Georges Bataille

Dr Michael Richardson, Michael Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134859283
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

George Bataille (1867-1962) is widely recognized as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. This is the first book in English to examine Bataille's work as a whole. It offers an accessible introduction to a complex and often ambiguous thinker.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Few stars have risen in the intellectual firmament as rapidly as that of Georges Bataille. When his The Story of the Eye was published in English translation in 1977,¹ few people would have imagined that within ten years its author would have become one of the most talked about thinkers of the age. That The Story of the Eye should have been published by Marion Boyers, a publisher specialising in important foreign-language authors with a restricted audience, seemed appropriate. In 1982, however, the story was reprinted in paperback by Penguin, something that offered a clear sign that a writer had ‘arrived’. Since then translations of his work have come thick and fast.

At the time Bataille was little known except as a shadowy figure in French literature. For those who had a particular interest in surrealism he was a troubling presence on the margins of the French Surrealist Group, who had been treated harshly by André Breton in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism way back in 1929. Others knew him as an influence on post-structuralism, an éminence grise behind the ideas of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard. But only a few specialists knew his work directly.

True, he had been translated before. His volumes on Manet and on prehistoric painting had been published in translation in 1955, the same year they appeared in French. However, this was probably due to their being published in a prestigious history of art series for which the publishers, Skira, doubtless had an arrangement whereby all the books would also be published in English translation. They were not, therefore, translated because of their intrinsic merits. His short text Madame Edwarda had also been published in 1955 by a small press specialising in erotica, Olympia Press. In 1962, the year of his death, his study Eroticism appeared, but despite its fashionable subject matter, it appears to have made little impact. In 1972, the novel My Mother was published, followed in 1973 by his study Literature and Evil. Neither book drew much interest and the former book sold only a tiny number of copies and was soon remaindered. Nothing suggested that there was any reason to believe that Bataille was of particular interest to an English language audience. In so far as it was recognised that his work was important, the prevailing view was that it related specifically to his own cultural context and that his focus on transgression and guilt—seen as residues of Catholicism—would have little appeal to an Anglo-Saxon audience. It is true that, with the exception of Eroticism, the importance of these books would be difficult to assess in isolation from the rest of his work, but even so it might have been thought that he was destined to remain a legendary figure on the margins of the margins of French literature whose thought would remain of interest only to specialists.

Besides, The Story of the Eye, despite being accompanied by essays by cultural luminaries Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, was not the sort of work that could have been expected to generate interest among scholars and intellectuals, being, like My Mother and Madame Edwarda, a highly charged erotic, not to say pornographic and sacrilegious, story of sexual initiation. Given the general propensity in Anglo-Saxon countries to reduce discussion of sexuality to the discourse of moralistic titillation on the one hand or ideological correctness on the other, Bataille’s single-minded examination of the violence of sexuality stands somewhat out on a limb. Also, the fact that The Story of the Eye was a book that Bataille never publicly acknowledged having written and which had only been published clandestinely under a pseudonym during his lifetime might also have been thought to discourage serious discussion.

If the erotic element may have helped to encourage sales of the book (although it did not seem to help My Mother) it does nothing to explain the peculiar appeal that Bataille’s work has had during the past decade. In this time virtually all of Bataille’s major texts have been translated into English (only Methode de meditation and a clutch of articles and conferences remain). Suddenly we find that a greater proportion of his work is available in English than that of his old adversaries like André Breton, Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre. If this is not explained by the erotic qualities of the books, it is equally not due to their accessibility. Bataille can be a difficult writer and he does not make concessions to easy understanding, and this is further complicated by the range of Bataille’s interests and the fact that he felt free to write about any topic that attracted him. There nevertheless remains a core to his thought that prevents this from ever degenerating into dilettantism, and today his importance is recognised in fields as diverse as philosophy, literature, theology, sociology, anthropology and even political economy.

What then are the reasons for this phenomenon? It is apparent that the rise of post-modernist criticism has been instrumental in encouraging the fashion for Bataille’s work. He tends to be read through post-modernism and, with the popularity of thinkers like Derrida and Foucault, his work has thereby gained a sort of reflected prestige. But again, like the erotic element, this is only one factor of the way in which Bataille’s thought has become of interest to a general readership and does not really explain why his work should have become as influential as it has. Indeed, despite its surface relation to ideas popularised by post-modernism, Bataille’s thought fits uneasily into the supposed ‘post-modern’ condition. Even if it has been appropriated pell-mell into it, frequently his precepts have been reversed in the process and it is arguable that Bataille’s appeal may have come about despite rather than because of the interests of post-modernism.

One key factor may have been that in an age dominated by cynical monetarist politics, people were in the mood to appreciate a thinker who had long scorned the whole principle of an economics of accumulation and utility to assert that the basis of economic health was a principle of pure exuberance. Bataille’s idea of an unassimilable ‘accursed share’ that responded to a sense of the glorious loss and waste in an excessive expenditure may have been attractive.

Equally it may be that an age in which sexuality has come to be viewed as problematic in ways that had seemed irrelevant during the previous two decades may have caused people to be more attentive of the disturbing aspects of the sexual relation as explored by Bataille. While the advocates of the ‘permissive society’ would have found no comfort in Bataille’s work, the incidence of Aids has brought a new sense of sexual insecurity. People have become acutely aware of the dangerous quality of sex and the resulting disquiet in sexual relations may respond in a direct way to the sense of anxiety that Bataille placed at the heart of his philosophy.

Whatever the reasons, though, Bataille is now firmly established as a key thinker of the age. Specialists may balk at Bataille’s refusal to be tied to accepted boundaries of intellectual discourse and his insistence on focusing analysis within the widest possible horizon. Yet this also remains his strength. Even if his maverick way with social fact does sometimes lead to difficulties with his analysis, Bataille’s whole ethos was based on a refusal to fragment the world up into tidy categories and he regarded it as pernicious to separate out any one factor or set of circumstances from the entire nexus of relations comprising any totality. He was not interested in playing safe and following well-charted routes. To do so was fraudulent. For this reason he felt it was not possible to contemplate philosophy without taking economic factors into account, nor the economy without considering the effusion of poetry. Such a project of totality is clearly unrealisable within the span of one person’s life experience, and this is one of the ‘impossible’ paradoxes Bataille never flinches from in the way he approaches his material.

Since most of those who have been drawn to Bataille’s work appear to have come to it through post-modernism, it is perhaps necessary to first of all examine the basis of his relation with the post-modernist surge, since fundamentally he is read ‘through’ Derrida, Kristeva, Sollers, Barthes, Lyotard, Foucault or Baudrillard,² all of whom have paid their tribute to the man many would like to sanctify as the prophet of deconstruction. I should say at the outset that I do not share this perception, which I believe is reductionist of the themes that Bataille wanted to tackle in his work.

My own interest in Bataille comes through a more general interest in surrealism and from an interest in the anthropological and philosophical issues his work raises. I first read Eroticism simultaneously with a reading of André Breton’s L’Amour fou and was immediately struck by the correspondence between the two books, which seemed to me then— and with time this conviction has grown stronger—to complement and complete each other. Too often Breton and Bataille are presented as being antagonistic and their thought is contrasted to valorise one or the other. This ignores the respect that both men had for each other and which they expressed on numerous occasions over the years. It is this perceived antagonism that tends to be emphasised by writers associated with post-structuralism and this has served to give it undue prominence in debates centred on Bataille’s work. For this reason the present work has a somewhat different perspective from most of the writings on Bataille in English.

While there are undoubtedly legitimate reasons for post-structuralism and post-modernism to see a pre-figuration of certain of their themes in Bataille’s work, too often (and this is an ideological problem inherent in the post-modernist position in so far as it tends towards a contempt for the unfolding of history) it appropriates his work in a way that is contemptuous of its determinants. Whether or not one regards post-structuralism and post-modernism as fertile approaches towards cultural phenomenon in general, it must be problematic to append to its dominion a thinker who died before even structuralism had really become established as a specific methodological approach. In so far as the prefix post—is assumed so prevalently these days, it would seem that to take hold of a thinker who remained ignorant even of the advent of the ideology that one claimed to have superseded would seem to be distinctly problematic. Yet this problem rarely seems to be acknowledged.

In such circumstances, and especially if one is sceptical about the merits of the resultant focus established by the de-contextualisation of his work, it becomes particularly important to situate Bataille’s work, and to make it clear that the post-modernist appropriation is not necessarily the only legitimate perspective in which it can be viewed. Let us then examine how some of those writers connected with post-modernism have approached Bataille’s work.

Of those thinkers mentioned above, whose names are frequently invoked in relation to Bataille, only Jean Baudrillard seems to have any real understanding of, or feel for, the centrality of Bataille’s work. Certainly in his early work Baudrillard did draw on concepts that he derived from Bataille. This is especially the case with L’Échange symbolique de la mort, and he does engage with Bataille’s ideas in a way that promises much. But this soon starts to deviate in a direction that serves to invert Bataille’s concepts.

Bataille continues to be an influence, but the approach Baudrillard then adopts serves to vulgarise Bataille, since it draws only on the most negative aspects of his thought. What Baudrillard dispenses with (which was essential for Bataille) is any notion of moral centring. Everything becomes a swirl of negative possibilities: there is nothing to choose since nothing has legitimacy, there are no underlying structures to reality (which dissolves into hyper-reality), there is no possibility of social solidarity or participation. Meaning goes out of the window in a helpless surrender not to darkness but to exasperation. Where Bataille wanted to give an unqualified ‘yes’ to the universe, Baudrillard gives an equally unqualified ‘no’ to it. In the end this negative response serves to dissolve negation, since it offers no positive against which negation can be measured and so becomes a mere floating critique that finally only operates as a parody of itself. From this perspective, Baudrillard merely turned Bataille on his head and in the process the critique that Baudrillard has developed serves as nothing but a burlesque simulation of the issues Bataille was concerned with.

Many of the other writers mentioned appear to have only a passing acquaintance with Bataille’s work and reading what they have written one has the feeling that, far from having influenced them, most of them only considered his writing because it was fashionable to do so rather than from a genuine interest in the questions it tackles.

An exception must be made for Foucault, who was undoubtedly influenced by Bataille in many ways. However, whether he really understood Bataille’s work in any meaningful way is seriously open to doubt, since Foucault’s way of thinking seems completely alien to that of Bataille and in great part his approach is incommensurate with Bataille’s. The article he wrote on Bataille’s death,³ even if it has interest in its own right in regard to Foucault’s own concerns, in so far as it deals with Bataille the best that can be said about it is that it takes misunderstanding to its limit as it utilises Bataille’s concepts for purposes that correspond with nothing at all in Bataille’s own work. In this article Foucault treats transgression in a way that could hardly be further from Bataille’s own approach. First, he isolates it as a thing in itself, abstracting it from its relation with taboo, something without which, in Bataille’s view, it had no meaning. Cast adrift in this way, Bataille’s very concrete notion of transgression is completely undermined. For Foucault transgression has meaning in itself as a particular sensibility. He describes what for Bataille was the common experience of all mankind as ‘a singular experience’.⁴ For Foucault transgression is a crucial element of contemporary society whereas Bataille believed it was being systematically excluded and that it was impossible for transgression to be anything but impotence within the society in which we live.

When Foucault deals with other questions of concern to Bataille—like sexuality or the growth of individualism—the frame of reference he establishes for his study is just as alien to Bataille’s own understanding. It is not so much that one can say that Foucault is in disagreement with Bataille, but that what interests him belongs to a different discourse. This is in great part explained by the fact that they came from different generations. Foucault in a sense was in revolt against the tradition to which Bataille belonged, and to fit Bataille to what Foucault wanted him to be requires a fundamental distortion of Bataille’s thought. By claiming not only Bataille, but also Roussel and Artaud, Foucault asserts a continuity in French thought that does not exist.

In reaction to Hegel, whose philosophy had dominated French intellectual life from 1930 to 1950,⁵ Foucault returned to a neo-Kantian framework as the basis for his social critique. Bataille’s relation with Hegel is complex and he certainly felt ambivalent about elements in Hegelian philosophy, but he was still of a generation that came to Hegel with a sense of wonder and recognition and his thinking is fully within the frame of dialectical reasoning. It would have been impossible for him to reject Hegel as Foucault did.

This is especially so in that what Foucault reacted against most of all was the Hegelian dialectic, and especially against the dialectic of master and slave. This was exactly where Bataille was most clearly in accord with Hegel. Foucault’s pluralistic viewpoint was offended by the relation Hegel drew between master and slave, which makes the sort of power relation Foucault thought existed between people inconceivable. Foucault could not see how people could be bound in such a complicitous way and therefore he believed that to make a relation between master and slave was simply a fiction and thus of little analytical value. From the same perspective, Foucault considers that concepts like ‘individual’ or ‘society’ are equally fictive. In Foucault there is no fixity. Every concept is defined through its discursive reference. This is manifestly against the centrality of Bataille’s thought and can even be said to be fundamentally anti-Bataillean. For Bataille to establish the reality of every concept was a fundamental methodological necessity. And for Bataille it was Hegel’s great achievement, with the notion of the master and slave relation, to have conceptualised a fundamental reality lying within human consciousness. This was a real relation for Bataille, not a discursive concept. Discourse was a snare that had to be avoided. With the notion of discourse he established, Foucault takes a starting point that Bataille insisted was invalid—the idea that discursive structures serve their own interests and impose themselves against individual specificity. Everything in Foucault revolves around ideas of power and knowledge refused by Bataille. For Bataille we are society. Therefore concepts like power and knowledge can never take form isolated from the totality of the societal relations which found them. For Bataille power and knowledge are dynamic concepts inherent in human activity and having no meaning in themselves. They cannot be abstracted in the way Foucault did. It is societal interaction that defines what we are as individuals and this implies an inextricable link that can never be broken. Power does not exist in the abstract, as it does in Foucault’s analysis. The essence of Hegel’s master and slave relation is complicity: the reality of the slave is the master, the reality of the master the slave. In this perspective, individuals can never be imposed upon. If they are subject to oppression it is because they are complicitous with the power relation placed above them. In the same way the power relation can be broken through a withdrawal of such complicity. Society, it should be understood, is for Bataille an organic whole that includes the individual; it too is not at all a discursive concept.

For Foucault, too, what is important is the plurality of being. He refused totality, which he saw as related to power relations. Bataille had exactly the opposite viewpoint, considering that the desire to cut things up into segments (we might say into separate discourses) was a way of avoiding the essential questions the material raised. The crucial difference between the two men is contained in this quotation by Foucault: ‘What reason perceives as its necessity, or rather, what different forms of rationality offer as their necessary being, can perfectly well be shown to have a history; and the network of contingencies from which it emerges can be traced…since these things have been made, they can be unmade, as long as we kn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Life and context of work
• 3 Themes and intellectual background
• 4 Towards a sociology of abundance
• 5 Expenditure and the general economy
• 6 Death, communication and the experience of limits
• Suggestions for further reading
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index