Il villaggio e la foresta. Il sacrificio tra sacro e politica

When we talk about sacrifice, we cannot ignore the rituals unfolding from ancient India to modern Hinduism. Unlike the Girard’s model, entirely based on the collective management of violence, Vedas and Brahmanas describe prescriptions responding to the needs of the individual. Here, there are no crisis to be solved or social conflicts to be appeased, but sacrifice is part and parcel of the correct unfolding of things in the world. Indian religiousness can be understood only by starting from the psychology of eating underlying it: if the original gesture that determines the passage from chaos to making sense of the world is the gesture of satiating a hungry stomach, the main categories we must focus on are not those of order and disorder, but those of full- ness and emptiness. The opposition/alternation of fullness and empti- ness is what in ancient India produces the separation of political space in two distinct parts, the village and the forest: the former seen as a complex social machine that guarantees the highest level of security among its inhabitants, the latter seen as the otherness in the strictest sense of the term. It must be clear that the forest and the village are not two opponent entities, but the forest represents the constant possibility of the negative reversal of all the principles of order underpinning differences and institutions. The Brahmanas effort to problematize the issue of violence, with all its social and existential consequences, is of great interest to Western philosophy, especially considering the countless convergences among these rituals and prescriptions and the theories underlying our political tradition.