Transcendence, Liminality and Excess: Durkheim and Bataille on the Margins of `Sociologie Religieuse

Georges Bataille and Émile Durkheim stand within the same broad tradition of social and anthropological theory, and their work also displays structural affinities in the ways in which they pose questions concerning the definitions of science and relations between science and religion and in the manner in which they represent the process of social inquiry. Rather than using social science as a tool to explain religion as a mere object in a social field, they both, in their own ways, bring religion and science into a dangerous but fruitful proximity to each other, and engage them in a sort of mutual interrogation concerning the status of human being, autonomy and knowledge, and the constitution of social life and of meaning.