Sacrifice – Women and femininity are exemplars of sacrifice and excess for Baataille.

In Bataille, women and femininity are often exemplars of self-sacrificial death, eroticism, and excess. Through contrast with male characters and the masculine, they structure a heteronormative, albeit provisional, sexual difference from men who, as narrators, illustrate a more stable subjectivity and a lesser degree of sacrificial self-differentiation. This gives rise to Bataille’s sexist heteronormativity. Yet the man’s heteronormative desire for women hews the path toward self-sacrifice, which is first figured as sacred ambivalence but finally so in the form of self differentiation, recounted both in silence and in the excess of narrative voices. Such self-differentiation reveals itself to be the same formerly specific to the feminine, first revealing the “extimacy” of femininity within masculine identity, but finally the prior self-sacrifice that conditions all identity, whether male or female, masculine or feminine. Such is the double-bind of Bataille’s women and femininity. Since they are provisionally “nothing,” i.e., that which “is not,” there where they “are not,” they cannot and do not provide an exclusive or totalizable category under which identity can be securely assumed. The feminine is also somehow not feminine as that which is largely self-differentiating, self-sacrificial, and non-identical. As such, however, it is impossible to ultimately oppose the feminine to men or the masculine—or indeed to anything else—since that to which it would be opposed is always already included by its inherent sacrificial non-identicality, which is also to say its excess of possible identities. By differing from itself, and thus compelling self-sacrifice and desire, it thereby implicates also that which exceeds it—including men and the masculine. For Bataille, sacrifice exposes the process by which identity always exceeds itself, differs from itself, in a queer space where gender and sex, male and female, are never one.