Bodies that Give: Sacrifice Beyond Metaphysics
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Katerina Koci
and
Esther Heinrich Ramharter
In the wake of the twentieth century’s unprecedented violence, the concept of sacrifice has taken on new and urgent meaning. As millions of bodies perished in world wars and countless conflicts, philosophers, theologians, artists, and psychoanalysts have grappled with fundamental questions: What does it mean to give one’s physical self for another? How is sacrifice embodied in different contexts such as ritual, art, war, or motherhood? These questions remain painfully relevant in our own time, as we continue to witness the corporeal toll of human conflict across the globe.
The discourse on sacrifice reveals a profound tension between metaphysical interpretations and embodied experience. While philosophical traditions often frame sacrifice in abstract terms of gift and exchange, the reality of sacrifice is invariably physical and embodied. Whether in religious ritual, artistic representation, or the intimate sacrifice of maternal bodies, sacrifice always involves the flesh. This collection moves beyond metaphysics by grounding sacrifice in the materiality of the body, exploring how bodies that give shape both individual experience and collective meaning.
The term “sacrifice” itself derives from the Latin sacrum facere – to make sacred. At its most basic level, sacrifice involves the transfer of something from the profane world to the sacred realm through an act of bodily destruction or transformation. As anthropological studies reveal, sacrifice is fundamentally a bodily practice, one that transforms physical matter through ritual action. The papers in this issue examine how different cultural and religious traditions understand this transformation, paying particular attention to the role of the body in sacrificial rites.
The Hebrew Bible offers profound insights into sacrifice through its maternal narratives, particularly in the intertwined stories of Sarah and Hagar. These accounts reveal complex structures of surrogate motherhood and sacrificial bodies, questions of power and victimhood, where women’s reproductive capacity becomes both gift and burden to serve the patriarchal power structures. The Sarah-Hagar narrative presents motherhood itself as a site of sacrifice, where bodies are given, shared, and sometimes destroyed in service of patriarchal and divine imperatives. This dynamic extends beyond individual stories to illuminate broader patterns of maternal sacrifice in religious and cultural traditions, where women’s bodies frequently become vessels of both creation and destruction.
The artistic representation of sacrifice offers a unique window into how modern culture visualizes and processes sacrificial acts. Barnett Newman’s “Abraham” (1949) radically reimagines the archetypal biblical sacrifice through abstract expressionism. The painting’s dominant vertical band, or “zip,” divides the canvas into two realms, suggesting both the moment of divine intervention and the threshold between the sacred and profane. Through this abstract vocabulary, Newman captures not just the narrative of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac but the existential tension inherent in all sacrificial acts. In stark contrast, Andrey Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice” (1986) explores sacrifice through concrete imagery and embodied ritual. Where Newman abstracts the sacrificial moment into pure form, Tarkovsky grounds it in physical gesture and temporal duration, presenting the protagonist’s sacrifice not as spiritual abstraction but as deeply physical ritual. Margaret Atwood’s novels further complicate this artistic discourse by revealing how sacrificial practices perpetuate gendered power structures, particularly through the ritualized control of women’s bodies and reproductive capacity. Her narratives expose how patriarchal societies transform women’s bodies into sites of sacrifice, where individual autonomy is surrendered to maintain social and religious order. Together, these works reveal how the sacrificed body becomes both medium and message in modern artistic discourse.
The philosophical and psychoanalytic understanding of sacrifice is powerfully expanded by Georges Bataille’s, Jacques Lacan’s, and Carl Gustav Jung’s distinctive interpretations. For Bataille, sacrifice represents the supreme moment of excess and transgression, where the boundaries between sacred and profane collapse through the destruction of utility and meaning. Lacan illuminates sacrifice’s psychological function through his theory of symbolic order and desire, offering ways to understand how sacrificial acts mediate between body and symbol. Jung extends this understanding into Christian theology, seeing Christ’s sacrifice as the supreme symbol of individuation where the ego’s sacrifice enables communion with the divine Self. For Jung, this transforms Lacan’s “lack” into spiritual fulfilment through the sacrificial body of Christ, offering a redemptive reading of psychoanalytic insights.
Comparative religious studies reveal how sacrificial practices across ancient traditions fundamentally oppose natural forms of continuity like childbirth and motherhood. As Nancy Jay demonstrates, sacrifice emerges as a distinctly patriarchal ritual that aims to transcend and control biological reproduction through culturally sanctioned bloodshed. In ancient Mediterranean religions and early Christianity, sacrificial rites served to establish male-controlled religious authority, deliberately superseding women’s natural creative power. The body thus becomes a contested site where patriarchal religious systems attempt to overcome and replace maternal forms of generational continuity through ritualized violence.
This gendered dimension of sacrifice reveals its intrinsically darker aspects. While motherhood represents a natural form of giving life through the body, patriarchal sacrifice demands the destruction of bodies to establish social and religious power. This dynamic continues to shape how sacrifice is understood and deployed, often serving to justify violence in the name of higher cultural or religious ideals.
What emerges from these diverse perspectives is a complex picture of sacrifice as both metaphysical and physical, both symbolic and brutally real. The papers collected here examine this complexity through various disciplinary lenses, from art history to psychoanalysis, from anthropology to religious studies. Together, they suggest that any adequate theory of sacrifice must account for both its bodily reality and its metaphysical significance.
This collection invites readers to consider how bodies that give shape human experience across cultures and contexts. By bringing together diverse perspectives on sacrifice and embodiment, it opens new pathways for understanding sacrifice beyond purely philosophical or theological frameworks, always grounded in the fundamental reality of human embodiment.
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Funding information: The editorial work on this special issue was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 10.55776/V10.47.
© 2024 the author(s), published by De Gruyter
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles in the same Issue
- Special issue: Sacrifice and the Body: Explorations beyond Metaphysics, edited by Katerina Koci (Institute for Human Sciences and University of Vienna, Austria) and Esther Heinrich-Ramharter (University of Vienna, Austria)
- Bodies that Give: Sacrifice Beyond Metaphysics
- Sacrifice and Natality: Surrogacy Structures
- Putting on Sarah’s Skin: Victim Identity in the Abrahamic Stories and Beyond
- The Impossibility of Representing the Sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac in Barnett Newman’s Painting
- Sacrifice as Necessity and the Ascetic Principle of Filmmaking: Andrei Tarkovsky Reconsidered
- “The Remedy for a World Without Transcendence”: Georges Bataille on Sacrifice and the Theology of Transgression
- Beyond the Sacrificial Fantasy: Body, Law, and Desire
- Blood Lines: Biopolitics, Patriarchy, Myth
- Special issue: Inductive Theology: How Systematic Theologies Can Relate to Everyday Life, edited by Lea Chilian (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Frederike van Oorschot (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
- Topical Issue: “Inductive Theology. How Systematic Theologies Can Relate to Everyday Life”
- Distributed Normativity in Theology: On the Relevance of Empirical Research Approaches to Systematic Theology
- Context-Attentive Theology: On the Rearticulation of Experience in Theological Inquiry
- Constructive After Systematic? On Doing Theology in South Africa Today
- Exploring Ethical Potentials of Christian Narrative Testimonies
- Imaginaries and Normativities. Experimental Impulses for Digital and Public Theologies
- Beyond Theory and Practice: Lived Theology and Its Intersection with Empirical Theology
- To Be Oriented and to Orient: Considerations on Principles, Requirements, and Objectives of an Inductive Systematic Theology
- Special issue: Gendered Allegories: Origen of Alexandria and the Representation of the Feminine in Patristic Literature, edited by Lavinia Cerioni (Aarhus University, Denmark)
- Editorial Introduction
- Sophia: The Female Aspect of Christ in Origen of Alexandria
- Feminine Metaphorical Language: Platonic Resonances in Origen of Alexandria
- The Doctrine of Memory in Origen of Alexandria: Intersecting the Theory of Divine Names, Platonic Recollection, and Feminine Perspectives
- The Pastoral Usefulness of Female Scriptural Speech in Origen of Alexandria
- “Teachers of Good Things”: Origen on Women as Teachers
- A Militant Bride: Gender-Loaded Metaphors in Jerome’s Writings to Ascetic Men and Women
- Regular Articles
- Becoming Child of the Moment through Deleuzian Philosophy and Sufism
- Interdisciplinary Approach to Overcoming the Persistence of Patriarchal Islamic Interpretations: Gender Equality, the Development of Empathy and Children’s Rights, and Insights from the Reformist Eurasian Scholars of Early Twentieth Century
- “… God Said”: Toward a Quantum Theology of Creation
- Daniel and Revelation: Blasphemy in the Cosmic Conflict
- Forward and Reverse Gematria are Very Different Beasts
- Candomblé in Public: How Religious Rites Become Civil Technologies in Salvador, Brazil
- Worry and Analytic Theology
- Framing the Reading Experience of an Apocryphal Text: The Case of the 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John’s Titles
- Against the Nudity in Art: Eliasian Reading of National Conservative Catholic Habitus
- Almighty, Freedom, and Love: Toward an Islamic Open Theology
- Gender-Oriented Analysis of Witchcraft Discourse in Social Media
- Clergy Becoming Spiritual but not Religious
- The Corrupted “Wheel of Life”: An Essay on Ouroboroses
- Review Article
- From Below, to Inclusion, Through Transformation: Urban Theology in the Twenty-First Century
Articles in the same Issue
- Special issue: Sacrifice and the Body: Explorations beyond Metaphysics, edited by Katerina Koci (Institute for Human Sciences and University of Vienna, Austria) and Esther Heinrich-Ramharter (University of Vienna, Austria)
- Bodies that Give: Sacrifice Beyond Metaphysics
- Sacrifice and Natality: Surrogacy Structures
- Putting on Sarah’s Skin: Victim Identity in the Abrahamic Stories and Beyond
- The Impossibility of Representing the Sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac in Barnett Newman’s Painting
- Sacrifice as Necessity and the Ascetic Principle of Filmmaking: Andrei Tarkovsky Reconsidered
- “The Remedy for a World Without Transcendence”: Georges Bataille on Sacrifice and the Theology of Transgression
- Beyond the Sacrificial Fantasy: Body, Law, and Desire
- Blood Lines: Biopolitics, Patriarchy, Myth
- Special issue: Inductive Theology: How Systematic Theologies Can Relate to Everyday Life, edited by Lea Chilian (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Frederike van Oorschot (University of Heidelberg, Germany)
- Topical Issue: “Inductive Theology. How Systematic Theologies Can Relate to Everyday Life”
- Distributed Normativity in Theology: On the Relevance of Empirical Research Approaches to Systematic Theology
- Context-Attentive Theology: On the Rearticulation of Experience in Theological Inquiry
- Constructive After Systematic? On Doing Theology in South Africa Today
- Exploring Ethical Potentials of Christian Narrative Testimonies
- Imaginaries and Normativities. Experimental Impulses for Digital and Public Theologies
- Beyond Theory and Practice: Lived Theology and Its Intersection with Empirical Theology
- To Be Oriented and to Orient: Considerations on Principles, Requirements, and Objectives of an Inductive Systematic Theology
- Special issue: Gendered Allegories: Origen of Alexandria and the Representation of the Feminine in Patristic Literature, edited by Lavinia Cerioni (Aarhus University, Denmark)
- Editorial Introduction
- Sophia: The Female Aspect of Christ in Origen of Alexandria
- Feminine Metaphorical Language: Platonic Resonances in Origen of Alexandria
- The Doctrine of Memory in Origen of Alexandria: Intersecting the Theory of Divine Names, Platonic Recollection, and Feminine Perspectives
- The Pastoral Usefulness of Female Scriptural Speech in Origen of Alexandria
- “Teachers of Good Things”: Origen on Women as Teachers
- A Militant Bride: Gender-Loaded Metaphors in Jerome’s Writings to Ascetic Men and Women
- Regular Articles
- Becoming Child of the Moment through Deleuzian Philosophy and Sufism
- Interdisciplinary Approach to Overcoming the Persistence of Patriarchal Islamic Interpretations: Gender Equality, the Development of Empathy and Children’s Rights, and Insights from the Reformist Eurasian Scholars of Early Twentieth Century
- “… God Said”: Toward a Quantum Theology of Creation
- Daniel and Revelation: Blasphemy in the Cosmic Conflict
- Forward and Reverse Gematria are Very Different Beasts
- Candomblé in Public: How Religious Rites Become Civil Technologies in Salvador, Brazil
- Worry and Analytic Theology
- Framing the Reading Experience of an Apocryphal Text: The Case of the 1 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John’s Titles
- Against the Nudity in Art: Eliasian Reading of National Conservative Catholic Habitus
- Almighty, Freedom, and Love: Toward an Islamic Open Theology
- Gender-Oriented Analysis of Witchcraft Discourse in Social Media
- Clergy Becoming Spiritual but not Religious
- The Corrupted “Wheel of Life”: An Essay on Ouroboroses
- Review Article
- From Below, to Inclusion, Through Transformation: Urban Theology in the Twenty-First Century
