In 1936, the French philosopher Georges Bataille attempted to stage a human sacrifice to explore the theoretical concepts he had been developing. Also present at the event were most of the founding members (Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Klossowski, Jean Wahl, Jules Monnerot et al.) of Acéphale, a secret society that fought right-wing politics and ideologies, and which also ran a public review under its name from 1936 to 1939. The bizarre yet ambitious enterprise foundered before it even had a chance to take place, not due to the unease or guilt of its practitioners, but because everyone volunteered to be the victim, leaving the role of the executioner unfilled.
What was Bataille trying to find out through this social experiment (if, indeed, it could be qualified as an ‘experiment’)? And why must he resort to such extreme measure to validate his thoughts? To understand Bataille’s idiosyncratic theory of sacrifice, let us take a look first at the foundation upon which the ideas are based – the gift culture.
In his famous essay The Gift (1925), French sociologist Marcel Mauss relates an intriguing custom in Trobriand Island where valuable goods and personal possessions were periodically cast into the ocean and destroyed. What could be the reason behind this blatant show of wastefulness? None at all, apparently! Power-thirstiness might be one of the possible triggers, Mauss further reveals, seeing the ritual as basically a modern day ‘cash clash’ in which power was measured by the level of extravagance the individuals were capable of. Another possible trigger was a more familiar sensation: the fear of divine or supernatural wrath. But if we were to take this account at its face value and accept that the activity yielded no explainable motive, how should we interpret – or, in a deeper sense, how should we comprehend the purposelessness of – the nature of the gift?
For Bataille, no gift-giving is wholly pure in its intention. The act of ‘giving’, according to Bataille, is akin to ‘acquiring a power’. It is true that to give is not always to lose, but to lose in order to procure the profits that come along with the loss. Thus, the gift culture, which constitutes one of the earliest examples of social and economic exchange, was really hedged about by a pretence, a deception, or, in Bataille’s terms, a ‘semblance’ of a monumental largesse.
If we regard gift-giving as a symbolic form of contractual agreement, sacrifice – in which the ‘gifts’ are often living beings – can be understood as a comparable yet more complex economic process. In The Accursed Share (1949), one of his most influential works, Bataille offers a unique perspective on global economy, emphasizing the central role of consumption. Gift culture and sacrifice are such prototypes of consumption that, on the surface, leave no tangible trace of value or benefit. The victim of sacrifice, like all of us, was bound to a world governed by work and production. According to Bataille, it was this ‘servitude’ of the self that a sacrifice aimed to destroy. The height of the festival saw life and death converge – the victim, on the brink of departing from the physical world, grappled with the emergence of sacredness, which Bataille foregrounded as the essence of sacrifice. Any attempt to resist the sacred, such as the futile holding-off of death throes, would unleash a torrent of violence that ultimately consumed the victim. In the end the victim was extracted from the cycle of utility and entered a realm freed from all earthly bounds: no time, no materiality, no thoughts or feelings, no work and no need to work to make provision, no future.
‘In 1936, the French philosopher Georges Bataille attempted to stage a human sacrifice to explore the theoretical concepts he had been developing.’
But there were other factors that went into the complex project of sacrifice. As mentioned earlier, fear was a common stimulus for many such events. Fear drove actions to achieve beneficial outcomes, such as averting disasters or ensuring successful harvests. Bataille categorized those benefits as good. Good entails a forward-looking mindset that stresses self-interest and stability. At the opposite pole is evil, which upends all that good upholds. Sacrifice is theoretically on the side of evil as long as the killing is done without any presupposed intent. But an unpremeditated murder in this case would not require the addendum of a festival, which grounded the whole shebang in the reinstatement of good. In conclusion, Bataille acknowledged that all historical sacrifices were ‘evil necessary for the good’.
Shall we then infer that good is the obstacle for sacrifice to fully register its potential (the ‘potential’ being, of course, the transference from the earthly to the sacred)? According to Bataille’s formulation, it is the victim to whom good relinquishes its binding control, allowing the sacrificial act to fully realize its transformative potential. Whilst the spectators can only experience the moment vicariously, they do manage to elicit something that resembles the sacred – a ‘simulacrum’ that stands in for the genuine article.
What is it exactly about the notion of the sacred that makes it so difficult to theorize? The difficulty itself touches on a dominant concern in philosophy: the conflict between representation and reality. What constitutes ‘objective reality’ if nothing other than, in truth, our ‘perception’ and ‘understanding’ of the supposed objectivity of a given reality? Symbolic systems like language have so effectively and totally shaped our thoughts that we are unable to conceive of the world beyond the frameworks they impose. According to Bataille, this limitation is also an advantage for it permits the conflation of representation and reality – regarding the sacred, for instance, it is the ‘appearance’ that counts, an appearance that embodies both the material and the transcendent. The appearance of the sacred thus hinges on the process through which it is evoked. In his later writing, Bataille would turn his attention from appearance to process as key to the possible unity of the sacred and the profane.
Is there a possible scenario where the spectator and the victim are one and the same? In an early essay about Van Gogh, Bataille ponders on the possibility of ridding the sacred of its earthly trappings – through the act of self-sacrifice. By cutting off his ear, Van Gogh was both the observer and the victim of a mutilated body. With self-sacrifice, the accumulation of roles is even more pronounced: the ‘one who sacrifices’ is the ‘one who conducts the sacrifice’ and is also the ‘one who experiences the sacrifice’. But what happens after the deed is done? There is a definite answer to that: death. It is widely believed that death takes away the consciousness with which anything post-death is registered. In the case of sacrifice, the victim cannot attest to the totality of the experience of the sacred, and the spectators are equally unable to confirm that such an experience is fully realized. The only thing for certain is that a transformation – from life to death – occurs. With Van Gogh, a severed ear symbolized an attempt to depart from the profane world – but the fact that his razor ultimately aborted its pursuit of other body parts, as horrible as it sounds, means that, Bataille argues, the undertaking, in the interest of attaining to the sacred, was a failure in the end.
The element of violence, essential to the act of sacrifice, does not always lead one to true sacredness. But to aim for a possible fusion of the two, violence is indispensable. The one who commits violence invariably objectifies the one receiving it: not only in the grammatical sense of subject versus object but, on an existential plane and to a certain extent, the victim’s basic humanness is at stake. This ‘subhuman’ status in fact appeals to the rules for acquiring sacredness, for it implies an impaired consciousness. The violence at work in a sacrifice thus destroys the subject–object relation in a two-step process that Bataille outlines: first, an external violence drawing the initial blood, presenting a corpse on the spot; second, the violence works internally to separate a person and a thing – and it is as a thing – a presumably insentient thing – that the victim finally enters into the world of the sacred.
‘Despite the failure to pull off a human sacrifice, Bataille’s fervent exploration of the paradoxical nature of sacrifice endured throughout his life, with an increasing focus on its abstract implications.’
The spectators partake of all of this and try to conjure up a comparable sensation. According to Bataille, the spectators are rewarded with a spectacle whose intensity and drama conspire to create an illusion of being (at the exact spot of being killed), which is then enlarged into a becoming (the victim). One might wonder: if the spectacle is to be made less spectacular, like that of ancient festivals where animals were slain in advance, can the same level of sympathetic participation still be achieved?
Following Bataille’s theory, death serves as the defining element of violence in sacrifice, and it is solely through death that true sacredness emerges. The spectacle itself, and the emotional disturbance it provokes in the onlookers, is in fact irrelevant where matters of death and the sacred are concerned. But to draw thus a sharp line between the living and the dead misses an important piece to the puzzle. Fear of loss was, as we have known, the driving force behind the earliest practice of sacrifice. A ‘death to prevent more deaths’ was basically the prevailing logic that sustained this fundamentally irrational custom for centuries.
Enter the Aztecs
A Mesoamerican civilization that flourished in central Mexico before the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century, the Aztec culture was renowned for its organization and near-puritanical ethos. Its people were marked by an innate pragmatism that extended even to their practice of sacrifice, which was integrated into daily life with a matter-of-fact regularity. According to French anthropologist Christian Duverger, the Aztecs abided by fastidious rules when carrying out brutal acts of murder. Societal equilibrium was secondary to a more pressing concern to which festivals of later periods were mostly geared: the need to reinforce power and domination. Human sacrifice was merely a ‘technical means’ that fostered the growth of the tribe at the expense of foreign populations captured in war. The Aztecs believed that it was through the extension of their dominance that their well-being was ensured.
Amongst other ancient civilizations that practiced sacrifice, very few conducted these ceremonies solely for their own sake. In lustration, for example, the object of this purification ritual held by both the ancient Greeks and Romans was to appease the wrath of gods. With the Chinese dynasties, a sacrifice of token offerings was integrated into the burials of autocrats. Similarly, the ancient Greek ceremony of bouphonia was undertaken by a gathering of guilt-stricken hunters who, seeking absolution for the violent nature of their occupation, sacrificed a plough ox – an animal deemed sacred by the Athenians – as a symbolic gesture. The ritual appeared to have taken hold as the Athenian state expanded, and, over time, even displayed a tendency towards becoming excessive. According to Walter Burkert, a prominent scholar on Greek mythology, the underlying theory of the ritual still had much to do with a higher purpose, although the method admittedly went beyond the representative.
Despite the failure to pull off a human sacrifice, Bataille’s fervent exploration of the paradoxical nature of sacrifice endured throughout his life, with an increasing focus on its abstract implications. For Bataille, sacrifice was not merely an act of wilful destruction but a profound gesture that transcended mundanity and challenged the established order of society. It revealed the sacred through violence, offering a glimpse into a reality where the boundaries between life and death collapsed. This relentless pursuit of the sacred, despite its inherent contradictions, underscores Bataille’s enduring fascination with the limits of human knowledge and his commitment to shattering the traditional frameworks of reason and morality. Bataille’s thesis, rooted in the tension between abstraction and its representation, invites us to re-evaluate the concept of sacrifice by confronting the raw, and often unnerving, truths about human existence.
• Sacrifice as transcendence: Sacrifice as a means to break free from the constraints of work and utility, allowing the victim to transition from the profane world to the sacred realm – one devoid of time, materiality and purpose.
• Violence and the sacred: Sacrifice is not just an act of destruction but a process where violence strips the victim of personhood, dissolving the boundary between life and death. This rupture allows access to the sacred, where existence is no longer bound by material or social constraints.
• Spectatorship and simulacrum: Whilst the victim undergoes the ultimate transformation, spectators can only gain a ‘simulacrum’ of the sacred, experiencing a vicarious but incomplete form of transcendence through the spectacle of death.
