Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology

Preface to the English Edition

With its new title, Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology, the subject matter and thrust of this work, which was written between 1974 and 1975 as my doctoral thesis and published in 1978, is highlighted much more pointedly than by its initial title, System and Metaphoricity in the Philosophy of Georges Bataille. Indeed, this work is not only an attempt to understand Bataille’s mythical anthropology, and critique of humanism, in a philosophical light by situating his thought within the fourfold marked by the names of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is above all a study on how Bataille’s materialist approach, or, to apply an expression by Carlo Michelstaedter to this thinker, his systematic hunger for what is lower, which instructs his reverse reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or step back from absolute knowledge to sense-perception, lays the abyssal groundwork for the spectral and phantasmatic other, or double of phenomenology that the latter inevitably co-produces in its steady speculative process toward self-certain knowledge.

With respect to the German edition I consider this English translation of the book its definitive version. Indeed, it is in a way a new original. Because of the time constraints, and special conditions under which the book had to be produced in 1978, the original contained many formal mistakes that have now been corrected. But, in addition, I have taken the opportunity of making some slight changes to improve the flow of the argument, thus making this also a more readable book than the first edition.

I would like to take the opportunity of this translation and republication to express my deepest gratitude to Prof. Dr. Klaus Heinrich, who at the extremely difficult moment when for reasons of illness Prof. Dr. Jacob Taubes could no longer serve as my supervisor, generously offered to take over the project. I also wish to thank all the students, who in 1971–72 participated in a workshop on Bataille that I conducted at the Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at the Freie Universität Berlin in which I sketched out the outlines of the present work. Most special thanks go to Werner Hamacher, Bernard Pautrat, Steffen Stelzer, and Samuel Weber, on whom, in almost daily conversations, whether in Paris or Berlin, I tested the main ideas of this work and whose searching criticism and comments were invaluable in shaping the argument in this book.

Rodolphe Gasché

Introduction

SUBSIDIARY DEVELOPMENTS

Even the interdependence is only apparent: each person is finally linked with his predecessors. Phantasms linked with phantasms. It is strange to take everything so seriously. Ancient philosophy is a strange labyrinthian aberration of reason. The proper note to strike is that of dreams and fairy tales.

—Friedrich Nietzsche¹

The foreword to this study on Georges Bataille evokes a figure—a phantasm, a scientific myth—whose analysis has become possible only now that this study has been completed. Like the eyes of Janus, the god of forewords, these subsidiary developments simultaneously glance in the direction of what is to come and look back from the results to the intention that occasioned the following arguments, in order to ascertain that this figure, which was a subjective source of inspiration, did not receive a thematic treatment. The upcoming arguments, therefore, situate themselves between these two perspectives, in the narrow gap that divides the two masks of the double-faced god, on the arch of the gateway where it is written: Augenblick, moment, or blink of an eye.

The figure that we have just alluded to is that of the pineal body, the inconspicuous organ that according to Descartes binds body and soul together. Even though according to Plato laughing does not constitute an argument worthy of philosophy, ever since Descartes’s Treatise of Man the pineal body has been an object of ridicule—of irony and sophistic or cynical laughter. So if initially we wanted to devote our attention to this figure, it was not in the least our intention to banter about in full agreement with philosophy, nor was it to obey the Platonic protest against laughter, since the laughter of philosophy and the earnestness of its argumentation are complementary. In fact, this laughter, for which Socrates reproaches Polus, merely intends to refute an argument that nobody would accept.²

We cannot, however, deny that it was a certain scurrility of this figure that first prompted us to pay attention to it. Scurrility in the sense that, like a foreign body, the pineal body disturbs the body and the corpus of philosophy and repeatedly provokes it to cheerfulness: but this is a cheerfulness and a laughter that merely lead to the expulsion and rejection of the pineal body. Based on the treatment that this figure had received in Georges Bataille’s texts, it appeared to us to be appropriate to demonstrate a movement on the body of philosophy, which makes the expulsion of the pineal body into a precondition of the constitution of its body. Or, to put it differently, to generate in its corpus a laughter alien to philosophy (Nietzsche’s or Bataille’s laughter), which should have unsettled it until its shattering.

But the occasion for the present work—the fascinating incongruity between the pineal body and the body of philosophy—and the prospect of a different way of addressing this difference are nevertheless not symmetrical. Something like a nonlogical difference has produced itself in the act of writing in the space between the occasion and the prospect. The thematic treatment of the pineal body based essentially on Plato’s Timaeus, Descartes’s Treatise of Man, and Bataille’s Dossier of the Pineal Eye would have attempted a deconstruction of the concept of truth, its inscription in the context of castration and blinding beyond its control. But, directing our attention to the myth and/or phantasm (the terms Bataille uses to describe the obsessive insistence of the pineal eye) of which the pineal body is merely one possible figure, the present work, while traversing Hegel’s Phenomenology, aims at the development of a phantasmatology that passes through the different stages of the becoming of the Spirit in an order contrary to that of the Encyclopedia. It appeared then that the particular phantasm of the pineal eye, as it is staged by Bataille, would require a traversing of the Hegelian philosophy of nature, a confrontation with this weak link in the dialectical chain, that is, of nature as the fully exteriorized idea, which produces things contrary to its own norm and makes it quite difficult to hang on to its concept or idea.

The reason why we abandoned the initial project of submitting the pineal body to any of these two possible demonstrations is the already mentioned displacement in the act of writing produced by the examination of the terms organizing Bataille’s text: phantasm, myth, image, sign, and so forth. As can be expected, the phantasmatology developed here will set up the rules with which we can account for a specific phantasm like the pineal body. At the same time, however, it is also clear that the possible application of these rules to the pineal body would lead only to a reduplication of phantasmatology. Rather than be an illustration or a distinguished example on which this rule can be verified or falsified, such an analysis would produce only another figure of phantasmatology.

Since the phantasm or scientific myth of the pineal eye does not constitute a symptom of Bataille’s text that could be dissolved by a phantasmatology, we could not assign to it the status of an example or an illustration. This is why phantasmatology differs from the Freudian interpretation of dreams, since it is not a method or a theory but a textual formation that cannot be separated from the materiality of the text in relation to which it is being developed. With regard to the combination of the elements of the dream that elucidate the dream so exhaustively, Freud wrote: We might also point out in our defence that our procedure in interpreting dreams is identical with the procedure by which we resolve hysterical symptoms; and there the correctness of our method is warranted by the coincident emergence and disappearance of the symptoms, or, to use a simile, the assertions made in the text are borne out by the accompanying illustrations.³

Phantasmatology cannot exhaustively explain or be verified by privileged examples. Thus, the point of departure—even the example of the pineal body—has belatedly suspended itself until its very cancellation as the occasion for the present work. If we now choose not to pursue the possibility of a different treatment of the topic than the one provided by philosophy, and that opened up toward the end of the work, the reason is that the repetition of the Hegelian philosophy of nature in the context of this work, would, as we have already suggested, have only provided an additional figure of phantasmatology. To be sure, the repetition is one of the rules that characterize phantasmatology, and the staging of the actual phantasm of the pineal eye would not have denied us the kind of bonus pleasure that we had promised ourselves at the outset. But who cares about a bonus, a mere additional pleasure, if one can carry out (without having to add to the debate with three consecutive spheres of the Hegelian system another one) a deconstruction of phantasmatology itself through which its theoretical construction itself appears as the foremost example of phantasmatology? With the deconstruction of the resulting theoretization of phantasmatology alone and its subjection to the law of repetition, a pleasure tightly bound to the death drive emerges whose perpetual repetition is the goal of even a text like Beyond the Pleasure Principle.⁴

There is, however, an additional point that cannot be ignored, which originally lay at the foundation of this work and regularly programmed it, yet it was still not followed. This time, we are not talking about a thematic aspect but the systematic and methodological form of our reading.⁵ The initial plan consisted of using the Dossier de l’oeil pinéal (published in the second volume of the Oeuvres complètes) as a reference text, and of relying on the early works (the first two volumes of the collected works and the period between 1922 and 1940) to help in its interpretation. As a first attempt, we have undertaken an analysis of all five versions of The Pineal Eye relying on linguistic and textual methods.⁶ A syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the texts uncovered the chains of metonymies and metaphors that structured them. In addition, we then identified anagrams, homophonies, correct, and punning etymologies as well as essential deviations from the canonical grammar and syntax of the French language. It became clear that the structure of the production of these texts obeyed the general economy of a perpetual erosion of linguistic materials. Thus, a recourse to the dictionary turned out to be unavoidable, which composes in its own way a text involved in that of Bataille’s to the extent that, in his own words, "the dictionary is executed by the text the way one is executed by firearms."⁷

This preparatory work was essential not because the five versions of the Dossier were literary texts, but because they can be located at the point of intersection at which the usually clearly separated domains of philosophy and literature overlap, cut across each other, and mutually cut into each other.⁸ Situated at the borderline of what is delimited through a definition, in the domain of the transgression of a ban on touching, this wavering status opens up the following possibilities: (1) a problematization of the language of philosophy, of its repression of any consideration of the materiality of its writing, which constantly threatens to distort its transparency for meaning; (2) the problematization of literature in its dependence on philosophy, as for the most part literature allows the latter to prescribe to it its domain, themes, ideology, and its mode of writing; (3) a mode of writing, an announcement of the materiality of language that accomplishes the transgression of philosophy and literature in this space between.

By concentrating on one text, on the different versions of The Pineal Eye that remained unpublished and unfinished by Bataille, we also hoped to avoid the danger of presenting a complete and exhaustive system in our explication of the systems and figures of Bataille’s philosophy. The system of inscriptions and productions of the Bataillean philosophemes was to have remained tied to the singularity of the five versions as an effect of only the things that are at play in these few texts themselves. Not only would it thus have been possible to replace the system constructed in this manner through the privileging of another text and, consequently, to exchange it for another web of concepts, but it would have been possible to thrust it into the process of the general exchange and waste that organizes Bataille’s way of writing. To the degree that the economy of expenditure cannot be totalized, it is also impossible to unite all possible readings into a single interpretation that would function as the true expression of Bataille’s thought.

The reading that we planned to perform here was to produce something like the illusion of a system. This way we hoped to be able to avoid writing about Bataille. Thesis-driven academic writing presents a discourse on an author in which the work’s becoming a work is a way in which truth becomes and happens, and which, as Heidegger writes, strives for the open, installs itself in it, setting and taking possession, and according to the Greek meaning of thesis, sets itself up in the unconcealed.⁹

In fact, it is possible to discuss that which preserves and conceals itself in the openness of the unconcealed as truth. Yet Bataille’s text itself makes such an operation impossible—provided that we observe the movements of its mode of writing. The necessary precaution to write about Bataille could be attributed to the fact that Bataille himself had explicitly posed the question of the about.¹⁰ Bataille’s simultaneous critical debate with discourses that want to write or talk about something and his strategic employment of these very discourses in the texts that we will analyze here inscribe as a sequel every discourse that attempts to write about Bataille in his own text, whose movements undermine every stable point of view. Writing about Bataille, something we do not fully get around to, we must imagine our position in him as a stand based in quicksand from which we could pull ourselves out only by our own hair.

However, the purpose of this meticulous analysis of the textual movements of the Dossier was not to dissect and describe the text from the outside with the reliable instruments of tried and tested methods in order to escape its entanglements. To the contrary, the textual and linguistic methods helped us to work out clearly the operations and movements of Bataille’s mode of writing in such a way that we (who must write about Bataille) could subject our conceptualizations to the same laws that govern his texts. Therefore, it should no longer come as a surprise if the traversal of phenomenology is supposed to lead to a phantasmatology. Up to this point, we have merely tried to show how our work here deviates from its original plan, but it remains that it would not exist without its first subjective motivation and the already mentioned technical discussion of the Dossier. Let us return to the praxis of our reading. In order to be able to allow the text of The Pineal Eye to unfold itself in its complete and complex materiality, we read it in such a way that we did not fix our attention either on this or that theme or on this or that signifier. Reading with evenly-suspended attention,¹¹ our objective was, as Lucette Finas has demonstrated in her amazing work on Madame Edwarda, to resend the story to itself, if possible, excluding all external references with the exception of making it traverse my own self; to detach and then reattach its retina. Nothing but its retina—the web of its noises.¹² Such a procedure is led by an economy of interpretation that renounces every profit (every extraction of meaning) that would come in the form of a surplus value from an investment of labor. To be more precise, it avoids every attempt at the constitution of a fixed meaning.

The question, then, concerns not only what makes such a reading of Bataille’s text possible but precisely what makes it necessary. First of all, this reading unavoidably calls for a certain set of themes staged by Bataille: above all, the theme of an economy of expenditure of riches as well as of meaning. But this theme does not yet constitute a sufficient ground for a reading of this nature, since a thematic interpretation implies that the reader can break down the text into its complexes of meaning and sense, which could then be grasped in a profit-oriented interpretation as the sense, the statement, or the meaning of the text. From such a perspective, the reading of the text would appear to be merely the in-itself meaningless investment of labor, which is nevertheless necessary to render the text’s intention and meaning transparent so that the latter can be brought out and conserved as the original idea. This process presupposes a form of blindness in relation to the text in its materiality and movements, the blindness of the philosopher, for example. As Derrida has it, "The philosopher is blind to Bataille’s text because he is a philosopher only through the desire to hold on to, to maintain his certainty of himself and the security of the concept as security against this sliding. For him, Bataille’s text is full of traps: it is, in the initial sense of the word, a scandal."¹³ This sliding that makes every conceptual and thematic reading unsatisfactory and necessitates a textual reading cannot be demonstrated on a theme like expenditure or the gift. It can be demonstrated only on the movements of the text itself. In other words, we must show that the particular theme is merely the surface effect of the expenditure practiced by this mode of writing. The stake of reading, therefore, cannot be only the explication of the way the text produces a concept. It also needs to reveal the movement that releases the concept produced as the effect of the play of signifiers and syntax to the movement of the text, which then ruins it as a concept.

How are we supposed to read the text then?

Usually, we read with what we could call an inner sense, since in the process of understanding we separate the essential from the inessential, the precious metal from the slag, the signified from the signifier. This inner sense is constituted in a similar way, in that the senses are deprived of their materiality as bodily organs: the eyes, the ears, and the tongue are sublimated in such a way that they make it feasible—in their henceforth possible cooperation and unison—to comprehend, grasp, and conceptualize the pure intelligibility of the written. Under the primacy of sense, in the purity of the mutual penetration of logos and phonē to the degree of their indistinguishability, the individual senses (the eye, the ear, and tongue) fuse into this inner sense.¹⁴ Reading a text, however, means that we give back to the individual senses their materiality so that the eye can abide by the insistence of the letters and the graphic organization of the written, and the ear can abide by the sound produced by the tongue, and, as a result, the unison of the organs fades away.¹⁵ Yet the differences between the graphematic, the sounds and the tones, and the gestural articulations and movements of the tongue correspond to the differences between the three organs of sensation that cannot be sublated.¹⁶ Reading Bataille or, in a more general sense, reading a text means, therefore, to assume the task of dismembering the body: In order to recover in oneself that which was miserably aborted at the beginning of the constitution of the human body, one would have to break oneself into pieces and feel in one’s body the madness of a contortionist while, at the same time, one would have to become a drooling fetishist simultaneously of the eye, the behind, and the foot.¹⁷ The fetishistic eruption of the individual organs from the homogeneous body or, what amounts to the same, their eroticization restores to them once again their heterogeneous difference upon which the process of sublation works itself out. Indeed, it is only through the annihilation of difference—through which the individual organs are reduced to functions and ideal parts of a whole—that their harmonious interplay becomes thinkable in the form of the ideality that we call a human being.

The dismembered organs open themselves to the equally diverse material instances that constitute a text. The already mentioned fetishization and eroticization, however, are not yet sufficient to prevent the realization of the unison. The individual organ is still an organon of the perception of a sense, even if the latter is only a restricted sense: the ear hears through sounds; the eye perceives essences through images and forms; the tongue produces sense and meaning in the ideal element of a diaphanous phonē. Thus, another operation needs to be performed on the residual ideality of the sense organs so that they become capable of reading a text without subjecting it to the violence of totalization that represses the text’s materiality and the structure of its networks.

Let us start with the ear. It is necessary to possess the third ear that Nietzsche speaks about in Beyond Good and Evil. Having the third ear, however, means "that one must not be in doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables, that one experiences the break with any excessively severe symmetry as deliberate and attractive, that one lends a subtle and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that one figures out the meaning in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs and how delicately and richly they can be colored and change colors as they follow each other."¹⁸ Hearing thus implies—and this is particularly true of reading a text by Bataille—that one feels from his arm down to his toes the dangerous delight of the quivering, over-sharp blade, which wishes to bite, hiss, and cut.¹⁹ This third ear is not an occult ear, the sublation of the pair that every human being possesses. Rather, it is the kind of ear with which we can hear if the function that the Holy Scripture refuses it is given back to it. In Lacan’s words, "We can confine our attention here to [Theodor Reik’s] sounding of the alarm in his book Listening with the Third Ear, the ‘third ear’ designating nothing other, no doubt, than the two at every man’s disposal, on the condition that the function the Scriptures claim they do not have be restored to them."²⁰

The third ear is also the kind with which the child perceives what is heard, the noises in the night, which irrupt into the child’s field of perception as an alien body and, in conjunction with lived experience, lead to the formation of fantasies: Hearing, when it occurs, breaks the continuity of an undifferentiated perceptual field and at the same time is a sign (the noise waited for and heard in the night) which puts the subject in the position of having to answer to something.²¹ It is, therefore, not merely the ear that we all possess, if we did not put our ears away in the drawer and if we read aloud, that means, with all the crescendos, inflections, and reversals of tone and changes in tempo.²² Rather, it is primarily the ear that, feeling the over-sharp blade, exposes itself to the imploding sound that ruptures the eardrum: a scream and/or the mad laughter in an extreme case. No other ear, therefore, than the one with which Derrida at the beginning of Margins of Philosophy listens to philosophy.

The eye, for its part, with which, as Nietzsche writes, only the Germans read,²³ and which constitutes a pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject, is the eye of theoria: "an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense."²⁴ This is the eye of the philosopher, of the painless subject of knowledge who, with downcast eyes in the medium of light, never looking up in order to avoid the danger of being dazzled, strips the perceived images of their materiality in order to perceive in them eternal forms and essences. But a look at the things themselves would dazzle his vision like a look at the sun, which still appears to the philosopher as the guarantee of every truth. Socrates clearly expresses the double danger of injury, for example, in Phaedo:

Well, after this, said Socrates, when I was worn out with my physical investigations, it occurred to me that I must guard against the same sort of risk which people run when they watch and study an eclipse of the sun; they really do sometimes injure their eyes, unless they study its reflection in water or some other medium. I conceived of something like this happening to myself, and I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.²⁵

Without further elaborating here on the connections between theory and light, we can at least say this much: The eye of the philosopher or, respectively, the eye of philosophy can see only in the light of the intelligible sun and in the ideal medium of transfigured light. Reading with these eyes, therefore, philosophy must necessarily avert its look from the graphein, the scratching and engraving function of writing, that is, from the movements of the text deposited in graphemes and from the collision of the signs of writing. Thus, as Bataille writes, philosophy is blind to the glare in an Icarian sense. It is blind to that which cannot be brought to the concept, so it does not possess the eyes with which it could read Bataille’s text: "To blind oneself to this rigorous precipitation, this pitiless sacrifice of philosophical concepts, and to continue to read, interrogate, and judge Bataille’s text from within ‘significative discourse’ is, perhaps, to hear something within it, but it is assuredly not to read it."²⁶

It would be too time-consuming and out of place here to present the chain of all the versions of the metaphor of the eye that characterizes Bataille’s texts.²⁷ In an epigrammatic form, we want to point out only that the third eye corresponding to the third ear is both the inward-turned eye that looks into the pit of its own night and, above all, the pineal eye that, dazzled by the sun, discharges its miasmas into it and thereby blinds it. If the eye of philosophy represents the theoretical organ, the pineal eye is the fantastic sense organ that constitutes the phantasmatic text. The dazzlement that it inflicts on itself is of a different nature from the Icarian blindness of philosophy. The pineal eye, which attests to the Nietzschean Love of Blindness, is also the one with which we must read Bataille’s texts: like the thoughts of the wanderer, our thoughts should not tell us where we are going while reading: I love ignorance of the future, and do not want to come to grief by impatience and anticipatory tasting of promised things.²⁸ In traversing the text, the labyrinth of the text, no Ariadne’s thread will save us from getting lost.²⁹

Finally, the third organ, the tongue. The tongue—which articulates the refractions that the excessively sharp blade of the writing device wishes to bite, hiss, and cut—bites itself off, like the tongue of Anaxarchus of Abdera, bit off and spat bloody in the face of the tyrant Nicocreon, and with the tongue of Zenon of Eleus, spat in the face of Demylos.³⁰ The text that is read falteringly with a stammering tongue now resembles the headless body that, as it is thematized by Bataille, characterizes also the figure or the profile of his own texts.

A text, therefore, cannot be a whole, a unity, as the tradition requires it from discourse. In Plato’s Phaedrus, to cite only one example, we find the following: Any discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work.³¹

If the reading of a decapitated corpus—which has no beginning, middle, or end—presupposes an equally dismembered object and subject, with dazzled eyes, broken eardrums, and a bitten-off tongue, then the reading of the textual body is no longer oriented: no horizon of meaning delimits its field—no path leads out of its labyrinth.³² We call the praxis of such a reading dé-lire: the de-lirium of un-reading.

Let us recall the clinical definition of the concept of delirium. At the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud quotes Maury, who, perceiving a close analogy between the associations characteristic of dream life and certain mental disorders, defines the term in the following way: ‘délire’: ‘(1) une action spontanée et comme automatique de l’esprit; (2) une association vicieuse et irrégulière des idées.’³³ Freud highlights this quotation because it comes close to what he will call the dream work and especially because it already anticipates, although not yet in a psychoanalytic terminology, some of the laws of the primary processes. Freud’s definition, however, is even more interesting: Deliria are the work of a censorship which no longer takes the trouble to conceal its operation; instead of collaborating in producing a new version that shall be unobjectionable, it ruthlessly deletes whatever it disapproves of, so that what remains becomes quite disconnected.³⁴ Censorship acts here with a force similar to that of a primary process, in that it strikes out the unconscious desires in their articulations and leaves behind only a text permeated by black lines that appears to defy understanding. The power of censorship and the deletions it effects, however, merely attest to the uncontrollable persistence of unconscious desires that provoke the repressing instances to their full recklessness. In the text permeated by black lines and respectively by the white of the paper, the transgressive function of unconscious desires manifests itself all the more blatantly as an unconscious desire realizes itself only in the transgression of a ban or a boundary.³⁵ The empty spaces are not only sites of the all-powerful power of censorship but also of its breakdown, thus forcing this power to make itself manifest.

The texts crossed by black lines, therefore, must be read as the sites of the powerful operations of what opposes the law.³⁶ In this sense, Bataille grasped delirium as a heterogeneous element: "Violence, excess, delirium, madness characterize heterogeneous elements to varying degrees: active, as persons or mobs, they result from breaking the laws of social homogeneity."³⁷ There are no pure heterogeneous elements, only degrees of heterogeneity: delirium, in its equally measureless violence, represents, inasmuch as it is initiated by persons or masses, a transgression of the social order that it necessarily presupposes. Inasmuch as it produces incoherent associations and texts permeated by empty places (as it does in the case of clinical delirium), delirium attests to the transgression of the rational association of ideas and of the ordered structure of language.

As soon as the tongue is detached (dé-lier) from discourse and its binding power, the praxis of un-reading (dé-lire) emerges. Based on the Latin de-lirare (to depart from the furrow), playing with the homophony between lire, lier, lirare, we could define un-reading as a nonlinear reading that follows a mode of writing that no longer measures itself according to the straight furrow. Jumping here and there, back and forth, this form of reading and writing does not appear to be subjected to any law.

The short example of a delirious etymology, as we have just carried it out on the word délire, already illustrates one of the operations that Bataille’s texts practice. It forms a stark contrast with the operations of philosophical discourses centered on truth, which, ever since Plato, employed etymology archeologically in order to uncover the original sense and the true meaning of words. But when philosophy is not just trying to collect and totalize the fragments of meaning of the fallen logos hiding in the myth (language), and thus identifying etymology with philosophy, then it is etymology that picks up the traces of the myth itself that have been blocked by rational language as the fuller truth of philosophy. Etymology functions precisely in this way, for example, in Schelling—in contrast to Hegel, who did not make use of etymology and fiercely criticized the delirious word plays of Hamann or Baader, although he did not shy from speculating about the connection between Dinge and Denken (things and thought).³⁸ As a result of the Romantic turn, Schelling prioritized myth over logos and conceived of the emergence of philosophy in connection with the birth of poetry: One is almost tempted to say: language itself is only faded mythology; what mythology still preserves in living and concrete differences is preserved in language only in abstract and formal differences.³⁹ Bataille’s praxis of writing diverges from this hermeneutic application of etymology (which, regardless of whether it pursues logos or myth, transforms words into the faint metaphors of an original meaning), and it resembles the operations of the dream work that forges condensed images and associations based on the consonance of words.

Therefore, in order to define Bataille’s method of writing more precisely, yet another step is necessary. Bataille avers: In the process of writing, how could I in any way do without indifference and even platitude (which appear to me to be necessary . . . perhaps for all forms of writing), if I had not already reached the region where one finally turns away the nostrils above one’s own corpse, where one senses a heart-breaking feeling of beatitude precisely because one plays like a maniac—at least without underwear and lewdly—with the frightening terror one provokes (OC, II, 87). What is at stake in writing is the body. Not only that of the writing subject but also the body of discourse, which can become a text only through the eroticization of knowledge and speech. Julia Kristeva calls this process fiction and designates with it a possibility of writing in which the body of the author, inasmuch as it forms a whole, becomes ceaselessly divided into multiple fissures by the eruption of the drive that is not symbolized, that separates and rearticulates logical structures.⁴⁰ This division of the logical instance can lead to linguistic dislocation and ideological subversion. The splintering of verbal substance, however, does not reach such a high point in Bataille as it does in Joyce or Artaud. According to Kristeva, This is perhaps a limitation of his experience that has the advantage . . . of making it more communicable. But he is in profound solidarity with Joyce in his subversion, through fiction, of the ‘great semiotic units’ of ideology and knowledge.⁴¹ Besides the delirious etymologies that lead to all forms of anagrams, glossolalias, and composite formations, we must also discuss the way the sentence is exploded by Bataille. Apart from a false, insidious, and perverted syntax that runs against the flow of discourse,⁴² this explosion of the sentence takes place also by way of the introduction of linguistic foreign bodies into the structure of the sentence (or, respectively, of whole sentences that act like foreign bodies within larger semiotic units). Bataille writes: "In fact, to the degree that shit provokes hilarity, it could be considered analogous to other foreign bodies that provoke the same effect—such as the parasites of the body, eminent personalities (in that they are objects of caricatures), the insane, the maladjusted, and above all the words introduced in a certain manner in sentences that exclude them" (OC, II, 72). With these words, which function as foreign bodies in the well-organized structure of the sentence, the continuity of the proposition comes to a halt. These verbal elements serve the purpose of generalizing the rupture, negating the value of every kind of homogeneity, primarily the elementary homogeneity of sentences (OC, II, 79). Bataille writes the following in the Dictionary that he began in the journal Documents: A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks.⁴³ Bataille introduces the words into the sentences for the sake of their effects and not for the sake of their meaning so that they can carry out their little task there. These words are, therefore, not merely arbitrary. They are precisely the repressed words that are repulsive—mostly because they are scatological. As representations imbued with affects, they function in opposition to scientific and philosophical terms (which are at best signs of obscene reality), not only in the sense of representations but primarily as themselves obscene realities on the level of language.⁴⁴ On the basis of this obscene linguistic reality, they penetrate the structure of the sentence as foreign bodies and perform their desublimating tasks. If the phonetic materiality of the linguistic substance erupts into the discourse through the degenerative and treacherous employment of etymologies and homophonies, the obscene word fulfills an analogous material function in the sentence structure. First, inasmuch as it is the presentation of an obscene reality that evokes precisely such a representation, it brings connotations into the sentence that interrupt its flow and eroticize other parts of the sentence. At the same time, inasmuch as it is itself an obscene reality on the level of language, it affects the sublime tone of discourse with an irreducible material element: When one resorts to images, which are most of the time decisive and provocative and are taken from the most concrete contradictions, it is the realities of the material order and of human physiology that are put in play (OC, II, 98).

The nonlogical difference that the sound and the obscene word provoke in the sentence through their materiality, thereby exploding its continuity, is the criterion (in fact, the only one) that according to Bataille characterizes matter: "Matter, in fact, can only be defined as the nonlogical difference that represents in relation to economy what crime represents in relation to the law."⁴⁵ We have to understand economy here as an organization of the relation of forces that produce meaning within a discourse. Matter is, thus, precisely such an insistence of sound or of the obscene word that disrupts such an economy. More precisely, it is what the foreign bodies produce in the sentence, that is, the nonlogical difference. It is in this sense that we could call Bataille’s way of writing materialist.

Let us go one step further and turn our attention to an aspect of larger semiotic units. What they present—the staging of anthropological, economic, political, and above all philosophical problems—is characterized by extreme simplifications. According to Bataille, on the one hand, this simplification attests to an aggressive manipulation; on the other hand, however, it is also the guarantee that allows the avoidance of a decrease of the aggressive force (OC, II, 152). We will have to say more about this simplification, so here we will state only a few things. Simplification represents a transgression of the complex discursive forms of organization of the already mentioned areas, whose evocation can no longer be understood as a transference of fields of problems and concepts but rather as a strategy of disappropriation (Entwendung also in the sense of extrication), misappropriation (Verwendung), and, why not, of rendering everything unfitting and incorrect (Verquerung). The disappropriation of different problematics belonging to specific discursive fields (of their materials and concepts) allows, through this extreme simplification, first, their appropriation for the presentation of connections alien to these fields; and second, their attachment to desires that are repressed and oppressed and as such can find expression in this simplification on the level of language in the form of dissonances. For Bataille, these desires are certainly political but not in an unambiguous sense (if such a thing exists at all): they are political in a sense that would have to be determined through a special examination that would be out of place here. Therefore, later in this work we will bring these desires and their articulations together with a problematic that corresponds to the objectives of the present study. Now, having briefly indicated the operations that Bataille undertakes simultaneously