Marcus Coelen
In the early 1930s, the word “heterology” appears in Georges Bataille’s writings and with it the promise of a science or a quasi-scientific adventure that would give some form of life to the term. The project of developing an explicit “heterology” can be seen as an endeavor limited to this specific moment in Bataille’s life and thought – around the year 1932–33 – and responding to one particular problem – how to introduce the insights, intuitions and methodological moves associated with Documents and The Story of the Eye and to delimit these from Surrealism. Alternatively, “heterology” can be taken as a name designating the entire spectrum of Bataille’s writings and activities, spreading over more than four decades, from scientific materialism to general eroticism, from the most intimate suffering to the public affirmation of life, from archival diligence to pornographic passion, from the exactitude of minute poetic expression to the most sweeping assertion in the political sphere. This somewhat strange term can be set in an open chain or illimitable constellation with others – “base materialism”, “general economy”, “evil”, “erotology”, “sacred sociology”, “hatred of poetry”, “inner experience”, even “laughter” and “anxiety”, to name just some – each of which mark certain texts or periods in Bataille’s career, and all of which share the same characteristic of resisting their appropriation into a clearly defined and stable category, even while continuing to appeal to categorization. These terms place themselves outside the reach of critical, systematic, or historic comprehension while nevertheless inviting it. In this manner, they expose a principle formulated by Bataille in a text called “The labyrinth” in 1936: the “principle of insufficiency” which is also a principle of contestation: “The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other” (VE, 172). Bataille, who was convinced that writing, if done in a certain way, is able to cut open a blasé and self-sufficient body of knowledge and conviction, set forth terms and poetic twists that contest as much as they invite contestation in the very moment they are put on paper, giving voice, as it were, to the insufficiency of the being that advances them. Taken in this way, “heterology” is neither the part of a whole – Bataille’s “life project” or “work” – nor an essential name for the whole itself. It rather contests elementary and pitilessly unavoidable categories such as “part” and “whole”. Faithful to the maddening thought that “my existence” contests the truth of the universe, the term marks more than others the singularity of what is linked to the name of Georges Bataille as insufficient and contested, leaving criticism the task of attuning its language and sensibility to his ontology of insufficiency. “Heterology,” perhaps a cry more than a concept, would thus have to be read as fundamentally deficient and defective, in a reading that itself falters by affirming “heterology” as the quest for truth in “lived experience” (VE, 113) without the horizon of totality or secure identification.
The remarks here base themselves on the hypothesis expressed in this third way of reading “heterology”. While indicating how “heterology” names a fiber detectable in almost all writing by Bataille, they will be limited to indicating and commenting on the more or less explicit occurrence of the term in one text – “The Use Value of D.A.F. Sade” – and in some notes and passages surrounding or resonating it.
Some reflections on the term itself as well as on its linguistic matter will help to approach it. The word “hétérologie”, when conceived by Bataille in the early 1930s, was a neologism in French. It has still not made its way into the main dictionaries of that language. The cognate adjective “hétérologique”, however, does exist as a technical term in linguistics, where it designates a word that does not describe itself: the word “red” is not red, unlike words that are “autologique”, such as “short”, which is a rather short word or “awkward”, which is an awkward word, and which are therefore in line with themselves. The same technical linguistic meaning exists for the English equivalent “heterologous”, while the term is also used in the Anglophone bio-medical vocabulary where it is opposed to “homologous”, both being used mainly in the field of immunology; the noun “heterology” is exclusively lexicalized in those two contexts and meanings.
The term “hétérologie” – as well as “heterology” – is thus autologous to a certain extent. Though it persists as a word, it is not completely recognized as one, or at least it could not be assimilated into the lexicon and accepted by the official safeguards and archives of the language. This is surprising for at least two reasons: firstly, it is frequently used in critical language, and at least one major figure in the field of theory besides Bataille has promoted it to the status of a name for a specific methodology, namely, Michel de Certeau (see Girard, 1991). For this author, “heterology” promised a new epistemology and “science of the other”. Secondly, the term follows a clear compositional principle combining two very common parts of words: “hétéro-” deriving from the Greek heteros meaning “other” and being employed in such terms as “hétérogène” or “hétérosexuel”, as well as “-logie” designating most frequently a science, a field of knowledge, or a specific theory. Very easily, then, the word could be recognized to signify the “science of otherness”, the “knowledge about heterogeneous things”, or “language and discourse pertaining to heterogeneity” – but instead, the term itself remains heterogeneous to the language insofar it is homogenized – or pressured to become so by official linguistic politics.
This is not without an ironic logic. For when Bataille introduced his neologism, he both asserted the possible – and for him even necessary – existence of that to which the coinage of the term refers, and yet immediately withdrew from it its validity. The paradox value of the term is clearly stated. Bataille “does not mean that heterology is, in the usual sense of such a formula, the science of the heterogeneous” (VE, 97). In what sense then can heterology be a science of the heterogeneous? And how can we account for the relation between the heterogeneous, the scientific and the heterological? These questions appear abstract, but we might be able to both provide them with some concreteness and answer them by referring to the place where they were able to occur. Yet again this “place” itself is indicated in an abstract manner: “The heterogeneous is even resolutely placed outside the reach of scientific knowledge, which by definition is only applicable to homogeneous elements” (VE, 97). The place of heterology is outside, as the place of the heterogeneous is: outside the homogeneous of human social existence in the case of the latter, outside science in the case of the former. And Bataille attempts to attain this “outside”, neither as the negative of the describable inside nor, as it were, from its “own inside”. Positioning philosophy vis-à-vis science, he writes in “The Use Value of D.A.F. Sade”:
The interest of philosophy resides in the fact that, in opposition to science or common sense, it must positively envisage the waste products of intellectual appropriation. Nevertheless, it most often envisages these waste products only in abstract forms of totality (nothingness, infinity, the absolute), to which it itself cannot give a positive content
(VE, 96)
But philosophy, he continues, will necessarily transform the “waste products” into an object of speculation: in what science cannot comprehend, it will see the infinite of the world. Therefore, it cannot be the philosopher who exposes this waste, giving it to thinking without appropriating it and thus making it homogeneous to knowledge and thought, in the form of common sense and a system. Rather:
Only an intellectual elaboration in a religious form can, in its periods of autonomous development, put forward the waste products of appropriative thought as the definitively heterogeneous (sacred) object of speculation.
(VE, 96)
But then religion also does not address and maintain the heterogeneous as heterogeneous. By separating a “superior world” from an “inferior”, it also renders the totality homogeneous. Christianity is obviously the model here, more precisely, the kenosis of Christ, his incarnation not only as human but as the “lowest” of humans. Bataille writes: “God rapidly and almost entirely loses his terrifying features, his appearance as a decomposing cadaver, in order to become, at the final stage of degradation, the simple (paternal) sign of universal homogeneity” (VE, 96).
The space is thus opened for something new, for “a practical and theoretical heterology.” That would be neither science nor philosophy nor religion: A new science is born: the “science of what is completely other” as Bataille explains in a footnote immediately following the introduction of the newly coined term. Yet the note continues arguing for the instability of that very name for the scientific endeavor just introduced. Referring to the Greek terms agios (sacred, holy; but also accursed, execrable) and scor (excrements), he underlines the fundamental ambiguity not only of the objects of this new science, but of itself as well as of its designation:
The term agiology would perhaps be more precise, but one would have to catch the double meaning of agio (analogous to the double meaning of sacer), soiled as well as holy. But it is above all the term scatology (the science of excrement) that retains in the present circumstances (the specialization of the sacred) an incontestable expressive value as the doublet of an abstract term such as heterology.
(VE, 102)
Heterology, a science, is threatened precisely by what it is: science, i.e. the elevation of the concrete to the level of abstract understanding and the deduction of laws of occurrence. Strangely, Bataille partakes here in a genuine philosophical concern, having perhaps Hegel’s rhetorical question “But whoever thinks abstractly?” in mind. (He started to read Hegel at around this time.) Maybe the heterogeneous – “sexual activity …; defecation; urination; death and the cult of cadavers …; cannibalism; the sacrifice of animal-gods; omophagia; the laughter of exclusion; sobbing …; religious ecstasy; the identical attitude toward shit, gods, and cadaver” (VE, 94) – is not so much a specific concreteness to be intuited by a new science as the figure of the concrete as such. It is not “shit” in itself that would be posited with the heterological quasi-science, but the concreteness and formlessness of matter before or after taking shape as an object. The shapeless shit of matter, after having been an object of consumption, would be the concrete figure of what it also is: concreteness before turning into the understandable. And the cadaver, the essentially decaying, after having been a living being, would project in front of the eyes of science and common sense, sensual corporeality before it becomes a body.
In this sense, Bataille’s endeavor would not only be directed to the appreciation of the waste products of culture, the low elements of productivity; it not only wants to render justice to the fundamentally ambivalent nature of society and human life; it is also the insistence of an intellectual movement “toward the concrete” – to take up the title of a book by the philosopher Jean Wahl (1932) who, although referring to very different philosophical authors (James, Whitehead, Marcel), made productive the same discontent inherent to philosophy which Bataille had grasped starting with Documents: discontent due to the betrayal of the concrete as soon as it is thought as something else, i.e. as something thinkable, as well as the dissatisfaction with the traditional means of working through this discontent (sensualism, empiricism). Despite his attempts at delimiting himself from philosophy – “Above all, heterology is opposed to any homogeneous representation of the world, in other words, to any philosophical system” (VE, 97) – Bataille’s project might nonetheless be seen as a genuine philosophical endeavor, an attentive listening to Aristotle’s exhortation “to save the phenomena”.
The heterological is a both weak and excessive response, the necessarily ridiculous answer to a question that would be asked by the homogeneous forces of society – science, religion, economics, politics – about themselves. If “excrement” is the answer to the question as to what food is for – an obviously ridiculous answer – then excretion does away with both question and answer, with the objects positioned in them, with the economy of consumption leaving the excrement only as useless remainder or recyclable matter for new consumption. Excretion does not produce the excrement, heterological writing does not propose a science, both contest economy and thought, and what appears with them, i.e. excremental elements of physiology and heterology, shit, pamphlets, sweat, sperm, scandalous stories, saliva and incoherent, laughable propositions, is not “reinvested” in the useful and the immanent machinery of the world, but concatenated with what is supposed to transcend it, the divine, holy and sacred. What heterology is after belongs to the logic and writing of this concatenation: its letters and phrases are laughs, tears, screams, trance, anxiety, horror, passion, its schematics are attraction, repulsion and convulsion, and it is neither bound by the immanent nor arrested in its direction towards the transcendent. Heterology does not speak about what breaks away from the homogeneous, it rather partakes in it.
Therefore, the linguistic characterization of “heterology” given earlier has to be extended: the term does not predominantly refer to the logos – to the science or discourse – on the heterogeneous; it indicates the “logic” of the heterogeneous, in the same way as the “physiology” of a living organism does not so much describe it, but rather is its logic, the logic of the physis, its functioning according to the specificities of the living. Heterology is the logic of the heterogeneous itself, which is not opposed to the homogeneous, but is rather opposition itself or, as Bataille expresses it, “polarity”: “The heterogeneous (or sacred) is defined as the very domain of polarity. Which means that the strongly polarized elements appear to be wholly other in relation to vulgar life” (OC II, 167). The identification of the heterogeneous with the sacred here shows the fundamental ambiguity of heterological terminology. For the sacred is both one extreme of the polarity and the extremism of polarization:
The notion of the (heterogeneous) foreign body permits one to note the elementary subjective identity between types of excrement (sperm, menstrual blood, urine, fecal matter) and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous: a half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous shroud can be seen as characteristic of this unity
(VE, 94)
The same can be said about the other extreme of polarization, the base material, faecal matter, etc. It is both the low and the notion embracing polarity in the name of an equally base science.
Excretion and appropriation are important and scandalous in the human; they are “important” and objectively describable in the realm of the (so called higher) animals; they are less important and not even clearly describable in the process of “living nature” where they are completely absorbed into general metabolism. To describe physiology as appropriation and excretion would both be a truism, and the assertion of an unspecific, and thus incorrect, objectivity. In this sense, the “scandalous nature” of the raw facts of consumption and waste defecation in the human is dissolved into the homogeneity of abstract knowledge. “The only way to resist this dilution lies in the practical part of heterology, which leads to an action that resolutely goes against this regression to homogeneous nature” (VE, 98). This “action,” however, is a peculiar one, for it is neither an action based on deliberation nor an act following a decision – it is rather the activity of the heterological physis itself, in spite of its metabolic law: laughter, orgasm, insignificant spasms of the “organism” insofar as it is inscribed into the economy of appropriation and excretion: laughing at the ridiculousness yet irrefutability of a philosophical argument, having an orgasm at the border of reproduction, losing one’s head in the process of thinking. The Solar Anus (1927) presents the following images: “An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality” (VE, 6). By spitting into the soup, the cook celebrates digestion in the open. The subject of heterological practice or “action” does not affirm shit as something, but says Yes nevertheless to excretion. This subject thus acquires “the capacity to link overtly, not only his intellect and his virtue, but his raison d’être to the violence and incongruity of his excretory organs, as well as to his ability to become excited and entranced by heterogeneous elements, commonly starting in debauchery” (VE, 99).
A thin line is drawn: neither the affirmation of the parts and practices negated by homogeneous societies, systems, and subjugations; nor the affirmation of the “products” of those practices as such. The thin line of the “insignificant” (VE, 99) is in the vast and indeterminate terrain of what Bataille understood as “subjectivity”. The subjectivity is thought and written by him as “lived experience”, torn and turned outside into the unrecognizable night and upwards into the blinding sun, basing its life on the “hypothesis of an irrevocable insignificance” (G, 113) as he wrote in his famous letter to Kojève. This insignificance is, however, also that of “the fathomless multitude of insignificant lives” (VE 221). One can ask, then, why debauchery and public transgression are necessary forms of the affirmation of “insignificance”. As far as the moment of the “Use Value of D.A.F. Sade” is concerned, the answer is clear: at the end of the heterological practice stands the “revolution”, the overthrowing of the system of injustice and exploitation of which the legalization and morality of restricted economy and restrained reason are an integral part. The “revolution” which Bataille envisions here, in the early 1930s, is not the fascist revolution: this is a perverted revolution, leading to “the accomplished uniting of the heterogeneous elements with the homogeneous elements, of sovereignty in the strictest sense with the State” (VE, 155). Nor is it the communist revolution, which is too exclusively based on the economic conditions, and not on the “actual psychological structure” (VE 157) of society. It is the revolution of a different proletariat: “This proletariat cannot actually be limited to itself: it is in fact only a point of concentration for every dissociated social element that has been banished to heterogeneity” (VE, 157). The liberating process that responds to the urges of the day “requires worldwide society’s fiery and bloody Revolution.” The “Use Value of D.A.F. Sade” ends on this affirmation, and the adjectives qualifying the revolution – “fiery”, “bloody” – are not accidental. Spilled blood, burning fire, violent frenzy are the revolution here, and not its by-products. The “Propositions” from Acéphale make this very clear by underlining that the goal of revolution is “universal existence” and not the dictatorship of an identifiable proletariat. The enemy, the one to be killed, is not so much the capitalist – a laughable and transient figure – but God, or the refusal to recognize the death of God.
For universal existence is unlimited and thus restless: it does not close life in on itself, but instead opens it and throws it back into the uneasiness of the infinite. Universal existence, eternally unfinished and acephalic, a world like a bleeding wound, endlessly creating and destroying particular finite beings: it is in this sense that true universality is the death of God.
(VE 201)
The adjectives of the “fiery and bloody Revolution” are “waste”, but this waste is to be fed back into the organism of thought, or rather, into the acephalic physis of writing, in order to re-emerge – as if it were more waste or even vomit – as the affirmation of a general notion of expenditure “endlessly creating and destroying the particular finite beings” called concepts and projects. For the goal of the revolution has to put an end to servitude, and this means for Bataille, a specific, unsecured and risky life: “What escapes servitude – life – risks itself; in other words, it places itself on the level of the chances it meets” (VE, 231). One could say that heterology – passing through a parody of science, a call for blood and fire, a hyperbolic affirmation of mythology, scandalous literature and untenable propositions for equally untenable communities – leads to a quasi-anthropological affirmation of the human as the animal of chance and contingency.
Neither the political – zoon politikon – nor reason and language – zoon logon echon – nor fundamental lack – Mängelwesen – determine this being called human. Yet the human is – in most cases – called by a name, and it is this name that befalls him by chance: as “George” carries a reference to the “worker of the earth” – “geo-orgos” in Greek – as well as to the military saint; or a man given a surname calling war and battle into the mind of everyone meeting him. Or both. In the name of being, life is thus put to risk, because it is called by chance. This is what the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” calls “living myth” (VE 231), exposing the author Georges Bataille to the ridicule of any reader wanting to ground general statements in generality, or even universalism in universality:
And living myth, which intellectual dust only knows as dead and sees as the touching error of ignorance, the myth-lie represents destiny and becomes being. Not the being that rational philosophy betrays by giving it the attributes of the immutable, but the being expressed by the given name and the surname, and then the double being that loses itself in an endless embrace, and finally the being of the city “that tortures, decapitates, and makes war”.
(VE, 231)
From the being called by chance, living this name as myth and lie, through the lovers transcending themselves, and the supposed unity of their entity as two in fusion, to the disseminated being of the conflicted society quoting the acts of violence and at times resorting to them – this sequence seems to describe an itinerary. But it is rather a constellation without direction. Bataille’s texts and action of the thirties at least go both ways: from the city-dwellers’ activism verging on war, with Contre-Attaque, to the beginning of an Inner Experience concerning first of all, though not exclusively, the one named Georges Bataille; from the concern of a subject stretched out in the personal phantasmatology of a singular body between its “Solar Anus” and its “Pineal Eye”, concerned with exhorting some comrades to engage in a political adventure heterogeneous to communism and fascism as well as to bourgeois democracy, to the founding of secret and public institutions addressing as well as being addressed by the violent fractures of society. Those are the pathways of practical heterology. And somewhere on these roads or in the soil they trace, meet the lovers.
At least twice in the course of these itineraries, heterology embraces the “true world of lovers” (VE 229). The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which was published in 1938 as the opening article in a special issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française calling “For a College of Sociology”, posits the act of lovers as the only truth, besides the sociology of the sacred and its rites itself, surpassing the life oppressively fractured in the restrained domains of science, art, and politics and thus open to “total existence” (VE 232). And a novel written 1934/35 yet published only in 1957, The Blue of Noon, gives with the encounter of Dirty and Troppmann another lovers’ world. Its mode, reminiscent of The Story of the Eye and resonating with Madame Edwarda to come, contrasts with the surprisingly serene tonality of the “Sorceror’s Apprentice”. Here the movement of transcendence is heterological in the more scatological sense, informed by horror and the direction downward: Dirty keeps vomiting, anxiety projects the narrator beyond himself and his copulations. The “world of the lovers” is set on the stage of all the political, literary, scientific, phantasmatological, and sexual issues addressed in the project of heterology. It has been pointed out that “the best commentary on The Blue of Noon can be found in the series of schemata in which Bataille analyses the forms and degrees of heterogeneity analyses” (Louette 2004, 1050). (The schemata referred to here can be found in the posthumous “Cahier de l’hétérology”, OC II, 178–202.)
While being conspicuously a roman à clé, The Blue of Noon can be read as Georges Bataille’s practical heterology, spelled out in a more detailed manner than anywhere else in this heterogeneous corpus. This “literature”, driven by the hatred of poetry, i.e. by the execration of everything edifying and aestheticizing in fictional writing, appears as the ultimate excretion. Yet since nothing is excreted here, except the nothing of its “fiction” – the raw making of it; the invention of a matter to be passed – the heterology of the Blue of Noon is free to be experienced while waiting for a movement of liberation to take place.
With some other adventures of the 20th century, such as Freud’s psychoanalysis and Barthes’ nouvelle critique, heterology is a quasi or ironically scientific undertaking moved by an idiosyncratic and singular affection by the other of mind and body – drive, mourning, anxiety – escaping into the labyrinth of a partly affirmed, partly checked anarchy of writing and literature. These projects are “autobiographies” in a sense not easily avowed either by their authors, or by their readers insofar as they maintain their will to be followers as well. Georges Bataille’s autobiographical heterology did not fail to discourage such an approach: “The simple project of writing implies the will … to provoke one’s fellow-beings to a point that they vomit you up” (OC II, 140–141). A different metamorphosis of metabolism will thus have to be invented by those desiring to continue to read Bataille’s heterology.
Girard, Luce. 1991. “Epilogue: Michel de Certeau’s Heterology and the New World”. Representations 33, 212–221.
Louette, Jean-François. 2004. “Notice de Le bleu du ciel” in Georges Bataille. Romans et récit. Paris: Gallimard.
Wahl, Jean. 1932. Vers le concret. Paris: Vrin.