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Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Volume 21,

2014, pp. 131-156 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/ctn.2014.0005

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ctn/summary/v021/21.traylor.html

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Violence Has Its Reasons

Girard and Bataille
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 formers predilection
for all things decadentwith 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
afnity between violence and the sacred, this remark furnishes us with an open
invitation to probe more deeply Batailles longstanding interest in religion,
specically, his meditations on the transgression or suspension of prohibition
carried out, most paradigmatically, in ritualistic sacrice and the sacred realm to
which such acts of transgression supposedly once granted us access. In the rst
part of this article, I will attempt to demonstrate that Batailles analysis of
sacrice may represent an important supplementif not indeed an
alternativeto the Girardian thesis that the scapegoat mechanism effectively
solves the riddle concerning the goal of ritualistic slaughter. More specically, 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. 131156. ISSN 1075-7201.
2014 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

131

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Anthony D. Traylor

sacred that is sought after for its own sake and not as a tactical reex designed to
restore communal peace.
Girards scapegoat hypothesis depicts ritualistic sacrice 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 deication. Thus, for
Girard, the experience of the sacred can be traced back to the chain of
events leading up to and culminating in the victims death. Ritualistic
sacrice is nothing other than a reexive and stylized reenactment of this
original singling out of a scapegoat. Accordingly, sacricial 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 Girards account here is the fact that the energy
released in the sacricial 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 signicance to the sacricial
event itself, aside from any societal benet arising in the wake of the
cathartic effect. To see exactly why Girard eschews this notion of sacrice,
it may be instructive to consider the 1977 essay Differentiation and
Reciprocity in Lvi-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 ood myths). Girard is particularly troubled by what he sees as
structualisms 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, Lvi-Strauss is
inevitably drawn to the opposite end of the spectrum and becomes
entangled in a metaphysical/linguistic antirealism, a philosophic position
that, in Girards words, tends to degenerate into the kind of relativistic freefor-all plaguing the contemporary intellectual scene. Crucial for Girard then

Violence Has Its Reasons

133

is that we abandon this metaphysical antithesis altogether and acknowledge

that ritual is not invested in undifferentiation for its own sake, but that it
constitutes an essential albeit preliminary moment subordinate to the goal
of (re)differentiation. In short, instead of abandoning us to some
Heraclitean ux, ritual strategically enacts motifs of undifferentiation to
bring about the goal of communal restoration. Of course, the kind of
undifferentiation that Girard has in mind is that of violent social upheaval
(the mimetic crisis) whose sole antidote throughout human history has
been its denouement in the single victim mechanism.
If a certain rationalistic squeamishness accounts for why those like
Lvi-Strauss turn their noses up at undifferentiation and take refuge in
idealism, the same cannot be said of Bataille who, while fully concurring
with the structuralist thesis that ritual is a perverse nostalgia for the
immediate, would not nd such perversity the least bit objectionable. Thus
from a certain angle, Bataille is as much a realist as Girard, if by this we
mean a willingness to confront the unembellished truth regarding the
unsavory origins of religion. Moreover, Bataille is able to account for why
it is that ritual exhibits the dual moments of undifferentiation and
differentiation, and is prepared to speculate on how the world lines itself up
hierarchically (undergoes redifferentiation), a problem that Girard tries to
resolve by postulating a progressively elaborate series of mimetic crises and their
respective resolutions in the victimage mechanism.3 So before completely
dismissing the view of ritual as a yearning for undifferentiation, we need to
consider whether or not Bataille his perversity notwithstanding has in fact
unearthed a dimension of ritualistic sacrice worthy of our attention.
My exposition of Bataille will focus mainly on a manuscript entitled
Theory of Religion.4 Occasionally, I will draw on the rst volume of The
Accursed Share,5 the collection of essays featured in Literature and Evil,6
some scattered reections from On Nietzsche,7 and his most widely read
work, Erotism,8 to build my case. As already noted, Bataille (like Girard)
sees a close connection between violence and the sacred. The manner in
which Bataille interprets this connection, however, differs considerably
from the account given by Girard. Theory of Religion opens with a haunting
and semi-poetic attempt to sketch a phenomenology of animal existence
variously depicted by Bataille as a state of immanence, immediacy, or
uninterrupted continuity.9 At the level of the animal, instead of objects or
things standing in opposition to consciousness, there prevails a kind of
nebulous ebb and ow between the organism and its surroundings. This
world of pure continuity devoid of purpose, distinction, or meaning

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Anthony D. Traylor

Bataille describes this state metaphorically as water within water10 gets

starkly contrasted with the human realm of discontinuity wherein the
appearance of objects marks a rupture in the nearly seamless experience of
animal life. It is only when experience encloses itself within boundaries and
crystallizes into an isolated thing that death can intrude upon existence on
the scale of something catastrophic. Nothing of the same order is
experienced in the case of one animal eating another as is testied by the
apathy which quickly envelops the predator shortly after the kill. This
animal depth which we once were, but from which we have long since
distanced ourselves, now whispers from afar in an undecipherable yet
vaguely familiar voice.
In a manner reminiscent of Heidegger,11 Bataille contends that it is the
introduction of the tool that marks the passage from continuous to
discontinuous being, in effect, by partitioning the worldly continuum into
an assemblage of discrete objects referentially linked together into relations
of instrumentality and subordinated to future ends. This steady inscription
of continuous being into the realm of things gives rise to the world of the
profane, which for Bataille is that sphere of human existence segmented off
through the restraint of prohibition and narrowly circumscribed by a
concern for security, utility, work, productivity, rationality, and moral
obligation, that is to say, a mode of being that shuts out the immediacy of
the present to prudentially seize upon a stable and predictable future.
Despite this transformation, beings still betray a trace of their native
volatility, not fully reducible, as they are, to the sphere of utility. This is
most palpably on display in the case of the animal whose inscrutable
existence is a poignant reminder of a lost immediacy that is far removed
from the everyday world of the profane. Such immediacy is experienced
as seductively sacred, something that on privileged occasions is
approached in a state of horror and fascination. From a moral/religious
standpoint, this seduction is interpreted as something sinister; for sin
is only possible for a being who having to some degree transcended its
original condition as animal through a harsh application of religious
prohibition has now the possibility of transgressing that prohibition.
Eroticism (to take one of Batailles favored examples) is through and
through a matter of transgression, and so only human beings are capable
of experiencing the erotic since only they can with intoxicating
bewilderment peer down into the dark recesses of their animality.12
Now Bataille contends that the sacricial act lifts the victim out of the
profane order and returns him or her to the realm of the sacred.13 Assuming

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135

the role of a mediator, the sacricial 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 sacrice is not so much to put an end to the victims 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 ash up briey and afrm 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, sacricial 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 sacrice 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
inicting 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
sacricesince what sacrice aims at, according to Bataille, is that which
paradoxically stands altogether outside a teleological frameworkit cannot be
that of setting into motion the string of events leading up to communal
harmony. Rather the urge to sacrice 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 sacrice 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

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Anthony D. Traylor

variety of evil pursued for its own sake that runs throughout Batailles reections
on sacricial violence and which may lead us to question whether the Girardian
reading of ritualistic sacrice truly gets to the heart of the matter.
Now to address the problem of redifferentiation, we must rst 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 sacrice (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 Girards scapegoat
who becomes the target of collective rage, we have Batailles 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 prohibitiona fact that Girard certainly
picks up on in his commentnot 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 Batailles standpoint, violence can be deployed as

Violence Has Its Reasons

137

a strategy for securing social stability principally because it injects a dose of

urgency and gravity into our moral sensibilities. Thus, the kind of community
Bataille has in view here is above all one that satises its members instincts to
merge together in the immediacy of the moment.21 The temporality, as it were,
of this community is constituted on a different plane than that of a society of
clearly delineated individuals cooperating peacefully for the sake of some future
good.
Recall that Girard had faulted metaphysical dualism for not being able
to account for how differences get parsed once they emerge from the void
of undifferentiation. Batailles response to this dimension of the problem is
to submit that redifferentiation mirrors on the profane level the sacred
world opened up and experienced in acts of transgression.22 As we have
seen, when continuous being contracts into the profane world of things, a
certain metaphysical ambiguity lingers on as objects still bear some trace of
their former continuity. Bataille contends, for instance, that God is a
reication of the world originally experienced without contour and thus
represents an ontological impoverishment of a sort, but one that still
obscurely signies the undifferentiated expanse. To a lesser extent, plant,
animal, and human life also share in this ambiguity. Spirit is the
designation for this aspect of being emanating from the far side of the world
of use. It is on this basis that a spiritual hierarchy can tower up with God
perched on the top, followed by lesser divinities (including the disembodied
souls of the dead), and then the priestly class whose ofce places them on
intimate terms with the sacred. Accordingly, the more remote a being is
from the mundane, the more ethereal or spectral it is. If political/social
authority is derivative of religious authority, the respectful distance signied
by degree in human society can ultimately be traced back to the measure
in which the sacred is palpably visible in deeds, speech, and demeanor. The
so-called spontaneity and luxuriousness of the nobility would then be an
index of the presence of spirit not yet thoroughly subdued under the weight
of necessity and avarice.23 Not surprisingly, Bataille puts forward his own
economy of desacralization, one where the spiritual impoverishment
characteristic of our time would be attributed to an increasing bureaucratization of the West, its vitality, as it were, gradually enfeebled by a steady
devaluation of sacricial consumption in favor of monotonous devotion to
accumulation and production. As the bureaucratic grip tightens and
genuinely festive outlets shrink in number, we can expect to see an
escalation in the kind of savage and large-scale eruptions of violence that
mark the last century.24 The seething procession of life will continue

Anthony D. Traylor

138

uninterrupted on its course, insists Bataille; the only question is whether it

is capable of being channeled in more or less tolerable directions.25
So far, we have examined Batailles analysis of ritualistic sacrice as the
attempt on the part of civilized humanity to give violence its due, not for the
sake of precipitating the scapegoat mechanism, but because human beings
experience an irresistible compulsion to break free from the enclosure of
discontinuous existence and absorb as much continuity as possible short of
annihilation. Our intent has not been to discredit or diminish the originality
of Girards own take on sacrice; rather, we set out to show that the sort of
objections Girard raises against the likes of Lvi-Strauss simply do not apply
to the account put forward by Bataille. At minimum, we have established
the possibility of an alternative conception and correspondingly have
introduced reservations concerning how exhaustive Girards reading is in
the end. Yet, if we are willing to grant the reality of something like a pure
lust for violence, then it is only tting to determine whether Girard has at
his disposal the means of accounting for this more nefarious side to human desire. This will entail a consideration of Girards rich analysis of
masochism and the mimetic trajectory leading desire down the nihilistic
slope to death.
METAPHYSICAL AUTONOMY

The truth of metaphysical desire is death, so concludes Girard in his

pioneering dissection of the modern soul in Deceit, Desire and the Novel.26 In
subsequent analyses, it is the death of the surrogate victim who foremost
enters the spotlight, serving as the target of the scapegoat mechanism. Yet,
in the original account the victim is not so much the other as it is the self. I
have just considered the possibility that at the heart of collective murder as
restaged in ritualistic sacrice lies a desire on the part of the self to return to
what Bataille calls lost continuity. Thus, against Girard, I presented a reading
of ritualistic sacrice wherein violence is sought for its own sake and only
secondarily as a tactical means for restoring communal peace. A dimension
of the question I have yet to address, however, is whether or not Bataille is
merely another example of what Deceit, Desire and the Novel characterizes as
a masochistic will to self-destruction when deviated transcendence runs its
nal course. If there be any truth to this, Batailles project would amount to
yet another incarnation of the illusion of self-deication, and such a verdict
would only cast doubt on his claim to have unearthed the true meaning of
ritualistic sacrice. It would be Girardnot Bataillewho would have the

Violence Has Its Reasons

139

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
sacrice (along with eroticism) as Bataille regularly insists, constitutes an
effective (albeit temporary) means of overcoming the selfs limitations, it
would stand to reason that Girard would indeed have the nal say on the
ultimate meaning of desire (including the desire to sacrice). It is in light of
this possibility that a return to his rst work is therefore unavoidable if we
wish to settle this question.
Much would depend on what signicance sovereignty has for Bataille
and whether it can survive Girards critique of metaphysical desire. Let me
therefore take up the question as it rst 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
modernitys frantic, yet futile attempt to shake off this burden by embarking
on the project leading to divine-like self-sufciency. 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 fullled 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.
Girards 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 satised by the self and so the
burden must stem from elsewhere (modernitys 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, nitude, or freedom, such a curse seems to be the dening mark of
the human condition and not something that merely aficts 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 ones neighbor. So, aside

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from any so-called false promise and whatever additional burden it may
impose, the condition in which the self invariably nds itself is one that is
decidedly nite. 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 nitude.
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 selfs 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 models divinity, and it is this element
with which the self is particularly fascinated and wishes to somehow
appropriate. It is signicant that the models manifest indifference to others
is interpreted as an absence of desire and as such is taken to be a hallmark of
metaphysical self-sufciency. What characterizes the masochist, therefore, is
the search for an invincible and inaccessible obstacle who will ruthlessly and
authoritatively pass judgment on the subjects 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 glorication
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.
Girards 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

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conscious afrmation and embracing of ones own singularity and intrinsic

nothingness. Feigned indifference to the other consolidates itself into
solipsistic isolation. Concealed desire is supplanted by total renunciation of
desire whose absence is synonymous with pure self-sufciency. For desire
presupposes dependence, and so desire must be completely expunged so as
to make room for pure apathy. Encased in pride, the self now severs its
remaining ties with the universe of deviated transcendence and xes its gaze
on what it perceives to be its nal solution: self-annulment. The paradox
consists precisely in the endeavor of recollecting the self via the annihilation
of this very self, for the self betrays itself as long as it continues to be
(continues to desire). Suicide is therefore the supreme expression of
freedom and sole means of achieving autonomy since all other approaches
(whether vertical or deviated) have come to naught.
Let us look more closely at the underlying motive behind Kirillovs
suicide, the father of this argument, to fully appreciate Girards claim that
the nal act of metaphysical desire and its dream of absolute autonomy
consists in self-destruction. In the Demons,30 Kirillov says we are brought
into this world at the heavy cost of being swept along by a constant tide of
fear, most notably, the fear of death, which is the starkest indicator of our
essential nitude. We do not fear death because we love life (this is the
whole deceit); rather, life itself is pain and fear, and we expend every
ounce of energy, short of death, trying to escape it. This Sisyphean pursuit,
of course, is merely an expression of metaphysical desire. Standing at the
summit of this pursuit, God is therefore nothing more than the ideological
expression of the pain and fear of life. Man has done nothing but invent
God, Kirillov says, so as to live without killing himself. In other words, so
long as we remain in the grip of fear, we continue to posit God. The only
real solution then is to once and for all kill this fear called life. Accordingly,
Kirillovs suicide will be unprecedented insofar as all previous suicides have
arisen out of fear and therefore have not mastered fear. Genuine self-mastery
(freedom) comes only when fear is dealt a fatal blow, and once this is
carried through belief in God too will necessarily vanish, since fear and
belief in God are at bottom one and the same. In the end, all comes down to
a battle of wills. If God exists, then I cannot get out of his will. God exists
only as long as fear of death exists. Consequently, when fear is gone, the
will is all mine; I become Self-will. For Kirillov, suicide (not out of fear
but for the sake of killing fear) is atheism with a tooth and nail and as such is
the indispensable precondition for becoming God or what Kirillov calls the
man-God in conscious opposition to the God-man (Christ).31 Now pain

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Anthony D. Traylor

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 nally come to possess
the object of desire (self-sufciency). 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
Kirillovs 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, ts 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 innite improbability and experiences itself as
cruelly cast out from the community of beings.34 The reader should have
little difculty 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 selfs particularity. But does
this scenario so neatly t 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 denition 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

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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 nite 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 conict, 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 rst 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 pregures Girard, Bataille depicts the child
as a kind of satellite orbiting the seemingly divine-like self-sufciency of its
parents. As we detach from our parents, we nd new centers (models) to
emulate insofar as they seem to wear the crown of self-sufciency as they
relegate us to the periphery of our own insufciency. This struggle to
gain access to the universal (the only thing that can thwart competition
between a multiplicity of insufcient 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
insufciency pervades all individuated beings.37 Any such posturing on the part
of insufcient 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 insufciency 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 nitude.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 insufciency coupled with a deliberate decision to cease wanting to
be everything which would henceforth be considered the ultimate sin of

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a nite being.39 Batailles preferred title for this imperative is sovereignty,

namely, freedom from any investment in the project of wanting to become
everything.40 But how is this principle, one may legitimately ask, any
different from that enunciated and carried out by Kirillov? Is this not simply
another renunciation of innity in a last-ditch effort to gain complete
possession of ones being (albeit nite), another salient example of
metaphysical desire slipping in through the backdoor?
On closer inspection, we can see there are signicant differences
between the two. Recall that Kirillov aims to kill desire and the pain and
fear which necessarily accompany it; this is how he intends to wrest himself
free from subordination to the will of God and achieve Self-will. Bataille,
on the other hand, has no wish to eradicate desire; on the contrary, the sole
task is to unreservedly live in the storm.41 Despite his stated intent,
Kirillov, right up to the decisive moment, remains reluctantly suspended in
a state of anguish. This alone shows that Kirillov has not conquered fear in
the least, and for this reason still acts out of fear. Bataille fancies no such
notion regarding the possibility of achieving metaphysical closure by way of
mastering fear or desire. Rather, for him it is always a matter of living on the
brink, where anguish and desire comingle in a state of maximum intensity.42
Sovereign desire, for Bataille, thus resists being subsumed under the rubric of
metaphysical desire, which is a desire to enclose the totality of being within
the tightly constructed boundaries of the self. For metaphysical desire is
dominated through and through by the egotistical ambition to appropriate
the whole, absent the willingness to endure all the anguish and pain of selfloss such a project would entail. What Kirillov seeks (with a pull of the
trigger) is to permanently insulate the self from any outside intrusion and
singlehandedly bring about a state of closure. Bataille, on the other hand,
refuses this absolutizing gesture, preferring instead to systematically expose
the self as an open wound to the ground whence it arose and to where it is
destined to return. This constitutes the dening mark of sovereignty: life
dedicated to a renunciation of anything that would in a spirit of meager
calculation and dreary utility subordinate the self to the servile end of
safeguarding its discontinuity (even via suicide) in favor of a life consumed
in the heat of the moment, freed from the self-serving constrains of
prohibition and its concern for the future, and losing itself in the night of
immediacy and continuity.
Can Bataille really be another Kirillov, if the latter is steadfastly
determined to put an end to a fear and desire he cannot endure while
the former is adamantly intent on setting them aame? This is why

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suicide (at least the sort advocated by Kirillov) shows up virtually

nowhere on Batailles agenda, since it would spell the complete negation
of the desiring and anguishing subject. Rather, the crucial thing for him
is assenting to life up to the point of death; that the discontinuous self
sustain as much continuity as possible without completely going
under.43 Indeed, this explains why eroticism and the specter of sacrice
exercise his imagination to the extent that they do. For these are not
acts of closure but temporary and partial breaches in the otherwise
safely guarded borders of the discontinuous self and as such open the
door to genuine (albeit violent) acts of communication between
isolated beings. For we know that for Bataille what is truly unbearable is
precisely the suffocating imprisonment in which autonomous beings
enclose themselves in their desperate efforts to keep up the charade of
independence.44
In short, metaphysical desire amounts to the project of circumscribing the entirety of the universe within the arbitrary and
ephemeral limits of a particularized self, bestowing upon this self the
semblance of autonomy. Both Girard and Bataille, I think, offer similar
versions of this story. Of more pertinence, however, is the issue of how
such a self is to be reconciled with its intrinsic insufciency and how
freedom from metaphysical desire, in the end, plays itself out. Girard
himself acknowledges the anguished lengths most go through to avoid
look[ing] freedom in the face,45 and in the nal chapter of Deceit,
Desire and the Novel testies to a liberation from metaphysical desire by
way of a novelistic (and Christian inspired) revelation into the inner
mechanism of internal mediation. But is there any guarantee that such a
revelation will assume the shape of a theistic resolution? Does not
Bataille in his own way break free from metaphysical desire and embrace
freedom with an atheistic vengeance? Furthermore, can such atheism
really be chalked up to rivalry with the Divine when, for Bataille, God is
nothing more than a reication of our lost continuity? What is it then
that leads Girard and Bataille down these separate paths after having
traveled much of the way together?
UNDIFFERENTIATION RECONSIDERED

Our reections got underway by drawing attention to Girards recognition

of Batailles appreciation of the role that prohibition plays in the formation
of cultural institutions. One of the virtues of the scapegoat hypothesis, as

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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 scientically keeping alive the traditional
question concerning the essence of man.46 As we have seen, a similar realist
current runs throughout Batailles 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 chiey have in mind is the apocalyptic dimension of Girards
thought that begins to gain momentum in Things Hidden and fully ripens in
his latest work Battling to the End.47 But rst, 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 ares 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 conict 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 conict 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 (nonconictual 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 sacricial character of archaic societies.

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The proliferation of differences that reconstitute the cultural order can

be construed as restoring the antagonists to their respective positions of
autonomy. As such, the scapegoat mechanism merely postpones or deects an
immediate and decisive confrontation of autonomous selves, and this is
the principal reason why it provides only a temporary crutch for the
community.48 Once the Judeo-Christian texts expose and derail this
sacricial cycle and historically introduce a gradual yet irreversible
deconstruction of the scapegoat mechanism, the mimetic trajectory,
especially in its nal stages, can now be analyzed frame by frame, as it were,
with modernity, in particular, presenting us with a kind of protracted
mimetic crisis.49 It is here that maximum light can be shed on the internal
process of cultural disintegration and prompts us to broach again the theme
of metaphysical autonomy and to reevaluate whether, with respect to its
dissolution, Bataille and Girard can be brought into closer proximity.
According to mimetic theory, the triangular character of desire
practically guarantees an eventual clash between model and disciple as the
distance separating the two gradually withers away. Consequently, the
move from external to internal mediation (marked by the introduction of
the rival or model/obstacle) ushers in a return of the violent reciprocity that
the hierarchical stratications of the cultural order temporarily held in
check. Equality (undifferentiation) breeds conict as the articial barriers
holding apart autonomous beings are systematically dismantled and the
selfs autonomy comes under assault by the threatening approach of the
other.50 With the onset of the mimetic crisis, the warring brothers (Girard
calls them doubles to underscore their growing symmetry) react by
desperately (violently) trying to restore lost differences with a view toward
salvaging what little remains of their sense of autonomy. Despite (or rather
because of) this frenetic attempt to restore autonomy, the lines separating
rival parties become increasingly blurred as the social body perilously
approaches a state of total undifferentiation. Formerly, there was always the
scapegoat mechanism to fall back on to avert a complete collapse and
resurrect social order. Absent this card in a desacralized world, we are
forced to choose between what appears to be two diametrically opposed
options: mutual annihilation or mutual reconciliation.51 There simply is no
middle ground for Girard since all cultural institutions, whether religious,
familial, juridical, economic, political, and even militaristic have been (or
are in the process of becoming) deprived of their legitimacy as a result of
the historical desacralization brought on by the Judeo-Christian texts.

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Now it is precisely the juxtaposition of these two extremes (annihilation and reconciliation) at the apocalyptic melting point of undifferentiation coupled with what will reveal itself to be a remarkable passage
from one kind of undifferentiation to that of another that presents us with
one of the most intriguing aspects of Girards latest reections on the
vicissitudes of violence. With the anthropological turn in Girards thought
beginning with Violence and the Sacred, undifferentiation was invariably cast
in a purely negative light as marking the paroxysms of the mimetic crisis
immediately preceding the intervention of the scapegoat mechanism and
the return to differentiation. The ground for this negative assessment was to
a large degree already laid in Deceit, Desire and the Novel by what appeared
to be a sharp dichotomy drawn between the two main forms of mimesis,
namely, external and internal mediation along with their respective
corollaries, vertical and deviated transcendence. Not surprisingly, this gave
some the impression that Girard was championing the one while
condemning the other, since it is only with internal mediation that the rival
(and hence all of the passions that lead up to conict and violence) comes
on line. But with the discovery of the revelatory and demythologizing effect
of the Judeo-Christian texts that set the stage for an apocalyptic nale, the
notion arises of another, decidedly positive kind of undifferentiation
together with a deeply rooted suspicion regarding the possibility of ever
turning the mimetic clock back to a world governed by ritual and strict
prohibition. Even if this were feasible, such a return to external mediation
could only occur through the immolation of further victims. For Girard, all
cultural institutions (the family not exempted) are tainted with the blood of
innocents and are thus predicated on good or generative violence.52 On
the other hand, Girard invests little faith in purely humanitarian remedies to
violence, and it is not difcult to see why. Despite being unwitting heirs to
the Judeo-Christian tradition and its concern for victims, these sorts of
solutions never really get to the root of the problem inasmuch as they are
incapable of renouncing the project of autonomy demonstrated in large part
by the constant search for scapegoats who stand in the way of realizing their
utopian dreams of unbridled freedom. We must ask then whether an
absolute and nal break with autonomy (in whatever shape or form) may be
the only course available if humanity is to avoid self-destruction.
Does violence somehow hold the key again to its own overcoming? As
early as Things Hidden, Girard begins to refer to two forms of reciprocity
which are at once very close and radically opposed.53 The rst form of
reciprocity, what is variously described as negative, malevolent, or evil is the

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violent reciprocity equivalent to the state of undifferentiation that marks

the mimetic crisis escalating amid doubles. This is the community of
antagonists who steadfastly cling to their autonomy, obstinately insist upon
the differences that dene and separate them, and from time immemorial
search out victims who will securely (albeit temporarily) reincorporate
them into a differentiated social order. Faced, however, with the specter of
apocalyptic doom in the absence of the scapegoat mechanism, there arises
now the counter-possibility of another kind of reciprocity, namely, one that
is positive, benecent, and benevolent.54 This, according to Girard, is the
message preached by the Gospel (the Kingdom of God), and it entails a
radical simplication of human relations in the form of an unconditional
or at minimum unilateral refusal to retaliate in favor of comportment
grounded in reconciliatory compassion for others.55 Now for the tide to turn
in the direction of universal reconciliation, it is necessary that all cultural
differences be swept aside. This presupposes, however, a perilous yet
inevitable descent into the night of violent undifferentiation where the
dangers but also the chances of succeeding are at a maximum.56
Essential here is the loosening of cultural constraints or the dissolving of
false differences to prepare the ground for a possible breakthrough (or
conversion as Girard calls it). Thus, it would seem that a certain threshold
of violence must be collectively crossed before anything like genuine
reconciliation can take root among rivals. Faced with a cultural order that is
no long capable of diffusing or deecting confrontation, doubles reach a
point where they can nally let go of false differences and own up to the
truth of their fundamental identity and the nothingness that stands
between themsomething they are generally loath to do given the deeply
entrenched habit of clinging to their precious autonomy.57 In short, what
must be violently broken through in the name of lasting reconciliation are
precisely the walls of separation culturally erected between selves who
stubbornly invest in the project of metaphysical self-sufciency. What love and
violence thus share in commonwhat moves them closer despite the abyss
separating themis nothing other than this abolition of differences.58
Battling to the End picks up on these new developments introduced in
Things Hidden and moves them into the rhetorical center. Attuned now to
the strange analogy subsisting between negative and positive reciprocity,
Girard resists minimizing any of its paradoxical aspects. This, however, does
not prevent him from shedding additional light on the structural similarities
and differences. Everything will ultimately hinge on the issue of autonomy,
its potential dissolution, and what course that dissolution takes. A

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consideration of some key passages from this text (originally entitled

Achever Clausewitz) will bear this out. Girard nds in Clausewitzs
reections on modern warfare intimations of his own mimetic theory, in
particular, the notion of human relations governed by what the latter calls
the duel or reciprocal action that if unchecked devolves into an
escalation to extremes, in other words, the apocalyptic threat that so
captivates Girard.59 Thus, in Clausewitz Girard discerns an embryonic
version of his own more anthropologically worked out thesis of reciprocal
violence, especially as it threatens to spiral out of control in a postsacricial
world. But aside from these considerations of Clausewitz as a forerunner of
mimetic theory, we also run across a number of passages that shed light on
Girards vision of an alternative to mutual annihilation, once the prohibitive
checks to violence and desire have been irreversibly lifted. Placing faith in
neither progressive nor reactionary cures to human violence, Girard nds in
identity (undifferentiation) not only the root of conict, but also the
nascent signs of Christian love, something he provocatively frames in terms
of a peaceful identity located (as the secret possibility) at the core of
violent identity.60 As with Things Hidden, the analogical relationship
linking negative (conictual) with positive (peaceful) reciprocity is too
conspicuous to ignore as almost the same form of undifferentiation is
involved in both cases.61 In fact, to ponder one, for Girard, is at the same
time to ponder the other, hence indicating a possible transition between
the two. Girard further underscores the mysterious relation between the
two forms of reciprocity by suggesting that reconciliation is the ip side of
violence, the possibility that violence does not [yet] want to see [Girards
italics].62
The secret kinship uniting the two types of undifferentiation is without
question considered now to be the hitherto unforeseen key to avoiding
planetary catastrophe. Precisely why this should be the case brings us
squarely back to the selfs investment in autonomy, and it is here that the
fundamental difference between both kinds of reciprocity (notwithstanding
their common ground in undifferentiation) becomes most apparent.
Girards basic insight is something like the following. As warring rivals enter
the crucible of undifferentiation and cultural differences dissolve away, the
prospect of recognizing what violence does not want to see rises for the
rst time. What violence does not wish to see is precisely the nothingness
that (strangely enough) under normal circumstances succeeds in dividing
and distancing us from our fellow human beings, making others out to be
implacable foes.63 Yet, if this masquerade of differences is recognized for

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what it is, identication with the other as essentially similar or equal to

myself becomes more than just a theoretical abstraction.64 This, for Girard,
is none other than the Gospel message whereby we are enjoined to
compassionately embrace our enemies. Now Girard strictly maintains that
the precondition for passing from violent to peaceful identity is the
elimination of false differences that in turn presupposes giving up any
claims to metaphysical autonomy.65 Thus, the divide separating violent
from peaceful identity is marked by the presence or absence of autonomous
self-assertion. It is signicant, however, that the transition from one state to
the other can only be made by means of a treacherous exposure to violence,
a veritable trial by re;66 recourse to reason alone will not sufce to bring
about the decisive breakthrough given its longstanding collusion with
metaphysical desire.67 On the contrary, what Girard has in mind is more a
matter of an intuitive empathy for the other with regard to his or her
existential vulnerability, what was referred to earlier as the plight of
particularity.68 For if metaphysical desire only gains traction vis-a`-vis our
perceived models, once our models shed the aura of divinity and reveal
themselves to be the ordinary souls they in truth are, guards can be let
down as we refrain from scandalizing others by posing as rivals. The rule of
the Kingdom is thus one of self-effacement and is governed not by the
negative contagion of rivals but the positive contagion of imitating
Christ.69 Girards reections here may be summed up in the following:
I want to think about the continuous. This is why we have to leave behind the
difference between war and peace, and try to understand the mysterious kinship
between violence and reconciliation, negative and positive undifferentiation, the mimetic crisis and what Christians enigmatically call the mystical body. It is impossible to go from one to the other except through a transformation internal to
mimetism [italics mine].70

Beyond the war of rivals, another face of violence is capable of revealing

itself, one that brings in its wake the possibility of an unconditional
effacement of the differences that are part and parcel of autonomous selves
and hence for the rst time of opening the door to a continuity that differs
categorically from the conditional or equivocal sort of continuity
characteristic of the unanimous crowd closing its ranks on scapegoats.71
Lying dormant at the heart of human conict then is a secret
longing for a type of union that, if we are honest, can only help to bring
to mind Batailles reections on the dialectical relationship between
continuity and discontinuity. For if the undifferentiation that sets in at

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the climax of the mimetic crisis is the necessary prelude to catching

sight of an underlying continuity between rivals, violence (as it reaches a
certain pitch and inection) can be viewed as opening up channels of
intimacy otherwise closed off in the tightly regulated network of cultural
differences. Such openings (which on their own accord so mesmerize
Bataille) would effectively clear the way for warring rivals to pass over to
a state of Christian reconciliation. Counterintuitive as it may sound, it
would seem that a turbulent collapse of the selfs autonomy (a` la
Bataille) could, in fact, constitute a viable and even indispensable step
toward lasting peace. Could this be the implicit lesson to be learned
from Battling to the End?
And so, it turns out that undifferentiation, contrary to what Girard
had originally suspected, does indeed have a telos beyond that of setting
into motion the scapegoat mechanism inasmuch as it can violently throw
open the gates to the Kingdom.72 Bataille, of course (despite this clear
gesture in his direction) would not tolerate any such notion of a telos
outside that of sheer undifferentiation, let alone talk of a Kingdom.
Nonetheless, if there is any truth to the claim that violence (as Bataille
and Girard both now insist) is in the end groping toward continuity, the
scapegoat mechanism could be viewed as an abortive strategy
humankind has historically adopted in a dramatic effort to break down
the barriers isolating one individual from another. Human beings are
intrinsically prone to violence because they simultaneously cling to and
call into question the autonomous hand they take themselves to have
been dealt. But if we take Girards most recent reections at their word,
violence may oddly enough contain the seeds of its own overcoming so
long as it does not in a moment of Dionysian haste prematurely lose its
footing and fail to arrive at the peace mysteriously lying in the
distance.73 Bataille would no doubt greet such a happy ending with deep
suspicion given its inspiration in the Biblical traditionit would
amount to yet one more in an already long list of narcotics. But in
these new lines of approach he would, I think, recognize an uncanny
resemblance to his own darker, yet equally unconventional meditations
on the nature of violence.
NOTES
1. Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1977), 222.

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2. Ren Girard, Differentiation and Reciprocity in Lvi-Strauss and Contemporary

Theory, in To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 15577.
3. See Ren Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann

and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 9399.

4. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992).
5. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone

Books, 1991).
6. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Marion Boyars,

1973).
7. Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1992).
8. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco:

City Lights Books, 1986).

9. See Part One of Theory of Religion.
10. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 19.
11. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson

(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), Part I, Chapter 3.

12. See especially Erotism, where this argument is reiterated throughout the text.
13. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 43 61.
14. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 13, 46.
15. See Part II of On Nietzsche.
16. See Literature and Evil, 29 30, 65 66, 143 44, 176 77.
17. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 5257.
18. Bataille, Erotism, 108.
19. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 59.
20. Bataille, Literature and Evil, 133 46.
21. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 5556; The Accursed Share, 58 60; Literature and Evil, 22, 54.
22. Theory of Religion, 36 37.
23. See Part IV of The Accursed Share and the essay on Baudelaire in Literature and Evil, 35 61.
24. See pages 2337 and Part V of The Accursed Share. The connection between a lack of

sacricial outlets and an apocalyptic threat is also (but for very different reasons) a
prominent feature in Girards account. See the third part of this paper.
25. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 21, 23, 31.
26. Ren Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans.

Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 282.

27. See especially Chapters VII and VIII, 15392.

Anthony D. Traylor

154

28. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 5355.

29. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 256 89.
30. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New

York: Vintage Books, 1995), 11316, 61719.

31. Dostoevsky, Demons, 238.
32. This headlong rush into the negative can just as well express itself in the realm of the

erotic in the form of an attraction to those qualities that bear the marks of baseness,
stupidity, and animality, in short, all that humanly speaking is mute and inaccessible. Such
traits signal divinity inasmuch as they are inherently resistant to our approach, and this
accounts for our masochistic passion for that which perpetually thwarts our desire. See
Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 282 89.
33. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Noldt (Albany: State University of

New York Press, 1988), p. xxxii. See also Sacrices in Visions of Excess, trans. Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 130 36.
34. Bataille, Inner Experience, 69.
35. Bataille, Inner Experience, 85.
36. Bataille, Inner Experience, 87.
37. Bataille, Inner Experience, 88.
38. Bataille, Inner Experience, xxxii.
39. Bataille, Inner Experience, 22.
40. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (Volume III), trans. Robert Hurley (New York:

Zone Books, 1993). See especially Part One entitled What I Understand by Sovereignty,
197257.
41. Bataille, The Accursed Share (Volume III), 343.
42. Bataille, Inner Experience, IE xxxii.
43. Bataille, Erotism, 11, 19.
44. See, for instance, On Nietzsche, Part II.
45. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 65.
46. Girard, Things Hidden, 37.
47. Ren Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, trans. Mary Baker

(East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010).

48. Girard, Things Hidden, 444.
49. Girard, Things Hidden, 288. See also Violence and the Sacred, 23738.
50. Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 14; Violence and the Sacred, 49 50.
51. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 240; Things Hidden, 136, 201, 258.
52. Girard, Things Hidden, 208
53. Girard, Things Hidden, 201.

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54. Girard, Things Hidden, 202, 205, 217.

55. Girard, Things Hidden, 197, 200.
56. Girard, Things Hidden, 202, 207.
57. Girard, Things Hidden, 26.
58. Girard, Things Hidden, 270.
59. See Chapter One of Battling to the End, 125.
60. Girard, Battling to the End, 46.
61. Girard, Battling to the End, 63.
62. Girard, Battling to the End, 72.
63. Girard, Battling to the End, 45, 48; Things Hidden, 26, 361.
64. Girard, Battling to the End, 48, 100, 131.
65. Girard, Battling to the End, 51, 72, 88, 131, 132. Contrary to what Girard insists, even more

original than the sin of vengeance would have to be that of metaphysical autonomy.
See Battling to the End, 21.
66. Girard, Battling to the End, 97.
67. Girard, Battling to the End, 48.
68. Girard, Batting to the End, 100, 133. This newly won perspective on the vulnerability of

our fellow human beings can be traced back to the second chapter of Deceit, Desire and
the Novel where behind the mask of divinity the hero catches a eeting glimpse of the
existential void lurking in the depths of the other but lacks the courage to universalize
this discovery.
69. Girard, Battling to the End, 109, 122, 133.
70. Girard, Battling to the End, 71.
71. The unanimity purchased at the expense of the scapegoat is one that remains tightly

wedded to the binary structure of doubles, not only in regard to facilitating the arbitrary
substitution of one victim for all of the other possible victims within the community, but
equally (if not more) important, with regard to the decisive shift that takes place among
the members of the community itself, namely, from being an individual feeling to being
a communal force. Such a metamorphosis is intelligible only if the community
consolidates and collectively redenes itself vis-a`-vis the victim. The community, in
effect, has become the double of its victim, whose death now stabilizes and simplies
the play of vacillating and individual differences. It is precisely this equivocal middle
ground where the moment of difference is projected onto the victim while that of unity
is projected onto the community that allows the latter to suspend their internecine
struggle. The burden of self-assertion, so to speak, has been lifted off each individual and
placed squarely on the back of the community that constitutes now a universal under
which the particular can be subsumed instead of oundering about in a void of
undifferentiation. With the departure of the god (the victim) and the quelling of the
mimetic storm, transcendent meaning is restored as each members identity is
vouchsafed within a totality whose legitimacy is accepted without further ado. It is the

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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 conict 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.