The Sovereign Without Domain: Georges Bataille and the Ethics of Nothing
There is work on Bataille’s part, but it is an effort to escape, an effort to release toward a freedom that is direct.
- Georges Bataille
‘Bataille’ is nothing but a protest against the signification of his own discourse.
- Jean-Luc Nancy
Exception and Transgression
Despite all of the things that might be said to set them apart, including their explicit political commitments, a scattered but consistent critical tradition seeks to associate the work of Georges Bataille with that of Carl Schmitt (for example: Habermas 1990; Jay 1993; Wolin 1996, 2004; Levi 2007). Inasmuch as they both wrote about the sovereign, the argument goes, and associated that figure with a mysterious, quasi-sacred ground-lessness or ‘nothingness’, Bataille and Schmitt formed part of an intellectual milieu or environment that, during the multiple crises of the inter-war period, renounced the project of the Enlightenment, and the achievements of discursive rationality, thus clearing space for and lending credence to the worst excesses of political irrationalism. If the former was a proponent of radical transgression, interested above all else in freedom, and the latter a strict authoritarian, concerned with the establishment and the preservation of political order, this difference, it is believed, only exposes the contradiction inherent to the attack on reason that characterized their age, the reverberations of which continue to shake our own. Thus, according to a logic that is nearly inescapable, not only their similarities hold Bataille and Schmitt together, their differences do as well – as though the only thing placing them in greater proximity to one another than their agreements were their disagreements, or the points at which they effectively diverge.
The first and most obvious purpose of this paper is to take issue with this interpretation of Bataille and Schmitt, and to insist that the differences between these two figures are significant and profound. I argue that, while Bataille’s sovereign transgression can only exist within an instant, and can only be sovereign insofar as it remains indifferent to all future purposes or goals, Schmitt’s sovereign exception is never so absolute, but motivated from the outset by a return to order, and by a reinvention of the law that it breaks (cf. Geroulanos 2010: 194). For the same reason, and along the same lines, only Bataille endeavours to understand nothingness, or the negativity of the sovereign experience, outside of all relation to positivity, and outside of every dialectic that would afford the sovereign experience a communicable meaning or sense. For Schmitt, on the other hand, the entire logic of the sovereign, and everything that might be understood as an exceptional state, is circumscribed by the problem of political and legal order. To be sure, the exception exceeds the order, but always with the aim of recreating it. And it is justified, albeit retroactively, only insofar as it is able to do so.
Of course, the aforementioned effort to associate Bataille with Schmitt is not merely concerned with textual exegesis. It forms part of a larger attempt to diagnose, and prevent the return of, the political catastrophes of the Twentieth Century. On this line of thought, totalitarianism in general, and fascism in particular, followed from a collapse of civil society, and all of the associations and institutions that come in between the state and the people. Without the mediating influence of civil society, the argument goes, totalitarian political movements were able to combine the boundless enthusiasm of the anomic masses, on the one hand, and the charismatic, personal leadership of a single authority, on the other. They operated by fusing, as it were, the master and the mob. In the absence of public spheres or spaces where individuals could engage in rational deliberation oriented towards consensus, political action was transformed into a terrifying amalgamation of popular fervour and executive fiat – a combination, as some would have it, of Bataille and Schmitt.
While this analysis – which draws on a strong tradition that extends from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism – has considerable merits, recent scholarship, such as the work of historical sociologist Dylan Riley, suggests an alternative approach. Without seeking to discredit the Tocquevillian-Arendtian model, Riley notes that, in fact, civil society had not collapsed in all of the nations that turned to fascism in the Twentieth Century. Indeed, in Italy, Spain, and Romania, for example, it flourished. Thus, against the tide of what he calls the ‘civil society romanticism’ of contemporary political theory, or the assumption that the associations that mediate between the state and the people are axiomatically democratic, Riley proposes that, in the inter-war period, ‘[c]ivil society development facilitated the rise of fascism, rather than liberal democracy’, and that ‘[f]ascist movements and regimes grew out of a general crisis of politics, a crisis that itself was a product of civil society development’ (Riley 2010: 2, emphasis added).
Now, whatever else we might make of the details, we can certainly say that, if this argument, or even something like it, holds, then it will be necessary to rethink a great deal of the dominant understanding of totalitarianism, or mass politics in general, and to reconsider the widely held assumption that there exists a relatively simple opposition between dangerous politics on the one hand and the discursive rationality of the public sphere on the other. Without wanting to exaggerate the issue, and while fully aware that Riley (whose theoretical leanings are more in the direction of Gramsci) would probably take a different approach, it seems to me that a reassessment of Bataille’s work could fruitfully inform such a project.
I would like to find my way into the question of the differences between Bataille and Schmitt, and the larger relevance of Bataille’s work, through a brief consideration of two of the better known efforts to repudiate Bataille by associating him with Schmitt – vspecifically those of Martin Jay and Richard Wolin. I think the limits of these two interpretations of Bataille reveal something about the strength of Bataille’s thought. That is to say, it is exactly what Jay and Wolin misunderstand, or misrepresent, that I would like to privilege and explore. For his part, Jay proposes that there is, if not quite an exact homology, at least a strong family resemblance between Bataille’s and Schmitt’s respective concepts of sovereignty. But, as I have already begun to suggest, despite the fact that the two thinkers employ the same term, what they mean by sovereignty, and the way that figure operates in their respective texts, is not only discrete, but discrete in important ways. Drawing on similar resources, Wolin insists that both Bataille and the generation of French intellectuals that he influenced (Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, and so forth) replace the normative conditions of political action with aesthetic ones, leading to a valorization of transgression for its own sake, or a violent destruction of limits as an end in itself. But while something like this might be at stake, I nevertheless believe that Bataille’s project is fundamentally ethical – albeit in a manner that cannot easily be assimilated to a Habermasian, or even Levinasian, conception of ethics.
According to Jay, both Schmitt and Bataille sought ‘a revalorization of the concept of sovereignty’ in a time of crisis. Lacking what Jay calls ‘faith’ in ‘the power of discursive rationality’, and the liberal parliamentary institutions that generally go along with it, both Schmitt and Bataille harboured ‘a residual counter-Enlightenment notion of secularized religion’ – one related, at least in part, to ‘the Catholicism of their youth’ (Jay 1993: 50). For Schmitt, this entailed an understanding of sovereignty as the, as it were, external guarantee of political order, and the exceptional, lawless violence required to defend the law. For Bataille, it meant a sovereign experience that exceeds every order, and every effort to limit the will to transgress. But, Jay maintains, these positions amount to two sides of the same coin – a fact evidenced by the fascination that both figures had with fascism, or the sense in which both viewed ‘the rise of fascism as a reassertion of the power of sovereignty’ against ‘the liberal illusion that rational norms or abstract processes of equal exchange could found a polity’ (Jay 1993:57). For Jay, the differences between Schmitt and Bataille are not acute, but integral to the concept of sovereignty they share. That is to say, the concept of sovereignty itself is incoherently split between a will to transgress and a will to order. And for this very reason, Jay concludes, ‘rather than being the ground of the political, its ultimate truth revealed in exceptional circumstances’, it must ultimately ‘share its place with other no less political factors’ (Jay 1993: 59).
Although it can certainly be said that Schmitt believes that the sovereign grounds the political, the same is not true of Bataille. Indeed, Bataille begins the third volume of The Accursed Share, entitled ‘Sovereignty’, by insisting that what he means by ‘sovereignty … has little to do with the sovereignty of states, as international law defines it’. Rather, it refers to a ‘general … aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate’ (Bataille 1991: 197). While, in the past, some cultures and societies might have latched onto this ‘aspect’, and organized power structures around it, what actually defines it, or what distinguishes the servile from the sovereign, is not a particular social relation, political position, or legal status, but an experience of time. While it is always servile ‘to employ the present time for the sake of the future’, Bataille maintains, it is always sovereign ‘to enjoy the present time without having anything else in view but the present time’. Or, to put the same point in different terms, ‘[l]ife beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty’ (Bataille 1991: 198).
Despite facile similarities, Schmitt’s sovereign has a very different relationship with time. As is well known, Schmitt understands sovereignty in terms of the capacity to decide on the exception, or to decide when it is necessary to break the law in order to preserve or maintain it. But for the same reason, this sovereign is never, like Bataille’s, entirely outside of the law, but always inside and outside at once, or on the border or the threshold between law and lawlessness. ‘Although [the sovereign] stands outside the normally valid legal system’, Schmitt insists, ‘he nonetheless belongs to it’ (Schmitt 2005: 7). And in this sense, the sovereign’s decision is not an absolute negation of order, but the negation of the present order in the name of a future one. One order is broken, we might say, but the principle of order prevails. Or, put differently, each time Schmitt proposes the notion that the sovereign exception exceeds a given legal or political order, he is certain, in an immediately subsequent gesture, to place limits or conditions on that excess. The sovereign exception is always circumscribed in advance by what it is directed towards – namely order.
For example, on Schmitt’s account ‘[w]hat characterizes the exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order’. But at the same time, Schmitt notes: ‘[b]ecause the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not the ordinary kind’ (Schmitt 2005: 12). Or, again: ‘Unlike the normal situation, where the autonomous moment of the decision recedes to a minimum, the norm is destroyed in the exception. The exception remains, nevertheless, accessible to jurisprudence because both elements, the norm as well as the decision, remain within the framework of the juristic’ (Schmitt 2005: 12-13). So while it is the case that, in the state of exception, executive authority suspends the existing order, and while the decision suspends the norm, from beginning to end, the whole operation is somehow contained by something Schmitt calls ‘the juristic’.
The same principle applies to Schmitt’s use of theological language, or the discourse of the sacred, to discuss sovereignty. No doubt Schmitt believes that, despite the efforts of the Enlightenment, political theory cannot really do without theological terms. This is why, in the crucial passage in Political Theology, he insists that ‘[a]ll significant concepts in the modern theory of state … are secularized theological concepts’ (Schmitt 2005: 25), and, more specifically, that ‘the exception in jurisprudence is akin to the miracle in theology’ (Schmitt 2005: 26). At the same time, Schmitt’s point is never that human interaction actually is influenced by an unknowable divine entity, or even that some aspect of human existence remains unknowable as such. Rather, his claim is that, from the outset and in every manifestation, theology is always an indirect way of discussing human political relations. What Schmitt calls ‘political theology’ is always another way of examining political power and political action. For Bataille, on the other hand, the sovereign experience genuinely is a ‘nothingness’, entirely beyond the register of knowledge in general, and language in particular. And even when we refer to the sovereign experience in terms of the sacred or the divine, we only do so on the condition that we recognize from the outset that we have failed, and that nothing, either directly or indirectly, can actually reference the experience that is at stake.
This brings us back to Schmitt’s insistence that, while it breaks with the established order, the sovereign exception nevertheless remains ‘accessible to jurisprudence’ and ‘within the framework of the juristic’. For, along with placing a definite limit on the state of exception, this claim also serves to legitimate or validate Schmitt’s own discourse. For if it was the case that the sovereign exception exceeds every order then, by definition, it would also exceed the order of discourse or language – certainly, at any rate, the order of juristic discourse and legal theory. And if that were the case, then Schmitt’s own work could only operate or proceed by negating itself. Each argument or claim about the sovereign exception would have to cancel itself out at the point of articulation. And it is this act of self-negation or self-cancelation that Schmitt is not willing to risk. The sovereign exception must remain within the framework of the juristic, for if it did not, then everything Schmitt says about it could only be valid on the condition that it is not valid as well. It could only be true on the condition that it is false. It could only be advanced on the condition that, at the exact same moment and in the exact same gesture, it is also withdrawn, or taken away.
Now, while it seems clear that Schmitt wants to avoid such a paradox of self-negation, it is equally clear that Bataille not only allowed it, but embraced it. Thus, and to pick just one of countless examples, in the third volume of The Accursed Share, entitled ‘Sovereignty’, Bataille highlights the absolute distance between the sovereign experience he wants to discuss, and the language he must use to discuss it. ‘[K]nowledge is never given to us except by an unfolding in time’, Bataille writes. It requires ‘a discourse, which is necessarily deployed in duration’ (Bataille 1991: 200). Thus ‘[t]o know is always to strive, to work’. It is always ‘a servile operation, indefinitely resumed, indefinitely repeated’. For this reason, knowledge is ‘never sovereign’ for ‘to be sovereign it would have to occur in a moment’. The only way to approximate sovereignty in knowledge, or to approximate some representation of it, would be via something Bataille calls ‘unknowing’, or by ‘cancelling … every operation of knowledge within ourselves’. It would somehow require a representation of the unrepresentable, or ‘[t]he miraculous moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING, detaching us from the ground on which we were grovelling, in the concatenation of useful activity’ (Bataille 1991: 201).
As other commentators have noted, relentlessly producing discourses that operate by cancelling or negating themselves is a – perhaps the – defining feature of Bataille’s work. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, ‘[a]longside all the themes he deals with, through all the questions and debates, “Bataille” is nothing but a protest against the signification of his own discourse’ (Nancy 1991: 62). New terms for ‘nothingness’ are constantly being produced and examined (sovereignty, the sacred, silence, inner experience, communication, intimacy, the heterogeneous, literature, eroticism, nothingness, and so forth), but each one of them is, as it were, rejected as soon as it is deployed, as though it were written down with one hand while being crossed out with the other. Thus, while Schmitt’s language is always a veil covering or concealing a deeper intention (a secret that, while opaque, nevertheless remains accessible, at least to those in the know), Bataille’s is, instead, a chain of substitutions or supplements for an always already absent origin. As I will argue in the next section of this paper, this practice of writing is not merely rhetorical. It is fundamentally ethical, or fundamental to what I call Bataille’s ‘ethics of nothing’.
Perhaps the most aggressive attempt to posit a link between Schmitt and Bataille is Richard Wolin’s ‘Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology’. For Wolin, Schmitt and Bataille are both deeply implicated in fascist politics, and they are implicated for similar reasons. At the same time that members of the Frankfurt School were composing a complex, mediated critique of modernity, one that took root in the internal contradictions or dialectic of the Enlightenment, Schmitt and Bataille pursued ‘a total break with the logic of modernity’, and thus ‘a totalizing diagnosis of modernity’ (Wolin 1996: 409). This approach is revealed most explicitly in their mutual contempt for the modern conception of law. ‘Both Schmitt and Bataille view the institution of law as the consummate embodiment of the spirit of bourgeois rationalism’, Wolin maintains. ‘It symbolizes everything they detest about the reigning social order: its prosaic longing for security, its unrevolutionary nature, its abhorrence of “transcendence”, [and] its anathematization of the vitality and intensity one finds in the “exception” (Schmitt) or “transgression” (Bataille)’ (Wolin 1996: 414). For Bataille in particular, the deliberative procedures associated with law were to be replaced with the emotion and excess characteristic of art. Thus Bataille ‘seeks to establish the normative basis of social action on an aesthetic foundation’ (Wolin 1996: 406). In effect, he aestheticizes the political.
Although it is considerably more polemical in its renunciation of Bataille, Wolin’s argument is in many ways predicated on Jürgen Habermas’s ‘Between Eroticism and General Economy: Georges Bataille’ – one of the twelve lectures that make up The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. On Habermas’s account, Bataille propagates ‘the dream of an aestheticized, poetic politics purified of all institutional and moral elements’ (Habermas 1990: 220). In opposition to the subject of modern reason, he fixates on ‘explosive moments of fascinated shock, when those categories fall apart that guarantee in everyday life the confident interaction of the subject with himself and with the world’ (Habermas 1990: 212). ‘Sovereignty’, for example, ‘is conceived as the other of reason’ (Habermas 1990: 228). And yet, Habermas continues, Bataille can only purse this assault on reason while simultaneously relying on the resources of reason. And to that extent, his entire project, and everything that follows from it, is mired in performative contradiction. ‘If sovereignty and its source, the sacred, are related to the world of purposive-rational action in an absolutely heterogeneous fashion’, Habermas insists:
if the subject and reason are constituted only by excluding all kinds of sacred power, if the other of reason is more than just the irrational or the unknown – namely, the incommensurable, which cannot be touched by reason except at the cost of an explosion of the rational subject – then there is no possibility of a theory that reaches beyond the horizon of what is accessible to reason and thematizes, let alone analyzes, the interaction of reason with a transcendent source of power. (Habermas 1990: 235-6)
As a result, Habermas concludes, ‘Bataille undercuts his own efforts to carry out a radical critique of reason with the tools of theory’ (Habermas 1990: 237).
No doubt this challenge – that Bataille seeks to replace rational deliberation with the aesthetic experience or event, but, in order to do so, requires the very reason he wants to destroy – has considerable force, and cannot easily be overlooked. At the same time, Bataille was by no means unaware of the problem. Indeed, a great deal of his work is taken up with an effort to come to terms with the fact that he must render what remains beyond language, discourse, or knowledge in the form of language, discourse, and knowledge. Moreover, and as I tried to explain towards the end of the last section of this paper, this willingness to negate or erase his own text is one of the things that distinguishes Bataille from Schmitt. While Bataille is caught up in a performative contradiction (in that he cannot, at one and the same time, say what he means and mean what he says), Schmitt most assuredly is not. Indeed, by insisting that the sovereign exception operates ‘within the framework of the juristic’, Schmitt effectively avoids this accusation, and avoids the problem of trying to use discourse to discuss something that exceeds it. In this section of my paper, I would like to suggest that the performative contradiction that Wolin and Habermas detect in Bataille is less a damning criticism of his work than it is a condition – or, perhaps more accurately, a performance – of his ethics. Or, alternatively, it is from this performative contradiction that we, Bataille’s readers, might begin to draw an ethics.
A) ‘The Insane Silence of the Night’
The central tension in all of Bataille’s work is expressed quite clearly in the opening pages of his book On Nietzsche – a figure with whom, as Wolin and Habermas correctly note, he not only empathized, but almost completely identified. ‘Man’s extreme, unconditional yearning was first expressed independently of a moral end or service to God’, Bataille writes, ‘by Nietzsche’:
This burning with no relation to a dramatically expressed moral obligation is surely paradoxical. It cannot serve as a point of departure for preaching or action. Its consequences are disconcerting. If we cease to make burning the condition of another, further state, one that is distinguished as good, it appears as a pure state, one of empty consumption. Unless related to some enrichment such as the strength and influence of a community (or of a God, a church, a party), this consumption is not even intelligible. The positive value of loss can seemingly be conveyed only in terms of profit. (Bataille 1986b: 47, emphasis in original)
How to understand this ‘burning’ outside of all ‘preaching or action’, this ‘empty consumption’ without reference to a ‘further state’, or the ‘value of loss’ outside of all possibility of ‘profit’ was not only Nietzsche’s conundrum, but Bataille’s as well. And it had a direct bearing on his practices as a writer. For he could never deny the fact that his own efforts to describe or discuss this ‘burning’ and this ‘consumption’ ultimately entailed inscribing them within the register of meaning and sense, thus providing them with an intelligibility, or a kind of return on the investment.
Further examples of Bataille explicitly addressing what Habermas would characterize as the performative contradiction in his work are too numerous to count, and they extend throughout all of the topics he addresses, and all of the genres he employs. For instance, in the preface to ‘The History of Eroticism’, or the second volume of The Accursed Share, Bataille summarizes his argument that all societies require the periodic destruction of excess energy or wealth, and that, while past cultures accomplished this via the sovereign transgression, in the contemporary world, where instrumental rationality dominates, sovereign transgression is replaced by the horrors of mass war. But as soon as Bataille explains this thesis, he feels compelled to acknowledge what he calls the ‘paradox’ of his ‘attitude’. ‘The paradox of my attitude requires that I show the absurdity of a system in which each thing serves, in which nothing is sovereign’, he explains. ‘I cannot do so without showing that a world in which nothing is sovereign is the most unfavourable one; but,’ he continues, ‘that is to say in sum that we need sovereign values, hence that it is useful to have useless values’ (Bataille 1991: 15).
A more poetic articulation of the same paradox pervades Inner Experience. Indeed, what Bataille means by ‘inner experience’ is not the internal world of an individual subject, but an experience that is so singular that it completely eludes the realm of discursive articulation. Here Bataille associates that experience with the spiritual practice of ‘supplication’, which attempts to mimic ‘the exhausting solitude of God’:
Forgetting of everything. Deep descent into the night of existence. Infinite ignorant pleading, to drown oneself in anguish. To slip over the abyss and in the completed darkness experience the horror of it. To tremble, in despair, in the cold of solitude, in the eternal silence of man (foolishness of all sentences, illusory answers for sentences, only the insane silence of the night answers). The word God, to have used it in order to reach the depth of solitude, but to no longer know, hear his voice. To know nothing of him. God final word for meaning that all words will fail further on: to perceive its own eloquence (it is not avoidable), to laugh at it to the point of unknowing stupor (laughter no longer needs to laugh, nor crying to cry, nor sobbing to sob). Further on one’s head bursts: man is not contemplation (he only has peace by fleeing); he is supplication, war, anguish, madness. (Bataille 1988: 36-7)
In a manner that is doubtlessly related to negative theology, as well as what, elsewhere, Bataille calls ‘atheology’, ‘God’ is the word used to indicate the failure of all words. It marks the limit of discourse in general. It goes without saying that something very different is at stake in Schmitt’s invocation of religious language, or ‘political theology’. If, for Bataille, theological language is a substitute for something that is always already lost, or that which remains inaccessible to discourse, for Schmitt, it is invariably an allegory for political life, or an indirect way of addressing the exigencies of our collective existence.
As if to punctuate the issue, and to do so from beyond the grave, Bataille himself provides a commentary on the self-negating elements of his writing in a brief ‘Autobiographical Note’ that was found among his literary remains and published post-humously. The text, which is written in a style that has to be read as ironically rational or controlled, recounts the general arc of Bataille’s career, but concludes with the following more personal, though still perfectly chilled, reflections: ‘If thought and its expression have become his main area of activity, this has not been without repeated attempts, within the limits of his means, at experiences lacking apparent coherence, but whose very incoherence signifies an effort to comprehend the totality of possibility, or to put it more precisely, to reject, untiringly, any possibility exclusive of others’, we read. ‘Bataille’s aspiration is that of a sovereign existence, free of all limitations of interest’. Here ‘the issue is not that of attainment of a goal, but rather of escape from those traps which goals represent’. And then, finally: ‘We must elude the task incumbent upon all men, but reserve a share of sovereignty, a share that is irreducible … There is work on Bataille’s part, but it is an effort to escape, an effort to release toward a freedom that is direct’ (Bataille 1986a: 109-110).
There are, no doubt, any number of ways of interpreting these acts of self-negation in Bataille’s text, and these efforts to escape the confines of language through the use of language. But by far the most intriguing is the one proposed by Jacques Derrida, in his early essay ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’. Here Derrida suggests that, while none of Bataille’s particular attempts to capture the sovereign experience within the confines of language are successful, and while all his attempts to describe sovereignty are necessarily inadequate, nevertheless, the manner in which he shifts between different attempts to describe sovereignty, developing and relinquishing one network of concepts after another, performs or enacts what he means by sovereign, or the sovereign enjoyment of the present without concern for past conditions or future aims. Put crudely, not what Bataille says, but the way he says it, or what Derrida calls the ‘form’ of his ‘writing’, is sovereign.
Derrida sets the context for his reading by comparing Hegel’s master or lord with Bataille’s sovereign. While the former risks death in his battle with the slave, he does so only in the name of a future life, or some promise of the future. The latter, on the other hand, risks an absolute death, without any relation either to the future or to the other. For the same reason, while Hegel’s master inhabits the realm of meaning and language, Bataille’s sovereign is singular and discrete. But, Derrida notes, this line of thought leads Bataille into a trap of sorts. For it effectively equates ‘discourse’ with ‘the loss of sovereignty’ and ‘servility’ with ‘the desire for meaning’. In order to begin to say anything at all, then, or to write about the subject in any manner, Bataille is compelled to ‘find a language which remains silent’. He is compelled to accomplish ‘the impossible’, or ‘to say in language – the language of servility – that which is not servile’ (Derrida 1978: 262).
According to Derrida, Bataille approaches this ‘impossible’ task by positing two kinds of language, or ‘two forms of writing’ (Derrida 1978: 265). The first, which Derrida calls ‘minor writing’, involves the secondary representation of a more original presence, or what Bataille refers to as the ‘mummy’ of meaning. The second, which Derrida calls ‘major writing’, or the ‘sovereign form of writing’ is not a representation of an original presence, but a chain of substitutions for that which is always already absent (Derrida 1978: 266). Far from imposing a kind of silence or withdrawal, the sovereign form of writing consists of a ‘transgressive affirmation’ of language. It ‘multiplies worlds, precipitates them one against the other, engulfs them too, in an endless and baseless substitution whose only rule is the sovereign affirmation of play outside meaning’ (Derrida 1978: 274). And in this manner, even while it speaks, it is effectively ‘absolved of every relationship’ and ‘keeps itself in the night of the secret’ (Derrida 1978: 266).
Thus, what Habermas takes to be a performative contradiction, Derrida treats as a performance or an enactment of sovereignty itself. The act of self-negation, or of generating a discourse that is simultaneously erased, signifies, not a failure or error in Bataille’s work, but its most essential point. The sovereign experience cannot be represented, or captured within the confines of representational discourse. And for that reason, Bataille is relentlessly shifting between discourses, or languages that have always already missed the mark. But in the act of moving between these discourses, in the act of beginning each time anew, without prior conditions or future promises, Bataille nevertheless manifests sovereignty.
It remains to be explained what any of this could have to do with ethics. While it might not immediately appear as an ethical project, certainly not from the perspective of traditional ethics, or those which begin with either the rational decisions of a responsible, autonomous subject, or the conventional mores of a delimited moral community, there is nevertheless a fairly clear sense in which Bataille’s writing is driven by an imperative, and a privileging of certain experiences over others. In this sense, and as Alan Stoekl notes, Bataille’s theory is ‘profoundly ethical’ (Stoekl 2007: 254). But this ethics it not, as Stoekl then goes on to suggest, rooted in Bataille’s effort to reassert genuine, sovereign modes of expenditure and waste in the face of modern instrumental reason, which deludes itself into thinking it can do without waste, and in doing so unconsciously mechanizes the process of waste production. As we have already seen, Bataille only advances these claims while resisting or cancelling them out at the same time. Rather, I maintain, for Bataille, it is not the striving for an ideal that is ethical, but the very act of self-negation or self-cancellation – the act, as I have tried to show, that we find repeated over and over again in his writing.
That striving for an ideal cannot be ethical for Bataille seems clear enough. Nothing is more servile, and less sovereign, in his estimation, than allowing future possibility to dictate or dominate the present moment. Even worse, from Bataille’s perspective, would be Habermasian discourse ethics, which not only suggests that statements and acts in the present can only be ethical insofar as they are oriented towards the possibility of a future consensus, or an agreement among all interested subjects, but also that such a consensus can never be attained, but is forever altered through the very practical engagements that it regulates, and thus retreats like an eternally unreachable horizon (Habermas 1991). Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to say that, for Bataille, ethics would involve the exact opposite – the rejection or annihilation, not only of all particular interests, but also of all universal norms. Or, we might say, it would have to begin by refusing nearly everything Habermas takes for granted.
Something very close, if not quite identical, to this point is made by Chris Gemerchak, in his article ‘Of Goods and Things: Reflections on an Ethical Community’. According to his interpretation, Bataille everywhere resists ‘the hegemony of an ethics that adheres to the principle of reason’, a principle that invariably ‘comes down to the calculations of interest for the good of the individual or a community of individuals and is oriented toward survival in the future rather than life in the present’ (Gemerchak 2009: 64). In the place of the calculation of interest and the projection of a future good, Bataille privileges the moments of what he sometimes calls ‘intimacy’ or ‘communication’. Importantly, such things cannot be understood in sanguine liberal terms. They do not involve subjects coming together in pursuit of rational consensus, nor do they involve the absorption of individuals into a kind of oceanic whole. Rather, for Bataille, in intimacy or communication each particular subject is placed, or torn, outside of themselves, not in such a way as to constitute a larger totality, but in such a way as to fragment all totalities, and all efforts to generate an individual or collective unity.
At this point, and like so many others I have discussed in this paper, Gemerchak comes up against the paradox of this approach – the paradox that, as mentioned earlier, Bataille repeatedly admits. It is the paradox of what Gemerchak calls ‘the unrelenting work of the dialectical economy, which makes every loss work in the service of a larger community’ (Gemerchak 2009: 75). Thus, while the moment of intimacy or communication might involve the complete dissolution of all subjective interests or future purposes, nevertheless, in order to formulate such things as an experience, let alone a discourse, interests and purposes must return. That Bataille himself is compelled, or seems compelled, to write about such things appears, for Gemerchak as for everyone else, to confirm this fact. As a result, and despite the innumerable paths his paper breaks, Gemerchak concludes by suggesting that, inasmuch as there must be one, the maxim of Bataille’s ethics would have to read: ‘do not give up on your dissatisfaction’ (Gemerchak 2009: 78). Or, to put it differently, do not foreclose the possibility of ‘intimacy’ and ‘communication’, or events that challenge the very core of your identity (the very core of identity as such), simply because you know from the outset that, in their wake, some identity must return. Do not say no to risking everything simply because, no matter how much you risk, you know you will get something back.
Here, I think, while Germachak comes very close to Bataille’s ethics, and what I am calling ‘the ethics of nothing’, his proposition needs to be finessed, or modified ever so slightly. For Bataille, I imagine, it would not have been a question of not giving up simply because you know you must fail. Rather, it would have been a question of incorporating your inevitable failure into your act – of affirming, in the moment of intimacy or communication, both the moment, and the failure against which you suspect it is destined to smash. In this way, perhaps, you usurp the power of the future, or deprive it of its authority over the present. You take it up in the present, as part of the present, and of the ecstasy that is the present. This, at any rate, is what Bataille seems to have done in his writing, and in the performances that are his texts. This is how, as Derrida maintains, he transformed his inability to describe sovereignty (or, more accurately, the impossibility of describing sovereignty), and thus his perpetual shifting between descriptions of sovereignty, into an enactment or a performance of sovereignty. This is how his text became a living example, rather than a mummified representation, of the sovereign act.
Arendt avec Bataille
In a manner that curiously reflects Bataille’s depictions of sovereignty, Hannah Arendt defines action – which she associates with freedom and politics, or with the experience of freedom that is specific to politics – as something that exhausts itself in its expression, and that has no purpose or goal outside of itself. In work, Arendt maintains (again inadvertently reflecting Bataille), humans try to accomplish some task; work is always an instrumental means to an end, and thus subordinate to a future possibility. In action, on the other hand, ‘the accomplishment lies in the performance itself, and not in the end product’ (Arendt 1993: 154). Action is free precisely because it has, as it were, no future.
As more than a few commentators have pointed out, however, while it might be intellectually compelling, it is not clear how well this conception of action applies to the actual experience or practice of politics. Can we really evacuate politics of all purpose in this fashion? Can we really treat it as a pure performance, devoid of all content save the talent or virtuosity of those involved? Is it not the case that, however minimal or oblique, politics always involves at least some measure of instrumentality, or some effort to advance a project and seek to achieve it? And in that case, would Arendt’s abstract definition of action not apply more effectively, not to politics, but to the kinds of experiences that Bataille associates with sovereignty – explosive frenzies of excess (sacrifice, violence, eroticism) and affective, somatic responses (tears, trembling, laughter)?
It is as though Bataille reveals the unspeakable, repressed underside of Arendt’s approach to action and politics – and perhaps, by extension, that of the civic republican tradition she represents, and the (as we saw Dylan Riley put it at the beginning of this paper) ‘civil society romanticism’ (Riley 2010: 2) that often goes along with it. For if we take Arendt’s theory of action at its word, in all of its frigid indifference to consequences and effects, then how could we ever distinguish in a rigorous or intellectually satisfying way between, say, the moment when a subject appears before others in word and deed, thereby revealing who as opposed to what they are, and the moment of brutal sacrifice, erotic pleasure, or spontaneous tears? Would the latter not always in some sense haunt the former? And is that perhaps why Arendt is so insistent on confining action to the realm of the political, and separating the political off from all other aspects of the human condition – and most especially, as I note elsewhere, intimacy and love (Barbour 2010)?
Maybe one could imagine composing an argument about Arendt and Bataille modelled on Jacques Lacan’s ‘Kant avec Sade’, where Lacan shows how, inasmuch as it must be purged of all ‘hypothetical’ concerns, and detached from what Kant called the ‘pathological object’ (any object that can appeal to one’s interests or desires, or any particular good), Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ constitutes a perfectly cold, abstract machine – one that, because it fixates on an abstract ‘Good’ that cannot be reduced to any specific, concrete ‘good’, is ultimately indistinguishable from de Sade’s ‘philosophy of the bedroom’ (Lacan 1986). Similarly, in its complete dissociation from all instrumentality, and all questions of prior conditions or future consequences, Arendt’s action cannot be rigorously distinguished from Bataille’s sovereignty.
And if that is the case, than perhaps a significantly different approach to the concept of the political – one associated with Lacan’s repositioning of ethics in relation to desire (Zupančič 2000) – is required as well. It would, at any rate, be necessary to acknowledge, as Riley impels us to do from a different angle, that civil society is by no means axiomatically democratic, and that there is no simple opposition between the deliberative procedures of civil associations, on the one hand, and the totalitarian fusion of mass politics, on the other; rather, we would have to allow, both endeavour, if also necessarily fail, to foreclose or suppress the experience or the event that Bataille referred to as ‘nothingness’, and Lacan, the traumatic excesses of the Real.
References
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