In the post-colonial moment it has become crucial to develop a global concept of civil war. The failures of post-colonial states in various locations (from Bengladesh, to Iraq to Lebanon) is co-incident to the emergence of civil war as an over-arching form in the past century. The post-colonial world can now instruct the ‘western’ world whose future past is not far behind. As much as we would like to think that the 19th century was an age of revolution, it is crucial to acknowledge that the time after it has been underlined by civil wars as the sole horizon of politics. Civil war seems to be a return of the repressed, in the wake of closures of political horizons in the post-modern context. In this talk, I will argue that the logic of sacrifice, or the violence of sacrifice, is what underpins capitalist inclusion. A return is necessary to Butrus al-Bustani’s incisive diagnosis of the phenomena of civil war, al-harb al-ihliya, as a form constituted by the exclusion of difference for the sake of the self-same. In 1860, Bustani provides a diagnostic of sacrificial violence that proves to be instructive for cycles of repetition that continue to plague Lebanon and the Middle East. Bustani’s attempted to understand fraternal animosity, neigbourliness, and the logic of sacricfice that underly the modern social contract. In my reading of Bustani, I will interrogate the mechanisms of disavowal and identification that are at play in the conversion of violence into the logic of capitalist exchange.