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Paradoxes of the Pineal: From Descartes to Georges Bataille

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

David Farrell Krell
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Behind the third ventricle of the human brain a miniscule pedunculate bud, close to the optic thalamus, that is, to the two beds of optic nerves, a gland soft in substance yet containing gritty particles. Function: unknown. Because of its pine-cone shape it is called the conarium or pineal body, even though the recent photographs of it by Nilsson and Lindberg show it to be morphologically reminiscent of nothing so much as the plucked tail of a gamebird, which Simon Dedalus refers to as ‘the pope's nose’. Today it is presumed to be an endocrine gland of some sort, even though there is no doubt that morphogenetically in all vertebrates it is a vestigial unpaired eye. As fossil evidence indicates—and we still find it almost fully developed in some extant amphibians—ancestral vertebrates possessed in addition to the paired bilateral eyes a solitary dorsal eye opening at the top of the skull to the sky. This singular evagination of the brain—something betwixt a visual organ and a gland—seems to hold a special fascination for philosophers. Here we shall consider two of them: René Descartes (1596–1650), the father, as we say, of modern philosophy; and Georges Bataille (1897–1962), the father, as many say, of post-modern philosophy. Three hundred years separate them. Devotion to the pineal body conjoins them.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 21: Contemporary French Philosophy , March 1987 , pp. 215 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1987

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References

1 See Nilsson, Lennart and Lindberg, Jan, Behold Man (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 170.Google Scholar ‘The pope's nose’ appears of course at that famous Christmas dinner at the outset of Joyce, 's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 33.Google Scholar Contemporary endocrinology appears to be making considerable advances in research on the functions of the pineal gland, but I shall not try to do justice to them here, where it is a question of paradox and obsession rather than physiology.

2 See articles XXXI and XXXIV of the Treatise. I shall cite Descartes' Oeuvres et Lettres, Bridoux, André (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1953)Google Scholar, simply by page number in parentheses in the body of my text. I shall occasionally refer to the Adam-Tannery edition, cited it as AT, with volume and page numbers.

3 In the Pléiade, edition, p. 855Google Scholar; cf. AT, XI, p. 180. It is important to refer to AT for the Treatise on Man and its integument, The World, along with the editors' ‘Avertissement’, in volume XI of that edition.

4 Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [first published 1759–67]), 162.Google Scholar

5 For this and the following, see the Traité de l'Homme, Pléiade, pp. 812–815, 841–846 and 850–863Google Scholar; corresponding to AT, XI, pp. 127–131, 165–171 and 174–189. The page references in parentheses in my text from now on refer first to the Pléiade edition, and then, after the solidus, to AT, XI.

6 See Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, Stoekl, Allan (ed.) (Manchester University Press, 1985), 74–90.Google Scholar In Bataille, 's Oeuvres complètesGoogle Scholar, presented by Foucault, Michel, 10 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1970 ff.)Google Scholar, see II, 13–35. In my text I will cite the French pagination, then the English: See also the selections published in October 36 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, Spring 1986).

7 Ferenczi, Sáandor, Schriften zur Psychoanalyse, 2 vols, (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1972), II, 317–400.Google Scholar English translation, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, by Bunker, Henry Alden (New York: Norton, 1968).Google Scholar

8 See Lacan, Jacques, ‘Kant avec Sade’, in Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 1966), 765.Google Scholar See also p. 779, ‘Oeuvre ennuyeuse…’

9 Freud, Sigmund, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930)Google Scholar, in the Freud, Studienausgabe, 12 vols (Frankfurt am Main; Fischer, 1982), IX, 229–230 and 235–236.Google Scholar See also letters 55 and 75 to Fliess, in Freud, , Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse, Kris, Ernst, (ed.) (New York: Imago, 1950), 198–199, 246–248.Google Scholar

10 I am thinking of a whole series of portraits from the mid–1940s to the mid–1950s, e.g. ‘Head I’ (1948)Google Scholar, ‘Head II’ (1949)Google Scholar, ‘Study for Portrait’ (1949)Google Scholar, ‘Pope II’ (1951)Google Scholar and ‘Chimpanzee’ (1955).Google Scholar See also the analysis by Ades, Dawn, ‘Web of Images’, in Francis Bacon (London: The Tate Gallery, 1985), esp. pp. 12–15.Google Scholar

11 I am grateful to A. Phillips Griffiths for provoking these thoughts on the limits of my undertaking here. Nor can I do justice to his suggestion that I take up the question of soul and body in Kant's paralogisms of pure reason (KrV, B399ff.), especially the second paralogism, concerning the simplicity and incorruptibility of the soul—a simplicity and incorruptibility that are surely reminiscent of the petite glande in Descartes' system. Kant calls the doctrine of incorruptibility ‘the Achilles of all dialectical deductions’ (A 351), ‘the cardinal principle of the doctrine of the rational soul’ (A 356) and the ‘mainstay’ (A 361: Hauptstütze) of rational psychology. Yet this central pillar is fissured, the cardinal or hinge is jammed, and Achilles has his heel. I shall refrain from comment on either the highly reduced and ‘logicized’ version in B, or the more expansive discussion in A, both of them much discussed in the literature, and shall merely pose two questions concerning Kant's introductory remarks to the paralogisms, remarks common to both A and B. First, if the ‘I think’ is ‘the sole text’, der alleinige Text (B 401), of rational psychology, do not body (Körper) and matter (Materie) come to intervene in The Critique of Pure Reason as a kind of fiction—a radically undecipherable text? Second, is it because matter is ‘no thing-in-itself but only a representation in us’ (A 360) that Kant envisages the monstrous possibility of an empirical psychology that would be ‘a kind of physiology of the inner sense’ (B 405)? Perhaps the text of rational psychology begins to suffer change already in Descartes’ fiction? Perhaps what Bataille is attempting can be described as a physiology of the inner sense?

12 More precisely, it is the second half of Heidegger's 1929–30 lecture course, ‘The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World—Finitude—Solitude’, that is relevant here. See volume 29/30 of the Martin Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1983), 273ff.Google Scholar See also the remarks on this course by Derrida, Jacques and Krell, D. F. in ‘Reading Heidegger’, Research in Phenomenology, XVII, 1987, passim.Google Scholar

13 Heidegger cites the letter (in AT, IX, 14) in his Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1967), 195Google Scholar

14 I am thinking of Schelling—and Schelling's use of Hamann—in the treatise On the Essence of Human Freedom (1809).Google Scholar See Krell, D. F., ‘The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century’, in Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten YearsGoogle Scholar, Moneta, Giuseppina, Sallis, John and Taminiaux, Jacques (eds) (forthcoming in 1989).Google Scholar