Killing and being killed is a demand that only the state can make on its members. It is the “sovereign prerogative” to demand a life. To act on that demand is to participate in sovereignty.

A sacrificial politics is not one in which I get something in return for offering up my life. Rather, sacrifice is a means of participating in the sacred. A sacrificial politics is one in which the violent destruction of the self is the realization of the transcendent character of the sovereign. The infinite value of the sovereign displaces the finite value of the individual. 

The sovereign is born in a sacrificial shedding of blood. One knows that the popular sovereign is present 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. This 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 is an insistence that others see the same presence of the sacred.

Torture and terror are violent forms of the production of truth: the truth of political sovereignty. The task of political philosophy is to understand the social imaginary within which this political violence not only makes sense but appears necessary. This social imaginary is one in which the polity is an expression of the will of the sovereign. The community rests on an erotic bond--not a judgment of reason. Citizen participation in the sovereign is realized through sacrifice.

The bearer of sovereignty in the West has moved from God to monarch to the people. The point is always the same. The sovereign is the source of meaning: it is not a means to any end apart from itself. It reveals itself in the act of sacrifice. Terror and torture are contemporary forms of killing and being killed--in the political/theological space of sovereignty.

The war on terror is a confrontation between two political/theological constructions of meaning, one of which is Western--but both operate on the same ground of sacrificial violence. Once politics enters the domain of sacred violence, conflict takes the form of each side seeking to prove the other an idolater--that is, a worshiper of false gods, which means a worshiper of nothing at all.

The body of the enemy must be read as a sacrifice for our god alone. In the classical tradition, defeat was the moment at which all the men were killed, the women and children sold into slavery, and the city razed. A people are literally destroyed to prove the emptiness of their faith. Today we call that practice genocide. 

The state goes to great effort to obtain the return of the war dead; it buries them under the flag. The sacred is not an idea but a presence. The tomb of the unknown soldier is not just a memorial; it must contain the body of the fallen soldier. The maimed veteran is a kind of living memorial that intrudes into our everyday life to remind us of the claim of the sovereign on the citizen's body.

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.

The Vietnam veteran is finally silenced when he is memorialized as himself a sacrificial patriot. He moves from victim/murderer to the citizen/soldier linked in the great chain of national martyrdom. He moves out of the street and back into the cabined space of the memorial—quite literally onto the Mall.

He is silenced by his own sainthood. The Vietnam veteran's accusation that the state is an instrument of torture and murder becomes a dim political memory that can no longer be spoken and of which we do not want to be reminded.