The Leveling of the Pit
This chapter explains the word “theater,” which speaks of a voyeuristic, perspectival doubling and a sacrilege in which cultish immanence tears apart the sacred immanence of ritual to display as a spectacle between action and its spectating. It points out the moment in which cult value, in the zero degree of its circulation, becomes exhibition or takes place as exhibition value. The emergence of a repetition, of the event's double, of its translation into another mediation in which the latter, precipitated outside of itself, returns to itself to constitute it as a first time in the spectator's second time. The chapter stresses the possibility for a theater to erupt in victims themselves when they turn to look at their executioner or at themselves. It also describes the scene of sacrifice in which playing a part and giving origin to the difference between stage and stalls represent the event or the event considered as representation.