1

The End of Eternity:

Georges Bataille’s Sacrificial Community
Visions of the ‘Coming Community,’ University of London
Jeremy Biles

The Myth of the Absent Community

In1936, Georges Bataille formed a secret society known as Acéphale, comprising a host

luminous figures in the French intellectual and artistic avant-garde. The “main goals” of the

group, as Allan Stoekl writes, “were the rebirth of myth and the touching off in society of an

explosion of the primitive communal drives leading to sacrifice. Myth, as Bataille states…, is the

way open to [humans]…to [access] these lower—and more ‘essential’—human drives,”1 drives

stimulated and expressed in “expenditure, risk, loss, sexuality and death.”2

Though the members of Acéphale were bound by an oath of secrecy, it seems certain that

Bataille, whose lifelong obsession would be “the enigma of sacrifice,” sought to enact a human

sacrifice as the founding myth of this acéphalic community. Bataille is said to have offered

himself as the victim of this mad act. But no one in the group was willing to lift the blade that

would render Bataille the headless victim of this headless community. The sacrifice never came

to pass; the group disbanded.

However scandalous Bataille’s proposed gift of death, this legend reveals something

crucial about community as it will come to be thought by Bataille. In investigating the sacrificial

logic that underwrites Bataille’s conception of community, I want to focus on key texts by two

prominent contemporary thinkers—Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben—who find in Bataille

the starting point for thinking the logic of sacrifice, the sacred, and community. Yet, Nancy and

Agamben offer critiques of Bataille that, I argue, themselves require criticism, for both commit

misreadings of Bataille that reproduce the particular logics of sacrifice and abandonment,

respectively, that they themselves seek to be done with.

   2  

Discerning the logics at work in these (mis)readings of Bataille allows my constructive

aims to emerge, namely, the consideration of the resources Bataille presents for thinking the

community that only comes in its dissolution.

Bataille’s Theory of the Sacred

Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of Bataille’s notion of sacrifice in his seminal 1983 text The

Inoperative Community (La Communauté désoeuvrée). He opens that text by invoking “the

gravest…testimony of the modern world”: “the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or

the conflagration of community.”3 The work of Georges Bataille, he believes, has “no

doubt…gone f[u]rthest into the crucial experience of the modern destiny of community.”4 Nancy

seeks to engage Bataille’s experience of community, an experience that “emerged out of a

political exigency and uneasiness,” including the “ordeal of seeing communism ‘betrayed.”1

The crux of this betrayal lay in communism’s negation of human “sovereignty,” a

concept central to Bataille’s anthropology. Sovereignty, for Bataille, is linked with the sacred,

and refers to escape from subjugation to work, calculation, instrumental reason, and sociopolitical

structures—in short the realm of the profane. Following Emile Durhkheim, Bataille posits a

radical heterogeneity of the sacred with respect to the profane, while also dividing the sacred

between what scholars refer to as the right sacred—order, power, and purity—and the left

sacred—the dangerous forces of chaos, corrosion, and impurity.

Bataille argues that the sacred/profane divide arises in conjunction with the advent of

labor. He relates labor to the rise of the subject/object dichotomy in human consciousness,

suggesting that “the positing of the object, [the thing,] which is not given in animality, occurs in

the human use of tools.”5 Subordinated to the one who uses it, a tool is assigned a utility, a telos

                                                                                                               
1
Nancy, IC
   3  

beyond its immediate existence, and thus takes its place within a newly emergent sphere of

discontinuous things that now includes oneself and others.

With the rise of self-consciousness, of oneself as a distinct, discontinuous individual, also

comes the fear of death and the corresponding desire for durable, even eternal, existence—an

existence that the subject vouchsafes to instrumental reason. Bataille identifies the realm of

instrumental reason with the sphere of the profane, with its discontinuous objects and individuals.

The sacred, on the other hand, is characterized by a sense of intimacy; it is the sphere of

continuity, which objects, in their distinct forms, transcend. For Bataille, then, “existence is

profane when it lives in…transcendence; it is sacred when it lives in immanence,” or continuity.6

Bataille’s critique of communism devolves on this line of distinction. The positing of the

essence of humans as producers in communism is tantamount to renouncing sovereignty. Bataille

argues that work necessarily subjugates one to some future aim or goal that defers experience of

the present moment. One’s instincts must be renounced, and enjoyment put off, in the interest of

maintaining the order that helps guarantee survival. Work is dedicated, in other words, to the aim

of preservation of the individual, the community, and the species; it attempts to ensure the future,

to secure durability.

Bataille’s aim in thinking community is to accede to a point of sovereignty, understood as

excess that transgresses the boundaries the profane world, and the system of taboos that uphold

the work of instrumental reason. For Bataille, sovereignty is thus linked with transgressions

through which such excesses erupt. Far from a quest for masterful control, sovereignty entails

ecstatic abandonment—the rupture of the closed, individual self as formed through social

prohibitions and work.

Sovereignty is thus a fleeting experience of explosive affects. Eroticism especially speaks

to Bataille’s conception of sovereignty, for it “always entails a breaking down of established

patterns…of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined

and separate individuals.”7 The risk upon which eroticism is predicated is a “conscious refusal to
   4  

limit ourselves within our individual [, discontinuous] personalities.”8 By upsetting “the physical

state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable

individuality,” the erotic experience brings the subject outside of itself, into an experience of

continuity with the other.9

In this connection, Bataille attributes to eroticism and other sovereign moments of

energetic, affective expenditure that undo the individual a sacrificial character. “The principle of

sacrifice is destruction,” he writes, “but though it sometimes goes so far as to destroy

completely…the destruction that sacrifice is intended to bring about is not annihilation. The

thing—only the thing—is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice destroys an

object’s…ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility.”10

The “antithesis of production,” sacrifice is not (a) work, but a counter-operation—an

open-ended and infinite undoing of the work of instrumental reason and the pretense to eternity.11

As Bataille puts it, to sacrifice is “to pass from a lasting order, in which all consumption of

resources is subordinated to the need for duration, to the violence of an unconditional

consumption.” In this precise sense, says Bataille, “to sacrifice is not to kill, but to abandon and

to give.”12

Nancy’s Inoperative Community: Sacrificing Bataille

Jean-Luc Nancy’s inquiry into the “inoperative community” proceeds through this

constellation of Bataillean concepts—sacrifice, death, sovereignty, ecstasy, givenness. For

Nancy, “community,” as he writes, must take “place in what Blanchot has called ‘unworking,’

referring to that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no

longer having to do either with production or with completion, encounters interruption,

fragmentation, suspension. Community is made of the interruptions of singularities…[it is] the

unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional.”13

   5  

“One does not [therefore] produce [community], one experiences or one is constituted by

it as the experience of finitude.”14 Thus echoing Bataille, Nancy affirms that the shared

experience of finitude is a passion “of and for community itself, and this passion emerges as the

desubjectivization of the passion for death.”15 But Nancy’s critique of Bataille emerges with this

point. By his reading, one danger in Bataille’s thought is the emphasis on sacrificial “fusion”—

the loss of self in the experience of continuity. Nancy regards fusion as dangerously akin to a

movement toward appropriative totality, an erasure of difference in some immanent unity.

This critique leads Nancy into a double bind. First, as one commentator has pointed out,

Nancy “achieves a conceptually consistent framework of thinking community in a nonsubjective

way, but in doing so…unwittingly attenuates the specificity…of Bataille’s experience,” upon

which he had predicated his own account of community as a preservation of singularities. “He is

bound to sacrifice Bataille much as he problematizes the notion of sacrifice itself.”16 This

performative contradiction, in which Nancy enacts the logic he seeks to move beyond, is

exacerbated in the second pendant of the double bind, as revealed by consideration of two further

texts by Nancy.

In an essay entitled “The Unsacrificeable” (1991), Nancy argues that existence itself is

“unsacrificeable.” In light of this point, he believes, Bataille “must be relentlessly

corrected…withdrawn from the slightest tendency towards sacrifice,” for such a tendency “is

always linked to a fascination with an ecstasy turned towards an Other or towards an absolute

Outside, into which the subject is diverted/spilled the better to be restored.” 17 This account of

Bataillean sacrifice, however, is suspect. For Bataille, the logic of sacrifice, though linked with

ecstatic ebullition brought about through exposure to and communication with the other, is not

destined toward any telos of resurrection, overcoming, or restoration. Sacrifice is, on the contrary,

precisely the sovereign counter-operation that unworks the social, political, and technical work of

individual ontological integrity and social integration.

   6  

In this respect, Nancy fails to acknowledge to what extent his own vision of the

inoperable community in fact operates according to a Bataillean sacrificial principle. In his 2001

text on “the confronted community” sacrifice is silently reinscribed at the heart of Nancy’s

account of community. The text is a response to Blanchot’s book The Unavowable Community,

which includes a passage that will come to function as a wound in Nancy’s own thinking of

community:

“Sacrifice: an obsessive notion for Georges Bataille…. In [his Theory of Religion,

Bataille writes], “to sacrifice is not to kill, but to abandon and to give.” To link oneself

with Acéphale is to abandon and to give oneself: to give oneself wholly to limitless

abandonment. That is the sacrifice that founds the community by undoing it, by handing

it over to time the dispenser, time that does not allow the community nor those who give

themselves to it, any form of presence, thereby sending them back to a solitude which, far

from protecting them, disperses them or dissipates itself without their finding themselves

again or together. The gift or the abandonment is such that, ultimately, there is nothing to

give or to give up and that time itself is...one of the ways in which this nothing to give

offers and withdraws itself…

To sacrifice is to give, to abandon without reserve. This is the sacrifice that founds a

community in its very undoing. And this is the sacrificial logic that Nancy confronts in his essay

on the confronted community, where he speaks of the provocation and admonition of Blanchot’s

essay. Ventriloquizing Blanchot, Nancy writes, “Beware not to elevate community in any way,

even under the designation ‘inoperative.’ Or else, follow even further the indication of this word.

The worklessness of inoperativity comes after the work’s operativity, but it comes from it.”18

The unavowable secret that operates before and beyond work is the counter-operation of

sacrifice, the wound that is a gift of the community’s undoing. To think community is, as Nancy
   7  

comes to believe, to think it “without subjecting or submitting it to any [eternalizing] hypostasis,”

even the hypostasis of inoperativity. In order to avoid hypostatizing the inoperative community,

making of its existence a durable essence that would also subjectivize those through whom it is

lived, it is necessary to think community according to the wounding ecstasy of time. Blanchot

recognizes this: “time…explodes existence,” he writes, “and liberates it ecstatically from

everything in it that would remain servile.” This, he says, is “the abandonment of and to the

ultimate fear which gives ecstasy”—the relinquishment unto death.19

Is the wound of time the sacrifice that Nancy had sought to disavow? In “The Confronted

Community,” he at once announces and maintains his secret, speaking around an absence that can

only be sacrifice—a term that, significantly, never appears in that text. To confront this

unavowable secret, he writes, is “…to part within one’s being a gash that is also the condition of

this being.” This is to say that communal existence is sacrificial abandonment to time: this

disavowed secret is also the shared secret of community itself.

Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Abandoning Bataille

Abandonment, a privileged concept in Nancy’s thought, is adapted by Giorgio Agamben

in his work, Homo Sacer, where it undergoes a transvaluation. A consideration of Homo Sacer

will reveal and extend Bataille’s importance for thinking the coming community.

In developing his account of homo sacer, or “sacred man,” Agamben divorces the notion

of the sacred from any religious meaning, as that which is defined in opposition to the profane or

“set apart for the worship of the deity”20 Rather, he offers an account of sacred man that claims to

be more original and politically originary, developing his idea with reference to Foucault’s

History of Sexuality. Foucault writes, “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a

living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal

whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”21 It is, Agamben writes, “the
   8  

entry of [natural life] into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—[that]

constitutes the decisive event of modernity.”22 The sacred man thus has an “essential function in

modern politics” as he “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed”; he is bare life, unprotected by

law or religion, existing solely in his capacity to be killed.23

Homo sacer is abandoned at once by and to the law as the constitutive exception of the

law. An exteriority internal to the law, homo sacer is the “correlate of sovereign power.” It is the

sovereign who bans homo sacer, instituting the law through the very pronunciation of its

exception.24 In both homo sacer and the sovereign, natural and political life thus collapse in a

“zone of indistinction” that Agamben calls the “threshold.” The “sovereign sphere [of the

threshold] is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without

celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life—that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed—is the

life that has been captured in this sphere.”25 “But where sovereignty is a form of power that

occupies this threshold, sacred life is nothing more than a life that occupies this threshold, a life

that is excluded and included in the political order.”26

The threshold names not only this zone of indistinction, but also liminal zones within the

architecture of Agamben’s text. It is in one such textual threshold that Agamben at once credits

Bataille for his “exemplary” effort “to have proposed the radical experience of…bare life” in his

thinking of sacrifice, and condemns Bataille for his failure “to consider the link that binds that life

to sovereign power”27 and to the function of the state that exercises it.

By this account, Agamben claims, “Bataille immediately exchanges the political body of

the sacred man, which can be killed but not sacrificed and which is inscribed in the logic of

exception, for the prestige of the sacrificial body, which is defined instead by the logic of

transgression. If Bataille’s merit,” Agamben continues, “is to have brought to light the hidden

link between bare life and sovereignty…in his thought life still remains entirely bewitched in the

ambiguous circle of the sacred.”28 Beholden to the notion of the sacred as religious and originally
   9  

ambivalent—“pure and filthy”, right and left29—Bataille fails to recognize the strictly political

origin of the sacred as life that may be killed but not sacrificed.

Thus consigning Bataille to the threshold, Agamben exercises the logic of sovereign

power; he bans Bataille, who is simultaneously constitutive of, and yet external to, Agamben’s

own account of sovereignty. With his tendentious reading, Agamben both displaces Bataille’s

conception of the ambivalent sacred and at the same time levels a critique of Bataille’s notion of

sovereignty and sacrifice that is based on his, Agamben’s, own political conception of the sacred.

This is a philosophically suspect move that effectively neutralizes the political dimensions of

Bataille’s thought.

But Bataille’s notion of the ambivalence of the sacred in fact provides resources for

political critique. Bataille, we will recall, associates the right sacred with the work of

transcendence—in other words, the attempt to transcend time and to install eternally inhering

structures—as well as with a conception of sovereign power that is consonant with Agamben’s. It

is, however, Bataille’s endeavor to undo sovereignty’s linkage to power that compels him to

identify with the corruptive, subversive, oppositional forces of the left sacred. Indeed, as his own

political activities in the thirties indicate, Bataille would seek to unleash the passional and

revolutionary forces of the left sacred in opposition to the rise of fascism.

Agamben further implies that Bataille’s theory of sacrifice, conjoined with his sense of

the sacred, fails to recognize what Agamben describes as the “mere ‘capacity to be killed’

inherent in the condition of the Jew” in the concentration camp. According to Agamben, “the Jew

living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of … [modern] biopolitical sovereignty

and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not

sacrificed.” The concentration camp is thus the paradigmatic instance of the threshold for

Agamben. “The truth,” Agamben says, “which is difficult for the victims to face, but which we

must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils—is that the Jews were exterminated not

in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as [vermin],’ which is to say,
   10  

as bare life.”30 Agamben suggests that Bataille’s account would see the Holocaust as a mad

sacrifice, an effusion of irrational passion.

The End of Eternity

But in fact, Bataille’s own comments on the Holocaust suggest nothing of the sort, nor is

the characterization of the extermination as being covered by sacrificial veils consistent with

Bataille’s thought. In concluding, I want to show how Bataille’s sacrificial sense of community

stands in opposition to both the socially homogenizing impulses of fascism and the horrors of the

camp.

Agamben is concerned with the possibility that regarding the Holocaust as a sacrifice—as

the “offering” implied in that very term—occludes horror by privileging the transgressive body of

the sacrificial victim. This is a concern that Bataille would have shared, not denied. Agamben is

right to credit Bataille with attempting to theorize bare life, but wrong to see Bataille as somehow

privileging bare life as sacred in his sense of the term. Agamben’s conceptual slippage obscures

Bataille’s own response to the victims of the camps. Bataille did not regard the Holocaust as an

act of mad sacrificial passion; on the contrary, he believed it to be the catastrophic culmination of

instrumental reason brought to its pitch in the attempt to install an enduring authoritative regime

through the eradication of all otherness that might call into question the secure collective identity

of those exercising power. The horrors of the camps were not, for Bataille, sacrificial logic

brought to its limit, but rather the expression of reason turned toward “transcendent” ends, in

other words, the attempt to overcome change, difference, and alterity, and thereby to eternalize

racial homogeneity and structures of sovereign power.

Bataille’s conception of a sacrificial community recognizes and responds to the dangers

of any sociopolitical movement based on the work of transcendence and eternity. The work of

reason, according to Bataille’s account, finds one expression in the aim to secure power, to
   11  

preserve oneself into the future, at the expense of others, at the expense of otherness. Reason

threatens to reduce the other to a thing, in some cases to bare life.

The principle of sacrifice, according to Bataille, opposes reduction to thinghood. It aims

to return what has been rendered a thing to the realm of intimacy. Sacrifice was the central

problem for Bataille, and he sought, in the wake of the dissolution of the Acéphale and the

horrors of the war, to think the possibility of sacrifice apart from physical violence, the reduction

to bare life. One vein of this investigation was Bataille’s pursuit of ecstatic mystical experience,

which took the “deleterious absurdity of time” as the object of meditative practices. Another was

thinking community itself along lines opposing the usurpative, homogenizing inclinations of both

traditional social structures and fascist movements.

The fusion of which Bataille spoke was thus never the totalizing fusion or bundling of the

social collective under fascism. The fusion Bataille theorized and sought was not aimed toward

eternity, homogeneity, and power—the power that makes things of others—but rather to a

fleeting experience of union, a dissolution expressed and experienced in the ecstatic embrace of

time, and predicated on, sparked by, exposure to alterity. Community thus experienced is a

desired abandonment unto time, an operation that counters that “tenacious concern with the

lastingness” of our enclosed, individual selves. It is the assent to life in the form of a risk

undertaken in passion. Never an imposition of power, community is a union without unity,

without transcendence into an eternalized totality, sameness, or oneness.

This is the sacrificial community that Bataille confers to us—a community in which all

are, and want to be, victims with no executioner except the ecstasy that awaits at the end of

eternity.

                                                                                                               
1
Stoekl cited in Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, xviii.
22
Pierre Joris, prefect to Blanchot, xix.
3
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 1.
4
Nancy, IC, 16.
   12  

                                                                                                               
5
Bataille, Theory of Religion
6
Hollier
7
Bataille, Erotism 18.
8
Bataille, Erotisim 24.
9
Bataille, Erotism, 17-18.
10
Bataille, TR, 43.
11
Compare to Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of task, as opposed to work.
12
Bataille, TR, 49. Translation slightly altered.
13
Nancy, IC, 31.
14
Nancy, IC 31. The idea of being constituted by community already signals Nancy’s departure from
Bataille.
15
Nancy, IC, 34.
16
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, “Elements of Experience: Bataille’s Drama,” in The Obessions of Georges
Bataille: Community and Communication, 108.
17
Nancy, The Unsacrificeable, 36.
18
Nancy, Confronted Community, 25.
19
Blanchot, UC, 16.
20
see Norris, “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,” 47.
21
Agamben, HS, 3.
22
Agamben, HS, 4.
23
Agamben, HS, 8.
24
Hussain & Ptacek, 497.
25
Agamben, HS, 83.
26
Norris, 47.
27
Agamben, HS, 112.
28
Agamben, HS, 113.
29
Agamben, HS, 112.
30
Agamben, HS, 114.