Introductory Notes on Georges Bataille
1 Bataille’s career is impossible to summarize. I won’t even try except to say that, through Kojève, Bataille found the key terms, key logic, and key concerns that would become his lifelong and unfinished ‘project’. The ‘project’, in part, was to pit Kojève against Hegel (taking Hegel to be the epitome of any completely comprehensive system of thought) in an attempt to twist himself free from both. B figured that if he could “overcome” Hegel with Hegel’s own terms and logic he could be free from any confinement to purely philosophical comprehension. While, after Kojève, his contemporaries in Paris turned to confront the challenge of Heidegger, Bataille persisted within a largely Hegelio- Kojèvean context. (But, with others like Klossowski and Blanchot, he also re-thought Nietzsche in light of Fascism’s monstrous mis-appropriation of Nietzsche’s philosophy) Bataille’s influence can be seen or felt in writers and thinkers such as M. Blanchot, J. Derrida, M. Foucault, M. Duras, M. Leiris, J. Kristeva, J. Butler—many, many others.
2 Here are some general remarks I made about Bataille in Berlin last year:
Georges Bataille is very well known to us; in fact, he is too familiar. We know too much about his various passions and indulgences because he incongruously and loquaciously wrote of them in the midst of his philosophical expositions. He was childish and was also one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He was a self-contradiction and he developed (if that is the word) a paradoxical philosophy, a philosophy that could only be practiced, not advocated. Bataille passionately sought childishness, which he experienced as a “glory”, and as an enlarging experience even as, at the same time, he experienced it as shame, as humiliation. He was willing to risk everything in pursuit of an impossibility: namely, to put everything and every one of us at risk. Anguish and humiliation were part of the deal. He stood up to grillings from professional philosophers and the literati, like Sartre and Breton, both in print and in person. He exposed himself not simply to critical and philosophical refutations but to derision. Bataille was ridiculed and degraded. Somehow, he found glory in that exposure. But it was crafty. In a certain way (a certain way—everything depends on how we understand this “way”), he baited (or incited, induced, invited) his critics and obliged them to scorn him. It was part of the deal, part of the game. But—and this is the anguish of Bataille and the anguish of still being too familiar this man even this long after his death—it was sincere. (Sincere in a way that can only be misunderstood, which I believe is the only way to understand him.) It was an exposition of sincerity, or an exaggeration of sincerity. I don’t know the right way to say it. It is still embarrassing and painful even to talk about. His humiliation has outlived him (like die Scham of Josef K. in Der Process). This must not be underestimated.
For Bataille, childishness is the condition adults put children in, or let’s say force children to endure, the better to laugh at them from a standpoint of superiority. Unconsciously, however, this enforcement of childishness conceals the adult’s own shame and humiliation that they once passed through childishness themselves. The path to reason leads through childishness, Bataille reminds us. The source of reason is childishness and humiliation. Children are said, by Bataille, to be similar to the “madmen (the absent ones) I play with today.” Bataille notes that the young Hegel “believed himself to be going mad” and that Hegel’s entire system of philosophy was an annulment of that dread. In laughing at the child in his or her childishness the adult secretly satisfies a desire for self-degradation but in a pusillanimous way. The child on the other hand who detects the seriousness involved in the world of the adult is able, on condition of this knowledge, to laugh at him/herself and hence experience a transgression. This would be one of the formulas for, what Bataille calls l’experience interieure. God is a child laughing at—humiliating, degrading and then rising to be superior to—him/herself. It is an auto-degradation and it is intolerable: it squanders itself, consumes itself. The child (or the adult) in childishness—and insofar as he or she laughs at him/herself—is glorious; he or she lucidly experiences the ridiculousness of the passion for subjectivity, the insufficiency of the practice of insufficiency that childishness is. This moment, the anti-sublimity of auto-degradation is, for Bataille, a chance to experience the self as that in relation to which all else is great—and to laugh at this “all else”. It is a vast, incomprehensible laughter. It is not a comprehension nor a misapprehension but an ambi-hension. I may then, weary of the game, either exit childhood, or I may persevere in it but no longer as innocent, the opposite. I become a guilty child. I become childish. I embarrass everyone who knows me. I oblige them to attack or defend me. I weary them; I tire them out. I become pathetic, a sad case. I become an exile within the social order who can never be taken seriously, as Bataille describes Kafka. But, at the same time, I detach childishness from childhood and occupy it as a separate realm; however, always vertiginously: a tiny, insignificant ipse, a good-for-nothing. The insignificant ipse is submitted to, or exposed to a more general order of signification.
3. Le Collège de Sociologie was a very peculiar group of artists and scholars from a variety of disciplines all of whom had been influenced by Mauss’s and Durkheim’s studies of the sacred in pre-modern societies. The group included Breton (marginally, as an antagonist) Klossowski, Wahl, Paulhan,Callois Leiris, de Rougement, others. Mauss and Durkheim felt that the sacred no longer had any essential function in modern societies. The ‘C d S’ felt that it did but in a different way. Their meetings, which lasted only two year, were attempts to reveal that the sacred was still vital. They felt it was the key to understanding the phenomenon of 20th c. Fascism. These people were not liberal democrats. B in particular wished to found a community on the sacred. (He and a small ultra-secret group of friends nearly went through with a human sacrifice. The details of this notorious episode are still incomplete but have been documented in M. Surya’s biography of Bataille.) If Kojève was a “Marxist of the Right”, B, at this time, was a “Fascist of the Left”. The working definition of the sacred was simply: that which cannot be integrated into the social, that which cannot be put to work, that which is unproductive. To the German Right, the sacred is the great cult leader, Hitler, or the Homeland, or das Volk. But to B, the sacred is that which is repulsive: prostitutes, drunkenness, childishness, non-productive eroticism, hairy body parts, mud, spit, the big toe…
4. The ‘Letter to Professor X’. Kojève’s lectures concerned the end of history. (Like the ‘end of Art’ in Hegel, the end of history does not mean that, from now on, significant things and events will cease to occur. However, we already know where these things and events lead; we know how things will end. In short, nothing essentially new can happen. Everything essential has already happened and has been realized in Napoleon and it has been completely understood by Hegel.) Unlike Sartre and Girard, B acknowledges his enormous debt to Kojève. He considers K to be much more important that Heidegger (whom he derisively considered to be no more than a bookish little philosopher-scholar who would not allow himself to be ravished by his own insights. Where Heidegger would contemplate and bring out the ontological significance of a glass of wine, B will get drunk on it.)
B grants that history has come to an end. Whether with Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin makes little difference. His disagreement with K concerns the consequences. In K man—that is to say, negativity—disappears. Why? Because the slave recognizes himself in his work, in his products. He recognizes himself—and others—in productivity, and they recognize him. Human desire has been fully satisfied. True action ceases. He is happy. No more wars; no more revolutions; no more essential change. Instead, he plays, loves, even makes art—but no longer to satisfy some essential urge to be human. This must be what life is like at the end of history, B and Queneau decide: its boring! I have nothing to do anymore but pass the time away like Americans. I make love, play golf on Sunday, take trips to the countryside. The trouble is, B is not satisfied by this American Way of Life. B’s own life is in itself a refutation of Hegel. But B is not Kiekegaard: this is not the ironic protest of the concrete individual against the abstract system, a protest that ends in religious conversion, a ‘leap of faith’. There is more to it. B fully accepts K-Hegelian logic; he agrees with it completely. He wants to critique the whole structure on its own terms. B poses hyper-Hegelian questions. If history is over and done with then why am I not happy? Because there is a kind of negativity that cannot be sublated. It is that negativity that can only appear after the end of history: Unemployed Negativity.
B himself, in his person, is unemployed negativity. This negativity is a remainder of the system as a whole. Even if B himself is the only example of it; it must be taken into account. In K’s terms, this is abstract negativity: that which only consumes, does not work productively. But, unlike the abstract negativity of the Master within history, this abstract negativity is radically unproductive. It is absolutely without any purpose. Because history is over and done with. (By the way, K’s response to B’s letter was to say that B was correct but that on his own logic he should just shut up since everything B wants to say or do has no purpose.) B decides to call this unprecedented negativity Sovereign Negativity. All aspects of human life that serve no purpose, no end are sovereign. For B, kings, pharaohs, emperors are in fact degraded forms of true sovereignty since they wish to remain in power and hence subordinate their sovereign power to itself, to self-preservation. Those who are radically sovereign are not interested in superiority but are radically insubordinate. True sovereignty is a means without an end in view. It’s pure expenditure, like laughter.
Hegel never took laughter, erotic love, or childishness into account. Because these are not serious, have no purpose. But this is just the point for B in a truly Kojèvean inspiration: the non-serious=the gratuitous=sovereignty. And these are affirmed up to the point of death, in fact, the truth of sovereignty is death. Play: bullfights, smoking cigarettes, human sacrifices. The only ‘proof of radical purposelessness is the senselessness of death.
Work // Play, art, love, laughter, sacrifice, expenditure
Profane // Sacred
Means in view of ends // Endlessness
Usefulness // Uselessness
Meaning // Senselessness
Projects // Chance, luck
Possible // Impossible
Concrete negativity // Useless negativity
Sobriety // Intoxication
Satisfaction (or at least contentment) // Dissatisfaction, restlessness
Thus the end of history has revealed something Hegel could not have anticipated: Georges Batailles’s sovereign dissatisfaction with it all. Purely by chance, B was born at the end of history. Hegel had not anticipated this. But what to do with this “discovery”? First, there is B’s own case: “the open wound that is my life”. B will not try to prove that his own life is not negligible, on the contrary, he emphasizes his own insignificance (that is also why he does not mount his own philosophy, that’s why he ‘caves in’ and says to K: Yes Master, you are absolutely correct…and yet). True sovereignty can only be insignificant, meaningless. To the truly sovereign being History-as-a-whole does not make sense. (There is only sense in history.) The entire struggle was pointless. History vanishes into night just as the truly sovereign being vanishes into insignificance, laughter, intoxication, delirium. B sees this clearly and thus humiliates himself before K in the letter. The more humiliated he is, the more sovereign.
5. Art In addition to B’s own case, his own ridiculous life, there is art. Art too is unemployed negativity. Art does not change the world. Important as it may be, art remains useless. In general, art is a negation of the whole of reality, the substitution of an image for productive work or a concept (productive thought). Art is false work. Art transforms the work of negation into an object of contemplation. It too is unsatisfying. It is a failure. Art can neither change the world nor truly negate the world since the art work itself remains behind as a kind of work. The failure of art, the fact that it too doesn’t satisfy me, is also a manifestation of unemployed negativity. In the art work (the painting, the novel, the statue) I see the image of my own essential idleness in the world. (Blanchot will thus call art an “un-working” and attempt to write of a community that “doesn’t work”.) However, art, B sees, is a form of sovereign sacrifice: wood, marble, silk, words, ideas are consumed to no end, for no purpose. Art is purely gratuitous work.
6. Sacrifice In the 1950’s B wanted to realize the project of revealing unemployed negativity as such. This is the negativity that had not been anticipated by Hegel and that Kojève simply refused to recognize. B takes up the issue of sacrifice. For B’s reader, the preoccupation with sacrifice is most troubling.
Unemployed, sovereign negativity might be satisfied if it could be recognized as such. Or is the unemployed negativity B discovers at the end of history an absolute dissatisfaction? By 1955 B recognizes that recognized sovereign negativity is unrecognizable as such for, as such, it is death.
After Hegel, B understands that nothing remains to be said. One can only repeat Hegel as K did. Philosophy is dead; the issue then is death. B at first goes back to Hegel’s writing themselves, bypassing K. We know that for Hegel (not K) man is but a moment within a larger History which is the History of Spirit (Geist). A man dies; thousands die at Waterloo: so what? Spirit lives in the sublimation of human death into its History. Spirit dwells with human death and maintains itself in death. History would be tragic except that we know how it all ends. It ends happily, in Absolute knowledge, with Spirit’s Self-Consciousness. But this means that in Hegel death itself is never revealed. Spirit keeps surviving death. The Passion of Christ is a comedy. Now, for K, the Wise man knows that Spirit is another name for atheism; Spirit mans that there is no God and the History of Spirit is the progressive realization of atheism, mortality and human finitude. Spirit = no God, that is to say, Nothing.
Human History is Negativity, or Nothingness, at work. Human History is Death living a human life. This is K’s revision of Hegel. For H, death is abstract; for K it is real, final, actual. The truth of human life is death. But, death reveals nothing and nothing reveals death—real death, that is, my own death. For K, as we have seen, struggle is what reveals truly human negativity. B is now asking if perhaps sacrifice does not reveal negativity even more profoundly and hence, not struggle (Master/Slave or Class Struggle), but fiction is at the bottom of history. Fiction because, since I cannot be present at my own death, I require a substitute, a representation. In sacrifice I contemplate negativity, from a safe distance. In sacrifice, and especially human sacrifice, I can, as it were, witness negativity—death—escape all dialectical struggle. Human sacrifice reveals that the negative cannot be manifested. Period. Human fascination with Art, with spectacle, with representation in general is a degraded version of (actual) human sacrifice wherein, in fascination and repulsion, we ‘experience’ human negativity. Moreover, the man of struggle remains discursive; the man of sacrificial spectacle is frozen in horror and pleasure. Hegel speaks of death—he “goes back to work” and writes philosophy after having had Absolute knowledge revealed to him as Napoleon’s guns rattled his windows; the man of sacrifice is anguished and gay in the face of death escape from his presence.
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