To whom do the streets belong? This question, formulated by Susan Buck-Morss in an article on Walter Benjamin, will serve as the starting point for an itinerary among some of Bataille’s writings between 1930 and 1941. The itinerary will be labyrinthine, because following Bataille is never a simple process; but also because that decade was particularly tortuous in its historical unfolding, and I want to read Bataille’s texts with and against the history of the 1930s. I will argue that as the decade moved toward its disastrous close, Bataille’s thinking about politics and action turned increasingly inward; and that, rather than constituting a major break in his thought, this inward turn—culminating in the publication of L’expérience intérieure in 1943—offered a solution, albeit a paradoxical one, to the ‘outward’ questions of politics and action that had preoccupied him throughout the 1930s. As to what this has to do with virility—wait and see.
‘Streets are the dwelling place of the collective’, wrote Walter Benj amin in the late 1920s.1 In this early note for his Passagen-Werk, Benjamin celebrated the street as the home of the crowd, ‘eternally restless, eternally moving’, where the proletariat might ‘awake’ to itself as a revolutionary subject. By the late 1920s, the street could claim a glorious history as the site of revolutionary uprisings all over Europe, even if, like the Paris Commune, many of those revolutions failed. Buck-Morss notes, however, that Benjamin was aware of another side to the ‘restless’ collective: what he called its ‘unconscious, dreaming state’, the state which—as became all too clear after 1933—was most receptive to the ‘political phantasmagoria of fascism’ (p. 117). After 1933, any attempt to think politically about the street had to grapple with its profound ambiguity: for to its long-accrued connotations of ‘progressive’ revolutionary action, there now had to be added the disturbingly regressive connotations of mass psychology. Marxists had to recognize that the street was not only the place of socialist revolution leading toward a new dawn, but the place of Nazi marches and torchlight parades, exploiting the darkest human longings for violence, war and death.
The ambiguities of the street did not (do not) end there, however; for if it is the privileged site of collective action and mass manifestations, whether of the Right or Left, the street is also the site of private needs, curiosities, obsessions. ‘Only those for whom poverty and vice turn the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me’, wrote Benjamin about his sheltered youth in Berlin.2 The penniless vagrant seeking a place to sleep, the wealthy prowler in search of erotic thrills, the bar crawler, the criminal, the prostitute, the poet—these too are denizens of the street, and what distinguishes these night people is that they move alone. Not necessarily literally, but spiritually and metaphysically, they are alone.
It was just five o’clock and the sun was burning hot. In the middle of the street, I would have liked to speak to the others; I was lost in the middle of a blind crowd. I felt as dull and as impotent [impuissant] as a baby.3
At the corner of a street, anguish, a dirty dizzying anguish, undid me (maybe because I had just seen two furtive whores on the staircase of a toilet)… I began to wander down those receptive streets which run from the Carrefour Poissonnière to the rue Saint-Denis. The solitude and darkness made me completely drunk. The night was naked in the deserted streets and I wanted to strip myself as naked as she: I took off my pants and hung them on my arm. I would have liked to tie the coolness of the night over my legs, a heady sense of freedom carried me forward. I felt myself growing bigger. I was holding my erect member in my hand.4
These two passages, taken from Bataille’s erotic fictions, were written six years apart (Le bleu du ciel, although not published until 1957, was written in 1935; Madame Edwarda was written and first published in an extremely limited edition, under the pseudonym Pierre Angélique, in 1941). Both may be called secret works, unavowed by their author at the time of writing, except to his close friends. Maurice Blanchot has spoken of a ‘communication diurne’ and a ‘communication nocturne’ in Bataille’s writing.5 These two works belong to the nocturnal category.
The relation of each of these nightworks to the ‘daytime works’—the political or philosophical essays—Bataille was writing around the same time is, however, interestingly different; and the two nightworks themselves are significantly different from each other, despite a certain family resemblance. This is evident in the above passages: in the first, the solitary narrator is surrounded by a crowd, but feels all the more alone and lost. The sun, way past noon, is still burning hot (we are in a southern city, Barcelona); and although he is a grown man, the narrator, Troppmann, feels reduced to the powerlessness of a baby. In the second passage, the narrator is also an anguished soul alone in the street, this time literally as well as spiritually. He is wandering in Paris, in the neighbourhood André Breton had celebrated in Nadja thirteen years earlier—deserted now, not the bustling place of Breton’s fateful encounter. In paradoxical contrast to Troppmann, this narrator’s anguish leads to a triumphant, if transgressive, virility: in the cool of the night, he walks the street half naked, holding his erect penis before him—like a lance, perhaps, or a gun.
Despite his persistent anguish and obsession with ‘undoing’ (‘l’angoisse… me décomposa’, ‘anguish undid me’), the narrator of MadameEdwarda is a potent male; soon after this opening passage he will enter a brothel and ‘go upstairs’ like any other John. Of course, that is not all he will do, for Madame Edwardd is no ordinary piece of pornography. As Bataille explained years later, it is the work without which the central section of his major philosophical work, L’expérience intérieure, which he was writing at the same time, could not be properly understood.6 In both works, virility is an important preoccupation, as it is in Bataille’s political essays of the 1930s and in Le bleu du ciel, where the sexual and political imbrications of that word are explored with particular acuity.
The narrator of Le bleu du ciel, despite the plethora promised by his name, is suffering from a generalized impotence; it is as if the crisis he is undergoing, at once political and sexual, had ironically transformed him into ‘Trop-peu-mann’, not enough of a man. Sexually, he is in crisis because, having met the ‘most beautiful and exciting woman’ of his life, he finds himself impotent despite efforts that exhaust him (pp. 404–5). He remains impotent with this woman (whose name, emblematically, is split: Dorothea/Dirty) until close to the end of the novel, when he is finally able to make love to her on All Souls Day (le jour des morts) in the mud above a cemetery in Germany. But his frantic lovemaking above the tombs seems more like an exception than the attainment of a new norm—a sudden surge of power, not a steady stream.
Politically, Troppmann’s crisis occurs in a European context. The year is 1934: he is in Vienna the day after the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss by the Nazis in late July; after that in Paris, where he suffers from nightmares and falls ill before leaving for Barcelona in late September, just in time to witness the preparation of the workers’ uprising—and then its crushing by government troops. (Although Troppmann does not mention it, the troops that crushed the Catalan revolt of October 1934 were led by a certain General Franco.) Finally, after leaving Barcelona (where he has been joined by his ‘impossible’ lover Dorothea), he and Dirty travel to Frankfurt where he watches, with a mixture of fascination and ‘black irony’, a parade of Nazi youth marching to military music under the leadership of a ‘kid degenerately thin, with the sulky face of a fish’, who moves a huge baton up and down in front of him like an obscene penis (p. 486).
Although Troppmann is evidently a Marxist and was involved in various political projects before his illness in Paris, once he is in Barcelona he is unable to muster anything but a touristic interest in the revolutionary action around him. Just before the passage I first quoted, when he walks in the crowd, reduced to solitude and impotence beneath the burning sun, we read the following sentence: ‘I hated the curiosity which was pushing me to participate, from very far, in the civil war’ (his participation consists in having offered his car to another French Marxist intellectual who is actively involved in the uprising). A few lines before that, we read: ‘I could not deny to myself that I had a guilty conscience toward the workers. It was unimportant, it made no sense, but I was all the more depressed because my guilty conscience toward Lazare was of the same order’ (p. 448). Lazare is yet another French Marxist intellectual in Barcelona, a young woman who simultaneously fascinates and repels Troppmann because of her political passion and authority—and also because he finds her sexually unattractive, an ugly ‘dirty virgin’ in contrast to the beautiful, exciting Dirty. (The model for Lazare is said to be Simone Weil, whom Bataille frequented in left-wing circles around 1934.)
Troppmann’s association of the workers with Lazare evokes a crucial earlier scene that occurred while he was still in Paris. Just before falling ill, but already in a feverish state, Troppmann visits Lazare in her apartment, which she shares with her stepfather, a professor of philosophy. The discussion centres on what Melou, the stepfather, calls the ‘anguishing dilemma’ confronting intellectuals once they have admitted ‘the collapse of socialist hopes’: ‘Should we isolate ourselves in silence? Or should we, on the contrary, join the workers in their last acts of resistance, thus accepting an implacable and fruitless death [unemort implacable et stérile]?’
Troppmann, in a state of shock, feels unable to respond. Finally, he asks Lazare to show him the toilet, where he proceeds to ‘piss for a long time’ and tries to vomit by shoving two fingers down his throat. Slightly relieved, he comes back and confronts Lazare and Melou: if they really believe the working class is ‘screwed’ (foutue), why are they still ‘Communists…or socialists…or whatever?’ Lazare answers: ‘Come what may, we must be on the side of the oppressed.’ This infuriates Troppmann, who thinks to himself: ‘Sure enough, she’s a Christian!’ The stepfather’s reply, though not Christian, is also in the idealist register. He compares himself to a peasant working on his land despite the gathering storm: stubborn, and at the same time sublime, the peasant ‘will raise his arms for nothing toward the sky…waiting for the lightning to strike’. Troppmann, seeing in Melou’s own upraised arm ‘the perfect image of a frightful despair’, feels ready to cry and rushes away (pp. 422–5).
Returning home, he falls seriously ill; but first he has a terrifying dream: on a stage he sees a corpse transformed into an armoured marble statue of Minerva, ‘upright and warlike (dressée et agressive) beneath her helmet’ (p. 419). Brandishing a marble scimitar (cimeterre), the ‘crazed’ Minerva, suddenly a giant, notices him in the ‘alley’ (ruelle) from where he is watching:
I had then become small, and when she noticed me she saw that I was afraid… Suddenly, she came down and threw herself on me, twirling her macabre weapon crazily, with increasing vigour. It was about to come down: I was paralyzed with horror.
(OC, III, 420)
Not the least interesting thing about this dream is that Troppmann recounts and interprets it before he recounts his meeting with Lazare and her stepfather, even though he subsequently makes clear that it occurred on the night after that meeting (p. 420: ‘that meeting resembled a nightmare, even more depressing than that dream, which I was to have the following night.’). Giving us a premature interpretation, Troppmann sees only his sexual dilemma in the dream: ‘I understood that, in this dream, Dirty, having become crazy and at the same time dead, had taken on the clothes and the aspect of the Commander’s statue’ (p. 420). Alluding to the Don Juan theme with which the novel began (a two-page monologue by an unidentified voice who could be Don Juan, evoking his encounter with the Commander in the cemetery —cimetière/cimeterre), Troppmann offers an exclusively Oedipal interpretation of the dream, and consequently of his own impotence. A desired woman who is at the same time a vengeful father is a powerful deterrent to sexual performance.
This psychosexual interpretation, although highly plausible, forecloses another, more obviously political interpretation that Troppmann would have been obliged to make if he had recounted the dream in its chronological place, after the visit with Lazare and Melou. By deferring his telling of the political discussion until after the telling and interpretation of the dream, Troppmann avoids having to notice that the virgin goddess who seeks to castrate him evokes the ‘dirty virgin’ Lazare as much as the sexual, silken Dirty. Lazare and her stepfather (the Commander, Zeus, Father-God?) have foretold the ‘implacable and fruitless death’ of intellectuals who support the working class. If the working class is ‘foutue’, it will be the revolution, not a dead Commander’s statue, that will kill Troppmann, as well as anyone else who may wish to ‘join the workers in their last acts of resistance’.
Note that the anxiety of the Oedipal/Don Juan plot, which Troppmann sees in the dream, is not rendered irrelevant by the political interpretation; to propose the sexual anxiety as the only one, however, as Troppmann does, is to deny the ‘other story’, the story of political uprisings and their failure. Walking the streets of Barcelona just before the workers’ insurrection (which he knows is doomed to fail), Troppmann tells himself that he cannot deny his feelings of guilt toward the workers and toward Lazare—for Lazare, as is made clear in an earlier scene, has the courage of her ‘Christian’ idealist convictions, even to the point of being willing to die for them. Troppmann, on the other hand, cowers before the upraised arm; and beneath the burning sun, he feels as helpless as a baby. On the day the insurrection begins and the sound of machine-guns and cannons fills the air, he does not venture into the street, but stays in his hotel room and watches from the window. Dirty, who has joined him and to whom he still cannot make love, goads him ironically: ‘If only you could lose your head!’ (‘Si seulement tu pouvais perdre la tête!’—p. 477).
Decapitation is a symbolic castration, if Freud is to be believed; but Troppmann is already symbolically castrated, so his decapitation would be redundant. (Troppmann, incidentally, was the name of a mass murderer beheaded in Paris in 1870.) Unless, of course, ‘losing his head’ restored his potency, according to that characteristically Bataillian equation which states that a violent loss of control is the precondition of jouissance, a radical letting go. Bataille would start to explore the political and philosophical connotations of potency as headlessness the year after writing Le bleu du ciel, when he founded the secret society of Acéphale. But in Le bleu du ciel, the male character who ‘loses his head’ is simply killed, not made potent: Michel, the revolutionary intellectual to whom Troppmann offered his car, is spurned in love, goes out into the street and is shot. The woman who spurned him blames herself and Troppmann: ‘I was horrible… The way you were with me…he lost his head’ (pp. 478–9). But Troppmann had already predicted Michel’s death much earlier (p. 448), independently of love: ‘If there’s an uprising, he’ll be in the moon, as usual. He’ll get himself stupidly killed.’ (‘Dans une émeute, il sera comme il est d’ordinaire, dans la lune, il se fera bêtement tuer.’)
Michel, being ‘in the moon’, gets killed in the noonday sun. But I am tempted to say by the noonday sun for, as Leo Bersani has noted, there is a powerful network of associations in the novel between the sun and murderous violence.7 Troppmann, recalling a childhood memory of seeing slaughtered sheep in a butcher’s van moving in the ‘blazing sun’ (‘en plein soleil’), associates the sun with red, and blood. In the passage I first quoted, the burning sun seems to be at least partly responsible for his feeling of infantile powerlessness. This configuration is repeated later, when Troppmann sees a ‘va-nu-pieds’, a ‘man in rags’, staring at him in the street: ‘He had an insolent air, in the sun, a solar air [unaspectsolaire]… I would have liked to have that frightful air, that solar air like him, instead of resembling a child who never knows what he wants’ (p. 468).
Troppmann’s Oedipal anxieties are closely related, as his nightmare in Paris suggested, to his political anxieties. In both cases, the son’s virility in the face of a powerful, castrating father (sun) is at stake. Bersani, commenting on this link, writes: ‘Bataille suggests that the political is always related to the sexual, but their interconnectedness implies no priority on one side or the other.’8 Bataille appeals to Bersani because he refuses ‘the culture of redemption’, a theory of sublimation that opposes the ‘high’ realm of the political to the ‘low’ realm of sex.
Bersani offers a powerful reading of Le bleu du ciel, but his framework is more philosophical than historical (despite his essay’s title, ‘Literature and History’). He does not ignore the novel’s concern with politics, and comments perceptively on the closing scene of the marching Nazi youth observed by Troppmann. His conclusions, however, are phrased in general and somewhat abstract terms:
For Bataille, a false perspective on Nazism gives an account of it… cut off from the desiring energies that produced it… In its avoidance of this reifying seriousness about History and Politics, Bataille’s art of vertiginous replications is designed to make us feel that we are already everywhere in history, and that an ethos of political engagement is grounded in the illusion that we have not produced the violence against which we struggle.
(p. 120)
As a philosophical summing up that emphasizes the ambiguity of Bataille’s thought (his ‘vertiginous replications’ allow the sun, for example, to be associated with both the workers’ uprising and the marching Nazis), this strikes me as right. What Bersani’s reading overlooks is the specific historical moment in which Le bleu du ciel was written, and the concrete problems of action and politics that Bataille was trying, both in that novel and in his public life and writings of the 1930s, to work through. He was not only trying to arrive at philosophical truths during those years; he was also trying to act in a specific historical situation that looked, after 1933, more and more bleak. The scene between Troppmann and Lazare and Melou, which Bersani’s reading ignores, is not an abstract discussion—it presents the dilemma faced by anti-Fascist and Marxist intellectuals (especially those not enrolled in the Communist Party) throughout the 1930s, and with particular urgency from 1933 on. Troppmann’s sense of powerlessness must be understood in a historical context, which was also that of Bataille. Bataille’s biographer, Michel Surya, speculates that Le bleu du ciel remained unpublished in 1935 because it was in too much contradiction with Bataille’s political activities and writings at the time:
If it had been published, the book would have created a scandal: one could hardly find a more violent contestation, a more sarcastic questioning of the very thing Bataille was known for in Paris…as a militant of the extreme left, convinced of the urgent necessity to fight the progressive rise of fascism with all the intellectual forces at his disposal.9
What is required, then, is to read Le bleu du ciel in the context of Bataille’s political and philosophical writings of the 1930s. Rather than attempting a general overview of those writings,10 will follow a single thread: Bataille’s uses of the word ‘virility’ in some of the major texts. This choice is justified not only by Bataille’s continuing preoccupation with virility—both the word and the concept—but also by the fact that so many other political writers of the 1930s were fixated on it, regardless of their ideological allegiance. From Malraux’s celebration of ‘virile fraternity’ to Drieu La Rochelle’s glorification of ‘the great white virile God’, virility figured as an absolute value to writers of the Left as of the Right. The question was, how to attain virility—indeed, how exactly to define it?
My contention is that Bataille moved during the 1930s from an outward, action-oriented definition of virility to an inward one, and that this move was intimately related to the evolution of European politics during that decade; furthermore, that it acquired a particular relevance and resonance in Nazi-occupied France.
For ‘virilité’ (from Latin vir, ‘man’), the Petit Robert dictionary gives the following definitions: ‘Set of attributes and physical and sexual characteristics of man; capacity for generation, sexual potency in man; virile, energetic character. Synonym: vigour; Antonyms: impotence, coldness.’ For the adjective ‘virile,’ the dictionary gives: ‘Characteristic of man; male, masculine; characteristic of the adult man; possessing the moral traits attributed especially to man: active, energetic, courageous. Antonyms: effeminate, feminine.’ Virility is thus a moral, political and sexual virtue: to be virile is to be active, energetic and courageous in matters private and public, and to be potent sexually. The contrary of virility is powerlessness, or else femininity. In this equation, femininity carries a negative charge, although it is not clear whether femininity in general or only femininity in men (effeminateness) is considered negative. The question may be academic, however; whether in men or generally, femininity is opposed to the manly virtues of courage, energy, effectiveness. Bataille emphasizes the sexual and moral connotations of virility in The “lugubrious game’” (1929), devoted to Dali’s painting by that name, and in ‘Sacrificial mutilation and the severed ear of Vincent Van Gogh’ (1930). In another early essay, ‘Le lion châtré’ (‘The castrated lion’, 1929), a polemic against André Breton, his attack on Breton’s lack of virility is both political and sexual.11 But it was in another polemic against Breton, the now famous ‘old mole’ essay written around 1930 (though not published until 1968), that Bataille fully exploited the political implications of the word. The essay was written at a time when many European intellectuals were becoming critically concerned with political action, prompted by the rise of Fascism and a general historical unease.
On the very first page of the ‘old mole’ essay, one finds the following statement: To whatever extent the unhappy bourgeois has maintained a human vulgarity, a certain taste for virility, disaffection with his own class quickly turns into stubborn hatred.’12 That the democratic bourgeois regime lacks virility, and prevents men from fulfilling theirs, will be one of Bataille’s themes throughout these years. In the ‘old mole’ essay, his solution is classically Marxist (as is the image of the old mole): the bourgeois intellectual who holds his manhood dear must throw in his lot with the lower classes. Bataille even criticizes Nietzsche, one of his personal heroes, for not having seen that
there is only one solution to the difficulties that gave play to the violence of his language, namely, the renunciation of all moral values associated with class superiority, the renunciation of all that deprives ‘distinguished’ men of the virility of the proletarian [la virilitéprolétarienne].
(Visions of Excess, p. 37)
Did Bataille assume that all workers were more ‘virile’ by definition, the way some white people mythologize the sexual prowess of black men? He does not say. In fact, he says very little in the essay about the virile proletariat. What preoccupies him is less the desired end than its possible failure—not virility, but castration. ‘The sun…castrates all that enters into conflict with it (Icarus, Prometheus, the Mithraic bull)’ (p. 34). After this, the adjective ‘Icarian’ recurs insistently; Bataille uses it to designate all enterprises, from revolutionary idealism to Surrealism, that seek to soar ‘toward the heavens from which it seems it will be easy to curse this base world (but from which we know above all with what derisive ease a man is cast)’ (p. 42). As the parenthetical remark emphasizes, the ‘Icarian’ adventurer is naively unaware that he risks losing his head—or else, he is aware, but is driven by a pathological desire for ‘a brutal and immediate punishment’, an unconscious ‘réflexe de castration’ (p. 39; OC, I, 103).
Taking this essay into account, one understands why Troppmann is outraged by Lazare’s idealism and Melou’s sublime imagery. If the proletariat is ‘foutue’, as they claim, then proletarian uprisings too can become Icarian adventures, and the bourgeois intellectual who counted on proletarian virility had better think again. Can even the old mole be castrated? That was not a possibility Bataille entertained in 1930, but by 1935, when he wrote Le bleu du ciel, things had changed. The biggest change was the rise of the German eagle.
The eagle as a sexual and political symbol of virility occupies a crucial place in the ‘old mole’ essay, making his appearance in two paragraphs that are worth quoting at length:
The eagle’s hooked beak, which cuts all that enters into competition with it and cannot be cut, suggests its sovereign virility. Thus the eagle has formed an alliance with the sun, which castrates all that enters into conflict with it… Politically the eagle is identified with imperialism, that is, with the unconstrained development of individual authoritarian power, triumphant over all obstacles…
Revolutionary idealism tends to make of the revolution an eagle above eagles, a supereagle striking down authoritarian imperialism, an idea as radiant as an adolescent eloquently seizing power for the benefit of Utopian enlightenment. This detour naturally leads to the failure of the revolution and, with the help of military Fascism, the satisfaction of the elevated need for idealism. The Napoleonic epic represents its least ridiculous development: the castration of an Icarian revolution, shameless imperialism exploiting the revolutionary urge.
(Visions of Excess, p. 34)
Although Bataille establishes his distance from ‘authoritarian imperialism’, he recognizes the appeal of the eagle as a symbol of power, and is willing to grant Napoleon epic stature despite his ‘castration’ of the French Revolution. With the rise of the German eagle after 1933, Bataille admitted not only his own attraction to its power, but analysed, in extremely persuasive terms, the psychological appeal of Fascism as a mass movement.13
What to do? Interestingly (or, one might argue, tragically), it did not occur to Bataille or to other intellectuals on the revolutionary Left to start defending the bourgeois democracies against the threat of Fascism. The democracies were in any case ‘foutue’ and ought to be, as far as Bataille was concerned (in this, he and Breton shared the same view). The solution lay elsewhere: the proletarian revolution had to appropriate the arms of its enemy and ‘use for the liberation of the exploited the weapons that had been forged to enchain them more’.14 The proletarian revolution had to learn how to ‘exalt’ men and move them in and into the street as the Fascists did, but in order to achieve different aims. This was the argument of Bataille’s 1933 essay (published less than a year after Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich), The psychological structure of Fascism’. It was also the argument he developed, in various forms, during the brief attempt to forge a dissident Marxist militant movement (outside the French Communist Party) that reconciled him temporarily with Breton and the Surrealists: Contre-Attaque, which lasted roughly from October 1935 to May 1936. Bataille, alone or in collaboration, wrote most of the tracts and manifestos distributed by the group, and spoke at several public meetings. The idea of a ‘counterattack’ and common action on the Left had gained momentum in France in early 1934, in response to the Fascist riots of 6 February. The Popular Front, uniting Socialists, Communists and Radicals; was a counterattack too but, in Bataille’s eyes, it was too timid and parliamentary. Contre-Attaque, as Bataille saw it, was a virile Popular Front, a Popular Front with (to put it crudely but aptly) balls.
In the hortatory essay entitled ‘Popular Front in the Street’ (first given as a speech at a Contre-Attaque rally in November 1935), Bataille used the sexual vocabulary quite consciously. Parliamentary democracy offered nothing other than
the horror of human impotence. We want to confront this horror directly. We address ourselves to the direct and violent drives which …can contribute to the surge of power that will liberate men from the absurd swindlers who lead them… The will to be done with impotence implies, in our eyes, scorn for this phrase-mongering.15
Enough words, actions are what count. Actions in the street:
What drives the crowds into the street is the emotion directly aroused by striking events in the atmosphere of a storm, it is the contagious emotion that, from house to house, from suburb to suburb, suddenly turns a hesitating man into a frenzied being [un homme hors de soi].
(p. 162)
Jean-Michel Besnier, commenting on ‘Popular Front in the street’ and more generally on this phase in Bataille’s thought, suggests that, despite the call to arms in the street, Bataille was always more interested in a certain state of exaltation than in political action; according to Besnier, Bataille’s politics during the 1930s was ‘a politics of the impossible which underpins revolutionary action while it resolutely rejects the goal of a takeover of political power’.16 I agree with Besnier that Bataille’s projected politics was a ‘politics of the impossible’ for many reasons, not the least of which was the problem of being a non-Communist revolutionary intellectual in the 1930s; but I disagree about the question of political power as Bataille conceived it at the time of Contre-Attaque. His writings during that brief period suggest that he did envisage a ‘takeover of political power’, including the use of authority and discipline. To be sure, he qualified the meanings of those terms: they were not those of ‘father, fatherland, boss’ (père, patrie, patron), the basis of the ‘old patriarchal society’. Rather, the new revolutionary discipline would displace the ‘servile discipline of Fascism’ and the authority of a single master would be replaced by ‘ALL acting as MASTERS’.17
These rousing public writings could hardly be further from the vacillations and impotence of Troppmann. It was as if, in reaction to the anxieties and premonitions expressed in Le bleu du ciel, Bataille sought to affirm, by means of his own ‘surge of power’, the possibilities of virile revolutionary action. Toward the beginning of ‘Popular Front in the street’ he evokes the mass demonstration of 12 February 1934 (the Left’s response to the riots of 6 February) which, according to him, marked the real beginning of the Popular Front:
Most of us, comrades, were in the street that day and can recall the emotion that overcame us when the Communist marchers, coming out of the rue des Pyrénées, turned into the Cours de Vincennes and took up the entire width of the street: this massive group was preceded by a line of a hundred workers, shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm, marching with unprecedented slowness and singing the Internationale. Many among you, no doubt, can remember the huge old bald worker, with a reddish face and heavy white moustache, who walked slowly, one step at a time, in front of that moving human wall, holding high a red flag.
(Visions of Excess, p. 163)
The huge old bald worker holding the red flag strikes me as Bataille’s hopeful (illusory, impossible?) counter-image to the closing figure of Lebleu du ciel, the ‘degenerately skinny’ Nazi kid manipulating his huge baton-penis. However, the black irony of that novel, rather than the red rhetoric of the Popular Front essay, proved to be premonitory. By the time the essay was published (in the first and only issue of Cahiers deContre-Attaque, May 1936) Contre-Attaque as a movement was dead, and there were not many to mourn it—not even Bataille, who probably realized that the programme of mass armed action in the street, appropriating the means of Fascism for other ends, had come dangerously close to Fascism tout court.18 The Popular Front, although triumphant at the polls in 1936, would soon be caught up in parliamentary politics and would fall a year later. In March 1936, Hitler occupied the Rhineland; in July, Franco’s troops launched their assault against the Spanish Republic.
What was a man to do?
By the summer of 1936, Bataille had founded the secret society of Acéphale, whose rituals, unknown in their details to this dày, were practised not in the street but in an ancient forest.19 The public side of Acéphale was a journal by the same name, written largely by Bataille, published irregularly from 1937 to 1939; and the Collège de sociologie, founded by Bataille and Roger Caillois in 1937 and active until July 1939. Denis Hollier has characterized the Collège as an attempt at ‘sociological activism’ and Caillois later claimed that Bataille’s ambition for the Collège was much more than that of a ‘groupe de recherche’.20 Yet there is no doubt that by the time he founded the Collège, Bataille’s idea of action had little to do with politics in any ordinary sense, or even in the extraordinary sense of Contre-Attaque. If one can speak of activism as part of his ambition for the Collège de sociologie, it was an activism founded in ritual and myth, unfolding between the ‘sacred space’ and the bedroom: The world of lovers is no less true than that of politics’, he wrote in one of his key texts for the Collège.21 Significantly, the essay begins with a note stating that his purpose is to show how ‘the results of sociology can appear as responses to the most virile concerns [des réponses aux soucis les plus virils] ‘He is still preoccupied with virility, but virility has become less a matter of action than of ‘total existence’, the opposite of ‘acting, depicting, or measuring’ (p. 228).
We see here one manifestation of the inward turn in Bataille’s thought. Some would argue that his thought had been ‘inward’ even at the height of his politically activist period and that it is artificial to impose ‘turns’ on it. Bataille’s chief preoccupations and obsessions endure from one end of his writing to the other; in that sense, he is a singularly single-minded thinker. Yet I would insist that no thought exists outside history. Between the defeat of the Republicans in Spain (foreseeable by the spring of 1938) and the Nazi Occupation of France, the problem of virile action continued to preoccupy Bataille; but the definition of virile action shifted.
One of the essays he wrote for the last issue of Acéphale, The practice of joy before.death’ (‘La pratique de la joie devant la mort’, published in June 1939), prefigures some of the major themes Bataille would elaborate in the grim autumn of 1941, in Madame Edwarda and L’experience intérieure:
He alone is happy who, having experienced vertigo to the point of trembling in his bones, to the point of being incapable of measuring the extent of his fall, suddenly finds the unhoped-for strength to turn his agony into a joy capable of freezing and transfiguring those who meet it.22
Whatever battles Bataille might have envisaged, a few years earlier, as unfolding in the street, have now been transferred exclusively to the interior, both spatially and existentially. Bataille uses (for the first time. or close to it) the word ‘mysticism’ to describe his preoccupation specifying that although his vocabulary may be Christian, his thought is not: The mystical existence of the one whose “joy before death” has become inner violence can never attain the satisfying beatitude of the Christian who gives himself a foretaste of eternity’ (p. 236). Unlike the Christian mystic, the man of ‘inner violence’ is not an ascetic: ‘those who would be afraid of nude girls or whisky would have little to do with “joy before death”. Only a shameless, indecent saintliness can lead to a sufficiently happy loss of self’ (p. 237).
From here to the brothel of Madame Edwarda, where the man of inner violence meets the whore in whom he will recognize the indecent saintliness he calls God, it is but a step.
The inward turn in Bataille’s thought became more pronounced as the outward events around him became more violent. By the autumn of 1941, when he wrote Madame Edwarda and began working on ‘Le supplice’, the Nazis were fully established in Paris, executing hostages, rounding up Jews and carrying on other ‘routine’ activities (such as dynamiting synagogues).23 Bataille’s inward turn provided a philosophical solution, albeit a paradoxical one, to the political and existential problems he had been struggling with since the early 1930s, chief among them that of effective, virile action.
Why was the solution paradoxical? Let me, going fast, cite two passages from ‘Le supplice’ and suggest the outlines of a commentary. The first deals with the problem of virility, though not as it relates to politics; rather, to poetry:
To go to the end of man, it is necessary, at a certain point, to no longer suffer fate but to seize it [non pas subir mais forcer le sort]. The opposite, poetic nonchalance, the passive attitude, the distaste for a virile, decisive reaction—that is literary decadence (pretty pessimism). Rimbaud’s damnation: he had to turn his back on the possible he attained, in order to rediscover a power of decision intact in himself. The access to the extreme has as its condition the hatred not of poetry, but of poetic femininity (absence of decisiveness, the poet is woman, invention and words violate him). I oppose to poetry the experience of the possible. It is less a matter of contemplation than of laceration [déchirement]. Yet it is a ‘mystical experience’ I am speaking about. (Rimbaud tried it, but without the tenacity he later put into trying to amass a fortune. To his experience, he gave a poetic solution; in general, he did not know the simplicity that affirms — half-baked schemes in some letters—he chose feminine evasiveness, aesthetics, the involuntary and uncertain mode of expression.)24
One of the difflculties in interpreting this passage (besides its maddeningly paratactic style) is that Bataille’s meanings for crucial words like ‘poetic’, ‘poetry’ and ‘possible’ vary not only from this text to others, but also, occasionally, from sentence to sentence. What I offer, therefore, is a necessarily tentative reading, although I firmly believe in it.
Rimbaud obsesses Bataille because he gave up poetry for action. Bataille, on the contrary, is trying to elaborate a mode of experience and a kind of action (‘going to the extreme’) that will not necessarily reject poetry, only the ‘feminine’ aspects of poetry. Opposed to ‘feminine evasiveness’ is the virile man who seeks the extreme, the ‘experience of the possible’—and also seeks to find a language to express that experience. One might expect Bataille to mock the merely ‘possible’ in the name of the extreme, but in this passage the ‘experience of the possible’ is itself envisaged as an acceding to the extreme, in both language and existence. Rimbaud’s ‘damnation’ was that he could not envisage, or practise, a poetry other than a ‘feminine’ one; in order to ‘rediscover a [masculine] power of decision’ in himself, he had to give up writing.
Remembering the anguished protagonist of Madame Edwarda and his broken, fragmented style of writing (the style of ‘Le supplice’ is no less shattered), one might ask where is his ‘power of decision’, his ‘simplicity which affirms’? To ask that, however, is to misunderstand Bataille profoundly—for the chief characteristic of the inner experience is not visible action, but déchirement, an inner sundering. But how, one may ask, does this sundering differ from ‘poetic femininity’, the ‘passive attitude’ of the poet who is violated by words? The difference is that the hero of the inner experience actively engages himself in ‘la déchirure’. He is dominant and virile (Bataille will later say, ‘sovereign’) because he actively chooses his sundering.
But seen from the outside, how can one distinguish between a hero of inner experience and an ordinary loser, or a wealthy prowler in search of erotic thrills? Précisément, one cannot. Seen from the outside, the protagonist of Madame Edwarda is just one more client with a few weird tastes, like engaging in oral sex in public or getting a kick out of watching his girl make it in the back of a taxi with a burly proletarian cabbie. It is only because he writes his inner experience that we know the philosophical stakes involved in his eroticism, know the anguish he is suffering, and know too that he dominates his suffering by the act of engaging himself in it. Bataille thus redefines the poète maudit in sovereign terms, and implicitly claims that status. Where Rimbaud stumbled, abandoning poetry for virile action (or what he considered as such), Bataille has pursued the quest, practising virile action in the inner experience and in its writing. Between gun-running in Abyssinia and the inner experience, which is the more virile?
The second passage I want to comment on is very brief: ‘I arrive at this position: the inner experience is the opposite of action. Nothing more’ (p. 59). Is the inner experience passivity (after all), or the boredom of the leisure class? No. Once again, it is a matter of understanding a paradoxical negation as affirmation: when Bataille says ‘action’, he means ‘project’ (‘“Action” is totally dependent on the project’); and when he says ‘project’, he means the ‘deferral ofliving to later’, ‘la remise de l’existence à plus tard’ (p. 59, his emphasis). The man who refuses ‘action’ (Bataille places the word in quotation marks to indicate his distance from its conventional definition, linked to the notion of project) is therefore the only one who really lives in the present: The inner experience is the denunciation of respite [la dénonciation de la trêve], it is being [l’être] without delay.’ The principle of inner experience, finally— paradoxically—comes down to this: ‘to exit by means of a project from the realm of the project’ (p. 60). It is not difficult to understand why Sartre, reviewing L’expérience intérieure at its publication in 1943, found it totally ‘unusable’—‘cette experience inutilisable’.25 The philosopher of the project par excellence, Sartre saw in Bataille’s book only the portrait of a paradoxical individual (he calls him a madman), not a programme.
Viewing L’expérience intérieure historically, one could arrive at a quite negative judgement: in the France of 1941, did not the inner experience, for all its lacerations, offer the writer obsessed with virility the comforts of an alibi? Why try to resist, why act in the street, when you could be just as virile sitting at home, or in a brothel, experiencing the extreme on the inside? This, however, is no doubt too simple a view. Besides, if the inner experience excused one from ‘vulgar’ action such as joining the Resistance, it could also protect one from active collaboration with the enemy. Bypassing the opposition between resistance and collaboration, as he bypassed in his fiction the opposition between ‘ordinary’ masculinity and femininity (the protagonist of Madame Edwarda has more in common with the ecstatic whore than with the burly taxi driver), Bataille may have been working toward a salutary third term. Years later, in the beginning of the cold war, when the reigning opposition was between the United States and the Soviet Union, he would propose the third term of neutrality— recognizing that ‘neutrality means, without any doubt, the refusal of all action, a resolute distance from all political undertakings’.26
Bataille’s paradoxes make him interesting, in his political theories as in his pornography. It has been claimed that his attitude toward Fascism was troublingly equivocal. Denis Hollier, confronting that claim, has argued on the contrary that the equivocal nature of Bataille’s thought saved him from Fascism: ‘A little equivocation gets close to fascism, a lot of it moves away from it.’27 That is because Fascism, like other political ideologies, abhors the equivocal.
Because I am persuaded by this argument, it is in the name of equivocation that I fault Bataille, finally, for his obsession with virility —the word as much as the concept. As a concept, virility took shifting forms in Bataille’s thought. His continued use of the word, however, locked him into values and into a sexual politics that can only be called conformist, in his time and ours. Rhetorically, ‘virility’ carries with it too much old baggage. Bataille’s male protagonists may be sexually equivocal, possessing feminine traits and female soulmates; but his rhetoric of virility does not follow them.
1 Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The flâneur, the sandwichman and the whore: The politics of loitering,’ New German Critique, 39, autumn 1986, 114. The question about the streets is on the same page of this very rich essay. Hereafter, page references are cited in parentheses in the text.
2 One-Way Street and Other Writings, London, NLB, 1979. Quoted in BuckMorss, 114.
3 Georges Bataille, Le bleu du ciel, in Oeuvres complètes(OC), III, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, 449. Further page references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the French are my own.
4 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, in OC, III, 19.
5 Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, Paris, Minuit, 1983, 39.
6 See OC, III, 491.
7 Leo Bersani, ‘Literature and History’ in The Culture of Redemption, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1990.
8 Ibid., 117. Hereafter, page references are cited in parentheses in the text.
9 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: La mort à l’oeuvre, Paris, Librairie Séguier, 1987, 222.
10 For comprehensive studies, see Jean-Michel Besnier, La politique del’impossible, Paris, La Découverte, 1988 and Francis Marmande, GeorgesBataille politique, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985. As always with Bataille, the interpretations of his positions vary considerably.
11 These essays are in OC, I; the first two have been published in English in Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R.Lovitt and Donald M.Leslie, Jr, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
12 Bataille, The “Old Mole” and the prefix sur in the words Surhomme and Surrealist’ in Visions of Excess, 32. Hereafter, page references are cited in parentheses in the text.
13 ‘The psychological structure of Fascism’ (1933) in Visions of Excess. Bataille’s relation to Fascism has been much discussed lately (see note 27). He himself, in his ‘Autobiographical note’ written in 1958, noted his ‘fascination’ with Fascism in the mid-1930s (OC, VII).
14 Bataille, ‘Vers la revolution réelle’ in OC, I, 422.
15 Bataille, ‘Popular Front in the street’ in Visions of Excess, 161–2. Hereafter, page references to this essay are cited in parentheses in the text.
16 Jean-Michel Besnier, ‘Georges Bataille in the 1930s: A politics of the impossible’, Yale French Studies, 78 (1990), 180. See also Besnier, Lapolitique de l’impossible, 114.
17 See ‘“Contre-Attaque”: Appel a l’action’ in OC, I, 396. The refusal of ‘the old patriarchal society’ is in ‘“Contre-Attaque”: La patrie et la famille’ (leaflet advertising a meeting), OC, I, 393. All of Bataille’s Contre-Attaque texts are in OC, I, 379–432.
18 Bataille suggests this in his ‘Autobiographical note’, OC, VII.
19 Many rumours have circulated about the secret rituals of Acéphale in the forest of Saint-Nom-la-Bretêche. For a reliable account, see Surya, Georges Bataille, 253–8.
20 See Le Collège de sociologie, ed. Denis Hollier, Paris, Gallimard, 1979, 31.
21 The sorcerer’s apprentice’ in Visions of Excess, 229–32. This essay was first published in 1938 in the Nouvelle Revue Française as part of an introduction to the Collège de sociologie, along with essays by Caillois and Michel Leiris. Reprinted in Le Collège de sociologie and in OC, I, 523–37.
22 ‘The practice of joy before death’ in Visions of Excess, 236. Hereafter, page numbers are cited in parentheses in the text.
23 Bataille was living in Paris throughout 1941; he wrote Madame Edwarda in September-October. In late September, three Communist deputies were executed, as were a number of hostages in reprisal against the Resistance. The infamous ‘Jewish exhibition’, Le Juif et la France, organized by a Nazi-sponsored Institute with the support of the Vichy Government, opened in late September. On 3 October, six Paris synagogues were dynamited. All these dates are cited by Michel Surya, Georges Bataille, 501–2. See also Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and theJews, New York, Basic Books, 1981.
24 Bataille, L’expérience intérieure in OC, V, 53. Hereafter, page references are cited in parentheses in the text.
25 J.-P.Sartre, ‘Un nouveau mystique’ in Situations, I, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, 187.
26 ‘Du sens d’une neutralité morale dans la guerre russo-américaine’. Review of Raymond Aron’s Le grand schisme, Critique, 1948; reprinted in OC, XI, 374n.
27 Denis Hollier, ‘On equivocation (between literature and politics)’, October, 55 (winter 1990), 12. Hollier cites an essay by Carlo Ginzburg which accuses Bataille of being dangerously close to Fascist and Nazi ideologies; a similar criticism is found in Daniel Lindenberg’s Les années souterraines, Paris, La Découverte, 1990. In terms of Zeev Sternhell’s analysis, Bataille could qualify as one of the many French intellectuals of the 1930s who were ‘fascists without knowing it’: Sternhell, Ni droite nigauche: L’idéologie fasciste en France, Paris, Seuil, 1983, 311. Bernard Sichère’s two-part article, ‘Bataille et les fascistes’, La Règle du jeu, 8 and 9 (September 1992 and January 1993), is somewhat inconclusive.