Abstract

This work examines the political thought of the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille . The main argument of this work is that Bataille's interwar writings on eroticism, death, human sacrifice, and aesthetics were intended as political interrogations of French and Western European social and economic institutions. This form of political engagement has been called, here, the politics of the sacred. The essence of this form of engagement rested in its emphasis on the destruction of the self, or the autonomous transcendental subject. Bataille argued that a direct link existed between the notion of the autonomous subject and repressive political, social, and economic regimes. In his view, there was little difference between the explicit sociopolitical repression of the fascist and Stalinist regimes and the socioeconomic repression of liberal democracies. Both types of regime, totalitarian and bourgeois, he argued, were predicated on the notion of the autonomous subject. The aim of Bataille's political praxis was to articulate a form of social collective that would transcend existing models of political organization by upholding a decentered, or de-constructed conception of human existence. He called this union of de-subjected beings the "sacred community." ;Bataille's politics, then, were grounded in an ontological metaphysics that viewed the conscious self as the agent of sociopolitical as well as psychological repression. His notion of the repressive subject was influenced by several sources: Freud's notion of the ego/id dichotomy; Nietzsche's preference for the instinctual over the rational; Alexandre Kojeve's materialist rethinking of Hegel's phenomenology, in which the self is redefined as a material rather than spiritual or purely intellectual phenomenon; and the idea of the "primitive" as opposed to the "civilized" in anthropological literature. Bataille attempted to combine these intellectual sources into an ideological critique of existing social, political, and economic institutions. ;While most commentators have dismissed Bataille's political commitments, this work has attempted to demonstrate the sincerity of Bataille's political agenda. It is the contention of this work that Bataille's politics appear incomprehensible or parenthetical to his philosophy only when his critique of the autonomous subject is viewed isolated from his politics