Why is politics so closely tied to death and destruction, and why is religion so often the midwife of sacrifice and ritual murder? This book addresses these questions, relying chiefly on the insights of René Girard's mimetic theory, Carl Schmitt's reflections on sovereignty, and Giorgio Agamben's notion of "homo sacer". Bringing together a remarkable collection of essays written by leading experts, the book ends appropriately with a chapter devoted to the present time defined as "mimetic post-modernity or "the age of panic".

Fred R. Dallmayr, Emeritus Packey J. Dee Professor of Political Theory, University of Notre Dame, USA

It is a rare event for such a startling and original collection of essays to appear. Drawing in various ways on René Girard's profound meditations on the deeper well-springs of our civilisation, this book reflects not just the work of a man but also the world that he represented and created. The European imagination has always been torn between the sacred and the profane, between the profundity of sacrifice and the violence of victimhood. This is reflected in modern forms of political sovereignty, which imbues both the body and the body politic with a dynamic of repressed and expressed violence, the management of which is the essence of contemporary statecraft. This brilliant collection of articles represent a profound meditation on fundamental questions of our times and therefore illuminates the enduring amalgam of the sacred and the political in all times.

Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics, University of Kent, UK

…The Sacred and the Political is an excellent and timely collection, putting Girard's mimetic theory into dialogue with some of the most prominent Western political philosophers, ancient and contemporary. The value of this volume is that it fills a gap in Girardian scholarship by further developing Girard's theory in politically relevant ways.

Reading Religion