Concrete Containment in Late Capitalism, Mysticism, the Marquis de Sade, and Phenomenological Anthropology

Georges Bataille is known for being complex and multifaceted: influenced by Christian mystics as well as Hegelians and Marxists, his work is also linked with that of the surrealists and existentialists of his own mid-20th century France as well as the post-structuralists – in particular the Tel Quel collaboraters – who followed in his wake. It would be astonishing, then, if Bataille’s thinking were not conflated with precisely those movements and those ideas with which he has so much in common, despite the fact that we should refuse to expect this. Much of Bataille’s work was devoted to the ambivalent overlapping of transgression and its reified containment, and this in part explains why such a large number of his interpreters fall prey to reducing the former category to the latter. This article is therefore an at-tempt to disentangle, to whatever extent possible, the transgressive from the contained. I will do this on four accounts: postmodern economics, mystical union, sexual degradation, and historical dialectics.