The Politics of Sacrifice: Mel Gibson and Georges Bataille

Abstract

The Politics of Sacrifice: Mel Gibson and Georges Bataille Milo Sweedler W I L F R I D L A U R I E R U N I V E R S I T Y, W AT E R L O O , C A N A D A This paper analyzes Mel Gibson’s depictions of human sacrifice in Apocalypto and The Passion of the Christ in conjunction with Georges Bataille’s writings on sacrificial rituals in The Accursed Share, Inner Experience, and related texts. Gibson at the dawn of the twenty-first century, like Bataille in the middle of the twentieth century, contributes significantly to bringing sacrifice into our collective imagination. These two men share afascination with rituals of blood letting, running throughout virtually the entirety of their careers, which they squarely put, through their writings or their films, on the proverbial cultural map. The intersection of Bataille’s and Gibson’s interests in extreme violence is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in their portrayals of sacrifice in preColumbian Mexico. The filmmaker’s depiction of such aritual transposes onto the screen virtually image for image the account that Bataille proposes of Mesoamerican sacrificial rites in his writings. In both of their cases, moreover, the specter of sacrifice functions as avehicle to present their views of the society in which they live. Both men allegorize pre-Columbian sacrifice, exploitingittotheirownends.Theseendsare,however,aswewillsee,quite different. More generally, one might note the fascination that the two men share with the graphic depiction of particularly gruesome acts of torture, evi¬ dent in The Passion of the Christ, which Roger Ebert calls “the most violent film [he has] ever seen,” and Bataille’s obsession with the horrific photographs of the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li, aChinese man sentenced to death by Len^Tch ’e (cutting into pieces) during the Boxer Rebellion, which communicate, the theorist says, “to [his] knowledge, the most anguishing of worlds acces¬ sible to us through images captured on film” (Tearr205). Here again, the two men’s interests in depictions of extreme violence seem to converge. Yet, once again, this convergence renders all the more palpable the gap that separates the two men. Through acomparative analysis of Bataille’s and Gibson’s recourse to rituals of blood letting, the present essay brings into relief the specificity of the two men’s projects, thereby enabling us to appreciate the uses and abuses to which the specter of sacrifice has been put in our time. The Ongoing Fascination with Sacrifice As Marina Galletti brings to light in arecent article, aconcern with Mexico in general and Aztec sacrificial rites in particular “irrigates Bataille’s entire Intertexts, Vol. 11, No. 22007 ©Texas Tech University Press 1 5 8 I N T E R T E X T S corpus,” from “L’Amerique disparue” (Vanished America), Bataille’s first major article, published in 1928, to The Tears of Eros, the last book he writes, published in 1961 (Galletti 54; my translation). Bataille’s investigations of Mesoamerican sacrificial practices are complemented throughout his career by meditations on other images of torture and ritual murder, including, most famously, the hair-raising photographs of the execution of Fou-TchouLi . Denis Hollier locates the latter images, called the “hundred pieces' of which was given to Bataille by his analyst, Adrien Borel, in 1925—at the origin of Bataille’s literary endeavor: “One thing is sure: Bataille began to write tvith the image of the tortured Chinese man before him” (84). It is to the same images of dismemberment that Bataille returns in the closing sec¬ tion of The Tears of Eros, where he juxtaposes these photographs with an image of an Aztec human sacrifice dating to around 1500, which he had already included in the 1939 text of “The Sacred.” "Whether in the form of meditations on pre-Columbian sacrificial rites or through contemplation of photographs of aman being hacked apart alive, ritualized violence consti¬ tutes aparticularly insistent obsession in Bataille’s work, running through virtually the entirety of his career. Itherefore disagree with Patrick ffrench’s affirmation that “the revela¬ tions of the existence of the Nazi concentration and death camps in 1944-45 give rise to adisplacement in...