Scolari 2017

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106 Journal of
Religion in
Europe
brill.com/jre
State Martyrs: Aesthetics and Performativity

of a Contemporary Political Discourse
Baldassare Scolari
Zentrum für Religion, Wirtschaft und Politik, Universität Zürich
baldassare.scolari@uzh.ch
Abstract
The paper focuses on the emergence of national state martyrs in modernity. The
investigationpostulates a connection between procedures of legitimization of po-
litical authority and martyr figurations. It considers martyrological representations as
linguistic performances, opening a civil religious space. On the basis of genealogical
discourse analysis, the author argues that through secularization the figure of the mar-
tyr underwent a transition from the sacral and theological to the profane and political
sphere of meaning. In the final part, the paper analyzes the ideological implications
of the representation of politician Aldo Moro, killed in 1978 by the Red Brigades, as a
state martyr.
Keywords
religion and politics – civil religion – political philosophy – sacralization –

secularization – Aldo Moro – terrorism – discourse analysis
1 Introduction: Setting the Theme
On the day of the shooting attack on the offices of the French satirical newspa-
per Charlie Hebdo in Paris in 2015, the American secretary of state John Kerry
said:
No country knows better than France that freedom has a price, because
France gave birth to democracy itself. […] Free expression and a free press
are core values, they are universal values; principles that can be attacked
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18748929-01002004

72 Scolari
but never eradicated, because brave and decent people around the world
will never give in to the intimidation and the terror that those seeking to
destroy those values employ. I agree with the French imam who today
called the slain journalists martyrs for liberty.1
Aristotle defined rhetoric as the “an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the
available means of persuasion.”2 Given this definition, the following questions
arise: why did Kerry (and the members of his staff) find the figure of the martyr
to be the appropriate terminology in this situation? And to what end was this
terminology employed? Why did one of the most influential politicians repeat
the rhetoric of martyrdom previously used by a French imam, to describe such
a dramatic event of political violence? I refer to this example for two reasons.
First, it stresses the topicality and the urgency of a critical analysis of the rheto-
ric of martyrdom in modern and contemporary discourses and narratives. Sec-
ond, it draws attention to some issues that I think are of importance in a survey
on the aesthetics and performativity of the martyr figure.
Three further remarks may evolve this latter aspect.
a) Kerry’s speech highlights in a paradigmatic way that the martyr figure is

not an exclusive rhetorical means of Islamism or other narratives that re-
fer to explicitly religious imagery. Kerry’s speech is an excellent example
of what appears to be a secular use of the rhetoric of martyrdom.
b) The deaths of the Charlie Hebdo journalists were represented as the
“price” that the French nation-state, the French citizens, have to pay for
freedom. What, in this speech, qualified the victims as martyrs is the fact
that they died because of their commitment to “universal” values and
principles (freedom, democracy, free press and expression), which were
born of enlightenment and revolution. Paradoxically, these values and
principles were described as “universal,” yet also as the acquisition of a
historical process. In Kerry’s speech, they appeared both as a product of
Western enlightenment and as universal, that is, ahistorical, somehow
transcendental.
c) In Kerryʼs speech, the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo journalists also ac-
quired the meaning of witnessing the moral correctness of the political
system that guarantees those principles. In universal terms, they were
1 John Kerry, “Remarks on the Terrorist Attack in Paris.” https://geneva.usmission.gov/2015/01/

07/secretary-kerry-remarks-on-the-terrorist-attack-in-paris/ (accessed 20 February 2017).
2 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. by George A. Kennedy, 2nd ed. (New
York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 37.
journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

State Martyrs 73
considered “martyrs for liberty,” but in historical terms, they assumed the
connotation of ‘martyrs of the French national state.’
These three clues—the secular use of the rhetoric of martyrdom, the relation-
ship between the figure of the martyr and the principles/values at the basis of
democratic constitutions (and human rights), and the emergence of nation-
state martyrs—serve as the starting point of this investigation. In this work,
I try to develop a theoretical and methodological apparatus, which serves to
relate these three issues, in order to understand the role and function of mar-
tyrologies in modern and contemporary public space.
2 The Performativity of Martyr Figurations
The figure of the martyr plays a significant role in contemporary discourses

and narratives. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in this fig-
ure within the different disciplines of the social and cultural sciences. One
of the main reasons for the renewed interest in martyrs and martyrdom is to
be found in the events of 9/11 and other circumstances related to war, terror-
ism, and political assassination.3 Other contemporary social phenomena have
also contributed to the proliferation of research on the topic, for example
self-immolations and other forms of physical destruction or injury during the
Arab Spring and the Arab-Israeli conflict.4 The fundamental question is: how
and for what purpose are martyrs made?5
3 See Dominik Janes & Alex Houen (eds.), Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contem-
porary Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Josef Niewiadomski & Roman
Siebenrock (eds.), Opfer, Helden, Märtyrer: Das Martyrium als religionspolitologische Heraus-
forderung (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2011); Paul Middleton, Martyrdom: A Guide for the Perplexed
(London & New York: T & T Clark, 2011), 1–3; Silvia Horsch & Martin Treml, “Einleitung: Zur
Figur des Märtyrers in den Religionskulturen,” in: idem (eds.), Grenzgänger der Religionskul-
turen: Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu Gegenwart und Geschichte der Märtyrer (München:
Wilhelm Fink, 2011), 7–21; Gilles Kepel, Terreur et martyre: Relever le défi de civilisation (Paris:
Flammarion, 2007).
4 See Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lori A. Allen, “Martyr Bodies in the Me-
dia: Human Rights, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Immediation in the Palestinian Intifada,”
A
merican Ethnologist 36/1 (2009), 161–180; Yael S. Feldmann, “Märtyrer oder Krieger? Die
Wiedererfindung Isaaks als Kriegsheld im jüdischen Palestina,” in: Horsch & Treml (eds.),
Grenzgänger, 341–356.
5 See Andreas Krass & Thomas Frank, “Sündenbock und Opferlamm: Der Märtyrer aus kultur-
wissenschaftlicher Sicht,” in: idem (eds.), Tinte und Blut: Politik, Erotik und Poetik des Martyri-
ums (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2008), 7–21, at 8.

74 Scolari
Although the issue is discussed in different ways, the majority of researchers

support the thesis that the emergence of martyr figures and the allocation of
martyr roles have a political function.6 What does this political function con-
sist of? Why does the figure of the martyr always, or at least so often, emerge in
relation to contexts of political struggle? Samuel Klausner defined martyrdom
as an act of self-sacrifice, which “imbues economic and political conflict with
sacred meaning” and “aims to reduce political authority to ineffectiveness by
challenging the sacred basis of the legitimacy of the adversary’s authority. […]
The martyr […] is a sacred symbol of an authority around which the society
rallies.”7 Although Klausner did not express it explicitly, at the root of this view
there is undoubtedly the idea exposed by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss that
sacrifice is a sacrum facere, a ritual practice that sanctifies the sacrificial vic-
tim.8 Through sacrifice, the victim passes from the realm of the profane world
to the realm of the sacred world (in Émile Durkheim’s sense of the terms).
Martyrdom, as an act of self-sacrifice, sacralizes both the victim and the au-
thority, which represents the social group to which the victim belongs. The
self-sacrifice of the victims of political violence produces a legitimization of a
new political order.
Another important factor in current research on the martyr figure is the
distinction between the sacrifice of a scapegoat and the self-sacrifice of the
martyr, which plays a decisive role in the mimetic theory of René Girard.9 Ac-
cording to Girard, at the core of sacrifice there is substitution—that is, fury
felt toward one party is redirected toward a surrogate scapegoat, who is cho-
sen only because of his or her vulnerability and dispensability.10 The sacrificial
object is thus an innocent who pays the debt for a guilty party. From this point
6 See Krass & Frank, “Sündenbock”; Hans Meier, “Politische Märtyrer? Erweiterungen des
Märtyrerbegriffs in der Gegenwart,” in: Niewiadomski & Siebenrock, (eds.), Opfer, 15–31;
Sigrid Weigel, “Schauplätze, Figuren, Umformungen: Zu Kontinuitäten und Untersche-
idungen von Märtyrerkulturen,” in: idem (ed.), Märtyrer-Porträts: Von Opfertod, Blutzeu-
gen und heiligen Kriegern (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 11–37; Mariagrazia Recupero,
Martirio: Elementi antropologici, politici e filosofico-simbolici (Massa: Transeuropa, 2011);
Horsch & Treml, “Einleitung”; Karin Fierke, Political Self-sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emo-
tion in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
7 Samuel Z. Klausner, “Martyrdom,” in: Lindsay Jones (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed.
(Detroit: Macmillan Reference usa, 2005), vol. 8, 5737–5744, at 5738.
8 Marcel Mauss & Henri Hubert, “Essay über die Funktion des Opfers,” in: Marcel Mauss,
Schriften zur Religionssoziologie, ed. by Stephan Moebius et al, trans. by Eva Moldenhauer
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2012), 93–218, French original edition 1899.
9 See Krass & Frank, “Sündenbock.”
10 René Girard, La violenza e il sacro (Milano: Adelphi, 1980), 13–62.

State Martyrs 75
of view, sacrifice is a ritual practice through which a community is reconciled

to itself by the extermination of a victim. By contrast, Girard described (Chris-
tian) martyrdom as an annulment of the “violent sacred,” because of its recog-
nition of the victim’s innocence.11
Maria Grazia Recupero has dedicated an extensive anthropological-
philosophical work to martyrdom, in which the Girardian conceptualization
of martyrdom is summed up well. The common thesis is that in the historical
transition from archaic myths to the mythical-ritual structure of Christianity, a
process of disclosure of the sacrificial mechanism occurs, through which sacri-
fice assumes a political function. The strength of the archaic myth—in which
the sacrifice of the scapegoat has the function of ending a social crisis—is its
ability to ‘hide’ the victim. Martyrdom, on the contrary, showcases the inno-
cence of the victim and thus the arbitrariness of sacrifice. In other words, the
archaic sacrifice legitimizes the status quo, whereas the Christian anti-sacrifice
constitutes and legitimizes the future community.12
Karin Fierke, researcher in international relations, also has supported the
argument that the martyr figure delegitimizes the status quo and legitimizes
new forms of political community. But unlike Girard and Recupero, she argued
that self-sacrifice, rather than being a substitution, “is an act of speech in which
the suffering body communicates the injustice experienced by a community
to a larger audience.”13 On the basis of four examples from the period after the
Second World War, she argued that an injured or dead body can function as a
medium of an experienced injustice.14 According to this view, the martyr is the
person who, sacrificing himself or herself for the sake of an oppressed commu-
nity, makes visible on his or her body the injustice and arbitrariness of violence
exercised by those who hold political authority. Fierke referred explicitly to
Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of ‘bare life’:
The visualization of ‘bare life’ in images of the body is a central element

of the emotional impact […]. The observer is faced with ‘bare life’ […]
stripped of its social meaning, standing alone and facing his or her own
11 Quoted in Michael Kirwan, “Girard, Religion, Violence, and Modern Martyrdom,” in: Peter
B. Clark (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 909–923, at 921.
12 See Recupero, Martirio, 20.
13 Fierke, Political Self-sacrifice, 33. Emphasis original.
14 The examples included hunger strikes of 1980–1981 in Northern Ireland; martyrdom of the
Polish Roman Catholic priest Popieluszko in 1984; self-immolation of Buddhist monks in
Vietnam in the early 1960s; and self-sacrifice in the Middle East.

76 Scolari
mortality […] The sight of the suffering body represents a confrontation

with ‘bare life’ that is followed by a struggle to inscribe it with meaning,
which is spectacularized by the visual nature of the performance.15
The visualization of bare life not only delegitimizes dominant power struc-
tures, but also potentially legitimizes alternative forms of community. From
Fierke’s perspective, the transformative power of self-sacrifice lies in the re-
constitution of the boundaries surrounding the individual body that is sacri-
ficed and in a larger ‘body politic’:
The agent of political self-sacrifice, often referred to as a martyr, becomes

the embodiment of the suffering nation. If Hobbes’ Leviathan […] is the
symbol of the authoritarian sovereign, who embodies the people, the
martyr is the embodiment of the nation, which seeks to transcend its
humiliation through a restoration of dignity and sovereignty.16
Fierke compared the functioning of the act of self-sacrifice within modern and
contemporary societies with ‘traditional’ ritual action, which transforms the
profane into the sacred.17 Self-sacrifice is a sacralizing act that transfers the di-
vine qualities of the sacrificed victim to the marginalized community. Interest-
ingly, we find a very similar theoretical model even in Sigrid Weigel’s studies on
the martyr figure.18 She has assumed that in the violent death of the martyr, life
is reduced to its purely fleshly dimension (not surprisingly, she too refers to the
concept of ‘bare life’), and that precisely this reduction leads to a sacralization
of the dead body. Death acquires a metaphysical sense and gains the status of
a profession of faith. The body itself becomes a witness of truth. The martyr
is the paradigmatic figure of one who, even in death, remains steadfast in his
faith. In reference to Carl Schmitt, Weigel saw the martyr as a dialectical nega-
tion of the sovereign. For those who are brutalized by the sovereign power and
who live in submission, opting for martyrdom represents the ability to act ‘sov-
ereignly.’ If the sovereign is defined as the one who decides on the state of ex-
ception, who has power over ‘bare life,’ the martyr is the one who decides in the
15 Fierke, Political Self-sacrifice, 79, 101, and 102.

16 Ibid., 53.
17 Ibid., 44.
18 Weigel, “Schauplätze”; Sigrid Weigel, “Souverän, Märtyrer und ‘gerechte Kriege’ Jenseits
des Jus Publicum Europaeum: Zum Dilemma politischer Theologie, diskutiert mit Carl
Schmitt und Walter Benjamin,” in: Daniel Weidner (ed.), Figuren des Europäischen: Kul-
turgeschichtliche Perspektiven (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 101–128.

State Martyrs 77
state of exception.19 Weigel also observed a return of the figure of the martyr in
secularized societies and considers it an ideal medium for ritual reproduction.
Through photography, film, and Internet the reproducibility of martyrological
representation has increased exponentially.20
This last aspect is of particular importance for the present investigation.
Weigel described martyrs as “media of ritual reproducibility [Medien ritueller
Reproduzierbarkeit].” Images, narratives, and rituals contribute to the spread of
the martyr figure, which serves as a model for imitation.21 This means that to
fully understand the performativity of the figure of the martyr, it is not enough
to analyze the performativity of the body, in the sense of self-sacrifice as an
act of speech. Further to this point, the performativity of its representations
within the discourses, as well as the appearance of such representations in
public space, must be included in such an analysis. Here too, Weigel and Fierke
seem to have followed a similar interpretive path. In fact, the latter explicitly
stated that the sacrificial act alone is not sufficient to produce a delegitimiza-
tion of the political authority in charge. The act itself can be described and
represented not only as martyrdom, but also as a suicide (or murder-suicide
in the case of suicide bombings). This depends on the attribution of meaning,
that is, on the way the act is represented linguistically. Based on her empiri-
cal study, Fierke identified a formal constant in the dynamics between the act
and its linguistic representation. In all four cases, the community to which the
agent of self-sacrifice belongs tends to politicize and sanctify the act, giving it
a martyrological representation. The social actors who recognize the sovereign
power in force tend to depoliticize the act, by representing it as a suicide or
murder-suicide. Referring to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fierke proposed a distinc-
tion between two language games:
The first language game of martyrdom provides a structure of rules with-

in which the resistance gives meanings to acts of political self-sacrifice.
The martyr is a witness to injustice, which refers to the humiliation of
a population vis-à-vis what is defined as an occupying power, as distin-
guished from the historical but oppressed community that the resistance
seeks to restore. This draws on a larger international discourse on hu-
man rights, which prohibits humiliation and highlights the dignity of all
people. […] The second language game expresses the meaning structure
employed by state authorities, which depoliticizes, by identifying the
19 See Weigel, “Schauplätze,” 12.

20 See ibid., 21.
21 Ibid., 20. All translations done by the author.

78 Scolari
a ctor as a c riminal or terrorist, whose death may be attributed to ‘suicide’.

The naming of the criminal or terrorist is part of a securitizing move that
identifies an existential threat to the state, which links to a larger interna-
tional discourse of sovereignty and justifies the punishment or elimina-
tion of this extremist element.22
According to Fierke, there are thus two different language games, which oper-
ate on the basis of two competing discourses—the discourse of sovereignty vs.
the discourse on human rights—referring to the same event. The act of politi-
cal self-sacrifice is, from this point of view, the site of a discursive contestation.
We have reached the heart, the central theme of the present study: the role
played by language and discourse in the construction of martyr figures. Let
us attempt to summarize the aforementioned considerations. First, as pointed
out by Fierke, the act of self-sacrifice alone is not enough to make a martyr. A
martyr must be represented and then become socially recognized as a mar-
tyr. In other words, in order to be able to emerge as a martyr figure, it is not
enough that an audience witnesses his/her violent death; someone has to rep-
resent the event of violence as a martyrdom. Second, as suggested by Weigel,
the consolidation and diffusion of martyr figures is directly proportional to
the amount and serial production of martyrological representations. The re-
production of the figure in the media increases its performativity. This means
that, to understand martyrdom, it is not enough to analyze it as an act of bodily
sacrifice, it is also necessary to analyze the serial representation of an event
of violence as martyrdom. The focus moves from the attitudes and subjective
intentions of social actors to the mechanisms of production and reproduction
of martyr figurations.
So far, we have looked at two of the three clues mentioned at the outset: the
rhetorical use of the figure of the martyr, as well as its relation to the discourse
on human rights. But there is a dark area, a missing element that Fierke’s and
Weigel’s theoretical models seem unable to integrate and explain: the emer-
gence of the state martyr figure. Both assume that martyr figures are always a
counterpart of sovereignty, namely martyrs of a community whose legitimacy
is questioned by a sovereign state. The example of Kerryʼs speech reveals a dif-
ferent situation, a kind of exception, which is difficult to explain under these
two theoretical frameworks. In the first place, it is highly problematic, if not
already ideological, to consider the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo journalists as
an act of self-sacrifice. This would amount to an attribution of intention to the
victims, which is very difficult, if not impossible, to prove: we are unable to
22 Ibid., 48.

State Martyrs 79
ask the deceased. In the second place, it is impossible to distinguish between

the discourse of sovereignty and discourse on human rights in Kerry’s speech.
Here the figure of the martyr seems to operate both as a political body of the
community—the people of the French Republic—as well as an instance of le-
gitimization of dominant power structures and practices. How can we explain
this rhetoric and this discourse, which is both a discourse of freedom and secu-
rity, of sovereignty and human rights? In other words: how could the figure of
the state martyr emerge, and how can we explain its performativity?
3 Signatures of the Martyr Figuration
Robert N. Bellah defined civil religion in America “as a genuine vehicle of na-
tional religious self-understanding,” which provides a “transcendental goal
for the political process” and contributes to the unity and collective identity
of Americans.23 More than three decades after Bellah’s publication, Marcela
Cristi has adopted some central aspects of this definition, but made remark-
able changes:
civil religion is concerned with both the social and the political order.
Civil religion tends to sacralize certain aspects of civic life by means of
public rituals and collective ceremonies. […] Civil religion may be con-
sidered a belief system or, a surrogate religion that expresses the self-
identity of a collectivity. Yet, like secular ideologies of different kinds,
civil religion may also attempt to force group identity and to legitimize
an existing political order by injecting a transcendental dimension or by
putting a religious gloss on the justification. This latter manifestation I
call political religion.24
According to this definition, civil religion has one modus operandi and two
functions. The modus operandi is indicated with the term ‘sacred.’ Civil reli-
gion operates through practices of sacralization, which are identified with
rituals and ceremonies. Those practices are anchored in a system of belief,
which seems to be both the fundament and the product of the sacralization
practices. Their function concerns two areas of human life: social and political
23 Robert H. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Dædalus: Journal of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences 96/1 (1967), 1–21, at 8.
24 Marcela Cristi, From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Poli-
tics (Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2001), 4.

80 Scolari
organization. First, sacralization causes identification of the individual with a

collectivity and, second, the legitimization of the political order. Although not
explicitly stated, the difference between civil religion and other kinds of ideol-
ogies, which Cristi termed “secular,” is that the former gives political and social
order a transcendental dimension. It is necessary to postulate this distinction,
because otherwise the concept of civil religion would lose all heuristic value.
Cristi referred to Max Weber, according to whom religion offers “an ultimate
stand toward the world by virtue of a direct grasp of the world’s ‘meaning.’”25
Cristi stressed the political and ideological implication of civil religion. Ac-
cording to her, Bellah has been strongly influenced by Durkheim, who “con-
ceives religion as essentially a spontaneous phenomenon.”26 Due to this adop-
tion of Durkheim’s “consensual tradition,” Bellah’s notion of civil religion is not
useful to study those cases in which civil religion is used as a political tool to
further national policies or programs. Cristi proposed combining the theoreti-
cal model of Durkheim with that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that is, to concep-
tualize civil religion on the basis of its dual manifestation—as culture and as
ideology. Durkheim’s notion allows one to take into account elements of spon-
taneity within civil religion. By contrast, the Rousseauian model allows one to
consider the possibility of an imposition of civil religion.
Indeed, Rousseau conceptualized a civil religion that is designed and con-
trolled by the state. He hypothesized that this form of religion is necessary for
the proper functioning of a good republican political order. The main function
of civil religion is to ensure the loyalty of citizens to the social contract, the law
and the nation. He considered Christianity (and all forms of positive religion)
inadequate to fulfill this task; there must be a “purely civil profession of faith,
the articles of which it is the business of the sovereign to determine.”27 The ar-
ticles are the following: there is a benevolent god; there will be life after death;
the just will be rewarded and the wicked punished; the social contract and the
laws are sacred; sectarian intolerance is prohibited.28
Rousseau, like most Enlightenment thinkers, was convinced that religion
was destined to disappear with the collapse of the old regime. But he also
25 Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in: H. H. Gerth &
C. Wright Mills (trans. and eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1958 [1915]), 343–359, at 352.
26 Cristi, Civil Religion, 7.
27 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy and the Social Contract (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994), 166.
28 See Christopher Bertham, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Rousseau and the Social Con-
tract (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), 185.

State Martyrs 81
b elieved in its indispensability, as a source of transcendental morality, for the

legitimization of the state. This is why his philosophical project called for the
creation of a new religious belief. This is the meaning of the adverb “purely”
in the citation above: Rousseau had in mind a form of faith purged of the lan-
guage and the mythologies of positive religions, primarily Christianity. Rous-
seau left no doubt that civil religion had to be imposed. The state must fix its
cult, its dogmas, its language forms. But is it possible to shape an ideology that
is not articulated by semantics, narratives, and rituals coming from earlier tra-
ditions of thought and action? To put it another way: is it possible to create a
new religious language and way of social acting out of nowhere?
There are two passages in Rousseau’s oeuvre that I consider very important
in order to highlight why the idea of a ‘pure’ civil religion should be considered
abstract and ahistorical. Those passages also help to establish a connection
between the issue of civil religion and that of martyrdom and, in particular,
the emergence of national martyrs. The first passage is situated at the end
of his Social Contract and clarifies the way in which the state should impose
civil religion. Rousseau wrote that “it does concern the state that each citizen
should have a religion which makes him cherish his duties” and that if a citi-
zen is “incapable of cherishing the laws and justice sincerely, or of sacrificing,
when necessary, his life for his duty,” he/she should be banished from the state
by the Sovereign.29 The second passage is situated in his Discourse on Political
Economy:
If it were to be said that it is well for one to die for the sake of all, I should
admire the saying in the mouth of a virtuous and worthy patriot who
voluntarily goes to his death out of duty, for the good of his country; but
if the meaning is that a government is permitted to sacrifice an innocent
person for the good of the mass, I hold this maxim to be one of the most
execrable that tyranny has ever invented.30
So, for Rousseau, a state that sacrifices its citizens is tyrannical, but a citizen
who is not willing to sacrifice does not have the right to participate in the rights
and civil liberties guaranteed by the state and should be banished. If the state
cannot force citizens, the only option that remains is to convince them that
it is right to sacrifice themselves for the state. This is where the ideological
dimension of civil religion becomes visible: “Good citizenship […] has to be
29 Rousseau, Discourse, 166.

30 Ibid., 19.

82 Scolari
imposed and enforced through what Willaime has called L’Etat éducateur.”31
However, what means does the state have at its disposal to convince people
of the necessity of the state itself to the point that they are willing to sacrifice
their lives for it?
During and after the French Revolution there were many people who died
because they believed in the values and principles of the Republic. Many of
these devout citizens were at the center of a new, specifically republican, form
of devotion. As pointed out by historian Albert Soboul, particularly with the
increasing importance of the sans-culottes in political life, a very popular wor-
ship developed around the “martyrs of freedom,” which goes hand in hand
with the processes of dechristianization.32 The most famous martyr of the
French revolution was certainly the deputy and journalist Jean-Paul Marat.33
“In memory of Marat,” wrote Soboul, “sans-culottes saw an affirmation of their
Republican principles, a form of popular communion, an exaltation of their
revolutionary faith.”34
Political rhetoric has played a significant role in the formation of this new
form of worship. On 1 Brumaire an ii (1793), citizen Pannequin delivered
an Eloge de Marat before the societé populaire of the Section de Picques. In
this speech, Marat, who was killed in June of that year, had been honored as
“l’apôtre et le martyr de la liberté.”35 As noted by Joseph Clark:
from the opening assertion that Marat had ‘anim[é] le néant, recré[é] la
nature’ to the conclusion that the ‘immortel ami du peuple’ was ‘le min-
istre envoyé de la part du Dieu de la nature, pour porter la parole de vie
parmi les peuples qui marchaient dans les ombres de la mort’, Panne-
quin’s Eloge was saturated with biblical allusions and messianic motifs.36
The birth of this republican martyrology shows why Rousseau’s “purely civil
profession of faith” is a problematic concept. It does not take into account
that faith in and commitment to any kind of values or principles cannot be
born or develop in a vacuum, but instead, are born of necessity and are always
31 Cristi, Civil Religion, 29.

32 Albert Soboul, La rivoluzione francese (Bari: Laterza, 1966), 332.
33 See ibid., 331–337; Ronald Schechter, “Terror, Vengeance, and Martyrdom in the French
Revolution,” in: Dominic Jenes & Alex Houen (eds.), Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern
to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 152–178, at 161.
34 Soboul, La rivoluzione, 335.
35 Quoted in Joseph Clarke, Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution
and Remembrance, 1789–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 171.
36 Ibid.

State Martyrs 83
articulated by adopting practices and language forms, which are socially, cul-
turally, and linguistically predetermined. The idea of the heroic sacrifice in the
popular imagination turns into a cult of the martyrs. The cult of the “martyrs
of freedom” resumes and iterates semantics, narrations, and rituals that have
developed and established within the Christian tradition.37
From this point of view, the republican martyrology can actually be consid-
ered as a narrative, which functions analogous to civil religion as defined by
Cristi. The martyrs were firstly figures with which citizens loyal to the revolu-
tionary project and the Republic could identify. Their representation and ado-
ration as martyrs makes them excellent symbols of the ‘political body,’ of the
national collectivity. At the same time, the cult of the martyrs certainly had the
function of legitimizing the new political order and delegitimizing the ancient
régime. Their death was a sort of manifestation of the truth of republican prin-
ciples, since they were demonstrations of the will of the sovereign citizens to
die for the sovereign state. Here it is important to draw attention to the close
link between the secular use of the rhetoric of martyrdom, the birth of the
nation-state, and human rights discourse. As Agamben noted:
in the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable

rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the
moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to
citizens of a state. […] This is in fact implicit in the ambiguity of the very
title of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, of 1789.
In the phrase La déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, it is not
clear whether the two terms homme and citoyen name two autonomous
beings or instead form a unitary system.38
This ambiguity is also present in the state martyr figure, which performs the
function of a witness to the truth of universal principles, but at the same time
serves as a symbolic political body for the citizens of a particular nation.
37 It is not irrelevant to note that the French Revolution has also produced figures of martyrs
on the opposite political front, namely the Catholic and counter-revolutionary. A famous
example is that of the martyrs of Compiègne. It is even more significant that even the
murderer of Marat Charlotte Corday soon acquired the status of a martyr of the counter-
revolution. This means that there were two competing martyrologies: one revolutionary,
secular, and republican; the other counter-revolutionary, religious, and catholic. They
were narratives in competition, but they recur to the same semantics.
38 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1998), 126.

84 Scolari
Unlike what Rousseau was thinking and probably hoping, the civil religion
of the First Republic was articulated by taking up and reframing forms of rep-
resentation belonging to the semantic and symbolic system of the Christian
tradition. Does this mean that we must deny the secular nature of the revolu-
tion and, with it, of the modern nation-state? Not at all. Both are results of
the secularization process. I argue that it is precisely because of the process of
secularization, that the figure of the martyr of the state, the nation, the repub-
lic was able to emerge and spread quickly.
Like Agamben, I understand secularization not as a concept but as a signa-
ture. Signature is a terminus technicus of discourse analysis.39 It broadens the
interpretative horizon, making it possible to observe how signs and concepts
change meaning over time. In this sense, it marks a breaking point between
semiology and hermeneutics. Semiology is what allows the identification of
signs, while hermeneutics discovers their meaning in a particular historical,
political, social, and cultural context.
Understood as a signature, secularization is a process of dislocation of signs
and concepts from the sacral to the profane sphere of meaning. According to
Agamben, signatures play an important strategic role because they give “a last-
ing orientation to the interpretation of signs.”40 The central idea is that some
religious language forms, which in modernity and post-modernity are used in
profane and secular contexts and discourses, are like “secret indexes” in the
sense that they recall the previous sacral meanings without making them
explicit.41
There is at least one other researcher who developed and supported a simi-
lar view on the phenomenon of secularization and who argued that there is an
“aesthetic potential of secularized [religious] language.”42 In The Legitimacy of
the Modern Age, the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg wrote:
Christianity has made language. It has been and still is a potenti-

ated language-spirit [Sprachgeist] from the beginning… The phenom-
ena of secularization are based largely on this language-spirit, on the
39 See Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris:
Gallimard, 1966), 44; Giorgio Agamben, Signatura rerum: Sul metodo (Torino: Bollati Bor-
inghieri, 2008), 35–81.
40 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy
and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 4.
41 Ibid.
42 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), 119.

State Martyrs 85
f amiliarities which it has created, on the transferabilities that it has left,

on the residues of demand attached to its materials.43
There are certain signs, concepts and statements, which deploy a specific
performativity with a specific power of persuasion by referring to a religious
“language-spirit,” to residues of religious signification. For Blumenberg, secu-
larized religious language has a “rhetoric function,” which is to provoke effects
“in the spectrum between provocation and familiarity” through exposure or
evocation of an original meaning.44
If the theses of Agamben and Blumenberg are correct, a critical analysis of
the figure of the martyr and its performativity cannot help but search for its
historical roots. What is the ‘original’ meaning of the figure of the martyr, what
is its ‘secret index’?
In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I wish to make clear that I am not
arguing that there is a genuine, true meaning of martyrdom, which has re-
mained unchanged over the centuries. That would mean a return to a danger-
ous essentialism. The goal of genealogical analysis is not to detect an inexistent
essential meaning, but to trace the “cultural and medial metamorphosis” of the
figure of the martyr in history.45
G. W. Bowersockʼs Martyrdom and Rome is one of the most important con-
tributions to the study of the genealogy of the martyr figure. He argued that
the concept of martyrdom was alien to the ancient world and criticizes those
researchers who consider for example the death of Socrates, of the three Jews
in the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, or of the Maccabees as earlier forms of
martyrdom.46 According to Bowersock, “martyrdom, as we understand it, was
conceived and devised in response to complex social, religious and political
pressures,” which took place from the second century onwards.47
Originally, the Greek word μάρτυς had the meaning of ‘witness’ in a trial. The
word “was part of the forensic and legal language of Greek court,” and it could
be used metaphorically for all kinds of observations and attestations. But until
the Christian literature of the mid-second century ce, it had never designated
43 Ibid., 126. Ellipsis original.

44 Ibid., 115.
45 Weigel, “Schauplätze,” 16–17.
46 See, e.g., Theofried Baumeister, Die Anfänge der Theologie des Martyriums (Münster:
Aschendorff, 1980); Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs: Acta Alexandrino-
rum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).
47 G. W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
[1995]), 5.

86 Scolari
“dying for a cause.”48 Even in the New Testament the wort μάρτυς is used only in
the sense of a verbal witness. However, there is no doubt that within the New
Testament, the act of witnessing takes on a different connotation than before.
The word continues to denote the act of witnessing something verbally (or the
person who is a witness of something), but what is being witnessed now has a
transcendent and metaphysical value. It is no longer the truth of an historical
fact, as in the case of a witness made before a trial, but of an absolute truth. The
earliest appearance of those words in the sense of death at the hands of hostile
authority is in the Martyrium polycarpi, which described the events connected
with the execution of the elderly bishop of Smyrna, a town in western Asia
Minor, around the year 150.
This new meaning of “martyrdom,” namely “to die for a cause,” is therefore
a product of late antiquity. The concept gradually took shape in the second
century and “had been an essentially urban manifestation of Christian zeal.” In
fact, “martyrdom in a city provided the greatest possible visibility for the cause
of the nascent Church, and it simultaneously exposed the Roman administra-
tive machinery to the greatest possible embarrassment.”49
What happened in the second century was not a simple re-nomination of a
social phenomenon that did not change over time. In the scenario of the Greek
cities of Asia Minor, Bowersock identified the necessary context for the genesis
of the phenomenon of Christian martyrdom. It is in this context (and under the
influence of the ethics of suicide modeled on the paradigm of Greek-Roman
tradition) that “an ideology of death to promote a cause” was born.50 Of course,
voluntary death, understood as suicide, was soon harshly criticized by church
fathers (particularly by Clement of Alexandria and Origin), and the concept of
martyrdom again took, in its theological interpretation, the meaning of “bear-
ing witness,” in the sense of a confession of faith in God. To die as a martyr
means, then, to witness the truth of Christ death and resurrection—martyrdom
as imitatio Christi. But despite this reinterpretation or re-signification, the idea
of martyrdom as a sort of “bodily performance” remains. During the second
century, the public death of the members of the Christian sect became the act
of witnessing the transcendent and absolute truth embodied by Christ.
The figure of the martyr was able to acquire a social and political function
precisely because of this re-signification of the concept of martyrdom. In the
same way that, according to Pauline theology, Christ was considered the sym-
bolic body of the Church (and vice versa), the martyrs, as imitators of Christ
48 Ibid., 4.
49 Ibid., 42.
50 Ibid., 74.

State Martyrs 87
in death, were experienced as being the same symbolic body. The martyr, we
can say, assumed the meaning of one who re-actualized the mystical bond be-
tween Christ and community, in a similar way to that of the sacrament of the
Eucharist.51 And, in eschatological terms, it can be said that the figure of the
martyr also had a legitimizing function. The Christian martyr figure, by wit-
nessing the death of Christ with his own death, also bore witness to the future
establishment of the city of God. In this way, it delegitimized the authority of
the Roman Empire.52
I stop here. A complete genealogical study of the martyr figure from late
antiquity until today is a mammoth enterprise and this is not the place to start
it. The goal of this article is another: to reflect on the emergence of modern
and secular state martyrs. For this purpose, Bowersockʼs study is of great help
because it demonstrates that to understand the functioning of martyrdom
we have to pay attention not only to the (ritual) staging and visualization of
the bodies, but also to the linguistic representations of victims of violence, as
well as to the pragmatic and discursive context in which those representations
appear.
Through the signature of the word ‘martyrdom,’ that is: the transposition
of the term from a legal and forensic into a religious context, public events of
violence acquired a new, metaphysical meaning. This signature has strongly
determined the way of attributing meaning to events of political violence in
which someone has been tortured or killed. Dying (in certain circumstances)
became an act of witnessing the truth of the Christian faith, or, more specifi-
cally, the truth of Christ’s death and resurrection.
As I have tried to show in the previous section, the figure of the martyr dur-
ing the French Revolution underwent another signature, perhaps as significant
as the one that occurred in the second century, through which it was trans-
posed from the pragmatic-hermeneutical context of Christian religion (and
theology) to a secular (and political) one. The transfer was possible because
the figure of the martyr soon proved to be useful for the construction of a nar-
rative of the nation-state, able to ‘appeal’ to the people and make them feel
part of a new form of political community called the republic.53 The birth of
51 See Karl Rahner, Zur Theologie des Todes: Mit einem Exkurs über das Martyrium (Freiburg:
Herder, 1958), 91.
52 See Recupero, Martirio, 24ff.
53 I refer here to the concept of ‘appeal’ as developed by Louis Althusser, who used it to
explain the function of ideology. The central idea is that ideology needs to ‘appeal’ to
individuals as subjects; the appeal is what constitutes individuals as subjects. The appel-
lation or interpellation is realized, according to Althusser, in everyday practices. See Louis

88 Scolari
the modern narrative of the nation-state and the secular signature of martyr-
dom are closely linked historical phenomena.
4 The Construction of the Martyr Aldo Moro
In the last part of this paper, I focus on the ideological implications of the link
between violence, martyrdom, and the narrative of the nation-state posing the
question: is the emergence of secular martyrs, which seem to have a central
role in civil religion, a spontaneous product of collectivity or the result of a
conscious and targeted use of the rhetoric of martyrdom for political purpos-
es? I want to pursue this question focusing on a specific case study.
Italy in 1978: the Christian Democrat politician Aldo Moro was kidnapped,
imprisoned, and finally killed by the terrorist organization called the Red Bri-
gades.54 The day he was kidnapped, the politician was on his way to Parliament
to begin debates toward ratifying a new government. It was to be the first imple-
mentation of Moroʼs strategic political vision as defined by the compromesso
storico (“historic compromise”), an historical political alliance and accommoda-
tion between the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party. After
the kidnapping, the Red Brigades proposed exchanging Moro’s life for the free-
dom of thirteen prisoners. But the new “government of national solidarity”—
constituted by Communists, Christian Democrats, and Socialists the day of the
kidnapping—decided from the beginning to adopt the so-called “line of firm-
ness,” which consisted in a categorical refusal to negotiate with the terrorists
for the liberation of Moro. During the captivity, Moro wrote several letters to
Althusser, Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate: Aufsätze zur marxistischen Theorie

(Hamburg & Westberlin: vsa, 1977), 130–153.
54 The Red Brigades were undoubtedly the most powerful and active left-wing terrorist
group in Italy in the early 1970s. They emerged in 1969/1970 and began to organize the
lotta armata, “the armed fight.” The first leaflet of the Red Brigades, signed in the singular,
appeared in Milan in April 1970. In October of the same year, the journal Sinistra Operaia
announced the creation of the Red Brigades as the avant-garde of the proletarian struggle
against capitalism. The kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro in 1978 was the most
striking action of the Red Brigades. Their actions continued with regularity until February
1982. After 1982, the group was detected and broken up by Italian investigators with the
aid of several leaders under arrest who decided to collaborate with the judicial system
and assisted the authorities in capturing other members. After the mass arrests which
took place in the late 1980s, the group faded into insignificance. See Giorgio Galli, Piombo
rosso: La storia completa della lotta armata in Italia dal 1970 a oggi (Milano: Baldini Cas-
toldi Dalai, 2004).

State Martyrs 89
leaders of the Christian Democrats Party, to his family and friends, and to Pope
Paul vi. With these letters, Moro tried to convince the government, his own
party, the church, and civil society of the moral correctness and political fea-
sibility of a negotiation for his release. Despite the fact that some social actors
showed a certain openness to the possibility of negotiations, the government
and the parties represented in it—except for the Socialist Party—as well as
most of the media considered it unacceptable to negotiate with a terrorist or-
ganization. On 9 May, after 55 days of detention, Moro was assassinated.
The circumstances of the death of Moro have not yet been fully clarified.
Here in this article it is impossible to summarize all the facts, evidence, and
testimonies related to the Moro affair which have emerged between 1978 and
the present. It would be even more unrealistic to attempt to summarize the
immense number of interpretations, hypotheses, and conspiracy theories that
attempt to explain and to pinpoint who is responsible for the murder of Moro
and more generally for what has happened in Italy during the so-called ‘years
of lead’ and the ‘strategy of tension.’55 As written by Giorgio Calli:
the kidnapping [of Moro] is a unique case not only in their [the Red Bri-
gades’] history, but in the entire history of guerrilla warfare in the West
[…]. Interpretations of what happened include a wide range that goes
from ‘everything is clarified’ […], with the Red Brigades as sole protago-
nists, to the idea of a conspiracy hatched by the cia and managed by the
Italian P2, through to the appeal on the front page of the ‘Corriere della
Sera’, in which Franceschini argues that Moretti is in fact an undercover
cia agent […].56
Moro’s kidnapping, detention, and death are events that have produced an
enormous amount of discourses and lengthy procedures. They have been the
subject of four trials and three debates in parliamentary committees, one of
which is still ongoing. They were recounted and presented using many per-
spectives, from different social actors, through different media. There have
been movies, novels, journalistic investigations, monuments, interviews, docu-
mentaries, plays, songs, and essays in criminology, history, law, and p
sychology.
55 For an extensive bibliography on the Moro case, see Miguel Gotor, Il memoriale della Re-
pubblica: Gli scritti di Aldo Moro dalla prigionia e l’anatonomia del potere italiano (Torino:
Einaudi, 2011), 571–606.
56 Giorgio Galli, Piombo rosso, 106. Franceschini was one of the historical leaders and found-
ers of the Red Brigades; Moretti was one of the Red Brigades’ leaders in the late 1970s and
one of the kidnappers of Aldo Moro; P2 was a clandestine (after 1976) masonic lodge.

90 Scolari
Although there is this plurality of voices, narrative forms, mediums, and per-
spectives, there is a theme or a recurring motif in the discourse on the Moro
case: his death was and is still represented as a martyrdom and as a sacrifice. I
will now scrutinize some of these representations.
On 11 May 1978, the President of the European Parliament, Emilio Colombo,
gave a speech in Strasbourg in memory of the murdered politician, calling him
a martyr of the democratic state, who died for his commitment to defend the
fundamental rights of citizens of the democratic state:
Dear colleagues, We now want to commemorate Aldo Moro, who was

barbarously sacrificed. […] The upper hand has retained an ice-cold, cal-
culating, incomprehensible brutality, which has turned the captivity into
sacrifice and martyrdom. […] Moro was sacrificed for the very ideals for
which he fought as a lecturer, as a politician, as a statesman during his
long, laborious, often controversial, but certainly fruitful years. […] The
Italian Constitution bears, especially in the part about the fundamental
rights of man and of the citizen in a democratic society, the stamp of
that Christian personalism, which influenced his conception of man, of
society and of the state.57
The figure of the martyr and the sovereign here seem to coincide and to blend
into one another. Moro is represented both as a representative of the sovereign
people—‘sovereign’ when we consider that his party was in power without in-
terruption since 1948, the year of the foundation of the First Republic—and as
a martyr who died because of his commitment to the defense of fundamen-
tal rights. Martyrdom here does not delegitimize an existing political order by
legitimizing the foundation of a new form of political community. The situ-
ation here is completely upside-down: the rhetoric of martyrdom tends to le-
gitimize the status quo and to delegitimize the Marxist-Leninist idea of the
constitution of a communitarian political community achieved by the means
of revolutionary violence. This inversion is possible because the offended com-
munity and political authority are presented as identical: the killing of one of
the representatives of the sovereign becomes here the symbol of an attack on
the entire nation, on the Italian people.
The second important aspect concerns the reference to Moro’s commitment
to the values and principles of the Italian Constitution. As in Kerry’s speech,
the victim is described as a defender of fundamental rights. Death itself takes
57 Emilio Colombo et al, Gedenken an Aldo Moro, transcript (Strassburg: Europäisches

arlament, 1978), 5.
P

State Martyrs 91
on the meaning of a real witness to the moral truth of those rights. The death
is the “price” that Moro (and with him the whole nation) “pays” for his com-
mitment to fundamental rights. But unlike Kerry, who described such rights
as something born with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the
speaker identified the source of those rights in Christianity. Here, Moro is to
some extent simultaneously a Christian martyr and a state martyr, inasmuch
as the basic values of Christianity and those at the base of the Italian Constitu-
tion are considered similar, if not identical.
Finally, there is another very significant aspect to highlight. In Colombo’s
speech, it is impossible to identify exactly who the intended agent of the sac-
rificial act is. There is a passage that, perhaps more than others, clarifies this
lack of concretion. Colombo said that an “incomprehensible brutality […] has
turned the captivity in sacrifice and martyrdom.” This formulation has, in my
view, a strategic function. It allows the speaker to make use of the rhetoric
of martyrdom and sacrifice without explicitly naming an agent. Although, the
Red Brigades obviously are the only agents of such brutality, they are not really
the sacrificers of Moro. It is brutality, violence itself, which qualifies the event
as martyrdom. Detached from the intentionality of the subjects, the event of
violence itself acquires a metaphysical connotation. It becomes a metaphysi-
cal force that acts in history, conferring a transcendental meaning to what hap-
pened. An almost Manichean conception of history seems to be present here,
according to which a cosmic force—evil—operates in the world and deter-
mines the fate of a whole nation.
Not all martyrological representations of the event were based on the same
narrative structure. There were also social actors disposed to identify the agent
of the sacrificial action. An editorial article entitled “He Died so that the Re-
public Lives,” which appeared on 10 May on the first page of the Corriere della
Sera, said:
For this Italian state, which has not succumbed to the blackmail of the
negotiations, Moro sacrificed his life. Now the state, which has defended
[itself] by not giving in, has a commitment to be honored: to the martyr,
to Italians and to itself. […] The Republic must regain its strength and
must restore, without emotional reactions, but with the firmness of the
dark hours, the law of a civil society that mourns its own martyrs but also
knows, dry-eyed, not to forgive.58
58 Corriere della Sera, “È morto perché la Repubblica viva,” 10 May 1978, 1.

92 Scolari
Moro is clearly identified as the sacrificial agent. The article used the ‘sacrifice’
of Moro to declare the moral and political obligation of the state to restore
law. Moro is described as a willing victim, who, by sacrificing himself, makes a
moral and political appeal: ‘you have to save the republican laws!’ The idea of a
restoration of the legal and political order automatically implies that there was
a period in which that order was suspended or otherwise severely threatened.
The sacrifice thus assumes the role of an event that closes a period of social
crisis and puts in place the conditions of possibility for the restoration of the
status quo. With the pair of sentences “Moro sacrificed his life” and “the state,
which has defended [itself] by not giving in,” the article basically legitimized
the government’s choice not to deal with the Red Brigades for Moro’s libera-
tion. The representation of Moro as the subject of the action implies, in a way,
the will to sacrifice. In this representation, the will of the victim and the will of
the government appear identical.
As has been mentioned, Moro wrote several letters in which he categorically
refused the ‘line of firmness.’ This obvious and manifest opposition between
the will Moro expressed in his letters and the will that has been attributed
to him makes the Moro case so special and somehow exemplary. The article
in the Corriere della Sera is an excellent example of a highly ideological and
symbolical construction. How could the newspaper attribute to Moro the will
to self-sacrifice when in the previous weeks they had published Moroʼs letters
in which he argued exactly the contrary? The answer is simple: by denying the
authenticity of the letters. Thus, on the same day the newspaper published
Moro’s first letter, which was addressed to the Minister of the Interior, Fran-
cesco Cossiga, it also questioned its authenticity with an editorial entitled “The
Red Brigades Have Forced Moro to Propose an Exchange in a Letter.” All ruling
parties and almost all newspapers supported this view.59
In fact, as Robin Erica Wagner-Pacifici shows in her study on the Moro case
as social drama, there was a massive media campaign to delegitimize not only
Moroʼs letters, but Moro himself as public person with a political position.60 At
the beginning, in the short period between the capture and the publication of
the first letter, the majority of newspapers praised the political and moral stat-
ure of Moro. Even the official organ of the Communist Party, the newspaper
L’Unità, which in the past had written in very critical or even accusing tones
59 Corriere della Sera, “Le Brigate rosse hanno costretto Moro a proporre con una lettera uno
scambio,” 30 March 1978, 1.
60 See Robin Erica Wagner-Pacifici, The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 220–230; Alessandro Silj, Brigate Rosse-Stato: Lo
scontro-spettacolo nella regia della stampa quotidiana (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1978).

State Martyrs 93
about the politician, on 19 March, the day the first photos of Moro in detention
were published, attributed the status of martyr of the Republic to Moro:
The emotion with which we are forced to reproduce—as the news piece
that it is—the photo of Aldo Moro in the hands of his jailors is very sad.
We do it with the disgust of those who touch a document handled by as-
sassins […] Look at this photo. It is the image of a man whom kidnappers
intend to martyr in one of those tragic farces to which they give the name
trial; and who is being made to endure the challenge to Italian democracy
and the honor of this Republic.61
That same day Gianfranco Piazzesi too described the photo of Moro in deten-
tion in an editorial article entitled “Stoic Dignity” in the Corriere della Sera:
The camera has reproduced him, behind the banner of the Red Brigades,
with that composed and thoughtful expression, for which he is known.
There is no trace of fear, and not even a burst of pride […]. Even a lay-
man can understand that only someone who believes, and who is truly at
peace with its conscience, may find the strength to look in that unmistak-
able way at those who do not know what they are doing.62
Two days later the newspaper Il Popolo, the official organ of the Democratic
Party, published an article that proclaimed that the character and moral values
of Moro were the reason why he was the true subject of a martyrdom for the
state:
Our choice is that the state cannot negotiate with the Red Brigades. The
painful eventual death of Moro, killed by the Red Brigades, signifies the
everlasting quality of his testimony in the golden dawn of liberty. Often,
immolation precedes the resurrection of the truth […]. Maybe for Moro
there is, yes, the problem of the pci but it is the problem, above all, of
the communion of the saints. The discourse is metaphysical, theological,
even if it is apparently political and constitutional […] It seems strange
that the man most engaged in our Italian history in reality is the man
most “disengaged.”63
61 L’Unità, “Un uomo torturato,” 19 March 1978, 1.

62 Gianfranco Piazzesi, “Stoica dignità,” Corriere della Sera, 19 March 1978, 1.
63 Francesco Grisi, “La forza della ragione,” Il Popolo, 21 March 1978, 5.

94 Scolari
In the three articles the ‘martyrdom’ of Moro was already configured: in the
first by saying that it was the intention of the Red Brigades to martyr the pris-
oner; in the second by producing the obvious allusion to the words of Christ
on the cross (Luke 23: 24). In the third article, Moro is already operating in a
metaphysical sphere: his anticipated death is transcended into a vague abso-
lute truth and functions as a sort of rite of passage from this world to the com-
munity of the saints. His martyrdom will be followed by the resurrection and
with him, the article seems to have suggested, the state too will be resurrected.
To summarize, in all three articles Moro’s death was anticipated. The possibil-
ity to save him, to negotiate his release, had already been discarded before the
Red Brigades could communicate their ransom proposal.
However, the attitude of the newspapers changed on 30 March, the day the
first letter of Moro was published. In this letter, he criticized the “line of firm-
ness” adopted by the government, the Christian Democrats, and the Commu-
nists, as well as by most of the mass-media. The same day, the Corriere della
Sera published an editorial entitled “But the Republic Will Never Be Their Pris-
oner” with a particularly significant passage:
Who wrote this letter? Was it written by Aldo Moro, President of the dc,
statesman, maximum mediator and inspirer of Italian politics, and cau-
tious strategist? Or was it written by a man who has the same name and
the same face, again Aldo Moro, but who is reduced to impotence by a
cruel imprisonment, isolated, perhaps not in full control of his mental
faculties due to drugs or something else? The second hypothesis seems
the most likely […]. Moro […] even comes to deny the fundamentals of
the state.64
On 31 March, on page three the same newspaper summed up what it had

published the day before under the title “Isolation, Drugs, Prolonged Wakeful-
ness: Here Is How Personality Can Be Destroyed”; another title on the same
page states: “The Letter Signed by Moro Perhaps Written under Dictation.”65
The same day La Repubblica published the following articles: “In the Prison
of the People Psychological Violence Makes Death Desirable” and “Tough and
64 Coriere della Sera, “Ma la Repubblica non sarà mai loro prigioniera,” 30 March 1978, 1.
65 Maurizio Chierici, “Isolamento, droga, veglia prolungata: Ecco come si annienta la per-
sonalità,” Coriere della Sera, 31 March 1978, 4; Roberto Martinelli, “La lettera autografa di
Moro forse scritta sotto dettatura,” Coriere della Sera, 31 March 1978, 4.

State Martyrs 95
efined Torture but Without the Use of Drugs.”66 A week after the publication
R
of the first letter, Gianfranco Piazzesi quoted a study by the u.s. think tank
“Rand Corporation” in an editorial of La Repubblica and compared the situ-
ation of Moro with that of a helpless child (after a first comparison with the
situation of partisans during the resistance against fascism):
[…] during the resistance, many Italians subjected to psychological stress

at least equal [to that of Moro], and even to physical torture, were able to
cope without fear of their abusers. […] The total physical dependence of
the hostage on the kidnappers often brings him to a state of total psycho-
logical introjection. In other words, he finds himself in the same situation
as that of a baby who needs help and who, given this fact, identifies with
his parents. Like a baby, the hostage ends up identifying himself with his
kidnappers.67
There are plenty of other examples of how the press has gradually annulled the
public and political person of Moro during the kidnapping, thus transforming
him into ‘bare life.’ As written by Alessandro Silj, there was:
a massive operation of institutionalized falsification of a national

reality—and Moro’s letters were part, regardless of their authenticity, of
this reality. It is an operation that could never succeed without the unani-
mous and decisive contribution of the national press.68
This, as I have shown above, has not prevented most of the press and political
parties from re-sacralizing Moro after his death:
He has disappeared before our eyes, but lives on in the grateful memory
of the true Italians, of those who seek justice, freedom, solidarity inspired
by love. Aldo Moro taught us by word and example, to live and fight for
these ideals, he teaches us, through his sacrifice, to remain true to the
faith, to hope against hope, even at this moment, one of the most dark
and sad, not only for his family and for his friends, but for Italy, for the big
66 Antonio Saba, “Nel carcere del popolo la violenza psicologica rende desiderabile la
morte,” La Repubblica, 31 March 78, 4; Giovanni Maria Pace, “Tortura dura e raffinata ma
senza l‘uso della droga,” La Repubblica, 31 March 78, 5.
67 Gianfranco Piazzesi, “La forza della dignità,” Corriere della Sera, 07 April 1978, 1.
68 Silj, Brigate Rosse-Stato, 184.

96 Scolari
family of mankind. [Written by Cardinal Michele Pellegrino and entitled

“The Death of the Innocent Mysterious Plan of God.”]69
Nonetheless, the question of the authenticity of Moro’s letters must be posed.

Several politicians who knew Moro well, his friends, his family, as well as sev-
eral prominent intellectuals and journalists, have claimed that the letters must
be considered authentic. Even the majority of the studies that have appeared
in recent years support the thesis of the authenticity of Moro’s letters. It has
been demonstrated that the position Moro stands for in the letters is identical
to his point of view in previous cases of political kidnapping. It is also a fact,
that, in the aftermath, the autopsy of Moro revealed no injuries, no traces of
drugs, or poisons. All the empirical data points toward Moro having been a
lucid, competent, and rational author. Finally, the style of the letters is clearly
consistent with his political speeches and writings.70
But, what did Moro write in his letters? In the first one he states:
The doctrine that kidnapping must not profit [the kidnappers], […] does
not stand up in the political circumstances, where it causes incalculable
and certain damage not only to the person, but to the state. The sacrifice
of innocents in the name of an abstract principle of legality, while an un-
deniable state of necessity mandates saving them, is unacceptable. […]
Let God enlighten you for the better, avoiding getting bogged down in a
painful episode, upon which many things could depend.71
In a later letter to Benigno Zaccagnini, his friend and secretary of the Christian
Democracy, which was published in the newspaper La Repubblica on 22 April,
Moro radicalized his appeal:
If you do not do something, it would be written a dreadful page in the

history of Italy. My blood would fall on you, on the party, the country.
[…] May God enlighten you, dear Zaccagnini, and enlighten the friends
69 Michele Pellegrino, “La morte dell’innocente disegno misterioso di Dio,” La Stampa, 10

May 1978, 3.
70 See Miguel Gotor (ed.), Aldo Moro: Lettere dalla prigionia (Torino: Einaudi, 2008), 185–390;
Francesco Barbagallo, “Le lettere della prigione di Aldo Moro,” Studi storici 49/1 (2008),
261–267; Giorgio Bocca (ed.), Moro: Una tragedia italiana (Milano: Bompiani, 1978), 7–32;
Galli, Piombo rosso, 106–132; Wagner-Pacifici, Moro, 260–261.
71 Aldo Moro, “Il mio sangue ricadrà su di loro”: Gli scritti di Aldo Moro prigioniero delle br, ed.
by Sergio Flamigni (Milano: Kaos Edizioni, 1997), 58–59.

State Martyrs 97
to whom I address a message of despair. Do not think the few cases in

which it [the state] has gone on right [following the rules of law], but to
the many resolved according to the rules of humanity […]. If pity prevails,
the country is not finished.72
The crucial point in these statements is not so much the explicit and radical
rejection of the line of firmness, but rather the fact that Moro himself used a
rhetoric of sacrifice, which is a sort of counterpart of the one that emerges after
his death. In his representation of the event—moreover of an event that has
yet to happen!—the state was identified as the agent of the sacrificial action.
Moro here took the role of an accuser. This line of conduct of the government
and of the ruling parties was judged incompatible with the rules of humanity.
The core of these values was, for Moro, piety. Thus, in the letters a distinction
and a rupture emerged between the legal, “abstract” principles of the state and
another kind of higher values. Only if the state would give up the former and
accept the latter will the country be safe. According to the Christian Democrat
politician, the law cannot be the foundation of the legitimacy of the Italian
state, but only the extra-legal, universal value of the “sanctity of human life.”73
Using the formula ‘my blood shall be upon you,’ an evident allusion to the bib-
lical text—Leviticus 20—Moro cursed all those who continue to support the
line of firmness. The sacrifice wanted by the government here becomes sacri-
lege, an act that desacralizes and delegitimizes its political authority.
Moro was not the only one to judge the event in these terms. Over the last
37 years, a lot of representations have been made that deviate from the gen-
eral doxa and in which the government, the media, and the civil society have
been accused of being responsible for the death of Moro. I want to show this
with one last example. In August 1978, three months after the death of Moro,
Leonardo Sciascia stated in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel
Observateur:
Yes. Aldo Moro by dying—despite all his historical responsibilities—has

acquired an innocence that makes us all guilty, then me too. […] Dying,
Aldo Moro was, so to speak, stripped of his Christian Democratic tunic.
His body does not belong to anyone, but his death puts everyone on
trial.74
72 Ibid., 112–113.
73 See Wagner-Pacifici, Moro, 182–188.
74 Quoted in Armenia Balducci, Giuseppe Ferrara, & Robert Katz (eds.), Il caso Moro (Napoli:
Tullio Peronti, 1987), 155.

98 Scolari
Although the words sacrifice and martyrdom are absent, Sciascia’s statement
is in my opinion a very good example of a subversive use of the rhetoric of sac-
rifice. The pair of concepts ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt,’ as well as the idea of a death
that radically transforms the moral status of both the victim and of those who
are held responsible for violence, recall and iterate the rhetorical structure of
Christian martyrological literature. Some might argue that the allocation of
innocence and guilt is also in use in modern forensic and judicial discourses.
But a closer observation reveals that this view is inconsistent. There is no legal
system that “puts everyone on trial.” Sciascia, by using the word “trial,” did not
want to refer to the process in which the ultimate instance of judgment is the
law of a country. What he had in mind, is rather an analogy, however implicit,
to the judgment of Christ at the end of time. This paper is not the place to
deepen the relationship between Christian eschatology and martyrology. Suf-
fice it to say that in Christian literature and especially in Catholic theology
there is the diffuse and recurrent idea that martyrs, as imitators of the Passion
of Christ, will have the privilege to preside next to the Messiah on the Day of
Judgment.75
But one must not be fooled. Sciascia, as an atheist, surely did not want to
say that on the Day of Judgment all Italians will have to take responsibility for
what happened in spring 1978. Rather, he used concepts and rhetoric forms in
order to provoke an emotional response in the readers. As a Sicilian intellec-
tual, Sciascia could not help but be aware of the performative power of Chris-
tian language. But, in the imaginary of Sciascia, there is no final judgment and
redemption, but only the historical guilt. In his representation, Moro is a weak-
ened martyr, who accused, desacralized, and delegitimized, but who “does not
belong to anyone,” not to the party, not to the state, not to the church, not to
the country.
At this point, we can hazard an answer to the question posed at the be-
ginning of this section. There is some evidence to support the thesis that the
elevation of Moro to a state martyr can not only be explained as a spontane-
ous phenomenon, but should be considered a defensive strategy adopted by
government representatives, political parties, newspapers, and other social ac-
tors involved in the affair that had supported the line of firmness. After Moro’s
death:
75 See Erik Peterson, “Martirio e martire,” in: Giuseppe Pizzardo & Pio Paschi (eds.), Enci-
clopedia cattolica (Citta del Vaticano: Ente per L’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cat-
tolico, 1952), vol. 8, 233–236; Erik Peterson, Zeuge der Wahrheit (Leipzig: Jakob Hegner,
1937); Rahner, Zur Theologie, 73–106; Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Martyrium und Mission,”
in: idem, Neue Klarstellungen (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1979), 158–172.

State Martyrs 99
the representatives of the newly installed government, the major political

parties, the established mass media, and the Catholic Church h ierarchy
enacted and attended public ceremonies of reconciliation. These cere-
monies were to symbolize Italy’s reunification, made possible by Moro’s
sacrifice.76
The rhetoric of martyrdom is definitely a key element within this strategy of

reconciliation.
Expressing this in Agamben’s terminology, we can say that the consecration
of Moro was the strategic response to the reduction of Moro into ‘bare life.’
It is important to be accurate: Agamben defined ‘homo sacer’ as one who can
be killed but not sacrificed. If, at first glance, this definition does not seem to
match the Moro case, a closer look reveals the heuristic value of the homo sacer
theory. In fact, what is ‘the line of firmness’ adopted by the government and the
political parties within it, as well as by the larger part of the media, if not a nihil
opstat, a declaration that nothing hinders the killing of Moro, namely its exclu-
sion from the sphere of the law? Article 2 of the Italian Constitution, where it is
written that “La Repubblica riconosce e garantisce i diritti inviolabili dell’uomo,”
was declared invalid for Moro, prisoner of the Red Brigades. What is at stake
is obviously not the impunity of the Red Brigades, the perpetrators of the ho-
micide, but of those who have allowed, or at least who did nothing, to prevent
the murder. But how can one explain the second part of the definition? Did the
Italian press not repeatedly claim that Moro was sacrificed for the republic, the
state, the principles of democracy? This is where the enormous potential of
the ideological construction of the state martyr figure lies: the state cannot
be the agent of the sacrifice, because by doing so the dark bond between bio-
politics and thanato-politics, “the capacity [of supreme power] to constitute
oneself and others as life that may be killed but not sacrificed,” would become
manifest.77 The sense of martyrological rhetoric is precisely to hide this dark
bond, transforming the victim of violence into the voluntary agent of his or
her own sacrifice. Since the sovereign power cannot sacrifice ‘bare life’ the con-
struction of the figure of the martyr becomes inevitable. This kind of martyrol-
ogy is none other than a state mythology, whose purpose is the concealment
of the sovereign power over ‘bare life.’ From this point of view, the figure of the
martyr appears to be an indispensable tool, or at least a very useful one, for
the legitimization of dominant power structures. In fact, as noted by Michel
Foucault:
76 Wagner-Pacifici, Moro, 208.

77 Agamben, Homo sacer, 101.

100 Scolari
power is tolerable only on the condition that it masks a substantial part

of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mecha-
nisms. Would power be accepted if it were entirely cynical? For it, secrecy
is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation.78
5 Conclusion and Outlook
I will now summarize my argumentation in the form of a list of theses.
a) The visualization of the body of the victim (in this case Ado Moro)
alone is not sufficient for the emergence of a martyr figure. The figure
of the martyr, in order to have a performative potential—an ability to
appeal to people—needs to be represented serially in discursive prac-
tices, which take form and manifest themselves in the public space. It is
through serial representation and medial manifestation, that a certain
event of violence can be experienced and recognized by the audience as
martyrdom.
b) The figure of the martyr is able to appeal to people—and is therefore able
to serve as the legitimization instance—because of its residues of histori-
cal antecedent signification, its ‘secret index.’ What in the pragmatic and
discursive context of Christianity was represented as an act of witness to
faith in God, in the context of secular modernity becomes an act of witness
to faith in the values and principles at the core of the modern nation-state.
Regardless of the name given to these values and principles—citizens’
rights, constitutional rights, human rights—they are always declared and
recognized as universal. In short, and in formal terms, church martyrs
and state martyrs seem to function almost the same way; what changes is
the truth instance to which they refer.79
c) Martyrological representations function as a practice of sacraliza-
tion through which events of political violence can potentially acquire
78 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume i: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon,
1978), 86.
79 Yet, there is at least one fundamental difference with regard to the political function. The
martyrs of the church (or more precisely of the first Christian communities before the
institutionalization of the church) were legitimization figures for an eschatological com-
munity, that is, a community that will be realized with the second coming of the Christ at
the end of time. It seems clear to me that there is a big difference between the legitimiza-
tion of an authority which ‘is not of this world’ and a concrete political authority.

State Martyrs 101
metaphysical meaning. The case study shows that martyrological rep-

resentations can sacralize the victim, making it a symbolic body of the
religious and/or political community, even where the victim refuses this
categorization. From the point of view of the homo sacer theory, marty-
rological representations are concealment strategies, through which the
sovereign state not only hides its power to decide on ‘bare life’ (as do the
social actors interested in the preservation of its sovereignty), but in fact
even transforms it, through an operation of re-sacralization, into a sym-
bol of and for the nation-state.
d) In comparison to the cases studied by Fierke, the martyrological repre-
sentation of Moro (as well as that of the Charlie Hebdo journalists) is a
borderline case, in which the legitimization of the ‘suffering’ community
and the legitimization of sovereign power intersect in one single dis-
course. Unlike Fierke’s case studies, here the figure of the martyr neither
challenges sovereign authority nor legitimizes a community without po-
litical recognition. Through state martyrologies, the mechanism of politi-
cal legitimization can be reversed. Given a certain pragmatic and discur-
sive context, the figure of the martyr can serve as a political body of an
existing nation-state and as a symbol for the legitimization of the ruling
political authority.
e) In the last part of this article, I posed the question as to whether the con-
struction of the narrative is a spontaneous or induced phenomenon. In
the case of the martyrological representation of Moro, one cannot help
but notice a certain ideological exploitation. There is some evidence to
support the thesis that his elevation to a state martyr was a defensive
strategy adopted by government representatives, political parties, party
newspapers, and other social actors involved in the affair that had sup-
ported the line of firmness.
f) Fierke distinguished between two language games, one political-secular,
referring to a sovereign community (the people of the nation-state), and
the other religious, referring to an oppressed community. But her point
that the figure of the martyr has a central role only within explicit reli-
gious discourses proves to be problematic. Fierke seems to have assumed
that it is always possible to distinguish between language games by ob-
serving their diverging semantic content. Such analytical operation can
work in certain contexts, but not in others. If the distinction between
language games is to keep its heuristic value, it should not be detected
by observing which linguistic forms are used, but by analyzing how they
are used. In fact, both Moro and Sciascia made use of martyrological

102 Scolari
semantics (blood, sacrifice, innocence, salvation, guilt, etc.), but in

different ways and with different purposes than those of the hegemonic
discourse. The rhetoric used by Sciascia shows that it is also possible to
offer a representation of events of political violence outside of the domi-
nant ideological-narrative structures.
In this regard, Roland Barthes has made the important distinction between
encratic and acratic discourses. Encratic discourses operate within the status
quo of power and in conformity with the general doxa, while acratic discourses
always operate against the doxa and outside of power. It seems to me that Co-
lombo’s speech and all newspaper articles quoted and analyzed in this inves-
tigation could be considered as part of an encratic discourse, while Sciascia’s
statement and Moro’s letters exemplify an acratic use of language. Sciascia’s
discourse is even para-doxa—a characteristic, according to Barthes, of any
acratic discourse.80 He somehow used the rhetoric of sacrifice and martyrdom
(the victim who makes everyone guilty, the purity acquired by Moro dying,
etc.), but in such a way as to prevent the legitimization of the status quo. He
resisted the encratic attempt to build a nation-state mythology. Moro, in turn,
with his letters tried to relocate himself within the sphere of law, but also with-
in the religious-moral sphere, declaring implicitly sacrilegious any attempt to
attribute to him the state martyr status. He appealed to human rights, to the
“sanctity of human life,” by decoupling the discourse of humanity from the
discourse of sovereignty. It was an attempt to think about politics outside of
the schemes of state sovereignty, understood as an absolute value to be de-
fended at all costs, and to conceive it in a truly humanistic way. In doing so,
Moro also clearly and explicitly explained his opposition to any attempt to be
transformed into a martyr of the state, of the nation, of faith, of democracy, of
the party, of the Republic. Unfortunately, this has not prevented several parties
of the right and left, the church, the media, and the government from trying to
symbolically take possession of his body.81
80 See Roland Barthes, “Die Spaltung der Sprachen,” in: idem, Das Rauschen der Sprache
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2005), 109–123, at 119.
81 In September 2012, the Diocesan Tribunal of Rome gave the green light for the investiga-
tion into the potential beatification of Moro, after the authorization given by Cardinal
Augusto Vallini, Vicar of the Pope, referring to the statesman as a “servant of God.” The
argument in favor of the beatification claims that Moro is a martyr in odium fidei, namely
a martyr because of aversion to the faith of his executioners.

State Martyrs 103
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journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106 Journal of

State Martyrs: Aesthetics and Performativity

religion and politics – civil religion – political philosophy – sacralization –

1 Introduction: Setting the Theme

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18748929-01002004

a) Kerry’s speech highlights in a paradigmatic way that the martyr figure is

1 John Kerry, “Remarks on the Terrorist Attack in Paris.” https://geneva.usmission.gov/2015/01/

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

2 The Performativity of Martyr Figurations

The figure of the martyr plays a significant role in contemporary discourses

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

Although the issue is discussed in different ways, the majority of researchers

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

of view, sacrifice is a ritual practice through which a community is reconciled

The visualization of ‘bare life’ in images of the body is a central element

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

mortality […] The sight of the suffering body represents a confrontation

The agent of political self-sacrifice, often referred to as a martyr, becomes

15 Fierke, Political Self-sacrifice, 79, 101, and 102.

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

The first language game of martyrdom provides a structure of rules with-

19 See Weigel, “Schauplätze,” 12.

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

a­ ctor as a c­ riminal or terrorist, whose death may be attributed to ‘suicide’.

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

ask the deceased. In the second place, it is impossible to distinguish between

3 Signatures of the Martyr Figuration

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

organization. First, sacralization causes identification of the individual with a

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

b­ elieved in its indispensability, as a source of transcendental morality, for the

29 Rousseau, Discourse, 166.

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

31 Cristi, Civil Religion, 29.

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

in the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

Christianity has made language. It has been and still is a potenti-

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

f­ amiliarities which it has created, on the transferabilities that it has left,

43 Ibid., 126. Ellipsis original.

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

4 The Construction of the Martyr Aldo Moro

Althusser, Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate: Aufsätze zur marxistischen Theorie

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

Dear colleagues, We now want to commemorate Aldo Moro, who was

57 Emilio Colombo et al, Gedenken an Aldo Moro, transcript (Strassburg: Europäisches

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

58 Corriere della Sera, “È morto perché la Repubblica viva,” 10 May 1978, 1.

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

61 L’Unità, “Un uomo torturato,” 19 March 1978, 1.

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

On 31 March, on page three the same newspaper summed up what it had

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

[…] during the resistance, many Italians subjected to psychological stress

a massive operation of institutionalized falsification of a national

journal of religion in europe 10 (2017) 71-106

family of mankind. [Written by Cardinal Michele Pellegrino and entitled

Nonetheless, the question of the authenticity of Moro’s letters must be posed.

If you do not do something, it would be written a dreadful page in the

a ctor as a c riminal or terrorist, whose death may be attributed to ‘suicide’.

b elieved in its indispensability, as a source of transcendental morality, for the

f amiliarities which it has created, on the transferabilities that it has left,

semantics (blood, sacrifice, innocence, salvation, guilt, etc.), but in