Par-delà la poésie: Blinding Immanence and the

System:
Poetry and the Unknown in Georges Bataille's
Critique of Hegel and Kojève

1. Hegelian reflections in fun-house mirrors.

The echoes of Alexandre Kojève's voice, delivering his famed lectures on

Hegel at the Sorbonne, from 1933 to 1939, are still with us, like a ringing in the

ear. Likewise, Jean Hyppolite's translation of Hegel's Phänomenologie des

Geistes, published in 1939, is still readily available; only in recent years have

new translations appeared. Moreover, both Kojève's Introduction à la Lecture

de Hegel and Hyppolite's Genèse et structure de la Phénomélogie de l'esprit de

Hegel, published merely a year apart,1 remain among the most influential

interpretations of Hegel, not only in France, but the world over. It would be an

interesting and time-consuming endeavor to articulate a full genealogy of their

influence; however, such an effort is beyond the scope of this essay.

Nevertheless, the broad diffusion and popularization of their respective

readings have distorted the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and his thought to a point

beyond recognition. Unrecognizable, now, the distorted Geist of Hegel haunts

contemporary thought as a spectral image cast through one of these lenses.

Moreover, Kojève's rather sensationalistic reading, which projected the

development of spirit in the Phänomenologie onto the screen of History, has

been so powerful that the seductive power of his reading has had such

dramatic effects as to restart the 'locomotive of history.'

The influence of these two interpretations of Hegel has played a larger

role in the history of contemporary philosophy; both Kojève and Hyppolite

1
Kojève's lectures were collected/transcribed by Raymond Queneau and were published in a
second edition, including Kojève's annotations, in 1947; Hyppolite's Génése was published in
1946.
introduced elements of Heideggerian phenomenology into their readings of

Hegel's Phänomenologie. Both constructed historical readings of the

Phänomenologie most directly from Kojève's predecessor at the Sorbonne, his

fellow émigré Alexandre Koyré, as well as the contributors to his journal,

Recherches Philosophiques. What is most important here is the turn toward

phenomenology, in its contemporary incarnation, and the surreptitious

introduction of the Heideggerian conception of language as the 'intelligibility of

being-in-the-world... expressed in discourse. The totality of significations of

intelligibility is put into words.'2 This influence is attested to in Kojève's lectures

by the overtly Heideggerian terminology he used when speaking of language;

for instance, in his infamous, protracted footnote regarding the 'end of history,'

in which he writes '”The definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called” also

means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict

sense... there would no longer be any “[discursive] understanding of the World

and of the self.”'3 Hyppolite's interpretation of Hegel's concept of language is

relatively more faithful to his text, but is also inflected with the idea of

Discourse in Heidegger. For instance, he writes, 'The function of language is

precisely to say the I, to make the I itself a universal. Thus, language is a

moment of the spirit; it is the logos, the middle term of intelligences... That

universal self-consciousness which results from the alienation of the specific

self is precisely what is to be realized. And language alone can realize it.'4 Thus,

in both trajectories, language is inextricably bound up with intelligibility, the

meaningful world, individuality and mediate understanding.

Among the auditors of Kojève's lectures, Georges Bataille was, by all

2
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, SUNY Press, 1996. §34,
p. 151.
3
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ed. Allan
Bloom, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1980. p. 160n. Hereafter, IRH.
4
Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 403.
accounts, among the most consistently in attendance. Although Bataille

maintained a close friendship with Kojève, he was hardly the uncritical Kojèvian

that he has frequently been charged with having been.5 Such arguments

neglect first of all the issues Bataille raised in a letter written to Kojève, a mere

two days after the latter's lecture of December 4th 1937. Furthermore, the

assertion that Bataille 'considered himself a “Kojèvian” as much as a

Nietzschean – and perhaps more,'6 is problematic in light of the position from

which Bataille critiques Hegel, and even more so in light of a series of

'Propositions,' written at some point prior to 1952, which speak for themselves:

'1. Circular thought is the only plausible thought. To be of one's own time is

quite simply to be a stooge. 2. But circular thought must begin not from a

proposition but from the ignorance that precedes it, and it culminates in non-

knowledge as well. 3. All mystical positions are shortened circles, therefore the

movements of non-knowledge are intellectually short. 4. My position is the

one that is opposed to Hegel-Kojève as 2 and to 3 as Hegel.'7 He thus

indicates that his understanding of Hegel was not one of a doctrinaire Kojèvian,

but rather that of one who had come to read Hegel closely through the

mediation of Kojève. It is my intent, in the present essay, to elucidate the

central role assigned to language and poetry in Bataille's criticism of Hegel. It

will be seen that Bataille was ultimately most critical of Hegel's actual position

on language, and that the central axis of his critique of both Hegel and Kojève

is their reliance upon the mediations of discursive language and closure of the

system of knowledge. Moreover, consideration of the Science of Logic will

5
This assertion is made, for instance, in Allan Stoekl, 'Recognition in Madame Edwarda', in
Bataille: Writing the Sacred, Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 77-90.
6
Stoekl, 'Recognition in Madame Edwarda', p. 77.
7
Georges Bataille, 'Aphorisms for the “System”', The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge,
Trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
p. 167. Hereafter: US.
ultimately shed light on Bataille's particularly courageous challenge to Hegel's

system – courageous, for the outcome is known in advance.

2. Bataille's Game: Ungraspable Reality.

Across the cover of the first edition of L'Expérience Intérieure (Gallimard,

1943), there appeared a band bearing the words: par-delà la poésie, or, in

another language, beyond poetry.8 These words, along with those printed upon

an insert in the 1943 edition (OC-V 422/IE 169), indicate a privileged position

occupied by poetry in Bataille's thought, despite the fact noted by his

biographer, Michel Surya; that prior to the publication of L'Expérience

Intérieure, 'Bataille had never had recourse to poetry (except as a teenager,

none of which was published: of all the genres he took stock of, poetry

remained the one he neglected. Not only did he neglect it, he violently opposed

it.'9 This is to say that Bataille's writings on poetry and, by the same token,

literature, above all do not take their object as uncritically given, and neither

does he valorize poetry and literature, tout court, but rather a particular use of

language manifest in specific situations. Above all and from the beginning,

Bataille's perspective closes off the possibility of making poetry or literature

into transcendent, distinct objects of study; instead, they are given the

privileged capacity to bring forth the indistinct, the unknown and the immanent

by means of language. This, perhaps, may be that which is indicated by the

phrase par-delà la poésie: that poetry and literature are privileged insofar as

they point beyond mere language, a beyond which is not to be awaited, but

rather to be experienced in the blinding flash of a moment

8
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany: SUNY Press, 1988, p.
83. Hereafter: IE. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes V: La Some athéologique, 1, Paris,
Editions Gallimard, 1973, pg. 422. Hereafter: OC-V. Both Bataille's Oeuvres Complètes and
English translations, where they exist, shall be cited throughout. Where an English
translation does not exist, translations are mine.
9
Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, Trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and
Michael Richardson (New York and London, Verso, 2002, pg 322
 It is uncertain how one might situate the passage that follows the phrase

par-delà la poésie in terms of L'Expérience Intérieure and numerous other

theoretical and literary pieces, written during the nineteen-forties. There is a

quite marked shift in Bataille's thought, of which L'Expérience Intérieure was

the first expression that was published under his own name. For this and other

reasons, we may read these words printed on this insert and those inscribed on

the band of the volume, as more than mere ornamentation. The text of the

insert begins as follows:

We are perhaps the wound, the sickness of nature.

It would be necessary for us in this case – and moreover possible,
'easy' - to turn the wound into a celebration, a strength of the sickness. The
poetry in which the most blood would be lost would be the most forceful. The
saddest dawn would announce the joy of day.
Poetry would be the sign announcing the greatest ruptures. (OC-V 422/IE
169)
In the original manuscript of Le Coupable, we find nearly identical lines,

crossed out, dated January 24th, 1943, concluding the penultimate chapter of

the book, La Chance (OC-V 554). Furthermore, the word blessure used in the

same sentence as 'nature' directs our attention to Bataille's letter to Kojève of

December 6th, 1937, which is reproduced in an edited form as an appendix to

Le Coupable.10 It is thus not at all surprising that the text of the insert

concludes with a meditation on Hegel:

Beyond (Au-delà) all knowledge there is non-knowledge and he who would

become absorbed within the thought that beyond his knowledge he knows
nothing – even were he to have Hegel's inexorable lucidity within – he would no
longer be Hegel, but a painful tooth in Hegel's mouth. Would a sick tooth alone be
missing from the great philosopher? (OC-V 422-3/IE 169)
He thus begins with the open wound in nature that we are, following Kojève's

reading of Hegel; in which the negativity of desire is at once a manque d'être, a

loss of being, a wound in nature, but at the same time expresses itself in action

10
Georges Bataille, Guilty, Trans. Bruce Boone, Venice & San Francisco, The Lapis Press, 1988.
pp. 123-125. Hereafter: G. Georges Bataille, OC-V, pp. 369-371 & 562-565. The unedited
letter can be found in Georges Bataille, Choix de Lettres, Ed. Michel Surya, Paris, Editions
Gallimard, 1997. pp. 131-136.
through the negation of given nature. This is a poetics announcing a rupture,

but what rupture? It is the final paragraph that designates that beyond into

which poetry irrupts: the non-knowledge that is beyond knowledge, beyond

Hegel. It seems, therefore, that this obscure passage attaches not to

L'Expérience Intérieure as an isolated work, but to the phrase par-delà la

poésie, itself, and as such brings into play other texts that were to appear

under the aegis of this phrase,11 in particular, Le Coupable and La Haine de la

Poésie (re-published in 1962 under the new title L'Impossible).

This is to say that the beyond to which poetry points is the unknown, that

which is excluded in and expelled by Hegel's system. The reference to Hegel

designates that this unknown is not some knowable phenomenon that could,

with time, become known and expressed in the discourse of the Wise Man at

the end of history. It is rather that which lies beyond the limits of discursive

existence, which Michel Foucault writes, 'follows from the actual penetration of

philosophical experience in language and the discovery that the experience of

the limit... is realized in language and in the movement where it says what

cannot be said.'12 To put it briefly, the poetry of which Bataille writes does not,

and cannot, submit to formal definition or description. One might approximate

by saying that it is nothing but the self-transgression of language aiming to say

that which is irreducible to discourse. This would be correct, but reductive

nonetheless. According to Bataille there is, rather, a radical heterogeneity

between the reality and language, but at the same time, between the world

and language there is a covert complicity: language, even literary or poetic

language, is, in the first instance structured such that every 'existence is linked
11
In notes associated with the manuscript of Méthode de Méditation, from 1945-6, we find one
of Bataille's earliest plans for the republication of a number of his writings under the general
title Par-delà la poésie. (OC-V, 459-60)
12
Michel Foucault, 'A Preface to Transgression' in Language Counter-Memory, Practice, Ed.
Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 51. Hereafter PT.
to language. Each person imagines, and therefore knows of his existence with

the help of words. Words come to him in his head loaded with the multitude of

human – or non-human – existences with respect to which his private existence

exists. Being is mediated in him through words, which can only arbitrarily give

themselves to 'autonomous being' and only profoundly as 'being in relation

to'(OC-V 99).

Such a role is not explicitly assigned to language in the Phänomenologie,

but rather more so in Hegel's Science of Logic, wherein he writes

Now the middle term whereby these extremes are concluded into a unity is
first the implicit nature of both, the whole Concept that holds both within
itself... [second] ...since in their concrete existence they stand confronting
each other, their absolute unity is also a still formal element having an
existence distinct from them – the element... in which they enter into external
community with each other... the middle term is only the abstract neutrality,
the possibility of those extremes... In the material world water fulfills the
function of this medium; in the spiritual world, so far as the analogue of such
a relation has a place there, the sign in general, and more precisely language,
is to be regarded as fulfilling that function. (SL ¶1583)13
But in the same movement, according to Bataille, words 'are themselves

reduced to the state of evasions [of experience]; such is the work of discourse

in us. And this difficulty is expressed in this way: the word silence is still a

sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would

be necessary to no longer speak'(OC-V 25/IE 13). To speak the word “silence”

is to break it, and thus with experience; we avoid the unsettling effects of

actual experience through language and thought.

3. The Law of Language

Before it becomes possible to properly discuss the poetic use of

language, we must examine the concept of language at work, and in a larger

context. As has already been mentioned, language is inextricably bound up

with the world to such a degree that they are to a large extent structurally
13
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, Trans. A.V. Miller, New Jersey, The
Humanities Press.
homologous. Bataille writes: 'Words – we use them, we make use of them the

instruments of useful acts. We could in no way have anything of the human

about us if language had to be entirely servile within us. Neither can we do

without the efficacious relations which words introduce between men and

things'(OC-V 156/IE 135). Language thus mediates existence, but it does so in

a specific modality: language is in the first instance used for instrumental ends,

as an accessory to, or substitute for action. Thus language is fundamentally

structured by its subordination to instrumental action and which orients

language toward projects. Of this Bataille writes:

Action is utterly dependent upon project... discursive thought is itself engaged

in the mode of existence of project. Discursive thought... takes place within
him beginning with his projects, on the level of reflection upon projects.
Project... is a way of being in paradoxical time: it is the putting off of existence
to a later point.(OC-V 59/IE 46)
Thus language is given structure and form by virtue of our engagement

in the everyday world of action and projects. Insofar as we have situated

Bataille's theory in terms of Hegel, the term “Action” ought to evoke the term

“Negation,” by virtue of Hegel's definition of action as the negation of given

being. Such negating action is the mediation that gives rise to language as

such, and which according to Hegel results in 'language as the existence of

Spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others, self-consciousness

which as such is immediately present, and as this self-consciousness is

universal... It perceives itself just as it is perceived by others, and the

perceiving is just existence which has become a self'' (PS ¶652).14 Which is to

say that insofar as language mediates our existence, and language is

structured by instrumental action, such linguistic existence dispossesses us of

everything irreducible to language and which is not in service of some deferred

14
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A. V. Miller, New York,
Oxford, 1977.
goal. Moreover, the thrust of Hegel's text is that by means of such language

self-consciousness for self and for others is unified in the universal “I.”

We must continue a bit further into Hegel's text, for the paragraph that

follows sheds light upon the linguistic calcification of the self:

The content which language has here acquired is no longer the perverted, and
perverting and distracted, self of the world of culture... [it] is law and simple
command, and complaint ... Language, however, only emerges as the middle
term, mediating between independent and acknowledged self-
consciousnesses; and the existent self is immediately universal
acknowledgment... The content of the language of conscience is the self that
knows itself as essential being.... Universal self-consciousness is free from the
specific action that merely is... and this is made actual in language. (PS ¶ 653)
This is to say that language as the law of action ceases to require action on the

part of the self, but instead, action has already been aufgehoben into

language. Thus language becomes the language of law; the law of language,

which then constitutes universal self-consciousness by virtue of its having been

interposed, as a middle term, between independent and acknowledged self-

consciousness. Further, it was not at all by chance that the preceding citations

are situated within the Phänomenologie immediately preceding the transition

from Spirit to Religion, for Bataille writes 'Morality only touches this system [the

empire] at the border where law is integrated. And the connection of one and

the other is the middle term by which one goes from the empire to the outside,

from the outside to the empire.'15 To cite Hegel once again, 'Order, which is the

merely external determinateness of objects, has passed over into the

determination that is immanent and objective; this is Law'(SL ¶1572).

Language is thus submitted to the law of mediation, which is the law of

useful action and the acquisition of knowledge. This is to say that language has

always already internalized the structures of action, project and deferral.

However, Bataille's entire theoretical apparatus is predicated upon the

15
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, Trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Zone Books, 1989, p.
68.
transgression of this law, in order to recover that which is lost in discursive

existence. What is lost? Bataille writes that 'there subsists in us a silent,

elusive, ungraspable part... We can only attain it or have it at our disposal on

certain terms. They are the vague inner movements, which depend on no

object and have no intent.' It is these interior states, not exterior objects, to

which discursive thought is so woefully inadequate. Discursive thought, he

continues, through a 'language which, with respect to the others, has the sky,

the room, to which it can refer – and which directs attention towards what it

grasps – is dispossessed, can say nothing, is limited to stealing these states

from attention'(OC-V 26-7 /IE 14). Thus, at another point he writes 'If we live

under the law of language without contesting it, these states are within us as if

they didn't exist. But if we run up against this law, we can in passing fix our

awareness upon one of them and, quieting discourse within us, linger over the

surprise which it provides us'(OC-V 27/IE 14-5).

But neither running up against the law nor bringing these states to

attention is at all the same thing as contesting the law. But what would such a

contestation be? Foucault notes that the term 'contestation' had been defined

by Maurice Blanchot, Bataille's life-long friend, following whom Foucault gives

the following definition:

Contestation does not imply a generalized negativity, but an affirmation that

affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity. ...contestation is the act which
carries them all to their limits and... to the Limit where an ontological decision
achieves its end; to contest is to proceed until one reaches the empty core
where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being. (PT 36)
What then would constitute a contestation of the law of language, of discursive

thought? Bataille fully recognizes that if language serves as such a middle

term, and 'each person imagines, and therefore knows of his existence with the

help of words'(OC-V 99/IE 84), then it is not through a negation or abolition of

language that the law may be contested. The truth is that there is no way out.

We have only language with which to contest language, and contestation itself

becomes a project:

The way out? It suffices that I look for it: I fall back again, inert, pitiful: the way
out from project, from the will for a way out! For project is the prison from
which I wish to escape (project, discursive experience): I formed the project to
escape from project! And I know that it suffices to break discourse in me; from
that moment on, ecstasy is there, from which only discourse distances me –
the ecstasy which discursive thought betrays by proposing it as a way out,
and betrays by proposing it as absence of a way out. (OC-V 73/IE 59)
And it is only experience that can ground such a contestation. For Bataille

writes, 'words designate poorly what the human being experiences'(OC-V 50/IE

38), and yet it is impossible to designate otherwise except with words. There

must therefore be, if experience is to be communicable, a use of language able

to articulate experience without effacing it in submission to the laws of

discursive language. Bringing inner experience to language can only take place

in the form of a project, but the expression of such experience that defies the

ordinary use of words carries language to a limit. The key, here, seems to be a

matter of turning project against itself, turning language against itself, for he

writes: 'Nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what. It is such –

man being entirely so through language which, in essence, with the exception

of its poetic perversion, is project. But project is no longer in this case that,

positive, of salvation, but that, negative, of abolishing the power of words,

hence of project'(OC-V 35/IE 23). After the necessary discussion, we will again

return to this “poetic perversion” of language.

4. Middle Terms: Hegelian Language

The unsettling images and middle terms to which poetic emotion has recourse
touch us easily. If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the
familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves
with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once
dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to
objects which link them to the known.(OC-V 17/IE 3)
Par-delà la poésie: we begin to get a sense for what this phrase signifies.
The beyond to which poetry impels us is the unknown expanses of interior

experience that are closed off by discursive language and thought. And yet: if

contestation means to carry its object to its limits, to the Limit, if poetry is not

to fall into the mere formalism and aesthetics of 'poetic facility, diffuse style,

verbal project, ostentation and the fall into the worst: commonness,

literature... the same old rut'(OC-V 63/IE 49), it can only do so by first carrying

the law of language to its limit, and this means overcoming Hegel by his own

means. That is, Bataille must expose that 'there is in understanding a blind

spot... [for] the nature of understanding demands that the blind spot within it

be more meaningful than understanding itself,' which is, Bataille continues,

that 'even within the closed completed circle (unceasing) non-knowledge is the

end and knowledge the means. To the extent that it takes itself to be an end, it

sinks into the blind spot. But poetry, laughter, ecstasy are not the means for

other things. In the 'system,' poetry, laughter and ecstasy are nothing'(OC-V

130/IE 110-1). This is to say that if, with Bataille, we argue that the Hegelian

system always returns to the non-knowledge of sense-certainty, knowledge and

language serve as means to that end, and are only secondarily mistaken for

ends in themselves. They have always already been mere middle terms,

bridging the gap between one form of non-knowledge and another.

This phrase, middle term, begs further explication. It appears only

intermittently in Bataille's texts and yet seems to occupy a central position with

regard to the possibility of non-discursive language and thought. The phrase

appeared in a similar context at least twice in Hegel's Phenomenology; once as

already cited 'Language, however, only emerges as the middle term, mediating

between independent and acknowledged self-consciousnesses; and the

existent self is immediately universal acknowledgment;' and again, in an

earlier stage, in that of culture, once again providing order for language and

thought: 'unity is broken up into two... sides... the unity appears as a middle

term, which is excluded and distinct from the separated, actual existence of the

sides; it has, therefore, itself an actual objective existence distinct from its

sides, and has reality for them'(PS ¶509). These middle terms thus function to

establish a linguistic order and, moreover, a linguistic order that is and more

real, absolute and universal than its operands in their prior, disordered state.

In §1437-8 of Hegel's Science of Logic, we find middle terms explicitly

defined in a manner similar to Hegel's predecessors: they are defined as the

mediate term of the logical syllogism, i.e. in this very rudimentary example, A

-> B -> C, B serves as the middle term. Hegel, however, goes on to claim that

'everything rational is a syllogism... [and] if reason is supposed to be the

cognition that knows about God, freedom, right and duty, the infinite,

unconditioned, supersensuous... the first question still remains, what it is in all

these objects that makes them rational'(SL §1437). Regardless of our position

regarding the premises of this argument, it is instructive to follow Hegel's line

of thought into the next section. Here Hegel continues to write that 'the

essential feature of the syllogism is the unity of the extremes, the middle term

which unites them, and the ground which supports them... The expression

middle term is taken from spatial representation and contributes its share to

the stopping short at the mutual externality of the terms'(SL §1438). More

generally speaking, for Hegel, middle terms constitute the unity of the

particular and the universal, and hence, Bataille is indeed correct to speak, as

he does, of God, Language and Reason as exemplars of middle terms, for, from

the standpoint of the believer, they serve to establish an enduring unity of the

individual and the universal.

 It does not suffice to explicate the Hegelian definition, but, we must also

pass by way of Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel to gain the full sense of

Bataille's usage, for Bataille's conception of discourse presupposes that the

following has been achieved.

If man is truly and fully satisfied by what is... he himself ceases really to
change. The only “desire” which he can still have – if he is a philosopher – is
the “desire” to understand what is and what he is, and to reveal it through
discourse. Therefore Man... is definitively satisfied by the adequate
description of the real in its totality which is given by the Science of the Wise
Man... (IRH 192)
Consequently, the middle terms have become fully realized insofar as absolute

knowledge has been achieved, and would then mediate and give order to

experience itself. This is so because, with the achievement of Absolute

Knowledge, the unity of opposites becomes self-evident.

In Bataille's version, middle terms are the means by which man attempts

to bring order to the seething chaos that existence is, and in order to establish

and guarantee selfhood, coherence, and autonomy. He writes with unusual

clarity in a fragment appended to the second edition of Le Coupable: 'human

existence relies on a middle term... For when we grasp ourselves... we perceive

our confusion and the deep dependence in which a confused nature holds us.

Hence the necessity to relate to ideal middle terms, such as “God” or

“reason.”', which are 'middle terms in this sense – that each is related to

confusion of some kind and to a graspable order inside the confusion'(OC-V

376/G 129). Thus middle terms are so because they transform the confusion of

existence into discursive order. Thus, it is no surprise that Bataille continues to

write 'Reason is language opposing general forms and common measures to

things, or at least to a confused nature; it is language opposing logical order to

chance' (OC-V 378/G 131). The result, however, is ambiguous – because

confusion and chance cannot be completely removed from human existence,

even through the linguistic mediations of Reason and God. It is thus no surprise

to read what follows:

Man has doubled real things – and himself – with words that evoke them and
signify them and outlive the disappearance of the things signified. Put into
play in this way, these words themselves make up an ordered realm, adding,
to precisely translated reality, pure evocations of unreal qualities, unreal
beings... For the formless consciousness of things and oneself there is
substituted reflective thought, in which consciousness has replaced things
with words. But at the same time that consciousness was enriched, words –
calling to mind both unreal and real beings – took the place of the sensible
world. (OC-V 378/G 131)
But before the increase of autonomy resulting from this substitution of

language for reality can exert any emancipatory power, 'man is led – by

language – to situate this autonomy in a (logical and unreal) middle term, but if

he gives reality to this unreality – becoming it himself (incarnating it) – the

middle term he utilizes becomes in turn nature itself'(OC-V 380, G 133). As

soon as middle terms double reality with words, emancipatory possibilities are

put into play, yet the nature of language itself leads us to believe that all words

have such reality that they supersede the sensible world itself. This includes

the middle terms themselves – they are included as the condition of possibility

for linguistic reality as such. It is also important to note that in the same

fragment, Hegel is frequently referenced, and in one particular instance

explicitly challenges Kojève's reading. 'The identification of Hegelian reason

with man is precarious and equivocal'(OC-V 380/G 132), and continues to argue

that this identification would only be possible if Kojève's reading of Hegel was

correct, and states that, of this he would only 'retain the basics' – that is, a

certain logic of the middle term.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote: 'I am afraid we are not yet rid of

God because we still have faith in grammar.'16 And it is evident that the middle

terms we have been discussing, God, Reason, etc. came to be believed

16
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Viking Portable Nietzsche, Trans. by Walter
Kaufmann, pg 483
because they provide a grammar that purports to be equally applicable to

language and to the world. Following Paul De Man, under the sway of such

middle terms, 'grammar stands in the service of logic which, in turn allows for

the passage to the knowledge of the world... the continuity between theory and

phenomenalism is asserted and preserved by the system itself.'17 But, he

continues to say that this grammatical organization of both language and world

'leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by

grammatical means.'18 The “residue of indetermination” here is specifically the

imaginative capacity granted by the linguistic reduplication of the world. If not

for the fact that these middle terms operate solely in the interest of creating

order out of confusion, the capacity to signify non-existent entities would

readily undo the grammatical illusion of an ordered world. There is, also, as it

were, another role played by middle terms, to which we will return shortly.

At this juncture, two paths diverge when we attempt to throw off the

tyranny of reason and language over experience. We will briefly discuss the

first of these, which constitutes a temporary restoration of a lost immanence

with the world by means of sheer negation: this would be L'Expérience

Intérieure and the negative knowledge it attains. We will then proceed to

discuss the second, wherein the perversion of language in poetic and literary

language serves as an initial rupture that points beyond language, and back to

the world itself. This second path will also illuminate the means by which

Bataille turns the middle term of language, in its poetic form, against Hegel,

illustrating how the moment of rupture in poetry can also be the rupture of the

closed system.

In the first case, Bataille begins with the statement that 'ipse and the
17
Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986. p.
14.
18
Ibid, pg 15
whole stand opposed, while the “I” and God are like beings'(OC-V 134/IE 116).

Bataille's term “ipse” refers to that part of the self that exists before the

constitution of the “I” by the mediation of discursive reason, while the “whole”

indicates the totality of being, also prior to the operations of discursive reason.

Ipse and the whole are therefore heterogeneous, ipse exists as if alien to the

world. Moreover, ipse only becomes “I” and convinced of an ordered world by

virtue of the middle terms “God” or “Reason.”19 In this instance, it is possible in

silence for 'ipse and the whole together slip away from the clutches of

discursive intelligence (which enslaves); the middle terms alone are

assimilable,' subsequently, ipse can renounce reason, 'casting the middle

terms into darkness, in a single and abrupt renunciation of itself, attain the

irrationality of the whole (in this case knowledge is still mediation – between

me and the world – but negative: it is the rejection of knowledge, night, the

annihilation of all middle terms, which constitute this negative mediation)'(OC-

V 134-5/IE 115).

This is the means by which ipse approaches the extreme limit, as

'existence successively strips itself of its middle terms: of that which originates

in discourse'(OC-V 135/IE 116). But what happens here? Without Reason, God,

or any middle term, this experience is mute and results in anguish. At this

point, ipse gains definitive non-knowledge of the whole and loses him/herself.

But in doing so, ipse has fallen short of contestation – ipse simply negates and

does not bring anything with it to the Limit: ipse's experience is devoid of

content. Thus the subtitle to this section of L'Expérience Intérieure is aptly

given: “Tale of a Partly-Failed Experience.”

19
A fragment appearing in the appendix to Le Coupable makes the equivalence of God and
Reason absolutely clear: “Christianity is only a crystallization of language... If you assume
man and language as doubling the real world with another world... – then Christianity is
necessary.” (OC-V 382/G 134)
5. Beyond Poetry: A Sacrifice Beyond Words

Par-delà la poésie: beyond poetry: sacrifice; and beyond sacrifice? I

repeat Bataille's claim that 'the poetry in which the most blood would be lost

would be the most forceful.' And to this question, the response: to whose blood

does this refer? It has been noted that the phrase 'writing in blood' evokes

Nietzsche, and nothing could be closer to the mark. The section of L'Expérience

Intérieure in which poetry is discussed at great length bears the simple title

“Nietzsche,” and in which, Bataille thematizes this “going beyond” of poetry in

terms of sacrifice, beginning with a citation, in its entirety, of an aphorism from

Beyond Good and Evil. This highlights the importance of the phrase, par-delà la

poésie, for, if one consults the French text it bears a striking resemblance to

title of the French translation of Nietzsche's book: Par delà la bien et le mal.

However, at this point, we must proceed according to a certain measure of

method. We begin with that which lends poetry its power.

The citation with which the preceding section opened, however, asserts

that poetry too must have recourse to middle terms if it is to be a means by

which the bonds of discourse might be loosened. Let it not be mistaken: neither

poetry nor literary language are panaceas for our discursive entrapment: they

are modalities of linguistic expression, but are neither thought nor experience.

Moreover, once written, poetry and literature lose much of their disruptive

force and become assimilated – canonized. However, it is of particular interest

that poetry, not only has recourse to middle terms, but also constitutes and

operates as a middle term: in L'Impossible we find Bataille's most brazen

assertion regarding this: 'Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the

unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is

a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown
painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun'(OC-III 222/IE 163).

What can this signify? Does this not mean that poetry masquerades as a

radical force, but is in reality only conservative? The answer must be

provisionally be in the negative: for, poetry has power insofar as 'It never

dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are

charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link

them to the known'(OC-V 17/IE 5). And insofar as poetry is a middle term, it

does not entirely detach words from discourse; by the same token, poetry can

touch us readily, and can make use of what we referred to as the emancipatory

power of language: the capacity of language to signify both real and unreal

beings, which marks a double aspect and allows it to avoid total reduction to

instrumentality. Furthermore, in relation to this ambiguity, Bataille writes in

L'Impossible : 'Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of

discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a

kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the death of the

logical world'(OC-III 222/TI 163). Which is to say that poetry can, rather than

domesticate the unknown into knowledge, instead it permits the unknown to

slip unnoticed into language, and, once it has gone beyond poetry and slipped

into the 'discursive real,'20 it can proceed to blind reason and incinerate logic.

It is not by chance that the brief passages recently discussed were drawn

from the final pages of L'Impossible, the first edition of which was to be among

the volumes intended to be republished under the title of Par-delà la poésie,

and are on pages immediately preceded by a page bearing only the words 'Être

Oreste' (OC-III, 215 / TI 155). They become particularly important in light of a

brief passage from L'Expérience Intérieure, in which Bataille writes: 'in the face

20
'Post-Scriptum 1953' (US 205)
of this time which undoes us, which can only undo what we want to

consolidate, we ourselves have the recourse of carrying a “heart to be

devoured.” Orestes or Phedra, who have been ravaged, are to poetry what the

victim is to sacrifice'(OC-V 169/IE146). Such mythical references seem to bear

some significance within Bataille's theoretical texts, for in the introduction to

the 1954 editions of both Le Coupable and L'Expérience Intérieure, he writes:

'To introduce the first edition of Le Coupable, I wrote these words, whose

meaning related to an impression I had in 1942 - that I lived in the world like a

stranger... Someone who called himself Dianus wrote these notes and died. He

(ironically?) thought of himself as guilty. The collection appearing under this

name is a completed work'(OC-V 239/G 5). The myths of Orestes and Dianus

thus have something to tell us about poetry and reality: that is, in the first

instance, we might now read 'with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the

infinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world'(OC-223/IE

164), as indicating that the total collapse of one's world is both the prerequisite

and consequence of writing. In the second instance, ought we not read

Dianus's death as a sacrifice completing the effect of having experienced the

impossible, having gone to the limits of the possible, to the effect of completing

his words with the silence of death? Moreover, after his death, in Dianus, it is

Père A. who speaks, and whose voice and character slowly merges with that of

the dead Dianus – thus, in L'Orestie neither D. nor A. speak, for the wound has

closed with 'une reconstitution l'auteur'(OC-III 511).

Furthermore, it is within the pages of L'Impossible that the mythological

double signification of the name Dianus finds full expression, for his death

expresses but one myth of Dianus, the king of the woods, high priest of Diana.

The other, however, does not carry an element of sacrifice along with it, for
Bataille explains in a preface or introduction to Le Coupable that was never

used, that the name Dianus is another name for Janus.21 It is then scarcely

surprising that L'Impossible constitutes a performance of the simultaneously

double and unitary, and in this context, it is relatively easy to understand how

poetry can at once be a middle term, like all language, and at the same time

introduce the chaos of the unknown into speech.

We are thus faced again with the questions of language: in what sort of

theoretical framework can Bataille at once exalt and denigrate the literary and

poetic uses of language, and moreover, if “beyond” designates the limit

between exaltation and denigration, how is this manifest in particular literary

or poetic manifestations and not others. The following passage from

L'Expérience Intérieure speaks most clearly to this problematic:

What one doesn't grasp: that, literature being nothing if it isn't poetry, poetry
being the opposite of its name, literary language – expression of hidden
desires, of obscure life – is the perversion of language even a bit more than
eroticism is the perversion of sexual function. (OC-V 173/IE 150)
Let us read this closely. The person designated by the indefinite “one” in the

first sentence is the writer, himself, in his sacrifice of himself or of poetry. Next,

we read that, literature is nothing if it is not poetry, which on its face would

indicate outright that literature is always poetry, however, given Hegel's

influence, the signification of the word “nothing” can hardly be taken at face

value. Now, if poetry is then the opposite of its name (from poiesis), then

poetry is not creative, but rather destructive; then, if literary language is a

greater perversion of language than the perversion of sex in eroticism, but also

expressive “of hidden desires, of obscure life,” its perversity is structurally

homologous. Thus the perversion of language in literary language is evidently

that it does violence upon itself, sacrifices itself and its world. And this is the
21
Referring to the publication of L'Amité in April 1940, he later wrote: 'Le nom choisi comme
pseudonyme est celui d'un grand dieu latin, de Janus ou Dianus, qui répondait alors à
l'atmosphére religieuse mais paradoxale où je vivais.' (OC-VI 369)
terror, of being left with nothing more to say and with no means to say

anything, is moreover, also the terror occasioned by the desire to sacrifice

oneself!

Now this is perfectly consonant with what we have already said. Here we

may pause to note that our provisional definition of literary language as

“language that does violence upon itself and, which does not stop with

language,” might be sufficient to rupture the closure of Hegel's system from

within. For, if literary language turns back upon itself and sacrifices itself, while

in the same movement, it smuggles the unknown in the back door of the real,

does this not violate Kojève's proof by circularity?

If Hegel's thought cannot be surpassed by thought, and if it does not surpass

the given real but is content to describe it (for it knows and says that it is
satisfied by what is), no ideal or real negation of the given is any longer possible.
The real, then, will remain eternally identical to itself... A complete and correct
description of this real will therefore be universally and eternally valid.... Now, the
circularity of the Hegelian description proves that it is complete and hence correct: for
an erroneous or incomplete description, which stopped at a lacuna or ended in an
impasse, would never come back upon itself. (IRH 194)

Would this not create an impasse, one which would never let the system come

back upon itself? Especially insofar as the impasse grows upon the soil of

existence itself. It remains true, however, that no real or ideal negation of the

given is entailed here. It is rather that it is the unknown real that intrudes first

into discourse, and then beyond. And this intrusion is perpetual, for Bataille

writes, explicitly disputing Kojève: 'Desire, poetry, laughter, unceasingly cause

life to slip... from the known to the unknown. Existence in the end discloses the

blind spot of understanding and right away becomes completely absorbed in it.

It could not be otherwise unless a possibility for rest were to present itself at a

certain point'(OC-V 130/IE 111).

In short time, we shall return to complete Bataille's critique of Hegel. But

let us first answer the question raised at the beginning of this section, which
aims to address those enigmatic words with which we began. In whose blood is

the most forceful poetry written? This time we should place the emphasis on

the syntagm, 'the most blood would be lost.” From our previous discussion, it is

quite evident that a true poet, in Bataille's eyes, sheds either his own blood or

the blood of his poetry. However, we have left sequential time out of joint and

have neglected yet to present Bataille's simple definition of poetry, that is, as

“the sacrifice in which words are victims... we tear words from their [servile]

links in a delirium'(OC-V 156/IE 135). Then we are given a concrete example: of

what happens when words are torn from servility and 'enter into a poem, they

do so detached from interested concerns. For as many times as the words

butter, horse are put to practical ends, the use which poetry makes of them

liberates human life from these ends'(OC-V 156/IE 135). Moreover, this

detachment from discourse grants words the facility to express the

nonexistent, a facility drawn from the very nature of discursive reason as a

middle term; only this time, poetry redresses the abuse of language that is

discourse. Consequently, the unreal order of reason dissolves for a time into

the reality of the poem, which merely expresses some unknown, but real,

possibility. He continues: 'No doubt I have barely enunciated the words when

the familiar images... present themselves, but they are solicited only in order to

die. In which sense poetry is sacrifice, but of the most accessible sort. For if the

use or abuse of words, to which the operations of words oblige us, takes place

on the ideal, unreal level of language, the same is true of the sacrifice of words

which is poetry'(OC-V 157/IE 136).

In a movement that parallels the movement of the quoted Nietzsche

aphorism, this is but the first rung of poetic cruelty, a sacrifice of words, 'the

path followed at all times by man's desire to redress the abuse which he makes
of language, it takes place, as I said, on the same level. Or on those – parallel –

of expression'(OC-V 170/IE 147). At this point, the sacrifice only operates on the

level of language and does not yet extend beyond poetry, it does not change

us yet, we are not yet in play. However, poetry remains a crucial moment.

Without it, poetry and literature would remain an idle privilege and an

accumulated and accumulating mass of knowledge. In a sense, were poetry not

to proceed further, in contrast to Adorno, 'It may [not] have been wrong to say

that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.'22 We are fortunate that

there is more power to the sacrifice of words than mere absurdities. Reaching

this first rung, one is impelled to go further, because: 'Among various

sacrifices, poetry is the only one whose fire we can maintain, renew... What is

essential is that on its own, the desire for poetry renders our misery intolerable:

certain that the sacrifice of objects is powerless to truly liberate us, we often

experience the necessity for going further, right to the sacrifice of the subject.

Which of itself can be of no consequence, but if the subject succumbs, it lifts

the weight of eagerness – its life escapes avarice. The one who sacrifices, the

poet, having unceasingly to bring ruin into the ungraspable world of words,

grows quickly tired of enriching a literary treasure..'(OC-V 172/IE 149)

Thus, by means of a 'feverish contestation of poetry'(OC-V 158/IE 137) we

ascend to the second rung of poetic cruelty, of which we have already spoken,

in brief, with regard to those mythical figures whom Bataille evokes. Now the

writer will spill his blood in the name of poetry, 'by virtue of the misery of the

sacrifice (in this respect the same is true of poetry as of any sacrifice

whatsoever), it causes a slipping from impotent sacrifice of objects to that of

the subject. What Rimbaud sacrificed is not only poetry as object but the poet

22
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Translated by E.B. Ashton, New York: Continuum Press,
1999, pg. 362
as subject'(OC-V 454-5/IE 208). A movement is thereby completed, for Bataille

notes: 'the strangest thing about this movement ... – is that it contains the

secret of poetry. Poetry is only a havoc-which restores. It gives to time, which

eats away, that which a dull vanity removes from it; it dissipates the false

pretenses of an ordered world'(OC-V 170/IE 147).

We thus return to our point of departure, except that the unknown has

been invested with desire, through successive sacrifice, which invests a power

in the middle term of poetry to once again shine forth as 'the unknown painted

in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.' At this point, the pinnacle of poetry

and therefore literature, the writer or poet is dissolved, whether literally or

figuratively, into anonymity, freeing language from a referential bond that is

beyond the mere signification of words. The secret of poetry comes to light

after the personal relevance of the communicated experience is dissolved. With

words and images freed from reference and the logic of creation, the erstwhile

poet stands at the brink of ascending to the final rung of poetic cruelty.

Unsatisfied by the 'way [that] poetry adds to the determined effusion... the

particular faculty of disordered images to annihilate the ensemble of signs that

is the sphere of activity'(US 93), the poet, then, enters a state of

desoeuvrement. If, then, the middle terms of discourse (Reason, God) have

been used to abuse the world in the same way as they have been used to

abuse language and ourselves, one further sacrifice is required: 'The supreme

abuse which man ultimately made of his reason requires a last sacrifice:

reason, intelligibility, the ground itself upon which he stands – man must reject

them, in him God must die; this is the depth of terror, the extreme limit where

he succumbs'(OC-V 155/IE 134). Thus, they must be sacrificed as one by the

poet with nothing left to say or do. They must be sacrificed, not in the name of
nothingness (as it was in Nietzsche's aphorism), but in the name of the

unknown, death and silence.

This sacrifice, of course, can only come to pass after the (provisional) end

of the history that has made it necessary. With the illusions of a discursively

ordered world, it is both Reason/God and the artificially closed Hegelian system

that must be put to death. What differentiates this third, highest sacrifice from

the previous two, is that the sacrifice does not spare the one who performs the

sacrifice, who is 'in the anguish before an incomplete world, incompletable and

forever unintelligible, which destroys him, tears him apart'(OC-V 179/ IE 153).23

Just before this point Bataille again cites Nietzsche: this time, it is the tale

of the madman from The Gay Science. The poet who has managed to sacrifice

reason itself has nothing left to do or say.

The sacrifice of reason is to all appearances imaginary – it has neither a

bloody conclusion, nor anything analogous to that. It differs nevertheless from
poetry in that it is total... (OC-V 170/IE 155)
The poet has thereby overcome the opposition between ipse and world, insofar

as the separation effected by the middle terms in discourse is overcome in a

total sacrifice: a sacrifice that began with poetry and went far beyond poetry.

The poet has gone beyond Reason, and this is the true par-delà la poésie, for

even if this sequence of sacrifices collapses into insignificance, and, for one

moment, poetry and literary language have overcome Reason. They have

overcome reason by doing violence to language, by acknowledging poetry as

not the creative poeisis of a knowing subject, but rather the transgressive

movement by which language 'continually breaks down at the center of its

space, exposing in his nakedness, in the inertia of ecstasy, a visible and

insistent subject who had tried to keep language at arms length, but who now
23
In notes connected to On Nietzsche, in volume 6 of Bataille's Oeuvres Complètes, we find
similar language used to describe the impact of Kojève's lectures on Hegel: 'le cours de
Kojève m'a rompu, broyé, tué dix fois.' Oeuvres Complètes Volume VI, Paris, Editions
Gallimard, 1973, p. 416.
finds himself thrown by it, exhausted, upon the sands of that which he can no

longer say'(PT 39).

What is it that can no longer be said? It is the two words “I” and “God,”

for Reason is no longer there to guarantee the order of things. Moreover,

Bataille writes of the consequences of the final sacrifice, beyond poetry:

If one proceeds right to the end, one must efface oneself, undergo solitude,
suffer severely from it, must renounce be recognized: to be as though absent,
insane over this, to undergo things without will and without hope, to be
elsewhere... I publish it knowing it in advance to be misread... Its agitation
must end, must remain hidden, or almost hidden... without honor. It and I – we
can only sink to that point in non-sense. Thought ruins and its destruction is
incommunicable to the crowd – it addresses itself to the least weak. (OC-V
171/IE 155)
Assuming that he truly proceeded to the end, it does not now seem

extravagant that Bataille claimed in his 1937 letter to Kojève: 'I think of my life

– or better yet, its abortive condition, the open wound that my life is – as itself

constituting a refutation of Hegel's closed system'(OC-V 369/G 123). For in this

letter, after having renounced the recognition of others, he writes of himself

that 'when the man of 'unemployed negativity' doesn't find in the art work an

answer to the question he himself is, he can only become the man of

“recognized negativity.” He has grasped that he is no longer employable. But

since this need can't be deluded indefinitely by the deceptions of art, at one

point or another it will be recognized for what it is: negativity without content

(OC-V 371/G 125).

Beyond all knowledge there is non-knowledge and he who would become

absorbed in the thought that beyond his knowledge he knows nothing – even
were he to have within him Hegel's inexorable lucidity – would no longer be
Hegel, but a painful tooth in Hegel's mouth. Would a sick tooth alone be
missing from the great philosopher? (OC-V 422/IE 169)
It is not only the reflexive violence done upon language by itself that

breaches the closure of the system, but the reverberations of poetry beyond

poetry break the middle terms, which served to guarantee the system's

circularity and to ensuring the completion of knowledge. It is when the blood of

words, of the subject, and finally of Reason itself have at last been drained,

that poetry announces the rupture of the system from within that ends its

ceaseless circulation. Having touched upon the impossible, Bataille recognized

himself first as “unemployed negativity” and then as “negativity without

content.” Thus, like the unemployed poet whose final sacrifice is that of

Reason, Bataille's “negativity without content” transforms language and

discursive thought into 'the servant of experience... [and] Non-knowledge

attained, absolute knowledge is no longer anything but one knowledge among

others'(OC-V 69/IE 55).

'I fail, no matter what I write, in this, that I should be linking the infinite –

insane – richness of “possibles” to the precision of meaning. To this fruitless

task I am compelled – happily?'(OC-V 51/ IE 38) Poetic language does not

'work,' but makes work grind to a halt. All this demonstrates the ephemeral

power of language to go beyond itself and expose that which is beyond

knowledge, those experiences that defy reason. Moreover, poetry, insofar as it

goes beyond mere belles lettres, displays the Janus-face of all reality and

language. And although rupture seems only possible in brief moments, there is

yet a reason to write, for discourse always needs to be interrupted by

experience, experience that is communicable only in words, which have to be

continually torn from discourse, 'even more than this is that other, the reader,

who loves me and who already forgets me (kills me), without whose present

insistence I could do nothing, would have no inner experience. Not that in

moments of violence – of misfortune – I don't forget him, as he himself forgets

me – but I tolerate in me the action of project in that it is a link with this

obscure other sharing my anguish, my torment, desiring my torment as much

as I desire his.' (OC-V 76/IE 61)

 Á la fin, it may be said, provisionally, that Bataille's reading of Hegel was

anything but a regurgitation of Kojèvian themes, but was, instead, a long and

sustained meditation on language that cannot be subsumed by the discourse

of the Sage. As early as L'Expérience Intérieure, Bataille had already

outstripped his teacher in his confrontation with Hegel, and yet he retained

certain derivative concepts, albeit in highly modified forms. However, on issues

of language, and the centrality of middle terms,24 he could not have gone

further from his master. His struggle with the bonds of language led him...

...Par-delà la poésie: to the forgetting of poetry.

24
See (SL §§1569-1572) on the central individual/body as middle term – this aspect of
Bataille's critique can be seen as early as the 1930's in his concept of acephality.