Ecce Monstrum

How should the academic study of religion engage the twentieth-century French thinker Georges Bataille? Bataille locates in limit-experiences such as sacrifice, eroticism, and torture the instruments of an intolerable ecstasy he calls sacred. This immediate sacred experience rejects outside of itself any and all disciplinary forms or archival codifications—in short, any possibility of academicization. For Bataille, the sacred is essentially and even vehemently nonacademic. How is a scholarly community ostensibly devoted to the second- or third-order study of sacred things to approach such a figure? It is to Jeremy Biles' credit that his study of Bataille foregrounds itself explicitly against the questions of Bataille's reception and communication, whether academic or otherwise. Building on previous research, Biles takes the importance of such questions as given—his focus is rather on how they might actually be answered in a contemporary intellectual context. As his introduction makes clear, Biles shares with Bataille the desire “to elaborate the possibilities for engaging in a practice of joy in the face of death” or, in other words, “for arousing the intolerable contradiction that defines the sacred” (8). In Biles' text, Bataille's life and writings become the scholarly material for such elaboration and arousal. In this respect, Ecce Monstrum presents an ambitious and provocative study in religious theoretical practice.

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology) · Contradiction · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept) · Literature · Order (exchange) · Political science · Sacrifice · Theology · Torture · French Literature and Criticism · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices