Bataille, Georges

« death, research into this kind of transcendence is both dangerous and difficult to replicate.

It was these dangers, at least in part, which led Bataille to develop alternative accounts of the move towards the Sacred.

What remains constant, however, is the important place he gave to the notion of death. Later, Bataille developed the important systematic notion of general economy with its emphasis on expenditure . Focusing on surplus and expenditure as the primary notions of economics (rather than on scarcity, as standard economic models do) allows Bataille to link his work on political economy with his work on inner experience, eroticism and religion, all of which he characterizes as displays of excess or surplus.

Here the Sacred is expressed in social practices rather than individual experiences.

By focusing on social behaviour which exceeds the limits of (instrumental) rational explanation (such as Amerindian potlatch ceremonies), Bataille highlights the myriad ways in which human life and practice resists rational description. The concept of a general economy of energy flows allows one to analyse not only economic phenomena but social, anthropological, biological and physical ones as well.

The fundamental problem with which the general economy must deal is that of excess.

The earth has a constant supply of new solar energy which must be either taken up or dispersed in some way.

Societies, which draw on this energy, quickly reach a point where production exceeds necessity.

The process by which this excess is dealt with is expenditure, which often takes place in a way which expresses the Sacred: through sacrifice or warfare.

Such sacrifice may take a literal form (as in Aztec society) or a more figural one as in the modern culture of conspicuous consumption. Practices such as sacrifice and warfare serve the Sacred by elevating those who are destroyed, together with that in whose name the destruction occurs, above the realm of mere things.

Even the victim is elevated; for the destruction that sacrifice is intended to bring about is not annihilation ( Bataille 1974: 43 ). The Sacred in general removes things from the realm of mere usefulness and thus elevates them above time and its laws of necessity and causality.

It not only leaves the realm of reason and discourse behind (which is part of what makes it so difficult for Bataille to discuss it), but actually destroys them (at least temporarily) as well.

The human move towards the Sacred is thus beset with a major difficulty.

On the one hand, the Sacred allows humans to separate themselves off from the realm of necessity by moving towards transcendence.

But if such transcendence leaves the realm of necessity entirely behind, it results in death.

Bataille's proposed solution to this problem is to limit moments of sacrifice so that their transcendence of time is still caught up in time.

The first example of this is the festival; the second is war (which still results in death for many of its participants). Bataille also treats the problem of transcendence through investigations of eroticism.

Eroticism is simultaneously the most potent form of embodied experience and one which, like a Dionysian festival, transcends (at least for a time) bodily and temporal limits.

And, like the festival, such experiences risk absolute annihilation but usually end with a return to the everyday (although not the same everyday).. »