Ronjon Paul Datta (2026). “14: The parallax of exclusion: Durkheim, Bataille, and Foucault”. In Marcel Fournier and Paul Carls (eds.) The Elgar Companion to Émile Durkheim. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035322930.00022
This piece investigates how Durkheim, the radical Durkheimian Georges Bataille, and Michel Foucault conceptualize exclusion and its effects. The central premise is that Foucault’s work inverts Durkheim’s approach to inclusion while extending Bataille. But, in the end Foucault neglects radical Durkheimian sensibilities about the ambivalent power of the sacred produced by constitutive exclusions. Bataille’s concept of abjection mediates between them by considering modern manifestations of the sacred. Durkheim’s treatment of solidarity, crime and exclusion, corporations, totemism, property and the sacred are discussed, and abjection is explicated in light of Durkheim’s discussion of the ambiguity of the sacred. Foucault’s treatment of discursive “systems of exclusion” is shown to leverage Durkheimian ideas. The parallax of exclusion, by accounting for the effects of perspectival differences, indicates that the valorization of social subjects and objects is structured by mechanisms of inclusion–exclusion. When paired with Durkheim’s and Bataille’s sense of the ambivalence of the sacred, Foucault’s theory of discourse provides means for radical Durkheimian analyses of the politics of experience.
