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October 18, 2003
From what I can gather by dipping into the aphoristic, fragmentary writings of Bataille, his conception of politics and political activity was deeply shaped by the events of 1930s. Crudely put, Bataille stands in the historical space between fascism and Stalinist communism, where he endeavours to create enough wriggle room to rethink the revolutionary moment.
He rejects fascism as part of the rescuing of Nietzsche's texts from their appropriation by the Fascists. He sees that once God is dead, then facism becomes almost inescapable. It shapes and directs the affective force of the powerful crowds and in doing so, it re-establishes a new political hierarchy.
What does Bataille as a surrealist do in response? As a part of the political and literary avant garde in the 1930s he helps to form an anti-fascist political group (Contre-Attaque) with Andre Breton. Bataille advocates force, agitation and violence in his essay, 'Popular Front in the Street.'
This politics/political activity was at a time Kojeve was giving his very influential lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that yoked together History, Desire and Death.
These themes are still with us today especially the end of history thesis in the work of Fukuyama.
Others are tracing the roots of postmodern politics back to the explosion of ideas arising from Kojeve's reading of Hegel.
The academic reading situates Bataille and his ideas into a pre-determined framework of “postmodern” thought currently in play within the academy to the intense dislike of the conservatives. The academic reading situates Bataille in this way either through the systematic embellishment of Bataille's role as an intellectual influence on Foucault, Derrida etc; or his role as an intermediary figure, and link, between Nietzsche and the French postmodernists.
From what I can make out Bataille is not considered in his own right. There is not much academic effort expended in exploring his ideas in the corporate university. They slided over his texts.
Why? Too embarrasing? Too radical? Too fragmentary?
The big philosophical idea in Kojeve's Hegel was negativity: it is what drove history along as it were. Bataille radically reworks the Marxist conception of negativity as class struggle into the destructive orgiastic drive or need that is expressed in expenditure. There are different modes of expenditure: potlach, gambling, ritual destruction, perverse sexuality. The true form of expenditure is a bloody revolution by the base classes at the bottom of society against the noble rulers.
Bataille needs lots of wriggle here because force, agitation and violence brings forth a very real danger: the embrace of the subversive violent tendency in a nihilist world at the end of history can easily turn to fascism. Hence the collapse of Contre-Attaque. It seems that he counters this with the formation of small secret society called Acephale, which invoked Nietzsche rather than Marx.
The avant garde becomes a marginalized group on the edge of French society, that is outside the mainstream of political life and is without a head. It appears that the sect (?) was concerned with a rebirth of social values that Bataille had been espousing in his texts on expenditure, risk, loss, sexuality and death. This revaluation was connected to the rebirth of myth and the explosion of primitive communal drives leading to sacrifice. It is the only way left to open up things after the failure of art, science and politics. It is myth that links into, or reconnects, with the orgiastic (Dionysian?) human drives. Hence we have the image of the subject without a head (sovereignty?) and the valourising of mystical experiences in relation to madness, war and death.
What continues to suprise me is that, in spite of the deep questioning that has been happening in Australian universities since the 1970s that has included the way we talk about philosophy, this kind of neo-Nietzscheanism has had little impact. Somewhow it falls into the holes between the reception of continental philosophy in the philosophy institution, the reception of French philosophy in the French studies disciplines and the postmodernism in the visual arts departments. This Australian avant garde (philosophical and artistic) has excised the 1930s from their memory, even though we now stand in the same space between fascism and communism.
Politically speaking, that space is liberalism and liberal democracy. In the 1930s that space between fascism and communism was shaped by the social democracy of the Popular Front. Today that space is shaped by a hegemonic neo-liberalism. So what Bataille means for us today is to think against the free market and its ethos of utility.
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