Far-li-mas manages to postpone death: it will no longer be blood sacrifice, but it will be the dark and all-consuming ruin of Kasch. Yet one thing escapes that ruin: his words. Under the reign of the priests, nothing would have escaped. The divine hand would have destroyed the realm in silence. But one voice still tells the story of the ruin of Kasch.

The story of the kingdom of Kasch teaches how sacrifice is the cause of ruin and also how the absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin. This pair of simultaneous and contradictory truths points to a single and darker truth, which rests in the stillness: society is the ruin. And from this obscurity we are pointed to something else, in the background: society is the ruin because it reverberates the sound of the world, its incessant devouring whirr.

In storytelling there is something profound that resists the sentence of death, that goes beyond its coercive aspect, that escapes the downward thrust of the knife. Storytelling is a way of moving ahead and looking back, a surging movement in the voice, a perpetual breaking down of borders, a way of circumventing sharp spears.

The ruin of Kasch is the origin of literature. Soma is the origin of sweetness.

The Ruin of Kasch is one of the stories of Far-li-mas.

Far-li-mas’s stories have the effect of soma, they act like the honey of the sacrifice, its fruit. In spreading the honey of the sacrifice, Far-li-mas defeats the blood sacrifice. But that honey ends with him: once the cycle of the stars has been abandoned, there is no more certainty about the soma. It is now an erratic gift. After the death of Far-li-mas, Naphta will go to ruin. And his stories will be all that is left to nourish the arid, avid body of history. Nothing is said about a successor to Far-li-mas. That would take us into literature.

“The king of Chou was seated with the prince of Fan.²⁵⁸ At a certain point the king of Chou’s courtiers announced that the princely state of Fan had been three-times lost. The prince of Fan told the king of Chou: ‘The ruin of my princely state is not enough to destroy its existence.’ If the ruin of Fan was not enough to destroy its existence, nor would the existence of Chou have been enough to preserve that realm. Looking at things in this way, the principality of Fan could not be said to be affected by its ruin any more than the kingdom of Chou could call itself safe.”

Elements of Sacrifice

The purpose of sacrifice is not to atone for guilt, as we read in the textbooks. Sacrifice is guilt, the only guilt.

Sacrifice is a guilt that elaborates itself. It transforms murder into a suicide. It transposes murder into the distant prospect of a suicide. So distant as to go back to the beginning. Where we encounter the divine suicide: the creation.