The Dark God: The Sacrifice of Sacrifice

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.

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 hoped-for 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.