Afl iction

Afl iction

The only future for art would necessarily be the dramatization of “the point,” where it would be apophatic if not silent. Yet, the revealing of inner experience as communicative required an apophatic exposition that wrote the point, a “thanotagraphie” (Teixeira 1997:98). Bataillean apophatic writing is a type of sacrii cial writing which plays in the space between saying and its collapse. It does not communicate through depic- tion, but moves by way of evoking the torrential immediacy of the point as paroxysm of the overcoming of linguistic, social, and metaphysical gram- mars. Sells (1994:9) reminds us that “many apophatic writers suggest that the reader cannot understand what is being said until she becomes it,” becomes the “meaning event” which is “that moment when the meaning has become identical to the act of predication.” But as a low mystical prac- tice, inner experience does not move to ontological identii cation; writerly practice here does not simply reconi gure transcendence as immanence, but eliminates the very possibility of the former as a condition of com- munication. The “war” is displaced to the ground of writing itself, where the “the writer” dies in the event. This is a deontological writing of non- union which does not conclude or i nd any resolution in the possibility of coincidentia oppositorum. Bataille does not aspire to burn away distinc- tions through the overl owing of mystical love, but moves to sustain the burning of anxiety that cannot be overcome with the rapturous work of the mystic’s longing. Hence, the reason for writing a book was to “cease to be,” requiring “that I die. To not be had become an imperative exigency of being, and I was condemned to live not as a real being but as a fetus that had been tainted before term and as an unreality” (Bataille 1970b:143).

The years between 1942 and 1959 were also marked by a l urry of apophatic thanato-poesis of which the culmination was L’Impossible

Apophasis in Representation: Georges Bataille 245

(1962), originally titled Hatred of Poetry. The impossible evokes the neg- ativity of language—an expenditure on the level of the word. Beyond poetry is Bataillean apophasis where poetry strains to become a language of tactility that also functions as an intimation of the wound. Hence, poetry is “the evocation by words of inaccessible possibilities,” which opens the night to the excess of desire,” exceeds this world, reveals and denudes the unknown, in a suspended night (Bataille 1962:188). A poesis without an object, it approximates, through the grain of language, the paucity of all that which attempts to complete itself. The impossible is glimpsed in a language of agitated descent where the self no longer can imagine totalities or even preserve itself as human. Smooth communica- tive language is eclipsed by the “holocaust of words,” a bloody language that can only fail in its unraveling. It is a dramatic discourse of rejection of and by the world: “What had I done, I thought, to thus be rejected into the impossible . . . nothing can escape you now. If God is not, this desper- ate cry in your solitude is the extreme limit of the possible: in this sense, there is not one element of the universe submitted to him! It is submitted to nothing, dominating everything” (ibid.:97). If poetry is the quest for the sacred, it only becomes sovereign when acknowledging the sacredness of its own bereftness. “The Impossible” is exile where solitude transforms every being into the lone man of anguish. A language of i re, where life is lived on the condition that one burns (ibid.:29); the impossible is an ineffa- ble non-substance that is only intimated in the aporia of signii cation. The self is undone in the ini nite impotence experienced in the chasm between the world to which one is no longer subjugated and the world that can never have you. As Marie-Christine Lala argues, Bataille’s “impossible uses the object-as-lack as a medium to translate something irreducible, which makes it impossible to render it directly accessible . . . the text of Haine de la poésie struggles to dramatize it, to expose it . . . Language, the body and the subject reach their own limits in this trial by the impos- sible and by death” (Lala 1995:107). However, although the impossible is the site of a trial, we should recall that “death” in this context, like “God” and “night,” functions as another name for deontological non- content. Bataille was no stranger to the play of the ineffable names of god and the negative theological tradition. The name names no-thing and, as Sells further notes, in the apophatic tradition, “if X is ineffable in this rigorous sense, it cannot be called X . . . no statement about X can rest as

a valid statement, but must be corrected by a further statement, which itself must be corrected in a discourse without closure” (Sells 1994:207). Bataillean apophasis recognizes the impossible to be unnameable, but in the name of sustaining anguish and the trial of being ousted from the world of things, he cannot correct himself or dialectically climb in unlim- ited non-closure. The point evades the cumulative narrative logic that conventional apophatic naming engenders and does not unfold through any perpetual play of contradiction and negation. Rather, it i xates and

246 S. Romi Mukherjee

pushes toward the zero of immanence which is always, unexperienced and only called “death.” Hence, against contradiction and ceaseless dia- lectical non-closure, with Bataille, writing the impossible is an enterprise of obsessed suspension and torrential inertia. He thus outbids negative theology by refusing metaphor, while nonetheless constructing a discur- sive i eld upon which the negative can be mobilized in order to swallow the signii er itself in the immanent substrate that looms underneath the work. Reproducing the repetitive explosion of aggregates that character- izes Thanatos, the language simply indexes the instant and never denotes:

Frozen tears Equivocations of eyelashes Lips of death Inexpiable teeth Absence of life Nudity of death. (Bataille 1962:154)

Poetry must be hated because it is not driven by hatred itself, because it l ees i nitude and cowers before the realities of the world transformed into war machine. The age of beauty had ofi cially ended and if there would be poetry it would lament in silence. The impossible is humanity on trial before its Other. And while not a site of artistic work, the discur- sive markers used by Bataille constitute nodal points for a kind of psy- chic-work in the present, a means of securing a certain type of courageous remembering of the existence of the immanent world underneath, and the vectors of contemporary violence that are denied in the name of human- ity’s will to progress. Guilty before the void, the impossible is a common point, a shared space where annihilated, sovereign humanity can emerge without a why and what for. Writing here serves to then transform the now-abandoned subject into a wounded bacchant whose fusion with others is contingent upon the collective apprehension of impossibility, and the excessive overl owing of the anxieties of i nitude: “I throw myself among the dead” (Bataille 1962:167).