Whilst working to upgrade the template and put the plugins into place to filter the automatic comment spam (hopefully things should be working after this weekend) I found myself thinking about my violent and hostile reaction to Bataille's On Nietzsche, my understanding of Bataille as a subject divided against itself, and the masculine subject.
On Nietzsche is a difficult text because it violently forces a very different kind of reading upon me; one completely at odds with the theoretical philosophical one I'd been trained in. It was a violent reading in that On Nietzsche forces an engagement with the body and the core of my subjectivity. Reading becomes a kind of laceration as it activates the fear of going crazy and the desire for mystical communion with God through wounding oneself.
Reading involves a loss or dissolution of (ego) boundaries.My own reading was marked by ambivalence (to the mysticism); dislike (Bataille's subjective violence); contempt (Bataille's construction of a mythical Nietzsche): hatred (I detested Bataille's obsessions or psychosis): and loathing (there is too much laceration, bleeding and shit). It was like engaging with the texts of a madman in a mental institution.
How was the subject divided? How was Bataille the subject divided in On Nietzsche?
All I could think of was Bataille desiring the death of self through an intense mystical fusion (union?) with God (or Mother?) whilst, at the same time, Bataille is struggling to maintain his ego boundary in order to function as a man within a patriarchal-capitalist society.
Then Jo Faulkner sent me her short piece on Bataille's On Nietzsche and his bodily engagement with Nietzsche's texts. It usefully introduces object relations psychoanalysis (Kleinian) into reading Bataille; it gives us a reading that develops the split or divided subject thesis.
If, as Bataille holds, communication with an other involves both a wounding (a loss of self to the other and a risk of contagion from the other, then Bataille opens himself to Nietzsche's wounds (his madness) and he partakes himself of Nietzsche's suffering.
This approach captures both Bataille's mythical relation to Nietzsche, the state of rapture and dissolution, the breaking down of the subject's autonomy, and the subject's wounded relation to others.
Do take time to read Jo's text.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 7, 2005 03:31 PM | TrackBackA great read.
Posted by: Matt on January 10, 2005 03:27 AMYes,
It also helps to highlight the way that Bataille is different,and to disclose the nature of his surrealist rebellion against the philosophical tradition.