Term
Post-Sacrificial
used in 36 texts across the archive
“In a post-sacrificial order, there are no more exchanges with the gods, or even God: what God has given us is everything and incommensurable with any return; what each of us gives to God is also everything, all of us, even in the knowledge of its utter inadequacy.”
In use
“The post-sacrificial epoch would better (and more positively) be called the epoch of the absolute imperative, a concept I take from Philip Rieff.”
“Post-sacrificial civilization (accomplished via the Judaic, Biblical, and Christian revelations in the West and otherwise—via Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, etc., elsewhere) is the ongoing effort to bring that category into focus.”
“Post-sacrificial modes of being involve giving over our desires and resentments to the center in the knowledge we will have to sustain our attention towards the center so as to be worthy of when those desires and resentments come back transformed into imperatives from the center.”
Key texts