Georges Bataille

Key Concepts

Mark Hewson, Marcus Coelen, Mark Hewson, Marcus Coelen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138908567
• eBook ISBN: 9781317327820
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Georges Bataille (1897 - 1962) was a philosopher, writer, and literary critic whose work has had a significant impact across disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, economics, art history and literary criticism, as well as influencing key figures in post-modernist and post-structuralist philosophy such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In recent years, the number of works published on Georges Bataille, as well as the variety of contexts in which his work is invoked, has markedly increased.

In Georges Bataille: Key Concepts an international team of contributors provide an accessible introduction to and survey of Bataille's thought. The editors' introduction provides an overview of Bataille's work, while the chapters in the first section cover the social, political, artistic and philosophical contexts that shaped his thought. In the second part, each chapter engages with a key theme in Bataille's philosophy, including: art, eroticism, evil, inner experience, heterology, religion, sacrifice, and sovereignty. The final chapter addresses Bataille's literary writings.

Georges Bataille: Key Concepts is an invaluable guide for students from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, coming to Bataille's work for the first time.

Contributors: Giulia Agostini, Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield, Tiina Arppe, Marcus Coelen, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Patrick ffrench, Marina Galletti, Nadine Hartmann, Mark Hewson, Andrew Hussey, Stuart Kendall, Claire Nioche, Gerhard Poppenberg, and Michèle Richman.

Part I

Contexts

1 Surrealism

Marina Galletti

If there is a possibility that humanity can be torn out of itself, it lies with surrealism and nothing else

(WS, 51)

In an interview with Madeleine Chapsal, a few months before his death, Georges Bataille stated: “My relations with surrealism have been of a certain absurdity, but probably no more so than anything else in my life […] I could better express my relations with surrealism by speaking of an idea which came to me […] of writing a book which would bear on the first page of the cover Surrealism is Dead and on the other side, Long Live Surrealism” (EW, 221).

For the purpose of exposition, one can organize Bataille’s relations with surrealism into three phases, corresponding to three distinct historical moments: the period between the wars; the Occupation of France; and the post-war period. In the first place, however, this schema shows that Bataille’s intellectual itinerary is marked by a constant confrontation with surrealism. One can say that this history begins with the sense of exclusion felt by Bataille at the moment of Michel Leiris’ adhesion to surrealism, which marked a rupture in their friendship and the end of the projects which had brought them together. They had envisaged a movement to be named Yes, which was supposed to be superior to Dada “because it would avoid the puerility of provoking through systematic negation” (CL, 8); and also an Orphic and Nietzschean society which Leiris had suggested calling Judas. At a certain moment, Bataille felt himself compelled to convert to the convictions of Leiris who, although younger, was invested with the authority of an initiate. In a posthumous autobiographical text, “Surrealism from Day to Day”, Bataille writes: “my timidity, my stupidity and my distrust of my own judgment were so great that I resolved to think what Leiris said with such absolute conviction” (WS, 37). Encouraged by Leiris, Bataille participated in the surrealist review, The Surrealist Revolution of 1926, contributing a translation into modern French of the “Fatrasies”, a group of poems from the 13^th century, preceded with a brief note from the translator associating them with a “burst of laughter” (OC I, 103). This anonymous publication was to be “the only gesture of Bataille’s indicating any kind of public or written participation in surrealism”, as Jean-Louis Houdebine writes, in an article discussing the conditions – suspect at the very least – of this publication, which does not give the reader information on the function, the addressee or the context (Houdebine, 1973, 157). The fatrasie is a poetic genre composed of freely juxtaposed sayings and proverbs, with an absurd or incoherent content. The overt nonsense of such texts brings them close to the spirit of Dada; and Bataille in fact associates his first steps in surrealism with this movement: “One of my difficulties, at the beginning, with surrealism, was that I was much more Dada than the surrealists, or rather, I was still Dada, whereas they were no longer” (EW, 222).

This beginning was followed by an explosion of conflict between Bataille and André Breton, the leader of the surrealist group. It was Breton who initiated hostilities in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”, denouncing Bataille for planning to form an anti-surrealist group, denouncing also the journal Documents (of which Bataille was the editor and the animating force), which Breton saw as the organ of the dissident group. The group that had been criticized in the “Second Manifesto” responded with the pamphlet entitled “A Corpse”. The idea was proposed by Robert Desnos and supported by Georges-Henri Rivière, but it was Bataille who put together this violent denunciation. The pamphlet takes over the form and the title of an earlier pamphlet, put out by the surrealists themselves at the moment of the funeral of Anatole France. Bataille also contributed to the volume with a text entitled “The castrated lion”. Houdebine remarks that this text “is not simply a series of insults, unlike most of the other contributions to the tract, but condenses in pointed form the arguments developed by Bataille in a number of other texts which remained unpublished at this time, notably ‘The Use-Value of D.A.F. Sade’ and ‘The Old Mole and the Prefix “Sur” in the words Surhomme and Surrealist’” (Houdebine, 1973, 157–158).

We will come back to these two posthumously published writings; they need to be read in the context of the combative atmosphere of the time, which culminates in a veritable brawl, the “Maldoror Affair”. In his denunciation of the dissidents in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”, Breton writes: “As final proof, I shall merely note in passing the unspeakable idea they had to use as a sign for a ‘nightclub’ in Montparnasse, the customary haunt of their nocturnal exploits, the only name which, since time began, constituted a pure challenge to everything stupid, base and loathsome of earth: Maldoror” (Breton, 1969, 167).¹ On the night of 14 February 1930, the surrealists ransacked the establishment.

For the moment, we will confine ourselves to noting that, in considering the intellectual relations between Breton and Bataille, one cannot ignore all that muddies their personal relations from before their first encounter. This basic incompatibility will be softened by time, without entirely being effaced. On Bataille’s side, it is a matter of an intolerance which he cannot conceal, a feeling of being reduced to silence by the prestige of Breton, the master of the surrealists. On Breton’s side, it is rather the violent refusal of one whom he sees as an obscure “obsessive”, the author of the scandalous tale W.C; but, as Bataille recognizes himself, it was also “a sense of unease next to a man who was so disturbed by him, who could never breathe freely in front of him and who lacked both innocence and resolution” (WS, 42). The fictional production of the two authors throws this persistent incompatibility into relief.

The two men overcame their differences in the 1930s in order to form Contre-Attaque, the “Union of intellectual revolutionaries”, which was constituted in the margin of the French Popular Front, with the aim of opposing the rise of fascism. Even if this attempt ultimately led to a renewed rupture, its theoretical presupposition – the elaboration of a science of totalitarianism or a sacred sociology, based in a problematics emerging from surrealism – continues to figure in the intellectual movements that Bataille led later in the 1930s, the College of Sociology and the secret society, Acéphale. In describing this latter, Bataille writes: “I had decided, if not to found a religion, at least to move in this general direction. What I had learnt from the history of religions had exalted me. Moreover, it seemed to me that the surrealist atmosphere, in the margins of which I had been living, was ripe with this singular possibility” (OC VI, 369).²

The second phase can be located at the beginning of the war and under the Occupation. Bataille contributed to a poetry review called Messages, which was created by Jean Lescure in 1942, in order to give expression to an idea of poetry as an instrument of tacit resistance to Nazism and the Vichy government, as well as opposition to the politics of the French communist party (Lescure, 1998). In this forum, Bataille was the subject of a violent attack by Main à Plume, a group which, while Breton was in exile in America, continued to work for the intellectual position taken by surrealism during the pre-war period. The attack was now extended to Bataille’s book, Inner Experience. It was focused on a passage in which Bataille criticizes the surrealist theme of the poetic utilization of the dream, citing a text by Jean-François Chabrun, who had developed this theme within the context of La Main à Plume (IE, 53). The response explicitly situates itself as a continuation of Breton’s attacks on Bataille in “The Second Manifesto of Surrealism”; but in accord with the transition of La Main à Plume from Trotskyism to Stalinism, it also takes on a political dimension. In the same year, Bataille, on the suggestion of Lescure, formulated a project for a book of aphorisms to be entitled Becoming Orestes or the Exercise in Meditation. This set of aphorisms was conceived as a “vehement protest against the equivocation of poetry” (C, 192). It can be interpreted as a reply to the accusations of mysticism made by the Main à Plume group in the 1943 tract, Nom de Dieu. It is also the first version of the text that came to be entitled “The Oresteia”. Here, Bataille interrogates the status of poetry which can constitute a form of expenditure, or as he writes in Inner Experience, “as a sacrifice in which the words are victims”; but which is more often only an abdication, “a minor sacrifice, an illusory transgression”, as Jacqueline Risset writes (Risset, 1999, 222). This is a crucial question which Bataille will continue to reformulate until the end of his life, and it leads him to annex “The Oresteia” first to The Hatred of Poetry (1947) and then to The Impossible (1962). Houdebine, noting that a fragment of The Oresteia bears the title “Abstract History of Surrealism”, underlines how Bataille’s interrogation of poetry presupposes his conflicted relation to surrealism, since it was surrealism which linked poetry to revolt and to the transformation of the world (Houdebine, 1973, 158).

In fact, this interrogation unfolds in two stages. In 1942, in his response to the “Inquiry on Poetry” organized by Main à Plume, Bataille states that where knowledge “leads from the known to the unknown”, poetry “leads from the unknown to the known.” In Inner Experience, this affirmation becomes the key to his reading of Proust as well as of surrealism. Then, in “The Oresteia”, he states that poetry “can neither put in question nor put in action this world to which I am bound”. In “Method of Meditation”, a text published in 1947, and closely linked to The Hatred of Poetry, it becomes clear that the point is made in opposition to surrealism:

In the end, poetry is only an evocation; poetry only changes the order of the words and cannot change the world. The sentiment of poetry is linked to the nostalgia to change more than the order of words, the established order. But the idea of a revolution starting with poetry leads to that of poetry in service of a revolution

(IE, 196).

In the third phase, corresponding to the post-war period, Bataille reaffirms his irreducible opposition to the movement of Breton, but abandons the polemical tone of the past. This position is already represented in the brief 1945 article, “The Surrealist Revolution” (a review of Jules Monnerot’s book, La Poésie Moderne et le Sacré). Here Bataille writes:

No matter what its defects or rigidity may have been, surrealism has given from the beginning a certain consistency to the “morality of revolt” and its most important contribution – important even, perhaps, in the political realm – is to have remained, in matters of morality, a revolution.

(WS, 53)

Above all, in “Method of Meditation”, in face of the ascendancy of existentialism, Bataille proclaims his adhesion to surrealism for the first time, writing: “I situate my efforts beyond but alongside surrealism” (IE, 167).

Bataille’s new stance is explained by his enthusiasm for the little periodical Third Convoy, which appeared after the war. This journal placed itself “under the flag of surrealism”, as Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange specified (in conversation with me); its goal, however, he writes, was to “bring out the natural character of a rupture that surrealism had represented from the beginning, in seeking to link it to the movement to intelligence, rather than to magic” (cf. Blanc, 1998, 191). The revolt of surrealism was to be re-organized and interiorized, beginning with a rejection of its weaknesses, not only the aestheticism of automatic writing, but also surrealism’s “golden-age complex”, as Marcel Lecomte calls it (Blanc, 1998, 122) – that is, its tendency to give priority to forms of thought associated with the past, such as esotericism, and to make them into the key for a re-appropriation of human destiny. In his first contribution to Third Convoy, Bataille writes: “Whenever the occasion has arisen, I have opposed surrealism. And I would now like to affirm it from within as the demand to which I have submitted and as the dissatisfaction that I exemplify” (WS, 49). Bataille proposes to reject the “surrealism of works” (that is, surrealism inasmuch as it is oriented purely towards the production of literary and artistic works) as well as its “conspicuous and even gaudy” aspect (WS, 68 trans. mod.). Instead he proposes to follow Rimbaud on another path, one not taken by surrealism, where the priority shifts from the accomplishment of works of art to the experience on to which their creation opens – the experience of “being”, or of “the depth of things” (le fond des choses): “at this point there begins the debate of existence in the night” (dès lors commençait le débat de l’être dans la nuit) (WS, 50). Bataille gives us an orientation for understanding this language in his text on André Masson, where he speaks of “an interior debate” which “has meaning only experienced in the depth of one night, with the same sense of being overwhelmed that, in the past, the Christian experienced before the idea of God” (WS, 178–179 trans. mod.). It is with this prospect in view that Bataille announces “the great surrealism” that is still to come (WS, 51).

One can say then that in the period after the war Bataille resumes the position of the “old enemy within”, in order to initiate an overcoming of surrealism, through a paradoxical combination of Dada and mysticism. In the interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Bataille remarks: “Certainly it is necessary for me to go to the extreme limit, to what one would perhaps call mysticism, and that I have tried to designate through St John of the Cross. When I say to the limit, I mean to two extremes; can you imagine a greater contrast than that of someone who affirms at the same time dada and is affected by the biography of St John of the Cross” (EW, 222).

It is not possible here to take into account the numerous texts written in the post-war period on the subject of surrealism, most of which appeared in the journal Critique. We can see the orientation of these writings if we turn to the re-definition of surrealism proposed by Bataille in his first major homage to Breton, written in 1946, the text “Surrealism and its difference with existentialism”. This re-definition turns around three points. The first and the most important is the character of totality that is proper to the movement, which separates it from the ordinary notion of a literary school. Surrealism, Bataille affirms, is above all, a “moral demand” (WS 58, trans. mod.); it is centred on an ecstatic apprehension of the instant, and it demands the conversion of being into being into the instant (WS, 66); as such, the decision that links Breton to surrealism also engages our “common destiny” (WS, 61). Secondly, however, surrealism nonetheless remains a literary and artistic school, based on the principle of automatic writing. Like the dream, automatic writing is a modality of thought that functions outside of the conscious control of reason, and it can be understood as a form of “poetic thinking”. And thirdly, the term surrealism signifies a collective organization, making each member into an “impersonal necessity” (WS, 60).

In this regard, one should note Bataille’s insistence, in his articles from the post-war period, on the contribution of those who, well before the constitution of the surrealist group, attest to “the historical existence of an orien...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Contexts
• Part II Key Concepts
• Bibliography
• Index