SOURCE: Connor, Peter Tracey. “Mysticism and Morality.” Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, pp. 94-153. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Connor argues that Bataille's system of thought engendered an ethical structure despite its inherent paradoxes.]

CONSCIOUSNESS OF OTHERS

On the face of things, the idea that the writings of Georges Bataille might harbor the groundwork for a rigorous rethinking of morality seems somewhat improbable. Given the paradoxical premise of his method—that there be no premise, no uninterrogated ground, but only contestation “without rest”—his entire endeavor appears to be at antipodes to the kind of systemic and regulatory thinking that ethics presupposes. And given his objective to assert a freedom known only in ecstasy and the “inward cessation of all intellectual operations” (IE [Inner Experience], 4, 13; V, 16, 25), it is difficult to imagine how morality could figure for Bataille as anything other than an obstacle to be overcome.

Of course, it is to be expected that Bataille would reject outright all forms of what Karl Jaspers in his Philosophie calls “truth-preaching” ethics—all the prescriptive, reactive moralisms that had already suffered such a severe blow from the pen of Nietzsche, Bataille's mentor in matters of morals.¹ From the moment the “subject” is conceived in terms of “non-knowledge,” there can be no possibility of dispensing eternal verities about the good and the true. For unlike the Cartesian or Hegelian subject—a subject constituted by knowledge and backed by the “profound assurance” that knowledge provides (IE, 106; V, 125)—Bataille's destabilized and radically ignorant subject maintains itself in “circular agitation” (IE, 111; V, 130); contesting every certainty that might serve as a ground for principles, codes, and imperatives, it resists the arrest and the stasis implied in the very idea of “holding” a moral position, or taking a “stand.” Inner experience is above all an unchecked submission to the immediate that by definition cannot stop itself. Bataille realized that the idea of submitting to the “inexorable movement” of ecstasy would summon forth the advocates of a calmer, more measured approach to existence, but he rejected their inevitable critique: “What I tried to describe in Inner Experience is that movement which, losing all possibility of stopping, falls easily prey to a critique that thinks it can stop it from the outside because the critique is not caught up in the movement” (“Réponse à Jean-Paul Sartre,” VI, 199). Impervious to any “critique” that is not in effect complicitous with its own freefall—a condition that manifestly would void the notion of “critique” of significance—inner experience is unbound and unbounded; mocking “dogmatic presuppositions” (IE, 3; V, 15), it is oblivious to the moral parameters that criticism might try to draw around it.

Yet, as Allan Stoekl has argued, part of the appeal that Bataille's text exerts today comes from the fact that this “‘precursor’ of much of the major post- or antihumanist work of the sixties […] nevertheless seems to hold onto the possibility of an ethics.”² The fact that he intended to write a Système des morales seems to confirm Bataille's commitment to thinking seriously about the question of morality. Moreover, if the sheer mobility of Bataille's thought—the “incessant slippage” of thought that produces only ambiguity and endless flux—accounts for the absence from his writings of anything resembling a normative moral utterance, it remains the case that each page of his text burns with the urgency of the ethical. Maurice Blanchot has written of Bataille that a “political exigency” was “never absent from his thought” (La Communauté inavouable, 14); in a spirit of Nietzschean untimeliness (“to be with the times,” wrote Bataille, “is quite simply to be a puppet” [VIII, 574]), Bataille seems to interpret this exigency as a demand to go beyond all exigency, without ever abandoning, however, the exigency that engenders that demand. “Bataille's rhetoric,” as Steven Shaviro has put it, “has the form of an ethical imperative, but its content is a demand to dissolve all grounds and all imperative necessities, including its own” (Passion and Excess, 101). Bataille's inflamed rhetoric, refusing to settle for maxims or to succumb to the pseudodrama of moral debate, burns only for itself: “Ardor that doesn't address a dramatically articulated moral obligation is a paradox. In this context there is no preaching or action that is possible” (ON [On Nietzsche], xx; VI, 12). Bataille is not a preacher, and the “paradox” of his ardor—a pure ardor, an intensity that, like Bataille himself, knows nothing—frustrates attempts to reduce his thought to clarity or draw from it a rule or a lesson. There are no rules in Bataille's textual world; on the contrary, Bataille admired especially those who, like Proust and Blanchot, “produced unruliness [dérèglement] out of the search for the rule [règle]” (VIII, 570). Yet the “ardor” itself, as we shall see, is in some way moral. And the “disorder” that this ardor spawns in Bataille's text—and which mirrors the fundamental “disorder” and “formlessness” of Bataille's experience of the world—is perhaps less deceptive than the discursive disguise by means of which others have tried to mask it: “In Hegel's thought […] disorder is an order that hides itself, this night is the mask of day. The disorder of my thought, what is irreducible in it to a clear view, dissimulates nothing. I know nothing” (“L'au-delà du sérieux,” XII, 315).

When asked, by Marguerite Duras, what constitutes the “major obstacle” to the pursuit of sovereignty, Bataille responded, “Without doubt the necessity of accepting the existence of others and of respecting it entirely” (BFD, 30). This frank statement suggests just how difficult it was for Bataille to reconcile the pursuit of ecstatic experiences with what he nevertheless regarded as the “necessity” of accepting and respecting others. And yet Bataille also insists that the mystical experience is itself the experience of the moral: “Morality is itself Mystical Experience. This throughout Zarathustra. This experience, as morality detached from any end to serve, is on that account a moral experience: climbing the peaks of evil and of laughter—made up of disarming freedoms of non-sense and of an empty glory” (Memorandum, VI, 259). Clearly, any attempt to conceive of a morality “detached from any end to serve” is destined to run into some fairly obvious difficulties. We have seen that Bataille, in promoting the extreme moments of experience to which the mystic is exposed, seeks to liberate the subject from the debilitating temporality of the world of labor, or “project,” which “enslaves us to belittling tasks of momentary interest” (“The Surrealist Religion,” AM [The Absence of Myth], 82-83; VII, 395). Yet it is difficult to envisage how Bataille's Système des morales might accommodate the privilege he accords to the self-consuming “instant,” in which experience, unmediated, “has neither goal nor authority which justify it” (IE, 53; V, 67). What concept of morality might be compatible with the priority Bataille gives to “ecstatic time” (“Propositions,” VE [Visions of Excess], 200; I, 471), given that any morality seems to presuppose, as its minimal and essential condition, a moment of self-reflection wherein an individual contemplates the consequences of an act, and hence submits to a thinking of ends? To the extent that “inner experience” is defined as that which eradicates the temporal fissure which facilitates reflection in general, does it not preclude the possibility of moral judgment altogether?

On the one hand, then, in stressing an experience of instantaneity, Bataille seems to have effectively precluded all possibility of articulating an ethics. Inner Experience is a critique of the notion of “project,” defined as “the putting off of existence to a later point” (IE, 46; V, 59); it would be contradictory to expect that the autotelic experience Bataille opposes to such a “putting off” could at the same time be a moral experience. Moral thinking, in its essence, involves thinking ahead; fixing its gaze on precisely that “later point” of which the ecstatic subject remains unaware, its activity is projective, anticipatory and speculative. Morality and project thus form an inseparable couple: “the realm of morality is the realm of project” (IE, 136; V, 158). To escape the world of project inevitably means also to exit the world of morality, for project alone opens up the space within which determinate moral options become available.³ Put another way: if “‘to be sovereignly’ means ‘not to be able to wait’” (MM [Méthode de méditation], V, 203), this means not being able to wait for our conscience to tell us what to do. And so the moral subject, bound to values beyond the immediate now of ecstatic time, comes to resemble Bataille's portrait of the “hesitating man,” who hesitates in order to deliberate, to weigh, to reflect, and to judge, and to whose vacillation Bataille opposes the “frenzied being” who, allowing a sudden “power surge” to override his faculty of judgment, escapes enslavement to projective activity (“Popular Front in the Street,” VE, 162; I, 403).

This “frenzied being” is Bataille's revenge on Enlightenment man. From Bataille's perspective, the Enlightenment was the great moment of project, when a combination of faith in Progress, confidence in the sciences, and trust in language produced an unshakeable conviction in the discoverability as well as in the utility of knowledge. A scientific mentality spawned what Bataille denounced as a terrible confusion: “Progress negates ecstasy, sin, confuses life with project, sanctifies project (work)” (IE, 48; V, 61). It is this emphasis on “work” which defines for Bataille the modern era, the world in which we live, or rather, to borrow the title of an essay by Bataille, “This World in Which We Die” (“Ce monde où nous mourons,” XII, 457). The end-point of Enlightenment thinking is to equate life itself with project, and to envision human existence as a series of tasks, jobs, purposive projects and achievements. The tendency to equate life with work finds its most definite philosophical expression in the Phenomenology, where Hegel, who “knows no other end than knowledge,” makes of knowledge a form of “work” and, equating human existence with knowledge, finally reduces “completed man” to nothing more than this “work” [travail] (IE, 111; V, 130). If the frenzied states of “sacred intoxication,” which Hegel's constricted vision of existence left out, are to be reintroduced, morality, it seems, has to go.⁴

Recently, Bataille's thinking has been linked, somewhat surprisingly, to the philosophy of Kant. Attention has been drawn to a “Kantian moment” in Bataille's thinking, to a neglected aspect of his thought that developed as much in “Kant's shadow” as in Hegel's.⁵ Nick Land has argued that “Bataille's philosophical vocabulary—regardless of first appearances—is in fact, and independently of Hegelian mediation, fated to address a Kantian inheritance” (The Thirst for Annihilation, 3-4). In support of this thesis, Land is able to adduce the insistence in Bataille's text of the motifs of sovereignty, the limit, the unknown, possibility, objectivity, the end, as well as his critique of immanence and transcendence. In addressing Hegel, Bataille was in fact addressing Kant's project, rather than trying to understand the “inherent potentiality for malfunction” of the Hegelian machine. This is a provocative idea, one which demands a rereading of Bataille's investment in “the Hegelian text,” which for Land “is nothing other than a response to the predicament of transcendental philosophy.”

Would it be possible, however, to conceive of Bataille's work as anything other than the obverse of the Critiques and of “What Is Enlightenment?”? References to Kant are few in Bataille; his name tends to appear now and again when Bataille addresses the writings of some of his contemporaries, but there is no extended engagement of his work in and for itself.⁶ In Inner Experience, Kant appears as the figure of limits and limitations; he is dealt with rather summarily in the “Preface,” where he appears momentarily as the representative of “inner hypocrisy,” of the “solemn distant exigencies” by means of which existence is rendered tolerable and calm. And yet the shadow of Kant does seem to hover around Bataille, threateningly, like the Commendatore in The Blue of Noon. “I was sure I was going to find Immanuel Kant waiting for me behind the door”: this line from “The Diary of Chianine” in L'Abbé C suggests that Kant, though absent, is perhaps just out of sight, ready to reappear (L'Abbé C, 135; III, 343). “I opened the door,” the diary continues, “and to my surprise, found nothing. I was alone; I was naked in the midst of the biggest thunderstorm I had ever heard.” Kant, and the “exigencies” he proposed, are what the characters in Bataille's world can no longer turn to in the immense thunderstorm. Such consolations as he offered are without any doubt no more than odious “evasions.” But they still turn their eyes to the sky, liberated and at the same time terrified by what they see, or fail to see there: “We were fascinated by this abyss of funereal stars” (BN [The Blue of Noon], 143 tm; III, 481). Bataille continues to seek something equal to “the starry sky” of Kant's second Critique, even if he seeks this in “insubordination” and in “ruin.” “I have the unshakeable conviction,” he writes, “that, come what may, what deprives man of value—that is, his dishonor and indignity—carries him away, must carry him above everything else, deserves for everything else to be subordinated to it and, if need be, sacrificed […] Within me nothing is sovereign but ruin. And my visible absence of superiority—my state of ruin—is the mark of an insubordination which equals that of the starry sky” (“Take It or Leave It,” AM, 96 tm; XI, 130).

The impression that Bataille's thinking might be operating on two fundamentally different and possibly exclusive levels is a premise of Jürgen Habermas's reading of Bataille. Habermas sees Bataille's writing as “oscillat[ing] between an incoherent reattachment to the Hegelian project of a dialectic of enlightenment, on the one hand, and an unmediated juxtaposition of scholarly analysis and mysticism, on the other” (“Between Eroticism and General Economics,” 216). Habermas's observation accurately names the tension that animates the writings of this self-described “inconsistent monster” (IE, 66; V, 80). Bataille's attempt to “unify that which discursive thought must separate” (IE, 9; V, 21) involved mediating between scholarly analysis and mysticism, as well as between mysticism and the dialectic; between “dry scholastic elaboration” (“Collège socratique,” VI, 287), in Bataille's terms, and the “inner experience” he felt to be irreducible to it. And from one perspective, Bataille's project—“to emerge through project from the realm of project” (IE, 46; V, 60)—indeed involves an element of incoherence. Yet Habermas, at the same time as he sees what Bataille's text is seeking to achieve, misses its point: writing from the perspective of the philosopher (and precisely in the mold of the “professional” philosopher as Bataille cast it—“hung up on results” [MM, V, 218])—he is unable or unwilling to see that the oscillation, incoherence, and nonmediation in Bataille do not represent some deficiency in method, but are intended to communicate the formless “what is” of existence.

The oscillation in Bataille's texts between order and disorder, reason and excess, method and antimethod reflects Bataille's fundamental vision of existence, which, he believes, oscillates between “two extreme poles,” two “instincts” irreducible to one another. When Bataille criticizes Hegel for reducing human existence to work, he is not saying that Hegel was simply wrong in all respects; he is correcting an error of omission that fundamentally skewed Hegel's presentation and that involved the exclusion of the “sacred intoxication” Hegel nonetheless—at least according to Bataille—personally experienced. The consequences of this exclusion are no doubt enormous, but Bataille knew that in spite of this the Phenomenology described an essential aspect of existence, one that he never sought to deny. “At its extreme,” Bataille writes, “existence is, in a sense, and in a fundamental way, honest and decent: work, concern for the children, benevolence and loyalty rule the relations of men among one another; in a contrary sense, violence erupts pitilessly: in certain circumstances, the same men pillage and burn, they kill, rape and torture. Excess contrasts with reason” (E [Eroticism], 186 tm; X, 184). The impulse to “reason, utility, order,” in other words, is as fundamental as the impulse to destruction, disorder, and the violence which is “proper to humanity as a whole” [le fait de l'humanité entière] (E, 184, 186; X, 182-83, 185). Each “instinct” is alternately affirmed or negated, such that in the end existence is “ineluctably, at the same time as its affirmation, the negation of its own principle” (E, 184 tm; X, 183). If this is “incoherent,” then existence is incoherence. In Bataille's terms, existence is “ambiguous,” in the way the sacred is ambiguous (VE, 242; I, 563), or “equivocal” in the way culture itself is equivocal (“L'équivoque de la culture,” XII, 437 ff).⁷

There is no desire on Bataille's part to reconcile these two opposing tendencies. “Men reach the end of their potential in two stages,” Bataille writes. “The first is that of their unleashing [déchaînement], but the second is that of consciousness” (TE [The Tears of Eros], 162; X, 624). What Bataille wants to show is that “there is in understanding a blind spot” (IE, 110; V, 129) which will forever resist the dialectic of the Enlightenment, which will never allow itself to be mediated or reduced by any of the moves of consciousness. But just because this “blind spot” is opposed to discursive thought does not mean that scholarly analysis should play no part in the attempt to reveal it (and as we have seen, inner experience is nothing if it is not communicated, revealed). Uneasy with, but nonetheless defending the intellectualism of Inner Experience, Bataille writes: “I believe that an inner experience is possible only if it can be communicated and that it could not be communicated in the last resort without attaining to the objectivity of scholastics” (“Collège socratique,” VI, 283). Scholastics alone will not suffice, for “part of the expression of inner experience belongs necessarily to poetry and cannot be translated into clear propositions,” but this does not change the fact that the elaboration of the experience “must have at one point a scholastic form” (“Collège socratique,” VI, 282). The expression of inner experience cannot be achieved by scholastics or by “subjective effusion”: the most Bataille can hope for is to reach and explore the limit of each of these discourses—he does not imagine that this limit can be definitively crossed, surpassed, or cleared, as though it were a hurdle.

Thus, within the broader perspective of his vision of existence, Bataille's “mysticism” cannot so easily be set in absolute opposition to the forms of reason it nonetheless contests. There is a complicity between mysticism and reason in Bataille; without this complicity, moreover, mysticism would hold no interest for him. Schlegel saw such a complicity in the works of Schelling, whose mysticism he termed “kritisierten Mystizismus,” in other words, a mysticism that has been subjected to and has withstood the demands and tests of the rational faculty (Kritische und theoretische Schriften, 89). Bataille's notion of inner experience is a strange and contradictory formation; for all the apparent immediacy, the incandescence and the fulguration of the experience, something of the subject—that philosophically hallowed subject that Bataille sets out to demolish—“remains.” To this extent, Habermas is not wrong to see in Bataille the remnants of metaphysical thinking. For if it is stated and argued at the outset of Inner Experience that the experience under discussion is “born of non-knowledge” and, moreover, that it “remains there decidedly” (IE, 3; V, 15), Bataille will soon take something back from that confident assertion: “The subject in experience loses its way, it loses itself in the object, which itself is dissolved. It could not, however, become dissolved to this point, if its nature didn't allow it this change; the subject in experience in spite of everything remains [le sujet dans l'expérience en dépit de tout y demeure]” (IE, 61; V, 76). The inner experience—and also, by association: the “unleashing of passions,” the “perception of the instant,” the sovereign subject, all the representations of a purely explosive, uncontainable subject exceeding its subjectivity, spinning out of control, beside or beyond itself—this experience, then, which Bataille had led us to believe brings about “the fusion of subject and object” (IE, 9; V, 21), nonetheless leaves intact some remnant of the subject, a trace of the very consciousness that the experience supposedly annuls. Why would Bataille want to protect this sliver of a subject?

Bataille minimizes the role of this subject without extinguishing it altogether: “The subject preserves on the margin of [en marge de] its ecstasy the role of a child in a drama: surpassed, its presence persists, incapable of more than vaguely and distractedly sensing—a profoundly absent presence; it remains off in the wings [à la cantonnade], occupied as with toys” (IE, 60 tm; V, 74). Moreover, the trace of the subject that remains—surpassed yet present, present yet absent—is conceived in recognizably moral, if abstruse, terms: “to the extent that [the subject] is not a child in the drama, a fly on one's nose, it is consciousness of others (I had neglected this the other time). Being the fly, the child, it is no longer exactly the subject (it is laughable, in its own eyes laughable); making itself consciousness of others and, as the ancient chorus, the witness, the popularizer of the drama, it loses itself in human communication; as subject, it is thrown outside of itself, beyond itself; it ruins itself in an undefined throng of possible existences” (IE, 61; V, 76).⁸

With these words we fall headlong into the abyss of Bataille's thinking on the question of the subject. The difficulties that these sentences present—the difficulty of style, the oddness of the examples, the idiosyncracy of expression—testify at once to the originality of Bataille's turn of mind and to the extreme demands made on one who attempts to solve this “unsolvable puzzle.” What Bataille had “neglected” in his thinking of experience “the other time” (i.e., earlier in the same book) was the necessity of an openness, on the part of the subject in inner experience, to others; a “consciousness of others” that, even as it keeps open the possibility of communication (and community), loses itself in that communication. This amounts to saying that the “experience” of which Bataille writes is experience ‘of’ the other. Experience not of an object, but of a fusion of subject and object that dissolves both the category of “subject” and the category of “object” but from which emerges, in spite of everything, a consciousness that witnesses and is, presumably, witnessed by the other. Without this “consciousness of others,” moreover, the subject of inner experience would surpass the need for communication, and would neither write nor speak.

Hence Bataille's mysticism is “critical” in the sense that into the mystic's experience of Oneness (the undifferentiated unity of the Godhead in Eckhart's mysticism, for example) intrudes a shaft of light; a marginal, paradoxical self-presence is needed if one is to “sense the walls […] of the tomb open.” Bataille's rethinking of his position on this question is crucial, for, if experience were to remain “decidedly” in non-knowledge, there would be no communication; there would be only a subject communing with itself in self-satisfying beatitude. (The mystics were not unaware of this problem. The subject in such a state of absorption would amount to no more than what Saint John of the Cross calls a “spiritual glutton,” seeking union with God only for his own enrichment.) This “consciousness of others” is the revealing trace of Bataille's ultimate inability to overcome metaphysics, and also I believe the sign of his continued attachment to at least “the possibility of an ethics.” In his assault on the idea of a fully intact Cartesian or Hegelian subject, Bataille fell shy of eradicating this last vestige of consciousness, which for him seemed indispensable if human existence was to be considered ethically.

Morality is thus “itself mystical experience” to the extent that mystical experience is consciousness of others. Since Bataille, others have run up against the same problem in seeking to address the ethical. Derrida and Labarrière, for example, have drawn our attention to the host of assumptions that underlie ethical discourse: “What leaves me always more reticent, I am not saying in regard to ethics itself, or even to the word ‘ethics,’ but to the whole of the concepts, the values which generally determine or weigh down the ethical discourse, is that which, to my knowledge, until now—even in Levinas—presupposes values such as those of person, the subject, consciousness, the self, the other as ‘self,’ as a conscious other, as a soul; that is, a network of philosophemes on which, I believe, the freedom of the question must be kept” (Altérités, 14). In confronting the question of the ethical, Bataille too found himself entangled in this “network of philosophemes”; although he did everything he could to resist falling back into the traditional and false terms of the debate, his critique of the Subject does not entirely succeed in escaping the values of subjecthood and consciousness he sought to overcome. Just as Derrida and Labarrière see the necessity of addressing the ethical only from within the context of an “ultraethicity,” Bataille's effort to “go further” pointed to the need for what he calls, in the preface to Literature and Evil, a “hypermorality,” a “rigorous morality” that results only from “complicity in the knowledge of Evil” (LE [Literature and Evil,], viiii [sic]; IX, 171). The inner or mystical experience is, at a most basic level, an attempt to represent human existence from a position beyond the philosophy of personalism and the subject-object dichotomy that dominated ethical thought in Bataille's times. But the undifferentiated unity that these experiences often presuppose had to be broken open if the question of morality—the question of “consciousness of others”—was to be addressed.

THE UNLEASHING OF THE PASSIONS

Evil is the stumbling block of every philosophy

—Notes to Sovereignty

In the summer of 1959, while engaged on the laborious task of composing The Tears of Eros, Bataille wrote a letter to his editor and friend J.-M. Lo Duca, who had asked Bataille to recommend some topics for inclusion in a dictionary of sexology. Heading up the list of rubrics that Bataille provides are three infamous criminals: the fifteenth-century nobleman Gilles de Rais, a “tragic criminal” who, having slit the throat and the belly of his young victims, would sit on top of them “at an angle, the better to see [their] last tremblings” and, masturbating, come on the dying body (GR [Le Proces de Gilles de Rais], 35, 10; X, 310, 278); Erzébet Báthory, the so-called Blood Countess, who, having put to death “with infinite cruelty” (TE, 142; X, 620) her young maidservants, bathed in their blood, apparently in the belief that it would keep her skin from aging; and William Heirens, a “young American criminal” whom Bataille deems “of exceptional interest” (cf. TE, 9; X, 717), a burglar and murderer who had dismembered the body of his last victim, a six-year-old girl, and concealed her remains in the sewers of Chicago.⁹

In attempting to probe the “possibility of an ethics” that Bataille's thinking seems to hold onto, an obvious point needs to be made: Bataille's thinking of ethics would hold no interest if his work did not at the same time respond to the necessity of conceiving ethics in its most intimate relation to evil—a radical evil, to be envisaged not as the simple other of the ethical, but as the point of departure and the unsurpassable point of reference for any morality “that escapes the evident servility of conventions” (“La morale du malheur: La Peste,” XI, 246). When Bataille speaks of “the unleashing of passions,” he has in mind the kind of passion that accompanies experience lived “from within, lived to the point of a trance” (IE, 9; V, 21): the deeds of Gilles de Rais and Erzébet Báthory, associated in The Tears of Eros with a “boundless unleashing” [déchaînement sans mesure] (TE, 162 tm; X, 624), are considered in some way exemplary of the perception of the instant and the “negation of ethics” it implies. For “it is through the unleashing of passions [le déchaînement des passions],” Bataille states, “that we enter into the instant” (“The Surrealist Religion,” AM, 88 tm; VII, 402).

It is part of the appeal of Bataille's writings that they offer a guided tour of the “peaks of evil” (VI, 259) and that they invite the reader to linger, fascinated and perhaps in awe, at the sites where infamous figures have acted—perhaps monstrously, perhaps sovereignly—according to impulses opposed to the calculations of reason. “Enthralled by decay and evil,”¹⁰ Bataille delights in mapping the geography of crime and in chronicling those acts of violence which evince what he calls, in his book on Nietzsche, “a willing of evil” (ON, 26; VI, 49). If the evocation of these crimes, executed with the chilling ease of those who have signed “a voluntary pact with sin, crime, and evil,” and of the sinister worlds of their authors in turn fascinates the reader, this is in part because of their contemporary feel and their dramatic nature: as archaic as the fortressed worlds of Gilles de Rais or Erzébet Báthory might appear, their crimes could rightly be described as “sensational,” inasmuch as they provoke a visceral reaction. Fully aware that “the desire to see wins out over disgust or fright” (“X Marks the Spot,” I, 256), Bataille turns his readers into voyeurs; reading Bataille involves the pleasures and the guilt that such a perspective implies.

But what fascinates as much as the cold aura of the “X” that marks the spot is the sheer intensity of Bataille's gaze on evil. The fixity of Bataille's stare works to unnerve the reader in a very subtle way. When Bataille asserts of Gilles de Rais, for example, that “he liked to watch” (GR, 10; X, 278), we become conscious of the complex ricochet of gazes in which we as readers—as spectators—have been trapped. Watching Bataille watching Gilles watch, then watching ourselves watching produces a dizzying effect of layering: the reader, implicated in the scene of violence by the very act of reading, is unable to affirm detachment from the inclination to look that is being described. Evil in Bataille's text makes its appearance as a staged spectacle, and the reader, more or less willingly, finds him or herself participating in the staging. It is not by chance that Bataille dwells on Gilles de Rais's “exhibitionism,” on his “passion for the theater” and on his obsession with spying: if crime of this magnitude always includes a “theatrical capacity,” and if the criminal's desire is primarily “to see death at work,” his “delight” is never fully realized until he is “unmasked” (GR, 11; X, 279)—until he has himself been seen, witnessed. The reader, looking on, is given to understand that the onlooker is in fact an accomplice in the scene, like Sillé, Briqueville, Henriet, and Poitou, Gilles's accomplices, the “louts” to whom he was bound unto death by an infrangible loyalty.

Linked in this chain of gazes, the reader's defensive reaction is foreseeable: Bataille's discourse on evil calls for a moral reaction, even as it shakes the ground upon which such a reaction might be based. To give some specificity to this reaction—often experienced, I imagine, as a vague yet acute uneasiness, composed of horror mixed with awe, shock, distaste, and so forth: this ambiguous reaction was precisely what Bataille sought to provoke—means to characterize it in a rather crude way. But let us say that it might take the form of the following suspicion: as sophisticated as Bataille's notion of evil appears, in its complex relation to Sade, Plato, and the rest, his evident fascination confirms the notion that behind his rhetoric of excess, expenditure and extremity, which he links to notion of liberation and freedom, there lies a much more visceral and, at the same time, perhaps banal affirmation of the basest of human instincts.

A purely thematic overview of Bataille's œuvre is likely to motivate such a suspicion. Bataille's textual world is replete with elements he has retrieved from the “heterogeneous realm,” a realm comprised of the “unruly elements” (“The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” VE, 139; I, 341) society rejects in order to constitute itself as an orderly and productive body. Everything that is considered abject, from trash, vermin, and excreta, to gangsters, pederasts, and misfits, finds its way to the surface in his essays as in his fictional works. Bataille's habitat is the underworld, the world of la pègre, where the rejected and the undesirable dwell. As he himself might have theorized, this is what makes it so attractive: the objects he describes, precisely because they have been sacrificed to social values, are touched by the “sacred,” and provoke the reaction of “guilty anguish” we have before that which is both “attractive” and “repulsive” (CS [College of Sociology], 118). Yet if a certain attraction à la boue (which is part and parcel of Bataille's romanticism: in one sense he is very much a nineteenth-century figure, complete with all the perversions and perverseness of the homo sensualis) draws Bataille to the seamy side of life, the mere fact that he likes to frequent what are, after all, the lieux communs of modern literature since Baudelaire is insufficient to explain the deep sense of discomfort that his work can provoke. More disconcerting than any of the specific instances of crime and evil he cites are certain epigrammatic statements—“to choose evil is to choose freedom” (ON, xxxiv; VI, 24), for example, or again: “Evil is love” (Le Petit, III, 37)—which seem to recognize existing values only in order to oppose them, and to oppose them by means of a simplistic inversion of terms. How are we to take, for example, the thesis articulated in “Evil in Platonism and Sadism,” that “from the moment reason is no longer divine, from the moment there is no longer God, the unleashing of passions [le déchaînement des passions] is the only good [le seul bien]” (VII, 373)? “There is no longer anything in us that deserves to be called sacred,” asserts Bataille, “that deserves to be called good, except for the unleashing of passions.” The thesis is clearly in line with the impulse to freedom and sovereignty that animates all of Bataille's writing, and which presupposes a rejection of “logical explanation” in favor of the intense form of “sensible experience” (IE, 33; V, 45) he values. But since Inner Experience, the context has changed somewhat: the promotion of the sensible has mutated from its role as a necessary corrective to the hegemony of Reason into something more positive, something we could not call a form of moral advocacy but which, situated in relation to a notion of “Evil,” engages the ethical in a dramatically new way.

It is tempting to regard Gilles de Rais and Erzébet Báthory as subversives; to argue, for example, that their violent acts have the same liberating value as the works of the Marquis de Sade, “the most subversive man who ever lived” who “was also the man who rendered the greatest service to humanity” (E, 179; X, 178)—in other words, to see in them examples of individuals who “refuse the rule,” and who in so doing represent what Bataille, in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” exalts as the “force that disrupts the regular course of things.” According to this theory, they—or the “violence, excess, delirium [and] madness” they embody—would represent the eruption of the heterogeneous world into the “profane,” “ordinary” world of homogeneous reality, arriving on the scene with “a force or a shock,” as heterogeneous reality always does (VE, 142-43; I, 346-48). A syllogistic logic might produce the following argument: since “the heterogeneous world is largely comprised of the sacred world,” Gilles de Rais and Erzébet Báthory—because “there is no longer anything in us that deserves to be called sacred … except for the unleashing of passions”—are in some sense themselves “sacred,” and hence also “good”—since “there is no longer anything in us … that deserves to be called good, except for the unleashing of passions.”

Bataille will indeed refer to Gilles de Rais as a “sacred monster.” Yet in recounting the deeds of these figures, Bataille never imagines that they themselves conceived of their crimes as transgressions of the social order. If they did transgress that order, the atmosphere of social constraint from which they sought liberation, and the need for secrecy this atmosphere engendered, contributed only incidentally to the pleasure they derived from their acts. Rather, their importance lies in the fact that the violent release of passions they incarnate challenges that dominant mode of thinking and knowing based on assessing the value of an act rather than simply recognizing that an act is. These characters are of interest to Bataille because they pursued and realized an experience outside of the norms and regulations of society, and did so not in reaction to those norms, but in sovereign indifference to them. Evil represents for Bataille a field of human activity that is properly human to the extent that it resists “the reduction of the world to the measure of our calculations” (“Le Mysticisme,” XII, 183-84): the murders committed by Gilles and Báthory, occurring in the instant—or in the instant of their occurring—would be acts that “do not allow themselves to be reduced either to aesthetics or ethics” (“Initial Postulate,” AM, 91; XI, 231). In this respect they raise questions that established modes of inquiry are unequipped to ask. Philosophy, theology, and aesthetics produce answers that merely reflect the moral bias of their questions—their interpretation of existence is consonant with the prejudices from which they depart. Bataille envisions the possibility of asking a question that would lead toward “profound existence”: “I should, it seems, choose between two opposite ways of seeing. But this necessity for a choice presents itself as linked to the position of the fundamental problem: what exists? What is profound existence freed from illusory forms? Most often the answer is given as if the question what is there of an imperative nature? (what is moral value?) and not what exists? were asked” (IE, 70; V, 84). As Bataille notes in “Sacrifices,” where the above sentence appears in almost identical form,¹¹ by approaching the world from a moral perspective, established disciplines fail to take into account “lived experience,” which “equally constitutes an inevitable point of view.” The “self” that emerges from philosophical inquiry, from any form of “honest (down to earth) research” (IE, 70; V, 85), is distinct therefore from a “profound existence” that Bataille experiences “in tears, in anguish,” in “the self that dies.” The question Bataille wants to ask, from beyond good and evil, would not seek to change the way things are by translating them into moral terms, but rather, addressing “the avid and obstinate question ‘what exists?’” (VE, 135; I, 95), would see and acknowledge evil as desire—as the consequence of a “willing,” a “voluntary pact”—and perhaps thereby help to explain its necessity.

To be able to utter a Nietzschean yes to “what is” involves first of all overcoming various enlightened notions of evil: evil as ignorance (as opposed to knowledge, which is the good), evil as a problem to be resolved, evil as an obstacle to progress and a better life, and so on. Evil represents for Bataille the impotence of discourse to change the world. Thus, contemplating evil, Bataille refuses to accept even for a moment that the object of contemplation can be made to coincide with the “already constituted frameworks” that purport to explain it. The spectacle of evil allows Bataille to slip into another mode of existence, one in which he escapes from “the clockwork regulation of thought,” “existing in the beyond as a stone does”: “To the extent that my indifference to evil increases, the serenity founded on harmony and the yes given to the universe that is, the imperceptible lighthearted hatred for the revolutionary idea (based on the conviction that the good of the world depends on change), I feel myself becoming alien, in spite of my own determination and at the same time in an assured way, to the thought of those who read me. Like a stone or a glass of water, like the paucity of a madman's existence” (“The Problems of Surrealism,” AM, 97 tm; VII, 453). To exist “in the beyond” is to exist, certainly, “beyond good and evil”; but more important, it is to recognize in Gilles de Rais, and to “appreciate” in him, as did Sade, “a hardness of stone” (TE, 138; X, 619).

THE MANUEL DE L'ANTI-CHRéTIEN

In representing the human subject in the throes of inner experience Bataille was anxious to preserve, notwithstanding the annihilating effect that such an experience has on the faculty of intellection, some trace of consciousness. This gesture accounts for the inextricability of his own position from that of a metaphysics he denounced. The phrase “consciousness of others,” read as the inscription of the ethical, implies that in the mystical experience that Bataille is trying to describe, space and time, often considered, rightly or wrongly, to be transcended in the experience, remain operative categories for a paradoxical but nonetheless identifiable perceiving consciousness. This recalcitrant consciousness, however, while it contradicts the assertions of immediacy typical of mystical discourse, does not apprehend objects dialectically in the manner described by Hegel, but “ruins itself in an undefined throng of possible existences.” These “possible existences” are existences other than my “own,” which is effectively “ruined” in its exposure to others.

There is a remarkable specularity between certain aspects of Bataille's thinking on morality and the morality he condemned in Christianity. As with Hegel's system, which Bataille could critique only after having accomplished its end for himself through a process of “mime and contagion,” and as with Nietzsche, whom, if one is to read him authentically, one must first “be” (“no one can authentically read Nietzsche without ‘being’ Nietzsche” [VIII, 476 and 650]), it seems that Bataille had to mimic Christian thought in order to arrive at a position that would allow him to “go further.” At first glance Bataille's thinking of morality, inasmuch as it continues to communicate intimately if critically with the premises of Christianity, at times takes the form of a reactive antithesis to it. So insistent is the presence of Christian iconography and rhetoric in his œuvre that the question has been raised as to whether or not Bataille ever overcame his Christian origins, whether in fact he did not remained trapped within, and complicitous with, that which he so virulently denounced. Jean-François Fourny, for example, has suggested that Bataille's later works in particular represent a reconciliation with his Christian beginnings, though he detects signs of such a reversion already in the Somme athéologique. Fourny sees in Bataille's final text, The Tears of Eros, “an about-face [un revirement] and an implicit liquidation of the anti-Christian past of ‘guilty’ [meaning: Le Coupable] and its fascination with violence” (Introduction à la lecture de Georges Bataille, 121).

Fourny is right to point out that Bataille dissociates himself only painfully and even regretfully from what Christianity seems to offer him: mysticism, exultation, transports, the possibility of grand transgressions.¹² Yet the complexity of Bataille's negotiation with Christianity demands that we respect a fundamental ambiguity, lest we succumb to positing reductive polarities in an effort to resolve what is an ineluctable and conscious contradiction in Bataille's text. Bataille was neither a fanatic anti-Christian crusader nor a lapsed Catholic recovering from the fall. It was rather a matter, in Bataille's blunt phrase, of “doing justice to Christianity in all hostility” (VI, 316). The violence of such a “rigorous hostility” finds expression in the contradictory utterances that Bataille makes regarding himself; both “ferociously religious” and “profoundly atheist,” Bataille sidesteps every attempt to label him.¹³ One might well say of Bataille's attitude to Christianity what Jaspers, in a book highly praised by Bataille, wrote of Nietzsche: “His opposition to Christianity as a reality is inseparable from his tie to Christianity as a postulate.”¹⁴ Just as it would be deceptive to assert that Bataille is either Hegelian or anti-Hegelian, it is equally impossible to state that Bataille is simply Christian or anti-Christian. Reading against and beyond the dramatic condemnations of Christianity, Bataille can be seen to suspend absolute judgment: like Nietzsche, he recognized the perniciously fertile values of Christianity, and was drawn to the extreme experiences of being it seemed to offer. Unlike Nietzsche, whose reading of Christianity is dominated by the figure of the ascetic priest and his value system of domestication and containment, Bataille, beyond his critique of the ascesis and the “dogmatic servitude” the church seems to promote, probes also the exquisitely obscene representations of which Christianity alone was capable. In its art and in its texts, Christianity represented eroticism and spirituality conjoined in unequaled intensity, even if only to condemn a sensuousness it held to be base. Perversely, then, Bataille's reading of Christianity is an affirmation of its clearest and yet most repressed projections: what is more Bataillean today than the image of the mutilated, naked body crucified in transcendent abjection?

Thus Bataille considers the crimes of Gilles de Rais, and the immense pleasures they afforded him, from within the perspective of Gilles's Christianity. “Perhaps Christianity is even fundamentally the pressing demand for crime,” writes Bataille, “the demand for the horror that in a sense it needs in order to forgive […] Perhaps Christianity is above all bound to an archaic human nature, one unrestrainedly open to violence? In his mad Christianity, no less than in his crimes, we see one aspect of the archaism of [Gilles de Rais]” (GR, 12; X, 281). In the crazed Christianity of Gilles de Rais, who “up to the end was naively a good and devout Christian,” religion is returned to what Bataille, in an early essay, had perceived to be its “immediate form”: “In conformity with the words attributed to Christ, who said he came to divide and not to reign, religion does not at all try to do away with what others consider the scourge of man. On the contrary, in its immediate form, to the extent that its movement has remained free, it wallows in a revolting purity that is indispensable to its ecstatic torment” (“The Notion of Expenditure,” VE, 127; I, 317).

Bataille's close relation to Christianity is especially marked in some of his earlier texts on religion, most notably in the thirteen pages of fragments that make up the Manuel de l'Anti-chrétien. The Manuel can be considered his early profession de foi: here, in the tradition of Kierkegaard's Attack upon Christendom and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Bataille sketches in broad and bold terms the history of religion as the history of renunciation and salvation. While Bataille repeats a good deal of the standard anti-Christian rhetoric of the times, he at the same time recognizes in Christianity the response to an “essential need” and a “congenital defect” [tare congénitale] on the part of humanity (II, 377). Christianity is not a “transitory aberration”; it is rather an inevitable response to the “constitutional sickness of man.” Looking beyond the institutional aspect of Christianity, Bataille tries to identify the innate human tendency to which this institution responds, namely, “the vertiginous inclination toward renunciation” [l'inclination vertigineuse au renoncement] of which the esprit chrétien is merely the dominant mode of expression.

Christianity, according to Bataille, manipulates this tendency to renunciation by investing earthly suffering with positive value. Suffering down below becomes purposive, meaningful, and measurable: “Christianity is worth […] at the most what the God it proposes for the love of its unworthy [indignes] creatures is worth” (II, 380). On the one hand, Christianity offers a path to states of mystical transport which transcend human suffering; on the other hand, it limits and controls these states by projecting onto them an origin and a meaning, thus robbing them of the sovereignty of which they might otherwise obtain. Bataille's experience of divinity, for which the Christian mystical transport serves as analogue, is the experience of an “earthly beyond” (II, 366): “I wanted non-knowledge to be its [i.e., the “experience”] principle—for this reason I have followed with a keener discipline a method in which the Christians excelled (they engaged themselves as far along this route as dogma would permit)” (IE, 3; V, 15). Following the Christians only up to a certain point—the point at which the Christian mystic turns over the meaning of the experience to God—Bataille refuses to “lead [the experience] to some end point given in advance.” The “harbor” in which the Christian experience, at the insistence of the church, ultimately takes refuge, is the haven of revelation, and to alight there is to renounce the sovereignty of ecstatic experience. Bataille seeks a comparable experience of “joy”; but his “practice of joy” “robs of meaning everything that is an intellectual or moral beyond, substance, God, immutable order, or salvation,” and has “no object other than immediate life” (“The Practice of Joy before Death,” VE, 237; I, 553-54).

Bataille shares with Christianity the conviction that the individual exists only in a state of insufficiency. “There exists at the basis of human life a principle of insufficiency. On his own, each man imagines others to be incapable or unworthy [indignes] of ‘being’” (IE, 81; V, 97). Humanity exists in a state of lack. As we shall see, the “principle of insufficiency” accounts not only for the rise of religions, but also for the possibility of communication in general. History is the history of responses to this insufficiency: in one way or another, Bataille believed, Christianity, philosophy, writing, socialism, and fascism represent different solutions to the problems posed by this lack, whose affective condition is the intolerable anguish of the isolated being. Hence Bataille's major interest in writing the Manuel [Manuel de l'Anti-chrétien] is not simply to denounce a singularly oppressive form of morality but to examine the genesis of the “essential need” that is the condition of possibility not only of Christianity but of configurations of political domination in general.

Christianity, as it is represented in the Manuel, turns out to be the least satisfactory of solutions. Bataille goes so far as to identify Christianity as the “constitutional sickness of man”: “Christianity is not a transitory aberration, it is not merely a response to problems that disappeared at the same time as their historical conditions. Anguish, to which renunciation was a response [à la-quelle il a été répondu par le renoncement], in fact belongs to man as a congenital defect: the vertiginous inclination towards renunciation, Christianity, is the constitutional sickness of his existence” (II, 377).

By “renunciation” Bataille means the renunciation of the will (of the “will to violence” that Sade represented, for example). What is pernicious in Christianity is its cultivation of renunciation as a value (an ideology clearly not restricted to the Christian church; Bataille points out that the esprit chrétien—a generalized mentality rather than a regulatory dogmatics—can be seen to operate “beyond Christian churches,” and insists that in the bidding wars over exclusive rights to individual anguish, Christianity is but “one possible mode of satisfaction”). One reason Christianity had such “success” with its remedy to alienation was that philosophy had ceased to be a contender: “Christianity is the bridge thrown over the abyss that separated reality from the ideal. The evangelic myth of redemption, the incarnation of the son of God and the atonement [rachat] of original sin through the death on the cross have filled the space left empty by philosophy” (II, 379).

The philosopher and the evangelist respond to the same human need: the need to avert our gaze from the misery of the phenomenal world and, placing existence in “dependence on the ideal,” to remit justice and equality—which, as “everyone knows,” “cannot be ‘of this world’”—to an abstract beyond. What is needed then is an explanation for the misery of the human condition, for the gap between the “unreasonable and immoral reality [of] this world where we die” and the “ideal” world figured in myth and legend (“Ce monde où nous mourons,” XII, 457).

For Bataille, it is this quest to answer or at least respond to primordial human anguish that defines Western civilization. Christianity succeeded because it promised to satisfy man's “sad thirst for the beyond”; it provided a “dramatic” solution to the human anguish: “Given that human anguish had no more discouraging a cause than the abandonment in which our good Lord left the real world, a dramatic solution answering to the need for a living and moving symbol had to immediately take on the value of a lucid interpretation of a bad dream. Thus the “truth” of Christianity imposed itself with an unprecedented force of conviction” (II, 379).

THE MYSTICISM OF SIN: BATAILLE VERSUS SARTRE

An unknown man, whom the desire—or the necessity—to reach the summit drove mad, gets closer to it, in solitude, than the highly placed figures of his time. It often appears that madness, anguish, crime together prevent access to it, but nothing is clear: who could say of lies and contemptible actions that they distance oneself from it?

—Inner Experience

If the ecstatic experience of the sacred, which “cuts the roots of the future and the past,” represents a rejection of the economic, moralizing temporalization of existence that Bataille had contested in the Hegelian system, the transgressive potential of evil lies in a comparable circumvention of rationalism's subordination of the “instant” to values external to it. “To choose evil is to choose freedom,” writes Bataille in On Nietzsche (xxxiv; VI, 24). In the paroxysmal convulsions known to the criminal in the commission of an evil deed, Bataille saw the possibility of escaping the crippling temporality imposed on the moral subject: “What evil in essence rejects is a concern with the time to come. It is precisely in this sense that the longing for the summit—that the movement toward evil—constitute all morality within us. Morality has in itself no value (in the strong sense) except inasmuch as it leads to going beyond being—rejecting concerns for a time to come” (ON, 28; VI, 50 tm).

There is therefore an intimate link between the sacred, mysticism, and evil. Each represents an experience freed of all constraints, including and especially the constraint of duration (la durée). This is why, in its pre-Christian form at least, religion, which is in essence a response to the need for the sacred, remains for Bataille a subversive force: “Religion is doubtlessly, even in essence, subversive: it turns away from the observance of laws. At least, what it demands is excess, sacrifice, and the feast, which culminates in ecstasy” (TE, 72; X, 610). This is also why the church, in its efforts to establish moral order, understood that its task was to institute a particular concept of temporality; the transgression of law represented by Christian festivals, if it could be prescribed—if times and dates could be fixed, saints ascribed to particular feast days, and so forth—could thereby be made to serve the ends of a moral order that festive revelry only seemed to perturb.

The crucial distinction between word and deed finds expression in Bataille's work in the mutating yet always proximate relation between crime and art. If Bataille makes of crime an art, if he asserts that the essential domain of evil is literature, confining violence to the textual level, a contrary impulse is for him forever present; the possibility of action is the horizon that Bataille's text constantly strives to embrace. To put it another way: Bataille struggles with the ineffectuality of the text, which he associates with the anathema of an ineradicable rationality that discourse perforce stages on the written page. If the writer is to attain to the intensity of experience represented by the criminal act, he must “lose his head”; the thinking, speaking, guiding organ must be violently severed so that art cedes to the “incoherence” that signals an outside of the text.¹⁵ Even that “incoherence,” of course, is present as a sign, as an inscription of significant discourse denying itself. As Michel Camus writes, “There is something absolute about Bataille's hatred of politics, as there is about his hatred of poetry, that is to say in his hatred of the sign that is impotent to signal the presence of the ‘without-sign’ at the heart of the man without name. Can one ever escape the prison of the me without escaping from the prison of language: With acephalic man, the wound of sense is opened” (“L'Acéphalité ou la religion de la mort,” iv). The literal mutilation of bodies carried out by Gilles de Rais, Báthory, and Heirens represents for Bataille a “wounding of sense,” a gesture he repeats textually through the use of ellipses, digressions, asyntactical or unfinished sentences.

The limit between word and deed is dramatically staged and tested by the group that identified itself with acephalic man and the wounding of sense he represented. With the mysterious communitarian endeavor known as “Acéphale”—in its rituals, its secrecy, in its apotheosis of war and its avowedly “untenable” and “monstrous” intention of founding a religion, and above all in the plan to hold a human sacrifice—Bataille seems to have grappled with the issue of talk versus action. There is no doubt that for Bataille the extremity of experience represented by a human sacrifice was of decisive moral significance. The adventures of the Acéphale contingent, whose members, notes one critic in shock, were “in their thirties” (Fourny, Introduction à la lecture de Georges Bataille, 94), were not the isolated expressions of a naive or youthful spirit. They were not misguided moments extraneous to an intellectual program, but rather the extreme and deliberate representations of a meditated project: “Acéphale,” like the Collège de Sociologie later, was attempting in its way “to pose the question of spiritual power” (CS, 358). And this project has everything to do with the articulation of an impossible ethics, an entirely other morality that dispensed with performative acts of repressive legislation.

With Acéphale, the crucial questions that Bataille had been asking himself since at least the late twenties—since the polemic with André Breton—crystallized in the “idea” of a human sacrifice. This “idea,” which was never put into practice, which perhaps was never meant to be put into practice, marks a pivotal stage in the development of Bataille's thinking about the relationship between writing and action. Bataille's sustained questioning of the philosophical consequences of materialism, from “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” to “The ‘Old Mole’” and “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic” and including “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,” is fueled at every stage by the need to mediate between “the general and essential contradiction of the high and the low” (“The ‘Old Mole,’” VE, 34; II, 96), between, on the one hand, a “purely literary” conception of existence regulated by the “exclusive use of ideas,” and, on the other hand, “the real decomposition of an immense world” and “the subterranean action of economic facts.” In all these writings, it is as though Bataille were subjecting himself to the critique leveled, almost a century before, against the Young Hegelians who, Marx had said, were “only fighting against ‘phrases’” (The German Ideology, 149). The “glorified and ineffective trivialities” (169) of the discourse of self-consciousness, by means of which the Young Hegelians attempted to change the world, were condemned by Marx as hopelessly insufficient to liberate humanity because they failed to take account of the sensuous world as “the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it” (171).

Marx's critique of the “contemplative” stance, specifically of the “contemplative materialism” of Feuerbach, and generally of all those mysteries which “mislead theory into mysticism” (Theses on Feuerbach, 94) is essentially the critique that Bataille never stops making of his own text. No matter what one does, as a writer, to combat the exclusion of sensuous reality from one's text, the medium itself remains as the last enemy to be conquered in the struggle against “mere contemplation” of the world. Writing, for Bataille, always risks alienation and crime; hence the omnipresence of the prison metaphors in his fiction, where the protagonists are seen to be incarcerated within the text, pushing the edges in search of an exit (“project is the prison from which I wish to escape (project, discursive experience). I have formed the project of escaping from project!” [IE, 59; V, 73]). Where Feuerbach posits a “religious self-alienation” resulting from the “duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world and a real one,” Bataille would posit a literary self-alienation; the text can never accede to the “totality of possibility,” short of which it will represent only a “servile idealism” and the sickly will to “poetic agitation.” Critical of “dry verbal translations” (IE, 6; V, 18), Bataille sought, along with and prompted by Marx and Engels, although not always in agreement with them, the possibility of “a mode of thought founded neither directly on the study of nature nor on a work of pure logic but […] on a lived experience” (“Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic,” VE, 113; I, 289).¹⁶

So it is that the “Program” for Acéphale takes as its first principle the idea of community—“I. Form a community creative of values, values creative of cohesion”—and, having rejected every existing form of community (nationalist, socialist, communist, church) in favor of “universal community,” finds the only value propitious to the creation of such a community to be violence: “II. Affirm the value of violence and the will to aggression inasmuch as they are the basis of all power” (II, 273). Acéphale's intention to hold a human sacrifice concerns the limit between “stating principles” and “putting them into action,” the limit between the textual event and the ‘without-sign’ of an experience “lived to the point of terror.” The strangely cold passion known to those historical figures which Bataille, not without reservations but in a mode of exaltation, brings to our attention, represents a freedom, an emancipation from all constraint that is for Bataille the experience of the moral itself.

The theory of two worlds—the “real” and the “ideal” worlds—as expounded in the Manuel de l'Anti-chrétien is clearly indebted to Nietzsche, not only to this philosopher's cryptic “How the ‘Real World’ at Last Became a Myth,” but also to “Schopenhauer as Educator,” where the philosopher, the artist, and the saint share in the single task of working toward the perfection of nature.¹⁷ Bataille seems in agreement with the Nietzsche who wrote that nature itself is “in need of redemption” (“Schopenhauer as Educator,” 177). It is Bataille's conception of the human condition as one of incompleteness that accounts for the resemblance between the inner experience and the Christian transports he so admires. Bataille's premise—the principle of insufficiency, the anguish that results therefrom, and the “essential need” that ensues—repeats the Christian premise of the incompleteness of the godless individual; the movement of human life is one toward redemption of an initial lack. The highest form of response to this lack, for Bataille, refuses to become a task or a goal and rejects any end: Bataille imagines an atheological response to anguish that, rather than resolving anguish by turning it into meaningful suffering, accepts anguish and abandonment as one possibility in the “totality of possibility” that is existence. “I teach the art of turning anguish to delight,” writes Bataille in Inner Experience. But this is the most difficult and paradoxical of endeavors, as the sentence following this shows: “But anguish which turns to delight is still anguish: it is not delight, not hope—it is anguish, which is painful and perhaps decomposes” (IE, 35; V, 47).

How anguish, turned into “delight,” is “not delight” and is “still anguish” is rather difficult to fathom. What interests us for the moment is that the “flaw” in existence is not seen by Bataille in terms of moral perfectibility: the principle is given as an irremediable insufficiency, not as a redeemable deficiency. Moreover, as an ontological condition of mankind, it is in fact the necessary precondition for communication. If, in the formulation of Nietzsche, “we have an immeasurable longing to become whole” (“Schopenhauer as Educator,” 163), our error is to have been seduced into believing that self-completion can come about only by way of self-denial, by refraining from certain actions in this world in order to guarantee recompense in the next (ideal) world. This is the purpose of the Christian myth of redemption: “The legend of redemption has taken account of the co-existence of a profound and perfect reality and of a miserable here-below, but it has made of ‘what you are’ a guilty slave at the feet of an immaculate master” (Manuel de l'Anti-chrétien, II, 380).

What is crucial in Bataille's critique of Christianity in the Manuel de l'Anti-chrétien is less his diatribe against Christian morality per se—which is very much in the spirit of the times—than the larger questions it raises regarding the tendency of humanity to submit to authority. As important as the emergence and rise of the Christian church might be in the long history of renunciations, Bataille is more interested in considering the etiology of this tendency, and consequently views Christianity as symptom rather than disease. The attempt to understand humanity's “inclination to renunciation” will henceforth determine his thought on the question of morality. Nietzsche had already pursued this path of inquiry in his essay on Schopenhauer, and had invested his researches in the figures of the philosopher, the saint, and the artist. Bataille, settling himself rather disruptively in the midst of this assortment of pretenders, proclaimed: “I am not a philosopher but a saint, perhaps a madman” (MM, V, 218). We shall now turn our attention to the first part of this statement. For if Bataille was not a philosopher, and if philosophy as a discipline is as harshly critiqued as Christianity, much of his thinking, especially on the question of morality, is nonetheless articulated in relation to a network that includes Plato, Hegel, and Heidegger as well as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Shestov.

During the famous “Discussion sur le péché” (“Discussion on Sin”¹⁸), Sartre questioned Bataille's notion of morality. The meeting represented a clash between the exigencies of the vita activa and the vocation of the vita contemplativa, between the in-the-world philosopher and the alleged mystic. The exchange took place following a lecture delivered by Bataille in March of 1944 before an audience of Christians and non-Christians, a modified version of which, entitled “Summit and Decline,” was later published in On Nietzsche (13-49). The Christian contingent had requested that Bataille clarify his position on the question of ethics. In this debate, which we must approach with some caution given the charged atmosphere of the encounter (which led to some unguarded remarks), Bataille is coerced, notably by Sartre, into disambiguating, as far as possible, his thinking on morals.

Bataille was well aware that his position, when it came to the question of morality, was in appearance contradictory: “betrayed by language,” he spoke from an “untenable position” only to end up in an “inextricable position” (VI, 345, 346). These avowals of self-contradictoriness can be disarming. They are not intended to be obstructive; rather, they are necessitated by an ambiguity inherent, for Bataille at least, as we shall see, in the question of morality itself, an ambiguity that demands imagining a position beyond the oppositional couple of good and evil. A position, then, that would effectively dissolve the possibility of holding anything like a “position,” insofar as this word connotes the inflexible rigor and groundedness of the moral “stance” or “stand.” Those unsympathetic to Bataille saw in this ambiguity a sign of moral equivocation, suspecting Bataille of a shiftiness running counter to “what the times expected” of intellectuals in the face of war. Bataille, admiring in Nietzsche the fact that “he took no political stance” (ON, xxii; VI, 14), held his ground, while recognizing that his position was necessarily “distinctly weak, distinctly fragile” (VI, 345).

The discrepancy between morality—in the practical sense of how we act out our daily existence—and the discursive articulation of morality—theorizing this acting out—surfaces repeatedly in the debate with Sartre. Sartre's position is straightforward. The truth is that one cannot live without positing values, unless—although even this is not certain—one lives in silence and in total inactivity; unless, that is, one lives as the mystic lives, absorbed in contemplation. But no one lives in this way, which would mean to live in the plenitude of inner experience, in the uninterrupted immanence of ecstasy. This was what Sartre was already getting at when, reviewing Inner Experience, he made the irrefutable and rather obvious point that “Monsieur Bataille writes, he has a job at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he reads, he makes love, he eats” (“A New Mystic,” 175). In other words: we live in-the-world, we therefore live actively, and this means that, whether we like it or not, we live in the world of project. Ecstatic, altered states of being can occur, concedes Sartre, only to add: “So what?” For Sartre, emphatically, “we are project” (“Un nouveau mystique,” 187). Bataille would not deny this: very much a writer in spite of himself, hateful of his own language, reproaching himself for describing experience rather than experiencing it, he remains painfully conscious that in-the-world activity is inevitable, that it implies project, which implies, as we have seen, morality. A principle of selection is operative and values are posited all the time in empirical existence and in the very language we use to describe it. There is in a sense no escape from values, precisely because there is in the end no definitive escape from project.

“Summit and Decline” begins with definitions: “The summit corresponds to excess, to an exuberance of forces. It brings about a maximum of tragic intensity. It relates to measureless expenditures, to the violation of the integrity of individual beings. It is thus closer to evil than to good. The decline—corresponding to moments of exhaustion and fatigue—gives all value to concerns for preserving and enriching the individual. From it comes rules of morality” (ON, 17; VI, 42).

It is Bataille's intention to demonstrate that this apparently oppositional schema is complicated by a “slippage” (glissement) that precludes polarizing the terms summit and decline as though they were merely substitutes for the old, oppositional, and “prejudicial” terms good and evil. Bataille opens with an attempt to articulate a position “beyond good and evil,” and in so doing to obviate what Zarathustra had called the “ancient arrogance” that presumed to cleanly separate the one from the other. From there, Bataille goes on to posit the crucial thesis of his argument: the possibility of communication between man and God, and, in the absence of God, communication between men, presupposes the violation of God, and an act of violence against other men, since no communication can take place between fully intact and self-sufficient beings. Communication can only take place after a necessary “wounding” (blessure) has shattered the “wholeness” (intégrité) of God. This “crime” of wounding is always the repetition of a more original sin, namely, the crucifixion of Christ. But the crime committed against God in the same moment shatters the wholeness of the criminal, throwing him into a state of anxious guilt, such that a single criminal act brings about a mutual wounding. The crime of which Bataille speaks is self-reflexive: “God, wounded by human guilt, and human beings, wounded by their own guilt with respect to God, find, if painfully, a unity that seems to be their purpose” (ON, 18; VI, 43). The infliction of the wound opens up a channel that allows for communication to take place (the bleeding wound of Christ symbolizing the flow of communication). Thus, if there is to be communication (and without it there would be “nothing,” only “egoism” and isolated being), there must be crime: “‘communication,’ without which nothing exists for us, is guaranteed by crime” (ON, 18; VI, 43). Exemplary instances of this crime are sacrifice, in which individuals “identify” with a “human or animal victim” (ON, 21; VI, 45) which is put to death in a communal ceremony, and “sensuality,” in which beings, “outside of themselves,” communicate through self-abandon and loss (ON, 24; V, 48). Since individuals “have to” communicate, they must also in a sense desire the criminal wounding that is its condition of possibility; in other words, they must recognize the necessity of what is deemed “evil”: “Individuals or humans can only ‘communicate’—live—outside of themselves. And being under the necessity to ‘communicate,’ they're compelled to will evil and defilement, which, by risking the being within them, renders them mutually penetrable each to the other” (ON, 25; VI, 48).

Bataille proposes “primitive life,” an existence in which sacrifice and orgies were freely practiced in the course of “celebrations” (ON, 30; VI, 52), as an existence in which the kind of communication he is trying to describe was more commonplace than in today's postsacred world. But self-loss and ecstasy (the state of being “outside of”) is present also in the trances known to Christian mysticism, which “encompass criminal and erotic transports” (ON, 31; VI, 52). The Christian mystic, whose eroticism is patent to Bataille (as it would be later to Lacan), transgresses God's law: “The saints' crime is erotic par excellence, related to the transports and tortured fevers that produce a burning love in the solitude of monasteries and convents.” The transvaluative operation of Christian morality consists in translating and sublimating this erotic excess into a form of spirituality; rejecting “real licence,” the church preferred “meditational subjects” and “symbols” to “real orgies, drunkenness” and “flesh and blood” (ON, 32; VI, 53). Bataille, in seeking an alternative to the repressive morality of renunciation, intends to return to the subject—in the form of mystical ecstasy or eroticism—the possibility of an experience without “consequence,” a jouissance of which it has been deprived by a morality predicated on the values of work, production, and useful expenditure.¹⁹

The idea that mysticism and morality might be closely related was not new. Schelling had perceived such a relation, and had even seen the connection between mysticism and sin: “Mysticism is related to the purest and most beautiful morality, just as in reverse fashion there can be mysticism even within sin” (The Philosophy of Art, 72). And for Friedrich Schlegel, “Genuine mysticism is morality in the highest dignity” [Echte Mystik ist Moral in der höchsten Dignität] (Kritische und theoretische Schriften, 110). Schlegel's formulation, uncannily close to Bataille's “Morality is itself Mystical Experience” (VI, 259), is revealing. He is not saying that mysticism is moral; rather, genuine mysticism is morality. Genuine mysticism is the measure of the moral; it is, in itself, neither moral nor immoral.

In the question and answer session immediately following Bataille's lecture, Sartre sought to show how Bataille's mysticism tilts dangerously in the direction of a mysticism of sin. To negate one value, Sartre believes, is necessarily to affirm another, such that human beings are constrained, by virtue of the “situatedness” of active, in-the-world existence, to make value judgments in accordance with the givens of any situation. Moreover, even if the ecstatic states triggered by crime and sacrifice appear extra-moral and “independent of consequences” (Bataille), as soon as one privileges them over and in the face of other existing values they thereupon become consequential: one has simply inverted the system, and substituted a different finality for the one that was already there. From Sartre's viewpoint, Bataille's quest for ecstasy is itself a form of project, and that, ipso facto, makes it into a value. And his values are less than clear: “What's to prevent one from raping human beings, for you? I don't see why, according to your principles, one wouldn't rape human beings as one drinks a cup of coffee” (VI, 343).

Does Bataille valorize sin? Here is a crucial exchange, in which Jean Hippolyte's intervention elicits a useful clarification:

SARTRE:
[…] do you or do you not attribute a value to states obtained through sin or in sin? For example, to the ecstasy of the sinner. If you do attribute values to them, you are making another morality. Likewise, one can very well obtain by means of narcotics [stupéfiants] a kind of disintegration, but if one seeks it, it becomes a value.
[…]
BATAILLE:
Of course, I propose values, and I've indicated that in proposing values in several ways I ended up in an inextricable position.
SARTRE:
So it's not a question of contesting morality by means of something that would be beyond morality. That leaves us with a coexistence of two moralities: a lower one and a higher one.
BATAILLE:
Naturally, and the higher one is obliged to give itself up [renoncer à elle-même] because, at a given moment, it notices that its own values are developed in the name of the lower morality. Consequently, it gives itself up and disappears, and everything enters into the night.
HIPPOLYTE:
That makes for a third morality; the giving up itself is a third meaning of the value.
BATAILLE:
The movement of contestation having begun in the second [morality], there is no difference between the second and the third; it's contestation following its course [qui se poursuit].

(VI, 345-46)

What Sartre is pointing out is that to invert the order and to preach a divinity of evil is not to escape from the “search for morality” itself, since one has merely changed directions, while continuing to respond to a fundamentally unaltered system. There still remains the affirmation of a value, even if it should be that of crime, or sin, which are simply negated virtues. For Sartre, Bataille's vision remains arrested in a dialectic: “In your version, sin has a dialectical value, that is, it cancels itself out [elle s'évanouit]; its role is to push you towards a state in which you can no longer recognize it as sin” (VI, 347).

The question then becomes the one suggested by Hippolyte: does contestation—the destruction and “renunciation” of values—constitute a third value? Bataille's answer seems to be yes and no. To the extent that it is the second morality—the “morality of the summit”—that initiates contestation, there is in fact no third morality: there is only an act of defiance, from a position of exteriority, directed toward the first. From this perspective Bataille indeed seems trapped in the very dialectic he is so anxious to escape. So that there is not simply an inversion of moralities that would end in the same sclerotic opposition as the one he wishes to denounce, and in order to arrive at a position that would not be purely reactive, Bataille must therefore posit that contestation contests itself; contestation would therefore assure the perpetual interruption of the process of formation of any morality. This is why Bataille (in imitation perhaps of St. John of the Cross) prefers to speak of “the ascent to the summit” rather than a “morality of the summit”; Bataille's morality is endlessly on the move. And if this movement itself appears to move in more than one direction at once it is because the two systems of morality are complicitous:

BATAILLE:
In all moralities, whatever they may be, values have only been made up of the interference of the two systems; the system of contestation, on the one hand, and the positive system of the separation of good and evil on the other.
[…]
What seems serious to me is that from a certain point onward, it's possible to be deprived of the faculty of describing a good and an evil that would be sufficiently persuasive such that one could maintain the other side of things, what I am calling the ascent to the summit. To ascend to the summit, one needs a pretext, that is to say, in order to give oneself over to contestation and to a system of self-contestation, to accomplish these violations of the integrity of the being of which I am speaking, one needs a pretext borrowed from the notions of good and evil.

(VI, 346-47)

“Strange way of holding onto a value—by denying it” (VI, 344), muses Sartre. What, then, is the originality of Bataille's discourse on morality? We seem to have arrived at a point from which, looking back as it were, the need for a new or different way of thinking morality appears quite clear, but before which lies still the task of articulating what this other morality is. Bataille himself is troubled by this, aware that his position is “untenable” and yet equally aware that the task before him is nothing less than a “duty”: “We have to go further. To articulate such a critique is already to decline” (ON, 37; VI, 56). It is at this limit point that the “exigency of a morality” to which Blanchot refers makes itself felt in the form of an impossible reticence. We must go further, we must go on and yet the limit of discourse has been reached. Once the complicity of the two systems has been denounced, it is almost impossible to proceed, for not only does the “critique” of morality participate in the negativity of the morality denounced, but the articulation of any other morality is also implicated, as soon as one begins to speak of it, in the “morality of descent”: “The fact of speaking of a morality of the summit itself belongs to a decline of morality” (ON, 37; VI, 55). One would indeed have to be ignorant of the summit in order to attain it: “The only possible way for the debauchee to reach the summit is by not intending to. The ultimate moment of the senses requires real innocence and absence of moral pretensions and, as a result, even a feeling of evil” (ON, 38; VI, 57). Morality for Bataille shares the structure of the mystical experience, which can never be attained if it is actively sought.

Bataille, then, is not at all proposing that we strain to reach the “summit,” nor does he himself pretend to be speaking from it; nor has he, Zarathustra-like, descended from it. This is why his own text does not deliver a message or a moral prescription. There is no moral of the story. Ethics does not consist in acquiring knowledge of some thing that can be communicated through a text. This was Kant's error. Rather, it lies in the infinite inquiry into how communication is possible in general. The movement toward ethics is a movement away from knowledge: it tends in the direction of “non-savoir,” a non-knowledge that here, in the context of morality, Bataille terms “innocence.”

“One realizes that, at a given moment, contestation cannot stop with itself and that it is like an acid that eats away at itself” (VI, 346). It almost appears as if contestation has the same structure as the “wounding” or crime of which Bataille speaks in his conference, in the sense that it is not only an agent in the destruction of existing values, but it also self-destructs upon completion of its mission. Contestation accomplishes the mutual disintegration of its object and itself. The relation between contestation and value is similar to that between men and God: it is, ultimately, one of mutual cancellation. Contestation itself would be the perfect crime, leaving no traces. Zarathustra's words (which Bataille places as the epigraph to “Summit and Decline”) “Your steps have effaced the path behind you”²⁰ are realized only through this annulling and self-annulling act of contestation. The consequence of this disappearing act is that the destruction of values accomplished in the act of contestation leaves behind it no legacy that might become the model for a new value. It sets no standards, establishes no example, but vanishes “into the night,” as Bataille puts it. Or, in Nietzsche's terms, it establishes no “foothold” upon which the weak might clamber: “When all the footholds disappear, you must know how to climb upon your own head: how could you climb upwards otherwise?”²¹

For all the talk of summit and decline, ascent and descent, what Bataille describes is a labyrinth, the elusive labyrinth of being from which “no one escapes” and which is itself, remarks Denis Hollier, “impossible to circumvent, for reasons stemming from the economy of language” (Against Architecture, 71). Bataille is obliged to concede something to Sartre: “Frankly put, the summit, when proposed as an end, is not the summit; since in speaking of it I'm reducing it to the search for profit” (ON, 37; VI, 57). To speak of the “summit” at all involves a degree of falsification, for as soon as one names the “summit” as such it becomes a project and is thus subject to an intentionality quite foreign to the morality without finality that Bataille is trying to promote. To stray from silence is necessarily to sully oneself: “I feel corrupt: everything that I touch is corrupt” (IE, 33; V, 45).

In the course of the “Discussion,” Bataille at more than one point insists that in his attempt to speak he is “betrayed by language” (VI, 350): it is the “faculty of description” that is at fault. Sartre, of course, will hear none of this: “It's easy to lay the blame on language […]; if the language distorts, that's your fault” (VI, 345). On this point it no longer seems useful to trace the sallies of the polemic. Sartre's unshakeable belief in the signifying powers of language ultimately limit his perspective on the inner experience that is being described here, even if the political import of his objection remains quite pertinent. What Bataille is trying to articulate will not pass into language, or at least not easily and perhaps not in recognizably ‘moral’ rhetoric. The limit Bataille reaches here, and against which he is constantly pushing, is the line separating language from experience. It is not simply that there are things of which he cannot speak, a secret interiority that defies exteriorization—ineffable, ungraspable things that, in a fairly banal and almost technical sense, resist linguistic enunciation (although the deficiency of language remains an important factor). Phenomenologists and poets alike have long realized that all things are ultimately this way—ungraspable in their essence. It is rather that the exigency of ethics demands that we speak of them anyway, even if to do so is “utterly ridiculous” (ON, 37; VI, 57). “That of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent,” wrote Wittgenstein. For Bataille, it is precisely that of which we cannot speak—the inner experience, the ecstatic state, self-loss—that we have to speak: this is what ethics is, or what it says. “If we live under the law of language without contesting it,” Bataille observes, “these states [i.e., the “vague inner movements which depend on no object and have no intent”] are within us as if they didn't exist” (IE, 14; V, 27). Or at least, with regard to morality, we have to try to speak of it, to speak around or toward it, even if failure is prescribed in the task from the very outset. The ethical, for Bataille, is “inaccessible”; it is nothing more than the impossible and necessary attempt to describe ethics when we are “deprived” of the “faculty of description.” The task is interminable, and it is in this sense that we must understand Bataille's constant injunction: “We have to go further”—an injunction that continually exasperates all who would settle for the consolations of conclusion and closure.

“THE EXTINCTION OF PHILOSOPHY”

“The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis,” reported Edmund Husserl in the course of a lecture entitled “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” commonly referred to as “The Vienna Lecture” (270). “It is said”: by May of 1935, when Husserl spoke to the assembled members of the Vienna Cultural Society, none was unaware of what was being said, in Europe, about Europe. Husserl's subsequent allusions to “our Europe-problem” (271), as well as his citation of the phrase “crisis in European existence” (299) attest to the familiarity of this “frequently treated theme” (269). Indeed, by 1935, the “discourses of worry,” as Jacques Derrida has termed a diverse but analogous cluster of discourses from the interwar years, had begun to converge around the same preoccupations, even the same words, with each text citing or echoing those that precede it. The recurrence of certain questions—what is the spiritual destiny of Europe? what role can reason play in guiding Europe? what has occasioned the current crisis? what is meant by “Europe itself”?—as well as the lexical uniformity that characterizes the articulation of these questions points up a number of “profound invariables” in this “great and fabulous European colloquium” which had announced itself a decade before Husserl spoke with Valéry's La Crise de l'esprit. Europe, spirit, and crisis, the constants in these discourses, coexist with words from the worrier's wordbook—destruction, atrophy, collapse, destitution, dissolution, sickness—words whose sonorous gravity seems attuned to the profound exhaustion of spirit they attempted to name.²²

Calling for a “medicine” to restore to the European nations a “genuine, healthy European spiritual life” (“The Vienna Lecture,” 291), Husserl warns Europeans to be wary, lest through fatigue and weariness—themselves symptoms of a community in crisis: “Weariness is Europe's greatest enemy”—they succumb to “the lore of the so-called nature cure” and the temptations of “a flood of naive and excessive suggestions for reform” (270). In this context of fever and false medicine, Husserl's prescription for Europe, eschewing both naiveté and excess, amounts to a challenging proposal: what “the humanity of higher human nature or reason requires,” according to Husserl, is “a genuine philosophy” (291). The “Europe problem” was, for Husserl, first and foremost a philosophical problem, both a problem with philosophy—with what constitutes philosophy in the “genuine” sense—as well as a problem whose solution could emerge only from within philosophy, or rather from its own internal reform. Arguing that reason has strayed from its path, Husserl issues a call to philosophical order; if the ailing European spirit is to be resuscitated, it can only be on the basis of a less “naive” philosophy, a more enlightened enlightenment, a “heroism of reason” (299). If the moment at which reason went off track could only be located, Europe could right its course, and, “on the road” again, resume its task of articulating “the true and full sense of philosophy” (291). The ratio, always susceptible to error, is, by the same token, always capable of self-correction.

Such was Husserl's faith in the regenerative capabilities of reason that, invoking the phoenix, he would speak of “the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy.” Philosophy—keeper of the flame of reason—was suffering from the very “weariness” against which Husserl repeatedly warns, a weariness with thinking itself, which left it vulnerable to incursions from discursive domains inimical to its very essence. Philosophy, in the wake of a lapse in vigilance, was now under siege. The enemies of philosophy, Husserl would specify in Prague later that same year, were familiar, sworn enemies: “In our time [philosophy] threatens to succumb to skepticism, mysticism and irrationalism” (The Crisis of European Sciences, 3). The forces of “skepticism, mysticism and irrationalism” to which Husserl alluded in 1935 were neither abstract nor at all distant: he referred, subtly but unmistakably, to specific elements of the National Socialist ideology, whose increasing influence threatened nothing less than “the imminent danger of the extinction of philosophy” and with it, “necessarily, the extinction of a Europe founded on the spirit of truth.”²³ The enormous philosophical implications of Husserl's central question in the Crisis—“Is it necessary to sacrifice the genuine sense of rationalism?”—are inseparable from the political context in which the question was formulated, inseparable, that is, from the “influence of the great fateful events [Schicksale] that completely upset the international community” (16). Foreseeing the consequences of a world set adrift from the anchoring goals of rigorous philosophical critique, Husserl recognized—and he was not alone in this insight—the dangerous efficacy of mysticism and irrationalism as instruments of popular manipulation, capable of uniting the German people around an idea of the nation, an idea presented as an ideal with which the masses could identify passionately, and uncritically.

In the debates of the 1930s, mysticism and its cognates were words associated, almost exclusively, with National Socialism and the rise of fascism in Germany. Within this context, the threat represented by mysticism bore directly on the idea of the thinking subject itself. Mysticism was seen to represent a kind of antiphilosophy. If philosophy emphasizes the virtues of doubt—self-doubt and doubt of the senses—if it fosters a spirit of reflection, rigorous analysis, and circumspection, mysticism, or the politicized version of it that circulated in the 1930s, promoted enthusiasm, a giving way to the senses and the certainties they can seem to offer, and the subsidence of the individual will into the collectivized will of a “people” or a “nation.” Mysticism thus spells the “extinction of philosophy” in that it strikes doubly against the cogito, usurping both the idea of thinking as a self-definitional act, equatable with being, and eroding the chiseled contours of the individuated “I” that performs that act. To thinking, mysticism opposed, broadly speaking, emotion, or a carefully crafted concept of emotion; to the “I,” it opposed an idea of community—or at least of communing—predicated on the supposed commonality of that emotion. Mysticism, as Wilhelm Reich had pointed out in 1933, was an affair of mass psychology.²⁴

A glance at the opening page of Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century serves to illustrate the special role reserved for mystical thought in National Socialist ideology. To inaugurate his new mythology, Rosenberg chooses as an epigraph the following words from Meister Eckhart: “This message is addressed to no one who does not already possess it as his own or at least as a yearning of his heart.” Eckhart's volo serves in Rosenberg's tract to cement an identification between the German people and the particular myth of the nation he presents, which itself draws heavily on mystical assertions of unity. The appeal to a “yearning of [the] heart” announces the modus operandi of the entire Myth of the Twentieth Century: a call from one heart to another, it arouses the passions of its readers by connecting with their secret interiority rather than by convincing them through argument. As Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have argued, the efficacy of National Socialist ideology rested upon “a theory of fusion or mystical participation” which, together with a romantic mythologizing of “the spirit,” provided the “identificatory mechanism” it needed in order to arouse and mobilize the masses—in other words, in order to collectivize spirit.²⁵ The Myth of the Twentieth Century proceeds, in conformity with the logic of its opening quotation, “by affirmative accumulation, almost never by argumentation […] There is neither knowledge to establish nor thought to overcome. There is only an already acquired, already available truth to declare” (“The Nazi Myth,” 304). The distortions inherent in Rosenberg's solicitation of Eckhart are for us less significant than the effectiveness of the method: “myth,” as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argue, is an instrument of identification, and if the emergence of German nationalism coincided with and consisted largely in “the appropriation of the means of identification,” then Rosenberg's appropriation of deutsche Mystik, and especially of the figure of Eckhart, can be seen as crucial to the success of that operation. And this success depends—to paraphrase Dionysius the Aeropagite—upon the “cessation of the operations of the intellect” which is at the heart of the mystical experience itself.

Rosenberg's citation of the mystical volo allows us to see the potential danger of the practice of ‘reading’ it prescribes. The Myth of the Twentieth Century is a closed text; since it does not address itself primarily to the understanding, but to the heart, and since it delivers nothing new, but only what is in some way already there, it institutes its own infallibility. It is to be swallowed whole rather than ruminated and digested. (Hitler prefaces Mein Kampf with his own version of the volo: “I do not address this work to strangers, but to those adherents of the movement who belong to it with their heart.”)

Bataille, of course, was as aware as any intellectual of his time of the politics and ideological strategies of National Socialism. He indeed devoted himself to a studious exposé of “the betrayals that deform the teachings of Nietzsche,” including, and especially, Rosenberg's.²⁶ But Bataille's own thought was bound up in mysticism, both in the mystical experience itself and in the ideas he found expressed in the texts of the mystics. In the 1930s and 40s, Bataille's encounters with the mystical were inseparable from his intellectual program. With the intellectual horizon so rigidly defined and delimited, Bataille's decision to publish, in June of 1939, “The Practice of Joy before Death” can only be seen as impolitic. His first overtly mystical text, it promulgates an ethic grounded in the “apotheosis of that which is perishable, apotheosis of the flesh and alcohol as well as of the trances of mysticism” (VE, 237; I, 554). No doubt this text, and its untimely appearance, were to a degree intentionally provocative; the extremity of its tone and the puerility of the values it propounds (“nude girls and whisky”) stem in part from a will to oppose the rule of convention, particularly austere in these precarious times. But beyond the desire to épater, Bataille's glorification of mysticism in this text seems designed to challenge, seriously and in an almost systematic fashion, every value that the by then reigning doctrine of existentialism had embraced. To valorize the contemplative over the active, and this precisely when the world was intruding into the life of every citizen; to urge self-absorption and indulgence when the unanimous call was for restraint; to hymn “the perishable” in the face of the threat of a massive perishing was, by all appearances, to mock the values of resoluteness, resistance, and community that sustained a nation on the brink of war. Addressing themselves to matters of more immediate pertinence—questions of responsibility, conscience, and commitment—the existentialists displayed an exemplary attunement to the historical moment that only set in relief Bataille's tenuous attachment to the world.

Bataille made no secret of feeling somewhat divorced from immediately political concerns, allowing that the reader of Inner Experience might well ask if its author “is not the victim of an incorrigible moral sadness and peculiarly distant from the living world” (V, 424). It was Bataille's relative indifference to political affairs that had led to the demise of the secret society of Acéphale. “In September 1939,” writes Bataille in his “Autobiographical Note,” “all of Acéphale's members withdrew. Disagreement arose between Bataille and the membership, more deeply absorbed than Bataille by the immediate concern with the war. Bataille, in fact, had begun in 1938 to practice yoga” (“AN” [“Autobiographical Note,”] 221; VII, 462). A line from the beginning of Guilty—“I won't speak of war, but of mystical experience” (G [Guilty], 12; V, 246)—echoes this idea of detachment. Later, Bataille would reflect upon and affirm what must have appeared at the time an irresponsible attitude: “Up to a certain point, on the political level, I claim the irresponsibility of madmen … I'm not really mad, but I do not take on responsibility for the world, in any sense whatever” (BFD, 32).

But Bataille in the thirties was not simply au-dessus de la mêlée—an intellectually defensible and for some a morally respectable position: his rejection of any notion of responsibility predicated upon involvement in “the world” was conscious, and the untimeliness of his meditations a calculated attempt to intervene in the debate, to breach its protocols, and to speak out in some other way. That he was, in the thirties and in the Somme athéologique, advancing an argument in many ways similar to that of Wilhelm Reich, or that his use of the word mysticism was in part also a critique of the history of that concept, was less apparent than the unhappy thematic coincidence between his own texts and an identifiable element of the prevailing discourse of National Socialism.²⁷ What was apparent, in the 1939 essay as well as in subsequent texts from the war period, and what explains the uneasiness and suspicion marking the reception of his contributions, was an unsettling amalgamation of reason and unreason, an uncomfortable merging of Pascal and Descartes into a kind of “mystical Discourse on Method,” as Sartre called Inner Experience. The exaltation of war, the emphasis on death and destruction, the narcissistic and morbidly apocalyptic tone of certain passages (“Ceaselessly destroying and consuming myself in myself in a great festival of blood” [VE, 238; I, 556]) all contributed to the impression of a politically dubious sensibility in thrall to the darker, more sinister aspects of the mystical.

One of the earliest references to mysticism in Bataille's published work occurs in an article entitled “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic,” cowritten with Raymond Queneau in 1932, which launches an assault on Reason and on the philosopher the authors take to be its chief representative, Hegel. The aim of this essay is to oblige the philosopher to own up to the “mystical antecedents” of the dialectic: “Things must be looked at squarely, and it is necessary to admit that the dialectic had antecedents other than Heraclitus, Plato, or Fichte. It is linked even more essentially to currents of thought such as Gnosticism, Neoplatonic mysticism, and to philosophical phantoms such as Meister Eckhart, the Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa, and Jakob Boehme” (VE, 109; I, 283).²⁸ The restitution of these “philosophical phantoms” to their proper place in the history of the dialectic was a key strategy in what amounted, at least for Bataille, to a lifelong campaign to challenge philosophy's pretension to scientificity in general, and specifically to question the foundation of a concept of knowledge that treated mystic thought “as a parasite, becoming ever poorer and finding itself reduced to the most miserable state” (VE, 109; I, 238). Mysticism, Bataille believed, provided the link to the “unknowable” (l'inconnaissable), or to “non-knowledge,” the repression of which governed the entire system Hegel had built up. Bataille wanted to reintroduce into Hegel's edifice, at the crowning moment when consciousness is about to become Absolute Knowledge, the extreme experience of non-knowledge that Hegel dismisses as “inapplicable to the domain of natural science.”

It is not without a sense of triumph that Bataille announces the presence of mystical thinkers behind Hegel's façade of rationality. The ecstatic non-knowledge of the mystics can bring only ruin to a philosophy that “knows no other end than knowledge,” and it was precisely Bataille's intention to bring down such ruin on a philosophy he saw as an apparatus of oppression. Knowledge, which Western philosophy installs at the center of its intellectual inquiries, is only one possible mode of experience, and for Bataille it is of less significance than experiences in which the movement toward knowledge is obstructed or suspended. In suppressing Eckhart, Cusanus, and Boehme—the ghosts in the philosophical machine—Hegel had effectively succeeded in eliminating certain human possibilities that Bataille considers not only important, but revolutionary inasmuch as, escaping the constrictive grid of science, they allow for a representation of the turbulent, often violent aspects of human life. Knowledge for Bataille does not and cannot set us free; to the contrary, the philosopher, far from exposing us to even the possibility of violent eruptions, strives to contain and diminish the explosiveness of raw experience. Poetry, laughter, and ecstasy—each of which exceeds the grasp of consciousness as Hegel represents it—can introduce the fervor that Hegel, in Bataille's reading of him, can only reduce to the cold state of intellection. Thus “the thought of these phantoms,” and to a certain extent that thought alone, can allow for the possibility of “representing the life and revolution of societies” (VE 109; I, 283).

In what way might the unearthing of these phantoms—and the “unleashing” of the “passions” associated with their names—constitute a radical gesture? In subjugating experience to the sole end of knowledge, Hegel emptied the system of what Bataille considered to be the essential part: the accursed or damned part, the heterogeneous remainder that refuses to submit to order and to the rule of the philosopher. Bataille came to identify that heterogeneous element with a number of social phenomena which evince an “effervescence” rigorously excluded from the philosophical systems that purport to describe or explain existence. The mystic's experience is at times taken as exemplary of such effervescence on the grounds that the mystic is, strictly speaking, unable to translate his or her experience into discursive terms. Consequently, the mystic can find no place in any system that relies on the logos as its structuring device, no place, that is, other than as the agitating, disruptive other of the dialectic.

Bataille figured the radical otherness that the terms heterology and heterogeneity suggest in many other ways; in violence, delirium, and madness, for example, as well as in waste matter, trash, and vermin—in everything, in fact, that tends to provoke a profound, ambivalent, and unreconcilable reaction composed of both attraction and repulsion. What these disparate examples of heterogeneity have in common is that, as instances of “unproductive expenditure,” they remain incommensurate with a society dominated by an idea of utility and by the criterion of knowability upon which utility is necessarily predicated. The “effervescence” of mystical effusion is knowable only in a mode of contradiction that is for Hegel the intolerable itself, since to ‘know,’ in Hegel's writings, consists according to Bataille in nothing more than relationality: “To know means: to relate to the unknown, to grasp that an unknown thing is the same as another, known thing” (IE, 108; V, 127). Since the mystic's experience is “born of non-knowledge” and “remains there decidedly” (IE, 3; V, 15), it must forever remain outside the system. The structure of knowledge that would correspond to a heterogeneous reality, composed of elements that are inadmissible to consciousness (it is “identical to the structure of the unconscious,” Bataille remarks) is therefore to be found not in the hyperconsciousness of philosophical thinking but “in the mystical thinking of primitives and in dreams” (“The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” VE, 143; I, 347). The mystic, whose experience is unrelatable—both in the sense of being incompatible with other, knowable experiences and in the sense of being un-narratable, that is, irreducible to the logos—is thus revolutionary because outside the system: the mystic is an outlaw refusing the rule, the Hegelian “law” that experience be available to consciousness and hence expressible. The mystic's experience represents the intoxicated rush that carries a being beyond the confines of discursive knowledge. It exemplifies the shock of the heterogeneous which, translated into action, becomes the “power surge” that “turns a hesitating man into a frenzied being” (“Popular Front in the Street,” VE, 162; I, 403).

Bataille's mystic is therefore a kind of revolutionary dreamer, in two senses; first, in the sense that his or her experience is less the experience of critical consciousness observing external phenomena—or observing itself observing, etc.—than one of experience itself, of experience experiencing itself, as it were, as in a dream. Freud has noted that in dreams “we appear not to think but to experience” (The Interpretation of Dreams, 115), and the mystic knows well that “inward cessation” of reflexive activity that characterizes the dream experience. Second, the mystic is a dreamer in a more political sense: the mystic's vision, which, we might recall, the mystic feels constrained to communicate, becomes an ideal, or a dream. It was the German romantics who first perceived the connection between mysticism and revolution. Schlegel, for example, suggests that the mystic's blind devotion to his lived ideal parallels the fervor of the committed revolutionary. “The few revolutionaries of the Revolution were mystics,” he writes; “They conceived of their essence and deeds as religious” (Literary Aphorisms, 156). We will want to determine the extent to which Bataille's representation of the mystical experience as subversive conforms to this paradigm.

We can at least assert that for Bataille the mystical experience is revolutionary in that it allows an escape from the dreary world of work and project, from that bourgeois world Bataille saw represented in the Phenomenology, in which existence is regulated according to the finite calculations of reason: “Perhaps it suffices,” he writes, “to escape from this enthrallment with operations, which leaves us living in the dependence of an always deferred outcome, in order to recognize simply what the saints perceived: a world not reduced to the measure of our works, [a world] forever unknown, unintelligible and disarming. The obvious relation between pathological and mystical states, which we find not only in the domain of religion, would have to do then with the fact that in every disturbance [dérangment] of our active organization we escape precisely from the reduction of the world to the measure of our calculations” (“Le Mysticisme,” XII, 183-84). What Bataille looks for in the dialectic, and fails to find other than in the form of an orchestrated repression, is the “disturbance” that thwarts the will to system at work within any thinking that posits knowledge as its end. If there is neither poetry nor mysticism in Hegel's world, it is because Hegel, “shrinking from the way of ecstasy,” contrives a world that mirrors the “existing, active, official world” (IE, 110; V, 129), leaving no space for the intrusion of the unknown, the unintelligible, or the disarming. Nothing is disturbed, including and especially Hegel himself. Having devoted himself to discovering the knowledge available to consciousness through “the analytic division of operations,” he never allows to surface in his work the ultimate question, the question of “the emptiness of intelligent questions” (IE, 8; V, 20). It is this question that Bataille raises. At the crowning moment of the system, Hegel, having reached “the summit of positive intelligence,” must face an unforeseen difficulty: “knowing everything,” he must still face the question “which allows human, divine existence to enter … the deepest foray into darkness without return; why must there be what I know? Why is it a necessity?” (IE, 109; V, 128).

“In this question is hidden,” according to Bataille, “an extreme rupture, so deep that only the silence of ecstasy answers it.” The “silence of ecstasy” is the province of the “philosophical phantoms”—Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Jakob Boehme—mystics who knew the impotence of “wanting to know discursively,” and who touched upon an extremity of knowledge which “strikes at the heart of knowledge.” At this limit of knowledge, Bataille located a notion of “life”—life “lived from within, lived to the point of terror” (IE, 9; V, 21)—and a “practice of joy” that affirmed that terror and the “nocturnal spasms” it spreads. As for Hegel: “beyond the slightest doubt […] the fact that he was still alive was simply an aggravation” (HDS [Histoire de rats], 21; XII, 338).

MYSTICISM AND THE VERTIGO OF FREEDOM

“For the Church,” Bataille observes, “the mystical state is far from being necessarily desirable; it can equally be of demonic origin.” “We should never forget,” he continues, “that in this negative path of life we meet first of all with disorder and dupery; excess and extravagance are the rule, so much so that, far from lauding those who thirst after an ineffable revelation, ecclesiastical authority cordons them off and surrounds them with suspicion” (“Le Mysticisme,” XII, 181). Wary of the transports of the mystics, the church knew where its interests lay: the ecstatic state had to be seen to originate in a recognition of God's existence, while its end could only ever be the confirmation of His absolute love. It was in order to contest these “undue limits” (IE, 3; V, 15) and to liberate the excessive, extravagant, and revolutionary aspects of mystical experience from “the ascesis of dogma and the atmosphere of religions” (IE, 169; V, 422) that Bataille felt it necessary to begin Inner Experience with a “Critique of Dogmatic Servitude (and of Mysticism)” (IE, 3; V, 15). The state, mirroring the anxiousness of the church, equally seeks to corral the “excess” and “extravagance” of an experience in which it discerns all too clearly a disruptive, anarchic potential. Both church and state see and fear in the mystic a kind of loner: the ecclesiastics see in the mystic the presumption of one who claims to have arrived at an intimacy with God without passing through the mediation of church doctrine; the state sees someone existing outside of the conventions of society, and indifferent to the social values it seeks to promote. A deviant, whose relation to community, reason, work, usefulness, production, and so forth, remains uncertain, the mystic shares the profile of an outlaw. What is “far from being necessarily desirable,” from both perspectives, is the will to autonomy of the subject in ecstasy: the experience of freedom that the mystic seems to know is in appearance a private and above all a self-arrogated freedom. “Free of ties,” taking as “sole authority” and “sole value” (IE, 6; V, 18) his or her own experience, the mystic is antiauthoritarian, antiestablishment (and, it could probably be shown, antigovernment). Unlike parishioners and citizens, the mystic depends on no external authority for the meeting out of freedom.

This is why the perception of the instant, or inner experience, is for Bataille conceivable only in the context of a “negation of ethics”: ethics, in the sense that Bataille most often understands the term, is a part of the regulatory system maintained—be it by the church, the state, or any other institution—expressly to contain the liberating “power surge” that “turns a hesitating man into a frenzied being” (VE, 162; I, 403). Yet morality—a word which in Bataille's text connotes a sort of ‘moral awareness,’ as opposed to strict adherence to the specific imperatives of an ethical system—although always at odds with the untrammeled experience of the instant, is nonetheless not incompatible with the ecstasy of which Bataille speaks. The morality Bataille has in mind, needless to say, is not the result of the ecstatic subject's sudden awakening, in the sober intervals between swoonings of consciousness, to the need to determine the rightness or wrongness of his modus vivendi. The need to search “feverishly” for a morality is never absent from Bataille's writings, even if this morality must somehow “escape the morality of decline.”²⁹

If the notion of a mystical morality seems vertiginous—including, within its boundaries, not only “evil,” but “laughter” (the first morality ever to have a sense of humor), “non-sense,” and “empty glory”—it is because Bataille's project is to reconcile two contradictory experiences: an experience of the moral—and therefore, inevitably, of rules—and an experience of freedom, which for Bataille can only mean refusing the rule. The only way Bataille can manage to reconcile the two is by making freedom a transgressive experience. This means that freedom for Bataille is not merely an absence of constraint; freedom presupposes prohibitions, and the possibility of violating these prohibitions. Bataille's vision of existence is essentially agonistic; for the author of “Heraclitean Meditation,” the limitless possibilities of “human movement and excitation” can “only be appeased by war” (“The Practice of Joy before Death,” VE, 239; I, 557), and war presupposes an enemy. The enemy is not difficult to detect: it is anything that threatens to arrest the course of “human movement and excitation.” Reason, science, philosophy, theology, ethics, the church, the state, discourse are different incarnations of the enemy in that each serves to restrict the freedom of the subject to follow human possibilities wherever they might lead. “I wanted the experience to lead where it would,” writes Bataille of inner experience, “not to lead it to some end point given in advance” (IE, 3; V, 15). Yet, without the grids and frameworks, the systems and protocols that each of the above-named forces seeks to impose on experience, there would be no possibility of transgression, no war at all. At the conclusion of a reflection on Mann's Doctor Faustus, Bataille argues that Nietzsche was first to recognize “the threatening truth” that “man […] cannot live without rules,” even if he “cannot attain full intensity except by letting go of the rules.” Passions could not be “unleashed” if they were not contained, and the force of inner experience as a notion derives in part from its negative relation to the mechanisms of containment from which it has broken free. Similarly, one cannot lay claim to any experience of the moral unless one has, like Nietzsche, known “the sum of experience,” both the law and its transgression: “[Nietzsche] was not so naive as to think that a life without prohibitions [interdictions] was possible, nor that one could humanly lift prohibitions without venerating them in fright. One deprives freedom of its salt if one ignores its price. Freedom demands a fear, a vertigo of freedom” (“Nietzsche et Thomas Mann,” VIII, 494-95).

The idea of a “vertigo of freedom,” a phrase which serves as the subtitle of the last section of Bataille's essay on Mann and Nietzsche, invites a passionate, demonic reading (indeed, it was Bataille's point in this essay that Mann had misread the “irreducible movement of passions” in Nietzsche). It seems to harken again to the delirious, murderous, vertiginous excesses of Gilles de Rais and of Báthory. Is freedom, for Bataille, inconceivable in the absence of some vertiginous transgression? Is it experienced only in fear and trembling, in the cellars of a fortress, surrounded by blood and death? Jean-Luc Nancy, commenting on Bataille's words on freedom, is led to ask: “Is this how we should think a thought that ‘lets Being be’ and which is necessarily the thinking of being's being-free—as free in ‘fury’ as it is in ‘grace’?” “To what extent,” continues Nancy, “do we not yield to a fascination for the ‘vertigo’ or ‘abyss’ of freedom, which leads in turn to a fascination with the evil that engulfs and repulses (and, at bottom, to a way of being tempted or attempting to bear the unbearable, which does not mean tolerating or defending it, but which despite everything implies entering into a strange and somber relation with its positivity)?” (The Experience of Freedom, 132-33).

These are reasonable questions (and the fact that Bataille has mounted a massive assault on Reason in all its forms does not lessen their pertinence). We might make two points, however, about evil in Bataille's text. If evil in Bataille's text is envisaged in its “positivity,” if it can appear to be a value to which all others are subordinated, this is the consequence of Bataille's profoundly Christian—and profoundly perverse—notion of sin and crime. Bataille is fascinated with evil in the manner of the Christian contemplating the forbidden fruit. Especially in his later writings on eroticism, he stresses the complicity between Christianity and what Christianity condemned (Satanism, libertinism, eroticism, etc.), a complicity of which the act of condemnation itself is the sign and the seal. The movement of condemnation always has a “counterpart”: “it was through condemnation that Christianity itself attained to a burning value [la valeur brûlante]” (TE, 80 tm; X, 614). Evil as a concept in Bataille's texts oscillates between a positive and negative value: as critical as he might be of Christianity's negation of “pleasures of the moment,” Bataille nonetheless must recognize that the condemnation is constitutive of the possibility of pleasure.

In this respect, Bataille once again repeats the experience of Nietzsche, who, “in order to keep for his object the appeal of the forbidden fruit,” “had to recognize the profound meaning, the human meaning of prohibition” (“Nietzsche et Thomas Mann,” VIII, 494). Bataille believes in sin and guilt, in crime and punishment, in transgression as a prelude to “the gift of an infinite suffering” (“The Practice of Joy before Death,” VE, 239; I, 557). At the same time, his notion of evil is not limited to the guilty, anguished pleasures it affords. Evil is also, according to On Nietzsche, connected to morality, and is so because it is an experience of freedom. Yet again, this seems to suggest a negative freedom, free only to transgress against the will of another, against the authority represented, ultimately, by God. Nietzsche knew—and pointed out, although it is sometimes overlooked—that “God is dead” does not mean God is absent. God—“the being of prohibition” [l'être de l'interdit] (“Nietzsche et Thomas Mann,” VIII, 494)—is everywhere at work, and the only weapon we have in the struggle against his authority is “disobedience of the rule” [la désobéissance à la règle] (VIII, 491), which extends to the possibilities offered by evil.

From this perspective, Bataille is to be situated in the tradition—that he himself begins to sketch in the essay on Nietzsche and Mann—of authors who addressed their words only to God, but only in order “to render more perfect the crime against the law (against God).” The “crime” in question is that of asserting “the irreducibility of man to calculation,” and the intent of the crime to “effect the ‘death of God.’” For Baudelaire, Bataille suggests, the matter had been simpler: content to leave intact “the authority of a divine and paternal world,” all he had to do was “sin and be guilty” (VIII, 493-94). Affirming evil as an “error” deserving of “condemnation,” Baudelaire “leaves the last word to the negative value of the prohibition.” Nietzsche wanted to go further: “he wanted the unlimited and irremediable violation that the fact of immolating God to nothingness accomplishes” (VIII, 494). Yet it is true that Bataille—who would like to align himself with Nietzsche rather than with Baudelaire—and even Nietzsche himself, in wishing to challenge the authority behind the prohibition, had difficulty articulating a position that did not, at the same time, respect the paradigm of sin and condemnation that afforded Baudelaire his “furtive sin,” a position that did not “follow the rules”—rules laid down by God, by the Father—even in the desire to violate them “irremediably.” Ultimately, what Bataille says Nietzsche said of himself might apply equally well to Bataille: “Thus we can see in Nietzsche's immoralism what he himself saw in it: a hyperchristianism” (VIII, 671).

This does not answer Nancy's questions. But we might further point out that, at least at certain moments, Bataille conceived of disobedience as a primarily textual act. “The good is the total awakening of being to evil,” he writes in the plans for The Sanctity of Evil, adding quickly: “this in no way means doing evil” (VIII, 637). If, on one level, Bataille's “fascination with evil” seems indeed oddly literal, it also stems from a belief in the significance and the necessity of representing evil. Bataille, as I think we have seen, is not a traditional moralist, and he has nothing but contempt for the weak forms of liberal humanism that littered the intellectual scene in the thirties and forties. Yet, alongside his discourse on evil, which is always close to becoming a discourse of evil, he reserves the right to draw a distinction between fictive violence—that represented by de Sade—and evil “in the world.” If de Sade is “the man who rendered the greatest service to humanity” (E, 179; X, 178) it is not because he committed the evil deeds he describes, but because he represented these acts: “We are not bound to translate into the world of possibilities [rendre au monde de la possibilité] what a fiction alone allowed [Sade] to envisage” (E, 175 tm; X, 174). If we were to do so, judgment would be swift and certain: “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” (E, 183; X, 182). The same goes for Gilles: “There could be no question of admiring the wretch, or of pitying him” (GR, 41; X, 317). But nor can we ignore the reality, for consciousness, of what evil signifies in the world. The evil that is spread by pretending that man is not evil—by “going into hiding”—is the lie against which Bataille, in his final work, takes aim: “I write these desolate phrases in a state of mind quite the opposite of the delirious sang-froid that the name Erzébet Báthory calls up. It is not a question of remorse, nor a rage of desire, as it was in Sade's mind. It concerns opening consciousness to the representation of what man really is. Faced with this representation, Christianity went into hiding. Beyond a doubt, mankind as a whole must forever remain in hiding, but human consciousness—in pride and humility, with passion and in trembling—must be open to the zenith of horror” (TE, 140; X, 619-20).

It is a matter, then, of avowing the ambiguous attraction-repulsion that the spectacle of immense crimes provokes in us. Bataille's interest does not lie in “defending the indefensible,” but in revealing and in understanding “the permanent taste of the crowd for the spectacle of death.”³⁰ The representation of crime and evil, to which Bataille devotes so many pages, aims to bring humanity out of hiding, and to oblige it to recognize that “violence belongs to humanity as a whole” (E, 186; X, 185).

Bataille is not entirely without convictions, even remarkably humanist ones. He is not unwilling, on one occasion at least, to offer up a “truth of experience” (vérité d'expérience), even if to do so involves expressing himself “crudely.” “Initial Postulate,” a brief essay published in 1947, attempts to articulate the premise for a “new discipline,” a “new mode of thought and behavior” that will focus on an aspect of existence that existing branches of knowledge have been unable to take into account, namely, “the perception of the instant.” This “new discipline” presupposes the following “truth of experience,” from which three important consequences or “postulates” are then derived:

I can, as a truth of experience, crudely put forward this proposition: If, at a given moment, I elude my concern for the next moment (and equally all those that follow after):

—in the realm of aesthetics I reach the purest form of ecstasy (which justifies well-known descriptions of it: conflagrations, excessive joy);

—I place in the realm of aesthetics the only value which is subordinate to nothing else […]

—in the realm of knowledge (by definition) I interrupt the development of the possibilities of knowing by clear distinctions.

(AM, 91; XI, 231)³¹

In spite of what looks like a Nietzschean subordination of ethics to aesthetics, the perception of the instant, Bataille claims, “is aimed at neither goodness nor beauty, neither truth nor God, but an immediate, which has no need of processes that are connected to moral, aesthetic, scientific or religious research.” Such perceptions, Bataille insists, “do not allow themselves to be reduced to aesthetics or ethics.” Devised in order to recognize a moment of experience in which “concern with the future” is not operative—which distinguishes it from “the common feelings of beauty, pleasure, ugliness, pain, tragedy, comedy [and] anguish,” in which “concern for the future retains first place”—Bataille's “new discipline” will be at once “logical and alogical, ethical and immoral, aesthetic and the negation of the aesthetic.”

Bataille's “new discipline” aims to consider what he calls “the complete man,” or “the entire being” (l'être entier), which, according to the text, “has no other end than itself and cannot surpass the instant.” Philosophy has never managed to represent this “complete” man. As a ‘critical’ activity—in the sense that Kant gives to this word, and which Bataille evokes when he speaks of “the analytic division of operations”—philosophy, concerned with the analysis of “action extended into time,” has been unable or unwilling to account for that part of being which, in its “immediacy,” eludes the grasp of concepts; distilling experience into various distinct categories of knowledge, it has had to neglect the fleeting, ungraspable “significance of the present moment,” in which thought is suspended. This partiality represents philosophy's crucial failing, and it derives from an error that neither a singer nor, for that matter, a pastry cook would ever make. For whereas “a pastrycook or a singer cannot claim to be a ‘complete man’ as a pastrycook or a singer,” the philosopher, confusing his own “specialized activity”—the pursuit of knowledge and “clear distinctions”—with “the totality of being,” imagines that he is “complete” by virtue of the professional activity that he practices. “To the extent that the philosopher wants to be a ‘complete man,’” writes Bataille, “he wants to be so as a philosopher.” But there is more to life, Bataille contends, than what is represented of it in any philosophy that “reduce[s] the world to thought.” The philosopher's only chance of being a “complete man,” according to Bataille, occurs when, laying down his “miserable instrument,” abandoning his “ridiculous attitude” and his “miserable calculations,” he allows himself to become “lost in the immediate.” The philosopher, in short, in his relentless and single-minded desire to know, has left no space in his “framework” to accommodate the most basic of human experiences—the immediate, “in which we live without ever recognizing it.”

It is difficult not to notice that Bataille's “new discipline” is almost identical to the “new way of thinking” he announced some years earlier at the outset of Inner Experience (IE, 9; V, 21). Inner experience, it was claimed, would “unify that which discursive thought must separate,” effecting the “fusion” of the logical, moral, and aesthetic operations that philosophic discourse must treat as discrete. In both texts, Inner Experience and “Initial Postulate,” Bataille is protesting against the undue privilege that philosophy accords to the processes of intellection, and most especially against the consequent separation of emotion and knowledge: he is seeking to find, in the language of Inner Experience, that elusive “field of coincidences” between “discursive knowledge” and “a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge” (IE, xxxiii; V, 11). But there is a significant shift of emphasis between the two texts. Whereas Inner Experience tends to stress the description of the experience itself and its difference vis-à-vis other notions of experience (its relation to the experiences of Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the mystics, etc.), “Initial Postulate” is more concerned with the relation between the immediate and the notions of “ethics” and “duty.” This relation seems to be almost entirely negative. In a footnote, Bataille acknowledges that the “free madness of the immediate” which characterizes the experience of the instant “is reached only through a negation of ethics.” This “negation of ethics” is envisaged in Kierkegaardian terms, as a suspension of judgment. In what reads like a kind of memorandum to himself, Bataille reminds himself that to “live”—in the emphatic sense invoked in Inner Experience: “one must live the experience” (IE, 8; V, 21)—implies a forgetting of “duty”: “I must […] without the shadow of duty, and without any reason […] live erotically, comically, poetically, tragically, ecstatically.” The closing words of the essay reiterate the idea that to live “ecstatically” means not to know one's duty: “I am free, powerless, and I will die: in every sense I do not know the limits of duty [j'ignore dans tous les sens les limites du devoir].”

Introducing a perspective that “avoids reducing the world to thought,” the “perception of the instant” necessarily “ignores” duty, its limits and its limitations, in the interests of furthering “life.” As a moment of experience in which the calculative operations of the intellect are in check (“in which we live without ever recognizing it”), such a concept cannot include an ethical component because, by definition, the consciousness that issues the “call” to the ethical—the “call of conscience,” as Heidegger puts it—has to be shut out if the instant is to be “lived.” Thus the poorly named “perception of the instant” is not only “external to philosophy,” whose clumsy apparatus reduces it to some form of knowledge, it is in fact incompatible with consciousness altogether: “Consciousness is never sovereign: to be sovereign, it would have to occur in the instant. But the instant remains outside, short of, or beyond all knowledge. We know nothing absolutely about the instant” (S [Sovereignty], 202; VIII, 253). Unless one allows for something on the order of an unconscious ethics, the instant must be considered also “outside, short of, or beyond” all ethics.

This is one possible reading of Bataille's “negation of ethics.” Rather crude but not illegitimate, this reading sees Bataille edging closer and closer to an ‘ethics of the instant,’ which to many means no ethics at all. No ethics can be brought to bear on something about which “we know nothing.” What kind of life would a subject, living “ecstatically,” live? Along with Sartre, we might wonder if such a subject, ignorant of the limits of duty, would be able to distinguish between violating human beings and “drinking a cup of coffee” (“Discussion sur le péché,” VI, 343).

THE REASONS FOR WRITING A BOOK

People with moral standards naively think of me as wild.

—Guilty

“The unleashing of passions” (le déchaînement des passions) is the phrase that Bataille came to prefer in the 1940s to designate the free expression of impulses opposed to the calculations of reason. It reprises one of the basic themes of his earliest essays, namely, the opposition between materialism and idealism, an opposition Bataille devoted himself to challenging throughout the late 1920s and '30s. Testing and contesting “the constraints of idealism,” Bataille delighted in countering the prevailing emphasis on the refined, the elevated, and the cerebral with provocative, sensual, earthy images—the corolla of flowers, big toes and corns, a shit stain, a gibbon's anus. In “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” for example, Bataille tries to illustrate “the helplessness of superior principles” by arguing that the practices of a sect of licentious Gnostics are irreducible to “the great ontological machines resulting from [ideal human] aspirations” (VE, 48-51; I, 224-25); in “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist,” which sets out to destabilize the “magnificent Icarian pose,” Bataille offers up “the putrescence of organic matter” as a challenge to “all forms of spiritual elevation” (VE, 39, 36; II, 103, 98); in “The Academic Horse,” he contrasts the wild, “barbarous deformations” that characterize the depiction of horses made by the Gauls—“who calculated nothing”—with that made by the Greeks, who made of the horse “one of the most accomplished expressions of the idea” (I, 159-63). The “unleashing of passions,” similarly opposed to idealism and intellectualism in any form, has as its ancestor the “raw phenomena” to which Bataille refers in his essay “Materialism,” published in 1929: “When the word materialism is used, it is time to designate the direct interpretation, excluding all idealism, of raw phenomena” (VE, 16; I, 180).

It is fairly obvious that Bataille attempted to counter the “higher ethereal values” (“The ‘Old Mole,’” VE, 39; II, 103) of idealist philosophies by articulating a base or, to borrow Breton's not inappropriate epithet, “excremental” philosophy composed of matter retrieved from the “heterogeneous” realm. Bataille unleashes “raw phenomena” like so many projectiles in the faces of the bien pensants, whose attachment to idealism, he believes, only serves to shore up the bourgeois order they purported to critique. Yet there is an apparent difference between the kind of “unleashing” of which Bataille speaks in the thirties and the “unleashing of passions” he evokes in the later essay “Evil in Platonism and Sadism.” When Bataille speaks of déchaînement in the essays from the prewar years, it is in the context of class struggle, as for example in “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933), where “the unprecedented unleashing of class struggle” [le déchaînement inouï de la lutte des classes] is heralded as “the grandest form of social expenditure” (VE, 125-26 tm; I, 314-16). The word operates here within a lexicon that Bataille in part lifted from his readings of Marx or else concocted for himself, mixing orthodox terminology with phrasings of his own. Déchaînement in the thirties is an integral part of a theory of revolution: it is linked to the violent overthrow of the bourgeois order by the workers, and to “the direct and violent drives which […] can contribute to the surge of power that will liberate men from the absurd swindlers who lead them” (“Popular Front in the Street,” VE, 162-66; I, 403). By contrast, the “unleashing of passions” of the later period seems couched in a different stratum of discourse: rather than evoking the collective revolt of the underclass, it is often associated with the violent acts of aristocratic individuals—Gilles de Rais or Erzébet Báthory, for example.

Did Bataille retreat from the model of class struggle which animates his early texts? In the postwar era, could he affirm, and sign his name to, as he had done in 1935, the twelfth of the “Positions of the Union on Essential Points”: “Our cause is that of the workers and the peasants” (I, 381)? There is some merit to the thesis, outlined by J. Pierrot, that Bataille's political attitude up to the time of the Somme athéologique underwent an “evolution.” According to Pierrot, let us recall, Bataille, emerging from an early “apparent indifference” to politics, committed himself in the 1930s to the politics of the extreme left, a commitment which reached it apogee during the period of Contre-Attaque (1935-1936). When the Left acceded to power in 1936, Bataille “seems very quickly to have turned about-face, and to have shown a greater and greater disinterest both in relation to politics and to the idea of a direction intervention in collective life” (“Georges Bataille et la politique,” 155). By the time war broke out, or shortly thereafter, Bataille had entered into what Pierrot terms “an almost complete disengagement,” with “political action giving way […] to mystical experience” (139). Pierrot has no difficulty finding signs of Bataille's “swift disaffection” with politics in the late thirties. (The epigraph from Kierkegaard, recalled earlier, which Bataille placed at the head of his article “The Sacred Conspiracy,” published in the first issue of Acéphale in June of 1936, seems to confirm the movement Pierrot describes: “What looked like politics, and imagined itself to be politics, will one day be unmasked as religious” [VE, 178 tm; I, 442].) When we read that Bataille affirmed, before the members of the College of Sociology in 1938, that “political agitation represents a precarious form of movement and, for all that, almost entirely deceptive” (CS, 133; II, 343), we might indeed discern a shift away from the “appeal to direct action” that characterizes such essays from the Contre-Attaque period as “Popular Front in the Street” (1936).³²

Bataille certainly came to see the possibility of social revolution as dependent upon smaller and smaller units. Less and less confident in the notion of collective resistance, he increasingly asserted the political viability of the erotic couple (“The world of lovers is no less true than that of politics” [“The Sorcerer's Apprentice,” VE, 229; I, 532]) and of the individual. Pierrot is right to point out that the traces of a profound individualism become more and more marked in Bataille's writings as the war approaches. Writing under the influence of Nietzsche, and in the wake of the collapse of the numerous experimental communities he had attempted to establish (Contre-Attaque, Acéphale, and the College of Sociology), Bataille begins to emphasize the historical role of exceptional individuals, denouncing the “loi du grand nombre” and insisting that “only individuals carry in their particular destiny the inexorable integrity of life” (II, 352). Yet the idea that mystical experience—associated with individualism and political inaction (the vita contemplativa)—simply supplanted his former political commitment is questionable. What thwarts such a neat tracing of successive stages in Bataille's political attitude is the role mystical experience played in some of his earliest texts, where it is explicitly associated with the possibility of revolution. The politically committed Bataille, the one whose tireless assault on bourgeois values is marked by a certain optimism, saw in mystical experience a potentially useful model for political action. Around the time of the outbreak of war, for personal as well as for intellectual reasons, Bataille began to think differently about the question of political action; his personal sense of the mystical was nonetheless intimately related to questions of politics and morality, and the kind of fervor—the explosive passion—it released was not in his mind distinct from the revolutionary turmoil he tried to foment. The decisive influence of Nietzsche's work, which “as of 1936,” Pierrot argues, “oriented [Bataille] toward aristocratic individualism and the inner life” (156), was for Bataille a way of approaching the essence of the moral and political questions he had been asking throughout the great communitarian moment of the mid and late thirties.³³

Moreover, Bataille's later works, specifically those published in the post-war period—when, as Jean Piel remarks, Bataille embarked upon “the search to put his thought in step with the world” (“Bataille and the World,” 98)—reveal the continuity of his preoccupation with the mystical experience, as well as his sense that certain crucial forms of exchange in societies past and present are founded in the kind of energies released only in the intense inner experience he described in the war years. His analyses of potlatch, of the gift, of Aztec sacrifice, and of the Marshall Plan, far from representing an abandonment of the mysticism that characterizes his earlier thought, represent attempts to find in the world of history and, in one case (the Marshall Plan), in contemporary events a corollary or even a confirmation of the theories he had arrived at experientially. As a social and political commentator, Bataille was, by his own admission, highly unorthodox in his approach both to “historical data” and “present data.” In The Accursed Share, at the conclusion of his analysis of the Marshall Plan, he writes in a footnote: “It will be said that only a madman could perceive such things in the Marshall and Truman plans. I am that madman” (Consumption, 197n; VII, 179). By “madman” he meant “mystic”: this lengthy economic treatise is written, he comments in the same note, “in the line of mystics of all times.” In other words Bataille's economic theory is deeply indebted to his understanding of aspects of the mystical literature, and takes up ideas he found expressed there. The revolutionary aspect of his analysis—where he proposes “a true Copernican transformation” of basic economic concepts and “a reversal of thinking—and of ethics” (Consumption, 25; VII, 33)—lies precisely in the mystical dimension of his theory.³⁴

What Bataille perceived, and celebrated, in the Marshall Plan, was the “sudden passage” from “the primacy of isolated interest to that of general interest”; the Marshall Plan, as a “means external to capitalism of raising the standard of living,” represents for him nothing less than “a profound negation of capitalism” (a negation of the rule of profit), and an “expenditure that would not be compensated by any capitalist profit.” Bataille's argument in The Accursed Share appears therefore to be largely an application of his theory of dépense (non-productive expenditure) to the question of global economic interests, an extension of his thinking of the inner and mystical experiences from which the theory of dépense derives. It is easy, with hindsight, to consider Bataille's analysis of the Marshall Plan naive; the purpose and outcome of the Plan, as was always intended, was to rehabilitate the economies of Europe in order to guarantee clients for the United States' enormous (“explosive” in Bataille's words) surplus of goods. But Bataille's point is that this outcome could not reasonably have been predicted with any certainty at the time the plan was inaugurated in 1947. As much as historical circumstance played a part in Truman's decision to fund Europe, and as much as the plan was born of the perceived need to prevent the spread of communism, the parameters of the European recovery program massively exceeded whatever political impetus lay at its origin. In short, the Marshall Plan represented a shift from a restricted to a general economy, and as such it recognized, on an unprecedentedly grand scale, what for Bataille was a fundamental truth about mankind: Truman's economic policy seemed to him to confirm that “mankind is […] a manifold opening of the possibilities of growth and an infinite capacity for wasteful consumption” (181).³⁵

The convergence Bataille sought between the mystical and the political, in the essays of the thirties, in the Somme athéologique, and in The Accursed Share, tended to arouse suspicion. He certainly did not share the profile of the committed thinker of the times: few of his contemporaries could affirm, easily and unequivocally, that Bataille was a brother, a comrade, “one of us.” If he was a revolutionary, it was more than possible that he was so for all the wrong reasons: cultivating the undirected élan of the ecstatic, promoting disorder as an end in itself, he no doubt looked like some eccentric and slightly frightening proponent of an essentially apolitical, amoral revolution, detached from the real concerns of the oppressed and valued only for the “state of excitation” (I, 372) it might happen to bring about or the “stimulant to the imagination” (II, 392) it might provide.³⁶ Bataille's valuation of “ecstasy, drunkenness, erotic effusiveness, laughter, the effusiveness of sacrifice, poetic effusiveness” (MM, V, 218) lacked the purposiveness as well as the high moral seriousness of the revolutionary spirit. The intent of Sartre's review of Inner Experience was to suggest that Bataille's thinking fell outside or short of serious political as well as philosophical reflection: Bataille was too preoccupied with himself, too concerned with showing his “ulcers” and his “wounds” to be of much use to the cause. In an even more direct assault on Bataille's individualism, Nicolas Calas argued that the author of Inner Experience had not managed to overcome a stage of “shrunken individualism.” Noting the mystic's “arrogant dismissal of the external” and indifference to “ethical problems,” Calas, who was writing in defense of Surrealism, concludes that Bataille's “extreme egocentrism” is “from a moral stand […] unjustifiable” (“Acephalic Mysticism,” 11). Ultimately, Calas shares Sartre's views that the man is more interesting than the ideas he presents, ideas which, for Sartre, are philosophically wrong, for Calas “both philosophically and ethically incorrect” (10). In the end, both agree that any merit attaching to Bataille's works lies not in the realm of ideas but rather, for Sartre, in a certain lyricism, for Calas, in their “deep poetic value.”

The notion that Bataille's mysticism, and the tendency to “aestheticism” (to use Calas's word) to which it leads, is itself a proof of political fecklessness has had a lasting effect on the reception of Bataille's work. As Jean-Michel Besnier has argued, Bataille continues to be viewed as “an irresponsible thinker,” as “a man who didn't think of changing the world or formulating regulatory ideals” (“The Emotive Intellectual,” 12). Among the arguments advanced in the attempt to disqualify Bataille as an intellectual, Besnier notes, is the one that posits that Bataille “would propose a desertion of history in favor of ‘an ecstatic swoon.’” Responding to the accusation, Besnier is able to show how Bataille's thought represents a challenge to the way the intellectual was then defined. Citing a letter to Roger Caillois in which Bataille rejects any conception of the intellectual that would require renouncing his espousal of existence in its totality, Besnier argues that Bataille consistently “refused to let the theme of Sartrean engagement to be imposed upon him.” Bataille abhors the idea of an intellectual agenda or program; his overall “refusal of servility” conditioned a contempt for ‘committed’ literature as intense as his distaste for the propaganda of the Fascists. Like the morality he advocated, Bataille felt it imperative that in approaching writing he remain “detached from any end to serve” (Memorandum, VI, 259).

Resisting littérature engagée, Bataille is moreover generally ambivalent about his “project to write” (V, 473). “Insistent upon totality” (CS, 357), Bataille at times—especially during the actual moment of composition—saw in writing a sacrifice of experience to “verbal servilities” (IE, 15; V, 27). Writing, as Bataille experienced it, is a chore, a task, a job, a burden. One is reminded of the deprecatory reference, early in Inner Experience, to the “laudable concern for creating a book” (IE, xxxi; V, 10), a “burden” that the author “drags along” inside him (IE, 60; V, 75). The effect of writing is to induce a “drowsy slowness,” an exhaustion brought on by the constant and excessive “attention always given to words” (IE, 16; V, 29) that the procedure of writing involves and which Bataille's books, paradoxically—even absurdly—hoped to contest.

To attempt to account for the multiplicity of factors that determine what prompts an author to write would be a mammoth and perhaps impossible task. In Bataille's case, one could construct a dozen interlocking theories—emphasizing the political, moral, scholarly, psychological, social, aesthetic, and especially the mystical impulses that all undeniably enter into play in his relation to writing—as to why he obstinately refused to quit this irksome “job” (besogne) (IE, 38; V, 51). The primary reason Bataille writes—fiction, essays, books, commentaries, poetry—is because he is convinced—and the conviction is decidedly moral in nature—of the urgent and imperative need to alter the existing state of social relations. “The reasons for writing a book,” Bataille writes, “can be traced back to the desire to modify the relations that exist between a man and his fellow-beings” (RW [“The Reasons for Writing a Book”], 11; II, 143). If Bataille, this reluctant author perpetually on the verge of giving up (out of fatigue and exhaustion, out of the desire to live life rather than describe it, out of disgust, out of a sense of the intolerable contradiction of the act, etc.), did not succumb “before the end,” if he remained in his own way “committed” to writing, it is because he wrote, at all times, out of a sense of social conscience, even out of moral outrage, and out of what “The Reasons for Writing a Book” terms “a hatred of authority that does not accept the possibility of defeat.”

The reason these relations need to be altered can be deduced from a reading of any one of Bataille's texts, each of which expresses, more or less explicitly and in various different formulations, a fundamentally unchanging animus. But it is perhaps nowhere more clearly stated than in the 1948 lecture “The Problems of Surrealism”:

It seems to me that no matter what the difficulties, the movement of minds converges: there is on all sides … a ferment which promises man a return to a so much freer life, to a so much prouder life, a life which could be called wild. There is within today's man a profound intolerance for the sense of humiliation which is demanded every day of our human nature and to which we submit everywhere: we submit in the office and in the street; we submit in the country. Everywhere men feel that human nature has been profoundly humiliated, and what is left of religion finally humiliates him in the face of God who, after all, is merely a hypostasis of work. I do not think that one could dream of denying this nostalgia … it is the nostalgia for a life which ceases to be humiliated; it is the nostalgia for a life which ceases to be separated from what lies behind the world. It is not a question of finding behind the world something which dominates it; there is nothing behind the world which dominates man, there is nothing that can humiliate him; behind the world, behind the poverty in which we live, behind the precise limits where we live, there is only a universe whose bursting open is incomparable, and behind this universe there is nothing.

(AM, 82-83; VII, 395)

“Work”—the “world of work,” that is, the modern, Christian-industrial world in which the “primacy of work” has been so “decisive” (TE, 61, 79; X, 604, 612)—lies at the origin of “the poverty in which we live”; the dominion of work equals a life of servility, submission, and humiliation. It would not be incorrect to say that Bataille, following Marx, wrote precisely in order to “change the world”: what brings him back to the writing table again and again is the obligation to challenge the forces that would reduce human existence “to the measure of our works” (“Le Mysticisme,” XII, 183), to change the conditions that permit such an abasement of existence, and to try to reclaim for a humiliated subject the sovereignty of which it is every day robbed. Whenever Bataille affirms mystical or inner experience, or the “unleashing of passions,” or ecstasy, he is thinking of—or better: he is passionately feeling, to the point of trembling with rage—the “atrocious poverty” (atroce misère) into which human relations have fallen. As they stand, these relations are quite simply “unacceptable” (RW, 11 tm; II, 143).

The author of Inner Experience and Guilty, books whose emphasis on interiority can easily be misunderstood as an assertion of individualism, is thus concerned, passionately and uniquely, with the social bond; the appalling spectacle of social dissolution is what prompts him to speak out. The drive to “combat” and “counter attack” the forces of oppression is not limited to the period in the thirties when Bataille was publishing radical articles in the journals so named. Inner experience, mysticism, ecstasy, evil, and eroticism are all forms of resistance, ways of overcoming the hegemony of a world regulated according to project, thought, discourse, work. So profound is his sense of the humiliation of the modern subject that Bataille sees it as equivalent to a privation of being, to which the only antidote is a furious unleashing: “To be, in the strong sense,” he writes, “is not in fact to contemplate (passively), nor is it to act (if by acting we give up free behavior in view of ulterior results), but it is precisely to let oneself go [se déchaîner]” (“L'amitié de l'homme et de la bête,” XI, 168). (“Se déchaîner”: to release oneself, to unleash oneself, to unchain oneself—is there in Bataille's repeated use of this word an implicit reference to Rousseau? In the passage quoted above, man is certainly seen to be “everywhere in chains.”)

In ecstasy, Bataille valued above all a state of riotous insubordination. Yet at odds with the imperative to write is Bataille's sense of the “impotence” of writing, of the “foolishness of every sentence” [sottise de toute phrase] (IE, 36; V, 49) and of “the emptiness of the intelligent questions” (IE, 8; V, 20) in which writing inevitably engages an author. “Writing is powerless” [L'écriture est impuissante] (“The Problems of Surrealism,” AM, 97; VII, 454), he writes. The reasons for writing a book cannot lie in the expectation that the stated goal of modifying existing social relations will be achieved. Referring to the “atrocious poverty” of these relations, Bataille writes: “Yet as I wrote this book I became conscious that it was powerless to remedy this poverty” [qu'il était impuissant à régler le compte de cette misère] (RW, 11; II, 143).³⁷ Still, that the possibility of effecting change through writing should be conceived only in terms of writing's “powerlessness” or “impotence” does not cancel out what writing can contribute in terms of meaningful social intervention. Impotence, according to Inner Experience, is opposed to the arrogance of an author's “concern for sufficiency,” a concern of which Bataille states, in a remark that reveals the profound ambivalence of his relation to writing, that “[he hates] at the same time the impotence and a measure of the intention” (IE, xxxii; V, 10-11). In other words, Bataille hates his text to the extent that it intends to achieve a goal, fulfill a purpose, prove a point, etc., while at the same time he hates its impotence to do so. Thus if writing is to be “an act of insubordination,” or even “a sovereign act,” the writer “must first abandon the concerns of the man of letters” who “writes in order to create a book with a given intent” (“The Surrealist Religion,” AM, 76; VII, 388).

All of which is a way of saying that writing is impossible to justify. “My reason for writing is to reach B.,” writes Bataille in The Impossible (I, 25; III, 114). “To reach B.”: in other words, to escape from A., to reach a beyond of A., the point of departure, the Self, the Author, the “I.” ‘I’, if it is not the Rimbaldian “other,” is the enemy; ‘I’ is the composed and complacent Subject competent to write a book adequate to its experience of the world. To reach the other, one must “annihilate” the “I” (IE, 116; V, 136) by writing, whilst knowing that writing knows only how to protect and fortify the ‘I’ it inscribes. If the “impossible” is in fact “infinite awareness of impotence” (I, 79; III, 154), then impotence is consciousness that writing is not a remedy, a cure, or a redemption, but a dawning “that my wound is incurable” (I, 24 tm; III, 113), that “I never have any means of reaching B.” (I, 45; III, 128). To reach B.—solution, answer, end, point, grail (“a quest for the Grail of chance” [ON, xxv; VI, 17])—would be to imagine that a remedy were possible. Writing, and thought and existence, are too slippery to settle in this way. Writing is an escapade rather than an escape, an adventure rather than a venture: “I escape from myself and my book escapes from me” (IE, 57; V, 72). And writing is delicious deferral, promising the greatest pleasure: “B's nakedness, will you deliver me from anguish? But no … give me more anguish …” (I, 29; III, 117).

Notes

1. Cf. Jaspers, Philosophy, 317. (Bataille borrowed the three volumes of Jaspers' Philosophie from the Bibliothèque Nationale on 16 September 1941; see XII, 617.)

2. See Allan Stoekl's preface to Yale French Studies 78 (“On Bataille”), 2.

3. The sine qua non of morality lies in the “duration” that allows for decision by introducing a temporalization of the moment that Bataille will elsewhere oppose to the sacred world of intimacy: “Morality lays down rules that follow universally from the nature of the profane world, that ensure the duration without which there can be no operation. It is therefore opposed to the scale of values of the intimate order, which placed the highest value on that whose meaning is given in the moment” (TR, 70; VII, 325).

4. See IE, 81 tm; V, 96: “Existence is a tumult which celebrates itself, wherein fever and ruptures are linked to intoxication. The Hegelian collapse, the finished, profane nature of a philosophy whose movement was its principle, stem from the rejection, in Hegel's life, of everything which could seem to be sacred intoxication. Not that Hegel was ‘wrong’ to dismiss the lax concessions to which vague minds resorted in his time. But by confusing work (discursive thought, project) with existence, he reduces the world to the profane world; he negates the sacred world (communication).”

5. See Arkady Plotnisky, “The Maze of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, and Kant.” Plotnisky's major study of Bataille is in In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious. See also Geoffrey Bennington's “Introduction to Economics I,” which considers Bataille notion of economy in relation to Kant's political writings (with an excellent excursus on de Selby's theory of sphericity).

6. See for example the typically brief allusions to Kant in the course of a discussion of Caillois in “La guerre et la philosophie du sacré” (XII, 53), and again in an essay on Camus, “Le temps de la révolte” (XII, 163). Plotnisky cites and reads the “coupling of Kant and Hegel” in the following sentence in Bataille's essay “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme (Superman) and Surrealist”: “It was necessary to endow antinomies in general with a mechanical and abstract character, as in Kant and Hegel.” In Inner Experience, Kant appears, but only to be quickly expelled: “And now: faced with a statement of Kantian morality (Act as if …), with a reproach formulated in the name of the statement, with an act, or failing an act, a desire, bad conscience, we can, far from venerating, look at the mouse in the cat's paws: ‘You wanted to be everything; the fraud discovered, you will serve as a toy for us’” (IE, 25; V, 38).

7. On the motif of equivocation and its political significance in the reception of Bataille's work, see Denis Hollier, “On Equivocation (Between Literature and Politics).”

8. The analogy with the fly and the child point to Bataille's desire to move beyond a strictly human definition of the subject. Francis Marmande makes some suggestive remarks on Bataille's discourse on animality in “Puerta de la carne.”

9. See letter from Bataille to Lo Duca, 24 July 1959 (TE, 10; X, 717). We might note that Bataille was sensitive to the “sexual excitement” of burglary (cf. E, 196; X, 194), recommending that a separate entry be reserved in the dictionary for “cambriolage” (breaking and entering, as we say in English). There is no reference to Heirens in the final draft of The Tears of Eros, although Bataille had asked Lo Duca to write to America for photographs of the young criminal, who had been apprehended in 1946. If he fails to appear in The Tears of Eros, Heirens made it to Joliet State Penitentiary in Illinois, and even shows up in The Almanac of World Crime, which mentions, in a psychologistic but nevertheless rather Bataillean way, that in committing his bloody murders this young man was “outside of himself.” When caught and charged with the murder of the six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, Heirens insisted that the police had the wrong man, maintaining even in prison parole hearings that “George did it all” and that “George is a bad boy.” Judged unstable, he avoided the death penalty. George is apparently a reference to his alter ego, George Murman (= Mur-der-man). See Jay Robert Nash, Almanac of World Crime, 142 and 220. See also Lucy Freeman, Before I Kill More … (The title refers to a message Heirens scrawled on the bathroom mirror of one of his victim's apartments: “For heaven's sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”)

10. Cited in Surya, La Mort à l'œuvre, 410.

11. “A choice between opposing representations must be linked to the inconceivable solution to the problem of that which exists: what exists as profound existence liberated from the forms of appearance? Most often the hasty and ill-considered answer is given as if the question what is there that is imperative? (what is the moral value) and not what exists? had been posed” (VE, 131; I, 90).

12. With regard to Bataille's religious formation, Surya points out the influence of Rémy de Gourmont's Le Latin mystique, a collection of some of the most fearsome and violent religious texts from the Middles Ages and earlier which, according to André Masson, was Bataille's “bedside reading” in the years 1918 and 1919. The immense suffering of the Christian martyrs described therein, the sexualization and mortification of the flesh and the sadistic methods and devices used to inflict this excruciating pain, filter into Bataille's text, surfacing most pointedly in Bataille's fascination with the Chinese “torture of the hundred pieces,” reproduced in The Tears of Eros. See Surya, La Mort à l'œuvre, 41-44.

13. See the discussion following Bataille's lecture “La religion surréaliste,” where, evading the question, he refuses to accept that his thinking is either Catholic or Buddhist. “I don't feel comfortable protesting against the qualification [of my lecture] as catholic. If one says something completely untenable to me, I don't respond” (VIII, 196-97).

14. K. Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity, 6. Bataille's compte rendu of this book can be found in I, 474-76. Gilles Deleuze has pointed to a comparable specularity in the Nietzschean opposition between Dionysos and Christ: “The opposition of Dionysos and Christ is developed point by point as that of the affirmation of life (its extreme valuation) and the negation of life (its extreme depreciation). Dionysian mania is opposed to Christian mania; Dionysian intoxication to Christian intoxication; Dionysian laceration to crucifixion; Dionysian resurrection to Christian resurrection; Dionysian transvaluation to Christian substantiation.” Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 16.

15. See on this point Carolyn Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures, 232. “Decapitation—any self-mutilation for that matter—is […] the necessary precondition for any literary undertaking, which is perhaps why Bataille mourned the intractability of his own ‘philosopher's head.’”

16. On the guilt associated with writing in Bataille's work, see Allan Stoekl, “Politics, Mutilation, Writing,” an essay to be read in conjunction with the same author's essay on the notion of sovereignty in Bataille, “Betrayal in the Later Bataille,” both in Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge. Stoekl shows how Bataille conceives of sovereignty itself as necessarily self-mutilating: “As criminal and God, the Bataillean writer bears within the inscription of a repetitious complicity and defiance. The utopian future society, rational in its irrationalism, and the useless inhuman revolt of avant-garde writing or crime, square off in the constitution of this cursed ‘being’” (102).

17. Cf. Ecce Homo, 40-41, and “Schopenhauer as Educator” 125-94.

18. See VI, 315-58.

19. On jouissance in Bataille, see J. Kristeva, “Bataille, Experience, and Practice.” On the issue of Bataille's sexual politics, see Susan Suleiman, who faults Bataille for his “obsession with virility”; Carolyn Dean, who sees Bataille as a “straight man with a twist”; Calvin Thomas, who has produced one of the most sophisticated readings of Bataille's unsettled and unsettling sexual identity, which serves in his work as a basis for a revised form of queer theory; and Mario Perniola, for whom Bataille's pan-eroticism represents an escape from traditional standards of aesthetic beauty.

20. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Wanderer,” 174. Translation modified.

21. Ibid. On a slightly different linguistic register, a similar figure of this autodegradable moral solvent is to be found in a note penned by Bataille during the polemic with André Breton. In this note Bataille calls for a “probity that obligates not like morality but like alcohol, that is, not like that which represses but like that which is repressed” (II, 421).

22. See J. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, 61 and 122-24 n. 2.

23. From a letter dated 30 August 1934, sent to the organizing committee of the International Congress of Philosophy at Prague. Cited by David Carr in his introductory essay to The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, xxvii.

24. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 5.

25. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” 302. See also Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, esp. ch. 7, “The Fiction of the Political.”

26. See “Nietzsche and the Fascists,” VE, 182-96; I, 447-65. Cf. on this subject Denis Hollier, “January 21^st.”

27. What Bataille was saying about “the trances of mysticism” was remarkably coincident with what Wilhelm Reich had argued in 1933 in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich traced the popular success of National Socialism to its exploitation of the “social effect of mysticism.” It was the tremendous political viability of this “effect,” he argued, that the Marxists had failed to recognize, or had at least seriously underestimated in the early thirties, such that “in the end it was the mysticism of the National Socialists that triumphed over the economic theory of socialism” (5). His thesis that fascism is the supreme expression of religious mysticism relies upon the idea that mysticism, in denying the body (or “the sex-economic principle”), represents an intolerable negation of the animal that man fundamentally is. The contradictions of such a negation are never resolved, however, and “from the deepest sources of biologic functioning, the cry for ‘freedom’ wins through again and again.” “At the bottom of his nature,” Reich argues, “man still remains an animal creature. No matter how immobile his pelvis and back may be; no matter how rigid his neck and shoulders may be; or how tense his abdominal muscles may be; or how high he may hold his chest in pride and in fear—at the innermost core of his sensations he feels he is only a piece of living organized nature. But he denies and suppresses every aspect of this nature, he cannot embrace it in a rational and living way. Hence he has to experience it in a mystical, other-worldly and supernatural way, whether in the form of religious ecstasy, cosmic unification with the world, sadistic thirst for blood, or ‘cosmic seething of the blood’” (344). Reich's theories are broad and have broad implications; although he here parodies the posture of the German soldier, the repression of animal nature he describes is, to a greater or lesser extent, present in and indeed inseparable from the Western civilizing process in general. But Reich undoubtedly contributes to our understanding of mysticism as a response to what cannot be embraced “in a rational and living way.” The pull of the mystical, the sway it can so easily exercise over so many, is attributable in no small part to the strenuousness of an existence governed by knowledge, to which the transports of the mystical seem to offer a liberating alternative.

28. See also E, 254; X, 248: “It seems that in part at least Hegel drew his peculiar dialectic from his theological knowledge as well as from his knowledge of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme.”

29. Bataille expresses both a sense of obligation to the task of discovering a morality and a sense of the difficulty that attends its formulation: “The annoying thing is that in feverishly seeking a morality that escapes the decay of morality—something we are led, even obliged, to do today—we have decidedly little chance on our side” (“La morale du malheur: La Peste,” XI, 246).

30. J.-M. Lo Duca, “Georges Bataille, from Afar …,” in TE, 5.

31. All further references to “Initial Postulate” are found in AM, 91-95; XI, 231-35. The translation has occasionally been slightly modified.

32. Pierrot, 153. See “Contre-Attaque: Appel à l'action” (I, 395-97).

33. The “aristocratic individualism” with which Pierrot reproaches Bataille recalls Nicolas Calas' harsh review of Inner Experience, in the course of which he condemns Bataille's “extreme egocentrism” and refers to the mystic's “arrogant dismissal of the external” (“Acephalic Mysticism,” 10, 7). Inner Experience, so obsessed with Bataille's personal experience (which, as I have tried to show, is neither properly speaking ‘personal’ nor an ‘experience’) no doubt leaves itself open to this critique. The reproach of individualism represents, however, one of the most persistent and pernicious misunderstandings of Bataille's work as a whole. The kind of intense, limit-experience to which Bataille refers, in Inner Experience and elsewhere, is an experience of sovereignty; in later texts, such as The History of Eroticism, Bataille would insist that it is an experience open to “the lowliest and least cultured human beings” (13). In Sovereignty, he suggests that drinking a glass of wine can open up consciousness, “for a brief moment,” to the “miraculous sensation” of “life beyond utility,” which is the domain of sovereignty: “As I see it, if the worker treats himself to the drink, this is essentially because into the wine he swallows there enters a miraculous element of savor, which is precisely the essence of sovereignty. It is not much, but at least the glass of wine gives him, for a brief moment, the miraculous sensation of having the world at his disposal. The wine is downed mechanically (no sooner swallowed than the worker forgets it), and yet it is the source of intoxication, whose miraculous value no one can dispute” (S, 199). Cf. William James's words on alcohol in the “Mysticism” chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience: “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it […] The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness …” (377-78). Nor women, for that matter. For a Bataillean reading of intoxication and ecstatic experience in literature see Avital Ronell's essay on Emma Bovary, “Scoring Literature,” in Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, esp. 103 ff.

34. Bataille himself was quite convinced of the revolutionary nature of his economic writings. Denis Hollier reports that Bataille once mused about his chances of winning the Nobel Peace Prize for The Accursed Share. See Hollier, “L'Inénarrable,” 271.

35. On Bataille and political economy, see Bennington, “Introduction to Economics I,” Stoekl, Agonies of the Intellectual, and Richardson, Georges Bataille, ch. 5 (“Expenditure and the General Economy”). Richardson, summarizing and developing an argument made by Christian Duverger (in La Fleur létale: économie du sacrifice aztèque), draws attention to the historical distortions inherent in Bataille's attempt to read the Aztec practice of sacrifice as an instance of nonproductive expenditure (Georges Bataille, 79-85).

36. Cf. Pierrot, 160.

37. It is difficult to know for which book Bataille jotted down “The Reasons for Writing a Book.” It is collected in volume two of the Oeuvres complètes, “Posthumous Writings 1922-1940.” But the motifs of alienation, of nonbeing, and of “impotence,” as well as something of the tenor of the passage links it with the later text “Surrealism from Day to Day,” in which Bataille recounts his early, uncomfortable encounters with the Surrealists. These encounters were indeed “annihilating,” to borrow a key word from the fragment; the young author felt, was made to feel in the presence of the literary establishment, like “nothing.” Meeting Breton, Aragon, and the Eluards at the Cyrano, Bataille was rendered “ill at ease” by the “oppressive, vigilant and sovereign” attitude of the group: “I was shy, and had too great a need for self-effacement to confront these distant beings who communicated to me the feeling of a majestic life which nevertheless remained caprice itself: I knew I would lack the strength to be—in front of them—what I was. They threatened—to the extent that I loved (or admired) them—to reduce me to impotence, literally to suffocate me” (“Surrealism from Day to Day,” AM, 40-41 tm; VIII, 177 emphasis in original).