Even if Bataille’s work redefines gender norms, self-sacrifice is still rooted in identity – sacrifices polarize masculinity and femininity.

Two subtle negotiations must be made to respond to this question. The first concerns conceiving gender in Bataille as a degree of subjectivity, rather than as a kind of subjectivity. The second concerns the means and ends of Bataille’s critique of the subject, specifically as it relates to his notion of sacrifice as a form of self differentiation. Provisionally, it will suffice to say that gendered identity in Bataille is itself provisional, permitting for tentative differences between masculine subjects and abject femininity, between potent and impotent men, between holy and whorish women that, to varying degrees, commonly herald the sacrificial space of eroticism in which these become a veritable excess of possible genders and sexualities. Ultimately, I argue that queer identity in Bataille concerns the inherently excessive and self-sacrificial quality of identity itself in Bataille, however apparently “virile” or “feminine.” As I argue below, the concept and function of sacrifice in Bataille offers an unexplored entry point into the queer qualities of his work. As a form of self-differentiation, sacrifice and sacrificial experiences demonstrate that, for Bataille, gender and sexual identity are not one. The excess implied in sacrifice always exceeds the limits of gender, sex, and sexual identity. In this way, the implications of sacrifice for gender extend recent discussions in queer and feminist scholarship on Bataille, especially as presented in the work of Shannon Winnubst and Zeynep Direk, who examine the complex implications of Bataille’s eroticism for sexual identity and difference. Much like erotic experience, sacrifice challenges the ostensible sexism and heternormativity that does typify the characters we see in Bataille’s work. We may consider in his fiction, for example, the (sexist) centrality of male narrators and their contrasting female counterparts, like Madame Edwarda, Simone in Story of the Eye, or Pierre’s mother in My Mother. Men seek women, and women seduce men into sex, violence, and transgression. Men are typically the virile subjects of erotic experiences, and women typically the taboo objects of erotic desire. In this vein, we might recall Bataille’s sexist assertion in Erotism: “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude. In so far as she is attractive, a woman is prey to men’s desire” (Erotism 131). How might one, then, negotiate the prevalence of sexist heteronormativity in Bataille’s work with the simultaneous and starkly contrasting ambiguities his work also presents for personal identity, whether male or female? To begin, it must be said that heteronormativity in Bataille does not describe a single, unified state of sexual or gendered identity opposed to another. Rather, heternormativity reveals a more ambiguous, prior form of queerness inherent to identity itself that comes to reveal a spectrum of genders and sexualities that polarizes the masculine and the feminine, albeit without dividing them. For example, Bataille’s conceptions of “virility” and “femininity” both ironically challenge heteronormative identity. In Inner Experience, for example, Bataille at once traces and erases the limits of heternormative difference with statements like the following (my translation): “I can capture the self in tears, in anguish (I can even endlessly [à perte de vue] prolong my vertigo and find myself only in the desire of another—of a woman— unique, irreplaceable, dying, in all things similar to me)” (85). As usual, Bataille grasps self-identity paradoxically in experiences of self-loss like anguish, eroticism, and death; yet such self-discovery through self-loss conjoins immediately with the desire of “another,” a woman, who is completely “similar” to him. At once Bataille posits a difference between male and female identity while claiming that self-recognition itself imbricates self and other, man and woman. Otherwise stated, Bataille paradoxically asserts that, in death and desire, “I am other than who I am,” or more subtly “I am gendered other than my gender,” simultaneously challenging and reproducing heteronormative difference in the self-realization of a queer difference within. Redoubling the queer ambiguity of self and other in this declaration of self-discovery is the phrase “desire of another” (désir d’un autre), which may ambiguously suggest in this context both Bataille’s desire of another—i.e., desire for a woman—or another’s desire for him, a woman’s desire. In this way, just as Bataille’s declaration here therefore challenges or queers the boundaries of (male) subjectivity, so does it make possible by implication a desirous female subject, another who desires “him.” Thus in the same movement does Bataille pose and subvert heteronormative identity, betraying varying possible degrees of masculinity and femininity within the same desiring subject. It is remarkable to note how often in Bataille sexual differences advance a concept or experience that itself undercuts the very sexual differences upon which it is based. In his famous essay “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” for example, Bataille promotes the quality of “virility” in the pursuits of myth, art, eroticism, and secret societies, since all express a form of amor fati that, like sacrifice, triumphantly embrace mortality. For Bataille, however, the “virile” challenge to individualism takes place in transcending the material conditions of life that hide the presence of love, myth, and human destiny, those mortal things that give life “human” meaning and valorize “human destiny.” Yet this “virile” man, initially emblematic of universal humanity, is quite intimately wed to heterosexual masculinity, shifting the universal meaning of man (l’homme) to manliness (virilité). The most obvious illustration of this shift is found in sections IX–XII of the essay, in which he talks about the relationship between the lover and beloved. The male lover confronts the beloved woman in a manner analogous to death and destiny. “The woman toward whom a man is drawn, as to his human destiny,” he writes, “no longer belongs to the space that money controls. Her sweetness escapes the real world, through which she moves without allowing herself to be any more imprisoned than a dream” (Visions 228–29). If the man faces his destiny, the woman “incarnates” it, yet not in a manner that would “imprison” her within the living “real world” the lover tries heroically overcome through her. Instead she represents a dreamy portal to destiny, a gateway between the real and transcendent, life and mortal destiny, much like the one sought in self-sacrifice. Staring at the woman is not enough for the man to capture his destiny and achieve true virility; however, this would remain only “an aesthetic emotion” without the “will to possess her and make true what her apparition had seemed to mean.” It is only when this feminine figure of fate, this femme fatale, is “conquered or lost” that the “fugitive image of destiny” becomes realized, and “ceases to be an aleatory figure and becomes reality determining fate” (Visions 230). The fulfillment of the man’s virility lies in conquering or losing the woman, whereby she becomes the reality of human destiny—i.e., his own “virile” destiny. As Bataille explains later in the essay, this virile, erotic pursuit of the feminine figure of fate is analogous to transgressing the limit that separates the profane from the sacred, making it tantamount to a form of transgression and sacrifice: Secrecy, in the domain where [the sorcerer’s apprentice] advances, is no less necessary to his strange procedures than it is to the transports of eroticism (the total world of myth, the world of being, is separated from the dissociated world by the very limits that separate the sacred from the profane). (Visions 233) On the one hand, therefore, virility is a condition seemingly particular to the masculine subject and his (heterosexual) desire; he is the one who pursues, loves, and dies, self-sacrificially embracing destiny through the erotic and fateful pursuit of the feminine. On the other hand, however, virility goes unrealized without the feminine, which provides a gateway to this destiny both figuratively and in fact. While “virility” seems to represent the “human” fulfillment of what is paradigmatically a heterosexual male subject (through its divestiture in virile self-sacrifice), virility is possible only on the condition also of a fateful feminine presence to be “conquered” or “lost.” The sorcerer’s apprentice does not realize his “virile” destiny without the presence of the feminine; yet this presence, paradoxically, he can “realize”—or rather “unrealize”—only in absentia, in the fateful sacrifice of self. Therefore, if the feminine is understood as an absence in Bataille—a vacuous realm of desire, fate, and heroic, self-sacrificial death—so too is, therefore, the virile man. Several ambiguities thus arise from this: does this obligatory pursuit of feminine fate subsume femininity under a virile manhood, or does it rather feminize this virility in some way, such that human destiny would go unrealized without the woman, without femininity itself? Is it not the fate of virility to be tainted with femininity? As the above demonstrates, the man’s amor fati, or self-sacrifice for virility is also, ultimately, the self-sacrifice of virility itself. Being a man necessarily implies also not being a man, the loss of oneself—a type of “loss” always akin to a fateful feminine absence. The virile man that is the sorcerer’s apprentice seeks out femininity as the fulfillment of his self-sacrificial fate, and yet such a fate seems This content downloaded from queerly both, and neither, masculine and feminine. In the virile and erotic pursuit of self-sacrifice, there is a mobile divide not only between life and death, but also between man and woman, the masculine and the feminine.