Georges Batialle: Writing the Sacred.
Sacrifice and violence in Bataille’s erotic fiction: Reflections from/upon the mise en abîme
Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons

My model suggests that violent energy is circumscribed in the first moment by Bataille’s image itself; the parameters of this image may be thus seen to contain the potential force of poetic violence. The limit against which this brutal force is directed (in the second moment) is formed by the boundaries delimiting received notions,5 be they those of God, of mother, of the eye or of any other signified; what is altered is the integrity of these notions as the energy of Bataille’s image—the acting body—exceeds the confines of its discursive parameters and collides against the parameters of the received notion, opening it and releasing its energy as body acted upon...(94)

After barricading the door, Sir Edmund rummaged through the closets until he finally lit upon a large chalice…

‘Look’, he explained to Simone, ‘the eucharistic hosts in the ciborium, and here the chalice where they put white wine.’

‘They smell like come’, said Simone, sniffing the unleavened wafers.

‘Precisely’, continued Sir Edmund. ‘The hosts, as you see, are nothing other than Christ’s sperm in the form of small white biscuits. And as for the wine they put in the chalice, the ecclesiastics say it is the blood of Christ, but they are obviously mistaken. If they really thought that it was the blood, they would use red wine, but since they employ only white wine, they are showing that at the bottom of their hearts they are quite aware that this is urine.12

In this passage, Bataille invites the reader to imagine a rite in which Christ’s sperm and urine are ceremoniously swallowed; the images of sperm and urine are used to violate the received notions of the host and Christ’s blood respectively; one sign violates another without, however, permitting either one to dominate the other. The value (or energy) of the received notions, once released, continue to reverberate in a loss that is not entirely subverted to the profit of the image inflicting sacrifice.

However, the mutilation and sacrifice effected by Bataille’s imagery does not always operate between signs. It may also be directed from signifier to signified within the boundaries of a single sign. There it is a question of Bataille setting a destructive reverberation in motion, a slippage by which the normally static objects of signifier and signified are disturbed into a movement upsetting their discursive equilibrium. This is the case of the slipping word, whose capacity for self-destruction or auto-mutilation (sacrifice) had been silenced by the straightjacket of discourse. The slipping word, the sign in reverberation, becomes, therefore, the site of a mutual antagonism, an antagonism between signifier and signified, which discursive language had silenced for the purposes and profit of project, and which Bataille sets off in a gesture of poetic violence.(97)