We have seen that Bataille is concerned with the experience of the living on the edge; living at the very limits of life, at the extreme where death impinges.

In section two of part 2 of On Nietzsche Bataille defines communication as physical lovemaking, as desire that takes nothingness as its object. He sees sex as a form of sacrifice. He adds that sacrifice generally is associated with a feeling of crime; and that this sacrifice is an evil that is necessary for good.

It's all a bit of a puzzle, is it not? What does nothingness mean here? How is nothingness linked to sex? How is sex a form of sacrifice? What connection does sex as sacrifice have to do with the sacrifice of Christ?

Now Bataille does spell out what he is trying to get at here. He says:

'To clarify the links between "communication" and sin, between sacrifice and sin, I'll suggest sovereign desire eats away at and feeds on our anguish, on principle this engages us in an attempt to go beyond ourselves.'

The sin stuff is very theological and it reflects Bataille's Catholicism. Bataille converted to Catholicism in 1915, in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of the Germans . It was Nietzsche’s work that lead him to abandon traditional religion for an idiosyncratic form of godless mysticism. The Catholic language remains 30 years latter.

Bataille says that the beyond of my monadic individual being is nothingness that is expressed in terms of painful feelings of lack. Those feelings disclose the presence of another person. Hence nothingness refers to the limit of an individual existence.

Bataille then says:

'Such a presence, however, is fully disclosed only when the other similarly leans over the edge of nothingness or falls into it (dies)."Communication" only takes place between two people who risk themselves, each lacerated and suspended, perched atop a common nothingness.'

Communication is each monadic individual reaching beyond the limits of their self-enclosed individual existence of I=I. This is pretty basic---a philosophical anthropology to use the academic jargon. Something that the sexblogs understand.

It reminds me of the beginings of Hegel's master slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit. It starts with two self-consciousnesses' posed in the element of externality. It is desire that opens up the moment of externality, or the reaching beyond the limits of the subject. The reaching beyond is a moment of relation. It is desire that drives the reaching beyond that leads to an encounter with another human being across the yawning gap or divide.

Does Bataille do what Michel Foucault’s asserts: that Bataille, “broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before”? Does Bataille tell us what has never been told before?

At the moment I see Bataille as working within the tradition of Hegel's master slave dialectic. He is rewriting it with a theological twist. The twist is sacrifice. Bataille says that his way of understanding:

"....gives a similar explanation to both sacrifice and the works of the flesh. In sacrifice, humans with a god by putting him to death; they put to death a divinity personified by a living existence, a human or animal victim....Sacrifice itself and its participants are in some waay identified with the ictim. So, as the victim is put to death, they lean to their own nothingness."

In both religious sacrifice and sexuality we have a leaning towards nothingness.

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