Not-dividing the Indivisible: Formation of the Sacred and Antagonistic Conflicts

Indivisibilities are at the core of economic theory as rarely individuals can or want to limitlessly divide goods, inputs and activities, as well as related economic phenomena such as economies of scale, externalities and public goods. Indivisibilities help in explaining conflicts over social objects which lose much or entirely their value if they were divided. In this paper we focus on the development of those conflicts: we focus on situations in which a player is fighting for the right to keep his opponent out of the exclusive access to the object. We examine the way the contending subjects need a Third player able to enforce the law and we questioned whether this Third player would contemporarily satisfy his own interests. We affirm that an object featuring non-rivalness is the only one manifesting an indivisibility that, although undivided, does not promote the conflict. Hence we argue that a form of non-rivalness is a collectivity’s imaginary, which relies in the partition between the sacred space - wherein the collectivity is placed - and the profane sphere. This form allows the group to recognize, reduces conflicts within the group, but at the same time transfers the conflicts on the indivisibilities to the relationship the group has with external and extraneous groups.