Bataille’s book, THEORY OF RELIGION | Nietzsche's hairs

Bataille’s book, THEORY OF RELIGION | Nietzsche's hairs



In the book itself, Bataille wants to introduce us to his notion of the sacred as pertaining to the condition of being nothing.    Death.  Self-erasure.  That is the thesis the book establishes.   But his other writings go further.  Bataille was Nietzschean but also Hegelian.  According to Nietzsche on Hegel, God is the most thinly defined concept -- virtually nothing.  In any case, I think you've summarized it well in broad outline, although not going into detail as to why erasing oneself produces revolution.   Actually one erases the limits imposed on onself.  One erases the bourgeois individual.



I get a sense that Bataille was setting a trap for the unwary.  Nietzsche said, that some people do decide to will nothing, since willing nothing seems a better option than not being able to will at all.   It's an experiment with nihilism.  To will "nothing" is to negate the bourgeois identity.  But superego is regenerative.  Whenever you erase its boundaries, by destroying the internalized mores of bourgeois culture, superego draws another line.  Only each time that superego redraws the line the defines the limits of your personal being, the line is drawn different and generally less narrowly.   Each subsequent encounter with the sacred reduces the inner binds of social control and restores power to the individual.   The individual becomes more and more himself (or herself) though facing death.  (One's fear of death was responsible for setting the boundary lines for the bondsman's subservience, as Hegel demonstrates in his Lordship and Bondage.)  Also, one has the pleasure of wrecking the bourgeois identity one had unconsciously developed.   If you are a strong-willed and audacious nihilist, you can actually free yourself from social control by combating the "God" within yourself.  You subdue it.  You form a different kind of inner relationship with it.   All of this is, ultimately, ego-strengthening.



But as I indicated, I think Bataille also set a trap for those who would not understand this need for mastery (through loss of the bourgeois self) implicitly.   Facing down one's superego -- one's "God within" -- is one of the most terrifying things one can do, because a voice in one's head says, "If thou does this, thou wilst surely die."  



I think some people may not make it through that kind of test to come out the other side in any sort of good shape.   Some people just get wrecked and others get "wrecked out of their wounds" (Marechera).