Recurrence on sacrifice functions within the political discourse as a kind of rhetorical empowerment, while in anthropology and theology the cultic sacrifice is permanently described and affirmed as the source of all culture. Both interpretations offer a universal explanation, though merely indicating recurrent history oblivion by withholding the complex interdependence of the two aspects of sacrifice: the ritual sacrifice and the sacrificed victim.

The study analyses the victim/sacrifice, tracking the path from the 17th to the 20th century when the notion sacrifice became intrinsic to practical and discursive strategies of (pre-) occupation. It examines the archaeology of those programmes, which were instigated by the concern on the two >bodies of the king<.
Police enforcement and educational programmes strengthened the agenda and measures in insurance and compensation structures assured its efficiency.
The transposition of the sovereign’s concern into a model of police organization of preventive action produces and preserves the purity of Volksgemeinschaft. It therefore only just generates what it was meant to represent and provide for.

Last but not least Wolf reads the phantasm of sacrifice as resulting from a particular modern project: the sovereign’s concern for the validity of the alliance between poetry and human science, literature and anthropology.






Dr. Burkhardt Wolf (*1969) holds a postdoctoral position at the Graduate College “Codierung von Gewalt im medialen Wandel” in Berlin. He has held positions at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin and at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar in the Department of Media Studies. Wolf has widely published on German literature, the history of media, film studies and other subjects.

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