Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form 9780823291434

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Ecce Monstrum

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Ecce Monstrum Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form

Jeremy Biles

fordham university press new york 2007

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Copyright 䉷 2007 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [[To come]] Printed in the United States of America 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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For Yuki and for Danny Hoffman (1957–1996)

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Sacred! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Georges Bataille

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contents

xi

List of Figures

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Acknowledgments Introduction

1

1.

Ecstatic and Intolerable: The Provocations of Friendship

9

2.

Nietzsche Slain

36

3.

The Labyrinth: Toward Bataille’s ‘‘Extremist Surrealism’’

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4.

The Cross: Simone Weil’s Hyperchristianity

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5.

The Wounded Hands of Bataille: Hans Bellmer, Bataille, and the Art of Monstrosity

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Conclusion: Bataillean Meditations

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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list of figures

Figure 1. Andre´ Masson, Ace´phale. 䉷 by ADAGP, Paris, 1985.

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Figure 2. Matthias Gru¨newald (Mathis Nithart Gothart). The Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece, c.1512–15 (oil on panel), c.1480–1528, 䉷 Musee d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France/The Bridgeman Art Library.

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Figure 3. Hans Bellmer, La Poupe´e, 1935 (printed 1949 or earlier). Vintage gelatin silver print, blind-stamped by the artist’s estate, 55/8 ⳯ 51/2 inches (14.3 ⳯ 14 cm), Ubu Gallery, New York / Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

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Figure 4. Hans Bellmer, German (born Poland), 1902–75. Les mains articule´es, 1954, color lithograph on white wove paper, image: 27.7 x 37.1 cm; sheet: 42 ⳯ 55.6 cm, Stanley Field Fund, 1972.32, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography 䉷 The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Figure 5. Hans Bellmer, La Poupe´e, 1938. Hand-colored vintage gelatin silver contact print, 21/8 ⳯ 21/8 inches (5.4 ⳯ 5.4 cm)—image, Ubu Gallery, New York / Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

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acknowledgments

This book began as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago Divinity School. During my time at the Divinity School, I received advice and support from numerous friends and professors. I am particularly grateful to the three members of the faculty who together made up a dissertation committee the better than which cannot be imagined: Franc¸oise Meltzer, Amy Hollywood, and David Tracy. I also wish to thank my three anonymous readers at Fordham University Press, who offered valuable suggestions for how to make this a better book; my mother and father, whose generosity is without reserve; Rick Nance, for his careful reading of the entire manuscript; Chris Pusateri, for continual correspondence; and John Kimbrough, for technical, moral, and other support.

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Ecce Monstrum

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Introduction

The Sacred Monster We must refuse boredom and live only for fascination. — g e o r g e s b a t a i l l e , ‘‘The Sacred Conspiracy’’

In the 1930s, French writer Georges Bataille (1897–1962) established a secret society known as Ace´phale. In the journal by the same name that provided the group’s public facade, Bataille sets the mood for this obscure ‘‘headless’’ organization, declaring with imperative exigency, ‘‘WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS.’’1 Following this fervent enunciation, he heralds the ace´phalic deity that embodies this fierce religious sensibility. Enhanced by a drawing executed by his friend, the surrealist Andre´ Masson, Bataille’s description evokes a headless being, anthropomorphic but incomplete. Arms outstretched in a cruciform posture, hands bearing a blade and a flaming sacred heart, intestines visibly churning within a gaping torso, and 1

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with a skull in place of the genitals, the ace´phale is at once frightening and ridiculous, an absurd but fascinating conjunction of terror and hilarity. Bataille insists on the contradictory nature of this headless being. Describing the encounter with the ace´phale, he writes: Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime. . . . He reunites in the same eruption Birth and Death. He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in

Figure 1. Andre´ Masson, Ace´phale. 䉷 by ADAGP, Paris, 1985.

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which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster [monstre].2

The ace´phale is thus neither merely man nor solely god,3 because he is both man and god—at once human and holy, mortal and deific. This conjunction of opposites is what endows the headless being with its aura of fascination, and what makes of it a sacred ‘‘monster.’’4 Bataille’s insistent conjunction of the monstrous and the sacred is the subject of this book. Regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of our time, and acknowledged as an important influence by such intellectuals as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, Bataille produced a corpus of wide-ranging writings bearing the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he also sought to produce in his readers. In the following chapters, I will specify some of the ways in which Bataille evokes monstrosity to elicit in himself and his audience an experience of simultaneous anguish and joy—an experience that he calls sacred. In particular, Bataille is fascinated with the ‘‘left-hand’’ sacred. In contradistinction to its lucent and form-conferring ‘‘right-hand’’ counterpart, the left-hand sacred is obscure and formless—not transcendent, pure, and beneficent, but dangerous, filthy, and morbid. This sinister, deadly aspect of the sacred is at once embodied in, and communicated by, the monster. As we will see, it is in beholding the monster that one might experience the combination of ecstasy and horror that characterizes Bataille’s notion of the sacred. The dual etymology of ‘‘monster’’ reveals that aspect of the sacred that enticed Bataille. According to one vein of etymological study, the Latin monstrum derives from monstrare (to show or display). The monster is that which appears before our eyes as a sign of sorts; it is a demonstration. But another tradition emphasizes a more ominous point. Deriving from monere (to warn), the monster is a divine omen, a portent; it heralds something that yet remains unexpected, unforeseeable—as a sudden reversal of fortune.5 In the writings of Bataille, the monster functions as a monstrance, putting on display the sinister aspect of the sacred that Bataille sees as the key to a ‘‘sovereign’’ existence. But in doing so the monster presents us with a portent of something that we cannot precisely foresee, but something that, Bataille claims, can be paradoxically experienced in moments of simultaneous anguish and ecstasy: death.

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Death, according to Bataille, is not only a source of anguish, but also that by which we ecstatically escape our limited senses of self. An experience ‘‘on the level of death,’’6 occurs in erotic encounters or in moments of extreme emotion, ‘‘jerk[ing] us out of our tenacious obsession with the lastingness of our [individual] being.’’7 Wounding the closed form of the individual, death elicits a sense of continuity, of communication with other ruptured beings. In this regard, sacrifice is Bataille’s obsessive reference, for it is the operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form. This sacrifice of form8 thus results in the creation of monstrous forms, which are related to the informe (formless), to use one of Bataille’s key terms. 9 At the same time, the presentation of monstrosity—the showing of the monster—provokes a sacrificial experience. Beholding the monster incites affective contradictions, a rupturing experience of both life and death, joy and anguish. This paradoxical combination of extreme affects defines what Bataille calls ‘‘religious sensibility.’’ In the course of this book, I will attempt to show how Bataille deploys writing, philosophy, and art to portray and produce monstrosity in himself and his audience, thereby inciting a sense of the sacred in the modern world. In doing so, I will elaborate Bataille’s monstrous mode of reading and writing, a mode that is agonistic, but also an expression of friendship and communion. Each chapter evolves through an examination of Bataille’s relations to the work of a particular ‘‘friend,’’ a figure with whom he exhibits simultaneous intimacy and opposition. Focusing on these friends will not only allow readers to discern important influences on Bataille’s thought (influences betraying both accord and opposition); it will also occasion consideration of the monstrous strategies Bataille employs in his interpretations of others and in his own writings. While individual chapters develop specific dimensions of Bataille’s monstrous mode—contradiction, truncation, inversion, reversal, excess, decay, and a confusion of the senses—the overall itinerary of the book suggests something about the role of monstrosity in Bataille’s thought more generally. In the end, we will find that the various ways of thinking with which Bataille engages—primarily philosophy, literature, and visual art—are themselves subject to monstrous operations, for Bataille brings them into relations that exploit both their mutual intimacies and antagonisms. Provoking violence through these relations is one way in which Bataille opens readers to ecstatic experience.

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I have followed dual but closely intertwining trajectories, assessing how, according to Bataille, individuals undergo monstrous transformations in relation to certain domains of thought, and how these forms of thought function in relation to, but also in tension with, each other. The discussion in the pages that follow is grounded in Bataille’s understanding of the self as it emerges in proximity and opposition to a Hegelian understanding of the subject. With this understanding in place, it is possible to examine the several monstrous strategies by which the self is transformed—altered through experiences of contradiction—in relation to varied intellectual and artistic expressions. The discussion opens with an analysis of Bataille’s account of the formation of subjectivity, which is particularly inflected by Alexandre Koje`ve’s influential lectures of the 1930s on G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It is Hegel’s formulation of subjectivity with and against which Bataille is working, and in the face of which monstrosity is generated. Bataille truncates the Hegelian account; displacing the central Hegelian concept of ‘‘recognition’’ in the master–slave dialectic, Bataille’s notion of sovereign subjectivity derives from a logic of profound identification: empathy without reserve. For Bataille, this identification proceeds not according to the dynamics of power and submission attendant upon Hegelian recognition, but rather by way of a total relinquishment of power in an empathic merging with an always and only powerless—indeed tortured—other. This notion of identification is part and parcel of what Bataille calls a ‘‘counter operation,’’ an operation opposed to the dominant mode or attitude of thinking associated both with Hegelian recognition and discursive thought. This counter operation takes many forms in Bataille’s writings, and each subsequent chapter of this book will address some instantiation of it. The account developed in chapter 1 sets the stage for my treatment of Bataille’s relationship to Friedrich Nietzsche in chapter 2. With Hegel, Nietzsche was among the greatest influences on Bataille’s thought; reading Nietzsche marked a decisive moment for Bataille. But Bataille’s interpretation of Nietzsche is idiosyncratic, as he insists on a Nietzsche who has sacrificed reason on the altar of madness, and whose writings are meaningless if not understood as expressions of a peculiar mystical or ‘‘inner’’ experience—a movement from the philosophical syntheses of the Hegelian spirit to the anguish of the experience of the eternal return. In this chapter I show how Bataille at once critiques those aspects of his German predecessor that

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attest to a will to power, while specifying and exploiting that in Nietzsche which exhibits a morbid will to sickness and decline. In developing his valetudinarian version of Nietzsche, Bataille inverts the Nietzschean concept of tragic overcoming, putting sacrificial death in its place. Ultimately, Bataille identifies with Nietzsche, but with a sacrificial Nietzsche, reading him not as the philosopher of the affirmation of life but, by way of a dramatic reversal, as the madman who also pronounces a ‘‘Yes’’ even to death. A similar antagonistic dynamic is examined in the analyses of chapters 3 and 4, where I discuss another crucial influence on Bataille’s thought: surrealism. Concerned with the interrelations of methodic rational thought and ecstatic experience, Bataille claimed that his ‘‘method of meditation’’ was situated ‘‘beyond but alongside surrealism.’’10 Indeed, Bataille occasionally collaborated with surrealism’s founding father, Andre´ Breton. More often, however, he was Breton’s critic and nemesis, railing against Breton’s ethereal inclinations—that is, his failure to face, much less embrace, the sordid aspects of material reality. Building upon the analysis of Bataille’s fraught ‘‘friendship’’ with Nietzsche, in chapter 3 I articulate, and develop, Bataille’s critique of surrealism, both extending and diverging from recent work by art historians who have made headway in reconceptualizing the surrealist movement. In a manner that recalls his subversive reading of Nietzsche, Bataille incorporates some of Breton’s most cherished surrealist concepts— dream, chance, and automatism—only to exceed and pervert their surrealist meanings; in Bataille’s hands they are not the tools of poetic transformation, but rather the means of embracing base reality. In developing an extremist and ‘‘monstrous’’ surrealism to counter Breton’s more moderate brand of surrealism, Bataille finds an unlikely companion in the figure of Simone Weil. While Weil and Bataille’s shared political interests drew them into conversation in the 1930s, their subsequent friendship was nonetheless fraught with a sense of opposition. Indeed, in some respects, no one could be more different from the famously austere and pious Weil than the infamously excessive and scatological Bataille. However, I argue in chapter 4 that Weil embodies, as much in her death as in her life, the ‘‘hyperchristianity’’ that Bataille believes to be the extreme culminating point of a surrealism that no longer fails to contend with the morbid and contaminating aspects of reality.11 Drawing on biographical and philosophical evidence in a reading of the character Lazare (based on Weil) in Bataille’s novel Blue of Noon, I sug-

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gest that Bataille construes an image of the posthumous Weil as a divine but decaying intercessor: a patron saint of perishability. His monstrous reading of Weil’s writing and life conveys an embodiment of contradiction that finds its fullest expression in the lacerating paradox of time and eternity, human and god, in the crucifixion. It is in light of this reading of Weil that Bataille finally witnesses a hyperchristianity that exceeds the sublimating paradigm of Breton’s surrealism, marking another dimension of the experience of the sacred. Crucifixion figures contradiction again in chapter 5, where I examine the work of artist Hans Bellmer in relation to Bataille. I argue that Bellmer’s work reveals a lasting obsession with the painted crucifixion of Matthias Gru¨newald’s harrowing Isenheim Altarpiece. Though an atheist, Bellmer and his work exhibit what Bataille calls ‘‘religious sensibility,’’ a monstrous and contradictory combination of horror and ecstasy. This sensibility is expressed in Bellmer’s construction of the iconic and uncanny decomposable doll for which he was best known, as well as in his graphic work. In particular we will see that Bellmer and Bataille dramatically oppose the philosophical tradition of the hand, in which dexterity and synthetic balance are paramount in the pursuit of good form. To this end I examine the skillful hands of Bellmer, arguing that his own dexterity is put to monstrous ends in a kind of Bataillean counter operation; his practiced right hand executes sinister forms: images of the left-hand sacred that instill in their viewers the religious sensibility that Bataille has articulated. Bellmer additionally provokes a confusion of the senses through his manipulations of image and text, bodies and language, each cutting into the other. I conclude chapter 5 with an examination of Bataille’s wounded hands, suggesting that the evocation of wounds in art and writing evinces a monstrous sacrifice of form that might provoke in the audience an ecstatic experience at the level of death—and thus an experience of the sacred in the contemporary world. The stakes of Bataille’s writings are high, as they not only attempt to provide the means to understand certain aspects of the sacred, but also attempt to elicit experiences of it. At the outset of his life as a writer, Bataille received a gift from his psychoanalyst, Dr. Adrien Borel: a photograph of a man undergoing a horrific torture. (Chapter 1 contains a discussion of this photo.) Dismembered and eviscerated, the man, still alive at the time the photo was taken, and exhibiting a strangely ecstatic expression, has been turned into a monster—disfigured, a vision of horror. For Bataille, the

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transfiguration of this man is emblematic of the monstrous transformation he seeks in his brand of religious experience—ecstatic even to ruin, rapturous and ruptured to the point of death. This profoundly troubling sacrificial model for inner experience is one that Bataille revisits and modifies throughout his writings. I think that ultimately Bataille’s writings can be read as a sustained method of meditation in which he explores the possibility of enacting and provoking—through a monstrous mode of writing, reading, and artistic production—the sacred ruination for which bodily sacrifice had been the model. In this book I attempt to clarify and build upon Bataille’s concept of monstrosity, and, in doing so, to elaborate the possibilities for engaging in a practice of joy in the face of death12—that is, for arousing the intolerable contradiction that defines the sacred: divine ecstasy and extreme horror.

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Ecstatic and Intolerable: The Provocations of Friendship Intimacy is violence. — g e o r g e s b a t a i l l e , Theory of Religion

The Tears of Eros What is truth, apart from the representation of excess, if we only see that which exceeds the possibility of seeing what it is intolerable to see, just as in ecstasy enjoyment is intolerable? — g e o r g e s b a t a i l l e , Erotism

Georges Bataille died in 1962, a year after completing his last book, The Tears of Eros, a lavishly illustrated essay on the history of eroticism. This book represents a visual and textual record of this writer’s final days; the inevitability of death that had terrified and elated Bataille throughout his life had now given way to awareness of death’s imminence. In poor health, Bataille, with the assistance of his friend J. M. Lo Duca, wrote the text that would accompany the images he had collected and arranged with scrupulous care during the previous two years. 9

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Among the dozens of images comprised in this book—ranging from basreliefs of copulating figures from the Aurignacian period, to Greek statuary, to the productions of surrealists such as Hans Bellmer and Andre´ Masson— are four photos of a man undergoing the punitive process known as the lingchi, translated as ‘‘death by a thousand cuts’’ or the ‘‘hundred pieces.’’ ‘‘Reserved for the gravest of crimes,’’ this mode of torture and execution entails the dismemberment and evisceration of its victim.1 The shots were captured in Peking in 1905 and published by Georges Dumas in 1923. But Bataille’s first exposure to these images, which he characterizes as ‘‘the most anguishing of worlds accessible to us . . . on film,’’2 came through Dr. Adrien Borel, a French psychoanalyst who treated Bataille during the years 1925–27. Borel, employing a rather unorthodox strategy to approach the ‘‘virulently obsessive character’’ of his patient, made a gift of one of these photos to Bataille. Bataille credited the psychoanalytic treatment, during the course of which he received the photo, with liberating him from the series of ‘‘mishaps’’ in which he had been ‘‘floundering.’’3 Bataille claims that ‘‘this photograph had a decisive role’’ in his life, that he ‘‘never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic (?) and intolerable.’’4 Indeed, this horrific image remained the subject of his scrutiny until the time of his death. With this in mind, it is worth inquiring into the question mark that punctuates Bataille’s description of the victim in this photo as ‘‘ecstatic’’ and ‘‘intolerable.’’ This question mark appears to refer to Dumas’s Traite´ de psychologie, which Bataille discusses in his treatment of the photos.5 Dumas’s physiognomic study analyzes the expressions of persons in states of extreme pleasure and pain. After commenting on the unclassifiable nature of the expression on the victim’s face, Dumas avoids drawing any definitive conclusions, remarking instead that the expression is ‘‘paradoxical’’ and perhaps ‘‘ecstatic.’’ The question mark in Bataille’s text may thus respond to Dumas’s own uncertainty regarding the ecstatic state of the victim. In apparent deference to Dumas, Bataille allows the question of ecstasy to remain open. This question mark could be read as disingenuous; it may be that Bataille is in fact certain that the image portrays a state of ecstasy, that the victim’s face reveals not just torment, but rapture. This case is bolstered by Bataille’s claim that ‘‘Dumas insists upon the ecstatic appearance of the victim’s expression,’’6 despite the fact that, as one commentator has noted, Dumas ‘‘really only mentions it on his way to concluding that the face cannot be read’’—not

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definitively, at least—in these terms.7 But further consideration may lead to a different conclusion. For instance, Amy Hollywood emphasizes that the conjecture concerning the victim’s putative ecstasy, however tentative, is initially made by Dumas, and is ‘‘only reluctantly taken up by Bataille.’’8 The very question of whether Bataille insists upon the ecstasy of the victim or is reluctant to accede to this hypothesis is in some sense also the response to the problem. The question mark points, finally, to Bataille’s ambivalence and uncertainty about the voluptuous pleasure he clearly wants to attribute to this person being literally sundered limb from limb— something he nonetheless hesitates to proclaim with finality. Bataille comments that he ‘‘cannot imagine a more insane, more shocking form’’ of violence—but it is one that ‘‘stuns’’ him ‘‘to the point of ecstasy.’’9 In other words, despite the inability to decide upon the victim’s inner state—which is, of course, unknowable—the horror of the photo gives rise to an ecstatic experience, for it is in the ‘‘violence of the image’’ that Bataille discerns ‘‘an infinite capacity for reversal’’ between antinomies, a revelation of the ‘‘fundamental connection’’ between ‘‘divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.’’10 This point is noteworthy for two reasons. First, if Bataille discerns a ‘‘capacity for reversal’’ in the lingchi image, this revelation does not occur without regard for the plight of the victim; on the contrary, it occurs despite the victim’s (merely apparent?) ecstasy. It is the suffering of the victim, the blatant ‘‘violence of the image’’ that throws Bataille into ecstasy, not the epiphenomenal aspect of bliss in the victim’s countenance. It is true that there is ‘‘something undeniable in [the victim’s] expression . . . which augments what is most anguishing about this photograph.’’11 But it is no less true that attention to the suffering of the human being occasions ecstasy for Bataille. In other words, not until Bataille has actually identified with the victim, in some sense become the victim, does he experience the ecstasy that may (or may not) be evident in the visage of the man in the photo. If this human face is indeed the representation of ecstasy, it does not communicate that ecstasy until suffering is first experienced, until Bataille identifies with the violence and horror embodied in the victim. The reversal from anguish to rapture, or the ‘‘identity of these perfect contraries’’ of ecstasy and horror, is important to note for a different but related reason.12 The reversal of which Bataille speaks is possible only so long as the element of excessive horror remains intolerable—that is, so long

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as the horror is preserved as horror, so long as it is not overcome, interpreted, given a definitive meaning, or converted into a purely conceptual form. If the question of the possibility of ecstasy remains open, what is certain is that, for Bataille, the photo continues to be ‘‘intolerable’’; its horror has never been neutralized, never converted, by way of familiarity, into banality. Across the decades in which Bataille contemplates this photo, it never stops obsessing him, never ceases to be excessive, nearly unbearable. Bataille, in short, never masters the image that he confronts. This observation leads one to ask how something can be revisited, contemplated at length, approached with extreme attention,13 while also remaining intolerable. Frederic Jameson, glossing Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s concept of ‘‘repressive tolerance,’’ describes a ‘‘universal neutralization’’—a condition of exhaustion, in the sense in which television performers speak of the ‘exhaustion’ of their raw material through overexposure. In this sense tolerance in our society can be said to be genuinely repressive, in that it offers a means of defusing the most dangerous and subversive ideas: not censorship, but the transformation into a fad, is the most effective way of destroying a potentially threatening movement or revolutionary personality.14

Jameson’s remarks underscore Marcuse’s claim that ‘‘universal toleration becomes questionable when its rationale no longer prevails, when tolerance is administered to individuals who parrot, as their own, the opinion of their masters, for whom heteronomy has become autonomy.’’15 In light of Bataille’s mounting readership and increasing recognition,16 we might also ask how to read Bataille today—how to approach his work in a way that neither neutralizes the potency of his thought through overexposure, nor treats as master this writer ‘‘known to insistently refuse masterful identity.’’17 One (often implicit) contention of this book is that there are resources within Bataille’s writings for evoking the ‘‘attitude of thought’’18 required for reading Bataille in a way that maintains, and even exacerbates, his intolerability, and that resists the ‘‘repressive tolerance’’ that might threaten to neutralize his thought. The chapters that follow will each develop an account of Bataille’s reading of another thinker or thinkers—philosophers, writers, and artists—with whom Bataille at once exhibits intimacy and antagonism. The practice elaborated in the course of this book invokes a reader willing to put himself at risk in reading.19

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This notion of risk recalls, but differs crucially from, the risking of one’s life described in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Assuming, but also critiquing, aspects of the Hegelian master–slave dialectic, Bataille offers an account of a practice that enacts a sacrificial logic of identification that defies the seeming ineluctability of Hegelian recognition. Behind this sacrificial dynamic is an anthropological vision both indebted to Hegel and in contradiction with him—exemplifying the simultaneously intimate and agonistic dynamic that those who approach Bataille might enact in their readings of him. Another important coincidence of proximity and opposition to Hegel is revealed in Bataille’s very approach to contradiction. In Bataille’s writings, contradiction is not avoided but frequently sought and intensified; Bataille’s thinking, as Joseph Libertson points out, ‘‘proceed[s] and inspire[s] itself by contradiction.’’20 Hegel, too, embraces contradiction, but of course to very different ends. Interpretations of the place of contradiction in Hegel’s dialectical system diverge significantly; the concept of Aufhebung (commonly translated as ‘‘sublation’’) is seen by some as the resolution or cancellation of contradictions, and by others as the lifting up and preserving of these contradictions.21 Whatever the interpretation, however, it can be said that for Hegel, contradiction is ultimately in service of the telos of the dialectical system, for the Aufhebung ‘‘is included within the circle of absolute knowledge, [it] never exceeds its closure, never suspends the totality of discourse, work . . . etc.’’22 The prominent contradictions with which Bataille’s writings are fraught, on the other hand, must be apprehended in a different manner. For Bataille, contradictions do not function within dialectical discourse, but rather confound discursive thought, if only fleetingly, refusing the synthetic moment and the aspiration to absolute knowledge.23 In his seminal essay on Bataille, ‘‘A Preface to Transgression,’’ Michel Foucault suggests that ‘‘perhaps one day [transgression] will seem as decisive for our culture, as much a part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier time for dialectical thought.’’ ‘‘We must find,’’ he asserts, ‘‘language for the transgressive which would be what dialectics was . . . for contradiction.’’24 But the transgressive—that is, non-dialectical or non-discursive—form of language that Foucault announces already has contradiction lodged at its core,25 and indeed the citation from Bataille’s Story of the Eye with which Foucault closes his essay betrays a coincidence of opposites, a dramatization of contradiction, to which Foucault seems blind:

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‘‘Two globes of the same colour and consistency were simultaneously activated in opposite directions. . . . This coincidence . . . gave me Marcelle for a moment.’’26 If this passage exemplifies transgression for Foucault, it is not despite, but rather because of the contradictions it portrays and evokes. In other words, it is not simply the case, as Foucault would have it, that ‘‘the act of transgression replaces the movement of contradictions.’’27 Bataille, as the passage from Story of the Eye makes clear, does not replace contradiction with transgression; on the contrary, contradiction is a condition of the possibility of transgression (a fact that has been largely overlooked by the poststructuralist school of thinkers who, following Foucault, have privileged transgression at the expense of contradiction).28 Derrida helps focus this point in his influential essay ‘‘From Restricted to General Economy.’’ Here he quotes Bataille’s Erotism, which refers to the ‘‘contradictory experience of prohibition and transgression. . . . But transgression . . . dispels the prohibition without suppressing it.’’29 That is, transgression is the experience of breaching the boundary of the interdiction in a way that, as Bataille repeatedly emphasizes, affirms the limit even as it is negated. If there is, as Bataille himself claims, a ‘‘Hegelian character’’ to the transgression, a moment that corresponds to that of the dialectical synthesis, it is an inverted or parodic form of the Aufhebung. Bataille is perhaps Hegelian, but also ‘‘less Hegelian than he thinks,’’30 as Derrida says, for in place of the synthesis Bataille puts the experience of clashing contradictories. Neither cancelled nor precisely preserved, contradictories are, for Bataille, experienced as contradictory. And neither replacing contradiction with transgression nor remaining caught within the Hegelian paradigm, Bataille in fact exacerbates and exploits contradiction to achieve this inner experience, even and especially to the point of ‘‘laceration.’’ As Joseph Libertson claims, ‘‘the integrity of opposition, and the synthetic homogeneity which normally accompanies it, are supplanted in Bataille by a suspended moment of contamination which is not a resolution,’’ but a wounding ‘‘intensity.’’31 Bataille is thus anti-Hegelian in his transgressive operations, where contradiction is experienced as a shattering force rather than a moment in the dialectical process—but he also betrays an intimacy with Hegel; to be sure, Bataille’s thought bears the marks of a certain interpretation of the idealist philosopher. An examination of the influence on Bataille of Alexandre Koje`ve’s lectures on Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit will reveal the psycho-

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logical mechanics of recognition and mastery in Hegel’s paradigm, as well the Bataillean ‘‘counter operation’’ that eschews these, replacing them with an extreme identification devoid of the imposition of power. This identification enlists a ‘‘sacrifice of form’’ that renders its willing victims neither masters nor slaves, but wounded individuals conjoined by a violence that is at once ecstatic and intolerable—an experience of intimacy and, strangely, friendship that Bataille deems sacred.

Master–Slave: The Problem of Recognition In 1933, political philosopher Alexandre Koje`ve embarked upon a series of lectures the impact of which reverberated throughout the French intellectual scene. Attracting such luminaries as Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Klossowski, Andre´ Breton, and Bataille himself, these lectures stimulated an entire generation of thinkers, and for a time placed Hegel’s formulation of the master–slave dialectic at the center of intellectual life. While Bataille’s thoughts on the problems of mastery had already been catalyzed by his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche,32 his subsequent writing on mastery, slavery, sovereignty, and subjectivity is clearly (and indeed explicitly) indebted to Koje`ve.33 Koje`ve’s idiosyncratic foregrounding of the master–slave dialectic in his reading of Hegel is perhaps his most noteworthy contribution, and it is this innovation which seems to have had the greatest influence on Bataille’s thought. Indeed, it not only played a role in Bataille’s conception of mastery and slavery in Hegel’s work, but characterized his personal struggle for and against recognition, a struggle that now might be considered in light of Bataille’s belated but increasing recognition. Bataille’s relationship to Hegel and Koje`ve has been the object of considerable scrutiny, but I want to reveal a formerly unconsidered aspect of Bataille’s engagement with the dynamics of the master–slave relationship. Doing so will ground my account of the agonistic mode of reading that defines Bataille’s intellectual friendships. These friendships, enacted by Bataille in the broad realms of philosophical, literary, and artistic discourse that will be examined in this book, ultimately displace Hegelian recognition with an agonized sense of identification—an identification akin to that of the sacrificer and his victim.

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Explicating Hegel, Koje`ve begins with an exploration of the genesis of self-consciousness. He describes the man who is absorbed in contemplation, who loses himself in the object of his attention. Such a man ‘‘can be ‘brought back to himself’ only by a desire; the desire to eat, for example.’’34 This desire is what transforms being, revealing to the subject its difference from the object that is opposed to it, different from it. The unsettling nature of desire compels man to take action to satisfy that desire. Taking up Koje`ve’s example, to satisfy hunger, food must be destroyed, consumed; the satisfaction of desire can only be obtained by ‘‘the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object.’’35 Such desire, with its attendant negating action, is, however, ‘‘an emptiness’’—for the destroyed, transformed, or assimilated ‘‘natural’’ object of the desiring subject leaves this subject in his animal state. The assimilation of a natural object thus does not transform the subject, the ‘‘I,’’ but rather preserves the I as natural. The subject obtains positive content only through the transformation of some ‘‘non-natural’’36 object—in other words, some other desiring entity—to ascend to self-consciousness; the desire of the I must be directed toward ‘‘something that goes beyond the given reality,’’ some non-natural object: ‘‘Desire itself.’’ Human desire, therefore, ‘‘must be directed toward another [human] Desire’’;37 it yearns to be ‘‘recognized’’ by another. What distinguishes human desire from merely animal want is that the latter is always ‘‘a function of its desire to preserve life’’—to maintain its existence intact, risking as little as possible. Human desire, on the other hand, demands a risk of life: ‘‘man’s humanity ‘comes to light’ only if he risks his (animal) life for the sake of his human Desire. It is in and by this risk that the human reality is created and revealed as reality.’’38 What is it that human desire wants to have recognized by the other? Hegel, on Koje`ve’s account, claims that it is a value—that is, the desiring I wants to impose a recognition of his value on an other. To satisfy this wish for recognition, two desiring subjects necessarily come into conflict, each wanting to impose this value on the other, each wanting to procure the other’s recognition. This conflict takes the form of a fight ‘‘to the death,’’ a fight ‘‘for pure prestige’’ in the pursuit of the satisfaction of having imposed one’s own value as the ‘‘supreme value.’’39 However, though this fight begins as a fight to the death, it is necessary that each adversary remains alive. If one or both adversaries die in the fight, the imposition of value cannot occur, and recognition is thereby precluded.

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The desired recognition thus presupposes that the opposing subjects ‘‘behave differently in this fight.’’ One ‘‘must fear the other, must give in to the other, must refuse to risk his life for the satisfaction of his desire for ‘recognition.’ ’’40 In short, one forgoes one’s own desire in order to satisfy the desire of the other; one adversary retreats, abandoning his attempt for recognition, while the other is recognized. The former is the slave; the latter, the master. As Koje`ve emphasizes, however, the recognition of the master by the slave ‘‘is not recognition properly so-called,’’ for the master is ‘‘recognized by someone whom he does not recognize.’’ He has, in other words, risked his life ‘‘for a recognition without value for him.’’41 The master is recognized by a being whom he, the master, only recognizes as a mere thing or an animal, and not as an agent of human desire. Now this instance of misrecognition42 gives rise to a host of problems for the master. Without entering into the complexities that Koje`ve does so much to elucidate, it will be necessary to underscore some of the features of this failed recognition in order to bring them into relation with Bataille’s thought. First, Koje`ve states that ‘‘the truth of autonomous Consciousness is slavish Consciousness.’’ By this he means to bring to light the place of work in its relation to autonomous consciousness. The slave, in his work for the master, transforms the world; his action is the negating and transforming action that prepares an object for consumption or enjoyment by the master. The slave, though not allowed to enjoy the pleasure of consumption, is nonetheless the agent of transformation whose labor is the ‘‘source of all human, social, historical progress.’’43 Moreover, it is just the slave’s laborious subordination to the master that allows the slave to achieve self-consciousness. While the master is relegated to an existential impasse, unable to recognize the slave who recognizes him, the slave is granted, by his very status as slave, the possibility of overcoming this position of subordination. In his ability to recognize the privilege of the other, and therefore to see the possibility of being other than a slave, the slave is predisposed to the negating action of self-overcoming. Though the slave does not manifest this will to selfovercoming from the beginning, there exists a tendency toward this negation of the slavish I; the fight in which he was initially engaged ‘‘predisposes him to that act of self-overcoming, of negation of himself.’’44 In relation to Bataille, this moment of negation in the dialectic is crucial, for it is here that a certain freedom from the form-imposing processes of work is evident,

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and it is here that Bataille wants at once to affirm Koje`ve emphatically and to depart from Koje`ve (or Hegel) definitively. To understand this it will be necessary to examine the terms and movements described by Koje`ve in the remainder of his initial analysis of the master–slave dialectic.

The Rise of Forms In what is perhaps at once Bataille’s most sustained and terse appropriation of Koje`ve’s reading of Hegel, his Theory of Religion, one finds an epigraph drawn from Koje`ve. The epigraph is taken from the opening lines of the lectures, in which the philosopher claims that ‘‘Desire is what transforms Being.’’ This citation concludes with these words: In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude, Desire disquiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the ‘‘negation,’’ the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object: To satisfy hunger, for example, the food must be destroyed or, in any case, transformed. Thus, all action is negating.

Bataille then begins the book proper with a note on ‘‘Where This Book Is Situated.’’ Here he claims that ‘‘the foundation of one’s thought is the thought of another.’’45 One may conclude that Bataille is here paying homage, above all others, to Koje`ve, whose words immediately precede Bataille’s claim; it suggests that the opening remarks of Koje`ve provide the opening to Bataille’s theory of religion. It is thus all the more important to take notice of what constitutes the end of Bataille’s book: a section designated ‘‘General Table and References.’’ Here Bataille cites the work of those to whom his book is most indebted. Among the references are Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For each of these references Bataille offers a brief description of their contents in two or three sentences. But in this annotated bibliography, the citation of Koje`ve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel stands out; it is both substantially longer than the other references and is the only one to contain critical remarks. These remarks, appended to the book proper, provide, in explicit terms, Bataille’s difference from Hegel’s thought—a difference that, it could be said, animates his entire theory

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of religion. Underscoring first his relation to Koje`ve, Bataille says that ‘‘[t]he ideas that I have developed here are substantially present in [Koje`ve’s Introduction].’’46 However, Bataille goes on to say that the differences between his theory of religion and the Hegelian analysis as rendered by Koje`ve ‘‘still need to be specified.’’ By way of specification, then, Bataille claims that the main difference concerns the conception that makes the destruction of the subject the condition—necessarily unrealizable—of its adequation to the object. Doubtless this implies from the start a state of mind radically opposed to Hegelian ‘satisfaction,’ but here the contraries coincide (they only coincide, and the opposition in which they coincide cannot this time be overcome by any synthesis. . . .)47

Bataille thus characterizes his difference from Hegel as a state of mind, one that affirms the coexistence of contraries, and which refuses the satisfaction of synthesis. The state of mind to which Bataille alludes brings to the fore the dualism that underlies his theory of religion and indeed his thought in general. It is the dualism of the sacred and the profane—and their rigorous distinction— that concerns Bataille, and that is admirably described by Koje`ve in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Koje`ve, however, valorizes a state of mind, or an ‘‘attitude of thought,’’48 that Bataille finds unsatisfactory for its very tendency toward satisfaction; Bataille remains ‘‘opposed to Hegelian ‘satisfaction.’ ’’49 With this in mind, we may return to Koje`ve’s lectures on Hegel. Koje`ve claims, it will be recalled, that the slave is ‘‘predisposed’’ toward negating himself as slave—that he exhibits the tendency toward self-overcoming. This self-negating action is only available to the slave because he has first undergone ‘‘the fear of death, the fear of the absolute Master,’’ whose incarnation is the human master. Only the terror and dread inspired by the master conveys the ‘‘sense of power’’ that allows the slave to ‘‘attain the final perfection’’ of the ‘‘completed man.’’50 This terror is crucial to the dialectical transformation of the slave into something ‘‘beyond himself.’’ As Koje`ve emphasizes, ‘‘it is not sufficient to be afraid, nor even to be afraid while realizing that one fears death. It is necessary to live in terms of terror. Now, to live in such a way is to serve someone whom one fears, someone who inspires or incarnates terror; it is to serve a master (a real, that is, human Master, or the ‘sublimated’ Master—God)’’ (27). The terror of man

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in service to the master’s laws is transformative. In other words, ‘‘by externalizing oneself, by binding oneself to others, [. . .] one is liberated from the enslaving dread that the idea of death inspires’’ (28).51 This is to say that terror, if it is to be transformative, requires the educative-forming process of work. These two elements, terror and work, are essential to the dialectical movement by which the slavish consciousness frees itself from the master. In the labor produced under fear of the master, nature is transformed, and it is in this transformation that the slave himself is transformed. Initially subordinated to nature in his service to the master, the slave accepts ‘‘the instinct of self-preservation’’—he submits himself to the laws of nature in submitting to the laws of the master. But by transforming nature, he also masters nature, liberating himself from its laws and from the laws of self-preservation that had first bound him to subordination. Thus labor has a liberating effect, one predicated on the repression of desires that seek immediate fulfillment. In repressing the instinct to consume immediately—an instinct that the master need not, and does not, repress— the slave transcends, or educates, himself; he ‘‘ ‘cultivates’ and ‘sublimates’ his instincts by repressing them’’ (24).52 This repression of the instinct for immediate consumption is not available to the master, to whom objects, already prepared by the slave, are available for present assimilation. ‘‘For the Master . . . the immediate relation [to the thing] comes into being, through that mediation’’—that is, through the slave’s transformation of the thing (17).53 The deferral of the instinct for satisfaction underscores the temporal element of the dialectic, an element that distinguishes the master from the slave. Whereas the master consumes objects in immediate enjoyment, the slave ‘‘postpones the destruction of the thing by first trans-forming it through work; he prepares it for consumption—that is to say, he ‘forms’ it,’’ and in so doing, forms himself. Educating himself, the slave also forms himself by transforming the world. The outcome of this temporal deferral is the conferral of a form by which the object ‘‘gains permanence, precisely because, for the worker, the object has autonomy’’ (25).54 The attainment of form, this positing or production of the object as separate, distinct, and durable, is also a reflection of the slave—the ‘‘realization of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realized in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it’’ (25).55 By means of his work, then, the slave, having deferred immediate

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satisfaction, obtains the satisfaction of realizing himself objectively as man—he is able to contemplate, in the autonomous product of his labor, his own image. The self-reflective subject that the slave now becomes is the ‘‘formed-or-educated’’ man, which Koje`ve describes as the ‘‘completed man who is satisfied by his completion’’ (25).56 The slave, having passed through slavish consciousness in the dialectical reversal engendered by self-negation, forms himself as something distinct and durable. He enters, by virtue of his labor, the world of objective reality—he recognizes himself in the world he has transformed by his work; in doing so, he achieves ‘‘his authentic freedom,’’ his ‘‘true autonomy’’ (27).57 The question of what constitutes as recognition the slave’s recognition of himself in the products of his labor arises here. That is, what differentiates the former slave’s recognition of himself in what are merely the objects of his labor—things—from the master’s false recognition by the slave, who is himself a thing? The answer relies on the two elements that initially impelled the slave’s self-negation: terror and work. The products of this work are, we have seen, transformed natural objects. Having been transformed, the objects are endowed with a kind of autonomy—they are no longer merely things, but the durable forms that have been imposed by the slave’s ‘‘forming activity of work,’’ and thus reflect the slave. In contemplating his work, therefore, the slave recognizes himself: a self-reflective recognition. But this recognition would not be possible without the terror that stimulates the labor, which in turn transforms the natural world into the ‘‘real objective World, which is a non-natural World’’ (26).58 The terror inspired by the master, who is the incarnation of the terror of death, at the same time inspires the labor that binds the slave to the master. Without this terror of the other, the ‘‘terror remains internal-or-private and mute.’’ It is only by way of ‘‘externalizing oneself’’ that the terror ceases to be that of a madman, private and ‘‘purely subjective’’ (28)59 Terror vis-a`-vis a master gives rise to the forming activity that shapes objects which in turn reflect their producer and allow for self-recognition. The former slave recognizes his humanity in his own work. Having passed through slavish consciousness and into self-consciousness, he is finally afforded satisfaction. And having transformed a given natural world into his own image, the slave transforms himself, and in so doing enacts a ‘‘revolutionary overcoming of the World that can free him, and— consequently—satisfy him.’’ This ‘‘desire of revolutionary negation,’’ as

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Koje`ve calls it, is engendered by the master, but is only realized and satisfied by the slave who ‘‘can transform the World that forms him and fixes him in slavery and create a World that he has formed in which he will be free’’ (29).60 In transforming the world the slave also creates new objective conditions that renew the fight for recognition. Having once been a slave to the terror of death and the hostility of the natural world, this slave, through work, creates a world that is the reflection of his ownmost value, and by which he seeks to impose this value on others in the renewed struggle for recognition. The creation of the technical world of work thus engenders and reveals the autonomous self-consciousness of the slave. Koje`ve’s description of the rise of self-consciousness through work is taken up by Bataille in his Theory of Religion. Here, Bataille recapitulates, while also significantly modifying, the movement of the coming to consciousness of humans, and with it the place of labor in the creation of the ‘‘real order’’ of the world of things. Like Koje`ve, Bataille distinguishes the world of animal life from that of human life, which arises from the former. Unlike Koje`ve, however, Bataille describes not a dialectical movement in which a satisfying resolution (or perfection) is obtainable, but rather the positing of two distinct worlds, those of the sacred and the profane, which can never be synthesized or resolved. Moreover, as we will see, Bataille subverts the dialectic of power as seen in the dynamic of the fight for prestige. While affirming Koje`ve’s emphasis on the terror inspired by death as being a critical element in the life of humans, he rejects the Koje`vian formulation of death as the absolute master, speaking instead of ‘‘death’s definitive impotence and absence.’’61 In doing so, Bataille refuses the struggle for recognition and the satisfaction to which it is directed, replacing it with a logic of identification and unsatisfied desire. This identification is possible—as we will see below—at that point of self-negation which, as described by Koje`ve, sets the slave on the road to mastery, but which in Bataille corresponds to a sacred world where the very distinctions on which recognition relies are erased. In short, Bataille, in his attempt to undo recognition, truncates Hegel at the point of self-negation, refusing the satisfactions of his telic thought. Bataille enacts a contrary movement, a movement opposed to the self-perfecting tendency described by Koje`ve. He engages in a counter operation—a reversal in the attitude of thought, a resistance to the dominant tendency characterized by that predisposition toward the furtherance of the dialectic of recognition.

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Leaving Hegel According to Koje`ve, the self-negation of the slave, arising from the predisposition to self-overcoming, sets the stage for the slave’s move to mastery over nature, the world, and himself. This requisite moment of negation allows for the transforming activity by which the slave enters the reflexive domain of self-consciousness and self-identity. But before the fixity of form is achieved, before the satisfaction of perfection is obtained, the slave must undergo a terror in the presence of the absolute master, a terror that entails the ‘‘absolute liquefaction of every stable-support.’’62 Elaborating this scene of dissolution, Koje`ve underscores the liberating nature of this terror, holding it in contrast to the fearless self-identity of the master. He claims that the master cannot go beyond himself, cannot change, but is fixed in his reified state of mastery, ‘‘tied to the given,’’ preserved ‘‘indefinitely in identity to himself.’’63 His supreme value of mastery having been achieved, the master is left with no place to go. The slave, on the other hand, has understood in terror, though unconsciously, ‘‘that a given, fixed, and stable condition, even though it be the Master’s, cannot exhaust the possibilities of human existence. . . . He did not want to bind himself to the Master’s condition, nor does he bind himself to his condition as a Slave. There is nothing fixed in him. He is ready for change.’’64 This liminal state, in which the human is no longer slave but not yet master, is what Bataille describes in his Theory of Religion as the sacred. Though the liquefaction to which the slave subjects himself in his self-negation resonates clearly with Bataille’s theory, the slave in Koje`ve’s account has at this very point ‘‘a positive ideal to attain; the ideal of autonomy.’’65 This ideal of autonomy is the ‘‘final perfection,’’ the supreme satisfaction of completion that finds its expression in the ‘‘formed-and-educated’’ man, the man of the project. In other words, the temporal deferral of satisfaction culminates in supreme satisfaction; repressed desires are diverted into work, and work into the projects that afford the slave a mastery over nature and the ability to create the conditions for autonomous recognition, the final and supreme satisfaction. In short, the project is the way the slave can engage in the ‘‘overcoming of the World that can free him, and— consequently—satisfy him.’’66 Therefore, according to Koje`ve, liberation, autonomy, and satisfaction are of a piece, and they are expressed in the ‘‘liberating Fight for recognition.’’

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The case is quite different for Bataille. Though he employs the concept of self-negation, the negating process he describes is one that supposes no obtainable ideal. Moreover, Bataille’s self-negation, I will argue, operates according to a logic of identification and exacerbated desire that rejects Hegelian recognition.67 Bataille develops his theory of religion on the basis of Koje`ve’s Introduction—but from the outset the dialectical model that took the struggle for recognition between the master and slave as its point of departure is replaced by a dualistic conception that opposes the sacred to the profane, the world of animal immanence and the world of human technology and transcendence. In conceiving this dualistic model, Bataille engages in a counter operation, an operation dedicated to the undoing of the spirit of Hegelian synthesis through the maintenance of antinomies.68

The Counter Operation If it is the case, as Koje`ve explains, that human self-consciousness comes into being as a mastery over nature, over the biological reality of animal life, then it could be said that Bataille seeks to sacrifice this self-consciousness, to induce the ‘‘sleep of reason that produces monsters,’’69 and adopt an attitude of thought opposed to Hegelian satisfaction. Such a state of mind, according to Bataille, is the only one that provides access to humankind’s total existence: an existence open to the extreme experiences of both life and death. Bataille’s theory thus begins—and also ends—with animality, a world that he describes as one of immanence: ‘‘Animality is immediacy or immanence.’’70 Elaborating this proposition, Bataille analyzes what takes place when one animal eats another. For the animal, ‘‘nothing is given in time’’— there is no discernible difference between the animal eating and the animal eaten because there is no perception of duration through time that would allow for such distinctions. Echoing Koje`ve, Bataille claims that ‘‘there is no relation of subordination like that connecting an object, a thing, to man, who refuses to be viewed as a thing.’’ In the animal world, void of the sense of time in which objects endure, there is thus also ‘‘nothing . . . that introduces the relation of the master to the one he commands, nothing that might establish autonomy on one side and dependence on another.’’71 There is thus a state of ‘‘perfect immanence,’’ or ‘‘continuity,’’ in which each animal ‘‘is in the world like water in water.’’72

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Bataille’s formulation calls to mind Koje`ve’s notion of liquefaction—that moment of non-fixity, of formlessness, in the master–slave dialectic. But whereas for Koje`ve this moment is conducive to self-overcoming through negative action, for Bataille the state of immanence is one of unemployed negativity. This can be understood, however, only by first grasping the rise of human self-consciousness, of which, Bataille claims, Koje`ve’s interpretation of Hegel is ‘‘the primary instrument.’’73 It is therefore to Bataille’s anthropological account and the development of the profane world that we must now turn. Bataille, following Koje`ve, relates labor to the rise of self-consciousness, suggesting that ‘‘the positing of the object, which is not given in animality, occurs in the human use of tools.’’74 The creation of the object induces an interruption in the continuity of animal life; it produces an element of exteriority in which one thing is distinguishable from another. Subordinated to the one who uses it, a tool is assigned a utility, and thus defines a sphere of discontinuous objects that Bataille describes as ‘‘a plane on which it is possible to situate clearly and distinctly’’ both things and other humans. He concludes with Koje`ve that we come to self-consciousness ‘‘the day we see ourselves from the outside as another. Moreover, this will depend on our first having distinguished the other on the plane where manufactured things have appeared to us distinctly.’’75 But while employing the terms set out by Koje`ve, Bataille departs from Koje`ve on this point. Rather than claiming that the work that produces selfconsciousness seeks to overcome or master nature, that realm of immanence, Bataille states that ‘‘this bringing of elements of the same nature as the subject, or the subject itself, onto the plane of objects is always precarious, uncertain, and unevenly realized.’’ This is a crucial divergence, for it is here that Bataille posits a dualism in place of a dialectic: ‘‘In the end, we perceive each appearance—subject (ourselves), animal, mind, world—from within and from without at the same time, both as continuity, with respect to ourselves, and as object,’’ or discontinuity.76 What he describes is the coexistence of two opposed attitudes of thought—one that expresses objectivity and discontinuity, and one that participates in immanence, or animal continuity. This dualism reflects the dualism of the sacred and the profane, that opposition which, as Denis Hollier has said, ‘‘is the matrix of [Bataille’s] thought.’’ Hollier explains that ‘‘existence is profane when it lives in the

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face of a transcendence; it is sacred when it lives in immanence.’’77 But this formulation needs qualification, for Bataille claims that ‘‘the sense of the sacred obviously is not that of the animal lost in the mists of continuity where nothing is distinct.’’78 Why, then, might Hollier refer to existence in immanence as the sacred? The answer lies again in the notion of an ‘‘attitude of thought,’’ as Hollier puts it. ‘‘The animal accepted the immanence that submerged it without apparent protest,’’ Bataille writes, ‘‘whereas man feels a kind of impotent horror in the sense of the sacred.’’79 What distinguishes the animal lost in the mists of continuity from the human who participates in that continuity is the human’s very consciousness of discontinuity, the real order of objects, and the domain of individuality. Humans, unlike animals, are thus able to experience the movement from the profane to the sacred world of immanence. Bataille’s dualism consists, then, of two orders: the real80 order of objects, as constituted by the positing of things, and the unreal or sacred order of immanence and continuity. Each order is also connected to an attitude (a tendency or disposition) of thought. The former is represented in Bataille’s account by the Hegelian attitude of synthesis, of the satisfaction contingent upon recognition and coming to full self-consciousness. The latter attitude of thought is expressed in Bataille’s counter operation. It is a refusal to accede to a final form or a fixed state of self-identical individuality. The counter operation seeks instead to undo the profane logic of recognition, predicated on work and power over the other, and to put in its place identification. The profane attitude of thought is proper to the world of things, the real order, and it sets out to subjugate nature. But in doing so, it ‘‘ties man to subjugated nature. Nature becomes man’s property, but it ceases to be immanent to him.’’81 That is, the attitude of thought implied by the creation of the world of tools, of things, effects a separation. ‘‘It is thus profane existence itself which produces separation, institutes itself as separate from the sacred, and the transcendence by which it defines the sacred in fact characterizes the profane itself.’’82 It is the profane disposition of thought that produces the sacred realm as such. The sacred is not simply the realm of animality, but the realm of animal continuity experienced as a return to intimacy, as a return to continuity, away from the real order of things. The return is thus not a transition to an earlier state, but to a world existing simultaneously with that of the profane order. The distinction between Ba-

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taille and Koje`ve is most apparent here. Whereas for Koje`ve the slave is freed from subordination to the master by a self-negating action that procures mastery over his animal existence, Bataille claims that it is the experience of continuity at the level of animality that is sacred. The sacred moment in the master–slave dialectic is for Koje`ve the beginning of the slave’s autonomy. For Bataille, on the other hand, it marks that moment to which the already perfected, self-conscious man must return. It is only through this return to immanence that the ties of subordination are broken, and it is only through this return that mastery is evaded. The distinction between the two notions of liberty at work here is noteworthy: Whereas Koje`ve describes a deliverance from slavery through the obtainment of autonomous perfection, Bataille, through a counter operation, seeks to undermine mastery and its requisite participation in the dialectic of power. This counter operation works through a principle of identification, enacted most dramatically through sacrifice. The word ‘‘sacrifice’’ comes from the Latin sacer and facere (to perform or make sacred). According to Bataille, to make a thing sacred necessitates its destruction; indeed, it is the destruction of things that is the very principle of sacrifice. But as he says in a crucial passage in the Theory of Religion, ‘‘the destruction that sacrifice is intended to bring about is not annihilation. The thing—only the thing—is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice.’’83 Indeed, for sacrifice to be experienced as a removal from the real ties of subordination to the unreality of the sacred world, a separation must be presupposed. Bataille emphasizes this experience of transition, claiming that ‘‘the sacrificer’s prior separation [in] the world of things is necessary for the return to intimacy.’’84 Sacrifice is therefore a sacrifice of clear self-consciousness, a violent reversal of the predominant tendency of thought, which posits the world of things. Bataille claims the return to intimacy implies a ‘‘beclouded consciousness,’’ in which the immanence between human and nature, subject and object, is affirmed. It is a movement—from the light of clear and distinct thought to the night of an animal lost in the mists of continuity—a night into which one enters consciously, and from which one inevitably returns. So, sacrifice is a movement from the realm of objects, always hierarchized in terms of utility and subordination, to the domain of intimacy. But this

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movement of fusion is no less an affirmation of distinction, of dualism—that is, it presupposes the distinctions posited by human consciousness, assuming the profane world that it seeks to dissolve. Hollier is helpful on this point: Dualism starts precisely here, with the fact that there is no point . . . where the sacred and the profane cease being perceived as contradicting one another, even if at times they have to coexist and seem to be superimposed on one another. Moreover, this very point, this instant of the fusion of contraries, defines the sacred as such, and distinguishes it from the profane: the sacred confuses that which the profane opposes or distinguishes.85

The contradiction in this statement—that the sacred at once fuses what the profane had rendered distinct, and in doing so makes itself distinct from the profane—is not merely apparent. It is for this reason that Hollier claims ‘‘dualism is an untenable attitude in the long run.’’ In other words, if dualism is ‘‘not a dualist system, but a will to dualism, a resistance to system and homogeneity,’’ it is therefore impossible—‘‘for system cannot help being monistic, and, since the exercise of thought is spontaneously systematizing and monistic, dualism results from the will bracing itself against this tendency, thought itself taking a stand against the movement proper to reason and its tendency toward conciliation, toward reduction,’’ and toward satisfaction.86 But it is just this untenability, this will to dissatisfaction with the inevitability of failure, that impels Bataille to take up this dualist thought, which I am here designating with Bataille’s term as a counter operation. The counter operation of sacrifice is the enactment of an attitude of thought that is doomed to failure, dissatisfaction, and imperfection. But it is no less the means by which a resistance against the stultifying, formative effects of rational thought (as described by Koje`ve) is carried out. It is a state of mind opposed to Hegelian satisfaction, an attitude that remains imperfect and unperfectable, and resolutely so. The question of how this counter operation works can be addressed only by examining the place of death in Bataille’s writings, for it is the horizon of death that defines the attitude of thought under examination here. Again, it is in Koje`ve’s terms but also against Koje`ve that Bataille addresses death and the anguish it induces. According to Koje`ve, fear of death initially renders man a slave in the fight for recognition: Fear makes him a thing. But Bataille reverses this notion, claiming that ‘‘man is not, as one might think,

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a thing because he is afraid. He would have no anguish if he were not the individual (the thing) and it is essentially the fact of being an individual that fuels his anguish.’’ For Bataille, therefore, the anguish induced by death is not experienced as such until the individual perceives himself as just that—a thing in the world, an object that takes duration ‘‘as the basic condition of his worth.’’87 It is with the advent of the profane world of things that the anguish of death becomes possible, for it is not until the world of distinct things has arisen in consciousness that the threat of death has any meaning, that death is perceived as a threat to the duration of a distinct individual. Bataille claims [man] is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of things. Death disturbs the order of things and the order of things holds us. Man is afraid of the intimate order that is not reconcilable with the order of things. Otherwise there would be no sacrifice, and there would be no mankind either. The intimate order would not reveal itself in the destruction and the sacred anguish of the individual. Because man is not squarely within that order, but only partakes of it through a thing that is threatened in its nature (in the projects that constitute it), intimacy, in the trembling of the individual, is holy, sacred, and suffused with anguish.88

For Bataille there would be no sacrifice were it not for the anguish before death that threatens humans. Sacrifice, then, is at once an affirmation of anguish, and thus an affirmation of the profane or real order, and also the movement to dissolve the individuality that engenders that anguish before death. It is the refusal of, or resistance to, the profane conception of temporality, and an expression, through destruction, of what Bataille calls the ‘‘religious sensibility in time.’’89 The religious sensibility in time mobilizes the counter operation of sacrifice. The attitude of thought implied here is not that of production and duration, but of expenditure and immediate consumption. The essence of sacrifice, which seeks to destroy what is a thing in the object, is not killing, but ‘‘relinquishing and giving’’—relinquishing the tendency to form, duration, and perfection. It is also a gift of death90 that returns an object to the domain of intimacy. Sacrifice reveals that death is not (or not only) the negation of life, but the affirmation of intimate life, ‘‘the wonder-struck cry of life,’’ that ‘‘dissolves the real order’’ in a ‘‘dazzling consumption’’ at once joyful and anguishing. The anguish arises because sacrifice violates the

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duration of the individual, discloses the ‘‘imposture of reality’’ to which individual life tenaciously clings. Sacrifice is joyful because it renders, in a ‘‘consumption that is concerned only with the moment,’’ what had been a mere thing, sacred. The counter operation of sacrifice thus expresses the ‘‘passion of an absence of individuality.’’91

Identification This absence of individuality is clear enough when thought of from the point of view of the sacrificed victim. But Bataille speaks of the anguish of those who witness sacrifice as well. ‘‘If one describes the individual in the operation of sacrifice, he is defined by anguish.’’92 The distressing nature of sacrifice, claims Bataille, is attributable to the fact that the individual participates in the sacrifice—not merely as observer, but as victim. As he puts it, ‘‘the individual identifies with the victim in the sudden movement that restores it to immanence.’’93 This moment of identification in sacrifice represents most clearly the effects of the counter operation of which Bataille speaks. It demonstrates the rage—understood not as anger, but as an intensity of passion—against what Bataille calls ‘‘man’s reduction to thinghood,’’ and against the operation of perfection toward which Hegelian thought tends. It is a rage against these things, but nonetheless a rage that employs the lucidity that defines rational thought and culminates in self-consciousness. Indeed, only through self-consciousness is identification possible, but at the same time self-consciousness turns not away from itself, but, in identifying with an other, against itself, against the will to duration—it is the ‘‘reduction of the reduction.’’94 Above all, then, this is a rage against form. It is a will to the destruction of form, where form is understood especially in the Hegelian–Koje`vian sense of the perfected human—autonomous, self-identical, stable, and durable. Not denying that human thought is predisposed to think in terms of system, reduction, and self-identity, Bataille works to resist, to revolt against this tendency. In his essay ‘‘The Big Toe,’’ he writes, there is a bias in favor of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation. . . . [M]en obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space. Human life entails, in fact, the

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rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse. . . .95

Rage is a desire to experience the laceration, the sacrificial wounding indicative of a move from the profane to the sacred. The identification that takes place in sacrifice expresses an attitude of thought that desires to return to the intimacy of sacred life—it desires not to be reduced to a thing, but rather to reduce the world of things to the world of immanence. This desire seeks not satisfaction, but the continual movement of resistance to satisfaction. It is clarity seeking momentary or partial obscurity, self-consciousness desiring dissatisfaction. In the end, identification with a sacrificial victim is just this expression of an attitude of thought that wills ‘‘a never resolved dissatisfaction.’’96 The movement of unresolved dissatisfaction is untenable. It requires, therefore, constant provocation, a ceaseless risk—even the desire not to be satisfied remains unsatisfied. In this way it might be said the movement itself is intolerable because it does not endure. This is at once the boon and the curse of Bataille’s dualist thought, and the impossibility of this dualism demands that it issue not in the form of a system or a doctrine, but as fomenting passion or rage. That said, the counter operation of which rage is a part is, if anguishing, also joyful. This operation, this movement against form, Bataille describes with the term ‘‘sovereignty’’: Sovereignty designates the movement of free and internally wrenching violence that animates the whole, dissolves into tears, into ecstasy and into bursts of laughter, and reveals the impossible in laughter, ecstasy, or tears. But the impossible thus revealed is not an equivocal position; it is the sovereign self-consciousness that, precisely, no longer turns away from itself.97

This notion of sovereignty thus stands in opposition to Hegelian mastery. More akin to the liminal stage in which the slave enters into selfnegation is the sovereign movement of sacrifice, which denies the real order of things to which mastery is bound. In subjugating an other—a man, nature—mastery remains tied to that subjugated other; as Bataille says, ‘‘overcoming nature, as far as we’re concerned, also means losing: because at that point we’re satisfied by nature.’’98 But in the sovereign, sacrificial movement of identification, the individual form is negated, and the sacrificer, like the victim, enters into the sacred realm whose experience had been sup-

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pressed—a moment without duration, an intolerable moment revealing the absence of the I.

Friendship In opposition is true friendship. —william blake

The counter operation under discussion here is one of identification; it is a sovereign movement that resists the progress of the fight for recognition, the progress toward perfection. In the immediate consumption of sacrifice—the expression of the religious sensibility in time—the instinct to consume is not diverted or suppressed, but is at once indulged and enflamed. Sacrifice marks an expenditure ‘‘exactly comparable to the flame that destroys the wood by consuming it.’’99 Though the counter operation is sacrificial in its movement, it is not limited to expression in sacrifice—that is, the literal, physical destruction of objects. It is evident in all those experiences that surpass the closed beings of individuals: excessive laughter, tears, ecstasy, and sometimes encounters with art. Perhaps above all, the counter operation is expressed in friendship: communication that stands most clearly opposed to recognition, and which, as much as actual sacrifice, consummates identification. In fact, Bataille did not advocate blood sacrifice;100 rather, he found in the logic of sacrifice the key to sovereign existence: an attitude of thought contrary to that of reason, but also enabled by reason. Moreover, sacrifice affirmed for Bataille the dualism outlined above. At once an acknowledgment of separation—of the sacred from the profane, of the sacrificer from the victim—and a movement of fusion, sacrifice seeks to bring the individual as close as possible to death while remaining alive. As Bataille claims, ‘‘it is not a question of dying at all but of being transported to the level of death.’’101 This failure to obtain a complete identification, an identification that would eradicate all distance and difference, is also the success of the sacrifice. The counter operation, even while seeking to rupture the self in identification with another, or with some image of violence, is yet one that is consummated in failure—the failure actually to die. For Bataille, the loss

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must always be partial; it must fail to achieve a complete and total annihilation. Rather, Bataille’s identification is a ‘‘little death,’’ an incomplete destruction. There remains some sense of self, some trace of the subject to experience the joy and horror of dissolution. As he claims in Guilty, ‘‘for the individual, partial loss is a means of dying while surviving. It’s foolish to try to avoid the horror of loss. At the brink of what can’t be borne, desire names this horror as possible. You have to come as close as possible to death. Without flinching. And even, if necessary, flinching.’’102 To come as close as possible to death but to fail to die is the sovereign movement of identification. ‘‘It means,’’ says Bataille, ‘‘that defeat is success,’’103 and the success of this defeat is the experience of joy. There are many ways in which this impossible congruence of defeat and success may be manifested, but friendship is perhaps the one that most concerned Bataille.104 Friendship is the passion—even the rage—of identification, the truest sacrifice, the manifestation of sovereignty in which intimacy replaces all ties of power and subordination, all traces of prestige and recognition. As Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen puts it, ‘‘sovereignty does not . . . indicate the external superiority of one man over another, but much more precisely that which forms its intimate condition, that is insubordination’’105—the insubordination, I would say, of friendship. Bataille suggests as much when he writes, ‘‘. . . friends until that state of profound friendship where a man abandoned, abandoned by all of his friends, encounters in life the one who will accompany him beyond life, himself without life, capable of free friendship, detached from all ties.’’106 If Bataille associates friendship with insubordination and also with mortality, this is because the identification on which friendship relies is itself a sovereign expression of death—that is, the death of the closed, integral self. Bataille claims that the communication of friendship can only take place ‘‘through death, with a beyond of beings.’’ It demands a rupture, a decomposing wound that exceeds one’s individual form. It would require, in fact, a kind of rage, a lacerating intensity of passion, issuing in measures of extreme joy and extreme pain. Friendship, says Bataille, is communication that ‘‘cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another. It requires individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked, placed at the limit of death and nothingness.’’107 Friendship is a refusal of the self, and thereby an affirmation of one’s own death in the wounding or death of another. Put otherwise, Bataille’s friendship is experienced as the return

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to the realm of intimacy, a return to the intimacy beyond the real ties of subordination—the intimacy that an experience at the level of death alone can afford. Friendship enacts that attitude of thought which rejects recognition and seeks to identify with the other, an intercourse between wounded subjects. From these wounds, painful and pleasurable, emanates rage in the form of laughter, ‘‘a trembling, a joyous shaking which jolts us with anguish.’’108

Laughter Bataille sees photographs of horror and responds with ecstasy. But if he laughs in his raptures, it is not because he hovers over the misery of another as a master over a slave who is as good as dead, but because, in a state of extreme ‘‘identificatory passion,’’ Bataille is, for a fleeting moment, at once himself and the other. And if, after years of contemplation, he is able to laugh in the face of such horror, it is because, as Borch-Jacobsen puts it, ‘‘laughing with him, at one with his fall and identifying with him, we are dead. We are, like him, other than ourselves, senseless. . . . We laugh . . . because we are dead, because we are, laughing, ourselves the dead man.’’109 Identifying with the other, our laughter is an experience at the level of death. This laughter is a fearful thing. It is not, of course, the only response to horror, but it is a response only to horror—and the occasion of an identification in which one’s own death becomes a matter of indifference, if only fleetingly. This is a matter of seeing oneself as absent, as already gone, even while staying alive. In identifying with the other who falls into death, laughter discloses one’s ‘‘ultimate insignificance’’; it reveals the sham of recognition. If, as Bataille says, ‘‘laughter is first the expression of an intense joy,’’ it is because joy is always joy in the face of death—and death reveals an absence of meaning, a ridiculous nullity that provokes us, that shakes us out of seriousness, out of the world of work and calculation, reason and recognition. Referring to Bataille’s ecstatic ‘‘interior experience,’’ of which laughter is one expression, Maurice Blanchot emphasizes the profound affirmation Bataille sought to communicate: ‘‘The interior experience affirms; it is pure affirmation, and it does nothing but affirm. It does not even affirm itself,

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for then it would be subordinate to itself: it rather affirms affirmation.’’ He goes on to say that this experience ‘‘is the decisive Yes.’’110 Significantly, in elaborating the sovereign affirmation expressed in this experience, Blanchot invokes the figure with whom Bataille exhibits an intimacy that culminates in identification: Friedrich Nietzsche. In appropriately paradoxical terms, Blanchot notes the measure of ‘‘extreme pain and extreme joy’’111 that defines Bataille’s ecstasies, and, I would suggest, his relationship with his predecessor, Nietzsche. This relationship involves a communication not only of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought, but also of his experience. And if it is true, as Blanchot claims, that Bataille’s ‘‘entire work expresses friendship,’’112 it is in his intimacy with Nietzsche that some of the contours of Bataille’s notion of friendship are most pronounced, and its contradictions most potent. The following chapter will reveal the strange dynamics of this friendship, asking how Bataille’s notion of sovereignty not only emerges in relationship to Nietzsche, but is enacted in his identification with the German philosopher. How does the friendship with Nietzsche, at once intimate and fraught with contradiction, dramatize the kind of agonized identification described in Bataille’s revision of the Hegelian paradigm? What role does power, crucial to the master–slave dialectic, play in Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche? I want to show how, through his sacrificial mode of reading and interpretation, Bataille is able to evoke a monstrous version of Nietzsche—to make of Nietzsche a sacred monster whose laughter is toxic and whose collapse into a powerless madness is, paradoxically, a potent polemical weapon. If Bataille finds in Nietzsche not only a philosophical precursor but also a friend, it is because for him, Nietzsche’s texts communicate an experience at once ecstatic and intolerable.

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Nietzsche Slain Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. — f r i e d r i c h n i e t z s c h e , Beyond Good and Evil

Misunderstanding Nietzsche A misunderstanding . . . am I, and ever will be. — f r i e d r i c h n i e t z s c h e , Ecce Homo Only when ye have all denied me will I come back unto you. — f r i e d r i c h n i e t z s c h e , Thus Spake Zarathustra

It was in 1923, at about the age of twenty-five, that Georges Bataille first read Friedrich Nietzsche. He cites this encounter as a decisive event in his life,1 one that infuses his philosophical inquiries with increased passion and fuels his explorations into the limits of human existence. In the years following his initial exposure to Nietzsche, Bataille never stops returning to him; Nietzsche haunts nearly all of Bataille’s writings. Indeed, Bataille’s fascination with his predecessor is so thorough that he founds an ‘‘essentially 36

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Nietzschean’’ religious secret society.2 Following the dissolution of this society, and confined to solitude in the French countryside by physical illness and emotional turmoil, Bataille seeks to establish a kind of community with Nietzsche. The expression of this communion is Sur Nietzsche, a book rife with citations from the German philosopher’s writings. It is in this book, written as the events of the Second World War are culminating, that Bataille claims that Nietzsche is, with but a few exceptions, his sole company on earth, that Nietzsche is a thinker with whom he feels intimacy. This intimacy resonates throughout Bataille’s writings. Not only do Bataille’s obsessions with sovereignty, excess, laughter, affirmation, and power reflect Nietzsche’s perduring concerns; Bataille’s various modes and devices of writing—fragments and aphorisms, poems, the employment of multifarious authorial voices—also reflect the influence of his precursor. The resemblances between these two writers have inspired a host of critics to expound upon the Nietzschean roots of Bataille’s thoughts and to examine the presence or repetition of Nietzsche in Bataille’s writings.3 But Bataille, while repeatedly and explicitly averring to the power and importance of Nietzsche, even to the point of deifying him,4 nevertheless has a more complicated relationship with his forerunner than that of an intellectual offspring influenced by an authoritative predecessor. Indeed, though Bataille’s initial reading of Nietzsche in 1923 leaves him feeling ‘‘overcome,’’5 he goes on to produce a body of work that, if bearing the marks of Nietzsche, nonetheless diverges from Nietzsche in crucial respects. ‘‘The commentator,’’ Blanchot remarks, ‘‘is not being faithful when he faithfully reproduces.’’6 This chapter will argue that, far from representing a simple continuation of Nietzsche’s thought, Bataille’s writings dramatically enact a rupture with Nietzsche—a denial of Nietzsche that paradoxically deepens, rather than mitigates, Bataille’s intimacy with this man he calls friend.7 This binding break, at once faithful and renunciatory, is effected through Bataille’s strategic misreading and rewriting of Nietzsche.8 Taking up the concepts of recognition and identification formulated in the previous chapter, I want to show that Bataille’s misprision of Nietzsche amounts to a refusal of recognition9 of his friend, instead marking an act of extreme identification. Denis Hollier has suggested that Bataille engages in a misreading of Nietzsche through which he repeats Nietzsche’s experience of madness as a sacrifice of identity.10 The present chapter will show how Bataille’s misprision proceeds as a kind of rewriting of Nietzsche, but a rewrit-

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ing that is specifically an inversion of him. Whereas Nietzsche provides a vitalistic, affirmative philosophy that takes as its central, motivating concept the valorization of life, Bataille writes a corpus of texts no less affirmative than Nietzsche’s that, while incessantly referring to his predecessor, focuses obsessively on what Nietzsche most disdained: excrement, decay, and death.11 In an attempt to affirm what the German philosopher could not, Bataille parodies Nietzsche; he masks himself as the morbid Nietzsche.12 Through this inversive parody, Bataille renders Nietzsche monstrous—an operation that further allows him both to rescue Nietzsche from the abuses through which fascism puts him, while also making Nietzsche a polemical weapon against the existentialist notion of an authentic self.

Purity and Danger While it is true that Koje`ve’s lectures on Hegel had a decisive influence on Bataille—as they had on so many other intellectuals of the time—it is no less the case that the French sociological school, exemplified by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, had a profound effect on Bataille’s thought, and in particular on his understanding of sacrifice and the sacred. The dichotomy of the sacred and the profane is fundamental not only to Bataille’s examination of religious phenomena and the development of subjectivity; the opposition between these two realms is a force13 at play in the very operations of Bataille’s thought. But there is another level of division, another opposition animating Bataille’s work—this one within the sacred itself. In his now canonical study of ‘‘primitive’’ religions, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, French sociologist Emile Durkheim sets forth an understanding of the sacred that may be regarded as the starting point for much of Bataille’s writings—not only his theoretical work on religion, but also his political thought, fiction, and contributions to economic theory. Durkheim famously conceptualizes the sacred in opposition to the profane, claiming that the entire universe of religious phenomena can be divided into these two domains, which are defined in relation to each other only by their complete heterogeneity.14 Historian of religions Mircea Eliade, taking up Durkheim’s concept, puts it succinctly: ‘‘The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane.’’15 But in addition to this contradiction of the sacred to the profane is an ambiguity within the sacred itself. The forces of the sacred, according to

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Durkheim, oscillate between two poles. Under what has become the standard designation of the ‘‘right-hand’’ sacred are virile religious forces, the ‘‘pure, noble, elevated, life-giving’’ forms of the sacred.16 The ‘‘left-handed,’’ meanwhile, names those ‘‘impure powers, productive of disorders,’’17 those ‘‘vile, degraded, and dangerous’’ forms of the sacred.18 Though these two poles are mutually antagonistic, they nonetheless exhibit a peculiar intimacy, which Durkheim describes as a ‘‘close kinship.’’ Both the pure and the impure, he insists, are opposed to the profane. But they do not themselves constitute separate classes, but rather two varieties of the same class, that of the sacred. And these two modes of sacredness are not stable in their opposition, but vacillate between purity and impurity, in an agitated conjugation: There are two sorts of sacredness the propitious and the unpropitious, and not only is there no break of continuity between these two opposed forms, but also one object may pass from the one to the other without changing its nature. The pure is made out of the impure, and reciprocally. It is in the possibility of these transmutations that the ambiguity of the sacred consists.19

The sentiments aroused by these two types of the sacred likewise oscillate between admiration and repugnance, each being simultaneously inimical to, and yet intimate with, the other: ‘‘respect is one thing, disgust and horror another,’’ Durkheim writes. ‘‘Yet if the gestures are to be the same in both cases, the sentiments expressed must not differ in nature. And, in fact, there is a horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense, while the fear inspired by malign powers is generally not without a certain reverential character.’’20 The ambiguity of the sacred and the corresponding interpenetration of fear and reverence are apparent in Bataille’s attitude toward Nietzsche. His early thoughts on Nietzsche are shot through with a perfervid devotion that Bataille himself describes as religious. Indeed, the ‘‘essentially Nietzschean’’ secret society that Bataille forms and leads between 1936 and 1939 expresses aims that are ‘‘solely religious’’ in character.21 This fearful respect is particularly to the fore in Bataille’s ‘‘Nietzschean Chronicle,’’ one of his contributions to the journal Ace´phale. Here and elsewhere, Bataille goes so far as to conflate Nietzsche with Dionysus, making the two figures a single deific entity—a ‘‘god born of a lightning-torn womb,’’ a ‘‘SACRED—NIETZSCHEAN—FIGURE’’ who liberates his disciples in death-spreading ‘‘ecstatic spasms’’ catalyzed by ‘‘nocturnal terrors.’’22

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What is most peculiar about this combination of fear and admiration in Bataille is that it derives from a highly idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche, a reading that apparently ignores or suppresses Nietzsche’s own avowed commitment to developing a philosophy of vigor and vitality, of surging feelings of power—a philosophy of life. Instead, Bataille envisions Nietzsche in reverse, as a figure of death—a headless, self-mutilating Dionysus. As this entity is portrayed in several of Andre´ Masson’s drawings for Ace´phale (see figure 1), Bataille’s Nietzsche-Dionysus is a figure of perpetual sparagmos, bodily disorder, and impurity—headless but for a skull in his groin, wounded by the dagger he wields, and with labyrinthine intestines churning within the massive hole in his abdomen. This ace´phalic figure, which Bataille calls a ‘‘monster,’’ seems an unlikely avatar of Nietzsche, whose valorization of life is tied up with notions of elevation, purity, nobility, and health. And yet Bataille and his Ace´phale conspirators grant Nietzsche a place of central importance and make of this headless Nietzsche-Dionysus a morbid mandala, an image used in beholding death and invoking the dangerous, chaotic, unconsolidated force of decay that Mary Douglas associates with formlessness.23 Why does Bataille effect this reversal of Nietzsche? How does Bataille make of Nietzsche an occasion for contemplation of death rather than life?24

The Brotherhood of Death [D]eath and deathly silence alone are certain and common to all in this future. How strange it is that this sole certainty and common element makes almost no impression on people, and that nothing is further from their minds than the feeling that they form a brotherhood of death. It makes me happy that men do not want at all to think the thought of death! I should like very much to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more appealing to them. — f r i e d r i c h n i e t z s c h e , The Gay Science Not all that important. When one witnesses a death there regularly arises a thought which, out of a false sense of decency, one immediately suppresses: that the act of dying is not as significant as it is generally regarded as being. — f r i e d r i c h n i e t z s c h e , Daybreak

Denis Hollier writes: ‘‘faithfully, jealously, Bataille repeats Nietzsche.’’25 To be sure, Bataille does repeat Nietzsche—he cites Nietzsche, discusses him,

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appropriates his vocabulary, addresses his concerns, and, above all, seeks to replicate Nietzsche’s experience of ecstasy.26 But a careful examination of this eternal return to Nietzsche reveals not a mere reduplication of the German philosopher’s writings, but rather an exacerbated, parodic re- or misinterpretation of his thought—a misprision that has at its crux differences in valuations of death and understandings of sovereignty. As the epigraph above shows, Nietzsche speaks of the ‘‘brotherhood of death’’ by which all people are more or less unconsciously united. He is happy that the ultimate certainty of death remains so far removed from the thoughts of men, and proposes to focus human thought even more exclusively on contemplation of life; the act of dying is, finally, ‘‘not all that important.’’ Bataille also speaks of a brotherhood of death, claiming that death, or the thought of death, is the element that binds humans together in a community; it ties them together through an ‘‘obsessive value.’’ The differences in the interpretation and valuation given to death are clear: Nietzsche sees thought of death as a symptom of negativity, decadent nihilism, an attack on life—the de facto brotherhood is a matter to be suppressed and overcome so as to afford life greater glory. Bataille, on the other hand, regards death as that which unifies individuals in a community; it is what all people have in common. Moreover, as we shall see, death marks the occasion of sacrificial rupture that opens up the possibility of profound communication between human beings. For Bataille, experience at the level of death is part of a total affirmation of existence, and the brotherhood of death is an expression of a communal ecstasy akin to Durkheimian ‘‘effervescence.’’27 But the differences between these respective valuations of death go further than this, hinging not only on the important notions of affirmation and negation, or ascent and decline, but on the related concepts of sovereignty and servility. The suppression of the thought of death is, according to Nietzsche, affirmative precisely because it evinces a sovereign will. The glorification of life, the sense of exuberance, and the feeling of power that the exalted individual exhibits in moments of overcoming strife are expressions of the sovereign individual who has attained a position superior to suffering and above the moral conventions of the ‘‘lower types.’’ Opposed to all forms of enslavement, Nietzshe’s writings are rife with metaphors of height and transcendent distances. This is not to say that Nietzsche is at all times averse to ‘‘plumbing the depths,’’ to falling down and foundering like a tragic hero. Zarathustra

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‘‘must descend to the depths,’’ coming down from his lofty mountaintop domicile to spread his gospel.28 And as David Farrell Krell rightly points out in an essay on philosophic burrowings, the tunneling mole that one finds in the introduction to Daybreak digs beneath the presuppositions that have undergirded the nihilistic ‘‘courage in the truth.’’29 Excavating evidence of ‘‘descensional thought’’ in Nietzsche’s writings, Krell offers a portrait of Nietzsche as a thoroughly ‘‘subterranean’’ thinker. But this argument advances by means of a series of suppressions. For example, there is no accounting for the fact Thus Spake Zarathustra closes with Zarathustra emerging from his cave to greet a rising sun with the proclamation: ‘‘my day is breaking: rise now, rise, thou great noon!’’30 Similarly, Daybreak, the very title of which should indicate something beyond philosophic tunneling, concludes with aphorisms propounding the need for rising above, for creating distance: ‘‘The higher we soar,’’ reads §574, ‘‘the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly,’’ while §575 is addressed to ‘‘aeronauts of the spirit,’’ and employs images of ‘‘brave birds’’ ‘‘flying up and away . . . . into the furthest distance.’’31 The point here is twofold: First, it is not to deny that Nietzsche refrains from descent, whether to undermine moral prejudices or to preach his word to terrestrials, but rather to emphasize that when Nietzsche does descend, it is to rise again—to ever greater heights. Over and over, Nietzsche performs variations on the now cliche´d insight that ‘‘that which does not kill me makes me stronger.’’ He is exulted by the feeling of power that accompanies occasions of overcoming, giving rise to a ‘‘pathos of distance.’’ This sovereign, Dionysian movement32 of dying to rise again activates the sense of tragic joy that Nietzsche advocates. Second, it raises the question of why Bataille seeks to suppress or reverse the upward inclination of Nietzsche’s thought, adopting a movement that opposes the predominant disposition of his predecessor. Bataille’s writings betray a descensional movement; in contrast to Nietzsche, the emphasis in Bataille’s thought is not on falling in order to rise again, but on ascending to the heights in order to experience the thrilling agony of collapse. It is in this movement from high to low, with the corresponding notions of purity and impurity, nobility and baseness, that we may distinguish Bataille’s notion of sovereignty from that of Nietzsche’s. Even though Bataille employs important elements from the Nietzschean lexicon, he often disfigures the meaning given to the word or concept by Nietzsche. In the

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case of ‘‘sovereignty,’’ Bataille ostensibly aligns himself with Nietzsche by propounding ceaselessly the need for human existence to attain this state of liberty. ‘‘Bataille’s inspiration is that of a sovereign existence, free of all limitations of interest. He is, indeed, concerned with being, and being as sovereignty.’’33 But by sovereignty Bataille means something quite different from Nietzsche; it is ‘‘that which does not serve anything—and no purpose—other than itself, that which is not a means (useful, instrumental, servile) in view of an end.’’34 Thus, far from describing a kind of height or superiority, Bataille’s sovereignty is exemplified by base matter such as excrement, monstrosities, and corpses—precisely because such base matter escapes all servile, useful ends. Rather than something to be overcome or suppressed, death itself is sovereign for Bataille, and therefore worthy of celebration. Sovereignty is not attained at the height of the summit, but in the fall from it. But to see exactly how Bataille effects this fall with the thought of Nietzsche, it will be necessary to sketch an understanding of Nietzsche’s upward-inclined side.

Falling to Rise In some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. . . . I am still waiting for a physician . . . one who has to pursue the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity . . . to risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all ‘‘truth’’ but something else—let us say, health, future, growth, power, life. — f r i e d r i c h n i e t z s c h e , The Gay Science

Many commentators have described Nietzsche’s philosophy in terms that emphasize images of height, ‘‘ascenionalist’’35 thought, and exhibitions of strength. Luce Irigaray, for example, paints a picture of an aquaphobic Nietzsche, accusing him of ‘‘never dwell[ing] in the great depths.’’36 Gaston Bachelard expounds an image of Nietzsche as ‘‘the very type of vertical poet, the poet of summits, the ascensional poet.’’ And such giants of Nietzschean exegesis as Karl Jaspers and Walter Kaufmann support this reading as well. Jaspers speaks of Nietzsche’s ‘‘tenacious will to health,’’ claiming that ‘‘all Nietzsche’s philosophizing favors health, disparages illness, and seeks to overcome all that is ill,’’37 while Kaufmann claims that illness is valued in

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Nietzsche precisely because it occasions self-overcoming, ‘‘the key to Nietzsche.’’38 The following section of this chapter will examine this major, vitalistic, right-hand side of Nietzsche, which takes as its central concept the valorization of life. Focusing on how this ascensional thought relates to Nietzsche’s tragic vision will then open the way for an examination of Bataille’s subversive and complex misreading of Nietzsche, with its celebration of death and the left-hand sacred. nietzsche’s tragic vision

A brief exegesis of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is in order here, as it introduces several concepts that are revisited in later works, and sets the itinerary that Bataille will engage and invert in his own writings. Describing the dynamics of Attic tragedy, Nietzsche proposes a tensive dialectic of opposed ‘‘artistic dispositions’’ embodied by the Greek gods Dionysus and Apollo, which find corollaries in the ‘‘separate art realms of dream and intoxication.’’39 To the Apollonian, oneiric disposition belong the plastic arts, whereas the Dionysian disposition expresses itself not only in music, but in frenzied bodily gestures and dance. Nietzsche locates the life-affirming nature of tragedy in this dialectic. The terrors and cruelties of life are manifestations of an essentially Dionysian reality, but the form-giving faculties of Apollo cast a necessary veil over this suffering, providing the sensation of a lucent illusion. But not mere illusions: The images created and the forms apprehended in the lucid Apollonian realm function to tranquilize. This tranquility has a lenitive effect, marking an aesthetic affirmation that ‘‘make[s] life possible and worth living.’’40 The ancient Greeks’ desire for participation in the fullness of life redeems the primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory.’’ Indeed, Nietzsche goes so far as to claim that the Greeks, who were able to ‘‘stop courageously at the surface . . . to believe in forms, tones, words . . . were superficial—out of profundity.’’41 A desire to live—a love rather than a resentment of life—gives rise to the Greek impulse to illusion. Yet to achieve this profound affirmation—to experience the joy of tragedy—the highest expression of the Apollonian consciousness, the principium individuationis must be destroyed. The form-giving faculties of the Apollonian disposition culminate in the sublime expression of the principle of indi-

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viduation, the creation of the individual who ‘‘sits quietly’’ in a dreamy repose, ‘‘in the midst of a world of torments.’’42 But it is the inevitable irruption of Dionysian ‘‘torments’’ that shatters this pleasant torpor, returning individuals to the ‘‘highest gratification of the primordial unity.’’43 The ‘‘blissful ecstasy’’ of intoxication reaffirms the ‘‘union between man and man’’ in a ‘‘higher community.’’ Tragedy is thus the expression of the Greek impulse to illusion, which makes suffering bearable, as well as the ecstatic ruination of those illusions of individuation, which occasions a ‘‘mystic feeling’’ of unity.44 As M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern sum up: ‘‘Tragedy . . . presents us with the destruction of individuals in a way which is exalting, because it gives us a glimpse of the underlying deeper power of life.’’45 Though it forms a central part of Nietzsche’s early concept of tragedy, this destruction of the individual and return to the impersonal continuity of a primordial One (which, as we will see, Bataille takes up and reworks), is tellingly brought under fire by Nietzsche himself in his remarkable ‘‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism,’’ which prefaces later editions of The Birth of Tragedy. Mention of the shattering of the principle of individuation is notably sparse in later discussions of tragedy by Nietzsche, for the reasons articulated in the self-criticism.46 Symptomatic of his increasing commitment to notions of individual overcoming and sovereignty, this shattering of the individual is implicitly recast, in this preface, in the unfavorable light of mere metaphysical comfort. Though the self-criticism contains no overt reference to the shattering, phraseology reveals the link: In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims that ‘‘the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort—with which . . . every true tragedy leaves us— that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.’’47 In this preface, however, Nietzsche denies with exclamatory vehemence the metaphysical comfort that had so attracted him sixteen years earlier. Decrying such comfort as romantic and essentially Christian, Nietzsche revises his tragic vision, propounding the need ‘‘to learn the art of this-worldly comfort.’’48 Citing his Zarathustra, Nietzsche admonishes his readers to ‘‘Raise up your hearts . . . higher, higher! . . . Zarathustra, the light one who beckons with his wings, preparing for flight, beckoning to all birds, . . . blissfully lightheaded.’’49 The tenor of this passage is decidedly at odds with those that called for a shattering of the individual. Rather than a collapse,

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the bliss is occasioned by a rising up; rather than the metaphysical, mystic comfort of dissolution into a primal unity, this ecstasy derives from ‘‘strength, overflowing health, overgreat fullness.’’50 This sense of power plays itself out throughout Nietzsche’s writings on tragedy, with his asensional tendency forming the nucleus of a cluster of important terms and concepts. To begin, Nietzsche’s tragic vision becomes even more vehemently one of overcoming, of the upsurge of life. The figure of Dionysus is now no longer just the agent and image of destruction of the individual, but rather the force of revivification. As Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power, ‘‘Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return from its destruction.’’51 Glossing this statement, he claims that the tragic vision is one in which ‘‘being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so.’’52 Suffering is a stimulant to life, a resistance that occasions a feeling of overcoming. Nietzsche puts the matter succinctly: ‘‘What is bad? Everything which makes one feel weakness. What is happiness? The feeling which comes from being up to full power, from being able to overcome resistance.’’53 Nietzsche, it is true, loves to fall—but his love of the fall derives from the power of rising again. Nietzsche has thus been said to have a ‘‘height complex,’’ characterized by incessant ‘‘talk of ‘ascending’ or ‘descending’ vitality (‘decadence’) or of life ‘raising’ itself to ‘higher levels’ of intensity, or of ‘higher’ men, the superior or ‘sovereign’ individual, the ‘super-’ or ‘overman.’ ’’54 In the context of the present discussion, Nietzsche’s concept of tragedy can be read as an expression of the right-hand sacred; it is a call to invigoration, a display of nobility, surging power, and increased individual purity. For Nietzsche, all of these notions can ultimately be placed under the general rubric of sovereignty, the highest expression of the valorization of life and the most profound achievement of the tragic vision. sovereignty

‘‘[W]ill, as the affect of command,’’ claims Nietzsche, ‘‘is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength.’’55 He goes further, explaining that the sovereign individual, or the ‘‘free spirit par excellence,’’ is the manifestation of a supreme will to life. Held in opposition to this ‘‘higher type’’ are those who

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exhibit a ‘‘disease of the will,’’ or ‘‘the will to decline.’’56 These lower types (the ‘‘herd’’ in Nietzschean parlance), lack the strength of spirit to command, to attain mastery, both over others and themselves, and therefore rely upon the imperious wills of sovereign individuals. Bereft of the lifeaffirming will to power, such rabble ‘‘covets someone who commands.’’57 Symptomatic of this ‘‘collapse of the will’’ is a certain deprivation of evaluation, an impoverished sense of what facilitates or inhibits the upsurge of power and life. Part and parcel of Nietzsche’s tragic vision is the will to affirm: ‘‘the will to say Yes . . . penetrates all of Nietzsche’s works.’’58 But the will to affirm, as we have already seen, proceeds by negation. That which appears as inhibition, weakness, or suffering is valuable to the degree that it presents the resistance necessary to occasion acts of overcoming. In this sense, overcoming is carried out through life-affirming negation. It is the inability to negate in the service of life, a failure in the face of resistance, that those of ‘‘diseased will’’ exhibit. The failure of the will is therefore a failure of affirmative evaluation; it favors a declension of strength rather than an evaluative tour de force. Explaining the logic of Nietzsche’s valuational procedures, Sarah Kofman claims that ‘‘the value of value—that which constitutes its truth or falsity—always depends on the valorization or devalorization of life, not its truth.’’59 The positive valence of an evaluation is thus concomitant with an increase of vitality. The sovereign individual, through self-mastery and the will to overcome, evinces this affirmative strength. The will of the sovereign Ubermensch cannot be separated from Nietzsche’s concept of nobility and the underlying notion of rank that it presumes. Indeed, the prefix uber-, or over- (which Bataille criticizes, as we will see later) implies a certain hierarchy, constructed around notions of purity and impurity, vitality and decadence—in short, on the difference or distance between those who possess the will to power and those who manifest the will to decline. Nietzsche thus develops what he calls a ‘‘pathos of distance’’ that describes this difference between the exuberant, higher types and the degenerate, lower types: Every enhancement of the type ‘‘man’’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata—when the ruling caste con-

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Ecce Monstrum stantly looks afar and looks down upon subjects and instruments and just as constantly practices obedience and command, keeping down and keeping at a distance—that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either— the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive states—in brief, simply the enhancement of the type ‘‘man,’’ the continual ‘‘self-overcoming of man.’’60

This pathos of distance, which consists of both an overcoming and a putting under, reveals something about the many equivocations and ambiguities of Nietzsche’s language, those qualities that lend his philosophy its paradoxical nature. These apparent equivocations recapitulate the very process of overcoming, and illustrate the hierarchy to which Nietzsche is committed. His writings often enact an analogical inversion, a transposition of terms that is activated in reference to the ultimate value of the affirmation of life. To demonstrate this point: If we inspect Nietzsche’s use of the interrelated concepts of criminality and sickness, we find on the one hand that criminality is given a negative valence in his writings. Criminality is a sign of decadence, a manifestation of the weakness and degenerate will of the lower types. The same may be said of sickness. Nietzsche lists some ‘‘consequences of decadence: vice—the addiction to vice; sickness—sickliness; crime—criminality.’’61 And articulating a ‘‘theory of exhaustion’’ (also a sign of decadence), he similarly claims that he must teach that ‘‘all that crime . . . and sickness are consequences of exhaustion.’’62 In contrast to the widespread sickness and crime of the herd is the strength of the nobility, the sovereigns, who uphold the laws of health. The nobility exemplify strength and purity; they partake of dimensions of the right-hand sacred. An analogical construction thus reads: sickness/crime is to health/strength as the lower types are to the sovereigns. health/strength sovereign types ⳱ sickness/crime lower types But, maintaining the ultimate evaluative referent of the valorization of life, Nietzsche performs an inversion of terms in the analogy. Even though he has explicitly connected crime with decadence, he also claims that ‘‘crime belongs to greatness,’’63 and that ‘‘a criminal is . . . a man who risks his life, his honor, his freedom’’64 —in other words, a sovereign individual. In these

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cases, crime is an admirable attribute of nobility. A similar transposition takes place with the concept of sickness, for now the health of the herd is seen as the sickness of the nobility; indeed, ‘‘purity is the illness of the nobility.’’65 In a telling moment of inversion, what we now find is this: sickness/crime sovereign types ⳱ health/strength lower types The attributes of crime and sickness are valued over the health and strength that constitute the pernicious social order of the herd.66 Thus crime is ‘‘guilty’’ when it refers to the will to decline, and ‘‘innocent’’ when it is represented by the noble impingement upon the moral order of the lower types. Similarly, sickness is an affirmative quality when mastered, when put in the service of life, or when it describes the sovereign exhibitions of strength that are deleterious in relation to the herd. One therefore may be either ‘‘sick from sickness or from excessive health.’’67 Whether sickness issues from an affirmative vitalism or from a weakness is crucial for Nietzsche. This concern extends to the type of sickness that is of greatest pertinence to the subject of this chapter: madness. Nietzsche makes clear that madness may proceed from one of two sources that constitute its two types: [T]here are two types of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life—they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight— and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness.68

While resembling other forms of sickness with their evaluative counterparts, madness presents itself as especially pertinent in the case of Nietzsche, for, as Pierre Klossowski points out, Nietzsche fore[sees], with a rare premonition, the conclusions that posterity would draw from his own demise. He would be counted among those who, through exhaustion, adopt a fallacious attitude of power, who seek to inspire fear through a ‘degenerate’ pathos: who make themselves sick, mad, who provoke the symptoms of their own ruin—all in order to attain the supreme degree of the superhuman.69

The question we are left with is how one masters madness without adopting the ‘‘fallacious attitude of power’’ associated with those who provoke their

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own ruin. In other words, how can Nietzsche, who foresees and admits the inevitability of his decline, also claim mastery over madness that will evince not exhaustion and a mere resemblance of power, but an ‘‘over-great fullness of life’’?70 This question of madness and the premonition of ruin relate to Nietzsche’s treatment of mortality. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche offers a sustained treatment of death. Apparently contradicting his notion that death is ‘‘not all that important,’’ here he claims that ‘‘death is an important matter for all.’’71 But death is an important matter just as sickness is an important matter—as an obstacle to be overcome. The exhortations to make death a sacred, ‘‘beautiful festival’’ represent an implicit injunction not to affirm death as such, but to convert death into a celebration of life, a ‘‘spur and promise to the living.’’ Nietzsche has not relinquished the will to overcome; rather, he advocates a ‘‘voluntary death’’ that will ‘‘consecrate life.’’72 The question here is whether one resents life and merely succumbs to death, or whether one affirms life, and thereby dies a voluntary, ‘‘free’’ death. But it is just this expression of voluntarism that Nietzsche himself has problematized in his dealings with madness. Decrying, on the one hand, a willed decline into insanity, and extolling, on the other hand, the need for a voluntary demise, Nietzsche places himself in an impossible situation. After all, does not the very idea of a death that is ‘‘voluntary’’ (from the Latin voluntas, ‘‘will’’) suggest the ‘‘will to decline’’ that Nietzsche has railed against in so many arenas? It is with this question that we may turn to Bataille, who does not answer the question so much as reformulate it from the point of view of an ‘‘affirmative will to decline’’ that plays upon the forces of the left-hand sacred.

Nietzsche Slain Not that Nietzsche was altogether incapable of wallowing in the mud. — g e o r g e s b a t a i l l e , ‘‘The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist’’

Bataille reads Nietzsche in the light (or darkness) of the latter’s madness and death. Indeed, most of the epigraphs that introduce the chapters of

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Bataille’s Sur Nietzsche are taken from the last decade of Nietzsche’s writings, as the German philosopher’s decline in health becomes more pronounced. And one of the few critical remarks that Bataille levels at his predecessor is found in an essay critiquing the use of the prefix sur in the words surhomme (overman) and surrealist. The critique found here is particularly poignant, as Bataille compares his friend Nietzsche to the man who often plays the role of Bataille’s nemesis: Andre´ Breton.73 In this essay, Bataille articulates the reasoning behind his inversion of Nietzsche—an inversion motivated by a valorization of death and an affirmative will to decline. This early essay (from 1929 or 1930) establishes an anti-idealist, antiimperialist stance that develops throughout Bataille’s later writings. Aside from forecasting the very real dangers of imperialist thought and the fascist ends to which Nietzsche will be put by Hitler, Bataille’s essay states concerns that resonate beyond the strictly political realm. (The important political stakes of this essay will be discussed later in this chapter.) Bataille sets up the opposition between the low and the high, between the Marxist old mole and the imperialist eagle, Nietzsche’s elevated avatar. The eagle he describes as ‘‘obviously the more virile conception’’; it not only ‘‘rise[s] in radiant zones of the solar sky, but it resides there with uncontested glamour.’’74 Moreover, the beak of the eagle, which cuts but cannot be cut, ‘‘suggests its sovereign virility.’’ This suraigle (supereagle) is allied with the sun and soars in ‘‘lofty space’’ above ‘‘the impurity of the earth where bodies rot,’’ and where the old mole does his burrowing. Thus opposing base reality and the elevated spirit, Bataille goes on to critique the upward, transcendent tendencies in Nietzsche, recapitulating the distinction between the right- and left-hand sacred. The critique is noteworthy not only because of its rarity, but because it is here that Bataille makes explicit the terms of the Icarian inversion that he will carry out on Nietzsche in subsequent writings. Claiming that Nietzsche was trapped in the ‘‘values associated with class superiority,’’ Bataille describes Nietzsche’s ‘‘unconscious pathological desire to be struck down violently like Icarus.’’75 But while the valence here is negative, even pejorative—Bataille calls Nietzsche a ‘‘sick individual’’ whose desire to assert the splendor of the dominating class culminates in an awareness of ‘‘the excessively derisive and even imbecilic character of this mental activity’’76 —it is the unconscious and pathological nature of Nietzsche’s thought that Bataille will exploit to produce Nietzsche’s left side.

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Bataille begins by formulating a corrective to that in Nietzsche which betrays a spiritual evaluation that would not only play itself out dangerously in the political realm, but would also, through an idealist, spiritual dictatorship, deny any meaning to the ‘‘human heart,’’ the base faculties at the root of human existence. Bataille seeks to liberate these base faculties from the intellectualist, idealist prison to which they are relegated by the morality of dominant classes. Thus, while admiring Nietzsche’s ability to wallow in the mud—his ability to speak, for instance, ‘‘of the sexual basis of the higher psychic functions’’—Bataille claims that the upward side of the double tendency ‘‘gain[s] the upper hand,’’ making of baseness a system of ‘‘higher ethereal values’’: ‘‘Laughter, brutal expression of the heart’s baseness, became along with truth something elevated, weightless, Hellenic, etc.’’77 To counter the pernicious effects of this elevated thought, Bataille sets out to return Nietzsche to the mud from which he arose.

Rising to Fall the mask of nietzsche

Born of a paralyzed, blind, syphilitic father and a mother prone to psychosis, Bataille himself was no stranger to illness.78 ‘‘Pain shaped my character,’’ he claims in Guilty. Indeed, Bataille struggled throughout his life with turmoil of various stripes, vacillating between depressive states and euphoria, unable (and unwilling) ever to relinquish his scatological obsessions, and dying, finally, of arterial sclerosis. Strangely, it was his submission in his twenties to psychoanalytic treatment by the unorthodox analyst Adrien Borel that finally made Bataille’s psychological illness a productive force. Bataille claimed that prior to the analysis he had been ‘‘floundering,’’ unable to write. The treatment opened up newfound productivity but did not remove the obsessions, the quality of ‘‘intellectual intensity’’79 with which his thinking had always been fraught. One of the products of his analysis was the exceedingly delirious essay ‘‘The Solar Anus,’’ where Bataille announces that ‘‘it is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.’’80 This notion of universal parody marks other writings in Bataille’s corpus, playing itself out in the

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shifting, obsessive imagery that he uses to advance his thought: Eyes become eggs become testicles; people become trees; and the sun, that lucent, celestial entity, becomes the very image of baseness—the anus. Such transpositions and inversions offer a clue to Bataille’s relationship to Nietzsche, for Bataille parodies Nietzsche; he is Nietzsche in a ‘‘deceptive form’’—the form of the morbid, left-hand Nietzsche. Bataille inverts his predecessor, portraying Nietzsche as the victim of an inevitable decline from the Icarian heights to which he had soared in a ‘‘pathological refusal to embrace stinking decomposition.’’81 As we will see, Bataille gives voice to this Nietzschebrought-low, disguising himself with the mask of Nietzsche to better subvert Nietzsche and, indeed, to make a monster of him. sacrifice, madness, and laughter

Bataille’s subversive parody of Nietzsche is enacted especially with regard to the concepts of tragedy and sacrifice, madness, sovereignty, and laughter. To grasp Bataille’s use of these concepts, we need to understand his approach to tragedy and his extensive employment of sacrificial images—for while Bataille examines the dynamics of Nietzschean tragedy, he does so by repeatedly couching tragedy in terms that are explicitly related to sacrifice. In other words, Bataille rereads Nietzschean tragedy as sacrifice.82 The major side of Nietzsche’s tragic vision is one of an overcoming that evinces an upsurge of health and life, akin to what Bataille calls a ‘‘tendential concentration’’ of power.83 Bataille’s notion of sacrifice betrays quite an opposite movement. Recalling the shattering of the principle of individuation that Nietzsche sought to suppress in his self-criticism, Bataille describes a sacrificial movement that carries out just this shattering. The individual reality of the ‘‘me,’’ of ipseity, is precisely what needs to be destroyed to experience the ecstasy of a return to the ‘‘impersonal totality’’ of existence. The need for sacrifice comes from this desire to return discontinuous individuals to the sacred domain of continuous nature. In his Theory of Religion, Bataille supplies his own version of Nietzsche’s tragic vision, opposing the profane world of things and discrete individuals to the sacred world in which humans are lost ‘‘like water in water.’’ Ties of subordination give way to the divine world in which profane reality is returned to the ‘‘intimacy . . . of immanence between man and the world, between subject and object.’’84 Sacrifice brings this return to intimacy, as the witness-participant identifies

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with the victim that is put to death and returned to the intimate order. In an exposition that uncannily echoes Nietzsche’s depiction of the tragic bacchanal in The Birth of Tragedy, Bataille claims that sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and ‘‘restores it to that of unintelligible caprice.’’85 This description of dissolution into continuity is a rewriting of Nietzsche’s shattering of the principle of individuation. But stripped of any metaphysical comfort, Bataille’s sacrificial shattering of ipseity is resolutely thisworldly in orientation, a present experience of sacred immanence. And in contrast to Nietzsche’s exhortations to rise up, Bataille’s sacrificial moment derives its importance from a collapse of power, from the death of the individual. The corpse becomes the repulsive but awe-inspiring emblem of a sovereignty that is contrary to that of Nietzsche’s. ‘‘In a sense the corpse is the most complete affirmation of the spirit. What death’s definitive impotence and absence reveals is the very essence of the spirit, just as the scream of the one that is killed is the supreme affirmation of life.’’86 Thus the Nietzschean notion of sovereignty is turned on its head; for Bataille, death shatters the individual and elicits a sacred world. ‘‘Death is the great affirmer,’’ Bataille claims, ‘‘the wonder-struck cry of life.’’ Death reveals ‘‘the affirmation of intimate life, whose measureless violence is a danger to the stability of things.’’87 Sovereignty thus resides not in the consolidation of power, but in the relinquishment of profane relations of utility.88 This sovereignty is also tied to the experience of madness. In a rare essay devoted exclusively to an exposition of tragedy, Bataille, in ‘‘La Me`re-Tragedie,’’ emphasizes the baseness of tragedy: ‘‘In no way does theater belong to the uranian world of the head and of the sky: it belongs to the world of the stomach, to the infernal and maternal world of the deep earth, to the dark world of chthonic deities.’’89 That Bataille is offering here a corrective to any upward tendencies in his predecessor’s thought is obvious. Where Nietzsche seeks to resurrect Dionysus, to be elevated into the domain of the ‘‘head and sky,’’ Bataille plunges tragedy back into the infernal regions of the stomach. And where Nietzsche’s self-criticism casts suspicion on the ‘‘intoxicating and befogging’’ effects of anti-Hellenic German music, Bataille is quick to proclaim such affects as quintessentially tragic; his reading of Dionysus is not as the god who promises resurrection, but the mad god who heralds death, and with it a dark joy: ‘‘The god whose celebrations become tragic spectacles is not only the god of drunkenness and wine, but

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the god of disturbed reason. His advent brings decomposing suffering and fever no less than flagrant joy.’’90 The ‘‘disturbed reason’’ of which Bataille speaks is symptomatic of the return to the sacred world; ‘‘the return to immanent intimacy implies a beclouded consciousness,’’91 where consciousness is tied to the positing of distinct objects and discontinuous individuals. Bataille makes much of Nietzsche’s descent into madness, for it is with the advent and culmination of this illness that Bataille finds the correction to Nietzsche’s upward inclination. The deific Nietzsche that Bataille heralds is not a tragic hero; no longer the Nietzsche of the sun and sky, the Icarian philosopher is now envisioned by Bataille (seven years after his critique of Nietzsche’s use of the prefix sur) as the fallen sacrificial victim. And while Nietzsche had been criticized as the apotheosis of the superior individual, his sovereignty is now located elsewhere. He is not the soaring eagle, but the god whose slaying represents the shattering of the individual and the return to the intimacy of the sacred world, of the basis and baseness of existence. In an essay devoted to Nietzsche, Bataille critiques the predominant attitude of thought in the modern world, observing that ‘‘no one thinks any longer that the reality of a communal life—which is to say, human existence—depends on the sharing of nocturnal terrors and on the kind of ecstatic spasms that spread death.’’92 Nietzsche in his madness represents such nocturnal terrors and the death that binds humans in continuity; he becomes the principle of the possibility of communal life. Tragedy is thus read not as the resistance that occasions overcoming, but the sacrifice that establishes a community: ‘‘Life demands that men gather together, and men are gathered together by a leader or by a tragedy. To look for a HEADLESS human community is to look for tragedy: putting the leader to death is itself tragedy, it remains a requirement of tragedy.’’93 The headless community is embodied in the Nietzschean god represented by the monstrous ace´phale.94 But the conflation of Nietzsche-Dionysus in the ace´phale also alludes to madness; Nietzsche, after all, loses his head. This loss of reason amounts to a liberation, which Bataille describes as a ‘‘rapturous loss of self.’’95 ‘‘Madness itself gives a rarefied idea of the free ‘subject,’ unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.’’96 Madness evinces sovereignty, a freedom from subservience and utility, a return to the sacred world. Bataille’s Nietzsche exhibits this madness as a sacrificial movement.97 Juxtaposing two short texts by Bataille, ‘‘Sacrifice’’ and ‘‘The Madness of

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Nietzsche,’’ both written in 1939, reveals this point. In ‘‘Sacrifice,’’ Bataille poses the enigma of sacrifice as ‘‘the ultimate question.’’98 In an attempt to find an answer to this question, Bataille turns to an exposition of the phenomenon of laughter. On the one hand, this represents again a reliance on his German predecessor, whose Zarathustra ‘‘pronounces laughter holy.’’ Nietzsche’s laughter, however, has been criticized by Bataille as having displayed the pathological tendency toward a Hellenic levity, as the expression of ethereal values. But the downward side of this tendency is the inevitability of the fall, even the unconscious desire to fall. Bataille thus rereads Nietzsche’s laughter, and laughter in general, as the base explosion of this desire to plummet from the heights. The link between laughter and sacrifice is made explicit when Bataille analyzes the hilarity of witnessing a person taking a fall. ‘‘The man who unwittingly falls is substituting for the victim who is put to death, and the shared joy of laughter is that of sacred communication.’’99 This sacred communication, the destruction of ipseity and the experience of communal continuity, is made possible by the fall that reveals the ‘‘illusory nature of stability.’’ Laughter in falling affirms the ‘‘fundamental accord between our joy and an impulse to self-destruction.’’100 As Bataille points out, the ecstasy and hilarity of the fall begins from a position of superiority; the witness to the fall ‘‘remains upright.’’ But the fall, like sickness, intimates death, and ‘‘the death of the other,’’ Bataille insists, ‘‘is always the image of one’s own death.’’101 Laughter begins, like sacrifice, with an identification with the victim; it gives the witness an experience ‘‘at the level of death.’’102 The sovereignty of laughter resides not in superiority but in downfall, in a loss of stability and the rapture of incertitude. Bataille’s divergence from Nietzsche is highlighted by Michel Borch-Jocobsen’s observation that ‘‘laughter is not divine and sovereign because it hovers over miserable human finitude, but rather because it allows itself to be carried away and falls along with that finitude . . . —and this immediately topples our previous certainties— . . . sovereignty resides within the fall.’’103 Nietzsche’s plummet into madness is read by Bataille as a similarly sovereign slip into powerlessness. In his essay ‘‘The Madness of Nietzsche,’’ Bataille insists that Nietzsche’s collapse ‘‘should be commemorated as a tragedy’’—a tragedy that exhibits precisely the characteristics Bataille attributes to sacrifice. Citing Zarathustra, Bataille says that ‘‘when that which lives is in command of itself, that which lives must expiate its authority and become judge, avenger, and VICTIM of its own laws.’’104 This statement

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sets up a characteristically Bataillean rereading of Nietzsche from the point of view of Nietzsche’s madness. Emphasizing the inevitable fall from a position of superiority and self-mastery, Bataille goes on to portray Nietzsche as a sacrificial victim of sickness. He traces Nietzsche’s movement from ‘‘impotent delirium to power,’’ citing his ‘‘will to self-mastery and victory’’ and his ascent to the ‘‘brightness and lacerations of the summit.’’105 But he moves inevitably from ‘‘power to collapse,’’ for ‘‘if it is true that the accomplishment of his destiny demands his ruin—accordingly if madness or death have in his eyes the brilliance of a celebration—the love of life and destiny demand that he first commit in himself the crime of authority that he will expiate.’’106 Superiority implies a fall; rising to power requires a collapse. The expiation of which Bataille speaks does not dissolve guilt—rather it is the moment of victimage itself. Bataille differs from Nietzsche again on this point. Where Nietzsche advocates a sense of innocence, of being superior to the morality of the herd, Bataille revels in the guilt that comes from sacrifice. It is not the crime of death that is atoned for, but rather authority and power: Power itself is the crime that must be atoned for by death, precisely through a lacerating sense of guilt. It is death, and the guilt associated with sacrificial death, that eradicates power and binds a community. By casting Nietzsche as the sacrificial victim, as the ‘‘accursed share,’’ Bataille does not remove Nietzsche from his position of master and relegate him to the role of slave. Instead he refuses Hegelian recognition by identifying with Nietzsche the victim, effectively removing Nietzsche from the dialectic of power. Without power and no longer separable from death, Nietzsche displays a ‘‘sovereign nullity.’’107 He is the sacrificial ‘‘royal gift’’ whose declension of power evokes a tragic hilarity, and whose existence no longer bespeaks a will to power, but the liberating ‘‘impos[ition] of chance upon the masses.’’108 Expiation culminates not in the innocence of the superior, but in the community of guilt, and this community is affirmed at every moment by the sense of chance that powerlessness elicits. under nietzsche I am the only one who thinks of himself not as a commentator of Nietzsche but as being the same as he. g e o r g e s b a t a i l l e , The Accursed Share, volume 3

It is with the notion of the imposition of chance that we may now turn to Bataille’s most extended meditation on his predecessor, Sur Nietzsche. Here

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Bataille is at his most parodic and his most ironic, for with this text Bataille most ingeniously masks himself as Nietzsche while at the same time carrying out a poignant inversion of his predecessor. We have seen that for Bataille, Nietzsche is superhuman—all too superhuman. It is surprising, then, that Bataille writes a book the title of which contains the preposition that, as a prefix, he had previously condemned: sur. But as Bataille admits, he is prone to ‘‘excess irony’’ in this book.109 This irony, frequently manifested in a parodic misprision of Nietzsche, can be observed throughout the text. Far from simply espousing Nietzsche’s thought (which, Bataille tells us, would be ‘‘impossible’’) Bataille repeats Nietzsche, but in doing so perverts Nietzsche’s vitalistic philosophy, making of it a voice propounding an affirmative will to decline.110 Introducing Bataille’s book, Sylve`re Lotringer makes the observation that Bataille goes ‘‘all the way to the top of the pyramid . . . so he [can] hurl himself down to the bottom, a violent, paroxyismic gesture all the more fascinating for being empty of all content.’’111 But this commentator does little to explain how this plummet is enacted in the text of the book.112 How does Bataille’s quest for intimacy with Nietzsche’s madness play itself out in the text? How does Bataille evoke the plummet of which Lotringer speaks, and the movement that I have attempted to describe in this chapter? In his essay on Bataille’s ‘‘rewriting’’ of Nietzsche, Allan Stoekl examines the suppression Bataille exerts on Nietzsche’s writings.113 Stoekl draws attention to the subtitle of Bataille’s text, a subtitle that does not appear in the English translation: volonte´ de chance (will to chance). ‘‘Chance is posited in place of power,’’ Stoekl claims, adding that Bataille ‘‘suppresses a part of Nietzsche. That ‘suppression’ is the suppression of Nietzsche’s suppression of chance. In emphasizing force, Nietzsche is still emphasizing power: the willful establishment, high on ‘hierarchy,’ of the ‘superman,’ to the exclusion of others.’’114 Stoekl goes on to argue that part and parcel of this positing of the will to chance in place of the will to power is a ‘‘forgetting’’ of that part in Nietzsche that had evinced the use of force or power. Bataille becomes, says Stoekl, ‘‘Sur Nietzsche (or surnietzsche). . . . Nietzsche then becomes pure death, rupture, or chance.’’ But Stoekl goes so far as to claim that this version of Nietzsche, ‘‘ ‘stripped’ of his ‘feudal’ side,’’ evidences a ‘‘radical self-forgetting’’ in Bataille; ‘‘at no point does Bataille directly state—or become clearly, self-reflexively aware of’’ his suppression of Nietzsche. There is, according to Stoekl, a forgetting of the forgetting.

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But is Bataille really the forgetful surnietzsche? Rather than forgetting the upward inclination of Nietzsche’s writings, Bataille very much remembers Nietzsche’s transcendental tendencies, and the very title of his book, Sur Nietzsche, should alert the reader to the possibility of a highly parodic, ironic, and self-reflexive misprision of Nietzsche. Indeed, far from being surnietzsche, Bataille attempts to out-Nietzsche Nietzsche, to play the Untermensch to his Ubermensch. Despite appearances to the contrary, Bataille inverts Nietzsche with his own lexicon. Ostensibly, therefore, Bataille identifies himself with Nietzsche. But in heralding the twilight of his idol, Bataille makes of himself the sousnietzsche, the morbid Nietzsche, and becomes harbinger of a sovereign will to decline.

Summit and Decline: The Sacrifice of Nietzsche Though many commentators—including those discussed here, such as Borch-Jacobsen, Lotringer, and Stoekl—suggest that Bataille seeks to hurl himself (and Nietzsche) from the heights, none of these has engaged on this point the section in Bataille’s Sur Nietzsche entitled ‘‘Summit and Decline’’—a chapter that would appear to contradict this urge. To be sure, ‘‘Summit and Decline’’ presents a considerable problem to those who would have Bataille ascend to the heights only to hurl himself down again. Bataille writes: I now want to contrast, not good and evil, but the ‘moral summit,’ which is different from the good, and the ‘decline,’ which has nothing to do with evil and whose necessity determines, on the contrary, modalities of the good. The summit corresponds to excess, to an exuberance of forces. It brings about a maximum of tragic intensity. It relates to measureless expenditures of energy and is a violation of the integrity of individual beings. It is thus closer to evil than to good. The decline—corresponding to moments of exhaustion and fatigue—gives all value to concerns for preserving and enriching the individual. From it come rules of morality.115

At first glance, this prolegomenon to ‘‘Summit and Decline’’ seems simply to recapitulate a Nietzschean vision of tragic overcoming. But an inspection of Bataille’s subsequent unpacking of these postulates reveals something else entirely—an inversion of Nietzsche’s paradigm.

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Buried among the footnotes of Bataille’s massive three-volume tome The Accursed Share, one finds the following admission from the author, who has just called himself ‘‘the same as’’ Nietzsche: ‘‘If I expressed myself at some length concerning the will to power, my thought would appear only as an indirect extension of Nietzsche’s. Indeed, in my view, Nietzsche’s main shortcoming is in having misinterpreted the opposition of sovereignty and power.’’116 The misinterpretation stems from Nietzsche’s equation, rather than opposition, of sovereignty and power, his commitment to a ‘‘pathos of distance.’’117 This is no small point of contention. And indeed when Bataille does express himself at some length concerning the will to power, it is precisely to invert Nietzsche, and to oppose sovereignty and power. ‘‘Sovereignty,’’ claims Bataille, ‘‘can only exist on the condition that it should never assume power, which is action, the primacy of the future over the present moment, the primacy of the promised land.’’118 This assertion can be read as a direct counter to Nietzsche, the ‘‘philosopher of the future,’’119 who, even as late as The Antichrist and Twilight of the Idols, propounds as a ‘‘formula for happiness’’ a ‘‘Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.’’120 The point here is that Bataille explicitly opposes Nietzsche’s longlasting concern with power and with the future.121 Only with Ecce Homo, written just prior to Nietzsche’s ‘‘final’’ collapse in Turin, does Bataille find the inroad to the accursed share in Nietzsche. It is with culminating madness that Nietzsche writes this book in which he claims that ‘‘I can’t recall efforts, there’s no trace of struggle in my life, and I’m the opposite of heroic natures. My experience knows nothing at all about what it means to ‘will’ a thing or work at it ambitiously or relate to some ‘goal’ or realization of desire.’’122 This is a far cry from the Nietzsche of self-overcoming, whose happiness is found in the future and the satisfaction of desires. And it is the anti-heroic Nietzsche, Nietzsche the sacrificial victim, who Bataille disguises himself as in Sur Nietzsche. Although Bataille speaks of ‘‘tragic intensity,’’ he writes the side of Nietzsche that declines, sacrificially, into powerlessness.123 Doing so requires Bataille to exploit in Nietzsche that which affirms decline or decadence, while suppressing that which, up to the last, makes of sickness an occasion for resistance, a thing to be used in the service of ‘‘higher’’ values. Indeed, Bataille is selective even in the citations he draws from 1888, the year in which Ecce Homo is written, quoting, for instance, the following from ‘‘Summit and Decline’’: ‘‘And as for decadence, the image

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of this in many ways is people who do not die prematurely; from their experience, they know the instincts that this implies; during nearly half their lives human beings are decadent.’’124 Indeed, Nietzsche claims in Ecce Homo that he himself is a decadent—that he is thoroughly versed ‘‘in questions of decadence.’’125 He claims that his ‘‘lightness and levity’’ are ‘‘quite compatible . . . not only with the deepest physiological weakness, but even with excessive pain.’’126 But Nietzsche goes on to claim that he is also ‘‘the reverse’’ of the decadent; he sees ‘‘healthier concepts and values in the perspective of the sick’’ and is thus able to ‘‘look down out of the abundance . . . of a rich life.’’ It is in this manner that he ‘‘[becomes] a master.’’127 Suppressing, as Stoekl points out, these images of height and ascent, of mastery and power, Bataille also exploits the fleeting affirmations of sickness and decadence in Nietzsche. If Nietzsche claims to be the reverse of a decadent, Bataille reverses that reversal in a move that mimics the vacillation from left- to right-hand sacred and back again. If the present reading of Nietzsche’s tragic vision has thus far tended to ignore the distinction between the tragic hero and the spectator of the tragedy, it is for this reason: For Nietzsche, the spectacle of the tragic hero’s destruction preserves the individual and evokes a sense of power and strength in the face of agony. Thus he claims that ‘‘to see tragic figures founder and to be able to laugh at the spectacle, despite the profound understanding, the emotion and sympathy that one feels, that is divine.’’128 It is overcoming the agony, laughing despite the sympathy, that is important for Nietzsche; tragedy preserves and uplifts the spectator even as it destroys the hero. But whereas Nietzsche is able to laugh despite this sympathy for the hero, Bataille’s laughter is aroused precisely because of the identification with the hero.129 It is on this point that Bataille’s sacrificial vision is most distinct from the tragic vision of Nietzsche. Bataille reinterprets Nietzsche’s ‘‘tragic intensity’’ as a moment of sacrifice, of identification with the destroyed individual; the power evinced in tragic overcoming is reversed, misread, as the glorious loss of self and the collapse of power in sacrifice. Bataille is the sousnietzsche, the parody of surnietzsche. This observation calls into question the most obvious reading of ‘‘Summit and Decline’’ as a mere recapitulation of Nietzsche. Rather this section admits an inversion of Nietzsche. Bataille claims that the ascent to the summit is characterized by a ‘‘violation of the integrity of individual beings,’’ even though the decline serves for ‘‘preserving and enriching the individ-

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ual.’’ This is Nietzsche in reverse; Bataille’s ascent is a parodic ascent; it designates not the upsurge of power, but a ‘‘measureless expenditure of forces’’—and thus a fall. Conversely, the ‘‘decline’’ of which Bataille speaks does not describe the destruction of the individual, but rather his preservation and the recuperation of strength.130 But Bataille further complicates this paradigm reversal with his notion of the volonte´ de chance (will to chance), which culminates in the experience of the summit. Bataille, trained as a medievalist, would have appreciated the shared etymological origins of de´cadence (decadence or decay) and chance. ‘‘Decadence’’ and ‘‘decay,’’ like the French choir, are derived from the Latin cadere (to fall). ‘‘Chance,’’ cadere, is this very fall. Bataille’s will to chance is the will to decline, to fall. As he says in Sur Nietzsche, ‘‘Chance, in French, has the same origin . . . as e´che´ance (‘deadline’). Chance e´choit, that is, it turns out to be the case. Or it just falls, tombe (like good luck or bad, originally). It is the randomness of dice as they fall.’’131 Chance falls as it will, as it wills, like a deadline, like a coup de de´s, like death. The will to chance is therefore not struggle but relinquishment; not willing, precisely, but waiting.132 The summit cannot be sought; it is only experienced as a piece of luck, good or bad: ‘‘The only possible way . . . to reach the summit is by not intending it.’’133 The ‘‘inevitability of the decline’’ is that which is to be affirmed, and that which, by the will to chance, is affirmative. Eschewing voluntary death, mastery over death, this is the only true amor fati, the saying-Yes even to decadence, to death, to nothingness. These are not affirmed because they occasion a Nietzschean sovereignty, but because they are themselves sovereign.134 This sacrificial movement glorifies death and enables a profound communication among its victims. ‘‘Communication,’’ Bataille claims, ‘‘only takes place between two people who risk themselves.’’135 Communication proceeds by a sacrificial rupture, a putting-at-risk of the individual, made possible by a lacerating sense of guilt, of sin. ‘‘The ‘communication,’ without which nothing exists, is guaranteed by crime.’’136 Communication involves the risk of approaching the other; it is a decision, as Blanchot emphasizes, to allow oneself to be ruptured and spilled out into a shared nothingness.137 ‘‘Communication cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another. It requires individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked, placed at the limit of death and nothingness; the moral summit is the moment of risk taking, it is a being suspended beyond oneself, at the limit

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of nothingness.’’138 Communication itself is thus guilty, for it ‘‘can’t take place without wounding or tainting our humanity.’’139

The Sacrifice of Form: Monstrosity The vision of humanity made monstrous by tainting or wounding is a constant in Bataille’s writings. But what is inconstant is the strategic task to which monstrosity is put. For Bataille, the concept of monstrosity is itself a monstrous concept, bearing the distinctive marks of what it designates— that which is ambiguous, contradictory, impure, dangerous, fearful, and often ridiculous. In his essay ‘‘The Deviations of Nature,’’ Bataille cites a passage from Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses that describes the sentiments aroused upon the encounter with natural anomalies: Among all things that can be contemplated under the concavity of the heavens, nothing is seen that arouses the human spirit more, that ravishes the sense more, that horrifies more, that provokes more terror or admiration to a greater extent among creatures than the monsters, prodigies, and abominations through which we see the works of nature inverted, mutilated, and truncated.140

This passage resonates poignantly with Bataille’s Durkheimian conception of the left-hand sacred, with its emphasis on the coincidence of repugnance and fascination, and its concomitant sensual exhilaration, at once palpably voluptuous and fearfully precarious. For Bataille, the monster is in some sense the very culmination of the left-hand sacred—a formless figure that is paradoxically both useless waste and the mechanism of subversive operations, ‘‘uniting birth and death in the same rupture.’’ Indeed, the very concept of monstrosity—with the contradictions, incompletions, and irrational effusions it implies—is itself monstrous; it is a tainted, wounded, maculate conception. And the ambiguity and contradictoriness of this concept allow Bataille to deploy it as a weapon and as a strategic means of evasion. In the following sections, we will see how Bataille deploys his monstrous conception of humanity, and in particular of Nietzsche, to counter the ideal of an authentic self as envisioned by Jean-Paul Sartre, while evading the fascist appropriations of Nietzsche.

How One Becomes What One Is Not Following the publication in 1943 of Bataille’s book Inner Experience, Bataille and Jean-Paul Sartre engage in a brief but mordant polemical volley in

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which Sartre accuses Bataille of being ‘‘a new mystic.’’ As a term of derision, ‘‘mystic’’ here connotes for Sartre a person who has disengaged himself from life, retreating from the crucial choices that ensure an authentic human existence. Bataille’s pursuit of a ‘‘rapturous escape from the self’’ amounts to cowardice, flagrant irresponsibility—a failure to exercise the free involvement with the world that defines authenticity.141 He accuses Bataille of escaping engagement, evading meaningful action.142 Though Sartre does not explicitly rely on Nietzsche in formulating his philosophical response to Bataille’s mystical raptures, Sartre does presuppose a certain reading of Nietzsche, his ‘‘great predecessor’’143—for Nietzsche emblematizes what Sartre refers to as authenticity, the antithesis of ‘‘bad faith.’’ Drawing from the German philosopher’s emphasis on will and overcoming, Sartre formulates his brand of existentialist philosophy around a humanistic vision in which choice (the free act of the will) allows a person to live authentically—that is, with an eye to future possibilities. Nietzsche’s philosophy becomes a ‘‘call for man to choose his own life, to take responsibility for it.’’144 According to Sartre, existence is absurd unless humans engage in projects through which they project themselves into the future. It is this telically oriented life that Bataille seeks to challenge.145 Part of this challenge is meted out rather personally to Sartre in Sur Nietzsche, where Bataille describes a scene in which he and Sartre dance ‘‘face to face in a potlatch of absurdity.’’ Amy Hollywood suggests that the account of this scene functions in part to implicate Sartre in just the kind of non-productive, useless, and non-future-oriented activity that Sartre wants to eschew.146 Indeed, this account is immediately preceded by a proclamation from Bataille that helps to specify the nature of this anecdotal critique of Sartre: ‘‘For me, turning away from the world, from chance, from the truth of bodies is shameful.’’147 Bataille’s refusal to renounce the world is enacted through a strategic reading of Nietzsche. Sartre embraces, if implicitly, a Nietzsche whose philosophy embodies a will directed toward possibilities, toward the creation of an authentic identity. This side of Nietzsche’s thought, with which Sartre’s clearly resonates, emerges largely from his contemplation of the ‘‘eternal return.’’ In his doctrine of the eternal return, Nietzsche proposes that the universe will eventually be extinguished, only to reconstitute itself again and again, until all possible configurations are exhausted and each configuration is infinitely repeated. Nietzsche finds the entailments of this doctrine grotesque—

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unless, that is, one succeeds in ‘‘giving style to one’s character and meaning to one’s life to such an extent that one can joyously affirm one’s existence.’’148 The great power of the eternal return is, for Nietzsche, the stimulus it offers toward making choices based on the future of this eternal recurrence. Understood this way, the doctrine lays the groundwork for what Sartre calls the ‘‘project,’’ the sculpting of one’s authentic self by way of an existence invested in a future of one’s own choosing—the rationally motivated production of an identity. But if the Sartrean project has its roots, at least in part, in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return, Bataille will counter this not with another doctrine, nor with philosophical argumentation, but with the experience of the eternal return.149 Bataille thus has a double contention with Sartre. First, he believes that Sartre’s version of Nietzsche is an enslavement of him; second, this enslavement of Nietzsche in turn mitigates true human freedom—a freedom ‘‘not to respond to any necessity,’’150 a freedom not to submit oneself to the telic pretensions of project or identity. True liberty consists, according to Bataille, of the freedom not to act toward some end. Bataille thus rejects Nietzsche’s doctrine, insisting on the value of the eternal return only as the ecstatic culmination of a visionary experience. Bataille cites Alfred Baumler affirmatively: ‘‘the idea of the eternal return is without importance from the point of view of Nietzsche’s system. We must consider it the expression of a highly personal experience.’’151 It is therefore not a philosophical doctrine that can be used for authentic existence, but rather an experience expressed in ‘‘tears of jubilation.’’152 The deep truth of the eternal return that excites Nietzsche’s mystical experience153 is, according to Bataille, ‘‘not the return . . . but what the return lay[s] bare, the impossible depth of things.’’ It shows that ‘‘the best will is immaterial.’’154 The thrust of Bataille’s suggestion here is that Nietzsche himself misinterprets the meaning of his own vision. The doctrine that emerges from this vision and the related exhortations to give style to one’s life—the very things Sartre draws upon—are misunderstandings that relinquish the import of the experience. Like Nietzsche himself, Sartre reduces the profundity of the vision and its concomitant ecstasy to a doctrine. The impotence of the will revealed in the vision of the eternal return elicits ecstasy, even madness, and it is the dissolution into madness that Bataille seeks to replicate in his writings. Bataille thus parodies Nietzsche, enacting ‘‘apostasy as his true discipleship’’155 and demonstration of intimacy. Batail-

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le’s own experience in identifying with Nietzsche is of ‘‘how Nietzsche was torn apart,’’ an experience of the collapse that parodically disperses, rather than develops, identity: ‘‘Nietzsche for a long time kept himself from sinking. When it was time for him to yield, when he understood that the preparations for sacrifice were ready, he could only say with gaiety: I, myself, Dionysus, etc.’’156 Nietzsche’s experience, as well as Bataille’s, denies the concern for the future that the doctrine of the eternal return would seek to install. Whereas Sartre takes up a reading of Nietzsche that puts him to philosophical and even political use, Bataille replicates an experience of a madman that exceeds the world of reason and utility. Sartre’s Nietzsche is a philosopher of the future and of authentic existence. Countering Sartre, Bataille instantiates a Nietzsche who cannot be put to any use, but must be identified with through an experience that takes place with no concern for the future—a sovereign act of immediate consumption, beyond the ties of reason. Bataille thus glorifies the mad Nietzsche—for the mad Nietzsche has no future. Bataille insists that Sartre cannot grasp the truth of Nietzsche’s writings because he has failed to live the experience from which they are born. The difference between Sartre and Nietzsche is, for Bataille, all the difference between the profane world of work, with its concern for the future, and the sacred world of immediate experience. Bataille does not argue against Sartre; he contradicts him in a manner that recalls the contradiction of the sacred and the profane. Bataille’s parody of Nietzsche, his repetition of the experience of Nietzsche that is also a repudiation of the discursive thought of Nietzsche, is thus at once a dramatic, lived rebuttal of Sartre’s particular accusations, and a liberation of Nietzsche from the existentialist commitments to which he was made to serve under Sartre.

From Blonde Beast to Beˆte Noire While Nietzsche played an undeniable but often implicit role in the debate between Sartre and Bataille, he is an openly contested figure in Bataille’s confrontation with fascism.157 Bataille’s writings on Nietzsche in the years preceding the Second World War exhibit a movement from a suspicion of Nietzsche’s ascencionalist thought, with its adherence to aristocratic values

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and fascistic inclinations,158 to a reading of Nietzsche that simultaneously rescues Nietzsche from fascist appropriation while also acting as an attack on fascism. Between the years 1929 and 1939, and repeated in the postwar years, Bataille’s reading eschews Nietzsche’s major side while exploiting his minor side in a vacillating movement consonant with Bataille’s Durkheimian conception of the ambiguity of the sacred. As a sacred figure, Nietzsche embodies the antipodes of right and left, pure and impure. This ambiguity makes Nietzsche both a candidate for fascist appropriation and, in Bataille’s hands, the very reverse of fascism. Bataille’s fascination with fascism, as well as his prescience regarding its ascendancy, has been mistaken for complicity; in Bataille’s own time, such thinkers as Sartre and some members of the Ace´phale group suspected Bataille of fascist leanings.159 It is true that, according to Bataille, fascism exerts a kind of seductive power; indeed, it reverberates with sacred forces. But, as Bataille makes clear in his 1933 essay ‘‘The Pyschological Structure of Fascism,’’ the sacred character of fascism is that of the right-hand sacred, with its purity and purifying tendencies. And it is this insight that arouses Bataille’s suspicions and provokes his attacks on fascism. Bataille’s analysis of the psychological structure of fascism is revealing on a number of points. Bataille opposes the homogeneity of society, in which ‘‘human relations are sustained by a reduction to fixed rules based on the consciousness of the possible identity of delineable persons and situations’’ to the realm of heterogeneity, which ‘‘includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure.’’ Bataille elaborates on this distinction, claiming that ‘‘[h]omogeneous reality presents itself with the abstract and neutral aspect of strictly defined and identified object (basically it is the specific reality of solid objects). Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock. It presents itself as a charge, as a value, passing from one object to another.’’160 The heterogeneous realm, corresponding to the sacred, is internally divided between the transcendent (or pure) and the base (or impure) poles. This ‘‘opposition of two extreme forms’’ can be seen, Bataille suggests, as ‘‘an identity of opposites between glory and dejection, between exalted and imperative (higher) forms and impoverished (lower)’’ types of heterogeneity. It is significant that in his analysis Bataille remarks that ‘‘in the Middle Ages, the word sacer was used to designate a shameful illness— syphilis.’’161 This allusion to Nietzsche, who, it is widely believed, died of tertiary syphilis, points not only to the sacred status of that which is defiled

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and shameful, but also to the vacillation between poles, or the identity of opposites, within Nietzsche himself; he is at once the emblem of glory, of the exalted form of the sacred, and the figure of the impure, morbid type, the avatar of a will to decline. Nietzsche’s major side, we have seen, expresses the upwelling or consolidation of an individual’s sense of power. This major side coincides with those characteristics of fascism that Bataille delineates in his essay. That is to say, the psychological structure of fascism is the psychological structure of Nietzsche’s major side. This structure consists in an ‘‘appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted and noble,’’ a sense of authoritative hierarchy and a concomitant pathos of distance, and what Bataille calls the ‘‘tendential concentration’’ or the ‘‘individualization’’ of power.162 This affirms Nietzsche’s sacred status for Bataille; Nietzsche remains a heterogeneous figure opposed to the homogeneous, profane world. On the other hand, it also suggests that the fascist appropriation of Nietzsche (most famously by Hitler, with the happy complicity of Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Forster) is not altogether a misappropriation; indeed, there seems to be much to justify the fascist embrace of Nietzsche, whose individualization of power is the hallmark of the fascist psychology.163 But whereas fascism largely exhibits the pure, exalted, and power-seeking form of the sacred, Nietzsche, in contrast, embodies both aspects of the sacred. Indeed, Nietzsche’s ambivalence allows Bataille to rescue Nietzsche from the fascist reading and even to hold up Nietzsche as an alternative to fascism. This reversal of Nietzsche, from the high to the low, takes place as a de-elevation of the noble superman to that ignoble, ridiculous, and horrific monster: the ace´phale—a movement that will constitute the transition from a society conceived under the consolidation of power in a single head or leader to a ‘‘headless community’’ bound together by ‘‘the obsessive image of a tragedy.’’ The quality of this tragedy is now defined by the sacrificial movement of Nietzsche’s decline into madness and death. Bataille sacrifices the right-hand Nietzsche, and places this sacrifice at the center of the community that it binds together. In a series of ‘‘Propositions’’ outlined in a 1937 issue of Ace´phale, Bataille brings forward a conception of Nietzsche that preaches the attainment of ‘‘the heights of joy’’ by way of ‘‘the most degrading events possible.’’ This coincidence of the high and low resonates with a passage in which Bataille conflates the monstrous ace´phalic figure with the Nietzschean Ubermensch:

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‘‘the headless man merges and melds with the identification with the superhuman.’’164 The hybrid of monster and overman is the figure of the sacred Nietzsche, at once noble and base. But, in an article that follows his ‘‘Propositions’’ by just seven months, Bataille alters this image significantly. In his ‘‘Nietzschean Chronicle’’ Bataille replaces, rather than conflates, the superman with the ace´phalic monster. Whereas in the previous article the impurity of the monster might be said to have tainted the purity of the superman, in this essay the superman is sacrificed, and the result is a drastic reversal from the noble to the base, from the leader in whom power is individualized to the ace´phale, whose meaning is that of death: The principle of this reversal can be expressed in simple terms. CAESARIAN UNITY, ESTABLISHED BY A LEADER—A HEAD—IS OPPOSED BY THE HEADLESS COMMUNITY, BOUND TOGETHER BY THE OBSESSIVE IMAGE OF A TRAGEDY. Life demands that men gather together, and men are only gathered together by a leader or by a tragedy. To look for a HEADLESS human community is to look for tragedy: putting the leader to death is itself tragedy, it remains a requirement of tragedy. A truth that will change the appearance of human things starts here: THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENT THAT GIVES AN OBSESSIVE VALUE TO COMMUNAL LIFE IS DEATH.165

Bataille, describing a scenario in which one can see reflected the decline of Nietzsche into madness, thus writes a scene in which the noble side of Nietzsche, whose attributes had been those of a leader, or head, is sacrificed, rendering Nietzsche free of his upward tendency—a mad, ace´phalic figure. This is no longer the major Nietzsche whose ultimate referent is life and surging power, but the Nietzsche whose decline and death open the possibility of an anti-fascist, ace´phalic community. One outstanding characteristic of this explosive reading of Nietzsche is the centrality that Bataille gives to Nietzsche’s conception of time. Whereas Bataille had read Nietzsche’s eternal return in opposition to Sartre’s futureoriented notion of authenticity, Bataille affirms the element of futurity in Nietzsche’s thought in order to combat the fascist interpretation. Bataille cites the fascist tendency to recuperate mythological images to stir up emotional forces that are in turn put in the service of a single leader. He views this attempt at a ‘‘recovery of the lost world’’ as subservience to the past, an instance of being tied to the past and its oppressive forms of class distinction

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and military power. This ‘‘intense feeling for the past is countered by the Nietzschean ‘‘myth of the future’’166 —not a deferral of being, as Bataille characterizes Sartre’s concept of project, but rather a present experience of the future as unknown: ‘‘The future, the marvelous unknown of the future, is the only object of the Nietzschean celebration,’’ Bataille claims.167 It is thus this drastic amor fati that Bataille embraces, against both the Sartrean understanding of the future and fascist nostalgia.

Nietzsche Redivivus According to Bataille, sacrificial rupture both destroys the individual and unites humans in a sense of continuity—a ‘‘brotherhood of death.’’ Ultimately, it is this affirmative will to death, the will to chance or risk, that separates the thought of Nietzsche from that of Bataille, but which, by way of textual sacrifice, unites the two in a communion that Bataille consecrates with the name ‘‘friendship.’’ This strange friendship is one not of hierarchy and consolidated force, but of a mutual sovereignty that binds its participants in the guilt of communication. Bataille, taking death, and therefore nothingness, as his ‘‘ultimate referent,’’ inverts Nietzsche, becomes the morbid Nietzsche, and makes Nietzsche a sacrificial victim. But it must be understood that Bataille is the morbid Nietzsche. His meditations on death and decadence, on rot and decay, do not, however, simply invert Nietzsche’s hierarchy in order to assert another hierarchy. Rather, the sousnietzsche evinces the parity of parody; he levels the ground while keeping opposing forces intact: Death announces life, even as life falls, inexorably, into death. ‘‘Death is the youth of the world,’’ and ‘‘life is the luxury’’168 of which death is the sovereign expression. What we are left with is a Bataillean inversion that not only misreads Nietzsche but resurrects him, affording him an interpretation that eschews the imperialistic philosopher and develops an account of Nietzsche as a sacrificial victim who opens the possibility of community. Inversion of this sort is not the only monstrous technique by which Bataille sacrifices those with whom he is most intimate. In the following chapter, we will examine Bataille’s relationship with Andre´ Breton, whose surrealist concepts Bataille appropriates only to press them to the point of explosive contradiction.

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Even though Bataille was most often explicitly at odds with Breton, their polemical relationship nonetheless recalls Bataille’s friendship with Nietzsche, for it speaks of a will to affirm even the most corruptive aspects of reality. In this chapter we have seen that together Nietzsche and Bataille offer the gift of a vision that relentlessly celebrates life even in death. In the words of Bataille: ‘‘[a]ll of being ready and open—for death, joy, or torment—unreservedly open and dying, painful and happy, is there already with its shadowed light, and this light is divine: and the cry that being— vainly?—tries to utter from a twisted mouth is an immense alleluia, lost in endless silence.’’169 Thus, with a sacrificial cry not different from a burst of laughter, the (impossible?) friendship of Nietzsche and Bataille, of life and death, lets forth a tremendous Yes to all of existence.

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The Labyrinth: Toward Bataille’s ‘‘Extremist Surrealism’’

The Birth of Art Upon a first reading, Bataille’s late book Lascaux, or The Birth of Art1 appears straightforward enough. Published in 1955 as part of the mainstream ‘‘Great Centuries of Painting’’ series by the Skira Color Studio, the text of this book is a sustained exposition of the conditions under which the now famous cave paintings of Lascaux came into being. Though some of the hypotheses that Bataille forwards may be somewhat extravagant for a book of its type,2 his characteristic obsessions with transgression, death, sovereignty, and eroticism nonetheless surface with relative gentleness, to less eruptive effect than one might expect in a work by the author of such violent and scatological texts as the ‘‘Pineal Eye.’’ And the uncharacteristic frequency with which he deploys adjectives like ‘‘beautiful,’’ ‘‘dazzling,’’ ‘‘miraculous,’’ and merveilleux (marvelous)3 to describe the subterranean subject of his study is more reminiscent of a photophilic 72

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Andre´ Breton, or better suited to an exalted Nietzsche, than to the ‘‘philosophe-excre´ment,’’4 Bataille. The tone of the book therefore seems all wrong; its apparent straightforwardness, coupled with its aureate style, is ill-suited to Bataille, the writer of death, blindness, and the night. Indeed, how could the former editor of Documents, who had excoriated certain surrealists for their tendency to engage in a sublimating ‘‘game of transpositions,’’ be given to describe ‘‘art’s purpose’’—in a patently Bretonian formulation—as the creation of ‘‘a sensible reality whereby the ordinary world is modified in response to the desire for the extraordinary, the marvelous’’?5 This stance seems to contradict Bataille’s otherwise rigorous refusal to transform base reality into something beautiful; it opposes his proclaimed imperative for art with ‘‘no new acceptances.’’6 The contradiction is not merely apparent—but neither does it represent a renunciation of Bataille’s previous writings. Rather, the contradiction here is strategic and, perhaps paradoxically, consonant with Bataille’s writings more generally. But it is also at once an undercutting of the reader’s expectations and, less obviously, a rupture with the two thinkers whose rhetoric Bataille’s most readily calls to mind: Friedrich Nietzsche and Andre´ Breton. The densely allusive preface7 to Lascaux provides a clue how to see these aspects of the contradiction. In the few paragraphs that introduce Bataille’s text, the editor of the ‘‘Great Centuries’’ series, Albert Skira, describes the difficult conditions in which the book was produced. He recounts the disorienting confusion of day and night, light and darkness, the visible and the invisible,8 the terrestrial surface and the subterranean depths, in which the research at Lascaux was accomplished. He claims that ‘‘nights were spent working underground in the intense light cast by projectors trained upon this magical world whose details and color nuances, invisible under the subdued lighting installed for visitors, sprang out vividly in all their pristine beauty.’’9 Further enhancing the sense of a coincidentia oppositorum, Skira goes on to say that the team of spelunking researchers would emerge from the cave at daybreak, only to go to sleep in a ‘‘hospitable inn’’ called the Soleil d’Or. The irony of this situation, which could not better dramatize the strange interplay of blindness and insight purveyed by the text had it been orchestrated by Bataille himself, would not have been lost on Bataille, who, like Breton, was particularly attuned to the ‘‘marvelous’’ effects of coincidence.10

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And, to be sure, Bataille must have reveled in the flagrantly anti-Platonic conditions of his research, which dwells in the cave and culminates in a scholarly hymn to the mimetic faculties of prehistoric men who did not emerge from a cavern to be enlightened, but descended into its bowels to inscribe the walls with visions of animality, monstrosity, and death. But the surest clue to the obliquely contradictory character of Bataille’s book comes when Skira offers his apologetic explanation for the photographs that accompany the text—photos that are necessarily inadequate to the anamorphic splendor of the paintings they attempt to reproduce: The truth is that the Lascaux paintings mysteriously shift and change. They are not painted on a uniformly flat surface and cannot always be viewed from a normal angle, from squarely in front a few yards away, like ordinary pictures. These cave artists took every possible advantage both of the uneven surface of the rock wall and the perspective in each of the various rooms. At every step things change, almost beyond recognition. A bull looks squat and hunch-necked; shift your position and the same animal acquires an elongated body and the head of a giraffe. What is the ideal point of vantage? Each visitor will have the one he prefers; the men of Lascaux must have had theirs, and this we strove to make our own. The pictures at Lascaux literally defy the camera; often, where the greatest depth of field is wanted, the photographer, as he backs away, is brought up short by the other side of the narrow corridor.11

Though the editor hypothesizes an ‘‘ideal point of vantage’’ from which to see the paintings, what he attests to is that in the presence of this art one invariably bumps up against labyrinth walls that mitigate the ‘‘normal angle’’ for viewing, or one encounters rocky obstructions that occlude vision. Though one may speculate about an ideal viewpoint, any real point of view will inevitably render the figure on the wall deformed. The labyrinthine structure of Lascaux thus guarantees the anamorphic condition of its paintings, and thereby precludes the recognition of any ideal, perfect form. As with the memento mori that hovers like an ectoplasmic smear in the foreground of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, and which only snaps into focus from an oblique angle, the cave paintings, in some sense more anamorphic, have only oblique angles from which to be seen; there is no ‘‘normal angle’’ from which the painting ever attains perfect form.12 The cratered cavern walls and twining passages thus assure an ‘‘avoidance of form’’13 that must have seduced Bataille’s eye.

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Bataille’s text, like the paintings he celebrates in such scintillant terms, is itself anamorphic—that is, it demands to be viewed obliquely, and from a variety of perspectives. Even though a first reading may allow the text to appear at once surprisingly straightforward and bewilderingly surreal in its intonation, it is this very undercutting of expectations that effects a readerly peripeteia—a reversal, not only from the feverish, violent, and drippingly lubricious character of his early writings to the somewhat more subdued tones proper to scholarly work,14 but also, and more importantly, from the decidedly base and aggressively excremental mode to a lambent rhetoric of the marvelous, miraculous, and beautiful that might just as easily have come from the pen of Andre´ Breton. Peripeteia is an apt concept for analyzing this undercutting of expectations in Lascaux,15 an undercutting that shows a reversal in the form of multiple contradictions. For example, in the previous chapter we saw that Bataille employed Nietzschean concepts and terminology in an inverted manner, appearing thereby to reiterate Nietzsche, but often proposing just the opposite of what Nietzsche had expounded. Similarly, in Lascaux, Bataille offers a rebuttal to the Dionysian philosopher. As an antithesis to the grecophilic account of the pinnacle of human artistic achievement forwarded in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Bataille offers an account of the birth of art16 from the spirit of sacrifice.17 Bataille’s study of the beasts on the grotto walls represents nothing less than a fall from the tragic heights that Nietzsche envisioned in the form of Attic theater;18 it is a ruination of Nietzsche’s ideal. The present and following chapter analyze another peripety at work in Bataille’s writings. They focus on Bataille’s unexpected embrace of Bretonian language, which, I will argue, Bataille uses to critique Breton and develop a sinister brand of surrealism. In doing so, he relies on an unexpected source of inspiration: Simone Weil.19 The present chapter addresses opposing notions of reality in Breton and Bataille, arguing that for Bataille reality is ineluctably contradictory and base, whereas for Breton it is baseness itself that must be transfigured in the productions of surrealism. Particular attention will be paid to the concept of the marvelous—central to the surrealist lexicon—as used by Breton and Bataille. In this regard Bataille’s language in Lascaux appears to mark a reversal from his hitherto unflinching rejection of any alchemical rhetoric that would signal a tendency toward transfiguring reality rather than accepting

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reality in its frequently gruesome facticity. But if Bataille contradicts his own precedent, it is only to better underscore his differences from Breton and, in doing so, to delineate a vision that, by way of a peripetic operation, counters the poetics of sublimation20 espoused by surrealism’s father. The contradictions that Bataille introduces in the course of this book and elsewhere, though sometimes implicit, are a component of his notion of a counter-surrealism—or what he at one point calls ‘‘extremist surrealism.’’21 Indeed, Bataille appropriates Bretonian terms and formulations only to push them past their limits in an operation culminating in ever more profound contradictions. Bataille thus precisely sums up his position when he claims to be surrealism’s ‘‘old enemy from within.’’22 He is, I will demonstrate, both working from within surrealism and against it, taking up its terms only to exceed them, pressing them to the point of explosive reversal or contradictory tension, shot through with lacerating desire—the keynote of his extremist surrealism. An examination of the symbol of the labyrinth in the work of Bataille and Breton will provide further grounds for demarcating the important differences between the two thinkers, while also setting the stage for my discussion of Bataille’s vision of Simone Weil. Freud’s concept of the uncanny here forms the basis of an account of Bataille’s portrait of Simone Weil in his novel Blue of Noon, where she appears as the character Lazare. Elaborating this portrait of Weil-Lazarus provides the groundwork for the argument of chapter 4, where I claim that Bataille employs a reading of Weil as an uncanny, demoniacal figure to counter Breton with an extremist surrealism that culminates in an experience of ‘‘hyperchristianity.’’23

Stories of the Eye Andre´ Breton opens his 1928 essay ‘‘Surrealism and Painting’’ with this famous proposition: ‘‘The eye exists in its savage state.’’24 The eye, in other words, is the organ of immediate and unadulterated perception, and is in this sense the very antithesis of discursive, reason-driven thought; it is free of the strictures of ratiocination,25 the shackles out of which surrealism is forever attempting to shake the human mind. The eye in its savage state grants access to the raw realm of the visible, rather than some mere intellectual refinement; the ‘‘clarity’’ and ‘‘strictness’’26 of images available to the

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savage eye are testaments to their reality. What Breton calls, in this context, our ‘‘integral primitivism’’ is thus a bridge to re´alite´ meˆme (reality itself ).27 If this concept of vision appears curiously akin to the Bataillean notion of base reality, or concrete materialism,28 it is so only at first glance—for no sooner has Breton begun to extol the merits of a perceptual apparatus that apprehends an external and autonomous reality than he effects a conceptual slippage that transfigures everything. By the third paragraph of his essay he is citing vision as a faculty that ‘‘exercise[s] control’’ over what is ‘‘vulgarly’’—that is, merely—‘‘understood by the real.’’29 Breton’s eye is not so much the passive recipient of pure visual data as the active organ of a will to transformation. From this point in the essay, moreover, reality is no longer defined in the positive terms of strictness and such, but is characterized negatively, as the symptom of an aesthetic and experiential impoverishment. Reality becomes the ontologically imputed half brother of what is truly real: surreality. Whatever one might wish to make of Breton’s proclaimed predisposition toward a ‘‘philosophy of immanence’’ in which surreality ‘‘would be embodied in reality itself and would be neither superior nor exterior to it,’’30 what he theorizes here and throughout much of his corpus makes clear that surreality is alternately both superior and exterior to concrete reality. In relation to the art of which he speaks in this essay, Breton goes so far as to say that Il n’y a pas de re´alite´ dans la peinture, ‘‘There is no reality in [surrealist] painting.’’31 This is because painting is the synthesis of dream and reality, a synthesis in which reality is rendered inferior, devalorized to the point of extinction.32 On the other hand, this aesthetic region in which ‘‘the mind rejects all external evidence’’ is the domain of surreality, a ‘‘domain of pure form’’ where ‘‘the most hostile elements meet and confront each other without catastrophic results.’’33 The formerly antagonistic elements of dream and reality surrender in the peaceful synthetic de´tente of surrealist painting. This domain of pure form is the Aufhebung34 of Bretonian surrealism, and represents a synthesis exterior to its component parts. What we observe therefore is a Bretonian version of Hegelian dialectic35 in which the hallmark moments of cancellation and lifting-up are analyzed into discrete operations, both of which function to suppress or deny reality. Breton’s is thus a vision of reality thoroughly sublated—made inferior by way of cancellation, and made exterior by way of the suppression attendant upon the lifting-up of the synthetic movement—a movement integral to

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surrealism, which, according to Breton, is a state of mind and mode of perception wholly heterogeneous (exterior) to reality. The crucial point here is that this reality is not preserved as a contradiction internal to surrealism, but is repressed precisely as contradiction. As we will see, reality is the stumbling block to synthesis; it is that which contradicts the dream of a wholly integrated, seamlessly constituted surreality. Reality is that accursed remainder that cannot be appropriated by the surrealist synthesis because it is contradiction itself—the contradiction of life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the pure and the impure. Seen from this perspective, it is no small point of admission when Breton, in the eulogistic appraisal of Picasso embedded in ‘‘Surrealism and Painting,’’ claims that Picasso perfectly embodies ‘‘the spirit, no longer of contradiction, but of evasion.’’36 This evasion is executed precisely by suppressing base reality in a ‘‘perfect resolution,’’ an ‘‘ideal reduction to a point’’ in which the world is transfigured by a ‘‘lightning flash’’ that bathes it in a purifying luminosity.37 Lest it be thought that my argument here is tendentious, consider the following anecdote, related by Breton upon a visit to Picasso’s studio.38 Here we find that the evasion that Breton attributes to the spirit of Picasso is really a manifestation of Breton’s own willfully transfiguring vision. Breton, who has spent the afternoon admiring the works of the master, is in the throes of admiration, basking in the ‘‘new light’’ that ‘‘suddenly radiated’’ from Picasso’s works.39 But toward the end of his visit, Breton comes upon a troubling object: a ‘‘small unfinished painting . . . the center of which contained simply a large impasted lump.’’ This lump, Picasso explains, represents a ‘‘piece of excrement.’’ To Breton’s presumed shock,40 Picasso goes on to explain that he regrets having to use paint ‘‘for want of a suitably durable genuine dried excrement.’’ But Breton’s surrealist pleasure principle outstrips the reality principle, as he ‘‘exorcises’’ any ‘‘repugnance that might have been aroused by this solitary lump around which the painter had not yet started to weave his magic.’’ Invoking the flies41 that Picasso explains he will attach to the excrement, Breton enters a reverie in which base reality is transfigured, rendered marvelous: I even caught myself visualizing the shiny, brand-new flies which Picasso would conjure up. Everything suddenly seemed bright and gay. Not only did my eye have no recollection of having dwelt upon anything disagreeable, but I was elsewhere, in some place where the weather was fine, life was pleasant and I was surrounded by wild flowers and morning dew: I plunged gladly into the woods.42

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As this anodyne account make clear, Breton’s eye, countenancing no disagreeable perceptions and brooking no unpleasurable memory, is far from the savage eye his initial postulation so boldly proclaimed. In fact, his eye reflects the entire surrealist program as he understands it, a program he has summed up earlier in his recollections of the day spent with Picasso: describing the inner workings of the Spanish artist, he claims that ‘‘a mind so constantly and exclusively inspired is capable of turning everything into poetry, of ennobling everything.’’43 A sufficiently inspired mind—the surrealist mind—is at all times capable of transporting itself, of ‘‘[leaving] the earth,’’ to hearken back to the first Manifesto.44 It is a mind that aspires to the perfect vantage point by transfiguring that which is base into something noble, like a shiny, brand-new fly.45 Given the opposition of the savage eye (whose focus is on base reality) and this transfiguring eye (which refuses to tolerate that same reality) how are we to understand Breton’s will to the marvelous and the contradiction manifested in reality? Extending Hal Foster’s observation that ‘‘Breton sees the marvelous in terms of resolution rather than contradiction,’’46 I will argue in the following chapter that this resolution is above all a product of a specific conception of desire. More specifically, I will show that, for Breton, the true mark of desire is its fulfillment, and that this fulfillment presupposes a cancellation or suppression of base reality. Bataille, observing and countering the suppressions assumed by this moderate surrealist position, develops an extremist surrealism that incorporates (and alters) Simone Weil’s conception of desire and contradiction, and in doing so elaborates a mode of thought and bodily engagement that culminates in a rending experience of ungratified desire. This inner experience is the experience of a ‘‘hyperchristianity,’’ a base mysticism predicated on monstrous, contradictory desire that resolutely fails to achieve satisfaction. The following section of this chapter will try to make clear certain aspects of the concept of the marvelous necessary for understanding the Bataillean notion of hyperchristianity, as embodied in Bataille’s imagining of Simone Weil.

The Monster in the Night of the Labyrinth47 More than two decades before Bataille makes his study of Lascaux, Breton has figured himself as a champion of cave painting. In ‘‘Surrealism and Painting,’’ which at times reads like a veritable surrealist hagiology, Breton

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includes a single, though approving, remark on surrealism’s prehistorical ancestry, alluding to the ‘‘marvellous buffaloes and reindeers on the walls of caves.’’48 However glancing the reference, the importance of this art to Breton is underscored by the fact that a reproduction of a cave painting from Altamira, Spain, is included among the illustrations accompanying the essay. But it is not until 1952 that Breton descends into the Pech-Merle Cave at Cabrerets,49 where he wastes no time in stirring up a controversy. Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti relates Breton’s testimony to the police: ‘‘Hardly had [Breton] and some thirty other visitors entered the cave when, seeing a painted line on the stone wall, he reached over to rub it ‘with the intent of judging the thickness of the chalk layer covering it.’ ’’ The grotto’s overseer, with the aim of protecting the painting from harm, ‘‘swatted’’ Breton’s hand. Protesting this impingement upon his desire, and incredulous about the painting’s purported authenticity, Breton ‘‘reached over and rubbed the painting with his thumb, causing a significant smudge.’’ The moist evidence of this besmirched digit thus ‘‘utterly astonishes’’ the perpetrator, who, noting that ‘‘the line had supposedly been drawn some 30,000 years ago,’’50 cried fraud. Charges were filed, a court case ensued, and Breton, despite marshalling the support of a league of highly recognizable intellectuals, was found guilty of defacing the historical grotto. This incident does not escape the scrutiny of Bataille, who relates the tale in slightly different terms in an appendix to Lascaux. Here Bataille sums up the offense simply by stating that Breton, ‘‘wishing to ascertain the state of one painting, ran a finger across it.’’ Though Bataille goes on to summarize the studies that prove the authenticity of this painting (the cave’s ‘‘natural dampness’’ accounts for the fact that ‘‘the paintings never dried’’), I think the encrypted agenda of his narrative lies less in a concern for prehistorical accuracy than polemical opportunity.51 It is significant that in Bataille’s account of the episode at Pech-Merle Cave, Breton runs a finger across the painting, consequently smudging himself with the parietal pigments. It is this same sweep of the finger that, by way of a kind of gestural metonymy, links Breton to a conception of the birth of art that Bataille finds suspicious.52 In his review of G. H. Luquet’s 1930 book L’Art primitif, Bataille has already taken up and problematized the author’s distinction between what he calls the ‘‘intellectual realism’’ of primitive art and the ‘‘visual realism’’ that characterizes Western art as we

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have come to know it. Luquet suggests, with a belittling analogy, that the art of ‘‘primitives’’ evolves just as it does in the modern child: both respond to the pleasure of running a dirty finger across an unmarked wall or blank paper. Initially lacking any mimetic intent, the child and primitive alike evolve resemblances only gradually, as a consequence of observing similarities between the happenstance lines of random scrawls and conceptions of objects. Intentional figuration, determined by mimetic aims, thus only comes by way of slow adjustment to ‘‘the conditions of representation.’’53 It is the adherence to an external model that characterizes visual realism, a kind of perfecting supplement to the pleasurable destructions of children and ‘‘primitives.’’ For Luquet phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny—though with ‘‘primitives’’ oddly exhibiting a kind of arrested development. Bataille takes issue with this condescending account. Aside from pointing out the chronological flaw in Luquet’s progressivist argument (the naturalism exhibited in the caves of Lascaux comes before the less refined art of subsequent periods), Bataille zeros in on what he sees as a much more telling failure in Luquet’s presentation. He highlights the strange fact that representations of humans and animals display strikingly disparate degrees of fidelity to their models. The animals, while anamorphic from any particular point of view, are nonetheless rendered in ‘‘perfect detail,’’ whereas the paintings depicting ‘‘the Aurignacians themselves are almost all informe and much less human than those that represent the animals.’’ They are, indeed, ‘‘ignoble caricatures of the human form.’’54 The point of this observation, reiterated in Lascaux,55 is that art proceeds not from an obedience to the pleasure principle, but through a desire for self-destruction evinced in the fact that the distortions have been ‘‘reserved for the human figure.’’ The deviations, as Bataille imagines them, are willful repudiations of the ‘‘positive virtuosity’’ of these ancient draftsmen. The representation of the human figure is therefore always a representation of something automutilated—‘‘semi-human’’ and ‘‘semi-animal,’’ something ‘‘awkward to the point of extreme,’’ ‘‘ill-formed, or formless,’’ ‘‘grotesque.’’56 These are men rendered as hybrids, as crude, malformed figures—or, as he calls such distortions elsewhere, monsters. It is this conception of art—art as an attack on the human form, art as destructive, corrosive, self-mutilating—that Andre´ Breton cannot tolerate,57 and it is his telling gesture of inspection in the grotto that Bataille exploits

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to make this point. Through the gestural metonymy in which Breton unknowingly mimics the child or the primitive, Bataille effects a reversal: Breton is mockingly presented as the anti-primitive—or what, taking a cue from Rosalind Krauss, one might call a soft primitive. In opposition to Bataille’s hard primitivism,58 in which ethnographic data is used ‘‘to transgress the neat boundaries of the art world with its categories based on form,’’ soft primitivism is the aestheticized view of primitive art, a ‘‘primitivism gone formal and therefore gutless.’’59 Breton, with his aspirations to pure form, thereby becomes the caricature of the primitive; with the primitive’s (or child’s) gesture he erases, if only partially, the distorted figure on the wall. In a movement that paradoxically looks very much like an attempt to clean up the graffiti, Breton manages to soil himself, or at least to dirty his finger. Bataille thus mocks Breton, and to powerful effect—for this mockery perfectly illustrates the difference between Breton’s conception of the marvelous, which he gladly applies to the beautifully rendered animals of the caves, and Bataille’s mocking use of the same term, which extends even to the grotesque figures that haunt the grottos and incite Breton’s malaise.60 So with a single gesture Bataille contradicts Breton’s will to ennobling transfiguration with his own will to deforming transfiguration—a will to the monstrous. Far from the formalizing, mannered appropriation of primitive art exhibited by Breton and several of his cohort—a mode of appropriation that resolves the differences between the grotesquery of primitive art and the formal requirements of Western art—Bataille points to the power of primitive art to alter its audience, to present a base reality that can be ignored only at the price of failing to see the destruction and death of which it is the product.61 Art, Bataille says, ‘‘proceeds . . . by successive destructions,’’62 a contention that strictly opposes Bretonian synthesis. It is true that for both of these thinkers the marvelous connotes a world transformed. But whereas for Breton the transfiguration is a sublimating and ennobling movement that suppresses base reality, Bataille’s transfiguration strips away any formal purity to reveal an irresolvable double reality—irrevocably dual, ineradicably contradictory. What the monsters in the caves of Lascaux show, and what Breton, who has exclaimed that ‘‘the human spirit must inevitably remain identical to itself,’’63 cannot sanction, is that man is both himself and an other.64 At the moment man wishes to designate himself, Bataille claims, he has ‘‘instantly to put on the mask of another.’’65 Man is not himself until he has mutilated himself, revealed in

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himself the contradiction of life and death that simultaneously animates and annihilates him. In a way that uncannily resembles this masking movement, Bataille himself, like Montaigne, proceeds masked. That is, he is both himself and another; his ideas are rendered, we will see, as both themselves and their opposites, in a constant movement of contradiction.66 Bataille once claimed that his ‘‘concern in this world [was] . . . with the formulation of a paradoxical philosophy.’’67 The following chapter will show that Bataille’s paradoxicality extends even further than has thus far been recognized. In examining his ongoing movement of contradiction, I will examine three concepts central to surrealism—objective chance, dream, and automatism—which are crucial to Bataille’s internal disruption of surrealism, and also important for a more general understanding of his paradoxical thought. Moreover, Bataille’s particular mode of deployment of these concepts is related to an idiosyncratic reading of Simone Weil, elaborated in the following section. This Weil is at once monstrous and humane, lovely and abhorrent—she is, like the figures in the caverns of Lascaux, an embodiment of contradiction. And it is for this reason that Bataille envisions a Weil so closely associated with that place where life and death meet: the cave.

Legends of St. Lazare Bataille’s fascination with caves and labyrinths is well known. Aside from his researches at Lascaux and the numerous articles in which the symbol of the cave or labyrinth is central, Bataille also co-edited with Andre´ Breton (during a tense and short-lived de´tente that ended in another rupture) the surrealist magazine Minotaure, for which Bataille also provided the moniker.68 But Breton and Bataille, as might be expected, envisioned the labyrinth very differently. Breton’s claim that ‘‘you only have to know how to get along in the labyrinth’’ expresses a sensibility completely foreign to Bataille, for whom the labyrinth is above all un-navigable, a maze of contradictions—the place of an experience of lostness or ‘‘drunken space’’ for which no solution can ever be found.69 Moreover, while Breton professed an interest in certain aspects of Greek myth that would have informed his understanding of the labyrinth, Bataille’s ethnographic interests, his hard primitivism, and as his studies of world

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religions would have provided him with a broad and nuanced understanding of the labyrinth, from which his idiosyncratic vision of the winding, intestinal structure developed. For this reason, a brief turn to the history of religions will help develop Bataille’s notion of the labyrinth and, as I will show, his fantasy of Simone Weil. Bataille’s epistolary friend, the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, provides a clue to Bataille’s eternal fascination with the labyrinth. Though Bataille might have been hostile to Eliade’s emphasis on the transcendental capacities of the labyrinth,70 Eliade’s formulation of the ‘‘contradictory morphology’’ of the sacred, heterogeneous space of the labyrinth would likely have enticed Bataille.71 Several aspects of this morphology are particularly important for the understanding of the labyrinth in the present context. First, Eliade explains that in mythic and ritual discourse, the labyrinth is inseparable from the notion of a center. This center corresponds to one of Eliade’s most famous conceptions, that of the axis mundi, the cosmic tree or pole that ensures the vital intercourse between heaven and earth. The path to the axis mundi is generally ‘‘sown with obstacles,’’ guarded by monsters from those who would seek access to its sacred powers. Indeed, the very structure of the labyrinth functions like these monstrous impediments, defending the center from those not worthy of its power. Labyrinth rituals are therefore generally those of initiation. Access to the center of the structure is also ‘‘access to the sacred, to immortality, to absolute reality, by means of initiation.’’72 Reaching the center amounts to obtaining consecration or initiation; it represents a rupture with everyday, homogeneous time, and entrance into an existence of a radically different order. But Eliade goes on to claim that though the labyrinth and the rituals associated with it emphasize the difficulty, danger, and experience of unfamiliarity associated with reaching a sacred center, it is also no less the case that representations of the axis mundi are eminently portable; thus it is perfectly legitimate to bring a tree representing the Cosmic Tree into every man’s yurt. The journey to the ‘centre’ is fraught with obstacles, and yet every city, every temple, every house is at the centre of the universe. The supreme rite of initiation is to enter a labyrinth and return from it, and yet every life, even the least eventful, can be taken as the journey through the labyrinth.73

The ready, almost ‘‘mechanical,’’ replication74 of the axis mundi, and the pervasiveness, even inescapability, of the labyrinth, do not so much domes-

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ticate the sacred as make it part of a practice of everyday life.75 But more than this, I want to suggest that this peculiar mingling of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the mundane with the ‘‘wholly other,’’ endows sacred space, and in particular the labyrinth, with a sense of the uncanny.76 The uncanny, or Unheimlich, is, according to Freud’s famous formulation, ‘‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’’77 What is ‘‘long familiar,’’ or heimlich, through a process of repression, ‘‘develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.’’78 Like the word sacer, which contains the antithetical meanings ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ or ‘‘holy’’ and ‘‘damned,’’ the uncanny means both itself and its opposite; it is simultaneously itself and its other.79 The contradiction encapsulated by the concept of the uncanny thus partakes of the ambivalence of the sacred that Eliade revisits throughout his scholarly oeuvre. The sacred, says Eliade, both ‘‘attracts and repels, it is useful and dangerous, brings death as well as immortality.’’ This uncanniness of the sacred extends to the structure of the labyrinth, the ‘‘negative qualities (inaccessible, dangerous, guarded by monsters and so on)’’ that ‘‘can certainly be explained by the ‘terrible’ aspect of the sacred . . . and vice versa.’’ This ambivalence thus underwrites the ‘‘complex and contradictory morphology’’ of the labyrinth, the domain of death through which heroic initiates and those on mystical quests must pass.80 For Bataille, the uncanny aspect of the labyrinth is even more pronounced, and in some regards it directly contradicts Eliade’s understanding of the sacred, even while insisting on that concept’s profoundly ambivalent nature. For Eliade, sacred rites and sacred space lift the religious person out of the world of time and change and into a realm of eternity structured by timeless paradigms and populated by unchanging archetypes. For Bataille, on the contrary, the sacred releases excessive forces that open one to a dangerous temporal flow in a terrified and exhilarated experience of ‘‘horrorspreading time.’’81 Indeed, the ‘‘deleterious absurdity of time’’ is the very object of the sacred, if the sacred can be said to be, or have, an object at all. It is thus the sinister, or left-hand, aspect of the labyrinth that interests Bataille—the aspect of the labyrinth that presents danger, and emphasizes its close alliance with death. Bataille also insists that one must in some sense remain within the labyrinth. In a direct reversal of Eliade82 that will recall the discussion of Bataille’s understanding of the sacred in chapter 1, Bataille

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equates the notions of eternity and the escape from time with profane life, and aligns the powers of the sacred with that of the destructive nature of time. And in a way that brings to mind his critique of Nietzsche examined in chapter 2, Bataille inverts Eliade’s understanding of the sacred, insisting that the sacred is precisely that which destroys the profane illusion of immortality by acceding to a deadly contagion that opens the individual to an experience of death. This ‘‘toxic character’’83 of the sacred releases the individual from the pacification of eternity, returning him to an ecstatic turmoil. In this sense one who has entered the labyrinth can never quite leave it, because the sacredness of the experience lingers uncannily within him. The portability of the axis mundi as described by Eliade is seen by Bataille not as a process of structural replication, but the spreading of a deadly contagion. And, in a manner that will inform his understanding of Simone Weil, he extends the Freudian logic of the uncanny to include the experience of death itself. It is death—always already within us, like an uncanny double, or a ‘‘mortal germ’’84 at the heart of human existence—that profane life represses, and the experience of death in the labyrinth uncannily returns to the person in the experience of time’s destructive force. The ambivalence of this experience resides in the simultaneous horror and joy elicited by an acknowledgment of mortality. For Bataille, then, the point is not to escape the labyrinth, nor precisely to dwell within it,85 but rather to accede to its joys to the extent that one suffers its terrors. In other words, the trials that confront the initiate are not conceived by Bataille as occasions for a kind of Nietzschean overcoming, in some attempt to emerge from the labyrinth into an experience of eternity in which time is rendered impotent; rather, they are the very testament to a sacred reality, a concrete reality that is not to be sublated or transcended, but rather confronted, suffered, and experienced ecstatically. But perhaps the most unexpected reversal of the vein of thought exemplified by Eliade is found in Bataille’s refusal to conceive the labyrinth as containing a salvific center. The labyrinth, for Bataille, does not enclose at its heart an axis mundi that would confer life-giving powers to those who find it. According to Bataille’s vision, it is a centrifugal structure, a structure that can only ever lead away from a center; as an experience of time, the labyrinth fatally ‘‘dissolv[es] each center that has formed,’’ rendering the individual within it lost, aimless—devoid of goals, projects, and all that would

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seek to overcome or transcend time.86 If there is a center at all in Bataille’s conception of the labyrinth, it can only be understood according to the uncanny logic described above—as a return or beholding of the mortal germ inhabiting the center of each individual. This is to say that in Bataille’s labyrinth one does not seek a center, but wanders aimlessly, in a kind of itinerant waiting.87 The metaphor of the mortal germ is operative, for if it signifies the deadly contagion of the sacred, it is no less an image of fecundity, and even of birth. The ‘‘germ’’ (from gignere, to beget) is, in other words, also a seed. And the seed, requiring burial before it is able to grow, is frequently associated with caves and labyrinths. As one commentator points out in a discussion of labyrinths, ‘‘[b]urying the dead and sowing seeds consecrates the ground. This creates a privileged place, a place of sacred mystery, of a conjunctio oppositorum, where life and death, light and darkness, male and female principles transform and melt into each other.’’88 The seed, entombed within the earth, undergoes a transformation, like that of the initiate. Buried for a time, the seed emerges from the ground under a new aspect, just as the rite of initiation within the labyrinth draws the hero or novitiate from the subterranean necropolis back into the world of the living. But while Bataille might have appreciated the conjunctio oppositorum that the seed connotes, he would have resisted the notion that the seed’s rebirth is simply a matter of rejuvenation. Rather, Bataille’s version of rebirth is resolutely sinister in its orientation. Without denying the fecundity and swarming life that emerges from death,89 Bataille’s vision is one in which death haunts even the most superb vitality: The act of begetting, sex itself, Bataille emphasizes, reeks of death.90 Indeed, it will be recalled that creation proceeds, according to Bataille, by means of successive destructions, a process of little deaths.91 Life thus understood bears the stigma of death within it; the burgeoning seed is always the mortal germ that promises not just a return to death, but the uncanny and unshakable presence of death, even in life.92 In other words, the resurrection of the dead, that initiatic movement so closely tied to the labyrinth, is just that—not precisely a resurrection to life, but a paradoxical resurrection of death, of the dead: the birth of death. This uncanny sense of resurrection characterizes Bataille’s novel Blue of Noon. It is commonly acknowledged that the character of Lazare in this novel is based on Simone Weil—an uncontroversial agreement, given the manifold resemblances of this character to Weil, and given the fact that

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Lazare’s relationship with the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Troppmann, clearly resonates with the relationship between Weil and Bataille.93 But if the resemblance is irrefutable, it is all the more uncanny for being so. Indeed, the portrait of Weil in Blue of Noon is created according to the logic of the uncanny—that is, Bataille detects in Weil something at once familiar and long repressed, and his portrayal of Weil as the macabre Lazare brings to the fore aspects of Weil that can be seen only obliquely, as if from within the tunnels of a labyrinth. To begin, commentators such as Alexander Irwin have called attention to the significant biblical moniker with which Weil is signified in Blue of Noon: Lazare. The name Lazare is ‘‘a clue to her mysterious liminal state, on the boundary between life and death, spiritual purity and sepulchral corruption. Troppmann presents Lazare as weaving a spell tinged with blood and madness, provoking simultaneous effects of attraction and repulsion.’’94 I qualify this statement by pointing out that the liminal state attributed here to Lazare is not precisely the liminality of the in-between, but rather the liminality of contradiction—the simultaneity or even sudden reversal of life and death, a ‘‘union without unity’’95 of life and death. Lazare, one might say, is the living image of death, a kind of dead woman walking. Indeed, Bataille’s unforgettable characterization Weil-Lazare as a crow, or garbage-eating ‘‘bird of ill omen,’’96 enhances her association with death. As Irwin shows, Troppmann and Lazare, and by extension Bataille and Weil, share a ‘‘perverse complicity’’ founded on a shared love of death. He argues that Bataille believes himself to have uncovered a self-deception at work in Weil, a failure to recognize the necrophilic compulsion propelling her revolutionary politics, and that Lazare’s ‘‘identification with affliction’’ exposes a connection between Troppmann and Lazare based on their allegiance to ‘‘those forces that oppose, corrupt, and seek to destroy life.’’97 At once affirming and extending these insights, I want to push the Weil-Lazare connection even further, reinforcing the notion that Lazare is herself a walking conjunctio oppositorum, and showing that this quality makes WeilLazare such a powerful figure in Bataille’s development of an extremist surrealism. Among the many strange reversals in a life fraught with contradictions at once anguished and ecstatic is Bataille’s relationship with Christianity. Bataille received the sacrament of baptism as a teenager, in the summer of 1914, most likely at the cathedral Notre-Dame de Rheims.98 As a young

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man, Bataille entered a seminary with the aspiration of devoting his life to God as a priest or monk.99 But the patent piety motivating Bataille’s clerical or monastic ambitions is not, or not only, what it seems; Bataille’s piety is also its opposite, a kind of blasphemy against his father, for Bataille’s determination to lead a life of pious obedience is also, it would appear, an act of rebellion against his father’s resolute atheism. Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche100 and subsequent conversion to atheism signifies yet another revolt, this one against Christianity—a kind of reversal of the reversal, which does not return Bataille to his original state, but leaves him altered. Bataille, however, remains forever in the wake of his Christian zealousness; he continues to bear within himself the marks of an earlier and fervent piety. Michel Surya suggests that Bataille reads Nietzsche, Proust, and Dostoevskey, as well as a host of others, ‘‘in the same way as’’ he had ‘‘ ‘read’ God with piety and fervour.’’101 I believe that Bataille’s fervent readings of Christian texts suggest something about the way we should read Blue of Noon, and in particular the character of Lazare. During his Christian devotional stage, it seems that the young Bataille combined devout scholarship with personal piety. Bataille’s friend Andre´ Masson102 reports that in addition to his seminary studies, Bataille partook of ‘‘assiduous bedside reading’’ (during 1918–19) in the form of Remy de Gourmont’s Le Latin mystique, a collection of ‘‘pungent, wild, violent and often splendid texts dating from the fifth to the eighteenth centuries, attributable to some of the most eminent figures of the devout Middle Ages.’’103 Not only might we discern here the seed of a later obsession with religious violence and the spectacularly atrocious mystical practices of the Middle Ages (Bataille later trained as a medievalist); we should, as Surya asserts, also find in these texts the rudiments of a link that Bataille will continue to revisit and elaborate until his demise—the connection between the flesh and death: [The] aim [of these texts] is to encourage impious souls to renounce the flesh (‘rejection of the flesh is without doubt essentially Christian,’ Remy de Gourmount writes), less because the flesh is odious (if it were, not knowing it would suffice) than because it is terrifying. As such, it gives rise to a veritable demonology. The flesh as presented by saints and preachers is nothing but sickness, nothing but pain; and even if it might avoid these, it would remain (and this is enough to prove how completely and intrinsically hostile it is to God) condemned to rot.

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Dead flesh, mutilated by corruption, is both an affront to God as well as the symbol of a permanently insufficient atonement. Indeed, flesh is always ‘‘already rotten’’105—rotten both for the pain it promises and promotes in the suffering person, and rotten in the corruption that it exhibits through its inevitable decay. Bataille, reading these texts that elaborate this fleshly decay in patently voluptuous detail,106 is permanently marked by this Christian sensibility. As Surya puts it, ‘‘If Bataille only retained one thing from the long years of his belief . . . it would have been this: he never loved the flesh, at least never in the sense that he could imagine it without repugnance; in any case never in such a way that he could not see the kind of death to which it, and whoever was wedded to it, was consigned.’’107 But Bataille’s ‘‘long years of belief,’’ during which he ‘‘lived a saintly life, imposing on himself a discipline of work and meditation,’’108 taught him more than a fascinated horror of the flesh. His devout, if ultimately doomed, journey into Catholicism provided him with a familiarity with the saintly panoply as well as the accompanying intercessory tradition. In fact, given his germinating obsession with the flesh in its most morbid, decomposing aspect, it seems that Bataille may have found in the figure of Lazarus something of a personal patron saint of perishability. I want to show that Bataille appears to have been acquainted not only with the familiar biblical story of the resurrected friend of Jesus,109 but also with the subsequent tradition of the sainted Lazarus. An examination of the stories of Lazarus will reveal several significant connections between this legend and the figure of Weil-Lazare. To begin, there is the well-known story of the resurrection of Lazarus of Bethany. John 11 relates the tale: Having been alerted to the death of his friend Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha, Jesus travels to Judea, where the corpse has lain in a tomb for four days. Consoling Lazarus’s grieving sister, Jesus tells Martha that Lazarus ‘‘will rise again.’’ But it is not until Jesus himself has wept for his dead friend that the two sisters then lead him to the tomb in the hollow of a cave. Upon asking for the stone to be removed from the mouth of the cavernous grave, Jesus is warned by Martha that the

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corpse of Lazarus, entombed already for several days, will reek with odors of fleshly corruption. But Jesus proceeds to call out to Lazarus, and, as the gospel puts it, ‘‘the dead man came out,’’110 enshrouded in burial cloths. The biblical figure of Lazarus is, for Bataille, a perfect embodiment of death in life, of the uncanny resurrection of death within life. Not only has Lazarus been transfigured in the cave—his flesh has begun to rot, we might suppose, having been partially digested in the viscera terrae—but his postresurrection status remains ambivalent; it is not a newly living being, but rather a ‘‘dead man’’ that emerges from the cave, still garbed in the accoutrements of interment. What the reader of this passage witnesses, according to this interpretation, is the resurrection of a corpse—the morbid resurrection of the body as a cadaver.111 But Lazarus’s posthumous life has only just begun. The legend of Lazarus in the days and years following his resurrection is disputed, the outcome of a confusion of ‘‘a series of traditions combined at different epochs.’’112 But it is the macabre details of a legend, and not the historical accuracy of a tradition, that concerns us here. Several of these details are worth noting, for they enhance the reader’s understanding of Bataille’s portrait of Weil as Lazare. According to The Catholic Encyclopedia, Lazarus of Bethany, later St. Lazarus, was ‘‘put out to sea by the Jews hostile to Christianity.’’ Lazarus eventually landed in Provence, after which he preached the Gospel in southeast Gaul, specifically Marseilles. To avoid persecution under Nero, Lazarus absconded in a crypt. Later, during the persecution of Domitian, he was imprisoned and then beheaded, only to be interred in the very crypt in which he had previously evaded death. The prison in which he met his eventual demise ‘‘is believed to be identical with a cave beneath the prison Saint-Lazare.’’113 There is, in this legend, a host of details that underwrites my account of Bataille’s conception, or fantasy, of Simone Weil. Drawing out some of the implications of these details bolsters my contention that Bataille’s portrait of Weil is best understood in connection to the legend of St. Lazarus. We might draw further conclusions about Weil’s value to Bataille vis-a`-vis surrealism if we understand her association with the beheaded saint. To begin, there is St. Lazarus’s imposed excursion into Gaul, a region specifically associated with the notion of monstrosity for Bataille. In his 1929 essay ‘‘Le cheval acade´mique’’ (The Academic Horse), Bataille extols the Gaulish art of the fourth century b.c. and following, calling it the work of a ‘‘monstrous

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mentality’’ that undermines by way of transgressive deformations the authoritatively ‘‘correct’’ Greek (and eventually Roman) art it incorrectly imitates. He compares the academically formal representations of the horse in Greek art to the ‘‘positive extravagance’’ evidenced by the Gaulish ‘‘monster-horses’’ that undermine them.114 This is all to say that St. Lazarus’s preacherly endeavors in this area might be thought in the same monstrous, aggressively anti-authoritarian register as the deformed art of the ancient Gauls. This point is driven home by St. Lazarus’s eventual beheading under the persecutory authority of Domitian, the tyrannical Roman emperor who installed a reign of terror during his tenure from a.d. 81–96. Lazarus’s decapitation endowed the eventual saint with an aura of funereal prestige in the eyes of Bataille, for whom the loss of a head amounted to an escape from reason and the confines of authority, even if achieved only at the hands of that authority. What we begin to discern here is a version of Christianity that is not that of the masters, but rather a pre-institutional, anti-establishment Christianity, an early and subversive religion deriving its power not from ecclesiastical authority, but from personal experience. This is a conception of Christianity that shares affinities with Simone Weil’s religious convictions, including her resolute refusal to be inducted into any church. Weil was singularly and rigorously obedient to a certain conception of Christian morality,115 but was seen by some as a spiritual libertine, refusing the sacrament of baptism.116 The subversive nature of this zealous refusal, an outstanding show of passion that is at once impious and hyperpious, intrigues Bataille. Weil possesses a paradoxical kind of authoritarianism so excessive that it culminates in perversion;117 it is a zealous rigor so steadfast that it appears irrational, unconstrained—and, one might add, daimonic. A note of irony sounds here, resonating clearly with the legend of St. Lazarus. Lazarus was beheaded for subverting Roman authority and buried in a cave beneath a prison that would bear his name. Readers of Bataille will immediately recognize the architectural mythos that gives rise to the irony. The prison, by Bataille’s account, is the supreme emblem of authoritative stricture, while architecture itself is always to some degree a manifestation of imprisonment, functioning to ‘‘constrain the spirit within an official ideal.’’118 In the case at hand, Lazarus’s imprisonment, beheading, and entombment within a cave conjure a labyrinth of significant reversals, simulta-

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neously ironic and tragic. The imprisonment of the intransigent saint could hardly be commemorated more ironically than with a prison that bears his name even while embodying the authority of a Church he never knew. Adding to this irony is the fact that the ‘‘divine’’ Marquis de Sade119 was for a time interned at the prison Saint-Lazare, a detail that would have piqued Bataille’s sense of coincidence. Though it is true that this is, on the one hand, a coincidence of opposites (the zealous Lazarus heralds a gospel that the Marquis de Sade will only ever seek to blaspheme), on the other hand it appears that St. Lazarus would have more in common with Sade than first meets the eye: Both were imprisoned in the very same location, and both were deemed threatening figures—elements of corruption requiring suppression. Corruption of a different sort completes this series of significant details. The legend of St. Lazarus is filled with fleshly corruption; his story becomes the story of bodily remnants buried and resurrected, of corporeal remains lost, recovered, and revered. Though the purported authenticity of these relics is disputed, what is beyond question is that St. Lazarus, whom Christ once resurrected, keeps returning from the grave, either in the form of a divided and corrupted body, or in the stories (including Bataille’s novel Blue of Noon), also divided and corrupted, that have germinated around it. Indeed, I would hypothesize that, for Bataille, the regularity with which Lazarus, in one form or another, traffics between the living and the dead endows him with the character of an intercessor of sorts—not in the form of a mediator, precisely, but rather in the form of a daimonic figure who combines the attributes of the living and the dead, death within life. It is this ‘‘union without unity’’ of the animate and inanimate that defines Bataille’s fantasy of Weil, his fantasy of a Weil who embodies, without reconciling, the opposed forces of life and death in a sinister communion. The contradictory, corrupted nature of this Lazarus thus provides a key to Bataille’s version of Simone Weil. Lazarus, we have seen, is not so much an emblem of rejuvenation as he is a walking corpse, an impossible manifestation of the resurrection of the dead. In this regard, ‘‘the corpse is alive, as corpse.’’120 The rot of his resurrected flesh and the division of his post-mortem body enhance his spectral quality; they corporeally realize the fearful, phantasmic character of the sacred that Bataille associates with corpses and ghosts. The decomposition of form associated with this aspect of the sacred shatters the unity of the human individ-

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ual, rending his flesh, and rendering him monstrous and grotesque. The putrefactive mutilation undergone within the cave or tomb is therefore akin to the ‘‘hideousness of the representations of humanity within the caves’’ of Lascaux, where ‘‘one finds humans only as grotesques.’’121 Bataille uses the word ‘‘alteration’’ to describe this breakdown of form accompanying the decay of the flesh or disfiguration of the body. As Rosalind Krauss explains, the Latin root of ‘‘alteration,’’ alter, exhibits dual, contradictory meanings, denoting both ‘‘a change of state and a change . . . of time,’’ and therefore ‘‘contain[s] the divergent significations of devolution and evolution.’’ She goes on to point out that ‘‘Bataille illustrates this by saying that alteration describes the decomposition of cadavers as well as ‘the passage to a perfectly heterogeneous state corresponding to . . . the tout autre, that is, the sacred, realized for example by a ghost.’’ Thus alteration connotes a paradoxical movement both upward and downward, a simultaneous movement of gravity and grace.122 It is, to be sure, the gravity within Weil’s conception of grace that Bataille exploits most fervently, and it is by fantasizing her as the rotten, spectral (or hallucinatory)123 Lazare that he does so. Indeed, Bataille effects a fall from grace within Weil.124 Weil’s notion of grace and the ascending movement it describes have received much scholarly attention.125 The following chapter will focus on the descensional aspect of Weil, the gravitous decline evident within her writings, that allows Bataille to see in her a kind of ‘‘intimate friend,’’ a saintly intercessor in communion with death, modeled after that St. Lazarus who was so familiar with crypts and caves. As I will show, Bataille and Weil seek not an escape from the labyrinth, but rather an experience of crucifixion at its very center. Confronting the monster in the labyrinth, and never seeking to avoid it, is what allows Bataille to exceed Breton’s moderate surrealism with a virulent hyperchristianity—the mystical practice of those, like Weil and Bataille, who never dream of being Daedalus.

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The Cross: Simone Weil’s Hyperchristianity

God in the Labyrinth Simone Weil was a familiar of caves and labyrinths, at least in her writings. For example, Weil identifies with Antigone, the tragic figure who takes her own life within the hollow of a cave as a show of impassioned obedience to divine law.1 Weil’s theological writings are also markedly inflected by Platonic thought, and it is in particular the image of Plato’s famous cave that at once fascinates and frightens Weil in her notebooks, where she associates the cave with the dangers of wounding and blinding.2 Moreover, in the essay ‘‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God,’’ Weil offers this striking formulation: ‘‘The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth.’’ She describes a scenario that resonates with Bataille’s conception of the labyrinth: The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything else he loves and is accustomed to, he walks 95

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Ecce Monstrum on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God.3

The elements of blind wandering, vertigo, and loss of hope in the first half of this passage attest to an affinity with Bataille’s understanding of the labyrinth as the ‘‘drunken space’’ of death, the hopeless and fearful—but also ecstatic and joyful—maze of contradictory affects.4 The previous chapter focused on the different conceptions of the labyrinth for Andre´ Breton and Bataille, concluding that Bataille and Weil, in contrast to Breton, seek not to escape the labyrinth, but to be lost in its maze of contradictions. In this connection, I adumbrated a Bataillean fantasy of Weil based on the legend of St. Lazarus. This chapter will elaborate the Weil-Lazarus connection that emerges in Bataille’s novel Blue of Noon, and will claim that Weil plays the role of a daimonic but saintly intercessor for Bataille in formulating an extremist surrealism. This anti-Bretonian surrealism, we will see, is not only indebted to a certain reading of Weil, but coincides with Bataille’s notion of hyperchristianity as embodied by the mystically inclined Weil. Bataille’s decision to withhold publishing his novel Blue of Noon until 1957—more than twenty years after authoring it and more than a decade after Weil’s death—offers important clues to how to read not only the book but also Bataille’s concept of hyperchristianity. In the concluding sections of this chapter, I will take up three quintessentially surrealist terms—chance, dream, and automatism—and demonstrate how Bataille, through his reading of Weil, presses these terms beyond Breton’s conception of them to arrive at an extremist surrealism shot through with a sinister mysticism. In the above passage Weil describes the mystical wanderer in the labyrinth as confronting God in the form of an incomparable danger—that is, as a monster. Indeed, God is experienced as the ravenous Minotaur that inhabits the labyrinth, waiting to devour those who have lost their way. However, like Bataille, who will seek the monster not to slay it, but rather to identify with it—to become it—Weil’s encounter with God in the dark night of the labyrinth evinces a will to be devoured and thereby incorpo-

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rated into (identified with) the devouring God.5 Denis Hollier comments on this impulse in Bataille in words that could just as well apply to Weil: Bataille ‘‘has no thought of return, he is not worried about getting out, he anxiously desires the Minotaur. When this desired contact occurs he will have to be metamorphosed into his absence . . . where the human being absents himself when he no longer respects human forms or the human form.’’6 Hollier emphasizes that in the drama of the ‘‘minotauromachy’’ within the labyrinth, Bataille’s triumph comes in identifying with the slain monster— thus an anti-triumph, and a kind of automutilation. Similarly, it is with anxious awaiting for God that one is, according to Weil, eventually devoured by God. For Weil, the labyrinth is the space of waiting in a state of open desire, a state that she elsewhere calls attention. ‘‘Attention,’’ in Weil’s lexicon, denotes a state of pure, unencumbered concentration, a kind of focused waiting without expectation and without distraction. Affliction, on the other hand, is the extreme, hyperbolic suffering that shatters attention, making the human being corporeally agonized, intellectually bereft matter, violently shorn of the possibility of attentive thought. But in the passage cited above, the space of attention and the experience of affliction meet in a confrontation with God that might be described as impossible. The unencumbered openness of attention here intersects with affliction: Wandering ‘‘without knowing anything or hoping anything’’ is an affliction exceeded in intensity only by the dangerous, indeed mortal, encounter with the God-monster. This affliction–attention complex is unique to this momentous encounter with the grotesquely conceived deity. The metaphors employed by Weil and Bataille are neither innocent nor haphazard, and we should take the coincidence of images here seriously.7 In the encounter with God, according to Weil, the wanderer-victim is fatally ‘‘eaten and digested.’’ His eventual rebirth into the world outside the labyrinth is not therefore an emergence into a renewed life so much as an evacuation that can be conceived, through a Bataillean reading, as defecation—an anal birth. Freud’s ‘‘Revision of the Theory of Dreams’’ supports this interpretation; here Freud concludes that ‘‘the legend of the Labyrinth can be recognized as a representation of anal birth: the twisting paths are the bowels and Ariadne’s thread is the umbilical cord.’’8 Similarly, Weil’s fervently excessive self-imposed degradation, extending from her humiliating selfdescriptions to her studiously filthy living quarters,9 suggests that she un-

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derstood herself, if not precisely as excremental, then at least in a register of abjection.10 And Bataille, of course, had given birth to his own version of the intestinal labyrinth’s scatological and mystical connotations, describing the entrails of the ace´phale as ‘‘the labyrinth [de´dale] in which [the headless being] has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster.’’11 That both Bataille and Weil encounter their gods as monsters in the labyrinth is not merely a matter of insignificant coincidence, and affords important comparative insights. First, both Bataille and Weil, as Irwin convincingly argues, are concerned with constituting their lives dramatically, as ‘‘saints of the impossible.’’ In particular, Irwin suggests that Bataille and Weil attempt to embody the dangerous, impure, monstrous forces of the left-hand sacred for the purpose of political revolution or revolt.12 One might also press the observation in a somewhat different direction, suggesting that, through this Bataillean reading, these two strange thinkers seek to be conceived of in an excremental register—as the dejecta of a monstrous, devouring God. This sinister orientation has implications not only at the political, but also at the personal, mystical level13—for to employ the concept of a devouring monster-god in the labyrinth is to imply a kind of inverted baptism: For both Weil and Bataille the encounter with the divine results not in a comforting reification of the individual self, but in a terrifying, ecstatic dissolution—not so much a rebirth as a redeath. This dissolution is achieved impurely, through a corruptive, corrosive, and contagious operation fraught with contradiction. Indeed, contradiction itself dissolves the mystical wanderer; for Bataille and, in this Bataillean reading, for Weil, the process of digestion by the monster is the dramatic figuration that registers and elicits the decomposing effects of contradiction—the contradiction of life and death, and the forces of integration and disintegration, incorporation and excretion. Excretion, according to Bataille, is one of ‘‘two polarized human impulses,’’ the other being appropriation. There are two kinds of appropriation: simple and sacrificial. The ‘‘elementary form of appropriation is oral consumption, considered as communion (participation, identification, incorporation, or assimilation).’’14 While Bataille places appropriation on the side of homogenization, he also insists that the diametrical operation of excretion is inseparable from consumption. The pertinent point here is that

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the image of God the monster, or the divine as a consumptive force, is to be understood as specifically sinister in orientation and excretory in function. For Bataille—and for Weil, as Bataille imagined her—the encounter with God is monstrous because God devours, and in devouring renders the victim both cadaverous and fecal. But one must insist on the contradictory nature of this excremental state. It is the ‘‘half-decomposed cadaver’’ that, according to Bataille, is identified with ‘‘types of excrement,’’ and which ‘‘can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous,’’ for it is only as half-decomposed that the cadaver maintains its heterogeneity; a complete disintegration—a reduction to dust—would exemplify merely profane homogeneity.15 Excretion and decay, however, do not represent a middle position between life and death; rather, the contradiction between life and death is maintained in a state of perduring, incessant corruption: the half-decayed corpse. ‘‘Excretion is not simply a middle term between two appropriations,’’ claims Bataille, ‘‘just as decay is not simply a middle term between the grain and the ear of wheat.’’16 If Bataille goes on to allege that decay needs to be understood as an ‘‘end in itself,’’ it is no less true that decomposition is conceived here as a process rather than a product—not a state but an operation. This operation proceeds as a back-and-forth movement (from low to high, corruption to purity, gravity to grace, death to life—and back again), and thus must be understood not as a dialectical synthesis, but as the irritating, ambivalent movement between two ‘‘radically opposed’’ orders, two brutally contradictory conceptions—in other words, as a ‘‘general and essential contradiction.’’17 This operation is fraught with an enrapturing and rupturing fury, a point that Krauss and Bois rightfully emphasize in their insistence that the dualist mode of thought espoused by Bataille ‘‘refuses to resolve contradictions’’ and issues, therefore, not in conciliatory placidity, but in rage.18 Rage, as we saw in the first chapter, characterizes the mode of contradiction between the high and low, the celestial, right-hand sacred and the realm of the left-hand sacred that Bataille calls ‘‘demoniacal.’’19 Though Bataille’s emphasis is decidedly on the corruptive and decaying aspect of the sacred, he nonetheless acknowledges, indeed insists upon, the duality of the sacred. But one must recognize that in favoring the demoniacal side, he is valuing a movement of decline and decay as opposed to the idealistically inclined movement of ascension and integrality. On the one hand, the rage of the back and forth movement is that of the ethereally oriented mind that

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envisions life ‘‘as an elevation.’’ Rage is here a reaction to the baseness of refuse (a rage that ‘‘is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot,’’ Bataille writes), a rage against all that fails to partake of ‘‘light and ideal beauty.’’20 But rage also partakes of a demoniacal aspect, and this species of rage characterizes Bataille’s thought generally. For Bataille, demoniacal rage is an excessive passion for the low, the explosion of passion for the incessant and brutal movement ‘‘from the ideal to refuse,’’ from the celestial heavens to the cavernous underworld. Rage is thus excretory—an explosive and decomposing release of base passions, a demoniacal expenditure. I insist upon the excretory, demoniacal aspect of rage, for this concept sheds light on Bataille’s fantasy of Simone Weil. If we take seriously Bataille’s portrait of Weil as Lazare, we find that Weil’s rage is that of a person willing the ideal but passionately dedicated to the base, to death. Lazare is a coincidence of opposites: a ‘‘combination of spiritual purity and physical filth, meticulous lucidity and madness.’’ Moreover, her often-professed love of life will ‘‘(ambiguously) emerge from, nourish, and incorporate necrophilia.’’21 It is this ambivalence that lends Weil-Lazare her sinister quality—her zealous, left-hand rage. Such decomposing rage is therefore linked to the notion of the devouring god-monster, for it is in being devoured, transfigured through digestion, and excreted that one emerges from the entrails (or the labyrinth) as a ‘‘saint of the impossible,’’ a sinister, demoniacal saint both alive and dead, and in incessant, corruptive communication with death—like the walking corpse of St. Lazarus. But in what, precisely, does this encounter with God consist? For both Weil and Bataille, the encounter is constituted by a more or less open intercourse with death. In being killed and devoured by the monster, that figure of death, one identifies with the monster, and in being lost within the bowels of the monster, or excreted from them, one partakes of the contradiction of life and death. If the tension involved in the maintenance of this back-and-forth movement is understood as the passionate rage that communicates the high and the low, the verticality of ascent with the horizontality of the labyrinth, then it is no wonder that both Bataille and Weil, in mutually illuminating ways, find the cross at the heart of the labyrinth. Indeed, the encounter with the monster is, for both thinkers, the experience of the cross and crucifixion. Bataille makes this notion most explicit when he describes the Minotaur that is encountered in ‘‘night of the laby-

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rinth’’ in terms that evoke the rage of crucificatory passion: The Minotaur is a ‘‘MONSTER lightly assuming many crimes.’’22 This monster is, as Allan Stoekl asserts, ‘‘clearly identifiable as Christ in a moment of death.’’23 Indeed, this monstrous and crucified God is, in Bataille’s words, ‘‘only death: . . . a mythic delirium proposes him for worship as a cadaver covered with wounds.’’24 Christ is thus God in the form of a lacerated cadaver, taking on crimes (though not redeeming them)25—God as a monster whose wounds are self-inflicted. This automutilated Christ (God as Christ on the cross) is a sacrificial victim, indeed a self-sacrificial victim, who is universal because he is ‘‘waste,’’ a ‘‘waste that is ‘absolute’ and ‘eternal.’ ’’26 The crucifixion heralds the death of God in the same moment it declares the birth of the Christ in the form of waste, excrement, death.27 This excremental and lacerated monster, the cadaverous embodiment of death and corruption, is not far from the Christ conceived by Weil. Weil’s Christ is a ‘‘hyperchrist,’’ a Christ beyond (or prior) to the historical-institutional accretions that make of him the basis of dogma rather than the object of a personal experience in a ‘‘mythic delirium.’’ For Weil as for Bataille, Christ is adored not as the promise of eternal life, but as the emblem of death; as Weil claims, divinity must be sought in the labyrinth, and in the encounter with a ‘‘corpse . . . hanging’’ on ‘‘dead wood.’’ ‘‘We must look for the secret of our kinship with God in our mortality.’’28 This mortality is paradoxically experienced, lived out through the clash of contradiction. Weil goes so far as to say that ‘‘the mystery of the cross of Christ lies in a contradiction,’’ a ‘‘union of contradictories [that] involves a wrenching apart. It is impossible without extreme suffering.’’29 Again, like Bataille, Weil imagines the crucifixion of Christ as involving the contradiction of a god taking on crime—that is, of a perfect, infinite being torn asunder by a punishment that is at once willed and experienced as if from without. This transformation from purity to waste shows ‘‘Christ . . . being made a curse for us. It was not only the body of Christ, hanging on the wood, that was accursed, it was his whole soul also.’’30 For both Bataille and Weil, then, Christ is understood as the very embodiment of the ‘‘accursed share,’’ forever crying out lama sabachthani—a figure simultaneously sacred and dirty, pure and excremental. The cross, from which this accursed share hangs, is the intersection that marks the contradiction of life and death, the irritating, incessant, and impossible intercourse ‘‘of the world and that which is not the world.’’31 In a

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passage that Bataille would have favored, Weil writes that the ‘‘function of the mediation’’ provided by Christ ‘‘implies a tearing asunder,’’ for it describes the ‘‘downward direction’’ in which the God of eternity becomes Christ the cadaver, dead matter ruined by time and the depredations of gravity. The salvation of the cross thus lies not in the escape from death, but in the truth revealed by the monster itself: that death is inevitable and worthy of delirious praise, that ‘‘death is the most precious thing which has been given to man,’’ and that if we are to love life, according to Weil, it is necessary to ‘‘love death still more.’’32 The object of praise and adulation is death itself, whether in the form of the wounded but devouring monster that digests its victims, or in the cadaverous monster crucified by contradiction. The truth of hyperchristianity is that death is at the heart of life, is the mortal seed within life, and that the encounter with God is an experience of death within life, an impossible experience of ‘‘being dead,’’ as both Bataille and Weil describe it. The act of identification that takes place in being devoured by death is thus one of corruption, a decomposing identification that renders the mystical victim not the axis mundi so much as the cruxus mundi—the spectral, demoniacal saint torn asunder at the intersection of life and death.

The Spectral Friend As we saw in chapter 3, for Bataille, the saint who most poignantly exhibits this demoniacal aspect is St. Lazarus. Here I suggest that Bataille’s fantasy of Simone Weil in the form of St. Lazarus recalls the Catholic intercessory tradition, and that it is the notion of the invisible friend that particularly applies to Bataille’s enduring fascination with Weil—and in such a way that her influence will be decisive in Bataille’s revolt against Bretonian moderate surrealism. Historian Peter Brown has argued that the cult of saints that arises in antique Christendom functions to ‘‘[join] Heaven and Earth,’’ with dead human beings acting as the mediators between the transcendent and the terrestrial.33 The reverence for the ‘‘very special dead’’ (holy men and women, such as martyrs and confessors) has to do in part with the role of the dead in communicating with Heaven; in a way that recalls Eliade’s

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conception of the axis mundi, these sainted beings function as axes conjoining the celestial to the earthly, providing assurances about the afterlife. The notion of the ‘‘invisible’’ or ‘‘intimate friend’’ that gained currency by the mid-fifth century suggests that ‘‘new invisible companions came to crowd in around the men and women of late antiquity and the early middle ages.’’34 These special and spectral friends act as protectors for the person with whom they are associated, being ‘‘almost . . . upward extension[s] of the individual.’’35 Brown argues that the invisible friend functions much like a daimon, providing constant communication with the heavenly divine while consoling Christians ‘‘for the sadness of finding themselves born into the flesh.’’36 The spread of the cult of saints was concurrent with the spread of the practice of adopting Christian names to reflect ‘‘the need to link the identity of the individual to a saint. . . . A Christian name stood for a new identity associated with a new birth.’’37 There is an irony at play here, for the renaming of the human being, associated with rebirth and eternal life, derives its efficacy from association with those martyrs who, ‘‘heavy with the humility of death,’’ could bridge ‘‘the fault that ran through the universe, separating the stars from the earth.’’ The intimate love directed at the saints is thus a kind of necrophilia that assures the continuity of heaven and earth; revering the corrupted body of the saint in the form of relics and bodily fragments, the individual is thus delivered from the anxiety concerning his own fleshly decay. Indeed, Brown makes the case that ‘‘the tombs of the very special dead were exempt from the facts of death.’’38 Describing first the tombs and then the relics of the saints, Brown claims that intercourse with ‘‘the very special dead’’ is part of an ‘‘imaginative dialectic’’ that functions not merely to block out the negative associations of physical death with all the resources of an imagery of paradise, but to raise the physical remains of the saints above the normal associations of place and time. At their graves, the eternity of paradise and the first touch of the resurrection come into the present. . . . The relic is a detached fragment of a whole body. . . . But it is precisely the detachment of the relic from its physical associations that summed up most convincingly the imaginative dialectic we have described. For how better to suppress the fact of death, than to remove part of the dead from its original context in the all too cluttered grave? How better to symbolize the abolition of time in such dead?39

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The saints, joined to the divine through death, are also the evidence of life after death, the heralds of rebirth. As described by Brown, this is the righthand, benevolent aspect of the cult of saints, that side of the cultic coin that promises life, defeats decay, and provides comfort. The believer ‘‘is reassured by the triumph of integrity over its disintegration.’’40 In short, it is a denial of death. Bataille’s sinister version of saintly intercourse is, of course, quite different from the one described by Brown, though no less fraught with paradox and a sense of intimacy with the dead. Whether or not Bataille was familiar with the language of the ‘‘intimate friend’’ (his assiduous studies of things both Christian and ancient suggest he might have been acquainted with the notion), it is a useful concept for understanding the uncanny friendship of Bataille and Simone Weil. I have already noted that Weil is conceived by Bataille as intimately associated with filth and with death. He describes Lazare’s complexion as ‘‘cadaverous’’ and identifies Weil’s character not with the love of life, but with ‘‘affliction: that is, [with] the sum of those forces that oppose, corrupt, and seek to destroy life.’’41 Bataille’s conception of Weil-Lazare, like the crucified Christ who is paradoxically ‘‘absolute’’ or ‘‘eternal’’ waste, becomes the ‘‘apotheosis of that which is perishable.’’42 She becomes, to use Bataille’s term, an ‘‘indecent’’ saint ‘‘for whom there is no beyond,’’ no ‘‘intellectual or moral beyond, substance, God, immutable order, or salvation.’’ An apotheosis of the perishable, Weil is also the embodiment of hyperchristianity; she is the Christian who rejects the salvific aspects of the religion, embracing instead an earthly mystical existence in which she ‘‘dances with the time that kills’’ her.43 To be sure, the divinity implied by the ‘‘theos’’ within ‘‘apotheosis’’ is in this case a divinity associated with the underworld. Depicting Weil as Lazare or St. Lazarus allows Bataille to conceive of Weil not as the axis mundi conjoining heaven and earth, but as the cruxus mundi binding terrestrial life with subterranean death. The daimonic function of this saint is to act as an intercessor communicating the mortal message of Bataille’s gospel: ‘‘Death is the great affirmer, the wonder-struck cry of life,’’ and ‘‘death reveals life in its plenitude.’’44 In contrast to Brown’s account, Weil is not an upward extension of the self, but rather betrays a downward inclination that at all times threatens the unity and integrity of the self. As her character’s namesake would imply, Weil is a heterogeneous force in league with the powers of death, proclaiming, rather than denying, that life itself is cor-

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rupted with a death that must be celebrated. Weil is thus eternally excremental as the mystic devoured and digested by a monstrous God of death; and she is absolute waste as the vision of Christ encountered in the tomb of the labyrinth. Imagined as Lazare, Weil is, as Surya puts it, ‘‘the hypostasis of death.’’45

Blue of Noon Resurrected The account of Weil-Lazare offered above may appear to contradict chronology. My suggestion that the character of Lazare, an invention of Bataille’s 1935 novel Blue of Noon, can be read in the light of Weil’s writings in Gravity and Grace, published only in 1947, might thus seem dubious. But I propose that the logic of the uncanny can be applied to the reading of Blue of Noon and to Bataille’s rendering of Weil as Lazare. Michel Surya asserts that ‘‘it is not impossible that a retrospective interest in the works Simone Weil started to write after [she and Bataille] lost contact [sometime after 1935] is present in this portrait’’ of Lazare. An examination of the conditions of the publication of Blue of Noon recommends this ‘‘retrospective’’ reading. Bataille wrote his novel Blue of Noon in 1935, but did not publish the book until 1957. The reasons for Bataille’s reticence remain a matter of speculation. In his 1957 preface to Blue of Noon, Bataille claims that the anguish to which he was prey at the time he wrote the novel accounts for the ‘‘freakish anomalies’’ that are ‘‘the ground’’ of the story, but that these anomalies were far from ‘‘a guarantee of the quality’’ of the book.46 He therefore refused to allow the book to be published. Surya points to ‘‘more trivial financial reasons’’ that might have caused the twenty-two year delay of the publication of ‘‘a book that counts among the most important of its century.’’47 However uncertain the reasons for the initial delay, there are specific strategic reasons that might explain Bataille’s decision to publish Blue of Noon more than two decades after it was written. Even though Bataille claims that the eventual appearance was due to the pressure of ‘‘friends who were affected by a reading of the manuscript and have now urged its publication,’’ I think that something more than a ‘‘[deferral] to the judgment of [his] friends’’ is at work here.48 Amy Hollywood applies a herme-

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neutic of suspicion to Bataille’s allegedly autobiographical account of the conditions that inspired his Story of the Eye, problematizing Bataille’s claims to the literal exactness of the tale.49 This suspicion ought also to extend to Bataille’s 1957 preface to Blue of Noon, which addresses the belated publication. For though it may be true that Bataille’s friends pressured him to publish the book, there is evidence to suggest that the delay itself can be conceived as a provocation of the effects of the uncanny, and a response to the tenets of surrealism as declared by Andre´ Breton. Commenting on the political turmoil that initially gave rise to the ‘‘burst of fury’’ evident in Blue of Noon, Bataille says that by 1957, long after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War had ‘‘rendered insignificant the historical events connected with the plot of the novel,’’ the book had become ‘‘remote’’; Bataille is ‘‘far removed from the state of mind out of which the book emerged.’’50 The political exigencies inspiring the book’s creation had receded, and with them the furious state of mind that produced the novel; the revolutionary political motivations of the story were obsolete. But as Bataille’s deferred preface makes clear, Blue of Noon is not only a book about strictly political revolution. It also involves another revolution not unrelated to the political strife of the time, but distinguishable from it: the surrealist revolution. Though many scholars have commented on the revolutionary political milieu in which Bataille wrote his novel,51 insufficient attention has been paid to the other war that Bataille is waging in this book—the war against surrealism. Indeed, Bataille called himself surrealism’s ‘‘old enemy from within,’’ and the publication of this novel can be interpreted as a strike against surrealism. Andre´ Breton’s disdain for the genre of the novel is well known. From the outset of the movement that would become known as surrealism, Breton decries any pretenses to writing novels, condemning them as the meanest expressions of bourgeois literary tastes and long-exhausted conventions. ‘‘In spite of its pretensions,’’ Breton wrote in 1920, ‘‘a novel has never proved anything.’’52 Breton’s condemnation of the novel is perhaps less theoretical than emotive, and, to be sure, the diligence with which he excoriated the genre is undercut by his embrace of certain authors—such as Sade—who had mastered the form. But Breton, many of whose own writings—as he acknowledged with discomfort—were not far from the genre he abhorred, continued throughout his life to rail against ‘‘literature,’’ and in particular the novel.53

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In 1935, amidst Breton’s condemnations and the general surrealist malaise vis-a`-vis literature, Bataille wrote Blue of Noon, which, even if hallucinatory and rife with scatological associations, nonetheless constitutes a story, or at least a story in the process of decay.54 As such, it might be interpreted as an act of resistance against the surrealist banishment of the novel. But Bataille refused to publish the novel immediately, waiting instead until its political portents were obsolete, and its plot outmoded. The novel, it seems, would have lost its political thrust and failed to execute its anti-surrealist resistance. By the time the novel is released, not only had the Second World War diminished the retrospective importance of the book, but surrealism was all but depleted of its former revolutionary artistic vitality. But it is just this sense of obsolescence that enhances the novel’s aura of decay and, paradoxically, heightens its sinister effects. If this novel was written from within ‘‘the tumult of surrealism,’’55 it was only published after surrealism had ceased to be a major wellspring of intellectual and artistic life. One of surrealism’s foremost historians, Maurice Nadeau, places the life of surrealism squarely between the two wars, claiming that surrealism flourished between 1918 and 1940, bringing new life to the artistic scene in Paris and eventually the world at large. That said, it is curious that Bataille, who had long been an associate (though never a member) of the surrealist camp, begins to do the bulk of his critical writing on surrealism only in 1945, when the movement was in decline. Michael Richardson emphasizes this point, suggesting that ‘‘it may seem surprising that Bataille should have been so concerned with surrealism at this time, for the cultural context was hardly propitious to this movement that had been so important during the interwar period, but was then becoming intellectually marginalized.’’ By 1948, surrealism had taken a back seat to existentialism, and was considered by many to be ‘‘irrelevant to the needs of the time.’’ Claiming that ‘‘Bataille took the opposite view,’’ Richardson cites Bataille’s ‘‘distaste for the mood of the time’’ as his reason for returning to a surrealism that was being dismissed by the culture at large. ‘‘Bataille had no time for the idea that surrealism was dead,’’ Richardson writes, ‘‘on the contrary, it had barely come into being; it was almost the embryo for a potentiality that could be realized only in the future. This above all marks Bataille’s own surrealism: it was a potentiality to be realized.’’56 Richardson is suggesting that surrealism is not, for Bataille, a defunct movement, but a movement waiting to happen, a revolution in its embry-

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onic state. But this characterization is somewhat misleading, for it is not surrealism in its newly discovered nascence that draws Bataille to it, but rather the very fact that it is in decline, that it is dying or dead. It is, in other words, the retrograde atmosphere surrounding the remains of surrealism that fascinates Bataille, and that makes surrealism a corruptive force of decay that it had never been during its lifetime. Put otherwise, Bataille develops the corruptive, sinister side of surrealism by turning surrealism against itself. Art historian Hal Foster makes the case that, despite Andre´ Breton’s synthesizing impulses and his repeated eulogies to the powers of love, surrealism is underwritten by the logic of the uncanny, in which that which has been repressed returns as a ‘‘harbinger of death.’’ Breton appears to affirm the death drive, but in fact ‘‘elides’’ it, with his emphasis on reconciliation and resolution evincing a ‘‘compensatory defense not only against the splitting of the subject but also against the dominance of defusion [sic].’’57 Bretonian surrealism thus operates according to a repression of death in the form of the synthesis of eros and thanatos, in which the ultimate resolution of the two opposed drives occurs by way of the suppression of thanatos.58 In a particular instance of the uncanny return of the repressed (the return of death) within surrealist practice, Foster cites the surrealist fascination with the de´mode´ (outmoded) objects and spaces, such as mannequins, obsolete machines, romantic ruins, and art nouveau decor.59 An aura of death clings to outmoded objects, their funereal glimmer lending them a potentially revolutionary force. Walter Benjamin asserts that Breton and his camp were the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘‘outmoded,’’ in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue had begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution . . . can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism. . . . They bring the immense force of ‘‘atmosphere’’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion.60

While affirming the thrust of Benjamin’s speculations, Foster nonetheless shows that the deployment of the de´mode´ is married to a certain will to

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sublimating transformation, for there is, in the surrealist use of the outmoded, also a reenchantment that transfigures and revitalizes the ruins, making them the stage in which a working-through of the past may occur— thus an overcoming or reversal of the death drive. Whatever the ultimate ambitions of the Bretonian surrealists on this point, I suggest Bataille resurrects Blue of Noon as part of a strategy that also employs the outmoded—but to the end of affirming, rather than denying, death, and to resist, rather than endorse, the dominant (Bretonian) mode of surrealism. First, Bataille employs surrealism itself as de´mode´. It is not precisely the as yet unexplored potentials of surrealism that leads Bataille to dedicate himself to its elaboration in the late forties, for, in a sense, the fact that surrealism is in decline is what entices Bataille. Foster suggests that the surrealists ‘‘confront[ed] the bourgeois order with tokens of its repressed past’’ in the form of outmoded objects. Bataille appropriates but reverses this strategy, embracing surrealism at the point of its decline, and confronting surrealism with tokens of its repressed past in the form of the decline itself. He shows surrealism to be not a set of eternally inhering principles, but an historical movement giving way to the ascendancy of existentialism.61 By celebrating surrealism in its decline, Bataille brings to the fore the very thing that Bretonian surrealism had sought to repress: death itself. In this case, obsolescence is embraced as the token of the death that surrealism could not countenance under the reign of Breton. Second, Bataille’s publication of Blue of Noon partakes of this same voluntary return of the repressed. Whether or not we believe Bataille’s claims regarding his initial reticence about the publication of the novel, his decision to resurrect and release this suppressed story is structurally similar to the functioning of the uncanny. Bataille claims that in the twenty years of latency, he had ‘‘more or less forgotten [the] very existence’’ of the novel. Given that the book’s portents have become obsolete and the mood of urgency depleted, the text thus partakes of the uncanny power of the outmoded; deprived of its original context, it is all the more a harbinger of death. Finally, and most importantly in the present context, with the publication of this novel Bataille enacts a resurrection of Simone Weil.62 Weil had died in 1943, and her portrait as Lazare in Blue of Noon would have gained new and uncanny resonances at the time of the novel’s publication. Not only is the figure upon whom the cadaverous character is based now deceased, but Lazare is also imbued with a new set of associations. While the

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Weil whom Bataille knew in the early thirties had implanted in him the germ of an obsession, this obsession, it would appear, only became more acute over time. Bataille’s continued interest in Weil is evident not only in the fact that he wrote a lengthy 1949 review of Weil’s posthumously published The Need for Roots, in which he attests to his fascination with Weil (in words almost identical to those found in Blue of Noon), but also in the affinities that Bataille’s writings share with Weil’s at about this time. Bataille thus refers to his proximity to Weil as indicative of ‘‘the coincidence of completely opposed minds.’’63 Though it is impossible to know precisely what exposure Bataille had to the writings of Weil, we do know that by the time of the publication of Blue of Noon it would be read not only in light of the political events that had inspired it, but with the inflection of the Simone Weil who had come to be known by 1957. In particular, the collection of fragments first published in 1947 under the title La Pensanteur et la graˆce strangely resonates with Bataille’s work, and it is with this work in mind that Bataille might have seen fit to publish his novel Blue of Noon. It is, in other words, the Weil who had encountered God in the labyrinth, the Weil whose mystical experiences had been endured as in a dark night, and the Weil whose theological writings are rife with contradictions and descriptions of the dissolution of the self, that Bataille resurrects like Lazarus with the publication of his novel.

Extremist Surrealism and Hyperchristianity Doubtless surrealism is not dead. — g e o r g e s b a t a i l l e , ‘‘The Surrealist Revolution,’’ 1945

In a single move, then, Bataille raises both Weil and surrealism itself from the grave. Through this double movement of resurrection we may unfold the implications of Bataille’s extremist surrealism, which lies at the intersection of Weil’s thought and Breton’s. In his adumbrations of an extremist surrealism, Bataille in some sense calls upon Weil as a saintly intercessor and as a model of hyperchristianity. This is not to suggest that Bataille was directly influenced by the writings of Weil in formulating his countersurrealism. What I mean to suggest is that Bataille’s publication of Blue of Noon attests to the Simone Weil he had come to know and imagine by 1957,

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and that the retrospective reading will allow insights into Bataille’s notion of hyperchristianity and his extremist version of surrealism.64 It is true that Bataille adopts Nietzsche’s coinage in referring to hyperchristianity, but it is Weil who comes to embody this concept for Bataille, especially as presented in certain passages of Gravity and Grace; this is the mystic with whose deathly aura Blue of Noon is uncannily imbued at the time of its publication. The resurrection of the Lazarus-like Weil underscores the morbid aspect of surrealism in its decline that interests Bataille. Moreover, the publication of Blue of Noon recommends a particular reading of Gravity and Grace, one that exploits the Lazarus-like aspects of decline, decay, and an allegiance to death. The following pages of this chapter will examine these moments of decline in Weil. In relation to Bataille’s polemic against Bretonian surrealism, the late publication of Blue of Noon and the raising of Weil from the crypt allow Bataille to announce himself as crypto-Weilan—that is, to effect an affirmation of Weil in the form of her return as the saintly model of hyperchristianity and counter to Breton. I will demonstrate this by focusing on three quintessential aspects of the surrealist ‘‘marvelous’’—objective chance, dream, and automatism—and show how Weil’s writings illuminate Bataille’s sinister rereadings of surrealism. Just as Weil remained both beside and beyond the institution of the Christian church, Bataille claims that he situates his efforts ‘‘beyond’’ but ‘‘alongside’’ surrealism.65 The analogy is telling, and, as we will see, the ‘‘beyond’’ of these two thinkers involves notions of desire, contradiction, and the real that moderate Christianity and surrealism find intolerable. To prove this point, I will offer a rereading of these three surrealist concepts in the monstrous registers of decline, contradiction, and ungratified desire, contrasting Breton’s transcendental and synthetic preoccupations with form and beauty to Bataille and Weil’s descensional obsessions with the filthy (as exemplified by excrement), the formless (as found in the decaying corpse), and the grotesque (rendered in the monstrous conception of divinity). the exquisite corpses of chance

The concept of objective chance is central to Bretonian surrealism from its inception. To be sure, the surrealist camp that evolved around Breton made the idea of the chance encounter the telos of its exploits; indeed, the very

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object of their itinerant meanderings among flea markets and nocturnal city streets was to elicit an encounter that appeared ‘‘fortuitous yet foreordained,’’66 both coincidental and necessary. In this way, incidents of objective chance, such as Breton’s famous chance encounter with Nadja, the woman who became the eponymous subject of his sustained meditation on ‘‘sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences,’’67 were above all the fulfillments of desire. Even though scholars like Hal Foster have argued that Breton’s concept of objective chance is more closely linked to the death drive than has generally been recognized, it is nonetheless the case that Breton’s account of chance is couched in terms of love and desire—that is, the pleasures of love and the fulfillment of desire. In particular, the pleasures of objective chance stem from the sense of resolution that coincides with finding an object that one was not conscious of having lost, an object that gratifies unconscious desire. There is, then, with the findings of chance, a distinct sense of destiny fulfilled, of a discovery of the inevitable achieved through the movement of desire. The pleasures of love secured in objective chance are borne out in the famous surrealist game cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), in which ‘‘a sentence is written collectively by adding phrases to a piece of paper on which the previous contributions have been folded away from view.’’68 Rosalind Krauss points to the irony in the surrealists’ embrace of the term ‘‘exquisite corpse’’ for a game that exemplifies the provocation of chance operations animated by desire and in programmatic complicity with the pleasure principle—the irony, in other words, of embracing a term of decay for a game that promotes the resolution of unconscious desires and tensions. Krauss, pursuing a different line of thought, comments on Bataille’s use of the term un cadavre to designate Andre´ Breton in the famous polemical scrip by that title. On this broadside, Breton is portrayed as a postmortem Christ, eyes closed, head crowned with thorns, and forehead bleeding. The Christ with whom Bataille is now identifying Breton is the very embodiment of what Bataille had contemptuously called ‘‘the simple (paternal) sign of universal homogeneity,’’ which is to say, a cadaver that has passed beyond a state of rot into dust, having thus lost the lesson in doubleness and hence heterogeneity that the sacrificial rites of more terrifying forms of religion can still deliver.69

Krauss puts her finger on the neutralizing aspects of both Breton, for whom desire is tied to a sublimating telos, and that conception of Christ as the

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promise of an afterlife, a salvific ‘‘beyond.’’ Bataille comments that Breton’s poetic transpositions, such as those found in games that put the unconscious in the service of poetic sublimations, are not far from the religious promises of an afterlife in which, as Krauss paraphrases, ‘‘the trials of this [life] would be redeemed, in a kind of mythical resolution.’’70 But while Krauss is right to point to Bataille’s emphasis on the heterogeneous forces inhering in the rotting corpse but absent from the one reduced to dust, she curiously omits any comment on the relations of this cadaver to Bataille’s conception of chance. As I noted in chapter 3, Bataille’s ‘‘will to chance’’ is also a will to decay, as the shared Latin root of these two terms implies: cadere (to fall, or fall away from). But Bataille, who was acquainted with Latin, would also have known that ‘‘cadaver’’ shares this root as well. To call Andre´ Breton a cadaver is thus a more complicated matter than Krauss makes it out to be. Not only is Bataille suggesting, as Foster argues, that Breton is intimately, if inadvertently, engaged with the death drive that he vociferously resisted; to figure Breton as the neutralized cadaver is to comment as well on his notion of chance, which is provoked toward the end of gratifying desire through a relief of tension. This satisfaction can be understood either as the culmination of the work of the death drive—a return to stasis—or as the final resolution of love’s agitations in which the object of desire is claimed, possessed.71 But Bataille espouses a different notion of chance, one that does not neutralize or gratify, but rather extends corruption and decay. And it is the half-decomposed cadaver of the Lazarus-like Weil that embodies this corruptive aspect of chance. To Breton’s synthetic operations of coincidence, conveyed as a Christ promising an afterlife, Bataille opposes another kind of coincidence—the coincidence of opposites. Bataille subtitles his book Sur Nietzsche with the phrase la volunte´ de chance (the will to chance). This will to chance, as chapter 2 showed, is also a will to decline or decay that betokens a descensional movement from power to impotence, from high to low, and from noble forms to base deformations. And this will to chance is enacted through a meditative practice that takes as its object chance itself—that is, the radical contingency of individual existence, the ‘‘abruptness of this facticity.’’72 Meditation on chance is thus a meditation on decline, which itself provokes a decay of the self; it is in facing the radical contingency of one’s individual existence that one is afforded that rupture or decay of the self

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that Bataille calls ecstasy. This method of meditation thus renders one cadaver-like, in the process of decay. Decline, decay, chance, and the cadaver—all these speak to an ‘‘ecstatic standing outside of the self . . . experienced as laceration, agony, and anguish, a rending of the self in the face of the real.’’73 Whereas Breton’s chance afforded him a corpse-like stasis, Bataille’s employment of chance realizes its corruptive potential in the lacerating tension achieved in meditation upon the coincidence of life and death in the form of radical contingency, that sense in which the overwhelming unlikelihood of one’s particular existence draws one into an awareness of death’s presence at the heart of life. Death and the contingency of the self are also obsessive objects of meditation for Simone Weil. Indeed, her notion of chance underscores Bataille’s, and it is my contention that her hyperchristian meditations on chance illuminate Bataille’s fatal brand of surrealist chance. If Bataille had in mind Weil’s writings in Gravity and Grace when he published Blue of Noon, it is not surprising that we find resonances between her meditations and those of Bataille. But what I want to emphasize here is that Bataille’s resurrection of Weil in the context of the decline of surrealism suggests that it is Weil’s hyperchristian meditations that go beyond surrealism itself. In Gravity and Grace Weil writes, ‘‘The beings I love are creatures. They were born by chance. My meeting with them was also by chance. They will die.’’ She goes on both to reinforce and exceed this link between chance and mortality: ‘‘Meditation on chance . . . is even more salutary than meditation on death.’’74 If she finds in chance a more efficacious object of meditation even than death, it is because chance reveals a contradiction at the heart of existence, an irresolvable contradiction that provokes desire while resolutely failing to satisfy it. For Weil, to meditate on chance is to apply one’s attention to that which is least amenable to it: ‘‘It is intolerable to suppose that what is most precious in the world should be given over to chance.’’75 Yet it is in sustaining this intolerable meditation on chance that alone affords the dissolution of the self contingent upon pure attention. When Weil writes that ‘‘the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence,’’76 she is suggesting that the mortal germ working its fatal way through life is the very testament to reality—to a mortified and decaying reality that Breton finds intolerable. If Weil is the ‘‘apotheosis of that which is perishable,’’ it is in part because her writings hold together contradictory notions; they testify to an eternal

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corruption at work in her meditative practices—for it is in the decreative act of meditating on contradiction that the self is broken down and decayed. Maintaining, rather than resolving, the psychic tension elicited by contradiction assures that one becomes, as Weil puts it, ‘‘dead’’ even while remaining alive. Contradiction is not only ‘‘the test of necessity,’’ but also, when meditated upon, that which ‘‘tears us heart and soul.’’77 This lacerating attention to contradiction is an imitatio christi, an act of identification with the crucified Christ who is the embodiment of chance—that is, the Christ who, on the cross, dramatizes the perfect and rending tension of contraries: life and death, good and evil, freedom and necessity. What Bataille finds in Weil, I believe, is a counter to Breton’s notion of desire achieving gratification in the resolution of contradiction. In Weil is the desire to be a cadaverous Christ who does not sublate, but rather maintains contradiction—not synthesis, but laceration. If Simone Weil suggests that this meditation on the chance encounter of opposites allows for a transcendental movement, an upward motion of the soul and a harmony or correlation of contraries, Lazare brings to the fore the corruptive, descensional aspect of this meditative practice—this will to decline—to which Weil, perhaps despite herself, nonetheless attests. It is thus in this hyperchristian notion of contradiction that Bataille finds an extremist counter to Breton’s conception of chance. dream vs. reality: desire and incarnation

Breton’s chance gratifications illustrate what Bataille finds most contemptible in surrealism—that, like the promises of an afterlife, it offers the illusions of gratified desire, the false assurance of fulfilled wishes. The grand surrealist wish is attested to by Breton’s fascination with dreams and fantasy life. Breton embraces the Freudian notion of dream and fantasy as the expressions and fulfillments of wishes in a purely psychical realm.78 The tendency toward satisfaction comes ‘‘by means of an illusion, against an outside world’’79 —the world of material reality. One need only recall Breton’s recourse to a hygienic fantasy in the face of Picasso’s excremental expressions to see at work this suppression of the material world.80 Indeed, Bataille’s ire reaches its pitch on just this point. It is no wonder, then, that he does all he can to force Breton to confront base reality, especially in the form of rotting cadavers and fecal excretions. And yet, for all his insistence on the base, expulsive, excremental aspects associated with the

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material body, Bataille himself puts fantasy at the heart of his mystical method of meditation. In Inner Experience, Bataille theorizes a program of dramatization that operates according to practices of visualization. Here he offers accounts of the visual fantasies that propel the dissolution of the self that characterizes mystical experience. For example, elaborating this notion of dramatization, Bataille claims that to imagine suffices, and the dreamed-of form vaguely takes shape. It is thus that years ago, when this streaming remained diffuse within me, without object, I felt myself, in the darkness of my room, become a tree and even a tree struck by lightning. . . . I had become a tree as one dreams, with no other consequence— but I was awake, I took pleasure in no longer being myself, in being different, in slipping away.81

Bataille describes a fantasy, a waking dream. Similarly, in an earlier text, Bataille illustrates the methodical fantasizing that promotes the experience of joy before death: ‘‘I imagine the frozen instant of my own death. . . . I imagine myself in a vision and in a halo that transfigures the ecstatic and exhausted face of a dying being.’’ Elsewhere Bataille imagines himself as a walking phallus, as a flame, and, most famously, as bearing the explosive ocular stigmatum of the ‘‘pineal eye,’’ which he describes as a virulent fantasy. Though Bataille employs fantasy as the means to ecstatic experience, the concept of fantasy that underwrites his praxis is in strictest opposition to Breton’s. For Bataille, fantasy does not suppress the reality of fleshly existence, but rather facilitates the experience of the body as flesh—that is, as corruptible, vulnerable, excretory, and base, in a manner that recalls the descriptions of the flesh in Le latin mystique. Far from a wishful escape from the sufferings of a vulnerable body, Bataille seeks out and affirms the dissatisfactions of the flesh precisely because they testify to reality, to what is there.82 Bataille thus meditates upon a locus of ‘‘all separation and dread, of all unsatisfied desire and all possible death.’’ He establishes the connection between ungratified desire and reality by claiming that ‘‘the impossibility of satisfaction in love is a guide toward the fulfilling leap at the same time that it is the nullification of all possible illusion.’’83 Bataille thus describes his fantasies in paradoxical language, positing the impossibility of satisfaction as fulfillment itself. But the fulfillment of which Bataille speaks is ‘‘at the same time’’ the eradication of ‘‘all possible illu-

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sion.’’ That is, fantasy, according to Bataille’s method, strips away any illusory comforts or satisfactions, to render naked ‘‘what is there.’’84 And if this fantasy, like all fantasy, is driven by desire, then in the case of Bataille it is desire reversed, turned away from an objective telos, from satisfaction, and back on itself. For Bataille, the fulfillment of desire is not predicated on desire’s extinction in satisfaction, but on desire’s perpetuation, in its lacerating dissatisfaction. Only in the rigorous maintenance of dissatisfaction is one able to eradicate the comforting—and illusory—satisfactions of wish fulfillment. Bataillean fantasy thus operates through desire in order to contradict the surrealist telos of desire: satisfaction. Bataille writes, ‘‘Desire desires not to be satisfied.’’85 In other words, ‘‘true desire is a desire for desire, not satisfaction.’’86 This stands in opposition to the Bretonian notion of fantasy as the means of relieving the tension of desire. What Rosalind Krauss says of Breton’s notion of objective chance might be said of his reliance upon fantasy as well—that it describes ‘‘the way the subject’s unconscious thoughts will operate upon reality, recutting it to the measure of their desires.’’87 But it is, of course, this transfigured reality that Bataille abhors, and it is the alleged reign of the unconscious that he will resist. As we will see, Bataille’s resistance to Bretonian desire hinges on his refusal to embrace psychical reality at the expense of material reality. In addition, Bataille embraces the Weilan doctrine of incarnation as the response to the Bretonian endorsement of the ‘‘omnipotence of the dream’’88 and the unconscious. Freud suggests that while conscious thought is governed by the law of noncontradiction, the unconscious not only admits, but sustains contradiction. The unconscious, as Krauss puts it, ‘‘knows nothing of the either/or: the idea that two opposites cannot hold true at the same time. Thus the unconscious not only courts the transformation of everything into its opposite but holds both of these things together at once.’’89 At first glance, it may appear that this resonates clearly with the emphasis on contradiction that I have been tracing in Bataille’s thought. Contrary to expectations, however, it is Breton’s embrace of this notion of the unconscious that most arouses Bataille’s suspicions. On the one hand, Breton proclaims a synthesis of dream and reality, of the unconscious and the conscious. In his first manifesto of surrealism, he famously heralds ‘‘the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a

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surreality.’’ However, a careful examination of his manifesto reveals that the marvelous beauty supposed by this resolution of dream and reality is, according to Breton, achieved only by suppressing reality and indulging in fantasy. ‘‘We really live by our fantasies,’’ he writes, ‘‘when we give free rein to them.’’90 Indeed, Breton goes on to explain that ‘‘surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream.’’91 The superior reality of which Breton speaks is specifically psychical reality, and the omnipotence of the dream he endorses as partaking of this surreality speaks to a devaluation of material reality. The omnipotence of the dream describes the power to fulfill wishes; it attests to a place in which all desire is gratified. As a product of the unconscious, where the absence of the law of noncontradiction means that no desire is contradicted, the dream designates ultimate satisfaction. But as Bataille makes clear, the Bretonian concept of the dream attests also to a failure to confront material reality. It is a kind of escapism that functions by the construction of comforting illusions and transpositions. For Breton, in other words, psychic reality is equated with dream life and the unconscious (in which all wishes are fulfilled) whereas conscious life, troubled at all turns by the incongruities of perception and the hard inconstancies of brute facticity, is corrupted by material reality. According to this understanding, the unconscious is not so much the place of a tense conjunction of opposed notions as it is the place of their resolution, the place in which what is impossible in material reality is enjoyed in an illusory surreality. Absenting material resistances, the unconscious is, in Breton’s account, the site of synthesis and the suppression of material, corporeal reality necessary for the satisfaction of desire. The point I want to emphasize here is that, for Breton, the unconscious resolves the contradiction between material and psychic reality, but does so by a suppression of material reality itself. It allows for the contradiction between the psychic and the material realms to exist, but only at the level of the psychical, where the contradiction itself is dreamed as satisfaction—not an experience of contradiction, but a dream of gratified desire. What appears to be a mining of base forces is in fact a sublation, a synthesis; indeed, Breton claims that there is an ‘‘absence of contradiction’’ in the unconscious (as I will discuss below).92 Fantasy is thus the suppression or evasion of bodily affect; it is the means of achieving ‘‘pure psychic’’ activity, at the expense of corporeal sensation and material facticity.

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This evasion of material reality spurs Bataille’s condemnation of Bretonian surrealism, and it is Bataille’s use of fantasy against the dominant grain of surrealism that most characterizes the extremist version of surrealism he develops in his mystical practices. For Bataille, the unconscious is not the site of resolution, but corruption; it is experienced as a bodily sensation, and a wounding one at that. We may again turn to the figure of Lazare-Weil to consider further what Bataille’s deployment of fantasy consists of: a provocation of a physical unconscious,93 a material experience of incarnation. I have argued that Bataille resurrects Weil by publishing Blue of Noon in a way that itself partakes of the logic of the uncanny. Provoking a sense of the uncanny, Bataille makes both his novel and Weil messengers from the crypt, harbingers of death. I believe that Bataille’s publication of Blue of Noon endorses a sinister reading of Weil’s concept of incarnation, and that this concept most powerfully counters Breton’s wish-fulfilling notion of the dream. A fuller understanding of Bataille’s mystical practice will take account of his spectral friend, Simone Weil. It should be recalled that for Bataille, a specter or ghost is not the equivalent of the fully decomposed corpse, but is conceived in the register of decay. In other words, the specter is the uncanny embodiment of fleshly corruption. If there is something immaterial in the concept of the specter, there is nonetheless something decidedly corporeal in the experience that the specter provokes—not, as Peter Brown puts it, in the ‘‘triumph of [bodily] integrity over its disintegration,’’94 but as a testament to the inevitability of that very disintegration, an irrepressible memento mori. And if Weil is Bataille’s spectral friend, it is only as she returns, like a daimonic intercessor, as the reality of bodily decay and death, and thus the nullification of illusion. Decay and death are indeed central to Weil’s concept of incarnation, a concept that paradoxically is no less spectral in nature than Bataille’s fantasy of Lazare. Weil promotes what might be called a practice of incarnation, a practice that has as its goal the eradication of illusion. Illusion, according to Weil, is a kind of error in perception; it is the mistaking of what is merely imagined for reality itself. The ‘‘test of what is real,’’ on the other hand, is that ‘‘it is hard and rough’’—that it is painful, in body and soul. ‘‘What is pleasant,’’ says Weil, ‘‘belongs to dreams.’’95 To overcome the evasions of dream and illusion, Weil says that ‘‘we must become incarnate.

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. . . Man has to perform an act of incarnation, for he is disembodied by his imagination.’’96 Incarnation therefore is a practice, part of a method that defies the imagination and affirms material reality. This practice of incarnation is remarkably close to Bataille’s use of fantasy, and it is with Weil’s concept of incarnation in mind that Bataille’s use of fantasy might best be understood. For Weil, the act of incarnation is specifically Christian (or hyperchristian), for to become incarnate is specifically to become ‘‘naked and dead—without imagination,’’ in other words, like Christ on the cross. Incarnation is thus the reverse of imagination; it is, rather, imitation. ‘‘I have to be like God, but like God crucified,’’ writes Weil.97 But this imitatio christi consists not in the imitation of a person, not even the person of Christ, but rather in the repetition of an experience that is at once bodily and psychical—the experience of the cross. This experience is simultaneously psychically inspired (in the contemplation of contradiction) and physically achieved (in corporeal suffering). Like Bataille’s use of fantasy, which affords the paradoxical experience of death in life that produces a bodily, ‘‘sensible ecstasy,’’98 Weil’s practice of incarnation involves a tearing asunder that, if part of a meditative practice, nonetheless has bodily implications. The experience of the cross is the experience of the body’s corruption in time, with the sufferings of the body eliciting an experience of reality that is anything but an instance of wish fulfillment. Simone Weil’s desire does not culminate in the false satisfactions of dreams; rather, hers is the embodied passion for contradiction—a perduring, crucificatory desire that seeks not resolution, but a participation in the vicissitudes of corporeal existence: a will to decline, an acceptance of death. This is an acceptance of ‘‘that which is,’’ as Weil puts it, and a refusal to turn away from the base reality that Breton abhorred.99 the prefix auto in the words automatism and automutilation

The experience of death while remaining alive is the paradox that brings the thought of Weil and Bataille most closely into alignment. For both thinkers, uniting, without resolving, the opposition of death and life is key to mystical experience. For Weil, this dissolution of the self, which she names ‘‘decreation,’’ is conceived in hyperchristian terms as imitatio christi, which implies a renunciation of the personality, or what she calls the destruction of the

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I.100 Bataillean fantasy involves an experience of death that is also conceived in terms of a ‘‘projection of a dramatic loss of self.’’101 The affinities between Weil and Bataille on this point are clear. What is also clear is Bataille’s disdain for the surrealist concept of dream, which, despite Breton’s protests to the contrary, does not so much liberate the contradictory forces of the unconscious as it secures the sense of the integral, invulnerable self. Thus Breton makes ‘‘psychic automatism’’ the very definition of surrealism102—for automatism is able to resolve ‘‘the deep individual psychic tensions’’ that threaten the unitary sense of self. Automatism, as exemplified in automatic writing and drawing, is ‘‘the only mode of expression which gives full satisfaction to both eye and ear by achieving rhythmic unity,’’ which Breton describes as ‘‘the absence of contradiction, the relaxation of emotional tensions . . . a lack of the sense of time, and the replacement of external reality by a psychic reality obeying the pleasure principle alone.’’103 Nothing could be further from Bataille’s thought than the automatism just described. And yet Bataille claims that automatism is a major, even revolutionary, contribution to human existence—no mere petty provocation, but a profound act of revolt. It is curious, then, that Bataille himself does not engage in automatic writing. I want to take up Bataille’s apparent ambivalence regarding automatism, and to suggest that in the years following Breton’s 1924 publication of the first manifesto of surrealism, Bataille counters surrealist automatism with the notion of sacrificial automutilation. However, Bataille’s automutilation only surfaces years later, in the person of Simone Weil.104 It is uncertain whether Bataille had Simone Weil in mind when he wrote of an ‘‘extremist surrealism’’ which would ‘‘take the human adventure to its limit through Christianity,’’ that is, ‘‘to go completely beyond Christianity by means of a hyperchristianity.’’105 Bataille wrote these lines in 1947, the year in which the first edition of Gravity and Grace appeared. Whether or not he knew it at the time, the Lazarian Weil with whom Bataille became intimate in the decade leading to his publication of Blue of Noon is also the Weil who goes ‘‘completely beyond’’ Christianity precisely by rejecting any notion of a beyond, an afterlife. Indeed, it is Weil the black mystic who, even more than Nietzsche, exemplifies the automutilation entailed in exceeding Christianity. On more than one occasion Bataille affirmatively cites a central passage from Breton’s Second Manifesto:

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Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and imagined, past and future, the communicable and incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.106

Though these repeated citations may appear to contradict Bataille’s overall critique of surrealism, he does not stop with Breton’s words. Hal Foster, remarking on Bataille’s declaration, claims that double and other to Breton, Bataille stands on the far side of this ambivalence. Often he rises to support the Bretonian formulation, only to supplement it in a way that subverts it, pushes it beyond the pleasure principle: ‘Good and evil, pain and joy,’ Bataille adds to the Bretonian list. ‘Divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.’ ‘The persistence of life and the pull of death.’ And finally: ‘Life and death, being and nothingness.’

Foster notes that Breton cannot countenance this subversion, and that he is particularly revolted by Bataille’s base materialism ‘‘precisely because it celebrates the coincidence of life and death.’’107 This is to say that Breton seeks a ‘‘normative reconciliation of contrary modes of experience,’’108 a reconciliation that is made available by way of automatism, where the unconscious relaxes the tension of contradiction. Bataille, on the other hand, wants to go beyond Breton, to take the coincidence of opposites to its limit. This extreme point—this coincidence of life and death—is the contradiction that provides a focus for contemplation whose culmination is an intellectual and affective experience of opposing forces. In his essay ‘‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,’’ Bataille explicitly links the ‘‘equivalence of opposing elements’’ to the sacrificial impulse that provokes automutilation. Bataille traces this mutilative drive to ‘‘the desire to resemble perfectly an ideal term, generally characterized in mythology as a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs.’’109 Bataille suggests that the rage that inspires such ‘‘absurd and terrible’’ behavior comes from the agitating rhythm, the back-and-forth motion, between an aspiration to the ideal—the identification with a selfmutilating and monstrous god—and the humiliating failures that represent its ‘‘exasperated antithesis.’’ This rage culminates in the ‘‘necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself.’’ In the act of automutilation, the victim comes to resemble the god through a ‘‘rupture of

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personal homogeneity and the projection outside the self of a part of oneself.’’110 The passion on display in these excessive acts of laceration is characterized by Bataille as the manifestation of ‘‘a love that refuse[s] to take anything into account,’’ a necrophilic passion divine in its excess. Simone Weil conceives of God’s love in the act of creation in a similar way—as an act of refusal, an act of renunciation, but also an automutilation. She claims that for there to be creatures at all, God had to renounce his infinitude, allowing time to enter eternity. This rent in eternity, a tear in God’s being, is the contradiction embodied by the crucified Christ: ‘‘Contradiction experienced to the very depths of the being tears us apart heart and soul: it is the cross.’’ Even as God is sundered in Christ’s incarnation, so is the contradiction of this incarnation the ‘‘union of contraries’’ that ‘‘involves a wrenching apart.’’111 Christ’s incarnation is therefore the image of God sundering Himself, projecting outside of Himself a part of Himself—rendering Christ both ‘‘God and infinitely other than God.’’112 The expulsed Christ is, for Weil as for Bataille, both divine and filthy, both sacred and excremental. In this way Bataille affirms the ‘‘subjective identity between types of excrement and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous: a half decomposed cadaver.’’113 And as such, Christ is also the apotheosis of that which is perishable, the hypostasis of death.114 But Christ is not a model of base materialism so much as a provocation to an experience. In the following chapter we will examine artist Hans Bellmer’s obsessive engagement with the image of the crucifixion as a way of provoking a sensible experience of contradiction, an ecstatic confusion of the senses. For Bataille as well, Christ is a point of focalization, dramatically embodying the contradictions of time and eternity, being and nothingness, in a way that elicits a decay of the self. And, surprisingly, for Simone Weil, Christ is similarly the supreme object of decreative attention. In no case is he the reconciliation of contrary modes, but always their contradiction— and in this sense, for both Bataille and Weil, he is the embodiment of a will to vulnerability, the injunction to an automutilation that stands at the far side of automatism. This is Christ as something beyond the surrealist unconscious, and beyond Christianity as well—a formless, cadaverous Christ on a cross in the bowels of the labyrinth, a Christ who knows nothing of the either/or: neither man nor god, but a monster.

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The Wounded Hands of Bataille: Hans Bellmer, Bataille, and the Art of Monstrosity

‘‘Just to see’’ Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. —martin heidegger

Among the artistic depictions of the crucified Christ at Golgotha, Matthias Gru¨newald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1515) remains among the most remarkable for its almost photographic portrayal of divine abjection (figure 2).1 To the right of the crucified Christ, supported by a sympathetic witness,2 is a swooning mother Mary, hands clasped and eyes closed in a faint. To his left is an anachronistically intact and relatively stoical John the Baptist, who, in this scene of hyperbolic agony and grief, ironically appears to be the only person keeping his head. Kneeling at the base of the cross is Magdalene, whose grimace is matched only by that of the crucified himself. It is Christ, of course, whose sufferings are the most profound, and whose near-naked body registers manifold tortures. His feet, apparently deformed by abuse, 124

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Figure 2. Matthias Gru¨newald (Mathis Nithart Gothart), The Crucifixion, from the Isenheim Altarpiece, c.1512–15 (oil on panel), c.1480–1528, 䉷 Musee d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France/The Bridgeman Art Library.

are fastened to the wooden base of the cross by a single enormous spike. From the wounds issue thick, serpentine strands of blood. Christ’s head is crowned with monstrous thorns, and hangs at an impossible angle, with his closed eyes directed toward the ground. The wounds of his body, on the other hand, are open, and so multiple as to be numberless. Most of these lacerations bleed; some still clasp thorns which, broken, remain impaled in his flagellated flesh. The wound in his right side is the most egregious, and bleeds abundantly, from torso to tattered loincloth. The musculature of Christ is sinewy, convulsed, at once rigid and undulant. But Christ’s agony culminates most poignantly in his hands. Conjoined with the horizontal beam of the cross, which bows as if in empathic imitation of the contorted body it supports, each hand is pierced in the palm by a nail driven through the wood. The fingers of the upturned hands are shockingly splayed and almost arachnid in their morbid posture. And

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though the sky’s blackness, the Marys’ grief, and the corpse-like demeanor of the crucified body indicate that Christ has uttered his last words and offered up his spirit, his crucified hands, as if still dying the death already undergone by the rest of the body, continue to cry out lama sabachthani. Indeed, so pronouncedly tortured (and so prominently positioned) are these hands that it is as if they are disembodied; they take on a life, or death, of their own.3 The uncanny separability of these organs is enhanced because the crucified hands are duplicated in the desperate gesture of Magdalene; though clenched together in supplication, her hands mimic those of Christ—but while her hands embrace each other, his are irreparably sundered. Artist Hans Bellmer viewed Gru¨newald’s rendition of the passion in 1932, during a vacation in Colmar. The encounter had an undeniable effect upon the young artist; his extreme emotional reaction to the painting was a mixture of horror and fascination that repeatedly emerged in graphic form in his subsequent work. Above all, the portrayal of hands in the famous religious painting seems to have influenced Bellmer, whose own renderings of this body part might be seen as so many meditations on the wounded and contorted appendages of Christ and Magdalene. Indeed, Bellmer appears to be obsessed with evoking damaged, twisted, monstrous hands in a manner that brings to mind Bataille’s virulent insistence on bodily deformation. Bataille and Bellmer not only collaborated in their work, but also partook of a certain intimacy based on their remarkably similar sensibilities. While other critics have addressed the illustrations Bellmer provided for Bataille’s Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda, the intimacy between the writer and the artist goes further than these collaborations alone suggest.4 Focusing on Bellmer’s other works, I want show that for him, the hand manifests that sinister aspect of the sacred that Bataille evokes in his own work. Bellmer paradoxically puts the renowned dexterity of his right hand to the task of creating monstrous images that manifest the left-hand sacred, and in doing so demonstrates the Bataillean counter operation that I have discussed previously—a sacrificial operation that reverses the dominant course of work, aimed toward strictly useful ends. The outcome of Bellmer’s work is a demonstration of what Bataille calls the ‘‘religious sensibility’’—a contradictory mixture of desire and terror, pleasure and anguish. It is this religious sensibility that underwrites the friendship of Bellmer and Bataille.5 Their work is mimetic of this religious sensibility, manifested in the dexter-

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ous productions portraying injured hands that are put before the eyes of the audience. Bataille’s experience of agonized hands thus coincides with that of Bellmer: ‘‘I had grasped my pen,’’ Bataille writes, ‘‘and, holding it in my clenched right hand like a knife, I repeatedly buried the steel nib in the back of my left hand and forearm. Just to see.’’6 Whether autobiographical or fantasized,7 this self-inflicted stigmatum, executed in a moment of exhilarated delirium, conjures a host of associations at work throughout Bataille’s corpus: the relations between violence and the sacred; the conjunction of horror and ecstasy in automutilation; and the coincidence of writing and wounding, ink and blood. Bataille continues, ‘‘I inflicted a number of dirty cuts [blessures sales], more blackish than red because of the ink.’’8 The writer claims that it is the desire pour voir (to see) that compels this bloody handiwork. But what does Bataille want to see? What would he have his readers see by way of this excessive gesture? What, in other words, do Bataille’s wounded hands make visible? In this chapter I will address these questions by inspecting the hands of Bataille in relation to those of Bellmer, whose work at once illustrates and enhances Bataille’s unspoken obsession with wounded hands. Bataille, known for dividing the body into discrete parts for fetishistic examination9 —the mouth, the big toe, the anus, and, of course, the eye all receive special treatment—never writes specifically about the hand. And yet the hand is everywhere in Bataille’s writings, though perhaps, like Poe’s purloined letter, so obvious as to remain virtually undetected.10 I want to show that for Bataille, the operations of writing are inseparable from an excessive—indeed blinding—desire to see, and that writing is therefore married to certain visual productions of the hand, as in artistic practices. I will illustrate this relation of writing to visual art, a union without unity, by comparing the hands of Bataille to those of Bellmer, whose artistic treatment of wounded and contorted hands reflects an ambivalent relation to his own hands. In addition, we will observe a curious affinity between Bellmer and Bataille that has been overlooked by scholars: their fascination with dictionaries. Attending to their respective treatments of lexicons illuminates how bodies and language, as well as writing and art, are held in tension with each other. This, in turn, reveals the workings of dexterous hands turned against themselves, made to exhibit sacred monstrosity. Indeed, for these thinkers, the hand is a monstrance of sorts, an organ by which the deathly, left-hand aspect of the sacred is manifested.11 The focus on the hand is a

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means of externalizing both the horror and pleasure they seek to explore and evoke, as well as the method for doing so—a way of achieving a ravishment of the senses. And for each man the creations of the hand proceed in successive destructions—through a counter operation of disarticulation that breaches the form of those who commit it, as well as of those who witness it. The writing or drawing of the monstrous thus provokes an experience of monstrous contradiction, or the religious sensibility. A monstrance, the hand also produces monstrosity.

On the One Hand: The Philosophical Tradition of the Hand Unnatural are the devices by which it is contrived to make a man’s left weaker than his right. — p l a t o , The Laws

By all indications, Bataille was right-handed. For example, the narrator of Blue of Noon, with whom it is easy to identify Bataille, grasps the stabbing stylus in his right hand in order to wound his left. But photographic evidence is more to the point. Among the published photographs of the writer, many clearly indicate a dextrally favored Bataille. A boyhood photo from 1907 shows Bataille taking a girlfriend’s hand in his own right one. In a 1920 portrait, Bataille’s right arm rests upon his student’s desk,12 while in 1938 he is photographed with his right hand on the shoulder of his daughter, Laurence. But the photos of Bataille engaged in the act of writing provide the most incontrovertible proof of his right-handedness. I want to focus upon one of these in particular. During his research in the caves of Lascaux, Bataille was photographed seated on a jagged rocky outcropping.13 Above him, on the uneven vault of the cave’s ceiling, are painted bison and other beasts. Adjacent to Bataille’s head an antlered animal head hovers like an avatar of the Minotaur. In his left hand, Bataille holds a notebook. In his right hand, he grasps a pen. More than a simple document of a scholar scrutinizing his subject, this photo speaks to Bataille’s regard for his hands and, by extension, to the relationship of writing and visual art. In chapter 3 I suggested that in his book Lascaux Bataille offers an account of the birth of art that displaces the dominant, Greco-centric account of art’s origins; Bataille’s is a story of art born of the spirit of sacrifice, and from the depths of caves. In the course of

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this chapter we will revisit and elaborate on that suggestion, showing that Bataille is also working to counter the philosophical tradition of the hand. In doing so, I do not mean to suggest that Bataille consciously tried to challenge this tradition in philosophical discourse (though it is not inconceivable, given his sustained interest in the problems of work, that he had this tradition in mind). I mean, rather, to offer an account of an aspect of Bataille’s thought that is brought to light by an investigation into the place of the hand in the history of philosophy and art. An examination of Bataille’s antagonistic relation to this tradition will illuminate his own profoundly ambivalent regard for the notion of work that shapes the hand. Bataille works against the hand. Indeed, the very concept of work is inextricably tied to that organ that accomplishes work. But to Bataille these function not in concert, but antagonistically. A brief look at a few key philosophical works related to the hand will frame this aspect of my argument. To begin, one finds in Plato’s Laws the admonition to be ambidextrous. The favoring of one hand over another is not only unnatural but also at odds with the notions of symmetry and wholeness that Plato deems necessary for the right fruition of techne, or skilled craftsmanship. The balanced interchangeability between right and left hands increases serviceability and production, the patent manifestations of inner being.14 Balanced hands, in other words, felicitously give shape to things. Though Hegel does not extend Plato’s insistence on ambidexterity, he does elaborate on the relation of the hand to work. As chapter 1 showed, for Bataille, Hegel is the thinker of work par excellence. In particular, Hegel articulates the relationships between inner desires and outer activity, between the individual’s invisible being and his manifest productions. In The Phenomenology of Spirit he discusses physiology in relation to work, claiming that not only is the working hand an operative organ—like the speaking mouth, which functions to produce the goods of labor; it is itself the creation of that labor. The ‘‘human shape and form’’ are thus the result of laborious activity as much as the means by which such activity takes place.15 Decades later, Friedrich Engels will echo Hegel’s analysis, asserting that ‘‘the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.’’16 Moreover, like Hegel, Engels links the work of the hand with language, insisting that humans distinguish themselves evolutionarily from their simian counterparts through labor, which culminates in speech.

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Hegel, whose account lacks Engels’s Darwinian inflections, nonetheless has much to say about speech and work, verbal articulation and manual labor. According to Hegel, the mouth that speaks and the hand that works are the organs through which ‘‘a man manifests and actualizes himself.’’ He claims that ‘‘we may say of the hand that it is what a man does, for in it as the effective organ of his self-fulfillment, he is there present as the animating soul.’’17 The hand not only works; it is the product of work. Similarly, the mouth is not only the organ of speech; it is also the outcome of speech: ‘‘Language and manual labour are outer expressions in which the individual no longer retains possession of himself per se, but lets the inner get right outside him.’’18 The spoken word is, in this sense, what delineates the mouth, what separates the mouth from the rest of the body as an organ produced by a particular function. The mouth, says Hegel, is that organ by which the self-reflecting individual ‘‘[converses] with himself,’’ thereby giving ‘‘articulate expression to this self-reflexion.’’19 But whereas spoken articulation breaks the silence of unexpressed inner being, it is the hand that lends otherwise ephemeral speech a ‘‘more durable existence’’ in the form of writing. More specifically, ‘‘the particular style of ‘handwriting’ ’’ supplements durability with the marks of a certain character, the ‘‘innate peculiarity of the individual along with what these become as the result of cultivation and development.’’20 For Hegel, speech is realized most fully not in the work of the mouth, but in the elision of the difference between speech and handiwork, articulation and manual labor. Heidegger, too, emphasizes the connection between (and indeed unity of ) speech and the hand. According to Heidegger, only thinking creatures—humans—have hands: ‘‘Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands,’’ he writes, explaining that ‘‘only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving the works of handicraft [Handwerk].’’ However, the converse is also true—only a being with hands is capable of thinking: ‘‘[T]he hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. . . . Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element.’’ The profound unity of gesture and speech—gesture as speech, or thinking—is brought to the fore when Heidegger speculates that ‘‘perhaps thinking, too, is just something like build-

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ing a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a ‘handicraft.’ ‘Craft’ literally means the strength and skill in our hands.’’21 He confirms his conjecture in an eloquent passage: But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness [Einfalt]. The hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft.22

The sign language that Heidegger articulates here is thus a kind of craft, or skilled work—an occasion of techne. Moreover, this sign language is not only the product of man; it also produces man in the moment of its articulation; man himself is a sign, Heidegger claims. The unity of thinking and craft, of language and handiwork, is nowhere more manifest than in the silent but profound gesture of two hands enfolded—perhaps in a handshake, perhaps in prayer: a gesture that delivers man into ‘‘the great oneness.’’ Heidegger published these remarks in 1954, as Bataille conducted his research in the obscurity of the caves of Lascaux. But what Heidegger and the other philosophers speak of is relevant to Bataille’s thought.23 For each of these thinkers, ‘‘the hand is a play of showing . . . of revealing and at the same time of hiding a truth of being.’’24 In Plato, the desired eradication of difference, of imbalance, between the hands is in the service of techne’s manifestations. In Hegel as in Heidegger, the work of the hand at once realizes and hides the work of thought; in the most exemplary instances it is the hand, and not speech, that manifests thinking. For Hegel, handwriting makes visible and durable what speech can only render in its ephemeral, invisible medium. And for Heidegger, enfolded hands visibly signify a ‘‘great oneness’’—an eloquent silence that speaks more profoundly than verbal speech itself. This show of hands is what Heidegger calls, by virtue of a curious but significant translation elaborated by Derrida, ‘‘monstrosity.’’25 Indeed, the hand is, according to Heidegger and others, a de-monstration, the organ for showing or revealing, signing or signifying. But, perhaps paradoxically, the monstrosity of the hands is achieved not through some deformation that might aptly be called monstrous, but rather through the cultivation of

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dexterity. The dexterous and monstrous hand produces man, unifies man in an integral shape, the very antithesis of the monster. Plato’s vision of a natural balance of hands suggests a form of the human to which only a symmetrical, whole, balanced person might conform. Hegel, too, makes explicit the hand’s role in achieving ‘‘human shape and form.’’26 In manifesting the inner desires by shaping exterior products, the hand, by Hegel’s construal, represses the distinction between inside and outside. And with his equation of thought and handiwork, Heidegger insists that man is a crafted being, a being formed by ‘‘the strength and skill in our hands.’’27 For each of these thinkers, the hands are tools dedicated to giving shape not only to the things of the world, but to man himself. Hands are to be balanced, dexterous, unified, unifying; the two hands work together as a single unit—a single hand in the service of the creation of form. This single hand—this synthesized, dexterous hand, whether Platonic, Hegelian, or Heideggerian—is always the right hand. Indeed, the etymology of ‘‘dexterous’’ (from the Greek dexios, situated on the right) suggests as much; one might say that the work of unification, skilled production, and formation is always the work of the right hand. The right hand holds the tool, be it a hammer or a pen,28 that crafts the world as well as the individual. Bataille also grasps the pen in his right hand. But for Bataille the work of writing is opposed to the dexterous productions exalted by the philosophers under consideration here. In fact, in turning the pen against himself in an act of writerly automutilation, Bataille illustrates the kind of counter operation that has been discussed in previous chapters: a work that undoes work—a sacrificial operation. Not only is this gesture sacrificial, something on par with the sacrificial mutiliation enacted by Van Gogh that Bataille fervently emulates in his own writing; it demonstrates, or monstrously displays, a certain aspect of the sacred. Chapter 2 introduced the fissure running through the concept of the sacred, the Durkheimian distinction between left- and right-hand aspects of the sacred that Bataille ceaselessly explores. I will argue in the following pages that for Bataille, writing and art are conceived as monstrous acts, sacrificial operations that demonstrate the internecine aspect of the sacred. They are acts that do not assume the enfolding of two hands into a single right one, but rather insist on the separateness and separability of the hands. Indeed, if Bataille writes with his right hand, it is only the better to injure himself and his readers—and this sacrifice depends on an adroitness that seeks to work against itself, agonistically. In a constantly re-enacted passion, Bataille turns right hand against

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left; he grasps the knife or pen with his right hand, only to stain the page with the blood of his wounded left hand.29 As Bataille himself puts it, in a sentence that at once confirms and, as we will see, contradicts Hegel and Heidegger, ‘‘Writing, thinking, are never the opposite of work.’’30 An examination of the hands of Bataille and Bellmer will demonstrate the sacrificial operation at work in Bataille’s writings and in certain other artistic practices. A scrap of paper found among Bataille’s notes provides the starting point for an analysis of the erotics of identification at work both in Bataille’s writings and in the sinister productions of Hans Bellmer. I will then turn to a discussion of artistic elegance in the service of decay, dexterity in the service of monstrosity. Finally, I will examine Bataille’s fascination with the origins of art in the caves of Lascaux, where one finds the painted traces of mutilated hands. These hands provide a way of understanding Bataille’s use of his own hands, suggesting a monstrous mode of reading, writing, and artistic creation that insists on the alteration of artist and audience alike.

‘‘Aggressive Fingers, Grasping after Form’’: Hans Bellmer’s Elegant Decay I set out to dismember language / but went too far / and now myself am spoken. —robert kelly

We may begin with an instance that is, at an initial glance, less sanguinary than one might expect of a writer for whom the pen doubles as a sword. It is a manuscript page taken from Bataille’s notes about a ‘‘universal history.’’ Throughout much of his writing life, Bataille harbored the ‘‘ambition to write a universal history, a single volume encompassing all of the developments and reversals of human culture and consciousness, from the cave paintings to the concentration camps, by way of the sacred.’’31 This page is covered with words in Bataille’s handwriting. Nothing like Nietzsche’s jagged script in its rigid stacks of lines, Bataille’s curvilinear lettering, drawn along intersecting arcs and angles, inscribes nearly every part of the paper. The writing is elegant, and many individual words on this densely cluttered page are legible—or nearly so. Near the middle of the page is what was likely the starting-point for Bataille’s universal history, a phrase whose ambiguous rendering allows it to be read either as ‘‘le centre de l’Etre’’ (the center of Being) or ‘‘le centre de l’Etna’’ (the center of Mt. Etna), which amounts to the same thing for Bataille.32

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From this center issues everything else: One finds on Bataille’s page Emily Bronte¨, Ho¨lderlin, and Sade; prehistory and the end of history (Hegel); the Greeks and the Bible; Van Gogh and le supplice. Toward the top of the page, one can discern what appears to be the name ‘‘Gru¨newald.’’ And one can also make out, in the lower left corner of the page, the name ‘‘Bellmer.’’ This artist’s name, however, appears here beneath one of the many X’s that mark up the paper. It would seem that Bataille, having initially included Bellmer in his universal history, intended to put the artist under erasure. But beneath the letters of Bellmer’s name appears a series of dots, a line of black ink spots—the manuscript editor’s mark indicating that the deleted item should be retained.33 Bellmer, having been erased, is reinscribed in the universal history. The simultaneous erasure and inscription of Bellmer is an apt visual metaphor for the contradictory affects that Bellmer himself sought to provoke both in himself and others through his art—an unrelenting mixture of being and nothingness, of torrid sexual passion and cool, lucid reflection, of dramatic decomposition rendered through technical precision. Michel Camus emphasizes just this combination of adroitness and convulsiveness: ‘‘At once crafty and spontaneous, Bellmer’s drawings are never static.’’ In a manner that confounds the Heideggerian emphasis on the unity of the hands, Bellmer’s hands are dedicated to producing images crafty and well-crafted, but also spontaneous and erotically agitating. They are, as I will discuss in detail below, deftly rendered to conjure a durable sexual shudder. As Camus says of Bellmer’s art, ‘‘It is rhythmic, like erotic activity.’’ This comparison is precise, for erotic activity provokes, and is elicited by, the ‘‘contradictory phantasms’’ guiding the movement of Bellmer’s hands—a ‘‘geometric incandescence’’ marking the ‘‘coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness.’’34 Bellmer’s eroticism is thus wholly consonant with Bataille’s notion of eroticism, which he characterizes as ‘‘assenting to life up to the point of death,’’ and ‘‘even in death’’35—and indeed Camus is theorizing Bellmer’s erotics through an analysis of the artist’s illustrations for the 1939 printing of Bataille’s Story of the Eye. That Bataille and Bellmer should have become involved in this collaboration would seem almost foreordained, so attuned is the work of one to the other. ‘‘Never perhaps have an artist and a writer found greater harmony of temperaments’’ as Bataille and Bellmer, one commentator has suggested.36

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But if the temperaments of Bataille and Bellmer evince harmony, it is above all in relation to eroticism, which for writer and artist alike is never a matter of harmonious relations—it is a coincidence of opposites, a lacerating contradiction of life and death, being and nothingness. Though Bellmer strenuously denied the existence of the God who for Bataille was rendered dead, absent, or still crying out from the cross, he nonetheless demonstrates, to a startling degree, what Bataille calls the ‘‘religious sensibility.’’37 In Bataille’s most sustained and systematic treatise on eroticism, he claims that eroticism and religious experience coincide on this point: Both ‘‘[link] desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and anguish’’; it is this coincidence of opposites that defines the religious sensibility. In this same book, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Bataille claims that ‘‘eroticism as seen by the objective intelligence is something monstrous, just like religion.’’38 In the following three subsections, we will see that Bellmer illustrates precisely this monstrous, sacred aspect of eroticism through his dexterous artistic productions, which exhibit a coincidence of life and death, and provoke an experience of simultaneous pleasure and anguish. i. golgotha: eroticism and contradiction

Hans Bellmer was born in 1902 in Katowice, Poland. In 1923, at the age of twenty-one, he was brought by his father to Germany, where he pursued studies at the Berlin Polytechnical Institute.39 Bellmer remained in Berlin until 1938, when his first wife, Margarete, died. His father was an ardent member of the Nazi party, and Bellmer was thus well acquainted with the social and political climate of Nazi Germany. Detesting authority, Bellmer was hostile not only to his overbearing father, but also to the state.40 Seeking a way to indulge the perverse erotic desires deemed unacceptable by the regime, and eager to outrage that same regime,41 in 1933 Bellmer conceived the work for which he is probably best known: ‘‘die Puppe’’ (‘‘the doll’’).42 Though Bellmer’s remarkable talents as a draughtsman are evident in his drawings and engravings, it is in the creation of his doll, or ‘‘articulated minor,’’ as he dubbed it, that his consummate skills are put to their most obsessive ends43 (figure 3). Made of a sturdy kind of papier-maˆche´, and carefully sculpted around a central ball joint, the doll is organic and lifelike, as well as inhumanly robotic.44 Exhibiting pronouncedly feminine curvatures,45 the doll is woman-like in shape but girlish in stature and visage.

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Figure 3. Hans Bellmer, La Poupe´e, 1938 (printed 1949 or earlier). Vintage gelatin silver print, blind-stamped by the artist’s estate, 5 5/8 ⳯ 5 1/2 inches (14.3 ⳯ 14 cm), Ubu Gallery, New York / Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

Reminiscent of Lacan’s ‘‘dehiscent imago,’’46 she is constructed so as to separate at prominent joints, some corresponding to the body’s natural composition, and others introduced by the artist. (For example, the breasts could be removed, and large, ocular ball joints put in their place).47 In addition to fashioning all the requisite parts for an intact body, Bellmer duplicated the legs, arms, upper torso, pelvis, and breasts, allowing him to fetishistically double the doll’s body, while thereby heightening its mechanical appearance.48 This skillfully achieved coincidence of lifelike attributes and lifeless, threatening mechanicity49 is one demonstration of Bellmer’s aptitude for obtaining that unsettling combination of vim and

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morbidity that distinguishes his—and Bataille’s—contradictory variety of eroticism. And it is this same simultaneous sexual seductiveness and uncanny50 anguish that lends the doll its almost universally acknowledged power to incite excessive erotic appeal,51 and which finds its perfect correlate in Bataille’s notion of religious sensibility. The religious sensibility is characterized by this combination of contradictory affects, and is achieved through the transgression of interdictions.52 Of the many the expressions of religious transgression, the crucifixion of Christ remains, for Bataille, among the most potent. Indeed, it is the sacrificed Christ who, as chapter 4 showed, exemplifies a host of paradoxes, embodying abjection and purity, sin and perfection, life and death. And while Bellmer seems to have rejected even this contradictory incarnation of God, he was nonetheless profoundly affected by his own experience of Christ at Golgotha in 1932, when he traveled to Colmar to see Gru¨newald’s altarpiece.53 Bellmer’s regard for the altarpiece can be apprehended with particular acuity by applying Bataille’s concepts of monstrosity and sacrifice to the artist’s erotic visual productions. ii. the hands of hans bellmer: dexterity in the service of monstrosity

Bellmer’s visit to Colmar in 1932 followed a vacation in Tunisia undertaken for his tuberculin wife’s health, as well as his own. Even though the salubrious effects of the vacation may have forestalled Margarete’s demise,54 Bellmer himself hardly achieved any relief for his profound and enduring ‘‘anxiety and unhappiness.’’55 Indeed, the artist’s anguish in the presence of his ailing wife exacerbated his already acute nervous anxiety—an anxiety likely not assuaged by the abject vision of the Isenheim Altarpiece. This altarpiece was originally installed at the Hospital Order of St. Anthony, where it served as an object of contemplation for ailing patients. Though the triptych may have inspired health-procuring prayers from its original audience, it is not clear that Bellmer’s devotions were directed toward such ends. Sue Taylor, marshaling insights from Freud’s Totem and Taboo in her psychoanalytic treatment of Bellmer, notes that ‘‘belief in the power of prayer is not inconsistent with a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and the techniques of magic, which conform to an ancient, animistic conception of the universe.’’ Taylor intimates that Bellmer, though decisively atheist, might have undertaken the journey as an act of prayer for the

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obtainment of health. But she also goes on to explicitly assert that Bellmer frequently photographs his doll in postures that echo those of Gru¨newald’s Christ, in a manner that ‘‘underscores the mutilated condition of the body itself.’’ She further contends that ‘‘whenever Bellmer invoked Gru¨newald’s painting, it was the emotionally anguished female figure that preoccupied his conscious mind. His attention did not (dare?) alight on the contorted body of Christ, the beaten Son he himself unconsciously wished to be, but focused instead on Mary Magdalene.’’56 These accounts may appear in tension with each other—but if so, they are all the more revealing as such. On the one hand, contemplation of the altarpiece evinces a will to health; on the other hand, the central figure of the triptych, an icon of mutilation, evokes a heightened sense of woundedness shot through with fleshly desire. Moreover, Bellmer’s attention would indeed seem to focus upon the body of Christ; in fact, as Taylor suggests, he poses his doll in multiple bodily imitationes christi.57 I offer here a Bataillean reading of Bellmer’s regard for the crucified Christ that exploits these very tensions, thereby exposing the contradictions that Bellmer’s work induces in its audience. For Bellmer, the power of the Isenheim Altarpiece lies neither in the promise and pleasure of health nor in the portrayal of agony, but rather in the coincidence of the two. As an image that at once comforts with the assurance of renewed bodily integrity58 even as it assaults the psyche with the spectacular image of physical harm, the altarpiece exemplifies the combination of ‘‘intense pleasure and anguish’’ that Bataille defines as the religious sensibility. Additionally, the altarpiece is an emphatically erotic icon for Bellmer. Indeed, Bellmer relishes the anguish of Magdalene: ‘‘Think of the Magdalene in tears,’’ Bellmer writes, ‘‘in her grief, she wrings not only her hands but also her head, her hair, the rags that cover her body and even her toes. When the reaction or gesture of a person does not find expression in the whole of their body . . . I am no longer interested.’’59 But Magdalene’s sensible anguish is underwritten by an erotic desire—a desire exacerbated by separation from her beloved, who hangs on the cross, and expressed in corporeal torsions. This much is evidenced by the Magdalenian declensions that the profoundly eroticized doll is made to suffer at the hands of Bellmer, as I will discuss below.60 But if the doll incarnates the anguish of Magdalene, she also imitates the agony of Christ; her postures are inflected by both

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figures. This observation provides a clue how to read Bellmer’s doll and his relations with her.61 Bellmer was explicit about his own erotic identifications with the doll. While the doll allowed Bellmer to enact his violent and apparently pedophilic fantasies on a perfectly submissive—but also non-sentient—entity, she was also the site of excruciated identification. The doll not only suffers sadistic manipulations, but is the medium through which Bellmer is able masochistically to alter his own identity. Through the doll, Bellmer adopts the position of both Magdalenian witness to, and Christ-like victim of, his own desires; he is at once the aggressive orchestator of perverse sexual scenarios and the harassed and tortured object of those scenarios—the agent and victim of humiliation. Bellmer’s work, particularly as it relates to the altarpiece, is thus akin to an act of sacrificial automutilation that might be understood in the Bataillean register of monstrosity. In his numismatic essay ‘‘Le cheval acade´mique,’’ Bataille argues that the ‘‘monster-horses’’ inscribed by Gauls on certain coins are not the result of inept craftsmanship. On the contrary, they are the expression of a rage against the authoritative, ‘‘elevated’’ form of the Greek horse, a willful ‘‘transgression of the rules’’ that expresses a ‘‘monstrous mentality’’ committed to turning the skills of its hands to rebellious ends. No mere ‘‘technical shortcoming,’’ the Gaulish horses, both ‘‘deformed’’ and ‘‘formless,’’ represent a ‘‘positive extravagance,’’ according to Bataille.62 This baroque prodigiousness, deftly executed, thus amounts to a counter operation— work dedicated to undoing form or, as Bataille puts it elsewhere, to creation by means of ‘‘successive destructions.’’63 The concept of monstrosity that Bataille articulates in this essay— monstrosity as a destructive mode of creation—parallels his notion of sacrificial mutilation, as discussed in his examination of Van Gogh’s severed ear. Bataille opens his investigation with an image that evokes the self-mutilating narrator of his later Blue of Noon. He relates the macabre tale of Gaston F. who, seized by a violent mental attack, and under the hypnotic instruction of the sun, grips his left index finger between his teeth, breaking the skin and tendons before completing the work by ‘‘using his right hand’’ to twist ‘‘the extremity of the dilacerated left index finger, severing it completely.’’ It is again the right hand that accomplishes the mutilating act of violence against the left hand. The severed left finger is, according to Bataille, the abject emblem of a pathological ‘‘necessity of throwing oneself or

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something of oneself out of oneself.’’ This need for ‘‘radical alteration’’— alteration to the point of monstrosity—is the expression of the ‘‘spirit of sacrifice’’ that underwrites the religio-erotic sensibility that preoccupies Bataille and compels Bellmer’s perverse creations.64 This point is brought home particularly when taking note of Bataille’s emphasis on the sense of contradiction that impels sacrificial work; it attests to the agonizing ‘‘equivalence of opposing elements,’’ an equivalence dramatically realized in ‘‘the close identification of the one who humiliates with the one humiliated.’’ In the specifically religious realm, this coincidence of opposites takes the form of a kind of sacrificial peripety: The sacrificer, Bataille asserts, reverses his fortune, continuously identifying with the vicitim.65 The Bataillean notions of sacrificial mutilation (in which sacrificer and victim are united) and monstrosity (in which creation proceeds by the destruction of authoritative forms) together provide an apt framework for understanding Bellmer’s regard for the Isenheim Altarpiece as well as the construction of his doll. By 1932, when Bellmer first beheld the altarpiece, he was not only harboring the acute hatred for his authoritative father that had been gathering since childhood, but also growing increasingly hateful of the National Socialist Party, which under Hitler’s leadership was now ascending at an alarming speed. It was thus in a climate of residual paternal hatred and exigent political disgust that Bellmer visited Colmar with his ailing wife. And it was in the days following this visit that Bellmer quit his job in advertising and design, announcing that he would ‘‘give up all work which, even indirectly, could be in any way useful to the State.’’66 In fact, he set out to accomplish specifically ‘‘useless’’ work, to set his skilled hands to the task of creating a body of work that would not only be of no value to the government, but which ‘‘might constitute a critical response to the authoritarianism of the Nazi regime.’’67 Bellmer, in other words, conceives of his artistic endeavors as a counter work. Without insisting on any causal connections between Bellmer’s visit to the altarpiece and his subsequent decision to reverse the course of his work, one may discern in his emotional reaction to Gru¨newald’s painting adumbrations of the sort of peripeties that will characterize his art and his eroticism thereafter. The simultaneous fascination and horror that Bellmer registers when facing the altarpiece evinces a spirit of contradiction and the impulsion of sudden reversals. Taking into account Bellmer’s paternally

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provoked anxieties as well as his contempt for the Fatherland, we will find that Bellmer reverses the dominant reading of the crucifixion; he makes the lama sabachthani not a despairing cry of abandonment, but rather a proclamation of rejection and revolt. The mutilated body of Christ becomes, in Bellmer’s hands, not a figment of God the absconder, but an icon of monstrosity, a vision of the Son who has repudiated the Father by mutilating himself.68 This reading is supported by provocative biographical data.69 The artist’s father, Hans Bellmer, Sr., had been an engineer until 1931, when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, forcing him to retire from the profession that he sought to impose upon his son.70 Hans, Sr., was thus ‘‘rendered strangely impotent—without the use of his right arm.’’71 This curious turn—in which the father, who had sought to channel his son’s skills toward productive ends, loses the very organ (his right hand) that had guaranteed his own usefulness—was still fresh in Bellmer’s mind as he visited the altarpiece. The sudden reversal in his father, from potent to impotent, from dexterous to inept, inflects Bellmer’s approach to Gru¨newald’s work, converting it from an affirmation of the omnipotent Father’s fulfilled will to the confirmation of the Father’s impotence before the image of the mutilated, sacrificial Son. So by way of a reversed or inverted crucifixion, Christ is, for Bellmer, a vision of rebellious potency achieved through injury—or health obtained by unhealth. Christ becomes the very image of the revolting, useless Son who undermines the Father’s putative omnipotence. Bellmer’s anguish before the altarpiece is thus coincident, by way of a sudden reversal, with an ecstatic affirmation of a masochistic and subversive joy. It is this image of a monstrous Christ—a figure whose torment provokes ecstasy, and whose mutilated condition functions as a strange dexterity—with which Bellmer identifies.72 The coincidence of opposites also calls to mind Bataille’s religious sensibility, and in particular his anguished ecstasy before the photos of the hundred-pieces torture, discussed in chapter 1. In these horrific images Bataille finds ‘‘an infinite capacity for reversal’’ in violence so ‘‘insane’’ that it occasions ecstasy. ‘‘What I suddenly saw,’’ Bataille writes in concluding his history of eroticism and religion, ‘‘was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.’’73 Identifying with the tortured, monstrous other, one both empathically affirms horror, even while

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being delivered into ecstasy. The victim of the hundred-pieces torture, the Christ of Gru¨newald’s altarpiece, and the abused doll modeled after it: Each of these is an icon of a contradictory religious sensibility; each is the object of tortured identification and erotic compassion; each provokes a passion through which the identity of the viewer is ecstatically altered. Through dramatic sacrificial identification, the abject victim is also the sacrificer, ‘‘suddenly outside of himself.’’74 In this sacrificial, monstrous register, Bellmer’s doll is revealed as the projected double of Bellmer; indeed, ‘‘the doll operates as Bellmer’s alter ego.’’75 But in addition to this abject and projected other, Hans Bellmer also has a rejected other: Hans Bellmer, Sr. The artist himself is in every way the monstrous double of the father whom he repudiates. Whereas the father is authoritative, the son is insubordinate; whereas the engineer imposes form and upholds norms, the artist deforms and transgresses;76 and whereas Hans Bellmer, Sr., from all indications, seeks to hew with his skilled hands his own steadfast character, the younger Hans revokes such equilibrium, seeking instead a continuous alteration of his identity through the variable contortions of his doll. Recalling chapter 2’s discussion of the duality of the sacred, it might be said that the younger Bellmer is the left-hand counterpart to the father’s right-hand fascism.77 A note of irony sounds here, for it was the father who lost the use of his right hand, and the son whose right hand continued to produce works of renowned elegance. And yet, this Icarian reversal is a perfect demonstration of the method of reversal that Bellmer and Bataille alike put to use in their counter operations. In a manner that could only have delighted the son, the elder Bellmer succumbed to maladroitness; he had only the awkward use of his left hand to rely upon. By contrast, the younger Bellmer maintained the use of a skilled right hand, but put it to strictly left-handed work, enacting an automutilation on par with that of the narrator of Blue of Noon. Bellmer, in other words, like Batille, uses his right hand to injure himself, and to demonstrate—dramatically, monstrously—the wounds he inflicts. Recalling the overview of the philosophical tradition of the hand that introduced this chapter, I want to show here how Bellmer’s dexterity is put not to the ends of equilibrium and useful craftsmanship, but rather to exacerbating tension—the tension between visual art and language, the products of the hand and the outcome of speech. At once doubling and rejecting his father, Bellmer paradoxically enacts the role of the lame, use-

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less hand by the dexterous use of this hand; moreover, he subverts the normative, authoritative speech of his father by engendering a subversive, erotic speech created by means of a continual disarticulation verging on silence. Bellmer mocks his father by simultaneously exhibiting the adroitness his father has lost, while also putting that adroitness to useless, or lame—but also positively extravagant78 —ends. Taken as a whole, this counter operation, encompassing Bellmer’s career as an artist, takes on the aspect of a sinister monstrance—an elegant exhibition of the left-hand sacred. iii. the monstrous dictionary: identification and disarticulation Your passion decomposes you scrupulously. —hans bellmer

In 1931, Hans Bellmer, Sr., lost the use of his right hand; in 1932, Hans Bellmer, Jr., beheld Gru¨newald’s altarpiece; and in 1933, the artist began constructing the first of two dolls that (or who) would remain his erotic companions thereafter.79 This concatenation of events brings to the fore an obsession in Bellmer that is expressed as a monstrous proliferation of arms and hands in his graphic work; he makes the hand and its multiplications the site of an erotic scene of ecstatic wounding. And this wounding is the manifestation of the desire to see—in particular, to see what our eyes find intolerable: death and the coincidence of life and death.80 We have seen that Bellmer models his doll after both Magdalene and Christ. A closer look at these contorted biblical bodies will allow us better to understand the erotic and contradictory functions of the doll. Part of the doll’s peculiar character comes from the tension created by its embodiment of both a male and a female figure. Such gender mixing, if less patent in the doll than in Bellmer’s graphic corpus, nonetheless enhances the erotic reversibility that Bellmer actively pursued and exploited in his work. Bellmer was fixated upon hermaphrodites and androgynes, speaking of ‘‘the hermaphrodite in me.’’81 These sexually confused figures were, for him, emblems of transgression, of an erotic rage undercutting the either/or sexual normativity imposed by his father and by the Nazi state.82 But more than this, sexual reversibility is for this artist a way of enhancing erotic tension. Conjuring drawn images that represent a coincidence of

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the sexes,83 and achieving, by way of the bizarre articulations of the doll, a figure feminine in secondary sexual characteristics but phallic in posture,84 Bellmer engenders a mythical iconography of the hermaphrodite that arises not from an impulse toward synthetic unity, but rather lacerating contradiction. ‘‘The masculine and the feminine become interchangeable images, straining against each other in the alloy [alliage] of the hermaphrodite.’’85 The alliage of the hermaphrodite, far from a resolution, is above all the site of an extreme tension—not only between the difference of the sexes, but in the simultaneous separation and union embodied by the hermaphrodite itself. Possessing one body that is also two, this single but sexually doubled figure is rent by the separation (what Bataille calls ‘‘discontinuity’’) of one being from another—the heart of erotic longing. Thus the ‘‘peculiar hermaphrodite interconnection’’86 is at the same time an image of separation and contradiction, like hands clasped but irremediably sundered. Bellmer reverses the myth of the Androgyne as an account of reunification, turning it into a graphic story of perpetual dismemberment, eternal longing—the creation of erotic art by a series of consecutive destructions.87 In much the same way as he deviates from the Platonic tradition of the hand, Bellmer, in another reversal of tradition, makes the synthetic, balanced Androgyne the very figure of an open wound. Peter Webb rightly emphasizes that even though ‘‘the Androgyne was a myth of corporeal redemption,’’ it would ‘‘be a mistake to associate . . . Bellmer’s ideas of the Androgyne with the attainment of a state of sexual tranquility or appeasement.’’ Rather, ‘‘it is the violence of love, leading even to madness, that confers on it its sacredness. The appearance of the Androgyne thus represents for Bellmer an extreme point of the exacerbation of desire.’’88 The hermaphroditic interpenetration of the sexes does not attenuate longing but prolongs the agonizing tension of erotic contradiction. This union without unity arises again in relation to Gru¨newald’s altarpiece as Bellmer reproduces the uncanny hands of both Magdalene and Christ in his artwork. Indeed, Bellmer’s fascination with hands is evident throughout his corpus, from the early period in which he constructed the doll, to his later work, such as his ‘‘Articulated Hands’’ (figure 4). No feature of this corpus so clearly attests to the enduring influence of Gru¨newald’s altarpiece as Bellmer’s portrayal of hands, and nowhere does the artist so clearly reverse the Heideggerian notion that the human hand is destined to produce and express an integral human character. Bellmer’s hands manifest

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Figure 4. Hans Bellmer, German (born Poland), 1902–75, Les mains articule´es, 1954, color lithograph on white wove paper, image: 27.7 ⳯ 37.1 cm; sheet: 42 ⳯ 55.6 cm, Stanley Field Fund, 1972.32, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography 䉷 The Art Institute of Chicago.

not the enfolded oneness proclaimed by the philosopher, but rather a convulsive, hermaphroditic duplicity expressed in a monstrous proliferation of hands that are contorted and wounded—sometimes convulsively clasped together like Magdalene’s, and sometimes sundered like Christ’s. Though more lithe and delicate than those of Gru¨newald’s Christ, and not convulsed like Magdalene’s, the doll’s hands nonetheless bear the marks of their dual inspiration. They are similarly posed, and, detachable at the wrists, they exhibit the uncanny separability I attributed to the hands of Christ at the outset of this chapter. This separability is again evinced in a peculiar set of photographs that Bellmer took in 1935. These represent a confluence of associations in Bellmer’s corpus, between the altarpiece, on the one hand, and, on the other, the research of psychiatrist Paul Schilder, author of a study on Ko¨rperschema (body image). Working with amputees and hemiplegics suffering paralysis (like Hans Bellmer, Sr., did) Schilder investigated his subjects’ perceptions of their bodies. His patients partici-

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pated in such exercises as the ‘‘Japanese illusion,’’ in which ‘‘one crosses one elbow above the other and intertwines the fingers and thumbs around the hands,’’ and is then ‘‘ordered by pointing to move a specific finger.’’ Schilder concludes that ‘‘double-twisting the optic and tactile sensations’’ in this way necessitates that the patient rebuild his or her body image.89 Intrigued by the findings of this study, Bellmer executes a series of blackand-white photographs that, mimicking the experiments described by Schilder, portray pairs of contorted hands with fingers variously entwined. As Taylor points out, ‘‘it is not clear whether the hands belong to one person or two, whether they are male or female, even whether . . . they are left or right.’’90 While posing this tensive confusion of opposites, these monstrous hands also reveal the reversibility, or transgression, of the senses themselves. Schilder concludes that ‘‘one of the most important characteristics of psychic life is the tendency to multiply images and to vary them with every multiplication.’’91 Bellmer’s graphic work abundantly affirms this conclusion, with the delirious proliferation of body parts: breasts, anuses, legs, eyes, and perhaps above all, hands. Indeed, ‘‘the multiplication of hands is a favourite theme of Bellmer’s.’’92 Bellmer explicitly relates this intense ‘‘multiplication of hands’’93 to one of his enduring interests: monstrosity.94 In fact, he reasons that monstrous deviations of nature95 affirm his own sinister artistic practice of dividing, multiplying, and interchanging body parts. But not only does Bellmer transpose and proliferate organs; in doing so, he also seeks to recreate the confusion and transgression of the senses elicited by Schilder’s corporeal experiments. Through his experiments, Schilder disorients the normal interplay of the optic and the tactile sensations that create a stable body-image. Bellmer, in his photographs, repeats this process, entwining hands in a manner that enhances their separation—like the Androgyne, they are held together, but in an unresolvable duplicity that disorients and confuses. From another perspective, the hands of the photographs recall those of Magdalene—not enfolded into one, but clasped in a convulsive tension that portrays erotic longing. These photos thus reenact Schilder’s experiments, but cast the hands as erotic and sensual as well as contorted and confused. It is in holding the hands together—as opposites, as separate—that the optic and tactile sensations are disoriented, confused: sensual transgression, an orgy of organs.96

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Bellmer literalizes this confusion of senses in his graphic work as well as his written texts in a way indebted to Schilder. Both Therese Lichtenstein and Taylor emphasize the influence of Schilder on Bellmer’s formulation of the concept of the physical unconscious, which ‘‘revolves around the symbolic interchange of body parts, under the influence of the emotions or of organic disease, as repeatedly described by Schilder.’’97 Bellmer appropriates the psychiatrist’s assertion that any anatomical part can be replaced by another, ‘‘every round part can represent another . . . [and] every hole can be interchanged with another.’’98 In a manner that recalls Roland Barthes’s analysis of Bataille’s Story of the Eye, with its ‘‘counterdivision of objects, usages, meanings, spaces, and properties, which is eroticism itself,’’ Bellmer not only enacts metonymical transfers between the rounded navel, breasts, and eyes in his doll, or the anus and the eyeball in his drawn figures;99 he also attempts—in his drawings, and in the very act of drawing—to confuse the operations of the organs, giving vision to the hand, hearing to the mouth, and so forth. Bellmer writes: How can one see with the hand, hear with the eyes, listen with the mouth? The body is the theater of a thousand jokes and strange games. A little girl . . . loses vision and acquires the faculty of seeing by the tip of her nose or by her earlobe. Her sense of smell is displaced to [se de´place´] her heel. Another reads with her hand in darkness [l’obscurite´].100

The hand not only sees; it also reads, even—or only—in the dark. This confusion of senses and organs, and the accompanying notion of reading in obscurity, evidences Bellmer’s fascination with hysterical transfers,101 particularly between the eye and the hand, unseeing vision and lucent tactility. The drawn portrayal of confused bodies—of twisted, multiplied, and opposed hands clamoring upon each other orgiastically—as well as the written suppositions heralding a reversal of senses and organs, together show what cannot be seen in any literal sense: an identity of opposites, a reversal that issues in the lived realization of a contradiction—an experience that Bataille calls ‘‘religious.’’ Bellmer’s drawings and writings insist that the viewer/ reader experience the contradiction they seek to portray—between the optic and the tactile, the written and the drawn, separation and intimacy, one hand and another—in a kind of synesthesia of horror. He creates for his audience as well as for himself a cast of monstrous doubles that invites—or incites—identification, even while eliciting an experience of decomposition

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or violent disorientation. Like Schilder’s experiments, Bellmer’s skilled hands possess ‘‘aggressive fingers, grasping after form’’102—while in the same gesture refusing form. They render art that performs the counter operation of destroying a unified, integral sense of self, a well-formed character. It is on this point that we may again return to Gru¨newald’s altarpiece, for it is in some sense the basis of the reversals and contradictions under discussion here. Thus far I have emphasized the influence of Magdalene’s clenched hands; I want to focus now on the hands of Christ. If the Magdalenian aspect of Bellmer’s hands manifests a holding-together of opposites, the Christly aspect of his hands allow Bellmer’s audience to see another intolerable sight: bodily disarticulation. But Bellmer, in a perverse imitatio christi, reverses the predominant notion of the word made flesh, turning flesh into a word, or into a wounded sentence—a linguistic unit subject to endless tortures and open to recurring alterations. In Gru¨newald’s altarpiece, Magdalene’s hands are entwined. Christ’s hands are not only separated, nailed to the antipodes of the horizontal beam of the cross; they are also separable from the rest of his body, remaining distinctly rigid, and thus rigidly distinct from the limp body. And the separability of these separated hands is doubled within each individual hand: The spikes that separate one hand from the other likewise separate each hand from itself, with wounds parting flesh from flesh. Bellmer’s fascination with uncanny doubling is well documented, and has been the subject of ample scholarly analysis.103 We may focus therefore not so much on the doubling of the hands, but on the separation introduced by the puncturing or wounding of the hands themselves. This wounding is variously figured by Bellmer in his doll, his drawings, and his written work, and displays the left-hand sacred that has been examined is previous chapters. Bellmer’s wounded hands are a monstrance, a showing of the sacred, that calls the viewer to an identification culminating in an experience of wounding contradiction. This experience is aroused in part by the fascinating interweaving of the textual and the corporeal, of written texts and drawn or sculpted bodies. Bellmer, by way of an incessant disarticulation of language and bodies, produces wounds that create a contradiction that our eyes find intolerable: the coincidence of life and death. Peter Webb refers to a 1954 pencil drawing, ‘‘Hands,’’ explaining that it is one of a series of studies ‘‘of expressive hands with predominantly jointed

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fingers inspired by Gru¨newald’s Magdalene in the Isenheim Altarpiece, which he had so admired over twenty years earlier.’’104 The altarpiece, however, provides a dual inspiration; the influence of the hands of Christ is of equal importance in appreciating this particular series, as well as much else in Bellmer’s corpus. It is worth noting that the hands in this drawing are not clasped, but separated, grasping after each other without yet taking hold. Also significant are the prominent joints of these hands, for they are also wounds. The monstrously bulbous sites of articulation resemble the pocklike marks covering the octopod limbs of the doll in a 1938 photo (figure 5). As other commentators have noted, the scabrous lesions of the doll’s multiplied limbs imitate the lacerations of Gru¨newald’s Christ.105 This is

Figure 5. Hans Bellmer, La Poupe´e, 1938. Hand-colored vintage gelatin silver contact print, 2 1/8 ⳯ 2 1/8 inches (5.4 ⳯ 5.4 cm)—image, Ubu Gallery, New York / Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

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significant because it establishes a connection between the wounds of the amorous doll and those of Christ,106 heightening a sense of divine decay and erotic decomposition—a manifestation of the left-hand sacred. But it also suggests that the wounds of the hands in this drawing are likewise metonymically linked to those of Christ. The connection between the wounds of Christ and the joints of the hand points to a dynamic between the articulations of the body and the articulations of speech and language, which Bellmer exploits in much of his work. Indeed, Bellmer reverses the notion of Christ as the perfect word made flesh; he works to produce Christ as the word made wounded flesh, while the body is conceived as a wounded word. The prominent articulations of Bellmer’s drawn hands are so many invitations to wounding. In the series under consideration here, the wounds of Christ’s body erupt at each joint of the hand, making these Magdalenian hands also Christly, crucified hands. And this convergence of wounding and articulation, of conjoining and separation, is reiterated in the disfigurements of the doll. The articulated minor is endowed with a monstrous abundance of joints that are the very sites of violent bodily separations. She is thus made to mimic Christ both in her tortured postures and in her simultaneous articulation and disarticulation; the doll is created by successive destructions, resurrected repeatedly in various crucifixions. And in erotically identifying with the Christ-like doll, Bellmer, and perhaps his audience, undergo the alterations that she embodies and displays. This sacrificial disintegration might thus be thought of as sacred in its ecstasy and left-handed in its agony. This disintegration is also enacted in the interweaving of the verbal and the corporeal in Bellmer’s work. Where Christ is conceived as the word made wounded flesh, the doll, by way of a reversal, is conceived as a body made wounded word, or a disarticulated sentence. In his book Anatomy of the Image, Bellmer confesses to an erotically imbued fascination with anagrams, treating his doll as a linguistic unit with infinite possibilities for plastic disfiguration and reconfiguration. The ‘‘various anagrammatic bodies’’ of Bellmer’s doll ‘‘appear incoherent, upsetting the logic and integrity of the ‘normal’ body.’’107 By the same token, the erotically confused body interrupts the integrity of normative speech. One might recall Bellmer’s assessment of Magdalene: ‘‘In her grief, she wrings not only her hands but also her head, her hair, the rags that cover her body and even her toes. When the reaction or gesture of a person does

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not find expression in the whole of their body . . . I am no longer interested.’’108 For Bellmer, the body’s disarticulating torsions are more eloquent gestures than words; indeed, the ‘‘violent silence’’109 of such Magdalenian declensions displays most emphatically the longing and separation of that body—from itself and from another. But while Bellmer demands that the whole body—and not just the hands or toes—be implicated in suffering, he also conceives of the body as a hand. Bellmer insists that focusing fetishistically on a detail of the body propels erotic desire to its apogee—and he frequently makes the hand the synecdochic detail that stands in for the body.110 In Bellmer’s corpus, it is above all the hand, with its several joints and its peculiar aptitude for torsion, that acts as the detail subject to the torturous practices he will inflict upon the bodies with which he seeks to identify— particularly that of his doll, which emits a bodily and silent counterpart to the lama sabachthani of Christ’s hands. The importance of the detail in eliciting the violent silence of the Christly outcry or the Magdalenian declensions is evinced in what Bellmer calls the ‘‘monstrous dictionary.’’ With this notion Bellmer makes clear the importance of linguistic disfigurations to his artistic work, affirming Bataille’s claim that ‘‘the irregular use of language can be an irregular form of silence.’’111 In a subversive gesture that undercuts authoritative speech and normative conceptions of the body with erotically impelled disarticulations, Bellmer develops a notion of the body as wounded language. ‘‘The starting point of desire, with respect to the intensity of its images, is not in a perceptible whole but in the detail. . . . The important point to retain from the monstrous dictionary of analogies/antagonisms which constitute the dictionary of the image is that . . . [an] object that is identical to itself is without reality.’’112 Elsewhere Bellmer elaborates on the contents of the monstrous dictionary, claiming that he ‘‘tried to rearrange the sexual elements of a girl’s body like a sort of plastic anagram. . . . [T]he body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams. I wanted to reveal what is usually kept hidden—it was no game—I tried to open people’s eyes to new realities.’’113 The monstrous dictionary thus operates not only according to analogies/ antagonisms—such as the migrations of round eyes, anuses, and navels—but also by anagrams. Anagrams thus dramatically demonstrate the sort of disarticulations and reversals that elicit the contradictory affects associated with the left-hand

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sacred. They also confirm Bellmer’s contention that an object identical to itself lacks reality; they reveal ‘‘what is usually kept hidden’’—the creative work of destruction. Anagrams, in which the letters of a word are rearranged so as to constitute a different word, are at the heart of Bellmer’s thinking of the body. Construing the body as a plastic anagram, Bellmer affirms Bataille’s claim that art—if it is to accomplish its left-handed task— will proceed in successive destructions. One of Bellmer’s privileged anagrams ties together this contradictory notion of creation–destruction as well as the antagonistic analogy between language and the body. In his book L’Anatomie de l’image, Bellmer manipulates the German words Lieb and Leib, claiming that in destroying the body (Leib), by reversing two of its letters, one expresses love (Lieb). Eros, eroticism, is thus enacted in the disarticulation of language, while the destructions of the body culminate in the creation(s) of love. Though other scholars have rightly insisted on Bellmer’s analogical treatment of language and the body, I want to follow Bellmer in proposing that these analogies be thought of as monstrous114 —that is, as contradictory, antagonistic analogies. Bellmer specifies that his monstrous dictionary contains ‘‘analogies/antagonisms.’’ The slash here indicates both the separation and conjunction of analogy and antagonism. I will elaborate the antagonistic side of this coincidence of opposites, showing that if Bellmer’s antagonisms (the opposition of meanings in his anagrams, for example) are analogical, his analogies (between language and body) are also antagonistic—in a manner Bellmer himself may have grasped only in his ‘‘physical unconscious.’’ In his treatise on anagrams in L’Anatomie de l’image, Bellmer, we have noted, asserts that the body is comparable to a sentence inviting disarticulation in a series of endless anagrams. But while he compares the body to language, he also claims that ‘‘if one looks carefully, the anagram arises from a violent, paradoxical conflict. It supposes a maximal tension of the imaginative will and, at the same time, the exclusion of all preconceived intentions.’’115 The conflict between the imaginative will and the eradication of any will is not, however, the only paradox at work in his anagrams; though the body and language alike ‘‘invite us to disarticulate’’116 them, an interweaving of language and the body also enhances the contradictory experience of each. Bellmer treats the body not simply as language, but as written language—as (hand)writing. This much is evinced clearly in his fascination

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with anagrams, which, at the level of sense perception, operate not phonetically, but visually—in the reversal of written letters rather than sounds.117 Bellmer treats language not as immaterial speech, but rather as flesh and material—as the product of the hand, and subject to the manipulations of the hand. Conversely, the artist regards his doll not only as an erotically invested body, but as physically manipulatable language or writing. In this interweaving of language and body, the verbal and the corporeal, each analogizes the other, and each is also held in tension with the other; the verbal antagonizes the corporeal, and vice-versa. Consider, for example, the tension aroused by the metamorphoses in the Lieb/Leib anagram. With the disarticulation of the body of the words, the verbal wound is witnessed through the eyes—an experience that entwines the optical and tactile. Conversely, the disarticulated dolls and the drawn, contorted hands are treated not (or not only) as bodies, but as language: The contradiction here is manifested by the insertion of language into the realm of the body—as when Bellmer speaks of the proliferation of meanings discovered in manifold corporeal disfigurements—and also in the fact that those meanings are never articulated in speech, but in the wordless contemplation of silent, disarticulated bodies.118 To make the body speak silently, and to incarnate words inarticulately: These operations recall Bellmer’s claim that an object identical to itself possesses no reality. The body must thus be antagonized by language, and words by their silent materiality; Bellmer thus forces the hand to see, even in the dark, while he ‘‘turns looking into an extension of touching.’’119 This coincidence of opposites achieves maximal tension in the lived experience of a contradiction that culminates in ecstasy and horror. For Bellmer, an artist who never ceased erotically identifying with the very works of art that he manifested as his doubles, it is above all the hand that exhibits the monstrous affectivity of eroticism. The hand, articulated but disarticulating, at once forms and deforms, creating by successive destructions; it produces the reality of the self to the extent that it destroys the self in the operations of identification it provokes. These destructions extend even to the working, productive hand itself; Bellmer’s hand, dedicated to counter work, is also produced by this counter work, in a manner that at once affirms and contradicts the Hegelian and Heideggerian conceptions of the hand. Though Hegel insists that the work of the hand cultivates an integral character, the left-handed use to which

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Bellmer puts his dexterous hand works in just the opposite direction— toward the incessant alteration of identity. In this regard, Hegel’s description of work as that by which the inner ‘‘get[s] right outside’’120 oneself is both mimicked and reversed by Bellmer. The work of Bellmer recalls Bataille’s notion of sacrifice, where the witness becomes the victim, and that which is sacrificially expurgated is also that with which one identifies. The animal struck down by the sword or the finger torn off by the madman is each the product of a counter operation in which man is free to ‘‘vomit his own being . . . in other words free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself.’’ This ejaculatory, abjecting movement resembles and reverses Hegel’s description of work; far from being the means by which to integrate one’s character, Bellmer’s hands are put to the sacrificial task of altering identity. And even as Hegel claims that handwriting attests to and secures durability, Bellmer finds in the materiality of writing the potential for plastic malleability and monstrous reconfigurations of identity. Antagonizing the form-conferring deftness of the right hand, Bellmer pursues the creation of the left-hand sacred: the corrupt, disarticulating, and agonizing— but also creative, erotic, and ecstatic—experience of identification with one’s sacrificial, abjected doubles. Bellmer’s hands—and what they create—are thus a monstrosity with a valence also wholly at odds with Heidegger’s monstrosity. According to Heidegger, the hand distinguishes humans from animals; it is what allows a human to be an articulate sign, rather than an inarticulate howl. ‘‘The hand occupies, in order to have in hand, man’s essence,’’ Heidegger writes.121 This essence consists in being joined into one, in the ‘‘great simplicity’’— integrated and integral, self-identical, unified.122 For this reason, Heidegger speaks not of hands in the plural, but of ‘‘the hand.’’123 Heidegger espouses the unity that his monstrosity proclaims—unity of the sexes, of inner and outer, of thought and work. But what does this sign of the hands, the sign that man is, signify? It signifies humanity itself, man’s difference from animals. It is the privilege of the thinking being to possess hands, and the privilege of creatures possessing hands to think, that separates him from animals. In this sense Heidegger speaks of the hand as a separate, single organ—an organ set apart for its capacity to integrate well-formed individuals, consecrated by its unifying power.124 Contrarily, Bellmer turns hand against hand; or, clasping the hands in a kind of hermaphroditic union without unity, he exploits the tension of the

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coincidence of opposites. Bellmer’s hands are manifested in a convulsive, disarticulated union the meaning of which is not lucid humanity, but monstrous passion. But Bellmer also takes a different tack, separating the hands from the rest of the body altogether—to better consecrate them fetishistically or mutilate them masochistically. In this regard, the double separation of Christ’s hands—flesh parted from flesh, hand uncannily dislocated from body—finds its counterpart in the separability of Bellmer’s multiplied hands. Cut off from the rest of the body as erotically invested details, or wounded at the joints, they enhance the sense of the interweaving of language and body—the disarticulated word made disarticulated flesh. Bellmer’s wounded hands, monstrances of monstrosity, are thus the embodiment (or disembodiment) of an interruption in the integrity of the individual. As such, they show what in some sense cannot be seen: a lack, the absence of stable identity. His hands exhibit the death of the self in a series of successive destructions that culminates in an experience Bataille deems sacred. At once exhibiting and eliciting reversals—between left and right, male and female, vision and tactility, horror and ecstasy—these hands, double and other to our selves, invite those who view them to risk an experience of disarticulation, to participate as willing victims in a sacred work: a sacrificial operation whose only product is monstrosity, extravagant and intolerable.

The Story of the Hand: Bataille, Lascaux, and the Eye Writing’s always a game played with ungraspable reality. — b a t a i l l e , Guilty

The hand that produces wounds also produces the wounded hand. Assuming and reversing the line of thought propounded by Hegel and Heidegger, in which the dexterous hand forms the balanced, fully human individual, Bataille and Bellmer put hands to the counter work of producing monstrosity. The portrayal of the monstrous condition in Bellmer’s work provokes in the viewer an experience of monstrous contradiction, an experience that Bataille claims is the hallmark of the ‘‘religious sensibility.’’125 Applying Bataille’s thought to Bellmer’s work, and vice-versa, I have thus far eschewed an obvious, and perhaps too-convenient, connection: the illustrations Bell-

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mer executed for Bataille’s books The Story of the Eye and Madame Edwarda. This is not only because Bellmer’s illustrations for these books and their relation to Bataille’s thought have been treated by other scholars,126 but also because I have tried to expand the application of Bataille’s concepts to Bellmer’s corpus more generally, showing that the relationship between the artist and the writer extends beyond their collaborations. We may now briefly turn to them, however, to illustrate another aspect of the friendship of Bellmer and Bataille. We have seen that Bellmer and Bataille exhibit a deep accord in their thinking, especially in their concepts of eroticism, monstrosity, and identification. But when Bellmer was invited to provide the illustrations for the 1939 edition of Bataille’s novel The Story of the Eye, the engravings he created for the book, while skillfully rendering in the most graphic manner the migrations among eggs, anuses, and such that Bataille portrays in his writing, nonetheless fail to render in any literal way the written scenes that he is allegedly making visible. For example, the engraving of the adolescent girl admiring the prodigious phallus emerging incongruously from her vagina is nowhere suggested in Bataille’s narrative. Commentators have remarked that this is proof of Bellmer’s sovereign imagination, his making of Bataille’s text the impetus for, but not the destiny of, his own productions; Bellmer did not subordinate his skills to the demands of an authoritative voice.127 I agree with this assessment, but the odd inconsistency also has somewhat different implications: This contradiction between written narrative and engraving, between the textual and the visual, is itself a perfect illustration for the contradictions under examination in the preceding discussion. Antagonizing each other, these opposed modes of production are held together— united, like Magdalene’s agonized hands, between the covers of a book. There is another peculiar affinity–antagonism between Bellmer and Bataille that has been overlooked: their interest in dictionaries. Bataille, like Bellmer, creates a monstrous dictionary, and like Bellmer, he does so through a series of successive destructions. Bataille’s dictionary came about during his tenure as editor of Documents, the journal of art and ethnography he oversaw with several dissident surrealists and art historians in 1929. During its two-year run, Documents regularly featured entries for a ‘‘Dictionnaire critique.’’ Bataille contributed such notable essays as ‘‘Eye,’’ ‘‘Mouth,’’ and, perhaps most famously, ‘‘Formless’’ to this mock dictionary. In this latter entry Bataille formulates the job of ‘‘formless’’—a job that extends to the

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critical dictionary on the whole. This job, as Hollier points out, is precisely to undo the normal course of work, and thereby to engage in the counter operation of a ‘‘productivity in which the word functions as a center of energy, a productivity in which the word is not defined by what it means (its ‘sense’) but by what it does, by the effects it induces (its ‘job’).’’128 But more than this, the critical dictionary, undercutting cohesive sense with libidinally charged effects and erotically explosive affects, also undercuts the authoritative form of the conventional dictionary with incisive deformations. Bataille’s lexicon might be likened to the remnants of sacrifice, the ‘‘vomited’’ parts of the dictionary pathologically cast outside itself. In a manner that recalls and reverses Bellmer’s treatment of the body as a linguistic unit, Bataille’s dehisced lexicon treats words like so many morsels of a fragmented body, consumed and purged. Divided according to fetishistically separated body parts or conceptually disgorged fragments (such as ‘‘formless,’’ ‘‘factory chimney,’’ or ‘‘dust’’), and substituting destructive tasks for definite meanings, this dictionary does not arrange clinically, but deforms critically—producing a ‘‘syntax of insubordination’’129 that echoes the subversive intent of Bellmer’s disarticulated dolls. Consumption and expulsion, seduction and repulsion, provide the matrix of contradiction for several of Bataille’s contributions to the critical dictionary. But the entry that most clearly prepares the altar for Bataille’s lifelong sacrificial obsessions is his essay ‘‘Eye.’’ Here, Bataille attributes to the eye a cannibalistic fascination that rouses both an ‘‘inexplicable acuity of horror’’ and an anxious attraction that can only be called seductive. These contradictory reactions—fearsome magnetism coinciding with pleasurable repulsion—thus terminate in an experience of ‘‘extreme seductiveness . . . at the boundary of horror.’’130 The razor-like line separating these reactions allows Bataille to relate the eye to the ‘‘cutting edge.’’ Citing Bun˜uel and Dalı´’s masterpiece of surrealist cinema, The Andalusian Dog, Bataille describes the infamous scene in which a razor incises the eyeball of a woman. This division of the eye is immediately refigured as a multiplication, as Bataille analyzes a drawing by J. J. Grandville in which ‘‘innumerable eyes . . . multiply under the waves’’ like swarming insects. The anxious proliferation of the organ of vision—at once threatened and threatening—recalls Bellmer’s incessant division and multiplication of limbs and organs. But the profusion of ocular globes in this essay and elsewhere in Bataille’s work says something more: The multiplication of eyes paradoxically figures the

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blindness that results from seeing too much, from exceeding what our eyes find tolerable.131 A swarm of eyes is Bataille’s image for a compulsion to see, to see even to the point of blindness. Indeed, in ‘‘Eye,’’ the nauseating abundance of eyes is immediately juxtaposed with a scene of enucleation; a condemned man, preparing to be executed under the blade of a guillotine, gives to the administering chaplain ‘‘the happy gift of his torn-out eye.’’ In the case of the condemned man, it is the spectacle of his own death that compels the automutilation; imminent spectacle (or too much vision) goes hand in hand with blindness. Bataille interrogates this compulsion to see, to multiply our eyes in the ‘‘blind thirst for blood’’ exhibited before the ‘‘spectacle of torture’’: ‘‘But why would these absurd eyes be attracted, like a cloud of flies, by something so repugnant?’’132 Why increase our vision to the point of its extinction, to the point of intolerability? This returns us to the question posed at the outset of this chapter: What is it that Troppmann wants to see by wounding his hand? In these closing pages, I will build on my analysis of Bellmer’s work to comment on the relationship of seeing and wounding for Bataille, and the relationship between the eye and the hand as well. Bataille once remarked that he considered his ‘‘life—or, better yet . . . the open wound that is [his] life’’—a practical refutation of Hegel’s ‘‘closed system.’’133 In the present context, the metaphor of the open wound applies with particular force to both Hegel and Heidegger’s conception of the integrating capacity of the human hand. Bataille does not argue against Hegel and Heidegger on this point so much as contradict them.134 That is, he refuses to engage them philosophically, but rather refutes them dramatically, through a display of his wounds. In this regard, Bataille shows what it is to write with wounded, crucified hands, and thereby produce oneself—to see oneself—as the opposite of a closed individual: wounded, incomplete, monstrous. The relationship between wounding and the eye are visited frequently in Bataille’s work. But perhaps nowhere is the organ of vision subjected to so many transformations, and made victim of such abundant violence, as it is in The Story of the Eye. The horrific tortures inflicted upon the eye, however, coincide with erotic ecstasy. Throughout Bataille’s book, the eye metamorphoses from sun to testicle to egg to anus.135 But the eye is also enucleated, dislodged, and thereby blinded.136 In one gruesome scene, the bullfighter Granero, whose death Bataille claims to have actually witnessed in Spain,137

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meets his demise at the end of a bull’s horn: ‘‘Granero was thrown back by the bull and wedged against the balustrade; the horns struck the balustrade three times at full speed; at the third blow, one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head. A shriek of unmeasured horror coincided with a brief orgasm for Simone,’’ who has just inserted a bull’s testicle, an avatar of the eye, into her vagina.138 The de´nouement of this novel is quite literally an unraveling. In a fearful display of murderous ecstasy, Simone, in a sexual frenzy, demands that the eye of the priest she has just molested and killed be plucked out. At her order, Sir Edmond ‘‘removed a pair of fine scissors from his wallet, knelt down, then nimbly inserted the fingers of his left hand into the socket and drew out the eye, while his right hand snipped the obstinate ligaments.’’ Simone takes the eye ‘‘in her hand, completely distraught.’’ However, she had no qualms, and instantly amused herself by fondling the depth of her thighs and inserting this apparently fluid object. The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation so bizarre that it has something of a rooster’s horrible crowing.139

The coincidence of horror and ecstasy, characteristic of Bataille’s morbid eroticism, is perhaps nowhere so poignant and terrifying as in this novel. But part of the unease elicited by these passages is due not only to the egregious violence, but to a different kind of transgression: the silent confusion of vision and tactility. In both of the examples above, the eyeball is not an object that contemplates from a distance, but an organ that, violently separated from its socket, is carefully inserted into the vagina, or made to caress with extraordinary gentleness the skin of a woman overcome by bestial inclinations. This quiet gentleness is nonetheless so exceedingly bizarre and unexpected as to merit comparison with a rooster’s scream—a violent silence. The eye is here both an organ subject to touch, as well as the organ of touch, an extension of the hand. It is thus not the eye that sees, but rather the eye that touches that creates the contradictions of erotic experience for Bataille.140 And this explains why Bataille insists on referring to the eye in the singular.141 If eyes, like hands, tend to come in pairs, they are only conceived, for Bataille, in terms of a duplicity that is manifested in the enucleation and blinding of one of that pair. Not until one eye is separated from the other, made blind and erotically tactile, can its story be told. And the story of the eye that Bataille tells

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is always the story of the assaulted right eye. The right eye is the traditional symbol of diurnal lucidity, a reflection of the lucent sun. But the sun possesses a dual aspect; it provides, as I have already discussed,142 the light by which we see, but it is also excessive, violent, even excremental. Contemplating the sun results in blindness—or in madness. An analogous duplicity of the eye—as lucid or blinded—is portrayed by Bataille through enucleation; the eye that had benefited from the sun’s lucidity is blinded by scrutinizing it. Seeing too much, it is stricken, or knocked from its orbit. But deprived of sight, it is granted the sense of touch. In this regard, Bataille’s eye resembles Bellmer’s hand. As Bellmer turned his right hand to left-handed ends, thereby imitating and mocking the lame arm of his father, so does Bataille pluck the lucent right eye to make it resemble its double, the left eye—the symbol of the night and blindness. One might recall here Bataille’s excrementally fantastic pineal eye, which erupts in bizarre singularity from the crown of his skull to see too much, to be dazzled to blindness by the sun. Its destiny is thus to be transformed from the eye that sees into the blind eye, an unseeing, but unspeakably sensuous, ‘‘durable orgasm.’’143 The right eye, which had once beheld forms illuminated by the sun, is, in its enucleation, turned into a parody of itself, made to resemble the left eye. But the right eye has another double, not by virtue of its roundness as in The Story of the Eye, but rather in its sinister, blind, wounded aspect: The torn out eye also corresponds to the mutilation of the hand. Bataille explicitly relates enucleation to the wounding of the hand in his essay on sacrificial mutilation, where it is the ‘‘overwhelming relations’’ visually maintained with the sun that drive Gaston F. to tear off his own finger (he ‘‘stared at the sun to hypnotize himself,’’ the text tells us).144 Such ablations, in which a ‘‘relatively unimportant’’ part like the finger or ear is removed, are sacrificial forms of the ‘‘Oedipal enucleation,’’ which Bataille deems ‘‘the most horrifying form of sacrifice.’’ And yet, Bataille reads the mutilation of the hand as excessive, mounting passion; the mutilation of the hand ‘‘leads’’ to the Oedipal mutilation, Bataille writes. The sacrificial ‘‘rupture of personal homogeneity’’ is evinced again ‘‘in the hand-patterns obtained in caves’’ from the Neolithic period, which are ‘‘obtained by applying the hand to the wall and surrounding it with paint,’’ revealing that ‘‘one or several phalanges are missing.’’145

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Evidence of mutilated hands at the site of art’s origins suggests that art is not only the product of mutilated hands; it also produces mutilated hands. The ablated fingers of the Lascaux hands thus figure the ‘‘refusal of form,’’146 the absence of a stable body image and integral identity, that Bataille sees as the impulse behind, and task of, art. Bataille’s sense of art is illuminated by Hollier’s description of painting as a pictorial space characterized by ‘‘automutilation as the rejection and destruction of the human figure in practice. . . . The space of painting is space where someone who has torn out his eyes like Oedipus feels his way, blinded.’’ Similarly, in regard to the Lascaux phenomenon, Hollier remarks that the ablation of one or more fingers ‘‘needs to be thought of as a pictorial act, even the pictorial act, par excellence. For painting is nothing if it does not attack the architecture of the human body.’’147 It is in painting, in art—but also in writing—that the wounded eye and the wounded hand correspond. And Bataille believes that in contemplating these wounds, one is also wounded. The eye that beholds the mutilated hand is itself stigmatized, blinded by the intolerable sight of an incomplete human form. If such visions threaten to blind, it is because what they reveal provokes a reaction more tactile than optical, something more felt than seen. And the artist’s hand that produces such excessive visions must also produce itself as a wounded form, must subject itself to the ‘‘cutting edge’’ of the eye at the boundary of horror and seduction.148 Talk such as this is, however, inconsequential, akin to what Bataille disparagingly calls the rhetoric of ‘‘symbolic transpositions,’’ if the person beholding a work of art does not put himself at risk in scrutinizing the images or the writing before him. Only when at risk may an individual partake of a wounding that, while separating flesh from flesh in a moment of horror, allows, finally and fleetingly, for the ecstasy of erotic union. Erotic communication ‘‘requires individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked,’’ Bataille writes, ‘‘placed at the limit of death and nothingness.’’149 The attraction–repulsion of eroticism operates from a wounding; what seduces and horrifies is ‘‘a wound, a break in the body’s integrity.’’ But this wound, Bataille insists, ‘‘doesn’t kill, it sullies.’’150 The sacrifice of art, like the sacrifice of bodies offered in eroticism, is a matter of a ‘‘little’’ or ‘‘incomplete’’ death, an experience at the level of death.151 Bataille mutilates his hand ‘‘just to see.’’ But what he sees, and what he would have his readers see, is precisely what is intolerable to our eyes: death

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and nothingness. And if he, like Bellmer, puts before our eyes monstrous images of incomplete forms, it is to provoke in the reader or viewer a willingness to risk himself, and perhaps to experience the lacerating contradiction that these images—written, drawn, or sculpted—can only represent. The affects elicited by these monstrous, contradictory images will themselves be contradictory, and—if experienced in the extreme, to the point of the death they seek to portray—sacred. It is for this reason that Bataille calls both eroticism and religion ‘‘monstrous.’’ For Bataille and for Bellmer, Eros, like the ace´phale, is neither a man nor a god, but a monster. And this sacred monstrosity provokes a desire to see, even to the point of death. The object of such a blinding vision is beheld and thereby experienced, simultaneously or successively, as horror and ecstasy. And whether they come in sobs or in laughter, the tears uttered from the wounds we willingly suffer are also the tears of Eros.

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conclusion

Bataillean Meditations The human species cannot remain indifferent to its monsters. — g e o r g e s b a t a i l l e , ‘‘The Deviations of Nature’’

Ecce Monstrum: Beholding the Monster In book 4 of his Generation of Animals, Aristotle remarks upon the conditions that define monstrosity: ‘‘Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity [teras], since in these cases Nature has in a way strayed from the generic type.’’1 Bataille would agree with the letter, if not the spirit, of this description. Aristotle’s interests are classificatory in nature; his purposes are scientific and philosophical. Bataille, on the other hand, aggressively pursues deviation, making aberration a component in an experiential process. His fascination with, and affective response to, such natural prodigies as those of which Aristotle writes is especially evident in his treatise ‘‘The Deviations of Nature,’’ where he speaks to the ravishment of the senses that these monstrous contradictions arouse in those who behold them. But ultimately Bataille is concerned with developing a mode of experience that does not depend on the literal existence of damaged or 163

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extraordinary bodies. Rather, he elaborates (as I have attempted to show in these pages) an agonistic, and indeed agonized, practice of reading, writing, and artistic production, a practice that presents the monstrous to those who are willing to look upon it, in order to incite monstrous transformations in them—transformations of their inner selves. Bataille’s sacrifices of form are textual, philosophical, and artistic, even as they aim to produce contradictory effects (and affects) that are sensible, erotic, and perhaps even traumatic.2 The monstrous thus not only figures but also evokes the sensibility defined by the conjunction of ecstasy and horror—the ‘‘religious sensibility.’’

Eros, God of Compassion The religious sensibility emerges in an instant in which contraries ‘‘seem visibly conjoined’’; divine ecstasy and horror coincide, as opposites, in an anxious union. For Bataille, it was photographs of a torture victim that revealed this conjunction, or ‘‘capacity for reversal,’’ among contraries.3 And this reversal proved also to be wounding. ‘‘The sight of torture,’’ Bataille writes in Guilty, ‘‘opens my individual being violently, lacerates it.’’4 Not seeking to avoid injury, Bataille gazes upon these intolerable photographs to ‘‘stretch the laceration out,’’ and thereby engage in a violent inner experience at the level of death. Fixing his attention upon the image of the wounded other, Bataille ruptures, if only fleetingly, his closed sense of self. ‘‘If I look,’’ he writes, ‘‘I’m beside myself . . . attaining ecstasy.’’5 This evanescent experience of the death of the self—even if undergone in solitude— proceeds by way of an image of another, for it is in relation to some other, whether rendered through art, literature, or philosophy, that the ecstatic rupture is provoked. Taken to its culminating point, to an erotic pitch, the wounds of the other become one’s own, even as they mark a separation that can never be fully overcome. ‘‘Compassion, pain, and ecstasy connive with each other [se composent].’’6 Bataille italicizes the element that he also places first in this series because pain and ecstasy, if they are to be experienced to the point of death, are only possible through compassion. And compassion, carried to its extreme in identification with the other, comes forth tears. The tears that issue in profound communication are the tears of a god at once cruel and gentle, sacri-

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ficing and self-sacrificial. They are the tears of Eros, the god who wounds those whom he conjoins. And as Bataille never stops reminding us, those who would risk compassion for the other also risk being wounded by what they look upon.

Risk: Doing unto Oneself In his book on the subject, Bataille characterizes eroticism, in contrast to ‘‘simple sexual activity,’’ as a ‘‘psychological quest.’’ Later in that same book, elaborating on the conditions under which this quest may proceed, he claims that eroticism is realized through ‘‘a conscious refusal to limit ourselves within our individual personalities.’’ Only by consenting to eroticism and the ‘‘violence to our inner selves’’ that it implies are we able to achieve the experience that he deems sacred.7 Acute experiences of eroticism of the sort that Bataille so often evokes can only be attained to the degree that we are able to shake off concern with our ‘‘discontinuous’’ selves as conceived in the profane world of work. But perhaps any interaction with another carries with it erotic possibilities if it involves individuals willing to put themselves at risk in the encounter. If, as Bataille says, the world of work and calculation—the profane world of discrete individuals, of tools, of rational consciousness—is destined to maintain the upper hand, moments of sacred communication will require an attitude of thought that includes a decision to put oneself at risk, to risk the rupturing, if only for a moment, of one’s discontinuous identity. Erotic communication opens up to those who willingly maintain a desire that cannot be fully satisfied, a desire for an experience at the level of death. Bataille, as we have seen, extends this desire to the realms of text and image: philosophy, literature, and art.8 He consents to placing himself at risk in confronting them, thus opening himself to the possibility of being altered (and agonized) not only by other individuals, but also by the writings and art he confronts—a fact exemplified in his relationship to Nietzsche. And in his own philosophical, literary, and other productions, Bataille again enacts this risk, injuring his inner self in a practice of writing that can be characterized as sacrificial. Bataille seeks readers who share this attitude, this willingness to risk. And yet, even for those who exhibit a deep accord

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with Bataille’s thinking, friendship with Bataille is always fraught with contradiction.

Friendship: Reading Bataille Whether with fathers or friends, parents or partners, and whether in conversation or collaboration, for Bataille, communication and antagonism are never separable. ‘‘Intimacy is violence,’’ he writes, in a characteristically startling formulation.9 In the course of this book, I have tried to demonstrate some of the ways in which these opposites—intimacy and violence— coincide in Bataille’s monstrous practices of reading and writing, and indeed in his friendships, which evince profound communication yet are fraught with opposition. But there is another coincidence of opposites that remains to be addressed here. This tensive opposition has to do with how to read Bataille today, especially in light of his increasing recognition (especially in America), both within and outside of the academy. Bataille himself was always suspicious of, and often hostile to, institutional structures.10 In the rigidity of institutional walls he discerned the ‘‘straightjackets’’ confining both the intellect and the libido.11 Bataille scathingly regarded minds ‘‘formed’’ by the university,12 and incessantly attempted to get out of his own ‘‘philosopher’s head,’’ itself shaped by the academy. Indeed, Bataille, who was an outstanding student,13 who pursued scholarship at its highest level,14 and who spent his working life within the quiet walls of libraries,15 was in this regard his own opposite, his own most virulent double and contradiction. It is with this in mind that we may address the questions asked in chapter 1: What are we to make of Bataille, that anti-institutional, ‘‘inconsistent monster,’’16 now that his contradictory writings, appropriated and sometimes imitated by ‘‘disciples,’’ threaten to be neutralized? In his essay ‘‘Le cheval acade´mique’’ (The Academic Horse), Bataille speaks of the ‘‘monstrous mentality’’ at work behind the aggressive ‘‘alteration’’ of academic forms.17 Bataille is writing here of transgressive ancient Gaulish art. But the ‘‘positive extravagance’’ he discerns in this aberrant art is applicable to the present discussion, for it touches upon the vital enmity within the intimacy of Bataille and his growing readership. It remains for those who embrace Bataille, and indeed identify with him, to refuse to play

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the part of disciples, engaging, rather, in an agonistic relationship. Indeed, only the constant counter operation of refusing to allow Bataille to be resolved into non-contradictory cliche´s will allow his writings to be regarded as monstrous. On the other hand, if the monster is, as Aristotle claims, that which deviates, that which diverges from the ‘‘generic type,’’ then Bataille’s heterogeneous, anti-generic,18 anti-patriarchal writings might, with their scatological exuberance and lacerating contradictions, alter those who read him, spreading their effects as if by contagion. In his Ele´ments de physiologie, Diderot writes, ‘‘What is a monster? A being whose duration is incompatible with the existing order.’’19 This insight can be turned back onto the monstrous writings of Bataille. I want to suggest that what Bataille claims of dictionaries in his essay ‘‘Formless’’ can be applied to his own writings as well. In that essay, he announces that a ‘‘dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks.’’20 Bataille’s writings have been the subject of much exegetical work, but not often enough put into practice.21 One might say that reading—and writing on—Bataille really begins when it no longer seeks to explain Bataille, but rather puts him to work as part of the kind of counter operation I have discussed in this book, in a way that contradicts and critiques the existing order—of scholarship, of literature, of art—while also refusing to let Bataille’s writings become merely an element in that order, or an order unto themselves.

Scholarship: Sacrificing the Academic Horse In his own writings, Bataille presents us with examples of scholarship that alters the scholar (and perhaps especially the scholar of religion). In its explorations of the sacred—in its interrogation of those aspects of existence that Bataille calls the ‘‘limits’’—a Bataillean mode of study could provide means not only for analysis and understanding, but also for alteration of the inner self through the experience of reading and writing. In this regard, Bataille’s conception of scholarly work is both analogous to, and the opposite of, that of his friend Mircea Eliade, pillar of the Chicago School of the history of religions. Eliade’s hermeneutical approach to the study of religions sought not only the recovery of sacred archaic meanings; it also—in a manner that echoes

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Bataille—aspired to ‘‘the inner transformation of the researcher and, hopefully, of the sympathetic reader.’’22 His adumbrations of a ‘‘systematic hermeneutics of the sacred’’ share with Bataille’s vision the urgent attempt to reinvigorate a sense of the sacred in contemporary life. Eliade’s project, however, is impelled by nostalgia for a lost past, and has as its goal the overcoming of the terrors of time and history through recovery of, and attention to, religious symbols and archetypes. His conception of the sacred is often called ‘‘ontological,’’ for it proposes a substantive understanding of the sacred as revealed in hierophanies—manifestations of transcendent power. This understanding could aptly be characterized as ‘‘vertical,’’ for it suggests, as we saw in chapter 4, intercourse between the heavens and the earth along an axis mundi. Bataille’s example inspires a quite different mode of attention to the sacred, one that insists on beholding, rather than transcending, the brute realities of time and death. Scholarship understood in this way is more akin to a counter operation, and might take its inspiration from Bataille’s College of Sociology or from the work of the contributors to Documents. It would not take nostalgic recourse to past paradigms (though it could look to archaic symbols or ‘‘primitive’’ art to disrupt the present order),23 nor would it seek the comfort that Eliade found in the sacred. Rather, this scholarly ‘‘practice of joy before death’’ might exhibit, and provoke, intellectual lucidity in the service of a left-handed operation—and in so doing, instill in others the religious sensibility that Bataille deems sovereign.

Sacred Bataille’s persistent conjoining of the monstrous and the sacred presents critical and creative possibilities. His notion of the sacred, far removed from Eliade’s, undermines ontological or substantive conceptions, insisting instead on the sacred as an experience of a ‘‘privileged instant’’; the sacred is ‘‘the opposite of a substance that withstands the test of time, it is something that flees as soon as it is seen and cannot be grasped.’’24 Whether momentarily consecrating the sacrificial victim, imbuing decaying or base matter with an aura inspiring reverence, or coursing through the subject whom it ruptures, the sacred is a disturbing force that is experienced in—rather than above—embodied space, and through—rather than beyond—the deleteri-

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ous absurdity of time. Bataille’s insubstantial, non-ontological view might thus be thought of as characterizing a horizontal, labyrinthine conception of the sacred, a conception that affirms the vicissitudes of time and space, the vagaries of experience, the horrors and ecstasies of life as lived in this world. But for all the differences between the vertical and the horizontal conceptions of the sacred, both Eliade and Bataille believe the sacred can be experienced in everyday life. For Eliade, aspects of popular culture—certain novels and movies, for example—reveal what he calls ‘‘the persistence of the sacred.’’25 Similarly, Bataille, who will affirm that the monstrous sacred is incompatible with the existing order (the ‘‘real’’ order of the workaday world) nonetheless trains his eye on the possibilities of experiencing the sacred through transgressions of that world. Thus for him it is not only in the spectacles of sacrifice, the ebullitions of erotic passion, or the tremblings that besiege the mystic that the sacred is experienced (though these constitute especially intense instances). There are also traces of the sacred in the ordinary; the monstrous menaces our everday world. The individual human face (whose ‘‘contradictory appearance’’ always escapes, to some degree, the geometrical norm, and is thus ‘‘monstrous’’);26 the big toe (seductive in its affront to ‘‘elegant and correct forms’’);27 spittle (that ‘‘monstrous’’ lefthanded aspect of ‘‘the divinity of the mouth’’);28 dust (which descends like an ‘‘injurious phantom’’ into the logical order);29 and a crushed spider (that emblem of the ‘‘formless’’)30: These things, some of them lowly, powerless, and perhaps even contemptible, may nonetheless elicit intellectual contradictions and inspire affective profusions—from laughter to horror to malaise—that bring about experiences akin to the sacred. Art, too, as we have seen, has resources for attaining ‘‘the sacred instant,’’ and indeed Bataille proclaims that artists—‘‘whoever creates, whoever paints or writes’’—have at their disposal ‘‘all possible human convulsions’’ associated with a sacred ‘‘heritage.’’31 Might this heritage also be shared by theorists and scholars? I have already claimed as much. But in closing, I want to suggest something further, something that has been implicit throughout these pages: That in reading Bataille as a religious thinker, one might consider him not only a theorist but also a technician of the (horizontal) sacred32 who uses his methods in a counter work that aims to open a realm beyond that of the profane world of utility and rational order.

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Bataille makes clear that in intellectual apprehensions of the sacred, it is ‘‘decisively important’’ to understand that the search, ‘‘undertaken at the promptings of unsatisfied desire, has always preceded theory’s delineation of the object sought.’’33 We know from his multifarious writings, in which autobiographical excurses frequently mingle with philosophical commentary, that in theorizing the sacred, Bataille is also compelled by an unsatisfied, and indeed unsatisfiable, desire—a desire to experience what he attempts to delineate. For this reason, I believe, Bataille’s texts, even his theoretical texts, can awaken in their readers a desire to experience the religious sensibility that they consider. Is this, then, to say that Bataille’s writings themselves are sacred? The answer to this question will depend, at least in part, on the reader. Bataille’s texts, both within and beyond their popular and academic appropriations, may, for those who read them with compassion and in friendship, incite and inspire what they theorize and describe. Approached with a willingness to put oneself at risk, these writings might not only be read but communicated. And in such privileged instants, the substance of the text disappears as if in a sacrifice, destroyed in being consumed: Theory and art, language and image, give way to an experience of the sacred, at once distressing and brilliant.

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notes

introduction

1. ‘‘Nous sommes farouchement religieux.’’ Georges Bataille, ‘‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’’ in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 179. 2. Bataille, ‘‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’’ 181. 3. Most English translations of Bataille render l’homme as ‘‘man,’’ as in the case of the above citation. To avoid unnecessary complication, in this book I will generally also use the masculine designation. However, I recognize that this is a problem that deserves further scrutiny. This is especially true regarding the figure of the ace´phale, which, while not precisely male, is nevertheless markedly masculine. Moreover, the headless monster, whose genitals are replaced by a skull, is sometimes read as a castrated figure. Bataille, whose writings persistently interrogate genres and the generic, whether through analysis or, more often, in practice, was likely attuned to the gendering problems implied by the masculine designation and graphic renderings of the ace´phale. 4. Didier Ottinger describes the ace´phale as ‘‘the figured apology of contradiction and duality’’ in ‘‘Masson, Bataille: In the Night of the Labyrinth,’’ in Andre´ Masson: The 1930s, ed. William Jeffett (St. Petersburg, Fla.: Salvador Dali Museum, 1999), 57. Bataille biographer Michel Surya characterizes the ace´phale as ‘‘no longer entirely a man or entirely a God; perhaps more than anything he is both. He is surely . . . a hybrid monster, a happy monster.’’ Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 236. 5. Marie-He´le`ne Huet offers a brief account of the two etymological traditions of the word ‘‘monster’’ in Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6. 6. Georges Bataille, ‘‘Joy in the Face of Death,’’ in The College of Sociology (1937–1939), ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneaplois: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 325. 171

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Notes to Pages 4–10

7. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1962), 16. 8. Georges Didi-Huberman uses a variation of this phrase in a passage in La ressemblance informe ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995). Discussing the relationship between form, formlessness, and matter in Bataille, he claims that ‘‘La matie`re selon Bataille pourrait eˆtre, alors, conside´re´ strictement comme ce dont l’informe est le symptoˆme: ce qui dans la forme sacrifie la forme,’’ 273 (emphasis in original). Though his study of form bears similarities to the present study, my use of the phrase ‘‘sacrifice of form’’ has little to do with his discussion of matter as ‘‘that which, in form, sacrifices form.’’ 9. See Bataille’s minuscule but influential essay ‘‘Informe’’ (Formless) in Visions of Excess, 31. The term ‘‘formless’’ has become the topic of much interest in the re-theorizing of surrealism over the last two decades. Art historian Rosalind Krauss has been the foremost figure in employing Bataille’s thought, and in particular his notion of formlessness, to evolve a Bataillean account of surrealism. In the present project, I both extend and diverge from her work on Bataille and the formless. See especially Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 149–95, and Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 10. See Bataille, Me´thode de me´ditation, in Oeuvres comple`tes V (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 191–234. An English translation of Bataille’s ‘‘Method of Mediation’’ also appears in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 77. 11. Bataille adopts the term ‘‘hyperchristianity’’ from Nietzsche. I argue, however, that despite his lifelong obsession with Nietzsche, Bataille embraces a vision of Simone Weil that provides a dramatic instantiation of the hyperchristianity that he evokes in his pursuit of ‘‘inner experience.’’ 12. See Bataille’s essay ‘‘The Practice of Joy before Death,’’ in Visions of Excess, 235–39. 1. ecstatic and intolerable: the provocations of friendship

1. Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989), 204–7. 2. Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 205. 3. Georges Bataille, ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ in My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Marion Boyars, 1995), 218. 4. Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 206. 5. In fact, the photos appear in Georges Dumas’s Nouveau traite´ de pscyhologie (Paris: Fe´lix Alcan, 1932), 2:283–86, as James Elkins points out in an unpublished manuscript, ‘‘The Most Intolerable Photographs Ever Taken,’’ 5.

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6. Bataille, Tears of Eros, 205. 7. James Elkins, ‘‘The Most Intolerable Photographs Ever Taken,’’ 12. I take Dumas’s description from this account. 8. Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 303, n. 2. 9. Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 206. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 205. 12. Bataille, here and elsewhere, appears to use ‘‘reversal’’ (which implies succession) and ‘‘identity’’ (which implies simultaneity) interchangeably. This problem is addressed by Joseph Libertson, who argues that the ‘‘coincidence of simultaneity and succession in Bataille’s formulation [of transgression] refers to a fundamental solidarity of prohibition and transgression which underlies their apparent alternation in a temporal perspective.’’ Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 62. 13. The concept of attention will be addressed in chapter 4, in a discussion of Simone Weil. In this regard, the work of Jean-Luc Marion on the ‘‘saturated phenomenon’’ is also instructive. See especially Being Given (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 14. Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 109. 15. Herbert Marcuse, ‘‘Repressive Tolerance,’’ in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 90. 16. In the area of literary theory, Bataille has long been an important figure. Critics and philosophers like Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes not only analyze Bataille, but also put his insights to use. See Kristeva’s The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) and Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). Through these figures and others—such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze—Bataille has had a profound, if indirect, impact on critical theory and literary studies. Over the past two decades in America, increasing attention has been paid to Bataille’s writings themselves, particularly with the introduction of numerous English translations of Bataille’s most important works. 17. Judith Surkis opens her discussion of Michel Foucault’s reading of Bataille by raising this issue: ‘‘In August 1963 Critique published an ‘Hommage a` Georges Bataille,’ a special issue commemorating the death of its founder. How did the volume’s contributors go about the seemingly tricky business of pledging fealty to the philosopher of sovereignty? How did they profess loyalty to, in effect recognize, the sovereign subject known to insistently refuse masterful identity?’’ Surkis’s answer is that the contributors appear ‘‘undisturbed by this difficulty.’’ See ‘‘No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgres-

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sion and Masculinity in Bataille and Foucault,’’ in Diacritics 26.2 (1996), 18. The present chapter of this book seeks to go some way in responding to the questions that Surkis raises. 18. My discussion below of the concept of ‘‘counter operation’’ will elaborate a certain attitude of thought in Bataille. This discussion is indebted to Denis Hollier’s formulation of Bataille’s dualist attitude of thought in ‘‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,’’ in Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 59–73. 19. Bataille claims, for example, that ‘‘ ‘[c]ommunication’ only takes place between two people who risk themselves.’’ Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 20. Chapter 2 will return to the place of risk in Bataille’s practice of reading. 20. Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication, 64. Libertson is here specifically addressing ‘‘the sector of Bataile’s text which describes . . . sacrifice.’’ 21. For a discussion of approaches to Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung, see the entry on ‘‘Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967), 3:435–50. 22. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘From Restricted to General Economy,’’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 275. Derrida’s emphasis. 23. Denis Hollier affirms Bataille’s simultaneous resemblance to and difference from Hegel when he writes that Bataille was ‘‘only ever Hegelian out of a taste for contradiction.’’ Hollier cited in Bois and Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 68 (emphasis in original). 24. Michel Foucault, ‘‘A Preface to Transgression,’’ in Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 27, 31. 25. This is to argue against Foucault, who, alluding to Nietzsche, claims that ‘‘transgression opens onto a . . . world without shadow or twilight, without that serpentine ‘no’ that bites into fruits and lodges their contradictions at their core.’’ See ‘‘A Preface to Transgression,’’ 29. 26. Foucault cites Bataille’s Story of the Eye in ‘‘A Preface to Transgression,’’ 39. 27. Foucault, ‘‘A Preface to Transgression,’’ 38. 28. Suzanne Guerlac discusses the prevalence of transgression in poststructuralist thought in her essay ‘‘Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux),’’ in Diacritics 26, no. 2 (1996), 6. Here she points out that ‘‘if there is a single term poststructuralism could not live without—at least within the intellectual circles associated with the review Tel Quel—it is ‘transgression,’ inherited from Bataille.’’ 29. Bataille cited in Derrida’s ‘‘From Restricted to General Economy,’’ 274 (my emphasis). 30. Derrida, ‘‘From Restricted to General Economy,’’ 275.

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31. Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication, 12. Libertson’s comments are within the context of a discussion of homogeneity and heterogeneity as they pertain to Bataille’s notion of a ‘‘general economy.’’ 32. That Bataille was already engaged in thinking about the problems of mastery is evident, for example, in his 1929–30 essay ‘‘The Old Mole and the Prefix Sur,’’ collected in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 32–44. 33. For example, Bataille’s essay ‘‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,’’ in Yale French Studies 78 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 9–29, is a direct engagement with Koje`ve, and Bataille cites a lengthy passage from Koje`ve’s lectures as an epigraph to his Theory of Religion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), in which his development of the notion of the self-conscious individual is patently indebted to Koje`ve. I discuss this aspect of Bataille’s thought later in this chapter. 34. Alexandre Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 3. 35. Ibid., 4. 36. In the context of Koje`ve’s account, the term ‘‘non-natural’’ applies to a human subject whose desire is directed toward the desire of another human subject. ‘‘Natural’’ denotes the rest of the world—everyday objects and artifacts, animals, and the ‘‘I’’ whose desire is directed toward merely biological satisfactions. 37. Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 5. 38. Ibid., 7. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 8. 41. Ibid., 19. 42. Misrecognition (me´connaissance) is a key concept for Jacques Lacan, who was himself so influenced by Koje`ve as to refer to him as his ‘‘master.’’ For an account of Lacan’s discipleship to Koje`ve, see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 43. Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 20. 44. Ibid., 21. 45. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 9. 46. Ibid., 123. 47. Ibid., 123–24. Bataille goes on to claim of Koje`ve’s introduction that ‘‘no one today can claim to be educated without having assimilated its contents.’’ This comment is undoubtedly as serious as it is ironic. While Bataille himself was educated by Koje`ve’s lectures, it is on the point of education—that is, of work that ‘‘forms’’ Man—that Bataille registers resistance, as we will see below.

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48. I situate this section of my work alongside that of Denis Hollier, from whose essay ‘‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,’’ I draw the notion of a certain ‘‘attitude of thought’’ in Bataille. Bataille: A Critical Reader, 59–73. 49. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 124. 50. Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 22–24. 51. Ibid., 28. 52. Ibid., 24. 53. Ibid., 17. 54. Ibid., 25. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 25. 57. Ibid., 27. 58. Ibid., 26. 59. Ibid., 28. 60. Ibid., 29. 61. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 40. 62. Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 21. 63. Ibid., 22–23. 64. Ibid., 22. 65. Ibid., 22. 66. Ibid., 29. 67. In his essay ‘‘From Restricted to General Economy,’’ Derrida examines the ‘‘sovereign renunciation of recognition’’ in the writings of Bataille (265). While my argument clearly agrees with Derrida’s in its insistence on the displacement of Hegelian recognition, it also differs from his in some respects. Derrida, while rightly distinguishing mastery (‘‘lordship’’ in this translation) and sovereignty, does not develop what I consider to be the lynchpin of the sovereign operation that counters recognition—namely, identification. In the following chapter I will argue, in a manner that moves beyond Derrida’s discussion, that the ‘‘renunciation of recognition’’ is, for Bataille, not only the refusal to be recognized, but also the refusal to recognize others. For a discussion of the renunciation of recognition in Bataille that both resonates and is at odds with Derrida’s, see Denis Hollier, ‘‘From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche’s Absence,’’ in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. and trans. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 61–78. My own discussion of misrecognition is indebted to Hollier’s analysis, in which the author claims that ‘‘if one remembers that Hegel’s slavery/master opposition rests on the struggle for recognition, the non-recognition that marks the relationship to Nietzsche is no doubt the condition for getting around this alternative’’ (70). 68. Joseph Libertson provides an illuminating discussion of subject formation, alterity, and the place of work as conceived within Bataille’s ‘‘general economy.’’ In a manner that underscores Bataille’s insistence on exploiting contradiction as a way of refuting the rational logic of the profane world of

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work, Libertson writes that ‘‘Bataille tended to observe and privilege the excessive or heterogeneous aspect of certain objects or contexts. . . . The phenomenality of these objects, in his eyes, exceeded their capacity of assimilation by a logic of non-contradiction whose principle of coherence was the notion of utility.’’ Proximity, 9. 69. Bataille cites here an etching by Goya on which are inscribed the words: ‘‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’’ (El suen˜o de la razon produce monstruos). See figure 3. 70. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 17. 71. Ibid., 18. 72. Ibid., emphasis in original. 73. Ibid., 124. 74. Ibid., 27. 75. Ibid., 31. 76. Ibid., 31. 77. Hollier, ‘‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,’’ 65. 78. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 35. 79. Ibid., 36. 80. Bataille, as I will discuss in chapters 3 and 4, also uses the term ‘‘real’’ in a very different manner, to designate not the profane world of work, but the base materialism that Andre´ Breton seeks to evade with his ‘‘surreality.’’ 81. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 41. 82. Hollier, ‘‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,’’ 65. 83. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 43. 84. Ibid., 44. 85. Hollier, ‘‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,’’ 65. 86. Ibid., 62. 87. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 52. 88. Ibid., 52. 89. Ibid., 110. 90. Jacques Derrida offers an investigation of sacrifice and the gift of death that is indebted to Bataille in his book The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). In this text Derrida continues to expand upon his considerations of a ‘‘general economy,’’ as discussed in his 1967 essay on Bataille, ‘‘From Restricted to General Economy.’’ 91. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 50. 92. Ibid., 51. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 99. 95. Bataille, ‘‘The Big Toe,’’ in Visions of Excess, 20–21. Yve-Alain Bois notes the place of rage in Bataille, specifically as it emerges against dialectical thought: ‘‘To read into this back and forth movement [from refuse to ideal, and from the ideal to refuse] something like a dialectic at work . . . would be quite simply to ignore the motif of rage.’’ See ‘‘Dialectic,’’ in Formless, 69.

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96. Hollier, ‘‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,’’ 61. 97. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 110–11. 98. Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boon (Venice: The Lapis Press, 1988), 104. 99. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 53. 100. At least, that is, not in his postwar writings, where his early interest in blood sacrifice is displaced by a quest for ‘‘inner experience,’’ in which the inner self is sacrificed. See Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 204–5. 101. Georges Bataille, ‘‘Joy in the Face of Death,’’ in The College of Sociology (1937–39), 325. 102. Bataille, Guilty, 93. 103. Ibid., 103. 104. In his Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida considers the contradictions and tensions within the philosophical tradition of friendship in a manner that recalls Bataille’s account of friendship, showing that the tradition is fraught with binaries—such as self and other, friend and enemy—that collapse upon themselves. Politics of Friendship (New York: Verso, 1997). 105. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, ‘‘The Laughter of Being,’’ in Bataille: A Critical Reader, 153. 106. Bataille is cited in Maurice Blanchot’s Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). My italics. For further discussion of the relationship between friendship and obligation, see Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death. 107. Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (New York: Paragon House, 1994), 19. 108. Borch-Jacobsen, ‘‘The Laughter of Being,’’ 149. 109. Ibid., 164. 110. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 209. 111. Ibid., 211. 112. Ibid., 211. 2. nietzsche slain

1. Georges Bataille, ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ reproduced in My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London: Marion Boyars, 1995), 218. 2. Bataille, ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ 220. 3. See, for example, Denis Hollier, ‘‘From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche’s Absence’’ in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). Here Hollier provides a characteristically passionate and compassionate analysis of Bataille’s ‘‘communication’’ with Nietzsche. On the relationship between Nietzsche and Bataille, see also Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

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(London: Routledge, 1992); Bernard Sichere, ‘‘Le ‘Nietzsche’ de Georges Bataille,’’ in Stanford French Review 12, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 13–30; Allen S. Weiss, ‘‘Impossible Sovereignty: Between The Will to Power and The Will to Chance,’’ in October 36 (Spring 1996); Lionel Abel, ‘‘Georges Bataille and the Repetition of Nietzsche,’’ in On Bataille: A Critical Reader, 51–60. 4. Bataille’s secret society Ace´phale conflated the figures of Nietzsche and Dionysus, as will be discussed later in this chapter. 5. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Verso, 2002), 52. 6. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 203. 7. Bataille claims that ‘‘it can scarcely be said we’ve encountered friendship. Not until Nietzsche,’’ Guilty, 47. 8. In his critical dyad The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), Harold Bloom develops a theory of poetic influence in which he claims that ‘‘strong’’ poets agonistically misread their predecessors in the creation of their own work and their bid to enter the canon. While my assessment of Bataille’s misprision of Nietzsche resembles Bloom’s in its emphasis on agonism, my terms are otherwise unrelated to his. I do not detect in Bataille any of the Bloomian sense of anxiety vis-a`-vis Nietzsche, but rather a desire to identify with him. In any case, it is not clear that Bloom’s paradigm can be applied to philosophical, rather than poetic, influence. 9. See chapter 1 for my discussion of the refusal of recognition in Bataille. Here I am at once affirming and diverging from Jacques Derrida’s account of Bataille’s ‘‘sovereign renunciation of recognition.’’ As I suggested in chapter 1, and as I further develop in the present chapter, the refusal of recognition should not be conceived only as the refusal to seek recognition for oneself, but also the refusal to recognize others. 10. In the course of this chapter I take significant inspiration from Hollier’s essay ‘‘From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche’s Absence,’’ in which the author claims that Bataille’s imitation of his predecessor amounts to his repetition of Nietzsche’s experience of madness; Bataille ‘‘becomes Nietzsche’s madman’’ (66). I follow Hollier in suggesting that Bataille eschews the doctrinal contents of the eternal return, instead choosing to experience the return. Extending Hollier’s insights, I elucidate the specific ways in which this experience of the eternal return refutes existentialist claims about authenticity as well as the fascist nostalgia for the past. Hollier also rightly suggests that ‘‘reading Nietzsche demands that the reader identify himself with Nietzsche’s experience,’’ and that this experience amounts to a non-recognition that dissolves identity. Placing Bataille’s understandings of sacrifice and Nietzschean tragedy at the center of my argument, I will extend Hollier’s claims, making use of the formulation of ‘‘identification’’ put forth in the first chapter. 11. In his essay ‘‘Georges Bataille and the Repetition of Nietzsche,’’ in On Bataille: Critical Essays, Lionel Abel asks if Bataille is, ‘‘throughout all of his

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books, restating the meditation on life, which was Nietzsche’s philosophy, as a meditation on death,’’ (55). In answering his own question, Abel suggests that ‘‘the one repeating Nietzsche would become the very opposite of Nietzsche’’ (59). While many commentators, such as Denis Hollier, Allan Stoekl, Franc¸ois Warin, and Sylve`re Lotringer discuss Bataille’s repetition of Nietzsche, Abel puts the matter most succinctly, suggesting that Bataille substitutes meditation on death for meditation on life. But he does not inquire deeply enough into why Bataille engages in this reversal, nor does he address the various ways in which Bataille effects this reversal; I attempt to address both of these questions in this chapter. In contrast to Abel, I focus not just on the place of death in Bataille, but on the more general ‘‘will to decline,’’ the will to sickness and decadence in Bataille. I also believe that Abel’s discussion of the relation of the remainder to totality is insufficient for understanding Bataille’s rigorous critiques of Nietzsche. In addressing Bataille’s opposition to Nietzsche, I develop an account of Bataille’s reading of his German predecessor that foregrounds his desire to exhibit a total affirmation, to pronounce a Yes not only to life, but also to sickness, morbidity, decadence, and decay. 12. For a different take on Bataille’s parody of Nietzsche, see Franc¸ois Warin’s Nietzsche et Bataille: La parodie a` l’infini (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994). Warin engages the concept of mimesis to correctly argue that, in relation to Nietzsche, Bataille’s ‘‘most faithful repetition also envelops the greatest difference’’ (37, my translation), and that ‘‘Bataille only repeats Nietzsche in moving away from him, and it is in mocking Nietzsche that he is closest to him’’ (31–32, my translation). While I agree with the tenor of the comment, I will show that Bataille does not so much mock Nietzsche as specify and exploit those moments in Nietzsche’s writings in which the German philosopher affirms, as if despite himself, the decadence and death that he elsewhere and most often wants to suppress. 13. The concept of force has a dual valence in the writings of Bataille. In relation to Nietzsche as well as to fascism (discussed below), Bataille critiques the consolidation of force in the form of power. On the other hand, he seeks to employ the left-hand forces associated with decay and corruption. On the consolidation of force versus the forces of corruption, see Bataille’s essay ‘‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,’’ in Visions of Excess, 91–102. 14. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: The Free Press, 1915), 53. The sacred and the profane, says Durkheim, represent two distinct and inimical categories, ‘‘two worlds between which there is nothing in common’’ (54). 15. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), 10. 16. Alexander Irwin makes use of these Durkheimian distinctions in analyzing the uses to which the sacred is put by Bataille and Simone Weil in his book Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred (Minneapolis:

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University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxiii. Irwin acknowledges in passing that Nietzsche, like Weil, is a ‘‘sacred figure,’’ a claim that I develop in this chapter. 17. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 455. 18. Irwin, Saints of the Impossible, xxiii. 19. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 458. 20. Ibid., 456. 21. Bataille, ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ 220. 22. Bataille, ‘‘Nietzschean Chronicle,’’ in Visions of Excess, 202–12. 23. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). See especially the chapters ‘‘Powers and Dangers’’ and ‘‘The System Shattered and Renewed.’’ Douglas describes the formless as ‘‘the stage at which [‘rejected bits and pieces’] are dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence’’ (161). While her discussion of the ‘‘power’’ inherent in such dangerous formlessness is not appropriate to my analysis of Nietzsche and Bataille, her notion of ‘‘creative formlessness’’ has particular affinities with my treatment of artist Hans Bellmer in chapter 5. 24. I situate my argument here alongside that of Lionel Abel, who proposes that Bataille restates Nietzsche’s meditation on life as a meditation on death. But I suggest that Bataille does not simply put death in the place of life in his meditations, but in fact makes Nietzsche a manifestation of the very things that Nietzsche sought to overcome: death, decay, decadence. In doing so, Bataille not only casts himself as the morbid Nietzsche, but also makes Nietzsche his own double and other, as evinced in Bataille’s conflation of Nietzsche/Dionysus with the ace´phale, as I discuss below. Perhaps most importantly, I diverge from Abel in my understanding of the repetition in Bataille of Nietzsche’s mystical experience ensuing upon his vision of the eternal return at Surlei. Like Denis Hollier and others, Abel suggests that Bataille repeats Nietzsche’s experience. While I believe this to be true, I will show that without first understanding that Nietzsche himself misunderstood his own experience, the full import of the claim cannnot be apprehended. Bataille, I will show, reads Nietzsche’s experience in a manner opposed to Nietzsche’s own interpretation of it. See my discussion in the section ‘‘How One Becomes What One Is Not,’’ below. 25. Hollier, ‘‘From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche’s Absence,’’ in On Bataille, 76. 26. See, for example, Bataille’s account of his ecstasy in Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (New York: State University of New York Press, 1988). The assertion that Bataille sought to replicate Nietzsche’s experience is addressed by several commentators. My own discussion is most indebted to Denis Hollier’s in ‘‘From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche’s Absence.’’ Hollier rightly claims that the repetition of Nietzsche and evasion of Hegelian mastery depends on non-recognition. ‘‘[T]he non-recognition that marks the relationship to Nietzsche is no doubt the condition for getting around’’ the Hegelian master–

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slave dialectic, Hollier claims. I extend these insights to develop a notion of Bataillean identification as the counter to Hegelian recognition. However, the ‘‘misreading’’ of Nietzsche of which Hollier writes differs from my concept of misreading as put forth in the present chapter. Hollier claims that in Bataille’s writings, ‘‘Nietzsche . . . is known, quoted abundantly, translated, commented upon. And even too much. But this Nietzschean inflation is itself the cause of a misreading that his beneficiary suffers from, a misreading for which remedies must be sought, remedies that are the inverse of those used for Hegel: one must actualize Hegel but hide Nietzsche’’ (65). My understanding of Bataille’s misreading of Nietzsche focuses on Bataille’s specific inversion of certain Nietzschean terms—sovereignty in particular—as well as his rereading of Nietzsche’s concept of tragedy as sacrifice. 27. Miche`le H. Richman discusses the place of Durkheimian ‘‘effervescence’’ in the thought of Bataille and in the Colle`ge de Sociologie in Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Colle`ge de Sociologie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 28. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 122. 29. David Farrell Krell, ‘‘The Mole,’’ in Infectious Nietzsche (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 115. 30. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 439. 31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 228. 32. In this chapter I will argue that Bataille revises this movement, making Dionysus a figure not of resurrection, but death. 33. Bataille, ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ 222. 34. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, ‘‘The Laughter of Being,’’ in Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 153. 35. This is Gaston Bachelard’s term, from L’air et les songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement, cited in Krell, Infectious Nietzsche, 235. 36. Luce Irigaray cited in Krell, Infectious Nietzsche, 239. 37. Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 115, 112. 38. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 16. 39. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 33. 40. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35. 41. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 45; Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 38.

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42. Ibid., 36. Nietzsche is here quoting Arthur Schopenhauer, from whom he draws the concept of the principium individuationis. Nietzsche introduces the concept of the principium with this quote from Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation: ‘‘In the midst of a world of torments the individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis’’ (36). 43. Ibid., 37. 44. Ibid., 38. 45. M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 267. 46. These reasons include Nietzsche’s repudiation of the doctrines of Arthur Schopenhauer, of whom he had once considered himself a disciple. In his self-criticism, Nietzsche quotes a passage from Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation treating the concept of tragedy: ‘‘That which bestows on everything tragic its peculiar elevating force . . . is the discovery that the world, that life, can never give real satisfaction and hence is not worthy of our affection: this constitutes the tragic spirit—it leads to resignation.’’ Hostile to the passage, Nietzsche replies, ‘‘How differently Dionysus spoke to me! How far removed I was from all this resignationsim!’’ The Birth of Tragedy, 24. 47. Ibid., 59. 48. Nietzsche, ‘‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism,’’ in The Birth of Tragedy, 26. 49. Ibid., 27. 50. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 21. 51. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §1052. 52. Ibid., §1052. 53. Nietzsche cited in Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve (New York: Continuum, 1994), 151. Discussing this passage, Ruprecht points out that suffering is necessary because it ‘‘presents us with resistance; and tragic pleasure derives from the successful overcoming of such resistance. In saying Yes to suffering, in joyous affirmation, lies the only genuine human happiness—not so much pleasure as power’’ (151). 54. F. D. Luke, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Imagery of Height,’’ in Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 107. 55. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §347. 56. This term is found in Nietzsche’s ‘‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism,’’ in The Birth of Tragedy, 23. 57. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), §347. 58. Jaspers, Nietzsche, 445. 59. Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 127.

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60. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), §257. 61. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §42. 62. Ibid., §34. 63. Ibid., §390. 64. Ibid., §392. 65. Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 52. 66. See, for example, Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §391. 67. Nietzsche cited in Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel Smith (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 78. 68. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §370. Similarly, in The Will to Power, he claims that ‘‘there are two sources of intoxication: the over-great fullness of life and a state of pathological nourishment of the brain’’ (§48). 69. Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 86. 70. Will to Power, §48. 71. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra cited in Hammer of the Gods, ed. and trans. Stephen Metcalf (London: Creation Books, 1996), 135. 72. Nietzsche cited in Metcalf, Hammer of the Gods, 135–36. 73. Bataille’s relationship to Andre´ Breton will be discussed in the following chapter. 74. Bataille, ‘‘The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist,’’ in Visions of Excess, 34. 75. Bataille, ‘‘The ‘Old Mole,’ ’’ 37. 76. Ibid., 38. 77. Ibid., 39. 78. That is, if we are to believe Bataille’s accounts of his life and if we read his fiction as autobiographical. On the truth or falsity of these claims, see Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, and Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), especially the chapter ‘‘The Scandal of the Real.’’ 79. Bataille, ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ 218. 80. Bataille, ‘‘The Solar Anus,’’ in Visions of Excess, 5. 81. Stoekl, Introduction to Visions of Excess, xv. 82. To posit a distinction between the concepts of tragedy and sacrifice is not to ignore the historical relations between the two, but to serve the heuristic purpose of distinguishing between the perhaps idiosyncratic approaches to these concepts by the thinkers with whom the present chapter is concerned. 83. See Bataille’s essay ‘‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’’ in Visions of Excess, 149. 84. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 44. 85. Ibid., 43. 86. Ibid., 40.

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87. Ibid., 46–47. 88. See chapter 1 for a discussion of the relationship between power and utility. 89. Georges Bataille, ‘‘La Me`re-Tragedie,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes, ed. Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 10:492–93. My translation. 90. Ibid. My translation. 91. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 45. 92. Bataille, ‘‘Nietzschean Chronicle,’’ 208. 93. Ibid., 210. 94. The founding myth of the secret religious society evolved around this figure was to be an actual human sacrifice. See Surya, ‘‘Everything calls for the death which ravages us,’’ in Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 235–53. 95. Bataille, ‘‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’’ in Visions of Excess, 181. 96. Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 1:55–59. 97. Considering Bataille’s re-experiencing of Nietzsche’s ecstasy at the pyramid at Surlej, Hollier claims that ‘‘this experience is that of sacrifice which cannot be represented by the notion [of the eternal return].’’ Bataille, Hollier continues, ‘‘sacrifices the notion. He sacrifices the notion of the eternal return such that it makes way, not for a philosophy of time, but for the experience of sacrifice,’’ Hollier, ‘‘From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche’s Absence,’’ 68–69. 98. Georges Bataille, ‘‘Sacrifice,’’ October 36 (1986), 61–74. 99. Ibid., 68. 100. Ibid., 70. 101. Bataille, ‘‘Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,’’ in Yale French Studies 78 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 24. 102. Bataille, ‘‘Attraction and Repulsion,’’ in The College of Sociology (1937– 39), ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 103–25. 103. Borch-Jacobsen, ‘‘The Laughter of Being,’’ 158. 104. Bataille, ‘‘La folie de Nietzsche,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. I, 545. My translation. 105. Ibid., 549. 106. Ibid. 107. Borch-Jocobsen, ‘‘The Laughter of Being,’’ 158. 108. Bataille, ‘‘La folie de Nietzsche,’’ 549. 109. Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (New York: Paragon House, 1994), 47. 110. This will to decline might be compared to what Nick Land calls Bataille’s ‘‘virulent nihilism’’ in The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992). 111. Sylve`re Lotringer, ‘‘Furiously Nietzschean,’’ introduction to On Nietzsche, xi.

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112. Lotringer does put forward a suggestive question regarding Bataille’s desire for a liberating, ecstatic disorder: ‘‘But wasn’t that precisely the kind of disorder Bataille feared (longed for) to get even closer to Nietzsche’s madness?’’ Lotringer, ‘‘Furiously Nietzschean,’’ xiv. 113. Allan Stoekl, ‘‘The Death of Ace´phale and the Will to Chance: Nietzsche in the Text of Bataille,’’ in Glyph: Textual Studies 6 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 42–67. My essay owes much to Stoekl’s piece, in tenor, even if not in content. His reading carefully traces the transformation of the figure of Nietzsche in the writings of Bataille, and he offers a fascinating commentary on Bataille’s treatment of Christ and the development of a protoNietzschean hyperchristianity. But while putting forth an insightful exposition of Bataille’s critique of Nietzsche and the positing of the will to chance in place of the will to power, Stoekl does little in the way of addressing sovereignty, which I take to be key to interpreting Bataille’s conception of power. His reading also emphasizes certain suppressions or ‘‘forgettings’’ of Nietzsche, while I have taken as my concern the inversions of Nietzsche that Bataille commits. Stoekl also uses the terms ‘‘minor’’ and ‘‘major’’ in relation to aspects of Bataille’s rewriting of Nietzsche. My use of these terms is unrelated to his. 114. Stoekl, ‘‘The Death of Ace´phale,’’ 62, 61. 115. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 17. Emphasis in original. 116. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 3:453. 117. Nietzsche cited in Stoekl, ‘‘The Death of Ace´phale,’’ 54. In ‘‘From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche’s Absence,’’ Hollier claims that while Bataille expresses ‘‘the most explicit reservations regarding certain decisive points of Nietzsche’s thought: in the first place, the notions of the will to power and the overman which, in a certain way, would remain this side of the mastery that Hegel put in place with the dialectic of the master and the slave,’’ he goes on to say that ‘‘it is not the Nietzschean will to power but rather Hegelian mastery that will be submitted to the tremor from which sovereignty will draw what one could call its existence’’ (67). I argue here, on the contrary, that sovereignty, according to Bataille, does draw its existence from the diminution of the will to power, which, as Hollier says, remains ‘‘this side’’ of the master– slave dialectic. 118. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Marion Boyars, 1993), 159. 119. This is to extrapolate from the subtitle of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. 120. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist,’’ in The Portable Nietzsche, 570. The ‘‘formula’’ appears in both texts. 121. However, we will see, on the other hand, that Bataille embraces a certain reading of Nietzsche’s concern with the future, in opposition to what Bataille will describe as fascist ‘‘nostalgia.’’ 122. Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, cited in Bataille, On Nietzsche, 35.

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123. One might recall, by way of a suggestive comparison, Bataille’s reading of the murderous pederast Gilles de Rais. Though portraying Gilles de Rais as a tragic hero, even a ‘‘Shakespearean hero,’’ Bataille describes his downfall as that of a victim. Gilles de Rais falls from a position of power to one of impotence; his tragedy betrays a ‘‘powerlessness of Reason’’ that, far from evincing an overcoming, exhibits a succumbing. ‘‘The decline of Gilles de Rais,’’ writes Bataille, ‘‘has the look of funereal magnificence.’’ In the end, the ‘‘tragedy’’ of this ‘‘sacred monster’’ resembles a sacrifice in which high rank, nobility, is the very source of the hero’s fall. The Trial of Gilles de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1991), 45. For a discussion of Bataille’s interpretation of the ‘‘tragedy’’ of Gilles de Rais, see Franc¸oise Meltzer’s For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 131–42. 124. Nietzsche cited in Bataille, On Nietzsche, 33. 125. Nietzsche, ‘‘Ecce Homo,’’ in The Portable Nietzsche, 658. 126. Ibid., 657. 127. Ibid., 659. 128. Nietzsche cited in Borch-Jacobsen, ‘‘The Laughter of Being,’’ 157. 129. Borch-Jacobsen makes a similar point where he discusses sympathy in Bataille’s reading of this same quote from Nietzsche. Borch-Jacobsen, ‘‘The Laughter of Being,’’ 156–58. 130. Indeed, in ‘‘Discussion on Sin,’’ in which Bataille clarifies his position on sin as found in On Nietzsche, he claims that ‘‘when I spoke of the morality of the summit, I was, in reality, speaking in the name of the morality of the decline.’’ See Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 59. 131. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 70. I am following Bruce Boone’s translation of On Nietzsche. However, it should be noted that cadere means not just ‘‘to fall,’’ but ‘‘to fall away from,’’ as a fruit from a tree. For a discussion of Bataille that plays upon the multiple meanings encapsulated in tomber, see Denis Hollier’s ‘‘Bataille’s Tomb: A Halloween Story,’’ trans. Richard Miller, October 33 (Summer 1985), 73–102. The translator notes, ‘‘tombe, tombeau, tomber—grave, tomb, to fall, tumble, come down, abate, and so on—the verbal acrobatics an attempt to render all of the various meanings, tacit and overt, that resound whenever any of these words occurs would demand are beyond the capabilities of translation.’’ 132. Bataille’s take on waiting owes much, I think, to Simone Weil. The relationship of Weil and Bataille will be examined in the next two chapters. 133. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 38. 134. Of course, the word ‘‘sovereign’’ itself has its roots in the Latin for ‘‘super’’—over, or above—adding another level of inversive parody to Bataille’s thought. 135. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 20.

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136. Ibid., 18. 137. ‘‘The limit-experience is the response that man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question. This decision involving all being expresses the impossibility of ever stopping.’’ Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 203. The decision to put oneself at risk in the context of erotic communication is concisely addressed by Bataille when he emphasizes that ‘‘the domain of eroticism’’ is opened ‘‘through a conscious refusal to limit ourselves within our individual personalities.’’ Bataille, Erotism, 24. 138. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 18, 19. 139. Ibid., 19. 140. Boaistuau cited in Bataille, ‘‘The Deviations of Nature,’’ in Visions of Excess, 53. 141. Emerging in relation not only to Nietzsche’s philosophy but also to the Heideggerian Eigentlichkeit (authenticity), Sartre’s construal of authenticity has to do with the liberty of humans in their situatedness, or the ‘‘human condition.’’ ‘‘Authenticity,’’ Sartre writes, ‘‘is a duty. . . . Authentic being is realizing fully its situated being [eˆtre-en-situation] . . . with this profound conscience that by the authentic realization of this situated being, one opens onto full existence.’’ Les Carnets de la droˆle de guerre (Paris: Gallimard), 72–73 (my translation). Defining authenticity in relation to freedom, Sarte claims that ‘‘on the level of total authenticity, I have recognized that man is a being in whom essence is preceded by existence, that he is a free being who can only, in his various circumstances, desire his freedom,’’ in L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Les E´ditions Nagel, 1970), 84 (my translation). 142. See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘Un nouveau mystique,’’ in Situations, 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 143–88. 143. Alfred Stern, Sartre: His Philosophy and Existential Psychoanalysis (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), 31. Sartre’s reading of Nietzsche is especially important in light of the fact that Bataille’s Inner Experience is itself so indebted to Nietzsche. Bataille’s meditations on mystical experience are, of course, informed by Christian mystics such as Angela of Foligno and St. John of the Cross. But Nietzsche’s ecstasy upon envisioning the eternal return is perhaps the model of experience that Bataille seeks most fervently to repeat. In addition, Bataille appends his rejoinder to Sartre to the main text of Sur Nietzsche, a move that underlines the importance, even if implicit, of Nietzsche to the debate at hand. 144. Allan Stoekl attributes this understanding of Nietzsche to Sartre, Camus, and the ‘‘dominant French philosophers’’ of their period, especially in contradistinction to Blanchot and Bataille’s readings of Nietzsche. Politics, Writing, and Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 105. 145. For a discussion of this point, see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 33. 146. See Hollywood, ‘‘Introduction: ‘The Philosopher—Sartre—and Me,’ ’’ in Sensible Ecstasy, 25–35.

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147. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 75. 148. Walter Kaufmann, ‘‘Nietzsche,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1967), 5:512. 149. Hollier argues that Bataille ‘‘sacrifices the notion of the eternal return such that it makes way . . . for the experience of sacrifice.’’ Hollier, ‘‘From Beyond Hegel,’’ 69. He further suggests that the ‘‘repetition of the Nietzschean experience’’ is ‘‘authentic right to the negation of authenticity.’’ This insight extends, as I try to show, to the polemical relations between Bataille and Sartre, whose notion of authenticity presumes an understanding of Nietzsche to which Bataille is precisely opposed. 150. Bataille, ‘‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’’ in Visions of Excess, 180. 151. Baumler cited in Bataille, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Fascists,’’ in Visions of Excess, 191. This essay was written in 1937, several years before his debate with Sartre, but it points to the stance that Bataille will take against Sartre on the question of experience. 152. See Bataille, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Fascists,’’ in Visions of Excess, 182–96, and the section on Nietzsche in Inner Experience, 130–58. Bataille claims to ‘‘remain indifferent while attempting to apprehend the intellectual content of the vision’’ of the return. Indeed, Bataille believes that Nietzsche’s repeated attempts to prove that the doctrine of the return is the ‘‘most scientific’’ of doctrines are simply bankrupt. 153. The use of the term ‘‘mystical’’ to describe Nietzsche’s vision of the eternal return is idiosyncratic, but Bataille, though himself taking issue with the term, nonetheless insists on Nietzsche’s ‘‘inner experience.’’ Bataille writes, ‘‘I want to be very clear on this: not a word of Nietzsche’s work can be understood without experiencing that dazzling dissolution into totality, without living it out.’’ On Nietzsche, xxxi. 154. Bataille, Inner Experience, 154. 155. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 100. 156. Bataille, Inner Experience, 153–54. As Hollier writes, ‘‘to repeat Nietzsche is to sacrifice . . . the guarantee of all identities . . . [r]ight down to the sacrificial destruction of Nietzsche himself.’’ Hollier, ‘‘From Beyond Hegel,’’ 72. 157. For an account of Bataille’s political involvements (or lack thereof ) before, during, and after the war, see Michel Surya’s Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. Bataille’s purported complicity with fascism is discussed in Amy Hollywood’s Sensible Ecstasy, while the transformation Nietzsche undergoes in this context is the subject of Allan Stoekl’s study ‘‘From Ace´phale to the Will to Chance: Nietzsche in the Text of Bataille,’’ in Glyph 6 (1979), 42–67. 158. The clearest example of Bataille’s suspicion of Nietzsche is found in his essay ‘‘The Old Mole and the Prefix Sur,’’ in Visions of Excess, 32–44. 159. See Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 235–53. In this regard, a comparison might be made with Bataille’s epistolary friend, Mircea

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Eliade. For a discussion of Eliade’s problematic political stances in relation to his nostalgic version of the sacred, see Robert Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). While a youth in Romania, Eliade had exhibited complicity with the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a ‘‘political/spiritual movement with fascist and anti-Semitic leanings powerful in Romania during the thirties’’ (82). But while Eliade has been called ‘‘catastrophically naı¨ve’’ (95) in this regard, Bataille was almost immediately and acutely aware, as well as rigorously critical, of his own fascination with fascism, which should not be mistaken for complicity. Indeed, early essays such as ‘‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’’ (1933) exhibit a remarkable understanding of fascism—an understanding that Bataille elsewhere puts toward critical ends. 160. Bataille, ‘‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’’ in Visions of Excess, 142–43. 161. Ibid., 145. 162. Ibid., 145–48. 163. For Bataille’s defense of Nietzsche in the face of such possible fascist appropriation, see his essay ‘‘Nietzsche and the Fascists,’’ in Visions of Excess, 182–96. 164. Bataille, ‘‘Propositions,’’ in Visions of Excess, 199. 165. Bataille, ‘‘Nietzschean Chronicle,’’ in Visions of Excess, 210. 166. Bataille, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Fascists,’’ in Visions of Excess, 193. 167. Ibid., 193. 168. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 3:85. 169. Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1986), 271. 3. the labyrinth: toward bataille’s ‘‘extremist surrealism’’

1. Georges Bataille, Lascaux, or The Birth of Art (Lausanne: Skira Color Studio, 1955). 2. For example, Bataille speculates liberally, though compellingly, about the origins of laughter, claiming that ‘‘Lascaux Man laughed, of that we may be sure.’’ Lascaux, or The Birth of Art, 25. 3. It comes as something of a shock, for instance, to read this sentence from Lascaux, in which Bataille describes the art of the grotto: ‘‘The life it incarnates is transfigured in the painting, made fair, made beautiful,’’ 24. 4. This is Andre´ Breton’s famously scornful sobriquet, found in the ‘‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism,’’ in The Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 185. 5. Bataille, Lascaux, 34. 6. See Bataille, ‘‘The Big Toe,’’ in Visions of Excess, 20. 7. The allusions I enumerate were not, one can only imagine, intended as such by their author, but it is for this reason that they demonstrate so well the role of chance, which will be one subject of the present study.

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8. ‘‘Paintings on the walls of ancient caves, or sculptures hewn out of rock within caverns, have been called ‘invisible art’ and likened to ‘silent music.’ ’’ Doris Heyden citing Carpenter in ‘‘Caves,’’ Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 130. 9. Alfred Skira, preface to Lascaux. 10. However, the sense of the word ‘‘marvelous’’ differs significantly for Breton and Bataille, just as Bataille’s sense of coincidence is opposed to that of Breton, as I will argue later in this chapter. The distinction here will be between Bataille’s sense of coincidence and Breton’s concept of ‘‘objective chance.’’ For a startling example of Bataille’s fascination with coincidence, see ‘‘Coincidences,’’ the allegedly autobiographical account of strange affinities between life and art that appends his Story of the Eye. 11. Skira, preface to Lascaux. 12. For a discussion of anamorphosis indebted to Bataille and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, see Jacques Lacan’s lecture ‘‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a,’’ in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 79–91. 13. This is how Rosalind Krauss characterizes Salvador Dali’s ‘‘psycho-atmospheric-anamorphic object,’’ which she, echoing Lacan, claims is apprehended only ‘‘through the modality of misrecognition.’’ The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 149. 14. Indeed, this signals a general trend in Bataille’s writings, from the more hallucinatory and ‘‘filthy’’ works of the 20s and 30s to the later analytical works, such as The Accursed Share. But this is not to suggest that the early essays, for instance, lacked intellectual rigor (a reading of ‘‘The Notion of Expenditure’’ or those pieces dedicated to the analysis, consistently insightful and prescient, of fascism will quickly dispense with this notion), nor that the later works mark a diminution of Bataille’s lifelong enthusiasms (until the end of his life, Bataille writes on eroticism and death, and his prose, if less delirious, is no less stirring for all that). 15. A curious note sounds here, as ‘‘peripeteia’’ is derived from the Greek for ‘‘sudden change,’’ more particularly a fall [from peri Ⳮ patein, to fall] and is most often associated with the reversal of fortune characteristic of tragic drama. In most cases, this reversal comes in the form of a fall (a point not lost on Bataille, who will effect a peripetic operation on Breton). In his Poetics (chapter 6), Aristotle sets forth a definition of the term: peripety, he writes, ‘‘is the change from one state of things within the play to its opposite.’’ That Bataille effects reversals to critical ends, and attempts to impose a coincidence of opposites, a lacerating and tensive state of contradiction, to mystical ends, will be the subject of this chapter. 16. The Birth of Art is Bataille’s subtitle to Lascaux, which all but confirms that one of his primary, if unnamed, interlocutors here is Nietzsche. Bataille’s

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counter-account to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy would provide the subject for a study of its own. As Suzanne Guerlac argues, in Lascaux, ‘‘Bataille rewrites the miracle of Greece, substituting a primitive world for the classical one, a world of the sacred for a world of reason.’’ ‘‘Bataille in Theory,’’ 10. For a wideranging study of Bataille’s thought on art, see Vincent Teixeira, Georges Bataille, La Part de l’art: La peinture du non-savoir (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1997). 17. For Bataille’s account of the spirit of sacrifice and transgression that animates this prehistoric art, see especially the chapter of Lascaux entitled ‘‘Prohibition and Transgression,’’ 37–39. 18. This is not a chronological proposition, of course, but a strike at the entire tradition of Western art in the form of a treatise on the murky origins of the mimetic faculty in humans. In the preface, Bataille must be thinking of Nietzsche and the Greeks when he states that the concern of his work is to examine ‘‘art’s birth, not some one of its later aspects or refinements’’ (Bataille’s emphasis). Yet, in this preface, he employs a language we are not used to hearing from Bataille, as when he claims that ‘‘nothing finer has been done’’ since these paintings as Lascaux. Such a statement counters an art historical tradition based on the supremacy of Greek art. (This is not undermined by the last sentences of Lascaux, in which Bataille claims that ‘‘Lascaux has its echo in each of those other new-blooded, fresh-sprung arts which vigorously broke free of inertia’s chains. It sometimes happened quietly. . . . I am thinking of early Egyptian art, of Sixth Century Greece.’’ Here Bataille is referring to such works of dark erotica as he reproduces in his book The Tears of Eros, 57–63.) However, what is most unusual is that throughout this study Bataille takes the tack of countering this tradition not by drawing the reader down into a base reality, but by claiming that these first works of art are also the ‘‘finest,’’ ‘‘fairest,’’ and ‘‘most beautiful.’’ At least, this is what a preliminary reading would suggest. I argue that the situation is not so simple as this, and that Bataille is in fact fully aware of the grotesque nature of the figures that haunt the twisting corridors of Lascaux. 19. Alexander Irwin has made headway in studying the startling similarities between Simone Weil and Bataille in his Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). However, while the study argues convincingly that these two thinkers shared the same desire to make sacred exemplars of themselves, orchestrating their lives according to a kind of saintly-writerly paradigm, there is little said of the fact that Bataille (who was ‘‘obsessed’’ with Weil) was likely profoundly influenced by her thought, while Weil (who dismissed Bataille as a fanatic of the irrational) probably developed her line of thinking independently of Bataille. While this necessarily remains the object of speculation, as neither of the thinkers explicitly comments on the degree of influence of the other, there is, as I hope to show in this chapter, nonetheless ample evidence that Bataille’s own mystical proclivities owe some of their character to the woman who seems at

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first sight in most every way his opposite. It is, perhaps, Weil’s disparity in relation to his thought that makes of her such an attractive and influential character for Bataille. 20. Breton’s interest in psychoanalysis, everywhere evident and endlessly commented upon, is nonetheless far from straightforward. For example, Breton resists the tendency to analyze dreams for fear of diluting their mystery, and instead endorses the recording of dreams with as little analysis as possible. That any representation of a dream will, as Freud himself made clear, already be the product of a significantly distorting editorial hand is a topic for another study altogether. In any case, what most interested Breton, it seems, was Freud’s concept of sublimation, which encapsulated the surrealist will to transfiguration, the desire to ennobilize reality. In Breton’s Second Manifesto he cites sublimation as the phenomenon in which surrealists are most ‘‘especially interested’’ (160). 21. Georges Bataille, ‘‘Henri Pastoureau: La blessure de l’homme,’’ in The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 1994), 128. Bataille’s emphasis. That Bataille is speaking here of a break with the Bretonian tradition of surrealism is worth noting; that this break would be affected by incorporating the experiences those who ‘‘take the human adventure to its limit through Christianity’’ is the crucial point developed in this chapter. 22. Georges Bataille, ‘‘On the Subject of Slumbers,’’ in The Absence of Myth, 49. 23. ‘‘Hyperchristianity’’ is, of course, Nietzsche’s term for a mode of existence meant to ‘‘overcome’’ Christianity. 24. Andre´ Breton, ‘‘Surrealism and Painting,’’ in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 1972), 1. 25. This is not to ignore surrealism’s origins as a literary, rather than visual, art movement, but rather to emphasize the degree to which, for Breton, vision is implicated in all aspects of surrealism, writerly or otherwise. For a discussion of the relationship between vision and writing in Breton’s surrealism, see Rosalind Krauss, ‘‘The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,’’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 87–118. 26. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 1. 27. Ibid., 3. 28. As opposed to the ‘‘idealist’’ materialism which Bataille accuses ‘‘most materialists’’ of espousing. See his essay ‘‘Base Materialism,’’ in Visions of Excess, 15. 29. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 2. Breton’s emphasis. 30. A claim made suspicious above all by the prefix ‘‘sur-’’ which, as Bataille argues, marks a position of superiority, a dominance over reality. See his essay ‘‘The Old Mole and the Prefix Sur’’ in Visions of Excess, 32–44. 31. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 28. My emphasis.

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32. ‘‘I believe in the future resolution of these states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute [rather than ‘‘vulgar’’] reality, a surreality.’’ Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 14. 33. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 44. 34. The Hegelian terminology is not gratuitous. Breton never stopped proclaiming his indebtedness to Hegelian dialectic. Hegel’s influence on Breton is encapsulated in the latter’s Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930). Whether embracing or departing from Hegel, Breton remains ‘‘ever Hegelian in his definitions of the surreal,’’ as Hal Foster claims in Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 20. 35. Both Breton and Bataille were, as was noted in the first chapter, heavily influenced by Koje`ve’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. For Breton, this is a dialectic that is a synthetic movement that suppresses or extinguishes contradiction. Bataille, too, frequently reads Hegel as the great synthesizer, the emblem of resolution. Whether Hegel himself meant to preserve or overcome contradiction is a matter of debate. Bataille was aware also that the will to synthesis was in tension with the spirit of contradiction in Hegel. See, for example, his essay ‘‘Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice.’’ For a brief discussion of the place of contradiction in Hegel’s dialectical system, see H. B. Acton’s entry ‘‘Hegel’’ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967). 36. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 6. 37. Ibid., 7. 38. The story is told in Breton’s essay ‘‘Picasso in his element,’’ in Surrealism and Painting, 101–14. 39. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 101. 40. Breton was famously scatophobic. In another well-known story, Salvador Dali, in an exemplary display of his redoubtable wit, defends the smear of excrement on the pants of a figure in his painting ‘‘The Lugubrious Game’’ by assuring Breton that it represents only a ‘‘simulacrum’’ of excrement. See Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre´ Breton (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 331. 41. That Picasso intended to incorporate flies into this work must have been a point of particular irritation to Breton, who, in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism of three years prior, had disgustedly claimed that ‘‘M. Bataille loves flies. Not we: we love the miters of old evocators, the miters of pure linen to whose front point was affixed a blade of gold and upon which flies did not settle, because they had been purified to keep them away’’ (184). This is a telling summation of Breton’s moderate surrealism. 42. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 114. Breton’s emphasis. If it is the case, as Mark Polizzotti claims, that ‘‘Breton abjured all sentiment, and . . . forged a badge of honor from insolence,’’ it is clear that in this instance Breton has fallen far short of his ideal. Revolution of the Mind, 58.

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43. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 113. 44. Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 15. The concluding sentence of this Manifesto must have raised Bataille’s hackles: ‘‘Existence is elsewhere,’’ it states (47). Bataille’s notion of being elsewhere (as when he claims that to write ‘‘is to go someplace else,’’ in Guilty, 113) has not to do with ‘‘leaving the earth,’’ as Breton would have it, but rather with exceeding the limits of individual existence through experiences of ecstatic communication. 45. It is worth noting that Picasso himself was never a part of the official surrealist group—a fact that, strangely, seems to have secured Breton’s reverence for the Spaniard. But surely it is the case that Breton transvalues Picasso himself, working to transfigure Picasso into more of a surrealist than the artist ever thought himself to be. As evidence in support of this hypothesis, it is necessary to look no further than the photographs that accompany Breton’s text ‘‘Picasso in his element.’’ Of the dozen images that illustrate the text, made up of reproductions of art as well as documentary photos of Picasso’s studio, all but the two final drawings seem to exemplify just the kind of art that Breton feels compelled to transfigure. Indeed, Picasso’s ‘‘element’’ appears to be anything but the clean and shiny sort that Breton would have desired. The photos of Picasso’s studio reveal it to be a mess of dust, dirt, scattered paint tubes, and strewn drawings (an ‘‘excretory’’ sight, as Breton admits). The art reproduced includes his 1933 ‘‘Composition,’’ which incorporates such detritus as a decayed leaf, as well as a host of other sculptures composed of the flotsam and fragments of real life. Breton strives mightily to account for this element of disorder. Indeed, this entire me´moire in miniature, with its repeated appeals to a ‘‘unity’’ at every turn contradicted by the photos, reads less as a recollection than an apology, less an embrace of Picasso’s base predilections than an attempt to sweep them under the carpet. Breton’s text sublimates the photos. On a similar note, comparing Bataille’s fascination with flies to Breton’s own interest in insects reveals all the difference between Bataille the base materialist and Breton the ennobling idealist. Bataille’s flies are always disrupting things— they land on the lips of corpses or on the noses of orators (this latter is the example that Breton cites in his excoriation of Bataille in The Second Manifesto). Breton’s favored insects are not those associated so closely with excrement, like flies, but are rather butterflies and mantes. But his butterflies are always captured, killed, neatly mounted, and scrupulously arranged, just as his mantes are bred within the confines of a cage, assuring they will not cause any extramural trouble. If the mantis is a figure of ‘‘desire unbound’’ for Breton, it is demonstratively self-contradictory for him to keep them bound between walls. In short, Bataille’s insects swarm and crawl; Breton’s stay neatly, categorically pinned, or shut up in boxes. 46. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 20. Foster also addresses Breton’s sense of the real, but develops, in this brief account, a different definition of the real according to Breton. In Foster’s discussion, the

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‘‘real’’ is that of the philosophical tradition which equates rationality with reality, the ‘‘reign of logic’’ in which ‘‘absolute rationalism’’ remains ‘‘in vogue’’ (Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 9)—this is, again, something that Breton is fighting against, though for reasons very different from those I am citing in tracing his understanding of the real as base, ‘‘vulgar’’ reality. But even as Breton alleges a disdain for the real in this philosophical sense, he nonetheless seeks a ‘‘synthesis of the rational and the real, without fearing to place in the word ‘real’ everything irrational it can contain.’’ Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 74. To be sure, Breton’s surrealist synthesis is, in this regard, a compromise formation, a way of warding off the baseness of the real that would, as Bataille repeatedly affirms, truly embody ‘‘everything irrational.’’ 47. This is the title of a subsection of Bataille’s essay ‘‘The Labyrinth,’’ in Visions of Excess, 171–77. 48. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 20. 49. This visit had been preceded by visits to other sites in the area, as Mark Polizzotti relates in Revolution of the Mind, 580. 50. Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind, 584. 51. Bataille, Lascaux, 137. 52. In chapter 5, I will examine the fingers and hands of Bataille and Hans Bellmer. In doing so, I will address Bataille’s identification with the artists of Lascaux, who left signs of their mutilated hands, with ablated fingers, on the walls of the caves in which they painted. 53. Rosalind Krauss, whose discussion I draw upon in my understanding of the problem, offers a concise summary of Bataille’s criticism of Luquet in her essay ‘‘No More Play,’’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 52–54. 54. Cited in Krauss, ‘‘No More Play,’’ 53. 55. Bataille emphasizes the ‘‘difference in the presentation of the man and of the beast’’ in Lascaux, 117. 56. Bataille, Lascaux, 117, 118. 57. An obvious objection here would be to point out that Breton spent his life championing, not to mention obsessively collecting, art that distorted the human figure: Dali’s elastic figures, Masson’s massacred orgiasts, Bellmer’s disarticulated dolls, Tanguy’s alien biomorphs, Ernst’s humanoid collages, and, of course, Picasso’s grotesque femmes, to name a very few. However, as the evidence in this chapter would suggest, Breton reads these deformations not as debased mutilations but rather as syntheses of reality and fantasy in an elevated surreality. Art historian Hal Foster suggests that behind this insistence on synthesis is, unbeknownst to Breton, the working of the death drive. See Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 15–17. 58. Evidenced most especially in the work found in the journal Documents, edited by Bataille. See the Documents essays collected in Encyclopedia Acephalica,

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ed. Alastair Brotchie, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1995). Documents has also been compiled in two volumes (Jean-Michel Place, 1991). 59. Krauss, ‘‘No More Play,’’ 64, 51. 60. It is true that we do not know for certain that the figure Breton partially erased was that of a human, rather than a beast. But that Bataille imagined it so is likely, for each mention he makes of the caves at Pech-Merle, where Breton committed his act of defacement, is in the context of a discussion of the ‘‘illmade, semi-animal, or grotesque’’ figures that represent humans. Pech-Merle seems to be particularly rich in these monstrous apotheoses. See Lascaux, 118– 19, 134. 61. ‘‘Alteration’’ is a key term for Bataille, and especially in the context of his approach to primitive art. See his essay ‘‘L’art primitif,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes, 1:247–54. Rosalind Krauss offers a clear exposition of this concept in ‘‘No More Play,’’ 54. 62. Bataille, ‘‘L’art primitif,’’ 253. 63. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 16. 64. As Rimbaud, that hero of surrealism, had himself claimed when he wrote, ‘‘Je est un autre.’’ 65. Bataille, Lascaux, 115. 66. In this regard and others, Freud’s formulations in ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ in Psychological Writings and Letters, ed. Sander L. Gilman (New York: Continuum, 1995), 136, are applicable. It is here that he echoes Otto Rank, speaking of the uncanny double that ‘‘reverses its aspect,’’ transforming from ‘‘an insurance against the destruction of the ego,’’ an ‘‘assurance of immortality,’’ to a ‘‘harbinger of death.’’ In the case of Bataille, conceiving the self as other, as double, amounts to affirming the self as a mortal self. One might say that, from a certain point of view, Bataille is Breton’s double, and Christ is God’s. I will revisit these propositions in chapter 4. 67. Bataille, ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ 218. 68. Breton continued in this subterranean vein when he named a later surrealist magazine ‘‘Labyrinthe.’’ 69. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture, 59. 70. As he was of Eliade’s book Yoga. See Guilty, where he speaks of feeling ‘‘hostile’’ toward certain aspects of Eliade’s work. In particular, Eliade’s notion of sacred space and ritual action as producing an experience of eternity, beyond the destruction of time, must have grated on Bataille, whose understanding of the sacred assumes an affirmation of ‘‘horror-spreading time.’’ See his essays ‘‘Sacred,’’ ‘‘Sacrifices,’’ ‘‘Labyrinth,’’ and ‘‘Obelisk,’’ in Visions of Excess. 71. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: New American Library, 1958), 384. 72. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 381. 73. Ibid., 382. 74. Eliade discusses ‘‘easy substitutes for sacred space’’ in terms that might usefully be compared to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the auratic and its rela-

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tion to technologies of reproduction. Eliade describes this substitution as ‘‘a reproduction which we can almost call mechanical, of a single archetype in variants ever more ‘localized’ and ‘crude,’ ’’ Patterns in Comparative Religion, 384—a sentiment that echos Benjamin’s 1936 consideration of the ‘‘decay’’ of the aura in the age of mechanical reproduction. See his famous essay ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). Both Benjamin and Eliade exhibit an ambivalence regarding these degrading repetitions. 75. It is worth comparing on this point Michel de Certeau’s account of the ‘‘spatial practices’’ of the ‘‘ordinary man,’’ the ‘‘common hero,’’ in everyday life. De Certeau reads the meanderings of the urban pedestrian as a kind of journey through a labyrinth, though of a ‘‘phatic’’ sort. See especially his essay on ‘‘Walking in the City’’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 76. Bataille, I am arguing throughout this book, finds a dangerous power holding together opposites as opposites. The clash—ecstatic and horrifying— between opposing elements (life and death, for example), thus does not represent a third term, but rather culminates in a dangerous moment. Anthropologist Edmund Leach, by way of interesting contrast, argues that the ambiguity of the sacred issues in a third term, a dangerous in-between that takes its power from the taboo surrounding it. See, for example, his essay ‘‘The Place of Ambiguity: Classification and Taboo,’’ in The Essential Edmund Leach, Volume I: Anthropology and Society, ed. Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 77. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ in Psychological Writings and Letters, ed. Sander L. Gilman (New York: Continuum, 1995), 121. 78. Freud, ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ 127. 79. Freud discusses the terms sacer and taboo in his Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950). Here and elsewhere Freud draws from Karl Abel’s essay, ‘‘Antithetical Meanings of Primal Words.’’ ‘‘Sacred,’’ it should be noted, also means ‘‘set apart.’’ Bataille, following Rudolph Otto, thinks of the sacred as the ‘‘wholly other,’’ set apart, completely heterogeneous. In the present context, the sacred embodies the contradiction that fascinates Bataille—it is both itself and its opposite, set apart from itself in being at once holy and accursed. While others have underlined the connection between the uncanny and the sacred, I will show how this logic can be used to understand Bataille’s reading of Simone Weil. On the uncanny logic of the sacred in relation to Bataille, see, for example, Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’s Formless: A User’s Guide, 52–53, and Krauss’s The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), chapter 4, as well as Mark C. Taylor’s Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 115–48. 80. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 384. Eliade here speaks of the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of the sacred. In perhaps his most famous

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formulation of the concept of the sacred, Eliade claims that the ‘‘first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane.’’ The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace), 10, Eliade’s emphasis. Eliade is drawing explicitly on Rudolf Otto’s classic text The Idea of the Holy, where the holy is characterized as the ‘‘wholly other,’’ and defined by a sense of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the ‘‘aweful’’ and fascinating mystery. In this connection, Otto also relates the sacred, or holy, to the uncanny—here approximated to the ‘‘numinous’’—and das Ungeheure, or the monstrous. The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 40. 81. See Bataille’s essays ‘‘Obelisk’’ and ‘‘Labyrinth,’’ in Visions of Excess. 82. I am not, of course, claiming that Bataille is reversing Eliade per se (whose Patterns in Comparative Religion follows Bataille’s essays by decades), but rather drawing attention to the reversal of any conception that equates the sacred with eternity and immortality rather than with time and death. 83. Bataille, ‘‘The Obelisk,’’ Visions of Excess, 220. 84. Jacques Derrida describes the ‘‘trace’’ as a ‘‘seed or mortal germ’’ in ‘‘Freud and the Scene of Writing,’’ Writing and Difference, 231. The doubleness spoken of here—between the trace as perpetual beginning, burgeoning life, and the trace as repeated end, the call to death—is not far from the ambivalent movement exhibited by Weil and Bataille. Weil, for example, cites John 12:24, which proclaims that ‘‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’’ On this point, she and Bataille achieve a strange accord. 85. The notion of ‘‘dwelling’’ is central to Martin Heidegger’s thought on the question of Being, particularly with reference to the creation of poetry and architecture. See, for example, his ‘‘Building Dwelling Thinking’’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1935) 344–63. There are curious resonances between Heidegger’s essay ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ in Basic Writings, 139–212, and Bataille’s own conception of the birth of art at Lascaux. The notions of strife and conflict in the thought of each of these writers is prominent, but Bataille would likely have resisted the notion of ‘‘dwelling’’ that Heidegger employs. Perhaps the most potentially fruitful grounds for comparison would be in their respective attitudes toward time and death. While both thinkers put time and death at the center of human existence, Heidegger’s dual notions of being-towards-death and authenticity would be at odds with Bataille’s insistence that any notion of project would itself render inauthentic human existence. 86. Bataille, ‘‘The Obelisk,’’ 219. 87. Waiting is a central concept for Weil, to whom Bataille may owe some of his own understanding of waiting, though issues of chronology and precursorship are difficult to sort out here. See Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper and Row, 1951). Waiting plays a strange

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role in Bataille’s relationship to Weil, as well. In the next chapter I will discuss Bataille’s waiting to publish his novel Blue of Noon until after Weil’s death. 88. Lima de Freitas, ‘‘Labyrinth,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 413. 89. In fact, the image of life teeming over a corpse or emerging from the rot of earth is dear to Bataille. See, for example, his Erotism, as well as The Accursed Share. Franz Kafka, who fascinated Bataille (see Bataille’s essay on Kafka in Literature and Evil ) provides a simultaneously fine and grotesque example of this merging of life and death in the image of a wound in his story ‘‘A Country Doctor’’: ‘‘The boy was indeed ill. In his right side, near the hip, was an open wound as big as the palm of my hand. Rose-red, in many variations of shade, dark in the hollows, lighter at the edges, softly granulated, with irregular clots of blood, open as a surface mine to the daylight. That was how it looked from a distance. But on a closer inspection there was another complication. I could not help a low whistle of surprise. Worms, as thick and as long as my little finger, themselves rose-red and blood-spotted as well, were wriggling from their fastness in the interior of the wound toward the light, with small white heads and many little legs. Poor boy, you were past helping. I had discovered your great wound; this blossom in your side was destroying you.’’ Collected Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 167–68. At least two features of this passage merit commentary. First, the wound in the side of this boy, this son, may suggest the wound in Christ’s side. That this boy is condemned to die, and that his father is conspicuously absent, underline this proposition. But more to the point of this chapter is the doctor’s mournful admission: ‘‘A fine wound is all I brought into this world.’’ The combination of birth and death, of fecundity and rot, resonates clearly with Bataille’s concerns. 90. See especially Bataille’s chapters ‘‘Affinities between Reproduction and Death’’ and ‘‘Sexual Plethora and Death’’ in Erotism. 91. The ‘‘little death’’ (petite mort) is a term denoting the orgasm, deriving from French erotic parlance. Evoking the pleasurably explosive but also depleting nature of the sexual climax, this term pertains to the mortal germ at the center of Bataille’s concept of eroticism. Bataille, who was fond of the term, develops his theory of the relationship between sex, death, and the sacred in his book Erotism. See in particular his chapter ‘‘Sexual Plethora and Death,’’ where he notes that ‘‘inevitably linked with the moment of climax there is a minor rupture suggestive of death’’ (106–7). 92. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud discusses cellular scissiparity as a way of approaching the death drive always at work within life. Bataille, perhaps taking his inspiration from Freud, also makes scissiparity a central concept in his discussion of the work of death in relation to eroticism. See especially Bataille’s introduction to Erotism, 11–25. 93. On the strange and fraught friendship of Weil and Bataille, see, for example, Simone Pe´trement’s Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal

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(New York: Pantheon, 1976); David McClellan’s Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (London: MacMillan, 1989); Gabriella Friori’s Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Joseph R. Berrigan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Michel Surya’s Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski (New York: Verso, 2002); Alexander Irwin’s Saints of the Impossible; and Peter Tracy Connor’s Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Of these works, those of Surya, Irwin, and Connor do the most to address the relationship between Weil and Bataille as something more, and more complicated, than a matter of opposed political sensibilities prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. 94. Irwin, Saints of the Impossible, xiv. 95. Jill Marsden uses this phrase in a different context, exploring the possibilities of a post-Nietzschean philosophy of ecstasy. In particular, she is concerned with the work of Bataille and Luce Irigaray in relation to the ‘‘sacred and erotic dimensions of rapture in mystical experience, the challenge being to think the notion of union without unity,’’ After Nietzsche: Notes Toward a Philosophy of Ecstasy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), xv, Marsden’s emphasis. See her chapter ‘‘The Night of Unknowing’’ in the same volume for an elaboration of mysticism and the philosophy of ecstasy. 96. See Bataille, Blue of Noon, 27–31. Bataille writes that Lazare’s ‘‘hair (short, stiff, unkempt, hatless) stuck out like crow’s wings on either side of her face,’’ a description used again in his review of Weil’s book The Need for Roots. To note the fact that crows are scavengers that eat corpses only enhances Weil’s association with, and even incorporation of, death. That Weil might be associated with monstrosity is made clear by another textual association. In his discussion of the deviations of nature, Bataille employs the same phrase to describe monsters that he uses to describe Weil: ‘‘Prodigies and monsters were regarded in the past as presages and, most often, as such, as birds of ill omen.’’ See ‘‘The Deviations of Nature,’’ in Visions of Excess, 53. 97. Irwin, Saints of the Impossible, 96–97. 98. Surya, Georges Bataille, 17. For Bataille’s initial elegy to the cathedral and his subsequent rage against any architectural form associated with religious or other authority, see especially Denis Hollier’s study of Bataille, Against Architecture. Also see Bataille’s essay ‘‘Architecture,’’ in Encyclopedia Ace´phalica, ed. Robert Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 35–36. 99. Surya, Georges Bataille, 23. 100. In his ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ Bataille describes this reading as ‘‘decisive’’ (218). 101. Surya, Georges Bataille, 27. Surya’s emphasis. 102. Not to be confused with another friend of Bataille’s by the same name, the painter Andre´ Masson. The strange coincidence of names underlines the theme of doubling and uncanny returns at play throughout Bataille’s life and in this chapter.

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103. Surya, Georges Bataille, 27. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 28. 106. Surya provides this excerpt from a passage in Le Latin mystique that expounds particularly upon the dangers and disgust of feminine flesh: ‘‘the very sight of a woman would be sickening to them: this feminine grace is nothing but suburra, blood, humours and gall. Consider what is hidden within the nostrils, the throat, the belly: filth everywhere. And we who find it repulsive to touch vomit or manure even with a fingertip, how could we wish to hold in our arms a mere bag of excrement?’’ (28). The resonances with Simone Weil’s own self-conception as a ‘‘bag of excrement’’ are worth noting. It is certainly not the case, however, that Weil’s troubled relationship with the facts of corporeal existence amount to a simple hatred or rejection of the flesh. Rather, the flesh for Weil is the touchstone of reality, and if the flesh is condemned to suffer, it is no less the case that it suffers at the will of God—a fact worthy of affirmation. I will explore Weil’s conception of the body later in this chapter. 107. Surya, Georges Bataille, 29. 108. Georges Delteil cited in Surya, Georges Bataille, 23. 109. There are, of course, two Lazarus figures in the Bible, a doubleness that must have pleased Bataille. Moreover, each is associated with death. The first Lazarus is the beggar in the parable of the beggar and the rich man. He escapes the torment that the rich man suffers in death (see Luke 16:19–31). The second is Lazarus of Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha, who died but was raised by Jesus (see John 11:1–44). 110. I am citing the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible. The most literal translation of the Greek reads: ‘‘the one who had died’’ came out of the cave. 111. On this point one should note the convergence of Blanchot’s reading of Lazarus with Bataille’s imagination of Weil-Lazare. See, for example, ‘‘Literature and the Right to Death,’’ in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), where Blanchot writes of a Lazarus ‘‘who already smells bad, who is Evil, Lazarus lost and not Lazarus saved and brought back to life,’’ 327. In Thomas the Obscure the eponymous character is described as ‘‘the only true Lazarus, whose very death was resurrected.’’ Blanchot cited in Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 168. For a discussion of Blanchot’s Lazarus, see Hart, 167–74. 112. The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Charles G. Herbermann, et al. (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910), on which I rely for my discussion of St. Lazarus, claims that what might be surmised about St. Lazarus of Bethany is the result of the combination of a series of traditions that render the prospect of historical certitude dubious. But the importance of the story of St. Lazarus for the present project depends, of course, not on historical accuracy, but on the details of a

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legend that would have at once appealed to and enhanced Bataille’s fascination with caves, crypts, interment, decapitation, and corrupted flesh. As the Encyclopedia says, much of the legend of St. Lazare ‘‘has no solid foundation’’—a fact that would have done more to incite Bataille’s interest than provoke his skepticism. 113. The Catholic Encyclopedia, 98. 114. That the Greek army, according to the poets, made wily use of a giant sculpted horse to infiltrate the walled city of Troy underscores the sense in which Bataille might have seen the horse as an emblem of domination by the Greeks, and the harbinger of death among those subjected to that domination. 115. Indeed, obedience to the point of self-eradication is key to Weil’s practice of decreation. The following chapter will examine Weil’s renunciation of the self in relation to Bataille’s vision of hyperchristianity. 116. On this point, Weil’s epistolary relationship with Father Perrin, a priest to whom she was introduced and with whom she had many discussions over the last two years of her life, is instructive. See especially her letter ‘‘Hesitations Concerning Baptism,’’ in Waiting for God, 43–51. Weil was born into a Jewish family, but developed a profound interest in Catholicism in the late thirties. However, refusing baptism, she never belonged to the Church. 117. Peter Tracy Connor discusses Bataille’s fascination with Weil’s ‘‘authoritarian excess’’ and ‘‘excessive zeal.’’ He observes that, according to Bataille, behind Weil’s ‘‘moral law’’ is a passion that exceeds the rationality that she believes grounds that law. Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, 76–77. 118. Bataille, ‘‘Architecture,’’ in the Critical Dictionary, reproduced in Encyclopedia Acephalica, ed. Robert Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 35. 119. The surrealists adopted this blasphemous designation for their hero, Sade. 120. Roland Barthes says this of the spectral object of photographs; that which is captured in the photograph is ‘‘the living image of a dead thing.’’ See Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 78–79. 121. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 152. 122. In this regard, one might also suggest that Bataille is the ‘‘alter-ego’’ of Weil, and vice-versa. 123. See Bataille, Blue of Noon, 28–43. 124. Alexander Irwin suggests as much, though in somewhat different terms, in his Saints of the Impossible. However, Irwin does not address the connection between Weil and St. Lazarus, nor does he elaborate the fuller implications of Weil as a saint that I adumbrate here. 125. See, for example, Peter Winch, Simone Weil: ‘‘The Just Balance’’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Miklos Veto, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, trans. Joan Dargan (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994).

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4. the cross: simone weil’s hyperchristianity

1. Weil shares more than one attribute with her tragic predecessor. Weil’s essay on Antigone can be found in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, trans. Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958). For a comparative discussion of the character of Antigone and Weil’s own character, especially in relation to the notion of resurrection, see Ann Loades’s essay, ‘‘Simone Weil and Antigone: innocence and affliction,’’ in Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings toward a Divine Humanity, ed. Richard Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). And, to take a sentence from Gravity and Grace that conjures the presence of Antigone: ‘‘Piety with regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist,’’ 19. 2. To be sure, Weil’s stated goal, contrary to Bataille’s, is to complete the movement from the shadowy cave of irreality to the unencumbered light of reason, full reality, beyond the cave. But there are occasions on which a close reading of her writings on the cave puts Weil more in accord with Bataille than might first be noticed. Taking an example from Gravity and Grace, Weil writes: ‘‘The image of the cave seems to suggest [a] . . . movement which hurts. When we reach the opening it is the light. It not only blinds but wounds us. Our eyes turn away from it’’ (52). This sentence evokes the very Icarian movement of which Bataille is so fond—in which the full light of reason in fact overwhelms its victim, stirring up vertigo, blinding him. That Bataille and Weil had two different phenomena in mind when using this language is likely. And yet there is clearly a sense in which it is just the wounding-blinding moment described by Weil that Bataille calls the ‘‘point,’’ that instant of rupture in which reason loses itself—a self-sacrifice. Moreover, for both Bataille and Weil, this explosive moment in the workings of reason comes about by a contradiction. Even more noteworthy, Weil and Bataille both resort to the image of the pyramid to describe this moment. Weil claims that ‘‘all truth contains a contradiction,’’ then goes on to say that ‘‘contradiction is the point of the pyramid’’ (89). The resonances with Bataille, who employs the image of the exploding tip of the pyramid to illustrate the notion of reason coming undone in a moment of supreme contradiction, are undeniable. See his essays on ‘‘The Obelisk’’ and ‘‘The Labyrinth’’ in Visions of Excess, 213–22 and 171–77. 3. Simone Weil, ‘‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God,’’ in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 163–64. 4. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 59. 5. Metaphors of ingestion and nourishment are to be found throughout Weil’s writings, and acquire peculiar poignancy in light of her own alleged anorexia. Whether or not Weil can properly be considered to have been anorexic, it is a fact that she was throughout her adult life exceedingly ascetic in her eating habits, and died of tuberculosis exacerbated as a result of refusing food in excess

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of the amounts rationed to those in France suffering under the Nazi occupation. Among the several works addressing Weil’s eating habits is Francine du Plessix Gray’s biography, Simone Weil (New York: Penguin, 2001). See also Simone Petrement’s biography, Simone Weil: A Life. Weil’s death from tuberculosis in 1943 would likely have brought to Bataille’s mind the death by the same disease of Laure, Bataille’s lover and Weil’s friend, in 1938. In the next chapter I will discuss the work of Hans Bellmer, whose first wife, Margarete, died of tuberculosis the same year as Laure. 6. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture, 62. My emphasis. 7. The metaphors in Bataille’s writings cannot be taken seriously enough— that is, they are wrought in a hallucinatory manner that almost compels the reader to give the images he employs a life of their own, to follow them where they lead, as through a labyrinth. It is the excessive nature of these images that make them compelling in every sense—they are employed to be part of a vast, complex, and, however paradoxical this might sound when discussing Bataille, rigorously integral mythological iconography; they are irresistibly joined. In turn, they also have, I surmise, the unmistakable effect of compelling his readers to give reign to the images. In the case of Weil, I would suggest, the metaphorical images are much more austerely, even reluctantly, deployed, but no less compulsively conceived. In her relatively unembroidered texts (writerly austerity—which she described as a ‘‘nakedness’’—was a virtue for Weil), her images are far less excessive, but no less compelling for all that. Indeed, if Weil, who was ingenuous to a fault, and who would have thought carefully about the implications of the images she used, describes the encounter with God as an encounter with a monster within the labyrinth, then we can, and should, take her seriously. 8. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Revision of the Theory of Dreams,’’ in New Introductory Lectures on Pyschoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 25. 9. Weil’s notorious will to degradation, a cause of great concern to her friends and parents, is exemplified by her insistence on living among heaps of garbage. In Blue of Noon Bataille describes Weil (scornfully? admiringly?) as a ‘‘garbage-eating bird of ill omen’’—a description that Weil herself probably would have embraced. 10. To suggest this is, of course, to read Weil as Bataille might have imagined her, and thus to read Weil against Weil to some extent. Weil’s bodily asceticism is here made to approximate the degradations that Bataille sought for himself. This is not to ignore the fact that Weil found Bataille exasperating, and that her own self-conceptions were likely far removed from the Bataillean reading I am developing here. But, drawing on the deep complicity of sensibilities that Alexander Irwin finds between Bataille and Weil, I am interested in elaborating a Bataillean account of Weil that reveals Weil’s uncanny approximations of Bataille’s thought, in particular with regard to the morbid aspects of her religious sensibility.

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11. Bataille, ‘‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’’ in Visions of Excess, 181. It is also in this essay that Bataille states that the ace´phale ‘‘unites birth and death in the same eruption.’’ 12. Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 13. This is not to suggest that Irwin ignores the mystical implications; on the contrary. But his book addresses the intersection of the mystical and the political. My concern here is with exploring more intimately the personal, individual aspects of Bataille and Weil’s mysticism, and to do so with especially with an eye toward the surrealist milieu that inflected Bataille’s, and, to a lesser extent, Weil’s thought. 14. Bataille, ‘‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,’’ in Visions of Excess, 95. 15. Anthropologist Mary Douglas, who may have read Bataille, offers remarks along these lines in her discussion of the powers and dangers of the sacred. Claiming that ‘‘ritual recognizes the potency of disorder,’’ she shows that ‘‘danger lies in transitional states’’ in which form and formlessness are held together. In a manner that recalls Bataille’s attitude before the half-decomposed corpse, she further explains that ‘‘this is the stage at which [decaying things] are dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. . . . Formlessness is therefore an apt symbol of beginning and of growth as it is of decay.’’ Douglas also analyzes the relations between dirt, decay, taboo, transgression, and contradiction—all terms pertinent to the present discussion. See Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 95–114, 160–80. 16. Bataille, ‘‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,’’ in Visions of Excess, 99. 17. Bataille, ‘‘The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur,’’ in Visions of Excess, 34. 18. See Bois and Krauss, Formless, 69. 19. Bataille, ‘‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,’’ 96. 20. Bataille, ‘‘The Big Toe,’’ in Visions of Excess, 20–23. 21. Irwin, Saints of the Impossible, 119. Irwin underscores the rationale behind what I have called Bataille’s imaginings of Weil. ‘‘According to Bataille,’’ Irwin observes, ‘‘what Weil was unable to acknowledge is that, at their highest, evil and good fuse in the sovereign sphere of communication. . . . [The] highest good is inseparable from evil: the force that shatters the limits of the self. Weil was unable to face this reversibility of good and evil, since it would have ‘ruined her beliefs.’ Yet her own writings and, even more, her own being bear witness to it’’ (209). 22. Bataille, ‘‘The Labyrinth,’’ in Visions of Excess, 177. 23. Stoekl, ‘‘The Death of Ace´phale and the Will to Chance: Nietzsche in the Text of Bataille,’’ in Glyph: Textual Studies 6 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 59. 24. Bataille, ‘‘The Labyrinth,’’ in Visions of Excess, 175.

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25. Allan Stoekl emphasizes this non-redemptive aspect of Bataille’s conception of Christ in ‘‘The Death of Ace´phale and the Will to Chance.’’ 26. Stoekl, ‘‘The Death of Ace´phale and the Will to Chance,’’ 60. 27. There is a sense, then, in which the experience of crucifixion is analogous to anal birth. One might observe, for example, that anal conception presupposes the depositing of the seed into the anal tract, and that the subsequent birth is equivalent to the evacuation of excrement. Alfonso Lingis comments on sodomy ‘‘theologically interpreted,’’ claiming that sodomy is an act committed to ‘‘release the germ of the species into [the partner’s] excrement. Thus sodomy, theologically interpreted, is an assault on the human species as such, an act of monstrous singularity, and an act directed against God, the ultimate formula for all norms.’’ Translator’s introduction, in Pierre Klossowski’s Sade My Neighbor (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), xiii. 28. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crauford (London: Routledge, 1952), 80. 29. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 93, 92. 30. Weil, Waiting for God, 122. 31. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 85. 32. Ibid., 77, 76. 33. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1. 34. Ibid., 50. 35. Ibid., 51. 36. Ibid., 57. 37. Ibid., 58. 38. Ibid., 76. 39. Ibid., 78. 40. Ibid., 83. 41. Irwin, Saints of the Impossible, 97. 42. Bataille, ‘‘The Practice of Joy Before Death,’’ in Visions of Excess, 237. 43. Ibid., 236–37. Bataille is not speaking here explicitly about Weil, of course. But this essay, written in 1939, reads as an apt description of the version of Weil that Bataille will espouse after she has gone through her own mystical experiences. Weil herself claims that ‘‘Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters,’’ Gravity and Grace, 74. 44. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 46–47. 45. Surya, Georges Bataille, 211. 46. Bataille, foreword, Blue of Noon, 154. 47. Surya, Georges Bataille, 216. 48. Bataille, Blue of Noon, 155. 49. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 42–47. Bataille insists that the account offered in ‘‘Coincidences,’’ following his Story of the Eye, ‘‘has a literal exactness’’ (99).

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50. Bataille, foreword, Blue of Noon, 154–55. 51. See, for example, Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 167–70 and 214–15; Francis Marmande, L’Indiffe´rence des ruines: variations sur l’e´criture du Bleu du ciel (Marseille: Editions Parenthe`ses, 1985); and Irwin, Saints of the Impossible. 52. Breton cited in Pollizotti, Revolution of the Mind, 190. 53. Breton, of course, is famous for two ‘‘classics’’ among the surrealist ‘‘novels’’: Nadja and Mad Love. 54. It might be said of Blue of Noon that it is created by means of ‘‘successive destructions’’: the novel is ruinous in nature, with a jagged narrative, the insertion of violent hallucinatory sequences, and the absence of any moral telos or political injunction that would allow it to be read as a roman a` the`se. It might more accurately be called as a roman a` anti-the`se; everything in the novel, from the narrator to the plot, is in the process of dissolution. As Alexander Irwin says of Blue of Noon, it is a text that ‘‘works methodically to achieve disorder’’ (Saints of the Impossible, 91). See also L’Indiffe´rence des ruines: variations sur l’e´criture de Bleu du ciel, by Francis Marmande, for an account of the novel that underscores its ruiniform nature. 55. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, ix. Bataille is speaking here of the literary milieu of which he was a part: ‘‘I belong to a turbulent generation, born to literary life in the tumult of surrealism.’’ 56. Michael Richardson, introduction, in Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, 2–3. 57. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 16. 58. Breton claimed that ‘‘Freud is Hegelian in me.’’ Cited in Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 15. 59. Breton names mannequins and romantic ruins as exemplars of the surrealist de´mode´ in his Manifesto. Salvador Dalı´ exploits the outmoded aspects of art nouveau, and many of the surrealists, Max Ernst most prominently, were enthralled by mechanical imagery. This marks a fascination with, and reversal of, the Futurist emphasis on technology and speed. 60. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism,’’ in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 181, 182. 61. Bataille, as I discussed in chapter 2, had his disputes with existentialism as well. What interests Bataille, I think, is how he can use a declining surrealism to counter existentialism, even while attacking that surrealism with the evidence of its own obsoleteness. Richardson discusses Bataille’s favoring of surrealism over existentialism in his introduction to The Absence of Myth, 1–25. While I take issue with Richardson on other points, as noted above, I agree that Bataille’s sensibility was far more closely aligned with the surrealist than the existentialist attitude. Indeed, in many regards, as I showed in chapter 2, Bataille’s mode of thought is inimical to existentialism.

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62. This uncanny and morbid resurrection of Simone Weil is only underscored by the fact that the depraved companion of the narrator in Story of the Eye, which first appeared in 1928, is also named Simone. 63. Bataille cited in Peter Tracey Conner, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 74. ¨ bersurrealism’’ are tempting phrases for de64. ‘‘Hypersurrealism’’ or ‘‘U scribing Bataille’s extremist surrealism, as they double the ‘‘sur’’ of surrealism, pushing it beyond Breton’s formulation. Again, it is instructive to recall Bataille’s critique of Nietzsche and Breton on the use of the prefix ‘‘sur’’ or ‘‘u¨ber,’’ a prefix that Bataille embraces in his search for a ‘‘hyperchristianity.’’ This again underscores the manner in which Bataille appropriates and reverses Bretonian and Nietzschean language, making of their flight toward the heavens a dramatic fall into the labyrinth. 65. Michael Richardson discusses Bataille’s position ‘‘at the side of surrealism’’ in his introduction to The Absence of Myth, 1. 66. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 29. 67. Breton, Nadja, 19. 68. Krauss, Formless, 64. Perhaps better known is the visual version of this game, in which a folded paper is passed among participants, each of whom adds a section to a drawn body without being able to see the sections drawn by other participants. 69. Krauss, Formless, 66. Mary Douglas’s analysis of the symbolic power and danger of decomposition enhances this point. See especially her discussion in ‘‘The System Shattered and Renewed,’’ in Purity and Danger, 160–80. 70. Krauss, Formless, 66. 71. Freud discusses death as the return to an earlier, static state in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1975). 72. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 81. 73. Ibid. 74. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 97. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid, 98. 77. Weil, Gravity and Grace. See especially the sections ‘‘The Cross’’ (79–83) and ‘‘Contradiction’’ (89–93). 78. See, for example, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 658–59, where Freud claims that, in regard to wishes, ‘‘psychical reality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality.’’ Freud’s emphasis. 79. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 315. 80. See chapter 3 for Breton’s account of his visit to Picasso’s studio. 81. Bataille, Inner Experience, 126. While Bataille speaks here of pleasure, his is always a pleasure mixed with its opposite, extreme horror. On this point, see,

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for example, Tears of Eros, in which he describes the mingling of desire, pleasure, and horror in the face of the ‘‘hundred pieces’’ photos which are the object of his meditations. For a discussion of the use of fantasy in Bataille’s mystical practices, see my ‘‘Meditations at the Midway: The Work of Fantasy in the Thought of Georges Bataille,’’ in Formless: Ways In and Out of Form, ed. Patrick Crowley and Paul Hegarty (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), 53–66. 82. Bataille attests to this sentiment throughout Inner Experience and Guilty. Jacques Lacan also espouses this conception of desire, claiming that desire seeks not satisfaction, but is constituted only in relation to an essential lack. In a formulation emphatically reminiscent of Koje`ve’s exposition of the master/slave dialectic in Hegel, Lacan claims that ‘‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other.’’ See Seminar 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 235. While this comment lends itself to multiple interpretations, I would say that for Lacan, desire is in, of, and through the Other, and that, as he emphasizes, the object of desire is always deferred, a ‘‘desire for something else.’’ See ‘‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,’’ in Ecrits, 146. 83. Bataille, ‘‘The Practice of Joy Before Death,’’ in Visions of Excess, 238. Bataille’s emphasis. 84. Ibid., 238. 85. Bataille, cited by Hollier in the introduction to Guilty, xii. 86. Denis Hollier, ‘‘A Tale of Unsatisfied Desire,’’ introduction to Bataille, Guilty, xii. 87. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 172. 88. Breton adopts Freud’s formulation in his Manifesto of Surrealism, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 26. 89. Rosalind Krauss, Formless, 106. 90. Breton, ‘‘Manifesto of Surrealism,’’ 18. Breton’s emphasis. 91. Breton, ‘‘Manifesto of Surrealism,’’ 26. My emphasis. 92. See, for example, Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 1972), for a discussion of ‘‘the unfathomable depths’’ of the psyche in which ‘‘there reigns the absence of contradiction’’ (70). 93. Bill Brown develops a notion of the material unconscious as ‘‘literature’s repository of disparate and fragmentary, unevenly developed, even contradictory images of the material everyday.’’ The Material Unconscious (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 4. My use of the term here differs from his; I mean it to denote the use of fantasy to provoke the contradictory affects of the unconscious as experienced materially, corporeally. The following chapter will revisit the concept of the ‘‘physical unconscious’’ in a discussion of Hans Bellmer, who coined the term. 94. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 83. 95. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 47. 96. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 48. 97. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 81.

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98. As Amy Hollywood puts it in her book of that title. 99. See, for example, Gravity and Grace, 159. In this regard, Weil and Bataille’s ‘‘that which is’’ is less like Heidegger’s es gibt, with its radical generosity, than Emmanuel Levinas’s dark and indeterminate il y a, which fills the void of non-being with ‘‘mute and anonymous rustling’’ much as ‘‘the place left vacant by one who died is filled with the murmur of the attendants.’’ See Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000), 3. 100. See, for example, the consecutive chapters ‘‘The Self’’ and ‘‘Decreation’’ in Weil, Gravity and Grace, 23–34. 101. Bataille, Inner Experience, 117. Bataille appropriates (and alters) the dramatizing techniques of other mystics, such as Angela of Foligno, whose Book of Visions is quoted and commented upon in the opening pages of Bataille’s Guilty (11). For a discussion of Bataille’s desire to be like Angela in her ‘‘coming near death (12), see Amy Hollywood’s ‘‘Mysticism and Catastrophe in Georges Bataille’s Atheological Summa,’’ in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 161– 87. See also her chapter on ‘‘Mysticism, Trauma, and Catastrophe in Angela of Foligno’s Book and Bataille’s Atheological Summa,’’ in Sensible Ecstasy, 60–87. 102. ‘‘SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state’’ is Breton’s formulation in his ‘‘Manifesto of Surrealism,’’ 26. 103. Breton, Surrealism and Painting, 68, 70. 104. Allan Stoekl discusses the trope of automutilation in Bataille’s Blue of Noon and in relation to the politics of Weil and Bataille in Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 3–21. 105. Bataille, ‘‘Henri Pastoureau: La blessure de l’homme,’’ in The Absence of Myth, 128. 106. Andre´ Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 123–24. 107. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 111–12. 108. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 111. 109. Bataille, ‘‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,’’ in Visions of Excess, 66. 110. Bataille, ‘‘Sacrificial Mutilation’’ in Visions of Excess, 68. 111. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 91–92. 112. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 87. 113. Bataille, ‘‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,’’ in Visions of Excess, 94. 114. As Surya describes Weil in Georges Bataille, 211. 5. the wounded hands of bataille: hans bellmer, bataille, and the art of monstrosity

1. For a superb description and analysis of Gru¨newald’s painting, see J. K. Huysmans’s novelized exploration of satanism and the historical figure of Gilles

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de Rais, La` Bas, translated by Keene Wallis under the title Down There: A Study in Satanism (New York: University Books, 1958), especially 6–15. He captures the paradoxical nature of the crucified Christ rendered ‘‘in the most abject of forms,’’ ‘‘at the same time infinite and of earth earthy’’ (9, 10). Bataille was well acquainted with this novel; it appears in the bibliography of his books The Trial of Gilles de Rais and Erotism. In Erotism, Bataille cites Huysmans’s novel in his discussion of Christianity and witches’ sabbaths, 126; he also reproduces the crucifixion detail from Gru¨newald’s altarpiece in this text. 2. This witness is the disciple charged by Jesus with Mary’s care. See John 19:27. 3. Freud remarks that severed hands are particularly capable of eliciting a sense of the uncanny: ‘‘Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist . . . all of them have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when . . . they prove capable of independent activity in addition,’’ ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ 145. The uncanniness of parceled body parts will be revisited later in this chapter. In a different but related vein, Descartes claims that the hand exhibits such independence that it can almost be conceived as separable from the rest of the body, ‘‘a thing apart.’’ In Bodies in Pieces: Fantastic Narrative and the Poetics of the Fragment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) Deborah A. Harter analyzes the relations between narrative and corporeal fragments in fantastic narrative. Broadly applying a Lacanian notion of the corps morcele´, Harter suggests that the linguistic and narrative unraveling of many fantastic narratives is mirrored in the division of the bodies portrayed therein. Expressing a sentiment that will resonate with the concerns of the present chapter, Harter concludes one analysis thus: ‘‘Hence these narrators’ ultimate fascination, and ours when we share in their looks: their pleasure, mixed with horror, in contemplating its separate pieces’’ (82). 4. Andre´ Masson—who, in 1936, would draw the ace´phale—provided the lithographs that accompanied the premier publication of Bataille’s Story of the Eye in 1928. Unlike Bellmer’s etchings for the 1944 reprint of the same book, Masson’s drawings correspond more strictly to the passages in the book they illustrate. For a discussion of Masson’s illustrations for Bataille, see Didier Ottinger, ‘‘Masson, Bataille: In the Night of the Labyrinth,’’ in Andre´ Masson: The 1930s (St. Petersburg, Fla.: Salvador Dali Museum, 1999), 55–63. 5. On this point, Bellmer scholar Sue Taylor, in Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 258, n. 10, cites and amends the claim by Peter Webb and Robert Short, who ‘‘report that ‘there is no evidence that . . . any close relationship or exchange of ideas developed between [Bellmer and Bataille] at a personal level.’ ’’ However, Taylor continues, ‘‘there certainly was a philosophical friendship: Bellmer gave Bataille a copy of his Petite Anatomie de l’inconscient physique ou l’anatomie de l’image upon its publication in 1957, with the inscription ‘A Georges Bataille avec les hommages et les amitie´s de Hans Bellmer.’’ This chapter attempts to go some way in analyzing the basis of this philosophical friendship.

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6. Bataille, Blue of Noon, 106. My emphasis. 7. While the incident described is not strictly autobiographical, to regard it as such is, as Michel Surya claims, at least ‘‘plausible.’’ Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 497. Bataille’s tortured hands find their counterparts in those of Simone Weil, who once asked a friend to drive pins under her fingernails as preparation for torture. See Simone Pe´trement, Simone Weil: A Life, 175. Amie´ Patri, to whom this request is said to have been made, responded to Weil with the threat of a slap. Bataille also refers to this incident in Blue of Noon. For an analysis of Weil’s troubled relationship to her own hands, see Franc¸oise Meltzer, ‘‘The Hands of Simone Weil,’’ in Critical Inquiry 27 (Summer 2001). The present discussion owes much to Meltzer’s essay. 8. Bataille, Blue of Noon, 106. 9. The examination is fetishistic inasmuch as it treats discrete body parts. But Bataille’s fetishism has little to do with the Freudian conception of fetish. Rather than the covering over the lack, or wound, in existence, Bataille’s parceling of the body reveals the lack, or inflicts a wound. For a discussion of Bataille’s repeated attempts to discover what Freudian fetishism would repress, see Amy Hollywood’s chapters on Bataille in Sensible Ecstasy. 10. Franc¸oise Meltzer makes this comparison in the chapter ‘‘Sleight of Hand’’ in Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature, where she claims that the hand’s very pervasiveness renders it difficult to detect. See especially 159–76. 11. Bataille, as I noted in chapter 4, considered himself surrealism’s ‘‘enemy from within.’’ Filmmaker S. M. Eisenstein describes the position of Bataille and the surrealist dissidents slightly differently, in a manner that has resonances with the concerns of the present chapter: he claims that they are the ‘‘l’aile gauche des surre´alistes’’ (left wing of the surrealists). Eisentstein cited in DidiHuberman, La Ressemblance informe, ou le Gai Savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: E´ditions Macula, 1995), 288. 12. This photo is grainy, and the bottom-left portion of the photo, in which Bataille’s right arm and hand appear, is particularly obscured by a ghostly haze where the paper has been degraded, perhaps by exposure to too much light. In any case, it is impossible to know for certain whether Bataille holds a pen in this portrait, though the setting, a student room with a desk piled with papers, would suggest as much. In this photo, Bataille’s right eye is totally obscured by shadow; it appears enucleated, a fact the significance of which will be borne out in the course of this chapter. For now it is enough to emphasize that this photo was taken around 1920, the year Bataille broke with Catholicism. One might say that the photo documents the loss of Bataille’s right eye, that traditional symbol of diurnal lucidity and piety, leaving him with only his left eye, the symbol of nighttime. For Bataille’s take on the eye, see his essay ‘‘Eye,’’ Visions of Excess, 17–19. Mark C. Taylor discusses the eye in relation to Bataille and to Derrida in Altarity, 115–48 and 257–59. ‘‘God’s eye is always the right eye,’’ Taylor remarks.

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13. In this photo, taken in the recesses of the Lascaux grotto, Bataille is decked out in elegant attire. Indeed, Bataille, for all his exercises in dissolute living, nevertheless exhibits a certain sartorial flair, as attested to in photographs of him. The combination of a delight in elegance and a love of disorder is evident in Bataille’s writings, as well, and further enhances the sense of contradiction that lends his work, and indeed his character, its aura of fascination. And is it significant that the rock on which Bataille sits in this photo is, like the stony outcropping that sent Nietzsche into ecstatic tears, pyramidal in shape? 14. Plato, ‘‘The Laws,’’ in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Lane Cooper et al., ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). Franc¸oise Meltzer discusses the dialectic of ‘‘inner being and outward manifestation’’ in relation to the work of the hands in ‘‘The Hands of Simone Weil,’’ 626. 15. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). See especially 337–44. 16. Friederich Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, cited in Meltzer, ‘‘The Hands of Simone Weil,’’ 625. See also Hanna Arendt’s account of ‘‘The Labour of Our Body and the Work of Our Hands,’’ in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 79–93. 17. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 343. Hegel’s emphasis. 18. Ibid., 340. 19. Ibid., 344. 20. Ibid. 21. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 16. The hand is found throughout Heidegger’s work, perhaps most notably in Being and Time, in which the concepts Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand) and Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand) are crucial in the analysis of Dasein’s engagement with the world. See especially section I.3.16 in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962). 22. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 16. 23. Though we know that Bataille read Heidegger (see, for example, his brief remarks on Heidegger in Inner Experience, as well as his comments in the Preface to ‘‘The Dead Man,’’ where he claims to have had a ‘‘fitful interest in Heidegger’’), it is uncertain to what extent Heidegger was familiar with Bataille. In any case, he knew Bataille’s work well enough to describe him as ‘‘one of France’s best minds.’’ While this quote makes a conspicuous appearance as the uppermost blurb on the back of Bataille’s book On Nietzsche, I have not been able to track the original source for Heidegger’s praise. 24. Meltzer, ‘‘The Hands of Simone Weil,’’ 627. 25. In fact, le monstre (monstrosity) translates Zeichen, which may also be translated, less obliquely, by ‘‘sign’’ or ‘‘showing.’’ But here I agree with Jacques Derrida, who suggests that however dubious or demonstrative this translation

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might be, it in any case ‘‘give[s] occasion for thought.’’ Derrida offers a discussion of the etymological convergences of le monstre (monster) and montre (to show) that merit the translation in question. In particular, he discusses a line from a passage from Ho¨lderlin that appears in Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?: ‘‘Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutengslos.’’ A French translation by Aloys Becker and Ge´rard Granel reads: ‘‘Nous sommes un monstre prive´ de sens’’ (‘‘We are a monster void of sense’’). See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,’’ in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 166. Moreover, Heidegger himself, Derrida points out, makes the association between the obsolete die Zeige (the pointing of the index finger) and la monstre [sic.] (the monstrance or showing), which in turn are associated with Zeigen eines Zeichens (the showing of the sign). 26. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 339. 27. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 16. 28. The mention of the hammer sounds a Nietzschean note. Nietzsche subtitles his Twilight of the Idols with a characteristically multivalent phrase: How One Philosophizes with a Hammer. The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954). He explains in his preface that the hammer that destroys ‘‘eternal idols’’ also touches those idols ‘‘as with a tuning fork’’—that is, delicately, with skillful precision, or dexterity, to ‘‘sound out’’ the hollowness of the idols. Indeed, the hammer is not only the wrecking tool, but an articulate, even eloquent tool; in the final section of Nietzsche’s book, ‘‘The Hammer Speaks,’’ the hammer cites one of Zarathustra’s hymns. Destroying eternal idols is not (or not only) an act of swinging the hammer. It is to use a tuning fork with a delicate hand and a subtle ear. Among the revelations in this book of aphorisms is Nietzsche’s sounding out of Socrates: ‘‘The anthropologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? At least that would not be contradicted by the famous judgment of the physiognomist that sounded so offensive to the friends of Socrates. A foreigner who knew about faces once passes through Athens and told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum— that he harbored in himself all the bad vices and appetites. And Socrates merely answered: ‘You know me, sir!’ ’’ (475). For further meditations on Nietzsche’s equation of the pen and the weapon, whether it is a weapon of tapping, smashing, or incising, see Jacques Derrida’s comments on the styles and stylus of Nietzsche in E´perons, or Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). On the formation of the body and self according to Nietzsche, see the chapter ‘‘Active and Reactive,’’ in Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 29. The mutilation of the hand by the pen conjures another Nietzschean association. Bataille was fond of citing Nietzsche’s admonition to ‘‘write with one’s blood’’—a notion he makes literal in Blue of Noon.

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30. Bataille cited in Kendall’s ‘‘Introduction’’ in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, xli. 31. Ibid., xlii. The distinctly Hegelian quality of this endeavor was not lost on Bataille, who was at once seduced by and disdainful of such totalizing impulses. 32. Bataille was fascinated by Mount Etna, which he climbed in 1937. 33. The ink spot in Bataille’s writings might be compared to the ink spot of Jacques Lacan. The spot is an important psychoanalytical conceit for Jacques Lacan, whose thought developed in tandem with Bataille’s. For Bataille, the ink spot was equivalent to the blind spot in the (mind’s) eye, and appears graphically in his novels as extended ellipses. Lacan, also engaging the visual model of the mind, speaks of the blind spot as well, connecting it with the work of Roger Caillois and the ocelli displayed on the wings of certain insects. See in particular Lacan’s discussion ‘‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a,’’ in Book XI of his Seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 34. Michel Camus, ‘‘Les Avatars de l’oeil chez Bellmer,’’ in Hans Bellmer, special issue of Obliques (Paris: Editions Borderie, 1975), 201. My translation. Camus is here citing the fifth chapter of Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which contains the following passage: ‘‘And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating.’’ I would emphasize here again what I have underlined in previous chapters, namely, that for Bataille, the ‘‘coincidence’’ of opposites in no way implies their resolution, but rather a tensive, violent holding-together of opposed notions, which culminates, therefore, not in a synthetic unity, but rather a rupture, or ‘‘fulguration,’’ as he puts it in the passage above. That Camus would single out a passage from Bataille’s 1929 novel containing the phrase ‘‘being and nothingness’’ may also allude to Bataille’s polemic with Sartre in the 1940s. 35. Bataille, Erotism, 11. 36. Sarane Alexandrian, Hans Bellmer, trans. Jack Altman (New York: Rizzoli, 1975), 75. 37. In the only critical remark by Bellmer in relation to Bataille that I have been able to find, the artist remarks of Bataille to an interviewer, ‘‘What bothers me about him is that God of his; even if He’s dead He’s always there, like a voyeur.’’ See ‘‘Hans Bellmer, or The Displaced Pain,’’ K. A. Jelenski, Arts Magazine (March 1964), 46–50. 38. Bataille, Erotism, 37. My emphasis. 39. Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 18. Taylor’s is a psychoanalytic treatment of Bellmer’s work which

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puts at the center of the interpretation Bellmer’s relationship to his strict father, against whom the artist rebelled, but for whom, Taylor suggests, the artist longed. Taylor discusses the impact that Gru¨newald’s altarpiece had on the young artist, citing primarily formal influences. Surprisingly, she does not remark on a further association in this regard, namely, that Gru¨newald’s painting depicts Christ in a state of abandonment by his Father. In a different vein, Taylor remarks that Bellmer ‘‘harbored destructive wishes toward a father who then, narrowly escaping death in 1931, was rendered strangely impotent— without the use of his right arm.’’ The linking of virility (potency) with the right arm, and impotency with the loss of the right arm, will be discussed later in this chapter. 40. K. A. Jelenski claims that ‘‘Bellmer’s opposition to Nazism, or rather his hatred for it, was absolute,’’ Arts Magazine (March 1964), 47. Sue Taylor’s psychoanalytic approach to Bellmer’s work opens with a treatment of Bellmer’s relation to his father, and to Nazism. See especially Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety, 18–22. Therese Lichtenstein, in Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), also accounts for Bellmer’s detestation of authority, and that of the Nazi state in particular. In his bid to outrage his authoritarian father, Bellmer, during the train ride to Germany, indulged in transvestism. ‘‘Toward the end of their trip on the night train,’’ Sue Taylor relates, ‘‘at the first glimmer of dawn, the father was shocked to see the would-be artist emerge from his compartment outrageously made up like a girl—with lipstick, powdered face, and curls penciled on his temples and cheeks,’’ 18. Themes of transvestism and other sex and gender mixings such as hermaphroditism reappear frequently in Bellmer’s artistic oeuvre. Bellmer also later sought to outrage his Nazi father by ‘‘setting up a hoax about an imaginary Jewish grandmother—which gave his father a time of considerable anxiety, forcing him to make a number of trips and pay for costly genealogical research.’’ See Jelenski, Arts Magazine, 47. 41. Bellmer, Therese Lichtenstein argues in Behind Closed Doors, sought to outrage the regime, though his work was created, and for a long time remained, secret—‘‘behind closed doors.’’ 42. While Sue Taylor offers a psychoanalytic treatment of Bellmer that takes account of the Nazi context in which the artist began his most important work, Therese Lichtenstein offers a historical account that takes the psychoanalytic approach into consideration. See Lichtenstein’s Behind Closed Doors. 43. Bellmer actually constructed two dolls, the first in 1933, the second in 1935. In the construction of the second doll, Bellmer ‘‘cannibalized the head, hands, and legs of the first doll.’’ Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 50. 44. The combination of feminine form and mechanical rigidity have inspired some commentators to compare Bellmer’s doll with the surrealists’ favorite insect, the praying mantis, with its robotic movements and deadly coital practices. See, for example, Silvia Eiblmayr, ‘‘Hans Bellmer’s Surrealist Eroti-

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cism—The ‘Praying Mantis’ and the Shock of Mechanization,’’ in Real Text: Reflection on the Periphery of the Subject, ed. Georg Scho¨llhammer and Christian Kraragna (1993), 233–39. Recalling the discussion of the previous chapter, one might also construe parallels between the praying mantis and Simone Weil, who, by Bataille’s rendering of her, was at once seductive and morbid, machinelike in discipline, and yet improbably attractive. And, to be sure, Weil’s decreative practice of prayer bears similarities to those mechanistic, inhuman practices attributed to the praying mantis. 45. Though the protruding breasts, fulsome belly, and callipygian backside suggest an adult woman, the doll possessed an adolescent’s face, and, at approximately four feet in height, was the size of a child. This disturbing coincidence of ages, or life stages, contributes to what several commentators, and Bellmer himself, describe as the doll’s ‘‘monstrous’’ nature, though I have found no commentators who have offered sustained analyses of this chronological/developmental mixing. Critics frequently cite the pedophilic nature of Bellmer’s work, an aspect Bellmer hardly sought to conceal. Bellmer published recollections of his childhood, which clearly inflect his erotic proclivities. Moreover, he collected pornographic photos, among which were several depicting men engaging in sex acts with female minors. Bellmer himself, however, appears never to have indulged whatever pedophilic tendencies he may have experienced, beyond the creation and use of images, however questionable they may be. His lovers were either consenting adults or non-sentient dolls. 46. In his essay ‘‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,’’ in which he describes images of the dehisced, fragmented body, Lacan describes the child who, experiencing corporeal dislocation, will render a ‘‘doll torn to pieces,’’ in Ecrits, 11. In this same essay he connects, though without detailing, sexual perversity and left-handedness in a manner that recalls the subject of this chapter: ‘‘I should also like to mention in passing that the decisive function that we attribute to the imago of one’s own body in the determination of the narcissistic phase enables us to understand the clinical relation between the congenital anomalies of functional lateralization (left-handedness) and all forms of inversion of sexual and cultural normalization’’ (25). 47. Sue Taylor and others have remarked upon the almost universal tendency for male commentators on Bellmer’s doll to refer to this object with the feminine pronoun. Thus the inanimate object, this doll, is frequently referred to not as the gender-neutral ‘‘it,’’ but as ‘‘she.’’ Taylor cites this as evidence of the doll’s role in fulfilling male fantasies of dominance. One such male writer who personifies the object is Peter Webb, whose informative biography of Bellmer is written with patent sympathy, and perhaps insufficient critical attention to Bellmer’s problematic use of the images of women. While the scope of this chapter precludes any sustained discussion of Bellmer’s misogyny, I would agree with Sue Taylor that one can admire Bellmer’s work, and even be moved by its erotic violence, without adopting its misogynistic perspective. Serious critique

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and fervent admiration, in this case, need not be mutually exclusive. On the other hand, while I acknowledge the validity of Taylor’s point regarding the tendency to refer to the doll as a ‘‘she,’’ I suggest that this kind of tendency is hardly unique to Bellmer’s work; when referring to painted or sculpted figures, the use of gendered pronouns is quite common. What is more particular to the case at hand is the profoundly erotic effects the doll seems to arouse in her—or its—male audience. 48. While Hal Foster devotes relatively little space to Bellmer’s work in particular, his discussion of the combination of the lifelike and mechanical in the Bretonian conception of surrealism can be applied to Bellmer’s doll. See Compulsive Beauty. Foster has more to say on this subject in ‘‘Armor Fou,’’ in which he ‘‘attempts to relate several works of Max Ernst and Hans Bellmer to a psychic apprehension of the body as armor,’’ an apprehension he considers ‘‘in terms of fascism.’’ October 56 (Spring 1991), 65–97. 49. Though diminutive in size and frequently depicted as the defenseless victim of tortures, the doll nonetheless possesses a threatening aspect. The aura of danger surrounding the doll can, I think, be attributed to several factors. First, Bellmer, and perhaps many others who encounter the doll, identify with the doll. Bellmer acknowledges his identification explicitly, and this explains the anxiety to which it gives rise: the witness to the doll’s sufferings also psychologically endures those sufferings, to some degree. Second, the doll’s machine-like construction endows it with a relentless, aggressive aspect. Third, its lifelikeness functions like that of the surrealist mannequin, that is, to provoke a sense of the uncanny, the ‘‘harbinger of death.’’ Finally, the doll provokes a number of tensions in relation to various taboos; as both a woman and a girl, it covertly provokes pedophilic desires; as structurally malleable, it threatens the Gestalt of those who identify with it—there is thus something murderous about it; and as both feminine in terms of sexual characteristics and phallic in its positionings, it provokes, some claim, castration anxiety. For example, see Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 72–79 and 101–3; Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety, 13, 47, 81; and Webb, Hans Bellmer, 43–44. 50. In this regard, the doll is more demonstrative of the notion of the uncanny proposed by Jentsch than Freud. Jentsch attributed the sense of the uncanny to intellectual uncertainty about ‘‘whether an object is living or inanimate.’’ See Freud, ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ 131. Freud argues against this concept of the uncanny, focusing instead on the role of repression and the return of the repressed in eliciting the Unheimlich, or uncanny. 51. The erotic incitements associated with the fascinating interplay of morbidity and vitality find a noteworthy counterpart in Bellmer’s graphic work. Bellmer frequently adorned his drawn adolescents with densely pleated garments. The many folds of the clothing he conjured for his drawn phantasms correspond to the fleshly wrinkles he also obsessively drew. Indeed, Bellmer spoke of ‘‘rot and its enemy, wrinkle.’’ While rot represented the ravages of

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time, the pleats and, strangely, the wrinkles seem to capture youth within their folds. Rot ‘‘signifies the state of disintegration, of matter decomposing,’’ as wrinkles and pleats indicate ‘‘matter’s active state, its ability to take on a multiplicity of appearances.’’ Alexander, Hans Bellmer, 50. 52. Bataille refers to various taboos in his studies of eroticism—the prohibition against murder, incest, nudity, and contact with sacred objects, to name the most prominent. But while Bataille insists on the importance of transgression for the obtainment of ‘‘inner experience,’’ or ecstasy, in no case does he promote, for example, murder; rather, he turns to sacrifice as a way of advancing to ‘‘the level of death,’’ which is necessary for ecstatic experience. On this point, see my discussion of Bataille and sacrifice in chapter 1. And while it is true that Bataille did hope to enact a human sacrifice to institute a foundational myth for Ace´phale, it is also true that he sought a willing volunteer to act as victim (some accounts claim that Bataille offered himself for this purpose). In any case, what is crucial, as I will try to make clear in this chapter, is the element of projection or ‘‘dramatization,’’ which allows humans simultaneously to uphold and transgress taboos. Sacrifice is one example of effective dramatization. But Bataille also discusses tragedy, photography, literature, and painting. See his essay ‘‘Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,’’ in Yale French Studies 78, in particular for an excursus on his notion of ‘‘dramatization.’’ 53. The momentous impression that this work left upon Bellmer is multiply inflected. Some commentators suggest that his reverence before this masterpiece is simply evidence that Bellmer was ‘‘fascinated and moved by images of martyrdom.’’ Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 85. Others have noted that the composition of characters in the painting corresponds uncannily to Bellmer’s own family, giving rise to psychoanalytic speculation: The wood of the altarpiece is the surface on which a perverse family romance is painted. As Sue Taylor asks, ‘‘Can it be a mere coincidence that Gru¨newald’s abject figure group echoes the composition of Bellmer’s immediate family—mother, brother, ailing wife, and father—in 1932, the date of his first pilgrimage with Margarete, to Colmar?’’ She goes on to speculate that the figure of John the Baptist is ‘‘a reminder of Bellmer’s own conscious, destructive wishes toward his authoritarian father.’’ The Anatomy of Anxiety, 93. 54. Margarete finally died in February 1938. It was, by yet another poignant coincidence, the same year and the same ailment—tuberculosis—that saw the death of Bataille’s lover and decadent muse, Laure. 55. Sue Taylor addresses Bellmer’s lifelong ailments in The Anatomy of Anxiety, 34–35. 56. Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 53–54, 93. 57. Taylor, in fact, rightly points out several postural resemblances between the doll and the crucified figure. Taylor’s point is that Bellmer could enact upon his doll the bodily mortifications that he unconsciously desired to have visited

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upon him by his father. While Taylor’s argument is compelling, I nonetheless find it difficult to accept the suggestion that the artist was not able to focus his attention for more than a fleeting instant upon the image that so often inspired the postures for his doll. It is impossible, of course, ever to reach definitive conclusions concerning Bellmer’s putative mental processes. However, given Bellmer’s well-known interest in images of Christian martyrdom—a fascination to which Taylor herself attests (92)—I find the assertion that he was forced by unconscious motivations to displace his attention onto the Magdalene figure debatable. 58. In this regard it should be recalled that although it was the central panel of this triptych, portraying the crucifixion, that apparently captivated Bellmer, the rightmost panel portrayed the resurrection. 59. Peter Webb cites these lines from a letter to Patrick Waldberg in Hans Bellmer, 24. This is also a point that Sue Taylor emphasizes. 60. To say that the doll suffers is, of course, to exemplify the kind of personification that Taylor and others rightly criticize. But while this putatively masculinist tendency might be improper when adopted by critics attempting to explicate the doll in art historical terms, it seems quite suitable when attempting to convey Bellmer’s erotic relations to the doll. It is helpful to recall that Bellmer’s erotic ties to the doll were so strong that for a long time he wanted to be interred with her. See Webb, Hans Bellmer, 262. 61. The matter of Bellmer’s intimate relations with the doll raises an array of gender-related questions that are beyond the scope of this study. What is clear is that in identifying with his doll, Bellmer adopted a certain ‘‘feminine’’ position, by turns crossing gender lines or combining gendered positions in a contradictory manner (as we will see below in the discussion of Bellmer’s fascination with hermaphrodites). Thinkers like Therese Lichtenstein (in Behind Closed Doors) and Rosalind Krauss (in ‘‘Corpus Delecti’’ and ‘‘L’Amour Fou’’) appropriate Bellmer as part of a feminist agenda that embraces the images of fragmented bodies as imagos of femininity that undercut the normative vision imposed by masculinist stances. But it is perhaps Sue Taylor who offers the most persuasive and penetrating account of Bellmer’s troubling relationships to women and to the female body in The Anatomy of Anxiety. 62. Bataille, ‘‘Le cheval acade´mique,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes, 1:159–63. 63. Bataille, ‘‘L’art primitif,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes 1, 253. 64. Bataille, ‘‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,’’ in Visions of Excess, 61. Here Bataille cites a report from the Annales medico-psychologiques by H. Claude, G. Robin, and his friend and analyst, Adrien Borel. 65. Bataille writes, ‘‘The one who sacrifices is free—free to indulge in . . . a disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim, to vomit his own being just as he has vomited a piece of himself or a bull, in other words free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself, like a gall or an aissaouah.’’ ‘‘Sacrificial

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Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,’’ in Visions of Excess, 70. The abject nature of Bellmer’s doll affirms this point, for it is, by Bellmer’s admission, a projection of himself, an abjected part of himself, which provides the ground for a continuous identification and alteration of him. 66. Bellmer, cited in Webb, Hans Bellmer, 27. 67. Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 5. 68. Taylor discusses Bellmer’s ‘‘repudiation of the father’’ in The Anatomy of Anxiety, 18–22. 69. This anecdotal evidence is more suggestive than definitive, but given Bellmer’s explicitly avowed obsession with his father as well as his abiding interest in mutilation and monstrosity, it is quite to the point. 70. The parallels between Bellmer’s relationship to his father and that of Bataille to his are remarkable in the present context. Like Hans Bellmer, Sr., Joseph Aristide-Bataille was stricken with illness (allegedly a maddening syphilis) and subsequently blinded and paralyzed. Whether Georges Bataille’s autobiographical claims can be trusted is open to debate; but it is clear enough that Bataille’s father instilled in his son an erotic admixture of horror and fascination. At the outset of his psychoanalysis, Bataille was implored by Dr. Adrien Borel to record his dreams. In one dream, Bataille locates the source of his horror in the coupling of his father’s blindness and the groping of his ‘‘obscene’’ hands: ‘‘And then suddenly I remember having gone down into the cellar with my father, a candle in my hand. . . . Terrors of childhood spiders etc. linked to the memory of having my pants pulled down on my father’s knees. . . . Kind of ambivalence between the most horrible and the most magnificent. I see him spread his obscene hands over me with a bitter and blind smile. This memory seems to be the most terrible of all,’’ ‘‘Dream,’’ in Visions of Excess, 4. My emphasis. The violent, incestuous nature of Bataille’s dream is uncannily paralleled in Bellmer’s simultaneous erotic attraction to, and revulsion before, his cruel father. For Bataille’s account of his father’s madness, see the ‘‘Coincidences’’ that append his Story of the Eye. For a discussion about the possible truth of Bataille’s accounts, as well as the relevance of Joseph-Aristide to Bataille’s development, see Michel Surya, Georges Bataille, 3–21. 71. Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 53. Taylor finds in the father’s illness a significant coincidence—an instance of wish-fulfillment (omnipotence of thought culminating in the destruction of the father) that would have enhanced Bellmer’s prayer-like attitude before the altarpiece. Webb also relates the incident in Hans Bellmer, 26. 72. The notion that Bataille, too, identifies with a monstrous vision of Christ was the topic of chapter 4, and is revisited in the present chapter. That Bataille might have felt predestined to such an anguished identification is evidenced by a fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no commentator has yet noted: that he was born to Joseph and Mary (Joseph-Bastide and Marie-Antoinette). In light of both Bataille’s autobiographical assertions and his fictional

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writings (such as My Mother) the family romance is complicated by the fact that each of the parents possesses a dual aspect: Joseph-Aristide is at once earthly father and God, while the maternal Marie-Antoinette is also a whorish Mary Magdalene. In this regard, too, Bataille’s affinities with Bellmer’s life and obsessions are astonishing, as the present chapter attempts to make clear. 73. Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 207. Though Bataille speaks of ‘‘the identity of perfect contraries,’’ his is not a vision of synthetic resolution. He proclaims, rather, a coincidence of opposites that remain opposites, such as ‘‘divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.’’ 74. Bataille, ‘‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,’’ in Visions of Excess, 70. 75. Therese Lichtenstein asserts, and Sue Taylor seconds, this idea. See Lichtenstein, ‘‘Hans Bellmer’s Dolls: Images of Pain, Pleasure, and Perversion,’’ in Sulfur 26 (Spring 1990), 22 and Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 6. The theme of alter egos and doppelgangers in literature is the subject of Otto Rank’s study The Double, trans. Harry Tucker Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1971). Rank’s psychoanalytic approach is concerned primarily with the theme of the double in literature, but his insights can easily be applied to the visual art of Hans Bellmer, as Lichtenstein, Taylor, and other commentators have shown. Of particular pertinence to Bellmer is Rank’s insistence on the contradictory meaning of the double, which confronts the living person with an apparition of his own death. In addition, Rank suggests that the ‘‘frequent slaying of the double’’ in literature is tantamount to ‘‘a suicidal act’’ (79). I think that this insight above all can be applied to Bellmer’s doll: she (or it) is the medium by which Bellmer enacts a masochistic aggression through an identificatory projection. Heightening the sense of uncanniness in Bellmer’s biography is the fact that in 1942 Bellmer married a French woman, Marcelle Ce´line Sutter, who gave birth, by Bellmer’s patrimony, to twin daughters. See Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 132. 76. Lichtenstein points this out in more than one analysis of Bellmer. See in particular Behind Closed Doors, the thesis of which is that ‘‘the dolls that Bellmer constructed and photographed were in part a response to the rise of fascism in Germany. Bellmer’s works are a violent attack on the stereotypes of normalcy evident in Nazi art and culture’’ (1). This contention resonates with Taylor’s psychoanalytic approach to Bellmer’s contempt for his father in The Anatomy of Anxiety. Peter Webb’s biography of Bellmer supports both of these compatible interpretations. See especially the first two chapters of Hans Bellmer. 77. A discussion of the politics of the right and the left, and how these may or may not correspond to the right- and left-hand sacred, is beyond the scope of this chapter. For an entre´e into this discussion in relation to Bataille and Simone Weil, see Alexander Irwin’s Saints of the Impossible. Miche`le H. Richman claims that, ‘‘as Bataille often reiterated, the etymological ‘coincidence’ between sinister and sinistra (left) reveals the long social and cultural history inscribed

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within the hierarcy of bodily habitus.’’ Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Colle`ge of Sociologie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 200. 78. In ‘‘Le cheval academique,’’ Bataille speaks of the ‘‘extravagance positive’’ of the Gaulish ‘‘chevaux-monstres,’’ Oeuvres comple`tes, 1:160, 161. 79. Bellmer also had human erotic relations; after Margarete, the artist Unica Zu¨rn was Bellmer’s longtime lover and companion. 80. For a subtle—and subtly humorous—discussion of death and the impossibility of witnessing one’s own death, see Paul Edwards, ‘‘My Death,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 5, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967), 416–19. Martin Heidegger discusses ‘‘being-towards-death’’ in division 2, section 1 of Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Here he treats the impossibility of experiencing one’s own death: ‘‘When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its ‘there,’ ’’ 281. 81. For a discussion of Bellmer’s ‘‘fascination with the experience of being a woman,’’ see Lichtenstein’s chapter ‘‘The Hermaphrodite in Me,’’ in Behind Closed Doors, 47–103. 82. What Lichtenstein asserts regarding Bellmer’s dolls applies to his images of hermaphrodites as well: They are ‘‘in part a response to the rise of fascism in Germany. Bellmer’s works are a violent attack on the stereotypes of normalcy evident in Nazi art and culture. The rebel against images of the ideal female Aryan body found in Nazi high art and mass culture’’ (1). 83. See Bellmer’s engravings for ‘‘A Little Treatise on Morals,’’ in which a large phallus protrudes from a girl’s vagina. 84. On the doll as a body-phallus, see especially Rosalind Krauss’s essay ‘‘Corpus Delecti,’’ in L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985) as well as her discussion in Bachelors, in which she compares the photomontages of Dora Maar to Bellmer’s dolls, emphasizing in each the representation of the phallic woman. ‘‘Claude Cahun and Dora Maar: By Way of Introduction,’’ in Bachelors (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 1–50. 85. Bellmer cited in ‘‘Les Avatars de l’oeil chez Bellmer,’’ in Obliques, special issue, 203. My translation. 86. Bellmer discusses this sexual interpenetration in his book L’Anatomie de l’image, here cited in Webb, Hans Bellmer, 169. 87. Bellmer’s hermaphrodite is thus a far cry from Alcibiades’ mythic synthesis of man and woman. See Alcibiades’ speech in Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 25–31. While comical in tone, there is a melancholic aspect to this speech, in which Aristophanes recognizes the impossibility of achieving, in this earthly life, the original unity of which the Androgyne is the emblem, and to which Plato, with his insistence on balance, admired. 88. Webb analyzes Bellmer’s approach to androgyny in Hans Bellmer, 169–70.

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89. Paul Schilder cited in Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 104. Taylor remarks that ‘‘nothing has yet been written’’ about Bellmer’s 1935 black-andwhite photos inspired by Schilder’s study. Taylor makes brief but insightful comments about the photos, emphasizing especially the place of these pieces in relation to Bellmer’s elaboration of the ‘‘physical unconscious’’ and the ‘‘symbolic interchange of body parts.’’ My comments extend her analysis. 90. Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 105. 91. Schilder is cited in Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 107. 92. Webb, Hans Bellmer, 173. Webb goes on to point out ‘‘the lithograph of 1954 titled ‘Les Mains articule´es’ . . . in which the obsessively treated knucklebones can be read as myriad tiny erect penises.’’ 93. Michel Butor has written a short, rather poetic piece entitled ‘‘La multiplication des mains,’’ which, though making no explicit mention of Bellmer, appears in Obliques accompanied by reproductions of Bellmer’s ‘‘Les Mains articule´es’’ as well as an untitled drawing of fingers intertwining with the body of a serpent. See Obliques, special issue on Hans Bellmer (1975), 14–17. 94. Sue Taylor reports that, in a letter to Dr. Gaston Ferdie`re, Bellmer emphasizes that natural monstrosities are ‘‘distinctly charming if not marvelous.’’ He also recommends a friend to visit a museum to witness the monstrosities on display there. Additionally, Bellmer shared with Bataille an interest in Kali, the terrifying and bloodthirsty Hindu goddess of destruction, who is generally represented as having many arms, and is sometimes depicted as wearing a belt of severed hands. Bataille published a characteristically horrific image of the goddess in Documents 6 (1930). Taylor summarizes these connections in The Anatomy of Anxiety, 253. A peculiar coincidence: not only were Bellmer and Antonin Artaud both treated by Dr. Gaston Ferdie`re, but one might also recall that the automutilator with whose case Bataille introduces his essay on Van Gogh and sacrificial automutilation appears with the truncated name ‘‘Gaston F.’’ 95. Bataille’s essay ‘‘The Deviations of Nature’’ resonates quite clearly with Bellmer’s conception of monstrosity. On this point see Visions of Excess, 53–56. 96. ‘‘Organ’’ comes from the Greek organon (tool, instrument) and is akin to ergon (work). The etymology of ‘‘orgy’’ overlaps with that of organ, coming from the Latin orgia, and akin to the Greek ergon. Originally denoting the ecstatic rites honoring Greek or Roman deities, ‘‘orgy’’ has come to refer to excessive sexual activity, often drunken and wild. The notion of an ‘‘orgy of organs,’’ of putting the tool of work to the ends of the counter work of the ecstatic rite or extreme sexual license, defines the monstrous aspect of Bellmer’s work I am trying to develop in this chapter. 97. Taylor makes this remark in affirming Lichtenstein’s connection between Schilder’s theory and Bellmer’s notion of the physical unconscious. See Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 107. See also Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 35–36.

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98. Taylor cites Schilder in The Anatomy of Anxiety, 107. 99. These migrations of round body parts can, of course, be compared to those found in Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which Bellmer went on to illustrate in the re-edition of 1939. For an intriguing discussion of the ‘‘round phallicism’’ displayed in Bataille’s novel, see Roland Barthes’s essay ‘‘The Metaphor of the Eye,’’ in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972). 100. Bellmer, ‘‘L’Anatomie de l’image,’’ in special issue of Obliques (1975). 101. On Bellmer’s ‘‘use’’ of hysteria, see Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 115–16 and 125–26. 102. Bellmer, ‘‘Memories of the Doll Theme,’’ reproduced in Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 174. 103. Both Taylor, in The Anatomy of Anxiety, and Lichtenstein, in Behind Closed Doors, discuss the role of the double in Bellmer’s work, especially in relation E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale The Sandman. Peter Webb emphasizes the importance to Bellmer of a ‘‘momentous visit to Reinhardt’s production of The Tales of Hoffmann,’’ in which Bellmer was captivated by the figure of Olympia, the lifelike doll. See Hans Bellmer, 43. In this regard, Freud’s essay ‘‘The Uncanny’’ is an almost irresistible source for scholars seeking to analyze Bellmer’s art and his psychology. While I would want to dispute neither the influence of Reinhardt’s production on Bellmer nor the usefulness of Freud’s text in assessing it, I have eschewed both of these in order to focus on new aspects of doubling, in an attempt to reveal a more thorough use of doubles than has previously been recognized. For further studies of the double in Bellmer’s work, see also the essays in Obliques special issue on Bellmer (1975) and Constantin Jelenski, ‘‘Hans Bellmer, or The Displaced Pain,’’ in Arts Magazine 38 (March 1964): 46–50. 104. Webb, Hans Bellmer, 212. 105. See, for example, Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 84. 106. The resemblance of the doll and the Christ figure is borne out in many photos of the doll, in which she is posed in a position of crucifixion or otherwise manipulated to resemble Christ. On this point, see especially Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 85–86. 107. Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 35. 108. Bellmer cited in Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 85. 109. Bataille’s phrase. See the ‘‘Preface’’ to The Dead Man, in My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Marion Boyars, 1995), 166. On the relationship of silence and eroticism, see especially the chapter ‘‘Sanctity, Eroticism and Solitude’’ in Erotism, 252–64. Jacques Derrida addresses the relations of silence, speech, and writing in ‘‘Two Forms of Writing’’ and in his essay ‘‘From Restricted to General Economy,’’ in Writing and Difference, 262–70. 110. For one stirring example of this phenomenon, see his untitled graphite drawing of 1951, in which ‘‘the artist’s inventive power is such that the hand

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. . . becomes . . . a grouping of at least three figures—all headless, wrapped like mummies, with their exposed ball-joint bellies and knees emerging from the great hand’s knuckles.’’ Sue Taylor, ‘‘Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body,’’ The Art Institute of Chicago Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. 2001 (http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/taylor3.php). 111. Bataille is quoted in Phillipe Sollers, ‘‘De Grandes Irre´gularite´s de Langage,’’ in Critique: Hommage a` Georges Bataille, 19:195–96 (August– September 1963), 75. 112. Bellmer, cited in Webb, Hans Bellmer, 103. Bellmer is here asserting a complete inversion of the law of identity, which expresses that a thing must be identical to itself: If anything is P, then it is P. His formulation thus runs contrary to an entire tradition of philosophical thinking that has its foundation in Aristotle’s argument in the Metaphysics (book 4) that it is incorrect to claim that ‘‘the same [thing] is and is not.’’ 113. Bellmer, cited in Webb, Hans Bellmer, 38. 114. Indeed, Bellmer describes his attitude before anagrams and such as one of a duplicitous, ‘‘monstrous fascination,’’ possessing a ‘‘black’’ and morbid aspect that ‘‘has as its other face true miracles of perception and imagination.’’ He specifies: ‘‘Impossible transfers, metamorphoses, permutations . . . whose shock and surprise compensate for the bitterness of life. To obtain by a simple permutation the phrase ‘O, rire sous le couteau’ from ‘roses au coeur violet’ is a miracle!’’ See Webb, Hans Bellmer, 200–201. Given these anagrammatic permutations among roses, laughter, and violence (the knife that cuts words as well as the body), Bellmer would no doubt have been pleased with Nabokov’s elegant anagram in Ada: ‘‘eros, a rose.’’ 115. Bellmer’s L’Anatomie de l’image is excerpted in Obliques, special issue, 109–11. It is in this same section of his book that he anagramatically claims that ‘‘Beil devient Lieb et Leib’’ (Axe becomes love and body)—again underscoring the erotic relationship between disarticulations of the body and language. 116. ‘‘Le corps est comparable a` une phrase qui vous inviterait a` la de´sarticuler.’’ Bellmer cited in Constantin Jelenski, ‘‘Hans Bellmer, ou la douleur de´place´e,’’ in Les Dessins de Hans Bellmer (Paris: Editions Denoe¨l, 1966), 15. 117. Antonin Artaud provides an example of an analogous but also contrary mode of expression; he turns written words into disarticulating screams, and screams into glossolalia. A comparative examination of the antagonism– analogies obtaining between Artaud and Bellmer would make the subject of another study. 118. Carolyn J. Dean cites Xavie`re Gauthier on the surrealist penchant for sexualizing language, using ‘‘perverse images to ‘decompose’ and ‘disarticulate’ the body so as to ‘transform it into language.’ ’’ The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 214.

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119. Sarane Alexandrian, Hans Bellmer (New York: Rizzoli, 1972), 22. 120. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 340. 121. Heidegger cited in Derrida’s ‘‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,’’ in Deconstruction and Philosophy, 178. 122. While the Heideggerian conception of ‘‘being-towards-death,’’ as formulated especially in Being and Time, appears at first to have much in common with Bataille’s own insistence on the paramount importance of death, their respective approaches to death are quite different. For Heidegger, being-towarddeath describes the possibility of the achievement of authentic existence. ‘‘Anticipation [of death]’’ he writes, ‘‘turns out to be the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being—that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence.’’ Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 307. Heidegger’s emphasis on project/projection as part of authentic existence stands in contrast to Bataille’s focus on immediate expenditure, a present ‘‘experience’’ of death; the attainment of full Dasein is foreign to Bataille’s thought, with its emphasis on incompletion, alteration, and monstrosity. In the present context, it is noteworthy that Heidegger’s famous tome was part of a project that itself was never completed. While divergent in thinking, a comparative study of the similar vocabularies of Heidegger and Bataille might prove illuminating to each; perhaps above all, the relationship between anxiety/anguish and ecstasy is to the fore in both thinkers, and merits consideration. 123. Derrida discusses this elision of the two into the one in ‘‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,’’ in Deconstruction and Philosophy. Franc¸oise Meltzer also addresses this curious unification in her chapter ‘‘Sleight of Hand’’ in Salome and the Dance of Writing. 124. Derrida speaks of the hand of man, according to Heidegger, as possessing a ‘‘double vocation’’ of giving and taking, of granting and grasping—taking hold of tools to work, and giving the gifts of the handiwork. This, Derrida claims, is what for Heidegger sets man apart from animals. See ‘‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,’’ in Deconstruction and Philosophy. 125. I am drawing an analogy with Hal Foster’s claim in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 156, that the portrayed condition of abjection in the work of some artists tends to provoke an operation of abjection. I am claiming that the portrayal of monstrous contradiction provokes monstrous affects, contradictory emotions of horror and ecstasy—Bataille’s ‘‘religious sensibility.’’ 126. See, for example, Noah Chasin, ‘‘Interview: Deborah Cullen,’’ in Bataille’s Eye & ICI Field Notes 4 (Santa Monica, Calif.: Published by Studely Press for the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 1997); Sarane Alexander, Hans Bellmer; Taylor, ‘‘Bellmer Illustrates Bataille,’’ in The Anatomy of Anxiety; Peter Webb, Hans Bellmer; Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors; Michel Camus, ‘‘Les Avatars de l’oeil,’’ in the special issue of Obliques dedicated to the work of Bellmer.

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127. A point made by Taylor in The Anatomy of Anxiety, 137. Other commentators have been more likely to overlook the ‘‘almost arbitrary affiliation’’ of Bellmer’s engravings to the written text, claiming that ‘‘no one better than [Bellmer] could, in a manner as moving and torrid, render visible the violence of the obsessions that unfold in Histoire de l’oeil.’’ Michel Camus cited in Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety, 137. The truth of the matter, I think, lies between Camus’s exhilarated claim and Taylor’s more critical one. I suggest that in relation to Bataille’s work, Bellmer’s engravings are not mimetic of the scenes portrayed in the texts, but rather mimetic of the ‘‘religious sensibility’’ they also seek to evoke. 128. Hollier, Against Architecture, 29. 129. Ibid., 30. 130. Bataille, ‘‘Eye,’’ 17. 131. In ‘‘The Solar Anus,’’ Bataille claims that eyes cannot tolerate the sun, coitus, obscurity, or cadavers. I hope that this chapter has gone some way in explaining why these four phenomena are exceptional for their intolerability. See Visions of Excess, 8. For a discussion of the ‘‘denigration of vision’’ in Bataille and the surrealists, see Martin Jay’s ‘‘The Disenchantment of the Eye: Bataille and the Surrealists,’’ in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 211–62. 132. Bataille, ‘‘Eye,’’ 17–19. Although the words ‘‘imminent spectacle of torture’’ are Grandville’s, Bataille would have been thinking, too, of his own regard for the spectacle of torture in the form of the photos of the hundred pieces execution he had begun contemplating two years before the publication of this essay. See chapter 1 for a discussion of these photos. 133. Bataille in a letter to Alexandre Koje`ve, cited in Bejamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 7. 134. He does, of course, argue with Hegel, but not in relation to the conception of the hand. Bataille rarely mentions Heidegger, and when he does it is generally glancing. See Bataille’s passing reference to Heidegger in Inner Experience, 109. On Bataille’s penchant for contradicting, rather than arguing with, his philosophical nemeses, see Amy Hollywood’s discussion of Bataille’s dramatic refutation of Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘Introduction: ‘The Philosopher—Sartre— and Me’ ’’ in Sensible Ecstasy, 25–35. 135. See Roland Barthes’s essay ‘‘The Metaphor of the Eye,’’ in Critical Essays. 136. In his seminal essay ‘‘Preface to Transgression,’’ Michel Foucault discusses the ‘‘obstinate prestige’’ that Bataille affords the eye in his writings, claiming that the eye, exorbitated and deprived of vision, is the ‘‘figure of inner experience’’ (34). 137. See Bataille, ‘‘Coincidences,’’ in Story of the Eye, and ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ in My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, 217.

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138. Bataille, The Story of the Eye, 64. 139. Ibid., 83. 140. In ‘‘A Preface to Transgression,’’ Foucault, addressing the climactic scene in The Story of the Eye, finds in the uprooted, lost eye the emblem of transgression and ‘‘a figure of inner experience.’’ But this transgression, as I argued in chapter 1, assumes contradiction as a condition of its possibility; the inner experience is one of contradiction, as Bataille repeatedly tells us. Foucault seems both aware of and blind to this fact, as when he claims that, ‘‘in a movement that is not necessarily contradictory,’’ the eye is ‘‘transformed into the bright night of an image’’ (34). Foucault’s essay is itself fraught with paradoxical formulations such as this, and indeed he characterizes the ‘‘upturned orb’’ as ‘‘both the most open and the most impenetrable eye’’ (35). 141. As in ‘‘Eye’’ or Story of the Eye. 142. See especially chapters 1 and 2. 143. Bataille, ‘‘The Pineal Eye,’’ in Visions of Excess, 82. 144. Bataille, ‘‘Sacrificial Mutilation,’’ 68. 145. Ibid., 68–69. 146. Hollier, Against Architecture, 76. 147. Ibid., 79–80. 148. Bataille, ‘‘Eye,’’ in Visions of Excess, 17. 149. Bataille, On Nietzsche, 19. My emphasis. 150. Ibid., 22. 151. Hollier speaks of ‘‘incomplete death’’ in Against Architecture, 52. conclusion: bataillean meditations

1. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 401. 2. On Bataille’s will to trauma, see Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 60–87. 3. Bataille, Tears of Eros, 206–7. 4. Bataille, Guilty, 35. 5. Ibid., 35–36. 6. Ibid., 36. 7. Bataille, Erotism, 11, 24. My emphasis. 8. Bataille’s explorations, as we have seen, also extended beyond these domains to others, such as ethnography, sociology, and poetry. 9. Bataille, Theory of Religion, 51. 10. Bataille was, however, persistently interested in communities, as evidenced by his establishment of the secret society of the Ace´phale. 11. See ‘‘Formless,’’ in Visions of Excess, 31, and ‘‘Architecture,’’ in Encyclopedia Ace´phale, 35–36. 12. In France, la formation refers to the academic educational process. Bataille’s notion of the informe might thus be read as a resistance to the academy.

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13. Having been a ‘‘very bad student’’ at Reims lyce´e, Bataille went on to matriculate in the School of Paleography and Library Science, where he was ‘‘regularly at the top of his class, but graduate[d] second,’’ ‘‘Autobiographical Note,’’ in My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, 217. 14. Both within and outside of the university. Displaying a fondness for paleography, Bataille wrote his thesis L’Ordre de chevalerie at l’Ecole des Chartres in 1922. In his later career he produced such scholarly works as The Trial of Gilles de Rais. 15. Bataille was employed at the Bibliothe`que National. 16. This is Bataille’s self-description in Inner Experience, 66. 17. Bataille, ‘‘Le cheval acade´mique,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes, 1, 162–63. 18. Bataille writes both across and against generic lines. His works can be easily categorized as novels, short stories, philosophical tracts, and scholarly treatises. But others of his texts are not so easily classified. How, for example, are ‘‘essays’’ such as ‘‘The Pineal Eye’’ or ‘‘The Obelisk’’ best categorized? They are in some respects scholarly and in other respects works of fiction. In a similar vein, Bataille’s Summa Athe´ologique comprises personal diaries, philosophical tracts, and meditative excurses. For a discussion of Bataille’s antigeneric tendencies, see Philippe Sollers, ‘‘De grandes irre´gularitie´s de langage,’’ in Critique 195–96 (1963), 795–802. 19. Marie-He´le`ne Huet cites Diderot in Monstrous Imagination, 89. 20. Bataille, ‘‘Formless,’’ Visions of Excess, 31. 21. There are, of course, examples of the application, rather than simply the exegesis, of Bataille. In the area of art history, Rosalind Krauss has put Bataille to use over the last two decades to call into question hitherto prevailing theories of surrealism. Bataille’s usefulness in the study of religion is only now starting to be embraced. Mark C. Taylor has been an important figure in bringing Bataille into the discourse of religious studies, particularly through his book Altarity. Amy Hollywood, in Sensible Ecstasy, makes significant use of Bataille in analyzing the bodily dimensions of mystical practices. Alphonso Lingis’s book Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) is written in a mode reminiscent of Bataille without simply parroting him. 22. Mircea Eliade, preface, in The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969), iii. 23. See the discussion of Bataille’s approach to ‘‘primitive’’ art in chapter 3 of this volume. 24. Bataille, ‘‘The Sacred,’’ in Visions of Excess, 241. 25. See the entries (in the Atlas Arkhive edition of the Encyclopedia Acephalica, comprising the ‘‘Critical Dictionary’’ and related texts from Documents) on ‘‘Human Face,’’ by Bataille (99–106); ‘‘Big Toe,’’ by Bataille (87–93); ‘‘Spittle,’’ by Michel Leiris (79–80); ‘‘Dust,’’ by Bataille (42–43); and ‘‘Formless,’’ by Bataille (51–52). The texts of Documents are comprised in two volumes edited by Jean-Michel Place.

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26. Bataille, ‘‘Figure humaine,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes, 1:180–85. Also collected under the title ‘‘Human Face,’’ in Encyclopedia Acephalica, ed. Georges Bataille, assembled by Alastair Brotchie (London: Atlas Press: 1995), 99–106. 27. Bataille, ‘‘The Big Toe,’’ in Visions of Excess, 23. 28. An article by Michel Leiris on ‘‘Spittle (Mouth Water)’’ containing this description appeared alongside works by Bataille and others in the Dictionnaire critique section of the journal Documents, edited by Bataille. Leiris’s text is collected in Encyclopedia Acephalica, 79–80. 29. Bataille, ‘‘Poussie`re’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes, 1:197. Also collected under the title ‘‘Dust’’ in Encyclopedia Acephalica, 43. 30. Bataille, ‘‘Formless,’’ in Visions of Excess, 31. 31. Bataille, ‘‘The Sacred,’’ 241, 245. 32. The term ‘‘technician of the sacred’’ is derived from Eliade’s characterization of shamans (‘‘shamanism ⳱ technique of ecstasy’’) in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4. Eliade’s emphasis. 33. Bataille, ‘‘The Sacred,’’ in Visions of Excess, 241.

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index

Abel, Lionel, 179–80n11, 181n24 abjection, 98, 124, 137, 228n125 Ace´phale (journal and secret society), 1, 39, 40, 67 ace´phale, 1–3, 55, 68; and contradiction, 2–3; as sacred monster, 3, 162 affirmation, 6, 34–35, 37, 41, 44, 48, 54, 180n11, 183n54 alteration, 94, 133, 140, 142, 148, 150, 154, 166, 167, 197n61 anagrams, 150–52, 227n114 anamorphosis, 74–75, 81 Andalusian Dog (Bun˜uel and Dalı´), 157 Aristotle, 163 Artaud, Antonin, 227n117 Aufhebung, 13, 14, 77. See also Bataille, Georges: refusal of synthesis authenticity (Sartre), 38, 63, 64, 66, 69, 179n10 authority, 56–57, 92 automatic writing, 121 automatism, 6, 83, 96, 111, 120–23 automutilation, 97, 120–23, 127, 132, 139, 142, 158, 161 axis mundi, 84, 86, 102–4, 168

174n18; concept of reality, 75, 86; death of, 9; ‘‘The Big Toe,’’ 30; Blue of Noon, 6, 76, 87, 89, 93, 96, 105–10, 139, 142, 208n54; ‘‘Le Cheval acade´mique,’’ 91, 139, 166; counter operations of, 5, 7, 15, 22–32 passim, 126, 128, 132, 139, 142, 154, 157, 167, 168; critique of Sartre, 63–70; ‘‘Deviations of Nature,’’ 63, 163; Documents, 73, 156, 168; Erotism, 14, 135; eternal return opposed to Sartrean ‘‘project,’’ 69; extremist surrealism, 76, 79, 96, 102–23 passim; ‘‘Eye,’’ 157, 158; ‘‘Formless,’’ 156, 167; Guilty, 33, 52, 164; hands, 127–33; identification with Nietzsche’s experience of eternal return, 35, 64–66, 185n98; images of torture victim, 7, 10–12, 34, 142, 164; imaginings of Simone Weil, 87–94, 96, 100, 102–5, 109, 110–11, 201n96, 205n10, 206n21; Inner Experience, 63, 116; intimacy with and opposition to Hegel, 14, 26–27, 174n23; interpretation/inversion of Nietzsche, 5, 37, 39, 40–58 passim; involvement with Ace´phale, 1, 39; labyrinths, 83, 85–87; Lascaux, 72–76, 80, 128; ‘‘The Madness of Nietzsche,’’ 55; ‘‘La Me`re Tragedie,’’ 54; method of meditation, 6, 8, 114, 116; as morbid Nietzsche, 38, 59, 70; as ‘‘new mystic,’’ 64; ‘‘Nietzschean Chronicle,’’ 69; Nietzschean conception of time, 69–70; parody, 38, 52, 53, 61, 66, 70; ‘‘primitive’’ art, 80–82;

Barthes, Roland, 147, 173n16 Bataille, Georges: Accursed Share, 60; ace´phale, 1–3; amor fati, 62, 70; attitude toward dream/fantasy, 116, 119–21; attitude toward fleshly decay, 89–91, 116; attitude of thought in, 5, 12, 19, 22, 24–26, 31, 32, 34, 165,

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‘‘Propositions,’’ 68, 69; psychoanalysis of, 52; ‘‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’’ 67; refusal/transgression of form, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 74, 81, 82, 92, 94, 97, 128, 139, 140, 157, 161, 162, 166, 169; refusal of satisfaction, 19, 22, 28, 31, 116–17; refusal of synthesis, 19, 24–26; relationship to Christianity, 88–90; relationship to father, 89, 222n70; as religious thinker, 169; repetition of Nietzsche, 37, 40, 66; response to Sartre, 63–66; ‘‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,’’ 122; ‘‘Sacrifice,’’ 55, 56; sacrifice of form, 4, 7, 15, 63, 160, 164; ‘‘Solar Anus,’’ 52; Story of the Eye, 13–14, 106, 147, 158, 160; ‘‘summit and decline,’’ 59, 62; Sur Nietzsche, 37, 51, 57, 59, 60, 64, 113; surrealism, 6, 75–122 passim; Tears of Eros, 9; theories of sacrifice, 27, 29, 30, 32, 38, 53–54, 56; Theory of Religion, 9, 18–22, 23, 27, 53; unsatisfied desire, 22, 31, 116, 170; will to chance (volunte´ de chance), 58, 62, 113; will to decline, 51, 58, 59, 62, 68; writings as sacred, 170 Bataille, Laurence, 128 Baumler, Alfred, 65 Beauvoir, Simone de, 15 Bellmer, Hans, 7, 10, 123, 126, 134, 143– 56, 218n45; Anatomy of the Image, 150, 152; ‘‘Articulated Hands,’’ 144–45; contradiction in work of, 138, 144, 147, 148, 153, 155, 156; counter operations in, 143, 148, 154; eroticism, 134–37, 140, 143, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155; hands, 144–51; ‘‘Hands,’’ 148; ermaphrodites/androgynes in work of, 143–46, 154, 224n87; identification with la poupe´e, 139, 221n61; illustrations for Story of the Eye, 126, 134, 156; misogyny of, 218n47; opposition to Nazism, 140, 143, 223n76, 224n82; relationship to father, 141, 142, 217n39, 217n40, 222n70. See also la poupe´e

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Bellmer, Hans (father of the artist), 141, 142 Benjamin, Walter, 108, 197n74 Blanchot, Maurice, 3, 15, 34–35, 37 blindness, 73, 95, 96, 127, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162 Bloom, Harold, 179n8 Boaistuau, Pierre: Histoires prodigieuses, 63 Bois, Yve-Alain, 99 Borch-Jocobsen, Mikkel, 33, 34, 56, 59 Borel, Adrien, 7, 10, 52 Breton, Andre´, 6, 15, 51, 70, 71, 72, 75– 83, 96, 106, 108, 115; as cadaver, 112–13; attitude toward dream/fantasy, 77, 115–20; attitude toward literature, 106; chance, 111–14; concept of surrealism, 77, 108, 111–23 passim; incident at Lascaux, 79–83; labyrinths, 83; Manifesto of Surrealism, 79; ‘‘reality,’’ 75–82, 195n46; scatophobia of, 78; Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 121; ‘‘Surrealism and Painting,’’ 76, 78, 79; synthesis in the thought of, 77, 78, 82, 108, 117, 118 Brown, Peter, 102–4, 119

Camus, Michel, 134 caves, 83, 91, 92, 94, 95. See also labyrinths Certeau, Michel de, 198n75 chance, 6, 57, 58, 62, 64, 70, 83, 96, 111– 15. See also Bataille: volunte´ de chance; objective chance Chicago School (history of religions), 167 Christ, 101, 102, 104, 105, 113, 115, 120, 123, 124, 126, 137, 138, 141, 142; Andre´ Breton identified with, 112–13; embodiment of contradiction, 102, 115, 123; hands of, 125, 126, 144, 145, 148, 149, 150, 155; inspiration for Hans Bellmer’s doll, 137–39, 143, 144, 145; portrayed in Isenheim Altarpiece, 124–26; resurrection of Lazarus, 93. See also crucifixion/cross Christianity. See Bataille, Georges: relationship to Christianity; hyperchristia-

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Index nity; Weil, Simone: relationship to Christianity coincidence: of extreme affects, 4, 8, 11, 73, 137, 141, 151, 153, 159, 162, 164; of opposites, 135, 136, 141, 147, 148, 155; of life and death, 78, 83, 87, 88, 93, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 114, 115, 120, 122, 134, 135, 137, 143, 148 College of Sociology, 168 communication, 33, 41, 56, 62, 70, 164, 165, 170 community, 55, 57, 68, 69, 70 compassion, 142, 164, 165, 170. See also empathy confusion of senses, 7, 123, 128, 146, 147, 159 contradiction, 3, 4, 8, 63, 79, 96, 98, 99, 101–2, 111, 114, 115, 135, 139, 144, 152, 155, 156, 169; in Bataille’s thought/writings, 13–14, 28, 73, 98, 99, 122, 140, 157, 159, 162, 166, 167; in Breton’s thought, 78, 79, 83, 118, 121; in concept of the uncanny, 85; figured in cross/crucifixion, 7; friendship, 35, 166; labyrinth/cave, 83, 96; opposed to Breton’s ‘‘moderate’’ surrealism, 70, 76, 83; opposed to Hegelian synthesis, 13, 14; sustained in unconscious, 117, 118. See also Bellmer: contradiction in work of; Christ: embodiment of contradiction; coincidence; monsters/monstrosity: contradiction; sacred: contradiction, opposed to the profane; Weil: embodiment of contradiction corpse/cadaver, 43, 54, 91, 93, 94, 99, 101, 111–13, 114, 115, 119, 123 crucifixion/cross, 7, 100, 101, 102, 104, 115, 120, 123, 124, 126, 137, 138, 140, 141, 150 cruxus mundi, 102, 104 cult of saints, 104

168; association with caves/labyrinths, 83, 85, 86, 87; ecstasy, 3, 4, 7, 33; fear of, 19, 21, 22, 28, 29; experience ‘‘at the level of’’ (Bataille), 4, 32, 34, 56, 161, 162, 164, 165; ‘‘joy before’’ (Bataille), 8, 34, 116, 168; in surrealism, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114 death drive, 108, 109, 112, 113, 200n92 decadence, 46–48, 60–62, 70 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 131, 178n104; ‘‘From Restricted to General Economy,’’ 14, 176n67 desire, 16, 79, 111, 112, 117, 119, 144. See also Bataille, Georges: refusal of satisfaction; master-slave dialectic: desire in dialectical thought, 13, 77 dictionaries, 127, 156–57, 167 Diderot, Denis, Ele´ments de physiologie, 167 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 172n8 Dionysus, 39–40, 44, 46, 54, 55, 66 disarticulation, 128, 143, 148, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157 ‘‘doll’’ (Hans Bellmer). See la poupe´e Domitian, 92 doubles, 86, 142, 147, 153, 154, 160, 166, 223n75, 226n103 Douglas, Mary, 40, 181n23, 206n15 dreams, 6, 44, 77, 78, 83, 96, 111, 115–21. See also Bataille, Georges: attitude toward dream/fantasy; Breton, Andre´, attitude toward dream/fantasy Dumas, Georges, 10, 11 Durkheim, Emile, 38, 39; Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 18

ecstasy, 4, 9, 10, 11, 31, 32, 34, 41, 45, 46, 53, 114, 120, 141, 142, 150, 161; and eternal return, 65; and intolerability, 10. See also coincidence: of extreme affects; death: ecstasy Eliade, Mircea, 38, 84, 85, 86, 102, 167, 168–69, 190n160, 197n74; theory of labyrinth, 84 empathy, 5, 164–65. See also compassion

Daedalus, 94 death, 3–4, 6, 7, 8, 28, 32, 34, 38, 54, 55, 56, 57, 62, 69, 70, 71, 78, 87, 103, 104, 116, 119, 122, 134, 137, 161, 162, 164,

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Engels, Friedrich, 129, 130 Eros, 152, 162, 164, 165 eroticism, 4, 134, 135, 137, 138, 140, 144, 147, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 169. See also Hans Bellmer: eroticism eternal return, 21, 64–66, 69, 179n10. See also Bataille, Georges: eternal return opposed to Sartrean ‘‘project’’; Nietzsche, Friedrich: experience of eternal return eternity, 7, 85, 86, 102, 123 existentialism, 107, 109, 208n61 exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis), 111–12 eyes, 76–79, 157–61, 160, 213n12

ghost, 93, 94, 119, God, 90, 96–102, 104, 105, 110, 120, 123, 135, 137, 141; Bataille’s early devotion to, 89; as imagined by Bataille and Weil, 95–99; as master, 19 Gourmont, Remy de, Le Latin mystique, 89 Grandville, J. J., 157 Gru¨newald, Matthias, 7, 124, 137, 138. See also Isenheim Altarpiece guilt, 49, 57, 62, 63, 70 hands: as disembodied, 126, 132, 145; of Mary Magdalene, 145, 146, 148, 150, 156; multiplication of, 146, 155; philosophical tradition of, 7, 128–33, 144;. See also Bellmer, Hans: hands; Christ: hands of handwriting, 130, 131, 133, 152, 154 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 13–31 passim, 194n35; and the philosophical tradition of the hand, 129–33, 153–54, 155, 158. See also Koje´ve, Alexandre. Heidegger, Martin, 199n85, 228n122; and ‘‘monstrosity,’’ 131–32, 154, 214n25; and philosophical tradition of hand, 130–33, 153, 155, 158 hermaphrodites/androgynes. See Bellmer, Hans: hermaphrodites/androgynes in work of Hitler, Adolph, 51, 68, 140 Hoffman, Danny. See madness. Hoffman, E. T. A., 226n103 Holbein, Hans, 74. Hollier, Denis, 25, 28, 37, 40, 97, 157, 161, 181n26 Hollywood, Amy, 11, 64, 105 Huysmans, J. K., 211n1 hyperchristianity, 6–7, 76, 79, 96, 104, 110, 114, 115, 120, 121, 172n11

fascism, 51, 63, 66–68, 69, 70, 142 fetishism, 127, 136, 151, 155, 213n9 fleshly decay, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 103, 116, 119. See also Bataille, Georges: attitude toward fleshly decay force, 38, 58, 59, 62, 67, 70, 85, 98, 104, 108, 168, 180n13 form, 7, 15, 18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30, 63, 74, 77, 82, 93, 97, 113, 129, 132, 139, 148, 161, 162, 169, 172,n8; and Apollo, 44; and loss of self, 4, 31, 33; in surrealism, 77, 82, 111; work, 17, 129, 132; in Hans Bellmer’s art, 142, 148, 153, 154. See also Bataille, Georges: refusal/transgression of form; master-slave dialectic: and form; sacrifice of form; formlessness; informe formlessness, 3, 4, 25, 40, 63, 81, 111, 123, 139, 156, 157, 167, 169, 181n23, 206n15. See also informe Forster, Elisabeth, 68 Foster, Hal, 79, 108, 109, 112, 113, 122 Foucault, Michel, 3; ‘‘A Preface to Transgression,’’ 13–14, 172n17, 230n140 French sociological school, 38 Freud, Sigmund, 76, 85, 97, 117, 137, 212n3; ‘‘Revision of the Theory of Dreams,’’ 97; Totem and Taboo, 137 friendship, 4, 6, 15, 32, 33, 34, 35, 70, 71, 104, 126, 156, 166, 170

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Icarus, 51 identification, 5, 11, 13, 15, 22, 24, 29, 57, 61, 69, 97, 98, 102, 133, 142, 147, 148, 153, 154, 156, 164; of Bataille with

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Index Nietzsche, 35, 37, 59, 66; with Christ, 115, 141; friendship, 32–33; with monster-god, 100, 122; in place of recognition, 26, 27, 32; as sacrificial, 30, 31, 53, 56. See also Bellmer, Hans: identification with la poupe´e identity, 23, 30, 37, 64–65, 66, 139, 142, 154, 155, 161, 165, 227n112 immanence, 24, 25–26, 31, 53, 54, 77 immortality, 84, 85, 86 incarnation, 117, 119–20, 123, 137 informe (formless), 4, 81, 156, 167, 172n9. See also formlessness inner/interior experience, 5, 8, 14, 34, 79. See also mysticism/mystical experience insects, 195n45, 217n44 intimacy, 4, 12, 15, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34, 37, 53, 55, 65, 126, 147, 166 ‘‘invisible’’ or ‘‘intimate’’ friend, 103–4 Isenheim Altarpiece (Matthias Gru¨newald), 7, 124–26, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 148, 149, 217n39, 220n53

labyrinths, 76, 83, 84–85, 95–98, 105, 110, 123. See also Bataille, Georges: labyrinths; Breton, Andre´, labyrinths; caves; Eliade, Mircea: theory of labyrinths Lacan, Jacques, 15, 136, 210n82, 218n46 language, 7, 129, 130, 131, 157, 170; of transgression, 13; in work of Hans Bellmer, 127, 142, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155. See also speech Lascaux, 72, 79, 81, 82, 83, 128, 131, 133, 161, 192n18 laughter, 31, 32, 34, 35, 52, 53, 56, 61, 169 Lazarus, 90–94, 100, 102, 202n111, 202n112. See also Weil, Simone: as Lazarus Levinas, Emmanuel, 211n99 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 15 Libertson, Joseph, 13, 14, 173n12 Lichtenstein, Therese, 147 lingchi: See Bataille, Georges: images of torture victim ‘‘little death,’’ 33, 161, 200n91 Lo Duca, J. M., 9 Lotringer, Sylve`re, 58, 59 Luquet, G. H., L’Art primitif, 80–81

Jameson, Frederic, 12 Jaspers, Karl, 43 John the Baptist, 124 joy, 3, 4, 8, 30, 33, 35, 42, 44, 54, 55, 56,68, 71, 86, 116, 141, 168. See also death, ‘‘joy before’’ (Bataille)

madness, 5, 100, 144, 160. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich: madness Marcuse, Herbert, 12 marvelous (merveilleux), 72–73, 75, 78, 79, 82, 99, 111, 191n10 Mary (mother of Jesus), 124 Mary Magdalene, 124, 126, 138, 143, 146, 149, 150 Masson, Andre´ (artist), 1, 10, 40 Masson, Andre´ (seminary friend of Bataille), 89 mastery, 12, 15, 47, 50, 57, 61, 62. See also master-slave dialectic master-slave dialectic, 5, 13, 15–35 passim; desire in, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23; form, 20, 21, 22, 23; labor/work, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26 Mauss, Marcel, 38; The Gift, 18

Kafka, Franz, 200n89 Kali, 225n94 Kaufmann, Walter, 43 Klossowski, Pierre, 15, 49 Kofman, Sarah, 47 Koje`ve, Alexandre, 4; Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, 14, 15–28, 38 Krauss, Rosalind, 82, 94, 99, 112, 113, 117, 172n9 Krell, David Farrell, 42 Kristeva, Julia, 3 labor/work, 129; relation to the hand, 130–33, 154, 155, 165. See also masterslave dialectic: labor/work

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Minotaur, 96, 97, 100–1 Minotaure (journal), 83 monsters/monstrosity, 4, 5, 7, 8, 35, 40, 68, 101, 102, 128, 131, 132, 133, 135, 139, 141, 142, 158, 163, 167, 169; Aristotle on, 163; association with God/ Christ, 96–98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 122, 141; as base matter, 43; concept of, 63; contradiction, 3, 63, 79, 128, 155, 162, 163 ; etymology of, 2–3; in everyday world, 169; form, 4, 166 ; and Gaulish art, 91–92, 94, 139; and labyrinths/ caves, 81, 82, 84, 85, 97, 98; religion as, 135, 162; ‘‘religious sensibility,’’ 164; sacred, 3, 63, 98, 126, 127, 135, 168, 169; and sacrifice, 63, 140, 142, 155 ; and transformation, 5, 8, 164. See also ace´phale; Heidegger, Martin: and ‘‘monstrosity’’; monstrous mode of reading, writing, and art; Nietzsche, Friedrich: as monstrous monstrous mode of reading, writing, and art, 4, 5, 7, 8, 70, 128, 132, 133, 139, 155, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167 mysticism/mystical practices, 5, 64, 65, 79, 85, 94, 96, 98, 104, 110, 116, 119, 120

69–70; power, 40–69 passim; principium individuationis, 44, 45, 54; psychological structure of, 68; as sacred, Dionysian figure, 37, 39, 40, 67, 68, 69; sickness in thought of, 43, 48–49, 57, 60, 61; sovereignty, 46, 48; Thus Spake Zarathustra, 42, 45, 50, 56; tragic vision of, 42, 44–46, 47, 53; Twilight of the Idols, 60; Ubermensch, 47, 68; as victim, 55–56, 57, 60; will to power, 6, 47, 57, 58, 60 nothingness, 33, 62, 70, 122, 123, 134, 161, 162 objective chance, 83, 111–12, 117. See also Breton, Andre´: chance Otto, Rudolph, 198n79 Pech-Merle Cave, 80 Picasso, Pablo, 78, 79, 195n45 pineal eye, 116, 160 Plato, 95, 129, 131, 132 Polizzotti, Mark, 80 la poupe´e (doll, Hans Bellmer), 7, 135–137, 142, 144, 149, 150, 157, 219n49. See also Bellmer, Hans: identification with la poupe´e power, 5, 19, 27, 46, 53, 58, 60, 61, 68. See also Friedrich Nietzsche: power; will to power

Nadeau, Maurice, 107 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 35, 75, 89, 165, 215n28; Antichrist, 60; ‘‘ascensionalist thought’’ of, 41, 43–44, 46; ‘‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism,’’ 45; attitude toward death, 41, 50; Birth of Tragedy, 44, 54, 75; concept of time, 69–70; contested figure between Bataille and Sartre, 64–66; Daybreak, 42; Ecce Homo, 60, 61; experience of eternal return, 5, 64–66; fascist appropriations of, 63, 67–70; influence on Bataille, 36–37; laughter, 56; madness, 5, 35, 37, 49–60 passim, 65, 66, 68, 69; as monstrous, 38, 53, 68–69; overcoming, 44, 47, 48, 59, 60; pain, 61; ‘‘pathos of distance,’’ 42, 47, 48, 60; ‘‘philosopher of the future,’’ 60, 66,

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rage, 30, 31, 33, 100, 122 Rais, Gilles de, 187n124 recognition, 5, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 32, 33, 34, 37, 57 religion: and eroticism, 141; as monstrous, 135, 162 ‘‘religious sensibility,’’ 1, 4, 7, 29, 32, 126, 128, 137, 142, 147, 155, 164, 168, 170 ‘‘repressive tolerance,’’ 12 resurrection, 87, 91 reversal, 11, 61, 140, 141, 143 Richardson, Michael, 107 risk, 12–13, 31, 33, 62, 70, 161, 162, 165, 170, 188n137

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Index sacred, 23, 27, 29, 30, 31, 54, 55, 99, 133, 144, 162, 165, 167, 168–70, 198n79: ambivalence of, 39, 67, 85, 132; contradiction, 8, 19, 23, 31; etymology, 67, 85; and friendship, 15; ‘‘horizontal,’’ 169; left–hand, 3, 7, 39, 44, 50, 51, 61, 63, 98, 99, 126, 127, 132, 143, 148, 150, 151–52; in modern world, 4, 7, 168; ‘‘ontological,’’ 168; opposed to profane, 19, 22, 24, 25–26, 28, 32, 38, 66; right–hand, 3, 39, 48, 51, 61, 67, 99, 132; theorization of, 170; ‘‘vertical,’’ 168. See also: monsters/monstrosity: sacred sacrifice, 29, 31, 32, 53, 55, 56, 69, 132, 154, 157, 160, 161, 165, 168, 169, 170, 220n52; art, 75, 128, 161; community, 55, 68; as counter operation, 24, 27, 28, 29, 32; etymology of, 27; of form, 4, 7, 15, 31, 63, 164; friendship as, 33, 70; guilt, 57; identification, 15, 30, 32, 61, 140, 154; of individual/identity, 8, 27, 29, 30, 31, 37, 61, 142; and laughter, 56. See also Bataille, Georges: theories of sacrifice Sade, Marquis de, 93 Saint-Lazare (prison), 91 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 63, 67, 69, 70; accuses Bataille of being a ‘‘new mystic,’’ 64; authenticity, 64–66, 188n141 Schilder, Paul, 145–46, 147 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 182n42, 183n47 silence, 130, 153, 159, 226n103 Silk, M. S., 45 Skira, Albert, 73 sovereignty, 31, 33, 41, 43, 54, 60, 70 speech, 129, 130, 131, 142–43, 150, 151, 153 Stern, J. P., 45 Stoekl, Allan, 58, 59, 61, 101 surrealism, 6, 7, 75–80; 83, 91, 94, 96, 102, 106–22 passim, 211n102. See also Bataille, Georges: ‘‘extremist surrealism,’’ surrealism; Breton, Andre´: concept of surrealism Surya, Michel, 89, 90, 105

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Taylor, Sue, 137, 146, 147 time, 7, 24, 29, 69, 85, 86, 87, 102, 103, 104, 120, 123, 168 torture, 158. See also Bataille Georges: images of torture victim tragedy, 44–46, 53–56, 61, 68, 69. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich: tragic vision of transgression, 13, 14, 137, 139, 143, 146, 159, 169, 173n12, 174n28 uncanny (Unheimlich), 76, 85, 86, 105, 108, 119, 212n3, 219n50 unconscious, 113, 117, 118; physical, 119, 121, 122, 147, 152 Van Gogh, Vincent, 132, 139 violence, 4, 9, 11, 15, 31, 32, 54, 89, 127, 139, 141, 144, 151, 159, 160, 164, 165, 166 waiting, 62, 87, 97 Webb, Peter, 144, 148 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 18 Weil, Simone, 61, 75, 76, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 95, 121, 123, 202n106, 204n5, 205n7; affliction, 88, 96, 97, 104; association with labyrinths/caves, 95–96, 204n2; association with death, 87–88, 93, 94, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105, 119, 120; attention, 97, 114, 115, 123; concept of chance, 114–15; concept/contemplation of contradiction, 101, 114, 115, 120; decreation, 120, 123; as embodiment of contradiction, 7, 83, 88, 110; ‘‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God,’’ 95; Gravity and Grace, 110, 111, 114, 121; as Lazarus, 76, 87–94, 96, 100, 104–5, 109–11, 113, 119; The Need for Roots, 110; relationship to Christianity, 92; as patron saint of perishability, 7, 90 wounds/wounding, 7, 34, 63, 95, 102, 119, 127, 133, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150, 155, 158, 160, 161, 164–65

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