SOURCE: Guerlac, Suzanne. “Bataille: The Fiction of Transgression.” In Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton, pp. 11-37. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Guerlac explores various readings, and misreadings, of Bataille's notion of transgression.]

I write for whoever, upon entering my book, would fall into it as into a hole, and would never come out.

—Georges Bataille, in M. Surya, Georges Bataille, la mort à l'œuvre

If there is a single term poststructuralist theory could not do without, it is “transgression,” inherited from Georges Bataille. Bataille elaborated a notion of transgression most explicitly in L'Erotisme (1957), an essay that reworked material from a previously unpublished piece, “L'Histoire de l'érotisme,” and that harks back to a study of “erotic phenomenology” projected as early as 1939. But eroticism is only one modality of transgression, which refers us to an experience of the sacred, the “motive force” of Bataille's thinking.¹ Bataille distinguishes the sacred from the profane in economic terms borrowed from the ethnographer Marcel Mauss, whose work impressed Bataille in the late 1920's. In “La Notion de dépense” (1933), Bataille distinguished between what he calls the restrained or utilitarian economy, and the general economy of sovereignty. Whereas the former implies production, saving, and exchange, the latter implies consumption, expenditure, and reciprocity. This economic distinction remains constant throughout Bataille's career, even as it operates in quite different registers—those of revolutionary politics, of mystical experience, and of literary community.

“La Notion de dépense” dates from the period following Bataille's break from the surrealists, prompted by Breton's declaration of support for the Communist revolutionary cause. These were the years of Bataille's own form of engagement, his involvement with Le Cercle Démocratique, a revolutionary group organized by the dissident communist Boris Souvarine, and of his intense involvement with the teachings of Alexander Kojève on Hegel. They will be followed, toward the end of the decade, with Bataille's investment in the group enterprises of Contre-Attaque, Acéphale, and the Collège de Sociologie, the last two devoted to an exploration of “sacred sociology.” If Breton was the avant-gardist, Bataille was the ultra- (and perhaps anti-) avant-gardist. If Breton announced his adherence to communist revolution, Bataille placed himself at the extreme left, and was in a problematic relation even to this milieu. Bataille was not only at the cultural margins during the 1930's, he was at the edge of those margins. He was in a relation of contestation first to Breton, then to Le Cercle Démocratique, and subsequently to Sartre. Of all the figures of his generation, it was this most hypermarginal and erratic character that was privileged by the avant-garde theorists of Tel Quel. In this chapter I would like to explore why this was so, to analyze the appropriation of transgression by contemporary theory, and to measure certain displacements that took place in the course of theoretical rereadings of Bataille.

.....

So powerful was the impact of Bataille upon the Tel Quel generation that the difference between structuralist and poststructuralist thinking itself was officially characterized in terms of Bataille's distinction between restrained and general economies. Structuralism was accused by poststructuralism of remaining Hegelian: that is, of operating binary oppositions (or contradictions) in relation to a framework of unified totality. To the extent that the movement of Hegelian dialectic puts every term to work in the service of a subsequent development of that totality, poststructuralist critics identified structuralism with the utilitarian or restricted economy and championed a nontotalizable or general one.

Derrida launches what we could call poststructuralist critique with his analysis of Husserl in La Voix et le phénomène (1967) and his elaboration of the force and dynamics of différance. Temporality, ontological difference, and the structure of the unconscious as analyzed by psychoanalysis are all invoked to put into question the presupposition of the horizon of presence crucial to the phenomenological undertaking. The post-phenomenological critique is then directed explicitly at structuralist thinking with the essays collected in Marges de la philosophie (1972). Here Derrida exposes the presuppositions of structural linguistics and semiotics, attacking the structure of the sign itself as a reinscription of metaphysical oppositions which, in Derrida's view, presuppose a horizon of presence. He specifically challenges the status of the transcendental signified, the term that had been brought into question in the reading of Husserl. The philosophical argument is elaborated within the literary domain in De la grammatologie (1967), where Derrida opposes writing to speech (as a necessary moment, on his analysis, of the phenomenological perspective) and launches a theory of writing elaborated in terms of différance. In an essay on Lautréamont published in Tel Quel, Philippe Sollers characterizes this theory of writing in terms of Bataille's operation of transgression. “God-meaning … is a figure of linguistic interdiction,” he writes, “whereas writing—which is metaphoricity itself (Derrida) transgresses the hierarchic order of discourse and of the world associated with it, through the introduction of a specific difference [écart].”² Never mind Sollers's misprision (as Derrida will subsequently make clear in “Le retrait de la métaphore,” différance does not operate through metaphor in grammatology); the important point is that he invoked Bataille's term “transgression” to characterize the break introduced by, or as, poststructuralism. This gesture will be repeated again and again, as we see, for example, in Ducrot and Todorov's Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language where the rhetoric of transgression is frequently invoked to characterize the epistemic break—the “Copernican revolution”—introduced by poststructuralism. Whereas Bataille elaborates transgression as a kind of supplement to philosophical discourse, Sollers borrows this language to characterize a philosophical shift, a move away from Hegel (associated with phenomenology and its appropriation by existentialism) toward late Heidegger. Sollers and Foucault both contribute essays that reconfigure “transgression” in terms of Heidegger's thinking of the question of the limit in relation to time and ontological difference. Transgression, they hope, will put to rest an exhausted Hegelian paradigm.³

By 1967, when Derrida published his now canonical essay on Bataille, “De l'économie restreinte à l'économie générale,”⁴ transgression can be invoked as a quasi-philosophical term, or at least a term carrying the authority of philosophical discourse. More significantly, however, it emerges as a theoretical term that elaborates a “transgression of philosophy,” one performed by literature as it communicates with theory (or by theory as it communicates with poetry). This is the program Tel Quel will put forth in the 1968 manifesto “La révolution ici maintenant.”⁵ In the writings of Kristeva, as we shall see, the transgression of philosophy will be reread as a revolutionary gesture; it becomes a Marxist revolutionary practice.⁶ Bataille's thinking on transgression both sets the Tel Quel agenda and enables crucial moments of what Sollers will subsequently call “the dream of theory.”⁷

If one had to isolate the single gesture of Bataille that had the greatest impact for avant-garde thinking of the 1960's and 1970's, it would be the insertion of the ethnological distinction sacred/profane into the discourse of philosophy (or of Hegel). Foucault meditates on this interlarding of philosophy and religion in his important essay “Préface à la transgression,” which appeared in a special issue of Critique devoted to Bataille in commemoration of his death in 1963.⁸ Foucault's essay is worth analyzing in some detail, for it anticipates in very precise terms (one could even say it generates) the role transgression will come to play within the theoretical enterprise of poststructuralism, particularly among those associated with Tel Quel. Foucault first tentatively proposes that transgression might be understood as an equivalent of profanation in a world that no longer gives any positive meaning to the sacred. He identifies transgression with eroticism. “Thus,” he writes, “at the depths of sexuality, of its movement that nothing ever limits … an experience is formed [se dessine], that of transgression” (PT 754).

After the preliminary paragraphs linking transgression to sexuality, the avant-gardism of Sade, and the nihilism of Nietzsche, Foucault moves on to a philosophical elaboration of transgression. Whereas Bataille emphasized the dual operation of transgression/interdiction in L'Erotisme, Foucault defines transgression as a “gesture which concerns the limit.” It is reduced to a simple gesture, one Foucault characterizes as a flash of lightning, and hence associates with the figure of the line.⁹ The move into the philosophical register is marked by this representation of a line, one that gesturally depicts the Heideggerian ontology of limitation: the coming into being, or appearance, of beings on the horizon of Being. Foucault nuances his initial formulation further on in the essay when he speaks of a “play of limits and of transgression.” Transgression, then, includes two gestures, which are ambiguously one: the inscription of a line and its crossing. “The limit and transgression owe to one another the density of their being,” Foucault writes, “non-existence of a limit that could absolutely not be crossed; vanity of the return of a transgression that would only cross an illusory or shadowy limit” (PT 755). Thus transgression is not exterior to the limit that is transgressed. The two are inseparable, and yet not the same. They are different. In the next sentence, however, the event of transgression is once again hypostatized, as it was through the figure of the line. It is given an existential status as “this existence so pure and so entangled [enchevêtrée]” (my emphasis).

Once posited in these terms, however, transgression can be distinguished from other existences and immunized against other discourses. In the first place, Foucault insists, it must be distinguished from the language of ethics. What Bataille calls “evil” in Literature and Evil, Foucault explains, has nothing to do with moral discourse. Nothing is negative in transgression, which affirms both the limited and the unlimited. At the same time, however, Foucault holds that this affirmation affirms nothing because it does not posit anything. Positing entails the dialectical moments of concrete negation and synthesis, whereas transgression, Foucault writes (anticipating the publication of Derrida's analysis of différance) is the affirmation of difference. This formulation introduces the next big step in Foucault's argument: the notion of a philosophy of transgression, glossed in Heideggerian terms as a “philosophy of non-positive affirmation, that is, the épreuve [ordeal/trial] of the limit.” This is the crucial step for the theoretical enterprise of Tel Quel.

Foucault wrote this sentence three years before Derrida's first essay on grammatology was published in 1966, also in Critique. He anticipated certain features of the Derridean analysis of différance when he alluded to Nietzschean affirmation and Blanchot's “principle of contestation.” His major point emerges in the following rhetorical question, which brings us to the crux of the matter. Speaking of transgression, he writes:

No dialectical movement, no analysis of fundamental laws [constitutions] and of their transcendental foundation [leur sol] can be of help in thinking such an experience or even the access to this experience. Might not the instantaneous play of the limit and transgression be today the essential test of a thinking of “origin” which Nietzsche bequeathed to us … a thinking that would be absolutely, and in the same movement, a Critique and an Ontology, a thinking that would think finitude and being?

(PT 757)

Thus we arrive tentatively at a “philosophy” of eroticism, where philosophy is neither cognitive nor rational, but involves “an experience of finitude and of being, of the limit and of transgression.” It is a question of philosophy as experience, one that has not yet found its language. “Would it be an exaggeration,” Foucault writes, “to say … that it would be necessary to find a language for the transgressive that would be what dialectic has been for contradiction?” (PT 759). Foucault has moved us to the ground of ontology, or to ontology as a question of grounding. With this move transgression has become a question of language—and of the language of philosophy.¹⁰

We are at a peculiar juncture here. Foucault brings to his reading of Nietzsche the discovery of structuralism, namely, that the subject is in language, and not the other way around. No explicit mention is made of the structuralist subtext, but it is implicit in the following account of the fracture of the subject of philosophy:

The philosopher knows that “we are not everything”; but he learns that the philosopher himself does not inhabit the totality of his language like a secret god … he discovers that next to him there is a language which speaks and of which he is not the master; a language that strives, and that fails. … And above all he discovers that at the very moment of speaking, he is not necessarily lodged inside his language … and that at the site of the speaking subject … a void has hollowed itself out.

(PT 751)

Foucault's analysis introduces the following crucial reversal: if transgression constitutes a philosophy, what is transgressed is the position of the philosopher—and to this extent philosophy itself—through the limitlessness of language. Here we have a preview of the fundamental program of poststructuralism, or of theory in the context of Tel Quel. The philosopher, Foucault writes, finds “not outside language, but in it, at the center of its possibilities, the transgression of his philosophical being.” This will be the starring role of transgression—the transgression of philosophy by language, that is, by the “nondialectical language of the limit that only unfolds in the transgression of the one who speaks it.” This is what we will read a decade later in Ducrot and Todorov's Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage, where it is a question of the “Copernican revolution” of theory. In Foucault's essay, then, transgression becomes a function of (even an experience of) a relation to the finitude of being. A thinking of transgression, Foucault concludes, marks an interrogation of the limit which replaces the totalizing gesture of Hegel: “The gesture of transgression replaces the movement of contradictions,” Foucault writes, by “plunging the philosophical experience into language” (PT 767-68).

“Perhaps one day,” Foucault speculates concerning the philosopheme “transgression,” “it will appear as decisive for our culture as the experience of contradiction used to be for dialectical thinking.” This is precisely the role transgression, as constituted in the essay by Foucault, will play for the thinking of poststructuralism and the avant-gardism of Tel Quel. Transgression is meant to take over from contradiction. Appropriations of Bataille's notion of transgression reveal a desire to get beyond dialectical thinking into a new field of language and of thinking, one in which it would be possible, as Tel Quel will put it, to “faire communiquer théorie et fiction [make theory and fiction communicate, or open out onto, one another].” Speaking of the language of transgression he adumbrates here, Foucault writes toward the end of his essay: “It is possible … to find the scorched roots, the promising ashes, of such a language in Bataille.”¹¹ The shadow of the phoenix in this figure is already an indication that the operation of contradiction will be difficult to get beyond completely. Transgression, as we shall see, implies a greater proximity to Hegel than Foucault's essay suggests.

Four years later (and one year after the appearance of Derrida's De la grammatologie) Sollers publishes a reading of Bataille's L'Erotisme in an essay entitled “Le Toit, Essai de lecture systématique.”¹² Transgression (now synonymous with eroticism) becomes identified with writing or text, that is, with what the director of Tel Quel will characterize as the “wrong side or inside out [envers]” of literature. “Le Toit” reaffirms Foucault's point of departure, namely, the distinction between transgression, understood as a “philosophy of eroticism,” and the popular notion of sexual liberation. Sollers labels the latter “pseudo-transgression” and dismisses it. He then reminds his readers that Bataille had posed transgression as a “dual operation,” an interplay between transgression and interdiction. He reaffirms that neither operation can take place, or have meaning, without the other, thereby reinscribing the term “interdiction,” which played an ambiguous role in Foucault's analysis, as we have seen.

Sollers goes on to interpret interdiction in terms of the opposition between discourse and silence, a move that constitutes the major step in the transposition of Bataille's eroticism into the key of language, writing, and text. Interdiction is read as discursive constraint upon language and meaning: “the world of discourse is the mode of being of interdiction … interdiction is the signifier itself (in the world of discourse …)” (T 29). Sollers does not invent here, for Bataille has made this identification. What is exceptional, however, is the exclusive emphasis on this register. The important point is that Sollers retains the broader philosophical claims made for Bataille's thinking by Foucault, while restricting transgression to the textual level. Thus he pursues one branch of Bataille's thinking concerning the fundamental structural difference between the sacred and the profane, and extends to it the supreme philosophical authority Foucault granted Bataille in the name of a “philosophy of transgression” that would go beyond the limitations of the Hegelian dialectic and proceed to the transgression of philosophy! The net effect is an inflation of the claims made for transgression in the linguistic, textual, or poetic register. These claims are then articulated with an evolving poststructuralist theory of writing and text.¹³

It is ironic that Bataille's thinking should have become so wedded to language. For Bataille initially rejected language altogether for silence, the silence of a non-savoir (non-knowledge) which was not at all a philosophical concept nor primarily a poetic mood or language effect. It was an experience of emotional intensity. Sacrifice, performed within the context of sacred ritual, could bind the members of a community together more forcefully, Bataille believed, and more enduringly, than anything words could do because of its overwhelming affective shock. What was at stake was a shared experience of radical immediacy, and the ultimate event of such immediacy was the experience of another's death. When this intimate experience was shared, a powerful collective bond was established. Sacrifice provides something like what one could call the “regulative idea” of non-savoir for Bataille. His relation to poetry (or to nondiscursive textual practices) existed as a function of this idea, and to this extent was ambivalent and unstable.

In Sollers's essay, the identification of transgression and nondiscursive language enables a theoretical link with psychoanalysis, where interdiction as repression is marked by linguistic parapraxis, or slips of the tongue. With respect to language, Sollers suggests, there is a fundamental transgression—a “scandal”—namely, the fact that discourse simply does not work. “There is nothing in the thing of what we say of it,” he writes, “… nothing in what we say that ‘belongs’ to the thing or which replaces it.” This, we recognize, amounts to the “scandal” Saussure had announced as the arbitrariness of the sign. Although fundamental, Sollers wants to suggest, this transgression “would recognize the necessity of the interdiction to which it finds itself bound,” that is, the “as if” of language's capacity to signify. On this account, then, interdiction is identified with the communicative function of language which serves as the basis for discursive exchange. Thus, a Saussurian structuralist moment is read back into Bataille, who was not at all concerned with this kind of problem (which worried Paul de Man)—the inefficacy of language truthfully to represent the world. Bataille was more inclined to feel that discursive language worked all too well, flattening out and homogenizing human experience in the process.

On Sollers's reading, transgression becomes a “space of organic effervescence of language.” It is organic, Sollers implies, in relation to the fundamental transgression, the scandal of the arbitrariness of the sign. It occurs in an agonistic relation to the interdiction of language as discursive event. What is at stake here (and it is barely concealed) is a return to the old polemic against realism that Breton (among others) launched in the previous generation and which has continued to haunt esthetic avant-gardism and the theoretical enterprise associated with it to the present day. “Eroticism is the anti-matter of realism” (T 36), Sollers declares, in a formula that reveals clearly what is at stake in the Tel Quel appropriation of eroticism for theory.

Transgression becomes explicitly polemical when it is analyzed in linguistic terms. For Sollers, the dual operation transgression/interdiction becomes a “dialectic of war,” where “interdiction or transgression provisionally gets the upper hand, depending on whether the field of objects and things (the domain of the discontinuous) wins out or whether the dimension of crossing beyond objects and things (the continuous) wins out” (T 30). Once the conflict is set up in such oppositional terms, the earlier proviso concerning the peculiar logic of reciprocity of interdiction/transgression (the logic of the dual operation) is neglected. It becomes a question of taking sides. Indeed, in spite of Sollers's explicit opening declaration that eroticism is not simply an apology of transgression, it becomes precisely that. For once interdiction is opposed to transgression, other binary oppositions enter the argument, culminating in the one between “literature” and “writing.” Literature implies representational discourse and thus belongs on the side of interdiction; writing, which is transgressive, belongs with poetry, madness, and excess.¹⁴

“Le Toit” works out in rigorous detail various analogies which will subsequently be taken for granted in the milieu of Tel Quel. Thanks to suggestive allusions to historical and dialectical materialism, the agon between transgression and interdiction takes on epic proportions. In the process, the reach of eroticism as “philosophy of transgression” is vastly extended, as is the rhetoric of its violence:

Eroticism—the fact that its theory is only produced today in the wake of Sade—takes on all its meaning: not only is it what, in history, presents itself as the end of the theological, philosophical and pre-scientific era—as that which visibly puts an end to their logical presuppositions—but moreover the rape/violation [le viol] of the individual constituted during this period, the organic and economic unity that was its support: the whole erotic mise en œuvre [putting into a work] and, as its fundamental principle, the destruction of the closed being that is the partenaire de jeu in the moral state. … All in all eroticism, understood as the unveiled richness and the avowal [aveu] of language—as its power of expenditure and of gratuitousness—involves … a function of penetration and destruction of discourse.

(original emphasis)¹⁵

This is then related to the materialist dialectic of Marx. But let us make the analogy explicit. Discourse is in the position of the woman violated in a gesture of transgressive eroticism that is performed by, or as, an “unveiled richness … of language.” Discourse is not only penetrated and opened, but also destroyed, as is the unified (closed) subject of discourse—implicitly the bourgeois subject. The world-historical framework of dialectical progression (the allusion to revolution) makes it difficult to see in what sense this transgression—the transgression of writing and text—could be said to retain the force of interdiction. The problem will not go away. We shall see in the following chapter how it returns in Kristeva's La Révolution du langage poétique, and how it will entail her critique of the very Derridean discourse Sollers had credited with opening up the possibility of a philosophy of eroticism in the 1960's.

By the end of his essay, Sollers announces bluntly that transgression has become writing. First, he cites Bataille to the effect that “eroticism, considered gravely, tragically, represents a reversal.” Then he adds the decisive commentary: “But we see right away how writing takes charge of this reversal from this point on, how it then has the same status and ultimately the same meaning as eroticism … writing … finally takes over from transgression” (T 41). Text becomes the object of eroticism. Once again, we have the citation and then the gloss. First Bataille: “Eroticism … is nevertheless expressed by an object,” and then Sollers: “this object … has a name: the detour, the detour of the text” (T 36). Lastly, eroticism becomes the name of the subversive program formally announced by Tel Quel the following year: “faire communiquer théorie et fiction.”¹⁶

Sollers has entitled his “systematic reading” of Bataille “Le Toit,” a figure borrowed from Bataille's L'Expérience intérieure, where it evokes “the interrelationship between all the opposed possibilities [la relation entre elles de toutes les possibilités opposées].” In Sollers, it is meant to evoke the dual structure of eroticism as interdiction/transgression precisely in the role Foucault had anticipated it would play once it had found its language: that of displacing the Hegelian logic of contradiction. What it found with Sollers, of course, was not its language, but quite simply, language. The figure of “le toit”—the roof of the temple—is posed by Sollers as a nondialectical alternative to the ostensibly dialectical point of surrealism, the “point of the esprit where life and death … cease to be perceived as contradictory.” Sollers writes: “The difference between these two formulations is essential (it would enable us, no doubt, to understand how Bataille and Breton are situated in irreconcilable positions with respect to Hegel)” (T 26).¹⁷ Sollers fleshes out what Foucault had hypothetically proposed in his “Préface à la transgression.” “Le Toit” moves Bataille's terms “eroticism” and “transgression” toward the field of language, writing, and text. “Text,” or “signifier,” has replaced the woman as object of desire. The metaphor of “le toit,” which figured the two worlds of the sacred and the profane and the dual operation of interdiction and transgression for Bataille, becomes an emblem of writing in its difference from literature: “the emblem of the ‘roof / home of writing’ … the two hands, one that writes and one that dies.” “Le toit” (the expression also signifies “home” and in this sense suggests an allusion to Heidegger's statement that language is “the house of Being”) not only prepares the ground for the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism, it announces this shift as imperative through the figure of excess. “According to a ‘dying’ logic,” Sollers writes, “it is necessary that an excess, which, no matter what the current logic, does not cease putting to death, correspond to a system of formal relations.” As theoretical discourse gains currency, eroticism and transgression come to stand for the transgression of structuralism by poststructuralism on the one hand, and the transgression of philosophy by writing or theory, on the other.

“L'Erotisme is a clear book … its exposition conceals itself because … of its extreme simplicity,” Sollers had written. His reading of Bataille's text, however, simplifies a little too much, for it overlooks the explicit statement by Bataille that the relation between the two “worlds” of transgression and interdiction is itself dialectical—a question of aufhebung. If transgression replaces aufhebung, as Hollier has stated, intensifying the force of Foucault's hypothetical claim, it does so through a specific reinscription of aufhebung, one which Derrida undertakes to analyze in his essay on Bataille.¹⁸ Sollers cites Bataille: “Transgression is different from a return to nature, it removes the interdiction without doing away with it,” and he asks rhetorically, by way of comment, “What can this operation, whose gesture is irreducible to classical rationality, mean?” (T 27). Derrida responds to this question when he cites Bataille's note concerning the dual operation of transgression/interdiction—“There is no need to stress the Hegelian nature of this operation which corresponds with the moment of dialectic expressed by the untranslatable term aufheben (to surpass while maintaining.)”¹⁹ If transgression replaces aufhebung, it is, as we shall see, because eroticism reinscribes the aufhebung in another register, that of the sacred.

Derrida's essay reveals the dynamics of a double writing in Bataille's text, one that displaces the terms of Hegel's Phenomenology while retaining certain of its movements. And, not surprisingly, the displacements signaled by Derrida largely coincide with those performed by poststructuralist writers in relation to the totalizing thinking of structuralist linguistics and semiotics. As we shall see, this also implies that poststructuralism itself becomes imbued with the aura of the sacred—or, more specifically, of the sublime.²⁰ From here on in, for Tel Quel critics such as Kristeva, the subversion of philosophy by writing goes hand in hand with the theorizing of writing. The project to formalize the infinite play of signifiance, for example, announced by Ducrot and Todorov in the Dictionaire, reveals the full extent of Tel Quel's ambitions for what Sollers called, retrospectively, “the dream of theory.”²¹

Henceforth, what Ducrot and Todorov call the poststructural “shift [basculement] to the side of the signifier” will be characterized in terms of a “materiality” of text. On Saussure's analysis, the signifier is one side of the sign that Saussure compares to a sheet of paper. On the front, as it were, is the signifier—an inscribed mark, or audible sound—and on the back, the signified or mental idea. When you cut out one side of the sign, the other side is delimited correspondingly. On this basis the sign divides into “materialist” and “idealist” components, associated with the signifier and the signified respectively. The notion of the “materiality” of the text rhetorically acknowledges Marxist dialectical materialism. At the same time, it alludes to the discourse of psychoanalysis and to the way in which the body is associated with unconscious drives and impulses in opposition to the conscious mind, construed as the field of signifieds. Rhetorically, at least, Marx and Freud can be reconciled through the extension of the term “materiality” to the linguistic domain. Furthermore, the materiality of text can be associated with the discourse of eroticism and the specific excess the body introduces in relation to the ostensible stability of the unified subject of consciousness. As Sollers writes, “What the flesh presents to the body … is an ‘impersonal plethora’ just as poetic language appears to scientific discourse as a fundamentally ‘repugnant’ putting into play of the subject of discourse” (T 34). Poetry, text, writing, signifiance, and so on, all enjoy the dilation of the “impersonal plethora.”

In 1966, Denis Hollier reminded his readers that “the opposition of the sacred and the profane is the basis for all aspects of the thinking of Bataille.”²² In the poststructuralist appropriation of Bataille, however, the dimension of the sacred is evacuated. It is displaced by the psychoanalytic register and the difference conscious/unconscious, by the ontological difference elaborated by Heidegger, and by Derrida's theoretical elaboration of différance in its difference from the metaphysics of presence. Although the three paths of displacement are quite distinct, taken together they mark a reformulation of the religious question of the sacred (which, since Durkheim, is related to the implicitly political issue of social cohesion) in terms of a question of philosophy, and of its end. The ethnographic perspective that had deliberately introduced a dimension of cultural otherness is lost when the question of transgression is transposed back into the European intellectual tradition in this way. As demonstrated by his investment in the collective experiences of the Cercle Démocratique, of Contre-Attaque, Acéphale, and the Collège de Sociologie, however, Bataille's marginal status is deliberate and is precisely a function of his refusal of the exclusively philosophical register—that is, of philosophy unalloyed by an experiential impact where intensity of affect is the moving force. Throughout the 1930's in particular (the period that saw the emergence of “La Notion de dépense”) Bataille was interested in questions of power and action. In the poststructuralist context, the discourse of psychoanalysis appropriates these issues. Interdiction and transgression are interpreted in relation to desire. With Lacan, the unconscious itself is analyzed in linguistic and rhetorical terms; it too becomes a field of language forces. The meaning of materiality is attenuated when materialism is restricted to the materiality of text.

REREADING

The canonization of Bataille within the avant-garde canon, the theoretical privilege accorded him (quite exceptionally among writers of his generation), contaminated the reception of his writings, which the poststructuralist glosses rendered both all too familiar, and unfamiliar at the same time. So much was made of Bataille's writing, writing that became emblematic of writing per se (in the new theoretical sense), that it became all but impossible to read him.

When we return to the text of L'Erotisme, conscious of the strategic shifts of emphasis that have occurred in the poststructuralist rereading of Bataille, we find a few surprises. Readers introduced to Bataille through Tel Quel (which is to say most contemporary readers of Bataille, and certainly most of his American readers) will have absorbed the poststructuralist identification of transgression with polysemia and the infinite play of signifiance, characterized as the literary equivalent of perversity. They will be familiar with Sollers's association of text with flesh and the erotics of an “impersonal plethora.” For these readers it is surprising to hear Bataille explicitly reject, in his analysis of eroticism, the experience of the orgy in favor of the determinate dialectical relation to the woman as object of man's desire. If we pursue this puzzling detail, a different reading of Bataille opens up, one that places the question of the sacred, or the difference sacred/profane, back at the center of Bataille's thinking. Once this focus is reestablished we can recognize how the issue of the sacred impinges on the question of philosophy for Bataille. We can then reconsider how transgression informs the question of the essence of literature and of its powers for Bataille—a question imposed by Sartre and the imperative of engagement.

Bataille begins his discussion of eroticism with what he calls “a philosophical detour,” a schematic opposition between continuity or fusion on the one hand, and discontinuity or separation on the other. In Hegelian terms, this would correspond to the difference between identity and difference, the latter introduced through the negativity of consciousness. It might be more fruitful, however, to take a philosophical detour through Bergson, who opposes the discontinuity of ordinary or intellectual experience and the continuity of duration.²³ For it was Bergson, not Hegel, who accompanied this distinction with a critique of language (in the name of discontinuity) which could only have appealed to Bataille. And it was Bergson who introduced the constellation of terms that return together in Bataille: the distinctions between homogeneity and heterogeneity as well as between utility and nonutility, and above all the notion of communication. “We perceive duration as a current that one cannot go back up,” Bergson writes in L'Evolution créatrice, “it is the depth [fond] of our being, we feel it well enough, the very substance of things with which we are in communication.” It is in roughly this sense that the term “communication” functions in Bataille, where it refers us to the experience of intimate immediacy that transgression is said to open up to us. Eroticism is characterized as just such a moment of communication, that is, as a movement from separation back to an experience of fusion.

Given this point of departure, we have all the more reason to expect the sacred orgy (extreme case of the loss of separateness through fusion) to become the privileged erotic experience. Bataille surprises us, then, when he declares the orgy to be “necessarily disappointing,” and proceeds to focus exclusively on heterosexual eroticism à deux, a gendered scenario of man's relation to woman as erotic object.²⁴ The orgy, it seems, involves too radical a loss of separateness for Bataille. “Not only is individuality itself submerged in the tumult of orgy,” he complains, “but each participant denies the individuality of the others. All limits are completely done away with.” Although radical fusion may be the ultimate meaning of eroticism, as Bataille declares, this meaning only emerges when the erotic experience is structured in intersubjective terms and intersubjectivity is modeled on a relation of subject to object. In Bataille's theory of eroticism, the presence of an erotic object is required. It is a question of losing oneself knowingly, and not too completely after all.

Whereas the philosophical tradition poses man as the rational animal, Bataille poses him not only as the erotic animal but simultaneously as the religious animal. He must therefore delimit the human realm from the animal one, although, as Bataille points out, these are usually identified in discussions of sexuality. It is for this reason that eroticism is defined here as the conscious activity of the sexual animal and distinguished from merely sexual activity, which pertains to the animal world. It is for the sake of this lucidity, ultimately, that erotic experience is staged as a relation to an erotic object and that, as Bataille puts it, “a dialectic is necessary.”²⁵

The object of desire, Bataille writes in “L'Histoire de l'érotisme,” is the “mirror in which we ourselves are reflected.” The woman mirrors the man's transgression. “Ordinarily a man cannot have the feeling that a law is violated in his own person,” Bataille writes:

which is why he awaits the confusion of a woman, even if it is feigned, without which he would not have the consciousness of a violation. … It is a question of marking, through shame, that the interdiction has not been forgotten, that the dépassement has taken place in spite of the interdiction, in consciousness of the interdiction.

(“H” [“L'Histoire de l'érotisme”] 134)

The man's transgression is reflected in the woman's shame which, real or play-acted (jouée), signifies eroticism. The problem with the orgy is that it produces a negation of limits but does not give this negation to consciousness. To this extent it does not give the experience to us as meaning. The erotic object, on the other hand, does precisely that. It is a paradoxical object, Bataille writes, “an object which signifies the negation of the limits of any object” (E [L'Erotisme] 143). In the possession of the erotic object man comes into consciousness—of loss, of death, and of himself as erotic subject. Lucidity lies at the heart of what Bataille thinks through the word “fiction.”

The erotic object must not only be a woman, but a woman as object, which for Bataille means a prostitute. In “L'Histoire de l'érotisme,” Bataille contrasts his theoretical erotic object with actual experience. In real life, he acknowledges, autonomous women are at least as desirable as prostitutes—usually more so. It is customary, he writes, to wish for “the movements of more real beings, existing for themselves and wanting to respond to their own desire,” instead of the “frozen figures [figures figées]” of prostitutes, “beings destroyed as ends in themselves” (“H” 124). If the passivity of the prostitute is less desirable erotically, however, it turns out to be of crucial importance philosophically. For in relation to autonomous, desiring women—women as subjects—one “cannot avoid struggle which would lead to destruction” (“H” 124). It is in order to avoid such struggle, Bataille concludes, that “we [men] must … place this object equal to ourselves, in the frame of the dead object, of the infinitely available object” (“H” 124, my emphasis)—hence the figure of the prostitute portrayed here as a work of art, indeed, a kind of still life.

It is just here that we find the note already mentioned concerning the necessity of dialectic. And it is here that we can begin to see the paradoxical proximity of Bataille to Hegel, and of sovereignty to mastery. From what has been said so far it should be clear that a version of Hegelian recognition is at play in Bataille's theory of eroticism. A determinate object of desire is required because a dialectic is necessary. A dialectic is necessary for the sake of recognition, that is, in order to achieve the self-consciousness of man as erotic animal. This dialectic yields a kind of meaning even in its nondiscursiveness, even in its silence, or non-savoir. It is precisely to avoid the kind of struggle to the death that occurs in Hegel's master/slave dialectic that the woman must not be a desiring subject, and must be placed in the frame of the dead object. And even when this precaution is taken, even with this correction of the recognition scene, we are not entirely free of the subordination associated with mastery. For the sovereign moment of erotic possession does subordinate object to subject. Does this mean that Bataille's thinking is still dialectical after all?

It is more exact to say that Bataille's thinking is dialectical again, in a repetition that renders the pertinence of the dialectical movement difficult to decide. The repetition operates in a rigorous way. The discrepancy between Bataille and Hegel, between sovereignty (as it operates in eroticism) and mastery, is less a formal or conceptual difference than a temporal or rhythmic one. Bataille takes a step back from Hegel, or, to be more precise, Kojève.²⁶ But it is a choreographed step in a paradoxical dance. In the Hegelian struggle for recognition, the positions of master and slave are designated when one subject concedes victory to another, thereby sacrificing his or her autonomy in order to survive.²⁷ Instead of being killed by his opponent he undergoes “dialectical suppression.” His life is spared but his status as subject is annulled. To be a slave is to be considered no better than a thing. It is to be reduced, in Kojève's words, to the status of “living cadaver”—like the prostitute, in other words, in Bataille's theory. The master, on the other hand, succeeds in finding satisfaction. In Kojève's words, “he succeeds in getting to the heart of things [au bout de la chose] and satisfying himself in pleasure [jouissance].” With Kojève's version of the Hegelian scenario in mind, we recognize that in Bataille's theory of eroticism, the woman is cast in the role of the already aufgeheben slave. She is given the status of thing, while the man enjoys the role of the master who can take the things of this world for his pleasure. In other words, and this is the important point, Bataille begins the dialectical relation to the erotic object just where the Hegelian master/slave dialectic concludes. What we have in Bataille, then, is something like a second-order scene of recognition.

Now in Kojève's version of the Hegelian story (and this is where he differs from Hegel and engages with a revolutionary myth) the slave will eventually regain his autonomy through work. He can do so because in the intense experience of fear of death that prompts his capitulation to the master, he has crossed the threshold from a merely animal “sentiment de soi” to a distinctly human self-consciousness. For Kojève, in other words, the fear of death serves the same function as the actual risk of death in Hegel's account. The intensity of this anxiety yields self-consciousness. For Bataille, erotic desire is an equivalent of the fear of death elaborated by Kojève. But since Bataille does not grant the erotic object this desire, she does not undergo this anxiety, and therefore cannot enter into the historical, dialectical progression toward autonomy. Thus what Kojève found tragic about the Hegelian recognition scene—the fact, as he put it, that the master is not “recognized by another man,” but merely by a slave—is not simply comic for Bataille. It becomes the opportunity, and the specific virtue, of eroticism: “recognition” by a woman!

Eroticism, then, or what will come to be known as transgression, involves a peaceful correction of Hegel's scene of recognition—a recognition essential to the specifically human, that is, lucid, experience of eroticism as distinct from mere brute sexuality. To appreciate this point, we must look more closely at the mechanism (ressort) of eroticism. Bataille presents it as a dynamic equilibrium (jeu de balance) between interdiction (l'interdit) and transgression. If, for a moment, we interpret Bataille's opening opposition between fusion and discontinuity in Hegelian terms, that is, in terms of identity and difference (or negativity), we see that it lines up with a number of other oppositions that enter into Bataille's elaboration as he leads up to the presentation of the “dual operation” of transgression/interdiction—oppositions between violence and reason, nature and culture, as well as between the sacred and the profane. According to one line of development here, the imposition of interdiction upon a violence of nature inaugurates a human world of work, consciousness of death, and restricted sexual activity. It thus marks a passage from the animal world to the human order. Just where Hegel would place his anthropogenic scene of the struggle for recognition, however, Bataille's theoretical elaboration splits in two.

In the first place, Bataille substitutes the unconscious negativity of interdiction for the negativity of consciousness Hegel opposes to continuity or identity, thereby injecting an ethnological term into the discourse of philosophy. This shift introduces a new dimension into the Hegelian dialectic of human history: the structural difference (or difference of level) between the sacred and the profane. Bataille refers the reader to Roger Caillois's analysis of the sacred in L'Homme et le sacré. He credits Caillois with the discovery of the dual operation of interdiction and transgression that Bataille considers to be the very mechanism (le ressort) of eroticism. The reference to Caillois, however, renders Bataille's use of the word “sacred” ambiguous, since Caillois not only analyzes an ambivalence in what he terms the primitive sacred, he also opposes this primitive sacred to a modern, monovalent sacred. Whereas Caillois emphasizes the distinction between ancient and modern versions of religious experience, Bataille mixes the two together. In L'Erotisme the opposition sacred/profane sometimes coincides with the opposition between transgression and interdiction, while at other times both transgression and interdiction are said to belong to the world of the sacred in its primitive ambivalence. In the course of his exposition of eroticism, Bataille switches blithely from one of these frameworks to the other.

Following the Hegelian, teleological line of development, Bataille suggests that the imposition of interdiction upon the violence of nature both sacralizes that violence and opens the domain of reason, thereby inaugurating the realm of history or culture. On this line of development transgression is said periodically to introduce the force and violence of the sacred into the profane world of reason in order to rejuvenate the system. This formulation implies a correspondence between the oppositions sacred/profane and transgression/interdiction. Bataille conflates Hegel's and Kojève's anthropogenic story of the dialectical passage from animal to man (or from desire to self-consciousness) with an anthropological narrative of the emergence of culture from nature. At other times, however, Bataille presents interdiction as a refusal of violence that he characterizes as a step back—a recul—prompted by a feeling of horror. Transgression, then, occurs as a rebondissement, a rebounding of violence produced by positive emotions of attraction or fascination (E 75). Here Bataille emphasizes the emotional nature of interdiction itself. This implies an irrational foundation of the domain of reason, for reason is set up by interdiction on the authority of feeling. We see how far we are from the more schematic treatment of interdiction in much of early poststructuralist theory.

It is in the context of this affective elaboration that Bataille transposes transgression and interdiction into the economic terms first introduced in “La Notion de dépense.” He identifies transgression and interdiction with the operations of expenditure and accumulation, respectively. The important point is that the economic formulation is not introduced for the sake of abstraction or theoretical articulation. Bataille insists upon the fact that it depends upon an emotional logic of attraction and repulsion. I say emotional logic because it is a question here of an equivalent, on the order of feeling, of the abstract moments of affirmation and negation in Hegel's logic. In the dual operation of transgression/interdiction, Bataille writes, the emotional ambivalence is so intense that the only clear distinction between the two moments of the mechanism of the sacred is the economic one. “Getting and spending are the two phases of this activity,” Bataille writes, “… seen in this light, religion is like a dance in which a step back [recul] is followed by a spring forwards [rebondissement]” (E 68-69). The ressort of eroticism involves just this dance, for the word ressort, as the Robert dictionary indicates, itself includes the meanings of both a recul and a rebondissement. And the dance is Bataille's playful and intimate version of the Hegelian dialectic. Only here, instead of a sober dialectical synthesis, the vertigo of the dance yields “a deeper harmony [un accord plus profond]” (E 69), an allusion to what Bataille elsewhere elaborates in the name of communication. By substituting interdiction for the Hegelian negativity associated with action or work, and by placing the woman, as “living cadaver,” in the position of the slave, Bataille appears to have elided the scene of recognition altogether. But he has only postponed it. His version of the scene of recognition—eroticism as relation to the erotic object—occurs in a second moment, a reprise of the dialectical turn that yields the experience of the sacred.

Bataille places interdiction, the negative moment in the development from animal to human in Kojève's diachronic story, in a dialectical relationship with its counterpoint (contrecoup), transgression. “There is no need to stress the Hegelian nature of this operation,” Bataille writes, as we recall, in a note to his text, “which corresponds with the moment of dialectic expressed by the untranslatable German verb aufheben (to surpass while maintaining).”²⁸ Bataille thus superimposes this dialectical mechanism, this ressort, onto the Hegelian development of the negativity of consciousness and the passage from the condition of animal to human being. At the same time, he suspends this story before the scene of the struggle for pure prestige, thereby interrupting one Hegelian development with another. To be even more precise we might say that he interrupts the development of one Hegelian movement with the same movement at another moment of its development. Bataille syncopates Hegel.

Throughout L'Erotisme Bataille calls attention to the ruses of his text, to what he calls “changes of emphasis,” which reveal the posturing of various theoretical gestures and tones. He even explicitly signals the superimposition of what Caillois had distinguished as primitive and modern versions of the sacred. This conflation operates through a strategic alignment of the philosophically grounded oppositions continuity/discontinuity (invoked by Bataille in the opening line of his essay) and nature/reason (linked to the opposition of animal to human) with the philosophically problematic ethnological oppositions sacred/profane and interdiction/transgression borrowed from Caillois. This alignment joins two theoretical stories together precisely through the ambiguity introduced by the recourse to two different versions of the sacred—primitive and modern—which yield two different accounts of the relation between the sacred and the profane. Transgression, Bataille writes,

is complementary to the profane world, exceeding its limits but not destroying it. Human society is not only a world of work. Simultaneously—or successively—it is made up of the profane and the sacred, its two complementary forms. The profane world is the world of interdictions. The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression.

(E 67-68)

The modern, monovalent sacred is here opposed to the profane, which is identified with interdiction. Bataille then shifts to the other track, though not without first signaling the move. “This way of seeing is a difficult one,” he acknowledges,

in that sacred has two contradictory meanings simultaneously. Basically whatever is subject to prohibition is sacred. Interdiction [l'interdit] designating negatively the sacred thing, has not only the power to give us … a feeling of fear. … This feeling can change to one of devotion. … Man is at the same time subject to two movements: one of terror, which rejects, and one of attraction, which commands fascinated respect. Interdiction and transgression correspond to these two contradictory movements.

(E 68)

Here it is a question of the ambivalence of the primitive sacred, which depends upon the emotional ambivalence of horror and fascination, or repulsion and attraction, which affects both interdiction and transgression. To operate this slippage from the monovalent sacred, which is identified with transgression, to the ambivalent sacred, which requires the dual operation transgression/interdiction, Bataille can rely upon the ambiguity of the word “interdiction” (l'interdit), which, in French, refers both to the rule (or the act) of exclusion and to the object rendered taboo.

In L'Erotisme, Bataille finesses the double inscription of the word “sacred” (and the double movement of his argument) so elegantly that we hardly notice it despite the signal he provides. In “L'Histoire de l'érotisme,” however, the dance with Hegel is much more explicit. The steps are traced out more boldly. Whereas in L'Erotisme, as we see in the passage cited above, Bataille characterizes the complementarity between profane and sacred worlds as simultaneous or successive, here he depicts the double movement of interdiction and transgression as “almost simultaneous” (“H” 66). In this elaboration Bataille takes Kojève's definition (derived from Hegel) as his point of departure: the dialectical progression of the self-creation of man as negation of the givens (les données) of nature. In a second moment, he proposes that the cultural world—as negation of the natural one through the imposition of interdiction (Bataille's ethnological correction of Hegel's philosophical story)—itself becomes the horizon of the given, which impinges on the freedom of the subject. This leads to the moment of transgression, where what was previously negated returns as desirable, for it no longer exists in relation to the constraints of the donnée (“H” 69). It is in this context that Bataille describes the two movements of interdiction and transgression as “almost simultaneous”—a negation and its contrecoup. “This double movement,” he explains, “does not even imply distinct phases. I can, for the sake of exposition, speak of it as two moments [en parler en deux temps]. But it is a question of a totality [or organic unity, ensemble solidaire]” (“H” 66). It is impossible to speak of one without the other, just as it is impossible to separate the ebb from the flow of the ocean tides. “The duplicity of eroticism,” Bataille writes, “is unintelligible as long as the totality of this double movement of negation and return is not grasped” (“H” 66).

The dual operation interdiction/transgression does not just involve two moments, one of negation and one of return. It involves two (double) moments of negation and return. First there is the moment of interdiction, presented as a negation of the state of nature which yields the passage to culture. Then comes transgression as a negation of this horizon of culture which has itself taken on the quality of the given (the donnée). This negation (or transgression) of the cultural given yields the passage to the sacred and to man as religious animal. This, we remember, was Bataille's ethnological correction of the philosophical topos that defines man as rational animal.

The dizzying character of this movement—this dance—has to do with its temporality. The two points of view concerning the “duplicity of eroticism,” the successive and the simultaneous versions of relations between interdiction and transgression, correspond to two positions with respect to history. The successive implies a situation within history, whereas the simultaneous refers us to a position at the end of history. Thus the rhythm of point and counterpoint, of ebb and flow, involves not just two moments, but two times or temporalities: the profane temporality of history and of work, and the sacred one in which time stops. The double movement itself is sequential. To say yes, Bataille writes, one must have been able to say no. Logically, then, transgression cannot precede interdiction. But it is also simultaneous with interdiction because, in the instant, there is no such thing as before or after. Transgression, la fête, opens a mythic time that is not linear. Finally, the two movements are both simultaneous and sequential to the extent that they collapse the two moments of Hegel's scene of recognition: the anthropogenic moment, which corresponds to the self-consciousness of the master, and the end of history, which corresponds to the self-consciousness of the sage as subject of absolute knowledge.

In “L'Histoire de l'érotisme,” Bataille is explicit about the relation between his thinking of eroticism and a Hegelian notion of the end of history, which Kojève insisted upon in his lectures and interpreted in revolutionary terms.²⁹ “History, to my mind, will have finished,” Bataille writes, “when the disparity of rights and of level of subsistence are reduced: such would be the conditions for an ahistorical mode of existence of which erotic activity is the expression” (“H” 163; my emphasis). Eroticism, then, would be a postrevolutionary mode of experience. At the end of history, Kojève wrote, the sage is content to retrace the path already traveled. This is precisely what Bataille does in this study of eroticism that he calls an “erotic phenomenology” (“H” 524), alluding back to the project he had identified for himself as early as 1939. Eroticism involves not the mastery of the lord, but the sovereignty of the sage. Bataille's version of the scene of recognition—man's relation to the erotic object, the beautiful woman prostitute—refers us to this moment of sovereignty. “By what right,” Kojève had asked, “can we affirm that the State will not engender in man a new desire, other than that of Recognition, and that it will not consequently be negated one day by a negative or creative action other than that of struggle or work?” (K 468). Eroticism is Bataille's answer to Kojève's rhetorical question. “Questioning has meaning only as elaborated by philosophy,” Bataille writes in his conclusion to L'Erotisme, “the supreme questioning is that to which the answer is the supreme moment of eroticism—that of eroticism's silence” (E 275).

Eroticism requires a scene of recognition in order to provide a conscious experience of transgression, and thereby to engender, for man, the status Bataille refers to as “religious animal.” In this corrected, second-order version of the master/slave dialectic, it is not a question of real struggle to the death, as in Hegel's scenario, but of a fiction of death—a philosophical equivalent of la petite mort of erotic jouissance. Recognition operates through a fiction of death. But it is not a question of a fictive death, as in the case of the dialectically suppressed slave according to Hegel. It is rather a matter of a fiction, or illusion of death as absolute recognition, or recognition of the absolute. The fiction does not occur by default, for want of the real thing. It is the positive result—the meaning—of this dialectic. The figure figée of the prostitute, the beautiful erotic object, is essential to the staging of this fiction.

“The dialectic has a positive result,” Hegel wrote, “because it has a specifically determined content, because the result is not … empty and abstract nothingness, but the negation of certain specific determination.”³⁰ The problem with the orgy, for Bataille, is that it involves abstract negation in Hegel's sense. Whereas in L'Erotisme it is the specific beauty of the erotic object that lends concreteness to the desire for possession; beauty presents the erotic object to desire. For Bataille, beauty is the meaning of the erotic object, a meaning (sens) that gives this object—this woman—its value (E 131). In a woman's nudity, Bataille writes, “the potential beauty of this nakedness and its individual charm are what reveal themselves … the objective difference in fact, between the value of one object and that of another” (E 131). Beauty provides the specific determinations negated in the act of erotic possession.

“The decisive element in the distinct constitution of erotic objects is a bit disconcerting,” Bataille concedes; “it presupposes that a human being can be considered as a thing” (“H” 119). He goes on to discuss various modes of subordination or alienation, passing in review man's domestication of animals and the master's domination over the slave before arriving at the question of relations between women and men. Of the slavery of Hegel's master/slave dialectic Bataille writes, “the fiction thanks to which our ancestors regarded their fellow men as things is full of meaning” (“H” 120). Slavery aside, Bataille writes, in a charmingly ambiguous turn of phrase, men have generally tended to “voir les choses dans les femmes [to see things in women / consider women as things]” (“H” 120). Before marriage, girls are considered the property of their fathers or brothers. It is for this reason that women, unlike the maenads, are granted a reified status. It is because they have the form and determinateness of an object, as object of exchange, that they can function as objects of erotic desire. Whereas the maenads fled in disorder, Bataille writes, “the object of desire … ornaments herself with the greatest care and offers an immobile figure/face [figure] to the temptation of he who would possess her” (“H” 121). The problem with the orgy, then, is that its participants, like the maenads, cannot be captured in order to be exchanged. They cannot be stabilized in order to function as the support of a figure or a fiction.

Bataille's study is a history of eroticism in the sense that it explores the dialectical development of the contradiction (or dual operation) of gift-exchange as it is associated with the problem of incest. The duplicity of eroticism, the dual operation of transgression/interdiction, corresponds to this economic contradiction. Bataille opens “L'Histoire de l'érotisme” with a rambling discussion of Lévi-Strauss's theory concerning the prohibition of incest. On the one hand, he says, the theory emphasized the expenditure associated with sexual interdiction because of the exchange of women. He calls the prohibition of incest “the law of the gift” because it sets in motion the movement of “generosity” associated with the circulation of women in exchange (“H” 29). It is in this sense that he describes potlatch as “at once beyond calculation and the epitome of calculation” (“H” 39). Bataille regrets that Lévi-Strauss did not emphasize the relation between the exchange of women (or the potlatch) and the structure of eroticism. Testily, he states that the anthropologist “would no doubt not go so far as to say what I say: that it is a question of a dialectical process of development” (“H” 36, original emphasis).

Bataille's dialectical development of the insight he shared with Lévi-Strauss involved a superimposition of various stories concerning a struggle for pure prestige. He combines elements from Hegel's analysis of the struggle for recognition (which requires the fiction of the servile man as object) with anthropological stories of potlatch as struggle for pure prestige, and of women as objects of exchange. In other words, he combines elements of the formal structure of the master/slave dialectic with one anthropological story of interdiction (the prohibition of incest) and one story of transgression (potlatch) which includes the gift and sacrifice. If the Hegelian fiction of slavery is “full of meaning” for Bataille, it is because it provides the point of articulation for these overlapping stories.

Paradoxically, for Bataille the erotic object operates in the registers of both the restricted and the general economies. To the extent that the relation to the erotic object includes elements of the Hegelian scene of recognition, there is subordination in the sovereignty of eroticism. There is possession in a nonreciprocal relation. On the other hand, the woman gives herself to the man. Erotic possession belongs not to the restricted economy of utility, but to the general economy of expenditure. Interdiction, as law of the gift, thus repeats the “double movement” Bataille attributes to the dual operation of interdiction/transgression. Interdiction (the interdiction of incest) precedes eroticism as relation to the erotic object because it is necessary to the constitution of that object. This movement corresponds to the first line of development of Bataille's theory, the story of history along the lines of Hegel-Kojève. At the same time, the woman as erotic object is necessary for transgression since she provides the “recognition” of erotic sovereignty; she is necessary for the transgressiveness of erotic possession per se.

In other words, there is no pure origin of transgression, no origin of the economy of expenditure. The dance of interdiction/transgression goes all the way back—or circles round. There is no transgression that is not mediated by interdiction, no rebondissement without a moment of recul. But neither is interdiction primary. The historical narrative refers us back to a (violent) animal sexuality from which we step back in horror. “To the extent that the tumultuous movement of the senses occurs,” Bataille writes, “it requires a step back, a renunciation, the step back without which no one would be able to leap ahead so far. But this step back requires the rule, which organizes the dance and assures that it will spring forth again indefinitely” (“H” 36). If woman is at the center of eroticism, as Bataille claims, it is as the paradoxical object that marks the limit between law and transgression, or their interpenetration.

In L'Erotisme Bataille figures the dual operation of interdiction/transgression through the image of the chrysalis. The emotions of desire and anxiety associated with interdiction and transgression, Bataille writes,

are … in the life of man, what the chrysalis is to the final perfect creature, the perfect animal. The inner experience [L'expérience intérieure] of man is given at the instant when, bursting out of the chrysalis, he feels that he is tearing himself, not something outside that resists him. He goes beyond the objective awareness bounded by the walls of the chrysalis and this process, too, is linked with this reversal [renversement].

(E 39)

As an intermediate form between the larva and the image, the chrysalis figures the transitional stage between animal existence and the emergence of the “perfect animal”—man as religious animal—from the limits of historical time. The image thus figures both the story of interdiction as entry into history (passage from larva to chrysalis, or from man to animal) and transgression as a leap out of history at the moment of the imago or image. Elsewhere in Bataille the appearance of the image on the walls of the Lascaux caves marked the emergence of civilized man from the “larval” state of animal existence. There, what Bataille called the “sacred moment of figuration” signals the beginning of history and of art. The figure of the chrysalis, therefore, accommodates Bataille's syncope, both moments of his ronde with Hegel. It does so through the insistence of the image (or figuration) per se. It both duplicates and delays the image through the hesitation of the moment implied in the metamorphosis of the chrysalis: the imago.

I have suggested that the dialectic of the erotic object is necessary to Bataille's theory of eroticism as the support of figuration or fiction—the fiction of death in particular. We can perhaps learn something more about what fiction means in Bataille, or how it operates, by examining the figure of the chrysalis. If the chrysalis figures a movement toward sovereignty, and sovereignty, as Bataille writes in the text on Lascaux, pertains to “the one who is an end in himself,” then the chrysalis is an image of man as erotic animal.³¹ If, however, woman is always at the center of eroticism, she is also at the center of this image, although in a manner that bypasses what the image gives us to see and operates through the language of the figure. For another word for chrysalide is nymphe, which, in a first meaning, refers to a mythological goddess, or rather, as the Robert specifies, “her image in the form of a naked young girl.” In addition to the zoological meaning, however (which is synonymous with chrysalis), the dictionary also gives an anatomical meaning: “the small lips of the vulva.” The synonym of the chrysalis, then—the nymph—signifies the woman's sex. It clothes or figures it with the image of nakedness.

In its form, Bataille writes, eroticism is fictive. The fiction is what ensures the lucidity, or consciousness, necessary to distinguish eroticism from mere animal sexuality. It is necessary to erect man as erotic animal, and religious animal as well. The woman (the erotic object) is essential to eroticism in order to render it perceptible (saisissable), in order to figure eroticism, to present it to consciousness through the mediation that distinguishes it from animal sexuality. Yet what is figured through the dialectic of the erotic object, what is seized by consciousness, is loss or expenditure. With eroticism, we are left with a fiction that does not represent anything, but must nevertheless be staged or performed—a fiction of death. Its appearance requires the presence of the “paradoxical object” (the beautiful woman prostitute), an object that signifies the absence of any object.

With the metaphor of the chrysalis we have the sex of the woman hidden within the figure of metamorphosis. The chrysalis names one moment of the process which it also “figures,” though only as an accumulation or juxtaposition of latent figures—the larva and the imago—which serve both to veil and to reveal one another. The metamorphosis, as image, passes not into another image of something, but into the word “image” per se, the imago. The linguistic level introduces a latent figuration that gives us the image, to the extent that it names it—imago. But it does not give us anything to see. Likewise the image of the woman's sex (or of the naked girl) is veiled by the linguistic alibi of the synonym, nymphe. This corresponds to the way beauty operates in Bataille's account of eroticism, where it is associated with nakedness. Nakedness is a revelation of beauty which reveals the “individual charm” of a woman—“the objective difference, in fact, between the value of one object and that of another” (E 131). At the same time, the beauty of the nude woman serves as a veil. It exerts a charm that seduces the man into desiring the woman's nonbeautiful parts—the nymphe in the anatomical sense. “The beauty of the desirable woman suggests her private parts, the hairy ones, to be precise, the animal ones. … Beauty that is a negation of animality and awakens desire ends up by exasperating desire and exalting the animal parts” (E 143-44). In the figure of the chrysalis, the nymph as image—the figuration of the mythological goddess through the image of the naked girl—clothes the naked fact of the woman's sex with an image of nakedness, a kind of seductive artifice or prestige.

The positive result of the dialectic of erotic sovereignty is a fiction, one “invented expressly.” “We approach the void,” Bataille writes, “but not to fall into it. We want to become intoxicated with dizziness and the image of the fall is enough” (E 94, my emphasis). But this is an image, like the word “imago,” which is not, in itself, an image of anything. The positive result of the dialectical movement of interdiction/transgression is neither discursive meaning, nor radical loss of meaning such as we find in the textual practice of signifiance with its indefinite deferral of meaning. Rather it is a fiction—a desired or intentional fiction (fiction voulue)—a seductive illusion or praestigium of death.

As I have already indicated, the transgression of eroticism has been appropriated as a model (or antimodel) for text and signifiance, and hence for the “communication,” or mutual contamination, between theory and literature (or writing) evoked in Tel Quel. The version of transgression that has been appropriated for signifiance, however, is one which would imply an orgiastic eroticism. This is elaborated by Barthes in Le Plaisir du texte in relation to the notion of jouissance. We have seen that a close reading of L'Erotisme is at odds with Sollers's reading of transgression, specifically his reading of the woman as figure for the interdit and the signifier. Transgression is not a function of what Sollers called “the flesh [la chair]” or “the impersonal plethora” in opposition to “the body [le corps].” It is rather a function of bodies, determinate bodies that can enter into a dialectical relation, if only a merely formal or fictive one. This reading has shown the extent to which the question of the limits of philosophy was posed by Bataille specifically in relation to Hegel. I have stressed the centrality of the structure of recognition in the elaboration of eroticism and emphasized the importance of the notion of fiction in Bataille, a term that dropped out of the language of Tel Quel in the early 1960's. Increasingly, the issues of avant-gardism have come to be articulated in opposition to realism and to phenomenology. It was therefore convenient to equate discourse, in Hegel's sense, with the esthetic project of realism. Clearly the sense of “fiction,” as it pertains to Bataille, has nothing to do with realism. But it does have something to do with meanings (although not discursive ones) and with lucidity—that se saisir (bringing to consciousness) which is essential to transgression for Bataille.

In Bataille's theory of transgression, fiction (or figuration) is necessary to enable consciousness of the erotic moment. Likewise the theory of sacrifice requires a fictive negation. For the moment of “se saisir”—the se saisir (bringing to consciousness) of a désaisissement (loss of consciousness)—is the experience common to eroticism, laughter, sacrifice, and poetry. It is what Bataille calls the “being in the instant.”³² It is in this sense that poetry, for Bataille, is event.³³ Lucidity, which we have considered in relation to the question of eroticism, is evoked as a “giving to visibility [donner à voir]” in Bataille's discussion of poetry. Poetry, Bataille writes, “is a cry that gives to visibility [un cri qui donne à voir].” In the same context he writes that sacrifice “gives to visibility that in the object which has the power to excite desire or horror”—that is, the sacred.³⁴ And he adds a temporal characterization of the encounter with “what is” when he defines sacrifice as “the burning moment of the passage where what already is no longer is, or what no longer is is for sensibility, more than what was.” In this essay he defines the sacred, which he identifies with the poetic, as an intensity one experiences on the level of sensibility, independently of the operations of intelligence. Poetry and sacrifice, he writes, have the same impact: “[They] render sensible, and as intensely as possible, the content of the present instant.”³⁵ We see from this early essay that the notion of fiction in Bataille has an important temporal dimension. Fiction gives us to see what linear time denies to us. When we neglect or efface the notion of fiction in Bataille (as theoretical rereadings of him tend to do) we lose this temporal dynamic. When the instant (or the “event”) is interpreted in terms of transgression it becomes reduced to a point or line. This facilitates its association with the Heideggerian question of limitation. What is lost, however, is the affective dimension, as well as the force of time.

Notes

1. Fourny, Introduction à la lecture de Georges Bataille, p. 19.

2. Philippe Sollers, “La Science de Lautréamont,” reprinted in Logiques, p. 270.

3. I am simplifying here. More precisely, it is a question of developing the dialectic between Nietzsche and Hegel within Bataille's thinking in the direction of late Heidegger via Nietzsche. See Hollier's introduction to Le Collège de Sociologie concerning Bataille and Nietzsche.

4. See Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, for an English translation of this text.

5. Tel Quel 34, 1968.

6. Quite different conceptions of revolution are at stake here. Bataille, in the 1930's, identified revolution with transgression. But (as I shall discuss further in the Conclusion) his was hardly an orthodox understanding of revolution. Subsequently, he identified revolution with rationalism and the utilitarian economy. As we shall see, Kristeva tries to have it both ways in La Révolution du langage poétique. She relies upon Bataille's rhetoric of transgression but tries to realign grammatology with a specifically Marxist notion of revolution. See Chapter 2.

7. Philippe Sollers, preface to Théorie d'ensemble.

8. Bataille founded the review in the 1940's. Critique was the principal rival to Sartre's Les Temps modernes. See Critique 195-96, 1963. Subsequent references to this essay by Foucault will be given in the text within parentheses, marked PT (my translation).

9. This is consistent with his use of the term “se dessiner” in the passage quoted above.

10. We are moving closer to late Heidegger. Kant, Foucault writes, opened up the question of the limit but closed it again by turning his attention away from critical philosophy toward philosophical anthropology. Here, already, the “return to Kant” that began more than a decade later is prefigured as a return to the ontological questions subsequently addressed by Heidegger. The burden of dialectical thinking is thus laid at the feet of Kant, who stepped back from a “thinking of the limit.”

11. “D'un tel langage, il est possible, sans doute, de retrouver chez Bataille les souches calcinées, la cendre prometteuse.”

12. Philippe Sollers, “Le Toit,” Tel Quel 29, 1967. Subsequent references will be given in the text within parentheses, marked T (my translation).

13. Whereas for Derrida “writing” is not to be taken literally, for Sollers “writing” carries less of the philosophical force of Derrida's analysis and usually implies something like “literature” (or “l'envers de la littérature”) and to this extent does signify more or less literally.

14. Bataille seems not to be particularly interested in this polemic per se, that is, the literary concern that will connect up with the philosophical issue of the critique of representation. Obviously Bataille's economic distinction, and his opposition of the heterogeneous world of the sacred to the homogeneous one of the profane implies a disinterest in realism. And yet in the contemporary theoretical context, once the critique of literary realism is reinforced by the philosophical critique of representation, all forms of esthetic figuration become suspect. Bataille is never so restrictive. He will appeal to figuration, fictions, images, and operations of “dramatization” in the service of transgression and the experience of the sacred. Bataille will become friends with Magritte late in his life. Modernist purists, on the other hand, reject Magritte as “realist.”

15. “L'érotisme—le fait que la théorie en soit faite seulement aujourd'hui dans le sillage de Sade—prend alors toute sa signification: non seulement il est ce qui, dans l'histoire, se présente comme fin de l'ère théologique, philosophique et préscientifique—comme ce qui met fin, visiblement, à leurs présupposés logiques—, mais encore comme le viol de l'individu constitué par cette période, de l'unité organique et économique qui en a été le support: ‘Toute la mise en œuvre érotique a pour principe une destruction de l'être fermé qu'est à l'état moral un partenaire de jeu …’ … En somme l'érotisme entendu comme la richesse dévoilée et l'aveu du langage—comme son pouvoir de dépense et de gratuité—occupe en un point une fonction de pénétration et de destruction du discours.”

16. This phrase is particularly difficult to translate. It means both that theory and literature would speak to one another and that they would be open to one another in the sense of one room communicating with another. It implies that the limit between the two is to be made porous. From “La révolution ici maintenant,” p. 68.

17. We shall return to this point in our discussion of Breton in Chapter 5, where I argue that Sollers and others have misinterpreted this passage from Breton. Denis Hollier also addresss this passage in his essay “Le dualisme matérialiste de Georges Bataille.” He writes that, whereas for Breton “the point of the fusion of the opposites [fusion des contraires] defines the sacred … and distinguishes it from the profane,” in Bataille, the sacred is understood in relation to a play of difference, specifically that between the “two worlds” of the sacred and the profane, of interdiction and transgression, etc. The sacred for Bataille is pertinent in and through the difference between the sacred and the profane, in and through the limit between them, and it is in this sense that the thinking of Bataille is a thinking of the limit.” Although I do not agree with Hollier concerning the “idealism” of surrealism (especially if this implies a dialectical opposition between idealism and materialism), his analyses of the relations between Bataille and Breton (and Bataille and Sartre) are nuanced and detailed and extremely helpful to anyone interested in attempting to contextualize the issues taken up by Tel Quel.

18. Derrida, “De l'économie restreinte à l'économie générale.” I have used the English text, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass.

19. Derrida, ibid.

20. See my “Sublime in Theory.”

21. Philippe Sollers, preface to the second edition of Théorie d'ensemble (1980).

22. Denis Hollier, “Le Dualisme matérialiste de Georges Bataille.”

23. Bergson, L'Evolution créatrice, p. 39. Subsequent references will be given in the text, marked EC (my translations).

24. Bataille, L'Erotisme, p. 129. Subsequent references will be given in the text, marked E.

25. Bataille writes this in a note to his essay “Histoire de l'érotisme,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, p. 549. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text within parentheses marked H, and will refer to this edition (my translation).

26. Kojève's Hegel, Besnier writes, is anthropologized. For Kojève, “the central lesson would be delivered in the famous dialectic of master and slave” (La Politique de l'impossible, p. 139, my translation).

27. I say “his or her” for ideological reasons. But it should be remembered that it was the question of the very possibility of this reciprocity that launched Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. To mark the point that feminine mastery was never to be taken for granted, I will henceforth use the masculine gender in connection with the Hegelian scenario of the master/slave dialectic.

28. This note is cited in Derrida's essay. I have used the English version of this text in Writing and Difference, p. 275. The note appears on p. 36 of Bataille's Erotism.

29. This is discussed further in the Conclusion.

30. Cited in Kojève, Lectures de Hegel, p. 477.

31. See Bataille, “Lascaux ou la naissance de l'art” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 9, pp. 32-36.

32. See Bataille, “Le Dernier Instant,” Critique 5, 1946.

33. See Bataille, “De l'âge de pierre à Jacques Prévert,” Critique 3-4, 1946. Here Bataille elaborates a notion of “the poetry of the event [la poésie de l'évènement]” (p. 197) which he opposes specifically to Sartrean engagement. Sounding a lot like Valéry, he enjoins the poet to “cry out what is [crier alors ce qui est]” (p. 198). Although the language is different, what Bataille describes in terms of the event and the instant is not unlike what Bergson had earlier elaborated in relation to duration. We hear echoes of Bergson when Bataille writes that “la misère de la poésie [misery or destitution of poetry] is the desire for its permanence. Between the man who cries out and the event that is, language usually intervenes, whose generality and immaterial nature lead straight to duration, the timeless, and the Academy” (p. 207). Bataille echoes the critique of language presented in Bergson's Essai although he uses the term “duration [durée]” to express just the opposite of Bergsonian duration.

34. Ibid., p. 209.

35. Ibid., p. 210.