Georges Bataille

January 10, 2010 1:12 PM

Literature And Evil
posted by vronsky (33 comments total)

wiki, other texts
posted by vronsky at 1:14 PM on January 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

People may want to know that the third link opens with a historic picture of live dismemberment.
posted by joost de vries at 1:14 PM on January 10, 2010

So anyway then we got a whole bunch of eggs and hard boiled them and umm... what was I talking about. Oh there's like eyes all over the place and ummm... then at this party she peed all over herself. So yeah. Bukowski was such a poser. Wait what were we talking about?
posted by Babblesort at 1:18 PM on January 10, 2010

At the very beginning of Before Sunrise Celine shows Jesse the book she is reading on the train. I've never been able to catch the title but it is by Bataille. I fell hard for her right then.
posted by Babblesort at 1:23 PM on January 10, 2010

I just posted the interview to my blog a few days ago. It's amazing to see Bataille speak and move (and slouch). Let alone to take in what he's saying - in 1958!

That said, Bataille doesn't seem to go over well in Mefi for whatever reason. Teh sex, I imagine.
posted by stinkycheese at 1:37 PM on January 10, 2010

From Michel Surya's excellent biography -

"In [the interview], Bataille appeared relaxed and handsome, and scandalous (for the times) beneath an absolutely serene exterior (his way of saying the worst of things with an air of innocence was all his own). He talked about literature and what was 'essentially childish' and infantile about it. It is a childishness that literature has in common with eroticism: 'It seems to me to be very important to perceive the infantile nature of eroticism.' Evidently Bataille was little concerned about demonstrating that eroticism was innocent in the sense that morality would like to understand it. It has the cruel, black innocence of childhood. To understand it, we must reflect on what Bataille said of Gilles de Rais: 'We could not deny the monstrosity of childhood. How often would children, if they could, be a Gilles de Rais.' It is a monstrously happy childhood that Bataille was thinking of, a childhood that has no limits except those imposed by law (by authority). And literature is dangerous because it is linked to childhood; because it is the element within us that is open to childhood that it is essential for us to 'confront the danger' in it, and that it is essential, through it, to 'perceive the worst'.

It was Bataille's first and last television appearance. He was too tired to remember what he had found to say (though in fact he had been clear to a fault); leaving the studio, he only recalled having talked about polygamy, and this was enough to send him into raptures."
posted by stinkycheese at 1:41 PM on January 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

stinkycheese: "Bataille doesn't seem to go over well in Mefi for whatever reason. Teh sex, I imagine."

However much respect I have for Battaille, I think it is more likely the rape and other violence rather than the sex that people object to. The Story Of The Eye, for example, depicts rape from the rapist's perspective and intentionally blurs the distinctions between rape and sex. And then there are the erotic descriptions pulling an eyeball out of an eyesocket etc. etc.

I have wrestled quite a bit with the contradictions between my ethics and my appreciation for Battaille and an artist and a philosopher and have no satisfactory answers.
posted by idiopath at 1:54 PM on January 10, 2010

Final line from the interview:

In short, the man who plays finds in the game the force to overcome what the game contains of horror.

No "evil" in the words we read, no horror to overcome, not literature. I'll buy that.

Meanwhile ...

I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met who could appreciate Georges Bataille
posted by philip-random at 2:51 PM on January 10, 2010

Interesting fellow, of whom I was unaware thanks to my university's no doubt wise belief that six hours of humanities is enough for any engineer.

From t3l:

it doesn't begin to explain Bataille's increasing valence within the last few decades of this country

Having written some fairly sexually violent prose myself, maybe I can explain that.

Most of what we are told about the human condition is very obviously, if you look too close, a lie. At our core we are really only a few primal drives, and everything we pile on top of those is both artificial and malleable; the more we become aware of people who are different from us, the more obvious this becomes. I will have to get around to reading him now that I know he exists but from the reviews and such it appears that he was obsessed with getting to the truth of the human condition, a truth he tended as a philosopher to express in terms I'd find a bit New Agey, but while he might say "negative flow" where I'd say "self-destructive programming" we ended up writing some very similar stuff.

I think that if you can't write a passage from the standpoint of the rapist, the pedophile, the serial killer, then you are missing a substantial fraction of the truth of what it means to be human. Because these are not supernatural monsters created in the bowels of hell; they are human beings who had mothers, childhoods, wet dreams, and so on just like the rest of us. And not all of these people were forged in the crucible of abuse and neglect; some have distressingly normal backgrounds.

Other than the truly primal stuff at the bottom, most of what we are can probably be changed. As a child I was taken to church twice or more a week; even as I was losing my faith the thought of losing the social aspects of this seemed almost unthinkable. Yet the habit was only sustaining itself, and when I quit the urge to find a replacement faded until the whole idea seems today like a silly waste of time.

What I saw on the morning in 1994 that inspired The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect was that, in a sufficiently warped environment -- such as perhaps one where we can have anything we want without cost, and cannot even escape the lack of true challenge by dying -- even relatively normal people will eventually be ground down, or perhaps more accurately evaporate, into their primal constituents.

And the reason Bataille is gaining currency is that even with today's technology, which has loads of flaws, we are so unchallenged or challenged in unnatural ways that do not engage us that some of us are evaporating like my characters already. This is why serial rapist-murderers, a relative rarity before the 20th century, now warrant an entire branch of the FBI. And that is what Battaille is trying to tell you with the depiction of pulling an eyeball out of its socket, or what I'm trying to tell you as Caroline is raped by a zombie; the potential for this sort of thing exists within all of us. And the modern world is gradually unlocking it. Consider yourself warned.
posted by localroger at 3:03 PM on January 10, 2010 [3 favorites]

I like Georges Bataille. I don't think he was unethical, or that his writing was.
posted by nervousfritz at 3:31 PM on January 10, 2010

Not having read the zombie rape scene you allude to, I will still make a guess that something distinctly different is going on with The Story Of The Eye.

When the eye is ripped out of the man's socket it is not a horrifying event done by a villain. It is the triumphant act of one of the protagonists. And when a woman puts that eye inside her vagina and urinates it is not depicted as a nadir of depravity, her urine becomes the tear of the disembodied eye, it is a moment of beauty and poetry. There is no revulsion in the text, the reader must bring her own to the text.

Your talk of this violence as a threat, as a thing to be warned about.

Bataille considers it an invitation, and he beckons you into it.
posted by idiopath at 3:32 PM on January 10, 2010

The eye is a very loaded symbol in Bataille's work, probably because his father was blind (as well as being insane). It made, shall we say, a big impression on him.
posted by stinkycheese at 3:36 PM on January 10, 2010

ideopath:

Your talk of this violence as a threat, as a thing to be warned about.

Bataille considers it an invitation, and he beckons you into it.

Actually that pretty much is exactly the vibe I was striving for -- for all the horror we tend to project on the scene through contemporary sensibilities, for the participants it is a light entertainment, something more worthwhile than usual to while away the infinite hours, and not to them a bad thing at all. (There's no deep meaning because the tangent of my story goes more in the drection of nothing having a deep meaning at all, but I was thinking of our methods, it's obvious his philosophy is grounded in a different way of thinking than mine.)

There is a later scene which many people have commented on in which a much younger Caroline, naif to the ways of immortality, is seduced by the person who becomes the monster of Ch. 1, who was in his previous mortal life a serial child murderer. That is probably one of the most difficult things I have ever written, requiring that you get into the mind of both a serial killer and an ordinary woman who accepts his seduction. That kind of has to be explained for the story to make any sense, and the fact that it works for so many people (to the point that they email to say how surprised they were that it did) gives me great satisfaction.
posted by localroger at 3:47 PM on January 10, 2010

When the eye is ripped out of the man's socket it is not a horrifying event done by a villain. It is the triumphant act of one of the protagonists. And when a woman puts that eye inside her vagina and urinates it is not depicted as a nadir of depravity, her urine becomes the tear of the disembodied eye, it is a moment of beauty and poetry.

I haven't read this before, but it sounds frickin' hilarious. Is it supposed to be ridiculous?
posted by Lobster Garden at 4:41 PM on January 10, 2010

Lobster Garden: you can get the full text from the Bataille Electronic Library and decide for yourself.

I am pretty sure it was meant to be erotic:

In the meantime, I had let Sir Edmund undress me, so that I could pounce stark naked on the crouching body of the girl; my entire cock vanished at one lunge into the hairy crevice, and I fucked her hard while Sir Edmund played with the eye, rolling it, in between the contortions of our bodies, on the skins of our bellies and breasts. For an instant, the eye was trapped between our navels.

- (a couple of paragraphs later) -

Now I stood up and, while Simone lay on her side, I drew her thighs apart, and found myself facing something I imagine I had been waiting for in the same way that a guillotine waits for a neck to slice. I even felt as if my eyes were bulging from my head, erectile with horror; in Simone's hairy vagina, I saw the wan blue eye of Marcelle, gazing at me through tears of urine. Streaks of come in the steaming hair helped give that dreamy vision a disastrous sadness. I held the thighs open while Simone was convulsed by the urinary sapasm, and the burning urine streamed out from under the eye down to the thighs below...
posted by idiopath at 6:25 PM on January 10, 2010

Idiopath: I might be horrified by this if I thought that the idea of people having sex with eyeballs was even remotely plausible, but it's so extreme that it's just absurd. What else do they do, wank each other off with someone's intestines? The fact that it takes itself so seriously adds to the hilarity. It sounds like something Aaron Rayburn would write.

Thanks for the link.
posted by Lobster Garden at 6:54 PM on January 10, 2010

The Story of the Eye begins like an erotic story. But it progresses on a exponential upward curve of bizarreness. It's hard to say exactly what Bataille was after. Lord knows people have written plenty of literary analysis on him.

Eventually I found it to be just absurdist. It easily sits on the same shelf as Bukowski, Mark Leyner, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs. What makes it really stand out is that it was written in 1928. It is pretty transgressive by today's standards. By 1928 standards I'm surprised he wasn't burned at a stake.
posted by Babblesort at 8:05 PM on January 10, 2010

It was published under the pen name "WC" (going for the British euphemism). It was not until much later that his name was attached to the work. He was kicked out of the surrealist movement by Breton for his essay The Lugubrious Game, about the Dali painting (for going into to much scatological detail in his description the stained underwear in the painting).
posted by idiopath at 8:15 PM on January 10, 2010

The Story of the Eye seemed to be more of some grotesque reminiscence on the part of Bataille's- so many things were linked to images and events that had personal meaning. Without sharing these, the book did little more than rape my own eyeballs.
posted by pugh at 8:24 PM on January 10, 2010

It's hard to say exactly what Bataille was after.

Without knowing much about it, I'm going to propose that he was just fucking with everyone for a laugh.
posted by Lobster Garden at 8:28 PM on January 10, 2010

You may find his obscenity humorous, but he was fond of humor as an excuse for obscenity (if that makes any sense). If I recall the argument correctly (I definitely don't remember which of his essays this is, probably one of the ones in the Visions of Excess collection I linked above) he appreciated humor not because he was a lighthearted person or even had much of a sense of humor, but rather because under the guise of humor one can get away with vulgarity and miscellaneous social transgression. I think it is in Eros or Eroticism and Death that he compares laughter to an orgasm (using the term paroxysm, which in his usage can mean a laugh, an orgasm, a sneeze, or even a hiccup), calling a violent bodily reaction to some breaking of the rules.

He was particularly interested in the loopholes by which people can get away with bypassing the rules that are usually taken for granted, humor being one of these, along with erotic passion (in private at least), warfare and the extremes of religious devotion (ascetics, martyrs, mystics etc.).

One of his more interesting formulations about this subject was that it is the richest and the poorest that are most free (when Bataille says free you can presume he means what others would call depraved) - when you have everything, or nothing, there is much less at stake in terms of social pressures.

If he was fucking with everyone, he made a lifetime's career out of it and as far as I now never broke character.
posted by idiopath at 9:00 PM on January 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

Seconding the position that if Bataille was joking, he was prepared to take the joke very, very far:

Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a secret society, Acéphale, the symbol of which was a decapitated man. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration; none of them would agree to be the executioner. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found before the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before the war.

Not to mention the whole "writing book after book expounding his ideas about sex, violence, transgression, excess, sacrifice, etc. etc." thing.
posted by DaDaDaDave at 9:11 PM on January 10, 2010

Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a secret society, Acéphale, the symbol of which was a decapitated man. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration; none of them would agree to be the executioner. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found before the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before the war.

I saw that, and find it hard to believe that it is serious. If it is indeed serious, I'm going to have to assume that Bataille was simply bat shit insane, in which case his writing is still funny but more in a "time cube" sort of way.
posted by Lobster Garden at 9:28 PM on January 10, 2010

I saw that, and find it hard to believe that it is serious.

Knowing nothing about Bataille, I presume it's a joke, and a pretty funny one at that.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:35 PM on January 10, 2010

The plan was to conduct a public human sacrifice as a ritual to attempt to end WWII, if I recall correctly. The group did exist. They had other "rituals" as well, some of which they actually followed through with. I would compare their plans to later Yippie stunts like the time they tried to levitate the Pentagon; Acephale had no illusion that what they did would directly end the war, but hoped that the bizarreness of the event would shock people out of their complacency with the state of warfare. Given the human sacrifice element, and the fact that they were reacting to the situation of living in an occupied country, it could be compared to the self immolating monks in Vietnam, if they had carried through with the plan. It had this in common with a joke: he had the intention of being as shocking as possible.
posted by idiopath at 9:53 PM on January 10, 2010

Babblesort: "It's hard to say exactly what Bataille was after. Lord knows people have written plenty of literary analysis on him. "

Thinking about this more, I would say that his own essay The Use Value Of D.A.F DeSade is helpful in understanding the amount and diversity of critical reception. So many intellectuals have done with Bataille exactly what he pointed out was done with DeSade, making a warm fuzzy less offensive castrated version of the original for their own discursive uses.

Bataille thought of rape as just another kind of sex. He approached ritualistic dismemberment and torture as someone else may approach an artistic tradition, as a transcendent and beautiful expression of humanity. It is tempting to take this for a joke, or call him insane, or ignore the violent aspects of his philosophy and focus on the things that are no longer such taboos (bisexuality, free love, BDSM, all kinds of kink in general - things which he did play a part in making more acceptable). But my take on this is that he strove to champion, as localroger alluded to above (In part through, I am guessing, the perhaps unconscious mediation of our friend J.G. Ballard, himself one of the folks who I think really gets Bataille) what he thought was the poison that the social body cannot digest without destroying itself, but which is embedded in humanity and impossible to remove. This of course reeks of the idea of eternal sin, and Bataille did consider himself, even while he was forming his own occult anarchist mystical secret society, a Catholic.

The immense amount of writing is the byproduct of social constructivist leftists trying to incorporate the ideas of a anti-rational champion of instinct and innate biological determinism. He may be contrarian about each of the specific items on the conservative agenda, but his opposition preserves the integrity of the social conservative worldview intact, it in no way contradicts it, it just mirrors it in reverse. I understand all too well the seductiveness of his philosophy but he offers the same bitter pill as the social conservatives, just taken as a suppository.

I still think there is a value in his essays and his novels - an essay does not have to be right, or even useful, to be worth reading. His philosophy played some small part in the evolution what became punk, and for that he is worth remembering and understanding. But overall he represents a seductive dead end.
posted by idiopath at 11:13 PM on January 10, 2010 [3 favorites]

Thank you idiopath. I've read a couple things by Bataille but never went to the effort to really learn anything about the man himself. Mostly I read him during a long kick of reading everything I could find that was noted as fodder for censorship and burning.

Your final statement there nicely summarizes the reasons why I was going out of my way to find things to read that were noted for being controversial or historically shunned. Really, thanks for your contributions here.
posted by Babblesort at 7:30 AM on January 11, 2010

His philosophy played some small part in the evolution what became punk, and for that he is worth remembering and understanding.

Yeah, why not? If "punk" has cultural value (and I firmly believe that it does) it's got something to do with giving voice to the kind of raw, unformed rage-disgust-vehemence that one feels in the wake of some great atrocity (World Wars One and Two for instance, or maybe just the whole of human history) that has otherwise struck the status quo mute, impotent, absurd. Surrealism, Dada, Cubism etc didn't just "happen" because various artists decided, hey, let's be as weird and offensive as possible; they happened because they had to, because if they hadn't we'd probably now be living in caves and ditches, eating dogs (or maybe just human flesh) instead of sitting "here" in various cafes, living rooms, offices having this discussion.

Keep on raging in the free world.
posted by philip-random at 10:04 AM on January 11, 2010

I'd like to join Babblesort in thanking idiopath for his very interesting comments in this thread. Something for my brain to chew on.
posted by stinkycheese at 11:37 AM on January 11, 2010

I still think there is a value in his essays and his novels - an essay does not have to be right, or even useful, to be worth reading.

Of course. I wasn't at all trying to imply that I thought this was total shit that no one should bother with. Hell, even the unbearably awful "Twilight" series reveals a lot about the nature of our society. And I was being a bit facetious by dismissing him as a loon.

It's still funny though. It tells me that I could write a story about people fucking penguin corpses while they eat each other's livers and present it as great literature and people would probably buy it.
posted by Lobster Garden at 6:40 PM on January 11, 2010

It tells me that I could write a story about people fucking penguin corpses while they eat each other's livers and present it as great literature and people would probably buy it.

Try it. If we're still talking about it more than 80 years later, then you've nailed it.
posted by philip-random at 7:49 PM on January 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

People fucking penguin corpses while they eat each other's livers? Sounds more like Aldapuerta than Bataille in any case.
posted by stinkycheese at 10:03 PM on January 11, 2010

It tells me that I could write a story about people fucking penguin corpses while they eat each other's livers and present it as great literature and people would probably buy it.

How about writing one single comment here that presents as "great literature" and using the favourites count as a rough metric of the marketability of an extended version of same?

Because I guess that's the only way to decide whether you like fucking dead penguins for fun or you're just doing it for the fish.
posted by Wolof at 4:50 AM on January 12, 2010