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254 Martha Reineke creatures of it, humans exist always in reference to lack. They labor along a mimetic continuum that, even in the absence of a lethal threat, is always perceived as potentially deadly. Although all humans engage in death-work, their labor is not always sacrificial. Sacrifice emerges under conditions of acute distress, when humans second-guess all their achievements in the cultural order. Words fade as those in the throes of crisis attempt ritually to reinvoke processes of differentiation that first won them a place in the world. This permutation of death-work is sacri- fice.30 Precipitating factors include intimate and familial relationships as well as economic, political, and social conflict.31 In the grip of crisis, subjects reenact the moments when they first summoned the most archaic markers of difference in their quest to separate themselves from their maternal origins and secure an independent existence. Cutting, killing, eating, they will summon from the flesh over which they linger the very powers of life and death. For the infant, “matricide” is a limited violence. When it summons its alimentary powers and the resources of its bowels and digestive tract to wrest difference from the maternal matrix, it does not truly threaten another. By contrast , under circumstances of crisis, the immoderate mimeticized violence of an older subject turns deadly. Drawing upon the internal logic of sacrifice to which they have been introduced in the course of subject formation, those who kill work the boundaries of language.32 They torture substance to make it signify; conversely, they somatize signs. They transgress at the very limits of mimesis in order to reestablish their standing in the world.33 Unchecked by social sanction, blind rage that escalates into murder is not fundamental to sacrifice. Not being on that count, therefore, an accident of human history, sacrifice evinces meaning in its origins. Sometimes, the victim is made to gradually give up its life, when it is stoned or burned. Or its body is subject to invasive magnification through torture and mutilation. But always, those who are fascinated by whatever is simultaneously deadly and life-giving in human flesh track closely the mimetic powers at work in sacrifice in order that they may capture sacrifice’s life-securing spoils. Women are preferentially victims of such acts because their bodies most readily recall the maternal body of our origins, at once the ultimate threat and the ultimate source of life. Even when the victim is not female, the body so invaded is made to evince maternal marks.34 In Sacrificed Lives, I explore figures of sacrifice in the Christian West that bear these marks: the mystic, the witch, and the mother portrayed in its cultural archives. Girard is as important to my effort as Kristeva. Because Kristeva attends most frequently to a landscape of violence that is intimate (as reported by her Sacrifice and Sexual Difference 255 clients in psychoanalysis) or aesthetic (revealed in literature or art), Kristeva’s readers may wonder whether “sacrifice” is only a literary trope or a cultural motif in her work. Therefore, I draw on Girard to secure the parameters of sacri- fice within society, even as I employ Kristeva to consider ways in which sacrifice turns on the somatic origins of human subjectivity in ways that preferentially summon maternally marked bodies. My theory of sacrificial violence, indebted to Kristeva and Girard, accounts not only for the sociohistorical factors precipitating gendered violence, on which most feminist theorists have focused their attention, but also for the formative aspects of human experience that establish pretexts for violence. From Girard and Kristeva, I take also the hopeful stance with which Sacri- ficed Lives concludes. Some readers of Girard find in his work the suggestion of a “good mimesis.” Glimpsed in Scriptures, a voice and truth of the scapegoat can break open the structure of victimization.35 So also do some readers of Kristeva observe her turn to Scripture in search of critical interventions in sacrifice. Paul’s notion of ecclesia suggests to Kristeva a “therapeutics of exile.” A heterogeneous group of merchants, sailors, sectarian Jews, and women sojourn with each other, retaining an otherness that is not made to mirror the same in order to throttle mimesis.36 For Kristeva, Paul’s vision of ecclesia intimates a space in which subjects can engage in the death-work that defines their labor as humans but also...

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