Georges Bataille (1897 – 1962) was a French librarian and ‘excremental philosopher’ whose intellectual impact on literature, sociology, sexology, anthropology and art was as profound as his pornographic writings were obscene.
Bataille was dismissed in his time as a self-indulgent mystic and a fascist sympathiser, the latter claim being demonstrably false. However, in the latter half of the 20th century his work was revived by philosophers of the ‘postmodern’ ilk from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Often pigeonholed as an intellectual of ‘visual culture’ not law and public policy, Bataille was nevertheless a vocal advocate for communism in his day as well as a theorist of political economy, found in his three-volume work The Accursed Share.
The following is an attempt to note the political significance of Bataille and his use in understanding modern political movements. His work prompts us to ask: can society balance its needs for stability with its longing for excess?
Violence, Sex and God
Bataille’s work is situated as a response to the fall of religion - a colossal collapse of which we are still grappling.
The Nietzschean ‘freedom’ brought about by the death of God has freed us from old myths, but also revealed our ugly, frail animality.
We are thrust into this world with a sensitivity far more attuned to pain or boredom than pleasure, with a mind tortured by an underlying anxiety over our inevitable death. Without God, this is painful.
But Bataille gives us hope: our worthless, short lives can be given meaning through an experience of the sacred. ''Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love'' he writes.
The sacred for Bataille, whilst drawn from religious experience, is not merely about prayer and penance, nor is it a form of hedonism. He recognised that the sacred could be both awe inspiring, but also horrific and traumatic.
The sacred can be found through quiet meditation, but also by strangling a man with your bare hands or visiting a brothel.
In sacred experience, the small little world of the animal is blown open and the twisted, terrible, beautiful world of the ‘divine’ can be grasped – all without the need for Jesus.
There is a sense of this version of the sacred in the French horror film Martyrs (2008), in which a woman is tortured and flayed alive by a cult under the belief that extreme pain allows visions into another world. In the final scene, stripped of most of her skin, the woman looks up and sees.
How is the sacred reached?
Bataille suggests we experience hints of the sacred when we transgress social taboos in confronting death (by viewing decaying bodies or our bodily discharges), participating in stylised acts of violence, becoming lost in sexual ecstasy and pushing the boundaries of our psyche with drugs or alcohol.
In Bataille’s view we never really ‘reach’ the sacred, as it is an experience that is inexplicable, being lost when we try and represent it in words or images.
However in our desperate attempt to climb to the summit of the sacred our horrible individuality is dissolved, we slip into the black void and experience life at the limit, if not just beyond.
Why is this mystical, vague experience so important?
For Bataille, it is not just the only thing that makes life worth living, but it also explains certain irrationalities of modern society such as why we go to war.
Warfare carries with it many of the ritualised components which lead to sacred experience: death, violence and extreme circumstances.
Societies may not wish to go to war, they may be horrified by the thought, but a deep longing influences are thinking – leading us to militarise and conquer, the same way a married man is driven to adultery by a pretty streetwalker in heels.
For Bataille, only by understanding and channelling our need for sacred experience can society truly avoid the failings of the 20th century.
Rational Brutality
Bataille lived through World War II and was particularly concerned with how a longing for the sacred led to the rise of fascism.
In ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ he tries to theorise how fascist doctrines in Italy and Germany can appeal to violent, radical, ruggedly individualist sentiments whilst at the same time proposing hierarchical regimes based on stability and control.
This twin appeal appears at first to be contradiction: the “don’t tread on me” crowd empowering the State to have secret police. However, Bataille theorised that fascism appeals to two seemingly disparate but complementary social forces: the homogenous and the heterogenous.
The homogenous describes social impulses that provide structure: production, rationality, specialisation, organisation, conservation, predictability and preservation. These are the utilitarian collective goals of society in action, of which each citizen is one part of the whole.
The heterogenous refers to all that can’t be rationalised and assimilated into the homogenous: violence, criminality, insanity, perversion, disorder, rowdiness, intoxication – all of which provide potential avenues for experiences of the sacred.
In modern bourgeois societies, the homogenous features of society are maximised (they suit both State and commerce) whilst the heterogeneous features are shunned.
However, the heterogeneous never goes away. For Bataille, state-sanctioned (or ‘imperative’) heterogenous impulses can still be seen in bourgeois societies in the behaviour of military and law enforcement, where disordered violence is utilised to maintain order.
This also explains the allure of fascist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler. By pitching to the heterogenous impulses of violence and war, these leaders have a ‘noble’ or ‘exalted’ appeal – being able to civilise impulses that are traditionally stigmatised and lifting themselves above the mediocrity of bourgeois society.
Bataille notes that this is not a new political tactic, having been the underlying appeal of sovereign leaders of the past: the king is chosen by God because he can do what none of us can, chop of our heads!
In Bataille’s view only by understanding the ‘hypnosis’ of fascism can this pernicious political theatre be effectively tackled.
A Society of Sovereign Experience
To provide an alternative to fascism Bataille wrote strangely poetic writings on political economy.
He describes his theory (somewhat allegorically) as the transformation of solar energy.
Our sun radiates the earth. This energy is utilised by plants to store nutrients which, one way or another, become the food we consume. Once food is eaten, waste is expelled and the remaining solar energy is used by our bodies.
Socially our bodies expend energy on work, care for others and other productive endeavours (the homogenous). But there is always excess that remains, the accursed share which must find release in the heterogeneous.
Bataille draws on the poetic image of the penial gland, which was theorised by Descartes to be the ‘seat of the soul’. For Bataille, this site, which represents our spiritual longing, is really an anus – expelling the prurient excess. Hence the name of Bataille’s infamous surrealist text ‘The Solar Anus’.
Bataille argues that we should allow for a much larger degree of heterogenous, ‘useless’ activity in society if we wish to avoid violence, war and fascism. We should in-fact give citizens the sense that they are their own little dictators, to become ‘sovereign’ of their own excess.
In Volume 3 of The Accursed Share Bataille writes:
What is sovereign has no end other than itself… every moment lived for its own sake is sovereign.
For Bataille, societies which allow for the experiences of the following are democratising the sovereign for its citizens:
Laughter, tears, poetry, tragedy and comedy – and more generally, every art form involving tragic, comic, or poetic aspects – play, anger, intoxication, ecstasy, dance, music, combat, the horror of death, the magic of childhood, the sacred – of which sacrifice is the most intense aspect – the divine and the diabolical, eroticism…beauty…crime, cruelty, fear, disgust.
One may think that modern Western societies already cultivate these virtues of excess, but they do so only in a homogenous sense: performed for the sake of utility.
Experiencing art as a form of temporary ‘leisure’ rarely provokes deep emotion in modern societies. Moreover, artforms which dare to transgress are censored and shunned rather than praised.
Widespread casual sex and pornography may be pleasurable but it rarely reaches the heights of Bataille’s notion of ‘erotism’ or eroticism – provoking deep transformative experiences.
This is partially because sexual release is often sought for utilitarian purposes: to boost self-esteem, to lock in a relationship or to ‘rub one out’. But also because sexuality is heavily commodified, with both men and women being sold a perfect look, technique and style for ‘liberated’ sex.
The erotic, for Bataille, is not just the transgression of sexual taboos but transgression as a means to overwhelm the psyche, to destroy all sense of individuality and merge in animalistic ecstasy.
It isn’t narrow pleasure-seeking, but spiritual. Bataille isn’t a ‘sexual liberationist’ – he’s a sinner.
Finally, violence in media is prevalent in modern society but is always experienced at a distance.
Murder, rape and violent accidents remain overly stylised in media covering up the anguish of real-life intensity. Even mixed martial arts, which carry on the brutal traditions of violent colosseums, are rationalised and pacified today as ‘professional sports’ reflecting ‘athleticism’.
We are far from a society which cultivates experiences of sacred excess and this may be why the theatre of fascism is making a resurgence.
--
Georges Bataille is an incredibly unorthodox thinker, whose ideas can at times seem too abstract and poetic for political use.
However, his insights regarding human longing for the sacred, the appeal of the heterogenous and the social forces behind excess are relevant theoretical tools to understanding modern political culture.