After Bataille

Sacrifice, Exposure, Community

Patrick Ffrench

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351577359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Author of the obscene narrative Story of the Eye and of works of heretical philosophy such as Inner Experience, Georges Bataille (1897-1962) is one of the most powerful and secretly influential French thinkers of the last century. His work is driven by a compulsion to communicate an experience which exceeds the limits of communicative exchange, and also constitutes a sustained focus on the nature of this complusion. After Bataille takes this sense of compulsion as its motive and traces it across different figures in Batailles thought, from an obsession with the thematics and the event of sacrifice, through the exposure of being and of the subject, to the necessary relation to others in friendship and in community. In each of these instances After Bataille is distinctive in staging a series of encounters between Bataille, his contemporaries, and critics and theorists who extend or engage with his legacy. It thus offers a vital account of the place of Bataille in contemporary thought.

CHAPTER 1
Affectivity without a Subject

What is (an) Affect?

We can begin with an investigation of affect and the related noun affectivity, since this concept plays an important role in the development of Bataille's thought in the 1930s. The underlying thesis is that, although Bataille's thought has tended to be interpreted in the context of theories of subjectivity, it emerges initially as an account of human emotion or affectivity which bypasses the question of the subject. Moreover, its initial context is not that of philosophy or aesthetics, but that of politics. In his essay 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire' Walter Benjamin proposes that the metropolitan crowd is 'imprinted on [Baudelaire's] consciousness as a hidden figure'.¹ The not-so-hidden figure which informs Bataille's writing of this period is that of the exalted, 'effervescent' crowd or mob, 'in the street', driven not by rational and discursive motives but by emotive or affective currents which are often figured as an electric charge.² This chapter, focused on Bataille's thought before the war and on different engagements with it, charts the ways in which Bataille attempts to elaborate a theory of human affectivity and its potential uses.

In their Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, Laplanche and Pontalis define affect as follows: 'Terme repris en psychanalyse de la terminologie psychologique allemande en connotant tout état affectif, pénible ou agréable, vague ou qualifié, qu'il se présente sous la forme d'une décharge massive ou comme tonalité générale. Selon Freud, toute pulsion s'exprime dans les deux registres de l'affect et de la représentation. L'affect est l'expression qualitative de la quantité d'énergie pulsionnelle et de seS variations' [Term taken up in psychoanalysis from German psychological terminology connoting any painful or agreeable affective state, vague or qualified, whether manifested in the form of massive discharge or as general tonality. According to Freud, any instinct is expressed in the two registers of affect and of representation. Affect is the qualitative expression of the quantity of instinctual energy and its variations].³ The key points to note here are the distinction between affect and representation, the notion of discharge, and the relation to instinct; affect is the expression of instinctual energy via a discharge which 'affects' the body. I will use the term affectivity to refer to the realm of human behaviour which relates to this dynamics of charge and discharge, and which contrasts sharply with the realm of ideas, representations, discourse, the entire field of the subject. We should note, however, the suggestions of vagueness and imprecision in Laplanche and Pontalis's definition: affect 'connotes' any affective state; it may be a specific discharge or a 'general tonality'. This sense of vagueness betrays the fundamental disparity between psychoanalysis and theories which offer an account of human psychology in terms of affects and affectivity. In a context in which psychoanalysis has become a persuasive and relatively dominant framework for the conceptualization of the psyche, recourse to notions of affect can appear anachronistic.

Indeed, after Freud, affect has had a bad press. 'Je n'ai pas besom de faire plus que de vous rappeler le caractère confus des recours à l'affectivité' [I don't need to do more than remind you of the confused nature of the recourse to affectivity], says Lacan in his seminar of 1959-60 on the ethics of psychoanalysis.⁴ He also says that psychoanalytic experience 'n'est pas celle d'un frotti-frotta affectif' [is not that of an affective smoochy-woochy].⁵ In 1926 Freud wrote that the domain of'affect in general' entails 'leaving the realm of pure psychology and entering the borderland of physiology.'⁶ The confusion arises in particular around the notion of unconscious 'feelings', and from the problematic status — for psychoanalysis — of emotion. Emotions, affects, cannot in themselves be unconscious, says Freud.⁷ Both imply a discharge of instinctual energy which must be conscious; there are no 'feelings' as such in the unconscious, or if there are, they are there only as 'beginnings'.⁸ The key distinction is between affects and representations: it is the latter alone of which the unconscious consists. Freud will therefore distinguish between the ideational and the affective portion of the original instinctual impulse, and the different 'vicissitudes' of the instinct in both forms. Affect usually qualifies an 'affection' of the body by the instinct, which Freud understands, initially at least, as a discharge of instinctual energy which is necessarily conscious. Undischarged affect tends to give rise to anxiety; indeed, anxiety is that for which 'all repressed affects are exchanged'.⁹

We must distinguish therefore between unconscious ideas and affective, emotional movements; it follows from the distinction between affect and representations that the unconscious is not a mass of unexpressed emotion or undischarged affect, but a complex network of representations (which are moreover not equivalent to 'images' but exist instead as invested mnesic traces) susceptible of entering into relation with each other or with 'verbal images' (and thus forming a structure or a chain). Freud contends furthermore that if the unconscious consists of 'thing-representations' (Sachsvorstellungen), word-representations (Wortvorstellungen) are conscious, and analytic practice functions through the linking of the former to the latter. The unconscious is the domain of representations; the domain of affect is that of discharge, which takes the form either of motility, enervation or secretory activity. Freud therefore conceives of the psyche on the basis of a mechanism which is charged with instinctual impulses, and which discharges these impulses. He conceives of this mechanism, moreover, as ruled by a 'principle of constancy' Such that it must maintain a constant level of energy. According to this understanding, affectivity is qualified as conscious and primarily expulsive, having to do with the discharge of the excess energy of a system or an economy — the system of the subject.

However, the Freudian definition of the unconscious in terms of representations arising from cathexes of mnesic traces does not fall fully formed into the field of psychology and psychiatry in France. Elizabeth Roudinesco has shown how psychoanalysis emerged in France only problematically and in hybridized form alongside the established disciplines of psychology and psychiatry.¹⁰ It emerged on the one hand as a supplementary element of a psychiatry termed 'dynamic' in that it would make use of a variety of models and techniques, and on the other hand in contest with accounts of mental illness or 'dementia' which emphasized neurological defects, inherited degeneracies or 'morbid' constitutions.¹¹ The 'Evolution psychiatrique' group in particular, to which Bataille's psychoanalyst Adrien Borel belonged, construed psychoanalysis in this sense.¹² We should thus bear in mind that psychoanalysis did not appear in France in the 'pure' form which we might now be able to access it through reading Freud's complete works or Lacan's rendering of them and that the notion of affectivity is determined by this 'confusion', as Lacan deems it. We can note here Bataille's interest in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as borne out by his reading, in medical, physiological and neurological studies, alongside an interest in psychoanalysis.¹³ The focus on the affective in Bataille's theory of the sacred should be seen in this context, as informed by an account of human psychology which does not feature the unconscious, does not follow Freud's emphasis on internalized representations, and which focuses rather on physiological or emotive manifestations — discharges — of the (conscious) body.

Further qualifications regarding Bataille's relation to psychoanalysis at this stage must be added. As noted above, Freud inherits from the general scientific context of his time the mechanistic principle of constancy.¹⁴ This informs the notion of the pleasure principle, such that pleasure as such is defined negatively as the avoidance of unpleasure, the latter being defined as an increase of excitation. It follows that instinctual energy is either discharged, or if such a discharge is inadmissible to consciousness, it is repressed and 'exchanged' for anxiety. In 'La Notion de dépense', written in 1933, Bataille disagrees with this utilitarian and economic understanding of affect. If Freud conceives of affective discharge as a result of the principle of constancy, for Bataille this view derives from a conservative principle for which such discharge is construed as an expenditure which will allow the organism to continue to function for other ends. In Bataille's view the equation needs to be turned on its head. In the same way that Bataille conceives of utility as a secondary derivation of a primary need for waste, or impulse to expenditure, affective discharge is to be construed as an end in itself, rather than a result of the principle of constancy of a regulated system. In the version of'La Notion de dépense' published in the journal La Critique sociale Bataille writes:

Le plaisir, qu'il s'agisse d'art, dédebauche admise ou de jeu, est réduit en définitive, dans les représentations intellectuelles qui ont cours, à une concession, c'est-à-dire un délassement dont le rôle serait subsidaire. La part la plus appréciable de la vie est donnée comme la condition — parfois même comme la condition regrettable — de l'activité sociale productive.

(I, 303; Bataille's emphasis)

[Pleasure, whether it is a question of art, open debauchery or play, is definitively reduced in current intellectual representations, to a concession, that is to an abandon whose role would be secondary. The most appreciable part of life is given as the condition — even sometimes as a regrettable condition — of productive social activity.]

The mechanistic derivation, in Bataille's view, of the principle of constancy is hinted at in a phrase absent from the published version, which adds, after 'subsidaire', the clause: 'analogue en quelque sorte, à la honte prés, à celui d'un radiateur réfrigérant' [analogous in some way, and almost shamefully, to the role of the radiator in a refrigerator] (I, 662). The critique of Freud is clearer in another paragraph which does not appear in the version in La Critique sociale:

La considération du temps a substitué á la représentation positive du plaisir désirable un principe de conservation d'un état prétendu agréable, qui est seulement un état non pénible: il n'est plus question de la recherche naïve du plaisir, mais d'une méthode sénile, d'une prudence inhumaine et parfaitement dégradante. Les théories psychologiques négatives (Fechner) [in a yet different version Bataille substitutes 'Wundt, Freud' here] qui représentent le plaisir comme la libération d'une excitation gênante — étant donné l'impossibilité de fait de définir le plaisir — expriment cette substitution inconsciente sous une forme prétendue scientifique.

(II, 149)

[The consideration of time has substituted, for the positive representation of desirable pleasure, a principle of conservation of a supposedly agreeable state, which is only a state without pain; it is no longer a question of a naïve search for pleasure, but of a senile method, an inhuman and perfectly degrading prudence. Negative psychoanalytic theories (Fechner) which represent pleasure as the liberation of a troubling excitation — given the established impossibility of defining pleasure — express this unconscious substitution in a supposedly scientific form.]

In the same way that Bataille conceives of pleasure as an end in itself, and is critical of Freud's account of it as regulated according to a mechanistic principle of constancy, affectivity, in Bataille, is autonomous and independent of the system of the psyche and the economy of the subject. Bataille does not therefore hold with the Freudian explanation of affective discharge, and conceives of it rather as an end in itself. At a fundamental level, the Freudian account of the psyche is incompatible with the Bataillean thesis of expenditure. It follows that affectivity, in Bataillean terms, has to be thought in separation from an account of the psyche as ruled by a principle of economic constancy, and rather as a play of charge and discharge, a potlatch of instinct, so to speak. The temptation to 'correct' Bataille according to Freudian terms should be resisted, even if, as suggested above, Bataille's emphasis on affect sidesteps the issue of the unconscious and of subjectivity and thus appears as fundamentally non-Freudian.¹⁵ What is particularly crucial here is the absence, in Bataille's thought, of the individual psyche, of the ego; this again begs the question: does Bataille's theory of the sacred (at this stage) have any need of a theory of the subject? Does the play of charge and discharge occur for the subject, between subjects, or independently of any reference to the individual consciousness? These questions will implicitly programme the mapping of Bataille's pre-war thought and writing in what follows.

Summer 1936: Bataille, Caillois, Kojève

In February 1937, in the Grand Véfour, a café near the Palais Royal, Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois gave presentations that would later be published in the Nouvelle revue française in 1938, along with an essay by their eventual collaborator Michel Leiris, as representations of the activity of the Collège de Sociologie.¹⁶ Beginning its official meetings in November 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Affectivity Without a Subject
• 2 The Subject and Writing as Sacrifice
• 3 Authority, Friendship, Community
• 4 Nudity, Femininity, Eroticism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index