Gary, you ask if it matters whether academic reviewers thought that Bataille and Klossowski weren't surrealists. Yes it does matter. Let me say why.

Firstly, I don't know that I agree with you that Studies in French Cinema, is closed to the public domain and the intellectual commons. If it is, it's closed in exactly the same way that books are restricted. If you want to know what is in one you've got to go and buy it or borrow it from a library. The good old photocopier has also been a tool for infringing copyright laws. Basically, ideas are commodities, goods produced for exchange, and while we are governed by commodity production there will always be such restrictions. The success of commodity production depends on restriction. This isn't the fault of academia.

Basically, academia is peopled by déclassés, people cut free by the productive arrangements but for some reason permitted to survive. Most of them have a private education but not all of them. Lots of them have shares but not all of them. Theirs is really a culture of nihilism. They don't believe in anything. As Adorno said, it's on their shoulders that the guilt for the outcomes of production has fallen. They're used and disposed of, like Hitler and Saddam Hussein. The problem with academia is that people who are not scholars are permitted to be academics. Some of these people, philosophers in particular, are excellent at being non-scholars.

But this is not the point. The point is that whoever my anonymous reviewer is, he, she or it has thought about the issues I am raising to the extent that disagreement with me is possible. I seek this disagreement. I have a phantasm that makes me do it. God knows why but it won't leave me alone. So, I need people like this reviewer.

I had a look at what Michael over at Two Blowhards had to say. I was pleased that he also liked Catherine Breillat's cinema but I didn't really get much else from his writing. It was chat. Michael hadn't thought about Breillat in the way that my anonymous reviewer had and he couldn't articulate what he thought so that I could start to have a serious conversation with him.

This is not especially a criticism of Michael but of the Internet in general. I know it's got wonderful potential but it's also a curse. It's overburdened with low-level chat. Perhaps this is all right, but I need more. That's why I went to Studies In French Cinema.

The pace of internet contributes to the curse. I can talk to people everyday and still be a scholar but I can't write to them everyday and still be a scholar. It's easier to talk than write. It takes less time. If I had to write everyday my writing would degenerate to chat too. Perhaps this is not true for everyone but it is true for me, and it is true for most people out there. Most of us aren't geniuses, we're plodders. A scholar isn't a genius, it is a certain way of life.

Those people who write everyday on the internet may very well be geniuses but a different phantasm has got hold of them than mine. I want to write too, we have that much in common. But I want my writing to knock you dead. And because I'm a plodder it is going to take some time. Perhaps I will not even make it. But that ghost inside is insisting that I try. Indeed, it is wrong to talk of me in this context because I am an intensity of a certain kind, not me at all. Me is something that has been created to try to control the intensity.

This is an answer to Gary's questions about Nietzsche and surrealism as well. Nietzsche is not a moral philosopher. In fact, he is not a philosopher at all. He is a pursuer after intensity, a liberator of intensity, this at least is how Bataille and Klossowski see it. And this is how surrealism sees it, as distinct from say existentialism. Existentialism is a philosophy, a rationalisation. Surrealism is an attempt to get beyond rationalisation.

To try to give an example for purposes of clarification, in relation to Hegel, if Kierkegaard offers a rational rejection, what is it that William Blake offers? Blake was not offering an alternative philosophy, even if he often said things that are very philosophical. He's looking for the same thing all poets are after.

Bataille said of surrealism:

"The profound difference between surrealism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre hangs on the character of the existence of liberty. If I do not seek to dominate it, liberty will exist: it is poetry; words, no longer striving to serve some useful purpose, set themselves free and so unleash the image of free existence, which is never bestowed except in the instant. This seizure of the instant -- in which the will is relinquished at the same time -- certainly has a decisive value. It is true that the operation is not without difficulties, which surrealism has revealed but not resolved. The possibilities brought into play go further than they seem. If we were genuinely to break the servitude by which the existence of the instant is submitted to useful activity, the essence would suddenly be revealed in us with an unbearable clarity. At least, everything leads one to believe so. The seizure of the instant cannot differ from ecstasy (reciprocally one must define ecstasy as the seizure of the instant -- nothing else -- operating despite the concerns of the mystics)."

Comments

Posted by: monkchild | December 18, 2003 8:08 PM

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson | January 19, 2004 10:25 PM