Introduction

This chapter aims to determine the nature of the victim and the role of violence in the thought of Georges Bataille. We will see that for Bataille, violence is inextricably linked to a victim. Consequently, access to Bataille's notion of violence occurs primarily through the travails of the victim – the victim in sacrifice, for example.

According to Giorgio Agamben, however, Bataille does not recognise that it is in fact ‘bare life’ (i.e., homo sacer) that is at the heart of sacrifice (see Agamben 1998: 112–113). The reason for this, Agamben says, is that Bataille, by invoking the prohibition against killing, can only interpret killing as a transgression of the law, whereas, as we shall see in the discussion of Agamben in Chapter 3, the killing of homo sacer occurs outside the province of the law, in a space where the law ceases to have any effect. Thus, homo sacer cannot be sacrificed. And Agamben is quite tranquil about this. Transgression, on the other hand, presupposes a return to the law as the centre of prohibition. Transgression could not be realised without the law.

A different interpretation of Bataille would propose, then, that Agamben does not recognise the victim at that heart of violence. For in terms of its etymology, ‘victim’ derives from the Latin, victima, which means ‘sacrificial offering’. Homo sacer cannot be sacrificed and therefore cannot be a victim. If there is no victim, there is no executioner. Consequently, it would make no sense to fight on behalf of homo sacer. Bataille's approach to the victim, which respects its sacrificial origins, thus intimates that the term, ‘victim’, can be understood to be a secularised version of a religious term. As such, Bataille makes a contribution to political theology and, therefore, it can be argued that his insight into this theme is more profound than Agamben’s.

However, Agamben is correct on one point: Bataille does follow the ‘anthropology of his day’ (112) in accepting the division between sacred and profane. Indeed, the latter opposition is central – as Hollier (1990: 131) first observed – to Bataille's dualistic materialism.