Water in Water: Bataille and the indifferent animal
Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield
Department of French and Italian
University of Colorado Boulder
Bataille is one of the few philosophers of the twentieth-century to have proposed a true
meditation on animals. Beasts of all kinds are present in the Bataillian oeuvre from the
obscene animals of L’histoire de l’œil to the frescoes of Lascaux. They inhabit his
fictions and are the privileged objects of his reflections on religion and art. Their
presence helps to explain the link between profane and the sacred as well as work and
play. It also provides one of the major tropes for man’s transgressions and is intimately
linked to both sacrifice and figuration. Animals are thus very important to Bataille, who
makes a true effort at understanding humanity’s relationship with the mysteries of the
animal world.
As Elisabeth de Fontenay has noted, however, Bataille’s conception of the
animal world is also strangely limited. As early as 1948, when his analysis of animality
becomes part of his anthropology of the sacred, Bataille understands animality only in the
context of an “elliptical meditation on immanence and sacrifice”. In his Theory of
religion, animal existence is reduced to an indifferent “immediacy” and understood solely
in terms of its sacrificial value. It is never examined for its potential subjectivity, and
communication with the animal world may happen only as a negation of the actual
individual animal. In Bataille’s oeuvre, thus, animals “offer us a truth that resists both
empathy and representation” (De Fontenay, 210). Bataille may confer upon them the
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prestige of the sacred but they remain, in his world and his texts, like “water in water”:
undistinguishable and indifferent.
I will study this contradictory presence of animals in Bataille’s work. What is exactly
Bataille’s forgetting of the animal in his Theory of religion? And why is this forgetting
necessary to the Bataillian anthropology of the sacred?
Except for a few passages found, here and there, in Lascaux’s collection of texts
and articles, Bataille wrote only one theoretical text on animal existence. It is a short
section entitled “animality” published as the first chapter of the author’s Theory of
religion. Written in 1948, this text remained unpublished until 1974. Bataille rewrote the
manuscript several times and included it in a 1953 project for a new edition of
L’Expérience intérieure, then, in 1961, in the “Dossier du pur Bonheur.” Several sketches,
designed to restructure the A-Theological Sum, planned to insert the section inside
putative books (books IV, V) which were to be added to the already existing volumes
(L’Expérience intérieure, Le Coupable, Sur Nietzsche), but were never written. These
various plans for the manuscript introduced, however, very little change to a text, which,
if one excepts a few variations introduced in the 1953 version, was never reworked.i
Once written, the manuscript itself remained unchanged, as did Bataille’s representation
of animality which stayed focused, all along, on the insistent – if not monomaniacal –
idea of « animal immanence ».
What is indeed striking in “Animality,” is the circular nature of the text, its
thematic and structural fixation on a thesis which Bataille himself calls “narrow” and
“questionable” (TR. 17): that of animal immanence or immediacy. The beginning and the
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conclusion of the section are purposely written with this immanence in mind. It structures
the argument, feeds the only metaphor of the text – that of “water in water” - and makes
way for a few select examples (eating and rivalry fighting) which the author himself
describes as “limited”. The only essay that Bataille devoted to the question of animality is
thus solely centred on an immanent vision of animal life, a vision in which beasts
disappear as complex beings and are simply described as undifferentiated.
It is true that Bataille’s immanent vision does not share the kind of indifference
that traditional philosophical texts harbor towards animals. He may talk about the neutral
immediacy of animal life, but he also attributes to beasts the depth of a secret existence.
And his intention is not really to present a theory about animal life but to analyse
animal’s role in the elaboration of the human sacred. Still, there is something problematic
about the fact that the Bataillian animal does not even benefit from this “ipseity” Hegel
himself granted it and which allowed it to be a “subject” i.e. a creature endowed with a
“feeling of self”.ii It is also puzzling that animals may be, for Bataille, the objects of our
fascination only if they disappear. For the Bataillian treatment of animals seems burdened
by the following paradox: in order for them to become part of our sacred world, it needs
to be annihilated: reduced to the neutrality of immanence or the status of sacrificial
victim. But what are we to do with this immanent and neutral animal? Is it much more
than a trope? And what does it really teach us about animals and the sacred.
In order to better understand this paradoxical approach to the question of animals
in Bataille’s Theory of religion, one has to understand its role in Bataille’s
anthropological system. The section entitled “Animality” is essentially a preface to a
human history in which the elaboration of the profane world is the decisive moment.
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Let’s start with this beginning of the human world, whose description remains very
classical in Bataille. Bataille borrows most of its conceptualization from a philosophical
tradition, which – from the Greeks to Hegel – interprets tools as the key to human
transcendence. The argument is well-known: the elaboration of the human world, that of
consciousness and intelligence, starts with tools, the fabrication of which defines the
domain of the discontinuous object by opposition to the continuity of natural things. The
“positing of the object,” says Bataille, is not given in the animal world. It is only given in
a human world where the fabrication of tools, which permits the creation of identical and
definite things, allows for the configuration of objective knowledge. “Having determined
stable and simple things, which it is possible to make, men situated on the same plane
where the things appeared (…) elements that were and nonetheless remained continuous
with the world such as animals, plants, other men, and finally, the subject determining
itself.” (TR, 31) In other terms and quite literally, things as well as subjects are fabricated
by tool making, by the ability they provide men to see the world and themselves from the
outside. Human transcendence is itself contingent upon a techn,e which introduces, in the
indistinct world of continuity (the natural world if you will), the discrimination and
discontinuity of the “object world”. It is this transcendence, which allows us to
differentiate between animal nature and the human world. It is also this transcendence,
which defines by contrast the undifferentiated nature which Bataille describes as an
absolutely immanent world. For Bataille defines animal immediacy as radically anterior
to all forms of objective or subjective elaboration. Contrary to Hegel who grants animals
a form of subjectivity, acknowledging that the animal which eats creates and maintains its
own sphere of existence by the assimilation of an exterior reality, Bataille sees nothing in
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animal eating but a quantitative difference in the natural flux of the energy. The beast,
says Bataille, does not objectify anything, not even what it eats. “The goshawk eating the
hen does not distinguish it clearly from itself in the same way we distinguish an object
from ourselves.” (TR, 18) Contrary to man who reifies the animal he kills, beasts remain,
with their prey, in an undifferentiated realm. They merge with a victim whom they
resemble. It is this confusion, excluding all qualitative difference, all hierarchy and all
autonomy, that Bataille calls “immanence”. Animals, he concludes, are “in the world like
water in water” (TR 19).iii
Viewed from the limited standpoint of Bataille’s anthropology, the analysis of
animality remains not only classical, but also regressive. It refutes the minor concessions
of Hegelian thought and only grants animals the continuous fluidity of an undifferentiated
existence. This reductive approach is all the more striking that Bataille does not only lock
animals away in their immanence, he closes off any communication with the human
world (except, as we will see, for sacrifice). His theory, which situates animals beyond
the grasp of scientific analysis, also places them outside the reach of the imaginary.
Indeed, the second textual moment of the section entitles “Animality” declares that
“nothing is more forbidden to us than this animal life from which we are descended” and
that poetic access is a “fallacy” (TR 20). Granted, this position will be modified in the
“Dossier du pur Bonheur” and rewritten in order to rehabilitate what the author calls the
“poetic fallacy of animality”.iv It is also true that this passage of the book is extremely
ambiguous insofar as Bataille situates, at the very heart of the inaccessibility of the
animal world, the depth of an “intimacy” familiar to men (TR 22). However, this
“intimacy” is placed beyond the reach of both science and poetry. In spite of its riches,
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poetry is only a way of substituting the “sticky temptation” of figures to the ignorance of
non-knowledge. It is not capable of grasping that which “is farthest removed from me,
that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to
me” (TR 22).
This critique of poetry is not surprising for Bataille. It is reminiscent of a general
contestation of the reductive power of the word present in the entire oeuvre. But this
contestation is more significant here insofar as it contributes to radicalizing animal’s
remoteness from man. The insistence of the author on the impossibility, both scientific
and poetic, to grasp animal immanence indicates that what is at stake in Bataillian
anthropology goes well beyond a simple philosophical refusal to grant beasts subjective
autonomy. It suggests that the aim of Bataille is not simply to deny animals the benefit of
transcendence but rather to deny man’s access to their immanence so as to maintain,
between animal’s meaningless universe and the world full of meaning devised by man,
the inviolable separation of the sacred. This sacred character of beasts is indeed essential
to a thought which, inverting the classical scheme of anthropogenesis, puts the sacred
back at the centre of human history and thought. Bataille, like Nietzsche before him,
inverts the traditional hierarchy of philosophical and Christian thought and, rather than
putting reason at the apex of our culture, sees, at the origin of our humanity, a Dionysian
nostalgia for the lost world of animal continuity. For the author, the primitive man sees
his own human world as the by-product of a more fully immediate existence whose
mystery has been emptied by work. Work does indeed structure and pacify human
existence. It gives each object its place in a world of means and ends, of subjects and
objects. But the animal world opens a much freer space, interwoven with terror and
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nostalgia. Its “continuity which is […] its only modality, offer[s] man all the fascination
of the sacred world, as against the poverty of the profane tool (of the discontinuous
object)” (TR, 35).
It may now be easier to understand why the Bataillian animal is bereft of
transcendence and exiled to the inaccessible domain of the immediate. If the animal
world is going to be synonymous with the sacred – i.e. a universe of lost intimacy,
anterior to utilitarian meaning and the limits of prohibition – then it is necessary that
animals be other than the objects they usually are for us (or the quasi subjects they are for
the philosophers). Their sacred continuity must be protected from any religious or poetic
contamination: that is to say from any objectification of sacred immanence. I cannot
follow with precision here Bataille’s careful demonstration of how a constant
contamination of the sacred world by profane categories is what gave rise to entities such
as spirits, gods and even a supreme being. These considerations are not essential for us,
but they explain by contrast the exclusive privilege that Bataille gives to sacrifice as the
sole access to immanence. For sacrifice, such as Bataille conceives of it in the wake of
Durkheim and Mauss, is a ritual act whose use is entirely negative and whose effect is
purely excessive. According to Bataille, the sacrificial operation does not produce or
invent – contrary to poetry for example. It does not add or exchange anything in the
world – contrary to other rituals whose function is more openly commercial. It does not
create anything either since its “action” is purely consumptive and consists in ritually
freeing victims from the object status they have in the profane world in order to reinstate
them to the sacred continuity of death. “When the offered animal enters the circle in
which the priest will immolate it, says Bataille, it passes from the world of things which
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are closed to man and are nothing to him, which he knows from the outside – to the world
that is immanent to it, intimate, known as the wife is known in sexual consumption
(consumation charnelle). This assumes that it has ceased to be separated from his own
intimacy, as it is in the subordination of labour” (TR, 44). To sacrifice an animal, then,
does not mean to destroy it, or to offer it in exchange for divine favours, nor does it mean
to appropriate its unknown existence ritually and spiritually. “The thing – only the thing –
is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of
subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of
unintelligible caprice” (TR 43). It allows us to compensate for the harm, domesticated
animals have suffered, and to enter, with them, in the “blinding night” where, freed from
the light of consciousness, we participate together in the unknowable truth.
Sacrifice is thus, for Bataille, a way to commune with an animal immanence,
which is both forbidden and inaccessible. The excess of sacrifice allows us to open onto
the immediacy of beasts ignored by a profane world of work (where animals are nothing
but things) and inaccessible to positive (poetic or religious) fictions of the sacred. This
moment of passage when “absence suddenly replaces presence” is the “expression of a
keen awareness of shared life grasped in its intimacy” (TR 48). It allows us to establish,
between the animal and the human world, the complicity of a shared refusal of the world
of things and of a common entry into immanence. Of course, the animal victim only
symbolically takes part in this ritual event. It is no more present in the sacred contagion
of his death than man is attracted to a limitless plunging into immanence (his own
sacrifice). As Bataille notes in “The Festival”, the conflagration of sacrifice “favours
human life and not animality; the resistance to immanence is what regulates its
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resurgence, so poignant in tears and so strong in the unavowable pleasure of anguish.
[For] if man surrendered unreservedly to immanence, he would fall short of humanity; he
would achieve it only to lose it and eventually life would return to the unconscious
intimacy of animals” (TR, 53). Man therefore only participates, partially (and
vicariously) to the sacred rituals it devises. Conversely, animals, which are lost in the
sacrificial killing, benefit only fictitiously from the ritual. Once dead, they are simply
subsumed into the sacred monologue of humans.
Although it may be unfair not to recognize, in Bataille’s theory of animality, a
symbolic rehabilitation of animals, it may be equally unjust not to underline the
problematic character of an approach where animals are rehabilitated only to be
sacrificed. Caught between an immanence in which they hide and the ritual death, which
annihilates them, beasts are, in Bataille, but variations on nothingness. And one wonders,
reading these texts, as seductive and nostalgic as they may be, where the animals have
gone. Where did their coats and snouts go? Where are these feathers and fins, flights and
jumps, which are an intrinsic part of animal existence and differences? Or, to phrase it
differently, using Bataille’s own vocabulary, where are, in the ocean of Bataillian
immanence, these waves which, although identical with one another, are also always
singular? Is it not the case that sacrifice’s deathly foray into immanence annuls what is at
the heart of the Bataillian metaphor of “water in water”, that is to say a flux, a rhythm
which does not simply involve a continuous « fluxus » (fuere, to flow) but also the
« fluctuare » (to float) of an alternative movement, involving both continuity and
oscillation, unity and difference?
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What is at stake here should be clear: any sacrificial conception of animality is
problematic, not simply because it raises the question of knowing if animals have access
to the sacrificial rites, if they participate in it, or even, as Elisabeth de Fontenay said, if
they benefit culturally and symbolically from it. It is problematic because it presupposes
the existential reduction of the very animal it purported to give back to the intimacy of a
sacred existence. The excessive sacrifice, which Bataille imagines, is always, in spite of
all its sacred excess, the economic manifestation of a negative appropriation of animal
existence. Not only does it lock up animals within the limits of our sacred obsessions:
death, anxiety etc., but it also wrenches them away from the complexity of their own
being – this fluctuating difference which they are in nature – to transform them into the
cruel and spectacular figure of our death. As if animal mystery was not in itself the whole
secret, as if the cruel “novel” of sacrifice was needed to pry into its secret.
Bataille, moreover, was clearly aware of this. The Theory of religion already
includes a very explicit critique of the restricted economy of animal sacrifice. It questions
its fundamental theoretical confusion: that of immanence and death. And the author
demonstrates very clearly how animal sacrifice is based on the fiction that killing is the
truth of immanence when it is simply “the opposite of that world of things on which
distinct reality is founded” (TR, 44-45). As Bataille says furthermore “death is nothing in
immanence”.v It is both nothing and everything. For “because death has no meaning,
because there is no difference between it and life and [because] there is no fear of it, no
defence against it, it invades everything”…but means nothing as well…(TR, 45). But if
death does not give us access to the intimacy of animal immediacy, if its sacrificial
mobilization is nothing but the figure of a negation of human reality, then sacrifice does
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not propose any real return to the intimacy of the animal world. It shows, rather, that
animals are, within our sacrificial fictions, negative metaphors allowing humans to
visualize the unknown.
Bataille’s lucidity concerning his theory of sacrifice remained ambiguous in this
text and in others. It did not prevent him from promoting the “seduction of this dying
animal god” until the end – up to L’érotisme and Les larmes d’Eros (O.C.X, 86). And it is
not in Bataille’s theoretical anthropology that one must search for something new. It is,
rather, in his study on the paintings of Lascaux of 1955, that Bataille will, beyond
sacrifice, another vision of animals. But that is another story, which we can explore may
be in the discussion.
Works cited :
Georges Bataille, Theory of religion, translated by Robert Hurley, 1992, Zone
Books, NY.
Hegel, L’Encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques, Philosophie de la nature, T.
2, Paris, 2004.
J.C. Bailly, Le versant animal, 2007, Paris, Bayard.
Elisabeth De Fontenay, Le silence des bêtes, la philosophie à l’épreuve de
l’animalité, 1998, Paris, Fayard.
The variations, which are found in the version of the “Dossier du pur Bonheur” are already
there in the 1953 text, which was to be inserted in the new publication of L’expérience
intérieure entitled “Le système du non-savoir”. The version of “Animality” present in the
Notes de la Théorie de la Relision, (O.C.VII, 602-605) also follows the text of 1953.
ii See the section on “Le Sentir” in L’encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques, Philosophie de
la nature, Tome 2, Paris, 2004, p. 336.
iii The exemplarity, which Bataille grants to the phenomenon of eating is not, despite
appearances, gratuitous. It allows the author to answer directly to Hegel’s theory in so far as
eating and digestion are, in the Phenomenology of the Spirit and the Encyclopedia, the first
elements in Hegel’s elaboration of animal subjectivity. For Hegel, the animal is a subjectivity,
existing in mediation and eating/digestion are the first negative actions which satisfy desire
i
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by destroying, transforming and assimilating the desired other (non-moi). Bataille, in
contrast, does not consider eating as mediation. It does not, for him, induce any primitive
subjectivisation by transforming the given. It is, instead, the place of a “constant flowing
from the inside to the outside and from the outside to the inside” and is, as such, a synonym
of spending. The example of Blake’s tiger, which Bataille gives in La Part maudite (“The
Accursed Share”) is, in this respect, enlightening. (see O.C. VII, 40) The Blakian tiger, a great
figure of predatory devouring, is not, at the top of the animal ladder, a beast which,
absorbing what he devours, reaches a kind of subjective sovereignty. For Bataille and Blake,
the tiger is, on the contrary the incarnation of a solar excess which consumes him. From the
point of view of a general zoological economy, Bataille’s tiger is a major trope of spending,
synonymous with animal immanence : a “flowing from inside to outside and from the inside
to the outside” which eating symbolizes.
iv It is the title of the third section of “Animality”.
v He also talks quite strongly about the “puerile unconsciousness of sacrifice”, saying that
“killing in the literal sense is not necessary” (TR, 45).
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