Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi
To many French intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) remained a divisive figure both as proponent of a positivist sociology and a secular morality and for his role in the reform of state education. Having rescued sociology from its status of Cinderella science at the turn of the twentieth century, Durkheim had helped it climb the ranks of academic legitimacy by arguing for its unique ability to explain and research social phenomena. As sociology became a fundamental component of French school curricula and pedagogical training, however, it suffered from its newly acquired position of dominance to the point that Durkheim found himself the target of attacks from both the right and left (Clark, 1973). In this scenario that negatively identified sociology with the status quo and presented Durkheim as guilty of sectarianism, tyrannical thought, conservatism and reductive scientism, it is no doubt surprising that such an iconoclastic figure as Georges Bataille embraced Durkheim and relied on him for his own investigation of modern sociality. A “pornographic” author, poet, mystic and essayist, albeit an austere librarian too, Bataille seemed the least plausible of candidates to be supporting Durkheim and his sociology. And yet Durkheim, along with other members of his school, became the leading figures in Bataille’s long lasting concern with sociological matters. What drove Bataille to Durkheim? And why did Bataille embrace sociology?
One of the most prominent features of Durkheim’s theory is the idea that society can only be held together by common beliefs, an ensemble of shared values. In the past, traditional social ties and religions fulfilled the task of maintaining cohesion within a group; Durkheim amply discussed the strong solidarity present among pre-industrial populations. In the modern epoch dominated by the scientific spirit and individualism, however, what elements could guarantee the integrity of the collectivity, Durkheim asked. Absent the faith that sustained traditional communities, was society destined to collapse? Durkheim firmly believed that it was possible to replace traditional moralities based on religious faith with a morality based on science; as long as people agreed on the values they upheld, their consensus ensured the strength of the social bond. Once beliefs are shared, he claimed, they gain a life of their own and impose themselves on the collectivity, for they express a power that does not derive from individual ideas but in contrast originates from an external force: society. As the result of the group’s shared beliefs, society acquires a sort of transcendence, a superior status, an almost religious character that makes it independent (sui generis) of its members, grander and more important than the sum of its parts. While individuals die, societies live on.
For Durkheim, society was the ultimate sacred; it anointed the group’s beliefs and practices and made them overlap with religion. When we worship the gods, he stated, we worship ourselves – the unity of the group. His study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1913) was meant to demonstrate this process by looking at the origins of the religious spirit. Through the case of totemism as the most primitive religion practiced by Australian aboriginal groups organized in clans, Durkheim claimed that religion is a hypostatization of society, its cypher. The venerated totem-god that the Australians celebrate during collective rituals and ceremonies expresses the group’s awareness of its own unity, the group’s sanctity.
Bataille was entranced by Durkheim’s notion of the sacred as what holds a society together. As he proclaimed in 1937, he was interested in all human activities that “have a communifying value” and “are the creators of unity,” and he considered sacred “everything in human existence that is communifying” (CS 74). For Bataille, Durkheim showed how to detect the presence of the sacred in society and pointed to sociology as able to identify the new morality necessary to forge social bonds and build strong communities in the contemporary world. The concept of the sacred, as formulated by Durkheim, linked Bataille to sociology and led him to develop original analyses of modern society; to Bataille, modernity seemed to lack a genuine sacred, the communitarian spirit necessary to accomplish true existence.
How did Bataille come to appreciate Durkheim? Bataille was an avid reader and working as a librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris certainly provided him with even more opportunities to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. From the records of his borrowings at the Bibliothèque, we know that he consulted Durkheim’s Elementary Forms several times between 1931 and 1933 (OC XII, 549–621). Beginning in 1930, he also borrowed books by several members and affiliates of the Durkheimian circle, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Marcel Granet, Célestin Bouglé, Georges Davy, and the Durkheimian journal, L’Année sociologique. Whether he had come across these works earlier, it is hard to establish. We know without a doubt that he began to cite Durkheim’s Elementary Forms in his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.” In 1930 he referred to Hubert and Mauss in his essay “Sacrificial Mutilations,” while his 1933 article “The Notion of Expenditure” was highly indebted, at least in terms of inspiration, to Mauss’s The Gift. In 1933–34 Bataille also cooperated in the preparation of a sociology course organized by the review Masses. Then in 1937, at the peak of his involvement with sociology, Bataille together with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris founded the Collège de sociologie, a study group that appealed to sociological science in order to explore and illuminate issues concerned with the sacred. The Collège explicitly stated that it studied “sacred sociology,” which it defined as the realm that included all human activities with a communifying value.
Bataille had selectively picked his inspirational sources for studying the sacred from an array of available thinkers. One of the reasons that particularly attracted him to the Durkheimians was their perceptive focus on “primitive” societies. Mauss, Hubert, Davy, Granet, as well as Durkheim, all engaged in ethnographic research, even if from the armchair. Because of this anthropological emphasis, they had been able to generate a deeper understanding of the life of groups as compared to the individualistic behavior typical of modern societies. By studying the conditions of social communities before the impact of modernity, the Durkheimians showed the spectrum of human potential in places and times untouched by the industrialized era, and they demonstrated the role of affective emotional states in the creation and strengthening of the social bond. Bataille benefited from the complementarity of sociology and ethnography displayed by the Durkheimians. In exploring the sacred, the College of Sociology was geared towards “rediscovering the primordial longings and conflicts of the individual condition transposed to the social dimension” (CS, 10).
In his writings of the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, Bataille was interested in assessing ways to revive a society that, characterized by the logic of productivity and fully subscribed to a market economy, seemed to have lost the sense of what gives value to existence. The historical phenomenon of fascism, which had emerged in full force in Italy at the time, made Bataille’s intellectual mission even more urgent. With its cults and rituals, fascism had shown a return to affective movements that complicated the analysis of modern societies. Were not the latter supposed to be characterized by the triumph of reason and the end of myths? How could one interpret this apparent incongruity? Bataille believed that findings on primitive societies could help assess the modern world’s emotional needs that were trampled on by interest-based behavior. Ethnography, as deployed by the Durkheimian school and others, played a critical role in this operation.
Ethnography’s appeal to Bataille emerges from the journal Documents, which was published between 1929 and 1931 under Bataille’s leadership. A critical response to Surrealism, Documents was first conceived as an art magazine, but progressively moved to placing a larger emphasis on ethnographic material. The journal was many things at the same time, yet its originality chiefly resided in the juxtaposition of art and popular culture, which was prominently featured in its pages, along with an innovative use of photography and a non-conformist approach to beauty. Several of Documents’ collaborators were ethnographers, including the future co-leader of the Collège, Leiris. The director and assistant director of the Parisian Musée d’ethnographie (later renamed Musée de l’Homme), Paul Rivet and Jean-Pierre Rivière, were on Documents’ editorial board and wrote several articles for the review.
The revolutionary but also contradictory idea that guided Documents was the need to affirm the value of “primitive” cultures even when their material production did not fit classic aesthetic standards. According to the journal, more rigorous knowledge of “other” societies was indispensable to overcome the superficial and exotic approaches that had traditionally vexed the study of “primitive” people. Leiris in particular regarded ethnographic material not as a mere classification of cultures but as means to explore and attain our humanity. As he wrote for the entry on “Civilization,” our culture rejects what is savage and in so doing denies our own violence and forfeits our instincts.1 Art, with its aesthetic ideals and conventions, is in part responsible for this attitude and epitomizes the distance modern bourgeois Europeans have traveled away from emotions and human nature in general. Leiris emphasized the disagreeable – a move that Bataille pushed to the extremes by promoting the repulsive (what he defined as the heterogeneous) against any forms of perfection.
Bataille’s early writings, including those in Documents and his whole polemic against Surrealism, had been geared toward dismantling idealist categories and hierarchical values. Without wishing to replace one form of idealism with another, Bataille opposed materialism and the formless to reason and harmony in order to challenge major Western philosophical conceptions and, ultimately, the modern ethics of “production.” Against capitalism and its utilitarian, ascetic ideals, Bataille invoked the notion of uselessness, or “useless expenditure,” which became one of his featured ideas, a trademark of his thought. The concept, especially deployed in “The Notion of Expenditure” (1932), was clearly inspired by the analysis of the potlatch in Mauss’s 1925 essay The Gift (Mauss, 1990), the only scholarly reference cited in the “Expenditure” article.
For Mauss, the potlatch practiced by tribes of the American Northwest exemplified an economy based on giving – a form of exchange and contract that had a symbolic dimension: it was by participating in the potlatch that social hierarchy was established. A festival lasting the entire winter, the potlatch was characterized by an exchange of gifts between nobles in which the gift-givers tried to outdo their rivals in order to gain prestige and power. The competition was so fierce that it even involved irrational acts of violence, such as the destruction of wealth, when all participants defied each other to give more without expecting anything in return. In the end, the struggle among contenders was not about the appropriation of material wealth but about attaining “the social-symbolic good of prestige” (Karsenti, 1997, 375). Honor derived from the ability to waste wealth and possessions, a slap in the face of utilitarian logic. Violence helped renew sociality, Mauss seemed to suggest, with a nod to Sorel’s notion of violence as regeneration.2
The Gift had a notable impact on Bataille, whether it inspired him or confirmed his intuitions. “Durkheim’s work and even more Mauss’s exercised an unquestionable influence on me” – he wrote in his “Notice biographique” (OC VII, 615). And in 1946, in his Theory of Religion, he stated that The Gift “forms the basis of any understanding of economy as being tied to forms of destruction of the excess of productive activity” (TR 125). For Bataille, irrational impulses are part of human existence, and he regretted that the bourgeoisie’s stingy calculations and attachment to accumulation had discarded emotions along with consumption for unproductive ends. Loss, destruction and expenditure came to play a critical role in Bataille’s approach to the sacred. Beginning with his 1930 essay “Sacrificial Mutilations,” Bataille relied on Hubert and Mauss’s work on sacrifice to ruminate about the relationship between what is destroyed – sacrifice – and the sacred. The essay on expenditure specifically related the two: “In the etymological sense of the word, sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things” (VE 127).
It is impossible to appreciate Bataille’s interest in ethnography and sociology as well as his approach to the sacred without taking into account his negative assessment of established order and what he considered “homogeneous” society – a system founded on production and money where everything useless is excluded. Critical of bourgeois platitude, and convinced of the non-economic essence of human nature, Bataille was attracted by the idea of the social as founded on irrational emotions and a non-identitarian bond. He was thus particularly intrigued yet worried by the resurgence of affective drives in the guise of fascist movements, in particular Mussolini’s regime. If the sacred is the other of homogeneous society – what is excluded – when it returns under false premises, as in the case of fascism, it changes into a fake sacred. In other words, if, as Bataille believed, an affective link united Mussolini to his followers, if attraction united the led to their leader, then it became urgent to decipher the emotional forces traversing social relations in order to stop a fake sacred from triumphing.
Understanding the sacred became Bataille’s main preoccupation in the 1930s, although it was only after a few years of active political militancy that he resumed researching the constitutive elements of the social bond. Thus in 1936 he founded a secret society, Acéphale, accompanied by a journal also called Acéphale. First issued on 24 June 1936, the journal’s subtitle was: “Religion, Sociology, Philosophy.” It anticipated some of the themes later to be studied at the Collège.
Acéphale called for a headless community that would mark the end of the dominance of authority and reason in order to re-envision the human condition. Existential motifs characterized the whole Acéphale project and signaled an inward turn in Bataille’s intellectual journey. Despite this turn, the original sociological impulse that had guided Bataille to imagine novel ways of conceiving society remained alive in Acéphale; it now combined with “religion,” intended not as mystical retreat but as a beacon for achieving a community of heart based on fraternity rather than tradition or blood.3 This community would be pervaded by a religious spirit and held together by the ritual performance of myths, without however subscribing to an authoritarian model as was the case with fascism. Acéphale advocated an atheological church bound together by communal intoxication, with the “religious” emphasis on the constitution of the social bond.
With Acéphale, Bataille attempted a closer analysis of one aspect of the sacred the Durkheimians had highlighted: myths and rituals. How did myths and rituals work?, he asked. What was their role? Acéphale had been conceived as a sociological study group to answer this question, but it never applied itself to the task. Recognizing that knowledge was necessary to understand the mechanisms guiding our impulses, Bataille called for a “mythological sociology” that would apply insights from ethnological studies of “primitive” societies to modern forms of human existence.4 If myths were catalysts of communal life, sociology would help gauge the emotional drives that move people; it would then be able to reverse the fate of modern societies now yoked to the dominance of instrumental reason. The time was ripe for the Collège de sociologie.
Established in March 1937, the announcement of the Collège’s founding appeared in the July 1937 issue of Acéphale, where the Collège stated its commitment to developing a strong research program; as a study group, the Collège would explore all the elements that contributed to building a sacred community. “The precise object of the contemplated activity can take the name of Sacred Sociology, implying the study of all manifestations of social existence where the active presence of the sacred is clear” (CS, 5). A longer version of the statement published a year later concluded by proclaiming: “Three prominent problems dominate this study: the problems of power, of the sacred, and of myths” (CS, 11). The group acknowledged being inspired by Durkheim’s Elementary Forms. Just as Durkheim had highlighted the role of mythical manifestations in creating and maintaining “primitive” communities, one could unveil the irrational elements at the foundation of the modern collective life that would reinstate the sacred at a time of its supposed demise. To be sure, the Collège did not embrace the whole of Durkheim’s work. Nevertheless, it saw in the Elementary Forms the spark for initiating a deep examination of the “interplay of instincts and ‘myths’” with the ultimate goal of enhancing the formation of true communities in the contemporary world (CS, 10).
The Collège particularly drew lessons from Durkheim and his school on three points: 1. the definition of society; 2. the assessment of the sacred as ambiguous; and 3. the importance given to festivals, rituals and myths for forging the social bond. At the Collège’s opening lecture of 20 November 1937, entitled “Sacred Sociology and the Relationship between ‘Society,’ ‘Organism’ and ‘Being’,” Bataille echoed Durkheim’s notion of society as more than the sum of its parts when he stated that society is “different from the sum of the elements that compose it” (CS, 74). At the heart of the sacred, Bataille continued, there lay an overall movement that transforms persons from individually oriented economic subjects into a “compound being” (CS, 77). Rejecting the individualist conception of social existence, Bataille eventually defined society as a “field of forces” traversing individuals in spite of their will (SS, 18). The group, as Durkheim had argued, was superior to the individual; associational life could not at all be explained by contractual theory.
How does a community then take shape, the Collège asked. What makes society? Inspired by another student of Durkheim, Robert Hertz, and by his study of the collective representations of death, Bataille theorized that death, and more specifically the horror death provokes in humans, enables the communifying movement. Hertz had pointed to the double valence of the sacred: the sacred could be pure and impure, right and left, attractive and repulsive. Bataille developed an original take on Hertz’s theory and envisaged unity as the result of horror: society’s origin was linked to disgust (Hertz, 1960). The institution of taboo, present among “primitive” societies, was a proof. As a form of prohibition, taboo marked the division between sacred and profane. By forbidding access to certain objects, people and places, it indicated their sacredness as compared to the profane world of everyday activities, where people and goods freely circulate. Bataille and the Collège evidently expanded the Durkheimians’ basic lessons on the sacred and pushed them to their limits by focusing on the dynamic of the duo attraction and repulsion. In connection with this duo, at the inaugural session of the Collège’s second cycle, Caillois gave a lecture by the title “The Ambiguity of the Sacred.” Leiris had addressed the same topic in his own lecture about the sacred in everyday life earlier in the year, at the 8 January 1938 session.
The Collège was mainly interested in gauging how modern forms of sociality could be transformed into true communities thanks to the force of the sacred. As Durkheim had addressed the role of myths and rituals in the making of the social, so the Collège was intent on examining the mythical and ritualistic activities that would help enact the sacred in modern societies. “Community” was after all a key term for the Collège. Durkheim’s identification of the sacred with the social, his argument about the hypostatization of society through religion, his emphasis on the need for social bonds against individualistic interests in modern societies upheld the Collège’s conviction that it was possible and indeed paramount to rekindle the communal spirit at a time of supposed desacralization. In the Elementary Forms, Durkheim had emphasized the role of practices, besides beliefs, in the making of society. We become aware of the energy elevating us above our everyday life and petty interests, Durkheim claimed, only when we share experiences with others. In the case of the Australian clans, the feeling of being in an assembly – the perception of material and spiritual closeness – provoked an emotion among members that moved them to the point of obliterating their individual selves. The ceremonies held at seasonal meetings during night celebrations provided participants with an electrifying atmosphere that affected their minds and bodies and made them be dominated by emotions. Durkheim’s poignant evocation of the corrobori ritual vividly portrayed the excitement of the assembled clan – a “collective effervescence.” The emotional intensity arising from the gatherings, heightened by screams and words, unified the group and made people feel as part of a bigger, superior whole. Individuals’ mental state became so suggestible that they believed external forces were moving them, and they identified those forces with what they saw represented in totems all around them. They did not realize that these forces were connected to society, that it was the collectivity’s moral authority that impressed them with excitement and enthusiasm for their totem-gods. They did not recognize that authority was indeed the clan itself but transfigured; the totem merely symbolized society. Durkheim referred to mana (or totemic principle) to explain this phenomenon. In the anthropological literature he had consulted, mana was defined as a dangerous anonymous force with which things are endowed; it was an impersonal energy hard to describe but that, once believed to possess random objects or persons, made them acquire sacredness and enabled them to exercise authority over others.5 Group assemblies, as the case of the Australian clans demonstrated, awakened the feeling of mana among the participants. For it was the group that was feted while celebrating the gods; rituals supported the coming together of the group in the creation and recreation of society.
The festivals’ critical role in evoking the sacred, which Durkheim had so suggestively emphasized in his discussion of the Australian clans, did not escape the Collège. Although Caillois was the most knowledgeable on the topic and delivered a lecture about it, festival was the one practice the Collège saw as able to rekindle and re-enact the sacred in modern societies. The Collège’s intent had always been to apply knowledge from archaic formations to modern reality while infusing the latter with that spirit of excitement and participation that would make possible attaining and worshipping the social bond – the guarantor of true existence. The utilitarian world of economic productivity and accumulation only deprived moderns of their human yearnings, Bataille warned. In particular, function defeated existence. With their excess and exaggerations, festivals, in contrast, constituted the antidote to functional movements, the counter altar to servitude, calculation and security. The Collège’s formulations strikingly echoed those of the potlatch, where destruction was the leitmotiv of the ceremony, against any “rational” consideration of needs or utility. Indeed, whether or not Durkheim would have agreed with the Collège’s take on the renewal of modern society, the Collège thought of the sacred as paroxystic and turbulent, an explosive force. This “left” sacred would surpass the administrative world’s conservative orientation; expenditure, waste, and the violation of interdictions would all preside over a regenerating, orgiastic sacred. This was a sacred that needed transgression in order to survive, for only destroying and rebuilding allowed renewal. Thus, festivals constituted the social manifestation of the transgressive act, a time when the order of things could be disrupted and the flame of energy lit. Within this context, sacrifice was the ultimate festival – an offering with no return.
In order for rituals to function, however, myths were necessary. As Durkheim had suggested in his definition of religion, beliefs went hand in hand with practices. Bataille agreed with this statement. In “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a sort of manifesto for the Collège first published in the summer of 1938 in the Nouvelle Revue Française, he recommended inventing mythology; myths could then be enacted ritually as the collectivity appropriated them emotionally and physically. “A community that does not succeed in the ritual possession of its myths possesses only a truth that is on the wane,” Bataille wrote. “Myth ritually lived reveals no less than true being” (CS, 22). Myths inspired the ritual action of the group and at the same time were inspired by the rituals that allowed the community to recognize itself as such. If the Collège’s ultimate goal were to recompose modes of collective existence in modern societies, rituals and myths had a paramount role in this undertaking.
An activist stance was at the heart of the Collège, although it eventually caused its demise. For Bataille, there was no meaning in setting up a study group that painstakingly looked at defining “crucial problems”; it was “an open door to chaos,” if it did not also pursue change (CS, 334). By focusing on specialization, on the part as opposed to the whole, science failed to get at the totality of existence. Blindfolded and narrow-minded, science excluded human destiny; sociology risked the same constrictions if it followed scientific rules. The consequences would be particularly negative considering that sociology addressed the emotional-symbolic underpinnings of society. If research assumptions were not modified, if sociology shied away from addressing “burning questions,” it would not be different from any other science. “If it is the social phenomenon alone that represents the totality of existence, science being no more than a fragmentary activity, the science that contemplates the social phenomenon cannot achieve its objective if, insofar as it achieves it, it becomes the negation of its principles” (CS, 12). As Bataille made it clear in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” he embraced sociology only insofar as it took upon itself to confront “life’s major decisions” (CS, 224). Sociology could not merely pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
At the last session of the Collège, Bataille was faulted for having neglected to abide by the rules of Durkheimian sociology. In a letter he sent to Bataille, Leiris expressed “doubts as to the rigor with which this venture has been conducted” (CS, 354). He continued by saying that “serious offenses against the rules of method established by Durkheim – whose spirit we continually evoke – have been committed many times at the Collège.” Leiris also judged the Collège’s emphasis on the sacred as demoting Mauss’s idea of “total phenomenon” – an asset of modern sociology in his opinion. Not that one needed to do pure sociology, Leiris acknowledged, but if one claimed to be applying the principles of Durkheim, Mauss and Hertz, then either one stuck to their methods or stopped calling themselves “sociologists” (CS, 355). Other differences, especially of an intellectual nature, also separated Bataille from Caillois. Thus the Collège finally ended in July 1939, the sociological experiment over. At the Collège’s last meeting, however, Bataille defended his right to rely on sociology and dismissed methodological or formal issues as secondary to what he saw as sociology’s potential as disinterested knowledge (CS, 254). As he had stated in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” sociology allowed one to see through our petty existence and to recognize the value of the sacred. Even several years after the Collège’s demise, Bataille maintained the importance of Durkheim’s sociology for countering the disintegration of modern society. In a 1946 essay, he confirmed his belief in two tenets of Durkheim’s theory: 1. Society is a whole different from the sum of its parts; 2. The sacred is the constitutive element of societies. The two principles together worked to demonstrate humans’ deep existence beyond the strict confines of interest, Bataille believed (WS, 103–111). Sociology and Durkheim, in sum, continued to hold valuable lessons for Bataille. As he wrote in 1948, “Émile Durkheim seems to me to be unjustly disparaged nowadays. I take my distance from his doctrine but not without retaining its essential lessons” (TR, 123).
Eventually, Bataille redefined the sacred and advocated considering it as a “concrete totality.” He also added that totality implied something that sociology would not be able to account for if it followed a scientific approach. Science could not explain the sentiment we feel at the moment when life ends, that is, our existential anguish, the “totality of being which exceeds the limits of the possible and until death” (OC XII, 129). Although sociology did not accept Bataille’s challenge and definitively ignored his call for “CONFRONTATION WITH DESTINY” as the “essence of knowledge” (CS, 334), it is ironic that Bataille was the one who came closest to upholding Durkheim’s wildest dream of turning sociology into the science of sciences, the science that truly mattered.
1 “Civilisation” in Documents 4, 1929 (D 221–222).
2 Mauss however rejected Sorel’s doctrine of violence.
3 “Nietzschean Chronicle” (VE 202–212).
4 “Ce que nous avons entrepris il y a peu de mois…” (A 367–377).
5 Durkheim adopted Robert Codrington’s definition of mana (Durkheim 1995, 196–199).
Clark, Terry N. 1973. Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated with Introduction by Karen Fields. New York: Free Press.
Hertz, Robert. 1960. Death and the Right Hand. London: Cohen and West.
Karsenti, Bruno. 1997. L’homme total: sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton.