'There has never been a society of sovereignty. Archaic, traditional and feudal societies curtailed the sovereign experience by linking its possibility to the possession of rank or nobility. Capitalist and communist societies also seek to eliminate sovereignty: the former by replacing it with commodities which only entrench class and individual divisions, the latter by seeking to exert total control over the people and abolishing the rhythms of prohibition and transgression. The relative proportions of these strategies vary between particular capitalist and communist regimes, but these only disguise more fundamental similarities: the reduction of humanity to a productive instrument; the reduction of thought to the accumulation of results; the reduction of life to servility.
For Bataille ‘ethics’ and ‘community’ are only possible if there is a fundamental and collective negation of utility and servility such that everyone experiences a sense of boundlessness, of the miracle of life. Of course, labour and production remain vital functions for society, but these tasks must be carried out without differentiations of rank, income or status. The communist experiment of the Soviet Union attempted to eliminate class differentiations, in a way that Bataille approved of, yet it also went about the elimination of the last vestiges of sovereign experience associated with feudal society without being able to introduce or even imagine new forms of sovereignty.
It is clear from the final volume of The Accursed Share that Bataille remained favourable to religious forms of sovereign experience, as religious prohibitions and taboos are temporal and provide for their transgression at certain times. Monarchic, fascist, capitalist and secular societies aim at total control, saturating space and closing down or eliminating forms of sovereign experience.'
William Pawlett, Georges Bataille: The Sacred and the Society, publisher: Routledge