Sacrifice and Sovereignty

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511581069.004

4 - Sacrifice and Sovereignty

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2009

Mateo Taussig-Rubbo

Edited by

Austin Sarat and

Jennifer L. Culbert

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Austin Sarat: Affiliation:
Amherst College, Massachusetts
Jennifer L. Culbert: Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University

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Summary

They made the ultimate sacrifice and they are missed by their friends and families and their clients.

– The Red Zone (Web site for private military contractors)

Sacrifice seeks to establish a desired connection between two initially separate domains.

– Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind

In recent years, sacrifice is often discussed as the act that U.S. citizens have not been asked to perform. Although many of our highest officials declare that this is a time of war, the complete giving of the self – or its taking by the government – that had come to characterize total war of the twentieth century is absent. Sacrifice instead appears as a tactic that America's adversaries employ when they martyr themselves. Even so, sacrifice and sacralization are visible at sites like Ground Zero in New York and in the public reception of the deaths of U.S. soldiers in war, and we can still detect republican currents by which sacrifice and citizenship are mutually constitutive, however attenuated or partisan these links might seem.

One reason to focus on sacrifice is that it can be a register of the government's dependence on the citizenry. Especially in the context of war, in which citizens kill and are killed on behalf of the government, the logic and rhetoric of sacrifice can function as a form of accountability. It serves to ground a claim that a loss was of (or should have been) of great significance.

Type: Chapter
Information: States of Violence
War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die
, pp. 83 - 126

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511581069.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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