In the present era, we have become familiar with the coupling of sexual violence and political conflicts. When Serbian paramilitary soldiers committed mass rapes against Bosnian Muslims during the wars in the 1990s, it was part of a project of Serbian nation building. And when Hutus raped a quarter-million Tutsi women during the genocide in Rwanda, the violence was also fed by a passion to "sanitize" the country from Tutsi (Power 2002: 334). In both of these recent genocides, sexual violence was used as a tool for a perverted form of nation building. In the history of political narratives, one also finds ample evidence of the coupling of sexual violence with the founding of a new kind of political community. For example, the story of the rape of Lucretia portrays her rape and subsequent suicide as motivating the overthrow of tyranny and the introduction of republican rule in Rome. Why do some narratives portray sexual violence as providing a crucial dynamic for the founding of new political communities? Is this pattern of thinking one that still affects us today? Do such narratives rationalize the wartime use of sexual violence as necessary for political change (Matthes 2000: 168-69)? Are media representations of atrocities and the response of international bystanders also influenced by the assumption that political beginnings take place over the dead bodies of women? What logic underpins stories in which a woman who is a member of a community is portrayed as suffering violence so that her community can take new shape? We have become used to thinking of sexual violence as a phenomenon that takes place between warring parties, so that rape is understood as an attack on the enemy who is unable to protect its women and its territory. It was this bit of wisdom that was encapsulated in the Cheyenne Indian saying, "A nation is not conquered until the women's hearts lay on the ground" (Arcel 1998: 184). But with this habit of thought, we overlook the ways in which sexual violence within a community also may play a decisive role for political transformations. If we focus on the narrative logic that links sexual violence with political foundations, can we loosen the grip that this pattern has on our imagination? Or do these narratives loosen progressive impulses in the minds of contemporary interpreters? The relation between sexual violence and political transformations can be placed against a cultural, literary, mythical, psychological, and religious background of views about the relation between birth and death. In ordinary understanding, we often treat birth and death as opposites. They are at opposite ends of the life-cycle, with the concept of birth marking beginnings and origins, while the concept of death marks endings and separation. Yet scholars of myth and religion have long since pointed to the ways in which these concepts are deeply embedded in one another. As the classical scholar Jane Harrison has pointed out, certain Greek festivals, such as the wine festival of Anthesteria, which celebrated the opening of new wine, reveal both the positive and the threatening dimensions of death. During this festival, the spirits of the dead were believed to rise up for three days and fill the city with pollution. An offering of seeds to the souls of the dead was prepared for the dual purpose of appeasing them and also allowing the dead to take the seeds below the earth and then give them back to the living in the autumn. The role of the dead in nurturing the seeds is familiar to us in the function of the earth mother. Aeschylus writes of "Earth herself, that bringeth all things to birth, and, having nurtured them, receiveth their increase in turn." While death plays a life-giving role in the cycle of life for the community, death is also life-threatening, since it brings the end of the life of the individual (Schott 1993: 28-29). The ancient view that birth and death are embedded in each other is echoed in religious views more familiar to the contemporary reader. In Genesis, chapter 3, of the Hebrew Bible, Adam's and Eve's eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and life is the cause of human mortality. And in Christianity, the sacrifice of God in the figure of Christ connects death to new life (Spielrein 1912: 491-92). Twentieth-century psychoanalysts have also explored the interrelation between birth and death. Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942), one of the first women to become a psychoanalyst, explores in her article "Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens" the interrelation of processes of destruction and creation, which many consider to be seminal for Freud's understanding of Eros and Thanatos, of the drives toward life and toward death. Drawing on examples from biology, dream interpretation, psychological pathologies, myth, philosophy, religion, and literature, she argues that becoming or creation is a result of, and conditioned by, processes of destruction (Spielrein 1912: 489). On the cellular level of biological reproduction, when single cells are united to produce new life, the unity of each single cell is negated. In simplest forms of life, for example with certain flies, the parent dies with the production of new life (Spielrein 1912: 466-67). Although in human beings the reproduction of new life does not literally entail the death of the parent, Spielrein argues that there is a sense in which sexual reproduction negates the separateness of each individual in the process of reproducing new life. Thus, the sexual life that connects the individual with a collectivity that endures over time is also a certain form of death for the individual. Spielrein adds that it is really more a question of taste whether one emphasizes the existence of a new product or the disappearance of the old life (Spielrein 1912: 476). The central implications of Spielrein's approach are as follows. (1) Destruction and becoming are inseparable moments, and they are both present in beginnings and endings. (2) Destruction involves the dissolution of individual separateness or differentiation. Thus, the experience of bonding and continuity in the experience of personal love or collective community also expresses a form of negation of self. (3) Creation involves the processes of separation, individuation, and differentiation.1 Spielrein's focus on the perpetuation of creation through processes of destruction can be placed in the same conceptual universe as Hegel's view that negativity-which is ultimately the negativity of death-is the motor of history, as Terry Eagleton observes (Eagleton 2003: 41).2 In fact, this bent to look for value released by the processes of destruction provides William James with one definition of the tragedy of life. "Doesn't the very 'seriousness' that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of the cup?" (James 2000: 129; Eagleton 2003: 26). This hospitality to tragic insights characterizes dominant intellectual trends in the twentieth century. The socialist literary critic Raymond Williams considers Marxism, Freudianism, and existentialism all to be essentially tragic ideologies (Williams 1966: 189; Eagleton 2003: 10). They all probe the tension between the need for radical remaking and the terrible cost of it, a cost that some see resolved or redeemed in political transformation or revolution (Eagleton 2003: 58-60). For Williams, the tragic crisis revolves around the paradox between the need to make a choice and the unbearable loss that this choice will bring. One of the most poignant figures of this tragic crisis is the idea of sacrifice, where one is forced to yield up what is precious in the name of some greater value. And notable figures of tragic sacrifice in Western culture include the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon (where according to earlier sources she was killed, but according to later sources replaced by an animal) and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, who miraculously also was replaced by a ram at the moment of sacrifice. Hence, one strain of this inquiry leads to a discussion of sacrifice, and I will consider the degree to which the concept of sacrifice is useful for interpreting political narratives that have sexual violence as their founding moment. A second strain of this inquiry will probe the sexual character of the violence in these founding narratives. How is political meaning given to the cultural representation of woman as the repository of both birth and death? © 2010 by Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.