Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth

Chapter Three - Theories of Sacrifice in the Modern World: Georges Bataille, René Girard, and Walter Burkert

79 CHAPTER THREE Theories of Sacrifice in the Modern World Georges Bataille, René Girard, and Walter Burkert The opening two chapters seek to demonstrate that sacrifice can be analyzed as part of an aesthetic process that defines the human relationship to nature. Adorno provides a strong argument for the validity of an aesthetic truth that might be opposed to a philosophical truth in providing insight about the world. Yet, because Adorno’s vision of aesthetic truth creates a mimesis of history rather than a mimesis of nature that would accept the inevitability of violence, his aesthetics do not take account of the centrality of sacrifice for human culture. At the same time, this refusal to take violence as constitutive for culture also leads Adorno to the positing of a universal subject whose structure is deemed identical for all cultures, resulting in a Eurocentric vision of culture. The analysis of Adorno’s aesthetic theory confirms his insight that aesthetic truth is possible as a kind of disinterested judgment about the world and that this aesthetic truth consists primarily of the mimesis of nature. As opposed to Adorno, however, chapter 1 argues, first, that the mimesis of nature is an experience of the particular way in which violence relates to human endeavor and so includes myth and ritual as well as works of art, and, second, that the mimesis of nature will necessarily contain a structure of sacrifice. Finally, this structure of sacrifice lies at the core of every culture where it determines that culture’s particular structure of subjectivity by laying out the limits against which subjectivity is established. Chapter 2 demonstrates that this acceptance of myth and sacrifice as aesthetic structures for determining subjectivity in a culture is to be differentiated from the use of myth and sacrifice as ideologies for justifying the use of violence. The acceptance of violence as an unavoidable limit of human endeavor does not need to translate into a supernatural or biological explanation of culture. On the contrary, such explanations undermine the aesthetic functioning of myth and sacrifice as cultural constructs that 80 Chapter Three define social processes as being based on an aesthetic judgment about the relation between culture and nature. The substitution of supernatural or biological explanations eventually leads to philosophical determinations that are based on the ideological defense of particular interests. By contrast, an aesthetic approach sees the proliferation of myths and rituals as part of a reception process within which the aesthetic truth of these structures can be confirmed by the everyday experience of individuals in the collective that is established on the basis of these structures. If myth and ritual are primarily aesthetic events and gain their legitimacy not from a supernatural or biological underpinning but from a collective reception that selectively chooses which myths and rituals to continue, then the significance of sacrifice would not lie in its materialist quality as naked violence, but in its symbolic structuring of the human relationship to violence. Together, the discussions of Adorno and Baeumler on myth and art provide an understanding of the possibilities and pitfalls in approaching sacrifice as an enduring category in modern society. This chapter considers the idea that the aesthetic understanding of sacrifice is based on a malleability of the structure of the subject, in which a particular structure of sacrifice will imply a specific structure of subjectivity . A particular structure of sacrifice would not only be essential for the formation of a subject but would also be the basis of the particularity of a culture’s identity. If the constitution of the subject through sacrifice is a generalized cultural process that adapts a culture to its situation, then this process can only successfully take place as an aesthetic mimesis of nature in which the sacrifice mediates to the subject the specific pattern of constraints within which a subject in that culture operates. Subject formation, mimesis of nature, and the establishment of a cultural identity all come together in the act of sacrifice, and the investigation of a specific economy of sacrifice will define the particularity of a culture and the impact of culture on subjectivity. This vision of sacrifice as an aesthetic process that carries out both a mimesis of nature and a determination of subjectivity places sacrifice at the center of a culture’s attempt to define and maintain its own separate identity. In making this argument, this chapter will counter objections to an aesthetic notion of sacrifice that are raised by alternative theories of sacrifice...