IBulletin de la Societe Amencaine de Philosophie de Langue FranfaisVolume 14, Number 2, Fall 2004

Bataille on Immanent andTranscendent Violence

Zeynep Direk

Violence is perhaps one of the most difficult concepts inGeorges Bataille's thought. This essay aims at discussing it byconcentrating on Bataille's Theory of Religion.1 I shall argue tl1at,in order to understand what Bataille means by "violence," weshould distinguish between "immanent violence" and"transcendent violence," and that this distinction is implicitin his thought. Such a distinction is helpful in clarifying severalontological issues. It enables us to distinguish the violence innature from the violence in the profane world and to put intoquestion the nalve view that all violence is areturn to animalityor the return of animality to inter-human relations. Toconceive human violence in terms of animality attests to themetaphysical opposition between man and anin1al in which"man" stands as the higher term, which affirms the superiorityof the human species over all the other animal species. Thusareturn to animality would be represented as a regression,which is necessarily negative. For Bataille, on the other lland,it seems that being in touch with our own animality may bean important way to experience immanence and a powerfulresource for a critique of Western civilization.

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What I call "transcendent violence" is not areturn toanimality, nor is it a "sovereign experience" in Bataille's sense.It gives rise to the regimes of servitude in which the subjectloses itself in the power relations that belong to systems ofproduction and restricted regimes of consumption and servesto establish the hierarchical differences among individualhuman beings. "Sovereignty" is misread when it is taken tomean an affirmation of the violence that gives a human beinga feeling of superiority or transcendence over others. Batailleconceives of "sovereignty" in terms of "immanent violence."An inquiry into the phenomenon of sacrifice is only one wayof approaching immanent violence, for laughter and eroticexperience are other experiences in which imn1anent violencemanifests itself. The key to that kind of violence can be foundin Bataille's statement that "intimacy is violence" (TR 312/51). Bataille locates intimacy in the realm of immanence, whichI take to be the impersonal, incarnated ground of our existencein which we are always already interconnected with other livingbeings.

In the archaic world of paganism, immanence acquiresa sacred and divine character as soon as the profane world ofwork and action begins to separate itself from the intimacyof all beings. In describing that moment, Bataille qualifiesimmanence explictly as "continuous," "impersonal" and"without distinction," and qualifies intimacy as "profoundsubjectivity" (TR 301/33). In The Accursed Share, he interpretsthat ground in terms of the dynamic and fluid life energythat is always in excess. Life is always already excessive becauseevery living organism receives more energy from the cosmosthan the amount sufficient for its self-preservation. In contrastto the limited problems of classical economy, "in the generalproblem there always reappears the essence of the biomass,which must constantly destroy (consume) a surplus ofenergy."2

Immanence can never be articulated in terms of theopposition between subject and object, which characterizesexperience in the profane world of work, action and project.

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However, it is the place of a deep subjectivity, a confused,non-reflective consciousness of the self that is not limited bythe I or other I's (fR 300/31). I believe that Bataille is a radicalthinker of subjectivity, and his attempt to go beyond theclassical notion of the subject can be related to Merleau-Ponty'sthinking of subjectivity as incarnated in The Phenomenology ofPerception. 3What Merleau Ponty calls "the ante-predicative lifeof consciousness" or "the silence of primary consciousness"is the natural perceptive involvement of incarnated existencewith the world.4 In that involvement, the relation with theother is not based on absolute separation, but on the fact thatbodily operative intentions read, understand, constantlyconnect, and affectively communicate with each other.Merleau-Ponty writes that operative intentionality "producesthe natural and ante-predicative unity of the world and ofour life"; it furnishes "the text which our knowledge tries totranslate into precise language."s For both Merleau-Ponty andBataille, subjectivity as the immanent unity of the world andlife can never become the object of knowledge, although itcan be "experienced." Such an experience, which implies theloss of a subject as clear consciousness of objects is, in Bataille'seconomical terms, nothing but an unlimited expenditure oEenergy. Bataille thinks that the subject, as an individual andseparate being, belongs to transcendence, for it has alwaysalready transcended the natural environment and is in aposition to know objects from the outside. I<nowledge is apossibility of transcendence, going outside of oneself to animpenetrable other. Moreover, that transcendence is relatedto violence not only because representation is violent but alsobecause the subject in the world of work is subordinated andservile. The violence to which animals are exposed in natureis very different than the violence to which we are exposed,and which reproduces us in the world of work as knowing,acting, speaking subjects.

In the technological era, man lives under thedomination of anonymous powers and experiences. He issubject to both oppression and the empty promises of

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transcendence. According to Bataille, the deep truth ofsubjectivity is never revealed by transcendence. Although hebelieves that the expenditure of the forces of the body-forexample, erotic experience and laughter-may open a wayfor the realm of immanence in which we re-establish ourcontinuity with ailliving and non-living beings, this feeling ofcontinuity is for him nothing n10re than abrief touching ofthe untouchable. The fact that he talks about "the lostintimacy" in our being even in the context of his historicaldiscourse on the displacement of the borders between thesacred and the profane in successive historical worlds maygive rise to the impression that Bataille is giving expression toadesire to go back to our archaie, immediate animal existenceby transgressing our subjectivist and objectivist moderncultures. That way of reading Bataille can make his thoughtlook like some sort of metaphysical nostalgia. However, thisinterpretation becomes suspect if we emphasize that the losshere is not the absence of something that was previouslypresent, but the absence of something that is still present inour lived experience-even though it is erased, forgotten, andconstancly ignored by the ways in which we schematize ourexperience. Our lost intimacy with other living beings-fromwhich immanent violence is never missing-is animal as weilas divine, life as much as death. Perhaps we need to treat"immanent violence" as an ontological concept that may callfor interpretation on the basis of an ontology of life.Obviously, this constitutes the ontological foundation ofBataille's further distinction between interior and exteriorviolence, in terms of which he reads destruction in societies.The distinction between immanent and transcendent violenceI find in Bataille has an explanatory value as an analytical too1.At the final analysis, it will be especially useful in understandingwhy Bataille refrains from condemning violence in purelyethical or political terms.

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I

How does Bataille draw the species barrier betweennon-human animals and human animals? He believes, withNietzsche, that the world oE things, inclividuals, work, utilityand action transcends immanent liEe. In asense, only whenwe were not yet "human" were we completely immanent tonature. In Theory of Religion, he conceives oE non-humananimality in terms oE "immanence" and "immecliacy" (TR291/17). The emphasis on "immecliacy" marks a liEe limitedto the realm oE the sensible. A non-human animal is deprivedoE universal concepts and ideas that serve as schemes Eorconstructing a world out oE liEe. Immanence is determinedby an inability to overcome the environment in which a livingbeing spends its liEe. Transcendence is the overcoming oE thesensible toward the cancept that Erames nature, whereasimmanence is being imprisoned in the environing sensibleelement.

We should note that this use oE the couple"transcendence-immanence" singles out man among otherspecies as a builder oE the world, failing to emphasize that ashumans we inhabit the earth along with other species. Thedefinition oE man as a "thinking animaI" immecliately givesway to a discourse articulating what thinking may mean as aspecific diEEerence, and usually not to what we may share withother animal species. But Eor Bataille, what is leEt unthoughtin this definition is precisely our being inside animality as weIlas outside it. As an animal species on earth, we have venturedoutside the immanent continuity oE being by a movement oEtranscendence. Because our intelligence originates in aninterruption oE immanence, it is bound to remain ignorantof its source. Intellegence can never return to immanencewithout losing itselE in it, and in the realm of transcendenceit Eails ta attain consciousness of the fact that the kernel ofOllr being still belangs to immanence.

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Nevertheless, Bataille does not n1erely affirm that wecan swim upstream, against intelligence, using intelligenceagainst itself to create an opportunity to find an exit to aconscious experience of the internal relation of all livingbeings. Only the violence which I exert, or to which I amexposed, can tear apart the constructed structures of the worldof subjects and objects in which life is suffocated, and cangive us access to sovereign experiences of immanence. Self­consciousness in Bataille's sense, which is not-knowing, is onlypossible through such experiences. Intelligence is bound toremain foreign to the life that gave rise to it: it can onlyenframe, intervene and know nature from the outside; it willalways fail to communicate with life from within. However,mental life consists not only of rational thinking. Theimmanent flow of our incarnated consciousness, which isessentially an internal relation of communication with othersin unceasing differentiation, is not constituted or controlledbya knowing subject. By "incarnated existence," we here needto understand impersonal existence, the ilya in which lifecommunicates with itself. We gain access to that immanenceand experience it only through the interruption of the worldof utility and work, and the dissolution of the individualitythat makes possible the overcoming of the separation ofbeings from each other. In our contact with the elements, innutrition, in the satisfaction of our needs, in desire and eroticexperience, we take part in the rhythm of communication oflife with itself, even though cultural forces persuade us tocontrol that contact with animal existence within us to tameit and forget it.

"Immanence" for Bataille does not mean immanenceto an object or a subject but to a total Being or "One." Ananimal's lack of access to transcendence does not imply thatit is a being closed in its inner world, for it does not have aninner world in which to enclose itself. Animal is immanent tothe environment in which it lives and does not have thecapacity to transcend it. But how is this milieu, this "One",described? Bataille depicts it by invoking the type of certainty

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that manifests itself "when an animal eats another one" (TR291/1 7). When an animal eats another one, the meaning ofthe situation in which the former finds itself is clearly similarto that of the latter. The similarity between the meanings ofthose two situations cannot be found in the sensations thatthe animals have, for one is being torn to pieces by the other.Nevertheless, both animals are immanent to one and the samemedium, which does not make the one who is active in eating"transcendent" with respect to the other who is eaten. Insome kinds of animals, during the period of copulation malesfight for females and those males who prove to be strongerchase away the others. There is a difference between thevictorious animal and the defeated one. However the victory,if it is not by chance, proves nothing else than a quantitativedifference of strength (TR 292/18). The establishment ofsuch a difference does not make the victorious male transcendthe others. The acts of killing, winning, and copulating giverise to a feeling of "transcendence" only in the human world,due to the "objectification" of the other as passive.

In opposition to the immanent violence in nature,violence is seen as a mark of transcendence in the humanworld. It bears in itself the promise of elevating man to God,enabling hirn to incorporate an image of Hirn. Revealedreligions bal~ homicide and human sacrifice. In the Muslimreligion, to take away someone's life, given to hirn/her by God,is to transgress the limits of the realm in which human beingscan legitimately use their power. To kill someone is to usurpGod's authority over life and death and thus to set one's selfas an equal to God. This is why only wars fought in the nameof God can legitimate the killing of human beings. The ideathat, in killing, the murderer substitutes hirnself for God, bearsin itself the implicit tendency to trunk that violence can deifya human being. Physically abusive husbands, parents, torturersand rapists take themselves to be transcending their victims.This sense of transcendence is accompanied by a pleasurestemming from their perception of physical superiority asconstituting an ontological, epistemological, and even a moral

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difference. In Theory of Religion, Bataille writes, "The lion isnot th.e king of the animals. In the movement of waters, he isonly a higher tide that can reverse the weaker ones. That ananimal eats another does not change a fundamental situation:every anima! is in the world like water in water' (fR 292/18-19).6

By contrast, nlan is not in the world like water in water. Evena superficial glimpse of "social status" in the human worldwill show that factors such as "education," "gender,""ethnicity," "race," and "class" intersect to constitute quiteincomparable situations.

Tlle power of transcendence in the world of work,utility and action rests on situational differences, and thesubject who assumes a status that such crisscrossing ofdifferences may assign to it pays for this by losing his/herown sovereign selE7 To the genealogy of the transcendenceof the subject belong the experiences of fear, submission,guilt, self-contempt, self-hatred, imitation of the desire ofthe other, and the illusion of self-sufficiency, self-coincidenceand independence. Being before the law and entering it, thefundamental experience of the symbolic order is a trauma. Inthe world of work, in order to become a subject, one needsto sacrifice one's self in the face of power, repress one'simmediate desires, reconcile oneself with the authority, acceptbeing rewarded and punished by it and delay free self­expression until one has nothing left to express. Bataille seeksways of transgressing the limits of a life of submission to theworld of power relations, but he is skeptical about the "warriorof freedom" as weIl. Both the submissive self and therevolutionary self become subjects by being exposed totranscendent violence, and they are produced by their oppositereactions to it. Oppressive systems of power do change bysacrificing or marginalizing those who fight for freedom, yettheir challenge and resistance open the path of communicationfor those who keep silent out of fear of persecution assurrogate victims. Freedom fighters become surrogate victims.However, it is also true that, even when they cannot make adifference that directly changes the oppressive systems, they

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open the way for the discourse that paves the way fortransformation. The fighter for freedom may be saving thedignity of the environment, but helshe cannot attain his/herself consciousness in so far as helshe is committed to actionand work for the common utility. An interior outlet toimmanence is neither possible for those WllO wait for theirturn to be in charge of power nor for the marginalizedrevolutionary. In short, struggle for power, no matter whatthe consequences are, takes one away from the direction ofthe immanence in which Bataille sees "the sovereign good"and the ultimate possibility of our existence. Neithersubmission to law and authority nor revolt may lead toimmanence. Occupying a position of power within a systemlicenses the subject to use violence. The feeling oftranscendence experienced as the possessor of that power isin fact illusory, for the truth is that one is temporarily possessedby that power. Because one is only the surrogate subject, thetransient host of power, the truth of the appearance ofsubjective potency is nothing but impotence. Immanentviolence targets this illusory sense of transcendence.

For example, Fight Club, one of the cult movies ofrecent years, lends itself to being read in terms of the questionof the unleashing of immanent violence against the nluchgreater violence errlbedded in a society organized by advancedcapitalist relations of production.8 The anti-heros of thismovie exert immanent violence to destroy the ways in whichlife is possessed by the desire to possess. They find relief in aplay of violence among friends which makes winning andlosing insignificant and yet their immanent violence risks beinglost in revolutionary terrorism. Fight Club seems to begin inBataillean fashion as a "project against the project" and endsup as a struggle to prevent the other's death to which it leads.This struggle is not the result of a conflict between the returnto immanence and morality or religion. It is a struggle betweentranscendent and immanent violence. The argument that aliving being's life can be sacrificed for higher ends is a mark

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of transcendent violence, for there are no such ends inimn~anence. Of course, this is not to say that immanencehas no risk or no danger.

A plane of immanence on which no cancern fortranscendence can have a hold manifests itself with anunthinkable power to emancipate. A globalizing worldpromises no history that would make mankind even moretranscendent. Technology tolerates only the accumulation ofinformation which supplies no critical resources. Given thispresent state of affairs, violence seems to have already lostthe promise of transcendence. However, one may ask aboutthe victims of immanent violence tao. For example, whatabout the pornographic snuff movies which cause the deathsof thousands of women in the world? Would that be aphenomenon of immanent violence?

Let us turn to Theory of Religion before we speculateabout how Bataille n1.ight answer that question. The violencethat makes transcendence possible presupposes an act ofobjectification. Unlike human consciousness whichdistinguishes itself from its objects, an eagle that attacks alamb does not distinguish it fronl. itself. An object is bydefinition that which is thrown in front of an onlooker, andthus samething I can set up over against myself. Unlike thehammer I use or the other whose hand I hold, an object cannever be an extension of my living body. The eagle does notperceive the lamb as an object. Animals da not have an"outside world" that consists of objects. Given that objectsare temporal syntheses, and presupposing with Bataille thatthe dimension of future that marks intelligence is not opento animals, an animal cannot see its prey as an object.According to Bataille, the eating of one animal by another isconsumption, an extermination that has no duration andoccurs in an actual time in which nothing is objectified.9

Neither can we say that an animal that eats another one isusing it. The eagle is immersed in the nutritive "element" inthe act of emptying the intestines of the other that it laysopen. In contrast to the relation with an object, the immanent

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relation with the other does not involve aseparation, aclistinction between me and the other. Accorcling to Bataillesuch an internal relation with the other has no duration, thatis, it is always in the present. This is not to say that it is closedto the future. However, the future here is not the time ofprojects but a time that can never be anticipated. When Bataillewrites that "intimacy is violence," we should perhapsunderstand this in terms of the fragilities of inter-corporealityas much as the exposure by the present to a future that is tocome, without any possibility of anticipation.

Bataille emphasizes that duration belongs to the worldof objects. Objects are spatial and temporal syntheses. It isimportant to ren1ember that Merleau-Ponty explains theillusion of transcendence by taking his departure preciselyfrom that synthetic nature of perception. As is well-known,for Merleau-Ponty an object that appears in its thickness isspatial as weil as temporal, and is never given to my perceptionfrom all the points of view at once.10 That the gaze is alwaysbound to a certain perspective implies that the object willalways absolutely be partially closed. Our classic and orclinaryfiction of an "object" owes its being to the attribution of theprimacy of vision over all the other senses, and to thepresupposition that there can be an all-encompassing gaze.In Merleau-Ponty's terms, this illusion rests on our forgettingthe role played by the spatiality of the living body in vision.We may say that our tendency, in our imagination, to separatethe gaze from the living body to which it belongs is one ofthe conclitions of transcendence that can make even the worlditself an object. "It is the ex-stase of perception which causesall perception to be perception of something."ll When weconceive the world as a big object, we forget that we inhabitthe earth with our fellow creatures.

Now, immanent violence is an attempt to overcomethe separation between the I and the other that gave rise tosubjects and objects. If, in the age of technology, one can talkabout violence on a plane of immanence which does not bringabout or reproduce transcendence by becoming internal to

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the subject, history, God, and so on, then such violence mayattest to the experience of the living body through pain, orthrough an experience of remembering that heals. Theviolence that results in transcendence objectifies-the femalebody killed by snuff is set on the screen as the ultimate objectin which life is destroyed. On the other hand, in the livedexperience of immanent violence, the desire is to destroy theobject that is the human body, the human body as an object.Bataille knows well that our civilization treats the female bodyas an object of a male gaze; however, erotic experience as asovereign experience cannot have anything to do withobjectification, except to overcome it. In so far as the eroticis a touching of lost intimacy, it is the dissolution of bothobject and subject.

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What can we know about immanence? By what rightcan we talk about it? The heaven where God lets Adam liveafter He has created him might be thought of as a magicalrealm of immanence. The forbidden fruit representsknowledge and transcendence. As soon as Adam eats it he isashamed of his own naked body. He is separated fromimmanence in the affect of shame lacked by the animals. TheBible recognizes Adam's and Eve's banishment from theGarden of Eden as the beginning of mortality. The story oforiginal sin as a mythical narrative of our exit from animalityrepresents knowledge of the passage from the realm ofimmanence to that of transcendence as forbidden to us. In away, this knowledge is the apple that has always already beeneaten, and so cannot be set in front of us and contemplated.In Theory of Religion, Bataille is concerned with just that passageas being unknowable, as that which is not knowledge and whichis impossible for us to knOw. Yet he implies that there areexperiences that enable us to swim back and touch this other,immemorable earthly existence. What is consciousness ofimmanence?

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Accorcling to Bataille, our relation to where we arecoming from-that is, to animallife-is very different fromour relation to objects. The obscurity of animal life for thehuman gaze is unlike the impenetrability of objects (fR 293/19-20). The foreign land ofanimal immanence cannot assurnethe senses human consciousness attributes to things in so faras they are given to it. If things get their sense by virtue of anoriginal synthesis that results from an effort to know, animalimmanence is neitl1er full of sense nor senseless, for bothalternatives require transcendence. The production ofknowledge rests on our capacity to create linguistic idealitiesthat shape and reconstruct our experience and to universalizethat experience by assuming that we can substitute any rationalconsciousness for our own and obtain the same relation ofknowing to what is known. According to Bataille, with respectto the clistance we have so far traversed, animal is "at the halfway point" (fR 293/21). That is not only to say that we comefrom the same source as animals, but also to en1phasize thefact that we have spent a long time together on the path ofevolution. This is precisely why animallife offers us an enigmathat is much more clifficult to see through than that offeredto us by things. It is impossible to describe with certaintywhat the animal gaze sees; as Bataille says, "it can only bedescribed by the poetry which slips toward the unknowable"(TR 293/21).12 Poetry, according to Inner Experience, is the"sacrifice of words" that enables the poet to express theprimitive, silent language of things, the cry of the animal, andthe vision of the child.13 In contrast to writing that seeks toclarify the sense of our experience of being in the world,poetry would seem to be closer to immanence. Poetry pointsto the "blurred consciousness" of "being at the half waypoint" where signification becomes expression of theimmanent communication of all beings. Bataille describes theconsciousness oE immanence as blurred, operating with imagesrather than concepts; but such a consciousness is for him theinternal communication of allliving beings. The fact that it isnot objective and reflective reminds us oE Merleau-Ponty's

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deseription of inearnated eonseiousness: "To be aeonseiousness, or rather 10 be an experience, is to hold innereon1munieation with the world, the body and other people,to be with them instead of being beside them."14

An animal's gaze opens for me depths that are alreadyfamiliar to me. This elusive depth that attraets me is my own(TR 294/22). Bataille does not attempt to think of theeneounter with the animal in terms of the operativeintentionality of an inearnated eonseiousness, as Merleau­Ponty would put it. Nor does he make expression depend onour eapaeity for eognitive representation. Our experienee withammals reveals that we share a signifieant world with them.One of the reasons this sharing remains unthought inphilosophy is our privileging of eognitive eonseiousness asmediating all intentionality. We Eail to think through our own"elusive depth" opened by and in the animal gaze beeause, itmight be suggested, we fear blurring the speeies distinetionbetween human animals and non-human animals. A blurringoE this barrier would put our eannibalistie eivilization intoquestion, and indeed, the violent exploitation oEanimal bodiesmay be the fundamental souree of human transeendenee. Whywould human eannibalism be transeendent violenee and notimmanent violenee? Bataille knows that the treatment ofanimals as if they were objeets begins with the proeess oEeating animals. 15 In the present stage of modern eapitalism,even the eutting of meat into pieees is not left to men.Teehnology veils the truth that the meat sold in the marketwas onee part oE an animal body. We manage to ignore thetotal uneanniness of the situation in whieh we find ourselveswhen we open the paekage of the ehieken meat sold in themarket and see that it involves four right and two left legstThere is no language that eould bridge the diseontinuitybetween the killing of the living animal, its fragmented eorpse,and the meat on my table. On the eontrary, the teehnologiealreereation of the language of euisine makes all assoeiationbetween the dead animal and its meat impossible.

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Bataille emphasizes the faet that wild anddomestieated animals are never "objeets" for uso We thinkthey are "elosed" to us beeause we do not see any eapaeityfor transeendenee in them. We believe that we are the onlybeings that have transeended immanenee and we are ineapableof eoneeiving a potential for transeendenee in any other non­human animal speeies. Transeendenee must have alwaysalready been aetualized wherever its eonditions are present;it is not a proeess of growth (TR 295/23-24). Coneeivinganimals in terms of a laek of transeendenee serves to burnthe bridges between speeies by representing the distaneebetween us as one that it is impossible to overeome, and toignore that we have an emotional and eorporealeommunieation with them. Instead of dwelling on themetaphysies of "the laek of transeendenee" in animals,Bataille seems to invite us to revalue our immanenteonneetion with them.

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Having established the differenee between immanentand transeendent violenee, we ean better understand whyBataille does not eondemn all violenee in ethieal terms. If myreading is eorreet, he shows the suborclinating funetion oftranseendent violenee and assoeiates immanent violenee withsovereignty. His aeeount of violenee is ontologieal as muehas historieal. Bataille's artieulation of the various clisplaeementsof the borders between the profane world and saeredimmanenee in different historieal worlds ean be read in termsof an eeonomieal play between immanent violenee andtranseendent violenee. We are not going to rehearse here thediffieult movement that takes us to the disenehantment ofthe modern world eharaeterized by pragmatism, seientism,and n1an's self-forgetfulness. Following Theory of Religion, Iam going to foeus on the phenomenon of saerifiee in t11e

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ancient pagan world in order to shed light on the question ofwhy the economical play between the sacred and the profanehas to be thought of in terms of violence.

The use of instrun1ents plays a central role in thepassage fron1 immanence to transcendence. In accountingfor the birth of the pagan world, Bataille makes clear that thispassage can never leave immanence completely behind. Thus,we need to think discontinuity by partially reinstitutingcontinuity. Because the subject of the pagan world is still veryclose to immanence, the object too is something to whichmythical powers are attributed. The exchange between subjectand object constitutes a universe of mythical transfersmediated by the "instrument." In other words, the pagan worldconsists of a "paradox" resulting from a transfer of the creativepowers of the subject, by means of instruments, to the thingsthat these instruments touch, manipulate, and produce. Hence,the pagan mind sees the world itself, including plants andanimals, as inhabited by gods and spirits. Bataille gives us adialectical account of the genesis of the "clarity" of theprofane world, in which animals are completely subjected toutility, by starting from that paradox. The decisive moment inthis development is the making of a distinction between bodyand spirit, which is made possible from within the ambiguousexperience of the human corpse.16 The experience of thehuman corpse is both an affirmation of the human spirit andthe final step in the reduction of the living animal-and ofthe living human body-to the status of a thing. When theanima! becomes a useful or useless thing, it loses its status ofbeing a fellow creature in man's eyes. Man, who still perceivesthe animality within himself, sees the animal as a "residue."This modification of the sense of man's experience of animalsis associated with a modification in the sense of the experienceof the world. Man experiences the world with a sentiment ofdiscontentment, deprivation, and falling. His enslavement andappropriation of living creatures brings about bis furtheralienation from nature, in which he forgets that he too belongs

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Ito it (TR 305/41). As nature becomes man's property, heiloses the feeling of his immanent continuity with it. Innegating nature, he negates himself (TR 305/41). Thenecessity to which the phenomenon of sacrifice correspondsappears at this very moment. Sacrifice is tl'le act of takingthe plant and the animal out of the world of utility in orderto return them to immanence. Hence man affirms bis originalbelonging to natural immanence by a negation of negation.

The reciprocal economy of the profane world oftranscendence follows a logic of calculation in which thedistinction between "useful" and "useless" beings appears tobe drawn by means of a narrow conception of humaninterests. Sacrifice is an act of immanent violence that negatesthe restricted economy on which instrumental reason depends.It provides for an exit from the economy held in place bytranscendent violence. By taking a potentially useful being inorder to destroy the object in it, sacrifice aims at a temporarysuspension of man's worries about production andaccumulation. The general economy of expenditure withoutreturn to which the sacrifice aspires within the limits set bythe profane world affirms man's original belonging to thesacred life of infinite generosity in which boundaries betweenGods, humans, animals, and other existing beings are fluid.

As sacrifice negates the objective reality of the creaturesacrificed, the sacrificing individual passes into a dreamyconsciousness, one to be contrasted with the clarity of theobjectifying consciousness. The sacrificing individualexperiences bis participation in the realm of immanence withanxiery or anguish (TR 312/51). The anxiety in question shouldalso be a consequence of identification with the victim whois returl'led to immanence. In that blurred consciousness ofanxiety, the community (of individuals) forgets that sacrificeis an attempt to make up for the injustice of reification,something humanity has been doing to nature, to animals,and to its own human animality. Thus the sacred that wereclaim in sacrifice is notbing other than our own incarnatedco-existence with other living beings, i.e., our animality.

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The clarity of the world of work is achieved by amovement of transcendence. However, transcendence wouldalways be haunted by what it has surpassed. What the worldofutility projects into the realm of the sacred is in fact nothingbut our own internal, intimate connectedness, which is neversimply left behind. The profane world is not in fact threatenedfrom without by the sacred; the threat comes from therepression of violence inherent to the excess ofcommunicative life and the subordination of life energy toutility. Pagan consciousness is in a double bind. On the onehand, the clarity of the human world is produced by thetranscendent violence exerted on our own immanence, thatis, on our own animal and divine existence. On the other hand,the sacred-our own transfigured violent intimacy-is acontinual threat to the profane. The latter, in its effort topreserve its own boundaries, looks for a way to make up forthe violence it has been exerting on naturallife. In fact, this isnothing similar to a symbolic compensation. The profaneworld has to find an outlet for the excess of immanentviolence, which has the potential to explode in society asinterior violence.

Rene Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, talks aboutsocieties that exterminate themselves through the unleashingof reciprocal violence when they cannot find a scapegoat tosacrifice. Sacrifice "is an instrument of prevention in thestruggle against violence."17 Both immanent and transcendentviolence can be reciprocal. Tying Bataille and Girard together,we can say that when the immanent violence that finds noother oudet explodes within a society in the form of "interiorviolence," it can easily take the character of reciprocal violence.Such violence does not aim at the establishment of structuresand systems of production for growth and development butat death and destruction. As Girard puts it, the surrogate victimof the sacrifice is a pharmakos for the possibility of reciprocalviolence that, once unleashed, may result in the self-destructionof the life of the community.18 In Bataille transcendentviolence establishes differences that cannot be accounted for

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merely in terms of quantitative differences. Girard emphasizesthat primitive mind fears the collapse of the differences onwhich society rests and perceives it as violence.19 Accordingto Bataille, immanent violence eliminates the differences,dissolves the individuals, and returns them to indistinction.This is obviously areturn to the natural condition. Girardand Bataille agree in their reflections on the social functionof sacrifice against the unleashing of immanent violence,which destroys all the distinctions that transcendent violencehad previously set and held in place. Nevertheless, Girard'sanalysis lacks Bataille's positive emphasis that with thedisappearing of such distinctions, the boundaries of the socialare transgressed toward a more original belonging together.We fear but also desire immanent life. It is the bearer ofultimate value and we touch it when the ordinary course ofthings is interrupted by experiences in which in1manentviolence makes itself feIt, such as the carnal proximity of theother in the erotic relationship and the experience of another'sdeath.

An ontological account of violence has to precedeany discussion oE the possibility oE ethics and politics thattakes Bataille's philosophical thought seriously. And the firstconclusion here would be that any thinking of ethics in termsof a pacific relation to the other sb.ould take into account thefact that there is no intimacy which is not violence. One virtueof Bataille's thought for us today is its capacity to provide aphilosophical ground for this-not only in terms of the powerstruggles of the world but also in terms of our incarnated co­existence.

Galatasaray Universiry

Notes

1 Georges Bataille, "Theorie de la religion," in Oeuvres Completes,vol. 7 (paris: Gallimard, 1976). English translation: Georges Bataille, Theoryof Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989). Hereafter

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"TR." For ease of consultation, page references refer first to the Frenchedition, then the English translation. All translations, however, are mine.

2 Georges Bataille, TheAccursed Share, voL 1, trans. Robert Hurley(New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 182; Georges Bataille, L.a Part maudite,in Oeuvres Completes, vol. 7 (paris: Gallimard, 1976), 171.

3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. ColinSmith (London and New York: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Arevised edition of this translation was published in 2002, with newpagination. Subsequent page references refer first to the 1962 edition,then the 2002 edition.

4 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xv/xvii.5 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xviii/xx.6 The French text reads : "Le lion n'est pas le roi des animaux:

il n'est dans le mouvements des eaux qu'une vague plus haute renversantles autres plus faibles. Qu'un animal en mange un autre ne modifie guereune situation fondamentale: tout animal est dans le monde comme de I'eau clI'interieure de I'eau." (fR 292).

7 For Bataille, loss of sovereignty and fragmentation are related:they both have to do with the submission of our being to actions withdefinite ends. See Georges Bataille, SurNietzsehe, in Oeuvres Completes, vol. 6(paris: Gallimard, 1973). 17-18.

8 Fight Club (1999) (Germany, USA), directed by David Fincher,based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, screenplay by Jim Uhls.

9 The French text reads : "Rien n'est donne pour l'animal alongueur de temps. C'est dans la mesure Oll nous sommes humains quel'objet existe dans le temps Oll sa duree est saisissable. L'animal mangepar un autre est donne au contraire en de<;a de la duree, il est consomme,il est detruit, ce n'est qu'une disparition dans un monde Oll rien n'estpose en dehors du temps actuel" (fR 292).

10 See "Experience and Objective Thought: The Problem ofthe Body," in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 67-72/77-83.

11 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 70/81.12 The French text reads : "Ou plut6t, la maniere correcte d'en

pader ne peut etre ouvertement que poetique, en ce que la poesie ne decritrien qui ne glisse al'inconnaissable" (fR 293)

13 Georges Bataille, L 'Experience Interieure, in Oeuvres Completes,vol. 5 (paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 158.

14 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 96/111.15 Bataille writes: "Dans la mesure Oll je puis voir aussi dans

l'animal une chose (si je le mange - a ma maniere, ce n'est pas celled'un autre anima! - ou si je l'asservis ou le traite en objet de science),son absurdite n'est pas moins courte (si l'on veut moins proehe) quecel1e des pierres ou de l'air, mais il n'est pas toujours, et jamais il n'est

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tout afait, reductible acette sorte de realite inferieure que nous attribuonsaux choses." ["Insofar as I can also see the animal as a thing (if I eat it-inmy own way, which is not that of another animal-or if I enslave it or treatit as an object of science), its absurdity is just as direct (if one prefers, just asnear) as that of stones or air, but it is not always, and never entirely, reducibleto that kind ofinferior reality which we attribute to things.'j (fR 294/22­23). And a few pages later, he says: "L'homme ne mange rien avant d'enavoir fait un objet. Au moins dans les conditions ordinaires, l'homme estun animal qui ne participe pas a ce qu'il mange. Mais tuer l'animal et lemodifier ason gre n'est pas seulement changer en chose ce qui ne l'etait sansdoute des l'abord, c'est defInir al'avance l'animal vivant comme une chose.De ce que je tue, que je decoupe, que je cuis, j'affirme implicitement que celan'a jamais ete qu'une chose." ["Man does not eat anything before he hasmade an object of it. At least in ordinary circumstances, man is an animalthat does notparticipate in what he eats. But to kill the animal and alter it asone pleases is not merely to change into a thing that which doubtless wasnot a thing from the start; it is to define the animal in advance as a thing.Concerning that which I kill, which I cut up, which I cook, I implicitly affirmthat thathas never been anything but a thing."] (fR 304/39).

16 Bataille writes : "Et J'esprit est si bien Jii au corps-chose que ceJui-ci necessejamais d'etre hante, n'estjamais chose qu 'a Ja Jimite, aupoint que, si Ja mort JeriduitaJ'itat de chose, J'esprit estpJusprisent quejamais: Je corps qui J'a trahi Je riveJedavantage qu'au temps OU iJ Je seroait. En un sens Je cadavre est Ja pJus paifaiteafJirmation de J'esprit." (fR p.305) ["The spirit is so closely linked to the bodyas a thing that the body never ceases to be haunted, is never a thing exceptvirtually, so much so that if death reduces it to the condition of a thing, thespirit is more present than ever: the body that has betrayed it reveals it moreclearly than when it served it. In asense, the corpse is the most perfeetaffirmation of the spirit."] (fR 305/40). Bataille emphasizes that man'sattitude toward the body involves a deep complexity. On the one hand, thebody is man's misery, the side which makes of him an animal, an object.On the other hand, it is sublimated as the bearer of the spirit. The spirit isso tightly connected to the body that because of its presence the body can

only be "a thing at the limit." However, the spirit's presence in the body isnever as apparent as when death makes the body a thing, a corpse. Thecorpse is the absence of the spirit yet it indicates and reveals the spirit. Inthis sense, "the corpse is the most perfeet affirmation of the spirit."

17 Rene Girard, VioJence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory(London: The Athlone Press, 1988), 17.

18 Girard, VioJence and the Sacred, 54 and 95.19 Girard, VioJence and the Sacred, 56.

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