First, we must remind ourselves of the tensions that run through Bataille’s work taken as a whole. Bataille takes Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power and re-interprets it as power that wishes to be squandered and ruined. In doing so, Bataille ends up with a philosophy that is anti-power and surprisingly democratic. This use and misuse of the doctrine of the will to power generates a riot of paradoxes. To begin with; how can you expend power if you have not acquired it first? This is a pin on which Bataille himself writhed, and he was not always afraid to show it.

Bataille’s paradoxical reading of power results in strange political theories. In the volumes of ‘The Accursed Share,’ Bataille states that the workers – in their nothing-to-lose Saturday night debauches – are more sovereign than the well-healed bourgeoisie despite their pleasures, since the bourgeoisie always have an eye on their social and economic position, and therefore have to hold themselves back from the necessary careless expenditure of energy that ‘authentic’ ecstasy demands. To achieve this view of the bourgeoisie as uptight killjoys, Bataille has to overestimate the extent to which the bourgeoisie are slaves to their projects and their desire for survival. After all, despite the bourgeoisie’s need to keep the show on the road, they can, and most often do, delegate tasks. And a member of the bourgeoisie probably fears ruin no more than the worker, who is perpetually close to ruin in any case. So, to recap Bataille’s position: the worker with no time to call his own and no wealth to burn is more sovereign than the bourgeois man who has free time when he wants it and access to all manner of luxury goods. Bourgeois man, with time and money for pleasure, ends up the true slave. This economy has never been seen for the upside-down thinking it clearly is. Bataille even throws a spanner into his own works when he goes on to declare that only an aristocrat (in this case Sade) can enjoy true sovereignty in his effortless swan dive from the heights.

Prose

In ‘Filthy,’ one of the two prose pieces offered here, Bataille mines the literary possibilities of a heavily debauched evening. An inebriated gentleman – standing in, one can assume, for Bataille himself – enlists the help of two servants to cater to the hysterical whims of a drunken women named Filthy. It should be remembered that Bataille’s narratives always reflect his philosophical stand. Bataille clearly intends this story to reflect his contention that pleasure is always insistent yet unsatisfied, and that all ecstasy must end in incompletion, exhaustion or ruin. Bataille therefore shows us the essential chaos of the debauch; its desperate, careening, unquenchable desires. Nothing in this narrative reaches a proper end or could even be said to properly begin. Filthy pisses herself, has herself washed, gets up, falls down, gets up again. Nothing is left out; the merest ephemeral whim is taken to be an imperative. Even if successfully consummated, a pleasure is almost instantly replaced by another desire. There is no narrative build up to some ultimate pleasure which would cap all the rest.

Bataille has succeeded at least in capturing the essence of a certain kind of decadent lifestyle, if not a certain kind of sovereignty, and his triumph here cannot be reduced. But since this depiction of tortured sovereignty is meant to express sovereignty as such, we are allowed to ask whether this kind of sovereignty is sovereignty with a capital S.

Bataille believed that a true debauch always ends in strewn debris and ruination, but is he not merely talking of an orgy that is badly planned? Is there no one interested in an orgy that feels like a health-giving tonic and that can lead seamlessly into the next rapture? An orgy that can endure, as one imagines the orgies of the bourgeoisie endure. And which, rather than bringing with it the death of power is, rather, health and power renewing? An orgy that does not end, as in the tale of ‘Filthy,’ with the screaming hell of hangover and guilt?

It should also be noted that in both ‘Filthy’ and ‘Divinity’ – the second story in the collection – the desire-entranced couples drink to the point of vomiting and beyond. As the first-person Bataille figure says to Devine: “Let’s drink …until we get sick.” Is it not the case that Bataille needs to introduce a little physical poison into his tales, since his equation of orgasm and ruin – the ‘little death’ – requires too much suspension of disbelief?

Both stories contain master and servant games. This is fair enough, considering that Bataille wants to show eroticism as an essentially cruel form of communication between beings. Also, Bataille incorporates servants and submissive prostitutes into his tales in order to show us our workaday slavery in short-hand and to contrast it with irreducible sovereignty. (In ‘Divinity,’ a submissive maid is required to lick champagne from off a mirror floor). It would be stupid to confuse the submissiveness of a prostitute with that of a factory worker. But one must admit that these tales reek of power, and that this is an indication that sovereignty requires power as much as it requires a love of failure.

As with the open-ended conclusions to Bataille’s novels ‘The Blue of Noon’ and ‘The Story of the Eye,’ ‘Filthy’ and ‘Divinity’ end with the characters moving off into further hinterlands of excess. We can note that in ‘The Blue of Noon,’ the Bataille character is planning to affirm the chaos of the coming war, and despite the ignominious end of the sacrificed priest in ‘The Story of the Eye,’ the main protagonists are shown heading off for further adventures. In ‘Filthy,’ we are told that the couple go on to scale further heights of unreason, and at the end of ‘Divinity,’ the newly initiated Bataille-based character is ready to take his new taste for ruin beyond his love for Divinity herself. Bataille’s stories appear to contradict his own view of debauchery as fatal and the ruin of drawn-out duration. Bataille’s aesthetes are no less career aesthetes than a Casanova. They go out into the night and are not consumed by fire.

Poetry

In the poetry fragment: ‘The Sky Goes Poo Poo’, Bataille reveals the universe as the gratuitous, exorbitant phenomenon that it in fact is. No metaphor is too wild to describe the whole of existence:

“If an orgasmic dick engendered the universe, it’d make it like it is. In the transparency of the sky, we’d have blood, screams, stench.”

Bataille is right to show a universe completely without plan or project, a universe that is an unhinged desiring machine. But he is wrong to consider that the universe’s extremes can be reached by anything as conventional as ritualistic violence. He is right to state that the universe is the antithesis of useful objects, and to demand that energy be spent. But energy spent ecstatically is not always spent ruinously. For example – shockingly enough – sexual excess is more likely to hold off a heart attack than it is to provoke one.

In another fragment translated here: ‘Type of Slow Death’, we see Bataille signing up to Nietzsche’s doctrine as set out in ‘The Genealogy of Morals.’ In Nietzsche’s view, force must be expressed in the form of action, or else it turns against itself in illegitimate guilt. It is therefore wrong to call an eagle bad simply because it preys on lambs; lambs, that condemn eagles as bad, only do so because they themselves have no claws. Bataille’s take on this moral – which Nietzsche wove together in order to de-demonise strength – strangely mirrors the self-laceration generated by Christian repression. In Bataille’s version, eagles come to perversely enjoy being demonised by the morality of lambs; eagles are happy to turn their claws to the task of tearing themselves apart when lambs are no longer up for grabs:

“Let the intelligence of eagles die in denial and annihilate itself in the mud. None of you know that in this mud, in its stench, a tiger-eyed angel dies drowning in agony, and orgasms from this.”

Could it be that Bataille secretly worshipped strength, and merely resigned himself to wallowing in ruin as the only thing a strong man can do in a world dominated by a conspiracy of the weak? Why not consider the possibility, drawn from this ‘fragment,’ that the whole of Bataille’s oeuvre is a slave’s Pyrrhic victory. Not an idea that would have been very palatable to the left-field postmodernist French writers, or would appeal to the current swathe of Bataille worshipers, who want to enjoy the politically-correct game of celebrating the supposed authenticity of the dis-empowered at the same time as they try to commandeer Nietzsche as a real-politic virile strap-on in order to intimidate critics.

Much within the Bataillean world view is due for overhaul or, at the very least, a radical calling into question. The fact that we will die and the world will go on without us – as if we had never existed – means little to one who is immersed in the virile world of action. Indeed, what happens after our death, and our death itself, has little purchase even on the ruinous expenditure of energy itself, since such ruin can only be felt as a living ecstasy. And any wildness generated by the thought of being’s ‘groundless,’ death unhinged nature, will not guarantee anyone the material with which to be sovereign. Future death cannot get any human being out of a secure prison except in a wooden box.

Even though ‘meditating on one’s future death’ is an existential commonplace that should have worn itself out by now, Bataille does at least give this meditation a poetic twist in a fragment taken from ‘The Archangelical,’ presenting us with a wonderful evocation of the strangeness of a universe that has the genius to move on after our demise. After our death, the heavy, inevitable and often sweet alternation of euphoric day and mysterious night will role on forever. Others, however, will be encased in this magic as we were:

“after my last croaking cry
in the sky without respite
the earth will make
day and night
alternate.”

The reassuring rhythm of night and day – a lullaby almost – by which we intimately measure our progress, which we feel is our due; this assurance will be someone else’s assurance, as we are cast out. Indeed, implicit here is the fact that we will be denied night itself. Here we can see Bataille’s fragment clashing with his own formulaic aesthetics which make the mysterious nature of night conjure up a sense of our deaths; here, we see that night can only be experienced by the living.

Bataille shows himself in this collection to be a genuine poet – in that limited sense of poetry as freestanding category – in the rank of Rimbaud. However, Bataille lacks some of Rimbaud’s free-wheeling non-partisan generosity, Bataille’s poetry remaining forever trapped into telling philosophical stories. Only in those brief lapses when he forgets to associate ecstasy with ruin do we see a more cheerfully pagan Bataille:

“I masturbate with grape
wipe myself with apple.”

There is much in this collection to simply enjoy, but a subtle agnosticism regarding Bataille as the ‘great man’ is required to reap greater rewards. If not, the subtitle ‘Lost Writings by Georges Bataille’ will be only too apt.

David Johnson has a D.Phil. in English Literature from York University, an MA in Continental Philosophy from Warwick University and a BA in Literature and Philosophy from Middlesex Polytechnic. He is author of the book, ’The Time of the Lords: An Attack on Bataille’s Slave Aesthetic of Transience’ (Leicester: Ephemera Books, 2001); articles - ‘Getting the Real On: Baudrillard, Berkeley and the Staging of Reality’ – (International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Issue 2, July 2004), ‘Why View All Time from the Perspective of Time’s End?: A Bergsonian attack on Bataillean transience’ (Time and Society, Volume 12, Issue 2, 09/2003) and ‘Kafka’s God of Suffocation: The Futility of ‘Facing Death,’ in ‘Making Sense of Dying and Death’ (Editions Rodopi B.V., New York, 2004)

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.