ABSTRACT
French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy once remarked that, “Contemporary reflection on sacrifice cannot not be haunted by the thought of [Georges] Bataille” (Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Richard Livingston. 1991. “The Unsacrificeable.” Yale French Studies 79: 20–38, at 20). How, indeed, could any modern discussion of the sacrificial gesture and its contemporary relevance not be haunted by the story of the obscure librarian who strived to restore sacrificial rituals in interwar France? More importantly, how could any thinking of sacrifice today not mention the thinker who radically interrupted the history of sacrifice in Western thought, by shedding light—despite himself—on the structural and ethical impossibility of the sacrificial gesture? What this chapter is committed to do is to give the fascinating work of Georges Bataille its rightful place in the present reflection on sacrifice. To do so, it will not only present Bataille’s sacrificial thinking and the ethical concerns it inevitably raised, it will also argue that Bataille’s refusal to move beyond sacrifice in the face of its impossibility laid the ground for a new thinking of community. Despite their divergent readings of Bataille’s work, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida are categorical: Bataille’s pursuit of a sacrificial aneconomy initiated a profound rethinking of the way life-in-common is understood in the modern West. Through an analysis of these three thinkers’ reading of Bataille’s treatment of sacrifice, this chapter elucidates how Bataille continues to haunt the most important “‘work-in-progress’ of contemporary philosophy,” according to Nancy: the community’s modern destiny.
