Special Section: Bataille and Heterology

Theory, Culture & Society

0(0) 1–20
Heterology as ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276416644506

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the Affirmation
of Impossibility
Kevin Kennedy
The American University of Paris

Abstract
Like all discourses on the ‘other’, Bataille’s heterology is faced with the problem of
conceptualizing the heterogeneous (the other of thought, reason and language), while
preserving its alterity, its fundamental resistance to conceptual thought. This paper
interrogates the potential parallels between this aspect of Bataille’s notion and some
of the prevalent concerns of contemporary and traditional aesthetics. The argument
is based on the idea that theories of the aesthetic, akin to Bataille’s heterology, are
always inevitably confronted with the paradoxical task of conceptually framing
an experience that, per definition, resists philosophical or political appropriation.
In relation to this my paper traces a development in Bataille’s thinking from an initial
rejection of art and the aesthetic to their later reconfiguration as manifestations of
sovereignty. Here I show how Bataille’s notion of sovereign art presents an implicit
attempt to overcome some of the aporias to have surfaced in his earlier account of
heterology. This development in Bataille’s thought is analysed in the context of his
changing relationship with Surrealism.

Keywords
aesthetics, art, Bataille, heterology, sovereignty, Surrealism

In fact this is all about something one can have ‘no idea of’.
(Hollier, 1992: 98)

The history of modern aesthetics, from Baumgarten to Badiou, is

haunted by a latent tension concerning art’s status in relation to philo-
sophical and/or political appropriation, which, as has already been
observed elsewhere,1 is essentially a tension between autonomy and

Corresponding author: Kevin Kennedy. Email: k.j.kennedy@me.com

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

heteronomy. One might even venture the proposition that the field of
aesthetics derives its very meaning from continually redefining and resi-
tuating this tension. On the one hand, there is a strong sense, in which the
aesthetic indicates something (necessarily) unrepresentable, which never-
theless needs to be preserved/articulated in its unrepresentability in order
to safeguard its autonomy/freedom from the iron law of rational
thought. On the other hand, the very elusiveness of this category is
concomitant with the urge to pull it back from its place of obscurity
by endowing it with a function, be it political, ethical or epistemological:
in other words, to subordinate its autonomy to the heteronomy of neces-
sity and reason. In the following I want to demonstrate how this basic
theoretical tension that aesthetics has grappled with ever since its emer-
gence also permeates, albeit in a slightly modified form, the work of
Georges Bataille.
In a short article on the works of Salvador Dali from 1929, Bataille
concludes his analysis with the following startling statement: ‘my only
desire here . . . is to squeal like a pig before his canvases’ (1985: 28). It is
not known whether he actually put this unusual wish into practice
(the image is not without its charm), yet it does give us an indication
as to why Bataille’s writings on art are usually read as an outright attack
on traditional aesthetics.2 This reading is certainly justified when it comes
to his work of the 1930s, guided as it was by his rejection of Surrealism’s
idealization or aestheticization of what Bataille calls ‘base material reali-
ties’ (1985: 45). In his famous essay ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’,
his first systematic elaboration of the notion of heterology, Bataille
dismisses poetry (and by implication art, in general) on the basis that
it creates ‘aesthetic homogeneities’ that are ultimately always ‘reduced to
playing the standard of things’ (1985: 97). However, what many critics
tend to overlook is that Bataille, in the course of his career, will persist-
ently return to this issue and, although no longer squealing like a pig, will
in fact equate the aesthetic with the heterogeneous.3 The reason for this
equation must be sought in Bataille’s definition of heterology as the
paradoxical inquiry into that which resists or is excluded by knowledge.
Denis Hollier, discussing the notion of eroticism in Bataille’s work,
expresses it thus: ‘eroticism falls under heterology insofar as it
marks . . . the impossibility of reducing something that can never be
other than a practice to the unity of the theoretical logos’ (Hollier,
1992: 74).
In the following I will explore to what extent this idea of the hetero-
logical, as a practice that resists conceptual appropriation, might be
applicable to the notion of the aesthetic, and to see whether it possible
to unearth a kind of ‘heterological aesthetics’ from Bataille’s writings on
heterology, sovereignty and art. I will show that Bataille’s notion of
heterology exhibits a striking similarity with many traditional and
Kennedy 3

contemporary theories of the aesthetic, in its struggle with the constitu-

tive impossibility of turning the object of its inquiry (the heterogeneous,
art) into a form of positive knowledge. Yet, as I will argue, it is precisely
the affirmation of this impossibility that gives urgency to Bataille’s
notion. A ‘heterological aesthetics’ would challenge both the idea of an
inherent political dimension of the aesthetic (as put forth, for instance, in
Rancière’s (2006) idea of an ‘aesthetic regime of art’) and the notion
of art as an autonomous realm, generating its own truths that resist
and challenge the capitalist logic (as developed, for example, in many
of Badiou’s or Adorno’s writings on art; see e.g. Badiou, 2005).
In Bataille’s later works the aesthetic becomes, although often only
implicitly, one of the central manifestations of sovereignty in the
modern world (the sovereign squeal before the canvas), which implies
that it can neither be subordinated to some political end nor hypostatized
as producing intelligible or useful knowledge, without sacrificing its most
fundamental aspect, i.e. the sovereign rejection of utility, intelligibility
and truth.

Heterology and the Homogenization of the Universe

Those familiar with Bataille’s oeuvre will be surprised to see him lumped
into a category that he so vehemently rejected in his early writings, when
he seems to only have used the word aesthetic as an insult to denounce
what he perceived to be the pretentiousness of the Surrealist movement,
in particular of its leader André Breton, ‘the old aesthete and false revo-
lutionary’ (2006a: 28). Yet in contrast to what a cursory reading of his
work might suggest, there is a significant affinity between Bataille’s
thought and the history of aesthetics, which, however, only becomes
absolutely manifest in his postwar work. In order to grasp the extent
of this proposed affinity, it is necessary to turn to of one of his earliest
concepts, the idea of heterology, or ‘the science of what is completely
other’ (1985: 102).
In ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ from 1930, Bataille argues that
one of the most fundamental activities of the human mind is to establish
homogeneous relations in the world by ‘replacing a priori inconceivable
objects with classified series of conceptions or ideas’ (1985: 96). This, he
asserts, is also the chief duty of philosophy and of science: to impose
order by ‘converting’ concrete material reality into abstract measure-
ments and organizing the resulting abstractions within stable and coher-
ent structures (be it in the form of Hegel’s all-encompassing
philosophical system or quantum mechanics). However, this activity,
the homogenization of the world, inevitably produces what Bataille
calls intellectual ‘waste products’, notions that cannot be contained by
the ordering discourses of science and philosophy. An example of this
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

‘intellectual waste’ can be found in a short piece entitled ‘Formless’,

where Bataille considers the shape or form of the universe and concludes
that it is essentially without form, resembles nothing and can therefore
never be sensibly appropriated by systematic thought. As Bataille sarcas-
tically remarks, ‘for academic men to be happy, the universe would have
to take shape’, it would have to be made to wear ‘a mathematical frock
coat’ (1985: 31). That is to say, the objectification of the infinite, formless
universe is possible only on the condition that its heterogeneous
‘properties’ (infinity, formlessness) are excluded.
In addition to the notion of the universe, other examples for hetero-
geneous elements to consistently feature in Bataille’s oeuvre include the
sacred, the impure, the debased, the transcendent, death, but also chance,
laughter, exuberance, madness, rage, slothfulness and the rejection of
seriousness – in other words, anything that resists the objectifying dis-
course of the sciences or actively challenges their detached sobriety.
However, as Allan Stoekl rightly observes, ‘there is nothing inherently
heterogeneous-repulsive, nonappropriable – in shit or in anything else.
It is the relation of that element, that object to a system in which it cannot
be given a stable position’ (2007: 21). This implies that the homogeneous
and the heterogeneous can never exist independently from one another,
as every homogeneous structure, utterance or idea is inevitably based
on an act of exclusion, which generates both the positive rational
content (the word, the concept, the idea) as well as the excluded part
(the heterogeneous, the other).
Now, for Bataille, heterology is precisely (and paradoxically) the
scientific and rigorous inquiry into those elements necessarily excluded
by science and rational thought. The logical outcome of such an oper-
ation can only be twofold: it can, firstly, result in the ultimate homogen-
ization of heterogeneous elements, in their assimilation to system and
order. Here the universe becomes merely another object with clearly
defined attributes and heterology remains analogous to other systems
of appropriation such as science and philosophy: ‘the pure and simple
objectification of [its] specific character would lead to [its] incorporation
in a homogenous intellectual system’ (1985: 98). Secondly, and more
importantly for the present purpose, heterology leads to an awareness
of the fundamental limit between the heterogeneous and the homoge-
neous, which, from a theoretical perspective, always remains untraversa-
ble. Thus ‘only . . . the process of limitation . . . lie[s] within the province of
heterology as science’ (1985: 97). In other words, the heterogeneous
‘element remains indefinable and can only be determined through
negation’, i.e. in relation to what it is not (1985: 98). This means that
heterology ultimately reveals nothing but the impossibility of rationally
interpreting or even grasping ‘heterogeneous elements’. Yet this impos-
sibility must not be understood as a simple capitulation in the face of
total otherness, but rather as an exploration of the limit, of that which
Kennedy 5

marks a radical barrier between thought and what is excluded

by thought. Thus, in opposition to Hegel’s totalizing idealism, which
proposes the incorporation of the excluded as excluded within the
‘Idea’, Bataille insists on the ultimate impossibility of hypostatizing
this exclusion (see Hegel, 1979). Any direct attempt at grasping the het-
erogeneous, at conceptualizing the other of conceptual thought, will
always necessarily fall short of its intention. One therefore has to insist
(even against some of Bataille’s own claims) that heterology, as a
‘rigorous inquiry’, can never itself be heterogeneous, as it is always
bound by the logical necessities and structures of reason. It can only
ever be an affirmation of heterogeneity through the recognition of the
latter’s logical impossibility. In short, heterology is itself a homogeneous
discourse.

The Impossibility of the Heterogeneous:

Appearance and/as Reality
From this perspective heterology seems to create yet another version of
the traditional theoretical opposition between appearance and reality, in
which the heterogeneous would occupy a function similar to Kant’s
noumena, Plato’s forms, or Freud’s elements of the unconscious. In
‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, Bataille acknowledges the
similarity of his notion with Freud’s theory: ‘The exclusion of heteroge-
neous elements from the homogenous realm of consciousness formally
recalls the exclusion of the elements, described (by psychoanalysis) as
unconscious, which censorship excludes from the conscious ego’ (1985:
141). Both, the heterogeneous and the unconscious, represent an idea of
the totally other, of the beyond of conscious life. The crucial point
of divergence must be located in their respective ideas on the possibility of
accessing this other of conscious thought, of turning it into an object of
knowledge. While Freud establishes a science of the unconscious
(psychoanalysis), Bataille insists on the fundamental unassimilability of
this ‘other’ for any conceptual discourse. As Hollier puts it, the hetero-
geneous ‘is not even a thing because every thing by definition is nameable
and corresponds to a concept’ (Hollier, 1992: 102). Yet this radical
otherness is not situated below or beyond the homogeneous world
(as in traditional or contemporary accounts of the appearance-reality
dichotomy, such as Kant’s notion of the ‘thing-in-itself’) but is intimately
intertwined with the latter in that it constitutes the necessary limit that
makes a homogenous, limited, structured world possible in the first place.
In this sense it is probably closest to Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian
realm of excess and limitlessness, which provides the dark back-
ground against which the light and form of Apollo may appear (see
Nietzsche, 2003).
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

In Nietzsche, the ‘realm’ of Dionysus can never be grasped unless, as

Peter Sloterdijk puts it, through ‘Apollonian quotation marks, i.e., the
imperative of enunciation, symbolization, disembodiment and represen-
tation’ (Sloterdijk, 1986: 54). Apollo, the god of appearance, form and
illusion, thus comes to represent the only communicable, and therefore,
to a certain extent, the only truly existent ‘reality’, at whose glimmering
borders one may merely surmise the dark Dionysian chaos, always
already out of reach. Nietzsche’s Dionysus and Bataille’s heterogeneity
may therefore not be conceived of as primal essences or underlying
grounds of being. Both should rather be considered as signs announcing,
within the Apollonian/homogeneous realm, the limit of conceptual
thought and its inevitable reliance on the unsignifiable.
Nonetheless, as Hegel would object, merely to state that something is
excluded, beyond thought, or untranslatable, already constitutes a form
of rational translation and introduces a certain homogeneity with respect
to the ‘element’ in question. Bataille, a discerning reader of Hegel, there-
fore argues that the only way to counter the inevitable theoretical appro-
priation or ‘dilution’ of the heterogeneous is through ‘the practical part
of heterology, which leads to an action that goes resolutely against this
regression to homogenous nature’ (1985: 98). In other words, although
heterology can ‘acknowledge’ the heterogeneous, the latter can only ever
manifest itself in practice. Still, the heterogeneous needs heterology to
attest to its heterogeneous character, to affirm the impossibility of grasp-
ing it, without which it would simply ‘dissolve fatally in a region where
no thought and word would have the slightest consequence’ (1985: 80).
This means that heterology as a scientific inquiry only allows the hetero-
geneous to manifest itself in discourse as both the necessary betrayal of
heterogeneous elements and the conscious affirmation of this betrayal.
From a heterological perspective the notion of a noumenal depth,
as something that exists below (or beyond) language, thought and
appearance, is therefore not merely impossible, it is – quite literally –
the impossible.

Heterogeneity and Its Effects: The Disruption

of Stability and Utility
The notion of the heterogeneous as a practice that is radically unavail-
able to rational thought and whose unavailability must nonetheless be
articulated as clearly and meticulously as possible has two basic conse-
quences, which are essential to an understanding of Bataille’s later con-
ception of art.4 Firstly, Bataille argues, it must be studied through the
emotional effect it has on the subject, which Bataille divides into two
basic categories, attraction and repulsion: ‘it is possible to assume that
the object of any affective reaction is necessarily heterogeneous . . . there is
sometimes attraction, sometimes repulsion’ (1985: 142). This implies that
Kennedy 7

we only become aware of the heterogeneous through our emotional

response to it, which, however, does not tell us anything about its onto-
logical status. To make this clear we can once more return to the example
of the universe, a notion to which, from a Bataillean perspective, three
responses are possible: scientific, religious and heterological.
A scientific analysis of the universe would tell us something about its
basic properties, such as atomic and subatomic particles, the laws
governing its emergence and development, and its future trajectory.
A religious interpretation would see in its magnitude the mysterious
presence and power of god, its creator. Both responses, scientific and
religious, thereby introduce a reassuring regularity, stability or purpose.5
A heterological approach, on the other hand, would attempt to intensify,
or at least acknowledge, the extreme confusion, absurdity or even horror
the notion of an infinite space, without direction or purpose, might pro-
duce, a response which science or religion are designed to assuage. Thus,
in opposition to traditional philosophical theories (Bataille here explicitly
refers to Kantian metaphysics) that accommodate the unknowable by
establishing a ‘sufficient identification . . . of an unknowable (noumenal)
world with the known (phenomenal) world’ (1985: 96) to keep the dis-
ruptive force of the aporetic to a minimum, heterology wants to sustain
and intensify this disruption. This does not mean, however, that Bataille
rejects science and philosophy tout court. But the reason why he calls for
a heterological investigation in the first place lies in his realization that
their sobriety and ineluctable interpretative schemas preclude an emotive,
fantastical, unreasoned and, in a sense, liberated response to life and
existence:

Philosophy has been up to this point, as much as science, an expres-

sion of human subordination, and when man seeks to represent
himself, no longer as moment of a homogeneous process – of a
necessary and pitiful process – but as a new laceration within a
lacerated nature . . . he can no longer recognize himself in the
degrading chains of logic, but he recognizes himself instead . . . in
the virulence of his own phantasms. (1985: 80)

The heterogeneous, conceived of as phantasmic and impossible, not only

eludes rational apprehension but also, significantly, resists every form of
utilitarian appropriation. This aspect is again only comprehensible in
relation to what it negates. Bataille argues that within the realm of sci-
entific/philosophical homogeneity ‘each element must be useful to
another without the homogenous activity ever being able to attain the
form of activity valid in itself ’ (1985: 138). That is to say, every element in
a scientific equation or a philosophical proposition (or in any coherent
account of life and existence for that matter) must serve a function in
relation to the overall structure, in which all redundancy and confusion
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

have to be eradicated. The heterogeneous, on the other hand, always

describes an element that does not serve an overall project or theory,
that exists for its own sake only, ‘valid in itself’, and thus implicitly
challenges the very notion of coherence and utility. Returning to our
example of the heterogeneous universe, it becomes clear that the latter,
‘conceived of’ as an infinite, formless ‘space’, cannot be utilized for the
constitution of a system, cannot be instrumentalized, not even abstractly;
it is fundamentally senseless and useless: ‘the universe answers no
purpose that reason defines’ (Bataille, 1986: 40).

Surrealism and the Heterogeneity of Art

This brief delineation of the heterogeneous as something that resists con-
ceptualization and utility, manifests itself in the affective life of the sub-
ject, only ever emerges in practice, and is always in opposition to
‘everyday life’ (1985: 143), suggests that art might constitute one of its
prime manifestations in modern society. In ‘The Use Value of D.A.F.
de Sade’, Bataille briefly entertains this idea: ‘poetry . . . permits one to
accede to an entirely heterogeneous world’, because the ‘practical unreal-
ity of the heterogeneous elements it sets in motion is, in fact, an indis-
pensable condition for the continuation of heterogeneity’ (1985: 97). This
means that the heterogeneous always needs to be unreal, fictional, as any
claim to reality (to an unambiguous ontology) would immediately render
it vulnerable to philosophical appropriation. Yet despite applauding
their phantasmic nature, Bataille immediately rejects art and poetry on
the basis that their autonomy, their detachment from ‘vulgar reality’,
creates ‘aesthetic homogeneities’, which ultimately deprive the heteroge-
neous of its truly disruptive force and thus, like religion, science and
philosophy, reduce it to ‘playing the role of the standard of things’
(1985: 97).
In Bataille’s prewar work his rejection of art and aesthetics is always
closely bound up with his rejection of Bretonian Surrealism, which he
accuses of an unworldly and naı̈ve idealism: ‘all of existence conceived of
as purely literary by M. Breton, diverts him from the shabby, sinister, or
inspired events occurring all around him from what constitutes the real
decomposition’ (1985: 41). The Surrealists, as is well known, not only
championed art and poetry as prime manifestations of the surreal in
modern life but also as models for a revolutionary activity, aimed at a
total aestheticization of life and existence.6 Like Bataille’s notion of the
heterogeneous, Breton’s conception of the surreal was based on cate-
gories traditionally excluded from science and philosophy, such as the
unconscious, dreams, violence and madness. Yet in Bataille’s estimate, by
aestheticizing these elements and thus ‘hiding in the wonderland of
poetry’ (1985: 29), Breton turned them into ‘pretentious idealistic aber-
rations’ (1985: 32). In order not to be tainted by the idealism of Breton’s
Kennedy 9

surreality, Bataille’s concept of heterogeneity therefore needed to remain

clearly separate from art, poetry and aesthetic considerations of any
kind. However, Bataille’s outright rejection of art and aesthetics contains
an unacknowledged prejudice, a blurring of categories, which is helpful
in illustrating his own initial rejection of the heterogeneous dimension of
art. In light of the failure of the historical avant-garde to effect real
political change, his insistence on the naiveté of the Surrealists’ belief
in the revolutionary power of art and poetry today seems justified:
‘Servile idealism rests precisely in this will to poetic agitation’ (1985:
41). Yet what Bataille seems to fail to realize at this point is that an
aestheticization of the heterogeneous aspects of life for political purposes
is not the same as an insistence on the heterogeneous ‘nature’ of art and
poetry.
Bataille, like the Surrealists, was disgusted with ‘the bankruptcy of
bourgeois culture’ (1985: 32). and his early thought not only sought to
‘analyse’ the heterogeneous but to unleash its destructive force for revo-
lutionary purposes: ‘to abolish all exploitation of man by man is not the
only motive that links the practical development of heterology to the
overturning of the established order’ (1985: 100). From the very start
of his career, and very consciously against the aesthetico-revolutionary
aspirations of the Surrealists, he insisted on the inability of aesthetics and
art to reach the uneducated masses and thus to bring about real social
change: ‘What cannot move the heart of a ditchdigger already has the
existence of shadows’ (1985: 43). Bataille’s main aim up until the out-
break of the Second World War, in groups such as the Collège de
sociologie, Contre-Attaque and Acéphale, was to establish, on a practical
as well as on a theoretical level, how the heterogeneous could potentially
be instrumentalized for political, revolutionary purposes: ‘an organized
understanding of the movements in society, of attraction and repulsion,
starkly represents itself as a weapon’ (1985: 159).7 Yet this attempt is
undermined from the very beginning by a fundamental and often only
implicitly acknowledged contradiction: if, as we have seen, the heteroge-
neous is defined as that which negates utility and instrumentalization, in
other words, if it is to remain ‘valid in itself’, then any attempt to turn it
into a tool for political purposes, for ends other than itself, immediately
deprives it of its heterogeneous character.
Thus, while Bataille’s dismissal of the Surrealists’ attempt to use art as
a political tool was certainly pertinent, his own ambition to channel the
heterogeneous as a revolutionary force was equally ineffective, as it was
haunted from the very start by an immanent contradiction. Bataille had
always been more or less aware of the paradox underlying his project, but
he did not explicitly address it until after the war, when, prompted by the
emergence and proliferation of Existentialism and the seeming demise of
the pre-war avant-garde, he returned to questions of political action and
its connection to aesthetic representation as it had surfaced in his initial
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

altercations with Surrealism. Bataille now invoked what he perceived to

be the true tenets of Breton’s movement against Sartre’s influential idea
of literary engagement.8 Although he never wavered in his insistence on
the political uselessness of art and poetry, this new intellectual climate
saw him fundamentally reconsider his previous position on both the
potentially heterogeneous nature of art and the political dimension of
heterogeneity.

Sovereignty, or Bataille’s Reconfiguration

of the Heterogeneous
This reconsideration is concurrent with a significant shift in Bataille’s
nomenclature. Whereas prior to the war Bataille’s theoretical work is
largely devoted to analysing heterogeneity, his postwar writing increas-
ingly abandons this term in favour of a different notion, which is directly
derived from it and comes to occupy a similar position in his theoretical
reflections: the idea of sovereignty (or the sovereign experience). One
of the crucial differences, however, is that this concept is now explicitly
given an aesthetic dimension. In The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge,
which remained unpublished during his lifetime, Bataille states unam-
biguously, ‘instead of the sovereignty of an aesthetico-ethical God it is
the sovereignty of the aesthetic that I pose’ (2004: 172). What exactly
constitutes the aesthetic dimension of sovereignty? According to Bataille
sovereignty, like heterogeneity, eludes every form of theoretical or philo-
sophical appropriation. True sovereignty, as Christoph Menke has
shown, must therefore be seen ‘not as the freedom of self-determination
but as self-questioning, self-transgression’ (1999: 308–9, my translation).
This sovereign negation has two crucial components, one temporal and
one spatial: it implies, firstly, a suspension of the ‘concern for the future’,
which normally characterizes human action, and, secondly, a breakdown
of the subject-object dichotomy, in which the subject, in its dissolution, is
withdrawn from the order of things.9 This dissolution, however, can
never be grasped with the conventional tools of cognition, as the latter
always relies on a stable, perceiving subject. In the absence of a solid
epistemological foundation, a truly sovereign experience, akin to the
shock of the heterogeneous, can only be described negatively, in relation
to what it is not: ‘The main thing is always the same: sovereignty is
NOTHING’ (Bataille, 1993: 430).
This postulated epistemological abyss of the sovereign experience is
clearly an extension of Bataille’s earlier reflections on the non-cognitive
dimension of the heterogeneous. Yet whereas Bataille had previously
clung to the possibility that this immediacy can somehow be accessed
directly and thus used for political ends, he now reconfigures it as a desire
for an absolute immediacy, which implies that it must always remain
unfulfilled, out of reach, impossible. In The Tears of Eros Bataille
Kennedy 11

explicitly states that this desire for immediacy is at the basis of his
conception of the aesthetic: ‘it has meaning only in this instant of trans-
figuration, wherein we pass precisely from use value to ultimate value, a
value independent from any effect beyond the instant itself, and which is
fundamentally an aesthetic value’ (2001: 70).
In Bataille’s last published work before his death, the aesthetic is thus
rehabilitated as designating a desire for a radical immediacy, for an
affective experience outside the limiting and temporalizing structures of
language and reason. In contrast to his earlier discourse on the hetero-
geneous, however, the aesthetic no longer ‘presents itself as a weapon’, as
a concrete possibility, but rather indicates a conscious and sovereign
affirmation of the impossibility of ever transposing it into the realms of
knowledge and future-oriented action: ‘The moment of sovereignty’s
appearance must decisively prevail over the “political” and financial
consequences of its manifestation’ (1990: 41).

Sovereign Art and Contemporary Aesthetics

Bataille’s postwar reconfiguration of the heterogeneous as aesthetic
immediacy is concurrent with a renewed focus on the social meaning
or function of art, literature and poetry.10 In Literature and Evil, from
1957, poetry is defined as ‘the means by which [man] can escape from
being reduced to the reflection of things’, in other words, as an escape
from the homogenizing and objectifying discourses of science and phil-
osophy. However, ‘the very means of avoiding reduction to the reflection
of things constitute a desire for the impossible’ (2006b: 45). Sovereign art,
as it is developed in Bataille’s later work, is a conscious display of its
illusory character, a medium which addresses and answers this desire for
the beyond of objectivity without, however, charging it with a specific
truth content or telos. Yet sovereign art not only addresses itself to this
need but also, due to its fictional, unreal, phantasmic nature, ultimately
reveals the impossibility of ever satisfying it. Connecting Bataille’s earlier
work on the heterogeneous with his later reflections on sovereignty, one
could thus claim that the purpose of sovereign art lies in the dramatiza-
tion of both the desire and the inevitable failure to ever access the
heterogeneous; it provides an experience of radical alterity, which is sim-
ultaneously an experience of its (logical) impossibility. As Carolyn J.
Dean aptly describes it: ‘The heterogeneous or other can thus be rendered
only as art, as spectacle, through a mimetic gesture that gives expression
to its unassimilable forces’ (1992: 229).
Bataille’s conception of sovereign art, as something that essentially
withdraws from discourse, exhibits certain similarities with Graham
Harman’s object-oriented ontology, which claims that the essential fea-
ture of all objects lies in their withdrawal from or unavailability to precise
or exhaustive definition. In an essay on the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft,
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Harman argues that philosophy and art are similar in that they both
probe but never fully explain this withdrawal (see Harman, 2008).
While Harman’s account is illuminating regarding the potential strange-
ness of all objects, he nonetheless fails to consider that philosophy, by
systematizing this strangeness, inevitably reduces it. It thereby (to use
Bataille’s diction) deprives the strange of its heterogeneous character. In
the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe, the strange, uncanny or
heterogeneous can be experienced because they are not subsumed within
a general theory of strangeness, which would immediately diminish the
feeling of horror and confusion their stories so masterfully provoke. In
order for sovereign art (such as the works of Lovecraft) to have the
desired effect (confusion, elation, attraction, repulsion, etc.) its aesthetic
sovereignty needs to resist the anaesthetic effects of theory. In Bataille’s
essay on William Blake he clarifies this point in relation to ‘the confusion
that is provoked’ (2006b: 94) by the works of the English poet. Here the
attempts of criticism and philosophy to account for this confusion by
forcing it into some kind of conceptual straightjacket are likened to a
state of sleep, which always petrifies and numbs the sovereign power of
the work: ‘As we try to escape from it, we pass from waking and aware-
ness of the confusion to the sleep of logical explanation’ (2006b: 94).
Bataille’s later account of art is closer to Rancière’s delineation of
Schiller’s aesthetic theory, which also insists on the radical incongruence
between heterogeneous art and homogeneous thought: ‘Free appearance
is the power of the heterogeneous sensible element . . . it is foreign to all
volition, to every combination of means and end . . . inaccessible for the
thought, desires and ends of the subject contemplating it’ (2009: 34).
However, unlike Schiller, for whom, according to Rancière, ‘this strange-
ness . . . this radical unavailability . . . bears the mark of man’s full human-
ity and the promise of a humanity to come, one at last in tune with the
fullness of its essence’ (2009: 34), Bataille’s conception of sovereign art is
radically divorced from any notion of utopian fulfillment. In the third
part of The Accursed Share, simply entitled Sovereignty, he explains the
difference between traditional forms of sovereignty (such as the idea of
god, the feudal lord or the fascist leader) and his notion of sovereign art:
‘Sovereign art is such only in the renunciation of, indeed in the repudi-
ation of the functions and the power assumed by real sovereignty. From
the viewpoint of power, sovereign art is an abdication. It throws the
responsibility for managing things back onto things themselves’ (1993:
421). In his work of the 1930s, as we have seen, art is rejected because of
its lack of revolutionary or political leverage. In Bataille’s later work this
lack of efficacy in the socio-political realm becomes the mark of its sov-
ereignty, of its sovereign rejection of responsibility and accountability.
Bataille now insists that the much decried distance or separation between
the artistic and the political realm in modern society needs to be
maintained or even made more trenchant, as any attempt at fusion
Kennedy 13

would instantly compromise art’s sovereign immediacy, its freedom to

celebrate confusion, disorder and incoherence.11 For this reason it should
never be expected to create blueprints or models for a possible future
society: ‘I have continually placed the present moment against a concern
for the future and for me poetry is defined by concern for the present
moment’ (2006a: 86).
Conversely, political action is now placed squarely in the realm of the
homogeneous, as it is always guided by a concern for the future, which,
according to Bataille’s definition, is a rational concern. Every work of art
is always an act ‘against the unacceptable world of rational utility’
(2006a: 70), as it is aimed at an experience of immediacy beyond the
practical and future-oriented considerations of everyday life. However,
‘the refusal this involves would gain from not being confounded with the
reasoned refusal of unreasonable conditions of life’ (2006a: 70). In other
words, it would be a mistake to attempt to enlist the heterogeneous,
immediate nature of art and poetry to combat the ‘unreasonable condi-
tions of life’, as this always requires a sober analysis of those conditions,
devoid of the effusive powers of attraction and repulsion: ‘the mastery
of [intellectual aptitude] remains the key to rigorous emancipation’
(2006a: 50). Bataille’s postwar insistence on the separation between
these two spheres, the political/rational (homogeneous) and artistic/aes-
thetic (heterogeneous), then presents an attempt to solve the immanent
contradiction that surfaced in his initial theory of heterogeneity. If, as we
have seen, the sovereign/heterogeneous is posited as that which resists
instrumentalization (for revolutionary or utopian goals), this new
disassociation is not only warranted but implicit in Bataille’s account
of heterogeneity from the very first. He now argues that the attempt to
apply the heterogeneous to the realm of homogeneity, the immediate to
mediating categories, art to politics, constitutes a disservice to both
realms: on the one hand it denies the effusive, strange, opaque dimension
of the sovereign artwork and reduces the latter to the flatness of a
formula or a service rendered: ‘In modes of thought in which the rational
and the poetic remain confounded, the mind cannot elevate itself to the
conception of poetic liberty, it subordinates the instant to some ulterior
goal’ (2006a: 65). On the other hand, to infuse politics with the perplex-
ing power of the heterogeneous precludes a clearheaded and rational
appraisal of the real conditions of social life, which is a prerequisite for
any meaningful attempt to bring about political change.
Although Bataille never formulated or developed a ‘heterological aes-
thetics’, one might legitimately ask what such a notion would entail. In a
very fundamental sense it would address itself to the same question that
John Roberts has identified at the heart of Badiou’s inaesthetics: ‘how,
and to what ends, and with what means, is the notion of art as a ‘thing
apart” to be theorized?’ (2008: 279). Badiou postulates a fundamental
difference between knowledge and truth, whereby truth, unlike the
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

conceptualizing imperative of knowledge, comes about through fidelity

to the event, which is always singular, beyond any identifiable or verifi-
able content, and in this respect similar to Bataille’s notion of the het-
erogeneous. In a second step, akin to Bataille’s insistence on the necessity
of affirming the impossible nature of the heterogeneous, Badiou’s evental
aesthetics also call for an affirmation of the fundamental impossibility at
the heart of the event; Badiou calls this ‘the point of impasse, or the point
of impossibility, which precisely allows us to think the situation as a
whole’ (2002: 121). The crucial point of divergence must be located in
their respective ideas on the political implications of this impossibility. As
Benjamin Noys has argued vis-à-vis Badiou’s position: ‘In identifying the
necessity for this relation of rupture as an essential part of the mechanism
of affirmation Badiou returns art to a certain form of relation to the
political that he had tried to distance it from’ (Noys, 2009: 391). In
other words, whereas Badiou insists that ‘emancipatory politics always
consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the
situation, is declared to be impossible’, and thus ultimately subordinates
the impossible to the possible, the aesthetic to epistemic, the heteroge-
neous event to the homogeneity of political emancipation, a heterological
approach would attempt to account for this separateness by insisting on
the impossibility of ever reducing otherness, as it is manifested in art, to a
specific form of politics or emancipation.12

Heterological Aesthetics and the Tension

between Autonomy and Heteronomy
In this sense, Bataille’s heterological aesthetics is close to Kant’s concep-
tion of aesthetic autonomy, which also construes the work of art as
being resistant to utility (‘a purposiveness without purpose’; 2007:
62ff.) and conceptualization (‘beauty ought to be unsayable’; 1996: 62).
Yet whereas for Kant the aesthetic experience is ultimately an expression
of an ethically significant harmony between reason and sense perception,
between objective universality and subjective feeling, a sovereign experi-
ence only arises on the basis of a fundamental discrepancy between
reason and affectivity, between homogeneous thought and heterogeneous
matter. As already indicated, Bataille’s heterological aesthetics stands in
stark contrast to all conceptions of art as a tool for political change,
emancipation or moral education. Although sovereign art needs to be
autonomous from social reality, it only derives its sovereignty through a
rejection of every form of power or influence, i.e. through the autono-
mous negation of its own autonomy (cf. Ebeling, 2000: 265). Sovereignty,
as that which refuses objectivity and responsibility, should never be
confused with power, which is a political category and thus belongs to
the homogeneous sphere of reason and utility.
Kennedy 15

This radical negativity would thus seem to constitute a variation of

Adorno’s notion of aesthetic negativity, which is probably the most pro-
found exploration, in the 20th century, of the tension between the
autonomous and heteronomous dimensions of art (see Adorno, 1997).
Analogous to Bataille’s heterology, Adorno’s aesthetic theory posits a
negative residue at the heart of the aesthetic experience that remains
external to subjective appropriation and thus produces dissonance and
disruption. In Adorno’s theory of aesthetic autonomy, however, the
modern artwork’s disruption of utility becomes a sign of political resist-
ance in a world dominated by instrumental reason. Only by virtue of its
complete separation from the reifying praxis of capitalism can it still
make valid, critical statements about society, not in terms of its manifest
content, however, but only by means of a complete and formal resistance
to appropriation, which Adorno calls its ‘truth-content’ (1997: 35ff.).
Thus, against Kant, Adorno clings to a Hegelian notion of truth in
art. I would argue that this also places him in close proximity to
Bataille’s position. Although Bataille, like Adorno, rejects the idea that
art could ever be fully translated into abstract categories, the truth of art
still has to be identified/affirmed in its negativity/non-identity, or, as
Bataille calls it, in its impossibility. The task of a heterological aesthetics,
to attest to this impossibility, would thus indicate art’s heteronomy with
regard to the rational requirements of philosophical discourse.
Yet, whereas Adorno’s negativity is historically contingent (for him
the overcoming of capitalism – and, to be fair, Adorno is very pessimistic
about this prospect – could potentially entail the eradication of negativity
and produce a state of affairs in which art and society are reconciled;
1991: 98ff.), Bataille’s notion of sovereignty constitutes an attempt to
articulate a trans- or even ahistorical form of negativity. Even in a society
free from instrumental reason and capitalist reification, a genuinely sov-
ereign art, in its rejection of meaning and purpose, would still have to be
negative in relation to the status quo. In other words, in order to unfold
its sovereign force, it is always dependent on the social reality it negates
and thus heteronomous, albeit negatively, with regard to the latter.
Although Bataille would concur with Adorno and Hegel that art
always needs to be considered in its specific historical context, he
claims that since heterogeneity is cognitively inaccessible, in other
words, since it has no definable essence which could render it present
and intelligible once and for all without destroying its ‘heterogeneous
quality’, the expression given to it necessarily varies in different ages,
while also remaining the same, as the impossible other of sense and
reason (cf. 2006a: 137ff.).
Bataille’s heterological aesthetics thus identifies two basic moments of
negation, two constitutive impossibilities, at the heart of the aesthetic
experience: firstly, the sovereign negation of its own autonomy and, sec-
ondly, a heteronomy that can be only be grasped in its negative relation
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

to social reality. Bataille’s insistence on negativity, unlike Adorno’s, is

not one of pessimism and defeatist elitism, but an attempt at a funda-
mentally affirmative articulation of the limits of positivity, identity and
truth, which are not reducible to capitalist categories. In other words, a
heterological aesthetics would constitute an attempt at an unconditional
affirmation of the tension between heteronomy and autonomy, a celebra-
tion of non-sense and irresponsibility, a sovereign squeal before the
canvas.

Conclusion: Heterology as Aesthetics,

Problems and (Im)possibilities
The aesthetic, as Bataille conceives of it, does not constitute a form of
judgement or an epistemological category. However, the notion of art as
the mimesis of the unassimilable implies that it is not completely devoid
of epistemological value. Yet this value lies first and foremost in exposing
the limit or the absence of the epistemological, in indicating a realm of
experience beyond the limits of reason. As Bataille puts it: ‘the only thing
[art] can do is direct our attention towards a part of the horizon where
everything is in flux’ (2006a: 63). Bataille’s insistence on the absence of an
epistemological foundation in art, however, is problematic for two basic
reasons: firstly, it would be naı̈ve to simply refute the fact that works
of art do have identifiable meanings and objective traits that criticism
or philosophy can extract and use for their own epistemological or
educative agendas. We cannot simply turn our backs on the demands
of reason and language, even if they seem incapable of sufficiently
accounting for certain experiences. Here a heterological aesthetics
would need to reconcile or at least attest to two competing factors:
the inscrutability of the aesthetic experience on the one hand and the
paradoxical exigency to mobilize it within discourse on the other. Yet
Bataille is adamant that by transposing the experience of aesthetic imme-
diacy into the registers of homogeneous knowledge, we sacrifice what
is essential to this experience for the stability and objectivity of know-
ledge: ‘if, having defined [it] objectively, we can consequently no longer
transform this external knowledge into intimate and subjective experi-
ence, has this not served to sacrifice the substance for the shadow?’
(2006a: 115–16).13
The second and interconnected problem is posed by the fact that we
cannot escape the homogeneous by merely introducing terms such as
heterogeneous, aesthetic, etc., which inevitably remain at the service of
an epistemological project. Even to posit such terms already gives the
outside of thought and reason the semblance of something stable and
accessible: ‘the fact of introducing the immediate into the categories of
language always creates difficulties . . . it sets in motion a system that
Kennedy 17

is completely contrary to its nature’ (2006a: 95). This is why, according to

Bataille, every account of the heterogeneous must include a disavowal of
its own claims as to the ‘nature’ of the heterogeneous, to highlight the
impossibility of its own undertaking. Bataille is unambiguous in elucidat-
ing what this position implies for art theory and literary criticism: ‘Any
commentary which does not simply say that commentaries are useless
and impossible moves away from the truth at the very moment when it
might come close to itself’ (2006b: 94).
This statement seems to suggest that one should simply stop talking
about art and literature once and for all and make a perpetual and irre-
versible vow of silence. But even a vow of silence needs to be articulated.
Bataille’s insistence on the uselessness of commentaries occurs in his own
commentary on the works of Blake, which, to be sure, painstakingly
uncovers some of the basic traits of Blake’s poetry and thus partakes
in rather than halts the philosophical appropriation of art. A heterolo-
gical aesthetics would therefore neither refute the claim that art contains
an epistemological, objective dimension nor deny the value of unearthing
or homogenizing it. Neither would it deny that a work of art may be
defined according to its use-value, be it in terms of the money it fetches
on the art-market, its castigation of social wrongs, the factual knowledge
it imparts, or even its specific ‘distribution of the sensible’. What it would
show, however, is, firstly, that all these approaches (capitalist, political,
philosophical) share a basic premise: here art is always judged according
to something exterior to the actual aesthetic experience. Secondly, it
would insist on both the importance of acknowledging this experience
and the concurrent impossibility of accounting for it within discourse:
‘thought measuring the beyond of things where it has no access is neces-
sarily negative and it cannot take something that it denies for a thing’
(2004: 168). It is thus only with regard to the sovereign power of the
work, in relation to its aesthetic immediacy, that ‘all commentaries are
useless’. Yet, and this would be the third and most important aspect, the
uselessness of commentaries (of a heterological aesthetics) is necessary
for the absence of utility, for heterogeneity itself to appear. In other
words, to safeguard the aesthetic sovereignty of the work of art, we
always need to ‘pull the rug from under [ourselves]’ (2006a: 94) by affirm-
ing our own inability to furnish any form of proof regarding its sovereign
or heterogeneous status.
A work of art can never be completely reduced to an underlying struc-
ture, a deeper meaning or definite purpose that aesthetics somehow has
to expose. At the same time it becomes the symbol or meaning for this
absence of depth and intelligibility, the sign of a definitive impossibility.
For Bataille this constitutes the sovereign, irreducible and infinitely baf-
fling ‘essence’ of art and poetry, which, however, always only appears in
relation to what it negates or excludes.
18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Notes
1. For an in-depth exploration of this idea see Peter V. Zima (2005).
2. See Bois and Krauss (1997). See also Allen S. Weiss, where he speaks of
‘a hatred of the aesthetic such as Bataille’s’ (1994: 20).
3. The following argument is based largely on two collections of essays, Visions of
Excess (Bataille, 1985), which covers the period from 1929–39, and The Absence
of Myth (Bataille, 2006a), which covers the period from 1945–51, and
which roughly correspond to the two phases in Bataille’s thought I thematize.
4. I use the word art in its general sense, encompassing all the different arts,
such as literature, the plastic arts, music, theatre, etc. Bataille’s notion of the
poetic and aesthetic, discussed further down, are not confined to particular
artistic genres or styles. As heterogeneous elements they necessarily resist
any such classifications. The theoretical insights I draw from Bataille’s dis-
cussion of painting are therefore equally applicable to poetry and vice versa.
As Bataille says: ‘For Breton painting is the same thing as poetry . . . I am
more or less in agreement with him’ (2006a: 87).
5. As Bataille puts it in ‘The Obelisk’: ‘The mocking universe was slowly
given over to the severe eternity of its almighty father, guarantor of pro-
found stability’ (1985: 216).
6. See Breton (1969).
7. This is not to suggest that Bataille’s views on the relation between aesthetics
and politics in the 1930s were set in stone. In many ways they underwent
significant modifications in the different projects he participated in. In this
respect see Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi’s recent study Rethinking the
Political (2011). While her reading of Bataille’s work during this period is
certainly illuminating and raises some very important questions, she implies
that Bataille never developed or changed the basic positions he advocated at
the Collège de sociologie. Although she acknowledges (in a short concluding
paragraph) that Bataille’s postwar work led to a ‘reconsideration of art’, she
also insists that, despite this reappraisal, ‘Bataille remained curiously distant
from politics’ (Falasca-Zamponi, 2011: 257–8). She thus almost completely
ignores the fact that Bataille later explicitly returned to the question of the
relation between the aesthetic and the political in order to confront some
aporias and paradoxes that his work at the Collège had generated.
8. In this respect see his short piece from 1945, ‘Existentialism and How It
Differs from Surrealism’ (2006a: 57–67).
9. See Bataille’s work Sovereignty (1993) for a detailed exposition of this idea.
10. See, for instance, the third part of The Accursed Share (1993), which
concludes with an extended mediation on the status of sovereign art in
contemporary society, his collection of literary criticism, Literature and
Evil (2006b), his Manet monograph and his final work, The Tears of Eros
(2001), an attempt to demonstrate the historical connection between sover-
eignty and aesthetic practices.
11. For Bataille’s postwar take on the relation between political action and
artistic expression see his ‘Letter to René Char on the Incompatibilities of
the Writer’ (Bataille, 1990).
12. I am aware of the reductive reading of Badiou and the other thinkers I
discuss in relation to Bataille (Rancière, Adorno, Kant etc.). A detailed
analysis, which, in some cases, could be highly productive and worthwhile,
Kennedy 19

would go far beyond the scope of the present paper. Here I am merely
concerned with indicating some general points of convergence and disparity,
in order to situate Bataille’s heterological approach within the general
framework of modern/contemporary aesthetics.
13. Although this statement refers to the sacred it is equally applicable to the
notion of the heterogeneous. From the very beginning Bataille often uses
these two terms synonymously. In ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’,
for instance, he defines the sacred as ‘a restricted form of the heterogeneous’
(1985: 141).

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Kevin Kennedy is Lecturer at The American University of Paris. He spe-

cializes in the work of Georges Bataille. His monograph Towards an
Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature
was published in 2014 by Academica Press.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section,
‘Bataille and Heterology’, edited by Roy Boyne and Marina Galletti.