The relationship of science with the unknown resumes and modulates the relationship of the Vedic Brahmins with their many gods. The existence of the unknown demands a continual, huge dissipation of energy, of life. And the benefit of this sacrificial work, from which every opus derives, is the occasional discovery, a gift granted by the unknown to its priests. And, just as the Vedic gods feared that, through sacrifice, the priests would indeed become immortal, following the path of the gods themselves, who in the beginning had also become immortal through sacrificing, likewise the unknown can fear that such a profusion of offerings is not a repeated gesture of homage but the prelude to some act of overcoming. And yet science, as well as being eager and astute, is also modest and shortsighted—and this reassures the gods who now hide behind the unknown as if it were the acronym of an association. Science wants only one kind of gift: it wants facts that are verifiable, controllable, and repeatable. And, during their long history, the gods hidden in the unknown know that the most valuable gifts do not belong to that category: happiness, above all, is unverifiable, uncontrollable and unrepeatable. Prometheus’s fatal trick is once again played out: men make sure they get the fat part of the offering, that core of energy that nevertheless brings hunger and death. The gods agree to be deceived, with a slight hint of sarcasm: they will have only the smoke of the sacrifice, those uncontrollable aromas, scattered in the air, which are nevertheless pure pleasure and do not bring hunger and death.

The renouncer (saṃnyāsin) seeks release (mokṣa) from the world: the gnostic condemns the elements of the world (stoicheīa toū kósmou): the libertine uses the world open-mindedly: anonymous technology uses the world as its material. The renouncer is an orthodox: the gnostic is a heretic: the libertine an atheist: anonymous technology believes in itself. An illegitimate lineage that runs the world.

The whole history of modern philosophy is deeply troubled by sacrifice, by its terrible truth: Hegel’s dialectics is a transcription, an adulterated translation of sacrifice; Schopenhauer is the Western saṃnyāsin, the renouncer, and always therefore associated with sacrifice; Abraham is the sacrifice around which Kierkegaard’s thought revolves; and Dionysus (and the Crucified, with which he signs two “letters of insanity” on January 4, 1889, in Turin) is Nietzsche’s sacrifice. Yet sacrifice is absent from the epistemological line that comes down from Kant to the Vienna circle by way of the formalization of systems: but here knowledge is assumed to be a prosthesis, to be offered to science: it fails to admit that this prosthesis will then be offered by science to technology, so that technology can sacrifice under the name of experiment, and the sacrifice is ultimately multiplied in production.

There’s a wisdom of the officiant and there’s a wisdom of the victim. The two gradually draw apart in history. From the wisdom of the officiant comes the sovereignty of the subject who builds the edifice of knowledge for himself. From the wisdom of the victim come the three words of Aeschylus, “tō páthei máthos,” “learning through suffering,” which allude to the passion for initiatory knowledge.²⁷⁵ The scandal of Christ is that he was priest and victim at the same time, as in the beginning, joining the two paths together in him.