Shaking in the Presence of God Reading Bataille during an
Earthquake
While I was reading Bataille’s work on sacrifice and the sacred
and was trying to articulate some ideas for a response to this
chapter, our city experienced the largest earthquake in living
memory (magnitude 7.1). While no lives were lost, some buildings
Matt Gwynne
did crumble, houses were irreparably damaged, streets flooded and
‘sand volcanoes’ erupted from beneath our streets and houses. With
“The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of
duration, the order of things holds in check, and that this holding changes
Bataille on the tip of my tongue the reactions I encountered to this
into a breaking loose, that is, into violence. It constantly threatens to
moment of terror – from myself, family, friends and the wider public
break the dikes, to confront productive activity with the precipitate and
– were particularly relevant to his thoughts on these subjects.
contagious movement of a purely glorious consumption. The sacred is
Immediately after the terror of 9-11 Americans across the nation
exactly comparable to the flame that destroys the wood by consuming
flocked to their long forsaken churches and while our experience in
it”.1
Christchurch might not have been as dramatic, the ensuing debates
1Bataille,1989,p52-53
in our daily newspaper portray a similar turn of public attention to a
higher realm beyond humanity. While this in itself is of course not
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surprising or particularly revealing, the earthquake on the 4 th of
September and our reaction to it can certainly be read in a similar
remain personally alive that establishes the person’s individuality is linked
to the integration of existence into the world of things”.2
vein to Bataille’s reading of the sacred. By thinking about the sacred
The ground began to shake, then it shuddered violently,
on its own terms so to speak, Bataille reveals psychological truths, he
uncontrollably and quite terrifyingly. When the very stability of the
allows himself to have thoughts which are often swept aside by the
ground suddenly becomes questionable thoughts are bound to turn
tide of simplistic atheistic response to religion which more often than
beyond the ‘world of things’ and towards much larger scales of time
not prevents any real understanding of the sacred from a modern
and existence than our own fleeting lives. The terror of such an event
western viewpoint. Bataille helps us to go beyond a mere negation of
has the power to remove us (briefly) from our usually solid belief in
religion and challenges us to think seriously about the thoughts and
permanence. It is easy to see how in such a moment we may
emotions that we attribute to ‘the sacred’.
experience something of the intimacy that is the sacred: “intimacy, in
“Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it is not
compatible with the positing of the separate individual… The separate
individual is of the same nature as the thing, or rather the anxiousness to
2Bataille,1989,p51
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the trembling of the individual, is holy, sacred, and suffused with
earthquake not a fitting example of what Bataille refers to as the
anguish”.3
“abrupt consumption” that sacrifice represents? At that moment the
Bataille addresses the function of sacrifice: “The thing – only the
thing – is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice
destroys an objects real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out
of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible
caprice”.4 Is it so absurd to suggest that on that day in this city we all
felt something like the sacrificial victim? That we were momentarily
earth was moving beyond the fixed terms of humanity, our certainty
in duration was suddenly overturned by “the violence of an
unconditional consumption”, a consumption which was “only
concerned with the moment”.5 Bataille here refers to the violence of
the unknown, and of the inexperienced, the sacred is a violation of
our certainty, a violence that interrupts our very state of individuality.
‘drawn out of the world of utility’ and thrust into some other
Bataille put forward the idea that sacrifice as it is performed in
unexplainable state of existence, another state of being? Was the
physical action (the individual sacrificing the victim) is a way of
“redressing the wrong done to the animal” who has been “miserably
3Bataille,1989,p52
4Bataille,1989,p43
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5Bataille,1989,p49
reduced to the condition of a thing”. 6 Of course the victim is
‘Life’ as it is intended here is the divinity of the moment, something
unaware, totally unable to comprehend such a perspective, and it is
which gets lost in the constant progression of modernity. The
this innocence that drives the guilt of the sacrificer and their need to
intimacy of the sacred returns in the destruction of our ‘thingness’, in
restore the animal to its “lost intimacy”.7 On that day were the
some way the earthquake momentarily achieved this destruction.
people of Christchurch not similarly unaware, were we not blindly
driven by our “need for duration” and then in some way in that
moment did we not return to a certain intimacy? As Bataille said, the
desire for duration “conceals life from us” and it is in this sense that
perhaps we have also been ‘reduced to the condition of a thing’.8
6Bataille,1989,p45
Immediately after the quake a friend mentioned to me that
‘suddenly Maori mythology doesn’t seem quite so mythical’. Thinking
like Bataille helps us to understand that before there was geology
there was mythology, before we looked to scientists to explain the
unexplainable, we asked our spiritual leaders. When New Zealanders
read of the mythical hero Maui and of the account of the creation of
the North Island, described as a “giant fish” which he “pulled to the
7Bataille,1989,p50
surface” and of his brothers who “chopped huge gullies and
mountains from the fish’s flesh”,9 we may now know the power
8Bataille,1989,p48
9Te Kete Ipurangi
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behind this story, and should also appreciate the value of such
voices of sarcasm who were eager to express their thoughts: “we
mythology.10
rejoice in your mysteries”.11 It is of course against these voices that
One of the most interesting things that emerged in the wake of
Bataille’s reading of the sacred becomes so crucial and so revealing.
the earthquake was a rather dramatic debate that developed in our
Bataille’s work challenges the religious and the secular, both of
daily newspaper The Press. Around three weeks after the event an
which fail in their attempts to understand the sacred. If we are to
entire page was dedicated to the accumulation of letters on the
read the sacred ‘as it is’ we find that it is violence, it is destruction,
subject of God. Most of these letters were simply over enthusiastic
that it is fundamentally opposed to our own individuality and that it
atheist responses to the (very few) Christians who had written in and
is suppressed for these reasons. It is in this sense that Bataille is
had claimed God’s will to be at work that day. So we heard the
intending such statements as ‘intimacy is destruction’. Under the
inevitable attacks on the “magic sky daddy”, and the many other
secular frame of thinking the sacred has effectively become taboo.
However removing the sacred from humanity is to throw away one
10- Many Maori stories portray similar themes of god’s or warriors creating the landscape.
of our greatest and most detailed record of human psychology, and it
One that stands out is the story of the creation of much of Fiordland in which Tu te raki
whanoa carved out the landscape with his magical adze, Piopiotahi (Milford Sound) was said
to be his finest sculpture.
11The Press (Sept 25,2010)
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is with this in mind that I began to understand the importance of a
reading such as Bataille’s. In moments of terror or destruction (either
natural or man-made) this literal reading of the sacred becomes all
the more relevant as we can longer refuse the immanence of death.
In these moments we get a sense of what Bataille meant when he
said that “the impossibility of duration frees us”.12
References:
- Bataille, Georges., 1989, ‘Theory of Religion’ (taken from Chapter III: ‘Sacrifice, the
Festival, and the Principles of the Sacred World’), (New York: Zone Books)
- The Press, ‘Letters’ (Saturday, September 25, 2010)
12Bataille,1989,p48
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- Te Kete Ipurangi – ‘Maori Myths, Legends and Contemporary Stories’ (web
resource: http://www.tki.org.nz/r/maori/nga_pakiwaitara/mauiika/index_e.php#top)