Let me try and put a political criticism on the table that I think will be directed against us for looking at, and exploring, Bataille's ideas. It sort of ties together a number of things I've been probing in my two posts on philosophy and politics.
The criticism is this. We accept that history is a tragedy in that a cold, instrumental and uninspired rationalism has conquered and disenchanted the world. Our conception of modernity (and Webers, Kojeve's, Bataille's, Heidegger's and Adorno's) is one in which there is the fateful triumph of an instrumental rationality.
The dominant form of instrumental rationality today is an enlightening economic reason that maximizes utility. This rules the world of public policy.
Kojeve's and Bataille's "picture" of modernity is that it gives birth to a dark romanticism that manifests itself in a profound nostalgia for what reason has banished-- myth, madness, disorder, spontaneity, instinct, passion, and virility. These ideas romanticize the gratuitous violence and irrationalism that characterize the postmodern world.
It is this criticism that is directed at postmodernism and poststructuralism. The critics see the roots of postmodernism (ie., what poststructuralism becomes when it is domesticated in an Anglo-American culture) in the Paris of 1930s.
I do not accept this criticism----given my reading of an ethical reason concerned with a flourishing human life that is a counter to an instrumental reason. It is far to broadbrushed and ignores the differences between a number of philosophers dumped into container marked irrationalists.
But how would Bataille respond to the criticism? He is susceptible to the criticism, given Contre-Attaque and Acephale.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 19, 2003 11:49 PM | TrackBack