ABSTRACT
The author introduces Bataille's remarks instead to suggest the possibility of a hitherto unremarked parallel between two of the most fascinating and disturbing figures in twentieth-century intellectual history, Carl Schmitt and Georges Bataille himself. It is precisely at this point that Georges Bataille's theory of sovereignty provides an interesting comparison. As in the case of Schmitt, Bataille was fascinated with sovereignty from virtually the beginning of his career until its end. His discourse of sovereignty was thus less juridical and constitutional than anthropological and literary. It was also carried out in the service of a politics that came closer to anarchism than to that conservative search for order in Schmitt he damned as Maurrasian. Thus, both Schmitt and Bataille could interpret and even welcome, if with differing degrees of enthusiasm and with different estimations of its full implications, the rise of fascism as a reassertion of the power of sovereignty.
