Special Issue: Bataille and Heterology

Theory, Culture & Society

2018, Vol. 35(4–5) 93–113
Heterology, ! The Author(s) 2017
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Transcendence and the sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0263276416636200

Sacred: On Bataille journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

and Levinas
John Lechte
Macquarie University

Abstract
This article examines the issues surrounding transcendence, the Other and base
materialism in relation to Georges Bataille’s heterology and Emmanuel Levinas’s
notion of the face of the Other as infinity and transcendence. The article concludes
that there is no facet of human existence – including work and the economy – which
is not touched by transcendence, and that the idea that there are societies based in
subsistence and in nothing but a ‘struggle for existence’ is a prejudice of modernity.

Keywords
Agamben, Bataille, Levinas, life, other, sacred, transcendence

Heterology is the science of the heterogeneous. That is to say, the

science of the excluded part (or at the very least of the mode of
exclusion that creates this part). (Bataille, 2018)

The face . . . escapes representation; it is the very collapse of phe-

nomenality. (Levinas, 1998: 88)

Transcendence is passing over to being’s other. (Levinas, 1998: 3)

If, as I assume to be the case, bare life has an ever increasing hold on life
on the planet, the question is to know whether Bataille’s work also suc-
cumbs to its determining influence. Given that bare life is absolutely
devoid of transcendence – at least according to the meaning I attribute
to it – how does Bataille’s theory of the sacred measure up in this regard?

Corresponding author: John Lechte. Email: john.lechte@mq.edu.au

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
94 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

Indeed, with respect to the theme of heterology, what kind of ‘other’ does
Bataille’s sacred harbor, and can it be at all compared to the Other as
delineated in Emmanuel Levinas’s thought?
The term bare life comes of course from the work of Giorgio Agamben
and is most extensively elaborated in his much talked about and contro-
versial book, Homo Sacer (1998). There, we see that the figure of homo
sacer, or ‘sacred man’, is used to highlight the extreme volatility of the
term ‘sacred’. Instead of being a pure, transcendent figure whose life
would be venerated, homo sacer is one who can be killed, but not sacri-
ficed by anyone without this being a murder or any form of homicide. It
is as though, rather than being pure, homo sacrer is absolutely vile – so
vile that this figure becomes equivalent to the non-human within the
human. Or better: homo sacer is the human that is non-human (and so
can be killed) within the human. Whether or not the Roman textual
evidence upon which Agamben claims to rely truly shows that such a
figure actually existed as the basis of Roman law constitutes one of the
controversial aspects of Agamben’s work (see Fitzpatrick, 2001). Roman
law aside, however, it seems clear that the force of argument resides in
the notion of the sacred’s extreme ambivalence: at one moment the
sacred entity is pure and to be venerated; at another, it is inseparable
from violence and the lowest of the low – sacred, yet low. Bataille’s
reference to spit comes to mind. Dirt and the sacred are thus not foreign
to each other.
To confirm his point, Agamben refers both to Benveniste’s entry on
the sacred in his Indo-European Language and Society (1973) and to
ethnographic data on the nature of the sacred in non-European cul-
tures, particularly as presented by the 19th-century anthropologist
Robertson-Smith. Thus, for Benveniste, as for Robertson-Smith, the
sacred is entirely paradoxical, evoking ambivalent meanings and often
composed of heterogeneous elements. What at one time can be clean
and subject to a taboo can at another be unclean and escape any taboo.
Thus the nature of the thing is not what makes it sacred; rather, the
sacred is in the thing’s location or in its relation to other things. For his
part, Benveniste indicates that the Latin origin of the word ‘sacred’
refers both to what is ‘consecrated to god and affected with ineradicable
pollution, august and accursed, worthy of veneration and evoking
horror’ (1973: 452).
Consequently, Agamben is quick to show that to think that by desig-
nating something as sacred one thereby ensures its worthy and venerable
character is to be quite mistaken. For the sacred is well and truly a
double-edged sword. This is what people need to keep firmly in mind
when referring to the sacredness of human life (e.g. in relation to human
rights), where the mere fact of human life – of life as bare life – sup-
posedly equals sacred life. Indeed, sacred life can quickly turn into the
bare life of homo sacer. ‘The sacredness of life’, says Agamben, ‘which is
Lechte 95

invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sov-

ereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both life’s subjection
to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure to the relation of
abandonment’ (1998: 83). Stateless people can be the subjects of aban-
donment in this sense.
I have allowed Agamben to set the scene in addressing Bataille’s
approach to the sacred because I want to show the significance of the
element of bare life in Bataille’s heterology. Heterology, one would think,
is just what is geared to make the ambivalence of bare life apparent. For
if it is true that, currently, power makes sacred life its plaything, reducing
it to bare life (stateless people, politically speaking, have nothing but
their humanness to fall back on), I want to argue that, equally, there is
no bare life that is not at the same time touched by transcendence.
Before considering bare life in Bataille’s theory of the sacred, it is
worth recalling that at the beginning of Homo Sacer, Agamben sets
out what he sees as Aristotle’s classification of life as zoe,  or what
Agamben designates as bare life – life evocative of biological or ‘natural’
life – and life as bios, qualified life, or life as a form or way of life,
characteristic of political existence (1998: 1). Despite Agamben having
been criticized, notably by Debreuil (2006), Derrida (2008) and Finlayson
(2010), for his simplistic interpretation of these two terms in Aristotle, the
distinction I want to go with is that of bare life as mere aliveness as
opposed to life as a way of life. Every way of life is to a certain extent
transcendent. Thus, I want to argue that there is no distinctly bare life
totally without transcendence and that all life – or all human life – is a
way of life (animal life is indeed relevant here, but it is a theme I cannot
address in detail in this essay – suffice it to say that I support the idea of a
form of indistinction between humans and animals; see Calarco, 2015).
My intention is to show how Bataille’s approach to the sacred relates to a
form or way of life and the extent to which this sacred remains under the
influence of bare life and is thus without transcendence.
Prior to engaging with Bataille on the sacred as a way of revealing the
role of bare life, it is worth noting Agamben’s view that what Bataille is
‘attempting to think’ is ‘the very bare life (or sacred life) that, in the
relation of ban, constitutes the immediate referent of sovereignty’
(Agamben, 1998: 112). The problem is that, according to Agamben,
Bataille makes this link between sovereignty and the sacred ‘unknow-
ingly’ because in fact he has a fairly conventional view of the sacred as
inscribed in the prestige of the body that can be sacrificed, as opposed to
the body of homo sacer, which cannot be. In short, ‘the conceptual appar-
atus of sacrifice and eroticism’ cannot grasp ‘the bare life of homo sacer’
(1998: 113).
Bataille explicitly addresses the theme of the sacred in terms of imma-
nence and transcendence in his Theory of Religion (1994). The life of the
animal (or of animals) is exemplary of immanence, given that an animal
96 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

‘is in the world like water in water’ (1994: 24). The immanence of animal
life returns for the human at the level of intimacy. Originally, human life
probably approximated animal life, and was thus dominated by imma-
nence rather than transcendence. We could also say that the time when
human and animal life coincided was also understood as the time of bare
life as a struggle for survival, as a battle between the ‘eater and the eaten’
(1994: 17).
The full impact of the sacred is revealed in relation to sacrifice and the
festival. If the principle of sacrifice is destruction, it is essentially the
destruction of utility, which, in Bataille’s terms, is also the destruction
of the profane world; for the latter arises on the back of utility. With
sacrifice the sacrificer becomes separated from the world of things and
there is, ironically, a return to continuity, immanence and the intimacy
of the divine world (which begins to resemble the animal world).
Identification, anguish and intimacy come together at the moment of
sacrifice and the sacrificed is restored to a moment of lost immanence.
‘But’, says Bataille, ‘if man surrendered unreservedly to immanence, he
would fall short of humanity; he would achieve it only to lose it and
eventually life would return to the unconscious intimacy of animals’
(1994: 53). The festival ‘drowns everything in immanence’ and thus
needs to be controlled.
Clearly, we have here a sacred world shrouded in immanence, whereas
the profane world exhibits a certain transcendence: ‘the profane world’,
Bataille confirms, ‘is predicated on the transcendence of the object’ (1994:
71). The object appears only in the profane world, the world of
consciousness.

A High and a Low Sacred?

For Denis Hollier, referring to Bataille’s early work, the sacred ‘is itself
split into a high sacred and a low sacred: the low sacred is produced by
scatology (the bit [sic] toe, base materialism, low social strata), whereas
the high sacred is only the ideal image that the profane projects of itself’
(Hollier, 1989: 132; emphasis in original).1 The low sacred is, in part, a
weapon in Bataille’s polemic with Breton. As such, it is set to oppose any
idealist, abstract or ontological approach to materialism, where matter is
not to be thought of as the ‘thing-in-itself’, as Bataille says in ‘Base
Materialism and Gnosticism’ (1986: 49). Notable here is the link between
the search for knowledge (whether or not this be self-knowledge) in
Gnosticism (cf. Gk, ‘gnosis’ ¼ knowledge) and the materialism that
Bataille is anxious to promote. This is yet to become the ‘non-knowledge’
of Bataille’s philosophy and so still evokes transcendence. In all his
efforts to valorize, in one way or another, the lowest of the low, might
there not be a clear modicum of transcendence? The answer is yes, even if
only by virtue of the action of ‘valorizing’ itself. But there would also be a
Lechte 97

transcendent quality if the sacred is as ambivalent as Agamben has

noted. On this basis, there is nothing so low that it cannot be sacred.
Conversely, what is elevated often hides a hideous face of baseness and
violence.
On the face of it, then, Bataille’s ‘Documents’ period (1929–30), where
lowness is valorized, seems to exhibit a different approach to the sacred
than that found in Theory of Religion. On the other hand, one is pulled
up short by a footnote that, like the passage cited above in note 1, points
precisely to the ambivalent nature of the sacred. The note occurs in the
essay (the full tittle is significant, as it evokes the polemic with surreal-
ism), ‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade (An Open Letter to my
Comrades)’, and refers to heterology as the ‘science of what is completely
other’ (Bataille, 1986: 102, n 2). In speculating that the term ‘agiology
would perhaps be more precise’, Bataille points out that agio, like sacer,
has the double meaning of ‘soiled as well as holy’ (1986: 102, n 22), only to
opt, under the circumstances, for scatology as a more appropriate syno-
nym for heterology. All of which suggests that Bataille wants to hold
onto the autonomy of a ‘base materialism’, a materialism without
transcendence.

Heterology, the Sacred and the ‘Excluded Part’

Although not explicitly related to the sacred, there are, in Bataille’s art-
icles in Documents, examples which evoke the nothingness (ne´ant) of
what are effectively non-objects. These non-objects without definite
form become, for that very reason, abject. Examples would include:
the ‘formless’ itself, exemplified by, amongst other things, ‘spit’ or
saliva, sperm, blood or urine; then there is dust, along with random or
arbitrary formations, like people in queues, or people walking across a
concourse (matter (people) out of place).3 If we add to this examples such
as ‘the big toe’, where the border of the body is evoked, activities, such as
‘shaving, tidying-up, cutting one’s nails’,4 we have a series of things
which become the basis of the sacred as ambivalence. For the sacred,
banality, materiality and arbitrariness are no obstacle, as it were, to a
certain consecration, or a making sacred of such objects. On this basis,
even a base materialism will not escape the path to transcendence.
While it is true that the ambivalence of the sacred has difficulty in
being accepted into a Western and European vision – while, for example,
saliva or nail clippings might, in certain non-Western societies, be ritually
excluded from the socio-cultural world and thus still remain in it in a
sense – it is a matter, in the West, not just of excluding but of attempting
to entirely eliminate the objects in question so that they cease to have any
existence or meaning. Another way of putting this, one which resonates
with Levinas’s notion of transcendence, is to say that the attempted
exclusion of the ambivalence of the sacred from Western culture
98 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

corresponds to the exclusion of the other tout court. Otherness as such

can now be understood as that which is unable to enter into the realm of
Western culture as sacred. Would it be this and not the arbitrary exclu-
sions connected to a ‘base materialism’ that heterology is called upon to
make manifest? This question remains constantly at large as we venture
to address those aspects of Bataille’s thought that evoke the issue of
transcendence, an issue that has in the past seemed to be what Bataille
had set himself against – at least when it was a question of materialism.
The invocation of the myth of Icarus serves as the confirmation of this.
Consequently, it is important to examine closely both materialism and
the notion of the ‘act of exclusion’ as these connect with Bataille’s con-
cept of community as the ‘union of those who have no community’ – or
again, as the union of those amongst whom there is only a negative
relation. This is a kind of non-group, thoroughly heterogeneous to all
forms of society, as conventionally understood, and even to the human
(recall Agamben’s homo sacer). Could such a union of those without a
community be constituted by the ambivalence of the sacred, and does
Bataille’s work make it any easier to break down such an exclusion, or
does it, on the contrary, confirm it? This is what remains to be seen.
Heterology, then, as the ‘science of the excluded part’,5 points to a
domain that is entirely other and foreign to identity and to the order of
the Same. More literally, though, heterology is the discourse on the other
(from the Gk, heteros ¼ other). And it is this which requires scrutiny and
interpretation. Accordingly, the following is a key passage: ‘L’he´te´rologie
recevant ainsi au de´but une de´finition minimum – en tant que science de ce
qui apparaıˆt tout autre’ (translated in this volume as: ‘Heterology receives
therefore from the start a minimum definition – as the knowledge of what
appears as completely other’).6 In his own way, Levinas will see this
‘completely other’, or others, as the absolute other (Autrui) – perhaps
ironically, given Bataille’s materialist orientation – as the way to the
Infinite, to transcendence and morality.
Unlike Bataille, Levinas would consider the excluded part (excluded
from the Same) as entirely beyond the reach of any science or philoso-
phy. Would this imply that Bataille was overly optimistic in thinking that
the excluded part could be an object of science, as the term, hetero-logy
implies – despite the precautions he takes in pointing out that, strictly
speaking, a science can deal with only what is homogeneous? Or is it that
Levinas underestimates the power of materiality when it comes to the
sacred and the absolute other? Is it not true that, despite the connotations
of the term, heterology (its evocation of difference, for example) in
Bataille’s strategy is more that of recuperation (that is, ultimately, of
inclusion) within the Same than it is a path to gaining access to the
excluded part as radical difference? This is suggested by Bataille’s failure
to carry through the implication that heterology is as riven with ambiva-
lence as the sacred it seeks to make extant. In other words, heterology is
Lechte 99

inherently unstable and unsusceptible to being lashed to the mast of

conventional science. Bataille knows this, but seems bent on creating a
new science just the same, one that would be distinguished more by the
object it seeks to know than by any scientific method. Or might it be that,
through his approach, Bataille stretches the resources of language to
their limit and so reveals its underside – its excluded part as the practice
or performance (cf. performative) of language?7 As a way of responding
to these questions, we consider some aspects of Bataille’s approach to the
theme of the human and bare life.

Heterology and Bare Life

It is important to recall again that the idea that we are dealing with an
essentially materialist philosophy might be the result of a superficial
reading of Bataille’s encounter with surrealism, an encounter which
appears to be based on the participation of Bataille in the ‘idealist-mate-
rialist’ debate, and which would see him take up the cudgels for a radical
base materialism, as opposed to the putatively Icarian stance of Breton
and those of the surrealist entourage closest to him. To take this at face
value, however, would imply reducing the issue of materialism and the
sacred to an ideological battle when, ultimately, it is anything but this.8
Within the ideological interpretation, Bataille would stand for the asser-
tion of a base materialism incarnate in the objects of a scatology (‘ord-
ures’ – faeces, urine, sperm, dirt) that surrealism represses, but which
evokes an essential truth about the world. The difficulty is that, like
the objects of heterology, scatological objects still signify. This means
that there is transcendence even in the midst of this base materialism.
But, in any case, it is a matter of determining whether repression of the
scatological object in modernity is what explains the attraction of base
materialism, or whether the latter is instead an evocation of the ambiva-
lence of the sacred that is the subject of exclusion, one constitutive of the
very condition of the possibility of modernity.9 The thesis defended here
is that this exclusion is central to (the constitution of) modernity and
results in the opposition not just between the sacred and the profane, but
more profoundly, between bare life – which would be assimilated in base
materialism – and life as transcendent, as based in the Other as Infinity
and signification, to use Levinas’s terminology. Here, bare life becomes
the means of dividing the world into – as has been said – the people and
culture of a non-ambivalent sacred and those for whom life lacks any
transcendence – those who, in the recent past, have been defined as living
nothing but a subsistence existence, an existence of pure utility in the
‘struggle for existence’, to use Darwin’s phrase. Does Bataille’s thought
contribute to this division, formative of modernity, or does he, perhaps
despite appearances, found a kind of ‘transcendental empiricism’.10
100 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

Again, with respect to bare life, if we accept, with Gilbert Simondon,

that Descartes’s view is determinate, we can say that the very division
between animal and human is also foundational as far as modernity is
concerned. Even though the division between animality and humanity
was far from radical in ancient Greece and Rome, by the time of
Descartes animals are machines or automata and possess neither intelli-
gence nor reason nor even instinct. This is an animality that is essentially
biological and it becomes equivalent to bare life as mechanical life.
Animals are simply programmed to behave in certain ways and cannot
modify such behaviour because they lack the faculty for thinking (see
Simondon, 2011: 73–7). Here, bare life means: absolutely bereft of tran-
scendence – absolutely reduced to a thing without significance that
cannot be sacrificed.11 Thus, when reduced to bare life in modernity
(or is it by modernity?), the human is also reduced to animality as
the satisfaction or otherwise of (what are called) basic biological or
‘natural’ needs.
Bataille’s numismatic studies are also significant for understanding his
approach to the human-animal distinction. There are two important rea-
sons for this. Firstly, these studies raise the question of the relation of the
human to the animal and vice versa. Or rather, the medals of interest to
Bataille are those fabricated at a time when a clear division between
human and animal was yet to be firmly established. This also implies
that the distinction between ‘necessity’ (satisfaction of needs) and ‘free-
dom’, or between the restricted and general economy, had yet to be
established. As Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield (2012) has noted, there is
a distinction that can be observed between Bataille’s early writing featur-
ing animals in the surrealist-inspired Documents and the more abstract
animal (or animality) in his later writings, such as Theory of Religion
(1994) and The Tears of Eros (1990a). Certainly, in saying that sacrifice
occurs apart from animal needs, Bataille opens the way for sacrificial
death to become transcendent. However, Bataille’s view of the human as
such is not reducible to sacrifice, but includes so called ‘animal needs’
(Bataille, 1990b: 25), so that, to this extent, there is in Bataille – apart
from the animal as immanence in relation to the sacred – a conventional,
Enlightenment understanding of the human, where, as we have seen, bare
life is set apart from a way of life. Bataille does not, in effect, take account
of his own insight that human destiny is tragic (Bataille, 1970b: 239)
because played out in an awareness of death, and that this necessarily
encompasses all aspects of life.
If, in the end, heterology’s task is to bring to the fore ‘animal needs’ as
made manifest in the human by scatology – if ‘animal needs’ are the
excluded part par excellence – this implies that, indeed, bare life is the
excluded part. And, to be sure, bare life is the excluded part; but bare life
does not exist in the sense that all human life is a way of life. This is why,
as has been shown (see Lechte and Newman, 2013), bare life is an
Lechte 101

instrument of power and not an instance of the human qua human’s

existence. Heterology thus pivots around two types of exclusion: the
first, as we saw earlier, is based around the ambivalence of the sacred,
where the abject, as incarnate in ambivalent threshold states, is ritually
kept at bay, and the second is based around so-called animal needs and
would include the need for food, shelter, reproduction, and the evacu-
ation of waste, including, most of all, human waste. Here, the notion
dominant in modernity, but apparently deriving from Aristotle, that cul-
ture and freedom are only possible after basic needs have been satisfied
provides the precondition for the prevalence of bare life. In his effort to
bring into focus the elements of base materialism, Bataille brings bare life
into presence – that is, he shows it to be part of culture and thus to have a
degree of transcendence. Heterology would, on this basis, break with the
notion of repression found in Freud. On this basis, too, the abject would
cease to be the object of an absolute exclusion and would become instead
part of a discursive formation. In other words, there is nothing that is
absolutely abject.

Death, Anguish and Sacrifice

The theme of death as sacrifice in relation to Bataille’s notion of the
general economy and difference is no doubt the most difficult and sensi-
tive part of the relation between the human and transcendence. For it
raises the question, with regard to transcendence, as to whether there can
be any form of human death that, for Bataille, is not, in some sense,
sacrificial. In other words, while Heidegger distinguishes, more or less
without a backward glance, between ‘everyday dying’ and ‘being-for-
death’, and while Agamben seems to agree that the original homo sacer
was killed as bare life and not sacrificed, and while, more poignantly,
there is a strong feeling of revulsion in referring to death in the Nazi
camps of ‘extermination’ as sacrificial, we have to try to go still further
than has been done in establishing just how bare life works in the play of
power. For if one concedes that there are instances where bare life is
objectively true, how is it then possible to support a notion of the essen-
tial transcendence of the human? Indeed, it might mean that a huge
concession has to be made to the ‘necessity-freedom’12 thesis and the
consequent recognition that there is bare human life – that there is
such a thing as ‘perishing’, which even the human can fall into, and
there is also human sacrificial death, even if its underside is
extermination.
I have suggested (Lechte, 1998) that Bataille makes an innovation to
Heidegger on death. For, while Heidegger argues that we cannot experi-
ence the death of another, and that no one can die in our place, Bataille
claims that the victim in death, or in sacrifice, does not experience death
as death. Only the one who does not die can have an experience of death
102 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

(to the extent that any experience of death is possible). Consequently, it is

less the case of an identification with the victim than it is the actual
experience of the other’s death. For the only experience of death possible
is captured in the experience of the one who does not die. While the
other’s death can never be my death, my experience of (the other’s)
death is an essential experience of death. This is death, in Bataille’s
sense, as immanence, as communication. Be this as it may, Bataille’s
phrase, ‘joy before [one’s own] death’, anguish before the death of
another (the anguish of the sacrificer), evokes the experience of death
as a mode of the ‘present-at-hand’ in Heidegger’s sense. Indeed, it is the
present which becomes privileged by anguish as opposed to the future
evoked by Heidegger’s notion of anxiety (Angst). As a result, the essential
immanence of communication in Bataille is opposed to Heidegger’s more
transcendent notion of anxiety.
We can note, however, that aspects which take Bataille’s approach to
death beyond the immanent moment are, firstly, that sacrifice (source of
anguish) requires the field of the sacred for it to have meaning and for its
effect to emerge. It is, then, mediated, not immediate, as it would be as
the pure ‘present-at-hand’. As such, anguish becomes revelatory of the
sacred as an existential structure in the world. Secondly, death, according
to Bataille, reveals, as we have already noted, the human’s essentially
tragic destiny (Bataille, 1970b: 239). The human becomes that being for
whom death as such, and not simply individual dying, is the basis of a
way of life that is lived, a point evocative of Heidegger’s ‘being-towards-
death’. In this sense, the tragedy of human death – the human whose
destiny is its finitude – would transcend a materialist explanation of the
human. Death for Bataille is not reducible to biological death, as Paul
Hegarty (2000: 177) notes. What, then, would life be exactly? Could the
life not reducible to biological life be a way of life – or the love and
enjoyment of life, as Levinas proposes (see below)? Might it not be in
this context that life is never reducible to bare life? And this has impli-
cations for any materialist approach that would transform all entities
into (material) objects – entities such as the human body, for example.
If, according to Bataille, the spectator in sacrifice identifies with the
victim, and so, in a sense, becomes the victim, the latter would cease to be
‘other’, would thus cease to be the one sacrificed. This is the paradox
produced by (the notion of) identification. What of anguish? Is anguish
aroused because I put myself in the place of the other to the point once
again of becoming the other? But then, as with death, do I become
anguished because it is me there who dies or who is at the point of
death and not the other? Is it ever possible, in fact, to do justice to the
other, whatever the circumstances might be? Levinas has a response to
such a question, as we shall see. But what of Bataille and heterology?
Does an actual or potential heterology really have the resources to do
justice to the other?
Lechte 103

Identification, Communication, the Other

Jeremy Biles, in a reading of Bataille, says: ‘identification is part and
parcel of what Bataille calls a “counter operation”, an operation opposed
to the dominant mode or attitude of thinking associated both with
Hegelian recognition and discursive thought’ (Biles, 2007: 5). But is iden-
tification really ‘opposed to the dominant mode or attitude of thinking’?
There are grounds for arguing that it is not if one thinks of identification
as empathy. In this regard, Biles puts forward the orthodox view: iden-
tification becomes ‘empathetic merging’ (2007: 5). What is avoided, how-
ever, is the question of whether I become radically other in such
identification or merging, or whether I assimilate the other to myself,
so that it is not that ‘I is another’, but that ‘the other is me’. As a
result, we would now be looking to find in Bataille’s writing the place
where identification is undermined – where, indeed, there is a profound
disturbance in the being of the human, where, in place of experience as
interiority, there is a radical exteriorization of experience. In Levinas, this
is where finitude encounters infinity.
However, by discovering exteriority in Bataille’s thought we effectively
turn him into a thinker of the ethical, just the opposite of what he wants to
say about himself and what others find in his thought. At the very least
such thought would harbor Nietzsche’s ambivalence regarding morality.
But this is to be on the wrong course. It is now time to move elsewhere and
off the well-worn path of a Bataille who forces us to confront so-called
unsavoury truths about ourselves (about the human, writ large), just as
Darwin deflated the 19th-century romantic view of the human as next to
the angels and substituted the now clichéd notion of a human nature
evolved from apes in the ‘struggle for existence’. It is here, in this context
most of all, no doubt, that the possibility of Bataille’s transcendental
materialism (echoing Deleuzes’s transcendental empiricism) needs to be
recalled. We know, for one thing, as has been mentioned above, that
Bataille’s encounter with death clearly evokes an element of transcend-
ence. We also know that Bataille saw language as pivotal in relation to the
human qua human. Language is a means of exteriorization. This is clearly
encapsulated in various passages of Inner Experience. Indeed, even at a
minimal level, inner experience is an externalization in the sense that it is a
communication that erases the borders between self and other. The ques-
tion is: is this an erasure of borders in favor of a radical otherness, or is it
instead that the other becomes the self? The way that Bataille presents the
case in Erotism suggests that a previously separate being is, through com-
munication, united with another in oneness, so that separation gives way
to total union – or to fusion. This is incompatible with Levinas’s position.
Thus, it is stated in Otherwise than Being that: ‘I am not a transubstanti-
ation, a changing from one substance into another. I do not shut myself up
in another identity. I do not fuse with anything’ (Levinas, 1998: 14;
104 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

emphasis added). By contrast, Inner Experience emphasizes fusion:

‘Experience attains in the end the fusion of object and subject’ (Bataille,
1988a: 9; emphasis added). Again: ‘“Oneself” is not the subject isolating
itself from the world, but a place of communication, of fusion of the sub-
ject and the object’ (1988a: 9; emphasis added.) Even if ipse (the enduring
I/self) is not a project (Inner Experience is a treatise against the project; cf.
Bataille, 1988a: 46) but the ‘losing’ of oneself in anguish and communi-
cation, there is, nonetheless, a desire to remain ipse – a matter, then, of
losing oneself, and still experiencing being oneself. Rapture captures the
essence of the situation: rapture ‘becomes my rapture, a rapture which I
ipse possess’ (1988a: 53; emphasis in original). All of which goes to suggest
that loss of self is never absolute, that there is always a residue that keeps
otherness as radical difference at bay.
Is what has just been said here not incompatible with any transcend-
ence and in favour of a radical immanence? Such would indeed appear to
be the case, so that ‘communication’ would ultimately consummate a
vertiginous adventure of the self in what would be its effective erasure
of the other. How a heterology that proclaims its allegiance to hetero-
geneity and otherness could operate in such circumstances can only be
wondered at. It might of course be that for Bataille otherness can never
truly pertain to the human, that the human is, above all, an identity and
an essence (in being), and that true otherness is irreducibly material in the
basest sense. Yet, inner experience is a ‘non-knowledge’ – an ‘ecstasy’ –
with no other end than itself; this would supposedly make possible access
to another’s interiority through dramatization and a transgression of
boundaries. At the same time inner experience is a unity that makes it
(a form of) communication (Bataille, 1988a: 13).
In Le Coupable (1944; Eng. trans. 1988b; second volume of Somme
Athe´ologique), Bataille writes: ‘I say: communication is a sin. But the
opposite is evident! Only egoism would be a sin!’ (1988b: 66; trans.
modified). Perhaps more important than the sentiment expressed here
is Bataille’s terminology: communication, sin, ego. As we will see, these
would confirm, in Levinas’s terminology, the notion of interiority, which
in turn calls up essence, being, the Same. This introduces the question as
to whether or not ‘expe´rience inte´rieure’ (inner experience) is inscribed in
the order of the Same to the exclusion of the other. Indeed, to what
extent does otherness intrude into Bataille’s expe´rience inte´rieure? To
what extent can it give access to exteriority? Such questions provide
the backdrop to a consideration of Levinas’s philosophy, which is an
engagement with the Other.

Levinas and the Other

For Levinas – as is now well known – the Other is the other’s face in the
face-to-face encounter, a face of transcendence touching on infinity.
Lechte 105

The face, like the Other as Autrui (other people), cannot therefore be
reduced to its plastic, phenomenal or empirical aspect; indeed, it cannot
be thematized, objectified, or reduced to the ‘said’. Even though all of
these things are not possible, it is still almost impossible not to think that,
in invoking the face as ‘face’ – that is, as an entity in discourse – Levinas
is thematizing and objectifying it, making it the subject of a version of the
‘said’. Do we, then, read Levinas against himself? But how would this be
done, given that the motivation for doing so derives from the Levinasian
said itself? Such a problem is similar, as our discussion has shown, to that
of Bataille’s heterology, given that heterology is the discourse of that
about which there can be no discourse, the science of the object which
can never appear as an object. Both Levinas and Bataille, as a result,
write of that about which it is impossible to write; they think that about
which it is impossible to think. In neither case does their discourse claim
to be itself a sign of what cannot be signified. And yet, it seems that this is
what we must understand to be the case, at least in part.
The approach that we must take now is to examine in greater detail
just how the Other appears in Levinas’s thought. We know that the
Other – absolute other – is the face as transcendence and infinity. We
know that the face cannot be represented or imaged in any way, that the
face is not the face of perception but precedes perception. Nor, strictly
speaking, can the face of the Other – like infinity – be conceptualized.
The face as the face of the Other is a radical exteriority. The ego is an
interiority and is part of the order of the Same. There is always the
danger that the face of the Other, of exteriority, will become caught up
in the order of the Same and cease to be the gift that it is. It risks
becoming part of a totality. By contrast, the human is a plurality of
separated beings that can never be totalized. As a plurality of social
relations, the human can never be totalized. However, all of this has in
fact happened, says Levinas; this is why, in the first of his truly major
works, Levinas claims that ‘Western philosophy has most often been an
ontology: a reduction of the other to the same by interpretation of a
middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being’
(Levinas, 2012: 43). In sum: ‘Philosophy is an egology’ (2012: 44).
Most of all, for our purposes in relation to Bataille and heterology, the
face, as the face of the Other, is also the beginning of ethics as transcend-
ence: ‘The epiphany of the face is ethical. The struggle this face can
threaten presupposes the transcendence of expression’ (2012: 199; empha-
sis in original). Moreover: ‘Infinity presents itself as a face in the ethical
resistance that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenceless
eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution’ (2012: 199–200).
The face is in society and is indeed the locus of the plurality of social
relations, where, nevertheless, the ‘I’s form no totality’ (2012: 294). Yet,
in principle, it cannot be thematized. Moreover, the face is expression
and discourse, yet it cannot be thematized. Again, the face is the locus of
106 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

the welcome of the Other as hospitality – the welcome of the Other that is
not, therefore, the subject or object of an exclusion, and yet it cannot be
thematized. The face is the locus of a ‘saying’, not of the ‘said’, and this,
in part, explains why it is not thematizable. Desire, to turn to it, is not the
desire of concupiscence, but is metaphysical desire as a yearning without
the possibility that it could be satisfied by any object. Desire, the Other,
hospitality, discourse and, most of all, the face are transcendent and
cannot be thematized because they are the condition of possibility of
every thematization – of every objectification. This, then, would be in
distinct contrast to Bataille’s heterology in as much as thematization is
part and parcel of its practice. Indeed, heterology, like scatology, has the
task of making difference a theme of discourse. In short, it is because
base materialism is not talked or written about in any meaningful way
that Bataille is concerned to bring it into presence. Moreover, for
Levinas, the relation between the Same and the Other is not symmetrical,
as is the case with Bataille, for whom difference is opposed to identity,
the sacred to the profane, continuity to discontinuity, the expenditure of
the general economy to the parsimony of the restricted economy. So,
even though difference is brought to presence by heterology, this is
because difference is the counterpart of an identity. For Bataille, every
identity has its alterity – its underside that is exposed once a certain
threshold has been transgressed. These are states, as we know, of intoxi-
cation and the carnivalesque, of eroticism and death, of tears and
laughter.

Levinas and the Economic – Without Transcendence

A crucial point in Levinas’s philosophy is that ‘Life is love of life’ (2012:
112; emphasis in original). This means that life is never reducible to bare
life, where life is first of all mere aliveness before it is enjoyable. This
opens the way to life as a way of life: ‘The bare fact of life is never bare’
(2012: 112). But previously Levinas had said that we ‘live from our work
[travail13] which ensures our subsistence’ (p. 112; trans. modified), even if
he adds that, ‘but we also live from our work because it fills (delights or
saddens) life. The first meaning of “to live from one’s work” reverts to
the second – if the things are in place’ (p. 112; trans modified). Even
though it is clear that there is never a situation of purely subsistence life,
the latter is still distinct from a love of life or from the ‘joy’ of life. The
thesis that I propose is that a way of life (life that is not bare life) is
irrevocably transcendent. However, for this to be so there would never be
anything like subsistence life. If I labour in the fields (to invoke a minimal
form of work) with a hoe turning over the ground I do it with a given
instrument, shaped in a specific way, and used at a given time of the year
(for ghosts may be present when the weather is cold!), at a given time of
the day (I sleep between noon and when the sun starts to set towards the
Lechte 107

West); I work so that the rice (as opposed to wheat) produced can be
shared by the community. I might use a buffalo, a horse or a tractor; the
technology is a sign of my culture. But when I say ‘community’ I also say
‘hospitality’ – hospitality as an irrevocable opening to the Other. Self-
identity, in effect, never exists in a pure form any more than does bare
life. Consequently, there is no pure utility. Levinas comes close to this
when he says that the

things we live from are not tools, nor even implements in the
Heideggerian sense of the term. Their existence is not exhausted
by the utilitarian schematism that delineates them as having the
existence of hammers, needles, or machines. They are always in a
certain measure – even the hammers, needles, and machines –
objects of enjoyment, presenting themselves to ‘taste’, already
adorned, embellished. (2012: 110)

Let us add to the ‘enjoyment’ of tools the idea that enjoyment is

always manifest in a given way. There is no enjoyment that is not also
a given form of expression. But what are we to make of the following
statement that the ‘first movement of the economy is in fact egoist – it is
not transcendence; it is not expression’ (Levinas, 2012: 157; emphasis
added). This is accompanied by Levinas’s references to work: ‘Work in
its primary intension is this acquisition, this movement towards the self.
It is not a transcendence’ (2012: 159; trans. modified). Again: ‘Work
“defines” matter without recourse to the idea of infinity’ (2012: 160;
trans. modified). Clearly, there is in Levinas, too, a domain of pure utility
and possession where transcendence is entirely absent, so that work
becomes labour done only because it is useful. The animal also has this
quality of non-transcendence, so that as a worker-labourer the human
correlates with being animal. Thus, writes our author: ‘Despite the infin-
ite extension of needs that it makes possible economic existence (just like
animal existence) remains within the Same’ (2012: 175; trans. modified.)
We know that the Same is the sphere of the ego, of subjectivity, of
immanence, of essence, of being.
Bataille’s approach – as is indicated in Inner Experience where refer-
ence is made to Hegel – is to place work within the sphere of the profane
world. Thus, says Bataille, in equating work with existence Hegel
‘reduces the world to the profane world; he negates the sacred world
(communication)’ (1988a: 81). We cannot say that there is no transcend-
ence for Bataille in relation to work and project; for he speaks of the
profane world as one of transcendence, while the sacred world is one of
immanence. However, the profane world is also the world of utility and
of the restricted economy. Utility takes us back to bare life, given that the
ultimate raison d’être of utility is to enhance the chances of physical
survival, which would not be transcendent. But Bataille’s distinction
108 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

between the restricted (conventional, profane) economy and the general

(sacred) economy (domain of expenditure) is only sustainable if the
human qua human is both sacred and profane – both transcendent and
the excluded part, which would count for nothing in terms of the sacred.
This would mean that the inhuman must be included in the notion of the
human, even if it must also be fought against.
However, Levinas says, there is, in relation to the economy, an aspect
that work produces but does not comprehend; for it is out of the scope of
its intention. This is the ‘trace’ or the ‘de´chet’. De´chet can be translated as
that which falls from a work as remnant, remainder, residue – as what
leaves a mark (¼trace). The material left over after the pattern for a dress
or trousers has been cut out is the de´chet, or leftover.14 It is what is not
included as much as what is excluded from work. So while work as such
is ‘not a transcendence’ (does not evoke the face) and is directly linked to
matter and has the satisfaction of need as its goal, the trace points to
what is other than the goal. This is confirmed by the notion of all technics
being a ‘groping’ towards a goal without the certainty that the goal will
ever be completely attained. The trace thus raises the question as to its
status, especially vis-à-vis transcendence. What precisely is this outside of
work or labour that cannot be comprehended in the satisfaction of need
as the goal of work? Levinas does not say. However, it does not take a lot
of ingenuity to work out that the trace or ‘de´chet’ cannot have anything
like a use-value. It is at the other extremity to all utility.
If work and the economic sphere (which evokes the Aristotelian notion
of oikos (household) as much as the notion of industrial production) are
on the hither side of transcendence, what of the de´chet? If we recall that
the equivalent of the de´chet is what sets up the sphere of the sacred in
certain non-Western contexts, there may be grounds for saying that the
de´chet (despite Levinas) also gives way to transcendence, albeit minimal,
if it is possible to speak in such a quantitative way. Against this is the
idea that the de´chet is what is excluded from human intercourse, par
excellence. It would be what Bataillian heterology seeks to render
extant. We will say that the Other occupies the field of the de´chet. This
is even close to what Levinas explicitly claims in a text which is exclu-
sively devoted to the trace. The latter, then, cannot as such be repre-
sented or objectified, is not available to consciousness or to the order of
the Same – all of which is in keeping with Levinas’s construal of the
Other. Significantly, Levinas, as we have mentioned, also calls the
de´chet ‘trace’.
In his discussion of the trace Levinas says that there is no intention
involved. The trace is the trace of the Other that the Other does not
present to me but which constitutes a meagre incarnation. The trace of
the Other is like the trace one leaves in attempting to cover up one’s
traces – a trace one leaves absolutely despite oneself, a trace that is an
immediacy and cannot be represented. This is a trace that is essentially
Lechte 109

not part of the finite world, where it would be integrated into a totality.
Rather, it gives rise to an infinity that stands out from the world, much
like, I would say, a ghost or an apparition – entities not of this world.
The trace, then, is the mode of the Other’s abiding presence, without this
meaning that the Other is simply present in the world.15 In this context,
the face would be a visitation as the apparition of the Other in the Same –
in Me. This visitation – the apparition (recall the Greeks) – is the image,
even though Levinas rejects such a conflation because, for him, the image
equals object and representation. Visitation, apparition, Other (Autrui),
infinity and, we could add, spectre (cf. Barthes, Derrida), individually
and collectively spell out the notion that the image as the equivalent of
these terms is not an object. As a result, I propose that the trace links the
domain of the radically excluded element to transcendence. Even though
work/labour and the economic sphere do not as such participate in tran-
scendence (because they are concerned with need), the opening of the
de´chet as trace takes things to a new dimension.

Conclusions: Heterology and Transcendence

Heterology, as proposed by Bataille, aspires to do justice to the excluded
part of human existence. And in posing its questions it opens up a crucial
domain of thought in relation to the human. In doing so, however, this
discourse, or semblance of discursivity, embraces certain presuppositions
concretized by modernity – such as the idea of a clear distinction and
separation (confirmed by Durkheim, as Bataille’s text shows; see Bataille,
2018) between the sacred and the profane, that profane life is essentially
animated by the restricted economy of work, utility and project. Here,
transcendence is referred to, but it is implausible to think of full tran-
scendence in such a context of utility and means-ends rationality.
Moreover, there is, in Bataille, little recognition that base materialism
can also evoke the sphere of what in this essay has been referred to as the
ambivalence of the sacred. Base materialism can be understood in a
manner analogous to the term ‘proper’ or ‘clean’ when it crosses the
boundaries of culture. For European modernity, ‘clean’ – especially in
relation to waste products – means antiseptically clean, or clean in an
objectively medical sense. Or, we could say, a notion of clean circulates in
the supposedly profane and secular domain of modern Western culture.
The other meaning of ‘clean’ relates, of course, to the idea of ritually
clean, or being cleansed in a religious sense, as is echoed in the opposition
of ‘purity and danger’ made famous by Mary Douglas. Thus, a ‘base
materialism’, similarly, can refer to ‘actual’ material objects that are only
seen as being worthy of destruction, or it can interpret such objects in
light of an evocation of the ambivalence of the sacred, opening them to
an aura of transcendence, an idea foreign to Bataille because, for him,
what is evoked is immanence. These objects can also be understood to
110 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

play a part in the satisfaction of ‘animal needs’, as Bataille expresses it,

where the material, biological existence of the human would be at stake.
A key strand in the tradition of Western thought sees the satisfaction of
‘animal needs’ as the precursor to the rise of any authentic culture.16 And
in this regard certain cultures and/or societies are viewed from a Western
perspective as destined to remain at subsistence level where humans
merely survive in the ‘struggle for existence’.
Levinas also seems to consolidate the ‘sacred-profane’ distinction by
similarly designating the economy as a whole and work in particular as
being without transcendence. However, the notion of trace as ‘de´chet’
deriving from work complicates the picture. For trace is also the trace of
the Other and so is evocative of transcendence. The radical nature of the
sacred-profane opposition thus collapses. Now, the sacred and tran-
scendence are in the so-called profane sphere.
Transcendence appears in what was the profane world and thereby
challenges the division of humanity into those peoples who have yet to
rise above subsistence existence (the realm of necessity for Arendt; see
Arendt, 1958: 28–37) and those who have solved the problem of subsist-
ence and have thus been able to rise above this level of existence reducible
to bare life. Here, the ‘excluded part’ would be all the elements that
cannot be allowed to appear as transcendent in any sense.
Consequently, what has begun to become clear, even though more
work remains to be done, is that the thought of both Bataille and
Levinas exhibits residues of European modernity’s distinctions between
the sacred and the profane, subsistence and culture, bare life and affluent
life, transcendence and immanence (materiality), but that, at the same
time, heterology and the Levinasian notion of the face as infinity and
transcendence – as ‘the very collapse of phenomenality’ (Levinas, 1998:
88) – open the way to another way of thinking altogether, one that truly
engages in life as a way of life – or, as Levinas puts it: life as the enjoyment
of life.

Notes
1. In a posthumously published text that challenges Hollier’s reading collected
under the title ‘Dossier “Hétérologie”’, Bataille, strikingly, notes that the
term ‘sacred’ is itself polarized into ‘pure and impure’. And he adds: ‘It
thus appears that the sacred is at the very least neither high nor low’ (see
Bataille, 1970b: 167). Here, Bataille seems to signal the sacred’s ambivalence
even if he tends not to draw the full implications of this in his published work.
This point will be further addressed later in the essay.
2. Hollier also cites this note (1984: 98), but rather uses it to emphasize the
implications of the lowness of the content of scatology.
3. In his article in Documents, ‘Musée’, Bataille writes: ‘A museum is like the
lung of a big city: the crowd like blood flows into the museum each Sunday
and it leaves purified and refreshed’ (Bataille, 1970a: 239). Similarly, in
Lechte 111

Inner Experience, Bataille writes, in talking of idleness or de´soeuvrement, of

crowds on the boulevards on Sundays that evoke ‘the character of ancient
festivals, the forgetting of all project, consummation beyond measure’
(Bataille, 1988a: 48).
4. These activities are referred to in the Documents article, ‘Lieux de pèlerinage:
Hollywood’ (Bataille, 1970a: 198).
5. This ‘excluded part’ is also the heterogeneous, which Bataille designates as
the ‘sacred’ (see Bataille, 1970b: 6, 167). Thus, science cannot study the
sacred with any degree of comfort.
6. This definition echoes that of the article by Bataille, ‘The Use Value of
D.A.F de Sade’ (see Bataille, 1986: 102 n2; see also 1970b: 61).
7. In this respect, note the sub-heading of ‘Principles of Practical Heterology’
in ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ (see Bataille, 1986: 99).
8. Consequently, Bataille’s position on materialism cannot be seen to be cap-
tured in his complaint that every materialism hitherto has turned out to be
an idealism (see Bataille, 1986: 15).
9. Such a thesis would also imply that Bataille’s base materialism is not simply
the result of a lapsed Catholic’s reaction to the puritanism of the Church.
10. The phrase, obviously evocative of this theme in Deleuze’s philosophy, has
been taken up by Kane X. Faucher (2005) in relation to Bataille, in a
manner, unfortunately, that strikes me as too limited. For a start,
Faucher bases his reading of Bataille almost entirely on Inner Experience,
and so neglects the issue of base materialism.
11. All the issues relating to death in the Nazi death camps derive from this.
For, if indeed, as a number of thinkers have argued (most notably, Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, but also Heidegger and Agamben), the inmates of
Auschwitz and all the other death camps were treated as little more than
industrial waste, there can be no sacrifice, no transcendence. As Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe says in commenting on the death of Jews at the hands of
the Nazis: ‘The Jews were treated as one “treats” industrial waste (les
de´chets) or the proliferation of parasites’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1987: 61).
And he adds: ‘There is not the least “sacrificial” aspect in this operation
[of extermination] . . . it was elimination pure and simple’ (Lacoue-Labarthe,
1987: 62; emphasis in original).
12. Where ‘necessity’ would be the level of basic needs (see Arendt, 1958).
13. Lingus always translates ‘travail’ by ‘labor’. On the difference between
‘work’ and ‘labour’, see Arendt (1958).
14. It is, in my view, misleading in this context to translate ‘de´chet’ as ‘waste’ or
‘refuse’. For here, un de´chet (from ‘de´choir’, ‘to fall’, in the sense of ‘to fall
from grace’) is ‘ce qui tombe d’une matie`re qu’on travaille’ (‘what falls from
the material upon which one is working’) (Le Petit Robert), which is pre-
cisely the sense in which Levinas uses the term.
15. As Levinas writes, the Other’s presence ‘consists in coming towards us, to
make an entrance. It is what can announce itself thus: the phenomenon as
the apparition of the Other is also the face’ (1963: 613). Again: ‘the epiphany
of the face is a visitation’ (p. 613).
16. Hegel says in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History that: ‘Aristotle
has long since observed that man turns to universal and more exalted things
only after his basic needs have been satisfied’ (1993: 155).
112 Theory, Culture & Society 35(4–5)

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Minneapolis, MN: Univocal publishing.

John Lechte is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University,

Sydney. His most recent books are Genealogy and Ontology of the
Western Image and its Digital Future (with Saul Newman; Routledge,
2012) and Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights: Statelessness,
Images, Violence (Edinburgh, 2013). He has also published key essays
on the thought of Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben
and Hannah Arendt, as well as on Derrida.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section,
‘Bataille and Heterology’, edited by Roy Boyne and Marina Galletti.