Passages from Chapter 5. In Kahn, Paul W. (2008). Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

To read the complete chapter, click here.

“The sovereign is born in a sacrificial shedding of blood that marks the appearance of the sacred. One knows the popular sovereign is present not by counting numbers in the crowds but by witnessing acts of sacrifice. The power of the sovereign is that of taking possession of the body of the citizen, emptying it of any meaning that it may have previously represented, and claiming it entirely.

“That claim takes the twofold form of killing and being killed. Traditionally, the power of a god was displayed in its capacity to destroy. Sovereign violence perpetuates this elemental form of the sacred. Terrorist violence, no less than lawful forms of combat, is an insistence that others see the same presence of the sacred.

“At stake in war is neither the life and death of the individual nor the distribution of goods, but the existence of the sovereign as an imagined reality of transcendent value. This is not a state of being that can be objectively measured. The scale of an existential threat works entirely in the imagination, just as a threat to religious belief cannot be measured in actual numbers.

“When the killing and being killed of war begins, we see that instead of the state offering a means to the end of individual well-being, sovereignty shows itself as an end in itself. There is nothing liberal about war. Because liberalism is fundamentally a commitment to a politics of reason through law. To think that war arises from substantive disagreements that can be resolved through law is like thinking that religious disputes over the locus of the sacred can be resolved in court.