, dehi me (“I give to you, you give to me”) pointed out by Mauss. But at that time the destiny of the whole of existence was placed at risk on every occasion, and not just the fortune of the individual. Precisely because the Vedic seers had thrown themselves into this boundless expansion of desire and its fruits, the later upaniṣadic speculation, sealed eventually in the Bhagavad Gītā, could reach the discovery that is the indelible mark of India: detachment, the metaphysical name for renouncing the fruit of sacrifice.

Sacrifice as action (sacra facere) is limited at first to the single act of the brahmin: eating the dangerous part of the victim, the “wounded part.” It is finally canceled out as a visible act by the renouncer, who refuses to have any contact with the killing. But from the renouncer, from the “individual-outside-the-world,” who is still obedient to the sacrificial approach, a path will be traced, through a series of circuitous routes, which Dumont has just begun to reconstruct, to the “individual-outside-the-world” of Christianity, and from him to the “individual-in-the-world” eventually outlined by Calvin, who contains “in himself, concealed in his inner constitution, an unperceived element of otherworldliness.”³⁴⁵ This paradoxical heir of the Vedic renouncer is none other than the modern Western individual who, having come back into the world, will end up using it in an unscrupulous and unprecedented way.

From the sacrifice, through the brahmin, to the renouncer. From the renouncer, through the individual, to technology. The process that had begun as an act of supreme affirmation of the world (and devotional empire over the world) in the doctrine of the Vedic seers, and had then been reduced to the analytic negation of the world (with the Buddha), is once again expanded, transforming the renouncer, the “individual-outside-the-world,” into the emancipated and enlightened “individual-in-the-world” and, through him, into the anonymous subject of technology, concerned with dominion, control, affirmation—of what, however, is unclear, since quanta have meanwhile dissolved the world beyond any possibility of localization.

The name of the new sacrifice will now be experiment. The sacrificial attitude continues to operate in it, but unrecognized and unaware: wherever it surfaces it is rightly dismissed as a remnant of the past.