Here we surprise the great anthropologist while he is blaming a religious ceremony for speaking about something “nonexistent,” which is “divinity.” Why such intemperance? Perhaps we are nearing the threshold where Lévi-Strauss feels the “savage mind” is becoming too “savage” and no longer worthy of being called “mind.” The analysis is paralyzed by a feeling of horror continui. And the language is suddenly no longer that of passionate description, but of rejection—almost, one might say, for moral reasons. Such thinking must not be thought. Eventually he comes close to insult, with a shrug of the shoulders of an upright, taxpaying citoyen: “To express this difference in level between totemism and sacrifice it is not, then, enough to say the former is a system of reference and the latter a system of operations, that one works out a schema of interpretation while the other sets up (or claims to set up) a technique for obtaining certain results: that one is true, and the other is false.⁴¹¹ Rather, to put it precisely, classificatory systems belong to the levels of language: they are codes which, however well or badly made, always aim to make sense. The system of sacrifice, on the other hand, represents a private discourse wanting in good sense for all it may frequently be pronounced.” The conclusion of anthropological science would therefore be that sacrifice is a discourse “wanting in good sense.”

Goethe’s Birthday

At Karlsbad—there for the waters—he listened “with tears in his eyes” as Angelica Catalani sang “Kennst du das Land” at the home of Prince Josef Schwarzenberg, until her voice broke in a fit of jealousy.⁴¹² He wrote to his son, August, that the inhabitants now behaved like pirates toward visitors. “In any case, everything is much more expensive and becomes even more so with each passing day by reason of the exchange rates.”⁴¹³ Approaching his sixty-ninth birthday, he felt the forces of his entelechy were now urging him toward “repeated puberty,” a long Indian summer.⁴¹⁴ He wanted to celebrate alone, in solitude. Eduard Genast recounts: “Karl, Goethe’s faithful servant, was ordered on the morning of August 27 to bring up two bottles of red wine and place them on the two windowsills in front of him. After which Goethe begins pacing up and down the room, pausing at regular intervals, first at one window, then the other, emptying a glass each time. Some time later, Rehbein, who had traveled with him to Karlsbad, arrives.⁴¹⁵

GOETHE: What a dear friend you are! What’s the day today, what date is it?

REHBEIN: It’s August 27, Excellency.

GOETHE: No, it’s the twenty-eighth, it’s my birthday.

REHBEIN: But no, I’d never forget that; it’s the twenty-seventh.

GOETHE: You’re wrong. It’s the twenty-eighth.

REHBEIN firmly: The twenty-seventh.

GOETHE rings, enter Karl: What’s the date today?

KARL: Twenty-seventh, Excellency.

GOETHE: What the … Bring me the calendar!

Karl brings the calendar.

GOETHE after a long pause: Damnation! Then I’ve got myself drunk for nothing.”