philosophical conversations

de Sade: the liberatine villain

Goya was an enthusiastic supporter of the Enlightenment and of the liberalisation of the economy and society. He depicted the intellectual and political revolution as a brilliant, omnipotent light that would illuminate humanity's destiny and cast the demons that brutalised human existence into the fiery pit from which they would never again arise.

However, Goya's 'Sleep of Reason produces monsters' from his 1796 Los Caprichos series is ambiguous. It represents an intellectual---the artist himself----is "asleep" at his desk, surrounded by cats and bats and a clear-eyed lynx. The etching is within the frame of the Enlightenment and it is unclear whether Goya means that the absence of reason breeds monsters or that reason is itself a kind of sleep.

The man of reason is beset by demons that haunt and assault him---is subject to the darknes of a swirling maelstrom of stupidities and evils, such as witchcraft. The nightmare continues to hold us in its grip.

What if the very darkness that is to illuminated is also the source of much life, imagery and passion? Could not the monsters disguise themselves with the finery of liberty, reason and justice?

In looking at the image I recalled my wariness about Bataille's celebration of excess, violence and sacrifice. Are these the demons that haunt the enlightened man of reason?

I then recalled the aristocratic de Sade, that liberatine villain concerned with the shocking and scandalous and the transgression of conventions. Can de Sade and Goya be seen as precursors to Bataille? Did not Goya strike out against convention to render the sensational and the shocking: robbery and murder, adultery and rape, cannibalism.

I then returned to reading Klossowski's Sade, Me Neighbour. I last looked at this text here, which was followed by Joe's post here, and then mine here about the Enlightenment-Sade-Nietzsche-fascism linkage.

I then came across some comments by Alphonse van Worden about de Sade:

"Here is The Sadien project - to shock, to scandalise, to pulverize conventions, to expose and refute categories - is trapped in the already established conflation of the aristocracy, typified by the liberatine villain, with the Shocking and Scandalous and Unconstrained by conventions, playing wantonly with the categories of its own creation. Seeking to break out of this pattern at the far end - to find the outermost boundary of that type and cross it (combine adultery, sodomy, sacrilege, incest - but neglecting counterfeiting or rigging the stock market, albeit perhaps out of absent-mindedness) - Sade's lurch at liberty fails. Perhaps it is a lack of imagination. Perhaps the project's purpose was spectacular failure. But a scandalous and shocking Marquis de Sade, descendant of Petrarca's Laura, would probably have stood a better chance of escaping his fated impunity heading for the other door.

The lack of imagination retuns us to Goya, for reason without imagination produces monsters.

Bataille, Flesh and consciousness

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.

Blanchot: Nietzsche, fragments, writing

After the rather thin accounts of nihilism in the two previous essays we come to Blanchot's third essay in his 'Reflections on Nihilism' section in The Infinite Conversation. It is called 'Nietzsche and fragmentary writing' and it is a part of the Limit-experience section.

This text acknowledges that Nietzsche's writing can be thought of as belonging to the philosophical institution, may even constitute a system, and can be interpreted as responding to Plato, Kant or Hegel. Blanchot says:

"Let us admit this. Let us admit as well that such a continuous discourse may be behind these divided works. It remains nonetheless true that Nietzsche does not contend himself with such a continuity. And even if a part of these fragements can be bought back into this kind of integral discourse, it is manifest that such a discourse--philosophy--itself---is already surpassed by Nietzsche; that he presupposes it rather than gives it exposition, in order further on, to speak according to a different language: no longer for the whole but of the fragment, of plurality, of separation."

Granted. Nietzsche is anti-system. He is no Hegel, constructing a dialectical system. Nietzsche's texts abound with aphorisms. Whole sections of a book are composed of an organized series of aphorisms. Nietzsche excels in this kind of writing.

So what? What is the significance of this?

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Blanchot: overcoming nihilism

Blanchot's 'Crossing the Line' essay in The Infinite Conversation ends with a short look at the exchange between Heidegger and Junger. I do not know the texts referred to. There is this piece by Ernest Junger, called 'Over the Line,' whilst Heidegger's 'Concerning the Line' (ie. "The Question of Being") is a response to Junger. The latter text is not online, but it is referrred to here.

Junger rejects Nietzsche's favorable prognosis of overcoming nihlism through the counter movement of the transvaluation of values by philosophers as lawgivers and legislators; these great individuals express their autonomy and self-determination in acts of courage, creation, destruction, passion, etc. The implication here is that autonomy opens up to those individuals able to create their own lives though positing new values.

Junger dashes the optimism presupposed in Nietzsche's value-creation, even though he accepts the need to cross the line of nihilism.

My understanding is that Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche as strieving for new values, thus trying to pass over nihilism by dancing in the abyss.I presume that as, this is seen as operating within the metaphysics of technological modernity, so Heidegger would critique Nietzsche's understanding of values. The latter is based on human beings positing our values, as creating them. Understanding nihilism as the lack of values is part of the problem not its solution.

Heidegger would see Junger's desire to 'cross over' the line of nihilism as operating within the same region of the metaphysics of technological modernity.

What does Blanchot say about this?

He is obscure as usual. He says:

Heidegger suggested--and this was his principal contribution to the examination of this strange adversary---that we would henceforth be well advised in writing both the word being and the word nothingness only as crossed with a St Andrews cross: being, nothingness.

Now what does that mean?

What ever it means it is clear that Blanchot does not address the issue of the transvaluation of values. He avoids the ethics and is silent about the creation of new values.

Blanchot goes on to question Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician of the West:

It is certainly appropriate to mediate on this [Heidegger's] invitation, but by returning to quite another reflection that would ask whether all preceding interpretations do not forget Nietzsche by placing him back into a tradition tha the himself was not content to simply put into question... the tradition fo the logical discourse issues from logos, of thought as a thought of the whole, and of speeech as a relation of unity...

Blanchot seek to recover a radical Nietzsche, one who shakes up philosophy, in opposition to Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche as trapped in the metaphysics of technological modernity.

He makes the turn to the poetic Nietzsche and literature, which is understood as a site of irreducible strangeness and resistance to conceptual thought of philsoophy. Hence Blanchot's critical thinking re-engages the old dispute between poetry and philosophy.

Blanchot nihilism ethics #2

Blanchot's reading of Nietzsche on nihilism in his 'Crossing the Line' essay in The Infinite Conversation fails to deal with Nietzsche's affirmation of values that enhance life as a response to nihilism. The essay remains caught up in nihilism, with an account of the movement of nihilism twisting in it on itself; without making the shift to connecting the will to power to the transvaluation of values and to the overcoming nihilism.

Blanchot writes:

Until now we thought nihilism was tied to nothingness. How ill-considered was this: nihilism is tied to being. Nihilism is the impossibility of being done with it and of finding a way out even in the end that is nothingness...nothing ends, everything begins again; the other is still the same. Midnight is only a dissimulated noon, and the great Noon is the abyss of light from which we can never depart...Nihilism thus tells its final and rather grim truth: it tell so the impossibility of nihilism. (p.149)

He does see a pathway out of this:

"...that the extreme point of nihilism is precisely there where it reverses itself, that nihilism is this very turning itself, the affirmation that, in passing from the NO to the Yes, refutes nihilism, but does nothing other than affirm it, and henceforth extends it to every possible affirmation."

Blanchot is certainly frustrating to read. He obscures what was previously clear. I can follow the argument line by line yet the conclusion just evaporates and I'm left holding onto obscurity--- a space of silences, absences and ghostly traces.

What is clear is that Blanchot does not walk done this pathway to make contact with Nietzsche's overman, the transvaluation of values and affirming those values that enhance life.

Instead the essay turns to the debate between Ernest Junger and Martin Heidegger on nihilism.

So why Blanchot's silence about Nietzsche's passing over the precipice through the creation of new values that affirm of life as a way of overcoming the movement of nihilism? Is it blindness? Is it an unease with ethics? Is it the old disconnect between literature and ethics in the 20th century?

A suggestion. Have we reached the limit of Blanchot where literature is nowhere and disappears into the space of the void? Blanchot seems to make everything darker? So we remain enclosed within the darkness of nihilism as writing withdraws language from the world.

Though he reconnects with Heidegger in the 'Crossing the Line' Blanchot does not connect with the way Heidegger puts some content into Nietzsche's proposal for a revaluation of values: a "homecoming" to the earth through marginalized practices and poetics in our technological mode of being.

Blanchot, nihilism, ethics

I see that the Australian reception of Blanchot is deepening. My guess is that the reception is taking place is primarily through literary studies and not philosophy. This is unsuprising because Blanchot is a becoming key thinker for modern literary criticism and language philosophy. It is Heideggerian understanding of literature presenting its own unique and (ultimately inexplicable?) mode of being, provides something for the reader, beholder or listener to dwell within, engages with nihilism and discloses a world.

What I find intersting with Blanchot is the form of writing that combines philosophy and literature.Does this mean a re-appearance of the view that philosophy can only be itself only by becoming literature?

I find Blanchot's reading of Nietzsche and nihilism limited because it misses the ethical dimension. This lack is a mark of the French reading of Nietzsche in the 1930s and 1940s.

We can make a distinction between ethics and the code of conduct which is placed under the morality of good and evil. By 'ethics' I mean the concerns with living a flourishing life, and the relationship of self and other in which the other is allowed to remain other. The classical (Greek and Roman) accounts focus on a flourishing life whilst the postmodern account focuses on self and other.

Nietzsche says that with the death of God we can mark the end of the moral interpretation of the world under the signature of God. The question of meaning will be asked with the death of God, as this spells the end of the moral interpretation of the world. In nineteenth century bourgeois society God (Christianity) stood for the high point of any code of conduct that achieves meaning via the dualism of good and evil. So the death of God leaves a voided, empty moral space, which leads to nihilism.

This is experienced as a disaster, not in the sense of a loss of faith, but in the sense Blanchot uses it, it's the dis-aster, i.e. the vanishing of the guiding star that leaves us without orientation. Hence the despair.This leads to attempts to comfort each other as we dangle over the abyss.

Yet Nietzsche suggests that nihilism can lead to strength, to the overcoming of nihilism, with the overcoming through the transvaluation of all values providing the basis upon which culture can thrive. Heidegger suggests that that our alienation from nature, which is due to an instrumental theoreticism that drives towards technical and objectifying modes of knowledge and marginalizes any kind of primordial mode of existence, can be redeemed though poetics.

And Blanchot?

Reading Blanchot on Nietzsche

I'm enjoying reading Blanchot on nihilism. He takes it seriously and I can understand what he is saying. He appears to accept that nihilism, as diagnosed by Nietzsche a century ago, had more to do with the state of civilization than with a metaphysical speculation about ulterior reality, or a metaphysics of nothingness. However, I do not think that Blanchot's Nietzsche's is one concerned with the best way to live.

For many academic commentators nihilism is a topic, a dead topic, rather than something that is lived. I understand Blanchot accepts nihilism as something that it lived by us. This takes us beyond the caricatures of Nietzsche having no positive teaching at all as he exposed all moral evaluations as untenable, held that perspectivity is all, and stated that all interpretation is arbitrary. Such readings are at odds with Zarathustra's affirmation of life that is articulated in a literary form.

So what is it that we are living beyond the death of God and the devaluation of our highest values?

Blanchot connects the overman with eternal return in his reading of Nietzsche on nihilism in in his 'Crossing the Line' essay in The Infinite Conversation. He says:

Enthusiastically and with categorical clarity Zarathustra announces the overman; then anxiously, hestatingly, fearfully he announces the thought of the eternal return. Why this difference in tone? Why is the thought of eternal return, a thought of the abyss, a thought that in the very one who pronounces it is unceasingly deferred and turned away as it were the detour of all thought? This is its enigma and, no doubt, its truth.(p.146)

Blanchot says that the thought of eternal return has struck most commentators to be arbitrary, useless, mystical and antiquated, since it had been around since Heraclitus.
Update
Despite the above historical reading of eternal return Blanchot takes the idea seriously:

The thought of the eternal return remains strange in its antiquated absurdity.It represents the logical vertigo that Nietzsche himself could not escape.It is the nihilist thought par exellence, the thought by which nihilism surpasses itself absolutely by making itself unsurpassable.It is therefore the most able to enlighten us as to the kind of trap that nihilism is when the mind decides to approach it head-on.

Blanchot describes this in terms of sentiment becoming ressentiment---is not Zarathustra full of ressentment?---and goes on to connect it to the will to power and suggests that nihilism signifies the defeat of overman as will to power.

Does this make the Overman the tragic hero? Are not the Overman, the children of Zarathustra?

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Blanchot, Nietzsche, nihilism #2

Back to Blanchot's reading of Nietzsche on nihilism in The Infinite Conversation. In his 'Crossing the Line' essay Blanchot asks a number of questions:

Another consequence is the following: to the void made by nihilism corresponds the movement of science; to the achievement of science, the domination of the earth. The greatest force of surpassing is set in motion. Now what happens to man when this transformation is realized and history turns? Does he come transformed? is he ready to become what he is, the lucid man who can rely on nothing beytond himself? Is he ready to become what he is, the lucid man who can rely on nothing and who is going to make himself master of all? (p.146)

Blanchot says no. We are still bourgeois. Man is still the nineteenth century bourgeois that Nietzsche knew. And he adds that Nietzsche sided "with science and with the being of exceeding, which is the becoming of humanity."

This is a historical reading. The bourgeoisie have broken with the nineteenth century with the rise of consumer society. However, Blanchot captures the moment of surpassing in Nietzsceh that is often overlooked. But does Nietzsche side with science in this? Is he not critical of science. He views science from the perspective of art? Does he not affirm the importance of values and ethics in opposition to the hegemony of a value-free positivist science?

Blanchot then turns to Heidegger's commentaries on Nietzsche and nihilism. He says that Heidegger's interpretation of the overman:

..he is not the man of today elevated disproportionality, nor a species of man who would reject the human only to make the arbitrary his law and titanic madness his rule; he is not the eminent functionary of some will to power, any more than he is an enchanter destined to introduce paradisical bliss on earth. The overman is he who alone leads man to what he is: the being who surpasses himself, and in whose surpassing there is affirmed the necessity of his passing.(p.147)

Let us accept this interpretation. What then? What is the significance of the overman in relation to the process of nihilism?

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Blanchot is clear on this. He says:

...the overman could be considered as the first decisive affirmation of the extreme negation of nihilism..the overman is the being who has overcome the void (created by the death of God and the decline of values), because he has known how to find in this void the power of overcoming, a power in him that has not only become a power, but will---the will to overcome himself.

This pretty much concurs with my interpretation of Nietzsche's understanding of overman, surpassing and nihilism. Once we have had values that guided our mode of living, then they decayed and we lost them, now we have to create new ones. The overman creates the new values.

being cast adrift

This article, by Lars Iyer in the Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory is courtesy of Matt over at pas au-delà. It caught my eye because of the reference to Blanchot and the link back to nihilism.

Entitled, 'The City and the Stars: Politics and Alterity in Heidegger, Levinas and Blanchot', it address the decay of nomos, the polis being cast adrift and our condition becoming disastrous. Lars says:

"My aim is to show how the overcoming of certain nostalgia for a lost authority, tradition or religion exhibited in different ways in Heidegger and Levinas might permit us to rethink our relation to others and to the world. Both thinkers offer a partial solution to the question as to how we might live in the midst of a growing secularism and dissatisfaction with existing models of politics."

Lars says that Blanchot names a way of being together that is no longer fixed upon older models of the political. Blanchot opens up the possibility of articulating a disastrous politics,that would permit us to look out for new spaces of freedom that break open in our present and to stand guard against the foreclosure of the political space.

Deleuze

A quote from Deleuze and Guattari's, What is Philosophy:

"Philosophy has not remained unaffected by the general movement that replaced Criique with sales promotion.The simulcrum, the simulation of a packet of noodles, has become the true concept; and the one who packages the product, commodity or work of art has become the philosopher, conceptual persona, or artist. How could philosophy an old person, compete against young executives in a race for the univesal of communication for determining the marketable form of the concept, Merz." pp.10-11

Their answer is well known: philosophy is the creation of concepts.

Blanchot, Nietzsche, nihilism

I'm on the road in Canberra and it is difficult to find time to post. I've been continuing to read Blanchot on Nietzsche's idea of nihilism in The Infinite Conversation. When I have a quiet moment I will try to get some material posted. So far I think that there is more in Blanchot than Bataille.

I have a quiet moment.

In his essay, 'Crossing the Line' Blanchot says that Nietzsche's thought remains associated with nihilism, and then adds:

'Here, then, is a first approach to nihilism: it is not an individual experience, not a philosophical doctrine, nor is it a fatal light a cast over human nature, eternally destined to nothingness. Rather, nihilism is an event accomplished in history that is like a shedding of history--the movement when history turns and that is indicated by a negative trait: that values no longer have values in themselves. There is also a positive trait: for the first time the horizon is infinitely open to knowledge, "Everything is permitted." This new authorization given to man when the authority of values has collapsed means first of all: everything is permitted, there is no longer a limit to man's activities.'(p.145)

Rightly said.

Blanchot then connects the historical movement of nihilism, the void of a world with no meaning and science. So he tacitly connects up with Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's understanding of nilihism as the loss of direction and meaning, the elimination of all meaningful difference and the levelling of what is importance and unimportant in the public world of liberal capitalism.

With this we have stepped outside or beyond the world of individual inner experience of Bataille, in which we plunge into the frenzy of intensity; or Klossowski's world of inner conflicts of the divided subject of unconscious processes in opposition to moral conscience derived from the signs of the public world.

Alas, I've run out of time.

Another quiet moment.

I read both of these response be seen as another stage in the proess of nihilism rather than an overcoming. We retreat into a privatised intensity and unconscious processes because the shared public world has lost its value, meaning and significance. We are adrift and without bearings. Blanchot reconnects us to this public world.

Kierkegaard's Christian response is to affirm individual commitment, dedication and concern as the way back to meaning and significance. Heidegger, in contrast, sees the lack of values and meaning in the public world as the reason for our retreat into privatised experience.

interpreting Nietzsche

I'm reading Shadia Drury's Leo Strauss and the American Right at the moment.

In chapter 3 entitled 'Strauss's German Connection' she briefly tackles Heidegger's ethic of authenticity. On her account this ethic 'bids the individual to be true to himself, rather than living as "they" expect, and silencing the voice within? ' She adds that in 'contrast to the Christian ethic, the existential ethic tells us simply to be true to our unique individuality, to listen to our inner voice, not because it is the voice of God or conscience, but simply because it is ours.'

She then asks: 'But what does it mean to be true to oneself, to be authentic. What is the self to which we should be true?' She responds:

"It does not help matters to tell us that we can live authenticall if we accept who we are and affirmn our destiny in the spirit of Nitetzsche's amor fati--the injunction to love our fate, to affirm our life and choose it energetically. This a strange ethic indeed. Is it not more honourable to resist or rebel against a disgraceful fate, not matter how inexorable? Is that not why we admire Oedipus? He did not say: "it was destined to kill my father and marry my mother, hurrah!"'

Well that's not Nietzsche.

His ethical response to nihilism is an active one--the creation of new values. This is the bit that nearly always gets left out. It is a systematic blindness in the political readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger.

timeout

I'm too tired to post. I was up early this morning (5am) after only a few hours of sleep. I've been sitting through a Senate committee hearing in Canberra listening to submissions on prothesis, Medicare and public health for most of the day.

I cannot access the online article I want (Gateway error). I cannot make much sense of Blanchot's essay on Nietzsche. I find myself keep on nodding off at the keyboard.

In the meantime, courtesy of a Guache, a link to the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. It looks to be a good read.

I noticed that there is a review of Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason. This argues that that the postmodern left hostility to the liberal Enlightenment has its roots in the dark side of Nietzsche and Heidegger.The radical left of today is the child of the French radical right in the 1930s-1940s.

Wolin's postmodernism is a construct. It is one based on the reduction of truth, knowledge, morality to power; the critical response or opposition to the positivist scientific Enlightenment is the Counter-Enlightenment; and a simple association between philosophy and politics.The review is more critical than that by Greg Barnes in Australia.

There is an article on Blanchot's 'Being Jewish' essay, which was mentioned here. The article, 'Judaism and Alterity in Blanchot and Levinas' by Michael Brogan usefully brings Blanchot's conversation with Levinas over the ethics of alterity and the antipathy to difference in the name of sameness.

Blanchot: reading Nietzsche

The fourth part in The Limit-Experience section of Blanchot's The Infinite Conversation consists of three essays on Nietzsche under the heading 'Reflections on Nihilism.'

In the first essay, Nietzsche, Today, we find the standard 1930's French response to Nietzsche: uncovering Nietzsche's texts from the political falsifications of the fascists and the editor's fabrication of the Will to Power as a posthumous book. The short essay then quickly moves on to a concern about how we should read Nietzsche's texts.

Blanchot makes several points:

"Jaspers was the first to advise us of the principles that every interpretation of Nietzsche must respect...The essential movement of Nietzsche's thought consists in self-contradiction; each time it affirms, the affirmation must be put in relation with the one opposing it: the decisive point of each of its certitudes passes through contestation, goes beyond it, and returns to it."

Another point Blanchot makes is that:

"In Nietzsche's work there is nothing that might be called a centre. There is no central work...Still, when his books are read in chronological order, one becomes aware of an obsessive monotony, despite the variety of preoccupations and changing colour of formulation. Something fundamental is seeking expression .... something like a non-centered centre ... This "whole" is neither a concept or system ...[it is] a non-systematic coherence."

These principles of interpretation lead us to read Nietzsche with a relentless suspicious gaze, which will prevent us being tempted to use Nietzsche.

An example of using Nietzsche can be found in the work of Lukacs, which interprets Nietzsche as belonging to a romanticism, which protests the degradation of human beings by capitalism that reduces everything to the mode of a thing. This alteration of the human being by capitalism liberates anarchic feelings without root or use.

Sarah Kofman, camera obscura, visual regimes

Whilst working on the visionary all-seeing eye for this post on phallocentric visual regimes at junk for code, I came across this book by Sarah Kofman. The blurb says that this text offers an extended reflection on the metaphor of the camera obscura as a mode of visual representation.

Kofman contrasts the mechanical function of the camera obscura as a kind of copy machine, rendering a mirror-image of the work, with its use in the writings of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In the camera obscura the image is always upside-down.

From memory Marx in the German Ideology uses this metaphor to explain the idelogy as inversions of the truth of capitalism established by social science (ie., historical materialism).Ideology represents reality in an inverted form; as a false consciousness that represents things 'upside down.

I presume the camera obscura metaphor in Freud's psychoanalytic, consciousness-centered notion of the 'human' refers to the unconscious as the dark room contrasted with the light of transparent vision of consciousness. Or, more complexly, Freud used the metaphor of developing a positive from a negative image in which the chamber of the becomes a series of chambers with negatives and positives, movements and repressions, screenings for and from the eye of consciousness.

For Nietzsche the camera obscura is a "metaphor for forgetting." Forgetting involves being attentive to the needs of the present and able to distinguish between what in the past is advantageous and what is disadvantageous for life. Thus "active" forgetting is a selective remembering, a recognition that not all past forms of knowledge and not all experiences are beneficial for present and future life.

Bataille, mysticism, Nietzsche #2

I would say that Bataille is an atheistic mystic who responds to the modern chasm between a theological Christian doctrine and a privatised lived spirituality that participates in the "nothingness" beyond all signifiers, and which transgresses all boundaries in a desolate nihilistic world.

So what does that mean?

Here is something to consider. It is an abstract of a paper on Bataille, religion and Nietzsche by Jim Urpeth that may be of some help. Jim says:

"Bataille's thought constitutes the most significant manifestation and development of the religious dimension of Nietzsche's thought. Following Nietzsche, Bataille offers a religious critique of Christianity. Central to Bataille´s perspective is the identification of a specifically religious form of 'eroticism' or self-expenditure. Bataille explores the affectivity of this 'religious eroticism' which he describes in terms of the interplay of 'anxiety' and 'joy' that characterises the 'experience' of the 'limit' or the transition across ontological planes he variously terms 'continuity' and 'discontinuity' or 'intimacy' and the 'order of things'. For Bataille a key religious phenomenon in this respect is 'mysticism', the states of ecstatic self-loss that characterises 'divine love'. Bataille valorises the 'sovereignty' of the mystics who, determined by the most fundamental processes of energetic matter, live beyond utility in disregard of 'project'. The key themes of this aspect of Bataille's thought, which resonate with elements of ... Nietzsche's ...thought are 'un-knowing' and 'communication'. However, in contrast to Nietzsche, Bataille .... offers an immanent critique of Christianity, which affirms traces of the 'sacred' within its predominantly 'profane' orientation."

What does this give us?

Well, we have a conscious reworking of Nietzsche's conception of Dionysus as opposed to Christ; and the idea of sacrifice [as] an ongoing quest for liberative potentials in the conjunction of violence and an atheistic 'religious spirit'. The Dionysian is affirmed in opposition to the Apollinian world of christian love and the crystalline beauty of a mathematically ordered, harmonious cosmos.

Then we have bodily function opposed to the head repressing and harnessing for utilitarian ends the free flow of vital forces. The affirmation of the body is also an embrace the Dionysian, as the unsubordinated expenditure of desire in laughter and tears, ecstasy and madness, vice and revolt, eroticism and death.

How then does this constitute a religion without a god in Bataille's hands?

The duality of the "sacred" and the "profane" in this Dionysisian celebration operate in terms of the elevated acts of profanation or desecration becoming singular mystical moments of Oneness with the All. The act of willfully violating taboos offers privileged access to the holy or sacred.

It is the nothingness that resonates. Bataille's lacerating" form of meditation (spirtual exercises) aims to induce a catastrophic dissolution of the self. It is only in such moments that Bataille could experience ecstasy and a form of communion. So he sought to plunge himself into nothingness: Here is his description of the resulting experience in Inner Experience:

"Contemplating night, I see nothing, love nothing. I remain immobile, frozen, absorbed in IT. I can imagine a landscape of terror, sublime, the earth open as a volcano, the sky filled with fire, or any other vision capable of "putting the mind into ecstasy"; as beautiful and disturbing as it may be, night surpasses this limited 'possible' and IT is nothing, there is nothing in IT which can be felt, not even finally darkness. In IT, everything fades away, but, exorbitant, I traverse an empty depth and the empty depth traverses me. In IT, I communicate with the "unknown" opposed to the ipse which I am; I become ipse, unknown to myself, two terms merge in a single wrenching, barely differing from a void -- not able to be distinguished from it by anything that I can grasp -- nevertheless differing from it more than does the world of a thousand colors." (pp.124-225)

That is a mystical experience of the void in which there is a fusion of subject and object.

Bataille, mysticism, Nietzsche #1

Bataille's Inner Experience, like his latter On Nietzsche, has a fragmentary form and consists of a mixture of diverse genres. These link the text back to both the texts of the medieval female Christian mystics (eg., Angela of Foligno) and to those of Nietzsche.

Bataille writes in Inner Experience:

"This book is a tale of despair...Like a marvellous madwomen, death unceasingly opened or closed the gates of the possible. In this maze,I could lose myself at will, give myself over to rapture, but I could also at will discern the paths,provide a precise passage for intellectual steps...Everything was giving way.I awakened before a new enigma, one I knew to be insolvable. The enigma was so bitter, it kept me in an impotence so overwhelming, that I experienced it as God, if he were to exist, would experience it."

This is a world of anguish and ecstasy, of revelation and suffering that link to, and mine, the female mystical texts.

Bataille couples the Christian mystics and Nietzsche. He rigorously defends this coupling, as he argues for a mystical and ecstatic experience in Nietzsche's work.Nietzsche as a mystic?

Dunno. I've always interpreted Nietzsche as a critic of the ascetic/religious hatred of the body and its turn away from this-worldly life. But Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra is infused with religious motifs and as Tyler Roberts indicates there are tensions in Nietzsche's texts:

"Nietzsche denounces the deep roots of the ascetic ideal in the west, yet with his ideas about "great suffering," discipline, and practices of body and spirit, pronounces his own asceticism. Nietzsche is extremely suspicious of intoxication and views the mystical path as a flight from the world, yet in the figures of Zarathustra and Dionysus he inscribes ecstasy deeply into his texts."

If Nietzsche's texts are interpreted from this perspective then wecan say that Nietzsche´s hostility to Christianity does not spring from an antipathy to 'religious experience' per se. As Jim Urpeth observes:

"Indeed the theme of 'affirmation' [in Nietzsche] is of an intrinsically 'religious' character which contests Platonic-Christian appropriation of the 'divine'. Nietzsche reconceives transcendence in immanent rather than transcendent terms on the basis of the recovery of the 'healthy' religious sensibility he detects in the ancient Greeks. For Nietzsche the 'noble' religious affectivity of the pre-Socratic Greeks is quite distinct from that which constitutes Christianity."

Okay that's Nietzsche, Bataille has a case. What then of the mystics and Bataille?

What mystics and Bataille have in common is their concern to negate their self so fully that the self is lost. Is Bataille a mystic?

Many would say no. They would argue that, despite all proximities between Bataille's texts and those of the mystics, they differ in their aims or aimlessness. First, Bataille is not a Christian. Secondly, whereas the mystics' path ends with the divine encounter, Bataille renounces all objects, aims, or end for his quest and his desire. Thirdly, Bataille also rejects all idealism and any hope for salvation. He rejects idealism as it refuses the real physical world and its physical truth.

I'm not so sure. Csn you not have a post-Christian mysticism?

What I do understand is that Bataille had to find a way of speaking to a world different from a world full of idealism. Hence the turn to the body. Hence the turn to the ecstasy of pain and suffering.

But he also seems to follow the writing strategy of female Christian mystics, such as Teresa of Avila or the writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg. Instead of the sacrifice and redemption of religion we have the sacrifice and redemption of writing.

Bataille: inner experience

Back to Bataille and his opposition of the sacred (mystical experience) to the world of work and utility. The pathway to the sacred is inner experience that has its own authority. So Bataille turns inward, re-enters oneself, places it opposition to the outer everyday social world and lives the experience of subjectivity to the point of terror.

What is the point of doing this? What is the point of turning inward to the world of pain, memories of past suffering, and psychological distortions and projections, to deal with the damage and pain.

It does not seem to be about healing the psychological damage so that we can become more healthy.

Update: 2 Feb
I try to connect to Bataille by linking him to the suffering in my own life. But it provies to be elusive because Bataille makes a turn to the sacred. The sacred, for Bataille, can only be known through intense pain and deep emotional ecstasy. Bataille writes:

"Experience attains in the end the fusion of object and subject, being as subject as non-knowledge, as object the unknown...this attained as an extremity of the possible.....And being dissolved into this new way of thinking, it finds itself to be no longer anything but heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean."(p.9)

So Bataille's strategy is to rework an ecstatic visionary tradition in order to critique the anti-bodily, anti-emotional character of the idealist Enlightenment. But I am puzzled how this is done.

Is not Bataille's working from within, and a reworking of, the sacred in medieval Christian mystical tradition, also working within idealism?

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