Sacrificial Simulacra from Nietzsche to Nitsch

by David Kilpatrick

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, June 2008. Copyright © 2008 David Kilpatrick and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

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SUMMARY

This paper explores the sacrificial rite as the quintessential mythopoetic gesture (in the absence of myth). Kristeva’s understanding of sacrifice as socially and symbolically foundational is consistent with the findings of social anthropology, but is contrary to the explorations of sacrificial imagery as an antidote to the modern condition. Nietzsche collapses the ontotheological significatory system through the sacrifice of its transcendental signified. After a brief overview of sacrifice in Nietzsche, discussion turns to how this informed Bataille’s understanding of the sacred, as well as the failed sacrifice of his Acéphale project. The paper concludes with a discussion of sacrifice in Hermann Nitsch’s Orgien-Mysterien Theater as decontextualized ritual.

TEXT

Perhaps no act better represents modern civilization’s supposed other, the savage, than the ultimate mythopoetic gesture, the ritual of sacrifice. As Julia Kristeva claims in Revolution in Poetic Language: “sacrifice designates, precisely, the watershed on the basis of which the social and the symbolic are instituted” (1984: 75). But for the myth-less modern man (who equates myth with lie), the bloodless death of Socrates and the crucifixion of Jesus render the barbarity of such rites obsolete, clearing the way for a more pacified sense of the holy than the horrifying means of religious communication among peoples (and, perhaps, the divine) offered by more archaic sacred sensibilities. In the Euro-American conflation of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, the ontotheological significatory system, the violence of sacrifice is discharged with the symbolism of the Mass, and then ignored altogether in the progressive name of reason. It is with the transgressive words of Nietzsche, “God is dead,” that this significatory system is itself sacrificed. My purpose here is to explore how Nietzsche engages with the simulacra of sacrifice as an antidote to the modern condition, how his exploration of this thematic motif is understood by Georges Bataille, whose theoretical obsession with this theme involved attempts at ritual practice, and how the ultimate status of contemporary post-theological sacrifice as decontextualized ritual is perhaps best exemplified by Das Orgien-Mysterien Theater of the Viennese Actionist, Hermann Nitsch.

The first stirrings of Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the absence of the sacred at the heart of modernity are found in his first work, The Birth of Tragedy [Die Geburt der Tragödie] where he notes that myth “is already paralyzed everywhere” (1968: 111). Arguing that tragic myth must be the response to this paralysis, and that this can only be done through an artwork that brings Apollinian structure to Dionysian insight, he concludes the book in the fictitious voice on an “old Athenian [. . .] with the eyes of Aeschylus,” who encourages the reader to, “follow me to a tragedy, and sacrifice with me [opfere mit mir] in the temple of both deities” (1968: 144). This closing image, this first shift from the author’s voice to the voice of another (a shift to drama), leaves the reader to question: what will be sacrificed?

In Human, All Too Human [Menschliches, Allzumenschliches], Nietzsche returns to the question of the sacrificial when he contemplates an archaeological display of sacrificial utensils (in section 112). The sight causes him to note the difficulty for the modern mind to appreciate the “combination of farce, even obscenity, with religious feeling” (1984: 84). What had been held sacred is now identified with the profane, the reconstitution of the sacred as holy recognized as a historical loss. Taking an objective position on the sacrificial objects and their decontextualization, Nietzsche observes that, “some feelings are disappearing: the sensibility that this is a possible mixture is vanishing; we understand it only historically that it once existed, in festivals of Demeter and Dionysus, at Christian passion plays and mystery plays” (1984: 84). Nietzsche associates the sacrificial objects with celebrations to the feminine deity and the feminized male deity—the chthonic and the tragic—as well as the theatre and drama of medieval Christianity. Even though these dramatic works share in the Christian, anti-Dionysian worldview, there remains a trace of the Dionysian in their theatricality. It is difficult to determine if this passage is a lament, comment, or celebration. Are we to look forward to the time in which this blend of sacred and profane is no longer understood or have we cooled off too much, the fire in need of rekindling?

The question becomes more problematic with the next section (113) of Human, All Too Human. Reacting to the sound of churchbells, he questions the persistence of Christian belief in an age of reason. Like the sacrificial utensils, “the Christian religion is surely an antiquity jutting out from a far-distant time” (1984: 84). As he makes a list of tenets of faith he perceives as absurdities, he cites the sacrificial core of Christianity: “a justice that accepts the innocent man as a proxy sacrifice; someone who has his disciples drink his blood [. . .] the figure of the cross as a symbol, in a time that no longer knows the purpose and shame of the cross. [. . .] Are we to believe that such things are still believed?” (1984: 85). Nietzsche seems here to share in an Enlightenment view of the sacrificial as a barbaric embarrassment from the all-too-dark (sub)human past. In the light of scientific progress, he appears to suggest, how can anyone shun the better conscience of reason and believe in such uncivilized superstition? One imagines that these two sections call for an end to all religious sensibility, that the appetite for sacrifice should become as useless as an appendix, from an evolutionary standpoint.

However, a far different view of the sacrificial is offered in section 138. Imagining a state of extreme excitement and tension, directed outside oneself at another (an enemy), Nietzsche touches on a theory of catharsis. Man, when “brought into a state of extraordinary tension,” is faced with the possibility of not only destroying the other but himself as well: “Under the influence of the powerful emotion, he wants in any event what is great, powerful, enormous, and if he notices by chance that to sacrifice his own self satisfies as well or better than to sacrifice the other person, then he chooses that. Actually, all he cares about is the release of his emotion; to relieve his tension” (1984: 96). This desire for catharsis finds its ultimate release in the willful transformation of not only a subject for an object, but one’s subjectivity given over to object-ness. While the sacrificial may be what is “great, powerful and enormous,” the sacrifice of one’s self is what is most great, powerful and enormous. Nietzsche goes on to say that, “a divinity that sacrifices itself was the strongest and most effective symbol of this kind of greatness” (1984: 96). He is careful here to use the past tense. His awareness or concern for the efficacy of a symbol becomes problematic when one compares his earlier comment in Human, All Too Human on the symbolism of the cross with this comment on autodeicide. What divinities does he have in mind here as “the strongest and most effective” symbolically? His earlier mocking comment on the symbolism of Christian sacrifice relates to the ignorance of adherents to the associations of humiliation and shame when the cross was employed as an instrument of capital punishment. Nonetheless, Nietzsche couldn’t argue that the Christian reconstitution of the symbolism of the cross has been ineffective. Its efficacy is undeniable but, Nietzsche would argue, its effects are in a state of deterioration. The sacrificial deity that (for Nietzsche) symbolizes greatness, Dionysus, does so through an affirmation of life, rather than its metaphysical denial.

The sacrificial trail that runs through Human, All Too Human reaches its conclusion in section 620, with the statement, “If there is a choice, a great sacrifice will be preferred to a small one, because we compensate ourselves for a great sacrifice with self-admiration, and this is not possible with a small one” (1984: 257). But what great sacrifice does Nietzsche have in mind?

In The Gay Science [Die fröliche Wissenschaft], he gives a suggestion, with the declaration of the death of God. Rather than a statement of simple atheism, his madman claims, “We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers” (1974: 181). This sacred violence of the death of god brings about a ritual necessity, as the madman asks: “what festivals of atonement, what sacred games will we have to invent?” (1974: 181).

It is perhaps odd that sacrifice, the quintessential religious act, should play such a prominent role in the thought of one whose work seemingly negates the religious instinct. But the announcement of the death of God does not render the symbolism of Christianity (reconstituted metaphysically by the Church) null and void; on the contrary (as he suggests in a fragment published as section 874 of The Will to Power [Der Wille zur Macht]), it frees the image, for with the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, “an image of God was spread which was as far removed as possible from the image of the most powerful—the god on the cross” (1954: 440). Collapsing this significatory system recovers the most powerful symbol, using the most powerful symbol against its static simulacrum, for the crucifixion mimetically seals the sacrificial from its threat of contagion, the Mass a solemn parody of the most mythpoetic rite, killing myth.

In section 53 of Beyond Good and Evil [Jenseits von Gut und Böse], Nietzsche makes it clear that he reconstitutes the religious experience, and that the death of God promotes its renewal: “It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in the process of growing powerfully—but the theistic satisfaction it refuses with deep suspicion” (1968: 256). This refusal is described in section 55 as the last step in a “great ladder of religious cruelty” (1968: 257). Nietzsche distinguishes three stages in this ladder, beginning with “human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most. [. . .] Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s own strongest instincts, one’s ‘nature’ ” (1968: 257). The sacrifice of human beings, the finest and most beloved, was replaced during the reign of the ontotheological significatory system with the destruction of that part of one’s self that is most intimately connected with the earth. By annulling one’s physicality, one sought to identify one’s self with spirit. Nietzsche’s deicidal words mark not only the end of that epoch, but the next stage in a sequence:

Finally—what remained to be sacrificed? At long last . . . didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already know something of this. (1968: 257)

Here we see most clearly how for Nietzsche the announcement of the death of God bears witness to a sacrifice of the highest proportions, for the “final cruelty” is a world-epochal event of sacred violence.

We may mythologize Nietzsche and cite his descent into madness in the Turin square as his own sacrifice. This is reinforced by the names with which he signed his letters shortly thereafter, “Dionysus” and “The Crucified” (1996: 345). Still, the question from The Gay Science remains: what sacred rites must be invented to atone for the final cruelty?

A sincere attempt to respond to this question can be found in the work of Georges Bataille. Although Bataille began reading Nietzsche intensely in the early 1920’s, this influence did not appear in his writing until the 1930’s, especially in the journal Acéphale, which was the mouthpiece for a secret society that was, as he later described, “religious (but anti-Christian, and essentially Nietzschean)” (Hollier 1988: 387). In “Propositions,” an essay published in the second issue of the journal, he links the group with Nietzsche’s deicidal conception: “The acephalic man mythologically expresses sovereignty committed to destruction and the death of God, and in this identification with the headless man merges and melds with the identification with the superhuman, which IS entirely ‘the death of God’ ” (1985: 199). The methods used by the group to attain this tragic goal remain a subject of speculation. Little is known of the collective, for, as Maurice Blanchot claims in The Unavowable Community, “those who participated in it are not certain they had a part in it” (1988: 13). In his introduction to Bataille’s Visions of Excess, Allan Stoekl notes that, “There was even talk of an actual human sacrifice being performed, but it was never carried out” (1985: xx). The sacrifice remains an enigma, a point of contention among readers of Bataille who dare approach the subject. In his biography of Bataille, Roland Champagne mentions the group simply en passant, claiming “the group performed strange rituals, including the sacrifice of a goat (none of the members would volunteer to be a human sacrifice)” (1998: 13). Patrick Waldberg’s account supports this view, as he recalls:

At the last meeting in the heart of the forest, there were four of us and Bataille solemnly requested whether one of the three others would assent to being put to death, since this sacrifice would be the foundation of a myth, and ensure the survival of the community. This favour was refused him. Some months later the war was unleashed in earnest sweeping away what hope remained. (Brotchie 1995: 15-16)

Sylvère Lotringer offers an alternative view to that of Bataille as an all-too-willing sacrificer of others, as he attempts a more detailed explanation of this act that defined the community as its project and as its impossibility:

The little sect . . . met secretly at dusk, in the forest of Marly, near Paris. [. . .] It was agreed that their secret community would be sealed by a symbolic act, violent, irreversible, collectively shared, a “section” executed with implacable rigor that would separate them from the rest of society and raise them to the level of myth. This was the essence of the sacred. It was only recently [. . .] that the “sacred conspiracy” was finally disclosed: Bataille himself had volunteered to be murdered. But no one in the group offered to do the deed . . . (1999: 76)

The question is one of performance: what exactly was the rite and (why) was(n’t) it staged?

The month after the last issue of Acéphale was published, at le Collège de Sociologie, Bataille claimed that, “men more religious than others cease to have a narrow concern for the community for which sacrifices are performed. They no longer live for the community; they only live for sacrifice” (1998: 252). An attempt at creating the sacred games desired by Nietzsche’s madman is thwarted not only by impending war, but also by the inability of the group to commit to the sacrificial rite, which would give birth to their myth. Bataille’s interest in sacrifice was greater than any community that the rite would ensure.

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