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To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth
To help emphasize just how offensive, there is a passage near the beginning of Death and Sensuality depicting the spectacle of primitive ritual human sacrifice, the communal production of a wasteful expenditure witnessed in common. Bataille uses the word "sacred" to describe the experience of the witnesses, underlining just how fundamental and revelatory to us he thinks such events were. Disturbing as it must be to us, he holds that the event of the spectacle of ritual sacrifice has power of conveying a profound meaning, This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. (Bataille 1962, 16)
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It is a disturbing thought that only a spectacular killing, that only events of this kind, can satisfy the human desire for the experience of sacred meaning. Along with a fear of our own immoral excess comes the question of whether hypermorality invites unleashing this destructive excess. Would Bataille like to see us unleashed, perhaps in the style of Charles Manson, to produce our own spectacles of ritual sacrifice?
Certainly Bataille describes irrational violence as having an undeniable meaning, one that is revelatory of the sacred continuity alluded to in the previous citation. Soon after that citation he similarly asserts that we seek "the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity" (1962, 18). Where do we find this power? We find it in transformative experiences akin to the sacrifice described above.
In other words, to acquire the power to know the unknowable, the production of transformative violence is the key. In the name of this power, the production of violence is not an accident but a goal. This production is the key to the transformative experiences that give our lives a sense of intensity, depth, and meaning. Hence, we always have ample motive to seek such experiences, to seek to bear witness to transformative violence. Given such ample motive, violence and spectacles of such violence will be produced. Moreover, no morality will ever be able to put an end to these productions. No morality has the power to stop the persistence of the sacred violence in our lives, since this violence is the only key we have to the experience of the miraculous, of the sacred.
As for Charles Manson, Bataille would certainly try to understand Manson's and our own violence in this context of the sacred, of our need for depth and meaning. The production of transformative violence is fundamental to our being, whether we are conscious of it in this way or not. He, then, would not regard Manson's production as an anomaly, as unlike what he himself would be driven to produce.
