November 24, 2003
Bataille as a sexual critic
Trevor, I had worked up a post on the dark side of sexuality ----S&M and rape---- and the difficulties of expressing the excess, violence and terror of these experiences in language. It was to be about Bataille as a critic of morality in the light of your remarks about intensities, exploding machines, the dissolution of being subjects in a world of objects, being beyond all identity and realityand entering into a state of muteness.
It picked up from this post. Alas, I lost it all when my Internet access gave out yesterday.
This post is different to the one lost. It will try and connect the beyond language and moral critic.
I will deal with a minor point of interpretation, then explore the excess and terror of people's experiences of S&M and rape as a way to consider Bataille as a critic of morality .
I do think that you give a one sided interpretation of Bataille. Your Bataille is the surrealist poet who is concerned with the radicality of individual experience and who gestures to what cannot be said in language. This is the poetic Bataille of the Acephale and mystical ecstatic experience. It is the romantic poet who is beyond philosophical reason and discursive knowledge: one who speaks about losing language to express our wounds in the deafening night. So we continue to bleed in the interminable silence.
This is the Bataille that Jurgen Habermas guns for in his attacks on French postmodernism in his Philosophical Discourses of Modernity.
There are other Bataille's. One is the left Hegelian (as interpreted by Kojeve), who worked in the College of Sociologie in the late 1930s to develop a theory of society and history based around the category of expenditure without utility. The College was a meeting ground between the avant garde literary and artistic intellectuals, social scientists and philosophers. It worked in terms of biweekly lectures and debate to explore the category of the sacred as it was understood by the French anthropologists. This Bataille worked within reason.
This left Hegelian Bataille is elided in the honours course you help teach in European Studies at Adelaide University because of his associations with Marxism. This Bataille is the one Jacques Derrida mentions in his essay on Bataille called "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve", that is in his Margins of Philosophy. This is a Hegelianism that explores the master slave relationship, and sees the close connections between desire and death.
It does not take much jigging for it to become relevant to this sexual Dom/sub relationship:
Steven Speliotis Asia Bondage
More one the sexual dom/sub relationship here and here.
There are many Bataille's. That was the interpretative point I wanted to make.
With that minor point out of the way I can turn to the significance for sovereignty of the experience of excess and terror of S&M and rape.
The Bataille I was probing in my earlier post was the Nietzschean concerned with moral discipline, taboo and its rupture. This Bataille, who operates in terms of the dialectic of taboo/prohibition and transgression, sees the similarity betweeen religious and erotic experience. Both of these modes of experience intimately connect, and interwine, desire and terror, intense pleasure and anxiety, loathing and rapture.
But God is dead as Nietzsche proclaimed. The basic categories of (Christian) religion have been moralized and its ethos secularized through the historical process of ethical rationalization. So the moral discipline of religion becomes a moral consciousness, which, in its conservative form, sees sexuality outside marriage as promiscuous and sinful and rails against the flesh. This is a punitive moral consciousness disconnected from the sacred.
That leaves sexuality, or the erotic, as the realm of the experience of excess through its risky experimental transgressions of what is taboo or prohibited. What would these transgressions be today. Porn? Or the S & M practices of today?
Steven Speliotis Asia Bondage
Can this bondage be considered an excess that transgresses moral limits?
Does this transgression of what is taboo lead to the frenzy of desire, rapture and ecstatic self-transcendence?
Is this outpouring, which leaves the body spent from excess, a pathway to sovereignty?
Or is this S & M transgression too domesticated? Do we have to keep pushing the limits to achieve excess? Is it about the ego evaporating with pain?
Is it here that we find Bataille the moral critic. This is not someone who wants to liberate life from that which crushes it. Bataille was no sexual libertarian of the 1970s variety, since he accepted limits. He explored a world exposed by the experience of limits; limits that we make and unmake by the excess that transgresses them.
Bataille the Nietzschean moral critic is someone who sees the sovereign waste in the erotic and religious forms of excess. He sees this expenditure surplus sexual energy as life-enhancing and exalting, and so contrasted with the squandering of the surplus energy and wealth in the distorted forms of the sacrifices of imperialistic wars, ecological pollution and nuclear destruction. The former is the pathway to sovereignty.
Do we have a language of sexual transgression?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 24, 2003 03:18 PM | TrackBack