The Remains of God: Bataille/Sacrifice/Community

Abstract

Over the span of his oeuvre, Georges Bataille (1897–1962) elaborates a conception of the sacred founded on the idea of the death of God. Taking inspiration from Nietzsche, Bataille develops an ‘atheology’ that, unlike ‘vulgar atheism’, is devoted to the sacrifice of God. This essay examines the sacrifice of God in the thought of Bataille, particularly in the context of his interrelated notions of communication and community. According to Bataille, anxious awareness of mortality originates with the advent of instrumental reason and consciousness of oneself as a separate and distinct individual. Fear of death compels humans to attempt to secure the future and overcome time through work and investment in the idea of eternity. Bataille equates this desire for infinite duration with the realm of the profane. The domain of the sacred, on the other hand, is the realm of death – the death of the self in moments of non-rational ‘expenditure’ and transitory experiences of intimate communication with others. Drawing upon Bataille's theory of a general economy, I reveal that Bataille's sacrifice of God – the God that Bataille identifies with the will to eternity – opens up onto the ecstatic destructions of time. In developing this account, I respond to critiques of Bataille forwarded by Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, arguing that Bataille offers resources for thinking a community that, through the sacrifice of God, is experienced in its very dissolution.

Notes

¹ This conjunction of Christly and Dionysian characteristics evokes Nietzsche's final madness; having lost his head, Nietzsche signs his letters both ‘Dionysus’ and ‘the Crucified’.

² The term ‘collective effervescence’ derives from Emile Durkheim, who, along with Marcel Mauss, profoundly influenced Bataille. For a discussion of the role of ‘collective effervescence’ in Bataille's thought and religio-political activities, see Richman (2002).

³ Some renderings of the legend suggest that each member of the collective was willing to be sacrificed, and none willing to commit the murder. In this regard, as David Tracy remarked in a private conversation, the Acéphale group was very Levinasian; each member desired to be the victim of the others.

⁴ Bataille's account owes much to Alexandre Kojève's famous lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which Bataille and many other prominent thinkers attended in Paris in the 1930s.

⁵ Bataille grappled profoundly with Sade, both recognising and affirming the limits to which Sade brought human thought, while also distancing himself from Sade on the ethical point of regard for others. For Sade, others are mere things; they present the occasion for inflicting suffering that enhances one's own pleasure. Bataille experienced little of the sadistic inclination. His ethical vision was dedicated not to inflicting cruelty upon others, but to risking a dissolution of oneself through erotic and other forms of communication.

⁶ The notion of fusion will be discussed below, particularly with reference to Jean-Luc Nancy's suspicion of the emphasis on fusion in Bataille's thought. Maurice Blanchot also questions the role of fusion in Bataille's writings (1988: 7). In fact, Bataille uses the term repeatedly in describing the suppression of the division between subject and object in the sacred experiences.

⁷ Numerous commentators have noted the problematic issue of equating the vagina with a wound. For a discussion of gender in Bataille, see Hollywood (2002: 114–6).

⁸ Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of task, as characterised in The Inoperative Community, might be compared to Bataille's concept of task (la besogne) as found in his essay ‘Formless' (Bataille 1985: 31), and as elaborated by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (Bois and Krauss 1997).

⁹ For a discussion of the ethical complexities of Bataille's meditational practices, and particularly his use of images of violence, see Hollywood (2002: 60–87).

¹⁰ It is instructive here to recall the etymology of ‘fascism’, from the Italian for ‘bundle’.