all action is "negating"
(21) "...In that poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable." ...but he's more interested (or seems to be, at this point) in what "appears distinctly and clearly."
(28) language: tool (utilitarian) subordinate-- if we think of it as an object: "has meaning that breaks the undifferentiated continuity-- stands opposed to immanence/flow of all that is-- which transcends. It's the subject's property, the subject's [self's] thing, but is nonetheless impervious to the subject."
quickly: a tool = manufactured object on same plane. "THe only means of freeing the manufactured object from the servility of the tool is art, understood as a true end." Though even art doesn't guarantee un-usefulness. water in water.
divine=sacred. profane v. holy & mythical
We refuse to make the human body an object-- we won't eat humans, will not make man (sic) a thing-- unlike animals. Though man can and does make himself a tool/thing (a farmer is a tool [as plow or grain] to the eater of bread).
Moving on: "Sacrifice, the Festival, the Sacred World:"
Sacrifice removes object (my word) plant/animal from world of things-- purpose is to destroy the thing in the victim, destroy the object's realities of subordination. Draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to unintelligible caprice.
Sacrifice restores thing to intimacy but turns its back on real relations (it must, as it goes against its own nature).
(46) Death = great affirmer of life
Sacrifice functions like death as it restores a lost value through a relinquishment of that value. Sacrifice is not to kill but to relinquish and give.
(49) Sacrifice (with death) reinforces life-- underscores it, brings out/back intimacy, Sacrificing to a deity, whose sacred essence is comparable to a fire, is fueled by sacrifice (spirit fueling spirit) as coal into furnace, but whereas coal is subordinated to furnace, in sacrifice, the offering is rescued from all utility.
Useful things, not luxury items, are sacrificed, as useful things were not destroyed beforehand (and therefore are only sacrificed once).
What is intimate: what has the passion of an absence of individuality, but also: violence and destruction. Animals have an unconscious intimacy.
(56) Basic problem of religion is given in the fatal misunderstanding of sacrifice: "Man is the being that has lost-- even rejected, that which he obscurely is, a vague intimacy--"
(Slavery, then, reduces human to thing-ness; human sacrifice: what is useful. [I have no idea, think I was just jotting down concepts from the text.])
***Connection to language: sacrifice of what's useful? Chant? Attempted use to highlight essence of a thing, to regain lost intimacy?
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