SOURCE: Hussey, Andrew. “‘Le taureau affronté’: Georges Bataille and the Problem of Mysticism.” In The Inner Scar: The Mysticism of Georges Bataille, pp. 1-36. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

[In the following essay, Hussey discusses Bataille's interpretation of mysticism and subsequent critical reaction to it.]

Bataille, abattage d'un humain bétail

—Michel Leiris, Glossaire: j'y serre mes gloses

Since his death in 1962, Georges Bataille has acquired the status of one of the most influential thinkers of the age. It is an irony, however, that this status has been achieved despite the fact that, in his lifetime, Bataille's writings were known only to a relatively small number of people and that, in the years which immediately followed his death, much of his work remained either unpublished or, for other reasons, inaccessible. However, Bataille's current prestige is such that since the publication of the twelve volumes of his Œuvres Complètes, in the 1970s, almost all of his works have been translated into English and other major languages, whilst in France and elsewhere he has been the focus for extensive critical debate in the form of a plethora of essays, monographs and conferences.

It is a further irony that Bataille's posthumous fame, unlike that of former enemies such as André Breton or Jean-Paul Sartre, rests upon his perceived contribution to contemporary thought. The fact that this reputation has been established by the likes of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers, indicates that Bataille, whose life and work intersect with the debates around the political and artistic avant-gardes of the first part of the century, is considered as a precursor of post-structuralism and post-modernism, the twin literary and philosophical movements which have, in recent years, dominated contemporary critical thinking in Europe and the United States.

The principal reason for this is that Bataille has often been perceived by contemporary critics as an avatar of limitless irrationalism.¹ This perception of Bataille is attractive to the post-modernist imagination, first of all, because it establishes Bataille as a thinker whose work is emblematic of the post-modernist urge to separate meaning and function in language and philosophy.² Bataille's reputation as a precursor of post-modernism is further enhanced by the the fact that the essential content of his writings—which borrow ideas and terminology from the various and separate worlds of Hegelian philosophy, mysticism, ethnology and economics—is elision and paradox.

Despite Bataille's current prominence, however, few contemporary commentators have engaged with those aspects of Bataille's thinking which he discusses with reference to the language of mysticism. This is an omission which is all the more striking given that Bataille considered his thought to be not only opposite to the philosophical tradition which had its origins in the project of the Enlightenment, but also as a form of speculation which was intricately related to the religious exigencies of the Christian Medieval period. In the same way, Bataille not only was widely read in texts on Eastern mysticism but, as he pursued his interest in Hermetic philosophy and Gnosticism through the 1930s, also experimented with collective and individual forms of mystical practice based on Oriental methods.

Therefore the present study will address itself specifically to the question and the challenge of Bataille's relation to mysticism, the apparent blind spot for contemporary Bataille criticism. More precisely, this study is an examination of the relation between Bataille's account of an experience of loss of identity, which he describes as an ‘inner experience’, and the way in which Bataille parallels this experience to traditional forms of religious mysticism. This relation will be traced and defined in the texts Bataille wrote between 1938 and 1947 and which either precede or form the core texts of the unfinished series he entitled La Somme athéologique.

THE DIFFICULTY OF DEFINING MYSTICISM

The term ‘mysticism’ has commonly been the source of misuse or abuse. In the considerable literature of mysticism this difficulty is generally acknowledged to be partly an inevitable result of the antiquity of the word, and partly because the ineffable nature of what is normally described as ‘mystical experience’ is inherently impossible or difficult to describe. As Bataille puts it in the opening section of L'Éxpérience intérieure, it follows from this central fact that one of the difficulties of reading the inner experience as experience rather than metaphor is that the term ‘mysticism’ very quickly loses any useful meaning.³

It is possible, however, to trace a pathology of mystical experience. In most instances, this means in the Christian tradition that mysticism is most often defined in relation to its original Greek cognate muo, ‘to close up’ or ‘conceal’, and that the mystic is one who is initiated and given access to visions of the unseen.⁴ The methods which allowed access to these visions were, in the early Church, close to Oriental methods of meditation in that they were forms of ascetic practice which aimed at a separation between mind and body and, thereby, the negation of the individual, thinking subject.⁵ The earliest accounts of Christian mystical experience, such as those given by Clement of Alexandria or his pupil Origen, also define themselves as ‘allegories’ in the sense that they provide—as in the Presocratic philosophy of Heraclitus so cherished by the Neoplatonic philosophers—a conduit to an occult relationship with the universe. Clement, in his Stromateia (Miscellanies) argued that there was in mystical experience a form of ‘gnosis’ (knowledge) which was a form of advanced Christianity. The secret, heretical tradition of what were termed the Gnostic Gospels was, in this sense, a key defining element in the formation of the early Church.⁶

It was an axiom of the Medieval Church, however, that true Christian knowledge was entirely separate from the hermetic philosophy represented by the Gnostics. The history of Christian mysticism during the Medieval period is, nonetheless, for the most part, a tradition which works against the hierarchical structures of the Church both as a political and philosophical body. This, clearly, explains Bataille's interest in mysticism as a process of thought which undermines or destabilises hierarchical forms of thinking.

Mysticism in the medieval period, particularly in Germany, France and Spain, was also concerned with forms of encounter or ‘Union’ which revealed God as within the body of the mystic as well as the external controlling principle of the universe. The law of the universe, it was implied, was also the law of the individual mind. In Germany and the Low Countries, for Meister Eckhart, Jan van Ruysbroeck, and the Blessed Henry Suso, this insight became the guiding theory of mystical speculation which sought to reconcile the themes of Neoplatonic contemplation with a spirit of analysis. In France, Aquinas' arguments for a separation between thought and feeling created a tradition which, in the Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade or the Quietist Madame Guyon, sought ‘abandonment’ in the ecstasy of God.⁷ This tradition also found its corollary in the Counter-Reformation where the Carmelite mystics, Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, described their experiences in the erotic idiom of The Song of Songs as a series of encounters which induced an orgasmic, rapturous loss of self.

Jacques Lacan's remarks on Bernini's ‘Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’, describing the ‘jouissance’ which Teresa feels but does not know,⁸ explain how, in the Christian tradition, mysticism has a dual status as the essential mystery of faith and as an interiority which defies the reductive narrative of the Church, thereby posing a threat to the fundamental principles of hierarchy and summit. This is a status which persists to this day and which, at least in part, explains the interest shown in Bataille's descriptions of the inner experience by thinkers such as Jean-Claude Renard or Le Père Daniélou who are operating within a Christian framework.

It is also important for this study that, like many of his generation, Bataille was widely read in the texts of Oriental mysticism. Indeed, as for the Surrealists, it seemed particularly significant for Bataille that in the Oriental tradition the participant in mystical experience did not aim at a summit which would be a point of encounter with God within a tradition, but at an experience in which the subject would be subsumed or literally dissolved into the movement of the cosmos. Bataille, in his mystical experiments during the late 1930s, specifically sought to enact this movement in real experience based on the techniques of Buddhist meditation.⁹

Most importantly, the object of mysticism—whether Eastern or Western—is practical and not theoretical. In her influential study, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness—a work which is still a key point of reference for contemporary writers on mysticism—Evelyn Underhill says that it is the fact that mysticism is a concrete practical operation which makes it of such crucial significance in all religious systems of thought. It is, in this sense, she says, the fundamental reality of religion.¹⁰

In the same way, as the present study suggests, it is the inner experience which is the touchstone of Bataille's thought. It is therefore of singular importance for Bataille that the ecstasies of the Christian mystics, the meditative practices of Hindus or Buddhists, even the alcoholic intoxication which William James describes as ‘a bit of the Mystic consciousness’,¹¹ whether these experiences take the form of ‘encounters’, ‘voices’ or ‘visions’ all have in common a salient characteristic: they are all experiences which cannot be described adequately because they take place beyond language.¹²

READING THE INNER EXPERIENCE

One of the particular difficulties in reading Bataille is his notion that absence can be met directly in experience.

This is the inner experience which is described in Bataille's 1943 book L'Expérience intérieure and it is, in many ways, the fundamental paradox of his philosophy.¹³ Marguerite Duras elaborated this point, with reference to the problem of Bataille criticism, in an article written in 1958 for the journal La Ciguë.

La critique, au seul nom de Bataille, s'intimide […]. Les années passent: les gens continuent à vivre dans l'illusion qu'ils pourront un jour parler de Bataille […] Cette abstention devient leur orgueil. Ils mourront sans oser, dans le souci extrême où ils sont de leur réputation, affronter ce taureau.¹⁴

For Duras, to confront Bataille's writing, and in particular his writing on inner experience, is to confront an assertion of pure negativity couched in terms which actively contradict each other and which seem to undermine or prohibit the analytical function of criticism. It is a further paradox, however, that despite these snares and impossibilities, within ten years of Duras' statement, Bataille's writing had taken on an almost canonical status in the French literary avant-garde.

This status was heralded by the special edition of the journal Critique, which was published in homage to Bataille in 1963, and in which articles from Bataille's friends and contemporaries, such as Maurice Blanchot or Pierre Klossowski, sat alongside articles from younger men such as Michel Foucault and Philippe Sollers. Through the subsequent course of the decade, a number of articles were published on Bataille's work by writers associated with the journal Tel Quel, which around the central figure of Philippe Sollers drew together a generation of writers and thinkers who saw the task of the avant-garde as matching theories of language and text to the practice of cultural subversion. In 1972, Tel Quel organised a conference on Bataille and Antonin Artaud under the rubric ‘Vers une révolution culturelle’. This conference firmly installed Bataille as an exemplary figure, whose practice as a writer and a thinker was to be followed and continued.

The reasons for the historical process which led to this status for Bataille were various and complex. In the first instance, however, as both Philippe Forest and Patrick ffrench have suggested in their histories of the journal Tel Quel, it is clear that Bataille played a prophetic role to a generation who were either hostile to the utopian demands of Surrealism, by now considered a pre-war antique, or suspicious of the lingering influence of Sartrean existentialism.¹⁵ Secondly, as a writer who actively played upon the impossibility of bringing together meaning and form in text, thought or society, for those writers closely associated with Tel Quel as well as others such as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, Bataille anticipated the revolutionary tension of 1968 France.

According to Patrick ffrench, Bataille was also ‘the acknowledged hero’ of Tel Quel because his work ‘rests on the ambiguous tension “between” Nietzsche and Hegel’.¹⁶ More specifically, for the theorists of Tel Quel and associates such as Foucault and Derrida, Bataille's work represented a move beyond the totalizing demands of Hegelian philosophy towards a matrix of speculative theories which ‘put the subject on trial’.¹⁷ Above all, what brought Foucault, Derrida and the theorists of Tel Quel together was the common belief that there was a metaphorical parallel between the breaking of sexual taboos and revolt against technical constraints in writing and text. As Roland Barthes argued in his important and influential 1963 essay on Bataille for Critique, ‘La Métaphore de l'œil’, aesthetic transgession, the breaking with the forms and rules of language, is not only metaphorically equivalent to sexual trangression, but indeed may well be at the foundation of eroticism.¹⁸

This reading of Bataille was fundamental in his establishment as a thinker whose primary concern is the limits of language rather than real conceptual thought. This meant however that when Bataille's critical reputation was in the ascendant in the 1960s, Bataille's inner experience was in fact described in terms which were at some distance from the Surrealist generation to which Bataille had belonged. More precisely, the generation which posthumously made Bataille a culture hero described inner experience in metaphorical or metonymic terms.¹⁹ The inner experience was read for the most part as a textual ‘transgression’, the term used by Bataille to describe an aesthetic, erotic or philosophical violation of law or limits. Bataille's writings on inner experience were discussed with exclusive regard to their theoretical implications for textual criticism, whilst the transgressive act of inner experience, which undermined ordered, discursive thought with the collapse of the subject, was seen as part of a textual game.²⁰ The actual experiences which lay behind the notion of inner experience, and which were described by Bataille with reference to the theories and experiences of religious mystics were, to a large extent, either overlooked or disregarded.

LA TACHE AVEUGLE

The generation which first read Bataille as a precursor of contemporary thought also privileged the term ‘blindspot’ as a metaphor for unknowable and unreachable parts of a text which no amount of reading can fully decipher or reveal.²¹ As the dizzying perspectives of Bataille's writing demonstrated for these readers, the ‘blindspot’ of the text has also dual status as the point from which the reader of the text cannot ‘see’ his or her own perspective, and also the point from which the reader's gaze, for reasons which may or may nor be innocent, has been averted.

For Susan Rubin Suleiman, it is highly significant that the body as represented in Bataille's erotic fiction is a notable ‘blindspot’ for this first generation which read Bataille. This is because, she argues, the body, and in particular the female body, ‘is the very emblem of the contradictory coexistence of transgression and prohibition, purity and defilement, that characterises both the “inner experience” of eroticism and the textual play of the pornographic narrative.’²² The mystical aspects of inner experience as a physical event, no less than its erotic content, are predicated upon a parallel contradiction which suspends thought. In this way they represent a form of poetic activity which actively works against the possibility of limiting inner experience to a textual process. The inner experience as a physical rather than a textual event, no less than the female body in Bataille's fictions, however marks a ‘blindspot’ for many of those critics who first announced Bataille as a contemporary.

In his essay, ‘Préface à la transgression’, published in Critique in 1962, Michel Foucault makes the inner experience the central point of his argument.²³ Foucault describes the enucleated eye as the key motif of Bataille's thought. The blinded eye is an image which stands for the finitude of meaning, of language, in death. Foucault isolates erotic experience as the experience which takes the subject of Bataille's thought to these limits. This experience of the limit, for Foucault, is equivalent to the experiences of religious mystics because, like the modes of sexual ecstasy described by Sade or Freud, it is a form of experience which is beyond words. It is also therefore outside history. For Foucault it is through language that the human subject participates in the process of its own construction and therefore in history. It is also language which determines the limits of subjectivity. Mysticism, as such, can only be for Foucault one of a series of metaphorical experiences (blindness and violent orgasm are others) which represent the limits of the subject and the point of transgression. One of Foucault's main aims in ‘Préface à la transgression’ is to revolt against Hegelian philosophy. In particular, Foucault wishes to move away from the Hegelian dialectic as a model of mind. He therefore cites the inner experience as an exemplary analytical process, which undermines the Hegelian model of subjectivity, and, based on this, argues for a future ‘discourse of transgression’ which would replace the Hegelian logic of contradiction and the law of the dialectic.

Bataille's inner experience is then for Foucault an experience which marks a non-dialectical form of philosophical language. In this sense it is for Foucault no more metaphorical than Descartes' notion of ‘acies mentis’, the ‘clear perception of sight’ which Descartes makes a central principle of his method and which is not only a metaphor but also an intuition, that is to say an insight which is experienced before it is articulated in thought. Foucault notes that that the finitude and exhaustion of Bataille's language in this way reveal in L'Expérience intérieure a double language of philosophy which, in its self-reflective nature, lies beyond Christianity, religious feeling or the law of the Hegelian dialectic. Unlike the thought of Descartes, however, or the experiences of traditional religious mystics, Bataille's inner experience does not fit in with any categorical, transcendental or spiritual framework. It can then only function within discourse, like the enucleated eye, as an image of the experience of the limit which it announces. Ultimately therefore, for Foucault, Bataille's equation of mystical experience with erotic feeling, trapped as it is in discourse, can therefore only be, like all other forms of transgression, a metaphorical equivalent.

Similarly, for Philippe Sollers, in his essay ‘Le toit’, originally written in 1967, Bataille's inner experience represents an ‘experience of limits’, an encounter with ‘le non-savoir’, which opens up an infinite series of perspectives which redefine and reshape the subject.²⁴ Like Foucault, Sollers insists that the most important aspect of this experience is its textual value and Sollers therefore makes the point that this experience is not related to the Surrealist practice of poetry which pursues a poetic ideal, the point which André Breton describes in mystical terms as the end of all contradictions. This is, says Sollers, because Bataille is concerned less with questions of ‘spirit’ or ‘perception’ rather than with ‘space’ and ‘relations’. The inner experience is a dizzying experience of a summit which suspends the subject between discourse and silence and which prohibits all forms of action. The view from this summit cannot be described in mystical terms as ‘vision’ or ‘encounter’, however, but only in metaphorical terms as interplay between discourse and silence. The question which Sollers asks of Bataille, therefore, is not what can be seen from the summit, or ‘the roof’, but rather what is this ‘roof’ made of (‘En effet, la question posée n'est pas seulement: que voit-on depuis le ‘toit’? mais encore: qu'est-ce que ce “toit” lui-même?’).²⁵

Sollers examines Bataille's relation to language, eroticism and death. He finds that in each of these categories, Bataille holds a dualist position which rather than seeking to bring together opposites, meaning and non-meaning for example, actively embraces the paradox of separation. It is this irreducible position which, Sollers asserts, defines the movement of the subject towards its own death, the negative operation of inner experience. However, for Sollers, this experience cannot be properly mystical, although it is obviously related to traditional forms of Christian mysticism as an experience of silence, of wordless thought. It is the annihilation of language, and not the experience which follows this process, which counts most of all for Sollers. The significance of inner experience, the encounter with silence, is not in any real sense ‘mystical’ but rather a dialectical foil to discourse and reason.

Il [Bataille] admet la validité de la science et de la philosophie, mais l'espace commun, qu'il leur assigne doit être séparé sans retour de la philosophie, de la science. Il ne s'oppose pas au savoir (au contraire), mais il n'hésite pas à s'appuyer sur un ‘non-savoir’. D'emblée la mise en forme extrêmement cohérente qui est la sienne prend donc le risque stratégique d'un malentendu: les accusations de ‘mysticisme’ et ‘d'obscurantisme’ ne peuvent manquer de lui être addressées.²⁶

Inner experience is, then, like the ‘roof’, a metaphor for a perspective of high altitude which reveals a multiplicity of metaphorical systems and the impossibility of fixed meaning. Bataille's alleged ‘mysticism’ is therefore, for Sollers, not a fixed state but, as it is for Foucault, only a passage towards a new theory of knowledge and discourse.

In his famous essay of 1967, ‘De l'économie restreinte à l'économie générale: un hégélianisme sans réserves’, Jacques Derrida presents an account of Bataille's ‘mysticism’ which, unlike either Foucault or Sollers, sets out to examine how Bataille's thinking corresponds to the conceptual language of Hegel.²⁷ Bataille's ‘mysticism’, for Derrida, is a metaphor which mediates the demands of the Hegelian system as an unrestricted negativity. The movement of inner experience can thus be traced as a movement beyond the Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’—the term used by Hegel to describe the dialectical transition in which a lower stage is both annulled and preserved in a higher one and which is commonly translated as ‘sublation’.²⁸ More specifically, although Bataille borrows the language of Hegel and engages with the dialectic, the possibility of the Hegelian sublation, as Derrida points out, is abolished by the self-destruction of the subject which occurs in inner experience. ‘Quoi qu'il en soit, les pages qui vont suivre se situent audelà du discours circulaire hégélien, writes Kojève in an abandoned preface for La Somme athéologique.²⁹

As Derrida recognises, Bataille's version of Hegelian ‘self-overcoming’ or ‘sublation’ not only posits ‘mystical’ ecstatic experience as the central value of inner experience but also affirms a movement into radical negativity, ‘négativité sans emploi’,³⁰ which paralyses the movement of the dialectic. In this way, Derrida explains inner experience as a textual experience of stasis which exceeds the logic of presence in a movement of self-annihilation which also annihilates all stable referents. Derrida describes Bataille's ‘Hegelianism or anti-Hegelianism’ as ‘the displacement of the ‘Aufhebung’ and privileges the texts of La Somme athéologique as the locus of this displacement.

Derrida's real purpose in this essay is not however to discuss or engage with the first principles of thought and activity, that is to say the vocabulary and grammar of mysticism, which determine the content of inner experience. As Susan Rubin Suleiman has pointed out, Derrida is more concerned with the suggestion that ‘transgression of rules of discourse implies the transgression of law in general, since discourse exists only by positing the norm and value of meaning, and meaning in turn is the founding element in legality.’³¹ Transgression for Derrida can therefore only have significance as part of a general violation of discourse, which does not exclude mysticism, but which refuses all referents beyond the immediate experience of language and text.

Other theorists writing on Bataille in the 1960s and the 1970s also saw language as preceding experience and, from this insight, developed either theories of reading or action from Bataille's work. As in the critical readings described above, the mystical aspects of the inner experience were either dismissed or discarded as analogical or symbolic forms of language and thought with no currency beyond the allegorical value of the text. For Denis Hollier, for example, Bataille's inner experience represents a form of activity which, while not in any sense properly mystical, borrows the language of mysticism as part of a strategy which allows Bataille to resist the reductive authority of either spatial structures (this is the central theme of Hollier's book La prise de la concorde)³² or symbolic dualities.

This theme is explored by Hollier in his influential article ‘Le matérialisme dualiste de Georges Bataille’ in which he describes how Bataille's thought is related to the dualist system of the Gnostic theologians, who emphasised the distance between opposites such as Good and Evil rather than their reconciliation.

Le Mal et le Bien ne s'opposent donc pas comme deux principes intérieurs au même monde, mais bien comme deux mondes étrangers et rivaux, quoique de leur impossible coexistence résulte entre eux une étrange complicité: monde d'une part de la raison et de la volonté, monde d'autre part de la fascination et de la séduction.³³

It is this symbolic system, asserts Hollier, which allows Bataille to move away from the framework of dialectical thought. The significance of the inner experience within this system of thought is primarily as an assertion of separation or impossibility. However although this dualist system is, according to Hollier, related to mysticism or at least to deep religious feeling, this relation is still predicated upon a metaphorical usage of the term ‘mysticism’, used to signify simply the negation of thought rather than a real religious encounter.

Similarly, in her article ‘Bataille, l'expérience et la pratique’, given originally as a paper at the 1972 Tel Quel conference, Julia Kristeva finds in Bataille a constitution of non-meaning which undermines the Cartesian subject. For Kristeva, the central importance of Bataille's texts lies in the fact that their symbolic language is predicated upon a contradictory tension between the ‘thetic’, the controlling principle of discourse, and the ‘semiotic’, a heterogenous series of principles which disrupts the organizing function of the ‘thetic’. Most importantly for Kristeva, the movement of inner experience is a movement backwards, or a traversal, which as the subject moves back towards itself, initiates a process of disintegration in the external world. The ‘illumination’ of inner experience is therefore a ‘thetic’ moment which introduces the subject back into the world.

L'expérience intérieure consiste à introduire le savoir dans l'immédiateté […] pour que le savoir traverse la vision, le spectacle, la représentation.³⁴

The real significance of inner experience for Kristeva is that the collapse of the subject and the consequent paralysis of the Hegelian dialectic provide a guiding theory for rebuilding the exterior world in political action (she argues in this way, through a materialist formula, for an alignment of Bataille's inner experience and the political theory of Mao Tse-tung, then still the hero of the Tel Quel group).³⁵ It is most important for Kristeva, however, that Bataille's inner experience is a site where meaning is contested in a way which confronts conceptual thought. The ‘traversal’ of inner experience, argues Kristeva, can therefore only be ‘mystical’ in an analogous sense, mirroring the poetic logic of Christian humanism. In the same way that Christianity confused experience with discourse, thereby reducing mysticism to a pure text, the inner experience is a form of play, a ‘fiction’, which cannot be entirely separate from the language system which it seeks to undermine.

The critical reception of Bataille in France and elsewhere has inevitably been greatly determined by these critical readings of Bataille, published during the period in which he was ‘the acknowledged hero’ of Tel Quel.³⁶ Since the 1960s and 1970s, much critical writing on Bataille in the English-speaking world has indeed considered him almost exclusively in relation to those writers who established his posthumous reputation in France. In a brief survey of Bataille's legacy outside France, Fred Botting and Scott Wilson assert that Bataille's singular importance is ‘in the mirror of post-structuralism.’³⁷ For Tony Corn, for example, this means that if there is a legacy which Bataille leaves us, it is as a thinker who marks a shift away from classical Hegelianism towards the ‘post-Hegelianism’ of post-modern thinking, thus prefiguring the inverted reading of Hegel which is one of the defining features of Derrida's Glas: ‘Between “1945” and “1968”,’ writes Corn, ‘“Bataille” and “Derrida” mark decisive moments (as much chronological as logical) in the historicity of modernity's reading of Hegel.’³⁸

The translation into English in 1984 of Jürgen Habermas's influential essay, ‘The French Path to Postmodernity: Bataille between Eroticism and General Economics’, similarly established Bataille's status as a precursor or even prophet of post-modern thought. Most importantly, Habermas reads Bataille as a thinker whose distance from modernity is expressed in the way he ‘oscillates between an incoherent attachment to the Hegelian project of the enlightenment, on the one hand, and an unmediated juxtaposition of scholarly analysis and mysticism, on the other.’³⁹

For Habermas, mysticism signals failure, withdrawal and retreat; this is how Habermas is able to conclude that Bataille's final contribution to the development of post-modern thinking is as a writer who ‘undercuts his own efforts to carry out the radical critique of reason with the tools of theory.’⁴⁰

The prevailing view of Bataille, in France and elsewhere, as the above readings have demonstrated, is then as a thinker whose work has primarily a textual value. Few contemporary readings of Bataille have engaged with the language or content of mysticism in his writings in relation to lived experience. However, although aware of the theoretical implications and ambiguities he is exposing himself to, Bataille himself does not shy away from using the term ‘experience’ in discussion of ‘inner experience’ and nor does he hesitate to explain what he means with reference to real, lived activity. Indeed, the paradoxical relation between metaphorical language and experience, Bataille indicates, is analogous to the ‘blindspot’ which undermines all forms of knowledge which are limited to discursive activity rather than the lived poetic actions of vision and blindness:

Il est dans l'entendement une tache aveugle: qui appelle la structure de l'œil. Dans l'entendement comme dans l'œil on ne peut que difficilement la déceler. Mais alors que la tache aveugle de l'œil est sans conséquence, la nature de l'entendement veut que la tache aveugle ait en lui plus de sens que l'entendement même. Dans la mesure où l'entendement est l'auxilaire de l'action, la tache y est aussi négligeable qu'elle est dans l'œil. Mais dans la mesure où l'on envisage dans l'entendement l'homme lui-même, je veux dire une exploration du possible de l'être, la tache absorbe l'attention: ce n'est plus la tache qui se perd dans la connaissance, mais la connaissance qui se perd en elle.⁴¹

As this passage implies, as a close if not always faithful reader of Hegel, Bataille understood the relation between language and experience as based not on an opposition but rather, as it was for the Surrealists, a complicity between the self-reflective subject and symbolical and analogical forms of thinking. It is the mystical nature of the inner experience, in lived erotic feeling or meditation wherein the subject divides and collapses, which reveals this relation by undermining the possibility of any stable or mediated series of metaphorical relations. This is why Bataille refers to the limits of the Hegelian system in visceral terms as ‘l'horreur de la tache aveugle’.⁴² It is also for this reason that I have chosen to consider the mystical aspects of inner experience, and the writing of that experience, as the point where so many previous critical readings have encountered their ‘blind spot.’

‘… JE N'AIME PAS LE MOT MYSTIQUE’: SARTRE'S CRITIQUE OF BATAILLE'S MYSTICISM

It is therefore also significant to the present study that one of Bataille's earliest and severest critics was Jean-Paul Sartre whose attack on Bataille, ‘Un Nouveau mystique’, was first published in Cahiers du Sud in 1941 as a review on the publication of L'Expérience intérieure.⁴³ Although the reasons why Sartre should have launched such a sustained attack on Bataille are unclear, it is evident that Bataille reacted immediately, and with a certain amount of anger, to the piece. Indeed, although the subsequent texts of La Somme athéologique are not entirely conceived as a response to this piece, it is, nonetheless, true to say that Sartre's article had a direct influence on Bataille's own approach to the problem of ‘mysticism’ after that date.

In this article, Sartre made several accusations against Bataille, most of them concerned with the paradox of writing inner experience. Specifically, Sartre describes Bataille's inner experience as a form of mourning for God and accuses him of replacing the exigencies of existentialist thinking with a casuistry born of the religious vocabulary he parodies or appropriates.

Et l'on croirait, à lire plus d'un passage de L'Expérience intérieure, retrouver Stravrogine ou Ivan Karamazov—un Ivan qui aurait connu André Breton.⁴⁴

Sartre's scepticism, however, is not merely founded in his scorn for Bataille's rhetoric. The most serious charge which Sartre lays against Bataille is that inner experience, if it is concrete experience of absence, is an unreserved negativity which mitigates against the possibility of literature as it mitigates against the possibility of thought. Bataille's ‘mysticism’, says Sartre, is therefore no more than an artifice, in the same way that L'Expérience intérieure is an exercise in mourning which is a parody of the Pascalian ‘essai-martyre’.⁴⁵

In many ways, Sartre's attack on the sham or false aspects of Bataille's ‘mysticism’ represents a closer, or at least less partial, reading of Bataille than those which established his posthumous reputation. Still more importantly, as Bataille himself acknowledged, Sartre's attack asks many of the most important questions about the function and meaning of inner experience.⁴⁶ Sartre does this without reference to a context framed by the authority of textual organisation or limited to the ‘great irregularities of language’⁴⁷ privileged by Bataille's post-modernist critics.

In other words, the question Sartre asks, and which Bataille engages with in all of the texts of La Somme athéologique, is what the precise relation is between a mystical framework—either Christian or Oriental—which aims at a point of encounter with a transcendent beyond, and an experience which actively denies the possibility of transcendence. Is Bataille's inner experience merely a parody of mysticism? Or is it an experience of absence which has no other system of referents other than itself?

Sartre goes on to identify Bataille's negative theology as being placed in dialectical relation to the hierarchy it has replaced. This is how Bataille's ‘mysticism’, writes Sartre, is predicated upon an inverse hierarchical structure which is as inauthentic as the Hegelian idealism that it seeks to replace with the demands of inner experience.⁴⁸ It is above all to this interrogation of the substance of inner experience, ‘the apparent blindspot of Bataille criticism’, that this study addresses itself.

THE LANGUAGE OF TRANSGRESSION

Bataille describes his philosophical method as indistinguishable from eroticism. He also compares it to religious mysticism and describes it as an experience as well as a mode of thinking. Thinking is akin to eroticism and mysticism in that it is an experience which strips away layers of discourse in an elliptical movement which exceeds limits. This is the movement which Bataille himself terms ‘transgression’—an excessive movement which brings together thought and experience in a moment which is both erotic and revelatory: ‘Je pense comme une fille enlève sa robe. A l'extrémité, la pensée est l'impudeur, l'obscenité même’.⁴⁹

One of the central goals of Bataille's thinking is to translate the experience of transgression into language which subverts the stable referents of philosophy. Bataille uses variously words such as ‘communication’, ‘souveraineté’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘nudité’ to describe the experience of transgression. These terms are sometimes, but not always, interchangeable. The experience of transgression is also sometimes described as a ‘blessure’, which indicates that the experience of transgression is a form of auto-mutilation, a self-inflicted wound, as much as it is a revelatory experience of external reality. What each of these terms has in common is that they each give subjective accounts of transgressive experience. They are not fixed by objective criteria and are therefore able—as is the case with much Surrealist terminology—to slide into different meanings in the space of the same text, even within the space of a single page. This means that any critical reading of Bataille which, such as this thesis, seeks to engage with the problem of the relation between language and inner experience must simultaneously engage with the theoretical implications which inner experience has for a poetics of criticism.

For readers and critics of mystical authors in the Christian tradition, the central problem has been how to reconcile the authority of mystical texts, which by definition defy intellectual analysis, with the corporate authority of the Church. In the same way, the central challenge of writing about Bataille's inner experience is how to establish a critical position with regard to texts which actively seek to undermine the possibility of any fixed position or distance. Bataille's writing about inner experience, most importantly, is a radical provocation in which Bataille's own voice seeks to establish a series of fractures or points of slippage which undermine all exterior critical positions and the possibility of theoretical reading as a static, fixed perspective.

Bataille does this, first of all, by using language in a transgressive fashion to undermine the authority and value of critical language. As Bataille's own vocabulary of inner experience continually slides between meaning and silence, and is therefore subject to modification and nuance, so the language of the critic who engages with these movements cannot finally define inner experience, but only be part of a process of critical reading which works towards its possible definitions. It follows from this that the critical voice of this thesis will engage less with the narratives of interpretation which have been constructed around Bataille's texts, but rather with the subversion of the potentialities of theory as criticism, intervention or description which inner experience demands.

The relation between this thesis and the literary object it seeks to describe is defined by a necessary complicity with the demands of inner experience, rather than the establishment of a static critical position which would be dissolved or undermined by those exigencies. A primary example of this is represented by the obvious difficulty in fixing the relation between metaphorical terms used by Bataille, such as ‘sacrifice’, ‘blessure’, ‘lacération’ and ‘cicatrice’, and ‘real’ experience, that is to say experience which is felt and lived before it is codified in language. More specifically, Bataille uses these metaphorical terms to describe an experience which, because it is beyond discourse, establishes a limit to the multiplicity of meanings and their free play which is a defining characteristic of metaphorical language. This paradox is not resolved in Bataille's writings because, at least in one sense, the inner experience is itself a process which emerges from the dynamic tension which Bataille establishes in the text between meaning and non-meaning in thought and language. For Bataille, the ‘real’ experience which precedes the discourse of inner experience functions in an equal and equivalent manner: its purpose is to destabilise the possibility of a metaphorical language which might provide an organising pattern for inner experience at a textual level.

Ces enoncés ont une obscure apparence théorique et je n'y vois aucun remède sinon de dire: ‘il en faut saisir le sens du dedans’. Ils ne sont pas démontrables logiquement. Il faut vivre l'expérience, elle n'est pas accessible aisément et même, considérée du dehors par l'intelligence, il y faudrait voir une somme d'opérations distinctes, les unes intellectuelles, d'autres esthétiques, d'autres enfin morales et tout le problème à reprendre. Ce n'est que du dedans, vécue jusqu'à la transe, qu'elle apparaît unissant ce que la pensée discursive doit séparer. Mais elle n'unit pas moins que ces formes—esthétiques, intellectuelles, morales—les contenus divers de l'expérience passée (comme Dieu et sa Passion) dans une fusion ne laissant dehors que le discours par lequel on tenta de séparer ces objets (faisant d'eux des réponses aux difficultés de la morale).⁵⁰

The paradox of the relation of metaphorical terms to real experience is made even more ‘impossible’ by the fact the experience of trangression which Bataille undergoes in inner experience is not common experience but is ‘erotic’. It is also related to traditional forms of mysticism in that it is ‘ineffable’ ‘ecstatic’ experience. It is therefore experience which defies reduction to language. The vocabulary which Bataille uses to trace this experience is, accordingly, language which cannot be wholly articulated or interpreted in textual terms. Bataille's poetry, it follows from this, is pared down to indicate all that is lacking in the texts of inner experience. Like the mystics who operate within a traditional religious framework, or indeed the Surrealists, Bataille seeks to endow or imbue his language with a quality which stands outside categorical discourse and which, like the living principle of poetry cherished by the Surrealists, has a religious meaning and context. Words such as ‘sacrifice’, ‘blessure’, and other terms which Bataille uses to transcribe the inner experience therefore necessarily function in part as metaphors (that they do so is a paradox as irreducible as it is inescapable). They also, within the framework of inner experience, have the status of liturgical language or prayer, that is to say language which escapes or exceeds a purely textual interpretation. This is how the vocabulary of transgression takes on the form of poetic experience and therefore takes on, in Bataille's terms, religious significance.

Si nous vivons sans contester sous la loi du langage, ces états sont en nous comme s'ils n'étaient pas. Mais si, contre cette loi, nous nous heurtons, nous pouvons au passage arrêter sur l'un d'eux la conscience et, faisant taire en nous le discours, nous attarder à la surprise qu'il nous donne.⁵¹

In the same way as the vocabulary of inner experience is subject to indeterminate meaning, Bataille's texts move uneasily between genres, ranging variously over essays, poetry and fiction in a way which demonstrates a profound suspicion of writing as a process. For those who have read Bataille through the prism of post-modernism this is how the defining feature of Bataille's work seems to be a movement between and displacement of literature and philosophy and it is these aspects of Bataille's work which have often been compared to the post-modernist urge to open up a space in which no one discourse can be privileged over another. This reading of Bataille has meant that in recent times, Bataille has been described not merely as a precursor of present conditions, but also as an active participant—albeit in a posthumous fashion—in contemporary debate. This is how, more precisely, his thinking, it was originally claimed by Foucault, Sollers and Derrida, not only presages present conditions but actively engages with the challenges set by the post-modernist interrogation of subjectivity.⁵²

But although it is undoubtedly true that, as described above, Bataille has made a significant contribution to contemporary thought, this does not necessarily mean, however, that Bataille's work belongs exclusively to the present age anymore than it belongs to those who have contributed to his current high prestige. Bataille writes about many subjects and themes—from economics to religious mysticism, from political science to poetry—and is often described as a ‘difficult’ writer because his thinking deliberately embraces ambiguities and ellipses at the margins of these topics.

By seeking to establish a proximity to Bataille's own voice, this thesis will show that, although it is true that Bataille is deliberately unsystematic—and indeed sometimes obscure—to the point where he will admit to himself and to the reader that his text has no real point of arrival, his work, nonetheless, exists as an organic whole which cannot be broken down into fragments of discourse. When Bataille discusses the psychological structure of Fascism, the use-value of the Marquis de Sade, inner experience, a theory of religion or Communism, there is a common thread which, although it is often difficult to discern, works through these texts holding them together and, most importantly, connecting ideas which are sometimes so diffuse or paradoxical as to seem entirely unintelligible.

Most significantly, if Bataille's thought is not always consistent it is, however, always made coherent by an aggressively anti-idealist philosophy which refuses all attempts at reduction or simplification. If this anti-idealism does not always shape his final position, it nonetheless determines Bataille's approach to philosophy from his earliest texts onwards. This means that his approach to problems of ethics, morality or rationalism is founded in real conceptual thinking. This a fact which evidently places Bataille at some remove distance from those post-modernist critics who have considered his work as merely a textual drama. And that is why the present study, therefore, will consider Bataille's thought as a dynamic movement whose ‘difficulties’, although they are founded on negative principles, are nonetheless, a direct engagement with the essential problems of existence. It is, most importantly, in this way that the experience of ‘transgression’, as well as the transgressive use of language which is related to that experience, comes to have a religious context and meaning for Bataille.

ATHEOLOGY

Inner experience, as Bataille describes it, is an experience which eludes all categorical possibilities and is radically opposed to all forms of transcendence. But, at the same time, as a process, it separates the subject from the object in a movement which is akin to the religious ecstasy fundamental to mystical experience. Furthermore, although Bataille describes inner experience as a contradiction of the traditional meaning and function of the word mysticism, he nonetheless persists in defining inner experience with reference to Christian mystics such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Blessed Angela of Foligno, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila, or with regard to esoteric religions or practices such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoga or Tantrism.

In the same way Bataille conceived of the project of La Somme athéologique as an ‘a-theological’ version of St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiæ. In the Summa, which is considered by many to be the major contribution of Medieval philosophy to modern thought,⁵³ Aquinas sought to reconcile faith and reason by placing philosophical speculation alongside a belief in the Divine origin of the world and by arguing, with a dialectical method he inherited from Aristotle, that the human and the Divine although distinct were not separate.⁵⁴ In the texts of La Somme athéologique, Bataille asks the question: how is it possible to be religious and an atheist? This, says Bataille, is a contradiction which cannot be resolved. However, in imitation of Aquinas, Bataille posits the relation between man and the dead God as a contradiction which cannot be separated from its dialectical function in his thought. At the centre of this contradiction is the negative principle that inner experience is a form of communication with the dead God. ‘Le parti pris de l'athéologie’, Bataille writes, ‘[…] place la pensée devant le pire et le meilleur qu'est Dieu, mais du même fait devant l'absence de Dieu.’⁵⁵

Although La Somme athéologique was unfinished, it is still possible to follow and respect Bataille's intentions for each volume. These fragmented texts, are in chronological order of publication: L'Expérience intérieure (1943), Méthode de méditation (1947), Le Coupable (1944), L'Alléluiah (1947), and Sur Nietzsche (1945). The chronology of their publication does not in all cases, however, match the chronology of their composition. Nor does the published version of each text correspond to the role Bataille had assigned it in his various plans for the finished La Somme athéologique—although the project was abandoned as incomplete, Bataille was still drawing up draft plans for publication as late as 1961. In the present book, however, each text will be considered as part of a totality—together with published and unpublished notes and addenda—because this is how Bataille conceived of them.

More particularly, in reading these texts in this way, I will trace how these texts interact with the outer world of politics, social relations and externalised discourse which Bataille sets up as the antipodes of inner experience. It will be further argued that the ‘mystical’ texts Bataille wrote during this period, whether critical, fictional, or poetic, like those of the Surrealists or Sade, are intended primarily as an interrogation of those conditions and an encounter with poetic experience. In the same way, although Bataille says that he has an aversion to the word ‘mysticism’ in its traditional sense, he is equally emphatic that this experience, which is a direct experience of absence, is predicated upon its dialectical relationship to traditional mystical experience. This is how inner experience becomes a ‘religious’ contradiction of philosophy.⁵⁶ It is from this starting point that I will develop the central argument of the present study: that the inner experience of limits in Bataille's work, the movement which he terms ‘transgression’, is, unlike the textual dramas cherished by postmodernist critics, a non-metaphorical, even visceral event.

THE ENCOUNTER WITH HEGEL

It is also of central importance to the present study that Bataille's intellectual itinerary traverses the period when the avant-garde, in politics as in art, asserted itself as the redemptory force in the history of human affairs. Bataille's key ideas and central themes were thus shaped by a series of encounters with movements, writers or thinkers who had in common a belief in a radical interrogation of politics, art and metaphysics. Above all, in each of these encounters, Bataille demonstrated a preoccupation with the reintegration of religious values, and in particular direct experience of the sacred, into a social sphere which had lost all sense of transcendent purpose. In this way, his political ideas reflected a concern with the religious function of the collective unconscious. It is also clear that his later writings on economics have their origins in a parallel ambition to move the Marxist dialectic beyond its direct application to theory of surplus value and the alienation of labour.

Bataille first emerged as a writer and thinker against the background of the Surrealist adventure in Paris. In his work for Documents, and then through the course of the 1930s, Bataille not only frequented circles associated with Surrealism but actively collaborated on projects with those close, or at least who had been close to Breton, such as Robert Desnos and, most importantly, André Masson. Moreover, aside from the apocryphal details of the fractious relationship between Breton and Bataille, it is significant that the origins of their rivalry lay in a fundamental disagreement over the meaning and function of poetic language. However, aside from the Surrealists, from the beginning of the 1930s onwards, Bataille also engaged with a variety of Left-wing circles engaged in the business of revolutionary politics. These ranged from the pro-Soviet group around Boris Souvarine and the ‘Cercle communiste Marx-Lénine’, to the ‘groupe de réflexion spiritualiste’, ‘Ordre Nouveau’, founded by Bataille's colleague at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Arnaud Dandieu—to whose journal, La Révolution nécessaire, Bataille contributed an anonymous collaborative article.⁵⁷ Bataille's final political position in the 1930s, however, developed separately from that of the groups he passed through. Like the anguished Tropmann, who in the novel Le Bleu du Ciel privileges his own suffering as a sole authentic value, by 1939, on the eve of war, Bataille had long since abandoned the utopian promise of the Marxist dialectic in favour of an interior experience.

The development of this position was partly determined by Bataille's encounter with the famous lectures on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève at the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes between 1933 and 1939. In these lectures, Bataille, who had started reading Hegel at roughly the same time as the Surrealists, that is to say in the mid-1920s, found a version of Hegel which established him as a paradoxical, even violent thinker, who, like Sade, far from representing the ‘monument of rationalism’ and the avatar of Enlightment rigour, opposed cultural order in the name of ‘sovereign’ need and described history as a series of convulsions ordered, in equal measure, by the dialectical process of civilization and the paroxystic imperatives of desire. Most importantly, Kojève took as his starting point the distinction which Hegel makes in Phenemonology of Spirit between ego and substance. This distinction is for Hegel an ‘inner distinction’, ‘negativity in general’, which annihilates all other attempts to rebuild the movement of the dialectic.⁵⁸ Hegel also uses the term ‘representation’ (‘Vorstellung’) to describe ‘transparent thought’, that it is to say thought which is not based on clear concepts but images. Such thought is opposed to thinking. For Bataille, most importantly, the ‘Vorstellung’ is a mode of thought which is essentially religious. It represents, in this sense, a form of mysticism which functions as a contaminating force in the Hegelian body of thought.

These were the central ideas which, along with a refiguration of Surrealist principles, influenced Bataille's political and literary activities in the 1930s, from the secret society and journal Acéphale to the discussion group the ‘Collège de Sociologie’, and which shaped the direction of his movements between a series of eclectic collaborations with other journals and societies. In each of these projects Bataille's declared ambition was to reintroduce into French thought, via Kojève, a Hegelian vocabulary—negativity, alienation, sovereignty, sacrifice—without ever giving in to the demands of the Hegelian system.

Bataille's own iniatives, however, were not, at least on any practical level, a success. Although he founded both the secret society and the journal Acéphale to investigate the limits of experience in politics and religion, both ventures ended with Bataille as the sole driving force and participant. Similarly, Bataille's most notable political effort, his collaboration with Breton on the anti-Fascist project of Contre-Attaque, was characterised by personal rivalry and suspicion and consequently collapsed into recrimination and accusations made against Bataille of Fascist sympathies.⁵⁹ Given the political conditions in Europe in the late 1930s, it is hardly surprising that Bataille, who in the pages of Acéphale demonstrated an uncompromising admiration for Nietzsche and who argued for a sociology based on sacrifice and poetry found himself, at the outbreak of the Second World War, politically and philosophically isolated.

‘LE POINT SUPRêME’: SURREALISM, MYSTICISM AND INNER EXPERIENCE

The first two chapters of this study will argue first of all that Bataille is closer to the Surrealist generation than many of his post-modernist critics have allowed. Indeed, despite the overt antipathy famously shown to Bataille by André Breton in the Second Manifeste du surréalisme, Bataille, by his own admission, had often felt the need to define his ideas in relation to Surrealism and, if he was not actually close to those, such as Breton or Louis Aragon, who were setting the agenda for the Surrealist revolution, it is clear that he was nonetheless affiliated to the spirit of the movement. Indeed, far from being an enemy of Surrealism, as many of his recent critics have suggested, Bataille entirely shares the Surrealist ambition to restore myth as a central social value.⁶⁰ This determines his sociology as well as his attack on rational systems of thought. If Bataille's attitude to Surrealism in the course of the 1920s and 1930s was sceptical, this was not because he considered surrealism to be antipathetic to his own ideas but because he felt that Surrealist activity was, rather, a form of antithesis which, as he described it, stood in dialectical relation to his work: Bataille describes this relation as ‘cette sorte de fumure qui nourrit une vérité toujours secrète.’⁶¹

In particular, the two opening chapters of this thesis will examine the language that Bataille uses to describe inner experience and its relation to Surrealist notions of transcendent poetic experience. As described above, Bataille in his exposition of inner experience draws upon the language of the Christian mystics and the methods of Eastern mysticism. However, his descriptions of ‘mystical’ states are couched in terms which are directly related to Breton's statement in the Second Manifeste du surréalisme of 1929 which describes how an individual, through the unconscious revealed in language, is enabled to fuse with the hidden nature of the cosmos in a form of mystic communion. This famous statement is itself drawn from the language of mysticism and Hermeticism.

Tout porte à croire qu'il existe un certain point de l'esprit d'où la vie et la mort, le réel et l'imaginaire, le passé et le futur, le communicable et l'incommunicable, le haut et le bas cessent d'être perçus contradictoirement. Or, c'est en vain qu'on chercherait à l'activité surréaliste un autre mobile que l'espoir de détermination de ce point.⁶²

Bataille often referred to this statement and, in many ways, it is a touchstone for many of the ideas which he develops in La Somme athéologique on the relation between language, experience and communication. The corollary of this, it will be argued in chapters three and four, is that Bataille's inner experience is predicated upon an inverse representation of the Surrealist notion that poetic activity is linked to the primal unity of the unconscious.

More particularly, for Bataille, the inner experience not only demonstrates the limits of metaphor as an expressive form of language but also the primacy of experience over the logic of linear or hierarchical thinking. The central movement of inner experience is, therefore, in Bataille's own terms, both a negation of action and a negation of itself.

In chapter three, this notion will be considered in relation to the early novels of Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l'Obscur and Aminadab, which were written at the time and partly as a result of, conversations between Blanchot and Bataille on the significance of inner experience. For both Bataille and Blanchot, inner experience is an ‘expérience nue’ which is a direct contradiction of the Surrealist belief in poetry as universal communication. This is not to say, however, that either Blanchot or Bataille disregard the Surrealist ambition to reconcile opposites. Rather, inner experience reveals that the textual reality is not distinct from metaphysical reality; this is, however, a negative rather than a positive movement.⁶³

The negative movement of inner experience is also related to the Surrealist belief in the logic of contradiction which, as noted above, Breton also famously defined in the Second manifeste du surréalisme and which, invoking Heraclitus, he saw as the living principle of the universe. Indeed, for Bataille, the relationship between inner experience and the outer world is conceived in similar Heraclitean terms as a practical form of poetic activity in which ‘Latent structure is the master of obvious structure.’⁶⁴ It is significant, therefore, that during the period that Bataille was planning and writing La Somme athéologique, he also wrote poetry as well as developing a theory of poetic experience.

Bataille's poetry is one of the most puzzling aspects of his work and has often been ignored or overlooked by critics who are unsure of its real status or significance. Chapter four will, therefore, consider the meaning of Bataille's ideas on the representation of the poetic image. These ideas are defined in L'Expérience intérieure with direct reference to Proust's Albertine and, in a more occluded fashion, throughout all of the texts of La Somme athéologique, with reference to Colette Peignot, Bataille's lover and collaborator who died in 1938 and whose death precipitated the crisis in Bataille's life which led directly to the writing of L'Expérience intérieure.

The poetry of inner experience, it will be argued, dramatises the death of the author, the thinking subject, in a literal experience which transgresses the textual surface of the poem. In the poetry of William Blake, Bataille saw a parallel movement into ‘vision’, or pure subjectivity; Bataille's poetry, it will be argued, is an inverse form of Blake's ‘Poetic Genius’ who asserts the universe as his own centre.⁶⁵ This is how the poetry of inner experience, as a form of a-theological prayer, assumes the same ‘religious’ significance as the experience itself.

Like the Surrealists, from the beginning of his writing life Bataille had been concerned with expressing experiences which were either taboo or which defied expression at all and relating these impossibilities to collective, social space. He had come to writing after receiving psychoanalytic treatment from Dr. Adrien Borel and, although it would be a gross simplification to say that Bataille's work originates in the therapy administered by Borel, by Bataille's own admission, his work is determined by the ‘obsessions’ which led him to undertake treatment.⁶⁶

These obsessions are represented in the form of allegories of sexual and religious transgression, most evident in his early fictions such as W. C. (later destroyed, although its opening chapter has been preserved in the first chapter of Le Bleu du Ciel), L'Histoire de l'œil (1928) and, then later, Madame Edwarda (1941), as well as early essays such as ‘L'Anus solaire’ (1927). Similarly, Bataille's work as editor and critic, firstly for Documents and then for the anti-Stalinist Marxist journal, La Critique Sociale, is characterised by a matrix of emotional responses to transgressive experiences which defy organization in the name of orgiastic liberation.

In chapter five these emotional responses are tested against the political context of Bataille's writings, and in particular his apprehénsion of the coming of the Second World War. In an autobiographical note, Bataille describes the writing of Le Coupable—a text in which he brings together the interior vision of mysticism and the agony of a Europe in flames—as ‘une expérience mystique hétérodoxe’.⁶⁷ This chapter will consider how this experience exists, as one commentator puts it in a description of Bataille's relation to the work of Jean Fautrier, in ‘a terrible and erotic universe’ which parallels the experience of war.⁶⁸ Inner experience is both ‘unformed chaos’ and ‘mystic despair’: it is also a form of communication, or mediation, between subjective and objective realities.⁶⁹ In the same way, this chapter will argue, war is the highest form of irrational desire and is, therefore, a mirror image of the interior apocalypse of inner experience.

In chapter six, this collision between the inner and outer world, the interior world of radical alterity and the outer world of objective presence, is considered as a crucial defining factor in the development of the key Bataillien notion of ‘souveraineté’. This is a term which Bataille alternatively uses to denote the disentanglement of the subject from the Hegelian dialectic of the master and slave, or to denote an assertion of freedom in the face of Divine absence. However, the ‘sovereign’ in Bataille's terminology is also often applied to erotic excess as a sacred experience of limits. In this chapter, I will argue that not only is eroticism central to Bataille's philosophical method—as Bataille himself pointed out (see p. 19)—but that eroticism is itself a form of ‘mysticism’.

This is how erotic experience can give substance to the ‘mystical’ encounter with Divine absence that Bataille posits as the central point of La Somme athéologique. It will therefore be argued that this is how inner experience—a ‘mysticism’ which contradicts the Surrealist notion of transcendence—functions as the defining paradox of Georges Bataille's thought.

‘THE ENEMY WITHIN’

As Breton pointed out, however, one of the principle reasons for Bataille's isolation in the late 1930s was that his relation to politics, as it was to Surrealism, was essentially parodic.⁷⁰ In the first instance, this meant that Surrealism, for Bataille, represents the pursuit of an ideal, the Surreal, which lies above and beyond language. The inevitable failure of Surrealism, for Bataille, is, therefore, inherent in its ambitions and the manner in which it is predicated upon the belief that poetic activity is the pursuit of a reconcilation of opposites which lies in a transcendent solution.⁷¹

For Bataille, on the other hand, the inner experience, which he describes as the first principle of knowledge or non-knowledge, is both irreducible and actively prohibits the generation of abstract or transcendent theories. In a secondary sense, therefore, a political conception of the world is also ‘parodic’ in the same way. Bataille defines ‘parody’ as the inevitable result of the failure of language to carry any stable meaning. The Bataillien universe, therefore, is predicated upon a notion of parody or failure, ‘échec’, in which no true connection can ever be made between the contradictory forces of the dialectical process.⁷²

For Bataille, therefore, the Surrealist notion of analogical thinking as revealing myriad hidden relationships was inseparable from the Medieval conception of the universe as a hierarchy of being. It was also equally devoid of any real content. Thus, although it is true, for example, that many of Bataille's themes are drawn together in a series of recurrent images—the sun, the eye, blindness, self-mutilation—which can be traced back to his earliest writings and which function as consistent metaphorical and metonymic patterns in his work, these key images are equally destabilised by the fact that, because God is dead, it is not possible to determine any linear form of meaning, either allegorically—that is to say, in the space of the text—or in terms of experience—that is to say in terms of religion or philosophy.

The logic of contradiction was something that Surrealism had come to associate with the unconscious through psychoanalysis. But Breton, differing from Freud and following Heraclitus, went so far as to see contradiction as the principle of the universe. It was by bringing together opposites and things normally unrelated to each other that the mind participated in the unceasing strife which drove the cosmos on.⁷³ For Bataille, the ‘parodic’ nature of the universe did not so much bring opposites together, but emphasise their difference and reveal the essential discontinuity of language and experience.

Depuis que les phrases circulent dans les cerveaux occupés à réflechir, il a été procédé à une identification totale, puisque à l'aide d'un copule chaque phrase relie une chose à l'autre; et tout serait visiblement lié si l'on découvrait d'un seul regard dans sa totalité le tracé laissé par un fil d'Ariane, conduisant la pensée dans son propre labyrinthe.

[…] Le Soleil aime exclusivement la Nuit et dirige vers la terre sa violence lumineuse, verge ignoble, mais il se trouve dans l'incapacité d'atteindre le regard ou la nuit bien que les étendues terrestres nocturnes se dirigent continuellement vers l'immondice du rayon solaire.

L'anneau solaire est l'anus intact de son corps à dix-huit ans auquel rien d'aussi aveuglant ne peut être comparé à l'exception du soleil, bien que l'anus soit la nuit.⁷⁴

If the world is parodic, it also follows that the relationship between words and their meaning is also one of slippage and discontinuity rather than a fixed set of stable referents. The movement between opposites, the sun into night, is the central shift or displacement which occurs in the inner experience.

The movement between meaning and non-meaning, light and shade, however, is clearly not properly ‘mystical’ in the traditional sense of the word, and Bataille, in the opening section of L'Expérience intérieure writes that he not only opposes ‘mysticism’ but that inner experience is its polar opposite. However, in the same space Bataille moves to a discussion of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, arguing that although the content of Christianity may be lost, the framework which shapes faith and experience remains intact.

It will be one of the central arguments of this book that Bataille's relation to Surrealism is conceived in the same manner and that inner experience, although separate from the Hegelianism of the Surrealists, emerges from a parallel concern with the function of non-metaphorical experience.

Nonetheless, it is clear that it is not enough to emphasise the differences between Bataille and the Surrealists, but that, in many ways, as noted by Breton, the distinguishing features of the Bataillien mode of thinking are unrecognisable to the Surrealist.

Nous sommes de toute évidence dans un autre champ que celui constitué par le surréalisme. Breton (et que dire d'Eluard, d'Aragon, etc?), littéralement englué dans une fétichisation incessante, en reste à une poésie conservée, dont le surréalisme tout entier offre une sorte de résumé saisissant; il n'accomplit la poésie que dans son reflux (poésie comme ‘échappatoire’, comme ‘issue’), dans sa réussite, non dans son échec, par où passe précisément le dépassement non-verbal du monde, dans la pratique réelle.⁷⁵

Bataille's language is indeed, as Houdebine points out, language which conceives of itself as ‘échec’: it actively works against itself as it parodies and ultimately fails to carry the meaning of experience. Most significantly, for Bataille, this means that the language he uses to describe inner experience is undermined by both this parodic relation with meaning and by its exposure to the unstable universe of the heterogeneous—a term Bataille first uses positively (in the 1930s) and then negatively (in the 1940s) to describe essential discontinuity.⁷⁶ With the quotation from Nietzsche, ‘La nuit est aussi un soleil,’ Bataille announces the essential movement of inner experience; the shift from night into sun is a metaphor for the reversal of the subject into its own blinding self-reflection in which the self collapses and disintegrates.

The present study will argue that Bataille's inner experience, is, therefore, not only the point at which Bataille's thinking is entirely separate from Surrealism, but also the point at which the pursuit of radical subjectivity, the atheological system embraced by Bataille, becomes a renunciation of poetic ambiguity, as it is understood by the Surrealists, and the opening into the wound of the failure of the project of idealism.

In the first volume of Bataille's collected works—making the point that, in death, Bataille's works assume a totality which they did not have during his lifetime—Michel Foucault writes emphatically that ‘Bataille est un des écrivains les plus importants de son siècle’.⁷⁷ However, like Nietzsche in Daybreak, who describes his work as mediating between necessity and chance, Bataille saw his writings as ‘Untimely Meditations’ in the sense that they defy all categorical systems of thinking but also collapse the distinction between temporal and infinite into an unresolvable contradiction.

Inner experience is such a contradiction and this is how it comes to represent the fundamental experience of irreligion or atheology. Bataille defines inner experience, thus, in conceptual terms:

L'expérience est la mise en question (à l'épreuve), dans la fièvre et l'angoisse, de ce qu'un homme sait du fait d'être. Que dans cette fièvre il ait quelque appréhension que ce soit, il ne peut dire: ‘j'ai vu ceci, ce que j'ai vu est tel’; il ne peut dire: j'ai vu Dieu, l'absolu ou le fond des mondes', il ne peut dire que ‘ce que j'ai vu échappe à l'entendement’, et Dieu, l'absolu, le fond des mondes, ne sont rien s'ils ne sont des catégories de l'entendement.⁷⁸

The purpose of this study, therefore, is not to seek any final argument which would fix inner experience as either a method or process which has a definite and immovable status in Bataille's thinking. Rather the book will present a series of commentaries on aspects of Bataille's writing which are most closely linked to the demands of inner experience. The aim is, therefore, to establish a complicity between the reader and the texts under discussion in a way that is faithful to Bataille's own notion that ‘La littérature n'est pas innocente, et, coupable, devait à la fin s'avouer telle.’⁷⁹

Bataille continues, in the same space, that ‘L'action seule a les droits’. The writing of inner experience is an action which commands the same intensity as confessional religious experience. Furthermore, the confessional writing of inner experience is often described by Bataille as the opening of a wound. Michel Leiris' description of confessional writing as ‘une tauromachie’ can, therefore, be applied equally well to the ‘mystical’ writings of Georges Bataille.⁸⁰ There is, however, one singular difference: that in the process of vertiginous reversal—‘le vertige dionysiaque’ which Leiris says is the central motif of Bataille's work⁸¹—which occurs reading Bataille's description of the inner experience, it is also the reader and the critic who finds himself confronted by Bataille.

Notes

1. A useful discussion of Bataille's status as a precursor of post-modernist thought can be found in the introductory chapter to Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994). For a more detailed discussion of Bataille's relation to contemporary critical theory see also Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Lecture: De Georges Bataille'in Georges Bataille après tout, ed. Denis Hollier, coll. L'Extrême contemporain (Orléans: Belin, 1995), pp. 11-34. Also the introduction by Michel Surya to Georges Bataille, une liberté souveraine, ed. Michel Surya (Orléans: Ville d'Orléans/Fourbis, 1997), pp. 7-11.

2. This aspect of Bataille's contribution to critical philosophy is discussed in detail in Robert Sasso, ‘Georges Bataille and the Challenge to Think’, in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie Anne Bold-Irons (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 41-51.

3. This paradox is, indeed, the contradiction which defines the impossibility of writing about an ‘inner experience. Bataille writes: ‘Mon livre fini, j'en vois les côtés haïssables, son insuffisance, et pire, en moi, le souci de suffisance que j'y ai mêlé encore, et dont je hais en même temps l'impuissance et une partie de l'intention.’ L'Éxpérience intérieure, ŒC, V, pp. 10-11.

4. See Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 1380.

5. A famous account of Oriental influences on the early Church is given in Frederick Copleston, ‘The Patristic Period’, A History of Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, vol 2 (Maryland: The Newman Press, 1962). See also Clement of Alexandria, Opera Omnia, trans. W. Wilson, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1867).

6. Frederick Copleston, op. cit., pp. 34-36.

7. The mystical principle of ‘Quietism’, a passive form of contemplation first advocated by the heretical Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1640-1697), had a widespread influence in the French Church during the period of the Counter-Reformation and its aftermath. The most important text of this period is François Fénelon's Explication des Maximes des Saints (1699) which defends Madame Guyon and ‘Quietism’ against the charge of heresy. See also Maurice Masson, Fénelon et Madame Guyon (Paris, 1907).

8. For a discussion of these well-known remarks see Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Fontana: London, 1991), pp. 151-153.

9. An account of these practices is given in Jean Bruno, ‘Les Techniques d'illumination chez Georges Bataille’, Critique, 195/196, 1963, pp. 706-721.

10. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1930) p. 45

11. William James, ‘The Drunken Consciousness is a bit of the Mystic Consciousness’, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902) p. 387.

12. The attempt to fix thought beyond language is the first principle of inner experience: ‘Le vrai silence a lieu dans l'absence des mots […] Dans ce silence fait du dedans, c'est n'est plus un organe, c'est la sensibilité entière, c'est le cœur, qui s'est dilaté.’ L'Éxpérience intérieure, ŒC, V, p. 30.

13. This paradox is inherent in Bataille's thinking from his earliest essays. In the article ‘La critique des fondements de la dialectique hégélienne’ Bataille refers to the possibility of making a distinction between ‘expérience’ and ‘valeur verbale’ in the Hegelian dialectical method. ŒC, I, p. 277.

14. Marguerite Duras, ‘A propos de Georges Bataille’, La Ciguë, 1 (1958), pp. 32-33.

15. Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992), pp. 29, 31, 41, 111-114. See also Patrick ffrench, The Time of Theory, A History of Tel Quel 1960-1983 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 25-28. A parallel account of Bataille's importance for the Tel Quel group was also given by Philippe Sollers in an interview with the present author in Paris, February 11, 1996.

16. Patrick ffrench, op. cit., pp. 27-28.

17. An account of debates around this theme is given in Philippe Forest, op. cit., p. 442-445.

18. Roland Barthes, ‘La Métaphore de l'œil’, Critique, 195-196, 1963, p. 771.

19. The term ‘metaphor’ in this study is based on Aristotle's definition of metaphors as verbal phenomena which have a mimetic resemblance to experience (‘To produce a good metaphor is to see a likeness’, Poetics, 14591, pp. 7-8). The term ‘metonymy’ is classically defined as a verbal figure which substitutes part for whole or evokes the whole by focusing on a salient aspect of it. See Christopher Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987, pp. 113-114). It is important for this study that metaphor and metonymy represent thinking beyond the logic of ordered thought and experience. For a useful summary of the interplay between metaphor and metonymy see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 33-34; Malcolm Bowie, op. cit., Lacan, p. 68; Elisabeth Roudinesco, Histoire de la psychanalyse en France, tome 2, (Paris: Fayard, 1994), pp. 315-316. The key source text for much contemporary debate on this subject, as well as being an important influence on Lacan and Derrida, is the seminal 1956 essay by Roman Jakobson and Morris Hall, ‘Deux aspects du langage et deux types d'aphasie’, initially published in the collection Fundamentals of Language (La Haye, 1957) and reprinted as ‘Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances’, in Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings: Word and Language, vol. 2, (La Haye, 1971), pp. 239-259.

20. It is the interplay between thought and language which is the essential characteristic of Bataille's discourse according to Maurice Blanchot in ‘Le jeu de la pensée’, in Critique, 195/196, 1963 pp. 737-738.

21. For a discussion of this point see Martin Jay, op. cit., Downcast Eyes, pp. 320, 355, 361.

22. Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Transgression and the Avant-Garde’, On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 327.

23. Michel Foucault, ‘Préface à la transgression,’ Critique, 195-196, 1963, pp. 751-769.

24. Also Philippe Sollers, ‘Le toit’, Tel Quel, 29, 1967, pp. 24-45, reprinted in L'Écriture et l'expérience des limites, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971) pp. 104-138.

25. Ibid., p. 107.

26. Ibid., p. 110.

27. Jacques Derrida, ‘De l'économie restreinte à l'économie générale: un hégélianisme sans réserves.’ L'Arc, 32 (1967), pp. 24-25, reprinted in L'Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967) pp. 369-409.

28. Ibid. p. 376. A useful definition of Hegel's use of the key term ‘Aufhebung’, its use in The Phenomenology of Mind, and an explanation of the difficulty of its translation, can be found in Charles Taylor, Hegel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 119. See also ‘Translator's introduction’ and ‘Translator's note’, Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19780, p. xix, p. 335.

29. ‘Plans pour la somme athéologique’, ŒC,VI, pp. 363.

30. This is how Bataille describes the work of negativity in the Hegelian dialectic. In a 1937 letter to Alexandre Kojéve he writes that he sees this version of negativity as the endpoint of Hegel's discourse. ‘Si l'action (le ‘faire’) est—comme dit Hegel—la négativité, la question se pose alors de savoir si la négativité de qui n'a ‘plus rien à faire’ disparaît ou subsiste à l'état de ‘négativité sans emploi’. […] Je veux bien que Hegel ait prévu cette possibilité: du moins ne l'a-t-il pas située à l'issue des processus qu'il décrit.’ Georges Bataille, Choix de Lettres, ed. Michel Surya (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 131-132.

31. Susan Rubin Suleiman, op. cit., ‘Transgression and the Avant-Garde’, p. 316.

32. Denis Hollier, La prise de la concorde. Essais sur Georges Bataille (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).

33. Denis Hollier, ‘Le matérialisme dualiste de Georges Bataille’, Tel Quel, 25 (1966), pp. 44-45.

34. Julia Kristeva, ‘Bataille, l'expérience et la pratique’, in Bataille à Cerisy, (Paris: U. G. E., coll. 10/18, 1977), p. 290.

35. A later analysis of inner experience as a ‘traversée’, which demonstrates how influential Kristeva's reading was, can be found in Bernard Sichère, ‘L'écriture souveraine de Georges Bataille,’ Tel Quel, 93 (1982), pp. 58-75.

36. Patrick ffrench, op. cit., p. 28.

37. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, ‘Introduction’, Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 7.

38. Tony Corn, ‘Unemployed Negativity (Derrida, Bataille, Hegel)’ in op. cit., On Bataille: Critical Essays, p. 89.

39. Jürgen Habermas, ‘The French Path to Postmodernity: Bataille between Eroticism and General Economics’, trans. Frederick Lawrence, in op. cit., Bataille: A Critical Reader, p. 171.

40. Ibid., p. 188.

41. L'Éxpérience intérieure, ŒC, V, p. 129.

42. Ibid., p. 130.

43. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Un nouveau mystique’, Cahiers du Sud, 260, 261, 263, (1943), pp. 783-790, 866-886 and 988-994, in Situations I, (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 133-175.

44. Ibid. p. 143.

45. Ibid. p. 134.

46. ‘L'opposition de Sartre m'aide à mettre l'essentiel en relief’, ‘Réponse à Jean-Paul Sartre’, Sur Nietzsche, ŒC, VI, p. 196.

47. See Philippe Sollers, ‘De grandes irrégularités de langage’, Critique, 195/196, pp. 795-802.

48. Sartre explains this notion with reference to the apparent impossibility of reconciling inner experience with conceptual thinking: ‘Vainement M. Bataille tente-t-il de s'intégrer à la machine qu'il a montée: il reste dehors, avec Durkheim, avec Hegel, avec Dieu le Père.’ Jean-Paul Sartre, op. cit., ‘Un nouveau mystique’, p. 154.

49. Méthode de méditation, ŒC, V, p. 200.

50. L'Éxpérience intérieure, ŒC, V, pp. 20-21.

51. Ibid., p. 27.

52. It follows from these readings that Bataille is described by Jean-Michel Besnier as having ‘fonction d'emblème’ for thinkers such as Sollers or Derrida (Jean-Michel Besnier, La politique de l'impossible, L'intellectuel entre révolte et engagement, Paris: Armillaire, La Découverte, 1988, p. 22). See also Jacques Derrida, op. cit., ‘De l'économie restreinte à l'économie générale: un hégélianisme sans réserves’, pp. 369-409. Also Philippe Sollers, op. cit., ‘Le toit’, pp. 104-138, and ‘Une prophétie de Bataille’, La Guerre du Goût, (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pp. 480-482. See also Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La communauté désœuvrée’, Aléa, 41 (1983), pp. 11-49. This essay was later published in extended form as La Communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Bourgeois, 1986).

53. See Evelyn Underhill, op. cit., pp. 99, 111, 117, 190.

54. See St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘What God is not’, Summa Theologiæ, edited and translated by Timothy McDermott (Texas: Christian Classics, 1989), pp. 9-33. See also Frederick Copleston, ‘Mediaeval Philosophy’, part 1, in A History of Philosophy, vol 2 (Doubleday: New York, 1962), pp. 55-96.

55. See ŒC, VI, pp. 365-374.

56. ‘En dernier lieu je montrerai l'expérience intérieure liée à la nécessité, pour l'esprit, de tout mettre en question—sans trêve ni repos concevables. Cette nécessité s'est fait jour en dépit des présuppositions religieuses.’ ‘Notes pour L'Expérience intérieure’, ŒC, V, p. 427.

57. Accounts of Bataille's relations with Arnand Dandieu are given in Michel Surya, Georges Bataille, La Mort à l'œuvre (Gallimard, 1987), p. 214, p. 324, p. 456 (hereafter referred to as Surya), and Pierre Prévost, Pierre Prévost rencontre Georges Bataille (Jean-Michel Place, 1987), pp. 11-14.

58. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 89.

59. See Robert Stuart Short, ‘Contre-Attaque’, in Entretiens sur le surréalisme, ed. Ferdinand Alquié (Paris, La Haye, Mouton, 1968), pp. 144-175.

60. Breton famously accused Bataille of being an ‘obsédé’ as well as ‘malhonnête et pathologique’ (See André Breton, ‘Second Manifeste du Surréalisme’, Manifestes du Surréalisme, Paris: Jean Jacques Pauvert, 1962, pp. 215-221). The reason for this was mainly because Breton feared that Bataille was setting up a rival group around the journal Documents. According to Michel Leiris the hostility between Breton and Bataille was based on personal animosity which dated from their first meeting in 1926. Michel Leiris, A Propos de Georges Bataille (Paris: Fourbis, 1988, pp. 24-26). See also op. cit., Surya (Gallimard, 1987), pp. 104-106, p. 630.

61. This is how Bataille announces the 1951 series of essays on Surrealism, Le surréalisme au jour le jour, (ŒC, VIII, p. 169). This text was never published in Bataille's lifetime but, aside from some acerbic comments on Aragon and Breton, it is a broadly sympathetic appraisal of the movement's ambitions. For an account of Bataille's relations with the surrealists in the late 1940s see also Jean Wahl, in op. cit. Entretiens sur le surréalisme, ed. Ferdinand Alquié, pp. 167-168 and Michael Richardson's introduction to Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 1-27.

62. André Breton, Œuvres Complètes, tome 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 781. This statement was obviously influenced by the famous sentence from the alchemical formula of Hermes Trismegistus, the ‘Tabula Smaragdina’, or ‘Emerald Table’—‘What is below is like what is on high and what is high is like what is below, in order to bring about the miracle of a single thing’ (trans. in E. J. Holmyard, Alchemy, London: Penguin, 1957), p. 97. Breton first refers to this sentence in some notes from the period 1920-1921 (see his op. cit, Œuvres Complètes, tome 1, p. 617); he also cited it, terming it a dialectical principle when discussing the painting of André Masson in Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme in 1941, reprinted in Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 68. See also Andrew Hussey and Jeremy Stubbs, ‘Tempête de Flammes: Surrealism, Bataille and the perennial philosophy of Heraclitus’, ‘Kojève's Paris/Now Bataille’, parallax, 4, pp. 151-167.

63. The point of connection between textual reality and metaphysical reality is also necessarily decribed in L'Expérience intérieure as ‘échec’. ‘J'échoue, quoi que j'écrive, en ceci que je devrais lier, à la précision du sens, la richesse infinie—insensée—des possibles’, L'Expérience intérieure, ŒC, V, p. 51.

64. Heraclitus, ‘Fragment 54’, quoted in Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (London: Duckworth, 1972), p. 35.

65. Bataille makes frequent reference to Blake and, in particular, Blake's notion of ‘Poetic genius’. The most extended discussion of this aspect of Blake's thought is to be found in the essay ‘William Blake’ in Georges Bataille, La littérature et le mal (Gallimard, 1957), pp. 84-101.

66. A detailed discussion of Bataille's relationship with Borel and psychoanalysis can be found in Elisabeth Roudinesco, ‘Bataille entre Freud et Lacan: Une expérience cachée’, in, op. cit. Georges Bataille après tout, pp. 191-212.

67. ŒC, VII, p. 462.

68. Sarah Wilson, ‘Fêting the wound’, in Bataille: Writing the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 172-187.

69. ŒC,VII, p. 462.

70. This, indeed, is the central thrust of Breton's argument in his famous attack on Bataille's anti-idealism in the ‘Second manifeste du surréalisme’. See André Breton, op. cit, ‘Second Manifeste du Surréalisme’, Manifestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Jean Jacques Pauvert, 1962) pp. 215-221.

71. Bataille discusses this notion most effectively in the fragment ‘Surréalisme et transcendance’, Sur Nietzsche, ŒC, V, p. 205.

72. This fundamental principle is defined by Bataille in the early essay ‘L'Anus solaire’: ‘Il est clair que le monde est purement parodique, c'est à dire que chaque chose qu'on regarde est la parodie d'une autre, ou encore la même chose sous une forme décevante’. ŒC, I, p. 81.

73. Andrew Hussey and Jeremy Stubbs, op. cit., ‘Tempête de Flammes: Surrealism, Bataille and the perennial philosophy of Heraclitus’, pp. 157-158.

74. ‘L'Anus solaire’, ŒC, I, pp. 81-86.

75. Jean-Louis Houdebine, ‘L'ennemi du dedans’, Tel Quel, 52 (1972) pp. 72-73.

76. See, for example, ‘La structure psychologique du fascisme’, ŒC, I, pp. 339.

77. ŒC, I, p. 1.

78. L'Expérience intérieure ŒC, V, p. 16.

79. La littérature et le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 8.

80. Michel Leiris, L'Age d'homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 22.

81. Michel Leiris, A propos de Georges Bataille (Paris: Fourbis, 1988), p. 40.