{"id":692,"date":"2016-09-21T09:22:29","date_gmt":"2016-09-21T13:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=692"},"modified":"2016-09-21T11:17:36","modified_gmt":"2016-09-21T15:17:36","slug":"of-bataille-sur-nietzsche-uber-humanismand-other-virilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/of-bataille-sur-nietzsche-uber-humanismand-other-virilities\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosalind C. Morris: Of Bataille, sur Nietzsche, \u00fcber humanism\u2026and other virilities"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rosalind C. Morris<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026[Often], we are \u2026 a play of obscure representations, and our understanding is unable to save itself from the absurdities into which they have placed it, even though it recognizes them as illusions.\u2026 The power of imagination enjoys walking in the dark\u2026\u201d\u00a0–Immanuel Kant, Anthropology<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe light of day is the space of thought. But this space is too hospitable to thought for something essential not to escape from this conformity\u2026Day only gathers thoughts subservient to the day; the insubordinate ones never come to light; they darken like the night.\u201d\u00a0–Denis Hollier, \u201c<\/em>The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026the fire of sacrifice is none other than the divinity itself, which consumes the victim, or, to put it more exactly, the fire is the sign of consecration which sets it on fire.\u201d –Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe surrealist man is very long, stretching like a live wire from 1938 as far into the future & through equally numerous stages of evolution as he reaches into the past.\u00a0 His beginning is a speck of transparency, impinged upon by the sun. His ultimate presence would have been virtually invisible to a twentieth-century eye.\u201d\u00a0–Mina Loy, \u201cVisitation,\u201d Insel.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Play.\u00a0 The play of light and darkness, of day and night. \u00a0And: the sacrificial consummation of that which, being burnt, gives light\u2014with no possibility and certainly no thought of return. \u00a0These are now-familiar tropes, bequeathed by Bataille but also, as I hope the above list of epigraphic citations attests, by others in a broken genealogy that is often eclipsed in a fantasized line of immediate descent (a virile line capable reproducing itself without sexual difference) from Nietzche. These are, one might say, not only familiar tropes but verily sacred topics, if the idea of the sacred hadn\u2019t itself become, well, profane, or at least secularized (which is, of course, not the same thing).<\/p>\n

I cannot help but recall here the inestimable wit of Mina Loy\u2019s narrator in the posthumously published novel Insel,<\/em> a novel that is nothing if not Bataillean (and, in my opinion, as good if not better than any novel Bataille wrote but did not publish). Insel\u2019s <\/em>narrator speaks of the \u201cmajor degradation of women,\u201d as \u201cthe effort to concentrate on something in which one takes no interest.\u201d It is not that I take no interest in Bataille, but rather that there is an excess of interest in Bataille, thanks in no small measure to his interest in excess.\u00a0 We might question that interest, noting, as we do, and quite obviously, that the problem of interest was central to Bataille\u2019s writing.\u00a0 He inherited this interest in interest from Marcel Mauss, the anthropologist of Essai sur le don\/The Gift, <\/em>and nephew of Durkheim, <\/em>as well as the co-author with Henri Hubert of the book, Sacrifice, its Nature and Functions <\/em>(cited above).<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, it is hard to question Bataille. Having been established as the critic of liberal utilitarian thought, of rationalism and acquisitive individualism, of violent unity and transcendentalism, having assumed the mantle of Nietzsche without ever having committed parricide, Bataille resists criticism. (When there are no phallic women, there is no need to struggle with the father, to possess the mother). Indeed, criticism of Bataille risks appearing, in advance, as a defense of these inadequate, puerile, and historically indictable philosophies.\u00a0 In his defense of Inner Experience <\/em>against Sartre, appended to Sur Nietzsche, <\/em>he writes, \u201cI don\u2019t land anywhere<\/em>\u2026This is why criticism of my thought is difficult.\u00a0 Whatever might be said, my reply is given in advance, and for me significant criticism will only be a new means to anguish, with intoxication remaining the starting point\u201d (SN, <\/em>184; OC <\/em>VI, 199).<\/p>\n

Bataille avows incoherence (or rather \u201cthe certainty of incoherence in reading\u201d), but we have been given texts that imply rather the opposite: the good Bataille, the anti-fascist Bataille, the Bataille who can appear to oppose war:<\/p>\n

\u201cWar, to the extent that it is the desire to insure the permanence of a nation, the nation that is sovereignty and the demand for inalterability, the authority of divine right and of God himself, represents the desperate obstinacy of man opposing the exuberant power of time and finding security in an immobile and almost somnolent erection. National and military life are present in the world to try to deny death by reducing it to a component of glory without dread.\u201d (\u201cPropositions, #9; Acephale <\/em>20-21).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Bataille is going to have an erection, he\u2019s going to feel it!\u00a0 The night is not a domain of somnolence for him, as Denis Hollier reminds us (in his brilliant \u201cForeword\u201d to The College of Sociology, 1937-39<\/em>), but of awakening, of dreaming in a manner that dissolves the opposition between night and day.\u00a0 In defense of Nietzsche against the charge of his unconscious, but anticipatory complicity with National Socialism, Bataille writes that Nietzsche \u201cdreamed of a humanness\u201d that, embracing its \u201ctragic fate,\u201d would \u201craise itself above [\u2026] social slavishness.\u201d Willing the future and thus recognizing \u201cthe known as to be surpassed,\u201d this enlarged humanness, this \u00fcbermensch would share with Bataille, the realization that \u201cour native country is what belongs to the past in us\u201d (SN <\/em>170, 171; OC <\/em>VI, 186, 187). \u00a0I agree.\u00a0 And like Bataille, \u201cI\u2019m frightened by those who find it easy to reduce political activity to propaganda clich\u00e9s\u201d (SN <\/em>164; OC <\/em>VI, 180).\u00a0 But this does not take us very far, and in fact, Bataille\u2019s anti-fascist writings are the most clich\u00e9d of his works, the point at which his philosophical project approaches its own reduction to clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n

In what will follow, I want to engage Bataille on the basis of his writings in other fields: on economy, on sacrifice, on the category of the human. And I will attend to the problem of gendering, which cannot be separated from them. These are the categories of anthropology.<\/p>\n

I am biased, of course. And perhaps even a bit resentful, but I\u2019m in good company. As Elizabeth Costello says, in a monologue recently delivered as part of Krzysztof Warlikowski\u2019s Phaedra<\/em>(s<\/em>)\u2014Bataille\u2019s \u201cPhaedra Complex\u201d is an entirely different story\u2014anthropology is the \u201cthe sole homegrown science\u201d of the gods.\u00a0 \u201cThey specialize in humankind because of what we have and they lack; they study us because they are envious\u201d (EC, <\/em>189).\u00a0 Coetzee\u2019s cynical heroine asks of those divine beings, \u201cDo they guess (what irony!) that what makes our embraces so intense, so unforgettable, is the glimpse they give us of a life we imagine as theirs, a life we call (since our language has no word for it) the beyond?<\/em>\u201d Bataille\u2019s anthropology commences there, not with a yes or no but with an interrogation of that divide which would posit the opposition, and leave us all too human.<\/p>\n

\n

References cited<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

References to Bataille use the English translations first, and are followed by indications to the French original, as it appears in \u0152vres Compl\u00e8tes <\/em>(Paris: Gallimard), except for texts from Acephale<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Bataille, George. Sur Nietzsche. <\/em>Translated by Bruce Boon, introduced by Sylv\u00e8re Lotringer.\u00a0 St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1994.<\/p>\n

——-. \u201cPropositions.\u201d In Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927-1939, <\/em>197-201. Translated by Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Edited and introduced by Allan Stoekl.\u00a0 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 [originally published in Acephale <\/em>(January 1937), 17-21].<\/p>\n

Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. <\/em>London: Secker and Warburg, 1999.<\/p>\n

Hollier, Denis. \u201cForeword.\u201d In The College of Sociology, 1937-1939, viii-xxix. <\/em>Translated by Betsy Wing.\u00a0 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 [1979].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rosalind C. Morris \u201c\u2026[Often], we are \u2026 a play of obscure representations, and our understanding is unable to save itself from the absurdities into which they have placed it, even though it recognizes them as illusions.\u2026 The power of… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1644,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51803,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-2-13","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}