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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
1 Bataille, Georges, Inner Experience, translated by Boldt, L. A. (New York: SUNY Press, 1988).Google Scholar
2 As we shall see, in Inner Experience knowledge and Hegel are both reducible to something Bataille calls “work” or “project.” After offering an introductory scheme to his text, Bataille claims that “opposition to the idea of project—which takes up an essential part of this book—is so necessary within me that, having written the detailed plan … I can no longer hold myself to it” (p. 6). All of Bataille's comments on both project and the purpose of his text echo this sentiment.
3 “No one understood more than [Hegel] the possibilities of intelligence (no doctrine is comparable to his—it is the summit of positive intelligence)” (ibid., p. 109).
4 Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Miller, A. V. (London: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. I will cite this text by numbered paragraph. For Bataille's discussion of the accuracy of Hegel's account see, e.g., Bataille, Inner Experience, pp. 77–81.
5 I do not aim here to challenge the logical or phenomenological validity of any of Bataille's specific arguments. While I do take issue with many arguments within Bataille's account, undoubtedly many of his supporters would see my criticisms as so many vain attempts to make Bataille speak the language of homogeneity. Consequently, I shall simply present Bataille's ontology in full, as he expresses it, with all of its consequences made fully explicit. My critique will rest solely upon an exposition of what Bataille's ontology actually entails, and what one is compelled to assert about his conception of the heterogeneous on his own terms.
6 Ibid., p. 93.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 85.
9 Ibid., p. 82.
10 Ibid., p. 85.
11 Ibid., p. 83.
12 Ibid., p. 94.
13 Ibid., p. 85.
14 Cf. ibid., p. 84.
15 Thus, a living being is constantly vitiated by the elements of its own death, and human beings are aware of this necessary vitiation. Human beings know themselves to be a kind of living death; a thing constituted by that no less which deconstitutes it. An excellent account of both the ontology of beings, and the consequences of our awareness of it, is contained in Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge Press, 1992), especially pp. 160–83.Google Scholar
16 Bataille, Inner Experience, pp. 81–84.
18 For vastly different perspectives on this anguish and the necessary response to it by human beings, see Sollers, Phillipe, “The Roof: Essay in Systematic Reading,” in Bataille: A Critical Reader, edited by Botting, F. and Wilson, S. (London: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 74–101, and Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pp. 74–79.Google Scholar
19 Cf. Bataille, Inner Experience, pp. 85–86.
20 Cf. ibid., pp. 9, 53.
21 “[T]his will to be the universe is, however, only a ridiculous challenge directed at an unknowable immensity” (ibid., p. 85).
22 Cf. ibid., pp. 9, 85–86.
23 Cf. ibid., p. 46.
24 Cf. ibid., pp. 83–84.
25 On the intimate connection between knowledge and language as well as the difficulties surrounding the rejection of language as a key element in inner experience, see Arnould, Elisabeth, “The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of Sacrifice,” Diacritics, 20, 2 (Summer 1996): 86–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For by far the most subtle and important account of Bataille's theory of language, see Derrida, Jacques, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, translated by Bass, A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 251–77Google Scholar. Derrida has been read far too often—and too often by Hegelians—as simply siding with Bataille in this debate. While there is no room here to adequately address this reading here, let me simply add my voice to the growing chorus of those who see Derrida as being, in fact, as scathing in his criticisms of those who attempt to step outside of metaphysics and reason as he is regarding those who apologize for presence and logos. For a discussion of this view see Critchley, Simon, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (New York: Verso, 1999), pp. 106–21.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., p. 46.
27 English translation in Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess, translated and edited by Stoekl, A. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 137–60.Google Scholar
28 Ibid., pp. 137–38.
29 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 108.
30 It is important to recall, here, that this is Bataille's account of Hegel's absolute, not mine. Despite his praise for Hegel and the fundamental place (his interpretation of) Hegel's Phenomenology plays in his philosophy, it seems possible, and perhaps likely, that Bataille never actually read Hegel. In his most explicit and direct works on Hegel, his reading is overtly Kojevean, and refers only to sections of the Phenomenology cited by Kojève in his lectures. We know Bataille attended those lectures and read Kojève's ensuing articles with care, leading many to note the strong Kojèvean tone of his writings (e.g., Flay, Joseph, “Hegel, Derrida and Bataille's Laughter,” in Hegel and His Critics, edited by Desmond, William [New York: SUNY Press, 1989], pp. 163–73)Google Scholar. Whether or not he was familiar with any more elements of Hegel's system, it is certainly evident that his explicit version of Hegel is limited to the Phenomenology, and that this limited reading is skewed by his adherence to Kojève's (at the time) dominant reading. For further insight into his Kojèvean slant, see Bataille, Georges, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” translated by Strauss, J., Yale French Studies, 78 (1990): 9–20.Google Scholar
31 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 80.
32 Ibid., p. 108. I would like to draw attention here to the association of the human and the divine in Bataille. This connection is made more explicitly in later works such as Erotism, translated by Dalwood, M. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986)Google Scholar, and Tears of Eros, translated by Connor, P. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989)Google Scholar. In the text at issue, however, it should be clear that Bataille draws a strong link between “divine” experience and specifically human ipse. Some commentators focus on the anti-human nature of such divine experiences, pointing at a kind of being beyond or prior to the human (for example, Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, pp. 133–59, “Aborting the Human Race”)– Burke, Victoria I. (“Antigone's Transgression: Hegel and Bataille on the Divine and the Human,” Dialogue, 38 [1999]: 535–45)CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that Bataille posits two “polar opposites, the divine and the human realms” (p. 535). Bataille, however, continually echoes the sentiment cited in the present passage, i.e., that the kind of experience he calls divine (or, as we shall see, “inner”) is only available once one has achieved all the possibles made available through knowledge and, consequently, divine existence is achievable solely by human beings. One must “recommence and undo Hegel's Phenomenology” (Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 80) for “[i]nner experience is led by discursive reason. Reason alone has the power to undo its work” (ibid., p. 46). For more detailed accounts of the relationship between the divine and the human, see Bataille, Erotism, pp. 29–49, and Heimonet, Jean-Michel, “Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism,” Diacritics, 26, 2 (1996): 59–73.Google Scholar
33 See Hollier, Denis, “The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,” in Botting, and Wilson, , eds., Bataille: A Critical Reader, pp. 59–73Google Scholar, for an excellent account of “the contradiction between the existential position of the subject and his knowledge, the gap between what man is and what he knows” (p. 70).
34 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 14.
35 Among Bataille's papers, attached to the rough draft of the introduction to Inner Experience, the following passage (included as an appendix to Inner Experience) is found, “inner experience is linked to the necessity, for the mind, of putting everything into question—without any conceivable respite or rest” (p. 175). It is interesting to note that what seems like, at best, a moral imperative to question is claimed, here, as a necessity, specifically for the human, knowing mind.
36 “By virtue of the fact that it is the negation of other values, other authorities, experience, having a positive existence, becomes itself positive value and authority” (ibid., p. 7).
37 Ibid., p. 14.
38 For a vital discussion of the sovereignty of the interior realm as contestation, by a thinker close to Bataille in both content and style, see Blanchot, Maurice, “The Limit Experience,” in The Infinite Conversation, translated by Hanson, S. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 202–29.Google Scholar
39 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 12.
40 Ibid., p. 53.
41 Ibid., p. 117.
42 Cf. ibid., pp. 117, 153.
43 Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” p. 147.
44 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 114.
45 Ibid., p. 118.
46 Ibid., p. 80.
47 Ibid., p. 118.
48 Ibid.
49 Cf. Hollier: “instead of positing two principles in conflict in the world, it posits two worlds … never do the two ‘totalities’ let themselves be grasped simultaneously, never are they side by side, next to each other, because they equally claim to be everything” (“The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,” p. 62).
50 Cf. Baudrillard, Jean, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,” translated by Miller, D. J., in Bataille: A Critical Reader, pp. 191–95Google Scholar: “Continuity, sovereignty, intimacy, immanent immensity: a single mythic thought in the work of Georges Bataille” (p. 191). While a sympathetic and subtle reader of Bataille's texts, particularly on the concept of general economy, in reading him one cannot help but be struck by Baudrillard's critique of the overall homogenizing tendency of Bataille's heterogeneity, a critique with which I am entirely in agreement.
51 As Bataille himself puts it, “Nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what.… But project is no longer in this case that, positive, of salvation, but that, negative, of abolishing the power of words, hence of project” (Inner Experience, p. 22). In other words, heterogeneity is the homogeneous project of a return to our “original” homogeneity.
52 Ibid., p. 154.
53 Ibid., p. 120.
54 Ibid., p. 116. Many commentators remark on the untenability of inner experience in the long run, e.g., Sollers, “The Roof,” p. 84; Botting and Wilson, eds., “Introduction,” in Bataille: A Critical Reader, pp. 1–23. These critics, however, focus mainly on what I soon call the redundant oscillation of inner experience. I shall argue, however, that Bataille recommends a way out of this “untenability.”
55 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 116.
56 Ibid., p. 111. Cf., Hollier “The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille”: “These two worlds cannot exist simultaneously because, by definition, there is only one world; they will thus have to succeed each other” (p. 63). This oscillation is also the central theme of Bataille, Georges, On Nietzsche, translated by Boone, B. (New York: Paragon House, 1994), esp. pp. 13–47.Google Scholar
57 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 154.
58 Ibid., p. 155. Cf. Baudrillard, Jean, “Death in Bataille,” translated by Grant, I. H., in Bataille: A Critical Reader, edited by F. Botting and S. Wilson, pp. 139–45Google Scholar: “Sacrificial death … aims at continuity” (p. 143). Bataille closes Tears of Eros with these verses: “All I can do for now is to add a new view, and, if possible, the final/view, to those I have already proposed./This would be to plunge into a complete whole whose cohesion might/appear to me at long last” (p. 173).
59 Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 129.
60 Ibid., p. 155.
61 This excessive conception of the subject in Hegel's Phenomenology has been affirmed by some Hegelians in response to the challenge of Bataille. See both Flay (“Derrida, Hegel and Bataille's Laughter”), and Westphal, Merold (“Laughing at Hegel,” Owl of Minerva, 28, 1 [1996]: 251–77)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for discussions of the viability of this excessive movement as a defence against what they perceive as Bataille's critique. However, there is no greater exposition of this view than that laid out in Hyppolyte, Jean, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Cherniak, S. and Heckman, J. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974)Google Scholar: “Now the finite subject is not limited in the way that an object can be limited; an object does not know its own limit, which is external to it; the subject continually seeks to transgress its limit. It tends toward the infinite, the unconditioned” (p. 145). Although this text was already becoming influential in France during Bataille's lifetime, he shows no sign of having considered it in his own thinking.
62 Hegel, Phenomenology, §182.
63 Ibid., §180. See also Hyppolyte, Genesis and Structure: “Consciousness of life rises above life … to prove to others as well as to oneself that one is an autonomous self-consciousness” (p. 169).
64 It should be remarked that, for Hegel, the beings that Bataille calls servility and sovereignty both must be moved through by consciousness. Consciousness, exceeding itself in its movement towards the absolute, cannot rest on its path of work, neither as Bondsman nor as Lord. Both moments are necessarily run through according to the essence of consciousness as self-excess. Hyppolite summarizes the Lord's actions as follows: “The master did not fear death, he raised himself immediately above all the vicissitudes of existence; the slave trembled before it, and in that primordial anguish he perceived his essence as a whole” (ibid., p. 175).
65 Hegel, Phenomenology, §189.
66 See Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure: “Self exists only by opposing itself…. Life which discovers itself only in the midst of the deepest laceration: therein lies the soul of the dialectic of life” (p. 577).
67 Hegel, Phenomenology, §804.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., §807.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., §808.
73 Ibid.
74 Had he considered the greater Logic, Bataille would have found Hegel's distaste for, and arguments against, this brand of mere agitation or oscillation, precisely in reference to the issues of limits and limitlessness, being and immediate indifference, etc. See Hegel's Science of Logic, translated by Miller, A. V. (New York: Allen & Unwin, 1993), pp. 137–56.Google Scholar
75 Hegel, Phenomenology, §808.
76 Miller, Hegel's Science of Logic, pp. 412–38.
77 Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 2, translated by Knox, T. M. (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 1235.Google Scholar
78 I would like to thank Jay Lampert and Antonio Calcagno, and Dialogue's anonymous referees for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.