sacred violence. girard, bataille and the vicissitudes of human desire

T I I N A A R P P EU n i v e r s i t y o f H e l s i n k i

Sacred Violence: Girard, Bataille and the Vicissitudes

of Human Desire

The article deals with two famous attempts to analyse the relationship between affec-tive violence and the sacred, namely those made by René Girard and Georges Bataille.Despite the apparent similarities of the problems (religious sacrifice as the affectivefoundation of community and the primordial role of violence therein) Girard andBataille end up with profoundly different visions of society’s entire affective economy.For Girard, religious sacrifice is a mechanism of projection and of repression by meansof which the society channels its own unmotivated violence to one arbitrarily chosenindividual (a classical functionalist approach); for Bataille, sacrifice is a means of shar-ing the experience of death which constitutes the repulsive core of the human commu-nity (a more phenomenological approach). The article shows that these differences can be traced back to two different (theoretical) sources. The first one is Durkheim’stheory of the sacred, particularly his vision of the ‘collective turmoil’ as the origin ofsociety and his interpretation of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’. The second one isAlexandre Kojève’s anthropological interpretation of Hegel, especially his theory ofhuman desire, which has clearly influenced both theorists although they both criticiseit (albeit in different fashions). What Girard and Bataille seem to propose us, are twodifferent and even opposing models regarding both the conceptualisation of human‘desire’ and the theoretical/methodological approach we should adopt when dealingwith it.

K E Y W O R D S

Death; desire; economy; negativity; sacred; sacrifice; violence.

Introduction

The connection between religion and violence has been one of the questions hauntingWestern sociology and anthropology since their foundation in the 19th century. Theclose and disturbing link of religious belief systems to a seemingly disproportionateaffective fury is especially manifest in the ritual practices of the so-called ‘primitivecultures’. The ethnographic descriptions of the rites of initiation, ritual sacrifice and

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so forth are loaded with colourful details attesting to this, see for instance EmileDurkheim (1990: 446 ff.).1

In the 20th-century French sociology of religion there are two well-knownattempts to analyse the relationship between violence and the sacred, namely, thosemade by René Girard and Georges Bataille. What makes these attempts sociologicallyinteresting and links them firmly to the history of the discipline is that they bothaddress the classical Durkheimian question concerning the nature of the social bond.Furthermore, they both follow the mature Durkheim in his observation that thisbinding factor is originally to be sought in religion and especially in its ritual aspect,the ‘collective turmoil’ (or a state of collective excitement) which the ritual expressesand canalises.

What distinguishes Girard and Bataille from Durkheim is precisely their empha-sis on the affective violence that the latter tended to dismiss. In short, in the theoret-ical constellation they are proposing, the social bond is based on a violent act of exclu-sion, which precedes any form of inclusion (communication or identification). Forboth of them this violence is fundamentally linked to the category of the sacred, andits privileged (ritual) instance and manifestation is the religious sacrifice. On the otherhand, both think that it is also connected to the particular nature of desire. Yet, inspite of these similarities Bataille and Girard end up with profoundly different visionsof the dynamics sustaining the social bond and, indeed, of society's whole affectiveeconomy.2

In this article I will propose two different sources for the divergence betweenGirard and Bataille which, to my knowledge, has not been properly analysed before.The first one is to be found in Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, especially in his visionof the ‘collective turmoil’ as the origin of society and in his interpretation of the‘ambivalence of the sacred’, an idea originally presented by William Robertson Smith.The second one can be traced back to the diverging conceptions of the two theoristsconcerning the nature of desire, which especially in Bataille’s case is clearly shaped byAlexandre Kojève’s anthropological interpretation of Hegel, extremely influential inpost-war French philosophy. Although Girard never once mentions Kojève, I will showthat the very same (Kojèvean) model of the mimetic desire has also influenced his con-ception of the mimetic desire, although he develops this idea in a quite different direc-tion than Kojève or Bataille. Finally, I will briefly discuss the impact of these two dif-fering approaches to the allegedly violent foundations of the social bond on contem-porary social theory. What Girard and Bataille seem to propose are two different andeven opposing models regarding both the conceptualisation of ‘desire’ and the theo-retical/methodological approach that should be adopted when dealing with it.

The Durkheimian Turmoil

The distinctive feature of Durkheim’s definition of religion is that there is no God orsupernatural agent involved: religion is a social system of beliefs and practices, which

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divides the universe into two mutually exclusive classes, the sacred and the profane.The sacred things are those set apart and forbidden from contact with the profane. Inprimitive religions the sacred is often believed to contain a dangerously contagious‘force’ which cannot be approached without ritual precautions. The main thesis ofDurkheim’s sociological theory of religion is that this force is nothing but a collectiverepresentation of society itself, merely objectified by the individual consciousnessexperiencing it.

In his famous book Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse from 1912 Durkheimpresents the idea of ‘collective turmoil’ to explain the origin of both religion and soci-ety. Although he firmly rejects any attempts to find the first origin of social institu-tions, he continually uses the most ‘primitive’ known religion of the time, the totemicsystem of the Australian Aruntas, as indirect evidence of how everything ‘must have’happened. According to Durkheim, everything must have begun from a state of col-lective frenzy in a crowd gathered together:

The very fact of the concentration acts as an exceptionally powerful stimulant. When they are once

come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to

an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance

in all the minds, which are very open to outside impression; each re-echoes the others, and is re-

echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds, growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows

in its advance. And as such active passion so free from all control could not fail to burst out, on

every side one sees nothing but violent gestures, cries, veritable howls, and deafening noises of

every sort, which aid in intensifying still more the state of mind which they manifest. And since a

collective sentiment cannot express itself collectively except on the condition of observing a cer-

tain order permitting co-operation and movements in unison, these gestures and cries naturally

tend to become rhythmic and regular; hence come songs and dances. […] How could such experi-

ences as these, especially when they are repeated every day for weeks, fail to leave in him [the indi-

vidual, TA] the conviction that there really exist two heterogeneous and mutually incomparable

worlds? […] So it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this efferves-

cence itself that the religious idea seems to be born. (Durkheim, 1947: 215–19; 1990: 308–13)

The fact that the force of society should be associated with the totem Durkheimexplains by transference of sentiments: the idea of a thing and the idea of its symbolare so closely united in the mind that the sentiments they trigger become commin-gled. However, since society itself is an entity too abstract to provoke such intense sen-timents, they become connected to some object which is sufficiently concrete and sim-ple. This explains the special status of the totem (usually an animal or a plant), whichbecomes associated with the state of over-excitement invoked by the ceremonies. Andsince collective ideas are most powerful when people are gathered together, the onlyway to vivify these representations is to submerge them into the source in which theywere born (i.e., the gathered groups). This in turn explains why the ceremonies needto be regularly repeated. In short, for Durkheim religion originates in a state of col-

33Tiina Arppe · Sacred Violence

lective delirium, but one which is paradoxically ‘well-founded’ (Durkheim, 1947: 226;1990: 324).

In spite of this notably secular explanation concerning the origins of religion,Durkheim tends to downplay the theoretical significance of the violent, frighteningand even repulsive features of the religious ritual. This becomes apparent not only inthe way he treats some orgiastic features (for instance, the breaking of the exogamicrules) connected to the states of collective turmoil, seeing them as ‘merely a mechan-ical consequence of the state of super-excitation provoked by the ceremony […], meredischarges of energy’ with no ritual meaning (Durkheim, 1947: 383, n. 2; 1990: 547, n. 2);it is also manifest in the interpretation he gives to Robertson Smith’s famous idea con-cerning the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’.

The Scottish theologian and exegete William Robertson Smith originally present-ed this idea in his book The Religion of the Semites from 1889. Robertson Smith paidattention to the fact that in primitive religions the taboo applies to two realities,which would seem to be mutually exclusive: to things that are considered sacred andto those regarded as impure, so that the boundary between the two is often vague, butstill real. The reality of the distinction is, for Smith, proved by the difference ofmotives: in the rules of holiness the motive is respect for the gods; in the rules ofuncleanness it is primarily fear of an unknown or hostile power (Smith, 2005: 150–55).This idea soon became very influential. Whereas Durkheim used Smith’s theory in hisexplanation of the piacular rites, his disciples Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss took itas the basis of their model of the sacrifice (Hubert and Mauss, 1968: 193–99), Freudused it in his interpretation of the emotional ambivalence caused by repressed impuls-es (Freud, 1995: 199–241) and Emile Benveniste later adopted it in his vocabulary of theIndo-European institutions in which he affirmed that the division sacred-profane ismost clearly manifested in the Latin word ‘sacer’ (Benveniste, 1989: 187–88).

Durkheim’s explanation of, or rather his solution to, this ambiguity is to dividethe religious forces into two categories: the benevolent and the malevolent forces, andto claim that the ‘dark’ or ‘bad’ forces are, in fact, produced by a specific category ofrites, the ‘piacular rites’ (Durkheim, 1990: 556 ff.; 1947: 389 ff.). In the primitive socie-ty every evil omen, every misfortune, illness or death, is interpreted as a product ofthese malevolent forces, and therefore necessitates expiation (piaculum). These rites, infact, objectify the negative sentiments provoked by different exterior misfortunes(death, illness, etc.) and turn them into ‘bad forces’ that the rite is destined to soothe.The different manifestations of anguish (weeping, groaning, inflicting wounds upononeself) restore to the group the energy which circumstances threatened to take awayfrom it, and thus enable it to get along. In short, the sanctity of a thing is due to thecollective sentiment of which it is the object, only circumstances colour the processdifferently (Durkheim, 1990: 584–92; 1947: 409–14).

Whereas Robertson Smith saw a fundamental moral difference between the pre-cautions founded on respect (demanding ‘a moral discipline’; Smith, 2005: 154) andthose based on fear alone (‘aberrations of the savage imagination’; Smith, 2005: 154),


Durkheim, in fact, subtly effaces the fear provoked by the malevolent forces: it is onlya secondary form, a fear ‘sui generis derived from respect more than from fright’, whenthe individual is met with a power that surpasses him or her (Durkheim, 1990: 87; 1947:62, italics in the original). In other words, between fear and respect there is no essen-tial qualitative difference in Durkheim’s theory, since both are reduced to the sameundifferentiated affective energy, the function of which is always the same: consolida-tion of the collective cohesion.

The Primal Scene of René Girard

Although René Girard firmly denies having read Durkheim’s theory of religion beforehe wrote La violence et le sacré (2007c),3 we can nonetheless shed some interesting lighton his model of the sacred by juxtaposing it with certain hypotheses of the Durk-heimian theory. Indeed, the Girardian theory of the sacred could schematically be pre-sented as a negative image of the ‘effervescent’ (that is, the affective and ritual) side ofthe Durkheimian theory of religion.4 Following Camille Tarot (2008a: 661) one mightin fact say that Girard’s theory of religion completes the Durkheimian theory bybringing into light the violence which Durkheim did not see.

Girard is less hesitating than Durkheim in posing the morpho-genetic questionconcerning the origin of culture and society, a question which had largely inspired19th-century evolutionist anthropology, but which the Lévi-Straussian structuralismof the 1950s and the subsequent post-structuralism of the 1960s later declared absurdand impossible. Whereas on the Durkheimian primal scene there is singing and danc-ing (and orgiastic sex), on the Girardian scene there is killing – or to be more precise,one single murder. The hypothetical chain of events could be the following.5 Every-thing begins when two primates with a relatively big brain and a strong propensity forimitation start to pursue the same object. Soon a third one will show up, then afourth, and pretty quickly there is a whole bunch of primates, lurking around eachother and pursuing the same object, which is desired because the others seem to desireit too. The general animosity becomes increasingly tangible; the aggressiveness pro-duced by the rivalry intensifies and the original object of the desire is progressively for-gotten. Everybody imitates the desire of everybody else; everybody is rival, obstacle andenemy for one another, until the rage bottled up suddenly and arbitrarily turnstowards one individual. There is a ferocious outburst, during which this individual isliterally torn apart.6

However, what is crucial for the development of culture only comes after the blood-shed. The group, recovered from its murderous frenzy, now directs all its attention tothe lifeless body of the victim. This first non-instinctual form of attention transformsthe body of the victim, so that it becomes the first signifier, introducing the first sig-nificant difference into the former instinctual indifferentiation. It is here that the‘long march’ towards the sacred and the culture begins (Girard, 2007b: 819–20).During a period of time which probably lasts for several hundred thousand years a


new method of restraining human violence is born, which replaces the former animalor instinctual mechanisms of protection with prohibitions and rituals, that is, withcultural mechanisms. The most important of these is the ritual sacrifice which sub-stitutes the first, spontaneously lynched ‘surrogate’ victim with a ritually chosen one.

Before getting into a more detailed analysis of the surrogate victimage mechanism,let us note the basic similarity between the Girardian and the Durkheimian ‘primalscenes’.7 Even though the sinister atmosphere of the former completely differs fromthe happy euphoria of the latter, Girard’s theory of the origin of culture is structural-ly very close to the Durkheimian model. For both the ‘productive’ canalisation ofaffectivity marks the event which sets the cultural development in motion. After thisthe free-floating affectivity gets permanently fixed to a signifier (for Girard the victim,for Durkheim the totem) which starts to act as its symbol, and the process progres-sively leads to the development of language. In short, in the beginning there is a homo-geneous affective flux from which the whole diversity of cultures and religions isderived. In Girard’s theory it is the first ‘spontaneous’ lynching which represents the‘big bang’ that sets the generation of differences in motion; in Durkheim’s theorythere is no such single founding event, the system of differences is forged gradually ‘inthe midst of these effervescent social environments’ (Durkheim, 1990: 313; 1947: 219).

The ‘Victimage Mechanism’ and the Ambivalence of the Sacred

Girard criticises the existing anthropological theories of sacrifice for treating theprimitive sacrifice as a mere symbolic institution. For example, Henri Hubert andMarcel Mauss, in their famous essay on sacrifice (1968), see the ritual sacrifice as a kindof symbolic technique, a buffer between the profane and the sacred which allows mento approach the sacred in spite of its alleged destructive power and dangerous con-tagiousness. This, in Girard’s opinion, is by no means an adequate explanation. Thereis a real connection between sacrifice and violence which the modern social science has stubbornly set aside, because this would lead to the genetic (and allegedly ‘un-scientific’) question concerning the origin of the institution (Girard, 2007c: 406–07).

Since a significant part of ritual commemorations consist of killing (i.e., sacrifice),it is natural to assume that the original incident (‘événement originel’) was indeed amurder. This is what Freud quite lucidly saw in Totem and Taboo (1995). His mistake,according to Girard, was to presume that it was the murder of one particular individ-ual (the father) and furthermore, that it was a unique historical event (see Girard,2007b: 733). In Girard’s view the tremendous influence that the original murder had onthe community was not due to the identity of the victim, but to the unifying effect ofthe sacrifice: it prevented the community from collapsing under its own internal vio-lence. Moreover, the (trans)cultural uniformity of sacrifices suggests that it is the sametype of murder in all societies, that is, with the same kind of ‘original incident’, onlythe forms of the murder varying from one religion to another (Girard, 2007c: 407).


However, it is important to note that there are, in fact, two different substitutionsat work in the Girardian model of sacrifice. The first one is the basic mechanism onwhich Girard builds up his hypothesis of the unity of all ritual institutions (sacrificebeing only one of them) and in which one single individual is substituted for thewhole community (the ‘surrogate victimage’). This is a process which remains hiddenand which happens inside the community. The second substitution is the scapegoatmechanism or the ritual sacrifice which replaces the original victim with a rituallychosen one, usually in some way coming from ‘outside’ the community (from somemarginal category, prisoners of war, slaves; etc.; see Girard, 2007c: 419–21).

It is precisely the first substitution which in the Girardian model acts as the basisfor all cultural institutions. The surrogate victimage is not itself an institution (beingthe condition of other institutions), but a mechanism which is temporally antecedentto all other institutions (see for instance Fleming, 2004: 53). The mechanism is basedupon an inevitable misapprehension (‘méconnaissance’), without which it would notfunction. The transferential character of the collective violence remains hidden fromthe murderers (and all the more from those who later carry out the ritual sacrificewithout the slightest notion of its mimetic character). The function of the surrogatevictim is thus not only to channel the collective violence into the victimage mecha-nism, but also to hide its collective roots. This is where religion steps into the picture:its role is to reproduce this function, that is, to reject violence outside the communi-ty by projecting it onto a transcendental category, namely, the sacred.

In Girard’s theory the sacred is not defined as a category with fixed limits thatwould be opposed to the profane, as in the Durkheimian model, but as a set ofhypotheses that the mind arrives at over an extremely long period, as a result of innu-merable collective transferences in which the collective violence is channelled timeafter time into the surrogate victim (Girard, 2007b: 753).8 The ritual machinery whichgrows upon this evolution is based on a double necessity to remember and prevent.The prohibitions surrounding the sacred reflect the need to prevent the repetition ofthe violent crisis which could entail the collapse of the entire cultural order. But, onthe other hand, there is an opposite need to remember, to repeat in order to banish,since the stabilisation brought about by the murder is always transitory (because ofthe mimetic character of desire, which always leads to new competitions and con-flicts). Girard explains this dynamic of prohibitions and their periodic, but measured(ritual) transgression by the impression that the first killing left to those present – animpression the memory of which was then engraved in the ritual institutions and car-ried on by them. This impression was a deeply ambivalent one: for the first murderers,the victim appeared both as the originator and the resolver of the crisis, the criminalas well as the redeemer. And this, for Girard, explains both the sanctification of the vic-tim and the famous ambivalence of the sacred. The impure sacred, which Durkheimsaw as a product of the rituals connected to mourning (the group projects its affectivestate in ‘bad forces’), is for Girard just a reflection of the ambivalent character of vio-lence itself, paradigmatically expressed by the Greek word ‘pharmakos’, which means


‘poison’ as well as ‘remedy’ (on this, see for instance Derrida, 1972). The impure vio-lence is precisely the contagious, freely escalating violence, which can only be tamedby the ritually purified violence (the scapegoat). The prohibitions are there to preventthe impure violence from escalating whereas their ritually controlled transgression(the purified violence) is necessary for the commemoration.

Girard’s analysis of the ambivalence of the sacred also reveals the basic differencebetween his social theory and that of Durkheim. Even though from Girard’s point ofview Durkheim was completely right in stating that the function of religion is tostrengthen social cohesion, he was mistaken in seeing the sacred as a collective repre-sentation of the force of society. For Girard the sacred is not a collective representationof society’s moral force, but a collective projection of the mimetic violence that the com-munity wants to keep far from itself. Although there is a sort of misapprehension alsoin Durkheim’s model (the members of society do not realise that they in fact adoresociety itself when adoring their totem), there is no ‘dark’ secret to be pushed away,since affectivity for Durkheim does not entail violence: the collective turmoil simplyends up in a collective fatigue (see Durkheim, 1990: 310; 1947: 216).This is also one ofthe main critical points that Girard turns against Durkheim: the identity of the socialand the sacred (the fact that the sacred is but a collective representation of the social)is not an explanation, it is merely another articulation of the social and cultural order(see Girard, 2007c: 731; Fleming, 2004: 68). In contrast to Durkheim’s theory in whichthe force of affectivity is domesticated in a positive manner, by confronting it with themoral power of society, in Girard’s theory the centrifugal, dissolving force of violencecan only be canalised in a negative way, by a new act of violence.

It might seem, then, that for Girard violence itself is the big causal force that setsthings in motion. However, this is not quite the case. Although violence in Girard’smodel is basically unmotivated (there is no ‘rational’ reason for it), its origin can beretraced to another factor, namely, the mimetic character of human desire.

The Mimetic Desire

The Girardian theory of culture is essentially based on one premise: the mimetic char-acter of human desire. This idea is already developed in Mensonge romantique et véritéromanesque (2007a), Girard’s first book, in which he analyses famous literary works(Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Proust) in the light of his hypothesis. Man’sdesire is by no means autonomous as the romantic literature would have it. On thecontrary, it is only aroused by another man’s desire directed towards the same object.The subject’s desire for the object is thus always mediated by a ‘third’, the model, thedesire of whom the subject is imitating. In the end, the subject’s desire is completelycaptured by the model that becomes the real object of desire, whereas the originalobject is turned into a mere vehicle of desire. Girard characterises this sort of desire as‘metaphysical’ (Girard, 2007a: 77) to distinguish it from a simple physical need; in fact,it is a desire for being, because the subject dreams of a plenitude of being which he/she


believes the model to possess. The subject expects the model to show him/her whathe/she should desire in order to attain this plenitude. By desiring an object the modelshows that this must be an object that could fulfil the subject’s dream. Hence, unlikethe need, the desire is infinite (it can never be fulfilled) (Girard, 2007a: 35–75).

Girard’s subsequent book La violence et le sacré (2007c) is mainly an anthropologi-cal application and enlargement of this idea. Two desires converging in the sameobject necessarily become obstacles for one another. The mimetic desire thereforeautomatically leads into conflict. Violence and desire are permanently interconnected(there is no desire free from violence).9 This becomes blatantly manifest in a situationthat Girard calls ‘sacrificial crisis’ in which the victimage mechanism is lost and thecommunity is in danger of collapsing under its internal violence. ’We believe that thenormal form of desire is nonviolent and that this nonviolent form is characteristic ofthe generality of mankind. But if the sacrificial crisis is a universal phenomenon, thishopeful belief is clearly without foundation’ (Girard, 1979: 144; 2007c: 472). The gen-eralised conflict deprives the participants of all their differentiating features. The sac-rificial crisis therefore entails the collapse of all differences, that is, a generalised crisisof culture (insofar as culture is defined as a system of differences). This is why sociallife would be impossible without the victimage mechanism which, by channelling themimetic violence productively, constitutes the basis of cultural order. The book endswith a general hypothesis of the unity of all rites:

We are now moving toward an expanded concept of sacrifice in which the sacrificial act in the nar-

row sense plays only a minor role. […] There is a unity that underlies not only all mythologies and

rituals but the whole of human culture, and this unity of unities depends on a single mechanism,

continually functioning because perpetually misunderstood – the mechanism that assures the

community’s spontaneous and unanimous outburst of opposition to the surrogate victim.

(Girard, 1979: 297–300; 2007c: 664–67)

In his subsequent book Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (2007b) Girardgoes even farther and links the mimetic desire and the victimage mechanism directlyto man’s hominisation. In order to explain the passage from nature to culture, Girardtells us, we do not need to postulate anything more than is already found among theanthropoids: a strong propensity for imitation together with a relatively big brain.Among the primates the escalation of violence is prevented by a strongly hierarchicsocial structure, on one hand (the group yields to the will of one leading individual),and by an instinctual system controlling the aggressiveness born from the mimetictendency, on the other (the development of tools and weapons progressively deprivespeople of this instinctual control mechanism, typical of animals whose weapons in thefight are their teeth, claws or other body parts). Hominisation can here be understoodas a process during which humans learn to domesticate and to tolerate ever growingamounts of mimetism – this process only begins with the first violent outburst, thatis, the founding murder.


Between what can be strictly termed animal nature on the one hand and developing humanity on

the other, there is a true rupture, which is collective murder, and it alone is capable of providing

for kinds of organisation, no matter how embryonic, based on prohibition and ritual. It is there-

fore possible to inscribe the genesis of human culture in nature and to relate it to a natural mech-

anism without depriving culture of what is specifically, exclusively, human. (Girard, 1987: 97;

2007b: 816)

Girard (1987: 3–4; 438; 2007b: 708) draws an implicit parallel between his own theoryand the Darwinian theory of evolution. Just as the theory of natural selection offers arational explanation for the formidable multiplicity of different life-forms on earth,so the Girardian theory of the victimage mechanism provides the same type of(unique and universal) explanation for the different forms of cultural evolution.Another parallel feature that Girard sees between Darwin’s theory and his own is thefact that neither can be verified empirically, since the time span covered by both theo-ries is extremely long (hundreds of thousands if not millions of years). Yet, accordingto Girard, the explanatory power of both hypotheses is the strongest of all theoriespresented so far (Girard, 2007c: 681).

From social theory’s point of view the most problematic points in Girard’s theoryare perhaps the transition from nature to culture, allegedly provided by the surrogatevictimage, and a related problem concerning the way Girard theorises (or rather doesnot theorise) the process of symbolisation which should lead to the replacement ofthe original victim by a ritual scapegoat. The surrogate victimage is, in fact, a theoret-ical postulate needed in order to perform the perilous leap from nature to culture,since animal imitation alone, however intense it might be, cannot produce human cul-tural forms. For this, as Girard himself affirms, we need the founding murder whichalone can set the development of the ritual (cultural) machinery in motion (seeGirard, 2007b: 816). However, in order to get from the first spontaneous (or rather,automatic) killing to a cultural institution like the ritual sacrifice, a whole history hasto be run through. Even the tiniest cultural institution not only requires imitation, italso requires substitution; and this is already an intellectual operation, which presup-poses reflexion, memory, in short, the intervention of an entire symbolic dimension.In other words, a quasi-automatic ‘natural’ mechanism of expulsion, provoked by themimetic nature of human desire, cannot per se give us culture (the big philosophicalquestion is whether it could do this even if it were repeated millions of times, since thesame problem would only be repeated with each individual mimetic crisis, and this adinfinitum). Girard seems to jump directly from nature to culture without theorising theenormous symbolic process we might call the ‘social’. Yet, it is only this process of col-lective memorisation, metaphorisation, distanciation that can give us any form oftranscendence (sacred) or culture in the first place (see also Tarot, 2003: 287–90).


Georges Bataille and the Affective Dynamics of the Sacred

The theory of sacred and of sacrifice proposed by Georges Bataille has a slightly dif-ferent starting point. Its main influences come from the French sociology of the sacredand Maussian anthropology, on one hand, and from Hegelian (philosophical) phe-nomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis, on the other. The phenomenologicalapproach stresses the role of the subjective experience, not only as an essential part ofthe ‘object’ of research, but also in Bataille’s own method. Ultimately this means giv-ing up the rigorous separation between the subject and the object of research. Forinstance, the sacred, being contagious, can only ‘contaminate’ the person studying it(see Ambrosino et al., 1995; Hollier, 1995: 7–8). This methodological heresy distin-guishes Bataille not only from Girard, but also from Durkheim for whom the objec-tivity of sociology was only guaranteed by the objectivity of the facts it studied.10

Moreover, the entire ontology of Bataille must be seen from the perspective of a post-Hegelian (or post-Kojèvean) phenomenology: the fundamental ontological unity ofman and nature can only appear to historical man as a lighting strike, through trans-gressive experiences, which momentarily break his individual isolation. B a t a i l l e ’ ssacred has to be seen as a part of his more general theory of the useless expenditure(‘dépense’) (see Bataille, 1970b). Although the Durkheimian division between thesacred and the profane and the central role given to the prohibition in the definitionof the sacred are also constitutive to Bataille’s conception of the sacred, for him it isnonetheless just a part of a more general sphere he calls the heterogeneous (see Bataille,1970d; 1970e). The heterogeneous comprises all the different forms of useless expen-diture. It is a domain of waste and dissipation in which the excess produced on thehomogeneous (productive, profane) domain is destroyed. However, apart from thisgeneral emphasis on waste and destruction, the heterogeneous resembles the Durk-heimian sacred in being ambivalent, that is, divided into a pure and an impure part(e.g. Bataille, 1970d).

Yet the explanation Bataille gives for the ambivalence of the sacred is more akin tothat proposed by Girard (sacred as an affective projection of collective violence) thanthe Durkheimian solution (sacred as a collective representation of society’s force),although for Bataille sacred is most of all affective communication (collective sharing ofanguish caused by death). In the Bataillean scheme, the ritual transgression of prohi-bitions (protecting the sacred) acts as a catalyst for a dynamics of attraction and repul-sion, which constitutes the foundation of the social core.11 The sacred, taboo-protect-ed entities are interpreted as things or ‘forces’, which the human body has rejected andin this sense ‘wasted’. The barrier of repulsion prevents the continuation of expendi-ture. This interpretation of the dynamics animating the social core has two notewor-thy consequences: 1) the integrity of the participants, as well as the community as awhole, is at stake every time the sacred is approached by the repetition of the ‘crime’(i.e., the transgression of the taboo); 2) the breaking of the barrier liberates tremen-dous amounts of energy, which in turn helps to keep the barrier up:


Subsequently, this expenditure lends its energy to the dynamism of the good power, lucky and

right, that prohibits crime, that prohibits the very principle of expenditure, that maintains the

integrity of the social whole and in the last analysis denies its criminal origin. (Bataille, 1995a: 167)

In spite of its Freudian influences, this scheme also seems to deviate from Freud’s theory in some significant respects. For Bataille the prohibition is not something,which, even in ‘primitive’ society, would have been imposed on the human conscious-ness by some exterior authority, as Freud (1995: 60) would have it. Firstly, the interdic-tion is not to be understood as an obstacle, imposed on human desire by the almightyFather (real or symbolic), but its origin is the common, inner, experience of terrorbefore death (see for instance Bataille, 1976b: 307–18). Yet, it is only the fleeting instantof the transgression of the symbolic taboo that can give us a glimpse of this anguishwithout which the prohibition would not exist. Secondly, it is first and foremostdeath, not the sexual desire directed towards the mother, which is barred by the pro-hibition. Thus the origin of the taboo is not the all-powerful primitive father, but thehorror caused by what Lacan, following Hegel (and above all Kojève), called ‘the ab-solute master’.

In this manner the Bataillean emphasis of the expenditure also constitutes the linkbetween his ‘structural’ model in which the heterogeneous is seen as a domain opposedto the homogeneous, and a more phenomenological approach in which it is examinedas an experience or a ‘movement’ (a common experience of finitude), since the apogeeof expenditure is none other than death. ‘Of all conceivable luxuries the death, in itsfatal and inexorable form, is certainly the most costly one’ (Bataille, 1976a: 40). Theconnection between the sacred and this luxurious loss is thus paradigmatically givenin the ritual sacrifice.

The Inner Experience of Sacrifice

Like Girard’s model the Bataillean theory of sacrifice is dominated by what could becalled the image of the ‘primitive society’. But although Bataille uses many historicalsocieties as examples for his theory (for instance, the Tlingit and the Kwakiutl tribesanalysed by Marcel Mauss and Franz Boas or the Aztecs of Mexico during the 15th and16th centuries), his ‘primitive society’ cannot be reduced to any of them. It is not asocial organisation or an archaic paradise, which once would have existed and thenwas lost, but rather a hypothetical model comparable to Rousseau’s state of nature: auniverse in which the relationship between man and the world is presumed to beimmediate and immanent (the world has not yet been divided into objects exterior toman) (Bataille, 1976a: 63).

It is this intimate and immanent world that Bataille (1976b: 302) calls the ‘sacred’,whereas the ‘profane’ in this (phenomenological) context refers to the world that ismediated by objects and is in this sense transcendental, exterior to man. However,alongside his ontology of immediacy Bataille (1970e; 1976a; 1976b; 1979a) develops a


phenomenological account of alienation, in which the secularisation of the world andthe enslavement of man begin with the invention of work and of language (work andlanguage are the original forms of alienation, whereas for instance Christianity andindustrial capitalism can be interpreted as its developed or historical forms). The divi-sion of the world into separated subjects and objects takes place as soon as man beginsto form words replacing the ‘immediate’ world, and to modify his natural environ-ment by his work. The birth of the transcendental world of objects also gives rise tothe fear of death by bringing along the consciousness of time and of the differencebetween the subject and the object. When contemplating their own existence the crea-tures, who know how to make objects and use durable tools, realise that something inthem cannot resist time, whereas objects seem to defy it (Bataille, 1976b: 297–306).

It is precisely the utility, the usability of objects and their dependence on exteriorpurposes that constitute the heart of Bataille’s phenomenological account of alien-ation. Utility lays the foundation for the profane universe of work, in which existenceis always harnessed to serve ends exterior to it. Existence valuable in itself can only begrasped by breaking up the prohibitions, which constitute the profane universe ofwork and which all concern the useless expenditure of energy in its different forms.Death must be viewed from this standpoint. In the Bataillean scheme death is a pro-foundly ambivalent thing. By destroying the isolated (and in his isolation object-like)individual (or sacrificial animal) it opens up a fleeting breach into the (always already)‘lost’ continuity of being. Thus, it is something to be celebrated (Bataille, 1988a: 103).On the other hand, it provokes unlimited fear and anguish in the isolated subject,because, with the loss of the intimate world relation, death, too, has lost its intimatecharacter and become transcendent.12 Men express this emotional ambivalence by sur-rounding death as well as other forms of dangerous excess, for instance, sexuality, withprohibitions. Seen from the viewpoint of the profane universe of work, death and sex-uality both appear as something completely different (‘tout autre’ – Bataille, 1970e:58–59; 1979a: 35), but at the same time they are fundamentally linked to man’s ‘bestial’(impure) existence, freed from the constraints of work. The prohibitions prevent theinvasion of this domain in the profane, orderly existence. On the other hand, ‘it is thestate of transgression which commands the desire, the demand of a universe moreprofound, more rich and prodigious, in short, the demand of a sacred universe’(Bataille, 1979a: 41; see also 1976a: 61–64).

This is also why the prohibitions affecting the various manifestations of excess cannever be absolute in Bataille’s scheme. This would definitely condemn people to theisolated and object-like (profane) existence, which can never be sovereign,13 valuable initself. The isolated individual can restore the immediate world relation only when theanxiety touching the future vanishes for a split second. This is what happens in ritu-als involving unmotivated expenditure. It is precisely through this excess that the sub-ject reveals his or her innermost, intimate being to his or her fellow beings. The trans-gression of the prohibition thus becomes the channel, through which the isolatedindividuals communicate, not only with each other, but also with the great (ontolog-


ical) continuity of being. For Bataille it is precisely this sacred experience which consti-tutes the foundation of the social bond (see Bataille, 1976b; 1995a).

The Paradoxes of Sacrifice

The Bataillean model of sacrifice contains two major problems, which should be dealtwith before going to Kojève, and of which he was himself acutely aware. The first couldbe called the problem of functionalism, the second the problem of simulation.Nonetheless, they both spring from the same source, namely, the ambivalent status ofsacrifice as a part of what might be called a ‘restricted economy’. In the first case, theproblem is linked with the economy of sociability (or of the social bond), in the sec-ond case, with the economy of representation.

The problem of functionalism is in a certain way implied in the very structure ofsacrifice. Sacrifice is a gift given to gods either as a payment of a debt or in order toreceive a return gift. According to the standard functionalist explanation of theDurkheimian school, these ‘utilitarian’ motives, which the primitives themselvesoften give to the sacrifice, are, nonetheless, merely apparent. In reality the ritual nour-ishes the social forces sustaining the community, that is, it regenerates the spiritualand moral energy of the group. Gods are the image, the emblem and the symbol ofsociety, and the function of the sacrifice is to solidify the social bond (see Durkheim,1990: 491–500; Hubert and Mauss, 1968).

In fact, Bataille’s interpretation of the sacrifice is not so far from this functional-ist model. Its latent functionalism is particularly palpable in the book L’homme et lesacré that Bataille’s friend, the French anthropologist Roger Caillois, published in 1939and to which Bataille greatly contributed (in his preface Caillois even talks about an‘intellectual osmosis’ between his own ideas and those of Bataille, see Caillois, 1950: 13;Worms, 1991: 44–45). In a sense Caillois is even more functionalist than Durkheim everwas, since he attributes a social function even to those ‘superfluous’ and excessive fea-tures of the rite, which Durkheim (1990: 547–48, n. 2), in default of a better explana-tion, interpreted as involuntary (quasi-natural) side effects of the ritual (see alsoArppe, 1995). According to Caillois, excesses are an essential part of the sacred powerof the rites, they contribute to the regeneration of nature and of the community thatis the principal function of the rite (see Caillois, 1995: 651–52). The same type of expla-nation can also be found in Bataille’s La part maudite, published in 1949 (Bataille,1976a: 64). Despite the book’s overall emphasis on the useless and constitutively super-fluous nature of expenditure (‘dépense’), the interpretation given of ritual sacrifice isstill strangely functionalist in its undertones. In sacrifice the ‘useless’ and allegedly‘sovereign’ expenditure seems to be transformed to a mere means, the function ofwhich is to channel human violence into socially acceptable forms, so that after theritual blood shedding the ‘normal’ everyday life could reassume its peaceful course.

From this point of view the Bataillean scheme seems quite close to theDurkheimian model of ‘collective effervescence’: the cultural order is reproduced by


ritually repeating the affective experience, which constitutes its foundation. InDurkheim’s theory, what is repeated is the creative chaos of collective frenzy, inBataille’s interpretation the euphoric, yet terrifying experience of man’s own finitude.Sacrificial violence seems to become a mere ‘safety valve’, whose function is always thesame, namely, the regeneration of the social order, an interpretation later adopted anddeveloped by none other than René Girard.

It is noteworthy that, in spite of the manifest similarities between his theory andthat of Bataille, Girard only once mentions the name of Bataille in his La violence et lesacré, and this in an overtly sarcastic tone (2007c: 565). From his viewpoint, Batailleappears as a degenerated aesthetician who, instead of presenting a scientific explana-tion of violence, goes on romanticising it. Even though Girard never formulates thingsexplicitly, it might be said that from his angle Bataille remains a prisoner of the meta-physical representation of violence, typical to Freud (the death instinct) or to Hegel(the dialectic of master and slave), for instance. Bataille does not take the functional-ist strain implicit in his theory to its logical conclusion, which would mean seeinghuman violence as a mechanism (a means to an end) and thereby attaching it to the verystructure and movement of society’s affective economy. Instead, he keeps on deplor-ing its inexplicable, ecstatic and ‘experiential’ nature that remains beyond the grasp ofdiscursive knowledge.

In a general fashion, what we’re looking for in sacrifice or in potlatch, in action (history) or in con-

templation (thinking), is always this shadow – which, by definition, we cannot grasp – which we

only in vain call poetry, the depth or the intimacy of passion. We are necessarily mistaken, because

we want to grasp this shadow. […] The ultimate problem of knowledge is the same as that of con-

summation. No one can at the same time know and avoid destruction, consume wealth and

increase it. (Bataille, 1976a: 76, italics in original; translation TA)

Here Bataille is indeed led into a cul-de-sac. Paradoxically, his problem is the verystructure that Girard offers as an explanation: the economy itself, the impossibility ofcapturing the ‘shadow’ of death in the economy of representation. This is what I callthe problem of simulation. On one hand, the Bataillean sacrifice appears as a channel,through which the community touches and thus controls the intimacy and the imma-nence (its own inaccessible foundation opened up in sacrificial death). But, on theother, Bataille is forced to admit that all attempts to appropriate and control thisintimate depth lead to an impasse and illusion.

If self-conscience is essentially the full possession of intimacy, then we must return to the fact that

all possession of intimacy ends up in a trap. A sacrifice can only lay out a sacred thing. The sacred

thing exteriorises the intimacy: it makes visible from the outside that which in reality is in the

inside. (Bataille, 1976a: 177–78, italics in original; translation TA)


Bataille is thus forced to admit the mimetic character of the sacrifice. In fact, the par-ticipants are only given access to a spectacle, a simulated and mediated (represented)death. Although man’s consciousness of his own future annihilation separates himfrom other animals, in reality death reveals nothing. The revelation of man’s human(mortal) essence to himself would require that he lived his own death, that he wouldbe able to appropriate himself integrally, without residue, in his own negativity. But asBataille himself points out (1988b: 336), ‘this is a comedy!’ In short, for Bataille theproblem of mimesis is on the level of representation, whereas for Girard it is essentiallymet on the level of appropriation.14

In a sense the whole economy of the Bataillean subject, both individual and col-lective, is based on the rejection of the economist interpretation of sacrifice. Sacrificeis not a mere commerce between man and god(s), but a means of access to transcen-dence, to some sort of exteriority, be it the sacred, the god or the experience of man’sown mortality, through which immanence and communication with others onlybecome possible. However, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1990) haspointed out, in spite of Bataille’s efforts to the contrary, this scheme remains pro-foundly Hegelian in its nature: it consists of the (dialectical) reappropriation of thesubjective identity, albeit in a torn and wrenched form, mediated by negativity, be-tween the impossible and the simulation. In Nancy’s opinion Girard, Bataille and infact the whole Western culture are caught up in a fascination with the sacrifice, a ‘sac-rificial phantasm’, the destruction of which would require that the whole dialecticallogic of negation be deconstructed.

However, as far as Bataille is concerned, this logic can largely be traced back toAlexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, which has been very influential especiallyin the French context. In Bataille’s case the connection is clear, since it is first and fore-most in his personal dialogue with Kojève that he develops his idea concerning thestatus and fate of negativity in human existence after man has satisfied his animalneeds. As for Girard, although he never once mentions Kojève, the whole triangularlogic of the mimetic desire could be directly from Kojève’s pen, even if the Girardianversion of things does not end up in any dialectical synthesis, quite the contrary, as weshall see (this Kojèvean influence has also been noted by Fleming, 2004: 169, n. 35).

The ‘Anthropogenic Desire’ of Kojève

Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s phenomenology is presented in his famous bookIntroduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947), which is a compilation of his equally celebratedlectures, held in 1933–39 at École des Hautes Études in Paris.15 This interpretation isfounded upon two major axes, namely, the dialectic of master and slave and the thesisof the end of history. To put things schematically, it is the human desire that sets his-tory in motion and it is the extinction of this desire that ends it.

Kojève starts from a clear-cut ontological dualism: there is a fundamental differ-ence between man’s and nature’s modes of being. The distinguishing factor between


man and beast is the specific nature of human desire. Whereas animal desire is direct-ed toward a material object (nourishment guaranteeing its survival), the ultimateobject of human desire is always another human desire. According to Kojève, the sat-isfaction of animal need can only be the basis for a ‘sentiment’ of the self, that is, foran animal ‘I’, focused solely on physical survival, not for self-consciousness in a strictsense (Kojève, 1947: 12). For the self-consciousness to be born, the human desire has tobe directed toward an object that surpasses the given reality. But the only such objectis the desire itself.

The ‘anthropogenetic desire’ (the desire that generates man) is therefore alwaysdirected toward another desire. Desire directed toward a natural object is human onlyto the extent, that it is ‘mediated’ by the desire of another, directed toward the sameobject. The satisfaction of human desire thus requires some sort of reciprocity orsocial recognition of the value of the object. For instance, in the relationship betweenman and woman desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the desireof the other – if he or she wants to be recognized in his or her human value, in his orher reality as a human individual. To desire another’s desire ultimately means that Iwant my value, the value that I represent as a human being, to become the value thatthe other person desires: I want him or her to recognize my value as his or her value.The humanity of man thus presupposes that his human desire outweighs his animaldesire (directed solely toward survival of the species). In Kojève’s scheme this meansthat the humanity of man rests on his will to risk his life voluntarily in order to gainrecognition. The birth of the self-consciousness is thus elementarily linked withexposing one’s life, with the risk of death (Kojève, 1947: 11–14).

This is why the desire for recognition necessarily appears as a bloody battle for‘pure prestige’ (‘lutte à mort de pur préstige’ – Kojève, 1947: 14). The ‘first battle’ consti-tutes the fictive starting point of history. However, since the satisfaction of this desirerequires that both parties stay alive, it has to generate two fundamentally differenttypes of human behaviour: one of the parties has to fear the other (and death) enoughto recognise the other without being himself recognised. The result of this battle is therelationship of submission known as the ‘dialectic of master and slave’, which inHegel’s philosophy constitutes the motor of both self-consciousness and history.

The position of the idle master, who has gained the recognition of the other (theslave), might at first seem ideal, but in the course of history it proves to be deceptive.Firstly, the recognition has been obtained from a creature, the value of whom the mas-ter himself does not recognise; and secondly, the idleness of the master means that hispleasure remains purely subjective and ‘bestial’. The slave, on the other hand, improvesthrough his forced labour not only the objective nature, but also his own nature. Onone hand, he realises his own idea in the material object; on the other, he surpasses thenature in himself by suspending his immediate desire toward the object. In short, theidle master can die like a human (in the battle for pure prestige), but he can only livelike an animal (because of his idleness). The future and history thus do not belong tothe belligerent master, but to the industrious slave who, by transforming the world,


creates the necessary conditions for a new, liberating battle for recognition (Kojève,1947: 18–34).

Whereas the ‘first’ battle for recognition and the resulting relation of submissionsets history in motion, it is equality that ends it. In other words, history ends at themoment, when the antagonism between the master and the slave vanishes (Kojève,1947: 143 ff.). The final satisfaction of the desire for recognition can only be reached ina universal and homogeneous state, born of a bloody revolution. Only in such a statecan man realise his individuality (the synthesis of the universal and the particular),because he becomes recognised universally in his irreplaceable and unique particular-ity. As a result the reserve of human desire, which in the course of history had nour-ished the different forms of sublimation, drains away: history stops, because man whocreated it is completely satisfied and therefore no longer aspires to change, to surpassthe given and also himself with his negative action. However, the end of history by nomeans signifies that nothing more will happen in the world, it only means that menstop acting as humans, that is, they stop risking their lives and working in order togain recognition. Kojève does not speak of the end of history for some metaphysicalreason, but because humanity in the state he describes is in principle completely sat-isfied. Although the end of history implies the death of man determined by the desirefor recognition and the negative action, it is in no way a cosmic or biological catas-trophe: nature remains the same, so does man as a natural creature (man becomes ananimal totally in harmony with nature or the given world; see Kojève, 1947: 113 ff.; seealso Roth, 1988: 117 ff.; and Auffret, 1990: 301 ff.).

Negativity and the Dynamics of Human Desire in Girard and Bataille

If we look at things from an ontological, or a metaphysical, point of view, the philo-sophical Hegelianism sustaining the Kojèvean phenomenology seems to be quite farfrom the Girardian attempt to provide a scientific explanation for human culture.Girard attaches his own model firmly to human evolution, to man’s biological natureand its conditions of development, which philosophically speaking situate man onthe same ontological continuum with other species. The difference between man andanimal is a matter of degree, not a radical ontological gap. Moreover, Girard empha-sises tirelessly the ‘scientific’ superiority of his model, its capacity to explain as eco-nomically and as elegantly as possible empirical data, for which anthropologists haveso far been unable to find a non-contradictory explanation (see for instance Girard,2007c: 688–90). Girard intends to present no less than a universal morpho-geneticexplanation of the origin of culture: from one single ‘natural’ principle (the mimeticnature of human desire) plus one corollary postulate (the surrogate victimage) thecultural institutions can be deduced in an almost a priori fashion (not in their histor-ical and particular form, of course, but in the general logic governing their forma-tion).16 Kojève, on the other hand, thinks that dualism is necessary precisely because,


according to him, the spirit cannot be deduced from nature, but presupposes a ruptureconstituted by a creative act of liberty.

By contrast, the respective theories of Girard and Kojève concerning human desirehave interesting similarities. For both theorists, the essential starting point is the tri-adic character of human desire. According to Girard, desire always entails three posi-tions: the subject (the ‘disciple’), the object and the rival (the ‘model’). This ‘triadism’is also for Kojève the very feature distinguishing human desire from mere animal need.In Kojève’s model this premise leads to the desire for recognition and to the dialecticof master and slave, which is the key to the constitution of self-conscience and histo-ry, in short to the entire auto-evolvement of the Hegelian spirit. It is, however, exactlythis sort of ‘philosophical’ interpretation of violence, which Girard denounces as puremysticism: ‘We have to refuse all the mystical explanations and their philosophicalsurrogates, as for instance the “coincidentia oppositorium”, the magical power of thenegative and the virtue of the dionysiac’ (2007b: 776). As he explicitly states, his theo-ry comprises no such element: ‘This thesis [of the surrogate victim] no more bears anytheological or metaphysical character in any sense that the contemporary critiquemight give to these terms’ (Girard, 2007c: 689–90).17 But although Girard struggles topush the ‘mystical’ negativity away, negativity as such plays a very significant role inhis own explanation of human culture – we might even say that negativity is omni-present in Girard’s theory: it is the mimetic violence itself. The most significant dif-ference in relation to Kojève is the lack of any dialectical reconciliation (‘Aufhebung’)of negativity or violence. In Girard’s scheme the mimetic situation escalates and leadsto a circle of violence, accelerating in a completely autistic manner.

Moreover, Kojève and Girard see the connection between mimesis and its objectsomewhat differently. Whereas in Kojève’s interpretation the subject’s desire is firstand foremost directed toward another desire (the other desire being its object), inGirard’s theory it is rather directed according to another desire (which is desiring thesame object). In fact, the Girardian desire seems to have no ‘real’ object at all, since allits varying objects are but an imaginary veiling, part of the structure of misapprehen-sion (‘méconnaissance’) typical of the double bind relation instituted by the mimeticdesire itself. To put it differently, in the Girardian constellation desire is not orientedby some pre-existing attractor, it is the desire itself which causes the attractor toemerge: ‘The object is a genuine creation of the mimetic desire; it is the composition ofthe mimetic codeterminations which cause it to spring from nothingness’ (Dupuy,1990: 132, italics in original).

This is why the Girardian desire can never be satisfied. It is inevitably foundedupon a misapprehension, which is the tragic moving force of the whole human cul-ture. Violence can only be soothed by violence (in this sense the victimage mechanismis comparable to the Hegelian ‘negation of negation’), but the cycle is always re-launched with no dialectical perspective of reconciliation. Instead we are left with anevolutionary adaptation to ever-growing doses of mimesis plus better and more effec-tive cultural techniques for channelling it. The mechanical (or quasi-biological) char-


acter of the Girardian desire completely detaches it from any teleological conceptionwhich poses some sort of finality to desire (the universal recognition in the Kojèveanstate, for instance). Such recognition is only a particular historical ‘guise’ (in this case,typical to modernity, which urges men to launch into the social competition) that themimetic process assumes in its never-ending circular movement (see Dupuy, 1990:133–34; and Girard, 1987: 376–77; 2007b: 1142).18

The Kojèvean dialectic also helps to sketch out the basic differences betweenGirard’s and Bataille’s theories of sacrifice. The most significant disparities lie in theanthropology sustaining the theories and in the status/logic of negation in the theo-retical structure. In the Bataillean anthropology man is likewise a creature of desire,but instead of a mimetic desire of appropriation his psyche is dominated by an uncon-scious impulse of expenditure. This is also the kernel of Bataille’s criticism against utili-tarianism in the 1930s: the reason why men try to ensure their subsistence or to avoidsuffering (the negative version of utilitarianism) is not that these functions would inthemselves contain a sufficient result, but because through them they want to reachout for the insubordinate function of free expenditure. For Bataille, both individualsand societies are animated by an irresistible and illogical impulse to abandon, to rejectmoral or material goods that could have been rationally used (Bataille, 1970b: 318–20).

Even if the ritual sacrifice has more or less vanished from the modern world,19 forBataille the term has not lost its meaning, insofar as it denotes an impulsion arisingfrom the subject’s inner experience, ‘a spirit of sacrifice’, which incites the individualto throw something of himself outside of himself (the modern examples Bataille givesare the self-mutilations committed by the mentally ill, Bataille, 1970a). Also in thearchaic sacrifice Bataille’s emphasis is on the radical change undergone by the personsattending to the rite; this transformation can, in turn, be associated to any sort ofchange on the social level: death of a relative, initiation, consumption of the new crop,etc. The explicit goals of the ceremony are nonetheless secondary compared to theunconscious necessity commanding it. In other words, the ritual sacrifice provides achannel for the heterogeneous impulses of expenditure, which constitute an integralpart of human existence and violate the individual’s habitual homogeneity andintegrity.

This impulsion of destruction is integrally linked with violence, but the impetusfor violence does not come from a mimetic tendency of appropriation, or from theimitation of/according to another desire, as in Girard’s model. In Bataille’s theory therole of violence only becomes intelligible, when the human existence as a whole is putin the perspective of unproductive expenditure (which Bataille calls ‘the general econ-omy’). It is precisely from this angle that Bataille also questions the Kojèvean concep-tion of the ‘active negativity’ and the idea of the end of history, implicating the satis-faction of the human desire. In a letter he wrote to Kojève in the end of the 1930sBataille (1995b) asks, what remains of human negativity after the satisfaction provid-ed by work and mutual recognition has been achieved. In Kojève’s model the disap-pearance of the human negativity implies the disappearance of man himself, a sort of


new ‘animality’ or ‘inhumanism’, insofar as productive negativity is constitutive toman’s humanity. Man becomes an animal completely in harmony with himself, com-pletely happy and with nothing more to do (see Kojève, 1947: 385). But Bataille is nothappy:

If action (“doing”) is (as Hegel says) negativity, the question arises of knowing whether the nega-

tivity of someone who has “nothing left to do” disappears, or whether it remains in a state of

“unemployed negativity”: personally, I cannot but decide in one sense, being myself exactly this

“unemployed negativity” (I couldn’t define myself in a more precise manner). (Bataille, 1995b:

75–76)20

In Bataille’s interpretation the negativity defining the human desire always leavesbehind a ‘useless’ remnant, a surplus that cannot be channelled to productive action.In the course of human history this surplus destined to pure loss has appeared inmany different guises: in religious rituals, in art and in other forms of useless or down-right destructive expenditure (on these forms, see for instance Bataille, 1970b; 1970e).Thus, alongside the phenomenological account of alienation (starting from the pro-ductive object-relation) there runs another story, which is like the negative image, asort of Freudian ‘Wunderblock’, which traces back the forgotten or repressed guises,under which the impulsion of expenditure has appeared during humanity’s conscioushistory.21 In the course of this story the desire of useless expenditure, ‘the idle nega-tivity’ deconstructs the results of the Hegelian (active and laborious) negativity intransgressive experiences, which nonetheless only become accessible to the consciousmind once the desire of appropriation has been (at least temporarily) satisfied.

Conclusions

All in all, Bataille’s theory of sacrifice can be seen as a vision, which largely questionsthe Hegelian ‘metaphysics of conscience’ and the Kojèvean ‘metaphysics of productivenegativity’, but also the Girardian ‘metaphysics of desire’, insofar as desire in Girard’stheory is always connected to appropriation. In this sense, it can definitely not beinterpreted as a ‘mechanism’, which could be isolated and used as a ‘scientific’ expla-nation of human violence, desire or culture. Rather, it is an existential question, whichexamines the historical limits of the accumulative, restricted economy (and anthro-pology). From this angle it is quite understandable that Girard should see Bataille asa mere romantic glamorising violence, and that he should want to present his ownmodel as an anthropological meta-theory, explaining the different modes of expendi-ture envisioned by Bataille as just a bunch of illusory projections, produced by themimetic violence.

However, as I have demonstrated, we can justifiably argue that the founding prem-ise of Girard’s own theory, namely, the mimetic and appropriative nature of humandesire, is a postulate which is just as metaphysical as Bataille’s vision of the uncon-


scious impulse of expenditure animating human existence, although Girard wouldlike us to think differently (on this, see also Gauthier, 2008). The common theoreticalinfluences (Durkheim and Kojève) which count for the several resemblances betweenthe two theories are also the very points where they diverge.

Whereas Girard’s theory on sacred and sacrifice could be said to constitute thereverse image of the Durkheimian theory of religion, putting the impure sacred in theforefront but preserving the idea of the ‘productive’ (ritual) canalisation of affectivityas the basis of human culture, Bataille undermines the Durkheimian model by bring-ing in the phenomenological dimension of lived experience and by placing his con-stellation in a general perspective of unproductive expenditure, always leaving behinda surplus which cannot be canalised into (ritual) action.

On the other hand, Bataille and Girard both strive to deconstruct the Hegelianteleological conception of desire, fundamentally connected to the dialectic of con-sciousness, but again their approaches to the problem are different. Bataille seeks tomine the Hegelian logic of the self-conscious subject (constituted by recognition), byconfronting it with the idea of an unproductive, idle negativity (desire which cannotbe canalised into productive action), deconstructing its teleological movement so thatit dissipates into nothing (‘en rien’ – see Bataille, 1973). The Girardian solution, by con-trast, is more akin to a classical dualism: the synthetic moment of the teleologicalmovement (i.e. the mutual recognition) is simply abandoned and appropriation sub-stituted for representation (the latter being judged as a mere effect of the mimeticdesire). The teleological concept of desire is destroyed by the same token – what comesin its stead is a biologically rooted ‘desiring machine’ freely revolving in its own dual-istic violence.

Although Girard’s theory has been fervently criticised in anthropology (explainingculture by one single factor simply does not seem like a plausible option to most con-temporary anthropologists; on this, see for instance De Heusch, 1982), it also has itsproponents. For the latter the undeniable advantage of Girard’s theory is that itbrings the problem of violence back to the sociology and anthropology of religion (seeTarot, 2008a: 631) and that it manages to give a logical explanation of some ritual prac-tices that have formerly eluded a satisfactory interpretation (e.g. Scubla, 2003).Although I have only examined the theoretical background of Girard’s model here, itshould be emphasised that the evidence he brings in to support his theoretical postu-late (the surrogate victimage mechanism) is of empirical nature, consisting of theanalysis and explication of various anthropological data. The weak point of theGirardian theory (the one-factor cultural explanation it proposes) can also be seen asits strength, if the aim is to construct a universally valid explanation of religion – or,on a more modest level, some sort of ‘ideal type’ of religion, that is, a model whichwould cover all the empirical occurrences of the phenomenon without the strongcausal pretensions of the Girardian model; this is how, for instance, Tarot (2008b) pro-poses to use Girard. On the other hand, one is tempted to ask whether there is any rit-ual practice that the Girardian model does not explain, that is, whether his hypothesis


can at all be falsified. Sacrificial violence is a well attested empirical fact, but the ques-tion is whether it can be charged with the burden of proof which Girard would like tomake it carry (i.e., explanation of the entire human culture and its various institu-tions, language included).

Whereas Girard’s theory offers us a clear-cut and simple causal model which caneasily be applied to several (even modern) phenomena, the potential benefit of theBataillean phenomenology of expenditure for social theory is less easy to pinpoint ina precise manner. Although Bataille aims at constructing a kind of universal historyof the human culture, he does not build it upon any one ‘mechanism’ that couldthereafter be applied to the interpretation of different sorts of empirical data. On onehand, he could be seen as theorising a problem which Girard, in his model, leaves com-pletely untouched: how is the sacred mediated on the individual level, how is it ‘inte-riorised’? On the other hand, Bataille opens up a larger structural question concern-ing not only the fate of affectivity in modern (or late modern) society, but also ourmeans of theorising it on a social (or sociological) level: if negativity (or violence) is nolonger interpreted in a functionalist manner, as part of a closed (restricted) theoreticaleconomy, how could we approach it sociologically (see also Arppe, 2009)? AlthoughBataille gives no straightforward answer, one might be tempted to look in the direc-tion of some sort of phenomenology of modern affectivity.22 In any case, it is clear thatthe ‘theoretical economy’ of this approach would be rather different than that of theGirardian ‘mechanics of desire’.

Notes

1. I have systematically used the French original sources, except for citations for which the existing

English translations have been used whenever available.

2. By the term ‘affective economy’ I mean the way in which production, distribution, channelling and

consumption of affective energy organises the very structure of society (in Freudian terms this

could be called the ‘energetic’).

3. Personally, I find this very hard to believe; not only are the resemblances between the two theories

a bit too striking to pass as a simple coincidence, but also the very idea of a French theorist who in

the 1960s starts to concoct a new anthropological theory of the sacred without acquainting him-

self with perhaps the most celebrated – French – theory ever written in the field is simply implau-

sible. Girard has a certain tendency to conceal his own mimetic models, as we shall also see with

Kojève and Bataille.

4. What should not be forgotten is, of course, that there is also another side of Durkheim’s theory

which could be called ‘symbolic’ and which has to do with collective representations and beliefs.

See for instance Tarot (2008a: 261–88).

5. Although Girard nowhere presents his hypothesis in the form of such a historical narrative, the

sequential chain of events presented above can easily be read out of his works (e.g. Girard, 2007b:

812–24; 2007c: 404–21) and can also well be used to describe his theory of the initial or original event

which then sets in motion a slow process of cultural evolution (Girard 2007b: 814–15; 1987, 95–96).


Even though the surrogate victimage is above all a ‘mechanism’ (and not a ‘history’), as Chris

Fleming points out, this mechanism itself has a history, albeit a hypothetical one. In other words,

from the fact that Girard presents it as something ‘that both produces and distorts history’

(Fleming, 2004: 176, n. 38), it does not follow that this mechanism would itself constitute an a-his-

torical transcendent. At least such a conclusion is not possible without succumbing to precisely the

sort of transcendental philosophy of history, which Girard – tirelessly stressing the scientific and

non-metaphysical character of his own theory – wants to avoid at all costs.

6. In man’s case the first, quasi-automatic convergence of violence into one individual is a direct result

of the logic of mimesis (or to put it in Girardian terms, the acquisitive mimesis is turned into an

antagonistic mimesis, see Girard, 2007b: 734–35). As the mimetic violence accelerates, the choice of

the adversary becomes increasingly arbitrary and also quicker and quicker, so that at any given

moment anybody can become the object of universal animosity and fascination. Sooner or later,

Girard argues, this movement inevitably culminates in a point where the entire community turns

against one single individual, who, because of some arbitrary single feature, suddenly becomes the

object of universal affective projection.

7. In a later book Girard has argued that his model differs from the Durkheimian ‘effervescence’ pre-

cisely because, according to Girard, the turmoil already takes place in a ritual context, which makes

it impossible to postulate it as the origin of culture (the origin of effervescence being, according to

Girard, the mimetic rivalry, see Girard, 1994: 53). This statement rather nicely encapsulates the basic

difference between the Girardian and the Durkheimian scenes: for Girard, the beginning is violent,

for Durkheim it is not.

8. In this context Girard also criticises Durkheim for giving the sacred-profane dichotomy far too

absolute a status.

9. This is where Girard seems to have backed off a little bit in his later books (see for instance Girard,

1994: 79–88).

10. Moreover, Bataille’s attitude towards science is a priori critical. See Bataille (1970f: 21–24; 1970d:

62–63; 1970c: 525).

11. Bataille later completes this pre-war scheme (the theory of attraction and repulsion dates from the

end of the 1930s) by the theory of expenditure (‘dépense’) which culminates in one of his major

post-war works, La part maudite (1976a).

12. The same phenomenon is described by Jean Baudrillard in his book L’échange symbolique et la mort

(1976), although Baudrillard seems to associate the transcendence of death more with the birth of

modern society (whereas in primitive societies dominated by what he calls ‘symbolic exchange’

death was regarded as a valuable partner of exchange, not a horrifying ‘otherness’, let alone a pure-

ly biological or natural ‘end’ (see Baudrillard, 1976: 265–80).

13. ‘Sovereignty’ is a central idea in Bataille’s thought. He completely detaches the notion from its

political connotations. Sovereignty has nothing to do with individual or political power; it is rather

a mode of being or a virtuality, in which every individual partakes by virtue of his or her existence,

but which nobody possesses (sovereignty being the opposite of a thing, see for instance Bataille,

1976c; 1979b: 287–316). Despite the importance of the notion in the present context (since it is pre-

cisely sovereignty which can be said to question the ‘economy of death’ implicit in the logic of sac-

rifice), I unfortunately cannot analyse this problematic in a more detailed manner here.


14. In fact, Girard criticises the whole Western philosophical tradition starting from Plato precisely for

confining the problem of mimesis to the level of representation (see Girard, 2007b: 712–14).

15. On the lectures of Kojève, see for instance Auffret (1990: 225–63) and Surya (1992: 229–33).

16. This is also what the psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian points out in his discussion with

Girard:

Desire becomes detached from the object and attaches itself to the model that is taken as an obstacle. All the phe-

nomena you have described or pointed out come back to this single principle and can invariably be deduced from

it in an almost a priori fashion. (Oughourlian quoted in Girard, 1987: 349; 2007b: 1112; see also 1987: 288–89; 2007b:

1045–46)

17. The translation is mine, since this paragraph is missing in the English translation of Girard’s book

(which he has himself revised and modified), published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in

1977.

18. This is what makes Girard so charming for some and so annoying for others: he has a tendency to

always put himself on the meta-level in relation to his critics and claim that not only does his the-

ory offer a better understanding of our cultural mechanisms, but that in fact his opponents are, by

the very act of opposing him, unwittingly caught in the play of the mimetic desire and actually

aggravating it (e.g. Fleming, 2004: 45). This is where his argumentation greatly resembles the

Baudrillardian theory of simulation.

19. Although Girard and Bataille both have very important theories concerning the fate of the sacred

and the desire in modern society, I cannot unfortunately discuss them here, since this alone would

be a topic for another article.

20. In a way both Girard and Bataille want to break out from the Hegelian dialectic of consciousness.

The ‘self’ for Girard is in fact a mere convergence point ‘in an indeterminate field of mimetic desire

[…], which is constituted, at base, by its interactions with others’ (Fleming, 2004: 36). This is also

the kernel of the Bataillian idea of ‘communication’: the ‘inner experience’ Bataille is talking about

is not the experience of an individual subject, since in it both the subject and the object of experi-

ence are transgressed or deconstructed. This is why it is possible only in community, as an experi-

ence of communication constituting its very foundation (on the Bataillean critic of the Hegelian

subject, see also Nancy, 1986: 83–84).

21. On the relationship between Bataille, Kojève and Hegel, see Heinämäki (2008); on Bataille’s con-

ception of negativity in relation to Kojève, see also Bau (2003).

22. See also Bataille: ‘Why should I not admit, in fact, that I have the chance to make a phenomenolo-

gy and not a science of society?’ (1995a: 147).

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Tiina Arppe works as Academy Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology,University of Helsinki, Finland. She is a specialist in French social theory and has written about Rousseau, Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille, Baudrillard and Girard amongothers. Her recent articles include ‘Rousseau, Durkheim et la constitution affective dusocial’ (Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 13, 2005) and ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentices andthe “Will to Figuration”: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Collège de Sociologie’ (Theo-ry, Culture and Society 26(4), 2009). She has also translated several French theorists intoFinnish, including texts of Derrida, Bataille, Baudrillard, Kristeva and Bourdieu.

Tiina Ar ppe

Academy Research FellowDepartment of SociologyP.O. Box 16 (Snellmaninkatu 12)00014 University of [email protected]


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