Their sacrifice is insignificant- can't change relationship to death

What Nancy admits is that “strictly speaking we know nothing decisive about the old sacrifice” and that “the Western economy of sacrifice has come to a close…it is closed by the decomposition of the sacrificial apparatus itself” (Nancy, 35). These confessions are significant because it indicates the fear that Nancy has of appropriating a symbol which has a remainder and a vector he cannot predict or control. What Bataille wanted from sacrifice was one thing, but Nancy fears that sacrifice carries its own valence. It is like the art that accedes to extinction, but suspends above it indefinitely. The force to accede to extinction is not guaranteed to suspend. The force that Bataille borrows from sacrifice is not guaranteed to behave in the way atheism dictates. Nancy reasserts that Western sacrifice always knew it sacrificed to nothing, but this latent knowledge makes the institution of sacrifice absurd, and Nancy is not willing to deny that sacrifice “sustained and gave meaning to billions of individual and collective existences” (Nancy, 35) What Nancy fears is this ignorance. He knows he does not understand the significance of the old sacrifice. If sacrifice was to no one and everyone knew it; why was and is it so universal and why have so many been tempted into believing its significance? But if one assumes that there is no one to whom one sacrifices, Bataille may not use sacrifice as the centerpiece of his philosophy because if sacrifice is not to anyone, it is not truly significant. If it is not significant or meaningful, it has no power. It becomes comedic. And it becomes massacre. That is why Nancy spends much of his time talking about the sacrifice of the Jews at Auschwitz. Without over-determining the significance, the sacrifice becomes a genocide or a holocaust. Bataille is trapped between two uncomfortable positions—let the blood continue to spill to make sacrifice real and significant and concrete, or deny the death the status of sacrifice, which in Bataille’s mind, would be to deny it realization. Nancy asks if Bataille’s “dialectical negativity expunges blood or whether, on the contrary, blood must ineluctably continue to spurt” (Nancy, 27). If Bataille spiritualizes sacrifice, it no longer has the power of real death, the concreteness of finiteness and the ability to rupture finitude. But if Bataille insists on the real death, he necessitates the constant spilling of blood in mimetic repetition until history is completed in the Sage