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February 12, 2004
Trevor,
I've been in Canberra for most of the week caught up in the events of the moment. I just haven't had time to post, nor read what you have written.
However, I did read some Bataille's On Nietzsche on the plane over to Canberra on Monday night. I read the first six chapters of part two. I had hoped I would have been able to post, but I was too busy throughout the day. In this part we have certainly moved beyond the confessional accounts of Bataille's own internal experience of anguish with the war and destruction raging in Europe of part one.
And somehow the text made sense: the isolation of the individual, the difficulties of communication and death. So I will use that experience as my context for working through these chapters.
In the first chapter of this part Bataille turns away from the concerns of good and evil to consider the moral summit---excess or the exuberance of forces that brings about an maximium of tragic intensity. Decline means moments of exhaustion and fatigue.
In this chapter there is a couple of pages on Christianity, the crucifixation of Christ, it being an evil and criminals. It represents a summit of evil. Bataille then says:
'So clearly the "communication" of human beings is guaranteeed by evil. Without evil, human existence would turn in on itself, would be enclosed in a zone of independence. And indeed an absence of "communication"---empty loneliness---would certainly be the greatest evil.'
For Bataille communication is love, and love taints those whom it unites.
Sitting on the plane flying to Canberra on Monday night I certainly understood the existential state that zone of independence, lack of communication and the empty loneliness referred to. That is the normal experience on the Canberra shuttle plane. You sit in your seat shut up inside yourself trying to avoid the body space of those sitting next to you. This experience is an example of Bataille's "egoistic folding back into self."
Bataille then says that communication (ie love) involves placing this separate existence at risk. By risk he means being placed at the limit of death of and nothingness. The moral summit is the moment of risk taking. That is understandable on the Canberra shuttle plane. The boundaries of individual separateness is continually threatened by death---the very real threat of the plane crashing. It's on everyone's minds. Our bodies hang by a thread.
This normality is one of being placed at the limit of death. The risk taking on the plane is a stepping out of ourselves. On the Canberra shuttle that stepping out represents "being suspended in the beyond of oneself, at the limit of nothingness."
No doubt there are other ways of being placed athe limit of death----sex, sacrifice, criminality, illness, political destruction. But I did understand what Bataille was saying when on the Canberra shuttle on Monday evening.
It went after I landed in Canberra, checked into some rooms, went shopping in the supermarket, returned to the apartment to watch a bit of TV before collapsing into bed. I was no longer "suspended in the beyond of oneself, at the limit of nothingness." I was once again living within the boundaries of individual separateness: living as a monad where I=I.
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