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MaryMattingly/Watercrawler

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Sacrifice / Michael Sawyer

The late Chinua Achebe, in his magisterial work of fiction, ThingsFallApart, employs the opening of Yeats
Second Coming as the epigraph and as inspiration for the title to his most well known work of fiction.Yeats
writes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

To begin this examination, I intend to employ the ancient practice of falconry as metaphor for the Western minds
imagination of sovereignty and its relationship to the integrity of the state. The direct relationship to the sport and
the question of societal order is exemplified by the instructions presented in the 15th centurys BokeofSt.Albans
which documents a hierarchical relationship of political figures and the species of bird of prey commensurate with
their station: The list runs as follows:

Emperor The Eagle, Vulture and Merloun

King The Ger Falcon and the Tercel of the Ger Falcon
Prince The Falcon Gentle and the Tercel Gentle
Duke The Falcon of the Loch
Earl The Falcon Peregrine
Baron The Bustard1

This continues apace until it reaches the lower rungs of society with the lowly Knave or Servant who is ordered,
through this paradigm, to rely upon the services of the tiny Kestrel. What is implicit in this list and in the
marshaling of falconry as an analogy of good governance for both Yeats and Achebe is the notion that the falcon
serves the falconer. That the falconer, from the Emperor to the Knave is representative of the multi-layered
hierarchy of the state that need only locate the proper avian counterpart for the society to function properly. It is
the intention here to invert this understanding and imagine that it is the prince who owes a debt of sacrifice to the
raptor and follow the line of the analogy to imagine the bird as the people, and the prince (that the prince is
sovereign) as able to possess the services of the falcon. And, when the technologies of control of the sovereign over
nature fail, things, such as they are, fall apart, and the center (if we allow for the existence of something like a
center) no longer holds. I wish to question this notion and do it through thinking more expansively about the

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term Sacrifice and adding to the poetics of this metaphor by listening to the falcon whisper as she (the female of
the species being desired for hunting) flies away: It is I who will no longer sacrifice. Farewell, says the falcon to
the falconer. When this circumstance occurs, governance, as we understand it, fails, and the contract is broken.
Going one step further, the argument proposes that the notion of the vector of service understood as flowing from
the animal to its human counterpart needs to be reversed and that the debt of service that the state (human) owes
the subject (animal) is the abdication of the franchise of death and to allow the subject to participate in the project
of state by having the expectation of life.

This notion does not trouble the analogy employed here with falconry. J.A. Baker writes in his text ThePeregrine:
We should not sentimentalize his song and forget the killing that sustains it.2 The same goes here for the state.
We must understand that it is death that serves as the coercive framework that undergirds the structures of state
power, and to forgo that logic as it relates to the subject is the sacrifice I intend to ask of the state.

Prior to turning more directly to the term Sacrifice, I ask that we unpack the dynamic of the falcon and falconer
and guard against the natural inclination to understand it as analogous to the domestication of the dog or the
horse, where it is understood that the human is lord and the animal bonded to that figure and relationship. This is
not the case in the ancient practice of falconry, and to understand it as the exemplar of a system of governance as
well as to mark sacrifice in the theory and praxis of politics we must insure that we give an accurate account of the
art. The dog and the horse come to rely upon their human master and our love of these animals is fueled not just
by their utility but also by our own affection for their seemingly endless capacity to please us. We have all
witnessed the patient canine sitting in front of his bowl while its tail belies the almost uncontrollable exuberance
the animal has in the maintenance of the tether to its master for food. The dog, we are told, will never bite the hand
that feeds it. This rule does not apply to the falcon. It possesses no such need to wait on the Earth bound human
for its food and does not require the explosions and fury man requires to break the hold of gravity. Accepting this
we must insure that we understand the bond between falcon and falconer as, in substantial ways, an inversion of
that between the human and dog, or at least a flattening of the hierarchy. The falconer must rely upon the falcon to
eat. Following this reality to the Yeats/Achebe we are then required to think of the state as the falcon and the
human falconer, Emperor or knave, as the subject that relies upon the sacrifice of the wild animal for the center to
hold. Obviously, at the outset of the relationship, the falconer captures the falcon and calms it to the presence of
the human, and in spite of the tethers, leashes, bells, and hoods, ultimately the falcon must be set free and the
falconer is left to hope and waitrelying upon the quality of the relationship the human has formed with the wild
animal to insure that she will return when called. The return to the fist of the falconer is exemplar of the political
valence of this act that I am hoping to propose as a way to reimagine the role Sacrifice plays in the theory and
practice of the political.

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The conceit of western governance, of whatever form, places the people (analogized here to the falcon) at the beck
and call of the state (the falconer) in the way that a possible reading of Yeats poetics appears to lean upon the
transcendental authority of the sovereign to enthrall even the eagle as delineated in the hierarchy of raptor
possession in the BokeofSt.Alban.

This logic is exemplified in President Kennedys inaugural address of January 20th 1961 which re-established the
imperative of sacrifice as the principal ethical responsibility of the American citizen. And so, my fellow
Americans,ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. This is generally read
as a call on the part of Kennedy to fortify the battlements of the state against the necessary and sufficient condition
of the external enemy. I mean here to read Kennedys exhortation alongside the imperative of inside and outside
rendered real by the existence of latent violence on the part of the state exposed by Rousseaus SocialContract.
What is required is that we think carefully about the relationship of the law to the lawgiver and the existence of the
criminal as critical for this understanding. In Chapter 5 of TheSocialContract, The Right of Life and Death,
Rousseau takes up the case of the figure that transgresses the laws writing:

Moreover, since every wrongdoer attacks the societys law, he becomes by his deed a rebel and a traitor
to the country; by violating its law, he ceases to be a member of it, indeed, he makes war against it. And
in this case, the preservation of the state is incompatible with his preservation; one or the other must
perish; and when the guilty man is put to death, it is less as a citizen than as an enemy.3

What Rousseau develops here is the essential understanding that it is the existence of the Lawgiver as an external
force that is free from, not only the General Will, but the law itself, that societal order can begin to understand the
individual that transgresses the established order with a will that does not comport with that of the collective. This
chilling rebuke quoted from Rousseaus Chapter 5 and its relationship to the coercion that we have illuminated
here serves as the foundation of the contract. The individual who transgresses the law is, prior to that event, a
citizen and therefore subject to the duties and rights binary that attends that status. Understood as the criminal,
the internal subject becomes an enemy who is immediately forced outside and is subject to death. Thinking again
of the call to service by Kennedy, we find the speaker and audience complicit in the acceptance and practiced
resolute denial of the insidious presence of an internalized friend and enemy distinction illuminated by the
addressee of the newly inaugurated presidents order: my fellow Americans. To qualify an American as fellow
necessarily supposes that there are those within the sound of Kennedys voice and within the boundaries of the
nation who are also understood as Americans and citizens, conceived, it is said, in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal and yet are not his fellows.

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The argument here is that Sacrifice is an essential component of the theory and practice of governance. However, I
propose that by rethinking Sacrifice along with Yeats and Rousseau there is a way to reimagine the term and
encounter Kennedy in a different register. Without a reimagined concept of Sacrifice and its relationship to
governance, Kennedys inaugural exists in the imagination as an exhortation for the endless Sacrifice of the citizen
in the service of the state. This relationship of giving extracts from the citizen, in the form of Sacrifice, power of
various forms that provide the nation the means to secure its existence against enemies that assail its external
borders and its internal logics erected through the establishment of and compliance with the law. There is a way to
imagine that it is the state that must be prepared to Sacrifice of itself in the same manner that the falcon gives up
her freedom for the falconer.

The return here to think with Rousseau establishes the origins of this thinking as critical to the alteration of the
notion of Sacrifice. In service of moving this thinking forward there are three additional seminal thoughts that I
wish to place into conversation in order to facilitate deformation of prevailing readings of Kennedys exhortation
and ask what the nation must be willing to Sacrifice of itself for its subjects. This is in service of the inversion of the
normative understanding of Sacrifice that requires that it be from the lesser of the parties to the greater, thus
distinguishing it from a bribe or mere commerce. The prevailing understanding of the term that views sacrifice as
the duty of the citizen understands giving on the part of the state as indicative of a bribe for the allegiance of those
who are citizens in the sense that there is something in it for them. The argument presented here relies upon the
understanding that Sacrifice occupies so critical a role in the theory and practice of governance that rethinking it in
this manner necessarily undermines the possibility of understanding giving by the state as tantamount to a bribe
for artificial or conditional allegiance. Or, perhaps, more carefully, in order to avoid recreating the error in reading
the Kennedy-esque model of Sacrifice, we are asked to understand that each party, state and subject, must give of
itself with no expectation of cause and effect like reward. But as an essential component of this move, the friend
and enemy distinction must be exposed for what it is: an excuse for the howling savagery that has delivered at the
back-door of civilization an ever growing death toll: 1.4 million dead in the 7 Years War. Another 4 million in the
French War of Religion. 11.5 million in the 30 Years War. Napoleons wars account for 6 million. Somewhere
between 7 and 20 million accompany the conquest of Tamerlane in the 14th century. 40 million in WWI and 85.5
million in WWII. 4,000 or more in this countrys practice of the lynching of black bodies, and in the contemporary
moment, in spite of the refusal of police departments to report their violence, we guess that 1,029 have died at the
hands of the state and their officers in 2014 alone.

The point exposed by this macabre body count is that it is this notion of the legitimacy of this violence, internal
and external, that establishes the coherence of the project of state rendering moot the notion of a violent-less
societal ordering. Further, the smearing here of the violence between states and the violence of the state against its
internal enemies is purposive of exposing the coherence of Rousseaus imperative of the internal transgressor

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becoming an enemy of the state substantively the same as an invader from another nation. With respect to the
subject become criminal, disciplining our thinking to disallow an expansive reading of Rousseau but holding the
text to its clear language, we understand that the police violence that seems acute in the early moments of the 21st
century is in reality a link in the chain that weaves thorough all of these conflicts. The argument is that it is a
mistake to view the employment of the police against those who are always already understood to be transgressive
as ideologically distinct from the employment of the armed forces of a nation against enemies outside of its
borders. Both the internal and external Other are read, pace Rousseau, as enemies of the state and treated as
such.

Carl Schmitt, in his text TheConceptofthePolitical, proposes that without enemies to fight there is no sacrifice to
give and therefore the erasure of the political. Thinking in this way with Schmitt allows us to posit a useful
equivalency for purposes of analyses between events of violence separated by time, space, and context.

A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a
world without politics. It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting
antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would be no meaningful
antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other
human beings.4

My employment of this quote here has several purposes. Initially it serves to mark Schmitts assertion that is
descriptive of an ethos that the notion of a particular state as a distinct entity requires that the distinction of inside
and outside be maintained. In pressuring this assertion and its consequences we must leave intact the notion that
there need to be distinct national formations as the normative condition of the world order. Altering that terrain
(proposing the dismantling of the state qua the state rather than the workings of it) is another project and for this
thinking the modern nation state, as we have found it, along with the requisite distinctions that fuel the need for
conflict glossed by Schmitt, remain in place. My concern here is to focus on the inner workings of the state and the
presence of a robust friend/enemy distinction amongst the residents within a political boundary. I will propose a
genealogy of this internalized notion of Sacrifice that serves as a refusal to hear, in the terms of Yeats, the cries of
the falconer when internal subjects, residents of the political space of the state, become an enemy and are treated
accordingly. The subjects that concern me here call to the state and find their voices ignored. To be specific, I wish
to focus on Kennedys notion of the fellow American and demonstrate that the state, in this reimagined model of
Sacrifice, has to substantively do away with the internal friend-enemy distinction that is imbedded in the
mechanism of the governance and is hidden through a systematic philosophical slight of hand, exemplified by
another passage from the Schmitt which alleges that party politics represent a type of internal conflict that:

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has the effect of weakening the common identity vis--vis another state. If domestic conflicts among
political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political
tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not the foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive
for armed conflict. The ever-present possibility of conflict must always be kept in mind. If one wants to
speak of politics in the context of the primacy of internal politics, then this conflict no longer reflects
war between organized nations but civil war.5

This should give us pause over and above the discomfort of self-reflection and self-recognition that being frank
about the veracity of Schmitts claims regarding the venal nature of the state seems to require. The substance of my
argument is that Schmitt has obliquely illuminated race as the central problematic facing this nation state and the
normative regime of Sacrifice that requires an enemy for its object, and in so doing illustrates the inevitability of
civil war as the telos of an internalized Other that serves as the enemy. One need only focus on the first of the
claims in the quotation from Schmitt employed above that marks the effect of weakening common identity to
locate evidence of this phenomenon. What I mean to trace is the refusal by the state to accept the sacrifice (efforts
at belonging, i.e. abdication or forced destruction of cultural identity through assimilation or erasure, military
service, and/or meta-physical allegiance) of certain subjects as the necessary and sufficient condition for creating a
technology of exclusion that is unresolvable for the Othered, so long as the internal friend-enemy logic reaches
its apotheosis in this fashion. Stated differently, the Sacrifice that I am proposing is for the state to allow an
expanded notion of the fellow and in that Sacrifice of the notional security of homogenous identity accept the
offering of those willing to give of themselves in service of a newly imagined constitution of the state. As I have
stated, three important thinking moments bracket this theorization.

The first of these moments is made apparent by what Halbertal considers in his text usefully titled, OnSacrifice, to
be the originary presence of the phenomenon in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the rejection by God of the offering
of Cain. He writes by way of definition and warning that:

Sacrifice is thus a gift given within a hierarchical context in which the ordinary obligation to receive and
return is not valid. As such, a cycle of gift exchange is not necessarily established with the presentation
of the offering, and a dangerous gap between giving and receiving is opened up, creating a potential for
rejection and trauma.6

What must be understood here is that the Judeo-Christian tradition situates sacrifice as a gift of the lesser to the
greater subject (supplicant to God), an understanding that allows the state to request of its subjects without a need
for explicit reward for that giving. It is this moment of rejection and the trauma that encumbers the denier and
denied that lead me to a significant moment of the same in W.E.B. Du Bois TheSoulsofBlackFolk that serves as

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the second thinking moment where he establishes the conditions under which it became apparent to him that he,
in his body, represented a problem to societal order.

I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New
England . . . In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys and girls heads to buy
gorgeous visiting-cards ten cents a package and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a
tall newcomer, refused my card, refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned on me with a
certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing,
but shut out from their world by a vast veil.7

This moment, for Du Bois, establishes consciousness of his exclusion and difference as cause and effect. In the
repurposed language of Kennedy, Du Bois, in his body, is representative of those Americans who are somehow not
the presidents fellows and, in my reading, are a product of what I read as the logical trajectory of Schmitts notion
of what I deem to be a self-inflicted civil war that drew the lines of battle internal to the state by designating the
enemy within. The third of these moments, that logically and temporally situates itself between the denied
sacrifices of Cain and Du Bois, is Madison as Publius in his Federalist 54 of February 12, 1788, wherein he
pronounces a meta-physical death sentence for the subject in question and the ethical integrity of the state by
proclaiming that:

The Federal Constitution therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views
them in the mixt character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character. . .

Let the case of the slave be considered as it is in truth a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient
of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by
servitude below the level of free inhabitants, which regards the slave as divested of two fifths of the
man.8

These moments: Cains sacrifice read as gift, Du Bois rejected offering to a putative friend, and Madisons
dehumanization of a race, establish Sacrifice as an essential element of the modern nation state for which
Kennedy, at the moment of his assumption of the mantle of leadership of the greatest among equal of these
political formations, reifies the notion that there is nothing that the state possesses that its people can demand and
in this assertion there is only a need for the state to require more and part with less. For his part in requiring us to
think about the political as a concept, Carl Schmitt renders imperative the logic of this divisive series of moments
as the necessary and sufficient condition for the maintenance of the friend enemy distinction that fuels his
formulation.

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To be clear, what I am arguing is that the three moments I have presented Cains rejected sacrifice which
paradoxically witnesses the mortal giving as a gift something that the Divine already possesses and is then
rejected, Madisons propitious extraction of the fullness of humanity from the racialized other, and the experience
of the rejected offering by the young Du Bois allow for a superstructure of societal order that is buffeted and
defined from without by the existence of an Other but buttresses the walls that defend it from external forces by
wedging the bodies of an internal, preordained and established enemy against the various pressures that assail its
battlements. The oath taken by all who have offered themselves to the service of this state in the armed forces
marks the existence of these two dynamic forces that must be resolved and rendered static. The oath taker vows to
support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and
domestic.

Hannah Arendt, in her treatment of modern revolution in the context of its instantiation in the thinking of the
Committee of Public Safety that formed and practiced the terror notes the following of their radical reading of
Rousseaus account. Rousseau proposed that [o]nly in the presence of the enemy can such a thing as lanationune
etindivisible . . . come to pass.9 Saint-Just was of the opinion that politics, as he understood it, as the vehicle for
this national unity, was the unique province of international relations. All other human relations as such,
constitute, the social.10 Arendt reads this in the following fashion:

Rousseau himself, however, went one step further. He wished to discover a unifying principle within
the nation itself that would be valid for domestic politics as well. Thus, his problem was where to
detect a common enemy outside the range of foreign affairs, and his solution was that such an enemy
existed within the breast of each citizen, namely in his particular will and interest; the point of the
matter was that this hidden, particular enemy could rise to the rank of common enemy-unifying the
nation from within, if one only added up all particular wills and interests. The common enemy within
the nation is the sum total of the particular interests of all citizens.11

A complication should be marked here whose analysis would consume all of the space available but is rich for its
implications. To understand that Rousseau and Madison must be read together is to locate the meta-physical
existence of the Negro within the particular and collectivized desires of the citizens as deposited in the epidermis
of this radical other in the common-sense claim that there can only be a generalized will as counter-point to
individual desires. The demonizing of the omnipresence of the individual will requires that the enemy (the
individual will) framed as the Negro is a presence in all of us and must be alienated from the psyche and embodied
and physically coerced from robust participation in the societal order. What I mean here is that the creation of the
Negro calls into existence an empty cipher that is a vessel to be filled with the negative formations that exist in
the psyche of the western subject. This allows the individual will of the normative subject to be projected outward

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as the way of being of the stereotypical absolute Other that contributes nothing to societal order and is only
interested in taking that which it has not earned. The Negro in this understanding is an ideological space that
exists to satisfy the imperative Arendt locates in Rousseau for a common enemy that becomes the vessel for the
accumulation of the individual wills of the citizenry. The idea of the Negro allows the alienation of these individual
tendencies from the body of the subject, who is understood to be a welcome presence in the state, to another in
order to prevent the violence of the state from being turned against its fellows. The subject who happens to be
Black is only one such exemplar of the marginalized Other thrust into the space Rousseau requires, and which I am
interpreting as the Negro.

This account may indeed be satisfying in one sense (illuminating the praxis that attends Schmitts thinking
regarding identity) and may assist in explicating the particular brand of violence done to the subjects targeted by
Madison in Federalist 54 in that his assertion, in important ways, requires that we understand the
disenfranchisement of certain subjects from the possibility of resolving themselves as static participants in the
balancing of the duties and rights binary that I propose forms the basis of full citizenship. The citizen is here
understood as an essential element of the nation that grants rights to those who are also man. This is sufficient in
one register, but what of those interests that are not welcome in the calculation of the general will and, further,
what of sacrifice in this formulation? In the absence of the possibility of Sacrifice or duty to the state there is no
commensurate responsibility for rights broadly understood. Therefore, with the state standing in the place of God,
for the black bodies rendered partially human by Madisons quill, there is no basis for the granting of rights to
these subjects because their sacrifices are already understood to be rejected. To revisit Kennedys exhortation
without alteration one would have to conclude that there is no possibility of Sacrifice for the subject who is
included only in exclusion. Readers may detect the presence of Agambens homo sacer here, the subject that can be
killed but not sacrificed. My reading of Agamben understands the plight of the sacer to mirror that of the Negro in
that there is nothing that this subject can give that will be understood as freely offered to the benefit of the state
since there is nothing good that can come of that which is already understood to be profane. What I mean here is
that Madisons formulation of the already marginalized humanity of the black body in this political space renders
the offer and rejection in Du Bois a micro-cosmic rehearsal of state making through the negation of the humanity
of the Other who is rendered abject at the moment of the denial. Here, clearly, I am leaning upon the implication
of Rancires Ten Theses on Politics by putting pressure on the possibility of a figure excluded even from the
logic of the 2nd thesis which posits: What is specific to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its
participation in contraries. Politics is a paradoxical form of action.12 And the 5th: The people is a supplementary
existence that inscribes the count of the uncounted, or part of those who have no part that is, in the last instance,
the equality of speaking beings without which inequality is inconceivable.13

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In the reading of Rancire, it is the destruction of the king and the breaking of the logic of his two-bodies that
signals the democratic moment and I adopt that thinking here as one side of the binary of this important and co-
equal other duality. Quoting Thesis 5:

Contrary to this interpretation, it can be argued that the peoples two bodies are not a modern
consequence of the act of sacrificing the sovereign body, but instead a constitutive given of politics
itself. It is initially the people, and not the king, that has a double body. And this duality is nothing but
the supplement by which politics, itself, exists as a supplement to every social (ac)count and in
exception to every logic of domination.14

Du Bois, at the moment of the denial of his Sacrifice, is inscribed in the blueprint of this American democracy as
the personamixta that preserves, in its creation, the logic of the sovereign in its embodied absence. What I mean
to mark here is the absolute sovereignty exercised in the extraction of the fullness of humanity from an empirically
human subject through the utterance of Madison. It is the ability of Madison to establish a fully human subject
as a mixture between human and property (non-human) that banishes and excludes the black subject from the
human race as an exercise of absolute sovereignty. Creating those who are not counted among those who are
uncounted. Twice excluded from the logic of sovereignty in order to buttress the downside of the sovereign
assemblage. Revisiting the three moments that I have proposed exposes the terms and conditions of those not
counted, of those who are uncounted. Madison remains definitive here in that his formulation of the persona
mixta is only about the counting of bodies that are compelled to labor, not for himself, but for a master; in being
vendible by one master to another master; and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty and
chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another. . .15 are only countable in partiality and even in that, the
uncounted portion of this being proves itself insufficient to the franchise of representation. One must carefully
witness the evil genius of Madisons formulation: The black body is counted for purposes of the census for
establishing the numbers of members of the House of Representatives, but only partially so in that these same
bodies are also property and therefore not sufficiently human enough to be given the right of participation in the
governance they are counted to establish. Again, not counted among those who are uncounted. To be clear, I
endeavor to leave the formulation here of a theory of democracy that is predicated on the existence of an
uncounted and unvoiced demos who become legible in doing that which they are never intended to do: (produce
recognizable sound) in place but propose that there is even a second form of exclusion that is internal to the logic
of the friend and enemy distinction that forms the center that Achebe posits and is representative of the existence
of another vector of Sacrifice that recalls that of the state, analogized as the falcon, to the unheard citizen as the
falconer.

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It is insufficient to imagine that this thinking is an anachronism of the relativist morality that has been overcome
by the fighting of an actual civil war, the like of which Schmitts thinking explicates aposteriori. The Thirteenth
Amendment is insufficient to the task of supporting an argument against the durability of this thinking. The
presence of the except as clause to the abolition of the enslaved condition gallops again to simultaneously accept
and deny the abolition of the fracturing of human subjects to serve as the foundation of a project of state. It reads,
[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted shall exist. . . creating an ever growing class of human subjects that continue to be twice excluded
from the demos and find their cries, whispered and shouted disregarded. They are ignored by the state that circles
ever higher and flies away from those understood to already exist as the criminal and the enemy.

Here is where Du Bois found an irreconcilable duality:

One ever feels his two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder.16

A phenomenon that Ralph Ellison exposes as invisibility: I am an invisible man . . . I am invisible, understand,
simply because people refuse to see me. . .17 and in the contemporary moment, paraphrasing Ellison, we have
characterized as strangled and I propose, in the current moment would give voice to his existence with the
revelatory statement: I am a cant breathe man. This figure cries and cannot be heard. Ruminating about the
choking of Eric Garner by the agents of the state, Congressman Peter King of the state of New York waxed
eloquently on CNN:

The fact is if you cant breathe you cant talk. If youve ever seen anyone resisting arrest, Ive seen it, and
its been white guys, and theyre always saying, Youre breaking my arm, youre choking me, youre
doing this, police hear this all the time.18

The congressman remains unimpressed by the fact that talking or not, Eric Garner is dead. He was choked to death
and his cries were not heard. And the center, as Yeats exposes, cannot hold without it resulting in civil war. To
unpack this: the Sacrifice of the body of Gardner to the project of state making is exemplar of the tragic logic I have
traced from the denied Sacrifice of Cain through the denial of full humanity to the black body by Madison that
plagues the existence of Du Bois in the multi-layered existence of his body as American and Negro. To reverse this
logic would allow Gardner to breathe and have his existence recognized as mattering positively in that it matters
rather than mattering only in that it doesnt. The challenge then is to deploy Sacrifice in a different register and for
the state to give of itself to those it has sacrificed to its desire for what Schmitt characterizes as common identity
and deconstruct the internal labyrinth of domestic friends and enemies to facilitate the hearing and listening to the
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sounds of those who have been un-enumerated even among the uncounted. What I mean to propose here is that
Sacrifice, reimagined as the foundation for projects of radical democracy, is much about the rejection of the
internal friend/enemy distinction as a companion to the external distinction which separates one state from the
other. The argument being that the borders of the state must be allowed to exist but no longer find themselves
doubly locked to the inclusion of others by the fact that internal to the state there must be, following the logic of
Rousseau and Schmitt, an outside of the inside. The Sacrifice required here allows for the maintenance of unique
identity internal to the project of state that disallows itself to become a specter of impending doom to residents and
renders Schmitts common identity and Kennedys fellow Americans a more capacious formation.

Michael Sawyer earned a PhD in Africana Studies from Brown University in 2015 and holds a B.S.
in Political Science from the United States Naval Academy, a M.A. from the University of Chicagos
Committee on International Relations and a M.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown
University. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Race, Ethnicity, & Migration Studies at
Colorado College.

1. Philip Glasier, FalconryandHawking (London: Batsford, 2005), 19.

2. J.A. Baker, ThePeregrine (New York: New York Review Book Classics, 2004), 1.

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, TheSocialContract (Penguin Classics: 1968), 79.

4. Carl Schmitt, TheConceptofthePolitical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 35.

5. Carl Schmitt, TheConceptofthePolitical, 32.

6. Moshe Halbertal, OnSacrifice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 13.

7. W.E.B. Du Bois, TheSoulsofBlackFolk (New York: Norton, 1999), 10.

8. James Madison, TheFederalistPapers (New York: Bantam, 2003), 332-334.

9. Hannah Arendt, OnRevolution (New York: Penguin Classics, 1977), 67.

10. Hannah Arendt, OnRevolution, 67-68.

11. Hannah Arendt, OnRevolution, 68.

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12. Jacques Rancire, Dissensus (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 29.

13. Jacques Rancire, Dissensus 33.

14. Jacques Rancire, Dissensus 34.

15. James Madison, TheFederalistPapers (Dover: 2014) 332.

16. W.E.B. Du Bois, TheSoulsofBlackFolk, 10-11.

17. Ralph Ellison, InvisibleMan (Vintage International: 1995), 1.

18. Sam Levine, Peter King Says Eric Garer Would Not have Died From Chokehold Were He Not Obese, TheHuffingtonPost.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/03/peter-king-eric-garner_n_6265748.html

2012

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