Abstract

According to Bataille, there’s a constitutive need for loss in every man, which is expressed in the attraction exerted by both perpetrated and suffered evil and destruction. The extreme of the possible for man is death, but death also marks the overcoming of the limit that separates the miserable and limited being of the individuals from the prodigal and unlimited one of the universe. This idea, which grounds the Bataillan interpretation of sacrifice as a means to rejoin immanence, can be found throughout his entire work. However, starting from the fifties, it is complicated by a new and more articulated understanding of the subject’s being and of the transgression, with which the need for loss identifies itself. Up to the last, Bataille holds firmto a thesis that, even inadmissible by our sensibility, we can’t avoid considering: horror is the possible of man, and the object of an experience we cannot ignore.