#expenditure

⚡999 Diamond Expenditure Set.

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page 566 - it was a nice town until everyone started turning their households into business firms.

Everyone thought the same thing: my household is inefficient. It provides shelter for myself and my family but I cannot quantify that using my late-capitalism vocabulary. Also, I am not generating income from the pull-out couch in the basement.

“Even if there is an egoism that accompanies the appropriation of food and wealth, the movement that pushes a man in certain cases to give himself (in other words, to destroy himself) not only partially but completely, so that a bloody death ensues, can only be compared, in its irresistible and hideous nature, to the blinding flashes of lightning that transform the most withering storm into transports of joy. In ritual forms of communal sacrifice, in any case, an animal can be substituted for the victim - a cowardly gesture. Only a pitiful, substituted victim "penetrates into the perilous domain of sacrifice; it dies there,” according to Hubert and Mauss, “and indeed it is there in order to die. The sacrificer remains protected." The freedom from "all selfish calculation," from all reserve, remains nevertheless at the limit of these efforts to remain outside sacrifice, to the extent that nightmare creatures, such as gods, are charged with carrying to the very end what ordinary men are happy to dream about: "the god who sacrifices himself gives himself irrevocably," write Hubert and Mauss. "This time all intermediaries have disappeared. The god, who is at the same time the sacrifier, is one with the victim and sometimes even with the sacrificer. All the differing elements that enter into ordinary sacrifice here enter into each other and become mixed together. But such mixing is possible only for mythical, that is ideal, beings." Hubert and Mauss neglect here examples of the "sacrifice of a god" that they could have taken from cases of automutilation - and through which alone sacrifice loses its character as mere performance.

There is, in fact, no reason to separate Van Gogh's ear or Gaston F.'s finger from Prometheus's famous liver. If one accepts the interpretation that identifies the purveying eagle (the aetos prometheus of the Greeks) with the god who stole fire from the wheel of the sun, then the tearing out of the liver presents a theme in conformity with the various legends of the "sacrifice of the god." The roles are normally shared between the human form of a god and his animal avatar; sometimes the man sacrifices the animal, sometimes the animal sacrifices the man, but each time it is a case of automutilation because the animal and the man form but a single being. The eagle-god who is confused with the sun by the ancients, the eagle who alone among all beings can contemplate while staring at "the sun in all its glory," the Icarian being who goes to seek the fire of the heavens is, however, nothing other than an automutilator, a Vincent Van Gogh, a Gaston F. All the wealth he derives from the mythical delirium is limited to the incredible vomiting of the liver, ceaselessly devoured and ceaselessly vomited by the gaping belly of the god.

If one followed these associations, the use of the sacrificial mechanisms for various ends, such as propitiation or expiation, would be seen as secondary, and one would only retain the elementary fact of the radical alteration of the person which can be indefinitely associated with any other alteration that suddenly arises in collective life: for example, the death of a relative, initiation, the consumption of the new harvest . . . Such an action would be characterized by the fact that it would have the power to liberate heterogeneous elements and to break the habitual homogeneity of the individual, in the same way that vomiting would be opposed to its opposite, the communal eating of food. Sacrifice considered in its essential phase would only be the rejection of what had been appropriated by a person or by a group. Because everything that is rejected from the human cycle is altered in an altogether troubling way, the sacred things that intervene at the end of the operation - the victim struck down in a pool of blood, the severed finger or ear, the torn-out eye - do not appreciably differ from vomited food. Repugnance is only one of the forms of stupor caused by a horrifying eruption, by the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume. The one who sacrifices is free - free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim, to vomit his own being just as he has vomited a piece of himself or a bull, in other words free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself, like a gall or an aissaouah.

Still, one can doubt that even the most furious of those who have ever torn and mutilated themselves amid screams and to the beat of a drum have abused this marvelous freedom to the same extent as Vincent Van Gogh, who carried his severed ear to the place that most offends polite society. It is admirable that in this way he both manifested a love that refused to take anything into account and in a way spat in the faces of all those who have accepted the elevated and official idea of life that is so well known. Perhaps the practice of sacrifice has disappeared from the earth because it was not able to be sufficiently charged with this element of hate and disgust, without which it appears in our eyes as servitude. The monstrous ear sent in its envelope, however, abruptly leaves the magic circle where the rites of liberation stupidly aborted. It leaves along with the tongue of Anaxarchus of Abdera, bit off and spat bloody in the face of the tyrant Nicocreon, and with the tongue of a zeno of Elea spat in the face of Demylos . . . both of these philosophers having been subjected to atrocious tortures, the first crushed while still alive in a mortar.”