[In the following essay, Besnier defends Bataille against his critics who find him to be inferior as an intellectual.]

The question of the intellectual comes back at regular intervals. I don't know if it is a French speciality, but ever since the Dreyfus affair at the beginning of the century, we on the continent have continually involved and compromised our thinkers in current political debates. Some, like Michel Serres, are beginning to show impatience and to demand a right of incompetence in political matters. I tend to think that is so much the better in some cases, but basically I prefer the attitude of someone like Maurice Blanchot, who dreams instead of keeping for himself ‘the right of the unexpected word’, that is to say, the possibility of speaking only sparingly about current affairs, and without it appearing to be a duty.² In short, French intellectuals are probably still in mourning for Sartre.

No matter: the history of intellectuals, the history of their engagement, of their mistakes, of their slips or of their cowardice, constitutes an important chapter in the cultural and political history of the twentieth century. It is sometimes the pretext for historians of thought to hand out group marks, to condemn or to absolve this or that gaffe by virtue of their position as latest arrivals on the scene—more often than not having themselves defected from militant illusions. Georges Bataille is rarely forgotten at these ritual award ceremonies, and he is almost always unfairly treated. It is in order to set straight some of the prejudices about him that I would like to speak now, by describing him as an emotive intellectual. This category should, in my view, be added to those commonly used to describe the intellectuals whom Sartre saw as occupying themselves with that which didn't concern them: the critical intellectual, the revolutionary intellectual, the organic intellectual, the Messianic intellectual or, more prosaically, the expert. I will try to show that the label of emotive intellectual applies best to writers, philosophers, artists or scientists who are less concerned with bearing witness, judging or teaching than with joining with history, which bruises and moves them just as much as anyone else.

I said just now that Bataille was generally badly treated by the theoreticians of the intelligentsia. The essence of the judgements passed on him is effectively to classify him as an irresponsible thinker—irresponsible in the broad sense, that is, as a man who didn't think of changing the world or formulating regulating ideals, and who didn't burden himself with the duty of representing or being exemplary which comes necessarily with the profession of writer. This accusation might be convincing were it not accompanied by contradictory arguments, which I would like to begin by rapidly sketching out.

What does one readily say about Bataille when seeking to disqualify him as an intellectual? Broadly speaking, there are three charges, which don't seem very coherent:

1 Hostile to democracy in the 1930s, Bataille was seduced by Fascism, and even orchestrated the celebration of Nazi values within the Collège de sociologie and above all within the secret society Acéphale. (A book has just come out in France, Les années souterraines by Daniel Lindenberg, picking up on this already old thesis.)³

2 Although he had rubbed shoulders with Trotskyism at the beginning of the 1930s, Bataille proclaimed himself a hardline Stalinist during the cold war, the main evidence for which is his attitude to Kravchenko in 1948.

3 Bataille was a seeker after God, even though he didn't admit it, ‘a new mystic’, who would propose a desertion of History in favour of ‘an ecstatic swoon’. We recognize here the well-known criticism by Sartre,⁴ which has implicitly conditioned many mystico-religious readings of Bataille (for example, that of J.-C. Renard published in 1987 by Editions du Seuil).

Fascist, Stalinist, mystic—three labels of accusation which all in different ways denounce the influence wielded (even today) by the author of La part maudite. The serious reader of Bataille is condemned to an eternal advocacy in his defence—eternal because there are none so deaf as those who will not hear:

1 To exculpate Bataille of Nazism, he must repeat that the project which aimed ‘to turn the weapons of Fascism back upon it’ was obviously dangerous, but that it seemed to be the moving force behind Contre-Attaque the only one capable of responding to the emergency in the context of moral and political degradation [deliquescence] of the prewar years. The advocate will also add that Bataille dissolved Contre-Attaque precisely because he was aware of the misunderstanding to which this ambition to defeat Fascism on its own terms could give rise. And the same advocate will conclude by citing, for example, the fate of Jules Monnerot who, unlike Bataille, remained fascinated by power to the point of seeing in Nazism a regenerative myth.

2 To set Bataille's Stalinism in context, he will need to recommend reading the final volume of La part maudite devoted to sovereignty,⁵ and to underline the ambivalence of its author towards Stalin, that sovereign who exhausted himself in forbidding (even to himself) all joy [jouissance], that is to say all ‘non-productive expenditure’; and who for that reason left himself open to the awakening of the same forces of opposition which in earlier times had risen against the tsars. At the very least, any honest reader will see that this book can only be interpreted as a critique of Communist society.

3 Finally, in order to reply to Sartre, it would be easy to cite the militancy of Bataille at the heart of Contre-Attaque and his intention ‘to strike down capitalist authority and its political⁶ institutions’, and to translate words into ‘action in the streets’ (as he proposed to Kojève, who was terrified). After the war, Sartre doesn't say a word about this exhortation to mobilization, perhaps because he himself had not yet discovered engagement in the 1930s. Perhaps also because he felt no sympathy for the leftism of the movement led by Bataille, which denounced with one and the same gesture bourgeois moralism, electoral compromise and the power struggles of a Soviet Communist Party capable of making alliances with Western democracies on the pretext of the struggle against Fascism. Perhaps, finally, because he is deaf to the motives which lead Bataille to pursue, in L'expérience intérieure, an asceticism whose stakes can be described in the same vocabulary used before the war to talk about revolutionary mobilization. Because ‘total existence’ remained fairly and squarely the impossible aim of the Contre-Attaque militant who no more intended to join up with the project and sacrifice the present for some predetermined future than before. Sartre himself sometimes acted in bad faith …

Whatever the case may be, it is undeniable that Bataille refused to let the theme of Sartrian engagement be imposed upon him. He did not want his often stormy interventions in pre-war history to be interpreted as a way for the intellectual to pay for justice or freedom with his own soul. I would like to refer to two events to demonstrate this.

First, a dispute between Bataille and Caillois in 1939.⁷ Irritated by the role Bataille gave to mysticism, to drama, to expenditure, to madness and to death, Roger Caillois stressed his own attachment to knowledge: he was an intellectual. The Collège de sociologie was in its last days, and Caillois deplored the fact that no one had been able to put theory into practice, which should have been the intellectual's true task. Bataille's response was pitiless:

I too ‘want to see myself as an intellectual’ provided that I do not take it lightly—that is, provided that I do not give the impression of being ‘upright’ and ‘honest’ by renouncing my espousal of existence in its totality, on the pretext of restricting myself to knowledge, or by letting it be imagined that it is possible scientifically to overcome ‘the unpredictable course of things’.

(Letter to Roger Caillois, 20 July 1939)

What is clear is this: the intellectual is obliged to lie to himself—he must tell himself that his erudition equips him to act in full possession of the facts, and that he can transform the world through it. There is in that the arrogance of the intellectuals⁸ converted to history. Bataille is manifestly humbler while at the same time more demanding, because he declares that, for his part, he cannot honestly deny ‘the total man’ by turning his back on the damned part [la part maudite] which continues to haunt humanity (in the form of drama, madness, the sacred, eroticism and violence). If the intellectual defines himself as a man who puts his knowledge at the service of history, one must denounce in him if not an impostor then at least the victim of an illusion which risks sustaining the one-dimensional character of social existence, and as a consequence the impotence in the face of the excess which in 1939 threatens to submerge Europe.

The second incident I want to mention took place after the war, when René Char undertook an enquiry into the relationship between literature and politics: an enquiry on the theme, ‘Are there incompatibilities?’ Replying to this question, it is to Sartre that Bataille addresses himself in order to signify his absolute resistance to the arguments for the engagement of intellectuals, even in the service of ‘freedom through socialism’ (as proposed by Sartre's manifesto, ‘Situation de l'ecrivain en 1947’, in ‘Qu'est-ce que la littérature?’). I would like to quote part of Bataille's response:

The incompatibility of literature and engagement, which entails obligation, is precisely that of opposites. The engagé intellectual never wrote anything that wasn't a lie, or that went beyond engagement itself.

(OC [Oeuvres complètes], XII, 23)

Once more, then, it is of lying that the intellectual stands accused: he lies if he takes up his pen in the service of a cause imposed on him from the outside—which Bataille makes clear by explaining that, in his opinion, one should never write to order in the same way that one never throws oneself into action motivated by a feeling of responsibility or obligation. Writing, like personal involvement in history, appears as ‘the effect of a passion, of an unquenchable desire’—never as the product of a reasoned choice, except that of resolving oneself to inauthenticity. In other words, literature is fundamentally sovereign: it doesn't serve any master, any value. That is why it is ‘diabolical’, and reveals the impossible in man. ‘I don't doubt’, writes Bataille, ‘that by distancing oneself from that which reassures, we approach that divine moment which dies in us, which already possesses the strangeness of a laugh, the beauty of an anguished silence.’ The reply to Sartre does not depend on circumstance, and doesn't betray any sign of personal animosity towards the author of Un nouveau mystique, who defined literature as ‘a profession requiring an apprenticeship, sustained effort, professional conscience and a sense of responsibilities’.⁹ Already in 1944, in an article in Combat (OC, XI, 12-13), Bataille denounced the propaganda literature organized by the Fascists and countered it with an ideal of inutility as well as his contempt for prejudices and commands: ‘I write authentically on one condition: taking account of no one and nothing, trampling on the rules.’ His conclusion was clear. The writer is the person who must reveal ‘to the solitude of everyone an intangible part which no one will ever enslave’; so he teaches only one thing—‘the refusal of servility’—in this context, hatred of propaganda. ‘That is why he is not on the bandwagon of the mob, and he knows how to die in solitude.’

So before, during and after the war Bataille shows himself to be equally disobedient to the idea of a reasoned engagement in action and anxious to make a place for that which can only elude the specialists of knowledge—the disobedience of all rules, the chaos of emotions, or if one prefers, the heterogeneity from which humanity ineluctably rises and to which it can constantly return.

If one forgets what these two incidents I have just cited show us, one can understand nothing of the way in which Bataille grabbed hold of the political history of his time. But equally, one understands nothing of the paradoxical attitude of the many men of letters and other intellectuals who launched themselves into the struggles of their time. That is what I wanted to show in my book La politique de l'impossible¹⁰ with particular regard to Maurice Blanchot, Paul Nizan and the Surrealists, but also in relation to Maurice Clavel, Michel Foucault and to the French Maoists of 1968: Sartre's theorizing of engagement is clearly incapable of explaining the pendulum swings from right to left or from left to right which mark the successive political alignments of many of the participants of pre-war France. It does not allow us to understand the intensity and the excesses of those who plainly feel the desire to be incorporated in the body of history more strongly than that of carrying out a political manifesto. Excess, enthusiasm, the fascination for limit-situations, for crowd phenomena, for the Apocalypse or death from which the new and the unheard-of could rise—all of this can be found in the struggles of Blanchot or the young Nizan, the Surrealists' lyricism of the uncontrollable, the revolutionary metaphors of someone like Clavel, the pro-Khomeini tendency of Michel Foucault, or the mysticism without salvation of the Maoists. All of this can be found, too, in the seduction of Sartre (in Critique de la raison dialectique) by the violence which gives birth to History, by those ‘perfect moments’ which dissolve the series in the ‘groupe-en-fusion’. In all of these examples, we are dealing with a version of the intellectual which is entirely alien to the register of responsible, exemplary engagement. These intellectuals do not baulk at the idea that they could slip [déraper], because the essential thing for them seems to be to let themselves be taken over by emotions, by inspiration and by the sublime—in short, by the irrational which fuses together the supercharged masses.

It is this attitude I call that of the emotive intellectual, and which I feel describes better than Sartre the mode in which many of the great names of contemporary literature and philosophy have been involved in history. (I have said nothing of Heidegger, but it will be clear that it is in this sense that I understand his aberrant adhesion to the Nazi madness.) Whether it was a question for them of escaping from the sentiment of decline, from disgust or from boredom, they surrendered to events as to a joyful invitation. At the high points of our recent history, they made excess their profession, evil their temptation and encouraged pathos to the extent of wishing for the Apocalypse. In short, Bataille was far from being the only one at the end of the 1930s to want to join with the elemental forces whose absence was causing democracy to wither—forces, precisely, which could spring from revolutionary sentiments, from a return to myth or from a quest for the sacred in all its forms. The emotive intellectual pursues every occasion which facilitates pathos, as though he more than anyone else felt isolated, abstracted. It is in this sense that he doesn't hesitate sometimes to celebrate the cult of irresponsibility as an antidote to the rationalism he is supposed to represent in the eyes of the world. Far from claiming to change the world, he is struggling to escape the inertia and cowardice of politics. Hence the haste shown by Bataille and before him by the followers of people like Georges Sorel to reject planning, manifestos and in general anything resembling an ideal. He wants ‘being without delay’, and if he abandons himself to action it is like others giving into alcohol or to lust. He wants ‘to be there with no other aim than to exist’, and it is this which seems most subversive—that which Bataille will soon describe as sovereignty. In any case, poles apart from what Sartre's message is in 1947, he is indifferent to any ethics of salvation and as a consequence to political ideologies, those ‘secular religions’ which all promise a final reconciliation. The emotive intellectual conceives his life entirely at the moment of tragedy; that is his strength or his weakness, depending upon your view. In any case, it is what will save him after the war from parading under the banner of engagement raised by Sartre.

Seeking to understand the intellectual context which made Bataille such a striking example of the emotive intellectual, I have given particular importance to the double reference in his work to Hegel and to Nietzsche. It seems to me that from the collision of the influences of Hegel and Nietzsche came the paradoxical result in Bataille of a will to action associated with a fatality which was demobilizing.

In the chaos of the 1930s, Bataille among many others was taken by Nietzsche, that is to say by the invitation to reopen the possibilities offered by a world without God. The appeal to danger, to adventure, to war—the joy of chaos—worked for him as a stimulant, and an entire aesthetics of pathos seems to have arisen from it. One cannot understand Bataille well if one does not take his integral Nietzscheanism seriously, if one forgets, for example, that one of his essential political gestures was to want to ‘wrest Nietzsche from the grip of the Nazis’—that is to say, to preserve the symbol of the irreducibility (of heterogeneity) of thought against the totalitarian enterprise. If Nietzsche could be saved from Nazism then sovereignty is impossible: we can see that, in these terms, it was clearly for him an entirely political gesture.

But in Bataille, Nietzsche meets Hegel, and at a very early stage, as I have tried to show in my book. At the moment when Bataille went to listen to the earth-shattering lectures of Kojève, he was already studying closely the work of the ‘philosopher of the system’.

If the thought of Nietzsche could be an incitement to explore the virgin territory of history, to invent the myth of the future and to shatter the idols to let new possibilities appear, the teaching of Hegel was stifling. Certainly, the representation of history which appeared in Kojève's teaching was impressive: struggle, toil, anguish and death ruled in this vision, and that must have helped to make Kojève's teaching credible to a generation brought up amid the sound and fury. But in the final analysis, Kojève revealed that Hegel was right—that history had ended, that there was no longer any point in waiting for some new possibility, and that it would be better to reconcile oneself to the present. We well know the effect on Kojève's audience: on Bataille, on Queneau, on Aron and on so many others. It was an unbearable and obvious fact—there is nothing left to do. All that remains is to live, as much as possible like a man—that is to say, through art, through love, or through the game.

Of course, I am merely sketching out here the collision of these two conflicting necessities which had characterized Bataille's thought since before the war. We know how this double necessity found its expression in terms of rupture, of paradox, of anguish: how Le bleu du ciel, for example, transposes it into a sad hero incapable of taking quite seriously the revolution before his eyes. The famous letter to Kojève of 6 December 1937 in which Bataille expresses his exhaustion merits a long commentary, which I am unable to undertake here. In it, Bataille describes himself as an animal screaming with its foot in a trap, as a ‘negativity without a cause’—that is to say, a desire to act (all action being negation in Hegel's view) which suffers from no longer being able to reach its goal because history is over. What was he to do with this surplus not foreseen by Hegel? How was he to cope with the rebellion which was by definition without prospects for the future, where the only outcome was tragedy? The only way out, said Bataille, was the impossible; that is to say that the only possible engagement is emotive.

Unreconciled with the world, Bataille consents to be a member of the category of intellectuals: but, convinced of the impossibility of a transparency that would be entirely satisfying, he can only consent on the level of pathos. Hence, the vertigo which seizes him, the will to wholehearted and endless action—to keep alight that flame which makes existence a rupture and a paradox. Acting for no reason at all (because all the cards have already been played), all one can do is call upon the emptiness which will henceforth sustain history. All of this is in order to try to escape from insignificance, to raise oneself to the level of the impossible. Hence, too, Bataille's tendency passionately to counter the unfinished nature of everything as the condition of human existence. In an essay in Critique devoted to Camus he underlines this in these terms: ‘Life, the world, are nothing in my eyes if not capriciousness.’ Which means that there can never be lasting satisfaction. The result is that the only conceivable good consists in never being still, and not in fighting the obstacles to a final reconciliation, as a Sartrian intellectual would do. One has reason never to be satisfied and one has reason also to abandon the illusion that there could be a remedy for this situation.

Bataille's work always gives one the impression of functioning as a ‘continual fight of honour’. Hegel is right. Everything has already been done. But Hegel left to one side the essential thing on which one must wager: The open wound that is my life, the erotic desire for the other, the tears or laughter that distance us—the sacrifice which unites men beyond the discontinuities sustained by societies where reason supposedly rules. In short, action has perhaps become futile and illusory, but what still remains is to live to the full extent of those states, or rather those ecstasies which are the reverse side of and the objection to a complete rationality dreamed by the philosophers. What remains, then, speaking like Bataille, is to confront in oneself the feeling of being ‘a savage impossibility’, the pain of existence confined to limits which one can only desire eternally to transgress.

What I describe here fairly schematically could explain how the fascination with revolutionary action of an earlier time finally gave way to a desire for asceticism permeated with the will to live and to communicate. This transition seems to be in place during Bataille's time at the Collège, at the time of L'expérience intérieure, but, I stress, does not in my opinion constitute a turning point, for Bataille did not come to deny himself. Privileging action obviously meant taking existence to its boiling point or, to put it another way, experiencing one's limits and feeling the fundamental continuity which fuses individuals together. In privileging the ascetic experience, the issue is the same, even if the quest is from now on a solitary one, sheltered from the solicitation of history. The figure of the sovereign sums up this transition and gives the emotive intellectual his most striking features.

The sovereign inherits the aspiration to total existence which Bataille continually demanded as the source of his ‘tattered humanism’. The figure imposes itself in his work more or less at the time when the ambition to live gets the upper hand over that of action; when Bataille himself admits to no longer being a man of action and feels the loss of all energy. So, at the advent of war, this existential figure of the sovereign lends his features to the man at the end of history, and in general to a humanity which recognizes itself as incomplete at the same time as being at the end of the line. One must add that, in the political context, the sovereign also incarnates the horror of power which blindly wants the end.

I have tried to show in my La politique de l'impossible in what way this sovereign differs from the citizen of a homogeneous universal state described by Kojève; and I have underlined, in this sense, that if he too escapes the pair of master-slave which determines the historical process, that is because he does not act, and is therefore responsible for no project or no historical initiative. There remains the fact that, unlike the citizen of Kojève, the sovereign remains in irreconcilability—which gives him his pathos. He is a solitary who calls on communication not as a need (which would presuppose that history was still possible) but in the mode of excess. He lives in tragic fashion the ‘paradox of surplus [excedent]’ in his own person, that is to say, the tortures of negativity without a cause. This exposes him to looking for the summits—those paroxystic experiences like so many escape routes to expenditure and communication—mystic, erotic, ecstatic; the experience of the sovereign operates at the limits; in other words like the revolution in times past it challenges all limits, invites ‘the putting into play of life in all its capriciousness’ (OC, XII, 199) and engages for that reason in a process of communal and sacramental unity.

In this sense it is clear that the term ‘emotive intellectual’ can still describe the man who takes on or lets himself be possessed by all the situations offered to this experience of limitlessness. If it is impossible to formulate a plan to achieve sovereignty, one can nevertheless open oneself to it by confronting the element of the impossible in oneself and in other people, that element which the tragic history of the twentieth century reveals so clearly. That is enough to explain the fact that Bataille never turned away from the unhappiness and promises of his time and that it was right to call him an intellectual. Auschwitz and Hiroshima have touched the very core of his being just as much as for people like Adorno or Aron, showing the excess which lies at the heart of humanity and polarizes it—often for the worse. In order to understand the paradoxes of sovereignty and its politics of the impossible, which consists of an approach to the world from the point of view of chaos, one asks oneself how Bataille was able to give the impression that he was a follower of Stalinism—up to the point where he was even suspected of being under the orders of Moscow, like any organic intellectual—the Bataille who nevertheless confirmed the common ground between the sovereign and the rebel.

In order to save him, on this point, from the title of ‘pitiful intellectual’, we must put things back in context—in January 1948, in Critique (reprinted in the third part of Le part maudite) Bataille evokes the book of Kravchenko, J'ai choisi la liberté. He does so after having described the Communist ideal to which he seems to subscribe: Communism aims to restore man to himself as against capitalism which alienates him. In that, it is not wrong to say that it is in the service of sovereignty, and that it works towards the whole man. The workers' movements which rally to the cause of Communism aptly express the ‘taste for living without delay’ (OC, VII, 145) which characterizes the sovereign. So it is clear that Bataille feels consistent in declaring his interest for Communism. I have mentioned elsewhere the book by Dionys Mascolo, Le communisme: revolution et communication, published in 1953, which shares with La part maudite the hope that man will be restored to himself through the realization of Marx's programme. But Bataille doesn't stop there: he knows that life in the USSR is not all roses, and that there is a long way between the ideal and the real. Before attaining sovereignty, one must accumulate, that is to say, produce. In fact, the Russia of 1917 had to give itself over to a class which despised extravagant wastage in order to preserve resources for equipping the country. Whence the need, in Bataille's view, to confront the ‘paradox of a proletariat reduced to forcing itself stubbornly to renounce life in order to make life possible’ (p. 147). In other words, Communism is obliged to deny itself in order to bring itself about; and the intellectual is obliged to cover up all that contradicts his beliefs while at the same time affirming that it is by contradicting his beliefs that they have the best chance of being realized. Sartre said that the intellectual is often obliged to think against himself. I don't see how Bataille could disagree!

This, then, is the context in which Kravchenko's book is discussed: Russia was working to create a surplus which would not serve consumption and joy [jouissance], but which was reinvested to create new means of production. Thus everyone should immediately recognize that, at that time, ‘Soviet Communism (had) resolutely shut out the principle of non-productive expenditure’ (p. 149). From that starting point, one can read Kravchenko's J'ai choisi la liberté and welcome the terrible description he gives of a universe totally subjected to the norms of work and which resorts to executions and deportations to achieve that end. Bataille doesn't claim that the dissident is a liar, but he accuses him of not understanding the inevitable character of this endless race for production without loss. Thus, as far as the author of La part maudite is concerned, his book is ‘without theoretical value’, because it does not recognize the inevitable necessity of Stalinism.

I certainly don't want to push this justification too far: Bataille certainly deserved to be criticized, and it was regrettable that (in 1948) he no longer felt inclined to denounce in Stalin the ‘cold monster’ which in 1932 he called upon the world to oppose in the same way as Hitler or Mussolini: ‘Stalin—the shadow, the chill cast by that name alone on all revolutionary hope’ (OC, I, 332). I think that it is now clear that the figure of the emotive intellectual which I use to describe Bataille expresses quite well the vulnerability to contradiction to which he gave in, no doubt too easily on this occasion. Another clue to this consent to paradox, which seems perverse in the context of a critique of totalitarianism, is the statement which ends an article entitled ‘Le mensonge politique’, still in 1948:

Man cannot be treated as an object. And that is why he is a Communist. (But one must add: Communism can, to begin with, only complete and generalize to begin this reduction to the object, and it is for this reason that man fights Communism to the death.)

(OC, XI, 338)

At a time when the cold war claimed to impose upon everyone the need to take sides, one must admit that Bataille's attitude could irritate and even scandalize.

I think that, to prevent ‘emotive’ being equated with ‘impotent’, ‘cowardly’, ‘incoherent’ or ‘blind’, it is valuable to read the third volume of La part maudite, begun in 1953 and published posthumously under the title Sovereignty (OC, VIII). I do not intend to comment on this work, the heart of which is devoted to a critique of Communist society, except to say that here Bataille is incontestably anti-Stalin, and that he expresses in straightforward terms a rejection of Communism, which he accuses of putting an end to non-productive prodigality. In this book, Bataille proclaims himself to be ‘a stranger to Communism’—guilty, in his eyes, of abolishing all difference and forbidding sovereignty, a criticism he was already making in Critique in 1950: ‘The Communists can neither unequivocally condemn nor tolerate the sovereign attitude, where the present life frees itself from, and loses interest in, the life to come.’ In short, Stalin was able to mislead people for a while: henceforth he is seen as an impostor. He was a man of power, not a sovereign. His legitimacy lay in his army, just as the Communist Party was founded on a military organization. That has nothing to do with sovereignty, the conditions for which the emotive intellectual seeks to define: ‘The sovereign in its true sense is passive, and military command on the contrary is the definitive form of activity’ (OC, VII, 393). Bataille continues that what in his view marks the incompatibility of the sovereignty he is seeking with Stalin's regime is that ‘there is in Communism a danger, which consists of the impossibility of accumulation being applied to any end except war’ (p. 394). That is precisely the risk: that the surplus is invested in the expenditure of war and that it conspires to total annihilation. The awareness of this menace proves at least that Bataille has still not rid himself of a sense of responsibility; as is shown, moreover, by the criticism he addresses to Caillois—who had, in the appendix to the reprinted L'homme et le sacre, described war as the modern equivalent to the paroxysm of archaic celebrations: ‘This interpretation is shocking, but there is no point in closing one's eyes: it lacks understanding both of the sacred and of war. And to be blunt it essentially lacks understanding of contemporary man.’ Taking the form of war, the sacred would in fact threaten man with total annihilation, which would precipitate a resolution to which the sacred is, on the contrary, the definitive contradiction.

Finally, we come back to the essential point: the intellectual is emotive because he expects only the worst, without being able to be satisfied with how things are: always between revolt and resignation, never engaged, at any rate. At the end of his life Bataille seemed to me to be comparable with Adorno, who offers a view of the intellectual preoccupied with resisting the barbarization of the modern world, of the intellectual who makes a point of honour out of refusing to play the game. Here I can only point to the pages I have devoted to this comparison in La politique de l'impossible.¹¹

I would like to end by referring to the sense of a phrase of Bataille's which is often called upon because it seems to sum up on its own the gulf that separates its author from the engagé intellectual like Sartre: ‘The world of lovers is no less true than that of politics. It even absorbs the totality of existence, which politics cannot do.’ Bataille wrote this at a time when he was battling ferociously against Fascism, and he was trying to polarize the forces which bourgeois individualism had let dissipate. That was the time of public declarations on the international crisis, and of the misdeeds of systematic pacifism. The celebration of the world of lovers has thus probably little to do with the justification for demobilization or the praise of private life. If we interpret it with reference to Le bleu du ciel, written at the same time, it gives a striking expression of the emotion (pathos) to which Bataille dedicated himself: namely, on the one hand, the aspiration to embrace the totality of existence—to which the worlds of art and politics and science are all equally alien; on the other, the subversion which, beyond all limits, offers the communal and sacramental unity for which humanity feels an irresistible nostalgia. In short, the strength of lovers clearly signifies the inadequacy and even imposture of the politics in which, according to Sartre, the intellectual ought to participate: it is certainly not a question of achieving power, but of keeping as close as possible to the emotion which fills the individual and then overflows into society in its first moments. At the time of Acéphale, that society which was secret but not plotting (in the sense of seeking to seize power), Bataille hoped in this way to get a foretaste of the mystery of the social bond, and perceive in the same gesture the sense of awakening of the Great Politics for which Nietzsche so longed.¹² Was ever an intellectual more demanding?

Notes

1. Translator's note (TN): In French, ‘Bataille, intellectuel pathétique.’

2. Cf. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Les intellectuels en question. Ebauche d'une réflexion’, Le Débat, Paris, Gallimard, 29 March, 1984.

3. Daniel Lindenberg, Les années souterraines, Paris, La Découverte, 1990.

4. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Un nouveau mystique’, Situations, I, Paris, Gallimard, 1947.

5. See Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, VIII, Paris, Gallimard, 1976. Hereafter referred to as OC, followed by volume and page number.

6. TN: politiciennes: pejorative, connoting cynicism etc.

7. See Georges Bataille, Lettres à Roger Caillois (4 août 1935-4 février 1959), selected and edited by J.-P. Le Bouler, Romillé, Editions Folle Avoine, 1987.

8. TN: clercs: cf. Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs.

9. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Qu' est-ce que la littérature?’, Situations, II, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, 265.

10. Jean-Michel Besnier, La politique de l'impossible: L'intellectuel entre révolte et engagement, Paris, La Découverte, 1988.

11. Cf. ibid., 191-5.

12. On this point, see, for example, Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: Introduction à sa philosophie (1936), Paris, Gallimard, 1950.