ABSTRACT
Before considering what, of Bataille, seems to haunt every discussion of sacrifice, and in order to piece together the moves which lead to the opening declarations of The Unsacrificable’, I propose to follow Nancy in his outline of a history of sacrifice. Although brief, even elliptical, Nancy’s sketch offers an original reading of the phenomena, even if it seems to borrow some of its traits from evolutionist sociological theories which, from Taylor to Girard and from Hubert and Mauss to Durkheim, aim to kindle a continuity between ancient ritual sacrifice and Christian moral sacrifice, in such a way that this latter would appear as the truth of the ritual-religious sacrifice which was none the less its point of origin. The originality of Nancy’s reading lies in the fact that it affirms —and this affirmation would doubtless encounter very serious reservations on the part of various specialized disciplines-the West as this truth or this dialectical sublation, a truth or sublation whose completion would be as much philosophical as Christian, which would be, in other words, ontotheological. Which means, purely and simply, and in as much as we, inhabitants of the West, live within the horizon of this sublation, that we can know, or in any case experience, nothing of the ancient or real sacrifice, and that the access to its truth is historically, and that is to say metaphysically, forbidden to us, unless ‘truth’ be understood in the sense of its overcoming or its sublimation which, precisely, defines us in our essence. Still further: in as much as the history of the West, as the unfolding of onto-theology, is today gathered around its end, all thinking of sacrifice must henceforth be riveted to this closure. No doubt one ought to pause here for a moment and ponder the significance of the ontotheological presuppositions of this rapid analysis, the path which they force us to take, and the avenues of thought which they block from us. It would be prudent, also, to ponder the weight that such an analysis gives to the later considerations concerning Bataille and to the framework
at the heart of which this thinking of Bataille would be envisaged. But I will leave these questions hanging in order to keep firmly to the text and thus progressively to start upon the path of the relation to Bataille.
