The ethico-aesthetic

Bataille’s ethics i nds its articulation in his de-ontic vision of the aesthetic. If, following Bataille, one accepts that humans are animals constituted by a severed relationship to a pure aesthetic of the low, a new horizon of inquiry opens up which asks what kind of animals they really are and how their aesthetic life rel ects this animality. It is precisely this question that opens up a domain of important ethical rel ection.

The intrinsic linkage between the good, the i ne, and the beautiful, has been a hallmark of philosophical thought from Aristotle to Durkheim to Wittgenstein, exemplii ed by the latter’s celebrated pronouncement that ethics and aesthetics are one. Insofar as ethics is an affair of shared principles, thinking the ethical through the aesthetic necessarily requires that we, on one hand, ask how such principles are incarnated in aesthetic representation and the aesthetic, and, on the other hand, how the aesthetic becomes a site where values are forged resulting in the construction of communal life. But with Bataille, as with other precursors of the postmodern death of the subject, the common, and the possibility of truth, is rooted in the experience of radical heterological difference. As Seyla Benhabib remarks, “the aesthetic intimates a new mode of being,

a new mode of relating to nature and to otherness in general . . . the aesthetic negation of identity logic also implies an ethical and political project” (1989–90:1443). However, while the principle of non-identity has become de rigueur among those who continue to rally to the call of decon- structionism, Bataille, a far more dramatic thinker than Derrida, did not content himself to trace the play of difference on the level of the signi-

i er, but rather radicalized difference to cut through all human ontologies revealing the voided space of apophasis where communities impossibly struggle to construct themselves in a zone devoid of “language.”

The impossible, as precisely the non-discursive moment of truth, func- tions as the point around which such communities of death, spectators

Apophasis in Representation: Georges Bataille 253

to their own sacrii ce, emerge. The self’s relationship to its own death in the general economy of nature, is precisely where it engages others and otherness, and becomes ethical. And it is in the aesthetics of excess that the immanent gradient of loss overwhelms and overcomes the human that the possibility of communicating presents itself. In the excess of the non-discursive, ethical life constructs itself anew without any recourse to outmoded paradigms of normativity. Philosophy, art, and aesthetics stop at the impossible, and with them the history of morality as well. If there will be a moral imperative, it will be articulated, as Jean-Michel Heimonet (1987:15) suggests, as an imperative to heterogenous reality which remains undecided on the level of language, but decisive on the level of the act or vécu. In other words, the apophatic representation or enunciation is precisely that which “presences” the traumatic trace of i nitude and the alterity to which we are all ultimately responsible and perpetually in debt.

And the balance-sheets of being in common never “break even,” insofar as my debt to the abîme and to the Other who interpolates me with

i nitude can never be fuli lled or made positive. If immanence is impossible, so is the community to come that is formed in relation to it. Society is an apophatic construct itself, speaking itself as its absence and unten- ability, always to come. The aesthetic, as intrinsically bound to the ethical, is thus also the experience and apophatic intimation of such incomplete- ness and indeed homelessness. Aesthetic life does not foster solidarity as in the Durkheimian paradigm, but rather proves how we can never be reconciled to one another. The neo-Durkheimian critique of the death of the community becomes a mythic and discursive means of retaining the communal in its absence, but as something of the imaginary, something that has actually never taken place. As Jean-Luc Nancy (1981:15) rightly claims, what this community has “lost”—the “immanence and the inti- macy of a communion”—is lost only in the sense that such a loss is con- stitutive of “community” itself. And just as society, and the great projects of modernity, implode because of their failure to reckon with such loss, preferring to erect social ontologies of essence and transcendence, art fails when it serves the former project.

However, the catastrophe and the negativity of the other are also very natural and alterity consists equally of the agon between the human animal and the explosiveness of the anthropocene. Confronting i nitude necessitates that we equally engage the catastrophic ferocity of the general economy of nature, and privilege its torrents and (re)presentation as the locus of aesthetic–ethical life. Bataille neither recognized the transcendence of nature nor coni gured it as raw matter to be mastered by human project. He refused, to take up Timothy Morton’s dark ecological thesis, that nature was ever something “over-there,” but knew that it was in us and of us as a nature which is our nature. Or, one could argue, that in between this world and the other, there lies a “second nature” that forms the space of Bataille’s inexorable and immediate entre-deux. The

254 S. Romi Mukherjee

construction of the new man is also the ethical and aesthetic construction of the new Earth. Rethinking the human animal as embedded within an immanent socio-eco system would then create the epistemological grounds from which responsibility would no longer be responsibility to oneself as the self would be marked by the principle of insufi ciency, but responsibility to negativity itself. And in foregrounding the codepend- ency of the human animal and milieu, a holistic approach to responsibility could be born wherein l ows circulating from one entity would enter into assemblage with others creating a series of l uxes and rel uxes that would oblige the human animal to act ethically in the face of the catastrophe. The very possibility of an ethics rests upon imagining the unim- aginable, in projecting the catastrophe, and herein lies the social function of the Bataillean aesthetic. Hence, as Kathryn Yusoff argues, “For Bataille . . . how the world is ordered through archival principles acts on the pos- sibilities of experience and ethics. Thus Bataille’s aesthetic engagement with the forms of experience and spaces of action in multispecies living suggests a radical departure from the careful conservational approaches that dei ne our current response of accounting for biological life and the loss of the world” (Yusoff 2010:88). The “conservational approach” which characterizes the human enterprise in all of its domains, most importantly the ethical and the aesthetic, actually forecloses the possibility of such an experiential ethics of the anthropocene. Bataille’s aesthetic and ethics, in foregoing “conservationism” and its falsehoods, thus posit

a communal possibility that is neither weighed down by moral anach- ronisms, nor a postmodern nihilism. Bataille’s apophatic aesthetic cuts through the fantasies of the conservationist and the conservative, by demanding that the anthropocene confront the traumatic kernel with a certain will to truth—to no longer fortify an already fragile civilizational ego by bringing it to cope, but rather incorporate the trauma to come as the horizon of being. And here one glimpses the politics of Bataille’s apophasis which does not imagine, but rather practices a continual unworking of the world.

The ethico-aesthetic