T I I N A A R P P E
U n i v e r s i t y o f H e l s i n k i
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.
K E Y W O R D S
death; desire; economy; negativity; sacred; sacrifice; violence.
Introduction
so forth are loaded with colourful details attesting to this, see for instance Emile Durkheim (1990: 446 ff.).[1]
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
divides the universe into two mutually exclusive classes, the sacred and the profane. The sacred things are those set apart and forbidden from contact with the profane. In primitive religions the sacred is often believed to contain a dangerously contagious ‘force’ which cannot be approached without ritual precautions. The main thesis of Durkheim’s sociological theory of religion is that this force is nothing but a collective representation of society itself, merely objectified by the individual consciousness experiencing it.
In his famous book Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieusefrom 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 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)
col-lective delirium, but one which is paradoxically ‘well-founded’ (Durkheim, 1947: 226-; 1990: 324).
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).
Durkheim, in fact, subtly effaces the fear provoked by the malevolent forces: it is only a secondary form, a fear ‘sui generisderived 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 killdanc-ing – 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]
new method of restraining human violence is born, which replaces the former animal or instinctual mechanisms of protection with prohibitions and rituals, that is, with cultural mechanisms. The most important of these is the ritual sacrifice which sub-stitutes the first, spontaneously lynched ‘surrogate’ victim with a ritually chosen one. 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 realconnection 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 originof 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,
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 mechanismwhich 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.
‘phar-makos’, which means ‘poison’ as well as ‘remedy’ (on this, see for instance Derrida, 1972). The impure violence is precisely the contagious, freely escalating violence, which can only be tamed by the ritually purified violence (the scapegoat). The prohibitions are there to prevent the impure violence from escalating whereas their ritually con-trolled transgression (the purified violence) is necessary for the commemoration.
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 projectionof 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 affectivityfor 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
believes the model to possess. The subject expects the model to show him/her what he/she should desire in order to attain this plenitude. By desiring an object the model shows that this must be an object that could fulfil the subject’s dream. Hence, unlike the need, the desire is infinite (it can never be fulfilled) (Girard, 2007a: 35–75).
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
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 historyhas 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 segive 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
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 objecobjec-tivity 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).
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 domainopposed
to the homogeneous, and a more phenomenological approach in which it is examined
as an experienceor 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).
phenomenological account of alienation, in which the secularisation of the world and the enslavement of man begin with the invention of work and of language (work and language are the original forms of alienation, whereas for instance Christianity and industrial capitalism can be interpreted as its developed or historical forms). The divi-sion of the world into separated subjects and objects takes place as soon as man begins to form words replacing the ‘immediate’ world, and to modify his natural environ-ment by his work. The birth of the transcendental world of objects also gives rise to the fear of death by bringing along the consciousness of time and of the difference between the subject and the object. When contemplating their own existence the crea-tures, who know how to make objects and use durable tools, realise that something in them cannot resist time, whereas objects seem to defy it (Bataille, 1976b: 297–306).
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).
(onto-logical) continuity of being. For Bataille it is precisely this sacred experience which con-stitutes the foundation of the social bond (see Bataille, 1976b; 1995a).
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 bookL’homme et le
sacréthat 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.
ritually repeating the affective experience, which constitutes its foundation. In Durkheim’s theory, what is repeated is the creative chaos of collective frenzy, in Bataille’s interpretation the euphoric, yet terrifying experience of man’s own finitude. Sacrificial violence seems to become a mere ‘safety valve’, whose function is always the same, namely, the regeneration of the social order, an interpretation later adopted and developed by none other than René Girard.
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 inpotlatch,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 deathin 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-conscienceis 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 thingexteriorises the intimacy: it makes visible from the out-side that which in reality is in the inout-side. (Bataille, 1976a: 177–78, italics in original; translation TA)
(represent-ed) death. Although man’s consciousness of his own future annihilation separates him from other animals, in reality death reveals nothing. The revelation of man’s
human (mortal) essence to himself would require that he livedhis own death, that he
would be able to appropriate himself integrally, without residue, in his own negativity. But as Bataille himself points out (1988b: 336), ‘this is a comedy!’ In short, for Bataille the problem of mimesis is on the level of representation, whereas for Girard it is essen-tially met on the level of appropriation.[14]
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
object of human desire is always another human desire. According to Kojève, the sat-isfaction of animal need can only be the basis for a ‘sentiment’ of the self, that is, for an animal ‘I’, focused solely on physical survival, not for self-consciousness in a strict sense (Kojève, 1947: 12). For the self-consciousness to be born, the human desire has to be directed toward an object that surpasses the given reality. But the only such object is the desire itself.
The ‘anthropogenetic desire’ (the desire that generates man) is therefore always directed toward another desire. Desire directed toward a natural object is human only to the extent, that it is ‘mediated’ by the desire of another, directed toward the same object. The satisfaction of human desire thus requires some sort of reciprocity or social recognition of the value of the object. For instance, in the relationship between man and woman desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the desire of the other – if he or she wants to be recognized in his or her human value, in his or her reality as a human individual. To desire another’s desire ultimately means that I want my value, the value that I represent as a human being, to become the value that the other person desires: I want him or her to recognize my value as his or her value. The humanity of man thus presupposes that his human desire outweighs his animal desire (directed solely toward survival of the species). In Kojève’s scheme this means that the humanity of man rests on his will to risk his life voluntarily in order to gain recognition. The birth of the self-consciousness is thus elementarily linked with exposing one’s life, with the risk of death (Kojève, 1947: 11–14).
This is why the desire for recognition necessarily appears as a bloody battle for ‘pure prestige’ (‘lutte à mort de pur préstige’ – Kojève, 1947: 14). The ‘first battle’ consti-tutes the fictive starting point of history. However, since the satisfaction of this desire requires that both parties stay alive, it has to generate two fundamentally different types of human behaviour: one of the parties has to fear the other (and death) enough to recognise the other without being himself recognised. The result of this battle is the relationship of submission known as the ‘dialectic of master and slave’, which in Hegel’s philosophy constitutes the motor of both self-consciousness and history.
Whereas the ‘first’ battle for recognition and the resulting relation of submission sets history in motion, it is equality that ends it. In other words, history ends at the moment, when the antagonism between the master and the slave vanishes (Kojève, 1947: 143 ff.). The final satisfaction of the desire for recognition can only be reached in a universal and homogeneous state, born of a bloody revolution. Only in such a state can man realise his individuality (the synthesis of the universal and the particular), because he becomes recognised universally in his irreplaceable and unique particular-ity. As a result the reserve of human desire, which in the course of history had nour-ished the different forms of sublimation, drains away: history stops, because man who created it is completely satisfied and therefore no longer aspires to change, to surpass the given and also himself with his negative action. However, the end of history by no means signifies that nothing more will happen in the world, it only means that men stop acting as humans, that is, they stop risking their lives and working in order to gain recognition. Kojève does not speak of the end of history for some metaphysical reason, but because humanity in the state he describes is in principle completely sat-isfied. Although the end of history implies the death of man determined by the desire for recognition and the negative action, it is in no way a cosmic or biological catas-trophe: nature remains the same, so does man as a natural creature (man becomes an animal totally in harmony with nature or the given world; see Kojève, 1947: 113 ff.; see also Roth, 1988: 117 ff.; and Auffret, 1990: 301 ff.).
Negativity and the Dynamics of Human Desire
in Girard and Bataille
If we look at things from an ontological, or a metaphysical, point of view, the philo-sophical Hegelianism sustaining the Kojèvean phenomenology seems to be quite far from the Girardian attempt to provide a scientific explanation for human culture. Girard attaches his own model firmly to human evolution, to man’s biological nature and its conditions of development, which philosophically speaking situate man on the same ontological continuum with other species. The difference between man and animal is a matter of degree, not a radical ontological gap. Moreover, Girard empha-sises tirelessly the ‘scientific’ superiority of his model, its capacity to explain as eco-nomically and as elegantly as possible empirical data, for which anthropologists have so far been unable to find a non-contradictory explanation (see for instance Girard, 2007c: 688–90). Girard intends to present no less than a universal morpho-genetic explanation of the origin of culture: from one single ‘natural’ principle (the mimetic nature of human desire) plus one corollary postulate (the surrogate victimage) the cultural institutions can be deduced in an almost a priorifashion (not in their histor-ical and particular form, of course, but in the general logic governing their forma-tion).[16] Kojève, on the other hand, thinks that dualism is necessary precisely
because, according to him, the spirit cannot be deducedfrom nature, but presupposes
By contrast, the respective theories of Girard and Kojève concerning human desire
have interesting similarities. For both theorists, the essential starting point is the
tri-adiccharacter of human desire. According to Girard, desire always entails three
posi-tions: the subject (the ‘disciple’), the object and the rival (the ‘model’). This ‘triadism’ is also for Kojève the very feature distinguishing human desire from mere animal need. In Kojève’s model this premise leads to the desire for recognition and to the dialectic of master and slave, which is the key to the constitution of self-conscience and histo-ry, in short to the entire auto-evolvement of the Hegelian spirit. It is, however, exactly this sort of ‘philosophical’ interpretation of violence, which Girard denounces as pure mysticism: ‘We have to refuse all the mystical explanations and their philosophical surrogates, as for instance the “coincidentia oppositorium”, the magical power of the negative and the virtue of the dionysiac’ (2007b: 776). As he explicitly states, his theo-ry comprises no such element: ‘This thesis [of the surrogate victim] no more bears any theological or metaphysical character in any sense that the contemporary critique might give to these terms’ (Girard, 2007c: 689–90).[17] But although Girard struggles to push the ‘mystical’ negativity away, negativity as such plays a very significant role in his own explanation of human culture – we might even say that negativity is omni-present in Girard’s theory: it is the mimetic violence itself. The most significant dif-ference in relation to Kojève is the lack of any dialectical reconciliation (‘Aufhebung’) of negativity or violence. In Girard’s scheme the mimetic situation escalates and leads to a circle of violence, accelerating in a completely autistic manner.
Moreover, Kojève and Girard see the connection between mimesis and its object somewhat differently. Whereas in Kojève’s interpretation the subject’s desire is first
and foremost directed towardanother desire (the other desire being its object), in
Girard’s theory it is rather directed accordingto another desire (which is desiring the same object). In fact, the Girardian desire seems to have no ‘real’ object at all, since all its varying objects are but an imaginary veiling, part of the structure of misapprehen-sion (‘méconnaissance’) typical of the double bind relation instituted by the mimetic desire itself. To put it differently, in the Girardian constellation desire is not oriented by some pre-existing attractor, it is the desire itself which causes the attractor to emerge: ‘The object is a genuine creation of the mimetic desire; it is the compositionof the mimetic codeterminations which cause it to spring from nothingness’ (Dupuy, 1990: 132, italics in original).
state, for instance). Such recognition is only a particular historical ‘guise’ (in this case, typical to modernity, which urges men to launch into the social competition) that the mimetic process assumes in its never-ending circular movement (see Dupuy, 1990: 133–34; and Girard, 1987: 376–77; 2007b: 1142).[18]
The Kojèvean dialectic also helps to sketch out the basic differences between Girard’s and Bataille’s theories of sacrifice. The most significant disparities lie in the anthropology sustaining the theories and in the status/logic of negation in the theo-retical structure. In the Bataillean anthropology man is likewise a creature of desire,
but instead of a mimetic desire of appropriation his psyche is dominated by an
uncon-scious impulse of expenditure. This is also the kernel of Bataille’s criticism against utili-tarianism in the 1930s: the reason why men try to ensure their subsistence or to avoid suffering (the negative version of utilitarianism) is not that these functions would in themselves contain a sufficient result, but because through them they want to reach out for the insubordinate function of free expenditure. For Bataille, both individuals and societies are animated by an irresistible and illogical impulse to abandon, to reject moral or material goods that could have been rationally used (Bataille, 1970b: 318–20). Even if the ritual sacrifice has more or less vanished from the modern world,[19] for Bataille the term has not lost its meaning, insofar as it denotes an impulsion aris-ing from the subject’s inner experience, ‘a spirit of sacrifice’, which incites the indi-vidual to throw something of himself outside of himself (the modern examples Bataille gives are the self-mutilations committed by the mentally ill, Bataille, 1970a). Also in the archaic sacrifice Bataille’s emphasis is on the radical change undergone by the persons attending to the rite; this transformation can, in turn, be associated to any sort of change on the social level: death of a relative, initiation, consumption of the new crop, etc. The explicit goals of the ceremony are nonetheless secondary compared to the unconscious necessity commanding it. In other words, the ritual sacrifice pro-vides a channel for the heterogeneous impulses of expenditure, which constitute an integral part of human existence and violate the individual’s habitual homogeneity and integrity.
This impulsion of destruction is integrally linked with violence, but the impetus for violence does not come from a mimetic tendency of appropriation, or from the imitation of/according to another desire, as in Girard’s model. In Bataille’s theory the role of violence only becomes intelligible, when the human existence as a whole is put in the perspective of unproductive expenditure (which Bataille calls ‘the general econ-omy’). It is precisely from this angle that Bataille also questions the Kojèvean concep-tion of the ‘active negativity’ and the idea of the end of history, implicating the satis-faction of the human desire. In a letter he wrote to Kojève in the end of the 1930s Bataille (1995b) asks, what remains of human negativity after the satisfaction provid-ed by work and mutual recognition has been achievprovid-ed. In Kojève’s model the disap-pearance of the human negativity implies the disapdisap-pearance of man himself, a sort of
new ‘animality’ or ‘inhumanism’, insofar as productive negativity is constitutive to
com-pletely happy and with nothing more to do (see Kojève, 1947: 385). But Bataille is not happy:
If action (“doing”) is (as Hegel says) negativity, the question arises of knowing whether the nega-tivity of someone who has “nothing left to do” disappears, or whether it remains in a state of “unemployed negativity”: personally, I cannot but decide in one sense, being myself exactly this “unemployed negativity” (I couldn’t define myself in a more precise manner). (Bataille, 1995b: 75–76)[20]
In Bataille’s interpretation the negativity defining the human desire always leaves
behind a ‘useless’ remnant, a surplusthat cannot be channelled to productive action.
In the course of human history this surplus destined to pure loss has appeared in many different guises: in religious rituals, in art and in other forms of useless or down-right destructive expenditure (on these forms, see for instance Bataille, 1970b; 1970e). Thus, alongside the phenomenological account of alienation (starting from the pro-ductive object-relation) there runs another story, which is like the negative image, a sort of Freudian ‘Wunderblock’, which traces back the forgotten or repressed guises, under which the impulsion of expenditure has appeared during humanity’s conscious history.[21] In the course of this story the desire of useless expenditure, ‘the idle nega-tivity’ deconstructs the results of the Hegelian (active and laborious) negativity in transgressive experiences, which nonetheless only become accessible to the conscious mind once the desire of appropriation has been (at least temporarily) satisfied.
Conclusions
All in all, Bataille’s theory of sacrifice can be seen as a vision, which largely questions the Hegelian ‘metaphysics of conscience’ and the Kojèvean ‘metaphysics of productive negativity’, but also the Girardian ‘metaphysics of desire’, insofar as desire in Girard’s theory is always connected to appropriation. In this sense, it can definitely not be interpreted as a ‘mechanism’, which could be isolated and used as a ‘scientific’ expla-nation of human violence, desire or culture. Rather, it is an existential question, which examines the historical limits of the accumulative, restricted economy (and anthro-pology). From this angle it is quite understandable that Girard should see Bataille as a mere romantic glamorising violence, and that he should want to present his own model as an anthropological meta-theory, explaining the different modes of expendi-ture envisioned by Bataille as just a bunch of illusory projections, produced by the mimetic violence.
influences (Durkheim and Kojève) which count for the several resemblances between the two theories are also the very points where they diverge.
Whereas Girard’s theory on sacred and sacrifice could be said to constitute the reverse image of the Durkheimian theory of religion, putting the impure sacred in the forefront but preserving the idea of the ‘productive’ (ritual) canalisation of affectivity as the basis of human culture, Bataille undermines the Durkheimian model by bring-ing in the phenomenological dimension of lived experience and by placbring-ing his con-stellation in a general perspective of unproductive expenditure, always leaving behind a surplus which cannot be canalised into (ritual) action.
On the other hand, Bataille and Girard both strive to deconstruct the Hegelian teleological conception of desire, fundamentally connected to the dialectic of con-sciousness, but again their approaches to the problem are different. Bataille seeks to mine the Hegelian logic of the self-conscious subject (constituted by recognition), by confronting it with the idea of an unproductive, idle negativity (desire which cannot be canalised into productive action), deconstructing its teleological movement so that it dissipates into nothing (‘en rien’ – see Bataille, 1973). The Girardian solution, by con-trast, is more akin to a classical dualism: the synthetic moment of the teleological movement (i.e. the mutual recognition) is simply abandoned and appropriation sub-stituted for representation (the latter being judged as a mere effect of the mimetic desire). The teleological concept of desire is destroyed by the same token – what comes in its stead is a biologically rooted ‘desiring machine’ freely revolving in its own dual-istic violence.
make it carry (i.e., explanation of the entire human culture and its various institu-tions, language included).
Whereas Girard’s theory offers us a clear-cut and simple causal model which can easily be applied to several (even modern) phenomena, the potential benefit of the Bataillean phenomenology of expenditure for social theory is less easy to pinpoint in a precise manner. Although Bataille aims at constructing a kind of universal history of the human culture, he does not build it upon any one ‘mechanism’ that could thereafter be applied to the interpretation of different sorts of empirical data. On one hand, he could be seen as theorising a problem which Girard, in his model, leaves com-pletely untouched: how is the sacred mediated on the individual level, how is it ‘inte-riorised’? On the other hand, Bataille opens up a larger structural question concern-ing not only the fate of affectivity in modern (or late modern) society, but also our means of theorising it on a social (or sociological) level: if negativity (or violence) is no longer interpreted in a functionalistmanner, as part of a closed (restricted) theoretical economy, how could we approach it sociologically? Although Bataille gives no straightforward answer, one might be tempted to look in the direction of some sort of phenomenology of modern affectivity.[22] In any case, it is clear that the ‘theoretical economy’ of this approach would be rather different than that of the Girardian ‘mechanics of desire’.
Notes
1. I have systematically used the French original sources, except for citations for which the existing English translations have been used whenever available.
2. By the term ‘affective economy’ I mean the way in which production, distribution, channelling and consumption of affective energy organises the very structure of society (in Freudian terms this could be called the ‘energetic’).
3. Personally, I find this very hard to believe; not only are the resemblances between the two theories a bit too striking to pass as a simple coincidence, but also the very idea of a French theorist who in the 1960s starts to concoct a new anthropological theory of the sacred without acquainting him-self with perhaps the most celebrated – French – theory ever written in the field is simply implau-sible. Girard has a certain tendency to conceal his own mimetic models, as we shall also see with Kojève and Bataille.
4. What should not be forgotten is, of course, that there is also another side of Durkheim’s theory which could be called ‘symbolic’ and which has to do with collective representations and beliefs. See for instance Tarot (2008a: 261–88).
from the fact that Girard presents it as something ‘that both produces and distorts history’ (Fleming, 2004: 176, n. 38), it does not follow that this mechanism would itself constitute an a-his-torical transcendent. At least such a conclusion is not possible without succumbing to precisely the sort of transcendental philosophy of history, which Girard – tirelessly stressing the scientific and non-metaphysical character of his own theory – wants to avoid at all costs.
6. In man’s case the first, quasi-automatic convergence of violence into one individual is a direct result of the logic of mimesis (or to put it in Girardian terms, the acquisitive mimesis is turned into an antagonistic mimesis, see Girard, 2007b: 734–35). As the mimetic violence accelerates, the choice of the adversary becomes increasingly arbitrary and also quicker and quicker, so that at any given moment anybody can become the object of universal animosity and fascination. Sooner or later, Girard argues, this movement inevitably culminates in a point where the entire community turns against one single individual, who, because of some arbitrary single feature, suddenly becomes the object of universal affective projection.
7. In a later book Girard has argued that his model differs from the Durkheimian ‘effervescence’ pre-cisely because, according to Girard, the turmoil already takes place in a ritual context, which makes it impossible to postulate it as the origin of culture (the origin of effervescence being, according to Girard, the mimetic rivalry, see Girard, 1994: 53). This statement rather nicely encapsulates the basic difference between the Girardian and the Durkheimian scenes: for Girard, the beginning is violent, for Durkheim it is not.
8. In this context Girard also criticises Durkheim for giving the sacred-profane dichotomy far too absolute a status.
9. This is where Girard seems to have backed off a little bit in his later books (see for instance Girard, 1994: 79–88).
10. Moreover, Bataille’s attitude towards science is a prioricritical. See Bataille (1970f: 21–24; 1970d: 62–63; 1970c: 525).
11. Bataille later completes this pre-war scheme (the theory of attraction and repulsion dates from the end of the 1930s) by the theory of expenditure (‘dépense’) which culminates in one of his major post-war works, La part maudite(1976a).
12. The same phenomenon is described by Jean Baudrillard in his book L’échange symbolique et la mort
(1976), although Baudrillard seems to associate the transcendence of death more with the birth of modern society (whereas in primitive societies dominated by what he calls ‘symbolic exchange’ death was regarded as a valuable partner of exchange, not a horrifying ‘otherness’, let alone a pure-ly biological or natural ‘end’ (see Baudrillard, 1976: 265–80).
13. ‘Sovereignty’ is a central idea in Bataille’s thought. He completely detaches the notion from its political connotations. Sovereignty has nothing to do with individual or political power; it is rather a mode of being or a virtuality, in which every individual partakes by virtue of his or her existence, but which nobody possesses (sovereignty being the opposite of a thing, see for instance Bataille, 1976c; 1979b: 287–316). Despite the importance of the notion in the present context (since it is pre-cisely sovereignty which can be said to question the ‘economy of death’ implicit in the logic of sac-rifice), I unfortunately cannot analyse this problematic in a more detailed manner here.
15. On the lectures of Kojève, see for instance Auffret (1990: 225–63) and Surya (1992: 229–33). 16. This is also what the psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian points out in his discussion with
Girard:
Desire becomes detached from the object and attaches itself to the model that is taken as an obstacle. All the phe-nomena you have described or pointed out come back to this single principle and can invariably be deduced from it in an almost a priorifashion. (Oughourlian quoted in Girard, 1987: 349; 2007b: 1112; see also 1987: 288–89; 2007b: 1045–46)
17. The translation is mine, since this paragraph is missing in the English translation of Girard’s book (which he has himself revised and modified), published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1977.
18. This is what makes Girard so charming for some and so annoying for others: he has a tendency to always put himself on the meta-level in relation to his critics and claim that not only does his the-ory offer a better understanding of our cultural mechanisms, but that in fact his opponents are, by the very act of opposing him, unwittingly caught in the play of the mimetic desire and actually aggravating it (e.g. Fleming, 2004: 45). This is where his argumentation greatly resembles the Baudrillardian theory of simulation.
19. Although Girard and Bataille both have very important theories concerning the fate of the sacred and the desire in modern society, I cannot unfortunately discuss them here, since this alone would be a topic for another article.
20. In a way both Girard and Bataille want to break out from the Hegelian dialectic of consciousness. The ‘self’ for Girard is in fact a mere convergence point ‘in an indeterminate field of mimetic desire […], which is constituted, at base, by its interactions with others’ (Fleming, 2004: 36). This is also the kernel of the Bataillian idea of ‘communication’: the ‘inner experience’ Bataille is talking about is not the experience of an individual subject, since in it both the subject and the object of ence are transgressed or deconstructed. This is why it is possible only in community, as an experi-ence of communication constituting its very foundation (on the Bataillean critic of the Hegelian subject, see also Nancy, 1986: 83–84).
21. On the relationship between Bataille, Kojève and Hegel, see Heinämäki (2008); on Bataille’s con-ception of negativity in relation to Kojève, see also Bau (2003).
22. See also Bataille: ‘Why should I not admit, in fact, that I have the chance to make a phenomenolo-gy and not a science of society?’ (1995a: 147).
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Tiina Arppe works as Academy Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland. She is a specialist in French social theory and has written about Rousseau, Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, Baudrillard and Girard among others. Her recent articles include ‘Rousseau, Durkheim et la constitution affective du social’ (Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines13, 2005) and ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentices and
the “Will to Figuration”: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Collège de Sociologie’ (
Theo-ry, Culture and Society26(4), 2009). She has also translated several French theorists into Finnish, including texts of Derrida, Bataille, Baudrillard, Kristeva and Bourdieu.
Ti i n a A r p p e
Academy Research Fellow Department of Sociology P.O. Box 16 (Snellmaninkatu 12) 00014 University of Helsinki Finland
