Bataille: death & transgression

p. 41

In the domain of our life excess manifests itself in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behaviour where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome them a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment. From the earliest times work has produced a relaxation of tension thanks to which men cease to respond· to the immediate urge impelled by the violence of desire.

p. 42 – 45

Violence is what the world of work excludes with its taboos; in my field of enquiry this implies at the same time sexual reproduction and death

the urge towards love, pushed to its limit, is an urge toward death. This link ought not to sound paradoxical. It is .clear from the outset that the two primary taboos affect, firstly, death, and secondly, sexual functions.

The essential difference is that between a man’s dead body and other objects such as stones. what we call death is in the first place the consciousness we have of it. We perceive the transition from the living state to the corpse, that is, to the tormenting object that the corpse of one man is for another. For each man who regards it with awe, the corpse is the image of his own destiny. It bears witness to a violence which destroys not one man alone but all men in the end. The taboo which lays hold on the others at the sight of a corpse is the distance they put between themselves and violence, by which they cut themselves off from violence.

The movement of work, the operations of reason were of use to him, while disorder, the movement of violence, brought ruin on the very creature whom useful works serve. Man, identifying himself with work which reduced everything to order, thus cut himself off from violence which tended in the opposite direction.

p. 45

the horror of death drives us off, for we prefer life ; on the other an element at once solemn and terrifying fascinates us and disturbs us profoundly.

the essential aspect of recoil in the face of violence which is expressed by taboos associated with death

Burial no doubt signified from the earliest times, as far as those who buried the body were concerned, their wish to save the dead from the voracity of animals.

the violence which by striking at the dead man dislocates the ordered course of things does not cease to be dangerous once the victim is dead. It constitutes a supernatural peril which can be ‘caught’ from the dead body. Death is a danger for those left behind. If they have to bury the corpse it is less· in order to keep it safe than to keep themselves safe from its contagion. Often the idea of contagion is connected with the body’s decomposition where formidable aggressive forces are seen at work. The corpse will rot; this biological disorder

p. 47 – 48

The violence attendant upon a man’s death is only likely to tempt men in one direction: it may tend to be embodied in us against another living person; the desire to kill may take hold of us. The taboo on murder is a special aspect of the universal taboo on violence.

Outside this given time, outside its own limits, the comunity can revert to violence, it can resort to murder in war against another community.

p. 63 – 65

The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it

This is the nature of the taboo which makes a world of calm reason possible but is itself basically a shudder appealing not to reason but to feeling, just as violence is. (Human violence is the result not of a cold calculation but of emotional states: anger, fear or desire.)

the taboo on murder, universal though it may be, nowhere opposes war. I am even convinced that without the prohibition war would be impossible and inconceivable! war is organised violence. The transgression· of the taboo is not animal violence. It is violence still, used by a creature capable of reason

If transgression proper, as opposed to ignorance of the taboo, did not have this limited character it would be a return to violence, to animal violence. But nothing of the kind is so. Organised transgression together with the taboo make social life what it is.

p. 67 – 69

Transgression is complementary to the profane world, exceeding its limits but not destroying it. Human society is not only a world of work. Simultaneously–or successivelyit is made up of the profane and the sacred, its two complementary forms. The profane world is the world of taboos.

The taboo gives a negative definition of the sacred object and inspires us with awe on the religious plane. Carried to extremes that feeling becomes one of devotion and adoration.

From an economic standpoint the reserves accumulated during periods of work are squandered extravagantly at feast times.

religion is the moving force behind the breaking of taboos. Now, religion is founded on feelings of terror and awe,