Negative Ecstasies

Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion

Jeremy Biles, Kent L. Brintnall, Jeremy Biles, Kent L. Brintnall

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823265206, 9780823265190
• eBook ISBN: 9780823265213
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Despite Georges Bataille's acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille's work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

Notes

Introduction: Sacred with a Vengeance

Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall

1. Gill, “Introduction” to Bataille: Writing the Sacred, xv. For a detailed study of Story of the Eye, see ffrench, The Cut: Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil. For divergent readings of the gender politics of the novel, see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 39–54; and Brintnall, Ecce Homo, 188–197.

2. Bataille’s older brother, Martial, disputes this characterization of their parents. For a detailed biographical account, see Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 3–13. It is tempting to see the parents—Joseph-Aristide and Marie-Antoinette—as the mad, perverse counterparts of the biblical Joseph and Mary and their son Georges as a sinister reiteration of Christ; Bataille indeed identified with the incarnate word, the carnal god, crucified and crying out.

3. Much of the present biographical account is drawn from Bataille, “Autobiographical Note,” collected in My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, 215–222.

4. See “Coincidences” in Story of the Eye, 94. For a discussion of Bataille’s reliability as a narrator of his own life, see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 44–45.

5. Bataille, “Autobiographical Note,” 217.

6. See Bataille, Story of the Eye, 58–64; see also Leiris, Mirror of Tauromachy. Bataille credited Leiris’s Mirror as central to his own endeavors to unravel the problems of eroticism and its connections to religion. See Bataille, Erotism, 9.

7. Bataille, “Autobiographical Note,” 218.

8. Bataille speaks of “the open wound that my life is” in a letter to Alexandre Kojève collected in Guilty, 123.

9. On Bataille’s repetition of Nietzsche, see Abel, “Georges Bataille and the Repetition of Nietzsche.” See also Biles, Ecce Monstrum, 36–71.

10. Stuart Kendall uses this phrase to describe Bataille’s Nietzschean undertakings in the publication Acéphale, addressed further below. Kendall, “Editor’s Introduction: Unlimited Assemblage,” xx.

11. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 109.

12. Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 206–207. The significance of Bataille’s meditations on this photo are testified to by the frequency with which scholars use it as an entry point to their consideration of Bataille. See, for example, Biles, Ecce Monstrum, 9–12; Brintnall, Ecce Homo, 1–8, 20–24; Buch, The Pathos of the Real, 27–39; Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, 1–7; Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 79–94. For critical assessments of Bataille’s use of these torture images, see Brook, Bourgon, and Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts, 222–242; and Elkins, “The Very Theory of Transgression: Bataille, Lingchi, and Transgression,” 5–19.

13. Denis Hollier cites Raymond Queneau’s quoting of Bataille in “The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille.”

14. Bataille, “Autobiographical Note,” 218.

15. See André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 119–194.

16. Leiris, “Dela Bataille impossible à l’impossible ‘Documents,’” 689.

17. For further discussion of Documents, see Ades and Baker, Undercover Surrealism; Falasca-Zamponi, Rethinking the Political, 95–103.

18. Bataille, “The Use Value of D. A. F. De Sade,” in Visions of Excess, 94.

19. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 19. On Bataille’s understanding of communication and community, see the exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy: Blanchot, “The Negative Community,” in The Unavowable Community, 1–26; and Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 1–42; see also the essays collected in Mitchell and Winfree, eds., The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication.

20. Bataille, “Autobiographical Note,” 220.

21. Bataille, “The Sacred Conspiracy,” in Visions of Excess, 179. Uppercase in the original.

22. Bataille, “The Sacred,” in Visions of Excess, 242.

23. For the Collège’s lectures, see Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology, 1937–1939. For intellectual histories of the Collège, see Falasca-Zamponi, Rethinking the Political; and Richman, Sacred Revolutions.

24. For a discussion of Bataille’s sacred politics, see Irwin, Saints of the Impossible. See also Surya, Georges Bataille, for a detailed account of Bataille’s political involvements.

25. Bataille, “Autobiographical Note,” 219–220.

26. Bataille himself claims that the secret society “[turned] its back on politics”—a statement that must be read in the context of his wider thought and activity. As Hollywood has argued, the gesture of turning away from politics is, for Bataille, itself a political gesture. See Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 60–87.

27. A complete survey of Bataille’s religious development would have to take full account of the profound influence exercised upon Bataille’s concept of the sacred by Laure. Mostly overlooked or underappreciated in the critical literature on Bataille, Laure was a key interlocutor for Bataille and a compelling, incisive, and impassioned thinker in her own right. For a detailed treatment of Laure’s role in the thought of Bataille and Michel Leiris, see Sweedler, The Dismembered Community; see also the notes collected in Stuart Kendall’s recent translation of Guilty. For Laure’s writings, see Laure: The Collected Writings.

28. Bataille, “Autobiographical Note,” 221.

29. Gemerchak, The Sunday of the Negative, 171.

30. On the complex compositional and publication history of La somme, see Kendall, “Editor’s Introduction.”

31. For recent investigations of Bataille’s emphasis on consumption over production and the general economy perspective of The Accursed Share, see Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak; Winnubst, ed., Reading Bataille Now.

32. Bataille, “Joy in the Face of Death,” in The College of Sociology, 1937–1939, 325.

33. Bataille, Erotism, 16.

34. Bataille, “Autobiographica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Series Editor
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sacred with a Vengeance
• Movements of Luxurious Exuberance: Georges Bataille and Fat Politics
• Sovereignty and Cruelty: Self-Affirmation, Self-Dissolution, and the Bataillean Subject
• Erotic Ruination: Embracing the “Savage Spirituality” of Barebacking
• Desire, Blood, and Power: Georges Bataille and the Study of Hindu Tantra in Northeastern India
• The Religion of Football: Sacrifice, Festival, and Sovereignty at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa
• Violent Silence: Noise and Bataille’s “Method of Meditation”
• Georges Bataille and the Religion of Capitalism
• Sacrifice as Ethics: The Strange Religiosity of Neoliberalism
• Bataille’s Contestation of Interpretive Anthropology and the Sociology of Religion
• The Traumatic Secret: Bataille and the Comparative Erotics of Mystical Literature
• Foucault’s Sacred Sociology
• Bataille and Kristeva on Religion
• Bataille, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Death of God
• Does the Acéphale Dream of Headless Sheep?
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Perspectives in Continental Philosophy