From the sacred conspiracy to the unavowable community: Bataille, Blanchot and Laure's <i>Le sacré</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".