[In the following essay, Boldt-Irons examines Bataille's notion of sacrifice as it appears in his erotic fiction, notably the element of loss as experienced by the reader and the witness.]

The sacrifice that we consummate is distinguished from others in this way: the one who sacrifices is himself affected by the blow which he strikes—he succumbs and loses himself with his victim.

(L'expérience intérieure)

In both L'expérience intérieure and L'érotisme Bataille declares that his view of sacrifice is to be distinguished from that of others: his view entails the loss of the sacrificer and witness along with the victim, whereas, traditionally, the former are not lost along with the victim, for they profit from the latter's loss and return to continuity. It is this mutual loss of witness and victim in sacrifice that Bataille hopes to realize in his erotic fiction, but to effect a loss in both reader (witness) and fictional character (victim), he must avoid transforming this loss into a gain for the reader.

At the same time, however, Bataille's fiction cannot aim to provoke a loss in the reader that is so radical that the experience of sacrifice is ‘lost’ altogether. In other words, the sacrifice depicted in his fiction would in itself be ‘lost’ or would not properly constitute sacrifice if this loss were too radical to be recognized as such by the reader. Bataille's objective in representing sacrifice in his erotic fiction must therefore be to effect a loss in the reader that is neither fully lost (unrecognized) nor gained as a profitable experience. I argue in this chapter that he maintains this precarious balance between loss and gain in sacrifice through the idiosyncratic use of the mise en abîme in his fiction.

One will notice my deliberate alteration of the spelling of the word abîme, which usually appears as abyme in the phrase mise en abyme. This expression is used to describe, within a literary text, the repetition or doubling, in miniature, of structural or representational elements appearing in the larger context of the work itself.¹ An example of this technique might be the description, in a novel, of a painting which depicts, in miniature, events taking place within the larger framework of the novel itself. Similarly, the mise en abyme technique would be used if a character were to read a novel in which the events of its own fictional existence were to be depicted.

In using the phrase mise en abîme, I have deliberately altered the spelling of the word abyme, in order to reflect Bataille's particular use of this technique, for his use of it denotes both the well-known structural technique of framing or replication within a larger frame (usually identified as a mise en abyme) and the capacity of his images to deliver notions and fictional characters to loss in continuity, a mise en abîme, understood as a ‘putting into the abyss’. The complexity of Bataille's idiosyncratic use of the technique becomes apparent when one observes that the mise en abîme of characters and notions sets off a second mise en abîme in the reader or witness. There is, then, a structural mise en abyme of an initial mise en abîme, the difference in spelling separating the two operations and their different functions in Bataille's text. As will become clear, the function of this mise en abîme in Bataille's texts is to initiate in the reader a loss that is neither fully lost nor gained, but caught, rather, in the paradox of a simultaneous and impossible loss and gain.

This precarious balance between profit and loss becomes more apparent if one examines more closely the status of the self and its relative loss in the sacrifice depicted in Bataille's literary texts. In La littérature et le mal, for example, Bataille writes that one can only recognize or love oneself completely if one is the object of a condemnation: ‘man is of necessity pitted against himself and … can recognize himself … [or] … love himself completely only if he is the object of a condemnation’.² This act of self-condemnation implies the loss of discontinuous and limited selfhood. It implies the violation of a limit, a limit that facilitates the creation and contemplation of the discontinuous self, for, if François Wahl is correct, conscious knowledge, itself limited, is knowledge of the discontinuous and the limited.³ When the limits of the self are violated, however, one is able, writes Bataille, to recognize oneself completely [jusqu'au bout] in what he describes as a profound ‘accord with one's self’. Given that Bataille often situates this ‘recognition’ of self in a continuity always already at the basis of discontinuous being, it is clear that the ‘recognition’ and the ‘accord’ of which he writes elude the simple and strictly discontinuous contemplation of self that necessarily remains this side of an intact limit. This ‘accord with one's self’, this ‘recognition’—situated as they are, then, beyond the limits of conscious contemplation—can perhaps be best designated by what Klossowski has termed a ‘simulacrum of death’. Klossowski's term ‘simulacrum of death’ is, I believe, an appropriate designation of the impossible sacrifice to which Bataille aspires in his erotic fiction, for it is caught between the two extremes of radical loss (death beyond the simulacrum) and profit (consciousness of death, this side of the simulacrum). The ‘accord with one's self’, the ‘simulacrum of death’, are able to designate, at the limit of notional language, that loss of self that is neither fully lost nor gained in an experience of the impossible.

Such an accord, passing as it does through condemnation and sacrifice to a ‘sort of death’, requires and assumes violence in various forms and degrees of intensity. As in all sacrifice, there is violence in the brutal release of energy which accompanies the violation of the limit of the self, and in Bataille's erotic fiction there is also violence in the wounding and mutilation of self and other. Indeed, in this fiction, violence as the operative force of sacrifice generally falls into two categories: one associated with a radical release of energy, and the other arising from cruelty and injury inflicted upon an other. For the remainder of this chapter, I will be concerned primarily with the first category of violence, as it appears in the representation of sacrifice in Bataille's erotic fiction.

A consideration of this type of violence reveals that its brutal force promises both the potential for destruction, and an enormous release of energy in action. Bataille himself associated the words force and violence, for he viewed the latter as the unleashing of heterogeneous force which had been contained (in a gesture of violence) by the structures ensuring the stability of the homogeneous:

Violence, excess … characterize heterogeneous elements to varying degrees … Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or a shock. It presents itself as a charge, as a value, passing from one object to another.⁴

This association of violence with disruptive force leads me to propose a model for the operation of violence in Bataille's erotic fiction: this model suggests that it is necessary to stress two moments—the moment of destructive potential and that of the radical release of energy. The question arises, then, of the role of the limit vis-à-vis this brutal force and its two moments. In other words, does the limit not oppose this force in order for it to be recognized as such? In physical terms, force is present when a static body is compelled to change its speed or direction. From this definition of force, one might extrapolate the following: in a first moment, there would be within the acting body a potential to effect change, a store of energy which, when released in a second moment, would cause this change in the body acted upon. A limit would serve in the first moment to contain this energy within the acting body while another limit would serve in the second moment to provide a point of resistance—the surface of the body acted upon—against which the force of energy might be directed.

This model which I am proposing for the violent passage of energy between bodies or entities is complemented by another put forward by Bataille in La part maudite and in ‘La notion de dépense’. In those texts, Bataille situates such movements of exchange within a general economy, stating that an inevitable excess of energy within each discontinuous being exerts pressure upon its limits until it is unprofitably spent in either a glorious or a catastrophic fashion. If there is no relief for the pressure of this surplus energy, conflict and destruction may result, for outlets must be sought within the confines of limited space. Both this model and my own are useful in determining the extent to which Bataille's fiction, through its representation of sacrifice, initiates a loss in the reader that is neither fully recuperated as a gain, nor left unrecognized and therefore lost altogether.

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. In Méthode de méditation Bataille describes poetry as a sacrifice or hecatomb of words:

[Poetry] … is the power words have to evoke effusion, the unlimited dépense of its own forces; thus, to an already determined effusion (comic or tragic), sovereignty adds not only the rhythm and overflow of the verses, but the special capacity of the disorder of words to annul the ensemble of signs which constitutes the realm of activity.⁶

Yet despite Bataille's reference to a hecatomb of words, to an ‘annulment’ of signs, to ‘the unlimited dépense’ of energy, other questions inevitably arise, namely: once the limits of notions have been ruptured to permit a release of energy, what remains of this destructive force? What becomes of this energy once released, and what is the status both of Bataille's image and the sacrificed notion after the act of poetic violence? Do they both submit to unlimited loss, a loss precluding the possibility of profit? Or does one figure gain from the other's loss? The answers to these questions may be found in several passages of L'erotisme in which the violence of sacrifice is described:

The [sacred] is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's continuity: what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.⁷

While this passage suggests the acquisition of an experience on the part of onlookers whose lives are not lost in the sacrifice, the quotation at the beginning of this chapter specifies that Bataille views the sacrificer and the onlookers as not only witnessing the victim's return to continuity, but as returning to continuity along with their victims. In the context of the sacrifice of notions outlined above, the victim of sacrifice within the text is the discontinuous notion which is ruptured and returned to continuity. Bataille's image transgresses, in opening the notion to continuity, in committing the act of sacrifice.⁸ The energy which is released from the notion reverberates within the reader as a simulacrum of death, and what reverberates is a sense of transgression, in the return to continuity, in the fading of the notion. The limit of the notion does not, therefore, disappear altogether, for, as Foucault writes in his ‘Preface to transgression’, the limit is not annihilated in transgression, but remains to heighten the sense of transgression. Similarly, during the sacrificial act, the witness, who identifies with the victim, retains, despite the victim's rupture and return to continuity, a sense of its former integrity, in order that the sacrificial moment be heightened in transgression. The retention of the sense of the victim's limit or former integrity during sacrificial loss ensures that this loss not be lost, but suggests at the same time that this loss is ultimately gained as such. Bataille tries in his erotic fiction to approach the ‘impossible’ of a loss that is neither fully lost nor gained in sacrifice by engaging the reader in a mise en abîme. For the reader who witnesses the mise en abîme of a notion or a character through the representation of sacrifice, the experience of continuity, as it is triggered by poetic violence, appears as a simulacrum of death. Caught in this simulacrum of death, the reader and writer absorb the energy released from the initial sacrifice of a notion or a character, only to be later absorbed themselves in a subsequent mise en abîme of which they are the sacrificial victims, this second mise en abîme preventing the energy lost in the initial sacrifice of the notion from being transferred into a gain by the reader. Klossowski characterizes the moment of ‘communication’, which I would locate in this second mise en abîme, as one of complicity, which he distinguishes from the act of comprehension or grasping:

The simulacrum has an object entirely other from that of the intelligible communication of the notion: it is complicity … the simulacrum, aiming at complicity, arouses in one who experiences it a movement which can immediately disappear; and to speak of it will not in any way account for what has thus happened.⁹

Klossowski's discussion of the simulacrum ‘aiming at complicity’ can, then, be linked to Bataille's idiosyncratic use of the mise en abîme in his erotic fiction. The initial mise en abîme of a notion or a character sets off a second mise en abîme in the reader, who attains ‘complicity’ without either grasping, or failing to recognize, the representation of a sacrifice permitting a mise en abyme of a mise en abîme. Indeed, the reader both meditates upon the sacrifice of the discontinuous notion (a reflection upon its initial mise en abîme) and ‘experiences’ it as his or her own return to continuity (a second mise en abîme which affords reflection from the initial mise en abîme, since conscious reflection upon the latter is now problematic). It is this intentionally curious paradox of reflections (and their mise en abîme) that is the characteristic effect of Bataille's imagery. The latter entails a structural mise en abyme of an experienced and perceived mise en abîme, in which the fading of the notion and the self is both elusive and recognized.¹⁰

In the following passage from ‘Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice’, Bataille describes this paradox of reflections characterizing the mise en abîme of the witness as victim, a mise en abîme that neither sacrifices consciousness nor preserves its integrity:

The privileged manifestation of Negativity is death, but death in fact reveals nothing … for man ultimately to reveal himself to himself, he would have to die, but he would have to do it while living—by watching himself cease to be. In other words, death itself would have to be consciousness (of itself) at the very moment that it destroys conscious being.¹¹

Consciousness of the fading of consciousness without however bracketing this for consciousness—this is the ‘accord with one's self’ that escapes notional language, for notional language can only represent loss as a gain.

A further examination of the poetic hecatomb, or release of ‘notional’ energy described earlier, shows that it operates on several levels in Bataille's texts. It may be practised between signs, when one sign mutilates another. In Story of the Eye, an obvious example of the assault which Bataille's images practise upon the integrity of the notion occurs when the holy chalice becomes a receptacle for priestly urine:

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.

It is at this juncture that Bataille's own model for the exchange of energy is useful as well, for in his description of the conservation and expenditure of energy, conflict arises from the pressure of energy straining against imposed limits. It is as if Bataille, in violating the limit protecting the signified from the energy of the signifier, opens the latter to destructive expenditure, thus freeing it from the pressure incurred by its restricted use in the designation and preservation of meaning. As my model suggests, this force of energy, no longer limited within the signifier, is directed against the limit of the signified, opening it in turn to release in an expenditure that is neither radically dissipated into loss, nor recuperated into gain.

The words silence and God are privileged examples of slipping words, whose reverberating signifiers rupture the limits of their corresponding signifieds, in order that their energy be released. In both cases, it is the integrity of the signified that is mutilated, it is its store of energy that is sacrificed: in other words, the intact image of the signified provides the limit against which the energy of the signifier is released in a movement of force:

I will give only one example of a ‘slipping’ word … [Silence] is already, as I have said, the abolition of the sound which the word is; among all words it is the most perverse or the most poetic: it is the token of its own death.

(IE [Inner Experience], 16)

The word God, to have used it in order to reach the depth of solitude, but to no longer know, hear his voice. To know nothing of him. God final word meaning that all words will fail further on.

(IE, 36)

As the sign reverberates in automutilation, the reader is aware of the fading of the signified (its sacrifice) which entails the fading of its corresponding signifier (the sacrificer is affected by the blow that it strikes). What remains of this energy? Derrida writes of the sovereign operation as a reduction of, not to, meaning. Like Klossowski, he has recourse to the term ‘simulacrum’:

This sliding is risky … It risks making sense … In order to run this risk within language, in order to save that which does not want to be saved—the possibility of play and of absolute risk—we must redouble language and have recourse to ruses, to stratagems, to simulacra.

(WD, 263)

To save play and risk as that which does not want to be saved and to lose the identity of non-meaning as that which wants to be saved from the sovereign operation—one risks all the more a slippage between these two possibilities if one considers that the presence of reader and writer are put in question, in play, for what is also mutilated in poetic violence is the integrity of the writing and reading self. Bataille's objective is to target these entities as those to be emptied in communication, engaged as they will be in a mise en abîme that pre-figures a loss neither gained (which would mean saving the identity of non-meaning) nor lost (which would mean losing play and risk as that which does not want to be saved). As author, Bataille presides over the sacrifice of notions, but this is a sacrifice to which he as poet/executioner risks succumbing, since he bears these notions within and becomes the site for their mise à mort:

I rely on God to deny himself, to loathe himself, to throw what he dares, what he is, into absence, into death. When I am God, I negate him right to the depths of negation.

(IE, 131)

The world, the shadow of God, which … [the] poet … himself is, can suddenly seem to him to be marked for ruin. So that the impossible, the unknown which they are in the end, are revealed.

(IE, 155)

For me the words ‘I will die’ are suffocating …¹³ But when, how will I die? Something that others, no doubt, will know one day and that I will never know.

(LC [Le Coupable], 342)

The reader is invited, through the violence of Bataille's imagery, to witness sacrifice—in the first case, that of the notion of God and ultimately of the poet himself; in the second, that of Bataille as he imagines his death. These are sacrifices which risk condemning the reader as well who, as guilty observer, or voyeur, becomes the executioner, in imagining the poet's succumbing to sacrifice. As guilty observer, the reader or voyeur becomes, in turn, a victim whose identification with the poet as victim lost in continuity provokes his or her own loss in continuity. As victim, the reader risks falling from the precipice of the page's edge into a mise en abîme:

I write for one, who, entering into my book, would fall into it as into a hole, who would never again get out … poetic existence in me addresses itself to poetic existence in others … I cannot myself be ipse without having cast this cry to them. Only by this cry do I have the power to annihilate in me the ‘I’ as they will annihilate it in them if they hear me.

(IE, 116)

It is this very construction of the text as ‘hole’ or ‘abîme’ that allows Bataille to pull the reader into the textual space of his writing, where the former joins him, lost with him in continuity.¹⁴ Pulled into the abyss, the reader's loss is neither lost (forgotten) nor transmuted into profit, but inhabits the impossible space where the experience of sacrifice is neither recuperated nor left unrecognized.

Given the energy required to effect this sacrifice or loss in the reader, it is not surprising that the theoretical texts of La somme athéologique should, at various breaking points of the text, expose a writing in the first person in order to lay bare the cry capable of initiating this loss:

The third, the companion, the reader who acts upon me … it is he who speaks in me, who maintains in me the discourse intended for him … even more than [project, discourse] … is that other, the reader, who loves me and who already forgets me (kills me), without whose present insistence I could do nothing, would have no inner experience … I tolerate in me the action of project in that it is a link with this obscure other sharing my anguish, my torment, desiring my torment as much as I desire his.

(IE, 61)

In cases such as these in which Bataille seems to address his reader in a reverberating mise en abîme, it is the limit of the poet's ‘I’ that is violated; the energy that is thereby released is a force that encounters the limit of the body acted upon, the reading self: as this second limit surrounding the reading self is violated, as the reader succumbs to the pull into the ‘hole’ of the text, the energy contained within the reading self is released. An emptied notion, the reader's violated self is no longer able to take its bearings vis-à-vis its own intact limit. It is therefore no longer ‘pitted against itself’ in an inner division that had previously ensured the self's integrity, be this a superficial and fallacious integrity which is ruptured in this accord with the self. Through the contagion of poetic violence, then, the self risks loss in continuity—‘a sort of death’—that, since it permits profound recognition while eluding conscious contemplation, constitutes a loss that is both elusive and recognized. This complex and multi-faceted, multi-layered mise en abîme operates, therefore, on both an intra- and extra-textual level: there is the reverberation within the boundaries of the sign or slipping word which Bataille had set in motion in a gesture of poetic violence. There is the violence which the image inflicts upon the sacrificed notion. The energy, the vibrations released from the sacrifice of notions and signifieds, from the opening of images, signifiers and characters, are not entirely dissipated or lost, for they are now echoed and enclosed in a reverberating mise en abîme moving from writer to reader and back again in an ever-deepening cycle. The author/executioner sacrifices notions and characters, a mise en abîme that returns to sacrifice him. The reader/voyeur/witness becomes an accomplice in the sacrifice—identifying with an initial mise en abîme which returns, in a mise en abîme of a mise en abîme, to sacrifice him or her. This intentional sacrifice of reader having been achieved, the author re-emerges as sacrificer. This reverberation and loss between and in signs, between and in writer and reader renders the position of the critic problematic at the very least, for as witness to this mise en abîme of a mise en abîme, he or she is also subject to risk: that of succumbing in turn to the contagion of sacrifice reflected and multiplied in the Bataillian text.

The problem for the critic becomes that of maintaining critical distance, there where the mise en abîme of Bataille's texts suggests succumbing to its reverberation. If this distance, necessary for critical activity, is maintained, does the critic necessarily finish by writing of this writing and by being restricted to a reflection upon it? Does the critic, in other words, betray the sense of (and refuse the invitation to) Bataillian sacrifice by using notional language (which always translates loss into gain) in order to describe and react to the ramifications of an experience in reading: that of a loss which, ‘ideally’, is simultaneously and paradoxically a loss and a gain, Bataille having tried to privilege neither in his own texts? In L'expérience intérieure, Bataille writes of the ‘absurdity of reading what should tear one apart to the point of dying and, to begin with, of preparing one's lamp, a drink, one's bed, of winding one's watch’ (IE, 37). In this case it is Bataille's reflection upon the possibility of a mise en abîme (the possibility of the impossible) that almost renders the impossible impossible:

And ecstasy is the way out! … The way out? It suffices that I look for it: I fall back again, inert, pitiful: the way out from project, from a will for a way out! For project is the prison from which I wish to escape (project, discursive experience): I formed the project to escape from project! And I know that it suffices to break discourse in me; from that moment on, ecstasy is there, from which only discourse distances me—the ecstasy which discursive thought betrays by proposing it as absence of a way out.

(IE, 59)

In lieu of a response to the question of the critical distance to be maintained in the face of Bataille's invitation to sacrifice (for this response can, in the end, only be determined individually and personally in the space of the precipice pre-figuring the ‘(w)hole’ of Bataille's text) I will simply refer to Bataille's own practices when confronted with the difficulty of writing about the impossible. He himself had several ways of escaping from the prison of discourse in order to allow the contagion of violent energy to reverberate in a profound mise en abîme. There are the repeated attempts to undermine his own discourse in his more theoretical books (Bataille sacrifices his own notions and presides over their loss in continuity, echoing the strategy put forward in L'abbé C. by Charles in his reflection upon the mise en abîme of Robert's writing—‘The only way to compensate for the fault of writing is to wipe out that which is written’). It is as if Bataille occupies the positions of Robert and Charles in his situation both inside and outside of the mise en abîme housed by his theoretical texts.

It is true that Bataille's own mise à nu in his theoretical texts also allows him to set off the mechanism of the mise en abîme in his readers and critics, for he aimed repeatedly to engage them in a mise en abîme of his own mise en abîme. If one absorbs the energy released by his imagery, one's reading and writing may reverberate in a movement in and between the various mises en abîme of his texts. Despite the attempt to maintain critical distance, one then risks losing the possibility of effecting solely a reflection upon texts which have incessantly aimed to engage the reader and critic in a reflection from a mise en abîme. In the end, it is perhaps the curious paradox of reflections from and upon the mises en abîme of Bataille's text that would solicit a different kind of critical writing, one that would no longer diminish the heterogeneous force of Bataille's writing by subverting it to the strictures of discursive writing, but that would allow the latter to surpass itself, to put its own notional language into question through a response to the various mises en abîme and mises à nu of Bataille's erotic fiction and philosophical texts.

Notes

1. For a good study of the technique of the mise en abyme see Bruce Morrissette's ‘Un héritage d'André Gide: La duplication intérieure’, Comparative Literature Studies, June 1971, 125-42. See also Lucien Dallenbach's book-length study of the subject, Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme, Paris, Seuil, 1977.

2. Bataille, La littérature et le mal, Oeuvres complètes (OC), V, Paris, Gallimard, 1979, 193. All translations mine throughout the chapter, unless otherwise specified.

3. François Wahl, ‘Nu, ou les impasses d'une sortie radicale’, Bataille. Direction: Philippe Sollers. Colloque du 29 juin au 9 juillet 1972 à Cerisy-la-Salle: Vers une révolution culturelle: Artaud, Bataille. Coll. 10/18, no. 805. Paris, Union générale d'éditions, 1973, 218.

4. Bataille, ‘The psychological structure of fascism’ in Visions of Excess: Selected writings, 1927-39, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. leslie Jr, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 142, 143.

5. In this discussion, I have chosen to use the term ‘notion’ to occupy the position of body acted upon and ‘image’ to represent the sacrificial agent or acting body. This distinction is supported by dictionary definitions which define ‘image’ as ‘a representation to the mind by speech or writing’. This relative lack of qualification suggests that an image is not tied to established connotations and has the potential to transgress limits through poetry and unconventional language uses. The word ‘notion’, on the other hand, is defined as ‘a general concept under which a particular thing or person is comprehended or classed’ (suggesting relative stasis, adherence to established connotation and the strictures of predetermined language use). In his ‘Discussion sur le péché’, Bataille uses the term ‘notion’ as something whose limits he aims to open: ‘I set out from notions which normally enclose certain beings around me and I played with them … Language fails, because language is made up of propositions which cause identities to intervene … one is forced to open notions beyond themselves’ (‘Discussion sur le péché’, OC, VI, 349, 350). Finally, Klossowski's distinction between the simulacrum and the notion is revelatory here: ‘The simulacrum is all we know of an experience; the notion is only its residue calling forth other residues … The notion and notional language presupposes what Bataille calls closed beings … it is evident … that, dependent on the notion of identity … the opening of beings or the attack on the integrity of beings … are developed like a simulacrum of a notion’ (‘A propos du simulacre dans la communication de Georges Bataille’, La Ressemblance, Marseille, Editions ryôan-je, 1984, 24, 25, 26 (article referred to hereafter as AP)).

6. Bataille, Méthode de méditation, quoted in Michèle Richman's Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, 70. Translation and emphasis Richman's.

7. Bataille, Eroticism, trans M. Dalwood, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986, 82.

8. Derrida describes the sacrifice of notions occurring in Bataille's text as the mutation of the meaning of concepts: ‘the same concepts, apparently unchanged in themselves, will be subject to a mutation of meaning, or rather will be struck by (even though they are apparently indifferent), the loss of sense towards which they slide, thereby ruining themselves immeasurably. To blind oneself to this rigorous precipitation, this pitiless sacrifice of philosophical concepts, and to continue to read, interrogate and judge Bataille's text from within “significant discourse” … is assuredly not to read it’ (Writing and Difference, trans. Allan A. Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 267 (text referred to hereafter as WD)).

9. Klossowski, AP, 24.

10. It would be very difficult, and no doubt distortive, to try and establish a temporal schema for the paradox of reflections from and upon the mise en abîme. In Inner Experience, Bataille writes of a cycle of reversals or slippages from points of knowledge to non-knowledge:

    NON-KNOWLEDGE LAYS BARE.

    This proposition is the summit, but must be understood in this way: lays bare, therefore I see what knowledge was hiding up to that point, but if I see, I know. Indeed, I know, but non-knowledge again lays bare what I have known. If nonsense is sense, the sense which is nonsense is lost, becomes nonsense once again (without possible end).

    (Inner Experience, trans. L. A. Boldt, Albany, State University of New York Press, 52: text referred to hereafter as IE)

    Derrida writes of the instant which ‘slides and eludes us between two presences; it is difference as the affirmative elusion of presence’ (WD, 263). Libertson prefers to maintain that there is tension between two conditions, a tension which he qualifies as impossible, the impossible. This defines an ipseity ‘whose closure is both absolute and uncertain’. The paradox stems from the fact that discontinuity always ‘contains more than it can contain’; it ‘must escape its limits’, but ‘cannot escape its limits’. For Libertson, transgression is both an activity, a dépense, and a form of cognition (J. Libertson, ‘Bataille and Communication: savoir, non-savoir, glissement, rire’, Sub-stance, 10, 1974, 50).

11. Bataille, ‘Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice’, OC, XII, 336.

12. Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans, J. Neugroschel, London, Marion Boyers, 1979, 61, 66.

13. Bataille, Le coupable, OC, V, 365 (text referred to hereafter as LC).

14. The mutual loss of reader and writer in continuity and their respective power to precipitate the other into a common mise en abîme implies, for Bataille, their shared strength and vulnerability. This union of writer and reader is, of course, ideal and corresponds to what Bataille had hoped would occur through his literature. For an excellent commentary on feminist responses to Bataille's imagery, see Susan Rubin Suleiman's chapter ‘Pornography, transgression, and the avant-garde: Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil’ in Subversive Intent, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1990.