Bataille and the Homology of Heterology

Abstract

‘Definition of Heterology’ illuminates sacred, heterogeneous experiences Bataille never stopped interrogating, in their throbbing movement of emergence. Furthering orthodox disciplines in the sciences of man, Bataille accounts for the ambivalent feelings of ‘attraction and repulsion’ at the heart of inner experiences that constitute the heart of his thought. In this paper, I further a mimetic line of inquiry in Bataille studies and argue that the laws of attraction and repulsion that animate heterology find their polarized foundations in the laws of the socius, which are also the laws of imitation understood in its heterogeneous – anthropological, ontological and psychological – manifestations. Paradoxically, heterology, while being the ‘science’ (logos) of the ‘totally other’ (hetero), may point toward an abyssal experience of a communicative homology that has the power to transform impure matters into pure spirits, angelic souls into material bodies.