Sacrificial Economy

Sacrificial Economy is McGowan's term for the structural logic by which capitalism does not eliminate sacrifice — as Bataille's ontology of general economy would imply — but instead disperses, multiplies, and renders invisible the sacrificial expenditure that underlies social reproduction. Against the Bataillean claim that modernity channels surplus energy into productive accumulation, McGowan argues that capitalism only secularizes sacrifice: it removes sacrifice from explicit ritual or religious framing while intensifying it throughout the social order. Nuclear arsenals, religious architecture, and industrial slaughter are offered as symptomatic evidence that expenditure without return persists at the heart of capitalist production rather than at its transgressive margins.

The concept has a further ideological-critical dimension: reactionary formations (terrorism, religious fundamentalism) misrecognize capitalism's concealment of sacrifice as the absence of sacrifice, and therefore attempt to re-inject visible, spectacular destruction back into the social fabric. This misreading does not subvert capitalist ideology but confirms it — it mistakes the symptom for a cure, repeating rather than interrupting the sacrificial circuit. The sacrificial economy thus names not only a structural fact about capitalism but also a key ideological blind spot that sustains it.

Within capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan, the concept of sacrificial economy functions as a critical intervention at the intersection of ideology, jouissance, and the Real. It draws on the logic of fetishistic disavowal: capitalism structurally enacts a "I know very well (that sacrifice persists), but nevertheless (I act as if it has been superseded)" — the secularization of sacrifice is itself the ideological veil that makes sacrifice invisible while proliferating it. This connects the concept directly to the cross-referenced Ideology, where the operative claim is that capitalist ideology does not function through false belief but through practical non-knowledge and libidinal investment.

The concept also bears on Das Ding and Jouissance. Sacrifice, in the Lacanian frame, is the structural operation by which the subject stages and manages its impossible proximity to das Ding — that unreachable, primordially lost Thing around which desire circles. Capitalism's sacrificial economy is therefore a displaced administration of jouissance: it extracts surplus-jouissance (structurally homologous to surplus-value) by multiplying sacrificial circuits while denying their character as such. The concept thus operates as a specification and materialist extension of Lacan's account of sublimation — where an object is "raised to the dignity of the Thing" — applied now to entire social institutions and technologies of mass expenditure rather than to individual aesthetic objects. Phenomenology is implicitly in view as a counter-method: a phenomenological reading of capitalism would take its secular, rationalist surface appearance at face value; McGowan's structural-symptomatic reading insists that the hidden logic of the Real persists beneath that surface.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free MarketsTodd McGowan · 2016 (p.125)

Capitalism's secularization of sacrifice actually multiplies its frequency in the social order... nuclear warheads, elaborate churches, and slaughterhouses testify to the persistence of sacrifice.

The phrase "secularization of sacrifice" is theoretically loaded because it refuses the standard modernization narrative (sacrifice belongs to pre-modern religion) and reframes secularization as a transformation of form rather than elimination of content; the list — "nuclear warheads, elaborate churches, and slaughterhouses" — functions symptomatically, naming sites where jouissance and expenditure without return are structurally organized, thereby grounding the abstract claim in concrete, heterogeneous social phenomena that cut across the sacred/secular divide capitalism ostensibly enforces.