/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4049247]

Why was Bataille so interested in sacrifice?

[Anonymous No.4049266]

Fag

[Anonymous No.4049345]

Fag

[Anonymous No.4049348]

Chronic Faggotry of the First Degree

[Anonymous No.4049354]

because he was a proto-mall-goth

> hurr lets start a spooky circle
> but someone will have to be sacrificed
> not me
> not me
> not me
> uh ok well i guess this is over now

he was an edgy try hard, if he were alive today no doubt he'd be posting pics of his dead cats on /b/

[Anonymous No.4049360]

>>4049354
the real problem was, they didnt find somebody who would do the killing.

[Anonymous No.4049362]

>>4049360
Right, that's it

> wow this spooky /x/ club didn't work out because no one wanted to get killed
> we'll just tell everyone that no one wanted to do the killing xD

so bad ass

so goth

so satan

[Screwtape !!tdBUE9PLvpz No.4049396]

>>4049354
have you even read Encyclopedia Acephalica you feculent cretin
have you even read anything beyond wikipedia in your entire life

Obviously sacrifice is a place where religion and death meet, but it's more than that. Sacrifice is willful destruction of excess (cf Accursed Share), often in a state of ecstasy as with Mayan sacrifices. It's important to remember that sacrifices are carried out in the open, in front of the community, too; they allow in a sense a communal knowledge of divinity, one which to a large extent no longer exists, as shown in the "Slaughterhouse" entry of the Encyclopedia. So our knowledge of sacrifice allows some level of knowledge of what pagans or 'primitives' or what have you considered knowledge of gods.
But there are a lot of different directions you can go in with sacrifice: sacrifice as hygiene, sacrifice as "transgression," sacrifice as duty and so on
also something something violent rupture I guess, I haven't read him in a while

[Anonymous No.4049402]

>>4049354
I mean beyond the whole secret society thing. I understand it's something about 'muh thirst for annihilation' / 'muh primal ecstasy' / 'muh creation of the sacred' / 'muh overcoming of subjectivity' but idk how it all fits together.
And yeah obviously he was edgy the dude stood around watching monkeys poop at the zoo and wrote vividly about how he wanted to smash the poop with an axe, he's still interesting though.

[Anonymous No.4049422]

>>4049396
>willful destruction of excess
Why is that interesting? Not sure what he's meaning by 'excess'
>communal knowledge of divinity
What is interesting about this to Bataille?

[Screwtape !!tdBUE9PLvpz No.4049451]

>>4049422
I'm on my way out so I can't provide a really detailed answer, sorry
To be honest, Accursed Share doesn't really lend itself to sacrifice that much: even though sacrifices give the best to the gods, it isn't a mathematical reduction of excess or anything.
Divinity in general is of interest to Bataille, mostly in terms of continuity against discontinuity. I think the communal aspect is interesting to Bataille because it offers a sort of "theater of divinity," one which is real rather than artificial (as in actual theater).
I think most of all, what I was maybe vaguely thinking of with "something something violent rupture" is that sacrifice is clearly an act of discontinuity, both as an act of violence and a special ritual with very specific guidelines, yet at the same time it offers communication with the gods and stable functioning of society. It can be seen as a broader metaphor for society, maybe, but I'm not sure if Bataille wrote much about that.

I hope that was helpful; it still seems a little vague even to me

[Anonymous No.4049455]

I think that by 1946 he was thoroughly discouraged as to the effectiveness of sacrifice as a symbolic/social act, given his whole ideology about the absence of myth. However at first I think he saw it as a means of transgressing the social conditions (and of the state of "sovereignty") in a way which could initiate a new, powerful mythology. He theorized about the execution of Louis Quatorze as a sacrifice that brought about a new reign of mythology in order to unify the social sphere (although he soon repudiated this seeing as how fractured it was, as well as the fact that for various reasons, no one wanted to recall, glorify, or even acknowledge this execution).

[Anonymous No.4049505]

>>4049451
I'm understanding more, but I don't understand what continuity against discontinuity has to do with divinity. As far as I can tell continuity has to do with the creature being one with the whole universe in a sort of buddhist sense? And discontinuity is the experience of ourselves as a seperate / isolated entity? Am I even close?

[Anonymous No.4049518]

>>4049505
Not that guy, but yeah, from my understanding, continuity is related to be in contact with everything, kind of like Nirvana or Samadhi in hinduism.

[Anonymous No.4049528]

Haven't read much Bataille outside of Agamben's discussion of him but I'd imagine he was obsessed with sacrifice because it's the one paradoxical human activity that explains the entire order of law and political/religious institutions.

It's paradoxical in the sense that it is a sanctioned killing - a legal perpetration of an illegal act - and in this sense, the key to understanding the concept of sovereignty.

[Anonymous No.4049532]

>>4049402
4chan has ruined you. You're writing like a moron.

[Anonymous No.4049630]

>>4049532
I don't doubt it

[Crass Criticizer No.4049686]

Everybody knows about the French tradition of revolution. It's funny, the students overthrew the gov't in the '60s. It can't happen here, as Sinclair Lewis said.

I wonder, and this is coming from a bystander critic, if his private life does not inflect itself upon his writing, that is, his private life as lived among Frenchmen.

Was his father abusive? Did his father's father give his father father issues? I don't know. There certainly was that illness his father had, which took his life. Clearly we are considering a man who does not inhabit what most would call a life lived happily ever after.

Sacrifice, as referenced above, serves a communal purpose, but it also serves a private one. Let's say his father's early exit left a mark on him in so marked a way that he was all purged of whatever thoughts or feelings a communal sacrifice would serve to purge. Probably he'd seen sacrifices, as referenced above, of zoo animals by zoo animals, or zoo animals by zookeepers. But what if these sacrifices we timid in comparison to what he'd known growing up. Like, whoop dee doo, another rabid animal hurling shit, this bores me now, now what I'm going to do is write down what a really major sacrifice is or is like or could be like, to teach or show or influence the others. But that's just my hunch.

[Anonymous No.4049716]

"Another of Bataille's apparent projects, to perform an actual human sacrifice, was still more dubious... It was not conceived as scandalous--everything suggests that it would have been performed discreetly, with all legal formalities followed (it is said that Bataille had even obtained legal clearance for a sacrifice of a willing victim, although it is a little difficult to believe that French law in 1937 would have given such sanction). Bataille wanted to understand the intense motivation behind the idea of human sacrifice, and the only way of understanding it was to participate in such an act. But to do so is impossible, since we do not live in a society that recognizes the value of sacrifice as a mediating ritual. Where a sacrificer in an ancient society is performing a public--and socially necessary--function, Bataille, had he proceeded, would have been performing a surreptitious antisocial--if not illegal--act that would be regarded as being socially meaningless. Bataille soon realized this, and the realization had a profound impact on him and his thinking.

This is what impelled him, throughout the early 1940s, to ponder what myth could mean in today's society, and he came to recognize that although contemporary society was not without myth, it had denied the very basis of ancient myth, founded on a mediation between mankind and the natural world through which teh cohesion (and necessity) of society would be affirmed. The myth of contemporary society, therefore, was an "absence of myth", since that society had deluded itself into believing it was without myth by making a myth of its very denial. Furthermore, it believed that it no longer had a need for myth, that it had evolved beyond dependence upon a ritual to establish a mediation between mankind and the rest of creation, since man now had dominion over nature. The word itself had become devalued, and "myth" now referred to something that is by definition "false." Both Bataille and the surrealists were convinced that this was profoundly misguided--and dangerously so: contemporary society was as much in need of mythical foundation as any other society, and by denying that fact it was simply making a fetish of its absence and denying part of itself."

[Anonymous No.4050705]

muh marilyn manson

[Big Jeff No.4051861]

You forget, it's remarkable he was able to ask why. The second world war ravaged Europe, and the Continent was able to ensure only through the brave, some might be so bold as to say heroic, individualism of thinkers and writers like Georges Bastille, whose work stands not only for itself, but as a gesture standing for all that is possible through a love for learning, for knowledge, for all that is possible when a great mind endeavors to crack through the blackened medievalism that had dominated the Continent for so long, the remnants of which an enterprising young graduate student might someday write a thesis about, as a cause for the Second World War.

It's ironic that his encyclopedia has not been as popularly received as it has been argued to have been able tone received. But of course, there is no book on what he was writing.