Georges Bataille’s Religion without Religion

Georges Bataille’s Religion without Religion: A Review of the Possibilities Opened by the Publication of The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge Author(s): Jeffrey Kosky Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 84, No. 1 (January 2004), pp. 78-87 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/379028 . Accessed: 28/02/2011 18:29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Review Article Georges Bataille’s Religion without Religion: A Review of the Possibilities Opened by the Publication of The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge * Jeffrey Kosky /

Washington and Lee University

Never published in a single volume by their author, Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge collects and translates writings associated stylistically, thematically, or editorially with Bataille’s Atheological Summa. Originally intending it as a five-volume work, Bataille later limited his Summa to three volumes (Inner Experience, Guilty, and On Nietzsche). The editors of The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Stuart and Michelle Kendall, aim to present what the remaining volumes might have contained. The collection is thus an appendix that incompletes the Summa, ruining the project with a fragmentary “postscript” that, though unplanned by Bataille, would for this reason further his atheological unknowing. But why read it, especially when this latest book contains little content that cannot be found in the work Bataille himself published? Scholars of religion will find that reading Bataille’s Unfinished System of Nonknowledge returns them to another origin of a field of investigation that has, over the past twenty years, become of increasing importance: religion and postmodernism. Reading Bataille reminds us that the possible “religion without religion”1 opened by the postmodern overcoming of metaphysics or onto-theo-logy might just as fundamentally bespeak a “hermeneutic of the death of God”2 as a hermeneutic of the desire for God. In this, Bataille helps us keep in sight an undecidability that is essential to the matter. * Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed. and introd. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), xliv⫹305 pp., $39.95 (cloth). 1 See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 2 Mark C. Taylor first used this phrase in reference to deconstruction. See Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6. 䉷 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/2004/8401-0004$10.00

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Georges Bataille’s Religion Reflecting the wide range of genres in which Bataille expressed himself, the writings collected here take various forms: essays, lectures, poetic aphorisms, transcripts of open discussions, and so on. In some cases, the writings were published during Bataille’s lifetime; in others, the material comes from lectures or notebooks that Bataille did not ready for publication but are included in the Gallimard edition of his Oeuvres comple`tes. The editors have arranged the material chronologically, leaving it to the reader to make thematic connections between the various texts and with the rest of Bataille’s work. Given that Bataille never intended to publish the book as such, some explanation as to how editorial decisions were made seems important. The reasons for including certain texts reflect Bataille’s expressed intentions—as with “Method of Meditation” and “Post-Scriptum 1953,” texts that were included in the French re-edition of Inner Experience but not in the English translation. In other cases, Bataille never indicated that the text would be part of the Summa, yet it discusses passages from the published portions of the Summa. In still others, however, the selection of texts seems to reflect the editors’ interpretation of Bataille’s intentions. In these cases, more explanation would be clarifying, and the editors could have devoted more attention to explaining these choices in the “Editor’s Introduction.” Although students who have never read Bataille might be better advised to start with one of the works Bataille himself readied for publication, those already acquainted with Bataille will find much of interest here—not the least of which is the information it provides about Bataille’s interaction with and reception by Parisian intellectual circles of the time. Bataille moved in a number of circles that included such apparent extremes as existential philosophers, avant-garde artists, and leading Catholic intellectuals of the time. “The Discussion on Sin” provides the best example of Bataille amid this heterogeneous culture, as it includes a transcript of a discussion with eminent Catholic figures such as Jean Danielou, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice de Gandillac, as well as leading philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Hyppolite, and Jean Wahl. Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Leiris, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were also present. Reading this discussion conveys the perhaps surprising image of Bataille as more comfortable with the theologians than the philosophers. Nervous and shaken by the rigors and polemics of institutional philosophy, Bataille writhes, like J. Alfred Prufrock, beneath “the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, . . . sprawling on a pin, . . . pinned and wrig-

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The Journal of Religion gling on a wall.”3 One can feel his vulnerability and undefended exposure when faced with the relentless questioning of Hyppolite and Sartre. The selections taken from his personal notebooks further this impression, showing clearly how agitated he was by the reviews of his work, especially the Sartrean polemics. For these intimate glimpses of the misery behind the man most often deemed a monster, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge is already invaluable. But its value extends beyond this. For, though it contains little that cannot be found in the published works, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge also captures the main trends of Bataille’s thinking. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Bataille was disillusioned with the emancipatory aims of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberalism and sought a liberation beyond that promised by liberal modernity. The liberal world, according to Bataille, was the bourgeois, workaday world of modern individualism, a world that degrades man by rendering all of human activity subordinate to some end outside that activity itself. In this sense, modernity determined human life in terms of action governed by what Bataille called “project.” Project makes every moment of life servile by valuing it solely in relation to its usefulness in producing a desired end. It finds an ally or mirror, according to Bataille, in the forms of knowledge and rationality promoted by Hegelian systematic philosophy. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, according to Bataille, reasonable thought is systematic thought that sees each individual and each moment in relation to the whole that transcends it. Bataille was sensitive to the fact that the Hegelian dialectic of consciousness is driven by unhappy consciousness and that it represents the historical progress of the slave who survives the struggle with the master. The Hegelian spirit, which for Bataille expressed the spirit of modernity, belongs therefore to a sad, servile, and serious culture, a culture that is always on the job, one that has no time for errant moments of laughter, tears, drunkenness, or ecstasy. These nonproductive instances of useless nonknowledge suppressed by the workaday logic of the workaday world are indices pointing to modernity’s lack of lack, its lack of the meaningless amid the fullness and completion of meaning achieved by the modern world. There is, in the modern world, no rose that grows without why.4 In his revaluation of meaningless moments, experiences of luck, and the aleatory, Bataille foreshadows a more widely accepted project 3 T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” lines 56–58, in Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1983), p. 995. 4 The rose that grows without why is an image from Angelus Silesius, also assumed by Martin Heidegger.

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Georges Bataille’s Religion among philosophers, psychoanalysts, artists, and literary figures thinking in the wake of modernity. His critique of modern life and, perhaps especially, its Hegelian expression joins camp with those thinkers who want to overcome the self-assertive, autonomous subject of modernity. Inaugurating postmodernity, the critique of this subject lies at the center of the project known more broadly as the overcoming of metaphysics or the surpassing of onto-theo-logy. Before this overcoming was named as such, Bataille had already sounded themes that would prove crucial: the wounding or laceration of subjectivity, the desire for the impossible, the blind spot of knowledge, expenditure without return, and luck and the aleatory. These themes figure prominently in Bataille and would later be invoked, with differences that should be specified, by the postmoderns. Bataille’s seminal critique of modernity accounts in part for the upsurge of interest in his work among English-language scholars during the late 1980s and early 1990s. He exercised a profound impact on art criticism, mediated mostly through the influential journal October led by Rosalind Krauss and the noted Bataille scholar Denis Hollier. Surely one of the most powerful conveyors of Nietzsche into the twentieth century, Bataille became an important hinge between the modern and the postmodern. Most of the names that the English-speaking world associates with postmodernity—Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Blanchot—all admit that their thought was shaped, in one way or another, by a confrontation with Bataille and his writing, a confrontation in which they surely learned more than they did from Sartre and the existentialists. Through these figures, Bataille then shaped literary studies and critical theory in the English-speaking world. When these figures became a field of study rather than a collection of passionate inquirers, it was only a short step to an investigation of their intellectual forefathers. This meant that the first reception of Bataille’s work in English was guided by scholars interested in him as a predecessor of these more commonly known figures—figures who were popular in departments of English, comparative literature, and to a lesser extent philosophy. As such, the first reading of Bataille was dominated by the primarily linguistic questioning of poststructuralism and the primarily Nietzschean critique of Hegelian modernity that occupied these departments. Led by a pioneering chapter on Bataille in Mark C. Taylor’s Altarity, however, Bataille began to draw the attention of students of religion.5 And rightly so, for Bataille’s challenge to the culture of modernity was 5

Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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The Journal of Religion executed in the name of what he called “the sacred.” Recalling E´ mile Durkheim’s sociology, Bataille maintains that the sacred breaks with the profane, workaday world of productive, economic existence by transgressing the limits of individual existence and conventional morality. Evident in “primitive” religious life with its moments of potlatch, orgy, and other forms of ritual excess, the sacred, for Bataille, culminated in sacrifice—where an individual executes a useless act of unredeemed expenditure, giving without return and so losing without gain. Sacrifice, for Bataille, is therefore always self-sacrifice insofar as the self gives without receiving anything in return and thus defies its own selfhood. Economically nonsensical, the experience of the sacred, culminating in sacrifice, opposes the calculated, rational activity and balanced accounting of expenditure and gain that determine human life in bourgeois modernity. In another register, the sacrificial experience of the sacred interrupts the circle of knowledge whereby the subject posits itself by returning to itself in and through the experience of otherness in every adventure of consciousness. Giving without getting, the subject is irreparably wounded by its experience of the sacred. While sociologists and anthropologically oriented scholars of religion have eagerly seized on Bataille’s discussion of the sacred, his work has more recently been assumed by scholars, led by Amy Hollywood and Peter Connor, who move into fields opened by Taylor’s work in Altarity.6 Sensitive to Bataille’s Christian background and his training as a medievalist, these scholars explore the connection between Bataille’s sacred and Christianity, not “primitive” religion. Their work is revising the models that guide the reading of Bataille—shifting from “primitive” models of excess and from Nietzschean models of affirmation to mystical models based on figures such as Teresa of Avila, Angela Foligno, and John of the Cross. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge will be of especial interest to such students, for many of the opening sections make evident Bataille’s preoccupation with theological issues and concerns, clarifying his obsession with themes drawn from an encounter with mystical forms of Christianity. In fact, there is little talk of penises, shit, or spilled blood in this book—themes that are popular among the devotees of Bataille’s primitive sacred. This is a different vision of Bataille. Bataille was clearly ambivalent about Christianity, and this ambiva6 See Amy Hollywood, “Bataille and Mysticism: A Dazzling Dissolution,” Diacritics 26 (Summer 1996): 77–85, “‘Beautiful as a Wasp’: Angela of Foligno and Georges Bataille,” Harvard Theological Review 92 (April 1999): 219–36, and Sensible Ecstasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Peter Tracey Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

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Georges Bataille’s Religion lence is nowhere more evident than in his readings of its mystical moments. Allied with the sacred, the mystical is the obvious forerunner to what Bataille terms “inner experience,” the “sovereign moment,” or often quite simply “ecstasy” or “the spiritual”—terms designating what breaks with the servility of knowledge, individualism, and project. In its move toward nothingness and the unknown, in its annihilation of the rational faculties, and in its ecstatic passage beyond the limits of individual existence, mysticism (like the sacred) involves a radical unknowing or loss of self. Ecstatic spirituality, for Bataille, thus points the self beyond the possibilities that a subject can realize by itself toward an experience of the impossible, namely, the experience of its own death or annihilation. Culminating in annihilation, mystical experience would give access to the impossible, meaningless, and aleatory (what comes despite me) that was excluded from the modern project of work and knowledge. Here death and negativity are not put to work, as they are for the Hegelian dialectic, in the production of a future moment or higher affirmation of meaning. In the finality of unknowing and nothingness, mystical ecstasy points toward an impossible enjoyment of the sovereignty of the present—“the rose grows without why” in an unknowing experience of a present that looks neither to past cause nor future fulfillment. Ecstatic experience and unknowing thus liberate a sovereign moment, a present that plays freely, freed as it is from subordination to the usefulness of a project aiming at a future beyond where loss is redeemed. And yet, according to Bataille, Christianity betrays the mystical moment by introducing God and salvation. Viewed in light of salvation, the mystical moment of nonknowledge becomes productive, a step in the plan aiming at a salvific end external to this moment. “He who loses himself saves himself” would be the slogan of this Christian reversal of the mystical loss of self: here, ecstasy and loss are not sacrifice and annihilation but efforts aimed at saving, not spending, except insofar as such spending earns a return, namely, the reinstatement of the self in a higher moment. “God,” for Bataille, is then the name of that which guarantees or provides certainty for this project, the name that transforms the impossible dispossession of self in mystical ecstasy into a possibility of the self, namely, the possibility of personal salvation that can be attained. “God” forecloses the impossible, making the experience of dispossession a possibility I can realize, a possibility named “salvation.” Expenditure and nonknowledge are thereby limited by “God,” a term that provides an endpoint where inner experience be-

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The Journal of Religion comes a project meeting with success or where spirituality finds rest by converting nonknowledge to knowledge, impossibility to possibility. Against this Christian betrayal of nonknowledge and ecstasy, Bataille aims to live gloriously or gaily inhabit a world without God and the meaningfulness his presence provides. In light of Bataille’s clear interest in mysticism, however, this Nietzschean way of phrasing his experience can be doubled by a religious one, a point that is developed at great length in Taylor’s chapter on Bataille in Altarity. Bataille himself speaks of the “experience of nonknowledge” as “negative inner experience” (p. 11), the latter phrase signaling the anthropological correlate of the negative theology of the mystics. But insofar as he dismisses the theological object of this mysticism, Bataille’s thought can be described as a mysticism without God—hence the title that he himself chose for his opus, Atheological Summa. The paradox of the title must be emphasized: Summa recalls the medieval theologians, while atheological negates them. One of the more interesting lines of research suggested by The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge centers on this question of God and Christian mysticism. In the “Discussion on Sin,” leading Catholic intellectuals of the day challenge Bataille’s interpretation of Christianity and suggest readings that would narrow the gap between Bataille and the mystics. As Father Danielou suggests, “No one is less settled than the mystic, whom God perpetually disturbs and prevents from turning back on himself . . . and who achieves in ecstasy this total decentering of the self which is in fact that toward which we tend—and which puts them in complete communication with others” (p. 36). Or as de Gandillac, the eminent medievalist and French translator of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa, claims, Bataille does not take seriously “negation by transcendence,” the redoubled negation of the mystical moment exceeding even the apophatic. This form of negativity, according to de Gandillac, makes it impossible to “corner the Christian, as [Bataille] seems to do, on one issue: as consciously or unconsciously seeking closure. . . . [The mystic] lives a total spoliation, including even the renunciation of the search for a God that could be defined in a perfectly positive way, the way one might know the program of salvation precisely in advance. The mystic tends toward a plenitude that corresponds to no project in the correct sense of the word and which is a kind of empty promise” (p. 69). Without overlooking significant differences between Bataille and the mystics, what Danielou and de Gandillac suggest is that Bataille’s sovereign values and inner experience are already mystical, already anticipated by Christian mystical theology, whose God therefore stands in closer proximity to Bataille’s pro-

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Georges Bataille’s Religion posed destruction of modernity than he admits. In other words, rather than seeing “God” as the name of everything Bataille opposes, God could just as well be that in whose name his critique of the modern subject is executed. Pursuing such suggestions would call for (1) a rereading of Christian mysticism and (2) careful conceptual consideration of what is involved in the naming of that which wounds or undoes the autonomous modern subject. Both questions have, of course, been the subject of important debate in and among those scholars sensitive to continental philosophy’s socalled turn to religion.7 According to the most recent interpretations of this turn, the critique of modernity, a critique most often associated with the overcoming of onto-theo-logical or metaphysical thought, does not spell atheology or the death of God and religion, but their liberation. What dies in the wake of modernity is not God so much as the forms of thought and knowledge (metaphysics and onto-theo-logy) that have blocked access to a truly divine God. On this reading, which parallels the points made by the Catholics Danielou and de Gandillac, God is not allied with metaphysics, onto-theo-logy, or the discourses of knowledge that make up the world to be overcome. Rather God and religion both provide resources in whose name the critique itself might be carried out. Like many of the philosophers steering continental philosophy’s turn to religion, Bataille does not designate his own experiences “Christian,” and yet, again like them, he will nevertheless deploy themes common to Christianity: “sin,” “spiritual,” and “rapture” are all frequent terms describing his experience. Even “mystical,” which Bataille claims is a word he does not like, is still one he uses frequently. This is a point that the philosophers note, with a negative spin: both Sartre and Hyppolite ask Bataille if he could have written his work without reference to Christian themes and concepts (pp. 56–64). The fact that Bataille retains a religious vocabulary, despite what the philosophers see as its philosophical nonnecessity and without identifying his discourse as Christian, would perhaps make him an exemplary instance of what one of the leading readers of continental philosophy’s turn to religion, John Caputo, has called, in reference to Derrida, “religion without religion”—a religious speech and language without the traditional or historical forms that governed its meaning and regulated its interpretation. Like Caputo’s Derrida, Bataille surely has a religion, 7 The phrase “turn to religion” was popularized by Hent De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), though Taylor had already called attention to the phenomenon with a different name and different emphases; see Taylor, Erring and Altarity.

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The Journal of Religion even if unconfessed and without dogmatic affirmations of God. What is more, Bataille’s religion is, again like Caputo’s, surely impassioned by the impossible, by the impossible experience toward which sovereign moments of ecstasy and rapture gesture. Its pursuit of this passion is, once more like Caputo’s, opened by a critique of the dogmatic and positive (metaphysical) interpretations of God, forms of thought whose introduction into religion evade the agony of this infinite desire for the impossible. Including Bataille in the list of thinkers considered by the turn to religion in and among continental philosophers might therefore prove fruitful to our wrestling with the question of what becomes of religion, what religion comes, after modernity. Surely Bataille’s critique of knowledge and subjectivity makes him one of the earliest of continental philosophers to raise the question of religion and its relation to the overcoming of what later was conceived as onto-theo-logy or metaphysics. What would happen if he occupied attention in the way that Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas, and Derrida have? While joining them in the undoing of the modern subject, Bataille, unlike these others, does not recover the word “God” with a significance that would maintain its consistency with the postmodern horizon. More so than the others named above, Bataille was willing to abandon the name “God” and the identity of the tradition left behind by the ecstasy of inner experience, sovereign moments, and nonknowledge. Bataille’s overcoming of the modern (metaphysical) subject involves an interpretation of human experience in the wake of modernity as an experience of the death of God and demise of religious tradition—a death of God that opens the religious experience of the sacred. Caputo and the recent turn to religion, by contrast, interpret the postmodern, postmetaphysical horizon in terms of the desire for God, a God who continues with the eschatological God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And yet, Bataille’s “hermeneutic of the death of God” is just as surely impassioned by the impossible as is Caputo’s “hermeneutic of the desire for God,” and his mystical anthropology’s desire for the impossible is articulated in a discourse that is at least as religious, without religion, as is Caputo’s Derrida. Wouldn’t this justify at the very least considering Bataille’s relation to the canon of continental philosophers belonging to the turn to religion? Like the fate that has befallen Taylor’s early work on religion and postmodernism, Bataille has been omitted from the tradition that defines postmodernism as it is considered by the latest wave of scholars of the turn to religion. We should try to remember what is at stake in this omission. By a negative logic, it points to the importance for the

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Georges Bataille’s Religion leaders of this new turn to religion of saving the name, precisely, of God. Sensitively remembering these omissions of founding moments could perhaps remind us that it is at least as plausible that religion without religion reinscribes all of religion—save the name, precisely, of God. While some theologians and philosophers might argue that this represents a backward step, a backward return to the atheological interpretation of postmodernity promoted by Taylor and Bataille, a step back often marks a way ahead—reminding us that if postmodernity means we do not know what we expect when we expect the impossible, a point that both Bataille and Caputo would agree on, we could just as well conclude that this postmodern expectation be named with the name “God” as conclude that this name be abandoned. Those involved with “religion and postmodernism” (and I count myself one) should remember this double that Bataille represents lest the designation of the impossible and unknowable slip too certainly toward one name, “God,” and the essential nonknowledge be lost. Remembering this other origin of postmodernity (Bataille’s atheology), this other overcoming of metaphysics (Bataille’s “hermeneutic of the death of God”), ensures that I do not write of the impossible and unknowable as one who has already experienced it, but as one who does not know if it still might, perhaps, lie ahead.

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