February 29, 2004
Bataille, sacrifice & Van Gogh
An example of sacrifice. Van Gogh cutting off his left ear.
Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889
This is Bataille from his 'Sacrifical Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh' in Visions of Excess:
". . . 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 [Z]eno 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." (pp.70-71)
We have lived through two decades of sacrfice. during the 1980s and the 1990s people's lives and happiness were sacrificed by the pointy heads for the sake of economic reform.
For Bataille sacrifice opens to the sacred, which is is the realm of meaning that is grasped in a mythological sense. If sacrifice is traditionally giving up for the divine, then in the world of economic reform sacrifice is the giving up of the materially valuable for that which is culturally meaningful. Sacrifice is the act of exchanging that which is valued for meaning. The objects of sacrifice that are lost or destroyed in the sacrifice (people's jobs, businesses, houses,) are things of value. If much is given (our happiness), much is gained (the wealth of the nation).
This suggests that can swap Hegel's philosophical system with that of mathematical economics as an example of what Bataille meant by the delirium of reason.