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December 1, 2003
My interpretation of Bataille's texts is that he works in the tradition of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. That text of Nietzsche's probed the origin of moral ideas by telling a story of masters and slaves; questioned the value of the notions of good and evil in European civilization; and showed the ways in which our orientations have been poisoned by the world view of the Christian tradition. His central problem is stated early in the Preface (para 3):
"....under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? and what value do they themselves possess? Have they hitherto hindered or furthered human prosperity? Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? Or is there revealed in them, on the contrary, the plenitude, force, and will of life, its courage, certainty, future?"
Nietzsche argued that we have become habituated to the old patterns of thought and conduct of the ascetic ideal that are increasingly poisonous. We are wounded from the effects of the slow-working poisons.
Nietzsche recognized, as Bataille did after him, that in terms of the lived human experience human beings live within a metaphysics that supports a positive definition of value about life. There is a direct connection between a negative metaphysics of value that stunts our lives and the ability or capacity of human beings to relate 'positively' to the world, to the body and to each other. Thus the idea of poisons.
Nietzsche's attack on traditional Western philosophy (and Christianity) and its value of "life-negation" is all centered around this issue. To say "Yes to Yes", to say "Yes to Life", is to say "Yes" to metaphysics of life enhancement, of intensity, of becoming.
Bataille reworks this tradition of geneology. He does so by showing the opposition between good and evil under the light of morality as an intimate problem of subjectivity. Nietzsche never treated morality as an "intimate" problem. In contrast, Bataille explores our interior world of subjectivity the breeding ground for that terrible sickness, bad conscience. He thus reworks the opposition between good and evil in the light of inner experience.
In this reworking of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals intensity of experience is everything. The argument is that the distinction between good and evil, operative in the context of vulgar morality, is inadequate to express the intense experiences that rip beings apart. Bataille is more shocking than Nietzsche because he allows us to see his terror and torment in a gesture of free play.
Could not the intensity of inner experience Could not intensity be value for Bataille? Affirmation, the affirmation of becoming, is a positive intensity. the erotic impulses (p. 7). What is most intense is our Christian religious experience and our erotic passions. They blend into one another for Bataille and become one and the same movement of assenting to, or affirming, life.
It is the inner experience of sexuality that distinquishes the erotic from sex as copulation. A lot of contemporary online porn is about copulation and not the inner experience of sexuality.
Sylvere Lotringer says that:
"All societies are founded on collective crimes which are subsequently denied by their many beneficiaries. Complicity and denial are constitutive of morality: concern for utility is merely there to suture the wound."
Fear and anxiety are our wounds in liberal civilization. The moral way our civilization understands these wounds are the symptoms of a crisis that we've never recovered from, just bypassed, forgotten and decodified into the ahistoricity and hyper reality of late capitalist societies.
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