Student BLOG POST: by Dan Brittain for his essay on Battaille
Thank you to Dan Brittain for sending this to us and for facilitating seminar in my absence during this day of class.
Georges Bataille (Sept. 10, 1987 to July 8, 1962)
1. A minor associative collection of individuals near/friends with Bataille:
Kadinsky and Kojeve (Kadinsky is Kojeve’s uncle)
Husserl Heidegger Levinas
(Levinas studies with Husserl, attends Heidegger’s lectures, and is close friends with Blanchot, who is close friends with Bataille.
Blanchot
Bergson Durkheim Mauss Hubert, Durkheim was classmates with Bergson, and is the Uncle of Mauss. Mauss working with Hubert, write works on Magic, Gifts, and Sacrifices: anthropology and sociology. Many of Bataille’s peers are influenced by this work, or, studied under Mauss. Hubert’s work the Gift is a work that brings to focus the potlach in French thinking, which is a title the Situationists will use for one of their journals.
Lacan
Bataille’s first wife will marry Lacan after Bataille and her divorce. Bataille was an early supporter of Lacan’s work and urged him to publish.
Surrealists
Bataille was a member of the surrealists for a short time before falling out with Breton. With other fringe members Bataille will start…
Accephale/College of Sociology/Documents
Accephale was a human sacrifical secret cult, though, no one was ever sacrificed.
The College of Sociology was a group of thinkers attempting to combat fascisim through new sociology. The Frankfurt School showed interest in trying to connect with the group (Benjamin had daily relations with Bataille at the Library where Bataille worked at), though, I believe the Frankfurt school thought there were too many fascist undertones in the College.
Documents was an early anti-surrealist magazine started by Bataille that was part ethnography, part essays and creative writing. Much of this work hasn’t been traslated, though, pieces can be read in the collection Visions of Excess, such as the piece the Big Toe.
Members in these groups included:
Roger Caillois
Pierre Klossowski
Andre Masson
Jules Monneral
Jean Wahl
Colette Piegnot (A major figure in Bataille’s life. Will leave his first wife to have an affair with her. The story Blue of Noon is based off of their relation. A collection of their letters has been published by city lights book).
Jean Paulhan (Was a partner to Ann Desclos, who wrote the Story of O)
Influenced by Bataille: Foucault, Derrida, Sollers (Kristeva), Barthes, Baudrillard, Deluze…
2. Thinking Bataille:
To experience Bataille, one must be both light and heavy. Able to reach the point where laughter emerges. For like tears, laughter appears in a way different from thought, from reason. At the Limit, the erotic, the relationship between life and death.
Influences are Hegel via Kojeve, Sociology/Anthropology through Durkheim and Mauss, friends with Blanchot, and Lacan (who will marry Bataille’s first wife after their divorce). Bataille is quite central in 20th century thought. He appears, quite everywhere.
Bataille would not refer to himself as a “philosopher.” Likewise, I think it would be wrong to refer to him as an “economist,” or a “surrealist”, a “pornographer”, “a librarian”, a “mystic”, “a yogi”, a writer. Maybe getting closer to Bataille with the term writer, but using that term in an incredible deceptive way, for if Bataille is a writer, he is one that is against project:
I wanted experience to lead where it would, not to lead it to some end point given in advance. And I say at once that it leads to no harbor (but to a place of bewilderment, of nonsense). I wanted non-knowledge to be its principle…The opposition to the idea of project-which takes up an essential part of this book-is so necessary within me that having written the detailed plan for this introduction, I can no longer hold myself to it. (I.E. 3, 6).
Expenditure, associated with project, possibility. A question: how to create without project, to act without direction?
Nietzsche: “Except for a (few) exceptions, my company on earth is mostly Nietzsche.” (On Nietzsche, viii). A strength for approaching the limit, for path walking. Confronting staring into the abyss, into death.
“The young and seductive Chinese Man I’ve spoke of, given over to the labor of the torture- I loved him with a love in which the Sadistic instinct had no part: he communicated to me his pain, or rather the excess of his pain and that was precisely what I was looking for, not to enjoy it, but to ruin in myself what was opposed to ruin (Inner experience, 120).
Fleeting Inner Experience of shock present (presence) solidifies into a word: Heterogeneity. That which is excluded from the system, expelled by the group, the organism. That which we violently dispel. That which is beyond appropriation, that which one can’t consume: shit, blood, vomit, the cadaver, etc.
The Other, alterity…
Bataille’s writing is incredibly unsystematic. Though, it molds together, a text that plays most playfully, each text pouring into a single one: the Book.
Lightness:
Glances wherein I perceive the path traveled. Fifteen years ago (perhaps a bit more), I returned from I don’t know where, late in the night. The rue de Rennes was deserted. Coming from Saint Germain, I crossed the rue du Four (the post office side). I held in my hand an open umbrella and I believe it wasn’t raining. (But I hadn’t drunk: I tell you, I’m sure of it.) I had this umbrella open without needing to (if not for what I speak of later). I was extremely young then, chaotic and full of empty intoxications: a round of unseemly, vertiginous ideas, but ideas already full of anxieties, rigorous and crucifying, ran through my mind. In the shipwreck of reason, anguish, the solitary fall from grace, cowardice, bad faith profited: the festivity started up again a little further on. What is certain is that this freedom, at the same time as the “impossible” which I had run up against, burst in my head. A space constellated with laughter opened its dark abyss before me. At the crossing of the rue du Four, I became in this “Nothingness” unknown-suddenly…I negated these gray walls which enclosed me, I rushed into a sort of rapture. I laughed divinely: the umbrella, having descended upon my head, covered me (I expressly covered myself with this black shroud). I laughed as perhaps one had never laughed; the extreme depth of each thing opened itself up-Laid bare, as if I were dead. (I.E., 34)
The heaviness:
A giant female gibbon struggles with three men, who tie her with long cords: her face is even more stupid than it is ignoble, and she lets out unbelievable screams of fear, screams answered by the various cries of small monkeys in the high branches…The three men tie her upside down to a stake planted in the middle of the pit. Attached in this way, her bestially howling mouth swallows dirt while, on the other end, her huge screaming pink anal protrusion stares at the sky like a flower…They are all armed with shovels, except the Englishwoman: the earth destined to fill the pit is spread evenly around it. The ignoble gibbon, in an ignoble posture, continues her terrifying howl, but, on a signal from the Englishwoman, everyone busies himself shoveling dirt into the pit, and then quickly stamps it down: thus, in the blink of an eye, the horrible beast is buried alive.
A relatively silence settles: all the stupefied glances are fixed on the filthy, beautifully blood-colored solar prominence, sticking out of the earth and ridiculously shuddering with convulsions of agony. Then the Englishwoman with her charming rear end stretches her long nude body on the filled pit: the mucous flesh of this bald false skull, a little soiled with shit at the radiate flower to its summit, is even more upsetting to see when touched by the pretty white fingers. (Visions of Excess: The Pineal Eye, 85-86)
It is easy to not take Bataille seriously, or, to take him casually. A way of writing that is common, that is non-academic. He is easily cast aside (as Sartre would do, thinking Bataille a mystic). However, beneath the pornography, beneath the simple diction, there is a depth that is shattering, a universality that is staggering, at the heart.
One perspective of Bataille applied to writing: Barthes, influenced by Bataille’s work with expenditure will pose these questions in The Pleasure of the Text about writing and the writer:
Does luxury of language belong with excessive wealth, wasteful expenditure, total loss? Does a great work of pleasure (Proust’s for example) participate in the same economy as the pyramids of Egypt? Is today’s writer the residual substitute for the beggar, the monk, the bonze: unproductive, but nevertheless provided for? (Pleasure of the Text, 23).
In exploring Bataille this Saturday we will be exploring expenditure (extension, pressure, and limit), and its relation to writing. Using the Accursed Share as a foundation I will walk us through Bataille (and possibly other thinkers who lend themselves to Bataille) linking the economic works (the Accursed Shares) with his Summa Theologica (Inner Experience, Guilty, On Nietzsche).
One of the goals of this presentation will be the ability to reflect deeper on the Retallack essay with her discussion of Poetics:
a) There is the shock of alterity. Or should be.
b) There is the pleasure of alterity. Or should be.
c) We humans with all our conversational structures have yet to invite enough alterity in.
d) Experiment is conversation with an interrogative dynamic. Its consequential structures turn on paying attention to what happens when well-designed questions are directed to things we sense but don’t really know. These things cannot be known by merely examining our own minds.
3. The Readings:
The Solar Anus is a great short piece to start with Bataille really showing the division of his thinking. Though I might not be able to mention this piece specifically, much of the lecture is walking through this work.http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_010/solar.htm
The Accursed Share-
Present is the first two chapters from the work. The Accursed Share provides a new perspective of economy based around consumption rather than conservation. The first chapter provides a context into the contemporary (the planning of a new ethics) while the second provides the laws of the General Economy. Bataille begins by providing a general topographical perspective of energy movement, excessively created by the sun, and then follows the movement of this excess. This work is influenced heavily by the Potlatches of the North West Natives, and the human sacrifices of the Aztek and Mayans.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ah1yks’>http://www.sendspace.com/file/ah1yks>>
A User’s Guide to Entropy-
This work is a nice overview of the theory of Entropy seen through contemporary art. Written by Yve Bois for the October Group, it goes through such individuals as Duchamp, Robert Smithson, Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Bataille. It’s a great article (though one that I don’t think you will have time to read.) If you do have time, read the last section on Zones (areas that can’t be said to exist at all)
http://www.jstor.org/pss/778906
(Will have to be printed out on campus, or you are going to have to go through Evergreen library webpage to log into Jstor).
4.Extras:
Story of the Eye.Quick short transcendental pornography that picks up incredibly fast that revolves around eggs and eyeballs.
http://supervert.com/elibrary/zips/bataille_story_of_eye.zip
Bataille was incredibly concerned with death and the erotic. These two works, albeit uncomfortable like the image of the torture of 1,000 pieces, introduce the relationship quite heavily.
Stan Brakhage- The act of seeing with ones own eyes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrU65rlruXM
Nekromantik Trailer
Philosophy in the Bedroom
http://supervert.com/elibrary/zips/sade_philobed_pdf.zip
120 Days of Sodomy
http://supervert.com/elibrary/zips/sade_120_days_pdf.zip