Georges Bataille

An Epitome

Lynn Hughey Engelbert

• Publisher: Kismet Press LLP
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780995671744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This short introduction to Georges Bataille’s work examines his philosophy and literature by identifying the central theories of transgression, sovereignty and/or subjectivity, sacrifice, art and/or aesthetic radicalism, general and restricted economies, as well as the profane and the sacred by way of eroticism and ecstasy. Bataille remains a singular and complex figure, an Outsider in poststructuralist, continental philosophy, and the complexities of his interdisciplinary approach to literature and theory compels this introduction to explore and explain his innovative and often controversial work as an impossible philosopher, as well as a philosopher of the Impossible.

V: Outsider Literature(s) inside the Abyss

It would be impossible to write about Bataille’s work and his relevance to modern philosophy without a full consideration of the central role of his literary work. In these texts, the narrator or set of narratives that are abject or Other to themselves, and as a literature that composes transgression into material representation, Bataille’s literary works never fail to engage and enact a set of principles that originate out of his philosophical theories. The reinvention of language and narrative he brought about, was effectively transmitted by cruelty and displacement, where text and meaning ruptured, and further, the creative potential for violence occurred routinely and randomly. This is founded on a kind of ambivalent yet affirmative affectation for Bataille, something like “the brilliance and suffocation” he described for Sade’s work, as “excretion and APPROPRIATION” or a dynamic, heterological system.1 The “science of heterogeneity” is comprised of limitation versus “violently alternating antagonism (expulsion) and love (reabsorption),”2 so one sees the “specific character of fecal matter,” of ghosts, and as well, “unlimited time or space.”3

This is always an “anti-social” aesthetic and literature, as it originates from impulses that oppose the interests of “a society in a state of stagnation.”4 The sadist/philosopher/author exists in a world ruled by the “solar anus,” argues Bataille, whose “two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement.”5 And this is a universe where

a dog [is] devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobbing accountant [and] a jar of mustard represents the confusion that serves as a vehicle of love.6

“Beings [that] only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them,” populate this environment.7 After the death of God, Bataille, like Nietzsche, finds that the birth of the “man-god” who “appears and dies both as rottenness and as redemption of the supreme person” creates “ME.”8 This is an “ideally brilliant and empty infinity” ruled by “catastrophe”9 and this is the horizon that characterizes his fictional works.

The split subject of literature, and those narrators and characters who come to inhabit the universe(s) of his novels, show the tension between the “monocephalic society” and the “bi- or poly-cephalic society,” where the latter serves as the model for a rejection of democratic enslavement in the mono culture or society.10 This bi- or poly-cephalic existence is governed by “ecstatic time,” where visions of things like “cadavers, nudity, explosions, spilled blood, abysses, sunbursts, and thunder,” are the signs and symptoms of an unfinished kind of existence, or of a “world like a bleeding wound” for Bataille.11 Bi/auto/biography is the form this adopts, I argue, as a split graphism and aesthetic approach to literature for Bataille: both a chronicle of the external acts and events in his own life, but also a kind of universal narrative that unveils the darker aspects of his (and everyone else’s) development into Otherness. He describes the process of this form of writing as follows:

And at the same time it is necessary to strip away all eternal representations from what is there, until it is nothing but a pure violence, an interiority, a pure inner fall into a limitless abyss; this point endlessly absorbing from the cataract all its inner nothingness, in other words, all that has disappeared, is “past,” and in that same movement endlessly prostituting a sudden apparition to the love that vainly wants to grasp that which will cease to be.12

This recognition of impending and/or actual loss creates the desire in the transgressive subject for writing, and this writing, therefore, originates out of an abject moment of conscious anxiety: “Nothing is more desirable than what will soon disappear.”13

I would have you consider how Kristeva’s idea of abjection could serve as the foundation for understanding this anxiety as the

experience that is always a contradiction between the presence of a subject and its loss, between thought and its expenditure which eroticism fuels.14

It is clear that it works in two ways towards this erasure of the subject and its severance from the world, and then, the creation of “a contradiction of it.”The body, as a central concern in Bataille’s literature, is treated in this way; bodies and more particularly women’s bodies are routinely structured or depicted as two-way hallways or corridors/rooms, like labyrinths, ruined cathedrals, and gigantic icons/monuments that seem “determined to disappear” as they come to form the landmarks for the “urge for death or disappearance within the passes of the erotic.”15 His novels are “orgasmic texts” argues Smith, which conjure up depictions of more general concepts of “the interior body,” and in texts like My Mother, Madame Edwarda, Story of the Eye, and “Filthy,” there is reiteration of the same forms (bodies) which allow for dual representation. Women are sacred yet profane, interior and exterior, known and unknown to the narrator and others (as well as themselves), and finally, they are the tools of literary design that are extinguishable and extinguished. This is done within the privacy and limits of the text and narrative, as well as outside of these boundaries.

This works like an inside/outside and downward/upward series of movements in Bataille’s books: there is a downward movement, like one you would experience coming down a circular staircase, and in Bataille’s specular construction of Simone in Histoire de L’oeil...

Table of contents

• I: An Introduction: Georges Bataille and Impossibility
• II: The General and Restricted Economies: Outsider Philosophy
• III: Sovereignty, Transgression, and Power: Bataille’s Subject
• IV: Transgression, Art, and Surrealism: In-between the Avant-Garde and Literature
• V: Outsider Literature(s) inside the Abyss
• VI: The Sacred/Profane or Eroticism/Ecstasy: Saint Bataille
• VII: A Conclusion for Bataille and the Anti-Aesthetic
• Bibliography
• Copyright
• Credits