The Politics of Religious Fervour: New Considerations on Georges Bataille and Religion

The Limits of Self-Loss

The Michel Surya-directed Éditions Lignes have published a work of Bataille’s which will make a significant contribution to this split tension in Bataille scholarship. La Limite de l’utile was previously only available in the Oeuvres complètes, but this is the first time it has been published as an independent text. Written during the war, like On Nietzsche, and bearing an even more religious fervour in tone, its appearance invites renewed consideration for this previously neglected work, particularly for the provocative introduction by Mathilde Girard. The book, and Girard’s contextualization of it, appear to be unequivocally aligned with the Bataille of unfettered excess, religious fervour and sacrifice. It has until now generally been understood as a fragmented, abandoned version of The Accursed Share. Its presentation in this new edition says this is only a partial truth and invites the reader to consider it not as a germinal version of The Accursed Share, but as an alternative version. To give readers a brief reminder of The Accursed Share, it argues for a reconsideration of social life from the perspective of excess. It starts from the premise that the sum of energy produced by humans or organisms is always surplus to the requirements of reproduction. Excess non-productive energy is evident in domains of life as varied as non-procreative sex, religious sacrifice, and war. Bataille argues for a thinking through of this excess in a manner that would harness the luxurious potential and thwart the possibility for destructive violence.

For example, Bataille spends considerable time thinking about political solutions to avoid violence and expresses his support for the ‘dynamic peace’ of the post-war Marshall Plan. In contrast to such sager analyses of The Accursed Share, there does not seem to be much political sobriety or rationalism evident in La Limite de l’utile. It appears to be a much less reasonable text, much more subjective and troubling, closer to the themes of the major texts of the 1930s. Girard argues that the subtitle of La Limite de l’utile [The Limit of the Useful], ‘Fragments d’une version abandonée de la Part Maudite’ [‘Fragments of an abandoned version of The Accursed Share’], was an error on the part of the editors of the Œuvres complètes because it associates the two texts far too quickly. While the first part of the text contains the essentials of what would become The Accursed Share, the second part is closer to Sovereignty, and even more explicitly ‘religious’ works such as Guilty and Inner Experience. The manuscript should then be considered as a ‘fragment autonome’ (2016: 14), whose conclusions of the economic analysis follow a different direction from that of The Accursed Share.

Like On Nietzsche, the book conceives of morality as being driven by human compulsion, as fuelled by excess forces. In the treatment of sacrifice, Bataille acknowledges the influence of French sociology, but he distinguishes his perspective. Where French sociology gives a coherent account of the effects of sacrifice, in fomenting social links between men, it does not tell us what forced men, what compelled them, to religiously kill each other (2016: 134–5). For Bataille, the religious fervour comes from a desire for communication with the other bound up with a will towards self-loss. However, the focus on Dionysian self-loss is problematized by the fact that his account of the self is not a stable or coherent entity. Bataille draws the parallel between a social being and an individual being, but reminds the reader of the fragility of the compositional nature of our being. The idea of a ‘collective consciousness’ is not entirely consonant with the principles which make of consciousness an indivisible moral entity. But Bataille takes issue with the concept of an indivisible moral entity, just as he takes issue with stable conceptions of ‘being’ or the ‘self’. Existence cannot be seized statically or in isolation. This poses problems for sacrificial self-loss. If the limits of the self are not clearly definable, and characterized by instability and flux, then how can any self be definitively negated? Bataille writes that ‘chacun des nous doit se livrer sans cesse à la perte de soi – partielle, totale – qu’est la communication avec autrui’ (p. 140) [‘Each one of us must constantly deliver ourselves to the loss of self – partial, total – which is communication with the other’]. ¹ The hesitation between ‘partielle’ and ‘totale’ is revealing, but what is even more crucial is that the ‘perte de soi’ [‘loss of self’] is something worked towards ‘sans cesse’ [‘constantly’]. If we must work towards it constantly then this underlines Bataille’s awareness, and his desire to make the reader aware, of the fact that complete self-loss or total self-destruction is not possible. This means that there is a persistent antagonism embedded in the desire for the impossible (a tempting but, as Bataille was aware, deeply problematic desire for pure self-loss). Bataille concludes this passage on the contradictions of self-loss by noting that rather than living in the face of abstract dualistic oppositions, we live them, are constituted by them and embedded in them. The alternative between existing as stable, isolated individual selves or existing in pure immanence with the world is impossible and irresolvable, but it is not an abstract consideration: ‘c’est le combat qui mènent notre être et notre mort …’ (p. 140) [it’s the combat which leads our being and our death …’].

The sense of ‘combat’, of thought thinking against itself, desiring two antithetical trajectories at the same time, is present throughout these passages. From this perspective, Girard’s preface somewhat overlooks the impossible antagonisms and dualisms that persist in Bataille’s thinking in favour of a sacrificial Dionysianism. For Girard, this text suggests that Bataille was not as quick to turn away from the sacrificial logic informing Acephale as is often claimed. She writes that:

‘S’il est vrai que Bataille avait alors quitté l’ambition de former une communauté et souffrait l’abandon de ceux qui l’avaient, avant guerre, accompagné, La Limite de l’utile semble contredire l’hypothèse qu’en entrant dans l’expérience intérieure Bataille ait cédé sur ce qui faisait pour lui le sens (mortel) d’une communauté. (p. 19) [If it is true that Bataille had then given up on the ambition to form a community and suffered the abandonment of those who had accompanied him before the war, The Limit of the Useful seems to contradict the hypothesis that in entering into inner experience Bataille had ceded on that which constituted for him the (mortal) meaning of a community’].

Given the ultimate impossibility of self-loss as mentioned both in this text and throughout other contemporary writings on inner experience, Girard somewhat exaggerates the importance of ‘mortal’, sacrificial community for Bataille. Her positioning of this text as a more autonomous and singular work than has been considered is certainly justified, as well as being provocative, but the importance of the text within Bataille’s wider oeuvre, and the orientation towards sacrificial Dionysian self-loss within the text, are overstated points. The tendency to unequivocally embrace Dionysian self-loss and religious fervour is a reading orientation that often leads in not only reactionary directions but can also reduce the complexity of the text and lead to a nostalgia for presence, despite claims to the contrary. The subject of ‘inner experience’ is not simply eradicated but is transformed in a process of interrogation. Some semblance or trace of a subject remains. Bataille writes in La limite de l’utile: ‘Personnellement, je ne suis rien auprès du livre que j’écris: s’il communique ce qui m’a brulé, j’aurai vécu pour l’écrire’ (p. 143) [‘Personally, I am nothing before the book I write: if it communicates what burned me, I will have lived to write it’]. The negation of the self before the content communicated is followed, and potentially undermined, by the weight of a writing subject, a subject who is ‘brulé’ [‘burned’], but a subject who is not simply extinguished in the communication, an ‘I’ who endures in the act of writing. Bataille repeatedly aims for targets which he hyperbolically negates: the negation of language in an experience of the sacred, a negation of the self in immanence with the world, a negation of literary discourse in favour of real life.

Taken on their own, these negations would be reactionary and simplistic. What makes Bataille’s work interesting is the way in which these negations are accompanied by a consciousness of fraught contradiction, a consciousness that the act of negation is compromised by its contamination in what it seems to be negating, and a negotiation of the sense of betrayal that emerges from these insights. In this regard, Girard asks the right question in the preface: what is a book that its author would not have written had he followed his lesson to the letter? What is a book that should not exist, according to its own internal rules? As Girard is well aware, however, and Bataille makes clear in the text itself, ‘le livre lui-même est peu de chose s’il est restraint à quelque domaine isolé, comme de la politique, de la science ou l’art …’ (pp. 143–4) [‘the book itself is not much if it is restrained within an isolated domain, such as politics, science or art …’].

But Girard, despite gestures to the contrary, ends up pushing the text towards an isolated domain of its own. She notes that where The Accursed Share focuses on the Marshall Plan and the contemporary world with a political and economic perspective, La Limite de l’utile: ‘dévie étrangement en son milieu vers le sacrifice, rejoignant le mouvement (la dépense) qui decide de l’écriture de l’expérience. Les considerations politiques ne tiennent plus à côté d’un exhortation à vivre à hauteur de mort’ (pp. 14–15) [‘deviates strangely in its milieu towards sacrifice, re-joining the movement (expenditure) which decides the writing of the experience. Political considerations no longer hold alongside an exhortation to live at the height of death’]. It is as if Girard wishes to separate the religious and the political, embrace the former and evacuate the latter. But surely what is stimulating about what Bataille is doing is a writing which communicates the embeddedness of the religious within the political and suggests, inversely, that religious fervour is not simply apolitical. The apparent contortions and theoretical dead-ends Bataille arrives at through religious thinking conversely engender moments where the impossible seems possible. In religious experience, this means that the anguish and paradox of trying to communicate a non-discursive experience of the sacred through written discourse becomes constitutive of the very ‘experience’ which appears to elude writing’s grasp.

Writing becomes part of the experience, as it becomes clearer that language is not so easily negated. The same consciousness of impossibility paradoxically gives rise to fresh perspectives when Bataille is focused on more explicitly political considerations. For example, in On Nietzsche, Bataille notes the strange moments of clarity and liberation that can be found within political pessimism: ‘It is a strange paradox: if one perceives the profound absence of escape, the profound absence of goal and meaning, then – but only then – the mind liberated, we approach practically, lucidly, practical problems’ (2015: 225). A sense of liberty is found within restrained limits, and a sense of the impossible can be a source of dynamic intensity. In other words, Bataille’s negations and hymns to loss (self-loss, and other kinds) are almost always accompanied by an internal conflict. And a consciousness of the impossible is not a de-libidinizing retreat from the excesses of immanence: an attentiveness to the impossible, and to the anguish compromising Bataille’s negations, is a generator of an intensity of its own, as well as being a marker of philosophical maturity.

In this regard, Bataille suggests, in both La Limite de l’utile and On Nietzsche, that the texts themselves should be considered as acts of war. In the notes to On Nietzsche, comprehensively translated by Stuart Kendall, Bataille writes: ‘this book resembles tanks abandoned in their essence and through combat, half destroyed in the field. It is immobile, mute, vain testimony to impotent efforts’ (p. 295). The emphasis on destruction is that it is always incomplete, only ever half-way there. Similarly, as previously noted, an internal ‘combat’ animates the movements of La Limite de l’utile (2016: 140). This means that even religious moments of intoxication have a political import, a sustained sense of antagonism with and against the world. La Limite de l’utile and On Nietzsche both seem to be texts with a primarily religious thrust, but the texts’ self-conception as acts of war display a deep political tension that persists within religious intensity. The rest of this review article will elaborate upon a number of recent critical publications which attempt to think through, following Bataille, these tensions between political and religious intensity.

Politics in a Different Key

The tension between understanding the world in religious and/or political terms is given close consideration in the recently published collection Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion. The book is less concerned with defining religious studies than disrupting it. It aims to use a Bataillean methodology, a generalized contamination where no discourse or perspective exists statically in isolation. In this regard, the volume often interrogates how much weight can be given to the political in Bataille’s thought, a mode of thought which often seems to be much more explicitly religious. Bataille was one of the earliest and most important interpreters of fascism to read it as a religious phenomenon in political disguise. Inversely, many Bataille scholars have noted that in Bataille’s own trajectory, the increasingly religious tone of his writings can be viewed as having a hidden political dimension of its own. As the editors Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall note in their introduction:

Just as Bataille’s seeming turn away from political engagement for the private realm of inner experience and mysticism has been analyzed as politics from another location and in a different key, this volume’s attempt to transform the politics of the academic study of religion should be understood as politics per se, as an attempt to render more viable by rendering more visible, the excessive explosive power of the sacred, with its creative cataclysmic affects and desires. (2015: 17)

A particularly interesting exploration of the interpenetration of the religious and the political comes in Jean-Joseph Goux’s article in this collection, ‘Georges Bataille and the Religion of Capitalism’. Goux develops a reading of Bataille’s religious theory as inseparable from his conception of economy, placing the notion of secularization at the heart of his analysis. Bataille analysed the effects of secularized modernity in The Accursed Share, where he highlighted the historical rupture between the religious expenditures and ostentations of feudal life and the contrasting utilitarian rationality of bourgeois modernity. In this respect, Bataille follows Max Weber’s analyses of the effects of the Protestant Reformation on capitalism, and the side-lining of religious life for more ‘productive’ life increasingly centred around work. This apparent side-lining of religion, however, raises the question of whether capitalism becomes an all-encompassing religion of its own. Goux asks whether economists have become priests and considers whether this religion is in line with Bataille’s analysis, or if it contradicts it. It is clear that religious and Christian values were not simply historically liquidated but were fulfilled and incorporated within the economic. Capitalism became a form of religion.

Goux refers to Kant’s account of religion as not simply being defined by worship of God but as a practice based on the fulfilment of duties towards others and oneself: the adherence to particular ethical codes and rituals is in some ways more religious than a priori belief, and thus the rituals and imperatives pushed by contemporary capitalism constitute a religion. Goux develops this line of analysis with reference to Walter Benjamin, who ‘sees in capitalism the most worship-oriented religion that has ever occurred. Though devoid of dogma and theology, the utilitarian practices of capitalism (production, selling and buying, investment and financial operations) are equivalent to worship – or, better are a form of worship’ (p. 113). It is more terrifying than other religions because there is no expiation of guilt: the poor are inherently guilty and must live with this guilt, as well as with the constant threat of further damnation in the form of debt and unemployment. If we were to follow through on Benjamin’s argument, considers Goux, then it would be useless to search for religious phenomena of any significant scope in the capitalist world because capitalism itself would be the only dominant and powerful religion (p. 111).

Bataille comes close to Benjamin’s interpretation in certain moments of his work. Even in La Limite de l’utile, for example, he writes: ‘… de même que l’Église voue l’homme à Dieu, mais plus efficacement, la société bourgeoise voue l’argent au capital’ (2016: 50) [‘… just as the Church devotes man to God, but more effectively, bourgeois society devotes money to capital’]. Goux describes Bataille’s view of capitalism as a religion in which ‘god is growth for growth’s sake’ (2015: 114). However, for Bataille, the sacrifices of capitalism do not resemble the sumptuous sacrifices of accumulated wealth in pre-modern societies, and capitalism’s suppression of unproductive expenditure is a suppression of religious experience which Bataille mourns. Since capitalism is motivated by a logic of ‘return’ on ‘investment’, rather than a sense of ‘loss’ and unproductive expenditure, Bataille does not see it as inherently religious or as the return to immanence he takes as the marker of religious truth.

The question of how Bataille’s analyses relates to the contemporary world is made more complex by Goux’s development of the distinction between two capitalisms – a ‘first’ capitalism, which he characterizes as ascetic, and a ‘new’ capitalism, ‘which is dominated by the unleashing of consumption’ (2015: 107). Here Goux is clearly developing some of the arguments from his 1990 article, ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’, where he similarly argued that postmodern capitalism bears an uncomfortable resonance with Bataillean desire. In contrast to rationality and the Protestant work ethic, contemporary capitalism is characterized by a championing of entrepreneurial risk and an irrationality that appears close to the kind of unproductive expenditure desired by Bataille. However, this would be to take the aesthetics and ideology of postmodern capitalism at face value. Far from a Bataillean sense of unproductive expenditure, the experience of contemporary capitalism for most people is one of grim subservience to work, and often austere and diminishing standards of living.

Where Goux’s 1990 article perhaps granted too much faith in the aesthetics of postmodern capitalism, this article is more attentive to contradictions. He points to Daniel Bell’s analysis of a key contradiction in contemporary capitalism: ‘between a puritan ethic of hard work and soberness on the one hand and a permanent appeal to consumer satisfaction on the other, satisfaction that makes possible, but also necessary from a certain point, the capitalist production itself, as a requirement of its unlimited development’ (2015: 118). As Goux notes, capitalism is not entirely ‘homogeneous’. Goux reasserts the ongoing critical value of Bataille’s work in the face of contemporary capitalism by looking at the split tensions and contradictions in both Bataille’s analysis and capitalism itself. Thus, while it has religious features and partakes of a religious logic, for Goux and Bataille, the experience of contemporary capitalism is not truly religious: ‘This burning quest by Bataille, for a proper terrain of religion, outside the sphere of things, outside the sphere of economy, outside labor, bears witness that for him capitalism is not able to be a religion. There is a shortage’ (p. 121).

A curious omission from the Negative Ecstasies collection is the absence of any essay dealing with Islam. Bataille wrote on Islam in several texts, most extensively in The Accursed Share. His engagement with Islam was significant and unusual for a French thinker at this historical moment. However, his characterizations of the religion are problematic: he describes historical Islam as a ‘conquering society’ whose internal logic has a greater militaristic dimension than other major religions. Bataille’s comments on Islam warrant renewed interrogation and critique today, especially in our current reading moment when Islam is weaponized to such a huge extent in the context of global jihadi terrorism. Michel Surya has engaged with some of these issues in his recently published essay-length book Capitalisme et djihadisme. As Bataille’s biographer, and given that his analyses here of Islam, capitalism and jihadism all show the explicit influence of Bataille, Surya’s book deserves consideration as the concluding section of this essay.

Capitalism and Jihadism

Jihadism, according to Surya among others, appears to be the only horizon of revolt with any geopolitical weight in the contemporary world. In the geopolitical imaginary, it appears to occupy the void left by Soviet communism. Surya’s essay is an attempt to think through these set of oppositions, informed by a Bataillean perspective on the identification of what is political and what is religious in this configuration. Surya begins by highlighting the increasing tendency for capitalism, which appears to be political, to be instead interpreted, quite justifiably, as religious. Conversely, jihadism wishes to be taken at face value, as religious, but it is becoming more common to read it as a political phenomenon. As has been pointed out by a wide range of specialists, a significant number of jihadists are recent converts to Islam. ‘Radicalization’ almost never takes place in mosques but is more likely to occur online, in prisons or in other social spaces. Jihadi terrorists often display poor understanding of Islam and little piety in their private lives, often indulging in petty crime, drugs, alcohol and other lifestyles completely dissonant with any Islamic fundamentalism. The manner in which jihadi terrorists arrive at a religious world view thus seems to be far more heavily shaped by political factors.

For Surya, capitalism has reached a religious stage of political radicalism precisely since the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of communism (2016: 16–17). It is because of capitalism’s religious radicalism that it gave birth to its own enemy in the form of jihadism. The pseudo-teleological world view of the neoconservatives was actually an eschatology, exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, according to which globalized capitalism had emerged as an historical victor with no more serious opponents. If this was any kind of victory, it was clearly pyrrhic, and Surya rightly underlines how neoconservatism and radicalized capitalism bear major responsibility for a new ‘théo-téléo-apocalyptisme islamiste (le djihadisme)’ (p. 17) [‘theo-teleo-Islamist-apocalypticism (Jihadism)’]. When we think of the apocalyptic discourse of ISIS, of the fact that hostages are dressed up in orange jump suits and presented in a manner deliberately referencing the inmates of Guantanamo Bay, and of their own appropriation of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis originally advocated by neoconservatives, it is clear that Surya is hitting on an important point: that jihadism, currently embodied in the form of ISIS, attempts to replay the past 25 years of geopolitical history, but on their terms, asserting their own more nightmarish ‘end of history’.

Capitalism and jihadism are not simply antithetical, as Surya shows, and can accommodate with each other quite well. He makes a comparison with the structural tension and simultaneous congruity between Nazism and capitalism in this regard (pp. 30–1). Developing this comparison with reference to Bataille and Hans Meyer, Surya points out that capitalism is not simply a rationalism in opposition to either jihadism or historic fascism’s irrationality or barbarism. He points to the Nazis’ combination of both the ferociously anti-modern and modern, and although he does not give many examples of this in relationship to jihadism, he clearly has in mind the combination of the archaic, for example in the form of decapitations, and their exploitation of modern technology and social media. Fascism and jihadism do not simply return to pre-modern or pre-capitalist ways of living: they are products of capitalist modernity, within which they remain embedded.

Jihadism appears to offer alienated youth the religious fervour and meaning lacking in capitalism, and in this regard Surya makes further comparison to Bataille’s analysis. He points to the following passage from ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’:

Until our times, there had only been a single historical example of the sudden formation of a total power, namely, the Islamic Khalifat … Just like early Islam, fascism represents the constitution of a total heterogeneous power whose manifest origin is to be found in the prevailing effervescence. (1985: 153, referenced by Surya, p. 47)

This is highly misleading. ‘Anti-islamisme’ generally refers to an opposition to political Islam, an often highly justified opposition to the manipulation of Islam as part of a political project. Islamophobia, by contrast, is a clearly racist manifestation that targets Muslims as a population. In France in particular, the increased presence of Islamophobia is undeniable and unjustifiable. The original 1905 laïcité law aimed to guarantee the liberty of individuals to practise religion freely and targeted the state: the state must bear the burden of religious neutrality. Today, laïcité is weaponized in an anti-libertarian, governmental manner that disproportionally targets Muslims. To be opposed to Islamophobia does not mean one defends the tenets of the Islam religion. It means, rather, that one defends the rights of Muslims to practise their religion with the same freedom as anyone else.

So Surya’s provocative essay shows us the rich basis in Bataille’s thought for critically engaging with the religiosity of politics and the politicization of religion in the contemporary world, but it also reminds us that there is much in Bataille(ean) attitudes to, and understanding of, Islam that remains to be interrogated beyond the scope of this review essay. An unsatisfactory account of Islam and Islamophobia risks compromising the otherwise stimulating confrontations between Bataillean thought and contemporary geopolitics in Surya’s work and beyond.