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November 28, 2003
Trevor,
further to yesterday's post, people are also saying that they find Bataille's category of sovereignty difficult to grasp, or get a hold of. As you know I've experienced this difficulty myself, given my background in Hegel and Nietzsche. It is hard to shift from philosophy to surrealism that is concerned to subvert reason to investigate the workings of the human subconscious and explore what is usually called the irrational.
The readers want some explication of the categories Bataille uses, and they would like some links to online material that they can read.
It would appear that Bataille has primarily entered Australian culture through the art world under the sign of the obscene without this transgression being linked to sovereignty. This kind of art work can be linked back to the 1930's surrealist, Hans Bellmer and his dolls:
Hans Bellmer. "Poupée, variations sur le montage d'une mineure articulée," Minotaure 6 (Winter, 1934–35), pp. 30–31.
There is more on Bellmer's dolls here at The Art Institute of Chicago. There is a post on Bellmer's dolls over at Junk for Code. It connects these to contemporary issues. There does seem not seem to be much leakage of Bataille from the art institution to the philosophy one. The leakage that has occurred is what has flowed from Freud’s theories about dreams, the unconscious, and sexuality in art, drama, and literature. Though this is old hat to us today, it was unquestionably avant-garde, controversial, and groundbreaking in the 1930s.
So let us start from European surrealism from the 1930's to open up a pathway to a working understanding of sovereignty. Two images. First an image created by Andre Masson for the Acephale days. 
This image give us a headless human being.
The emphasis is on the body and bodily desire.
Reason (the head ) is placed to one side. It is about the body.
It is not about the fantastic or the immediate world of dreams, nor is it obscure. But it does seek through a therapy of shock and surprise to liberate our conventional vision from its obscurity.
This is made more obvious in the image called The Lovers created by Rene Magritte.
 A related image is held at the National Gallery of Australia. It is less the expression of personal fantasy or private neurosis and more an image designed to express the darker side of subjectivity.
This headless body is unconcious sexual desire; physical intensity; bodily pleasure; amoral desire. The hooded body links to contemporary bondage play sessions in which a leather hood is used to enclose the subject in isolation; the submissive body is used for pleasure by the Dominator in whatever way the Dom desires; and the consciousness of the submissive body is the sensations of physical intensity. This is very much within Bataille's understanding of exploring the boundaries of sexual taboos in his The Story of the Eye, where a young a young couple, play with eggs, milk and all bodily fluids. Bataille's understanding of pornograpahy is different from the standard one: it is ultimately about death not sex.
So what is the link from bodily pleasure to Bataille's category of sovereignty?
Sexual union causes a momentary indistinguishability between otherwise distinct objects. The secret of eroticism opened visions into unknowable continuity of being, the death. (Poetry has similar dimensions when it dissolves the reader "into the strange." )
A good place to start is Literature and Evil, where Bataille says:
"Death alone -- or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in time -- introduces the break without which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy. And what we thereby regain is always both innocence and the intoxication of existence. The isolated being loses himself in something other than himself. What the 'other thing' represents is of no importance. It is still a reality that transcends the common limitations. So unlimited is it that it is not even a thing: it is nothing."
What we have here is a pushing the physical limits for the sake of experiencing pleasure through a surrendering of control and becoming submissive.
This loss of self to the sacred is freedom, or what Bataille often calls sovereignty.
More on Bataille's conception of sovereignty can be found here.
Sovereignty is a complex category in Bataille. It needs working at to grasp it. What we can say us that sexuality allows for the momentary loss of self, and it is this loss which Bataille equates with religious ecstasy, with immersion in the sacred.
Sovereignty then is not a kind of Hegelian or Nietzschean lordship which still works within the traditional understanding of sovereignty: one is sovereign when one has right or force of command over oneself or one's dominions. Sovereignty is used predominantly to define a form of political power, whether manifested in an individual. Bataille turns away from approaching sovereignty from the point of view of political theory.
For Bataille sovereignty refers to the properties of the inner relation of man to the objects of his desire. For Bataille, sovereignty is the collapse of the dualism that grounds Western thought -- subject/object, good/evil, body/spirit. Sovereignty depends on the loss of self. and, as soon as I say: "I am sovereign," I am not. As soon as I realize that my self has fallen away, it has returned. Sovereignty is not something I can have; it is not something I can be. It is not something at all.
And so sovereignty is an impossibility, unrealizable. “Sovereignty,” Bataille writes, “is the object which eludes us all, which nobody has seized and which nobody can seize for this reason: we cannot possess it, like an object, but we are doomed to seek it.” [Literature and Evil, pp. 193-194]
What Bataille posits, then, is a philosophy of impossibility, a thinking without resolution, an eternal striving without a definable or achievable goal.
Sexuality allows for the momentary loss of self, and it is this loss which Bataille equates with religious ecstasy, with immersion in the sacred. It is this momentary loss of self that takes us across the threshold of sovereignty.
If we look at Bataille through the eyes of Nietzsche, then Bataille's philosophy is what Nietzsche calls a "transvaluation of all values." For Bataille, access to the sacred is possible not for those who behave themselves and faithfully observe prohibitions and taboos; it is for those who fully acknowledge the force of the moral taboos in everyday life and yet willingfully transgress them. The values that are being revalued are those embodied in what is tabooed.
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