Apophatic Representation Georges Bataill. pdf
Apophasis in Representation
Georges Bataille and the Aesthetics and Ethics of the Negative
S. Romi Mukherjee
The apophatic aesthetic
Georges Bataille was an enemy of “art”. He loathed all that attempted to redeem the base with appeals to the lofty, cultivated a sustained distrust of “absolutes” and “beauty,” and saw through the hypocrisies of high culture and other bourgeois loci of distinction and anxiety. It would then appear misguided to speak of “Bataille and art.” However, Bataille was not simply an aesthetic reactionary. Rather he suggested a reworking of the dispositif of “seeing” which, in his view, should be tantamount to being blinded and indeed torn apart. The capstone of knowledge is found in the dialectical inversion of the positivist gaze, in the blind spot of reason and in the liminal passage between the human and its Other. This “site” is moreover one constituted by the unraveling of semiotic coherence and the descent into non-form, night, and void. And paradoxi- cally, it is from within the interstices between this night and the black hole of the eyes that Bataille’s “aesthetic” begins; art,if it was to exist for Bataille, was a bastion of dark sensuality where the aesthetic is swal- lowed by the ecstatic and the value of the work is found in its capacity to call into question the very nature of human project. The Bataillean aes- thetic thus cannot be illuminated if one remains bound in conventional notions of art as the province of the painterly, the writerly, the plastic, and the beaux.
Bataille tried to outbid art; Outbidding art moved by way of the subver- sion and refusal of art’s formal and structural limitations, its history, its pretensions, in favor of a repositioning of the aesthetic in what it uncom- fortably l ees from—l ies, excreta, howls. In a broader sense, Bataille outbid ethics, epistemology, and all forms of totemism through a rabid aesthetic that violated rather than consoled. While “outbidding” does
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mean befouling beauty, it also means displacing reading practices and bringing sensorial experience to grapple with that which it perpetually disavows. What this would entail would be nothing short of a project to collapse aesthetic habitus which, in its aversion to the repugnant, canalizes the apprehension of the beautiful into certain ideal forms. “Beauty” is neurotic.
Bataille also outbid the Durkheimian tradition, and did so by guard- ing Durkheimian paradigms while perverting them and interpolating the Durkheimian edii ce with its blind spot. On one hand, in shifting the site of the aesthetic away from the Arts and toward a more experiential regime of imaginative, representational, and ritual life, he echoed Henri Hubert’s forays into sociologie esthétique in the early days of L’Année soci- ologique. Inl uenced by The Elementary Forms, he too recognized archaic religious life to be the well-spring of the aesthetic, which was not one social fact among others, but rather a symbolic force and real energy that shot through all of social life in its totality, one which he also readily used to criticize the modern. A dramatist of the sacred, he also lamented to disappearance of temporal, spatial, and experiential undulation between these domains and how “we no longer know how to employ blood and bones to effect a rupture with the regularity of days . . . the modern spirit has only put in place methods applicable to literature or painting (Bataille 1970a:273–74).” While never ceasing to invoke Durkheim as authority, Bataille rallied against Durkheimian utility and envisioned a “lacerating” sacred, which would tarry with the impossibility of the human project and force it into immediate confrontation with its “headless” negativ- ity. He “insisted on the Durkheimian theme,” but knew that “what excludes the Durkheimian solution is the identity between sacred–social, magical, and erotic elements (Bataille 1970b:171),” an identity that opened up a decidedly non-Durkheimian space. Bataille’s sacred exploded Durkheimian representation and posited non-symbolic forms of language which possessed no grammar and moved, by way of de-sublimation, tor- rents of effusion which shattered Durkheim’s symbolic moral substrate. And in the grips of the sacred, an alchemical function revealed itself; the anxiety of human i nitude and abjection could be transformed into col- lective ecstasy. Such was also the essence of the aesthetic: the plunge into horror that created the possibility for sovereignty, freedom, and ethical life. Denis Hollier (1997:68) is thus right to refer to Bataille as “dualist materialist,” a non-dialectical thinker of two worlds that know nothing of the other: “the world we live in,” a world organized against the world of expenditure, which Bataille also calls “the world we die in,” “a world for nobody,” “a world from which subjects have been evacuated, the world of the non-I.” And the dualisms he erected tarried explicitly with
the Durkheimian edii ce. 1 W.S.F. Pickering (2000:116) has suggested of Durkheim that his response to the question of “what lies behind the repre- sentations,” would be “reality,” insofar as “all reality is representable and
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knowledge can only come from representations of reality. Man is in fact a representing creature.” Bataille’s response to what he might interpret as
a false problem would rather be that the representation is precisely what needs to be exploded in order to enter into the tragic void between the two worlds; precisely where one becomes non-human; precisely where one incarnates the “non-known” or a “non-knowledge” that lays bare the paucity of the human.
Bataille’s aesthetic and moral sensibility must also be understood against the backdrop of the malaise of inter-war France, and the shared perception of an Occidental world on its last legs where modernity’s great projects were already considered failures. It was too late for the moral toning up that the Durkheimians called for. Rather, for Bataille, what was necessary was not the establishment an aesthico-ontological iden- tii cation between the individual, the totem, the representation, and the transcendent social, but the desecration and disintegration of all ontology tout court. The Bataillean aesthetic articulates itself from within the ruins of ontology, there where we would least expect it.
Bataille is the ultimate theorist of the negative, that de-ontic site that surpassed language, but nonetheless traversed conscious life as a looming traumatic trace, a horrifying excess that was always there but barred— the catastrophe to come. The Real is negativity incarnate or what Diana Coole (2000:6) calls a creative–destructive force that engenders as well as ruins positive forms. Contra Kojève, who l abbergasted the inter-war avant-garde by proclaiming Stalin as the end of history and announcing the evacuation of all negativity from the world, Bataille pleaded for the existence of a man of “unemployed” and “recognized negativity,” one who feels “horror” at “looking at negativity within himself,” a horror which “is no less likely to end in satisfaction than in the case of a work of art (not to mention religion)” (Hollier 1988:91). Post-history may not
be Kojève’s “Sunday of Life,” but as Christopher Gemerchak suggests (2003:. 19), a Bataillean “Sunday of the Negative,” an empty day where the sacred as negativity is unleashed against man’s domination of nature, which quickly becomes a form of domination over man. On this Sunday, when no one went to church, “recognition” was also an awareness of the outside of representation. In other words, there remained for Bataille, as Vincent Teixeira argues, a “power of destruction and recreation, an ‘aesthetic negativity,’ produced by dispossession, calling into question and destabilizing the homogenous world” (1997:92). The artistic quest was thus deeply political for Bataille, insofar as they were constituted by the heterological demand to cut through the post-historical Sunday of the twentieth century with the alterity of the Real.
Bataille was a highly repetitive writer of a i nite set of themes and vari- ations. However, underneath such repetition is a straining, striving, and pushing toward, this aesthetic negativity which can never fully reveal itself. Hence, Richman also writes that Bataille “strained a rhetorical
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muscle to maintain his discourse at the level of death” (1982:8), and death was not only the pinnacle of the Bataillean aesthetic insofar as it was the most radical of alterities, but also a i gure of metonymy for all het- erological experience. Bataille’s straining was not merely stylistic; it was an attempt to bring the aesthetic negative to the threshold of articula- tion through a practice of unsaying and unfolding. The aesthetic, like many of Bataille’s texts themselves, is thus “apophatic,” a term tied to the negative theological tradition that refers, on one hand, to negation, but also to a certain type of performativity, which, according to Michael Sells (1994:3), “afi rms ineffability without turning back on the naming used in its afi rmation of ineffability . . . unnameability is not only asserted but performed.” The aesthetic is a type of unsaying and Bataille’s theory and theoretical performativity are radically apophatic. But Bataille’s own apophasis does not move in any systemic manner, and unraveling it in order to illuminate his aesthetic theory and its inversions of art, culture, and the Durkheimian, demands that we too strain and rethink the visual imagoes of Bataille’s cosmogony, and genealogically reconstruct his apophatic aesthetic.
Spheres
It begins with the eyes rolling back into the head; Bataille’s father was afl icted with syphilis and suffered bouts of blindness, and the inability to control the expulsion of feces: “The child had to place him on the bedpan on which getting out of bed “with difi culty” . . . the needs that in fact without embarrassment, he satisi ed under the eyes of everyone (of his son, but what eyes would he assume for a child conceived in blind- ness other than eyes likely to see everything), the spectacle of “brutalizing abandon” he gave, with eyes rolled back” (Surya 2002:8). . Unseeing is also an “unsaying”; blindness is the condition for aesthetic experience where seeing everything necessitates a confrontation with the shadowy non-site beyond ocular normativity. The aesthetic requires eyes which are nothing but all-seeing—where thought dissolves into incommensurability. The mind’s eye is blind, but encompasses a “night” that will be alternately referred to as “negativity,” “non-god,” the “void,” the “limit,” and the “non-discursive” among the many apophatic nodal points of Bataillean aesthetics. The absolute epistemology of Hegel was unable to confront this limit. The dialectic cannot subsume its non-dialectical other and. no different than the blind spot of vision, knowledge too is laden with la tache aveugle. The blind spot is the negative analogue to the eye and thus, the locus of aesthetic negativity: “a blind spot . . . which recalls the struc- ture of the eye . . . While the blind spot of the eye seems to be of little consequence, the nature of understanding actually dictates that the blind spot carries more meaning than understanding itself . . . the spot merits
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attention: it is no longer the spot that is lost in knowledge, but knowledge in itself” (Bataille 1951:129).
Conventional representational life, burdened by comfortable modes of seeing that assert a metaphysics of subjectivity, reduce aesthetic life to a state of false totality that betrays the real kernel of sensorial experience, the blind spot where sensation and sens are denuded. The frontiers of the aesthetic open here insofar as the transcendent aesthico-moral antinomies that customarily produce “seeing” fall apart.
The eye must be pierced, or extracted in the same way that the meta- physical totality that transcendent aesthetic experience assumes must be crushed. The glassy eyes of the father roll back into a body that is no longer upright and embodies no law whatsoever. In 1928’s The Story of the Eye, Bataille, or Lord Auch, explores his primordial obsession with the homologies between, inter alia, eyes, eggs, bull testicles, sun, orb. and Earth—homologies which create one semiotic chain that apophatically maps the Bataillean aesthetic. The orgies narrated throughout the novella represent immanence to be the end result of the crushing of eyes, eggs, and balls, and the strained expenditures of physical, earthly, and cosmic bodies in a never-ending movement of loss that leads nowhere. The rep- resentations do not refer to reality or anything at all; rather, immanence is
a “continuity” which establishes a continuum of tactility, typii ed by the identity of bodily and terrestrial l ows. The text is also an allegorical attempt to apothatically crush the (eye) “I” who narrates and attempts to master the narrative and the women of the novella through a virility that can never be total. Moreover, the novel- la’s climax was based on real events. In 1922, in Madrid, Bataille watched as famed toreador Manuel Granero had his eye pierced by the horn of
a bull, resulting in his immediate death. In Bataille’s recollection of the moment: “on Simone’s seat was a white plate with two white peeled balls, glands like pearls, the size and shape of eggs, slightly bloodshot, like the orbs of an eye . . . Granero was beat back by the bull and pinned against the balustrade; the horns struck the balustrade three times at full speed and, on the third lunge, one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head . . . two globes of equal size and consistency had been propelled
in opposite directions at once” (Bataille 1970a:56–57). 2 The body too must
be decomposed as a holistic and self-assured apparatus, and along with it its own metaphysical projection of Being. Bataille’s contributions to the review Documents thus, cut the body and the cosmos open into a series of part-objects that were points of relay for the forces of the negative. In “Eye” (1928), he played with Surrealist ocular tropes, inspired by Bunuel and Dali, and again telescoped the relations between the eye as “cutting edge,” the eye as “cannibal delicacy,” the “eye of conscience,” the “lugu- brious eye,” and the “living eye,” etc., (Bataille 1968:187–88). However, beyond the corporality of these orbs, lay the true seat of unseeing, the blind spot that lived, and secreted within the human head itself: the
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pineal eye. 3 For Bataille, it was the blind spot of civilization and classical reason, that which escaped the head from within the head and made men drunk on negativity. It produces an “existence” which “no longer resem- bles a neatly dei ned itinerary from one practical sign to another, but a sickly incandescence, a durable orgasm” (Bataille 1985:82). The pineal eye does not see, but rather as Allan Stoekl remarks, “is experienced communally . . . the eye/anus/brain in its ejaculation/defecation/thought becomes an erotic and sacrii cial object not just for an isolated individual, but . . . perhaps, even by implication, for an entire civilization at the end of history ( Stoekl in Ibid.,:xiii).”
In this, a post-Durkheimian end of history, society as transcendence had imploded and, with it, a mode of seeing that transposed an idea of the world onto the world, establishing a positivist ontological comfort. And where the totem and social once stood, one now only glimpsed the presence of void. The experience of the pineal is neither social nor social scientii c insofar as this de-centering opposes rules and method and is devoid of full content. The apophatic eye introduces a “lawless intel- lectual series into the world of legitimate thought” (Bataille 1985:80), and contemplating “sinister solitude,” “it is not a product of understanding,” but rather “an immediate existence,” which, moreover, “eats the being, or more exactly, the head” (ibid.:82). As such the pineal eye, where the eye becomes the anus, which becomes the mouth etc., is the excretion of nega- tivity from within the pit of the skull where it enters into a chiasmus with the “fecal sun,” which de-creates the world by breaking nature’s chains and collapsing into a limitless void (ibid.:85).
The sun is the nucleus of the forces at play within this economy of unseeing and undoing. Energy ceaselessly accumulates to be expended without compensation, purpose, or objective (unilateral discharge). That which bestows life and engenders life-aggregates runs off into loss and dissipation. Two suns: the radiant sun of fall that delivers the harvest and the black sun that wastes itself. Although functioning as our principle of light and “good,” the sun does not allow itself to be directly gazed upon; incandescence and unbridled aggression, production and unproductive expenditure, radiant and black, the sun embodies the general economy of the universe. The solar will be dual; transcendent in the domain of “project,” immanent in the domain of expenditure.
Excreting and ingesting, the sun is also a locus for pineal aesthetics and, when scrutinized, it is a mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epileptic crisis. The scrutinized sun is identii ed with the man who slays a bull (Mithra), with the man who looks along with the slain bull (ibid.:57). This is also Bataille’s man of art, a (dis)i gure of mouth/anus/sun/eye who understands his status as cosmic dejecta. Icarian, he longs to be the sun, but is thrust back to the status of “a creature who, under a sick sun, is nothing other than the celestial eye it lacks” (ibid.:90). He is the sun’s vomit which he naively challenges in the name of totality. The sun’s rays
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castrate his vision. The confrontation with the wasteful sun that ravishes is precisely where normative aesthetics and the “beautiful” crumble; the condition for aesthetic wholeness or redemption lies in the state of forsak- enness. In other words, solar immanence, unseeable and akin to epileptic foam, is the reservoir from which artistic practice and aesthetic experience must emerge. Let the black sun run its course; contra the designs of aca- demic painting which sought solar elevation, art is actually the stopping of the principle of the good sun itself.
And what of the Earth, that sphere “covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus” (ibid.:8)? The aesthetic is not a human activity any more than the Earth is the center of the cosmos. The aesthetic production of human animals is embedded in not only the general economy of nature, but in what can only be described as a Bataillean cosmo-socio-techno- ecosystem wherein the distinctions between the human and the non-human are swal- lowed up in the frenzied expenditures of a pineal cosmology. Here, the foam on the lips is the foam of the sea and the Earth, a homological double for the ejaculations and emptying of the head, the eye, anus, sun etc. As Bataille thus notes, “the terrestrial globe has retained its enormity like a bald head, in the middle of which the eye opens on the void is both vol- canic and lacustrine” (ibid:84). The apophatic aesthetic brings the lacunae of the terrestrial void to interpolate earthly abundance. Communication is not an intra-human modality, but the transformation of the non-human world into a place of non-discursive rapprochement, which impossibly moves toward the hidden substrate of the solar l ow that secretes not Being, but fractured beings. Bataillean anthropology begins with l uxes of nature and lowers itself into the void precisely where it amasses its docu- ments, which resist museums, and confound anthropos tout court insofar as they are sediments of the Earth to which human life is simply one l ow of energy. Bataillean anthropology is thus actually a physics, measuring the collective movement of each particle that is composed of solar energy, unleashed and equally devoured by the Earth (Bataille 1970a:518). The challenge then, for art, would be to (de)create with the pineal eye, to bring it to gaze into the glassy eyes of negativity.
Low
For Bataille, it also began with the razing of a Church. In Notre-Dame de Rheims (1918), German shelling burns the cathedral to l ames and “in the red glow of l ames and in the acrid smoke, is the symbol of war as crazy and brutal as i re . . . and I thought that corpses themselves did not mirror death more than did a shattered church as vastly empty in its magnii - cence as Notre-Dames de Rheims” (Hollier 1992:17).
The desire to become upright and embody morality was doomed to failure. The symbolic, the law of the father, and the church, i nd themselves
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immolated and the morality of the spire proves to be a sicknesses that leads to its own desecration. If God is absolute lack, we too i gure as God’s absolute lack: gods are always as powerless as their creatures (reciprocal lack). And with our virgin lady mutilated and the congregation reduced to the status of corpses, the a-theology to come would be one of ruins and ruining. Religion, the genesis of art, will be low.
As Hollier (ibid.:23) argues, the text function as the origins of the “anti- architectural gesture” of Bataille’s non-system that “undermines and destroys everything whose existence depends on edifying pretensions.” Demolishing the edii ce does not result in an inversion of the Church’s foundations, where the spire would plunge downwards or construct a subterranean architecture. Immanence is not an inverted transcendence. Unities do not replace one another; Bataille was a negative dialectician, and collapsing the architecture with appeals to the low and decline meant exacerbating the latter, and dramatizing the antagonism between the two worlds to the point of incommensurability. The low is a hermeneutic of aesthetic critique and, also, another world.
Architectural composition, the desperate attempt to epistemologi- cally erect sovereign authority, plagues, inter alia, physiognomy, dress, music, and painting (Bataille 1970a:171). Architecture is a collective lie in which high aesthetic practice is implicated. Architectural composition hides terrain, dissimulates verticality, and conceals the anarchic pulsions that vibrate underneath the foundations. Architecture is paranoid and runs toward symbolic heights in the mad rush from organic negativ- ity. The falsehood of architecture holds civilization hostage and denies that humans only represent one intermediary step in a morphological chain where we are actually located “between monkeys and the great edii ces.” Against Maussian morphology, Bataillean morphology would bring the material substrate to oppose society itself.
Architectural physiognomy, from the Indo-European system of the varnas to the present day, has homologized the head with not only the seat of thought, but also with the atmosphere, the priestly, and the sovereign. Conversely, the foot, and more specii cally, the “most human part of the body” (Bataille 1985:20), the big toe, are identii ed with the vile, the untouchable, and the abject; for Bataille, “human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to ideal, and from ideal to refuse—a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot” (ibid.:20–21). This rage is misplaced and cultural taboos on the foot serve only to re-embolden the monstrousness of the big toe to which the head and the eye are terrestrially doomed. In addition, beyond bringing the too-human big toe to interpolate the human categories of language and art, Bataille was also reorienting the Freudian theory of fetishism away from perversion., According to Alan Bass (2000:29), in fetishism “while the operation of defense always implies an attempt to convince oneself that something disturbing has not
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been registered, the defense always implies that the disturbance has been registered.” For Bataille, one never succeeds in convincing oneself and the traumatic trace seethes through the defensive construction, which does not compensate for castration, but rather articulates it simultane- ously. Bataille argues that the foot fetishist does not replace the empty site of castration with a false totality. He is “seduced in base manner . . . opening his eyes wide . . . before the big toe” (Bataille 1985:22), which cuts through the defense and opens not only the wound of castration, but the wounding that constitutes the human as torn between high and low. Base seduction opposes Freudian seduction in the same way that the empty site of the phallus ceases to be the part object par excellence. Entering into the wound begins with the Bataillean injunction that “any amateur of painting loves a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a shoe” (1970a:273).
The anthropoid foot raises the body from mud and bars itself from the subterranean. Once raised, it objectii es nature and develops a “language of l owers” which codes, for example, a rose with “love,” “ideal beauty,” “nobility,” and “purity.” But for Bataille, “love smells like death,” and the truth of the beautiful rose lies in the putrid roots, “swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin . . . the ignoble sticky
roots wallow in the ground, loving rottenness just as leaves love light” 4
(1985:13). He recognized in roots the disrobing of joy and the denuding of beauty, revealing a sordidness that corresponded to the underbelly of aesthetic longings. Moreover, against Durkheim, Bataille’s base mate- rialism, plunging into the puerile dimensions of être in favor of the idea of devrait-être (ibid.:5) will cut through social facts in order to muck in “raw phenomena” (ibid.:16). Bataille’s radical naturalism recognizes that before society and religion, the human is posed in relation to climate, mud, storms, and l ies, and embedded in a proto-social natural rawness. However, base materialism is not necessarily a-religious, but rather a Gnostic heresy against the church fathers and the fathers of sociology. And in Gnostic traditions, Bataille thus located a “. . . materialism not implying an ontology, not implying that matter is the thing-in-itself . . . Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations . . . it was a question of disconcerting the human spirit and idealism before something base” (ibid.:49–51, emphasis added).
Practicing such a materialism proceeds by scouring being of idea and ideal, and submitting wholly to the active principle that is matter, an autonomous matter of that other world which does not oppose form. And in a series of Gnostic reliefs, Bataille would i nd an aesthetic tendency that refused ontology by melding the natural orders: gods with human legs, serpent bodies, the heads of cocks and donkeys, acephalic images l anked by animal heads, etc. The human form is shattered into the animal, whose representation remains surprisingly unchanged on the level of iconicity,
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suggesting an anti-anthropocentric hierarchical conversion. Man does not simply become kangaroo, as in Durkheimian effervescence, but is reduced to the animal. These reliefs were important for their early attempt to confound the human, ontology, and virility/totality insofar as it “is only in a reduced and emasculated state that one i nds the base elements” (ibid.:52). More importantly, they confound all aesthetic paradigms based on identity and open up to a chthonian l ow where the positivist tidiness of form and meaning is unraveled. The apophatic strategy is to push toward the outside of such positivist ontology from within the world of human representation itself.
Getting low is also about digging and there does indeed exist a Bataillean archeology where the excavation of the vestiges of past igno- bleness serves to supplement contemporary debates on the identity of the human. In any early numismatic portrait, Bataille would, on one hand, theorize the dominant aesthetic vision of any given society to be rep- resentative of its symptoms and anxieties, and on the other hand rally prodigal Celtic maladresse against Greek academicism. The noble Greek horse is debased in the deformities of Celtic coins, collapsing the academic desire to again merge in ideal the form of the body, with the forms of the world, and the forms of thought. The Celtic horse, on the contrary, is ani- mated by an “aggressive ugliness . . . a frenzy of forms, transgressing the rule and realizing the exact expression of a monstrous mentality” (Bataille 1970a:161–62). In Bataille’s rendering, Celtic abjection, its respect for the horrors of natural life, was a powerful critique of the academic desire, one which he struggled to remobilize against modernity’s ideals. Moreover, the Celtic coins revealed the alternance of human life as ensconced within the alternance of the general economy of nature, again opening the path to a materialism that was not simply ugly, but also a critique of plastic forms which only express themselves as society’s symptoms—whence comes the negation of all that is not compatible with actual human life (ibid.:163).
Crucial, then, to Bataille’s aesthetic is the value of the formless as the site where form breaks apart, or where one is in between forms. In other words, the key aesthetic polarity, according to Bataille, was not that between form and line or structure and content, but rather between spittle and form. Presaging the post-modern interest in the abject, Bataille had early on understood the abject as an un-saying revolt against bourgeois mores and aestheticism. In “The Use Value of D.A.F. Sade” (1985[1929– 30]), Bataille would conclude that excreta remained a vital and liberatory substance that could effectively challenge and subvert bourgeois homo- geneity. In Sade, bourgeois appropriation and the working class as excre- tion are merged in a total heterogeneity where “the one who eats his shit vomits: he devours her puke” (Bataille 1985:94). With the impossibility of revolution and the demise of the alternating rhythm and fusion of appropriation and excretion, the homogenous world would have to be
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sacrii ced in an orgy where excreta is consumed the bourgeois. And this was among the many tasks of art. The orgy was also the place of “non- form,” which did battle with bourgeois and “academic men, for whom happiness was simply an affair of the world taking shape” (ibid.:31). The absence of form is an affront to the cleavage between the high and the low, which has from the nascence of modernity dictated taste, vision, and a world of clear dimensions. Heterology accelerates the entropy of the world, turns categories and classes back on themselves, and actually reveals how there is only no-thing to represent. Abjection and formless- ness are not states and, although embodied in spittle, excrement, and l ows, they resist thing-ness. As Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (2000:245) therefore suggest, one cannot simply set apart the abject as a type of negative essence; formlessness is predicated upon the refusal of substance and substances necessitating that the concept of no-thing be aesthetically operationalized (without recourse to representation).
Bataille afi rmed a painterly practice where the canvas is an index of the entropic abject l ow. Thus, in Picasso, Bataille (1985:24) notes how the dislocation of forms leads to a dislocation of thought, bringing the intel- lectual movement to abort itself. In Dali, he would recognize an irrevers- ible ugliness that was sovereign in its overturning of the great prisons of the intellect (ibid.:27). In Masson, he gleaned the tension between the desire to be “total” and its impossibility, resulting in nothing short of a “pure aesthetic” (Bataille 1988:40). And in Miro, who did not produce paintings, but was rather “killing painting,” decomposition left us with “traces of god knows what disaster” (Bataille 1970a:255).
The aforementioned painters were all Surrealists and, as is well known, Bataille too frequented Breton’s circles until his excommunication in 1930 where he was lambasted as “a vile esthete.” The fallout would result in a series of ad hominem attacks between the two men, but what was truly at stake was the aesthetic battle for the “outside” of the world, a battle for authenticity and for non-system. This was a war between ideal and matter, between sur-realism and the Real, redemptive love and i ery eroticism, art and apocalypse, and the eagle in the sky and the old mole in the ground. In his celebrated indictment of Surrealism, “The Old Mole and the Prei x Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist,” Bataille pled his case. He reproached the Surrealist spirit for its desire to elevate and sterilize the low, and argued that such a tendency was nothing more than the priggish l irting with the low that ends in its domestication in the bourgeois prison. The Surrealists may have claimed to be on the side of the low, but had to “sacralize” or “surrealize” it, in order to make it palp- able to their tastes, resulting in an aesthetic condescension, which looked down from a seat of values that was high above (Bataille 1985:33). They simply did not want to be really scared, and remained a “peevish aris- tocracy,” trapped in a “servile idealism,” and the “juvenile dialectics” of poetic agitation (ibid.:41). They betrayed neither classical epistemological
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and aesthetic categories nor their own class positions. Surrealism was a pathology, not a revolutionary art, which not only remained bound to the literary and the painterly, but, actually feared the unconscious. The low was not only authentically aesthetic and intrinsically revolutionary, but was also the index of good health. The confrontation with the negative is the condition for full liberty and organic vitality.
Don Juan Redux
In the Contra-Attaque days of 1934, Bataille was thirty-seven years old, dazed, delirious, and sick with History. As Surya notes, he traversed Europe as the very image of death itself, “by turns sick, drunk, rheumatic, drifting from one hotel to the next, and going crazy from Dark Italian wine and from this woman who was more uncompromising and pure than any other” (Suey 2002:209). The woman was “Dirty” (Dorothea), who, with Henri Troppmann, would confront the hangover, rel ux, and dyspepsia of progress in Le Bleu de Ciel (2002[1935]). Ini nity was no longer tenable
and in the novella, a tale of anti-Don Juanism, 5 the law castrates. Drunk on dark wine again in Tossa de Mer, in April of 1936, Andre Masson and Bataille danced to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. They gave birth to a new man and a new myth. Bataille said to Masson, “make me a god without a
head—you’ll i nd the rest,” 6 and the result was that
Man has escaped from his head like the condemned man from prison. He has found beyond himself not God, who is the prohibition of the crime, but
a being who ignores the prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is without a head, who i lls me with anguish because he is made of innocence and of crime: he carries a metal dagger in his left hand, l ames like those of the Sacred Heart in his right hand. He unites in the same eruption Birth and Death. He is not a man. He is not even a god. He is not me but is more me than me: his stomach is the labyrinth where he has lost himself, lost myself with him and in which I rediscover myself being him, that is a monster. (Bataille 1995a:text without page numbers)
Mystery continues to enshroud the activities of Bataille’s secret society Acéphale, but we do know that Bataille, according to Leiris at least, was “quite serious” (Lévy 1991:175) in his desire to create a headless religion, an idea whose origins dated back to 1925–26. Leiris proposed the name
“Judas” for the group. 7 Judas was replaced by a new Overman, a head- less monster who incarnated the frenzy of Dionysos and the lawlessness of Don Juan. The Acéphale was a myth founded on the death of god and the invocation of a new politico-aesthetic paradigm that would oppose all monocephalic structures. The new religion also needed a totem which would be a repository of the “totally other”; it needed a mythical struc- ture to articulate its disgust and embrace the forces of the destinal. As
Apophasis in Representation: Georges Bataille 235
Jean Clair (2010:39) has further suggested, Bataille’s endeavor epitomized an epochal aesthetic transition; the head without a body, the decapitated head, was the leitmotif of nineteenth century, but the “new man” of the twentieth century was undoubtedly headless.
The Acéphale was raised from the depths to do battle against utility and philosophical absolutism. Ecstatic and tragic, he was also a distant relative of Mithra, Orpheus, Christ, the Minotaur, and Osiris. Undomesticated,
he did not know the world, had not internalized its laws and, lacking reason, was incapable of doing so. As pure and unbridled tumult, he is cataclysm and emblematic of the necessity to become “tout autre” (1995a text without page numbers).
His genitals are covered by a skull, merging sex and death, creation and castration, and expenditure and i nitude. The l ames in the right hand, according to Masson, signify not the sacred heart of the crucii ed, but those of “our master Dionysos” (Léonard-Roques, Valtal 2003:63). His torso is l ayed, revealing the labyrinth where one i nds the Minotaur and Ariadne’s thread. His monstrous toes grip the earth. But while embody- ing nature’s plenitude and force, he is simultaneously a i gure of incom- pletion. As the inverse of normativity he cannot be total. As pure bios, he is the monstrosity of Being scoured of its contents. The different drawings of Acéphale hence place him in unstable and liminal circumstances: he is seated on a volcano; he teeters in balancing a mountain and a cloud; he is projected in the air by an explosion, probably volcanic; the body of a monster; in losing his integrity, he ceases to correspond to the plentitude of the world, reducing himself to fragments of emblems, translating rather the “principle of insufi ciency” or “principle of incompletion” of Man which was, according to Maurice Blanchot, the foundation itself of the communitarian project of Acéphale (ibid.:65). Bataille (1995c:20–21) desired that the Acéphale “mythologically express sovereignty devoted to destruc- tion, the death of God,” and be a “super-human who IS the death of God”;
he is a “catastrophe without end,” a non-teleological space of incomplete
becoming, a dynamism that seeks no point of rest. Like the Overman, the Acéphale is a bridge, and a critical apparatus divorced from all tem- poral forms of power. He is the impossibility of both magico-sovereign and communitarian binding, and perched atop the volcano by himself,
he is the solitude of non-human singularity. He is the contingent and aleatory nature of human existence that threatens to destroy, and in his case, disembowel. The Acéphale thus preached the eternal return against modern civilization’s illusory coherence and its fantasy of bourgeois secu- rity, while rallying against the monocephalic orders of Christianity and Nazism. As a decapitated king and a pagan beast-god, he raged against permanence. He was the advent of a limitless order of immediacy, which incarnated the earth, but was simultaneously groundless.
Bataille’s war, moreover, was one between two politico-aesthetic orders and codings of the chthonic. Monocephalic order condensed force
236 S. Romi Mukherjee
and, in privileging relative stability and conformity to natural law, was doomed to atrophy or totalitarianism. Through leveling, consensus, and democratizing immanence, democracy contained within it a structural corollary to fascism. The question then was how to rediscover the hetero- geneity inherent in democracy’s many heads, and insure that they not be reduced to a monocephalic structure. The head as an end enslaves force and disavows the ini nity of nature. Politics, religion, art, and society had to be dismembered in order to achieve the immanence that the death of god promised. Bataille thus wanted to unveil the existence of a new plane of mythical life characterized by pure affectivity: whether understood as left-fascist or democraticizing, the Acéphale was the immanent god of the left-sacred. Achieving immanence meant mastering Nietzschean laughter which was also dual in its nature like Dionysos; it was the delirium of being swept up in nature’s exuberance, but also the giddiness that accom- panies the descent into non-being.
Dionysos’ historical refrain in the postmodern can be explained by his eternal status as the beast-god who incarnates the raging and the exorbi- tant forces of too much life, too much earth, and too much wine. But, above all, Dionysos, as “too much,” is a i gure of alchemical purging. Following Nietzsche and Bataille, all of these characteristics inform the Dionysian aesthetic, constituted by loss, contingency, misrecognition and inno- cent suffering. Like religion, Dionysos always returns, and he returned with heightened vigor in 1930s and became one of the key drivers of the French political and artistic avant-garde, the orgiastic point of origin for
a new culture to come. Bataille’s articles on the Dionysian, historically important for their early defenses of Nietzsche against fascist appropria- tion, are nonetheless l ailing rhapsodies which set tragic Dionysian life forces against the völkisch phantasms of the Nazis in nothing short of a contestation of Dionysian aesthico-politics: “On one side a constitution of communal forces riveted to a narrow tradition—parental or racial— constitutes a monarchial authority and establishes itself as a stagnation and as an insurmountable barrier to life: on the other, a bond of fraternity . . . and the goal of their meeting is not clearly dei ned action, but life itself—EXISTENCE, IN OTHER WORDS, TRAGEDY” (Bataille 1995b:18). Bataille was not simply reclaiming Nietzsche from Hitler, but reclaiming exuberance in a desperate attempt to return Dionysos and his imagoes to the left. Against the Nazi homogenization of social life and its radically immanent chosen race, Bataille would counter a Dionysian “chthonian- ism,” which sought to recompose society through a cathartic and natural binding which revealed the true essence of the beast-god in an immanence that crystallized without a Führerbefehl. Dionysos may have reigned over
a sect, but he was no chef, and his magical sovereignty emerged from his own dismembering. In other words, as Bataille suggests, “TO CESARIAN UNITY THAT GIVES RISE TO THE LEADER OPPOSES ITSELF THE COMMUNITY WITHOUT A LEADER, JOINED BY THE OBSESSIVE
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IMAGE OF A TRAGEDY . . . men are only aggregated by a leader or by tragedy . . . a truth which will change the aspect of human things begins here: THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENT WHICH GIVES AN OBSESSIVE VALUE TO COMMON EXISTENCE IS DEATH” (ibid.:18). Dionysos embodies the tragic drives of Life as it teeters constantly between annihi- lation and harmony. For Bataille, the essence of the Dionysian mysteries remains tied to the play of Life veering toward death and hence, no state, leader, or organization can either domesticate or institutionally deploy Dionysos.
As the 1930s wore on, Bataille’s Dionysian delirium would grow more rabid and his will to turbulence would coalesce with his already honed will to tragedy. Dionysos and Jesus share many attributes. Both are lacer- ated. Both typify the alchemy of bread/blood/wine and promise their eventual return. In Dionysos-Crucii ed, Bataille imagined the frenzy of
a new meta-political community joined in its mutual tearing, one which lives, paradoxically, only for and through sacrii ce. Dionysus and the cru- cii ed thus open a tragic procession of bacchants and martyrs (Hollier 1988:340); Dionysos-Crucii ed is pure liminality and the paroxysm of folly and revolution/rebellion. In other words, the contagion of tragic com- munities bound by death and sacrii ce could resist the atomization and individualism of modernity and capital through the will to excess and dissolution.
But these prophecies would do little to combat to Nazi shelling. More importantly, we should recall that the Dionysian theatre, which was once the center of the Greek polis, was replaced by the city as war machine and then the city as center of commerce, and then, in an ultimate historical sublation, a site of commerce that proceeds from within the state of excep- tion that is the permanent war. This historical transition corresponds to a mutation in collective lived aesthetic experience.
Beyond reii cation
If, for Bataille, the capstone of one’s being was the immanence and conti- nuity of death, then sacrii ce was the causal principle of humanity. And in Bataille’s theory, sacrii ce is elevated to a religious and aesthetic principle. But although Bataille’s sacrii cial paradigm is all encompassing, it was not necessarily a total social fact in any pure sociological sense; Bataille had little interest in facts, but rather only in the violent undulations that they attempted to constrain. Sacrii ce was less a fact than the l ight from servitude, the glorious act of creative destruction that liberates being from its closed state, and the artistic act itself; it was precisely what had been lost in a modern representational world of artistic utility.
Immanence is that which does not happen, and requires that being be depersonalized and indeed made sacred through dismemberment. The
238 S. Romi Mukherjee
aesthetic is a chiasmatic site of violence; the artist violated by the Real, violating the object itself, again apophatically straining, and creating an artifact that is the violation of the world as it which will violate the specta- tor. From the perspective of the aesthetic, the sacrii cial is a processual tensor which unleashes a chain of ruining that creates the conditions for communitas. One must thus speak of art as a plane of sacrii ce, and the aes- thetic as the experience that shrouds it. Art makes sacred, and functions as a hierophantic port that moves us from this world to the other through an act of dehumanization. Hence, religious experience—from wherein the aesthetic is born—is the vanquishing of real thingness in victims and, through ontological projection, ourselves. We too must then become void of moral content. What sacrii ce illustrates is the presence of the inhuman within the human, opening the “invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing” (Bataille 1989:47). Religious and aesthetic liminality is achieved through the destruction of the “thing” within the thing. That is, sacrii ce, in its quest for the inhuman-religious-aesthetic, eschews all human and symbolically based relations. Sacrii ce destroys an object’s real ties of sub- ordination, and art too must liberate in a similar manner. And Bataille did not equivocate: “the secret of art is given in this proposition: like the sacrii ce, the victim, art takes its object out of the world of things” (Bataille 1988: 421, emphasis added). Art violates the object by inundating it with negativity and formlessness.
In addition, art was indeed an “exercise in cruelty,” which directed its sadism at the “painter condemned to please” (Bataille 1970b:40); the sac- rii cial aesthetic cuts through and explodes artistic works which content themselves to simply re-present world appear, by making the world dis- appear. Art must then be set as aside as the accursed share, and it must, as Bataille argues, represent horror precisely in order to open to possibil- ity. Sacrii cial art then vanquishes art itself and raises itself to glorious ritual while reasserting the raw realities of the sacred against beauty, a profane concept of which the sacred knows nothing. One must choose between the museum and the negativity incarnated by the sacred, or rather between the profane art of high civilization and the sacred art of the low which strains toward sovereignty. The aesthetic was an “attitude toward death” ensconced in the dynamism of nature’s general economy where there reigns a movement that demands that la mort soit (ibid.:240). This attitude was a plunge into prodigality without measure and the ulti- mate abandoning of material or spiritual speculation, which in capitalist economies represent “atrophy” while reveling in accumulation.
In “The Utility of Art,” Bataille (2008:212) thus suggests that the art of
a desacralized civilization is doomed, and that beyond the closed realm of the plastic arts, a new autonomous art should evolve, one which is forever in quest of a lost world, the sacred world. Its autonomy would lie in its capacity to inject into the world of things the alterity of meta-death. It would be a series of wounds deliberately etched into the profane: and
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unable to be instrumentalized, but certainly not “art for art’s sake,” it would be the “will to think the impossible . . . and attain a marvelous moment, suspended, a miraculous moment” (Bataille 1976:249). This instant of sovereignty, moreover, can only be attained by the sovereign artist who is not a sur-homme, but the victim of a self-inl icted wound.
Driven by a “solar obsession,” Van Gogh cut off his ear for a prostitute—a sacrii ce made for the church that was the brothel. His sacri-