ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 begins in Georges Bataille’s and Antonin Artaud’s reactions against Christianity’s degrading of human corporeality, only to let Foucault begin meeting the challenges they pose. The chapter describes Foucault’s account of Édouard Manet’s art in relation to Bataille’s earlier book on Manet. Toward the background of Georges Bataille’s appraisal of what he calls Manet’s pictorial “blasphemy,” which, in Bataille’s regard, effects a “sacrificial economy of negation,” Foucault’s analysis of Manet is seen as taking Bataille’s account even closer to a truly material spirituality. Thus, in conversation with Bataille and Artaud, the chapter finally experiments with the idea of a material and performative understanding of sacramentality, what the author tentatively speaks of as a radical liturgical theology.
