Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield
Jean-Luc Nancy has noted that sacrifice held an almost obsessive sway over Bataille’s work. Bataille, he writes, “sought not only to think sacrifice, but to think according to sacrifice. He willed sacrifice itself, in the act; at least he never ceased presenting his thought to himself as a necessary sacrifice of thought” (Nancy 1991a, 20, my emphasis). Such engagement means that sacrifice was never, for Bataille, a mere historical object, a religious artifact or a figure of fiction. From his very first essays, Bataille saw sacrifice as “life’s necessary games with death” (O, 62).1 He believed that its “tragic terror and sacred ecstasy” were linked to the very essence of man’s communal being (O, 61). And it is because sacrifice was, for Bataille, the very archetype of his atheological experience that he identified his own thinking with the exigency of its transgression.
It is not a simple affair, however, to study and elucidate a motif, which looms as large in Bataille’s work. Sacrifice’s ubiquitous presence throughout his texts gives it a lot of figural as well as critical play but it also complicates its theory and muddles its figures. From the sacrificial fantasies of The Pineal Eye to the last images of the Tears of Eros, sacrifice is present in virtually every single one of Bataille’s texts, but it changes constantly. There is a lot of continuity but also much difference between the “Aztec revival” of the thirties and the ecstatic self-immolations of Inner Experience, written in the war years. There are also significant variations between these last atheological sacrifices and the archeological studies Bataille publishes after the war. The former explores the problematic pertinence of the sacrificial model for Bataille’s non-knowledge, while the latter speculates on the origin and role of the ritual in the birth of religious man. And while both are variations on a similar exposure to the sacred and to finitude, they have a significantly different way of negotiating their relationship with knowledge.
An exhaustive study of the sacrificial motif in Bataille would have to register these differences and carefully map out chronologically changes in sacrifice’s roles and forms. I will not, however, for reasons of economy, base my study on such variations. Instead, I shall focus on the fact that, despite obvious differences in discourses and contexts, Bataille’s sacrificial writings present a remarkably united front. All of Bataille’s many sacrifices – whether they be anthropological reconstructions or his own rapturous inner drama – share the same structure and ambition. They have no clear use value but strive instead to reveal the violating force of excess. They also partake of exactly the same ambiguities and paradoxes. For sacrifice is as vexed and inauthentic, for Bataille, as it is illuminating. It is both the tragedy and the comedy of death. And we will attempt, here, to understand the ambiguity of its fascination.
Chapter VII of The Limit to Usefulness is one of the most luminous texts of Bataille on sacrifice. Written between 1939 and 1945 as one of the several unfinished versions of The Accursed Share, the unpublished essay belongs to the series of drafts Bataille wrote on general economy and the principle of expenditure. Chapter VII, composed well after the initial fictional as well as theoretical forays of the thirties, proposes a precise recapitulation of Bataille’s theoretical positions and scientific sources on sacrifice. Bataille here addresses what was most probably his contemporaries’ main objection to his previous reflections on sacrifice. Denying that he ever intended to revive sacrifice and “start new cycles of holocaust,” he minimizes this early aspect of his writings and emphasizes instead his interest in sacrifice as a universal “enigma” (O, 61).
Bataille is being less than honest when he denies having attempted to revive sacrificial rites. In 1936, he co-founded with André Masson the journal Acéphale whose headless figure became the symbol of the publication and of the secret society of the same name. It is well known that the secret society, which embodied the College of Sociology’s dream of a “sacred sociology,” planned to carry out a human sacrifice.2 And in 1939 Bataille’s memory of Acéphale and its fantastic project of human sacrifice must have still been fresh. He could also scarcely have forgotten his intention during the pre-war years to recreate a “virulent and devastating sacred, whose epidemic contagion would end up affecting and exalting the entire social body” (Caillois 1974, 58).3 In the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” one of the texts presented at a 1938 session of the College of Sociology, Bataille was clear in his desire to invent a “ritually lived myth” assembling communities around the sacred intimacy of its tragic ebullience (Hollier 1995, 322).4 This “living myth” was not, in this text, identified solely with sacrifice. And Bataille was already aware of the fictitious nature of “a myth revealing the totality of existence” (Hollier 1995, 342) Yet sacrifice was very much, in this text as in others – The Pineal Eye also comes to mind – at the core of the “total existence” Bataille wished for. And most essays of the period were indeed haunted by the fiction of reviving, through “bloody fantasies of sacrifice,” man’s lost intimacy with the sacred (O, 61).
Bataille’s disavowal is not, however, entirely mendacious or unjustified. After 1939, Bataille does abandon the dream of reintroducing ritual violence in modern society.5 And he turns towards a more sober reflection on sacrifice. His understanding of the sacred – and of sacrifice’s role as a fundamental manifestation of man’s drive towards totality – has not changed. But Bataille is now more attuned to the historical as well as epistemological contexts of the sacrificial experience and pursues his reflections on two fronts. On the one hand, in Theory of Religion and other anthropological studies, he investigates the birth of the sacred and the role of sacrifice in primitive societies. On the other, in the Atheological Summa, he pursues the project of a contemporary “limit experience” whose sacrificial rapture requires an abolition of the Hegelian subject and an excess of his absolute knowledge.
What are then Bataille’s views on sacrifice? Chapter VII of The Limit to Usefulness is again helpful here, because it describes clearly the complex mix of scientific rigor and ontological intuition that is behind Bataille’s theories. From his earliest essays in Documents, Bataille’s reflections are grounded in contemporary sociological theories, particularly those of the Durkheim school. Bataille was well versed in the history as well as the sociology of sacrifice. By the time he wrote The Limit to Usefulness, he had already done a decade’s worth of theoretical readings. Some of these readings – Robertson-Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Freud’s Totem and Taboo as well as Hubert and Mauss’s important Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice – are mentioned in one of the first theoretical essays Bataille devotes to sacrifice: “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh”.6 Bataille will continue to study these sources and add others (Sylvain Levi, Emile Durkheim) to refine his understanding of the sacred in subsequent texts such as The Accursed Share, Theory of Religion and Eroticism. 7 And his dialogue with ethnographic science is constant throughout.
Yet, as the text informs us, the signature of Bataille’s sacrificial approach is the way it reframes social scientific theories inside a much larger and fundamental enquiry. “One must not linger, Bataille says, over [scientific] answers already received” but concentrate instead on the larger and more profound question of sacrifice’s cause (O, 61). Ethnographic studies focused on specific cultures are oriented towards an explanation of sacrifice’s effects, interpreting the ritual as a means to an end – a gift, or a tool for propitiation or expiation. But these interpretations ignore a fundamental aspect of the ritual that is as provocative as it is enigmatic. Sacrifice is universal. It is present for men of all times and places and transcends, as such, the bounds of scientific, contextual enquiry. The universality of ritual sacrifice raises a question far more fundamental than the concern for the use value of individual rites: the ultimate question of a “why”? Why indeed, or “How was it,” asks Bataille, “that everywhere, men found themselves, with no prior mutual agreement, in accord on an enigmatic act, they all felt the need or the obligation to put living beings ritually to death” (O, 61)? The answer Bataille gives to that question is at the very core of his general theory of sacrifice. It suggests that man’s consciousness is constitutively bound with tragic terror and sacred ecstasy and that communities murder ritually to share in the violent exuberance of being. Sacrifice is, for Bataille, nothing less than a manifestation of the sacred, i.e. “the continuity of being, revealed to those who focus their attention, during the course of a solemn rite, on the death of a discontinuous being” (E, 82 trans. mod.).
Bataille’s conception of sacrifice is the result of this uneasy yet productive tension between the historical and ethnographic knowledge of sacrifice and the tragic Nietzschean ontology that reframes it. To understand the intricacies of that thinking – and elucidate, for example, why Bataille keeps to a model he also deconstructs – one must investigate further what Bataille borrows as well as contests from scientific sources. I mentioned earlier that Bataille kept well abreast of recent theoretical developments in the sociology of sacrifice. He was quite familiar with Hubert and Mauss’s Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice, and recognized the importance of this essay, whose novel definition of sacrifice he partially appropriated. The originality of Hubert and Mauss lies in their attempt to define sacrifice solely in terms of its basic social function and procedure. Contrary to their predecessors, who search for the unity of sacrifice in what Hubert and Mauss felt were “arbitrarily selected principles” – such as communion8 – the French sociologists propose to identify a kind of zero degree of sacrifice: a common structure anterior to its changing forms and economic ends. Sacrifice, they write, can be defined, as “a religious act, which, through the consecration of the victim, modifies the state of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which it is concerned” (Hubert and Mauss 1968, 14).
Hubert and Mauss’s minimalist definition may not seem revolutionary or even particularly suited to Bataille’s more transgressive ends. Yet it works quite well with his approach. For Bataille, indeed, the most fundamental aspect of sacrifice is its ability to tear the veil of the profane world and to bring about a communication with the sacred. Hubert and Mauss’s definition, by stating that sacrifice’s first function is to make sacred, allows him to fit his tragic vision into their basic scheme. Bataille’s theoretical accord with the theories of the French school is limited, however, as he takes issue with Hubert and Mauss’s procedural descriptions of the phases of sacrifice. Their essay on sacrifice identifies three successive phases in the ritual: the first phase of the initiatory rites designed to sanctify the participants, the solemn moment of ritualized murder and the aftermath of the rite marked by the ceremonial and utilitarian disposal of the sacred remains. For Bataille, the second moment of ritual slaying is the apex of the ceremony. It is the only truly significant moment of the rite because its deadly violence allows the contagion of the sacred to flow out into the world. But, for Hubert and Mauss, this phase, as important as it may also be, is eventually superseded by a final moment whose utilitarianism belies the excessive and sacrilegious violence of the previous phase. In this third and last phase of the rite, the sacrifier disposes of the victim’s consecrated body in communion or offerings. Gifted to the gods or used as an instrument of appeasement (propitiation) or amends (expiation), the victim’s body becomes a means of negotiation with the religious sphere.
Bataille takes issue with the importance Hubert and Mauss grant this final, “useful,” phase of sacrifice. He did not, of course, disagree entirely with the suggestion that a portion of the ritual could be used for profane purposes. He knew full well that sacrifice was inherently ambiguous and served various religious purposes beyond that of ritual destruction.9 Yet Bataille never wavered in his belief that sacrifice’s “essential phase” was to be found in the cruel participation of the “sacrifiers” in the victim’s violent slaying (VE, 70).10 This moment of contagious communication with the sacred is, for him, the only veritable goal of a rite whose destructive modality is paramount. And Bataille always believed that sacrifice’s true purpose was to bring men to commune with the anxious yet joyous rapture of death.
What is exactly, however, this essential phase of sacrifice? What does its rapture communicate? And what is the purpose and power of its ritual destruction? These questions have different answers according to the various experiences and epochs Bataille considers. It is possible to find the same fundamental postulates, however, in virtually all Bataille’s reflections on sacrifice: firstly, that sacrifice is the necessary alteration of individuals and objects; and secondly, that sacrifice’s destruction is the very mimesis of the universe’s excess. These principles are illustrated in Bataille’s first essays on sacrifice, “Lost America” and “Self-mutilation and the severed ear of Vincent Van Gogh.” If Bataille is drawn, for example, to the bloody apex of the Aztec’s rite, it is because the destruction of the victim is readily apparent in the image of the bloody heart offered, pulsating still, to the sun. Likewise, when he proposes – somewhat counter-intuitively – to identify Van Gogh’s self-mutilation with sacrifice, it is because he sees the “rupture of personal homogeneity and the projection outside the self of a part of oneself,” as the very paradigm of sacrificial destruction (VE, 68).
The purpose of sacrificial destruction, Bataille writes in The Accursed Share, is to restore to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane:
Servile use has made a thing (an object) of that which, in a deep sense, is of the same nature as the subject, is in a relation of intimate participation with the subject. It is not necessary that the sacrifice actually destroy the animal or plant of which man had to make a thing for his use. They must, at least, be destroyed as things, that is insofar as they have become things. Destruction is the best means of negating a utilitarian relation between man and the animal or plant.
(AS 1, 56)
Sacrificial destruction is a compensatory act, which is intended to regain communication with a world free of labor and the constraints of objectivity. Whether it is the Aztecs restoring prisoners to the magnificence of the sun, or Van Gogh freeing himself from the poverty of self, sacrifice frees. Its consummation liberates the “violent truth of the intimate world,” and this explains why men of all epochs and cultures have practiced sacrifice. It also explains why sacrifice seems to preside over the birth of the sacred and the origin of religious man. As Bataille explains in Theory of Religion, Eroticism and the essays on Lascaux and the Birth of Art, the birth of man is far from being straightforward. It is a dual process marked, first, by the birth of industrious man and, second, by a religious birth bringing with it a “restoration to the truth of the intimate world” (AS 1, 58). If Bataille believes, as most paleo-anthropologists do, that our first true ancestors were homo sapiens who gained mastery over the world through their use of language and tools, he also believes that their true birth as sacred and artistic beings starts with man’s rebellion against the poverty of his instrumental world. Having reduced the universe to a profane “order of things,” “man himself became one of the things of this world, at least for the time in which he labored. It is this degradation which man has always tried to escape. In his strange myths, in his cruel rites, man is in search of a lost intimacy from the first” (AS 1, 57).
Destruction is the key to sacrifice as a religious phenomenon because it opens the door between the discontinuous world of work and the intimacy of the sacred realm. But this negativity of sacrifice is also essential in that it represents the very excess of this realm. As we noted above, the idea that sacrifice negates utilitarian relationships with the world is almost always linked to the corollary that sacrificial consumption is the mimesis of the universe’s excess. In the solar rites of the Aztecs or Van Gogh’s self-mutilation, for example, Bataille saw a “desire to resemble perfectly to an ideal term generally characterized, in mythology, as a solar god” (VE, 66). And he often understood sacrificial destruction as a desire to join, in consumption, the ever-changing fluidity of being – whose preferred trope is indeed, the sun. It is not always easy to interpret what lies behind Bataille’s mimetic paradigm – the idea that excess might be imitated goes against its very insubstantiality and lack. But I believe that Bataille’s image of sacrifice as a mirror of being’s excess is less designed to comment on the quality of sacrifice’s representation than it is to help us measure the exhaustive character of its destruction.11 Bataille, in other terms, is attempting to convey the fact that sacrifice, to be authentic, must not simply “destroy what it consecrates” and give its participants access to a lost world of violent immanence. It must also communicate that world’s radical inaccessibility (a message which impels sacrifice to self-destroy in order to “imitate” the impossibility of the sacred world of excess).
This last point is essential for anyone wishing to understand the economy of sacrifice in Bataille’s work. When Bataille reinterprets Hubert and Mauss’s sacrificial paradigm and emphasizes the moment of destruction at the expense of any other phases of the ritual, he is saying, indeed, that the destruction of the consecrated offering is paramount and that “this offering cannot be restored to the real order” (AS 1, 58). But he is also saying that this principle of absolute heterogeneity “liberates violence while marking off the domain in which violence reigns absolutely” (AS 1, 58). What Bataille means by this last statement is that there can be violent communication with the sacred world opened by sacrifice but no rational appropriation of it. “The world of intimacy is as antithetical to the real world as immoderation is to moderation, madness to reason, drunkenness to lucidity” (AS 1, 58). Because it is the very negation of the objective world, it does not share its separateness and definition. It is therefore impossible to substantialize as well as to conceptualize. No more durable than the blinding flash, which restores life’s fullness at the very instant of sacrificial death, it communicates nothing but “the invisible brilliance of life which is not a thing” (TR, 47). Far from revealing death or opening for us the mysteries of the sacred, it blinds us to the very intimacy it illuminates. And Bataille’s sacrificial experience is ultimately a question without an answer. As a sacrifice “without reserve or gain,” it is also a sacrifice “for nothing” (ffrench 2007, 75).
Bataille’s sacrifice, it should now be clear, owes little to the traditional sociological phenomenon we call sacrifice. It is a “sacrifice in the second degree,” whose redoubled destruction is aimed not only at the victim but also at sacrifice itself. Because it refuses to give its ritual a result and identifies its only moment of truth with the rapture of death, it questions its own operativity. Indeed, the suggestion that sacrificial death reveals nothing leaves sacrificial negativity “unemployed.” It destroys the process by which habitual sacrifice instrumentalizes the victim’s destruction to gain mastery over death, and it frees the rapturous moment of death from any appropriation by the participants. Such “total immolation,” which Bataille has also described as a “sacrifice where everything is a victim” has little to do with the traditional transitive sacrifice (IE, 130). As an “access without access to a moment of disappropriation” it is scarcely more than a simulacral gesture towards an impossible experience of finitude (Nancy, 30). And sacrifice is ultimately, for Bataille “a notion violently separated from itself” (Blanchot 1983, 30).
It is hard to say if Bataille believed in the authentic existence of such a purely excessive ritual. He believed that “the man of sacrifice” “act[ed] in ignorance (unconscious) of sacrifice’s full scope” and was therefore “closer than Hegel’s Sage” to its expensive spirit (HDS, 19). But Bataille also set himself the task of renewing, in the modern world, the forms and conditions of a sacrificial experience equally rapturous and free. This project gives birth, in the war years, to the Atheological Summa and, in particular, to Inner Experience, texts dedicated to reviving, in this post-Hegelian era, the difficult dream of a sacrifice without speculation. It also marks, however, a turning point in Bataille’s attitude towards sacrifice and seems to inaugurate “the long drifting that led [him] to denounce the theater of sacrifice and consequently to renounce its successful accomplishment” (Nancy 1991a, 21). Bataille appears, indeed, to have become wary of his reliance on sacrifice in the very texts that were to define his atheological experience as an ever-deeper sacrifice of the Subject. At this point his critique of sacrifice makes the transition from a critical attitude towards the rites’ functional economy to a full-blown denunciation of sacrifice’s spectacular subterfuge.
There is no doubt that Bataille was already aware of sacrifice’s “theater” before 1939. Texts such as “Self-Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh” showed clearly that he was already mindful, in 1928, of the essential danger posed by the specular nature of sacrifice. The exemplarity he gave self-mutilation – or the immediate form of self-destruction he calls “sacrifice of the god” – was already an expression of a struggle with the vicarious economy of the ritual. But Bataille did not, then, thematize explicitly this theater, which becomes a topos of his later texts. In Eroticism, he denounces sacrifice as a “novel” or a “story illustrated in a bloody fashion” whose efficacy depends on a fictitious and vicarious identification with the victim’s death (E, 86). And in “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” (1955), he writes:
In sacrifice, the sacrifier identifies himself with the animal that is struck down dead. And so he dies while seeing himself die, and even, in a certain way, by his own will, one in spirit with the sacrificial weapon. But this is theater.
(HDS, 19 trans. mod.)
The text, it is true, adds, in the next sentence, that this theater is essential to the experience of death as “no other method [exists] which could reveal to the living the invasion of death” (HDS, 19). Yet, inevitable or not, this element of theatrical drama casts a problematic shadow over Bataille’s version of a sacrifice without gain or reserve. In Bataille’s zero-sum sacrifice, nothing is to be gained from the essentially rapturous moment of identification with the victim’s death. But if, as Bataille also believes, this rapturous ordeal remains vicariously bound to a sacrificial subject, it becomes as appropriative as any catharsis and as economical as any dialectics. As long as the sacrificial subject can gaze upon, and identify with, the staged death-throes of the victim, she is appropriating her own “negativity.” And since there is, obviously, no sacrifice without a scenic dimension – since self-sacrifice itself is also spectacular or…completely abstract – sacrifice reveals itself to be, for Bataille, somewhat of a “red herring” (OC XI, 101).12 Instead of exposing us to the non-appropriable excess of finitude, it simulates the very type of totalizing knowledge Bataille wanted to displace.
One might wonder, at this point, if Bataille ever reached any conclusive condemnation of sacrifice or if his approach remained ambivalent throughout. It may seem strange indeed that he could both carry out a vigorous critique of sacrifice’s economy and remain inconclusive in his renunciation of its drama. Such critical indecisiveness is precisely what Jean-Luc Nancy – one of the most intelligent, and critical, readers of Bataille’s sacrificial scheme – finds wanting in Bataille’s otherwise revolutionary thinking of finitude.13 In “The Unsacrificeable,” for example, Nancy reiterates Bataille’s own denunciation of sacrifice as a speculative comedy by which the subject appropriates, “by means of the transgression of the finite […] the infinite truth of the finite” (Nancy 1991a, 25). But unlike Bataille, Nancy leaves no room for any prodigal form of sacrifice claiming to reverse and replace sacrifice’s “trans-appropriative” death by a rapturous one. There can be, for Nancy, no sacrifice free of speculation. And Bataille’s rapturous rewriting of sacrifice is illusory, firstly because sacrifice’s comedy is structural, not incidental, secondly because, as soon as it is staged through the sacrificial process, death’s rapturous “non-knowledge” becomes a figure of truth.
This last caveat is, I believe, one of the most important points of Nancy’s critique. It is certainly the most decisive of his attempt to invalidate Bataille’s atheological version of sacrifice. But it is also, I believe, the critical core of Bataille’s Inner Experience and the very point Bataille seems to address in the last parodic moment of the volume. I will not be able to show in sufficient details why I believe Bataille anticipates Nancy’s objection and renounces sacrifice as a literal model for his experience of non-knowledge. But I want to reiterate the fact that, after 1939, Bataille separated implicitly his reflections on sacrifice as a sociological object and his textual treatment of sacrifice as an inner experience. Nancy’s readings pay scant attention to the latter texts, which may be found in the Atheological Summa and The Impossible. But many critics have noted, as I do, that it is precisely in those texts that Bataille problematized his former critical idyll with sacrifice. Whether they describe his Inner Experience as a supremely self-aware parody of Hegel’s own sacrificial Absolute (ffrench); or whether they note that, in the same text, Bataille’s sacrifice is undone by writing and replaced by poetry (ffrench, 2007; Arnould, 1996, 2009; Amano, 2004), these critics show how Bataille’s Atheological Summa writes sacrifice into its very playful demise. The end of the Inner Experience is, in this respect, exemplary. For it is at the very threshold of the text that Bataille addresses (a last time, but ironically and conclusively) the last strenuous objection Nancy raised against sacrifice.
Nancy’s argument in “The Unsacrificeable,” we recall, was that the death to which sacrifice exposes us is always defined by the violence that brings it about. Rapturous or not, it appears, through the breach of the victim’s body, as an “outside” of finitude, an “obscure God” as haunting as it is infinite. This presents the great inconvenience, says Nancy, of locating a finitude, the “in between” of which should remain un-locatable and impenetrable.
One does not enter the between […], not because it would be an abyss, an altar or an impenetrable heart, but because it would be nothing other than the limit of finitude and lest we confuse it with, say, Hegelian “finiteness,” this limit is a limit that does not soar above nothingness.
(Nancy 1991a, 37)
Now, Bataille did, I believe, intend a similar critique of sacrifice’s theological “Outside” when, at the end of his Inner Experience, he throws a handful of poems into the sacrificial night.14 The gesture is complex and is meant to remain somewhat ambiguous. But it is, without a doubt, a disclaimer of the sacrificial regime of an Inner Experience, which never ceases, to the very end, to immolate its subject, its writing, its very experience. Bataillian inner experience is indeed conceived as a perpetual sacrifice – incessantly redoubled. As such, it remains, as Nancy would say, caught inside a dialectical logic where sacrifice is forever immolated to itself, to the infinitely held up possibility of its non-knowledge. What Bataille has described as the “torment” of the perpetual contestation of his experience is nothing but the struggle against its own inability to free itself from the pull of sacrificial “trans-appropriation.” But the last gesture of the book interrupts this infinitization of the sacrificial dialectics. By letting us know that the final self-immolation of the experience’s subject does not reveal sacrifice’s nocturnal “Outside” but a handful of poetical tropes, Bataille puts an ironical end to sacrifice’s “trans-appropriation.” He shows us that finitude cannot be revealed through the sacrifice of the subject. He shows us as well that the truth of the sacrificial night is always already a literary one and that sacrifice, itself, is not much more than a “flower,” a figure.
There would be much to say about this last statement and the complicated relationship Bataille establishes between sacrifice and literature. I would like to reiterate, however, that it is in the complication of that relationship that Bataille liberates his own experience of finitude from the illusion of a “sacrificeable” death. Bataille never truly renounced sacrifice because it offered him an irreplaceable figure of rapture. Neither did he cease to be tormented by the ambiguities of its cruel theater. But in his atheological texts, Bataille did stage some of his most parodic sacrificial dramas. These may still have been too speculative for Nancy’s inoperative finitude, but they certainly did not take seriously their own bloody staging.
1 Unless specified otherwise, translations of Bataille’s quotations from his Complete Works in French are mine. Where possible, I have used the English translation available.
2 On this topic, see Surya (2010).
3 Quoted and translated by ffrench (2007, 18). Caillois’ original quotation states that the contagious violence of the sacred was to “exalt whoever had sown its seed”.
4 “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is the title of a talk presented in 1938 at the College of Sociology, in response to Kojève’s critique of Bataille’s immediate and violent theory of the sacred.
5 On the subject see Patrick ffrench’s enlightening chapter “Affectivity without a subject” in After Bataille, Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (ffrench 2007, pp. 10–59).
6 With “Lost America,” published in 1928, this essay, included in 1929 in Documents, is one of the first texts to use historical as well as sociological sources to support the author’s intuitions on sacrifice.
7 Bataille refers to Sylvain Levy, La Doctrine du Sacrifice dans les Brahmanas (1898) in Theory of Religion.
8 Hubert and Mauss’s essay is written in partial response to Robertson-Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889), which places communion between God and worshipper at the center of the sacrificial system.
9 See, for example, Bataille’s reflections on “festivals” in the Theory of Religion, 52–57.
10 “Sacrifier” is a term Bataille borrows from Hubert and Mauss who discriminate between victim, sacrificer (the one who wields the knife) and sacrifier (participants and beneficiaries of the rituals).
11 The question of sacrifice as mimesis is complex and would have to include an analysis of how Bataille links religious sacrifice to the very structure of being. For him, being is the fluid passage between unstable objects. Such being has no unity, and is made of currents and circuits from series of beings to others. To access this instability (to communicate) means to strive to transcend the separation between beings. It means to “imitate” through the violence of the sacrificial passage, the ungraspable fluidity of being. For descriptions of being’s labyrinthine or communicative structure see “The Labyrinth” in Inner Experience or Sacrifices, 64–74.
12 Bataille uses the expression “pavé de l’ours” in an article entitled “From the Stone Age to Jacques Prévert,” published in Critique in 1946. I have chosen Patrick ffrench’s translation of the expression (ffrench 2007, p. 91) over Richard Livingston, the translator of Nancy’s “The Unsacrificeable,” whose translation “definitely a shocker” misses the meaning as well as critical impact of the expression (“The Unsacrificeable,” p. 30).
13 Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot have debated Bataille’s contestation of sacrifice and its relationship to community and literature in their twin books: Nancy’s (1991b) Inoperative Community and Blanchot’s (1983) Inavowable Community.
14 See the section entitled “Manibus date lilia plenis” (EI, 157–167).
Amano, Koichiro. 2004. Georges Bataille, la perte, le don, l’écriture. Dijon: Presses Universitaires de Dijon.
Arnould, Elisabeth 1996. “The impossible sacrifice of poetry, Bataille and the Nancian critique of sacrifice.” Diacritics 26, 2: 86–96.
Arnould, Elisabeth. 2009. Georges Bataille, la terreur et les lettres. Villeneuve-d’Asq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1983. La communauté inavouable. Paris: Minuit.
Caillois, Roger. 1974. Approche de l’imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard.
ffrench, Patrick. 2007. After Bataille, Sacrifice, Exposure, Community. London: Legenda.
Hollier, Denis, ed. 1995. Collège de sociologie. Paris: Gallimard.
Hubert, Henri and Mauss, Marcel. 1968. “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice.” Oeuvres, I. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991a. “The Unsacrificeable.” Yale French Studies 79: 20–38.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991b. The Inoperative Community. Translated by Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Surya, Michel. 2010. Georges Bataille : an Intellectual Biography. Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski. New York: Verso.