“Beautiful as a wasp”: Angela of Foligno and Georges Bataille

Abstract

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a central figure within twentieth-century French avant-garde circles, yet the importance of his work for the study of religion is only beginning to be recognized. Between the First and Second World Wars, he not only edited journals(Documents, Acéphale)and engaged in literary and political movements, but also organized (together with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris) the College of Sociology, which attempted to bring the sociological methods of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss to bear on the study and pursuit of the sacred. Throughout his work of the 1930s, Bataille sought to reintroduce the sacred into modern industrial, secular societies, which, he argued, believed in God only insofar as they equated God with reason. For Bataille, the power of the sacred lies in its ambiguity and violence. Sacrifice and expenditure mark the antithesis of the instrumental rationality of modern bourgeois society; through sacrifice, then, new sovereign communities might be engendered. Religious questions, for Bataille, were irrevocably political. He thus attempted to theorize and to create a community without authority, one that might counter the authoritarian movements coming to dominate much of Europe in the 1930s.