Special Section: Bataille and Heterology

Theory, Culture & Society

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The Politics of Religious ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276417719325

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Georges Bataille and

Religion
Eugene Brennan
The American University of Paris

Abstract
The recent publication of a new translation of On Nietzsche invites renewed consid-
eration of one of Georges Bataille’s most intriguing and complex texts. This work
was originally situated within La Somme athéologique, Bataille’s unfinished project for a
set of texts exploring the paradoxes of religious atheism. These texts are often
consumed with a religious fervour and seem far from the explicitly political consid-
erations of Bataille’s anti-fascist texts in the 1930s, or from the more measured
analytical tone of The Accursed Share. However, as some critics have suggested,
these texts have a political significance of their own. This review essay will thus
consider the tensions between Bataillean perspectives which put more weight on
either the ‘political’ or the ‘religious’ as modes of analysis. It begins with an analysis of
On Nietzsche before moving to a broader thematic discussion of religion in several
recently published texts related to Bataille. The central question posed in the latter
half of the article is the following: how can Bataille’s thought be deployed to theorize
the religiosity of contemporary capitalism?

Keywords
Georges Bataille, capitalism, excess, Nietzsche, politics, religion

La Limite de l’utile
Georges Bataille,
preface by Mathilde Girard
Paris: Éditions Lignes, 2016

Corresponding author: Eugene Brennan. Email: ungeee@gmail.com

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

On Nietzsche
Georges Bataille,
trans. Stuart Kendall
New York: SUNY Press, 2015

Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion

Edited by Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall
New York: Fordham University Press, 2015

Capitalisme et djihadisme
Michel Surya
Paris: Éditions Lignes, 2016

The titles of Georges Bataille’s books are often misleading. Inner

Experience, for example, does not deal with any stable notion of self-
present experience. The ‘experience’ it does gesture towards is not
entirely focused on the interior either: it aims to break apart the particu-
larity of individual subjects and transform them into different forms of
ecstatic communication with the outer world. Similarly, On Nietzsche,
now available in a new translation by Stuart Kendall, offers us very
little commentary on Nietzsche. Written largely in the form of diary-
like entries and aphorisms, it attempts rather a kind of communication
with Nietzsche, an idiosyncratic rewriting of his work, or as Kendall sug-
gests in his translator’s preface, ‘an attempt to be more Nietzschean than
Nietzsche’ (2015: xviii). Inner Experience and On Nietzsche are two of the
major works in Bataille’s La Somme athe´ologique [The Atheological
Summa], an (anti-)project for a collection of works exploring the para-
doxes of a religious atheism. This series of works holds a singular place in
Bataille’s oeuvre. Written during the Second World War, the often-febrile
tone and immersive writing style contrasts with the more reserved, even
scholarly tone we find in later Bataille works.
Additionally, in contrast to Bataille’s anti-fascist political writings of
the 1930s, these texts demonstrate a turn away from an engagement with
the political to more explicitly religious questions. However, Kendall,
like many critics, views this turn as a continuation of the political by
other means. The ‘political’ import of On Nietzsche is not an abstract
theme. The politicizations of Nietzsche’s thought, as well as the fact that
Bataille’s writings on Nietzsche took place within the context of occupied
France, are themes which are overtly referenced throughout the book.
Kendall notes how Bataille’s preface ‘situates the work as one of ethical
and political philosophy, or rather, more pointedly, as an antifascist
work written under conditions of enemy occupation, which is to say as
a book written as a covert act of war’ (2015: viii). The tension between
viewing the world in either religious or political terms will be examined
Brennan 3

here across several recently published Bataille(an) texts. Before moving

to a broader thematic discussion, this new version of On Nietzsche invites
closer consideration of what this particular text tries to do.
Bataille makes clear that this book is primarily preoccupied with ‘moral
concerns, of the search for an object whose value sweeps all others away’
(2015: 3). He does not always adhere to the Nietzschean terminology, but
it is clear the he is concerned with a confrontation of nihilism through
transvaluation. For Bataille, the sacred gives access to an experience of
the incommensurable, to a value which appears to sweep away all values.
We normally associate moral concerns with moral ends. However,
Bataille’s critique of traditional morality targets this orientation towards
an end, the subservience of the present towards the future. The challenge
he sets himself is to communicate a sense of morality liberated from this
logic. For Bataille, true ethics takes place ‘independently from a moral
goal’ (2015: 4–5). This conception of ethics thus shares in the logic of
sacrifice: it exceeds representation and it exceeds quantification. Most
accounts of ethics position moral thought as a restriction against excess.
But for Bataille, and this is a view broadly shared with Lacanian thought,
ethics is fueled by excess energy. True ethical behavior comes from com-
pulsion, and even burning desire. Ethics is an excess for Bataille.
The uniqueness of this engagement with Nietzsche is the total lack of
interest in the question of power. Nietzsche is commonly perceived as the
philosopher of the will to power, but for Bataille he is the philosopher of
evil. Nietzsche’s work is used as a departure point to develop a vision of
morality starting from an unusual account of evil. The starting point is
the observation that morality does not simply reject evil but depends on
it. ‘The killing of Jesus Christ is held by Christians as a group to be an
evil’ (p. 42) Bataille writes. The contradiction at the heart of Christian
morality is the following: the crucifixion is a sin, a crime that wounds the
Christian God. The guilty ones who share in the responsibility for this act
of evil are not only the Romans doing the physical deed. In Christian
logic, the fault falls on all humans, and all Christians share in this guilt.
‘Pilate’s executioners crucified Jesus but the God that they nailed to the
cross was put to death in sacrifice: the agent of the sacrifice is the Crime
that sinners have committed infinitely, since Adam’ (p. 32). This shared
guilt is not something that can be simplistically rejected in Christian
redemption. Bataille argues that guilt and sin are precisely what enable
communication, universalism and shared Christian values. If human
beings had not sinned, if they had not shared in the guilt of the crucifixion,
they would have persevered in isolation: humans on one side, and God on
the other. For any ‘communication’ or ‘communion’ to take place, there
had to be a moment of ‘laceration’, that of the crucifixion. In Bataille’s
schema, what binds us together is what tears us apart: ‘Thus the ‘‘com-
munication’’’ without which, for us, nothing would exist, is assured by
crime. ‘‘Communication’’ is love, and love defiles those it unites’ (p. 33).
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

This leads Bataille to describe man’s role in the crucifixion as ‘the

summit of evil’. But it is precisely this evil which gives us access to ‘com-
munication’ with one another, to some experience of universalism. This
means that ‘the absence of ‘‘communication’’ – empty solitude – would
be without any doubt a greater evil’ (p. 33). The absence of evil, then,
would seem to deny any possibility of not only religious but political
belonging. It would be an apolitical state of solitude. The consideration
of evil is thus clearly in terms of its structural role. Bataille is not neces-
sarily advocating acts of evil and is certainly not interested in simplistic-
ally championing a morality of evil. For example, he rejects general
criminality because crimes are usually committed not for an embrace
of the disorder they introduce into reality, but rather for ‘interests’,
and these illegal ‘interests’ do not hold any attraction beyond more
‘elevated’ or legitimate interests. There is still a narrow subservience to
selfish and utilitarian ‘interests’. For Bataille, a morality is valuable to
the extent that it entails putting oneself at risk. Bataille’s evil thus entails
renouncing any subservience to future interests, whether it be the promise
of Christian redemption or the material gains of pseudo-transgressive
criminality. In deconstructing traditional moral dualisms, Bataille
notes how the ‘good’ is associated with conservation, with maintaining
the existing state of things, while evil is associated with destruction.
The ‘good’ is thus what keeps humans separate as it maintains and con-
serves them in their isolation, while the destructive force of evil opens the
possibility of communication. If the good is associated with the ‘existing
state of things’, evil at times looks like an (anti-)political necessity in
Bataille’s schema.
One of the problems with evil, even within this framework, is that
it comes from a position of egotism and, despite efforts to the contrary,
it very often cannot help some adherence to a recuperative logic of ‘inter-
ests’. Even if we are thinking of ‘evil’ as a necessary part of communi-
cation, this recuperative logic of using evil for our ‘wellbeing’ is
problematic for Bataille. Evil becomes a strategy of communal self-help.
Morality here serves a utility. ‘This morality is less a response to our
burning desires for a summit than a barrier opposed to these desires’
(p. 43). This does not mean that evil should be embraced in and of
itself. Bataille is inviting the reader, rather, to recognize evil’s unavoid-
able place within moral systems. Bataille’s desire is to communicate a
morality beyond good and evil, a morality which does respond to ‘our
burning desires for a summit’. This moral orientation entails different
poles of ethical value, those of ‘decline’ and ‘summit’. Bataille valorizes
the ‘summit’ which corresponds to excess, and to ‘tragic intensity’: ‘It is
linked to limitless expenditures of energy, to the violation of the integrity
of beings. It is therefore closer to evil than to good’ (p. 32). In contrast,
‘decline’ corresponds to moments of exhaustion when beings try to
‘conserve their waning energy’.
Brennan 5

These ethical poles are not states of being but rather moral orienta-
tions. This is because the ‘summit’ is seen as synonymous with the impos-
sible. We cannot exist in any extended state of ‘limitless’ expenditure. The
summit names a desire for the impossible, which always ‘slips away from
us’ (p. 50). Just as the summit is ultimately the inaccessible, the exhaus-
tion of ‘decline’ is inevitable. We strive for one and strive to avoid the
other. The consequences of this slippery conception of morality are that
it cannot be defined without being betrayed. Bataille notes of Nietzsche
that ‘with just cause he thought that one cannot define something that is
free’ (p. 166), and the same applies to Bataille’s work here. The freedom
of the summit is bound up with its elusiveness and instability. To defini-
tively situate it would irrevocably compromise that promise of freedom.
The form of the book On Nietzsche itself thus reflects the incomplete
nature of the morality of which it speaks. It is not a programme for a
new moral order but an invitation to the reader to discover hypermor-
ality immanently. It does not necessarily propose an entirely new order of
the real but attempts to punch holes in the already existing order of the
real.
On Nietzsche was written during the final months of Nazi occupation
of France in 1944. It was the final publication of Bataille’s Somme athe´o-
logique. Many critics have expressed frustration and disappointment with
subsequent work, more sober, with much less of the religious fervour
found throughout the Somme athe´ologique. The reception of Bataille
has often been divided between those, such as Nick Land, who celebrate
the excess and rhetorical animus of Bataille’s earlier work, and those,
such as Jean-Luc Nancy, who have a more ‘sober’ reading of Bataille,
particularly based on an engagement with Bataille’s postwar critical read-
ings. This split in how Bataille has been read has a special relationship to
the theme of sacrifice. Bataille’s valorization of sacrifice appeared to
reach its zenith in 1939 when, in an exceptionally strange moment in
French intellectual history, he expressed his desire to enact a human
sacrifice as part of the secret society Acéphale. His texts from the
period reflect this belief in sacrifice. From that period onward, his atti-
tude towards sacrifice was often more tempered, even implicitly critical.
The logic of sacrifice implies a communion with death, a philosophical
monism and a nostalgia for presence. By contrast, many of Bataille’s
later texts more often stress the ultimate impossibility of such commu-
nion. The themes of the impossible and of the irresolvability of worldly
tensions come to have greater prominence in his thinking, bound up with
a generally more cautious critical attitude.

The Limits of Self-Loss

The Michel Surya-directed Éditions Lignes have published a work of
Bataille’s which will make a significant contribution to this split tension
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

in Bataille scholarship. La Limite de l’utile was previously only available

in the Oeuvres comple`tes, but this is the first time it has been published as
an independent text. Written during the war, like On Nietzsche, and
bearing an even more religious fervour in tone, its appearance invites
renewed consideration for this previously neglected work, particularly
for the provocative introduction by Mathilde Girard. The book, and
Girard’s contextualization of it, appear to be unequivocally aligned
with the Bataille of unfettered excess, religious fervour and sacrifice. It
has until now generally been understood as a fragmented, abandoned
version of The Accursed Share. Its presentation in this new edition says
this is only a partial truth and invites the reader to consider it not as a
germinal version of The Accursed Share, but as an alternative version. To
give readers a brief reminder of The Accursed Share, it argues for a
reconsideration of social life from the perspective of excess. It starts
from the premise that the sum of energy produced by humans or
organisms is always surplus to the requirements of reproduction.
Excess non-productive energy is evident in domains of life as varied as
non-procreative sex, religious sacrifice, and war. Bataille argues for a
thinking through of this excess in a manner that would harness the lux-
urious potential and thwart the possibility for destructive violence.
For example, Bataille spends considerable time thinking about polit-
ical solutions to avoid violence and expresses his support for the
‘dynamic peace’ of the post-war Marshall Plan. In contrast to such
sager analyses of The Accursed Share, there does not seem to be much
political sobriety or rationalism evident in La Limite de l’utile. It appears
to be a much less reasonable text, much more subjective and troubling,
closer to the themes of the major texts of the 1930s. Girard argues that
the subtitle of La Limite de l’utile [The Limit of the Useful], ‘Fragments
d’une version abandone´e de la Part Maudite’ [‘Fragments of an abandoned
version of The Accursed Share’], was an error on the part of the editors of
the Œuvres comple`tes because it associates the two texts far too quickly.
While the first part of the text contains the essentials of what would
become The Accursed Share, the second part is closer to Sovereignty,
and even more explicitly ‘religious’ works such as Guilty and Inner
Experience. The manuscript should then be considered as a ‘fragment
autonome’ (2016: 14), whose conclusions of the economic analysis
follow a different direction from that of The Accursed Share.
Like On Nietzsche, the book conceives of morality as being driven by
human compulsion, as fuelled by excess forces. In the treatment of sac-
rifice, Bataille acknowledges the influence of French sociology, but he
distinguishes his perspective. Where French sociology gives a coherent
account of the effects of sacrifice, in fomenting social links between men,
it does not tell us what forced men, what compelled them, to religiously
kill each other (2016: 134–5). For Bataille, the religious fervour comes
from a desire for communication with the other bound up with a will
Brennan 7

towards self-loss. However, the focus on Dionysian self-loss is proble-

matized by the fact that his account of the self is not a stable or coherent
entity. Bataille draws the parallel between a social being and an individ-
ual being, but reminds the reader of the fragility of the compositional
nature of our being. The idea of a ‘collective consciousness’ is not entirely
consonant with the principles which make of consciousness an indivisible
moral entity. But Bataille takes issue with the concept of an indivisible
moral entity, just as he takes issue with stable conceptions of ‘being’ or
the ‘self’. Existence cannot be seized statically or in isolation. This poses
problems for sacrificial self-loss. If the limits of the self are not clearly
definable, and characterized by instability and flux, then how can any self
be definitively negated? Bataille writes that ‘chacun des nous doit se livrer
sans cesse à la perte de soi – partielle, totale – qu’est la communication avec
autrui’ (p. 140) [‘Each one of us must constantly deliver ourselves to the
loss of self – partial, total – which is communication with the other’].1 The
hesitation between ‘partielle’ and ‘totale’ is revealing, but what is even
more crucial is that the ‘perte de soi’ [‘loss of self’] is something worked
towards ‘sans cesse’ [‘constantly’]. If we must work towards it constantly
then this underlines Bataille’s awareness, and his desire to make the
reader aware, of the fact that complete self-loss or total self-destruction
is not possible. This means that there is a persistent antagonism embedded
in the desire for the impossible (a tempting but, as Bataille was aware,
deeply problematic desire for pure self-loss). Bataille concludes this pas-
sage on the contradictions of self-loss by noting that rather than living in
the face of abstract dualistic oppositions, we live them, are constituted by
them and embedded in them. The alternative between existing as stable,
isolated individual selves or existing in pure immanence with the world is
impossible and irresolvable, but it is not an abstract consideration: ‘c’est le
combat qui mènent notre eˆtre et notre mort . . .’ (p. 140) [it’s the combat
which leads our being and our death . . .’].
The sense of ‘combat’, of thought thinking against itself, desiring two
antithetical trajectories at the same time, is present throughout these
passages. From this perspective, Girard’s preface somewhat overlooks
the impossible antagonisms and dualisms that persist in Bataille’s think-
ing in favour of a sacrificial Dionysianism. For Girard, this text suggests
that Bataille was not as quick to turn away from the sacrificial logic
informing Acephale as is often claimed. She writes that:

‘S’il est vrai que Bataille avait alors quitte´ l’ambition de former une
communaute´ et souffrait l’abandon de ceux qui l’avaient, avant guerre,
accompagne´, La Limite de l’utile semble contredire l’hypothe`se qu’en
entrant dans l’expe´rience inte´rieure Bataille ait ce´de´ sur ce qui faisait
pour lui le sens (mortel) d’une communaute´. (p. 19) [If it is true that
Bataille had then given up on the ambition to form a community
and suffered the abandonment of those who had accompanied him
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

before the war, The Limit of the Useful seems to contradict the
hypothesis that in entering into inner experience Bataille had
ceded on that which constituted for him the (mortal) meaning of
a community’].

Given the ultimate impossibility of self-loss as mentioned both in this

text and throughout other contemporary writings on inner experience,
Girard somewhat exaggerates the importance of ‘mortal’, sacrificial com-
munity for Bataille. Her positioning of this text as a more autonomous
and singular work than has been considered is certainly justified, as well
as being provocative, but the importance of the text within Bataille’s
wider oeuvre, and the orientation towards sacrificial Dionysian self-loss
within the text, are overstated points. The tendency to unequivocally
embrace Dionysian self-loss and religious fervour is a reading orientation
that often leads in not only reactionary directions but can also reduce the
complexity of the text and lead to a nostalgia for presence, despite claims
to the contrary. The subject of ‘inner experience’ is not simply eradicated
but is transformed in a process of interrogation. Some semblance or trace
of a subject remains. Bataille writes in La limite de l’utile:
‘Personnellement, je ne suis rien aupre`s du livre que j’e´cris: s’il communique
ce qui m’a brule´, j’aurai ve´cu pour l’e´crire’ (p. 143) [‘Personally, I am
nothing before the book I write: if it communicates what burned me,
I will have lived to write it’]. The negation of the self before the content
communicated is followed, and potentially undermined, by the weight of
a writing subject, a subject who is ‘brule´’ [‘burned’], but a subject who is
not simply extinguished in the communication, an ‘I’ who endures in the
act of writing. Bataille repeatedly aims for targets which he hyperbolic-
ally negates: the negation of language in an experience of the sacred, a
negation of the self in immanence with the world, a negation of literary
discourse in favour of real life.
Taken on their own, these negations would be reactionary and simplis-
tic. What makes Bataille’s work interesting is the way in which these neg-
ations are accompanied by a consciousness of fraught contradiction, a
consciousness that the act of negation is compromised by its contamin-
ation in what it seems to be negating, and a negotiation of the sense of
betrayal that emerges from these insights. In this regard, Girard asks the
right question in the preface: what is a book that its author would not have
written had he followed his lesson to the letter? What is a book that should
not exist, according to its own internal rules? As Girard is well aware,
however, and Bataille makes clear in the text itself, ‘le livre lui-meˆme est peu
de chose s’il est restraint à quelque domaine isole´, comme de la politique, de
la science ou l’art . . .’ (pp. 143–4) [‘the book itself is not much if it is
restrained within an isolated domain, such as politics, science or art . . .’].
But Girard, despite gestures to the contrary, ends up pushing the text
towards an isolated domain of its own. She notes that where The
Brennan 9

Accursed Share focuses on the Marshall Plan and the contemporary

world with a political and economic perspective, La Limite de l’utile:
‘de´vie e´trangement en son milieu vers le sacrifice, rejoignant le mouvement
(la de´pense) qui decide de l’e´criture de l’expe´rience. Les considerations
politiques ne tiennent plus à côte´ d’un exhortation à vivre à hauteur de
mort’ (pp. 14–15) [‘deviates strangely in its milieu towards sacrifice, re-
joining the movement (expenditure) which decides the writing of the
experience. Political considerations no longer hold alongside an exhort-
ation to live at the height of death’]. It is as if Girard wishes to separate
the religious and the political, embrace the former and evacuate the
latter. But surely what is stimulating about what Bataille is doing is a
writing which communicates the embeddedness of the religious within
the political and suggests, inversely, that religious fervour is not simply
apolitical. The apparent contortions and theoretical dead-ends Bataille
arrives at through religious thinking conversely engender moments where
the impossible seems possible. In religious experience, this means that the
anguish and paradox of trying to communicate a non-discursive experi-
ence of the sacred through written discourse becomes constitutive of the
very ‘experience’ which appears to elude writing’s grasp.
Writing becomes part of the experience, as it becomes clearer that
language is not so easily negated. The same consciousness of impossibil-
ity paradoxically gives rise to fresh perspectives when Bataille is focused
on more explicitly political considerations. For example, in On Nietzsche,
Bataille notes the strange moments of clarity and liberation that can be
found within political pessimism: ‘It is a strange paradox: if one perceives
the profound absence of escape, the profound absence of goal and mean-
ing, then – but only then – the mind liberated, we approach practically,
lucidly, practical problems’ (2015: 225). A sense of liberty is found within
restrained limits, and a sense of the impossible can be a source of
dynamic intensity. In other words, Bataille’s negations and hymns to
loss (self-loss, and other kinds) are almost always accompanied by an
internal conflict. And a consciousness of the impossible is not a de-libi-
dinizing retreat from the excesses of immanence: an attentiveness to the
impossible, and to the anguish compromising Bataille’s negations, is a
generator of an intensity of its own, as well as being a marker of philo-
sophical maturity.
In this regard, Bataille suggests, in both La Limite de l’utile and On
Nietzsche, that the texts themselves should be considered as acts of war.
In the notes to On Nietzsche, comprehensively translated by Stuart
Kendall, Bataille writes: ‘this book resembles tanks abandoned in their
essence and through combat, half destroyed in the field. It is immobile,
mute, vain testimony to impotent efforts’ (p. 295). The emphasis on
destruction is that it is always incomplete, only ever half-way there.
Similarly, as previously noted, an internal ‘combat’ animates the move-
ments of La Limite de l’utile (2016: 140). This means that even religious
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

moments of intoxication have a political import, a sustained sense of

antagonism with and against the world. La Limite de l’utile and On
Nietzsche both seem to be texts with a primarily religious thrust, but
the texts’ self-conception as acts of war display a deep political tension
that persists within religious intensity. The rest of this review article will
elaborate upon a number of recent critical publications which attempt to
think through, following Bataille, these tensions between political and
religious intensity.

Politics in a Different Key

The tension between understanding the world in religious and/or political
terms is given close consideration in the recently published collection
Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion. The
book is less concerned with defining religious studies than disrupting it.
It aims to use a Bataillean methodology, a generalized contamination
where no discourse or perspective exists statically in isolation. In this
regard, the volume often interrogates how much weight can be given
to the political in Bataille’s thought, a mode of thought which often
seems to be much more explicitly religious. Bataille was one of the ear-
liest and most important interpreters of fascism to read it as a religious
phenomenon in political disguise. Inversely, many Bataille scholars have
noted that in Bataille’s own trajectory, the increasingly religious tone of
his writings can be viewed as having a hidden political dimension of its
own. As the editors Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall note in their
introduction:

Just as Bataille’s seeming turn away from political engagement for

the private realm of inner experience and mysticism has been ana-
lyzed as politics from another location and in a different key, this
volume’s attempt to transform the politics of the academic study of
religion should be understood as politics per se, as an attempt to
render more viable by rendering more visible, the excessive explo-
sive power of the sacred, with its creative cataclysmic affects and
desires. (2015: 17)

A particularly interesting exploration of the interpenetration of the

religious and the political comes in Jean-Joseph Goux’s article in this
collection, ‘Georges Bataille and the Religion of Capitalism’. Goux
develops a reading of Bataille’s religious theory as inseparable from his
conception of economy, placing the notion of secularization at the heart
of his analysis. Bataille analysed the effects of secularized modernity in
The Accursed Share, where he highlighted the historical rupture between
the religious expenditures and ostentations of feudal life and the con-
trasting utilitarian rationality of bourgeois modernity. In this respect,
Brennan 11

Bataille follows Max Weber’s analyses of the effects of the Protestant

Reformation on capitalism, and the side-lining of religious life for more
‘productive’ life increasingly centred around work. This apparent side-
lining of religion, however, raises the question of whether capitalism
becomes an all-encompassing religion of its own. Goux asks whether
economists have become priests and considers whether this religion is
in line with Bataille’s analysis, or if it contradicts it. It is clear that reli-
gious and Christian values were not simply historically liquidated but
were fulfilled and incorporated within the economic. Capitalism became
a form of religion.
Goux refers to Kant’s account of religion as not simply being defined
by worship of God but as a practice based on the fulfilment of duties
towards others and oneself: the adherence to particular ethical codes and
rituals is in some ways more religious than a priori belief, and thus the
rituals and imperatives pushed by contemporary capitalism constitute a
religion. Goux develops this line of analysis with reference to Walter
Benjamin, who ‘sees in capitalism the most worship-oriented religion
that has ever occurred. Though devoid of dogma and theology, the utili-
tarian practices of capitalism (production, selling and buying, investment
and financial operations) are equivalent to worship – or, better are a form
of worship’ (p. 113). It is more terrifying than other religions because
there is no expiation of guilt: the poor are inherently guilty and must live
with this guilt, as well as with the constant threat of further damnation in
the form of debt and unemployment. If we were to follow through on
Benjamin’s argument, considers Goux, then it would be useless to search
for religious phenomena of any significant scope in the capitalist world
because capitalism itself would be the only dominant and powerful reli-
gion (p. 111).
Bataille comes close to Benjamin’s interpretation in certain moments
of his work. Even in La Limite de l’utile, for example, he writes: ‘. . . de
meˆme que l’Église voue l’homme à Dieu, mais plus efficacement, la socie´te´
bourgeoise voue l’argent au capital’ (2016: 50) [‘. . . just as the Church
devotes man to God, but more effectively, bourgeois society devotes
money to capital’]. Goux describes Bataille’s view of capitalism as a
religion in which ‘god is growth for growth’s sake’ (2015: 114).
However, for Bataille, the sacrifices of capitalism do not resemble the
sumptuous sacrifices of accumulated wealth in pre-modern societies, and
capitalism’s suppression of unproductive expenditure is a suppression of
religious experience which Bataille mourns. Since capitalism is motivated
by a logic of ‘return’ on ‘investment’, rather than a sense of ‘loss’ and
unproductive expenditure, Bataille does not see it as inherently religious
or as the return to immanence he takes as the marker of religious truth.
The question of how Bataille’s analyses relates to the contemporary
world is made more complex by Goux’s development of the distinction
between two capitalisms – a ‘first’ capitalism, which he characterizes
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

as ascetic, and a ‘new’ capitalism, ‘which is dominated by the unleashing

of consumption’ (2015: 107). Here Goux is clearly developing some of the
arguments from his 1990 article, ‘General Economics and Postmodern
Capitalism’, where he similarly argued that postmodern capitalism bears
an uncomfortable resonance with Bataillean desire. In contrast to ration-
ality and the Protestant work ethic, contemporary capitalism is charac-
terized by a championing of entrepreneurial risk and an irrationality that
appears close to the kind of unproductive expenditure desired by Bataille.
However, this would be to take the aesthetics and ideology of postmod-
ern capitalism at face value. Far from a Bataillean sense of unproductive
expenditure, the experience of contemporary capitalism for most people
is one of grim subservience to work, and often austere and diminishing
standards of living.
Where Goux’s 1990 article perhaps granted too much faith in the
aesthetics of postmodern capitalism, this article is more attentive to
contradictions. He points to Daniel Bell’s analysis of a key contradiction
in contemporary capitalism: ‘between a puritan ethic of hard work and
soberness on the one hand and a permanent appeal to consumer satis-
faction on the other, satisfaction that makes possible, but also necessary
from a certain point, the capitalist production itself, as a requirement of
its unlimited development’ (2015: 118). As Goux notes, capitalism is not
entirely ‘homogeneous’. Goux reasserts the ongoing critical value of
Bataille’s work in the face of contemporary capitalism by looking at
the split tensions and contradictions in both Bataille’s analysis and cap-
italism itself. Thus, while it has religious features and partakes of a reli-
gious logic, for Goux and Bataille, the experience of contemporary
capitalism is not truly religious: ‘This burning quest by Bataille, for a
proper terrain of religion, outside the sphere of things, outside the sphere
of economy, outside labor, bears witness that for him capitalism is not
able to be a religion. There is a shortage’ (p. 121).
A curious omission from the Negative Ecstasies collection is the
absence of any essay dealing with Islam. Bataille wrote on Islam in sev-
eral texts, most extensively in The Accursed Share. His engagement with
Islam was significant and unusual for a French thinker at this historical
moment. However, his characterizations of the religion are problematic:
he describes historical Islam as a ‘conquering society’ whose internal
logic has a greater militaristic dimension than other major religions.
Bataille’s comments on Islam warrant renewed interrogation and critique
today, especially in our current reading moment when Islam is
weaponized to such a huge extent in the context of global jihadi terror-
ism. Michel Surya has engaged with some of these issues in his recently
published essay-length book Capitalisme et djihadisme. As Bataille’s
biographer, and given that his analyses here of Islam, capitalism and
jihadism all show the explicit influence of Bataille, Surya’s book deserves
consideration as the concluding section of this essay.
Brennan 13

Capitalism and Jihadism

Jihadism, according to Surya among others, appears to be the only hori-
zon of revolt with any geopolitical weight in the contemporary world. In
the geopolitical imaginary, it appears to occupy the void left by Soviet
communism. Surya’s essay is an attempt to think through these set of
oppositions, informed by a Bataillean perspective on the identification of
what is political and what is religious in this configuration. Surya begins
by highlighting the increasing tendency for capitalism, which appears to
be political, to be instead interpreted, quite justifiably, as religious.
Conversely, jihadism wishes to be taken at face value, as religious, but
it is becoming more common to read it as a political phenomenon. As has
been pointed out by a wide range of specialists, a significant number of
jihadists are recent converts to Islam. ‘Radicalization’ almost never takes
place in mosques but is more likely to occur online, in prisons or in other
social spaces. Jihadi terrorists often display poor understanding of Islam
and little piety in their private lives, often indulging in petty crime, drugs,
alcohol and other lifestyles completely dissonant with any Islamic fun-
damentalism. The manner in which jihadi terrorists arrive at a religious
world view thus seems to be far more heavily shaped by political factors.
For Surya, capitalism has reached a religious stage of political radic-
alism precisely since the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of communism
(2016: 16–17). It is because of capitalism’s religious radicalism that it
gave birth to its own enemy in the form of jihadism. The pseudo-tele-
ological world view of the neoconservatives was actually an eschatology,
exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, according to
which globalized capitalism had emerged as an historical victor with no
more serious opponents. If this was any kind of victory, it was clearly
pyrrhic, and Surya rightly underlines how neoconservatism and radica-
lized capitalism bear major responsibility for a new ‘the´o-te´le´o-apocalyp-
tisme islamiste (le djihadisme)’ (p. 17) [‘theo-teleo-Islamist-apocalypticism
(Jihadism)’]. When we think of the apocalyptic discourse of ISIS, of the
fact that hostages are dressed up in orange jump suits and presented in a
manner deliberately referencing the inmates of Guantanamo Bay, and of
their own appropriation of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis originally
advocated by neoconservatives, it is clear that Surya is hitting on an
important point: that jihadism, currently embodied in the form of
ISIS, attempts to replay the past 25 years of geopolitical history, but
on their terms, asserting their own more nightmarish ‘end of history’.
Capitalism and jihadism are not simply antithetical, as Surya shows,
and can accommodate with each other quite well. He makes a compari-
son with the structural tension and simultaneous congruity between
Nazism and capitalism in this regard (pp. 30–1). Developing this com-
parison with reference to Bataille and Hans Meyer, Surya points out that
capitalism is not simply a rationalism in opposition to either jihadism or
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

historic fascism’s irrationality or barbarism. He points to the Nazis’

combination of both the ferociously anti-modern and modern, and
although he does not give many examples of this in relationship to jihad-
ism, he clearly has in mind the combination of the archaic, for example in
the form of decapitations, and their exploitation of modern technology
and social media. Fascism and jihadism do not simply return to pre-
modern or pre-capitalist ways of living: they are products of capitalist
modernity, within which they remain embedded.
Jihadism appears to offer alienated youth the religious fervour and
meaning lacking in capitalism, and in this regard Surya makes further
comparison to Bataille’s analysis. He points to the following passage
from ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’:

Until our times, there had only been a single historical example of
the sudden formation of a total power, namely, the Islamic
Khalifat . . . Just like early Islam, fascism represents the constitution
of a total heterogeneous power whose manifest origin is to be
found in the prevailing effervescence. (1985: 153, referenced by
Surya, p. 47)

Surya leaves these provocative lines in isolated quasi-aphoristic form but

does make his own controversial comments, treating contemporary
concerns around Islamophobia in dismissive terms. He writes: ‘le XXIe
sie`cle n’est en effet pas moins fonde´ à eˆtre ‘‘islamophobe’’, que le XVIIIe à
avoir e´te´ ‘‘christianophobe’’’ (p. 38) [‘the 21st century is no less justified in
being characterised as ‘‘Islamophobe’’ than the 18th century had been
‘‘Christianophobe’’’]. This is a misleading and false equivalence, lacking
in historical specificity. Christians were not a minority group in 18th-
century Europe and were not treated as such, whereas Muslims in
Europe today are viewed as a minority and are thus far more susceptible
to be racialized according to their religion. The attempt to downplay
Islamophobia does not hold. Furthermore, in passing, Surya dismissively
equates ‘anti-islamisme’ and ‘islamophobie’ where he writes: ‘On lit que
l’anti-islamisme (ce qu’on appelle en France: l’islamophobie) serait provi-
dentiel, sinon pour le capitalisme du moins pour l’État’ (2016: 47) [‘One
reads that anti-Islamism (what people in France call: Islamophobia)
would be providential, if not for capitalism at least for the state’].
This is highly misleading. ‘Anti-islamisme’ generally refers to an
opposition to political Islam, an often highly justified opposition to the
manipulation of Islam as part of a political project. Islamophobia, by
contrast, is a clearly racist manifestation that targets Muslims as a popu-
lation. In France in particular, the increased presence of Islamophobia is
undeniable and unjustifiable. The original 1905 laı¨cite´ law aimed to guar-
antee the liberty of individuals to practise religion freely and targeted the
state: the state must bear the burden of religious neutrality. Today, laı¨cite´
Brennan 15

is weaponized in an anti-libertarian, governmental manner that dispro-

portionally targets Muslims. To be opposed to Islamophobia does not
mean one defends the tenets of the Islam religion. It means, rather, that
one defends the rights of Muslims to practise their religion with the same
freedom as anyone else.
So Surya’s provocative essay shows us the rich basis in Bataille’s
thought for critically engaging with the religiosity of politics and the
politicization of religion in the contemporary world, but it also reminds
us that there is much in Bataille(ean) attitudes to, and understanding of,
Islam that remains to be interrogated beyond the scope of this review
essay. An unsatisfactory account of Islam and Islamophobia risks com-
promising the otherwise stimulating confrontations between Bataillean
thought and contemporary geopolitics in Surya’s work and beyond.

Note
1. Translations throughout the text are my own.

References
Bataille G (2016) La Limite de l’utile. Paris: Éditions Lignes.
Bataille G (2015) On Nietzsche. New York: SUNY Press.
Bataille G (1985) The psychological structure of fascism. In: Visions of Excess:
Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Biles J and Brintnall K (2015) Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study
of Religion. New York: Fordham University Press.
Goux JJ (1990) General economics and postmodern capitalism. Yale French
Studies 78: 206–224.
Surya M (2016) Capitalisme et djihadisme. Paris: Éditions Lignes.

Eugene Brennan teaches English and Comparative Literature at The

American University of Paris and the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Paris 3. He recently completed his PhD thesis, The Anglo-American
Reception of Georges Bataille: Readings in Theory and Popular Culture.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section,
‘Bataille and Heterology’, edited by Roy Boyne and Marina Galletti.