Abstract

The dissertation offers a reading of Georges Bataille's Somme atheologique, a collection of four important works published in the 1940's: l'Experience interieure, Methode de meditation, Le coupable, Sur Nietzsche. The reading is guided by three rubrics: sovereignty, communication, and death, showing that, for Bataille, sovereignty is not defined as a pure self-consciousness, identical with itself, nor defined in terms of political sovereignty nor bound with a dialectic of power or a dialectic of mastery and servitude. Rather, sovereignty is a contestation of the limits of experience as articulated in the structural complicity of taboo and transgression. In terms of these rubrics, Bataille articulates a conception of experience as ceaseless self-contestation, as refusal of arrest, as "voyage to the limit of the possible." This, he writes, is sole value and authority for the Somme atheologique. In showing the relationship of sovereignty, communi- cation and death, the dissertation focuses on the image of sacrifice which was so important for Bataille. Sacrifice is both affirmation and transgression of the limits drawn against death. Hence, in discussing sovereignty, communication and death in Bataille's work, the disser- tation researches the "sacrificial places" in the symbolic, epistemo- logical and ethical orders as places of rupture, of inutilizable excess with which the symbolic order is always and essentially in relation but which are irreducible to the symbolic order In researching sovereignty, communication and death, Bataille's texts move in a direction contrary to that of philosophical, scientific operations. These rubrics and the dialectic of taboo and transgression index this operation opening thought from the known to the unknown. These rubrics and the sacrifical drama in which they are condensed are pursued through three contexts: Bataille's reading of the Lascaux paintings, his reading of Hegel and Nietzsche, and finally, in terms of the Orpheus myth. Throughout, it is a question of language and the experience of limits and of the limits of experi- ence, of a radical, irreducible negativity sans emploi, not related to a higher positivity, of a communication and a violation, and of the relation of writing and reading with death