The key terms of this study are ‘violence’, ‘victim’ and ‘image’. Each may be interpreted as they occur in the context specified. Broadly speaking, for the inflection Agamben wishes to place on them – largely in light of the thought of Walter Benjamin – the most important aspect of both violence and the image is covered by the term, ‘mediality’, which can rendered as ‘pure means’ in relation to violence, and as ‘acclamation’ in Agamben's study of government based on Guy Debord's notion of the ‘society of the spectacle’ (Debord 2006), where social relations are said to be mediated by images. As will become evident, it is the place and status of the victim that, with Agamben, remains ambiguous. ‘Homo sacer’ – the one who can be killed without this being homicide or a sacrifice – is never referred to by Agamben as a victim. Moreover, the precise motivation for the homo sacer's death is difficult to discern, other than to clarify the nature of the absolute power of sovereignty.

If Nietzsche's philosophy – supposedly so influential for Bataille – links the status of the victim to morality in general and to Christianity in particular, this is in order to show, it will be argued, that ‘saving’ the victim from the persecutor is, for Nietzsche, to rally against life – understood in the fullest sense as the biological, cultural and social being of the human. With Bataille, by contrast, the victim looms large. Indeed, Bataille's thought is consumed by the being of the victim. Bataille is thus to this extent against Nietzsche.

In the work of Bataille and Girard, by contrast with Agamben, violence becomes manifest because it has an object: the victim of violence. Violence and victim are thus inextricably bound together – in sacrifice and torture, in the case of Bataille, and in relation to the scapegoat, in the case of Girard. We could almost (note the nuance) say that with Bataille and Girard, there is a valorisation of the victim.

With Bataille, image and victim are not connected in a systematic and general way, but in an incidental and more or less contingent way: in the caves of Lascaux, for example, and in the paintings of Edouard Manet. It behoves us therefore to provide an analysis of these themes that is as illuminating as possible.