Rowan G. Tepper April 27, 2005
Bataille’s Negative Dialectic of Desire: Immanence, Time and Eschatological Desire
If we are to speak of Georges Bataille’s thought on desire in terms of influence and the historical traditions from which he borrows, we must first note that Bataille stood at the crossroads of the GrecoRoman and Judeo-Christian traditions, as well as that of the traditions of ontological and eschatological desire. In epigraphs he quotes from Theresa of Avila and Alexandre Kojeve and throughout his writings can be found numerous discussions of Hegel and Nietzsche. While Bataille’s account of desire refuses to conform strictly to either the ontological or the eschatological model, it is evident that his is a primarily eschatological account, bearing more similarities to the Christian mystics than to the Platonic tradition, despite appearances to the contrary. To be sure, a cursory reading of Bataille might leave one with the impression that desire is, for him, not only ontological but rather radically so. In so far as anguish and loss are constitutive elements of this account of desire, a surface reading would indicate that not only is desire for that which is lacking but instead that desire, being desire for the impossible, cannot overcome this lack. This misconception is shown for what it is by means of a closer look at the structure and movement of Bataillean desire. In the introduction to Erotism, Bataille writes:
We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure but we yearn for
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our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is. (Erotism 15)
This lost continuity is for Bataille to be found exemplified in the manner in which animals exist in continuity with the world, with no knowledge of transcendence. This parallels the judeo-Christian conception of the prelapsarian edenic world. Much like in the judeoChristian myth, desire, for Bataille, aims at the restoration of this prelapsarian state. By contrast we may see how Bataille’s interpretation constitutes an inversion of the Hegelian dialectic. The endpoints are reversed. We begin as subjects with objects and desire entreats us and impels us to fragment this identity until we arrive at pure experience, and more radically, at pure inner experience – which re-establishes this lost immanence of the world. This lost immanence can be construed as the godless analogous to the god of the mystics. In Erotism, Theory of Religion, and The Accursed Share Volume II, we may find explicit statements to this effect; however, it is key to see how we first depart from this state of immanence and how we may return to it, in order for it to be seen how this desire is eschatological in nature. Death is the only manner in which immanence is materially restored (Erotism 13-17, Theory of Religion Chapter 3, “Sacrifices,” The Accursed Share Volume II 79-86, Tears of Eros, etc) However, death itself destroys the self who dies and as such permanently annuls desire in its fulfillment. However, for Bataille some portion of desire’s satisfaction is its own desiring, so despite desire’s remaining fixed
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upon the horizon of death, means by which this desire can be fulfilled had to be devised. The first and simpler form produced to address this difficulty constitutes the sacrifice and the second, more complex form constitutes eroticism. This forms, like the idea of slipping ‘slipping’ words introduces in Inner Experience (Inner Experience 16), permit a slippage between the profane, day-to-day world of things into the sacred immanent world, much as ‘slipping’ words such as the word ‘silence’ introduces a slippage from discourse to pre-discursive reality. Bataille’s immanent, sacred world is the same as what a world consisting of mere sense-certainty would be for Hegel. I cannot emphasize enough that by contrast to Hegel, we initially find ourselves in a world of already constituted subjects and objects; Bataille’s dialectic must operate in reverse. Here the subject is initially given as absolutely existent and the world given as nothing. In the Discussion on Sin, held in 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Hyppolite tag-team Bataille on the issue of negativity and nothingness. In his responses to their questioning, we may see Bataille’s position in contrast to Hegel. In response to Hyppolite’s questioning, Bataille responds “In relation to this ego, there exists an absence of this ego, which one might call nothingness if one so desired and toward which desire doesn’t exactly carry us as though it were toward an object, since this object is nothing, but as though toward a region through which the beings of others appear.” (Discussion 50) He continues to say “I simply wanted to indicate that nothingness can be found at any point in the experience, and nothingness is always the annihilation of being, the point at which being annihilates itself.” (50-1) This is to say that this nothingness is at once the fundamental character of the world beyond us, but it is also a medium to be traversed by desire.
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In a hypothetical first experience of this nothingness we experience a horror vacuii and in order to contain this caustic nothingness set up prohibitions, limits and taboos: regions beyond which it is forbidden to go; limits determining where beings end and nothingness begins. These are the great prohibitions on murder, incest and derivatively all sexual prohibition. Bataille sees in the relation to death the common denominator in all forms of prohibition and taboo, because the traversal of being into nothingness always puts the integrity of the self at risk. Prohibitions and taboos as it were set up ‘safety zones’ beyond which to be is simultaneously to risk not being. Once again, in this same experience the world of subjects and objects is initially posited on the grounds of time operating according to its own course (and aiming at its own annulment in permanent). Without passing time there can be no subject-object distinction. Bataille writes in Theory of Religion: The objective and in a sense transcendent (relative to the subject) positing of the world of things has duration as its foundation: no thing in fact has a separate existence, has a meaning, unless a subsequent time is posited, in view of which it is constituted as an object. The object is defined as an operative power only if its duration is implicitly understood. (46) Thus, transcendent objects are constituted in view of their use – this food in front of me only becomes an object for me in view of preserving it for later consumption; without view to the future it is immanent to me in that I eat it immediately and its meaning is only manifest in the nutrition I derive from it not from reflective knowledge of its value
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as object. Thus, time without view to future preservation or use induces the opposite movement. We may now see the first stage in the movement of desire, which in the case of the sacrifice delivers us to immanence (however, in terms of erotic desire this is only the first half). In order to reach its object desire must cross nothingness to find its negation in some other. This negation is carried out through the transgression of a prohibition, i.e. in the case of the sacrifice the prohibition of murder. This transgression is also known in the form of sin outside of the festival of sacrifice. In the ‘Discussion on Sin’ Bataille notes that all transgressions, all traversals of the nothingness constitute sin and it is the identification with the object that transforms sin into ecstasy, carnal eros into divine eros. (Discussion 53). In the sacrifice the object is annihilated in death, but at the antecedent moment, the sacrificer and the spectators identify with the object and experience its death vicariously and achieve ecstasy. However, after the festival, the subject takes over the nothingness of the world into itself as guilt and sin. We find the same structure in erotic desire in the paradigmatic example of sex without love. The subject finds the object of desire amid the nothingness of the world. In order to achieve ecstasy with this object, it becomes necessary to break down the boundaries of individuation so that subject and object may lose themselves. This is achieved through the negation of the nothingness in the transgression of sexual prohibitions. The self and other identify with one another in transgression and achieve ecstasy. At this juncture, however, they turn away from one another and desire is left opened onto the void and the self takes on this nothingness in the form of anguish. “Anguish is an effect of desire that by itself and form within engenders a loss of being.” (Guilty 92) Time first betrays us by
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producing and insisting on the stability and duration of subjects and object, and then betrays us again by negating ecstasy and the object of desire. The second betrayal, however, is not as it seems. In betraying us, time, like Janus,
shows its other face and shows itself to be the
motor driving the dialectic and more generally as that which produces the lack of desire. And properly Janus-like, time will also show itself to bring about the return of prelapsarian immanence through the desire of the beloved. At the first stage the self is not fully lost; ecstasy is achieved but is un-repeatable and incomplete; in the first stage immanence is revealed as immanence to me as a heterogeneous being. I have pure external experience, but am left short of pure inner experience and absolute immanence. Anguish, as the negative moment in desire, plays a crucial role in this second stage. In Inner Experience Bataille writes: In anguish, there appears a nudity which puts one into ecstasy. But ecstasy itself (nudity, communication) is elusive if anguish is elusive. Thus ecstasy only remains possible in the anguish of ecstasy, in this sense, that it cannot be satisfaction, grasped knowledge. (Inner Experience 52) Thus, prior anguish is the condition of possible for ecstasy, and the anguish that initially permits ecstasy in the first form is the horror of death. Anguish in the second stage, however, is the anguish of desire. It is in the second stage that the figure of the lovers becomes the dominant one and in which the eschatological nature of desire becomes fully clear. It is also in this stage that ecstasy results in pure immanence without subject or object and pure inner experience. In the first instance, here we have two anguished desires, desiring one
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another’s desire. The other chosen here by the self is absolutely unique and irreplaceable and the significance of this uniqueness is amplified by the fact that the improbability of by chance meeting such an other and that the other should desire the self is so high as to be effectively an impossibility. Bataille writes in On Nietzsche that “In love, chance is first sought out by the lover in the beloved. Though chance is also given as the two meet. In a sense the love uniting them celebrates a return to being…” (On Nietzsche 74) Moreover, in an earlier essay entitled “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Bataille writes more emphatically “Simple coincidences arrange the meeting and constitute the feminine figure of destiny to which a man feels bound… the value of this figure is dependent on long term obsessive exigencies, which are so difficult to satisfy that they lend the loved one the colors of extreme luck” (VOA 230) The improbability infinitely valorizes the beloved. This may seem at first glance tangential. However, it is crucially important; the affirmation of chance and luck in the selection and meeting of the beloved is at the same time an affirmation of time in its second face. Chance in us takes form as time (loathing the past). Time is freedom. Despite the constraints that fear erects against it… Time is chance insofar as requiring the individual, the separate being. (ON 114)
Time makes ‘what is’ occur in individuals… chance is the individual’s duration in his or her ruin. (134)
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The combination of exceeding love and the desire to lose (actually the continuous state of this loss) IS TIME AND IS CHANCE. (130)
Time brings about the chance appearance of the beloved and permits the beloved to slip from the world of things into the sacred. Time has already brought us to anguish and now time brings the object of desire. My beloved arrives by chance and at a given time always in the future until her arrival. The impossible coincidence of anguished desires desiring one another permits ecstasy to erupt through erotic transgression. These transgressions enable a loss of self to ensue because in anguish we have already put ourselves into question and revealed nothingness within us. By virtue of this prior laceration of our beings the force of transgression is redoubled and permits me to identify with my beloved at the same moment at which she identifies with me. Since we have both already been de-centered in anguish, this reciprocal identification results in an ephemeral fused state neither in the lover nor in the beloved, but in the world which is then revealed as continuous with the lovers. If the being that I embrace has taken on the meaning of the totality, in that fusion which takes the place of the subject and object, of the lover and the beloved, I experience the horror without whose possibility I cannot experience the movement of the totality. There is horror in being: this horror is repugnant animality… [this] does not repel me… on the contrary, [I] thirst for it; far from escaping, I may resolutely quench my thirst with this horror… for this I have filthy words at my disposal, words that sharpen the feeling I have of touching on the intolerable
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secret of being. I may say these words in order to cry out the uncovered secret, wanting to be sure I am not the only one to know it; at this moment I no longer doubt that I am embracing the totality without which I was only outside: I reach orgasm
(The
Accursed Share Volume II 118)
In this loss of self and fusion with my beloved, I experience a ‘death’ that both is and is not mine. Our separate existences have temporarily died in the embrace. Thus the link between death and eroticism here becomes clear and the moniker ‘la petit mort’ becomes all the more poignant. However, as my beloved turns away in the afterglow of eroticism, I am thrown back into my heterogeneity and anguish. In fusion and ecstasy is a pure inner experience of immanence. The world is not immanent to me, but rather I and the world am in immanence to one another. It is this immanent unity with the world that Sartre and Hyppolite, the good Hegelians that they are, cannot seem to wrap their minds around. In the final result, the distinction between interiority and exteriority breaks down. What is important here is the fact that this inner experience of immanence, the totality of the real that is the object of desire comes only out of the future and through the intercession of the beloved. My beloved means the world to me, quite literally. Only through her can I experience the profound intimacy of the world. It is always only through the desire of an other for my desire that comes about through the whims of heterogeneous time that brings desire to its fulfillment. Thus, corresponding to Bataille’s atheology we have in his work an eschatology of desire.
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