The sacrificial practices Bataille celebrates sustain existing power relations.

Yet, in his celebratory discussions of sacrifice, potlach, and so forth, Bataille fundamentally misconstrues the historical and contextual parameters of such ritual practices. One could even go so far as to say that, in a certain measure, Bataille’s understanding of these phenomena succumbs to a type of “primitivism”: he decontextualizes the cultural practices he analyzes in order the better to incorporate them within his own theoretical agenda of his own critique of modernity. Here, Bataille seeks nothing less than “an anthropology that will itself provide a living – and orgiastic – myth to overturn, through its experience on a collective level, ‘modern’ sterile bourgeois society.”51 Bataille chooses to view sacrifice and gift-giving in the first instance as gratuitous, non-utilitarian, or, as he puts it, “having no ends beyond themselves” – but this is far from the case. While he is correct in characterizing such practices as related to the production of wealth, they are very much oriented toward the reproduction of existing relations of power. The act of human sacrifice as practiced among the Aztecs redounds to the credit of the sacrificer(s): it reinforces existing relations of authority, viz., the authority of those who are empowered to commission a sacrifice (in this case, the priests and aristocracy). It provides those in authority with a quasi-divine power to preside over life and death. In this sense, it is misleading to claim that sacrifice has no end beyond itself.