Gift or Sacrifice? History, Politics, and Religion
John Milbank looks at the contexts in which ritual sacrifice occurs (sacral, tribal, theocratic, political, secular) to reconsider Girard’s idea that sacrifice aims at containing competitive aggression. Engaging the work of Marcel Gauchet, Philippe Descola, and Moshe Halbertal, Milbank argues agains...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2019
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| In: |
Mimesis and sacrifice
Year: 2019, Pages: 177-189 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Sacrifice (chess) (Religion)
B Girard, René 1923-2015 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | John Milbank looks at the contexts in which ritual sacrifice occurs (sacral, tribal, theocratic, political, secular) to reconsider Girard’s idea that sacrifice aims at containing competitive aggression. Engaging the work of Marcel Gauchet, Philippe Descola, and Moshe Halbertal, Milbank argues against the idea that the political is of necessity a move away from the archaic religious toward the ostensibly more civilized secular. He holds instead that a gift-giving reciprocity grounded in religion is not only the first form of human living but the prevailing one. Sacrifice, Milbank concludes, is not foundationally murderous and scapegoating but “retains . . . its primordial subordination to gift.” Indeed, Milbank holds, the move from tribal to monarchical forms of living “was not a shift to the political and secular but rather a mutation within a religious, gift-exchanging vision and practice. . . . In a sense, this renders not just the social but the economic more primary than the political in an ultimately divine oikonomia of distributive care adapted to the minutiae of circumstances and person. . . . The passage of gift through loss and death that characterizes sacrifice only serves to suggest an unlimited sway of gift and of gift-exchange.”—editor’s note... |
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| ISBN: | 9781350057449 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Mimesis and sacrifice
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5040/9781350057432.0018 |
