Sacrifice in Hegel and Bataille

Abstract

This article aims to oppose and expose the notion of sacrifice in the philosophies of religion of the thinkers Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Hegel (1770-1831) and their relationships, commenting on how the reading of Hegelianism made by Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) shaped Bataille's interpretation of Hegel's philosophy. Bataille builds a thought about sacrifice that constitutes a response to Kojève's Hegel, more precisely, a way of resisting the work of negativity. In the Kojevian reading of Hegel, man is characterized as a death that lives a human life, having negativity as its guide. Sacrifice would be the answer to this tearing, because it is in it that there is the full movement of death: the sacralization of something profane, the identification of the sacrificer with the sacrificed and the spectacle. However, Bataille's conception of death is antithetical to Hegel's: the latter considers death as the holder of meaning, while the former considers it as the destroyer of meaning. Sacrifice in Bataille would thus make possible a sovereign operation that would escape systematization, as it would reveal that death reveals nothing. Therefore, we will expose Hegel's notion of sacrifice to expose Bataille's criticism of his system using the same concept.