xii u INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION u xiii

ficiency, in a form tending to become generalized, the doctors would say" (p. 184). Breton, the former medical technician, even has a term for Bataille's condition: "psychasthenia" (p. 185). In response to the "Language of Flowers," Breton points out that a rose, even if stripped of all its petals, is still a rose (p. 186); the most telling remark of Breton is that, in stripping the rose of its petals and throwing them in the manure, Sade only wanted to get rid of the usual trappings of poetic sentiment associated with the rose "in order to try to make the human mind get rid of its chains" (p. 186). Thus in Breton we see a certain configuration of values that he opposes to Bataille: the refusal of the interpenetration of reason and bestial unreason; the desire to psychoanalyze (hence to categorize and cure Bataille); the ideal image (the rose), and therefore the mind. That Breton had an aversion to filth is fairly apparent;" he was taken aback by Dali's inclusion of a shit-smear on the underwear of a little man in the lower right-hand corner of his painting The Lugubrious Game. This brown smudge found its champion in Bataille. In a footnote to his essay "The 'Lugubrious Game,' " a clear response to Breton's charges against him, Bataille in fact sees the smudge as a kind of vehicle for liberation: through this stain "a new and real virility is rediscovered by this person [the man in his underwear] in ignominy and horror themselves." The essay "The 'Lugubrious Game' " must be seen in the context of two fragments, unpublished in Bataille's lifetime, that are, for their scope and theoretical audacity, among his most important writings.' These are "The Jesuve" and "The Pineal Eye." Both circle around an "excremental fantasy," a legacy of an anal fixation worked out in Bataille's psychoanalytic cure. This fantasy involves, through the process of evolution, the movement of a tremendous erotic force up from the ape's provocative anus to the erect human's head and brain. The next stage of evolution, manifested by a kind of parodic Nietzschean superman, posits a "pineal eye," a final but deadly erection, which blasts through the top of the human skull and "sees" the overwhelming sun. The point here is not to sublate the anal obsession, but to embrace it; the dialectical procedure of the psychoanalytic cure when completed suddenly falls, and with it the dialectical movement of human evolution as well. And behind Darwin lurks Hegel: the temporal movement toward erect, properly adjusted, rational man is one with the dialectical movement toward Absolute Spirit. But what happens when this movement is not simply deniedas Breton would have Bataille deny, as contradictory, his own ability to reasonbut pushed as far as it can go? The answer is that at the end of reason, at the end of man, at the end of the Cartesian pineal gland (the supposed seat of consciousness) there is only orgasm and a simultaneous fall, a simultaneous death. Death and perversion do not take place in splendid isolation; instead, they are at the endpoint of the human. The energy of obscene, anal sexuality may be temporarily brought to a higher level in the elevated mind, in the ramrod-straight military man, in spiritbut when spirit

reaches its full elevation, it sees the light of night, it becomes the ejaculation that idealist religious and philosophical systemsBreton's as well as Hegel'shad merely temporarily forgotten and not done away with. At the furthest point of evolution, of' absolute knowledge, elevation is the fall; humanity is animality; insight is blindness; health is terminal pathology; God, when he knows, is a pig. Castration is thus not forgotten, sublimated, or sublated, but is ecstatically experienced, as the ax-blade cutting into the ape's anus, as the father's actual castration of the son as a response to the son's total defiance. But this is more than a simple individual experience of night. Bataille makes it clear in "The Pineal Eye" that his considerations have to do not only with evolution but with larger sociological phenomena. The pineal eye is experienced communally; the gibbon is sacrificed, the eye/anus/brain in its ejaculation/defecation/thought becomes an erotic and sacrificial object not just for an isolated individual, but for a cult, a secret society, or perhaps even, by implication, for an entire civilization at the end of history. Hence Bataille's opening remarks on anthropology: what is needed is not simply an anthropology that will reduce myth and collective experience to the status of ideal mental (and academic) categories, but instead an anthropology that will itself provide a livingand orgiasticmyth to overturn, through its experience on a collective level, "modern" sterile bourgeois society. It must he remembered, however, that evolution (and thus the dialectic) is not simply escaped or done away with. It is impossibly fulfilled, and completed, at the recurrent instant in which it is ruptured and annihilated. Bataille's text itself stands in an impossible neutral space between absolute knowledge and its implacably hostile double, sheer loss. Yet the text is neither one nor the other; it is precisely the conjoining of the two that establishes their identity as automutilation, their violent doubling. In fact one of Bataille's other essays from this period of Documents is an affirmation of the madman's duality and automutilation: "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh." One could argue that the pattern established in "The Jesuve" and "The Pineal Eye" reappears, in its various guises, throughout the later work of Bataille. But one would have to be careful: Bataille is not simply privileging a new object (excrement, flies, ruptured eyes, the rotten sun, etc.) over the old one (the head, the king, spirit, mind, vision, the sun of reason, etc.). If, as Angus Fletcher has pointed out in Allegory,"" the medieval allegorical imagination posits a fundamental congruence between hierarchy in the body and the guaranteed, stable meaning of allegory (in the body, the highest element is the head; in society, the king; and in the universe, God), then we must conclude that a theory that simply substituted one hierarchy for another (a hierarchy that favors the high replaced by one that favors the low) would only inaugurate a new metaphysics and a new stabilized allegorical system of meaning. Filth would replace God. But Bataille's approach is not that simple. Fully conversant as a medievalist