Bataille not violent CHANGE PAGE #s

Is violence an inevitable part of satisfying sacred desire? As we have seen, Bataille's historical analysis does suggest that political communities cannot, in the long-run, repress the source of sacred desire in natural horror. Consequently, as Paul Hegarty argues, we must face violent nature squarely, without falsifying it. It might be concluded from this that violence is inevitable. Kenneth Itzkowitz, for instance, argues that for Bataille violence is not only inevitable but is also desirable as the most powerful entry into the sacred, and that the normative implication of his thought is, therefore, that we should seek to substitute "less damaging acts for the more violent alternatives", because "violence is the only key we have to the experience of the miraculous, of the sacred". This conclusion is, however, too quick, and assumes that only violence can offer insight into natural horror. There are plenty of indications in Bataille's texts that there are non-violent practices that can generate intimacy with horrific nature.

In some of his less cited works, particularly the second and the unfinished third volumes of The Accursed Share, Bataille repeatedly emphasizes that certain forms of culture are valuable because they are capable of invoking the sacred. Indeed, sacred desire is the basis for the arts: "If human life did not contain this violent instinct, we could dispense with the arts." (LE 60). Not all art possesses the power to invoke the sacred. Art is "authentic" or "sovereign" when it is not reducible to utility and is capable of offering a window into the sacred realm, capable of producing a "suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment" (AS III 200), of responding to the desire "to lose ourselves—tragically, comically—in the vast movement where beings endlessly lose themselves" (AC II 109). The most powerful incarnation of this desire is the desire to glimpse the violent squandering at the heart of nature. The highest forms of art are, therefore, those that produce "derangements" and "laceration" in the mindset of everyday life, exposing the "wound" of human existence, the ceaseless circulation of anonymous life (LE 68). In this moment of laceration, we glimpse and experience the continuity between horror and ecstasy. For example, in "the most engaging" iterations of the "authentic" novel the protagonist embodies the virtues excluded from the world of utility, glory, splendour, prestige, and exhibits a disregard of utility that gradually leads him to his own destruction (AS II 107). The reader takes pleasure in his anguish, "in the feeling of loss or endangerment it gives us" and experiences the lure of ruination (AS II 106). It is the ability of art to represent and invoke the horror of the natural world that leads Bataille to claim that it is possible for literature to be the "principal heir" of religions and sacrifices: "this longing to lose, to lose ourselves and to look death in the face, found in the ritual of sacrifice a satisfaction it still gets from the reading of novels" (AS II 106). Both sacrificial practices and authentic novels are enactments of a crime against the everyday world (AS III 106). It is possible, then, for culture to be a viable heir to sacrificial rites, a naturalized means of satisfying sacred desire. For this reason, Bataille flirts with the idea that surplus resources could be poured into cultivating culture (AC III 429). Not only would this provide outlets for the investment of sacred desire, but this would also offer a solution to the pressing problem of how to spend the surplus resources that make up a society's accursed share: "We must seek exhaustion through rational means, as against the subjective means of the pursuit of rank and of war" (AC III 428). While this line of reasoning is not comprehensively worked out in Bataille's work, it is, nonetheless, a clear indication that there are more palatable methods for cultivating a meaningful intimacy with natural horror than resorting to violence itself.