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November 30, 2003
As we have seen Bataille's conception of sovereignty means that intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should aim at the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. It is about the experience of the edge, living at the very limits of life, at the extreme, at the borderline of possibilities. Sexually it means to have been scared and to have surrendered.
I've been continuing with my reading of the 'Preface' to Bataille's On Nietzsche. After making his remarks about experiencing Nietzsche means pouring out one's life blood Bataille indicates how he interprets Nietzsche's texts. These remarks are directed at Heidegger's Nietzsche. Bataille says that:
"There exists an idea of Nietzsche as the philosopher of the "will to power," the idea that this is how he saw himself and he was accepted. I think of him more as a philosopher of evil. for him the attraction and value of evil, it seems to me, gave significance to what the intended when he spoke of power."
Bataille is known as the "metaphysician of evil". Evil is a very old religious term that describes what is morally bad, corrupt, wantonly destructive, selfish, and wicked. In a casual or derogatory use, the word "evil" can characterize people and behaviours that are painful, ruinous, or disastrous.
Does Bataille's use of evil refer to his interest in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potentialities of obscene? Not quite. Just after the above passage Bataille mentions what he understands by evil:
"...I am opposed to all forms of coercion---but this doesn't keep me from seeing evil as an object of moral exploration. Because evil is the opposite of a constraint that on principle is practiced with a view towards good. Of course evil isn't what a hypocritical series of misunderstandings make it out to be: isn't it essentially a concrete freedom, the uneasy breaking of a taboo?
Evil is about transgressing taboos.
In Literature and Evil Bataille argues that literature is "guilty" in that literature is complicit with evil and that it must admit this. Only through acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully. Bataille explores this idea through a series of remarkable studies on the work of eight outstanding authors: Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, Blake, Michelet, Kafka, Proust, Genêt and De Sade.
Bataille "eroticises" literary creativity thrrough arguing that literture is anti-utilitiarian and embedded in desire and pleasure. He contends that the modernist notion of "Art for art's sake", which emerged as a reaction to a fragmented and reified social world dominated by utilitarianism and commodity fetishism, is actually a subterfuge. It is literature masquerading as innocent under the mantle of "pure art". What literature does is to rechannel the forces that are dammed up owing to the repressions imposed by a liberal capitalist culture.
From a critical philosophical perspective Bataille, in putting his finger on the pulse of evil, is alert to madness, violence, hatred and humiliation which were about to rock Western civilization, and unleashed atrocities on an unprecedented scale. These are experiences (eg., the of Holocaust & the Gulag) that are unimaginable and impossible to communicate. These experiences of horror are the unspeakable.
Have you noticed how silent academic analytic philosophy is about these atrocities? It avoids addressing them. This abstract instrumental reason retreats into systematic theory about science and language and dismisses all attmepts to articulate the horror of the 20th century as irrationality. Such a philosophy stands condemned of irrelevancy.
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