|
November 17, 2003
I've just started reading Bataille's On Nietzsche. Suprisingly, given the reputation of his immoralism, the text is about morality, moral concerns and value---as seen through the eyes of Nietzsche of course. On first appearances it a chaotic, fragmentary book. It is all over the place and it is difficult to know what is going on. The style of On Nietzsche looks as if it were some kind of surrealist journal.
Digging deeper into the Preface I can see that the text has its own rhythms, figures and thought-paths. Bataille understands Nietzsche to be writing with his blood and he is concerned to experience Nietzsche. By this Bataille "means pouring out one's lifeblood." Bataille understands that phrase to mean "being ablaze with ardour."
It's an example of what Heidegger in his essay, "What are Poets For?, called poetic thinking in a destitute time after the completion of Western metaphysics by Nietzsche. It is a thinking that has "poetically experienced and endured the unconcealedness of beings which was shaped by that completion." This is relevant to Bataille, even though he is not a poet like Rilke, because Heidegger says that:
"To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, signing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy."
Heidegger then goes on to say that:
"The time is destitute because it lacks the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death and love. Thsi destitutiin is is itself destitute because that realm of being withdraws within which pain, death and love belong together."
What then is the concern of Bataille's poetic thinking? He says that:
"The basic problem tackled in this chaotic book (chaotic because it has to be) is the same one Nietzsche experienced and attempted to resolve in his work---the problem of the whole human being."
This refers to the Bk 4 of Nietzsche's The Will to Power This is about discipline and breeding of human beings. Nietzsche presupposes that a high culture created by exception human beings stands on a broad base, upon a a stong and healthy mediocrity.(para 864) His concern is how to enhance the strong aristocratic individual or overman.
Bataille's specific link is to para 881:
Order of rank: "....Most men represent pieces and fragments of man: one has to add them up for a complete man to appear. Whole ages, whole peoples are in this sense somewhat fragmentary; it is perhaps part of the economy of human evolution that man should evolve piece by piece. But that should not make one forget for moment that the real issue is the production of the synthetic man; that lower men, the tremendous majority, are merely preludes and rehearsals out of whose medley the whole man appears here and there, the milestone man who indicates how far humanity has advanced so far."
Bataille sidesteps Nietzsche's concerns about rank, breeding and social order. He says that life is whole when it isn't subordinated to a specific object that exceeds it. He identifes this with freedom. It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against a particular oppression that lifts us human beings above the mutilated existence of a damaged life.
next
|
