Abstract

The following text deals with the underground and the roots of the political: violence and sacrifice. It analyzes an extreme case of political subjectification: the political subject is born at the same moment the »real« subject vanishes. Instead of being a living person, it becomes an icon. By this, the text develops a genealogy of political founding myths that are based both on the dying and the sanctification of special subjects. Four figures will be identified and discussed: the hero, the martyr, the partisan, and the sniper. Those figures represent different cultural formations and thereby different ways of staging death as a political act.