I've started reading Part 111 of Bataille's On Nietzsche, which is more or less a diary he kept in the early part of 1944. I guess the experience of reading this text (and Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle) embodys a lived process of thought by myself as gripped by, exploring, and trying to work through, the contrary tendencies and shifting moods. It is a new way of reading a text.
The question I keep asking myself is: Why was Christian mysticism so attractive to alienated secular French intellectuals in the 1930s? I have no answer beyond interpreting it as part of a radical critique of the anti-bodily, anti-emotional character of the Enlightenment. They had the hyper-rational conception of what it means to be human and live in the world--presumably Descartes rather than the materialist's conception of humans as a machine?
The enlightenment in our era has perverted itself by overrationalization and mechanization. Bataille was alert to such dangers. But why his turn to mysticism?
With that in mind I go back to reading Bataille's diary section of On Nietzsche. In Chapter 111 he writes:
"My obsessive need to make love opens on death like a window on a courtyard.To the extent that lovemaking calls up death (like the comical ripping apart of a painted stage set) it has the power to pull the clouds from the sky." (p. 61)
Does the desire for one another actually masks a desire for death? I have no idea.
Sex, violence and death. Where are the boundaries between them?
Presumably the sex-death boundary is more social than natural and it is maintained through our signifying practices in everyday life. For Bataille the sociologist/anthropologist taboos are the structures which protect societyfrom inherent contradiction. They establish the core identity of the culture by establishing precisely what must be abjected. Transgression is then the means by which the desires and frustrations masked, or set up, by taboo are released in socially-sanctioned ways.
Bataille, as the individual writing On Nietzsche, is trying to release the desires and frustrations masked by established Christian religion. He trusts the unconscious desires and distrusts the social masking. The focus is on the violent intensity of the desires not on the need to heal the damage the masking has done. So what connects desire and death?
Love decays and this decay reminds me of my own movement toward death? I don't buy it for a moment. Life decays from within? Hardly. Unconscious desire is always attached to death--a promise of release from the demands of consciousness leads to death? Perhaps.
But the interlinking between desire and death for Bataille has more to do with Christianity.Christianity has an obsession with death, loss and failure. A core tenet of Christianity is that man through desire (Adam) brought death (Christ) into the world. Consequently, death must haunt desire as the source of all suffering.That is more like Bataille.
I come back to question above: Why was Christian mysticism so attractive to alienated, secular French intellectuals in the 1930s?
From what I can make out, Bataille is writing through visions and physical feeling. This is not the mysticism as an acceptable form of religion that is based on an intellectual mystical union. It is the more bodily, experiential and visionary form of mysticism that Bataille is expressing; he is articulating a subjectivity deeply grounded in bodily life. The sacred can only be known through intense pain and deep emotional ecstasy.
Bataille accepts that our emotional life is a valuable source of experience and provides crucial kinds of knowledge. He tries to engender it. Is Bataille seeking to revitalize contemporary Catholicism by recovering untapped aspects of Christian mystic thought?
Sartre interpreted Bataille's mysticism as an escapism, as a rejection of history and its ethical and political imperatives. Maybe Bataille is using a bodily mysticism to engage with history and temporality differently, through subverting a series of binary oppositions entrenched in the rationalistic Enlightenment tradition?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 24, 2004 08:28 PM | TrackBack