Sacrificial threshold is determined on personal identity- the degree to which the human subject is “queered” and gendered is the degree to which it is sacrificial.

The sacrificial threshold between life and death, therefore, is kin to the threshold at which personal identity is created and undone, including heteronormative identity. Along this threshold, Bataille’s work evinces a veritable excess of differing males and females, masculinities and femininities, which the mobile limits of heteronormativity ambivalently constrain and enable. Given that heteronormativity and queerness both commonly exist in Bataille, they should be understood as representing differing degrees of the subject’s (self-)sacrificial self-differentiation. Sacrificial self-differentiation is analogous to sexed and gendered self-differentiation, or queerness. The degree to which a human subject is “queered” is the degree to which it is self-sacrificial, broaching experiences of eroticism and death. The degree to which it resists sacrifice, conversely, is the degree to which it is a subject that eschews experiences of eroticism and death. Queerness arises in Bataille when characters and subjectivity transgress the sacrificial limits of life and death, selfhood and otherness. Such moments reveal a high degree of sacrificial self-differentiation, an attribute more strongly tethered to Bataille’s female characters and representation of femininity. It is in this way that the feminine is “exceptional” in Bataille. “One knows” writes Bataille in the History of Eroticism, that (my translation) “the ancients identified the possession of a woman with sacrifice. Concerning this, I cannot fail to insist on the fact that women are, more than men, the center of eroticism. They are the only ones that can completely dedicate themselves to it [s’y consacrer]” (Œuvres VIII 337). Heteronormativity, in contrast, exhibits a lower degree of sacrificial self-differentiation, and is more closely linked to Bataille’s more timid and anxious male narrators, if not men lacking “virility.” These differing degrees of sacrificial self-differentiation enable us to explain the apparent antinomy of heteronormativity and queerness in Bataille’s work. These degrees not only clarify his heternormative, sexist tendencies, but also their immanent critique and subversion. In Bataille, typically, men and women provisionally differ in their degrees of self-sacrifice, and thus also in their respective degrees of subjectivity, along a continuous spectrum of genders, sexes, and sexualities. Insofar as men and women provisionally differ in these respective degrees, they likewise provisionally differ in their degrees of queerness. These differences, as I show below, also provisionally structure the heteronormativity between men and women apparent in Bataille’s work. If self-sacrifice itself describes the mode of selfdifferentiation as described above, therefore, heteronormative difference should be understood as provisionally different degrees of sacrificial self-differentiation. In other words, sexed and gendered differences are provisional differences in degrees—not kinds—of subjectivity and self-sacrifice. Whereas Bataille’s men and masculinity provisionally err on the defensive side of a stable subjectivity, women tend toward self-sacrifice and the sacred realm of complete otherness, abjection, and absence. As Bataille famously writes in Madame Edwarda: This God, for all that, is what? A public whore, in no way different from any other public whore . . . God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God: in the sense of common everyday being, in the sense of dread, horrror and impurity, and, finally, in the sense of nothing. (Edwarda 142) As this passage suggests, God, otherness, eroticism, and nothingness are provisionally feminine things, whereas the subjective experience of these, as revealed by the anxious narrator of this story, is characteristically masculine. In contrast to the “ravishing” Edwarda (L. rapere, “to seize,” “to take away”), the male narrator anxiously reflects upon her fearful absence: “I was alone, as if face to face with a black rock. I trembled, seeing before me what in all this world is most barren, most bleak” (Edwarda 152). Besides explaining the prevalence of heteronormativity in Bataille, these differing degrees of self-difference explain the controversial exemplarity of women as well. The gender divide seems intimately related to a divide provisionally particular to women before or beyond men and their desires. In Bataille, women always traverse the sacrificial threshold between life and death with a facility foreign to men, making them figuratively embody, or rather disembody, the bivalence characteristic of sacrifice itself. In a short essay, critic Phillipe Sollers accurately notes that Bataille’s women signify . . . the compromise that humanity establishes between prohibition and transgression, a compromise which, through marriage, is transpierced by the possibility of erotic violence; not only does she assume the role of (pure) mother and (impure) animal, of respect and the violation of respect . . . but she lends her consistency to a structure of exclusion within which a resistant milieu—a stage (scène)—may be constituted in terms of its potential reversal. (Sollers 89) The “staged compromise” between prohibition and transgression, pure and impure, violation and respect Sollers describes echoes the sacrificial self-differentiation described above. In short, women in Bataille are the compromise, the self-differentiated threshold that challenges the secure limits of identity. In this way, women in Bataille exhibit a greater degree of sacrificial self-differentiation than men or masculine identity, and thus a lesser degree of subjectivity; yet once this is recognized or experienced by men, they too cross the same sacrificial divide provisionally proper to women such that, in the end, self-sacrificial self-differentiation queers all gendered difference. This result is especially apparent in Bataille’s erotic fiction. If queering is the effect of sacrifice on gender, however, and women in Bataille are more intimately linked to sacrifice, it follows that women and feminine identity are provisionally “queerer” than men and masculine identity—even though such queerness, as shown above, ultimately obscures the heteronormative difference that gives rise to femininity and masculinity themselves. In other words, women exemplify sacrifice insofar as they are the primary provisional gender that “ungenders” itself, that queers itself, and becomes the gender that “is not.” Becoming so compels the desire of men—i.e., a desire that compels an analogous inner-lack and openness—setting them along the path of self-sacrifice, which queers them in turn. With both genders commonly lost in erotic self-sacrifice, they exceed all heteronormative difference, yielding to a queer shared sacrificial self-differentiation.