Content provided in partnership with
To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth
The examples given in the essay "Sacrificial Mutilation" emphasize both how easy it is to distance ourselves from this danger as well as how terrible such a danger could be. They include a man twisting off his own finger and a woman tearing out her own eye, both terrible examples of our strange, cruel, and uncontrollable needs for expenditure. Along similar lines, as a commentary on events of this kind, Bataille argues,
The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior. (Bataille 1985, 73)
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Here as throughout his writings, Bataille emphasizes two key aspects of the decline of sacrifice that we ignore at our own peril. In the first place, he contends that the violent need that ritual sacrifice was once able to address remains with us despite all optimism to the contrary. We don't put violence on display in the same ritualized fashion, but the need remains constant. We've only become less aware of it in ourselves, and less aware of ourselves as those who have need of such violence.
Thus Bataille's first point is that the need for nonproductive usages does not diminish when it is denied. His second point is that this denial in which the need persists represents a decline in self-awareness, one with obviously dangerous consequences. No longer do we congregate as a community to witness the violence we desire to bring into this world and to affirm our lack of control over this violence, our lack of control over this desire. We no longer congregate to produce the sacrificial spectacle, to produce thereby a community of mutual complicity in the knowledge of the sacred continuity of being. We no longer allow ourselves to organize spectacles in the name of the sacred that enact that which exceeds the good. Such spectacles would have to violate every stricture of human rights known to us today.
Yet we have not changed, according to Bataille, except for becoming less known to ourselves than ever. We are now more than ever the condemned on the way to becoming the destroyed by way of imagining ourselves as the good. Even an utter catastrophe like the Holocaust does little to alter our naive self-image. In his short piece on David Rousset's book The Universe of the Concentration Camp, Bataille refuses to side with the moralists because moralistic self-delusion here is our problem, not our solution, There exists in a certain form of moral condemnation an escapist denial. One says, basically, this abjection would not have been, had there not been monsters.... And it is possible, insofar as this language appeals to the masses, that this infantile negation may seem effective; but in the end it changes nothing. It would be as vain to deny the incessant danger of cruelty as it would be to deny the danger of physical pain. One hardly obviates its effects flatly attributing it to parties or to races which one imagines to be inhuman. (Bataille 1991, 19)
