“Concerning sacri-fice, I can essentially say that, on the level of Hegel’s philosophy, Man has, in a sense, revealed and founded human truth by sacri-ficing; in sacrifice he destroyed the animal in himself, allowing himself and the animal to survive only as that noncorporeal truth which Hegel describes and which makes of man-in Heidegger’s words a being unto death , or – in the words of Kojève himself – “death which lives a human life.”

• George Bataille