Georges Bataille by Hewson Mark; Coelen Marcus;

Author:Hewson, Mark; Coelen, Marcus;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Notes

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).

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