Bataille, Georges (1897–1962)

The French philosopher Georges Bataille briefly converted to Catholicism as a teenager and later trained as a medievalist, but he went on to engage with the transgressive writings of Marx, the Surrealists, Freud, Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, and the anthropology of archaic and primitive societies. He was a member of the Surrealists but did not get along with André Breton. In the 1920s and 1930s, he contributed articles to the anti-Stalinist Marxist journal La critique sociale and cofounded two review journals: the Surrealist Documents and the Nietzschean-inspired antimainstream Acéphale (Headless), with inquiries into archaic sacrificial cultures, Gnosticism, mythology, Christian mystics, madmen, Dionysius, sexuality, and [Page 121]death. He was a founding member of the influential Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939), an organization dedicated to retrieving “the sacred” for modern society. The biweekly lectures at the Collège were attended by ex-Surrealists, anthropologists, and sociologists, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Mauss, Michel Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexandre Kojève, and Pierre Klossowski. Bataille's own writings have inspired a later generation of French theorists: Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard.

Central to Bataille's passionate critique of modernity was his notion of ritual expenditure as a key form of nonproductive consumption, which has all but disappeared in our utilitarian and future-oriented modern life. These expenditures include religious festivals, massive rituals and sacrifices, competitive spectacles, lavish court luxuries and ceremonies, large nonproductive monastic communities, and giant monuments such as the pyramids and medieval cathedrals, which moderns consider wasteful. The prototype for these expenditures was the potlatch of Native Americans of the northwest coast, community feasts where wealth and property were willfully destroyed or squandered in exaggerated generosity, as described by Marcel Mauss. These expenditures allowed people to maintain a deep connection with the sacred realm of the gods and ancestors. Just as orgiastic sexual states of pleasure cannot be reduced to the teleology of reproduction, so also ritual expenditures do not merely fulfill the instrumental functions of providing food and shelter but also satisfy a human desire for profligate loss and destruction. They have also prevented these societies from transforming people into instruments or things, as found more commonly in modern secular societies, whether capitalist or communist, where workers spend much of their lives fulfilling capitalist or state production targets. Bataille's experience of the horrors of war as a soldier in the trenches of World War I informs his theory of the decline of ritual expenditures and the modern obsession with industrial productivism and military expenditures in his The Accursed Share (1989a). In closing off the joie de vivre of ritual profligacy, modernity condemns us to a single outlet for our destructive desires: the catastrophic destruction of modern warfare.

The Theory of Religion is a grand narrative of human religious history. Bataille begins with a fabulous account of the state of animality (the consciousness of a cow) or intimacy as one of immediacy, immanence, lack of identity or time, and nondifferentiation between the self and the world. What breaks up this originary monistic world is not language, as the Chinese Daoists would have it, but tool-use. Tool-use introduces an objectification process that differentiates the subject and object and the categories of the sacred (supreme beings) and the profane (tools and their products). Increasingly in human history, distinctions are drawn between humans and animals and between humans and supreme beings, whereas before there was a sense of continuity between humans and both animals and gods. With progressive tool-use, not only do animals become things for the use of humans, but humans themselves become objectified as things. The longing for a return to intimacy is then partially satisfied through effervescent religious rituals and festivals that refocus people on the present and indulge in an excess of material waste and loss. Whereas in archaic societies, production was subordinated to nonproductive destruction, the rise of institutionalized religions introduced the categories of morality and evil, where morality is rationally grounded in the real order of things and ostentatious destruction of wealth is condemned. However, it is the Protestant ethic that Bataille regards as the beginning of modernity's complete reduction to the reign of things. In Protestantism is found a religious rationalization for the marshaling of productive forces.

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