Sacredness has historically meant both inviolability and exposure to violence

Evidence

In the Latin of the Roman Republic, the word sacer referred to anything that was owned by a deity, having been “taken out of the region of the profanum by the action of the State, and passed on into that of the sacrum.” However, even then there was an intriguing exception: the term homo sacer was used for someone who, as the result of a curse (sacer esto), became an outlaw liable to be killed by anyone with impunity. Thus while the sacredness of property dedicated to a god made it inviolable, the sacredness of homo sacer made him eminently subject to violence. This contradictory usage has been explained by classicists (with the acknowledged help of anthropologist colleagues) in terms of “taboo,” a supposedly primitive notion that confounds ideas of the sacred with those of the unclean, ideas that “spiritual” religion was later to distinguish and use more logically. The conception that “taboo” is the primordial origin of “the sacred” . — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 133

Categorization

• XREF: The homo sacer figure connects to Agamben’s later elaboration and to the reader’s interest in how putatively ‘modern’ legal categories quietly encode theological-ritual logic.
• SHARE: For a friend into political theology or Agamben: ‘sacredness’ once carried two opposite senses — inviolable property versus someone killable by anyone.