The sacred and the profane

I think that by choosing this term, “destruction”, Bataille did not mean this in an simple way at all.  Rather, it means making a shift from a mode where everything seems fixed and eternal, stuck in stone, into a mortal mode.  So, in this sense, one becomes a mortal again and acknowledges mortality through being destroyed, consuming, and sacrificing an animal (traditionally).

 

The mode of the profane is “continuity”.  Kind of like when somebody in your workplace dies, but someone else gets their job and life goes on in its regular mechanical pattern.

 

The mode of the sacred is “discontinuity”.   Mortality (death) intervenes, and one has to recognise that one is animal and matter,

 

Of course Bataille’s writing about the sacred and profane seems quite extreme, because he is trying to incite people to think in terms of doing their “sacred” duty and committing the bourgeois to death.  I think this is the underlying refrain in his text –THEORY OF RELIGION – which I am able to pick up, because I am pineal.

 

But the bourgeois themselves, the current academics and intellectual leaders do not pick up on this underlying meaning, despite the fact that this project is more than hinted at here and expounded more directly in some of Bataille’s other books.    They can’t pick up on it because they cannot hear that echoing refrain that, when describing the depression of returning from work on Friday and taking up drinking in consolation goes, “I destroy, I destroy, I destroy...”

 

“I, the proletarian, am a potentially destructive beast and yet I am in chains to bourgeois mores and its structures of continuity.” 

 

Anyway, that’s in there, but the bourgeois critics, because they are DOXA, say instead, “Oh he slightly overdoes the motif of destruction, when he could have cut quite a few pages out of the book when explaining his theory of religion to us.”

 

But then he would not have set the scene in the way he wanted to.

 

The pineal mind always hears something more – something that happens to be IN THERE.  Whereas the doxa mind thinks that it already understands all there is to know and that some words are extraneous.

 

But without making that enormous assumption that the DOXA critic ALREADY knows everything that Bataille REALLY intended to say, and indeed what is extraneous to what he “intended” to say, the DOXA critic would not be able to excise the pineal elements from the text.

 

Indeed, a real listener should just open their mind to what is new in a book, without excising, but the DOXA critic is never prepared to do this.

 

It could be a matter of attuning the ear, but the DOXA critic is tone deaf, not out of choice, but ON PRINCIPLE.

 

It’s the whole principled mentality of the bourgeois critics that excludes what is really there and cannot see it.

 

This principle of excision also works on the level of gender, too.  There is a certain range of DOXA behavior permitted to one on the basis of gender.  If I write outside of this range or use ideas that aren’t permitted to this DOXA range of gender, I am said to be “emotional”.  Indeed, what the DOXA critic really means is “incomprehensible, since not complying the DOXA regulations of how each gender expresses itself.

 

But the bourgeois critic never likes to be caught at a loss for words, so they re-insert me into my box, the one allocated to me on the basis of my gender, and they pronounce me “emotional”.

 

DOXA, then, is inauthenticity and excision ON PRINCIPLE.

 

Its relationship to the wild, is not just complimentary (although it is in some ways), but more often policing and silencing.  (No wonder Bataille did not trust “language” – for language is the mode of CONTINUITY, making many things appear to be the same, under a defining label,  when they are actually individually very different).

 

DOXA is the thought police.