Apart from clear-thinking believers, who are an embattled minority, the world is inhabited by those who follow family beliefs or who have no beliefs at all—the moderns, those who feel bound for some reason to deny the existence of anything supernatural. These include the harshest bigots. But here we also encounter the individual most peculiar to this moment: the one who belongs to no confession, nor even to any secular bigotry (belief in science, in socialism, in the individual, in the free market, in the proletariat, in progress). So what does he think? Here, once again, there is a clear distinction between those who use sacrificial categories and those who reject them. Nietzsche speaks from the outset in sacrificial terms, following Dionysus, his god; Rudolf Carnap speaks like those many who regard sacrifice as a superstition, insofar as it is eminently unverifiable; Freud wants to reveal the originating sacrifice; Jung wants the sacrifice to be performed. Literature doesn’t even need to talk about sacrifice. In one of its forms—that’s to say, absolute literature (a genealogy of decadence: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Gottfried Benn; or Flaubert, Proust)—writing takes on the features of a sacrificial offering, which implies a certain destruction of the author.

German romanticism marks the reawakening of sacrifice. The dark, the impure, the uncontrolled; the landscape; the incongruous, the somnambulistic, the sentimental, the foreboding, the passionate: whatever might, with some awkward speculation, be called Negative was its terrain, where the intoxication of double meanings is once more to be found, each time invigorating and destructive, just as it had been a long time ago around the sacrificial post. But no one can now assume the role of officiant, or of sacrificer: in the absence of a ritual, of an order, the only role left is that of the victim, who wanders the forest, prey to Rudra, waiting for his fatal arrows. This is the consumption that kills Novalis and Keats. For Hölderlin, Rudra is Apollo, who strikes him down in Bordeaux. When, with Rimbaud, the writer becomes officially maudit, it is already time for a change, time to go selling weapons in Harar. The victim discovers sadly that the world has already prepared an archaic niche for him. He must now return to the forest. In the city, he will be anonymous, barely visible, he will write business letters in English, he will sit in a café after office hours: the forest is Pessoa’s trunk, crammed full of names.