Sacrifice of Sacrifice

The "sacrifice of sacrifice" names a third, non-substitutionary reading of the Crucifixion developed by Rollins in which the event does not merely replace one sacrificial victim with another (the penal-substitution model) nor serve as a morally edifying example detached from sacrificial logic altogether. Instead, it is the meta-level operation that dismantles the entire sacrificial structure itself. The logic of sacrifice presupposes a constitutive lack: there is something we are separated from — a plenitude, a God, an Idol — and the sacrificial act is supposed to bridge that gap or appease the power that guards it. The Crucifixion, on Rollins's reading, reveals that no such plenitude ever existed; the Idol/God behind the curtain is itself a fiction. By "sacrificing sacrifice," the event dissolves not a particular object of desire but the very framework — Lack, Law, Idolatry — that generates sacrificial desire in the first place.

In Lacanian terms, the structure being dismantled is the logic of constitutive lack as it organizes religious and ideological experience: the subject assumes it is separated from das Ding (the primordial Thing), enters into the symbolic law that governs the approach to it, and submits to idolatrous fantasy frameworks that promise eventual satisfaction. The "sacrifice of sacrifice" does not offer a new object to fill the gap; it exposes the gap itself as the product of a fiction — the fiction that there ever was something behind the curtain. This is not a filling of lack but a revelation that the structure generating lack (the Idol, the Law, the Fantasy of completion) was illusory. Liberation here is not achieved within the economy of substitution but through the collapse of that economy altogether.

Within rollins-peter-the-idolatry-of-god-breaking-our-addiction-to-certainty-and-satisf, the "sacrifice of sacrifice" functions as the climactic theological-theoretical move. It is positioned explicitly against two prior models and thus operates as a second-order negation — not a correction within the system but a cancellation of the system's conditions of possibility. The concept cross-references Alienation, Das Ding, Fantasy, Fetish, Gap, Ideology, Idolatry, and Jouissance as the interlocking structure it targets. Rollins's argument implies that orthodox sacrificial theology — and by extension, all ideological and consumerist substitution-logic — reproduces the subject's alienation (the constitutive loss structuring desire) and channels it toward an Idol that functions precisely as das Ding does: an impossible, forbidden fullness posited as lost. The Fetish and Fantasy are the operative mechanisms: the believer or consumer disavows the gap (the Fetish veils it) and sustains desire through a Fantasy frame that promises eventual reunion with the Thing. The "sacrifice of sacrifice" punctures that frame.

The concept is best understood as a theological specification of what Lacanian traversal of the fantasy (la traversée du fantasme) attempts at the level of individual analysis, transposed here onto a collective-religious register. Just as traversal does not fill the gap but exposes the fantasy-structure that organized desire around it, the Crucifixion on Rollins's account does not close the gap between the subject and God but reveals that the Idol positing that gap was itself constructed. This aligns structurally with the Lacanian notion that the Gap is not a contingent absence but a positive feature — what Rollins adds is the claim that Idolatry misrecognizes the gap as contingent (hence curable by sacrifice), while the "sacrifice of sacrifice" reveals it as constitutive-yet-fictitiously-generated by the Idol-structure. The concept thus extends and theologizes the cross-referenced canonicals rather than merely illustrating them.

The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and SatisfactionPeter Rollins · 2013 (page unknown)

There is, however, a different approach to understanding the Crucifixion. A third approach sees the Crucifixion neither as the ultimate sacrifice nor as a moral message unrelated to the religious structure of sacrifice, but as the sacrifice of sacrifice itself.

The phrase "sacrifice of sacrifice itself" is theoretically loaded because it enacts a reflexive, second-order negation: the genitive "of sacrifice" signals that what is being sacrificed is not an object within the sacrificial economy but the economy as such — its own operative logic. The word "itself" is the hinge, marking that this is not substitution (replacing one sacrifice with another) but abolition of the frame that makes sacrifice meaningful.