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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Bataille, Flesh and consciousness « Previous | |Next »
February 26, 2005

I've always thought of Bataille as caught up in the Catholic guilt machine and so torturing himself about his sinful base desires with his orgiastic excess used as a means to trangress the moral codes of Catholic France. Hence we have sick sex/ guilt/ confessional obsession and the desire to reach a state of consciousness unburdened by intellect and reason, and celebrating a fleshly carnality as good that avoids the return to nature as the healthy animal or noble savage.

Now I have read Bataille radically: the techniques of cruelty, sacrifice and the transgressive were a response to the life-hating disinfect-unto-death, repressive liberal civilization. A sort of Dionysian rewrite of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents if you like; one that is all about excess and ecstasy as a Rousseauistic resistance to civilization and its repressive culture. Less Rousseau and more a Nietzschean bodily rhetoric that launches an assault on humanism.

Yet, I've always suspected that Bataille's Dionysian intoxication belongs to the cruel Catholic counter-Enlightenment tradition. The atavistic-primitivist blood sacrifice rites is precisely a turn away from Enlightenment rationality, which Bataille codes as an universal utilitarian ethos.

My gut feeling is that Bataille, like Nietzsche, cannot kiss Christianity good bye, as he is the Crucified. Rather than renouncing Catholicism Bataille remains with the frame of religion as a mystic; embracing a medieval tradition in which creation is the outpouring of desire as an active creative force.

I've chanced upon an article on Bataille, consciousness and the body in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. It is by Jonathan David Yorke and is called, 'Flesh and Consciousness: Bataille and the Dionysian' (JCRT, August 2003).

Yorke locates Bataille in the Gnostic tradition and says that the central problematic in his work is the conflict between flesh and consciousness, spirit and matter.This duality is rejected in favour of a totalizing consciousness of the godhead.

And yet Bataille's base matterialism places the emphasis on the body. Rather than reject the body for spirit (freeing spirit from its bodily prison) Bataille finds spirit in waste matter. Base matter is alive and vital and a creative force. That is so different to the atomistic mattter of the Enlightenment materialists.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:56 AM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

Gary

While I think you are right that Bataille is caught up in Christian guilt, he was also attempting to think of economic relationships outside of utilitarianism. One thinks of the "Accursed Share" where he glorifies the potlatch as an example of a symbolic exchange that goes beyond western economic thinking. This is where the notion of "radical expenditure" moves from a mystical experience to one of luxurious spending, a gift that is given without expectation of return. I am not sure what sort of economics this leads to but it does make for a good read.

Alain,
I agree with sociology bit. But that mystical inner experience leads to self dissolution and a metaphysics of life affirmign and creative energies in base matter.

It is a recoil against the mechanistic universe of the French materialists and a return to a more organic conception of a creative nature.