SOURCE: Itzkowitz, Kenneth. “To Witness Spectacles of Pain: The Hypermorality of Georges Bataille.” College Literature 26, no. 1 (winter 1999): 19-33.

[In the following essay, Itzkowitz discusses Bataille's thoughts on the possibility that excessive energy necessarily results in social violence and legal transgression.]

The two opposing values “good and bad,” “good and evil” have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years; and though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long time, there are still places where the struggle is as yet undecided. … [T]here is perhaps no more decisive mark of a “higher nature” … than that of being a … battleground of these opposed values.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

The more ideal ethics is the better. It must not permit itself to be distracted by the babble that it is useless to require the impossible. For even to listen to such talk is unethical and is something for which ethics has neither time nor opportunity. Ethics will have nothing to do with bargaining. …

—Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

This is the point of my book. I believe that man is necessarily put up against himself and that he cannot recognise himself and love himself to the end unless he is condemned.

—Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

I. A SACRIFICE OF ETHICS: BATAILLE'S SQUANDERING SELF

It would be pointless to deny that most illegal violence is abhorrent or immoral. At the same time, however, given the violence of the life of our culture, we need to understand immoral violence more deeply than any blanket condemnation of it will allow. Beyond our condemnations, we need to recognize that the acts we most prohibit are paradoxically also the very ones we most celebrate.

A foremost proponent of this need is the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. Relying on a notion of excess energy and the problem of its expenditure, Bataille argues that the transgression of law is what he calls an accursed yet ineluctable part of our lives. We make laws in the name of prohibiting acts of violence, yet the problem of the expenditure of an excess of energy requires behaviors that violate the very same rules we cherish and intend to uphold.

The commentator Jean Piel took note of how Bataille managed “to view the world as if it were animated by a turmoil in accord with the one that never ceased to dominate his personal life” (1995, 99). Here, the fact of an individual-in-turmoil reflects the surplus of energy disturbing life in general, rather than a moral deficiency for which an individual can be held accountable. For Bataille, an individual's wasteful behaviors are ultimately reflections of the problem of the surplus of solar energy. Piel put it this way: “The whole problem is to know how, at the heart of this general economy, the surplus is used” (1995, 103).

How should the surplus of solar energy be used? Bataille contends that this surplus is never extinguished and that its expenditure always leads towards the commission of violence. The surplus of energy is accursed and finally cannot serve us productively. The accursed excess confronts us with the problem of how to expend energy when this results in usages that cannot be made useful. Thus the production of violence has a value for us as those condemned to the realm of non-productive expenditures. We undoubtedly deny this value, as Bataille notes, when “Under present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to giftgiving, to squandering without reciprocations” (1988, 38). Nonetheless, as Bataille puts it, “the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander” (1988, 29). When this impossibility of useful expenditure is ignored, then we fail to recognize ourselves on the deepest level, as who we most fundamentally are.

Against this failure and in the name of a kind of inverted Hegelian self-recognition, Bataille calls for the transgression of our prohibitionist moral values. We need an ethics of squandering goods, of squandering what is good, in recognition of an overabundance over and beyond all others, i.e. an overabundance that can only, at best, be squandered. He writes,

life suffocates within limits that are too close; it aspires in manifold ways to an impossible growth; it releases a steady flow of excess resources, possibly involving large squanderings of energy. The limit of growth being reached, life … enters into ebullition: Without exploding, its extreme exuberance pours out in a movement always bordering on explosion.

(Bataille 1988, 30)

As living lives that must enter into ebullition, we find ourselves fundamentally committed no more to moral righteousness than to immoral outpourings of energy, to sudden and violent outbursts exceeding all rational considerations. The protests of moralism are secondary and never responsive to Bataille's questioning of morality: “Supposing there is no longer any growth possible, what is to be done with the seething energy that remains?” (1988, 31). We are told by reason and morality to do what is best, which is to prohibit behaviors that are nonproductive or harmful. Our morality identifies the right with the useful and productive, with whatever makes us better. Bataille, however, argues against this morality and for the requirement of useless, nonproductive, violent outpourings of energy—a requirement for what he calls “a draining-away, a pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case” (1988, 31). These violent, nonproductive outpourings, according to Bataille, are required of us all as living beings regardless of whether or not we take the responsibility to manage and arrange their occurrence in our lives. At issue, for Bataille, is energy in excess, energy as an excess. As an excess, such energy must be discharged explosively in outpourings that, in the end, are inevitable.

Does it make a difference how an excess of energy is squandered if, in the end, the results will have to be violent, if we cannot avoid taking actions that must be acknowledged as wrong? Bataille proposes that we face up to the value of the choices that remain, rather than continue to shrink from the available options, especially those moral prohibitionism would regard as either dirty or simply unacceptable. All expenditures, even acts of squandering, cannot be equally unacceptable; our available options lie with respect to the contrasting degrees of unacceptability of various acts and the various amounts of waste each entails. He states that “in no way can [an] … inevitable loss be accounted useful … [but there remains] a matter of an acceptable loss, preferable to another that is regarded as unacceptable …” (1988, 31).

The key to the possibility of an ethics for Bataille is that beyond the naïve hopes of our prohibitionist morality, we can see that some acts of violence are preferable to others. He contends in this vein that we need something counterintuitive, a kind of morality of evil, a morality able to face up to what he refers to as “a question of acceptability, not utility” (1988, 31). This distinction between the acceptable and the useful transforms the idea of a moral project to where it becomes right to enact those wrongs that would constitute the best (i.e., least damaging) uses of energy given the requirements of expenditure in situations of limited growth. For Bataille, it is “right” to “constructively” suspend moral prohibitions in order to substitute less damaging acts for the more violent alternatives. Our prohibitionist morality is an inevitable failure in even imagining how a surplus of energy may best be discharged. By default, this morality results in more violent discharges of energy, in lives that are, as a consequence, made worse.

Like Nietzsche, Bataille proposes a revaluation of moral values, a transformation of what Nietzsche calls “herd” morality. For both Bataille and Nietzsche, ordinary morality is too constricted with respect to the biggest picture, to conducting the totality of our lives. The value of the “herd” morality breaks down when taking human life as a whole into account. To recognize ourselves for all that we are means having to change the outlooks that now constrain us. In recognizing ourselves we alter our values and behaviors in the name of living the fullest lives possible.

A system of moral values, under construction, may be regarded as analogous to any system of valuation. For example, we may also construct a system of trading equities on the stock exchanges. This latter value-system will select some equities as preferable to others, and makes trades accordingly. Good trades acquire better equities while bad trades acquire worse ones. Moreover, the value-system as a whole is better to the extent it maximizes good trades. The best value-system makes the greatest number of good trades, thereby maximizing profits, and minimizing what is lost.

Analogous to this kind of value-system, a morality may be regarded as a system of exchanges with the aim of maximizing excellence in living. As such, a morality values actions and intentions as better or worse in the name of right and wrong. We ordinarily assume that an action is wrong simply if it violates the system of moral rules (the Ten Commandments, for example) and right if the rules are upheld. Given this assumption, to do the right thing is analogous to using the stockpicking system correctly. On this level, when morality tells us what to do, we are either right or wrong, depending simply on whether or not the rules are obeyed.

But Bataille's Nietzschean morality demands that we evaluate the value of the moral value-system itself, the success or failure of the system generating the rules. Those who trade equities know not to stand by a set of rules that loses money. A value-system may sometimes have to be abandoned. For Bataille, the same is true for a dysfunctional set of moral values. Yet our moral system that sets the standard of value for our behaviors has been subjected to no standards of evaluation. We need to abandon the assumption that the rules of morality are absolute, productive in all contexts, and beyond dispute. We need to make it possible to employ so-called “immoral” values when these have life affirming effects, and to suspend or transgress “moral” values when these serve a sufficient life-affirming purpose.

The key is to recognize ourselves as the extreme beings we are. Bataille sees human life as beyond the limits set by morality, as desiring nothing less than the wild, destructive, celebratory excesses by means of which we are granted ecstatic gifts. We produce acts of violence in part because they have a supreme value for us, even though the thought of such acts as having supreme value is always laughable and almost always denied. A typical day betrays little in the way of a lust for outrageous excess. However, for Bataille, a typical day reveals only a part of our being. According to Literature and Evil,

just as certain insects, in given conditions, flock towards a ray of light, so we all flock to an area at the opposite end of the scale from death. The mainspring of human activity is generally the desire to reach the point farthest from the funereal domain, which is rotten, dirty and impure. We make every effort to efface the traces, signs and symbols of death. Then, if we can, we efface the traces and signs of these efforts.

(Bataille 1973, 48)

In other words, there is a radical duality at work in our lives, although traces of this duality are ordinarily effaced. For Bataille, there is first the fundamental value of the unacceptable and second the unacceptability of this first fundamental value, i.e., the overwhelming need to efface the value of the unacceptable along with every trace of it as a value in our lives. He contends that both the left and right poles of this duality are mainsprings of human self-recognition. With the right pole of effacement, we suppress the awareness of the left pole, of the presence of our own destructive desires. He acknowledges that the resulting self-conception does fit us to the extent that “the being which we are is primarily a finite being (a mortal individual) … [with] limitations [that] are no doubt necessary” (1973, 50).

Yet, at the same time, Bataille's own writings never fail to emphasize the primacy of what is harmful to us, of what is neither useful nor good, of what is beyond our mere finitude. Throughout Literature and Evil, for example, he repeatedly affirms the destructive behaviors and dark values that must come at the expense of survival needs. Mere survival is the necessary but insufficient condition of striving to live a full life. To live fully actually means to live at the expense of future survival, to completely waste ourselves, blind to all consequences.

Along these lines, Literature and Evil argues that to live life really means nothing less than that we don't “flee wisely from the elements of death … [but instead] enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid” (Bataille 1973, 50). To live fully we must shun wisdom; in living fully we laugh even at death itself, in the awareness that “When we enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid … we really live” (1973, 50). When we achieve “a heightened consciousness of being,” we burn, because only “by going beyond … these limitations which are necessary for … preservation … [are we able to] assert … the nature of … [our] being” (1973, 50).

The first chapter of Literature and Evil similarly contends that “Death alone—or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in time—introduces that break without which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy” (Bataille 1973, 13). This is because for every individual, “an irreducible, sovereign part of himself is free from the limitations and the necessity which he acknowledges” (1973, 16). Indeed, in the same chapter, Bataille celebrates the desire for self-ruin as a divine or sovereign inspiration, as one taught to us by religion, Greek tragedy, and the great books. In his words,

The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consideration of the future. Divine intoxication … is entirely in the present.

(Bataille 1973, 9)

The main point, for Bataille, is that the dark forces that drive us towards ruining ourselves cannot be dismissed—these forces are a crucial part of who we are. Concomitantly, we suffer from a problem of self-recognition, of not knowing ourselves for who we are. This failure to know ourselves does not limit our dissoluteness and ruinousness, only our self-knowledge as such. The self-image of ourselves as good prevents our acknowledging the problem of the surplus of energy that must be squandered, as the problem of who we ourselves are beneath and beyond that of the irrational atrocities that particular individuals commit. Our prohibitionist morality deals with evil only after the fact, without taking into account the prior, fundamental value disruption has for our lives.

The epigraph to this article from Literature and Evil says that we won't recognize ourselves for who we are until we see ourselves as condemned, which Bataille considers his main point (1973, 25). But the failure to recognize ourselves has an alarming implication, that we may be headed in the direction of self-destruction, and that we are actually driven in this direction by our need to produce our own final condemnation. Bataille gives us reason to pause to wonder whether we are blundering towards self-annihilation beneath the amazingly resilient image we have of ourselves as good. Do we have sufficient motive to avoid proceeding violently and negligently, to the very moment of our own demise? To not have to go all the way to self-destruction, we need to show and know ourselves outside of the house of the good, to recognize ourselves for who we are also as evil, as condemned. But when we remain complacently within this house or realm, Bataille's dialectic of self-recognition remains for the most part unknown. From within the house of the good, it makes little sense to alter the image of the human to include the necessity of evil. Indeed it seems like an irrational or frivolous act to do so, as stated in The Accursed Share,

Minds accustomed to seeing the development of productive forces as the ideal end of activity refuse to recognize that energy, which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly (without return), and that a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect than the squandering of profits. To affirm that it is necessary to dissipate a substantial portion of energy produced, sending it up in smoke, is to go against judgments that form the basis of a rational economy.

(Bataille 1988, 22)

Under the image of the sovereignty of the good, all expenditures will be thought to be potentially valuable and useful. We lack the recognition of squandering and evil as having fundamental value, of ourselves as condemned. For Bataille, such a lack of self-recognition amounts to a dangerous refusal that moves us in the direction of having to condemn and destroy ourselves. We may have to go so far as to produce an apocalyptic spectacle of our condemnation, to witness the final end itself, in order to bring our dialectic of self-recognition to completion. Can we come to show/know ourselves short of producing the moment of self-completion that in this case would be sadly irrevocable? We encounter in Bataille's writings the problem of knowing ourselves as the condemned without having to become the destroyed. With what forms of experience will we achieve such rare and unusual self-knowledge?

II. BATAILLE'S HYPERMORALITY: AN ETHICS OF SACRIFICE

If the only goal of ethics were what is useful or productive in the sense Bataille contrasts it with nonproductive or wasteful squandering, then in dismissing our ordinary moral values on grounds of their utility or productivity, Bataille would be dismissing ethics itself. He would be dismissing the possibility of an ethics—the project for an ethics—of his own. There would be no ethical ground for his dismissal of morality as tied to the productive and useful; there could be no other moral values on which his dismissal of the productive good as the dominant moral value could stand. In other words, there would be no way for us to see him striving to make our lives or anything else better. He would have to be seen as wanting to make everything worse.

But this is not so. There are moral values on which Bataille's dismissal of the useful and productive good stands. Of course our tradition has tied these values to the good, which in turn has been tied to the useful and productive. Hence for anyone even to speak of these other values automatically brings the useful to mind.

Still, if the dominant sense of the good has long been the useful and productive, there are also other senses of what we mean by the good. The good can also be thought of as what to pursue rather than what to avoid and what to praise rather than blame. For example, the two interlocutors of Plato's Euthyphro agree from the outset on the importance of the matter of the praiseworthy, although not necessarily on the importance of the usefulness of the praiseworthy which is addressed much later on. Similarly in Hippias Major, Hippias immediately assumes that since the fine itself is of the highest value, this means first and foremost that it is worthy of praise far greater than anything merely useful. Hence when Socrates asks whether the well-made pot and wooden spoon are fine, Hippias scornfully responds that be they fine or not, to praise such common items is boorish (Plato 1983, 61, 288d).

Finally, the issue of praise and blame is also a starting point for Aristotle, which is why he sustains an analysis to forge the distinction between voluntary and involuntary behaviors. Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics devoted to this topic begins as follows,

Since virtue is concerned with passions and actions, and on voluntary passions and actions praise and blame are bestowed, on those that are involuntary pardon, and sometimes also pity, to distinguish the voluntary and the involuntary is presumably necessary for those who are studying the nature of virtue, and useful also for legislators with a view to the assigning both of honours and of punishments.

(Aristotle 1941, 964, 1109b)

Here the praiseworthy and blameworthy are values attached only to behaviors done voluntarily, to deeds rightly or wrongly pursued and avoided. Obviously, both Plato and Aristotle fully assume that these values are consistent with the value of utility—that we would never praise the useless or blame the useful, as such. Bataille, however, challenges this assumption. The praiseworthy may be useless; it may not be good in the sense of useful. Like Plato and Aristotle, he puts forth an ethics of praise and blame. Unlike them, however, he is largely concerned with separating the praiseworthy from every possible sense of utility.

Bataille rejects the notion of a unified good. When he criticizes the moral good, this is because by assuming such unity, morality has blinded us to the importance of disutility, to the praiseworthiness of nonproductive usages serving no end beyond themselves. We generally assume that there are no such praiseworthy usages, but Bataille insists that there are. Indeed, there is a whole realm of them, he contends, as well as the need for an ethics corresponding to them, one able to take their violence into account.

In Literature and Evil, he twice refers to this alternative ethics as his “hypermorality” (to capture both senses of an excess of morality and a morality of excess). In hypermorality, we do find the traditional moral values, but now as strangely (in both senses of uncannily and comically) set alongside other, antithetical, sacred-gift values. Bataille's hypermorality juxtaposes Kantian respect on the one side with the excesses of the Marquis de Sade on the other. In this way, hypermorality can simultaneously present the survival value of ordinary “moral” morality, while ranking this moral morality as a deficiency or lack. In Literature and Evil he says, “The moralist condemns the energy which he lacks” (1973, 76). And in his culminating work, entitled either Death and Sensuality or Eroticism in its two English editions, he further elaborates on morality as such a deficiency or lack, specifically in that,

The man who admits the value of other people necessarily imposes limits upon himself. Respect for others hinders him and prevents him from measuring the fullest extent of the only aspiration he has that does not bow to his desire to increase his moral and material resources. Blindness due to respect for others happens every day. … Solidarity with everybody else prevents a man from having the sovereign attitude. The respect of man for man leads to a cycle of servitude that allows only for minor moments of disorder and finally ends the respect that their attitude is based on since we are denying the sovereign moment to man in general.

(Bataille 1962, 167)

A brief digression here will be helpful in capturing the fuller meaning of this passage. One could argue that on the surface, there is nothing entirely unique about the criticism of morality making us servile. According to this and many other passages in Death and Sensuality, the problem with morality is a lack of efficacy with respect to the absolute aspirations of human life, which Bataille labels as “sovereign” as opposed to merely subservient aspirations. Of course many philosophers and moralists before Bataille already contend that the highest good, whatever name it is given, is difficult if not impossible to achieve. Plato, Spinoza, and Kierkegaard are three obvious examples of philosophers envisioning steep existential ascents.

Bataille is hardly different from these and other philosophers in his assertion that sovereign aspirations can be realized only at great, even ultimate expense, and that our everyday approaches to the good cheapen it by trying to make it more accessible. Many philosophers have protested along the lines that “user-friendly” approaches to the good completely miss the mark, since to reach the good is something fundamentally difficult. The “user-friendly” approach will deceive and debilitate rather than enable anyone in pursuit of the highest goals in life. The epigraph from Kierkegaard at the beginning of this paper takes note of this problem in protesting that “ethics … must not permit itself to be distracted by the babble that it is useless to require the impossible” (1980, 17). Could these words not suit Bataille as well, if they were slightly modified to say, perhaps, that we “must not permit [ourselves] … to be distracted by the babble that … [the break with servility is] impossible”?

The problem with equating Bataille and Kierkegaard is that the depiction of sacrificing the low for the high suggests a more conventional moral position than Bataille puts forth, one where sacrifices are understood as good, in the name of a greater good, whether we reach this good or not. This is precisely the position Bataille sets out to resist, however, and not only because, as he puts it, “we do not possess the excessive store of strength necessary to attain the fulfillment of our sovereignty” (1962, 167).

The problem is more one of the value or direction of our exertions than of their strength or brute force. Some of our exertions are good but others are evil. Sovereignty actually takes us in the latter direction, with our sacrifices authenticated but in the name of something other than the good, perhaps something not higher but lower. Bataille's own words to this effect are that “Evil—an acute form of Evil—has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a ‘hypermorality’” (1973, unpaginated preface). Indeed, his view is that our ultimate aspirations will be misunderstood unless we see them less on the side of good than of evil. When he calls for a hypermorality, he demands we recognize that in fully accounting for ourselves, the prohibition of evil aspirations does not suffice.

Here Bataille invokes Sade to represent sovereign aspirations as entirely gratuitous, what Bataille calls “the need for an existence freed from all limits” (1962, 162). Sade is an exemplar to show us that we have such aspirations. What we can see in him, says Bataille, “is the ruinous form of eroticism. Moral isolation means that all the brakes are off; it shows what spending can really mean” (1962, 167).

One thing such spending shows, according to Bataille, is that “pleasure is … close to ruinous waste” (1962, 166), with “[e]rotic conduct … the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting” (1962, 166). In this view, we regularly engage in behaviors that actually amount to an extravagant exercise in “squander[ing ourselves] … to no real purpose” (1962, 166). Moreover, these include both sexual behaviors as well as others far more extreme,

Brutality and murder are further steps in the same direction. Similarly prostitution, coarse language and everything to do with eroticism and infamy play their part in turning the world of sensual pleasure into one of ruin and degradation. Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. As remote as we can: that is hardly strong enough; we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason.

(Bataille 1962, 166-67)

The purpose of offering a series of such strong, disturbing characterizations is not to dismiss ordinary moral values but to supplement them, to say that such values are not enough for us. At the same time that we outlaw and condemn all of these ruinous squanderings, our sovereign aspirations demand them. The list includes brutality, murder, prostitution, swearing, sex, infamy, ruin, degradation, and finally treason. These are activities we must prohibit, activities we cannot allow ourselves to participate in, but which at the same time identify who we are. Hypermorality instructs that while we cannot take up such behaviors, we cannot not take them up either. We cannot not squander ourselves in these and other ways, many of which are offensive of mention to ordinary morality.

To help emphasize just how offensive, there is a passage near the beginning of Death and Sensuality depicting the spectacle of primitive ritual human sacrifice, the communal production of a wasteful expenditure witnessed in common. Bataille uses the word “sacred” to describe the experience of the witnesses, underlining just how fundamental and revelatory to us he thinks such events were. Disturbing as it must be to us, he holds that the event of the spectacle of ritual sacrifice has power of conveying a profound meaning,

This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice.

(Bataille 1962, 16)

It is a disturbing thought that only a spectacular killing, that only events of this kind, can satisfy the human desire for the experience of sacred meaning. Along with a fear of our own immoral excess comes the question of whether hypermorality invites unleashing this destructive excess. Would Bataille like to see us unleashed, perhaps in the style of Charles Manson, to produce our own spectacles of ritual sacrifice?

Certainly Bataille describes irrational violence as having an undeniable meaning, one that is revelatory of the sacred continuity alluded to in the previous citation. Soon after that citation he similarly asserts that we seek “the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity” (1962, 18). Where do we find this power? We find it in transformative experiences akin to the sacrifice described above.

In other words, to acquire the power to know the unknowable, the production of transformative violence is the key. In the name of this power, the production of violence is not an accident but a goal. This production is the key to the transformative experiences that give our lives a sense of intensity, depth, and meaning. Hence, we always have ample motive to seek such experiences, to seek to bear witness to transformative violence. Given such ample motive, violence and spectacles of such violence will be produced. Moreover, no morality will ever be able to put an end to these productions. No morality has the power to stop the persistence of the sacred violence in our lives, since this violence is the only key we have to the experience of the miraculous, of the sacred.

As for Charles Manson, Bataille would certainly try to understand Manson's and our own violence in this context of the sacred, of our need for depth and meaning. The production of transformative violence is fundamental to our being, whether we are conscious of it in this way or not. He, then, would not regard Manson's production as an anomaly, as unlike what he himself would be driven to produce.

Yet in our lives there are also limits. It is unlikely that Bataille would applaud Manson for the same reason he ultimately rejects Sade. They are both indiscriminate; they both go too far. “Continuity is what we are after,” Bataille confirms,

but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sade's aberration exceeds that limit.

(Bataille 1962, 13)

In other words, our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To actually approve of our own self-destruction goes too far. Later on in Death and Sensuality, Bataille continues,

Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Juliette should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are bound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them.

(Bataille 1962, 179-80)

This passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's ethics. Usually Bataille writes on behalf of the violence that remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate this transformative violence. There is always ample motive to produce the experiences of sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions.

Yet self-preservation is also a fundamental value for Bataille; there is also ample motive to resist the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in the second of the above passages, we must condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too far. In another passage he speaks of our need “to become aware of … [ourselves] and to know clearly what … [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly disastrous consequences” (1962, 181). It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that we are most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway, albeit inattentively.

In the end, hypermorality asks us to encounter our aspirations to evil, to join in what Bataille calls “complicity in the knowledge of Evil” in order to construct what he calls a “rigorous morality” (1973, unpaginated Preface). What does it mean to encounter such aspirations, to join in such complicity? Bataille's hypermorality requires that, as a culture, we appreciate the value of becoming more active in our productions of violence.

From his earliest writings to his latest, Bataille always bemoaned the decline of the practice of sacrifice in the modern world, beginning in the West, and he always believed that such a decline only obscures our productions of violence, rather than doing away with them or the needs from which they stem. Two closely related discussions of this appear in his early essays “The Jesuve” and “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” where Bataille suggests that the decline of the practice of sacrifice has been far less than a blessing for us. He argues that the production of violence continues, the danger of this production continues, although in the most unrecognizable forms.

The examples given in the essay “Sacrificial Mutilation” emphasize both how easy it is to distance ourselves from this danger as well as how terrible such a danger could be. They include a man twisting off his own finger and a woman tearing out her own eye, both terrible examples of our strange, cruel, and uncontrollable needs for expenditure. Along similar lines, as a commentary on events of this kind, Bataille argues,

The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior.

(Bataille 1985, 73)

Here as throughout his writings, Bataille emphasizes two key aspects of the decline of sacrifice that we ignore at our own peril. In the first place, he contends that the violent need that ritual sacrifice was once able to address remains with us despite all optimism to the contrary. We don't put violence on display in the same ritualized fashion, but the need remains constant. We've only become less aware of it in ourselves, and less aware of ourselves as those who have need of such violence.

Thus Bataille's first point is that the need for nonproductive usages does not diminish when it is denied. His second point is that this denial in which the need persists represents a decline in self-awareness, one with obviously dangerous consequences. No longer do we congregate as a community to witness the violence we desire to bring into this world and to affirm our lack of control over this violence, our lack of control over this desire. We no longer congregate to produce the sacrificial spectacle, to produce thereby a community of mutual complicity in the knowledge of the sacred continuity of being. We no longer allow ourselves to organize spectacles in the name of the sacred that enact that which exceeds the good. Such spectacles would have to violate every stricture of human rights known to us today.

Yet we have not changed, according to Bataille, except for becoming less known to ourselves than ever. We are now more than ever the condemned on the way to becoming the destroyed by way of imagining ourselves as the good. Even an utter catastrophe like the Holocaust does little to alter our naive self-image. In his short piece on David Rousset's book The Universe of the Concentration Camp, Bataille refuses to side with the moralists because moralistic self-delusion here is our problem, not our solution.

There exists in a certain form of moral condemnation an escapist denial. One says, basically, this abjection would not have been, had there not been monsters. … And it is possible, insofar as this language appeals to the masses, that this infantile negation may seem effective; but in the end it changes nothing. It would be as vain to deny the incessant danger of cruelty as it would be to deny the danger of physical pain. One hardly obviates its effects flatly attributing it to parties or to races which one imagines to be inhuman.

(Bataille 1991, 19)

Based on what we have already seen in this paper, Bataille can never accept the moralist's claim, distancing us from the purveyors of evil, no matter how attractive it is to join hands at a particular moment of victory over an oppressive enemy. It would be inconsistent for him to specify a particular set of disagreeable behaviors and state that they aren't human, that they aren't ours. Even at this point, standing in the ruins, the main point would be to obstruct our all-too-ready inclination to find ways of denying the cruelty at the heart of us all; to interfere with our desire to attribute all cruelties to the monstrous one or the aberrant few. For hypermorality, this cruelty is precisely what we need to take into account of ourselves, rather than to deny it as the evil of others.

How is this to be done? Bataille faces a serious dilemma that a contrast between his hypermorality and Aristotle's morality helps to show. The goal of morality is to take virtuous behaviors into account, to make them part of our lives by learning through habituation to enjoy right behaviors with respect to our pleasures and pains. Aristotle says that it is the job of “legislators [to] make the citizens good by forming habits in them, … and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one” (1941, 952, 1103b). He continues saying that “the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them badly bad” (1941, 955, 1105a). As he puts it, “We assume … that … excellence tends to do what is best with regard to pleasures and pains, and vice does the contrary” (1941, 955, 1104b). How do we become excellent? We begin with instruction by role models, who demonstrate the praiseworthy behaviors and the rule to follow in practice until we follow it automatically, internalized as part of our second nature of moral character. Such learning is by imitation of those who delight in shunning the wrong pleasures, who delight in withstanding the right pains. Such imitation is difficult but noble and good, making us excellent.

In contrast to these virtuous displays serving Aristotle's purposes of moral instruction, what about the kinds of spectacles or displays Bataille proposes with his hypermorality? Whereas Aristotle's are displays of virtue, Bataille's would be closer to displays of vice. Whereas the former invite imitation of the right relations to pleasure and pain, the latter would invite imitation of morally wrong relations. In the former case we have a heroic role model. In the latter case, the role model would be closer to the opposite, to the traitor, the practitioner of vice; the role model would be closer to Sade. Hence, finally, whereas in Aristotle, the learner easily accepts the identification with the role model and wants to continue to imitate his/her virtuous pursuits and aversions, in the latter case, such identifications would have to be tenuous at best, always fraught with ambivalence and would even be unacceptable. In this sense, Bataille's hypermorality proposes that we witness ourselves as we can never accept ourselves. In the sacrificial spectacle, we witness ourselves far removed from the Aristotelian model, closer to vice than virtue, closer to evil than good, closer to the other's pain than to his or her pleasure. For Bataille, only by witnessing ourselves in this way (as we are) do we begin to take into account the cruelty that lies at the heart of us all.

Still, how far in the direction of praiseworthy cruelty can we really go? Bataille bemoans the decline of the practice of ritual sacrifice, seeing in our cultural and personal excesses of violence the same need at work as in the ritual sacrifice, albeit in a far more destructive fashion. But there can be no clear solution to this problem we face, even assuming it has been correctly understood and portrayed. Bataille himself admits in discussing Sade that we cannot consent to practices that are overly destructive. On the other hand, only the sacrificial spectacle would seem to be effective in showing us to ourselves, with the prospect of such showing lying at the heart of hypermorality itself. What to do in the face of such a dilemma? It is obviously horrible to exercise cruelty, yet perhaps even worse to do nothing, to find no way to praise and pursue this exercise. Doing nothing, we can have the pleasant ease of remaining ignorant of our situation and dilemma. But as Bataille explains, “Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood” (1988, 23). Piel asks us, in support of Bataille, to consider the only options we have,

Will … [we] continue to “undergo” what … [we] could “bring about,” that is, to let the surplus provoke more and more catastrophic explosions instead of voluntarily “consuming” it, of consciously destroying it through ways … [we] can choose and “agree to”?

(Piel 1995, 104)

Works Cited

Aristotle. 1941. Nicomachean ethics. Trans. W. D. Ross. In The basic works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House.

Bataille, Georges. 1962. Death and sensuality: A study of eroticism and the taboo. Trans. Mary Dalwood. New York: Ballantine Books.

———. 1973. Literature and evil. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Calder & Boyers, Ltd.

———. 1985. The Jesuve. In Visions of excess, trans. and ed. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 1988. The accursed share. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vol. I. New York: Zone Books.

———. 1991. Reflections on the executioner and the victim. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Yale French Studies 79: 15-19.

Kierkegaard, Soren. 1980. The concept of anxiety. Trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Piel, Jean. 1995. Bataille and the world: From “The notion of expenditure” to The accursed share. In On Bataille: Critical essays, trans. and ed. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Plato. 1983. Hippias major. In Plato: Two comic dialogues, trans. Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.