From the sacred conspiracy to the unavowable community

This article analyses the importance of the writings of Laure (pseudonym of Colette Peignot) for Georges Bataille's communitarian projects of the late 1930s and early 1940s and for Maurice Blanchot's interpretation of these projects. Through readings of theoretical essays by Bataille, his annotated edition of Laure's Le Sacré (published illegally in 1939, only months after the author's death, and distributed clandestinely to a restricted group of readers), and Blanchot's La Communauté inavouable , I argue that Laure's book functions as the literary analogue to two avant-garde communities in which Laure and Bataille were involved — Acéphale and the College of Sociology — and that this same book is at the heart of the unavowable community theorized by Blanchot. Bataille's justification for publishing Laure's writings echoes the very terms he uses to describe his group projects of the late 1930s: community, communication, the sacred, sacrifice. I argue that, in publishing and distributing her book, Bataille effectively sanctifies Laure, turning her into a martyr for the community. However, in contrast to Acéphale and the College of Sociology, the community founded over Laure's dead body was a virtual community: one based on the members' solitary experiences of reading. Laure becomes the figurehead of an unavowable community, as Blanchot's locution would have it

Art · French Historical and Cultural Studies · French Literature and Criticism · French Literature and Poetry · History