The Sacred,Heterology and Transparency: Between Bataille and Baudrillard

Abstract

This article re-examines Bataille’s increasingly influential notion of the sacred, with particular emphasis on the left or impure aspects of the sacred and their relationship to social structure or topology. Bataille’s understanding of the ‘sacred nucleus’ of society is examined in detail, particularly his suggestion that society endures only as the hardening of the conduits of sacred and profane around a radically heterogeneous, impure or ‘filthy’ central nucleus. For Bataille the sacred as heterogeneous is necessarily excluded from profane, homogeneous working life, and is internally divided between left and right, or pure and impure aspects. The article then examines the theme of profanation in Bataille’s writing, and the emergence of what he calls ‘post-sacred’ society. Finally, the article turns to Baudrillard’s relationship to Bataille’s work, and, beyond their common indebtedness to Mauss, the author examines the thematic relationship between Bataille’s heterological sacred and Baudrillard’s notions of symbolic exchange, evil and transparency. Baudrillard’s work presents a version of heterology more adapted to the contemporary era of rampant consumerism and virtual technologies, but, as the author argues, it actually departs rather little from Bataille’s position. However, for Baudrillard, profanation generates conditions of hyper-positivity and transparency which reintroduce evil, repulsion and disorder into the social system.

Keywords

heterology impurity profanation the sacred society transparency

Introduction

Bataille’s influence on Baudrillard’s thought, and a certain proximity concerning their approaches to society – specifically, the problematic of gift exchange – has been treated to detailed analysis over recent decades (Boldt-Irons, 2001; Gane, 1991; Kellner, 1989; Pawlett, 1997, 2013; Pefanis, 1991). What is usually emphasized is a common indebtedness to Mauss’s hugely influential study The Gift (1992[1924–25]), of pivotal importance in a number of Bataille’s theoretical works and apparent in Baudrillard’s reinterpretation of potlatch, and its relationship to sacrifice and death in his major theoretical statement Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993a[1976]) and in his essays on terrorism after 9/11 (2003[2002]). Baudrillard’s later themes of transparency, evil and disappearance have not yet been placed in the context of Bataille’s heterology, and this article begins the task.

The first section will examine Bataille’s understanding of the sacred and how it relates to social structure. Bataille develops a highly original and singular vision of society which draws on many sources: Sade’s philosophy of eroticism, Hegel’s dialectical negativity, and Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis being amongst the most important.¹ In his sociological essays of the 1930s, Bataille insists on the vital importance of Durkheimian sociology and reads Durkheim and Mauss against these other major influences, and, while later, in the 1940s, Bataille’s approach evinces increasing distance from that of the Durkheimian school of sociology, by 1955 he again brandishes Mauss against Alexandre Kojeve to develop an alternative interpretation of Hegel’s negativity (Bataille, 1970, Vol. 12: 326–45; Bataille, in Hollier, 1988: 89–93).²

Bataille also follows Max Weber in asserting that politics and economics derive their guiding ethos from the religious sphere, an ethos that is dramatically transformed by Calvinist and Baptist theology facilitating the rise of modern capitalism. Yet, Bataille rejects Weber’s social scientific methodology, focusing attention on the fundamental nature of the sacred and arguing that social scientific thought, and, indeed, the religious perspective itself, remain only profane perspectives on the sacred because they are dependent upon the ‘defusing’, isolation and abstraction of certain objects and practices defined as sacred. For Durkheim, any object can be treated as sacred; the content of the sacred is arbitrary, it need only receive the emotional investments of a particular social group to be venerated (Durkheim, 1973[1914], 1995[1912]). Yet Bataille increasingly departs too from Durkheimian sociology as he seeks a subjective, intimate experience of the sacred, one that will suspend the structures of profane consciousness. The sacred can only be experienced; it cannot be abstracted, defined and known social scientifically. Certain substances, primarily the decaying corpse and flowing menstrual blood, cannot be encountered without a subjective experience of horror, repulsion and misery: an experience that unbinds the structures of profane subjectivity, altering consciousness, however fleetingly.³ It is not the brute fact of death or of sexual reproduction that is barred or prohibited by the sacred, but rather the formless, seething substances of the decaying corpse and the involuntary flowing of menstrual blood that generate the affects of repulsion, dejection and helplessness. Hence Bataille offers a startling image of the sacred as inseparable from abjection, defilement and filth; the very high and the very low are intimately linked, both are demarcated from the homogeneous or profane realm of society.⁴

I will be particularly concerned with the role played by the impure, ‘filthy’ or left pole of the sacred in social being and structure. For Bataille, society has no pre-given or transcendent form; human society differs from animal societies only, fundamentally, because of the mediation or intervention of the sacred. Sacred symbols and rites are fantastically arbitrary and so remarkably diverse, yet, for Bataille, the sacred core or ‘nucleus’ of any human ‘agglomeration’ is neither arbitrary nor normative, it concerns a fundamental and constitutive sense of horror and repulsion, a heterogeneity that is unavailable to reasoned discourse. Just as the human (and animal) body is a conduit of energy – from the assimilation of energy through the mouth, to the expulsion of the inassimilable through the anus – so too, society, for Bataille, is a conduit for the energy of the sacred, with some energies assimilated into social structures, while other aspects are expelled or are transformed into manageable and useable forces. Religious institutions traditionally preside over the processes of assimilation and excretion, that is, of productive deployment and of exclusion or setting aside. Ritual sacrifice is the principal means of the expulsion of excess wealth and energy – the ‘accursed share’ – in traditional societies. In modernity, by contrast, Bataille postulates the notion of ‘unemployed negativity’ to describe the condition, at the (Hegelian) end of history, where human beings become aware or recognize that there is nothing, fundamentally, left to negate.

There are many parallels between the work of Bataille and Baudrillard, and Baudrillard acknowledges his debt to Bataille. Their central theoretical notions, Bataille’s sacred and Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange, function in very similar ways in their texts. Baudrillard’s early work presented transgression as a fundamental characteristic of symbolic exchange as it challenges the order of the sign and simulation models in modern culture (Baudrillard, 1981[1973]: 123–9). The manner in which Baudrillard’s notion of symbolic exchange switches, or reverses, from being the organizing principle of traditional societies to a subversive, heterological form in defiance of the structures of modernity (Baudrillard, 1993a[1976]: 131, 188 n.7), closely parallels Bataille’s thought on the sacred, which after being the organizing principle of traditional societies switches to a marginal yet subversive position in modernity (Bataille, 1994[1946]: 103–12). The final section of the article will examine Baudrillard’s theme of new, internal and viral heterogeneities emerging as ‘hyperpositivities’ after the age of unemployed negativity is eclipsed. As the global system of neo-liberal capitalism haemorrhages support and appears increasingly fragile, Baudrillard’s later thought becomes highly suggestive in its contention that ‘secret’ internal repulsions are at work within us, both in the over-developed and under-developed regions of the world. The sudden reversal of apparently hegemonic systems may well be greeted with ‘jubilation’, but what lies in wait beyond neo-liberalism? Baudrillard’s answer remained close to Bataille’s position; there will be new servitudes, new rules, new unfreedoms, and also new repulsions.

Bataille: The Formlessness of Society

… the sociology we intended to expound here was not the generally accepted sociology, nor was it a religious sociology, but rather, very precisely, sacred sociology. (Bataille, 1970, Vol. 2, trans. in Hollier, 1988: 104)

We are accustomed to the belief that societies possess form: simple or complex, agrarian or industrial, traditional or modern; that societies are made up of structures: classes, institutions, nations, discourses, networks; and that these structures are saturated with politics or power relations. The political dimension of a society is often viewed as quasi-autonomous, a determining or causal force having primacy over other spheres of society such as religion, cultural expression, economic relations and everyday life which are often said to ‘reflect’ power relations. Neither Bataille nor Baudrillard subscribe to this three-fold belief, although they certainly differ in their modes of refusing this image of society. For Bataille, the political can never be separated from the economic and religious spheres of life, but he does not thereby give primacy to the religious dimension. Rather, the notion that society or human life consists of conceptually separable but interlocking domains, each bearing the imprint of power, is rejected. Power is, for both Bataille and Baudrillard, a derivative and residual category, resulting, ultimately, from profanation. For Baudrillard, the possession of power is remarkably evanescent and fragile, prone to sudden reversals and disappearance (Baudrillard, 2009).

For Bataille, society, defined schematically, is the result of the barriers erected against the sacred and its forces of repulsion. The notion that societies, either in their contractual associations, or in their more affective and communal dimensions, are based on inter-attraction and mutually beneficial interaction is entirely rejected by Bataille. Society, through its institutions or practices of economy, religion and politics, concerns the channelling of some aspects of the sacred towards relatively durable relationships with the profane world, the world of things, while other aspects remain excluded or prohibited. The sacred domain, as a whole, is heterogeneous to all social structures and institutions, including religion. Economics, politics and religion concern the knowing, ordering and manipulation of profane things, for the purpose of accumulation. This is the realm of homogeneity, of profane things abstracted from ‘totality’ or ‘intimacy’ and subjected to discursive knowledge, identity and duration. Yet these social institutions must enter into a durable relationship with the ‘pure’ aspects of the sacred to confer on them the stability, meaning and an ultimate purpose which they lack and cannot generate from within themselves (Bataille, 1985: 137–60).

Bataille’s lectures, ‘Attraction and Repulsion 1 and 2’, delivered to the College of Sociology early in 1938, present his alternative approach to theorizing the relationship between the sacred and society. The defining feature of human societies, Bataille insists, is that all relations and interactions are mediated, to a greater or lesser extent, by the sacred. The ‘sacred nucleus’ of society is not merely subject to, or protected by, a system of cultural prohibitions – a position that might be derived from Durkheim’s Elementary Forms (1995[1912]); for Bataille (1988[1949]: 104) the sacred nucleus is repulsive, it is a special kind of ‘filth’, ‘untouchable and unspeakable’. Further, the sacred core is not unconscious in the Freudian sense since it precedes or exceeds any distinction between conscious and unconscious. The sacred is not disavowed [Verleugnung] or foreclosed [Verwerfung] from consciousness, rather the experience of the sacred creates another, altered and ‘richer’ consciousness than that adapted to and confined by the homogeneous domain (Bataille, 1991[1949]: 93).

The sacred then is immediately collective, a contagion linking individuals by a potent sense of shared, interior and constitutive repulsion, taking them beyond their homogeneous existence. For Bataille, the sacred concerns communication in the profoundest sense, where being itself is placed at stake. Although social being is forged in repulsion, the sacred, as a whole, functions to transform the sentiments of horror and repulsion into joy, strength and attraction:

Now, human nature as a whole, in each group agglomerated around each sacred nucleus, has, to a large extent, by participating in the activity of this nucleus, acquired the faculty of transforming the left into the right, distress into strength. (Bataille, 1970, Vol. 2: 317, in Hollier, 1988: 111)

There is a remarkable duality and ‘renversement’ in play here: the sacred nucleus is repulsive, gathering repulsion to itself – as a graveyard gathers the dead, for example – yet it amplifies repulsion, confronting the group with horror, only to dramatically transform this repulsion into social attraction. The notions of spontaneous inter-attraction, similarity, cohesion, survival – all the phantoms of liberal ideology – are, or would be if they existed, insufficient to form a society or ‘agglomeration’. Only the dynamic alternation of repulsion and attraction can channel sacred and profane into a form which sustains social life. The left pole of the sacred is dual in that it is heterogeneous to the profane, and also heterogeneous within itself, a formless matter that cannot be ascribed identity and which operates through ambivalence, switching, reversal and which is, nevertheless, the foci for all spiritual or religious endeavour.

The category of the profane is also far from unitary. Bataille follows Durkheim in understanding the profane as providing a firm foundation from which the leap into the sacred can be achieved; however in modernity, with the reciprocal weakening of sacred and profane in favour of an indifferent ‘reality’, the profane, if it is considered meaningful at all, contains a sense of impurity and defilement conferring the power of profanation. Unfortunately, neither Durkheim nor Bataille examine the category of the profane in great detail, indeed Pickering (1984: 136–9) regards this as a fundamental weakness in Durkheim’s sociology. It has been argued that Bataille’s pairing of sacred and profane, and of taboo and transgression, is fundamentally dialectical and Hegelian (see, for example, Habermas, 1987), but the left sacred is immediately both ‘taboo’ and transgressive, a seething disorder which is also the only possible source of any order.

Although Bataille’s reading of Hegel, mediated by Alexandre Kojeve, is of pivotal importance, he veers back to Mauss, against Hegel, in these lectures:

It seems to me that the marked heterogeneity established between the sacred and the profane by French sociology, or between the unconscious and the conscious by psychoanalysis, is a notion entirely foreign to Hegel … the negativity I will speak about is of another nature. (Bataille, 1970, Vol. 2: 324, in Hollier, 1988: 117)

Later, in Hegel, Death and Sacrifice (1990[1955]), Bataille challenges Hegel, and Kojeve, for failing to consider the social anthropology of sacrifice as the ultimate instance of negativity, of ‘absolute dismemberment’, where indeed ‘death lives a human life’ in Hegel’s startling words. Bataille evokes the moment of sacrifice as follows:

… it is sacred horror: the richest and the most agonising experience, which does not limit itself to dismemberment but which, on the contrary, opens itself, like a theatre curtain, onto a realm beyond this world, where the rising light of day transfigures all things and destroys their limited meaning. (Bataille, 1970, Vol.12: 10, in Stoekl, 1990: 21)

The moment of sacrificial immolation is, for Bataille, a moment of ‘totality’, of the immanence of all things. Indeed, sacrificial ritual, as the putting to death of limited or self-contained thingness (of plants, cakes, animals, and even, apparently, humans), is remarkable when seen through the topology of the sacred. Where the sacred as a general category converts left-pole sentiments of horror, despair and loss into right-pole sentiments of joy and unity, sacrificial ritual stages violent death, evoking the horrors of the left pole deliberately to supercharge the transformation of horror into euphoria and joy. Bataille elaborates that this joy is always ambivalent as it is achieved only through the participants’ awareness that their ‘thingness’ too will, in time, be destroyed. Nevertheless, sacrifice reveals that life is not limited by work, duration or ‘reality’, that it is limited only by death.⁵ The ‘absolute dismemberment’ of sacrificial ritual, extending from the victim to the witnesses, is inassimilable to Hegel’s dialectics of recognition. Only in confrontation with the ‘sacred left’ is the totality of being at stake; sacrificial ritual is then a site for both the experience and expenditure of the ‘radical negativity’ of human being (Bataille, 1937, in Hollier, 1988: 89–93).

What has become of this special kind of filth that forms the nucleus of any community? Bataille occasionally used the crude and unsatisfying term ‘post-sacred’ to describe European modernity, but a far more subtle position is also in evidence in his more sociological writings. Can the sacred core still effect a transmission of left-pole sentiments and experiences to the right pole? Unquestionably it can. But, nevertheless, the left pole of the sacred is transformed by modernity. Bataille follows Weber in asserting that capitalism was not brought about by the actions of merchants or entrepreneurs, but by ‘a new spirit’ or ‘ethos’ provided by Protestant Reformism (Weber, 1992[1905]: 31).

The Protestant notion of a ‘calling’ concerns an individual’s duties to the profane realm, while the specifically Calvinist notion of predestination increases the scope of sin, fixing and interiorizing it within individual conscience. Bataille adds a further layer to this thesis, only hinted at by Weber: Protestantism situates evil and the powers of Satan within the profane realm where they may roam free, while God is figured as remote and as entirely transcendental (Bataille, 1989[1973]: 79–85). The vast majority of people have no access to God, nor to the sacred, not through their imagination or passions, not through the mediation of the priesthood or sacraments, not through their salvation. All that remains is ‘an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen’ and to work diligently to demonstrate not one’s salvation but merely that one is dealing positively with the fear of damnation (Weber, 1992[1905]: 66). ‘Keep calm and carry on’, the irritating slogan of life under the perpetual austerity of neo-liberal capitalism is, it seems, much in accord with the life-long misery created for believers by Calvinism in the 17th century. Capitalism, in summary, is built upon a profound profanation, not merely a profanation of specifically sacred things – although this does occur, and is a frequent tactic of colonial violence – but a deep-rooted irreversible profanation of the once dual and reversible movements of sacred and profane.

Bataille elaborates further, yet remaining in a schematic mode, in Erotism (1986[1957]). Christianity, he argues, reduces religion to its ‘benign aspect’, expelling the left sacred and projecting it into the profane world. The mechanism of transgression is fundamentally re-ordered so that it no longer offers a pathway into the sacred realm; indeed Satan, the angel of transgression, falls to earth as ‘transgression was the basis not of his divinity but of his fall’ (pp. 120–1). Indeed Christian culture generates a new religious categorization: the simultaneously profane and impure or diabolic, with no effective limits or demarcations between the two. For Bataille ‘only in Christianity did the existence of the impure world become a profanation in itself. The profanation resided in the fact that it existed, even if pure things were not themselves sullied’ (p. 122). Thus, while spitting on a religious symbol or text may be regarded as a profanation, in Christian and especially in Puritan culture, spitting on the pavement is considered impure and defiling, animalistic or base. The animal, base or low, is fully segregated from the sacred, producing a category Bataille sometimes refers to as ‘divine’ rather than sacred. Further, the merging or indifferentiation of the impure and the profane generates an enlarged category of evil as, for Bataille, a ‘misunderstanding’ of the volatile movements of sacredness between left and right poles. Modernity is left in thrall to the seduction and fascination exerted by evil and the perverse figures of its embodiment.

Good and Evil, partnered by Spirit/Mind and Matter, are reductive modern dualisms, issuing from the profanation of the left pole of the sacred. Good and evil are two aspects of this world: there is no other heterogeneous world, just one world, or ‘reality’. Profanation creates a reality at the mercy of evil, or of a violence ‘set free on all sides’ (Bataille, 1989[1973]: 85). Sovereignty is reduced to the mastery of the world of things, including people reduced to the status of things. The heterogeneous is now everywhere and nowhere, placeless and unconfined; it is the heterogeneous in this sense that characterizes much of Baudrillard’s later thought. According to Baudrillard, evil is now eliminated from the profane world too; it has no place in the world of transparency.

Baudrillard: Heterogeneity, Transparency and Evil

The relationship between sacred and profane is not, ostensibly, a salient feature of Baudrillard’s work. The term profane, and the notion of profanation, are occasionally used to evoke modernity, and the notion of the sacred makes odd appearances too, notably in the essay ‘Precession of Simulacra’ (see Baudrillard, 2010: 20, 1994: 46, respectively). Baudrillard shares with Bataille the view that Western capitalist modernity is not, in any fundamental sense, religious, that its religious symbols, figures and movements are generally ‘epigonal’ (Baudrillard, 2009). The transformation from traditional societies to modern ones is marked by, amongst other factors, the loss of a clearly defined or locatable sense of evil, an evil that could be contrasted with, or ritually exchanged with, the ‘divine’ or good (Baudrillard, 1993b: 82).

Baudrillard’s preface to Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993a[1976]) declares that symbolic exchange, no longer the ‘organising principle’ of modern societies as it had been in traditional formations, is now an ‘intoxicating revolt… based on the extermination of value’ (p. 1). As ceaseless, immanent reversal of all terms, structures and objects, symbolic exchange annuls all separate, opposable or accumulated terms; it is ‘a functional principle sovereignly outside and antagonistic to our “reality Principle”’ (p. 2). The line of argument follows the course of Bataille’s position, expressed in the mid-1940s, that for societies that jettison or banish heterogeneity the sacred becomes a force of subversion. However, some eleven years later, Baudrillard re-considers his argument and moves away from the notion of symbolic exchange, developing his figures of fatal strategies and the transparency of evil (Baudrillard, 1988[1987]). Reflecting on the trajectory of his thought in L’Autre par lui même (1987: 80), Baudrillard states, ‘there is no longer any symbolic referent to the challenge of signs, and to the challenge through signs… The object itself takes the initiative of reversibility, taking the initiative to seduce and lead astray’ (emphasis in original). Indeed, ‘the fatal reversibility of the object’ is Baudrillard’s definition of the principle of evil (p. 82). Transparency, for Baudrillard, refers to the networked, informationalized social system that has eliminated all heterogeneities, that sees alternatives to itself as merely laughable, but is also a highly vulnerable system through which evil, disorder and virulence ‘transpire’: a dual sense characteristic of Baudrillard’s formulations.

This re-evaluation of his position leads Baudrillard to what might seem like a departure from Bataille’s understanding of the sacred as heterogeneity, but it results in a position which is very closely related.⁶ Where Bataille sees the crushing banality of the world of utility and homogeneity, for Baudrillard there are no longer distinct orders or realms of homogeneity and heterogeneity; they cannot be retrieved as distinct values. And, instead:

Against the banal vision (conventional and religious) of the fatal, one must set up a fatal vision of the banal. It is at the extremities of this monotony, this insignificance, this indifference of our systems, that the sequences, unfolding, and processes – which no longer proceed from cause to effect – appear; a challenge that is immanent in the very unfolding of things. (Baudrillard, 1988[1987]: 84–5)

Baudrillard posits a fundamental shift to (self-defined) ‘modern’ cultures characterized by an irresistible proliferation of indifference and transparency brought about by a generalized loss of specificities and limits. Systems, physical, mental and technological, crash through their former limits into the condition of simulation and uncertainty where values are not realized or transcended but are circumvented or bypassed through a higher logic of homogenization and control. Simulation is not merely the condition of abstraction or mediation but a logic of control which operates by plunging all judgement of value and direction into irresolvable uncertainty.

The system of simulation and transparency constitutes a further attack on impurity, a further reduction of the single world of profane ‘reality’. Evil, disorder, death and all other impurities, all living contradictions to the principles of functionality and performance, are treated with attempted neutralization. Natural and social bodies are, for Baudrillard, now ‘over-protected’, over-managed in their being wrested from their former limits, values and trajectories. Modernity tends towards a state of immune-deficiency, characterized by allergic over-reactions to minimal or non-existent threats on both collective and individual levels, to sudden glitches and reversals in hyper-efficient systems: a major example being the viral attack, which crosses all boundaries of the natural, social and technological. Never shy of pushing an argument to extremes, Baudrillard contends that the principle of reversibility, once the very form of symbolic exchange rituals, is now manifest through the reintroduction of evil into social systems that had attempted to banish all impurities. Evil returns, not as moral category or content, but as the reversal of dominant systems, as the involuntary and unanticipated secreting of new limits in apparently limitless systems: ‘Abreaction, rejection and allergy are manifestations of a singular kind of energy, a visceral energy which has replaced negativity and critical revolt’ (Baudrillard, 1993b: 71).

Disgust and repulsion, including self-loathing, as well as disgust with the state, society, political reason and authority, become defining features of the contemporary world, Baudrillard insists. Repulsion and radical negativity remain the defining characteristics of social being, but are now unhinged from reciprocal movements with attraction, without the strengthening and restorative effects of dynamic alternation between left and right poles. In an age that has sought to remove prohibitions and limits, to trumpet a banal, consumerist liberation which has precious little connection to the desire for freedom, new limits and barriers are forming. There is even, Baudrillard claims, a prevailing ‘disgust with the lack of disgust’, a redoubling and proliferation of disgust no longer hindered by any value that could be set into opposition (symbolic or dialectical) to disgust (p. 73). Lacking a dramatic or symbolic sense of the Other (Baudrillard prefers to capitalize), long since reduced and sanitized into ‘difference’, we turn on ourselves in a limitless process of self-experimentation which is driven by self-disgust.

Where does this leave society, or ‘the social’? Baudrillard remained insistent that any society is most clearly defined by its excesses, its vices, its immorality, its negatives – an argument he draws from Bernard Mandeville’s notorious The Fable of the Bees (1997[1723]), in addition to the influence of Bataille, and others, such as Pierre Klossowski. ‘The social’ as it is generally presented today, by the social sciences, is, for Baudrillard, an abstraction produced or simulated from ‘the ruins of the symbolic and ceremonial edifice’ (Baudrillard, 1983: 65). Indeed, ‘the social’, in a fundamental symbolic or sacred sense, begins to disappear at the same time that it is produced or simulated by leading social institutions: the economy, polity, health, etc. In a sense then, societies dominated by symbolic exchange or by the duality of the sacred were ‘societies without a social’ (p. 76, emphasis in the original). Indeed, for Baudrillard, ‘the social’ emerges and proliferates, ultimately, to replace the mechanism of sacrifice; sacrifice (as a form of symbolic exchange) had prevented the accumulation of ‘remainders’, of surpluses of wealth, power through which the state and market establish themselves. In modernity ‘the social exists to take care of the useless consumption of remainders so that individuals can be assigned to the useful management of their lives’ (pp. 77–8, emphasis in the original). Nevertheless, death, the repulsion of death and the spectacle of death, remain, for Baudrillard, powerfully collective (Baudrillard 1993a[1976]: 160–3, 2003[2002]: 3–34).

Baudrillard’s writings on the 9/11 attacks draw together the themes of sacrificial death, collective spectacle and internal rejection in the contemporary age of global media and global security with the startling assertion: ‘they did it, but we wished for it’ (Baudrillard, 2003[2002]: 5, emphasis in the original). The suicidal–sacrificial acts of 9/11, countering terror with terror, unleashed the ‘absolute weapon of death’: the horror and misery of the left pole of the sacred (p. 8). Yet, within a culture of irreversible profanation, having neutralized the collective, ritual movements between left and right poles of the sacred, the only available responses to 9/11 were mediatized rituals of condemnation and mourning and the military reprisals which, for Baudrillard, both fell far short of the symbolic level at which we are all ‘complicit’ in the attack. Such complicity is a dual or symbolic form, a disavowed and heterogeneous ‘pact’ against the (illusory) global world order.

In his very late works The Intelligence of Evil (2005), The Agony of Power (2009) and Carnival and Cannibal (2010), Baudrillard examines what he understands as the disappearance of both evil as symbolic/poetic and evil as metaphysical form from the culture of global techno-modernity, which enforces a ‘hegemonic culture of happiness’ (Baudrillard, 2005a: 139). Broadly speaking, good is reduced to happiness and evil is reduced to misfortune. In modernity, ‘evil’ is treated as something accidental, something that can be secured, controlled and finally eliminated, for example by a culture of surveillance, insurance and risk assessment. While many instances of misfortune may be treatable, perhaps by welfare spending or international aid, evil is something else entirely: it is, for Baudrillard, ineradicable, fated to appear and reappear because it is carried by the medium of the good.

Baudrillard appears to postulate three stages or phases in the relationship of good and evil. Firstly, good and evil as symbolic and reversible forms; secondly, good and evil as metaphysical and dialectical oppositions; and thirdly, the disappearance of good and evil into the modern binary of happiness/misfortune. Yet, this is not a historicist position but a formalist one: good and evil as symbolic forms do not go anywhere, they are severed, smothered, yet they remain, to take their revenge on, or through, the culture of happiness/misfortune. When good seeks to totalize itself by eliminating evil, not only does it fall far short of good but evil returns in catastrophic form (Baudrillard, 1990: 181–191).

If modernity has sought the separation of good and evil, in order to reify the good and expel evil, hypermodernity seeks the elimination or obliteration of evil, such that the distinction between good and evil disappears. Yet these strategies always fail. Indeed, Baudrillard offers a number of new figures of alterity or heterogeneity, and not all of them are violent or destructive. For example, his notion of ‘radical otherness’ refers to the other in their ‘unfathomable singularity’, beyond any discursive comparison, difference or positioning; an otherness that is not ‘understood’ by either self or other and is also a dynamic of mutual seduction (Baudrillard, 1993b: 111–74). Here is a new heterogeneity, one seeming to emerge directly from symbolic and dual relations to the other, rather than through the viral or hyper-positive effects of systems. Such alterity or radical otherness, Baudrillard asserts, is indestructible.

Concluding Remarks

For Bataille, systems have no form: they exist through the erection and maintenance of limits or barriers. The marking of a limit, a line drawn in the sand, generates the notion of inside and outside, licit and illicit. On the inside, at the core of society, is the sacred, a formless monstrosity. The sacred seems to give form to society only by the drawing of a barrier around it. The barrier keeps sacred and profane apart on behalf of the profane world. There is no opposition or even settled distinction between sacred and profane, except from the perspective of the profane which sits safely beyond the realm of the sacred. The sacred, in Bataille’s thinking, is a mortal danger to the profane world. So far as the ‘sacred nucleus’ can be said to have a content, it is that which disgusts and debilitates most, principally menstrual blood and ‘bodily putrefaction’. Yet such a society, of the dynamic alternation of right and left poles of the sacred, no longer exists. The topology of sacred and profane, of left and right aspects of the sacred, and of pure and impure tendencies within the profane, can only be sensed and, for Bataille, ‘experienced’ through its vestigial forms surviving in modernity.

The narrative offered by Bataille, and taken up by Baudrillard, concerns the fate of the left pole of the sacred – sacred repulsion – as it is severed from ritual reversals and alternations, banished and profaned. These are the grandest of grand narratives, without a trace of the postmodernist style of writing with which Bataille and Baudrillard are often identified (Habermas, 1987; Pefanis, 1991). Capitalism, or rather economy itself, are figured as the major forces of irreversible profanation. Yet, even more fundamental is the collapse of the internal duality of the sacred and the profanation of the impure pole which result in a single and impoverished plane of existence: ‘reality’. This construct is then subject to further reduction and homogenization, reaching a condition Baudrillard refers to as transparency or ‘integral reality’. For Baudrillard, this reduction reintroduces evil, disorder and repulsion in the form of ‘hyper-positivities’ as the inevitable or destined revenge of the object on fragile and vulnerable systems. This revenge or ‘blowback of duality’ cannot, of course, be relied upon, it does not arrive in a timely fashion to undo the tyrannies of the powerful. Instead, we are left with our hyper-reactions and allergic repulsions to others, and a strange investment in hatred often lacking an object upon which to fasten itself (Baudrillard, 1996: 142–7).

Yet Baudrillard’s position is not, ultimately, one of despair or resignation (as claimed by Foss in Frankovits, 1984, for example). Duality is regarded by Baudrillard as being the essence of collective being or experience, and as inevitable, indestructible, and never predictable or settled. The energy of the accursed share, of heterogeneity and sacrificial expenditure, are still, for Baudrillard as for Bataille, the fundamental dynamics of social systems, the core or nucleus disavowed by economic, cultural and technological institutions. The writings of Bataille and Baudrillard, taken in conjunction, are more than prescient: they offer rich theorizations of the social topologies and dynamics of profanation, sacrifice and the heterological; they examine society at moments of crisis and catastrophe, and, what is perhaps most surprising, they are not confined by nihilism. The left or impure pole of the sacred cannot be extinguished, it lives within profanation and thrives upon it.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the commercial, public or not-for-profit sectors and there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

William Pawlett is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Communications and Philosophy at the University of Wolverhampton. His main publications are: Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality (Routledge, 2007), Violence, Society and Radical Theory (Ashgate, 2013/Routledge, 2016) and Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society (Routledge, 2015). New research examines social topology and the themes of profanation and violence.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special issue, ‘Bataille and Heterology’, edited by Roy Boyne and Marina Galletti.

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