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Sacred Death:

Freud’s Death Instinct and Bataille’s Sacred

There are moments in which sense passes over into non-sense. Thinking, through its own

nihilistic tendencies, reaches its own outer limits. Rational thought that has exhausted the possi-

ble loses the power of sober discourse. It can only gesticulate towards an impossible, intoxicat-

ing beyond. This is the place of mythology, poetry, and mysticism. “At the heart of mystic writ-

ing,” claims Michel de Certeau, “there is something other that comes without reason: the poem”

(de Certeau, 97). These poetic moments say “nothing,” but through that nothing they allow “the

very production of meaning” (de Certeau, 99).

Both Sigmund Freud and Georges Bataille have touched upon these limit places of ratio-

nal thought and reflection. As a result, they have had to resort to poetry and wild speculation. In

following thought to its dark recesses both of these thinkers reached a place in which words fail

to do justice. Through their poetry they gesture towards powerful forces that pulsate through fi-

nite human existence. Freud, in his search for a beyond of the pleasure principle, finds himself

bumped up against a confounding drive, the death instinct. He has experienced this drive in his

clinical practice, but when he is called upon to give it a name he draws upon old pagan mythol-

ogy. Life is the whirl and twirl of Eros and Thantos. Bataille, in his search for the beyond of

God, runs into the Sacred. This atheological sacred is an excess, it is an energy that exceeds the

profane world of rational thought and things. Religion has often been marked as a way of re-

sponding to this excess. Freud’s death drive and Bataille’s sacred are both irrational, anti-social

forces that can only be spoken of through an almost mystical poetry. At the same time, as de

Certeau mentions above, they are also fruitful foundational concepts through which to encounter

the mystery of human existence.

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The sacred and death Drive, in Bataille and Freud respectively, seem to be pointing to-

wards similar forces and phenomena in human life. In looking at the death instinct of Freud it its

necessary to focus on his first articulation of this concept in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

From that initial glimpse, one can then turn to Civilization and its Discontents where this princi-

ple is thought within the context of the socio-political. From there Freud’s concept of the death

instinct will be brought into conversation with Bataille’s reflections on the sacred and excess.

I.

“Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone

to devour” - 1 Peter 5:8

Freud designates the Instincts as being the most “abundant sources of internal excitation”

(40). These excitations come from within the body and not the external world. He further com-

ments that the instincts are both the “most important and the most obscure element[s] of psycho-

logical research” (40). He goes on to suggest that the energy of the instincts is not “bound” en-

ergy, but rather “freely mobile” energy (40). The operating of these instincts, therefore, are to be

thought along the lines of the unconscious (41). The unconscious is the point of impact for this

instinctual energy (41). Instincts are of the order of intoxication and the dream. They seem to

defy the causal, sober reality of the waking world. They do not correspond to the human world

of order and rationality. In popular parlance, instinctive behavior is often associated with the an-

imal. Animals are often excused from moral responsibility through an appeal to their instincts.

In their naturalness, the instincts seem to be almost beyond the human. The human, cut off and

alienated from nature, draws back to its origin via its instinctual impulses.

The failure to bind this energy can result in a “disturbance analogous to a traumatic neu-

rosis” (41). Freud, through analogy, links the “obscure” instincts to the “dark and dismal” trau-

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matic neurosis (12). Traumatic neurosis, Freud opines, occurs as a result of an individual having

experienced a disastrous and shocking occurrence. Affectively, traumatic neurosis is marked by

a sense of fright which emphasizes the equally important aspect of “surprise.” Fright, as Freud

defines it, “is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger with-

out being prepared for it” (11). Fright differs from an emotion like fear in that it does not have a

clear object. Fear has a “definite object” where fright does not. Furthermore, anxiety differs

from fright in that it is a state of constant expectation, where fright occurs due to its very lack of

expectation (11). The occurrence that produces fright is unanticipated. In his observation of

dreams, Freud notices that those who have experienced some shocking trauma are continually

brought back to the site of this trauma in the dream. This runs counter to Freud’s original theory

that dreams are essentially wish-fulfilling. Freud is convinced that the dream is related to wish-

fulfillment and is unwilling to sacrifice this theory. This leads him to surmise that this trauma is

so severe that it throws off the original function of the dream (11). He is left with the question of

why it is that one would return to the site of trauma.

Once this energy is bound in the “higher strata of the mental apparatus,” the predomi-

nance of the pleasure principle is secured. Energy that is mediated through the secondary

processes of the mental apparatus is caught in the dialectic of the pleasure principle and its modi-

fication by the reality principle. At this point, however, Freud is still left with the conundrum of

why the human organism manifests a “compulsion to repeat” (41). If the pleasure principle is in

dominance, then why is the human driven, at times, to act counter to that principle? Freud

writes, “The manifestations of a compulsion to repeat exhibit to a high degree an instinctual

character and, when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some

‘daemonic’ force at work” (41). The patient’s compulsion to repeat is likened to that of demonic

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possession. It is a force that works against the best laid plans of the seemingly sober and con-

scious subject.

In drawing on his experience with patients in analysis, Freud remarks, “the compulsion to

repeat the events of [the patient’s] childhood in the transference evidently disregards the pleasure

principle in every way” (42). This compulsion for the patient is distressing. It does not seem to

have any traces of conscious or discernible pleasure. Freud says that the patient behaves in a

“purely infantile fashion” which indicates for Freud that the patient’s “primaeval experiences”

are not bound in the subject (42-43). Within the subject there remain excessive energies linked

to archaic experiences that roam and prowl beneath the rational surface of everyday life. This

means that bounding is not comprehensive. These primitive experiences have not been caught

up in the secondary processes, and are marked by their irrational eruption into the life of the

adult subject. Freud notes that he has encountered individuals who fear the prospect of undertak-

ing analysis. These hypothetical individuals fear waking something that would be “better left

sleeping” (43). He writes, “what they are afraid of at bottom is the emergence of this compul-

sion with its hint of possession by some ‘daemonic’ power” (43).

Freud’s reflection on the demonic power of repetition permits him to posit a “universal

attribute” of instincts (43). Like the compulsion to repeat, which returns the subject to an origi-

nal trauma, the instinct is “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”

(43). Instincts, therefore, are “conservative” in nature and mark an “inertia inherent in organic

life” (43). Rather than being a force that propels one forward into linear futurity, the instincts are

a regressive return. Freud sees this theory as being confirmed through natural observation.

Birds maintain migratory patterns from generation to generation. Fish, like salmon, face a

treacherous journey upstream to lay their eggs in the location of their birth. The human embryo

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repeats its evolutionary heritage as it grows. The hypothesis that Freud suggests is that “all in-

stincts tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things” (44).

It then occurs to Freud that his thinking on this topic seems to be floating into the fantas-

tical fields of the mystic. His line of thought comes streaking to a halt in order to offer his reader

a warning. This movement towards an earlier state of things may give the “impression of mysti-

cism or of sham profundity,” he worries (45). Freud, a man of science and rationality, makes an

effort to distance himself from his own self-accusations. Even if Freud’s hypothesis seems mys-

tical, still his conscience remains clear. His intentions are geared towards lucidity and certitude

(45). He did not intend to lapse into such a discourse. Though, nevertheless, Freud does seem to

enter such a domain, or something that wreaks of it.

It is despite his sober intentions that he touches upon the place of the mystical, i.e. of the

breakdown of certainty into speculation and rationality into mythology. Freud takes his thinking

to the “precise point where science stops and religion proves to be an illusion” (Nancy, 104). In

providing a mystical or “mythical” speech, Freud “attempts to allow to speak what precedes

speech” (104). In his 1925 footnote to this section he writes, “The reader should not overlook

the fact that what follows is the development of an extreme line of thought” (Freud, 45). His re-

flections, in dwelling in the darkness of instinctual life, are excessive thoughts. They are cogita-

tions that Freud—in perhaps a place of more reserved sobriety—reads as extreme.

As his analysis continues, Freud suggests three specifications with regards to his theory

of the instincts. All “organic instincts” are [1] conservative, [2] historically acquired, and [3]

“tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things” (45). This creates a theoretically com-

plicated situation when it comes to Freud’s attempt at accounting for the increasing complexity

of life on earth. If the instincts are conservative and tend towards a primal restoration, then it

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does not make sense that life would evolve and change. Freud writes, “The elementary living

entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the

same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life” (45). The organism

changes and develops due to its interaction with the external world. The instinct is blind in its

circularity. No matter how the much path changes, due to the increased complexity of the organ-

ism, the instinct always returns to its end. All external changes are incorporated by the organism

and “stored up for further repetition” (45). Any sense of progress, from the instinctual level, is

deceptive. The instinct’s goal is an “ancient” state that will be achieved through a variety of

pathways (45).

One is brought to the conclusion that the ultimate path of instinct-driven life is death.

Death is the goal of life (46). Emil Cioran, in his The Trouble with Being Born, pessimistically

reflects, “We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth…Fear of death is merely

the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life” (Cioran, 2).

The advent of life, repeated in every birth, is the initial trauma. The initial spark of energy that

united matter into a unicellular organism unleashed the repetitive trauma of existence. Freud

writes, “The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by action of a force

whose nature we can form no conception” (Freud, 46). The spark of life in inanimate matter cre-

ated a tension that sought to cancel itself out (46). As cosmic history continued to interfere in

this process, the path towards death became longer and more drawn out for certain organisms

(46). One could compare the average life span of a human—which is about 70 years—with that

of a mayfly, which is at most 24 hours. In terms of the instinct’s circuit, the mayfly achieves

life’s goal far quicker. This is to say nothing of the additional human burden of consciousness,

which is yet another sour fruit plucked from the chaotic collisions of the material world.

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The conservative, death-driven nature of the instincts that Freud arrives at seems to run

counter to another commonly held hypothesis—the self-preservative instincts. It is undeniable

that there is a will for life in organisms. Life continues to persistently multiple. The human or-

ganism, especially, tends to cling to its own life like the most precious of commodities. If Freud

is to maintain the “exclusively conservative nature of the instincts,” then he must account for the

organism’s drive for self-preservation (46). He speculates that perhaps the life instincts covertly

serve the death instincts. The life instincts permit the organism to “follow its own path to death”

(47). In seeking to maintain the organism’s own individual existence, the life instinct actively

motivates the organism to resist and avoid threats from the external world.

Life and death are held in dynamic tension. Freud writes, “Our views have been from the

very first dualistic, and today they are even more definitely dualistic than before” (63). There

are in his metapsychology “true life instincts” as well as a death instinct (48-49). The life in-

stincts “operate against the purpose of” the death instincts (49). The organism constantly wavers

between the instincts of life and death. The life instincts, however, are not to be thought of as

progressive instincts, i.e. aiming “towards higher development” (49). Progress and development

are problematic terms in the instinctual life. Instincts are blind impulsions with little regard for

the good and bad of the intelligible world. Drawing upon evolutionary theory, Freud notes that

what is considered progress is merely a “matter of opinion” (50). Animals adapt to the external

environment, and as that environment changes one day’s evolution may lead to tomorrow’s ex-

tinction. There is no ultimate or scientifically objective way to establish whether or not an exter-

nal change in an animal is progressive or regressive. The same narrative of progress can equally

be read as decay.

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In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud analyzes the death instinct within a mostly or-

ganic and biological setting (Freud [1961], 77). Civilization and Its Discontents continues to de-

velop this concept through a consideration of its social implications. Paul Ricoeur remarks,

“Freud had, of course, already forged his doctrine of the death instinct by 1920…, but he did so

in an apparently biological framework and without emphasizing the social aspect of aggressive-

ness” (Ricoeur, 125). Also, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle the life and death instincts were

merely “tentative concepts.” However, at the time of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud

says “I can no longer think any other way” (Freud [1961], 79). Time and further reflection had

evidently convinced Freud to keep his life/death formulation. At this point in his psychoanalytic

thinking, the dual life and death instincts have become crucial in developing his thought.

Freud begins his discussion of the instincts in Civilization and Its Discontents with a

summary of the concept’s development within his own thought (75-76). He traces its formation

up to his previous work in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He reemphasizes a dualistic “convic-

tion” with regards to the instincts. He writes, “the instincts could not all be of the same kind”

(77). This conviction, coupled with his analysis of the compulsion to repeat, allowed him to

posit the existence of two mutually operative and oppositional instincts of life and death, Eros

and Thantos (77). The phenomena of life is the oscillation of these two “concurrent and mutu-

ally opposing” instincts (77-78).

Freud emphasizes his difficultly in clearly locating the death instinct. He says that per-

haps it operates “silently,” but this would not serve as an acceptable proof of its existence (78).

The more analytically beneficial idea is that some portion of this instinct is directed towards the

outside world (78). Through this outward manifestation it is rendered somewhat cognizable.

The death instinct “comes to light,” claims Freud, through acts of aggression and destruction.

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Pressed in the service of Eros, the life instinct, it is channeled towards the external world as ag-

gression. This prevents the death instinct from completely fulfilling its ultimate goal, the com-

plete return of the organism to the inanimate.

Freud further makes the observation that perhaps both Eros and Death are never com-

pletely separated from each other. The two instincts appear together and may, in fact, be insepa-

rable. Paul Ricoeur, in his own reading of Civilization and Its Discontents, observes that the

death instinct’s “antagonism grows louder and louder as Eros progressively registers its effects

of uniting first the living organism with itself, then the ego with its object, and finally individuals

in ever larger groups” (Ricoeur, 126). Throughout most of its functioning, the death instinct is

“veiled” by Eros and it is only at the level of culture as “anticulture” that it is “unmasked and un-

veiled” (126). As Eros homogenizes the individual into the universal, the Oneness of many, the

death instinct insists as an antisocial remainder, i.e. as the one who will not be One.

This innate instinct towards aggression and destruction, Freud realizes, can be hard for

some of his perhaps more optimistic and humanistic colleagues. He writes, “‘little children do

not like it’ when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to ‘badness’” (79). The existence

of “evil” can be hard for individuals to stomach. Referencing theology, Freud asserts that the

mythology of the devil finds its source in this very inability to accept destruction and aggression.

The classical theological reasoning suggests that God must be completely good, therefore any

evil or destruction that befalls his beloved creatures must derive from a source outside or con-

trary to God. Satan, or the devil, fills the role of embodying this meaningless site of anti-human

destruction. The devil plays the role of a scapegoat who is forced to bear the burden of embody-

ing an evil that cannot be permitted in an all-good, all-loving deity (79). Freud points out that

“one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of

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the wickedness which the Devil embodies” (80). Any expulsion of evil onto an Other will ulti-

mately find its source in the expeller and not the expelled. The inability to face the darkness in

one’s own heart casts a shadow on some abject Other forced to figure that darkness.

The social manifestation of this destructive instinct is the “greatest impediment to civi-

lization” (81). The death instinct is that which confounds Eros’s goal of humanistic oneness. It

is that instinct which “disrupts interhuman relationships” (Ricoeur, 125). Civilization is “a

process in the service of Eros.” This Eros seeks to “combine single human individuals, and after

that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind” (Freud,

81). This Love-driven movement towards universality is thwarted by “man’s aggressive in-

stinct” (82). This aggressive instinct, as has already been suggested, is the main instantiation of

the primordial death instinct. Civilization, like the human organism itself, is the site of an epic

battle between consolidating Eros and divisive Death (82).

II

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father

feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” ~ Matthew 6:26

Georges Bataille begins his Theory of Religion in what he calls “poetry” (Bataille [1989],

20). Poetry, Bataille writes in The Impossible, is “not knowledge of oneself, and even less the

experience of a remote possible…but rather the simple evocation through words of inaccessible

possibilities” (Bataille [1991], 162). Poetry is not a site of knowledge, a place in the “logical

world,” rather it is a “fleeting” moment of “relative darkness” and the “unreal” (163). In its

“madness” and unreality it is in fact closer to the world than the rational and logical (163). Po-

etry, Bataille further reflects, is a “middle term” in that it “conceals the known within the un-

known” (164). It takes words and asks them to speak of something beyond. Where Freud wor-

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ried that he was lapsing into mysticism, Bataille ventures in that direction without a qualm. This

poetic space is a place of ultimate unknowability and utter immediacy. Bataille describes this

ungraspable dark place as animality. It is from the animal that humans have come and it is back

to the animal that humans seek to return.

Animality is the place that seems to touch most explicitly upon Freud’s death instinct.

Like the death instinct, it is a primordial place of persistent return. Bataille writes, “animality is

immediacy or immanence” (Bataille [1992], 17). The image of this state is of one animal eating

another animal (17). At the level of the animal, between the consumer and the consumed there is

no distinction (18). Animals are without consciousness and have, within Bataille’s poetic imagi-

nation, no principle of individuality. It is pure immanence without difference and distinction.

The animal is emblematic of the Nietzschean “innocence of becoming” (Nietzsche, 27). Bataille

writes, “The lion is not the king of the beasts: in the movement of the waters he is only a higher

wave overturning the other, weaker ones” (Bataille [1992], 19). In the animal world there are

not relations of “subordination,” but only beings crashing into beings in the ceaseless flux and

flow of existence (18). Subordination is linked to temporality and futurity.

Human beings, contrary to animals, have masters and slaves because we experience the

world in a temporal way. Humans, the rational animals, qualify the differences in quantities.

Taking Bataille’s example into account, the quantitative power differential between the lion and

the rabbit has been rendered, through human reflection, as a “kingly” quality. The lion’s quanti-

tative power is given a qualitative meaning. Over time, there are those individuals who gain and

keep power over other individuals. As Bataille sees it, this is not possible at the level of the ani-

mal. The animal world is an instantaneous now without an awareness of duration through which

one can assign differences in quality.

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Just at the moment when one might wonder how it is that Bataille can know so much

about a world that is allegedly beyond human experience, Bataille reminds the reader of his po-

etic intentions. He admits, “Nothing…is more closed to us than this animal life from which we

are descended” (20). There is nothing, he continues, more alien to us than a silent universe that

is beyond the human construction of meaning (20). There is no way to articulate a world without

human consciousness. The attempt to imagine this world, a world seen through the “gaze of the

animal,” leaves one seeing “nothing” (21) There is no conceivable manner in which one can

give a “precise” description of this meaningless world (21). Even the designation of meaning-

lessness offers one with a type of meaning. One could call to mind the stereotypical response to

the nihilist’s proclamation, “There is No Truth.” The response is, “Except for the Truth that

there is No Truth.” Returning to the animal world, the tick sucking blood out of the neck of a

dog does not mourn the loss of meaning. It does not dwell in meaninglessness like a brooding,

adolescent existentialist. The animal is a poetic way of speaking of the beyond of meaning and

meaninglessness. This poetry is “a way by which a man goes from a world full of meaning to

the final dislocation of meanings, of all meaning, which soon proves to be unavoidable” (22).

“The animal,” Bataille asserts, “opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar

to me” (22). It is representative of an “intimacy that keeps vigil in us” (23). The more an indi-

vidual rationally reflects upon this poetic animal, the more it slips away into its darkness. The

animal, in Bataille’s theory, is a oneness that, in our state of alienation, we are forever separated

from. It is a visceral state towards which humanity seeks to return. Bataille links the state of an-

imality to his wave metaphor. He writes, “in our eyes, the animal is in the world like water in

water” (24). Similarly, Freud posits his death instinct as having the purpose of facilitating a re-

turn to a sealed-off land. In Freud’s work this lost place and goal of return is the inanimate. For

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Bataille, it is the animal. Are both of these ideas merely metaphors that serve to indicate some-

thing that has been lost? Humans are cut off from their Nirvana, from their becoming. They are

cut off from their Oceanic oneness, the All, the Unconditional, the Unlimited.

Philosopher and psychoanalyst Richard Boothby links Freud’s death drive to Anaximan-

der’s apeiron, the Unlimited. For Anaximander, all existence is caught in a dialectic between the

Unlimited and the limited. The limited breaks off from the unlimited and throughout time it con-

stantly seeks to return to that original state. Boothby writes, “Determinate beings are carved out

of the Unlimited by the defining action of the Limit, only to be reclaimed, in the fullness of time,

by the maelstrom of the Unlimited” (Boothby, 154). The limited can only partially contain the

Unlimited for a finite amount of time before it is surrendered back into the Unlimited void.

Boothby points out that Freud’s death drive is also an unlimited and primordial principle toward

which life, the limiting principle, ceaselessly returns. The apeiron is more “elemental and ar-

chaic” than the limited, much like the death drive. Bataille’s animality and its connection to im-

manence can be thought within a similar framework. Both Freud and Bataille are gesturing to-

wards places in which human animals are instinctually driven to return. The animal’s participa-

tion in immanence and the restful state of inanimate matter are two different metaphors for the

apeiron.

The limiting factor for Bataille is the profane world of the “Thing” (Bataille [1992], 27).

The limiting point for the death instinct is the instinct for self-preservation. The death instinct is

thwarted from its ultimate return to the void through the counterforce of life. The loss of this ini-

tial state occurs, for Bataille, in the human creation of tools. Tools are things that are used for

specific purposes, they have meanings for individuals. Utility is the beginning of meaning in

Bataille’s story of the human condition. The tool or the object “stands opposed to immanence or

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the flow of all that is—which it transcends” (29). It is through the use of tools that the subject/

object dyad enters the scene. The user of the tool has agency and is assigned the role of the sub-

ject where the tool is the object that finds its meaning in reference to the subject. Through the

conscious use of tools, the connection to the immanent flow of becoming is lost. As the world of

tools, things, and objects expands, humans move further away from their animal origins. The

world is classified and categorized according to metrics of utility. Even the body—in the body/

soul division—is recast as a tool of the soul. This movement does not occur, Bataille notes,

“without a feeling of doubt mixed with terror and longing” (35). A sense of loss haunts the hu-

man experience.

The “sacred,” in Bataille, stands as the marker of a counterforce that thwarts the continu-

ous movement into the endless expanse of the thing. The human individual, by virtue of its

sense of individuality, is itself a thing. The thought of losing that individuality, of becoming lost

in immanence, fills the individual with “a kind of impotent horror” (36). Like the Freudian or-

ganism caught in the whirl of death and life, Bataille’s human is found in between the dialectic

of the sacred and the profane. The instinct for self-preservation finds its place in relation to the

thing. The instinct for death, for the return to immanence, is incarnate in Bataille’s sacred.

Sacrifice, according to Bataille, is the means through which one is delivered from the

prison of the thing. The principle of sacrifice is “destruction” (43). To further the parallel to

Freud, the manifestation of the death instinct is aggression and destruction (Freud, 78). It is

through the destruction of the self and others that the death instinct pulsates towards its goal of

return. Through the act of sacrifice, the victim is removed from the world of “utility” and it is

returned to the “unintelligible caprice” of immanence (43). Sacrifice, and religion in general, are

geared towards a “return to intimacy” (44). If religion, in Bataille’s formulation, is essentially a

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return to lost intimacy, then one can also define it as a manifestation of the death instinct. The

priest who offers a sacrifice, through his act of irrational waste and consumption, seeks to deliver

the victim from this world of limitedness and thinghood. The act of sacrifice “turns its back on

real relations,” humanistic and civilized relations, through its mad drive to return to the “inti-

macy of the divine world, of the profound immanence of all that is” (44). The return to intimacy

is not achieved through sober-minded human beings, but it is manifested in the animalistic and

archaic drives of a “beclouded consciousness” (45). The sacred marks the irruption of the body

—one’s surest connection to the animal and material world—into the realm of the psyche.

The violence and destruction inherent in the sacred is horrific to the rational man of the

post-Enlightenment era. One could certainly react to Bataille’s sacred in the manner that the “lit-

tle children” did for Freud at his assertion of an inherently destructive drive in human beings.

Religion, as the liberal humanistic discourse asserts, is nothing but old vestiges of tribalism and

violence. When one sees violence, in the name of any implicit or explicit religion, the common

human reaction is horror. This horror is indicative for Bataille of just how lost in the world of

things human beings are. The horror of sacred violence stems from the fear of losing one’s indi-

viduality. Individuality, our instinct for self-preservation, is the cause of anxiety when faced

with the prospect of sacrifice.

In the flow of immanence, of wave crashing upon wave, “death is nothing…but because

it is nothing, a being is never truly separated from it” (45). There is no distinction or division in

the Unlimited, death and life are indistinguishable. As was stated earlier, the temporality of the

immanent is the present or instant. Only in the world of things, of individuality, is “duration” a

source of anxiety for the human organism. Bataille writes, “Future time constitutes this real

world to such a degree that death no longer has a place in it. But it is for this very reason that

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death means everything to it” (46). The instinct for self-perseveration seeks to extend the indi-

vidual into the future. In its drive to temporally extend life, the world of things seeks to expel

death.

Death comes like a trauma or surprise. It always seems to be from an unexpected else-

where. This expulsion of death from the order of things also helps to account for the resistance

Freud experienced in positing an internal instinct towards death. Death is to be avoid for it is in-

human and antisocial. Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life observes the ways in

which death has become an “elsewhere” in medico-scientific society (de Certeau, 192). The dy-

ing individual in a hospital is a sign of failure on the part of the medical establishment (190).

The dying person is a grim reminder of the thing’s failure to prolong the individual indefinitely.

It has become shrouded in “silence,” it is both “unthinkable” and “unnameable” (192). Death,

having been “displaced by scientific productivity,” is void of any “sense” (192).

The return to the intimate manifests as a will towards death. The profane thing “rejects

the affirmation of intimate life” (46). The real order, the order of civilization, must “annul—neu-

tralize—that intimate life and replace it with the thing” (47). The human is swept up in this dual

dynamic of the extension of the thing and a horrific desire to return to intimacy. The animal in

the human cries out for release. In its rationalized cage that cry erupts in the form of violence.

Bataille likens this excessive cry to a “fire.” The sacred, he claims “is exactly comparable to the

flame that destroys wood by consuming it” (53). There is energy that pulsates, unbound, through

the human organism that is released through acts of violence. In the world of animals there is no

violence. Violence as a means of return is only possible in light of the thing. It is not an injus-

tice or sin for a wolf to devour a sheep, or even for a mother to devour her young. The return to

intimacy, to the beyond of the animal, is marked by violence. Bataille writes, “Intimacy is vio-

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lence, and it is destruction, because it is not compatible with the positing of the separate individ-

ual” (51). The act of destruction in sacrifice is only distressing when considered from an indi-

vidual perspective (51). The anxiety produced by the awareness of death is merely the thought

of an individual death. In the return to intimacy the individual trembles, it is “holy, sacred, and

suffused with anguish” (52).

III

“Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with

what…” (Cioran [1974], 13)

Why think the death drive as a return to intimacy? Both Freud and Bataille saw life as

being a dualistic dance between forces of futurity, life, and forces of return, death. Bataille, in

his thinking, sees the world of things as attempting to eradicate this intimacy. In our attempt to

ignore and avoid this death instinct, the human penchant for violence goes unchecked. Violence,

destruction, and aggression are part and parcel of human existence. Bataille and Freud are both

well aware of this fact, and both thinkers take these instincts seriously.

As Paul Ricoeur indicated, as civilization increases, the scream of the death instinct

grows louder. The more our desire for intimacy is repressed in the service of an illusion of civi-

lized progress, the greater and the more destructive are the death instinct’s manifestations. Is

there a way to feed the fire within? Can demons be appeased rather than exorcised? Bataille, in

his work, demonstrates the ways in which the expanse of the thing is coupled with greater acts of

violence. He traces the story of the search for intimacy from human sacrifice to the growth of

militarism and war. In war, this violence is mediated towards delusions of usefulness and con-

quest. War is not an act of waste but it is an act of effectiveness. In the Accursed Share, Bataille

writes:

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“To waste it is obviously not to use it. And yet, what we have is a draining-away, a pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case: From the first, the excess energy, if it

cannot be used for growth, is lost. Moreover, in no way can this inevitable loss be ac-counted useful. It is only a matter of an acceptable loss, preferable to another that is regarded as unacceptable: a question of acceptability, not utility. Its consequences are decisive, however” (Bataille [1989], 31).

Waste and loss are unavoidable. They are like an instinct that irrationally seeks to return to void

and nothingness. Though, perhaps a different point of view is possible. These pulsations may be

met with channels of acceptability in new manifestations of the sacred.

Work Cited

Bataille, Georges (1992). Theory of Religion. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

Bataille, Georges (1989). Accursed Share: Volume 1. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

Bataille, Georges (1991). The Impossible. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

Cioran, E. M (2013). The Trouble with Being Born. New York: Arcade Publishing.

Cioran, E. M. (1974). The New Gods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

de Certeau, Michel (1986). Heterologies, Discourse on the Other, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.

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de Certeau, Michel (2011). The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, CA: University of Califor-nia Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1961). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Freud, Sigmund (1961). Civilizations and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Nancy, Jean-Luc (2013). Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II. New York: Fordham University Press.

Ricoeur, Paul (2004). The Conflict of Interpretations. New York: Continuum.