[In the following essay, Hollywood finds parallels in the thought of Bataille and the thirteenth-century Umbrian mystic Angela of Foligno.]

TOWARD A NEW MYSTICAL COMMUNITY

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a central figure within twentieth-century French avant-garde circles, yet the importance of his work for the study of religion is only beginning to be recognized.¹ Between the First and Second World Wars, he not only edited journals (Documents, Acéphale) and engaged in literary and political movements, but also organized (together with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris) the College of Sociology, which attempted to bring the sociological methods of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss to bear on the study and pursuit of the sacred. Throughout his work of the 1930s, Bataille sought to reintroduce the sacred into modern industrial, secular societies, which, he argued, believed in God only insofar as they equated God with reason.² For Bataille, the power of the sacred lies in its ambiguity and violence. Sacrifice and expenditure mark the antithesis of the instrumental rationality of modern bourgeois society; through sacrifice, then, new sovereign communities might be engendered. Religious questions, for Bataille, were irrevocably political. He thus attempted to theorize and to create a community without authority, one that might counter the authoritarian movements coming to dominate much of Europe in the 1930s.

As the Second World War approached, however, and as antifascist political options seemed increasingly futile, Bataille turned to what he called “inner experience,” a form of self-sacrifice and self-expenditure in which the ecstasy and anguish of human existence is laid bare. For many, this marks Bataille's rejection of the political, a sign of his resignation or despair in the face of world historical events that he came to realize were beyond his control.³Inner Experience, the first volume of the three-part Atheological Summa that Bataille composed during the Second World War, opens with the claim that human beings must come to realize that they are not everything, suggesting a recognition of his own insignificance in the face of time and history. Yet I am not sure that this move is best understood as a turn toward individualism and away from community. Rather, it marks a historically situated shift in Bataille's understanding of how nonauthoritarian communities might be formed. In the late 1930s he created a secret society; after 1939, the members of his community were unknown, even to Bataille himself. Most of the Atheological Summa was written in isolation, away from Paris and its intellectual circles; yet Bataille always wrote to readers, the new community that he hoped to forge through writing about inner experience. He also wrote as a reader, and the texts that communicated to him during these years are crucial to the community that he hoped to forge, to his experience, and to his writing practice.

These texts were, first and foremost, mystical (although the writings of Nietzsche are also crucial for Bataille during this period). Guilty, the second volume of Bataille's Atheological Summa, begins with a series of journal entries, written in the opening days of World War II, that make clear the centrality of the thirteenth-century Umbrian mystic, Angela of Foligno, to his wartime writings:

It is impossible for me to read—at least most books. I don't have the desire. Too much work tires me. My nerves are shattered. I get drunk a lot. I feel faithful to life if I eat and drink what I want. Life is an enchantment, a feast, a festival: an oppressing, unintelligible dream, adorned nevertheless with a charm that I enjoy. The sentiment of chance demands that I look a difficult fate in the face. It would not be about chance if there were not an incontestable madness.

I began to read, standing on a crowded train, Angela of Foligno's Book of Visions.

I'm copying it out, not knowing how to say how fiercely I burn—the veil is torn in two, I emerge from the fog in which my impotence flails.⁴

Despite “living like a pig in the eyes of Christians,” Bataille finds his own tormented desire reflected in Angela's pages. Angela surpasses him in the pursuit of abjection and ecstasy. Bataille aspires to imitate her desire for, and proximity to death: “I suffer from not myself burning to the point of coming close to death, so close that I inhale it like the breath of a loved being.”⁵

Readers of Bataille have remarked on his affinity with the Christian mystics, at least since the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Roger Caillois and Jean-Paul Sartre each used this as a point of attack.⁶ Bataille recounts in his final lecture for the College of Sociology that Caillois was critical of Bataille's turn to mysticism. The letter in which Caillois voices these concerns has been lost, but he seems to have equated Bataille's mysticism with a rejection of politics. Sartre's 1943 review of Inner Experience, the first volume of Bataille's Atheological Summa (although the sections in which I am most interested were written after 1939 and hence after the opening sections of Guilty) similarly critiques Bataille's turn to mysticism and claims that it marks the resurgence of Christianity in his work. Rather than accepting his argument that nothingness and the unknowable take the place once occupied by God, thereby destabilizing theological and salvific claims, Sartre suggests that for Bataille nothingness becomes God. According to Sartre, Bataille hopes to escape temporality, historicity, and responsibility through inner experience. Both Caillois and Sartre, then, note the importance of Angela of Foligno, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola as reference points in Bataille's work from the late 1930s on, contest or ignore Bataille's warnings against an easy assimilation of his writings with the mystical, and reject his work as mystical.⁷

Bataille himself is ambivalent about the relationship between inner experience and mysticism, though not because he sees it as drawing him away from politics. Rather, in a historical moment in which concrete political action seemed hopeless, he turned to mysticism as an alternative form of community building. His ambivalence toward mysticism stems from the kind of community it engenders. In Guilty, he insists on the proximity and the distance between his work and that of Angela of Foligno. After citing her book, for example, Bataille states that “Angela of Foligno, speaking of God, speaks in servitude.”⁸ In this way, he marks his distance from Angela's text, insisting on the sovereignty of inner experience, which rejects any authority external to itself. Yet he then cites Angela at length, claiming that, “If laughter is violent enough, there is no limit.”⁹ This suggests that the extremity of Angela's experience breaks through the bonds of servitude marked by God's presence, thereby bringing her experience into greater proximity with his own experience of a community without authority.¹⁰

Inner Experience opens with a section entitled “Critique of Dogmatic Servitude (And Of Mysticism)” in which Bataille makes clear his objections to the term “mysticism”:

By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, than of an experience laid bare, free of attachments, even of origin, of any confession whatsoever. This is why I don't like the word mystical.¹¹

Insofar as mystical traditions are concerned with salvation, with project, and with ends external to experience itself, Bataille insists on their divergence from inner experience. God is rejected insofar as claims to the existence of God are tied to the promise of salvation.¹² Yet, Bataille does not reject the term mystical so much as appropriate it; he suggests that inner experience better captures the mystic's experiences than do their own dogmatic utterances. Part IV of Inner Experience, then, is entitled “Post-Scriptum to the Torment (or the New Mystical Theology).”

This portion of Inner Experience is markedly indebted to Angela of Foligno's Book. Through an analysis of Bataille's relationship to Angela, I will show that “Post-Scriptum to the Torment” can be read as his attempt to repeat, communicate, or translate her experience, to bring himself “close to death.”¹³ Bataille writes for those who would themselves repeat Angela's excesses in the twentieth century, those who will create a new sacred community. By reading and translating her texts, moreover, Bataille creates a community with her in which the reader might also come to share. Uncovering the relationship between Inner Experience and Angela's Book, then, offers important insight into the political and religious import of Bataille's “project that is not a project.” It will also, perhaps surprisingly, cast light on Angela's experience as it is depicted within her Book.

This Book, so central to Bataille's wartime writing, is tremendously complex.¹⁴ Modern editors divide it into two texts, the Memorial (a relatively coherent narrative of Angela's religious experience from the time of her conversion, organized into a series of steps or “transformations” of the soul)¹⁵ and the Instructions (a group of visions, letters, and hagiographical accounts emanating from Angela and her circle).¹⁶ Bataille focuses his attention on the Memorial, although he also discusses the Instructions' account of Angela's final words. The Memorial raises crucial textual and authorial problems, as well as problems of translation, for it is the work of a scribe, Brother A., who says that he took down Angela's Umbrian dialect, translating rapidly into Latin. When he reads portions of this text back to Angela, she invariably complains about its brevity, dryness, and lack of accuracy, at times claiming not to recognize her own words in his (and did he read to her in Latin or translate her words back into the original Umbrian dialect?).¹⁷ The importance of Brother A. to the production of the Memorial is still hotly contested, with some going so far as to argue that one cannot posit Angela's authorship and that the text is so mediated as to offer little concrete information about Angela herself.¹⁸ For Bataille, however, Angela was the author of her Book, and I proceed with my discussion on Bataille's terms.¹⁹

TOWARD A NEW MYSTICAL THEOLOGY

Bataille begins his new mystical theology with a reminder to the reader of its divergences from the old. He writes that, like Maurice Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure, he seeks a new theology “which has only the unknown for its object.”²⁰ Such a theology must:

• have its principles and its end in the absence of salvation, in the renunciation of all hope.

• affirm of inner experience that it is authority (but all authority expiates itself), and

• be a contestation of itself and nonknowledge.²¹

Bataille wants to develop a mystical theology without God, an atheology in which God (as this concept is understood, according to him, within the modern Christian West) is subverted through a radical experience of the limit and the unknowable. He follows this call for a new mystical theology, then, with a series of chapters dealing with God and the philosophical conceptions of God, knowledge, and totality found in Descartes and Hegel. As Sartre points out in his 1943 review essay, these philosophical reflections are framed by accounts of inner experience and the anguished ecstasy of the writing subject in the face of the unknowable. He argues that this marks a confusion of the subjectivity of experience with claims to objectivity (whether philosophical or scientific). For Bataille, meanwhile, subjective experience decenters and subverts the very claims to objectivity on which systematic philosophy is based.

The God of the mystics, Bataille suggests, is a God without aim, project, salvation, or knowledge—hence not God at all, at least as that concept is deployed within the mainstream of Christian theology and philosophy. Mystics experience the limit that undermines conceptions of the divine central to Western philosophical traditions. Yet their continued reliance on traditional conceptions of God, despite the textual shattering of these concepts in accounts of their experience, gives rise to ambiguities within their writings. These same ambiguities exist in Bataille's work; in some places he describes the mystic's God from the standpoint of shattering experience, while elsewhere he emphasizes the return to salvific conceptions of God. The section of “Post-Scriptum to the Torment (or the New Mystical Theology)” entitled “God” plays on this ambiguity. On the basis of the mystic's experience of divine darkness and unknowing, Bataille subverts the concept of God as the omniscient, omnipotent, and fully self-present source of unchanging transcendence and salvation.

Bataille begins with the startling claim that God hates himself. Only when human beings are exhausted by existence and full of self-loathing do they turn to God as a source of salvation. Human self-hatred, then, is reflected in the self-hatred of God. Bataille argues that “within human thought,” God always conforms to humanity; this suggests a reading of human conceptions of the divine as projections of human desire. Bataille subverts such conceptions and also shows how mystical experience itself deconstructs these cultural constructs. God, understood as the projection of human desire, can never find rest and satisfaction. This claim is grounded in the contradictory nature of human desire, reflected in mystical conceptions of the divine. Human beings desire fulfillment, and yet the fulfillment of that desire would mark the end of desire itself. Following many of the mystics, Bataille posits human desire as ceaseless, endless, and only capable of momentary appeasement. For God (as desire) to know himself as God (as the fulfillment of all desire), then, would imply a satisfaction God (as desire) cannot allow; God thus is, according to Bataille, an atheist. The mystic's experience of divine insatiability, darkness, and unknowability becomes the basis for these atheological assertions. So, while God may be a cultural construct, a projection of human desire, the interrogation of the conception of God reveals a crucial aspect of human experience. The section of “Post-Scriptum” begins and ends with appeals to the mystics—first Meister Eckhart and then, at much greater length, Angela of Foligno. Bataille cites central passages that occur at the end of the Memorial, in which Angela describes the twenty-sixth transformation in which she is immersed in God “in and with darkness.”

Bataille's choice of texts stress the “nothingness” of that which Angela encounters in this final transformation:

Saint Angela of Foligno says: “One time my soul was elevated and I saw God in a clarity and a fullness that I had never known to that point in such a full way. And I did not see any love there. I lost then that love that I bore in myself; I was made into nonlove. And then after that I saw him in a darkness, for he is a god so great that he can not be thought or understood. And nothing of that which can be thought or understood attains or approaches him (Livre de l'expérience I, 105).” A little further on, “… The soul sees a nothingness and sees all things (nihil videt et omnia videt); my body is asleep; language is cut off. All the numerous and unspeakable signs of friendship God has given me, and all the words that he has spoken to me … are, I perceive, so below this good encountered in a darkness so great that I do not put my hope in them, that my hope may not rest in them (id., 106).”²²

Although in Guilty Bataille contrasts mystical and erotic experience, arguing that the former can be perfected, whereas eroticism is marked by insatiability and ceaseless desire, here he points to a moment in which Angela's erotic mystical experience subverts the limits of more traditional mysticisms.²³ Angela's soul passes beyond experiences of loving union with God and into a darkness in which there is no pretense of satisfaction or completion.

Yet Bataille remains ambivalent about Angela's text, which he reads as itself ambivalent—servile in its hopes for salvation, yet lacerating and sovereign in its description and enactment of the sacred annihilation of self and God. As in Guilty, Bataille argues that “it is difficult to tell to what extent belief is an obstacle to the experience, to what extent the intensity of the experience overturns the obstacle.”²⁴ He presumes a gap between inner experience and the dogmatic utterances found in Angela's Book, but is not clear as to whether her beliefs obstruct her ability to achieve inner experience or simply distort her accounts of it. Inner experience, Bataille suggests, necessarily lacerates dogma, just as it does the subject. From this perspective, Angela's desire for abject suffering and death becomes emblematic of the corrosive quality of the mystical.²⁵ This same ambiguity emerges, as Bataille shows, in Angela's reported last words: “Oh unknown nothingness! (o nihil incognitum!).”²⁶ Whereas the text of the Instructions interprets Angela's words as referring to the nothingness of her created being, Bataille suggests she may refer to the nothingness of the divine.²⁷ His own account of inner experience, moreover, demonstrates the inextricability of the two; Angela's nothingness and that of the divine are one in ecstasy.

TOWARD A NEW MEDITATIONAL PRACTICE

After sections on Descartes, Hegel, and a fragmentary and interrupted account of a “partly-failed” inner experience (one described, the author says, in order better to evoke a successful experience),²⁸ Bataille introduces two digressions that elliptically return to Angela's Book: “First Digression on Ecstasy before an Object: The Point” and “Second Digression on Ecstasy in the Void.” Without crediting her, he here translates a distinction central to Angela's account of the twenty-sixth transformation. After having emphasized the role of suffering in her experience and its relationship to the sufferings of Christ in life and on the cross, Angela is compelled to clarify the relationship between that object-centered and desirous loving relationship, and the encounter with darkness in which she is made into nonlove and lies in the abyss.

When I am in that darkness I do not remember anything about anything human, or the God-man, or anything which has a form. Nevertheless, I see all and I see nothing. As what I have spoken of withdraws and stays with me, I see the God-man. He draws my soul with great gentleness, and he sometimes says to me; “You are I and I am you.” I see, then, those eyes and that face so gracious and attractive as he leans to embrace me. In short, what proceeds from those eyes and that face is what I said that I saw in that previous darkness which comes from within, and which delights me so that I can say nothing of it. When I am in the God-man my soul is alive. And I am in the God-man much more than in the other vision of seeing God with darkness. The soul is alive in that vision concerning the God-man. The vision with darkness, however, draws me so much more that there is no comparison.²⁹

Angela here articulates the relationship between her experience of unity with Christ in his suffering and that with the divine abyss of darkness, nothingness, and unknowing. She asserts a relationship between these two forms of experience without fully clarifying the nature of the link between them.³⁰ Yet, she sees the darkness in the eyes and face of Christ, suggesting a causal connection between her meditation and identification with the passion of Christ and her experience of the dissolution of self and other into ecstatic darkness.³¹ Similarly, Bataille seeks to articulate the relationship between an ecstasy generated before an object and out of love for another and that experienced in the void.³²

Given Bataille's atheological agenda, a crucial issue in his rereading of Angela will be the role of the Christ within her experience. Bataille argues that the object contemplated by the mystic is a projection of the self, a dramatization of the self's dissolution that leads to ecstasy.³³ He thereby makes explicit the relationship between ecstasy before an object and that before the void or darkness suggested by Angela's text.

I will say this, although it is obscure: the object in the experience is first the projection of a dramatic loss of self. It is the image of the subject. The subject attempts at first to go to one like itself. But having entered into inner experience, the subject is in quest of an object like itself, reduced to its interiority. In addition, the subject whose experience is in itself and from the beginning dramatic (it is loss of self) needs to objectify this dramatic character. …

But it is only a question there of a fellow human being. The point, before me, reduced to the most paltry simplicity, is a person. At each instant of experience, this point can radiate arms, cry out, set itself ablaze.³⁴

The extremity of the other's suffering leads not only to his own dissolution, but also to that of the one who contemplates that suffering. It is through this laceration and loss of self that communication between the self and the other occurs. The practice of dramatization or meditation is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition if one is to stand out of the self and open oneself to the other—in other words, to attain ecstasy and communication.

Bataille explicitly ties ecstasy before the object to the practice of meditation described by Ignatius of Loyola and other Christian mystics. Angela's accounts of Christ's suffering, like those of many others in the later Middle Ages, attempt to explore fully the details of Christ's torture in order to make his suffering come alive for herself and for the reader. Meditation on the details of Christ's abjection is essential to the mystic's and the reader's identification with him.

Once when I was meditating on the great suffering which Christ endured on the cross, I was considering the nails, which, I had heard it said, had driven a little bit of the flesh of his hands and feet into the wood. And I desired to see at least that small amount of Christ's flesh which the nails had driven into the wood. And then such was my sorrow over the pain that Christ had endured that I could no longer stand on my feet. I bent over and sat down; I stretched out my arms on the ground and inclined my head on them. Then Christ showed me his throat and arms.³⁵

Angela does not just meditate on the figure of a crucified Christ, but on the bits and pieces of his lacerated body. Attention to these fragments renders her body into the very cruciform pattern of Christ's torment, suggesting her complete identification with that suffering. This suffering, moreover, leads to her joyful ecstasy.

Whereas Angela's Book suggests that she renders herself Christlike through her identificatory meditations on Christ's suffering flesh, Bataille argues that the other is a projection of the self. Angela's desire to dissolve the self, to approach death, and open herself to the lacerating wounds required for communication, are projected onto another, in this case, Christ. Bataille has recourse to other images.

In any case, we can only project the object-point by drama. I had recourse to upsetting images. In particular, I would gaze at the photographic image—or sometimes the memory I have of it—of a Chinese man who must have been tortured in my lifetime. Of this torture, I had had in the past a series of successive representations. In the end, the patient writhed, his chest flayed, arms and legs cut off at the elbows and at the knees. His hair standing on end, hideous, haggard, striped with blood, beautiful as a wasp.³⁶

Some of the most shocking aspects of Bataille's text, then, are attempts to repeat or to translate the Christian mystic's contemplation of Christ's suffering in the modern world (or as Bataille no doubt would put it, after the death of God). The image of Christ on the cross is analogous to the photos of the dismembered body of a Chinese victim of torture (the contemporary figure of ignominy and abjection so central to Inner Experience and Guilty) on which Bataille meditates.

The move away from Christ occurs for two reasons. In order to reenact the meditative and writing practices of medieval mysticism, Bataille must defamiliarize the bodily torture of the crucifixion. More importantly, if the theocentrism and Christocentrism of Angela's experience is to be decentered, other images of woundedness and laceration must take the place of the Christ figure. The “object point,” as Bataille tells us, is simply a “person,” “a fellow human being”:

The young and seductive Chinese man of whom I have spoken, left to the work of the executioner—I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin.³⁷

What is central about the cross, Bataille suggests, is not who is on it or the salvific nature of his suffering, but the suffering itself, which serves as the projected image through which the subject experiences his or her own dissolution. What one cannot ruin directly in oneself, Bataille argues, one can ruin through the projection of the other's bodily laceration.³⁸

Angela also defamiliarizes Christ's suffering in her repeated attempts to imagine extreme tortures for herself, tortures that pass beyond those associated with traditional images of Christ crucified and of the Christian martyrs:

then I would beg him to grant me this grace, namely, that since Christ had been crucified on the wood of the cross, that I be crucified in a gully, or in some very vile place, and by a very vile instrument. Moreover, since I did not desire to die as the saints had died, that he make me die a slower and even more vile death than theirs. I could not imagine a death vile enough to match my desire.³⁹

At other times, Angela uses images she might have seen around her as a way of making imaginatively vibrant her soul's identification with Christ's suffering:

Concerning the torments of the soul which demons inflicted upon her, she found herself incapable of finding any other comparison than that of a man hanged by the neck who, with his hands tied behind him and his eyes blindfolded, remains dangling on the gallows and yet lives, with no help, no support, no remedy, swinging in the empty air.⁴⁰

Angela's repeated accounts of her own abject suffering and her desire for suffering and death, moreover, suggest the viability of Bataille's claim that the image of the suffering Christ serves as a projection through which the subject comes to experience her own dissolution.⁴¹

TRANSLATION AS TRANSGRESSION

We might usefully understand the relationship between Bataille's and Angela's text in terms of translation, reading him as translating portions of her Book. More pertinently, Bataille is interested in translating or carrying her experience into the early twentieth century. Yet most people would complain that the translation is not faithful—it does not claim or want to be literal. In reading Angela, Bataille experiences something that he believes the doctrinal language of Angela's text masks. His translation, then, like all translations, is also an interpretation and a reenactment (a dramatization?). Fidelity to inner experience demands a transgression of the body of the text. The importance of the transgressed body to mystical and inner experience is mirrored in the process by which Bataille translates Angela's experience.

The medieval Christian practice of translating the remains and dismembered relics of holy persons, a practice linked to the ascetic sanctification of flesh and humanity in the work of mystics like Angela of Foligno, may serve as a key to unlocking the relationship between translation and transgression in Bataille's work.⁴² Within medieval Christianity, translation (translatio) refers (among other things) to the removal of a saint's remains from one place to another. If linguistic translation carries meaning from one place or tomb to another, this suggests that for medieval people the body itself is a kind of language. But in medieval practice, the body's meaning is translated only when it is transgressed, lacerated, and torn apart in the saint's ascetic excesses and the division of his or her corpse after death.⁴³ The (quasi-) auto-hagiographical texts of Angela of Foligno and other women in the later Middle Ages and early modern period are, in part, sites in which we find representations of the lacerated and exploded body as meaning. Bataille translates this experience through a transgression of the body of their texts parallel to the transgression of the saintly body described within them.⁴⁴

Along with God and salvation, Bataille rejects the asceticism of Christianity, thereby stressing the projection of pain and laceration onto the body of the other.⁴⁵ The explosion of the other's body serves as a dramatization, leading to greater ecstasy in the void. Here one sees the move from ecstasy before the object, parallel to Angela's meditations on the figure of Christ, to ecstasy before the void, which is analogous to Angela's account of the darkness of the divine.

The movement prior to the ecstasy of non-knowledge is the ecstasy before an object (whether the latter be the pure point—as the renouncing of dogmatic beliefs would have it—or some upsetting image). If this ecstasy before the object is at first given (as a “possible”) and if I suppress afterwards the object—as “contestation” inevitably does—if for this reason I enter into anguish—into horror, into the night of non-knowledge—ecstasy is near and, when it sets in, sends me further into ruin than anything imaginable. If I had not known of the ecstasy before the object, I would not have reached ecstasy in night. But initiated as I was in the object—and my initiation had represented the furthest penetration of what is possible—I could, in night, only find a deeper ecstasy. From that moment night, non-knowledge, will each time be the path of ecstasy into which I will lose myself.⁴⁶

Bataille's text itself attempts, like Angela's, to engender in writing and in the reader the dissolution of subject and object that is inner experience. Through this, communication occurs and a new community emerges—between Angela and Bataille, and between him and his projected readers. Angela and her book become objects on to which Bataille can project his own dissolution, leading to the greater dissolution of self before the void. (Arguably, Bataille in turn becomes such a figure for readers of his text.)

Inner experience begins, however, with dramatization and meditation, “images of explosion and of being lacerated—ripped to pieces.”⁴⁷ The process of translating Angela's mystical experience and texts, Bataille suggests, begin with the fragmented and exploded body. The violence of this translation lies less in the inevitable loss of meaning that occurs in the movement between experiences and between languages⁴⁸ than in the woundedness necessary to opening one human being to the other. Bataille argues that the greater this woundedness or laceration, the more the self is exploded and ripped apart, the fuller is the communication that occurs between this non-self and the now ruined other. The crucial question remains as to why openness to the other and communication are understood as woundedness.⁴⁹ I cannot explore this issue fully here, yet it is important to see that, despite his emphasis on violence and laceration, Bataille recognizes that to speak of communication, experience, or translation at all, one must have a self lingering on the edges of this dissolution. The explosion cannot be literal. This suggests the limits of Sartre's critique of Bataille, for Bataille does not desire a timeless existence and resolutely refuses death, despite his fascination and his desire to live within its breath. War becomes an opportunity for Bataille. In a troubling way, the constant threat of death, like the death of Christ on the cross for Angela, leads to ecstatic communication and community. This, rather than his purported renunciation of politics, is the source of the unease with which Bataille's contemporaries received his wartime texts. Yet, to pick up again the metaphor of medieval translatio, the division of the corpse cannot be absolute if fragments capable of being translated are to remain. Bataille, unlike Angela, does not want to die. Yet, does inner experience depend on the death of the other? Bataille would, I think, argue that it does not, but in a time of war the slide between fiction or dramatization and reality is difficult to control. It is on this fine line between dissolution and death that Bataille's and Angela of Foligno's writings uneasily converge.⁵⁰

Notes

1. See Mark C. Taylor, “The Politics of Theo-ry,” JAAR 59 (1991) 1-37; Stephen Webb, Blessed Excess: Religion and the Hyperbolic Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) 59-88; Amy Hollywood, “Bataille and Mysticism: A ‘Dazzling Dissolution’,” Diacritics 26 (1996) 74-85; and Alexander Irwin, “Saints of the Impossible: Politics, Violence, and the Sacred in Georges Bataille and Simone Weil” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1997).

2. This formulation, however, only becomes clear in texts written after the war, particularly the 1961 introduction to the second edition of Guilty and the posthumously published Theory of Religion. See Georges Bataille, Le Coupable (Paris: Gallimard, 1961); and Théorie de la Religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). For translations of these texts, see Georges Bataille, Guilty (trans. Bruce Boone; Venice, CA: Lapis, 1988); and idem, Theory of Religion (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Zone, 1992).

3. This claim is suggested most famously by Jean-Paul Sartre in a review essay that will be discussed below. See also Raymond Queneau's claim that in writing Guilty, Bataille did not “want to have anything more to do with politics” (quoted in Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: La Mort à l'oeuvre [Paris: Gallimard, 1992] 499). For more on this issue, see Irwin, “Saints of the Impossible,” chs. 2 and 4.

4. “Il m'est impossible de lire. Du moins la plupart des livres. Je n'en ai pas le desir. Un excès de travail me fatigue. J'en ai les nerfs brisés. Je m'enivre souvent. Je me sens fidèle à la vie si je bois and mange ce qui me plaît. La vie est toujours l'enchantement, le festin, la fête: rêve oppressant, inintelligible, enrichi néanmoins d'un charme dont je joue. Le sentiment de la chance me demande d'être en face d'un sort difficile. Il ne s'agirait pas de chance si ce n'était une incontestable folie.

   J'ai commencé de lire, debout dans un train bondé, le Livre des visions d'Angèle de Foligno.

   Je recopie, ne sachant dire à quel point j'ai brûlé: le voile ici se déchire, je sors de la brume où se débat mon impuissance” (Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes [12 vols.; Paris: Gallimard, 1973] 5. 245; idem, Guilty, 11). Although I will give page numbers for both the French and the English, the translations are my own.

5. “[J]e souffre de ne pas brûler à mon tour au point de m'approcher de la mort si près que je la respire comme le souffle d'un être aimé” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes 5. 246; idem, Guilty, 12).

6. See Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology: 1937-39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 333-41; and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” in idem, Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) 143-88. These charges are echoed by Jacques Lacan's assertion, in the seminar of 1972-73, that “the mystical is by no means that which is not political.” (Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality [ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose; New York: Norton, 1985] 146). I think that this entire section of the seminar is an homage to Bataille.

7. Bataille himself uses mysticism as a charge against the surrealists in his earlier writings (Oeuvres Complètes, 1. 219).

8. “Angèle de Foligno parlant de Dieu parle en esclave” (ibid., 5. 251; idem, Guilty, 16).

9. “Aucune limite à partir d'un rire assez violent” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 251; idem, Guilty, 17).

10. This move parallels Bataille's earlier attempt to differentiate a sovereign community without authority from totalitarian demands that one sacrifice individual autonomy before the authority of the state. For Bataille, community must involve a dissolution of the self and his or her sovereignty with and as the whole. See Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess (ed. Allan Stoekl; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) 116-29, 137-60.

11. “J'entends par expérience intérieure ce que d'habitude on nomme expérience mystique: les états d'extase, de ravissement, au moins d'émotion méditée. Mais je songe moins à l'expérience confessionelle, à laquelle on a dû se tenir jusqu'ici, qu'à une expérience nue, libre d'attaches, même d'origine, à quelque confession que se soit. C'est pourquoi je n'aime pas le mot mystique” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 15; idem, Inner Experience [trans. Leslie Anne Boldt; Albany: SUNY Press, 1988] 3).

12. “Je ne sais si Dieu est ou n'est pas, mais à supposer qu'il soit, si je lui prête la connaissance exhaustive de lui-même et que je lie à cette connaissance les sentiments de satisfaction et d'approbation qui s'ajoutent en nous à la faculté de saisir, un sentiment nouveau d'insatisfaction essentielle s'empare de moi” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 126; Inner Experience, 107-8).

13. Bataille suggests in his preface to the book that readings of Inner Experience should focus on Part 2, “The Torment,” and the final brief section, which contains two poems (“Gloria in excelsis mihi” and “God”); only these were “written with necessity” rather than with “the laudable concern of creating a book” (“écrites nécessairement. … J'écrivis les autres avec le louable souci de composer un livre” [Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 9-10; idem, Inner Experience, xxxi]). “The Torment” offers an account of inner experience, and “Post-Scriptum to the Torment (or the New Mystical Theology)” describes the methods used to attain it (although Bataille insists that no method alone can promise inner experience). Given the more explicit debt to Angela in the latter, I will focus my attention on that text here. I believe, however, that Angela is crucial to all of Inner Experience and Guilty.

14. Bataille generally cites the Book through the 1927 edition and translation of M.-J. Ferré (Sainte Angèle de Foligno, Le livre de l'expérience des vrais fidèles [trans. M.-J. Ferré; Paris: Éditions E. Droz, 1927]) which gives the Latin text facing a French translation. In the portions cited by Bataille, this edition and translation do not substantively differ from the critical edition of Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti on which Paul Lachance's recent English translation is based.

15. Chapter 1 tells us there will be thirty steps or transformations and gives the first twenty. This is followed by a long digression (chapter 2) in which the scribe tells the readers how he has come to take down Angela's account of her experiences. Chapters 3 through 9 give seven supplementary steps, beginning with the twentieth, briefly described in the earlier section. The total number is then twenty-six rather than the expected thirty.

16. For the critical edition and a modern English translation, see Angela of Foligno, Il Libro della Beata Angela da Foligno (ed. Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti; Grottaferrata: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985); Angela of Foligno, Complete Works (trans. Paul Lachance; Mahway, NJ: Paulist, 1993).

17. For the complex textual details, see Catherine Mooney, “The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno's Revelations,” in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) 34-63.

18. This debate is crucial for any attempt to analyze Angela's book in terms of gender. See Mooney, “The Authorial Role”; Paul Lachance, The Spiritual Journey of the Blessed Angela of Foligno according the Memorial of Frater A. (Rome: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1984); and Jacques Dalarun, “Angèle de Foligno a-t-elle existé?” “Alla Signorina”: Mélanges offerts à Noëlle de La Blanchardière (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995) 59-97.

19. Insofar as mysticism and the figure of the mystic are gendered feminine for Bataille, recognition of the highly mediated nature of Angela's text is crucial.

20. “[Q]ui n'a que l'inconnu pour objet” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 120; idem, Inner Experience, 102).

21. “• qu'avoir son principe et sa fin dans l'absence de salut, dans la renonciation à tout espoir,

    • qu'affirmer de l'expérience intérieure qu'elle est l'autorité (mais toute autorité s'expie),

    • qu'être contestation d'elle-même et non-savoir” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 120; idem, Inner Experience, 102).

22. “Sainte Angèle de Foligno dit: ‘Une certaine fois, mon âme fut élevée et je voyais Dieu dans une clarté et une plénitude que je n'avais jamais connue à ce point, d'une façon aussi pleine. Et je ne voyais là aucun amour. J'ai perdu alors cet amour que je portais en moi; je fus faite le non-amour. Et ensuite, après cela, je le vis dans une ténèbre, car il est un bien si grand qu'il ne peut être pensé ou compris. Et rien de ce qui peut être pensé ou compris ne l'atteint ni ne l'approche (Livre de l'expérience, 1. 105).’ Un peu plus loin: ‘… L'âme voit un néant et voit toutes choses (nihil videt et omnia videt), le corps est endormi, la langue coupée. Et toutes les amitiés que Dieu m'a faites, nombreuses et indicibles, et toutes les paroles qu'il m'a dites … sont, je l'aperçois, si au-dessous de ce bien rencontré dans une ténèbre si grande que je ne mets pas mon espoir en elles, que mon espoir ne repose pas sur elles (id., 106)’” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 122; idem, Inner Experience, 104; the passages cited are from idem, Il Libro, 354, 358; idem, Complete Works, 202, 204).

    Another turn in the screw of translation: Bataille's English translator, Leslie Anne Boldt, makes some telling alterations and mistakes in just these passages, all designed to stress Bataille's “atheism” and hence to remove from Bataille all taint of Christianity (i.e. “Nothingness” for “néant” and “above” for “au-dessous”). Bataille substantializes “nihil” and Boldt further reifies with her decision to capitalize nothingness.

23. Bataille takes up the relationship between mysticism and eroticism in a number of postwar texts, including Erotism: Death and Sensuality (trans. Mary Dalwood; San Francisco: City Lights, 1986); and idem, The Accursed Share, vol. 2: The History of Eroticism (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Zone, 1991).

24. “Il est difficile de dire dans quelle mesure la croyance est à l'expérience un obstacle, dans quelle mesure l'intensité de l'expérience renverse cet obstacle” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 122; idem, Inner Experience, 104).

25. See Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 122-23; idem, Inner Experience, 105.

26. “‘O néant inconnu!’ (o nihil incognitum!)” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 122; idem, Inner Experience, 104). For the passage in Angela's work, see Il Libro, 734; Complete Works, 315-16.

27. For Sartre, Bataille's hypostasization of nothingness as the divine itself marks his return to the kind of dogmatic mysticism he claims to eschew. See Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” 179-88.

28. This part of the book and its organization should be compared with Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (trans. Gillian C. Gill; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). The partly failed experience reads like a kind of nature mysticism, ecstasy before scenery, if you will. Bataille's digressions are an attempt to clarify the distinction between contemplation of the point and this kind of more amorphous experience.

29. “Nec recordor, quando sum in illa ‘tenebra’, de aliqua humanitate vel de Deo homine nec de aliqua re quae formam habeat, et tamen omnia tunc video et nihil video. Et discendendo me vel remanendo me ab isto iam dicto, video Deum hominem; et trahit animam cum tanta mansuetudine, ut dicat aliquando: Tu es ego et ego sum tu. Et video illos oculos et illam faciam tantum placibilem et cum tanta aptitudine, ut amplexetur me. Et illud quod resultat de illis oculis et de illa facie, est illud quod ego dixi quod ego video in illa tenebra, quod venit de intus, et illud est quod me tantum delectat quod narrari non potest. Et in isto Deo homine stando anima est viva; sed illud de tenebra adhuc trahit animam multo plus quam istud de Deo homine sine comparatione” (Il Libro, 362; Complete Works, 205; I have used Lachance's translation).

30. For a theological elucidation of Angela's work, see Lachance, Spiritual Journey.

31. This would be similar to the relationship between suffering with Christ in his humanity and being divine with God articulated by the thirteenth-century beguine mystic, Hadewijch. See Hadewijch, Complete Works (trans. Mother Columba Hart; New York: Crossroads, 1980).

32. A central and unresolved issue lying behind this paper is that of the relationship between experience and language, in particular that between mystical experience and language. I assume here that mystical texts attempt to engender certain kinds of experience in the reader, but much more needs to be said about the philosophical implications of this view and about how texts engender experience. See Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

33. This suggests further the importance for Bataille of thinking about God as a projection of human desire. The point is not that God is “merely” humanity, but rather that this process of projection is necessary to attaining inner experience.

34. “Je dirai ceci d'obscur: I'objet dans l'expérience est d'abord la projection d'une perte de soi dramatique. C'est l'image du sujet. Le sujet tente d'abord d'aller à son semblable. Mais entré dans l'expérience intérieure, il est en quête d'un objet comme il est lui-même, réduit à l'intériorité. De plus, le sujet dont l'expérience est en elle-même et dès le début dramatique (est perte de soi) a besoin d'objectiver ce caractère dramatique. …

    Mais il ne s'agit là que d'un semblable. Le point, devant moi, réduit à la plus pauvre simplicité, est une personne. A chaque instant de l'expérience, ce point peut rayonner des bras, crier, se mettre en flammes” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 137; idem, Inner Experience, 118).

35. “Quadam vice cogitabam de magno dolore quem Christus sustinuit in cruce et cogitabam de clavis illis, quos ego audiveram dici quod clavi illi de manibus et pedibus eius carnem portaverunt intus in ligno. Et desiderabam videre vel saltem illud parum de carne Christi quod portaverunt clavi in ligno. Et tunc habui tam magnum dolorem de illa poena Christi, quod non potui stare in pedibus, sed inclinavi me et sedi et inclinavi caput super brachia mea quae proieceram in terra, et tunc ostendit mihi Christus gulam et brachia” (Il Libro, 192-94; Complete Works, 145-46).

36. “De toute façon, nous ne pouvons le point-objet que par le drame. J'ai eu recours à des images bouleversantes. En particulier, je fixais l'image photographique—ou parfois le souvenir que j'en ai—d'un Chinois que dut être supplicié de mon vivant. De ce supplice, j'avais eu, autrefois, une suite de représentations successives. A la fin, le patient, la poitrine écorchée, se tordait, bras and jambes tranchés aux coudes et aux genoux. Les cheveux dressés sur la tête, hideux, hagard, zébré de sang, beau comme une guêpe” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 139; idem, Inner Experience, 119).

37. “Le jeune et séduisant Chinois dont j'ai parlé, livré au travail du bourreau, je l'aimais d'un amour où l'instinct sadique n'avait pas de part: il me communiquait sa douleur ou plutôt l'excès de sa douleur et c'était ce que justement je cherchais, non pour en jouir, mais pour ruiner en moi ce qui s'oppose à la ruine” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 140; idem, Inner Experience, 120). His identification is not with the sadistic torturor (God in earlier formulations?), but perhaps a masochistic identification with the tortured person (if we take the passage to be disavowing only sadism, not every pleasure). This suggests that to disavow God is to disavow sadistic pleasure. Yet, what is the masochist without the sadist—merely a victim of chance?

38. I am tempted to write that which one cannot ruin literally, one ruins symbolically, but that begs the question of the reality of the torture victim's suffering and death. Bataille, unlike Angela, does not desire his own death, but is his desire to live within its breath dependent on the death of the other?

39. “[Q]uod ego peterem eum quod faceret mihi istam gratiam, scilicet quod, quia Christus fuit crucifixus in ligno, me crucifigeret in una ripa vel in uno vilissimo loco vel in una vilissima re; et quia non eram digna mori sicut fuerunt mortui sancti, faceret me mori magis viliter et cum longa morte. Et non poteram cogitare ita vilem mortem sicut ego desiderabam” (Il Libro, 144; Complete Works, 128; see also Il Libro, 206-8; Complete Works, 150-51).

40. “De tormentis vero animae, quae a daemonibus sustinebat, nullam sciebat assignare similitudinem aliam nisi de homine suspenso per gulam, qui, ligatis manibus post tergum et velatis oculis, suspensus per funem remansisset in furcis et viveret, cui nullam auxilium, nullam omnino sustentamentum vel remedium remansisset” (Il Libro, 338; Complete Works, 197). This is just one of many similar images of abjection found throughout Angela's Memorial (see Il Libro, 144, 206-8, 242, 302-4; Complete Works, 128, 150-51, 162-63, 184-85).

41. We should not forget, however, that Angela's book was recorded by a scribe who translated her words into Latin. Similar translations by male scribes of women's texts suggest that this emphasis on the external suffering and asceticism of medieval women may be a hagiographical trope rather than an accurate reflection of mystical experience. In this reading, Angela's suffering body might be seen as an “object” onto which her readers can project themselves. See Amy Hollywood, “Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographers,” in Catherine Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

42. At this point, I am just using translation of relics as an analogy with which to think through Bataille's relationship to Angela. Given the centrality of communication to his work, however, and his insistence that communication depends on laceration and woundedness, there might be deeper connections between translation as the removal of a saint's relics and translation as communication. To make this argument, I would need to explore the disanalogies, for medieval translatio refers to other movements not seemingly dependent on death or laceration.

43. Alternately, and more hopefully, Patrick Geary suggests that the body of the saint possesses meaning only insofar as it is surrounded by or embedded within a narrative. A bone is just a bone until it is named as that of a saint and thereby given religious, thaumaturgic, political, and economic significance. Hence the importance of translatio narratives in which the remains possessed by a particular community are identified, and the story of the translation authorizes links with a saintly person. Yet from Bataille's perspective, one might ask whether such authorizing narratives are not attempts to place the lacerated human body back into discourse and the realm of project, precisely the antithesis of the ecstatic. The meaning Bataille wishes to communicate or translate is self-authorizing and without end or aim (hence without meaning?). See Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 5-9.

44. The question then becomes why bodily and linguistic transgression are so crucial at these divergent historical moments.

45. Although his desire to dissolve the self is itself a form of asceticism.

46. “Le mouvement antérieur à l'extase du non-savoir est l'extase devant un objet (que celuici soit le point pur—comme le veut le renoncement aux croyances dogmatiques, ou quelque image bouleversante). Si cette extase devant l'objet est d'abord donnée (comme un possible) et si je supprime, après coup, l'objet—comme la ‘contestation’ fatalement le fait—si pour cette raison j'entre dans l'angoisse—dans l'horreur, dans la nuit du non-savoir—l'extase est proche et, quand elle survient, m'abîme plus loin que rien imaginable. Si j'avais ignoré l'extase devant l'objet, je n'aurais pas atteint l'extase dans la nuit. Mais initié comme je l'étais à l'objet—et mon initiation avail représenté la pénétration la plus lointaine du possible—je ne pouvais, dans la nuit, que trouver une extase plus profonde. Dès lors la nuit, le non-savoir, sera chaque fois le chemin de l'extase où je me perdrai” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 144; idem, Inner Experience, 123-24). The last line suggests Bataille's affinity with Marguerite Porete, whose text he did not know. She argues that the movement through the “object” can be surpassed.

47. “des images d'explosion, de déchirement” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 269; idem, Guilty, 32). I have here used Boone's evocative translation.

48. Note Bataille on the much discussed “ineffability” of mystical experience: “It is easy to say that one cannot speak of ecstasy. There is in it an element which one cannot reduce, which remains ‘beyond expression’, but ecstasy, in this respect, does not differ from other forms: I can have, can communicate the precise knowledge of it as much—or more than—that of laughter, of physical love—or of things; the difficulty, however, is that being less commonly experienced than laughter or things, what I say of it cannot be familiar, easily recognizable” (Bataille, Inner Experience, 123; idem, Oeuvres Complètes, 143-44).

    Although this passage suggests a distinction between experience and language that confirms Derrida's critique of Bataille, I am not sure that this “irreducible” something is not very close to that which Derrida writes of in his work on translation. Derrida focuses on the loss that occurs in the movement between and within languages. Bataille maintains experience as a category, yet he never claims that one can escape the confines of language. Rather, language/communication and experience are inextricably linked, and so he needs new forms of communication to engender new (or at least uncommon) forms of experience. The link suggests another reason for using the category of translation in thinking about Bataille.

49. Many would read this as a gendered conception of communication and the imaginary wholeness of the self, in which any openness is conceived as a wound. Irigaray compellingly makes this critique, although in relation to Lacan rather than Bataille. In response, she attempts to articulate a conception of fluid subjectivity that does not understand openness as a wound. See, for example, Luce Irigary, Speculum of the Other Woman, and eadem, Sexes and Genealogies (trans. Gillian C. Gill; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Although I find much in this reading compelling, I wonder what to do with the emphasis on woundedness within medieval women mystics like Angela. Does one read this solely in terms of their complicity with a masculinist religion? Or are there other issues aside from sexual difference playing into this account of subjectivity? In the case of Bataille, for example, I think that there is a historically specific dimension to his emphasis on violence and laceration. The context of war clearly pervades Bataille's texts.

50. Angela's hope for a future life may lie behind her desire to die, pointing to the gap between her experience and Bataille's. It could be, however, that Angela truly desires dissolution in a way unmatched by him.