I have some test questions and one essay to complete based on the course religion and violence in the attached Question sheet.

46 47 THE BASIC DATA SACRIFICE THE FESTIVAL THE SACRED WORLD Duration ceases to have any value, or it is there only in order to produce the morbid delectation of anguish. On the contrary, the objective and in a sense transcendent (relative to the subject) positing of the world of things has duration as its foundation: no thina in fact has a separate existence, has a meaning, unless a subsequent time is posited, in view of which it is constituted as an object. The object is defined as an operative power only if its duration is implicitly understood. If it is destroyed as food or fuel is, the eater or the manufactured object preserves its value in duration; it has a lasting purpose like coal or bread. Future time constitutes this real world to such a degree that death no longer has a place in it. But it is for this very reason that death means everything to it. The weakness (the contradiction) of the world of things is that it imparts an unreal character to death even though man's membership in this world is tied to the positing of the body as a thing insofar as it is mortal. As a matter of fact, that is a superficial view. What has no place in the world of things, what is unreal in the real world is not exactly death. Death actually discloses the imposture of reality, not only in that the absence of dura- tion gives the lie to it, but above alJ because death is the great affirmer, the wonder-struck cry of life. The real order does not so much reject the negation of life that is death as it rejects the affirmation of intimate life, whose .' measureless violence is a danger to the stability of things, an affirmation that is fulJy revealed only in death. The real order must annul - neutralize - that intimate life and replace it with the thing that the individual is in the society of labor. But it cannot prevent life's disappearance in death from revealing the invisible brilJiance of life that is not a thina The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal its dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out. No one knew it was there when it was; it was overlooked in favor of real things: death was one real thing among others. But death suddenly shows that the real society was lying. Then it is not the loss of the thing, of the useful member, that is taken into consid- eration. What the real society has lost is not a member but rather its truth. That intimate life, which had lost the ability to fulJy reach me, which I regarded primarily as a thing, is fulJy restored to my sensibility through its absence. Death revea1s life in its plenitude and dissolves the real order. Henceforth it matters very little that this real order is the need for the duration of that which no longer exists. When an element escapes its demands, what remains is not an entity that suffers bereavement; all at once that entity, the real order, has completely dissipated There is no more q uestion of it and what death brinas in b tears is the useless consumption of the intimate order, 48 49 THE BASIC DATA SACRIFICE. THE FESTIVAL. THE SACRED WORLD It is a naive opinion that links death closely to sorrow. The tears of the living, which respond to its coming, are themselves far from having a meaning opposite to joy. Far from being sorrowful, the tears are the expression of a keen awareness of shared life grasped in its intimacy. It is true that this awareness is never keener than at the moment when absence suddenly replaces presence, as in death or mere separation. And in this case, the con- solation (in the strong sense the word has in the "conso- lations" of the mystics) is in a sense bitterly tied to the fact that it cannot last, but it is precisely the disappear- ance of duration, and of the neutral behaviors associated with it, that uncovers a ground of things that is dazzlingly bright (in other words, it is clear that the need for dura- tion conceals life from us, and that, only in theory, the impossibility of duration frees us). In other cases the tears respond instead to unexpected triumph, to good fortune that makes us exult, but always madly, far beyond the concern for a future time. not to kill but to relinquish and to give. Killing is only the exhibition of a deep meaning. What is important is to pass from a lasting order, in which all consumption of resources is subordinated to the need for duration, to the violence of an unconditional consumption; what is impor- tant is to leave a world of real things, whose reality derives from a long term operation and never resides in the moment - a world that creates and preserves (that creates for the benefit of a lasting reality). Sacrifice is the antithesis of production, which is accomplished with a view to the future; it is consumption that is concerned only with the moment. This is the sense in which it is gift and relinquishment, but what is given cannot be an object of preservation for the receiver: the gift of an offering makes it pass precisely into the world of abrupt consumption. This is the meaning of "sacrificing to the deity," whose sacred essence is comparable to a fire. To sacrifice is to give as one gives coal to the furnace. But the furnace ordinarily has an undeniable utility, to which the coal is subordinated, whereas in sacrifice the offering is rescued from all utility. This is so clearly the precise meaning of sacrifice, that one sacrifices what is usiful; one does not sacrifice luxuri- ous objects. There could be no sacrifice if the offering were destroyed beforehand. Now, depriving the labor of The Consummation of Sacrifice The power that death generally has illuminates the mean- ing of sacrifice, which functions like death in that it restores a lost value through a relinquishment of that value. But death is not necessarily linked to it, and the most solemn sacrifice may not be bloody. To sacrifice is THE BASIC DATA manufacture of its usefulness at the outset, luxury has already destroyed that labor; it has dissipated it in vain- glory; in the very moment, it has lost it for good. To sac- rifice a lu'xury object would be to sacrifice the same ob- ject twice. But neither could one sacrifice that which was not first withdrawn from immanence, that which, never hav- ing belonged to immanence, would not have been second- arily subjugated, domesticated, and reduced to being a thing. Sacrifice is made of objects that could have been spirits, such as animals or plant substances, but that have become things and that need to be restored to the imma- nence whence they come, to the vague sphere of lost intimacy.

The Individual, Anguish, and Sacrifice Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or what it's about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting. . . are so many evasIons. What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky: this is 50 SACRIFICE, THE FESTIVAL. THE SACRED WORLD still a negative definition, from which the essential is missing. These statements have the vague quality of inaccessi- ble distances, but on the other hand articulated definitions substitute the tree for the forest, the distinct articulation for that which is articulated. I will resort to articulation nevertheless. Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruc- tion, because it is not compatible with the positing of the separate individual. If one describes the individua] in the operation of sacrifice, he is defined by anguish. But if sac- rifice is distressing, the reason is that the individual takes part in it. The individual identifies with the victim in the sudden movement that restores it to immanence (to inti- macy), but the assimilation that is linked to the return to immanence is nonetheless based on the fact that the vic- tim is the thing, just as the sacrificer is the individual. The separate individual is of the same nature as the thing, or rather the anxiousness to remain personally alive that establishes the person's individuality is linked to the inte- gration of existence into the world of things. To put it differently, work and the fear of dying are interdepen- dent; the former implies the thing and vice versa. In fact it is not even necessary to work in order to be the thing of fear: man is an individual to the extent that his appre- hension ties him to the results of labor. But man is not, 51 THE BASIC DATA as one might think, a thing because he is afraid. He would have no anguish if he were not the individual (the thing), and it is essentially the fact of being an individual that fuels his anguish. It is in order to satisfy the demands of the thing, it is insofar as the world of things has posited his duration as the basic condition of his worth, that he learns anguish. He is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of things. Death disturbs the order of things and the order of things holds us. Man is afraid of the intimate order that is not recon- cilable with the order of things. Otherwise there would be no sacrifice, and there would be no mankind either. The intimate order would not reveal itself in the destruc- tion and the sacred anguish of the individual. Because man is not squarely within that order, but only partakes of it through a thing that is threatened in its nature (in the projects that constitute it), intimacy, in the trembling of the individual, is holy, sacred, and suffused with anguish.

The Festival The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence. It constantly threatens to break the dikes, to confront productive activity with the precipitate 52 SACRIFICE. THE FESTIVAL. THE SACRED WORLD and contagious movement of a purely glorious consump- tion. The sacred is exactly comparable to the flame that destroys the wood by consuming it. It is that opposite of a thing which an unlimited fire is; it spreads, it radiates heat and light, it suddenly inflames and blinds in turn. Sacrifice burns like the sun that slowly dies of the prodigi- ous radiation whose brilliance our eyes cannot bear, but it is never isolated and, in a world of individuals, it calls for the general negation of individuals as such. The divine world is contagious and its contagion is dangerous. In theory, what is started in the operation of sacrifice is like the action of lightning: in theory there is no limit to the conflagration. It favors human life and not animality; the resistance to immanence is what regulates its resurgence, so poignant in tears and so strong in the unavowable pleasure of anguish. But if man surrendered unreservedly to iinmanence, he would fall short of human- ity; he would achieve it only to lose it and eventually life would return to the unconscious intimacy of animals. The constant problem posed by the impossibility of being human without being a thing and of escaping the limits of things without returning to animal slumber receives the limited solution of the festival. The initial movement of the festival is given in elementary humanity, but it reaches the plenitude of an effusion only if the anguished concentration of sacrifice 53 THE BASIC DATA sets it loose. The festival assembles men whom the con- sumption of the contagious offering (communion) opens up to a conflagration, but one that is limited by a counter- vailing prudence: there is an aspiration for destruction that breaks out in the festival, but there is a conservative prudence that regulates and limits it. On the one hand, all the possibilities of consumption are brought together: dance and poetry, music and the different arts contribute to making the festival the place and the time of a spec- tacular letting loose. But consciousness, awake in anguish, is disposed, in a reversal commanded by an inability to go along with the letting loose, to subordinate it to the need that the order of things has - being fettered by nature and self-paralyzed - to receive an impetus from the outside. Thus the letting loose of the festival is finally, jf not fet- tered, then at least confined to the limits of a reality of which it is the negation. The festival is tolerated to the extent that it reserves the necessities of the profane world.

Limitation, the Utilitarian Interpretation of the Festival, and the Positing of the Group The festival is the fusion of human life. For the thing and the individual, it is the crucible where distinctions melt in the intense heat of intimate life. But its intimacy is dis- solved in the real and individualized positing of the 54 SACRIFICE. THE FESTIVAL. THE SACRED WORLD ensemble that is at stake in the rituals. For the sake of a real community, of a social fact that is given as a thing - of a common operation in view of a future time - the fes- tival is limited: it is itself integrated as a link in the con- catenation of useful works. As drunkenness, chaos, sexual orgy, that which it tends to be, it drowns everything in immanence in a sense; it then even exceeds the limits of the hybrid world of spirits, but its ritual movements slip into the world of immanence only through the mediation of spirits. To the spirits borne by the festival, to whom the sacrifice is offered, and to whose intimacy the victims are restored, an operative power is attributed in the same way it is attributed to things. In the end the festival itself is viewed as an operation and its effectiveness is not gues- tioned. The possibility of producing, of fecundating the fields and the herds is given to rites whose least servile operative forms are aimed, through a concession, at cut- ting the losses from the dreadful violence of the divine world. In any case, positively in fecundation, negatively in propitiation, the community first appears in the festival as a thing, a definite individualization and a shared project with a view to duration. The festival is not a true return to immanence but rather an amicable reconciliation, full of anguish, between the incompatible necessities. Of course the community in the festival is not posited simply as an object, but more genera]]y as a spirit (as a 55 THE BASIC DATA subject-object), but its positing has the value of a limit to the immanence of the festival and, for this reason, the thing aspect is accentuated. If the festival is not yet, or no longer, under way, the community link to the festival is given in operative forms, whose chief ends are the prod- ucts of labor, the crops, and the herds. There is no clear consciousness of what the festival actually is (of what it is at the moment of its letting loose) and the festival is not situated distinctly in consciousness except as it is inte- grated into the duration of the community. This is what the festival (incendiary sacrifice and the outbreak of fire) is consciously (subordinated to that duration of the com- mon thing, which prevents it from enduring), but this shows the festival's peculiar impossibility and man's limit, tied as he is to clear consciousness. So it is not human- ity - insofar as clear consciousness rightly opposes it to animality - restored to immanence. The virtue of the fes- tival is not integrated into its nature and conversely the letting loose of the festival has been possible only because of this powerlessness of consciousness to take it for what it is. The basic problem of religion is given in this fatal misunderstanding of sacrifice. Man is the being that has lost, and even rejected, that which he obscurely is, a vague intimacy. Consciousness could not have become clear in the course of time if it had not turned away from its awkward contents, but clear consciousness is itself 56 SACRIFICE, THE FESTIVAL, THE SACRED WORLD looking for what it has itself lost, and what it must lose again as it draws near to it. Of course what it has Jost is I not outside it; consciousness turns away from the obscure ,intimacy of consciousness itself. Religion, whose essence IS the search for lost intimacy, comes down to the effort of clear cohsciousness which wants to be a com- plete self-consciousness: but this effort is futile, since consciousness of intimacy is possible only at a level where consciousness is no longer an operation whose outcome implies duration, that is, at the level where clarity, which is the effect of the operation, is no longer given.

War: The Illusions of the Unleashing of Violence to the Outside A society's individuality, which the fusion of the festival dissolves, is defined first of all in terms of real works - of agrarian production - that integrate sacrifice into the world of things. But the unity of a group thus has the ability to direct destructive violence to the outside. As a matter of fact, external violence is antithetical to sacrifice or the festival, whose violence works havoc within. Only religion ensures a consumption that destroys the very substance of those whom it moves. Armed action destroys others or the wealth of others. I t can be exerted individually, within a group, but the constituted group 57 THE BASIC DATA can bring it to bear on the outside and it is then that it begins to develop its consequences. In deadly battles, in massacres and pillages, it has a meaning akin to that of festivals, in that the enemy is not treated as a thing. But war is not limited to these explo- sive forces and, within these very limits, it is not a slow action as sacrifice is, conducted with a view to a return to lost intimacy. It is a disorderly eruption whose external direction robs the warrior of the intimacy he attains. And if it is true that warfare tends in its own way to dissolve the individual through a negative wagering of the value of his own life, it cannot help but enhance his value in the course of time by making the surviving individual the beneficiary of the wager. War determines the development of the individual beyond the individual-as-thing in the glorious individual- ity of the warrior. The glorious individual introduces, through a first negation of individuality, the divine order into the category of the individual (which expresses the order of things in a basic way). He has the contradictory will to make the negation of duration durable. Thus his strength is in part a strength to lie. War represents a bold advance but it is the crudest kind of advance: one needs , as much na'ivete - or stupidity - as strength to be indif- ferent to that which one overvalues and to take pride in having deemed oneself of no value. 58 SACRIFI'CE. THE FESTIVAL. THE SACRED WORLD From the Unfettered Violence of Wars to the Fettering of Man-as-Commodity This false and superficial character has serious conse- quences. War is not limited to forms of uncalculated havoc. Although he remains dimly aware of a calling that rules out the self-seeking behavior of work, the warrior reduces his fellow men to servitude. He thus subordinates violence to the most complete reducti~n of mankind to the order of things. Doubtless the warrior is not the initiator of the reduction. The operation that makes the slave a thing presupposed the prior institution of work. But the free ,«orker was a thing voluntarily and for a given time. Only the slave, whom the military order has made a commodity, draws out the complete conse- quences of the reduction. (Indeed, it is necessary to specify that without slavery the world of things would not have achieved its plenitude.) Thus the crude unconscious- ness of the warrior mainly works in favor of a predomi- nance of the real order. The sacred prestige he arrogates to himself is the false pretense of a world brought down to the weight of utility. The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest. Human Sacrifice The sacrifices of slaves illustrate the principle according to which what is useful is destined for sacrifice. Sacrifice 59 61 THE BASIC DATA SACRIFICE. THE FESTIVAL. THE SACRED WORLD surrenders the slave, whose servitude accentuates the degradation of the human order, to the baleful intimacy of unfettered violence. In general, human sacrifice is the acute stage of a dis- pute setting the movement of a measureless violence against the real order and duration. It is the most radical contestation of the primacy of utility. It is at the same time the highest degree of an unleashing of internal vio- lence. The society in which this sacrifice rages mainly affirms the rejection of a disequilibrium of the two vio- lences. He who unleashes his forces of destruction on the outside cannot be sparing of his resources. If he reduces the enemy to slavery, he must, in a spectacular fashion, make a glorious use of this new source of wealth. He must partly destroy these things that serve him, for there is nothing useful around him that can fail to satisfY, first of all, the mythical order's demand for consumption. Thus a continual surpassing toward destruction denies, at the same time that it affirms, the individual status of the group. But this demand for consumption is brought to bear on the slave insofar as the latter is his property and his thing. It should not be confused with the movements of violence that have the outside, the enemy, as their object. In this respect the sacrifice of a slave is far from being pure. In a sense it is an extension of military combat, and internal violence, the essence of sacrifice, is not satisfied by it. Intense consumption requires victims at the top who are not only the useful wealth of a people, but this people itself; or at least, elements that signify it and that wiJI be destined for sacrifice, this time not owing to an alienation from the sacred world - a fall - but, quite the contrary, owing to an exceptional proximity, such as the sovereign or the children (whose kiJJing finally realizes the performance of a sacrifice twice over). One could not go further in the desire to consume the life substance. Indeed, one could not go more recklessly than this. Such an intense movery1ent of consumption re- sponds to a movement of malaise by creating a greater malaise. It is not the apogee of a religious system, but rather the moment when it condemns itself: when the old forms have lost part of their virtue, it can maintain itself only through excesses, through innovations that are too onerous. Numerous signs indicate that these cruel demands were not easily tolerated. Trickery replaced the king with a slave on whom a temporary royalty was conferred. The primacy of consumption could not resist that of military force. 60