French sacrifice: Violence and the sacred in the thought of Emile Durkheim and Georges Bataille

Focusing on the work of Emile Durkheim and Georges Bataille, this dissertation explores the appeal in France from the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century of the notion of ritual blood sacrifice for discussions of community formation and renewal. During this time period, and especially during the interwar years, interest in sacrifice spread from ethnographic and social scientific circles to the artistic and literary avant-garde, a process that allowed for some surprising and often paradoxical paths of influence. While Durkheim found in ritual sacrifice (which he associated with "primitive" societies) the active representation of mental processes that work to produce collective ideals and communal bonds, entailing for him that collective unity and rejuvenation within contemporary Western societies must occur through a specifically sacrificial---albeit symbolic, non-bloody---process, Bataille tended to draw a very different conclusion. Through an examination of monographs, essays, lectures, novels, notes, and correspondence, however, I demonstrate that Bataille, not widely known for his works of sociological analysis, adopted and adapted aspects of Durkheim's understanding of sacrifice. Indeed, despite his reputation as a conservative positivist---as a "watchdog" of the bourgeois republic---Durkheim's analysis of sacrifice contained elements that would prove fruitful for someone like Bataille who was very much opposed to the established order. I show that this influence was not confined to the period, short-lived as it was, when Bataille helped found, and formed the principal leader of, the Collège de Sociologie, which was explicitly inspired by Durkheimian sociology, but continued, and in fact was enhanced to some extent, in the years subsequent to the dissolution of the Collège. Though there are numerous and fundamental differences between Durkheim and Bataille, I argue that the affinities of their theories of sacrifice spring largely from a common concern, integral to these theories but producing very distinct effects, with social outsiders.