SOURCE: Noys, Benjamin. “Communicative Unreason: Bataille and Habermas.” Theory, Culture, and Society 14, no. 1 (February 1997): 59-75.

[In the following essay, Noys discusses Jürgen Habermas's criticism of Bataille as an originator of an “anti-modern neo-conservatism.”]

How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all ‘good things’!

(Nietzsche, 1969: 62)

For Jürgen Habermas it is Georges Bataille who stands as the origin of French postmodern neo-conservatism:

To instrumental reason they juxtapose in Manichean fashion a principle only accessible through evocation, be it will to power or sovereignty, Being or the Dionysiac force of the poetical. In France this line leads from Georges Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida.

(Habermas, 1985a: 14)

The result is an anti-modernism that attempts to ‘step outside the modern world’ (Habermas, 1985a: 14) and so, objectively for Habermas, finds itself allied with a neo-conservative rejection of modernity. This initial political criticism of Bataille by Habermas, as the originator of an anti-modern ‘young’ neo-conservatism, was then developed into a politico-theoretical analysis and critique of Bataille's function as the originator of the ‘French path to postmodernity’ (Habermas, 1984a: 79-102, 1987: 211-37). Political anti-modernism was diagnosed as the effect of a theoretical anti-modernism that was itself incoherent. The incoherence is the result of a performative contradiction that Habermas detects in Bataille's texts. In attempting to criticize the functioning of reason with a ‘principle’ exterior to reason it is impossible for that criticism to legitimate its critique of reason, the result is a ‘totalized, self-referential critique’ (Habermas, 1984a: 101, 1987: 236) that, whatever its scientific pretensions, becomes indistinguishable from an irrationalism.

This ‘performative contradiction’ is not regarded by Habermas as simply a fault of Bataille's, but is structured by the very functioning of the philosophical discourse of modernity. The structural aporia of Bataille's texts is the result of repeating the aporias of the subject-based philosophical discourse of modernity (Habermas, 1987: 74). Although Bataille's texts are critical of philosophical modernity, Habermas argues that they remain negatively bound to its discourse and so reproduce its failure to think an alternative foundation to subjectivity. They are caught between being inside or outside of reason and either based on the subject or its opposite, the dissolution of the subject. So, Habermas makes Heidegger's analysis his own; that it is ‘the human subject who posits principles of reason during the Age of Enlightenment, that is, the Age of Modernity’ (Gasché, 1989: 105), while also distancing his philosophical work from Heidegger's by claiming that Heidegger ‘propagates a mere inversion of the thought of the subject’ (Habermas, 1987: 160). The consequence is that a critical understanding and completion (Habermas, 1985a: 3-15) of modernity is required that will resolve the failed dialectic of modernity by displacing the discourse of the subject and so offering a solution that is not caught in this oscillation between reason and its outside.

The analysis that Habermas offers extends from Bataille's thought to its role in the origin in French postmodernism to a wider consideration of the problems of the philosophical discourse of modernity. At stake in this analysis is Habermas's contention that ‘the project of modernity has not yet been fulfilled’ (Habermas, 1985a: 13), as against what he regards as the anti-modernist options of French thought that ‘give up’ on this project. Against this postmodernism Habermas responds with the notion of communicative rationality that would fulfil the project of modernity, which ‘aims at a differentiated relinking of modern culture with an everyday praxis that still depends on vital heritages, but would be impoverished through mere traditionalism’ (Habermas, 1985a: 13). This communicative rationality would not only avoid the aporias of a subject-based philosophical discourse by shifting to the intersubjective event of communication but it would also allow a critique of instrumental uses of reason and misuses of reason, or irrationalisms. It achieves this through a communicative standard of reason that preserves the differentiated form of modernity and permits interlinking and criticism through rational debate. Communicative rationality would solve both the (linked) political and theoretical problems of modernity. It would avoid the political and theoretical exteriority of postmodernism to reason and modernity, an exteriority that leaves it unable to intervene in reason and modernity and trapped in an objectively neo-conservative anti-modernism and archaism.

The present analysis intends to challenge this presentation of Bataille's thought, and so also to challenge Habermas's characterization of what he calls ‘French postmodernism’ and the philosophical discourse of modernity. This is developed by presenting Habermas's critique of Bataille and Habermas's alternative of communicative rationality. What is striking is that in his discussion of Bataille Habermas does not ever consider the work that Bataille's texts devoted to the analysis of communication, especially as Habermas's own discourse is so dependent on the use of this concept. It is this alternative analysis of the concept of communication that provides a means to interrogate the assumptions of Habermas's discourse and its failings to think the conditions of its own concept of communication, especially as it is deployed in communicative rationality or communicative reason. What Bataille develops in his alternative notion of communication is a thought that is not dependent on the subject nor on being simply outside reason or modernity. It suggests an opening of Habermas's criticisms to a different mode of thought that resists his characterization of ‘postmodernism’. This opens not only his analysis of Bataille but also his determination of later French thought, and it suggests a space beyond the coordination of modernity/postmodernity.

How then does Habermas establish his critical reading of Bataille's texts? Against the aporias of the philosophy of the subject, Habermas uses the intersubjectivity of communicative reason as the new operator of critique. From this position Bataille's texts are seen as caught in a movement between ‘the paradoxes of self-referential reason’ (Habermas, 1984a: 83, 1987: 216) that result from the opposition of a scientific critique to the source of that critique which is beyond reason: once outside reason the critique cannot get back in. The alternative of a ‘nonobjectifying science’ (Habermas, 1984a: 101, 1987: 236) is also impossible because to contact the experience of this ‘outside’ of reason entails for Bataille (on Habermas's reading) the dissolution of the subject: ‘At this point, however, the knowing subject would—paradoxically—have to surrender his own identity and yet retrieve those experiences to which it was exposed in ecstasy—to catch them like fish from the decentred ocean of emotions’ (Habermas, 1984a: 101, 1987: 236). Only the subject can catch fish! These positions then form the two limits around which Habermas will position his criticisms, along the twin axes of communicative reason and its instantiation in intersubjectivity. Communicative reason offers a standard of reason that is not exterior to reason and intersubjectivity offers a foundation that is neither subject-based nor its negative: the dissolution of the subject.

It is at the political point of Bataille's analysis of fascism that Habermas makes a theoretical intervention. Habermas argues that Bataille opposes fascist violence with the violence of the sacred and heterogeneous, to the point where it becomes impossible definitively to separate the two violences from each other. So Bataille is trapped into the logic of fascism by attempting to counter it with the ‘tools’ of fascism (the chthonic energies and myths released by Nazism in particular). Habermas uses the work of Walter Benjamin as an alternative because it offers the resources to distinguish between the two opposed violences (fascist vs. socialist). This is because Benjamin maintains ‘a sphere of agreement free of violence’ (Habermas, 1984a: 87, 1987: 220) that is held in language and distinguishes socialism from fascism (or, it must be presumed, any totalitarian use of the socialist project).¹ This specific instance is part of the wider problem of Bataille's attempts to provide a critical standard against which to assess phenomena such as fascism:

Bataille is faced in any case with the same difficulty as Nietzsche, who proceeded in terms of a scientific critique of ideology: if sovereignty and its source, the sacral, is related to the world of purposive-rational action in an absolutely heterogeneous fashion; if the subject and reason are constituted by excluding all kinds of sacral power; if the other of reason is more than just the irrational or unknown—namely, the incommensurable which cannot be touched by reason, except at the cost of an explosion of the rational subject—then there is no possibility of a theory that reaches beyond the horizon of what is accessible to reason and thematizes, let alone analyzes, the interaction of reason with a transcendent source of power.

(Habermas, 1984a: 101, 1987: 236)

The result in this instance is that Bataille, for Habermas, can only pose one sort of violence against another with no possibility of a justification by reason for this choice.

Against Bataille's ‘totalized’ critique, which depends on a principle of the sacral which is outside reason and so cannot criticize the irrational because it is itself irrational, Habermas uses Benjamin's work on language as a means of linking to his wider project to establish a new principle of reason that is not transcendental (as in Kant), nor entirely historical (as, in different ways, Hegel, hermeneutics and historicism), but embodied in language. Communicative reason is embodied in language and this gives it a quasi-transcendental status. It is embodied in language because Habermas claims that all speech acts necessarily raise questions of truth, rightness and appropriateness (Habermas, 1984b: 39). To enter into speech is to agree minimally with these rational standards as possibilities to judge your speech act: even if you enter into the act intending to lie you still enter into the standard possible claim of truth. It is quasi-transcendental because it is linguistically embodied, and so has empirical existence, but also it is potentially raised by all speech acts, and so is transcendental. Therefore it preserves standards of reason from a position that is both internal to reason and also above its particular uses as a critical standard.

Habermas's ‘quasi-transcendental’ communicative reason can seem to be in close proximity to certain conclusions in those French thinkers whom he opposes, for example Derrida.² However, it is argued here that although Habermas seems to be indicating a similar limitation and retention of the function of philosophy, his construction of the quasi-transcendental remains within a metaphysical field. Instead of rupturing the regulative and philosophical functioning of the transcendental, Habermas risks merely shifting that function from the philosophical to the linguistic. The result is that instead of challenging philosophy by the force of the human sciences (in this case linguistics) Habermas conceals the continued philosophical functioning of the transcendental through the human sciences.³ What Habermas claims is that his method means that ‘philosophy surrenders its claims to be the sole representative in matters of rationality and enters into nonexclusive division of labour with the reconstructive sciences’ (Habermas, 1985b: 196). However, the seeming modesty of this Lockean under-labouring conceals the continued existence of a philosophical regulation within the cognitive functioning of language. The functions of language are determined so as to support this philosophical determination. This becomes clear when Bataille's thinking on communication is posed against Habermas; what Bataille's thought offers is the possibility of an alternative ‘quasi-transcendental’ that inscribes and exceeds Habermas's operator of communicative reason.

Habermas wants to preserve a linguistic zone free of violence to function as a regulative force on all speech acts, and this ‘free-speech situation’ is contained as an ideal within any event of communication (for Habermas). This then allows for a critical standard of judgement to prevail, both theoretically and politically, which Bataille's emphasis on violence would seem to threaten with a nihilism of force. The problem is that Habermas's theory does not adequately account for its own determination of this non-violent realm in language and its critical functioning. It takes as primary certain features of language and communication that do not exhaust communication. First, Habermas determines the event of communication by arguing that all speech acts involve the raising of the cognitive claims of truth, rightness and appropriateness. This is a reduction of language to its cognitive dimension by making that the primary model for the assessment of speech acts. Second, Habermas makes communication essentially a linguistic act, so the paradigm of communication is linguistic. In that way communication is reduced to or modelled in relation to language. What is explored in Bataille's analysis of communication is how this non-violent norm of communication is constituted by and operates through a violence that its claim to non-violence means it cannot think.

Initially it would appear that Bataille's propositions about communication run counter to the more commonsense theory of communication that Habermas offers, to the point where it would seem that Bataille is not talking about communication at all. However, Bataille argues that ‘the idea of communication is difficult to understand in all its potentiality’ (Bataille, 1985a: 189). This potentiality of communication involves a deeper account of communication that operates prior to more commonsense notions of communication (including that of Habermas). Bataille argues that ‘It is essential to understand the distinction between two sorts of communication, but this is difficult: they intermingle in that the emphasis is not on powerful communication’ (Bataille, 1985a: 199). But this is not just posing one form of communication against another, but analysing communication to reveal how this more powerful form of communication challenges the sorts of reductions that Habermas makes. In fact, communication is never stronger than when communication in the weak sense, in the sense that Habermas uses, fails (Bataille, 1985a: 199). It is in exploring this seeming paradox that the more powerful functioning of communication can be found.

Therefore it is necessary to examine how Bataille's reading of communication undoes Habermas's theory while at the same time developing its own account of communication. This is done in three stages: first, by showing how Bataille's analysis of communication is more powerful than that proposed by Habermas; second, by relating that reading of communication to the question of the subject; it is argued that Habermas is correct in seeing in communication a resource to rupture the metaphysics of subjectivity but that communication is not reducible to an event of intersubjectivity either; third, communication is related to the question of violence, which runs through and connects these problems. This is intended to substantiate the claim that Habermas's desire for non-violence leads to a problem with thinking the very functioning of violence in communication. It also demonstrates the superiority of Bataille's analysis of the functioning of communication and violence.

As we noted, it seems to be common sense to think of communication on the basis of language and to regard language as the model for all other sorts of communication. Certainly a theory of communication that could not account for language as communication would be nonsensical. Bataille agrees that language is a form of communication that must be analysed, but questions its primacy in determining communication. This is because Bataille argues that linguistic communication is dependent on a prior form of communication, an original event of opening that is itself not completely linguistic (Bataille, 1992: 14). That is, there is already a flowing of forces which open bodies, and in opening the body they make possible all forms of communication, including linguistic communication. In a sense, then, there is a sort of communication before communication:

What you are stems from the activity which links the innumerable elements which constitute you to the intense communication of these elements among themselves. These are contagions of energy, of movement, of warmth, or transfers of elements, which constitute inevitably the life of your organized being. Life is never situated at a particular point: it passes from one point to another (or from multiple points to other points), like a current or like a sort of streaming of electricity.

(Bataille, 1988: 96)

This is not just an unsubstantiated assertion or a fantasy of a prelinguistic realm; this functioning of opening is already present as a potential in the concept of communication. As Derrida has pointed out it is precisely the commonsense concept of communication that not only describes communication by language but also describes communication by non-semantic movements, as when we talk of the communication of a force or shock (Derrida, 1988: 1). So, communication includes something in its functioning that is not reducible to the linguistic and which is lost when communication is modelled as linguistic. What Bataille does is to deconstruct the primacy of communication as language over communication of non-semantic forces which has become sedimented in the concept of communication. It is this sedimentation that Habermas's theory depends on and does not question.

Bataille's analysis of communication has to show how communication consists of both the linguistic and non-linguistic and how these types of communication are both dependent on a primary event of communication as opening. There is an open ‘network of communications’ (Bataille, 1985a: 198-9) which is prior to the commonsense concept of communication. So, ‘From one single particle to another, there is no difference in nature …’ (Bataille, 1988: 93); instead there are waves, contagions, flows, which are both linguistic and non-linguistic. Although there are no fixed differences this is not just saying that the linguistic and non-linguistic are the same. Instead it is bringing out a general function of communication that involves this initial opening and transmission. If the body was closed, or being was sufficient, communication could not get started. There must be ‘the first opening, the permeability of a dawning smile’ (Bataille, 1988: 95) or there could be no communication of any sort. It is from this opening that it then becomes possible to analyse the specificities of forms of communication, and without this opening it would be impossible to think the full potentiality of the functioning of communication.

It also means that the accusation that Habermas is reducing communication to the linguistic and the cognitive can be substantiated. What Habermas cannot account for is how communication became possible in the first place; his is a secondary attempt to regulate communication by a normative theory of speech acts. Those cognitivist linguistic validity claims float across all communications, ‘transcending spatio-temporal and social limitations’ (Habermas, 1984b: 31). So, at the centre of the theory of free speech is something that must not be freely spoken of, norms which are themselves not free. In that sense Bataille's analysis of communication makes communication freer than does Habermas's. It gives communication that freedom which is essential to making it a communication, its capacity of movement across frontiers and fields. The ideal of communication that Habermas proposes would be an end to communication, it would reduce all communication to one message.

What is now examined is how the occurrence of the event of communication relates to the question of the subject. For Habermas the power of communicative reason lies not only in its existence in linguistic norms, which are for him quasi-transcendental, but also that it appears in an intersubjective event of communication: specifically, during argumentation when participants establish ‘both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld’ (Habermas, 1984b: 10). For Habermas this means that communicative reason is a renovation of philosophical modernity away from the aporias of subjectivity into the new surer basis of intersubjectivity. Habermas argued that the philosophical discourse of modernity and those discourses which were critical of modernity mirrored each other in their dependence on the subject. Even those critiques of subjectivity and modernity which attempted to dissolve or liquidate⁴ the subject only ended up producing a new subject through a dialectical reversal. Habermas himself proposes a classical dialectical solution to this opposition of subject (or too much subject) to non-subject (or not enough subject) through the concept of intersubjectivity (enough subject but not too much). The obvious rejoinder is how much does this sort of sublation actually shift us away from the discourse of the subject; is intersubjectivity in fact simply two (+n) subjects (Young, 1989: 222)? Could then the problem lie with Habermas's own reading of the philosophical discourse of modernity as structured by the initial opposition subject/non-subject? Are there possibilities in that discourse which Habermas does not detect and which do not fit his schema?

It is these possibilities that appear in Bataille's texts through his analysis of communication. For Bataille, communication does not begin from one subject to another, but involves a necessary interconnection before the subject: ‘Communication is a phenomenon which is in no way added to Dasein, but constitutes it’ (Bataille, 1988: 24). The ‘body’ or ‘bodies’ that are opened in communication are also constituted by this event of opening and do not pre-exist it. This shift in terms from subject to Dasein to ‘body’ is an attempt to show that communication is constitutive and not derivative. The problem is that such terms become regarded as the origin of communication not its effect. Although no term may ever be wholly adequate the subject, and intersubjectivity, tend more strongly to block the thinking of the constitutive functioning of communication. If communication is the event of opening to the flow of contagions (which cuts across the division of linguistic and non-linguistic) then the ‘subject’ is a point in this flow: ‘I am and you are, in the vast flow of things, only a stopping-point favouring a resurgence’ (Bataille, 1988: 95). The philosophical subject constitutes itself through the limitation dependent on this effect of resurgence and erects this as the foundation. Now despite Habermas's account of intersubjectivity pushing at the limit of the philosophical subject through communication, it fails to think the primacy of this communication. What Bataille develops is the impossibility of arresting this flow, whether that arrest be philosophical, social, personal, etc.: ‘Thus, there where you would like to grasp your timeless substance, you encounter only a slipping, only the poorly coordinated play of your perishable elements’ (Bataille, 1988: 94).

Instead of the concept of intersubjectivity doing away with the privileges of the philosophy of the subject by constituting the subject in a linguistic dialogue, it simply shifts those privileges on to intersubjectivity as the new ‘stopping-point’. Despite Habermas's retaining the Kantian threefold division of reason (science, morality, art) against any totalizing impulse, intersubjectivity remains a totalizer of regulative functions. The ideal that it produces, consensus, is presumed to be the result to which dialogue is presumed to aim. The difficulty is in specifying an account of communication that does displace the philosophical subject. Even Bataille's texts are not always clear on this point, and the problems that Habermas detects in them around the philosophy of the subject have also been noted in poststructuralism (Derrida, 1978: 267; Nancy, 1991: 23-4). For example, in Inner Experience Bataille writes of communication as a place of the fusion of subject and object (1988: 9). Not only does this formulation retain the traditional philosophical discourse of German idealism probably relayed through Sartre,⁵ but also this place of communication risks making communication into a new meta-subject (Nancy, 1991: 24). At this point Bataille does not sufficiently interrogate this difficulty but what Derrida and Nancy point out is that, despite these difficulties, Bataille's texts do offer resources that are more effective at displacing the philosophical subject than a philosophy of intersubjectivity.

What Bataille argued is that where the attempt is made to grasp a subject or an intersubjective ground in a ‘timeless substance’, what is encountered is a play of ‘perishable elements’ (1988: 94). In this new analysis of communication there is a ‘profound lack of all stability’ (Bataille, 1988: 95). Before discussing the question of violence in detail this mention of ‘perishable elements’ suggests that the event of communication is related to death, and the death of the subject. This is because this opening that happens before the subject entails both a linking to others and the prefiguring of the subject's death in the loss of itself. The event of communication therefore opens to a sense of something beyond the subject that is the result of the subject's finitude: ‘as a subject, it is thrown outside of itself, beyond itself, it ruins itself in an undefined throng of possible existences’ (Bataille, 1988: 61). This throng offers a new way of thinking community through communication. Community is not primarily a space of wholeness or communion (what Nancy calls ‘immanence’) but instead a space that Bataille calls the desert (1988: 28).

Contrary to the claim of Wolin (1992: 13) this is not a call for communities to destroy themselves. Instead, the point is that communities cannot ever wholly grasp themselves because of the functioning of communication which opens people to each other (and so makes community possible) but which also means that this opening cannot ever be fully closed. That is, community cannot be taken as an aim to replace the subject, which would mean making community into a meta-subject. Of course communities can think of themselves as closed or try to close themselves, but this involves denial of this primary openness. Attention to communication as an opening which involves a minimal violence is not the support of an ‘aestheticized politics’ (Wolin, 1992: 13) that risks a new fascism. It suggests an analysis contrary to the dependence of fascism as an ideology on the reduction of communication and community to constitute itself as a closed community or a community that could be closed.

This suggestion that communication is related to death and violence needs to be clearly specified and explored to make clear that it is not a celebration of death and violence or a demand for more violence. Why does Bataille argue that communication is related to both violence and death? This is because, as we have seen, any event of communication can only exist through a primary ‘permeability’. Without this permeability it becomes impossible to understand how any communication could take place, because for communication to take place it must involve a movement from one, or more, sites (whether that be human or not) to another site or sites. This transmission must open a path between the two (or more) sites and so this pathbreaking always involves a minimal violence. Now because communication involves an opening of the ‘body’, and because that opening necessarily involves violence, Bataille will never cease to equate communication with evil and the paradigm of communications which attend to their constitution in this event of violence will always be coordinated with evil (Bataille, 1985a). From the position of our usual weak conception of communication the event of primary communication will appear evil. The danger is that this understanding of communication through references to evil, death and violence could seem to be an aesthetic celebration of these events.

Actually, it is not so much that death, evil and violence should be seen as recommended by Bataille or as more honest forms of communication for Bataille; rather it is the violence that is necessary for the event of communication that opens the possibility of these other forms of violence. The event of communication both separates and links us in its minimal violence. In Eroticism Bataille analyses this as relations of discontinuity and continuity (Bataille, 1962), that are both the results of communication. Commonsense conceptions of communication remain with discontinuity and the separation of persons and then have to try to explain how they are linked. Even intersubjectivity still does not overcome this position, because it tends to suppose subjects who interrogate each other in argumentation. It depends on discontinuity which it tries to mend or heal in dialogue. From this position any continuity is both desired and dangerous, leading to the effects of eroticism and a fascination for death (Bataille, 1962: 13). If we start with communication as resulting in both continuity and separation, connecting and disconnecting, then we are not subject to this fantasy of violence or the alternative fantasy of non-violence. Instead acts of violence have to be understood through the primary violence that communication inaugurates. This position can be clarified through the work of Derrida.

Derrida has also developed this sort of analysis of violence, especially relevant in his discussion of Lévi-Strauss. There (1976: 122) Derrida identifies the complexity of the structure of violence, its three-fold functioning. First there is the primary violence of what Derrida calls ‘arche-writing’, and which functions analogously to what Bataille calls communication. Then there is a second violence that forbids this primary violence, the law or the moral, that depends on this primary violence, confirms it by forbidding it and conceals it. Then there is a third violence that emerges as an empirical possibility, for example evil, war, rape, etc. This is made possible by arche-violence and regulated by the violence of law, that refers to both the arche-violence and law. Habermas succeeds in making it impossible to think arche-violence and the violent functioning of the law. Instead he remains at the third level of violence as accidental or exterior, and removable through a reformed morality or law incarnated in linguistic communication. The result is that the structure of violence is occluded, and it supports the ‘myth’ (Derrida) of a non-violent ‘good’ communication. As Derrida points out, by thinking this structure of violence the ethical or political is not foreclosed but it becomes possible to think ‘the nonethical opening of ethics. A violent opening’ (1976: 140). Without this thinking ethics and politics will be impoverished, leaving violence as an accidental phenomenon that could be eliminated, rather than an essential possibility that can only be reduced.

How then is it possible from this position to analyse the failures in Habermas's concept of communication? Habermas would be in obvious error for arguing that there is a possibility of a communication free of violence, even as an ideal. It also suggests that the operation by which this ideal of non-violence is determined as held in the cognitive functions of language could also be interrogated. Although made in the name of non-violence, these operations involve violence in the very constitution of the space of non-violence. This is a paradox that Habermas's thought cannot escape or even think. Also, for communicative reason to function regulatively it must, even potentially, be able to intervene in any communication. Again this operation must involve a certain violence, even if it is in the name of ‘non-violent’ discussion. Communicative reason must be able to enforce its standards or it would not be able to claim its regulative position. From the position of Bataille's texts Habermas's recourse to linguistics, as a scientific guarantee, will always miss what makes its concept of communication (im)possible: ‘The recourse to scientific givens (the fashionable perhaps—the present-day, the perishable—in the realm of knowledge) appears to me to be of secondary importance, given the foundation, the ecstatic experience from which I set out’ (Bataille, 1988: 98; emphasis in original).

The sphere of agreement free of violence, communicative reason, is set up by Habermas as a limited and protected zone that then polices acts of communication. Specifically, communicative reason regulates itself, especially in its instrumental uses. It offers a model of reason that is not tied to performance or utility but to critical discussion. This supposes a division in reason, which immediately begins to have problems with the construction of that limit. It appears that the charge that Habermas makes against Bataille returns to his own text; once the sheltered space of violence-free communication is constituted, how is it then possible to get back to intervene in the domain of violence, and how is it possible to maintain this initial division without violence? Rather than Bataille offering a ‘totalized’ critique, Habermas's model of communication itself appears to function as a totalization. It too is self-referential in its failure adequately to think the necessity of a minimal moment of heterogeneity between communicative and instrumental reason. It cannot do this because of its failure to think the structure of violence.

In contrast to thinking violence as accidental, Bataille's analysis of communication begins from this primary violence, to proceed to thinking the violence of the law and empirical violence. This clarifies the point that Bataille is not celebrating empirical instances of violence for their own sakes, but using them to reach back into the violence of the moral law (as in Nietzsche) and through this to the analysis of the primary violence of communication which makes the other forms of violence possible. Also, this attention to the violent event of communication allows Bataille to radicalize Nietzsche's contention that ‘blood and cruelty’ is at the origin of all good things. No longer is this the matter of an alternative history, a genealogy of the unreasonable origins of reason, but an interrogation of the very possibility of history and genealogy in the violent event of communication. Violence may in fact penetrate more fundamentally into communication than even Nietzsche's genealogy can recognize. It is through this recognition of the fundamental functioning of violence that it then becomes possible to think the reduction of violence in an economy of violence without being trapped between the fantasies of a pure violence or a pure non-violence. It is not a nihilism of competing violences but an analysis of their economy that aims at the reduction of violence through attention to the primary minimal violence of communication that itself is always an opening to the possibility of the ethical.

This allows an answer to be made to the claim by Wolin that ‘Later in life Bataille himself realized that his fascination with the aesthetics of violence and a politics of transgression exhibited a “paradoxical fascist tendency”’ (1992: 13), which itself reiterates the charge made by Habermas (1984a: 87, 1987: 220). Wolin does not consider that this tendency, which Bataille himself recognized and took responsibility for, may have been corrected through the later analysis of communication. Communication locates a general economy of violence that resists the simple celebration of the third level of violence as empirical possibility. In fact, even at the time of Bataille's ‘fascist tendency’ (1930s), which Wolin simply makes the dominant feature of all Bataille's texts, there are important and complex analyses which resist this tendency. This is especially true of ‘Nietzsche and the Fascists’ (originally published in July 1937) in which Bataille showed both how Nietzsche's thought had been violently appropriated by fascism and how its own ‘mobility’ of thought resisted this appropriation (Bataille, 1985b: 182-96). This is not just opposing one sort of violence to another, but showing how the empirical violence of a fascist reading must also deny the minimal violence of communication. Bataille is calling for a reduction of violence, that the mobility of Nietzsche's thought be read in its full effects of communication that opens beyond the violent fascist attempt at containment. This detailed reading of Nietzsche by Bataille shows how it was possible for fascist writers to exploit resources in his texts, but also how those texts resist that exploitation. It deserves a more detailed reading than can be given here but is inserted to suggest the violence and unjustness of Wolin's own reduction of Bataille's thought to a form of fascism.

What Bataille shows in his attention to the operations of violence in communication is that Habermas refuses to think that any desire, political or theoretical, to reduce violence must involve a certain violence. Without thinking this, the result can only be a hypocrisy and an occlusion of the operation of violence. Determining violence as exterior and accidental leaves this primary violence untouched, and also the violence of the law or the moral itself. It restricts itself to one determination of violence rather than analysing the general structure. Therefore Bataille's conception of communication does not correct, extend or stand as an alternative, to Habermas's communicative reason but it deconstructs it toward this violent effect of force that it must foreclose to function as a regulative concept. That is its work on the potentiality of communication. Communication has resources in its functioning that Habermas cannot either admit or think. Against the appearance of paradox that Bataille's account of communication may have initially had it can now be seen as actually more accurate than the account of Habermas.

Therefore, Bataille's analysis of communication can account for how Habermas could erect his account of communication and also show how that account is limited in a way which means it fails to function accurately both as an account of communication and as a political operator. What it demonstrates is a rupture in the two axes with which Habermas critically manages Bataille's texts. It exceeds the sphere of non-violent linguistic agreement and it exceeds its instantiation in intersubjectivity. It does not achieve this by simply abandoning reason or the subject. Instead it charts the process by which those fields are constructed and opened to new forces. ‘Communication’ describes this process of opening, which cannot be reduced to a cognitive linguistic function but which makes those functions possible while also delimiting them.

Through the functioning of communication in Bataille's texts we reach the possibility of a quasi-transcendental that exceeds the structures that Habermas uses to order his discourse (his ‘quasi-transcendental’), his operation of political and theoretical critique, his characterization of ‘French postmodernism’ and his characterization of the philosophical discourse of modernity. It is insofar as Bataille offers a particular opening of the possibility of this ‘quasi-transcendental’ that Habermas is correct in identifying him as an origin point for what Habermas calls ‘French postmodernism’, or what is also known as ‘poststructuralism’. It also demonstrates the limits of Habermas's critical analyses of that mode of thought. What is being suggested is that Habermas's failure to think accurately Bataille's thought suggests that he also fails to think accurately the writers that draw on it. By missing the structure of the quasi-transcendental (which exhausts structure) that is present in what Bataille presents as communication Habermas can only detect political and theoretical irrationalism and nihilism.

How then could this analysis of communication by Bataille affect the more contemporary debates between Habermas and French thought, especially the so-called ‘postmodernism debate’ that has primarily involved Lyotard and Baudrillard? It may help to clarify exactly what is at stake in this debate and also explicate the difference in the functioning of the quasi-transcendental between Habermas and poststructuralism. The analysis of communication presented here suggests that the debate about postmodernism is not reducible to the sort of debate that Habermas's theory of communication would be able to resolve through its use of the rational norms instantiated in dialogue. However, Lyotard, and especially Baudrillard, do not always proceed with enough caution and explanation to entirely avoid the danger of this reduction of debate. We briefly suggest that Bataille's analysis of communication helps to reveal other resources in their texts which show that the debate is more profound and troubling for Habermas than his readings would suppose. It allows us to understand that this is not just a competition between alternative theories of postmodernism.

So, for example Lyotard is not just posing dissensus against Habermas's telos of consensus (Lyotard, 1984: 65-6, 1988: 43-4). Dissensus could not be an alternative telos because it would be incoherent: to aim discussion toward dissensus would already suppose a consensus about the aim toward dissensus. Instead of being an alternative telos, dissensus would be analogous to what we have explored as the opening of communication, the quasitranscendental condition of communication. This would mean the destruction of any telos of communication, a teleological reading of communication actually meaning events of communication could not take place. The debate is not just about the nature of a response to a social reality but is about the very possibility of communication. There cannot be a reconciliation or rapprochement at this level, because the new analysis of communication developed from Bataille and carried forward by Lyotard shows the very impossibility and inadequacy of Habermas's theory of communication.

If Lyotard does not always make this clear, then often Baudrillard is even less careful in his work about what is at stake in this debate. In fact, the more sociological nature of his work makes it far more vulnerable to the philosophical criticisms that Habermas makes. However, there are comments by Baudrillard that do suggest that his work is familiar with the problems about the thinking of communication that have been outlined here. He argues that ‘“Communication” restricts itself to putting things that already exist in contact with each other’ (Baudrillard, 1993a: 57), just that criticism that has been made here of the traditional concept of communication. Against this concept of communication Baudrillard poses the category of the symbolic that he developed in Symbolic Exchange and Death (Baudrillard, 1993b), which was also the book in which he was most directly indebted to Bataille (1993b: 154-7). Therefore at that stage of his thinking there was an attempt to deconstruct a certain form and concept of communication by reference to a category which would exceed that concept. The danger was that in deriving the symbolic from so-called ‘primitive societies’ Baudrillard was vulnerable to the charge of a nostalgic racist fantasy of the other, that was questionable both in its accuracy and in its relevance to contemporary social reality. What the analysis of communication shows is that the symbolic could be relocated to this criticism of the concept of communication and so would not be dependent on this ‘primitive’ referent but operative in communication as a general possibility.⁶

This means that the analysis of communication that was outlined by Bataille is essential in understanding the power of this type of thinking and how Habermas has persistently misread it. Against the binarisms of reason/unreason and modernism/postmodernism on which Habermas organizes his critical discourse and his typology of contemporary thought this communicative thinking of the quasi-transcendental reveals a rupturing. It does not simply oppose a valorized unreason against reason or postmodernism against modernism, but in singular ways for each thinker interrogates and disrupts these sorts of oppositions. As has been shown in detail for Bataille and suggested as a consequence for Lyotard and Baudrillard, the new reading of communication is an opening that traverses reason and unreason, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. That is what is meant by communicative unreason, a function that appears as unreason from within a reason that is content to tranquilize itself and leave itself untouched (and therefore risking becoming unreasonable). Instead communicative unreason is an opening of reason, putting it into a communication that it cannot regulate and control a priori, it is in that event of communicative unreason that reason can think itself.

Notes

1. Although Adam Michnik has pointed out to Habermas in an interview that Habermas has not provided any direct theoretical analysis of, or criticisms of, Stalinism (to select one example of ‘socialist totalitarianism’) and Habermas agrees that this is a lacuna in his work (Habermas and Michnik, 1994: 9-10).

2. See Gasché's (1986: 284) discussion of Derrida: ‘Arche-writing is only, if one may say so, the quasitranscendental synthesis that accounts for the necessary corruption of the idealities, or transcendentals of all sorts, by what they are defined against, and at the very moment of their constitution.’ For further discussion of the difference between Habermas and Derrida on the quasi-transcendental see the discussions of Bennington (1988: 125, note 47, reprinted in 1994: 57, note 47).

3. One often sees the descriptive practices of the ‘human sciences’ mix up, in the most seductive confusion (in all senses of seductive), empirical inquiry, inductive hypothesis and intuition of essence, without any precaution being taken as to the origin and function of the propositions put forward. (Derrida in Bennington, 1994: 58, note 66)

4. Derrida (1991: 96) remarks on the suspicious status of claims made that certain discourses have ‘liquidated’ the subject, and how these claims tend to function as philosophical slogans.

5. Further exploration of the conflictual interrelation of Bataille's and Sartre's writing is given in my MA thesis (Noys, 1993: 25-46).

6. Although coming from a different theoretical field (a heterodox Hegelian-Marxism), Gillian Rose (1984) makes the same error and diagnosis.

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