Literature and the Exigency

Abstract

Two fundamental propositions, elaborated for the most part in the years after the publication of his Somme athéologique, define Bataille’s initial concept of literature. Firstly, the basic notion of transgression, considered as the institutionalized violation of an ineluctable law — with the many complex conditions applied to this moment in an economic sense — is privileged by Bataille in a distant past or in a context foreign to Western culture. In his eyes, the history of Christianity in its solidarity with capitalism represents a progressive movement of institutionalized values in the direction of utility, work, and a “primacy of the future” grounded in comprehension and conservation. These values describe for Bataille a “profane” world of activity which is not interrupted in Western society by a sacrificial or in other way transgressive behaviour. Instead, the exigency toward transgression which had a legitimate place in other societies is specifically condemned in the culture of Christianity and capitalism.¹ This condemnation of transgression is, for Bataille, a banishment of the sacred from the world of religion or a profanation of religion itself. The result of this profanation for the citizen of the Christian society is an unprecedented solitude. No longer may he share with his community a ritualized form of dépense, for it is ultimately dépense itself that is outlawed by the advent and influence of Calvin. Since prohibition and transgression are understood by Bataille as complements, equal and equally ineluctable moments of human comportment, the solitude of the Christian becomes absolute. In this context, the exigency of transgression will take a new form: le mal.