philosophical conversations

Back to Bataille's blues

Back to Bataille and his techniques of caring for his self in the diary/journal section of On Nietzsche, where he is philosophizing about his daily life.

The April-June 1944 section is introduced by a quote from Nietzsche about morality's self-destruction and needing ongoing strength and courage to leave the ancient habours to sail the open seas for new lands with a new mode of valuation.

In the third chapter Bataille, has the anguish blues bad, real bad:

"I'm ashamed of myself.There's something soft about me easily swayed . .... I'm not young anymore. A few years ago I was tough, filled with bravado, with a take charge attitude. It seems that's over with and was shallow, perhaps. Back then there wasn't that much risk in action and affirmation!

My ability to bounce back seems gone for good: war crushes my hopes (nothing functions ouside of systems): illness is wasting me away; unrelenting anguish ends up playing havoc with my nerves; at a moral level I feel reduced to silence." (p.84)

He confronts the anguish blues with his little rules of living. He tells himself that his consciousness is sure of itself:

"Even if I'm older, sick and feverish, it's not in my nature to simply sit by and do nothing. I can't help endlessly accepting this infinitely monstrous sterility which fatique brings to my life...Inside of me everything laughs blindly at life...My depressed state, the threats of death, some kind of destructive fear that also shows the way to the summit--all these whirl in me, haunting and choking me...ButI am--we are---going to go on."

Today we would turn to drugs, alcohol,or put on heavy metal music. Bataille, instead, is working on himself, struggling to shape a form of life defined by his understanding of the Nietzschean ethos.

That ethos involves a way of life that is foreign to, and at odds with, the world of everyday living. It involves a perpetual conflict between the philosopher's effort to see things are in relation to European nihilism and the strugle against the old Christian valuations and the conventions and habits binding liberal society; a conflict between the life one should live as a free spirit and the customs and conventions of daily life. It is a conflict that can never be fully resolved.

Bataille is trying to live his daily life in a philsiophical manner, rather than refuse the world of social conventions or turn his back on it; or accept the everyday world of conventions and seek an inner peace. It is a life marked by tension, torment and anguish; by deploying techniques of self control and unrelaxing vigilance; and by faith in the possibility of self-improvement.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 16, 2005 11:21 PM | TrackBack