Sacred Violence Girard Bataille and the

TIINA ARPPE

University of Helsinki

Sacred Violence:

Girard, Bataille and the Vicissitudes of Human Desire

The article deals with two famous attempts to analyse the relationship between affec- tive violence and the sacred, namely those made by René Girard and Georges Bataille. Despite the apparent similarities of the problems (religious sacrifice as the affective foundation of community and the primordial role of violence therein) Girard and Bataille end up with profoundly different visions of society’s entire affective economy. For Girard, religious sacrifice is a mechanism of projection and of repression by means of which the society channels its own unmotivated violence to one arbitrarily chosen individual (a classical functionalist approach); for Bataille, sacrifice is a means of shar- ing the experience of death which constitutes the repulsive core of the human commu- nity (a more phenomenological approach). The article shows that these differences can be traced back to two different (theoretical) sources. The first one is Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, particularly his vision of the ‘collective turmoil’ as the origin of society and his interpretation of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’. The second one is Alexandre Kojève’s anthropological interpretation of Hegel, especially his theory of human desire, which has clearly influenced both theorists although they both criticise it (albeit in different fashions). What Girard and Bataille seem to propose us, are two different and even opposing models regarding both the conceptualisation of human ‘desire’ and the theoretical/methodological approach we should adopt when dealing with it.

KEYWORDS

death; desire; economy; negativity; sacred; sacrifice; violence.

Introduction

The connection between religion and violence has been one of the questions haunting Western sociology and anthropology since their foundation in the 19th century. The close and disturbing link of religious belief systems to a seemingly disproportionate affective fury is especially manifest in the ritual practices of the so-called ‘primitive cultures’. The ethnographic descriptions of the rites of initiation, ritual sacrifice and

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In the 20th-century French sociology of religion there are two well-known attempts to analyse the relationship between violence and the sacred, namely, those made by René Girard and Georges Bataille. What makes these attempts sociologically interesting and links them firmly to the history of the discipline is that they both address the classical Durkheimian question concerning the nature of the social bond. Furthermore, they both follow the mature Durkheim in his observation that this binding factor is originally to be sought in religion and especially in its ritual aspect, the ‘collective turmoil’ (or a state of collective excitement) which the ritual expresses and canalises.

What distinguishes Girard and Bataille from Durkheim is precisely their empha- sis on the affective violence that the latter tended to dismiss. In short, in the theoret- ical constellation they are proposing, the social bond is based on a violent act of exclu- sion, which precedes any form of inclusion (communication or identification). For both of them this violence is fundamentally linked to the category of the sacred, and its privileged (ritual) instance and manifestation is the religious sacrifice. On the other hand, both think that it is also connected to the particular nature of desire. Yet, in spite of these similarities Bataille and Girard end up with profoundly different visions of the dynamics sustaining the social bond and, indeed, of society's whole affective economy.[2]

In this article I will propose two different sources for the divergence between Girard and Bataille which, to my knowledge, has not been properly analysed before. The first one is to be found in Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, especially in his vision of the ‘collective turmoil’ as the origin of society and in his interpretation of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’, an idea originally presented by William Robertson Smith. The second one can be traced back to the diverging conceptions of the two theorists concerning the nature of desire, which especially in Bataille’s case is clearly shaped by Alexandre Kojève’s anthropological interpretation of Hegel, extremely influential in post-war French philosophy. Although Girard never once mentions Kojève, I will show that the very same (Kojèvean) model of the mimetic desire has also influenced his con- ception of the mimetic desire, although he develops this idea in a quite different direc- tion than Kojève or Bataille. Finally, I will briefly discuss the impact of these two dif- fering approaches to the allegedly violent foundations of the social bond on contem- porary social theory. What Girard and Bataille seem to propose are two different and even opposing models regarding both the conceptualisation of ‘desire’ and the theo- retical/methodological approach that should be adopted when dealing with it.

The Durkheimian Turmoil

The distinctive feature of Durkheim’s definition of religion is that there is no God or supernatural agent involved: religion is a social system of beliefs and practices, which

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In his famous book Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse from 1912 Durkheim presents the idea of ‘collective turmoil’ to explain the origin of both religion and soci- ety. Although he firmly rejects any attempts to find the first origin of social institu- tions, he continually uses the most ‘primitive’ known religion of the time, the totemic system of the Australian Aruntas, as indirect evidence of how everything ‘must have’ happened. According to Durkheim, everything must have begun from a state of col- lective frenzy in a crowd gathered together:

The very fact of the concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant. When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impression; each re-echoes the others, and is re- echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance. And as such active passion so free from all control could not fail to burst out, on every side one sees nothing but violent gestures, cries, veritable howls, and deafening noises of every sort, which aid in intensifying still more the state of mind which they manifest. And since a collective sentiment cannot express itself collectively except on the condition of observing a cer- tain order permitting co-operation and movements in unison, these gestures and cries naturally tend to become rhythmic and regular; hence come songs and dances. […] How could such experi- ences as these, especially when they are repeated every day for weeks, fail to leave in him [the indi- vidual, TA] the conviction that there really exist two heterogeneous and mutually incomparable worlds? […] So it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this efferves- cence itself that the religious idea seems to be born. (Durkheim, 1947: 215–19; 1990: 308–13)

The fact that the force of society should be associated with the totem Durkheim explains by transference of sentiments: the idea of a thing and the idea of its symbol are so closely united in the mind that the sentiments they trigger become commin- gled. However, since society itself is an entity too abstract to provoke such intense sen- timents, they become connected to some object which is sufficiently concrete and sim- ple. This explains the special status of the totem (usually an animal or a plant), which becomes associated with the state of over-excitement invoked by the ceremonies. And since collective ideas are most powerful when people are gathered together, the only way to vivify these representations is to submerge them into the source in which they were born (i.e., the gathered groups). This in turn explains why the ceremonies need to be regularly repeated. In short, for Durkheim religion originates in a state of col-

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In spite of this notably secular explanation concerning the origins of religion, Durkheim tends to downplay the theoretical significance of the violent, frightening and even repulsive features of the religious ritual. This becomes apparent not only in the way he treats some orgiastic features (for instance, the breaking of the exogamic rules) connected to the states of collective turmoil, seeing them as ‘merely a mechan- ical consequence of the state of super-excitation provoked by the ceremony […], mere discharges of energy’ with no ritual meaning (Durkheim, 1947: 383, n. 2; 1990: 547, n. 2); it is also manifest in the interpretation he gives to Robertson Smith’s famous idea con- cerning the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’.

The Scottish theologian and exegete William Robertson Smith originally present-

ed this idea in his book The Religion of the Semites from 1889. Robertson Smith paid attention to the fact that in primitive religions the taboo applies to two realities, which would seem to be mutually exclusive: to things that are considered sacred and to those regarded as impure, so that the boundary between the two is often vague, but still real. The reality of the distinction is, for Smith, proved by the difference of motives: in the rules of holiness the motive is respect for the gods; in the rules of uncleanness it is primarily fear of an unknown or hostile power (Smith, 2005: 150–55). This idea soon became very influential. Whereas Durkheim used Smith’s theory in his explanation of the piacular rites, his disciples Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss took it as the basis of their model of the sacrifice (Hubert and Mauss, 1968: 193–99), Freud used it in his interpretation of the emotional ambivalence caused by repressed impuls- es (Freud, 1995: 199–241) and Emile Benveniste later adopted it in his vocabulary of the Indo-European institutions in which he affirmed that the division sacred-profane is most clearly manifested in the Latin word ‘sacer’ (Benveniste, 1989: 187–88).

Durkheim’s explanation of, or rather his solution to, this ambiguity is to divide the religious forces into two categories: the benevolent and the malevolent forces, and to claim that the ‘dark’ or ‘bad’ forces are, in fact, produced by a specific category of rites, the ‘piacular rites’ (Durkheim, 1990: 556 ff.; 1947: 389 ff.). In the primitive socie- ty every evil omen, every misfortune, illness or death, is interpreted as a product of these malevolent forces, and therefore necessitates expiation (piaculum). These rites, in fact, objectify the negative sentiments provoked by different exterior misfortunes (death, illness, etc.) and turn them into ‘bad forces’ that the rite is destined to soothe. The different manifestations of anguish (weeping, groaning, inflicting wounds upon oneself) restore to the group the energy which circumstances threatened to take away from it, and thus enable it to get along. In short, the sanctity of a thing is due to the collective sentiment of which it is the object, only circumstances colour the process differently (Durkheim, 1990: 584–92; 1947: 409–14).

Whereas Robertson Smith saw a fundamental moral difference between the pre- cautions founded on respect (demanding ‘a moral discipline’; Smith, 2005: 154) and those based on fear alone (‘aberrations of the savage imagination’; Smith, 2005: 154),

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Durkheim, in fact, subtly effaces the fear provoked by the malevolent forces: it is only

a secondary form, a fear ‘sui generis derived from respect more than from fright’, when the individual is met with a power that surpasses him or her (Durkheim, 1990: 87; 1947:

62, italics in the original). In other words, between fear and respect there is no essen- tial qualitative difference in Durkheim’s theory, since both are reduced to the same undifferentiated affective energy, the function of which is always the same: consolida- tion of the collective cohesion.

The Primal Scene of René Girard

Although René Girard firmly denies having read Durkheim’s theory of religion before

he wrote La violence et le sacré (2007c),[3] we can nonetheless shed some interesting light on his model of the sacred by juxtaposing it with certain hypotheses of the Durk- heimian theory. Indeed, the Girardian theory of the sacred could schematically be pre- sented as a negative image of the ‘effervescent’ (that is, the affective and ritual) side of the Durkheimian theory of religion.[4] Following Camille Tarot (2008a: 661) one might in fact say that Girard’s theory of religion completes the Durkheimian theory by bringing into light the violence which Durkheim did not see.

Girard is less hesitating than Durkheim in posing the morpho-genetic question concerning the origin of culture and society, a question which had largely inspired 19th-century evolutionist anthropology, but which the Lévi-Straussian structuralism of the 1950s and the subsequent post-structuralism of the 1960s later declared absurd and impossible. Whereas on the Durkheimian primal scene there is singing and danc- ing (and orgiastic sex), on the Girardian scene there is killing – or to be more precise, one single murder. The hypothetical chain of events could be the following.[5] Everything begins when two primates with a relatively big brain and a strong propen- sity for imitation start to pursue the same object. Soon a third one will show up, then

a fourth, and pretty quickly there is a whole bunch of primates, lurking around each other and pursuing the same object, which is desired because the others seem to desire it too. The general animosity becomes increasingly tangible; the aggressiveness pro- duced by the rivalry intensifies and the original object of the desire is progressively for- gotten. Everybody imitates the desire of everybody else; everybody is rival, obstacle and enemy for one another, until the rage bottled up suddenly and arbitrarily turns towards one individual. There is a ferocious outburst, during which this individual is literally torn apart.[6]

However, what is crucial for the development of culture only comes after the blood- shed. The group, recovered from its murderous frenzy, now directs all its attention to the lifeless body of the victim. This first non-instinctual form of attention transforms the body of the victim, so that it becomes the first signifier, introducing the first sig- nificant difference into the former instinctual indifferentiation. It is here that the ‘long march’ towards the sacred and the culture begins (Girard, 2007b: 819–20). During a period of time which probably lasts for several hundred thousand years a

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Before getting into a more detailed analysis of the surrogate victimage mechanism, let us note the basic similarity between the Girardian and the Durkheimian ‘primal scenes’.[7] Even though the sinister atmosphere of the former completely differs from the happy euphoria of the latter, Girard’s theory of the origin of culture is structural- ly very close to the Durkheimian model. For both the ‘productive’ canalisation of affectivity marks the event which sets the cultural development in motion. After this the free-floating affectivity gets permanently fixed to a signifier (for Girard the victim, for Durkheim the totem) which starts to act as its symbol, and the process progres- sively leads to the development of language. In short, in the beginning there is a homo- geneous affective flux from which the whole diversity of cultures and religions is derived. In Girard’s theory it is the first ‘spontaneous’ lynching which represents the ‘big bang’ that sets the generation of differences in motion; in Durkheim’s theory there is no such single founding event, the system of differences is forged gradually ‘in the midst of these effervescent social environments’ (Durkheim, 1990: 313; 1947: 219).

The ‘Victimage Mechanism’ and the Ambivalence of the Sacred

Girard criticises the existing anthropological theories of sacrifice for treating the primitive sacrifice as a mere symbolic institution. For example, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, in their famous essay on sacrifice (1968), see the ritual sacrifice as a kind of symbolic technique, a buffer between the profane and the sacred which allows men to approach the sacred in spite of its alleged destructive power and dangerous conta- giousness. This, in Girard’s opinion, is by no means an adequate explanation. There is

a real connection between sacrifice and violence which the modern social science has stubbornly set aside, because this would lead to the genetic (and allegedly ‘unscientif- ic’) question concerning the origin of the institution (Girard, 2007c: 406–07).

Since a significant part of ritual commemorations consist of killing (i.e., sacrifice), it is natural to assume that the original incident (‘événement originel’) was indeed a murder. This is what Freud quite lucidly saw in Totem and Taboo (1995). His mistake, according to Girard, was to presume that it was the murder of one particular individ- ual (the father) and furthermore, that it was a unique historical event (see Girard, 2007b: 733). In Girard’s view the tremendous influence that the original murder had on the community was not due to the identity of the victim, but to the unifying effect of the sacrifice: it prevented the community from collapsing under its own internal vio- lence. Moreover, the (trans)cultural uniformity of sacrifices suggests that it is the same type of murder in all societies, that is, with the same kind of ‘original incident’, only the forms of the murder varying from one religion to another (Girard, 2007c: 407).

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However, it is important to note that there are, in fact, two different substitutions at work in the Girardian model of sacrifice. The first one is the basic mechanism on which Girard builds up his hypothesis of the unity of all ritual institutions (sacrifice being only one of them) and in which one single individual is substituted for the whole community (the ‘surrogate victimage’). This is a process which remains hidden and which happens inside the community. The second substitution is the scapegoat mechanism or the ritual sacrifice which replaces the original victim with a ritually chosen one, usually in some way coming from ‘outside’ the community (from some marginal category, prisoners of war, slaves; etc.; see Girard, 2007c: 419–21).

It is precisely the first substitution which in the Girardian model acts as the basis for all cultural institutions. The surrogate victimage is not itself an institution (being the condition of other institutions), but a mechanism which is temporally antecedent to all other institutions (see for instance Fleming, 2004: 53). The mechanism is based upon an inevitable misapprehension (‘méconnaissance’), without which it would not function. The transferential character of the collective violence remains hidden from the murderers (and all the more from those who later carry out the ritual sacrifice without the slightest notion of its mimetic character). The function of the surrogate victim is thus not only to channel the collective violence into the victimage mecha- nism, but also to hide its collective roots. This is where religion steps into the picture: its role is to reproduce this function, that is, to reject violence outside the communi- ty by projecting it onto a transcendental category, namely, the sacred.

In Girard’s theory the sacred is not defined as a category with fixed limits that would be opposed to the profane, as in the Durkheimian model, but as a set of hypotheses that the mind arrives at over an extremely long period, as a result of innu- merable collective transferences in which the collective violence is channelled time after time into the surrogate victim (Girard, 2007b: 753).[8] The ritual machinery which grows upon this evolution is based on a double necessity to remember and pre- vent. The prohibitions surrounding the sacred reflect the need to prevent the repeti- tion of the violent crisis which could entail the collapse of the entire cultural order. But, on the other hand, there is an opposite need to remember, to repeat in order to banish, since the stabilisation brought about by the murder is always transitory (because of the mimetic character of desire, which always leads to new competitions and conflicts). Girard explains this dynamic of prohibitions and their periodic, but measured (ritual) transgression by the impression that the first killing left to those present – an impression the memory of which was then engraved in the ritual institu- tions and carried on by them. This impression was a deeply ambivalent one: for the first murderers, the victim appeared both as the originator and the resolver of the cri- sis, the criminal as well as the redeemer. And this, for Girard, explains both the sanc- tification of the victim and the famous ambivalence of the sacred. The impure sacred, which Durkheim saw as a product of the rituals connected to mourning (the group projects its affective state in ‘bad forces’), is for Girard just a reflection of the ambiva- lent character of violence itself, paradigmatically expressed by the Greek word ‘phar-

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Girard’s analysis of the ambivalence of the sacred also reveals the basic difference between his social theory and that of Durkheim. Even though from Girard’s point of view Durkheim was completely right in stating that the function of religion is to strengthen social cohesion, he was mistaken in seeing the sacred as a collective repre- sentation of the force of society. For Girard the sacred is not a collective representation of society’s moral force, but a collective projection of the mimetic violence that the com- munity wants to keep far from itself. Although there is a sort of misapprehension also in Durkheim’s model (the members of society do not realise that they in fact adore society itself when adoring their totem), there is no ‘dark’ secret to be pushed away, since affectivity for Durkheim does not entail violence: the collective turmoil simply ends up in a collective fatigue (see Durkheim, 1990: 310; 1947: 216).This is also one of the main critical points that Girard turns against Durkheim: the identity of the social and the sacred (the fact that the sacred is but a collective representation of the social) is not an explanation, it is merely another articulation of the social and cultural order (see Girard, 2007c: 731; Fleming, 2004: 68). In contrast to Durkheim’s theory in which the force of affectivity is domesticated in a positive manner, by confronting it with the moral power of society, in Girard’s theory the centrifugal, dissolving force of violence can only be canalised in a negative way, by a new act of violence.

It might seem, then, that for Girard violence itself is the big causal force that sets things in motion. However, this is not quite the case. Although violence in Girard’s model is basically unmotivated (there is no ‘rational’ reason for it), its origin can be retraced to another factor, namely, the mimetic character of human desire.

The Mimetic Desire

The Girardian theory of culture is essentially based on one premise: the mimetic char- acter of human desire. This idea is already developed in Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (2007a), Girard’s first book, in which he analyses famous literary works (Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Proust) in the light of his hypothesis. Man’s desire is by no means autonomous as the romantic literature would have it. On the contrary, it is only aroused by another man’s desire directed towards the same object. The subject’s desire for the object is thus always mediated by a ‘third’, the model, the desire of whom the subject is imitating. In the end, the subject’s desire is completely captured by the model that becomes the real object of desire, whereas the original object is turned into a mere vehicle of desire. Girard characterises this sort of desire as ‘metaphysical’ (Girard, 2007a: 77) to distinguish it from a simple physical need; in fact, it is a desire for being, because the subject dreams of a plenitude of being which he/she

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Girard’s subsequent book La violence et le sacré (2007c) is mainly an anthropologi- cal application and enlargement of this idea. Two desires converging in the same object necessarily become obstacles for one another. The mimetic desire therefore automatically leads into conflict. Violence and desire are permanently interconnected (there is no desire free from violence).[9] This becomes blatantly manifest in a situa- tion that Girard calls ‘sacrificial crisis’ in which the victimage mechanism is lost and the community is in danger of collapsing under its internal violence. ’We believe that the normal form of desire is nonviolent and that this nonviolent form is characteris- tic of the generality of mankind. But if the sacrificial crisis is a universal phenomenon, this hopeful belief is clearly without foundation’ (Girard, 1979: 144; 2007c: 472). The generalised conflict deprives the participants of all their differentiating features. The sacrificial crisis therefore entails the collapse of all differences, that is, a generalised crisis of culture (insofar as culture is defined as a system of differences). This is why social life would be impossible without the victimage mechanism which, by chan- nelling the mimetic violence productively, constitutes the basis of cultural order. The book ends with a general hypothesis of the unity of all rites:

We are now moving toward an expanded concept of sacrifice in which the sacrificial act in the nar- row sense plays only a minor role. […] There is a unity that underlies not only all mythologies and rituals but the whole of human culture, and this unity of unities depends on a single mechanism, continually functioning because perpetually misunderstood – the mechanism that assures the community’s spontaneous and unanimous outburst of opposition to the surrogate victim. (Girard, 1979: 297–300; 2007c: 664–67)

In his subsequent book Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (2007b) Girard goes even farther and links the mimetic desire and the victimage mechanism directly to man’s hominisation. In order to explain the passage from nature to culture, Girard tells us, we do not need to postulate anything more than is already found among the anthropoids: a strong propensity for imitation together with a relatively big brain. Among the primates the escalation of violence is prevented by a strongly hierarchic social structure, on one hand (the group yields to the will of one leading individual), and by an instinctual system controlling the aggressiveness born from the mimetic tendency, on the other (the development of tools and weapons progressively deprives people of this instinctual control mechanism, typical of animals whose weapons in the fight are their teeth, claws or other body parts). Hominisation can here be understood as a process during which humans learn to domesticate and to tolerate ever growing amounts of mimetism – this process only begins with the first violent outburst, that is, the founding murder.

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Between what can be strictly termed animal nature on the one hand and developing humanity on the other, there is a true rupture, which is collective murder, and it alone is capable of providing for kinds of organisation, no matter how embryonic, based on prohibition and ritual. It is there- fore possible to inscribe the genesis of human culture in nature and to relate it to a natural mech- anism without depriving culture of what is specifically, exclusively, human. (Girard, 1987: 97; 2007b: 816)

Girard (1987: 3–4; 438; 2007b: 708) draws an implicit parallel between his own theory and the Darwinian theory of evolution. Just as the theory of natural selection offers a rational explanation for the formidable multiplicity of different life-forms on earth, so the Girardian theory of the victimage mechanism provides the same type of (unique and universal) explanation for the different forms of cultural evolution. Another parallel feature that Girard sees between Darwin’s theory and his own is the fact that neither can be verified empirically, since the time span covered by both theo- ries is extremely long (hundreds of thousands if not millions of years). Yet, according to Girard, the explanatory power of both hypotheses is the strongest of all theories presented so far (Girard, 2007c: 681).

From social theory’s point of view the most problematic points in Girard’s theory are perhaps the transition from nature to culture, allegedly provided by the surrogate victimage, and a related problem concerning the way Girard theorises (or rather does not theorise) the process of symbolisation which should lead to the replacement of the original victim by a ritual scapegoat. The surrogate victimage is, in fact, a theoret- ical postulate needed in order to perform the perilous leap from nature to culture, since animal imitation alone, however intense it might be, cannot produce human cul- tural forms. For this, as Girard himself affirms, we need the founding murder which alone can set the development of the ritual (cultural) machinery in motion (see Girard, 2007b: 816). However, in order to get from the first spontaneous (or rather, automatic) killing to a cultural institution like the ritual sacrifice, a whole history has to be run through. Even the tiniest cultural institution not only requires imitation, it also requires substitution; and this is already an intellectual operation, which presup- poses reflexion, memory, in short, the intervention of an entire symbolic dimension. In other words, a quasi-automatic ‘natural’ mechanism of expulsion, provoked by the mimetic nature of human desire, cannot per se give us culture (the big philosophical question is whether it could do this even if it were repeated millions of times, since the same problem would only be repeated with each individual mimetic crisis, and this ad infinitum). Girard seems to jump directly from nature to culture without theorising the enormous symbolic process we might call the ‘social’. Yet, it is only this process of col- lective memorisation, metaphorisation, distanciation that can give us any form of transcendence (sacred) or culture in the first place (see also Tarot, 2003: 287–90).

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Georges Bataille and the Affective Dynamics of the Sacred

The theory of sacred and of sacrifice proposed by Georges Bataille has a slightly dif- ferent starting point. Its main influences come from the French sociology of the sacred and Maussian anthropology, on one hand, and from Hegelian (philosophical) phe- nomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis, on the other. The phenomenological approach stresses the role of the subjective experience, not only as an essential part of the ‘object’ of research, but also in Bataille’s own method. Ultimately this means giv- ing up the rigorous separation between the subject and the object of research. For instance, the sacred, being contagious, can only ‘contaminate’ the person studying it (see Ambrosino et al., 1995; Hollier, 1995: 7–8). This methodological heresy distin- guishes Bataille not only from Girard, but also from Durkheim for whom the objec- tivity of sociology was only guaranteed by the objectivity of the facts it studied.[10] Moreover, the entire ontology of Bataille must be seen from the perspective of a post- Hegelian (or post-Kojèvean) phenomenology: the fundamental ontological unity of man and nature can only appear to historical man as a lighting strike, through trans- gressive experiences, which momentarily break his individual isolation. B a t a i l l e ’ s sacred has to be seen as a part of his more general theory of the useless expenditure (‘dépense’) (see Bataille, 1970b). Although the Durkheimian division between the sacred and the profane and the central role given to the prohibition in the definition of the sacred are also constitutive to Bataille’s conception of the sacred, for him it is nonetheless just a part of a more general sphere he calls the heterogeneous (see Bataille, 1970d; 1970e). The heterogeneous comprises all the different forms of useless expen- diture. It is a domain of waste and dissipation in which the excess produced on the homogeneous (productive, profane) domain is destroyed. However, apart from this general emphasis on waste and destruction, the heterogeneous resembles the Durk- heimian sacred in being ambivalent, that is, divided into a pure and an impure part (e.g. Bataille, 1970d).

Yet the explanation Bataille gives for the ambivalence of the sacred is more akin to that proposed by Girard (sacred as an affective projection of collective violence) than the Durkheimian solution (sacred as a collective representation of society’s force), although for Bataille sacred is most of all affective communication (collective sharing of anguish caused by death). In the Bataillean scheme, the ritual transgression of prohi- bitions (protecting the sacred) acts as a catalyst for a dynamics of attraction and repul- sion, which constitutes the foundation of the social core.[11] The sacred, taboo-pro- tected entities are interpreted as things or ‘forces’, which the human body has reject-

ed and in this sense ‘wasted’. The barrier of repulsion prevents the continuation of expenditure. This interpretation of the dynamics animating the social core has two noteworthy consequences: 1) the integrity of the participants, as well as the commu- nity as a whole, is at stake every time the sacred is approached by the repetition of the ‘crime’ (i.e., the transgression of the taboo); 2) the breaking of the barrier liberates tremendous amounts of energy, which in turn helps to keep the barrier up:

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Subsequently, this expenditure lends its energy to the dynamism of the good power, lucky and right, that prohibits crime, that prohibits the very principle of expenditure, that maintains the integrity of the social whole and in the last analysis denies its criminal origin. (Bataille, 1995a: 167)

In spite of its Freudian influences, this scheme also seems to deviate from Freud’s theory in some significant respects. For Bataille the prohibition is not something, which, even in ‘primitive’ society, would have been imposed on the human conscious- ness by some exterior authority, as Freud (1995: 60) would have it. Firstly, the interdic- tion is not to be understood as an obstacle, imposed on human desire by the almighty Father (real or symbolic), but its origin is the common, inner, experience of terror before death (see for instance Bataille, 1976b: 307–18). Yet, it is only the fleeting instant of the transgression of the symbolic taboo that can give us a glimpse of this anguish without which the prohibition would not exist. Secondly, it is first and foremost death, not the sexual desire directed towards the mother, which is barred by the pro- hibition. Thus the origin of the taboo is not the all-powerful primitive father, but the horror caused by what Lacan, following Hegel (and above all Kojève), called ‘the absolute master’.

In this manner the Bataillean emphasis of the expenditure also constitutes the link between his ‘structural’ model in which the heterogeneous is seen as a domain opposed to the homogeneous, and a more phenomenological approach in which it is examined as an experience or a ‘movement’ (a common experience of finitude), since the apogee of expenditure is none other than death. ‘Of all conceivable luxuries the death, in its fatal and inexorable form, is certainly the most costly one’ (Bataille, 1976a: 40). The connection between the sacred and this luxurious loss is thus paradigmatically given in the ritual sacrifice.

The Inner Experience of Sacrifice

Like Girard’s model the Bataillean theory of sacrifice is dominated by what could be called the image of the ‘primitive society’. But although Bataille uses many historical societies as examples for his theory (for instance, the Tlingit and the Kwakiutl tribes analysed by Marcel Mauss and Franz Boas or the Aztecs of Mexico during the 15th and 16th centuries), his ‘primitive society’ cannot be reduced to any of them. It is not a social organisation or an archaic paradise, which once would have existed and then was lost, but rather a hypothetical model comparable to Rousseau’s state of nature: a universe in which the relationship between man and the world is presumed to be immediate and immanent (the world has not yet been divided into objects exterior to man) (Bataille, 1976a: 63).

It is this intimate and immanent world that Bataille (1976b: 302) calls the ‘sacred’, whereas the ‘profane’ in this (phenomenological) context refers to the world that is mediated by objects and is in this sense transcendental, exterior to man. However, alongside his ontology of immediacy Bataille (1970e; 1976a; 1976b; 1979a) develops a

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It is precisely the utility, the usability of objects and their dependence on exterior purposes that constitute the heart of Bataille’s phenomenological account of alien- ation. Utility lays the foundation for the profane universe of work, in which existence is always harnessed to serve ends exterior to it. Existence valuable in itself can only be grasped by breaking up the prohibitions, which constitute the profane universe of work and which all concern the useless expenditure of energy in its different forms. Death must be viewed from this standpoint. In the Bataillean scheme death is a pro- foundly ambivalent thing. By destroying the isolated (and in his isolation object-like) individual (or sacrificial animal) it opens up a fleeting breach into the (always already) ‘lost’ continuity of being. Thus, it is something to be celebrated. On the other hand, it provokes unlimited fear and anguish in the isolated subject, because, with the loss of the intimate world relation, death, too, has lost its intimate character and become transcendent.[12] Men express this emotional ambivalence by surrounding death as well as other forms of dangerous excess, for instance, sexuality, with prohibitions. Seen from the viewpoint of the profane universe of work, death and sexuality both appear as something completely different (‘tout autre’ – Bataille, 1970e: 58–59; 1979a: 35), but at the same time they are fundamentally linked to man’s ‘bestial’ (impure) existence, freed from the constraints of work. The prohibitions prevent the invasion of this domain in the profane, orderly existence. On the other hand, ‘it is the state of transgression which commands the desire, the demand of a universe more profound, more rich and prodigious, in short, the demand of a sacred universe’ (Bataille, 1979a: 41; see also 1976a: 61–64).

This is also why the prohibitions affecting the various manifestations of excess can never be absolute in Bataille’s scheme. This would definitely condemn people to the isolated and object-like (profane) existence, which can never be sovereign,[13] valuable in itself. The isolated individual can restore the immediate world relation only when the anxiety touching the future vanishes for a split second. This is what happens in rit- uals involving unmotivated expenditure. It is precisely through this excess that the subject reveals his or her innermost, intimate being to his or her fellow beings. The transgression of the prohibition thus becomes the channel, through which the isolat-

ed individuals communicate, not only with each other, but also with the great (onto-

T iina Ar ppe · Sacred Violence T iina Ar ppe · Sacred Violence

The Paradoxes of Sacrifice

The Bataillean model of sacrifice contains two major problems, which should be dealt with before going to Kojève, and of which he was himself acutely aware. The first could

be called the problem of functionalism, the second the problem of simulation. Nonetheless, they both spring from the same source, namely, the ambivalent status of sacrifice as a part of what might be called a ‘restricted economy’. In the first case, the problem is linked with the economy of sociability (or of the social bond), in the sec- ond case, with the economy of representation.

The problem of functionalism is in a certain way implied in the very structure of sacrifice. Sacrifice is a gift given to gods either as a payment of a debt or in order to receive a return gift. According to the standard functionalist explanation of the Durkheimian school, these ‘utilitarian’ motives, which the primitives themselves often give to the sacrifice, are, nonetheless, merely apparent. In reality the ritual nour- ishes the social forces sustaining the community, that is, it regenerates the spiritual and moral energy of the group. Gods are the image, the emblem and the symbol of society, and the function of the sacrifice is to solidify the social bond (see Durkheim, 1990: 491–500; Hubert and Mauss, 1968).

In fact, Bataille’s interpretation of the sacrifice is not so far from this functional- ist model. Its latent functionalism is particularly palpable in the book L’homme et le sacré that Bataille’s friend, the French anthropologist Roger Caillois, published in 1939 and to which Bataille greatly contributed (in his preface Caillois even talks about an ‘intellectual osmosis’ between his own ideas and those of Bataille, see Caillois, 1950: 13; Worms, 1991: 44–45). In a sense Caillois is even more functionalist than Durkheim ever was, since he attributes a social function even to those ‘superfluous’ and excessive fea- tures of the rite, which Durkheim (1990: 547–48, n. 2), in default of a better explana- tion, interpreted as involuntary (quasi-natural) side effects of the ritual (see also Arppe, 1995). According to Caillois, excesses are an essential part of the sacred power of the rites, they contribute to the regeneration of nature and of the community that is the principal function of the rite (see Caillois, 1995: 651–52). The same type of expla- nation can also be found in Bataille’s La part maudite, published in 1949 (Bataille, 1976a: 64). Despite the book’s overall emphasis on the useless and constitutively super- fluous nature of expenditure (‘dépense’), the interpretation given of ritual sacrifice is still strangely functionalist in its undertones. In sacrifice the ‘useless’ and allegedly ‘sovereign’ expenditure seems to be transformed to a mere means, the function of which is to channel human violence into socially acceptable forms, so that after the ritual blood shedding the ‘normal’ everyday life could reassume its peaceful course.

From this point of view the Bataillean scheme seems quite close to the Durkheimian model of ‘collective effervescence’: the cultural order is reproduced by

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It is noteworthy that, in spite of the manifest similarities between his theory and that of Bataille, Girard only once mentions the name of Bataille in his La violence et le sacré, and this in an overtly sarcastic tone (2007c: 565). From his viewpoint, Bataille appears as a degenerated aesthetician who, instead of presenting a scientific explana- tion of violence, goes on romanticising it. Even though Girard never formulates things explicitly, it might be said that from his angle Bataille remains a prisoner of the meta- physical representation of violence, typical to Freud (the death instinct) or to Hegel (the dialectic of master and slave), for instance. Bataille does not take the functional- ist strain implicit in his theory to its logical conclusion, which would mean seeing human violence as a mechanism (a means to an end) and thereby attaching it to the very structure and movement of society’s affective economy. Instead, he keeps on deplor- ing its inexplicable, ecstatic and ‘experiential’ nature that remains beyond the grasp of discursive knowledge.

In a general fashion, what we’re looking for in sacrifice or in potlatch, in action (history) or in con- templation (thinking), is always this shadow – which, by definition, we cannot grasp – which we only in vain call poetry, the depth or the intimacy of passion. We are necessarily mistaken, because we want to grasp this shadow. […] The ultimate problem of knowledge is the same as that of con- summation. No one can at the same time know and avoid destruction, consume wealth and increase it. (Bataille, 1976a: 76, italics in original; translation TA)

Here Bataille is indeed led into a cul-de-sac. Paradoxically, his problem is the very structure that Girard offers as an explanation: the economy itself, the impossibility of capturing the ‘shadow’ of death in the economy of representation. This is what I call the problem of simulation. On one hand, the Bataillean sacrifice appears as a channel, through which the community touches and thus controls the intimacy and the imma- nence (its own inaccessible foundation opened up in sacrificial death). But, on the other, Bataille is forced to admit that all attempts to appropriate and control this intimate depth lead to an impasse and illusion.

If self-conscience is essentially the full possession of intimacy, then we must return to the fact that all possession of intimacy ends up in a trap. A sacrifice can only lay out

a sacred thing. The sacred thing exteriorises the intimacy: it makes visible from the out- side that which in reality is in the inside. (Bataille, 1976a: 177–78, italics in original; translation TA)

Bataille is thus forced to admit the mimetic character of the sacrifice. In fact, the participants are only given access to a spectacle, a simulated and mediated (represent-

T iina Ar ppe · Sacred Violence T iina Ar ppe · Sacred Violence

In a sense the whole economy of the Bataillean subject, both individual and col- lective, is based on the rejection of the economist interpretation of sacrifice. Sacrifice is not a mere commerce between man and god(s), but a means of access to transcen- dence, to some sort of exteriority, be it the sacred, the god or the experience of man’s own mortality, through which immanence and communication with others only become possible. However, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1990) has pointed out, in spite of Bataille’s efforts to the contrary, this scheme remains pro- foundly Hegelian in its nature: it consists of the (dialectical) reappropriation of the subjective identity, albeit in a torn and wrenched form, mediated by negativity, be- tween the impossible and the simulation. In Nancy’s opinion Girard, Bataille and in fact the whole Western culture are caught up in a fascination with the sacrifice, a ‘sac- rificial phantasm’, the destruction of which would require that the whole dialectical logic of negation be deconstructed.

However, as far as Bataille is concerned, this logic can largely be traced back to Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, which has been very influential especially in the French context. In Bataille’s case the connection is clear, since it is first and fore- most in his personal dialogue with Kojève that he develops his idea concerning the status and fate of negativity in human existence after man has satisfied his animal needs. As for Girard, although he never once mentions Kojève, the whole triangular logic of the mimetic desire could be directly from Kojève’s pen, even if the Girardian version of things does not end up in any dialectical synthesis, quite the contrary, as we shall see (this Kojèvean influence has also been noted by Fleming, 2004: 169, n. 35).

The ‘Anthropogenic Desire’ of Kojève

Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s phenomenology is presented in his famous book Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947), which is a compilation of his equally celebrated lectures, held in 1933–39 at École des Hautes Études in Paris.[15] This interpretation is founded upon two major axes, namely, the dialectic of master and slave and the thesis of the end of history. To put things schematically, it is the human desire that sets his- tory in motion and it is the extinction of this desire that ends it.

Kojève starts from a clear-cut ontological dualism: there is a fundamental differ- ence between man’s and nature’s modes of being. The distinguishing factor between man and beast is the specific nature of human desire. Whereas animal desire is direct-

ed toward a material object (nourishment guaranteeing its survival), the ultimate

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