‘Working Girl’: Sex Work and Intersubjectivity in Georges Bataille's Madame Edwarda

This article examines the role of sex work in Georges Bataille’s account of intersubjectivity through transgression and the erotic. It conducts a close reading of Madame Edwarda, a short text in which a sex worker takes centre stage. This text is cited as exemplary of Bataille’s rejection of the limits of reason, limits imposed by a socio-economic model wherein everything must be exchanged, invested, and subordinated to logics of profit and accumulation. The aim of this article is to show that the model of transgression that Bataille sets out in Madame Edwarda in fact depends on another person’s labour. However, it is able to disavow this dependency because it assumes the labour in question – sex work – to be a free act of generosity: Edwarda’s sex work disappears as work, because she is identified with sex absolutely. The article argues that Bataille’s intersubjectivity is thus founded on work, and so on subjection.