Further reading:

From Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1987:

... the face or body of the despot or god has something like a counterbody: the body of the tortured, or better, of the excluded. There is no question that these two bodies communicate, for the body of the despot is sometimes subjected to trials of humiliation or even torture, or of exile and exclusion. "At the opposite pole one might imagine placing the body of the condemned man; he, too, has his legal status; he gives rise to his own ceremonial... not in order to ground the surplus power possessed by the person of the sovereign, but in order to code the lack of power with which those subjected to punishment are marked. In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man outlines the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king."5

…

In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier at its center and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle.

*5 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975

From Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998:

For a long time now, scholars have approximated the figure of homo sacer [sacred man] to that of the devotus who consecrates his own life to the gods of the underworld in order to save the city from a grave danger.

…

Why does the survival of the devotee constitute such an embarrassing situation for the community that it forces it to perform a complex ritual (see below) whose sense is so unclear? What is the status of the living body that seems no longer to belong to the world of the living? In an exemplary study, Robert Schilling observes that if the surviving devotee is excluded from both the profane world and the sacred world, “this happens because this man is sacer [sacred]. He cannot be given back in any way to the profane world because it is precisely thanks to his consecration that the entire community was able to be spared the wrath of the gods” (“Sacrumetprofanum,”p. 956). This is the perspective from which we must see the statue that we have already encountered in the emperor’s funus imaginarium and that seems to unite, in one constellation, the body of the sovereign and the body of the devotee.

The complex ritual:

From Reason and Violence, R.D. Laing & D.G. Cooper, 1964:

The survival group is first a practical invention in each of the permanence of a common unity through each other. It is freedom wishing to become inert, praxis seeking a way of metamorphosing itself into exis. When a multiplicity of freedoms makes common praxis in order to find a basis of the permanence of the group, it produces by itself a form of reciprocity mediated by its own inertia. This new form of reciprocity Sartre calls the pledge. The pledge takes different forms. The historical act is not the necessary form of the pledge. It can be seen as the resistance of the survival group against separationist action, whether of going away or differentiation; as guarantee of the future through a lack of change produced in the group by freedom. Paradoxically, as provision of stability, as promise of permanence, and so forth, it affords the basis of all separation and differentiation. The pledge, however, is not a social contract, in Rousseau's sense, but the necessary passage from an immediate form of the group in danger of dissolution to another more reflective permanent form.

The pledge, as an invention of praxis, is the affirmation by the thirds of the permanence of the group as negation of its permanent possibility of negation through the multiplicity of alterity. The threat to the permanence of the group is, of course, not necessarily the physical extermination of its members. By the pledge the group seeks to make itself its own instrument against seriality, which threatens it with dissolution.

The pledge is not a subjective determination. It is a real modification of the group by my regulative action. It is my guarantee to the others that it is impossible for serial alterity to be introduced into the group through me. This guarantee cannot, however, annul the permanent possibility that I can 'freely', that is, by my individual praxis, abandon my post, go over to the enemy. Treason and desertion can never be annulled as possibilities, but I have sworn my loyalty, I have given my pledge as guarantee against this exercise of my own freedom. I seek to utilize my own and everyone else's presence in the group as a third, as regulator, as my common-being, as a fact that cannot be transcended. I seek to convert my free being-in-the-group into an exigency that there is no way through or round, by the invention, as far as it is possible, of an inorganic, non-dialectical, rigid future. This rigid substantiation of my future is endowed with the triple characteristics of being the exigence, container, and ground of all my subsequent praxis. But there is no new dialectic.

Now, thus far two developments of the group-in-fusion have been distinguished for clarity—survival group and pledged group. We must now consider more closely the intelligibility of the pledge. The individual and the group praxis of the group-in-fusion have been seen to be comprehensible. Is the re-invention of the pledge in defined circumstances a process that is dialectical and comprehendible? The pledge becomes intelligible as the common action of the group on itself. We said above that the group undergoes a transformation in and through the common action of the pledge. How then does the unity of the group-in-fusion compare with that of the pledge group? The former is a fusion in the face of material danger. In this fusion, real work is done. In the pledge group, on the other hand, nothing material binds the members, the danger is not real, it is only possible. The origin of the pledge is anxiety. Once the real menace from outside has passed, the danger to the permanence of the group is from dispersion and seriality. A reflexive fear arises.

There is not enough to fear to keep the group together now that the danger seems remote. The condition of the permanence of the group is thus the negation of the absence of fear. Fear must be reinvented. The fundamental reinvention, at the heart of the pledge, is the project of substituting a real fear, produced by the group itself, for the external fear that is becoming remote, and whose very remoteness is suspected as deceptive. And this fear as free product and corrective action of the group against serial dissolution is terror induced by the violence of common freedom. Terror is the reign in the group of absolute violence on its members.

The essential basis for this transformation is the risk of death that each runs at the heart of the group as possible agent of dispersion. The pledge group is a common product of reciprocities mediated under the statute of violence. Through this form of unification, the being-in-the-group becomes a limit that can be breached only with the certitude of dying.

Traced back to original praxis, man is in the position of absolute power of man over man. But in the vicissitudes of alienation, God can be substituted for the guillotine. The pledge, the oath of loyalty, backed up by violence, is the original free attempt to strike terror into each by each, in so far as it must constantly reactualize violence as the intelligible negation of individual freedom by common praxis. This is the pledge. Its intelligibility is complete, since it is a question of a free transcendent of elements already given, towards an objective already posited. My pledge offers him and them a guarantee and invites violence as his and their right to suppress me if I default. By the same token the unmitigated pledge creates Terror, and invents treason, since there is now no excuse for defection. While the circumstances are not particularly constraining, I can remain on a level where violence-terror, loyalty-treachery, are not experienced in ultimate form. But the fundamental structure of the pledged group is violence-terror since I have freely consented to the possible liquidation of my person. My right over the other is my obligation to them, and contains in itself, implicitly, death as my possible destiny.