I went to my Star Of Redemption reading group last night. There were seven of us there and it looks like it might be settling down to about that number, three old girls, three old guys, and a youth – possibly two youths. What a setting! relics studying relics.

I’ve discovered what I do that always leads to disputation in any such groups I join. I listen to what is going on, a story about the ideas of some hundred-year-old German, usually a Jew. After a while I notice that the discussion takes a form that gets up my nose. I sense an underlying philosophical difference. I know. You’re thinking: strange thing to get into a dispute over. Well, I’m a strange guy, I guess. I’ve got my views. I’m sick of eating somebody else’s shit. So I deal with the German, whoever he is, by having a look at what Benjamin or Adorno have to say on the matter. Often they articulate something I’m already thinking. Anyway, I take this stuff back to the group with me. Therein lies the bone of contention.

Last night I caused an immediate irritation by saying that Protestantism was a bourgeois religion – I can’t remember the context. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The point is, this caused immediate concern, not from the old girls who mostly see themselves as less informed than the old guys, the latter of course happen to be academics, one defrocked, twit, moi. (I don’t speak French, by the way, so don’t anyone try to converse with me in that language.) I digress. The other old guys didn’t know, the bourgeoisie weren’t in charge when… the nineteenth century is really the bourgeois century… you can guess the sort of stuff, concerns over the specificity of particular circumstances, as if anyone said anything about direct class rule or the grand class direction of history. They hummed and harred. They’d smelt a commie under all the words and they didn’t like it.

I said some irrelevant things about the bourgeoisie being the middle class and so on – you can guess the stuff. I don’t need to tell you. The thing is, there’s a new worldview that shows up around the Renaissance and it is related to the activities of an emerging class on the world stage – for this last extravagant term read ‘Europe’. Whether or not they didn’t really run the show in Germany until the 1900s doesn’t really matter. It’s beside the point.

I don’t know whether it my paranoia or not but, in these conversations, I always get the feeling from my combatants that if you use the word ‘bourgeoisie’ you are somehow giving it a pejorative twist, which puts them on the defensive. For a so-called ‘Marxist’ it may be a term of abuse. The Nazis used the word in rather this context. It’s not my view. In the sense that I am using the term we are all bourgeois in this sense although we live in a post-bourgeois era. Corporate administration doesn’t really like too much bourgeois affectation. It prefers some amorphous mass, a déclassé society. Just like in the extermination camps, everybody comes from the same declass (if you’ll forgive the neologism).

Déclassé society is the outcome of bourgeois machinations. Marxists would say that it was a result of the evolution of capital. I like that way of saying it too, so I must be a commie. Jesus Christ! I’m getting off the track again. It point is, as Hannah Arendt argued in Volume Two of The Origins Of Totaliterianism, imperialism is the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie. If you’d like some of those concrete facts, albeit a bit removed, in Britain it came about when the cabinet was drawn from the House of commons instead of the House of Lords. I think the Duke of Wellington – the soldier, not the pub – was the last prime minister from the H of L but I could be wrong. The corporation soon provided the administrative model and they were away. They haven’t looked back. If they did they’d notice the pile of rubble. I won’t go on. You’ve heard enough. You’ve made your decision: commie ratbag. Q.E.D. (whatever that means).

You may even be getting a bit shirty by now. When’s he going to get on with the philosophical conversation? you might be wandering. What’s all this got to do with Bataille and inner experience? Well, the answer is, not much, at least not directly. Although… sometimes when I’m sitting there with a bunch of old ducks and drakes upsetting everyone by being an opinionated commie ratbag, I something think, wouldn’t be better if we just had an orgy? But I never say anything. I just go on with the argument.