Le « sacré gauche » chez Georges Bataille et Hubert Aquin

Georges Bataille and Hubert Aquin explore a mystic experience presenting strong similarities, related to what Roger Caillois calls « left sacred », that is the impure, malefic sacred, which is accessible by transgression and corresponds to the privileged moment of unity between people. To Bataille, God is absent, even dead : Lamma sabachtani is the question become assertion in his essays. The object of his new mystic theology is not God, but « the unknown». So what is divine is returned to the human being, transcendence to immanence. The goal is to free the mystic experience from its religious background and to make ecstasy accessible to everybody. It is precisely by communicating, that men can break their isolation and unite themselves with the others. « Eroticism of bodies » and « eroticism of hearts » are two of the experiences proposed by Bataille which lead to the sacred. Hubert Aquin is also fascinated by the « left sacred », by eroticism in particular, but it represents for him a temptation which takes away from the « right sacred », in this case, Jesus Christ and the perfection He is. The absolute consists much more for Aquin in being in communion with the Son of God, in being reborn and in living in the Christ of the Revelation.