Bataille

Writing the Sacred

Carolyn Bailey Gill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134854172
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Georges Bataille's powerful writings have fascinated many readers, enmeshed as they are with the themes of sex and death. His emotive discourse of excess, transgression, sacrifice, and the sacred has had a profound and notable influence on thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva. Bataille: Writing the Sacred examines the continuing power and influence of his work.
The full extent of Bataille's subversive and influential writings has only been made available to an English-speaking audience in recent years. By bringing together international specialists on Bataille from philosophy and literature to art history, this collection is able to explore the many facets of his writings.

1: Chichicastenango

Alphonso Lingis

Copán, in Honduras, is celebrated by mesoamericanists as the most beautiful of all the Mayan ruins. Also the most intact; it and the river valley its people had cultivated had enigmatically been abandoned four centuries before the conquistadors arrived. Four centuries of tree roots had held and hidden its stones from the builders of colonial cities and churches. In this century archeologists from the North came to clear away the jungle and expose again its plazas, its temples, its great carved stelae. US ambassador John Stevens had personally acquired the entire city in 1840 for fifty dollars. It was discovered that the first priority was to redirect the river, which had shifted the direction of its force and had eroded the highest part of the city. Every summer teams from the North work to map out with the aid of helicopters and infra-red scanning the roads and buried ruins, to advance the excavation, to reassemble the walls overturned by the jungle, to dig up burial grounds and measure bones and teeth and subject them to radiation scanning. When they leave they continue to work, in university buildings filled with computers, over the data, publish monographs—historians, sociologists, linguists, agronomists, biologists. A veritable multinational corporate industry, transforming these ruins whose hewn shapes were effaced by five centuries of bacteria, lichens, roots and rain, into texts. Texts filed in microchips, reinstated in the great text of world civilization. Soon one will not have to come here at all, one will tap numbers into one’s home modem and these ruins will be restored as a city, one will watch its priests and nobles circulating in hologram in one’s own living room.

I bought a bagful of the latest publications, and went to have lunch in the village inn. The dining room was full of people, I had to wait long to be served. The others were finished as I began to eat; one of them stood up and began to give an account of the most recent findings by pathologists, who had studied the data derived from the burial sites, as to what these people fell ill of and died of. The others were taking notes, already busy on their future publications. Abruptly I recalled that Copán was the principal research site in Central America of the Physical Anthropology Department of my own university. I could not focus my mind on what he was saying in the noonday heat. I did not introduce myself. I walked to the site with my bag of literature. I studied the great stelae, thick figures cut in high relief, not idealized human bodies as in the art of what we call Classical antiquity, but their torsos studded with other figures, their limbs fitted between psychedelic protuberances, every inch of the space about and above them filled with enigmatic carvings. Soon I tired too of reading all the explanations before each marked site, I could do it this evening in my room. I contemplated the stelae much worn by the elements, craggy rocks re-cemented in the plazas now cleared and levelled, turned into parks. I strolled about the constructions which had sunk or whose upper layers had collapsed and had been reassembled; behind them the tangled jungle rustled with monkeys and birds. The once precision-cut stones no longer fitted together; sometimes cement had been needed to hold them. High staircases led from level to level of the city; one had to climb them on strictly designated paths, there were signs warning of the instability of either side. Wherever I looked I saw stones eroded, cracked, their relief effaced, lichens and bacteria gnawing at them. By the time the great text was completed, they would have subsided into a zone of the lithic strata of the planetary crust. The worshippers and the gods had vanished from these ruined temples centuries ago. The campesinos who had recently cultivated their milpas in these ancient plazas had been relocated elsewhere; now on the levelled lawns young mestizo men of the village who had been educated in English in government schools were reciting the explanations the scientists had summarized for them to the moneyed tourists. I became weary in the heat and damp of the afternoon; I sat down on a rock in the shade spread by an enormous ceiba tree that had grown on the highest point of the city walls, its trunk splayed at the bottom to send roots down in all directions, seeking the rock strata beneath over which the city had been built. I contemplated the multicoloured lichens spreading like acidic stains over the stones. The vegetation was dusty with tiny insects; I quickly gave up flailing them off, their minute stings drew nourishment from the torpor into which my body drifted. The theories—historical, sociological, religious —tangled in my mind, which could not sustain interest in them. Even images faded out. The ruins about me depopulated even of its ghosts. The clear-toned calls of unseen birds echoed in my skull. The wet humus and smell of rotting leaves rose to fill my inhalations. My eyes gazed unfocused, and the slight swaying of the trees and displacements of splatches of sunlight neutralized into a dense medium without colour and form. I don’t know how long I remained in this lethargy; gradually I became aware not of eyes but of a look before me. The look was mild and fraternal. Little by little, about the look, a deer materialized, knee-deep in the vegetation. It was a soft grey as I had never seen on deer, with white belly and tail. It was so close I slowly shifted and reached out to touch it, but however I turned it always seemed to be the same distance from me. Little by little its grey turned to smoke and then charcoal as night fell. When I finally made my way to the entrance gate, it was locked; a high fence with five strands of barbed wire on top surrounded the site. I tore my clothes and cut my hands and legs getting over it.

The received judgement is that the Mayan civilization was the greatest of the Americas; its cities grand as Harappa, Memphis and Thebes, Rome, its agriculture so sophisticated that the unpopulated marshlands of Tikal and Chiapas once supported vast populations, its science—the Mayas discovered the zero a thousand years before Europe, they calculated Venus’ year to within six seconds of what today’s electron telescopes have fixed as exact—one of the greatest spiritual achievements of humanity. Where have they gone? Fully 50 per cent of the population of Guatemala today is pure Mayan stock; one can see them on market day in Chichicastenango.

Conquistador Pedro Alvarado contracted with one side, then another, of two rival Quiché nations in the high mountains of Guatemala, then betrayed them both. The remnant that remained of the smaller nation was put in reducctiones in the lowlands; that of the larger group was resettled in the ruins of the former capital of their rivals. The Aztecs conscripted in Pedro Alvarado’s army called it Chichicastenango, the Place of the Nettles. The conquistadors garrisoned there had mansions of stone built. Franciscans arrived, and set the Indians working to construct an enormous church rising over a great flight of steps over the former Quiché sacred rock. The place was remote, the only road descended in rocky switchbacks down a deep gorge and then up again.,

I went to Chichicastenango. By the entrance to the town there is a large billboard with the words ‘Dios Familia Patria’ and ‘El Ejército es su Amigo’. Chichicastenango has hardly grown in five centuries; from the central plaza one can see the whole town, its streets stopped on all sides at the brink of gorges just four blocks away. But they are choked with people: market day. The plaza is filled with stands, down its narrow lanes blankets, hats, embroidered blouses and intricately woven skirts, iron picks and shovels and machetes, painted masks, fruits and vegetables, salt, are piled high. Some distance away, there is an empty lot where women are gossiping, holding in their fists the cords tied tightly to the rear legs of black pigs. Some of them have half a dozen pigs on leashes. The pigs pull and retreat, grubbing in their muck. In the streets Indians are still arriving, bent under huge baskets or heavy bundles of firewood. Many have walked the whole night. They are very small, with parched brown skin, the women dressed in extravagant colours, the men in dust-clogged trousers and wearing straw hats with the brims smartly turned up at the sides, down in front and back. In the central lanes of the plaza, women are cooking pans of beans and corn, vegetables, stir-frying chicken. The women converse in their melodious tongue in groups, laughing children chase one another around the stands. The men, alone or in groups, are getting drunk on chiché. One walks the lanes over the decaying husks of fruit, wrappings of leaves and twine, dirty plastic bags, broken bottles; in alleys and in doorways swept by the wind they pile up, splattered with urine, vomit, under swarming flies. Troops in combat dress carrying automatic rifles walk through the streets with impassive faces. Tourists under broad cloth hats panting from the sun and the dust are peering desultorily into the stands; occasionally one of them decides, after some confused bargaining, to buy something, the others gather protectively as she or he extracts some banknotes from a money-belt,

From the whitewashed tower of the church dedicated to Santo Tomás — Thomas the Doubter—the bells begin pealing. The church stands high in the sun over twenty feet of steps, the lower steps on one side are piled with bundles of gladioli and calla lilies around women whose blouses under lace mantillas blaze with crimson, royal blue, ochre. Above them in the thick smoke of sacrifices smouldering on the steps men are swinging incense-burners. I hear the high-pitched repetitive melodies of flutes dancing over the beat of drums; the officiants of the Indian communes are arriving, dressed in embroidered jackets and black kneelength trousers with elaborate head-dresses of plumes and animal fangs and carrying maces of burnished silver. The flower-women make a path for them and they climb the steps to the church entrance and disappear between men swinging incense-burners.

The main entrance is forbidden to those who do not know the secret Quiché formulas with which to invoke ancestral spirits; I make my way to the cloister on the right side of the church and enter through a side door. The church nave is long and high and filled with sticky perfumed smoke. Women are standing on the right side, men on the left; I cross over and move half-way up to the sanctuary. The centre aisle is open, every ten feet there is a small raised cement block upon which sacrifices, charred chickens and pieces of pigs, are smouldering in the midst of mandalas of flower petals. Over them men in workclothes are swinging incense-burners. A white-haired priest enters from the sacristy to begin the mass, the Indian officiants are already standing on both sides of the sanctuary with their hands closed over their maces. A marimba band in front of the altar rail begins to hammer out cadences. Men and women are continually stepping into the centre aisle, placing on the fires packets wrapped in leaves and consulting the crouched shamans who stand up and make wide-open-arm gesticulations in different directions before receiving the next supplicant. When the priest has reached the climax of the mass, the consecration of the bread and wine, he lifts the host and chalice high over his deeply bowed head; down the length of the centre aisle the shamans are occupied in making different kinds of ritual dances over their consultants. No one approaches the alter rail to take communion. When the mass is over the priest disappears into the sacristy; the Indian officiants descend from the sanctuary preceded by flutes and drums and leave from the main portal. I see along the side walls of the church only a few chapel altars; the carved statues of saints, completely black with soot, have been crowded upon them. On a few of these altars glass has been fitted over a painting, no doubt from the colonial epoch but barely discernible under the coat of greasy soot. I look down the length of the now empty church; with its blackened walls and ceiling and the charred statues of saints pushed together against the walls, its sooty windows with many broken panes, it looks like an old warehouse abandoned after a fire.

On the side of the plaza I notice a piece of cardboard with the word ‘Museo’ and an arrow on it. I find two rooms with handmade glass cases housing some broken pre-Columbian Quiché pots decorated with red pictures and designs, gold and jade pieces restrung into necklaces, incense-burners, strange deities like psychedelic visions congealed in brick-red clay. It turns out that this was the collection made by Padre Rossbach, whose faded photograph hangs in an aluminium frame on one wall. A sign says that he had been pastor of the Santo Tomás church from 1898 until his death in 1948. Campesinos brought him these things they had turned up with their ploughs, and he had told them not to sell them to the tourists. I looked at the photograph; Padre Rossbach looked German. In Central America, the ruling families still send one son to the seminary, they preside over the great basilicas with altars encrusted with gold in Guatemala City, Antigua, Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula, Managua. But aside from a few old priests drinking and fathering children in the mestizo and Indian towns, almost all the little churches in the mountains are boarded up. Those that have mass celebrated and children baptized in them are periodically tended by missionaries. These have come from missionary orders in Portugal, Ireland, the United States. Such idealistic young men have now too become scarce. Those that came, and found themselves isolated for long months in dusty and famished villages, often heeded the Liberation Theology that was formulated originally in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and has since been silenced by the Roman Curia. During the 1970s and 1980s, and in Guatemala especially during the dictatorship of Rios Montt, they were often the first to be massacred when the troops arrived in the Indian highlands. Even last year the priest was killed in nearby San Andrés, a village on the edge of Lake Atitlán much visited by tourists.

After eating some corn and beans in the plaza, I descended into the gorge on the east side of the town, crossed a small marsh and the now insignificant river, and looked into the forested hills that rise at once on the other side. From one of them I could make out a thin ribbon of smoke trailing into the blazing sky. I walked through milpas of parched cornstalks, and found a path into the trees. The path rose steeply and I trudged with slow steps like the old campesinos and had to stop several times until my heartbeat stabilized. On top, there was a circle of rough stones. Against it, a flat black rock about three feet high upon which one could see a face. It was roughly carved, one side much narrower than the other, the eyes not on the same level. They did not seem to look at me, and the expression was impassive. The stone had been broken across the face and cemented back together. Up against it there was a bundle of gladioli, not in a container of water, wilted. Within the circle of stones, and outside it, there were several piles of greasy ashes, still smouldering, and limp flower-heads laid in lines and circles. All around the dusty ground was littered with chicken feathers, all ragged, some spotted with black blood, the leaves under the trees were clotted with them. I sat down under a tree at the edge of the clearing. There were many long-needled pines in the forest, and the wind hummed in their thin branches. There was no other sound, even the locusts were silent in in the heat of the day. After awhile I looked back at the shrine; there was now an old woman with one eye opaque laying a packet wrapped in leaves on the embers, and moving in a kind of slow dance. Then she turned and vanished into the forest as silently as she had come.

The noonday sky bleached out the forest and forced shut my eyes. I hear the sludges of my body pushed with uncertain pulses. The essential is that sweat, secretions, vapours depart from it. The body’s thrusts are expulsions. Its orifices expel urine and excrement, also phlegm, mucus, tears, groans. The feelings that irradiate in me are discharged down its nerve fibres. The grey mass of my brain crystallizing insights, thoughts, projects, destinies, only to expel them. Everywhere we humans move we leave sweat, stains, urine, faecal matter. The organized constructions of our sentences flatten into bromides, erode into clichés, deteriorate into prattle, break into sighs, screams, sobbing and laughter in orgasm. What we call construction and creation is the uprooting of living things, the massacre of millions of paradisal ecosystems, the mindless trampling of minute creatures whose hearts throb with life. We level mountains to pave them with temples whose gods become forgotten, and markets settling into rotting husks and plastic bags. The beat of our life is relentless drives to discharge our forces in things left behind, our passions, charged with revulsion and awe, are excremental. Our blood shed, breast milk, menstrual blood, vaginal discharges, semen are what is sacred in us, surrounded from time immemorial with taboos and proscriptions. Bodies festering, ruins crumbling into a past that cannot be reinstated, ideas and ideals that are enshrined in a canon where they no longer light the virgin fires of first insight in our brains, extend the zone of the sacred across the mouldering hull of our planet.

Indians of Guatemala, driven to the high mountains by the ranchers who in the past twenty years have deforested the hills below for the raising of grass-fed cattle for hamburgers, Indians driven into Chiapas in Mexico during forty years of army rule, Indians dwarfed and stunted by chronic malnutrition. Indians stumbling all night under the weight of their handcraft, standing in lanes covered with debris and rotting vegetables, when night comes leaving under their heavy unsold bundles. Their Catholicism in disintegration, barely visible through the debris of Quiché myths and rituals of a civilization destroyed five centuries ago.

I was haunted all day by a sentiment I had felt nowhere in my country, in neo-Gothic cathedrals squeezed between high-rise buildings in cities or modernistic churches surrounded by spacious lawns and parking lots in the suburbs. A sentiment of the departed, the irrecuperable, the radically other. The sacred hovered inconceivably in the charred hull of the once-Catholic temple, in the broken idol in its circle of rough stones in the hill outside the town, in the grime of sacrificial stones and torn and bloodied chicken feathers, in the stunted bodies of Indians hunted down in these rocky heights by soldiers from the capital transported by helicopter. No, the sacred is this decomposition.

The sacred is what repels our advance. The taboos and proscriptions that demarcate it do not constitute its force of withdrawal. It is not the salvific but the inapprehendable, the unconceptualizable, the inassimilable, the irrecuperable.

One had to come this far, to this disheartening impasse of intellectual and conceptual activity. One had to come to this excretion of inassimilable elements. One had to come in a body breaking down in anguish, dejection, sobs, trances, laughter, spasms and discharges of orgasm.

Religion advances triumphantly over the decomposition of the sacred. It separates from its turgid ambiguity the covenant from the taboos, the celestial order from the intoxication with spilt blood, milk and semen, the sublime from the excremental. Its intelligence separates a celestial and divine order from the demoniacal world of decomposition. It levitates the sacred into an extra-cosmic empyrean, where a reign of.intelligible providence and a paternal image of a personalized deity function to foster in humans exalted phantasms of indecomposable sufficiency. It consecrates the profanation of the world, given over to industry, information-processing, tourists bussed to the market of Indians while soldiers tread through the lanes with Uzis.

I got up and returned down the path and this time followed the river at the bottom of the gorge. Tangles of dirty plastic bags hissed in the scrub bushes. After a while I came upon the gate of the cemetery, which lay above on a height facing the city from the north. At the entrance there are stone and cement family mausoleums in which the creoles are buried. Behind them graves with simple headstones. And then more and more graves without even crosses or names, with only mounds of clay to mark them. Here and there on the rocky ground there are black smudges of ashes, with circles of flower petals. At the back of the cemetery there is a structure like a small chapel; it has been cracked by earthquake and most of the once-yellow stucco has crumbled off its bricks. Inside on the floor there is a large cross of raised cement: it is the grave of Padre Rossbach. Rays of light fall upon it from the halfcollapsed roof. The floor is black with the tar-like grime of sacrificial fires, chicken feathers stuck to it or drifted into corners. There are wilted flower petals in lines and circles. The walls are completely caked with soot. At the back two men and a woman are bent over candles and packets wrapped in leaves. Padre Rossbach has been transformed into a Quiché ancestor, revered with rituals already centuries old when Christianity first arrived in this hemisphere…

I thought of his photograph. Germany was not sending Catholic missionaries to Central America, he must have been an American. I imagined a missionary order from a traditional area settled by Germans, Wisconsin or South Dakota. He came here to take over the Santo Tomás church, in a small town of creole landowners and Chinese merchants and thousands of Indians come from the mountains on market day. He learned Quiché, discovered in the Indian hamlets, their social order intact, the elected elders serving without salary, in fact having to expend all their resources to help in emergencies and to stage complex rituals. On market day they came to him with problems with the landowners and army. They brought offerings of corn and chickens, and sometimes old pottery they had had in their hamlets for generations. The Cardinal Archbishop in Guatemala City did not visit outposts of foreign missionary orders. There was no money to paint the church, repair the altars. There were no nuns to run a school. Little by little he let them come in their own garb, which the Franciscans five centuries ago had forbidden, knowing that the apparently decorative patterns were so many woven amulets invoking Mayan demons. He let the marimba players come in with their instruments, and when they began to play what were not hymns he did not stop them. He let them burn incense on the entrance steps, built over an ancient shrine. He himself took down altars which he was told were built over sacred stones. He ceased to demand they consecrate their unions in matrimony. He ceased to demand they come to tell him their sins in confessions. He let their officiants come with processions of flutes and drums into the sanctuary, the shamans to burn sacrifices in the centre aisle. One day a delegation of shamans showed him an ancient copy of the Popoh Vul, the great myth of the Quiché, which the world had believed lost irrevocably when Bishop de Landa in 1526 ordered all copies of the Mayan sacred writings to be burnt. They let him come to their meeting house night after night to copy it. He learned the sacred script, and was spending more time studying it and pondering its meaning than reading his breviary. The Quiché brought their children for baptism; it was the only one of the seven sacraments that were still performed in the Santo Tomás church. He must have opened his door to women who brought him chiché for the long cold nights, and received them in his bed—how many children called him padre? His last trip back to the motherhouse in the North American Midwest was before the war; his parents were gone and his relatives dispersed, and he found he had difficulty expressing simple things in English. He returned to the shamans he knew, who came with remedies and spells during his last illness. I thought of the afternoon of the first time I had come to Chichicastenango, eight years ago. I was sitting in the doorway of a building o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the translations
• Introduction
• 1: Chichicastenango
• 2: Bataille, the emotive intellectual
• 3: Bataille in the street
• 4: Introduction to economics I
• 5: The sacred group
• 6: Recognition in Madame Edwarda
• 7: Sacrifice and violence in Bataille’serotic fiction
• 8: The hatred of poetry in Georges Bataille’s writing and thought
• 9: Surrealism and the practice of writing, or The ‘case’ of Bataille
• 10: The use-value of the impossible
• 11: Poussière/peinture
• 12: Fêting the wound