Sacred Violence Girard Bataille and The Vicissitudes of Human Desire PDF

TIINA ARPPE
Un i ve 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 Ren Girard and Georges Bataille.
Despite the apparent similarities of the problems (religious sacrice as the affective
foundation of community and the primordial role of violence therein) Girard and
Bataille end up with profoundly different visions of societys entire affective economy.
For Girard, religious sacrice is a mechanism of projection and of repression by means
of which the society channels its own unmotivated violence to one arbitrarily chosen
individual (a classical functionalist approach); for Bataille, sacrice 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 rst one is Durkheims
theory of the sacred, particularly his vision of the collective turmoil as the origin of
society and his interpretation of the ambivalence of the sacred. The second one is
Alexandre Kojves anthropological interpretation of Hegel, especially his theory of
human desire, which has clearly inuenced both theorists although they both criticise
it (albeit in different fashions). What Girard and Bataille seem to propose us, are two
different and even opposing models regarding both the conceptualisation of human
desire and the theoretical/methodological approach we should adopt when dealing
with it.
KEYWORDS
Death; desire; economy; negativity; sacred; sacrice; violence.
Introduction
The connection between religion and violence has been one of the questions haunting
Western sociology and anthropology since their foundation in the 19th century. The
close and disturbing link of religious belief systems to a seemingly disproportionate
affective fury is especially manifest in the ritual practices of the so-called primitive
cultures. The ethnographic descriptions of the rites of initiation, ritual sacrice and
Distinktion No. 19 2009: 3158 31

so forth are loaded with colourful details attesting to this, see for instance Emile
Durkheim (1990: 446 ff.).1
In the 20th-century French sociology of religion there are two well-known
attempts to analyse the relationship between violence and the sacred, namely, those
made by Ren Girard and Georges Bataille. What makes these attempts sociologically
interesting and links them rmly to the history of the discipline is that they both
address the classical Durkheimian question concerning the nature of the social bond.
Furthermore, they both follow the mature Durkheim in his observation that this
binding 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 expresses
and 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 identication). For
both of them this violence is fundamentally linked to the category of the sacred, and
its privileged (ritual) instance and manifestation is the religious sacrice. On the other
hand, both think that it is also connected to the particular nature of desire. Yet, in
spite of these similarities Bataille and Girard end up with profoundly different visions
of the dynamics sustaining the social bond and, indeed, of society's whole affective
economy.2
In this article I will propose two different sources for the divergence between
Girard and Bataille which, to my knowledge, has not been properly analysed before.
The rst one is to be found in Durkheims theory of the sacred, especially in his vision
of 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 theorists
concerning the nature of desire, which especially in Batailles case is clearly shaped by
Alexandre Kojves anthropological interpretation of Hegel, extremely inuential in
post-war French philosophy. Although Girard never once mentions Kojve, I will show
that the very same (Kojvean) model of the mimetic desire has also inuenced his con-
ception of the mimetic desire, although he develops this idea in a quite different direc-
tion than Kojve or Bataille. Finally, I will briey 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 and
even 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 Durkheims denition of religion is that there is no God or
supernatural agent involved: religion is a social system of beliefs and practices, which
32 Distinktion No. 19 2009

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. In
primitive religions the sacred is often believed to contain a dangerously contagious
force which cannot be approached without ritual precautions. The main thesis of
Durkheims sociological theory of religion is that this force is nothing but a collective
representation of society itself, merely objectied by the individual consciousness
experiencing it.
In his famous book Les formes lmentaires de la vie religieuse from 1912 Durkheim
presents the idea of collective turmoil to explain the origin of both religion and soci-
ety. Although he rmly rejects any attempts to nd the rst origin of social institu-
tions, he continually uses the most primitive known religion of the time, the totemic
system 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 nds 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: 21519; 1990: 30813)
The fact that the force of society should be associated with the totem Durkheim
explains by transference of sentiments: the idea of a thing and the idea of its symbol
are 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 sufciently concrete and sim-
ple. This explains the special status of the totem (usually an animal or a plant), which
becomes associated with the state of over-excitement invoked by the ceremonies. And
since collective ideas are most powerful when people are gathered together, the only
way to vivify these representations is to submerge them into the source in which they
were born (i.e., the gathered groups). This in turn explains why the ceremonies need
to be regularly repeated. In short, for Durkheim religion originates in a state of col-
Tiina Ar ppe Sacred Violence 33

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 signicance of the violent, frightening
and even repulsive features of the religious ritual. This becomes apparent not only in
the way he treats some orgiastic features (for instance, the breaking of the exogamic
rules) 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 [], mere
discharges 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 Smiths 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 paid
attention 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 and
to those regarded as impure, so that the boundary between the two is often vague, but
still real. The reality of the distinction is, for Smith, proved by the difference of
motives: in the rules of holiness the motive is respect for the gods; in the rules of
uncleanness it is primarily fear of an unknown or hostile power (Smith, 2005: 15055).
This idea soon became very inuential. Whereas Durkheim used Smiths theory in his
explanation of the piacular rites, his disciples Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss took it
as the basis of their model of the sacrice (Hubert and Mauss, 1968: 19399), Freud
used it in his interpretation of the emotional ambivalence caused by repressed impuls-
es (Freud, 1995: 199241) and Emile Benveniste later adopted it in his vocabulary of the
Indo-European institutions in which he afrmed that the division sacred-profane is
most clearly manifested in the Latin word sacer (Benveniste, 1989: 18788).
Durkheims explanation of, or rather his solution to, this ambiguity is to divide
the religious forces into two categories: the benevolent and the malevolent forces, and
to claim that the dark or bad forces are, in fact, produced by a specic category of
rites, 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 of
these malevolent forces, and therefore necessitates expiation (piaculum). These rites, in
fact, 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, inicting wounds upon
oneself) restore to the group the energy which circumstances threatened to take away
from it, and thus enable it to get along. In short, the sanctity of a thing is due to the
collective sentiment of which it is the object, only circumstances colour the process
differently (Durkheim, 1990: 58492; 1947: 40914).
Whereas Robertson Smith saw a fundamental moral difference between the pre-
cautions founded on respect (demanding a moral discipline; Smith, 2005: 154) and
those 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 only
a secondary form, a fear sui generis derived from respect more than from fright, when
the 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 Durkheims theory, since both are reduced to the same
undifferentiated affective energy, the function of which is always the same: consolida-
tion of the collective cohesion.
The Primal Scene of Ren Girard

Although Ren Girard rmly denies having read Durkheims theory of religion before
he wrote La violence et le sacr (2007c),3 we can nonetheless shed some interesting light
on 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 of
the Durkheimian theory of religion.4 Following Camille Tarot (2008a: 661) one might
in fact say that Girards theory of religion completes the Durkheimian theory by
bringing into light the violence which Durkheim did not see.
Girard is less hesitating than Durkheim in posing the morpho-genetic question
concerning the origin of culture and society, a question which had largely inspired
19th-century evolutionist anthropology, but which the Lvi-Straussian structuralism
of the 1950s and the subsequent post-structuralism of the 1960s later declared absurd
and 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 for
imitation start to pursue the same object. Soon a third one will show up, then a
fourth, and pretty quickly there is a whole bunch of primates, lurking around each
other and pursuing the same object, which is desired because the others seem to desire
it too. The general animosity becomes increasingly tangible; the aggressiveness pro-
duced by the rivalry intensies and the original object of the desire is progressively for-
gotten. Everybody imitates the desire of everybody else; everybody is rival, obstacle and
enemy for one another, until the rage bottled up suddenly and arbitrarily turns
towards one individual. There is a ferocious outburst, during which this individual is
literally 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 to
the lifeless body of the victim. This rst non-instinctual form of attention transforms
the body of the victim, so that it becomes the rst signier, introducing the rst sig-
nicant difference into the former instinctual indifferentiation. It is here that the
long march towards the sacred and the culture begins (Girard, 2007b: 81920).
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 animal
or instinctual mechanisms of protection with prohibitions and rituals, that is, with
cultural mechanisms. The most important of these is the ritual sacrice which sub-
stitutes the rst, 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 primal
scenes.7 Even though the sinister atmosphere of the former completely differs from
the happy euphoria of the latter, Girards theory of the origin of culture is structural-
ly very close to the Durkheimian model. For both the productive canalisation of
affectivity marks the event which sets the cultural development in motion. After this
the free-oating affectivity gets permanently xed to a signier (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 ux from which the whole diversity of cultures and religions is
derived. In Girards theory it is the rst spontaneous lynching which represents the
big bang that sets the generation of differences in motion; in Durkheims theory
there is no such single founding event, the system of differences is forged gradually in
the 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 sacrice for treating the
primitive sacrice as a mere symbolic institution. For example, Henri Hubert and
Marcel Mauss, in their famous essay on sacrice (1968), see the ritual sacrice as a kind
of symbolic technique, a buffer between the profane and the sacred which allows men
to approach the sacred in spite of its alleged destructive power and dangerous con-
tagiousness. This, in Girards opinion, is by no means an adequate explanation. There
is a real connection between sacrice and violence which the modern social science
has stubbornly set aside, because this would lead to the genetic (and allegedly un-
scientic) question concerning the origin of the institution (Girard, 2007c: 40607).
Since a signicant part of ritual commemorations consist of killing (i.e., sacrice),
it is natural to assume that the original incident (vnement originel) was indeed a
murder. 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 Girards view the tremendous inuence that the original murder had on
the community was not due to the identity of the victim, but to the unifying effect of
the sacrice: it prevented the community from collapsing under its own internal vio-
lence. Moreover, the (trans)cultural uniformity of sacrices suggests that it is the same
type of murder in all societies, that is, with the same kind of original incident, only
the 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 substitutions
at work in the Girardian model of sacrice. The rst one is the basic mechanism on
which Girard builds up his hypothesis of the unity of all ritual institutions (sacrice
being only one of them) and in which one single individual is substituted for the
whole community (the surrogate victimage). This is a process which remains hidden
and which happens inside the community. The second substitution is the scapegoat
mechanism or the ritual sacrice which replaces the original victim with a ritually
chosen one, usually in some way coming from outside the community (from some
marginal category, prisoners of war, slaves; etc.; see Girard, 2007c: 41921).
It is precisely the rst substitution which in the Girardian model acts as the basis
for all cultural institutions. The surrogate victimage is not itself an institution (being
the condition of other institutions), but a mechanism which is temporally antecedent
to all other institutions (see for instance Fleming, 2004: 53). The mechanism is based
upon an inevitable misapprehension (mconnaissance), without which it would not
function. The transferential character of the collective violence remains hidden from
the murderers (and all the more from those who later carry out the ritual sacrice
without the slightest notion of its mimetic character). The function of the surrogate
victim 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 Girards theory the sacred is not dened as a category with xed limits that
would be opposed to the profane, as in the Durkheimian model, but as a set of
hypotheses 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 time
after time into the surrogate victim (Girard, 2007b: 753).8 The ritual machinery which
grows upon this evolution is based on a double necessity to remember and prevent.
The prohibitions surrounding the sacred reect the need to prevent the repetition of
the violent crisis which could entail the collapse of the entire cultural order. But, on
the 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 of
the mimetic character of desire, which always leads to new competitions and con-
icts). Girard explains this dynamic of prohibitions and their periodic, but measured
(ritual) transgression by the impression that the rst killing left to those present an
impression 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 rst murderers,
the victim appeared both as the originator and the resolver of the crisis, the criminal
as well as the redeemer. And this, for Girard, explains both the sanctication of the vic-
tim and the famous ambivalence of the sacred. The impure sacred, which Durkheim
saw as a product of the rituals connected to mourning (the group projects its affective
state in bad forces), is for Girard just a reection 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 tamed
by the ritually puried violence (the scapegoat). The prohibitions are there to prevent
the impure violence from escalating whereas their ritually controlled transgression
(the puried violence) is necessary for the commemoration.
Girards analysis of the ambivalence of the sacred also reveals the basic difference
between his social theory and that of Durkheim. Even though from Girards point of
view Durkheim was completely right in stating that the function of religion is to
strengthen 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 representation
of societys 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 also
in Durkheims model (the members of society do not realise that they in fact adore
society 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 simply
ends up in a collective fatigue (see Durkheim, 1990: 310; 1947: 216).This is also one of
the main critical points that Girard turns against Durkheim: the identity of the social
and 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 Durkheims theory in which
the force of affectivity is domesticated in a positive manner, by confronting it with the
moral power of society, in Girards theory the centrifugal, dissolving force of violence
can 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 sets
things in motion. However, this is not quite the case. Although violence in Girards
model is basically unmotivated (there is no rational reason for it), its origin can be
retraced 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 vrit
romanesque (2007a), Girards rst book, in which he analyses famous literary works
(Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Proust) in the light of his hypothesis. Mans
desire is by no means autonomous as the romantic literature would have it. On the
contrary, it is only aroused by another mans desire directed towards the same object.
The subjects desire for the object is thus always mediated by a third, the model, the
desire of whom the subject is imitating. In the end, the subjects desire is completely
captured by the model that becomes the real object of desire, whereas the original
object 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 what
he/she should desire in order to attain this plenitude. By desiring an object the model
shows that this must be an object that could full the subjects dream. Hence, unlike
the need, the desire is innite (it can never be fullled) (Girard, 2007a: 3575).
Girards subsequent book La violence et le sacr (2007c) is mainly an anthropologi-
cal application and enlargement of this idea. Two desires converging in the same
object necessarily become obstacles for one another. The mimetic desire therefore
automatically leads into conict. Violence and desire are permanently interconnected
(there is no desire free from violence).9 This becomes blatantly manifest in a situation
that Girard calls sacricial crisis in which the victimage mechanism is lost and the
community is in danger of collapsing under its internal violence. We believe that the
normal form of desire is nonviolent and that this nonviolent form is characteristic of
the generality of mankind. But if the sacricial crisis is a universal phenomenon, this
hopeful belief is clearly without foundation (Girard, 1979: 144; 2007c: 472). The gen-
eralised conict deprives the participants of all their differentiating features. The sac-
ricial crisis therefore entails the collapse of all differences, that is, a generalised crisis
of culture (insofar as culture is dened as a system of differences). This is why social
life would be impossible without the victimage mechanism which, by channelling the
mimetic violence productively, constitutes the basis of cultural order. The book ends
with a general hypothesis of the unity of all rites:
We are now moving toward an expanded concept of sacrice in which the sacricial 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
communitys spontaneous and unanimous outburst of opposition to the surrogate victim.
(Girard, 1979: 297300; 2007c: 66467)
In his subsequent book Des choses caches depuis la fondation du monde (2007b) Girard
goes even farther and links the mimetic desire and the victimage mechanism directly
to mans hominisation. In order to explain the passage from nature to culture, Girard
tells us, we do not need to postulate anything more than is already found among the
anthropoids: a strong propensity for imitation together with a relatively big brain.
Among the primates the escalation of violence is prevented by a strongly hierarchic
social 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 mimetic
tendency, on the other (the development of tools and weapons progressively deprives
people of this instinctual control mechanism, typical of animals whose weapons in the
ght are their teeth, claws or other body parts). Hominisation can here be understood
as a process during which humans learn to domesticate and to tolerate ever growing
amounts of mimetism this process only begins with the rst violent outburst, that
is, 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 specically, exclusively, human. (Girard, 1987: 97;
2007b: 816)
Girard (1987: 34; 438; 2007b: 708) draws an implicit parallel between his own theory
and the Darwinian theory of evolution. Just as the theory of natural selection offers a
rational 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 Darwins theory and his own is the
fact that neither can be veried empirically, since the time span covered by both theo-
ries is extremely long (hundreds of thousands if not millions of years). Yet, according
to Girard, the explanatory power of both hypotheses is the strongest of all theories
presented so far (Girard, 2007c: 681).
From social theorys point of view the most problematic points in Girards theory
are perhaps the transition from nature to culture, allegedly provided by the surrogate
victimage, and a related problem concerning the way Girard theorises (or rather does
not theorise) the process of symbolisation which should lead to the replacement of
the 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 afrms, we need the founding murder which
alone can set the development of the ritual (cultural) machinery in motion (see
Girard, 2007b: 816). However, in order to get from the rst spontaneous (or rather,
automatic) killing to a cultural institution like the ritual sacrice, a whole history has
to be run through. Even the tiniest cultural institution not only requires imitation, it
also requires substitution; and this is already an intellectual operation, which presup-
poses reexion, memory, in short, the intervention of an entire symbolic dimension.
In other words, a quasi-automatic natural mechanism of expulsion, provoked by the
mimetic nature of human desire, cannot per se give us culture (the big philosophical
question is whether it could do this even if it were repeated millions of times, since the
same problem would only be repeated with each individual mimetic crisis, and this ad
innitum). Girard seems to jump directly from nature to culture without theorising the
enormous 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 of
transcendence (sacred) or culture in the rst place (see also Tarot, 2003: 28790).

Georges Bataille and the Affective Dynamics of the Sacred
The theory of sacred and of sacrice proposed by Georges Bataille has a slightly dif-
ferent starting point. Its main inuences come from the French sociology of the sacred
and Maussian anthropology, on one hand, and from Hegelian (philosophical) phe-
nomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis, on the other. The phenomenological
approach stresses the role of the subjective experience, not only as an essential part of
the object of research, but also in Batailles own method. Ultimately this means giv-
ing up the rigorous separation between the subject and the object of research. For
instance, the sacred, being contagious, can only contaminate the person studying it
(see Ambrosino et al., 1995; Hollier, 1995: 78). 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-Kojvean) phenomenology: the fundamental ontological unity of
man 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 s
sacred has to be seen as a part of his more general theory of the useless expenditure
(dpense) (see Bataille, 1970b). Although the Durkheimian division between the
sacred and the profane and the central role given to the prohibition in the denition
of the sacred are also constitutive to Batailles conception of the sacred, for him it is
nonetheless 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 the
homogeneous (productive, profane) domain is destroyed. However, apart from this
general 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 to
that proposed by Girard (sacred as an affective projection of collective violence) than
the Durkheimian solution (sacred as a collective representation of societys force),
although for Bataille sacred is most of all affective communication (collective sharing of
anguish 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 and
in 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 a
whole, 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 inuences, this scheme also seems to deviate from Freuds
theory in some signicant 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 almighty
Father (real or symbolic), but its origin is the common, inner, experience of terror
before death (see for instance Bataille, 1976b: 30718). Yet, it is only the eeting instant
of the transgression of the symbolic taboo that can give us a glimpse of this anguish
without which the prohibition would not exist. Secondly, it is rst and foremost
death, 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 the
horror caused by what Lacan, following Hegel (and above all Kojve), called the ab-
solute master.
In this manner the Bataillean emphasis of the expenditure also constitutes the link
between his structural model in which the heterogeneous is seen as a domain opposed
to the homogeneous, and a more phenomenological approach in which it is examined
as an experience or a movement (a common experience of nitude), since the apogee
of expenditure is none other than death. Of all conceivable luxuries the death, in its
fatal and inexorable form, is certainly the most costly one (Bataille, 1976a: 40). The
connection between the sacred and this luxurious loss is thus paradigmatically given
in the ritual sacrice.
The Inner Experience of Sacrice

Like Girards model the Bataillean theory of sacrice is dominated by what could be
called the image of the primitive society. But although Bataille uses many historical
societies as examples for his theory (for instance, the Tlingit and the Kwakiutl tribes
analysed by Marcel Mauss and Franz Boas or the Aztecs of Mexico during the 15th and
16th centuries), his primitive society cannot be reduced to any of them. It is not a
social organisation or an archaic paradise, which once would have existed and then
was lost, but rather a hypothetical model comparable to Rousseaus state of nature: a
universe in which the relationship between man and the world is presumed to be
immediate and immanent (the world has not yet been divided into objects exterior to
man) (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 is
mediated 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 and
the enslavement of man begin with the invention of work and of language (work and
language are the original forms of alienation, whereas for instance Christianity and
industrial 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 begins
to 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 to
the fear of death by bringing along the consciousness of time and of the difference
between 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 in
them cannot resist time, whereas objects seem to defy it (Bataille, 1976b: 297306).
It is precisely the utility, the usability of objects and their dependence on exterior
purposes that constitute the heart of Batailles phenomenological account of alien-
ation. Utility lays the foundation for the profane universe of work, in which existence
is always harnessed to serve ends exterior to it. Existence valuable in itself can only be
grasped by breaking up the prohibitions, which constitute the profane universe of
work 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 sacricial animal) it opens up a eeting 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 intimate
character and become transcendent.12 Men express this emotional ambivalence by sur-
rounding death as well as other forms of dangerous excess, for instance, sexuality, with
prohibitions. Seen from the viewpoint of the profane universe of work, death and sex-
uality both appear as something completely different (tout autre Bataille, 1970e:
5859; 1979a: 35), but at the same time they are fundamentally linked to mans bestial
(impure) existence, freed from the constraints of work. The prohibitions prevent the
invasion of this domain in the profane, orderly existence. On the other hand, it is the
state of transgression which commands the desire, the demand of a universe more
profound, more rich and prodigious, in short, the demand of a sacred universe
(Bataille, 1979a: 41; see also 1976a: 6164).
This is also why the prohibitions affecting the various manifestations of excess can
never be absolute in Batailles scheme. This would denitely condemn people to the
isolated and object-like (profane) existence, which can never be sovereign,13 valuable in
itself. The isolated individual can restore the immediate world relation only when the
anxiety 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 isolated
individuals 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 Sacrice

The Bataillean model of sacrice contains two major problems, which should be dealt
with before going to Kojve, and of which he was himself acutely aware. The rst could
be called the problem of functionalism, the second the problem of simulation.
Nonetheless, they both spring from the same source, namely, the ambivalent status of
sacrice as a part of what might be called a restricted economy. In the rst case, the
problem 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 of
sacrice. Sacrice is a gift given to gods either as a payment of a debt or in order to
receive a return gift. According to the standard functionalist explanation of the
Durkheimian school, these utilitarian motives, which the primitives themselves
often give to the sacrice, are, nonetheless, merely apparent. In reality the ritual nour-
ishes the social forces sustaining the community, that is, it regenerates the spiritual
and moral energy of the group. Gods are the image, the emblem and the symbol of
society, and the function of the sacrice is to solidify the social bond (see Durkheim,
1990: 491500; Hubert and Mauss, 1968).
In fact, Batailles interpretation of the sacrice is not so far from this functional-
ist model. Its latent functionalism is particularly palpable in the book Lhomme et le
sacr that Batailles friend, the French anthropologist Roger Caillois, published in 1939
and 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: 4445). In a sense Caillois is even more functionalist than Durkheim ever
was, since he attributes a social function even to those superuous and excessive fea-
tures of the rite, which Durkheim (1990: 54748, n. 2), in default of a better explana-
tion, interpreted as involuntary (quasi-natural) side effects of the ritual (see also
Arppe, 1995). According to Caillois, excesses are an essential part of the sacred power
of the rites, they contribute to the regeneration of nature and of the community that
is the principal function of the rite (see Caillois, 1995: 65152). The same type of expla-
nation can also be found in Batailles La part maudite, published in 1949 (Bataille,
1976a: 64). Despite the books overall emphasis on the useless and constitutively super-
uous nature of expenditure (dpense), the interpretation given of ritual sacrice is
still strangely functionalist in its undertones. In sacrice the useless and allegedly
sovereign expenditure seems to be transformed to a mere means, the function of
which is to channel human violence into socially acceptable forms, so that after the
ritual blood shedding the normal everyday life could reassume its peaceful course.
From this point of view the Bataillean scheme seems quite close to the
Durkheimian model of collective effervescence: the cultural order is reproduced by

ritually repeating the affective experience, which constitutes its foundation. In
Durkheims theory, what is repeated is the creative chaos of collective frenzy, in
Batailles interpretation the euphoric, yet terrifying experience of mans own nitude.
Sacricial violence seems to become a mere safety valve, whose function is always the
same, namely, the regeneration of the social order, an interpretation later adopted and
developed by none other than Ren Girard.
It is noteworthy that, in spite of the manifest similarities between his theory and
that of Bataille, Girard only once mentions the name of Bataille in his La violence et le
sacr, and this in an overtly sarcastic tone (2007c: 565). From his viewpoint, Bataille
appears as a degenerated aesthetician who, instead of presenting a scientic explana-
tion of violence, goes on romanticising it. Even though Girard never formulates things
explicitly, 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 seeing
human violence as a mechanism (a means to an end) and thereby attaching it to the very
structure and movement of societys affective economy. Instead, he keeps on deplor-
ing its inexplicable, ecstatic and experiential nature that remains beyond the grasp of
discursive knowledge.
In a general fashion, what were looking for in sacrice or in potlatch, in action (history) or in con-
templation (thinking), is always this shadow which, by denition, 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 very
structure that Girard offers as an explanation: the economy itself, the impossibility of
capturing the shadow of death in the economy of representation. This is what I call
the problem of simulation. On one hand, the Bataillean sacrice 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 sacricial death). But, on the
other, Bataille is forced to admit that all attempts to appropriate and control this
intimate 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 sacrice 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: 17778, italics in original; translation TA)

Bataille is thus forced to admit the mimetic character of the sacrice. In fact, the par-
ticipants are only given access to a spectacle, a simulated and mediated (represented)
death. Although mans consciousness of his own future annihilation separates him
from other animals, in reality death reveals nothing. The revelation of mans human
(mortal) essence to himself would require that he lived his own death, that he would
be able to appropriate himself integrally, without residue, in his own negativity. But as
Bataille himself points out (1988b: 336), this is a comedy! In short, for Bataille the
problem of mimesis is on the level of representation, whereas for Girard it is essentially
met 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 sacrice. Sacrice
is 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 mans
own mortality, through which immanence and communication with others only
become possible. However, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1990) has
pointed out, in spite of Batailles efforts to the contrary, this scheme remains pro-
foundly Hegelian in its nature: it consists of the (dialectical) reappropriation of the
subjective identity, albeit in a torn and wrenched form, mediated by negativity, be-
tween the impossible and the simulation. In Nancys opinion Girard, Bataille and in
fact the whole Western culture are caught up in a fascination with the sacrice, a sac-
ricial phantasm, the destruction of which would require that the whole dialectical
logic of negation be deconstructed.
However, as far as Bataille is concerned, this logic can largely be traced back to
Alexandre Kojves interpretation of Hegel, which has been very inuential especially
in the French context. In Batailles case the connection is clear, since it is rst and fore-
most in his personal dialogue with Kojve that he develops his idea concerning the
status and fate of negativity in human existence after man has satised his animal
needs. As for Girard, although he never once mentions Kojve, the whole triangular
logic of the mimetic desire could be directly from Kojves pen, even if the Girardian
version of things does not end up in any dialectical synthesis, quite the contrary, as we
shall see (this Kojvean inuence has also been noted by Fleming, 2004: 169, n. 35).
The Anthropogenic Desire of Kojve

Kojves interpretation of Hegels phenomenology is presented in his famous book
Introduction la lecture de Hegel (1947), which is a compilation of his equally celebrated
lectures, held in 193339 at cole des Hautes tudes in Paris.15 This interpretation is
founded upon two major axes, namely, the dialectic of master and slave and the thesis
of 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.
Kojve starts from a clear-cut ontological dualism: there is a fundamental differ-
ence between mans and natures modes of being. The distinguishing factor between

man and beast is the specic nature of human desire. Whereas animal desire is direct-
ed toward a material object (nourishment guaranteeing its survival), the ultimate
object of human desire is always another human desire. According to Kojve, the sat-
isfaction of animal need can only be the basis for a sentiment of the self, that is, for
an animal I, focused solely on physical survival, not for self-consciousness in a strict
sense (Kojve, 1947: 12). For the self-consciousness to be born, the human desire has to
be directed toward an object that surpasses the given reality. But the only such object
is the desire itself.
The anthropogenetic desire (the desire that generates man) is therefore always
directed toward another desire. Desire directed toward a natural object is human only
to the extent, that it is mediated by the desire of another, directed toward the same
object. The satisfaction of human desire thus requires some sort of reciprocity or
social recognition of the value of the object. For instance, in the relationship between
man and woman desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the desire
of the other if he or she wants to be recognized in his or her human value, in his or
her reality as a human individual. To desire anothers desire ultimately means that I
want my value, the value that I represent as a human being, to become the value that
the 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 animal
desire (directed solely toward survival of the species). In Kojves scheme this means
that the humanity of man rests on his will to risk his life voluntarily in order to gain
recognition. The birth of the self-consciousness is thus elementarily linked with
exposing ones life, with the risk of death (Kojve, 1947: 1114).
This is why the desire for recognition necessarily appears as a bloody battle for
pure prestige (lutte mort de pur prstige Kojve, 1947: 14). The rst battle consti-
tutes the ctive starting point of history. However, since the satisfaction of this desire
requires that both parties stay alive, it has to generate two fundamentally different
types of human behaviour: one of the parties has to fear the other (and death) enough
to recognise the other without being himself recognised. The result of this battle is the
relationship of submission known as the dialectic of master and slave, which in
Hegels philosophy constitutes the motor of both self-consciousness and history.
The position of the idle master, who has gained the recognition of the other (the
slave), might at rst 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 his
pleasure remains purely subjective and bestial. The slave, on the other hand, improves
through his forced labour not only the objective nature, but also his own nature. On
one hand, he realises his own idea in the material object; on the other, he surpasses the
nature in himself by suspending his immediate desire toward the object. In short, the
idle master can die like a human (in the battle for pure prestige), but he can only live
like an animal (because of his idleness). The future and history thus do not belong to
the belligerent master, but to the industrious slave who, by transforming the world,

creates the necessary conditions for a new, liberating battle for recognition (Kojve,
1947: 1834).
Whereas the rst battle for recognition and the resulting relation of submission
sets history in motion, it is equality that ends it. In other words, history ends at the
moment, when the antagonism between the master and the slave vanishes (Kojve,
1947: 143 ff.). The nal satisfaction of the desire for recognition can only be reached in
a universal and homogeneous state, born of a bloody revolution. Only in such a state
can 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 who
created it is completely satised and therefore no longer aspires to change, to surpass
the given and also himself with his negative action. However, the end of history by no
means signies that nothing more will happen in the world, it only means that men
stop acting as humans, that is, they stop risking their lives and working in order to
gain recognition. Kojve does not speak of the end of history for some metaphysical
reason, but because humanity in the state he describes is in principle completely sat-
ised. Although the end of history implies the death of man determined by the desire
for 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 an
animal totally in harmony with nature or the given world; see Kojve, 1947: 113 ff.; see
also 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 Kojvean phenomenology seems to be quite far
from the Girardian attempt to provide a scientic explanation for human culture.
Girard attaches his own model rmly to human evolution, to mans biological nature
and its conditions of development, which philosophically speaking situate man on
the same ontological continuum with other species. The difference between man and
animal is a matter of degree, not a radical ontological gap. Moreover, Girard empha-
sises tirelessly the scientic superiority of his model, its capacity to explain as eco-
nomically and as elegantly as possible empirical data, for which anthropologists have
so far been unable to nd a non-contradictory explanation (see for instance Girard,
2007c: 68890). Girard intends to present no less than a universal morpho-genetic
explanation of the origin of culture: from one single natural principle (the mimetic
nature of human desire) plus one corollary postulate (the surrogate victimage) the
cultural 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 Kojve, on the other hand, thinks that dualism is necessary precisely because,

according to him, the spirit cannot be deduced from nature, but presupposes a rupture
constituted by a creative act of liberty.
By contrast, the respective theories of Girard and Kojve concerning human desire
have 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 Kojve the very feature distinguishing human desire from mere animal need.
In Kojves model this premise leads to the desire for recognition and to the dialectic
of 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, exactly
this sort of philosophical interpretation of violence, which Girard denounces as pure
mysticism: We have to refuse all the mystical explanations and their philosophical
surrogates, as for instance the coincidentia oppositorium, the magical power of the
negative 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 any
theological or metaphysical character in any sense that the contemporary critique
might give to these terms (Girard, 2007c: 68990).17 But although Girard struggles to
push the mystical negativity away, negativity as such plays a very signicant role in
his own explanation of human culture we might even say that negativity is omni-
present in Girards theory: it is the mimetic violence itself. The most signicant dif-
ference in relation to Kojve is the lack of any dialectical reconciliation (Aufhebung)
of negativity or violence. In Girards scheme the mimetic situation escalates and leads
to a circle of violence, accelerating in a completely autistic manner.
Moreover, Kojve and Girard see the connection between mimesis and its object
somewhat differently. Whereas in Kojves interpretation the subjects desire is rst
and foremost directed toward another desire (the other desire being its object), in
Girards theory it is rather directed according to another desire (which is desiring the
same object). In fact, the Girardian desire seems to have no real object at all, since all
its varying objects are but an imaginary veiling, part of the structure of misapprehen-
sion (mconnaissance) typical of the double bind relation instituted by the mimetic
desire itself. To put it differently, in the Girardian constellation desire is not oriented
by some pre-existing attractor, it is the desire itself which causes the attractor to
emerge: The object is a genuine creation of the mimetic desire; it is the composition of
the mimetic codeterminations which cause it to spring from nothingness (Dupuy,
1990: 132, italics in original).
This is why the Girardian desire can never be satised. It is inevitably founded
upon 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 mechanism
is 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 an
evolutionary 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 conception
which poses some sort of nality to desire (the universal recognition in the Kojvean
state, 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 the
mimetic process assumes in its never-ending circular movement (see Dupuy, 1990:
13334; and Girard, 1987: 37677; 2007b: 1142).18
The Kojvean dialectic also helps to sketch out the basic differences between
Girards and Batailles theories of sacrice. The most signicant disparities lie in the
anthropology 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 Batailles criticism against utili-
tarianism in the 1930s: the reason why men try to ensure their subsistence or to avoid
suffering (the negative version of utilitarianism) is not that these functions would in
themselves contain a sufcient result, but because through them they want to reach
out for the insubordinate function of free expenditure. For Bataille, both individuals
and societies are animated by an irresistible and illogical impulse to abandon, to reject
moral or material goods that could have been rationally used (Bataille, 1970b: 31820).
Even if the ritual sacrice has more or less vanished from the modern world,19 for
Bataille the term has not lost its meaning, insofar as it denotes an impulsion arising
from the subjects inner experience, a spirit of sacrice, which incites the individual
to throw something of himself outside of himself (the modern examples Bataille gives
are the self-mutilations committed by the mentally ill, Bataille, 1970a). Also in the
archaic sacrice Batailles emphasis is on the radical change undergone by the persons
attending to the rite; this transformation can, in turn, be associated to any sort of
change 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 the
unconscious necessity commanding it. In other words, the ritual sacrice provides a
channel for the heterogeneous impulses of expenditure, which constitute an integral
part of human existence and violate the individuals habitual homogeneity and
integrity.
This impulsion of destruction is integrally linked with violence, but the impetus
for violence does not come from a mimetic tendency of appropriation, or from the
imitation of/according to another desire, as in Girards model. In Batailles theory the
role of violence only becomes intelligible, when the human existence as a whole is put
in the perspective of unproductive expenditure (which Bataille calls the general econ-
omy). It is precisely from this angle that Bataille also questions the Kojvean 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 Kojve in the end of the 1930s
Bataille (1995b) asks, what remains of human negativity after the satisfaction provid-
ed by work and mutual recognition has been achieved. In Kojves 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 to
mans humanity. Man becomes an animal completely in harmony with himself, com-
pletely happy and with nothing more to do (see Kojve, 1947: 385). But Bataille is not
happy:
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 couldnt dene myself in a more precise manner). (Bataille, 1995b:
7576)20
In Batailles interpretation the negativity dening the human desire always leaves
behind 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 in
many 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, a
sort of Freudian Wunderblock, which traces back the forgotten or repressed guises,
under which the impulsion of expenditure has appeared during humanitys conscious
history.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 in
transgressive experiences, which nonetheless only become accessible to the conscious
mind once the desire of appropriation has been (at least temporarily) satised.
Conclusions
All in all, Batailles theory of sacrice can be seen as a vision, which largely questions
the Hegelian metaphysics of conscience and the Kojvean metaphysics of productive
negativity, but also the Girardian metaphysics of desire, insofar as desire in Girards
theory is always connected to appropriation. In this sense, it can denitely not be
interpreted as a mechanism, which could be isolated and used as a scientic expla-
nation of human violence, desire or culture. Rather, it is an existential question, which
examines the historical limits of the accumulative, restricted economy (and anthro-
pology). From this angle it is quite understandable that Girard should see Bataille as
a mere romantic glamorising violence, and that he should want to present his own
model as an anthropological meta-theory, explaining the different modes of expendi-
ture envisioned by Bataille as just a bunch of illusory projections, produced by the
mimetic violence.
However, as I have demonstrated, we can justiably argue that the founding prem-
ise of Girards own theory, namely, the mimetic and appropriative nature of human
desire, is a postulate which is just as metaphysical as Batailles vision of the uncon-

scious impulse of expenditure animating human existence, although Girard would
like us to think differently (on this, see also Gauthier, 2008). The common theoretical
inuences (Durkheim and Kojve) which count for the several resemblances between
the two theories are also the very points where they diverge.
Whereas Girards theory on sacred and sacrice could be said to constitute the
reverse image of the Durkheimian theory of religion, putting the impure sacred in the
forefront but preserving the idea of the productive (ritual) canalisation of affectivity
as 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 behind
a surplus which cannot be canalised into (ritual) action.
On the other hand, Bataille and Girard both strive to deconstruct the Hegelian
teleological conception of desire, fundamentally connected to the dialectic of con-
sciousness, but again their approaches to the problem are different. Bataille seeks to
mine the Hegelian logic of the self-conscious subject (constituted by recognition), by
confronting it with the idea of an unproductive, idle negativity (desire which cannot
be canalised into productive action), deconstructing its teleological movement so that
it 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 teleological
movement (i.e. the mutual recognition) is simply abandoned and appropriation sub-
stituted for representation (the latter being judged as a mere effect of the mimetic
desire). The teleological concept of desire is destroyed by the same token what comes
in its stead is a biologically rooted desiring machine freely revolving in its own dual-
istic violence.
Although Girards theory has been fervently criticised in anthropology (explaining
culture 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 its
proponents. For the latter the undeniable advantage of Girards theory is that it
brings the problem of violence back to the sociology and anthropology of religion (see
Tarot, 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 Girards model here, it
should be emphasised that the evidence he brings in to support his theoretical postu-
late (the surrogate victimage mechanism) is of empirical nature, consisting of the
analysis and explication of various anthropological data. The weak point of the
Girardian theory (the one-factor cultural explanation it proposes) can also be seen as
its 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 which
would cover all the empirical occurrences of the phenomenon without the strong
causal 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 falsied. Sacricial 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 to
make it carry (i.e., explanation of the entire human culture and its various institu-
tions, language included).
Whereas Girards theory offers us a clear-cut and simple causal model which can
easily be applied to several (even modern) phenomena, the potential benet of the
Bataillean phenomenology of expenditure for social theory is less easy to pinpoint in
a precise manner. Although Bataille aims at constructing a kind of universal history
of the human culture, he does not build it upon any one mechanism that could
thereafter be applied to the interpretation of different sorts of empirical data. On one
hand, 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 our
means of theorising it on a social (or sociological) level: if negativity (or violence) is no
longer interpreted in a functionalist manner, as part of a closed (restricted) theoretical
economy, how could we approach it sociologically (see also Arppe, 2009)? Although
Bataille 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 that
the theoretical economy of this approach would be rather different than that of the
Girardian 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 nd 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 eld is simply implau-
sible. Girard has a certain tendency to conceal his own mimetic models, as we shall also see with
Kojve and Bataille.
4. What should not be forgotten is, of course, that there is also another side of Durkheims theory
which could be called symbolic and which has to do with collective representations and beliefs.
See for instance Tarot (2008a: 26188).
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:
81224; 2007c: 40421) 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: 81415; 1987, 9596).

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 scientic and
non-metaphysical character of his own theory wants to avoid at all costs.
6. In mans case the rst, 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: 73435). 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: 7988).
10. Moreover, Batailles attitude towards science is a priori critical. See Bataille (1970f: 2124; 1970d:
6263; 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 (dpense) 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 Lchange 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: 26580).
13. Sovereignty is a central idea in Batailles 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: 287316). 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-
rice), 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
conning the problem of mimesis to the level of representation (see Girard, 2007b: 71214).
15. On the lectures of Kojve, see for instance Auffret (1990: 22563) and Surya (1992: 22933).
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: 28889; 2007b:
104546)
17. The translation is mine, since this paragraph is missing in the English translation of Girards book
(which he has himself revised and modied), 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 eld 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: 8384).
21. On the relationship between Bataille, Kojve and Hegel, see Heinmki (2008); on Batailles con-
ception of negativity in relation to Kojve, 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 among
others. Her recent articles include Rousseau, Durkheim et la constitution affective du
social (Revue dHistoire des Sciences Humaines 13, 2005) and Sorcerers Apprentices and
the Will to Figuration: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Collge de Sociologie (Theo-
ry, Culture and Society 26(4), 2009). She has also translated several French theorists into
Finnish, including texts of Derrida, Bataille, Baudrillard, Kristeva and Bourdieu.
Ti i n a A r p p e
Academy Research Fellow
Department of Sociology
P.O. Box 16 (Snellmaninkatu 12)
00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
tiina.arppe@helsinki.

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The Durkheimian Turmoil

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The Primal Scene of Ren Girard

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The Victimage Mechanism and

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The Mimetic Desire

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The Inner Experience of Sacrice

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The Paradoxes of Sacrice

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The Anthropogenic Desire of Kojve

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Negativity and the Dynamics of Human Desire

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