Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought 9781474268691, 9781474268707, 9781474268714, 1474268692

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Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought

Also available from Bloomsbury Hegel and Resistance, edited by Rebecca Comay and Bart Zantvoort The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran Castoriadis, Foucault, and Autonomy, Marcela Tovar-Restrepo

Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought Will Stronge

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Will Stronge and contributors, 2017 Will Stronge has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-6869-1 ePDF: 978-1-4742-6870-7 ePub: 978-1-4742-6871-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents Notes on Contributors

vi

Introduction  Will Stronge 1 1

Frenzy, Feeder, Falcon: Eroticism in the Twenty-First Century  Scott Wilson

2 Bataille’s Nature: On (Not) Having One’s Feet on the Ground  Patrick ffrench

11

33

3

Bataille and the Left Pole of the Sacred  William Pawlett

51

4

Making More (of Waste)  Stuart Kendall

73

5

Georges Bataille as a Thinker of Statehood: A Relational and Materialist Approach  Teresa Pullano

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Guilty, Capable, Extravagant, Dialectic  Georges Didi-Huberman

117

7

Useless Practices in Sacred Spaces: Bataille’s Elegance and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty  Kevin Kennedy

129

‘The Only Real Outlaws’: Animal Freedom in Bataille  Oxana Timofeeva

155

Black Metal Theory: Speculating with Bataille’s Unfinished System – ‘Mystical Vomit’ from Neoplatonism to Neroplatonism  Edia Connole

173

8 9

10 The Politics of Excess and Restraint: Reading Bataille alongside and against Accelerationism  Eugene Brennan

217

11 Bataille and the Neanderthal Extinction  Howard Caygill

239

12 On Thinking at the End of the World: Derrida, Lyotard, Bataille  Michael Lewis

265

Index

289

Notes on Contributors Eugene Brennan teaches English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris and the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. In 2016 he completed his PhD on the reception of Bataille’s work in popular culture. He is the co-editor, with Russell Williams, of Literature and Intoxication: Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess (Palgrave, 2015). His research focuses on critical theory, cultural studies and modernist literature. Howard Caygill is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London. He is author of many articles, books and contributions to multi-authored works, including On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Levinas and the Political (Routledge, 2002). Edia Connole is a black metal theorist and Bataillean scholar with an orientation in apophatic mysticism. Her books include Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory (Mimesis, 2015), co-authored with Nicola Masciandaro, Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology (Schism, 2015), co-edited with Gary J. Shipley, and Through the Subcultural Lens: Hebdige and Subculture in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is, with Scott Wilson, co-founder of MOUTH, mmmouth.wordpress. com, and co-author of The Georges Bataille Cookbook (Schism, forthcoming). Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher and art historian. He teaches at the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. He has published some forty books on the history and theory of images. His books available in English include Images in Spite of All (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Confronting Images (Penn State University Press, 2005). Patrick ffrench is Professor of French Language and Literature at King’s College London. He gained his PhD, on French literary and theoretical journal Tel Quel, in 1993, following which he undertook research on the role of Georges Bataille in twentieth-century French intellectual history at University College London. He is author of, amongst other publications, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (Routledge, 2007).



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Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of philosophy, poetics, visual culture, and design. He is the author of a biography of Georges Bataille and translator of six volumes of Bataille’s work including Inner Experience (SUNY Press, 2014), Guilty (SUNY Press, 2011), and On Nietzsche (SUNY Press, 2015). His other books include Gilgamesh (Contra, 2012), The Ends of Art and Design (Infra-Thin, 2011), and Phrases: Six Films with Jean-Luc Godard (Contra, 2016). He teaches in the graduate program in design at the California College of the Arts. Kevin Kennedy holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Free University Berlin. Has taught at Goldsmiths College and the American University of Paris and currently lectures at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is the author of Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature (Academica Press, 2014). Michael Lewis teaches Philosophy at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and is a Research Associate at the Rights and Justice Research Centre at the University of Sussex. His current research addresses the question of the boundary between the human and the animal. William Pawlett is Senior Lecturer in Art, Philosophy and Social Practice at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. His main areas of research are social, cultural and media theory, continental philosophy and the application of these to the issues of sexuality and consumerism and to violence, hatred and ‘otherness’. He has written on the sociological and philosophical ideas of Jean Baudrillard and the social and religious philosophy of Georges Bataille. Teresa Pullano is Assistant Professor of European Global Studies at the University of Basel, Switerland. Her research interests include critical theory, political theory, political philosophy, political sociology, European politics, nationalism and state formation, critical social theory and social epistemology. Will Stronge is Associate Lecturer in Theology at the University of Chichester in the UK and a PhD student at the University of Brighton. He previously studied philosophy and critical theory at Kingston University and the University of the West of England, where he also taught. His research interests include postKantian and Marxist critical theory and the writing of Antonio Gramsci on the function of intellectuals in the context of today’s political economy.

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Notes on Contributors

Oxana Timofeeva is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Philosophy, Department of Political Sciences and Sociology at the European University at St Petersburg, where she teaches courses in Contemporary Problems of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophical Anthropology and Philosophy of Film. She is the author of History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence, and Freedom (Jan van Eyck, 2012) and Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (in Russian, New Literary Observer, 2009). Scott Wilson is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Kingston University London. He is author of The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment (SUNY Press, 2008) and Great Satan’s Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism (Manchester University Press, 2008). He is also co-editor (with Michael Dillon) of the Journal for Cultural Research and (with Fred Botting) of The Bataille Reader (Blackwell, 1997). His research interests include cultural and critical theory, particularly psychoanalysis and the legacy of Georges Bataille.

Introduction Will Stronge

How are we to understand the corpus of Bataille today? How can we extricate his own perspective from the welter of interpretations of his work that have accumulated over the years? The difficulty of this endeavour is exacerbated by the fact that his writings have had contradictory predicates applied to them: Bataille is apparently premodern, modern and postmodern all at once.1 The struggle to summarize Bataille’s project, to decide upon his usefulness or the political import of his work, has in fact been ongoing since his first publications nearly 100 years ago, when he was divisive of the French intellectual milieu (particularly Surrealist and revolutionary circles). This undecidability continued with the generations that followed (for example, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas), where his work either prefigured the deconstruction of (pseudocomplete) systems of sense, indexed a new form of sexual subjectivity or was emblematic of anti-Enlightenment thinking.2 Bataille continues to be controversial among contemporary thinkers. Giorgio Agamben, to take one prominent example, never tires of invoking Bataille – sometimes as an opponent to be dismissed, sometimes as the apex of Western reflection upon sovereignty (and its catastrophic nature).3 Agamben’s curious and persistent return to Bataille only to keep him at arm’s length finds its opposite in Roberto Esposito, who, like Jean-Luc Nancy before him, finds in Bataille the true kernel of community and communication.4 Traversing the twentieth century and outlasting the toxic prefixes, we are perhaps now able to characterize Bataille as an untimely provocation, a voice that will always ‘shuffle the cards’ of our common sense.5 It is with this conviction that the current collection gathers knowledge from various domains in an effort to let his voice speak today.

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Bataille’s Accursed Share The collection finds its centre of gravity in Bataille’s masterful The Accursed Share (La Part Maudite).6 According to Bataille, these three volumes represent an antagonism: a text that expresses the ephemerality and servility of its own process. As a work, the project tacitly validates labouring and accumulation, while in stark contrast the written content itself concerns the superfluousness and vulgarity of such activity. The medium contradicts the message. ‘Should I say that under these conditions I sometimes could only respond to the truth of my book and could not go on writing it?’7 In many ways unfinished, and the product of numerous restarts, it is perhaps symptomatic of Bataille’s thought that the project is a kind of highly organized chaos rather than an ascetic, scientific treatise; here we find a vision that oscillates productively between mysticism and biology, between philosophical anthropology and phenomenology. Nevertheless, there are coherent threads running through the project, to such an extent that one can reconstruct a set of ‘Bataillean’ concepts – even if these concepts themselves identify a fundamental incoherence or formlessness that constantly threatens to loosen the bonds between rationality and subjectivity.8 If Hegel’s system is a maze whose every corridor ends in reason, then Bataille’s thought is a labyrinth whose pathways can only end in death or madness, which is to say, two forms of what Bataille will call the subjectivity of ‘NOTHING’.9 The Accursed Share hides this excess well, formatting it into historical, ecological and philosophical lines of thought that in their totality amount to a consistent system predicated on the second law of thermodynamics.10 The sun is, of course, a recurrent motif in Bataille’s oeuvre,11 but in The Accursed Share it occupies a central position in the closest thing to a materialist (a)theological cosmology to be found in Bataille’s work: the solar economy. In a reversal of the role of the demiurge that we find in Plato’s Timaeus, the sun for Bataille does not forge the world according to a concept, but produces life simply out of its own (non-conceptual) excess and, once it has eventually spent its energy, will snuff out life (concepts and all).12 The sun embodies – it is the ontological foundation for – much of what follows in the Accursed volumes. I shall identify three important points here.13 MM

First, this solar cosmology posits a non-thoughtful world that is both prior and posterior to the human being’s cognitive and conceptual capacity. This constitutes yet another Copernican Revolution, albeit a particularly

Introduction

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MM

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materialist one, which leads, in Volume III, to an ethical–political position we might call ‘Sovereign Humanism’. Second, the sun’s excessive generosity – its giving without return – ultimately grounds the validity of the distinctions, crucial to the later volumes of The Accursed Share, between servility and sovereignty, between subject and object, between use and utilization (and so on). This poses the question of purposes and ends to the modern age and its obsession with instrumental reasoning.14 This generosity also motivates the epistemological transition from ‘restricted economy’ to ‘general economy’, or from an economy governed by the notion of accumulation to an economy that acknowledges excess and the non-recoverability of the resources it utilizes.15 Third, and following on from the previous point, this ontological–ethical position provides a realist means of affirming death, which relates directly and critically to social and political realities (as opposed to a passive nihilism that affirms the current conditions of life, as we might read in, for example, Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus).16 In this regard, Bataille’s political perspective is simple yet radical: work – that which in the modern age monopolizes our time and energy – is by definition valueless on its own; value, an end in itself, only arises once any energy accumulated has been spent and the process has achieved its material and conscious end (in play, dance, festivals, community, intoxication, eroticism, and so forth) – or, to put it in a more mystical formulation, once we have re-established, even if only momentarily, continuity with being.17 In this way, if Nietzsche’s proposition is to evaluate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in terms of the affirmation or denial of life, then Bataille’s evaluation is carried out in the register of energy expenditure or accumulation (which is in fact either the affirmation or negation of death – for Bataille the highest, which is to say, the most vital, experience of life).18

The nature of this collection The aim of the present volume has been to provide equal space for new readings of Bataille’s concepts as well as new Bataillean approaches to certain problematics. The authors have each responded in different ways to Bataille’s writings, using texts from the entire breadth of his oeuvre, yet every contribution can be connected to a theme or section within the three volumes of The Accursed Share. Scott Wilson’s essay, for example, takes up Bataille’s identification in Volume

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I of the ‘three luxuries of nature’ (eating, death and eroticism) and proceeds to diagnose the present through these categories. The Accursed Share begins with a quotation from William Blake that succinctly sums up what will follow: ‘Exuberance is beauty.’ Wilson’s chapter underlines the abject exuberance of today’s beauties: bodies filled with Oreo cream spilling into rolls of flesh that simultaneously signify beauty and the obscene; computer software designed specifically to jack you off, mechanizing the orgasm beyond the capacities of the all-too-human body; the technically exquisite military drone – one of the most advanced, tireless and non-living embodiments of death that we know. Life has indeed outgrown its original framework of possibilities. While Wilson builds upon Bataille’s categories as laid out in Volume I, Oxana Timofeeva instead draws upon the anthropological reflections of the second volume, concerning the paradoxical leap from animality to humanity (and back). She contends, contrary to Kojève’s reading of Hegel, that it is not the human that negates the animal, but rather the animal that negates itself. It is with this particular dialectic that Timofeeva thinks through Bataille’s notion of sovereignty: if it is the animal that negates itself, then the paradoxical possibility of sovereign animality reveals itself. Some essays in the collection have opted to re-interpret Bataille’s concepts and in the process recast both his relationships to other thinkers and his relation to contemporary debates. William Pawlett, for example, returns to Bataille’s theoretical relationship with Émile Durkheim and sociology in order to refine the impure ‘left pole’ of the sacred (representing, in summary, excess and heterogeneity) that has been too often discarded in discourse since Bataille in favour of emphasis upon the ‘right pole’ that stabilizes and orders our sacred experiences (e.g. in religious ceremony). These two poles may be found throughout the Accursed Share volumes, from the community-binding potlatch discussed in Volume I (right pole) to the frenzied killing of the king presented in the reflections on sovereignty in Volume III (left pole).19 Pawlett’s intention is to recover the ‘left pole’ as an essential category with which to analyse the present, particularly in light of post-9/11 religious violence and the deceptive, apathetic appearance of Western liberal democracies. In a similar manner, although choosing a different area to work within, Kevin Kennedy turns to Bataille’s recurrent aesthetic themes, in particular the appearance of sovereignty, in order to recover the link identified by Bataille between excess and elegance. In so doing, Kennedy shines critical light upon current reflections on art and its disenchanted ‘realism’ as well as contemporary discussions that overlook the incommensurability (or sacredness) inherent in art as such.

Introduction

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Other writers in this volume have attempted to speculate with Bataille, uncovering new potentials inherent within his thought by bringing it to bear on issues in contemporary philosophy, mysticism and ecological thought. Stuart Kendall draws inspiration specifically from the guiding principle already identified as central to Bataille’s corpus: loss as value. He takes issue with ecological and environmental perspectives that either pass over or are ignorant of the fact of waste – a fact that is integral to the perspective of Bataille’s ‘general economy’ – in order to posit waste-less utopias and contradictory ecologies of superabundance without excess. Pushing Bataille’s thought even further, Michael Lewis’s essay takes the solar-economic perspective to its logical conclusion: the cosmic annihilation of consciousness. Taking up the general economics of energy dissipation found in Volume I, and relating it both to Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung and later polemics that take Hegel as their target, the essay is both speculative and revelatory. The end of thought itself takes three preliminary forms within the essay, each more extreme than the last: the destruction of the human archive thanks to nuclear war (Derrida), the death of philosophy thanks to the exhaustion of the sun (Lyotard) and finally (or originally?) Hegel’s image of the apocalypse of finite, determinate being that gives the stoical thinker access to being as such. Consummating this series of annihilations, Bataille imagines an apocalypse of being without even the survival of a philosophical consciousness able to pronounce ‘being, pure being – without any further determination’. Running beneath Lewis’s treatment is a confrontation with ‘the real’ not conceived of in terms of a reality that lies beyond our (more or less passive) subjectivities, but in terms of a reality that violently imposes itself upon all subjectivities, to the point of destruction without remainder. Lewis therefore proposes that Bataille’s general economic perspective is a nihilism both of the subject and of the object (it acknowledges the destruction of both). Ultimately, we are left with the experience of ‘NOTHING’: the subjectivity of objective destruction.20 Bataille’s particular brand of nihilism also appears in Edia Connole’s essay, albeit not within the context of the planetary annihilation of thought but as part of an intellectual journey through the history of philosophy, science-fiction imaginaries, black metal theory and careful analysis of Bataille’s terminology.21 In a long essay that rewards multiple readings, Connole begins by treating Bataille as part of the lineage of mysticism, and manages, by the end of the exegesis, to turn his thought into a speculative philosophy of the thing itself. Mirroring the same apocalypse of particularity that Lewis takes from Hegel, Connole grapples with a related process: the individual’s attempt, in the face

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of the loss of communion, to re-join being so as to be ‘lost without being found’.22 This union with being or God, a notion that has Neoplatonist roots as well as Christian reformulations, is for Connole the core of Bataille’s ontology and she proceeds to articulate a specific configuration of concepts – tearing, severing, the violence of individuation, the eroticism of commensuration and, finally, vomit – that links thirteenth-century and modern-day mystics, John Carpenter’s The Thing and the work of Quentin Meillassoux. Howard Caygill’s essay relates The Accursed Share to Bataille’s fascination with prehistory already evident in his work from the 1930s and further prompted by the discovery of the Lascaux caves in 1940. What Bataille finds in the deep past is confirmation of an excess at the birth of humanity: the dawn of art and the supersession of animality. As Caygill stresses, however, one particular being complicates matters by shimmering under the surface of Bataille’s text as an extinct mirror: Homo neanderthalensis, Neanderthal man. Via a brief reconstruction of the history of paleo-anthropology, the essay brings us to some uncomfortable conclusions involved in Bataille’s schema of ‘catastrophic’ development. It is both a discussion of the potentially violent limitations of the human/non-human binary (reminiscent of Agamben’s ‘anthropological machine’)23 and a necessary burial of imperial conceptual frameworks so that ‘post-colonial Neanderthals’ can emerge. Finally, also included in this collection is a new translation of Georges Didi-Huberman’s essay on Bataille and Picasso, ‘Coupable, Capable, Dépensier, Dialectique’, which includes a succinct formulation of his innovative reading of Bataille’s Hegelian–Nietzschean dialectical inheritance.24 According to Didi-Huberman, Bataille’s constant return to Hegel is conspicuous considering his Nietzscheanism and vice versa.25 The key to his dialectical thinking is the idea that negativity can never be exhaustively subsumed or incorporated into absolute knowledge; negativity instead opens a wound – we can say an excessive one – within the dialectical circuit. This unfinished dialectic must ‘be passed, like a blade, through the system’ in a joyful affirmation of a self-negating dialectic that, in accordance with the principles of The Accursed Share, can know and work only ephemerally, but can laugh and play eternally.26 Anchored by The Accursed Share, the themes investigated in this collection fall into place as so many components of a philosophy of sovereignty that can scale up to the cosmological level and down to the phenomenological, that can diagnose and evaluate religious affect and horrific violence, fascism and communism and the work of Hegel and of Nietzsche. Hence, I think these essays can be seen as a more or less unified extension into the present day of the

Introduction

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three volumes of the Accursed Share and their contents, albeit mutated, updated and vastly different in style. This is not an introductory guidebook to Bataille’s philosophy, but rather a set of new encounters with his writing, new provocations in comradeship with his perspective.

Notes 1

2

3

4

For a well-founded claim that much of Bataille’s work is infused with premodern themes, see Bruce W. Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. See, in order, Michel Foucault, ‘The Preface to Transgression’, in Language, Counter-Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977; Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978; and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity, 1987. The opinion that Bataille’s thought is merely ‘useless to us’ is expressed in Giorgio Agamben, ‘Form of Life’, trans. Cesare Casarino, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 150. The irony involved here is that uselessness is a condition of value for Bataille. That Bataille’s thought is the expression of the most dangerous biopolitical nexus is suggested in the ‘Threshold’ to Part Two of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 112. Here Agamben avers that in spite of Nancy’s valiant defence Bataille nevertheless conceives of the human in terms of sacrifice and exceptional violence and thus falls into the trap of framing politics precisely in terms of homo sacer. See, respectively, Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impolitical, trans. Connal Parsley. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015, 156; and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. and ed. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. If Agamben sees biopolitics as something to be deactivated, while Esposito seeks a way to affirm the biopolitical machine, then what of Bataille’s perspective? It is Bataille who argued that the system, or oikonomia, of life – once it inevitably reaches certain limits – must spend itself either sovereignly or catastrophically (i.e. turn into its opposite: death). This is why, when it comes to political economy, for reasons different from those adduced by Agamben, Bataille posits that thanatopolitics and biopolitics coincide. See Scott Wilson’s essay in the present volume for an innovative perspective on today’s cultural–political nexus between life and death.

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Bataille’s own words, from an interview with Madeleine Chapsal for L’Express, 1961, as quoted in Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 2002, 492. 6 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991 [1949] and The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1993 [1949]. 7 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 11. 8 There are many connections between Bataille’s philosophy and Kant’s third Critique (particularly regarding the notions of the beautiful and the sublime). See, for example, §16 in the Critique of Judgement, where Kant distinguishes between ‘merely dependent beauty’ and ‘free beauty’, that is, beauty as the relation between an object and a concept – the former being servile to the latter – and beauty as holding no such relation (i.e. beauty as being excessive of functionality). Coincidentally, both Kant and Bataille use ‘wall-papers’ and home decoration as examples, but while for Kant these ‘represent nothing’ and are ‘free beauties’, for Bataille they are indeed excessive, but are ‘caricature’ and the ‘comedy of dignity’. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1790]), 60–2; Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume III, 346. 9 The labyrinth is of course inhabited by the Minotaur, a man whose own head has been replaced by that of a beast. Is there a more Bataillean image than this frenzied body without nous, fused with the animal? As Michel Surya notes, the Minotaur had explicitly interested Bataille and Masson, the creator of the famous Acéphale image, since 1924 (Georges Bataille, 192). The cover design of the present volume is another imagining of the Bataillean labyrinth. 10 The influence of natural science on Bataille, in the form of Vladimir Vernadsky’s work on the biosphere (see The Biosphere, trans. David Langmuir. New York: Copernicus, 1998 [1926]), is explicit in The Accursed Share (see Volume I, 29). For further discussion and speculation regarding Bataille, life and thermodynamics, see L. Margolis and D. Sagan, What is Life? London: Simon & Schuster, 1993. 11 See, for example, Bataille, ‘Solar Anus’ and ‘Rotten Sun’ in Visions of Excess, trans. A. Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 12 The sun thus epitomizes the contiguity between life and death: life is both (initially) possible and (ultimately) impossible due to the sun’s glorious self-immolation. 13 See Michael Lewis’s and Patrick ffrench’s contributions in this volume for more detailed discussions of the naturalistic framework within which Bataille is working. 14 In this, Bataille joins other critics of modernity such as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt. 5

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15 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 25. In contrast to Derrida’s utilization of the notion of ‘general economy’, the merits of that reading notwithstanding, I think it is important not to miss Bataille’s comparatively simple insistence that the general economic perspective literally studies the ‘movement of energy on the globe’ (The Accursed Share: Volume I, 20). Derrida, Writing and Difference, 317–50. 16 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien. London: Penguin, 2005. 17 See Edia Connole’s extended essay in the present volume on Bataille’s links to religious and mystical traditions. 18 Bataille’s ‘revaluation of all values’ is therefore mapped on to our affective relationship with energy. See Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 39. 19 See ibid., 63 and The Accursed Share: Volume III, 210 respectively. 20 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume III, 234. 21 There are multiple connections between Connole’s and Lewis’s contributions: see, for example, how Connole treats the ‘thought that thinks the death of thinking’ towards the end of her essay (though this is with particular reference to black metal theory rather than to late twentieth-century French philosophy). Both also see the relevance of Bataille’s perspective to contemporary revivals of realism, specifically the work of Quentin Meillassoux. 22 Georges Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, in The College of Sociology, ed. Dennis Hollier. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 336. 23 Giorgio Agamben, The Open, trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 24 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Coupable, Capable, Dépensier, Dialectique’. Revue Des Deux Mondes (May 2012): 152. 25 See the section on Nietzsche, Hegel and Bataille’s reflections on his relationship to both: The Accursed Share: Volume III, 368–71. 26 See Didi-Huberman’s essay in the present volume, 117.

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Frenzy, Feeder, Falcon: Eroticism in the Twenty-First Century Scott Wilson

A very typical Christian way of thought is apparent in Bataille’s idea that, in short, God does not manifest himself while our being remains in its proper, balanced form; and only when our existence exceeds this life and leaves behind it something like the outlines of the people left on the stone steps of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, then will God manifest himself. Yukio Mishima1

Frenzy Georges Bataille wrote the second volume of The Accursed Share, A History of Eroticism, in 1951, a few years after some of the darkest years in human history following the carnage of the Second World War, the disclosure of the death camps and the detonation over human populations of nuclear weapons. Indeed, Bataille lived his last ten years under the cloud of nuclear obliteration, concluding his last essays on Lascaux wondering if nuclear war was about ‘to make the planet unliveable for man’.2 The reverberations of these catastrophic circumstances seemed to echo the death of God announced with much proclamation at the end of the nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and – more sotto voce but no less devastatingly – by Charles Darwin and a host of scientific materialists. The death of a king, writes Bataille in ‘A History of Eroticism’, ‘is apt to produce the most pronounced effects of horror and frenzy’, assuming ‘a character corresponding strictly to the catastrophe that has occurred … popular frenzy is never resisted in the least way’

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and the disorder ‘ends only with the complete elimination of the putrescent substance of the royal cadaver, when nothing more is left of the royal remains but a hard, sound and incorruptible skeleton …’.3 The festival of horror and frenzy that characterized the first half of the twentieth century, in Europe at least, headed East and culminated in those blinding flashes above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One assumes that the Christian God did not manifest himself to the Japanese vaporized by American weapons; Mishima’s dark metaphor for the revelation of God is enigmatic, perhaps suggesting that in 1945 it was the divine inexistence of the Christian God that was definitively disclosed, the remnants of God not rotted to the bone but smeared in the stains of burned flesh and blackened ruins. The bombing that stamped the end of the war against Japan would from then on be the ultimate sign of all future wars, signalling absolute destruction, thus requiring, for Bataille, that life ‘be lived at the height of Hiroshima’.4 This statement echoes his formulation that a sovereign individual must live his or her life at the height of death with the fate of humanity generally. From that moment, humanity has been situated at a receding horizon where an in-human scientific and technological drive arcs over an annihilating abyss as it exceeds human form and limitation. Bataille died in 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis that took the Cold War to the brink of the nuclear promise. As the crisis passed to lower levels of anxiety, the character of the ‘festival’ changed somewhat and became more formally identified with the American way of life that is dominated by the economics of consumer capitalism driven by the production of new products and technologies. This was essentially the point at which Bataille concluded the first volume of The Accursed Share – where the future of ‘mankind’s accomplishment’ was firmly ‘linked to that of the American economy’.5 In a context where the American response to European post-war disenchantment, shame and despair at the death of meaning represented by the camps and Hiroshima was to ‘aim at an improvement of the overall global standard of living’, Bataille posed the question of the ‘consciousness of the ultimate end of wealth and “self-consciousness”’.6 From the 1950s on, economic growth and the exchange of commodities had become both the new starting point for self-consciousness and the threshold that must be overcome, since the drive for economic growth necessitates a ‘subordination to increase’ and the loss of autonomy in a reduction to a world of things. As Volume II of The Accursed Share showed, Bataille believed that the preferred or most promising modality of self-consciousness and the re-enchantment of the world in the midst of American wealth was eroticism.



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Three types of eroticism In this chapter I want to look at Bataille’s conception of eroticism and its pertinence in the twenty-first century. The decade following Bataille’s death in 1962 saw, in the West, a much trumpeted ‘sexual revolution’ in the form of a liberalization of sexual mores and attitudes, much of which has been sustained in, for example, legislation concerning the decriminalization of homosexuality and the commercial (particularly online) ubiquity of pornography that has overcoded most sites of sexual transgression in the form of functionalist images and commodities. While I have no doubt that Bataille would have approved of the normalization of homosexuality, I am sure he would have been dismayed by the generally utilitarian and infinitely repetitive nature of most pornography on the Web. ‘I must first make plain the futility of the common contention that sexual taboos are nothing but prejudice and it is high time we were rid of them’, he writes in ‘A Preface to Madame Edwarda’.7 Bataille was keen to distinguish sexual transgression from what he called the ‘back-to-nature’ movements of the twentieth century that sought to dispel the irrational laws of religious prohibitions for the sake of rational policies concerning reproduction and the regulation of safe sex and healthy pleasures. Indeed one might confidently suggest that in the age of ‘biopolitics’, in which populations are administered on the basis of their health, Bataille’s indelible association of eroticism and death is anathema. ‘Eroticism is assenting to life up to the point of death’ affirms Bataille, by which he means that there can be no assenting to life if it is not pushed to the limit of death; a life that is conscientiously spent in useful and healthy pursuits dedicated to the avoidance and deferral of death at all costs is a life that is denied. ‘There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image’ writes Bataille with reference to Sade, affirming also that ‘the sight or thought of murder can give rise to a desire for sexual enjoyment’.8 For Bataille, this connection between sex and death is not primarily a feature of neurosis, perversion or pathology, but the basis of religious ecstasy, and its debased, horrifying remnant in a secular world. Eroticism, Bataille maintains, is the concern to substitute the discontinuity of the isolated individual for ‘a feeling of profound continuity’.9 These terms are synonymous with those Bataille uses in Theory of Religion, where religious desire is the desire of discontinuous beings for the lost continuity of the order of intimacy of animal immanence in which animals consume each other like water in water. In religion and eroticism, then, sex, death and eating, described in The Accursed Share as the three great luxuries of nature, are the gateway between continuity and discontinuity.

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In Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Bataille outlines three different types of eroticism that broach this gateway in slightly different ways: physical, psychological and religious. The first concerns the ‘animality’ of the body that violates ‘the very being of its practitioners’, in the sense that being is an effect of the endowment of human speech and ideas of dignity; second, eroticism is a ‘psychological quest’ that while it may be supported by an art or technique of sensations is nevertheless defined by transgression and emotional trauma. Both these types of eroticism are distinguished from the sexual activities of animals that Bataille assumes are entirely functional and reproductive. ‘Only men [and women no doubt] appear to have turned their sexual activity into erotic activity.’10 Appearances can be deceptive, however, not least when etho­logists and zoologists through moral or theoretical embarrassment hide their evidence. After Bataille, it is now widely acknowledged and accepted that non-reproductive and same-sex sexual activity is commonplace among birds and mammals. Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, the first book to disclose the extensive evidence of the ‘polysexual’ and ‘polygendered’ world of the animal kingdom, draws on Bataille’s statement in The Accursed Share that ‘the history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance’ to give theoretical consistency to his own ideas of biological diversity.11 But while all kinds of animals engage in sexual activities for non-reproductive reasons, the assumption remains that this sexual activity is purely functional in the sense that animals have sex by compulsion and for pleasure, not because they are undertaking some kind of psychological quest. Bonobo chimpanzees, the closest living primate relative of Homo sapiens, seem to have no sexual taboos even as they employ sexual activity to mediate social relationships and relations between kinship groups, including parent– child relations. Even territorial disputes between a pair of ‘alpha-males’ can be resolved through sexual behaviour that results in a relaxation of tension and rivalry.12 The archetypal human taboos of incest and murder, then, and the aggression between male rivals upon which sexual prohibition and shame are traditionally said to be based, fail to arise with the bonobos because of the social mechanism of sex. While Bataille may have been delighted and amused at the apparently benign way that bonobo chimps put sexual activity to social use, it is unlikely that he would have regarded it as erotic. Eroticism is that with which human consciousness calls its being into question. While ‘[a]nimal sexuality does make for disequilibrium’, Bataille writes, ‘nothing like a question takes shape within it.’13 Nothing approaching the happy functionalism of the bonobos is in prospect for human beings, of course, for whom sex remains an



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emotional and psychological trauma, a source of abuses of power and trust that require, in public and commercial institutions, increasingly stringent prohibitions on amorous relations involving asymmetries in age, rank and status. Even as many taboos concerning sexual acts and object choices have dissipated, sex has become an increasingly intense focus of biopolitical governance, law being supplemented by elaborate forms of professional ethics and codes of conduct. The ongoing anxiety about the power of erotic desire and sex to destroy someone’s life in trauma, shame or ignominy indicates that eroticism continues to pose the question of existence, a question that is for Bataille essentially religious. The third and most profound type of eroticism is then both mystical (the desire for God) and theological, concerning the love of God as the purification or sublimation of the Order of Intimacy in the idea of the Spirit where we become One, through death, with God. God is another great ocean where we are like spiritual water in water. ‘Continuity is what we are after’, writes Bataille, but until the ultimate point of dissolution, the petit mort of eroticism must suffice until the ultimate point of death.14 Mysticism, erotic or otherwise, and belief in the Christian God have declined in the West, along with the credence given to traditional forms of paternal guarantee and grand narrative. Belief in capitalism, however, remains robust in spite of numerous financial crises. Volume II of The Accursed Share follows the conclusion of Bataille’s volume on Consumption by positing eroticism as an exemplary mode of resistance to the reduction and subordination of capitalist growth. The erotic assent to life at the point of death, it becomes ‘a question of arriving at the moment when consciousness will cease to be consciousness of something’ – for example a commodity. Rather, it is a question of becoming conscious of ‘the decisive meaning of an instant in which increase (the acquisition of something) will resolve into expenditure; and this will be precisely self-consciousness, that is, consciousness that has nothing as its object’.15 In 1997, in the Introduction to The Bataille Reader, Fred Botting and I argued to the contrary that Bataille’s investment in the promise of eroticism had not only been anticipated by American capitalism, but that eroticism had become the economy’s general model: ‘a single, global erogenous zone’ that pulsed and dilated at the threshold of nothing but emptiness: The total eroticization of the economy has little to do with advertisers’ perennial attempt to sell products by associating them with sex. The totally eroticized economy opens desire to an unlimited terrain for the ex nihilo supply of ever more commodities whose saleability alone determines whether they have become ‘useful’. Desire, here, is predicated on the absence of any final object: the

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Detaching itself from all reference to utility or reason, eroticism became the imperative mode of sovereignty for the whole system that ceased to serve or even register the needs and desires of human consumers. Needs and desires quickly became pre-figured, pre-written in the ‘potlatch’ of supply and the rapidity of technological innovation and change with which human beings struggled to keep pace. Indeed, it seemed that the primary objects of expenditure and consumption (‘burn out’) were human beings themselves, ‘the abjection of non-corporate existence’ becoming equivalent to ‘human garbage’.17 However I want to argue that it is now possible to perceive a number of practices relating to physical, psychological and religious modalities of eroticism that are integral to and yet precipitate the system of economic excess that remains inassimilable, that is to say they take the very form and image of its fatality. In these types of eroticism elements of physical, psychological and religious eroticism are all evident insofar as they involve a relation to death and interiority that is expressed in a desire for continuity, or a fantasy of immersion into the intimacy of the divine world that religious mysticism associates with God. I will look, for example, at how eroticism as a psychological quest has propelled being in the direction of an asexual continuity with data and I will consider how the return of religious taboos and limits has served to eroticize political antagonisms between East and West. First, however, I want to look at a form of physical eroticism that is the pure immanence of the eroticism immanent to American capitalism: its expression and realization.

Feeder Alexandre Kojève famously argued that the essentially secular nature of the American way of life resulted in a termination of political desire, the properly human desire that has no object other than recognition, and ‘humanity has become animal again’. For Giorgio Agamben the consequence of this is that there is ‘nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of the unconditional unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task’.18 ‘Developed’ humanity, sunk in bovine consumption, is managed, governed and regulated in the name of its health in the form of the preservation of its animal life.



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This was not Bataille’s view, nor does the survival of eroticism suggest that this is the case. For Bataille, ‘since man has uprooted himself from nature, that being who returns to it [in acts of eroticism or festive consumption] is still uprooted, he is an uprooted being who suddenly goes back toward that from which he is uprooted, from which he has not ceased to uproot himself ’.19 At the same time, a return to de-natured animality in acts of eroticism has taken, in the context of contemporary consumer capitalism, a perverse yet literal direction towards the immanence of eating. Perhaps this is an effect of the God that died: the Christian God who defined himself through a Son who performed miracles with food; the God who eats and whose body and blood are themselves eaten in turn in a consecration of the Christian community. After His death, the ‘festival of the King’ becomes an imperative in which everything must be organized around the right to feast, but feasting itself decelerates in its Protestant instantiation of moral utility into a long and protracted overturning in which consumption is work and work is consumption as the trauma of the festival is ameliorated, slowed down, managed, regulated, therapized, rendered easier, more convenient, sweeter … not just in the multiplication of loaves and fishes or water into wine, but cakes and fizzy drinks filled with sugars, chocolate, ice cream, biscuits, hot breads, melted cheese, pizzas, fries … . Agamben’s contention concerning biopolitical governance in the name of health is attentive to the forms of internment of the various homo sacer that are excluded from the category of life that defines the threshold and limitation of political decision. He maintains that beyond the definition of the life that is economized, politics is displaced in ‘the unconditional unfolding of the oikonomia’.20 Yet in so doing he ignores the dimension of general economy that effects contemporary biopolitics as much as any other system. In the first volume of The Accursed Share, Bataille sets out the fundamental rule that every system from biological organisms to complex societies has at their ‘disposal greater energy resources than are necessary for the operations that sustain’ them.21 The problem for these organisms and societies is how to dispose of the excess. Bataille offers various examples of how different societies have disposed of their excess from sacrifice and potlatch to festival and war. As we have seen, in the twentieth century the preferred mode of expenditure for Western capitalist societies was war, leading even to the prospect of global destruction by nuclear weapons. While conflicts continue beneath this horizon, an increasingly important mode of squandering excess energy in consumer capitalism is the production of what the World Health Organization (WHO) has called a ‘global epidemic of obesity’. Surplus energy is being stockpiled in body fat to

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the point where bodies become overburdened, malfunction (diabetes, strokes, heart attacks) and die. The production of obesity is increasing exponentially as the American way of life spreads from the Anglophone world to developing economies such as China, India and Brazil. The WHO reports that the 857 million obese bodies recorded in 1980 increased to 2.1 billion in 2013. There is no prospect of this increase diminishing – quite the contrary. The genocidal ‘sacrifice’ of over 2 billion bodies, then, is an impressive achievement for any social-economic system that neatly combines two of Bataille’s great luxuries of nature: eating and death. Further, the relative deferral involved in death by obesity on such a scale promises to change the culture of the third great luxury, sex, which in human societies takes the general economic form of eroticism. Most societies that engage in sacrificial practices in order to dispose of their surplus, sacrifice their wealth in modes of potlatch involving the destruction or loss of prized possessions. For the Aztecs, this was their most beautiful children, who were murdered for the benefit of the Sun God; for patriarchal societies, the loss involves women, who are regarded as marital gifts that establish bonds of debt, or as erotic objects. In this, it is important to remember that restricted and general economies are not oppositional or mutually exclusive. Culture is defined by the ways in which a particular form of social or economic restriction is breached, just as the point of law is to intensify the ecstasy of transgression. It is perhaps counterintuitive that the societies of globalized consumer capitalism should result in the sacrifice of what traditionally would be regarded as freakish bodies (obesity was virtually unknown until the twentieth century). But canons of beauty are of course culturally and historically specific and we are already seeing these canons redefined in relation to the increasing size and weight of bodies. Advocates of the Big Beautiful Woman (BBW), the ‘Bear’ and their attendant sites and societies are commonplace. It is inevitable that this will only increase to the point where thin people will be seen as the fat once were: as weirdly excessive and unnatural, the product of perversely ascetic and expensive diets and fitness regimes. ‘I’m a fat girl. Cool,’ writes Julia Nicole of the number of ‘feeders’ she is beginning to encounter socially and online. ‘In times of quiet financial desperation, I’ve even entertained the idea of sensually eating Oreos for a quick thirty bucks.’22 The spectacle of extravagant consumption that was for Bataille once the privileged site of prostitution here comes down to paying to watch a self-styled fat girl eat biscuits. Nicole mentions the online Fantasy Feeder site that outlines the forms and modalities of feedee eroticism, providing a forum for feeders and feedees to share their fantasies and arrange to meet. According to Fantasy



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Feeder, the term ‘feedee’ is loosely defined on the internet as ‘someone who loves to eat, loves to be fed, and loves to deliberately gain weight’. Eroticism here is defined by a sumptuous physicality in which the body is an intensive surface that swells and pulses in an affirmation of fattening and fatness to the point of death: Your love of food and your desire to eat will have undoubtedly had its effect on your body and you will almost certainly already be chubby, fat or even very obese … you know all the health risks associated with being overweight, but you consider it a small price to pay compared to the pleasure you get from being so fat.23

On the one hand, obesity is enjoyed in a full circle of auto-eroticism in which, according to Fantasy Feeder’s hypnotic tones, ‘you will stand in front of a mirror and admire your well fattened body, squeezing your fat rolls to feel how thick they have become, and lifting your belly to see how heavy it is’. On the other hand, indispensable to a feedee’s pleasure is the presence of a feeder, who will attend to your every pleasure and indulgence like a slave, as if you were a sultan or a woman of great wealth and idleness – ‘living the lifestyle of a truly obese person, where you laze on the sofa watching television with your fat belly stretching out before you while your feeder pops chocolates into your mouth’. At the same time, the attentive feeder, while encouraging and enabling you to put on weight, ‘is willing to bear the consequences of your increasing obesity’ by becoming your carer. ‘Feeders’ are not just carers, however – they can also be ‘dominators’ and ‘encouragers’. The former seek to control the feedee through excess, through compelling the feedee to submit to a force of consumptive desire over which they have no choice, even to the point where ‘they feel like they are going to explode, just because they know it will please their feeder’. The latter also exert a form of control through the power of ‘encouragement’ that takes the form of planning and management. ‘Encouragers’ eroticize the ‘actual fattening process’ itself and measure minutely each increase in weight, ‘their BMI, percent body fat, base metabolic rate and everything else’, meticulously planning the process towards death, prolonging it, nourishing it, recording it in an extenuated systematization of bureaucratic ecstasy, a sublime manifestation of the carer’s joy at the spectacle of death. Other feeders seek an analogous form of domination and suffocation, but in the reverse form of being ‘squashed and crushed’ by their obese partners, enjoying the eroticism of the victim: ‘little can make you feel more vulnerable and helpless than being sat upon or rolled over by a 500lb man or woman, smothering you with their warm soft flesh, restricting your movements and breathing’.24

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The feedee and feeder mode of eroticism is more than just exemplary. The feeder and feedee have taken on the very form and function of consumer capitalism and excited and swollen it in bubbles of obese luxury that remain immanent to the general system. This system that is predicated upon the management of life and convenience, standardization and sweetness, economization and comfort has been bloated to the point where billions of obese force-fed bodies foam in a tumbling stream of undulating flesh at once mobile and immobile, intimate and unceasingly obscene: an ecstatic tideflow of intensive bodily surfaces streaming into a sea of excess like water in water.

Falcon In the task of managing life through the facilitation of pleasure and comfort along with economic efficiency, technology, of course, has a privileged role. Through the offices of play and consumption it seems distinctions between humanity, technology and animals have become problematized and deconstructed. Even as the continuities in consciousness, pleasure and suffering between humans and animals are increasingly disclosed by science, the originarily prosthetic nature of human beings is emphasized. Human beings are regarded as always already hybrid creatures, cyborgs whose future and retro-fitted past are inexorably bound to a post-human destiny driven by technological innovation. Perhaps the completion of this system of equivalence between technology, humans and animals would be the total transformation of all subjects into objects or gadgets, subjects of data, temporary formations of one big information system. In a famous footnote to his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel that qualified his announcement of the culmination of ‘History’ in the completion of Absolute Knowledge, Kojève posited Japan as an alternative to the animalization represented by the ‘American way of life’.25 In the footnote Kojève suggests that the Japanese had already achieved a post-historical state but had managed to sustain a ‘properly human’ desire through purely formal, that is to say cultural or aesthetic, means. The end of feudalism and the isolation of Japan from the rest of the world arrested Japanese society in a situation analogous to the End of History in which there were no more warlike revolutionary acts and therefore, properly speaking, no historical action. Rather, the latter was replaced by a system of ‘specific Japanese snobbery’. Kojève characteristically highlights one ritual act in particular. ‘In the extreme, every Japanese is in principle capable of



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committing, from pure snobbery, a perfectly “gratuitous” suicide … which has nothing to do with the risk of life in a Fight waged for the sake of “historical” values that have social or political content.’26 While hara-kiri is no longer a required practice in Japanese society, the Japanese nation itself seems to be committing a slow collective suicide through depopulation. Japan has been experiencing a natural population decrease since 2007, with annual deaths topping births. The Japan Times commented in 2013 that in 2011 the total fertility rate – the average number of babies a woman gives birth to during her life – was 1.39. A total fertility rate of 2.07 is required to maintain population levels. Its editorial noted that ‘although the public sector has been taking steps to make it easier for women to have more children, it will be extremely difficult to improve the situation’.27 A variety of reasons are offered for this decline in the birth rate that is exacerbated by a traditional hostility to immigration. The ageing population that this implies has contributed to the Japanese investment in ‘social robots’ that are designed to comfort and care for the elderly. Few contemporary cultures, it seems, enjoy new technological objects more than the Japanese, whose production and consumption of technological objects has been in the vanguard of ingenuity and innovation generating a whole lexicon describing the solitary yet hyper-technologized world of the otaku and hikikomori that describes a new world of erotic object orientation. Examples include the concept of moh, which measures the affectivity of objects and the cult of ‘cuteness’ supposed to imbue objects with ‘aliveness’ from the early Tamagotchis and Furbies to today’s sexualized robot-girl lolibots. Perhaps because of the Shinto notion of kami that refers to the ‘life forces’ of the physical world like rocks and trees, wind and sky that interact with human society, even inorganic objects can be imbued with spirituality and eroticism. The widely reported difficulties in sexual relations in Japan apparently produced by the high level of social sexual segregation and formality have been further compounded by a rise in the use of pornography and other technological supplements that has resulted in sex becoming an increasingly solitary activity. For Bataille, of course, eroticism – as opposed to sexual reproduction – is indeed solitary. ‘My starting point is that eroticism is a solitary activity.’28 This is because it necessarily involves the negation of the ‘erotic object’ – ‘we are faced with the paradox of an object which implies the abolition of all objects’.29 The path of eroticism leads to death and for Bataille this logically implies that the most erotic object is a dead body. Indeed, in one of the most famous and notorious of anecdotes concerning his own desires, repeated at least three times throughout his oeuvre, Bataille masturbates next to the corpse of his mother.

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Sexual murder and necrophilia feature prominently throughout his fiction – Simone and Marcelle, Simone and the Priest in Story of the Eye, for example, while in Blue of Noon the narrator and Dorothea have sex in a graveyard, her own nakedness described as ‘a freshly dug grave’.30 Many young men in Japan seem to have ardently pursued the logic that places sex on a solitary path of anaturality away from reproduction. But rather than corpses, it is the robots, dolls and online avatars that provide the Japanese support for the psychological quest that probes the limits of human life and its future. Jordan Gold of online magazine Futurehype reports that ‘Japan already boasts the world’s most advanced sex dolls from firms such as Kanojotoys or Orient Industries based in Tokyo’, reporting on a new advance, the ‘Dutch Wives [that] are slowly becoming a staple of Japan’s sexual subculture. £6,000 and a smile will buy you the very superior Yasuragi “dutch wife” sex doll.’31 They have moveable parts made of skin-like silicon and rubber, coming in ‘a staggering range of designs’. Collectors and obsessives have begun to squander hundreds of thousands of dollars on these dolls that in their ‘creepy’ life-like stillness resemble beautiful corpses: erotic dead bodies that nevertheless promise continuity with the ‘kami’ of the spirit world that animates their affective charms. ‘It’s getting easier to imagine a world where humans are more comfortable sharing their sex lives with robotic aids and virtual avatars’ writes Brian Merchant of Motherboard. In a review of the latest video game that allows users to have virtual sex with a 3D avatar with the help of a fully responsive robotic assistant, Merchant predicts that ‘haptics, VR, and augmented reality platforms … [will] eventually shift the way we have and think about sex’.32 These gadgets and interfaces are by no means restricted to men, of course. There is a very wide range of machines, toys and scenarios designed specifically for female pleasures.33 However, Motherboard notes the peculiarly Japanese – and Bataillean – character of the interfaces produced by Tenga in which Merchant glimpses ‘the future of onanism: solitary immersion into a responsive, pixelated fantasia’. Gateway to this immersion is the lolicon avatar that conveys a passive and submissive attitude. Asked by Merchant ‘why the girl looked so sad’, the manufacturer failed to respond. For Merchant, this was ‘the creepiest thing’ about the scenario, ‘the melancholic submissiveness of the avatar they’d rendered’. This attitude is conventional in Japanese erotica. Rope bondage expert Masami Akita writes that in kinbaku videos the camera must focus first on the rope work and then on the model’s face, which must always look sad and serious, ‘never laughing as in the [W]estern style’.34 The models need to understand and convey the concept of ‘sensitive shame’ in order to ‘transform shame into beauty’.35 Similarly for



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Bataille, in the case of ‘sacred’ (as opposed to commercial) prostitution, shame ‘became a ritual matter [that came to imply] transgression’. It is only through the exhibition of shame that the erotic actor can feel that ‘a law is violated … Shame, real or pretended, is a woman’s way of accepting a taboo that makes a human being out of her.’36 It is presumably through the simulation of sensual shame that the 3D avatar evokes the violation of a taboo for the user who thus is able to accede to the promise of the digital ‘life force’. For many then, it seems, eroticism has become a question of the transgression of a boundary between human and artificially gendered machines, sexual energy becoming transformed through an interface with undead images and software into data. Motherboard reports that the software was designed for Tenga by the Japanese erotic game developer  Illusion that introduced into its usual virtual reality equipment a ‘Novint Falcon’, a ‘haptic device designed to replace the mouse for PCs that  became popular with gamers because  it can  respond to gunfire in first person shooters’. It is not a data glove as such, of course, that is used, nor is it a hand that is inserted into the device, a ‘Tenga sex tube’. ‘The Falcon’s sensors can keep track of the handle’s position to sub-millimeter resolution, and the motors are updated 1000 times per second (1 kHz), giving a realistic sense of touch. The surfaces of virtual objects feel solid, and can have detailed textures applied to them,’ offering a new realism to the sex simulation. ‘The “game” consists of a 3D-rendered woman in schoolgirl attire, who is either bent over a bed or kneeling before the “player.” As the avatar in virtual reality moves, so does the Falcon – and so does the Tenga sex tube. Clothing is optional in the VR and out. You get the picture.’37 The Falcon software is developed out of military and recreational drone technology. The Falcon website advertises that ‘Falcon Unmanned manufactures and sells professional grade unmanned aircraft … we are the only manufacturer who sells fixed wing and multi-copter aircraft with interoperable, modular, multimission payloads and a common ground control station.’38 Multipurpose as well as multi-mission, the American drones of course deliver a different payload to the ones enabled by Tenga’s Falcon software, but they set their end-users similarly on a path towards death.

The hatred of God In the Epilogue to The Accursed Share: Volume III, Bataille echoes the thesis of Alexandre Kojève by suggesting that the history of eroticism moves from the

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fringes of history to centre stage precisely at the moment of the end of history. For Bataille, however, the end of history would not be signalled by the triumph of neoliberal capitalism, but by the ‘end of the disparity of rights and of living standards’,39 disparities that have only been exacerbated by the acceleration of capitalism enhanced by the World Wide Web. Nevertheless, ‘consciousness of erotic truth anticipates the end of history’, and something like the ‘apathy’ that this point of culmination implies for Bataille seems to have resulted from the termination of the dialectical struggle for recognition in the satisfactions of the capitalist world. ‘Humanity is faced with a double perspective’, Bataille writes in the Preface to The Impossible, ‘in the one direction, violent pleasure, horror, death – precisely the perspective of poetry – and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility’.40 The Impossible is a short philosophical novella originally conceived with the title ‘The Hatred of Poetry’ because Bataille believed the violence of ‘true poetry’ could only be reached by hatred. As we have seen, a certain ‘post-historical’ eroticism has benefitted from the products of science, products originally designed for war that might, in the prevalent use of automated drones, be rendered entirely free of risk for the aggressor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the insouciance of a system that places eroticism, war and the delivery of consumer objects on the same plane of automated production and distribution has produced a violent reaction fuelled with the passion of hatred that is taking the form of religious fanaticism. In his chapter on Islam from the first volume of The Accursed Share, Bataille draws a relation of equivalence and rivalry between Islamic and capitalist modes of expenditure, underscoring a parallel made by the Arabist scholar H. Holma between the piety of Islam and that of Puritanism and Protestantism. While the pietistic way of thinking of the latter became essential to the origin and development of capitalism through replacing the medieval rule of consumption in Northern and Western Europe, the former, Bataille argues, transformed ‘the reckless and wasteful agitation of the Arabs … into an effective instrument of conquest’.41 Only their histories are asymmetrical as the war machine of Muhammed eventually gives way to the war machine of Capital. Bataille develops the analogy in his general economic analysis in which both Islam and Puritanism are seen to transform societies of consumption, investing the surplus or excess into war and conquest on the one hand and industrial development and colonialism on the other. Early Islam renounced ‘any expenditure of force that was not an external violence turned against the infidel enemy’.42 In so doing Islam instrumentalized religious expenditures into forms of discipline



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and observance geared towards military expansion and growth – not of capital – but of territory. Bataille concludes his chapter by noting how Islam remained in this fashion a rather ‘empty, rigid framework’ that added little to the Arab culture that preceded it, or indeed those cultures that it conquered. Those cultures subsisted within it, as did the culture of the capitalist West when it came to divide up the Ottoman Empire and the land of the nomadic Arabs into national client states after the First World War. The descent into the prodigality and ‘decadence’ of postmodern capitalism in the Middle East of the 1960s produced a reaction. The end of the twentieth century saw a return to the austerities of Islam in a form of resistance to the imposition of colonialist capitalism exemplified by Iran during the government of the Shah. A reawakening or ‘Sahwa’ of Islamic piety and principles, re-purposed into a modern form of jihad, provided the rationale and disciplinary rigour for revolution, revolt and insurgency. Accordingly, the twenty-first century was for many people announced in the West by the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. A noticeable feature of Sahwa from the 1970s was the adoption by young women, especially students, of the various veils, hijabs and niqabs that had been prohibited by a number of post-colonial nationalist governments, particularly in the Maghreb. The re-adoption of the veil is in some ways a curious development, the significance of which would not seem to be entirely down to a return to tradition. Indeed, the wearing of veils is not at all restricted to Islam, but is evident in many other cultures and religions pre-dating Islam. In a brief passage in the Qur’an (Surah 24:30–1) there is an injunction to all ‘believing women’ to ‘lower their gaze and guard their modesty’, and a specific directive to the ‘wives and daughters’ of the prophet who ‘should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad): That is most convenient, that they may be distinguished and not be harassed’ (Surah 33:59). For Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair this injunction is consistent with pre-Islamic customs and suggests that the practice is a social habit picked up with the expansion of Islam and resonates with those ‘expenditures of the tribal world’ that Bataille suggests Muhammed sought to replace. The veil is a signifier of the wealth of the husband that guarantees the woman’s status and the erotic beauty that is destined for his own private enjoyment. ‘A veiled woman silently announced that her husband was rich enough to keep her idle.’43 The idleness of course was dependent upon a system of slavery, and Mohja Khaf notes that in the Assyrian community ‘female slaves and unchaste women were explicitly forbidden to veil and suffered harsh penalties if they did so’.44

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In their idleness, the wives of rich Arabs sustained their erotic charms in contrast to the dynastic wives of the classical and medieval West whose domain was not so much eros as oikos, the management of the household. The role of the veiled wife as erotic object held out of the restricted use-circuit of commerce or the exchange of gazes seems to have more in common with the ‘consecrated’ prostitute of the pagan world or even of the rich Renaissance Italian city states. ‘Certain women become objects in marriage’, writes Bataille, ‘they are the instruments of domestic work, of agriculture particularly … Prostitution made [women] into objects of masculine desire’ dedicated to the ‘close embrace’ of a ‘convulsive continuity’.45 This form of prostitution has nothing to do with the commercial aspect of modern prostitution but with the association of women with the gift economy that includes of course the exchange of women in marriages. Clearly, in this context, while they may have been put to reproductive use, rich Arabic women were not expected to work but to occupy the realm of wealth and the gift, giving themselves freely and receiving ‘the gifts that dedicate [them] to the luxurious life of eroticism. This sort of exchange led to all sorts of extravagance rather than to the regularity of commerce.’46 In Arabic society, then, the veil functions as the barrier, the line of prohibition and taboo that separates the commerce of everyday economic life, the life of the bazaar or the souq, with the sumptuous consumption of objects of extravagance and eroticism.

Figure 1  Kristen Alvanson, dESIRE Project, 00358047



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Figure 1, ‘003580’, is from Kristen Alvanson’s ‘dESIRE Project’, which seeks to capture and document instances of the photographer’s desire. ‘003580’ was taken in Iran and offers a beautiful image of the mirror of desire between East and West; indeed the tension between the gaze of the woman in the picture, framed by the black niqab, and the gaze of the photographer/viewer seems to illustrate Bataille’s contention that it is in sacrifice that beauty’s perfection points to death’s full brutality.48 A photograph actualizes and commemorates death. It ‘kills’ through freezing and fixing the object of its lens in a foretaste of the death the subject will proceed to suffer sometime in a future which the photograph will outlive. A first glance at the photograph produced in this viewer an initial double take. It looked to me as though the veiled woman were warding off the camera, the hennaed hands not so much a blessing as a curse. Of course, it is the back, not the front, of her hands that is visible, splayed out and thrust towards the camera lens in pride and supplication, the tattoos perhaps signifying a forthcoming marriage. But, compositionally, the hands are so much in the foreground that they are positioned in the picture almost as if they were indeed ‘our’ hands – or indeed the photographer’s hands that should be taking the photo. It is as if we have suddenly dropped our camera in order to hold back some sinister apparition looming up from behind the glass. The blurring of the picture gives this sense of double movement, pushing back and forward, thrusting and repelling. A woman beautified, ceremonially painted-up, adorned, veiled for someone’s delight, looks ominous. ‘We’, similarly adorned, hold back, with our hennaed hands and our slender pointed nails, our double, our darkened image. The composition of the picture sets up this equivalence, this Iranian stand-off, conveying our gaze directly into the eye-line of the woman framed in the blackness of the niqab. One eye is obscured behind the reflected flash of light; the other – the evil one, no doubt – looks directly at ‘us’, at the photographer, from behind thick eyeliner. ‘As we are about to take the final step, we are beside ourselves with desire, paralyzed, in the clutch of a force that demands our disintegration.’49 Hands are held up against the translucent barrier and the dark figure behind it. What denotes the glass barrier is the reflected light and, in the top left-hand corner, where the left index finger points, some painted writing. Whatever it is, writing signifies that there is Law somewhere, and here, as ever, it marks the point of separation, all points of separation, between light and dark, subject and viewer, beauty and its profanation, woman and woman. Before the undead gaze of the photograph looks at a viewer, an ‘us’, a woman has looked at a photographer. These hands at the foreground of the picture address another woman – the photographer – as if in challenge and complicity,

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each woman looking the other in the eye. What do they see – each other’s life, love and beauty, or death? In the place of the photographer, the viewer of the photograph enacts her own sacrifice. In Alvanson’s ‘003580’, we see a brief moment of transgression in the exchange of gazes between the woman as object-of-extravagance both heavily veiled and heavily ornamented and the Western photographer who ‘captures’ her in a moment of desire. There is an instant of recognition, of identification and desire, of difference and erotic rivalry. The prohibition on looking announced by the niqab does little other than eroticize the look, especially the look of the woman and the promise of transgression. This prohibition has ironically been doubled by the prohibition on the veil itself in some secular Western societies and institutional contexts that has underscored the misogynistic use of women as goods and objects of political control. God’s hatred, as ever, bears on the antagonisms of sexual difference. In the developed West, God has died, of course, but in His wake he has left ethical committees to do his work. In this way the curse on eroticism – and indeed sex – has not been lifted in the twenty-first century, but redoubled in the form of its hyper-commodification and as the focus of micropolitical governance. While many of the taboos and rituals that lent meaning to transgression have given way to the liberation of brief ‘coiterations’ that are increasingly facilitated by various phone apps, this seems to have produced a prevailing sense of depression or morose boredom.50 This moroseness is perhaps partly an effect of the sexual cowardice that gives up on the other in the resigned embrace of eroticism’s solitary fate. It might also be an effect of the disappointment inherent to the endless displacement of images promised in the online parade of partners and perversions that takes place beneath the horizon of normativity. Eroticism, for Bataille, is disruptive. It is a consensual confrontation with dis-equilibrium, the exacerbation of the incommensurability of desiring, heterogeneous bodies. As such it remains a disorder and a source of wider disturbance. It is no surprise therefore that social institutions continue their attempt to harmonize and homogenize sexual relations into something safe, normal and appropriate. It is the bland and austere mirror of romantic union. Yet while the impossibility of harmonious resolution is acknowledged by eroticism, it gives rise, according to Bataille, to an obscure inter-recognition that demands fierce loyalty: love, in effect, that has lost all illusion of oneness. In Literature and Evil, one of his last texts, Bataille maintains that the transgressive ‘catastrophe’ of erotic love depends upon a ‘hypermorality’ that owes nothing to the committees of good conduct. Citing Jacques Blondel, who suggests that Emily Brontë’s



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novel Wuthering Heights discovers in artistic creativity that which is refused by social reality, Bataille concludes that ‘passion does not go without a curse: only a “cursed share” is set aside for that part of human life which has the greatest significance. The curse is the necessary path for true blessing.’51

Notes Yukio Mishima, ‘Georges Bataille and Divinus Deus’, in Georges Bataille, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man. London: Marion Boyars, 1989, 9–22, 13. 2 Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall. New York: Zone Books, 2009, 178. 3 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 89. 4 Bataille, cited in Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 2002, 362. See also Georges Bataille, ‘On Hiroshima’, trans. R. Raziel, Politics 4 (1947): 147–50. 5 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988, 188. 6 Ibid., 189. 7 Bataille, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, 266. 8 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986, 11–12. 9 Ibid., 15. 10 Ibid., 11. 11 Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999, 252. 12 Ibid., 269–75. See also F. B. M. de Waal, ‘Sex as an Alternative to Aggression in the Bonobo’, in P. A. Abrahamson and S. D. Pinkerton (eds), Sexual Nature / Sexual Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 154–73. 13 Bataille, Erotism, 29. 14 Ibid., 8. 15 Ibid., 190. 16 Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds), The Bataille Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, 31. 17 Ibid., 32. 18 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, 76. 19 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume II, 90. 1

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20 Agamben, The Open, 10. 21 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 27. 22 Julia Nicole, ‘I Accidentally Fell into the Feeder Fetish Community’, 2 July 2014, http://munchies.vice.com/articles/i-accidentally-fell-into-the-feeder-fetishcommunity (accessed 21 February 2017). 23 FantasyFeeder.com 24 All quotations from FantasyFeeder.com, n.p. 25 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James Nicholls, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, 162. 26 Ibid. 27 Japan Times, ‘Editorial: Japan’s Depopulation Timebomb’, 17 April 2013, www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/04/17/editorials/japans-depopulationtime-bomb/#.VP7IDTo27ow (accessed 21 February 2017). 28 Bataille, Erotism, 253. 29 Ibid., 130. 30 Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon. London: Calder & Boyars, 1985. 31 Jordan Gold, ‘#FutureHype: When Japanese Sex Dolls “Come Alive” With Robotics’, www.konbini.com/en/lifestyle/japan-sex-robot-dolls/ (accessed 21 February 2017). 32 Brian Merchant, ‘The Robot that Makes Virtual Sex Feel Real’, 14 February 2014, n.p., http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/real-sex-virtual-reality-oculus-rift-tenga (accessed 21 February 2017). 33 See studyweb.com team, ‘35 Coolest Robots to Have Sex With Today’, 24 March 2015, www.studyweb.com/25-coolest-robots-that-you-can-have-sex-with/ (accessed 21 February 2017). 34 Brett Woodward, Merzbook: The Pleasuredome of Noise. Melbourne: Extreme, 1999, 27. 35 Ibid. 36 Bataille, Erotism, 134. 37 Merchant, ‘The Robot that Makes Virtual Sex Feel Real’. 38 Falcon Unmanned (2014), www.falconunmanned.com (accessed 21 February 2017). 39 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume III, 189. 40 Georges Bataille, The Impossible. San Francisco: City Lights, 1991, 10. 41 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 86. 42 Ibid., 89. 43 Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, 46–7. 44 Mohja Kahf, From Royal Body the Robe was Removed: The Blessings of the Veil and the Trauma of Forced Unveiling in the Middle East. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008, 27.



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45 Bataille, Erotism, 132. 46 Ibid., 132–3. 47 Kristen Alvanson, Nicola Masciandaro and Scott Wilson, ‘dESIRE Gloss: A Specimen’. Glossator: Practice and Theory of Commentary 3 (2010): 95–125, 95. 48 Bataille, Erotism, 144. 49 Ibid., 141. 50 The depressing congruence between brief ‘coiterations’ and capitalism’s boring renewal of the same through simulations of novelty was noted by Bataille’s close friend Jacques Lacan in 1974 in the wake of the events of 1968. Despite appearances, Lacan claimed, ‘the starting point’ of capitalism ‘is getting rid of sex’ (Lacan, Television. New York: Norton, 1990, 23, 30). 51 Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil. London: Calder & Boyars, 1973, 10–11, 16.

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2

Bataille’s Nature: On (Not) Having One’s Feet on the Ground Patrick ffrench

In The Accursed Share, and in various early drafts that date back to the late 1930s, Georges Bataille seeks as we know to develop a systematic theory and history of what, in 1949, he calls the ‘general economy’. He proposes what he sees as a fundamental dynamic of expenditure, waste and loss, beyond the limits of productivity and growth. In a previous sketch of the project, published in the review Constellation in 1946, we find an alternative formulation of the title: L’Économie à la mesure de l’univers – economy at the level of the universe, an expression that gives a good indication of the general thrust of the argument.1 It is an argument for a reconfiguration of economics from a specifically global or cosmic perspective, in contrast to the particular or restricted perspective of orthodox economics. My focus here will in part be on the epistemological problems implied by this demand, particularly as concerns the question of nature, although I will also move on from this to address more specific issues related to the question of the ground of the argument; the question of where the ground is, on what ground one stands with this perspective, particularly insofar as it is proposed as ‘fundamental’. My central proposition is that Bataille’s thought is radically ungrounding: that it promotes an affirmative experience of the ‘fundamental’ contingency and destructive tendency of nature, the foundation of which is an absence of ground. This theoretical absence of ground is figured in Bataille’s writing as an experience. A crucial step and a recurrent appeal in Bataille’s various arguments is the demand for an account of economy according to nature; Bataille seeks to think, and to write, according to nature, while aware of the logical, textual and existential problems posed by this demand. Indeed, a large part of his work consists in an anxious if not obsessive focus on the existential and moral

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problems that such a demand imposes, to the extent that the main focus risks becoming deflected from the demand to think according to nature to the anxiety that this demand provokes, as a defining epistemological and psychological characteristic of the human condition. Another way of putting this would be to say that the starting point of Bataille’s thought is the radical contingency of the human subject in relation to the world and universe in which they exist, a contingency that human agents seek to reduce or resolve through the projection or invention of something like meaning, and the postulation of frames and limits that enable something like meaning to come into focus. One might say that the perspective ‘at the level of the universe’ lacks ground, that the ground beneath one’s feet gives way, leaving nothing, a void. Yet something persists. Bataille is acutely conscious of this effort to give meaning to contingency, to propose the ground, and is often extremely critical of it, but without avoiding it completely himself, a fact of which he is also acutely and sometimes painfully aware. This is a general problem, a problem in the general economy of Bataille’s thought and writing, one might say, were one to think with Bataille. However, a not inessential element of the argument here is that Bataille does not think the general economy of his own scattered and multi-layered work; its totality escapes him. One might say, this time with Jean-Luc Nancy, that this enjoins us to think with Bataille up to a certain point, but then to think after or beyond him.2 But on the other hand one might say that the very incompletion and failure of Bataille’s thought functions as a measure of the contingency and mobility of the real; he thinks, he says, with a ‘disastrous rapidity’, offering in this way a thought which is the image of nature.3 The intention to think ‘at the level of the universe’, to think general economy, poses a problem for knowledge, since in order to think at this level one might have to be able to comprise the universe from a perspective outside it. This is a general problem, then, that Geoff Bennington, in what he himself calls a rather ‘brutal’ account of Bataille’s argument in The Accursed Share, names as a specifically logical problem, rendered as ethical and existential by Bataille.4 I want to address the problem initially via a focus on the specific issue of Bataille’s reference to nature, broadly conceived. For if Bataille stakes out a demand for an account of economy ‘at the level of the universe’ or ‘in harmony with the world’, one which should consider ‘the play of living matter in general’, this seems to propose a straightforwardly empirical account of nature, or of ‘life’.5 Bataille appears here, as Bennington suggests, as a ‘naturalist’ thinker, expressing a demand to give a true or truer account of nature, and moreover proposing that we ignore the real empirical nature of the world and of its dynamics at our peril.6



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This is the thesis: nature, Bataille proposes, is characterized by a principle of prodigality, of which the foundational point is that the sun gives its energy without return. A second step is the proposition that the energy not used in the maintenance of terrestrial organisms will be used towards growth. However, since the energy available will, Bataille argues, always exceed the amount necessary for maintenance and for growth (which in Bataille’s schema means reproduction), this energy must be spent, expended, ‘wasted’.7 A postulation internal to this argument is that there are limits to growth; the energy available exceeds the amount that can be used for growth, because growth itself is limited, or checked. This postulation seems to have to do with space; there are limits to growth and reproduction because the space available is limited. In more concrete terms, because the habitable surface of the terrestrial globe is finite, or because a specific social structure has imposed limits on itself, life reaches a limit to its growth and must expend the surplus energy thus caused in other ways. So a key point here is on the one hand a point about the terrestrial surface; it is because life is limited to the habitable surface of the world (which Bataille, in reference to the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, calls the biosphere) that its extension – in other words the reproduction of species – is limited.8 One might imagine objections to this point through considering the potential extension of the ‘habitable surface’ through various means such as land reclamation or high-rise buildings, or space travel, but these accessory points might not really affect the logical principle of a spatial limit to growth. One might also argue that the proposition assumes that space is not superimposable. Bataille counters this implicitly with the notion that for two living beings to overlap, for one to exist ‘inside’ one another, one must be incorporated, be ‘devoured’, by the other, and thus die. There is thus a principle of loss and expenditure internal to the system, and proceeding directly from the postulation of a spatial limit to growth. On the other hand this consideration of the limited nature of the terrestrial surface seems a concern specific to the contemporary situation, and in the context of Bataille’s recourse to primitive societies one has to consider the self-imposed boundaries of a given social structure. Here the natural and the social seem to be conflated around the postulation of the limit to growth. Bataille’s general economics nevertheless depends on a view of nature and of life that is empirical and is presented as a fact. This empirical, dogmatic basis informs what will ultimately become an ethics: we (humans) ought to have a clear consciousness of the dilapidations and destructive expenditure of nature, which will happen anyway (because this is a law of nature), so that we can

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ourselves operate these dilapidations gloriously rather than catastrophically. Bataille writes: We can’t ignore or forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions. Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: it causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood. It deprives of the choice of an exudation that might suit us. Above all, it consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions.9

What Bataille might be taken to mean here, particularly in the context of the late 1940s and the Cold War, is a preference for a deliberate choice of sumptuary forms of loss and expenditure in order to avoid the (self)-destructive violence that will inevitably result from the intense competition and conflict over space and resources of the two superpowers (thus Bataille’s argument in favour of the Marshall Plan). This is also why Bataille’s argument resolves into a humanism; we ought to carry out our violence on our accumulated resources, on our objects, rather than on ourselves, rather than allowing the destruction to be of humanity itself, due to an ignorance of the necessity of destruction. There is an agency at work here. However, by the end of The Accursed Share, the sacrificial logic at work here seems to be defined differently. Beyond the specific issue of the economy, Bataille’s argument is an argument for consciousness, which he eventually puts in terms of intimacy and interiority, a state where consciousness ceases to be consciousness of an object (some thing) and becomes consciousness of nothing. Bataille writes: ‘Doubtless it is paradoxical to tie a truth so intimate as that of self-consciousness (the return of being to full and irreducible sovereignty) to these completely external determinations.’10 This needs some explanation. It seems as if the inevitable expenditure inherent to the dynamic of nature is sublimated or ought to be sublimated, Bataille argues, by an interiorization of loss, by a pure interiority without object, a subjectivity that has ceased to operate sacrifice upon objects and become consciousness as sacrifice, but without for all that ceasing to be consciousness. Bataille writes: If self-consciousness is essentially the full possession of intimacy, we must return to the fact that all possession of intimacy leads us to a deception. A sacrifice can only posit a sacred thing. The sacred thing exteriorises intimacy; it makes visible on the outside that which is really within. This is why self-consciousness demands finally that, in connection with intimacy, nothing further can occur … This comes down in fact, as in the experience of the mystics, to intellectual



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contemplation ‘without shape or form’, as against the seductive experiences of ‘visions’, divinities and myths.11

It is a question then of a movement from a consciousness of loss and excess, exteriorized in an exterior object, in some thing, to consciousness as loss or expenditure, to a sovereignty without content, a lucid consciousness of and as nothing. The expenditure or dilapidation inherent to the dynamics of energy on the terrestrial surface should be met or pursued, Bataille implies, by an equivalent dynamics of loss at the level of consciousness. Sovereignty, Bataille insists, is NOTHING. A question arises here, however, as to whether this implies a persistence of subjective consciousness as NOTHING, but without dissolving into this absence, or whether consciousness itself, and the subject, is drawn along in this movement of loss, towards its own immolation and absence. One might posit that for Bataille this is also a consciousness that cannot be possessed, as an experience or a ‘vision’; consciousness does not return upon itself to possess or actualize its being as NOTHING but remains on the fault line between NOTHING and the slight degree or purchase that prevents it from being just one among the myriad of things. This is what might be meant then by thinking according to nature, by a thought ‘at the level of the universe’. It entails a renunciation of the process by which nature is given meaning, of ‘seductive … visions’, a renunciation of epistemological production or at least a recognition of its limits, a passage from the accumulation of knowledge to the non-possession of an experience of non-knowledge, but nevertheless with the sustained persistence of an anxious awareness of this, of some kind of subjective grip, albeit a fragile one. The ‘error’ of the perspectives of restricted economy, wherein production is proposed as the ultimate aim of any given system, would be equivalent to a perspective according to which the object, the meaning given to any phenomenon, or the knowledge of it, is proposed as the be all and end all of the thinking process. Thought, here, is itself a process of expenditure rather than accumulation and possession. Thus the loss inherent to nature is to be carried over into the epistemological and experiential domain. Clear consciousness without content, which in another context Bataille will call lucidity (following Maurice Blanchot, a profound influence on Bataille since the early 1940s), involves a renunciation and a lucid critique of the illusions (‘seductive visions’/‘ruses’) we project on to nature. Lucidity nevertheless implies, or seems to imply, some kind of faith in the capacity of the visible world to offer itself to consciousness, as light given, as given light. Something of the order of a subject persists.

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The epistemological or perhaps more accurately existential argument for a lucidity without content is sketched out in an only apparently more ‘poetic’ vein in a short essay by Bataille called ‘Landscape’ published in the French ‘literary’ review Verve in 1937, which I would like to examine more closely, as an earlier variant of the broad argument of The Accursed Share.12 The categories of the ‘literary’ or the ‘poetic’ are troubled, however, by the thrust of Bataille’s thought, and reveal a consistent fault-line that runs throughout his work. For one might see the ‘poetic’ and the ‘literary’ as precisely the process that gives meaning or form to nature and therefore as precisely the kind of discourse Bataille argues against in the essay, as we will see. Bataille espouses a ‘hatred of poetry’ in this sense.13 A fault-line emerges between poetry as the accumulation of meaning(s), aesthetics as the production of beautiful (or terrible) images, and the advocacy of a kind of consciousness and a writing that would express and perform it, which practises the loss or expenditure of such images, giving way to an absence of meaning, a sovereignty without content. The same fault-line is there between ‘fine poetry’, and the poetry of ‘hatred’, which destroys poetry and abandons it, between surrealism as the accumulation of works, and ‘the greater surrealism’ of which Bataille saw himself and Blanchot as the inheritors and chief exponents, in texts written in the late 1940s.14 The same fault-line is there, I would argue, in Bataille’s early texts Story of the Eye and The Solar Anus, which provisionally borrow the genres of narrative and of aphorism only in order to propose a generalized loss of sense, a vertigo in which no tangible image or object hinders, unless it be syntax itself, the slide into an absence of content. ‘Landscape’ is one of a series of short texts Bataille wrote for Tériade’s quarterly review Verve in 1937 and 1938, texts that consistently destabilize the category of the ‘literary’ through a rigorous critique of what Bataille will later term restricted economies.15 What will in The Accursed Share become schematized as a critique of economy is being worked through, in these texts, as a virulent and aggressive critique of anthropocentrism. A recurrent point of reference is to the astral dynamics of the globe ‘in its galactic movement’ and to the terrestrial contingencies of nature, vis à vis the humanizing projections imposed upon them in order to ground the subject in reassuring certainty and immobility. In contrast to The Accursed Share, however, these essays avoid the relatively scholarly tone and form of the later book, supported as it is by reference to scientific or pseudo-scientific authorities of the time such as Vernadsky (Le Biosphère) and Eddington (The Rotation of the Galaxy), in favour of a somewhat vituperative and prophetic style that, despite the prevalence typical to Bataille of complex metaphorical structures and equivalences,



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resists as I have suggested categorization within the frame of aesthetics. The rhetorical instability of the texts and the provocations they intend exceed such a categorization, making them formally excessive texts, not, in this case, because of the kinds of ellipsis and incompletion that characterize Inner Experience or Madame Edwarda, composed slightly later in the early 1940s, but due to the aim, aggressively performed, to de-sublimate, to de-aestheticize, to de-form. The same tendencies towards desublimation, an anti-aesthetic, have been analysed by Georges Didi-Huberman on the one hand and Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois on the other, with different emphases, in Bataille’s texts for Documents of the late 1920s and early 1930s.16 In these later texts we find the same textual form – short prose essays structured around metaphorical chains with precise rhetorical aims. They are performative texts. Their difference from the Documents texts lies in the greater emphasis they place on the critique of anthropocentrism, but also in a more consistent reference to empirical truth, to a view of nature presented as fact.17 Verve was published from December 1937 as a large-format lavishly illustrated quarterly journal featuring full-colour reproductions of paintings and other illustrations as well as full-page black and white photographs alongside short written texts by prominent names and scholarly authorities. Issue 3, which includes Bataille’s ‘Landscape’, also features texts by Rabindranath Tagore, Pierre Reverdy, Paul Valéry, Henri Michaux, André Malraux, Paul Claudel (with a facsimile of a manuscript) and Roger Caillois. Interestingly, a dominant focus of the issue is Hindu art, with a number of striking colour reproductions of Hindu deities accompanied by essays (by André Siegfried, Louis Massignon, Elizabeth de Gramont), but there are also images from Henri-Douanier Rousseau, Delacroix, Matisse, Rembrandt, Chagall, Mirò and Paul Klee, and a sketch in colour representing ‘Winter’ on the page facing Bataille’s text. The review is interspersed with black and white photographs of ethnographic provenance. This description indicates a number of things: that Verve partakes of the same generalized enlargement of focus, away from strictly aesthetic European concerns, that characterized Documents and indeed was a pronounced tendency of the time, the juxtaposition of European contemporary art with ethnographic imagery being a recurrent trope of the 1920s and 1930s. Verve adds a significant concern with non-Western sacred imagery, most markedly in this issue. Despite the emphatically aesthetic presentation of the material in what can only be described as a ‘luxury art magazine’, there is a tendency to displace the strictly European frame to take in a wider historical and geographic/cultural context. One view would have it that a review such as Verve only extends the frame of

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its sustained support of the aesthetics, of art, essentially conceived as decoration or supplement. The tenor of Bataille’s text ‘Landscape’ and of the other essays published in Verve is at odds with this, insofar as it is critical of the humanizing tendencies of the aesthetic, vis à vis what it puts forward as an embrace of ‘rough reality’, to paraphrase Rimbaud.18 But this is generally true of Bataille’s position in relation to most if not all of the periodicals with which he was involved or in which he published, Documents included; he invariably appears as ‘the old mole’, as an advocate of a materialism countering the aesthetic, idealizing or scientific tendencies of the contexts in which he intervened.19 In the first sentences of the essay ‘Landscape’, Bataille underlines nature’s indifference to humanity and to the human consciousness of this indifference via a characteristic metaphor or structure of equivalences (X is to Y as A is to B): ‘A man can recognize his abandonment. The universe is as ignorant of it as a window-pane is of the wasp that crashes against its illusory surface.’20 The universe (the window-pane) is ignorant of humanity’s sense of abandonment (the wasp). But the metaphor adds a supplementary meaning via the figure of the wasp crashing against the illusory surface of the window-pane. The universe also presents an illusory surface, against which humanity crashes and dies. Bataille extends the motif of indifference and impenetrability to inter-subjective communication – we imagine that the face of the other signals acceptance or sympathy (‘open faces’), but in reality they are just as impenetrable, just as resistant to the projection of hope or of meaning: ‘The rest of humanity is ignorant of it too; apparently open faces are perhaps no more penetrable than the window-pane.’21 The metaphor has limits; it’s difficult for us to put ourselves in the position of the wasp, in other words to truly realize the impenetrability of the obstacle, of the world. Our own representation is conditioned by a certain propensity, Bataille argues in what follows, to always see beyond the window-pane or to see through it. It is perhaps the wasp’s representation of the window-pane that Bataille wants to reach, to get into, in this essay, a representation that might in effect undo representation, since it may be the representative capacity, as such, which compels us to see around or through the obstacle in our way, to see beyond nature’s indifference. But it isn’t easy to propose a representation of the world equivalent to the one the wasp must have of the obstacle in its way, of which it has no knowledge. In contrast, each time man comes up against the impossible, he has at his disposal a remarkable aptitude to see a signal of his future success, and deliverance from his suffering.22



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Humanity’s condition is to always seek to transcend the impossible, and this is related here to the capacity to read signs, to a semiotic activity existentially tied in to a certain future-oriented perspective. To recognize a sign, in nature, is to see something pointing the way forward, to establish a futurity. Signs are ‘premonitions’, and this premonitory nature of signs is also marked in Bataille’s fiction.23 The human universe – that is, the universe imagined by humankind – is not closed (not an impenetrable obstacle like the window-pane for the wasp) since its movement endows it with the capacity to form recognizable signs, or images that can be read as signs, premonitions of some future event. The figure of the Magi’s star is significant here, since Bataille proposes that it burns brighter when death is on the horizon, suggesting a human capacity to endow natural phenomena with a special significance when faced with the ‘impossible’ reality of human finitude. Premonitory signs thus propose an overcoming of the empirical obstacles of nature: Man’s universe is not closed, like a vast and luminous, sepulchral tomb of fog, because the infinite variety of appearances easily provides him with the changing perspective of hope. The mages’ star shines with sudden brightness every time it appears above the road which leads to death. The flaming bush at the end of the field, the skeleton of a bird on the shoreline, the shimmering constellation – each sign is the annunciation of an impending joy.24

Bataille proposes that language as such is conditioned by the structure of the question and answer; the landscape speaks an intelligible language, communicates hope, in response to humanity’s excessive and ‘mad’ interrogation: Places abandoned by life, clusters of rock and ice, even the desert, speak an intelligible language to man, and communicate emotions charged with hope. Each figure which man meets is called upon to witness the destiny that bears him along under the planet’s skies: it must give some comprehensible answer to his almost mad interrogation.25

The italicization of must here suggests the emotive, quasi-ethical demand made of the landscape and of its figures; the answer is thus conditioned by the question, and the form of the question, as a question, demands that there must be an answer. In contrast to the necessity with which the natural world is supposed to propose answers to humanity’s anxious interrogation, here Bataille underscores the contingency of nature, the chance that determines both the forms of nature and the position of the spectator who looks upon it, and he emphasizes this in what follows:

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Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought But what do they mean – this Roman fountain, or the snowy summit of Engadine? Is the sun, or the darkness, anything more than a quirk of chance? And how can it be that a landscape, formed of interrelated appearances without any meaning, can, according to the position of the eye, in one place be empty and without charm, and in another be a breach opened upon a dazzling world?26

The meaning nature offers, and the answers it gives, are entirely subject to the shifting conditions of both the subject and the object of the look. The landscape, as such, is formed of interrelated appearances without inherent meaning, Bataille’s parenthesis here performing a rhetorical interjection of an empirical fact for which the question marks have already prepared. The text continues: ‘Laws of affinity and contrast can explain the effects of the play of humanized illuminations placed between us and the inexorable void.’27 The window-pane here becomes a screen on which a play of light proposes images that respond to humanity’s interrogation, which meets the demand, as it were. Bataille proposes a further point here about the humanizing tendency with regard to the landscape – that it is effectively dialectical, alternating between affirmation and negation, between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’, the high and low: Flowers, birds and meadows make up a world which it is easy to see as destined for man’s beatitude. Sterile or devastated, empty spaces, starry nights, the ocean itself, make for a world which in contrast is hostile and savage, but fills the heart no less. Cities, the expression of the human will, show the opposition of the noble world of rich stone monuments and the abject and wild world of the slums.28

Nature, insofar as it is humanized by people and responds to the question humanity asks of it, is determined by laws of affinity and contrast, by what we might call, following Didi-Huberman, a dialectic of forms. What is being described here, however, is not nature itself but the image of nature as perceived by the human spectator, the image on the screen. Both the high and the low are superseded in a dysfunctional dialectic that, as Barthes might have it, is lopsided; the alternation of high and low is superseded by a concept of nature as a fluid domain of chance that has nothing to do with these two terms. The window-pane, become a screen, here becomes a scene or a stage on which the alternation of night and day is played out, subject to the juxtapositions of chance: Each time chance happily juxtaposes shadows and lights for the pleasure of beings, now saturated with the day, now by the night, life can see nothing strange or empty on the stage on which it is played.29



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But these images on the humanized screen are but a play of light and shadow that can decompose as swiftly as the images of a dream: But the illusion depends on aleatory coincidence. The screen on which light and shadow are happily composed dissipates and is decomposed sometimes as quickly as a dream-image.30

Decomposition begins to operate here as a privileged motif, resonating with those of alternation or desublimation from Bataille’s earlier work. Decomposition reduces images to ‘what they are’, reiterating the rhetorical interjection of the empirical real. It also evacuates the ‘will to live’ that had, one assumes, driven the demand for future-oriented signs, and makes space for the Baudelairean motif of ‘ennui’ or apathy: ‘Then apathy, apathy without a heart and without disgust takes hold of the space occupied by the will to live – hard and cold apathy which reduces fountains, summits and beautiful landscapes to what they are.’31 The indifference of nature is met by the indifference of the subject; thinking according to nature implies a refusal of phantasmatic projection and an equivalent absence. The term apathy (ennui) evidently brings with it all the resonances of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal and of its dedication in particular, where apathy exceeds the evil of all other sins and joins the poet to the reader in hypocritical complicity. Baudelaire practises the same kind of lopsided dialectic as Bataille (as described by Barthes); apathy is not a sin like the others, and there is a certain similarity between the emptiness Bataille proposes that apathy makes visible (a prefiguration of the sovereignty of nothing mentioned above) and Baudelaire’s accreditation of the destructive qualities of apathy in the lines: ‘Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris / Et dans un baîllement avalerait le monde’ [Ennui would willingly make of the earth a shambles / And, in a yawn, swallow the world].32 Yet Baudelaire’s account is perhaps still too premised on a Christian morality of good and evil it does not quite escape; apathy remains a sin, a ‘monster’, albeit a ‘delicate’ one, while Bataille affirms that apathy as he intends it is without disgust or emotive capacity. Apathy does however enable something, a negative capability, so to speak; it enables a vision that lacks the qualities Bataille has previously described as phantasmatic, as projective, and in particular enables the kind of vision the wasp must have as it dies: ‘Apathy does not allow you to keep crashing wildly against the glass. It gives to the man it overcomes the possibility of opening the hopeless and uncomprehending eyes of the dying wasp onto the universe.’33 Following the terms of Bataille’s metaphor we should see this as the kind of vision humans must have when confronted with the fact of death, without

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illusion or desperate projection into the future, without the ‘will to live’ that seeks for any sign of permanence. If apathy decomposes – that is to say, if it undoes or dissipates the solidity and unity assured by the stable contemplation of the meaningful landscape – it may also lead somewhere else. In a return to the systematic reduction of humanity’s conceptual and imaginative capacities Bataille here proposes a distinction between the dying wasp and the human vision of the impossible, of contingent finitude: ‘But while the wasp, waving its broken body on the ground, can only let itself be overcome by death, after a long struggle, the man decomposed by apathy has the possibility of drawing conclusions from his terrifying experience.’ Thinking according to nature does not quite propose an equivalence between humanity and nature, insofar as nature does not think. Decomposed man (and woman) may, Bataille acknowledges, have the memory of the illusions nature offered him in response to his anguished interrogation, but these are ‘doubled’ by that of ‘the final spasm’: ‘He only has a distant memory of the scintillating illusions, his eyes are calm but lost on a fleeing horizon, the image of the final spasm doubles that of the flower in bloom.’ The term ‘spasm’ here designates the blot or stain produced in the withering or decay of flowers; that it ‘doubles’ the image of the flower in bloom, and that it is ‘final’, suggests that the empirical fact of nature’s mobile processes of growth and decay supersedes and literally blots out the static memory image of the ‘beautiful flower’, Bataille returning here to the concerns and thematics of his texts for Documents, ‘Informe’ and ‘The Language of Flowers’ in particular.34 The article ends with the evocation again of a kind of contiguity between humans and nature, insofar as the image of the naked foot pressed into the humid earth heralds a process wherein humanity ‘sinks’ into the earth: ‘He looks at the world of illusions with slow anger. He shuts himself into an oppressive silence, and as he places his naked foot on the humid earth, feeling himself sinking into nature and being annihilated by it, it is with anguished joy.’35 What interests me here are the implications concerning surface and depth. Humanity’s humanizing vision of the landscape – the vision of mountains and valleys and so on – proposes a slightly elevated but nevertheless upright position upon the terrestrial surface; the vision Bataille draws out as possible for the subject whose aesthetic visions have been decomposed, or have decomposed, begins a movement under the surface. Decomposition evidently suggests a return to the soil; Bataille’s text ends then with an image of immolation, not so much of humanity, or of human consciousness by nature, as with it, as a kind of immersion in nature’s incessant process of loss and expenditure. That this



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immolation and the proposed lucidity with which it is confronted are expressed through an image that has to do broadly with the question of (the) ground, both literally and metaphorically, suggests the absolute importance of this dimension across Bataille’s work. The naked foot pressed into the earth sinks into it rather than being solidly supported by it, on its surface. The ‘hook’ that halts the slide to destruction and loss, the inherent principle of nature, according to Bataille, is the landscape and the aesthetics of the landscape that locate and ground humans on the terrestrial surface through relation to an object or a vision endowed with meaning, the real purpose of which is to repress the contingency and inherent mobility of this position. The tensions between restricted and general economy are here rendered in phenomenological, embodied terms as a tension between suspension and vertigo promoted to the status of a universal condition. As a pendant to the image on which ‘Landscape’ ends, and in the same register of experience, I’d like to refer briefly here to a striking image from Bataille’s novel The Blue of Noon, written in the mid-1930s but not published until 1957. The narrator, Troppmann, and his lover, ‘Dirty’, are in Germany, in the city of Trier. Walking through the neighbouring countryside at night on their way back from a restaurant they come to a ploughed field on an escarpment overhanging a cemetery. It is 1 November, the Day of the Dead, and candles have been lit on the graves. Troppmann and Dirty have sex in the field overhanging the graves, and Bataille’s text highlights a vertiginous play of double images: between Dirty’s body, penetrated by the narrator, and the bodies in the graves below; between Dirty’s breasts, of a ‘lunar whiteness’, and the moon above; between the flames on the graves and the starry sky: ‘Each of the lights proclaimed a skeleton in its grave, and they thus formed a wavering sky, as unsteady as the motions of our mingled bodies.’36 This mirroring effect, between the sky and what is ‘underneath’, has the effect of troubling and suspending the ground as a stable surface and foundation. The ground appears as an unstable, transient, suspended instance, such that when Dirty and Troppmann start to slide down the slope this is experienced as a ‘fall upwards’: ‘Farther down, the rick formed an overhang. If I hadn’t stopped our slide with my foot, we would have fallen into the night. And I might have wondered with amazement if we weren’t falling into the void of the sky.’37 This carefully constructed image has the effect, through its ‘anti-phenomenological’ postulation of a ‘fall upwards’, of underlining the contingency of upright posture, feet on the ground, of the ground as a stable foundation for the human foot and what it supports.38 Bataille writes between this foundationless ‘fall’, and the ‘hook’ that stops the slide. In contrast to the (absent) ground and

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the foundation, however, the hook ‘just happens to be there’; thus Bataille hangs human existence and experience on a contingency, on the necessity of chance. To return to the concerns with which we started, and to The Accursed Share, we can see that Bataille derives an ethics of political economy – ‘we’ should expend gloriously in order to avoid catastrophe – from what is essentially a phenomenological or ‘anti-phenomenological’ hyper-consciousness of the contingency of having one’s feet on the ground, the contingency of any foundation. Terrestrial supportedness, or having one’s feet on the ground, is recurrently relativized and dislocated as the basis not only of subjective certainty, but of morality and politics. Bataille’s critique of anthropomorphism and of restricted economies has its starting point in an embodied consciousness of the contingency of terrestrial grounding, and the imminent sensation of a fall, whether upwards or downwards, provoked by the extreme lucidity of a sovereignty without content. There is, nevertheless, a ledge, a hook. Despite the evocation of the decomposition of the subject in or with the incessant decomposition of nature, there is a precipice from which perhaps Bataille, and perhaps Bataille’s writing, proceeds, from which it is uttered, pronounced. What, where, is the ledge? One postulation would be that the subject sustains itself on this knife-edge as capable of perspective and of utterance, though not with the same upright posture and groundedness that for them would now be a distant memory. Rather, with a consciousness of the immanence of a fall, and of the contingency of this ledge, this hook, here, now. Bataille steps back from immersion, maintains the subject on its ledge, suspended …

Notes Georges Bataille, ‘L’Économie à la mesure de l’univers’, in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard, 1976, 9–16. 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Unsacrificeable’. Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 38. 3 Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche. London: Bloomsbury, 2004, 183. 4 Geoff Bennington, ‘Introduction to Economics 1: Because the World is Round’, in Writing the Sacred, ed. C. Gill. London: Routledge, 1995, 49. 5 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 11, 23. 6 Bennington, ‘Introduction to Economics 1’, 49. 7 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 23. 8 Ibid., 29 n.5. 1



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9 Ibid., 23–4. 10 Ibid., 189. 11 Ibid. 12 Georges Bataille, ‘Le Paysage’. Verve 1 (3) (June 1938) and in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970, 521–2. The translation to which I refer in this chapter is my own. 13 See La Haine de la poésie (The Hatred of Poetry), the initial title of the book subsequently published as The Impossible. San Francisco: City Lights, 1992. 14 See Patrick ffrench, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community. Oxford: Legenda, 2007 for an account of this moment. 15 Bataille’s contributions to Verve include ‘Chevelures’ and ‘Van Gogh Promethée’ (1 [December 1937]); ‘Corps célestes’ (2 [April 1938] – partially revised in ‘La Limite de l’utile’, an early draft of The Accursed Share); ‘Le Paysage’; ‘La Chance’ (4 [November 1938]). 16 Georges Didi-Huberman, Le Gai savoir ou la resemblance des formes. Paris: Macula, 1995; Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. 17 A further distinction is to be found in the influence of an important intertext (although one should hesitate to use such a term to designate a relationship as integral and irreducible as that between Bataillle and Nietzsche, as if to reduce it to a question of textual continguity; Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ has a more appropriate affective stress). The period of the mid- to late 1930s in which these essays were published coincides with Bataille’s first sustained engagement with the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra, both formally and philosophically, in the review Acéphale. For reasons of space I will not delve further here into the relations between Bataille and Nietzsche, which are nevertheless prevalent in this text, specifically in the reference to the Engadine, the region of Switzerland where Nietzsche composed Thus Spake Zarathustra. 18 Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Adieu’, in Une Saison en enfer: ‘je suis rendu au sol, avec un devoir à chercher, et la réalité ruguese à étreindre’ [I am returned to the soil, with a job to find, and rough reality to embrace]. 19 Cf. Bataille’s (posthumous) essay ‘The “Old Mole” and the prefix “sur” in the words Surhomme and Surrealist’, in his Visions of Excess. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 32–44. 20 Georges Bataille, ‘Le Paysage’ in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1, 521–22. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 A chapter of The Blue of Noon and an unpublished text from the same period, from which it is partly drawn, have the title ‘Les Présages’, translated as ‘The Evil Omen’. See Georges Bataille, The Blue of Noon. London: Penguin, 2001, 17–28. 24 Bataille, ‘Le Paysage’, 521–2.

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25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Au lecteur’, in Les Fleurs du mal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. The poem ends with the lines ‘Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat / Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère’ [You know it, reader, this delicate monster / hypocrite reader, my fellow, my brother]. 33 Bataille, ‘Le Paysage’, 521–2. 34 See Bataille, Visions of Excess, 10–14, 31. 35 Bataille, ‘Le Paysage’, 521–2. 36 Bataille, The Blue of Noon, 99. 37 Ibid. 38 For an extensive account of Bataille’s version of the ‘fall’, see Laurent Jenny, L’Expérience de la chute: de Montaigne à Michaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.

Bibliography Bataille, Georges, ‘Le Paysage’. Verve 1 (3) (June 1938) and in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Bataille, Georges, ‘L’Économie à la mesure de l’univers’, in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share: Volume I. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bataille, Georges, The Impossible. San Francisco: City Lights, 1992. Bataille, Georges, The Blue of Noon. London: Penguin, 2001. Bataille, Georges, On Nietzsche. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du mal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Bennington, Geoff, ‘Introduction to Economics 1: Because the World is Round’, in Writing the Sacred, ed. C. Gill. London: Routledge, 1995. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Le Gai savoir ou la resemblance des formes. Paris: Macula, 1995. ffrench, Patrick, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community. Oxford: Legenda, 2007. Jenny, Laurent, L’Expérience de la chute: de Montaigne à Michaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.



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Krauss, Rosalind and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘The Unsacrificeable’. Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 20–38. Rimbaud, Arthur, Collected Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Bataille and the Left Pole of the Sacred William Pawlett

Sacred things are constituted by an operation of loss.1 [T]he sacred announces a new possibility: it is a leap into the unknown, with animality as its impetus … the force of a movement, which repression increased ten-fold, projected life into a richer world.2 Man feels a kind of impotent horror in the presence of the sacred. This horror is ambiguous. Undoubtedly, what is sacred attracts and possesses an incomparable value, but at the same time it appears vertiginously dangerous for that clear and profane world where mankind situates its privileged domain.3

Introduction This paper examines Bataille’s notion of the impure ‘left pole’ of the sacred (le sacré impur, le sacré néfaste) and particularly the tensions inherent within the sacred between its pure and impure dimensions. The first section of the paper traces the emergence of the notion of the left pole of the sacred in Bataille’s work, focusing on the themes of ambivalence and the relationship to taboo, horror and death that are central to the left pole of the sacred. I discuss key influences on Bataille’s thought on the sacred and challenge some critiques of his position. The second section examines the relationship between the right and left poles or ‘charges’ of the sacred through the themes of death and mourning, and also looks at the wider processes of sacralization and profanation in modernity.4 Bataille follows Durkheim, and also Robert Hertz (a leading Durkheimian scholar before his early death in World War I), in theorizing the sacred as a dual and internally divided or ambivalent category. The sacred, in this view, consists

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of a dynamic and inherently unstable or ‘contagious’ force that revolves around left and right poles or charges. Left and right poles or charges of the sacred, though in tension with each other, are both segregated from the profane realm, the world of everyday objects, in particular objects associated with labour, production and economic exchange. The movements and relations between left and right poles of the sacred have been discussed in French sociology5 and will be examined in the next section. The contention that the sacred is characterized by ambivalence, consisting in both ‘pure’ benevolent tendencies and ‘impure’ malevolent energies, has an established intellectual lineage. The notion of an ambivalence or polarity within the sacred appears in late nineteenth-century social anthropology and studies of folklore; it is discussed at length in William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1898) and later developed by Durkheim in his masterpiece The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]). Yet, the notion of an impure or left sacred has been neglected in recent years. Specifically, the notion that the sacred contains within it a sense of horror, misery and explosive violence is seen as unpalatable and as, potentially, culturally divisive. There are then both intellectual and political reasons for this neglect or disavowal of the left pole of the sacred. Current theories and methodologies prefer to emphasize the ‘diversity’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘positivity’ of social phenomena; negativity, violence and destructiveness are barred or silenced in many strands of contemporary theory, as Noys6 shows convincingly. Further, thinkers working with these assumptions of ‘diversity’ and ‘hybridity’ continue to conflate radical duality – found in the work of Durkheim, Mauss, Bataille and others – with thinking in terms of binary oppositions.7 The failure to distinguish duality from binary opposition is widespread, and for writers who dismiss Bataille’s writing on the sacred and religion this failure is, in part, a failure to understand the intellectual genealogy of Bataille’s notion of the sacred. For example, writers in cultural sociology and the sociology of religion have suggested that viewing the sacred in terms of left and right, or pure and impure, poles is simplistic, binary and also somehow ‘mystical’, and, further, that it cannot account for the diversity of religious practice in a multi-cultural and multi-mediated age.8 Notions of diversity and hybridity chime well with Neoliberalism and its partner-in-crime left-liberalism: ‘diversity’ and ‘hybridity’ work to assimilate radical otherness into a system of commercially marketable ‘differences’, which can also be deployed as evidence of cultural ‘tolerance’. The notion that religion might be more than simply a ‘culture’ or system of beliefs – preferably available to all in a globalized spiritual marketplace – that religion



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might harbour within it a principle of impurity, contagion and destructiveness that won’t simply go away is utterly intolerable to the Western liberal notion of toleration. Against the grain, I will argue that neither the sacred and profane distinction nor the division between left and right poles are ‘binary’, and that Bataille’s writings on the sacred draw out volatile and contingent movements between pure and impure sacred and between sacred and profane. Indeed, Bataille confronts the intensity of the sacred, and of religious sentiments, in ways that recent cultural sociological accounts of religion cannot. In the post-9/11 world, where the strength of religious sentiments and the intimate relations of the sacred to horror and sacrificial violence – dimensions of the impure, left pole of the sacred – are highly visible, the ‘cultural’ conception of the sacred in some strands of contemporary thought begins to look puerile or even obfuscatory. Bataille’s thought on the sacred has long been regarded with suspicion, particularly by those with strong ideological attachments to liberal, left-liberal and also Marxist paradigms. Bataille’s approach to religion and the ‘inner experience’ of the sacred was challenged by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s.9 Vague and unsubstantiated suggestions that Bataille’s understanding of the sacred is somehow reactionary, perhaps even complicit with Fascism, or at least not compatible with progressive left-wing thinking, continue to circulate; the accusation of Fascism has been effectively countered.10 It is the case that Bataille’s ideas are not compatible with a left-liberalism or a Marxist economic determinism, but it is a gross misreading to suggest that his thinking on the sacred is somehow fascistic. Indeed, as we will see below, aspects of the impure left pole of the sacred are banished from monarchic, capitalist and fascistic notions of sovereignty as a condition of their existence. In other words, the left pole of the sacred constitutes a challenge to monarchic and fascist social structures.11

The development of Bataille’s notion of the left pole of the sacred Though clearly driven to confront the nature of the sacred by traumatic life experiences, particularly the death of the father he abandoned, the death of his mother in 1930 and of his lover Laure (Collette Peignot) in 1938, Bataille developed his understanding of the sacred by engaging with a wide range of intellectual sources. Particularly important is the influence of Emile Durkheim’s

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Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995 [1912]) and Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift (1990 [1924–25]). Following Durkheim and Mauss, Bataille understands the sacred as a force of expenditure, of loss and of excess, in contrast to the realm of the profane, which is characterized by sobriety, work and duration. Bataille also follows the Durkheimian school in thinking of the relationship between sacred and profane as a dynamic process of alternation: of radical negation and intense affirmation. For Durkheim, sacred and profane are not oppositions, but rather are two worlds, worlds that must be kept apart from each other: ‘two worlds with nothing in common’.12 Durkheim is clear that the sacred is dual and that it includes impure or malignant powers that must be ‘set aside’ or prohibited just as are the ‘holy’ or beneficent aspects of the sacred. Indeed, ‘there actually is a certain horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense; and the fear inspired by malignant powers is not without a certain reverential quality … [a]n impure thing or evil power often becomes a holy thing or a tutelary power – and vice versa – without changing nature, but simply through a change in external circumstances’. So the sacred can sanctify, purify or expiate, but it can also pollute, defile and destroy; further ‘the pure can contaminate while the impure sometimes sanctifies’.13 Menstrual blood is one of Durkheim’s examples (and is also discussed by Bataille14) of an impure and prohibited substance that, in certain conditions, has the power to purify and heal – that is, the impure sacred can be used as a weapon against illness and defilement, as well as sometimes being the cause of defilement. There is no law of non-contradiction here, or of binary oppositions, but a rich and complex web of ambivalence, alternation and duality. Since for Durkheim sacred things are, most fundamentally, that which is ‘set aside’, sacred things cannot be said to be in ‘opposition’, still less binary opposition, to anything external to themselves (Durkheim 1995). The definition of the sacred as ‘set aside’ is often lost or fudged in recent cultural and sociological studies of the sacred.15 The sacred is not simply radically other to the profane, but is radically other to itself and within itself – in other words, it is fundamentally ambivalent. Bataille follows Durkheim on this crucial point, though he does not accept all aspects of Durkheimian thought and method by any means.16 Though the sacred is seen by Robert Hertz17 and others as divided into two poles, the left pole entailing repulsion, impurity and malevolence, the right pole attraction, purity and benevolence, this remains, for Bataille, a perspective from the profane world. Inside the realm of the sacred, Bataille



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asserts, each object has a left and a right charge and the charges are radically unstable. Bataille was also strongly influenced by the ethnographic studies conducted by his friends Michel Leiris and Alfred Métraux, both of whom worked within a broadly Durkheimian perspective. Métraux’s work Voodoo in Haiti influenced Bataille’s study Erotism and it describes the public humiliation of Vodou practitioners inflicted by the colonial powers in order to strip them of their sacred aura.18 For example, Mambos, or high priestesses, had their heads shaved in public and were mocked when they failed to summon their spirits to resist this humiliation (Métraux 1972 [1959]). This is an example of profanation issuing from beyond a religious system, a form of profanation designed to eliminate the sacred. I return to this process of profanation in the final section below.19 Far more than any of those who influenced his thought, Bataille emphasizes the sheer violence of the sacred in its radical dual or doubled negation of the profane world.20 For Bataille, the sacred erupts or rips through the profane and suspends it; it exposes the structures and routines of the profane world – order, duration and discursive reason – as ‘lies’. Yet the profane world, based on a system of taboos or prohibitions, had negated nature and animality, indeed had negated ‘the world’, so allowing human civilization to develop.21 By suspending the profane the sacred does not contaminate the profane, and this allows profane life to return with renewed, collective vitality after sacred or sacrificial activities are completed. For Bataille, then, the intense, volatile force of the sacred is a great danger to the profane: it is not simply that the profane might intrude on the sacred and bring about profanation, but also that the sacred might contaminate the profane creating an unstable sacralization, in some contexts akin to magic.22 The profane realm is itself a religious category, defined through the sacred, and not a non-religious, secular or legal one. Bataille describes the prohibitions of the profane realm as ‘a backward step without which no one could not leap so far’. In The Accursed Share: Volume II, Bataille writes of ‘negation and return … this dual movement does not even involve distinct phases’.23 The sacred is then a violent force of double or dual negation, a force of violation, yet one that anticipates the return of profane time, which itself anticipates the return of ‘the sacred instant’.24 The sacred violates the taboos that found the profane world, and it plunges into nature and animality as tabooed or cursed, transforming them into ‘miraculous’ forces. The bursting forth of the sacred reveals that taboos exist not only to protect the profane world, but also to give the sacred the multiplied force of violation. The sacred is indeed as close to ‘nature’ as it is to ‘culture’, but not in

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the banal contemporary sense of a network or hybrid of ‘nature–culture’. Rather, the sacred is ‘nature’ or life at its greatest intensity: banned, prohibited and so immeasurably intensified in its desirability; it is not nature absorbed into culture to become productive, but nature veiled, nature made seductive and repulsive in a dynamism without distinct terms or phases since discursive ordering can only emerge in the profane realm. Transgression does not merely restore, fleetingly, that which was prohibited. There are elements of prohibition so fundamental, so ‘radically negative’ that they are not subject to religious coding, thus human excrement is not even considered taboo, but as merely ‘animal’.25 On this point Bataille rejects Hegelian dialectics, in particular Hegel’s understanding of the emergence of the ‘consummate religion’ of Christianity as pure reason and truth, achieved through the dialectical subsumption of all other religious traditions.26 Bataille’s general economic approach seeks to include the fundamentals of all religious traditions without imposing a hierarchy or teleology upon them, though occasionally he will refer to Christianity as the ‘least religious’ of religions.27 The ‘truth’ of religion for Bataille is its ability to suspend the necessary but stifling alienation enforced by the profane, to dissolve the human enslavement to discourse and to rational truths, and to plunge being into inexpressible ecstasy and oblivion. Misery, horror and death become springboards to ecstatic transformation. However, Bataille acknowledges his debt to Hegel, often emphatically.28 Bataille’s essay ‘Gnosticism and Base Materialism’ plays an important role in the development of his position on the sacred, and particularly the inassimilability of the sacred to social, or even religious, norms and principles.29 Gnosticism, Bataille argues, does not posit hierarchies (still less ‘oppositions’) of good and evil or of elevated and base; it presents a mythology of subversion, overthrowing, and so expresses ‘a nauseating, inadmissible pessimism’: this world is corrupt and must be rejected. For Bataille, Gnostic religion supports his wider assertion that the sacred and religion are not intrinsically tied to the service of ‘social necessities’ – the maintenance of order, power and the state. Bataille departs from Durkheim on this point. For Durkheim, the impure sacred is a necessary component of any society, because all societies will suffer losses, failures and reversals. Society must symbolize and so incorporate threats, dangers and horrors; it must know of ways to process these calamities and it does so by bringing its people together for intense collective rituals of healing and re-affirmation.30 Yet Bataille opens up a space between the sacred and society in which the left pole plays a crucial role; it is the right pole of the sacred that sanctifies and legitimates social power. The sacred is not only the



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symbolic worship of society’s power over individuals, as Durkheim suggests. The movement from left to right poles is logically and temporally prior to, and constitutive of, the emergence of ‘society’. Society is built upon the stabilizing, attractive forces of the right pole; the left charge is a formless energy that oozes and swarms under the foundation stones of the social order. Most thinkers on the sacred emphasize that the sacred needs to be protected from the profane.31 For Bataille it is the profane that needs protection from the sacred, particularly the left pole of the sacred. The profane world cannot survive contact with the left pole of the sacred: it is shattered or suspended, exposed as a lie and a prison. The right pole of the sacred – hierarchy, the symbols and architectural edifice of religion – are weakened or even destroyed by profanation. Yet the left pole of the sacred survives contact with the profane, though it may well undergo transformation, for example becoming identified with evil, magic, filth or the abject.32 In modernity, the ‘homogeneous realm’ of society – its productive and instrumental capacities – is separated from the immediacy of sacralization, and also, increasingly, from an understanding of itself as profane. A world dominated by productive and economic values is unable to supply any foundations for its existence and so must draw, selectively, upon the sacred to achieve some semblance of a foundation. In doing so the productive, homogeneous world must confront both left and right poles of the sacred. The transformation of left charges of the sacred into right charges is central to Bataille’s enquiries into the sacred conducted within the College of Sociology.

The left pole of the sacred and the College of Sociology The College of Sociology was formed by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Pierre Klossowski with the aim of studying the sacred as the most ‘active’, ‘total’ and vital expression of collective life. It sought to develop a ‘sacred Sociology’, not merely a contribution to the sociology of religion, since the sacred was conceived by the collegians as a force that impacted being, subjectivity and creativity at the deepest levels, not as a circumscribed topic or object for enquiry. Further, the sacred was studied not only to gain a better understanding of it, but to re-invigorate it as a force in modernity with Bataille himself as both sorcerer’s apprentice and as volunteer sacrificial victim.33 It is the left pole of the sacred that is vital to this re-invigoration. Bataille argued that what distinguishes human societies from animal societies

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is ‘a set of objects, places, beliefs, persons and practices that have a sacred character, all of which belong to one group and not another’.34 The sacred then marks all aspects of life in a given group, and yet is also fantastically arbitrary, since other groups generate quite distinct sacred objects and practices. The sacred is the ‘nucleus’ or ‘generative core’ of society; it does not simply reflect or symbolize the core values and beliefs of a particular society, thereby providing stability or cohesion, but, for Bataille, actually generates and sustains the conditions whereby society can be said to exist. More specifically, without the alternating force of the left and right charges of the sacred, society, or collective life, would not endure; it would be so ravaged by death, terror and lust – a contagion of violence – that lasting structures would not develop. For Bataille the sacred consists not only of a force of social attraction and bonding, but more fundamentally a force of repulsion: The social nucleus is, in fact, taboo, that is to say untouchable and unspeakable … early human beings were brought together by disgust and by common terror, by an insurmountable horror focussed precisely on what was the central attraction of their union.35

The ‘sacred nucleus’ of a society is not the same thing as its foundation. The foundations of society are the major taboos or prohibitions that enable work and production to take place: the edifice of human civilization is built on these foundations. Yet taboos or prohibitions are not simply blocks or barriers against horror, violence and death – they are reversible pathways and lead humans away from violence in profane time, and they lead into the tumult of violence during the time of the ‘sacred instant’. For Bataille, human beings are bound together by terror, not guilt at the primordial crime of the murder of the ‘alpha ape’, as evoked in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (orig. 1912), but terror of themselves, terror of the universe, terror of a world to which they no longer belong. It is important to emphasize that ‘taboo’ in Bataille’s sense is not simply a conventional or normative injunction. It does not simply protect order, that which the powerful – kings or priests – require to symbolize and legitimate their power, but has a special relationship to horror, death and contagion. Taboos do not silence horror, but give to horror a place of silence. For example, the incest taboo does not simply ban certain types of sexual relations within a group; rather, it ensures the circulation of ‘sacred objects’ – in this case, women. A family, clan or tribe gives its young women as gifts – in Mauss’s sense – in order to receive in turn women from outside their group. Bataille insists, ‘There is more intense communication in exchange based on generosity than there



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would be in immediate gratification.’36 In other words, the incest taboo intensifies eroticism and adds the dynamic of alternation of left and right poles; the wedding night is a sacred ‘orgy’ where the incest taboo is transgressed via a sacred object that moves from outside the group to inside, from licit to illicit, from right charge to left charge. Taboos do not suppress that which threatens, horrifies or terrifies, but mark the place of horror and provide a channel through the experience of horror by means of organized, ritual transgressions. ‘Terror’, in this sense, is not a position in a cultural system of classification, as Douglas suggests,37 but it is that which must be banished before classification becomes possible. However, classifications can operate only if what is banished is allowed, occasionally, to return. Otherwise, the system of classification would become permanently and irredeemably vulnerable to that which it has pushed outside itself. But what is the ultimate source of horror? What is it that taboos prohibit? For Bataille, the major taboos do not bear on sex and death exactly, but more precisely upon menstrual blood and the sight of the putrefaction of the human corpse: the origin and the destiny of human embodiment. In Bataille’s words, ‘we have no greater aversion than the aversion we feel toward those unstable, fetid and lukewarm substances where life ferments ignobly, [they] make our hearts sink and turn our stomachs’.38 These aversions are not necessarily the subject of specific religious injunctions, yet they are the ultimate source of the apprehension of the sacred. It is not that these formless substances cannot or must not be seen, indeed they will be seen often, but that they cannot be viewed with indifference – they embody an unmanageable collision of life and death, they inspire awe, wonder, terror and, for Bataille, they generate collective existence: if human relations stop passing through this middle term, this nucleus of violent silence, they are emptied of their human character … I believe that nothing is more important for us than that we recognise that we are bound and sworn to that which horrifies us most, that which provokes our most intense disgust.39

The sacred, in demanding both observance and, on occasions, the ritual transgression of its taboos, creates and channels an intense collective energy consisting in the violent and unpredictable alternation of attraction and repulsion: that which inspires awe and marvel also provokes terror and ‘dread’. This collective energy is all the more intense and volatile because it does not depend solely on attraction and association; attraction is the stronger because it responds to repulsion, and repulsion is magnified as a force which threatens

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attraction, yet is inseparable from it. The primary force of the sacred, for Bataille, is not its authority, or the protection offered by the right pole – it is its suspension of the routines of everyday life and individual selfhood and the plunge into the repulsive forces of death, blood and matter (encapsulated by its left pole) in order to renew the attractive forces of life, fecundity and joy. Indeed, ultimately joy cannot be separated from death, as fecundity cannot be separated from base matter.40 Societies grow around a ‘central nucleus … the place where the left sacred is transformed into the right sacred, the object of repulsion into an object of attraction, and depression into stimulation’.41 So the ‘central nucleus’ consists in the collective transformation of sensations of fear, horror and repulsion – the left pole of the sacred – into the structured, hierarchical and positive communal sentiments associated with the right pole. This seems to give the left pole a logical priority: for the sacred to be able to transform distress and misery into joy and exaltation, to seize life from the grip of death, its core or nucleus seems to consist, fundamentally, in the left pole or charge. Yet the left charge immediately implies a passage to the right. The sacred gathers and intensifies horror through the constraining action of the taboo, but it does so the better to suddenly transform horror and misery into exuberance and joy. Indeed, the left pole of the sacred is that which is most ‘immediately taboo’ and it is also that which is released as the force of transgression suspends the taboo and the profane world that is gathered around it. Society cannot endure without the stabilizing right pole of the sacred, but it cannot energize, inspire or alter the individuals who make up a society without the actions of the left pole. Ultimately, we might say attraction repels and repulsion attracts, or more specifically attraction attracts by drawing upon and channelling the force of repulsion, its power accelerated immeasurably by the dynamic of alternation, of the seemingly magical transformation of despondency and despair into ecstasy, abandon and awe. The left and right poles are a fundamental duality or polarity feeding and energizing each other. Yet, left and right poles are also inseparable; they are not binary oppositions because each term of an opposition – for example, male/female, good/evil, true/false, right/wrong – issues from the profane sphere. Logical oppositions and discursive constructions develop within the profane world and have no currency within the realm of the sacred. The sacred sphere, divided yet charged by left and right poles, is heterogeneous or radically other to the ordered, systemic oppositions that structure the profane sphere of society.



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Death, mourning and the left pole of the sacred The left pole can be sensed, Bataille suggests, through ‘the region of oppressed silence that falls around the dead’. However, the poles or charges do not float apart, nor do they solidify or reconcile into structures or moral entities: ‘inside the domain [of the sacred] each object has a left and right side … it must be added that the relatively right or left side of a given object is mobile: It varies in the course of ritual practices’.42 For example, even the most intense ‘left pole’ horror of a putrefying corpse will, in time, as the fleshy matter falls away, lose its demoralizing aspect, eventually gaining a place within the ‘right pole’ as the bone of an ancestor. Mourning rites are a major example of the actions of the left pole or charge of the sacred. Bataille offers an example of the movements between left and right poles that is characteristically Catholic: a village church, a place of occasional celebration with weddings and baptisms, is, simultaneously, a place of ‘solemn repulsion’ with ‘the power to attract corpses’.43 The bodies of the deceased carry a great force of sacred repulsion even as the bereaved family gather to affirm their remaining strength in numbers. That is to say, funeral rites do not have the power to make the corpse any less repulsive or horrific, nor do they aim to do so. The funeral rite consists in attracting family or clan members to a site where repulsion is confronted as repulsion, and through this confrontation the horror of death (which separates) is transformed by the occasion into a force which binds and strengthens. Weeping at funerals, Bataille insists, occurs because of this dramatic transformation of misery into joy: death reveals life, and life, when revealed by death, is experienced as joy. If, in the language of modern therapeutics, the taboo on death could be overcome and we could all learn to ‘accept’ death and bereavement, the force of repulsion and reciprocally the force of attraction would be diminished with a loss in the strength or vitality of the social group. To assert that death is a ‘natural’ part of life is still to subsume death within life. Indeed, despite the frequent protestations from members of the counselling and therapeutic industries that we still need to work on ‘breaking’ the taboo on death, such thinking has already succeeded in weakening social bonds to perilously low levels and in fostering a sense that death is meaningless. And if death is considered meaningless, the absence of meaning must rebound on what is now understood as the binary accompaniment of death – that is, meaningless life. Nevertheless, even today, not to attend the funeral of a close family member remains close to being taboo in Bataille’s sense – it is almost unthinkable, demeaning to the

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individual who refuses to share in collective expression, and producing a ‘taint’ that cannot be rationalized away. The operation of the sacred in Bataille’s account is not reducible to persons, such as priests, nor to belief systems, institutions or ritual practices; the energies of the left pole can only be stabilized, temporarily, through the actions of the right pole of the sacred. The central nucleus of society is ‘mobile and diffuse’; it does not require a nation-state or geopolitical boundaries in order to function. Yet, Bataille is clear, the sacred, in the sense in which he theorizes it, is waning. While organized or state-sanctioned religions tend to weaken, domesticate or, for Bataille, ‘betray’ the operation of the left pole, it remains visible in Christianity, for example, in the open wounds of Christ (deleted by many Protestant sects but visible in most Catholicism) and in the unquestionably divine yet impure figure of Satan. In religions sometimes viewed as polytheistic there are gods of destruction, discord and death; the Hindu goddess Kali is discussed by Bataille in Documents.44 Kali, meaning the black one, is, Bataille claims, the goddess of  ‘terror, of destruction, of night and of chaos … of cholera, of cemeteries, of thieves and prostitutes’. She attracts blood sacrifices: goats in Calcutta, buffalo in Nepal, and, importantly for Bataille’s understanding of the sacred, as recently as the early nineteenth century (according to Bataille’s source, Sylvain Levi) ‘two men of high rank were still immolated every twelve years: they were made drunk, their heads sliced off and the jet of blood directed onto the idols’.45 Whatever the veracity of these anthropological accounts, the figure of Kali supports Bataille’s assertion concerning the free reign of sacred violence, violence that stops at nothing, which recognizes no limits. Kali is often depicted dancing on the corpse of her husband, Shiva: according to legend, Kali attacked and destroyed a giant by decapitating him. Rising to a state of frenzied exaltation, fuelled by drinking the giant’s blood, she fails to recognize her husband approaching and in an ecstatic victory dance tramples him to death. Kali can be seen as a goddess of the left pole – in her exuberance, she accidentally kills the great God Shiva: the right charge of victory and celebration suddenly switches to a left charge of chaos and death. Shiva is the God of creation and destruction, of the great and cruel balance of cosmological forces; Kali has no interest in balancing acts – she deals in pure destruction, protecting only the most lowly and accursed. Such untrammelled sacred violence has immense power to terrify, inspire and bind together worshippers. Yet the volatility and unrestricted nature of such experiences, even shared vicariously, is dangerous to the powerful. The rulers of city-states sought to narrow and focus such volatile energies to achieve



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a workable balance between the sacred and profane, between the heterogeneous and the homogeneous, and they achieved this by electing a permanent priesthood. This social authority, in time, produces a further narrowing of the sacred into the single, supreme entity, the God of theology and philosophy who, for Bataille, ‘represents the most profound introjection of the structure characteristic of homogeneity into heterogeneous existence’.46 The left pole of the sacred is jettisoned or expelled, demonized and finally projected into the profane realm.47 The profane realm then comes to be divided between the mundane and the abject or filthy: excrement, suppuration, all intimations of death. Yet even in hyper-modernity the profane sphere never becomes entirely mundane or quotidian. The meaning of death, in both the profane and sacred worlds, is key to following Bataille’s argument on the nature of sacrifice. For Bataille the profane world is dependent upon duration, upon the imposition of linear time: The world of things has duration as its foundation: no thing has a separate existence, has a meaning, unless a subsequent time is posited, in view of which it is constituted as an object … Future time constitutes this real world to such a degree that death no longer has a place in it.48

So, it is a mistake to think that religion is built upon a denial of the ‘reality’ of death. Rather, Bataille suggests, ‘reality’ – as a system that confines human experience – cannot accept that life is not a thing, and it is not a thing precisely because of death. Indeed, ‘reality’ has no place for life or death, but only duration and thinghood, which stifle both life and death: ‘The real order does not so much reject the negation of life that is death as it rejects the affirmation of intimate life, whose measureless violence is a danger to the stability of things, an affirmation that is fully revealed in death.’49 Life, in Bataille’s sense, cannot be said to be a property of the individual; only existence imprisoned by duration can be understood as a property, or as capital. Yet, the system of ‘reality’ ‘cannot prevent life’s disappearance in death from revealing the invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing’.50 Death then is not the end-point of the thing ‘life’, a part that must be ‘accepted’ as a natural part of the ‘lifecourse’, as counselling discourse would have it. Death is not the completion of the final phase of life; it is the partner of life, it is what makes life life. Sacrifice is an intensely escalated, dramatized moment where life’s ‘invisible brilliance’ is revealed through death.

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Modernity and the transformation of the left pole of the sacred Bataille is clear that religion, as a social institution dedicated to excess – an institution enabling the expenditure, consummation and expulsion of excess energy and wealth (the accursed share) – is compromised by serving the state. Religious devotion, from mourning to fasting to festive celebration, demands vast quantities of physical and emotional energy from worshippers. Priests and shamans are often required to exhaust themselves in performing sacred rituals or to fast until close to death. Sacrifice and feasting constitute a holocaust of waste and loss: animals, and sometimes human beings, that could provide years of productive service are immolated in spectacular and horrifying moments. Even in its institutionalized, domesticated forms, religion creates a space to shatter profane existence, leading worshippers into anguish and horror, alternating wildly with joy and ecstasy. The heterogeneous and volatile left pole force of the sacred resists the reduction of institutional religion to a tool for ‘individual consolation’ and ‘social cohesion’, and for this reason Bataille draws a parallel between the left pole of the sacred and radical left politics.51 Yet, Bataille is also clear that religion has always sought to ‘regulate’ rather than simply ‘satisfy’, and the accursed share is channelled to the benefit of the priesthood, and to the founding of social hierarchies. In time: religions bring about a profound separation within the sacred domain, dividing it into a superior world (celestial and divine) and an inferior world (demoniacal, a world of decomposition); now such a division necessarily leads to a progressive homogeneity of the entire superior domain (only the inferior domain resists all efforts at appropriation). God rapidly and almost entirely loses his terrifying features, his appearance as a decomposing cadaver, in order to become, at the final stage of degradation, the simple (paternal) sign of universal homogeneity.52

All major ‘world religions’ are caught up in this ‘progressive homogeneity’. Religions as social and state institutions built around systems of prohibitions provide only a ‘partial freedom’.53 That is, religious systems only partially recognize (and also exploit) what Bataille understands as a collective human need for violent expenditures and destructive renewal. In time, the extremities of both left and right poles, or charges – the most repulsive and the most attractive – are curtailed, the intensity of movements between them reduced to a de-vitalized, sublimated or symbolic belief system. The intensity of communal attraction, joy and ecstatic revelry can be as threatening to the religious and



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state authorities as the intensity of suffering, horror and mourning: both prevent the operations of production and duration upon which the profane world depends. In capitalist modernity mourning tends to be reduced to attendance at a funeral, understood as a ‘psychological’ opportunity to grieve and ‘get over it’; marriage is reduced to a profane relationship, often legitimating gendered exploitation, and religion is reduced to the practices and garb of the right pole. In his 1929 essay ‘The Language of Flowers’, first published in Documents, Bataille defines evil as ‘a movement from high to low’.54 Bataille does not simply celebrate the low, base or evil, but insists on the relations and movement between high and low, divine and evil. Even ‘jettisoned’ the left pole – as evil, inassimilable or abject elements of the profane sphere – is mobile and contagious. As the left pole is restricted by being increasingly identified with the profane, reciprocally, the right pole is thereby restricted by being divorced from the left pole.55 Evil, for Bataille – the degenerated, abandoned or expelled left pole of the sacred – is not the opposite of Good, but that which confounds the ordered opposition of Good and Evil upon which Good is based. For Bataille, the notion of an ordered distinction between sacred and profane originates within the profane sphere of society, not from within the sacred. It is a distinction marked out by the profane sphere of society to protect and preserve it from the ravages of the sacred that ‘might destroy it’.56 The profane endures only by the erection of this boundary, without which work, order, exchange and duration (that is civilization) are impossible. While the sacred as general category needs to be protected from the profane, it seems that the left pole of the sacred does not. The left pole of the sacred does not need nor respect boundaries since it lives by contagion. Since the sacred is internally dual, even as the symbols of the right pole of the sacred are defiled by contact with the profane, the left pole of the sacred flares up in impurity – ‘the inferior domain resists all efforts at appropriation’;57 it has a special affinity with defilement and profanation, with blasphemy and obscenity. However, from Bataille’s general economic perspective, such abstractions as left and right must be resisted, even as the knowledge that such procedures enable is recognized and valued. It seems that Bataille’s approach is distinct in that it ultimately refuses to privilege one pole or term over the other. The attempt to think both together is a task Bataille considers to be ‘what is hardest to comprehend, but at the same time it is the most familiar thing’.58 Indeed Bataille generally writes of the sacred without distinguishing between the left and right poles. Bataille’s general economic approach, of course, seeks much more than a historical schematic of shifts in the relations of sacred and profane.59 For Bataille

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abstraction is always the enemy. Within the general economic perspective the dividing line between the left and right poles, between purity and impurity, is also a joining, a space where the left pole and the right pole are affirmed: as holy words are spoken or recorded they fall empty and meaningless into the void or silence of the left pole; as the left pole burns and consumes it provides the only possible inspiration for the edifice of the right pole. The relationship between the poles or charges of the sacred is not a dialectical one; it is dual, reversible and non-accumulative. The charges of left and right poles alternate, and in Bataille’s reading expenditure or dépense occurs not in the movement between poles, but in the realm of the sacred as a whole. In this sense the right pole of the sacred is characterized by dépense, just as is the left pole. The sacred consists in these moving charges, in these detonations of accumulated energy.

Concluding comments Bataille’s writings on the sacred challenge the ‘cultural’ conception of religion that dominates thinking in much current sociology and in religious and cultural studies. The notion of the left pole of the sacred is vital to this challenge and to Bataille’s understanding of religion, society and political power. For Bataille all sacred things are constituted by expenditure and loss; they are accursed; each has both a left and right charge. The sacred is understood as dual or ambivalent, not as unitary, binary or monistic: the sacred is not the opposite of the profane, but that which confounds, explodes and lays waste the ordered opposition of sacred and profane upon which the profane is based. Disorder must be given its due. Taboos exist not only to protect the profane world, but also to give the sacred the multiplied force of violation. Yet all known, or studied, societies ‘betray’ the sacred, in Bataille’s sense. The sacred was never free from compromises with the profane sphere; the left pole was never fully unleashed from the right pole. Society and its religious institutions fail, just as politics and community must also fail. Today, unspeakability and horror are disguised through laughter, (post) ironic detachment and the inattention afforded by technology. Yet the sacred is unquestionably the most powerful force known to human societies, a power that cannot be contained by religious institutions, by ideological or legal repression, nor by the void of info-tainment. Who would sacrifice themselves for the sake of liberal democracy? For the sake of science and technology? For the sake of consumer freedoms?



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Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6 7

8

9

10

G. Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. A. Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 119. G. Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1991, 93. G. Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1989, 36. As the use of the term ‘poles’ seems too spatial, suggesting relatively fixed locations, I prefer left and right ‘charges’ of the sacred. However, where I refer directly to Bataille’s writing on the left sacred, I retain the term ‘left pole’. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995; Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964; Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone, 1990; Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001; Michèle Richman, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002. B. Noys, The Persistence of the Negative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity, 1987; Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 19–29; Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013, 3–4; Noys, The Persistence of the Negative. Jeff Alexander, ‘Toward a Sociology of Evil: Getting beyond Modernist Common Sense about the Alternative to “the Good”’, in Re-thinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. M. Lara. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001; Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World. See G. Bataille, The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, ed. and trans. Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001; Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 211–23; Alexander Nehamas, ‘The Attraction of Repulsion: The Deep and Ugly Thought of Georges Bataille’. The New Republic 201 (17) (October 1989): 31–6; Richard Wolin, ‘Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology’. Constellations 2 (3) (1996): 397–428; Tiina Arppe, ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentices and the “Will to Figuration”: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Collège de Sociologie’. Theory, Culture and Society 26 (4) (2008): 117–45 for suggestions that Bataille’s thought is reactionary or

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even fascistic; and M. Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso, 2002 and Richman, Sacred Revolutions for criticism of these positions. 11 See Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, in Visions of Excess, 137–60. 12 Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 36. 13 Ibid., 414, 415. 14 See Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume II, 63–5. 15 The approach of the Durkheimian school is quite distinct from other influential accounts of the nature of the sacred and religious experience that date from a similar period, such as William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (orig. 1902), Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (orig. 1917) and Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (orig. 1957). These studies adopt a psychological approach, seeking to understand the feelings associated with religion and the sacred. Each study examines the uniqueness of the sacred and its very pronounced difference from or opposition to the profane. More recently, Lynch’s The Sacred in the Modern World, a pallid account of the sacred, claims to jettison the weaknesses of Durkheimian thought, which he considers (wrongly) to be a binary account of sacred and profane. He also rejects Bataille, whom he accuses of mysticism, and he associates Bataille’s notion of the sacred with the universalizing pretensions of studies such as those of James, Otto and Eliade. In this manoeuvre the sacred is reduced to a mere ‘value’; indeed, the sacred is reduced to the right pole, to that which possesses, symbolizes or reinforces power or authority. A great strength of Bataille’s approach is to resist this domesticating approach to the sacred. He does not do this by locating a single, central or universal form of the sacred, as Lynch charges – on the contrary, Bataille examines multiple, unstable, dynamic and even inadmissible manifestations of the sacred in his theoretical, fictional and autobiographical writings. No other thinker seeks to fuse scholarly research on the sacred with the ‘inner’ experience of the sacred to the same extent as Bataille. 16 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 123; see also Bataille’s On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone. London: Athlone Press, 110 and his Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011, 235. 17 See Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham. London: Routledge, 1960. 18 In his fascinating study Voodoo in Haiti (trans. Hugo Charteris. New York: Schocken, 1972), Alfred Métraux argues that the syncretic religion of ‘voodoo’ (properly Vodou or Vodun) – a fusion of Catholicism and African religions practiced in Dahomey and Nigeria in the late seventeenth century when French slave traders arrived – survived colonial violence and suppression only to be finally undermined by global tourism as it was pressurized into becoming a commercialized spectacle of itself. This might be called a terminal profanation or



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elimination, a profanation so subtle and insidious that it prevents re-sacrilization by appearing to encourage the practice of Vodou. Métraux’s study also suggests that the left pole of the sacred need not be seen only as a vestige or survival of earlier more dynamic forms, but can also emerge as a response to new conditions, in the case of Vodou to colonial suppression in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 19 Three distinct forms of profanation can be specified: firstly, the profanation that results when the sacred – as general category – comes into contact with the profane; secondly, profanation resulting from the exposure of the sacred to forces outside of a religious community and its self-defined limits – such as colonial violence which seeks to profane the religious practices and symbolism of those it seeks to dominate; and thirdly, profanation/sacrilization as a volatile effect of the left pole of the sacred acting on or against the right pole of the sacred. I examine this third form in a reading of Bataille’s Story of the Eye in W. Pawlett, Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society. London: Routledge, 2015. 20 Bataille, ‘The Sacred’, in Visions of Excess, 240–5; The Accursed Share: Volume I, 45–61; Theory of Religion, 43–61. 21 This argument is made in Bataille’s Theory of Religion, 47. On the negation of ‘the world’ see Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 53. 22 See Mauss and Hubert’s A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain. London: Routledge, 1972. 23 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume II, 43, 77. 24 Bataille, ‘The Sacred’, in Visions of Excess, 241, emphasis in original. 25 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume II, 53. 26 G. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, trans. P. C. Hodgson et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 [1827]. 27 Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986, 32. 28 Ibid., 36 n.1; Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’, in On Bataille, ed. A. Stoekl. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, 9–28. 29 In Bataille, Visions of Excess, 45–52. Gnosticism is a religion with very close ties to Christianity, yet, according to Bataille, it gives a far freer rein to animality, baseness, monstrosity and evil – elements associated with the left pole of the sacred – than does Christianity. In Gnostic and Manichean religious dualism the sacred and the profane are understood as two worlds, not as an opposition within a single ‘real’ or objective world. Notions of a ‘real’ world derive from the profane world, and, for Bataille, such notions appear solid and meaningful only on condition that they are not exposed to the sacred. Notions of ‘reality’ are, in a sense, simply inappropriate or irrelevant when considering the sacred world. In Gnosticism Bataille finds the possibility of thinking about materiality in a spiritual way, indeed the ‘baseness’ of Bataille’s base materialism is developed

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through an engagement with Gnostic spiritualism. Gnosticism is, for Bataille, the most radical ‘subversion of the ideal’; it confronts evil, disorder and monstrosity as autonomous forces, not subject to dialectical sublation or resolution, that is, not merely as the opposite terms of good, order and normality. 30 Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 403–6. 31 See for example ibid., Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane and, more recently, Alexander, ‘Toward a Sociology of Evil’, 152–72. 32 See Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in his Visions of Excess, 116–29; Erotism, 117–28; Theory of Religion, 79–85. 33 This sacrifice did not take place – none of Bataille’s friends were willing to perform the act. 34 See Bataille’s lecture ‘Attraction and Repulsion 1’, in D. Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 106. 35 Ibid. 36 See Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume II 2, 43. 37 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. 38 See Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume II, 8. 39 Bataille’s lecture, ‘Attraction and Repulsion 2’, in Hollier, The College of Sociology, 114. 40 See Bataille, ‘The Practice of Joy before Death’, in ibid., 235–9. 41 Bataille, ‘Attraction and Repulsion 2’, in ibid., 122. 42 Ibid., 118, 121. 43 Ibid., 118. 44 See G. Bataille, M. Leiris, M. Griaule, C. Einstein and R. Desnos, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, trans. Iain White et al. London: Atlas, 1995, 54–5. 45 Ibid. 46 Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, in Visions of Excess, 153, emphasis in the original. 47 Bataille, Erotism, 121; Theory of Religion, 69–77. 48 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 46. 49 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 46–7. 50 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 47. 51 Bataille, in Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology 1937–39, 122. 52 Bataille, ‘The Use Value of D. A. F. De Sade’, in Visions of Excess, 96. 53 Ibid. 54 Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers’, in Visions of Excess, 13. 55 Bataille expands on the process by which Christianity identifies the left pole of the sacred with the profane sphere, archetypally through the expulsion of Satan



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from Heaven to earth, in Erotism, 117–28. Bataille does not elaborate on whether a similar process of the profanation of the left pole is evident in other religious traditions. Agamben, in his recent study of profanation (Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort. New York: Zone, 2007, 73–92), is quite right to argue that modernity is losing the ability to profanate, just as it loses the ability to sacralize – the duality is inseparable. 56 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume II, 214. 57 Bataille, ‘The Use Value of D. A. F. De Sade’, in Visions of Excess, 96. 58 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 111. 59 Even as Bataille engaged with sociological studies of religion, he brought a Hegelian/Kojèvian phenomenology of death to bear upon them. Without the phenomenological evocation of the lived confrontation with death, coming as close to death as one can in life through the experience of conflict, ‘rending’ and sacrifice, the social scientific studies of Mauss, Freud and others would fail to enflame the thinker, or force them to confront their being, and so would remain as discrete packages of knowledge.

Bibliography Agamben, G. Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort. New York: Zone, 2007. Alexander, J. ‘Toward a Sociology of Evil: Getting beyond Modernist Common Sense about the Alternative to “the Good”’, in Re-thinking Evil – Contemporary Perspectives, ed. M. Lara. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Arppe, T. ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentices and the “Will to Figuration”: The Ambiguous Heritage of the Collège de Sociologie’. Theory, Culture and Society 26 (4) (2009): 117–45. Bataille, G. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. A. Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bataille, G. Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Bataille, G. The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Bataille, G. Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1988. Bataille, G. Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley: New York: Zone Books, 1989. Bataille, G. The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bataille, G., M. Leiris, M. Griaule, C. Einstein and R. Desnos, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, trans. Iain White et al. London: Atlas, 1995. Bataille, G. The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, ed. and trans. Stuart Kendall. Minnapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

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Bataille, G. Guilty, trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011. Braidotti, R. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Caillois, R. Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Douglas, M. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge: London, 1996. Durkheim, E. Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields. New York: Free Press, 1995. Eliade, M. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harvest, 1959. Habermas, J. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity, 1987. Hegel, G. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, trans. P. C. Hodgson et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hertz, R. Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham. London: Routledge, 1960. Hubert, H. and M. Mauss. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Lynch, G. The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Mauss, M. and H. Hubert. A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain. London: Routledge, 1972. Métraux, A. Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris. New York: Schocken, 1972. Nehamas, A. ‘The Attraction of Repulsion: The Deep and Ugly Thought of Georges Bataille’. The New Republic 201 (17) (October 1989): 31–6. Noys, B. The Persistence of the Negative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Richman, M. Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Sartre, J.-P. Situations 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. Stoekl, A. (ed.). On Bataille. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Surya, M. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso, 2002. Vernant, J.-P. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone, 1990. Wolin, R. ‘Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology’. Constellations 2 (3) (1996): 397–428.

4

Making More (of Waste) Stuart Kendall

In a footnote to his short book Method of Meditation, Georges Bataille offered an almost impossibly brief account of the problem of loss, as envisioned from the perspective of general economy, the science of the circulation of energy that he was then still working to elaborate in his major work, The Accursed Share: ‘General economy makes evident in the first place that a surplus of energy is produced that, by definition, cannot be used. Excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest goal, consequently without any meaning. It is this useless, senseless loss that is sovereignty.’1 ‘Sovereignty’, he wrote elsewhere in the same note, ‘is in no way different from a limitless dissipation of the “wealth” of substance.’2 Loss in this compacted description refers to a useless, goalless, meaningless, senseless dissipation of the surplus or excess energy that is the wealth of any given substance. It is arguably the primary topic, the connecting thread, tying Bataille’s corpus together. Over the years, writing in a range of styles and registers, he will use other words to describe this loss: words like squandering, waste and expenditure. The processes that exemplify consumption and loss in the world go by other names as well: eating, sex, laughter, intoxication, poetry, gift, sacrifice and death are only some of the most widely recognized. Whatever its form, the problem of loss is the problem that must be confronted by human consciousness if the curse upon the accursed share is to be lifted.3 Lifting the curse entails nothing less than a reversal of values, the value of loss in particular. This presents a fundamental paradox since, by definition, loss cannot be understood as valuable, meaningful, beneficial, purposeful and so on and still remain loss. My purpose here will be to pick apart this paradox and graft its parts on to several trends in the contemporary discourse on sustainable design. In his essay ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, Bataille observed a ‘positive principle of loss’,4

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reflecting his understanding of the positive purpose of negativity, destruction and waste in both natural and cultural forms of expenditure. By contrast, in 1992, in ‘The Hannover Principles’, one of the most influential statements on the topic of sustainable design, William McDonough and Michael Braungart called for designers and consumers to ‘eliminate the concept of waste’.5 If waste is a necessity, as Bataille claims, and sustainable design requires us to eliminate waste, as McDonough and Braungart suggest, sustainable design is a hopelessly untenable human ambition. How might we reconcile these two thoughts? How can design be reconceived so that it might accommodate the psychological necessity of waste?6 * * * General economy is the name Bataille gives to the science that studies the circulation of energy in all of its forms. He borrows both the phrase and the approach from Friedrich Nietzsche, who developed it alongside his notion of will to power as a means of understanding all things, physical and psychological, from the atomic to the cosmic, in terms of the immanent disposition of forces.7 The fundamental gesture of general economic thought is to trace the flows of energy and material in the universe, a gesture that begins with base matter and proceeds through ever more complex arrangements of matter and energy, at ever larger scales, including but also surpassing human life, ultimately situating human life within cosmic cycles of the acquisition and disposition of energy. For Bataille’s purposes, all energy derives from the sun.8 General economy is thus first and foremost a solar economy: ‘Solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development … Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe.’9 In another short text from the same period, he situates human life within the circuit of solar exchange: ‘The green parts of the plants of land and sea endlessly implement the appropriation of an important part of the luminous energy of the sun. In this way light – sunlight – produces us, animates us, and engenders our excess. This excess, this animation, is the effect of this light (we are essentially only an effect of the sun).’10 In The Accursed Share, he offers another humbling view of human life related to the cycles and the circulation of energy: ‘Man is only a roundabout, subsidiary response to the problem of growth.’11 Human life, like all other life, is a product of energetic and material exchange in the universe, an ‘effect of the sun’ like many other effects; a ‘response to the problem of growth’ like many other responses to the problem of growth.



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In an early exercise in mythographic cosmology, The Solar Anus, Bataille took this thought a step further by offering a more delirious formulation: ‘I AM THE SUN.’12 If solar radiation is the source of life, human life – my life – is a moment in the life of the sun. This delirious affirmation is also an attempt at a delirious total identification with the sun. Such an attempt gains its pathos from its position, from its terrestrial origins. Human life is terrestrial life, bound to the earth, yet rising up toward the sun. The history of human life, and not just human life, has been circumscribed by the terms of this tense opposition, this impossible will to rise up from the earth toward the sun. To rise up from the earth is to reject it, to cast it down, both psychologically and physically. Many of our great religious and philosophical structures derive from the physical situation and orientation of human life. In his article ‘The Big Toe’, Bataille sketches a modern man, standing erect between the earth and the stars: The division of the universe into subterranean hell and perfectly pure heaven is an indelible conception, mud and darkness being the principles of evil as light and celestial space are the principles of good: with their feet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space. Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse – a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.13

The materiality of the earth is rejected; even the physical materiality of sunlight is forgotten in a human yearning for a form of imperishable, eternal life, free from the relentless circuits of exchange and expenditure. Bataille was almost singularly clear-eyed on this point: ‘Most materialists’, he wrote, ‘even though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist.’14 Bataille’s purpose, the purpose of general economy, was to overcome this forgetfulness, this rejection of materiality, and thereby propose a mode of vision in which human beings can perceive themselves as material, terrestrial beings, bound by the circulation of solar energies, but also capable of celebrating that fact. He shares this purpose with Nietzsche, who wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!’15 A passage from The Accursed Share is far more laconic on this same point: ‘Man’s disregard for the material basis of his life still causes him to err in a

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serious way.’16 The point in either case is to recognize and align oneself and one’s life with the material basis of all life. In his early unpublished essay ‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade’, Bataille insists upon the importance of developing a sense of ‘profound complicity with natural forces’, developing what he described as ‘a sadistic understanding of an incontestably thundering and torrential nature’.17 ‘Sadistic understanding’ is an understanding that derives from the thought of the Marquis de Sade. In Justine, Sade put these words in the mouth of one of his characters to explain murder as just another natural process: With regard to the crime of destroying one’s fellow, be persuaded, dear girl, it is purely hallucinatory; man has not been accorded the power to destroy; he has at best the capacity to alter forms, but lacks that required to annihilate them: well, every form is of equal worth in Nature’s view; nothing is lost in the immense melting pot where variations are wrought: all the material masses which fall into it spring incessantly forth in other shapes, and whatsoever be our interventions in this process, not one of them, needless to say, outrages her, not one is capable of offending her. Our depredations revive her power; they stimulate her energy, but not one attenuates her; she is neither impeded nor thwarted by any.18

Sade’s view of nature as a melting pot of incessant and endless change, wherein nothing is lost, is also one in which the process of change is itself energizing, fecundating: ‘Our depredations revive her power; they stimulate her energy’. Annihilation itself begets more life, ever more life. The ‘profound complicity with natural forces’ proposed by Bataille, following Sade, is a complicity with annihilation, with the provocation and stimulation of nature. This complicity is of course paradoxical. It is simultaneously inevitable – human life is part of nature, human beings are nothing more than an effect of the sun – and impossible, utterly foreign to human consciousness and understanding: for the last 10,000 years, human life and civilization has served as a bulwark against the violence of nature, human nature included. And, specifically in regard to human life and our own individual lives, as Bataille remarks in Eroticism, we shudder in fear of our own desires: ‘Prey to the most astonishing impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself.’19 Our ‘astonishing impulses’, our desires, our energies go in search of outlets, physical or emotional effusions, conscious or unconscious, glorious or catastrophic. Confronting those desires as individuals and in the life of our species, we have evolved into a curious kind of creature, capable of regulating our affairs, to some extent and within distinct limits, capable of restraining and redirecting our desires, finding alternative



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means of satisfaction. The evident failure of this constraint as well as the obvious necessity of finding another way out motivates Bataille’s work: to what extent can we be both complicit with nature and in control of our desires? In The Accursed Share, Bataille is explicit about the limits of our capacities in this regard: As soon as we want to act reasonably, we have to consider the utility of our actions; utility implies an advantage, a maintenance or growth. Now, if it is necessary to respond to exuberance, it is no doubt possible to use it for growth. But the problem raised precludes this. Supposing there is no longer any growth possible, what is to be done with the seething energy that remains? To waste it is obviously not to use it. And yet, what we have is a draining-away, a pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case: From the first, the excess energy, if it cannot be used for growth, is lost. Moreover, in no way can this inevitable loss be accounted useful. It is only a matter of an acceptable loss, preferable to another that is regarded as unacceptable: a question of acceptability, not utility.20

This radical circumscription of the possibility of utilitarian expenditure is central to Bataille’s thought and to my argument here. It is also the aspect of Bataille’s thought that may ultimately be the most difficult to accept, so contrary is it to the modern, scientific worldview. Indeed, the faith of modern science holds that all of the facts of the world will eventually be known and all of the problems caused by human industry can be solved by orderly, rational means. In the words of John Thackara, for example, ‘if we can design our way into difficulty, we can design our way out’.21 In this view, the goal of sustainability is a goal that can be achieved through greater knowledge and the more intricate and accurate application of that knowledge, through greater rationality and utility. These are points to which we will return. For now, my point is to follow Bataille’s argument and to insist upon the role of loss in the disposition of excess energy. The problem of sustainability cannot be solved by denying expenditure or by seeking to curtail or eliminate it. Inevitably, consciously or unconsciously, expenditure will take place, whether we recognize it or not, accept it or not: ‘In the most universal way, isolated or in groups, men find themselves constantly engaged in processes of expenditure. Variations in form do not in any way alter the fundamental characteristics of these processes, whose principle is loss.’22 The laws of general economy help clarify the unrecognized peregrinations of loss by charting the course of expenditure through the processes of both production and consumption, even when those processes are not directly or clearly linked. In fact, the outputs of a mechanism of production may be radically distinct from its inputs. To describe a cathedral only as a building of

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stone and glass is to say nothing of the energy and intricacy with which such a building honours in glory the God of its makers. To speak of a meal only in terms of the nutrients of the food says nothing of the natural and cultural processes of farming and food distribution or the natural and cultural aspects of cuisine. Yet, from the perspective of general economy, all expenditure is essentially equal, at least in formal terms. Theoretically, what matters is the fact of waste, not the form it takes. In The Accursed Share, Bataille analyses eating, sex and death, human sacrifices, trade and exchange among the Aztecs, the practice of potlatch, Islamic militarism, Tibetan Buddhist societies, modern bourgeois capitalism, Soviet industrialism and the Marshall Plan all as modes of individual or social, conscious or unconscious, expenditure. The lucidity of this view obscures the fact that some modes of expenditure are indeed more acceptable, more preferable, than others, for both individuals and societies as well as for the potential continued success of our species on this planet. As Bataille remarks in The Tears of Eros, ‘unless we consider the various possibilities for consumption which are opposed to war, and for which erotic pleasure – the instant consumption of energy – is the model, we will never discover an outlet founded on reason’.23 As noted above, while Bataille’s fear for the fate of our species may have been grounded on the threat of continued warfare, ours compounds that threat with those of environmental degradation, resource depletion and climate change. What we need, Bataille suggests, is a ‘politics of expenditure’,24 and not only a philosophy and a psychology of expenditure, but a political consciousness organized around the recognition of individual and social forms of expenditure. Such a consciousness would require a more frank social recognition of expenditure as well as, undoubtedly, the reorganization of educational and other cultural institutions around or in recognition of expenditure, a recognition of the ways in which contemporary societies expend their energies. This recognition is a distinctly human burden, a burden for human consciousness. Every form of expenditure is of equal worth from the perspective of nature, as we saw Sade suggest. But every form of expenditure is decidedly not equal in the lives of individuals or in the life – and continued success – of our species. Human life is part of nature and yet apart from it, separated from nature by consciousness. In The Accursed Share, Bataille locates human life within but at the summit of natural processes: The general movement of exudation (of waste) of living matter impels [man], and he cannot stop it; moreover, being at the summit, his sovereignty in the



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living world identifies him with this movement; it destines him, in a privileged way, to that glorious operation, to useless consumption.25

Elsewhere, he is more specific: Just as the herbivore relative to the plant, and the carnivore relative to the herbivore, is a luxury, man is the most suited of all living beings to consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy offered up by the pressure of life to conflagrations befitting the solar origins of its movement.26

Two types of expenditure are implied in these remarks. First, the unique capacity of human beings to organize and effect large scale changes in nature, including expenditures, situates human life in a position to make more of nature, to make nature more sumptuous, more intense, more fruitful, to energize the energies of nature. Human beings can simply waste more than other creatures, expend more, make more of our waste than possibly any other form of life. Second, due to our capacity to make connections and impose meaning on the things of the world, to understand, and to experience emotional and psychological trauma through the loss or sacrifice of that meaning, human beings are uniquely situated to experience a kind of loss utterly absent from almost all other forms of life. Not only does our intelligence lead us to create more complex and intricate forms of expenditure, more forms of loss, but our consciousness and emotional intelligence destines us to experience the meaning of that loss in a distinct way, as tragedy. Nature knows nothing of loss. In The Accursed Share, Bataille observes that ‘in the history of life on earth … the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life’.27 Burdensome forms of life are complex, intricate and intense forms of life – forms that gather and dispose of larger and larger quantities of energy. While ants may use relatively small amounts of energy on an individual level, an ant colony, conceived as a single living mass, can be perceived as a structure of extraordinary complexity, as a conflagration of either appalling or inspiring violence and consumption. The human body is a similar commonwealth: it is host to millions of microorganisms, bacteria, fungi and archaea, among other organisms, inside and out, that may outnumber more distinctly human cells by as much as ten to one. In another sense, the human animal has become such a burdensome animal that it may have irrevocably damaged the capacities of this planet to sustain human life. As William Catton observed in his book Overshoot: By our sheer numbers, by the state of our technological development, and by being oblivious to differences between a method that achieved lasting

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Catton’s view understates the point to which the toll exercised by human life on this planet may already have made it uninhabitable for future generations. His reference to our being ‘oblivious’ to different methods of or approaches to our survival also understates the role of repression and denial in cementing what may be a delusional faith in the capacity of human ingenuity and reason to solve problems brought about by those very capacities. The fundamental failure to understand the mechanisms and processes of expenditure is, of course, the curse on the accursed share. That failure to understand is in part a failure to adequately apply our consciousness to the problem of expenditure, but it also reflects our fear of ourselves and blindness toward the mechanisms and processes of our own desires. Indeed, if one history of life is the history of the development of increasingly burdensome forms of life, another history of life might be the history of increasingly elided or repressed forms of expenditure, a history in which expenditure, loss and death have been increasingly denied or set aside within individual and social life. As Bataille put it in ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in the modern world, ‘everything that was generous, orgiastic, and excessive has disappeared; the themes of rivalry upon which individual activity still depends develop in obscurity, and are as shameful as belching’,29 and, more forcefully, ‘the general atrophy of the ancient sumptuary processes … characterizes the modern era’.30 ‘True’ – he wrote in The Tears of Eros – ‘the wars of the twentieth century gave the impression of an increase in unleashed fury. But however immense the horror may have been, this furious violence was measured: it was ignominy perfected through discipline!’31 Today we live in the simultaneous presence of unprecedented expenditures, wreaking catastrophic damage to the environment as well as individual and social life, alongside the almost complete denial of those expenditures as worthy of serious consideration either in individual or social life. * * * This problem is particularly meaningful and acute in discussions of sustainable design. It is particularly meaningful because these discussions are, arguably, our best hope for continued success on this planet, and yet they are, generally speaking, typically founded upon radical forms of utilitarian rationalism that



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exclude, repress or deny the problem of expenditure that attempt, as noted above, to ‘eliminate the concept of waste’. Approaches to sustainable design range from a radical Luddite rejection of modernity and modern technology to an equally radical embrace of that same technology, environmentalism on the one side, technotopian futurism on the other. Both of these approaches reject waste by stressing the importance of increased utility and efficiency, either through reduced consumption or technological advances. One apotheosis of the technotopian dream of radical – if not complete – efficiency of resource use, reclamation and recycling appears in the thought of R. Buckminster Fuller. From 1938 to 1940, Fuller was on the staff of Fortune magazine as a science and technology consultant. Studying global industrial production and consumption, he observed the extent to which previous models of assessing industrial production were inadequate to the task of representing then current economic activities: We were doing so much more given work with so much less pounds of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given function as to occasion ever newer, lighter, and stronger metallic alloys, chemicals, and electronics … The amount of energy being electrically generated and consumed became the most sensitive telltale of economic health.32

He would later refer to this process as ‘ephemeralization’: the process of continually doing more with less.33 In Fuller’s analysis, ephemeralization results in ‘epochal transformations’, changing the role of human beings on earth: As man is progressively disemployed as a quantity-production muscle-andreflex machine, he becomes progressively re-employed in the rapidly increasing army of research and development – or of production-inaugurating engineering – or of educational and recreational extension, as a plowed back increment of industrialization.34

Changes in modes of production thus result in changes in our human role in production creating ever more complex and intricate forms and systems of production alongside similarly complex forms of consumption. For Fuller, ephemeralization promises a technotopia of ever increasing and increasingly complex modes of production and consumption – in short, a sustainable future for life on this planet. What my experience taught me was that if the physical laws thus far found by science to be governing the Universe were intelligently and fearlessly employed

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Fuller’s enthusiastic optimism about our potential for continued success as a species was not boundless. The title of one of his collections of essays sets his view of our options in stark relief: Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity.36 Heretofore, he observed, humans beings have done ‘many of nature’s required tasks only inadvertently’.37 Our applications of ingenuity and innovation have too often been inadvertent and haphazard, our discoveries accidental or unexpected in any given context. To meet these challenges, Fuller proposed sweeping changes to education, industry and government, and a new mode of  ‘comprehensive design science’: ‘The specialist in comprehensive design is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.’38 In reading Fuller alongside Bataille, we should note the extent to which Fuller’s ‘comprehensive’ approach fulfils the laws of general economy. Fuller’s purpose is to understand the principles of nature and to align design with those principles. His analysis attempts to encompass the total material resources of the planet as well as their patterns of use. He described himself as a ‘comprehensive viewer of patterns’: I have to start with what I think the human’s function in the universe may probably be. Next I explore the way humans and all other biological species subconsciously cooperate in the successful regenerative balance of nature. Next, I think about what is ‘happening to’ only subconsciously functioning man on earth, and next about what is happening to the chemically, biologically, invisibly, and unselfconsciously-coordinated evolution of the little spaceship Earth, and lastly about whither that dynamically evolute [sic] earth and its passengers are trending and wending. Next I review the relationship of humans to other humans on earth, and their mutual relationship to the life-supporting biosphere of earth, and next and lastly the United States, the Illinois, the Chicago, etc., relationship to that larger pattern. Finally, I study the local problems of any one man and place them in respect to the larger-scale total information and its derived theory of life.39

In the mid-1960s, Fuller proposed a ‘world game’ using computers to aid research on resource allocation on a global scale alongside comprehensive design strategies to accelerate ephemeralization. He later wrote: ‘Our technological strategy



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makes it incontrovertible that we can live luxuriously entirely on our daily Sun-radiation-and-gravity-produced income energy.’40 In full flight, Fuller’s utopian optimism can be off-putting, inadvertently inducing scepticism in his reader. But the core substance of his claims remains indisputable: our survival as a species on this planet is dependent upon our ability to effectively allocate and manage resources, our sources of energy and nourishment foremost among them. Fuller’s technotopian project strives to eliminate waste through ephemeralization. He accommodates luxury only as the utopian outcome of the acceleration of ephemeralization. His thought is relevant here not only as background to any discussion of sustainable design but also as a direct progenitor of it. Extending and deepening some trends from Fuller’s thought and work in their book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins advance four central strategies for sustainable design relevant to our discussion here: radical resource productivity, biomimicry, a service and flow economy, and investing in natural capital.41 The notion of radical resource productivity clearly echoes Buckminster Fuller’s notion of ephemeralization: do more, much more, with less, much less. ‘Nearly all environmental and social harm is an artifact of the uneconomically wasteful use of human and natural resources’, they write.42 Their second strategy – biomimicry – has, in years since the publication of Natural Capitalism, been widely adopted in many areas of engineering and design practice. Their description of it is relevant here: Reducing the wasteful throughput of materials – indeed, eliminating the very idea of waste – can be accomplished by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines that change the nature of industrial processes and materials, enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed-cycles, and often the elimination of toxicity.43

Recall that ‘eliminating the very idea of waste’ is the sixth of McDonough and Braungart’s ‘Hannover Principles’, the problematic core of the paradox under investigation here. ‘Redesigning industrial systems on biological lines’ may involve working from the fundamental principles of nature, as Buckminster Fuller suggests, or it may involve another mode of mimicry.44 In the present context, we should also recall Bataille’s experience of a ‘profound complicity with nature’.45 Through sacrifice, Bataille writes, ‘a kind of mimeticism. Man puts himself in the rhythm of the universe.’46 The authors of Natural Capitalism propose biomimicry as a means of re-imagining industrial production and the

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engineering and design of objects; Bataille references it as a fundamental mode of human behaviour, rooted in pattern recognition, aligned where possible with the largest patterns in the universe. The third strategy of natural capitalism suggests transitioning away from an economy based on the production and consumption of goods toward one based on a ‘flow of economic services’ wherein wealth is not measured by acquisition and ownership but rather through the provision of services. Here radical resource productivity is rewarded and reinforced with the notion of increasing flows. The fourth strategy continues this thought by emphasizing the importance of investing and reinvesting in natural capital, of, in their words, ‘sustaining, restoring and expanding stocks of natural capital, so that the biosphere can produce more abundant ecosystem services and natural resources’.47 Both of these strategies might be gathered under the general title of this paper – making more: increase the flows of resources, increase the resources themselves, so that they may independently and exponentially make more. Natural Capitalism places a heavy emphasis on closed-loop cycles of material use and reuse.48 Closed-loop cycles of use require isolating materials of different types into systems set apart from systems comprised of other materials. The materials used to manufacture a television, for example, would be recuperated when that television was no longer functional and used in the manufacture of other televisions. Closed-loop manufacturing like this requires retooling the production process as well as rethinking the engineering and design of goods. The notion derives from several sources but is widely recognized by the phrase, coined by Walter Stahel, ‘cradle to cradle’ design.49 Like biomimicry, this strategy has been widely adopted and adapted as a model of sustainable design. The notion is now perhaps most often associated with William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.50 The association of cradle to cradle design with closed-loop thinking is both almost inevitable and ironic. As McDonough and Braungart note in a footnote to their subsequent book, The Upcycle, when Cradle to Cradle was translated and publishing in China, for example, it was given the subtitle The Circular Economy, but, they suggest, ‘Cradle to Cradle is not a circle – not simply closed loops – it’s a spiral that celebrates growth.’51 Fundamentally, for them, cradle to cradle design requires that the waste or output produced by one object or system become the food or fuel for another. The second object or system may be an object of the same type, but it need not be. Nor should this process be conceived in a simple one to one ratio: the outputs of one



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object being the food for only one other. The outputs of one object or system may in fact be multiple and serve as inputs for the use of many other objects or systems. The wastes or outputs of an object or system may include actual waste – nutrients that cannot be assimilated by the object or system – or they might be the remains of an object after its period of life, use or functionality has ended. McDonough and Braungart describe these cycles of circulation and exchange eloquently: Nature operates according to a system of nutrients and metabolisms in which there is no such thing as waste. A cherry tree makes many blossoms and fruit to (perhaps) germinate and grow. That is why the tree blooms. But the extra blossoms are far from useless. They fall to the ground, decompose, feed various organisms and microorganisms, and enrich the soil. Around the world, animals and humans exhale carbon dioxide, which plants take in and use for their own growth. Nitrogen from wastes is transformed into protein by microorganisms, animals, and plants. Horses eat grass and produce dung, which provides both next and nourishment for the larvae of flies. The Earth’s major nutrients – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen – are cycled and recycled. Waste equals food.52

Compare Nietzsche: The world exists; it is not something that becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away – it maintains itself in both. – It lives on itself: its excrements are its food.53

Reading Cradle to Cradle alongside Nietzsche and Bataille reveals the extent to which the cradle to cradle design strategy exemplifies a general economic view of the circulation of energies in the universe. Cradle to cradle design is a systems view of design, as attentive to the inputs and outputs that create, sustain or ensue from an object, or system, as it is attentive to the object or system itself. Objects in this view are all but indistinguishable from systems, both systems in and of themselves and the multiple systems of production and consumption in which they are created, deployed and dispersed. Rather than focusing on design objects as objects, McDonough and Braungart situate them within nutrient flows, making a distinction between biological or technological nutrients.54 The distinction between the biological and the technological may be difficult to perceive in certain cases – as in genetically modified seeds of some types. Its purpose is to eliminate the creation of what McDonough and Braungart call monstrous hybrids, products that combine biological and technological

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materials in such a way that they can no longer or not easily be separated from one another. Mountains of waste rising in landfills are a growing concern, but the quantity of these wastes – the space they take up – is not the major problem of cradleto-grave designs. Of greater concern are the nutrients – valuable ‘food’ for both industry and nature – that are contaminated, wasted or lost. They are lost not only for lack of adequate systems of retrieval; they are lost also because many products are what we jokingly refer to as ‘Frankenstein products’ or … ‘monstrous hybrids’ – mixtures of materials both technical and biological, neither of which can be salvaged after their current lives.55

Though nature knows nothing of waste or loss, cultural systems can produce waste or loss in the form of monstrous hybrids or other mechanisms that separate nutrients from their flows, making their salvage or retrieval impossible. The flow of nutrients from one object or system to another can be understood as growth though it is more rightly simply change. The total amount of matter does not change though its arrangement, its order, surely does. Again reflecting a general economic view, McDonough and Braungart stress the connections and interrelationships between heterogeneous systems. They ask: ‘What is the entire system – cultural, commercial, ecological – of which this made thing, and way of making things, will be a part?’56 Or again: ‘It is useful to think of these processes as part of a dynamic interdependence, in which many different organisms and systems support one another in multiple ways. The consequences of growth – increases in insects, microorganisms, birds, water cycling, and nutrient flows – tend toward the positive kind that enrich the vitality of the whole ecosystem.’57 Here as elsewhere, particularly in The Upcycle, the emphasis is on the promotion of growth, enrichment and vitality, on creating systems that make more. This goal is distinct from that of radical efficiency. Whereas radical efficiency proposes only heightened utility – less waste – McDonough and Braungart propose making more, more outputs of a different kind. The key, for them, is not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world. Thus the ‘right things’ for manufacturers and industrialists to do are those that lead to good growth – more niches, health, nourishment, diversity, intelligence, and abundance – for this generation of inhabitants on the planet and for generations to come.58



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In their view, ‘buildings, systems, neighborhoods, and even whole cities can be entwined with surrounding ecosystems in ways that are mutually enriching’.59 Already present in Cradle to Cradle, this goal becomes central in The Upcycle: This is upcycling: taking Cradle to Cradle and applying it not just to how people design a carpet but how they design a home, a workplace, an industry, a city. Using the Cradle to Cradle framework, we can upcycle to talk about designing not just for health but for abundance, proliferation, delight. We can upcycle to talk about not how human industry can be just ‘less bad’, but how it can be more good, an extraordinary positive in our world.60

The proposal here is for ‘good growth’, using design to create abundance, proliferation, more niches, heightened diversity. Chapter five of Cradle to Cradle carries the title ‘Respect Diversity’. Diversity here means a diversity of flora and fauna, but also a diversity of manufactured things, a diversity of views, tastes and experiences. In The Upcycle, the emphasis deepens beyond simply respecting diversity toward actually promoting it. You can respect the endangered golden lion tamarin in Brazil. And you will be paying your respects long after they are all dead. If you do nothing to support them, encourage them, design for them, they will disappear. You can’t just put them in a frame and respect them … [C]onsider celebrating a delightfully diverse world – a much more positive term, indicating pleasure and enjoyment … Let us agree on this as our destination – a world we celebrate.61

Designing for abundance is designing for diversity, not simply making more of the same thing, but making more different things and making more differences between things. Abundance like this may also imply a certain degree of obsolescence. The phrase ‘planned obsolescence’ carries justifiably negative connotations, suggesting as it does that products have been designed in such a way as to become inoperable or otherwise obsolescent within a foreshortened period requiring consumers to continually purchase new products of the same type. McDonough and Braungart however join others in promoting a shift toward designing objects as products of service that may be purchased and used by consumers but ultimately returned to their manufacturer when their period of usefulness or effectiveness is over or when a technological advance makes them obsolete.62 ‘Industry need not design what it makes to be durable beyond a certain amount of time, any more than nature does.’63 In this model the durability of a product is not a necessity: it is an open question. Some things should not be durable, either because they serve some function that benefits

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from frequent replacement or because the technologies upon which they are based are in rapid development and change. Other things might nevertheless be designed and built to last, even through generations of use. In the first case, the impermanence of the object might be viewed as abundance. In the second case, the qualities that merit and permit the endurance of the object are themselves markers of abundance: these are markers of real luxury. All of this is to say that Cradle to Cradle proposes a ‘world of abundance, not one of limits, pollution, and waste’,64 optimistically advancing a fundamental paradigm shift: ‘Safe and generous abundance can become intentional and replace scarcity as the defining situation of our time.’65 Nietzsche anticipated that shift in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘Behold’, he wrote, ‘what abundance is around us!’66 As relevant and compelling as these proposals may be, by recasting sustainable design as design for abundance, McDonough and Braungart effectively elide the problem of waste and the psychological necessity of the experience of loss. They even seek to cover up the problem of waste by renaming it: ‘Waste handlers’ are becoming ‘nutrient managers’.67 And yet, at one point in Cradle to Cradle, they offhandedly remark: ‘Throwing something away can be fun, let’s admit it; and giving a guilt-free gift to the natural world is an incomparable pleasure.’68 This gift becomes the gift of abundance in The Upcycle, but the psychological, indeed existential experience of giving remains unexplored. Even in this offhand remark, the notion of giving is associated only with fun and pleasure. Gifts, however, and giving are rather more ambiguous, more equivocal. * * * Even the word gift is a distraction from the problem of expenditure, waste and loss. Despite the necessity of reciprocity implied in the classical formulation of the gift exchange, a gift freely given is all but inevitably a positive good.69 Reframing the gift as an offering or a sacrifice, as in a religious ritual, though more equivocal, also masks the fundamentally ambiguous – if not traumatic – quality of the experience. For the purpose of this exposition, I will set these rather freighted terms aside to focus more narrowly on the problem of waste as an experience and to suggest a place for that experience in sustainable design practice. As noted above, several models of sustainable design all but entirely avoid, deny or dream of escaping the problem of waste, whether by doing ever more



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with ever less, closed-loop models of resource use and reuse, or by attempting to re-imagine waste as a purely positive good, as food, fuel or some other kind of nutrient, slipping quietly out of one object or system into another. While it is true that nature knows nothing of waste, aside from the problems caused by monstrous hybrids, all outputs find their way into some new system as input; this formulation of the facts elides the psychological problem posed by the experience of waste. Nature knows nothing of waste, but human beings do, and we regard waste all but uniformly with a horror that is not inappropriate. Whether the waste derives from our own bodies or behaviours, or from outside of us in the workings of the world, we struggle to recast it, to interpret, explain or otherwise tame its virulence, while nevertheless allowing ourselves, wittingly or unwittingly, consciously or unconsciously, to be caught up in its mechanisms. We cannot but fulfil the fundamental laws of the universe, the dispersion of energy through emergent forms of matter; we can only do so with a greater or lesser degree of consciousness. Ultimately, however, expenditure leads beyond consciousness, beyond understanding, beyond our strict control. Our choice, as Bataille presents it, is not between more or less expenditure but only between more or less acceptable modes of expenditure. The psychological necessity of expenditure, the necessity of aligning our experience with processes of expenditure, is a necessity of escaping, however briefly, from the burdensome limits, the confines, of our everyday experience, our servile or goal-oriented experience, by acceding to a sovereign mode of being in the world, a mode aligned with the processes and rhythms of the universe. To the extent that our actions remain limited by utility, they are bound by it, fragmented, constrained and cut off from the world. This confinement, whether it derives from physical constraints, moral constraints or some other source, including the admirable, even necessary goals of sustainable design, results in stultification, boredom and anxiety. These states are, however, temporary, not because we can conquer our own inner compulsions through our moral will but because it is the nature of human nature to find a way to dispose of its excess energy, gloriously or catastrophically. If sustainable design is necessary, it is equally essential that sustainable design find a means to accommodate our need and capacity for expenditure. Bataille himself offers more suggestive allusions than concrete suggestions as to ways in which we might infuse individual and social life with acceptable modes of consumption. Such modes include intoxication, eroticism, laughter, poetry, sacrificial representations and narratives, among others.70 Religious rituals of sacrifice are communal modes of consumption relevant here, some of

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which may be acceptable, though certainly not all rituals of religious sacrifice can be considered commonly acceptable in contemporary culture. Luxuries, whether luxurious objects like jewels, clothes and other objects of consumption, or experiences that might be considered luxurious for their capacity to open a world intimate with immanence, are perhaps the most crucial expenditures to consider for our purposes. As Bataille remarks at the beginning of The Accursed Share: ‘It is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury”, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems.’71 Luxuries, excesses are the problem, but as such they are also perhaps the ideal means to a solution. Fundamentally, the orchestration, if not actual control, of consumption will require that luxury become a problem for design, not as something that must be minimized or eliminated, but rather as something that must be arranged and intensified. Designing for abundance, joy or delight means designing for luxury. Directing sustainable design beyond the closed loops of recirculation requires thinking in terms of transition and transformation, placing an emphasis on the point at which one system opens on to another. The goal is to find acceptable ways to inscribe loss at the borders of systems, where one system meets another, where the excess of one system pours across the borders of another, into that other system. In Theory of Religion, Bataille observes toward this end: If we are to preserve the movement of the economy, we need to determine the point at which the excess production will flow like a river to the outside. It is a matter of endlessly consuming – or destroying – the objects that are produced. This could just as well be done without the least consciousness. But it is insofar as clear consciousness prevails that the objects actually destroyed will not destroy humanity itself.72

Consumption is destruction to the extent that it is loss or waste. Sustainable design must not only account for and shape the flows of nutrients – of materials and energies – through our world; it must also strive to mark the points of intersection, the places and moments of transformation – physical and temporal – between one object and another, one system and another, where objects and systems overflow their bounds and spill out beyond their limits. These points of intersection and transformation are moments of encounter between systems, each organized as a distinct economy with its own organization or arrangement and mode of expenditure. The output of one system may be regarded, from the perspective of that system, as waste or loss, gift or sacrifice, and, from the perspective of the system for which it is an input, as food or fuel, a pure positivity. The design challenge is not only in the



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arrangement of the systems such that the outputs of one might more beneficially become the inputs of another, or of several others, but also in the marking of these points of connection and exchange between these systems such that they may become occasions for consciousness to encounter and remark on the implacable processes of loss and gain, of death and life taking place all around and even within us. These points of intersection are also reversible, at least for consciousness: occasions to shift or reverse perspective, to perceive life as loss and loss as life. Satisfaction follows from our ability to participate, either physically or through psychological identification, with that movement toward the outside, where excess flows outside of a system. The joy we experience in such moments is what Bataille calls joy before death.73 It is a tragic joy, rooted in the recognition of loss, the recognition that, as Bataille says, ‘energy finally can only be wasted’.74 To the extent that sustainable design seeks to eliminate the concept of waste, it will remain bound by bonds of utility and, burdened by their constraints, fail to excite the joyful and passionate participation of its constituents. In order for sustainable design to become joyful, it must allow individuals to expend energies beyond their own limits, beyond individual need or greed, and thereby to escape servility. Luxury is not extraneous to a sustainable future: it is essential to it. When life is not reduced to servility it is not reduced at all. It is life lived at the measure of the universe. To live at the measure of the universe, make more, accelerate abundance, be prolific – in the words of Zarathustra: ‘Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the waters may flow golden from it and carry the reflection of your delight over all the world!’75

Notes Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014, 191. 2 Ibid., 191. 3 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 41. 4 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 122. 5 Widely reprinted, The Hannover Principles are also included in William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s most recent book, The Upcycle. New York: North Point Press, 2013, 10. 1

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Allan Stoekl brought Bataille’s work into dialogue with problems in sustainable energy use in his book Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. See my review in SubStance 116 v 37 n 2 (2008): 146–50. 7 The phrase ‘general economy’ appears, for example, in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, § 23, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967. 8 Fossil fuels are the result of the transformation of ancient solar energy. Contemporary non-solar forms of energy generation, including nuclear power, change the source of energy generation in significant ways without changing the fundamental problem explored in Bataille’s works, namely, the peregrination of waste. 9 Bataille, The Accursed Share, 28–9. 10 Georges Bataille, ‘The Economy Equal to the Universe’. Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy 5 (Summer/Autumn 2013): 34. 11 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 37. 12 Bataille, Visions of Excess, 5. 13 Ibid., 21. 14 Ibid., 15. 15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1954, 125. 16 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 21. 17 Bataille, Visions of Excess, 101. 18 Marquis de Sade, Justine, in Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1965, 518–19. 19 Georges Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, 7. 20 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 31. 21 John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, 1. 22 Bataille, Visions of Excess, 128. 23 Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989, 149. 24 Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard, 1976, 556. 25 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 23. 26 Ibid., 37. 27 Ibid., 33. 28 William Catton, Jr, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980, 3.



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29 Bataille, Visions of Excess, 124. 30 Ibid., 126. 31 Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 143. 32 R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981, 103–4. 33 R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities. Toronto: Collier Books, 1963, 179. 34 Ibid., 179. 35 Fuller, Critical Path, 128. 36 R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity. New York: Bantam Books, 1969. 37 Fuller, Critical Path, 142 38 Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 176. 39 Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, 209. 40 Fuller, Critical Path, 199. 41 Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. New York: Back Bay Books, 2000, 10–11. 42 Ibid., 10. 43 Ibid. 44 On biomimicry, see Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. See also http://biomimicry.org/ (accessed 21 April 2017). 45 Bataille, Visions of Excess, 101. 46 Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 7, 255. 47 Hawken, Lovins and Lovins, Natural Capitalism, 11. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 17. 50 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002. 51 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability: Designing for Abundance. New York: North Point Press, 2013, 173. 52 McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 92. 53 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1967, § 1066. 54 McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 93. 55 Ibid., 99. 56 Ibid., 82. 57 Ibid., 80. 58 Ibid., 78. 59 McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 87. 60 McDonough and Braungart, The Upcycle, 11. 61 Ibid., 153.

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62 McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 111. 63 Ibid., 114. 64 Ibid., 91. 65 McDonough and Braungart, The Upcycle, 36. 66 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 197. 67 McDonough and Braungart, The Upcycle, 169. 68 McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 109. 69 See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. 70 Bataille, Inner Experience, 193–94. 71 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 12. 72 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1992, 103. 73 Bataille, Visions of Excess, 235. 74 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 11. 75 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 122. Translation modified.

5

Georges Bataille as a Thinker of Statehood: A Relational and Materialist Approach Teresa Pullano

Turning to Georges Bataille’s thought to understand contemporary transformations of statehood is not an obvious gesture. It may even seem incongruous to resort to this French avant-garde theorist, literary critic, mystic and philosopher to talk about something so institutionalized as statehood. In fact, Bataille as a theorist of politics is still a problematic figure for academic literature: is there a political thought in Bataille and, if so, is this something we can use without ending up flirting with fascism? In 1996, Carolyn Dean wrote that we need to take some distance from Bataille’s ambivalence due to a ‘desire for accountability’.1 Habermas, discussing the meaning of modernity and postmodernity, classifies Georges Bataille within the line of the young conservatives, together with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Bataille, Habermas argues, opposes instrumental reason and the spontaneous powers of imagination, thus transforming will to power or sovereignty into a principle only accessible through evocation.2 In consequence, this line of thinking exaggerates the autonomy of the artistic sphere over and above morality and science, thus deviating from modernity for exalting (at the expense of the others) one of the spheres into which the Enlightenment has partitioned social and spiritual life. As Wolin remarks, Habermas in this text posits some affinities between French theory and German conservative theorists during the Weimar Republic, such as Carl Schmitt.3 Critiques of the idea of reason, of liberalism, individualism and constitutionalism pave the way for a weakening of democracy and for the risks of fascism. Nevertheless, if the German critics of reason of the 1920s were in favour of an authoritarian state, for authors such as Bataille and Foucault, as well as Derrida, any adhesion to the concept of state is extremely problematic. Despite these differences, Wolin endorses the parallel established by Habermas

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between the French and the German line of conservative critiques of modernity: ‘One of the intellectual traits that ties Bataille most closely to the German young conservatives is his “affect against the universal”.’4 Bataille is here once again reduced to a Manichean opposition between reason and unreason, calculation and life. In this chapter, not only do we argue against associating Bataille’s political theory with fascism, but, more importantly, we point to a line in his thinking that is an ‘undercover’ trace within modernity itself and that could be useful when conceptualizing today’s forms of statehood restructuring and of state-effects. We argue here that Bataille’s political theory is closer to the one of his master Alexandre Kojève than to romantic irrationalist positions, and that the two both share a hyper-modern and hyper-rationalist vision.

Bataille as a contemporary political theorist It is in the last ten or fifteen years that Bataille has been ‘allowed’ to be seen as a political theorist: he is an important, even though not central, figure within the ‘biopolitical’ paradigm that originates with Michel Foucault and is, in a different manner, reconceptualized by Giorgio Agamben.5 It is only very recently, though, that Bataille’s thought is used to deal with contemporary social and political challenges. This is the case of Allan Stoekl’s book on climate change, Bataille’s Peak, as well as of the reflections of Kathryn Yussof on the same topic: the question of the animal and of politics is also the theme of Derrida’s last works, Rogue States and The Beast and the Sovereign, works that are strongly indebted to Bataille’s philosophy.6 Still, Bataille is rarely used to understand politics and especially the contemporary political challenges. This is a call that has been, for now, answered by few texts, such as the ones of Alexander Hirsch, of Gavin Grindon and of Stefano Harney and Randy Martin.7 The authors address three different questions concerning the use of Bataille’s political theory: the actuality of his concept of sovereignty, the relationship between the French philosopher and Marxism, and Bataille as a thinker of the state. Before dealing with these same questions in this chapter, it is worth going through the aforementioned authors’ positions. Hirsch places the work of the French philosopher within current debates on the transformation of sovereignty in the post-Westphalian moment: Bataille’s notion of sovereignty could thus contribute to the debate opened up by authors such as Jacques Derrida, Roberto Esposito, Wendy Brown, Ahiwa Ong, Michel Foucault and Claude Lefort. Hirsch starts with a reference to Carl Schmitt’s



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reception by authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe: the claim is that we are living in a time of exception, and thus ‘perhaps it is time for a new vision of sovereignty to emerge, one attendant to the eccentricities of the present conjuncture’.8 It is noted that Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty may not be able to account for protests and power shifts coming from below, such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy or the anti-austerity movements in Europe and the United States. This is why there is a need to discuss alternative theories of sovereignty, ‘visions that may hold clues for coming to terms with our own political present’.9 For Hirsch, two of these alternative visions may come from the work of Georges Bataille and Frantz Fanon. For the first, sovereignty is a condition of experience, and the power of the sovereign is also the one that scatters the sense of unity of the individual as subject. Hirsch associates this experience of power with colonialism, ‘[t]he self-shattering “unproductive expenditure” Bataille equates with sovereignty is precisely that which colonial regimes operationalize’.10 This is only the negative side of sovereignty as experience as it is thematized by Bataille, but what is interesting is that alternative visions of political power can be seen at play in the other aspect of the modern nation-state, which is precisely the colony. For Hirsch, Bataille’s concept of sovereignty is mainly aesthetical, linked to experiences of transgression of the limits of reason that can be attained through art or poetry: ‘Such “formless, transgressive being” is articulated best, for Bataille, by poetic expressions of surrealist experience. Such expressions eviscerate the very meaning of words, thus rendering them useless, beautiful and as such sovereign.’11 It is true that the language of art and beauty plays an important role in Bataille’s political philosophy, but nevertheless it is problematic to reduce his thinking of power and politics only to artistic beauty and uselessness, since it may weaken the institutional, legal and social elements of his thinking. This is why here we share Besnier’s opinion, according to which Bataille, and his critique of modernity, is closer to the thinking of Max Weber or of the Frankfurt School, such as Horkheimer and Adorno.12 Bataille would then be one of the thinkers of the disenchantment of the world, and his quest is for the conditions of sovereignty in a desacralized world. This reading contextualizes Bataille’s reflections of art and on sovereignty within, nevertheless, a disenchanted vision of the world, allowing him to build a political philosophy that we need to take seriously as such, and not instead as a disengaged reflection over what is not mundane, such as poetry, beauty or, in some sense, the sacred. We agree here with Hirsch when he makes a parallel between Bataille’s theory of sovereignty as experience and Sheldon Wolin’s notion of ‘fugitive democracy’, according

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to which ‘democracy is not about where the political is located but how it is experienced’.13 A more ‘political’ understanding of Bataille’s thought emerges when the literature confronts his position to the one of other clearly ‘political’ thinkers, such as Marx and Marxism, as does Grindon, or Carl Schmitt, whose influence upon Bataille is discussed by Geroulanos.14 Indeed, as Schmitt (and Kojève) is an influence for the idea of sovereignty developed in ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, Marx is a referent for the concept ‘base materialism’ explored in the articles of Documents. As Grindon remarks, there is no in-depth critical account of Bataille’s engagement with Marxist thought, and this, in turn, obfuscates the consequences that this confrontation had on the political theory of the French philosopher himself.15 Grindon’s thesis is that Bataille appropriates a series of Marx’s topics and figures and then places them within a material theory of the ‘affect’, by which the author points to an ‘economy of desire’: ‘All repressed and taboo affects are necessarily those with the greatest revolutionary potential.’16 As such, the accursed share of society and political community is represented by the proletariat, and class struggle derives from the expulsion of the low and heterogeneous elements of the proletariat from bourgeois institutions.17 Bataille is thus seen by Grindon as a thinker of class struggle,18 even though he conflates the entire working class with the lumpenproletariat, and understands Bataille solely as a thinker of production and of political economy. In The Notion of Expenditure, class struggle is theorized as ‘the grandest form of social expenditure’, intended here as repressed vitality.19 Even though Grindon recognizes Bataille’s engagement with Marxism, he still sees his political thinking as deeply ‘ambiguous’. The turn towards an affective materialism was shared by one of Bataille’s contemporaries, Wilhelm Reich: Both not only make a novel and pioneering turn towards a revolutionary social psychology, but do so in remarkably similar terms. Both understand a potential Marxian account of affect not as a critique of ideology but as an attempt to outline the organizational structure of a political economy of desire, extending from their assertion of the determinate materiality of the forces uncovered by psychoanalysis.20

But, if Reich seems more pragmatic and concrete to the author, Bataille is, once again, defined as a ‘millennial literary howl’. At the same time, Grindon concedes that ‘Bataille had opened the possibility of the radical political role of affect, not in vague Romantic or poetic terms, but in terms of concrete Marxian analysis and engagement’.21 In this sense, Bataille is read as being closer to social



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movements, as in Stefano Harney and Randy Martin.22 These authors also associate the French philosopher to contemporary transformations of the state: Bataille asks us in his studies to seek out the effects of the accursed share, the State effects that come to trace the State-form. We mean by the State-form something more than the State as it is used as a category by political scientists. We mean something Bataille provokes us to consider. We mean that which becomes visible in the struggle over excess as an economy of excess, that which stands in for the mode of excess itself. So to ask what State-form corresponds to this mean and indifferent mode of excess is to take these State effects as clues, effects produced by a public capacity itself forged in the struggle today to produce capital’s division of risk and at risk populations.23

The state here is thus what produces excess and what neutralizes it. We find this double nature or double function of the state in Bataille’s text ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’.

The state and the heterogeneous: A relational dialectic Bataille wrote ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ in 1933 and the article was published by the journal La Critique Sociale, directed by Boris Souvarine.24 The aim of the circle of intellectuals that gathered around this journal was at the same time to conduct a critique of fascism, which was spreading in Europe and in France during those years, and of Stalinism in Russia, but within a Marxist perspective.25 On the pages of La Critique Sociale, Bataille published two other important texts beyond the one on fascism – ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ and ‘The Problem of the State’. Nevertheless, the text on fascism gave rise to endless debate when it was published (Souvarine published a note in which he said that the editorial committee of the journal did not share Bataille’s view) and afterwards, prompting endless debate on whether its author was close to fascist positions or flirting with the forthcoming Vichy regime. As Stoekl makes it clear, Bataille was not a fascist nor a collaborator, and the text published in 1933 was one of the first attempts to understand what fascism was not from a moral point of view, but using the tools of the social sciences and of psychoanalysis.26 This is one of the most clearly ‘political’ texts from Bataille, since he deals with classical political concepts such as the state, sovereignty, political power and, of course, fascism. But, through the effort of understanding why fascism is possible and where its fascination comes from, the author also provides a theoretical

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account of what is a political community. As he says at the beginning of the article, in ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ Bataille wants to describe what are the transformations that take place at the political and at the ‘religious’ level within a given society ‘in the light of fascism’, and what is the connection between these phenomena and the ‘economic infrastructure’. Thus, Bataille clearly places himself within a Marxist paradigm, but also points to its limits. To understand fascism, one needs to describe the basic structure of society as such: ‘However, the simple presentation of the structure of fascism had to be preceded by a description of the social structure as a whole.’27 This social structure is guided by two main principles, which are homogeneity and heterogeneity. Even though it would be easy to place rationality on the side of homogeneity and the affect, or the sacred, on the side of heterogeneity, we should resist doing so, because the relation within these two terms needs to be examined more closely in order to avoid a confusion that would then place fascism itself on the side of affect, or of the sacred. Let us start with the definitions that Bataille gives of the key terms of homogeneity, the state and heterogeneity. Homogeneity defines the most visible and accessible to understanding aspect of society, and it is characterized by ‘commensurability’. This is defined as ‘the possible identity’ of persons and situations and it implies fixed rules as well as the exclusion of violence, which means a transgression of these same rules. Importantly, Bataille defines homogeneity not only as the possibility of conformity of persons and situations, but also as the awareness of this commensurability. This epistemological dimension is made evident by sciences and technics, which express the laws that govern a ‘measurable’ world. Making reference in a note to Mauss, Bataille explains how sciences and technics are thus opposed to magic and religion, which instead do not express the understanding of the homogeneity of society.28 There is a close relationship between homogeneity and production: technics are the knowledge that operates a transition between sciences and the law of homogeneous society they reveal, and production. Thus, production makes sure that all the useless elements of social life are excluded by the homogeneous part of society. Activities, in this sense, are never valid for themselves; they are rather reduced to their utility to another activity. This is why the common measure is established between useful activities, and not with activity as such. The measure of usefulness is money, which Bataille defines as the calculable equivalent of the different products of collective activity. Calculation and common measure are thus the key concepts to define homogeneity: this is not rationality, but a more specific concept of correspondence between terms linked to production itself. A human



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here becomes a function of collective production, and not a value in itself: he or she is ‘an existence for something other than itself’. In industrial society, writes Bataille, it is only those who own the means of production, thus the producers, that are effectively part of the homogeneous segment of society.29 This is not the case, for example, for the proletariat, which remains, writes Bataille, ‘for the most part irreducible’. Still, the proletariat has a double relation to social homogeneity, since as workers they participate in production, but they do not benefit from the profits of their activity, and thus they are not integrated into social homogeneity ‘as men’. Already in the way he theorizes the proletariat – or better, that part of it which is not integrated by the bourgeois state – we can see that Bataille does not propose a reductive dualism between affect and rationality, or heterogeneity and homogeneity. Bataille already sees the necessary entanglement between these two categories and even their ‘potential complicity’.30 The question Bataille addresses in ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ is the problem of the role of the heterogeneous in the concrete determination of the political, and thus of the state, within the dialectics of social classes. As Stallybrass and Thoburn argue, Bataille’s text can be seen as a contribution of the role of the lumpenproletariat, as the quintessential heterogeneous element, within the state. Marx, indeed, moves from a static understanding of the relation between the state and social classes, where the first is simply an instrument of the dominant social class, to a more dynamic and processual understanding, that he makes explicit in the text The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The state (and the political) was previously not an interesting object for Marx since ‘classes are formed in the sphere of productive relations while the political merely reflects and mystifies the relations of those classes’.31 But in The Eighteenth Brumaire politics is seen as a more dynamic field: ‘Politics is now seen less as a (superstructural) level than as a formative process. Moreover, that formative process can fashion classes out of radically heterogeneous groups.’32 The lumpenproletariat is seen by Marx as the heterogeneous force that can come into the way of the bourgeois political dialectics: with the term ‘lumpenproletariat’ Marx and Engels depict the poor as ‘a nomadic tribe, innately depraved’. Bataille thus, in his text, addresses the same problem that Marx discussed in The Eighteenth Brumaire – that is, the ways in which the interplay of the homogeneous and heterogeneous elements within a society acts within politics as a formative process.33 In this sense, Bataille agrees with Marx when he writes that, in general, the state is at the service of the class that wants to preserve homogeneity: the bourgeoisie. Homogeneity is not a given, stable condition, but is constantly threatened by those unproductive forces existing in a society. The

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protection of homogeneity is ensured by ‘imperative elements which are capable of obliterating the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order’.34 The state is not itself one of these imperative elements, but it is the result of the contact between homogeneous society and imperative elements, which are kings, heads of the army or of nations. The state is thus defined by Bataille as an intermediate level and agent between the sovereign agencies and homogeneous classes. This definition already shifts the discourse from a Marxist framework to the themes of sovereignty and statehood that we can find in the reflections of, for example, Schmitt or Kojève.35 In contrast to Schmitt’s state of exception, though, sovereign agencies always need the mediation of the state to act. The state is the mediator between the three terms of politics, that is, the homogeneous part of society, its heterogeneous part and sovereignty: ‘In practical terms, the function of the State consists in an interplay of authority and adaptation.’36 Democracy requires less authority and more spontaneous adaptation, since the state ‘derives most of its strength from spontaneous homogeneity’. If, for the most part, the state acts as a force that neutralizes heterogeneity, it is also possible that it does not succeed in doing this, and this happens especially for internal reasons, which constitute the ‘internal dissociation’ of the homogeneous part of society. This happens when the contradictions in the economic system make a part of society lose its interest in the conservation of the given system. We witness here a process of transformation of that part of the homogeneous society that rejoins the previously heterogeneous forces. What Bataille describes when talking about this process of disintegration is a dynamic and not a simple opposition between two principles. Moreover, the state is a key element in this process: ‘social heterogeneity does not exist in a formless or disoriented State […] when social elements pass over to the heterogeneous side, their action still finds itself conditioned by the actual structure of that side’.37 The state is thus an essential factor in the structuring, and restructuring, of the economic and of the political dimension of a given society. There is a passage in Bataille’s reasoning that is very relevant: Thus, the mode of resolving acute economic contradictions depends upon both the historical State and the general laws of the heterogeneous social region in which the effervescence acquires its positive form; it depends in particular upon the relations established between the various formations of this region when homogeneous society finds itself materially dissociated.38

What is important is that this sentence points to a relational concept of statehood: social and political elements of a given society enter into a different



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setting of relations when there is a material dissociation in the system of production. The definition of homogeneity and heterogeneity is also a relational one: ‘the primary determination of heterogeneity defined as non-homogeneous supposes a knowledge of the homogeneity which delineates it by exclusion’.39 Bataille’s text thus sketches a relational and differential concept of statehood, as the site of mediation between the parts of society that conform to a norm, or which respond to symmetrical relations, and, on the other hand, those parts, or relations, that point towards asymmetry and differential relations. Heterogeneity and homogeneity are thus relational categories, beyond the reductive values of rationality or romantic irrationality. Being relational categories, they also have an epistemological dimension. This is where the psychological dimension of statehood and heterogeneity enters into Bataille’s reasoning: since there are social and epistemological difficulties in producing a scientific knowledge of heterogeneous relations and phenomena, these elements are excluded from the ‘consciousness’ of a society and they are similar, in this sense, to unconscious forms of existence. At the same time, Bataille makes it clear that this is an analogy, and not identity: heterogeneous relations are not the same as the unconscious elements that can be experienced by a given society. The unconscious is, for Bataille, one of the aspects of the heterogeneous. This last term is defined as the non-explainable difference and Bataille’s project is to produce a knowledge of it. The sacred is, for the French philosopher, one of the restricted aspects of heterogeneity – hence the difficulties that Durkheim experienced in providing a science of the sacred. As Michèle Richman underlines, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is probably the most important reference for Bataille’s reflection on heterogeneity and fascism, probably even more so than the work of Freud.40 Unproductive expenditure, the object of affective reactions as well as violence, excess, delirium and madness, is also part of the definition of the heterogeneous. The interpretation of homogeneity and heterogeneity not as much as two sets of values or of two modes of existence, but as two different categories of relation between the subject and society, is reinforced by the fact that Bataille writes that ‘The reality of heterogeneous elements is not of the same order as that of homogeneous elements.’ Everyday life, and the platitude of homogeneous life that is reflected by democratic systems, are thus on a different level with respect to the heterogeneous moments and experiences of social and political life. Bataille creates a typology of four different forms of heterogeneous manifestations of political relations: fascism, monarchy, uprisings or revolts and the heterogeneity of social and political exclusion. The social effervescence of heterogeneous relations can

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either be used in a positive direction, where the existence of humanity counts for itself, or in a negative one, where the energy of the heterogeneous social relations ‘constitutes, as authority, an agency directed against men’. Monarchy is ‘an existence for itself before being useful; an existence for itself distinct from that of a formless uprising where for itself signifies “for the men in revolt”’.41 The lower strata of society, the poor or the untouchable in India, or the lumpen­ proletariat, are also, as we have said, part of the heterogeneous forms of society. Here Bataille makes the dialectics of the homogeneous and the heterogeneous more complex: the heterogeneous can thus represent both pure forms of power, such as the monarch or the fascist leader, and impure ones, such as the lumpenproletariat. As such, ‘the internal heterogeneous social structure is almost entirely reduced to the opposition between two contrary terms’.42 Sovereignty, or political power, includes in itself both aspects of heterogeneity, the higher – and eventually the fascistic – and the lower: those reminding us of the lumpenproletariat. Here Bataille redefines Hegel’s (and Kojève’s) master–slave dialectics through a dialectic of the heterogeneous and the homogeneous. Indeed, ‘the simple fact of dominating one’s fellows implies the heterogeneity of the master, insofar as he is the master’, and this heterogeneity is opposed to the one of the slave: ‘If the heterogeneous nature of the slave is akin to that of the filth in which his material situation condemns him to live, that of the master is formed by an act excluding all filth: an act pure in direction but sadistic in form.’43 We see here that there is a close link between heterogeneity, sovereignty and ‘filth’, which is what Bataille calls formless in the text of Documents.44 Politics is on the side of authority and sadistic activity and thus sovereignty differentiates high and lower heterogeneous forms: ‘This differentiation can be more or less complete […] but, on the whole, within the heterogeneous domain, the imperative royal form has historically affected an exclusion of impoverished and filthy forms sufficient to permit a connection with homogeneous forms at a certain level.’45 Again, we see that there is a movement within heterogeneous relations that creates a connection with that part of society that is useful and productive. The figure of the king, or the sovereign, acts as a mediator among these different parts of a society, just as the state itself does. Bataille’s concept of heterogeneity is not only a response to Hegel, but also to Kant, or, to be more precise, to the Kantian reading of Hegel proposed by Kojève. In Bataille, we witness the reversal of Kant’s logic: the moral imperative is one of non-conformity, of heterogeneity, and not the one of unity or homogeneity: ‘Yet, the pure having to be, the moral imperative, requires being for itself, namely the specific mode of heterogeneous existence.’46 However, the moral imperative is



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itself immediately turned upside down, too. Indeed, homogeneity implies an a posteriori unification of what it is, a unity that is at the same time an existential category (it affects what it is) and a normative one (unity as what it has to be). But heterogeneous relations accede immediately to Being, and not to any moral norm. This means that there is no constructed or imposed unity of what it is, but heterogeneous existence ‘produces itself as a value being or not being’47 (Being). There is then no distinction between existence and norms, be they in the form of rational or moral imperatives. This creates a paradox, which represents the relationship between conformity and non-conformity: ‘The complex form in which the resolution of this incompatibility culminates poses the having to be of homogeneous existence in heterogeneous existences.’48 Thus, through the mediation of sovereignty and the state, the homogeneous and the heterogeneous come into contact with one another. The state is at the centre of this dialectic. In fact, the state is on the one hand only a derivative form of existence, since it finds its reason to be in the heterogeneous and sovereign power of the sovereign. On the other hand, though, ‘the State penetrates imperative existence through reaction; but, in the course of this introjection, the proper form of homogeneity becomes absorbed by heterogeneity and destroys itself as strictly homogeneous’ because it refuses any subordination to utility. The state and the king remain separate forms of existence, though, since the king represents pure heterogeneity. The state is nevertheless at the centre of a dialectic that combines deformity and conformity, transgression and normative rationality. Sovereignty, as different from the state, is the reduction of the plurality to a unity, and fascism is, like Bonapartism, ‘an acute reactivation of the latent sovereign agency’.49 The army, or forms of religious life, represent different articulations of both heterogeneity and homogeneity as qualities of existence or of relations. It is nevertheless in the paragraph dealing with religious life that Bataille makes a hyper-rationalist statement: ‘the idea can be substituted for God as a supreme existence and power’; as such the idea itself belongs to the realm of the heterogeneous, and here Bataille points again to Hegel, who ‘raised the Idea above the simple having to be’.50 Fascism is defined by Bataille as a condensation of power and as the perfect union, realized by the fascist state, between heterogeneous and homogeneous elements. But if fascism needs a state to realize its condensation of power, this does not imply that the state in itself is a fascist form. Heterogeneity on the one side and homogeneity on the other are each internally dual, thus an attentive reading of Bataille’s text cannot lead to an accusation of flirting with fascism, since this is a specific form resulting from a dialectic of homogeneous and heterogeneous forces, and not only an expression of the heterogeneous form

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of social relations. Fascism is thus an outcome of a precise affective formation, and of the adhesion of the proletariat to moral-imperative solutions instead of turning to subversive ones. In the last paragraph of the text, Bataille calls for a descriptive, scientific understanding of fascism, instead of a moral or an ideal one, thus pointing out the need for a structural analysis of power and of its less immediately recognizable forms. The final call for ‘emancipation of human life’ gives us the true definition of heterogeneous forms and in this sense we can talk about a hyper-rationalism in Bataille’s political theory.

Documents’ base materialism and a relational materialist approach to statehood The concept of the heterogeneous as non-conformity was already developed by Bataille in texts that precede ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ and in particular in articles that were published in the review Documents.51 This publication is now iconic, even though the editorial activity of the journal lasted only two years, from 1929 until 1930. Documents was a journal of art, and thus Bataille’s philosophy finds expression as a commentary of images and ‘forms’, but the aesthetic turn of his articles does not weaken the theoretical, and also political, dimension of the arguments he exposes, or, better, of the concepts he creates. For the purpose of our chapter, we focus on two key notions that we see at work in Documents: base materialism and formless. Both these notions contribute to shaping Bataille’s heterogeneous matter: ‘matter so repulsive that it resisted not only the idealism of Christians, Hegelians, and surrealists, but even the conceptual edifice-building of traditional materialists’.52 For Bataille the critique of the ideal, of the elevated is inseparable from a political critique of fascism. It is precisely in Bataille’s concept of base materialism that we find the key to understanding his ‘relational’ account of the state and the basis of his political theory. There are two major points that Bataille makes concerning his specific concept of materialism in the article ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’. One concerns the difference between ‘base’ materialism and classical, we could say also Marxist, forms of materialism. At the beginning of the article, Bataille makes clear that he is not interested in abstract matter, since this is only another variant of idealism. He confronts himself instead with dialectical materialism, which is ‘the only kind of materialism that up to now in its development has escaped systematic abstraction’, but it ‘had as its starting point, at least as much



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as ontological materialism, absolute idealism in its Hegelian form’.53 Then Bataille, without too much explanation, associates Hegel’s philosophy and Gnosticism, and especially turns to the latter to extract from it an ‘innovative’ concept of matter: ‘In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness … and as evil’, where ‘darkness’ and ‘evil’ are not meant to be negative forces, but creative actions.54 Bataille associates an active and creative concept of matter with the radical dualism of this heresy that does not allow for any form of reconciliation: it is a dualism ‘without any possibility of hope’. And thus, the animal and the human cannot be reconciled within the conformity of the ‘Human Figure’, as it is for the Greek or the Christian tradition. In this sense, the gnostic paradigm constitutes a possible reference for the notion of sovereign and heterogeneous materiality that Bataille developed all along his career: ‘Thus the adoration of an ass-headed god […] seems to me capable of taking on even today a crucial value: the severed ass’s head of the acephalic personification of the sun undoubtedly represents, even if imperfectly, one of materialism’s most virulent manifestations.’55 We already have here the idea of a-cephalic sovereignty, that is, a form of sovereign existence without a head, thus without any possible reconciliation between base matter and idealism, as it will be further developed by the collective of Acéphale.56 Matter, in this article by Bataille, is an active principle, and thus it is not a passive derivative of the idea. It has a force and an autonomy in itself. Moreover, ‘base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations’. Base matter is thus a concept that needs to be seen as valid in itself, not as merely opposed to idealism, and it is precisely the impurity, the non-conformity of this concept of materialism, that ‘permits the intellect to escape from the constraints of idealism’. This heretic way of dealing with matter is opposed to idealized conceptions of materialism, as Bataille writes in another article of Documents having as its title ‘Materialism’. Here, he puts into question the idealization of matter itself: ‘Most materialists, even though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist … Dead matter, the pure idea, and God in fact answer a question in the same way ….’ What becomes clear if we read together these two articles explicitly dedicated to materialism in Documents is that Bataille is opposing a symmetrical form of materialism to an a-symmetrical, or relational, one. The question Bataille deals with in Documents is: how do we think matter that is non-conforming?

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He developed this theme through the movement of figures as well as through the movement of thought, thus directly putting into practice his non-idealist claim. The relational dimension of Bataille’s materialism is also stressed by his thesis according to which ‘Materialism will be seen as a senile idealism to the extent that it is not immediately based on psychological or social facts, instead of on artificially isolated physical phenomena.’ Looking at Freud as a source for materialism indicates that what interests Bataille are the relations that develop among individuals and groups, as he makes clear also in ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’. Bataille’s relational approach can then be seen at work also in his critique of modern, but also of ancient, dualism. Gnosticism is a form of ancient dualism, proposing an opposition between the sphere of perceptible, concrete experiences and the one of metaphysical entities: ‘It is true that the supreme object of the spiritual activity of the Manicheans, as of the Gnostics, was constantly the good and perfection.’57 Modern dualism instead is ontological, since it divides reality into form and matter, but in so doing it forces thought into a prison, from which there is no way out, since the question is only if abstract ideas or abstract matter should prevail, but the structure of the game is unchanged. Bataille elaborates what we can call an immanent form of materialism through a critique of Hegel’s dialectics. Hegel’s philosophy is an ontological monism, since it envisages the absolute as the only being, and nevertheless it conceives the opposite categories of matter and of form in a dialectical harmony.58 Understanding the modalities through which Hegel contests the dualist position as the main trait of modern philosophy is useful to clarify how Bataille, discussing and overcoming Hegel, re-elaborates the mystical concept of an original intimacy and moves towards an idea of a non-unified unity. This explains precisely why, in the first paragraph of Base Materialism and Gnosticism, Bataille makes a connection between Hegel and Gnosticism, which otherwise would be difficult to understand: ‘Now Hegelianism, no less than the classical philosophy of Hegel’s period, apparently proceeded from very ancient metaphysical conceptions, conceptions developed by, among others, the Gnostics, in an epoch when metaphysics could still be associated with the most monstrous dualistic and therefore strangely abased cosmogonies.’59 Hegel, nevertheless, expresses the need to overcome the Gnostic dualism, and to come back, with dialectics, to a unity, which would thus be a synthesis of the original unity. Bataille, instead, is a thinker of separation or, better, of difference. We can grasp the distance between these two positions reading what Denise SoucheDagues writes on Hegelianism and dualism:



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For the point of view that adopts scission as its starting point, the absolute synthesis is beyond reach, it is the undermined, the formless, which is opposed to the specific details of the separation: it is an absolute of a very different nature from the one that the other approach poses in the first place.60

This passage could very easily have been talking of Bataille, and as such the two concepts of base materialism and of the formless, expressed in two different articles of Documents, form a dialectic of the heterogeneous. The concept of the formless is precisely opposed to the idea of an original unity of being: ‘Affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.’61 The revolutionary force of Bataille’s philosophy is precisely to destabilize every form of transcendence and of idealism: it frees thinking from the straitjacket of the ‘mathematical frock coat’62 from which ‘the universe would have to take shape’. But, as Bataille makes clear from the first lines, formless is not just a concept – it is instead a movement, an operation: ‘A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world …’ Formless is thus a movement, a process, an act. As such, not only is it not the opposite of ‘form’, but a ‘formless’ dialectic is the activity of matter itself. Matter, as an active principle, intervenes in particular in the gap between the human being and nature, which is precisely the question of the conformity of the ‘human figure’ to a ‘common measure’. Instead, the virulent materialism of a god who is half animal and half man, as in the Gnostic tradition, prevents every possibility of unifying reality through mathesis, that is, through the reduction of being to the common measure of human reason. Matter as an active principle is thus this leap, this gap that separates humanity and nature, good and evil, homogeneity and heterogeneity, and that, precisely because it separates them, is also what unites them. This is why Bataille’s concept of materialism goes beyond the opposition between idea and matter instead of reiterating it, but doing so means especially going beyond symmetrical relations, that is, conceiving an ‘unstable dialectic’ and relations that allow us to move beyond binary oppositions as well as beyond any idea of unity, be it a scientific or a moral concept.63 In this sense, active matter moves ‘into the position of being both high and low, accounting for the interdependence of the high and low by being what they share’.64 Base matter can thus be defined as ‘unresolved dissatisfaction’, as deformity and non-conformity, rather than simply as difference.65 I would suggest calling Bataille’s position one of relational materialism,66 since the active power of matter is not to be found in an hypostasized notion of matter, but in a materialist account of social and

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theoretical relations. Indeed, as Bataille writes, ‘Gnosticism, in its psychological process, is not so different from present-day materialism, I mean a materialism not implying an ontology, not implying that matter is the thing-in-itself.’67 In Bataille’s philosophy matter is active, and it is also the basic principle that creates alterity, or more precisely the form of heterogeneity that is expenditure: In this way the boundless refuse of activity pushes human plans – including those associated with economic operations – into the game of characterizing universal matter; matter, in fact, can only be defined as the nonlogical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to law.68

The notion of expenditure expresses the consumption of oneself in relation to the other, and in particular in The Accursed Share expenditure is also referred to economic consumption: alterity is precisely the non-logical difference expressed by matter, and it is so as differed intimacy. The openness created by the disruptive energy of disproportion that lacerates and decomposes the human figure throws a person into the space of dispossession: he or she does not belong to him or herself anymore, and matter itself moves away from a relation of appropriation and towards creating relations. Matter, in this sense, is always transgressive.69

The heterogeneous part of politics we are unable to think at present, and how Bataille can help us Experience, ‘the insubordination of material facts’, is the basis of Bataille’s relational political theory: experience is precisely the heterogeneous, or active matter, that is, that difference that is not reducible to rational conformity and that, as such, makes social and political relations possible. Let’s now come back to Bataille as a thinker of the state. Bataille has operated, passing through Kojève, a complete reversal of Hegel’s phenomenology. The state is a key concept in Hegel’s (and in Kojève’s) political philosophy. Through the analysis of ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, I have shown that Bataille is a thinker of politics and of the state beyond any ‘accusation’ of  being an irrational, a romantic thinker or, even worse, of flirting with fascism. I have then discussed Bataille as a thinker of relational materialism. Now, I want to conclude arguing that Bataille offers us resources to think about a relational and materialist concept of statehood that can be of use for interpreting contemporary transformations of political power. Here, I consider Bataille’s reflections over base



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materialism in Documents and his theory of the state, as it developed in ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, together. First of all, Bataille’s concept of the state is a dynamic one, and the state is not reduced only to an economic function. On the contrary, the French philosopher develops a notion of the state as eminently political: the heterogeneous elements of political power that are mediated by the state cannot be reduced to economic rationality, which is on the contrary disrupted by that part of sovereign power that is not reducible to utility. Economy is, nevertheless, not swiped out of the picture, but economic and production relations are among the factors that can destabilize the homogeneity of a given political community. The interest of Bataille’s theory of the state, and of his political philosophy, is precisely in the way in which he theorizes this element, proper to politics as much as politics is a manifestation of social life and thus of concrete experience itself, that is irreducible to any common measure: the role played by the heterogeneous forces in the political and social domain of a given community is similar to the one of active matter in a philosophical system. The element that is not reducible to conformity, or homogeneity, is also the factor of a dialectic that does not lead to any form of unitary solution. On the contrary, it engages in a struggle within the forces that constitute statehood itself. In the texts I have discussed, Bataille describes precisely the movements of state effects and of the state-form, be it directly, as in ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, or indirectly, as in the texts of Documents. The category of state is here to be understood in a broader sense than the one it is usually given by political scientists. If Bataille himself gives to the state-form the task of protecting homogeneity and thus the ruling class, a task that Harney and Martin associate with ‘criminality’, at the same time Bataille builds a dynamic and asymmetric notion of state, and of political power or sovereignty, that makes it possible also to account for the disruption of the heterogeneous as a stateeffect.70 The breakthrough of heterogeneous forces does not need to be always regressive, as in the case of fascism. In this sense, the approach of Bataille shares some commonalities with Poulantzas’ idea of the state as well as with more recent conceptions of the state as an ensemble of social and political relations. For Poulantzas, the state is made by the struggles over its form and over the structure of social relations. In this sense, he shares the relational and materialistic approach of Bataille.71 Nevertheless, for Poulantzas there is still some symmetrical correlation between economic forces, that is, relations of production, and state-forms as well as state-effects. Bataille is more radical: he gives priority to the elements of

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non-conformity, and thus inscribes instability at the heart of statehood and of social and political relations.

Notes 1

Carolyn J. Dean, ‘Introduction: Georges Bataille: An Occasion for Misunderstanding’. Diacritics 26 (4) (1996): 3–5. 2 Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’. New German Critique 22 (1981): 3–14; Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987 and, by the same author, ‘The French Path to Postmodernity: Bataille between Eroticism and General Economy’. New German Critique 33 (1984): 79–102; Alessandro Passerin D’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. 3 Richard Wolin, ‘Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology’. Constellations 2 (3) (1996): 397–428. 4 Ibid. 5 Stefanos Geroulanos, ‘Champs de Bataille dans le monde anglophone’. Critique 1 (788–89) (2013): 163–72. 6 Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007; Kathryn Yussof, ‘Biopolitical Economies and the Aesthetics of Climate Change’. Theory, Culture and Society 27 (2–3) (2010): 73–99; Nick Mansfield, The God who Deconstructs Himself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010; Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 and, by the same author, The Beast and the Sovereign, vols I and II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 and 2011. 7 Alexander Hirsch, ‘Sovereignty Surreal: Bataille and Fanon beyond the State of Exception’. Contemporary Political Theory 13 (2014): 287–306; Gavin Grindon, ‘Alchemist of the Revolution: The Affective Materialism of Georges Bataille’. Third Text 24 (3) (2010): 305–17; Stefano Harney and Randy Martin, ‘Modes of Excess: Bataille, Criminality and the War on Terror’. Theory and Event 10 (2) (2007). 8 Hirsch, ‘Sovereignty Surreal’, 2. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Jean-Michel Besnier, ‘Georges Bataille et la modernité: “la politique de l’impossible”’. La Revue du Mauss 25 (1) (2005): 190–206, 193.



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Sheldon Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, 31–46. 14 Stefanos Geroulanos, ‘Heterogeneities, Slave-Princes, and Marshall Plans: Schmitt’s Reception in Hegel’s France’. Modern Intellectual History 8 (3) (2011): 531–60. 15 Grindon, ‘Alchemist of the Revolution’, 304. 16 Ibid., 307. 17 See Rosalind Krauss, ‘Informe without Conclusion’. October 78 (1996): 89–105. 18 See Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat’. Representations 31 (1990): 69–95. 19 Georges Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 116–29. 20 Grindon, ‘Alchemist of the Revolution’, 313. 21 Ibid., 317. 22 Harney and Martin, ‘Modes of Excess’. 23 Ibid. 24 Georges Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, in Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess, 137–60. 25 Michèle Richman, ‘Fascism Reviewed: Georges Bataille in La Critique sociale’. South Central Review 14 (3–4) (1997): 14–30. 26 Allan Stoekl, ‘Truman’s Apotheosis: Bataille, “Planisme,” and Headlessness’. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 181–205. 27 Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, 137. 28 Ibid., 160 n.3. 29 Ibid., 138. 30 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx and Heterogeneity’. 31 Ibid., 70. 32 Ibid. 33 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 1987. 34 Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, 139. 35 See in particular Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985 and Alexandre Kojève, Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. 36 Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, 139. 37 Ibid., 140. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 13

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Richman, ‘Fascism Reviewed’; Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995. 41 Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, passim. 42 Ibid., 141. 43 Ibid., 146. 44 Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’, in Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess, 31. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 147. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, passim. 50 Ibid., 153. 51 Georges Bataille, Documents. Paris: Mercure de France, 1968. English translations of Documents articles are available in Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess and in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents. London: MIT Press, 2006. 52 Stoekl, ‘Introduction’, in his Visions of Excess. 53 Bataille, ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’, in Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess, 45. 54 Ibid., 47. 55 Ibid., 46. 56 Marina Galletti (ed.), L’Apprenti Sorcier du cercle communiste démocratique à Acéphale: textes, lettres et documents (1932–1939). Paris: Ed. de la Différence, 1999. 57 Ibid., passim. 58 Denise Souche-Dague, Hégélianisme et dualisme: réflexions sur le phénomène. Paris: Vrin, 1990. 59 Bataille, ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’, 46. 60 Souche-Dague, Hégélianisme et dualism, 137, personal translation. 61 Bataille, ‘Formless’. 62 Ibid. 63 On this point, see Benjamin Noys, ‘Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism’. Cultural Values 2 (4) (1998): 499–517. 64 Ibid. 65 Denis Hollier, ‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille’. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 124–39. 66 This term is also used by authors belonging to the group of actor–network theorists. See Jon Law and Annemarie Mol, ‘Notes on Materiality and Sociality’. The Sociological Review 5 (1995): 274–94. 67 Bataille, ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’, 49. 68 Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, 129. 40

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Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe. Paris: Macula, 1995. Harney and Martin, ‘Modes of Excess’. Nicos Poulantzas, State Power Socialism. London: Verso, 1980. On the elaboration of a contemporary materialist and relational approach of statehood, see Bob Jessop, State Power. A Strategic Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.

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Guilty, Capable, Extravagant, Dialectic Georges Didi-Huberman

Translated by Stuart Kendall

Anger, laughter, obscenity: economies of expenditure.1 Joyous, anguished, extravagant economies. Non-economical economies. Economies in disorder, without ‘economic order’. Paradoxical economies that the authors of Documents will easily associate with the aesthetic tumult of Picasso and the authors of the Collège de Sociologie will see unfolding in the religious and political uproar of the carnival or the mass demonstrations of their era. What was Georges Bataille seeking in all these phenomena of expenditure, if not an original philosophical position locating experience on the level of what he will soon call sovereignty? One could say that, in the crucial years from 1928 to 1930, that is, the years that saw the appearance of Story of the Eye then the review Documents, Picasso’s painting evidenced – the respective positions of Carl Einstein and Michel Leiris were there to support that evidence – part of what Bataille sought in the name of ‘sovereign experience’. It isn’t surprising that Picasso’s ‘great anger’ – not only in regard to the traditional forms of representation, but also his playful ‘great laughter’ and his erotic ‘great obscenities’ – was in such strong agreement with certain aspects of the Bataillean experience, notably on the level of laughter, eroticism and disorder, and of course that of Spanish culture, his dramaturgy of light or his passion for bullfights, for example. It isn’t surprising that the literary motifs mobilized by Bataille in order to speak of Picasso in Documents were extended in theoretical motifs to constitute, a little later, the notion itself – the economic notion – of expenditure. For example, the ‘insubordination of materials facts’ that constitutes a crucial motif in the text in La Critique Sociale on the ‘notion of expenditure’ in 1933 responds directly to the previous commentaries on ‘materialism’, ‘rebellion’ and the ‘impact of forms’ in the texts on Picasso from Documents.2

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Another motif common to these two moments – aesthetic-literary then politico-economic – in Bataille’s thought is that of the sun; think, first, of the ‘Sunspot’ and the ‘Sun of Seville’ in Story of the Eye;3 also think of ‘Rotten Sun’ – overturned, overturning – that Bataille offers, in Documents in the guise of a homage to Picasso’s painting.4 Also recall the role of the sun as paradigm even of writing, considered by Bataille as a sovereign experience (closer still to Picasso, Leiris will say: a bullfight): ‘The necessity to dazzle and blind can be expressed in the affirmation that in the final analysis the Sun is the only object of literary description.’5 Recall, finally, the fundamental place granted by Bataille to what he calls the solar economy in his texts on the notion of expenditure, whether in Les Limites du l’utile, between 1939 and 1945, where he speaks, alongside Aztec sacrifices, of the ‘gift of the sun’ and of its limitless radiation6 or even in ‘Economy Equal to the Universe’ in 1946: The sum of energy produced is always superior to that which is necessary for its production. This is the principle of life, which generally confirms the actions of plants and animals … This fundamental law of life is not surprising. The sums expended usefully permit life to capture solar energy and this easily provides the excess of the living world … This excess, this animation is the effect of this light (we are essentially only an effect of the sun). In practice, from the point of view of wealth, the radiation of the sun distinguishes itself with its unilateral character: it loses itself without taking account, without compensation. The solar economy is founded on this principle … The solar energy that we are is an energy that loses itself. And undoubtedly we can delay it, but not suppress the movement that demands that it lose itself.7

From there Bataille will develop a thought over the long term on expenditure as sovereign economy. In ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, from 1933, he will be concerned, in the first place, with finding an alternative to the ‘classical principle of utility’8 so as to repeat in the economic and political order the gesture that, in Documents, gave rise to all the aesthetic alternatives to the ‘classical principle of representation’. The debauchery of ‘insubordinate’ forms in Picasso and André Masson now finds its answer through a more general observation of human practices of ‘nonproductive expenditure’.9 A vast anthropology of expenditure founded on the analyses of Marcel Mauss and including social phenomena as large and varied as cults, games, the production of art and simple practices of adornment (jewellery) is henceforth substituted for the demand for liberation from avant-garde artists and poets. This is how the ‘primitive’ economy of forms in Picasso gives way to an economic theory transversal with ‘primitive societies of consumption’.10 A supplementary step will be taken when Bataille has decided



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to analyse more directly the fate of the accursed share in the contemporary – and concurrent – economies of capitalism and the soviet system.11 What stays firm, from ‘Rotten Sun’ to The Accursed Share, is nothing other than the fundamental antagonism, violent, psychological and physical at once, that relentlessly opposes a miserly economy of conscious – meaning conscientious, which is to say moralistic and calculating – ‘conservation’ to a generous economy of ‘consumption’, open to the powers of the unconscious. In 1933, this economy is clearly situated on the double level of a politically revolutionary attitude and a poetic and artistic attitude: ‘The term poetry, applied to the least degraded and least intellectualized forms of the expression of the state of loss, can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss.’12 Furthermore, this is what is shown in the series of ‘heterological tableaux’ wherein Georges Bataille arranges his front line between ‘directed masses’ and ‘supported masses’ as between Picasso’s ‘revolutionary tendencies’ and ‘ordinary art of the Bourgeois type’, or between ‘noble poetry’ like Racine’s and ‘accursed poetry’ like Baudelaire’s, etc.13 One then understands that the economic and political positions developed by Bataille around the notion of expenditure derive their source, alongside his anthropological readings, in the artistic and political debates that marked his statements in the fields of literature and painting during the years 1928 to 1930, between Story of the Eye and Documents. One will even understand the ethical and philosophical developments of these same positions in the 1940s, years of the din of real battles and of an accompanying silence – the political retreat, notably – of Bataille, the writer.14 It is, effectively, in a context of generalized misfortune – war – that the author of Guilty, parallel to his quest for ‘inner experience’, will develop the motif of chance as sovereign ethic. This is the chance of friendship, of sin, of the attraction to risk (but also before death). The chance to lose one’s gaze – and to lose it completely – in a vertigo experienced above the crater of Etna or in the vision of a tortured person.15 The chance to offer oneself to the worst, but also just as much to laughter. ‘Chance is a kind of arrow. It is the arrow that is different from others and only my heart is wounded. If I fall to my death, it is this arrow at last: this and no other.’16 Chance will be art, Bataille even writes, on the condition that the artist knows never to stop undoing – losing and losing again – what he knows how to do and redo: ‘If it did not stop along the path, art would exhaust the movement of chance. Art would then be something other than art and more.’17

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And thought? What Picasso eventually was for pictorial chance – for example through his way of showing us under our very eyes the ‘laughable truth of space’18 – Nietzsche will be for philosophical chance, for thought as chance: that of the ‘joyful science’, of the Dionysian dance and the ‘divinity of laughter’.19 Recourse to Nietzsche – to which testifies the great work On Nietzsche: Will to Chance20 written by Bataille parallel to Guilty – obviously imposes a return to the Hegelian question on us. Without having to go back in detail over the ‘Hegelian dialectic’ and ‘openness’ put to work in the period of Documents,21 we can briefly recall how, even in the economy of ‘expenditure’ and ‘chance’, Bataille had to invent the case of the paradoxical figure that is guilt as sovereign dialectic. Sovereignty was first a Hegelian motif, amply commented upon by Alexandre Kojève in the famous ‘dialectic of the master and the slave’ from the Phenomenology of Spirit, a philosophical blow to which Bataille will never cease to return, notably in the 1950s.22 On the other hand, Bataille recognized in the Hegelian dialectic these ‘possibilities’, as he says, through which ‘language, at the same time that it utters positive propositions, opens a wound in us by means of interrogation’ and of course through negation.23 What Nietzsche made Bataille understand, beyond Hegel – or required by the dialectic despite Hegel himself – is not the necessity of a return to ‘simple affirmation’, but rather the necessity of keeping open the wound that the Hegelian dialectic had concluded by closing up in ‘circular absolute knowledge’, against which Bataille will never cease to invoke his ‘definitive nonknowledge’.24

Cut, spend, be free Cut, spend, be free: the dialectic must, in short, be generous at the risk of being tragic. That it doesn’t gain through change, that it does not stop being cut, cutting or guilty: unfinished, unfinishing or unfinishable.25 The dialectic must therefore be passed, like a blade, through the system, which is to say toward the excess or the exasperation of the system: ‘the dialectic of the self and the totality is resolved in my exasperation’, Bataille wrote in Guilty, a way of saying that nothing is ever resolved and that ‘there is no key’.26 Sovereignty must therefore be passed through mastery: no longer alongside force, but alongside power or chance (Nietzschean themes). Truth must therefore be passed through the seriousness of philosophical speech, and rediscover in that way, beyond Hegel – ‘Hegel at the summit of knowledge is not gay’27 – Dionysian laughter and Nietzsche’s joyful science. Human experience must therefore equally be passed



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through work and rejoin in that way, beyond the serious theories of Hegel and Marx, chance and the dance of the child Zarathustra: ‘elaborating a philosophy of work … Hegel suppressed chance and laughter’.28 If Georges Bataille never stopped returning to Hegel – rather than purely and simply substituting Nietzschean ‘affirmation’ for his thought – it is because he wanted to make his own the fecundity and the power to open linked to the possibilities of the dialectic itself. But he wanted, against Hegel, the dialectic to remain open and reveal itself as playful, extravagant and sovereign: he wanted, in short, a negativity that was neither economical nor wise (which is to say encircling, complete, logical) but rather generous and dangerous (which is to say cutting, guilty, tragic). Method is necessary, Bataille says, but only as ‘violence done to habits’, even if they are habits taken from Hegel himself in his direction of the dialectic.29 Such is the meaning of the famous letter sent by Bataille to ‘X, Instructor of a Class on Hegel’ – who is of course Alexandre Kojève – in December 1937, a letter deposited in the appendix to Guilty and wherein, against every ‘closed system’, Bataille proposes not only to suppress but even to alter the dialectic, which is to say to return irreducible alterity to it. Thus, the instrument of this alteration – the blade used by Bataille to cut into the system – is none other than the experimental notion of ‘unemployed negativity’: already an economic notion linked to expenditure but a notion also linked – through the memory of Picasso? – to the endlessness of artistic work (to consider the work of art according to its purpose, for Bataille, is only to betray its power): If the action (‘doing’) is – as Hegel says – negativity, the question poses itself of knowing if the negativity of someone who has ‘nothing left to do’ disappears or persists in a state of ‘unemployed negativity’. Personally, I can only decide in one sense, being myself precisely this ‘unemployed negativity’ (I could not define myself in a more precise fashion). I admit that Hegel foresaw this possibility: at least that he did not situate it as the outcome of the process he described … There is no longer a question of misfortune or of life, but only of what becomes of ‘unemployed negativity’, if it is true that it becomes something. I am following it in the forms that it engenders not initially in myself but in others. Most often, impotent negativity creates a work of art … [The guilty man] is before his own negativity as if it were a wall. No matter how uneasy he feels, he knows that henceforth nothing could be ruled out, since negativity no longer has an outlet.30

Negativity without an outlet, without Aufhebung: tragic or comical negativity, it all depends (it’s sometimes both together). Open in any case, even guilty of its

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efficiency. ‘Negativity is in this double movement of action and interrogation [which Bataille says precisely, moreover, of the dialectic]. Likewise, guilt is linked to this double movement. A human being is this double movement.’31 This is why laughter appears so important in Bataille’s eyes: it is expenditure and cut, abundance and ‘rupture’ of every closed economy.32 This to which even the economy of the ‘economic summa’ conceived by Bataille between 1933 – the year of ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ – and 1956, when the consummation of the first volume will be committed in the third (Eroticism standing between the two), a general theory of sovereignty.33 That would therefore be, in Bataille, the sovereign economy of the guilty, about which we understand that it goes much further than all psychology or every inductive morality of ‘guilt’, since it makes the cut – and its concomitant opening – its fundamental operative principle, its ‘capacity’ itself or its ‘capability’. And it’s there that Picasso returns, less as that ‘guilty conscience’ of modernism that Rosalind Krauss will later recognize in the practice of pastiche,34 than as that artist of the cut, always capable of opening painting to new possibilities, that Carl Einstein already recognized in 1929: We draw attention to the polyphony of the surface of the … paintings, which present multiple indications to the subject of the space. One might speak of divisions in the ‘fields of forms’ containing diverse figures. The forms, in these paintings, find the fields of action clearly divided; one might speak of formal elimination. The incrusted signs correspond to the vertical axes of the figures and compositions. These paintings represent the opposite of purist arrangements, of lightening: something entirely different from a geometric misunderstanding is there.35

Just as Bataille speaks in Guilty of sovereign laughter as a cut or ‘rupture’, as a transgressive expenditure of energy,36 Carl Einstein might have spoken of ‘sovereign painting’, if I can say that, as a painting that cuts: ‘A cutting painting’, one reads about Georges Braque.37 Or even about Hans Arp, who laughs as much as he paints and demolishes (like a child his toys) as much as he ‘cuts’, to better identify, his figural objects: Arp isolates facts so as not to drown in the quagmire. So that something does not remain anonymous, it must be torn from the ensemble and overvalued; thus, the logical continuity is dispossessed. But these isolated figurations have numerous psychic meanings. A sheet contains a number of divergent experiences, which are all different from the initial object, and this all the more as the sheet is figured more distinctly. Each theme provokes its opposite and slips



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imperceptibly toward it. Thus the paintings psychically decompose outside of their forms. How boring the opposite case would be! It’s true that before such a dialectic one often tries to take refuge among infantile primitives, but these are only wasted efforts. All forms are ambiguous, which permits the romantic to draw a multifaceted humor from them … Arp cooked, sawed, cut: necks encircled by a tender tie; birds struggle in an egg; dolls and mustaches, etc. Among the Negro beliefs, a part means as much if not more than the whole; because a vast state is concentrated in the fragment, without dispersing the magical forces in accessories. This is an ecstatic isolation. Through decapitation and dismemberment, one isolates that which is decisive.38

Just as childish laughter ‘folds us in half ’, makes us guilty in its sovereign expenditure, eroticism – this game that, in secrecy and freedom, the ‘community of lovers’ plays – will be promoted by Georges Bataille, in the second volume of his ‘economic summa’, as an accursed share and sovereign, essential, to human activity: ‘This time we are concerned with a sovereign form, that can serve nothing’, he writes to distinguish it from sexuality, which ‘can serve something’ not only in the order of biological reproduction but even – Bataille here reading Claude Lévi-Strauss – in that of symbolic exchange and kinship.39 Indulging in erotic experience, a human is liberated from social exchange, but he or she is no less ‘guilty’: ‘cut off ’ between the taboo and transgression, but equally divided by a ‘horrified desire to lose and to lose oneself ’,40 Bataille thereby anticipating what Jacques Lacan, following the same detour through Hegel and Kojève, will develop in 1960 about the ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’.41 The final book published by Bataille will be, in 1961, The Tears of Eros, a book of images at the centre of which will reappear, with force, Picasso’s erotic iconography –assembled thanks to the help of Louise and Michel Leiris – an iconography of ‘guilty couples’, centaurs or fauns with nymphs, picadors and toreadors clothed in light making love with great lively female nudes.42

‘What our times possess of freedom’ We would be mistaken however in seeing this ‘return to Picasso’, in Bataille’s preoccupations, solely from the perspective of erotic sovereignty. In fact, it is through political sovereignty – that which at the time of the Collège de Sociologie kept the author of Guernica out of the field – that Picasso, in 1945, will return to the first rank of Bataillean references. In 1945, the Second World War had ended and, with it, European fascism … except in Spain, where Franco continued

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to handle his economy of executions with a garrote, infamous dungeons and concentration camps, including ‘under the Sun of Seville’.43 In this context, Bataille edited a special issue – the only one that appeared, in fact – of the journal Actualité devoted to ‘Free Spain’ whose participants included, among others, Albert Camus, Maurice Blanchot and Jean Cassou. One of the two texts written by Bataille for this special issue recounted his own Spanish experience at length, from the death of Manuel Granero in the bullring in Madrid, on 7 May 1922, to the underground – but sovereign – struggles of the Spanish anarchists, passing through the ‘culture of anguish’ and risk mixed together in the art of the canto jondo.44 The other text was entitled ‘Les peintures politiques de Picasso’ [Picasso’s Political Paintings]. It begins like this: If free, antifascist Spain is for us full of meaning, the Spanish painter Picasso, who had occasion to express his antifascism during the civil war, cannot be dissociated from it. Picasso is not only the greatest of living painters: he is also the freest. He is this, it seems to me, in the most Spanish way, at once harsh, familiar, and even in a way excessive.45

Isn’t affirming Picasso’s freedom in this way a precise return to the statements of 1930, for example when Carl Einstein wrote that ‘Picasso is the distress call of all that our times possess of freedom’?46 Doesn’t adding the term ‘excessive’ to this emphasize the value – economic, political – of expenditure and sovereignty to which Bataille would henceforth associate the painter? But doesn’t it also insert the tragedy, inherent in Guernica, as a paradoxical condition – already claimed by Bataille during the period of the Collège de Sociologie – for all sovereignty in the political field? ‘It is strange that the most free of the arts has reached its summit in a political painting,’ Bataille even wrote.47 Strangeness, in fact: Picasso reached the summit in the exact moment when he was able to paint that nothing was won (Guernica appeared, in this sense, as the absolute opposite of a trophy). He reached the summit by sinking his gaze into the bomb crater, into the throat of crying beings, into the cracks in dismantled space or in the cut, the fold of open wounds. So his impotence was complete before history. But the strangeness – the dialectical strangeness – of his painting justly caused this defeat of life to explode or exceed itself so as to let power surge up, sovereignty par excellence: suddenly ‘unintelligible, extreme horror … liberated in him an excess in every sense, [and] drives the procession of life excessively, unloads the impossible contents of things’.48 History, in Guernica, would ‘unload’ in this way, in Bataille’s eyes, the ‘impossible contents’ of his internal things, like a gored horse in the



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corrida suddenly unloaded the contents of its viscera. This is why his tragedy – and the ‘excess of emotion’ that it entails – deploys itself as this ‘excessive life’ even in his caricatural effects and bursts of laughter.49 This is also the way to recall better than anyone else the great lesson of Goya, of whom Bataille often spoke during the same period, and even in the same terms of political ‘subversion’ lead by a tragic – or comic – ‘accord with the impossible’.50 This would therefore be the ‘sovereign economy’ of which a painter is capable, on the condition that he is truly ‘free’, therefore ‘guilty’ of so being, on the condition that he accept, at some moment, to ‘lose’ everything or to ‘expend’ everything before history. In Bataille’s eyes, Picasso has not only ‘taken’ the bombardment of Guernica as the subject of a painting; he has ‘given’ – and to everyone – Guernica as an image of our contemporary memory. And he has done so in a sovereign way, without taking count. Of course, he ended up by ‘gaining’ from it: in international reputation, in enduring market value. So much is it true that the sovereign economy is in general only a symptom – a ‘brief summer’, to use that beautiful expression from Hans Magnus Enzensberger about Buenaventura Durruti51 – in the economic order of things. This is what gave rise, in Bataille, to multiple investigations of modern art insofar as it ‘pursues the end that our utilitarian disasters no longer attain’, but equally insofar as it finds itself unfailingly reduced to the status of means in the ‘social void left by the decline of sacred values’.52 Hence, in conclusion, what Georges Bataille will call the ambiguity of culture, in a reflection wherein the anthropological perspective, invoked from the beginning – through the great teachings of Marcel Mauss – comes to be in some way divided, cut in two, according to the two possible ways, perhaps complementary but violently tensed one against the other, of envisioning the gift and, with it, the notion of value itself. Exchange value on one side: this is what grounds the estimable in art, its capacity to be incarnated in some objects of which some will become cultural ‘fetishes’, supports for the power of certain institutions, exemplary ‘productions’ of human labour.53 This is what leads the experts to ask how much is it worth on the level of historical, stylistic or economic value. That’s when Picasso won the game of the history of art and made his art dealers or the museums dedicated to his work (nothing out of the ordinary, besides) gain power. But, at the heart of this ‘social fact’ there is also the symptom, the ‘brief summer’ – in fact: the fundamental desire – of a value of expenditure linked to the ‘unemployed negativity’ of art images. This is what, in the eyes of Carl Einstein or Georges Bataille, should have grounded their entire struggle on the

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front of the inestimable in art: its capacity to be incarnate in those gestures of pure loss, moments of tragic ‘ecstasy’, ‘bursts’ of laughter or of ‘free gifts’. This is how Bataille approaches the ‘sovereign end’ of art, insisting on saying that ‘culture is sovereign or it does not exist’, against all subjugation to ‘economic or ideological utility.’54 This is how Carl Einstein speaks of admiring in Picasso the ‘pitiless consummation [which is equally to say the destruction] of forms [linked to] a powerful contempt for fetishes’.55 This is a way of asking, not ‘how valuable is it’ in the order of exchange but how is it valuable in the order of experience and of the power of the gaze.

Notes 1

This text is an extract from a more extensive study on the ‘Picasso-economy’ in the texts of Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein. It appeared in Revue des Deux Mondes (May 2012): 152–65. 2 Georges Bataille, ‘The ‘Lugubrious Game’, in Visions of Excess, trans. and ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 24–30; ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Bataille, Visions of Excess, 116–29. 3 Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 23–9, 65–71. 4 Georges Bataille, ‘Rotten Sun’, in Visions of Excess, 57–8. 5 Georges Bataille, ‘La nécessité d’éblouir …’, in Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 140. 6 Georges Bataille, Les Limites de l’utile [1939–45], in Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard, 1976, 183–94. 7 Georges Bataille, ‘Economy Equal to the Universe’ (1946), trans. Stuart Kendall. Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy 5 (Summer–Autumn 2013): 34–7. 8 Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess, 116–18. 9 Ibid., 117. 10 Ibid., 116–23; Bataille, Les Limites de l’utile, 185–212; Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1988, 43–77. 11 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume 1, 79–191. 12 Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, 120. 13 Georges Bataille, ‘Dossier “hétérologie”’ (n.d.), in Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 2, 186, 190, 197. See also Georges Bataille, ‘Textes se rattachant à “La notion de dépense’’’ [1930–3], in ibid., 145–58 and ‘Les onze agressions’ [1938], in ibid., 385–86. 14 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography [1992], trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 2002, 281–356.



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Georges Bataille, Guilty [1944], trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany: SUNY Press, 2011, 27–36, 106–7. 16 Ibid., 71. 17 Ibid., 67. 18 Ibid., 49. 19 Ibid., 77–107. 20 Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche [1945], trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015. 21 See Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visual selon Georges Bataille. Paris: Macula, 1995, 201–35. 22 Georges Bataille, ‘Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice’ [1955], trans. Jonathan Strauss. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 9–28 and ‘Hegel, l’homme et l’histoire’ [1956], in Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 12. Paris: Gallimard, 1988, 349–69. 23 Bataille, Guilty, 115. 24 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience [1943], trans. Stuart Kendall. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014, 110. 25 Bataille, Guilty, 19–23. 26 Ibid., 73–103. 27 Ibid., 95. 28 Ibid., 86. 29 Ibid., 25. 30 Ibid., 111–13. 31 Ibid., 124. 32 Ibid., 127–30. 33 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume III [1953–6], trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 365–410. 34 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, 241. 35 Carl Einstein, ‘Pablo Picasso: quelques tableaux de 1928’, Documents 1 (Avril 1929): 38. 36 Bataille, Guilty, 128. 37 Carl Einstein, Georges Braque. Paris: Editions des chroniques du jour, 1934, 47. I offered a commentary on this formula in ‘“Tableau=Coupure”: Expérience visuelle, forme et symptome selon Carl Einstein’. Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 58 (1996): 5–27, reprinted and amplified in Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2000, 159–232. 38 Carl Einstein, ‘L’enfance néolithique’. Documents 8 (1930): 479, 482. 39 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume II [1951], trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 16–17. 40 Ibid., 103–10. 15

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Jacques Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’ [1960], in Jacques Lacan, Écrits [1966], trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007, 671–703. 42 Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros [1961], trans. Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989, 163–5. 43 Gonzalo Acosta Bono, Jose Luis Gutiérrez Molina, Lola Martínez Marcías and Angel del Rio Sánchez, El Canal de los Presos (1940–1962), Trabajos forzados: de la represión politica a la explotación económica. Barcelona: Critica, 2004. 44 Georges Bataille, ‘À Propos de Pour qui sonne la glas d’Ernest Hemingway’ [1945], in Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 11. Paris: Gallimard, 1988, 25–7. For the complete text, see Michel Surya (ed.), Georges Bataille: une liberté souveraine. Fourbis-Ville d’Orléans, 1997, 41–7. I offered a commentary on this text in ‘L’Oeil de l’expérience’, in Vivre le sens. Paris: Éditions du Seuil-Centre Roland Barthes, 2008, 147–77. 45 Georges Bataille, ‘Les peintures politiques de Picasso’ [1945], in Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 11, 24. 46 Carl Einstein, ‘Picasso’. Documents 3 (1930): 155. 47 Georges Bataille, ‘Les peintures politiques de Picasso’ [1945], in Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 11, 25. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., where Bataille alludes to the two famous engravings from 1937, Songe et mensonge de Franco. On these engravings and their ‘political iconology’, see Pepe Serra (ed.), Viñetas en el frente. Barcelona: Museu Picasso, 2011. 50 Georges Bataille, ‘Les peintures politiques de Picasso’ [1945], in L’Espagne Libre. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1946, 24; ‘Goya’ [1948], Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 11: 309–11; ‘L’oeuvre de Goya et la lutte des classes’ [1949], in ibid., 5503. 51 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie: Buenaventura Durrutis Leben und Tod. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1973. 52 Georges Bataille, ‘L’Utilité de l’art’ [1952], in Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 12, 212. 53 Georges Bataille, ‘L’Équivoque de la culture’ [1956], in ibid., 437–8. 54 Georges Bataille, ‘L’Équivoque de la culture’ [1956], in ibid., 439, 443. 55 Carl Einstein, L’Art du XXe siècle [1926–31], trans. Lilian Meffre and Maryse Staiber. Paris: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon-Actes Sud, 2011, 155.

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Useless Practices in Sacred Spaces: Bataille’s Elegance and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty Kevin Kennedy

A concern for elegance is always connected to waste.1 Sovereignty on display exerts its fascination by appealing to the universal desire for sovereignty.2 Contemporary Western societies are characterized by an increasing regulation and homogenization of public life in the name of security and common sense, in which the highest freedom, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, is to not be hassled by your neighbour.3 This process of rationalization is intimately tied to the marginalization of practices and ideas that do not conform to the sobriety and efficiency of an enlightened rationality, a process Max Weber famously described as the ‘disenchantment of the world’.4 While many do welcome the disappearance of this auratic, magical, sacred dimension from the public sphere, rightly pointing to its ambiguous if not downright questionable political heritage, this disappearance, it seems, is synonymous with the retreat of a crucial dimension of sociality itself. As the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller has recently suggested, contemporary society, in its fixation on the individual and its overriding demand to reduce everything to the latter’s narcissistic aspirations and tastes, no longer recognizes that such supposedly irrational categories as charm, glamour, charisma and elegance are not mere vestiges of a now obsolete religious or feudal worldview, but products of a public sphere, of collective practices, irreducible to the practical concerns of the enlightened individual.5 Georges Bataille’s life and work are not commonly considered in terms of what could be called an aesthetics of elegance, a category more frequently associated with flamboyant dandies such as Charles Baudelaire or Jean Cocteau.

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Many Bataille scholars would probably reject such an association on the basis that much of his work derives its force precisely from a relentless dismantling or overturning of such aesthetic notions.6 However, as Michel Surya notes in his seminal biography, even though ‘there was nothing bohemian about Bataille’, he nonetheless ‘displayed an elegance that was close to dandyism’.7 And in a short piece on the Surrealist Louis Aragon, Bataille himself confesses to his ‘persistent liking for an appearance of a particularly elegant way of life, which I often considered sovereign’.8 To be sure, Bataille was no advocate of the public posturing and empty posing he often considered to be the hallmark of many Surrealists. Still, as the former quote underlines, his work was guided to a large extent by an analysis of what he variously called the marvellous, the radiant, the magical, the sacred or the elegant in the modern world, a cluster of seemingly disparate terms, whose fundamental unity he theorized under the name sovereignty: ‘it seems useless to go any further in our exploration of sovereignty without accounting for the underlying unity of aspects whose appearance is so varied’.9 There is a plethora of secondary literature on Bataille’s notion of sovereignty, exploring it in relation to such typically Bataillean topoi as eroticism, general economics, violence, evil and transgression.10 In the following, however, I want to demonstrate that this notion can and should be read in terms of its aesthetic dimension, as a desire to overcome necessity and objectivity, which always relies on a process of aesthetic mediation to manifest itself. To clarify this point, it will be necessary to trace Bataille’s historical account of sovereignty in La Souveraineté, from what he calls an archaic sovereignty to the sovereignty of modern art, in an attempt to unearth the aesthetics that underpin it and to show how it survives in several contemporary practices, most notably in the world of art, but also in such apparently minor practices as smoking. Drawing on Bataille’s reading of Durkheim’s famous distinction between the sacred and the profane, I will argue that sovereign practices in modern societies, such as art, can only survive as long as they are given their own ‘sacred space’, distinct from the profane realm of political and social utility, and whose justification or evaluation by way of the latter, a prevalent concern of many contemporary aesthetic theories, not only seems misguided but fundamentally negates the sovereign dimension of life itself.



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A minor form of expenditure: Bataille’s elegance and the sovereignty of smoking Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose.11 It is possible that today men spend no less on smoking tobacco than on our forefathers did on sacrificial animals.12

Although Bataille contracted tuberculosis as a young man and suffered from its incapacitating effects for most of his adult life, he nonetheless, and somewhat incomprehensibly to contemporary sensibilities, championed smoking as a modern form of sovereign behaviour. In a lecture delivered in the spring of 1942 entitled Socratic College, Bataille asserts that smoking tobacco is a modern form of sacrifice.13 This identification of a highly ritualized ancient custom, in which animals, goods and, in some societies, even human beings were solemnly destroyed with the, by comparison, vapid habit of filling your lungs with tobacco smoke seems strange, if not completely off the mark. Yet if we recall Bataille’s basic definition of sovereignty as that which is carried out for its own sake, regardless of profit or consequences, and that it is precisely the latter that makes it sovereign, the equation becomes less puzzling: ‘we may call sovereign the enjoyment of possibilities that utility doesn’t justify (utility being that whose end is productive activity)’.14 Bataille argues that both practices, sacrifice and smoking, constitute a ‘surrender to a squandering indefensible by sound reason’, creating an ‘atmosphere detached from the general mechanics of things’.15 Like sacrifice, smoking is a senseless consumption of resources and energy, impossible to justify in utilitarian terms. For Bataille this imperviousness to rational justification produces an aesthetic effect; it is the precise reason why ‘smoking is elegance’.16 This idiosyncratic definition implies that the refinement or sophistication we tend to associate with elegance is not connected to any particular fashion, attire or embellishment, nor even to a certain simplicity or economy of means; elegance, in Bataille’s analysis, is always an inevitable by-product of acts of useless expenditure that cannot be recuperated by the restricted economy of profit and growth. It requires an act that negates the primacy of productive action and thus becomes, in Balzac’s apt phrase, ‘the art of animating repose’.17 If Bataille’s interpretation of smoking as a modern form of sovereign expenditure thus seems fairly unambiguous, his assertion, in the same lecture, that ‘tobacco, even if smoked in solitude is a connection between men’ is slightly more perplexing.18 Yet it points towards one of the crucial aspects of Bataille’s

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lecture, and of his thought more generally: the critique and rejection of the modern ideology of individualism, which posits the individual as the ultimate, unsurpassable horizon of social and political activity.19 Influenced by Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Bataille paints an anthropologically inflected picture of humanity, in which the latter’s supposedly stable individuality is merely an effect of the negation (transcendence) of animal nature, achieved through work and instrumental reason.20 To simplify radically Bataille’s complex argument, one could say that if reason and future-oriented action are responsible for producing the individual ego in the first place, an escape from the demands of work and productivity can only be achieved through the latter’s negation. For Bataille the ‘beyond’ of individuality, however, is not a transcendent, supernatural realm, but rather, following the Durkheimian paradigm, the social sphere itself.21 In other words, the participation in a truly communal activity is always predicated on the negation or at least disruption of one’s normal, everyday sense of self, a process Bataille calls communication. Unlike the Habermasian definition of the term, for whom it designates the rational exchange between two stable subjects,22 Bataillean communication is based on the subversion of self and the rejection of productive activity: ‘The habitual activity of beings – what we call “our occupation” – separates them from the privileged moments of powerful communication.’23 Now, in Bataille’s analysis, ‘tobacco, even if smoked in solitude … produces communication’ because ‘it is the most exterior thing to our understanding’, i.e. it cannot be recuperated by the rational paradigm of self-preservation, which dominates our everyday notion of self: ‘insofar as we are absorbed in smoking we escape ourselves’.24 A cigarette smoked in solitude opens up a ‘sacred space’ beyond the limits of the individual, which, however, only comes into being through the ritualized negation of the latter’s inevitable subjection to work and productivity: ‘the sacred is an aspect of the natural given that reveals itself after the fact, in the world of practice – where it is denied – through effects that have escaped the negating action of work’.25 One might reasonably object, however, that a cigarette is not required to escape this subjection, as one could just as well sit back and ‘do nothing’. Yet the key point for Bataille is that the wasteful charm or elegance of sovereignty always needs an outside perspective, a minimum of ritual, like a cigarette, to signify this nothingness, to celebrate this active rejection of all activity. As he puts it in relation to his notion of intimacy, it is ‘never separated from external elements without which it could not be signified’.26 In other words, sovereignty does not exist prior to its articulation, symbolization or externalization: it has no objective, ontological essence, nor



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does it operate according to a logic of mimesis or representation, in which it could be traced back to a sovereign core within the individual; like the smoke of a cigarette, it evaporates as soon as one attempts to seize it. While in Bataille’s lifetime the cigarette still played a prominent part in public life, today an entire army of politicians is preoccupied with eliminating this cultural phenomenon on the pretext that it is unhealthy and curtails the freedom of non-smokers. However, as Robert Pfaller has shown, this marginalization and to some extent criminalization of smoking is not based on the sudden realization that smoking is harmful or addictive, but on a changed perspective regarding the relation between the sacred and the profane.27 Following Durkheim’s basic insight that qualities such as the dirty, the obscene, the disgusting etc. do not inhere in the objects themselves, but are always expressions of the social separation of the sacred and the profane, Pfaller demonstrates that today tobacco is perceived as dirty because it has ‘fallen out’ of the sacred sphere. As Bataille puts it ‘the profane object is not essentially something different from the sacred. In both cases there is simply a change of perspective.’28 Whereas smoking had up until very recently been seen as something glamorous, elegant, sovereign, a public celebration of waste, it now constitutes a ‘dirty’ activity connected to the ‘abnormal’ tastes of the private individual.29 This change of perception is a reflection of a wider, more fundamental shift in society, from what Pfaller calls a culture of taboo to a moral culture: whereas ‘a moral culture is based on interiorized self-observation, the culture of taboo is based on an exteriorised outside perspective, which is always slightly superficial, not completely assimilable to the self, not reducible to reason and purpose’.30 According to Pfaller a culture of taboo has recourse to processes of cultural sublimation, in which things that are unacceptable to the individual (death, madness, intense passion, crime, dirt, deviance) are transformed and celebrated in public spectacles. This process enables the individual members of society to approach or engage with the dirty, the incomprehensible, the frightening without being held personally accountable. As Pfaller puts it, the culture of taboo ‘found a space for such practices and therefore did not produce dirty individuals’.31 This process of cultural sublimation is reflected in Bataille’s analysis of the ritual transgression of the taboo on murder in the sacrificial act. The essence of a sovereign sacrifice, as Bataille argues, does not reside in the actual killing of a human being, but in the fictionalization of murder, which always requires an imaginary perspective, external to the rational self: ‘A sacrifice is no less fictional than a novel; it is not a truly dangerous, or culpable, killing; it is not a crime but

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rather the enactment of one; it is a game. At its beginning it is the narrative of a crime whose final episode is performed for the spectators by the priest and the victim.’32 A sovereign sacrifice (like elegance) is a performance, a game, and thus needs observers, an audience, participants; it is not something that belongs to or originates within a particular person; it is not a form of self-expression, but designates a sphere beyond or even alien to the latter’s tastes and aspirations: ‘in a world of individuals, it calls for the general negation of individuals as such’.33 Contemporary culture, in its blind adherence to the values of authenticity and veracity, seems to have lost the ability to recognize, let alone celebrate such ‘useless’, ‘superficial’ habits. It is telling that for the majority today the sacred designates nothing but an aspect of one’s private religious beliefs. Yet the original impetus behind an initial sacred sentiment, as Durkheim has shown, is not to be found in the personal belief in a higher power, but in the strict demarcation between profane and sacred zones, designed to temporarily leave behind the profane order of work and the strictures and demands of everyday life. As Robert Pfaller puts it, modern culture ‘seems to have lost those spatial and temporal zones of exception, in which it could publicly celebrate [the sacred] and appreciate its glamorous nature’.34 For Bataille, echoing Pfaller’s argument, ‘the present permits no more than some ungraspable forms of the sacred’, which accounts for ‘the distance that separates the bloody sacrifice from a cigar’.35 This means that the difference between the sacrificial act and smoking does not lie in their fundamentally different ‘nature’, but rather in a changed perception, in the gradual appropriation of the scared by the profane, which ultimately prevents contemporary society from recognizing and appreciating their sovereign ‘essence’. Even though Bataille portrays smoking as a form of sovereign elegance, by means of which ‘we get away from heaviness’, he is quick to point out that this ‘lightness is paid for with insignificance’.36 Smoking cigarettes or cigars, even though it responds in some oblique way to our desire for sovereign enchantment, is undeniably a minor form of expenditure, which, in the general matrix of things, is unable to arouse the extreme passion we would normally associate with the sovereignty of a bloody sacrifice. As Michèle H. Richman observes: If such rituals appear to be on the wane in the modem world, it is not because the necessity for an extreme movement beyond the self has been superseded. Rather, speculates Bataille, it is because we cannot muster the requisite passion – whether hatred or intense disgust – without which sacrifice would appear as a form of servitude.37



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Yet for Bataille it is not so much that the marvellous or the sacred have simply disappeared from modern society: ‘the world we live in remains, in its depths, permeated with the sacred’.38 It is rather that the ubiquitous process of rationalization in modern capitalist societies has relegated the sacred (marvellous, irrational, strange etc.) from the centre of public life to the domain of the unconscious: ‘The primacy of the miraculous … seems to belong to the past … leaving our most deeply rooted desires in the penumbra of the unconscious.’39 In other words, Bataille does not denounce modern society for having abolished the intensity of actual sacrifices, but rather for its inability to consciously engage in non-utilitarian practices: ‘elegance persisting in the unconscious is stagnation’.40 The mark of a truly sovereign experience thus resides in the conscious appreciation and celebration of its futility, not in the unrestrained release of passion or violence. By making this futility tangible, by giving it a ritualized, aesthetic form, smoking becomes a contemporary manifestation of sovereignty, an elegant and conscious way of wasting energy and resources. However, having been ‘banished’ to the profane sphere, in which concerns for self-preservation, health and security dominate, it now simply appears as dirty and harmful, no longer sovereign, elegant or glamorous.

From glory to glamour: Bataille’s ahistorical history of sovereignty We can now recognize that man is himself and that he alone is the sovereign value of man, but this means, above all that man was the real content of the sovereign values of the past. There was nothing in God, or in the kings, that was not first in man, and that without the alienation that reduces him I would rediscover in him what was enchanting in God or in the magnificence of the kings.41

In La Souveraineté, Bataille attempts to demonstrate that if sovereignty always requires the (simulated) destruction of objectivity, then its true ‘content’ is nothing but subjectivity itself. This, for Bataille, is sovereignty’s timeless, ahistorical dimension, present in one form or the other since the beginning of humankind, a domain that, like eroticism, ‘marks off a space outside history’.42 This ahistorical element, however, can only be grasped by means of a stringent analysis of the historical permutations of that which resists positive knowledge, i.e. in terms of the objective manifestations of the desire for the beyond of objectivity. As Stuart Kendall puts it: ‘However vast his perspective, Bataille insists on the subjective ground of historical thought.’43 Yet his notion of subjectivity

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should not be confused with the limits of the individual self, its personal preferences or tastes. In Bataille’s work subjectivity is always ‘NOTHING’, literally not a thing, which means it can only ever be understood negatively, as the negation of objectivity, rationality, temporality and individuality.44 His concept of subjectivity is thus based on a fundamental paradox: it signifies ‘something’ that is limitless and without objective qualities, yet the only way to grasp it is by transforming it into something limited, temporal and objective. This, as Bataille argues, is the original impulse behind the creation of sacred, ceremonial or aesthetic objects: ‘The sacred thing externalizes intimacy. It makes visible on the outside that which is really within.’45 As there is no objective quality to subjectivity, its ‘appearance’ is necessarily based on a form of fiction, invention and creation. In other words, the sacred object never actually achieves this projected objectification of subjectivity, but merely gives an objective form to the subjective desire to transcend empirical, objective reality and thus in effect remains an illusion of subjective immediacy. From this it follows that sovereignty, as the real desire for a chimerical immediacy, as a practical negation of all ontological, epistemological and ethical concerns, always relies on a form of aesthetic mediation to cast its sovereign spell.46 As Bataille puts it in the Tears of Eros: ‘a sacred value remains nonetheless in its principle an immediate value: it has meaning only in the instant of this transfiguration, wherein we pass precisely from use value to ultimate value, a value independent of any effect beyond the instant itself, and which is fundamentally an aesthetic value’.47 Bataille’s historical account of sovereignty sets out to demonstrate that this aesthetic value, this desire for an irrecuperable immediacy, ‘has from the very beginning dominated the life of our species’ as it constitutes the ‘foundation for communication among individuals’.48 The first men, he argues, recognized both the necessity to work (to ensure food and shelter) and the desire to escape the latter’s inescapable demands in search of sovereign experiences: ‘from the moment this species came into existence this species longed for the world of wonder that a work of art creates’.49 This initial ‘phase’ of sovereignty, associated in Bataille’s work mainly with the Upper Palaeolithic period and in particular with the cave paintings of Lascaux, is distinguished by a strict demarcation between the sacred and the profane and the possibility for all members of the community to participate in both. Bataille describes this division as follows: ‘I can … in a community where each receives an equal share of obligations and advantages, labour for another without losing my sovereignty for a time longer than that of the labour. But if the share is not equal, this sovereignty is given up for the profit of the one who doesn’t labour but profits from labour.’ 50



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It is only when the sacred sphere and its immanent sovereignty begin to be combined with objective power that the first break in the history of sovereignty occurs. Bataille calls this type of sovereignty ‘imperative’, characteristic of all societies controlled by institutionalized religion and/or military elites. These differ from previous, archaic communities in that the sovereign elements of existence, such as useless splendour, idleness and excessive wastefulness, are no longer accessible to all but reserved for a social elite. Here the population is divided into two basic categories: those who labour (the slaves, serfs, farmers, servants) and those who consume (the priests, the kings, the lords). The key point regarding the aesthetics of sovereignty lies in the fact that the general public, according to Bataille, is willing to relinquish its share of sovereignty as long as there is the ‘slight possibility of participating in that glory whose appearance fascinates’ – in other words, as long as the sovereignty which is condensed in a single person or institution, such as the king or the religious casts, is put on display for everyone to see. This implies that behind traditional manifestations of sovereignty there always lurks an aesthetic core: For the splendour of a king consisted of nothing but appearance, and appearance was the domain of the architects, painters, musicians and writers that surrounded him. It was insofar as these latter had the power to give the sovereign’s splendid subjectivity the signs that expresses it that the king was radiant to all others … art brought them near to his own essence.51

The ‘radiance’ of the royal personages (or even of god) is fundamentally based on the aesthetic representation it is given in art, in courtly and public rituals and in impressive buildings, such as palaces and cathedrals, designed to reflect the glory of the sovereign, which, in ‘essence’, however, is never anything but a manifestation of sovereign subjectivity, of ‘life beyond utility’ and objectivity.52 This is evidently not to deny that religious, military or feudal leaders did not have real, objective power over the general public. Yet the reason they could maintain this power was partly due to the fact that their ostentation and wasteful splendour allowed the politically exploited individual to participate, albeit passively, in these ‘spectacles’ and thus ‘to receive his subjective truth from them, seeing in the king and his entourage an image of the splendour to which in his heart of hearts he has not ceased to aspire’.53 The aesthetics of radiance or glory are characteristic of the Middle Ages, but in fact apply to every social structure in which the right to waste the surplus of productive labour is reserved for a small elite who manifest this right in conspicuous displays of wealth. The aesthetics of glory thus differ from the aesthetics of archaic humanity in that the

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latter allows each member of society to directly participate in both the creation and the destruction of resources. Both forms, however, are responses to the desire for sovereign enchantment, for an experience of the marvellous, for an aesthetic expression of subjectivity that exceeds the bounds of the individual and of practical reason. The aesthetic kernel of sovereignty, however, only clearly emerges with modern art as the inheritor of institutionalized sovereignty. This is because these imperative forms are always characterized by a fusion of political power and aesthetic representation. Even though traditional sovereignty could also only be experienced aesthetically (in religious art, rituals, royal portraits, palaces or cathedrals) it was always connected to an objective claim to power, to an influence in the real socio-political world. The initial sense of a sovereign experience, i.e. of an experience that eludes necessity, justification and objectivity, is thereby compromised and instrumentalized for profane purposes. It is only with the gradual separation of the different social spheres in modernity, as described by Max Weber, in which art gradually disentangles itself from its religious and feudal roots, that the aesthetic ‘essence’ of sovereignty becomes intelligible.54 Modern art takes on the aesthetic, spectacular aspects of traditional sovereignty, that is, those aspects that are based on fiction and symbolization, yet without their claim to power, truth or accountability. Detached from every political or ethical necessity, it therefore remains true to the essence of the sovereign experience, as postulated by Bataille. From this one can derive the general thesis that the transition from the sacred art of the Middle Ages to modern, autonomous art is not as radical as often assumed: pre-modern art also always contains a moment of sovereign self-transcendence. Behind the development from a socially useful, sacred art to an autonomous art, which, as Adorno argues, can only be defined by means of its total societal functionlessness,55 there is a central similarity, i.e. the sovereign rejection of function and purpose, an aspect that previously had been merely represented by God and the monarchs.56 Still, the crucial difference between sovereign art and traditional forms of sovereignty lies in the affirmation of this aesthetic mediation. In the Christian doctrine of salvation, for instance, the sovereign aspects of the aesthetic experience are lost, as salvation is here postulated as the purpose or ultimate goal of Christianity’s aesthetico-ritualistic practices and thus becomes a principle of utility or a ‘real’ possibility. Sovereign art, in contrast, is a conscious display of its illusory character, a medium that addresses and answers this desire for the beyond of objectivity, without, however, charging it with a specific truth content or telos. Yet sovereign art not only addresses itself to this need, but also reveals the impossibility of ever



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satisfying it. For Bataille it thereby becomes the sign or the symbol of this impossibility, of an experience of sovereignty, which is simultaneously an experience of its (logical) impossibility. As Christoph Menke puts it, ‘art is “sovereign” because it overcomes the “desire for meaning” that defines our nonaesthetic discourse. To view art in its sovereignty is not to avoid and repress the “risk of being meaningless” that it calls into view but to accept and preserve it.’57 In Bataille’s history of sovereignty, art appears as the inheritor of an archaic sovereignty, through which the latter’s original, non-utilitarian dimension becomes intelligible, after having been obscured by millennia of profane instrumentalization. This process is triggered by the rise of bourgeois capitalism, in which the latter’s injunction to productivity, growth and efficiency completely divorces sovereign wastefulness from the organization of the social body. Today, Bataille concludes, sovereignty belongs to the domain of art, no longer to the domain of politics. This becomes obvious if one compares the glamour of modern film or rock stars with contemporary politicians, who, unlike the kings and feudal lords of former times, and despite their best efforts, rarely have anything glamorous about them: ‘The “glory” of the prime minister belongs essentially in the category of false glory, of the untrue reflection; it is always a bit comical, and the prime minister is not serious unless he holds it in contempt, adhering to the objective truth of “power”.’58 However, despite having revealed the illusory, aesthetic nature of sovereignty, modern art, in contrast to sovereign practices of former times, pays for its aesthetic freedom, its prerogative to waste surplus resources, with a lack of influence in the socio-political sphere, which is now completely under the yoke of capitalist productivity and rationalization. This lack of political influence has been one the central points of contention in modern and contemporary philosophy. In the final part of this essay I will briefly contrast Bataille’s conception of sovereign art with a few prevalent ideas in contemporary thought to ascertain whether it is legitimate to construe art as a ‘useless practice in sacred space’ or whether art itself is being increasingly instrumentalized for profane, non-aesthetic ends and thereby gradually surrenders its sovereignty.

Useless practices in sacred spaces: Sovereign art and the contemporary experience of sovereignty Whoever speaks on behalf of a sovereign art places himself outside a real domain on which he has no hold, against which he is without any rights. The

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artist is NOTHING in the world of things, and if he demands a place there…he follows in the wake of those who believed that sovereignty could, without being surrendered, have a hold on the world of things.59

Bataille’s history of sovereignty is evidently very broad and cannot be applied in a strictly chronological sense. For instance, the fact that modern capitalist societies have relegated sovereignty to the sphere of art in no way implies that they do not produce their own forms of imperative sovereignty. The aesthetics of the Third Reich (the grand spectacles, the propaganda, the elegant uniforms etc.) are a case in point. Despite the historical vagueness of Bataille’s model, it is nonetheless helpful in identifying some general movements that a more localized analysis might obscure. The main point to have emerged from my previous analysis is that art, as a distinct institution in the modern landscape, implicitly reveals that all sovereign practices require aesthetic mediation, or, to be more precise, that sovereignty has always been a function of the aesthetic. This ultimately suggests that true sovereignty is always a dream of sovereignty, an expression and reflection of the yearning for a sovereign immediacy that can never be objectively achieved: ‘sovereign life … responds to the desire to be an end in itself, without any expectations’.60 In this respect Bataille’s theory of sovereignty is surprisingly close to the scientific, mathematical branch of speculative realism, represented by Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier, both of whom, although not particularly interested in aesthetics as such, castigate their speculative realist peers for their belief in an illusory immediacy: ‘Belief in this pseudo-originary, pre-theoretical dimension of experiential immediacy is the phenomenological superstition par excellence.’61 While Bataille would concur with Brassier’s emphasis on the illusory nature of immediacy, he would nonetheless insist on the necessity of practices, such as sovereign art, that give expression to this illusion. Bataille’s argument derives its ethical urgency from the idea that a complete eradication of such enchanting practices may be potentially catastrophic: ‘when man’s need for miracles is not satisfied it transforms itself into a passion for destruction’.62 For Brassier, on the other hand, the miraculous is a remnant of an outmoded, superstitious worldview and thus needs to be abolished: ‘the disenchantment of the world … is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment’.63 Bataille’s work, as we have seen, is devoted to an analysis of subjectivity, which, as he argues, fundamentally separates humans from animals and the



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world of objects. From a speculative realist perspective his thought is therefore ‘correlationist’, i.e. it is based on the belief that objects can only ever be known in relation to human thought, never in themselves.64 Meillassoux and Brassier, on the other hand, claim that the other of thought, what they call the ‘real’, can be accessed directly, regardless of mediation, representation or agency. This claim is based on the traditional metaphysical opposition between reality and appearance, in which, as Brassier argues, science would ‘slowly and pain­stakingly excavat(e) the deep structure of a reality whose fundamental features may turn out to bear little resemblance to the kinds of entities and processes with which we are currently familiar’.65 From a Bataillean perspective this argument disregards the fact that every act of homogenization, i.e. the scientific appropriation of material reality, always necessarily translates into thought (language, concepts, ideas) that which lies outside it: in other words, to posit a notion such as the real (or the sovereign) is only possible within the realm of human thought and language, even though it designates something beyond it.66 Any scientific or philosophical notion of an unmediated, noumenal reality (and in this sense they are very similar to the religious belief in a transcendent deity or realm) are characterized by a disavowal of mediation, by a desire for a beyond, which is posited as ‘real’ (e.g. Meillassoux’s idea of an ‘ancestral realm’).67 The idea of an aesthetic sovereignty, on the other hand, even though it also posits ‘a beyond’ (of utility, reason, the individual), requires an affirmation of mediation, an acceptance of its fundamentally illusory nature, an avowal of the impossibility of ever attaining it. It always remains a projection, a desire for the beyond of objectivity, that, when all is said and done, leaves the realm of objects and their inevitable reliance on human mediation intact: ‘Where we think we have caught hold of the Grail, we have only grasped a thing, and what is left in our hands is only a cooking pot …’68 In stark contrast to Brassier and Meillassoux’s demythologizing rationalism,69 Bataille wants to safeguard a domain for play, magic and sovereign enchantment, where this desire for an illusory immediacy can freely and consciously express itself, without being tied down by the dogmas of truth or probability. The sovereign, however, should not simply replace or usurp reason (science, philosophy, economics), but should exist alongside it, in a space unencumbered by the latter’s inevitably utilitarian or rational stance. For the same reason, sovereign practices should never be expected to provide a reasonable alternative to the existing political system. As Bataille puts it: ‘such an act can be performed only if it is accepted as a sacred act: against the unacceptable world of rational utility. The refusal this involves would gain from

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not being confounded with the reasoned refusal of unreasonable conditions of life.’70 This means that even if the political status quo were completely acceptable and reasonable, just and fair, a veritable utopia, a sovereign art, in its celebration of unreason and irresponsibility, would still have to oppose it. This explains Bataille’s assertion that ‘a man like Rimbaud would have had as much reason to flee from a post-revolutionary world as from the present world’.71 The call for a sovereign space, exempt from political obligations, in no way diminishes the importance of political action, such as the resistance to the exploitative nature of capitalist society, for instance; yet, as the previous quote makes clear, politics should always be guided by ‘a reasoned refusal of unreasonable conditions of life’, never by a demand for sovereign expenditure.72 In this sense Bataille’s conception of sovereign art is similar to Badiou’s claim that art is a ‘truth procedure … irreducible to other truths – be they scientific, political, or amorous. This also means that art, as a singular regime of thought, is irreducible to philosophy.’73 Like Badiou, Bataille attempts to understand art in its specificity to avoid turning it into yet another object for philosophy or politics. The relation of philosophy/politics (the profane sphere of knowledge, practice and responsibility) to art (the sacred sphere of magic, illusion and the absence of consequences) is thus strictly negative. However, art, understood as a politically useless practice, is not simply unrelated to the political field, but the domain within the latter, ‘a sacred space’, whose ‘function’ is precisely to provide a sphere devoid of function, purpose and meaning. Sovereign art can therefore never become a site for aesthetic resistance, as proposed, for instance, in Rancière’s famous formula of ‘the distribution of the sensible’.74 Although Rancière and Bataille both account for the emergence of modern art in terms of a process, in which traditional hierarchies are destroyed, they draw radically different conclusions regarding its political implications. For Rancière ‘the aesthetic regime of the arts … frees art from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter and genres’,75 while for Bataille the sovereignty of art implies the ‘limitless play of all possible forms’.76 However, unlike Rancière, for whom this destruction contains a ‘new form of “sensible” universality and equality’77 and is thus inherently political, Bataille’s conception of sovereign art, although it also appeals to the universal desire for sovereignty, is ‘devoid of political implications’.78 Due to its enchanting, magical power, sovereignty can and has been instrumentalized for political purposes, but in essence it always remains completely apolitical. From this perspective, art, as a modern manifestation of sovereignty, should be celebrated rather than reproached for its lack of political influence.



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Nevertheless, even though contemporary society still allows for a marginalized form of sovereignty in the world of art, the latter’s apolitical, aesthetic essence is increasingly subordinated to the demand for profit. As Walter Benjamin argues, the aura of the modern movie star is not a function of the magical dimension of cinema, but a product of commodity fetishism itself: ‘the film responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality”, the phony spell of a commodity.’79 From this perspective modern art abrogates its aesthetic sovereignty and (like the aesthetics of glory associated with the kings and gods of previous ages) subordinates the auratic or the magical to an ulterior goal: in this case to the ubiquitous tenets of capitalism, profit and commodification. Such an art can no longer be construed as a ‘useless practice in a sacred space’. Bataille’s assessment, however, is not as pessimistic as Benjamin’s. Even though he acknowledges the usurpation of art’s sovereignty by the capitalist market (which today, in contrast to Bataille’s time, seems to increase exponentially with the ongoing commodification of culture by multinational corporations), he insists that art can only be instrumentalized in this way because it responds to the fundamental desire to escape the predominance of capitalist commodification: here ‘sovereignty … shows itself to be what it always was in spite of its many compromises: a movement irreducible to social utility … Bestsellers and the most servile of poems leave the freedom of poetry or the novel intact.’80 Bataille is adamant that even the most commercial works of art, such as Hollywood blockbusters, still contain a speck of sovereignty, beyond the ‘phony spell of the commodity’. Although art, like all other spheres of social and political life, is subject to the laws of the market, it still provides an outlet for that universal and timeless desire for sovereign enchantment. In order to counter the commodification of art, it is therefore necessary to abolish the capitalist system, which is responsible for this commodification in the first place, not to call for a politicization of aesthetic practices. Put differently, the liberation of art from the fetters of profit would require an intervention in the profane sphere of politics, not in the sacred domain of sovereign art. However, Bataille’s insistence on the inherent sovereignty of all aesthetic, non-utilitarian practices only applies to art as an institution within capitalism and neglects the form and content of the artworks themselves. Thus, against Bataille’s claim, I would argue that his notion of sovereign art does contain a strongly normative dimension: despite its formal distance from the world of the

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everyday, despite its autonomy, not all art is automatically sovereign. A sacred act, as we have seen, is always based on a rupture with the existing state of affairs, without however providing a rational (ethical, political) alternative. For art to provide such a sacred dimension in life it must in some way break with the ideas that govern it, i.e. art must in a fundamental sense appear strange or unassimilable to the demands of the everyday. A truly sovereign art can never be reduced to the use we can make of it in the real world.81 Yet today, in a culture dominated by identity politics and the pre-eminence of the individual, it seems that art itself is increasingly being judged according to the parameters of personal utility and individual gain. Alain de Botton’s recent plea for a therapeutic art is emblematic in this respect: The challenge is to rewrite the agendas for our art museums so that collections can begin to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as, for centuries, they served those of theology. Curators should attempt to put aside their deep-seated fears of instrumentalism and once in a while co-opt works of art to an ambition of helping us to get through life.82

De Botton’s conception of art as some kind of sophisticated self-help manual perfectly encapsulates the contemporary urge to subordinate the aesthetic to individual needs, to make it serve a purpose. From a Bataillean perspective, such an art, which caters to the psychological needs of the alienated subject, evidently foregoes its sovereignty and becomes yet another profane tool, like medicine, psychology or new age spirituality: ‘We enter art galleries as we do the chemist’s, seeking well-presented remedies for accepted sicknesses.’83 Yet this attempt to cleanse art from its sovereign aspects is not only present in such popular self-help philosophies à la de Botton, but also in many contemporary art galleries and museums. As Robert Pfaller has argued, contemporary art is conspicuous in its attempt to eradicate any trace of magic, illusion, unreason or glamour from its exhibitions. Many artworks on display today, as he sarcastically remarks, are ‘interchangeable with the press release accompanying the exhibition’.84 This is because works of art, like all cultural products, are increasingly judged on moral grounds, according to the merciless and aseptic principles of political correctness, which cannot tolerate any form of ambiguity or strangeness for fear of causing offence. In a society in which moral outrage has replaced collective practice everything is reduced to content or selfexpression and thus precludes any form of communication outside the registers of self and identity. As a result the aesthetic sovereignty of art, its glamour, excess, elegance and magic, is lost.



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It thus seems that the increasing rationalization of social life is slowly encroaching on the last bastion of sovereignty in contemporary society and thus corroborates Bataille’s assessment that ‘our present world disparages man’s longing for the marvellous’.85 As already indicated, Bataille’s insistence on the necessity of sovereign, of enchanting practices in the modern world should not be misconstrued as the demand for total re-enchantment. Yet a world completely devoid of sacred sovereignty lacks the essential: ‘This miracle to which the whole of humanity aspires … the anticipation of a suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment.’86 The question thus remains how to integrate a sacred space within the public, profane sphere, without aestheticizing the latter and/or instrumentalizing the former. It is clear that the sensuous elegance of smoking, although formally a sovereign practice, is not enough to fulfil the collective requirements of true sovereignty. Elegance always remains a minor form of sovereignty, akin to what Michel Leiris calls the sacred in everyday life.87 Traditional forms of sovereignty, which have survived into the modern world, such as religion, are impeded both by their initial utilitarian transformation of the sacred (God as a principle of utility) and the increasing pressure to adapt their tenets to the demands of modern individualism. The world of governments, party politics and nation-states, which we usually associate with the term sovereignty, even though it still contains pockets of aesthetic ritual (the playing of the national anthem, the solemn swearing-in of the president), today is almost completely at the service of corporate capital and therefore as far removed as possible from Bataille’s understanding of sovereignty. Art still remains the key space in which sovereignty can be experienced, yet only as long as it resists the desire for objective meaning and social utility. One thing, however, is clear: in order to protect the sovereign from its elimination by the disciples of reason, from its annexation by the practitioners of religion and new age spirituality and from its instrumentalization by the proponents of a politicized or moral art, it becomes paramount to resolutely affirm its illusory, impossible, aesthetic nature, ‘to insist upon the fact that it could never have been a substantial reality’.88 Sovereignty can never become a new reality, yet it needs a real space in which the desire for sovereign experiences can be expressed or acted out. Returning once more to Bataille’s lecture on his idea of a ‘Socratic College’, we get a glimpse of what such a sacred space, devoid of consequence and faithful to the illusory nature of the sovereign, could look like: ‘a college that would publish nothing, would have neither means of propaganda nor of overt assembly, but that would nevertheless attempt to absorb, in its lack of solutions, the activity that is most clearly outside of each of our activities’.89

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Notes Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004, 6. 2 Michèle H. Richman, ‘Spitting Images in Montaigne and Bataille for a Heterological Counterhistory of Sovereignty’. Diacritics 35 (3) (1 October 2005): 53. 3 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Against Human Rights’. New Left Review August (2005): 120. 4 See From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, 129–56. 5 Robert Pfaller, Das Schmutzige Heilige Und Die Reine Vernunft: Symptome Der Gegenwartskultur. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008. 6 See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997 and Allen S. Weiss, Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994. 7 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. London: Verso Books, 2002, 71. 8 Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson. London: Verso Books, 2006, 38. 9 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1993, 201. 10 For an excellent account of the philosophical foundations of Bataille’s sovereignty and its critical reception see Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2000, 80ff. 11 Honoré de Balzac, Treatise on Elegant Living, trans. Napoleon Jeffries. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010. 12 Bataille, The Unfinished System, 7. 13 Ibid., 5–17. 14 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 198. 15 Bataille, The Unfinished System, 6. 16 Ibid. 17 Today this connection between elegance and smoking is a commonplace; one need only take a cursory look at the history of cinema and the countless iconic scenes portraying its wasteful and seductive charm. And although we would normally associate the aesthetics of smoking with the films of previous generations, such as those of Fellini or Godard, even a fairly recent film like Jim Jarmusch’s 2002 Coffee and Cigarettes is arguably concerned with portraying the ‘coolness’, or sovereign elegance, produced by the fact of actively and consciously doing nothing, symbolized by the cigarette. Coffee and Cigarettes, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 2003. MGM, 2004 (DVD). 1



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18 Bataille, The Unfinished System, 6. 19 See Chris Gemerchak, ‘Of Goods and Things: Reflections on an Ethics of Community’ for a recent analysis of the ethics that underlie Bataille’s critique of individualism, in Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree (eds), The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009. 20 Cf. Georges Bataille Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1992. 21 Cf. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008. 22 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1991. 23 Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: M. Boyars, 2006, 201. 24 Bataille, The Unfinished System, 6. 25 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 215. 26 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1991, 130. 27 Pfaller, Das Schmutzige Heilige, 16. 28 Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 115. In this respect there is a parallel between Bataille’s notion of the sacred and Kant’s theory of beauty: we ‘speak of the beautiful as if beauty were a property of the object and the judgment logical (constituting a cognition of the object through concepts of it), although it is only aesthetic and contains merely a relation of the representation of the object to the subject’. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 97. 29 See Pfaller, Das Schmutzige Heilige, 19. 30 Ibid., 22. 31 Ibid., 20. Pfaller’s argument is based on his reading of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. 32 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 106 (Bataille’s emphasis). 33 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 53. 34 Ibid., 24. 35 Bataille, The Unfinished System, 8. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Richman, ‘Spitting Images’, 48. 38 Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 115. 39 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 225.

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40 Bataille, The Unfinished System, 9. 41 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 321. 42 Ibid., 80. 43 Stuart Kendall, ‘The Sediment of the Possible’, in Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall. New York: Zone, 2005, 15. 44 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 204. 45 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 189. 46 It is important to note that Bataille himself never explicitly makes this point and rarely uses the word aesthetic; what I am trying to do is to demonstrate how this idea of a necessarily illusory dimension of sovereignty may be extrapolated from his work, even though it remains largely implicit. 47 Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2001, 70. 48 Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, 102. 49 Ibid., 102. 50 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 239. 51 Ibid., 417. 52 Ibid., 198. 53 Ibid., 251. This description of feudal radiance could equally be applied to some icons of modern popular culture such as Elvis Presley, the ‘King’. Using Bataille’s formula one could argue that the fans are drawn to Elvis because he is an incarnation of subjective sovereignty, of life beyond utility and reason, which, deep down, they aspire to themselves. It is obviously irrelevant whether these focal points of sovereignty actually live a life ‘beyond utility and reason’; they merely serve as projection surfaces, as aesthetic representations, for the universal desire for sovereignty. 54 Cf. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner, 1958. 55 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hollut-Kentor. London: Continuum, 1997. 56 Here lies the answer to a question recently posed by Anthony Reynolds in an article on the possibility of a sovereign cinema: ‘Such a suggestion that literature can replace the violence of sacrifice as a modern means by which to restore our fallen sovereignty seems paradoxical, given the status of literature as a traditionally privileged form of mediation. How, after all, can mediation of any kind – be it literary or artistic – serve to overcome mediation and restore immediacy?’ Anthony Reynolds, ‘Toward a Sovereign Cinema: Georges Bataille’s Hiroshima Mon Amour’. Literature/Film Quarterly 38 (4) (1 October 2010): 311. Bataille’s history of sovereignty demonstrates that man’s desire for sovereign



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immediacy has always been aesthetically mediated, even in such supposedly unmediated practices as sacrifice. Sacrifice, in its elemental structure, is based on artifice, ritual, spectacle and a form of self-distancing, in which, even though an actual human being is killed, the spectator only ‘becomes’ sovereign through the identification with the other, i.e. through an aesthetically mediated form of death. 57 Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon. Minneapolis: MIT Press, 1999, 164. 58 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 355. 59 Ibid., 257. 60 Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 171 (my emphasis). 61 Ray Brassier, Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter, PhD Thesis, 2001, 26–7, http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4034/1/WRAP_THESIS_ Brassier_2001.pdf (accessed 25 April 2017). For a more detailed analysis of the different positions regarding aesthetics and the notion of immediacy within speculative realism, see Ridvan Askin, Andreas Hägler and Phillipp Schweighauser, ‘Aesthetics after the Speculative Turn’, in Ridvan Askin, Andreas Hägler and Phillipp Schweighauser (eds), Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century. New York: Punctum Books, 2014. 62 Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, 103–4. See Bataille, The Accursed: Volume I for an in-depth analysis of this notion. 63 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, xi. 64 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2009, 5. 65 Ray Brassier, ‘Transitzone/Against an Aesthetics of Noise’, nY 2 (2009), http:// www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html (accessed 25 April 2017). 66 Cf. ‘The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade’, in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39, trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 67 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 10. 68 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 130. 69 I am aware of my highly schematic and reductive portrayal of Brassier and Meillassoux’s complex arguments. A thorough appraisal, however, would go far beyond the scope of the present piece. 70 Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 70. 71 Ibid., 85. 72 This only applies to Bataille’s later, post-war work, where he explicitly renounces the political function of art – see Georges Bataille, ‘Letter to René Char on the

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Incompatibilities of the Writer’, trans. Christopher Carsten. Yale French Studies 78 (1 January 1990): 31–43. Bataille’s work in the 1930s, in contrast, is devoted to an exploration of how the sacred, magical, sovereign elements of life can be used for political, revolutionary ends. See, for instance, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Bataille, Visions of Excess. See also Kevin Kennedy, Towards An Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature. Betheseda: Academica Press, 2014. 73 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 9. As Chris Gemerchak has recently suggested, ‘the questions relevant to Bataille are similar to the one’s Badiou suggests, namely … how to relate to that excess beyond oneself without appropriating that excess for oneself; how to persevere in that which exceeds your interest in self-preservation’. See Gemerchak, ‘Of Goods and Things’, in Mitchell, The Obsessions of Georges Bataille, 78. 74 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2006. 75 Ibid., 23. 76 Georges Bataille, Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art. New York: Skira, 1955, 53. 77 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity, 2009, 99. 78 Bataille, Prehistoric Painting, 53. 79 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969, 231. 80 Bataille, ‘Letter to René Char’, 41–2. 81 It is easy to see that the works of Bataille’s favoured modern artists and writers, such as Manet, de Sade, Baudelaire and Blake, fulfilled these criteria at the time when they were created. Cf. Georges Bataille, Manet, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons. New York: Skira, 1983 and Bataille, Literature and Evil. 82 Alain de Botton, ‘Why Museums of Art Have Failed Us – and What They Might Learn from Religions’, http://alaindebotton.com/why-museums-of-arthave-failed-us-and-what-they-might-learn-from-religions/ (accessed 25 April 2017). 83 Georges Bataille, ‘The Modern Spirit and Game of Transpositions’, in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker (eds), Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS. London: The MIT Press, 2006, 242. 84 Pfaller, Schmutzige Heilige, 243–44. 85 Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 103. 86 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 101.



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See Michel Leiris, ‘The Sacred in Everyday Life’, in Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology, 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 88 Bataille, Visions of Excess, 241. 89 Bataille, The Unfinished System, 10. 87

Bibliography Ades, Dawn, and Simon Baker (eds). Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS. London: The MIT Press, 2006. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hollut-Kentor. London: Continuum, 1997. Askin, Ridvan, Andreas Hägler and Phillipp Schweighauser (eds). Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century. New York: Punctum books, 2014. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso, 2002. Badiou, Alain. Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Balzac, Honore de. Treatise on Elegant Living, trans. Napoleon Jeffries. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010. Bataille, Georges. Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art. New York: Skira, 1955. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39, trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bataille, Georges. ‘Letter to René Char on the Incompatibilities of the Writer’, trans. Christopher Carsten. Yale French Studies 78 (1 January 1990): 31–43. Bataille, Georges. Accursed Share, Vol. I: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1991. Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1992. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, Vols II and III: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1993. Bataille, Georges. The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2001. Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Bataille, Georges. The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall. New York: Zone, 2005. Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson. London: Verso Books, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.

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Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind E Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York: Zone Books, 1997. Brassier, Ray. ‘Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter’. University of Warwick, 2001. Brassier, Ray. ‘Transitzone/Against an Aesthetics of Noise’. nY 2 (2009), http:// www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html (accessed 20 February 2017). Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. De Botton, Alain. ‘Why Museums of Art Have Failed Us – and What They Might Learn from Religions’, http://alaindebotton.com/why-museums-of-art-have-failed-us-andwhat-they-might-learn-from-religions/ (accessed 20 January 2017). Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman. London: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Hollier, Denis (ed.). The College of Sociology, 1937–39, trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Jarmusch, Jim (Dir.). Coffee and Cigarettes, 2003. MGM, 2004. DVD. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kennedy, Kevin. Towards An Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature. Betheseda: Academica Press, 2014. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Menke, Christoph. The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon. Minneapolis: MIT Press, 1999. Mitchell, Andrew J. and Jason Kemp Winfree (eds). The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Noys, Benjamin. Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Pfaller, Robert. Das Schmutzige Heilige Und Die Reine Vernunft: Symptome Der Gegenwartskultur. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2006. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Reynolds, Anthony. ‘Toward a Sovereign Cinema: Georges Bataille’s Hiroshima Mon Amour’. Literature/Film Quarterly 38 (4) (1 October 2010): 311. Richman, Michèle H. ‘Spitting Images in Montaigne and Bataille for a Heterological Counterhistory of Sovereignty’. Diacritics 35 (3) (1 October 2005): 46–61.



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Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krysztof Fijalkowski. London: Verso Books, 2002. Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. Princeton, NJ: Oxford University Press, 1958. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner, 1958. Weiss, Allen S. Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Against Human Rights’. New Left Review II (34) (August 2005): 115–31.

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‘The Only Real Outlaws’: Animal Freedom in Bataille Oxana Timofeeva

Man, despite appearances, must know that when he talks about human dignity in the presence of animals, he lies like a dog. For in the presence of illegal and essentially free beings (the only real outlaws) the stupid feeling of practical superiority gives way to a most uneasy envy.1 Georges Bataille’s writings can be defined as philosophy or as anti-philosophy, but one thing is absolutely certain: his theories of eroticism, sacrifice, sovereignty, inner experience and so on are deeply and dramatically embedded within the European philosophical tradition. His works might present a kind of bridge between classical metaphysics and contemporary theory understood in a very broad sense, from post-structuralism and deconstruction of the twentieth century to today’s posthumanism and the variety of new materialisms. From the classical there are, for instance, binary distinctions, which he constantly makes between the general and the restricted economies, between sovereignty and slavery, between human and animal beings, between the profane and the sacred worlds, within the sacred between left and right, and within sovereignty between power (sovereignty in a traditional sense, feudal sovereignty, etc.) and freedom, etc., and from the contemporary the subversive character of these very oppositions. As Benjamin Noys accurately objects to the idea of Joseph Libertson that ‘A multiplicity of dual oppositions structures Bataille’s system’,2 these oppositions do not construct but rather deconstruct the system: ‘These dual oppositions and Bataille’s “system” are undone by his thinking through of these oppositions by their instability.’3 According to Denis Hollier, Bataille’s attitude, rather than referring to the metaphysical tradition, ‘can be portrayed as dualist materialism’,4 which is an ‘impossible attitude’ opposed to both idealist

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and materialist reductionism of the whole complexity of being and beings to one single principle. One such binary distinction drawn by Bataille throughout his writings so obsessively that it effectively undermines itself is the human–animal distinction. Nowadays an extensive critique of anthropocentrism and of the anthropocene in contemporary theory takes as its target the classical metaphysical model of the predominance of humanity over non-thinking, non-speaking and non-working animals that were excluded from the domain of reason, logos, language, truth, law and so on. From Aristotle and Plato, through Kant and Hegel, to Heidegger and Levinas, a ubiquitous tendency of philosophical ‘maltreatment’ of animality in the hierarchy of beings (and of reproducing such hierarchy in general) is now laid bare, and the very possibility of such a distinction, on which this hierarchy was based, is perfectly compromised. In this regard, Bataille’s position, both political and philosophical, is uniquely interesting. On the one hand, he seems to be the one who ends the chapter of thinkers of the past, preoccupied with making this essentially metaphysical distinction between animals and humans. On the other, he can be considered as precisely the one who breaks with this current. Bataillian animals and beasts are permanent residents of the heterogeneous realm. They come from another world, populated by things that radically differ from those we think we know and those we think we can know as reasonable, calculable, scientifically approachable and commensurate. There is something in animality that is beyond our cognition, namely, as Bataille insists throughout his work, its irreducible character. Animals and beasts are on the side of the sacred, the excluded, the unconscious, the formless, madness, the divine or the accursed, and even the crime. The animal is a symbol of an impossible continuity no human being can ever reach; the beast is a symbol of an impossible transgression no human being can ever perform. I say ‘animals and beasts’ as if there is a clear distinction between the two. ‘Animal’ is often used as a neutral, general category that includes all living beings differing from mushrooms, plants, algae and so on by a certain level of complexity (eukaryotic, multicellular, heterotrophic, motile) whereas ‘beast’ usually stands for something more specific and emotionally charged, like wildness, ferocity, fury, violence. In turn, by mentioning both animals and beasts here, I am trying to indicate, for convenience, two different sides or two different meanings of animality in Bataille’s philosophy. These are, respectively, immanence and sovereignty. I will try to clarify the connection between the animal’s immanence and the beast’s sovereignty by addressing the question of



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negativity and the idea of the beginning and end of history in relation to which the figure of the animal occupies a position that is not central, but significantly marginal and at the same time genuinely crucial. ‘Animality is immediacy and immanence’, Bataille says in his Theory of Religion.5 Animality does not know negation or rupture and maintains itself in the continuity of life: ‘The world of animals is a world without difference because animals know nothing of negativity, and thereby know nothing of difference.’6 Animals are indifferent – they do not differentiate between themselves and others. It is all right, for Bataille, if one animal devours the other, since it does not clearly differentiate itself from its prey. Both eating and being eaten, they share some pulsation of energy: the generosity of life can easily be transformed into the exuberance of death: ‘Every animal is in the world like water in water.’7 Thus Bataille is trying to stick to the scenario (which, of course, fails8) where there are on the one hand animals in the immanence of nature and on the other a historical humanity possessed of negativity and transcendence. Bataille draws special attention to the genuine desire, which he ascribes to human beings, to be distinguished from everything natural, animalistic, ‘dirty’, ‘barbaric’ and so on, and to a certain correlation between this desire and actual inequalities within the human universe. But where does this desire come from? My basic argument, which I am trying to develop here, will be that it comes not so much from the human, but from the animal: that it was already, ‘from the very beginning’ (if there were a beginning), there, where Bataille places his impossible immanence. There are different degrees of humanity, or human dignity, depending on a person’s place in a social hierarchy. As Bataille points out, the wealthier and more powerful a person is, the less ‘animal’ and the more ‘human’ is she or he in symbolic quality. Human separation from nature is at the core of social and cultural hierarchies and divisions. In his investigation of traditional archaic institutes and everyday practices, Bataille is trying to demonstrate how profound the roots of injustice and inequality are and to understand why. It is no easy task to get rid of them, but this does not justify them, as right-wing conservatives usually think. Bataille, instead, wants to expose a subversive element at the very heart of these phenomena. As he argues in the History of Eroticism, people and cultures we conceive as primitive are in fact not closer to animality than we ourselves with our civilization and technical developments (it is for this very reason that he criticizes racism). Moreover, their distance from natural forms of life can be even bigger, their rituals with respect to nature, death, sexuality can be

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even more rigid, their fear of nature and prohibitions related to it can be even stronger: It is always a matter of marking between oneself and brutish nature a strange distance, unthinkable at first and so all the greater: the distance between a man eating in a delicate way, according to the aristocratic code, and one who naively drinks the coffee that has fallen into the saucer (it is significant, as I see it, that coffee intentionally spilled into a saucer is called a ‘foot bath’) … A Kanaka might seem to us to be much coarser than the ‘foot bath’ drinker. Yet it is not the Kanaka who is beastly. He maintains the greatest distance he can between animal behavior and his own, so that actually the Kanaka is akin to the aristocrat, not to the boor that I have chosen to depict.9

Bataille sees the history of humanity as starting from humanity’s separation from nature: ‘Man is the animal that negates nature: he negates it through labor, which destroys it and changes it into an artificial world; he negates it in the case of life-creating activity; he negates it in the case of death.’10 It is important to note that this negation of nature, in Bataille, is not an overcoming or dialectical Aufhebung, as it is in Hegel, but rather a violent exclusion: ‘The forms of animality were excluded from a bright world which signified humanity.’11 A full transformation of nature is a spectacle: nature is neither eliminated, nor really transformed, but excluded; such ‘natural’ things as death, spontaneous sexual intercourse, menstrual blood, incest or defecation are now beyond the border of prohibition – that is how the domain of the sacred appears (and animals become gods): ‘Something unfamiliar and disconcerting came into being, something that was no longer simply nature, but nature transfigured, the sacred. In a basic sense, what is sacred is precisely what is prohibited.’12 One might compare it to repression, in a psychoanalytic sense: the appearance of the sacred out of the excluded nature on the level of social organization is parallel to the appearance of the unconscious out of the excluded animal sexuality and instincts on the level of an individual psychological life. The latter moment refers to what Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, described as an ‘organic repression’, which happens with humanity’s adoption of an upright posture.13 According to Bataille, both the sacred and the unconscious are restricted aspects of the heterogeneous realm.14 Moreover, there is a certain continuity between them: Bataille’s reflection on their correlation suggests that the modern unconscious takes up the baton of the ancient sacred, and, in a way, what psychoanalysis calls the return of the repressed (this particular version of the eternal return of the same manifests itself through symptoms) in modern society functions in a similar way to the repetition of the transgressive



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rituals that characterize prehistoric communities. What was social now became psychological; the negation of nature (the line of prohibition) was internalized by the modern subject who is thus torn apart. Such understanding is grounded in the ‘low materialism’, developed by Bataille in the early pre-Second World War period of his thought, particularly in the 1930s. Going back to the Gnostic tradition, this materialism considered matter as duel, ambiguous or heterogeneous, akin to both the unconscious and the sacred. The very position of a human body as regards to this matter (upright, as it were) is the focus of his ‘phantasmatic’ anthropology,15 where Hegel and Freud are already attempting to be read through each other. One can even go further and juxtapose the return of the repressed that always accompanies repression (as Jacques Lacan says, ‘the return of the repressed and repression are the same thing’16) with the transgression that inevitably accompanies prohibition. Nature is negated (by prohibition), but this negation is itself negated (in transgression), the line is crossed, the law violated. Negativity thus simultaneously leads human animals in two different directions. It creates the world of prohibition, useful activity, labour, knowledge, language, morals and laws, but it also gives birth to transgression, play, arts, poetry, eroticism and other forms of what Bataille calls ‘unemployed negativity’. This negative movement is driven by the desire of some greater freedom, a sovereignty-freedom, which is at stake throughout history. It is for this desire that nature is negated in prohibition, prohibition is negated in transgression, and so on. Sometimes Bataille also calls this kind of freedom ‘autonomy’: ‘man is first of all that autonomous existence which refuses to be simply subjected to the limits of the past’.17 In the case of nature, it is precisely this refusal to be subjected to limits that paradoxically creates limits: humanity’s desire to be rid of the animal state of dependence on natural necessities and contingencies creates another – societal – level of limitations. But there is another freedom in Bataille’s thought. This other freedom is positive and natural – an immanencefreedom that allegedly was there, among animals, from the very beginning, but it will always remain lost for us. Such is, for instance, a sexual freedom and spontaneity unconsciously experienced by Bataillean animals, but absolutely unattainable for Bataillean humans. I intentionally list a sovereign-freedom and an immanence-freedom in this order: I argue that the second, animal freedom, which can be imagined as a primordial one, is in fact a peculiar projection, something like a necessary illusion, or, rather, a necessary fantasy, which helps us to rethink a social structure. It is as if the idea of animals as ‘essentially free beings’ appeared

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retrospectively together with what I call the second level of limitations (prohibitions). The static character of an immanence-freedom (as opposed to the dynamics of an autonomous movement) reveals a rather utopian character of nature understood as an initial freedom, but it is precisely this utopia that gives energy to the movement of transgression. On the other hand, these two freedoms never meet – they are incompatible. I see in the mutual exclusion of the sovereign-freedom of humans and the immanence-freedom of animals one of the reasons why Bataillean history, which starts from the negation of nature, cannot end. The human desire for autonomy (a sovereign-freedom movement) allegedly breaks natural continuity (an immanence-freedom state) and introduces differences into the world. But where there are differences, there are inequalities and therefore there are struggles, wars and revolutions: ‘History would be ended if the disparity of rights and of living standards was reduced’ says Bataille in The History of Eroticism.18 Further, in Sovereignty, he shows that even communism, which aims to eliminate social differences, inequalities and hierarchies, cannot provide a proper answer to the drama of history, as it is still based on the very principle of all differentiation, i.e. on the separation of humanity from the indifferent natural animal kingdom: If the universal man of communism has a value so great that it is criminal to exploit him, he gets it from the ancient ‘curse of man by man.’ The man of ‘classless society’ owes the value in the name of which he destroyed the classes to the very impulse that divided humanity into classes.19

It is eroticism rather than communism that ‘anticipates the end of history’20 since it brings with it some experience of indifference. But, again, this erotic indifference – apathy – is specifically human; it is far from immanencefreedom (countering the widespread idea that an unlimited sexuality brings us back to animality, nothing is less animalistic than a sexual orgy). Both communism and eroticism are anything but natural – they are highly artificial human phenomena, totally alien to the animal realm, and in this sense they are historical. This problematic knot that binds together the beginning and the end of history and the role played within this by human and non-human animality Bataille inherits from Alexander Kojève, who in his influential, although very misleading, commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit proclaimed that history is over and nothing truly new can henceforth occur on Earth.



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To make a long story short, the beginning of time, according to Kojève, coincides with the appearance of humanity. Before this moment, there is no time: there is only natural being, or space, and animals that inhabit this space. History (which he basically identifies with time) begins when, at a certain point, one of these animals turns into a human. The appearance of a human as an active, suffering, fighting and working nothingness will introduce history and time, in the process that continuously negates the natural given manifold of being for the benefit of supernatural ideal goals: ‘Man is negating Action, which transforms given being and, by transforming it, transforms itself.’21 Humanity marks the beginning of the history of struggles, wars and revolutions. In the course of this history, it actively changes the world. However, history is not an infinite line: the point of its end should coincide with the point of its beginning. This means that at the end of history human being turns back into an animal. History makes its circuit only once, with no repetition, and this is the history of becoming human, which is already over. At the end of history, humanity creates a universal homogeneous state of mutual recognition. People do not need to change the world, to work and to fight any longer; all their desires, including the desire for the desire of the other, that is, the desire for recognition, are immediately satisfied. It seems that the task of Kojèvean history is to turn the unhappy animal into a happy one, and a human being, or history, or time, or negativity is nothing but the lengthy journey between the two: ‘Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given being.’22 In 1948, Kojève acknowledged that the end of history is already a matter of fact. In his notes to the second edition of the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel he suggests that, after the Battle of Jena in 1806, the end of History is ‘already a present here and now’: In the end by this battle the vanguard of humanity virtually attained the limit and the aim, that is, the end, of Man’s historical evolution. What has happened since then was but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre–Napoleon. From the authentically historical point of view, the two world wars with their retinue of large and small revolutions had only the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the peripheral provinces into line with the most advanced (real or virtual) European historical positions.23

However, Kojève was never completely sure as to where exactly the end of history takes place. He was looking for it in China and in the Stalinist Soviet

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Union; he discerned a human return to animality in the American way of life with its increasing consumption, and, finally, after his visit to Japan in 1959 he came to an interesting conclusion. He observed some Japanese rituals and realized that this type of human being there, although actually living in posthistory (at least enjoying three centuries free of war), can go so far as to commit a ritual suicide ‘from pure snobbery’24 simply as a result of the formal beauty of the act. According to Kojève, ‘No animal can be a snob’,25 and thus he in fact ends up rejecting his initial idea of the death of man at the end of history. Here, ambivalence appears. On the one hand, ‘all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalized values, that is, values completely empty of all “human” content in the “historical’ sense”’. On the other, ‘since no animal can be a snob, every “Japanized” post-historical period would be specifically human’.26 Thus, it seems that, finally, in making his choice between the human and the animal, Kojève decides for the human, for the Japanese, for the one who, instead of returning to the animal condition, gives himself over to a free play of forms. What remains after the end of history is not an animal, but, on the contrary, it is precisely what is human in humanity; what is human in humanity is not history, not politics, not war, but fundamental formal opposition, as subject, to some objective content. After the end of history, this opposition is finally free of all the ‘noise’ of time: the form is purified of the contingency of historical content. Bataille, preoccupied with the question of what happens to human negativity when social contradictions are resolved, opposed his idea of unemployed negativity to the very first, ‘animal’ version of the end of history. As noticed by Giorgio Agamben,27 perhaps this late, ‘Japanese’ version is in fact Kojève’s parody of Bataille’s figure of unemployed negativity, or a veiled ironical reply to his objection, raised in the ‘Letter to X, lecturer on Hegel’ (1937), where Bataille famously writes: If action (doing) is – as Hegel says – negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘unemployed negativity’. Personally, I can only decide in one way, being myself precisely this ‘unemployed negativity’ (I would not be able to define myself more precisely). I don’t mind Hegel’s having foreseen this possibility; at least he didn’t situate it at the conclusion of the process he described. I imagine that my life – or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life – constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s closed system.28

Of course, by ‘Hegel’s system’ Bataille means its Kojèvean interpretation, since that was the main source of his ideas about Hegel’s philosophy. What remains



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after the end, according to Bataille, is negativity which still persists but for which supposedly there is no need any more: the humanity of the human, which has already been cast aside. An open wound in human being is produced, first of all, by the voluntary negation of its animal nature. It is important to note here the following: the mechanism, adopted by Bataille, by which human identity is produced by detaching itself from animality, as well as the idea that negativity is a phenomenon peculiar to human beings, is in fact not Hegelian, but Kojèvean. In Bataille’s version, at the beginning there was an event of separation from animality, a prohibition, a self-negation of humans as natural beings. Bataille calls this proto-event ‘the first step’ of the human, and it is for him the beginning of history. I think that the idea of the first step comprises one of the greatest paradoxes of Bataillian negative anthropology (I call it negative because it is based on the idea of humanity as negativity), perhaps not even realized by Bataille himself: in fact, it is not a human but an animal that negates itself, being both a subject and an object of this supposed very first historical or rather prehistoric negation.29 Thus, in his Tears of Eros, Bataille describes the first people who began to practice funeral rituals in the following way: However, these men who were the first to take care of the corpses of their kin were themselves not yet exactly humans. The skulls they left still have apelike characteristics: the jaw is protuberant, and very often the arch of the eyebrows is crowned by a bony ridge. These primitive beings, moreover, did not quite have that upright posture which, morally and physically, defines us – and affirms us in our being. Without doubt, they stood upright: but their legs were not perfectly rigid as are ours. It even seems that they had, like apes, a hairy exterior, which covered them and protected them from the cold.30

In order to become the only animal that negates itself as an animal, this creature had first to be an animal, which, suddenly, for some reason, rises, stands up, straightens its legs and says: ‘I am not an animal any more.’ By standing upright, he thus exposes his sex which he immediately covers with clothing (here again one is reminded of Freudian ‘organic repression’). This step, which, if understood literally, is first for the one walking on two limbs, can be presented as a drama, where the Bataillean human animal withdraws from primordial continuity and immanence of being. From that moment on, nature is presented as forbidden (sacred), but also as lost. Knowledge and shame, knowledge of differences – ethical, sexual, etc., along with the shame and guilt of being exposed in these differences – such are the

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definitions of both the Christian and Bataillean human, creatures of original sin. For both of them, labour, or the necessity to work in order to maintain their lives, is the price to be paid for this knowledge of differences, a type of fall. However, as we have already said, it is not only labour but also art, eroticism, laughter and play that mark the birth of Bataillean humanity. As there are two kinds of everything, there are also two kinds of negativity: labour’s negativity and the unemployed negativity. The first belongs to a restricted economy of rules and prohibitions; the second actualizes itself as non-productive expenditure and transgression of these rules and prohibitions. Such is, for instance, prehistoric art: Paleolithic cave paintings document an ambivalent moment of passage from animality to humanity. This is how Bataille describes the famous ‘scene in the well’ that he saw in Lascaux cave: In particular, the most moving image is found in Lascaux, in a part of the cave that is so difficult to access that today the public is not admitted, in the bottom of a kind of pit. A dying bison, losing its intestines, is depicted there in front of a dead man (apparently dead). Other details hardly render this strange composition intelligible. I cannot insist on it: I can only recall the childlike aspect of the image of a man; this aspect is even more striking since the dead man has the head of a bird.31

This detail is very telling. Referring to various aspects of totemism, the animal head indicates prehistoric feelings of the human being’s primordial kinship with animals, but also of animals’ primordial superiority over humans. Bataillean animals still inhabit the land of immanence from which the human being withdraws, and they are sacred. They are the ancient ancestors and gods, and therefore cave paintings are literally the icons of the Neanderthal. These moving figurations oppose in a way the figuration of man, what we must consider the inferiority felt by primitive humanity, which worked and spoke, in front of the apparition of the silent animal, which did not work. In principle, the human figurations in the caves are of lesser quality, they tend toward caricature, and they are often concealed beneath an animal mask.32

The fact that animals do not work finally brings us to another side of Bataillean animality – sovereignty. Animals do not work: they are sovereign. Although some animals (donkeys, caws, horses, dogs, etc.) are working, in his article ‘Friendship of a Man and a Beast’33 Bataille says that they are never really employed (at least, I would add, they are not paid for the work they do). Even doing their labour, they remain strangely detached from it, retaining their inconceivable sovereignty-freedom. Beasts have a kind of potentiality to stop working



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at any moment, like a horse all of a sudden galloping off. If they get carried away, we shall never stop them. They enjoy their sovereignty-freedom without even being aware of it. The difference between the sovereignty of the beast who does not work and the sovereignty of the human who negates his own animality and refuses to be subjected to limitations is that the former is immediate, whereas the latter goes through mediation. In the homogeneous human universe one first needs to work in order then freely to destroy what has been produced. Proletarians, as well as philosophers, can be sovereign in a human way (Bataille is speaking about the worker in the third volume of The Accursed Share, titled Sovereignty, and about himself in Theory of Religion) – for instance, when they stop working and negate their unfreedom by a simple act of drinking wine. These two passages deserve to be cited extensively: Now I place a large glass of alcohol on my table. I have been useful. I have bought a table, a glass, etc. But this table is not a means of labor: it helps me to drink alcohol. In setting my drinking glass on the table, to that extent I have destroyed the table, or at least I have destroyed the labor that was needed to make it. Of course I have first completely destroyed the labor of the winegrower, whereas my absorption has only destroyed a minute amount of the carpenter’s labor. At least this table in this room, heavy with the chains of labor, for a time had no other purpose than my breaking loose. I am now going to recall the use I have made of the money earned at my worktable. If I have wasted part of that money, wasted part of the time, the rest enabled me to live, the destruction of the table is already more advanced. Had I just once seized the moment by the hair, all the preceding time would already be in the power of that moment seized. And all the supplies, all the jobs that allowed me to do so would suddenly be destroyed; like a river, they would drain endlessly into the ocean of that brief instant.34 If I consider the real world, the worker’s wage enables him to drink a glass of wine: he may do so, as he says, to give him strength, but he really drinks in the hope of escaping the necessity that is the principle of labour. As I see it, if the worker treats himself to the drink, this is essentially because into the wine he swallows there enters a miraculous element of savour, which is precisely the essence of sovereignty. It’s not much, but at least the glass of wine gives him, for a brief moment, the miraculous sensation of having the world at his disposal. The wine is downed mechanically (no sooner swallowed than the worker forgets it), and yet it is the source of intoxication, whose miraculous value no one can dispute.35

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A worker and a philosopher can be sovereign in a human way, but not really in the manner of the beast. Drunkenness will never turn them back into animals. To paraphrase Kojève, no animal can be an alcoholic. Drunkenness will never return us to the continuity and immediacy of nature, but, instead, it is itself a kind of mediation of this immediacy. In his book Post-History Wilem Flusser defines drugs as media, or as ‘the mediation of the immediate’.36 Drugs, including wine, make public what is supposed to remain private, or deeply intimate: a certain experience that effectively mirrors our culture. Art, according to Flusser, is a special kind of inebriation, since ‘after having mediated between man and immediate experience, [it] inverts this mediation and makes it so that the immediate becomes “articulated”, that is: mediatized towards culture’.37 It ‘publishes the private’, or ‘turns conscious the unconscious’.38 In this sense, Bataillean prehistoric artists, too, experience drunkenness; they are inebriated by their transgressive touch upon the immediacy of the animal world, which they immediately mediate. The drunkenness of the Bataillean philosopher or proletarian is one of the very human ways to experience sovereignty not as power (like sovereignty of the monarch or the state), but as autonomy, or freedom. In this experience negativity remains unemployed – this is what Bataille opposes to the Hegelian negativity, which aims toward some use and benefit. He doesn’t discuss at length the sovereignty of the beast, but one can assume that it is something different: there is no negation in the experience of a galloping horse or leaping tiger: their sovereignty is positively immanent. There is, however, something in Hegel’s philosophy that breaks this schema of two different freedoms. First of all, there is a crucial difference between Hegel’s and Kojève’s ideas of negativity. Kojève was interpreting it as something specifically human, as the very essence of humanity, whereas according to Hegel himself, negativity, and therefore subjectivity, is there already in nature, in every creature. For a perfect image of negativity, drunkenness, and animality all at once, one should only read the following passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel criticizes self-certainty and compares the animal with an initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries: In this respect, what one can say to those who make assertions about the truth and reality of sensuous objects is that they should be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, namely, to the old Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus and that they have yet to learn the mystery of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. This is so because the person who has been initiated into these secrets not merely comes to doubt the being of sensuous



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things. Rather, he is brought to despair of them; in part he brings about their nothingness, and in part he sees them do it to themselves. Nor are the animals excluded from this wisdom. To an even greater degree, they prove themselves to be the most deeply initiated in such wisdom, for they do not stand still in the face of sensuous things, as if those things existed in themselves. Despairing of the reality of those things and in the total certainty of the nullity of those things, they, without any further ado, simply help themselves to them and devour them. Just like the animals, all of nature celebrates these revealed mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.39

One might see in the Hegelian Eleusinian animals a kind of subversive parody of the Cartesian cogito, suspended between its own self-certainty and the theoretical radicalism of its doubt about the sensuous world. It’s not that these animals entertain any ‘doubts’ about the existence of sensuous objects. No, they despair of them, and in despair they negate those objects. Their animality is resumed as subjectivity through this negative gesture towards objective reality; they are always already midway through this leap away from their immediacy, or, to be more precise, their simple immediacy is nothing – what really counts is this very movement of mediation, towards a greater freedom. Hegelian animals are subjectivities that lack freedom. The natural being of an animal, exposed to the contingency of its environment and to the dangers of life with its perpetual violence, brings it to the state of an incessant ‘alternation of health and disease’ and makes it essentially ‘insecure, anxious and unhappy’.40 The life of animals, in its essential sickness, unhappiness and anxiety, already contains within itself the force of negativity, which can express itself as an anxiety, or, as Hegel says in his Science of Logic, an unrest: ‘the unrest of the something in its limit in which it is immanent, an unrest which is the contradiction which impels something out beyond itself ’.41 This moment is comparable to Bataille’s humans’ desire for autonomy, or sovereign movement that pushes people beyond animality. However, in Hegel, it is not only the animal in its natural milieu, but every something that knows unrest, an unease Jean-Luc Nancy will describe as the restlessness of the negative.42 Every something at every moment is pushed beyond itself in its desire not to be what it is, this desire to leave the place it occupies. It is the lack of free will, which does not allow Hegelian animals to stay upright for long, if at all – that is why, as Hegel thinks, their bodies run parallel to the ground, although, compared to plants, which remain rooted in the earth, they already freely determine their movements.

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What if in their insecurity, anxiety and unhappiness Hegelian animals are already essentially drunk? As such, they truly are, as in the quotation from Bataille taken here as an epigraph, ‘the only real outlaws’. Unlike Bataillian proletarians and philosophers, they do not even need wine to mediate between the immanence of nature and the historical negativity. In a way, they are this mediation themselves. I would suggest that although, in Hegel, they never do this, becoming human – a tiger’s leap into history – would be the only way for them to begin to sober up (sobriety seen as the alleged condition for resuming the erect stance of humanity). The Hegelian animal anxiously requires history. There would be no history without the animal’s unrest. In this sense, a creature that straightens its legs and says it is not an animal any more must be a hybrid of an unhappy Hegel’s animal and Bataille’s sovereign human. Thus in his reflections upon prehistoric humanity, Bataille turns out to be more Hegelian than Kojèvean, or, to use Derrida’s definition, he truly turns Hegelian ‘without reserve’ (Derrida 2005). His way of escaping from the paradox of two freedoms (immanence/sovereignty) could be to radicalize Hegel’s negativity by expanding the domain of unemployment of all living beings, on a global scale. If unemployed negativity, which Bataille posits on the side of the human – art, laughter, eroticism, play – comes from that ‘desperate’ animal, whose unrest again and again makes us human, then it is a kind of subversive corollary, rather than a refutation of Hegel’s thought. It relates not to the Kojèvean homogeneous state of mutual recognition at the end of history, but to a heterogeneous animal realm at its beginning. It is not human being that negates nature, but nature that negates itself (via human being). However, such a Hegelian perspective on animality as subjectivity and negativity that is already in nature makes the idea of the beginning highly problematic. The fact that animals are already unhappy (before they ‘turn human’) actually withdraws them from what Bataille calls continuity, immediacy and immanence (and since, for Bataille, these are the definitions of it, animals are thus withdrawn from their very animality). In this sense, as I already said, the immanence of animals should be considered as a utopian projection, a necessary delusion of a certain primordial unity, or continuity, before the rupture between the now and the before (such is, for instance, the rupture between the human and the animal – the Bataillean ‘open wound’ of negativity constitutive for human society and history). If we assume that continuity (animality as immanence) appears retrospectively, and a rupture, a differentiation itself, precedes the differentiated, then nature ceases to be a lost paradise – and so does communism. But it is precisely from tension, which thus appears



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between them, that some new political horizon may eventually appear behind our back.

Notes 1

Georges Bataille, ‘Metamorphoses’, in ‘Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-knowing’. October 36 (1986): 22–3. 2 Joseph Libertson, ‘Bataille and Communication: Savoir, Non-Savoir, Glissement, Rire’, in Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (ed.), On Bataille: Critical Essays. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, 209. 3 Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2000, 138. 4 Denis Hollier, ‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille’. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 130. 5 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1992, 17. 6 Noys, Georges Bataille, 136. 7 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 19. 8 Noys, Georges Bataille, 137. 9 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 68–9. 10 Ibid., 61. 11 Ibid., 61–2. 12 Ibid., 92–3. 13 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2002. 14 Georges Bataille, ‘Psychological Structure of Fascism’. New German Critique 16 (1979): 68–9. 15 See Rodolphe Gasché, Georges Bataille, Phenomenology and Phantasmatology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. 16 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Vol. 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–4, trans. J. Forrester. London: W. W. Norton, 1988, 191. 17 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 77. 18 Ibid., 189. 19 Ibid. 337. 20 Ibid., 191. 21 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1980, 38. 22 Ibid., 158.

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23 Ibid., 160. 24 Ibid., 162. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, 2. 28 Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds), The Bataille Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, 296. 29 Oxana Timofeeva, History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence, and Freedom. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academy, 2012, 95–115. 30 Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. P. Connor. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1989, 25. 31 Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity. Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. M. Kendall and S. Kendall. New York: Zone Books, 2009, 137. 32 Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, 142. 33 Georges Bataille, ‘L’amitié de l’homme et de la bête’, in G. Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 11. Paris: Gallimard, 1988, 167–71. 34 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 102. 35 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, 198. 36 Willem Flusser, Post-History, trans. R. M. Novaes. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013, 132. 37 Ibid., 136. 38 Ibid., 137. 39 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, 65. 40 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 417. 41 G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969, 128. 42 Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. J. Smith and S. Miller. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Bibliography Ades, D. and S. Baker (eds). Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Agamben, G. The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.



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Atterton, P. and M. Calarco (eds). Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. London: Continuum. Bataille, G. ‘Psychological Structure of Fascism’. New German Critique 16 (1979): 64–87. Bataille, G. ‘Metamorphoses’, in ‘Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-knowing’, October 36 (1986): 22–3. Bataille, G. ‘L’amitié de l’homme et de la bête’, in G. Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 11. Paris: Gallimard, 1988, 167–71. Bataille, G. The Tears of Eros, trans. P. Connor. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1989. Bataille, G. The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III – An Essay on General Economy, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bataille, G. Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Bataille, G. The Cradle of Humanity. Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. M. Kendall and S. Kendall. New York: Zone Books, 2009. Benjamin, A. ‘What If the Other Were an Animal? Hegel on Jews, Animals and Disease’. Critical Horizons 8 (1) (2007): 61–77. Botting, F. and S. Wilson (eds). The Bataille Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Buchanan, B. ‘Painting the Prehuman: Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, and the Aesthetic Origins of Humanity’. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 11 (1–2) (2011). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Derrida, J. Heidegger et la question: De l’esprit et autres essays. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. Derrida, J. Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass. London. New York: Routledge, 2005. Derrida, J. The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Derrida, J. The Beast and the Sovereign, vols 1–2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009–2011. Flusser, W. Post-History, trans. R. M. Novaes. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2013. Fontenay, Elisabeth de. Le silence des bêtes. La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Freud, S. Civilization and its Discontents, trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2002. Gasché, R. Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Haraway, D. When the Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Hegel, G. W. F. Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Heidegger, M. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Hollier, D. ‘The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille’. Yale French Studies 78, On Bataille (1990): 124–39. Kojève, A. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980. Lacan, J. (1988) The Seminar Vol. 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–4, trans. J. Forrester. London: W. W. Norton, 1988. Latimer, J. and M. Miele, ‘Naturecultures: Science, Affect and the Non-Human’. Theory, Culture and Society 30 (7–8) (2013): 5–31. Libertson, J. ‘Bataille and Communication: Savoir, Non-Savoir, Glissement, Rire’, in Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (ed.), On Bataille: Critical Essays. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995, 239–32. Nancy, J.-L. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. J. Smith and S. Miller. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Noys, B. Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Rand, S. ‘Animal Subjectivity and the Nervous System in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature’. Revista Eletrônica Estudos Hegelianos (2010). Rohman, C. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Simondon, G. Deux leçons sur l’animal et l’homme. Paris: Ellipses, 2004. Simondon, G. ‘The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis’, trans. Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7 (2009): 4–16. Steeves, H. P. (ed.). Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. Timofeeva, O. Vvedenie v eroticheskuu filosofiu Georga Batailla [Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille]. Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009. Timofeeva, O. History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence, and Freedom. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academy, 2012. Waldau, P. and K. Patton (eds). A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Wolfe, C. (ed.). Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Wolfe, C. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Wolfe, C. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

9

Black Metal Theory: Speculating with Bataille’s Unfinished System – ‘Mystical Vomit’ from Neoplatonism to Neroplatonism Edia Connole

Neoplatonism In an excerpt from his 1939 introduction to several practical proposals worthy of those means possessed by the College of Sociology, Bataille begins by saying that one of the best established results of ‘the efforts man has made to discover who he really is is the absence of integrity of person’,1 by which he means, of course, the obliteration of individuated being – what the medievals after Aristotle, and from Anselm of Canterbury on, termed haecceitas, or ‘thisness’, and that which Heidegger, who, perhaps more than any other modern philosopher, understood the Middle Ages, and whose own thought was profoundly influenced by it, would later term ‘facticity’ – that which accounts for the individuality of an individual, or the individuation of different members of a species.2 In announcing in the first line of this text from 1939 – which, by the way, would seem to encompass the whole of his philosophy, in announcing here that the obliteration or annihilation of individuated being, or facticity, this thisness, this ‘such a lot the gods gave to me – to me’,3 is the best established result humanity has made in its endeavour to discover who it really is, Bataille at once betrays what Amy Hollywood has identified, with respect to other texts from this period, as his simultaneous alignment with, and insistent divergence from, the Christian and non-Western mystical traditions.4 The text begins with a series of thought experiments designed to bring ‘maximum disorder into habitual perspectives’5 – pre-empting the Meillassouxian imperative of following a logic of speculative solution, whereby we ‘transform our perspective on unreason … ceasing to construe it as the form of our deficient

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grasp of the world [by] turning it into the veridical content of the world as such’6 – and ends with an image of a universe where there is no longer any structure or form of being, which, following a certain decollative logic, declassifies the notion of ‘totality’, inciting, through the supreme metaphysical problem – that of being – those who would, at the level of social existence, to throw themselves ‘headlong [vivant] into that which has no foundation and no head’,7 resulting in the negation of thought, reason and consciousness itself. As a whole, this text follows the trajectory found throughout Bataille’s oeuvre and synthesized in his three-volume work The Accursed Share (1991 [1949]), ‘moving from considerations of what it is to be human, he proceeds to social groups, to whole societies’.8 It begins rather apologetically, not wishing to insist on something that is only a scientific introduction to the absence of integrity or annihilation of individuation he wants to describe, and arrives in hurry and haste at the more concrete example of the ‘erotic activity that most of us maintain with one, or successively several of our kind’.9 Like nearly all of his writing, then, this text could be read as ‘another doomed attempt to encompass the tumult of the sexual act’,10 with one difference: while it discloses Bataille’s concern with facticity to be at the root of his fascination with eroticism, this does not linger on the latter as the realm of chance – apropos of inception or, as he writes elsewhere, ‘as a quest for union at the mercy of circumstance’.11 Nor does it linger on the latter as the realm of death – where, in the sexual act, as in decomposition, the body loses its integrity and returns to the ‘earth’, whatever that may be.12 Rather, it lingers on eroticism as the realm of loss, and of a very peculiar kind of loss in the context of what Stuart Kendall would identify as Bataille’s broader holistic project,13 where, beyond the will to leave one’s integral or individuated being for a vaster one, there exists the ‘desire only to be lost without being found’.14 Here, Bataille mobilizes what he calls the ultimate question of being – which, it seems, is one of direction. Being, he says, is continually drawn in two (different) directions, like that found in the union of lovers. Where, on the one hand, the unified being that lovers ‘form counts more for them than love [itself], they are condemned to the slow stabilization of their relationship [and the] vacant horror of steady conjugality encloses them’.15 On the other, ‘if the need to love and be lost [in love] is stronger in them than the concern with being found, the only outlet is in tearing in the perversities of turbulent passion’.16 (It is probably a good time to mention that this word ‘tearing’ appears seventeen times throughout this short text, and denotes a scission or cut, the aperture through which being is ‘lost in a convulsion that binds’,17 where, as Heidegger would say, ‘severing [das trennen, the disconnect] is also a joining’.18) In his



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signature move of transplanting his findings on inner experience, from singlecell organisms to social groups to whole societies, in a reversal of the much celebrated aphorism of hermetic philosophy, ‘as above, so below’,19 Bataille relates the conjugality of marriage to various figures of totality and finally then to God, who becomes, in the kind of apokatastasis we find in Origen, ‘the wall against which the passion of love for love collides’.20 ‘God’s eternal vastness’, he says, ‘serves in the beginning as the object of loss for each being, who, in self-loss is found again in God. But what is lacking’, he says, ‘is satisfaction for those who desire only to be lost without being found’.21 This notion of ‘self-loss’, or loss of the self that is found again in God, is often seen as the defining characteristic of mysticism. Within Western discourse it is usually referred to as mystical union (unio mystica), a term that does not emerge until the fourth century, whence it is used only sparingly, until in the modern study of mysticism it attains a central place. This may be due in part to the Bible’s relative silence on the matter, because while Neoplatonic mystics, in particular Plotinus, left stunning analyses of its metaphysical and existential definitions, the Church Fathers, for reasons presumably pertaining to Neoplatonism’s pagan nature, tended to avoid the language altogether. There were, nevertheless, some Christian mystics who were willing to speak about it, going back to the fourth century, for example, Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) provides an analogy that would often be repeated in later mystical texts. Here, of the eventual union of fallen minds with God – where ‘fallen minds’ refers, through a Neoplatonic doctrine taken up in the Middle Ages, and rediscovered in modern times by the likes of Bataille and the Existentialists (and presently and more pejoratively by the likes of Thomas Ligotti),22 to nothing more than our self-consciousness, our standing out through individuation from the primordial wholeness – he says: When minds flow back into him like torrents into the sea, he changes them all into his own nature, color and taste … And as in the fusion of rivers with the sea no addition in its nature or variation in its color or taste can be found, so also in the fusion of minds with the Father, no duality of natures or quaternity of persons comes about.23

What is most immediately striking about this analogy of mystical union is its complete commensurability with what Bataille would later term ‘continuity’, through which – in opposition to ‘discontinuity’, the state of affairs that ‘binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality’24 – we become, independently of death, indistinct from the material continuum of the natural world: ‘like water in water’25 or, as Ponticus relays, ‘like the fusion of rivers with the sea’.

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Reading Bataille’s later work, in particular Eroticism (2012 [1957]), where he explicitly takes up this notion of continuity, he would seem indubitably aligned with the Christian mystical tradition, specifically that of the thirteenth century, with its genius for speculative synthesis, and from which there was a surge of accounts that, using philosophical categories drawn from Neoplatonic philosophy, spoke of  ‘union of identity’ (unitas identitatis/unitas indistinctionis) with God – in opposition to an earlier tradition that spoke of ‘union of spirits … a uniting of willing and loving in which the infinite Divine Spirit and finite created spirit nonetheless always maintained their ontological distinction’.26 Of the former, that of the thirteenth century, to which I am suggesting Bataille is most definitely aligned – and by extension, then, to a period in Western metaphysical thinking when the coupling of spirituality and speculation was not yet maligned – the foremost spokesman was Meister Eckhart (d. 1327). In what is perhaps his most famous sermon, Eckhart claims: ‘I and God are one … I am an unmoved cause that moves all things. Here, God finds no place in man, for man by his poverty [of spirit, or annihilation of individuated being] wins for himself what he was eternally, and shall eternally remain.’27 Ergo Bataille in Eroticism: ‘God is a composite being possessed of the continuity [of which I speak], on the affective plane in a fundamental way.’28 But not so, or at least it would seem, for the Bataille of 1939, whose own insistent and ostensible divergence from the mystical tradition is brought to a barb in this text’s concluding remark, where, in correlating the figure of totality, through the conjugality of marriage (and those mystics who would lose themselves only to find themselves again in a new form), to that of God, he says: ‘Totality cannot be analogous to the composite beings we know [and are], beings driven by the same impulse [which is to say, by the impulse to tear].’29

Dying because I do not die In following Hollywood’s reading of other texts from this period, Bataille’s own insistent divergence from the mystical tradition may then be construed as being based on ‘err’ – or, more properly, on what he sees or understands as the mystic’s refusal to err: ‘to do without end for their speech and experience’; their inability to love and be lost in love perpetually.30 This would seem to consolidate Hollywood’s claim regarding what she sees to be Bataille’s ultimate apostasy. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, the primary model for what Bataille calls his ‘morose bias’31 when confronted with the question of being is none other



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than the Blessed Teresa of Ávila (d. 1582), invoked in this text’s penultimate paragraph, for her passion, which, like that of ‘lovers whose need to lose exceeds their need to find each other’, opens what Bataille calls ‘an unstoppable breach into a universe where there is no longer any structure or form of being, where it seems death rolls on from world to world … ’.32 And he is, of course, referring to that poem in Teresa’s oeuvre, which begins: I live, yet no true life I know, And, living thus expectantly, I die because I do not die.

And ends: Oh life, what service can I pay, Unto my God who lives in me, Save if I first abandon thee, That I may merit thee for aye? Such yearning for my spouse have I, Dying because I do not die.33

This becomes for Bataille the figural expression of existence, in what he proposes ‘to assume as a law’, that beings are never united except through tears and wounds, which, rolling on from world to world, engender and lay claim, beyond the narrowness of community they sustain, to what Scott Wilson has termed ‘an infinite concatenation of [tears] that teem in a series of openings, dilations, contractions, holes that assimilate, expel, vomit and communicate through the [mouth of the] wound that lacerates integrity’.34 ‘Dying because I do not die’ or, as Bataille would later write, ‘Life is a door into existence: life may be doomed but the continuity of existence is not. The nearness of this continuity and its heady quality are more powerful than the thought of death.’35 Over and against any understanding of Bataille’s claim that beyond the will to leave one’s own being for a vaster one there exists ‘only the desire to be lost without being found’, against any understanding that this claim could and must be construed – when read alongside other texts from this period – as exhibiting what Hollywood has posited as Bataille’s experience of the failures of mysticism, I would claim, on the contrary, that this statement – whose figural expression is the ‘wound’/‘wounding’, the ‘tear’ that appears with such tenacity throughout this text, the ‘tearing in the perversities of turbulent passion’ which, like Teresa’s cry that she is dying because she cannot die, opens an unstoppable breach into a universe where there is no longer any structure or form of being, and that,

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capitulated against the conjugal union of identity with a totality against which the ‘passion of love for love collides’ – far from exhibiting Bataille’s divergence from, more thoroughly aligns him with, the Christian mystical tradition. Within which, union of identity, or mystical union construed as union of identity, remained controversial for an awfully long time – particularly after the condemnations of Marguerite Porete and Eckhart, until it was eventually clarified in none other than Teresa’s own oeuvre, and that of John of the Cross, as being one of spiritual marriage: the very ‘horror of conjugality’ Bataille spies and pits against the former in this 1939 text. It is described by Teresa no less, as ‘[being] like rain falling … into a river or stream, becoming one and the same liquid, so that the river and rain water cannot be divided … resembl[ing] a streamlet flowing into the ocean, which afterwards cannot be disunited’.36 Again, this is the ‘water in water’ that constitutes continuity or continuous existence for the later Bataille, where he writes, ‘Every animal is in the world like water in water.’37 (‘Does this mean that animals are mystics? No. But more importantly, it means that they are not not mystics,’38 as Nicola Masciandaro would quip, and this will be my next point. For now I will say:) It is a far from inconsequential fact that – just as it is for Teresa in her earlier writings, so it is for Bataille in his earlier writings (and I speak here specifically of this College of Sociology text) – it is not union of identity, but wounding or tearing that represents the height of the mystical path.39 In Teresa’s Interior Castle or Mansions, composed in 1577, this is the place or rather non-place where, in states of mystical consciousness, rapture and ecstasy, the soul is torn and wounded by love. This is, to be precise, the sixth mansion of Teresa’s ascension, where the soul, ‘determined to take no other Bridegroom than [the] Lord’, is disregarded by Him in its desire for speedy espousal; ‘wishing that these longings should still become more vehement, and that this good … should be purchased at some cost to the self ’.40 Here, Teresa – and I would proffer, by extension, Bataille – is firmly rooted in a tradition stemming from Corinthians (2 Cor. 11.2, cf. Eph. 5.23 or Rev. 21.2 and 22.17) that profoundly eroticizes devotion to God: where our relation to Him is ‘the kind of thing found in a stormy love affair; or even in the dangerous territory where pain is close to orgiastic delight’,41 where, as Bataille would write, ‘in spite of what appears on the surface, the simplicity of the instant belongs to the man who, spontaneously bewitched, is laid open to anguish’.42 As Rowan Williams has noted, the earliest application of this imagery – the visual correlative of which is the sort of grotesque hyperrealism found in artistic depictions of ‘the effects of scourging, beating, crowning with thorns …’ that



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culminates in the fifteenth century with a specific ‘Man of Sorrows’ image in art – seems to be Origen’s third-century commentary on the Song of Songs, where the latter writes of how we are wounded or torn by the touch of divine love (cf. Origen’s commentary on Song 5.8: ‘I have been smitten through with the dart of His passionate love’).43 Here, as in the comparable commentaries by Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century and Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth – not to mention the entire genre of commentaries and homilies on the Songs that, as Rowan attests, became, in the intervening years, one of the richest in monastic literature – our relation to God is mediated through the crucified Christ, who finds powerful and uninhibited expression as an erotic partner that, in abandoning lovers, gives share of His own sense of abandonment by the Father.44 The last great expression of this tradition is to be found in the poetry of sixteenth-century Spain, in the prose reflections of John of the Cross and of his contemporary and friend, the Blessed Teresa. Both use the conventions of vernacular love lyrics to convey the way erotic union with the divine is construed through imitatio christi as the search for the renewal of an encounter that has torn or wounded the soul’s life; where the soul, torn, in what Bataille would term ‘the perversities of turbulent passion’, reaches a state of ecstatical rapture (impossibly inverted, no doubt) in an image of darkness and absence: the forlorn shepherd, who, despairing a response from the beloved, allegorizes the crucified Christ’s sense of abandonment by the Father.45 As Bataille would write in ‘The Lure of the Game’: ‘THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE ABSENCE OF AN OUTSIDE ANSWER. THE INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE ANSWER THE WILL GIVES ITSELF, SUSPENDED IN THE VOID OF UNKNOWABLE NIGHT.’46 It is here where facticity and sorrow not only intersect, but where, as Masciandaro’s oeuvre suggests, ‘tearing’ and ‘tearing’ are figuratively if not etymologically linked through the locus of the mouth (via German zehren, ‘to gnaw’), the site where sorrow ‘undoes the being-with-itself that is its gnawing actuality’.47 Where the articulation of the question that stands at the commencement of Dasein itself dissolves into babble, froth and drool, and ‘where everything is divine, because everything is impossible, above all to explain, to speak’48 – bringing Bataille’s oeuvre to ‘a threshold where the experiment of thought restores itself to experience, [where] the laboratory re-becomes life, and more specifically, then, where the subtractive procedures of rationalist discourse … bottom out in a total situation of unknowing’:49 I am not a man among men. I am an animal.50

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Unknowing animals One of the principles of mysticism is that union of identity with God is achieved in the perfection of unknowing, where, as the sixth-century Areopagite would write, ‘being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing’.51 In the context of thirteenth-century mystical thought this is captured in Eckhart’s account of the way to God ‘as an invisible intensification of the pure fact of God’, where, as the latter would say: ‘… not knowing makes her [the soul] wonder and leads her to eager pursuit, for she perceives clearly that it is, but does not know how or what it is’.52 Or, to put it differently, in the words of Eruigena, a ninth-century Irish theologian who was responsible for introducing Dionysius’ pseudonymous corpus to the West: ‘the Divine likeness in the human mind is most clearly discerned when it is only known that it is, and not what it is … what it is is denied in it [negatur in ea quid esse], and only that it is is affirmed’.53 This principle comes into play in a mystical treatise from the fourteenth century, The Book of Privy Counseling, attributed to the same anonymous author as The Cloud of Unknowing.54 Here, as Masciandaro’s ‘Unknowing Animals’ relays, the human capacity for divine contemplation is said to be exemplified by animal consciousness – which is to say, the question of animal awareness is brought into play in order to demonstrate the radical availability of contemplation and the divine union [it] produces … in a figure of what the human is, if only it were not so human, so waywardly rational: ‘So bleendid in here coryous kunnyng of clergie and kynde’ that [she is] no more able to understand ‘the threwe conceit of this light werk’ than ‘a yong childe at his A.B.C.’ can understand ‘the kunnyng of the greatest clerk’.55

In giving ‘animal consciousness the surprising task of exemplifying what he considers to be the essential faculty of contemplative work, the ability to experience not only what, but that one is … the weird taskless task … inherit[ed] from the Cloud-author’,56 and taken up by Bataille, is to see the human into being what animals unknowingly are. Or, to finish this sentence differently, as Masciandaro himself does, and thereby reintroduce a figure central to this section’s conclusory remarks, ‘to see the human into being what Heidegger unknowingly thought animals are’.57 Heidegger, who – ‘shoring up the power of the question around the human’58 – would say: ‘questions … do not



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simply occur like stones and water. Questions are not given like shoes, clothes or books. Questions are as they are actually asked, and this is the only way in which they are.’59 Here, in what Masciandaro would call Heidegger’s ‘strong, identitarian ontology of the question’,60 we are returned to the figure of the mouth, the locus of speech and the site of Dasein’s princely primacy over other entities. It is precisely the integrity and autonomy of this space that Bataille’s oeuvre seeks to unground, and ‘rejoin in being a philosophy that is there ready made’.61 The animal could speak if it wanted to, Bataille would say, but prefers not to, and Bataille sees this silence as proof of the animal’s superiority over man.62 For his part, he says: ‘[e]verything I’ve asserted, [every] conviction I’ve expressed, it’s all ridiculous and dead. I’m only silence, and the universe is silence. The world of words is laughable .. . Sovereignty does not speak.’63 But Bataille does speak, and, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would assay, this is a weakness in him … an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence. … But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence that he hearkens to within himself. His entire ‘work’ is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences … 64

The will affirms itself in contradiction ‘Only silence is able to express what we have to say’, says Bataille, in a short lecture on ‘The Consequences of Nonknowledge’ delivered on 12 January 1951; the whole lecture pivots on contradiction, on oxymoron – on that ‘hyperbolic comparison’ in which, as Wilson notes, we witness ‘the Petrarchan conceit par excellence’.65 Bataille was almost certainly hungover delivering this lecture, he had been drinking in a Parisian bar until 3 a.m. In tow were A. J. Ayer, MerleauPonty, and Giorgio Ambrosini, the physicist whose work exerted a profound influence on his Accursed Share. The conversation, which was clearly interesting enough to keep them all there imbibing, took a scandalous turn around 2 a.m. – such that Bataille felt like he was already commencing his lecture – when Ayer, a philosopher committed to scientific realism, made the simple proposition that the sun existed before humanity. While Ayer couldn’t even doubt it, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty and Ambrosini were not of the same mind. Recounting this anecdote in a review of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2008 [2006]) – the founding text of speculative realism – Simon Critchley explains why:

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The thesis under discussion was very simple: did the sun exist before the appearance of humans? Ayer saw no reason to doubt that it did, whereas Bataille thought the whole proposition meaningless. For a philosopher committed to scientific realism, like Ayer, it makes evident sense to utter ancestral statements such as ‘The sun existed prior to the appearance of humans,’ whereas for a correlationist like Bataille, more versed in Hegel and phenomenology, physical objects must be perceived by an observer in order to be said to exist.66

Critchley’s closing iteration of the verb ‘to say’ foregrounds the fact that this is a representational problem – one that bleeds into an epistemological prohibition – on which the technomaterialist, transfeminist and experimental poet Amy Ireland (also one of the principal promulgators of Nick Land’s epistemic legacy) expands with exceeding clarity: ‘Since Kant’s “Copernican Turn,” philosophical orthodoxy has considered realism either as a folly – subscribed to only by those naïve enough to believe reality to be entirely consonant with what appears as reality – or as an epistemologically untenable and therefore outmoded position.’67 As Ireland goes on to explain, ‘the heartbreaking premise’ of what Critchley accuses Bataille, i.e. what Wilson would call ‘the worst excesses of “correlationism”’,68 thus ‘begins with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2007 [1781]), in which he bequeaths to the modern age the irrevocable burden of human finitude’ – a burden that is bequeathed at – or better, endowed on – the transcendental level of experience: Following the Critique’s model of consciousness, when an object is perceived, its raw sensory material – what Kant referred to as ‘the sensible manifold’ – is processed in the mind via the pure forms of intuition: space and time. These forms are universal to human consciousness and inhere within the mind rather than in objects themselves. In order for anything to enter into human experience it must pass through these forms, which imbue it with an exchange value, yielding it up to the synthetic function of the categories of judgement that complete the process of exchange, inscribing the object in phenomena. It follows that the sensible manifold is absent of spatiotemporal configuration before arriving in consciousness. Rather, it is form-less. Thus, we can never know the reality of things-in-themselves because their appearance is always mediated by our perception of them: the in-itself is always already a for-us.69

Through Kant’s innovation of this model of – what is, in his parlance – a priori aesthetic judgement, knowledge claims are limited to the realm of the for-us as well, since it follows that we cannot have knowledge of objects that do not manifest empirically. Thus, from the representational problem emerges an epistemological prohibition, which only intensifies over the 150-odd



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years separating Kant and Bataille, giving rise to a multitude of anti-realist positions that, ‘increasingly narrow[ing] the field of meaningful inscription within human experience: idealism, phenomenology, post-structuralism’s focus on the text’, culminate in the late twentieth-century decree on the death of metaphysics, in whose wake we are left oscillating between two economies, what Ireland calls ‘the restricted economy of the phenomenal – a controlled appropriation of the outside that fuels the human system of representation; and the general economy of the noumenal – an anarchic alterity always operating in excess of the phenomenal, formless, irrecuperable, and unknowable’.70 Certainly, as Ireland suggests, if one were to consent to give Kant this Bataillean twist, the restricted economy of the phenomenal reads like a mask or veil that devitalizes the general economy of the noumenal, concealing and/or obscuring it, i.e. the real/‘Real’ – what Bataille himself would simply call ‘nonknowledge’ – through a process of purification, driven by something like the metaphysical principle of economy – utility (use-value) – at the transcendental level of experience. Despite the fact that Bataille’s entire oeuvre (and in particular the essay central to the seventh volume of his Oeuvres Complètes, and to the concerns of this book) targets such utility at its roots, exposing it as ‘a principle of impotence’, as ‘an ineradicable deficiency that cuts the human being off from all possibility of sovereignty’71 – where, rather than pushing intellectual limits, we would cling to our cotermined ‘world’ of subject and object with all the confidence of children – there is a strong temptation to elide the correlationist accusation levelled against Bataille, by either 1) invoking the very particular role the sun plays in his lexicon; or 2) saying that while Ayer was talking about the sun as a well-defined scientific object that precedes humankind, and is comprised of various elements, Ambrosini and Bataille were referring to ‘the sun’ as ideal representation of the real. Tempting, and perhaps even correct as this move may be – Ireland, for example, maintains that ‘Bataille is so much more complex than those who want to point to him as a marker for “radical finitude” or the “end of metaphysics” or whatever pomo trip they might be on’72 – to do so would be to ignore the context in which Bataille himself recalls the anecdotal basis for this accusation, and the admission made therein, that he felt like he was already commencing his lecture on ‘The Consequences of Nonknowledge’ when confronted with the ‘uneasy’ proposition of an object-oriented universe independent of human perception;73 leaving his Unfinished System of Nonknowledge (2001), indeed, his entire oeuvre, ‘see-sawing between metaphysics and fideism’, rather than – as I have set out to suggest – invoking the Meillassouxian imperative:

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[W]e must transform our perspective on unreason, stop construing it as the form of our deficient grasp of the world and turn it into the veridical content of the world as such – we must project unreason into things themselves, and discover in our grasp of facticity the veritable intellectual intuition of the absolute.74

Or as Masciandaro after Ibn al-‘Arabi has said, ‘rational speculation leads to bewilderment [hayra] and theophany leads to bewilderment. There is nothing but a bewildered one. There is nothing exercising properties but bewilderment. There is nothing but Allah.’75 Or better yet, Bataille himself: When one knows that one knows nothing, it helps a lot; one must continue thinking in order to discover the world of someone who knows that he knows nothing. The world of those who have pushed intellectual limits is very different from the world of those who have confidence (children); It’s difficult for philosophers to resist the temptation to play like children … The true sage, in the Greek sense, uses science the way it can be used, in view of the moment wherein every notion will be brought to the point at which its limit will appear – the beyond of any notion … It is not about ineffable states: it is possible to speak about all the states we go through. But there remains a point that always has the meaning – rather, the absence of meaning – of totality. Thus a description, from the point of view of discursive knowledge, is imperfect, if through the description, at the desired moment, thought does not open onto the very point wherein totality, the annihilation of this description, is revealed. Would I talk about God?76

Speculative realist discourse, as both the term and the above quotations – not to mention the epigraph animating this section of my paper – suggest,77 is broadly characterized by the self-contradictory intensity of a desire for thought that can think beyond itself, all the while pursuing this desire in thoroughly rationalist terms. So, for example, while Bataille, engaging the rational premise of apophatic mysticism (from Greek apo, ‘away from’, and phasis, ‘assertion’), refuses to do so honestly,78 for his part, the belligerent Meillassoux would talk about God – specifically, about a God to come79 – underscoring the extent to which ‘the realist contention that God does not exist does not preclude the possibility that he may come to be in the future’.80 And it is precisely this ‘possibility’ – ‘a realist attitude applied not to the real but to the possible’ – that defines ‘speculative realism’ and simultaneously differentiates it from the innumerable other realisms there may be – ‘as many as the possible objects of perception or thought’ – but of which ‘the realism of the possible is the widest in scope’.81 Its vector of thought, what Masciandaro describes as ‘immanent touching of an



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outside’,82 can be found everywhere in the work of Bataille, but nowhere is it punctuated (from medieval Latin punctuat – ‘brought to a point’) more clearly than in Inner Experience (1988 [1943]), where he writes: ‘I enter a dead end. There all possibilities are exhausted; the possible slips away and the impossible prevails. To face the impossible – exorbitant, indubitable – when nothing is possible any longer is in my eyes to have an experience of the divine … ’.83 The divine, which is co-extensive with continuity in Bataille’s lexicon, stands outside the subject/object relation inaugurated by and defining humanity. As such, it is ‘the impossibility of the human … negative in character [and] only intuitable to us as an enigmatic something that recedes into shadows, obscurity and darkness’84 – corresponding to Dionysius’ description of divine union as taking place ‘in calignem ignorantiae occidit vere mysticam [… the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing]’.85 As the veritable blind spot of human knowledge, the divine is prefigured in Bataille’s ‘pineal eye’,86 through which he imagines ‘that it is as in vision, which is rendered sharp in darkness [l’obscurité] by the dilation of the pupil. Here darkness is not the absence of light [or of reason] but absorption into the outside [dehors]’87 – unreason. This is the outside-in-itself, or ‘le grand dehors [the great outdoors]’,88 to use Meillassoux’s terminology: If we look through the aperture which we have opened onto the absolute, what we see there is rather a menacing power – something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet of also never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recess.89

This is what Meillassoux calls ‘hyper-chaos’, and Bataille, in terminology more directly appealing to the sensible manifold as that which is absent of spatiotemporal configuration before arriving in consciousness, ‘l’informe [formless]’ – in either case, it is the extension of unreason into being: [F]or academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is … On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.90

Of course, Bataille’s statement is – rather appropriately – unreasonable in itself, insofar as to say the universe is something like a spider or spit is precisely to give it a form – the form of a spider or spit. But there are two ways of addressing this: a) on the level of content (i.e. anatomy – ‘in many ways the exemplary practice of form and forming’),91 and b) on the level of style (i.e. Bataille’s). On

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the occasion of the first, we need to show just how it is the spider lacks form, and, as Gary J. Shipley has noted, ‘the most immediately obvious indicator of this – like the earthworm with which Bataille makes the spider congruous – is its lack of an independently formed head, as what would in other arthropods constitute two bodily segments are combined in the spider into a single tagmata: the cephalothorax’.92 Joining Shipley in And They Were Two In One And One In Two (2014) – a collection of essays on beheading and cinema in which Bataille looms large – Eugene Thacker discusses the cephalothorax in the context of the latter’s ‘formless’ by way of John Carpenter’s film The Thing (1982), and specifically with respect to the events surrounding a character therein named Norris. Up to the point that concerns us, the ‘thing’ in question has escaped from the bowels of an alien spacecraft buried deep in the arctic ice for what may have been eons. Incidentally, the spacecraft functions here as a kind of ‘arché-fossil’, to borrow Meillassoux’s terminology, insofar as it introduces ‘a reality – a thing or event – which existed before life on earth’93 or, in recalling the animating anecdote above, the arché-fossil describes the state of the world prior to ‘the world’, i.e. an ancestral statement qua scientific object or datum which discloses a concept of uncorrelated time. As Paul J. Ennis – the philosopher who gave the first comprehensive account of Meillassoux’s thesis in After Finitude, and accordingly, then, what the latter would go on to describe as ‘an indispensable introduction to speculative realism’94 – attests, the importance of the arché-fossil is that it introduces a concept of uncorrelated time, or time without becoming, what Meillassoux calls the ancestral realm95; a realm to which the ‘thing’ surely belongs. Subsisting parasitically on other living organisms, this ‘thing’ makes its way into a neighbouring research station where it passes contagiously from one being to another and finally, then, to Norris, taking on each being’s form before wholly incorporating them from the inside out. As Thacker expands: This thing is really a ‘no-thing,’ insubstantial and without determinate form, and yet omnipresent and omnivorous. The ‘thing’ has no body, is not composed of any substance, and it cannot be identified by simply pointing to it or even by naming it … When the ‘thing’ does manifest itself, it does so not through an un-veiling or un-masking – a [Kantian] gesture which would reveal something ‘real’ beneath an illusion or a mirage. Instead, the ‘thing’ only indicates its presence by un-doing the body … The head splits open, sprouting feelers and tentacles; the chest caves in and sprouts strange heads; abject arms grow out of the abdomen; muscle, tendon, and the viscera are recombined into a paradoxical formless anatomy.96



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As Thacker goes on to contend, this paradoxical formless anatomy is best demonstrated in the weird transformation of the character Norris in what is one of the pivotal scenes in the film. Here, amidst growing fear and paranoia, Norris – having collapsed from either stress or shock – is taken to the infirmary, where his colleagues attempt to revive him. Suddenly and inexplicably, his abdomen opens up and out like a large-toothed mouth that proceeds to bite off the arm of the doctor performing CPR on him. As his colleagues stand back in shock, a head sprouts from a fleshy stalk that surges from his abdomen before clinging to the ceiling with insect-like legs, all the while vaguely resembling Norris’s own head, which by now has started to separate itself from his body. In something like ‘long, thick, strand[s] of fleshy tar’, Norris’s head pulls itself apart from his body, landing silently on the floor beside the gurney on which he – or what remains of him – is convulsing. In what Thacker describes as ‘a final, unsettling scene’, Norris’s severed head abruptly sprouts spider-legs and two long, fleshy stalks with amphibian eyes, before scuttling off unceremoniously, prompting the wise-cracking character Palmer – who is looking on at the wildly unreasonable amalgam of head, spider and frog with a stupefied expression – to quip, ‘You gotta be fucking kidding!’, neatly encapsulating the extent to which, as Thacker contends, ‘only absurdities can result from this last transformation, this last detail. At this point, theory [as it stems from its medieval roots in theoria, vision, contemplation] can only become more absurd (that is, more [wildly unreasonable] than it already is). In short, one moves from beheading, to be-heading, to spider-heading’97 – cephalothorax – Bataille’s preferred figure for l’informe or ‘formless’, which is to say, the truth of the ground of being; reconfigured anew by Meillassoux through the principle of unreason, the absolute attribute of ‘hyperchaos’: ‘a menacing power – something insensible … and capable of destroying, without reason or cause, every physical law … every determinable entity, even a god, even God’.98 Written and published in 1929, seventy-seven years prior to the publication of Meillassoux’s After Finitude, Bataille’s short text on ‘l’informe/formless’ prefigures the latter’s concept not of the posthuman, transhuman or even unhuman, but of the inhuman, ‘with a prepositional pun on the negation’, as Masciandaro prefers, ‘so as to register that the human passes beyond itself from within, inside an exacerbated realization of its own nature as more and other than whatever it is’99 – brilliantly played out in both Carpenter’s film and Thacker’s erudite exposition of the ‘thing’ as threatening precisely because it collapses, ‘[i]n a kind of grotesque pastiche of the simulacra’, the definitions of self and other, of the phenomenological and the noumenological, of the for-us

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and the in-itself, a collapse that ‘can only be thought at the cost of well-formed philosophy and upright logic’.100 Ergo Meillassoux, We are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which there is a necessary reason why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of unreason. There is no reason for anything to be or remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able to be and/or be able to be other than it is.101

The principle of unreason is Meillassoux’s reconfiguration of the principle of sufficient reason bequeathed by Kant, and it is for him the only properly rational outcome of reason’s realization of its own limitations. It is also, importantly, an augmentation anticipated by Bataille in his Unfinished System, where – in what is essentially mystical terminology, ‘awakening in the night of nonknowledge’102 – he is seen to be directly appealing to the Meillassouxian moment, the speculative realist turn or decision ‘to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity of thought’,103 when he writes: My contribution. The honesty of nonknowledge, the reduction of knowledge to what it is. But it will augment itself, through consciousness of the night, through awakening in the night of nonknowledge; I changed a knowledge that dishonestly transgressed its possibilities through dangerous connections, fundamentally unjustified, into a continuous renewed awakening, every time that reflection could no longer be pursued (since on waking, being pursued, it would substitute acts of discernment grounded on falsifications for nonknowledge). Awakening on the contrary, restores the sovereign element, the impenetrable (inserting the moment of nonknowledge into the operation of knowledge; I restore what was missing to knowledge …)104

This passage is also important in that it reinforces Bataille’s rationalist position at the same time as it shows it to be not only commensurate with mystical or what he would call ‘inner experience’, but its essential double. In two consecutive fragments in Inner Experience we read: ‘Principle of inner experience to emerge through project from the realm of project’; ‘Reason alone has the power to undo its work, to hurl down what it has built up … Without the support of reason we don’t reach “dark incandescence”.’105 Recalling the spiritual and theoretical synthesis achieved in the mystical summas of the thirteenth century, the gemitus cordis or ‘groaning of the heart’ that we encounter in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge – a phantasmic paratextual à paraître of Bataille’s own Atheological Summa – is shown over the course of articles, lectures and notes to be the essential double of the fulgor speculationis or ‘brilliance of speculation’



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whereby, as Masciandaro avers, ‘mind is deliriously led beyond itself ’106 – in a move, pre-emptive of Meillassoux, to reclaim an absolute after the reputed rejection of the possibility of rationality proving the existence of any absolute, with the essential difference, that for both thinkers, indeed for both systems – speculative realism and apophatic mysticism – the absolute truth of unreason is not a proof of an absolute being, but rather of the truth of the ground of being itself. Ergo Eckhart, No truth learned by any master by his own intellect and understanding, or ever to be learned this side the day of judgement, has ever been interpreted at all according to this knowledge, in this ground. Call it, and thou wilt, an ignorance, an unknowing, yet there is in it more than in all knowing and understanding without it, for this outward ignorance lures and attracts thee from all understood things and from thyself.107

The notion of ‘allure’ here, and of a ‘self ’ that is, like all ‘perception’, ‘purely a matter of phantoms’108 – a ‘transcendental x … known only through the thoughts that are its predicates’,109 and thus not really known at all, but said – brings us to the quandary of semantics, and the mathematizable qualities that, for Meillassoux, at once constitute the cosmos and condition its evasion from language. It is here that we witness the Petrarchan conceit Wilson spies in Bataille’s lecture, but that runs the gamut of his Unfinished System, indeed his oeuvre, wherein, as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘despite language’s power for error, for its cutting of the continuous tissue that joins us vitally to the real … and is installed between ourselves and that tissue like a screen. The philosopher speaks … ’.110 For not only does he speak, but he speaks with Petrarchan conceit, evoking through the oxymoronic amorphous spider, for example, the inversion of perception that folds and twists form into a selfcontradictory figure of formlessness – the phobic object par excellence, the formless spider ‘gives definition and shape to fears that are related not so much to a “what” but to a “where” that is indefinite and formless, without limit or boundary, lacking even the regular dimensions of time and space’.111 If ‘[t]he depth of the horror of things proposes itself to human beings as the truth to uncover’,112 phobia is an effect of the question that being raises for the subject ‘from where he was before the subject came into the world.’ Anxiety occurs the moment discontinuity apprehends the vulnerability of its existence in the presence of a voracious outside, an order, momentarily, of exteriority that would return existence to the infinite continuity of intimate violence.113

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This is paradox-as-style, then, but it responds on a more penetrative level, as Ireland would agree, to language’s subsistence at one remove from the threshold of the real; ‘… That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see.’114 As the Petrarchan conceit par excellence, the oxymoronic formless form is a type of performative apophasis115 that functions at a more immediate level akin to the verbose refusal of language and definition we find throughout Bataille’s Unfinished System – and, indeed, his Atheological Summa, as well as his novels; as Yukio Mishima has said of Madame Edwarda (1989 [1956]): [M]y aim here is not to develop a theory on Bataille. I have too many things that I would like to say about Bataille in this limited space. What is certain, nevertheless, is that, being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. It is the verbalization of a silence called God, and it is also certain that a novelist’s greatest ambition could not lie anywhere else but here.116

It also links him semantically to the aesthetic of the ‘best worse’ in the work of Samuel Beckett, where, as Ireland discusses, statements such as, ‘The void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail’ – indicative of an equivalence between ‘say’ and ‘fail’ – point to ‘an epistemological void’ alongside language’s ‘inherent incapacity as a representational medium when engaged in the impossible task of representing the real’.117 And yet, in finding further equivalence between Bataille’s sense of ‘writing on’, with respect to the task language is condemned to perform, and Beckett’s ‘nohow on’, Ireland’s study of the latter after finitude brilliantly and unknowingly elucidates the only conceivable trajectory for what Wilson, with a nod to the ‘bel nero’ of Laura’s eyes, would call Bataille’s Neroplatonism: ‘a Platonism that finds its truth in the black eyes of its beloved’; ‘a Neoplatonism that as such is always a Neroplatonism’, deriving as it does, to quote Rime 37 of Petrarch’s Canzionere (1976 [1327–68]), from that ‘Strange pleasure that in human minds is often found, to love whatever strange thing brings the thickest cloud of sighs!’118

Following the sigh119 Emerging out of speculative realism, to literally and literarily follow the sigh into that most pessimal – maximally bad or optimally worse – oxymoronic



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musical noise that is black metal, Bataille’s Neroplatonism takes on its appropriately absurd dimension, and here we must remember Thacker’s contention, that at this point theory can only become more absurd, which is to say, more wildly unreasonable than it already is. ‘[S]tepping in to what must happen’, then, in accord with the aesthetics of inevitability governing metal,120 and attempting to address realism’s central problem of finding the point at which the inside gives onto the outside while remaining vigilant of the epistemological paradox imparted by the limits of language, the oeuvres of each of these thinkers – Masciandaro, Wilson, Critchley, Shipley, Thacker, Ennis and many more besides – have coagulated since 2009 under the aegis of black metal theory, championing a ‘hideous gnosis’,121 or what Beckett would call, ‘impossible prose’.122 As Ireland relays, Beckett had used these words in a letter to Alan Schneider in 1982, to describe his then work in progress, Worstward Ho (1983) – ‘a text about two things: knowing and saying’. Worstward Ho ‘describes a consciousness representing itself representing others. And this consciousness wonders about the part of itself that it cannot perceive, just as the “transcendental unity of apperception” – the post-Kantian subject – wonders about, but can never access, the noumenal thing that is thinking it.’123 Kant had established this axiom in the first Critique, where he writes: Through this I, or he, or it (the thing), which thinks, nothing is represented beyond a transcendental subject of thoughts = x. This subject is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and apart from them we can never have the slightest concept of it; therefore we revolve around it in a perpetual circle, since before we can form any judgement about it we must already use its representation.124

This is one of the most poignantly simple formulations of correlationism, insofar as it shows how it is from our very facticity that finitude – and, subsequently, the entirety of Kant’s system – springs forth: ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being and never to either term considered apart … ’.125 Asking if Beckett’s Worstward Ho must then be read as the staging of yet another failed attempt to register the real, in a manner that immediately recalls the accusation levelled against Bataille by someone or other who suggested his oeuvre is a failed attempt to capture the tumult of the sexual act, Ireland responds, yes: Failed – necessarily, since it is an attempt registered in literature, and not in consciousness where – and Meillassoux is perhaps the proof – this engagement

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might at least be possible. Language can never touch the real. Because art exists as a subsidiary of human experience, the idea of a realist aesthetics is self-negating, for the realist programme is immediately betrayed as soon as it is relegated to a representational system that does not exceed human experience.126

In noting how Beckett returns to this problem time and again in his writings on art, pointing out to his various interlocutors – in terminology entirely evocative of the language and life of Bataille – that ‘representing the dissolution of human consciousness and calling it dissolution-in-itself is supremely naïve’, Ireland’s text goes on to suggest that rather than (naively) attempting to resolve this paradox through an art-form, Beckett inhabits it and thus makes it acute on both the representational and the transcendental level – repeating them within the text itself – so that not only do you have an analogon [and here she borrows a term from Meillassoux, who uses this idea phenomenologically to account for the ways in which art can instantiate the real] of the representational prohibition of the transcendental level at the level of artistic representation, but you have an analogon of the analogon unfurling inside the representational space of the text as the represented-consciousness represents itself representing others in the ultimate mise-en-abyme.127

This comes to a crux in a crucial passage which recalls the one quoted above from the first Critique, where we find Worstward Ho’s narrating voice wondering about the words that it speaks: ‘Whose words? Ask in vain. Or not in vain if say no knowing. No saying. No words for him whose words. Him? One. No words for one whose words. One? It. No words for it whose words. Better worse so.’128 Proving himself to be an impossible contemporary of the ‘retarded antiaestheticism’129 of the French Circle, and a black metal theorist avant la lettre, Beckett’s last utterance of ‘better worse so’, of better worsening, and of what is cumulatively, then, an aesthetic of the best worse, responds to the failure of representation. ‘[For] what remains of the representable if the essence of the object is to evade representation?’ Beckett asks in ‘Peintres de l’Empêchement’ (1983 [1948]). ‘What remains is to represent the conditions of this evasion’130 or, as Ireland suggests, ‘What remains is the representation of representation’s incapacity – what Beckett calls “la peinture de l’acceptation/the painting of acknowledgement” in the same essay.’131 As indicated, ‘this acknowledgement or acceptance of art as a priori failure activates an inversion of values’ that we find in black metal, where ‘the worst representation, because it shows the conditions of evasion, becomes an



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objective’.132 Within the genre it is generally referred to as ‘necro’ or ‘necrocorpse’ sound, but it is far wider reaching than simple sonic instantiations. We can, in fact, see a systematic aesthetic of the best worse in black metal. It manifests formally in the exceedingly lo-fi production values that foreground the opacity and materiality of music as a recorded artifact, by deictically pointing to the technical frame, ‘the unheard material pre-condition of the recording on the level of content’.133 This is recapitulated vocally in an aural experience of voice detached from meaning – groaning, growling, screaming, any number of sounds that ‘signal the return of voice in vengeance against the event of language as what negates it and thus a repossession or being possessed by voice as ontic exponent’.134 And turning, then, to a level terminologically proximal to what Beckett calls ‘the painting of acknowledgement’, this is recapitulated visually in the artwork and iconography of the genre, from the degraded photocopy to ‘the demonic figure of paradox, possession, and the impossible, Satan’ – as Wilson notes, ‘the untenable metaphor for nonknowledge’.135 Now, while metal studies, in thinking ‘about’ (from OE onbutan, ‘on the outside of, around’) black metal, would contend – looking in – that what we find in this aesthetic of best worsening is nothing more than a ‘pantomine’, a ‘play’, i.e. ‘no one is taking it seriously’136 – or, if they are, they would do well to remember that representing the dissolution of the conditions of human experience and calling it dissolution-in-itself is extremely naïve! – black metal theory, in thinking ‘with’ black metal, follows this aesthetic of the best worse (gnomeatically prefigured in the ‘long, low funeral sigh’ axiomatic of pessimism as the best aesthetic of worsening)137 to its absolute extreme, in the belief that black metal literally and literarily inhabits the epistemological paradox imparted by realism, and that, by inhabiting it, black metal thus makes it acute at both the representational and the transcendental level. And so black metal theory exits from metal studies before it even enters it, paradoxically, just as ‘pessimism exits from philosophy by taking its sigh seriously, by recognizing the seriousness of philosophy’s not knowing its own sighing: “I turned away from philosophy,” writes Cioran, “when it became impossible to discover in Kant any human weakness, any authentic accent of melancholy [tristesse].”’138

Dead thinking or ‘Mystical vomit’139 ‘Why write when you are already dead’, asks Ennis, ‘and yet …’140 As appallingly melodramatic as the music it thinks with, black metal theory – or in this case,

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a tiny bleak theory – asserts itself as the best worsening of speculative realism. Employing one of the text-centred hermeneutic models that speculative realism delights in having departed from,141 black metal theory emerges as a mutually successful infection of theoretical prose with black metal lyricism, and of black metal lyricism with theoretical prose, and more specifically, then, with respect to the mutual experience of non-knowledge we find in both. As above, this is an experience that Bataille characterizes as ‘uneasiness’ – what Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek have equated with Wittgensteinian paradox and Sartrean nausée142 – and which manifests musically in Belkètre’s ‘Empli de Répulsion’ from the 2015 album Ryan Èvn-a (Kaleidarkness), a work dedicated to this author and born out of an ongoing discussion of the subject with composer Vordb Na R.iidr: […] Remous ! Aspirant les corps gémissants … Final ! Soubresauts des sables mouvants … H.erwèn ! Vualgèr.-a r.èn-sl èy-ir.y o-ud ! Wèyna ! R.ènsl èy-œtlu yèn pruœurdn … Ma répulsion est comme le sang dans mes veines ! Ma répulsion est comme l’air dans mes poumons ! La création est le ferment de ma géhenne ! La création alimente ma répulsion ! Et je vomis ce monde !143

While paradox is implicit from the outset, it is perhaps the last line here that most immediately illustrates the rationale behind the equation of nausea with the experience of non-knowledge in the work of Bataille. This is after all the point at which absolute knowledge and le non savoir/saveur coincide, particularly in the face of ancestral statements, given that what is at stake in such statements is precisely ‘the world’, i.e. for us – ‘I vomit this world’ – as opposed to the world whose boundary is not set by the existence of an experiencing subject – which is to say, a world that is not co-extensive qua being with manifestation. This latter constitutes ‘the night of nonknowledge’ that Bataille speaks of throughout his Unfinished System; ergo Vordb’s despair elsewhere ‘at the ending of the night which was my protection [a recurrent theme in Moévöt], realizing the necessity to temporarily return to a world that I absolutely abhorred … ’.144 On the other hand, vomit – qua disgust loosed from its vicarious roots – becomes an analogue of this night that is unbroachable in the Kantian system, constituting an abyssal slide into immanence, a dissolvent oblivion that cannot be defined



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or comprehended, a ‘fanged noumena’ apropos of Land145 or – what Jacques Derrida, with a nod to Bataille, would call – ‘impossibility’: This impossibility cannot be said to be something, something sensible or intelligible that could fall under one or the other senses or under some concept. One cannot name it within the [Kantian system] – within the name – which can only vomit it and vomit itself in it. One cannot even say what it is. That would be to begin to eat it, or – what is no longer absolutely different – to vomit it. The question what is? already parleys [arraisonne], like a parergon, it constructs a framework which captures the energy of what is completely inassimilable and absolutely repressed. Any philosophical question already determines, concerning this other, a paregoric parergon. A paregoric remedy softens with speech; it consoles, it exhorts with the word. As its name indicates.146

An alimentary instantiation of Bataille’s l’informe or ‘formless’, vomit, as a parergon of the third Critique, is often regarded as the synthesis of Kant’s transcendental system: an absolute heterogeneity, an inassimilable x, that ‘never letting itself be swallowed must therefore cause itself to be vomited’.147 As such it informs (or better unforms) the inversion of values concurrent with the best worsening we find in black metal, both in the aesthetic sense we have been discussing, but also in the moral–ideological sense – as Derrida notes, in being determined ‘by the system of the beautiful, “the symbol of morality,” as its other’148 – vomit is pure unadulterated evil. Hence its privileged place in black metal. While a list of exemplary bands, song titles, album titles, record companies, magazines, fanzines, webzines, and, yes, even online communities, would far exceed the space provided, here are just a few examples: Vomit (Norway), Black Vomit (Mexico), Black Vomit (England), Vomit Bitch (Greece), Anal Vomit (Peru), Death Vomit (Chile), Radioactive Vomit (Canada), Black Anal Goat Vomit (Australia), Vomit of Doom (Argentina); Nattefrost’s Blood and Vomit (Season of Mist [2004]), Hatevömit’s Necrövömit (Underground Resistance Records [2015]); Midnight’s ‘Vomit Queens’ (Farewell To Hell, Nuclear War Now! Productions [2008]), Earth Rot’s ‘Witch Vomit’ (Follow The Black Smoke [Independent, 2014]); Hells Vomit Productions, Black Vomit Records, and so on … in a systematic aesthetic of best worsening that culminates aurally in the genre’s signature throat-vomiting vocals, through which – in the sacrifice of logopoeia (meaning) to phonopoeia (sound value) – vomit becomes the acoustic analogue for non-knowledge; all of which may go some way towards explaining why, on overhearing Bataille say ‘man lives with his

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own death’, Paul Éluard would call it ‘Mystical vomit’,149 or why, in his appraisal of Meillassoux’s After Finitude, Justin Clemens would for the same reason call it ‘Vomit Apocalypse’: It is this vomit that is the disavowed paradigm of the speculative realist utopia: precisely not subject nor subjectivisable, precisely not conformable to the phenomena–noumenon distinction; precisely the name for the factuality of matter without any possible representation and without any possible meaning.150

The speculative realist trajectory of this vomit can be gleaned from another of Vordb’s audio projects, Moévöt, particularly in what is referred to as its ‘first manner’.151 Here, in offerings like De fenêtre entrouverte (Kaleidarkness [1992–2015]), ‘uneasiness’ and ‘nausea’ really come to the fore, conceptually and lyrically, but in a manner that places vomis (‘vomited’) and rends (as Vordb notes, ‘another French word with which to say vomit again’) at the source of ecstatic visions,152 and thus an economy of masochism we encounter in apophatic mysticism. An economy that quite literally ‘clearing away’153 – as in the case of Catherine of Sienna (d. 1380), who would induce vomiting with such violence, ‘bitterness’ and ‘peyne’, ‘quykke blode’ would ‘come oute of hir moup’, or Mary of Oignes (d. 1213), who starved herself to death until ‘her spine was stuck to her stomach’154 – in imitation of Christ, thus forms a total sacrifice that divinizes even as it annihilates. The experience of Bataille’s non-knowledge precisely as ‘mystical vomit’, ‘constituted by the “projection” of the subject to this not-yetpresent’155 – of the one who, ‘hack[ing] and hew[ing]’ at the self to create a space, ‘or widen the place’, as Porete puts it, ‘in which Love will want to be’156 – perfectly prefigures the utterly empty/vectorial subject required by Meillassoux and, what is for the latter, the eternality and thus absoluteness of facticity as temporality; ergo that ‘very special [diachronic] time’157 we glimpse in ‘Il Soliliqua’: Il Soliloque, sur les ruines d’un monde à l’agonie … Je n’ai jamais cherché à fuir ce crucial face à face … Il Soliloque, avec toi, mon seul ami, dans ce vent, de braise ou de glace … Il Soliloque, pour l’Éternité …158

In the penumbra of Bataille’s mystical vomit (rend), Vordb’s cosmological vision, his language invention,159 the belief that he might possibly be dead thinking160 and, lastly, given the fact that all of this hinges on vampiric journeys or ‘wanderings’161 à la Odin – which, ‘like Meillassoux, who wants to go to death’s realm and return’,162 or Ray Brassier, ‘whose vision temporarily tosses him to the



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end of the universe and back, only to re-render the latter such that it is a long slow cosmological death march’163 – at once foretokens black metal theory’s bid to escape correlationism through the question of ‘how does thought think the death of thinking?’164 while relaying its vigilance or watchfulness (apropos of theoria, vision, contemplation) of the epistemological paradox imparted to it by the limits of representation. Vordb does not attempt to resolve this paradox through his art form, but rather makes it acute at both the representational and the transcendental level, showing him – through constant recourse to ‘Darkness,’ i.e. there is no Vordb there is only ‘Darkness’165 – to be allied with thinking à la speculative realism, ‘even if this is alien thinking that, attached to the will to nothingness, eats away at personal meaning in favor of a godless (or, godless for now in Meillassoux) alien process’.166 As Ennis contends with respect to Vordb’s ‘interesting inversion’ or best worsening of speculative realism, ‘in a way you may as well be dead/are dead once you begin thinking like this’.167

Following the inversion: ‘Better worse so’ or black metal Beckett Emerging out of a concept of ‘Chaos’ that suggests a radical, paradoxically divine atheism which, in loathing God, thereby embraces Satanism, Vordb’s idea of ‘Darkness’ presupposes the infernal principle of materialism maintained by Meillassoux168 and opens itself at once to a world of transcendent imagination that the latter contends secular atheism precludes.169 Indeed, as Ireland’s mentor Land maintains, ‘this kind of satanic blasphemy is precisely what atheism must sustain if it is not to subsist in miserable banality’. As Wilson relays in Melancology (2014), ‘For Land the fact that “God has wrought such loathsomeness without even having existed only exacerbates the hatred pitched against him. An atheism that does not hunger for God’s blood is an inanity.”’170 That the best worsening of the ‘so-said seat and germ of all’ occurs in Beckett’s Worstward Ho when the narrating voice’s ‘clenched staring eyes’ are superseded by ‘one dim black hole mid foreskull’171 is, then, doubly apt, if we take the ‘black’ in black metal to mean Satanic, and to be emblematic of a conceptual structure of opposition and inversion.172 For as Ireland notes, this ‘“one dim black hole mid-foreskull” … recalls less an instrument of representation than its inversion: a pineal eye, an organ that Bataille imagines “at the summit of the skull like a horrible erupting volcano”.’173 From Visions of Excess (1985),

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In the mind there is a blind spot that recalls the structure of the eye. In the mind, as in the eye, it is difficult to detect. But, whereas the eye’s blind spot is unimportant, the nature of the mind means the blind spot will, in itself, make more sense than the mind itself […] It is no longer the spot that vanishes into knowledge, but knowledge that gets lost in the spot. Existence in this manner comes full circle … just as it went from the unknown to the known, at the summit it has to turn around and return to the unknown.174

Corresponding to the movement figured in Bataille’s pineal eye, and the equation of absolute knowledge with non-knowledge in his Unfinished System, the destination ‘nohow’ – with a pun on know-how or savoir faire – in Beckett’s text posits a peculiar kind of logic that ‘exists beyond the limit it simultaneously marks as nohow on … the point at which absolute knowledge and le non-savoir coincide’, and, as Ireland asserts, ‘a revelation is anticipated’: ‘When nohow on. Then all seen as only then. Undimmed. All undimmed that words dim. All so seen, unsaid.’175 The ‘dim’, which is an analogon of consciousness – or representation of the first degree, ‘and more specifically, then, of a veil-like conscious that distorts or dims the real’, is undimmed at the point of nohow on – a revelatory point of dark incandescence (to recall Bataille’s own terminology in the Unfinished System) we are driven to by the compulsion to go ‘On somehow on’ in language ‘Till nohow on’.176 As Ireland relays, the ‘on’ denotes the labour language is condemned to perform, condemned ‘because it has to represent at a secondary level, the level of analogy, the level of failure; but as “nohow on” it also denotes the opposite of this, fixing a course for the thing-itself’,177 and a fulfillment of art’s promise, that ‘the work of art does not simply refer to something, because what it refers to is actually there’.178 For it follows that if representation at the transcendental level is a veiling of the real, then the imperative to missay instead of say – an imperative concurrent with the aesthetic of best worsening we find in black metal, and which reaches its rational apogee in the language invention of Vordb Na R.iidr, such that, like Beckett’s, ‘fail[ing] the head said seat of all’,179 Vordb’s ‘impossible prose’ – equates to an elimination of this distortion, and a dissolution of the veil that is consciousness: Vaszagraèbe Éakr Uatrè Brenoritvrezorkre, Vèrmyaprèb, Nèvgzèrya, Uatr Borvuatre Zuèrkl, Szaèmdre, Èrvœlbtre, Morvbtre Urvdrèm Zlaèvatanvèrhzlévaryavge,180 Éèpr Govérèrv, Favoapr Uatr Zuflèvbre Oatrb Bouarvtre Blèhrurb, Tsaévarya Zurgtapre, Hkrèbre, Maèvdréu, Bor.arp!181 – at this point one discerns nothing, and the mouth belongs to no one, quite literally. For if we follow the inversion concurrent with this aesthetic of best worsening, when said backwards – like so many inversions notoriously



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associated with black metal lyricism – ‘no one’ designates the point of nohow on in Beckett’s text: ‘noh ow on’, ‘no wo hon’, no one.182 The point of ‘no wo hon’ is at once ego death, fana, manonash, mors mystica,183 and a mindless index of the material thing thinking the transcendental subject, and thus an instantiation of the Petrine cross turned upside down, which, like the Unfinished System’s reversed hermeticism, returns mastery to matter over consciousness in a black metal Beckettian move that perfectly figures what Masciandaro would call ‘the Godlessness, though certainly not the undivinity’,184 of Bataille’s mysticism. With respect to this last inversion, Ireland concludes: The point of nohow on indexes the material thing that thinks the transcendental subject, returning mastery to matter over consciousness in the moment where consciousness expires. It is thus the elimination of the final veil, the revelation of the blind spot, the end of representation, death, and absolute knowledge in absolute non-knowledge, because one has finally dispensed with the distortion that veils the real and becomes real – in mindless materiality: the ‘mind mattering’, to hark back to Burstein’s exposition. The inversion concurrent with the aesthetic of the best worse is made epistemological and the paradox posed by realism is resolved. Or is it?185

Neroplatonism Just as Ireland contends ‘[t]here are no ultimate resolutions in Beckett’, so we may assume there are none in Vordb, and certainly not in Bataille. Rather, ‘the timely reminder that the threshold of representation cannot be crossed in representation’, issuing in the very last instance from Worstward Ho’s narrating voice, ‘Said no how on’,186 ensures the paradox – the selfsame one that sees Bataille resorting to prayer in the very last instance of his atheological system (and that will subsequently see Meillassoux ‘seeking to create, to construct his own work as an object that is by its own arguments contradictory …’)187 – has the last word. Or does it? Given that the point of ‘nohow on’ is also the point of ‘unsaid’ in Beckett’s text, ‘Said nohow on’ could be read instead as ‘Said unsaid’ – more explicitly an oxymoron, which, when inverted, following the logic of this aesthetic of best worsening, becomes a type of performative apophasis – a hyperbolic comparison or ‘Unsaid said’ on par with the formless form or unknown known

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that is at once the unfathomable source of Petrarchan love and of the base materiality that accounts in Bataille, but also in speculative realism apropos of ‘allure’, for the possibility of contingency that shapes perceiving and thinking beings in their relation with the real. As Wilson writes, it is through this ‘active principle’, having its own ‘autonomous existence as darkness’ in Bataille’s oeuvre,188 that changes in phenomenal reality may occur in the ‘advent’ of strange new forms.189 It is perhaps, then, this darkness – ‘the formlessness of form’, ‘the indeterminate determination of all determinacy’190 – that Bataille spies in the face of death – that thing in which, as Plotinus suggests, one ‘comes across a residuum which it cannot bring under determination’191: the force of an outside so voracious that it transforms the psyche, and according to which, in one final inversion in his Unfinished System – ‘ready to pray’192 – Bataille bears witness to how one becomes somehow identical to this strange new thing (cosa nove) behind it. Just as theory, in thinking with Bataille, and looking deep into the ‘bel nero’ eyes of its beloved, becomes somehow indistinguishable from it/this: Not black metal. Not theory. Not not black metal. Not not theory. Black metal theory. Theoretical blackening of metal. Metallic blackening of theory. Mutual blackening. Nigredo in the intoxological crucible of symposia.193

Notes 1 2

Georges Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, in The College of Sociology, ed. Dennis Hollier. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 333. For a good overview on the subject see, for instance, Philip Toner, ‘Haecceitas and the Question of Being: Heidegger and Duns Scotus’. Kritike II (2) (December 2008): 146–54. Cf. Philip Sheldrake, ‘Human Identity and the Particularity of Place’. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality I (2001): 43–64. Sheldrake traces Scotus’s haecceitas back to St Francis, to the tenor of his Laudes Creaturarum (1222–26), and the dignity he grants each particular creature. ‘Francis experienced each particular element of creation’, explains Sheldrake, ‘not merely Creation as an abstract whole’ (60). Heidegger first transposes this particularity into the term ‘facticity’, as that which describes the self ’s original reality, at the end of summer semester in 1920; by 1921, it becomes for him the principal point of philosophy. A good understanding of the development of this concept in Heidegger’s early work can be gleaned from Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.



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H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Outsider’, in The H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales. London: HarperCollins, 2000, 11, cited in various places throughout Nicola Masciandaro’s oeuvre, most pertinently, perhaps, in relation to individuation, in ‘The Sorrow of Being’. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19 (1) (Fall/Winter 2010): 9–35, 9. 4 Amy Hollywood, ‘Bataille and Mysticism: A “Dazzling Dissolution”’. Diacritics 26 (2) (Summer 1996): 74–87. Cf. Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, where she develops this research, though somewhat apologetically, in relation to claims made in her earlier work. 5 Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, 333. 6 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008, 82. 7 Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, 336. Cf. Georges Bataille, ‘The Obelisk’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 222. 8 Alastair Brotchie, ‘Introduction’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary and Related Texts and the Encyclopaedia Costa, ed. Georges Bataille, Robert Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg, trans. Iain White. London: Atlas Press, 1995, 21. 9 Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, 333. 10 Stuart Kendall, ‘Editor’s Introduction: The Sediment of the Possible’, in Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall. New York: Zone Books, 2009, 29–30. 11 Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood. London: Penguin, 2012, 20. 12 Brotchie, ‘Introduction’, 12. 13 See Kendall, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, cf. Weston La Barre, The Human Animal. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955, ix–xvi. 14 Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, 336. 15 Ibid., 335. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 334. 18 Martin Heidegger, ‘Logik: Heraklits Lehre Vom Logos’, in Heraklit, ‘Gesamstausgabe’, Bd. 55. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970, 337, cited in Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Decapitating Cinema’, in And They Were Two in One and One in Two, ed. Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker. London: Schism, 2014, 67. 19 See Brotchie, ‘Introduction’, 12. 20 Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, 335–6. Origen maintained that in order to be knowable God cannot be unlimited. On this, see Origen, Origen on First Principles, 3

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Bk 2, Ch. 9: 1, trans. G. W. Butterworth. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, 129–37. In contradistinction, Gregory of Nyssa held that God is fundamentally incomprehensible and, then, in contrast to Origen, that he is unlimited, as is our desire towards him. See, for example, Gregory of Nyssa, ‘The Life of Moses’, in The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, ed. Bernard McGinn. New York: The Modern Library, 2006, 13–26: ‘Your desire is always strained forwards and your motion knows no weariness; further, you know no limit to the good and your desire is always intent on something more. This all means that the “place” is ever near you, so that whoever runs therein never comes to an end of his running’ (19). 21 Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, 336. What Bataille exhibits here is just an inchoate or, as yet, undeveloped understanding of individuation, which – according to the analogy of proportionality inherent in the concept of being developed by the scholastics – must be absolute. See Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge. London and Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 1983, or Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Absolute Secrecy: On the Infinity of Individuation’, in Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, ed. Joshua Ramey and Mathew Harr Farris. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Cf. Edia Connole, ‘Seven Propositions on the Secret Kissing of Black Metal: OSKVLVM’, in Mors Mystica: Black Metal Theory Symposium, ed. Edia Connole and Nicola Masciandaro. London: Schism, 2015, 333–66: ‘This absolute analogy ensures the openness or endlessness of desire that characterizes the soul’s relation to God, where the Return to the One does not lead to satiety, or to what Bataille, in what he perceives as the analogous figure of marriage, would liken to “the vacant horror of steady conjugality,” according to which God becomes – in the kind of apokatastasis we find in Origen – the very “wall against which the passion of love for love collides.” Rather, this absolute analogy ensures Bataille’s preferred “tearing in the perversities of turbulent passion,” remaining ever a movement forward, a “straining beyond” – what Gregory of Nyssa would posit as “an epektasis without end”’ (338). 22 See Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2011. 23 Evagrius Ponticus, ‘Letter to Melania 6’, in McGinn, ed., The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 428. 24 Bataille, Eroticism, 15. 25 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1989, 17. 26 McGinn, ‘Mystical Union’, in McGinn, ed., The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 428. 27 Meister Eckhart, ‘Sermon 52’, in McGinn, ed., The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 443.



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28 Bataille, Eroticism, 22. 29 Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, 336. 30 Hollywood, ‘Bataille and Mysticism’, 82–3. 31 Bataille, ‘College of Sociology’, 332. 32 Ibid., 336. 33 Teresa of Avila, ‘Vino sin vivir en mi, I Die Because I Do Not Die’, in Nine Centuries of Spanish Literature, ed. Seymour Resnick and Jeanne Pasmantier. New York: Dover Publications, 1994, 157. 34 Scott Wilson, ‘Culinary Heterology’, extract from Edia Connole and Scott Wilson, ‘The Divinity of the Mouth: Exhumanism and Animality’, presented by Will Stronge, ‘Sovereignty and the Human: Exploring Bataille’s Accursed Share Project’, Bristol, 24 April 2014. 35 Bataille, Eroticism, 23–4. 36 Teresa of Avila, ‘The Interior Castle 7.1–2’, in McGinn, ed., The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 457. 37 Bataille, Theory of Religion, 17. 38 Nicola Masciandaro’s ‘Unknowing Animals’, in Speculations II, ed. Michael Austin, Paul J. Ennis, Fabio Gironi and Thomas Gokey. New York: Punctum, 2011, 228–44, 241. 39 Cf. McGinn, ‘Mystical Union’, 451. 40 St Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle or The Mansions. London: Thomas Baker, 1921, 155. 41 Rowan Williams, ‘A History of Faith in Jesus’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus, ed. Markus Bockmuehl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 227. 42 Bataille, Eroticism, 251. Ergo, with respect to the correlative claims made in Eroticism, and specifically in ‘Mysticism and Sensuality’ therein, we read in one of Bataille’s earliest works, Story of the Eye. San Francisco: City Lights, 1987: ‘I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed, we crashed into a cyclist … her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels … The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another’ (5). For a discussion of this with respect to mysticism and Bataille’s related divergence from Sadism, see Edia Connole and Nicola Masciandaro, ‘On “Heroes/ Helden”’. Mors Mystica 1–52; 29–34. 43 Williams, ‘History of Faith in Jesus’, 227; Origen, ‘III. Amor and Caritas’, in McGinn, ed., The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 10. 44 Williams, ‘History of Faith in Jesus’, 226–8. 45 Ibid. Though I do not develop it here, I am indebted to Nicola Masciandaro for explaining rapture in relation to ‘the dereliction on the cross [which, as he notes],

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can be seen as a kind of inverse rapture, the moment of non self-coincidence, i.e. what is precisely impossible for God from the theological perspective’ (personal communication, 4 May 2014). Cf. ‘mysticism is [perfectly construed as] the involutionary science of turning the transcendental vector of flight from World to One into the most radical immanence without reduction whatsoever, of truing World to One via unbounded or non-decisional translation of the meaning of Plotinus’ pros from “to/toward” to “with” … [i.e.] Individuation is a flight of the alone with the alone’ (Masciandaro, ‘Absolute Secrecy’, 273). 46 Georges Bataille, ‘The Lure of the Game’, in The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, 45. 47 Masciandaro, ‘The Sorrow of Being’, 21. 48 Bataille, cited in Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. London: Routledge, 1992, 198–9. 49 Masciandaro, ‘The Sorrow of Being’, 24. 50 From a conversation with Sadean scholar Maurice Heine, recorded on 31 October 1939 – just four months after the presentation or publication of this College of Sociology text; see Kendall, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, 19. Correlatively, Christ, in raising his complaint to his Father while suffering on the cross – ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’ – would say, ‘But I am a worm, and no man’ (Psalm 22.6). Cf. Nicola Masciandaro, ‘WormSign’, in Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology, ed. Scott Wilson. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2014, 81–101, and Edia Connole and Scott Wilson (MOUTH), ‘“os mentis [mouth to mouth]” with Nicola Masciandaro’, in Weaponising Speculation, ed. Caoimhe Doyle. New York: Punctum, 2014, 43–60. 51 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 1001A, in The Complete Works, ed. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987, 137. 52 Meister Eckhart, ‘This is Meister Eckhart From Whom God Nothing Hid’, Meister Eckhart, ed. Franz Pfeiffer. London: John M. Watkins, 1924, 7. 53 John Scotus Eruigena, Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae), ed. I. P. SheldonWilliams and Edouard A. Jeauneau, trans. John O’Meara, 4 vols. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1999–2009, IV, 73, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Absolute Secrecy’. 54 See The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling, trans. William Johnston. New York: Image Books, 1973. 55 Masciandaro, ‘Unknowing Animals’, 240; Barry Windeatt (ed.), English Mystics of the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 80, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Unknowing Animals’, 241. 56 Masciandaro, ‘Unknowing Animals’, 241–4. 57 Ibid., 244. 58 Ibid., 236.

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Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959, 19, cited in Masciandaro, ‘Unknowing Animals’, 228. Contra Heidegger, ‘[t]he being for whom being is a question is not’, for Bataille, ‘a singular kind, but every kind of being. Every entity is a who?’ as in Masciandaro’s evaluation, ‘a something that exists precisely on the grounds of not knowing itself (‘Unknowing Animals’, 231). Hence in his oeuvre we find that ‘animalcula [single-cell organisms] have this inner experience just as complex creatures do: the transition from existence in-itself to existence for-itself cannot be assigned exclusively to … mankind’, he asserts. ‘Even an inert particle, lower down the scale than the animalcula, seem to have this existence for-itself ’, and though Bataille finds ‘none of the terms used to describe it … wholly satisfactory. [One] cannot fail to know’, he says, ‘that this inner experience which I can neither undergo myself nor picture in my imagination implies by definition a feeling of self …’ Employing ‘a kind of reductio ad absurdum of those infinitesmal changes at the very foundations of life’, he says, ‘We can discuss this rudimentary experience while admitting that it is incommunicable. The crisis of existence is here. The being experiences being in the crisis that puts it to the test, the being’s very being is called into question …’ (Eroticism, 100–1). Mihi maha quaestio factus sum, the privilege of unknowing, what Tuauo Jämsä (‘Semiosis in Evolution’, Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis, ed. Marcello Barbieri. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007, 69–100) defines as a stable semiosic tension and anticipation across the dividing line between object and representamen, is tied up with circumstances at the cosmological dawn and, as Masciandaro’s ‘Unknowing Animals’ contends, extends to everything. Masciandaro, ‘Unknowing Animals’, 232. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Interrogation and Intuition’, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, 105–29, 125. See Kendall, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, 24–5. Cf. Eveline Lot-Falck, Les Rites de chasse chez les peuples siberiens. Paris: Galimard, 1953. Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone. Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1988, 40–1. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Interrogation and Intuition’, 125. Georges Bataille, ‘The Consequences of Nonknowledge’, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 111–18, 113; Scott Wilson, ‘Neroplatonism’, in Speculative Medievalisms: Discography, ed. The Petropunk Collective. New York: Punctum Books, 2013, 103–20, 107. Simon Critchley, ‘Back to the Great Outdoors’, Times Literary Supplement, February 28, 2009: 28. Cf. Wilson, ‘Neroplatonism’, 103–5. Amy Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real: Meillassoux, Bataille, Beckett: Towards

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a Sovereign Speculative Poetics’, http://www.academia.edu/3690500/ Naught_is_More_Real_Meillassoux_Bataille_Beckett_Towards_a_Sovereign_ Speculative_Materialist_Poetics (accessed 7 October 2015). 68 Wilson, ‘Neroplatonism’, 103. 69 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 70 Ibid. 71 Jean Baudrillard, ‘When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy’, trans. Stuart Kendall. Scapegoat 5 (2013): 44–9, 45. 72 Personal communication with the author via Facebook (12 September 2015). 73 Bataille, ‘Consequences of Nonknowledge’, 111–12. 74 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 82. 75 Ibn al ‘Arabi, The Meccan Revelations, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz, trans. William C. Chittick and James W. Morris, New York: Pir Press, 2005, 198.2, cited and discussed by Nicola Masciandaro with respect to Meillassoux’s After Finitude in ‘Urania, or, Astral Theses on Deep Bewilderment’, The Whim, http://thewhim.blogspot. ie/2010/10/urania-or-astral-theses-on-deep.html (accessed 8 October 2015). 76 Bataille, ‘Consequences of Nonknowledge’, 14; Georges Bataille, ‘Nonknowledge’, in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 196–205, 198–201. 77 See Bataille, ‘Consequences of Nonknowledge’, 117–18, 117: ‘J. Wahl: “Discussion is difficult since you yourself said that you like to contradict yourself. You said ‘aspire to’ nonknowledge. Thus, you are searching for it, it is a kind of ideal for you?” G. Bataille: “I think I could, with difficulty, avoid this search for nonknowledge representing a moment”. J. Wahl: “Your attitude is ambivalent: you are desperate and you want to be this way”. G. Bataille: “The will affirms itself in contradiction …”’ 78 This turning away from assertion is already given in the etymological derivation of the word ‘mysticism’, which, from Indo-European root mu, gives us the English ‘mute’ via Greek muien, to ‘close the eyes or lips’, and forms the higher or more accurate element in the mystical theology that Pseudo-Dionysius introduced in the sixth century. Here, it is coupled with the cataphatic, from Greek cata, ‘affirmative’ and, again, phasis, ‘assertion’, from phanai, to ‘speak’, intending knowledge of God that moves in accordance with language as it is conventionally conceived. Ergo Bataille, ‘Nonknowledge’, 201–2: ‘To talk about God would be – dishonestly – to link that about which I can only speak through negation to the impossible explanation of what is.’ Cf. ‘I read in Denys l’Aréopagite: “Those who by an inward cessation of all intellectual functioning enter into an intimate union with ineffable light … only speak of God by negation” … So it is from the moment that it is experience and not presupposition which reveals (to such an extent that, in the eyes of the latter, light is “a ray of darkness”; he would go so far as to say, in the tradition of Eckhart: “God is nothingness”). But positive theology – founded



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on the revelation of the scriptures – is not in accord with this negative experience … In the same way, I hold the apprehension of God … to be an obstacle in the movement which carries us to the more obscure apprehension of unknowing [l’inconnu]: of a presence which is no longer in any way distinct from an absence’ (Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988, 4–5). Verily, since this essay was written, Stuart Kendall has furnished a more critical translation of Bataille’s Inner Experience (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014) which, with recourse to Hollywood’s study, better elucidates Bataille’s own insistent divergence from the Christian and non-Western mystical traditions. In rendering ‘unknowing [l’inconnu]’ as ‘the unknown’ Kendall is better aligned with the later Bataille of The Accursed Share: Volume III wherein we read: ‘Negative theology, which tries to carry the implication of the theopathic state over into the realm of knowledge, might merely take up the thought of Dionysius the Aeropagite. God is nothingness, but I prefer to say God is NOTHING, not without linking this negative truth to a perfect laughter: the laughter that doesn’t laugh’ (The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 439 n.3). Bracketing the fairly standard mystical trope of a coincidence of opposites, Bataille goes on to say that this NOTHING has still less in common with the metaphysical concept of nothingness (n.6, n.11 and n.12) which, in returning us to Kendall’s translation of ‘the unknown: [as a] presence that is no longer distinct in any way from an absence’ (Inner Experience, 10) suggests that this is in fact the perforce absolutely alien, trans-mundane divinity, i.e. NOTHING, and DARKNESS, of the Gnostics. So much ink, too much ink in truth, has been spilled in scholarly studies of Bataille’s ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’ (in Visions of Excess; Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, 45–52) that, in treating Gnosticism’s appearance in Bataille’s oeuvre as an isolated incident, qua base materialism, consistently fail to expand upon, or even notice, the atheological, and indeed apolitical, principles of Gnosticism inherent to his larger holistic project. Cf. Section 11, ‘Virtue and the Soul in Greek and Gnostic Teaching’ (with respect to antinomian libertinism and) concluding with ‘The Unknown God’, plus ‘Epilogue’, in Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & The Beginnings of Christianity. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001, 239–88, 320–40. There is no need to furnish additional details and nuances here, the rigorous researcher will surely fill in the necessary blanks reaching from Bataille’s propositions on Eastern mystical traditions in his Atheological Summa – stemming from Inner Experience, but reaching right throughout his oeuvre, as suggested – to the otherwise consequential, posthumous discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library. See Meillassoux’s thesis on ‘Divine Inexistence’, in Graham Harman, Quentin

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Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 90–122. Cf. Wilson, ‘Neroplatonism’, 108, 117–20. 80 Wilson, ‘Neroplatonism’, 108. 81 Sarah De Sanctis, ‘An Interview with Tristan Garcia’, in Breaking The Spell: Contemporary Realisms Under Discussion, ed. Sarah De Sanctis and Anna Longo. Milan: Mimesis, 2015, 229–34, 230. 82 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Per Speculum in Aenigmate: Response to Eugene Thacker’, in Speculative Medievalisms, 39–44, 44. 83 Bataille, Inner Experience, 33. 84 Eugene Thacker, ‘Divine Darkness’, in Speculative Medievalisms, 27–38, 29. 85 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 137, cited and discussed by Masciandaro with respect to Bataille’s apophatic mysticism in ‘Per Speculum’, 43. 86 See Bataille, ‘The Jesuve’ and ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Visions of Excess, 73–8, and 79–90, respectively. 87 Bataille, Inner Experience, 88, cited and discussed by Thacker with respect to apophatic mysticism and the eponymous concept of ‘Divine Darkness’, in Speculative Medievalisms, 27–38, 33–4. Cf. Thacker, ‘Prayers for Darkness’, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2015, 38, 39–42. 88 ‘[T]he great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory – of being entirely elsewhere’ (Meillassoux, After Finitude, 7). 89 Ibid., 64. 90 Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’, Documents, 1. Paris, 1929, 382, reprinted in Visions of Excess, 31. 91 Eugene Thacker, ‘Thing and No-Thing’, in And They Were Two in One and One in Two, 11–30, 16. 92 Gary J. Shipley, ‘Nonhuman Materialisations: The Horror in the Detail of the Cockroach’, Fanzine, http://thefanzine.com/nonhuman-materialisations-thehorror-in-the-detail-of-the-cockroach/ (accessed 9 March 2017). 93 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Time Without Becoming (Middlesex University, Londres, 8 mai 2008)’, Speculative Heresy, https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress. com/2008/07/3729-time_without_becoming.pdf (accessed 8 October 2015). 94 Quentin Meillassoux cited in the front-matter of Paul J. Ennis, Continental Realism. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2011. 95 See Ennis, Continental Realism, 1, passim. 96 Thacker, ‘Thing and No-Thing’, 16.



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97 Ibid., 16–20. 98 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 64. 99 Masciandaro, ‘Per Speculum’, 42. 100 Thacker, ‘Thing and No-Thing’, 16 and 26, respectively. 101 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 60. 102 Cf. John of the Cross, ‘The Dark Night’, John of the Cross: Selected Writings, trans. Kieran Kavanagh. New York: Paulist Press, 1987, 155–210. 103 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53. 104 Bataille, ‘Nonknowledge’, 201. 105 Bataille, Inner Experience, 46–7. 106 Masciandaro, ‘Absolute Secrecy’, 273. Cf. Bonaventure, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. Masciandaro refers here to the prologue of the Itinerarum wherein Bonaventure invites the reader to enter upon the work with a deep longing, with prayerfulness and with the groanings of inner man, ‘so that he may not believe that reading is sufficient without unction, speculation without devotion, investigation without wonder, observation without joy … knowledge without love … or reflection without divinely inspired wisdom’ (55–6). 107 Eckhart, ‘This is Meister Eckhart’, 9. 108 See Graham Harman, ‘Offshore Drilling Rig’, Circus Philosophicus. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2010, 39–51: ‘Even in what is called “love at first sight” there must be a minimal instant in which we are in contact with the beloved before love takes effect. What I mean is that things can be in contact with something else without being fully in contact with them, just as the philosopher loves wisdom without fully possessing it. Our initial state is that of a hazy half-contact with the images of things. These images may shift or warble slightly, but this need not have any resulting effect on the world. The landscape of entities remains stable: perception is purely a matter of phantoms. Only now and then does this situation break down and lead to two real objects indirectly affecting one another by means of a third. And this is one form of what I call “allure”’ (50–1). Discussed by Wilson with respect to Bataille’s lecture ‘On the Consequences of Nonknowledge’ in ‘Neroplatonism’, 103–17, the various threads of which should come together over the course of this essay providing the reader with a kind of denouement in the concluding section. 109 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Marcus Weigelt. London: Penguin, 2007, 319. 110 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Interrogation and Intuition’, 125. 111 Scott Wilson, ‘Spider Universe: Weaponising Phobia in Bataille, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Deleuze’, in Weaponising Speculation, 99–106, 99.

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112 Georges Bataille (OC 11: 264), cited by Stuart Kendall in ‘The Horror of Liberty’, in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree. New York: SUNY Press, 2009, 48. 113 Wilson, ‘Weaponising Phobia in Bataille’, 99; Wilson is quoting Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006, 42. 114 See Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’; Bataille, Inner Experience, 21. 115 For an understanding of the implications of performative apophasis in mysticism, see the excellent study by Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Cf. ‘Nancy coins a term to describe Bataille’s writing practice – exscription – through which he attempts to describe the mechanisms by which Bataille’s texts point outside of themselves to an experience that is constituted in the very act of writing. The parallels with … the linguistic strategies of apophatic mysticism are striking … these analyses demonstrate how insistence on the materiality of the text through which the practice of writing is inscribed leads not to a stultifying idealism, as some people oddly insist, but to a recognition of the interpenetration of world and writing in the production of a textual experience of desire without limit, without end, without aim. By exacerbating the paradoxes of writing a desire without object and without aim, Bataille creates a performative text in which inner experience [mystical experience] is (for him and perhaps for the reader who thinks the contradictions of his text) “realized”’ (Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 108). 116 Yukio Mishima, ‘Georges Bataille and Divinus Deus,’ in Georges Bataille, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1989, 4. 117 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 118 Wilson, ‘Neroplatonism’, 108; Petrach, ‘Rime 37’, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and other Poems, ed. Robert M. During. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976, 65–8. 119 The title animating this section of my paper is derived from an essay on pessimism by the inaugurator of black metal theory: Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Following the Sigh’, Sufficient Unto the Day: Sermons Contra Solicitudinem. Charleston, SC: Schism, 2014, 193–203. 120 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”: A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song’, in Edia Connole and Nicola Masciandaro, Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory. Milan: Mimesis, 2015, 35–52, 51–2. Cf. Edia Connole, ‘The Missing Subject of Accelerationism: Heavy Metal’s Wyrd Realism’ in the same volume, 115–32. 121 The title of the volume edited by Masciandaro that collects the essays, artworks and commentaries related to the first black theory symposium, held in New York



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in 2009. Of note, the volume itself is epigraphically animated by Bataille’s Inner Experience. See Hideous Gnosis, ed. Nicola Masciandaro. New York: n.p., 2010). 122 Samuel Beckett in a letter to Alan Scheider, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Hannon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 421, cited and discussed by Ireland in ‘Naught is More Real’, as I go on to mention. 123 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 124 Kant, Critique, 319. 125 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5. 126 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 127 Ibid. 128 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Nowhow On. New York: Grove Press, 1980, 98, cited and discussed by Ireland with respect to the passage above from Kant’s Critique, in ‘Naught is More Real’. 129 Valter, ‘Brenoritvrezorkre – Four Demos’, available from Surreal Documents, http://surrealdocuments.blogspot.ie/2009/02/br.html (accessed 10 October 2015). 130 Samuel Beckett, ‘Peintres de l’Empêchement’, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. London: Calder, 1983, 136, cited and discussed by Ireland, as I go on to mention. 131 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’; Beckett, ‘Peintres de l’Empêchement’, 137. 132 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 133 K-punk, ‘Phonograph Blues’, Abstract Dynamics, http://k-punk.abstractdynamics. org/archives/008535.html (accessed 10 October 2015), cited and discussed by Valter in ‘Brenoritvrezorkre – Four Demos’. 134 Nicola Masciandaro, ‘What is This That Stands Before Me: Metal as Deixis’, Floating Tomb, 59–72, 67. 135 Scott Wilson, ‘Introduction to Melancology’, in Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology, ed. Scott Wilson. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2014, 5–25, 10. 136 Karl Spracklen, ‘Too Old to Raise the Horns?’, Topics in the Aesthetics of Music and Sound, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DQJ1x8XwI8 (accessed 10 October 2015). 137 Eugene Thacker, ‘Cosmic Pessimism’. Continent 2 (2) (2012): 66–5, cited and discussed by Masciandaro in ‘Following the Sigh’, 194. 138 E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Arcade, 1975, 47, cited and discussed by Masciandaro in ‘Following the Sigh’, 198. 139 This section is epigraphically animated by Paul Éluard’s words, and more specifically by a quip he made upon overhearing Bataille say ‘man lives with his own death’, which is recalled somewhat anecdotally by Michel Surya, all of which will be made plain in what follows. But this section is also animated by

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Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought the corresponding notion of ‘dead thinking’, which was borne out over many conversations with both Paul J. Ennis and Vordb Na R.iidr over the course of September 2015, and to whom it is, then, in its entirety, heavily indebted. Paul J. Ennis, ‘Tiny Bleak Theory’, Without Hope: An Ontology of Nihilism. Unpublished manuscript. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), cover-text which suggests turning against the reduction of philosophy to the analysis of texts and accordingly, then, a ‘depart[ure] from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past [in order to] engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself ’. As the ‘best worsening’ of speculative realism, black metal theory is born out of an intellectual commitment to medieval commentarial method, and more broadly, to the essentially relational principles of medieval exegesis. For a good methodological overview of the genre, see the section on ‘Labor’ in Connole, ‘Les Légions Noires: Labor, Language, Laughter’, Floating Tomb, 149–58. And on its essential relation to speculation, then, see The Petropunk Collective, ‘Speculative Medievalisms: A Précis’, in Speculative Medievalisms, i–xi, x. Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek, Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism. London and New York: Continuum, 2009, 87. ‘Empli de Répulsion’ lyrics © Vordb, 2014, cited with Vordb’s kind permission. Vordb Na R.iidr, ‘KGOOD0001 [De fenêtre entrouverte]’, Kaleidarkness ‘Offerings of Darkness’, http://www.kaleidarkness.com/offerings_of_darkness.html (accessed 10 October 2015). See Land on the corresponding concept of laughter (which, of course, looms large in Bataille’s Unfinished System) in Thirst for Annihilation, 105–20. Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, Diacritics 11 (2) (1981): 2–25, 25. Derrida, ‘Economimesis’, 21. Ibid., 25. See Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London and New York: Verso, 2002, 192. Justin Clemens, ‘Vomit Apocalypse: Or, Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude’, Parrhesia 18 (2013): 57–67, 63. ‘[W]hich mainly consisted in a synthesizer with very cold, bleak sounds, and a lyrical, moaning, ghostly voice’ (Vordb, ‘KGOOD0001’). Vordb, ‘KGOOD0001’. Cf. Vordb, ‘KAOOD0001 [De fenêtre entrouverte (Kaleidarkness [1992–2015])]’, Kaleidarkness ‘Offerings of Darkness’, http://www. kaleidarkness.com/offerings_of_darkness.html (accessed 10 October 2015). As per apophasis (aphareisis) in Pseudo-Dionysius, who says: ‘If only we lacked



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sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge … We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue. They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image, and simply by this act of clearing aside (aphareisis), they show up the beauty which is hidden’ (Mystical Theology, 138). 154 Brian C. Vander Veen, The Vitae of Bodleian Library MS Douce. Unpublished thesis (PhD), University of Nottingham (2007). 155 Margaret Poret (Marguerite Porete), The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. E. Colledge, J. C. Marler and J. Grant. Paris: University of Notre Dame, 1999, 142. 156 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘There is contingent being independent of us, and this contingent being has no reason to be of a subjective nature.’ (‘Interview with Quentin Meillassoux’, trans. Marie Pier-Boucher, New Materialisms: Interviews & Cartographies, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.4/-new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext [accessed 11 November 2015]). 157 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 10. Cf. Vordb on diachronic time in ‘The Ritual Key/ Symbol’, in ‘Concepts’, Kaleidarkness, http://www.kaleidarkness.com/concepts. html (accessed 11 November 2015). 158 Bèlkètre, ‘Il Soliliqua’, from the 2015 album Ryan Èvn-a (Kaleidarkness); lyrics © Vordb, 2013–15, cited with Vordb’s kind permission. 159 See for example, Vordb, ‘Biography of the Entity’, and ‘Languages’ in ‘Concepts’, Kaleidarkness, http://www.kaleidarkness.com/biography_of_the_entity.html and http://www.kaleidarkness.com/languages.html, respectively (both accessed 11 November 2015). Cf. Edia Connole, ‘Les Légions Noires’, 149–208. 160 Personal communication with Vordb Na R.iidr (email, 16 September 2015). 161 See, for example, Vordb, ‘Moévöt’, in ‘Audio Darkness’, Kaleidarkness, http://www. kaleidarkness.com/moevot.html (accessed 11 October 2015). Cf. Edia Connole, ‘Table talk with Vordb Na R.iidr’, Metal Music Studies 2 (2) (2016): 151–88. 162 Paul J. Ennis, personal communication with the author (September 2015). Cf. ‘Q. Meillassoux/F. Hecker/R. Mackay, Chez Meillassoux, Paris, 22.7.2010’, Urbanomic, http://www.urbanomic.com/Documents/Documents-1.pdf (accessed 11 October 2015); ‘can we found the capacity of mathematics to grant us access to the Kingdom of death, and then to return so as to recount to the living the discoveries of our voyage? The principle of materialism is infernal: it supposes that the Hell of the inorganic world – those deep, subterranean realms where life and subjectivity are absent – can nevertheless become the object of human knowledge’ (Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign’, Spekulative Poetik. Freie Universitat, Berlin, 20 April 2012, 19). 163 Ennis, personal communication with the author (September 2015). See Ennis’s

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concise reading of Brassier in ‘Anti-Vitalism as a Pre-Condition for Nihilism’, in Breaking the Spell, 19–29. Cf. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 164 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 223, italics removed. 165 See, for example, Vordb, ‘The Name of the Entity’, Kaleidarkness, http://www. kaleidarkness.com/the_name_of_the_entity.html (accessed 11 October 2015). 166 Ennis, personal communication with the author (September 2015). See Ennis, ‘Anti-Vitalism’, 26–7: ‘The Subject that embraces the truth of extinction will be capable of merging with the will to know (the thinking “form” of the will to nothingness) and will no longer present itself as a barrier to knowledge of the in-itself. This would allow for the intensification or acceleration of philosophy as “the organon of extinction.” The nihilist will act as a mere vector, an already dead subject, allied with a process pursuing its own interests … an alien process (the will to know/will to nothingness) that actively undermines attempts to provide our species with a unique, special status within the cosmos.’ 167 Ennis, personal communication with the author (September 2015). 168 See note 163 above. Meillassoux, ‘Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition’, 19; incidentally, Ennis cites this with respect to the question of how to think a de-subjectivated world in ‘Anti-Vitalism’, 20–1 n.8, in a manner that immediately begs the answer given by Lord Meyhna’ch: ‘What would a world created [in] your image look like?’ ‘It would be a “no” world. The obliteration of a “world” like the one of the humans’ (‘Interview with Bèlkètre’, in The Black Plague: First Chapter [And Maybe the Last One], ed. Lord Meyhna’ch. Les Légions Noires Fanzine, 1995, 13). See Vordb on ‘Chaos’, in ‘Concepts’, available from Kaleidarkness, http://www.kaleidarkness.com/concepts.html (accessed 11 October 2015). 169 Meillassoux, ‘Divine Inexistence’, 226. 170 Wilson, ‘Introduction to Melancology’, 9–10; Wilson is quoting Land from Thirst for Annihilation, no pagination given. The Bataillean scholar/thinker par excellence, Land is not only, as Wilson notes here, a ‘black metal theorist avant la lettre’ (10), but an important figure in the pre-history of speculative realism (Ennis, ‘Anti-Vitalism’, 26 n.44). 171 Beckett, Worstward Ho, 114, cited and discussed – as I go on to make plain – in Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 172 On other possible meanings of the word ‘black’ in black metal, see Eugene Thacker, ‘Quaestio I: On the Meaning of the Word “Black” in Black Metal’, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1. Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2011, 11–21, and Edia Connole, ‘On the Meaning of Style: Black Metal’s “Black” or So, Black Is Myself (“Wisdom that will bless I, who live in the spiral joy at the utter end of a black prayer”)’, Through the Subcultural Lens: Hebdige and Subculture in the 21st Century, ed. The Subcultures Network (led



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by Pete Webb and Sian Lincoln). London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming 2017). 173 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 174 Bataille, ‘The Jesuve’, 74. 175 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’; Beckett, Worstward Ho, 112. 176 Ibid., 89. 177 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 178 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 35; as Masciandaro, citing Gadamer, would note, ‘This is Metallica’s instruments becoming weapons as Hetfield leads the charge: “Attack! | Bullets are flying | People are dying | With madness surrounding, | All hell’s breaking loose” (Metallica, ‘No Remorse’, Kill ’Em All)’ (Masciandaro, ‘Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath”’, 50–1). 179 Beckett, Worstward Ho, 97, cited and discussed by Ireland in ‘Naught is More Real’. 180 Words from one of Vordb’s invented languages, ‘Gloatre’, that also form some of the demo titles constituting the first chapter of Brenoritvrezorke, 1995–6. 181 Gloatre words that form some song titles from the demos constituting the first chapter of Brenoritvrezorke. 182 This point is made, sans the black metal or Satanic aspect, by Ireland in ‘Naught is More Real’. 183 Mors mystica, or ‘mystical death’, also being the theme of the most recent black metal theory symposium co-organized by myself and Masciandaro, and held in New York in April 2015. See Edia Connole and Nicola Masciandaro, ‘Introduction: On “Heroes/Helden”’, in Mors Mystica, 1–52, passim. 184 Masciandaro, ‘Per Speculum’, 40–1. 185 Ireland, ‘Naught is More Real’. 186 Ibid; Beckett, Worstward Ho, 116. 187 Wilson touches on this in his various readings of Meillassoux, of course, not least in ‘Neroplatonism’, which is notably divided/divisive – the second part dealing solely with Meillassoux’s follow-up to After Finitude, and in the original French: Le Nombre et la sirène: Un déchiffrage du ‘Un coup de dés de Mallarmé. Paris: Fayard, 2011. But I think Justin Clemens captures it best here in a closing note to ‘Vomit Apocalypse’, where he says: ‘My thesis, briefly put, is this: Meillassoux deliberately contradicts himself between After Finitude, where non-contradiction plays a foundational role, and The Number, wherein an impossible virtuality takes command of the deliberately vacillating precision of the actual …; Meillassoux himself is therefore seeking to create, to construct his own work as an object that is by its own arguments contradictory … and therefore, as he claims in After

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Finitude, would be a necessary being. Meillassoux’s work would thereby become the Realist God that he claims Kant destroyed, that is, an absolutely necessary substance. To which one can only whistle admiringly: What subtlety! What ambition! What inconsistency!’ (66 n.35). 188 See Bataille, Visions of Excess, 46. 189 Wilson, ‘Neroplatonism’, 113. 190 Ibid., 113 and 117, respectively. 191 Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. John Dillon. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2005, 99, cited and discussed by Wilson in ‘Neroplatonism’, 112–13. 192 Bataille, ‘[Appendix]’, Unfinished System, 273. 193 As stated on its inaugural website, Black Metal Theory, http://blackmetaltheory. blogspot.com/ (accessed 11 October 2015).

10

The Politics of Excess and Restraint: Reading Bataille alongside and against Accelerationism Eugene Brennan

The final chapter of The Accursed Share raises a major question about the possible transition to a post-capitalist society. Bataille rhetorically asks ‘What would be the meaning of a destruction of capitalism that would be at the same time the destruction of capitalism’s achievements? Obviously it would be the crudest possible denial of Marx’s lucidity.’1 This is a consideration that has obviously animated a broad range of critical theory but it has recently been pointedly and polemically advanced by theorists of accelerationism, arguing that the only way out of capitalism is through capitalism. This essay puts Bataille’s work in dialogue with two principal scenes of accelerationist thought, the 1990s texts of Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), and the more recent development of a politicized ‘left’ accelerationism. For a number of reasons outlined below, Bataille’s work is often seen as outmoded or as offering little of critical purchase for our contemporary reading moment. I will briefly point to a number of insightful critiques of Bataille’s politics of excess. However, my examination of his work alongside accelerationism will argue for its potential ongoing critical value, and will suggest that Bataille’s work warrants reconsideration less for its advocacy of excess than for the often overlooked sobriety and restraint of its politics. Accelerationism has generated a significant amount of critical debate in recent years. It was coined as a term of critique by Benjamin Noys in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative. Noys first defined accelerationism in terms of a post-68 variant of a politique du pire whereby ‘if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalize capitalism itself: the worse the better’.2 In contrast to Noys’ critical position, the 2011 publication of

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the collected writings of Nick Land offered some of the most extensive examples of a theoretical advocacy of this position. Land’s work celebrates and seeks to intensify the deterritorializing and alienating aspects of capitalism in an often pointedly nihilistic manner. Texts such as ‘Meltdown’, for example, envision a dystopic future of techno-capital singularity: The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.3

The attempt of politics to modernize, or any pursuit of human ‘resistance’, is futile. As he writes with barely concealed jouissance, ‘Nothing human makes it out of the near future.’4 Where Land’s texts display an increasingly anti-political and (neo-)reactionary position, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek have attempted to develop accelerationism as a more tempered left-wing political position, most notably with their manifesto included in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian’s #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader (2014). Like Land’s 1990s texts, Williams and Srnicek embrace the alienating effects of modernity. However, they make a break with Land in their belief in the viability of planning for a potentially emancipatory post-capitalist future, as will be discussed later in this essay. This surge of interest in accelerationism is particularly interesting from our perspective because several of the most prominent theorists and critics of acceleration all worked extensively on Bataille in the 1990s,5 but are now largely in agreement (often for very different reasons) on the basic point that Bataille has little of critical or theoretical purchase to contribute to contemporary accelerationist thought. The texts gathered in Fanged Noumena show Nick Land’s waning interest in Bataille, turning increasingly to the more libertarian thought of Deleuze and Guattari to develop his accelerationist philosophy. If Bataille proved inadequate for Land’s development of a politics of excess, Benjamin Noys views Bataille as somewhat outmoded for almost the opposite reason in that it is Bataille’s complicity with the excesses of postmodern capitalism which is so problematic. In The Accursed Share and throughout Bataille’s writings related to ‘general economy’, waste becomes what Noys describes as a site of ‘terminal acceleration’ where the waste of capitalism can be used to break through to a ‘higher’ level of excess that might rupture economic subordination to either use-value or exchange-value. However, as Noys explains, ‘The



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impasse of Bataille’s critique is not only that it has been outpaced by a “cloacal” capitalism, a capitalism that thrives on excess and waste. The more damaging problem is that it conceives this excess or waste as the site of a new production, which hardly seems to break with capitalism.’6 Similarly, Steven Shaviro sees Bataille’s theory as too consonant and complicit with abundance of excess characterizing contemporary capitalism. Neoliberalism, Shaviro explains, thrives on the forms of excess valorized by Bataille: From Stravinsky to the Dadaists, from Bataille to the makers of Deep Throat, and from Charlie Parker to Elvis to Guns N’ Roses, the aim was always to stun audiences by pushing things further than they had ever been pushed before. Offensiveness was a measure of success. Transgression was simply and axiomatically taken to be subversive. But this is no longer the case today. Neoliberalism has no problem with excess. Far from being subversive, transgression today is entirely normative … Every supposedly ‘transgressive’ act or representation expands the field of capital investment. It opens up new territories to appropriate, and jump-starts new processes from which to extract surplus value.7

In contrast with a transgressive attempt to break into a ‘radical Outside’, Shaviro attempts to theorize an accelerationist aesthetics in which art remains ‘entirely immanent, modulating its intensities in place’. The articulation of accelerationism as either an object of advocacy or a point of critique has thus often unfolded in terms of a break with the thought of Bataille. The critical points raised by Noys and Shaviro expand upon Jean-Joseph Goux’s critical analysis of Bataille in his 1990 article ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’. In this article Goux considers the remarkable ‘copernican reversal’ of political economy Bataille undertook with The Accursed Share. However, Goux explores the possibility that postmodern capitalism has outpaced Bataille’s analyses. Bataille identified contemporary capitalism in terms of a ‘restricted economy’ based on utility and the accumulation and rational reinvestment of profit. He opposed the ‘restricted economy’ with a ‘general economy’ that would entail the squandering of profits, where the ‘surplus’ of economic production is converted into the ‘excess’ of unproductive expenditure. The problem which Goux highlights is that ‘advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted economy and utility that presided at its beginning. No society has “wasted” as much as contemporary capitalism.’8 Bataille’s observations of the capitalism of his time may have accurately expanded upon Max Weber’s analysis of a Protestant work ethic, but, as Goux

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suggests, that critique of the ‘cramped, profane, narrowly utilitarian and calculating bourgeois mentality’ would find an unlikely accord with the apparent abundance of unproductive expenditure and championing of entrepreneurial risk in postmodern capitalism.9 This has resulted in the oxymoronic situation described by Goux where ‘one can now point to an “antibourgeois” defence of capitalism’.10 It is in this context that an anglophone articulation of accelerationism, and Bataille’s complex relationship to it, should be considered. Nick Land explicitly aligns his reading of Bataille with the excesses of postmodern capitalism at several points throughout The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (1992). The book sometimes suggests tendencies towards a potentially emancipatory post-capitalist orientation entirely absent from Land’s later work. Ultimately, however, the object of ‘annihilation’ that Land thirsts for is not ‘capitalism’ but the ‘human’, the ‘bourgeois’ or any form of ‘identity’. As Land writes, ‘Politics is the archaic and inadequate name for something that must pass away into the religious history of capital. There are no effective anticapitalist interests, but only anti-bourgeois desires in alliance with zero …’11 Land’s focus of contempt upon the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘human’ thus situates his reading of Bataille within the intellectual space Goux examined of complicity with postmodern capitalism as an ‘antibourgeois’ form of excess. Land’s reading evacuates any semblance of anthropocentrism from Bataille, but this is developed in such a manner that flattens out the tensions between the human and the worldly indicative of the highly anti-political trajectory Land’s later work would take. In Land’s conception of Bataillian expenditure, for example, excess is valorized as something in simplistic opposition to the human, exacerbating the desire for the erasure of the human in his text: Cowering in the shadow of its gods, humanity is the project of a definitive abrogation of expenditure, and is thus an impossibility. Despite the fortifications of prohibition, the impossible corrodes humanity in eroticism; the eruption of irreducible excess, which is the base unity of sexuality and death. Eroticism gnaws us as the inevitable triumph of evil (utter loss).12

Humanity is defined as that which hinders expenditure and impossible excess, which, Land implies here, can only be accessed on the ‘outside’ or the ‘beyond’ of the human. Humanity must simply be corroded or annihilated to give access to ‘irreducible excess’, ‘the base unity of sexuality and death’. In contrast to Land, when Bataille writes about excess, it often sustains a sense of tension in the relationship between the human and the worldly. Land’s ‘base unity’ of



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irreducible excess and human dissolution is a simplistic erasure of the tensions and the sense of the ‘impossible’ which Bataille often sustains: God is the mind of a man envisioned in the excess which annihilates him. But excess itself is a given of the mind of man. This given is conceived by this mind, it is conceived in its limits. Would the sum of the pains withheld by the human body exceed the excess that the mind conceives? I believe so. In theory, the mind conceives unlimited excess. But how so? I remind it of an excess that it is not quite capable of conceiving13

Excess is both a given within humanity and potentially self-annihilating of humanity but the attainment of an unlimited excess is not quite conceivable. The tension in the above passage is partially based on a conceivable and inconceivable excess. It is not necessarily the case that the former simply dissolves into the latter. As with much of Bataille’s theory, forms of excess and the intensity derived from them are partially generated from, and dependent upon, irresolvable constraints. This is why, for example, one definition of the ‘accursed share’, in an unpublished fragment for the book, is given as an experience of ‘angoisse’. ‘Tous les hommes’, Bataille writes, ‘sont en quête d’un bien qui leur échappe […] De ce bien, il m’a semblé qu’une sorte d’angoisse nous séparait et je l’ai pour cette raison désigné sous le nom de part maudite.’14 The ‘angoisse’, Bataille explains, is the conflicted feeling we feel when confronted by continued desire for the impossible amidst a consciousness of its ultimate unattainability. In Land’s work, that anguish is often too simply jettisoned along with any sustained sensitivity to constraints and limits. This can further be illuminated by the relationship between community and death that Land develops from Bataille: Tragic community is not the affirmation of a collective identity, but rather the dissolution of all identifiable traits in a circumscribable movement of catastrophe and festival; catastrophe of the individuated self, festival of anonymous flow. Sacred communion (as opposed to mere empirical aggregation) cannot be politically restricted, since it does not proceed by means of a controllable process of assemblage, but by the blinding subsidence of autonomy.15

With reference to Nietzsche in this section, Land is also channelling the Bataille of Acéphale where the Dionysian and the sacrificial held especially prominent places in his thought. Land highlights the importance of inner violence for Bataille’s conception of community. Community must in some sense be developed on the basis of its absence or ultimate impossibility, since any assertion of community as a closed affirmative identity runs the

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risk of resulting in fascism. However, Land’s vocabulary in the above passage suggests major theoretical problems. Where tragic community is sometimes theorized as the impossible or as the absence of community, for Land it is the ‘dissolution’ of human identity and autonomous ‘sacred communion’. Land’s ‘libidinal materialism’ is developed as a virulent negation of the ‘identitarian monotheism’16 of Christianity: ‘Zero is immense.’ Zero is prioritized as a field of primary processes that resists representation. It negates both the identitarian monism of the One and necessity of representation and dialectical critique implied in the figure of the Two. However, its synthesis with primary processes gives rise to a philosophical monism of its own. The reference to ‘communion’ for example implies, by its very etymology, a fusion within one body. Even if that fusion is with an anti-humanist abyss, it still entails a monism that renounces a sense of dissonance with the world or with the given state of things. The human becomes the ultimate target of negation rather than the existing state of things. Commenting upon the relationship between laughter and death suggested by Bataille’s poem ‘Rire’, Land again uses a monistic vocabulary when he says laughter is a ‘communion with’ death: ‘it is death itself that finds a voice when we laugh’. Against this reading of Bataille that valorizes a ‘communion with’ death I wish to highlight an alternative reading of Bataille that stresses the ultimate impossibility of communion with death. Laughter and communication could be considered on alternative terms as an exposure to death rather than a fusion within. This follows the relationship to death developed by Jean-Luc Nancy, which is not the ‘death that plunges into a pure abyss: it is death as sharing and exposure’.17 These alternative trajectories of reading Bataille, between Dionysian self-dissolution on the one hand, and the suspense of an impossible antagonism on the other, are sometimes present in the same text. However there is an historic shift away from the former to the latter where much of Bataille’s later work is an implicit self-critique of the valorization of sacrifice and death exemplified by the Acéphale period. As Milo Sweedler notes, Bataille ‘rethinks communication and death, associated with Laure, in terms of the incommunicable and the impossibility of dying, associated with Blanchot’.18 In other words, in some respects Bataille becomes a more cautious, tempered thinker, a trajectory that does not match Nick Land’s increasing acceleration. One of the most explicit examples of an accelerationist vocabulary in Bataille’s writing offers the opportunity to further highlight the overall points of tension and incompatibility between Bataille and Landian accelerationism. Writing about Roger Caillois’s work on the sacred in the 1951 article ‘War and



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the Philosophy of the Sacred’, Bataille notes with frustration that Caillois’s more recent position ceaselessly alternates in its turn, between acceleration and putting on the brake: he has never found the straight and wide road in front of him which would have allowed him to yield to the temptation to speed, If that has any value as a critique, it is perhaps only in a general sense. It is time to confess that the nostalgia for the sacred necessarily can end in nothing, that it leads astray: what the contemporary world lacks is the offer of temptations.19

Bataille’s argument is that the absence of the sacred from the contemporary world should not lead to a nostalgia or backward desire for the pre-modern, but rather should lead us to try and locate forms of the sacred emerging from an alternative conception of modernity. However, despite his advocacy of certain contemporary ‘temptations’, Bataille’s own conclusions about the sacred lead him to hesitate and alternate between opposing positions. Even though he appears to criticize Caillois for the same point, Bataille himself often alternates ‘between acceleration and putting on the brake’. This is exemplified by his considerations on the sacred and the political in both this article and throughout The Accursed Share. Rather than any advocacy of ‘return’ to pre-modern forms of the sacred, Bataille’s argument in this article is that potential forms of the sacred must be located within the modern. However a problem emerges when he acknowledges that one of the few unique and intense experiences of the sacred found within modernity is that of war. This leads him to a problematic conclusion in the article: ‘Without the sacred, the totality of the plenitude of being escapes man; he would no longer be anything but incomplete. But the sacred, if it takes the form of war, threatens him with complete extinction.’20 This problematic is one that informs Bataille’s thought throughout The Accursed Share. He does not resign himself to a destructive fatalism that concedes the sacred to war, but seeks to find political solutions based on preventing war and limiting destruction. In this sense, considering the theoretical violence and excess informing the book, the political conclusions he reaches are relatively tempered and restrained. Even if war is the experience that offers most intense access to the sacred in the contemporary world, it must nevertheless be avoided at all costs, and the political prescriptions of The Accursed Share are based around this concept of a tense and fragile but ‘dynamic’ peace. In the concluding section of the book, Bataille admits the instrumental role war has had in the development of societies, but goes on to write that:

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Nevertheless, it is hard to see what a third war would bring us, other than the irremediable reduction of the globe to the condition of Germany in 1945. Henceforth we need to think in terms of a peaceful evolution without which the destruction of capitalism would be at the same time the destruction of the works of capitalism, the cessation of economic development, and the dissipation of the socialist dream. We must now expect from the threat of war that which yesterday it would have been callous but correct to expect from war.21

This passage combines an accelerationist vision of the future with a more tempered and cautious political prescription. The desire to not simply destroy but appropriate and repurpose ‘the works of capitalism’ is not accompanied by the hyperbolic speed through modernity found in Landian accelerationist discourse. Bataille says that war cannot be the only outlet for an ‘excess of forces’,22 but that an alternative outlet for that excess must be found through the route of a ‘dynamic peace’. In this sense, it is not so much that he is alternating between ‘acceleration and putting on the break’. Rather, this concluding section to The Accursed Share suggests that his own analogy, as used to criticize Caillois, is logically incoherent in political terms because the implication here is that intensity and dynamism can arise from the fragility of an apparently static deadlock. The intensity and desire for change associated with speed-rush can actually be found in apparently static conditions. As he writes, ‘Only a dynamic peace answers a crying need for change.’23 Here Bataille decouples a futurist orientation from accelerationist speed or destruction. These sorts of relatively tempered conclusions are what render Bataille increasingly irrelevant for Landian accelerationism. An advocacy of ‘dynamic peace’ is developed by Bataille in response to the threat of humankind’s ‘complete extinction’. In this regard it might be argued that Land’s increasing theoretical distance from Bataille after his first book is fuelled by reasons similar to the critical point Bataille himself raised towards Caillois, that he does not fully succumb to the ‘temptation to speed’. Where Bataille’s political conclusions are partially based around an attempt to prevent human extinction, Land’s anti-political conclusions move in the opposite direction, embracing human extinction in the face of techno-capital singularity. Bataille’s concern for geopolitical planning in his advocacy of the Marshall Plan, and his fear of extinction, would be seen from Land’s perspective as a moralizing retreat from the ‘ruthless fatalism’ he considers a marker of philosophical taste.24 For Land, the concept of  ‘dynamic peace’ is a feeble idealistic attempt to delay the inevitable. He makes brief note of his distaste for this trajectory of Bataille’s thought when he writes that:



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The chronological tendency of Bataille’s writings is one of demilitarization, with the ardour for insurrectionary war that typifies his early polemics being rapidly phased out of his text from the early 1940s onwards […] The sacrificial exigency becomes increasingly interpreted as one of forestalling war [VII 31–3], slipping precariously towards the abject status of a means to the preservation of peace.25

Furthermore, this trajectory of Bataille’s thought is even more problematic from Land’s perspective given that that practical example of a ‘dynamic peace’, the Marshall Plan, is a partially state-managed solution, completely unpalatable to Land’s insistent anti-statism. For Land, the state hinders capitalism’s development. Were it left to its own devices, all-encompassing capitalist competition would lead to its selfdestruction, opening up space for an inhuman future. Here in Thirst Land identifies what he sees as some of the major ‘state-capital’ problems of Marxian theory. These are not developed very clearly but give us an indication of Land’s early accelerationism: There has always been a bureaucratic-cooperative element of political intervention in the development of bourgeois economies, restraining the more nihilistic potentialities of competition. The individualization of capital blocks that Marx thought would lead to a war of mutual annihilation has been replaced by systematic state-supported cartelling, completely distorting price structures in all industrial economies.26

The other problem with Marxian theory that Land mentions is ‘bureaucratic socialism’ or ‘red totalitarianism’. In the end he writes that both sets of problems ‘are irrelevant to the Marxism of Bataille, because they stem, respectively, from theoretical and practical economism’.27 However, these problems, leaving aside their questionable validity as genuine problems of Marxian theory rather than strawman caricatures, are not as Land claims irrelevant. They are integral to the more tempered political prescriptions described in The Accursed Share. The claim being made by Land in the above passage is that were capitalism allowed to flourish by itself it might lead us into interesting territory but that the state is the problem hindering acceleration. This is developed in other essays throughout the 1990s where Land argued for harnessing the destructive and deteritorializing aspects of capitalism. In the article ‘Making it with Death’, for example, the development of a ‘schizopolitics’ is described in both ‘coercive’ and ‘immanent’ terms. ‘Schizo-politics is the coercion of capital into immanent coexistence with its undoing.’28 This means abandoning any attachment to sensitivity to any remnants of the human or the state. Elaborating this point

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in schizoanalytical terms, he writes: ‘Always decode, chatters schizoanalysis; believe nothing, and extinguish all nostalgia for belonging. Ask always where capital is most inhumane, unsentimental, and out of control. Abandon all attachment to the state.’29 Land advocates an abandonment to the inevitability of an inhuman(e) future. He insists on stripping away any attachment to the state and aligning oneself with the most destructive facets of capitalism. In sharp contrast, in the last chapter of The Accursed Share Bataille advocates forms of centralized planning for the future and has no problem retaining an anthropocentric and ethical geopolitical analysis. This is another principal reason why the Bataille of The Accursed Share seems so incompatible with Landian accelerationism, with its antipathy to planning. This position is based on an equation of capitalism with exuberance and futurity that, in Land’s account, no form of centralized planning can provide. If we analyse this trajectory of Land’s thought a little further in the wider context of 1990s accelerationism, we can show how the advocacy of excess against any form of planning is both outmoded and ideologically incoherent, before extending our comparison of Bataille to contemporary ‘left’ accelerationism. Simon Reynolds’ article ‘Renegade Academia’ (1999) offers a useful insight into nineties accelerationism, as exemplified by the Cybenetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). The CCRU was a research group initially affiliated to the philosophy department at Warwick University under Sadie Plant and then Nick Land. Reynolds’ article emphasizes the anti-academic provocations of the unit and in particular their affinities to the DIY values of rave and darkside jungle music cultures. The unit’s acceptance and essential advocacy of an increasingly rightward and anti-socialist conception of DIY culture is particularly interesting. Reynolds notes how Land and Plant embrace ‘the tendency of market forces to generate disorder and destabilise control structures’. The discussion with Plant highlights the extent of the CCRU’s concession to much of the capitalist ideology of their moment: In the mid-Eighties, for instance, she supported the Coal Miners’ strike, a revolt against Thatcherite modernising policies and an attempt to preserve a traditional working class culture. Since then, she has come to believe that the privatisation and anti-welfare policies pursued by the Conservative government in the 1980s really did constitute ‘a revolution’. She talks approvingly of the end of ‘the dependency culture’, arguing that this helped catalyse the Nineties upsurge of British pop culture, fashion and art. ‘Obviously it is painful for any particular community that ends up on the scrapheap of history,’ Plant says, looking appropriately pained. ‘But I’ve got a



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far more evolutionary view of history these days. Just as particular species or ecosystems flourish and die, so do human cultures.’30

This passage makes the ideological positioning of the CCRU quite explicit. The rise of rave culture and DIY underground movements in the wake of Thatcherite policies suggests capitalism exerts a libidinal allure and futuristic excitement lacking in what she negatively refers to as the ‘dependency culture’ of the socialist welfare state. For the CCRU, socialism is boring. We could say that Land’s gradual turn from Bataille is premised on similar terms: like socialism, Bataille is boring in the contemporary context. He is no longer seen as offering a trajectory towards ‘the Outside’. I am not suggesting that Bataille is more socialist than previously thought, merely that, from Land’s perspective, Bataille recodes desire within determinate limits, like the socialist state, hindering access to capitalist excess. This turn in perception is most evident in Land’s ‘No Future’ (1995), a theory-fiction that makes a number of enigmatic references to Bataille that seem to suggest the limitations of his work for Land’s project: When you ask Continuity whether Bataille understood the capital-antichrist conjunction any better than Weber she laughs coldly, and says: ‘he ran out o’ yang, just about the time the Hitler-trip caved in. Orgasm is impossible after Aushwitz.’ You look perplexed. She merely adds a dismissive shrug, and the suggestion: ‘defocus desire across the skin, where it can hurt security. It’s war.’31

The description of running ‘out o’yang’ is a reference to Bataille’s ‘demilitarized’ trajectory discussed above, occupying more tempered political positions in his post-war writing. The character’s suggestion to ‘defocus desire across the skin’ with its explicit reference to Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy offers a break with the libidinal economy of taboo and transgression associated with Bataille to an economy of defocalized desire associated with Lyotard but also Deleuze and Guattari. The suggestion to ‘defocus’ points towards conceiving desire on durational terms as opposed to a repetitive cycle of diminishing returns and subsequent burnout often associated with Bataillean transgression. Land’s increasing distance from Bataille here becomes clearer in political terms in the following passage where he further develops a libertarian anti-statist and antihumanist political perspective: Acephalization = schizophrenia: cutting up capital by way of bottom-up macrobacterial telecommerce, inducing corporate disintegration. The doomed part of intensively virtualized techonomic apparatuses subverts the fraying residues of anthropomorphic guidance. Control dissolves into the impossible.32

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Socialism is boring because it is identified with a centralized command structure while the deterritorializing aspects of capitalism are celebrated because they are acephalic, ‘bottom-up’ processes that can subvert control, centralized power and formal organization. As Land puts it, ‘organization is suppression.’33 This belief in horizontal, anarchic platforms as short-circuiting power reflects the ideology of its moment, exemplified by Wired magazine, in which the internet was hymned as inherently democratizing and subversive. Instead, we have seen how the internet has been controlled by monopolies and intricately monitored by state security. On the socio-cultural level, however, the CCRU’s use of rave culture and DIY values to suggest that libertarian capitalism offers access to cultural innovation that socialism cannot offer is an even more outdated ideological perspective. Indeed, one former CCRU member, Mark Fisher, has argued from almost the opposite perspective, namely that many of the most innovative cultural moments in British popular modernism, from post-punk to dance music, could not have emerged without the minimum basic security offered by what Plant derogatorily referred to as ‘dependency culture’.34 For Fisher and for the theorists of ‘left-accelerationism’, it is neoliberal capitalism that is boring. As Williams and Srnicek argue in their manifesto, all contemporary capitalism seems to offer is ‘marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.’35 Williams and Srnicek regularly refer to Land’s writing, which has had a discernible influence on their work. However, they seek to break with Land’s anti-political perspective in their critique of neoliberal capitalism and advocacy of centralized socialist planning. Indeed, in contrast to Land’s febrile prose and hyperbolic dystopian theoryfictions, Williams and Srnicek’s accelerationism is a lot more ‘sober’, often verging on the technocratic. The contrast between these two versions of accelerationism is usefully illustrated by two articles on the theme of ‘casino capitalism’ in a 2014 issue of the philosophical journal Collapse. In the article ‘Transcendental Risk’, Land says that ‘casino capitalism’ is not always simply tantamount to capitalism, unless, however, this proposition is ‘elaborated to the point where the casino has become the stake. Only then does risk become “existential”, absolute, or transcendental, fully subsuming the gambler into the game, and the game into itself.’36 Land thus goes on to make clear that for him ‘Whether approached as a generic arrangement, or as a singular event, capitalism is also identifiable through its intimate involvement with risk.’37 Capitalism is identified with risk and granted an unchallenged position as a libidinal motor of history and



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generator of the new. In the same volume, Williams and Srnicek challenge this position with an article entitled ‘Cunning Automata’. They argue that image of ‘casino capitalism’ occludes the centrality of the political in contemporary financial capitalism. Drawing on various sociologists of finance, they claim that: the slippery reflexivity of financial models, the lawless shadow banking system of OTC derivatives, and the ruthless market manipulation of leading investment banks all engender a system far more corrupt and non-transparent than even the most stacked of Vegas poker tables. Moreover, this gambling metaphor also entirely conceals the significant technical innovations generated by the financial sector in the last decade.38

The image of ‘casino capitalism’ is thus both depoliticizing and misleading: the depiction of entrepreneurial capitalism as a risk or gamble occludes the hidden forms of political and technical planning. ‘Free’ markets are rarely free but entail highly politicized construction and manipulation of markets. This is the lie neoliberalism sold, marketing itself as a form of libertarianism but actually using the state in expanding forms of governing rationality to subject more and more domains of social life to economic metrics. Landian accelerationism accepts much of the mythology. It overlooks the persistent forms of governing rationality within neoliberalism and argues that capitalism unleashes disruptive and exciting forces it cannot control.39 Instead, however, far from offering us exciting risks or operating on logics of excess, Williams and Srnicek suggest that contemporary capitalism still operates on the basis of a ‘miserly rationalism’ that fails to generate anything truly aleatory or futuristic. It is noteworthy here that Fredric Jameson’s description of the paradigmatic exemplar of contemporary capitalism in the form of Walmart follows a similarly quasi-Weberian ethic of miserly rationalism to that diagnosed by Williams and Srnicek: What has to be observed here is that Wal-Mart is also driven by moral incentives: the secret of its success is not profit but pricing, the shaving off of the final pennies, so fatal to any number of its suppliers. ‘Sam valued every penny’, observes one of the founder’s colleagues (WME, 30), and it is a fateful sentence: for this imperative – ‘Always Low Prices’ – is in fact driven by the most fundamental motive of all, the one Max Weber described as the ‘Protestant ethic’, a return to that thrift and obsessive frugality which characterized the first great moment of the system and which is recaptured (with or without its religious component) in the hagiography of Sam Walton and the heroic saga of his company.40

Following Jameson’s description here, left-accelerationist theorists like Williams and Srnicek suggest that capitalism does not operate on a logic of excess but is

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often primarily based upon boring but cold and ruthless forms of rationality and miserliness. In this sense we can return to the question of Bataille’s apparent consonance with contemporary capitalism first outlined by Goux, as discussed earlier. Just as ‘casino capitalism’ is a misleading occlusion of the political in our contemporary context, the characterization of postmodern capitalism as being founded on ‘excess’ sometimes runs the risk of taking the aesthetics and ideology of postmodern capitalism at face value and might again occlude instrumental forms of governing rationality. Goux’s analysis stems from an engagement with the Reaganite economist George Gilder, whose analyses of capitalism situate him, curiously, on the same terrain as Bataille, if only to arrive at opposite conclusions. Goux describes Gilder’s praise of the exuberance and irrationality of contemporary capitalism: While a certain philosophical left, since Lukac, Horkheimer or Adorno, and in the wake of Weber – or a certain philosophical right with Heidegger – is bent on denouncing calculating reasons as a dominant and alienating form of thought, inherent to capitalism (whose market, exchange side obscures its entrepreneurial side), a displacement is occurring (which is not entirely new since ‘capitalist anarchy’ was denounced a long time ago) of which Gilder’s book is a frank and unnuanced expression. Capitalism is irrational (in the last analysis it can rely only on a theology of chance – ultimately opening to the divine, to creativity and to the future) and this is why it is superior to all rationalist (hence socialist) pretentions to master the process of production and consumption. Is this not in 1981 the formulation of the postmodern legitimation of capitalism? Irrationality is no longer a denunciation but a justification, a defense.41

Goux further explains that the capitalist cannot count on a calculable return on investment. ‘He agrees to spend money and spend himself in a project that is always aleatory.’42 The capitalist is thus described as a ‘gambler’ in terms that resonate with Land’s account of ‘transcendental risk’. Similarly, the equation of capitalism with the irrational and exuberant, and of socialism with the rational and restrained, reflects the ideological problems of the CCRU discussed above in granting capitalism an unwarranted status as primary generator of the new. Returning to The Accursed Share, we can see that Bataille often problematizes any neat dichotomy between rationality and irrationality and that his politics are not as celebratory of excess as is often perceived or implied by Land’s writing. Both Goux’s article and Noys’ treatment of Bataille in Malign Velocities offer some of the most important and incisive critical analysis of reading Bataille in a more contemporary context. However, Goux’s identification of ‘general economy’ with postmodern capitalism potentially concedes



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too much ground to the aesthetics of ‘excess’ sold by neoliberal capitalism, which is often colder and more ruthlessly rational than this ideological image suggests. It can also lead us on to a potentially one-sided consideration of the politics of The Accursed Share. As Jean-Luc Nancy has noted, ‘There is no doubt that some have hammed it up compared with what were, in spite of everything, Bataille’s restraint and sobriety.’43 Thus, rather than excess being posited as a desired condition external to restraint, it is worth remembering that excess is often depicted as immanent to restraint. Bataille makes this point in a revealing set of endnotes not included with the English translation of The Accursed Share. He goes on to write: ‘Le capitalisme est contre la contrainte parce que la contrainte mène à l’excès[.] Qu’est la contrainte sinon l’expression de la volonté?’44 Capitalism is then described as apathetic with no subsequent explanation, but we can surmise that the point being made is that capitalist society lacks the tensions and senses of ‘contrainte’, which, he writes, leads to excess. We can refine this account of excess here by first reiterating some of the basic points of The Accursed Share. ‘Excess’ is not something that is voluntarily willed into existence. For Bataille, excess energy is a primary principle of all organisms. The sum of energy produced by individual organisms and societies is always surplus to productive requirements. The Accursed Share argues for a reordering of social life by firstly demanding we recognize this fact. If we ignore this surplus energy or waste, we risk running into ‘catastrophic destructions’. Furthermore, ‘if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion’.45 This is not an argument for excess, but an argument to recognize that excess already exists whether we want it or not, and that if we do not adequately deal with excess forces we face the catastrophes of war and social self-destruction. This is why Bataille defines capitalism as both apathy and crisis. If a system can no longer grow then its excess energy (wealth) can no longer be fully absorbed – it must necessarily be lost without profit: ‘it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’.46 An apathetic attitude or failure to consider how to deal with that excess energy will result in catastrophe, according to Bataille. Excess is thus not posited as something external to rationality. It is immanent and has a rationality of its own. In this respect Bataille’s work does not constitute a celebration of the irrational or an argument for irrationalism. As Patrick ffrench has argued with regard to his texts from the early 1930s, ‘His theory of the sacred is a science of the heterogeneous, a supra-rational critique of rationality.’47 Thus the primary critiques levelled at Bataille by Sartre and Breton, that

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he ends up rationalizing experiences of the irrational, are actually principal strengths and points of interest throughout his work. Bataille is clearly scornful of the instrumentalization of reason and rationality, or of anything resembling a philosophy centred upon rationalism. But the political conclusions he gestures towards throughout The Accursed Share are conceived as the result of a rational thought. In Volume III, Sovereignty, he returns to the issue of a ‘dynamic peace’ in the following terms: ‘The problem I speak of – exhausting the surplus without war – is that of a world of production that would escape the control of subjectivity. We must seek subjectivity through rational means, as against the subjective means of the pursuit of rank and of war.’48 Geopolitical forms of non-productive expenditure are described as the ‘rational’ alternatives to a world of permanent crisis and war. The descriptions of  ‘dynamic peace’ also more broadly parallel the concept, found throughout Bataille’s work, of anguish and theoretical deadlocks as paradoxically precipitating moments of breakthrough. As he notes in ‘Politique’, ‘Il est un paradoxe étrange: si l’on aperçoit la profonde absence d’issue, la profonde absence de but et de sens, alors – mais alors seulement – l’esprit libéré, nous abordons pratiquement, lucidement, les problèmes pratiques.’49 To return to the relationship with contemporary accelerationism, then, where Land seeks to destroy constraints and limits, Bataille tarries with them, seeing them as both paradoxical generators of new liberties and necessary contradictions to be negotiated. In other words, Landian accelerationism accelerates through, and breaks with, constraints while Bataille more often amplifies the tension generated by such constraints. As noted above, he saw change arising from the apparent deadlock of a geopolitical ‘dynamic peace’. In some respects, then, the politics of The Accursed Share seem to have more in common not with Land but with contemporary ‘left’ accelerationism in the sensitivity to rationality, the taste for planning, and a more tempered and surprisingly sober approach to the political. In an attempt to mark a clear delineation between Land’s work and their own, Williams and Srnicek posit two regimes of acceleration: the dromological and the universal. The dromological, which they identify with Landian accelerationism, is described as a ‘brainless’ increase in speed. Williams and Srnicek seek to develop another ‘universal’ regime of acceleration: We here distinguish between a mere increase in speed within a localised horizon (dromological acceleration = increasing intensification of the value form of late capitalism) and a mode which goes beyond brainless speed to navigate within a larger, global space of possibilities (universal acceleration).50



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One of the key distinctions they make here is that the former accelerationist tendency is ‘brainless’ while the new perspective is ‘rational’. This opposition ultimately pivots between a form of acceleration which overlooks limitations (brainless = irrational) and the exploration of acceleration through redefining and using determinate limits (rational). It is suggested that rationality entails a greater sensitivity to how limits and rules are used. This follows the basic point made by Ray Brassier from his essay in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader in which he argues that ‘rationality is simply the faculty of generating and being bound by rules’.51 The use of limits and attempt to formalize a rational perspective in ‘left’ accelerationism thus suggests points of comparison with the more sober and rational aspects of The Accursed Share, which I have attempted to highlight. Despite the vast differences, Bataille and left-accelerationists coincide on the basic point that rational restrictions are both useful and necessary in certain respects. The irony of this however is that the ‘rational’ turn in accelerationist thought was largely based around a further rejection of Bataille from the accelerationist narrative. In the latter days of the CCRU, under a collective blog entitled Hyperstition, a number of 2004 blog posts by Mark Fisher, blogging as ‘mark k-p’, offered a very loose theorization of what he referred to as ‘cold rationality’, which we could read as an early and germinal tendency towards the ‘left’ accelerationism developed by Williams and Srnicek. In ‘Surfascism’ and ‘Cold Rationality’, Fisher reviews a public lecture by Carlo Ginzburg on the subject of the College of Sociology and gives a one-sided and somewhat misleading portrait of Bataille as celebrant of the irrational. He calls for a break with the Dionysian excess associated with Bataille, much of whose ‘flight from reason’ bears uncomfortable parallels to fascism.52 However, Fisher’s account of Dionysian excess and the outmoded romantic notion of the ‘glorious annihilation of the self ’53 has much more in common with Land’s reading than with the reading of Bataille I have been outlining. As I have attempted to show in this essay, Bataille’s work offers a more ambivalent and restrained approach to the politics of excess than is often claimed, an ambivalence that might generate more constructive points of dialogue with contemporary accelerationism. Against the gradual rejection of Bataille from the accelerationist narrative, we should reconsider Bataille’s work on terms which decouple his more ‘sober’ political inisghts from Land’s intoxicating but essentially depoliticizing Thirst for Annihilation. To counter Goux’s argument that his work has been ‘outpaced’ by contemporary capitalism, it should be noted that the inherent tensions and contradictions of the theory of ‘general economy’ retain a sense

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of dissonance with any epoch. Due to his impact on the major theorists of post-structuralism, it was often noted that Bataille was ‘ahead of his time’. Goux turns that into a negative proposition such that Bataille’s ‘time’ arrives in the dystopic form of postmodern capitalism. However either proposition potentially reduces intellectual history to a race-track and smoothens out the bicephalic and anguished tensions internal to Bataille’s text. As Derrida noted, ‘Bataille’s a-theology is also an an-eschatology’.54 Challenging points of dissonance and antagonism remain to be rediscovered because the inner conflict of his work potentially renders it out of joint with any cultural moment. Against the aesthetics of excess sold by both postmodern capitalism and Landian accelerationism, this essay has attempted to point towards points of critical dissonance and jarring sobriety in Bataille’s work from which to reconsider The Accursed Share today.

Notes Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 170. 2 Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 5. 3 Nick Land, Fanged Noumena. Falmouth and New York: Ubranomic and Sequence Press, 2011, 441. 4 Ibid., 443. 5 As well as Land’s texts, see, for example, Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2000 and Steven Shaviro, Passion and Excess: Bataille, Blanchot and Literary Theory. Florida: University Press of Florida, 1990. 6 Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities. Winchester: Zero, 2014, 76. 7 Steven Shaviro, ‘Accelerationist Aesthetics’. e-flux 46 (2013), http://www.e-flux. com/journal/accelerationist-aesthetics-necessary-inefficiency-in-times-of-realsubsumption/ (accessed 20 July 2015). 8 Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 210. 9 Ibid., 217. 10 Ibid. 11 Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 79. 12 Ibid., xii 1



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Georges Bataille, ‘Pure Happiness’, in The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 231. 14 ‘All men are in search of a good which escapes them […] Of this good, it seemed to me that a sort of anguish separates us and for this reason I designated it under the name of accursed share.’ OC VII, 471–72 (my translation). 15 Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 58–9. 16 Ibid., 17. 17 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 67. 18 Milo Sweedler, The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris and the Remains of Laure. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009, 168. 19 Georges Bataille, ‘War and the Philosophy of the Sacred’, in The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. Michael Richardson. London and New York: Verso, 2006, 120. 20 Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 22. 21 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 186. 22 Ibid., 187. 23 Ibid., 188. 24 Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, xiii. 25 Ibid., 107. 26 Ibid., 38. 27 Ibid. 28 Land, ‘Making it With Death’, in Fanged Noumena, 278. 29 Ibid., 264. 30 Simon Reynolds, ‘Renegade Academia: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’. Energy Flash, 3 November 2009, http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot. fr/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html (accessed 1 September 2015). 31 Land, ‘No Future’, in Fanged Noumena, 396. 32 Ibid., 397. 33 ‘Organization is Suppression: An Interview with Nick Land’. Wired UK, 1997, https://oldearthisdying.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/organization-is-suppressionan-interview-with-nick-land-wired-uk-1997/ (accessed 1 September 2015). 34 See Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester and Washington: Zero, 2014. 35 Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’, in Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (eds), #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014, 355. 13

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Nick Land, ‘Transcendental Risk’. Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development VIII (2014): 362. 37 Ibid., 366. 38 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, ‘On Cunning Automata’. Collapse VIII (2014): 464–65. 39 For a further critique of Landian accelerationism’s adherence to neoliberal logic, see Benjamin Noys, ‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism’, in Joshua Johnson (ed.), Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside. Hong Kong: [NAME] Publications, 2013, as well as Noy’s previously mentioned Malign Velocities. 40 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic. London and New York: Verso, 2010, 424. 41 Goux, ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’, 213. 42 Ibid., 215. 43 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Exscription’. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 60. 44 ‘Capitalism is against constraint because constraint leads to excess. What is constraint if not the expression of the will?’ OC VII, 577 (my translation). 45 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 24. 46 Ibid., 21. 47 Patrick ffrench, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community. London: Legenda, 2007, 29. 48 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1993, 428. 49 ‘It is a strange paradox: if one perceives the profound lack of a way out, the profound absence of an end and of meaning, then – but only then – can one actually, with a liberated spirit, lucidly tackle practical problems.’ OC VI, 251. 50 Srnicek and Williams, ‘Cunning Automata’, 489. 51 Ray Brassier, ‘Promeathaism and its Critics’, in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014, 485. 52 Mark-k-p, ‘Surfascism’. Hyperstition, 10 December 2004, http://hyperstition. abstractdynamics.org/archives/004528.html (accessed 15 August 2015). 53 Mark-k-p, ‘Blissblog, Surfascism and Cold Rationalism’. Hyperstition, 13 December 2004, http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004552.html (accessed 15 August 2015). 54 Jacques Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, 343. 36



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Bibliography Bataille, Georges. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 6. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Bataille, Georges. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 7. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1993. Bataille, Georges. The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. Michael Richardson. London and New York: Verso, 2006. Brassier, Ray. ‘Promeathaism and its Critics’, in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014, 467–88. Derrida, Jacques. ‘From Restricted to General Economy’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, 317–50. ffrench, Patrick. After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community. London: Legenda, 2007. Goux, Jean-Joseph. ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 206–24. Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. London and New York: Verso, 2010. Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic and Sequence Press, 2011. Land, Nick. ‘Transcendental Risk’. Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development VIII (2014): 361–84. Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘Exscription’. Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 47–65. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Noys, Benjamin. The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Noys, Benjamin. ‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism’, in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside, ed. Joshua Johnson. Hong Kong: [NAME] Publications, 2013, 36–54. Noys, Benjamin. Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Winchester: Zero, 2014. Reynolds, Simon. ‘Renegade Academia: The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’ (director’s cut of unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, 1999). Energy Flash, 3 November 2009. Available online: http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot. fr/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html (accessed 1 September 2015).

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Shaviro, Steven. ‘Accelerationist Aesthetics’. e-flux 46 (2013). Available online: http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/accelerationist-aesthetics-necessary-inefficiency-in-timesof-real-subsumption/ (accessed 20 July 2015). Shaviro, Steven. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Sweedler, Milo. The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris and the Remains of Laure. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009. Williams, Alex and Nick Srnicek, ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’. in #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014, 347–62. Williams, Alex and Srnicek, Nick. ‘On Cunning Automata’. Collapse VIII (2014): 463–506.

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Bataille and the Neanderthal Extinction Howard Caygill

The Accursed Share extends a fascination with paleo-anthropology already evident in Bataille’s work from the early 1930s and intensified by his book and series of articles and lectures prompted by the discovery of the cave paintings of Lascaux in 1940.1 The conjuncture of an interest in the discipline dedicated to studying the origins of the human species and the discovery of cave art led Bataille to his central paleo-anthropological but also philosophical hypothesis that the phase of human development achieved by ‘Lascaux Man’ was inaugurated by the invention of art. He saw the violent bid for transcendence expressed in the majestic images of hunted animals as an act of human self-definition against animality, but also, we shall see, from other humanities. His reflections upon ‘animality’ often explicitly refer to the uncanny human-animals encountered by Homo sapiens on their migration into northern Eurasia. Perhaps this is the reason why his paleo-anthropological meditations return insistently to a link between the emergence of the kind of human capable of producing art and the extinction of ‘prior’ ‘Neanderthal’ humanity. The remorseless haunting of his paleo-anthropological and philosophical texts by the Neanderthals points to unanswered even unasked questions concerning the relationship between the emergence of a single humanity and the Neanderthal extinction. Bataille’s hypothesis assumes the chronological coincidence between the arrival of Homo sapiens, the departure of Homo neanderthalensis and the beginnings of art. While the fossil record broadly supports the first coincidence, with the arrival of Homo sapiens coinciding with the Neanderthal extinction, the second coincidence is not quite as certain. The surviving examples of cave art, including Lascaux, point to them being made between 15,000 and 20,000 years after the Neanderthal extinction, making the artists of Lascaux closer to us than they were to that event. The sculptures of female figures Bataille discusses alongside the cave paintings are admittedly older, ranging back as far as 35,000

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years, which is to say 4,000 years after the extinction. Bataille’s exemplary female sculpture – the Venus of Willensdorf – dates back 28,000 years, which locates it 10,000 years after the extinction.2 This dating was not known to Bataille, who believed that a date of 40,000 years for the birth of art was ‘unquestionable’.3 It is on the contrary very questionable, although most recent debate is moving back to proposing far older dates for some of the work consistent with Bataille’s hypothesis.4 However, my intention is not to refute his hypothesis by pointing to disputed chronology but to explore its conceptual limits by showing that, even assuming his chronology, Bataille’s response to the hypothesis is confined by the limits set by then prevailing paleo-anthropological knowledge.

The science of human origins By responding to the question ‘What is human?’ with an enquiry into the origins of humanity, paleo-anthropology emerged in the mid-nineteenth century under the dual auspices of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and the discovery of problematically ‘human’ fossilized remains in the Neander valley of the river Düssel slightly earlier in 1856. The new discipline confirmed and strengthened geology and paleontology’s earlier challenge to biblical chronology and the creation narrative with the proposition that humanity not only had a pre-history, but also, as Nietzsche quickly deduced, that this history was not yet finished. Any answer to the question ‘What is human’ had now to account not only for where humans came from and where they had arrived, but also where they were going. But the very possibility of the existence of paleo-anthropology had been bitterly disputed and most forcibly from within the emergent science of fossil life – paleontology – with Cuvier famously declaring ‘fossil humanity does not exist’ (‘l’homme fossile n’existe pas’). While there may have been myriad forms of life that emerged and sank back into the obscurity of the sedimentary strata, human life was considered qualitatively distinct from the fossil life studied by paleontology. Acknowledging the existence of human fossils required not only accepting that humans emerged from animal life but also that the species Homo sapiens had a beginning and, by inference, must also have an end. It was for these reasons that paleo-anthropology would prove such an important point of reference for Bataille’s thinking on the nature of the human and its (im)possibilities. His fascination was part of a broader philosophical interest in the question of the origins of the human shared by Blanchot and Leroi-Gourhan, among others, but it was an interest enabled but also restricted



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by the then state of paleo-anthropological knowledge. Less than a century old when Bataille and his contemporaries began to reflect on the significance of its findings, the attempt by the discipline of paleo-anthropology to establish the distinctive factors contributing to the emergence of contemporary humanity was ensnared by the assumptions of colonial anthropology. And, in spite of the peculiarly French inflection contributed by the pioneer Paul Broca and later Abbé Henri Breuil, such assumptions persisted until the late twentieth century. The spatial colonialism of comparative anthropology was played out in the temporal colonialism of paleo-anthropology. In the case of the latter it was manifest above all in the concern to distinguish Homo sapiens from another known form of fossil humanity – Homo neanderthalensis – and to justify the existence of an evolutionary and/or species distinction between the two humanities. The existence of a strong distinction between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis structures Bataille’s reflections on paleo-anthropology and is a condition of possibility for his thinking in The Accursed Share. It informs and disrupts his hypothetical distinction between restricted and general economy. Yet working with the paleo-anthropological distinction brought with it assumptions and blind-spots that would return to haunt Bataille’s broader enquiry. These converged on the problem of the causes of the Neanderthal extinction and its possible role in the formation of Homo sapiens. To appreciate how this problem played through in Bataille to emerge in suspicions of a paleo-genocide it is necessary to review the role played by Neanderthal humanity in the formation of the discipline of paleo-anthropology and the ways in which they became – and remain – problematic objects of knowledge. In August 1856 two quarry workers preparing the ground for the extraction of lime in a complex of caves overlooking the Düssel river came across some bones, which they unceremoniously threw on to the spoil heap.5 They were seen by the quarry owner, Wilhelm Beckershoff who – in the first of a line of misidentifications – suspected them to be the fossilized remains of cave-bears. Aware of the lively market for such fossils, he collected the sixteen fragments and invited the opinion of a local teacher and scientist, Johann Carl Fuhlrott. Fuhlrott immediately rejected the cave-bear hypothesis, but was perplexed by the morphology of the fossilized bones. They seemed human, but were thicker and stronger with the fragments of arm and leg bones slightly curved and the skull displaying an unfamiliar morphology. His perplexity was understandable. In the first place, contemporary paleontology held that human bones were not supposed to exist in a fossilized state, and, what is more, these human

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bones displayed peculiar deviations from the anatomical norm. Fuhlrott’s initial announcement of the find in the local newspaper subsequently carried in a Bonn regional newspaper cautiously referred to similarities with Native Americans – the uncovered bones ‘belonged to humans of the race (Geschlecht) of flat-heads who still live in the American West’.6 From being identified as cavebears, the bones moved into comparative anthropology as Native Americans, an identification that, even if quickly dropped, prepared the ground for investing the bones with fantasies of colonial and even genocidal violence.7 The transformation of the Neanderthal bones into objects of knowledge provides a case study in the generation of accredited knowledge in nineteenthcentury science, but also made them hostages to competing hypotheses, interests and broader cultural conflicts. Fuhlrott’s article was noted by an anatomy professor at Bonn, Hermann Schaafhausen, who had previously published an article arguing the case for the possibility of human fossils and saw the bones as confirmation of his thesis. With Fuhlrott, he toured the bones around various scientific societies, and in 1857 jointly published an article, ‘Human Remains from a Cave in the valley of the river Düssel’, in the ‘Proceedings of the Natural Historical Society of the Prussian Rheinland and Westphalia’ that set the bones in a number of contradictory contexts. From one perspective, calculated to placate religious critics, they were proposed as evidence for the existence of humanity before the Flood while from another more scientific but not yet Darwinian point of view they were said to have belonged to an ‘ur-typical individual of our race’ (Geschlecht).8 A visit by Charles Lyell, author of the prodigious Principles of Geology, to survey the scene of the discovery in 1860 and to take a cast of the enigmatic skull introduced the bones to Darwinian circles in Great Britain where they stepped forth yet again, this time in the guise of the long-sought evolutionary link between humans and apes. Darwin’s indefatigable public champion Thomas Huxley situated them in a series of evolutionary transitions from the skull of the ape to the human skull, predicting the discovery of more fossilized bones of even more or less humanized apes. At this point the bones were still known as the ‘Human Remains from a Cave in the Valley of the river Düssel’ and only in 1864 were they given a dubious honour of belonging to a distinct species – Homo neanderthalensis – by William King. The name has since entered into popular legend as designating the ‘Neanderthals’, but while identifying the bones as part of the human genus it left undecided whether the bones belonged to humans who once lived in the Neanderthal or whether they belonged to a distinct species of humanity. The question of whether they belonged to a distinct species remains disputed,



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perhaps surprisingly given the now-established biological definition of a species in terms of the possibility of its members successfully reproducing that we shall see in the case of Homo neanderthalis and Homo sapiens has now – but not in Bataille’s time – been proved incontrovertibly to have been the case.9 A series of further finds in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extended the fossil record of what became known as ‘Neanderthal man’ but in spite of the discovery of the larger brains possessed by Neanderthal humanity (1520 cm3 compared to Homo sapiens’ 1400 cm3) and evidence of developed sociality extending to care for the infirm and wounded, funerary practices ornamentation and (disputably) musical instruments, they were quickly identified as bestial, stupid and no match for the astute, better armed and colonizing Homo sapiens. Which is to say, they were cast not as another humanity, but as an evolutionary stage to be overcome, an alien species to be vanquished and their territory and possessions appropriated. In many respects, Neanderthal humanity was drawn into a European colonial narrative as a paleo-colonized population possessing the characteristics lent by contemporary colonial discourse to native peoples to justify their dispossession. Neanderthal humanity functioned as a cipher for contemporary colonized peoples and their apparent fate presaged that of the colonized. In short, Neanderthal humanity was drawn into an emergent racial discourse associated with colonialization and a vulgarization of Darwin regardless of the improbabilities and immense ironies attending such capture.10 Apart from the anatomical evidence of the remains themselves, the distribution of the fossil discoveries of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries allowed for a chronological and geographical description of Neanderthal humanity. Fossilized remains associated with Neanderthal humanity were found across Northern Europe, from Gibraltar11 and the south of Italy to France and Germany. Finds were also made in the Near East and as far north east as the Caucasians and Siberia. The finds dated from 200,000 to 39,000 years ago, when – with some disputed exceptions – they cease marking the disappearance of Neanderthal humanity. They are thus almost strictly contemporary with Homo sapiens, whose earliest fossil remains have been dated to 195,000 years ago in Ethiopia.12 The fossil record also attests to a spatial and temporal movement of Homo sapiens arriving in the Near East 55,000 and Southern Europe 45,000 years ago and entering Northern Europe soon thereafter. The arrival of Homo sapiens in the territory occupied by Homo neanderthalensis coincides with the near definitive disappearance of the latter from the fossil record 39,000 years ago. The stark coincidence generated (and continues to generate) speculation concerning the relationship between the arrival of Homo sapiens and the

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extinction of Neanderthal humanity. Until recently, this question obsessed paleo-anthropology and historically inspired some of Bataille’s darker thoughts about the formative past of humanity.

Bataille’s humanity Bataille’s distinction between general and restricted economy in The Accursed Share should not only be understood as the emancipatory ‘Copernican turn’ of political economy from scarcity towards the thinking of plethora, but also as the encrypted inscription of a potentially genocidal logic. It is one that he intuited and even begins to address explicitly in later work but nevertheless remains at play not only in his view of an excessive humanity but also in the basic conceptual architecture of the two economies. It is in this spirit that we should approach the ‘basic fact’ with which The Accursed Share opens: The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g. an organism): if the system no longer grows, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.13

The ‘basic fact’ establishes a scenario in which the globe is bathed in an energy whose excess over the needs of life drives an organism or system either to expand or expend. The scenario of global expansion and the first either/or of expansion or expenditure leads to a question of the nature of expenditure: if expansion is not possible then excess energy must be spent either willingly or unwillingly, gloriously or catastrophically. However, this is not a scenario in which either/ or is a real option, for limits to expansion provoke expenditures that are at once glorious and catastrophic. From the standpoint of the Accursed Share’s ‘basic fact’ the future lies with an organism that can both expand and expend – as Bataille will equivocally define Homo sapiens – and not with organisms whose systems cannot grow or expend. For Bataille and his contemporaries and colleagues in the Collège de Sociologie (including on its margins Walter Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ essay), Homo sapiens is such an organism and system, with its colonial adventures tending towards global domination, possessed of an overwhelming sense of transcendence and a creativity or ability gloriously to expend excess energy in the creation of art. But also, it should not be forgotten, in its capacity to induce catastrophe.



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Bataille’s convictions regarding the origins of the human developed during the 1930s were confirmed and intensified by the discovery of the cave art of Lascaux whose images of animals and hunting scenes would prove of such importance to Bataille and his views on expenditure and sacrifice developed in The Accursed Share. The imagery of Lascaux confirmed Bataille’s understanding of how humanity distinguished itself from nature and animality in an act he describes in an early note on ‘The Frobenius Exhibit at the Salle Pleyel’ of 1930 as one of ‘inconceivable violence’.14 The rest of this note, saturated in the discourse of colonial anthropology, is dedicated to understanding sacrifice and art as ways of conceiving this apparent inconceivablity. Bataille’s first methodological step is to propose a parallel between African and European paleolithic civilizations: ‘This civilisation, which disappeared thousands of years ago in our region, was interrupted in South Africa only several centuries ago by the invasion of the Bantu, a people infinitely more advanced in ironwork.’15 The parallel between the disappearance of the European and African Paleolithic humanity implicitly extends to the cause of disappearance in the arrival of a technologically superior invader. In this early note, Bataille constructs a scenario that he will return to in the case of Neanderthal humanity, one which sees the South African bushmen as ‘typologically ancient men’ whose art ‘from the point of view of life’ ‘surpasses in interest that of the European caves’,16 but who, like them, were violently supplanted. With the reference to the caves and cave art Bataille is carefully referring to ancient Homo sapiens but the mise-en-scène of the destruction of a form of life and humanity by a technologically superior human invader will be carried over into his view of a civil war within humanity between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. In this early note, however, Paleolithic humans ‘born of nature’ appear as a ‘kind of waste’: ‘Man’s first movement amid animals and trees had been to conceive of the existence of these animals and trees and to negate his own’.17 Animals and trees served the ‘unhappy waste’ that is humanity in the same way as ‘houses, churches, and administrative buildings do around us’, but instead of submitting ‘to these buildings, these churches’ early humans killed them to ‘eat their meat’.18 This intimates an act of sacrifice – glorious and catastrophic expenditure – that restores what has been separated by ‘inconceivable violence’ and engenders ‘not only man but his rapport with nature’.19 But there is something evasive in this Hegelian account of the emergence of humanity in a negation of the negation or violent sacrificial response to an inconceivably violent exclusion from nature. For the bushmen have already been described as victims of a human violence directed against them: they are

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‘negated’ by (and themselves originally ‘negated’) not just nature and animality, but other humans. Human beings were not only surrounded by elephants, zebras, trees and grass, but also by other humans with violent designs on their lives without the alleviation offered by a struggle for recognition. The violence expiated by sacrifice and art described in this and Bataille’s other succeeding essays on cave art is not just directed by and against ‘nature’ and animality, but also against other humans. In looking at the ancient art, Bataille is also forced to see something else, the possibility barely tangible and difficult to coax into visibility that the original violence was ‘inconceivable’ because it was directed not just against nature or other humans in some paleolithic struggle for recognition, but was part of an exterminatory gesture directed against another kind of humanity. The question of the Neanderthal extinction, possibly prefigured in the fantasy of the violent extinction of the bushmen by the Bantu in the note on Frobenus, becomes increasingly prominent in Bataille’s work. Contemporary paleo-anthropology provided Bataille with two ways of understanding the coincidence of the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe and the disappearance of Homo neanderthalenis.20 One explained the coincidence in terms of Neanderthal humanity meeting a violent end at the hands of an invading Homo sapiens as victims of a literal and successful paleo-genocide. The other maintains that the two humanities entered into sexual relations that led to the emergence of a new humanity or hybrid Homo sapiens–neanderthalensis.21 The options in short involve violence and sexuality, both of which it hardly needs to be said are fundamental concerns not only of The Accursed Share but of Bataille’s wider thought. Although Bataille is initially reticent to discuss violence directed against or sex with (or a combination of both) Neanderthals, he will eventually incline towards the thesis of a Neanderthal genocide at the hands of Homo sapiens – the tool-using, art-making, genocidal animal – even if he does not pursue the full implications of this position and its implications for the erotic life of ancient humanity. When The Accursed Share is read in the context of Bataille’s paleo-anthropological writings it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that it repeats at the level of the concept of the genocidal gesture by which he thought Homo sapiens became synonymous with humanity. Indeed, it appears as if The Accursed Share depends not only on a parallel between the two species of humanity and the two forms of economy – with Homo neanderthalis exemplifying restricted and Homo sapiens general economy – but also, albeit ambivalently, on situating Homo neanderthalis at a lower point of the scale between animality and humanity



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than Homo sapiens.22 Yet there is also a sense that Bataille believes that contemporary humanity is falling back from the art making excessive creature that was Lascaux man to a Neanderthal condition of ceaseless labour driven by fear of death. For him Neanderthal man may be the future of the contemporary humanity, certainly if the restricted economy associated with the Neanderthal condition continues to prevail. The enquiry into the origins of humanity is quickly transformed into speculation on its future and the kind of production and labour discipline associated with industrial capitalism. In a remarkable and revealing essay from 1959, ‘The Cradle of Humanity: The Vézère Valley’, Bataille provides a testament to the abiding importance of paleo-anthropology for his thought. He fully endorses its search for the ‘essential element’ in the birth of the human and ‘a characteristic unique to humanity’.23 The unique characteristic is less the creation of tools or the possession of consciousness than ‘the power to create a work of art’.24 It is with the discovery of this power that ‘humanity decidedly distanced itself from the animal, unleashed itself in a way, risking the full gamut of its richness’.25 The time and place Bataille assigns this event – the region of Southern France and Northern Spain during the Pleistocene but specifically the Vézère Valley 40,000 years ago26 – immediately provokes conjecture: it coincides with the arrival of Homo sapiens but also with the disappearance of all trace of Homo neanderthalensis. Bataille’s last contribution to paleo-anthropology is haunted by what he took to be a coincidence between the birth of art and the death of Homo neanderthalensis and an answer to the unasked question nevertheless ineluctably emerges in the course of his meditation. Bataille proposes a dramaturgy of the birth of humanity that fully conforms to the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action: the ‘the coming of humanity’ is ‘a drama in two acts’,27 the first interminably slow and the second accelerated and sudden – a glorious catastrophe. The pace of the two acts is governed by their prevailing economies – the first act conforms to the regime of restricted, the second to general economy. In addition, the cast of players also differs between the two acts: the cast performing the restricted economy of production according to scarcity, need and fear of death are made up of Homo neanderthalensis who are succeeded in Act 2 by the glittering, sovereign performance of the excessive general economy of Homo sapiens. Act 3, of course, has yet to be written; whether it will be a dramatic synthesis of the first two acts, a return to the Neanderthal condition following the short and catastrophically glorious eruption of Homo lascauxensis or something completely different cannot be foreseen for we are still enmeshed in the unfolding drama. Bataille is not afraid

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of exaggerating the significance of the drama he saw played out in the arena of the Vézère Valley: ‘Some tens of thousands of years ago, this small valley was the theatre of changes whose consequences are the origin of everything that follows.’28 But what exactly were these changes that manifested themselves in the origin of the work of art and why does Bataille understand them in terms of birth, awakening and glorification? Once again, the chronology provides an important clue: Bataille refers to the thriving population of the Vézère Valley over a period ‘that began around 120,000 years ago’ and its occupants who differ profoundly from us. They are not as close to the monkeys as those from earlier periods, but we must locate them midway on the path that goes from the Pithecanthropus or the Sinananthropus to Homo sapiens, who resemble us precisely and populated the valley only at the dawn of art, at the end of the Mousterian period.29

Bataille is referring, of course, to Homo neanderthalensis, further from animality than their predecessors but not yet one of ‘us’. In the text of a lecture delivered on 18 January 1955, Bataille stated absolutely explicitly that ‘Neanderthal man was of the same genus as us but not of the same species’, adding ‘the human species in the strict sense of the word made works of art’.30 But there is nothing strict at all about this use of taxonomy and the word species. If we return to the passage on the pre-colonial occupants of the Vézère Valley we can trace the emergence of a major problem involving Bataille’s definition of humanity as a species in the wording of the second part of the sentence. For, of course, strictly speaking, the existence of Homo sapiens as a species pre-dated the invention of art by over 150,00031 years; as a species they too played out the long first act of Bataille’s drama in distant East Africa. The invention of art did not distinguish them as a species, and did not make them genetically us. Bataille’s wording ‘they resemble us precisely’ registers this difficulty – what is the difference between identity and ‘precise resemblance’? The latter can only mean that Homo sapiens both are and are not us. Something happened to Homo sapiens; what exactly it was is quickly passed over in the bland description of their ‘populating’ the valley ‘only at the dawn of art’ at the end of the ‘Mousterian period’, i.e. the epoch of Homo neanderthalensis. The question of how the three events are conjoined – Homo sapiens populating the valley 40,000 years ago, experiencing the birth of art and becoming human with the end of the restricted economy of Neanderthal humanity – remains unasked. At this point in ‘The Cradle of Humanity’ Bataille introduces the ‘race of the Neanderthals’, identifying them now as a race and no longer a species and



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placing them vaguely out of history as a force of nature ‘appearing just about everywhere at the same time, with the exception of America … ’.32 While he is fascinated by the physiognomy of this humanity – the large but low skull, arched eyebrows, thick neck and overall ‘animal appearance’ – he is most concerned to fix its character as Homo faber or the proponent of a productive restricted economy of scarcity. Bataille is too Hegelian to deny consciousness to Homo neanderthalensis; on the contrary, he urges us ‘to never lose sight of the fact that work expanded consciousness … work is the intellectual operation that changed the brain of the animal that man initially was into a human brain’.33 The experimentation of the action of chipping flint to create a tool, the use of that tool in a collective project, usually the hunt, and finally the consciousness of death – the death of the animal but also of the hunter – were all properties of Homo neanderthalensis. Bataille describes the funerary practices of this humanity as evincing consciousness of death and even a terror before the fact of death requiring ritual propitiation. Neanderthal humanity possessed consciousness, contrary to a widely accepted assumption; for Bataille it was not this that distinguished it from Homo sapiens. The ‘first act’ of the birth of humanity – both sapiens and neanderthalensis – was the era of restrictive economy, the era of an industrious but death-obsessed humanity. Bataille describes this era – which has by no means irretrievably ended – in terms of the conflict between ‘two orders of possibility’. In the first, ‘Man responded to the harshness of the climate through industriousness,’34 preparing animal skins, working wood and developing ‘the capacity to overcome human difficulties through continual activity and work [that] undoubtedly made the Mousterian man feel that he would carry the day’.35 Except that, ‘Like us, he had to bow down before death; death completely sabotaged his industrious efforts’; the Neanderthal was not master in his own cave but subject to ‘the radical, terrifying negation of what he essentially is’.36 Consciousness is made up of these two orders of possibility, work and the absolute negation of death, the latter of which is equally an order of impossibility. It is ‘not only consciousness of objects and actions’ but also of death as ‘designating the limit of the power of human action’.37 It is this consciousness rent between possibility and impossibility with its consequent ‘mobile and ambiguous state of mind’ that is shared by Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens; it is the shared predicament of humanity, but one that Bataille believes can be lived in different ways. The mise-en-scène of the second act of Bataille’s drama forcibly inaugurates general economy under the sign of invasion and violence. In a trope that would be often repeated with respect to the encounter of Homo sapiens and Homo

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neanderthalensis he imagines the apparition of travelling Homo sapiens from the standpoint of the sedentary Neanderthals: ‘One day, at a twist of a road, perhaps in a group, perhaps alone, a new kind of man appeared.’38 Bataille focuses immediately on the differences in physical appearance between the two humanities, emphasizing height (Homo sapiens is on average fifteen centimetres taller than Homo neanderthalensis) and the physiognomy of the neck (for Bataille, that of Homo sapiens resembles a swan and Homo neanderthalensis significantly a bull). Bataille then moves to a short series of questionable deductions that can only be described as symptomatic of the problems besetting his narrative of the second act of the birth of humanity. The first is that Homo neanderthalensis is only an ‘approximation of a human being, still crude’, the second that ‘the newcomer was man himself; his skeleton hardly differed from our own: meaning that of the European’.39 We it seems are the descendants of the newcomer, and we are the Europeans. But what does it mean to claim that we are descendants of the more perfect human? Is Bataille emphasizing that ‘we’ Europeans are of African origin (as in a longer perspective are all humans), or is he diverting attention from this by suggesting the multi-regionalist position that ‘Apparently he came from a central point in Eurasia’40 and that Europeans had consequently always been Europeans? In any case, the severe reduction of chronological perspective is noteworthy: the fossil record of Homo sapiens does indeed show an approach from the East of what is now Europe, but this was but the final phase of a journey from East Africa by way of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean. The fossil record also suggests that the encounter between the humanities – and there were not only two – took place on the southern Mediterranean corridor and if at all then most improbably in Western Europe.41 The focus of Bataille’s dramaturgy now shifts from appearance to disappearance – enter Homo sapiens stage left, exit Homo neanderthalensis stage right. Yet the interval between entrance and exit remains obscure: ‘We know nothing about the transition period except the final result: the Neanderthal man disappeared.’42 Bataille at this point makes a symptomatic and immediately disowned return to the position of the Frobinus essay, noting ‘He disappeared so completely that beyond the appearance of the new man, more than fifty thousand years before us, we no longer have any trace of his existence.’43 What then are the traces Bataille allows to survive in Southern Africa? They are certainly not Neanderthal fossils and seem to be the bushmen Bataille mentioned earlier as victims of a Bantu invasion. But this introduces a variant of the problem we encountered earlier of Homo sapiens existing over 100,000 years before inventing art and becoming … Homo sapiens. Bataille is clear that



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all surviving humanity is Homo sapiens and that Homo neanderthalensis has been completely extinguished: ‘No race today represents him.’44 But, according to him, ‘we’ are ‘closer’ to the ‘primitive humanity’ that invented art than we are to contemporary Bushmen, the Australian Aborigines, and the Eskimoes who endure … [who] present us with a tableau approximate to that of the life of the inhabitants of the Vézère valley in the period of the painted caves. However, these modern primitives lack this outpouring, this upsurge of creative awakening that makes Lascaux man our counterpart and not that of the Aborigine.45

In a complex transposition, Bataille transfers the colonial relation of the colonist to the contemporary native peoples on to that between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis complete with a justification for the cultural superiority of the former. The problem remains of how a relation between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis becomes for Bataille a relation within Homo sapiens. It is as if he is edging towards proposing a new species emerging from within Homo sapiens – Lascaux Man Homo lascaux ensis or ‘we’ Europeans – as opposed to the South African Homo sapiens who are allegedly culturally closer to Homo neanderthalensis. Certain Homo sapiens remained (and it seems still remain) repeatedly playing out the ‘first act’ of the restricted economy of Neanderthal humanity – working under adverse conditions of scarcity, oppressed by fears of death and responding with rudimentary chthonic liturgies of burial – while other Homo sapiens have entered the ‘second act’ and respond creatively and artistically to the same predicament. Bataille then sketches an evolutionary schema explaining this development within Homo sapiens based on ‘Similitudes between Aboriginal life and prehistoric life [that] allow us to represent the dawning of humanity in a concrete way.’46 The aboriginal peoples have ‘tools and stone weapons’ and live as ‘hunter gatherers’; ‘as in pre-historic times, they place their hands on the cave walls and surround them with paint’. From the similarities between paleo-anthropological and contemporary aboriginal mark-making Bataille draws the questionable inference ‘that the human beings of the upper Palaeolithic had reactions similar to those of the Aborigines, that these human beings had, like the aborigines, a religion, and that this religion was not altogether very different from that of the aborigines’.47 But this religion of art is very different from that Bataille imagines for Neanderthal humanity. Aware too of death, their response was one of avoidance – Neanderthal burial is interpreted by Bataille as a gesture of protection: ‘to escape the threat the dead

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represented, they made them disappear below the earth’.48 Apart from liturgical gestures such as burial with the feet towards the sun, Neanderthal religiosity was for Bataille restricted to avoidance; the religion of Homo lascauxensis was quite the opposite, dedicated more to appearance than to disappearance. The paintings of animals on walls, for instance, was not a simple prophylactic gesture of holding them at a distance but was intended to ‘bring them to appear before their weapons: to dispose of an apparition was to already make the animal fall into their power’.49 This was an expansive and excessive gesture, indifferent to the sense of loss and fear of loss that oppressed Neanderthal humanity; the two humanities in short occupy the worlds of restricted and general economy. Given the importance of the entry of Homo sapiens into general economy as well as the disquieting analogies between their encounter with Homo neanderthalensis and the contemporary colonial encounter within surviving Homo sapiens, the issue of the Neanderthal extinction becomes salient. Bataille’s explanation is ambivalent. After claiming that the extinction of Neanderthal humanity was so complete that ‘No race today represents him’, he continues, ‘Undoubtedly, violence is the only explanation. The more intelligent, more agile newcomer must have effortlessly supplanted him.’50 In this scenario, developed further in his 1960 essay ‘Unliveable Earth’, the Neanderthal extinction was a paleogenocide, one characterized by a confusion of the sacrificed animal, human and divine represented by Neanderthal humanity. Haunted by the self-destructive technical possibilities of nuclear warfare and the spectacle of excessive festival, ‘Unliveable Earth’ presents the two acts of the birth of humanity in terms of a continuous disengagement from the animal through work, consciousness and the creation of that art. It is upper Palaeolithic revolution ‘from which man emerged fully formed’51 art becomes festive and excessive: ‘from the immense crowd of animals, figures that are half human and half animal emerge. They lead, it seems, a musical tumult, a dance of deliverance into intoxication.’52 The animal figures represented on the walls of the cave ‘were those of the hunt’ summoned to appear while the other ‘strange – human yet animal – figures were in fact divine: for the undeveloped men, the animal, being essentially man’s double, had something of the divine, the very thing he no longer attains except in the prodigious effervescence of the festival’.53 The excessive expenditure of general economy seems to summon this conjuncture of human, animal and divine and yet it also seems as if this strange being was physically present in the figure of Neanderthal humanity, the uncanny human who could be killed as if an animal. Fantasizing a moment when Homo sapiens did not kill each other, Bataille notes in a strangely detached way that ‘If men killed other men, they were of



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a different species. Thus Palaeolithic man had to hunt, and it seems he was as capable of killing the Neanderthal man as he was of killing his prey.’54 But instead of lingering on this peculiar killing of the men who are animals (and perhaps Gods) and the connection between this killing and the expenditure of the festivals, Bataille moves rapidly into general considerations of animality and the human. Ancient Homo sapiens and ‘some very primitive savages today’ think of themselves as animals ‘because animals are in their mind, the most holy, having a sacred quality, which men have lost’.55 But another interpretation is possible – it is not that humans have lost a divine/animal quality but that they killed the divine/animal humans that they encountered. The revolution in art associated with Lascaux might, in ways Bataille intimates but does not explore, be connected with the killing of Neanderthal humans. If this is plausible – and it is a possibility certainly entertained by Bataille – then the Lascaux humanity defined by this revolution in art is constituted by the genocidal act of killing Neanderthal humans, making them disappear only to re-appear in the image of the animal. There is very little fossil evidence to support this conclusion – some rare bones with marks that might be consistent with injuries sustained by the weapons of Homo sapiens – and Bataille himself, on the whole, avoids resorting to it. After evoking violence as the only explanation for the Neanderthal extinction he adds ‘we have no way of imagining it’ and, drawing on his view that warfare is associated with sedentary, agricultural social formations, swiftly reverses his violence hypothesis in favour of ‘a rather long period of co-existence’ that might constitute ‘thousands of years’.56 On this account, ‘the life of the newcomer was not very different from that of the supplanted unfortunate’ (note that although co-existing by hypothesis with Homo sapiens, Neanderthal humanity has also already been ‘supplanted’ as per the violence hypothesis). The newcomer peacefully enjoying his newly acquired possessions slowly develops art-making in a way very different to the ‘crashing roar that is proper to birth’ that only two pages later will describe the same passage into art, identified with the paintings of Lascaux.

Lascaux and the Venus of Willendorf Bataille’s Lascaux is haunted by intimations of the Shoah. Even his description of its discovery by a group of schoolboys in 1940 – commenting in a lecture on a filmed reconstruction – emphasizes that one of them was a Jewish refugee

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from Paris and that he and his fellow discoverers had originally set out to give another group of Alsatian refugee schoolboys ‘a good thrashing’. It is not hard to imagine a possible motivation of this foray against the German-speaking and possibly anti-Semitic children from Alsace. In his discussion of the slaughter of animals in his 1952 lecture ‘A Visit to Lascaux’, he comments on the industrial slaughter of animals that ‘our own kind did as much with other human beings in Germany not so long ago’, adding flippantly ‘but in the end this was an enormous scandal … ’.57 This reference to the Shoah emerges from a broader argument contrasting the humanity’s self-distinction from animality with the ‘equality between prehistoric humanity and animals’.58 The equality between animality and humanity is Bataille’s key to understanding what he will later term the ‘enigma’ of the cave art of Lascaux, but also of the ancient portable female figurines that feature prominently in Bataille’s Tears of Eros. Another understanding is possible, however, following from the literal de-facement of human self-representation common to both the wall paintings and the sculpture. In order to describe the distinction between humans and animals in ‘A Visit to Lasaux’, Bataille resorts to the term ‘transcendence’ – ‘humans see themselves as transcendent in relation to animals. For a human being there is a discontinuity, a fundamental difference between an animal and himself.’59 Humans are esprit while an animal is only a thing. Bataille held to this position and the fascination with the nexus human/animal in spite of its difficulties, implicitly acknowledged but rarely explicitly worked through. The first is that humanity is not one thing – there are many humanities – and the second linked with this is that if Lascaux man did not possess a clear distinction between animality and humanity, when did this distinction emerge and how can we claim to be heirs of the art-making animals? Bataille’s explanation seems to entail extending the Hegelian master–slave dialectic to animality with the drama of the emergence of the human played out in art and the confrontation with the animal ‘not as though he were confronting an inferior being or a thing, a negligible reality, but as if he were confronting a spirit similar to his own’.60 The art records a struggle to the death, a struggle for recognition that issued in the human mastery over the animal. The details of Bataille’s audacious argument are pertinent and in their own terms not unconvincing, with the alterity of the animal figuring death and transcendence and the art a practice of atonement for the death and the propitiation of the avenging god-animal. But another logic intimated but not worked through shimmers through this abstract dialectic and radically challenges its terms and its consequences.



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Bataille’s evidence yields a different understanding if we set the general problem of animality within a context of the presence of different humanities whose very differences seem to be defined in terms of their proximity to animality. Occupying the grottoes previously occupied by Neanderthal humans, the question of the relation between human and animal is posed not so much to the animal but to the questionable animal–human predecessors. This can be seen by paying closer attention to Bataille’s account of the ‘paradox’ or ‘enigma’ of human self-representation in ancient art and in particular to the non-representation of the face in contexts of killing and sex. Yet how does this account look if we foreground the presence of Neanderthal humanity? In this context, the severely and consistently defaced representations of the human might point to the attempt to distinguish the physiognomy of Homo sapiens from the more ‘bestial’ physiognomy of Homo neanderthalensis. Throughout his reflections on Lascaux and cave art, Bataille consistently affirms the inseparability of the wall art and the portable sculptures as the first ‘human’ self-representations. But Bataille underestimates how far this art may be used to distinguish between distinct human physiognomies. He notes how in cave art the few humans that appear among the animals ‘are often grotesque; they are generally tiresome caricatures, engraved carelessly and without conviction on the cave wall. Women alone were the object of more attentive representations.’61 Bataille maintained this position consistently throughout his paleo-anthropological reflections, but without linking the representations to the presence or memory of Neanderthal humans, in appearance ‘closer’ to the animals. Bataille acknowledges that ‘In regard to its own species, humanity first had only the strange feelings evidenced by the figures in the caves,’62 but perhaps these feelings concerned not so much the animal in general than the more-animal-humans encountered by Homo sapiens. The art does not so much mark a distinction between human and animal than between kinds of humanity and to focus on the former distracts attention from the latter. The most explicit and complete human representation – what Bataille called the ‘Holiest of Holies’ – is found in a remote cave in the Lascaux complex. The representation of a human figure is strikingly different from the rest of the art in the complex. It is a graphic almost caricatural or ‘schematic silhouette’63 of a fallen male human figure with an avian head lying before an injured bison, a staff with the head of a bird fallen beside him. Although reluctant in his book on Lascaux to over-interpret the ‘Holiest of Holies’ as a shamanistic image, Bataille is confident that this is more than the representation of a hunting incident. His later reading of the image in ‘The Cradle of Humanity’ emphasizes expiation for

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the death of the animal and the possibility of overcoming death ‘symbolized’ by the bird features prominent in the figure. Yet he takes the human physiognomy of the figure for granted, finding its schematic elements tiresome rather than valuable evidence of an act of violent graphic distinction. For this image can be read as the attempt to distinguish a bird humanity from a bovine humanity – Bataille had, of course, on repeated occasions likened Homo sapiens to a swan and Homo neanderthalensis to a bull. The head of a bird on the fallen human figure and the attacking but dying bovine animal emphasized the different facial and cranial features of the two humanities. By literally identifying the human figure with the pointed face of a bird the artist marked the difference of the sharply defined facial forms of Homo sapiens from the broader facial form of the other, vanquished humanity. The fallen figure also possesses the long narrow trunk and the straight limbs and feet of Homo sapiens as distinguished from the squat body and curved limbs and feet of Homo neanderthalensis, although the left arm is bowed.64 The image of the human in short is a seemingly caricatural exaggeration of the visible features that distinguished Homo sapiens from Homo neanderthalensis. If this is the case, then all Bataille says with respect to guilt and expiation holds not so much for the human as killer of animals but as killer of different humans. The masculinity of the figure is emphasized by the dagger-like form of the erect penis, which seems to form a triangle with the equally pointed but straight feet. The curved feet of Neanderthal humanity gave them a gait and posture different from Homo sapiens – Bataille notes ironically that they would have made poor soldiers; the difference in posture emphasized by the straight but pointed feet is visually linked to the sexual excitement of the fallen figure. Bataille links the body ‘full of virile force’ to ‘the convulsive obscurity of the animal world’ and ‘the act of being suspended, hung over the abyss of death’.65 But the rush to identify eros and thanatos overlooks the visual link between the penis and the feet or the erotic swoon connected with one of the main physiognomic markers of the difference between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. The question posed by the sign of desire whether in overcoming death or in an erotic swoon directs us to the other genre of art practiced beside the cave painting. Bataille regularly juxtaposes the male caricatures that appear in the cave paintings with the ‘more attentive representations’ of women in ancient sculpture. These sculptures trouble him for a number of reasons, although in the ‘Cradle of Humanity’ they are passed over quickly in the drive to get back to humans and animals. The first is the ‘more attentive’ representation that shows the caricatural style of male representation to have



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been a deliberate choice and not a technical shortcoming. The second is the character of their bodies that ‘seem monstrous to us; their hips and breasts are enormous’, a characteristic Bataille swiftly reduces to ‘the ideal of beauty or at least to the fecundity of human beings during this period’.66 The ‘attentive representation’ then is of a ‘monstrous’ woman. The third and most striking is the ‘absence of a face on these statuettes. Instead of a face, some of them have a smooth or ribbed surface; others have a head whose face and nape have, without human traits, the bumpy appearances of a big blackberry.’67 Bataille moves quickly to link this consistent defacement of the erotic object with the obliteration of the face as identifying ‘the now-dead living being’, thus bringing the sculptures quickly under the sign of his wider reflections on the relationship between death and sexual desire that impatiently dictated his reading of the Lascaux ‘holiest of holies’. In the more extended discussion of the faceless and monstrous representations of women in ‘The Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth of Art’ Bataille places the sculptures of women in a ‘third world’ beside those of men and animals. They have no animal characteristics but ‘their human aspect is also suppressed’,68 notably their facial characteristics, leaving either a smooth polished surface or, in the case of the Venus of Willendorf, a granular sphere. Bataille leaves the question of this defacement unanswered, moving quickly to a connection between women and animality. He overlooks the possibility that while the female bodies are recognizably human, they are physiognomically closer to Neanderthal female humanity, but with care taken to obliterate the specific identifying marks of Neanderthal humanity. The Venus of Willendorf is a case in point. Bataille notes that her face is obliterated and replaced with rows of points leaving no trace of facial features but does not comment on other abbreviations of the figure even though he reproduces it from three different perspectives in The Tears of Eros.69 He does not note how her short neck corresponds more to his view of the bovine physiognomy of Homo neanderthalensis than Homo sapiens nor how the compact and powerful body with its perceived erotic exaggerations is consistent with the morphology of female Neanderthal humanity. And significantly not only the face but also the other markers of Neanderthal physiognomy – the bowed arms and the bowed feet – have also been effaced (Bataille did not comment on the Venus of Willendorf having no arms or feet). It is then possible that these defaced objects of erotic desire are women of another humanity to Homo sapiens, raising more questions about the character of the desire in play and the formidable ban that attends or incites it and that is expressed in such severe disfiguration.

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Reflecting on the meaning of the defacement of the erotic sculptures and the masks in the wall paintings, Bataille’s train of thought quickly returns, by way of the ugliness of monkeys, to Neanderthal humanity. He muses on ‘the extent to which the monkey’s ugliness disturbs us: it never ceases haunting us’70 and traces the origin of this disturbance to the uncanny apparition of Neanderthal humanity: ‘The attitudes I’m talking about surfaced at a time when the sight of a monkey was definitely familiar and were even more important since Middle Paleolithic man certainly looked like a monkey.’71 This train of association leads to the question ‘did Middle Paleolithic man’s appearance, which the first men who walked upright had to have known well, cause the same horror in these men that the sight of a monkey induces in us?’72 Bataille concedes that this question cannot ever be answered and instead modulates it via an alleged aversion for monkeys to the question of humanity’s self-distinction from the animal kingdom, very recently we learn later, and the invention of monotheism. The question is fundamental for Bataille and in many respects reveals the assumptions that vitiate his paleo-anthropology. One line of argument for the source of aversion moves from the monkey to the allegedly monkey-like Neanderthal humanity but it is countered by a phrasing which reveals that the aversion begins with Neanderthal humanity and is only subsequently extended to monkeys and then to the animal kingdom as a whole. It was the encounter with ‘previous stooped man’ that provoked the aversion for monkeys and ‘then the entire animal kingdom’.73 Bataille tries to make the reluctance to represent the human face part of ‘prehistoric man’s’ sense of his own ugliness, but once again his argument runs in a different direction. It is the aversion for the other man, ‘what we must call unfinished man’, one that was ‘loved and killed’.74 The complex historical and cultural equation linking humanity and animality that Bataille tries to solve always results in a disowned Neanderthal humanity. They are the objects of violence and the expiation of violence, of a sexual desire accompanied by a defacement of the signs of Neanderthal humanity. The problem of animality in short is a cipher for that of a different humanity, one both familiar and alien – an object of murderous desire.

Epilogue: Post-colonial Neanderthals Bataille’s hypothesis made the Neanderthal extinction central to the emergence and sole domination of the human that recognized its own violence with respect to nature, animality and itself through the invention of art. His intuition of a



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connection between the Neanderthal extinction and the eruption of art-making Lascaux Man rested on paleo-anthropology and saw itself as making a contribution to the discipline. Yet the hypothesis remained underdeveloped and uncertain, transposing a possible violence against another kind of human into a problem of animality. In many respects Bataille’s hesitation to explore in depth the relationship between genocide and the invention of art and the human was the outcome of the limits of contemporary paleo-anthropology traceable to its own debts to imperial anthropology. Recent developments in paleo-anthropology are slowly changing the model of violent invasion and pointing to a far more nuanced understanding of the Neanderthal extinction. The view that the arrival of Homo sapiens and the extinction of Homo neanderthalensis was a coincidence has been both supported and refuted in recent debate. The very small population of Neanderthal humanity rendered it vulnerable to a number of causes of extinction and reduced the probability of extensive encounters with Homo sapiens. The paleo-genetic advances of Svante Pääbo’s team reconstructing the Neanderthal genome from fossil mitochondrial and nuclear DNA have confirmed sexual contacts between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis that resulted in offspring. Apart from questioning the view that Neanderthals were a different species of humanity, the finding have also revealed significant traces of Neanderthal DNA in contemporary European and Asian populations. The case for the Neanderthals not being extinct but living on in contemporary humanity has also been confirmed by fossil finds after the extinction that might be described as Homo sapiens– neanderthalensis. Yet even the genetic evidence does not point to a wide range of encounters between the humanities. It has, however, also confirmed the existence – in one case in the same Siberian cave – of another kind of humanity – the Denisovan – opening the possibility that there were not only two but many humanities co-existing over millennia. It has also shown how developments in the material culture of later Homo neanderthalensis, especially in the creation of ornament and (questionably) musical instruments, may be interpreted as a positive outcome of its contact with Homo sapiens. Bataille’s interest in paleo-anthropology and the Neanderthal extinction as we have seen throughout was tied to a broader concern not only with the past but also the present and future of the human. His paleo-anthropological hypothesis was also intended as a critique of the current condition of humanity, capable of mass murder, warfare and genocide. The mapping of the distinction between general and restricted economy on to the two forms of humanity was part of this broader project. If current paleo-anthropological knowledge were

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available to Bataille he would probably have emphasized the sexual contacts between the humanities, been more reticent but not wholly repentant about the chronological lack of fit between the catastrophic Neanderthal extinction and the glorious birth of art, and would have considered more carefully the implications an art-making Neanderthal humanity that developed this capacity alongside and perhaps together with Homo sapiens.

Notes See Georges Bataille, ‘Lascaux Ou La Naissance de L’art’, in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 9. Paris: Gallimard, 1979 and his The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall. New York: Zone Books, 2005. 2 The ‘Venus’ figurines are associated with the ‘Gravettian’ culture, which is dated to 37,000 years ago and linked with novel survival strategies that are thought to distinguish them from the Neanderthals. The Venus of Willendorf is thus plausibly a late example of a kind of art-making practised long before and thus within the window of Bataille’s chronology. See Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse, The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story. London: Thames & Hudson, 174. 3 Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, 145 4 The cave of Chauvet discovered in 1994 posed another challenge to the dating of prehistoric art. Some of the images, very similar to those of Lascaux, may be over 35,000 years old. Recent research into the material traces found in the cave has distinguished two phases of occupation – 37,000 to 33,500 and 31,000 to 28,000 – with the art-making confined to the first, older period of occupation. In this case the chronology begins to agree with the older dating of the cave art that underlies Bataille’s hypothesis. See Soline Roy’s article on Anita Quiles’ work on Chauvet: ‘Grotte Chauvet: son âge n’a plus de secret’. Le Figaro (12 March 2016): 9. 5 My account is indebted to Rainer Harf and Sebatian Witte’s article ‘Jäger der verlorenen Schatzes’. GEOkompakt: Der Neandertaler 41: 40–9. 6 Ibid., 44. 7 One of the wilder fantasies proposed by Franz Josef Karl Meyer, Professor of Anatomy at Bonn, departed from the axiom of the impossibility of fossil humanity and identified the bones as those of a Mongolian Cossack who deserted from Napoleon’s army and took refuge in the cave; another strategy, pursued by the usually astute Berlin pathologist Rudolf Virchow, identified the ‘abnormalities’ as consistent with a modern individual suffering from rickets and arthritis (Harf and Witte, ‘Jäger der verlorenen Schatzes’, 45–6). Both tried to remove the bones 1



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from the scene of paleo-anthropology while retaining a sense that they belonged to a victim, whether of war or illness. 8 The term Geschlecht recurs throughout German-language discussions of the Neanderthal remains and should be read in the philosophical context enriched by Heidegger’s and Derrida’s contributions, which see it as essentially equivocal – signifying at once ‘race’, ‘species’, ‘generation’, ‘sex’. The flexible ambiguity surrounding the term allowed it to operate in a number of registers. 9 See Svante Pääbo’s judicious reflection on the problem of species difference, inclining to a more flexible definition of ‘species’: Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. New York: Basic Books, 237. 10 Neanderthal humanity unwittingly posed a revaluation of racial values, with the colonizers coming from Africa and the ‘primitive’ native European peoples being vanquished by them. My thanks to Scott Wilson for alerting me to the continuing reverberations of the late nineteenth-century racial capture of Neanderthal humanity in contemporary racism. 11 A discovery pre-dating that of the Neanderthal and only subsequently identified. The Gibraltar remains are sometimes taken to represent the last surviving group of Neanderthal humans. 12 The two humanities are thought to share a common ancestor in Homo heidelbergensis. 13 Georges Bataille. The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991, 21. 14 Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 46. 15 Ibid., 45. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 46. 19 Ibid. 20 We shall see below that this picture has been considerably complicated by recent paleo-anthropological research into Homo neanderthalensis and its fate. 21 This is the current position, which distinguishes between Homo sapiens– neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens–sapiens; for Bataille the latter would more properly be described as Homo sapiens–lascauxensis. 22 Bataille happily employs the scale to distinguish between grades of humanity. In a discussion of Chinese and European fossil discoveries, he notes parenthetically ‘the latter being very primitive; the former, closer to us than more recent humanity, called Neanderthal …’ (Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, 124). 23 Ibid., 143. 24 Ibid., 145. 25 Ibid.

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‘The birth of art, unquestionably more than 40,000 years ago, follows an interminable period of stagnation’ (ibid.). 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 146. 29 Ibid., 149. 30 Ibid., 89. 31 Recent analysis of fossil remains assigns both Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis a common ancestor – Homo heidelbergensis – with a species life span stretching between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. 32 Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 149. 33 Ibid., 150. 34 Ibid., 151. 35 Ibid., 157. 36 Ibid., 152. 37 Ibid., 153. 38 Ibid., 155. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 See Pääbo’s Neanderthal Man’s deductions from his team’s reconstruction of the Neanderthal genome. 42 Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 155. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 159. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 154. 49 Ibid., 160. 50 Ibid., 155. 51 Ibid., 177. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 178. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 156. 57 Ibid., 48. 58 Ibid., 49. 59 Ibid., 48. 60 Ibid., 49. 61 Ibid., 168.



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62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 170. 64 The apparent possession of an arm characteristic of the two human species invites interpretation of the figure as a hybrid, although on the whole it is elements of physical distinction that are emphasized. 65 Ibid., 173. 66 Ibid., 168. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., p. 30. 70 Ibid., p. 73. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Bataille characterizes the human–animal nexus in these terms: ‘They loved them and they killed them’ (Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, 75). But the unasked questions remains, were animals loved and killed like the other humans, or were the other humans loved and killed like animals?

Bibliography Bataille, Georges. ‘Lascaux Ou La Naissance de L’art’, in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 9. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1993. Bataille, Georges. Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2002. Bataille, Georges. The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall. New York: Zone Books, 2005. GEO Kompakt, GEOkompakt: Der Neandertaler 41 (2014): passim. Harf, R. and S. Witte, ‘Jäger der verlorenen Schatzes’. GEOkompakt: Der Neandertaler 41: 40–9. Pääbo, Svante. Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Papagianni, Dimitra and Michael A. Morse. The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015. Scientific American. Scientific American 25 (4), Special Collector’s Edition (Autumn 2016): passim.

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On Thinking at the End of the World: Derrida, Lyotard, Bataille1 Michael Lewis

The end of thought Is it possible to think the end of thought? Can writing describe its own obliteration? Can they do so without idealizing or otherwise falsifying that end by imagining a new form of thought that would survive the death of thought, or a mark left by the effacement of all traces? This is to wonder, once again, if one can think beyond the Hegelian Aufhebung or sublation, a task which, since Jacques Derrida’s intervention, we have come to associate with the work of Georges Bataille. It is our hypothesis that Bataille’s notion of a sovereign selfconsciousness capable of thinking pure loss without sublation or remainder will allow us to make sense of the notion of extinction which has recently become one of philosophy’s central concerns, as it attempts to think in a new way the problems of accessing the radical other of thought. We shall examine the concept of an absolute destruction of certain activities almost indissociable from humanity itself – writing, thinking – in Jacques Derrida’s work on nuclear catastrophe, Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the death of the sun, the speculative realism of Ray Brassier and Quentin Meillassoux, and Mladen Dolar’s notion of an apocalypse at the beginning of thought, as described in G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic, which may fruitfully be juxtaposed with Meillassoux’s notion of an impossibility of thought at the beginning of the universe, in the age of the ‘arche-fossil’, in an attempt to present Bataille’s project in The Accursed Share as a solution to the problem of thinking the end of thought.

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The ambiguity of apocalypse We stand between two notions of the apocalypse: the final manifestation of a truth upon whose eclipse history was premised and towards which it was thereby destined, and the complete eradication of all being, appearing, and thinking. Today, it is as if the old sun is beginning to burn itself out, and it is as if the word ‘apocalypse’ is shifting from its biblical sense of revelation in the perspective of the final judgement, to the nihilistic sense dramatized by Nietzsche in the parable of the Madman: the end of all illumination, as life and thought, together with the archived traces they have built up face the unprecedented possibility of eradication without remainder. Our age is perhaps already tilting towards nihilism, rendering it timely to ask: will there be some record of the obliteration of all records, some apparition of the disappearance of all appearance, some ideal sublation or the written trace which constitutes the material form of memory? Will there be some memorial to humankind, or will it be altogether forgotten?

The ambiguity of the sun This ambiguity of apocalypse stems from an ambiguity at the heart of illumination itself. The sun as source of light is too bright to be seen.2 Martin Heidegger expressed this insight by saying that being is not itself a being. In comparison with the entities which its light allows us to discern, being is nothing, darkness or void: it is less than beings. This nothing oscillates between the pure non-existence that natural science sees bordering the totality of entities, and the event of manifestation, a sub-representational individuating process which explains the appearance of individual entities themselves. To take the former route was to end up in nihilism. While for Heidegger, this nihilistic misunderstanding of the nothing is a possibility unique to our epoch, for Jacques Derrida, philosophy has known from the beginning that the possibility of eclipse is an eternal accompaniment to the very possibility of light.3 And yet there is something unprecedented in our age, even for Derrida: we face the prospect of the sun burning itself out for good, scorching the earth, or a human fire brighter even than the sun wresting sight from our eyes, or leaving nothing of us save our shadow, blazed in stone, left behind as a sign that will never be read.



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On death as real Whichever way it comes, the very possibility of all philosophy, all logos, and all humanity, and even all life, is today threatened with annihilation, one so complete that all records of the event will be obliterated. It is an erasure that will not leave a trace, which might never be sublated, a negation philosophers have perhaps never been able to envisage: we face a new end of philosophy and a new end of man; it is demanded of us that we confront a genuinely real event, and experience an absolute death. Death is real, and it may stand as a metonym of the real or the event in general; the question posed to philosophy is whether it is possible to think the real, or whether, in the Hegelian fashion that itself seems to return like the living dead, one must imagine a future beyond the event, in the hands of a survivor, and, by means of this anticipation, to encompass the event in thought.4 This is to risk idealizing the real unjustifiably for it does not allow for the possibility that this real might have no thought within it, no commensurability with thought and no access for thought, as materialism suggests, or that thought might one day absolutely cease to be. The most unavoidable way to confront thought with its other, with a real and not an idealized event, is to confront it with the death of thought, with a situation in which there is no thought, such as the end of the world. In other words, we are dealing with a negation of all things, a negation of thought and being, but one which is not outlived by any survivor or any surviving form of thought that would thereby sublate it and reduce the trauma of that event. By means of an examination of Derrida’s, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’,5 Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘Can Thought Go On Without a Body?’6 and Bataille’s Accursed Share,7 we shall attempt to see how thought might begin to approach this thoughtless material real, a real that may be achieved by means of a negation more total than any envisaged by Hegelianism.8

Derrida: Thinking and being in light of nuclear war In ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, Derrida’s ultimate question might be said to be: how should nuclear war affect our understanding of thought and being? What kind of thought, if any, is capable of measuring up to the nuclear age and the end of all things, which Derrida understands to mean the eradication of all human records, the razing of the entire historical archive and all trace of its destruction?9

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For Derrida, being is traditionally understood along the lines of Plato’s sun, as a transcendental signified fully self-present and self-grounding, which conditions a web of traces that succeed only inadequately in recording it because they introduce absence, difference and delay into the immediate self-relation of presence. Derrida shows how the curious referent of nuclear war, when the latter is understood as the wiping out of all differential traces, forces us to replace this Being with a referent more real than being, but one that would be an absence more radical than anything philosophy has ever been able to think, and one which, since its existence depends wholly upon the signifier, will be more like the referents of a piece of literature than those of philosophy.10 In parallel with a rethinking of being, Derrida’s essay also traces a history of logic which lays the complex foundations for deconstructive thinking itself: Kantian critique, Hegelian absolute knowledge and the Heideggerian question of being, all situated within a certain Christian structure, for the text involves seven letters, like those sent by St John, and its first and last words echo Genesis and Apocalypse: ‘In the beginning […] John.’ In this way the essay keeps the two senses of apocalypse, revelation and nihilism, tightly bound. And at the end of all this, Derrida meets Bataille.

Nuclear war has not taken place Our thinking of being is so affected by nuclear war as a consequence of two features which the latter may be said to possess when it is understood as the referent of a discourse: 1) it is always delayed, it will not yet have happened; and 2) its only existence is rhetorical or textual. It is ‘a phenomenon whose essential feature is that it is fabulously textual’,11 ‘a fable’.12 It depends upon ‘structures of information and communication […] of codes and graphic decoding’, but also ‘to the extent that, for the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it’.13 Because of nuclear war’s perpetual postponement, it can exist only as the referent of a certain discourse which speculates about it, and this gives nuclear war an existence akin to the referent of literature. Literature is characterized as ‘producing and then harbouring its own referent’.14 ‘[N]uclear war is the only possible referent of any discourse and any experience that would share their condition with that of literature.’15 But Derrida makes an important specification here, that the archive which is supposedly to be destroyed in nuclear war is ‘the juridico-literary archive’ and that this is ‘[n]ot necessarily the destruction of



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humanity, of the human habitat, or even of other discourses […]; these latter might reconstitute their living process and their archive, at least to the extent that the structure of this archive (that of a nonliterary memory) structurally implies reference to a real referent external to the archive itself ’,16 while ‘literature produces its referent as a fictive or fabulous referent that in itself depends on the possibility of archivisation and that in itself is constituted by the act of archivisation’.17 Derrida describes this as ‘the performative character of its relation to the referent’.18 As a consequence of its kinship with literature, nuclear war tells us something important about textuality itself, and its supposedly secondary place in relation to its signified and referent. Because nuclear war is an event which erases all traces along with the possibility of reading them, as long as we are writing and reading such traces, the event signified cannot yet have taken place. So nuclear war is a referent which is by definition absent, and thus it is a signified that does not and cannot pre-exist the text which conjures it up. And far from being an event that would finally fulfil the signification of the text itself, or at least provide an illumination that would do away with the need for such a text, this particular referent would be the erasure of all textuality and the complete occlusion of sense and revelation.19 Derrida speaks of ‘the presence of this present [today] in and through this fabulous textuality’.20 ‘“Reality”, let’s say the general institution of the nuclear age, is constructed by the fable, on the basis of an event that has never happened’.21 So the possible destruction of all textuality might allow us to see that the very notion of a full presence apart from textuality is a mirage, not least because the end of all textuality occurs in a conflagration that leaves no remains, and only absence. The unique nature of this kind of war, as always deferred, allows us to see the phantasmatic status of the ‘always already’, the transcendental presence that we have always been encouraged to see outside of the text, particularly as philosophers. More precisely, a pure presence (outside the text) and a pure absence (of any text) are both fantasies. What deconstruction shows is that each of presence and absence, along with the very opposition between them, are derived from textuality and hence not strictly originary. This is why things are not quite so simple as they would be if the relation between condition and conditioned had simply been reversed here. For Derrida says that, in turn, language is itself conditioned by the referent, the very referent which it was said to have created. We speak of ‘a total nuclear war, which, as a hypothesis, or, if you prefer, as a phantasm, conditions every discourse and all strategies’.22

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This is the paradox of transcendental conditioning on Derrida’s account and it sheds light on one of the essay’s most prominent motifs, to the effect that a moment of absolute ending allows one properly to think the beginning, even to the extent of making that beginning possible. Derrida begins his text with the curious statement: ‘In the beginning there will have been speed [Au commencement, il y aura eu la vitesse].’23 This refers, in part, to the speed of an ever-accelerating nuclear arms race, a progression towards the potential destruction of the archive, an event which in its impending makes it possible to think that very archive itself, including the very discourse which creates the referent of destruction, which discourse the event itself in turn makes possible – this is the mutually conditioning relation in which the literary text and the literary referent are entwined.

Derrida on Bataille To clarify his own position on the fictional status of nuclear war and the way in which language cushions us from the traumatic real of the event, Derrida turns to Hegel and Bataille, to examine the question of survival, which is to say, sublation. On Bataille’s account, according to Derrida, in the master and slave’s struggle to the death, the master survives death, and is capable of risking his own death because he sees in himself something worth more than natural life, which would be freedom and spirit. And yet, as Bataille pointed out, he must still naturally live in order to enjoy this freedom, to profit from the death he faced up to. A memorial stone with his name on it will not be enough; he must himself live on naturally in order to himself bear the name: ‘That is what made Bataille laugh: the master had to keep living in order to cash in on and enjoy the benefits of death endured […]. Bataille was laughing, in sum, at the name’.24 As we shall see, Bataille will in the end allow us to conceive a way of thinking the disaster without surviving it. In the end, for Derrida, we might say that nuclear war is revelatory, and what it reveals is the nature of the name, of language. If language itself is what carries out revelation, then what is revealed here is nothing but revelation itself, and the revelatory capacity of language which was once thought to be subsequent to a prior and wordless revelation: ‘End and Revelation of the Name. That is the Apocalypse’.25 This revelation can in the end take place because the nuclear war has not yet happened. It still has time to bestow insights upon us. Thus we remain within



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an understanding of catastrophe and death which allows it to be revelatory, which draws some profit from it in the form of revelation, which sublates that reality. This indeed is possible with nuclear war. And yet this is not so with all catastrophes. There is another catastrophe of a different nature, which Jean-François Lyotard fastens upon: it is the death of the sun. And, unlike nuclear war, this event is neither uncertain nor a fictional invention of human artifice and language, and hence it will have a different outcome when it comes to ‘apocalypse’. In Derrida’s terms, the death of the sun comes under the heading not of a ‘signified referent’ but a ‘real referent’. Here we have a disaster which outstrips Derrida’s, for even those natural scientific discourses which cluster around a real referent will not recover from this inferno. All forms of writing, all discourse and all thought will be deprived of their very possibility.

Lyotard’s apocalypse: The sun Lyotard’s essay, ‘Can Thought Go On Without a Body?’, given as a talk in 1986 and elaborated in 1987, is concerned even more explicitly than Derrida’s with a limit beyond which thought cannot think, and Lyotard at least opens up the possibility of an event which cannot be sublated and take on the function of manifestation which Derrida seems ultimately to bestow upon his apocalypse. With Derrida’s nuclear war we were dealing with a textualized fantasy, which may or may not happen. But in the case of the solar catastrophe, what we are confronted with is not an artificial fantasy, uncertain or incalculable; we are dealing with a real referent that is the subject of natural scientific discourse, an event entirely ‘natural’, absolutely certain, ‘ineluctable’, and precisely calculable:26 ‘While we talk, the sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years […]. With the sun’s death your insoluble questions will be done with too.’27 Lyotard contrasts this annihilation with the death of man in the Hegelian sense, which will always involve a certain survival of man and hence the endurance of thought. For Lyotard this death is one which will remain incomplete, a determinate negation that is in fact a survival or resurrection, ‘dead in human terms, [but] still capable of being sublated in thought’,28 and not a real death that would be irreversible and absolute. The death of the earthly horizon and bodily support of thought ‘is enough to render null and void your anticipation of a world after the explosion. Political science-fiction novels depict the cold desert of our human world after nuclear war. The solar explosion won’t be

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due to human war. It won’t leave behind it a devastated human world […] with […] at least a single survivor, someone to […] write it down.’29 The death of the sun, and of the living bodies that it nourishes, constitutes a limit which thought cannot think beyond. Here Lyotard opposes Hegel’s notion of a limit as something the beyond of which must be available to us if we are to draw it at all, which implies that the line separating us from our other, the finite from the infinite, is sublated or overcome: ‘this is true of limits belonging to thought. But after the sun’s death there won’t be a thought to know that its death took place.’30 Thus this moment of solar catastrophe restores a bad infinite Hegel thought he could overcome, the infinity that remains absolutely distinct from the finite; more precisely, the true infinite and the sublation of limits characterize only thought, not thought’s irreparable eradication. For Lyotard, the extermination of thought is a limit Hegelian dialectics can only betray, a real event or other of thought, which it can only idealize. Indeed, Lyotard goes on to say: ‘There’s no sublation or deferral if nothing survives.’31 ‘Human death is included in the life of the human mind. Solar death implies an irreparably exclusive disjunction between death and thought: if there’s death, then there’s no thought. Negation without remainder.’32

Lyotard’s two voices, avoiding disaster Lyotard makes it clear that to attempt to think how thought can go on even in the absence of a sun, earth and body is precisely to try and imagine how thought can survive the disaster: ‘Thought without a body is the prerequisite for thinking of the death of all bodies, solar or terrestrial, and of the death of thoughts that are inseparable from those bodies.’33 Lyotard’s essay is divided into two voices, describing two opposed positions, described by the sexuated terms ‘HE’ and ‘SHE’. Here, ‘HE’ is speaking, and addresses a philosopher recognizably influenced by the French pedagogic tradition of les trois hâches, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, which quite explicitly includes Derrida himself.34 Lyotard goes on to describe two particular ways – broadly assigned to SHE and HE respectively, despite the latter broaching the topic of solar death in the first place – of refusing to face up to the absoluteness of the event: ‘this event is ineluctable. So either you don’t concern yourself with it – and remain in the life of the mind and in earthly phenomenality [SHE] […]. Or else you try to anticipate the disaster and fend it off [HE].’35 And this latter means ‘simulating conditions of life and thought to make thinking remain materially possible after the change in the condition of matter that’s the disaster’,



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a task which techno-science had already begun to pursue.36 ‘So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as: how to provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth. [/] That is: how to make thought without a body possible.’37 That Lyotard explicitly links this eponymous notion with HE’s position might suggest that this is the direction Lyotard himself would take. But in fact certain of SHE’s statements to do with the necessity that thought be capable of passively awaiting an event, which a computer is supposed to be unable to do, seem equally reminiscent of certain aspects of Lyotard’s own work.38 In the end, Lyotard’s thoughts on the matter are left indefinite and in truth are less important than the question his essay opens up: what would a philosophy be which did not try to fend off the disaster? Let us then understand Lyotard as urging us to think beyond both options presented by the essay itself, and to think a limit beyond which thought cannot go, to consider the difficulty of thinking the moment at which thought terminates: this is not nuclear war, however total, as Derrida has demonstrated; it is the death of the sun. Can thought go along with its own destitution and ruin? An understanding of how this might be so is what we shall suggest is offered to us by the thought of Georges Bataille.

From restricted to general economy One might think the passage from Derrida, to Lyotard, to Bataille as a passage from a relatively restricted economy to gradually more general ones. Derrida takes an absolute disaster to be the effacement of (almost) all material remnants of humanity; Lyotard thinks the end of absolutely all traces and all possibility of life and thought. But there is still a restriction in Lyotard’s way of posing the problem. It remains perhaps too close to Platonic philosophy in assuming that there is only one sun, and when it is extinguished all phenomenality will have quit the cosmos: one sun and one planet harbouring sentient life. In this respect, Lyotard’s text follows Nietzsche’s breathtaking parable in ‘Of Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ in which the sun turns cold and consciousness is revealed in all its transience and arbitrariness.39 On this account, when the unique sun dies, all possibility of generating new energy – and expending it – would have vanished from the universe. This is to say that Lyotard is thinking not of an economy in which there would be surplus and expenditure, a ‘general economy’ in Bataille’s terms,

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but of a catastrophic event that would eliminate all economy, production and consumption, and issue only in heat-death. If one resituates the sun within the galaxy and a universe that may be presumed to include innumerable planets upon which sentient life receives sunlight, one is transposing this restricted economy into a more general economy in which the death of one sun is only a minor event, which does not put an end to all economy but only to a certain restricted economy, perhaps a philosophical economy which from Plato to Nietzsche remained convinced that there was but one source of illumination. Bataille directs our thinking to the cosmos, a cosmos in which we may think of the death of the sun and the incineration of the earth and its archives in the context of a profusion of suns, in a process of general explosion and extinction. We should read the death of the sun and the countless supernovae currently illuminating the darkest corners of the universe as necessary moments of waste, sacrifices of accursed planets which have reached the limits of their growth and must in one final orgiastic moment of brilliance pass into darkness. Nevertheless, Lyotard’s text will have given our reading of Bataille a novel inflection, since Bataille himself is largely concerned with a single sun, and the surplus energy it imparts, which is ultimately wasted. To extend this notion, we shall think instead of the wasting of the sun itself. In this way, Bataille’s work would allow us to escape from our planet and its inhabitants, without leaving thought behind altogether. It would rather allow us to conceive of a thought which would be capable of thinking the disaster in a non-Hegelian fashion. Bataille’s thought is a thought of pure non-utilitarian waste, which is associated with an attitude he describes as ‘sovereign’,40 unsubordinated to the future, to accumulation, profit and purpose. The ultimate wastage of philosophical thought as productive dialectical memorialization of a real event is the death of the sun, literally and as metaphor. This absolute negation or disaster is one in which there is no survival, not even an imaginary one. And Bataille will present us with a picture of thought that is capable of thinking this loss. What Bataille gives us is a theory of self-consciousness that allows us to think the real event of extinction or disaster without idealization, a consciousness that thinks along with the destruction of all objects, which thinks – or indeed carries out – loss or expenditure itself, without allowing itself to subordinate that process to some future survival beyond the disaster: a sovereign consciousness that would be prepared to lose itself as well as the sun with the energy of which a more servile kind of thought was nourished.41



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Bataille: Consciousness without an object At stake in all of these discourses on the end of the world has been the ability of consciousness to think a real event of novelty, in the form of the destruction of thought, without idealization or the least material remnant. In conclusion, I want to show how Bataille might be read as offering us a conception of human consciousness which would be possessed of this ability.42 To approach this topic, it is instructive to contrast Bataille’s sovereign attitude towards death with Heidegger’s notion of anxiety. For Heidegger, anxiety is associated with the individual and the future, and indeed the most acute moment of individuality, the futural possibility of the individual’s own death.43 Thus anxiety makes it clear that Heidegger’s understanding of death is one in which the subject remains resolutely alive, but in a more authentic form, which is to say at a point of maximal individuation, as if Heidegger were still ultimately caught up in Epicurus’s vision of death as something which cannot be experienced, since we cannot be there when it is.44 In opposition to Heidegger, Bataille wishes to think death as a real moment of vanishing, a pure irrecuperable loss which does not leave anything in reserve, and which leaves behind no trace. A sovereign life faced with death will not save anything up for the future. ‘Of all conceivable luxuries, death, in its fatal and inexorable form, is undoubtedly the most costly.’45 In death, all accumulation will be wasted, for Bataille, just as in sexuality and eating understood as pure non-purposive consumption.46 And Bataille attempts to think a consciousness that would be capable of experiencing this loss – a sovereign self-consciousness, which Bataille associates specifically with the human being, and with the final stage of the transition from the animal to the human.47 Bataille describes this as a consciousness that would not be a consciousness of any finite, determinate object, but rather a consciousness of nothing. This would be a consciousness that goes against its most spontaneous tendency, to objectivize, to follow the gesture of a restricted economy, and to accumulate or produce without consumption, to maintain the integrity of an individuated entity: consciousness tries to grasp some object of acquisition, something [quelque chose], not the nothing [le rien] of pure expenditure. It is a question of arriving at the moment when consciousness will cease to be a consciousness of something; in other words, of becoming conscious of the decisive meaning of an instant in which increase (the acquisition of something) will resolve [itself] into expenditure; and

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this will be precisely self-consciousness, that is, a consciousness that henceforth has nothing as its object [rien pour objet].48

And here Bataille appends a footnote: ‘Nothing but pure interiority, which is not a thing [une chose].’49 This would be a consciousness that, contrary to phenomenology, does not possess intentionality: its self-relation does not need to pass by way of a relation to an outside. Hence, Bataille describes this consciousness as ‘intimate’, and indeed as self-consciousness rather than mere consciousness, of which the former would be the ultimate development: ‘[S]elf-consciousness is essentially the full possession of intimacy’, and intimacy is precisely ‘the component most purely opposed to things [l’élément le plus purement opposé à la chose]’.50

Meillassoux’s ancestral witness To turn this reading of Bataille in the direction we desire, we must here make a detour through the work of Mladen Dolar and Quentin Meillassoux. Let us first approach Meillassoux. We shall not concern ourselves so much with the central pillars of Meillassoux’s thought, but remain rather on the margins. For our purposes, the most important notion Meillassoux introduces is that of an explosion at the beginning of the universe and the impossibility of any form of life and thought witnessing such an event, thus putting in question all ‘correlationist’ attempts to render intelligible natural scientific statements about the birth of the universe and those moments prior to living sentience whose remnants Meillassoux calls ‘the arche-fossil’ (archifossile).51 At a certain point, Meillassoux invokes a possible objection to his anticorrelationist discourse, before immediately disavowing it: it is that of an eternally all-seeing ‘ancestral witness’ (Témoin ancestral), a divine figure capable of witnessing everything, even events at the very beginning – and end – of the universe, thus ensuring that even those moments which could never be given to a human observer are nevertheless given.52 Such a hypothesis would make it possible to restore the ‘correlationist’ equation between being and givenness, being and phenomenality, allowing us to say once again that to be is to be perceived.53 Now in fact, just such a figure is to be found at the beginning of Hegel’s Science of Logic, which as a whole is said to comprise ‘the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind’.54



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In a reading of Hegel radically distinct from Bataille’s, Mladen Dolar presents a reading of this divine mind in the absence of finite determinate entities that renders Meillassoux’s hypothetical objection far more difficult to dismiss.

On thinking without objects: Mladen Dolar Mladen Dolar, along with the other members of the Slovenian school, have provided us with a rich and immensely progressive reading of Hegel that stands in direct contrast with the reading of Alexandre Kojève which Bataille inherited and which we have perhaps been dealing with all along. Like Meillassoux, Dolar attempts to think an apocalypse at the very beginning of thought, which he opposes to the apocalypse that, for Derrida among others, looms only at the end of all things: ‘My proposal would be to consider not the apocalypse that stands as the impending catastrophe at the end, but rather the universal ruin that conditions and frames the beginning, inaugurating thought and being.’55 At the beginning of the Science of Logic, Hegel attempts to show how thought might arrive at pure being (Sein) without any further determinations, being which has not yet assumed the form of determinate individuated beings. He compares this to a Stoic thinker who remains undaunted even as the world around him is brought to ruin. It is an apocalypse of all finite determinate entities. And yet thought is still capable of thinking even in this situation, and indeed it comes into its own for the very first time in this apocalyptic gesture, as it finds itself faced with ‘pure being’. Hegel, or rather the divine thinking in question, survives the apocalyptic reduction of all finite entities and is thereby able to pronounce the immortal syntagm, ‘being, pure being – without any further determination’.56 At the very beginning of thinking, we witness both an apocalypse and its survival. Is this just another failure to think the true nature of annihilation? What is more important is that something else is also taking place here: Hegel is attempting to think the presence of thought at a moment of disaster, and in this moment, thought is given a different interpretation to the accumulative dialectical logic that will predominate later.57 This is a divine thought that is capable of thinking a pure vanishing – in this case the slipping away of all determination. Thought attains the state already broached at the inauguration of philosophy by Parmenides, which is that of a pure thought confronting, or rather inhabiting, a pure being, which will show itself precisely because of its lack of determinate properties to be the same as nothing. We have a consciousness without objects,

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and one which is there at the beginning of the world, witnessing an apocalypse, just as Meillassoux had ruled out. Here Hegel arrives at a point of almost infinite proximity to Bataille, with two crucial differences: in Hegel, the destruction is not complete and there is indeed a survivor still around to profit from the ruination, and while Hegel attributes the pure thinking described in the Logic to God, Bataille assigns that privilege to the human being. Dolar allows us to discern in Hegel a theological version of what we take to be Bataille’s understanding of sovereign thought. At the very least, it provides us with a way to render intelligible Bataille’s hypothesis.

Bataille’s human thinking Bataille’s Accursed Share expounds an economy of expenditure, the consumption of a surplus that is present at all levels of organic life. We might think of the destruction of the human archive, of all organic life, and, still more fundamentally, the death of the sun itself as the ultimate source of energy, as ever more extreme forms of this expenditure. So it would not simply be those entities which are fed by the energy of the sun that would be expended, but the very source of life itself. Bataille speaks of ‘one crucially important fact: Solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development. […] [T]he sun, which dispenses energy – wealth – without any return.’58 The sun is thus the cause of the existence of that surplus the consumption of which is Bataille’s topic: ‘Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe’.59 The death of the sun, the guiding metaphor of philosophical thought, is akin to a drying up of the source, a return to a prior moment of being, which is so close to non-being as to be indistinguishable from it, a moment in which being may not be identified with phenomenality. To it would correspond a twilight thinking that would effectively be the thought of nothing, since the individuation allowed by the sun’s light is no longer in effect. If Bataille’s selfconsciousness is a consciousness without objects, it is because it attempts to think an expenditure that would be the disintegration of individuality, the cracking open of wounds, rendered vulnerable to incursion, the individual’s once strict boundaries now porous. Sovereign self-consciousness would be a thinking of the loss of finite determinate objects. We need only transport Dolar’s Hegelian consciousness to the



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end of the world and to see that it belongs not to God but to a sovereign human being, endowed with a consciousness that would finally have cast off its servility to a future it would live to see.60 Thus in Bataille, the self-consciousness at stake will have been made finite and restored to a resolutely immanent and non-theological context. It will also have lost all concern for its survival. The endurance of the sovereign is not the survival of an undaunted Stoic, indifferent to the falling world around him. It is a consciousness that does not think primarily of survival when faced with the wastage of all things, and by means of this resolute shunning of the future in the name of the present and its irrevocable passing, Bataille’s thought is given an especial access to the real character of the event. It is a thought of perishing, corruption or passing away (phthora). Beyond Derrida and Lyotard, Bataille affords us a glimpse of how it might be possible to think a real event of novelty, without idealization, without anticipated survival or symbolic mourning; one simply has to rethink consciousness in the sovereign form of a relation to nothingness as the expenditure of every actual objectivity, without holding anything in reserve for the future, which in any case, as we know all too well today, cannot be relied upon to foster our survival. Perhaps the ultimate key which Bataille gives us in our attempt to think the end of thought at the end of the world is a form of consciousness which does not think beyond the disaster, surpassing it in the name of an imaginary ideal survival. By relinquishing this sublation, one might attain that way of thinking for which Lyotard’s essay on solar catastrophe opened the way. As Lyotard suggested, all previous attempts to approach this disaster failed to think it in all its catastrophic extremity, to really think the loss of thought. Bataille’s would be a thought that exceeds the thought of survival, and the survival of thought, to think a kind of self-consciousness that thinks along with its own loss, a consciousness of the fading of consciousness, fainting or blacking out, as Jean-Luc Nancy has it – a consciousness falling asleep: a consciousness which precisely thinks along with the destruction of all objects, which thinks loss or expenditure itself, without allowing itself to subordinate that process to some imagined future beyond the disaster; a sovereign, human consciousness that would be prepared to lose itself along with the rest of the world and the sun that is falling from the sky above it.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

This text was inspired partly by Mladen Dolar’s ‘Si fractus inlabatur orbis’, draft manuscript, quoted by kind permission of the author, lecture given at Villanova University in 2013, Ray Brassier’s ‘Solar Catastrophe: Lyotard, Freud, and the Death-Drive’. Philosophy Today 47 (4) (Winter 2003): 421–30, and Keith AnsellPearson’s Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. London: Routledge, 1997, as well as by conversations with Patrick Crogan in July 2015 on the anthropocene, along with a number of earlier conversations with Paul Davies, which juxtaposed a speculative realist notion of extinction with the text of Derrida engaged with here. Any number of other remarkable coincidences, including a reading group in Brighton on Quentin Meillassoux, went to shape the text. For all of these encounters I give thanks. Bataille was intrigued by this ambiguity from his very earliest writings: ‘If we describe the notion of the sun in the mind of one whose weak eyes compel him to emasculate it, that sun must be said to have the poetic meaning of mathematical serenity and spiritual elevation. If on the other hand one obstinately focuses on it, a certain madness is implied, and the notion changes meaning because it is no longer production that appears in light, but refuse or combustion.’ Georges Bataille, ‘Rotten Sun’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970, 57/231. Bataille describes this duality as ‘Icarian’: ‘the summit of elevation is in practice confused with a sudden fall of unheard-of violence. The myth of Icarus is particularly expressive from this point of view: it clearly splits the sun in two – the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus’s elevation, and the one that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got too close.’ Ibid., 58/232. Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982 [1972]. Hegel himself identifies sublation with survival: ‘[A]bstract negation [is] not the negation of consciousness, which sublates [aufhebt] in such a way that it preserves and maintains [aufbewahrt und erhält] what has been sublated and which thereby survives [überlebt] its having become sublated [sein Aufgehobenwerden, here in the sense of ‘to cancel’].’ G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, draft available online: http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenologyof-spirit-page.html (accessed 6 September 2015), para. 188. Sublation is what Hegel describes as ‘determinate negation’, and we should note at the outset Hegel’s crucial distinction between two forms of negation in order to understand



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something of Bataille’s relation with Hegel, and hence this essay’s entire relation with Hegelian sublation, understood as the survival of the event: these two negations are abstract negation and determinate negation. These negations characterize pre- and non-dialectical manners of thought and dialectical philosophy, respectively.   For Hegel, the difference between the two lies in their attitude to contradiction. For a philosophy of abstract negation, the only thing revealed by a contradiction is the falsity of a premise; hence the only result of a contradiction, or negation, is a reductio ad absurdum: a negation of the premise which erases it without leaving a single trace of what it negated. One simply starts again and forgets the dead-end along which one was previously led.   For a thought of dialectical negation, like Hegel’s own, reason cannot simply allow a contradiction to stand, but nor must it see in it merely a sign of irredeemable error. Contradiction must be seen as the motivation for progress, and the next stage in that progress must be the determinate negation of that which preceded it, which is only ever partially in error, and hence not to be entirely rejected – which is to say, abstractly negated – but rather taken as the first stage in a process of Bildung or formative and cumulative education: a ‘true infinite’ of development, which characterizes history and its spirit as well as dialectical Reason, as opposed to the ‘bad infinite’ of mechanical repetition, the endless unchanging cycle of natural processes, along with the Understanding. Hegel speaks of determinate negation in the following way: ‘this nothingness is only the determinate shape of the nothingness from which it itself has resulted. However, it is only the nothingness which is taken as the nothingness of that from which it emerges which is in fact the true result. That nothingness is itself thereby determinate and thereby has a content’ (Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 79). Both negations remain, in the end, logical. But they embody two different understandings of logic. We see the two understandings unfolded in the difference between the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy today, and, according to Adorno, between dialectical thought and post-Hegelian French philosophy.   But Bataille sought another form of negation, and indeed he saw the need to postulate another form of energy behind the forward march of the dialectic, a new and broader economy that would encompass even the gigantic encyclopaedia of Hegel. The two are bound as one since the energy that allows productive work to take place relies on a negation more vast than even the abstract negation of the logicians: a non-logical negation.   Bataille effectively asked after something which he took Hegel to have neglected: what energy drives the dialectic along? And what if this energy did not engender productive work and remembering, but were wasted unproductively, and everything was forgotten?

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  Here, Bataille stands in the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach. For Feuerbach, the beginning of Hegel’s philosophy is not without presuppositions as it claims to be, since it presupposes philosophy itself. Dialectic happens only if we presuppose that it is better for there to be philosophy and rationality, otherwise the dialectic would never begin to move. In other words, the Logic presupposes that there will be development, Aufhebung, in so far as this means a certain retention of what has gone before. Cf. ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi. New York: Doubleday, 1972 [1839].   To rescue Hegel from this accusation of neglect, Frank Ruda (‘Hegel’s First Words’. Problemi (2013): 29–82 and Mladen Dolar, ‘Si fractus’, 2), demonstrate that Hegel in fact identifies the source of the progression of the dialectic in a certain decision or resolution (Entschluss): the decision to think rather than not, to proceed in a ‘logical’ way, to remember what has passed before, rather than absolutely to forget. Nevertheless, even if Hegel can be rescued in that way, Bataille’s point stands, as this would make the driving force of the dialectic solely a rational one. 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives’ [1984], trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Volume 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007; original Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. 6 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Can Thought Go On Without a Body?’, trans. Bruce Boone and Lee Hildreth, in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Original L’inhumain: Causeries sur le temps. Paris: Galilée, 1988. 7 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1991; Georges Bataille, La part maudite. Paris: Minuit, 1967 [1st edn. 1949]; Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone, 1993; Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 8. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. 8 Beyond the imminence of extinction, and the possibility of moving beyond the impasse of the two kinds of negation and their respective philosophies, there are other reasons for returning to Bataille today, among them the fact noted by Stiegler and Žižek that what is most lacking in continental political thought today is ‘political economy’. Cf. Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity, 2010 [2009/10], 14ff. Bataille begins the first volume of The Accursed Share precisely by describing it as a book of political economy (The Accursed Share: Volume I, 9/49). 9 It is important to see why Derrida has to understand the destruction as complete,



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‘a total and remainderless [sans reste] destruction of the archive’ (‘No Apocalypse’, 400/377), ‘the total destruction of the archive’ (ibid., 402/379).   A partial destruction (‘of society, tradition, or culture’ [‘No Apocalypse’, 402/379]) can always be symbolized, give birth to literature, to writing, be mourned, remembered, sublated. Something or someone will survive. But here with the destruction of the very capacity for symbolization we are speaking of a death that can never be mourned, for there will be no one left capable of mourning it, of writing or reading symbols which can refer to an absent referent and thus sublimate or sublate the real of the event, rendering the absence into which presence passes less than absolute. In other words, partial deaths always involve possible survival, and so the event of death can be evaded in its irreversibility, the blow ‘cushion[ed]’ (ibid., 402/379). ‘They limit the “reality” of individual death to this extent, they soften or deaden it in the realm of the “symbolic”’ (ibid., 403/379).   With absolute death, on the other hand, death in itself, or the ‘second death’ that is the evaporation of the entire symbolic order, the occurrence is simply traumatic, without any literary or symbolic mediation to soften the impact by means of an anticipatory idealization. ‘The only absolutely real referent is thus of the scope of an absolute nuclear catastrophe that would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity, the very survivance […] at the heart of life’ (‘No Apocalypse’, 403/379). 10 Derrida himself states that the principal question of his text is that of being: ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ (‘No Apocalypse’, 406/383), and the conditions for asking such a question, particularly in an age in which this nothingness impends more acutely than ever, as the existence of anything teeters on the brink. Derrida describes this as ‘[a] nuclear question in that it seems ultimate, at the edge of the abyss – and destined to be better than ever heard and understood in the age called nuclear’ (ibid., 406/383). He suggests that going beyond the question of being, which Heidegger brought to its historical culmination, is perhaps what the nuclear age might allow us to do: ‘Can one go any further without overcoming the resistance of being […], or even of the ontological difference, or even of the question itself, the ultimate dignity of the question as first or last resource of thinking?’ (ibid., 406/383). 11 ‘No Apocalypse’, 393/369. 12 Ibid., 393/370. 13 Ibid., 393/369. 14 Ibid., 401/377. 15 Ibid., 402/379. 16 Ibid., 400/376. 17 Ibid., 400/376–7.

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Ibid., 402/378. This is what makes literature ‘precarious’ (ibid., 401/377), because it cannot be reconstituted once its text is lost. Literary discourse has no real anchoring point beyond itself on the basis of which it might be reconstructed later, as for instance a natural scientific description might; its referent is only created and sustained by the inscribed traces. Derrida describes this as ‘the performative character of its relation to the referent’ (ibid., 402/378). ‘The terrifying “reality” of nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent’ (ibid., 393/369). Thus literature is distinguished from a natural scientific discourse, which is anchored by a real referent beyond the inscribed traces of the discourse itself. 19 This is why the apocalypse which follows nuclear war will not be one of Hegelian absolute knowledge: ‘an absolute self-destructibility without apocalypse, without revelation of its own truth, without absolute knowledge’ (‘No Apocalypse’, 401/377). 20 ‘No Apocalypse’, 393/369. 21 Ibid., 394/370. 22 Ibid., 393/369. 23 Ibid., 387/363. 24 Ibid., 407/384. 25 Ibid., 408/385. 26 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 11/20. 27 Ibid., 8/17–18. 28 Ibid., 10/19. 29 Ibid., 10/19. 30 Ibid., 9/18. 31 Ibid., 10/19. That Lyotard’s target is Hegel, who in fact goes unnamed in the text itself, becomes clear when the former speaks of ‘death as the life of the mind [comme vie de l’esprit]’ (ibid., 10/19); we should read this ‘vie de l’esprit’ rather as ‘life of the spirit’ (Leben des Geistes), since it is an implicit citation of Hegel: ‘the life of spirit [das Leben des Geistes] is not a life that is fearing death and austerely saving itself from ruin; rather, it bears [erträgt] death calmly, and in death, it sustains [erhält] itself ’ (Hegel, Phenomenology, para. 32). The Hyppolite translation that Lyotard may have had in mind indeed translates ‘das Leben des Geistes’ as ‘la vie de l’esprit’. Jean Hyppolite, trans., G. W. F. Hegel, Phénoménologie de l’esprit: Tome I. Paris: Aubier/Montaigne, 1941, 29. 32 Lyotard, The Inhuman, 11/20. 33 Ibid., 14/22. 34 Lyotard refers to ‘[y]our philosophy of […] interminable difference, of the undecidable [de l’interminable différence, de l’indécidable]’ (The Inhuman, 13/22). 35 Ibid., 11/20.

36 37 38 39

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Ibid., 12/20. Ibid., 13/22. Cf. ibid., 18–19/26–8. ‘Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.’ ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ [1873], in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979, 79. Lyotard implicitly refers to the parable: ‘[I]n a remote corner of the cosmos […]’ (The Inhuman, 10/19). 40 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume III, 197ff./247ff. 41 Philosophy has at times attempted to think becoming (genesis), but has it ever come to think passing away (phthora)? 42 Bataille himself clearly recognizes that he is speaking of a consciousness that would be capable of thinking its other, the material real: ‘reason, being consciousness, is fully conscious only if it has for an object that which is not reducible to it’ (The Accursed Share I, 197 n.22/249 n.12). 43 Bataille speaks of  ‘the isolated, individual character of anguish’ (ibid., 39/80). 44 ‘Letter to Menoeceus’, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Books VI–X, trans. R. D. Hicks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925, 651. 45 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 34/74–5. 46 Ibid., 35/75. 47 Ibid., 190/248. 48 Ibid., 190/248. 49 Ibid., 197 n.21/248 n.11. 50 Ibid., 189/247. 51 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008. Original Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Paris: Seuil, 2006, 10/26.   Once again, the question seems to be whether thought can think the radical other of thought, and this question is posed by confronting thought with a situation in which it could not possibly have existed. More precisely, this is what we choose to take from Meillassoux’s text; perhaps in the end it is more a question of whether a certain construal of philosophy (including phenomenology, but not just that) is capable of understanding how statements – mostly from natural science – about such a situation can have a sense or meaning. This seems to be an exacerbation of the philosophical war we have traced from Derrida to Lyotard.

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Meillassoux dismisses the witness from the standpoint of both correlationist philosophy (‘we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’ (After Finitude, 5/18) and his own speculative thought (which posits precisely the ability of thought to think being outside of its correlation with thought, a being without givenness, or an ‘absolute’). From the standpoint of correlationism: ‘We do not know of any correlation that would be given elsewhere than in human beings, and we cannot get out of our own skins to discover whether it might be possible for such a disincarnation of the correlation to be true. Consequently, the hypothesis of the ancestral witness is illegitimate from the viewpoint of a strict correlationism’ (ibid., 11/27, emphasis added). Over a hundred pages later, Meillassoux returns to this ancestral witness, and from his own speculative standpoint or more precisely from the standpoint of a modern science which would be inherently speculative (cf. ibid., 117/162). Here he rejects not the possibility or ‘legitimacy’ of the witness, but its necessity, for speculative thought can make sense of the statements of natural science without invoking any such thing, even in a non-human form: ‘such statements [as the ancestral statement] certainly do not claim that there could be no relation to the world other than the human relation to the world – we cannot prove that dia-chronic events [events in which there is a ‘temporal discrepancy between thinking and being [un décalage temporel de la pensée et de l’être]’ (ibid., 112/155), ‘events that are anterior or ulterior to every terrestrial-relation-to-the-world [rapport-terrestre-au-monde]’ (ibid. 112/156), which is to say every human ability to experience them, if not every animal ability] could not have been the correlates of a non-human relation to their occurrence (i.e. we cannot prove that they were not witnessed by a god or by a living creature [qu’un dieu ou un vivant n’en ont pas été les témoins ancestraux])’ (ibid., 116/161). It is simply that ‘the “question of the witness” has become irrelevant to knowledge of the event. […] [Dia-chronic events] are described in such a way that they must be assumed to be adequate to what we manage to think about them [sont décrits de telle sorte qu’ils doivent être supposés adéquats à ce que nous parvenons à en penser], while the question as to whether or not they were witnessed becomes irrelevant to the adequacy [pertinence] of this description’ (ibid.).   Worthy of note in this later passage is the fact that Meillassoux introduces the animal alongside the god. The living being (le vivant) was earlier left out of consideration, an elision Meillassoux appears to attribute to the limits correlationism sets for itself, but which we might deploy in order to ask certain questions of his own account. Secondly, the return of the witness takes place precisely in the context of a generalization of the ‘ancestral statement’, which broadens its scope so as to include statements about the nature of the world after



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humanity, in the era that will follow ‘the extinction of the human species [la disparition de l’espèce humaine]’ (ibid., 112/155). 53 ‘[A]n “ancestral witness”, an attentive God [un “Témoin ancestral”, un Dieu attentif], who turns every event into a phenomenon’ (After Finitude, 11/27). ‘To think ancestrality is to think a world without thought – a world without the givenness [donation] of the world’ (ibid., 28/39). 54 G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1969 [1831], 50. 55 Dolar, ‘Si fractus’, 2. 56 ‘[T]he stoic hero is still around, albeit covered by ruins, and so is Hegel, to report on the (non)annihilation, and to state, equally undaunted, “being, pure being – without further determination” ’ (‘Si fractus’, 3). 57 Stephen Houlgate has insisted that there is no presupposition of dialectical logic in the opening of Hegel’s Logic, nor is it all-pervasive in Hegel’s encyclopaedia. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006, 32f. 58 Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume I, 28/67–8. 59 Ibid., 29/68. 60 Why shift context to the end of the world instead of its beginning? The answer revolves around Bataille’s subtle thought on the necessity for restricted economy and the reification of the nothing: the non-thing must be transformed into a thing in order for it to appear, according to the most spontaneous tendency of consciousness (The Accursed Share: Volume I, 193 n.25/114 n.9). All of which might be to say that one does indeed have to survive in order for these catastrophes to appear to us, and hence a certain fictionality remains necessary – Derrida will have been right, the sun had to have existed, and so did thought, which is ultimately why we have to transfer the context from the beginning of thought to its end: the death of the sun rather than the dawning of light.

Bibliography Ansell-Pearson, Keith. Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. London: Routledge, 1997. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1991. Original La part maudite. Paris: Minuit, 1967 [1st edn, 1949]. Bataille, Georges. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Bataille, Georges. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 8. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Bataille, Georges. ‘Rotten Sun’, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed.

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and trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Zone, 1993. Brassier, Ray. ‘Solar Catastrophe: Lyotard, Freud, and the Death-Drive’. Philosophy Today 47 (4) (Winter 2003): 421–30. Derrida, Jacques. ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982 [1972]. Derrida, Jacques. ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives’ [1984], trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Original Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Dolar, Mladen. ‘Si fractus inlabatur orbis’, draft manuscript, quoted by kind permission of the author, lecture given at Villanova University, 2013. Epicurus, ‘Letter to Menoeceus’, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Books VI–X, trans. R. D. Hicks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Feuerbach, Ludwig. ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi. New York: Doubleday, 1972 [1839]. Hegel, G. W. F. Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Tome I, trans. Jean Hyppolite. Paris: Aubier/ Montaigne, 1941. Hegel, G. W. F. The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1969 [1831]. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, draft available online: http://terrypinkard.weebly.com/phenomenology-of-spirit-page.html (accessed 6 September 2015). Houlgate, Stephen. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘Can Thought Go On Without a Body?’, trans. Bruce Boone and Lee Hildreth, in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Original L’inhumain: Causeries sur le temps. Paris: Galilée, 1988. Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008 [2006]. Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Paris: Seuil, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ [1873], in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979. Ruda, Frank. ‘Hegel’s First Words’. Problemi (2013): 29–82. Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross. Cambridge: Polity, 2010 [2009/10].

Index The letter f after an entry indicates a page that includes a figure ‘003580’ (Alvanson, Kristen) 26f–8 Aborigines, the 251 abstract negation 281 n.4 abundance 87–8 #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader (Mackay, Robin/Avanessian, Armen) 218 accelerationism 217–18, 220, 222–4, 225–6, 228, 229–30, 232 dromical 232–3 rationality 233 universal 232–3 Accursed Share, The (La Part Maudite) (Bataille, Georges) 2–4, 11, 33 capitalism 217, 226 eroticism 15 excess energy 17, 231 expenditure 78, 110 general economy 33 see also general economy history 24 luxury 90 materiality 75–6 paleo-anthropology 239, 246–7 peace 232 war 223, 232 Acéphale 221, 222 Actualité 124 aesthetics 39–40 aesthetics of elegance 129–30, 145 aesthetics of glory 137–8 aesthetics of sovereignty 130, 137 Agamben, Giorgio 1 biopolitics 16, 17 Akita, Masami 22 alcohol 166 allure 189, 200 alterity 110

Alvanson, Kristen ‘dESIRE Project, 003580’ 26f–8 ambiguity of culture 125 ambivalence 52, 54 Amrosini, Giorgio 181, 183 analogon 192 ancestral witness 276 And They Were Two in One And One In Two (Thacker, Eugene) 186–7 angoisse (anguish) 221 animality 156–68, 239, 253, 255 Kojève, Alexandre 161–2 women and 257 animals 156, 163, 167, 168, 179 consciousness 180–1 freedom 159–60 history 161 humans, in relation to 254–5 immanence 156–7, 159–60, 164, 168 negativity 167, 168 slaughter of 254 sovereignty 164–5 superiority 181 annihilation 76 ants 79 anxiety 167, 189, 275 apathy 43–4 apocalypse 266, 271–4, 277–9 see also nuclear war apophasis 190, 199–200 apophatic mysticism 184, 196 Arabic society 25–6 arché-fossils 186, 276 Arp, Hans 122–3 art 97, 119, 122–5, 138, 166 Aboriginal 251 capitalism 143 failure of 192 galleries 144

290 Index genocide and 258–9 human self-representation 255–7 humanity and 239, 247, 248, 252, 255 invention of 239, 251 ‘Man of Sorrows’ image 179 modern 142 prehistoric 166 see also cave paintings; sculpture sculpture 256–7 sovereign art 138–45 therapeutic art 144 transition from sacred to modern 138 value 125–6 atheism 197 attraction 59–60 autonomy 159, 160 see also freedom Avanessian, Armen/Mackay, Robin: #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader 218 Ayer, A. J. 181, 183 Badiou, Alain 142 Bagemihl, Bruce: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity 14 base materialism 106–7, 109 ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’ (Bataille, Georges) 106, 107, 108 base matter 109 Bataille, Georges 21 Accursed Share, The (La Part Maudite) see Accursed Share, The appearance 130 ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism’ 106, 107, 108 ‘Big Toe, The’ 75 Blue of Noon 22, 45 ‘Consequences of Nonknowledge, The’ 181 ‘Cradle of Humanity: The Vézère Valley, The’ 247, 255–6 Derrida, Jacques 270–1 L’Economie à la mesure de l’univers 33 ‘Economy Equal to the Universe’ 118 Eroticism: Death and Sensuality 14, 176 fiction 22 ‘Friendship of a Man and a Beast’ 164 ‘Frobenius Exhibit at the Salle Pleyel’ 245

Guilty 120, 121 Impossible, The 24 Inner Experience 185, 188 ‘Landscape’ see ‘Landscape’ ‘Language of Flowers, The’ 65 ‘Letter to X, lecturer on Hegel’ 162 life experiences 53 Limites du l’utile, Les 118 Literature and Evil 28–9 ‘Lure of the Game, The’ 179 ‘Materialism’ 107 Method of Meditation 73 necrophilia 21–2 ‘Notion of Expenditure, The’ 73–4, 80, 98, 99, 118 On Nietzsche: Will to Chance 120 ‘Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth of Art’ 257 ‘peintures politiques de Picasso, Les’ (Picasso’s Political Paintings) 125 philosophy of 173–4 politics 53, 95–106, 110 see also base materialism ‘Problem of the State, The’ 99 Psychological Structure of Fascism, The 98, 99–100, 108 ‘Rire’ 222 smoking 131 Socratic College 131, 145 Solar Anus, The 38, 75 Souveraineté, La (Sovereignty) (Bataille, Georges) 135, 160, 165, 232 Spain and 124 Story of the Eye 22, 38, 117, 118 Tears of Eros, The 78, 80, 123, 136, 163 Theory of Religion 13, 90, 157 Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, The 188, 190, 194 ‘Unliveable Earth’ 252 ‘Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade, The’ 76 Visions of Excess 197 ‘Visit to Lascaux, A’ 254 ‘War and the Philosophy of the Sacred’ 222–3 Bataille Reader, The (Botting Fred/Wilson, Scott) 15–16 Baudelaire, Charles: Fleurs du mal, Les 43 beasts 156

Index beauty 18 Beckershoff, Wilhelm 241 Beckett, Samuel 190, 191–2 Worstward Ho 191–2, 197–9 being 174, 176–7, 180–1, 185, 189, 266 Derrida, Jacques 268 Meillassoux, Quentin 276 Bèlkètre ‘Empli de Répulsion’ 194 ‘Soliliqua, Il’ 196 Benjamin, Walter 143 Bennington, Geoff 34 ‘Big Toe, The’ (Bataille, Georges) 75 binary oppositions 52, 155 Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (Bagemihl, Bruce) 14 biology, technology and 85–6 biomimicry 83–4 biopolitics 7 n.4, 16 biosphere 35 black metal 192–3, 197, 198–9, 200 vomit and 195–6 black metal theory 190, 193–4, 200 Blair, Jonathan 25 Blanchot, Maurice 37 Bloom, Sheila 25 Blue of Noon (Bataille, Georges) 22, 45 Bonaventure, Saint 209 n.106 Bonobo chimpanzees 14 Book of Privy Counseling, The 180 Botting Fred/Wilson, Scott: Bataille Reader, The 15–16 bourgeoisie, the 220 Brassier, Ray 140, 141, 196–7, 233 Braungart, Michael/McDonough, William Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things 84–8 ‘Hannover Principles, The’ 74 Upcycle, The 84, 86–7 Caillois, Roger 222–3 ‘Can Thought Go On Without a Body?’ (Lyotard, Jean-François) 271–4 Canzionere (Petrarch) 190 capitalism 12, 15, 24, 217–19, 227, 228 see also accelerationism art 143 casino capitalism 228–9, 230

291

Cybenetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) 226–7, 228, 233 destruction 217, 224, 225 eating and 20 excess 230–1, 234 Gilder, George 230 Islam 24 natural 84 profit 143 Protestantism 24 Puritanism 24 sex and 28 sovereign art 139 state, and the 225–6 Walmart 229 waste 219 Carpenter, John: Thing, The 186–7 casino capitalism 228–9, 230 catastrophe 28, 36, 231, 247, 271 see also apocalypse Land, Nick 221 Catherine of Siena, Saint 196 Catholicism 61, 62 Catton, William: Overshoot 79–80 cave paintings 239–40, 251–2 dating 260 n.4 gender 256–7 Lascaux 136, 164, 239, 245, 253, 254 physiognomy 255–6, 258 CCRU (Cybenetic Culture Research Unit) 226–7, 228, 233 cephalothorax 186, 187 chance 119–20 Chauvet cave paintings 260 n.4 Christ 179 Christianity 56, 62, 70 n.55, 138 eroticism 178–9 Land, Nick 222 mystical tradition 175, 176, 178, 180 cinema 143 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, Sigmund) 158 class 98 Clemens, Justin 196 closed-loop cycles of use 84 ‘Cold Rationality’ (Fisher, Mark) 233 College of Sociology 57–60, 173 colonialism 97 paleo-anthropology 241, 243, 251

292 Index communication 132 communion 221, 222 communism 160 community 221–2 consciousness 36–7, 191, 198, 249, 275–6, 279 ‘Consequences of Nonknowledge, The’ (Bataille, Georges) 181 conservation 119 consumption 77, 78–9, 89–90, 119 continuity 160, 168, 175–6 contradiction 181–90, 281 n. 4 correlationism 141, 191, 197, 286 n.52 ‘Cradle of Humanity: The Vézère Valley, The’ (Bataille, Georges) 247, 255–6 cradle to cradle design 84–8 Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (McDonough, William/Braungart, Michael) 84–8 Critchley, Simon 181–2 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant, Immanuel) 182 Critique Sociale, La 99, 117 culture 18 ambiguity of 125 moral 133 socialism 228 taboo 133 ‘Cunning Automata’ (Williams, Alex / Srnicek, Nick 229 cutting 120–2 Cybenetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) 226–7, 228 darkness 197, 200 De Botton, Alain 144 death 3, 174, 176–9 see also extinction apathy 43–4 communion with 222 community and 221 consciousness of 249 eroticism and 13, 21 exposure to 222 funeral rites 61, 163, 249, 251–2 joy before 91 laughter and 222 left pole of the sacred 61–3 life and 63

Nancy, Jean-Luc 222 Neanderthal humanity 249, 251–2 obesity and 18 as real 267 reality and 63 sovereignty 275 of the sun 271–4, 278 survival 270 of thinking 197 decomposition 43–4, 46 democracy 97–8, 102 depth 44–5 Derrida, Jacques 195, 266, 273 Bataille, Georges 270 ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ 267–8 design 74 see also sustainable design cradle to cradle design 84–8 nature and 82 desire 76–7 ‘dESIRE Project’ (Alvanson, Kristen) 26f–8 desublimation 39 determinate negation 281 n.4 diversity 52, 87 divine, the 185 Documents 39, 106, 117 Dolar, Mladen 277–8 dromical accelerationism 232–3 drugs 166 drunkenness 166, 168 dualism 52, 108–9 dualist materialism 155–6 durability 87–8 duration 63 Durkheim, Emile 51, 56 Elementary Forms of Religious Life 52, 53–4, 103 dynamic peace 224–5 earth, the 75 eating 17–18 eroticism and 18–20 Eckhart, Meister 176, 180, 189 L’Economie à la mesure de l’univers (Bataille, Georges) 33 economy, the 12 see also general economy; restricted economy nature and 33–4 of the noumenal 183

Index of the phenomenal 183 service and flow economy 84 sovereign economy 125 ‘Economy Equal to the Universe’ (Bataille, Georges) 118 efficiency 86 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte, The (Marx, Karl) 101 Einstein, Carl 122, 126 elegance 129–30, 131, 145 smoking and 131, 134 Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim, Emile) 52, 53–4, 103 Eliade, Mircea: Sacred and the Profane, The 68 n.15 Éluard, Paul 196 ‘Empli de Répulsion’ (Bèlkètre) 193–4 energy 74, 278 excess 17–18, 35, 73, 231, 244 see also loss; waste Ennis, Paul J. 186, 197 environment see also sustainability damage to 79–80 ephemeralization 81–3 Eruigena, John Scotus 180 eroticism 12–16, 123, 160, 174 curse on 27–8 death and 13, 21 eating and 18–20 God 178–9 Japan 21 Land, Nick 220 prehistoric art 256–8 solitude 21 technology 21–4 veils 26f–8 Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (Bataille, Georges) 14, 176 err 176 Eruigena, John Scotus 180 Esposito, Roberto 1 Essay on the Gift (Maus, Marcel) 54 ethics 35–6 Evagrius Ponticus 175 evil 65 excess 219, 220–1, 226, 231, 233 see also loss; waste capitalism 230–1, 234 energy 17–18, 35, 73, 231, 244

293

Land, Nick 220–1 war and 223, 224 exchange value 125 expenditure 33, 35–7, 77–80, 89–90, 119 cut and 122 excess 220 extinction and 278 festival 252–3 heterogeneity 110 Land, Nick 220 nonproductive 118 phenomena of 117 sacrifice 245 as sovereign economy 118 value of 125–6 extinction 224, 265, 267 see also apocalypse Neanderthal 245, 246, 250–1, 252–3, 258–60 nuclear war 267–71 thought 271–3 facticity 173, 174, 196 Fanged Noumena (Land, Nick) 218 Fantasy Feeder 18–19 fascism 53, 99–100, 105–6 Spain 123–4 feedees 19–20 feeders 18, 19–20 fenêtre entrouverte, De (Moévöt) 196 festival 221, 252–3 Feuerbach, Ludwig 282 n.4 Fisher, Mark 228, 233 ‘Cold Rationality’ 233 ‘Surfascism’ 233 Fleurs du mal, Les (Baudelaire, Charles) 43 Flusser, Wilem: Post-History 166 formless 109, 185, 186, 187, 190, 199–200 freedom 159, 166 Freud, Sigmund Civilization and Its Discontents 158 Totem and Taboo 58 ‘Friendship of a Man and a Beast’ (Bataille, Georges) 164 ‘Frobenius Exhibit at the Salle Pleyel’ (Bataille, Georges) 245 Fuhlrott, Johann Carl 241–2

294 Index Fuller, R. Buckminster 81–3 Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity 82 funeral rites 61, 163 ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’ (Goux, Jean-Joseph) 219–20 general economy 3, 33–4, 73, 74, 219, 233–4, 273–4 expenditure 77–8 Fuller, R. Buckminster 82 genocide 244 Goux, Jean–Joseph 230 human life 75 paleo-anthropology 244, 246, 249–50 production and consumption 77–8 genocide 244, 245–6, 250–1, 252–3, 258–9 gifts 88 Gilder, George 230 glory 137–8, 139, 143 Gnosticism 56, 107, 108, 207 n.78 God 12, 105 see also religion death of 11–12 eating 17 Eckhart, Meister 176, 180 eroticism 178–9 eroticism 28 imagery 178–9 language 206 n.78 Origen 175 self-loss 175 speculative realism 184 unknowing 180 Gold, Jordan 22 Goux, Jean-Joseph 230, 233–4 ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism’ 219–20, 230–1 Gregory of Nyssa, Saint 202 n.20 Grindon, Gavin 98 ground 33–4, 36, 45–6 growth 35, 86–7 Guernica (Picasso, Pablo) 124–5 guilt 120, 122 Guilty (Bataille, Georges) 120, 121 Habermas, Jürgen 95 haecceitas (thisness) 173

‘Hannover Principles, The’ (McDonough, William/Braungart, Michael) 74 hara-kiri 21, 162 Harney, Stefano 99 #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader (Mackay, Robin/Avanessian, Armen) 218 Hawken, Paul/Lovins, Amory/Lovins, L. Hunter: Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution 83–4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 56, 104, 108–9, 120–1 animals 167–8 limits 272 negation 280 n.4 negativity 162, 166–7, 168 Phenomenology of Spirit 120, 166–7 Science of Logic 167, 276–8 sublation 280 n.4 Heidegger, Martin 173, 180–1, 200 n.2, 266 anxiety 275 heterogeneity 101, 102–6, 107, 111 dialect of the heterogeneous 109 expenditure 110 heterogeneous matter 106 Hindu 62 Hirsch, Alexander 96–7 history 20, 160 end of 20–1, 24, 160–2 expenditure 80 first step 163 Kojève, Alexandre 160–2 sovereignty 135–40 Hollywood, Amy 173, 176 Homo faber 249 Homo lascauxensis 251–2, 253 Homo neanderthalensis see Neanderthal humanity Homo sapiens 239, 241, 243, 244, 245–7, 249–53, 259 see also humanity physiognomy 255–8 as species 248 Homo sapiens-neanderthalensis 246, 259 homogeneity 64–5, 100–3, 104–5, 111 society 129 thought and 141 horror 59 human–animal distinction 156

Index ‘Human Remains from a Cave in the valley of the river Dussel’ (Schaafhausen, Hermann) 242 humanity 20, 41, 220 see also being animals, in relation to 254–5 art 239, 247, 248, 252, 255 burdensome 79–80 damage and 79–80 dignity 157 energy 74 excess 221, 244 extinction 224, 245, 246, 250–1, 252–3, 258–9, 265 first step 163 future of 247 history 161 indifference to 40 individualism 132 knowledge 163–4 Kojève, Alexandre 161–2 nature and 40–5, 76–7, 78–9, 158, 245–6 Neanderthal see Neanderthal humanity negativity 159, 163, 164, 168 origins of 240–4 see also paleo-anthopology Paleolithic 245 physiognomy 255–8 primitive 157–9, 163, 164, 239–44 see also cave paintings scale of 246–7 shame 163–4 sovereign experiences 136 sovereignty 165 sun, and the 75 see also solar economy violence 245–6 see also genocide waste and 89 Huxley, Thomas 242 hybridity 52 hyper-chaos 185, 187 Hyperstition 233 Icarian duality 280 n.2 Idea of the Holy, The (Otto, Rudolf) 68 n.15 identity, union of 176, 178,180 Illusion 23

295

immanence, animals and 156–7, 159–60, 164, 168 immanence-freedom 159–60 immolation 44–5 imperative sovereignty 137 Impossible, The (Bataille, Georges) 24 impossibility 194, 195 incest 58–9 individualism 132, 144 individuality 173 individuation 202 n.21 inhuman, the 187 inner experience 188 Inner Experience (Bataille, Georges) 185, 188 Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila, Saint) internet, the 228 Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Kojève, Alexandre) 20, 161 Iran 25 Ireland, Amy 182–3, 190, 191–2, 197, 199 Islam 24–7 James, William: Varieties of Religious Experience 68 n.15 Jameson, Fredric 229 Japan 20–1 eroticism 21 pornography 21 ritual 21, 162 sex 21, 22 sex dolls 22 technology 21, 22 Justine (Sade, Marquis de) 76 Kali 62 kami 21, 22 Kant, Immanuel 8 n.8, 104, 147 n.28, 191 Critique of Pure Reason 182 Kendall, Stuart 207 n.78 Kojève, Alexandre 16, 121 end of history 160–2 Introduction to the Reading of Hegel 20, 161 negativity 166 sovereignty 120 Lacan, Jacques 31 n.50 ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire, The’ 123

296 Index Land, Nick 197, 218, 224–5, 232 Cybenetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) 226 Fanged Noumena 218 ‘Making it with Death’ 225 ‘Meltdown’ 218 ‘No Future’ 227 Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, The 220–2, 233 ‘Transcendental Risk’ 228–9 landscape 41–2, 45 ‘Landscape’ (Bataille, Georges) 38–9, 40 wasp/window metaphor 40, 43–4 language 41, 120, 189–90, 198, 270 ‘Language of Flowers, The’ (Bataille, Georges) 65 Lascaux 253–4 cave paintings 136, 164, 239, 245, 253, 254–6 humanity 251–2, 253 laughter 122, 222 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Smith, William Robertson) 52 left-accelerationism 226, 228, 229–30, 233 left pole of the sacred 51–7 College of Sociology 57–60 death and mourning 61–3 modernity 64–6 ‘Letter to X, lecturer on Hegel’ (Bataille, Georges) 162 Libidinal Economy (Lyotard, Jean-François) 227 life 63, 177 life forms 79 Limites du l’utile, Les (Bataille, Georges) 118 literature 268–9 Literature and Evil (Bataille, Georges) 28–9 literary, the 38 loss 73–4, 77, 174 see also waste humanity 79 self-loss 175 love 174–5 Lovins, Amory/Lovins, L. Hunter/ Hawken, Paul: Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution 83–4

Lovins, L. Hunter/Lovins, Amory/Hawken, Paul: Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution 83–4 low materialism 159 lucidity 37–8 lumpenproletariat 101, 104 ‘Lure of the Game, The’ 179 luxury 90, 91 Lyell, Charles 242 Lynch, G.: Sacred in a Modern World, The 68 n.15 Lyotard, Jean-François 279 ‘Can Thought Go On Without a Body?’ 271–4 Libidinal Economy 227 McDonough, William/Braungart, Michael Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things 84–8 ‘Hannover Principles, The’ 74 Upcycle, The 84, 86–8 Mackay, Robin/Avanessian, Armen: #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader 218 Magi’s star 41 ‘Making it with Death’ (Land, Nick) 225 Malign Velocities (Noys, Benjamin) 230 ‘Man of Sorrows’ image 179 Mansions (Teresa of Avila, Saint) 178 marriage 26, 65, 175 Marshall Plan, the 224–5 Martin, Randy 99 Marx, Karl 98, 101 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte, The 101 Marxism 98, 225 Mary of Oignes 196 Masciandaro, Nicola 180–1, 184–5, 187, 189, 203 n.45 master–slave dialectics 104 materialism 106–10 base materialism 106–7, 109–10 dualist materialism 155–6 low materialism 159 relational materialism 109–10 ‘Materialism’ (Bataille, Georges) 107 materiality 75–6 matter 106–7, 109, 110 Mauss, Marcel: Essay on the Gift 54

Index meaning 34 Meillassoux, Quentin 140, 141, 183–4, 185, 186, 188, 196, 276–7 Melancology (Wilson, Scott) 197 ‘Meltdown’ (Land, Nick) 218 menstrual blood 54, 59 Merchant, Brian 22 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 181 metal studies 193 metaphysics, death of 183 Method of Meditation (Bataille, Georges) 73 Métrax, Alfred: Voodoo in Haiti 55 Meyer, Franz Josef Karl 260 n.7 military technology 23 Minotaur 8 n.9 Miracles 140 Mishima, Yukio 12, 190 modernity 65, 96 art 138, 142 Moévöt 196 fenêtre entrouverte, De 196 moh 21 monarchy 104, 105 money 100 monkeys 258 monstrous hybrids 85–6 moral culture 133 mourning 61, 65 mouth, the 179, 181 movie star, cult of 143 music 192–3 mystical union 175–6, 178 mysticism 175, 180, 206 n.78 Nancy, Jean-Luc 222, 230, 279 natural capital 84 natural capitalism 84 Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Hawken, Paul/Lovins, Amory/Lovins, L. Hunter) 83–4 nature 33–7, 38 annihilation 76 change 76 design and 82 endowing significance to 41 humanity and 40–5, 76–7, 78–9, 158, 245–6 indifference of 40, 43

297

landscape 41–2 sacred, and the 56 violence 245–6 waste and 85 nausea 194 Neanderthal humanity 239, 240, 241–3, 246–50, 259 extinction 245, 246, 250–1, 252–3, 258–60 physiognomy 255–8 necro-corpse sound 193 necrophilia 21–2 negation 267 negativity 121–2, 157–9, 162–3, 166–7 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 162, 166–7, 168 labour’s 164 unemployed 164, 168 neoliberalism 219, 229 Neoplatonism 176 Neroplatonism 190, 199–200 Nicole, Julie 18 Nietzsche, Friedrich 47 n.17, 74, 120 ‘Of Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ 273 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 75, 88, 91 waste 85 ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ (Derrida, Jacques) 267–8 ‘No Future’ (Land, Nick) 227 nohow 198–9 non-explainable difference 103 non-knowledge 183–4, 188, 194 vomit and 195, 196 nothing 207 n.78 ‘Notion of Expenditure, The’ (Bataille, Georges) 73–4, 80, 98, 99, 118 noumenal, economy of 183 Novint Falcon 23 Noys, Benjamin 218 Malign Velocities 230 Persistence of the Negative, The 217 nuclear war 11–12, 17, 267–71 nutrient flows 85–6 obesity 17–19 obsolescence 87–8 ‘Of Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ (Nietzsche, Friedrich) 273

298 Index On Nietzsche: Will to Chance (Bataille, Georges) 120 Origen 175, 179 Otto, Rudolf: Idea of the Holy, The 68 n.15 Overshoot (Catton, William) 79–80 paintings 122 see also art paleo-anthropology 239, 244–53, 259 art 253–8 colonialism 241, 243, 251 human origins 240–4 Lascaux see Lascaux Vézère Valley 248 paleo-genetics 259 paleo-genocide 252–3 see also genocide Paleolithic humanity 245, 246 paleontology 240 ‘Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth of Art’ (Bataille, Georges) 257 patterns 82 peace 224–5, 232 ‘peintures politiques de Picasso, Les’ (Picasso’s Political Paintings) 125 Persistence of the Negative, The (Noys, Benjamin) 217 Petrarch: Canzionere 190 Petrarchian conceits 189–90 Pfaller, Robert 129, 133, 144 phenomenal, economy of 183 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) 120, 166–7 phobia 189 photography 27–8 physiognomy 255–8 Picasso, Pablo 117, 122, 123, 124, 126 Guernica 124–5 piety 24–5 pineal eye 198 planned obsolescence 87–8 Plant, Sadie 226–7 poetry 119 hatred of 24, 38 political correctness 144 political sovereignty 123 politics 16, 95–106, 110, 139, 220 see also base materialism communism 160 fascism 53, 99–100, 105–6, 123–4 Marxism 98, 225

Plant, Sadie 226–7 schizo-politics 225–6 socialism 227, 228 sovereign art and 141–2 Thatcherism 226–7 pornography 13 Japan 21 Post-History (Flusser, Wilem) 166 posture 44–6, 158, 159, 163, 167–8, 256 Poulantzas, Nicos 111 power 137–8 prehistoric art 136, 164, 166 premonitions 41 Presley, Elvis 148 n.53 priesthood, the 63, 64 ‘Problem of the State, The’ (Bataille, Georges) 99 production 77–8, 81 biology/technology 85–6 homogeneity and 100–1 products of service 87 profane, the 54–5, 57, 63, 65, 66, 134 smoking 133 profit 143 prohibitions 159–60 proletariat, the 101, 165 prostitution 26 Protestant work ethic 219–20 Protestantism 24, 62 Psychological Structure of Fascism, The (Bataille, Georges) 98, 99–100, 108 Puritanism 24 putrefaction 59 radical resource productivity 83 Rancière, Jacques 142 rapture 179 rationality 231–3 realism 182–3, 191 see also speculative realism reality 63 appearance and 141 reason 188 Reich, Wilhelm 98 relational materialism 109–10 religion 13, 15, 52–3, 63, 206 n.78 see also God; sacred, the Catholicism 61, 62 Christianity see Christianity

Index devotion 64 Gnosticism 56, 107, 108, 207 n.78 Hindu 62 Islam 24–7 modernity 65 polytheistic 62 priesthood, the 63, 64 primitive 251–2 progressive homogeneity 64–5 Protestantism 24, 62 Puritanism 24 sacrifice 89–90 ‘Renegade Academia’ (Reynolds, Simon) 226–7 representation 192–3, 199 repression 158–9 reproduction 35 repulsion 59–60, 61 resources 82–4 restricted economy 3, 37, 38, 219, 273–4 genocide 244 paleo-anthropology 244, 246–7, 249 Reynolds, Anthony 148 n.56 Reynolds, Simon: ‘Renegade Academia’ 226–7 Richman, Michèle H. 134 ‘Rire’ (Bataille, Georges) 222 ritual 89–90, 145 see also hara-kiri funeral 61, 163 sacred, the 51–3, 66, 134–5, 223 see also left pole of the sacred ambivalence 52, 54 animals 164 art 138 expenditure 245 heterogeneity and 103 right pole of 52, 54, 57, 65–6 smoking 133 society and 56–8, 60 subjectivity and 136 value 135 violence 62 war and 223 Sacred and the Profane, The (Eliade, Mircea) 68 n.15 Sacred in a Modern World, The (Lynch, G.) 68 n.15 sacred space 132

299

sacrifice 18, 27, 36, 63, 89–90 smoking 130 sovereign 148 n.56 taboo 133–4 Sade, Marquis de: Justine 76 sadistic understanding 76 Sahwa 25 salvation 138 Schaafhausen, Hermann 242 ‘Human Remains from a Cave in the valley of the river Dussel’ 242 schizo-politics 225–6 Schmitt, Carl 96–7, 98 science 77 Science of Logic (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) 167, 276–8 sculpture 256–7 Venus of Willensdorf 240, 257 Second World War 11–12 self-consciousness 12, 15, 36–7, 175, 265, 274–6 sovereign 278–9 self-loss 175 service and flow economy 84 sex 14–15, 174 see also eroticism animals 14 functionality 14 Japan 21, 22 paleo-anthropology 246 taboos 14–15, 28, 55–6, 58 technology 21–3 transgression 28 sex dolls 22 sexual murder 22 sexual revolution, the 13 shame 22–3 Shaviro, Steven 219 Sheldrake, Philip 200 n.2 Shipley, Gary J. 186 Shiva 62 Shoah, the 253–4 signs 41 silence 181 Smith, William Robertson: Lectures on the Religion of the Semites 52 smoking 130–5, 145 Spain 124–5 social robots 21 socialism 227, 228

300 Index society 56–8, 60, 65 aesthetics of glory 137–8 class 98 control of 137 culture of taboo 133 homogenization 129 politics 102
 sovereignty 137–8 structure 100 Socratic College (Bataille, Georges) 131, 145 Solar Anus, The (Bataille, Georges) 38, 75 solar economy 2–3, 74–5, 118 solar energy 278 ‘Soliliqua, Il’ (Bèlkètre) 196 Song of Songs 179 Souche-Dagues, Denise 108–9 Souveraineté, La (Sovereignty) (Bataille, Georges) 135, 160, 165, 232 sovereign art 138–45 sovereign economy 125 sovereign elegance 134, 145 sovereign experiences 117, 135, 136, 138 sovereign-freedom 159 Sovereign Humanism 3 sovereign sacrifice 133–4 sovereignty 73, 96–8, 102, 104–5, 107, 120, 165–6 aesthetics and 130, 137 animals 164–5 beasts 156–7 death 275 freedom 166 history of 135–40 imperative sovereignty 137 Kojève, Alexandre 120 political sovereignty 123 politics 142 self-consciousness 279–80 smoking and 131–5, 145 traditional forms 145 space 35–6 spasm 44 speculative realism 140–1, 184–5, 188–9, 194 vomit and 196 speech 179, 181 spiders 185–6, 187, 189 spirits, union of 176 Srnicek, Nick 218, 228

Srnicek, Nick/Williams, Alex 232–3 ‘Cunning Automata’ 229 state, the 95, 99, 102–3, 105, 110–12 capitalism 225–6 Marx, Karl 101 Stoekl, Allan 99 Story of the Eye (Bataille, Georges) 22, 38, 117, 118 subjectivity 135–6, 140–1 sublation 267, 270, 280 n.4 ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire, The’ (Lacan, Jacques) 123 sun, the 2–3, 35, 74–5, 118, 181–3 ambiguity of 266 death of 271–4, 278 surface 44–5 ‘Surfascism’ (Fisher, Mark) 233 survival 270 Surya, Michel 130 sustainability 77, 79, 81–2 closed-loop cycles of use 84 cradle to cradle design 84–8 sustainable design 74, 80–1, 83, 84, 88–91 closed-loop cycles of use 84 cradle to cradle design 84–8 Sweedler, Milo 222 taboo 28, 55–6, 58, 66 culture of 133 death 61 incest 58 sacrifice 133 sex 14–15 tearing 174, 178–9 Tears of Eros, The (Bataille, Georges) 78, 80, 123, 136, 163 technology 20 see also Homo faber biology and 85–6 eroticism 21–4 genocide 245 Japan 21, 22 sex 21–3 Teresa of Avila, Saint 177, 178 Interior Castle or Mansion 178 terror 59 textuality 269 Thacker, Eugene: And They Were Two in One And One In Two 186–7

Index Thatcherism 226–7 Theory of Religion (Bataille, Georges) 13, 90, 157 therapeutic art 144 Thing, The (Carpenter, John) 186–7 Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, The (Land, Nick) 220–2, 233 thisness 173 thought 285 n.51 apocalypse 277–8 Dolar, Mladen 277–8 end of 265, 279 extinction and 271–3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche, Friedrich) 75, 88, 91 totality 176 Totem and Taboo (Freud, Sigmund) 58 tragic community 222 transcendence 254 ‘Transcendental Risk’ (Land, Nick) 228–9 transgression 219 uneasiness 194 unemployed negativity 121, 168 Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, The (Bataille, Georges) 188, 190, 194 universal accelerationism 232 universe 40–1 at the level of 33–4 beginning of 277–8 unknowing 180, 200, 207 n.78 ‘Unliveable Earth’ (Bataille, Georges) 252 unreason 188–9 Upcycle, The (McDonough, William/ Braungart, Michael) 84, 86–8 upcycling 87 uprisings 104 ‘Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade, The’ (Bataille, Georges) 76 uselessness 7 n.3 Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (Fuller, R. Buckminster) 82

301

value of expenditure 125–6 Varieties of Religious Experience (James, William) 68 n.15 veils 25–8 Venus of Willensdorf 240, 257 Verve 38, 39–40 Vézère Valley 247–8 video games 22–3 violence 246 Virchow, Rudolf 260 n.7 Visions of Excess (Wilson, Scott) 197–8 ‘Visit to Lascaux, A’ (Bataille, Georges) 254 vomit 194–6 voodoo (Vodou) 68 n.18 Voodoo in Haiti (Métrax, Alfred) 55 Vordb Na R.iidr 1934, 196, 198 Darkness 197 Walmart 229 war 11–12, 17, 36, 223–5, 232, 267–71 ‘War and the Philosophy of the Sacred’ (Bataille, Georges) 222–3 wasp/window metaphor 40, 43–4 waste 74, 83–6, 88–9, 91, 218–19, 245, 274 Williams, Alex 218, 228 Williams, Alex/Srnicek, Nick 232–3 ‘Cunning Automata’ 229 Williams, Rowan 178, 179 Wilson, Scott 190, 200 Wilson, Scott/Botting Fred Bataille Reader, The 15–16 Melancology 197 witness see ancestral witness Wolin, Richard 95–6 women circulation of 58–9 prostitution 26 veils 25–8 work 3, 164–6 Worstward Ho (Beckett, Samuel) 191–2, 197–9 Zero 222