This paper explores the use of terror and torture as catalysts for community building and political action amongst the Iranian Left from 1963-1979. Against the notion that politics is based solely on contract, I begin by re-examining politics and nation-state formation based on the possibility of sacrifice. With this divergent lens, I examine the Pahlavi government’s transition from terror to torture – in the name of constructing an idealized Iran - in the early 1970s onwards as an alternative means of communication. Using Bataille, I argue that the state’s actions precipitated reciprocal forms of creating and sustaining political meaning. Specifically, I assert that the state’s authoritarian then arbitrary use of such rituals of pain catalyzed communication as an ecstatic experience where the boundaries between self and other dissipate from a severe disruption of the self, a psychic laceration. However, in contrast to Clastres’ examination of rituals of pain as a moment when society “tak[es] possession of the body” and makes “certain that the intensity of the suffering is pushed to its highest point” to “giv[e] notice of membership,” the nation-state is not built or reified in hierarchical, state systems where the law is not applied in an egalitarian manner. Rather than creating or consolidating the nation-state, torture serves as the means of community building amongst those similarly situated through the psychic laceration. This disruption of the self is a sacrifice (the giving of part or all of the self) that represents the death of the individual ego as well as a communication/communion. This loss of self - the portion of the being that remains after the torture, the “remainder which is not eliminated by negation,” “the accursed share” - culminates as more and more citizens become victims of the arbitrary state. This accursed share then forms the counter-discourse to the idealized Iran asserted by the Pahlavi state. Using archival works and the publications of the Leftist literati of the 1970s, I argue, the nation-state (in its new or status quo position) becomes the higher transcendent authority to which and for which the need to love and to lose oneself can become the de jure state culminating in Iran as the sacred, as the universal god.