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.