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September 26, 2003
Gary, as you know, I've been attending Wayne Cristaudo's honours seminars at Adelaide Uni and yesterday the discussion was closely related to our electronic conversation. Most of the people in the seminar were familiar with a fair bit of Nietzsche's writings and everybody read the selection by Lou Salome that is in the library. They also read a discussion between Marguerite Duras and Georges Bataille, mostly on sovereignty, a brief note on Bataille by Duras, Bataille's Madam Edwarda, including the preface, and Pearson's review of Klossowski's book on Nietzsche that is also in the library.
The general feeling among these people was that Bataille and co have a particular, even idiosyncratic, reading of Nietzsche, even given Salome's discussion. In particular, all of the material that has been made most use of by fascists is absent from Bataille's Nietzsche. That is okay: Bataille is not a Nietzsche scholar. He is telling his own story and a bit of Nietzsche just happens to play a pivotal role. Superman becomes a cow standing in the meadow in Bataille's story.
The recurring objection that is raised to Bataille's approach is that it does not provide any practical guidance. There's nothing to do to change society for the better. But that is just it: for philosophy it is the questioning and not the answering that is important. Bataille is trying to avoid giving answers. There is none of; Do this, or This is the correct thing to do. It is because of this kind of thing that the reality, dark and dirty, that Bataille focuses on comes about in the first place. Perversion is the expression of repressed intensity.
"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 world of 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?"
Witold Gombrowicz, Preface to Pornografia, (New York, Grove, 1978).
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I would suggest that this is not "subculture," but the "culture" of Western civilization. Once this junk is confronted...most particularly in therapy, it begins to dissipate..at least in the life of individual former suffferers. The problem lies in that our political leaders... e.g., have no interest in lying aside their unconscious material and the nightmares which their attitudes and actions spawn. Hence, the world steadily becomes more nightmare-like.