SOURCE: de Kessel, Marc. “A Sovereign's Anatomy: The Antique in Bataille's Modernity and its Impact on His Political Thought.” In Cogito and the Unconscious, edited by Slavoj Žižek, pp. 199-24. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, de Kessel explores Bataille's concept of sovereignty and its ramifications for geopolitical issues.]

“Man shall not live by bread alone.” Few in our rich and fickle tradition have ever rejected this evangelical proposition outright, and neither has Georges Bataille,¹ who adopted it, but in his own way. Although man may live by more than bread alone, for Bataille there is nothing besides bread to live by. In his view, man coincides with the bread he eats, with the work he makes a living from, and with the economy that sustains him. But then, says Bataille, this bready, working, and economic man can also live by nothing; he can ignore the fact that he cannot live by anything else and simply enjoy this light-spirited attitude, even if he is going to pay for it with his life, or at least with everything he possesses, when he, sovereign as he is and fully aware of what he is doing, rejects it, burns it, gratuitously, without any reason, as if Nothing could hurt him, not even the nothingness he keeps. And he cannot be hurt even when he loses this nothingness.

Such an attitude of human beings toward life and its nothingness, is what Bataille calls “sovereignty.” This sovereign reflex is not something man does when he finds no other way out; it is an indication of what man comes down to, every man, whatever he does, thinks, and asserts. This sovereignty is something like man's universal “essence,” making him what he is. According to Bataille, man expresses his “essence” when he ostentatiously destroys all the bread he lives on and wastes it in a frivolous and unbridled orgy.

And yet, sovereignty is not a romantic or unworldly concept for Bataille, something that would belong to a previous, archaic era. In his thought, sovereignty takes on the air of a constructive solution, meeting the most urgent geopolitical problems that modern man has been confronted with. Hence, it is not without reason that in the early fifties he uses the title La Souverainité for a text that, in a pivotal passage, dwells upon the problem of Stalinist terror, the scope of which became apparent only after the dictator's death. Without any doubt, Bataille is convinced that in this concept of sovereignty he is handing man a concept that is essential in order to keep this disaster from striking out all over the world. Furthermore, he is very clear about the necessity and the urgency of handling the problem. Modern world policy has only two options to choose from: either “thinking Stalin,” or being submerged by a Stalin and his terror. For Bataille, “thinking Stalin” is thinking sovereignty. It is always sovereignty that is involved—even in the case of someone like Stalin who tried to eradicate it to a greater degree than anyone else. For this reason (so Bataille said in the early fifties as the threat of the Cold War was spreading all over the planet), it is of the utmost importance to face sovereignty in this way too, precisely because sovereignty is so much more dangerous when unseen and unrecognized.

MODERN SOVEREIGNTY

SOVEREIGNTY AND REVOLUTION

La Souverainité, the unpublished work written in 1953-55, demonstrates that the concept of sovereignty gives modern man unexpected insight into twentieth-century sociopolitical problems, especially into the hidden mainsprings underlying the communist revolutions that have played such a decisive role in this century. According to classical Marxist theory, these revolutions were supposed to erupt first in societies with a settled bourgeois (and hence) capitalist order, as in these societies means of production and surplus-value were monopolized by a tiny but immensely rich minority, which left only one way out for the impoverished masses: the destruction of the capitalist class and the seizure of all means of production. The actual course of history confronted Marxist theory with a question: How was it possible that revolutions broke out in precisely those societies that still were a long way from reaching the stage of extreme conflict between the classes, societies in which the accumulation of wealth and means of production had hardly started? Why did only backward, feudal countries, in which a bourgeois revolution was due, see successful Communist revolutions? Because, according to Bataille, feudal societies were characterized by something that drove people to revolution, much more distinctly and to a greater extent than was the case in bourgeois societies. After all, this “something” is nothing other than sovereignty, and feudal culture did explicitly stress the rulers' prodigality and ostentation, which their subservient subjects would humbly and respectfully look up to. During the revolution, these people would throw away all respect and humbleness, and, by all means possible, would attempt to capture the sovereign luxuries of the formerly revered, but now hated upper class.

The medieval, feudal lord could indeed be considered a “sovereign” in the Bataillean sense. He is by definition a person who does not work: he squanders and gambles away the earnings of others. He does not care about the future, and his life does not depend on plans, whether they are designed by others or by himself. He lives only by the yield of every “moment.” He lives on pure freedom and on the luxury of regarding everything he comes across in a light-spirited manner, enjoying it as if it were his own. To put it more dramatically: he does not allow his life to be led by conservative life principles, but rather by “death principles,” by everything that makes life a game or puts it at risk. He lives by the moments in which his very existence is at stake. Therefore, what he needs are “pure moments,” an insouciant time, no worries whatsoever, no worries even about his own mortality. Light-spirited as he may be, he lives the life of a “perfect” man: he does not live to a certain end, but lives as if all his aspirations had already been realized, all his wishes granted, his needs fulfilled, as if there were nothing to fear. He lives as if every moment were the last in his life and there were nothing to worry about. Although his existence may express a radical finitude, he lives it as “fullness,” as fulfillment of being as such.

For Bataille, the sovereignty of a person is the sovereignty of being itself. “Being” has no aims outside itself, and is not bothered by its own transience as it includes both life and death. “Being” is its own transience, and, as such, it is its own negation. The existence of death beside life, of disintegration beside integration, does not make “being” less perfect. Being is also aimless in that it needs no aim or cause to justify its existence: it is what it is in every single moment. The fullness of being lies not in the fulfillment of its (supposed) evolution, but in every “moment” in which it is, as such. By living, sovereign man asserts the sharing of this perfect “moment,” which being always is.

From this perspective, revolution can only succeed when revolutionaries mirror themselves—whether consciously or unconsciously—in this radical sovereignty, when they enjoy their revolutionary “moment” without any further consideration of the future. The basic drive of a true revolutionary does not reside in his ideals, but rather in his merciless wish to be free, to die rather than to give up that freedom. By looking at an audacious sovereign who plays frivolously with his life and with the lives of others, man realizes who he essentially is and throws himself into the battle game, which, strictly speaking, has no other purpose than the battle as such, and, which will finally—man being finite—mean his death.

According to Bataille, revolution, of course, will claim to stand for a certain ideal and fight against undeniable wrongs, but the deadly risks of revolution would not have been taken if revolutionaries had not been attracted by the sovereignty of this violent “moment,” secretly or unconsciously. The ideals one fights for are never more than a secondary revolutionary mainspring; their role is to veil, behind rational and ideological reasons, the principal purpose man seeks, and which lies in this “moment” of lethal negativity. One overthrows feudal and royal authority, not because one objects to feudalism or royalty, but because one desires to be just as wild, unjust, and irresponsible, as any feudal, sovereign lord; because one wants to dispose of one's own life just as frivolously as of the lives of others. It is only in and during this violent moment that the revolutionary realizes the purpose of his action, and not in the new society he thinks his revolution is aiming at. But for fear of the lethal negativity of this very sovereign moment, one will always already have filled up the emptiness of the “moment” within which “everything is possible.” One thinks one is fighting for ideals, and not for the sovereign “fun” of the deadly fight itself. One will have this sovereign (and therefore lethal) game of revolution converted into labor, fighting for a different, better world.

To Bataille it is clear: the poor laborers who served as the catalyst for the Communist revolution did not want all people to be equal, they wanted to be as rich and as prodigal as the wealthy sovereigns above them. It was not the difference between their own hunger and the wealth of others that pushed them into revolution and violence, but wealth and luxury as such, the prodigality and the “glamour” of the rich. The revolutionary zest of the working classes was not aroused by the capitalists who hid their wealth, but rather by gaudy aristocrats who, although probably not even wealthy, did their best to ostentatiously exhibit the (often false) splendor of their feudal ancestry. Revolution did not break out in highly capitalist countries like Germany, France, or England, but in countries that had not really done away with feudalism as yet: Russia and China (8:320-21; 3:278-79). Successful Communist revolutions were not carried through by a politically conscious working-class, but by largely “unconscious,” illiterate peasant masses with an almost completely feudal mentality.

THE SOVEREIGN “SOVEREIGNLESSNESS” OF COMMUNISM

Communism may take its sociopolitical position by revolutionary force, but once settled as a society, it is far from existing in a state of permanent revolution. On the contrary, it attempts to ban the same violence from its own political order, which it had previously used to ascend to power. But here too, the ultimate mainspring behind this solid political and economic system is sovereignty. Here again, Communism will repeat—but in a better, more decisive way—what all previous revolutions have done: the sovereign, negative force used to attain power, will now be employed to fight this same headstrong sovereignty, in order to utilize within a new and stern economy the things sovereignty so easily spills and wastes.

According to Bataille, Communism should be understood within the historic process in which man continually finds better ways to control and neutralize his fickle and prodigal sovereignty. Sovereignty has become increasingly aware of its own infinite power, and has therefore tried to reduce the destructive forces, or convert them into constructive ones. Essentially, man will forever remain the free sovereign he has always been, but it is the fear of this unfathomable freedom, of this infinite lethal emptiness as it is manifested in his wasting prodigality, that causes him to check his sovereign freedom and curb it, to invest the passion he has spent for his game in more useful things like labor and economy. Man has always become increasingly addicted to labor; more and more, he has sacrificed his sovereign freedom, be it, paradoxically, only to obtain a world full of sorrow and distress, caused by the very (and ultimately vain) intention to save and not to spoil his world. Communism fits perfectly into this evolutionary development; it even constitutes its ultimate moment.

The hatred that Communism bears toward capitalism is not related to fundamental ideological antagonisms, but should be understood as part of the competition between the two systems concerning the final conquest of sovereignty. More than simply being critical of capitalism, Communism is the perfection of the mentality that had served the former, especially since Calvinism (7:128; 1:134). This ideology sternly condemned the economic extravagance and waste of the medieval sovereign, and in its criticism of religion it focused on exactly the aspects that Bataille considered so essential to religion: excesses, squander, and prestige. In freeing the economy of any kind of waste, it brought about a mentality in which capitalism was to flourish. Capitalism, in turn, indeed enslaved everything and everyone to its economic law, but at least individual capitalists would still enjoy a limited measure of freedom and, hence, of sovereignty. Strong as the Calvinist mentality was, it still allowed for the choice between accumulating wealth and not doing so.

Communism will close this last loophole of economic waste and finally bring the capitalist economy and its mentality into power on a universal scale. Sovereignty will be entirely invested in a collective sovereignly renouncing sovereignty. No man will be able to permit himself (private) luxury or any other economic excess, and as the economy will be led by a collective of equals, no man will be able to maintain the pretense of sovereignty. It is only through Communism that the accumulation of wealth will be brought to perfection: the circular movement by which all revenues (all surplus-value) flow back into “creation of means of production” will no longer be skimmed by luxurious excesses, but will finally be absolute. The abolishment of sovereignty, which bourgeois revolutions had never fully achieved, will finally be realized by the apparent countermovement of the Communist revolution. No traces of wasteful sovereignty will remain when the people themselves will command over the revenues of their labor and economy. Ultimately, nobody will be able to exempt himself from being part of the people, nobody will be able to keep up the appearance of reigning sovereignly over others or to be a kind of sovereign “on his own.”

But paradoxically, this implies that with the final blow to sovereignty, everybody will become sovereign, as the collective absolute death of sovereignty plants it anew within each member of society—this is Bataille's conclusion when he reads the then newly published study of Stalin and a recent text by Stalin himself.

Bataille quotes a casual remark by Stalin, in which sovereignty, albeit suppressed by Stalin, almost symptomatically seems to reappear. The Soviet leader argues against a certain Yarochenko, who claimed that the aim of the Communist economy was production (a notion through which he proves to be true to the previous aggressive industrialization policy of Stalin himself), by stating explicitly that the goal of all efforts he demands from the Soviet workers is not the high working pace as it is, but something akin to “leisure.” When the “socialist” stage makes room for a genuine “Communist” economy, a worker will have to work a mere six, and perhaps later even five, hours a day, and then be free for the rest. Free for what? Free for further schooling, studying, or anything else, eventually freeing him from the “job” he ended up with.

Of course, according to Stalin, leisure is to be seen entirely in the function of labor; in this way, the worker seems hindered from obtaining sovereign liberty once again. But precisely because this leisure gives the worker the chance to become a perfect one (according to the logic of the economic system), he reaches the point at which he can master all work, so that no work and no labor will ever again master him. As of that moment, he is no longer simply part of the system, nor is he totally immersed in it, but has become capable of striking an independent attitude toward it. It is this attitude toward the system as a whole that gives him back his sovereignty. And from that point on, he will be able to recognize sovereignty as his most intimate companion. Once the entire Communist economy becomes real, all workers who before had been reduced to mere instruments of (sovereign) others, have become sovereign themselves over all things and all instruments, without having someone above them as their (sovereign) master. In effect, every “all-round” skilled worker can admire in every comrade his own sovereignty as well as the one of universal mankind.

NECESSITY AND IMPOSSIBILITY OF MODERN SOVEREIGNTY

This situation would, according to Bataille, “draw as possible to that kind of sovereignty which, linked to the voluntary respect of the sovereignty of others, would go back to the initial sovereignty [souverainité initiale] that we must ascribe to the shepherds and hunters of ancient humanity.” Bataille immediately adds the following remark: “But the latter, if they respected the sovereignty of others, respected it only, it must be said, as a matter of fact” (8:341; 3:302); so they did not do it with conscious knowledge.

In Communist society, no one is master or sovereign precisely because everybody has become one—just as in early, archaic societies. There, nobody was anyone else's sovereign, and therefore everyone could be sovereign. But in those societies the mutual respect toward each other's sovereignty was, as Bataille suggests, not the result of a conscious willing decision, but a situation that de facto happened to be so. In fact, after the detour of its history, sovereignty, which found its way back to man in Communism, was far from being a brute, contingent factuality, but was rather a matter of self-conscious decision. Indeed, sovereignty by which—denied or acknowledged—modern society is characterized, is the result of a decision and is therefore self-conscious.

Analyzing this self-conscious sovereignty in Hegelian terms, one must notice that here the negative power by which sovereignty was driven and by which it “negated” everyone and everything, has now been applied to itself, to its own negation. It has negated its own negativity and (in this way) become pure positivity. Communism has pretended to demonstrate that this sovereign negativity, by sovereignly negating itself, can re-establish a free, sovereign, and peaceful society—a society without sovereigns oppressing the other people.

The whole question however, is whether this self-conscious sovereign decision (whether it is collectively to be sovereign or, which amounts to the same, sovereignly to refuse sovereignty) is indeed possible at all. Will such a decision ever be able to revive the society of “shepherds and hunters” in which the sovereignty of each individual was respected? The only thing that Communism has shown is that hitherto this has not been the case: it couldn't offer any guarantees toward a collective mutual respect for one's sovereignty. And for Bataille, the Communist system is not so much just another example, but rather the paradigm, the “truth” about the entire modern (essentially capitalist) economic social policy. Communism is close to its principal goal of “sovereignly eliminating sovereignty” (i.e., renouncing sovereignty as the cause of social inequality and eliminating the waste that undermines economy). At the same time, however, it is this very sovereignty that, in a Communist society, unfolds its most catastrophic guise. First of all, there are those figures like Stalin, who are infinitely more sovereign than the greatest medieval feudal lord ever was—and this in spite of their own claiming to be sovereignty's fiercest adversary, or their promises to make everyone sovereign, which amounts to the same. Worse, however, are the excesses to which the Communist system has given itself, which can be taken as proof of the ineradicability of sovereignty. Waste, a practice that Communism strove to eliminate, now involved masses of its “best” people, with which it fed an insatiable holocaust in its gulags. And even if nobody in this system (Stalin included) could openly act as a sovereign, sovereignty was nevertheless manifested in a terror that was crueler than any political oppression of the past.

In the fate of Communism, we thus face the impasse of modern, self-conscious sovereignty: while trying to eliminate or integrate its negative side (of which it has become aware as being its very essence), this negativity strikes harshly and fatally more than ever. On the one hand, it seems as if consciousness in the long run cannot consciously master the negative powers by which it is driven. On the other hand, we have only this consciousness to solve the problem sovereignty has become for us. Our culture cannot return to an archaic, not yet consciously sovereign society, even if only for the fact that this would be the result of a consciously taken step. Our culture will have to look at that missed, impossible sovereignty as being a failure of its own consciousness, but paradoxically, it will only be able to strike a conscious attitude toward it.

Witnessing the terror Communism itself had fallen into, Bataille leaves no doubt as to this impasse in which our culture became stuck: if our culture will not be able to take sovereignty (as it presents itself in Communism) into account in a lucid way, it will be brought down by it. But at the same time, sovereignty escapes anything like the “taking into account” that self-consciousness is, by definition. This impossibility cannot, however, mitigate the demand for modern self-consciousness to take sovereignty into account, says Bataille. Here we have the persistent short-circuit between the explosive impasse and the demand our culture can no longer ignore.

Just as the way out of the impasse cannot circumvent consciousness, only a keen consciousness can provide one. Bataille's entire oeuvre explores the possibility of such a keener consciousness. The seriousness of his attempt appears from the mere fact that he uncompromisingly approaches thought and consciousness from the angle of their inherent impasse.

CONSCIOUS SOVEREIGNTY

Self-consciousness, it has been said before, has caused sovereignty to escape itself, hence causing alienation and social repression. If this sovereignty returns to itself after its odyssey, it can only do this self-consciously. In the quote in which Bataille compares Communist sovereignty with the early sovereignty of “shepherds and hunters” (8:341; 3:302), he suggests that at the end of history, man will have to be the same “shepherd and hunter” he was in the beginning, but lucidly, consciously so.

Bataille's solution for the impasse of modern sovereignty seems to go toward a kind of lucid “shepherdness.” According to Bataille, modern man will have to be lucid enough for himself to see that his perfect self-consciousness is ultimately the same as the “factual,” probably most “unconscious” self-awareness of the early, primitive shepherds and hunters. Modern man will have to see his self-consciousness mirrored, not in the results of his work (perfect as it may be in comparison with the more primitive work of the shepherds and hunters), but in their very insignificance—an insignificance these results fully share with the things produced by the labor of the ancient shepherds and hunters. He will also have to affirm the insignificance of his work in the way that the “primitives” did (i.e., by explicitly destroying his products). To endorse their sovereignty, to affirm that their products were not so much something that they needed, than something they had made in sovereign freedom, the “primitives” explicitly consigned them to destruction with their own hands. This was the essence of their sacrificial religion, the expression of the finitude and sovereignty of their economy. But while the early shepherds and hunters acted unconsciously, modern sovereign man has to bring about destruction in full consciousness.

Starting from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and with the paradigm of sacrificial religion in mind, Bataille pretends he can think through the negative power of self-consciousness more than Hegel did. To Bataille, as to Hegel, self-consciousness will recognize itself and its sovereignty in its infinite negativity, which is the capacity to bring reality “to itself” (this is: to its “concept”) by negating itself. But unlike Hegel, Bataille will insist that in the end, this self-consciousness will not be able to sublate the negation, which it essentially “is,” exhaustively. The negation that carries reality will in the end recognize itself in a negativity that it cannot include in the functioning of its own economy. On the most fundamental level, negation, which lies at the basis of all functioning (and reality), offers itself to itself as a radically “unemployed negativity.”² Self-consciousness does not recognize itself so much in the infinity as in the finitude of its negation: a hard, stubborn negativity that it cannot assume control of. The sovereign negativity that keeps our human self-consciousness going is, according to Bataille, the code of our finitude; therefore, in its radicalism, it cannot come to us as infinite consciousness, but as a radical finite experience.

It is this “expérience intérieure” of the unemployed negativity that is uncompromisingly affirmed by “sovereign” man. Bataille's sovereignty must therefore not be confused with the subjective, complacent arbitrariness in which man could confidently cherish himself; it is the experience of a subject being confronted with its own radical and intimate finitude, that is, with the fact that it escapes itself precisely in its most intimate self-experience and is therefore traversed by a lethal exteriority. The attitude asserting this intimate exteriority or the radical finitude of the subject is what Bataille designates as “sovereign.” It affirms the fact that the subject is not grounded in its own self, that is, in its own negation. This negation is its most intimate self, and at the same time comes from a radical “outside.”

Our self-conscious civilization, which thinks of itself as being at “the end of history” or living in “the best of all possible worlds,” must confront itself with its own sovereignty or “identity” as coming from a radical outside. In order to recognize our sovereignty in a sovereign way, we have to be overtaken by it as if by something exterior, coming from the outside. Otherwise we should lose ourselves in it as in something that transcends our own limits and (which comes to the same) forces us into deadly excesses. The sacrifice of the ancient “shepherds and hunters” in the Bataillean sense revolves around this experience: sovereign uselessness, light-spirited gratuitousness, and the radically unbound, deadly freedom—all being names for the same “essence” of man. They all appear in the form of a sovereign death, to which one sovereignly surrenders the products of one's labor.

HOLOCAUST VERSUS HOLOCAUST

But what then is the difference between this and Stalinist terror? Does sovereignty not overtake man here from the outside as well—even clearly and embarrassingly so? Does the sovereign power of negativity, which has given to society its existence and its strength, not reveal itself here in its pure radicalism, in its unconquerable exteriority? Is Stalin's terror, are the gulags a modern form of sacrifice? Are we to see this macabre show as our sovereignty and as an affirmation of our finitude?

Bataille's positive answer seems to be as radical as it is untenable: the gulags may indeed be seen as some kind of “sacrifice,” but only if we are willing to look at them actively and consciously, that is, consciously affirming that this “sacrifice” both escapes our consciousness, and at the same time is closely related to it. Only when we—and with us our entire culture—succeed in this, in “consciously” maintaining this impossibly conscious view of the gulags, will we stand a chance to avoid the abomination manifested in the gulag.

However, before going into this problematic position, the following should be made clear: Bataille unequivocally disapproves of any abominations of the sort that took place in Auschwitz and in the gulags. As has been stated, his thought wants to help to make these atrocities avoidable, but Bataille realizes that these atrocities could descend upon us precisely because we pretend to have eliminated such things from our world. As already mentioned, this pretension is based on the denial of sovereignty and of the hard, unsublatable negation active inside our consciousness. Therefore, our consciousness cannot but face these atrocities now. In them, we see something absolutely useless and pointless. But it is in this that we see the essence and the finitude of our own purpose. Our culture, in a way, has achieved “everything” and has reached “the end of its history” (as Bataille phrases it, referring to Hegel), the end of its consciousness-raising process. Modern man is no longer a subordinate “thing” within the totality of being, but has assumed an attitude toward it and now faces it sovereignly, both individually and collectively. Therefore, this sovereignty is not reflected in something purposeful, but rather in purposeless and senseless things, in whatever appears not to need an aim or a purpose whatsoever, and which is therefore absolutely unacceptable.

It is this kind of radical, abominable, unacceptable pointlessness in which modern man must recognize himself, not by approving it, even less by profiting from it, but by first seeing what these unacceptable atrocities are all about, and then by consciously realizing this himself. He first has to realize that the atrocities, much like his entire economy (in the widest sense of that word, also like the economy of being), are a matter of waste and destruction. Although one might be inclined to think the opposite, the excesses have become unavoidable and even vital to our (accumulative, capitalist) economy, as this economy is defined by the principle of sovereignty, and therefore heads for its transgression. Modern sovereign man will then have to execute this (ontologically based) destruction himself, and consciously so: instead of “draining away” excess population into camps for certain reasons, man now has to realize a similar thing being totally aware it is radically senseless. He now has to destroy the products of his accumulative economy without having a reason, and sovereignly consign the product of his labor to death. The result will be that he will no longer have to destroy people whom he thinks to be the cause of waste in his economy. He will understand that the reason he had put those people inside camps (“they sabotaged the economy, they assumed sovereign rights, they wasted what belonged to the entire community,” etc.) was the very reason of his economy as such, and mainly of its sovereignty.

Bataille's position implies that destruction can only be averted by destruction: the (profane) holocaust of the gulags by a (religious) holocaust, an “unconscious” holocaust by a “conscious” holocaust. The power of negativity that keeps a system or another organism alive will have to burst for the sake of the sovereignty of this power, and lose itself in unrecoverable economic waste. It is precisely man's being sovereign (just like “being” itself) that makes this waste, this “all-consuming fire” (which is the literal meaning of the Greek word holocaustos) inevitable. While the one holocaust will kill people en masse because they do not seem to suit the ultimate sense that their society has given to man and the universe, the other holocaust will convince these same people of their sovereignty vis-à-vis every sense, by letting them consciously destroy the products of their sense-giving or their labor. The result of this latter holocaust will be that people themselves will not be deprived of their lives, but endowed with them, with wasteful, sovereign, finitude-conscious lives.

The claim Bataille brings forward here, a claim that bears upon his entire thought, is a difficult one, to say the least. On one of the last pages of his Théorie de la Religion of 1948, the hardness of his reasoning is unequivocal: “It is a matter of endlessly consuming—or destroying—the objects which are produced. This could just as well be done without the least consciousness. But it is insofar as clear consciousness prevails, that the objects actually destroyed will not destroy humanity itself” (7:345). In the end, everything is to be consciously destroyed by us, and if we do not destroy it ourselves, we ourselves will be destroyed by it; this is the ultimate consequence of the sovereignty that is the essence of our being.

SOVEREIGNTY AND FINITUDE

Since Bataille's oeuvre, we can no longer disregard things like sovereignty and dissipation at work in human society, in politics and in the economy. With these Bataillean terms we are better armed to conceive and to affirm our finitude—an affirmation required by our modernity itself. But conscious sovereignty, his “solution” to the modern problem of an economy that is perpetually at its zenith, is, to say the least, a rather strange if not untenable solution. To say that this economy wishes to escape its own finitude by perpetually conquering new domains and sources, without noticing that it is in fact merely seeking new opportunities to allow dissipation (in the form of war or terror), be it under the guise of some motive or ideal—so far, such an analysis is acceptable. But why should it, after becoming aware of this, also start spilling effectively? Why is it impossible for a conscious human society to be sovereignly free without effectively destroying something? Why can this sovereignty (which we, according to Bataille, should consciously assume, if we don't want to be destroyed by it in the shape of terror or war) not exist without an actual “holocaust” or destruction?

To put this same question more concretely: Why should the sovereign game of the (working) man be “played” in a conscious, real holocaust? Why should a holocaust, consciously “played” to avert an unconscious, real holocaust, also itself be effective and real? Why should we “really play” dissipation, spilling, and destruction in order to avoid the dissipation, the spilling, and the destruction that threaten to wipe us off the planet by terror, or at least threaten to turn us into amorphous slaves of totalitarian systems?

How can the “realness” of a (sovereign) game be thought? This is the problem Bataille is confronted with. In what follows we will see how, to cope with this, he forcefully pushes conscious thought beyond its utmost limits. And we will also detect that the “hardness” and the untenability of Bataille's sovereign “solution” to the problem of modern sovereignty is in a certain way due to the interrelation between three basic concepts of his thought: consciousness, game, and reality. Of course, Bataille is strongly aware of the problem of modernity, which permeates his entire thinking to a large extent, but this does not prevent it, at a certain moment, from bouncing off this problem of modernity. Only in viewing the contours of Bataille's thought from this perspective will we be able to understand why he keeps returning to his “solution” while openly admitting its untenability.

SUNNY SOVEREIGNTY

Bataille is able to think the “realness” of the sovereign game because, for him, on the most fundamental level, reality is a sovereign game. “Being” itself is playing a lethal game, playing frivolously with all that lives, works, and produces. Bataille may call the sovereignty of that game Nothing, but then this nothingness is about the only thing that can fully claim to exist.

To understand this, our thinking needs the courage to undergo a sort of “Copernican revolution.” Just like Copernicus, who abandoned the “limited” terrestrial view of our planetary system in favor of a more “general” solar view, Bataille advocates an abandonment of the limited (restreint) view of the “economic” game of being for a view from a more general angle.³ The first page of his “Introduction Théorique” in La part maudite (1949) shed some light on this turnover. When we observe things in action from their own (limited) angle, the frivolous, dangerous, and sovereign game they so often surrender to looks like a senseless act that needlessly endangers their vital power. Seen from their angle, their death implies an irreparable loss. Yet, this very death, when observed from a more “general” angle (i.e., from the angle of the infinite transgressive movement with which “being” actually coincides) is all but a loss: it is a necessary element in this being that perpetually transgresses its boundaries. Here, playing and (lethally) putting at stake are coincidental. From the point of view of the “économie générale” things exist not so much by energy, but fundamentally, energy lives within everything, and outlives everything. From the limited angle, death may be the ultimate sign of man's and the world's deficiency, but from the wider angle it is luxury “pur sang,” a luxury that even indicates the most essential element of life. The energy concentrated and accumulated inside a being (and thus giving it its existence), escapes upon the death of this entity and joins the universal free movement of energy that “being” (fundamentally) is. The energy will then accumulate inside a newly formed entity, finally escape again and bring about its death.

Bataille's view on “being” appears to be a strongly energetic one. Everything that exists—from the tiniest particle of dust, to human consciousness, to the most distant stars—is supposed to be a source brimming over with vital power that is not teleologically tuned to any preset objective, but which (sovereignly) knows its goal inside itself, in its own use (i.e., its own spilling) of energy as such. The structure in which this brimming power is kept, is therefore a transgressive and an excessive one. Everything that exists is already in decomposition, it keeps on going by the same force that will later start the process of decomposition. Every being lives by a power that has given itself away to that being, and the same power makes it unavoidable that this being too, one day, will lethally give itself away. A being is sovereign when it recognizes that every being is actually a pure (and therefore) lethal gift and self-gift.

It is from this perspective that we must understand Bataille's claim that on the most fundamental level, everything is sovereign since it is “cosmic solar energy”: energy originating in energy “itself,” that is, in something that exists entirely by giving itself away. Everything is solar energy, and is therefore radical self-giving. As individuals, beings store and accumulate that energy for a restricted period and build a temporally limited existence. What keeps these beings alive, however, is (at least when seen from the limited angle) a “death drive”: they are driven by an energy that perpetually tries to transgress the accumulated equilibrium and radically give itself away to the pure “giving” that “being” fundamentally is. But only from our limited point of view is this principle a principle of death. When seen from a wider, “general” angle, this principle is a principle of life, if a term like that can still make sense, since on that level, life is the only thing there is. So must we conclude that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as death? For Bataille, death is merely the event of individual, “personal” life transforming into “impersonal” life (7:41).

This impersonal life, this cosmic energy of being flowing through a person, is larger than what this person needs to keep himself alive. The concept of excessive vital energy implies a radically finite concept of man: what keeps him alive is not his energy, but an energy that transcends him and that as such could also turn against him. Therefore, he is not necessarily capable of keeping the energy within the limits he wants, and this explains why he is able to live the excesses and commit the atrocities he is too often known for, why his economy is secretly fascinated by waste and excessive luxuries. In all of these excesses, man is confronted with his irreversible finitude: they reveal not only the limits within which his existence has to take place, but also his inability to keep those limits from being transgressed. This last unavoidable transgression confronts man with his finitude in the clearest possible way because he has to fail in this transgression; if he does not, he “really” will get lost in the decomposition he has surrendered his vital energy to.

Therefore, our existence is based on an essentially excessive and (from the limited angle even) destructive energy: “the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions.” If we are not aware of this, “our ignorance only has this uncontestable effect: It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood [elle nous fait subir ce que nous pourrions, si nous savions, opérer à notre guise (at pleasure)]. It deprives us of the choice of an exudation that might suit us. Above all, it consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions. For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used; and like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who will have to pay the prize of the inevitable explosion” (7:31; 1:23-24). Our “ground” turns out to be an untamable, violent “animal” that, if not disciplined or tamed, will bite at our own flesh.

Which brings us back to the aforementioned “holocaust versus holocaust” dialectics. We need to gain insight into the sovereign holocaustal character of being as such, and even more so, we must assume the excess and the superfluity of being in “general” by consciously executing “real played” holocausts ourselves. If we ourselves do not “play” real holocausts, the holocaust that being itself is, will conquer us, bringing catastrophes as witnessed by the gulags, Auschwitz, or the seemingly peaceful cruelty of a “people's dictatorship.” The sovereign holocaust that being itself is, we ourselves have to be it in a conscious way: this is for Bataille the way to affirm the radical finitude of ourselves and of being as such. If we do not do this, the holocaustal sovereignty will wash us away like a wave of blind terror, or at best, we will remain “slaves” forever. With all of the power that our lucidity still possesses, we must affirmatively assume our finitude, for if not, the “adventure of man” might soon belong to the past—this way one could, in a nutshell, resume Bataille's position (and that of his entire intellectual engagement).

THE CAPITALIZED “NOTHING” OF SOVEREIGNTY

Bataille's concept of sovereignty therefore confronts us with this task, which should be seen in the context of the typically modern finitude problem. Modernity as such coincides with a radical concept of finitude, and Bataille even endows it with something like an ontological statute: in his eyes, the finitude man has been confronted with in the course of the last three centuries is the one of “being” itself. Being itself is but a permanent transgressive force that lethally goes beyond the limits of every singular “being.” However, this implies that the limits of this thing have been created by being itself as well. In order to transgress every limit, it is being itself that creates those limits.

Yet, we should ask now, has the Bataillean reflection approached finitude in a way justified by the modernity of this problem? Has it been thought “finitely” enough? Has Bataille been sufficiently aware of the finitude of his own thought, when thinking finitude? We are confronted here with the question of the finitude of Bataille's own thinking, and especially of the possibility of thinking the finitude problem in a transgressive way, as this is what the Bataillean “Copernican revolution” means: in it, thinking makes the same transgressive movement as the things that are thought of. In the same way that things transgress and lose themselves into a form of existence that is pure excessive energy, thinking must transgress and mortally lose itself in an eccentric, principally “general” view.

Where this transgression confirms its own failure, where this “general” view confirms that it de facto never takes place because it cannot be held, finitude will (also) be thought in a finite way. In this way, a thinking that transgressively attempts to capture finitude also confirms its own finitude. In this respect, Bataille's thought is a radical (and therefore a modern) finite thought; for him, thinking must go further than it actually can. It has to go beyond every kind of knowledge and aim to reach radical “non-knowledge” (non-savoir). And by experiencing the nothingness and the impossibility of this transgression, Bataille's thought is confronted with its own finitude. In a double, essentially tragic movement in which thought transgresses its limits and also fails in doing this, the finitude of thought is revealed. It demonstrates the extent to which it is marked by the nothingness that can only find an adequate pendant in a “non-knowledge.”

Yet, it is not his concept of non-knowledge as such that has made Bataille a milestone in modern thinking about finitude, but rather his discontentment toward it, which can be read on every page of his oeuvre. This non-knowledge is never employed as a cunning solution by which to evade all problems. Never does it function as that “night in which all cows are black.” Rather, it is a concept with which he wants to think the finitude of reality in relation to the finitude of his own thinking.

And yet, in spite of what it asserts itself, this thought seems to “know” of what this non-knowledge still refers to. Somewhere in his rotating about this nothingness, this thought seems to hide a non-expressed insight. Occasionally, complete cosmological explanations are given, which, while not being the kernel of his thought, are yet inseparable from it. Often, it seems as if this non-knowledge is completely based on an ancient metaphysical knowledge. Therefore, it is not uninteresting to detect and reflect upon the “cosmological” and “(meta)physical” statements in the Bataillean oeuvre, even if only to do justice to his own demand, which is to think finitude, the finitude of his thinking included.

Sovereignty may be a Nothing that is confirmed only by non-knowledge, but in many places throughout his oeuvre, Bataille seems to know what this nothingness is. He knows that this nothingness is “being” itself. He knows that it is what Hegel called “negation”: something perpetually negating itself, and thereby founding a positivity; a positivity, however, that will only be reality as long as negativity will be actively at work in it. He knows—taking a step beyond Hegel—that this negation is more arduous than its ability to sublate itself, and that therefore it is not merely (inner) Geist, but harsh exteriority, and (even) biological, energetic materiality. This nothingness is a biological-energetic objectless “being,” which, in its sovereign game, runs into limits that it has created itself,⁴ and thereby “enwraps” itself into objects that eventually will unwrap again in their excessive, sovereign moment. To this object, death, which happens to nothing but Nothing, means the ultimate life, as it is the ultimate excess.

But doesn't Bataille know too much here? Nota bene: of course he realizes that what he knows is too much, that what he knows is but an “excédent,” an excessive product of luxury in which Nothing and death (which is the living life itself) have transgressed themselves. But doesn't he know too well that he knows too much? Doesn't he know too well that his knowledge is finite, and therefore essentially Nothing? Hasn't he fixed finitude by charting it so? Hasn't his concept of finitude (the nothingness underlying everything) closed the circle again? Hasn't he made death into an—be it ungodly—immortality, which gratuitously and sovereignly hands out mortality?

AN ANTIQUE, CLOSED COSMOLOGY

These questions suggest that at least one of the basic schemes underlying Bataille's thought tends toward an antique, closed worldview. Being's finitude is also charted by such a worldview, but not in a way conforming to modernity and the problems related to the latter. At least, the cosmic-energetic and biophysical schemes in Bataille's oeuvre, which are all pre-Newtonian and therefore premodern, point in that direction.

If we think through the logical consequences of Bataille's “cosmology,” we find that outside this cosmos, in which this nothingness unfolds its binding-unbinding activity, there is “nothing” indeed, as everything takes place inside of it. Bataille's transgressive, “general” view is limited to the inside of the absolute space of nothingness, whereas on the outside there is “nothing.” This last “nothing” simply does not exist for Bataille, and therefore the universe, based on his concept of nothingness, is closed and finite. This final, closed finitude is precisely a “classic,” “antique” finitude, in which the universe was said to rigorously embrace everything, including the space in which things, and the universe itself, existed. Therefore, strictly speaking, this cosmos was nowhere, because everything, space included, took place within the cosmos. The outermost arch of heaven was not in space (as we moderns spontaneously assume), but it was space, rather, that was situated within the outer star-adorned firmament (as we moderns since Newton cannot even imagine): the firmament was the “end” of all that existed, and as such it was finite. This did not rule out the possibility, however, that everything inside could be considered as infinite and unlimited: everything connected with everything else and participating in a “primal cause” that was caused only by itself. Within this closed, finite universe it was possible to have an infinite all-embracing outlook without any limit; every limit one confronted was a limit brought about by the limitless “prime cause,” which was being as such. Finitude, being its own cause and its own ground, could in this respect be conceived as being at the same time infinite.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Bataille's cosmology could in this light be compared to that of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius. In his thought, too, “being” exists merely by the grace of that which drives it into disintegration. Here too, death means disintegration into elements that are not really lost, but that recombine to form a new “being.” Here too, the wisdom of an emperor or a politician lies not in denying this excess (something Bataille accuses Stalin of), but in linking that disintegration to the regularity of being as such; a more “general” view is expected of him as well.

Not that there would be anything Stoical about Bataille's opinions. Therefore, they lack the necessary calmness (the apatheia) underlying the worldview of the Stoic. The Stoic does not call his wider, “general” view of things nothingness, but rather uses positive terms like “Soul of the World,” “Cosmos,” or “Nature.” If the Bataillean concept of nothingness is to be linked to a closed (for instance, a Stoic) worldview and inherits therefore some antique influence, this does not count for the unbearable restless “pathos” that characterized his thinking. This pathos, anything but Stoic, is extremely modern, in the sense of being a “finite affirmation of finitude.” Permanently, this pathos throws his thinking out of balance and pitilessly tortures every conceptual pattern that could give a resting point or any other point of certainty to his thought. “Modern,” in Bataille's thinking, is not so much the (Hegelian) insight that the “loss” that rules everything can only be regained with a supreme effort, but rather the insight that this loss is to be abandoned to its radical chasm (as Bataille's reading of Hegel demonstrates).

“Modern” is a concept of loss indeed, of shortcoming, death, and finitude. “Modern” is first and foremost the insight that no insight can understand it completely, that no insight can touch what is lost, dead, or finite, even if, from a certain point of view, it comes very close to it. This modern understanding of finitude is displayed by the disarmingly honest “patheticity” in Bataille's thinking, which uncompromisingly directs (i.e., confuses) his writing. This “patheticity” can be described as honest because his thought openly dares to get stuck in the impasse of his experience (i.e., of the experience of his thinking as such). In Bataille's writing we can indeed feel how thinking itself becomes touched (even physically so) by its own “uncanny” exteriority. This “pathetic” experience of the exteriority of thinking itself is the kernel of what Bataille calls “inner experience” (expérience intérieure).

But perhaps Bataille's patheticity is as forceful as it is, simply because the conceptual patterns he uses are in a certain way too easy, capable as they are to give at any time the solution to all his questions. The antique (meta)physical schemes he uses can easily make of his concept of nothingness, which is made to affirm finitude, that which explains everything and thus “sublates” finitude into infinity. Thinking within terms inherited from a closed worldview threatens to place finitude in a world in which this nothingness would be everything. So, the moment Bataille's writing “feels” the easiness of his antique schemes and is almost forced to solve his question of finitude, it seems he has to let its impossibility formally interpose. Every time, death threatens, not to threaten, but to be a smooth and easy “solution.” The lethal insolubility that Bataille wants to demonstrate, threatens to become enfeebled by the “easy” death. Only a pathetically invoked unsublatability of death (and here he can rely only on the pathos of the inner experience) seems to be able to ensure the finitude of his reflection, that is, to deliver it to the typically modern restlessness with regard to the concept of finitude.

BATAILLE'S NEWTONIAN SHORTFALL

It might not be totally indefensible to argue that Bataille's understanding of finitude depends largely on his honest “patheticity” and that he therefore does a certain injustice to the specifically modern character of this problem. The reason may be found in an obstacle that Bataille's thought seems to have circumvented—more specifically, the obstacle of the “Kantian caesura,” which we prefer to link to modernity. In this respect, Bataille seems not to have taken a particular stand regarding Kantian thought or—which in this context comes to almost the same—to Newtonian physics. From this perspective it might be arguable that Bataille—surprisingly, and in spite of the indications to the contrary—did not think through profoundly enough, things like “death” and “Nothing.”

In Bataille's conceptual schemes, it is unthinkable that things are dead, without life, that they are an indifferent neutral “mass,” as Newtonian physics teaches. Things may be marked by death, their vital energy may be integrally oriented toward it, but for Bataille this is only thinkable because death is not merely death, but rather a closed cosmos of nothingness, within which, from the viewpoint of the “économie générale,” nothing can be lost. From the Bataillean viewpoint, the neutral, bloodless death attributed by Newton to things without the least degree of “patheticity” is an absolute incongruity or a totally insane “skandalon.”

The difference between the two visions of (the death of) things can best be explained by way of the problem of the death of God, to which both “thinkers of death” react in clearly distinct manners. The perspective of God's death will enable us to have a look at the kernel of the two physical systems (antique Bataillean physics, and modern Newtonian physics).

In La Souverainité Bataille states in a footnote: “The place left by the absence of God (if we prefer, by the death of God) is enormous” (8:274; 3:441). For Bataille, modern man must affirm the tragedy of God's death by keeping open and empty this “immense place,” by making this tragedy into an (objectless) “object” of non-knowledge, to put it in his own terms. Within his “cosmology,” this infinite open place will become the place or the “space” tout court, which will be modeled after an antique, closed model of finitude.

God is dead, indeed, and the infinite universe is not closed anymore in (and by) the infinity of God. So, with God's death, the infinite has become simply the infinite “place,” the limitless “space.” But for Bataille this space nevertheless “closes” in its own limitlessness itself. For him, the whole of being remains within the very limits of this infinity. After God's death, being remains closed within (and by) the infinity of death itself. So we see how, in its infinity, “death” itself has—so to speak—survived even God. Within this infinite space, but precisely because it somewhere does still have a limit where it resists the vital power of being that is “pressing” at it, death will be able to play its excessive games, and maintain life, of which it is the basic principle.

Bataille thus accomplishes a regressive movement with regard to the Christian creationist vision of being. Christianity had broken up the finite world of antiquity with the idea that being as such had a “sovereign” origin outside of what was held to be “being.” From a classical Greek philosophical point of view, Christianity was doing something quite absurd: it founded “being” in a place where until then one could only (unreasonably) speak of non-being, in a “space” where there was only pure, nonexistent nothing. Strangely enough, this vision survived, among other reasons because this “nothing” was mitigated in its severe and incongruous negativity by being seen as something “more than being,” and by attributing this “hyperbolic” ontological character to God. Christianity taught that the all-embracing cosmos turned out not to be “everything”; outside of it there was an infinite “nothing,” in which the Infinite One dwelled. The feeling of infinity did not depart from internal closeness of being itself any longer, but from an exterior infinity within which there was “being.” If, in the past, the cosmos was based only on itself, henceforth it was to be based on the Infinite One who had created (ex nihilo) the cosmos while, in essence, not being part of it.

When this infinite God died, the infinite space he left behind did not disappear along with him, but did henceforth, as radically open infinity, define man's finitude. Henceforth everything that is, is in a space that does not necessarily coincide with “being,” nor does it go back to its “exterior creator,” but literally loses itself in indefinite infinity. Everything that is, exists in an infinite “space” devoid of any raison d'être. Since God's death, that is since the beginning of modernity, it is this kind of “cold” abysmal infinity that has determined the being of things. If in the past these were determined by an infinitely distant God who would touch their soul and “give” them their existence, this God now ceased to be, and so did the soul, which was embedded in his existence. Things are only embedded in an empty, exterior, and unbounded space. Things have turned into dead mass, entirely defined by their exteriority. Whatever it is that moves them, it has nothing to do with their inner “essence,” but only with mechanical laws directed at the exterior protocol of their movements. The rest—their inner essence—is dead to the new knowledge, simply dead, and (scientifically) not worth thinking of.

Sensitive as he was to the dramatic situation that thought fell to after it was forced to give up its hold on the inner essence, Kant turned out to be the first to affirm that traumatic caesura with “the things themselves.” In his attempt to radically think modern finitude, he was the first to succeed in investigating the conditions of a thought that has given up the claim to be able to know “das Ding an sich.” According to Kant, the infinity of the space previously occupied by God could never be conquered by knowledge, and thus, in its endlessness, it characterizes knowledge as something finite. While human knowledge will indeed be finite in the sense that it will never live up to its final end (i.e., das Ding an sich), this virtually unlimited knowledge will nevertheless be radically finite: the ultimate knowledge will escape and remain absent from every known object. This absence (of das Ding an sich, that is, of a rational and free raison d'être, formerly known as God) makes the knowledge both its infinity and, on a more fundamental level, its finitude. So, the typically modern finitude is installed with Kant. Man is virtually able to know everything, and as such he feels himself capable of (technically) doing everything, but only because of the radical finite status of that infinite knowledge: the real essence, the real thing to know can never be known or controlled.

Like no other, Bataille is aware of this dramatic and even traumatic aspect of modern infinity, and tries to affirm this infinity (or the “totality,” as he often calls it) in its radical finitude. By writing closely to the skin of his brute “experience” of thinking itself, he confronts the reader with the modern finitude-problem in a very sharp way. Where, for example, he reports to us on the way in which his thought takes an infinite (i.e., transgressive) position only so as to frightfully experience the transgressive and failing character of it, he is effectively demonstrating a radical modern understanding of finitude. This character is threatened, however, when he wants to trace this “inner experience” back to his bioenergetic cosmology, or rather, to his cosmic-biologic reading of Hegel's negation. It is as if he wants to “close” again the open universe left by God's death, albeit a “closure” in infinity itself. It is as if he wants to give his experience of finitude an ontological foundation: the fear of infinity (being the basic experience of modern finitude) would be in “harmony” with the terrifying character of being itself—whereas perhaps the frightening side of our limited experience of being is only really radical if it simply lacks any relation to being itself. The possibility that this conceptualization may temper (if not neutralize) the very terrifying aspect of his inner experience prompts him to invoke its fear and its impossibility in a formal way. This formal invocation often seems to be the ultimate reason for the “pathos” of Bataille's writing.

Notes

1. References to Georges Bataille's Oeuvres completes, vols. 1-12 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970-88) are given parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. Volumes most often quoted are 7 (La part maudite) and 8 (La Souverainité). Volume and page numbers given after a semicolon reference the English translation; quotes are from Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1 (New York: Zone Books, 1988) and Bataille, The Accursed Share, vols. 2 and 3 (New York: Zone Books, 1993). All other translations are mine.

2. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 103-4.

3. “Changing from the perspectives of a restrictive economy to those of a general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics” (7:33; 1:25).

4. Bataille works out his “biochemical energetics” in the second part of his “Introduction Théorique” of La part maudite. Life (which to Bataille is the same as “being”) is thought according to the laws of pressure (pression). Once “life” (i.e., the vital energy) has reached certain limits, it will come under high pressure and, transgressive as it is, burst out to start new life (7:36-37).