*Article* **A Maximal Understanding of Sacrifice: Bataille, Richard Wagner, Pilgrimage and the Bayreuth Festival**

**Philip Smith 1,\* and Florian Stoll 2,\***


**Abstract:** This paper calls for a broad conception of sacrifice to be developed as a resource for cultural sociology. It argues the term was framed too narrowly in the classical work of Hubert and Mauss. The later approach of Bataille permits a maximal understanding of sacrifice as non-utilitarian expenditures of money, energy, passion and effort directed towards the experience of transcendence. From this perspective, pilgrimage can be understood as a specific modality of sacrificial activity. This paper applies this understanding of sacrifice and pilgrimage to the annual Bayreuth "Wagner" Festival in Germany. Drawing on a multi-year mixed-methods study involving ethnography, semistructured interviews and historical research, the article traces sacrificial expenditures at the level of individual festival attendees. These include financial costs, arduous travel, dedicated research of the artworks, and disciplines of the body. Some are lucky enough to experience transcendence in the form of deep emotional experience, and a sense of contact with sacred spaces and forces. Our study is intended as an exemplary paradigm case that can be drawn upon analogically by scholars. We suggest that other aspects of social experience, including many that are more 'everyday', can be understood through a maximal model of sacrifice and that a rigorous, wider comparative sociology could be developed using this tool.

**Keywords:** sacrifice; pilgrimage; sacred; festivals; Wagner; Bayreuth; Durkheim; opera

Narrowly understood sacrifice conjures the image of priests, shamans, altars, dead animals and burnt offerings—in short religious contexts and certain forms of institutionalized ritual. However, in this paper, we argue that a fluid and 'maximal' understanding of sacrifice is more useful for social science. Sacrifice can be understood as those irrational, evanescent expenditures—of money, time, energy, goods, concern, passion, attention, discipline—in life that generate the experience of a more meaningful personal and collective existence, and, at the limit, an encounter with the sacred. Of course, the experiences and their attendant sacrifices will be of varying intensity and take diverse forms in particular lifeworlds, settings and social contexts. These require specification, and such is the task for the sociologist seeking to make the general model tractable as a way of seeing. We illustrate all this with reference to the composer Richard Wagner's Bayreuth Festival, a major cultural event that takes place every summer in Germany. We demonstrate that a maximal theory of sacrifice helps us understand this particular gathering, along with its participant motivations, experiences and patterns of action. We also show that it belongs to the specific sacrifice modality of 'pilgrimage'. This has its own dynamics and needs to be understood from within as a form of life. To make sense of our approach and what it contributes, we need first to detour into the history of cultural theory.

Within the Durkheimian tradition, the canonical resource for understanding sacrifice is the one-hundred-and-nine-page essay by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, first published in the *Année Sociologique* in 1899. It had taken several months to write—longer than expected despite the persistent urgings and micro-management of Émile Durkheim himself. Under the auspices of E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the item was eventually translated into English as

**Citation:** Smith, Philip, and Florian Stoll. 2021. A Maximal Understanding of Sacrifice: Bataille, Richard Wagner, Pilgrimage and the Bayreuth Festival. *Religions* 12: 48. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010048

Received: 20 December 2020 Accepted: 7 January 2021 Published: 11 January 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

many as six decades later and published as a small book (Hubert and Mauss 1964). The venture was driven more by intellectual devotion than by popular demand in the academic community. The Foreword by Evans-Pritchard notes and accounts for neglect: "If little reference to this Essay has been made in recent decades it is perhaps due to a lack of interest among sociologists and anthropologists in religion and therefore its most fundamental rite" (Evans-Pritchard 1964, p. viii).

Does this statement hold true today? In one way, no. Since the late-1980s, cultural sociology, to take just one intellectual field, has drawn heavily on the *Elementary Forms of Religious Life* (Durkheim 1995) to develop a comprehensive understanding not so much of religion but rather of the wider 'religious' dimensions of society (Smith 2020). According to the Strong Program, for example, the world is classified into the sacred and profane (Alexander and Smith 2010); and for Collins (2004), social structure consists of nested and contending interaction rituals that generate totemic power. But if the religious/ritual quality of social life has moved center stage, it is not clear that Hubert and Mauss's essay has garnered that much interest as a consequence. At the time of writing, there are a little over 2000 citations listed on Google Scholar for all versions of this 'classic' and, following through, we find that many of those are in the history of theory mode. The short book is often noted but less frequently used. Why so?

At the heart of the limited appeal is the narrow understanding in *Essai sur la Nature et la Fonction du Sacrifice*. 'Sacrifice' here is not a particularly useful, supple or general concept. For all their pioneering brilliance, Hubert and Mauss were still attempting to intervene in the anthropological debates of the late-Victorian era that had been set in motion by Tylor and Frazer, and above all Robertson Smith. In his *Religion of the Semites*, Robertson Smith (2002) argued that the origins of sacrifice lay in totemism, and notably the collective meal during which the tribe generated a sense of common identity through consumption of the totemic animal. With the emergence of agriculture, the domestication of animals and increases in social complexity, the feast had been replaced with an expiatory sacrifice that was mediated, symbolic or tokenistic in form and guided by priestly specialists. True enough, Hubert and Mauss fault Robertson Smith's method and his speculative efforts at a reconstruction of the evolution of a complex social and cultural institution. And to their credit, in its place, they offer a more universal or structural vision of the necessary and functional elements of a sacrificial system. Yet as they trawl through examples from Vedic, Christian, Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations in a virtuoso display of ethnological encyclopedism, the image remains one of priests and religious devotees killing and destroying upon altars in order to placate Gods or bring about desired social ends. Given the diversity of uses to which the word 'sacrifice' is applied in everyday life, and the later evolution of Durkheimian theory itself, this is a curiously literal/liturgical understanding that does not provide the concept with room to breathe.

Nearly three decades on from his collaboration with Hubert, Marcel Mauss was a more ambitious and fluid thinker. In his celebrated essay on *The Gift* from 1925, he mapped out a landscape of generalized symbolic flows and non-accumulative exchanges as pivotal to the moral economy of primitive society (Mauss 1954). Whereas modern capitalism was marked in his view by utilitarian calculation, commodities, and profit seeking, these gift economies involved generosity, reciprocity, and the sharing and destruction of surplus goods. Pivotal to Mauss arriving at this point of insight was an impactful reading of the work of Bronislaw Malinowski. In his masterwork *Argonauts of the Western Pacific*, first published three years before *The Gift* in 1922, Malinowski (1932) offered a vivid description and analysis of the *kula* ring. This saw venerated ceremonial objects, such as shell jewelry, circulate around remote islands in a process that involved risky open canoe voyages over hundreds of kilometers, followed by elaborate ceremonies of welcome and exchange. The recipients of the artefacts were obligated to pass them on. They could not hoard, nor sell the valuable items for profit. Argonauts emphasized that *kula* exchange was clearly differentiated from the market exchange in the Trobriand Islands that was known as *gimwali*. This involved more conventional understandings of pricing, fungibility and commensurability. Although *kula* exchange appeared irrational in terms of any risk/energy/reward calculus Malinowski, in his trademark effort to foreground primitive rationality, stressed the benefits to the individual of being a central player in *kula* exchange networks. In receiving and giving away goods, they gained social visibility and prestige. Mauss, ever the Durkheimian, differed in seeing *kula* exchange as an act that was more about collectivities than the desires of individuals and the politics of village life. It tied entire societies together, prevented war and was about solidarity and shared ritual experience.

So Mauss perceived a deep, binding sociality arising from the movement of sacred items around the *kula* ring of Melanesia and drew parallels with another constitutive social fact that had seized the attention of ethnologists—the wholesale destruction of trade goods in the potlatch of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Yet he never quite connected his thinking in *The Gift* to his earlier work with Hubert via an adequate discussion of how sacrifice could be seen as imminent to such aspects of ritualized, solidaristic economicsocial activity. Symptomatic of this was the fact that whereas gift exchange was broadly understood as moral and communicative, potlatch was viewed with a hint of suspicion as a competitive activity—ironically a reading not unlike that which Malinowski had made of the *kula* ring. There was a certain asymmetry to the evaluation that prevented Mauss from seeing positive dimensions to destruction/consumption/waste as well as exchange and sharing. Furthermore, Mauss had folded in a critique of modernity into his description of the gift economy. His normatively loaded examples suggested that it mostly belonged in the simple and wise societies of the past. Mauss had painted himself into the ethnologist's corner. How, then, could the lessons from *The Gift* be deployed to understand modernity?

It was to be the maverick Durkheimian Bataille (1985, 1988) who joined the dots in the two decades following the publication of Mauss's essay. He did so in three important ways. First, he explicitly connected Mauss's work on primitive economics to the theme of sacrifice, suggesting that all operations of consumption have a sacrificial logic. They are the forms of destruction and expenditure that curiously enough hold society together. Secondly, he insisted that modern society also had the primitive economic operations Mauss had identified and that sacred forces were behind these. Whereas Mauss had ghosted in a critique of modernity, Bataille thought that we were not particularly modern. Thirdly, Bataille offers a more general resource and set of examples that drag the study of 'sacrifice' away from its theological origins and so expand the concept's explanatory reach to explain a raft of activities and passions. The consequence? Bataille was able to consider a large proportion of the modern political economy to be founded on logics of sacrifice.

Drawing on Mauss on gift economies, Durkheim (1995) on the ambivalence of the sacred and Hertz (1960) on the bilateral symbolism of left and right, as well as upon surrealism, Freud and a general distrust of Western civilization, Bataille developed a complex and somewhat cosmological vision of cultural life. Energy pours into the planet from the sun. This surplus energy leads to the production of life forms. Human cultures feed off these, developing complex symbolic systems and patterns of association. Cosmological balance can only be restored when that surplus is destroyed. In Bataille's vision, the core of sociality lay in these irrational expenditures of a sacrificial nature that enabled a flow and translation of energies. But he did not see 'sacrifice' in the narrow way of Robertson Smith, or Hubert and Mauss. Rather, Bataille opens up a landscape that includes acts of violence, eroticism and desire, individual efforts towards the experience of sacred terror, the love of luxury, and the sybaritic pleasures of indulgence and decadence. All these were essentially non-utilitarian, ceremonial activities that fruitfully disposed of surplus capital and energy rather than engaging in rational, profane accumulation. Through these expenditures, social life was valorized, completed and made whole. It is no accident that in his masterwork of the 1940s *The Accursed Share*, Bataille (1988) speaks admiringly and at length of Aztek human sacrifice as a paradigm case. He sees in the complicity of the victims and the extraordinary ceremonial courtesies extended towards them a refined and knowing gesture. The Aztecs, as he saw them, had a deep civilizational awareness of the productive and energizing forces attending to destructive expenditures of human life.

It is too bad that Bataille's message has never quite stuck, at least in sociology (Smith 2020). He writes in a style that is too literary and elusive, too far from positivism and too full of manifesto-like calls for anarchy. Sociologists in the academy have never quite known what to do with him. Yet the core themes have filtered through to some of the most significant social theory of our time (Riley 2013). Hence, Foucault has written on experiences of the extreme, Baudrillard on consumption rather than production as pivotal to modern capitalism, and Kristeva on the strange attractions of abjection and horror. Perhaps the most influential item attempting to use Bataille in a more conventional mode is Miller's (1998) much cited *Theory of Shopping*. Based on an ethnography of a north London high street, Miller sees shopping not as a practical activity aimed at provisioning the household but as a series of irrational expenditures that bind society together. It is a vehicle for expressing love, pampering the self, generating ritual solidarity and celebrating social life through a privileging of non-utilitarian, reckless choices that often go against our own better judgement. This is done as much by buying a new shade of lipstick as a pound of potatoes. With the sacrifice of money for that which is not really needed, with the treat, gift, or upsell come emotional and spiritual rewards that affirm and build human relationships.

But shopping is just one domain where the sacrifice/expenditure model holds. Consider the following grist for Bataille's all-purpose mill: Formula One motorsport; high fashion and fast fashion; New Year firework displays; Roller Derby; the bullfight; boxing; hobbies that soak up discretionary income; risky sex with strangers; gift giving in the family; getting drunk on Friday night; women's overpriced haircuts and hair styling; super yachts or the much smaller boat that stretches the family budget; the circus; carnival; meticulously white sneakers in poor neighborhoods; funerals; Las Vegas; collecting garden gnomes. As the saying goes, the possibilities are endless. And note that each of these domains of irrational expenditure and theaters of excess has its own rules of the game, its own emotional rewards, subject positions, performative scripts and cultural codes. So the general vision of sacrifice needs to be specified through detailed sociological inquiry into defined spheres of activity in particular lifeworlds. Bataille's model points to a general direction of intellectual travel, but it is just too imprecise to do the detailed explanatory mapping of empirical sociology. Rather, we need blueprints for the geometries of specific irrational expenditures. To illustrate the point, our paper applies the general thematic of sacrifice and expenditure to the specificities of Wagner fans at the Bayreuth Festival. It considers the search for aesthetic pleasure and the role of travel. In so doing, we make use of a developed intermediary resource in the cultural sociological toolbox—the concept of pilgrimage. This brings the gloss of 'sacrifice' down to earth in a middle range way. Now to our second detour into theory.

#### **1. Pilgrimage**

Within the Durkheimian tradition, the classical resource for understanding pilgrimage is far less well known than the Hubert and Mauss essay on sacrifice. Indeed, less than thirty years ago, Macclancy (1994, p. 32) noted in a review essay that he could find only one reference to it in the English literature and that it seemed unknown even to most pilgrimage specialists. The first English translation was not until the 1980s and even then it was not easy to find, buried he tells us in an edited collection. The item in question *Saint Besse: Etude d'un culte alpestre* dealt with pilgrimage to a shrine high in the Alps and was written by Durkheim's talented student Hertz (1913). Published in 1913, it tells how pilgrims came from two different Italian valleys to the shrine carrying a heavy statue, how there was an auction to raise funds, and how pilgrims chipped at rocks so as to have a relic to take home. Hertz recounts competition between cults from the two valleys and their divergent mythologies surrounding the Saint. The approach is somewhat ethnological, 'fact collecting' and theory light. In contrast to Hertz's work on classification and death, the wider lessons have to be extracted by readers. Namely, that in retrospect this is a pioneering study of the politics of ritual and contested collective memory.

It was, of course, Turner (1969, 1973) who much later put pilgrimage firmly on the map for cultural anthropology, sociology and to some extent also religious studies. He saw it as an institutionalized form of liminality. In the course of their journey away from routine social life with its hierarchies and fixed identities, pilgrims would experience an openness to the sacred, the deep solidarity known as 'communitas', and, with this, transformations of the self. Perhaps seeing Durkheim as a functionalist, Turner never recognized that many of his insights were prefigured in Durkheim's (1995) *Elementary Forms of Religious Life* but the parallels are clear (Smith 2020, p. 183). Importantly, while Hertz opens up the study of pilgrimage to themes of power, Turner comes closer to a more Geertzian understanding of the activity as expressive and meaningful. It exists precisely because it offers symbolic, social and emotional rewards. Like 'sacrifice', however, 'pilgrimage' was been hamstrung over the years by narrow applications to religious contexts—such as travel to Jerusalem, Mecca and saintly shrines in Spain, Latin America or India. It is through wider literatures such as tourism studies that we first started to see a broader range of activities through this lens. Australian backpackers travelling to the battlefields of Gallipoli in Turkey, for example, are encountering sacred national myths in a very personal, emotive and embodied way (West 2008). Their extended vacation is reasonably viewed as a pilgrimage, or at least of having pilgrimage-like properties during some phases of activity.

Finally, we arrive at the point in this paper where the concepts of 'pilgrimage' and 'sacrifice' can be united. Putting Turner into dialogue with Bataille, we see pilgrimage as a particular lifeworld form of non-rational, 'pointless' expenditure in pursuit of the sacred. Rather than engaging in productive labor and the accumulation of material goods, the pilgrim expends effort and capital as they enter a form of special time to engage in long distance travel, overcome trials and enter into contemplative activity that has no utilitarian purpose. Energy, physical and mental, is discharged freely in celebrating the sacred, deepening the self and generating existentially profound experiences. It is a sacrificial action of a serious kind. Notably pilgrimage requires effort, discipline, asceticism, abstinence and deferred gratification. Many of Bataille's favored illustrations of sacrificial logics involve easy pleasures—alcohol, orgies, luxury goods and bohemian decadence. Pilgrimage alerts us to the ways in which irrational expenditures can take a contrary form while being equally transient, non-utilitarian and non-accumulative. Suffering is a form of sacrifice.

#### **2. Wagner, Bayreuth and Pilgrimage**

This brings us to the 19th-century composer Richard Wagner and his deeply serious vision of art. Although increasingly indifferent to organized religion and an admirer of the atheist philosopher Schopenhauer, Wagner (1994) nonetheless had a spiritual understanding of social life. He saw art replacing religion as a provider of mythological and spiritual truths and as a source of solace. He also believed in the power of myth, the study of which could provide profound knowledge regarding the centrality of compassion, redemption, suffering, love and sin in meaningful human experience. His own artworks were conceived as bringing listeners closer to this set of understandings at both conscious and unconscious levels. It is no surprise, therefore, to see that themes of pilgrimage and sacrifice loom large in his oeuvre. Characters such as Lohengrin, Siegfried and Parsifal engage in journeys that have spiritual elements and result in trials, transformations, realizations and purifications of the self. As for sacrifice, this is shown to be central to the closure of rupture: Hans Sachs puts aside his desire and renounces his claims on Eva's affections so that the natural order of young love can be restored; Isolde dies so as to bring about a deeply spiritual erotic unity with Tristan and so reconcile 'day' and 'night'; Brünnhilde rejects the cursed *Ring des Nibelungen* and throws herself on Siegfried's funeral pyre to the sound of the *Erlösungs-* (resolution) *motif*. We cannot resist noting that these actions within the plot are absolutely consistent with Bataille's logic: sacrifice enables cosmological and social balance to be restored.

57

That said, we are not concerned in this paper with the mytho-poetics of Wagner's stage works but rather with his larger social project. In some ways, Wagner can be considered a spiritual social movement leader. He hoped that his final work, *Parsifal*, "would purify the world by bringing it to a state of Christian pity and renunciation" (Spotts 1994, p. 79). Drawing on the local tradition of community passion plays, he dubbed it a "sacred stage consecration play" (*Bühnenweihfestspiel*) and for a long time refused permission for it to be performed outside of Bayreuth. Despite the bourgeois tendencies in his personal lifestyle that have long fascinated and disappointed critics (Adorno 2005; Mann 1985), the composer and one-time revolutionary was always something of an egalitarian, ascetic purist when it came to the role of art in society. His theoretical and programmatic writings set out the stall. He despised the ways that opera was subordinated to ostentatious social display in Paris. The opera house he designed at Bayreuth was one in which every seat, deliberately uncomfortable, had a good view of the super-sized stage in a darkened auditorium. Tickets to the first Bayreuth Festival were available at low cost to subscribers who had demonstrated their loyalty to his project, rather than sold off to elites at high prices. His ambition was to develop a rather cult-like cooperative organization, led by himself, organized around the performance of his artworks. The remote location of Bayreuth was also something he praised. In contrast to big cities with their distractions, Bayreuth was and is—a sleepy country town. Festival-goers would have to make a dedicated trip and, Wagner hoped, would be able to focus on his works seeking therein spiritual truths. There was something stripped back rather than hedonistic about the entire enterprise, despite the complexity and luxuriance of his music. Indeed, attending Bayreuth was conceived by Wagner as something of a pilgrimage: travel to an inconvenient and unfashionable destination, egalitarianism, pursuit of the sacred and self-knowledge were combined. If this was the intent, then what has been the experience?

Since 2015, we have conducted mixed-methods research on the Bayreuth Festival. Central to the project has been the collection of historical accounts, as well as a series of interviews with contemporary festival-goers and substantial ethnographic participation at the event. The accounts and interviews cover a range of topics including the experience of the festival and the town, responses to performances, thoughts about Bayreuth's troubled past due to associations with Hitler and antisemitism, and travel practicalities. Through an investigation of these resources, we can reconstruct the meanings of the event and the ways in which the sacrifice/pilgrimage model keys to this particular context. The themes: travel and movement to a liminal space, suffering and effort, learning and changing the self, egalitarian solidarity, transcendent experience, a sense of the sacred, an awareness of costs and of the activity as deeply meaningful. By attending to these, we come to understand the form of life that is involved in this particular sacrificial domain.

We note in starting that the language of pilgrimage is commonly applied by historians, critics and commentators to the journey to Bayreuth and to capture the mentality of attendees. It is an explicit part of the folk logic, an 'emic' element of Bayreuth-speak and not simply our 'etic' imposition from cultural theory. Hence, commentators make use of the pilgrimage theme to capture ascetic privation and liminality:

*"Why content oneself with the annual ritual of the Bavarian Epidaurus, the very architecture of which was designed as an uncomfortable pilgrim's arena to make it easier for the seekers of total aesthetic phenomenon to leave behind the mean comforts of the common world and to raise their minds to the heights of art"* (Heller 1985, p. 19)

Or extremes of long-distance travel:

*"Although there were fewer foreigners in the audiences during the early years of the century, Bayreuth retained its allure as a place of pilgrimage. The pilgrims came from as far away as China and California"* (Spotts 1994, p. 130)

Or self-transformation:

*"Does this mean that the former "sanctuary" of the primarily German bourgeoisie is being transformed into an "adventure park" for a post-bourgeois high culture scene, a*

#### *procession to the refuge of eternal truth for a "pilgrimage into the self"?"* (Gebhardt and Zingerle 1998, p. 30; our translation)

Our focus here, though, is not so much on the interpretations of other intellectuals, which as we just saw can be laced with irony, and more on the folk logic of participants. How do those coming to Bayreuth view their experiences? What images and stories do they conjure when reflecting on their participation?

Our transcripts and the historical accounts we examined showed that talk about Bayreuth was surprisingly thick with talk about expenditures. These included money, cognitive mental energy and emotions. There is a pervasive sense of effort rather than ease. The efforts are combined with an underlying belief in the significance of the festival and its artworks. Seeing a performance in Bayreuth does not only demand financial spending but also focus, personal dedication and physical discipline. It is crucial to know the dramaturgy, the music and even the German lyrics well to have access to a deeper understanding of Wagner's works. There are no subtitles or translations provided during the performance. Listening to the several-hours-long operas, reading the libretto and even more mundane duties such as organizing tickets and selecting a tuxedo or a festive dress are part of a trip to Bayreuth. All these activities are more than simply 'fun'—they are in fact arduous.

Such expenditures make a visit to Bayreuth a very different experience than ordinary summer travels such as attending the Glastonbury Festival, doing a city trip to Rome, or visiting historical sites in Greece. From Bataille's perspective, of course, these also involve sacrificial 'pointless' expenditures. But with the *Festspiele* (festival), these expenses and efforts are more visible and intense. It is not a holiday or a cultural event—the logic is one of pilgrimage. And so going to the *Festspiele* involves a usually complicated trip to the inconveniently located German province, alongside mental and physical preparation to experience spiritual insight—similar to religious pilgrims who walk the Camino de Santiago or go to Mecca. Difficulties and inconveniences are an integral part of the festival. The investments force people to concentrate and so assist in the evolution of passion. In the logic of pilgrimage, the sacrifices involved bring meaning. And that meaning explains why people do not just do the 'sensible thing' and stay at home and watch the operas on DVD. Let us bring in some more detail and go through the sources of effort in a logical order.

#### **3. Tickets**

We begin with a difficulty that is hiding in plain sight: getting a ticket to a performance. For decades, the major share of tickets was given to clearly defined groups such as the Wagner supporters club *Freunde Bayreuths* (Friends of Bayreuth) with its expensive membership. Allocations were also made to core players in Germany's industrial and civil order, such as federal employees, trade unions and sponsoring corporations. Wagner's egalitarian dream had failed. The only regular way for opera fans to get tickets was to apply at the festival's dead letter office, then to move up the waiting list year by year. There was much rumor about how to game the inscrutable system. For example, the Munich-based *Süddeutsche Zeitung* published in 2008 a half-satirical, half-serious article how one can find alternatives to the estimated 10 years waiting time (Zinnecker 2008).

The improbable hunt for tickets demonstrates how the hope for a transcendent experience, waiting and suffering go hand in hand in this case. It is also something that takes the festival in multiple ways out of the exchange system of ordinary commodities and turns participation into something more ritualized and mysterious or providential. The tickets arrive like mana from heaven after long years of frustration. For "Jonathan" (this is a pseudonym and all names in the remainder of this paper have been changed), a 30-year-old Bayreuth-based academic, the annual application adds deep layers of meaning:

*"[I] found the idea of preparing and fighting for something like this for so long actually very nice. Because where else do you do it? And I always think it's nice that way. [* ... *] You have to apply for it every year anew. Um, in the past it was by post, today it's online and if you forget that, you're out of the game. Then you can start all over again. And that's already part of the ritual, the performance. And I was tempted by the fact that* *there are limits to get it. That you have to do something for it. And this thinking ahead, I find, a period of 7 years, and back then, it was supposed to take 12 or 13 years, that's kind of absurd too. But as I said, I found it attractive. I don't know why exactly" (Our translation from German language interview).*

To Jonathan, the ticketing process is a mixture of a thrill about the gamble to get tickets, despair about the low chances and the hope for a unique experience at the opera. It is also an annual "ritual" that once involved mailing letters and now anxiously waiting for the exact moment the online shop opens while repeatedly pressing the 'return' button on a computer keyboard (a nerve-wracking five minutes we replicated during our fieldwork). When Jonathan succeeds with his application, he is extremely happy. His expenditure of energy will bring truly meaningful rewards. Jonathan is lucky—or perhaps, as we will see, unlucky—because he lives in Bayreuth. Most festival visitors need to travel. This is costly financially, costly to family life and costly in terms of energy.

#### **4. Travel**

For those living overseas, the unpredictability of receiving tickets adds serious organizational problems. It is impossible to plan more than a few months ahead. Carol, a 60-year-old Australian member of a Wagner Society, embodies something close to the maximum of sacrifice in terms of distance travelled, financial efforts relative to income, and disruption to her personal life. On being allocated some tickets, she felt she had no choice but to augment the travel plans to Europe that had already soaked up her carefully budgeted vacation savings.

*"We had a trip planned to Ireland and Scotland. And that trip was already organized. And then suddenly here I was with an opportunity to go to Bayreuth. Well so that really made a mess of my trip to Ireland and Scotland. So I'm still going. I'm meeting the girls in Dublin on the 30th of August and so the preparation was crazy. Because suddenly I had to factor in an extra two and a half weeks here with my six tickets to Bayreuth Festival and I had to reorganize my life. And I have a mother and a husband and a daughter and so the preparation the logistical the logistics were just insane. But I'm here. I got here."*

Carol demonstrates paradigmatically how highly Wagner fans value a visit to the festival and the extraordinary expenses and inconvenient efforts they are willing to take on themselves and impose on others. Most people would consider a holiday in Ireland and Scotland the experience of a lifetime—enough indulgence for one summer. But Carol does not even think about giving away her tickets. As a former teacher, she has a modest income. Yet she spent thousands on new flights and hotel bookings, extending her trip and causing chaos for her family. As a devotee, what else could she do?

After all the planning, there is the actual 'getting there' that involves moving a body through space. This is a major source of suffering for international travelers especially. Since the 19th-century, attendees have complained about the difficulty of getting to Bayreuth, and notably the poor train service on peculiar branch lines. Bayreuth still has poor connectivity and visitors flying in from abroad usually come via Munich, then Nuremberg, to the festival. Laura, by coincidence another 60-year-old Australian member of a Wagner Society, offers a complaint that became familiar to us concerning the troublesome, multi-connection route from the airport to Bayreuth (something we have experienced more than once during our fieldwork). True to the pilgrimage motif, she told a story of hurdles and challenges arriving one after another and of a body that had to suffer and take risks.

*"But last year the flight was into Munich and then I took the train and I did it all in one hit without stopping until I got to Bayreuth. And that involved a train. I'd been on the plane for goodness knows how many hours 24 h or something and then you get a train a train to the main station in Munich. That worked well. Then I got on a train to Nuremberg and then I had to get off and change platforms to get the train to here. And I had to haul my suitcase. There were no lifts no elevator I had to and I had a bad back. I was not supposed to be doing it. I had to pull my suitcase up the stairs up a really*

*long flight of stairs in a rush to get to the train. Fortunately, a young woman helped me. The men don't help you and I got to the train and not enough carriages had turned up. Again you've got the dreadful trains with steps to get your suitcase up. You know it's not sliding you've got to go up and I got to there was no room to even get in the carriage. You had to just stand there. So, on top of twenty four hours in the plane and I'd probably by then had at least two and a half hours or something of trains, three hours maybe. I then had that stand for an hour and it was really stuffy and hot. Just in the stairwell not in the carriages for an hour to get here and that was just dreadful* ... *"*

This is a story of sacrifice in the pilgrimage mode. There is endurance, fatigue, physical effort and even danger to the body.

#### **5. The Performance**

What could be more relaxing than sitting in a chair listening to opera? Well quite a few things actually. Once you have your tickets, have made it to Bayreuth and up the hill into the concert hall, the economy of effort and suffering does not stop. There is a tax on the body, on the mind, and the soul. In a letter from 1909, the novelist Thomas Mann wrote to a friend about his summer:

*"And then I was in Bayreuth for the Parsifal* ... *But quite apart from the physical exhaustion of it all (it was dreadfully hot), I also found it a demanding emotional experience".* (Mann 1985, pp. 44–45)

We find a similar response in the composer Tchaikovsky's (1876) report that although he was a "musician by profession," he was "overcome by a sensation of spiritual and physical fatigue close to utter exhaustion" by the end of *Götterdämmerung*, the fourth opera in *Der Ring des Nibelungen*. The Wagnerian George Bernard Shaw was an active young man in the 1880s. Likewise he noted in his dispatches the cognitive labor involved in being a conscientious opera fan and music journalist: "It is desperately hard work this daily scrutiny of the details of an elaborate performance from four to past ten" (Shaw 1889a). The renowned author and critic singled out the particular challenge of the *Meistersinger*, "I had just energy enough to go home to my bed, instead of lying down on the hillside ... That Third Act, though conducted by Hans Richter, who is no sluggard, lasts two hours, and the strain on the attention, concentrated as it is by the peculiarities of the theater, is enormous" (Shaw 1889b).

What exactly are those 'peculiarities' that troubled Shaw? In contrast to regular concerts, most attendants honor the ritual of the Bayreuth Festival by being dressed in tuxedos or other elegant clothes. These are restrictive and do not permit good ventilation of the body. The central European summer reliably reaches over 30 degrees C. The performances are long, the music tempi generally languid. The doors to the auditorium are closed for acoustic purposes. Yet, even today, there is no air conditioning as the building is heritage listed. The heat is trapped. The famously hard seats help somewhat to keep the audience awake, but in their own way they also make focused attention a challenge. This is all something of an ordeal. Peter, a 67-year-old American living in Germany's Heidelberg, is a first-time visitor. He describes his experience in one of the more affordable parts of the concert hall:

#### *Our seats are way up so it's very hot. And people are we're all packed in like sardines up there. So it's not* ... *not comfortable at all but you know you just have to focus.*

Peter had done well for a novice—he had translated discomfort into a resource. Yet Helena and Stefanie, two German women aged 70 and 79, underestimated the strain of the long performances, high temperature, and the hard wooden seats. They gave up after the first act due to the unbearable conditions and felt that they could not continue. The trip to Bayreuth was for these ladies a rare opportunity because they were lucky in the online ticket sale. For them, going to Bayreuth was a once-in-a-life-occasion and one of many highculture events that they had attended. But they were not true adepts. Their motivation was more curiosity than a special fascination with Wagner. Unlike more experienced festival

visitors, these mature-age first-time visitors were not well prepared for the uncomfortable seats and slow performances. They paid a price for it. Stefanie:

*In general, I felt good. But the chairs made it hard for me as said before. And then you lose focus. Then I was looking around so much in the theatre to see who is there. You don't notice anymore what is going on onstage. Yes, I was fidgeting a little. There were two girls whispering. Just like us. She [Helena] wanted to tell me something and I had to stop her. It was like that. One loses concentration. One looks left and right to see what others are doing. That's part of it just to stay flexible. Not sitting still. [* ... *] Yes, with other seats we may have fallen asleep but not with these. (Interview in German. Our translation).*

Helena and Stefanie were unable to translate discomfort into an incentive to concentrate. Unlike those who had invested heavily—financially, with travel, with bodily effort, with the ritual preparations of studying the artworks—they were unable to interpret the experience as pleasurable or as offering the possibility of encountering transcendence. Viewed through the lens of the *Elementary Forms*, such draining experiences and privations, forms of disciplinary sacrifice, are perhaps essential as preparations for leaving behind the profane. Hence, Durkheim (1995, p. 314) writes: "no one can engage in a religious ceremony of any importance without first submitting to a sort of initiation". In this context, it is noteworthy that Tchaikovsky (1876), who attended the first iteration of the festival in 1876, considered that his own lack of preparation contributed to a somewhat reserved appreciation of *The Ring*. He noted that other professional musicians were more enthusiastic than he was before admitting, "I am willing to grant that it is my own fault that I have not yet come to appreciate fully this music, and that, once I have got down to studying it diligently, I too may eventually join the wide circle of genuine admirers of Wagner's music".

#### **6. Transcendent Experiences**

So attending Bayreuth requires effort and energy. It is draining and uncomfortable. For many, it is expensive. You need to prepare diligently. Expenditures of all kinds abound. But, as both Bataille and Turner argue, at the end of the suffering there can come a connection with sacred spaces and traditions. For example, the reward can be a sense of entering an enchanted land that is separated from profane space. Bayreuth is where the operas that people have been listening to for decades are supposed to be performed—in the building designed by Wagner, built to his specifications, and where the master's eyes personally oversaw the civilizationally significant first productions of the entire *Ring* (in 1876), and *Parsifal* (in 1882). For many fans, it is a place that they have read about for years in books about Wagner or the festival, or seen referred to on program notes at other concert halls. In addition to such mystique and mythology, the very travel involved to this annoyingly remote location builds commitment and contributes to a liminal separation from everyday life. A sense of special, slow time can intersect with that of space. Even our German interviewees told us that going to Bayreuth is a very different experience than visiting a performance in their hometowns such as Berlin or Dresden. Instead of rushing to the theater after the office, most festival visitors dedicate the whole day to opera. In the morning, there is often a presentation at the *Festspielhaus* (the concert hall) that introduces the performance of the afternoon. The day can be spent carefully preparing the mind and body. A study of the libretto is usual. This can be arduous. Alcohol is avoided, food light, an afternoon nap advisable. As in the Aboriginal rituals studied by Durkheim, these smaller preparations, prohibitions and privations are all organized so as to maximize the climactic experience of the artworks over a four-to-eight hour period starting according to Wagner's instruction in the late afternoon.

Several of our interview partners invoked the magic of place, especially during their first visit to Bayreuth. As we just noted, many had spent years reading about Wagner and Bayreuth, or looking at photographs. Encountering them in reality was an intense experience that blurred the lines between myth and reality—not unlike when we encounter a celebrity in the street. When asked about this, Preston, a 60-year-old visual artist from the United States, repeated himself as he struggled for words. He spoke in hushed, breathy tones as he mentally recaptured the feeling of an intense sense of otherworldliness he had experienced when he first visited Wagner's own villa, *Wahnfried*.

Question: *What about the fact this is Wagner's town? Does that make it more meaningful?*

Preston: *Yeah especially in the beginning. I'm just in awe. Every, everywhere you go everything you see is Wagner. It's a magic, magic Kingdom* ... *This is Wahnfried! This is the dream. The dream.*

More important even than *Wahnfried* as a sacred space was the *Festspielhaus*. Designed and built by Wagner after considerable financial struggles, it is arguably the largest wooden building in the world. With this all-wood construction, hollow pillars and resonant floors, it has unique acoustics that send vibrations through the body. It seems alive. Some remove their shoes so as to feel this through the soles of their feet. The hall is also famous for the concentration of the audience—known as the "Bayreuth hush". This interactional norm indicating shared devotion also makes the performances special for Preston.

*Physically the wood and the sound there's no way in the world anywhere could you build this. I keep forgetting I haven't been here for a couple of years. I started coming in 2001. It's really the orchestra and the sound. Also the concentration of the audience it is pitch black and you're packed, packed in this little place and all you see is the performance and you hear the sound and music.*

Another informant, Simon, echoed these feelings about sacred, special places. Simon (German, aged around 50) is today a professional Wagner intellectual and cultural heritage manager. His initial contact with the sacred at Bayreuth came decades ago when he was a student. The visit was literally life changing.

*"I remember when I first came to Wahnfried at twenty-one years old when I entered Wahnfried I really walked on the top of my toes. It was something very, very holy like coming to the Holy Grail".*

While Bayreuth has sacred places, it is Wagner's music itself that provides a culmination to the pilgrimage quest for the extraordinary. His music has a mesmerizing, deeply emotional effect on many listeners and offers to them a glimpse of transcendence. The impacts can be mysterious and are very hard to explain. Shaw touched upon this theme long ago.

*"This Parsifal is a wonderful experience: not a doubt of it. The impression it makes is quite independent of liking the music or understanding the poem* ... *When you leave the theater after your first Parsifal you may not be conscious of having brought away more than a phrase or two of leitmotif* ... *yet before long the music begins to stir within you and haunt you with growing urgency that in a few days makes another hearing seem a necessity of life".* (Shaw 1889c)

Thirty-six years later, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. So, it is no surprise that our less verbally talented respondents also struggled to explain what was going on. Steffen (German, aged about 60), an accomplished musician, made use of a metaphor we often encountered (and indeed can be found in Nietzsche's writings)—that of bathing in warm water.

*"It grabs you by the intellect and grabs you by your feelings and sentiment. Both, right? You're swimming in beautiful, warm water. "*

Sandra [Steffen's wife] added that *"My husband can't talk for a long time after such a* ... *It's, uh* ... *(Interview in German. Our translation).*

This shift towards introversion and silence that Sandra noticed happened to us too. In our field observations, we often noticed that other audience members were unusually quiet as they filed out during intermissions or at the end of the long evening. It seemed as if the music had cast a spell and it would take a while to return to a profane world where words were adequate to experience and interactions anything other than a crude intrusion. Like Thomas Mann and Steffen, we and they were emotionally full and emotionally exhausted at the same time. Chat would typically resume as patrons unlocked their cars or passed by the railway station, after about a kilometer on the long, late-night downhill walk back into town.

True to Durkheim's vision of the sacred as a commanding force, Steffen went on to describe the moment of ecstatic submission to the power of the music with reference to the climax in the Third Act of the *Meistersinger*, where various contending keys that have been at play for the prior four or five hours resolve to C major. The impact on the audience, the vast majority of whom would not be intellectually aware of the compositional technicalities, was such that "*it knocks them out. It knocks them out. It brings tears to their eyes or something. They can't breathe.*"

This sense of meaningful contact with intense emotions and a higher power was also captured by Preston, who contrasted the unique impacts of Wagner to those of other composers. Usually articulate, Preston really struggled to communicate his feelings during our interview.

*"I play a lot of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart everything. But with Wagner. He has a knack of taking control of you. Me anyway. His music almost grabbed hold of you and just he could* ... *manipulate you. And I just, you just totally surrender to Wagner. Other people like Beethoven you play through and there's no emotion, I don't feel any anything inside. With Wagner it's different. And as older when I get older it's even worse you know because* ... *with Parsifal the music. At one point when the Gurnemanz is singing especially if it is a good bass singing* ... *and with Wagner's music. I completely lose control* ... *to tears."*

Simon's experience was even more intense. We last encountered him entering *Wahnfried* on tip-toe. Later that same day, he had slipped into the *Festspielhaus* and listened to a dress rehearsal of *Die Walküre (Valkyrie)*. His account of what followed was full of the repetitions and expressive struggles we often found in our transcripts when respondents attempted to communicate a sense of the transcendent.

*"It was like an infection like a medical infection. I remember after, after Valkyrie I had a spare day, a free day after Valkyrie. I attended the general uh the dress rehearsals and after Valkyrie I had a free day and I took a walk up on the on the Bürgerreuth, this hill behind the Festspielhaus. I climbed up to the Siegesturm, this tower of victory. Yeah I was standing there quite alone for myself and I was in a very, very special mood. It was like everything was floating through me and I was fascinated and really was crying. It was a deep, deep emotional effect. Really it was erotical in a way and very, very special. And well it was like* ... *was ist ein Erweckungserlebnis? An awaking experience. Suddenly something became light in my head. And if it was like like this uh this flash of Erkenntnis, of knowledge, of knowledge. Everything seemed to be clear and I had the impression that I had found something very important for me in my life. Okay. That was the infection and I couldn't stand it anymore."*

Simon had indeed encountered the sacred as he looked out over the landscape, the town, fields and rolling wooded hills. There is perfect consistency with Durkheim's observation in the *Elementary Forms* about the intense experience of a higher power after ritual:

"Its immensity overwhelms him. That sensation of an infinite space surrounding him, of an infinite time preceding and to follow the present moment, of forces infinitely superior to those at his disposal, cannot fail to arouse the idea inside him that there is an infinite power outside him to which he is subject. This idea then enters into our conception of the divine as an essential element." (Durkheim 1995, p. 80)

It is an outcome of which Wagner, no doubt, would have approved.

#### **7. Some Closing Thoughts**

We have written about participation in an event that is an impractical, expressive expenditure of surplus, not a rational, accumulative, profitable enterprise. Tchaikovsky (1876) captured this essence when he wrote: "In the sense of contributing to the material prosperity of mankind, the Bayreuth Festival, of course, is of no consequence whatsoever, but in the sense of a quest for the realization of artistic ideals it surely is fated, in some way or other, to acquire a tremendous historical significance". The pilgrimage to Bayreuth is a particular kind of sacrificial activity that attaches to this broader aesthetic project. Suffering, travel to a sacred space, and mental and physical discipline of listening lead in some cases to a transcendent encounter with deeply meaningful complex cultural forms. It is a serious and contemplative mode of expenditure that provides only spiritual rewards. And that is the entire point.

The sacrifice of time, commitment and money is the required expenditure of surplus that makes the trip to Bayreuth a maximal spiritual success. We saw how Wagner fans suffer before and during the events. In some cases, these visitors are completely overwhelmed by attending the operas. The aesthetic experience of the musical theatre, the magic of the place, and restricted access to one of the sought-after performances combine alchemically. The several-hours-long operas, the heat in the Franconian high summer and concentration on the demanding art works distinguish a trip to Bayreuth from fun trips to pop concerts or city breaks. But even as people complain about them, these hurdles are in fact a necessary step towards a more transcendent experience. With the right preparation and mind set, something truly life changing can happen. Within the framework of Bataille's understanding of sacrifice, the impacts of these non-utilitarian costs and privations make perfect sense. As an act of sacrifice built on the hope of grasping transcendence, each of the seemingly irrational acts of spending and restraint brings participants a little closer to their goal. Bataille perfectly sums all this up, not with reference to Europe or modernity but in his understanding of sacrifice among the Aztecs:

"The only valid excess was one that went beyond the bounds, and one whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods. This was the price men paid to escape their downfall and remove the weight introduced in them by the avarice and cold calculation of the real order." (Bataille 1988, p. 60)

The crucial point about human sacrifice for Bataille was that it tore down the established profanity of everyday life and put the individual in immediate contact with the sacred and divine. In its expressive details, an opera in a Bavarian province is not the same as the religious ceremony of an extinct Mexican culture. However, they are analytically akin. Excessive efforts, incommensurability beyond the exchange of equivalents, and the struggle to escape the profane world are the carriers of symbolic and emotional power in both the Aztec event and the German opera festival.

Bataille's brutal case study can be considered a kind of Foucaultian real-world exemplar of a system of ideas and rituals. It highlights by looking to the extreme. In Bayreuth, the cultural patterns are a little more muted and veiled. So of course, there will be a range of experiences and levels of commitment. As we saw with Helena and Stefanie, not everyone going to the opera is an adept or enthusiastic Wagnerian or can be easily interpreted as engaging in pilgrimage activity. For some locals we interviewed, a visit to the *Festspielhaus* is just another entertaining night out—a lesser form of sacrifice to be sure but for all that an irrational expenditure of efforts just the same. Nor is all tourism to Bayreuth driven by Wagner. Many come to enjoy the beer, the landscape, the flower gardens, and the castles and stately homes that litter the region. And in the everyday life of the town's residents, we might find shopping, drinking, eating, hobby activity, physical training, reading, focused attention, and sex. But are these not also gratuitous expenditures? Understood through the lens used in this paper, we might reconstruct a more comprehensive, nested and layered ecology of the expenditures and sacrifices within the city of Bayreuth, of which the festival and its 'pilgrims' are but a seasonal part. Foucault spoke of a vision of the carceral city, of a network of institutions and activities of control spread out over urban space. With

a very different *dispositif* of modernity, a Durkheimian cultural sociology could map out the town's landscape of individual and institutional discipline, effort, sacrifice, emotional and expressive release. To do so would be a magnificent accomplishment, and clearly one that is beyond the scope of this initial inquiry. It is, however, an agenda called forth by the maximal understanding of sacrifice as the expenditure of surplus. Our sketch of the Bayreuth pilgrimage is just an illustration of how one might go about such a task.

**Author Contributions:** The authors contributed equally to the research and writing of this paper. Both authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was supported by a grant from the MacMillan Center of Yale University and by a University of Bayreuth Centre of International Excellence "Alexander von Humboldt" Senior Fellowship.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** This research was conducted according to the Institutional Review Board and informed consent protocols of Yale University and Bayreuth University.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** The authors have all data available. However, the data are subject to restricted access due to confidentiality.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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### *Article* **The Dark God: The Sacrifice of Sacrifice**

**Joseba Zulaika**

Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557, USA; zulaika@unr.edu

**Abstract:** The Frazerian question of murder turned into ritual sacrifice is foundational to cultural anthropology. Frazer described the antinomian figure of a king, who was, at once, a priest and a murderer. Generations of anthropologists have studied sacrifice in ethnographic contexts and theorized about its religious significance. But sacrifice itself may turn into a problem, and René Girard wrote about "the sacrificial crisis", when the real issue is the failure of a sacrifice that goes wrong. The present paper addresses such a "sacrificial crisis" in the experience of my own Basque generation. I will argue that the crisis regarding sacrifice is pivotal. But my arguments will take advantage of the background of a more recent ethnography I wrote on the political and cultural transformations of this generation. This requires that I expand the notion of "sacrifice" from my initial approach of ethnographic parallels towards a more subjective and psychoanalytical perspective. As described in my first ethnography, the motivation behind the violence was originally and fundamentally *sacrificial*; when it finally stopped in 2011, many of those invested in the violence, actors as well as supporters, felt destitute and had to remodel their political identity. The argument of this paper is that the dismantling of sacrifice as its nuclear premise—the sacrifice of sacrifice—was a major obstacle stopping the violence from coming to an end.

**Keywords:** sacrifice; martyrdom; ETA; Yoyes; ethnography; psychoanalysis

**Citation:** Zulaika, Joseba. 2021. The Dark God: The Sacrifice of Sacrifice. *Religions* 12: 67. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/rel12020067

Academic Editor: Javier Gil-Gimeno Received: 21 December 2020 Accepted: 12 January 2021 Published: 20 January 2021

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

#### **1. Sacrifice as Duty and Crisis**

Sacrifice is a central topic in modern anthropology. Frazer addressed it while reporting on the institution of divine kingship found in many ethnographic societies; typically, when a king became old and feeble, the future monarch would challenge him to a duel, kill him, and take over the priestly and political powers of the dead king. Thus, he was, at once, "a priest and a murderer" (Frazer 1963, p. 1). Evans-Pritchard expanded this ritual complex to the study of Shilluk regicide (Evans-Pritchard 1963). Recently, Sahlins and Graeber (2017) have revisited and updated the theoretical foundations of kingship and sovereignty. René Girard argued that, given the absence of a judicial system in primitive societies, sacrifice was a key form to restrain vengeance—"an instrument of prevention in the struggle against violence" (Girard 1977, p. 17). Maurice Bloch examined how ritual achieves transcendence by the sacrifice of the participants, thus affirming through symbolic violence the timeless truth that binds a community to a belief or a cause (Bloch 1992, 2013). Based on the principle that violence and the sacred are inseparable, sacrificial rites assume essential functions in restoring social control. I applied this ritual model, in which sacrifice and murder substitute reciprocally, in my own study of the Basque political violence of the 1970s. Following Roy Rappaport's statement that "Morality, like social contract, is implicit in ritual's very structure" (Rappaport 1979, p. 198), the aim of my ethnography was to show the cultural, performative and religious dimensions of the violence. Still, despite all the models I borrowed from ethnography and the literature, I concluded that "The thing itself, the sacramental literalness of the sacrificial act, cries out against any final interpretation" (Zulaika 1988, p. 342).

Two decades after the end of the Spanish civil war, dictator Franco was still in power when, in the 1950s, a small group of young, politically minded students began meeting in Bilbao to study Basque history and language. One of them was Julen Madariaga, a member

of a prominent Bilbao family of lawyers who had returned after a decade of exile in Chile; he was three years old when was exiled as Franco's army was closing in during the Spring of 1937, days before Guernica was burnt to the ground by Hitler's planes. When, in the summer of 1959, they founded the underground ETA (*Euskadi Ta Askatasuna*—"Euskadi and Freedom"), Guernica's sacrifice was the axiom behind the group's commitment. They carried in their pockets a small volume known as *The White Book* (due to the color of its cover), which summarized their cause. Its insistence on the primacy of "conscience" and "responsibility", quoting Catholic moralists such as Maritain, sets it closer to the *Spiritual Exercises* of the Basque founder of the Jesuits, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, than to anything of their own day. The ideological pillars of the new patriotism were an irrevocable Ignatian decision to surrender one's will for the cause—Sartrean absolute freedom—and the founder of Basque nationalism's Sabino Arana's oath to offer one's life for the fatherland. ETA's initial mission was to create a new subject capable of total sacrifice in the fight against Franco's regime.

There were two prominent figures in literature and art in the Bilbao of the 1950s— Ernest Hemingway, a frequent visitor to the city's summer bullfights, and the local sculptor Jorge Oteiza. "Art is sacrament" is the logo that condenses Oteiza's thinking in a book he completed in Bilbao in 1952. "Writing is tauromachy" is the equivalent summary of Hemingway's work, the American writer who commanded Bilbao's largest international audience. Yet, at the turn of the 1950s, both men were experiencing an existential crisis. Their culture of sacrifice and sacrament had turned down a blind alley. Oteiza quit sculpting in 1959; Hemingway committed suicide in 1960. They were both representatives of what philosopher Maria Zambrano named "the generation of the bull", people who gave it all in their fight against fascism, "because of their sense of sacrifice" (Zambrano 1995, p. 44). Picasso's sacrificial tauromachy for "Guernica" is the emblem of this generation.

There was a category of young people who were particularly attuned to ETA's sacrificial politics—seminarians and religious people. Hundreds of them left the seminaries and joined ETA's ranks in the 1960s. During Franco's era, education was, for the most part, in the hands of religious orders, which meant that, for most lower-class people, the only possibility of a secondary education was internment in a seminary or convent. In the process of schooling, religious institutions would fish for "vocations" for priesthood. A critical part of the indoctrination was the duty of sacrifice for the sake of one's own salvation and the world's redemption. As if the daily sacrifices of religious discipline, endless prayer, and even self-flagellation were not enough, a favorite fantasy of these orders was martyrdom in some faraway missionary post, which was to be embraced as an ardent desire and a secret enjoyment.

But such religious idealism could not endure confrontation with the reality of contemporary life. Authors such as Nietzsche played a key role in awakening this generation to the profound nihilism behind a passion for sacrifice that was "*a will to nothingness*, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life" (Nietzsche 1967, p. 163). Seminaries and convents were mostly empty by the late 1960s. With the loss of the religious world, its entire system of beliefs and values became meaningless, which meant that there was no longer any reason for sacrifice. Far from feelings of exhilaration for the new freedom, the common experience was rather a sense of vacuity and meaninglessness. Loss of faith meant a denial of the big Other of religion—a lack of belief, a lack of commitment, and a lack of sacrifice. It was disbelief *after* belief, de-conversion *after* conversion. In Hegelian terms, it was the negation of negation, or the redoubling of reflection by which the subject posits their own presuppositions. It was the sacrifice of sacrifice, experienced in a state of subjective destitution (Zulaika 2014).

But this overturning of the duty to sacrifice was easier said than done. The religious desire of self-immolation may have transformed into some form of delirium, but was politics not the *real* domain where sacrifice made sense in the fight against military fascism? After the general emptying of seminaries and convents, those hungry for sacrifice had a legitimate substitute in surrendering to a political commitment that demanded the perilous

rigors of underground activism, which included armed action. The consequences of such a fateful decision were almost certainly torture, death or exile.

It was one thing to give up religion as a fundamental fantasy, but quite another to give up what we might call, in psychoanalytic terms, its *infinitization* of desire, for "desire is nothing but that which introduces into the subject's universe an incommensurable or infinite measure" (Zupancic 2003, p. 251). This is a desire that resides in "the body as distinct from the organism inasmuch as it is not a biological real but rather a form" (Miller 2009, p. 40). No longer able to believe in religious transcendence, many of my generation decided to surrender their lives to the political cause—"giving your life" for political freedom was a way to repeat that fullness of sacrifice in the infinitization of desire. For the many former seminarians and priests who entered ETA, the opportunities of new political martyrdom it offered were a thousand times more preferable than the destitute emptiness of a world without a Cause.

ETA filled the passion for sacrifice to the brim. Still, the nationalist desire regarding the Cause for which the youths were ready to die was not the same as that of the older generation; the structure of transference for the Basque nationalists who fought the Spanish civil war of 1936–1939 had been Arana's formula for sacrifice: "Me for Euskadi and Euskadi for God". One of the victims in Guernica was "Lauaxeta", a well-known poet who was arrested and executed; before facing the firing squad at dawn, he wrote a farewell poem to his country, which concluded: "Let the spirit go to luminous heaven/Let the body be thrown to the dark earth". In the ETA of the 1960s, such religious mediation had no place in the ideology of the militants who, by the end of the decade, were, for the most part, avowed Marxists and atheists. For the older generation, the nationalist duty to fight for their country had the Homeric inevitability of defending one's community militarily from the antidemocratic forces of European fascism; for the new ETA generations of youths, it was a much more individualized call; their notion of "freedom" was far more personal and political, and mediated as much by the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre and Dostoyevsky than those of Arana or the Bible.

#### **2. Sacrificing Your Love to "Freedom or Death"**

Together with Madariaga, the other most influential founder of ETA was José Luis Álvarez Enparantza, "Txillardegi". During the formative years of ETA. Txillargedi published a novel in 1957, constituting a breakthrough in Basque literature because of its existentialist themes staged in urban settings. Txillardegi, ETA's main ideologue at the time, admitted that this novel was a testament to the subjective and intellectual issues of the period. One theme shown in the novel is the direct influence of political militancy on the sex lives of the protagonists. In the convents and seminaries, there was little doubt regarding the issue: strict chastity was the rule. There was no such rule in the area of politics, but many of the male activists would behave according to the premise that their patriotic duty was above any love affair and that "the sacrifice of the woman" was to be expected.

Txillardegi's novel narrates the failed love between the protagonists Leturia and Miren, which ends in her sickness and death, followed by his suicide. After marrying Miren, and then abandoning her to go to Paris and experiment with a life of his own, Leturia comes to the realization that "my heart needed something Absolute", and falling in love with a woman was only a symptom of that need. Leturia debates the conflicting demands that derive from his reason (which makes the subject the center of his world) and his sentiment (which demands the surrender of one's life for others). Leturia finds a resolution in *The Tragic Sense of Life* (Unamuno 1972), the Bilbaoan philosopher who "denies to thought the capacity to find truth", in Txillardegi's words, "and he takes the road of sentiment alone" (Alvarez Enparantza 1985, p. 73). Unable to choose, Leturia thinks that the best thing he can do is surrender to destiny; he describes his relationship to fate with the analogy of the dog in relation to his master: "I have to ask not 'Who is my servant?' but 'Whose servant am I?' This is the salvation". Salvation is serving the big Master. In the

end, Leturia's love for Miren is a thinly veiled metaphor for his love of the Motherland: "Miren needs me; my motherland needs me; my people need me. I belong to them, and without them I am nothing". He recognizes, "I am guilty, yes", for having abandoned Miren/the Motherland, and he promises that, if she survives, "I will redeem my sins with love. With love ... with love ... Who used to speak always about love? I am afraid to admit it: Christ!" (Alvarez Enparantza 1977, pp. 137, 139, 142). As in the plot of a Greek tragedy, one is *guilty* whether one sides with the law or fights against it. Leturia is barely a Christian, and Txillardegi's protagonist in his next novel (published in 1960) is no longer one. The previous generation of Basque nationalists who fought the war were guided by the slogan "God and Ancient Laws". For the ETA generation, God was no longer the big Other. Even though Txilardegi's Leturia was inspired by atheists such as Unamuno and Sartre, he repeats Christ's formula as his mantra: "And what is love? To lay down your life" (Alvarez Enparantza 1977, p. 136). In short, ETA members were Sartrean existentialists, Dostoyevskian nihilists and Nietzschean atheists, but their supreme model of *passage à l'acte*, the only one their audience could totally understand, was none other than the Crucified's sacrificial "gift of Death" (Derrida 1995).

Txabi Etxebarrieta is arguably the most consequential figure in the history of ETA. He joined the armed group in 1963 and came to define its basic ideology as "a Basque socialist movement of national liberation". He was the first ETA member who killed a Spanish policeman at close range and who was subsequently killed by the police himself. But what is most remarkable about Etxebarrieta the writer is his poetry. Before he died in 1968 at the age of twenty-three, he had written five short books of poems—many of them love poems. Right before joining ETA, he had an intense love affair with a woman named Isabel, which was reflected in his poems and letters. Etxebarrieta's older brother, Jose Antonio, was, at the time, a top ideologue in the organization and a mentor to Txabi; he contracted a grave illness and Txabi, besides nursing him, replaced him in ETA's next general assembly, reading a report written by Jose Antonio. Soon, Txabi communicated his decision to join ETA to Isabel, and his letters began to reflect the difficulties in their relationship. At one point, his letters become a repetition of strings of "I love you" followed by "forgive me". One of his poems at the time is marked with the repeated uncertainty of "Perhaps ... ": "Perhaps ... /I am cruel—for committing suicide ... /and for not leaving my blood to others, still unborn". Even for an existentialist nihilist like himself, his passion for suicide was perhaps too cruel. Why did he have to sacrifice himself by sacrificing Isabel? What did she have to forgive him for? Did his motherland and his brother deserve that kind of love?

The Etxebarrietas lived on the fifth floor of an apartment house at the plaza Unamuno in Bilbao's *Casco Viejo*. The plaza displayed the bronze head of Unamuno at the top of a column. From the balcony of the apartment, Txabi would stare at Unamuno's bust and the roofs of Bilbao's old quarters. Unamuno's thinking, best known for his "tragic sense of life", was a major influence on Etxebarrieta. Still, what is most remarkable in Etxebarrieta's early writing is his critical assessment of Unamuno's work. In an essay entitled "Unamuno, Tomorrow (A Feeling Not Felt)", written when he was nineteen, Etxebarrieta distances himself from the Unamunian tragic sense of life in favor of Sartrean existentialism. He pointedly criticizes Unamuno for being one of those who "displace their existential center" toward the future "and are not 'in themselves,' but come to live at the service of the hopedfor transcendence. Only the one who does not expect to be can be 'in himself' comfortably and fully, without any violence". And he continues accusing Unamuno of living in a "dative" mode, i.e., toward an indirect third person or object or temporality—"the today in and for tomorrow, the now in and for later". Etxebarrieta claims that "one should live in a strictly human dimension", an attitude that "dispenses with totalitarian and global solutions" and dismisses Unamuno's tragic sense as "a romantic idea in the irrational sense of the term", because "there is a short step from irrationalism to fascism" (Lorenzo Espinosa 1996, pp. 162–63, 165). Etxebarrieta was essentially saying that there is no big transcendent Other for whom one should live in a "dative", third-person form of indirect subjectivity.

But, again, this was easier said than done. In the end, Etxebarrieta could not live up to his insight; he would be devoured by his own idealism and his passion for sacrifice sacrifice being the act that "proves" the existence of the big Other. One of his poems, "Motherland", begins with an epigraph from Blas de Otero: "Wretched whoever has a motherland and that motherland obsesses him as much as she obsesses me" (Lorenzo Espinosa 1996, p. 76). Patriotism was both Etxebarrieta's fate and the curse that would not allow him to enjoy a life with Isabel. He writes a poem dedicated to "Your Body": "I'd like to be buried in you./No longer to be" (Lorenzo Espinosa 1996, p. 87). In the last poem of his final book, written just months before his death, an Etxebarrieta now fully surrendered to political action expresses his wish that he could trade it all to simply be Isabel's lover: "With fury I would trade our lives/for the enormous marching of bodies, where loving you would cover me/like the sea covers itself, entirely" (Lorenzo Espinosa 1996, p. 120).

It was not for nothing that Etxebarrieta had long been obsessed with death, which he had repeatedly prophesized for himself. There are repeated mentions of death as a self-fulfilling prophecy in his poetry. In 1965, already in ETA, he wrote three short stories in which the main character has a premonition of death and leaves a farewell to his mother in his notebook (Lorenzo Espinosa 1994, pp. 231–32). In his last political text, written for the occasion of May Day, 1968, and in one of those clandestine cyclostyled pamphlets, Etxebarrieta wrote: "Any day now we will have a dead body on the table".

His day of sacrifice came on June 7 of that year, when he was stopped for a traffic violation. As a policeman, José Pardines, began checking his license plate, Etxebarrieta shot and killed him from behind. He and his ETA companion hid for a few hours in the apartment of an acquaintance. But an agitated Etxebarrieta recklessly decided to leave the hideout, despite the fact that all roads were under police surveillance. He was stopped by police and killed on the spot; his companion escaped but was arrested the next day. His closest ETA friends believe to this day that he let himself be killed (Uriarte 2005, p. 90). One of his ETA comrades wrote, after his death, that he would say frequently, "the country needs me and I will offer myself for her" (Lorenzo Espinosa 1994, p. 271). Another comrade wrote, "at bottom I always thought that he was obsessed with his own martyrdom and perhaps he shot Pardines just so that they could kill him" (Onaindia 2001, p. 322).

Thus Etxebarrieta ended up repeating, in real life, the very subjective structure sketched by Txillardegi in his Leturia character—encountering and falling in love with a woman; the impossibility of maintaining intimate relationships because of the call of the motherland's Absolute; inner struggle between the more rational and the more emotional aspects of their personality; and a decision to take action and the redemption of unconscious guilt for sacrificing the woman through the patriotic love of self-immolation. Both Leturia's narrative and Etxebarrieta's life illustrate the struggle between the body "as the site of *death*" versus the body as "the site of *sex*" (Copjec 2002, p. 28)—a struggle that, as we will see below, would find a historic resolution in Yoyes. Kierkegaard, who wrote the story of Isaac losing his faith in the God of his idolatrous father, was behind much of Unamuno's existentialist thinking, and both philosophers were cornerstones to Txillardegi and Etxebarrieta. What was said of the Danish philosopher—that "Abraham was not only Kierkegaard's father, who offered his son as a sacrifice, but Abraham was also Kierkegaard himself, who sacrificed Regine" (Garff 2000, p. 256)—could be applied to Txillardegi's Leturia character and to Etxebarrieta, both of whom sacrificed what they most loved, Miren and Isabel, for the sake of the country.

ETA's defining alternative, emblazoned as a logo in every pamphlet and publication, was *Askatasuna ala Hil* (Freedom or Death) or *Iraultza ala Hil* (Revolution or Death). Only death could "prove" one was truly fighting for freedom and revolution. But even if ETA's revolutionary discourse spoke of readiness to sacrifice one's life, on that day in 7 June 1968, the haunting issue for Etxebarrieta was how he and the public should view his killing—was it a revolutionary act or a vulgar murder? There was one thing that could demonstrate he was not a common killer—the *sacrifice* of his own life as a proof that he acted for his commitment to the big Other of the patriotic cause. Whether or not his obviously reckless

behavior could be construed as "suicide", the political and ethical justification of this inaugural killing and death demanded that it be deemed a revolutionary self-immolation. Etxebarrieta, who saw, as no one else did, the romantic trap of Unamuno's "tragic sense of life", became the paradigmatic figure whose killing and death ironically marked the birth of ETA's tragic period.

The new ETA, erected in the memory of Etxebarrieta's murder/martyrdom, required vengeance from his orphaned comrades. They assassinated a police officer known to be a torturer, Meliton Manzanas. Killing was now a revolutionary demand. ETA was no longer able to distinguish (with Benjamin) between "mythic violence" and "divine violence". Žižek explains: "It is mythical violence that demands sacrifice, and holds power over bare life, whereas divine violence is non-sacrificial and expiatory ... [it] serves no means, not even that of punishing the culprits and thus re-establishing the equilibrium of justice" (Žižek 2008, pp. 199–200). ETA and its followers thought that the premeditated killing of a policeman, to be followed by hundreds of similar killings in the future, was nothing but the logical conclusion of the revolutionary embrace of violence. After Etxebarrieta, it was too late to stop the cycle of human sacrifice. It would take nearly half a century to confront the defeat of such mythic violence.

#### **3. The House of the Father: Patricide, Masochism and the Superego**

Etxebarrieta's father died when he was thirteen. The Etxebarrieta family house was in the coastal Bizkaian town of Ispaster. After the war, his family house was turned into a Spanish police station (Lorenzo Espinosa 1996, p. 109). One can hardly think of a greater political offence for a nationalist family. The slogan that summed up the ETA generation's political ethos was the best-known line of the greatest post-war poet, Gabriel Aresti: "I will defend the house of my father". This was the father who had lost the war against fascism and, paradoxically, the sons of the new generation had to kill him first, before defending his house. The same Basque nationalist leaders who had been internationally lauded for their fight against fascism during the Spanish war had become, for ETA's generation, politically irrelevant in their Parisian exile—they were the impotent father who had sold his soul to bourgeois placidity. The Etxebarrieta brothers considered the gradualist approach and struggle of the older generation of nationalists a "crisis of adolescence" (Etxebarrieta 1999, p. 136).

In Txabi Etxebarrieta's essays, one particular writer is quoted and invoked prominently—Feodor Dostoyevsky, the author of the struggle between Christianity and faithlessness, crime and punishment, freedom and guilt. Etxebarrieta mentions each of the brothers Karamazov in his writings. What was fiction in Dostoyevsky's novels a century later became the vividly experienced reality for ETA's generation. But, in the case of *The Brothers Karamazov*, a novel that deeply impacted Etxebarrieta and other prominent Basque writers, one should pay attention to its central plot: it was the story of a patricide. Dostoyevsky put his finger on some of the core issues of Etxebarrieta's generation: the religious killing of their Christian Father, as well as the political killing of their vanquished fathers—patricides that filled them with an unconscious guilt that could only be redeemed by the masochistic passion of religious and political self-sacrifice.

Another author for whom patricide was at the center of his work was Freud. The myth put forward by Freud in *Totem and Taboo* describes a despot father who appropriates all the women of the tribe for himself and who is murdered and his body eaten by his sons. The sons feel remorse for the murder and establish a new order based on the two taboos of exogamy (against the incestuous possession of women) and totemism (against killing the totem animal that, while representing the father, establishes affiliation and can only be sacrificed to divinity). The paradigm of the Freudian sacrifice is "The totem meal", which is, for Freud, "the beginning of many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion" (Freud 1950, p. 142). Freud writes about sacrifice in relation to "civilization and its discontents"—the fact that civilization is based on controlling instinctive drives, a

renunciation sanctioned by religion as a sacrifice to divinity, and which is also, for Freud, the origin of neurosis.

Freud links the primal myth with the structure of Christianity, where "There can be no doubt that the original sin was one against God the Father" (Freud 1950, p. 154)—a myth that, as Lacan adds, "is the myth of a time for which God is dead", a God who "has never been the father except in the mythology of the son" (Lacan 1992, pp. 177, 307) who is commanded to love him. Freud uses this myth to state that, psychoanalytically, in the structure of the unconscious, the father function has to do with castration (in the son's rivalry for the mother's love) and with the origin of the superego. When asked his name, this God/Father responds in the Exodus, "I am who I am"—His name is The Name, and it is in the Name of the Father, turned superegoic after his death and by assuming his voice, that the subject speaks and acts (Lacan 2013, pp. 78–81). The first thing that the believer must do in the Name of the Father is the sacrifice of Isaac, so that the bond between father and son becomes binding.

The birth of Freudian psychoanalysis was related to the inevitable decline of paternal authority in modern societies (Roudinesco 2016, pp. 213–17, 284, 369). This is linked, in our case, to the theme of so-called "Basque Matriarchalism" (Ortiz-Osés 1980). In a nutshell, this was the proposition that women dominate the Basque household and, more relevantly, the Basque unconscious. Basque feminist anthropologists were strongly opposed to this thesis (Del Valle et al. 1985; Bullen 2003). The mediation of the maternal figure of God was prominent in the Marian version of Catholicism typical among Basques. Th structure of desire in such a religious complex is one of maternal sublimation and filial sacrifice. The cult of the Virgin Mother has elements of medieval courtly love in which the Lady operates as a mirror upon which the vassal projects his idealized wishes. What matters is the inaccessibility of the object by which the vassal turns what is an impossibility into a prohibition, the object of desire being the same condition that forbids its obtainment. Sacrifice goes hand in hand with the secret enjoyment of the love object. The male masochistic dream of sacrifice to an idealized woman is summed up by Deleuze in three words: "cold-maternal-severe", where cruelty is intimately related to the Ideal. The guilty masochist asks to be beaten, but for what crime? Deleuze suggests that "the formula of masochism is the humiliated father" (Deleuze 1989, pp. 51, 60–61). The masochist experiences the symbolic order (of religion, patriotism, the family) as a maternal order: it is the Mother who requires the Son's sacrifice. In this cultural configuration, which is constitutive of the ETA generation's subjectivity, masculinity is embodied in the role of the son, whereas femininity is projected onto the role of the mother. Sociologists and historians of ETA have underlined the prominence of mothers in the lives of their militant sons.

The link between the Freudian superego and the demand for sacrifice requires special consideration. The psychoanalytic literature has translated Kant's categorical imperative into the agency of the superego, which is never satisfied and which demands more sacrifice the more we sacrifice. Freud wrote in *Civilization and Its Discontents*: "The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is ... the same thing as the severity of the conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this way ... the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic super-ego" (Freud 1961, p. 100). The Christian superego commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is psychoanalytically "impossible to fulfil", which leads the therapist "for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we endeavor to lower its demands" (Freud 1961, pp. 107–8). Lacan called the superego's law of sacrifice a "dark God": "If the superego always demands more sacrifice, more work, this is because the ideal it sets in front of the subject is kept aloft by a loss that the subject is unable to put behind him. The superego attempts to mask the loss of the Other by posing as witness or reminder of that absolute satisfaction which can no longer be ours" (Copjec 2002, p. 46). Psychoanalysis is determined to expose the cruelty and otherness of this sadistic superego and to keep its distance from it.

In his study of such a "dark God" Lacan was greatly inspired by the Pauline dialectics between Law and desire: "The relationship between the Thing [i.e., sin] and the Law could not be better defined than in these terms ... It is only because of the Law that sin ... takes on an excessive, hyperbolic character. Freud's discovery—the ethics of psychoanalysis does it leave us clinging to that dialectic?" (Lacan 1992, pp. 83–84). Lacanian psychoanalysis is an affirmation that there is a way to relate to the Thing "somewhere beyond the law", which, in Žižek's commentary, is "the possibility of a relationship that avoids the pitfalls of the superego inculpation that accounts for the 'morbid' enjoyment of sin" (Žižek 1999, p. 153). Lacan's maxim, "don't give way on your desire", no longer refers to the desire involved in the morbid dialectic with Law, but to desire as equivalent to fulfilling your ethical duty. Entangled in the Pauline mutual involvement between Law and desire is the paradox of the superego, which enjoys pleasure in feeling guilty by producing "This perverse universe in which the ascetic who flagellates himself on behalf of the Law enjoys more intensely than the person who takes innocent pleasure in earthly delights—is what St Paul designates as 'the way of the Flesh' as opposed to 'the way of the Spirit': 'Flesh' is not flesh as opposed to the Law, but flesh as an excessive self-torturing, mortifying morbid fascination *begotten by the Law*" (Žižek 1999, p. 150). This morbid self-sacrifice was what repelled Nietzsche, who wrote: "Finally: what is left to be sacrificed? Did not one have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in a concealed harmony, in a future bliss and justice? Did one not to have to sacrifice God himself ... ? To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was reserved for the generation which is even now arising" (quoted in Keenan 2005, p. 60).

What one learns from Paul is that a true Christian life is not based on the superegoic prohibition and struggle for self-sacrifice, but on the affirmative prospect of *agape.* If sacrifice has a transcendental intention towards the superegoic Other who inaugurates the cycle of Law and desire, "*Agape*–as the sacrifice *of* the sacrifice of one's 'pathological' sinful desire to transgress the Law ... –is what St. Paul calls 'dying to the law'" (Keenan 2005, p. 130). Thus, Paul does not preach an economy of sacrifice that pays, in which one suffers in this world to get a reward in the other, as Nietzsche accused him; his agape is spontaneous work without expecting a reward, sacrifice that is not for a Cause but *for nothing*, after one has experienced, in Lacan's terms, "symbolic death" or "subjective destitution".

#### **4. Yoyes' Breakthrough: Unmasking the Forced Choice**

There was a militant in ETA who broke with the traditional male model of heroism— Yoyes, the nom-de-guerre of María Dolores González Cataraín, one of the teenage girls in the organization's early 1970s underground. She was forced into exile in 1974. By 1978, she held one of ETA's highest leadership positions. However, the following year she decided to abandon the armed organization and start a new life in Mexico, where she studied sociology and, in 1982, had a son. She returned to Paris in 1985 and then settled in Donostia-San Sebastián with her son and her partner. On 10 September 1986, while visiting her town during the Basque fiestas, she was shot and killed as a traitor by her former comrades in front of her three-year-old son.

With her decision to challenge ETA, Yoyes rejected the symbolic order of her own former militant identity as a condition of her autonomous ethics. Her alienation began with her realization of the machismo behind her ETA comrades' attitudes. She wrote in her diary that introducing feminist perspectives into the underground organization was a "most urgent task", adding, "What should I do for these men to understand and fully assume that women's liberation is a revolutionary priority?" Not only does she reject the machismo of her comrades, she is also afraid that it might infect her as well: "I don't want to become the woman who is accepted because men consider her in some way macho" (Garmendia Lasa et al. 1987, p. 57). When the organization repeatedly tried to lure her back to armed activism, she described their efforts as something akin to those of "a spurned husband abandoned by his wife" (Garmendia Lasa et al. 1987, p. 166). In her writings, Yoyes describes the radical

changes she experienced in the coordinates of her subjectivity. She had the unique courage to openly take the position that "in the modern ethical constellation ... one *suspends this exception of the Thing*: one bears witness to one's fidelity to the Thing by *sacrificing (also) the Thing itself* " (Žižek 2000, p. 154). In both her surrender to and then her overcoming of the ethics of martyrdom, Yoyes became ETA's most consequential member. She embodied the Kierkegaardian paradox of "being a martyr without the martyrdom associated with being a martyr" (Copjec 1999, p. 258).

Yoyes persevered in her new freedom until she was murdered. What Copjec wrote about Antigone applies to her: "Perseverance does not consist in the repetition of a 'pattern of behavior', but of the performance, in the face of enormous obstacles, of a creative act, and it results not in the preservation of the very core of her being—however wayward or perverse—but of its complete overturning. Antigone's perseverance is not indicated by her remaining rigidly the same, but by her *metamorphosis* at the moment of her encounter with the event of her brother's death and Creon's refusal to allow his burial" (Copjec 1999, p. 258). ETA's refusal to allow Yoyes' own desire to have a child and an ordinary family life turned her into an unyielding rebel, this time not in defiance of Spanish rule, but against her former comrades. She persevered by keeping the faith, not to a nationalist allegiance, but to an inner ethical core. Yoyes' drama was, as Butler wrote of Antigone, "a conflict internal to and constitutive of the operation of desire and, in particular, ethical desire" (Butler 2000, p. 47). By her decision to oppose ETA, Yoyes, who writes of a feeling of "entombment", made of herself, like Antigone, a figure "between two deaths". Yoyes' decision to disobey ETA shows her determination not to compromise her desire, even if this implied death. But, in the case of both Antigone and Yoyes, "Her 'criminal desire' is *not* the sacrifice for a cause (and therefore a desire mediated by one's alienation in/by the symbolic order), but rather the sacrifice of the sacrifice, which is a separation from the symbolic order" (Keenan 2005, p. 116).

It is hard to overestimate the breakthrough effected by Yoyes. Not only had she given herself entirely to the "terrorist" cause of Basque independence for a decade, but she also ended up sacrificing the Cause/Exception itself of her own fight. If Abraham had been willing to sacrifice his son for the sake of the big Other, Yoyes would not. Yoyes would become the first ETA militant to show that the glorification of the sacrificial hero was a *masculine* affair. "I don't like the business of heroism", she wrote in her diary. Begoña Aretxaga summed up best the conundrum posed by Yoyes to ETA: "Hero, traitor, martyr— Yoyes was everything that, from the cultural premises embedded in nationalist practice, a woman could not be. Moreover, Yoyes was a mother. In the nationalist context, the models of hero, traitor or martyr and the model of the mother are mutually exclusive. It is precisely, I believe, the synthesis of these models in the person of Yoyes which made her 'treason' much more unbearable than that of other ex-militants" (Aretxaga 2005, p. 158).

Yoyes not only lived for a decade by the axiom "Freedom or Death", but she also forced an evolution in that ultimate alternative by unmasking that ETA had corrupted the empowering revolutionary dilemma into a *forced choice*—the kind of choice faced by the mugger's alienating dilemma, "Your money or your life", where the alternative resides entirely in the realm of the Other. The radicalness of Yoyes' act consisted precisely in having transformed the understanding and reality of "freedom" and "death" in the revolutionary dilemma. From her beginning with ETA, "death" had intersected with "freedom" in the revolutionary domain, but later, for Yoyes, both terms collided in her own gendered being.

Lacan paid closed attention to the structure of such a "forced choice". He wrote: "*Your freedom or your life*! If he chooses freedom, he loses both immediately—if he chooses life, he has life deprived of freedom" (Lacan 1998, p. 212). Only in theory can you choose one of the alternatives, in reality if you want to preserve your freedom of choice you can only choose one of the two, for in "*freedom or death*!, the only proof of freedom that you can have in the conditions laid out before you is precisely to choose death, for there, you know that you have freedom of choice" (Lacan 1998, p. 213). The structure of the "forced choice", by which one "chooses" what is already given, a choice in which only one alternative is valid, when the subject is forced to make the "empty gesture" of choosing as his own what is already there, "*is* the symbolization of the Real, the inscription of the Real into the symbolic order" (Keenan 2005, p. 112).

As Yoyes resexualized her life and rejected ETA's forced choice, the fusion of love and death took on a different dynamic. She wrote in her diary: "'To be ready to give your life' cannot mean 'to be ready to surrender your life to the enemy,' they are two totally different things, I would say they are opposed" (Garmendia Lasa et al. 1987, p. 68). In the revolutionary alternative, the meaning of "death" could be read literally in biological terms. But for the post-ETA Yoyes, the meaning of death is rather the psychoanalytic notion of the "death drive", which is not opposed to the "life drive", but rather both drives emerge from the same erotic core. When Yoyes decides to resexualize her life by giving priority to having her son, the fusion of love and death takes on a different dynamic. In her new life, death will keep intersecting her subjectivity, but only in terms of the "death drive", not biological sacrificial death. The ethical act by which Yoyes changes the coordinates of the sacrificial politics of ETA is summed up in the transformation of the "freedom or death" alternative, which she rescues from the mugger's forced choice under the threat of physical death to a death drive that is fully eroticized in a corporeal manner, culminating in an intersection that allows for a free choice to be made by the ethical actor.

In psychoanalysis, the forced choice is tied of to the formation of the big Other. It took the historic rupture of Yoyes to see the link between ETA as the big Other of Basque politics and to lead others to rebel against the turning of its revolutionary alternative into a forced choice. Yoyes' breakthrough meant that she came to see the unconscious link between the political superego, male symbolic castration, and the need for sacrifice. "Symbolic castration" is the psychoanalytic name for "the loss of the Real" upon the emergence of the subject into the symbolic order, the sacrifice of the incestuous Thing at the origin of individual consciousness; it is also the name for the price one has to pay when one is acting not in one's own name, but in the name of a superior Other that one embodies. Lacan described with the distinction between "feminine" and "masculine" modes of subjectivity regarding the "phallic function". He concluded that there is, on the female side, a fundamental undecidability, referred to as "not-all" (not all of her is subject to the phallic rule), whereas, on the male side, all of man is subject to such a rule. The "feminine" subjectivity relies on an ontological definition of being plural and partial; woman does not form an "all"; "she is not susceptible to the threat of castration" (Copjec 2002, p. 35). Lacan's conclusion was that the castrated one is not the woman, as Freud thought, but it is the man who is completely dependent on the phallic signifier and therefore more frequently subjected to symbolic castration. The prohibition of the Father, on the other hand, inaugurates the domain of the superego—the internalization of ideals fashioned by society. The superego is, for Lacan, "a correlate of castration" (Lacan 1999, p. 7). In the original scenario of castration, the boy, not the girl, is subjected to the father's prohibition. Castration is enacted for boys as a prohibition that comes from a "beyond"—the law that inaugurates the superego. It is this cruel superego that is always thirsty for sacrifice and that affects masculinity in particular. ("Feminine" and "masculine" are not substantive gendered realities nor are they trapped in any binary logic, rather they involve two subjective modalities).

The historic rupture brought about by Yoyes consisted of traversing through the unconscious links between symbolic male castration, its political superego, and the need for sacrifice. In ETA, Yoyes had become "the man" by imposing a different subjectivity. She was the one who showed her comrades, who had defined themselves as Guernica's victims, the transposition by which they had turned into executioners themselves. Like Antigone, Yoyes "is *destined to overturn her fate through her act*" (Copjec 2002, p. 45). The same ETA militants who assassinated her would soon embrace Yoyes' positions and call for an end to sacrificial politics. After the Yoyes event, ETA could no longer be the same. Yoyes had sacrificed sacrifice.

#### **5. From Antigone to Sygne: Yoyes at the Window**

Antigone's fate took place in a context of tyranny, one in which the individual lacks the possibility of choosing because the master has chosen for her. Etxebarrieta's commitment found its fate in a situation of modern military dictatorship, and so did Yoyes when she made her decision to join the underground in the early 1970s. But when military tyranny was replaced by democracy in Spain after Franco's death in 1975, thanks to Yoyes, the coordinates of the armed struggle changed. In the ensuing debate within ETA as to how to proceed, she found herself alienated from her organization. Until then, she had embodied Antigone's unflinching rejection of the Spanish dictatorship. But with the change in the political context, should Antigone continue to be her unique model?

The fate of Antigone has been contrasted with that of another modern heroine, Paul Claudel's Sygne de Coûfontaine in *L'Otage*. Sygne's fate occurs in modern France during the revolutionary period that haunts the Ancient Regime. Sygne is forced to choose between marrying the executioner of her family, the loathsome Turelure, and making him the Lord of Coûfontaine, or being arrested in the company of Georges (the cousin to whom she has sworn eternal love) and the Pope (who is hiding at home after escaping from French captivity). After talking to her confessor, the devout Sygne marries Turelure for the sake of saving her noble House and the Pope. She bears him a son. Later on, as her cousin is about to fire a bullet at Turelure, Sygne jumps to shield her husband and receives the fatal shot; Turelure asks from Sygne a sign to give some meaning to her suicidal act of saving his life, not out of love for him but just to save the family name; she refuses a final pardon and reconciliation, her only expression a compulsive tic in her lips signaling a "no". So, in the end, Sygne sacrifices even her own religious principles of love and forgiveness, for which, until then, she had been willing to sacrifice everything else. Several commentators, following Lacan, see in this sacrifice *the exception* of what can be sacrificed as a paradigm of the true ethical act. While Antigone transgressed the laws of the city and died a sublime heroine, Sygne dies in abjection with no cause and no pride left.

Alenka Zupancic writes about Sygne's choice: "terror presents itself in those situations where the only way you can choose A is by choosing its negation, non-A; the only way the subject can stay true to her Cause is by betraying it, *by sacrificing to it the very thing which drives her to make this sacrifice*. It is this paradoxical logic which allows subjectivation to coincide here with the 'destitution' of the subject" (Zupancic 2000, p. 216). Something similar applies to Yoyes: after experiencing that the revolutionary alternative "freedom or death!" had turned into a forced choice, she can only stay true to the Cause of freedom by betraying its initial revolutionary slogan, by sacrificing to freedom the very revolutionary ideal that drove her to make the sacrifice of her life.

A paradigmatic case of the terror of forced choice is William Styron's novel, made into the film *Sophie's Choice*, in which Sophie, as she arrives in Auschwitz with her two children, is forced by the German officer to choose who of the two children will be saved and who will go to the gas chamber: "Sophie loses more than a child ... she must sacrifice something more than anything she *has* ... she has to sacrifice what she *is*, her being which determines her beyond life and death" (Zupancic 2000, pp. 214–15).

Signe's final "no" before dying signals that she did not give up her desire, for "it is characteristic of the logic of desire itself to have as its ultimate horizon the sacrifice of the very thing in the name of which Sygne is ready to sacrifice everything" (Zupancic 2000, p. 229). This was the negation of negation, the multiple sacrifice of sacrifice. That final negation was only possible after her initial choice; the confessor did not ask her to love Turelure, only to marry him to save the Pope in an act that can be seen as religious but that did not prevent her from not giving up her desire beyond desire. From the time of her forced choice, Sygne surrenders the life she *has* and the honor she *is*, but at her last breath she still refuses to disappear and denies any divine sublimity of a final reconciliation. This is the moment of "pure desire", which "can be defined as the moment when the only way for the subject not to give up on her desire is to sacrifice the very Cause of her desire, its absolute condition ... pure desire can be defined as the moment at which desire is

forced to say for its own Cause (for its absolute condition): 'That's not It'. This means that the moment of pure desire is, paradoxically, the very moment at which desire loses the foundation of its purity" (Zupancic 2000, p. 244). After a decade of underground militancy, Yoyes found herself protesting at her comrades in arms: "That's not it!"

The trouble with Antigone's type of ethics of desire is the role fantasy plays in it. Since "desire is nothing but that which introduces into the subject's universe an incommensurable or infinite measure", from such a perspective, "to realize one's desire means to realize, to 'measure' the infinite, the infinite measure" (Zupancic 2000, p. 251). The infiniteness of desire is of a negative magnitude in that it has no end—which is Hegel's "bad infinite". This type of desire lacks any temporal dimension, it is ruled ultimately by fantasy, it has no capacity to frame the fantasy from which one can contemplate the spectacle of one's actions. Despite all her sublime beauty, and even if "it might seem paradoxical", we could "link the figure of Antigone to the 'logic of fantasy' in this way" (Zupancic 2000, p. 253). She is unable to experience any feeling of the sublime in her suicidal action because she has no frame to impose on her fantasy, she is inside it—as Lacan put it, "from Antigone's point of view life ... can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side" (Lacan 1992, p. 280). In this regard, "the ethics of desire *is* the ethics of fantasy ... : we cannot deny all ethical dignity to someone who is ready to die (and to kill) in order to realize his or her fantasy" (Zupancic 2000, p. 254). We call these "anachronistic" people terrorists, fundamentalists, and madmen. We all have our fantasies but prefer not to realize them.

Etxebarrieta, not Yoyes, was Antigone. The words of protest by the Chorus against Antigone, in Žižek's play *Antigone*, apply to Etxebarrieta: "the greatest wisdom is to know when this very fidelity [to what can and cannot be said] compels us to break our word, even if this word is the highest immemorial law. This is where you went wrong, Antigone. In sacrificing everything for your law, you lost this law itself". Antigone replies: "I just stood for justice, whatever the costs. How can this be wrong?" Chorus: "We see how dedicated you are to your Cause, ready to sacrifice everything for it. But wisdom tells us that, sometimes, when you forsake everything for your Cause, what you lose is the Cause itself, so all your sacrifices were in vain, for nothing. Then you end up not as a noble hero but as an abject whose place is neither with the living nor with the dead, but in the uncanny in-between where monsters abide that our mind cannot even contemplate" (Žižek 2016, pp. 23–24).

Yoyes' diaries were published with the title "Yoyes from her window", displaying a photo of her at a window on the cover: the window was the metonym for her attempt at creating a new life for herself by putting a frame on her fantasy and desire. She was at the window watching the equivalent of a horror movie unfolding in front of her eyes after she returned with her son and partner to a civilian life. How could she show her comrades and the Basque public that what she needed was to go beyond the ethics of fantasy? Framing was necessary to see the change in the status of knowledge throughout the history of ETA. If Etxebarrieta's initial ETA, as a blind Oedipus, did not know where his choice for martyrdom would lead the organization, after democracy and years of armed militancy, Yoyes, like Sygne, was like "an Oedipus who knows" (Zupancic 2000, p. 256). A change in the symbolic constellations had taken place: not only was the big Other of Franco dead, but, after the transition to democracy during the late 1970s, ETA itself, the big Other of the Basque resistance to fascism, had lost its raison d'être and turned itself, for most Basques, into an anachronistic remnant of Francoism. Yoyes' historic role was to show that ETA, as the big Other, was dead and that the symbolic debt owed to the Cause embodied by ETA had lost its unconditional value. There was no sublime heroism a la Antigone for Yoyes; she was, instead, like Sygne, who sacrificed even the ground for her Cause.

#### **6. Conclusion: The Sacrifice of Sacrifice**

The theme of the sacrifice of sacrifice has been studied among others, in the wake of the work of Hegel and Nietzsche, by Lacan, Derrida, and Žižek, and by Kierkegaard, Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Kristeva, and Irigarai. Following the Hegelian logic of "the negation of negation", the sacrifice of sacrifice is, for these authors, an authentic ethical act. It is a topic that has become pivotal for any assessment of historical processes, such as the one I am attempting here. There was nothing harder and more consequential for many of my own post-war Basque generation than such a sacrifice of sacrifice in the various domains of religion, politics, sex, or militant culture in general. As many were forced to sacrifice religion in order to keep its ethical core alive, the Basque radical Left also finally found the courage to "sacrifice" ETA for the sake of keeping their fidelity to the political project that gave birth to it.

The Hegelian dialectical system has been caricaturized as a progression from thesis and antithesis to synthesis, but the second negation is not a mere synthesis of the opposites but rather a more radical negation that negates the first symbolic position. There is no simple progression or succession between the two negations; according to Hegel, "the very initial immediacy is always-already 'posited' retroactively, so that its emergence *coincides with its loss*" (Žižek 2002, p. 167; also v Žižek 2012, pp. 292–304). In other words, "negation is itself negated; sacrifice is itself sacrificed. Essence 'is' *nothing but* redoubled reflection, *nothing but* radical negativity, *nothing but* radical sacrifice that cannot not be (dis)embodied in 'appearance'" (Keenan 2005, p. 106). In the move from the first negation to the second "negation of negation", there is a change from the objective to the subjective—in the second stage, the subject, who sees the results of his own position, includes himself in the process. Objectively, the "crucifixión" marks the death of God and there can be no more extreme negation, but, in its double negation, it turns into the space of subjective freedom—Christ's death turns into "the death of death".

The Hegelian logic by which the subject posits his/her own ground in a redoubled negation is echoed in the basic psychoanalytic experience of knowledge through misrecognition, where truth is produced through the structural illusion of transference. The subject has to first be deceived by the call of the Other before recognizing its inexistence, what leads to the experience of "subjective destitution". Thus, Job had nothing to complain about, what happens to him is nothing exceptional, there is no secret meaning to it, unless the secret is God's own impotence. What self-relating negativity demands from Job is not only to accept the utter despair of the complete loss that has befallen him, but also to get rid of the loss itself ("the loss of the loss") in the sense of not expecting to regain any of the losses, but finding "a radical void after losing the very coordinates which made the loss meaningful" (Žižek 2012, p. 478).

In the case of ETA, it was the sacrificial model of the Crucified that its own public perceived from the very beginning (Zulaika 1988). This sacrificial duty inherited from the Abrahamic religious traditions is the one described by Derrida as "the gift of Death" (Derrida 1995). "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for a friend" (John 15:13). From Plato's Socrates to Heidegger, at the very heart of Western thought resides the idea that willingness to surrender your life for someone else's sake is a supreme expression of love and freedom, the ultimate triumph of life. Derrida sees the history of the West grounded on such a measureless principle, including the commandment to give and take human life as something imposed by modern states on their citzens. This is, in short, what Kierkegaard reads into the story of Abraham: the ultimate duty and aporia of responsibility, as well as the ultimate mockery of ethics, is human sacrifice. Derrida insists that the sacrifice of Isaac cannot be erased from the tradition of the three Abrahamic religions. This is the Christian *mysterium tremendum*, Kierkegaard's "fear and trembling" when confronted with the experience of life as sacrifice. What does it mean to "give yourself death", to be responsible for it, to accept the gift of death for another as Socrates, Christ and so many others did? Derrida debates these issues while he examines the founding position of sacrifice has in the thought of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and other thinkers. One can die for someone but not instead of someone else. In such a philosophical tradition that begins partly with Kant and Hegel, a thought that "repeats" the possibility of religion

without religion, the logic of sacrifice becomes concrete in that all death is in the end is a donation; thus, death also brings life, a notion confirmed by world ethnography.

But there is one lesson Derrida cannot avoid drawing from Abraham: "[W]hat does Abraham teach us, in his approach to sacrifice?" Derrida asks before replying: "That far from ensuring responsibility, the generality of ethics incites to irresponsibility" (Derrida 1995, p. 61). For Abraham, writes Kierkegaard, "the ethical is the temptation" (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 115). He overrides his ethical responsibility towards his son by feeling bound to another absolute responsibility, which is inconceivable, and about which Abraham cannot speak. The absurdity of using the notions of responsibility and duty to justify arbitrary murder turn the story of Abraham towards the conceptual limits of paradox, scandal and aporia, for "Abraham is faithful to God only in his absolute treachery" (Derrida 1995, p. 68). While the religious expression of his action is *sacrifice*, the ethical expression is no other than *murder*. "Abraham is therefore at no instant a tragic hero", Kierkegaard concluded, "but something quite different, either a murderer or a believer" (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 67). The problem with this Kierkegaardian logic in the domain of politics is that it is a bottomless abyss that would never reach the end of murder.

For Nietzsche, this sacrificial *hubris* was the "stroke of genius called Christianity". This is an economy, concludes Derrida, that is taken "to its excess in the sacrifice of Christ for love of the debtor; it involves the same economy of sacrifice, the same sacrifice of sacrifice" (Derrida 1995, p. 114). One must sacrifice calculated sacrifice (the one looking for reward or recognition) to preserve true sacrifice, as such. This leads, ultimately, to the double bind of religion, in that it "*both requires and excludes sacrifice*" (Derrida quoted in Keenan 2005, p. 158), in that it requires a sacrifice of sacrifice. Keenan sums up Derrida's position towards religion thus: "Bearing witness to the infinite transcendence of what is worth more than life [which] requires, therefore, not only a sacrifice in the name of transcendence, but also a sacrificing of transcendence ... [which] is a sacrificing of that in the name of which one sacrifices, which is a sacrificing of the very reason of sacrifice, insofar as sacrifice involves a transcendental intention. A sacrificing of transcendence is, therefore, a sacrificing of sacrifice" (Keenan 2005, p. 158).

Basque nationalism is no exception to the psychoanalytical truism that loss is constitutive of the subject; what demands perennial sacrifice is the effort to regain the lost liberties, laws and sovereignty of the past. ETA was fueled by such centuries-old loss, tragically reenacted most recently in Guernica. In the militant actor's subjective economy, sacrificial exchange for the freedom of the country was nothing but the dutiful thing to do. It was always doubtful that this sacrificial exchange would achieve its ultimate goal of erasing the original loss. But even if this was not the case, there was a basic factor that made the sacrifice necessary, namely to ascertain the existence of some Other out there. Suffering and defeat had a purpose and an explanation with ETA; without it, the world was a blind piece of machinery ruled by chance. "The sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other that I call here *the dark God*", wrote Lacan (1998, p. 275). Beyond affirming the existence of the big Other, the subject offers his/her sacrifice "to fill in the lack *in the Other*, to sustain the appearance of the Other's omnipotence or, at least, consistency" (Žižek 2001, p. 70). Sacrificing sacrifice meant, for those who had formed their basic political identity around ETA, that the world became meaningless as they had to give up what granted consistency to it.

The lesson to be learned by ETA's generation is the one that derives from psychoanalysis, whose aim "is not to enable the subject to assume the necessary sacrifice (to 'accept symbolic castration', etc.) ... but to *resist* the terrible attraction of sacrifice—attraction which, of course, is none other than that of the superego. Sacrifice is ultimately the gesture by means of which we aim at compensating the guilt imposed by the impossible superego injunction" (Žižek 2001, p. 74). Exorcising the passion for sacrifice has been the hardest subjective task for many of the ETA generation.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** This paper has benefitted from the insightful comments of Josetxo Beriain and an anonymous reviewer.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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