Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Violence Has Its Reasons. Girard and Bataille
Violence Has Its Reasons. Girard and Bataille
Violence Has Its Reasons. Girard and Bataille
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Michigan State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
Anthony D. Traylor
Assumption College, Worcester, Massachusetts
RITUALISTIC SACRIFICE
Nested within Violence and the Sacred1 is an isolated and brief allusion to
Georges Bataille whom Girard credits— despite the former’s predilection
for all things decadent—with having not overlooked the true nature of
prohibition as holding back the tide of violence and consequently
responsible for establishing and maintaining the social tranquility necessary
for the rise of civilization. Considering that both thinkers discern a deep
affinity between violence and the sacred, this remark furnishes us with an open
invitation to probe more deeply Bataille’s longstanding interest in religion,
specifically, his meditations on the transgression or suspension of prohibition
carried out, most paradigmatically, in ritualistic sacrifice and the sacred realm to
which such acts of transgression supposedly once granted us access. In the first
part of this article, I will attempt to demonstrate that Bataille’s analysis of
sacrifice may represent an important supplement—if not indeed an
alternative—to the Girardian thesis that the scapegoat mechanism effectively
solves the riddle concerning the goal of ritualistic slaughter. More specifically, a
confrontation with Bataille may reveal a dimension of violence and hence of the
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 21, 2014, pp. 131–156. ISSN 1075-7201.
© 2014 Michigan State University. All rights reserved. 131
sacred that is sought after for its own sake and not as a tactical reflex designed to
restore communal peace.
Girard’s scapegoat hypothesis depicts ritualistic sacrifice as the
restaging of a historically real event whereby a community unanimously
gathers around and rallies against an arbitrarily selected victim, upon whom
the sum total of societal agitation is concentrated, and who consequently
serves as the ill-fated target of the virulent and lethal hysteria of the
persecutors. The cathartic discharge proceeding from this collective
lynching is mistakenly attributed to some unforeseen benign aspect of the
victim who is posthumously credited with reconciling the once warring
members of society and as a result is treated to mythic deification. Thus, for
Girard, the experience of the sacred can be traced back to the chain of
events leading up to and culminating in the victim’s death. Ritualistic
sacrifice is nothing other than a reflexive and stylized reenactment of this
original singling out of a scapegoat. Accordingly, sacrificial violence can be
interpreted as the attempt to replicate the conditions proven by past
experience to be effective in generating communal harmony and renewal.
Conspicuous in Girard’s account here is the fact that the energy
released in the sacrificial act gets straightaway siphoned off and harnessed
for the sake of the collective good (peaceful reconciliation). This reading,
however, appears to ignore the possibility of a significance to the sacrificial
event itself, aside from any societal benefit arising in the wake of the
cathartic effect. To see exactly why Girard eschews this notion of sacrifice,
it may be instructive to consider the 1977 essay “Differentiation and
Reciprocity in Lévi-Strauss and Contemporary Theory,”2 where Girard
takes issue with the structuralist claim that ritual (unlike myth) embodies a
“perverse nostalgia for the immediate.” Rejecting a metaphysical dualism
that pits a realm of “undifferentiation” (that which ritual strives to access in
its quest for the “real”) against a realm of “differentiation” (the stuff of myth
and discursive thought), Girard highlights the fact that both ritual and myth
exhibit traits of differentiation as well as undifferentiation (e.g., baptismal
rites and flood myths). Girard is particularly troubled by what he sees as
structualism’s failure to account for how the realm of undifferentiated
immediacy gets “carved up” into the differences they so greatly prize.
Reluctant as he is to embrace this so-called undifferentiation, Lévi-Strauss is
inevitably drawn to the opposite end of the spectrum and becomes
entangled in a metaphysical/linguistic antirealism, a philosophic position
that, in Girard’s words, tends to degenerate into the kind of relativistic free-
for-all plaguing the contemporary intellectual scene. Crucial for Girard then
the role of a mediator, the sacrificial priest forces a temporary breach in the
self-enclosed circuit of utility and escorts the victim into a lost world of
irrational immediacy and animal intimacy. According to Bataille, the point
of sacrifice is not so much to put an end to the victim’s life, as it is to efface
its character as a thing of use. To render a being sacred is to single it out as
something essentially useless and arbitrary, as something to be generously
consumed or squandered. With the death of the victim, the exuberance of
life is allowed to flash up briefly and affirm itself in what Bataille chillingly
calls “the truth of [the] scream” or the “wonder-struck cry of life.”14 Before
being an offering to the gods, sacrificial death imparts the gift of vitality to
the victim at the very moment it is snatched away from its impoverished
existence as an object imprisoned in the profane network of utility.
Not only the victim, the participants in the sacrifice are also for a brief
span of time released into the euphoric indeterminateness of the moment.
Condemned everyday to the tedium of discontinuous existence, they must
bear the yoke of their separateness, of being cloistered from their fellows
(who share the same fate of being cut off from the world and others) as they
yearn to break free from this isolated state and grope beyond the limits of
their selfhood. Thus, for a discontinuous being, communication only
happens through the medium of violence, namely, through acts that rupture
the barriers separating one self-enclosed being from another.15 Only by
inflicting wounds can I force an opening in the near impervious integrity of
the other and expose his or her interior life in all of its dazzlingly immediacy.
To perpetrate violence is to submit to evil; yet, for Bataille, such evil is the
condition of the possibility for communication between beings that can no
longer endure the imprisonment of discontinuity.
If one can at this level meaningfully ascribe a goal to ritualistic
sacrifice—since what sacrifice aims at, according to Bataille, is that which
paradoxically stands altogether outside a teleological framework—it cannot be
that of setting into motion the string of events leading up to communal
harmony. Rather the urge to sacrifice signals a longing to revisit the seamless
depths of lost animality and hence a desire to violate the individuating
boundaries that segregate one from the other on the plane of discontinuity.
Contrary to Girard, Bataille stresses the essentially noninstrumental nature of
ritualistic sacrifice that disregards future gain in its immediate lust for violence. A
broader distinction could be drawn then between a self-interested malevolence
that subordinates itself to ulterior ends (e.g., wealth, ambition, or even peace)
and a kind of wickedness that recklessly abandons itself to capricious
destruction, even to the brink of self-ruin.16 It is precisely this more sinister
variety of evil pursued for its own sake that runs throughout Bataille’s reflections
on sacrificial violence and which may lead us to question whether the Girardian
reading of ritualistic sacrifice truly gets to the heart of the matter.
Now to address the problem of redifferentiation, we must first keep in
mind that ritual (as a human institution) is an event that takes place within
the profane world and must for this reason partially conform to the
community that regularly clears a space for it. A tension can be discerned
then between the goal of ritualistic sacrifice (access to the sacred) and the
utilitarian pressures exerted by the social body. Bataille suggests that the
festival is the resolution of this tension.17 Strictly speaking, there is no such
thing as unreserved transgression, since this would spell the utter demise of
the community. Beginning with the human and ending with the animal,
transgression always follows a downward slope. But this freefall is partially
buffered by the community that can tolerate transgression only so long as it
does not jeopardize its project of survival. It is here then that ritual displays
moments of differentiation, namely, at the point where the sacred is forced
to negotiate with the profane. Festival is therefore a salient example of what
Bataille calls an organized transgression18 whereby the disintegrating and
contagious forces that mark the sacred are made to adapt to the order and
rhythm of society. In this way, the turbulence of life is permitted expression
in a relatively self-contained fashion, instead of spiraling out of control and
ravaging the entire community.19 Hence, in the place of Girard’s scapegoat
who becomes the target of collective rage, we have Bataille’s accursed share,
the single victim whose meticulously orchestrated slaughter provides the
astonished participants with a nonlethal glimpse into the sacred.
The community does more than simply “tolerate” such threats to its
stability. It also reinvigorates itself by means of these repeated incursions
into the sacred in a way that differs essentially from that of the scapegoat
mechanism. Bataille shares a kind of strange (perhaps aberrant would be the
more apt term) respect for moral prohibition—a fact that Girard certainly
picks up on in his comment—not only because it sets the stage for
transgression, but for the reason that morality is always in danger of
becoming something stale and antiseptic if it does not stay on intimate
terms with evil, vigilantly mindful of the tumultuousness that characterizes
prehuman animal life.20 Ritual thus constitutes a scheduled reminder of the
darker side of existence and hence the need for the harsh restraint of prohibition.
To some degree, Girard is correct in claiming that undifferentiation is not
sought for its own sake but with a view toward redifferentiation (revivifying the
moral community). But from Bataille’s standpoint, violence can be deployed as
METAPHYSICAL AUTONOMY
last word on the matter. Accordingly, when Bataille advances the ideal of
sovereignty as a renunciation of any strategies that would preserve the self
within the limits of its discontinuous being, should we not be suspicious
that this is simply metaphysical desire up to its old tricks? If ritualistic
sacrifice (along with eroticism) as Bataille regularly insists, constitutes an
effective (albeit temporary) means of overcoming the self’s limitations, it
would stand to reason that Girard would indeed have the final say on the
ultimate meaning of desire (including the desire to sacrifice). It is in light of
this possibility that a return to his first work is therefore unavoidable if we
wish to settle this question.
Much would depend on what significance sovereignty has for Bataille
and whether it can survive Girard’s critique of metaphysical desire. Let me
therefore take up the question as it first gets formulated in the second
chapter of Deceit, Desire and the Novel (“Men Become Gods in the Eyes of
Each Other”) in the context of what Girard calls the “curse of subjectivity”
(or what I would like to refer to as the “plight of particularity”) and
modernity’s frantic, yet futile attempt to shake off this burden by embarking
on the project leading to divine-like self-sufficiency. Girard attributes this
plight to a “demand” or “false promise” originating from a source “outside”
of the self, namely, the modern promise of metaphysical autonomy, one
moreover incapable of being fulfilled and dogging us ever more relentlessly
as we falsely take others to have attained to that which somehow always
manages to elude us. Thus, the agony is only compounded insofar as we
either fail or refuse to universalize this experience to our fellow human
beings, in effect turning our ordeal into an essentially solitary one.
Girard’s account, however, remains somewhat undecided on the
precise origin of the curse. On the one hand, it is claimed that a “demand
arising from the self must be capable of being satisfied by the self” and so the
burden must stem from elsewhere (modernity’s false promise of
metaphysical autonomy in the wake of the death of God). On the other
hand, the curse seems to be just another name for “original sin,” something
that in former times (in the age of belief) all openly acknowledged as their
common plight. Whether we designate it as “subjectivity,” “particularity,”
“sin,” “finitude,” or “freedom,” such a curse seems to be the defining mark of
the human condition and not something that merely afflicts the modern
self. The decisive question, according to Girard, is: do we take refuge in the
universal (God, king, or country) or alternatively do we turn others into
substitute gods? The choice comes down then to vertical or deviated
transcendence, imitation of Christ or imitation of one’s neighbor. So, aside
from any so-called false promise and whatever additional burden it may
impose, the condition in which the self invariably finds itself is one that is
decidedly finite. The larger issue then is what to make of this particularized
self and the various strategies it is inclined to adopt in an effort to overcome
its finitude.
The remainder of Deceit, Desire and the Novel tracks the evolution of
mimetic desire along the axis of deviated transcendence, and it is precisely
here that we eventually stand a likely chance of running into Bataille.
According to Girard, as internal mediation traverses its ineluctable course, it
enters a phase of masochism that when carried to its logical extreme
expresses itself as a will to self-annihilation.27 Its underlying progression is
as follows. Given the self’s need to “feign indifference” and “hide” its
admiration from the model, it comes to disdain those who openly declare
their adoration and instead seeks out those who consistently scorn it. This
hostile attitude is evidence of the model’s divinity, and it is this element
with which the self is particularly fascinated and wishes to somehow
appropriate. It is significant that the model’s manifest indifference to others
is interpreted as an absence of desire and as such is taken to be a hallmark of
metaphysical self-sufficiency. What characterizes the masochist, therefore, is
the search for an invincible and inaccessible obstacle who will ruthlessly and
authoritatively pass judgment on the subject’s essential nothingness, such
that, circuitously, this truth will provide the self with the secret to
overcoming its nullity and at last of laying hold of metaphysical autonomy.
Suffering is never sought for its own sake, but is only endured in the hope of
some day entering the Promised Land. Accordingly, masochism (as an
inversion of Christian martyrdom) invests evil (the evil presumably
incarnated in the persecuting obstacle) with an aura of something
seductively omnipotent. As a result, the opposition between good and evil
steadily grows and eventually takes on cosmic proportions, with evil in
particular assuming the quality of something inherently sacred. The sadist,
like his counterpart the masochist, is equally caught up in this glorification
of evil insofar as the sadist sees in his victim the spectacle of his own
suffering. This reversal of “roles,” Girard perspicuously observes, constitutes
the intimate bond linking the torturer with his victim.
Girard’s analysis of masochism directly follows from his more general
thesis that mimetic desire is at bottom an attempt to “absorb the being of
the other” that in turn is grounded in “hatred of the self” and its curse of
particularity.28 In the penultimate chapter of Deceit, Desire and the Novel,29
this strategy of askesis (which the hero adopts) eventually morphs into a
and fear, the stuff of life, are only other names for desire. Thus, one rises to
the level of divinity (to pure autonomy) only when one strikes at the very
heart of desire; hence, the imperative to annihilate the self as desiring.
Paradoxically, it is then and only then, that we finally come to possess
the object of desire (self-sufficiency). Of course, despite all his cold
determination, Kirillov does not fully grasp the true nature of his endeavor,
namely, that it is merely the last remaining move in the game of
metaphysical desire and that he is only a pawn in this game. For animating
Kirillov’s entire Promethean project is the same prideful scorn for his own
particularity.32
Thus far, we have seen that in response to the plight of particularity
deviated transcendence naturally inclines in the direction of a nihilistic slide
toward death. I wish to now consider whether the notion of sovereignty,
which Bataille advances as a kind of privileged response to the problem of
the singular self, fits the scenario sketched throughout Deceit, Desire and the
Novel. In the preface to his 1943 work Inner Experience,33 Bataille lays down
the following axiom: “We have in fact only two certainties in this world—
that we are not everything and that we will die.” From out of an ocean of
possibility, the self enters the world as a chance union between two human
beings. The slightest departure from the course of events would have
delivered the self over to a fate of nonbeing on par with death. Existing in
place of me, in other words, would be the other. This “mad improbability” of
my existence makes me the “irreplaceable being which I am” and despite
any “empirical similarity with others” radically isolates me from them as well
as everything else in the world. Thus, the self is, as it were, suspended over
an “immense void” of “infinite improbability” and experiences itself as
“cruelly” cast out from the community of beings.34 The reader should have
little difficulty in recognizing this as an early version of what Bataille
eventually characterizes as the opposition between discontinuity and
continuity.
In the absence of God, the pursuit of metaphysical autonomy no doubt
represents a distinctly modern response to the self’s particularity. But does
this scenario so neatly fit a postmodern thinker like Bataille? We are not
everything, to be sure, and some day must die. Notwithstanding this
sobering truth, the improbable island called the self, with whatever relative
autonomy it can for the time being claim, embarks on the futile project of
identifying itself with the whole that by definition it is not: “At the same
time that it encloses itself in autonomy [the self] wants to become the
whole of transcendence [and thereby] surrenders to the desire to submit
the world to its autonomy.”35 Bataille is fully aware then of the temptation
metaphysical autonomy offers, but he is equally appreciative of the
essentially comic (or tragic) sight of the isolated self endeavoring to envelop
within its finite skin the sum total of reality. Looked at more closely,
autonomy really has not one but two senses: (1) selfhood or what Bataille
calls Ipse (oneself) and (2) the desire on the part of Ipse to become the
whole. An irresolvable conflict, however, ensues between these two senses of
autonomy. For the self to identify with the whole, it must negate the very
boundaries that demarcate the self as the singular being that it is. The self, in
other words, cannot become the whole without at the same time forfeiting its
autonomy in the first sense of the term. Such a project can only end in anguish,
in the comic/tragic spectacle of the “tiny particle” (which the self is) engaged in
the “ridiculous challenge” to encompass the immensity that surrounds it.
Bataille harbors no misconceptions then regarding the prospect of
achieving metaphysical autonomy. He is, however, acutely aware of how
human beings stubbornly refuse to renounce this project despite all of its
futility. In a way that strikingly prefigures Girard, Bataille depicts the child
as a kind of “satellite” orbiting the seemingly divine-like self-sufficiency of its
parents. As we detach from our parents, we find new “centers” (models) to
emulate insofar as they seem to wear the crown of self-sufficiency as they
relegate us to the “periphery” of our own insufficiency. This struggle to
“gain access to the universal” (the only thing that can thwart competition
between a multiplicity of insufficient beings) persists up to the point of
positing God as standing at the metaphysical summit.36 But this search for a
center is in the end nothing more than a fruitless attempt to attribute
metaphysical closure to some random “point,” when the truth is that
insufficiency pervades all individuated beings.37 Any such posturing on the part
of insufficient beings can, in principle, always be subverted by a laugh, a
slanderous word, doubt, a mocking gesture, or a revealing look of exhaustion on
the face of the other. For Bataille, metaphysical insufficiency is the truth of
human existence, for that matter the truth of every being, despite all of our vain
attempts to ignore this fact: including morality, snobbery, heroism, religion, the
quest for immortality, vanity, money, and especially in the modern age,
rationality and the realm of action, all of which Bataille considers mere
“narcotics” designed to numb the pain of our finitude.38
Now to refuse to invest in these strategies is precisely what Bataille
means by “inner experience,” namely, human existence lived in the full light
of its insufficiency coupled with a deliberate decision “to cease wanting to
be everything” which would henceforth be considered the ultimate “sin” of
UNDIFFERENTIATION RECONSIDERED
Girard sees it, is its refusal to dismiss prohibition (as well as ritual) as
inherently “irrational.” This ability to account for all three facets of religion
(myth, prohibition, and ritual) reopens the possibility of tackling the
problem of religion, unearthing the origins of humanity (the process of
hominization), and hence scientifically keeping alive the traditional
question concerning the essence of man.46 As we have seen, a similar realist
current runs throughout Bataille’s own work, despite the wide theoretical
gulf that appears to divide the two. Perhaps by returning to the problem of
cultural structures and differences (as erected on the back of prohibition
and ritual) and, in particular, the erosion of these structures and differences
in a world that has undergone a steady process of desacralization, the
distance separating the two thinkers can to some extent be diminished.
What I chiefly have in mind is the apocalyptic dimension of Girard’s
thought that begins to gain momentum in Things Hidden and fully ripens in
his latest work Battling to the End.47 But first, we need to examine more
closely the place of prohibition in the cultural order and why exactly it
serves, according to Girard, the vital purpose of keeping violence
temporarily at bay.
A recurrent motif that crops up in the Girardian corpus is the insistence
that cultural differentiation is responsible for channeling and therefore
managing desire as it flares up in the context of human relations that have
evolutionarily undergone an exponential increase in acquisitive mimesis,
namely, the inclination to appropriate what the other desires (food, land,
and sexual objects). As occasions for conflict and violence multiply,
prohibitions are set up to place distance between the subject and the
contested object as well as space between the various contenders
themselves in the form of social divisions and hierarchies. Such prohibitions
and hierarchical structures in archaic (religious) societies provide the
necessary brakes and barriers against an outbreak of reciprocal violence.
Societies tightly regulated by prohibition are thus pervaded by strategies of
avoidance as a means of warding off potential conflict over the desired
object. (Think, for instance, of the seemingly innocuous rules of etiquette
and how in the modern world they still provide a ready-made social
lubricant.) In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, this is the arrangement that
Girard refers to as external mediation (nonconflictual mimesis), and it is to
an impressive degree successful at keeping the social fabric from unraveling.
Eventually, however, the prohibitions wear thin, and there is the need to
ritualistically reproduce the mechanism that originally put them in force;
hence the cyclical and sacrificial character of archaic societies.
NOTES
1. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977), 222.
“equivocal” nature of the resolution then that betrays the fact that metaphysical desire
has not at all been renounced, but merely resituated on a higher plane under the guise of
group solidarity. Otherwise, how could we explain the cathartic satisfaction everyone
receives if the selfsame thirst for differentiation (autonomous self-assertion) were not on
some level still active? So, despite this shift in intentionality (in the phenomenological
sense of the term), metaphysical desire remains alive and well, which explains why it is
destined to revive time and again in its individuated, viral form. See Violence and the
Sacred, 79, 161, 247.
72. Ought we therefore accuse Girard of “fetishizing” violence, a vice he tends to denounce
in his “nihilistic contemporaries”? I think it safe to say that what Girard has in mind in
such cases mainly has to do with the conflict between doubles still tenaciously clinging to
their autonomy and not the disintegration of this autonomy.
73. Perhaps the “protracted” character of our current mimetic crisis will for this very reason
work to our advantage, affording us a “reprieve,” as it were, before we hasten toward the
abyss, as may have been the fate of any number of prehistoric communities (see Things
Hidden, 27) who for having traversed the mimetic crisis too rapidly were unable to resort
to the scapegoat mechanism (let alone embrace Christ-like reconciliation). Indeed, one
is tempted to say that this “slowing down” effect may be a key ingredient in the
providential plan.