ABSTRACT
The proposition that in his pre-war writings Bataille tries to tap into an immediacy that induces a contagious affectivity, 'without a subject', may meet the objection that it is precisely the 'scene' of the subject which Bataille ruptures, that it is precisely the subject who is wounded, exceeded, sacrificed, in his work. This chapter explores how the immediacy of affective experience which in the pre-war work Bataille associates with the sacred might be considered not as prior to the dialectic of self-consciousness, but as coming after it. In Derrick's account Bataille's operation thus mimes and mines the Hegelian system of Absolute Knowledge and submits it to a displacement which induces its rupture, at the summit. The Hegelian concept of mastery is replaced by Bataille's sovereignty. The sacrifice which reserves the possibility of the return of the life that it gives up is replaced by a concept of sacrifice without reserve, 'a fonds perdu'.
