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Year 2019, Volume: 39 Issue: 1, 85 - 108, 30.06.2019

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References

  • Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Agamben, G. (2007). In praise of profanation. Log, (10), 23–32.
  • Althusser, L. (1970). From capital to Marx’s Philosophy. In L. Althusser & É. Balibar (Eds.), Reading Capital (Part I). New York, NY: Verso.
  • Althusser, L. (1976). Is it simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy? Essays in Self-Criticism (pp. 163–208). London, UK: New Left Books
  • Bataille, G. (1990). Hegel, death and sacrifice. Yale French Studies, 78, 9–28.
  • Bataille, G. (1995a). The accursed share (Vol. 1). San Francisco, CA: Zone Books.
  • Bataille, G. (1995b). The accursed share (Vol. 2–3). San Francisco, CA: Zone Books. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos. New York, NY: Zone Books.
  • Caillois, R. (1959). Man and the sacred. Glencoe, UK: The Free Press. Cosgrave, J. (2014). The market totem: Mana, money and morality in late modernity. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 39(4), 667–696.
  • Datta, R. P. (2007). From Foucault’s genealogy to aleatory materialism: Realism, nominalism and politics. In J. Frauley & F. Pearce (Eds.), Critical realism and the social sciences: Heterodox elaborations (pp. 273–295). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
  • Datta, R. P. (2008). Politics and existence: Totems, dispositifs and some striking parallels between Durkheim and Foucault. Journal of Classical Sociology, 8(2), 283–305.
  • Datta, R. P. (2017). Zombie capitalism and the collective conscience: Between Bataille and Agamben. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, 1, 59–73.
  • Datta, R. P. (2018). Theorizing fiscal sacrifices in zombie capitalism: A radical Durkheimian approach. In M. Beare, S. Tombs, S. Bittle, L. Snider, & D. Whyte (Eds.), Revisiting crimes of the powerful: Marxism, crime and deviance (pp. 87 –101). New York, NY: Routledge
  • Datta, R. P., & MacDonald, L. (2011). Time for zombies: Sacrifice and the structural phenomenology of capitalist futures. In C. M. Moreman & C. J. Rushton (Eds.), Race, oppression and the zombie (pp. 77–92). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
  • Durkheim, E. (1960). Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of sociology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
  • Durkheim, E. (1961). Moral education. New York, NY: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1963). Incest: The nature and origin of taboo. New York, NY: Lyle Stuart.
  • Durkheim, E. (1984). The division of labor in society. New York, NY: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1992). Professional ethics and civic morals. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Durkheim, E. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life. New York, NY: The Free Press.
  • Durkheim, E. (2004). Review of Antonio Labriola, Essays on the Materialist Conception of History. In K. Thompson (Ed.), Readings from Emile Durkheim (pp. 15 –17). New York: Routledge.
  • Durkheim, E. (2006). On suicide. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
  • Durkheim E., & Lukes, S. (1969). Durkheim’s ‘individualism and the intellectuals’. Political Studies, 17(1), 19–30.
  • Falasca-Zamponi, S. (2011). Rethinking the political: The sacred, aesthetic politics, and the Collège de Sociologie. Canada: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.
  • Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
  • Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
  • Foucault, M. (1980). The confession of the flesh. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 (pp. 194–228). New York, NY: Pantheon.
  • Foucault, M. (1994). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
  • Foucault, M. (2003a). Questions of method. In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The essential Foucault: Selected works from the essential Works of Foucault (pp. 246–258). New York: The New Press.
  • Foucault, M. (2003b). Truth and power. In In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The essential Foucault: Selected works from the essential Works of Foucault (pp. 300–318). New York, NY: The New Press.
  • Foucault, M. (2003c). Omnes et singulatim: Toward a critique of political reason. In In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The essential Works of Foucault (pp. 180–201). New York, NY: The New Press.
  • Foucault, M. (2006). The history of madness. London, UK: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Fourcade, M., Steiner, P., Streeck, W., & Woll, C. (2013). Moral categories in the financial crisis. Socio-Economic Review, 11(3), 601–627.
  • Fournier, M., (2013). Émile Durkheim: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
  • Gane, M. (1983). Durkheim: The sacred language. Economy and Society, 12(1), 1–47.
  • Gane, M. (1992). The radical sociology of Durkheim and Mauss. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Graeber, D. (2012). Debt: The first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Grahl, J. (2000). Review essay money as sovereignty: The economics of Michel Aglietta. New Political Economy, 5(2), 291–316.
  • Hardy, N. (2015). Aleas Capta Est: Foucault’s dispositf and capturing chance. Foucault Studies, 19, 191–216.
  • Hubert, H., & Mauss, M. (1981). Sacrifice: Its nature and functions. Chicago, CA: University of Chicago Press.
  • Karatani, K. (2005). Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
  • Lacroix, B. (1979). The elementary forms of religious life as a reflection on power (Objet pouvoir). Critique of Anthropology, 4(87), 87–103.
  • Lazzarato, M. (2015). Governing by debt. New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Marazzi, C. (2011). The violence of financial capitalism, new edition. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
  • Martel, J. R. (2006). Can we do away with sacrifice? Political Theory, 34(6), 814–820.
  • Marx, Kç. (1973). Grundrisse: Introduction to the critique of political economy. New York, NY: Pelican Books.
  • Panitch, L., & Gindin, S. (2012). The making of global capitalism. New York, NY: Verso. Pawlett, W. (1997). Utility and excess: The radical sociology of Bataille and Baudrillard. Economy and Society, 26(1), 92–125.
  • Pawlett, W. (2018). The sacred, heterology and transparency: Between Bataille and Baudrillard. Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5), 175–191.
  • Pearce, F. (2001). The radical Durkheim (2nd ed.). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press International. Pearce, F. (2003). ‘Off with their heads’: Public executions with Klossowski, Caillois and Foucault. Economy and Society, 32(1), 48–73.
  • Pearce, F. (2010). Obligatory sacrifice and imperial projects. In W. Chambliss, R. Michalowski, & R. C. Kramer (Eds.), State crime in the global age (pp. 45–66). New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Pearce, F. (2014). Challenging the anthropomorphic master narrative in the elementary forms of religious life and forging a more materialist Durkheimianism, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 39(3), 619–642.
  • Pietz, W. (1993). Fetishism and materialism. In E. Apter and W. Pietz (Eds.), Fetishism as cultural discourse (119–151). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  • Plouin, J. (2010). Durkheimism: A model for external constraint without a theory of violence. In S. R. Mukherjee (Ed.), Durkheim and violence. New York, NY: Wiley Blackwell.
  • Ptacek, M. (2015). Durkheim’s two theories of sacrifice: Ritual, social change and les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Durkheimian Studies, 21,75–95.
  • Quiggin, J. (2010). Zombie economics. New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Ramp, W. (2008). Transcendence, liminality and excess: Durkheim and Bataille on the margins of sociologie religieuse. Journal of Classical Sociology, 8(2), 208–232.
  • Riley, A. T. (2010). Godless intellectuals? The intellectual pursuit of the sacred reinvented. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
  • Riley, A. T. (2015). Angel patriots: The crash of United Flight 93 and the myth of America. New York, NY: NYU Press.
  • Richman, M. (2002). Sacred revolutions: Durkheim and the collège de sociologie. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Shilling, C., & Mellor, P. A. (2013). ‘Making things sacred’: Re-theorizing the nature and function of sacrifice in modernity. Journal of Classical Sociology, 13(3), 319–337.
  • Stedman Jones, S. (2001). Durkheim reconsidered. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
  • Steiner, P. (2011). Durkheim and the birth of economic sociology. New Jersey, NY: Princeton University Press.
  • Steiner, P. (2012/2013). Religion and economy in Durkheim: Two forms of social cohesion? Archives de Science Sociales des Religion, 159, 247–263.
  • Steiner, P. (2017). Religion and the sociological critique of political economy: Altruism and gift. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 24(4), 876–906.
  • Streeck, W. (2017). Buying time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Verso.
  • Strenski, I. (2006). The new Durkheim. New Jersey, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sandel, M. (2012). What money can’t buy. New York, NY: Penguin.
  • Veyne, P. (2010). Foucault: His thought, his character. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
  • Watts Miller, W. (2012). A Durkheimian quest: Solidarity and the sacred. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
  • Zizek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. New York, NY: Verso.

You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice

Year 2019, Volume: 39 Issue: 1, 85 - 108, 30.06.2019

Abstract

Recognizing the convergence of renewed scholarly interest in the sacred, and debates about fiscal sacrifices in recent economic history, this rethinking of Durkheim develops a symptomatic reading of his theory of sacrifice in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The paper argues that Durkheim’s suppression of political economic sensibilities in The Forms leads him to generate a fetishistic account of sacrifice as a moral activity that renews existing bases of rule. His analysis does so because it inadequately accounts for the role of structured inequalities in the production of the rite. A radical Durkheimian political economy of sacrifice is reclaimed by critically synthesizing it with the Foucauldian concept of dispositifs, one better able to account for the combined impact of knowledge control, inequality, and exclusion on moral life. The critical theoretical work is then applied to the axiological implications of neoliberal individualism, highlighting that it depends on and disavows sacrifice, specifically the sacrificing of people’s capacity for altruism (or, the sacrifice of sacrifice). Finally, Durkheim’s heterological sensibilities about the constitutive potential of the sacred in moments of collective effervescence are used to put the politics back in this political economy of sacrifice. 

References

  • Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Agamben, G. (2007). In praise of profanation. Log, (10), 23–32.
  • Althusser, L. (1970). From capital to Marx’s Philosophy. In L. Althusser & É. Balibar (Eds.), Reading Capital (Part I). New York, NY: Verso.
  • Althusser, L. (1976). Is it simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy? Essays in Self-Criticism (pp. 163–208). London, UK: New Left Books
  • Bataille, G. (1990). Hegel, death and sacrifice. Yale French Studies, 78, 9–28.
  • Bataille, G. (1995a). The accursed share (Vol. 1). San Francisco, CA: Zone Books.
  • Bataille, G. (1995b). The accursed share (Vol. 2–3). San Francisco, CA: Zone Books. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos. New York, NY: Zone Books.
  • Caillois, R. (1959). Man and the sacred. Glencoe, UK: The Free Press. Cosgrave, J. (2014). The market totem: Mana, money and morality in late modernity. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 39(4), 667–696.
  • Datta, R. P. (2007). From Foucault’s genealogy to aleatory materialism: Realism, nominalism and politics. In J. Frauley & F. Pearce (Eds.), Critical realism and the social sciences: Heterodox elaborations (pp. 273–295). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
  • Datta, R. P. (2008). Politics and existence: Totems, dispositifs and some striking parallels between Durkheim and Foucault. Journal of Classical Sociology, 8(2), 283–305.
  • Datta, R. P. (2017). Zombie capitalism and the collective conscience: Between Bataille and Agamben. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, 1, 59–73.
  • Datta, R. P. (2018). Theorizing fiscal sacrifices in zombie capitalism: A radical Durkheimian approach. In M. Beare, S. Tombs, S. Bittle, L. Snider, & D. Whyte (Eds.), Revisiting crimes of the powerful: Marxism, crime and deviance (pp. 87 –101). New York, NY: Routledge
  • Datta, R. P., & MacDonald, L. (2011). Time for zombies: Sacrifice and the structural phenomenology of capitalist futures. In C. M. Moreman & C. J. Rushton (Eds.), Race, oppression and the zombie (pp. 77–92). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
  • Durkheim, E. (1960). Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of sociology. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
  • Durkheim, E. (1961). Moral education. New York, NY: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1963). Incest: The nature and origin of taboo. New York, NY: Lyle Stuart.
  • Durkheim, E. (1984). The division of labor in society. New York, NY: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1992). Professional ethics and civic morals. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Durkheim, E. (1995). The elementary forms of religious life. New York, NY: The Free Press.
  • Durkheim, E. (2004). Review of Antonio Labriola, Essays on the Materialist Conception of History. In K. Thompson (Ed.), Readings from Emile Durkheim (pp. 15 –17). New York: Routledge.
  • Durkheim, E. (2006). On suicide. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
  • Durkheim E., & Lukes, S. (1969). Durkheim’s ‘individualism and the intellectuals’. Political Studies, 17(1), 19–30.
  • Falasca-Zamponi, S. (2011). Rethinking the political: The sacred, aesthetic politics, and the Collège de Sociologie. Canada: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.
  • Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
  • Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
  • Foucault, M. (1980). The confession of the flesh. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977 (pp. 194–228). New York, NY: Pantheon.
  • Foucault, M. (1994). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
  • Foucault, M. (2003a). Questions of method. In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The essential Foucault: Selected works from the essential Works of Foucault (pp. 246–258). New York: The New Press.
  • Foucault, M. (2003b). Truth and power. In In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The essential Foucault: Selected works from the essential Works of Foucault (pp. 300–318). New York, NY: The New Press.
  • Foucault, M. (2003c). Omnes et singulatim: Toward a critique of political reason. In In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The essential Works of Foucault (pp. 180–201). New York, NY: The New Press.
  • Foucault, M. (2006). The history of madness. London, UK: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Fourcade, M., Steiner, P., Streeck, W., & Woll, C. (2013). Moral categories in the financial crisis. Socio-Economic Review, 11(3), 601–627.
  • Fournier, M., (2013). Émile Durkheim: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
  • Gane, M. (1983). Durkheim: The sacred language. Economy and Society, 12(1), 1–47.
  • Gane, M. (1992). The radical sociology of Durkheim and Mauss. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Graeber, D. (2012). Debt: The first 5,000 years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. Grahl, J. (2000). Review essay money as sovereignty: The economics of Michel Aglietta. New Political Economy, 5(2), 291–316.
  • Hardy, N. (2015). Aleas Capta Est: Foucault’s dispositf and capturing chance. Foucault Studies, 19, 191–216.
  • Hubert, H., & Mauss, M. (1981). Sacrifice: Its nature and functions. Chicago, CA: University of Chicago Press.
  • Karatani, K. (2005). Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
  • Lacroix, B. (1979). The elementary forms of religious life as a reflection on power (Objet pouvoir). Critique of Anthropology, 4(87), 87–103.
  • Lazzarato, M. (2015). Governing by debt. New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Marazzi, C. (2011). The violence of financial capitalism, new edition. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
  • Martel, J. R. (2006). Can we do away with sacrifice? Political Theory, 34(6), 814–820.
  • Marx, Kç. (1973). Grundrisse: Introduction to the critique of political economy. New York, NY: Pelican Books.
  • Panitch, L., & Gindin, S. (2012). The making of global capitalism. New York, NY: Verso. Pawlett, W. (1997). Utility and excess: The radical sociology of Bataille and Baudrillard. Economy and Society, 26(1), 92–125.
  • Pawlett, W. (2018). The sacred, heterology and transparency: Between Bataille and Baudrillard. Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5), 175–191.
  • Pearce, F. (2001). The radical Durkheim (2nd ed.). Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press International. Pearce, F. (2003). ‘Off with their heads’: Public executions with Klossowski, Caillois and Foucault. Economy and Society, 32(1), 48–73.
  • Pearce, F. (2010). Obligatory sacrifice and imperial projects. In W. Chambliss, R. Michalowski, & R. C. Kramer (Eds.), State crime in the global age (pp. 45–66). New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Pearce, F. (2014). Challenging the anthropomorphic master narrative in the elementary forms of religious life and forging a more materialist Durkheimianism, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 39(3), 619–642.
  • Pietz, W. (1993). Fetishism and materialism. In E. Apter and W. Pietz (Eds.), Fetishism as cultural discourse (119–151). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  • Plouin, J. (2010). Durkheimism: A model for external constraint without a theory of violence. In S. R. Mukherjee (Ed.), Durkheim and violence. New York, NY: Wiley Blackwell.
  • Ptacek, M. (2015). Durkheim’s two theories of sacrifice: Ritual, social change and les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Durkheimian Studies, 21,75–95.
  • Quiggin, J. (2010). Zombie economics. New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Ramp, W. (2008). Transcendence, liminality and excess: Durkheim and Bataille on the margins of sociologie religieuse. Journal of Classical Sociology, 8(2), 208–232.
  • Riley, A. T. (2010). Godless intellectuals? The intellectual pursuit of the sacred reinvented. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
  • Riley, A. T. (2015). Angel patriots: The crash of United Flight 93 and the myth of America. New York, NY: NYU Press.
  • Richman, M. (2002). Sacred revolutions: Durkheim and the collège de sociologie. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  • Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Shilling, C., & Mellor, P. A. (2013). ‘Making things sacred’: Re-theorizing the nature and function of sacrifice in modernity. Journal of Classical Sociology, 13(3), 319–337.
  • Stedman Jones, S. (2001). Durkheim reconsidered. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
  • Steiner, P. (2011). Durkheim and the birth of economic sociology. New Jersey, NY: Princeton University Press.
  • Steiner, P. (2012/2013). Religion and economy in Durkheim: Two forms of social cohesion? Archives de Science Sociales des Religion, 159, 247–263.
  • Steiner, P. (2017). Religion and the sociological critique of political economy: Altruism and gift. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 24(4), 876–906.
  • Streeck, W. (2017). Buying time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Verso.
  • Strenski, I. (2006). The new Durkheim. New Jersey, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sandel, M. (2012). What money can’t buy. New York, NY: Penguin.
  • Veyne, P. (2010). Foucault: His thought, his character. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
  • Watts Miller, W. (2012). A Durkheimian quest: Solidarity and the sacred. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
  • Zizek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. New York, NY: Verso.
There are 65 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Sociology
Journal Section Articles
Authors

Ronjon Paul Datta This is me 0000-0002-6439-9749

Publication Date June 30, 2019
Published in Issue Year 2019 Volume: 39 Issue: 1

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APA Datta, R. P. (2019). You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice. İstanbul University Journal of Sociology, 39(1), 85-108.
AMA Datta RP. You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice. İstanbul University Journal of Sociology. June 2019;39(1):85-108.
Chicago Datta, Ronjon Paul. “You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice”. İstanbul University Journal of Sociology 39, no. 1 (June 2019): 85-108.
EndNote Datta RP (June 1, 2019) You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice. İstanbul University Journal of Sociology 39 1 85–108.
IEEE R. P. Datta, “You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice”, İstanbul University Journal of Sociology, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 85–108, 2019.
ISNAD Datta, Ronjon Paul. “You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice”. İstanbul University Journal of Sociology 39/1 (June 2019), 85-108.
JAMA Datta RP. You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice. İstanbul University Journal of Sociology. 2019;39:85–108.
MLA Datta, Ronjon Paul. “You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice”. İstanbul University Journal of Sociology, vol. 39, no. 1, 2019, pp. 85-108.
Vancouver Datta RP. You Only Get What You Give? A New Radical Durkheimian Political Economy of Sacrifice. İstanbul University Journal of Sociology. 2019;39(1):85-108.