Document Type
Article
Abstract
Why does the figure of sacrifice remain central in the discourse of American national and military commemoration? This essay approaches this familiar question in two ways: first via some examples of American public discourse about the war in Iraq, and then by briefly contrasting the differing approaches to the question of sacrifice in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. I begin by bringing together a few disjecta membra from the Presidential campaign of 2008 in which both candidates briefly entertain the possibility that the lives of American soldiers might have been “wasted” in Iraq, only to correct themselves and insist that these lives had been, on the contrary, “sacrificed.” The discourse of American military commemoration, as I suggest with a series of further examples (including the dying words of Nathan Hale), is similarly marked by a strange economy of calculation and incalculability: the sacrifices of past and present wars are envisioned as, so to speak, mortgaging the future to an endless fatal debt. I conclude by considering Agamben’s attempt to think “the definitive elimination of the sacrificial mythologeme” through the paradoxical figure of homo sacer, the “sacred man” who can be killed but not sacrificed. For Derrida, by contrast, there could be no “beyond” of the sacrifice. However much this figure remains in service of a techno-military calculation, it also remains the site where one must think an incalculable negativity: death as absolute loss beyond all sacrificial recuperation (the very thing that, in Derrida’s reading of Bataille, always eludes the Hegelian project of absolute knowledge).
Repository Citation
Shershow, Scott C.. "The Time of Sacrifice: Derrida contra Agamben." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss2/4