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Bataille and Ritual Sacrifice: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ritual sacrifice, either real or symbolic, is a ubiquitous feature of ritual traditions across times and cultures. Surprisingly, few serious accounts of the underlying meaning of sacrifice have been advanced. We will rely on Georges Batailles theory. His starting point is an investigation of our evolution from animals to persons. His is an a priori, conceptual account of certain fundamental changes in consciousness that must have occurred in order for human life to have emerged. These changes can be traced speculatively in the advent of the manufacture of stone tools, for example. Even at that nascent level, we can see what is required. To makeand then amendtools requires the postulation of the object as such; and that entails the recognition that the tool is a form of the non-I separate from the maker, and that it exists in duration. Furthermore, since the tool is typically modified in order to better serve our purpose, we come to conceive of ourselves as transcending the tool, and this introduces considerations of utility, the distinction between means and ends, and between subjects (the person) and objects (the stone tool). In short, we come to live in a world of separate things enduring through time, a discontinuous world mediated by tools and ultimately by language. This opens up the possibility of turning subjects (other living creatures) into objects (things). We bend the world to our purposes even to the point of transforming persons and animals into things by subjugating or enslaving them. Of course the gains are great: we become people of project, inhabiting a world of things that can be molded to our ends. Bataille sees no possibility of retreat from this condition; it characterizes who we are as human beingspeople of project in a world of things. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The World Prior to Project: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If this is the situation into which
we emerged, what did we emerge from? Bataille arrives at a description of
our former state by negating the concepts just discussed. Our prior state
was a state of animality; poetically speaking animals are in the world
as water in water. That is, the prior state is one of immanence rather
than transcendence; it is unbounded, not circumscribed conceptually; it
can exhibit violence rather than controlled stability, casual and abrupt
destruction, in place of production of the useful which requires delayed
gratification. It is also immediate, existing in the present rather
than in duration, and unmediated by either tools or language. Bataille
sometimes refers to this state of things as the immanent immensity.
This too is what we are; we are of the immanent immensity and we have a foot in both camps: the unbounded world of intimate immediacy and the stabilized, individuated world of things. In that sense we are paradoxical creatures, and are a mystery to ourselves.8 We will see that ritual sacrifice mirrors and responds to this paradox. It is not easy to conceive of the immanent immensity, of course, since it is outside conceptual divisions, and it seems to entail at least a momentary dissolution of the self. Bataille resorts to metaphorical description. First, he pictures us caught up in the vast flow of things like one wave among many (water in water), and urges us to become precisely aware of this anguishing position.9 In contrast, if we continue to see ourselves only as things among other things in the comparatively stable world of project, then, he says, we have been deprived of the marvelous. He goes on: The glories, the marvels of your life are due to this resurgence of the wave which was tied in you to the immense sound of the cataract of the sky.10 Finally, he says, What is intimate in the strong sense [i.e., the immanent immensity] is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky: [even so] this is still a negative definition from which the essential is missing.11 Tatsuo experiences the world this way from time to time, and its the affection images that express this experience. |
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