Gerhard Poppenberg
The concept of “inner experience” derives from the religious tradition. It is associated with the spiritual dimension of religion and develops its particular character above all in Christian mysticism. Here it signifies an access to the reality of God and the sacred in an emotional and ecstatic mystical experience, and not through rational and discursive knowledge, as in theology. Since God and the sacred are the absolute other in relation to the profane reality of the human, the experience of this encounter takes place as ecstasy. The Greek word ἔκστασις signifies being-outside-the-self, rapture. The corresponding verb ἐξίστασθαι literally means “to step outside of oneself, to stand outside oneself”. The paradox of mystical experience is that it is an inner experience which at once implies being-outside-oneself. In the Christian tradition this experience has been evoked ever again in erotic metaphors. The Old Testament Song of Songs, describing a pastoral love-story in ardent erotic imagery, was taken by Christian exegesis as an allegorical representation for the encounter of the individual soul with God. The human soul is the bride, anticipating marriage with the divine bride-groom, Christ. Bride-mysticism is an essential part of the tradition of inner experience. Georges Bataille draws on this tradition in developing the concept of inner experience, although certainly without binding himself to any specific religious doctrine. He attempts to save the experience of the sacred, beyond institutionalized religion:
Religion in the sense I mean it is not just a religion, like Christianity. It is religion in general and no one religion in particular. My concern is not with any given rites, dogmas or communities, but only with the problem that every religion sets itself to answer
(E, 32)
Erotic ecstasy is also an access to inner experience for Bataille, one with a privilege equal to that of mystical experience. Eroticism begins with a chapter on “Eroticism in inner experience”. And the erotic novels and stories should also be understood as explorations and representations of inner experience. The novella Madame Edwarda is closely related to Inner Experience. In some notes for a preface, reproduced in the notes to the Oeuvres Complètes, Bataille writes: “I wrote this little book in September-October of 1941, just before ‘The Torture’, which makes up the second part of Inner Experience. For me, the two texts are closely related, and one cannot understand the one without the other […]. I could not have written ‘The Torture’ if I had not first provided its lewd key” (OC III, 492). Peter Connor, whose book on Bataille is among the best one can read on the subject, describes Inner Experience as an “eroticization of thought itself” (Connor 2000, 36).
Given the religious connotations of the concept of inner experience, Bataille had to engage with the forms in which it had been developed within religious tradition in order to become familiar with its essential elements and to continue its practice beyond the limits of religion. “By inner experience, I understand what one usually calls mystical experience: states of ecstasy, of ravishment, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to hold oneself hitherto, than of a bare experience, free of ties, even of an origin, to any confession whatsoever” (IE, 9).
Inner Experience was published in 1941. It is the first of three works to which Bataille gave the collective title, The Atheological Summa. The reference to the Summa theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas makes Bataille’s question explicit. It concerns an experience of the sacred without any religious commitment and without any relation to God. What becomes of mysticism and inner experience after the “death of God”, dramatized by Nietzsche in The Gay Science? Can there be a mysticism without God, a “profane illumination”, in the words of Walter Benjamin? Michel Leiris referred to his friend Bataille as a “mystic of debauchery” (CL, 5).
The idea of a mysticism without God first appears towards the end of the 19th century and recurs often in the 20th century. Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is one of the initiators; the motto to Inner Experience is taken from the “Night-Wanderer Song”: “Night is also a sun”. In his foreword, Bataille writes that he would like his book to share the spirit of The Gay Science, which brings together “depth and cheerfulness”, and which “plays naively” with all that is sacred, but in such a way as to allow “the great seriousness” to begin (Nietzsche, cited by Bataille, IE, 3). The third part of the Atheological Summa is centered on reflections on Nietzsche (cf. Part 1, chapter 4 of the present book).
Atheist mysticism and profane illumination seek to preserve the luminous core of religious experience under the conditions proper to enlightened modernity. Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste is said by his wife to be a “mystic without God” (Valéry 1947, 35). The Abbé, to whom she confides this comparison, dismisses it as nonsense. What is possible for humans, he tells her, has to be directed towards a genuine reality, and have its telos in this reality. An atheist mystic is attempting something that is not in his reach. He wants the impossible, and he wants it in the domain of the “totality of what is possible to him” (l’ensemble de ce qu’il peut). Bataille takes the objection of the Abbé seriously; his profane mysticism is centered on the concept of the impossible.
The implications of atheological inner experience can be developed by reference to Bataille’s conception of laughter. Guilty, the second volume of the Atheological Summa, contains a chapter entitled “The divinity of laughter”. This correspondence between laughter and the divine has a theological authority. According to the Church father, John Chrysostom, Christ never laughed; in consequence, laughter was condemned in Christianity. Bataille’s chapter title “Laughter and trembling” alludes to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (which itself alludes to chapter 2 of the Letter to the Philippians); it indicates that, for Bataille, the theme of laughter signifies a reversal of religious doctrine. Laughter is the essence of man: “to be what I was: laughter itself” (G, 89).
Laughter is the experience of the loss of the self: “Uncontrollable laughter leaves behind the sphere that is accessible to discourse, it is a leap that cannot be defined in terms of its initial conditions – […] Laughter is a leap from possible to impossible and from impossible to possible” (G, 101 trans. mod.). The leap consists in the abandonment of discursive and conscious thought, and access to another reality, which Bataille conceptualizes as “the impossible”. The possible and the real can be related back to their causes, and thus explained through them. If an effect and a reality are not brought about by a cause, if they cannot be explained by a cause, then they are, in a strict sense, “impossible”.
Laughter brings about an immanent ecstasy, which is at the same time an opening to an exterior. “In laughter, ecstasy is freed, is immanent. The laughter of ecstasy doesn’t laugh, instead it opens me up infinitely. Its transparency is traversed by laughter’s arrow, released by a mortal absence” (G, 103 trans. mod.). The metaphor of the arrow also comes from religious tradition. The transparency of the illumination in ecstasy is penetrated by the arrow of laughter, just as the heart of Saint Teresa of Avila is struck by the arrow of God’s love. The arrow of laughter for Bataille, however, issues from a “mortal absence”. The death of God makes human death into an absolute absence. If laughter is the essence of humanity, it is a laughter about this absence – and it is not an hysterical, but a sovereign laughter.
Among the authors cited in Inner Experience, a great number stem from the spiritual and mystical tradition – Dionysos the Areopagite (5th century), Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), and above all, Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591). For Bataille, Saint John of the Cross is the most important of the spiritual teachers because, within the domain of Christianity, he is the one who radically poses the question of inner experience, instead of simply reducing ecstasy back to “satisfaction, happiness, platitude”. “Saint John of the Cross rejects the seductive image and the rapture, but finds repose in the theopathic state. I have followed his method of reduction right to the end” (EI 57, trans. mod.). Pierre Klossowski, therefore, argues that “Bataille, despite his atheist attitude, remains in solidarity with the whole Christian cultural structure” (Klossowski 2007, 68).1
In inner experience as it is conceived in the mystical tradition, the soul becomes the space for the encounter between God and the human. The human being was made in the image of God, and so it is possible for us to find this image in our own interior. Inner experience, then, is not so much a cultivation of the self, as a means to go beyond the self, a form of transcendence. The self has to be dissolved and annihilated in order to unite with the absolute other that is God. This transformation of the self into the substance of the divinity is what is meant by “inner experience”. It is something different from the knowledge of scholastic theology, and exceeds the relation to God supposed by theology. It creates another form of knowledge: Bataille distinguishes between “the facts of a common and rigorous emotional understanding and those of a discursive understanding” (EI, 5). Their union at a “precise point” gives rise to a new form of ontology.
Saint Augustine systematically elaborated the theological understanding of man as an image of God in his treatise on the Trinity. Since God is a trinity, the human soul also consists of three moments; these are the faculties of the soul, which are matched to the trinitarian persons. The memory corresponds to the father, the understanding to the son, and the will to the holy spirit (De Trinitate X, XI). The dynamic center of inner experience is the conversion. It is a caesura, dividing the individual life into a before and an after. As Christ redeemed sinful man through his sacrificial death, so each individual has to make the transformation from the sinful to the blessed life. This metamorphosis is a psychomachia, an inner struggle against the malevolent powers of evil. Augustine’s account of his conversion in the Confessions (VIII) became the defining model for the Christian era.
Saint John of the Cross formalized this complex of inner experience. The Catholic Church named him as a Doctor of the Church in questions of spirituality; his writings have been incorporated into the dogma of the Church. Therefore Bataille could take him as the point of departure for his re-writing of the tradition. In Saint John of the Cross, the psychomachia is a confrontation of the soul with its own negativity. This conception responds to a formal imperative. If the soul is to have an experience of the supernatural, then it must put off everything that is natural. Since the divide separating man and God is infinitely great, there is no mediating instance on the human side which could make the transition possible. All that is human has to be negated in preparation for the union with God, as the absolutely other of man. This negativity in the human corresponds to the negativity on the side of God, who negates his own divinity, in becoming a mortal man, and dying on the cross. This double negativity now becomes the medium for the conversion, and the mystical union of the soul and God.
The transformation of the soul takes place in the intellectual faculties. These faculties belong to the non-divine part of man, and therefore must be destroyed (St John of the Cross 1934, Ascent of Mount Carmel, II.v.7). This destruction is not to be thought of as a loss, since it is the pivotal moment of the conversion. The three intellectual faculties correspond to the three cardinal virtues: the intellect to faith; memory to hope; and the will to love. These virtues are conceived in terms of their contrast to the intellectual faculties. The light of reason becomes darkness through faith because faith enters into play precisely where there is and can be no knowledge. Nonetheless, the certainty of faith transcends the knowledge of reason; the non-knowledge of faith is a higher form of certainty (Ascent, II.vi.2). In a similar way, memory is reduced to forgetting by hope. God cannot be apprehended through anything earthly, and so the contents of memory have to be erased, in order that in its place, hope, which is oriented towards the future, can prevail (Ascent, III.vii.2). Finally, the will is transformed into a passive letting-be by love (The Dark Night of the Soul, II.xviii.3). It is this passivity, and not the will (which has been destroyed), which brings about the conversion.
The power of the negative comes from its correspondence to the passion of Christ. The transformation of the intellectual faculties takes place through negation. The experience of this annihilation is “horrible and awful to the spirit”; it is “the dark night of the soul”. But such a privation is required in order “that the spiritual form of the spirit may be introduced into it and united with it, which is the union of love” (Dark Night, II.iv.3). The non-knowledge of the intellect becomes faith, the forgetting of the memory becomes hope, the passivity of the will becomes love. Thus the soul, through the negation of the three intellectual faculties, and their metamorphosis into the three cardinal virtues, enters into relation to the three persons of the Trinity.
The negation of the intellectual faculties is a spiritual death, an imitation of the sacrificial death of Christ. It goes as far as the eli lama sabachtani, the despairing words spoken by Christ on the cross (Mark 15, 34; Matthew 27, 46). The God who is abandoned by God and descends into his own negativity is the model for the human spiritual death and sacrifice. “What the sorrowful soul feels most in this condition is its clear perception, as it thinks, that God has abandoned it, and, in his abhorrence of it, has flung it into darkness; it is a grave and piteous grief for it to believe that God has forsaken it” (Dark Night, II.vi.2). The sacrifice consists in the abandonment of the self; in this way, the believer becomes another. The unification with God via the mediation of a negation signifies here losing oneself rather than finding oneself.
The moment at which God is absent from himself is also the moment of his highest love, and so the highest form of divinity. The deity comes to itself in descending into the depths of that which, in God, is not God himself. Thus, the death of God is a moment of God himself. This is the path that is taken in the passion of Christ; and it is the same path that is taken in inner experience. The cultivation of inner experience is the wild heart of Christianity. The sacrifice of Christ is the most extreme giving or expenditure of oneself: the God that dies as a man gives up his divinity. And this sacrifice invites a similar gift of the self on the part of humanity.
The religious conception of transcendence as a transition to a higher world, reserved for what is holy and divine, is transformed by Bataille into a model of immanent transgression. Inner experience takes place between humans; thus “the sacred” becomes an inner-worldly event. The title of the 4th section of Inner Experience – “The new mystical theology” – should be understood in this sense. The new theology “only has the unknown (l’inconnu) for its object” (EI, 104). Bataille finds the same question at work in Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure. And it is from Blanchot that he derives the conditions for an atheological spirituality: “to have its principle and its end in the absence of salvation, in the renunciation of all hope; to affirm of inner experience that it is the authority (but that all authority expiates itself); to be contestation of itself, to be non-knowledge” (EI, 104).
In Christianity, God is the instance that gives unity and wholeness to the world, and meaning and truth to human life. Bataille’s atheological inner experience begins with an insight into the non-totality of world and life (EI, 4). This insight is at the origin of the concept of non-knowledge. “To no longer want to be everything is to question everything. Anyone who, slyly, wants to avoid suffering identifies himself with the entirety of the universe, judges each thing as if he were it, in the same way that he imagines, at bottom, that he will never die. We receive these hazy illusions with life, like a narcotic. But what happens when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are” (EI, 4). The desire for wholeness implies not to have to die; it is put in question by the experience of finitude. This desire, the elementary narcotic of life, has been sustained by religion, the “opium of the people”, as Marx says. To awaken out of the intoxication of this illusory identification of the self and the whole demands that everything has to be put into question. Bataille’s book is about the pains of this awakening – the hangover of the life that begins after religion. If the “desire to be everything” can only be satisfied by an illusion, then to recognize it as such is an act of Enlightenment. And “to put everything in question” becomes the foundation for a genuinely human mode of being.
When the identification with the totality and one’s own immortality are seen as illusions, it creates a “void in which one cannot breathe” (IE, 4). This void gives rise to a “singular experience”, one composed of anguish and ecstasy. The traditional mystical experience is a revelation of divine truth. The new inner experience begins with the emptiness of the non-totality – and it is itself void and empty. Non-knowledge, then, a key category in Bataille, above all in the Atheological Summa, has its meaning as a counterpart to the revelation of religious truth. It must be underlined, however, that such an experience is not a religious revelation: “nothing is revealed, except the unknown”. And unlike religious inner experience, it does not lead to the tranquilitas animi, to the peace of soul and inner joy: “it never provides anything calming” (IE, 4). Inner experience puts every last certainty in question; therefore it does not exist in view of any pre-given goal: “I wanted experience to lead me where it was leading, not to some end given in advance. And I say at once that it does not lead to a harbor (but to a place of bewilderment, of non-sense)” (EI, 9). Inner experience is a movement without direction and without goal or meaning. The distinction between emotional and discursive knowledge is based on this recognition. Inner experience is not the mediation of any kind of positive cognitive content; it is an event and a movement, nothing more. It communicates, in the literal sense, an “emotional knowledge” (une connaissance émotionelle). Such a “knowledge”, unlike discursive knowledge, does not come to rest in a conceptual term, which would be its “terminus”; it is knowledge in motion, and knowledge as motion; and for the human subject, it is experienced as emotion, as a movement of the feelings. There is no principle that guides and authorizes it, since it is centered on non-knowledge and the unknown. Nonetheless, if it is to provide a new ontological determination of the human, it cannot be simply arbitrary; it must, then, be justified and authorized.
Bataille finds the resolution to this paradox of a questioning of all authority, which nonetheless has to be authorized, in a conversation with his friend Maurice Blanchot, from whom he borrows the formula: “experience is itself authority: but authority has to be expiated” (EI, 14). Two moments should be noted here. Firstly, the principle of self-authorization is announced by another; it is derived from a conversation, an act of communication and friendship. The origin of the formula is not merely anecdotal; self-authorization requires this articulation with another. And secondly, the authority demands its “expiation”. The meaning of the term in this context, and the mode of its accomplishment, is then elaborated under the category of “torture” (le supplice), which is the title of the second part of Inner Experience. This chapter was written, Bataille claims, “with necessity, in accordance with my life” (IE, 3).
The principle of non-knowledge ends in a “state of nudity”. While it leaves particular knowledge and even particular areas of knowledge intact, non-knowledge takes away their final ground. The truth of the human being then appears as a “supplication without response” (IE, 19). It is the non-essential essence of non-knowledge that it never provides a solution or a response. To know signifies precisely to have an answer to a question. Absolute knowledge gives the answer to the absolute question, to the world considered as “an enigma to be resolved” (IE, 4). The search for this answer has to remain unsatisfied. This is what is meant by non-knowledge. The will to lose oneself replaces the will to “be everything”. “To lose oneself in this case would be to lose oneself and in no way save oneself” (EI, 29). The insight into incompleteness, Bataille writes, is “the highest ambition, it is to want to be a man”; to attain this point is even to “rise above man”, to be more than human, given that until the present, humanity has always understood itself in terms of its religious vocation (EI, 32).
In order for this transformation to take place, just as in Christian salvation, the old man has to die and be reborn as the new man. But this is now an entirely human and earthly process; “condemned to become man (or more), I must now die (to myself), give birth to myself” (EI, 39). Here then we have Bataille’s version of the Christian conversion narrative, founded on the insight into contingency and finitude.
These theoretical developments are intertwined with the account of a personal experience. Bataille recalls walking through Paris, 15 years earlier, with an open umbrella, his head full of wild ideas, when suddenly the idea of the impossible dawns on him. “A space constellated with laughter opened its dark abyss before me.” His laughter is ecstatic: “I laughed as perhaps no one had ever laughed, the final depth of each thing opened, laid bare, as if I were dead” (EI, 40). The umbrella becomes a “black shroud”. This is the traditional illumination-experience that reveals the ultimate reason of the world. From Saint Paul to Augustine, to Teresa of Avila and Jakob Boehme, it has been described ever again. In Bataille, the illumination originates with laughter, and accomplishes itself as laughter, which is also an experience of death.
At this point, he is “convulsively illuminated”. The illumination is the recognition that “man is only man”. That is liberating, but also unbearable, and causes anguish. The aim of Bataille’s book, he writes, is to “turn anguish into delight” (EI, 40). This does not mean simply to pass from anguish to joy, but rather to reveal the joy that originates from anxiety, and in anxiety. Anxiety remains the dark background on which joy lights up. It is the agent of the conversion. Hence it has to be experienced in its full terror: the experience ends in a pleading without any hope of being heard: “supplication, but without gesture and certainly without hope” (EI, 41). In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard described this emotion as the original experience of the modern age. Subsequently, Heidegger, in Being and Time and “What is Metaphysics”, analyzed the structure of anxiety (Angst), confirming its status as the fundamental affective disposition of modern humanity. The joy in anxiety, the joy that does not dissolve anxiety, is the joy at having finally attained humanity.
The plea becomes a prayer, in which he calls upon the divine father, who, in a night of despair, sacrificed his son. The relation to God is not a union with the divine plenitude, but an identification with the abandoned and despairing God, the God who experiences “exhausting solitude” in the eli lama sabachtani (EI, 41). The answer to the plea is given in the negative revelation that there is no answer. The “revelation” consists in the acceptance and the affirmation of this silence.
The self that assumes its finitude no longer interprets inner experience in terms of its relation to God, but in terms of its humanity, and hence of its relation to other humans. “But in me everything begins again, nothing is ever risked. I destroy myself in the infinite possibility of others like myself: it annihilates the meaning of this self. If I attain, an instant, the extremity of the possible, a little later, I will flee, I will be elsewhere” (EI, 41). The self (le moi) is always another, always elsewhere. This is the torment of “being forsaken, drop by drop, in the multitude of the misfortunes of man”. But the despair of the dark night – “my different nights of terror” – is also accompanied by an “unspeakable joy” (EI, 42). The humanity of the human, in the horizon of others, is its immanent transcendence. It is a field of “infinite possibility”, but it forms no totality, because humanity is made up of a “multitude of misfortunes”, and because its history is also finite.
The figure for this infinite non-whole is again taken from the mystical tradition. Teresa of Avila describes the spiritual wedding of the mystical union with God in the metaphor of raindrops, which fall into a river, and dissolve into its water: the river then flows out to the sea, and merges with it. Bataille reverses this figure, which is common in the spiritual tradition. The individual dissolves “drop by drop” into the multitude of human misfortunes. This dissolution ends in death: “Joy of the dying, wave among waves” (EI, 56). Death is not to be understood as dissolution into a totality – the dissolution is anonymous, and its medium is not a determinate something: drops in the sea, waves in waves, individuals in humanity.
A central part of the mystical tradition is the meditation upon the image of Christ dying on the cross. In the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola and the reflections of John of the Cross, meditation on the cross is the means by which the self is dissolved in inner experience. In Inner Experience the same function is served by the series of photographs – “disturbing pictures” (images bouleversantes) – of the torture of the Chinese regicide, which Bataille long kept on his person: “he communicated his pain to me or rather the excess of his pain, and it was precisely this that I was seeking, not to enjoy it, but to ruin that in me which is opposed to ruin” (EI, 122; TE, 205–207).
This tortured Chinese man is the figure of the Ecce Homo in the secular world, the figure of a suffering that cannot be redeemed, and of complete dissolution: his body is being cut up and the flesh torn open. This image of “the torture” as a fatal ecstasy and of death as ecstasy becomes the epitome of mortality: irredeemably delivered over to death, without hope or resistance.
Nonetheless, the non-knowledge of inner experience is not simply void and empty; it has its own content, which becomes accessible in “vague inner movements”. These are not bound to any specific objects or intentions (cf. EI, 21); they can be triggered by the “purity of the sky”, or by the odor of a room, but the sensations are arbitrary, unmotivated. The odor of a room evokes something, the auratic quality of a blue sky allows something to appear, but the manifestation that takes place does not have a specific cause that could be located in some way in the room or the sky. In the chapter “Ecstasy”, in the final section of the book (“Post-Scriptum to the Torture, or the New Mystical Theology”), Bataille describes and analyses two basic modes of this experience. The first is triggered on a certain evening, at twilight: “Without giving these words more than an evocative value, I thought that the ‘sweetness of the sky’ communicated itself to me and I could feel precisely the state within that responded to it. I felt it to be present inside my head like a vaporous streaming, subtly graspable, but participating in the sweetness of the outside, putting me in possession of it, making me take pleasure in it” (EI, 114). He compares the state of “happiness” that overcomes him with “mystic states”. The quotation marks around “the sweetness of the sky” are there because dulcedo (sweetness) is an essential metaphor of the spiritual tradition of inner experience (Chatillon, 1954). In this term, the element of physical sensation and spiritual experience are intertwined. Such an experience is an “inner presence which we cannot apprehend without a leap of our entire being”, carrying the self beyond itself (EI, 115). “The movements flow into an external existence: they lose themselves there, they ‘communicate’, it seems, with the outside, without the outside taking a determined form and being perceived as such” (EI, 118). This ecstasy is momentary and particular, since the “outside” with which it communicates still has the character of an object: things, world, sky. The experience is finally that between a subject and an object: I experience “the sweetness of things”. As long as the experience takes place in the interaction of the self with the external world – even if it is no more than the experience of an indefinite “there” – it finally returns to a definite kind of being that is known and recognized in discourse, and the inner experience comes to an end.
The direction of Bataille’s reflection then is towards a mode of experience that departs from recognizable and nameable experience and enters into the sphere of non-knowledge. Non-knowledge is an experience of the night, in which the perception of things and world is no longer possible, in which sight, the basic mode of knowing, is extinguished. “From then on the night, non-knowledge, will each time be the path of ecstasy along which I will lose myself” (EI, 125). In the darkness of the night, however, the desire to see still subsists: “What then finds itself in a profound obscurity is a fierce desire to see when, before this desire, everything slips away” (ibid.). The night, the medium in which every relation to things, every relation to the world dissolves, now becomes itself an object – one whose property is to make every kind of object-relation impossible.
A citation from Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure illustrates the point: “He saw nothing and, far from being distressed, he made this absence of vision the culmination of his sight […] Not only did this eye that saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its own vision. It saw as object that which prevented it from seeing” (cited by Bataille, EI 103). As Blanchot underlines in his essay on Bataille, the dark of night is not simply an absence of light: it is a “surplus of nothingness”, “a pure affirmation” (Blanchot 1993, 307, 310). The “night of non-knowledge” is now encountered face to face, and no longer as an object to be defined: “Suddenly I know it, discover it without a cry, it is not an object; it is HER that I was awaiting” (EI, 125 trans. mod.). The experience of the night as the absolute other is evoked in terms taken from the tradition of bride-mysticism: “In HER everything is effaced, but, exorbitant, I traverse an empty depth and the empty depth traverses me. In HER, I communicate with the ‘unknown’ opposed to the ipse that I am; I become ipse, unknown to myself, two terms merge into the same laceration, scarcely differing from a void” (EI, 126 trans. mod.).
Such affective movements are disturbed or completely blocked by consciousness and by discursive thought, proceeding in accordance with the “law of language”. They are only to be attained – “with a little luck” – through a struggle against language. But since the human mode of being is profoundly constituted by language, this actually means a struggle against oneself. The struggle of the soul (the psychomachia) in the spiritual tradition against the obstacles put up by the enemy becomes a struggle with language, an internal struggle with and against oneself as a creature of language.
The linguistic agon appears in formulations composed of mutually exclusive meanings, whose juxtaposition is formally ironic. “Silence” is an example of such a “sliding word”. Its signification is the destruction of what it is, as word and phonic form: “among all words it is the most perverse, or the most poetic: it is itself proof of its own death” (EI, 23). Silence is the paradigmatic ironic word, setting sound and meaning against each other in open contradiction. This dimension of Bataille’s thought is unfolded a generation later with deconstruction.
Bataille draws one last consequence from this thought. In past attempts to write a book, he broke off the project, before it was finished, having forgotten what it was that had so fascinated him. “I escape myself and my book escapes me” (EI, 62). But in this experience, he now recognizes the movement of inner experience itself: “And if this book resembles me? If the conclusion eludes the beginning: is unaware of it or indifferent to it? Strange rhetoric! Strange means of invading the impossible” (ibid.). Anacoluthon is the figure of language and thought which responds to the impossible. It expresses the inherent impossibility to bring a thought to term, because it ends in non-knowledge. The anacoluthon is the syntactical figure of the “supplication without response”.
Hence Maurice Blanchot makes the stipulation, which also holds for the present study, that Bataille’s book will not let itself be contained in the critical commentary. “Since Georges Bataille’s book is an authentic translation it cannot be described. The book is the tragedy that it expresses. Certainly, if one has discerned its meaning, one can reduce it to a weighty scholarly exposition. But its truth is in the burning of the mind, in the play of the lightning, in the silence full of vertigo and exchanges that it communicates to us” (Blanchot 2001, 41).
Translated by Mark Hewson.
1 Buvik (2010) presents the 1944 discussion between Bataille, Klossowski, Marcel Moré and the theologian Jean Daniélou, which took place in the house of Moré (cf. OC VI 315–359).
Blanchot, Maurice 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Blanchot, Maurice. 2001. Faux Pas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Buvik, Pierre. 2010. L’Identité des contraires. Sur Georges Bataille et le christianisme. Paris: Éditions du Sandres.
Chatillon, Georges. 1954. “Dulcedo, dulcedo Dei” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, Paris: Beauchesne, 1777–1795.
Connor, Peter Tracey. 2000. Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Feyel, Juliette. 2013. Georges Bataille: une quête érotique du sacré. Paris: Champion.
Hussey, Andrew. 2000. The Inner Scar. The Mysticism of Georges Bataille. Amsterdam (Atlanta): Rodopi.
John of the Cross, Saint. 1934–1935. The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church. 3 vols. Trans. Alison Peirs from the critical edition of P. Silverio de Santa Teresa. London: Burns Oates and Washbourne.
Klossowski, Pierre. 2007. Such a Deathly Desire. Translated by Russell Ford. Albany: SUNY Press.
Valéry, Paul. 1947. Monsieur Teste. Translated by Jackson Matthews. New York: Knopf.