#accursed share

[ahumourlessworld]

Kimitake Hiraoka was the sacrificed and the character he invented and lived in, Yukio Mishima, was the sacrificer. The moment the sword entered the belly, the two became one and the beheading is the sacrifice that was required by Bataille’s Acéphale.

“The Victim, Sacred and Cursed

The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings.

Nothing is more striking than the attention that is lavished on him. Being a thing, he cannot truly be withdrawn from the real order, which binds him, unless destruction rids him of his "thinghood," eliminating his usefulness once and for all. As soon as he is consecrated and during the time between the consecration and death, he enters into the closeness of the sacrificers and participates in their consumptions: He is one of their own and in the festival in which he will perish, he sings, dances and enjoys all the pleasures with them. There is no more servility in him; he can even receive arms and fight. He is lost in the immense confusion of the festival. And that is precisely his undoing.

The victim will be the only one in fact to leave the real order entirely, for he alone is carried along to the end by the movement of the festival. The sacrificer is divine only with reservations. The future is heavily reserved in him; the future is the weight that he bears as a thing. The official theologians whose tradition Sahagún collected were well aware of this, for they placed the voluntary sacrifice of Nanauatzin above the others, praised warriors for being consumed by the gods, and gave divinity the meaning of consump-tion. We cannot know to what extent the victims of Mexico accepted their fate. It may be that in a sense certain of them "considered it an honor" to be offered to the gods. But their immolation was not voluntary. Moreover, it is clear that, from the time of Sahagún's informants, these death orgies were tolerated because they impressed foreigners. The Mexicans immolated children that were chosen from among their own. But severe penalties had to be decreed against those who walked away from their procession when they went up to the altars. Sacrifice comprises a mixture of anguish and frenzy. The frenzy is more powerful than the anguish, but only providing its effects are diverted to the exterior, onto a foreign prisoner. It suffices for the sacrificer to give up the wealth that the victim could have been for him.

This understandable lack of rigor does not, however, change the meaning of the ritual. The only valid excess was one that went beyond the bounds, and one whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods. This was the price men paid to escape their downfall and remove the weight introduced in them by the avarice and cold calculation of the real order.” - Georges Bataille, ‘The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy’ (1949) [p. 59 - 61]

[odettecarotte]

What is the meaning of art, architecture, music, painting or poetry if not the anticipation of a supsended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment?

Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

[criminal-delirium]

If, however, we are blessed with enough courage and luck, the object we desire most is in principle the one most likely to endanger or destroy us.

Georges Bataille. The Accursed Share Volumes II & III. 

[whentheynyan]

directly and immediately, life is it's own end.

[ahumourlessworld]

“To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the “pleasures of the flesh” only on condition that they be insipid.

But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as “pleasures of the flesh” because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as “dirty.” On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.”

[ahumourlessworld]

Georges Bataille - The Sacrifice of the Gibbon

Pondering the post on Abruptum and Hermann Nitsch , I was reminded of Georges Bataille's short story "Le sacrifice du Gibbon", which was wri

"Like a storm that erupts and, after several minutes of intolerable delay, ravishes in semidarkness an entire countryside with insane cataracts of water and blasts of thunder, in the same disturbed and profoundly overwhelming way (albeit with signs infinitely more difficult to perceive), existence itself shudders and attains a level where there is nothing more than a hallucinatory void, an odor of death that sticks in the throat."

[ahumourlessworld]

Our Obsession with Consumption — while Ignoring Saving and Investment — Is a Big Problem

Our Obsession with Consumption — while Ignoring Saving and Investment — Is a Big Problem Mises.org 06/13/2018 by Hans-Hermann Hoppe & Juan F

“In the economics profession today very little attention is given to the role of savings and very much, indeed overwhelming importance is attached instead to the role of consumption. This is a very curious situation. For while it is true that the ultimate goal of all human activity is consumption, there can be little or no consumption without prior production, and there can be no production without prior saving. To explain: Nature on its own provides us with only very few consumer goods, such as apples growing on trees or berries on bushes. For anything more and above this nature-given level of possible consumption, we must first produce the goods that we then afterwards can consume. That is, we must first devise and construct tools, instruments or machines – in economic terms: indirectly useful producer goods – which help us increase the supply of nature-given consumer goods (such as apples and berries) above their natural level or which help us bring about entirely new consumer goods, i.e., goods not found in nature at all (such as houses or cars). But: to devise and construct these producer goods (such as knifes, buckets, nets, hammers, bricks, steel plates, etc.) always requires some time, and to bridge the time to complete the construction of these goods, i.e., to eat and drink while working on them, prior savings of food and drink are necessary. Without prior savings and the “investment” of such savings in the production and accumulation of producer goods, then, no increase of future consumption is possible.

Why, then, economists pay so little attention to saving despite its enormous importance, is a question concerning the psychology or sociology of the economics profession. Naturally, the answer must be somewhat speculative.

(...)

However, the more fundamental reason is another one. It concerns the immediate follow-up question as to why Keynesian economics could possibly achieve such extraordinary success. The answer: Because what Keynesianism teaches is exactly what state-governments want to hear. And saying and preaching what governments like to hear in order to “scientifically” legitimize what they want to do all along anyhow brings rich rewards within a system of “public education,” i.e., within a school and university system almost totally controlled and tax-financed by government.

And what, then, is it that the “high priests” of Keynesianism, ensconced everywhere in the most prestigious and well-paying academic positions, teach and preach and that all governments love to hear? That all economic problems (stagnation, recession, depression, or whatever) are the result of under-consumption; and never ever are they, as plain common sense would suggest, the result of under-saving or under- production. And how to fix the problem of under-consumption and stimulate consumption? By taxing the rich (because they supposedly spend too little of their income on consumption and too much on savings) and giving it to the poor (who spend almost all of their income on consumption), by printing and spending more government paper-money, by the expansion of government paper-money credit, and by increasing government debt.

Rightly, Ludwig von Mises has characterized and ridiculed this economic “stimulus program” as the vain attempt of performing the biblical miracle of turning stones into bread.”

“The only valid excess was one that went beyond the bounds, and one whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods. This was the price men paid to escape their downfall and remove the weight introduced in them by the avarice and cold calculation of the real order.”

[whentheynyan]

labor established the world of things. Once the world of things was posited, man himself became one of the things of this world