Naming, Origins and the Necessary Self-Referentiality of Social Order

Only the origin of a social order can "justify" that order.

At the same time determining the "real" origin can be inconclusive and therefore divisive. Nor can we hold on to rituals that purport to go back to the origin.

The very fact that origins are disputable means we are in a post-sacrificial order. We don't and can't believe that if we give something to the gods they will give us back something in return.

But we are always recreating the post-sacrificial order because we are always deferring scapegoating (the consequence of sacrifice). So we don't need to identify the exact moment at which we became post-sacrificial--we can mark the origin of the post-sacrificial order in many events.

Everything that we commemorate (naming things, days, institutions) should commemorate the origin of the post-sacrificial. We then create a whole "social vocabulary" reminding us of how we came to be.

This makes it impossible to find some point outside of the social order from which it could criticized or condemned.

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Does that help?

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Yes, in fact I think every discipline has these unbridgeable oppositions or antinomies, and it's always some tension between system and temporality that can only be resolved through the originary hypothesis.