The Question of Sacrifice

3. Bataille: The Hegelian Dialectic, Death, and Sacrifice

3 Bataille The Hegelian Dialectic, Death, and Sacrifice Nancy’s reading of Bataille in the previous chapter sets the stage for a more detailed reading of Bataille, whose reading of sacrifice is at risk of being misread if his anthropological, philosophical, sociological, theological, and economic readings of sacrifice are not read within the horizon of an obsessional sacrifice of sacrifice. Bataille’s obsession with sacrifice is a response to the question of death. I argue that a reading of Bataille’s reading of sacrifice must be attentive to the sacrifice of sacrifice characteristic of the question of death, that is, the irreducible undecidability of the double meaning of death articulated by that moment when death as possibility turns into death as impossibility. Bataille’s “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” (1955)—an essay written within the horizon of the work of Kojève—must be read, I would argue, as a response to the following “fundamental text” of the preface of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807): Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. (PG 27/PS 19) The Question of Sacrifice 46 This is likewise a fundamental text for Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” from The Work of Fire (1949). Given that Bataille’s response to this Hegelian text turns, I would argue, on “fiction,” it would perhaps be helpful to explore Blanchot’s response to the same text, a response that turns on “literature.” Blanchot and Literature Literature begins, Blanchot writes, “at the moment when literature becomes a question” (LDM 293/LRD 300, emphasis added). This question—“the ‘question’ that seeks to pose itself in literature, the ‘question’ that is its essence” (LDM 311/ LRD 322)—is posed to language by language that has become literature. This question is “an irreducible double meaning” (LDM 330/LRD 344): death as possibility and as impossibility. “[L]iterature,” Blanchot writes in the concluding sentence of the essay, “is the form in which this double meaning has chosen to show itself behind the meaning and value of words, and the question it asks is the question asked by literature” (LDM 331/LRD 344). This question is what Blanchot, in The Space of Literature (1955), calls “double death.” The following remarks on “Literature and the Right to Death” are limited to a reading of “Revolution,” which marks the first instance of Blanchot’s irreducibly ambiguous reading of the following passage from the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “[T]he life of Spirit is [ . . . ] the life that endures it [i.e., death] and maintains itself in it” (PG 27/PS 19). Literature begins at the moment when it becomes a question, that is, at the moment when an initial reading of this passage, which reads death as possibility, turns into a reading of this passage that reads death as impossibility. Revolution is what Blanchot calls one of a writer’s temptations. A writer’s temptations are those decisive moments in the work or production of the Phenomenology of Spirit, those “decisive moments in history” (LDM 309/LRD 318, emphasis added), which seem (at least on a first reading) to describe the very process of literary creation, the destructive act of transformation that is a step into the next shape of the dialectical progression . But these decisive moments are fraught with ambiguity. They are decisive moments in the work of the Phenomenology of Spirit when work is discovered to be at a certain distance from that work. Blanchot reads the experience of the writer alongside that...