ABSTRACT
Two exactly contemporary but exceedingly different authors, Roger Bastide and Georges Bataille, are capable of aiding in the construction of a social theory of the sensible. The teeming anthropology of Bastide and the heterodox anthropology of Bataille indeed open pioneering avenues of research for elaborating the anthropology of the moving and the living. Bastide is admittedly a thinker of life, but certainly not of immediate life that can be grasped by intuition. By distinguishing formal frames and material contents, Bastide appears to situate himself in a Kantian and Durkheimian perspective. Whereas for Bastide, energy is given to inflecting and complexifying category without abandoning it, Bataille gambles reason in an energy thinking (that he calls “heterology”) that is apt to submerge category. They were thus both, during the same period, obstinate precursors of an anthropology of the body and the sensible.
