Carolyn J.

(Carolyn Janice) Dean - Introduction - Diacritics 26:2 Fri Oct 03 2003 00:40:41 Europe/Copenhagen

Copyright 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.Diacritics 26.2

(1996) 3-5

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Introduction
Carolyn J. Dean

. . . even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but an
occasion for misunderstanding?

--Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

At the current juncture in the history of studies "on Bataille,"admiration and indebtedness have
given way to admiration constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desire
for accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through these inevitable
critical shifts, symptoms of an immeasurable debt to a writer from whom we have necessarily
taken distance. It is also an occasion to ask about our own investments in the renewed
production of Bataille.

During his lifetime (1897-1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a
"pornographer" and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among some
intellectuals, for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker. Since his untimely
death, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jrgen Habermas, this former
librarian at the Bibliothque Nationale, editor of Critique, author of covertly circulated erotic books
and other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French intellectuals leading from
"Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida" [Habermas 14]. 1 Bataille's remains are located
in the posthumanist pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical,
psychoanalytic, and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice
Blanchot; he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a prizewinning
biography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being unknown.

But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom many critics identify, yet his
work is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes (but not always) in the interests of preserving its
insights. Critical work on Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of dpense (expenditure), his
mysticism, his attraction to the sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends,
viscerally if implicitly, to identify with Bataille's refusal to be hard in the conventional sense--his
repudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its association with moral resolve. In 1945,
Bataille wrote that he was the "contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels from
the shore, because in fact . . . I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could notice the one who
is dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is something altogether different, one can have
it to one's heart's content. . ." [OC 6:358]. In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: "Bataille's cogito, thus,
reads: 'I sink therefore I am'" [Hollier 138]. In other words, Bataille was no proponent of a
sink-or-swim philosophy, but of "the hard desire to endure"--words he wrote to describe Vincent
Van Gogh, whose self-mutilation was, from Bataille's perspective, the necessary precondition of
his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the self, a project that entails
yet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in the storm: Bataille insisted that creation
required symbolic castration rather than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of
those who volunteer heroically for the rescue mission ("Heroism," he said, "is an [End Page 3]
attitude of flight" [OC 5: 347]). As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille's most
relentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the self-shattering of the phallic body.

The sacrificial constitution of the man who would sink--for this Bataille was giddily embraced after
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his death. By 1990, when Yale French Studies devoted a special issue to him, the embrace was
equally enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those theorists who
did not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue with the ego-dissolving sublimity of
fascism. After all, some of his friends and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutiny
for their anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the editor of that
special issue insisted on Bataille's "ethics" of sacrifice. He claimed that Bataille held "onto the
possibility of an ethics" through a paradoxically "incessant repositing of the ethical" [Stoekl 2, 5].
This account of Bataille's ethics avoids the problem that the ethics of sacrifice in Bataille's work
turns out to be identical to the sacrifice of ethics. This reading resurrects Bataille as a man of
principled equivocation. To the extent that some recent accounts of Bataille directly or indirectly
transform his performative renunciation of ethics into a substantive declaration of the ethical, they
mistake the performative dimension of the text for an ethical position.

In order to defend Bataille's insistence on the perpetual sacrifice of the stable meaning
embedded in phallic virtues and bodies (his contention that meaning is historically contingent and
internally unstable), his friends now transform aporia into the aim and summit of analysis. By
! idealizing aporia, this reading hypostatizes it. Isn't this elevation to a privileged place in the !
pantheon, this restoration of manly principle and lucidity, exactly the sort of "position" that Bataille
would have found unbearable?

But how to preserve Bataille's critique except as an aporia? Cynical feminists never doubted that
his admirable repudiation of phallic virtue was but another stage in the history of "man." Now
shorn of his illusory armor--war, beginning with the Great War that so traumatized Bataille, was
no occasion for glory--he refashions virility as self-loss, embraces castration in his quest for
self-restoration. The pain is there, but tragic manliness still reserves the prerogatives of manhood
for itself. Other critics are justifiably disturbed by Bataille's proximity to the politics of
self-dissolution, all the while rightly insisting that aporia is not a figure for suicide (you sink so you
can swim and vice versa--the point is not to drown). But when hard decisions have to be made,
equivocation--since aporia implies the impossibility of taking a position--is not a tenable posture.

Perhaps Bataille's insistence on equivocation, his refusal to ask (as he made so clear in a letter to
Roger Caillois in 1946: "morality . . . to what end" [Lettres 137-38]) would eventually become
unbearable for a generation bearing the legacy of genocide. Perhaps his insistence on self-loss
as a form of self-recognition would, after repeated atrocities committed in the name of the nation,
become suspect. What, after all, was Bataille for? What was he against?

If he did not want to relinquish the privileges of manhood, he was against phallic hardness. This
opposition is more of a critical accomplishment than it might seem, especially in light of the fact
that Bataille's longing to unbind the phallic self is the very desire that has rendered him suspect.

After World War II democratic men sought to sustain the virtues of hardness even though the
Nazis had celebrated the same quality. In his 1943 Posen speech, Heinrich Himmler praised his
men for being "hard" and scandalously linked hardness to the "integrity" required of mass
murderers. But antifascists interpreted fascists as soft--Theodor Adorno, we recall, said that the
"tough guys are the truly effeminate ones. . . ." This claim has plausibility except for its theory of
causality, in which homosexuality and femininity more generally account for fascism. Extreme
hardness disguises extreme softness; as Adorno put it, "Homosexuality and Totalitarianism
belong together" [46]. To [End Page 4] be evenhanded, then, to be judicious and ethical and
make the right decisions, requires just the right amount of hardness and, moreover, requires a
world of balanced men who never sink, know when to swim against the stream and when to float.
But by what historical miracle are such men produced if not by the fantasy of a world without the
longings ascribed to women and those "women" masquerading as men? Bataille's work is an
unequivocal reminder that this ideal manliness is no miracle, but a cultural fantasy. His
complicated relationship to fascism notwithstanding, Bataille was no fascist. He was simply not
man enough.

Carolyn J. Dean is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of The
Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (1992) and
Sexuality and Modern Culture (1996).

Notes
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Carolyn J. (Carolyn Janice) Dean - Introduction - Diacritics 26:2 Fri Oct 03 2003 00:40:43 Europe/Copenhagen

1. Allan Stoekl notes that La part maudite (The Accursed Share) (1949) sold only fifty copies [2].

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Minima moralia. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books, 1974.

Bataille, Georges. Lettres Roger Callois: 4 aout 1935-fvrier 1959, prsentes et annotes par
Jean-Pierre Bouler. Paris: Folle Avoine, 1987.
________. Oeuvres compltes 12 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1970-88.

Habermas, Jrgen. "Modernity--An Incomplete Project." The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on

Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.

Hollier, Denis. "The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille." Yale French Studies 78 (1990):
124-39.

Stoekl, Allan. "Editor's Preface." On Bataille. Special issue of Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 1-6.

Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: La mort l'oeuvre. Paris: Sguier, 1987.

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