Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Could its context be defined in advance, the conferral of a status analogous to that of the “first,” but detached from its normal serial meaning, would be no more mysterious than naming the trump suit in a card game. The difficulty is that this status cannot be defined a priori otherwise than by its difference (or différance )—whence the ambiguity that makes sacré the equivalent of “cursed” and sacrer of “to swear”—which originally referred in both languages to swearing a sacred oath. Rather than lament this situation, we should understand it as a demonstration of the sacred’s fundamental nature, less in a speculative ontology of “reality” or “the universe” than in defining human language and the human as such. This understanding requires as its preliminary step that we accept to consider the terms sacred and significant as synonyms: what is sacred is what is worthy of being designated by a sign. Let us bracket for the moment the “aborted gesture of appropriation” that provides the sign with its hypothetical worldly source. Then we will say that the attribution of a sign to an object/activity, in positing it as sacred/significant to the human community, endows it with an authoritative firstness that demands the deferral of the community’s current activities in order to direct their attention to it on a higher level, that of the sacred scene ontologically transcendent to the world.”

— Eric Gans, The Sacred/Significant · Saturday, January 1st, 2022 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment