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THE HANDSTAND |
AUGUST 2002 |
| The
Philosopher Georges Bataille
George Bataille was born in Billon, Puy-de-Dôme, France in 1897. One of the most significant events in the life of the young Bataille was the gradual physical decline of his father, his blindness and subsequent paralysis caused, Bataille says, by syphilis. The family moved to Rheim in 1900, where Bataille undertook his baccalaureate, remaining there until the outbreak of World War I, when the advancing Germans forced residents to abandon the city. After his father’s death Bataille had an almost obsessive relationship with Catholicism, which he abandoned in 1920. After graduating as a medievalist from the École des Charters, Paris in 1922, Bataille developed an interest in the works of Freud and Nietzsche. These two figures were a decisive influence on Bataille's philosophical development during this period. In the 1920s Bataille immersed himself in the Parisian intellectual circles and especially the surrealist group led by the poet and critic André Breton. Bataille made his living by working as a librarian at the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris (1922-1944), but was also involved in the production of several intellectual journals. During 1929-30 Bataille edited Documents, and in 1946 he established one of France’s best known journals, Critique, which published the works of writers such as Blanchot, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. In 1936 Bataille also formed a group that published the Acéphale review, The College of Sociology, which hosted speakers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno & Claude Levi-Strauss. Before his death in 1962, Bataille held a series of posts in provincial libraries, and was only able to return to Paris with the financial support of friends like Picasso, Ernst, Michaux and Míro who auctioned paintings on his behalf. During the years of German occupation Bataille wrote three very important books: L’Expérience intérieure (Inner Experience, 1943), Le Coupable (The Guilty, 1944), and Sur Nietzsche (On Nietzsche, 1945). It is in these books that l'informe becomes not only a concept, but also a practice of writing. They incorporate Bataille’s personal reflections with his fascination for chance, which he equates with transgression, sacrifice and anguish. This is a common theme that permeates most of Bataille’s writings. In his fictional works Bataille reveals a significant interest in the erotic, which often delves into a base world of horror, obscenity and death. His first novel, Histoire de L’Oeil (Story of the eye, 1924), tells the story of a couple who explore the limits of sexuality and subsequent death as Simone strangles her partner in an extreme sexual act. Two subsequent novels Le Bleu du Ciel (Blue of Noon, 1945) and L’Abbé C (The Abbot C, 1950) continue in a similar vein. Le Blue du Ciel is set against the background of German Nazism and is about a drunk, Troppmann, who has two lovers, Lazare and Dorothea. In one scene Dorothea and Troppmann make love in a graveyard amongst the dead, again emphasising Bataille’s obsession with erotic death. It was to the death of his father, and the subsequent insanity of his mother to which many commentators attribute Bataille’s interest in anguish and depicting the link between art and horror in both his fictional and philosophical works. Another significant moment was the grotesque death of the bullfighter Manuela Granero, an event witnessed in Spain 1922, and which is depicted with a powerfully symbolic eroticism in the novel Histoire de l’oeil. In a sense, much of Bataille writing is the voicing of certain of his most intimate obsessions. In his philosophical works, Bataille follows Freud in breaking taboos, describing sexuality in a symbolic and abstract way. In the text Eroticism (1957), Bataille is primarily interested in the relationship between man and woman, and the physical expression as the means to establish continuity of being in death, as two separate entities merge. By death, I assume he is using death symbolically as a simulacrum for a state that is outside of even life or death. In this sense, for Bataille, sex is a transgression of boundaries that arises from a fusion of two separate individual beings, at odds with the loss of integrity in the discontinuity of life. Nakedness and sexual passion lead to a loss of identity symbolically equated with death. “Passion fulfilled itself provokes such a violent agitation that the happiness involved, before being a happiness to be enjoyed, is so great as to be more like its opposite, suffering. Its essence is to substitute for the persistent discontinuity between two beings. Yet this continuity is chiefly to be felt in the anguish of desire, when it is accessible, still an impotent, quivering yearning. A tranquil feeling of secure happiness can only mean the calm which follows the long storm of suffering. For it is more likely that lovers will not meet in such a timeless fusion, than that they will; the chances are most often against their contemplating in speechless wonder the continuity that unites them.” (Eroticism, p. 19-21) Bataille describes a transgression from the discontinuous states of birth and death in states of anguish that he associates with the continuity of being in death. In my opinion he is talking about sex removed entirely from procreation, based more on the unconscious human desire for eternal existence. It is hard to decide if it is valid to generalise and draw conclusions from another essentially polarised argument, but perhaps Bataille is again referring to l’informe or simply some abstract sense of “otherness.” It is clear that this is a powerful link that connects Bataille’s philosophical and fictional works. Another important strand in Bataille’s work was his interest in myth and society in the late 1930’s. Bataille rejects society’s claim to define ontological truth, by claiming that reality is defined by myth itself. Bataille claims that society denies myth, creating a concept of reality that is in itself mythical. “‘The decisive absence of faith is resolute faith. […] Night is also sun’, and the absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purist, the only true myth.” (The Absence of Myth, 1947) While this sounds like a ridiculous philosophical conundrum it describes the surrealist agenda to negate the positivist attempt to replace God with science. In surrealism, the formless becomes the subject, and the concept of reality no longer exists and is no longer a motive for art. Surrealist artwork depicts unconscious thought, neither real nor imaginary, but more like a dream state, which is ruled by chance. While many of Bataille’s writings from 1945 to 1951 testify to his close connection with surrealism, his relationship with its leader André Breton was not that amicable. Initially, Bataille was drawn towards the group, which included some of his closest friends, but later said that he felt intimidated by the atmosphere of ostentation and was suspicious of their authoritative tone. In 1929, when Bataille became editor of Documents, he gathered together some of surrealism’s cast-offs, and subsequently, Breton accused him of starting a counter movement. Bataille replied by suggesting that there was a suspicious religious intent in Breton’s surrealist enterprise. It was not until the post-World War II era that the two men made up their differences after the impact of fascism. Linked to his interest in myth was Bataille’s association of sacrifice with the concept of ‘loss’ In his book Accursed Share, Bataille uses an anthropological study of human sacrifice in ancient Aztec culture to describe disequilibrium in a society controlled by utilitarian exchange values. Bataille acknowledges that human sacrifice is a symbolic ritual, used to bring life and death into relation with the infinite, and is essentially a transgressive function. However, he then suggests that sacrifice is a means to oppose capitalist restraint and values. The notion of ‘gift’ or ‘loss’ that is derived from sacrifice is for Bataille the most important means of expenditure of surplus that is outside rational economic necessity. “Sacrifice
is the antithesis of production, which is accomplished
with a view to the future; it is consumption that is
concerned only with the moment. This is the sense in
which it is gift and relinquishment, but what is given
cannot be an object of preservation for the receiver: the
gift of offering makes it pass precisely into the world
of abrupt consumption.” (Bataille, Theory
of Religion, pp. 49-50) Bataille was more interested in society’s expenditure of excesses rather than the perceived lack of economic resources. Take for example the concept of “war,” as being defined by the expenditure of excesses, rather than arising from a need like scarcity of economic resources etc. It is with this expenditure that Bataille believed culture is defined. Each society has its own choices and in a sense is defined by the manner in which it utilises these choices: “On
the whole, a society always produces more than is
necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its
disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this
surplus that determines it. The surplus is the cause of
agitation, of structural changes and of the entire
history of society. But this surplus has more than one
outlet, the most common of which is growth. And growth
itself has many forms, each one of which eventually comes
against some limit. Thwarted demographic growth becomes
military; it is forced to engage in conquest. Once the
military limit is reached, the surplus has the sumptuary
forms of religion as an outlet, along with games and
spectacles that derive therefrom, or personal
luxury.” It occurs to me that Bataille has hit upon something that is very pertinent in our modern life, but I do not see how sacrifice relates to the reality of an economic context. It seems to me that the example of human sacrifice is entirely concerned with the transgressive function linked to Bataille’s reading of sexuality. It is a celebration of myth through ritual as a means to regenerate society. For Bataille sacrifice becomes a sort of symbolic abstraction: “The victim is surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed pointlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed.” (The Accursed Share, vol.1, p. 59). It is somehow bizarre that Bataille manages to equate excesses of sexuality and death with his surrealist agenda of anti-rationalism. If one is using it as a means to confront the capitalist “value” concept, it becomes a polarised argument. Bataille states that those who give are no longer dependent on utilitarian value systems, value being defined by actual need, rather than value as a capitalist commodity. Bataille responds to capitalist economics with the notion of excess of expenditure that will rupture and alter society To quote Kosalka: “He [Bataille] emphazied the irrational in opposition to the rational, the erotic as opposed to bourgeois morality, celebration of excesses as opposed to capitalist restraint, transgression as opposed to conformity.” (Kosalka, George Bataille and the Notion of Gift, 12/99). Bibliography: George Bataille: Selected Writings, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Sage Publications, 1998) Bataille: A Critical Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth. Trans. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1994) Kosalka, David L. R. Georges Bataille and the Notion of Gift. (12/99, http://www.lemmingland.com/bataille.html) Selected Reading:
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My first encounter with the
French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille
occurred during a recent conference held at University
College Cork, Ireland.
