December 03, 2003
The Story So Far
Gary, I think your discussion of sovereignty has become quite excellent. Let me try to summarise it as a coda.
There is a problem in understanding sovereignty from standard Hegelian and Nietzschean perspectives. One needs to shift from philosophy to surrealism, from a concern with reason to a concern with the irrational. This surrealism is not about the fantastic or the immediate world of dreams and nor is it obscure, but it seeks through surprise and shock therapy to liberate vision from its constraints. Less an expression of personal fantasy or neurosis, this surrealism aims at expressing the darker side of subjectivity.
You introduced two images: Masson's image of a headless male, emphasising the body and bodily desire, and Magritte's 'Lovers' paintings, in which hooded bodies represent unconscious amoral sexual desire, physical intensity and bodily pleasure. There are no faces here, no subjects, no subjectivity. Bataille's novella 'My Mother' concludes with an image of two women who are naked but masked. Leiris has remarked on Bataille's fascination with such images.
It is interesting to note that Magritte spoke of his work as trying to paint the impossible. Ivan and I have come to regard Magritte's painting 'Rape'
as one of his greatest achievements in this regard.
See our discussion in the 'A ma soeur' article which has been placed in the Library.
As you say, sexual union causes a momentary indistinguishability between otherwise distinct objects, or better, an indistinguishability of subjects.
This loss of self is freedom, sovereignty. Sexual activity may lead to a momentary loss of self, which you equate with religious ecstasy. This is different from Hegelian and Nietzschean ideas of sovereignty as the right or force of command oneself and one's dominions. In contrast, for Bataille sovereignty is the property of an inner relation of the human animal to the objects of desire. As you say, 'sovereignty is the collapse of the dualism that grounds Western thought -- subject/object, good/evil, body/spirit.' Political sovereignty is the opposite of inner sovereignty. As 'soon as I say "I am sovereign" I am not. As soon as I realize that my self has fallen away, it has returned.' I may experience sovereignty but I can never possess it.
You want to take these ideas, which are derived from a break with reason, and bring them into a moral calculation, which you do by conceiving of what you call 'Bataille's philosophy' through Nietzschean glasses as a transvaluation of all values. Thus, access to the sacred is not available to those who behave themselves, observing prohibitions and taboos, but rather is available only to those who, while acknowledging the force of the moral taboos in everyday life, wilfully transgress them. The values transvalued are those embodied in what is tabooed.
You relate Bataille ideas to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, an account of the origin of moral ideas in European civilization. Bataille shows that the opposition between good and evil is related to the formation of subjectivity, a
'breeding ground for that terrible sickness, bad conscience'. Gombrowicz is making a similar point when he remarks:
'Man, tortured by his mask, fabricates secretly, for his own usage, a sort of "subculture": a world made out of the refuse of a higher culture, a domain of trash, immature myths, inadmissible passions....a secondary domain of compensation. That is where a certain shameful poetry is born, a certain compromising beauty....Are we not close to Pornografia?' (Pornografia, p. 8)
The big danger for those tortured by a desire for sovereignty is that this desire can be manipulated for utilitarian motives. In fact, the wanting is what is manipulated. Wanting is stimulated. I might do a painting, say of some woman, naked, legs apart, in which I can lose myself. Yes, it's shameful, it's compromising, yet it is different from the otherwise identical image created to make a dollar. In the end, that is what it is all about; that is why we don't experience sovereignty. I do not want dominion of you in order to live exactly as you live. If I seek it, it is because I want to live better than you, because I want to live at your expense.
The question is--and it's the big question, the biggest even--does all utilitarian calculation have this consequence? That is, does all utilitarian thinking inevitably lead to exploitation, or is its use in exploitation something additional? On this question depends the fate of philosophy. The conservative forces--the analysts, the rationalists, the enlightenment types--see philosophy as somehow timeless, utilitarian reason no doubt but of the most abstract and universal kind, the very antithesis of exploitation. We can slip back into Hegel easily at this point. Rousseau thought it all went wrong when someone said, 'This is mine', but perhaps it was when someone said, 'I can do this!'
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