Georges Bataille, Gender, and Sacrificial Excess, SEAN P. CONNOLLY , 2014
“Man is the most suited of all living beings,” he writes, “to consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy offered up by the pressure of life to conflagrations” (Accursed Share 37). The prodigal waste of one’s own excess energy and resources, therefore, finds its natural conclusion in the expenditure of life in the assent to exceed even life itself, above all, in death. It is for this reason that “life’s intimacy,” he writes, “does not reveal it’s dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out” (Theory of Religion 47).
Connolly claims that for Bataille sacrifice= the essence of existence, which wasteful excesses of luxury are by-products of and part of the use-value commodity exchange Thus, luxurious excesses possess an inherently sacrificial character.
However… Bataille emphasises that “This is so clearly the precise meaning of sacrifice,” he writes, “that one sacrifices what is useful; one does not sacrifice luxurious objects . . . Depriving the labor of manufacture of its usefulness at the outset, luxury has already destroyed that labor; it has dissipated it in vainglory .
In Defacement : Public Secrecy and the Labour of the Negative by Michael Tassuag (1999) , Tassuag argues that sacrifice and the despoiling of something precious is a fundamentally sacred activity within both secular or religious societies. "knowing what not to know") is the most powerful form of social knowledge. Sacrifice is an unveiling of knowledge and then a transformation/re-enchantment of it "truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it."-Walter Benjamin
Bataille: the revelation that life and usefulness themselves are already implicated beforehand in a general economy of sacrificial excess
Sacrifice reaches it’s highest expression in the sacrifice of a God. the god who sacrifices himself gives himself irrevocably . . . the god, who is at the same time the sacrificed, is one with the victim and sometimes even with the sacrificer. All the differing elements that enter into ordinary sacrifice here enter into each other and become mixed together” (“Sacrificial Mutilation” 69; Mauss 101).
Therefore all sacrifice = self-sacrificial and a critique of the philosophy of personal identity
for Bataille; its “violence and destructiveness ontologically tear individuals apart, allowing them to forge unique communal bonds with other similarly sundered, anguished human beings . . . Bataillean sacrifice challenges human beings to confront and test the limits of their communities and being” (Goldhammer 23). Yet it is precisely this testing, challenging, and confrontation—in short, this transgression—of individual and social limits that has made Bataille so significant not only to the French Left and its intellectual history, but also to gender studies and its politics.
Citing Mauss again in his “Sacrificial Mutilation” essay, Bataille explains that sacrifice “breaks the habitual homogeneity of the individual” and thus allows access to the “heterogeneous,” the divine otherness that individuality habitually hides. In essence, personal identity itself is already self-sacrificial, a fact revealed through sacrifice itself in the same manner as Mauss’s sacrificial executioner and victim, who commonly (he writes) “go beyond themselves.” In other words, they both exceed themselves, as “selves,” in and through sacrifice. “The one who sacrifices is free,” he explains, “free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim . . . in other words free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself” (Visions 70). Like the god’s “suicidal” sacrifice of himself to himself, so does the identity of executioner and victim arise and dissolve, even arise through dissolution, in the ecstatic liberation of sacrifice.
sacrifice both ruins (“rottenness”) and redeems (“redemption”) the identity of the “man-god,” who is manifested and dies both at the same time
Sacrifice therefore eludes to the what Bataille expresses is “the truth of humanity”. We are all victim + executioner, the synthesis of all that exists nothing and everything
My notes on a paper on Bataille, Sacrifice and gender
