even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but an occasion for misunderstanding?--Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
At the current juncture in the history of studies "on
Bataille,"admiration and indebtedness have given way to admiration
constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desire for
accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through
these inevitable critical shifts, symptoms of an immeasurable debt to a writer
from whom we have necessarily taken distance. It is also an occasion to ask
about our own investments in the renewed production of Bataille. During his
lifetime (1897-1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a "pornographer"
and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among some intellectuals,
for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker.
Since his
untimely death, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jürgen
Habermas, this former librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, editor of Critique, author of covertly circulated erotic
books and other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French
intellectuals leading from "Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques
Derrida".
Bataille's remains are located in the posthumanist
pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical, psychoanalytic,
and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot;
he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a
prizewinning biography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being
unknown. But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom
many critics identify, yet his work is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes
(but not always) in the interests of preserving its insights. Critical work on
Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of dépense
(expenditure), his mysticism, his attraction to the
sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends, viscerally
if implicitly, to identify with Bataille's refusal to be hard in the
conventional sense--his repudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its
association with moral resolve. In 1945, Bataille wrote that he was the
"contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels from the
shore, because in fact . . . I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could
notice the one who is dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is
something altogether different, one can have it to one's heart's content. .
."
In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: "Bataille's
cogito, thus, reads: 'I sink therefore I am'" [Hollier 138]. In other
words, Bataille was no proponent of a sink-or-swim philosophy, but of "the
hard desire to endure"--words he wrote to describe Vincent Van Gogh, whose
self-mutilation was, from Bataille's perspective, the necessary precondition of
his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the
self, a project that entails yet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in
the storm: Bataille insisted that creation required symbolic castration rather
than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of those who
volunteer heroically for the rescue mission ("Heroism," he said,
"is an attitude of flight").
As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille's
most relentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the
self-shattering of the phallic body. The sacrificial constitution of the man
who would sink--for this Bataille was giddily embraced after his death. By
1990, when Yale French Studies devoted a special issue to him, the embrace was equally
enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those
theorists who did not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue
with the ego-dissolving sublimity of fascism. After all, some of his friends
and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutiny for their
anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the
editor of that special issue insisted on Bataille's "ethics" of
sacrifice.
He claimed that Bataille held "onto the possibility
of an ethics" through a paradoxically "incessant repositing of the
ethical" [Stoekl 2, 5]. This account of Bataille's ethics avoids the
problem that the ethics of sacrifice in Bataille's work turns out to be
identical to the sacrifice of ethics. This reading resurrects Bataille as a man
of principled equivocation. To the extent that some recent accounts of Bataille
directly or indirectly transform his performative renunciation of ethics into a
substantive declaration of the ethical, they mistake the performative dimension
of the text for an ethical position. In order to defend Bataille's insistence
on the perpetual sacrifice of the stable meaning embedded in phallic virtues
and bodies (his contention that meaning is historically contingent and internally
unstable), his friends now transform aporia into the aim and summit of
analysis. By idealizing aporia, this reading hypostatizes it. Isn't this
elevation to a privileged place in the pantheon, this restoration of manly
principle and lucidity, exactly the sort of "position" that Bataille would
have found unbearable? But how to preserve Bataille's critique except as an
aporia?
Cynical feminists never doubted that his admirable
repudiation of phallic virtue was but another stage in the history of "man."
Now shorn of his illusory armor--war, beginning with the Great War that so
traumatized Bataille, was no occasion for glory--he refashions virility as
self-loss, embraces castration in his quest for self-restoration. The pain is
there, but tragic manliness still reserves the prerogatives of manhood for
itself. Other critics are justifiably disturbed by Bataille's proximity to the
politics of self-dissolution, all the while rightly insisting that aporia is
not a figure for suicide (you sink so you can swim and vice versa--the point is
not to drown). But when hard decisions have to be made, equivocation--since
aporia implies the impossibility of taking a position--is not a tenable
posture. Perhaps Bataille's insistence on equivocation, his refusal to ask (as
he made so clear in a letter to Roger Caillois in 1946: "morality . . . to
what end" [Lettres 137-38]) would eventually become unbearable for a generation
bearing the legacy of genocide. Perhaps his insistence on self-loss as a form
of self-recognition would, after repeated atrocities committed in the name of
the nation, become suspect. What, after all, was Bataille for? What was he
against? If he did not want to relinquish the privileges of manhood, he was against phallic hardness. This opposition
is more of a critical accomplishment than it might seem, especially in light of
the fact that Bataille's longing to unbind the phallic self is the very desire
that has rendered him suspect. After World War II democratic men sought to
sustain the virtues of hardness even though the Nazis had celebrated the same
quality. In his 1943 Posen speech, Heinrich Himmler praised his men for being
"hard" and scandalously linked hardness to the "integrity"
required of mass murderers. But antifascists interpreted fascists as
soft--Theodor Adorno, we recall, said that the "tough guys are the truly
effeminate ones. . . ."
This claim has plausibility except for its theory of causality,
in which homosexuality and femininity more generally account for fascism. Extreme
hardness disguises extreme softness; as Adorno put it, "Homosexuality and
Totalitarianism belong together". To be evenhanded, then, to be judicious
and ethical and make the right decisions, requires just the right amount of
hardness and, moreover, requires a world of balanced men who never sink, know
when to swim against the stream and when to float. But by what historical
miracle are such men produced if not by the fantasy of a world without the longings
ascribed to women and those "women" masquerading as men? Bataille's
work is an unequivocal reminder that this ideal manliness is no miracle, but a
cultural fantasy. His complicated relationship to fascism notwithstanding,
Bataille was no fascist. He was simply not man enough.
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