In Mystic Suprematism, painted in the early 1920s by the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich, a tilted black cruciform is hammered on an asymmetrical red oval. Despite evoking a striking contrast, the two shapes harmoniously come together. Malevich’s treatment of mysticism and geometry is remarkable, specifically when interpreted in relation to sacrifice. The cross is pushed to the limits of abstraction, yet the intensity of sacrifice remains viscerally present. The cross is delimited by razor sharp corners and edges, almost lethal. While not bloody, it is nailed onto an oval pool of dark, abyssal red.
The rational abstraction, by means of meticulous geometry, purifies sacrifice from any instrumental associations. It fuses the temporal with the divine. Sacrifice is sublated and restored to its sacred, universal essence.
Marxism, often taken to be a rationalist theory of history, is rarely associated with sacrifice. Nevertheless, as in other sociocultural creeds, sacrificial logic configures Marxism. Throughout the phases of revolution and socialism, the working class sacrifices itself, and sacrifices the bourgeois enemy, to bring about the communist divine/earthly kingdom of absolute surplus and equality. However, instrumentalized sacrifice may degenerate into catastrophic violence, violence that reproduces the profanity communism sought to eradicate.
Walter Benjamin illuminates a path that redeems the dynamics of emancipation from this predicament, as he gestures toward a pure sacrificial ethos, devoid of the crude profanities of teleology.
A Teleological Deadlock
Classical Marxism carries teleological motifs: history progresses in stages toward an end. Class struggle is the engine of a history divided into phases defined by relations of production and modes of production. In capitalism, antagonisms intensify, leading to a revolution overthrowing the capitalist order, just as earlier systems collapsed. Workers will then inaugurate the transitionary dictatorship of the proletariat (socialism), preparing society for the classless and stateless communist goal. This rough outline summarizes scattered ideas found in Marx’s and Engels’ writings which are echoed by later Marxists.
The role of violence in the Marxist narrative is ambivalent. Marx and Engels at times imply the possibility of peaceful means of transitioning toward communism while on other occasions they insinuate that violence is essential. Nevertheless, in the Communist Manifesto, force appears to be inevitable in the battle between “two great hostile camps.”
The Marxist teleology stipulates two discharges of violence, closely coiled with sacrifice.
The first is sacrificing the bourgeois other. This is embedded in the revolutionary struggle against capitalism and the socialist state’s fight against counterrevolution.
The second violent emission is inflicted on the working class and requires that class’s self-sacrifice. As Marx emphasizes, “It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come … it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory.” Marx also defended the communards’ burnings of Paris during the Paris Commune, describing their acts as “heroic self-holocaust.”
To grasp the logic and functions underlying these Marxist sacrifices, I turn to the accounts of sacrifice offered by René Girard and Georges Bataille.
Sacrifice: The Instrumental and the Glorious
Girard regards violence as an essential element of sociocultural life. He argues that “violence is not to be denied, but it can be diverted to another object.” This violence emanates from mimetic desire. Our desire toward an object is provoked by the other’s desire towards the same object. The result is intractable rivalries and cycles of violence. Ignorance of this dynamic leads to the collapse of social order.
According to Girard, humanity devised sacrifices to pacify the violence of mimetic desire, although only temporarily. Communities search for a human scapegoat to blame for catastrophes and conflicts, directing their violent impulses to the victim and thereby restoring stability.
Girard’s sacrifice is utilitarian. It functions to restore social order. Conversely, Bataille’s notion of sacrifice in The Accursed Share and Theory of Religion refuses to reduce sacrifice through utility. Bataille argues that organisms and systems depend on energy (or wealth) to grow. Every system fails to absorb all energy due to its limited capacity for growth, resulting in unused excess. However, excess energy “must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.”
According to the capitalist rationale, excess expended without profit is unthinkable. Therefore, surplus wealth is diverted toward the “rational extension of a difficult industrial growth, or into unproductive works,” resulting in the catastrophe of war.
Bataille renounces these utilitarian principals of capitalism which culminate in catastrophes. Rather, he endorses the glorious expenditure of abundance through pure sacrifice. Such sacrifice establishes communication between the profane world and the sacred realm. A victim of sacrifice is “surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth … in order to be consumed profitlessly.” Anti-utilitarian sacrifice “destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice.”
A Profane-Sacred Predicament
Reading Marxism through Girard and Bataille sheds new light on its sacrificial dimension. The Marxist struggle against capitalism, through revolution and socialism, positions sacrifice in a utilitarian role. Marxism condenses all worldly evil and wickedness into a bourgeois enemy, rerouting and releasing the working class’s violent inclinations toward the capitalist other and eventually stabilizing the social order of the proletariats.
Yet, there is a non-instrumental sacrificial element in the Marxist telos. Communism is a society of abundance where capitalist utility becomes non-existent. Communism here desires transcendence, embracing the superabundance of energy beyond the constraints of the restricted economy. In communism, pure sacrifice becomes actualizable and normalized in perpetuity. Additionally, as Marxism incites the self-sacrificial spirit among the working class, it withdraws victims from the useful mass of the proletariat, removing them from the capitalist profane.
Attending to sacrifice reveals important features of the socialist transition. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx asserts that socialism is necessary because the emergence of a new society requires eliminating capitalism’s moral, economic, and intellectual imprints. Another component of sacrifice appears in this Socialist quest for the gradual sanctification of society from the remnants of capitalism. Revolutionary activity stimulates and invigorates the spirit of self-sacrifice in a way that gradually withers away capitalism’s ideological tenets. Capitalism esteems self-interested subjects and encourages directing superabundance toward utilitarian expenditure and profit-making. The pre-communist sacrifices nurture the principals of altruism and communalism, in preparation for the world to come.
Ultimately, communism is the ideal condition of human flourishing in which pure sacrifice is enabled. Nonetheless, this goal remains a telos instrumentalizing various sacrifices. Or in other words, Marxism aims at attaining a non-instrumental telos through instrumental sacrifices.
The problems that follow from such a commitment are apparent in the socialist experiences of the twentieth century: the goal of communism was distant, and humans became subservient to its realization. Socialist states reduced individuals and groups to disposable means for pursuing the supreme goal of history. Utilitarian sacrificial violence intensified to articulate in concentration camps, totalitarian rule, and wars. Society became entrapped within instrumental socialist expenditure. The Socialist states eventually drifted toward replicating the catastrophic utilitarian rationale of capitalism.
Benjamin and the Theology of Pure Sacrifice
Benjamin may have provided the foundations for potential resolution. In his “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin critiques the mythic violence of the state and capitalism. Mythic violence threatens, “inculpates,” and “expiates,” operating within a framework of boundary establishment and “law-positing”. In contrast, Benjamin proposes a notion of divine violence which “de-expiates,” strikes without threatening, and “lethal in a bloodless manner,” as in the biblical judgment on Korah’s horde. Divine violence intervenes to boundlessly annihilate the boundaries and laws of domination.
As Benjamin affirms, “Mythic violence is blood-violence over mere life for the sake of violence itself; divine violence is pure violence over all of life for the sake of the living. The former demands sacrifice; the latter assumes it.” Mythic violence is instrumental, it establishes and extends domination, inflicted on the living and forcefully commands sacrifice. Alternatively, divine violence is pure, holding dominion over all life. Its sacrificial activity is taken as given and voluntary, and it is welcomed.
Benjamin’s divine violence is pure means, destroying hegemonic unjust structures while not aiming to posit utopian ends for the future. As Werner Hamacher argues, Benjamin’s thought is open-ended, irreducible to teleology or instrumentalism. And as Hamacher suggests, Benjamin’s title of a lost essay, “Teleology without End,” resonates in its paradox with his conception of pure means.
Benjamin’s later works persist in opposing teleology. In Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin locates the messianic task in redeeming past oppression and arresting catastrophic progress. He recalls the Jewish tradition of remembrance and the prohibition on “investigating the future.” These sources transform “every second” into “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”
Benjamin attacks democratic socialism (i.e., the belief in progressive incremental reform) for tasking the working class with redeeming the future instead of redeeming past oppressions, arguing that democratic socialism conveys deterministic rationale. The notion of progress persuaded the proletarians to believe that their condition will inevitably improve — ultimately undermining revolutionary action. Such a commitment to progress “made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice,” a spirit that is properly “nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”
Here, Benjamin does not only charge democratic socialism with enfeebling the sacrificial impulse, but he also patently reveres the spirit of sacrifice. Yet, Benjamin’s sacrifice is messianic, not prompted by a telos. It is activated by the sacrifices of enslaved ancestors, to suddenly strike the homogeneity of history, at all times and at every instance.
Toward a divine sacrifice without end
An instrumental sacrificial reason is woven into the Marxist teleology. Accordingly, instead of realizing the promised conditions in which the social aligns and amalgamates with the sacred, orthodox Marxism entraps the emancipatory ethos within the estranged profane.
Benjamin liberates Marxism from the deadlock of utilitarianism and sacrifice. He lays the foundations for an emancipatory sacrificial disposition that detonates the historical continuum and renders time a permanent divine calendar. Every second, and every point, turns into a vessel of possibility, an active locus for the pure sacrifice to flare.
