The Sovereign Community of G. Bataille in the Perspective of French Neo-Hegelianism

The aim of the paper is to analyze Georges Bataille's notion of "sovereign community" in the perspective of the reception and critique of the Neo-Hegelian reading of the dialectic of slave and master. The study demonstrates that this concept inherits and develops the Neo-Hegelian problem of the freedom of self-consciousness in intersubjective relations understood through the conceptual scheme of the dialectic of slave and master. Bataille borrows from Neo-Hegelianism key ontological principles and categories for analyzing the subject of self-consciousness (such as desire, consciousness, self-consciousness, negativity), but offers a different way of dealing with them, in some places changing their semantic content up to the opposite. We believe that the specificity of Bataille's conception of community stems from his critique of the understanding of freedom as autonomy, as well as his understanding of genuine intersubjective relations as a message or communication organized according to the principle of unproductive waste, transcending hierarchical relations in the struggle for recognition. Whereas the neo-Hegelian collective wisdom community of the end of history is characterized by a state of homogeneity based on the universality of absolute knowledge, the sovereign community, by contrast, is constructed through the transgression of individual boundaries, in which there is an interpenetration and encounter with the radically other that transcends the isolation of the individual, and is not graspable in knowledge.