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November 30, 2004
Gary, you wrote the other day,
My take on this kind of self-examination of our inner experience is that Bataille is working in the tradition of a therapeutic philosophy, which is concerned to help us deal with our demons; ie., to cure us of those desires and thoughts that make us sick.
But I'm a little uncomfortable with this characterisation of Bataille's philosophy—although this might reflect my own prejudices associated with the term "therapeutic philosophy," and I may have missed your meaning... Bataille is certainly concerned with the personal within philosophy—or how thought and corporeal being engage with one another. But this isn't exactly therapeutic: if anything, he hints at the possibility of becoming crazy as a result of this engagement, and even welcomes such a possibility (notwithstanding the dubiousness of such a claim—perhaps for another post).
I do agree that Bataille's willingness to suffer for philosophy reflects his previous Catholicism... and this also makes sense of his comments about the relation between God and the Christian being based upon their mutual laceration of one another. For instance, where he writes:
It looks as if creatures couldn't communicate with their Creator except through a wound that lacerates integrity.
Or,
In this way God (wounded by human guilt) and human beings (wounded by their own guilt with respect to God), find, if painfully, a unity that seems to be their purpose.
This illustrates for Bataille the self -risk and -mutilation that must occur in any act of communication. This is Bataille's joissance, or enjoyment in pain, which he also claims to share with Nietzsche... they are united through the wounds left in them by their break with God (elsewhere Bataille states that when Nietzsche writes of the death of God, he addresses him directly).
With regard to the contrast between Bataille's passivity and Nietzsche's "commanders and legislators revaluing all values in the face of nihilism", I think there is a strain of Nietzsche's philosophy that is active (and also rather bombastic and macho as well), to be sure. But consider also the sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra such as "The Vision and the Riddle," and "At Noon," as well as all the quiet moments, when he cannot speak and is forced to commune with his soul: these are highly reflective (even 'passive') texts, wherein Nietzsche sits back and observes the effects of his philosophy upon his life and self (albeit in a stylised manner, especially when compared with Sur Nietzsche). Bataille certainly understands himself in this text to be continuing a tradition of philosophising that began with Nietzsche—the bringing together of the personal and the theoretical.
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Do we go crazy for the sake of going crazy, or do we push it to deal with our poisons?
If you don't like the word therapeutic how about self-governance?
As an ex-Catholic he has a few problems dealing with the excesses of desire, does he not? It leads to torment and guilt.
Are these not poisons requiring some form of philosophical therapy?
If that is still uncomfortable then is not psychoanalysis interested in charting how the human mind affects the body, particularly in forms of mental illness, such as neurosis and hysteria?
Is it not also concerned about finding ways to cure those mental illnesses?