Concept · Imperative Mode

The Sacred

The minimal binding force that makes a sign a sign for everyone simultaneously

The sacred is among the most misused concepts in modern thought, which is why it needs to be recovered with precision. The sacred is not religion. It is not mystery. It is not the supernatural. It is the minimal binding force that makes a sign a sign — the constraint that ensures that when you point at the center, everyone on the scene orients toward the same thing.

On the originary scene, the first sign is sacred in the precise sense that it binds everyone simultaneously. The participants do not each independently decide to emit the sign; the sign emerges simultaneously from all of them, and it binds all of them to the same center, and that binding is not a social contract made between autonomous individuals — it is the constitutive event of sociality itself. The sacred is this binding, prior to any individuals who might be bound by it.

The minimal sacred. Katz identifies what he calls the "minimal sacred" — the sacred that inheres in ordinary language use, in the constraint of meaning that makes a word mean the same thing for speaker and hearer. This minimal sacred is too weak to support a god or a ritual order, but it is the condition of possibility for all communication. Without it, signs would be private — each speaker's sign meaning something different from each hearer's reception of it. The minimal sacred is what prevents that collapse.

Liturgical and secular sacrality. Katz distinguishes between liturgical sacrality (which confers generative power on God) and secular sacrality (which confers generative power on humans). This distinction is more useful than sacred/secular because it recognizes that modernity does not abolish the sacred — it relocates it. The rights of the individual, the will of the people, the dignity of the person — these are secular sacralities. They perform the same binding function as liturgical forms; they differ in what they name as the generative source.

Post-sacrificial sacrality. The Christian revelation — in Center Study's reading — is the revelation that the victim is innocent, that the scapegoat mechanism is a mechanism and not a cosmic necessity. This revelation evacuates the sacrificial sacred without abolishing the sacred as such. What remains is the obligation to defer violent centralization — a moral imperative that Katz describes as the only possible repayment of the debt to the center that revealed our own potential centrality.

The sacred and the center. The center is sacred — its binding force over the scene is the sacred's function. To occupy the center is to borrow the sacred's authority. This borrowing is always precarious: the occupied center can always be challenged by appeal to the signifying center — the sacred itself.