Bataille's
Inner Experience

This is a reading group of several texts of Georges Bataille with a focus on his philosophy of life. Bataille stands out as an eclectic, fascinating and controversial figure in the world of French letters. A contemporary of Sartre and Lacan, he combined ideas from diverse disciplines to create a unique position that he labeled 'base materialism' and which could equally be called 'ecstatic materialism'. Keeping outside the academic mainstream (he worked as a librarian), Bataille writes at the intersection of multiple disciplines including philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, mythology, and mystical theology. His works develop a libidinal economy, offer a critique of fascism and embrace marginal experiences in the style of the French poets. He is a formative precursor to the post-structuralist philosophers of the '60s -- and may well be more relevant in our time than ever.

We'll start with Bataille's early writings on Nietzsche and make our way through his important concepts over a number of weeks. We'll aim to understand Bataille's thought on its own terms as well as to place him in the context of the German thinkers that preceded him and the French philosophers who followed his lead. In view of Bataille's early relationship with Surrealism, the referenced artworks will spotlight this movement.

Note: Bataille's texts, while philosophically important, discuss difficult themes such as mortality, the unconscious, eroticism, primeval social practices, etc. Keep this in mind as you approach him, especially if this is your first experience with French philosophy.

In section VI of Inner Experience Bataille reiterates his guiding dualist distinction between sacrifice and project. Project is the engine of utilitarian, profane existence. It is a servile mode of being in which the agent works, that is, turns him or herself into a means towards a given end. Every project remains bound to a concrete object, person and situation, and, ultimately, communicates with things and with people reduced to things. The faculty that links means to ends in a project is reason, and therefore the project standpoint is indelible from philosophical rationalism. As we've seen in previous readings, this rational attitude is incapable of encompassing the entire human being. Echoing both Marx and Heidegger, Bataille sees project, together with its scientific and technological derivatives, as a fragmenting force that alienates human beings from one another and humanity as a whole from nature.

Bataille goes so far as to say that human action itself is the alienating force. In one way or another, every mode of action is appropriative. Action encounters something other and incorporates it within the framework of the acting self. Economic action does this in an obvious way by maximizing the bottom line. An act of theoretical thought likewise brings reality into a conceptual system, turning the real into an object of thought. Moral action, even when altruistic, tends to incorporate human reality into a harmonious ethical whole. Political action, when not explicitly revolutionary, only aims at maintaining the homogeneity of the social unit. Even the artistic act, as we saw in the case of Proust's genius, cannot free itself from a basic narcissistic possessiveness. The poet must, if he is to approximate liberation from project, follow the example of Rimbaud and give up his art altogether.

Bataille doesn't deny that human action is the basic element behind the progress of civilization. Action in its different forms is Productive: it gives us prosperity, knowledge, technology, peaceful coexistence and the pleasures of culture. Modernity has exponentially accelerated the pace of progress by liberating properly individual action. The Lutheran and later Cartesian revolutions placed the primacy on the individual self and its actions in the world, rather than any contemplation of a beyond. And here we come to the heart of Bataille's logic of sacrifice, which could only be revealed in modernity. Action as such is profane because it individualizes the agent, renders it into a thinking and acting ego, an entity separated from the continuum of social and natural being. Action violates communion: it fragments the interrelation of all things with one another in the encompassing plenum of materiality. For this reason Bataille claims that all action is abuse.

Since action profanes the sacredness of being, it must be expiated. This is the key turning point in Bataille's logic of sacrifice. The productivity of action must be offset by unproductive expenditure, a sacrifice that restores the sacred. The unproductive is an act of pure destruction of what is good and valuable. It is a negativity enacted purely for its own sake and on its own authority. Bataille sees in sacrifice the source of genuine sovereignty and the true prerogative of the master. Where project individuates the self and presents reality before it as a fixed object, sacrifice undoes this movement. It puts to death the individuality of the ego and with it dissolves the solidity of the object, plunging both the self and its other into the encompassing continuity of being. Sacrifice restores communion and makes possible genuine communication.

Drawing on Nietzsche, Bataille offers an anthropology of sacrifice. He traces the way epochs differ based on their dominant mode of unproductive expenditure through which they expiate the violence of projective action. Pagan societies performed human sacrifice and surrendered to the gods what was most valuable in each family: the first born. Judaism proverbially liberated humanity from human sacrifice, replacing the human victim with a ram. Christianity radicalized this substitution, with God himself (in the person of his Son) taking the place of the human victim. However, the Christian Godhead is not sacrificed and remains eternal, bolstered by faith in the resurrection. Moreover, Christianity demands of humans a spiritual sacrifice in the name of the ascetic ideal. All that is vital, natural, overflowing, cheerful and full of energy in the human being must be slain on the Christian altar. As Nietzsche recognized, the ethic of self-denial practiced over two millennia built up a tremendous tension at the heart of the European spirit. Modernity is the culmination and ultimate release of this “taut bow string,” which has the potential to send the human arrow into spiritual territories as yet unimagined.

Bataille, having abandoned Catholicism in the 1920s, follows Nietzsche's pronouncement of the death of God. He accepts the diagnosis of modernity as the era in which God himself must be sacrificed, entirely and without any remnant. Not just God the Son, but the Father and the Spirit too—the entire Divine “family”—become sacrificial victims. This is a total sacrifice, not limited to any particular being or object. God's very transcendence is put to death, which implies that the classic five transcendentals—being, the one, the true, the good and the beautiful—no longer have subsistence. The death of God throws humanity into a world nearly indistinguishable from the void. Absolute standards and norms give way to pervasive relativism. Purpose dissolves into disorientation. There is no longer any solid ground for meaning, truth or virtue to stand on, and intelligibility falls into the abyss of the depths.

The sacrifice of God amounts to a sacrifice of reason itself, and with it of the objective world that it constitutes. The rational self wanted to be everything; this was its narcissism and even its megalomania. It wanted to be God, this fulfilling the project of theosis begun by the early Christians and finally completed in Hegel's system (and perhaps especially in the person of Hegel himself). Now that God is dead, this self of absolute knowing dies too. Who or what is left in its place?

Throughout Inner Experience Bataille has intimated answers to this question. He has dramatized man's petrifying encounter with the unknown in the wake of God's death. For the sacrifice of God is not done in the name of some higher positivity or law. It is Nothingness itself to which God is sacrificed. Meaning and truth are plunged into the abyss of the empty or negative infinity, the absolutely inscrutable register that Lacan for his part calls the Real.

Nietzsche writes that to have killed God is an event of inconceivable proportion. Only a transfigured human, a Superhuman, can endure the angst and despair of this predicament. For Bataille the superhuman is an acephalic being who plunges into ecstatic communion, a Dionysian moved by passion, gripped by terror and transported by fits of laughter. He loves his fate as a madman to whom it is given to contemplate the death of God. He contests any impregnation of the resulting void with all-too-human values. He anxiously enacts the repetition of the divine self-sacrifice and each time finds himself ineffably transported into a state of terrifying ecstasy. Otherness, difference, heterology mark his inner experience, rupturing the fabric of the self upon the jagged rays of the unknown.

The last section of part 4 in Inner Experience takes us on a long digression into the novels of Marcel Proust. Bataille's intention here is no doubt to contrast Proust's literary approach to existence with the thought of Nietzsche. While admiring Proust's subtle sensibility, Bataille sees him as failing to go far enough into inner experience—a reservation that extends his overall critique of poetry. For him the poet/novelist does not succeed in relinquishing his ego and is thus incapable of the complete self-surrender that Bataille calls communication. Poetry is indeed a sacrifice of words—a holocaust that atones for the violence that human projects and activities inflict upon language. It tries to liberate language from the utilitarian function forced upon it by humanity and to reveal the word and the image as sacred beings that are an end in itself: not butter that allays hunger, nor a horse for riding but a "butter horse,” a pure image divorced from both objective reality and human projects.

The poet, however, is trapped in a perversion that his art prohibits him from escaping. While the poetic act reveals the sacred universal dimension of language, it is only a work of the imagination and lacks an inherent reference to existence. Poetic genius itself is distributed to singular individuals and must draw its reality from the actual life of the artist. Hence the perennial temptation for the artist to use his genius for all-too-human projects and activities.

This tension of the poetic points to the ineluctable tendency of all art towards profanation. In clinging to the form of the image and the literary word, art is incapable of liberating the sacred in the full force of its negativity. Its powers of contestation fall short of the full sacrificial task that Nietzsche discerns as the destiny of modernity. Even the most self-surrendering of artists—a Byron, a Baudelaire or an Artaud—remains anchored to the artistic act as his ego's last point of refuge. The "suffering artist” contests and gives up everything—except his artistic identity. The only full artistic sacrifice was performed by Rimbaud when he abandoned poetry altogether. What matters with him is not his prosaic subsequent existence as an African trader, but his leap out of the poetic sphere and into existence. Poetry shares this with knowledge, that both revel in faculties of the subject (imagination, understanding) and both pursue idealized aims (Beauty, Truth) that turn away from material existence. Paradoxically, Rimbaud had to contest and renounce poetry in order to perfect it through his absence.

Bataille's critique of poetry, and poetry's own interplay with knowledge are reminiscent of Hegel's famous words on beauty in the Preface to the Phenomenology: 

‘Death—if we wish so to name that unreality—is the most terrible thing there is and to uphold the work of death is the task which demands the greatest strength. Impotent beauty hates this awareness, because understanding makes this demand of beauty, a requirement which beauty cannot fulfil.’

In Proust the poetic paradox reveals itself in several ways. Towards his beloved Albertine, Proust's narrator is torn between an obsessive passion to possess her and a longing to dissolve himself in her as in a vast ocean. Woman being every man's fateful unknown, he clings to her with a decisive will to grasp and know her. For this knowledge promises to open the riddle of his own existence, of his birth in woman's flesh and of his final destiny that returns him to the elements of material nature. The project of knowing offers man a stable ground where he is saved from his deathly fall into the feminine abyss. Yet this fixed identity of the concept is also the obstacle that prevents him from fusing with her in a true communication.

Going further, we find that desire as such is this paradox of a self that strives, and ultimately fails, to reconcile its relation with the other. Beginning with Hegel's Phenomenology and passing through Kojève, this notion of desire as the living negative marks an entire epoch of French thought, from Sartre's “man is a useless passion” to Lacan's “there is no sexual relation,” down to Bataille's erotics and his critique of Proust. What is distinctive of desire is that it demands and lives on this paradox: if communication with the object is definitively attained in fusion, desire itself ceases in a kind of contemplative death, and with it ends the possibility of future satisfaction. Desire is the irresistible power of life that thrives on its own failure. Bataille's preoccupation throughout his career is to find some path, if not out of, then through this impasse of desire. The same could well be said of the intellectual and political history of the 20th century.

Finally, we can derive this formula from Bataille's analysis: for man, woman is desire, woman is time. We know of existence that it is submerged in temporality. Following Hegel, time is the power of the negative, the Lord and Master whose ineluctable flow brings destruction and rebirth. In Proust the longing for the moments of a time now lost is the fundamental drive and the pulse of his literary production. Memory is the element of Proust's writing and gives rise to his guiding question: how can what has become past and only a memory reclaim its reality, when the only real existence we encounter is the impression that the senses present in the now? Here comes Proust's most famous philosophical discovery, with which Deleuze will do so much in the '60s. In a device afforded by nature herself to human psychology, the past can enter into a remarkable resonance with the present. When a present impression, such as the shape of a tree or the sound of a footstep, evokes, in that same moment, a past memory, the two—the impression and the memory—are for a brief time conjoined in a single experience. They resonate like a standing wave on the string of temporal continuity. In their symbiosis, the memory takes on the existence that only a present impression can possess, while the fleeting now is clothed with essential significance, a certain enhanced meaning and sacredness brought forward to it by the past. What is produced in the resonance, Proust says, is pure time, which creates a pure aesthetic pleasure not possible in the present or the past alone. He goes so far as to say that pure time reveals the pure, essential self that is normally hidden behind the contents of our experience. This self attains a certain mastery over time and even finds immunity from death itself.

For Bataille, again, Proust's remarkable account, innovative and striking though it is, remains a poetic subterfuge destined to fall short of the demands of existence. The artist continues to grasp onto time, just as he did with woman, now as a pure reflection of his equally pure self. The ecstatic self-surrender into temporality, the unconditioned expenditure of a total sacrifice, remains just out of reach. The artist must, if he is to enter genuine inner experience, follow Rimbaud's footsteps. He must contest and renounce not only the pure self of artistic contemplation but the very imaginative pleasures that sustain him.