Bataille and Mysticism

13
Bataille and Mysticism: A "Dazzling Dissolution" Author(s): Amy Hollywood Source: Diacritics, Vol. 26, No. 2, Georges Bataille: An Occasion for Misunderstanding (Summer, 1996), pp. 74-85 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566298 Accessed: 03/07/2009 13:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Diacritics. http://www.jstor.org

Transcript of Bataille and Mysticism

Page 1: Bataille and Mysticism

Bataille and Mysticism: A "Dazzling Dissolution"Author(s): Amy HollywoodSource: Diacritics, Vol. 26, No. 2, Georges Bataille: An Occasion for Misunderstanding(Summer, 1996), pp. 74-85Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566298Accessed: 03/07/2009 13:08

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toDiacritics.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Bataille and Mysticism

BATAILLE AND MYSTICISM A "DAZZLING DISSOLUTION"

AMY HOLLYWOOD

Within Georges Bataille's texts of the late 1930s and 1940s, in particular those later brought together in the tripartite Atheological Summa, he repeatedly suggests that his primary models for writing and experience are the texts of the Christian and non-Western mystical traditions (often represented, in Bataille, by women's writings) and those of Friedrich Nietzsche.' Inner Experience opens with evocations of Nietzsche, and the final volume of the trilogy, On Nietzsche, is "devoted" to his work. References to mystical writings occur throughout Inner Experience and Guilty, and significant portions of both texts can be read as providing "guides" for inner experience analogous to the "itineraries" of Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Teresa of Avila (d. 1582) or as spiritual daybooks like those of Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. ca. 1275). These models are, I think, the key to understanding Bataille's own writing strategies in theAtheologicalSumma.2 Despite their apparent divergence, moreover, Bataille insists that mystical and Nietzschean texts reflect and are constitutive of the same experience and writing practice.

Like both Nietzsche and the mystics, Bataille's "antigeneric" writing mixes genres and styles within and between texts.3 Throughout the course of his career, experience and writing are in a constant state of movement, flux, or chaos (to echo Bataille's self- description in On Nietzsche). The Atheological Summa encapsulates within what purport to be three unified books the diversity of genres and styles that run throughout Bataille' s corpus as a whole. They contain ample quotation of Nietzsche's texts and those of the mystics-undigested hunks and fragments of these allusive writings4-together with philosophical reflections, confessional meditations, diary fragments, letters, and, at the end of On Nietzsche, a set of six brief historical and theoretical appendices. Anything broaching traditional textual commentary is reserved for the margins of these nonbooks. Like many mystics, particularly women who were denied access to the traditional genres of sermon, biblical commentary, and philosophical or theological treatise, and like Nietzsche, who eschews and subverts traditional genre distinctions, Bataille comments and critiques through practice rather than exposition. Although Bataille acknowledges the oddity of his coupling the mystics and Nietzsche, he also rigorously defends it, arguing for a mystical and ecstatic experience in Nietzsche's work.5 As I hope to show, Bataille's

This essay is part of a larger project: Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

1. Nietzsche's work had been important for Bataille since the 1920s and was part of his movement away from Christianity. While Bataille seems to have read ascetic, meditational, and mystical works during his Christian period and after, the word mystique ("mystic" or "mystical") does not appear in his work until the later 1930s [see Surya].

2. The complete argument will need to show divergences between Bataille's writing practices of the '20s and '30s and those of the Atheological Summa.

3. For Bataille's work as resisting generic constraints, see Sollers. 4. A later text, The Memorandum, is made up only of citations from Nietzsche's work, almost

like aflorilegia of Nietzschean writings. 5. I speak to the religious issue here. More needs to be said about the relationship between

Nietzsche's obvious misogyny and his 'feminized" style. See, for example, the essays collected in

diacritics 26.2: 74-85 74

Page 3: Bataille and Mysticism

experience of the failures of mysticism and of Nietzsche speak to each other and lead to Bataille's necessary apostasy as his true discipleship.

Repetition of the divergences between Bataille and the mystics, first stated by Bataille himself in Inner Experience, has become something of a commonplace, yet his claims have not been sufficiently explored or challenged. So, for example, Alain Arnauld and Gisele Excoffon-Lafarge unproblematically assert that despite all proximities be- tween Bataille's texts and those of the mystics, they differ in their aims or aimlessness. Michel Surya joins a host of other scholars whose primary concern is to demonstrate (against the insinuations of Sartre, made now almost fifty years ago) that Bataille was not a Christian. Whereas the mystics' path ends with the divine encounter, Bataille renounces all objects, aims, or end for his quest and his desire.6 Most importantly, he rejects all idealism and any hope for salvation. Bataille himself insists on his divergence from the Christian mystics in Inner Experience and Guilty. At the same time, his citations and mimings of central texts from the Christian mystical tradition show that what fascinates him within these writings is precisely the moment in which the soul desires "to live without a why," embracing the suffering of hell-understood as the absence of/from the "object" of desire-as desire.7 In a move later echoed by Jacques Lacan, Bataille claims that some medieval mystics attained that beyond of which he writes, but without knowing anything about it: "Exuberance is the point where we let go of Christianity. Angela of Foligno attained it and described it, but didn't know it."8

Commentators follow Bataille in resisting his identification with the mystics, then, whereas Nietzsche is a less troubling model for Bataille and his readers. In fact, Bataille' s more forthright statements about his debt to Nietzsche can help us understand his relationship to mystical texts. The claim is repeatedly made-by Bataille and his interpreters-that Bataille does not comment on Nietzsche as a disciple or student might on the texts of a master, but rather attempts to live what Nietzsche himself lived, to experience that which gave rise to Nietzsche's writings. Nietzsche's text engenders a writing that is itself an experience. This is most explicitly the case in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which like the gospels of the New Testament and many mystical treatises is a transformative text meant to bring about the experience of conversion described within it. Yet this implies the text has an aim, as all practices and acts do according to Bataille; Zarathustra' s fifth gospel thereby subtly misses the pure aimlessness of inner experience.

In Beyond Good and Evil and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche enjoins those who would understand him to read slowly, like philologists. Bataille attempts, in the preface to On Nietzsche, to specify how he reads Nietzsche and, by implication, how the reader should approach Bataille' s own texts. I think he also gives us a picture of how he read the mystics:

You shouldn't doubt it any longer for an instant: you haven't understood a word of Nietzsche 's work without living that dazzling dissolution into totality. Beyond that, this philosophy is just a maze of contradictions. Or worse, the pretext for

Paul Patton, Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory; and Peter J. Burgard, Nietzsche and the Feminine. I think that reading Nietzsche with and through Bataille may help elucidate these issues

6. See Bataille, OC 5: 15-17; Inner Experience 3-5 and passim; Arnauld and Excoffon- Lafarge 26-30.

7. The phrase "living without a why" is used by Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268), Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), and Meister Eckhart (d. ca. 1327). The reference to preferring hell to divine gifts is found in many mystical texts, including those by Mechthild, Marguerite Porete, and Angela of Foligno. Forfull citations of texts and discussions of some of them, see Hollywood. Michel Surya shows the importance of Angela of Foligno for Bataille and the miming of Angela in his meditations on "Cent Morceaux" [375-771.

8. "Le point ou nous lachons le christianisme est I 'exuberance. Angele de Foligno l'atteignit et le decrivit, mais sans le savoir" [OC 5: 259].

diacritics / summer 1996 75

Page 4: Bataille and Mysticism

lies of omission (if, as with the Fascists, certain passages are isolated for ends disavowed by the rest of the work).9

Mystical works often open with similar instructions for reading. So Mechthild of Magdeburg begins The Flowing Light of the Godhead with the claim that it must be read seven times if it is to be comprehended, and Marguerite Porete warns that those who approach her Mirror of Simple Souls armed with reason will fail to achieve the liberation that the book describes and enacts. In showing us how he reads Nietzsche, Bataille echoes mystical texts, again suggesting the interplay between the textual practices of these seemingly divergent figures.

The parallel with Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Angela of Foligno goes even further, however, in Guilty. Guilty is drawn from the journals or notebooks that Bataille kept from the opening of World War II (September 5, 1939) through October 1943. To this text, published in 1943, Bataille added in 1961 an introduction and a text from 1947, "Alleluia." Inner Experience, published first and placed at the beginning of the Atheological Summa, was written from the winter of 1941 through the summer of 1942. This complicated textual history is another of the many parallels between Bataille's work and those of late medieval Christian women mystics. In addition, I will argue, they share commonalities in their look, apparent lack of structure, mixing of genres, and use of contradiction or paradox.?0

Guilty (like Inner Experience) is aphoristic, or, more aptly, fragmentary. It has been compared, justifiably, to the Pensees of Pascal and the aphoristic writings of Nietzsche [Surya 405]. But perhaps there is another source, suggested by Bataille himself in the opening pages of Guilty:

The date on which I begin to write (September 5, 1939) is not a coincidence. I am starting because of these events, but not in order to speak of them. I write these notes, incapable of anything else. It is necessary for me to let myself go, from now on, to the movements offreedom, of caprice. Suddenly, the moment has come for me to speak without detour. //

It is impossible for me to read. At least, most books. I don't have the desire. Too much work tires me. My nerves are shattered. I get drunk a lot. I feelfaithful to life if I eat and drink what I want. Life is always an enchantment, a feast, a festival: an oppressing, unintelligible dream, adorned nevertheless with a charm that I enjoy. The sentiment of chance demands that I look a difficult fate in the face. It would not be about chance if there was not an incontestable madness.

I began to read, standing on a crowded train, Angela of Foligno's Book of Visions."1

9. "Qu 'on n 'en doute plus un instant: on n' a pas entendu un mot de 1' oeuvre de Nietzsche avant d'avoir vecu cette dissolution eclatante dans la totalite; cette philosophie n'est en dehors de la que dedale de contradictions, pis encore: pretexte a des mensonges par omission (si, comme les fascistes, on isole des passages a des fins que nie le reste de l'oeuvre)" [Bataille, OC 6: 22]; On Nietzsche xxxi-xxxii.

10. I think there are also commonalities on the level of sentence structure, itself often fragmentary [see Nancy, "'Exscriptions "].

11. La date a laquelle je commence d'ecrire (5 septembre 1939) n'est pas une coincidence. Je commence en raison des evenements, mais ce n'est pas pour en parler. J'6cris ces notes incapable d'autre chose. II me faut me laisser aller, desormais, a des mouvements de liberte, de caprice. Soudain, le moment est venu pour moi de parler sans detour. /

76

Page 5: Bataille and Mysticism

diacritics / summer 1996 77

Page 6: Bataille and Mysticism

Bataille follows these fragments with passages transcribed from Angela's Book. Not only do these transcriptions run throughout Guilty, but as Michel Surya has pointed out, central aspects of Bataille's own practice of inner experience have direct, although uncited, parallels in Angela's.'2

More importantly for my purposes here, the practice of writing in Guilty parallels or even mimes that of medieval mystical women like Angela of Foligno and Mechthild of Magdeburg. Although there are generic similarities between Mechthild's Flowing Light of the Godhead and Angela's Book, Guilty more closely resembles the former. It's unlikely that Bataille knew Mechthild's work, yet I think that a comparison between them is enlightening as Mechthild displays in more marked form important, although obscured, features of Angela's book that are mimed (consciously or unconsciously) by Bataille. Both Mechthild and Angela wrote what are probably best called "confessions" in the tradition of Augustine (Surya includes the Confessions in his list of possible models for Bataille's work). However, the radical difference in the nature of Augustine' s, Mechthild' s, and Angela's experiences lead to a very different set of writing and rhetorical practices within their deployment of the genre, to the point of making the women's works unrecognizable to many as "confessions." Instead modern scholars have, until recently, insisted on reading them as diaries or journals-immediate outpouring of the woman authors' experience. (This is particularly odd given the variety of forms in which the material appears in texts like Mechthild's; there are poems, dialogues, visions, prayers, as well as more traditional prose exposition.)13 Existing versions of Angela's Book give little evidence for her "writing" practice, because it was transcribed for her by a male cleric (and they both insist he didn't quite get it). Although there is some evidence for the mediating hand of male priestly authority in Mechthild's work, it keeps its fragmented form and the unresolved dialectic of its structure-what Caroline Walker Bynum refers to as "oscillations between alienation and ecstasy."'4

Aside from the visual similarities between Mechthild's and Bataille's texts, engen- dered by their fragmentary form and their mixture of diverse genres ("Disorder is the condition of this book; it is unlimited in every sense"),'5 they also share a concern with the process of writing and of the relationship between writer and reader that place their texts within the tradition of the Confessions even as it distances them from Augustine's practice within that complex genre. The Flowing Light of the Godhead and Guilty are not

II m'est impossible de lire. Du moins la plupart des livres. Je n'en ai pas le desir. Un exces de travail me fatigue. J'en ai les nerfs brises. Je m'enivre souvent. Je me sens fidele a la vie si je bois et mange ce qui me plait. La vie est toujours l'enchantement, le festin, la fete: reve oppressant, inintelligible, enrichi neanmoins d'un charme dont je joue. Le sentiment de la chance me demande d'etre en face d'un sort difficile. II ne s'agirait pas de chance si ce n'etait une incontestable folie.

J'ai commence de lire, debout dans un train bonde, le Livre des visions d'Angele de Foligno. [OC 5: 245]

Note the truncated and fragmentary sentence structure. 12. Bataille's descriptions, in Guilty and Inner Experience, of his contemplation of the

photographs of a Chinese torture victim directly echo Angela's accounts of her contemplation of Christ's cross.

13. This claim goes together with a number of standard assertions about the nature of women's writings-i.e. that it is more spontaneous, immediate, more often in the first person and hence autobiographical-almost all of which are false. See Hollywood; and, for the modern novel, Lanser.

14. The closest thing to a structuring paradigm for the book is the constant interplay of presence and absence in the Song of Songs. "Alleluia," the final appended section of Guilty is described by Denis Hollier as Bataille's rewriting of the Song of Songs [see Hollier].

15. "Le desordre est la condition de ce livre, il est illimite dans tous les sens" [OC 5: 264].

78

Page 7: Bataille and Mysticism

journals or diaries as commonly understood, because they are written for an audience on whom the text desires to act. It is this confessional aim, moreover, that brings together the diverse materials making up their texts (as opposed to the relative, albeit hardly complete, homogeneity of Augustine's). Mechthild opens with the claim that the soul's experiences recounted within the book are made through her to all of Christendom. Bataille begins with similar clarity-soon to be effaced-about the pedagogical purpose of his writing. "As simply as I can, I will speak of the paths by which I found ecstasy, in the desire that others will find it in the same way."'6 This aim, however, is bound to sacrifice itself, for the pathless ecstasy he seeks cannot be given an itinerary. One side of the paradox enacted by Bataille's text can be located here, for although he envisions a reader on whom he wishes to act, the very desire to act is called into question by inner experience. Bataille is insistent on this point; "I hate sentences.... What I have affirmed, the convictions that I have shared, all of this is laughable and dead; I am only silence, the universe is silence."17

Later he makes a more characteristic claim about the reader and with it about his text.

What I write differs from a diary/journal in this: I imagine a man, neither too young nor too old, neither too subtle nor too sensible/practical, pissing and shitting, simply (cheerfully). I imagine him (having read me) reflecting on eroticism and the putting into question of nature. He would see then what care I have taken to lead him to the decision. There's no use giving an analysis: he evokes the moment of arousal-naive, but ambiguous, unconfessable. He is putting nature into question.18

Only a writing that puts itself, the writer, and the reader into question can lead to inner experience. This becomes clearer when we look to the other major interlocutor within the confessional tradition (and the other noninterlocutor of Bataille's communications).

Augustine's Confessions, Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light, and Angela of Foligno's Book are addressed not only to the human reader, on whom the text hopes to work a transformation, but also to God, before whom the human author stands "confess- ing" her life, sins, and the glory of God reflected in it. This seems to mark the point of greatest divergence between their work and Bataille's. Yet the story is complicated. Throughout the Confessions, Augustine speaks as a human being to a transcendent God. Mechthild' s use of voice is more complex. When in the first person, the text speaks more often as God than to God; those moments when the soul is shown speaking to God (and God to the soul) are put in third-person allegorical and dramatic form, thereby achieving a distancing effect and undercutting the text's autobiographical or journalistic form. I have argued elsewhere that these rhetorical strategies are a function of Mechthild's lack of traditional authority as a woman within medieval Christianity. She takes this subordi- nation to its limit, negating herself so fully that the self is lost and becomes that place in and through which God speaks. Paradoxically, Mechthild's work attains divine authority in her very act of self-denial. There are moments in the text, moreover, where Mechthild

16. "Aussi simplement quejepuis,jeparlerai des voies par lesquellesje trouvai l'extase, dans le desir que d'autres la trouvent de la meme facon" [OC 5: 264].

17. "J'abhore les phrases.... Ce que j'ai affirme, les convictions que j'ai partagees, tout est risible et mort: je ne suis que silence, 'univers est silence" [OC 5: 277].

18. "Ce quej 'ecris differe en ceci d'un journal: j'imagine un homme, ni tropjeune ni trop age, ni trop fin ni trop sense, pissant et crottant, simplement (gaiment), je l'imagine reflechissant (m 'ayant lu) sur l'erotisme et la mise en question de la nature: il verrait alors quel souci j'avais de l 'amener a la decision. Inutile de donner I'analyse: qu'il e'voque le moment de 1'excitation naive, mais louche, inavouable: il met la nature en question " [OC 5: 355]. Early in the text Bataille makes it clear that it is not addressed to his friends or intimates, but to those he does not know and who will be alive after his death.

diacritics / summer 1996 79

Page 8: Bataille and Mysticism

pushes this self-negation to the point where salvation itself is denied. Other women, like Angela of Foligno and Marguerite Porete, will push even further to the negation of the divine being itself.19

Bataille's relationship to a divine or sacred other within Guilty is also complex. Nietzsche argues in On the Genealogy of Morals that there is no simple atheism, or that simple atheism is really a kind of idealism in that the atheist still believes in truth. Bataille's relationship to God and to the sacred must be located within this dilemma. Guilty can be read as an attempt to enact that freeing of the sacred from God described by Bataille in his introduction of 1961.

It seemed to me that human thought had two terms: God and the sentiment of the absence of God. But God being the confusion of the sacred (the religious aspect) and reason (the instrumental aspect), he has a place only in a world where the confusion of the instrumental and the sacred becomes the basis for reassurance. God terrifies if he is no longer the same thing as reason (Pascal, Kierkegaard). But if he is no longer the same thing as reason, I am before the absence of God.20

The sacred is nothing, and it is the absence of God, in the sense that God is understood as that which gives reason, order, coherence, and meaning to human existence. The sacred is that which lies beyond meaning, instrumentality, and reason-and hence beyond God. It lies beyond salvation. When Mechthild, Angela, Marguerite Porete, or Meister Eckhart claim that the soul no longer cares for heaven or hell, they also seek this beyond of which Bataille writes. Bataille recognizes this, but claims that the Christian mystic moves beyond God without knowing it. Yet what does it mean to know that you are in the realm of the unknowable? The crucial distinction Bataille tries to make between himself and the mystics seems finally to collapse.

Elsewhere, Bataille calls this nonplace beyond "the impossible," thereby clearly raising the other aspect of the paradox structuring Guilty. What does it mean to write (to) the impossible? Moreover, for Bataille human beings are themselves this impossible paradox, making the dilemma of the human addressee and that of "the impossible" one. This is first enacted in Bataille' s text through the correlation of the writing self and God. In a section entitled "The Lure of the Game," Bataille returns to the question of the "object" of desire and of ecstasy. "THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS THE ABSENCE OF RESPONSE FROM THE OUTSIDE. THE INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE RESPONSE THAT THE WILL GIVES ITSELF, SUSPENDED OVER THE VOID OF AN UNINTELLIGIBLE NIGHT. THIS NIGHT, FROM ONE END TO THE OTHER, HAS THE IMPUDENCE OF A HOOK. "2 Bataille refers here to hooks that used to be placed on the incline of roofs; these hooks held up poles that kept snow from sliding off the roof. Bataille is fascinated by this hook, which he associates with chance. The philosophical reference-one that runs throughout Bataille' s writings-is to the question

19. For examples, such as the dialectic of all and nothing in Porete or Eckhart's prayer that God free the soul from God, see Hollywood.

20. "Il m 'a semble que la pensee humaine avait deux termes: Dieu et le sentiment de l 'absence de Dieu; mais Dieu n'etant que la confusion du SACRE (du religieux) et de la RAISON (de l 'utilitaire), il n'a de place que dans un monde ou la confusion de l 'utilitaire et du sacre devient la base d'une demarche rassurante. Dieu terrifie s 'il n 'est plus la meme chose que la raison (Pascal, Kierkegaard). Mais s'il n'est plus la mime chose que la raison, je suis devant l'absence de Dieu" [OC 5: 2401.

21. "L'OBJET DE L'EXTASE EST L'ABSENCE DE REPONSE DU DEHORS. L'INEXPLICABLE PRESENCE DE L'HOMME EST LA REPONSE QUE LA VOLONTE SE DONNE, SUSPENDUE SUR LE VIDE D'UNE ININTELLIGIBLE NUIT; CETTE NUIT, D'UN BOUT A L'AUTRE, A L'IMPUDENCE D'UN CROCHET" [OC 5: 320].

80

Page 9: Bataille and Mysticism

articulated by Nietzsche at the end of On the Genealogy of Morals: "why man at all?" Guilty's meditations on chance particularize this question. As Surya notes, Bataille not only questions the meaning of his own existence and that of human existence (why live in the face of death?) but also continually brings himself face to face with the sheer contingency of his own existence as the individual he himself is. Chance is the hook on which existence falls. It is without meaning and offers no answer other than its own sheer facticity. The abruptness and impudence of this facticity, the absence of response in the response, is/engenders ecstasy.22

Bataille continually plays on the relationship between the absence of God and the contingency of the self. He insists that religion is that place in which everything is put into question. God, the confusion of the sacred and reason, represents an attempt to answer the question and to elude the hook. But, Bataille claims: "I don't believe in God: from an inability to believe in myself." Or conversely, "God is dead: he is so to the point that I can't make his death understood without killing myself."23 It is not only that the death of God brings the self face-to-face with the inevitability of its own death. For Bataille, the death of God has not been understood or experienced until the death of the self has been. Because one cannot experience one's own death, then, Bataille suggests that God will never be entirely dead. Yet the self must be put into question in order to move toward an experience of the absence of God. Moreover, Bataille claims that the self has always already put itself into question insofar as it attempts to communicate. The attempt to communicate- writing-puts itself into question by refusing the answer. Whereas, "[t]he God of theology and reason never puts himself into play," Bataille insists that "[w]ithout end, the unbearable me, that we are, plays itself; without end, "communication" puts it into play."24 We return, then, to the imaginary other to whom Bataille writes. The attempt to communicate to another the way to ecstasy puts the self into play, destabilizes the sacred, and leads to the lacerations of ecstasy.

The question now becomes why communication puts the self into play or into question and engenders the experience of the absence or death of self and the absence or death of God. Here Bataille evokes the paradoxes of writing elaborated further by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida.25 The first evocation seems merely banal: "History," Bataille writes, "is unfinished. When this book is read, the smallest schoolchild will know how the war turned out. At this moment when I write, nothing can give me the knowledge of that schoolchild."26 Like Nietzsche, Bataille claims here to love his ignorance of the future-and its fundamental unknowability. By thus invoking the absent-yet-to-be- born and hence fundamentally mortal-other, Bataille evokes his own death. Writing is an attempt to inscribe presence (transparence) that is always predicated on absence; the absence of the other to whom one writes and the absence of the self to that addressee.

22. My hesitation in word choice here raises a crucial question about the kind of claims made by such texts. Does Bataille think that the process of reading itself is the ecstasy, or that it is capable in certain conditions of engendering it? Similar questions have been raised about the claims of mystical texts [see, for example, Sells]. This concern with the hook is at the root of Bataille's fascination with the moment of inception, and also with eroticism as the realm of chance.

23. "Je ne crois pas en Dieu: faute de croire en moi. " "Dieu est mort: il l'est au point que je ne pourrais faire entendre sa mort qu'en me tuant" [OC 5: 282, 327].

24. "Jamais le Dieu de la theologie et de la raison ne se met en jeu. Sans fin, l'insoutenable moi, que nous sommes, se joue; sans fin, la 'communication' le met en jeu" [OC 5: 328].

25. See, for example, Blanchot. For an early and important formulation by Jacques Derrida, see his "Signature, Event, Context."

26. "L'histoire est inachevee: quand ce livre sera lu, le plus petit ecolier connaitra I 'issue de la guerre actuelle; au moment ou j'ecris, rien ne peut me donner la science de l'ecolier" [OC 5: 261-62].

diacritics / summer 1996 81

Page 10: Bataille and Mysticism

The penultimate section of the main body of Guilty is entitled "La volonte" ("Will/ Willpower"). Bataille here ties the problem of death to the paradox engendered by human beings' desire to write so as to transform the other and the fact that this transformation itself denies all intentionality. As in "The King of the Wood," Guilty's final section (before a series of appendixes, of course), Bataille condenses the paradoxes that have been enacted throughout the text. After evoking the radical nothingness and unthinkableness of my death, Bataille writes that "[t]o write is to go elsewhere. The bird who sings and the man who writes deliver themselves."27 They deliver themselves to death in the going elsewhere and yet also attempt to escape death through the act of writing, the inscription of an always already absent presence. The one who will receive this writing is no longer a man who can be imagined (pissing and shitting);

I do not write for this world (surviving-intentionally-that world from which war has emerged), I write for a different world, a world without respect. I don't desire to impose myself on it, I imagine myself being silent there, as if absent. The necessity of effacement to the point of transparency. I do not oppose real strengths or necessary connections: idealism alone (hypocrisy, lies) has the virtue to condemn the real world-to ignore its physical truth.28

Bataille is caught here in his own paradox: how to reject idealism, which refuses the real world and its physical truth, while speaking to a world different from that one full of idealism, lies, and hypocrisy in which world war is inevitable (according to Bataille's political analysis throughout the 1930s). Bataille's strategy, like that of the mystics, is not to avoid the paradox, nor to attempt to resolve it, but to embrace it and force the reader to think it in all its contradiction. Only in this way, the text suggests, can the physical world be that other world to which Bataille speaks silence.

Furthermore, if to write is to go elsewhere and to encounter death (to speak silence), it is also an attempt to stay alive (to speak). "The Death of the King" refers to the death of Dianus, the priest of Diana and he under whose name Bataille first signed fragments of Guilty. According to legend, Orestes is the first Dianus, a criminal who gains power over the woods (the woods of nemo-nothing) through a second crime, the murder of his predecessor; he rules awaiting his own murder. This is the place from which Bataille writes.

Iam inhabited by a mania to speak, and a maniaforexactitude. I imagine myself to be precise, capable, ambitious. I should have been silent and I spoke. I laugh at the fear of death: it keeps me awake! Battling against it (against fear and death). // I write, I do not want to die. For me, the words "I will be dead" aren't breathable. My absence is the wind from outside. It is comical: pain is comical. I am, for my protection, in my room. But the tomb? already so near, the thought of it envelops me from head to toe. //

27. "tcrire est partir ailleurs. L 'oiseau qui chante et I 'homme qui e'crit se delivrent" [OC 5: 359].

28. "Je n'ecris pas pour ce monde-ci (survivance-expressement-de celui d'oui sortit la guerre), j'e?cris pour un monde different, pour un monde sans egards. Je n'ai pas le desir de m 'imposer a lui, j'imagine y etre silencieux, comme absent. La necessite de 'effacement incombe a la transparence. Rien ne m 'oppose auxforces reelles, aux rapports necessaires: 'idealisme seul (I'hypocrisie, le mensonge) a la vertu de condamner le monde reel-d'en ignorer la verite physique" [OC 5: 360].

82

Page 11: Bataille and Mysticism

Immense contradiction of my attitude! Has anyone ever had, so gaily, this simplicity of death? But ink changes absence into intention.29

Whereas in the passage cited above Bataille stresses the absence that always already haunts writing, he here emphasizes the other side of the paradox encompassed in writing. To write a book, Bataille repeatedly reminds us in Guilty, is to participate in instrumen- tality; to use language in the attempt to accomplish an end: "to change absence into intention."30

The paradoxical problem of Guilty is how to write (a) desire (without object) aimlessly or how to write without end and without a why.

I couldn 'tfind what I am looking for in a book, still less put it in a book. I fear courting poetry. Poetry is a drawn arrow. If I have aimed well, what counts- what I want-is neither the arrow nor the target [le but], but the moment when the arrow is lost, dissolves into the air of the night; until the memory of the arrow is lost.31

The significance of this becomes clear when we juxtapose Bataille's critique of the Christian mystics with his insistence on Nietzsche' s failure. Where the mystics err insofar as they refuse to err-to do without an end for their speech and experience-Nietzsche's fault lies in his abrogation of communication. If the great prophet of aimlessness seeks an ideal with which to overcome the ascetic, as some argue (and is constantly suggested and then subverted in Zarathustra), then for Bataille Nietzsche capitulates to the ascetic ideal. Yet Nietzsche suggests that any attempt at communication is in service to the ascetic ideal. Bataille insists, however, on his communion with Nietzsche in the writing of On Nietzsche, thereby suggesting that other modes of communication are possible through writing experience and textual activity.32 Only through this writing practice is the sacred released from the ideal and the God to which it is still in part held captive within Nietzsche's work. Taken as an answer to the question of the meaning of being, Nietzsche's

29. La rage de parler m'habite, et la rage de l'exactitude. je m'imagine precis, capable, ambitieux. J'aurais duf me taire et je parle. Je ris de la peur de la mort: elle me tient eveille! Luttant contre elle (contre la peur et la mort). //

J'ecris, je ne veux pas mourir. Pour moi, ces mots, "je serai mort," ne sont pas respirables. Mon absence est le vent

du dehors. Elle est comique: la douleur est comique. Je suis, a 1'abri, dans ma chambre. Mais la tombe? deja si voisine, sa pensee m'enveloppe de la tete aux pieds. //

Immense contradiction de mon attitude! Personne eut-il, aussi gaiment cette simplicite de mort? Mais l'encre change l'absence en intention. [OC 5: 365]

30. It is worth remembering at this point that Bataille had some trouble completing books. By 1939-41 he hadfinished only two, both published anonymously-The Story of the Eye andThe Blue of Noon. Other than that, he had produced only essays and aborted plans for books.

31. "Je ne pourrais trouver ce queje cherche dans un livre, encore moins l 'y mettre. J'ai peur de rechercher la poesie. La poesie est unefleche tiree: sij'ai bien vise, ce qui compte - queje veux - n'est ni lafleche ni le but, mais le moment ou lafleche se perd, se dissout dans l 'air de la nuit: jusqu''a al memoire de lafleche est perdue" [OC 5: 340]. This is the place to locate Bataille 's own poems in relation to his Hatred of Poetry (The Impossible).

32. Eric Blondel begins to demonstrate a similar twofold movement with Nietzsche's texts [see Blondel].

diacritics / summer 1996 83

Page 12: Bataille and Mysticism

writing capitulates to the ideal. Taken as a process of writing (and reading) and as a putting into question of the self (both that of the writer and the reader), it communicates.33

In an important essay on Bataille, Nancy argues that Bataille's writing is "a sacrifice of writing, by writing, which redeems writing" [334]. Reading Bataille with his mystical models helps us to unpack this evocative phrase and to suggest why, for Bataille, the sacrifice and redemption of writing by writing are necessary, and how they are effected by the contradictions within and fragmentation of his texts. Writing, for Bataille, is always an attempt to force language to enact what it communicates. In describing Bataille's writing practice, Nancy coins a term-exscription-through which he attempts to describe the mechanisms by which Bataille's texts point outside themselves to an experience that is constituted in the very act of writing. The parallels with Eric Blondel's work on Nietzsche and with contemporary studies of the linguistic strategies of apophatic mysticism are striking. As in Nancy's work, these analyses demonstrate how insistence on the materiality of the text through which the practice of writing is inscribed leads-not to a stultifying idealism, as some oddly insist-but rather to a recognition of the interpenetration of world and writing in the production of a textual experience of desire without limit, without end, and without aim. By exacerbating the paradoxes of writing a desire without object and without aim, Bataille creates a text in which inner experience is (for him and perhaps also for the reader who knows how to read) "attained."

By emphasizing the practice of writing and with it the materiality of the text, moreover, the dangers in Bataille's elision of the object of desire-and hence, it would seem, with that which marks and maintains normatively defined gender difference- might be averted, while the positive gains that can come through such an elision are retained. For Bataille's writing suggests that desire taken to its limit subverts not only genre but also gender, leading to what has been called in another context (a reading of Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls and Meister Eckhart's sermons) "the apophasis (unsaying) of gender" occasioned by "living without a why" [see Sells]. For Bataille this occurs in that he is "virile" and "lacerated" or insofar as Madame Edwarda as lacerated is divine. If Bataille's text is still marked by gender difference and gender hierarchies, as Susan Suleiman argues (I don't know yet if I agree), he has failed in his own project [see Suleiman]. Success, however, would also be unattractive for many feminist thinkers, who argue that sexual difference can be elided only at the expense of women. I am suggesting, however, that Bataille merely subverts the normative association of sexual difference with the nature of the desired object. There is good reason to believe this move might be necessary and salutary for women, while not itself leading to a neglect of material bodies and our multiple differences. If Bataille places importance on the materiality of the text as it inscribes a practice of writing, might not the materiality of the flesh also be a source of recalcitrant desire, a desire that refuses to be limited to any object while also refusing to become such an object for the other?

WORKS CITED Angela of Foligno. Complete Works. Trans. Paul Lachance. New York: Paulist, 1993. Arnauld, Alain, and Gisele Excoffon-Lafarge. Bataille. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1961. Bataille, Georges. Guilty. Trans. Bruce Boone. Venice, CA: Lapis. 1988.

. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: SUNY P, 1988.

. The Memorandum. Oeuvres completes, vol. 6.

33. Whether the reduction of Nietzsche to a truth that can be communicated is the fault of Nietzsche or of those commentators who insist on reducing his work to a discourse and a doctrine can only be decided by a comparison of Nietzsche's and Bataille's writing practices.

84

Page 13: Bataille and Mysticism

. Oeuvres completes. 12 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. [OC]

. On Nietzsche. Trans. Bruce Boone. New York: Paragon House, 1992. Blanchot, Maurice. The Madness of the Day. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station

Hill, 1981. Blondel, Eric. Nietzsche: The Body and Culture. Trans. Sean Hand. Stanford: Stanford

UP, 1991. Burgard, Peter J. Nietzsche and the Feminine. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1994. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle

Ages. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. "Signature, Event, Context." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Hollier, Denis. "A Tale of Unsatisfied Desire." Bataille, Guilty. Hollywood, Amy. The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete,

and Meister Eckhart. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1995. Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Marguerite Porete. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Trans. Ellen Babinsky. New York:

Paulist, 1993. Mechthild of Magdeburg. Mechthild von Magdeburg 'Dasfliessende Licht der Gottheit':

Nach der Einsiedler Handschrift in kritischem Vergleich mit der gesamten Uberlieferung. Ed. Hans Neumann. 2 vols. Munich: Artemis, 1990-93.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Exscriptions." The Birth to Presence. Trans. Brian Holmes et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.

. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1967.

. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1954.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Patton, Paul. Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory. New York: Routledge, 1993. Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Un nouveau mystique." Situations. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Sells, Michael. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Sollers, Philippe. "De grandes irregularites de langage." Critique 195-96 (1963): 795-

802. Suleiman, Susan. "Bataille in the Streets: The Search for Virility in the 1930s." Bataille:

Writing the Sacred. Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill. New York: Routledge, 1995. Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: La mort a l'oeuvre. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

diacritics / summer 1996 85