|
September 24, 2003
Gary, you had three concerns with the material I have been presenting, a problem with surrealism, with the interpretation of Nietzsche, and with scholarship as a way of life. At the time of writing I haven't read your views on scholarship so this is a reply to your first two points.
Your view of twentieth century art is rather Hegelian, which is regressive in my view. From this perspective, Dada represents the negative spirit. It is anti-art deliberately defying reason. Surrealism, as synthesis, is a critique of Dada's one-sided negativity and reflects a desire to seek an alternative, creative force in its place. Its emphasis is not solely on negation but on positive expression, the desire to reunite the conscious and unconscious realms of experience so that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world; surreality as reconciliation.
I would argue that surrealism is not an alternative practical philosophy in this sense, with a vision for a future reconciled state of affairs. In fact, it is not a philosophy at all, even if it leads to certain philosophical pronouncements. It stands in essentially the same relation to reason as does poetry. Hegel's view of art came from his systematic theory, rather than from observing the character of actual art. If any story is out of date according to our current sensibilities it is Hegel's. Max Weber's view is much closer to our own.
You call this reconciliatory surrealism Bretonian surrealism. You may be right. I have not given enough thought to Breton to say one way or another. Perhaps we could pursue the matter further in the near future.
You sense a danger in Bataille's more radical version of surrealism because of his appeal to all that is offensive and despicable, to a base materialism. The danger in Bataille's approach is that the subject ends up outside reason, that the subject ceases to be a subject. This is true. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Bataille sees the subject for what it is, an historical construct, the me that represses intensity. You say that there is little room in the visions of excess for the active critical role of the subject in the interpretative process. This is not completely correct, nonetheless. Bataille says:
"Anguish only is sovereign absolute. The sovereign is a king no more: it dwells low-hiding in big cities. It knits itself up in silence, obscuring its sorrow. Crouching thick-wrapped, there it waits, lies waiting for the advent of him who shall strike a general terror; but meanwhile and even so its sorrow scornfully mocks at all that comes to pass, at all there is." (Madam Edwarda).
Bataillean surrealism is absolute negation, an unhappy consciousness that will never experience rest. As Blanchot describes it, imagine the end of history in an Hegelian sense has been reached and dialectical negation has ceased to be. There Hegel's greatest fear is realised: there is still a negative spirit that scornfully, relentlessly mocks everything. It all goes back to the existentialist notion of freedom and to the idealist conception in general. For both these freedom is realised through the perfection of the system. For Bataille, like Adorno, freedom lies in non-identity.
In Guilty, Bataille writes:
“...philosophy takes on a strange dignity from the fact that it supposes infinite questioning. It is not that results gain philosophy some glamour, but only that it responds to the human desire that asks for a questioning of all that is. No one doubts that philosophy is often pointless, an unpleasant way of employing minor talents. But whatever the legitimate biases on this subject, however erroneous (contemptible, even heinous) the results, its abolition runs into this difficulty; that exactly this lack of real results is its greatness. Its whole value is in the absence of rest that it fosters."
You are correct that this approach points beyond the expression of thought but, arguably, not beyond artistic expression. Indeed, artistic expression is its very spirit, its essence, its life-blood. Art is the voice of self-dissolution, as you say, a dissolution akin to a river losing itself in the sea, or in Bataille's words, like water in water. Sure this is a problematic place for philosophy. But as Adorno suggests, philosophy continues to exist only because we are still waiting.
You suggest that the surrealists did not understand Nietzsche as a philosopher because they lived in different century and country to ours. It is quite correct that we came to Nietzsche through the poststructuralists and Critical Theory, rather than through Hegel's Phenomenology Of Spirit, and I can agree that we will read these texts in the light of our own concerns but that does not mean that we can read them in any way we like. What Salome says about Nietzsche wasn't just true in 1894. Either she is right or she is wrong. This will never change.
It seems to me that you are not addressing the points Salome raises. She would not have disagreed that Human, All Too Human is a recoil from Nietzsche's earlier Schopenhauerian position. However, you have assumed, rather than shown, that this early position is also Bataille's. HATH reflects the critical free-spirit that Salome identifies as the second position. Yes, this is a long way from the death-orientated, romantic surrealist interpretation; just as it is also a long way from the final phase in Nietzsche's system identified by Salome. She doesn't call this final phase beyond will and representation; but I will. Bataille's position, and that of surrealism in general, is just as far from Schopenhauerian romanticism as the final position in Nietzsche's system Salome identifies. You want to stop at the critical free-thinker. Bataille and Klossowski want to go all the way.
|
