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Georges Bataille’s favourite Jacobean tragedy was John Ford’s

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

. He cites the play’s climactic scene as the epigraph to

On Nietzsche

, the third of the volumes comprising

La Somme athéologique

. In the quoted scene Giovanni walks on to the stage to confront and confound those that are plotting to take his life, bearing, on the point of his dagger, the heart of his beloved sister

trimmed in reeking blood, That triumphs over death; proud in the spoil Of love and vengeance. (V.vi.9–11)

Strangely, Giovanni claims that he has torn Annabella’s heart from her breast on the bed of incest in an act of revenge. This revenge is obscure because no wrong has yet befallen Giovanni except the absolute wrong of a symbolic order that has cursed his love as incestuous and evil. Revenge is the economic figure

par excellence

of an unforgiving law that paradoxically symbolizes loss as reparation and return: for one enucleated eye another is plucked out, one shattered tooth requires the extraction of still more, and so on; bodies are ripped apart in order that signifiers may settle their scores.