Bataille and the Writing of Sacrifice
David Kilpatrick
MSA 7 Seminar: Modernist Excess
Chicago, 6 November 2005
Bataille and the Writing of Sacrifice
Georges Bataille’s texts are characterized by their attempt at a writing of sacrifice,
a bringing forth of the sacred in the absence of the divine. That which is sacrificed with
this writing is the authorial subject. Of course, we could not speak of Bataille’s writing if
it were not for a collection of texts (including those written under pseudonyms), taken to
be the works of the subject/author Georges Bataille. But what distinguishes the texts of
Bataille is his effacement of such limits as “author,” “text,” “work.” Thus the texts of
Bataille are those in which the authorial subject risks itself. Through this “writing with
blood” (to use Nietzsche’s phrase), language enters finite transcendence as authorial
subjectivity abandons itself through an ek-stasis, an opening or laceration that allows for
a true or essential communication. Bataille’s writing is not merely the writing of an “I,”
but the writing of the subject’s loss of subjectivity. The language which attempts a
communication of this experience thus exceeds the domain of everyday, profane,
equipmental language in which the subject produces a means of relation with alterity,
thus stabilizing a position via linguistic construction in which the subject grounds an
identity.
Our everyday language works, because of language’s disappearance, it’s
accessible utility. Words submit to reason as a tool. Language is used as the means to
produce meaning. But in the movement of the subject’s textual dismemberment, what is
produced is the impossibility of the production of an authorial subject, the impossibility
of meaning or of knowledge. The grounds for the subject’s constitution are revealed in a
language that appears as language precisely because of its failure to produce. This
Kilpatrick
2
language communicates the excessive movement of the subject’s expenditure, and
dramatizes the sacrifice of the author.
In “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh” [“La
Mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh”] Bataille discusses, from
the interdisciplinary perspective of a psychoanalyst-sociologist-mythologist-philosopher
(as if dancing from position to position, never maintaining a singular reference point –
exceeding disciplinary boundaries), cases in which subjects undergo a crisis that results in
auto-mutilation. He links such acts to the spirit of sacrifice. Civilization defines itself in
relation to the barbarity of “savage” peoples who engage in the practice of sacrifice. To
be modern is to abstain from any such practices, but Bataille notes a return of the
repressed:
It is not less striking that, in our day, with the custom of sacrifice in full
decline, the meaning of the word, to the extent that it implies a drive
revealed by an inner experience, is still as closely linked as possible to the
notion of a spirit of sacrifice, of which the automutilation of madmen is
only the most absurd and terrible example. (67)
This example (in the spirit of surrealism) is to shake us from the stasis of conventional
representation/s. Van Gogh provides us with a challenge to the egoistic confines of
rationality. Bataille does not want to reduce these examples to the knowable; rather, they
open thought to a thinking of the “necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself
out of oneself” (67). Such a consciousness invites thought to escape the subject through a
break with rationality. The power encountered in the figure of sacrifice is “the power to
liberate heterogeneous elements and to break the habitual homogeneity of the individual”
Kilpatrick
3
(70). Through this ek-stasis, sacrifice breaks down the barriers between self and alterity.
Sacrifice communicates this drive felt as inner experience. The cogito does not here
isolate itself in auto-gratification; the I that thinks collapses its position of closure and
stands outside itself in the ecstasy of a finite transcendence.
However, throughout
“Sacrificial Mutilation” Bataille remains situated in a position of observation, looking at
extreme cases of insanity. One senses the power unleashed in sacrifice, but this power
remains with the other.
The first sentence of “The Jesuve” [“Le Jesuve”] communicates the interior
experience of the sacrificial power overwhelming the subject, in which the subject is
radically exposed, opened as if through a wound to the ecstatic: “I have acquired over
what happens to me a power that overwhelms me” (73). What happens to the subject is
an overcoming of subjectivity. The going under of the subject is an overcoming of the
subject’s limit and isolation. Returning to the question of sacrifice, he notes:
The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet is has been,
due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other.
Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of
sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. (73)
In “Sacrificial Mutilation” Bataille expressed this need from the perspective of a
spectator, not fully drawn into the drama. The scene was staged with information taken
down by others who merely observed the acts of madmen and the customs of aboriginals.
But in “The Jesuve,” Bataille details a practice of the imagination that led him to ecstatic
states. He writes, “to provoke violently my comrades to perhaps unhoped-for excesses”
Kilpatrick
4
(74). The word “comrades” suggests a sense of community is central to his concerns.
Bataille describes the way in which he conceived of the “pineal eye”:
I imagined the eye at the summit of the skull like a horrible erupting
volcano, precisely with the shady and comical character associated with
the rear end and its excretions. Now the eye is without any doubt the
symbol of the dazzling sun and the one I imagined at the summit of my
skull was necessarily on fire, since it was doomed to the contemplation of
the sun at the apogee of its brilliance. (74)
He tells of how he had taken this exercise of the imagination to the point of belief in the
inevitability of the phenomenon as an evolutionary fact. 1 Bataille insists that “I was not
insane but I made too much of the necessity of leaving, in one way or another, the limits
of our human experience” (74). How are we to understand this confession of making
“too much” of this necessity? Perhaps he took this movement as too violent in its
excessiveness. But why, then, communicate this with the intent to provoke, or, did he not
publish this essay because of this polemic? The movement operates through scientific
knowledge breaking into speculation and then pushed to religious fervor, at which point
he suffered bliss: “my imagination did not go on without giving me horrible brain
transports, accompanied by an intense satisfaction” (77). The experience is felt as intense
ambivalence. The “brain transports” are both horrifying and gratifying. The movement
is sacrificial; an auto-mutilation in which rational consciousness is expended, exploding
This conception of the pineal gland as the seat of transcendental consciousness
(transcendental in that it exceeds the ego’s field of consciousness) is not unique to
Bataille. It can be found in Hindu and Tibetan mysticism as sahasrara, “the thousandpetaled lotus” and in Hopi religion as kopavi, the “open door.”
1
Kilpatrick
5
through the top of the skull (creating an acephalic consciousness in which the Sun is no
longer an object which blinds the subject).
He concludes “The Jesuve” with a description of an experience that overcame him
at the Zoological Gardens of London. The site of an ape’s anal projection “overwhelmed
me to the point of throwing me into a kind of state of ecstatic brutishness” (78). Here we
can see how although the writing describes an ecstatic experience, what is written
remains the writing of an “I.” This memory triggers off a writing of sacrificial violence,
which remains an expression of the writer’s imagination in that what is written is not
descriptive or prescriptive but provocative:
I cannot imagine the enormous anal fruit [. . .] other than as an ignoble
skull that I would smash with an axe blow, a rattled grunt deep in my
throat.
The axe blade would sink into this imaginary skull, like the
cleavers of butchers that split in two, in a violent block struck on the
block, the sickening heads of skinned rabbits. (78)
The text appears, at moments, to be confessional, writing by a subject who constructs the
text around memories in which that subjectivity slips away (but not a disappearance) into
ecstasy. Consciousness is focused on the exterior object at which violence is directed.
Bataille does not write of a heavenly vision that lifts the subject into transcendental
contemplation of the divine object. Homogeneity breaks under the explosive force of the
heterogeneous.
“The Pineal Eye” [“L’Oeil pineal”] begins with the claim that scientific
anthropology and philosophical speculation are no longer relevant because the liberating
moment has arrived when man “can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chains
Kilpatrick
6
of logic, but he recognizes himself, instead, not only with rage but in an ecstatic torment
– in the virulence of his own phantasms” (80).
The identity founded on rational
consciousness is no longer valid. Rather than this ordered stasis, consciousness achieves
self-recognition paradoxically through losing itself in the projection of images
encountered in inner experience. But it is an exterior object that accesses the alterity of
the inner experience. That which is most repulsive to the ego provokes a disturbance that
carried consciousness outside itself: “undergoing, without being overwhelmed, the
attraction of the most repulsive objects” (80). The subject remains, but recognizes its
finitude through transcendence, no longer taking itself as absolute.
The most terrifying and repulsive image Bataille conjures in this text is his
“description” of the sacrifice of a gibbon. There are two objects which consciousness is
focused upon in this narration: the gibbon and an Englishwoman (all others present are
referred to collectively). The Englishwoman acts as the priestess who conducts the ritual,
delivering the signal that directs the group to bury the gibbon alive. Only the anus of the
small ape remains above ground. It is here that narrative focus is brought to a contact
between the two objects (the woman and the ape’s anus): “Then the Englishwoman with
her charming rear end stretches her long nude body on the filled pit: the mucous-covered
flesh of the bald false skull . . . is even more upsetting to see when touched by pretty
white fingers” (86). This tension builds through another long sentence describing the
communal anxiety, a sentence that runs as if it could not end but with an explosion that
transcends language, and it does: “the beautiful boil of red flesh is set ablaze with
stinking brown flames” is followed by three lines of ellipsis (86). The sacrifice which is
re-presented exceeds its writing. Language breaks beneath this movement, felt as an
Kilpatrick
7
inner experience provoked by the unity of the object of erotic attraction and the object of
violent repulsion. The touch does not result in synthesis but in rapture. The subject
exposed to this sacrifice is drawn into its excessive movement. This scene consumes the
subject through which a spectral projection is conjured in the free falseness of uninhibited
mimetic play: “it was not a mere carcass that the mouth of the Englishwoman crushed her
most burning, her sweetest kisses, but on the nauseating JESUVE” (86). The writing
subject is reconstituted through this impossible memory that breaks from its
remembrance (again, a break in language – the descriptive scene in interrupted by the
indescribable). The binary oppositions posted (as the subject observes these objects) are
staged as an initial dialectic (male/female, human/animal, mind/anus, sun/dirt), which
does not result in an Aufhebung, for this negativity is non-appropriable. The subject does
not render a meaning to the other, reducing it to sameness; rather, the rational order of
signification collapses into a mimetic chaos in which identities shift and meaning
dissolves. The sacrifice of the gibbon is the death of meaning. The subject is thrown into
an abyss of non-knowing. It is here that language is experienced in its essence. We are
most aware of language - we most sense its immediacy - precisely when it escapes us.
Ellipses do not indicate an omission or suppression of language, but language exceeding
itself (the language of ecstasy).
These three texts, all written circa 1930, communicate the movement of inner
experience encountered in the sacrificial crisis, the lived experience of the catastrophic.
In all three Bataille “writes with blood,” for his writing is an engagement with the
effacement of the writing subject. He stages tragedies in which the spectator dissolves
from detached observation to affected participant. What we read is the staging of this
Kilpatrick
8
staging. The mimetic distance of the reader is three-folds removed from the inner
experience. The reader looks at Bataille looking at the sacrifice. Does the subject that
reads the subject that collapses collapse as well? We look on like Pentheus, masked in
the other’s identity, in danger of being dismembered and consumed. The danger is in the
imaginary, but this does not make it any less real. The danger is the threat to identity, to
the transcendental security of the subject constructed in the onto-theo-logical tradition.
Literary contact is perhaps the most dangerous in that what is at stake is language,
therefore signification. This communication threatens to spread like an infection and
destroy the homogeneous order of the static subject.
Bataille writes sacrifice as a
significatory crisis, unleashing the energies denied by the anthropologos of the onto-theological tradition, providing us with an exemplary case of modernist excess.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl.
Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1985.
MSA 7 Seminar: Modernist Excess
Chicago, 6 November 2005
Bataille and the Writing of Sacrifice
Georges Bataille’s texts are characterized by their attempt at a writing of sacrifice,
a bringing forth of the sacred in the absence of the divine. That which is sacrificed with
this writing is the authorial subject. Of course, we could not speak of Bataille’s writing if
it were not for a collection of texts (including those written under pseudonyms), taken to
be the works of the subject/author Georges Bataille. But what distinguishes the texts of
Bataille is his effacement of such limits as “author,” “text,” “work.” Thus the texts of
Bataille are those in which the authorial subject risks itself. Through this “writing with
blood” (to use Nietzsche’s phrase), language enters finite transcendence as authorial
subjectivity abandons itself through an ek-stasis, an opening or laceration that allows for
a true or essential communication. Bataille’s writing is not merely the writing of an “I,”
but the writing of the subject’s loss of subjectivity. The language which attempts a
communication of this experience thus exceeds the domain of everyday, profane,
equipmental language in which the subject produces a means of relation with alterity,
thus stabilizing a position via linguistic construction in which the subject grounds an
identity.
Our everyday language works, because of language’s disappearance, it’s
accessible utility. Words submit to reason as a tool. Language is used as the means to
produce meaning. But in the movement of the subject’s textual dismemberment, what is
produced is the impossibility of the production of an authorial subject, the impossibility
of meaning or of knowledge. The grounds for the subject’s constitution are revealed in a
language that appears as language precisely because of its failure to produce. This
Kilpatrick
2
language communicates the excessive movement of the subject’s expenditure, and
dramatizes the sacrifice of the author.
In “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh” [“La
Mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh”] Bataille discusses, from
the interdisciplinary perspective of a psychoanalyst-sociologist-mythologist-philosopher
(as if dancing from position to position, never maintaining a singular reference point –
exceeding disciplinary boundaries), cases in which subjects undergo a crisis that results in
auto-mutilation. He links such acts to the spirit of sacrifice. Civilization defines itself in
relation to the barbarity of “savage” peoples who engage in the practice of sacrifice. To
be modern is to abstain from any such practices, but Bataille notes a return of the
repressed:
It is not less striking that, in our day, with the custom of sacrifice in full
decline, the meaning of the word, to the extent that it implies a drive
revealed by an inner experience, is still as closely linked as possible to the
notion of a spirit of sacrifice, of which the automutilation of madmen is
only the most absurd and terrible example. (67)
This example (in the spirit of surrealism) is to shake us from the stasis of conventional
representation/s. Van Gogh provides us with a challenge to the egoistic confines of
rationality. Bataille does not want to reduce these examples to the knowable; rather, they
open thought to a thinking of the “necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself
out of oneself” (67). Such a consciousness invites thought to escape the subject through a
break with rationality. The power encountered in the figure of sacrifice is “the power to
liberate heterogeneous elements and to break the habitual homogeneity of the individual”
Kilpatrick
3
(70). Through this ek-stasis, sacrifice breaks down the barriers between self and alterity.
Sacrifice communicates this drive felt as inner experience. The cogito does not here
isolate itself in auto-gratification; the I that thinks collapses its position of closure and
stands outside itself in the ecstasy of a finite transcendence.
However, throughout
“Sacrificial Mutilation” Bataille remains situated in a position of observation, looking at
extreme cases of insanity. One senses the power unleashed in sacrifice, but this power
remains with the other.
The first sentence of “The Jesuve” [“Le Jesuve”] communicates the interior
experience of the sacrificial power overwhelming the subject, in which the subject is
radically exposed, opened as if through a wound to the ecstatic: “I have acquired over
what happens to me a power that overwhelms me” (73). What happens to the subject is
an overcoming of subjectivity. The going under of the subject is an overcoming of the
subject’s limit and isolation. Returning to the question of sacrifice, he notes:
The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet is has been,
due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other.
Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of
sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. (73)
In “Sacrificial Mutilation” Bataille expressed this need from the perspective of a
spectator, not fully drawn into the drama. The scene was staged with information taken
down by others who merely observed the acts of madmen and the customs of aboriginals.
But in “The Jesuve,” Bataille details a practice of the imagination that led him to ecstatic
states. He writes, “to provoke violently my comrades to perhaps unhoped-for excesses”
Kilpatrick
4
(74). The word “comrades” suggests a sense of community is central to his concerns.
Bataille describes the way in which he conceived of the “pineal eye”:
I imagined the eye at the summit of the skull like a horrible erupting
volcano, precisely with the shady and comical character associated with
the rear end and its excretions. Now the eye is without any doubt the
symbol of the dazzling sun and the one I imagined at the summit of my
skull was necessarily on fire, since it was doomed to the contemplation of
the sun at the apogee of its brilliance. (74)
He tells of how he had taken this exercise of the imagination to the point of belief in the
inevitability of the phenomenon as an evolutionary fact. 1 Bataille insists that “I was not
insane but I made too much of the necessity of leaving, in one way or another, the limits
of our human experience” (74). How are we to understand this confession of making
“too much” of this necessity? Perhaps he took this movement as too violent in its
excessiveness. But why, then, communicate this with the intent to provoke, or, did he not
publish this essay because of this polemic? The movement operates through scientific
knowledge breaking into speculation and then pushed to religious fervor, at which point
he suffered bliss: “my imagination did not go on without giving me horrible brain
transports, accompanied by an intense satisfaction” (77). The experience is felt as intense
ambivalence. The “brain transports” are both horrifying and gratifying. The movement
is sacrificial; an auto-mutilation in which rational consciousness is expended, exploding
This conception of the pineal gland as the seat of transcendental consciousness
(transcendental in that it exceeds the ego’s field of consciousness) is not unique to
Bataille. It can be found in Hindu and Tibetan mysticism as sahasrara, “the thousandpetaled lotus” and in Hopi religion as kopavi, the “open door.”
1
Kilpatrick
5
through the top of the skull (creating an acephalic consciousness in which the Sun is no
longer an object which blinds the subject).
He concludes “The Jesuve” with a description of an experience that overcame him
at the Zoological Gardens of London. The site of an ape’s anal projection “overwhelmed
me to the point of throwing me into a kind of state of ecstatic brutishness” (78). Here we
can see how although the writing describes an ecstatic experience, what is written
remains the writing of an “I.” This memory triggers off a writing of sacrificial violence,
which remains an expression of the writer’s imagination in that what is written is not
descriptive or prescriptive but provocative:
I cannot imagine the enormous anal fruit [. . .] other than as an ignoble
skull that I would smash with an axe blow, a rattled grunt deep in my
throat.
The axe blade would sink into this imaginary skull, like the
cleavers of butchers that split in two, in a violent block struck on the
block, the sickening heads of skinned rabbits. (78)
The text appears, at moments, to be confessional, writing by a subject who constructs the
text around memories in which that subjectivity slips away (but not a disappearance) into
ecstasy. Consciousness is focused on the exterior object at which violence is directed.
Bataille does not write of a heavenly vision that lifts the subject into transcendental
contemplation of the divine object. Homogeneity breaks under the explosive force of the
heterogeneous.
“The Pineal Eye” [“L’Oeil pineal”] begins with the claim that scientific
anthropology and philosophical speculation are no longer relevant because the liberating
moment has arrived when man “can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chains
Kilpatrick
6
of logic, but he recognizes himself, instead, not only with rage but in an ecstatic torment
– in the virulence of his own phantasms” (80).
The identity founded on rational
consciousness is no longer valid. Rather than this ordered stasis, consciousness achieves
self-recognition paradoxically through losing itself in the projection of images
encountered in inner experience. But it is an exterior object that accesses the alterity of
the inner experience. That which is most repulsive to the ego provokes a disturbance that
carried consciousness outside itself: “undergoing, without being overwhelmed, the
attraction of the most repulsive objects” (80). The subject remains, but recognizes its
finitude through transcendence, no longer taking itself as absolute.
The most terrifying and repulsive image Bataille conjures in this text is his
“description” of the sacrifice of a gibbon. There are two objects which consciousness is
focused upon in this narration: the gibbon and an Englishwoman (all others present are
referred to collectively). The Englishwoman acts as the priestess who conducts the ritual,
delivering the signal that directs the group to bury the gibbon alive. Only the anus of the
small ape remains above ground. It is here that narrative focus is brought to a contact
between the two objects (the woman and the ape’s anus): “Then the Englishwoman with
her charming rear end stretches her long nude body on the filled pit: the mucous-covered
flesh of the bald false skull . . . is even more upsetting to see when touched by pretty
white fingers” (86). This tension builds through another long sentence describing the
communal anxiety, a sentence that runs as if it could not end but with an explosion that
transcends language, and it does: “the beautiful boil of red flesh is set ablaze with
stinking brown flames” is followed by three lines of ellipsis (86). The sacrifice which is
re-presented exceeds its writing. Language breaks beneath this movement, felt as an
Kilpatrick
7
inner experience provoked by the unity of the object of erotic attraction and the object of
violent repulsion. The touch does not result in synthesis but in rapture. The subject
exposed to this sacrifice is drawn into its excessive movement. This scene consumes the
subject through which a spectral projection is conjured in the free falseness of uninhibited
mimetic play: “it was not a mere carcass that the mouth of the Englishwoman crushed her
most burning, her sweetest kisses, but on the nauseating JESUVE” (86). The writing
subject is reconstituted through this impossible memory that breaks from its
remembrance (again, a break in language – the descriptive scene in interrupted by the
indescribable). The binary oppositions posted (as the subject observes these objects) are
staged as an initial dialectic (male/female, human/animal, mind/anus, sun/dirt), which
does not result in an Aufhebung, for this negativity is non-appropriable. The subject does
not render a meaning to the other, reducing it to sameness; rather, the rational order of
signification collapses into a mimetic chaos in which identities shift and meaning
dissolves. The sacrifice of the gibbon is the death of meaning. The subject is thrown into
an abyss of non-knowing. It is here that language is experienced in its essence. We are
most aware of language - we most sense its immediacy - precisely when it escapes us.
Ellipses do not indicate an omission or suppression of language, but language exceeding
itself (the language of ecstasy).
These three texts, all written circa 1930, communicate the movement of inner
experience encountered in the sacrificial crisis, the lived experience of the catastrophic.
In all three Bataille “writes with blood,” for his writing is an engagement with the
effacement of the writing subject. He stages tragedies in which the spectator dissolves
from detached observation to affected participant. What we read is the staging of this
Kilpatrick
8
staging. The mimetic distance of the reader is three-folds removed from the inner
experience. The reader looks at Bataille looking at the sacrifice. Does the subject that
reads the subject that collapses collapse as well? We look on like Pentheus, masked in
the other’s identity, in danger of being dismembered and consumed. The danger is in the
imaginary, but this does not make it any less real. The danger is the threat to identity, to
the transcendental security of the subject constructed in the onto-theo-logical tradition.
Literary contact is perhaps the most dangerous in that what is at stake is language,
therefore signification. This communication threatens to spread like an infection and
destroy the homogeneous order of the static subject.
Bataille writes sacrifice as a
significatory crisis, unleashing the energies denied by the anthropologos of the onto-theological tradition, providing us with an exemplary case of modernist excess.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl.
Trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1985.