Prima facie, there are two Georges Batailles: one the writer of fiction, one the philosopher. Yet there is a persistent effect in Bataille of an overlapping, of an entanglement, concerning these distinctions. As Foucault asked in his text »What is an Author?«, where does the concept of the author’s oeuvre begin and end - should a mundane account of Nietzsche’s grocery lists be added to Nietzsche’s collected works?

Despite the banal hyperbole, it is this very entanglement that makes Bataille compelling for post-modern theory. This is a question of locations, of spacing, of identifying contours, of segregating and privileging personages: where does Bataille the theoretician begin and end, where does the Bataille of fiction begin and end - the motif of an obfuscation of the narrative and of the scientific. Such an ambiguity is wholly congruent with postmodern thought, their foundational thesis of “the end of the meta-narrative” - that is, that there is no plausible metaphysical transcendence of the world, or in the terms of theoretical physics, a TOE (theory of everything) - the work of Bataille is the abandonment of a certain philosophical desire, the turning away from “great narratives”. In a book such as On Nietzsche he will discuss Nietzsche’s theory alongside the account of an inebriated dance with Sartre; he will describe the German invasion of France as the incursion of the »transcendental Germans«, a code for philosophers a la Hegel, Kant, etc.; National socialism as residue of metaphysics.

Conversely, there are no references to Hegel in the erotic fiction; Bataille’s conceptual schematic is, in this sense, rigid. Consider also that the erotic works were initially published under a pseudonym. Nevertheless, his fiction compliments the theoretical writings. For the consistent content of Bataille’s work is the aspiration for what he termed a »base materialism«, that which the philosopher of Greece, and subsequently, of Europe, would consider as the vulgar. He wished to inscribe a particular impossibility within the philosophical discourse, and for this, he is a sophist – he wished to isolate a negativity which the philosopher, the European, the Enlightened, could not think, could not calculate.

But the negativity Bataille sought throughout his theoretical work perhaps marks the failure of the post-modern – it is a paradigmatic case of the limits of post-modern thought. Current philosophers such as Badiou, Žižek and Laruelle have already exposed the paradoxes of the post-modern, they have already revealed the post-modern’s inherent limit, its own theoretical failure. To abstract their critiques: to bar the possibility of the meta-narrative, to exclude any articulation of a theory of everything, is the metaphysical thesis par excellence – it merely functions as the obverse of the classical theoretical strategy.

From another perspective, the classical post-modern dismissal of Europe as hegemonic ignores the initial gesture of Europe, an origin of Europe traced to Greece: the philosopher, Socrates, was condemned to death by the state, by the hegemonic apparatus, for the corruption of the youth and the denial of the Gods. In turn, these themes all fall precisely within the Greek continuity, within the metaphysical project. For Europe is nothing more than heterogeneous, nothing more than violent, in its persistent mobilization of the instrument of a radical and critical thought, of its aphasia, the continued suspension of the ritual, of the ideological.

This tension of remaining within the horizon of Europe, all the while attempting to transgress it, is present throughout Bataille. How to think the negative, how to conceptualize the negative is his great aporia, because it is this thinking of the negative, its philosophizing which links it to the originary space of Greece and of Europe, the enemies of Bataille, these “transcendental Germans”.

A quick recapitulation of how Bataille designs his concepts lucidly evinces this tension: atheology, acephalic, etc.,. The “a”, the grammatical form of the alpha privative, the α-privativum, may only operate as a negation in the context of its stem word. This notion of Bataille’s form, this theoretical degradation practiced by the post-modern, is the pronounced sign of its collapse – Bataille has to construct his negativity in relation to something, he has to take an object, god, reason, etc., and subsequently desecrate it to introduce his particular negativity. The cover of the inaugural issue of his journal »L’Acephale«, as illustrated by Andre Masson, shows a headless body, an attempt to signify the overturning of reason, the alpha privative of the absence of the head which denotes reason. This negativity is contingent, is derivative – and Bataille was certainly aware of this. Bataille’s ideal would be the possibilty of an alpha privative lacking its stem word, the consecration of this little alpha isolated and alone without losing its negative signification. Which is why Bataille ultimately proposed a concept, negativité sans emploi, a negativity abstaining from use and function; this little alpha standing on its own without reference or relation, inculcating a pure negativity that could not be accounted for as a ligature with any positive essence. Again, the question of form subverts content: the pure negative as content appears in the form of the theoretical, it appears in relation to, it appears as a concept, it ties itself to Greece, it remains within the philosophical space, within the philosophical discourse. It is cited and commented upon, it is built from citations and commentaries - it is consanguineous.

And the problem of a form, a form of writing, which is always to function as an allusion to a tradition, to a homogeneity, is the true didactic aspect of Foucault’s question concerning the status of the author. The identification of a form, of a presentation, of a design, will acutely delineate what contents are to be accentuated, to be brought to the fore – what is to have value for the aesthetic critic, for the philosopher or the theoretician. The form of the work, how it is presented, will give the text a fictional value or a philosophical value. Form will allow and permit the possibility of categorization – Bataille’s erotic works are separated from the philosophical works, although the content, what Bataille seeks as his object, remains consistent.

The affinity of the negative in the erotic and the philosophical are to be separated by form. Consequently, when Bataille seeks the destruction of the boundaries of texts, their classifications, this post-modern desire operates as a simple binary theoretical decision, a decision that occurs within the ordinates of the dialectic form-content, and therefore Greek dialectics, Europe: the emphasis of content as opposed to form, the subjugation of form by content. »I have sought to speak a language equivalent to zero, a language amounting to nothing, a language returning to silence.«

Yet Bataille betrayed himself, for he was a writer.

Written by d/visible contributor Mstislav Hryuko.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Culture, Profile, Literary form. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.