| Summary: | As much as they are opposites, ways of thinking as much as topics of interest-obsession – sacrifice, violence, and guilt – tie Georges Bataille and René Girard in knots of similarity. Their theories offer bold and surprising ways of understanding the extraordinary fate of a global society in which traditional religious and economic forms have been all but obliterated. Their theories are equally marked by a kind of violence, both stylistically and substantively speaking – that suggests a particular understanding of nature that points respectively toward excess or apocalypse. I argue that, far from rendering their ideas irrelevant or meaningless to contemporary political crises, their understanding of nature reflects an aspect of our (now global) civilization that the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse explicitly addresses. Bataille and Girard, much like Benjamin's Marinetti, have ‘the virtue of clarity,' but they remain unable to articulate a robust critical theory addressing the substantive political alternatives of our time. Tracing the relationship between the Bataille-Girard impasse and critical theory helps to deepen and clarify what Adorno called ‘negative dialectics.'
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