Abstract
This article aims to clarify the
notion of community such as it is perceived by the singularly modern outlook of
Georges Bataille, especially in it’s illustration in his story Madame
Edwarda. The absence or loss of community seems to represent the very
condition of its existence. The lovers in Madame Edwarda simultaneously
illustrate the birth as well as the death of such an unusual kind of community.
While offering one’s self to the other in a sacrificial attempt to surpass
oneself, each of them conveys to the other a sense of shared immoderation, and
goes exceptionally beyond the completeness of a homogeneous enclosure in and on
oneself. However, at the very moment when it seems to succeed, community is
lost, and the being returns to its initial loneliness, which seems to have
never been surpassed.
