CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Aiming to make a contribution to the studies about the origins and the fundaments of the political community, this presentation will reflect on the problem of sacrifice and the sacred from a biopolitical and archaeological perspective. The sacrifice is understood as a dispositive that establishes a fundamental imbrication between the bare life and the political, juridical, and religious spheres. For a start, I will consider Émile Benvenistes "The Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions" (1969) so as to reconstruct the Indo-European juridical-political matrix. Then I will take into account Henri Hubert y Marcel Mauss´s "Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions" (1899) and Sigmund Freud´s "Totem and Taboo" (1912) and "Moses and Monotheism" (1939). They are reference writings for a philosophical, political, and anthropological interpretation of culture and constitute crucial turning points in the consideration of the sacrificial paradigm that shot through occidental culture. I will also ponder the way René Girard has continued this examination from the concept of mimetic violence and the propitiatory victims social function in "Violence and the Sacred" (1972). In the contemporary philosophical-political scenery Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have established a more or less explicit debate with the theoretical corpus mentioned above. Therefore I will compare the works of both authors from the books assembled under the denomination "Homo Sacer" in the case of Agamben, and the trilogy "Communitas," "Immunitas," and "Bios" in that of Esposito. Even if those two proposals have similarities, my purpose is to demonstrate that they are irreducible, a feature that has profound consequences in order to rethink the fundaments of a future political community.

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