The practice of the impossible: Selfhood, God, and suffering in Simone Weil and Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille and Simone Weil have generally been viewed as thinkers with no fruitful points of intellectual contact. This study challenges the received picture of Bataille's and Weil's incommensurability. Reading Bataille and Weil together on sacrifice, desire, and community illuminates the writers' parallel efforts to shape a politics of the sacred and clarifies insufficiently understood aspects of their work.; Confronting the multiple crises of the 1930s, both Bataille and Weil turned to performative mobilizations of religion, staging themselves as sacred figures. In 1933-34, Bataille used the language of sacrifice and ritual destruction to frame an original theory of political revolution. At the end of the decade, sacrifice internalized as spiritual violence defined Bataille's atheistic mysticism. Sacred violence reemerges in Simone Weil's concept of "force." After her explicit embrace of Christianity, Weil pursued a double strategy with respect to force: practicing resistance to oppressive force in the political realm, while internalizing and using force in mystical self-transformation ("decreation"). Weil's sacrificial asceticism received an unexpected endorsement in Bataille's portrait of Weil as the Christian revolutionary Lazare in Le Bleu du ciel (1935).; Bataille's mystical turn after 1939 has been denounced as a shameful political withdrawal. I argue that Bataille's mysticism should be interpreted not as a flight from political responsibility, but as a provocative effort to model an alternative mode of resistance (through autosacrificial writing) beyond the bankruptcy of conventional notions of duty, virtue, and virile action. Weil, meanwhile, theorized religious experience as the source of empowerment for direct political struggle. Weil's view of all human action as communication and her concern with death as the determining moment of existence converged in her plan to expose herself to sacrificial death on the battlefield. Through such a death Weil intended to transform her existence into what she termed a "real metaphor" expressive of religious and political truth.; Bataille and Weil sought not to resolve, but to dramatize the tensions of their worldviews by staging themselves, through writing, as sacred figures. Their self-stylizing performance allowed Bataille and Weil to sustain the pressures of multiple conflicts in an era of violence and ideological disorientation.