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November 10, 2003
In this post I will reach behind the recent material on the philosophy/literature relationship and reconnect with the earlier posts on sovereignty. I want to mull over sovereignty because what Bataille means by this concept appears to be so different to Nietzsche's free spirit conception of sovereignty.
For Nietzsche free spirits are the homeless ones who endure suffering, redeem us from the reigning ideals, overcome the great nausea and the will to nothingness in nihilism, and revalue our values. They are the ones who provide a counter to the ascetic ideal through affirming life. It is an ideal, the overman (Ubermensch ideal) whose affirming life involves affirming eternal recurrence reliving one's life eternally and experience joy at the prospect including the most horrible parts.
In para 382 of The Gay Science Nietzsche says that these new nameless ones do not exist. All we have are the premature births of an as yet unproven future; argonauts of the ideal who have suffered shipwreck and damage, who are dissatisfied with present day human beings, and whose eyes are turned towards an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed.
In para 211 of the 'We Scholars' section in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche connects these free spirits to a certain kind of philosopher, ones he calls genuine philosophers:
"Actual philosophers, however, are commanders and law givers: they say `thus it shall be!', it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical labourers, of all those who have subdued the past; they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their `knowing' is creating, their creating is a law giving, their will to truth is will to power. Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?"
These legislators and commanders are people of tomorrow, and the day after tomorow. They find themselves in contradiction to today. Hence they have a great task, which Nietzsche spells out in para 212, in the following way:
"By laying the knife vivisectionally to the bosom of the very virtues of the age they betrayed what was their own secret: to know a new greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his enlargement. Each time they revealed how much hypocrisy, indolence, letting oneself go and letting oneself fall, how much falsehood was concealed under the most honoured type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived; each time they said: `We have to go thither, out yonder, where you today are least at home.'"
This mode of being of philosophers as educators and shapers of humankind cannot be taught. In para 213 Nietzsche says that:
"What a philosopher is, is hard to learn, because it cannot be taught: one has to 'know' it from experience; or one ought to be sufficiently proud not to know it....Thus, for example, that genuinely philosophical combination of a bold exuberant spirituality which runs presto and a dialectical severity and necessity which never takes a false step is to most thinkers and scholars unknown from experience and consequently, if someone should speak of it in their presence, incredible."
Nietzsche reckons that artists have more sensitive noses in these matters, since
"...they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act 'voluntarily' and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height."
That is a sketch of the Nietzschean background to sovereignty. It is an ideal of a new class of nobility as masters who are capable of tying the knot that forces humankind on a newtrack in response to the nothingness of nihilism. They are powerful educators who mold the character of future generations.
What does Bataille do with the ideas associated with overman? As a creative writer he reshapes the material in terms of his ideas of restrictive and general economy. The world is separated into the servile and the sovereign.
In chapter one of volume 3 of The Accursed Share Bataille writes:
"...we may call sovereign the enjoyment of possibilities that utility doesn't justify (utility being that whose end is productive activity). Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty....What is sovereign in fact is to enjoy the present time without having to anything else in view but this present time."
Sovereignty is a savouring of the marvellous abandonment to objects of desire and crucially beyond any calculation of their utility. It is the opposite of servility which is to employ the present time for the sake of the future.
Could sovereignty be as simple as the brief moment of enjoying a glass of wine whilst watching the last rays of the sun play across the sand of the beach? A miraculous sensation of having the world at our disposal? It is a miraculous moment which delights us.
Bataille then connects this moment to knowledge and introduces his idea of 'unknowing.' He says:
"To know is always to strive, to work; is it a servile operation, indefinitely resumed, indefinitely repeated. Knowledge is never sovereign: to be sovereign it would have to occur in a moment. But the moment remains outside, short of, or beyond, all knowledge....Consciousness of the moment is not truly such, is not sovereign, except in unknowing. Only by cancelling, or at least neutralizing, every operation of knowledge within ourselves are we in the moment, without fleeing it. This is possible in the grip of strong emotion that shut off, interrupt, or override the flow of thought."
Unknowing? This seems to have surrealist connotations. But it is a surreal discourse that grows from an historical analysis of social structure or sociology and an account of lived social relations. This is very different to the carnival postmodern world of signs as mirrors (of a Baudrillard) that displaces material social relations, and it offers links for an engagement by social theoriests working within the tradition of the Frankfurt School.
The difference between servility and sovereignty does makes sense in relation to human sexuality. Bataille distinquishes between sexuality and eroticism. Sexuality is servile in that it is a means to an end; the goal of sexuality is reproduction. To have sex to procreate is to be servile to the future. Eroticism, on the other hand, is based entirely in the present. It is the expenditure of all available energy and passion with the only goal being pleasure or fulfillment of desire.
Sovereignty is thus linked to the loss of our own subjectivity as such. This loss of subjectivity is condition of life and the underlying force that drives eroticism, laughter, and writing itself.
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