ORESTIE BATAILLIENNE : LES EXPÉRIENCES DE LA FAUTE
The Oresteia of Bataille: Experiences of the Mistake

Summary/Abstract: Crossing the reference to antiquity and the Christian reference, the figure of the guilty seems to be omnipresent in the thought of the writer Georges Bataille. Indeed, anyone who opposes the law is guilty, and therefore always guilty in terms of a norm. We can therefore put forward the hypothesis of a positive side of the culprit as the one who opposes: isn't Antigone guilty of a desire for justice? The Bataldian text allows for the emergence of a liberating image of guilt as a voluntary and transgressive breach of the diktat of rationality. If Bataille's first fictions show an essentially oedipal fault, it seems that the transgressive gesture of the culprit is increasingly directed towards a praise of a poet-Oreste as the one who, thwarting the authority of power, embodies the exhilarating reverse of crime. Orestes appears as the one who is finally guilty of an overreach of the city that repudiates him for a just fault. Reinvesting Aeschylus' Orestes as well as Racine's Orestes in love, Bataille shows how the threshold of madness, where the fault gangrenes man's spirit can prove to be a passage towards a moral and intellectual liberation. The experiences of the novel L'Impossible and the novel Le Petit bear witness to this. But it is also in the search for the Atheological Summa that an interrogation of crime as a moral of the self is played out, notably in the diary of The Guilty or in The Alleluia – Catechism for the Outcast. This article therefore intends, through an examination of Bataldian orestia, to highlight the importance of fault and guilt as the motors of human emancipation in the face of the law, which alienates the instinct and opposes the epiphanic transgressive gesture.

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