Many anthropologists and other theorists of sacrifice insist that destruction of the victim is key to sacrifice. See, for example, Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, pp. 97–98; and René Girard, “Violence and the Sacred,” in Jeffrey Carter (ed.), Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 242. “The victim is sacred only because he is to be killed,” writes Girard.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 734