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English translation, Foreword, Preface to the English Edition, and Introduction © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Originally published in German (Peter Lang) under the title System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille © 1978, Rodolphe Gasché.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gasché, Rodolphe, author.

[System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille. English.]

Georges Bataille : phenomenology and phantasmatology / Rodolphe Gasché ; translated by Roland Végső.

pages cm. — (Cultural memory in the present)

“Originally published in German under the title System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7606-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-7607-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-8428-3 (e-book)

1. Bataille, Georges, 1897–1962—Philosophy. 2. Phenomenology. I. Végső, Roland, translator. II. Title. III. Series: Cultural memory in the present.

PQ2603.A695Z67413 2012

848'.91209—dc23

2012006357

GEORGES BATAILLE

Phenomenology and Phantasmatology

Rodolphe Gasché

Translated by Roland Végső

Foreword to the English edition

by David Farrell Krell

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Cultural Memory in the Present

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

Foreword

by David Farrell Krell

During the 1930s and 1940s two readers of Nietzsche were preparing lineages that would generate the major part of what has come to be called, in the English-speaking world, “Continental Philosophy.” Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), lecturing on Nietzsche’s notions of eternal recurrence of the same and of will to power—as art; as knowledge, science, and technology; and as the culmination of the history of nihilism—was opening the phenomenological movement to elements that his teacher, Edmund Husserl, never dreamed of entertaining. Heidegger was reading Nietzsche against the backdrop of the entire history of Western metaphysics. He was taking seriously Nietzsche’s claim that his thought was the inversion of Platonism and that it upset value-structures that had dominated metaphysics since its inception. Meanwhile, in Paris, then hiding out in various locales during the Nazi Occupation, Georges Bataille (1887–1962) was reading Nietzsche for a very different reason. He was reading Nietzsche, he said, in order to prevent himself from going mad. An odd therapy, a bizarre therapist, considering the final ten years of Nietzsche’s life. Yet it was clear to everyone, as it was to Bataille himself, that he wanted and needed to pursue Nietzsche’s sense of Dionysian ecstasy to the very verge of madness.

If Heidegger created a lineage that devoted itself to dismantling and reinterpreting the entire history of metaphysics, Bataille fathered a lineage that devoted itself to a phantasmatic philosophical anthropology, sociology, psychology, and genealogy of morals. One thinks of Foucault, Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot, all of them readers of Heidegger but also ignited by Bataille; one thinks also of Gilles Deleuze, seriously allergic to Heidegger but rapt to Bataille. It is difficult to find thinkers who take Heidegger and Bataille with equal seriousness, thinkers who acknowledge both lineages as their own. In France, the late Jacques Derrida. In the English-speaking world, Alphonso Lingis—and Rodolphe Gasché.

Herewith, an anecdote that Gasché will not enjoy. When his Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection was published in 1986, philosophers everywhere were delighted. Derrida’s texts were so difficult that no one (apart from Gasché) appeared to have the background in both philosophy and literary theory that would enable an expert explication of Derrida’s work. At last, Derridean deconstruction would become comprehensible! After reading the first part of Gasché’s book, however, which dealt rigorously with the stringent demands of reflexivity in German Idealism and in contemporary German theorists of reflection, readers now had to hope that Derrida would write a book explicating Gasché.

For those whose interest in Bataille begins and ends with The Story of the Eye, those for whom a hard-boiled egg will never be the same, the present book may produce the same effect and result in a similar dilemma. As though he were a child of Heidegger, Gasché insists on taking the words mythology, image, and phantasm in Bataille seriously, tracing their impact on and in philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Whereas the more relaxed reader might take Bataille’s mythology in a very haphazard sense—mythology would simply be whatever opposes or ignores logic and science—Gasché wants to know why and how philosophy since its inception has tried to distance itself from, but also in some way to overpower and even devour and digest, the traditional stories of goddesses, gods, heroines, heroes, and world-shapers. And Gasché wants to know this in order to be able to read a very early set of texts by Bataille, begun when Bataille was about thirty years of age and completed around 1930, a set of texts devoted to a very strange and even uncanny theme—that of the “pineal eye.”

Even the most innocent reader knows about the pineal gland. His or her philosophy instructor got a rise out of the students by telling them of Descartes’s fantastic—or phantasmatic—assertion that the human soul has its “seat” in the pineal gland. The less innocent, for example, those in pre-med, will know that the pineal gland sits deep in the bicameral brain, not quite at the center but a bit off-side, that it has its name (in Latin, conarium) because of its pinecone shape, and that its functions are still not altogether clear: it almost seems a vestigial organ, the intestinal appendix of the brain, as it were, having to do with the hormone melatonin and thus affecting sleep patterns, inhibiting gonadal activity (something one can look upon only with suspicion and apprehension), and being involved in some way with the phenomena of jet lag and the cycles of time, as well as with the passage of time in general. Some researchers say that the gland’s activity diminishes as soon as children reach seven years of age, the traditional age of reason, as though reason now dispenses what the pineal gland once secreted. Perhaps most mysteriously, the pineal gland is photosensitive, as though it has, or at one time had, some connection with vision: it seems to be present in the development of all amphibians and mammals, and at some point far back in our phylogenetic history, it was a third, unpaired, dorsal eye situated at the crown of the head. The sutures of the skull harbor a reminiscence of its place at the surface of the brain and opening onto the sky. Crocodile Dundee, knife at the ready, knows about these sutures, still remarkably gaping among some amphibians. Georges Bataille has no interest in exterminating and exploiting these amphibian reminiscences, but he is gripped by the evolutionary tale of this unpaired third eye, this eye of Polyphemus pushed back from the forehead to the top of the skull. It is perhaps an anthropological myth, a story that encapsulates the complex story of humankind’s effort to find its feet, to stand up, and to shoot for the stars.

It is all about erection. The Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, knew about the erection of humankind even in the thirteenth century. He noticed that animals, at least many of them, go on all fours across the surface of the earth, whereas plants grow upward toward the moon and sun. Did God know what he was doing when he made humankind stand on two feet with its head in the clouds? Was he not confusing them with trees and vegetables, for are not the horizontally committed animals of a “higher” nature than plants? His answer to this predicament was based on Scripture: Deus fecit hominem rectum. The last word in the phrase has to be translated very carefully. Let us say, and hope, that God made human beings straight up. Their election depends upon their erection. Thomas isolates four points in his demonstration:

1. Among human beings, who are “superior” to both plants and animals, the senses serve not only for defense but also for knowledge and pleasure. Humanity experiences the elevating beauty of food and of other humans. Whereas the animal, with its prone posture, grubs for food and sniffs out its partners, the human face graces a head that swivels freely not only from left to right but also up and down, and, most notably, up and back toward things celestial. Even without a pineal eye, the human being’s verticality shows it the way to go.

2. The brain in humankind is located not low down in its body but high up, super omnes partes corporis elevatum. The foot, by contrast, smacks of earth, reeks of sex and corruption, whereas the head is exposed to heavenly breezes. If the heart supplies heat, the brain, separated from the torso by what Plato’s Timaeus called “the isthmus of the neck,” remains cool-headed. The brain contains the scintillating glacial light in the aerie of the house, the light of the soul.

3. To consider matters by way of the negative, the contrary-to-fact: If humankind scurried about on all four, its hands would soon become rough, its fingers stiff and maladroit—the utilitas manuum would be lost. Without the free use of its hands, humankind would become altogether pedestrian.

4. If hands regressed to the status of feet, humankind would have to seize its food with its snout; its head would then be oblong in shape, like a sow’s or a dog’s, arranged for convenient foraging. The lips and tongue would grow coarse, “lest they be wounded by the outside world,” and this coarsening and elongation would impede speech—which, for its part, constitutes “the proper work of reason,” reason being the heart of the soul.

Thomas already knows what neurophysiologists centuries later will demonstrate, namely, that those portions of the brain once dedicated to the sense of smell are in humankind dedicated to the higher intellectual functions. If humanity is possessed of pessimum olfactum, it has by way of compensation maximum cerebrum. As the species rose to its feet, there was less and less to sniff out on the surface of the earth, but more and more to think about. And whereas other animals had fur and shells and carapaces to protect them, human beings had little more than their cunning and artifice.

Sigmund Freud too was intrigued by the story of human erection. His Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, by which time Bataille had completed his series of reflections on the pineal eye, contains two long footnotes on the fateful rise of a bipedal humankind. For Freud, one of the things that changed most dramatically for human beings was that the periodicity of sexual excitement—based on the menstrual cycle and the capacity of mammals to follow this cycle by the nose—receded and made way for a primarily visual excitation, which is to say, a permanent excitation. Human sexuality became unhinged, as it were, from the frame of reproduction. Eros got mixed up with everything the eye could see.

Georges Bataille was gripped by such reflections and stories. Humanity’s desire to fly as high as the sky, its passion for the overview, its love of sky gods and all their Ascensions, but also its sunny good nature’s exposure always and everywhere to lunacy—these threads began to weave a very strange tapestry in his imagination and to impose multiple tasks for his research. Nor could he fail to descry in humanity’s fateful and fatal erection the shadow of that other sense of Deus fecit hominem rectum. He had already written a text on what he called “the solar anus.” He hypothesized that as the pineal eye sank into the interior of the brain, the rectum rose high between the globes of the buttocks. This enteric view of the species, recapitulated in every developing embryo, along with the production by culture of multiple and variegated means (religions, moralities, totems, and taboos) to obscure and to obfuscate entirely the enteric view, suggested to him that something at the very origins of humankind miscarried. If for Descartes the pineal gland was the noble and tender receptacle of the soul, itself a flame, a tiny spark of heaven kept alive in the darkling chambers of the brain, the pineal eye and the vanishing anus became for Bataille corporeal symbols of the hapless, hopeless struggle of human beings against animality, gravity, and the earth; eye and anus became carnal symbols of humanity’s vain attempts to soar in the heights of the open sky and to inherit heaven.

Yet if Bataille’s admittedly phantasmatic reading of human evolution is lucid at least in its outline, startlingly clear if not edifying, why must Gasché approach that reading in terms of both the history of metaphysics and the intricacies of literary theory? Why the complex and demanding readings of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others? Why, beyond the challenges of Freudian psychoanalysis, the outrageous demands of Lacan? Why once again Heidegger on Nietzschean will to power? Why yet another turn to Hegel, to ask whether Bataille is in battle with, and is thus engaged to, Hegel’s Phenomenology? And why, beyond all these, the specter of Derrida, who identifies the phenomenology of appearances (phainesthai) with the phantasm (phantasma) itself? No quick answers here, nothing to forward by way of foreword to the reader holding this book now in hand, but only the obvious reply: Gasché is convinced that the images and phantasms of Georges Bataille’s “pineal eye” are in the lineage of the very best that philosophy, psychology, and literature have offered us and can offer us. Bataille’s text has “unheard-of consequences,” argues Gasché, even if we have been listening for millennia. If the reader is incredulous, incredulity would be a perfect place to begin to read. If we may delay that beginning a moment longer, let us take Gasché’s chapter on mythology, devoted principally to F. W. J. Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology, as exemplary for his approach to the Bataillean phantasm.

If mythology is simply ideology, if it is irrational and dangerous, as the racist and sexist ideologies of our own time seem to demonstrate, then should we not simply set Bataille none too gently aside? Or could mythology, and even the phantasm, be something more than ideology, something that thinkers and scientists could never set aside even if they wanted to? Schelling’s entire career—and it lasted a long time, from the early 1790s to the mid-1850s—was dedicated to demonstrating over and over again the power of “the oldest narratives” of humankind. These old stories, these myths, especially those of the Greeks, ought to have been absorbed by philosophy, as today philosophy is largely absorbed by the sciences. Yet the old narratives resisted such absorption. Not only did poets and artists continue to be inspired by them but the myths and stories themselves reappeared on the periphery—and sometimes at the very center—of the philosophical and scientific systems that tapped into them. The more philosophy and science tried to found or ground their systems, the more they were subject to a strange catabolism: the very movement of founding, deducing principles, and justifying themselves, or even of recounting the history of their origins, became a movement of downfall and collapse. Such catabolism was already in full evidence by the time Plato wrote, not a Platonic Dialogue that does not refer to the ancient stories, myths, and mysteries as essential resources for a foundational discourse and a dialectic that are forever getting stuck. And whereas philosophers after Plato have expended endless amounts of energy trying to convince their disciples that philosophy replaces mythology, they have expended even greater volumes of energy trying to sweep under the rug all the evidence that the old stories have more to tell than any system of thought can capture. Many scientists today find themselves engaged in the same effort vis-à-vis philosophy; and many “logical” philosophers are themselves trying hard to show that all past thinking and storytelling have by now been systematized, mathematically reduced, and successfully computerized; such efforts succeed only in making their own sciences and logics more opaque than they were to begin with. Schelling knew that he too was tempted by the dream of absorbing into his various systems all the wisdom and uncanniness of the mythologies—to subsume, for example, all the gods of sky and goddesses of earth across all cultures under the edifying story of Christianity—but he was compelled to see that all the evidence to the contrary, all the inexhaustible newness and surprising relevance of the oldest stories could not be swept under the rug. Hegel and others were much better with a broom, but Schelling was a disaster in this respect, and that is why Gasché musters the patience to take us readers through Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology. One of the results of Schelling’s lifelong encounter with myth was that no concept of deity or divinity could ever be liberated from matters sexual and mortal. (That’s mortal, with a t.) Christianity would be able to absorb most if not all of the older stories if only it could learn that the Father was a woman and that (s)he, like the rest of us animals, was bound to mortality.

One final word, about words. Gasché is not only an extraordinarily knowledgeable philosopher but also a literary theorist of the greatest perspicacity and sensitivity. He approaches the dossier of Bataille’s “Pineal Eye” as one that contains texts. What is a text? Like a myth, a text is always telling more than it admits to telling or even knows to tell; it is always releasing forces and energies that are impossible for it to control. Reading we might define as a gleaning of texts, a gathering of the fruit that in the span of time falls to the ground. Yet that span of time is long, and the fruit quite various; the labor of gleaning is often backbreaking, the resulting harvest almost always full of surprises. If in the end we wish that Bataille could have written a book explaining Gasché to us, Gasché’s wonderful book on Bataille confirms our judgment that Bataille’s work is as important and as worthy of study as that of any other thinker of the twentieth century. And this heady confirmation returns us to the phantasm of the pineal eye with both sharper focus and enhanced openness to ecstasy.

Preface to the English Edition

With its new title, Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology, the subject matter and thrust of this work, which was written between 1974 and 1975 as my doctoral thesis and published in 1978, is highlighted much more pointedly than by its initial title, System and Metaphoricity in the Philosophy of Georges Bataille. Indeed, this work is not only an attempt to understand Bataille’s mythical anthropology, and critique of humanism, in a philosophical light by situating his thought within the fourfold marked by the names of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is above all a study on how Bataille’s materialist approach, or, to apply an expression by Carlo Michelstaedter to this thinker, his systematic “hunger for what is lower,” which instructs his reverse reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or step back from absolute knowledge to sense-perception, lays the abyssal groundwork for the spectral and phantasmatic other, or double of phenomenology that the latter inevitably co-produces in its steady speculative process toward self-certain knowledge.

With respect to the German edition I consider this English translation of the book its definitive version. Indeed, it is in a way a new original. Because of the time constraints, and special conditions under which the book had to be produced in 1978, the original contained many formal mistakes that have now been corrected. But, in addition, I have taken the opportunity of making some slight changes to improve the flow of the argument, thus making this also a more readable book than the first edition.

I would like to take the opportunity of this translation and republication to express my deepest gratitude to Prof. Dr. Klaus Heinrich, who at the extremely difficult moment when for reasons of illness Prof. Dr. Jacob Taubes could no longer serve as my supervisor, generously offered to take over the project. I also wish to thank all the students, who in 1971–72 participated in a workshop on Bataille that I conducted at the Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at the Freie Universität Berlin in which I sketched out the outlines of the present work. Most special thanks go to Werner Hamacher, Bernard Pautrat, Steffen Stelzer, and Samuel Weber, on whom, in almost daily conversations, whether in Paris or Berlin, I tested the main ideas of this work and whose searching criticism and comments were invaluable in shaping the argument in this book.

Rodolphe Gasché

Introduction

SUBSIDIARY DEVELOPMENTS

Even the interdependence is only apparent: each person is finally linked with his predecessors. Phantasms linked with phantasms. It is strange to take everything so seriously. Ancient philosophy is a strange labyrinthian aberration of reason. The proper note to strike is that of dreams and fairy tales.

—Friedrich Nietzsche1

The foreword to this study on Georges Bataille evokes a figure—a phantasm, a scientific myth—whose analysis has become possible only now that this study has been completed. Like the eyes of Janus, the god of forewords, these subsidiary developments simultaneously glance in the direction of what is to come and look back from the results to the intention that occasioned the following arguments, in order to ascertain that this figure, which was a subjective source of inspiration, did not receive a thematic treatment. The upcoming arguments, therefore, situate themselves between these two perspectives, in the narrow gap that divides the two masks of the double-faced god, on the arch of the gateway where it is written: Augenblick, moment, or blink of an eye.

The figure that we have just alluded to is that of the pineal body, the inconspicuous organ that according to Descartes binds body and soul together. Even though according to Plato laughing does not constitute an argument worthy of philosophy, ever since Descartes’s Treatise of Man the pineal body has been an object of ridicule—of irony and sophistic or cynical laughter. So if initially we wanted to devote our attention to this figure, it was not in the least our intention to banter about in full agreement with philosophy, nor was it to obey the Platonic protest against laughter, since the laughter of philosophy and the earnestness of its argumentation are complementary. In fact, this laughter, for which Socrates reproaches Polus, merely intends to refute an argument “that nobody would accept.”2

We cannot, however, deny that it was a certain scurrility of this figure that first prompted us to pay attention to it. Scurrility in the sense that, like a foreign body, the pineal body disturbs the body and the corpus of philosophy and repeatedly provokes it to cheerfulness: but this is a cheerfulness and a laughter that merely lead to the expulsion and rejection of the pineal body. Based on the treatment that this figure had received in Georges Bataille’s texts, it appeared to us to be appropriate to demonstrate a movement on the body of philosophy, which makes the expulsion of the pineal body into a precondition of the constitution of its body. Or, to put it differently, to generate in its corpus a laughter alien to philosophy (Nietzsche’s or Bataille’s laughter), which should have unsettled it until its shattering.

But the occasion for the present work—the fascinating incongruity between the pineal body and the body of philosophy—and the prospect of a different way of addressing this difference are nevertheless not symmetrical. Something like a nonlogical difference has produced itself in the act of writing in the space between the occasion and the prospect. The thematic treatment of the pineal body based essentially on Plato’s Timaeus, Descartes’s Treatise of Man, and Bataille’s Dossier of the Pineal Eye would have attempted a deconstruction of the concept of truth, its inscription in the context of castration and blinding beyond its control. But, directing our attention to the myth and/or phantasm (the terms Bataille uses to describe the obsessive insistence of the pineal eye) of which the pineal body is merely one possible figure, the present work, while traversing Hegel’s Phenomenology, aims at the development of a phantasmatology that passes through the different stages of the becoming of the Spirit in an order contrary to that of the Encyclopedia. It appeared then that the particular phantasm of the pineal eye, as it is staged by Bataille, would require a traversing of the Hegelian philosophy of nature, a confrontation with this weak link in the dialectical chain, that is, of nature as the fully exteriorized idea, which produces things contrary to its own norm and makes it quite difficult to hang on to its concept or idea.

The reason why we abandoned the initial project of submitting the pineal body to any of these two possible demonstrations is the already mentioned displacement in the act of writing produced by the examination of the terms organizing Bataille’s text: phantasm, myth, image, sign, and so forth. As can be expected, the phantasmatology developed here will set up the rules with which we can account for a specific phantasm like the pineal body. At the same time, however, it is also clear that the possible application of these rules to the pineal body would lead only to a reduplication of phantasmatology. Rather than be an illustration or a distinguished example on which this rule can be verified or falsified, such an analysis would produce only another figure of phantasmatology.

Since the phantasm or scientific myth of the pineal eye does not constitute a symptom of Bataille’s text that could be dissolved by a phantasmatology, we could not assign to it the status of an example or an illustration. This is why phantasmatology differs from the Freudian interpretation of dreams, since it is not a method or a theory but a textual formation that cannot be separated from the materiality of the text in relation to which it is being developed. With regard to the combination of the elements of the dream that elucidate the dream “so exhaustively,” Freud wrote: “We might also point out in our defence that our procedure in interpreting dreams is identical with the procedure by which we resolve hysterical symptoms; and there the correctness of our method is warranted by the coincident emergence and disappearance of the symptoms, or, to use a simile, the assertions made in the text are borne out by the accompanying illustrations.”3

Phantasmatology cannot exhaustively explain or be verified by privileged examples. Thus, the point of departure—even the example of the pineal body—has belatedly suspended itself until its very cancellation as the occasion for the present work. If we now choose not to pursue the possibility of a different treatment of the topic than the one provided by philosophy, and that opened up toward the end of the work, the reason is that the repetition of the Hegelian philosophy of nature in the context of this work, would, as we have already suggested, have only provided an additional figure of phantasmatology. To be sure, the repetition is one of the “rules” that characterize phantasmatology, and the staging of the actual phantasm of the pineal eye would not have denied us the kind of bonus pleasure that we had promised ourselves at the outset. But who cares about a bonus, a mere additional pleasure, if one can carry out (without having to add to the debate with three consecutive spheres of the Hegelian system another one) a deconstruction of phantasmatology itself through which its theoretical construction itself appears as the foremost example of phantasmatology? With the deconstruction of the resulting theoretization of phantasmatology alone and its subjection to the law of repetition, a pleasure tightly bound to the death drive emerges whose perpetual repetition is the goal of even a text like Beyond the Pleasure Principle.4

There is, however, an additional point that cannot be ignored, which originally lay at the foundation of this work and regularly programmed it, yet it was still not followed. This time, we are not talking about a thematic aspect but the systematic and methodological form of our reading.5 The initial plan consisted of using the Dossier de l’oeil pinéal (published in the second volume of the Oeuvres complètes) as a reference text, and of relying on the early works (the first two volumes of the collected works and the period between 1922 and 1940) to help in its interpretation. As a first attempt, we have undertaken an analysis of all five versions of “The Pineal Eye” relying on linguistic and textual methods.6 A syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the texts uncovered the chains of metonymies and metaphors that structured them. In addition, we then identified anagrams, homophonies, “correct,” and punning etymologies as well as essential deviations from the canonical grammar and syntax of the French language. It became clear that the structure of the production of these texts obeyed the general economy of a perpetual erosion of linguistic materials. Thus, a recourse to the dictionary turned out to be unavoidable, “which composes in its own way a text involved in that of Bataille’s” to the extent that, in his own words, “the dictionary is executed by the text the way one is executed by firearms.”7

This preparatory work was essential not because the five versions of the Dossier were literary texts, but because they can be located at the point of intersection at which the usually clearly separated domains of philosophy and literature overlap, cut across each other, and mutually cut into each other.8 Situated at the borderline of what is delimited through a definition, in the domain of the transgression of a ban on touching, this wavering status opens up the following possibilities: (1) a problematization of the language of philosophy, of its repression of any consideration of the materiality of its writing, which constantly threatens to distort its transparency for meaning; (2) the problematization of literature in its dependence on philosophy, as for the most part literature allows the latter to prescribe to it its domain, themes, ideology, and its mode of writing; (3) a mode of writing, an announcement of the materiality of language that accomplishes the transgression of philosophy and literature in this space between.

By concentrating on one text, on the different versions of “The Pineal Eye” that remained unpublished and unfinished by Bataille, we also hoped to avoid the danger of presenting a complete and exhaustive system in our explication of the “systems and figures of Bataille’s philosophy.” The system of inscriptions and productions of the Bataillean philosophemes was to have remained tied to the “singularity” of the five versions as an effect of only the things that are at play in these few texts themselves. Not only would it thus have been possible to replace the system constructed in this manner through the privileging of another text and, consequently, to exchange it for another web of concepts, but it would have been possible to thrust it into the process of the general exchange and waste that organizes Bataille’s way of writing. To the degree that the economy of expenditure cannot be totalized, it is also impossible to unite all possible readings into a single interpretation that would function as the “true” expression of Bataille’s “thought.”

The reading that we planned to perform here was to produce something like the illusion of a system. This way we hoped to be able to avoid writing about Bataille. Thesis-driven academic writing presents a discourse on an author in which “the work’s becoming a work is a way in which truth becomes and happens,” and which, as Heidegger writes, strives for the open, installs itself in it, “setting and taking possession,” and according to the Greek meaning of thesis, sets itself up in the unconcealed.9

In fact, it is possible to discuss that which preserves and conceals itself in the openness of the unconcealed as truth. Yet Bataille’s text itself makes such an operation impossible—provided that we observe the movements of its mode of writing. The necessary precaution to write about Bataille could be attributed to the fact that Bataille himself had explicitly posed the question of the about.10 Bataille’s simultaneous critical debate with discourses that want to write or talk about something and his strategic employment of these very discourses in the texts that we will analyze here inscribe as a sequel every discourse that attempts to write about Bataille in his own text, whose movements undermine every stable point of view. Writing about Bataille, something we do not fully get around to, we must imagine our position in him as a stand based in quicksand from which we could pull ourselves out only by our own hair.

However, the purpose of this meticulous analysis of the textual movements of the Dossier was not to dissect and describe the text from the outside with the reliable instruments of tried and tested methods in order to escape its entanglements. To the contrary, the textual and linguistic methods helped us to work out clearly the operations and movements of Bataille’s mode of writing in such a way that we (who must write about Bataille) could subject our conceptualizations to the same laws that govern his texts. Therefore, it should no longer come as a surprise if the traversal of phenomenology is supposed to lead to a phantasmatology. Up to this point, we have merely tried to show how our work here deviates from its original plan, but it remains that it would not exist without its first subjective motivation and the already mentioned technical discussion of the Dossier. Let us return to the praxis of our reading. In order to be able to allow the text of “The Pineal Eye” to unfold itself in its complete and complex materiality, we read it in such a way that we did not fix our attention either on this or that theme or on this or that signifier. Reading with “evenly-suspended attention,”11 our objective was, as Lucette Finas has demonstrated in her amazing work on Madame Edwarda, “to resend the story to itself, if possible, excluding all external references with the exception of making it traverse my own self; to detach and then reattach its retina. Nothing but its retina—the web of its noises.”12 Such a procedure is led by an economy of interpretation that renounces every profit (every extraction of meaning) that would come in the form of a surplus value from an investment of labor. To be more precise, it avoids every attempt at the constitution of a fixed meaning.

The question, then, concerns not only what makes such a reading of Bataille’s text possible but precisely what makes it necessary. First of all, this reading unavoidably calls for a certain set of themes staged by Bataille: above all, the theme of an economy of expenditure of riches as well as of meaning. But this theme does not yet constitute a sufficient ground for a reading of this nature, since a thematic interpretation implies that the reader can break down the text into its complexes of meaning and sense, which could then be grasped in a profit-oriented interpretation as the sense, the statement, or the meaning of the text. From such a perspective, the reading of the text would appear to be merely the in-itself meaningless investment of labor, which is nevertheless necessary to render the text’s intention and meaning transparent so that the latter can be brought out and conserved as the original idea. This process presupposes a form of blindness in relation to the text in its materiality and movements, the blindness of the philosopher, for example. As Derrida has it, “The philosopher is blind to Bataille’s text because he is a philosopher only through the desire to hold on to, to maintain his certainty of himself and the security of the concept as security against this sliding. For him, Bataille’s text is full of traps: it is, in the initial sense of the word, a scandal.”13 This “sliding” that makes every conceptual and thematic reading unsatisfactory and necessitates a textual reading cannot be demonstrated on a theme like “expenditure” or the “gift.” It can be demonstrated only on the movements of the text itself. In other words, we must show that the particular theme is merely the surface effect of the expenditure practiced by this mode of writing. The stake of reading, therefore, cannot be only the explication of the way the text produces a concept. It also needs to reveal the movement that releases the concept produced as the effect of the play of signifiers and syntax to the movement of the text, which then ruins it as a concept.

How are we supposed to read the text then?

Usually, we read with what we could call an “inner sense,” since in the process of understanding we separate the essential from the inessential, the precious metal from the slag, the signified from the signifier. This inner sense is constituted in a similar way, in that the senses are deprived of their materiality as bodily organs: the eyes, the ears, and the tongue are sublimated in such a way that they make it feasible—in their henceforth possible cooperation and unison—to comprehend, grasp, and conceptualize the pure intelligibility of the written. Under the primacy of sense, in the purity of the mutual penetration of logos and phonē to the degree of their indistinguishability, the individual senses (the eye, the ear, and tongue) fuse into this inner sense.14 Reading a text, however, means that we give back to the individual senses their materiality so that the eye can abide by the insistence of the letters and the graphic organization of the written, and the ear can abide by the sound produced by the tongue, and, as a result, the “unison” of the organs fades away.15 Yet the differences between the graphematic, the sounds and the tones, and the gestural articulations and movements of the tongue correspond to the differences between the three organs of sensation that cannot be sublated.16 Reading Bataille or, in a more general sense, reading a text means, therefore, to assume the task of dismembering the body: “In order to recover in oneself that which was miserably aborted at the beginning of the constitution of the human body, one would have to break oneself into pieces and feel in one’s body the madness of a contortionist while, at the same time, one would have to become a drooling fetishist simultaneously of the eye, the behind, and the foot.”17 The fetishistic eruption of the individual organs from the homogeneous body or, what amounts to the same, their eroticization restores to them once again their heterogeneous difference upon which the process of sublation works itself out. Indeed, it is only through the annihilation of difference—through which the individual organs are reduced to functions and ideal parts of a whole—that their harmonious interplay becomes thinkable in the form of the ideality that we call a human being.

The dismembered organs open themselves to the equally diverse material instances that constitute a text. The already mentioned fetishization and eroticization, however, are not yet sufficient to prevent the realization of the unison. The individual organ is still an organon of the perception of a sense, even if the latter is only a restricted sense: the ear hears through sounds; the eye perceives essences through images and forms; the tongue produces sense and meaning in the ideal element of a diaphanous phonē. Thus, another operation needs to be performed on the residual ideality of the sense organs so that they become capable of reading a text without subjecting it to the violence of totalization that represses the text’s materiality and the structure of its networks.

Let us start with the ear. It is necessary to possess the “third ear” that Nietzsche speaks about in Beyond Good and Evil. Having the third ear, however, means “that one must not be in doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables, that one experiences the break with any excessively severe symmetry as deliberate and attractive, that one lends a subtle and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that one figures out the meaning in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs and how delicately and richly they can be colored and change colors as they follow each other.”18 Hearing thus implies—and this is particularly true of reading a text by Bataille—that one feels “from his arm down to his toes the dangerous delight of the quivering, over-sharp blade, which wishes to bite, hiss, and cut.”19 This third ear is not an occult ear, the sublation of the pair that every human being possesses. Rather, it is the kind of ear with which we can hear if the function that the Holy Scripture refuses it is given back to it. In Lacan’s words, “We can confine our attention here to [Theodor Reik’s] sounding of the alarm in his book Listening with the Third Ear, the ‘third ear’ designating nothing other, no doubt, than the two at every man’s disposal, on the condition that the function the Scriptures claim they do not have be restored to them.”20

The third ear is also the kind with which the child perceives what is “heard,” the noises in the night, which irrupt into the child’s field of perception as an alien body and, in conjunction with lived experience, lead to the formation of fantasies: “Hearing, when it occurs, breaks the continuity of an undifferentiated perceptual field and at the same time is a sign (the noise waited for and heard in the night) which puts the subject in the position of having to answer to something.”21 It is, therefore, not merely the ear that we all possess, if we did not put our ears “away in the drawer” and if we read aloud, “that means, with all the crescendos, inflections, and reversals of tone and changes in tempo.”22 Rather, it is primarily the ear that, feeling the “over-sharp blade,” exposes itself to the imploding sound that ruptures the eardrum: a scream and/or the mad laughter in an extreme case. No other ear, therefore, than the one with which Derrida at the beginning of Margins of Philosophy listens to philosophy.

The eye, for its part, with which, as Nietzsche writes, only the Germans read,23 and which constitutes a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject,” is the eye of theoria: “an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense.”24 This is the eye of the philosopher, of the painless subject of knowledge who, with downcast eyes in the medium of light, never looking up in order to avoid the danger of being dazzled, strips the perceived images of their materiality in order to perceive in them eternal forms and essences. But a look at the things themselves would dazzle his vision like a look at the sun, which still appears to the philosopher as the guarantee of every truth. Socrates clearly expresses the double danger of injury, for example, in Phaedo:

“Well, after this,” said Socrates, “when I was worn out with my physical investigations, it occurred to me that I must guard against the same sort of risk which people run when they watch and study an eclipse of the sun; they really do sometimes injure their eyes, unless they study its reflection in water or some other medium. I conceived of something like this happening to myself, and I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.”25

Without further elaborating here on the connections between theory and light, we can at least say this much: The eye of the philosopher or, respectively, the eye of philosophy can see only in the light of the intelligible sun and in the ideal medium of transfigured light. Reading with these eyes, therefore, philosophy must necessarily avert its look from the graphein, the scratching and engraving function of writing, that is, from the movements of the text deposited in graphemes and from the collision of the signs of writing. Thus, as Bataille writes, philosophy is blind to the glare in an Icarian sense. It is blind to that which cannot be brought to the concept, so it does not possess the eyes with which it could read Bataille’s text: “To blind oneself to this rigorous precipitation, this pitiless sacrifice of philosophical concepts, and to continue to read, interrogate, and judge Bataille’s text from within ‘significative discourse’ is, perhaps, to hear something within it, but it is assuredly not to read it.”26

It would be too time-consuming and out of place here to present the chain of all the versions of the metaphor of the eye that characterizes Bataille’s texts.27 In an epigrammatic form, we want to point out only that the “third eye” corresponding to the “third ear” is both the inward-turned eye that looks into the pit of its own night and, above all, the pineal eye that, dazzled by the sun, discharges its miasmas into it and thereby blinds it. If the eye of philosophy represents the theoretical organ, the pineal eye is the fantastic sense organ that constitutes the phantasmatic text. The dazzlement that it inflicts on itself is of a different nature from the Icarian blindness of philosophy. The pineal eye, which attests to the Nietzschean “Love of Blindness,” is also the one with which we must read Bataille’s texts: like the thoughts of the wanderer, our thoughts should not tell us where we are going while reading: “I love ignorance of the future, and do not want to come to grief by impatience and anticipatory tasting of promised things.”28 In traversing the text, the labyrinth of the text, no Ariadne’s thread will save us from getting lost.29

Finally, the third organ, the tongue. The tongue—which articulates the refractions that the excessively sharp blade of the writing device “wishes to bite, hiss, and cut”—bites itself off, like “the tongue of Anaxarchus of Abdera, bit off and spat bloody in the face of the tyrant Nicocreon, and with the tongue of Zenon of Eleus, spat in the face of Demylos.”30 The text that is read falteringly with a stammering tongue now resembles the headless body that, as it is thematized by Bataille, characterizes also the figure or the profile of his own texts.

A text, therefore, cannot be a whole, a unity, as the tradition requires it from discourse. In Plato’s Phaedrus, to cite only one example, we find the following: “Any discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work.”31

If the reading of a decapitated corpus—which has no beginning, middle, or end—presupposes an equally dismembered object and subject, with dazzled eyes, broken eardrums, and a bitten-off tongue, then the reading of the textual body is no longer oriented: no horizon of meaning delimits its field—no path leads out of its labyrinth.32 We call the praxis of such a reading dé-lire: the de-lirium of un-reading.

Let us recall the clinical definition of the concept of delirium. At the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud quotes Maury, who, perceiving a close analogy between the associations characteristic of dream life and certain mental disorders, defines the term in the following way: “‘délire’: ‘(1) une action spontanée et comme automatique de l’esprit; (2) une association vicieuse et irrégulière des idées.’”33 Freud highlights this quotation because it comes close to what he will call the “dream work” and especially because it already anticipates, although not yet in a psychoanalytic terminology, some of the laws of the primary processes. Freud’s definition, however, is even more interesting: “Deliria are the work of a censorship which no longer takes the trouble to conceal its operation; instead of collaborating in producing a new version that shall be unobjectionable, it ruthlessly deletes whatever it disapproves of, so that what remains becomes quite disconnected.”34 Censorship acts here with a force similar to that of a primary process, in that it strikes out the unconscious desires in their articulations and leaves behind only a text permeated by “black lines” that appears to defy understanding. The power of censorship and the deletions it effects, however, merely attest to the uncontrollable persistence of unconscious desires that provoke the repressing instances to their full recklessness. In the text permeated by “black lines” and respectively by “the white of the paper,” the transgressive function of unconscious desires manifests itself all the more blatantly as an unconscious desire realizes itself only in the transgression of a ban or a boundary.35 The empty spaces are not only sites of the all-powerful power of censorship but also of its breakdown, thus forcing this power to make itself manifest.

The texts crossed by “black lines,” therefore, must be read as the sites of the powerful operations of what opposes the law.36 In this sense, Bataille grasped delirium as a heterogeneous element: “Violence, excess, delirium, madness characterize heterogeneous elements to varying degrees: active, as persons or mobs, they result from breaking the laws of social homogeneity.”37 There are no pure heterogeneous elements, only degrees of heterogeneity: delirium, in its equally measureless violence, represents, inasmuch as it is initiated by persons or masses, a transgression of the social order that it necessarily presupposes. Inasmuch as it produces incoherent associations and texts permeated by empty places (as it does in the case of clinical delirium), delirium attests to the transgression of the rational association of ideas and of the ordered structure of language.

As soon as the tongue is detached (dé-lier) from discourse and its binding power, the praxis of un-reading (dé-lire) emerges. Based on the Latin de-lirare (to depart from the furrow), playing with the homophony between lire, lier, lirare, we could define un-reading as a nonlinear reading that follows a mode of writing that no longer measures itself according to the straight furrow. Jumping here and there, back and forth, this form of reading and writing does not appear to be subjected to any law.

The short example of a delirious etymology, as we have just carried it out on the word délire, already illustrates one of the operations that Bataille’s texts practice. It forms a stark contrast with the operations of philosophical discourses centered on truth, which, ever since Plato, employed etymology archeologically in order to uncover the original sense and the true meaning of words. But when philosophy is not just trying to collect and totalize the fragments of meaning of the fallen logos hiding in the myth (language), and thus identifying etymology with philosophy, then it is etymology that picks up the traces of the myth itself that have been blocked by rational language as the fuller truth of philosophy. Etymology functions precisely in this way, for example, in Schelling—in contrast to Hegel, who did not make use of etymology and fiercely criticized the delirious word plays of Hamann or Baader, although he did not shy from speculating about the connection between Dinge and Denken (things and thought).38 As a result of the Romantic turn, Schelling prioritized myth over logos and conceived of the emergence of philosophy in connection with the birth of poetry: “One is almost tempted to say: language itself is only faded mythology; what mythology still preserves in living and concrete differences is preserved in language only in abstract and formal differences.”39 Bataille’s praxis of writing diverges from this hermeneutic application of etymology (which, regardless of whether it pursues logos or myth, transforms words into the faint metaphors of an original meaning), and it resembles the operations of the dream work that forges condensed images and associations based on the consonance of words.

Therefore, in order to define Bataille’s method of writing more precisely, yet another step is necessary. Bataille avers: “In the process of writing, how could I in any way do without indifference and even platitude (which appear to me to be necessary . . . perhaps for all forms of writing), if I had not already reached the region where one finally turns away the nostrils above one’s own corpse, where one senses a heart-breaking feeling of beatitude precisely because one plays like a maniac—at least without underwear and lewdly—with the frightening terror one provokes” (OC, II, 87). What is at stake in writing is the body. Not only that of the writing subject but also the body of discourse, which can become a text only through the eroticization of knowledge and speech. Julia Kristeva calls this process fiction and designates with it a possibility of writing in which the body of the author, inasmuch as it forms a whole, becomes ceaselessly “divided into multiple fissures by the eruption of the drive that is not symbolized, that separates and rearticulates logical structures.”40 This division of the logical instance can lead to linguistic dislocation and ideological subversion. The splintering of verbal substance, however, does not reach such a high point in Bataille as it does in Joyce or Artaud. According to Kristeva, “This is perhaps a limitation of his experience that has the advantage . . . of making it more communicable. But he is in profound solidarity with Joyce in his subversion, through fiction, of the ‘great semiotic units’ of ideology and knowledge.”41 Besides the delirious etymologies that lead to all forms of anagrams, glossolalias, and composite formations, we must also discuss the way the sentence is exploded by Bataille. Apart from a false, insidious, and perverted syntax that runs against the flow of discourse,42 this explosion of the sentence takes place also by way of the introduction of linguistic foreign bodies into the structure of the sentence (or, respectively, of whole sentences that act like foreign bodies within larger semiotic units). Bataille writes: “In fact, to the degree that shit provokes hilarity, it could be considered analogous to other foreign bodies that provoke the same effect—such as the parasites of the body, eminent personalities (in that they are objects of caricatures), the insane, the maladjusted, and above all the words introduced in a certain manner in sentences that exclude them” (OC, II, 72). With these words, which function as foreign bodies in the well-organized structure of the sentence, the continuity of the proposition comes to a halt. These verbal elements serve the purpose of “generalizing the rupture, negating the value of every kind of homogeneity, primarily the elementary homogeneity of sentences” (OC, II, 79). Bataille writes the following in the Dictionary that he began in the journal Documents: “A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks.”43 Bataille introduces the words into the sentences for the sake of their effects and not for the sake of their meaning so that they can carry out their little task there. These words are, therefore, not merely arbitrary. They are precisely the repressed words that are repulsive—mostly because they are scatological. As representations imbued with affects, they function in opposition to scientific and philosophical terms (which are at best signs of obscene reality), not only in the sense of representations but primarily as themselves obscene realities on the level of language.44 On the basis of this obscene linguistic reality, they penetrate the structure of the sentence as foreign bodies and perform their desublimating tasks. If the phonetic materiality of the linguistic substance erupts into the discourse through the degenerative and treacherous employment of etymologies and homophonies, the obscene word fulfills an analogous material function in the sentence structure. First, inasmuch as it is the presentation of an obscene reality that evokes precisely such a representation, it brings connotations into the sentence that interrupt its flow and eroticize other parts of the sentence. At the same time, inasmuch as it is itself an obscene reality on the level of language, it affects the sublime tone of discourse with an irreducible material element: “When one resorts to images, which are most of the time decisive and provocative and are taken from the most concrete contradictions, it is the realities of the material order and of human physiology that are put in play” (OC, II, 98).

The nonlogical difference that the sound and the obscene word provoke in the sentence through their materiality, thereby exploding its continuity, is the criterion (in fact, the only one) that according to Bataille characterizes matter: “Matter, in fact, can only be defined as the nonlogical difference that represents in relation to economy what crime represents in relation to the law.”45 We have to understand “economy” here as an organization of the relation of forces that produce meaning within a discourse. Matter is, thus, precisely such an insistence of sound or of the obscene word that disrupts such an economy. More precisely, it is what the foreign bodies produce in the sentence, that is, the nonlogical difference. It is in this sense that we could call Bataille’s way of writing materialist.

Let us go one step further and turn our attention to an aspect of larger semiotic units. What they present—the staging of anthropological, economic, political, and above all philosophical problems—is characterized by extreme simplifications. According to Bataille, on the one hand, this simplification attests to an aggressive manipulation; on the other hand, however, it is also the guarantee that allows the avoidance of a decrease of the aggressive force (OC, II, 152). We will have to say more about this simplification, so here we will state only a few things. Simplification represents a transgression of the complex discursive forms of organization of the already mentioned areas, whose evocation can no longer be understood as a transference of fields of problems and concepts but rather as a strategy of disappropriation (Entwendung also in the sense of extrication), misappropriation (Verwendung), and, why not, of rendering everything unfitting and incorrect (Verquerung). The disappropriation of different problematics belonging to specific discursive fields (of their materials and concepts) allows, through this extreme simplification, first, their appropriation for the presentation of connections alien to these fields; and second, their attachment to desires that are repressed and oppressed and as such can find expression in this simplification on the level of language in the form of dissonances. For Bataille, these desires are certainly political but not in an unambiguous sense (if such a thing exists at all): they are political in a sense that would have to be determined through a special examination that would be out of place here. Therefore, later in this work we will bring these desires and their articulations together with a problematic that corresponds to the objectives of the present study. Now, having briefly indicated the operations that Bataille undertakes simultaneously on the level of words, sentences, and larger semiotic units in order to bring about the shattering of the linear continuity of speech, we can ask who the addressee of Bataille’s text is. Certainly, it is not the painless subject of knowledge that Nietzsche spoke of. Furthermore, it is not the philosopher who clings to his subjectivity and refuses to put it into play inside a language by which it becomes expropriated. What takes place in Bataille’s way of writing is, as Michel Foucault writes, the end of the philosopher.46

If Bataille’s text, thus, does not address itself to the philosopher, its addressee can only be the figure, heterogeneous to social relations themselves, of what has not (yet) reached subjectivity or is not yet a subject. Is this subject, for example, the child (enfant, infans) who is still not yet capable of language and therefore is not yet autonomous?

For the child, the sounds of a language, the specific words in their materiality, and the simplified representations and concepts become objects of the play of his fantasy constructions, which all circle around the question of origin. His “infantile or savage manner of seeing” diverges from the scientific way of seeing, since for the child everything that encounters him becomes “the revelation of a state of violence in which he finds himself assailed.”47

This leads us back to the already mentioned Dictionary that Bataille composed for Documents and whose entries, as he writes, are addressed to “the little boy, the terrified witness of the birth of that image of the immense and sinister convulsions in which his whole life will unfold.”48

The child sees himself addressed not only by what he sees but also by the sounds and words that he had the opportunity to perceive in domestic noises. Disorganizing his own field of perception, he looks them up in the lexicon, but their meanings will also be used for ludicrous associations. Discussing the origins of “superficial associations” that manifest themselves in the contents of the dream in the form of wordplays, Freud establishes a connection between fantasy and the perusal of dictionaries. He remarks: “It is the consultation of encyclopedias (and lexicons in general) by which most people have satisfied their need of an explanation of the sexual mystery when obsessed by the curiosity of puberty.”49 This curiosity, which seeks to find the answers to the three essential questions of the child (the origins of the individual, gender difference, and sexuality), will be satisfied through fantasies in the form of “wild theories.” The entries of the lexicon, however, confront this curiosity with a new riddle. As a result, they merely provide additional materials for the phantasmatic constructions that were created by the fantasy operating with the consonance of words according to the laws of the unconscious. As Bataille notes, “But the dark chaos which makes up the deep underside of infantile representations is itself a representation no more deserving of scorn than the civilized universe of books.”50 The darkness of this chaos represents the divided and fragmented body of the child: the result of the first irruption of sexuality. Inasmuch as chaos is the result of the first excitement to which desire attaches itself in order to restore this violent and simultaneously enjoyable trace, Bataille’s text is the production and repetition of the institution of the enjoyable trace through the act of writing, which produces on the body of discourse those eroticizing intrusions that turn it into a text, a network of traces.

In the process of writing, Bataille lets himself go all the way to the point of a “puerile naivete—something done not by feigning, but with a strength sustained by a sentiment of profound exaltation,”51 as if he wanted to engrave on his own body that of the text. As Bataille notes, happy is the one whose “joy will . . . be reborn from the nocturnal terror of his childhood, because the noise of the night where he sinks down intoxicates him no less profoundly than a desire for nudity.”52 This connection, briefly outlined here, between writing and the originary erogenization of the body as its repetition on the level of language might have suggested a psychoanalytic investigation of Bataille’s fantasies. Such an analysis, however, must immediately be confronted by the question concerning the subject of writing. Who is the author of the texts we are reading here? The empirical subject whose name is Georges Bataille? Or the identical name under which several texts have been consigned to publication? This difference cannot be overlooked since the already mentioned signature is simultaneously an element of the text and, referring to a battle, also the name of a phantasmatic body. Or is the subject the countless pseudonyms: Lord Auch, Pierre Angélique, Divinus Deus, Dianus, Louis Trente, and so on? Without being able to discuss here in detail the problem of the signature, we merely want to point out that, in the labyrinth of the text, the empirical subject expropriates its own subjectivity. This is a problematic that invalidates every (psycho-)biographical approach and, borrowing a word from Philippe Sollers, introduces a “thanatography.”53

Since this work admittedly relies quite heavily on psychoanalytic terminology, it is necessary to point out that we, nevertheless, are not trying to present a psychoanalytic reading of Bataille: first, for the superficial reason that the philosophies of Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche will be used just as much as Freud’s. But more important, because psychoanalysis itself is at stake in Bataille’s text. Psychoanalysis represents one of its theoretical stakes that do not leave it untouched. As a specific field of knowledge, it will be used in such a way that its theoretical foundations will be shaken.

But let us return once again to the discussion of the child’s point of view, whose wild way of seeing and thinking Bataille appears to oppose the scientific view. We could think that Bataille’s way of writing is regressive as it pursues infantile fantasies. Whether this recourse to the child’s wild world of perception can be called regressive in a strict sense (inasmuch as this is not an ideal but a violent, even if enjoyable, world according to its nature) is questionable, especially because it precedes the first phase, that of object relations. The time of enjoyable difference cannot be reached through regression in the same way as that of object relations. The task of reconstituting this time is impossible, since it lasts merely the length of a glimpse: it represents the moment in which the eye of the child, through the eroticized gaze of the mother, becomes a chasm, a trace, or as Serge Leclaire writes, becomes a letter.54 According to the law of displacement, the moment of this glance can be repeated only on another body, in our case that of language.

The evocation of the child and his wild way of perception in Bataille’s text does not allow us to construct this child as the addressee. He is himself only a part, even if not an insignificant part, of the scenery. Like the obscene word, he functions as an alien body introjected into scientific and philosophical discourse. This child is a no less provocative insertion than any of the other heterogeneous elements, and hence, none of Bataille’s fantasies can be objectified in him. The metaphor of the child carries no more and no less meaning than the other elements in which we have to invest with the same intensity. Could the same not be said of any other possible figure of the addressee of Bataille’s writing?

A reading that pays attention to the operations animating the text—without elevating (as it is the case in the interpretation of dreams, for example) one element to the status of a nodal point in which the latent thoughts become immediately graspable in the manifest content of the dream and through which the whole web of the dream can be completely untangled—cannot define either a signifier or a signified as its center. Not at all being centered like a dream, the text has no center at all: neither a full center, nor the empty place of its absence. This lack of an organizing center becomes tangible precisely in the structure of the text, whose way of writing does not allow the privileging of one single element. Every single element insists here in the same degree.

What does insistence mean? It is a perseverance, a pausing-in-speech, a breaking off of connections, and therein related to the function of the instance, a figure of speech defined by Aristotle in the Rhetoric as a form of refutation: what makes it special is that it plays off the exception and the particular against universalizing predication.55 The individual signifieds or signifiers (provided that we can still maintain this distinction) persist in Bataille in their singularity; they incessantly interrupt the flow of the text, and they defy every generalization. The insistence of the individual elements in the text (words, sentences, or larger units) finds its expression in another gesture of Bataille, in the persistence with which it insists. Only one example of many: “I am not completely sure whether this method has truly allowed me so far to be more intelligible, but I believe in the virtue of persistence and I shall take today the same indirect path.”56 The power of persistence, apart from its rhetorical force of persuasion, which it can possess in its violence, consists primarily in playing off in an insistent manner the exception, the singular, the particular, against the power of the universal. In this, it diverges in a decisive manner from philosophical argumentation, whose function consists of securing syllogistically the universality of propositions in their truth under the precondition of the concept. What insists and in its persistent performance breaks down and halts the sentence—as it shows the particular in its irreducibility—displays a lack of the need for justification that is in direct opposition to philosophy. Blanchot thus writes quite accurately: “Even less than Nietzsche would [Bataille] have wished to move on the impulse to be right or to exercise influence, whether by the intermediary of signs or by example.”57

Before that which does not want to and cannot be justified (similarly to the sophistic gesture “I do not want to” or “I do not wish to”),58 philosophy and its logic of argumentation come to a halt. Not only because, disarmed by the irrationality of this obstinate stubbornness, it must dismiss such a behavior as a preoccupation unworthy of philosophy but because the impossible repetition of difference adjourns the very constitution of philosophy itself.

The figures in which this impossible repetition is condensed are endlessly substitutable and do not hide latent, or hidden, meanings that would have been written in them. These figures and their particular substitutes (words, sentences, and larger units) are the letters, written characters (themselves), inasmuch as they are only the marks and traces of the violent and enjoyable opening of the erogeneity of language and writing. The difference or split that constitutes the written signs as such can be filled with meaning only in a retroactive occulting gesture, like the mouth of the crying child with the mother’s breast.

What does a philosopher read in a palimpsest? In those manuscripts in which, due to the economic rarity of parchment or papyrus, the earlier writing had to be effaced and deleted so that it could be covered by another?59 If the first writing remained latently conserved, the philosopher remembers again what had escaped his memory. He had forgotten only the meaning of the hidden text—only that with which the letters had already been filled. That which speaks from these hidden texts, the philosopher sublates again by sacrificing the quality of the text. Hermes—the god of eloquence and the spoken word who, as the messenger of the gods, precedes hermeneutics—is the sly and cunning god who makes humans believe that in the beginning was the word: the word of God, which, like the babble of children, is already the substitute for the lost joyful opening of his lips—the opening that carves the written sign into the body.

Taking into consideration the economy of Bataille’s text, which represents an economy of the expenditure of meaning, we must, rather, interpret his text in a Nietzschean sense, even if we are hopelessly condemned not to gain anything by it, without exerting any profit of whatever kind. In accordance with this economy of expenditure, interpretation can mean only excessive exegesis and following the text in its endless interweaving at the risk of falling prey to its abysmal groundlessness. To interpret with excess, however, also means that the eventual gains are again spent and not kept, and they are not converted into the truth of the text in the limited economy of the circulation of meaning in order to increase the capital of accumulated meaning. Therefore, whatever we might be able to produce in our reading of Bataille, it will not be a concept through which the text could be conceptualized. To a textual economy that assumes the unreserved wastage of its signifiers and signifieds, only an interpretation can correspond that, together with the results of its reading, throws itself into the potlatch of meanings, the “potlatch of signs.”60 In other words, interpretation should be bewildered and go crazy by what it interprets. So much about the b-a-ba of rules that a reading of Bataille must observe.61

But how then are we supposed to write about Bataille hereafter? The fact that this writing can take place only in a linear fashion due to the constraints placed on our study poses a problem for representation similar to the one broached by Freud on several occasions: “We have no way of conveying knowledge of a complicated set of simultaneous events except by describing them successively.”62 Precisely “when it is a question of forcing a structure which is itself in many dimensions onto the two-dimensional descriptive plane,” as in the case of the analysis of the Wolf Man, analysis finds its “natural limit[s]” with such a presentation,63 and “all our accounts are at fault to begin with owing to one-sided simplification.”64 The “natural limit” obstructs the complexity of the text so that the description runs exactly contrary to it, in that it restores the limit that Bataille’s text transgresses. The simultaneity of the multidimensional structure—representing the concurrent dispersion of fragmented meanings in a sequence and bringing it into the order of a temporal development (that of the concept)—inevitably produces the appearance of a totality of meaning whose dissipation Bataille’s text attempts. How are we supposed to write, then, without running the risk of merely serving the purposes of a reappropriation by philosophy and the dominant discourse?

Let us read the following statement by Bataille: “These propositions having been articulated as briefly as it was possible for me to do so, I suppose that it is easy to realize that every one of them necessarily contains an important development. The way they are, however, they appear to me to be intelligible and, in particular, we must clearly show that any ulterior developments, no matter how necessary they might be, are subsidiary” (OC, II, 77). In our analysis, we will go after those empty sites in Bataille’s text that, even if they do not interfere with intelligibility, require a necessary development. No matter how necessary these developments might be, according to Bataille they remain subsidiary, that is, secondary. Certainly. But in the battle that Bataille leads, they represent also the reserves (subsidium): the reserve troops, the help that stays behind in the back, which can be thrown into the battle formation for support. The battle that is being fought here is of such a nature that all the forces must be completely used up and spent. Thus, if we retroactively carry out the subsidiary developments, according to Bataille, we are performing unnecessary work. However, the dissipation of the forces of the reserves that lie ready in support obey this unreserved dissipation, the expenditure of the reserves, staged by Bataille’s text. This null-and-void operation is the one that is most appropriate to Bataille’s text. Furthermore, since we provide subsidiary help and sacrifice the still available reserves, we avoid writing about Bataille: we under-write and force the expenditure of the last reserves.

Now, what does this imply for the problem of presentation? Since the necessary secondary developments bring philosophy into play, we can (making them into the stake of the game) black out the already mentioned empty places with our ink. The stakes of the game are the concepts that are capable of or, respectively, even demand a linear production and representation in philosophy. We can always confidently expose these concepts (which are primarily Hegelian concepts) in their propositional structure there where the possibility of a belated debate offers itself. These concepts are mythos, logos, image, concept, sign, word, consciousness, self-consciousness, mastery, and servitude. To throw the reserve troops into the battle that is being waged means to deconstruct these concepts.

In other words, we will stage the concepts that secure the linearity of philosophical representation in order to confront them with the irreducible element that had to be excluded so that the concepts could constitute themselves. Since it is irreducible, the concept must overthrow, cast down, and repress that which it produces in the process of its self-generation in order to preserve itself as a concept. Only this operation, which must be carried out on the concepts, coincides with the expenditure of the reserves.

Nothing stands, therefore, in the way of a linear, although scanned sequence. To the contrary, the development in question turns out to be unavoidable if we want to show that the (self-)constitution of the concept brings about its very own failure. Remaining faithful to all the rules of argumentation, we will stage this sequence in order to be able to sacrifice it in the end so much the easier.

In principle, this also applies in the same way to the phantasmatology that we have developed. First, we will present phantasmatology as a concept or a theory to account for Bataille’s way of writing and for what writes itself in his texts. The debates with Hegelian philosophy that will be carried out in the individual chapters will produce these irreducible elements, which could be conceived of as facets or cornerstones of such a “theory.” After its main parts have been assembled, phantasmatology must be, however, inasmuch as it is still a -logy, spent as a theory. This way the limits of theorization as such can also become obvious.

If we write this way, practicing an unavoidable linear representation in order to disintegrate it in the end, our text belatedly obtains the traits of a network or a web that define Bataille’s mode of writing.

Phantasmatology—as it is conceived here: a linear construction and subsequent deconstruction—will prove to be, in the last instance, the irreducible movement of Bataille’s syntax: a syntax that can be detected only in its effects as we also repeat it on the level of a theory that seems to comprehend and conceptualize it.

We are convinced that in writing in this manner and completing the subsidiary developments in order to crush the mobilized auxiliary troops on the battlefield, our helpful and unprofitable work of excessive expenditure ceases to be a commentary on Bataille’s text. The debate with Bataille’s philosophy and literature, therefore, does not seem to impose the kind of limitation that Roland Barthes discusses in “The Metaphor of the Eye,” which supposedly stems from our author’s attempt to compose “an open literature which is situated beyond any decipherment and which only a formal criticism can—at a great distance—accompany.”65 We do not believe that a more or less critical paraphrase appears to be the only possible analysis of Bataille’s text, nor that the work must stop at the elaboration of the web of metaphors that are interspersed in his text according to the movements of a general metaphorization. Neither can it be a question of completing The Critical Dictionary, this monstrous glossary that, according to Michel Leiris, the universe becomes for Bataille, “where the meaning of words disappears since they all define themselves by reference to each other.”66 Regardless of the fact that the mutual definition of words is not all sufficient to make them lose their meanings and become powerless, it is important to point out that the open sky Barthes speaks about is the night sky in which the stars (astres) are dispersed as in a disaster. Of this sky, Bataille writes: “During the night, an immense, troubled love, sweet as a young girl’s spasm, abandons and throws itself into a giant universe, with the intimate feeling of having urinated the stars.”67 Without considering the rich web of metaphors woven into this passage, we can, since we know the connection between sperm and urine well enough, at least since its discussions in psychoanalysis, propose the following remarks as a commentary. Although it is, strictly speaking, incorrect, we will link sperm as semen with semen as the general meaning of a morpheme. Taking advantage of this possibility, Derrida has defined the term “dissemination” in such a way that it designates the irreducible dispersion of meanings as the seeds of a never-to-be-developed polysemy. Consequently, what becomes legible on the nightly firmament are no longer traceable or integrable fragments of meaning that are separated from each other by the abysmal blackness of the sky. Bataille’s text generates such a dispersion, in other words, the violent diffusion of the “moments” of meaning condensed into a unity of meaning by an imperative power and stripped of their differences, that is, of the meaning that philosophy seeks to construct.

The fragmenting dispersal is not an act forced upon philosophy from the outside, an operation that legitimates itself from the outside of philosophy—an outside that would necessarily be its outside, the outside of philosophy. Rather, this dispersal represents an operation that is carried out on philosophy from its inside, from its unmastered borders—starting, for example, from its unmastered syntax. Since its beginnings, metaphysics has, with its prohibition of diversion (which bans all forms of enjoyment since they threaten its philosophical seriousness),68 also always already mobilized within itself the repressed desire for its very own destruction. The unheard of and insolent attacks on philosophy that Bataille allows himself seek to provoke an enjoyment in philosophy by which it transgresses its own law. He writes: “In the order of philosophy . . . such insolent manifestations procure considerable pleasures” (OC, I, 190). To conclude, let us quote this unusual proposal: “Hollywood is also the last boudoir in which philosophy (now turned masochist) could find the wrenches to which it, in the end, aspires: in accordance with an unavoidable illusion, it does not appear to be possible to encounter anywhere else women denaturized to such a point as to appear impossible in such a gaudy fashion” (OC, I, 199). As philosophy opens itself to banned desire, it transgresses the border and breaks up on the difference that enjoyment leaves behind as a trace, and returns again in the feast of its destruction to the dust of the no-longer-sublated fragments of meaning.

The deconstruction of philosophy cannot be undertaken from a position that would be external to it, since there is no such position. Every outside is already appropriated by philosophy, which has always already defined every thinkable outside as the other of its inside. The Gaia Szienza can be reached only by traversing philosophy itself. Inasmuch as it is within our power to do so, let us then try to begin such a crossing, citing a few words by Nietzsche from his late notebooks, with the hope that we will also be granted such a “moment.” Nietzsche writes: “Abstract thinking is for many a fatiguing work—for me, on good days, it is a feast, an intoxication.”⁶⁹

1

Mythological Representation

1. Reversal

From old—and indeed extremely ancient—times there has been handed down to our later age intimations of a mythical character to the effect that the stars are gods and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The further details were subsequently added in the manner of myth. Their purpose was the persuasion of the masses and general legislative and political expediency. For instance, the myths tell us that these gods are anthropomorphic or resemble some of the other animals and give us other, comparable extrapolations of the basic picture. If, then, we discard these accretions and consider the central feature, that they held the primary substances to be gods, we might well believe the claim to have been directly inspired. We might also conclude that, while it is highly probable that all possible arts and doctrines have been many times discovered and lost, these ancient cosmologies have been preserved, like holy relics, right up to the present day. It is these, and these alone, that we can know clearly of the ancestral—indeed primordial—beliefs.

—Aristotle1

What sort of a new under water boat ride; and what new spyglasses are to be invented for this vast domain?

—Johann Gottfried Herder2

If thought once attains power sufficient to give existence to itself within itself and in its element, the myth becomes a superfluous adornment, by which Philosophy is not advanced.

—G. W. F. Hegel3

Right at the very beginning of Bataille’s text that we will attempt to read here, we encounter the following terms: “mythic,” “mythological,” “myth,” and “mythology.” In order to be able to grasp the organizational role of these terms within the texts into which they have been woven, and in order to be able to decide if “myth” functions here as a concept or only as a signifier, it is necessary to briefly outline the Romantic concept of myth, which has been presupposed without exception by all later efforts to think the mythical. The Romantic concept of myth, just like that of German Idealism, indicates a turn that appears to have reversed the hierarchy of myth and logos that had been valid up to that point. Jean Bollack describes this turn in the following way:

While ever since Aristotle myth had appeared to be the corrupted form of an always already revealed truth, a form of forgetting or intentional veiling that philosophy once again sublates, for Romanticism myth counts as something primary and undetermined. Thus, philosophy becomes for Romanticism the explicator of this myth whose mysterious original truth it translates into a more controlled, more precise, and for this reason also poorer language.4

Generally speaking, in the following short presentation of the relation of myth and logos by the Greeks we will follow Bollack’s explanations.5

According to Bollack, Aristotle, who based himself most likely on Plato’s doxographic speculations in Timaeus and Critias, presupposes another age that is anterior not only to the present age but also to mythical times. This “Saturnine Age,” or “divine age of true theology,” which has been destroyed by a cataclysm, is an age that is in full possession of true knowledge concerning the divine, in short, of philosophy. Needless to say, with the catastrophic end of this age the science of the divine that characterized it is lost and is followed by a time of forgetting. Yet, according to Bollack’s reading of Aristotle (and Plato), “the legacy of this age, although fragmented and distorted, still contains enough truth to be incorporated into mythological thought, and to be able to bring forth again philosophy through the adjustment of reflection.”6

According to Aristotle, before the epistemological efforts of philosophy at progressively rediscovering the truths of the Saturnine Age, the myths of the poets are the first to take up the remaining traces of the lost science. Although the poets are the guardians of the philosophical heritage of the age of true theology, they also clothe, and thus disguise, it in mythopoetical ways. In other words, myths are only transitional figures between prehistorical knowledge and the world of posterity. They, therefore, represent something that after the loss of the oldest revelation of truth was added to it, and that is again to be cast off in the parousia of the Saturnine Age. In other words, according to this conception, myth itself is not a preform of philosophy but only a recipient in which something that is heterogeneous to it, that is, the traces of philosophy as it existed in the Saturnine Age, is preserved. Truth in myth is not something that intrinsically belongs to it.

But Plato and Aristotle view the return of the knowledge of the Saturnine Age differently. For Plato, the theology in question can come to a reactualizing completion only beyond the epoch that remains suspended between past and future. A fully accomplished philosophy—which for Plato arises also from myth and restores prehistorical knowledge to its full plenitude—is not possible either in myth or in philosophy but only beyond them. By contrast, according to Bollack, “the nature of Aristotelian metaphysics forbids it to search for the fulfillment of an original theology beyond itself.”7 Its own epistemological efforts at rediscovering the lost heritage are indeed its progressive realization.

Whereas for Plato perfection is banned from the world that we live in and is displaced into the beyond of the universe, for Aristotle the idea of the divine survives the demise of philosophical knowledge in such a way that the newly emerging philosophy can divest it of the mantle that mythopoetical activity has dressed it in so as to develop it until its new completion in this world. This is possible because for Aristotle the heterogeneity of mythology and philosophy is contained in the mysterious element of myth like a seed, as it were, yet, as we have already seen, “the ‘philosophical’ element, that is, the truth in myth, does not for its part belong to the myth itself.”8 Indeed, the fact that philosophy at its first emergence appears in the form of the mythical, as is to some extent the case with the pre-Socratics, does not at all deny its autonomy and its essential independence from myth. To the contrary, philosophy is from the very beginning a disposition that with its first appearance has already subjected myth to itself. Philosophy—just like science standing by its side—does not originate from a gradual rationalization of mythical thinking. It immediately ties itself to the idea of the divine, which is presented in myth only in a veiled form. From the outset, these direct ties to the idea of the divine secure for it its proper authority and autonomy in opposition to myth. They put philosophy from the beginning in a position of mastery of what is other than it.

But, ever since their births, philosophy and metaphysics have always relied on the mythologem merely in order to “clarify a thinking, which in spite of its theoretical autonomy does not yet possess its own language.”9 Philosophy, therefore, uses the discourse of myth in order to allow it to say something other, something alien to itself, given that myth has also already become alien to philosophy.10 The recourse to mythical language—which, under the already mentioned conditions, has been demoted by Aristotle to a world of images—is therefore not to be understood as a “lack in science” (PM, II, 284). Rather, this usage is grounded in the demand for the political effectiveness of philosophy (as it conceals the inability of philosophy to work out a language that is its own and adequate to it). With the “formalization of teaching” that renders “the recourse to mythical language superfluous,” the degradation of myth is further intensified. Henceforth degraded to a “figure of mythical narrative,” it duplicates properly philosophical discourse and makes two completely new kinds of application possible:

Either myth now becomes a container of the kind of meaning that was obtained outside of experience through speculative abstraction. In this manner, the allegory of the Sophists could affect an audience whose consciousness remained faithful to traditional representations and allowed, by means of myth, a system that was no longer mythical in nature to appear convincing to a general public.

Or myth opens up an access to the world of eternal ideas as intentional poetic fiction. It shows to man, delivered to temporality, the reasons that should move him to finally abdicate the mythical world.11

Philosophy’s claim to mastery grounded in its self-issued autonomy, however, cannot be explained merely on the basis of its relation to mythology as a world of images and as a means of rhetorical persuasion. Philosophy and metaphysics are from the very beginning instruments of mastery. They are the discourse of mastery. Vernant writes: “Greek reason is the type of reason that makes it possible to act in a positive, deliberate, and methodical manner upon men. . . . In its limitations, as well as the innovations that it brought about, it was truly the product of the city.”12

The description of philosophy as a discourse of mastery is preserved regardless of whether we present its birth as consistent with the emergence of the polis, its legislation, and its new social organization (as it happens in the works of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet), or if we derive this claim to mastery necessarily from its own concept of truth (as it was attempted by Bollack): “The break between myth and philosophy coincides with the assertion of the identity of all beings, regardless of how indispensable mythical forms of presentation remain even later.”13

This assertion of the identity of all being—with which philosophy in the proper sense of the term first actually emerges (an identity that philosophy tries to grasp beyond physis or Nature)—has nothing in common with the mythical supernatural: “it belongs to a quite different category; it is a pure abstraction, that which always remains identical, the very principle of rational thought made objective in the form of the logos.”14 Just as the essence of all beings from now on can be thought only as self-identity, discourse is subjected to the absolute requirement of noncontradiction. Therefore, philosophy establishes itself, on the one hand, through its rejection of the mythical mode of explanation and its critique of the supernatural, and on the other hand, insists on the inner coherence of discourse, through its break with the “logic of ambivalence” that characterizes mythical thought.15

We can demonstrate in Greek thought, in Plato as well as in Aristotle, the priority of logos over mythos: they form a hierarchy in which myth always represents only a corrupted logos. Philosophy will remain faithful to this relation until Romanticism. In the eighteenth century, however, the hierarchy appears to reverse itself. From this moment on, myth is credited with harboring originary truth, of which logos in the form of philosophy can only give an abstract, and anemic, expression. Henceforth, myth counts as a nonsublated remainder that confronts logos and reason with the unfulfilled promise by the latter of full presence. Provided that we could posit something like a “primal Romantic experience” of myth, perhaps Herder’s journal of his journey to France in 1769 would be the text that we needed to return to. This journey stands under the sign—or the “landmark [Wahrzeichen]”—of myth. The destination of the journey is France, which Herder tries to reach from Riga by way of the sea. The boat trip over the seas provides him an occasion to “explain the first mythological times.”16 Even in the case of the Greeks, mythology, according to Herder, came from foreign lands over the seas:

There exist thousands of new and natural explanations of mythology, or . . . it had to be sailors who brought their first religion to the Greeks. The whole of Greece was a colony on the sea. Therefore, it could not possess a mythology like the Egyptians and Arabs behind their deserts of sand. The Greeks needed a religion of the foreign, the sea, and the groves.17

In the same ways as these seamen a stranger, for Herder, is a refugee—“perhaps like someone banished from his fatherland in his youth, who has slain his father and seeks a foreign land”¹⁸—he takes the reverse way back. This time, however, the goal is not to bring a myth to the foreign land but rather to return to the source of the myth. Indeed, the return is a boat ride to the mothers, the “vagina hominum.”19

Like a child, Herder returns to this place, ignorant of the language of the foreign country, as he was raised only in the language of sciences and their abstract world of concepts inimical to the senses. With this, all the essential concepts are given in which the Romantic reversal takes place. Yet, significantly enough, this return and turning around fails to keep its promise. Upon his arrival in France, in place of the “mothers of being” (Nietzsche), Herder encounters only an old woman: “On the 4/15 of July, we disembarked in Painhöf and our landmark was an old woman.”20 Although Herder believes that he is motivated by his thinking to feel the mythical element, all he experiences is only “numbness,” “a kind of shudder that is not even the shudder of lust.”21 And while he is ready “to utilize all of his senses,”22 he is only destined “to see shadows, rather than to feel real things.”23 Indeed, the language of the sciences and the new rationality (in contrast to the “old reason” of the Greeks) by which he has been marked, whose spell Herder cannot escape, allows the anticipated return to the mythical only in a distorted form: as a “grotesque deformation,” as a “walk through gothic domes.”24 Therefore, the simple return or the turning back fails: what remains is the longing for the origins and the painful experience of the impossibility of its renewed realization.

This nostalgia still dominates, and seemingly even more consistently, The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism with its demand for a “new mythology.” In 1793, Schelling anticipated this program to elaborate a mythology that would function as “a means of the return of science to poetry” in his essay “On the Myths, Historical Sagas, and Philosophemes of the Most Ancient World.” Demanding a new sensibility (which has been lost to knowledge as based on understanding), myth represents for Schelling at this point in time the form in which the spirit of childhood—of the most ancient humanity characterized by ignorance and simplicity—dresses historical events and the first philosophemes. Myth is the appropriate and historically only possible form in which the imagination, the most effective faculty of the soul at the time, can express its representations. The mythical form, moreover, pursues the goal of a “doctrine, a presentation of truth,” inasmuch as it serves the purposes of “the sensualization of a philosophical speculation” or of an “idea.”25 As we can see in Schelling’s discussions, the mythical mode of presentation functions as an unavoidable “mythical garment” and a necessary moment of alienation.26 In order to bring an idea effectively to the people— to “a childish people, not capable of knowing the truth in general”—truth must be obtained as represented in a sensible-mythical and historical form.27

Yet, according to Schelling, “the mythical element in a mythical philosopheme pertains . . . only to the form of the philosopheme”—with the provision, however, that this philosopheme is not “mere poetry”!28 However, if the philosophy of the most ancient world could easily present itself in a mythical garment, the reason is that it was often a work of mere poetry. As Schelling holds, a philosopheme can be distinguished from a mythologem “mostly through its origin,” which is henceforth to be strictly separated from the origin of the mythical.29 Thus, the criterion of true philosophy is to be sought in its origins, which are to be distinguished from those of myth. Myth, consequently, must be understood simply as a sensible form, as a garment only for an intelligible content or for an idea in itself foreign to the myth. As a result, this definition of myth, distinct from its Romantic definition, once again follows the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition.

Myth—which for Schelling is also preceded by logos in the form of ideas and first philosophemes—nevertheless retains a positive value due to certain characteristics that belong only to myth. In contrast to the abstractions in which logos is caught up, through its oral transmission myth appears to be richer, more fiery, more alive, and more pleasing than the written discourse of philosophy, which addresses only the understanding and is therefore colder and more pedagogical, even if paradoxically it is more appropriate for truth and expresses it more precisely.

The whole reversal of the relation of mythos and logos in the case of Schelling then consists only of the following: Myth, the mere birth place from which philosophy emerges as always already foreign to myth, confronts philosophy with a language, which as a spoken language guarantees the sensible fullness of philosophical ideas, a sensuousness that is absent from the philosophical discourse as a written discourse wresting itself away from myth. This return to myth, the demand for a new mythology, the opposition of sensibility and understanding, under the perpetuation of the classical hierarchical relations between myth and logos, leads to the privileging of only certain aspects of the mythical, which can be held up against philosophy as an abstract science of the understanding. The Romantic reversal consists, then, of the demand on philosophy to redeem or to sublate the given promise of originary truth in a (new) philosophical mythology.

Herder’s failure (who could always only rediscover Riga in France) and the inner conflict of Romantic longing are overcome here in Schelling merely to the degree that only certain aspects of the myth and the mythological are taken up and preserved: its sensible garmentlike character as well as its promise of the full presence of the ideal, as the result of its oral transmission.

And so the movement begins in which the philosophy of German Idealism starts to reflect on its origins (no matter how foreign they might be to the logos speaking in them) as moments of its becoming. But however unavoidable and necessary the sensible shell of the first philosopheme may have been, it is again discarded in the attempt to dialectically appropriate the origins, insofar as the sensible itself can be conceptualized and sublated in the concept. Consequently, for Hegel, myth ceases to be a concept and is completely eliminated from philosophy. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, myth is primarily defined in relation to form, which is to be distinguished from the one of thought. Hegel writes: “Thought does not take the first place, for the myth-form remains predominant.”30 The form of the mythical is essentially a product of the sensuous representation in which the contents are dressed. But contents, for Hegel, are not immediately given and are not only belatedly subjected to the mythical form. Yet “the content of myth is thought. In the ancient myths, however, myth is not a mere shell; man did not simply have the ideas and then concealed them.”31 Insofar as thoughts are in myth, they present unreflected thoughts in a “mixture” with images: thoughts, in which essence is objectified but that, due to the fact that they are the products of sensuous imagination, remain subjective and cannot yet be raised to universality. Just as religion, which emerged from myth, addresses itself to the hearts and minds of people, myth also addresses only subjectivity. Like religion, myth must “enter into the sphere of subjectivity.”32 Truth must “in the first place come to men from without as a present object, sensuously represented.”33 This external form, however, is not adequate for the essence of truth: “the form of externality is devoid of Spirit.”34 It must be sublated.

Indeed, for Hegel, there is no doubt that in myths an implicit content is hidden:

As the products of reason, though not of thinking reason, the religions of the people, as also the mythologies, . . . indubitably contain . . . thoughts, universal determinations and truth for the instinct of reason is at their basis. Bound up with this is the fact that since mythology in its expression takes sensuous forms, much that is contingent and external becomes intermingled, for the representation of the Notion in sensuous forms always possesses a certain incongruity, seeing that what is founded on imagination cannot express the Idea in its real aspect.35

It is therefore essential to liberate the universal idea, the content, from the sensuous exteriority of the mythical shell, “to dig this content out of such myths” in the form of philosophemes:36 “The thinking mind must seek out the substantial content, the thought and the theory implicitly contained therein, as reason is sought in Nature.”37 According to Hegel, the Neoplatonists, but especially his friend Creuzer, have achieved this goal. Yet, under no circumstances can the liberation of the philosopheme in myths, its extraction from the sensuous shell, be the business of philosophy. Philosophy begins only when the philosopheme has already divested itself of its sensuous shell. This is the reason that mythology can claim no validity as part of the history of philosophy, even if universal ideas are hidden in it:

But Mythology must remain excluded from our history of Philosophy. The reason for this is found in the fact that in Philosophy we have to do not with theorems generally, or with thoughts which only are implicite contained in some particular form or other, but with thoughts which are explicit, and only in so far as they are explicit and in so far as a content such as that belonging to Religion, has come to consciousness in the form of Thought.³⁸

In addition, “The philosophemes which are implicite contained within Religion do not concern us; they must be in the form of thoughts.”39 Mythology is excluded from philosophy also because it does not speak the only appropriate philosophical language, since the language of philosophy is the only element in which thoughts can come into presentation purely without external adornments. Mythological “form is not suitable to Philosophy. Thought which has itself as object, must have raised itself to its own form, to the form of thought.”40 Only in the language of philosophy, in the language of words and concepts, is it possible for thought to reach its own transparency in order to possess itself. By way of an example, Hegel says of the symbol—which functions as the sensuous-material medium of presentation, as a mixture of image and thought—that it is not only the expression that remains deficient through the symbol but also that “thought concealed in symbols is not yet possessed, for thought is self-revealing.”41 Only with the transparency of language in which thought “is made the absolute ground and root of everything else,” only in a language that is the appropriate medium of truth, does real philosophy emerge.42 Only in this language, as logos and phonē, can thought appear undistorted to itself and possess itself, freed from everything sensuous and no longer separated from itself by something external (a shell or an adornment): “The Spirit does not need . . . symbols; it has language.”43 The Spirit possesses its own proper language; or even better, as the ambiguity of logos and phonē suggests, it is the language.

Thus, the Romantic reversal, inasmuch as it was a reversal at all, came to its end in Hegel. With the sublation of the sensuous as a moment in the becoming of the Spirit, the preoccupation with myth has become superfluous. Myth remains external, something low, which does not count as a first for philosophy, which can find its beginning only in itself. In spite of all the implicit contents and hidden philosophemes, the heterogeneity of mythos and logos persists from the very beginning. Incongruent to thought, the mythical form is the always already or always only corrupted logos in the Platonic-Aristotelian sense: the other of philosophy.

As a result, the reversal of the traditional priority of logos over myth turns out to be an illusion—a mere turn toward “origins” that seem to promise full plenitude and full presence for thought and that appear to have been betrayed by philosophy—precisely because the aim of Romanticism and German Idealism is in no way to question philosophy itself but only to demand that philosophy make up for something that had been missed. Indeed, without questioning the discourse of philosophy itself, it is completely impossible to reverse the relation between myth and logos. A careful reading of the irrationalist philosophies of the late nineteenth century, as well as their later effects on the reception of myths by Rudolf and Walter Otto, for example, would demonstrate this impossibility, and thus a willingness for only a limited return to the mythical. The radical privileging of the mythical, the subjugation of logos to the exclusive domination of myth is not thinkable, since the thinking of a first instance, of a beginning, is only possible as the thinking of logos, in logos and in its own proper language. Myth as absolute origin would be still and always only logos. Only a questioning of the discourse of philosophy, a radical undoing of the oppositional pair, could make it (perhaps) possible to create a “mythological” language, which then, however, could no longer be thought by way of the contrasting concepts of myth and logos.

Based on this brief discussion of the relation of myth and logos in philosophy, we can now devote ourselves in more detail to Schelling’s late lectures on the “philosophy of mythology,” especially since, as we will see, Bataille authorizes us to do so. While we have already identified a few crucial aspects that characterize the treatment of myth in the discourse of philosophy that we can oppose in the course of our work to the Bataillean term “myth,” our discussion of Schelling will now necessarily lead us into an area that, being excluded from philosophy (Schelling’s own “philosophy of mythology” as well), exceeds it as something in which it is included and represents the kind of “blind spot” in which we will see Bataille’s “concept” of the mythical operate. With the attempt to think this “unthought” of philosophy—something unthought that, nevertheless, does not culminate in the question of Being as it is defined by Heidegger but rather represents a blind spot that cannot be eliminated—to a certain degree our discussion will also cease to follow the orderly path of a history of ideas. This blind spot, then, is that which is devoid of the Idea and, above all, the Spirit.

2. Displacement / Ecstasy

The lectures on the “philosophy of mythology,” delivered by Schelling between 1830 and 1840 partly in Munich and then later in Berlin, coin a concept of mythology that we must call restrictive. Not everything that springs forth from the imagination of the most ancient humanity can be subsumed under this concept. Schelling’s definition of mythology as a theogonic process assumes a nonmythological beginning for mythology that still falls in the domain of the supra-historical. History, in the proper sense of the word, begins only with the mythological process itself, provided that its subject is not humanity as such but humanity separated into peoples. With regard to Bataille’s concept of myth, which we intend to develop later, what interests us is this event that still falls in the supra-historical and with which the process of mythology in Schelling’s sense first arises.

The relation of mythology to truth, its moment in the becoming of the Spirit, can be conceptualized only in hindsight, after the completion of mythology. The completion of mythology would also mean its sublation in a knowledge that would be capable of grasping its truth and singularity. Only a philosophical religion could assume this role. However, as long as the latter is still not available and a full evaluation of the meaning of mythology cannot be accomplished, a philosophy of mythology has no other choice than to explain mythology with the means of mythology itself. In this context, therefore, Schelling rejects every allegorical interpretation that would pretend to be already in possession of meaning. Likewise, he also refuses to derive mythology from an original revelation that had been lost or forgotten. Schelling writes:

We did not put mythology into the position from which we are going to examine it here, since mythology itself put us in that position. From now on, the content of this lecture is not our explanation of mythology, but mythology as it explains itself. In this self-explanation of mythology, it is no longer necessary for us to avoid the expressions of mythology itself. For the most part, we will allow it to speak its own language. . . . What we accomplish by putting these mythological expressions within our own arguments into positions where they must be comprehensible based on the context is that it is not we who explain mythology but mythology explains itself, and that it is not necessary for us to seek for the mythological representations meanings that are alien to them (sensum improprium) or to understand them allegorically. (PM, II, 139)

By means of such an approach, which explains mythology through mythology (and, for example, seeks to discover “most certainly the original meaning of a god” [PM, II, 353] in the etymology of its name), Schelling believes that he freed himself from “preconceived notions” and did not “in the least rely on a philosophy”: “the result, therefore, is independent from anything found or established by philosophy” (PM, I, 251). To what extent Schelling’s etymological method—which aims to understand the essence and above all the reality of these gods—can remain independent from philosophy (since the concept of mythology itself is already a philosophical concept) remains to be seen, just like the obvious connection between the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of mythology that Schelling explicitly emphasizes: “The philosophy of mythology is the philosophy of nature not according to its intention but according to the thing—in a higher sphere” (PM, II, 258). Indeed, Schelling attempts to “observe the mythological formation completely in the same way that we are accustomed to observing the phenomena and formations of nature” (PM, II, 265). The ideas belonging to the philosophy of nature that are repeated in the mythological process—inasmuch as the “natural at the same time also assumes the meaning of something divine”—also explain why, in Schelling’s approach, “mythological research could take on another meaning” (PM, I, 224).44 If we want to understand what initiated the mythological process, we are taken back to this sphere of nature, which reaches its completion with the development of the human being.

In Schelling’s case, we have to distinguish three different ages: the absolutely prehistorical, the relatively prehistorical, and the historical times. There is nothing beyond absolutely prehistorical time. As “the supra-historical, [it is] a time that is already not a time anymore in itself but always only in relation to the time following it” (PM, I, 235). It is “the time of a perfect historical immobility. It is the time of a still undivided and unified humanity, a time that itself does not need boundaries since, in relation to what follows it, it behaves only as a moment and as a starting point, to the extent that there is no true succession, no events, no sequence of times within it as in the other two times” (PM, I, 234).

Absolute prehistory, as we have seen, belongs to a still homogeneous humanity:

But if we ask the question, what single spiritual power was strong enough to preserve humanity in this immobility, we must immediately perceive that it must have been a principle, and a principle that exclusively occupied and dominated the consciousness of humanity. . . . A principle, which left no room for any other in consciousness and did not allow any other besides itself, could have been only something infinite, a God that completely pervades the consciousness common to the whole of humanity; a God that involved humanity in its unity and denied it any movement or deviation . . . ; only such a God could maintain this absolute immobility and standstill of all developments. (PM, I, 104).

The consciousness of prehistorical humanity on this level of the supra-historical is “in an absolute relation to God,” which means that what we need to think here is “consciousness in its pure substance before any real consciousness, where man is not a consciousness of himself . . . , but since it still must be a consciousness of something, it can only be a consciousness of God, . . . pure substantial consciousness of God” (PM, I, 185). In this respect, monotheism is “the ultimate condition of mythology” (PM, I, 185):

But . . . first as the supra-historical, and second not as a monotheism of human understanding but of human nature, since man in his original being has no other meaning than to be this God-positing nature; because he originally exists only to be this God-positing being, which is not a being for-itself, but nature turned toward God, as it were, in blissful ecstasy with God. (PM, I, 185)

Schelling describes this essential and potential monotheism, which still falls in the supra-historical and affects natural consciousness in its substance, inasmuch as it is not a known monotheism, as a merely “natural and blind” monotheism (PM, I, 187):

The blind theism of this primal consciousness from which we start—as posited with the essence of man before any movement, therefore also before any events—can be defined only as something supra-historical. Similarly, the movement—through which man by being put in the relation to the divine itself falls prey to the real God—can also be thought only as a supra-historical event. (PM, I, 191)

It is not real consciousness itself but the transition from natural consciousness to real consciousness, which still falls within the supra-historical, because with real consciousness relatively prehistorical time begins, that is, the time of the formation of mythology, whose completion then allows the emergence of history and historiography in the proper sense of the words.

It is now essential to trace the crisis of this first, immemorial, and natural consciousness intertwined with God in its very substance, in other words, the exit from nature, which remains a vague memory for humanity as a Golden Age. We used the word crisis because Schelling himself alludes to the fact that it means “setting apart and separation” (PM, II, 662). This crisis is caused by an accident, which introduces a split into man’s consciousness of God. Now, this primal consciousness itself is, at first, accidental as well, since that which was outside itself in the whole of nature once again possesses itself in the human being, this time, however, only in “blissful ignorance” (PM, II, 142) and therefore (still) possesses the possibility to come into being (again):

We call accidental in general that which could be and could not be; but that which can merely be or not be is also accidental, since it is and is not what it is, namely, capable of being, and it is not so that it could not be the opposite. The accidental, furthermore, is also that which, independently of itself, that is, with regard to itself—without its will—is accidentally what it is. The accidental is, therefore, also the undeservedly lucky. (PM, II, 152)

From what we have said so far, it follows that the God that human consciousness possesses in its very substance in the supra-historical age is therefore a blind, unknown, and to put it briefly, an undetermined (unentschiedener) God, because just as it has befallen the primal consciousness of humanity, it can also fall away from it. Now, this accidental and undetermined nature is confronted by the power of Nemesis: “The power, therefore, that . . . is hostile to the undetermined, to that what is what it is merely accidentally (and therefore undeservedly), is the power is Nemesis” (PM, II, 152).

In the state of its blissful ingenuousness, the possibility of the self-inversion of the capability for being or of the self in control of itself does not yet reveal itself to primal consciousness. This lack constitutes the moment of the accidental in the absolutely first. Schelling remarks that

this ambiguity, so to speak, may not persist—it must be decided. It may not remain, I say, and thereby also pronounce a law that bans everything from persisting in indecision, a law that requires that nothing remain hidden, that everything come into the open, that everything should be clear, determined, and decided, so that every enemy will be defeated and finally a perfect, calm being can be posited. In fact, this is the only, the highest law hovering over everything in the universe. (PM, II, 142)

Only insofar as the will becomes aware of the possibility of this inversion, this turning around, can the indeterminacy of the ambiguous nature (natura anceps) of primal consciousness and its God be terminated. For this, however, an indication pointing to it, and the activation of this possibility within the will itself, is necessary. As “the cause of this activation—through which the so far unified will is redoubled also for itself, or the inactive will is first put in a situation to will or not to will—solely this highest law of the world itself can be thought. This law of the world, the power inimical to the uncertain, the ambiguous, as well as the accidental, is Nemesis” (PM, II, 143).

The law of the world, or Nemesis, shows this possibility to natural consciousness, but not in order for it to want this reversal, “not in order for it to really become the opposite, but rather by not wanting the opposite to be what it is with freedom and with free will” (PM, II, 143–44). This Nemesis, who according to Hesiod must be counted among the children of the night, is nevertheless itself an ambiguous mythical figure. It is also the “misery of mortals.” Nemesis, who reveals for primal consciousness the possibility of overcoming its indeterminacy, who shows it this capability, becomes for it a seducer in the shape of Adrastea, “who makes that happen that did not happen and brings the merely possible to its completion and realization” (PM, II, 146). Therefore, as a result of the double-willed nature of Nemesis (according to Pindar), the “unhappy ambiguity” (PM, II, 151) of the happy primal consciousness is not overcome. To the contrary, it gets entangled in ever-more-complicated forms of ambiguity. Indeed, if it were the task of Nemesis to show humanity the possibility of warding off the potential inversion through free will, or to allow to exist the potentiality that humanity was entrusted with to preserve, Nemesis also tries to get humanity to will this possibility not only as a possibility but as a reality:

After the will has been shown this possibility and it is put in a position to make a decision, as a next step . . . the hitherto idle will really wants the being that it has been shown, and it really rises from the mere capability for being that it is into the accidental being that it has called upon itself. Nothing more can be said of the process itself than that it happened and it took place. It is, as I say, the primal fact itself (the beginning of history), the factum, the happening kath’exochen that happened. With regard to human consciousness, it is the absolutely first thing that occurs, the primal event, the irrevocable fact that cannot be revoked, cannot be canceled once it has happened. (PM, II, 153)45

If, therefore, the opening up of the possibility to step outside pure potentiality (the pointer of Nemesis) is already, “so to speak, the first deception” (PM, II, 152), then the process of the actual crossing over into reality (that is, the constitution of real consciousness and its corresponding God, which represents a process that “still falls completely within the domain of the supra-historical” as “the most ancient accident”) represents the “immemorial destiny [Verhängnis].”46

[It is] immemorial, because consciousness cannot think anything, that is to say, cannot remember anything earlier than this process itself. But it is a destiny . . . , because the will is surprised by the unintended result in a way that it cannot subsequently grasp. The will believed that it could still remain the same thing in reality what it was in possibility, but it finds itself deceived precisely on this point. It is, therefore, surprised by the result of its act, which appears to it to be unwilled, unforeseen, unexpected. (PM, II, 153–54)

The becoming real of human consciousness, therefore, consists of a fatal tearing away of itself from its entanglement with God, of being thrown out of the inside. In fact, the beginning of mythology “rests on a first mistake, the emergence of a principle that in actuality is not supposed to exist.” But this error, as we will see, is also a “beautiful mistake” (PM, II, 645–46). Similarly, and this represents the reverse side of the process, its beginning is to be explained as a “real displacement” of humanity from its original standpoint (PM, I, 205). Both of these complementary processes are named by Schelling’s expression “first dislocation,” the displacement of the blissfully ecstatic consciousness from the center (the inner to the periphery), as well as the elevation of a principle from its place beyond its limits (PM, II, 646).

The dissolution of homogeneous humanity and its hitherto unitary language takes place at the same moment, parallel to this double process:

The same God that preserved unity in its unshakable self-identity—which is no longer identical to itself and is now changeable—had to disperse the human race the same way that it had once held it together. The same way that it was the cause of its own unity in its identity, it is now the cause of its fragmentation in its multiplicity. (PM, I, 105)

With the crossing over from potentiality and from mere possibility into reality, through which the first God assumes its form, all the differences are posited in one single stroke. This first God is forced by the second principle—which displaces this God by exteriorizing it to the periphery of the first center that it had occupied up to this point—to proceed from one figure to another: “As soon as the first figure of the God is posited, so are all the subsequent figures as mere distant possibilities” (PM, I, 130). Furthermore:

The different forms of God correspond to equally different, materially distinct theonomies. . . . The different theonomies correspond to the different peoples, as even the latter are potentially present with the entrance of the second reason, even if they do not all appear in reality at once but in careful succession. (PM, I, 130–31)

Thus, the spiritual crisis of primal consciousness becomes the starting point for the emergence of successive polytheism, the confusion of languages, and the formation of separate peoples. “The foundation of mythology,” Schelling writes, is thus “already present in the first real consciousness, and polytheism is already present according to its essence in the transition to this consciousness” (PM, I, 192). We have already referred to the fact that the absolute-prehistoric time (the time of unified humanity in blissful ecstasy with God) is a time that in itself does not constitute a real time—“it is merely a time” that becomes the past “only in relation to the time following it.” In other words, it is a time that becomes having been time only belatedly. Consequently, according to Schelling, it follows that the God of such a completely prehistoric time (who is absolutely One for human consciousness) is always already the relatively One God and that human consciousness at this time is already the first real consciousness. However, for this first real consciousness, which the substantial consciousness of God has always already been, this absolutely One God is not quite real yet; just as consciousness itself is not yet real, since it still has not perceived the sign of Nemesis. Both consciousness and God are not yet in actu although already potentially real. The beyond of real consciousness, “consciousness in its pure substance prior to all real consciousness,” is therefore also always already real consciousness. Primal consciousness, for which nothing remains but the fact “that it is that which posits God in its truth and absolute unity,” this primal consciousness (as potentia it is already mythological consciousness) can, as Schelling writes, be a result only of a becoming, even if this process does not fall in history. But the supra-historical (the time of the One God, of the substantial consciousness ecstatically in God that posits God), as we have seen, is also the time of separation, the time in which the One God becomes relatively One, in which consciousness becomes the potentia of real (that is, displaced) consciousness. To put it briefly, the time of the supra-historical is the undifferentiated and indistinct time of the positing of a beginning, as well as its crossing out as a full beginning by the difference that is always already at work in it. The act through which the human being is displaced from its relation to God is an act, a movement, which as a supra-historical event, always already dislocates primal consciousness as well as the divine itself.

According to Schelling, “Only the consequence of the act remains in consciousness” (PM, II, 154), and no memory can reach back to it, since real consciousness and humanity as such first emerge from this act:

The consciousness emerging now, after the act, is the first real consciousness (prior to which consciousness exists only in its pure substantiality): this first real consciousness, however, cannot again become conscious of the act through which it was created, since it has become something wholly different through this act and is cut off from its earlier state. Memory requires the identity (the sameness) of what exists now (the remembering) and of the object of memory. (PM, II, 154)

In addition:

The first real consciousness can be found already with this affection, through which it is separated from its eternal and essential being. Consciousness can no longer return to it, and it can move no further away from this determination than it can move beyond itself. This determination, therefore, assumes an incomprehensible character for consciousness. It is the unwanted and unforeseen consequence of a movement that it cannot take back. Its origin lies in a region that it has no access to once it is separated from it. (PM, I, 192)

In what follows, we will delve in greater detail into how such origin must be understood if that to which it gives rise remains forever separate from it, and of what the consequences for consciousness are that arise from the incomprehensibility of the movement to which it owes its existence. This will interest us precisely because of what we will encounter in Bataille. But for the time being, let us note here the following: Understood as successive polytheism and theogony, real consciousness and mythology (in its restricted meaning as Schelling understood it) are the results of an immemorial crossing out or a dislocation of the center, of the One God, and of the consciousness unified in God.47 The original destiny that introduced into this unity the abyss of difference is the same power as the one that casts out consciousness and its God from the center to the peripheral path, through which these are first constituted as real consciousness and real God. This immemorial event preceding all thought (which therefore remains, strictly speaking, unthinkable) separates consciousness and God from the double ground from which they have emerged (the One and what the act is qua difference). Therefore, what necessarily emerges for this “self-alienated consciousness” is “a depth that remains unfathomable for it” (PM, II, 154).

This depth or abyss over which mythology and consciousness raise themselves, over which they are hanging, over which they are suspended, falls outside mythology: this is the nonmythological beginning of mythology understood as theogony. The separation, however, which sets the mythological process in motion, in which it expels and ejects that which constitutes it, and abandons it to the forgetfulness of the abyss, is once again the difference that first makes truth possible (inasmuch as the latter can exist only for a real consciousness).48

The falsehood that initiates the tension and the process is located . . . before the process. Therefore, within the process itself (and this is what it all comes down to) there is nothing false, only truth. It is the process of the truth reconstituting itself and, thereby, realizing itself. It is . . . , of course, not true in its individual moments; otherwise there would be no need for the progression to the next moment, for the process itself. It generates itself in the process, and it is, therefore, in it—as something self-generating—the truth that is the end of the process and is contained in the process as a whole in a completed form. (PM, I, 209)

The meaning of the process consists of the following two components: (1) Everything that was taken apart through the original separation can be brought together again and unified; and (2) the consciousness that stepped outside its original natural relations can once again be brought back to them, but in such a way that as a result the originally blind monotheism is realized and becomes conscious. This process—which can posit God only indirectly, and in which consciousness appears “as that which produces God and is, therefore, theogonic” (PM, I, 198)—will therefore reach its apex in the redemption of God from reality. In other words, at the end of the process consciousness will release this God (who has in the meantime become the real One God) from reality into potentiality again, this time, however, without any ambiguity and with free will. Since the mythological process contains the possibility of the delivery of God from reality to potentiality, inasmuch as it is the telos of the whole process, in spite of everything false that it rests upon, it remains (as the guarantee and only precondition of truth) a beautiful error.

Let us then further emphasize that for Schelling the process becomes possible only with the original separation in question. The affliction of consciousness by the stain of the real occurs through a separation from its essential being. Only on the ground of this immemorial and inconceivable separation does the process of the creation of the various god figures begin, which will lead in a teleological fashion to true monotheism.

As the preceding developments demonstrate, Schelling is involved here in a reflection on some of the metaphysical conditions of the concept of the process itself: the mythological process adopted by him has, like every other philosophical concept of the process, “always the alienation from the divine itself as a prerequisite” (PM, I, 212). This alienation drives the consciousness created by the original division necessarily into the succession of mythological god figures:

With this first determination, consciousness is at once submitted to the necessary succession of representations through which actual polytheism emerges. Once the first affection is posited, the movement of consciousness through these successive forms is such that thought and will, understanding and freedom, have no share in it. In this movement, consciousness develops unexpectedly, in a way that is no longer comprehensible for it. The movement, therefore, relates to consciousness as a destiny or a fate that it cannot oppose. It is a real power opposing consciousness, which no longer controls it and is overpowered by it. Before all thinking, consciousness is already taken in by the principle whose purely natural consequence is polytheism and mythology. (PM, I, 192)

Inasmuch as the human being or primal consciousness elevates God from potentiality and wills him to be real, this possibility turns against man and “shows him a completely different countenance, and instead of being his servant, it subjugates him, and he is now controlled by the principle that no longer contains itself within the limits of human consciousness” (PM, II, 164). Thereby, “the most ancient humanity indeed finds itself in a state of bondage—that we who live under the law of a wholly different time cannot directly conceptualize—struck by a kind of stupor (stupefacta quasi et attonita), seized by an alien power, and set outside itself (that is, outside its own control)” (PM, I, 193). The destiny that forces humanity under the yoke of an alien power is the law of generation, of the reestablishment of truth through “a necessary process (with regard to consciousness) whose origin is lost in the supra-historical and that hides itself from consciousness, and while consciousness might be able to resist it in individual moments, as a whole it cannot bring it to a halt let alone reverse it” (PM, I, 193).

The three concepts—mythology as theogony, the necessary process, and truth—are tightly bound, and therefore Schelling can justly write that “since we must suppose a necessary origin in mythology, we also need to acknowledge in it a necessary content, which is truth.” Truth is in it as such only to the degree that it is a process; however, only in mythology as a whole can truth be found and not in its individual moments: “truth is not the individual moments of mythology but the whole of the process” (PM, I, 211). The significance of these points needs to be emphasized since we will see that in Bataille myth is not grasped as a theogony, nor is it affected by the attributes of the processual or truth.

In order to bring the first main thread of our presentation of Schellingian mythology to a conclusion, we still need to speak about the end of this process. The mythological process cannot have anything else for telos apart from the reestablishment of the annihilated unity, which for Schelling means the unity suspended through the original act and the original fact: “Since primal consciousness is natural consciousness, consciousness cannot come forth from the latter without also returning to it through a process” (PM, I, 198). The same principle is valid with respect to God:

Objectively speaking, what pretends to be mythology is real theogony and divine history. But only the gods based on God are real, and this is why the final stage of the divine history is the generation, a real becoming of God in consciousness, in relation to which the gods behave only as individual moments of generation. (PM, I, 198)

If under the pressure of mythological succession consciousness does not stand in a free relation to God, the goal of this whole process in the different successive stages that it passes through is, on the one hand, to once again reunite the elements that have been taken apart from each other by the original act, and thereby, on the other hand, to allow God in his unity to become real for human consciousness: “We can therefore consider the whole process [following the alienation] as a transition from that essential monotheism (that has been, so to speak, incorporated into the essence of man) to a freely acknowledged monotheism” (PM, II, 126). At the same time, it is also obvious that the alienation that initiates the process yields to the necessity that, as the power of Nemesis, does not tolerate the blind monotheism of natural consciousness. It is a process that, as we have seen, in the end once again releases God from its actual reality into potentiality. But is this mythology unifying all of its moments in itself, then, the true religion? Does it make possible the consciousness of the One God that has become real? No, since what mythology realizes at its highest point (that is, in Greek mythology) is true only to the extent in which this truth can only be realized in a process:

The divine self is . . . of course not in mythological consciousness; only its image is there. The image is not the object itself, and yet it is completely like the object: in this sense, the image does contain truth. But as it is still not the object itself, it is also not true. The image of the true God is created in the last mythology in the same way, without the relation to the divine itself, to the true God, being actually present. (PM, I, 212)

If, however, within the process the divine itself can be constituted only to the degree that the process as process allows it, and if within the process of successive mythology the idea and the reality of true monotheism prepare themselves only as conscious monotheism—in which mythology, progressing step by step, performs separations, rejections, and ejections (and we will have more to say about the concept of katabole that describes this operation) that formally obey this first separation that led to the alienation from the divine—then the idea and the reality of the One God remain trapped in mythology even in the fulfillment of mythology. They remain caught in Homer’s history of gods and Hesiod’s theogony. We could even go as far as to ask the question whether the idea and the reality of God do not have to remain structurally bound to mythology itself.⁴⁹

In this context, the argument that Schelling devotes to Metis toward the end of the second volume is quite noteworthy.50 Metis is one of the daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys, whose lot granted by Zeus was to raise and educate young humans.51 Furthermore, Metis is Zeus’s first wife with whom he begot Pallas-Athena:

In Theogony, Metis is called by all gods and mortals the wisest. Metis is therefore obviously consciousness in its universality and in its freedom regained from the mythological process.52 However, inasmuch as Zeus absorbs this consciousness in himself,53 he elevates it to the level of a self-knowing consciousness, which is Athena. In this sense, Athena already transcends mythology. Metis is the consciousness that hovers over everything, including Zeus. But the mythological drive for generation that wants to secure and conclude its work does not allow this consciousness free from mythology—which could overcome the mythological world—to exist outside itself. . . . The mythological drive for generation, therefore, is able to bring it about . . . that even this consciousness is also absorbed in mythology. (PM, II, 665–66)

Thus, there appears to be no way out of mythology into an outside that would be different from it. When such an outside is posited, mythology reclaims it at the very moment of its birth. As a result, even at the final stage of mythology (in theogony as the first ontology and its self-presentation in the mythical element itself), freedom, consciousness, and truth cannot escape the process and the element from which they came. An act is necessary to achieve this goal, a separation analogous to the first act that brought into motion the process in the first place. The mythological process can be interrupted only by a real operation that must be as real as the one that defined the successive polytheism until its self-overcoming. Schelling remarks: “It can be overcome only by a real process by an act that is independent of human representations and surpasses it. Only an act can oppose the process, and this act will be the content of Christianity” (PM, I, 247).

The future tense of this sentence, like that of countless other passages in the lectures, bears witness to the fact that this act, or at least its effects, has still not been realized. So it becomes clear that the beginning and the end of the mythological process must still be thought from within mythology itself. So long as the act has not yet universally dissolved mythology in the free relation of the human being to his God, the originally blind monotheism to be freed in the future (and that would realize itself in a philosophical religion) remains still mythical. Mythology remains, then, suspended between two supra-historical states, whose discussion remains trapped within the laws of myth itself. Schelling states it explicitly: “This philosophical religion does not exist” (PM, I, 250). But “precisely such a philosophical religion would be necessary in order to grasp as possible and therefore philosophical what we feel compelled to acknowledge as real in mythology and, thereby, to attain a philosophy of mythology” (PM, I, 250). Only, this philosophical religion does not exist,54 and neither does the philosophy that would be in the position to grasp what mythology truly and really is. Philosophy “knows only a religion of reason and a rational relation to God” (PM, I, 250–51).

In the absence of a foundation for the philosophy of mythology, in hindsight we can now also understand why Schelling tried to execute his analyses without reference to any philosophical presuppositions, why he wanted to explain mythology by mythology itself. As such, the Schellingian philosophy of mythology therefore becomes merely a variation on or a transformation of Hesiod’s theogony. The same way as in the latter consciousness and knowledge about the theogonic process are again incorporated into myth, Schelling’s philosophy of mythology remains, in spite of all revelations and the anticipated act of Christianity, caught in the orderly flurry of mythological images.

Even if Schelling’s Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation) were a philosophy (of the act) that would allow us to think and sublate myth, that would make it possible to release God once again into his potentiality, and that would be therefore the discourse of the outside or the other that allegedly masters mythology and can no longer be captured by it again, it nevertheless remains that in Schelling’s philosophy of mythology another “other” is inscribed unthought by Schelling, which contains the condition of possibility of mythology as a theogonic process as well as of philosophy in its function of sublation. This is, however, a blind spot, and a blind task for thought, to which we must now set ourselves. Schelling did not perceive it, and not without reason, since it would have led him astray from the goal of his analyses. It is this other, which at first presents itself as something immemorial, that we want to try to “think” now.

3. The (First) Katabole

The Homeric world of gods silently hides a mystery in itself, and it is constructed above a mystery as if above an abyss that it covers with flowers.

—F. W. J. Schelling (PM, II, 649)

It was in order to be able to live that the Greeks had to create these gods from a most profound need. Perhaps we may picture the process to ourselves somewhat as follows: out of the original Titanic divine order of terror, the Olympian divine order of joy gradually evolved through the Apollonian impulse toward beauty, just as roses burst from thorny bushes.

—Friedrich Nietzsche55

Don’t all these beautiful things run the risk of being reduced to a strange mise en scène, destined to make sacrilege more impure? And the disconcerting gesture of the Marquis de Sade, locked up with madmen, who had the most beautiful roses brought to him only to pluck off their petals and toss them into a ditch filled with liquid manure—in these circumstances, doesn’t it have an overwhelming impact?

—Georges Bataille56

In what sense is philosophy able to think something other at all? The “philosophy of mythology” suggests that science, poetry, and philosophy came into being only by way of an original alienation that at the same time designates the birthplace of mythology as a theogonic process. The origin of the three disciplines is to be understood in such away that initially they were unified in mythology as “a common center,” and they separate from each other only gradually to formally oppose each other (PM, I, 49). If the formation of philosophy in its separation from mythology takes place by an attempt to eliminate everything mythical, it nevertheless remains that for philosophy as well as for mythology the immemorial instance that set the whole process in motion in the first place, and of which real consciousness has no longer any memory, appears to philosophy and mythology as the absolutely other, something inaccessible and foreign. There is no doubt that Schelling tried to sub-late in reason this immemorial instance as the condition of reason. The place of this sublation is his positive philosophy.57 Nevertheless, it can be shown that the foundation created for reason through the positing of the immemorial (by way of a katabolically collapsed ground) cannot be sublated without a remainder even in positive philosophy. To make this point, our demonstration must rely upon the materiality of Schelling’s language, and it must explicitly turn to his images and metaphors in order to be able to show that the discourse of positive philosophy does not fully control its own language.

The immemorial, as the other of philosophy, must be committed to forgetting in order for philosophy to be able to constitute itself. Therefore, philosophy does not know this other, and at the risk of its disappearance once again, it is not even allowed to know it. This other is not allowed to become an object of philosophical debate, since otherwise philosophy could no longer comply with the necessity of its own self-grounding. Instead, philosophy knows another other, its other. The mythical is this other, that which is foreign to it to the second power, that philosophy eliminates from itself in the act of its own constitution. To the degree that philosophy, at least since German Idealism, has developed itself as “a history . . . of self-consciousness,” and thereby begins to grasp the element from which it emerged as a moment in its becoming, it gains “with its own formation within history” a “relation to the inside of mythology” (PM, I, 223). Thereby, this other to the second power that it had to eliminate in order to constitute itself becomes the external moment of its inside, that is, the other that is always only and always already the other of its self. As a result, philosophy considers itself called upon to “discover reason in the apparently irrational and meaning in what appears to be meaningless, but not, as this has been attempted hitherto, by way of an arbitrary distinction such that the things that we dared to declare reasonable or meaningful were counted as the essential, while everything else was considered merely accidental and was counted as veiling or misrepresentation. The intention must rather be that form should also appear as something necessary and reasonable” (PM, I, 220–21).

Consequently, there will be no more absolutely other for philosophy. Not even nature, to which Schelling’s philosophy of nature testifies: “Nature cannot be explained simply on the basis of its being other” (PM, II, 267). And this is why there cannot be an outside at all in mythology, in which the development to spirituality repeats itself only on a higher level than in nature. Let us take up the case where antimythological elements can be detected as in the case of Indian mythology. Schelling notes:

As we make the transition to the inexorable mythological process, we must note that right from the beginning there was an opposition against it, and a system opposed to mythology has preserved itself in silence from the beginning all the way through to Indian mythology, which of course could not itself avoid being brought to ruin. (PM, II, 205)

The same holds true for the Persian religion. Although, like that of all other peoples, Persian consciousness had also completed the transition to mythology, it also resisted the reduplication that, as a decisive moment of the mythological process, creates a spiritual God in opposition to the real God. The resistance to this division must, therefore, be understood as “a reaction against the mythological process” (PM, II, 224), as a “standstill in the path of the mythological process” (PM, II, 209). However, inasmuch as this standstill or resistance commences with the beginning of the theogonic process and turns itself against it (and is therefore antimythological), this “antimythological doctrine” cannot deny “its kinship with the mythological principles. . . . It cannot do so precisely because it is antimythological; mythology is present in it albeit in a sublated form” (PM, II, 224). In spite of all the opposition, the antimythological tendency is, consequently, founded on mythology. Consequently,

it is by no means absolutely unmythological. Rather the Persian system contains . . . all elements of mythology only in another position. . . . It is, as it were, a suppressed and arrested mythology preserved only in potentia. (PM, II, 228)

Even more remarkable is, however, Schelling’s treatment of Chinese culture and its religion. He writes about the Chinese that it is “an absolutely unmythological people” (PM, II, 521). From this it necessarily follows for him that it is not a real people in the proper meaning of the word but “a still surviving part of absolutely prehistorical humanity” (PM, II, 522). Now how does Schelling connect this unmythological to the mythological process? He contends: “The Chinese character opposes the whole of the mythological process, not just one moment of it” (PM, II, 559). It represents “in a certain sense, the side opposed to mythology” (PM, II, 558). Shouldn’t we then conclude that there exists an exception in the general theogonic process that questions the universality of this process? I quote:

In any case, since mythology is an eccentric movement that tends toward one side, which therefore needs an opposite, the totality of the development of the world encompassing all sides requires that this opposite should really exist, while the totality of presentation requires that we do not exclude this opposite but rather grant it a place in our discussions in order, as it were, to provide a counterweight for the positive side. (PM, II, 558)

Therefore, it follows:

If the Chinese character does not fall within the domain of mythology but stands entirely outside it as its pure contrary and relates to mythology as its absolute negation, it is obvious that we cannot even speak of this negation posited in Chinese consciousness until the positive side has been produced and developed, since negation only has meaning as the negation of its opposing positive side and receives a content only through the latter. (PM, II, 559)

As a result of these presuppositions, the Chinese character represents “only one of the ways out, only one of the deviations in face of the results of the process” (PM, II, 526). This exception, therefore, as a possibility and a necessity and the opposite of the mythological process as such, is of a kind that does not disturb the process at all but rather confirms and furthers it just as the exception does it with the rule. The exception (the unmythological) is thus the necessary yet external moment of the process itself:

It belongs to the character of the world spirit as such that it realizes every true possibility, it wills or allows everywhere the greatest possible totality of appearances, and its actual purpose with the movement of the world is that every true possibility should be fulfilled. (PM, II, 526)

Consequently, the absolutely unmythological is not an opposition, just like the antimythological, which represents a standstill within mythology. The absolutely unmythological is an opposition to mythology in general from the outside, but in such a way that this outside is posited by mythology itself. This absolute outside obtains its meaning through the opposition. The opposition of the mythological to the unmythological gives it its meaning. Thereby, it becomes a true outside with its foundation in the becoming of mythology, in its inside, in its truth. Therefore, it is not the kind of other or outside about which philosophy would have to worry.

The question that emerges here is whether it is possible at all to think something like an absolute other that would be detached and released from what philosophy is capable of conceptualizing and apprehending. Can it exist as an antiphilosophical or unphilosophical other without immediately being reabsorbed by philosophy? In any case, as an absolute other it cannot be a complete, closed, unconditional outside, since these are the very concepts through which philosophy has traditionally thought its own other.

In order to detect the traces of such an impossible other that is contrary to thought, we must take yet another detour through Schelling’s text. This detour is the attempt to determine whether the unmythological completely succumbs to that above-mentioned opposition to the mythological-theogonic process understood in the Schellingian sense. To that end, we must first devote our attention to the phenomena that Schelling describes as unmythological for being still supra-historical, namely, the religion of the Pelasgians and Sabianism.

Let us recall here that the supra-historical represents an immemorial state in which the natural consciousness of homogeneous humanity was completely absorbed in a substantial, blissful ecstasy with God. This God, however, was blind, and the consciousness of this humanity did not really know anything about this God. But this is also the timeless time of the division and the crisis in which consciousness is cut off from its interiority and its self through the power of Nemesis as soon as it really wills this God. This supra-historical state is like the becoming of difference within the One. But since this becoming cannot be historical, it cannot be thought otherwise than an always already accomplished event, as the always already effective split that divides the One in itself, and displaces as well as the consciousness absorbed in it from itself.

The first religion, the religion of the Pelasgians, that Schelling describes—on the one hand, relying on Herodotus and, on the other, on Plato—is therefore a religion already marked by the original division.58 It here becomes clear that the principle of the One (about which we have shown that it held together the original humanity before the emergence of the nations) is itself already fragmented. In addition, consciousness also opposes itself here already to the consequences that follow from its becoming real. This is a state of tearing apart,

in which the One (that consciousness wants to maintain as the absolute center, as the absolutely or exclusively One) is unavoidably broken up and turned into a multiplicity for consciousness that it does not want. Consequently, it still seeks to restore the unity in this multiplicity. And since this One is the God that rules in consciousness and it is torn apart and turned into a multiplicity for it, the necessary creation of this struggle for consciousness is the first multiplicity of gods, or rather of God, the first simultaneous polytheism. (PM, II, 172)

In this struggle, this tearing apart, this breaking up of the exclusively One, in its becoming peripheral in nature, the stars become gods (and not the other way around): “The exclusive being broken up in nature—pushed to the peripheries = the astral. Similarly, consciousness is also displaced to the astral” (PM, I, 179).

The first polytheism, the religion of the Pelasgians or Sabianism, as Schelling describes sidereal religion in general, is star worship: the adoration of the dispersed that is still willed as a unity. These gods, therefore, are of a spatial nature who, just as in Plato’s Cratylus, are naturally wandering on an “everlasting course” while “orbiting in a circle that is not subservient to but essential for them and that belongs to their nature” (PM, I, 174). Consequently, this time—according to the above-mentioned definitions of the absolutely prehistorical and supra-historical time—is a time of rest without motion: a time that does not know any becoming. It is characterized exclusively by dispersion and the eternal orbiting of fragments without any becoming. With regard to the most ancient humanity, this corresponds to “a part of humanity that has still not progressed to historical life and the formation of peoples,” a time of “erratic wandering around,” in short, a time of nomadic life (PM, I, 182). It is a time without law, constitution, or possession, since this humanity, under a foreign force, is itself possessed.

Let us define this state more precisely. With regard to the Pelasgians, Schelling retains the following moment from Herodotus: “that they have sacrificed everything for the gods but without distinguishing them by names or epithets. We have here the time of a silent, still enclosed history of gods” (PM, I, 18). Schelling writes:

The first appearance or effect of God in consciousness and the first acknowledgment of God as such must . . . be distinguished. It cannot be acknowledged as God immediately as soon as it announces itself or begins to produce its effects in consciousness; and as an incomprehensible being for consciousness, it cannot be named immediately either. (PM, II, 277)

Furthermore:

I recall here once again what Herodotus says about the state of mind of the Pelasgians (that is, the original Hellenic people) in a so far little understood passage: that although they knew Gods, they did not distinguish their names. We have here a state in which the gods of the late theogony exist still chaotically, merely materially and substantially—namely, the state that in the Pelasgian, pre-Hellenic consciousness preceded the setting apart, division, and separation of these gods. The Hellenic people first emerged in historic life as Hellenic people through or with this division. As Pelasgians, they were still part of prehistorical humanity that was preserved until its moment came, and as long as it remained undecided, it bore the gods in its consciousness according to their substance but did not articulate them verbally. Based on Herodotus’s account, we can see how the whole mythological past weighs on the consciousness of the Pelasgians and renders them mute. (PM, II, 588)

The multiplicity or fragmentation that characterizes Sabianism inhibits the becoming of multiplicity through the very attempt to hold it together. Only an even more thorough fragmentation will grant language the possibility of naming. The silence that distinguishes this time also shows that the language of the Pelasgians must have been “astrally animated,” as it were. Indeed, the “sidereal force” that defines language in the supra-historical is the force of writing that breaches the spoken word. Furthermore, it is monosyllabic and is characterized by the inhibited development of individual words (and thereby also of names).59 Finally, under the sway of Sabianism consciousness lacks the capacity to present images:

The adoration devoted to unformed, inorganic masses untouched by the work of human hands is more ancient than all the images and belongs fully to the earliest times. It was in lifeless solidity and pure massiveness (in which form is still lacking or appears to be accidental, and even internally the spiritual most often shows itself dead or darkened) that it was most possible to believe at the time in the presence of a God that is closed in itself, resists all spirituality, and insists on materiality. (PM, II, 293)60

We can summarize these developments in the following way: Supra-historical humanity is in a state of silence, dumbness, the dominance of writing over the spoken word, and without images. It is a state of darkening (due to the emphasis that Schelling puts on the stars in opposition to light and the sun), in which a blind consciousness worships an equally blind god: “The God of the first times—the God of pure Sabianism—is without objection the blind God” (PM, II, 288). This “God existing in blind being” strikes the consciousness of humanity with a similarly blind force. It is also relevant, and this will become clear only later, that in these times this blind consciousness “wants to affirm [behaupten, that is, also provide with a head] the One as the absolute center” (PM, II, 172), yet this unity unavoidably breaks up into a multiplicity for it. Thus, it is the time of the beheaded (enthauptet) god, the headless god: Acephalous. Following Herodotus, Schelling understands this absolutely supra-historical state to be still devoid of mythology. All the traits that characterize the mythological process as a theogonic process are still absent. Nonetheless, although or precisely because it is in absolute opposition to the mythological process, Sabianism does become for Schelling the originary moment of the process:

In fact, Sabianism in itself is still unmythological and unhistorical, since no individual element forms a sequence or a step forward for it. This, however, does not prevent it from being, at least for us, the first member and element of a future progression, that is, of a future mythology, which in general is already acknowledged in advance. (PM, II, 199)

Schelling can achieve this by conceiving of this state (even though it is supra-historical) as “the conquered and conquering exclusivity [and centrality] of the first principle” (PM, II, 350). However, due to this belated determination as the originary moment of the mythological-theogonic process, certain decisive aspects that served the description of the supra-historical are suppressed: first and foremost, that centrality is already posited as peripheral; that the One in its first “form” is always already fragmented; and that this state is always separated from its inside, from the first principle, through the split of the divided self. Sabianism could be a first moment only if it were possible in retrospect to make out in the supra-historical a state of primal consciousness, in which the substantial interconnectedness of consciousness with God would be indifferent. Yet

God itself is not absolute indifference (= that to which nothing can be unequal) but absolute difference (= that to which nothing can be equal), and therefore the absolutely determined (id quod absolute precisum est), cut off from everything according to its nature. (PM, II, 100–101)

Thus, the human being or its primal consciousness can never be substantially bound to God in pure indifference. This means that although this moment (which is supposed to be Sabianism), even though it is unmythological and supra-historical, would always have to refer back to another earlier moment, since contrary to all assertions otherwise, certain elements sneak into its description that can never come first, provided that indeed there existed a blind yet potential monotheism whose dispersal on the night sky was the origin of the movement that brought about monotheism with an iron necessity through the theogonic process. We must also add that there is nothing within Sabianism that could bring this process into motion by itself. Indeed, the Pelasgians became Greeks only by completely giving up their religion. By accepting Hellenic mythology and, thereby, the possibility of the theogonic process, they came of age and became capable of language. What Homer and Hesiod have taught Herodotus is

the novelty of the history of gods as such, namely, that it first emerged as fully and completely Hellenic with the Greeks. Herodotus places the Pelasgians before the Greeks, who became Greeks through a crisis—what kind of crisis, we cannot say at this point. (PM, I, 18)

Certainly, this passage is not unequivocal. Nevertheless, it still remains that in Schelling’s description of Sabianism nothing prepares and secures necessarily the transition within the process to the second stage. This second moment is “the becoming peripheral of the first principle [which, as we have seen, has always already been peripheral], where at the same time it becomes the object of a possible overcoming” (PM, II, 350).

Schelling called the transition to the second moment, which leads from the state of the supra-historical to the historical and mythological, crisis (krisis): separation or setting apart. The concept, however, that most appropriately describes this transition is the concept also used by Schelling: katabole.

Katabole, derived from kataballo, means

1. To throw down, downward, downstairs; to push down; to plunge; to hurl;

2. To lay the foundation of something, to originate, to ground, to begin;

3. To drop, to throw away, to cast away from oneself.61

The three meanings could be brought together in the following way: the katabole is a process in which “something” is thrown away from itself in such away that this throwing opens up a deep abyss into which it plunges. Thereby this “something” becomes the ground, the foundation of that which now appears as the opposite of the abyss, that which is above it. In the act of expulsion, the katabole opens up the opposition between above and under: through the process of throwing down, it founds the thrower as the self at the same time as the thrown as the ground of the self.

Without being able to fully trace down through all of its stages the whole process that begins with the first katabole, which always progresses with the help of another plunge, here we will attempt to better understand only the first downfall.

“The exclusive rule of the principle of the One was realized in the originary religion, Sabianism” (PM, II, 570). Quoting Herodotus once again, Schelling has Urania follow Sabianism as the transition to mythology: “Urania is . . . the first god figure as such that follows pure Sabianism. She is the immediate transition to historical, that is, to actual mythology. . . . Urania is . . . the turning point between the unhistorical and historical times of mythology” (PM, II, 200). Indeed, Urania is the goddess who follows the exclusive One and, as we will later see, the upright-standing god, who became exclusively One by becoming real for consciousness. This exclusive god of the supra-historical prehistory is overcome and cast down by Urania:

Urania is . . . within mythology the first overthrow of the principle that was once in an upright-standing state, if I may say so, the first katabole. In mythology, she is the same moment that we must think in nature as the actual beginning of nature, as a transition to nature, as everything gradually began to transition from the original spirituality to materiality, which subsequently became available only to the higher demiurgic powers. This is the moment when the world is grounded on a foundation, when that which is erected in being becomes relative non-being and a ground—the ground of the actual world, if by world we understand the manifold, gradated difference of things from each other, the world of divided Being. Before that there is only undivided Being. (PM, II, 201–2)

The once upright-standing principle of the exclusive One (the One that has become real for consciousness) collapses with the katabole. It is struck down and thereby becomes the ground of that which now emerges as the world and mythology elevated to this position through the act of casting down. This is how the first division that sets the process in motion is constituted as real duplicity, since, as we have already shown, the duplicity that separates substantial consciousness—the natural consciousness as always already in transition toward real consciousness—from itself is not yet real duplicity as it is not a conscious duplicity. Appearing to consciousness as the open conflict of principles, this duplicity is hierarchical: one of the poles provides the ground for the other. The toppled god of Sabianism, which has now become a relatively exclusive One, thereby enters an opposition with the god that has overcome it through a katabolic precipitation. As a result of this downfall, it becomes the ground of mythology and something other than the god it originally was. While earlier it was exclusive, now it comports itself only in relation to Urania. This reduplication is not irrelevant. In order to clarify it, let us proceed to a comparison:

Chronos (a god who still belongs to the unmythological and to Sabianism) is the inorganic time of mythology, but we should not understand the inorganic here as the relatively inorganic, the way it is now as the foundation of the organic. The inorganic that precedes everything organic is wholly other than that which already has the organic outside itself as its opposite and above itself as its superior. The relatively inorganic only exists together with the organic. The absolutely inorganic, however, is the time that fully precedes the organic, when the inorganic is not at all in a struggle with the organic, as the true primal rocks show no signs of organic beings, while the later formations already conserve the traces of a conflict between the inorganic and the organic. . . . It is impossible for the relatively inorganic to come into existence before the organic. The relatively inorganic also comes into being through a katabole, per descensum. But nothing can become the ground, the relative non-being, the past, unless that of which it is a ground and relatively past is posited as well. (PM, II, 356–57, emphasis added)

We encounter here an other of mythology that is no longer identical to the earlier discussed antimythological or unmythological instance. To be more precise, it is necessary to highlight two types or two aspects of the unmythological. Or even more than two. First, there is the unmythological that, as a whole, accompanies the process and acquires its meaning as the opposite of the mythological: we could call this the synchronic other. Furthermore, an unmythological must be thought that entered the order of the relatively unmythological through a katabole, as it is overthrown by its opposite and becomes its ground: the diachronic other. Finally, there is the (perhaps) absolutely unmythological that precedes the first two (but not in a temporal or a spatial sense) and that represents the very possibility of the separation of the mythological and the relatively unmythological to begin with.

We must conceive of this absolutely unmythological in the following way: As its name already indicates, it represents the absolute outside of mythology; yet it is not the opposite, the other side, or the way out of mythology, since the other side of mythology is the unmythological brought down and knocked down by the katabole—that is, it is the relatively unmythological. The absolutely unmythological, therefore, can no longer be thought through the categories of the mythological and the relatively unmythological.

Schelling, however, obscures the differences that we have found necessary to establish reading his text. The reason for Schelling’s refusal to consider more precisely the relevant distinctions is that if the separation were absolute and the fragmented did not remain One in its tension, the necessity of the process that restores unity would be jeopardized. Schelling emphasizes that “if [the powers] could fully disperse, there would be no process” (PM, I, 106). We must now examine the above-mentioned obfuscation in order to highlight a few additional aspects that will allow us to think the absolute other in its impossibility—that is, the unmythological that does not allow itself to be subsumed under the moment of the relatively unmythological in opposition to the mythological.

We should remember again that the religion of homogeneous humanity was Sabianism. With the krisis and the katabole, through which the supra-historical gods are toppled, the different peoples and mythologies appear:

Until the moment arrives that it is supposed to represent, every people stays behind in a potential state as a part of the still undecided humanity determined to dissolve itself into peoples. As we have seen, the Pelasgians persisted in such an undecided state before they became Hellenic. But since the krisis, which is the effect of the second reason, in general applies to the whole of humanity, a people reserved for a later time and a later decision also goes through all the moments but not as a real people but as a part of a still undetermined humanity. Only this way is it possible that the moments divided among different peoples unite themselves into a complete mythology in the consciousness of the last people. (PM, I, 131)

This process, however, which progresses gradually and allows one part after the other of this still undifferentiated humanity to participate in the process in order to reunite them later again, leaves one part of original humanity behind forever. Of this part—for example the population of South America—it is said that it is “only externally similar to humanity.” For Schelling, these are “masses that—although physically homogeneous yet still lacking any moral or spiritual unity—have remained among themselves.” He adds: “They appear to me to be the sad results of that krisis from which the rest of humanity salvaged the ground of all human consciousness, while this ground was completely lost to them. They are living testimonies to fully accomplished, unmitigated dissolution. The entire curse of dispersal has been fulfilled on them” (PM, I, 112). This part, therefore, is not an intact remainder of the original homogeneous humanity but rather the part brought down by the katabole that elevated the other peoples into the mythological and the historical. It has missed the annexation, and it had to be sacrificed for the sake of the process: as a remainder, it had to undergo a “perhaps instinctive separation.”

“It is as if the higher and freer development of European nations had been deadly for all the others” (PM, I, 97). But the imperialistic and logocentric character of this katabole remains unquestioned, as it is not allowed to glimpse in this remainder—this residuum consecrated to death—its own necessary other and that, therefore, it must eradicate. We retain here only that this part of humanity remains without a ground and is ruled by the principle of death (which is naturally thought here only from the perspective of triumphant truth).

We can illustrate the treatment that the part cast out, thrown out, or excluded from the process receives on the problem of fetishism as it is raised by Schelling. Against the uncritical applications of this concept, Schelling restricts his use of the term to the analysis of particular customs of tribes and peoples who worship “inorganic matter” and therefore remain on the level of Sabianism eliminated from the theogonic process. As a result of this separation, the worship that was meaningful until the first katabole, as the first moment of the process, belatedly loses its meaning, with the result that henceforth only death as such will be worshipped.

This also explains that actual fetishism—that is, a fetishism that really only worships the dead wood, or the dead stone, or a feather, or a claw—cannot be considered a real moment of the actual mythological movement. It is by all means based on a mythological moment, but in fetishism it ceases to be a moment of the mythological movement. It exists only among peoples that have been separated out at this point of the theogonic movement as merely dead and stagnant products. (PM, II, 295) The peoples removed from the movement, just like their worship of “inorganic matter,” are affected by the exclusion in such a way that they are left over as “dead residuum.” They no longer possess any truth, since truth is either the totality of the process itself or one of its moments as long as it remains a moment. Schelling remarks that “false religion as such is always only a dead and, therefore, meaningless remainder of a process, which in its totality is truth” (PM, I, 212).

Schelling, therefore, intervenes against the identification of the fetish worshippers with the unhistorical peoples. They are merely prehistorical peoples, which should not be confused with the former. This distinction, however, is ambiguous: It can mean that there existed unhistorical peoples, who had stood outside the process before it began. But it can also mean that these peoples, to whom Schelling devotes his attention, became prehistorical at the moment when the unhistorical peoples entered history. The prehistorical peoples are no longer the unhistorical peoples as such, since by missing out on their inclusion in the theogonic movement, they became something other than what they originally were. It follows from this necessarily that the pre- and supra-historical as well as the absolutely unmythological cease to exist with the emergence of the process. In hindsight, from the perspective of mythology and its truth, the unmythological had never existed. The katabole with which the movement begins strikes down the unmythological in such away that it is transformed into a meaningful ground and, in more abstract terms, it becomes the other of the self.

This transformation, which happens to a moment of the theogonic process as soon as it becomes past, behaves the same way as the transformations that we have to assume in the grand historical development of the Earth, about which geologists cannot explain so many things precisely because they think every entity and every formation as originally being what it became only when a progressive development posited it as a past. What is separated out as past thereby becomes something other; and it is no longer what it was before, when it was still a living element of a progression. (PM, II, 296)

By striking down what was already there before the process and what appears as a past moment through the theogonic-mythological progress, the movement of the katabole, thus consists either of transforming it belatedly into the meaningful ground of the process or, inasmuch as it resists the process and persists in existence, of denying it any founding function. Thus, it can be said about the remainders of the process—which do not allow themselves to be absorbed in the ground of the mythological movement, since they persist in the unmythological—that they have nothing in common with the relatively unmythological, that is, with the mythological that retrospectively founds mythology itself. From the perspective of this progressive movement, they represent a dead residue that is no longer comprehensible even for the excluded peoples or tribes who were left behind, since they are no longer capable of remembering the process in which they were (perhaps) once a meaningful moment: “This is how the merely material worship of the stars has remained behind from the original spiritual Sabianism after the theogonic movement has left this moment behind like a residue or caput mortuum” (PM, II, 296). Dead residue or caput mortuum: a dead, severed head that can be understood only as a result of a process that deposits it in the form of a residue. Caput mortuum or dead origin, dried-up fountainhead: qua head, a dead extremity.

Let us keep in mind the expressions Schelling uses to describe the excluded products of the katabolic movement that cannot become relatively unmythological. Now, since the dead residues show themselves precisely where the transition from the supra-historical and the unmythological to the mythological takes place, and since they concern the religion of Sabianism that only the first katabole could overcome and strike down, in spite of all the distortion that they suffer through their overthrow, these residua bear witness to the absolutely unmythological. Similarly, Schelling’s descriptions of the severed products of the katabole, which continue to exist as consecrated to death, completely match the characteristics of the state of the Pelasgians and Sabianism, which in itself is unhistorical and unmythological: dumb, imageless, blind, formless, and so on. This absolutely unmythological—which is not outside in a synchronic manner like the unmythological Chinese character, which after all serves the process as its affirmation, but rather represents the absolutely unmythological in a “diachronic” fashion—undergoes a blurring and obfuscation that hide the differences between the relatively and absolutely unmythological as a result of Schelling’s efforts to allow it to become, “at least for us,” “the first link and element of the future progress,” of the future mythology known by us “in general already in advance” (PM, II, 199).

We can distinguish two forms of this other of mythology as theogonic movement. On the one hand, there is Sabianism, inasmuch as it is for itself and has not yet belatedly become the relatively mythological ground of mythology itself, that is, the moment when Sabianism still does not know any becoming and is still at a standstill and at rest. On the other hand, there are the overthrown and excluded products of the katabole that, in their persistence on an already surmounted level, cannot be made into the ground of mythology. Similar to the inorganic that precedes everything organic or relatively organic, this unground or abyss that cannot found mythology should be a “wholly other,” one that can no longer be thought as the “true outside” of mythology and philosophy. What Schelling asserts of relatively prehistorical time (which, as supra-historical, becomes relative prehistory in hindsight) must apply even more to the absolutely supra-historical, unmythological wholly other and, if you will, untrue outside:

Historical time itself, therefore, is not continuous with prehistorical time. Rather, it is cut off and separated by it as something wholly other. We call it wholly other, but not because it is not historical in the broadest sense, since grand things do happen in it and it is filled with events, only of a wholly different kind and obeying a wholly different law. (PM, I, 234)

This untrue outside and the wholly other (the absolutely unmythological in Schelling’s sense) is an other that neither mythology nor philosophy is capable of mastering. It is in this sense that we must also understand the blurring between the absolutely and the relatively unmythological that we have tried to describe in Schelling and that functions as a setting aside or an exclusion. This putting aside sets the wholly other to the side, to the margins and the edges of mythology and philosophy, but as their untrue border they do not want to side with them at all. The setting aside, however, is at the same time also an exclusion, in other words, one of the unthought sides of the katabole that founds mythology and philosophy. It follows from this that the wholly other—the untrue outside as the unthought of philosophy and mythology (in the Schellingian sense, needless to say)—is the unwanted (the other side of the will) and uncontrollable waste product of the movement of the katabole that constitutes philosophy and mythology, whose effects they will never fully master.

To be more precise, the movement of the katabole constitutes the discourses of philosophy and mythology through the exclusion of the wholly other. As a result, these discourses are now in the position to posit their other in such a way that it becomes the other of their own selves. In doing so, both discourses practice the movement of the katabole itself that they believe to have mastered. But they are not capable of controlling that which is created by the katabole; neither of the two discourses is capable of thinking the wholly other law from which they have emerged. This is not a weakness of philosophy or mythology resulting from their allegedly ideological nature. Rather, this impossibility is a necessarily inherent impossibility of philosophy as a product of the katabole without which philosophy and mythology would not exist. Indeed, philosophy and mythology obey the law of the katabole without their knowledge: incapable of thinking that which founds them (and therefore not being capable of accomplishing their self-grounding), they let their origin be what it is: something unthinkable. Philosophy does not possess the power to fully control its own veiling function, since as an extension of the overturning movement, it stands in the service of the wholly other, which withdraws (itself) with its help.

Thus, in our efforts to think within the Schellingian text a wholly other from which mythology could be unraveled, in the end we are referred back to the katabole (itself). The katabole whose movement generates philosophy and mythology hides a side, another side, that produces an other, which as an unground and an abyss reaches ever deeper as the ground of philosophy and mythology. This side is the katabole (itself) as the abysmal untrue ground of philosophy and mythology.

It follows from this that we cannot try to think the wholly other, the untrue outside of mythology and philosophy from the outside in opposition to the whole of philosophy as something unphilosophical or antiphilosophical (which are still moments of philosophy). Rather, we must highlight in or outside the movement of the katabole that constitutes philosophy and mythology a side that is not overpowered or overcome by any of the two discourses, namely, the abyss, which is the katabole itself, over which it produces itself through and together with philosophy and mythology.

Consequently, the “radical” thought of the katabole does not intend to destroy philosophy and mythology from the outside. It is, rather, the deconstruction of philosophy in the sense of the operation introduced by Jacques Derrida. According to this operation, the other or the outside that opens itself up in traversing a philosophical text is an outside that is to be read within philosophy. Nevertheless, it is external to philosophy to the degree that philosophy is incapable of thinking it and cannot posit it without the risk of undoing itself. Schelling writes: “The first throwing down or laying down the foundations, this katabole—which first provides a basis and the materials for the subsequent process—is nothing less than a turning point in science, which could never enter concrete reality without this mediation” (PM, II, 258). It follows from this that the thinking of the law of the katabole as the unthought and as the blind spot of philosophy and mythology also opens up another application of science, since just like the two other domains of knowledge, the latter first emerges with this movement as well. Thinking the law in question grants another kind of access to science different from what philosophical reflection makes possible, an access that we will encounter in our readings of Bataille.

We will now turn our attention to yet another aspect of the fabric of the Schellingian text, which will allow us to think the katabole from a new perspective. With the help of this aspect, we can establish a connection between the katabole and another specific movement that has gained a crucial theoretical significance with the beginning of Freudian psychoanalysis, namely, castration. Schelling writes: “In other words, this transition [from the unmythological to the mythological] could be represented as the unmanning or emasculation of the first exclusively ruling God” (PM, II, 194).

Although we have earlier argued with Schelling that Urania represents the first god of the transition, as she (just like Cybele) katabolically displaces the exclusive and upright-standing god, this claim is not contradicted by the fact that in Greek theogony Chronos represents the figure who unmans Uranus. Chronos, “the general name for the unvanquished, still upright-standing real god” (PM, II, 578), is merely another form of the same god who always manifests itself in different aspects, or moments. Hence, Chronos merely prepares the way for Urania’s crucial katabole. The liberating god announces himself through this first act, that is, also the last katabole through which Zeus, the god who has again become spiritual, completely casts down the past.

What then is the function of the unmanning of Uranus with regard to the final dethronement of Chronos by Zeus?

That Zeus deprived his father Chronos of his throne and, according to some stories, also of his manhood means: . . . for a while, creative nature has produced only wild monstrosities (like the inorganic); this was followed by a time when the production of mere matter stopped, and organic form appeared in place of the amorphous and the formless. The end of this formless production is the unmanning of Chronos. Zeus is himself the force of nature that already possesses form and produces forms, and that inhibits and limits the first wild production preventing it from further creation. (PM, I, 30–31)

The act of castration, the downfall of Uranus and Chronos, introduces the assertion (Behauptung) of the spiritual over the real principle. This act initiates the binding of the formless to form, the imageless to the image, blindness to seeing, and the nameless to the name. In addition, this act also introduces the transition of writing to the spoken word, to logos and the predominance of speech. With the assertion of the spiritual principle, with castration and the katabole, the overturning principle becomes the head [Haupt], a living head (in opposition to the caput mortuum), since the principle first acquires a head through them in the sense that the head represents “the intelligible part” (PM, II, 421). As we have seen, the first gods of the unmythological supra-history were acephalous: similarly to what we find with the Egyptians, they bore animal heads over human bodies. Yet, these half-human and half-animal forms are already creations from the times of the transition, the first katabole; thereby they are also compromise formations between the spiritual epoch and “the once again threatening spectacle of the all-consuming principle, before which (prae quo) nothing individual could exist or subsist” (PM, II, 368). The first principle of supra-history, therefore, must have represented the truly headless and acephalous. Schelling, however, perceives in this fragmentation and tearing apart of the real principle, which represents itself in half-human and half-animal bodies, its death throes, “the final convulsions of this deisidaimonia, this principle of fear” (PM, II, 369) of the unmythological prehistory as a result of the violent unmanning through the self-asserting spiritual principle.

This death of the real principle had to be violent, the result of a struggle, not gentle and quiet, but, as I say, explicitly, cum ictu et actu bound, so that consciousness expressly posits also the spiritual god as that which was not possible without the death struggle of the real god. (PM, II, 269)

The unmanning of the father and of the devouring and engulfing acephalous gods is always carried out by the sons of these fathers—Chronos and Zeus. Now, at the end of all the kataboles and castrations, we first encounter “with Zeus as the head . . . the actual Hellenic history of gods, and it is the same turning point—the beginning of actual Hellenic life—that the poet designates mythologically through the name of Zeus, and the historiographer historically through the names of the two poets” (PM, I, 19–20). But it follows from what we have seen so far that the unmanning, the downfall of the exclusive and upright-standing gods—an act that introduces the transition into actual mythology—is the overturning of the castrating principle itself. The gods unmanned by Chronos or Zeus are the devouring acephalous gods (threatening their children), whose very headlessness—similar to the head of the Medusa, but in an inverse fashion—represents the threat of castration. Zeus, by removing Chronos from his throne and possibly also robbing him of his manhood, merely repeats the law of prehistory. As the head of the Greek Olympus, he is subject to this law whose victim he becomes as soon as he applies it in order to assert himself against the unmythological. By asserting himself against prehistory and its formlessness and by making form, image, language, head, and so on possible through the unmanning of castrating gods, he counteracts castration with castration itself, a process still inscribed in the law of castration as well as in that of the katabole itself. This is why it is no surprise that Zeus’s head is always only a mask worn by the one who succumbed to castration. It is true that we cannot read this in Schelling—only, to a certain degree, in Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy, Apollo actually assumes the same position against Dionysus that Zeus possesses against Chronos and Uranus in Schelling. For Nietzsche, Apollo is the constructive, controlling, form-giving, and ordering god, who is opposed to the boisterous and wild Dionysus representing the primal pain of the primal One in the figure of the convulsively dancing satyr. Apollo can be thought only as the one who, with the help of the principii individuationis, restrains the destructive effects of the god who tears himself apart. At the moment of the irruption or the return of the always only arriving god, Dionysus, into the Greek world, we see “the figure of Apollo, rising full of pride, h[olding] out the Gorgon’s head [Medusenhaupt] to this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian power—[who] really could not have countered any more dangerous” force.62

That Apollo’s head is, thus, a Medusa head means that the head threatening with castration represents the always already castrated and removed head. Ever since Freud’s sketch “Medusa’s Head,” we have known that the fright occasioned by the sight of this head is, on the one hand, the fear of castration and, on the other hand, due to the fear of the swarming snakes surrounding the head, also the self-assertion of manhood in face of this threat. As Freud claims, “A multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration.”63 In face of the threatening intrusion of the Dionysian, which he knows how to fend off only by castration, Apollo can erect himself in his full pride only by giving form to and shaping the equally castrated/castrating god, the primal pain tearing itself apart.64 This erection in face of the threat of castration serves merely as an apotropaion to reassure the castrated that he is still in possession of his manhood. Nietzsche writes: “But, on the other hand, it is equally certain that, wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever.”65

At the sight of such titanic powers, which tear themselves apart in the form of Dionysus, Apollo, so to speak, turns into stone, petrified by fear. Just like the erection, for Freud this hardening also means the self-assurance of manhood. At the same time, however, Apollo himself becomes rigid as a Medusa head: his looks are not any less terrifying than those of Dionysus. In the struggle against the threat that Dionysus’s all-consuming and all-annihilating principle represents, Apollo necessarily assumes the face of that which he is fighting, even if perhaps in a modified form. Standing under and subjected to the law of castration, as soon as he attempts to fend off the threat of castration with the threat of castration itself, Apollo becomes “a rigid majesty” that allows “the Doric state and Doric art” to appear “as a permanent military encampment of the Apollonian.”66 This way he takes upon himself the traits of the state and the powers that he is trying to avert: stiffness and immobility. These aspects appeared to us already from the very beginning as characteristics of the primal state, even if they cannot be recognized as directly Dionysian.

This short excursus through Freud and Nietzsche has perhaps highlighted for us an unthought side of Schelling’s Zeus. This is, in effect, a side that must necessarily deface his head as the head of Greek mythology, since he obeys the law of castration for the purpose of his own assertion (Behauptung).

Thus, the thought of the other, the outside of mythology (in the Schellingian sense) and of philosophy at the same time requires that we think castration and the katabole. Since castration is always opposed and denied, it is not a surprise that philosophy performs that blurring and veiling that we have mentioned earlier. As we have noted, philosophy continues to be subject to this law even in the act of concealment and hiding. Consequently, neither the katabole nor castration (but only a certain kind of castration) can be sublated or repressed. The concealment of what Schelling terms “wild infinity” (PM, II, 654), which is prevented from its desolate proliferation by the katabole and castration, reaches its absolute peak with Hellenic mythology: “It becomes the general mythology that none of the earlier were. It becomes the mythology that contains the perfect exposure and explanation of all previous mythologies” (PM, II, 591).

And so the first gleam of philosophy begins to shine in the mythological process drawing to its end, especially in Hesiod’s poem, which should be understood, according to Schelling, “as the product of a scientific consciousness” (PM, II, 595): “The mythological process reaches in Hellenic consciousness its end and final crisis; we have seen here the first gleam of a philosophy that seeks to comprehend mythology” (PM, I, 255). But as we have already seen, especially with the figure of Metis, this knowledge does not at all sublate the ground of mythology. The comprehended result of the process remains an integral part of real consciousness, that is, of a consciousness still subject to mythical law. Indeed, in the orderly pantheon of the Greek world of gods, an esoteric pole can be opposed to the exoteric one, in which the knowledge concerning the way in which the realm of gods has come into being, a knowledge that is hidden and that hides itself, remains caught up in mythology. These esoteric institutions and the knowledge preserved in them are the mysteries “whose development Herodotus ascribes to the philosophers” (PM, I, 256). We will have more to say about the role of these mysteries in our discussions of Bataille. Thus, the following should suffice here: In these mysteries, the essence or the inside of mythology is preserved as the esoteric knowledge about the world of gods that has become exoteric. For Schelling, the relation of the exoteric and the esoteric can be represented in the following way:

(1) The esoteric keeps reproducing itself but only through the mythological process; it cannot separate itself from it; it does not come about as something abstract but always only as enveloped in the process; (2) . . . nor can the exoteric sublate this esoteric consciousness; since, in its emergence, the exoteric always posits the esoteric, like the shell always posits the core since it is a shell only inasmuch as it surrounds a core. If it did not posit the esoteric, it would be pulled into the inner dark birthplace, which lacks divisions and conflicts. The external, free being of the exoteric presupposes the esoteric as the obstructing force that was overcome. Only when the unity itself that obstructs and rejects every multiplicity steps back into the hidden mystery does the multiplicity remain externally standing as the pure product no longer grasped in dark becoming but as a really finished product. (PM, II, 643)

Similarly to what we find in Nietzsche, the “roots” of the “Olympian middle world of art,” which were “again and again overcome” and “veiled and withdrawn from sight,” come into view here as well.67 The covering up of this inner dark birthplace of the exoteric world of gods, all of whom are endowed with heads, formally still obeys the law through which this place has been expelled. The abyss, the mystery, above which the pure sky extends itself, is the bottomless depth that made it possible to create the ether of the Greek world of gods through suppression, a precipice that, so to speak, the sky covers over with flowers:

After the dark and darkening force of this uncanny principle (we call uncanny everything revealed that should remain secret, hidden, and latent) . . . after the violence of this uncanny principle that dominated earlier religions was deposited in mystery . . . could it first occur to [the Homeric age] to formulate this pure poetic history of gods, after the actually religious principle was sheltered in the inside and was fully let free on the outside following the spirit. (PM, II, 649)

The mysteries—which represent “the other by no means accidental but rather necessary side of Hellenic religion” (PM, II, 647) and correspond like the inside to the outside, the esoteric to the exoteric—constitute an other that this time, as the inside and the essence of the self-asserting world of gods that has been fully turned inside out, contains the seeds of purely spiritual consciousness: philosophy and science. Although the knowledge available in the mysteries remains shrouded in mythology and remitted to the future, to the degree that they preserve the proper religious meaning of mythology, the knowledge of the mysteries is still the suppressed beginning of free thought and of the consciousness that, as the true outside of philosophy, announces the liberation from the mythological process. This other, this genuine other of mythology remains still caught in mythology. At best, its disentanglement has just begun.

What concerns us, however, is not this outside, this other of philosophy, but the false other of philosophy in general and of Schelling’s philosophy in particular. And when we tried to remove the flowers, the roses, that cover the abyss, we did so to make visible the manure pit over which (according to a not fully reliable anecdote) the Marquis de Sade had scattered the petals of beautiful roses. We sought to bring the abyss itself into view, on the one hand, in order to show even more clearly that everything noble and beautiful has its roots in the downfallen abyss and to profane the rose petals in sacrilege; on the other hand, in contrast, to allow the stench of the abyss to rise to the skies, as it were, even more strongly.

Philosophy is not capable of thinking this completely other and “absolute” outside of philosophy and mythology as an unground, abyss, and manure pit. It can always only perceive in it that which grants “no separation or setting apart.” Philosophy is not in the position to acknowledge that the movements of the katabole and castration—which form the basis of its constitution as a discourse and which it believes to be in control of—are the movements of this abyss (itself). The abyss conceived of as difference is the “wild infinity” with which philosophy does not want to have anything to do, and which, therefore, according to Schelling, is to be attributed to those objects that “philosophy must consider to be outside of every relationship to itself.” As Schelling writes, this is “everything that does not have any essential reality within itself,” and “furthermore, everything corrupt, deformed . . . unlimited, endless, . . . dead and stagnant” (PM, I, 221–22). These are the same characteristics that we have read in Schelling’s text in the description of the unmythological and the absolutely supra-historical! As we have seen, however, this “absolutely” other and unmythological is not an anti- or unphilosophical other. Rather, it is the other that is not to be thought by philosophy. It is the abyss that appears in philosophy as a blind spot and that philosophy (subject to the law of this abyss) must cover up continually. Even though philosophy precipitated and struck down this abyss to raise itself up, it still remains inscribed in it forever.

We have taken upon ourselves the blind task of thinking this blind spot, so that we can begin our discussions of Bataille, precisely because Bataille’s text situates itself explicitly in this spot fully, without any reservations. Therefore, the operation that we have carried out on Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology in order to lead us to the Bataillean concept of myth did take place with the intention of situating Bataille’s concept in the perspective of a history of ideas. The Bataillean text is not based on ideas that he brought together in order to weave them into his text. To the contrary, his writings position themselves “immediately” in those unthought and unthinkable openings of all philosophy that make its discourse possible. These openings cannot be equated with ideas, since they are not thought and they are not to be thought in the philosophical sense. Inasmuch as thinking and speaking are one as logos, and ideas can only be spoken and thought, what confronts us in this turn to the Bataillean text is that which precedes their articulation: writing, the text, and graphemic operations. This scene is not philosophical: What writes itself here, therefore, is the katabole, the virtually limitlessly extended castration as it were whose limitlessness is not to be confused with Hegel’s bad infinity, as it designates an infinity in/out of philosophy that constitutes the precondition for concepts that cut off all further regression. This infinite is this cutting off (itself) that is not controlled by philosophy.

The way some imagine to themselves a presuppositionless beginning, is such that they should not presuppose thinking itself either and, for example, should first deduce the language in which they express themselves. But since this cannot take place without language, there would remain only the falling silent, what some try to approach through incompetence and faint audibility, and so the beginning should also be the end. (PM, I, 312)

What Schelling advances here would be, in fact, the consequence, if philosophical discourse began with reflecting on its own language in language itself. In this dilemma, however, this “false” presupposition, which can be false only for philosophy, stands in opposition to something that philosophy does not control and that, as we have seen following Schelling, dominated the period of the unmythological: writing and certainly the cry, Bataille’s and Nietzsche’s cry. This silent writing and the inarticulate cry lie beyond the “particular terminus a quo,” which can “only be desired by the lover of true science.”

If, as Schelling writes, the will to think the limitless and endless cutting off can only be the accomplishment of “a barbaric philosophy,” then, in the case of Bataille and our attempts to retrace what he has written, we are certainly moving in the domain of such a barbaric philosophy.

4. “X Marks the Spot”

When the human sciences analyze the original and prelogical aspect of myth, they grasp only the shadow of triumphant philosophy. The method of the sciences continues the philosophical demonstration. A conceptual system predicated upon the principle of identity conceals the object that it is supposed to grasp. Ethnology and sociology cannot experience mythology either in themselves or according its own laws, nor can they reconcile it with the laws of scientific thinking. No matter how strong the sympathy is that animates their research, in the end they cannot avoid interpreting the unbridgeable alterity of myth as a deficiency. The concept of historical development offers them the appropriate medium in which they can leave the question concerning the essence of myth unanswered and, thereby, render the legitimacy of scientific thinking unquestionable. —Jean Bollack68

The opposition that we encounter at the very beginning of Bataille’s “Pineal Eye” is not that of mythos /logos but myth/science (and philosophy). Here Bataille is following at first a philosophical current that started sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century and, finding its explicit formulation in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, created an “irrational” movement that attempted to play off myth, life, and so on against the logos ossified in abstract philosophy and science. What remains in philosophical discourse after the sensuous elements of the mythical and its “ambiguous logic” are cut out is a lifeless logos. Science, on the other hand, in the form of positivism and empiricism, forms the necessary yet similarly powerless counterpart to abstract philosophy and tries to get hold of that which escaped philosophy as a concrete object. It remains powerless because it approaches the concrete only from the perspective of its application according to social interests. Lebensphilosophie (as the “philosophy of life”) turns against the atrophied and abstract objectivity of philosophy and science by opposing its concept of experience to that of explanation. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it has degenerated into the most commonplace worldview and popular philosophy.

In a certain sense, we can discover also a popular understanding of science and philosophy in the works of Bataille. Sartre has explicitly commented on this aspect of Bataille’s work in his essay “Un nouveau mystique” (A new mysticism). Yet, and we are getting ahead of ourselves here, this popular understanding of science and philosophy is radicalized by Bataille in the sense that—as Bataille writes, “excessively simplifying things” (OC, II, 222)—it can become the representation of what has been cast out, such as the dregs of society, as well as of the isolated subject. Free from deferential and submissive aesthetic wonder that characterizes in an essential manner the popular and ideological reception of science and philosophy, this extremely simplified scientific and philosophical discourse serves the purpose of articulating the “elementary” interests and needs of those who were denied access to language as outcasts. The concept of “lived experience” is in turn subjectivized in this context to the degree that, paradoxically, it breaches the limits of the subject without, however, thereby obtaining any of the objectivity that belongs to philosophy and science. This “uncomprehending” and thoroughly subjective management of scientific ideas leads to certain movements in Bataille’s text that do not only lead to a decisive historical break with the aesthetic and poetic use of these areas of knowledge by Surrealism, for example, by Breton, but also make it possible to shatter the discourses of science and philosophy from the inside.

Contrary to what Sartre believes, however, this scientism and philosophism do not render Bataille’s entire thought false. The belated vengeance of philosophy announced by Sartre is even less certain. Sartre writes: “But philosophy takes revenge: this technical material employed without proper judgment, animated by a polemic or dramatic passion, which is bound to produce gasps and spasms for our author, turns against him.”69 A critique like this is based on the traditional assumption that an author’s own ideas exist independently from language, in this case independently from a scientific and philosophical vocabulary. Furthermore, it assumes that thought, inasmuch as it exists, moves exclusively in the domain of thinking. The question at hand, however, concerns not only the relation of traditional philosophy to science and empiricism but in particular the specific relation that Bataille’s discourse, his language, and “its logic” entertain in relation to these domains.70 One of our tasks is to define this relation more precisely.

In order to explain the relation between myth and science or, respectively, philosophy as it functions in Bataille’s text, let us now turn to the first two sections of the first version of “The Pineal Eye,” including the appendix of notes that is included in the second volume of Bataille’s collected works. These sections bear the following titles: “Scientific Anthropology and Mythical Anthropology” and “Conditions of Mythological Representation.”71

Thus, anthropology constitutes the field within which the confrontation with the conceptual pair mythos /logos takes place. The possibility of both a scientific and a mythological or mythical approach to anthropology divides the latter in itself, so we can assume that mythological anthropology already implies another concept of mythology different from the one used by scientific and philosophical anthropology. If Bataille claims in the appendix that it is necessary “to confine oneself in anthropology to something other than philosophy in order to begin” (OC, II, 413), then the logos that appears in the designation “anthropology” can no longer be the one that speaks from the side of science and philosophy. Inasmuch as in the first chapter of “The Pineal Eye” mythological anthropology is played off against scientific anthropology, it follows that the logic that organizes mythological anthropology must itself be somehow of mythological nature. As we will later see, this logic obeys the laws of the phantasm. At this moment, however, we need to assert only the following: When Bataille speaks of mythology or speaks of myth in an adjectival form (as in “mythological anthropology”), no logos speaks here, not even in a primitive or original manner.

The situation is similar in the case of the term anthropos as well. In scientific and philosophical anthropology, anthropos designates the sovereignly autonomous and synthetic subject with an unchanging identity in opposition to nature. Anthropology explains the universe from the perspective of the human being and in view of the human being. Calling it “the unconscious unity of the mental and the natural,” Hegel had already put anthropology on trial.72 In the juxtaposition of the mythological and the anthropological, however, Bataille attempts simultaneously to preempt scientific-philosophical anthropology from constituting itself and to reduce the human to a moment in the becoming of the Spirit. It is true that the human being in the form of anthropos still represents for Bataille an upright-standing living being that has been known by philosophy since Plato (for example, anthropos is derived from ano athrein, “to glance up,” as well as from enarthron echein epos, “to possess an articulate language”),73 but standing up or glancing upward will prove to have in Bataille’s text certain consequences that are completely alien to science and philosophy.

Now, mythological anthropology will have to achieve the following: it has to show “what the formless universe has accomplished by producing man rather than something else, how it has been led to this useless production and by what means it made this creature something different from all the rest.”74 This description of the task of anthropology highlights at first only the opposition between the human being and nature or the universe. This opposition, which comes from philosophy, is temporarily accepted by Bataille. Whether we understand universum, following Schelling, as “the inverted One turned inside out (whose inside is external and whose outside is internal)” (PM, II, 90) that transforms itself “into substance and substratum” (PM, II, 258–59) through the process of universio (“the original moment of the inversion” [PM, II, 532]), or, following Blanchot, as the universe, that is, as “that which is turned toward the One, or “the cosmos (which presumes the existence of a physical time that is oriented, continuous, homogeneous, although irreversible, obviously universal and even super-universal),”75 the reference to the One as plenitude, truth, and presence remains constant. What also remains is the primacy of the whole over the moments or parts that it contains, which (either taken out of or reintegrated into the One) must appear to be accidental in contrast to it.

The adjective informe (formless) that Bataille uses to describe the universe, however, fundamentally changes this privilege of the One. What does informe mean? We can learn the function and role that this adjective has to perform in Bataille’s text from the Critical Dictionary that Bataille published in the journal Documents:

Thus, formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or a spit.76

It is obvious that Bataille uses the word formless in its pejorative sense to circumvent the “exclusive valorization of the immense universe” (OC, II, 132). Through the adjective formless, the universe thus becomes that which in a certain way (uniformly) diverts itself so as to become a (unified) whole of the formless or a formless whole. Thus, already through the lexical juxtaposition of the two words, the downgrading of the universe in relation to what it creates (the human being as the object of mythological anthropology) is accomplished. The human being that this formless universe creates is described as a “useless product” supposedly different from everything else.77 Relying on the analyses of Emile Meyerson,78 Bataille resorts to the concept of a “major improbability” to describe the “irrational diversity” of the universe. While Meyerson still believed that the concept of improbability can grasp the diversity of the universe, for Bataille the mere concept of improbability is no longer enough to think a notion of “irrational that is sufficiently irreducible,” which means something irrational that is no longer tributary to reason. Bataille recognizes, indeed, the “almost indelible contexture of the rational and the irrational” described by Heidegger in the following way: “We must not conceive of the trust in reason and the powerful dominance of ratio one-sidedly as rationalism, for irrationalism too belongs within the scope of trust in reason. The greatest rationalists are most likely to fall prey to irrationalism, and conversely, where irrationalism determines the worldview, rationalism celebrates its triumphs.”79

Yet everything depends on the modalizing adverb almost in Bataille’s statement. What he hints at is indeed “a paradoxical truism” (OC, II, 138) whose development is the necessary prerequisite for the deconstruction of the relation between the rational and the irrational. For Bataille, the very opposition rational/irrational is already a part of a dualist philosophy that goes absolutely against the monism (that is, “the profoundly monistic Hellenic spirit,” which refers to Platonic metaphysics) that has supposedly defined all previous philosophies (as the “primordial tendency” of the universal).80 But if dualistic philosophy, in order to account for the irrational “posed by an improbable primitive diversity,” opposes to the law of probability (which it considers to be rational) a “law of major improbability” (one not yet to be understood in the absolute sense), this concept of improbability still remains rational since it “conforms to the law of the spirit” (OC, II, 137). On the other hand, the law of probability that appears to be rational also turns out to be irrational, since from the perspective of reason it does not fall under the only rational principle of causality. But this interdependence or the paradoxical truism introduced here is not sufficient to effectively undermine the relation of the rational and the irrational inasmuch as it is itself rational. Bataille, therefore, remarks with irony that the subjection of diversity to the law of “major improbability” and the attempt to grasp the irrational with this law of improbability is itself irrational since in principle this law itself hides a “major irrationality.” Although many things can be made to comply with the rational law of reason, the laws of reason themselves are not rational. If they were fully rational, reason would not be able to think the law of the “major improbability” at all. It follows from this observation (and this constitutes the first decisive step toward a deconstruction) that the dualism must be radicalized. Henceforth, to grasp this dualism even more tightly, to some extent Bataille will privilege one of its poles. This happens by foisting a “major irrationality” on the “major improbability” (which, as an improbability that is not yet absolute, remains tied to the rational law of probability and reason). The expression “major irrationality,” which revises the law of the “major improbability” as absolute improbability and thereby delimits the rational as well as the irrational, represents what Bataille had in mind as the “irrational that is sufficiently irreducible” (OC, II, 137). As he writes, to think it means to throw light on the diverse state of the formless universe even though, at first, it is only an apparent and dubious one. We quote the following passage, on the one hand, to reinforce what we have said so far, and on the other hand, to show that this movement of deconstruction represents only the beginning of a series of similar operations:

We assimilate the sudden loss—necessarily situated in the succession of time [since time must remain invariant, if we actually want to think expenditure and loss]—of the rational value of reason to other psycho-physiological phenomena such as spasmodic enjoyment or vertigo, all situated at the extreme point of one of the alternative activities that form the object of the dualism. (OC, II, 138)

The expressions “irreducible improbability” and “absolute irrationality”—which are no longer subject to the law of reason and irrationality and indicate the sacrifice and dissipation of “the rational value of reason” in that they prepare the ground for a reinscription of reason and irrationality into irreducible irrationality—no longer fall within the domain of philosophy even if they are possible only by passing through it. Heidegger highlighted the consequences of such an operation of deconstruction when he recognized that it undermines the goal and purpose of philosophy as “securing permanence”:

If reason, as the representing apprehending of the actual, wanted to break out into the purposeless and to dissipate itself in the aimless and the inconstant, thus to relinquish the poetizing of the identical and the orderly, it would be overpowered by the torrent of chaos; life would come to swerve and slide in its essential process, in the securing of its permanence, would give up its essence and thus turn out badly.81

This is exactly Bataille’s objective, to expend essence, bring it into a movement of swerving and gliding, to allow it to miscarry. As we have witnessed here the first failure of the universe that becomes One or comes from the One, we can now try to answer our opening question about the human being’s relation to this formless universe.82

According to the law of probability—which has its roots in the “ground” of absolute improbability—the existence of the human being is purely accidental. The existence of the human being does not obey any purpose or goal, from which it follows that it is useless. Yet what allows it to appear to be wholly different from everything else is precisely this accident and coincidence, a definition, however, that becomes meaningful only through the image of a unified and fully formed universe.83 Indeed, if so far the scientific term “improbability” has served to destroy the primacy of the universe in relation to the human being, this time in a second moment it is again posited as a unity in order to provide an additional definition for the human being who, in opposition to it, has now as a result of the law of improbability and irrationality become something accidental, dispensable, and useless. Against the background of this universe once again thought in a unified way, the human being becomes something particular that competes with “the necessity and . . . immensity of the universe in time and space.” From now on, only this particular and accidental entity has the right to be called “meaningful,” and Bataille (although hesitantly) acknowledges that it alone possesses the only reality. He writes: “The most insignificant accident is significant, which means that the exclusive valorization of the immense universe that usually follows the comparison is usurped” (OC, II, 132). An additional concept borrowed also from the scientific instrumentarium designates the lack of “common measure” between the human being and the alleged intelligibility of the continuous universe of philosophy and science: the concept of disproportionality.84

In the face of the radical improbability and disproportionality of the human being in relation to the unified and continuous universe, the irreducible particularity of the human being acquires a “certain” yet-to-be-determined “meaning.” As Bataille points out, “This universe is perfectly insignificant, homogeneous and empty, and the extravagant disproportion that characterizes it is nothing but a quality borrowed from some random miserable passerby” (OC, II, 131). Since the passerby is the truly disproportionate, the description of the universe with this predicate (as well as with the qualification of the “least significant accident”), which reaches its peak in the ephemeral act of passing of a passerby, represents an illegitimate transference and appropriation. Even if the particular can “really” be particular only in comparison with the unified universe, the universe is still only the shadow of the individual passerby:

The most futile and above all the most impossible to predict among the constellations of facts is, if we must use the term, the only reality, vertiginously free, doubled by its shadow, that is, by the immense universe, which has never been anything else but the often terrifying shadow of that which arbitrarily isolates itself in front of any human mind. (OC, II, 132)

So far we could identify two movements: on the one hand, the image of a unified universe was undermined with the help of the term “major improbability”; on the other hand, by way of the principle known by painters as “contrast,” the absolute disproportionality and particularity of the human being was highlighted through the preservation of the image of a superior and in itself meaningful universe. We can now see how the particularity of the human fits into a particularized universe and becomes a part of a general disorder.85 The human being itself becomes a fragment: “at the interior of a universe broken into pieces . . . isolating and breaking itself against everything else that exists” (OC, II, 132). In the context of the transgressions yet to take place, which bring about the expenditure of reason and the collapse into absolutely irreducible irrationality, the name “human” must be denied to this particular and particularized being: “it is to conform to a habit as good as any other to refuse the name of ‘man’ to that which exceeds the limits within which the human race has defined itself ideologically” (OC, II, 128). The fragmented being of the human, the fragment in the universe of “major improbability” that is broken up not only in the form of the individual of the human species but also in itself as well, therefore, can no longer be covered by the philosophical and scientific concept of anthropos.

In order to discuss the definition of the human in the universe and in nature, in order to be able to show to what extent Bataille’s anthropos deviates from that of philosophy, we would have to first clarify what nature means. But we will postpone this discussion for a later time. It should suffice here to describe the particularized human being with the additional term “deviation” (écart)—as the deviation from a norm, however, that is merely abstract and idealistic, as, for example, a reading of the essay “The Deviations of Nature” shows.86 Yet why is science or philosophy not capable of answering the question concerning anthropos, the being that, according to Bataille, is no longer to be called “human.” First, we need to introduce some of the most important characteristics Bataille uses to think about science. It appears to him as an abstract entity, a system ruled by logic that tries to eradicate everything heterogeneous or heterologous to its homogeneous system. To describe it, Bataille uses the metaphor of the feather duster that brushes aside everything that soils the system:

When plump young girls, “maids of all work,” arm themselves each morning with a large feather-duster or even a vacuum-cleaner, they are perhaps not completely unaware that they are contributing every bit as much as the most positivist of scientists to dispelling the injurious phantoms that cleanliness and logic abhor.87

Science devotes itself to objects in order to determine the characteristics that allow us to differentiate and classify them, but this takes place exclusively in accordance with the utility immanent to human reason in service of the technological and social application of objects. As a result, science remains on the surface of things, and it must content itself with “superficial observation” at the risk of diminishing its own effectiveness.88 The first thing that is neglected by science—or to be more precise, what it immediately ejects from itself—is the sensible aspect of phenomena and things:

No doubt it is not absolutely certain that nothing sensible has ever intervened in the exact sciences. Some sort of intuitive representation of phenomena accompanies the positing of laws, but that is only a sort of weak moment for the scientist and is somehow external to science, properly speaking, which tends to reduce sensibility to a minimum.89

Next to the exclusion of the sensory, science also rejects something else that is even more important for Bataille: subjective knowledge and lived experience. The fact that, contrary to expectations, these terms cannot simply be assigned to irrationalist individual philosophies and philosophies of life (even if they are borrowed from their vocabularies) cannot be shown here without a detour. As a result, for the time being, we propose only the following: They are interrelated with the particularized character of anthropos as well as with the irreducible irrationality that is no longer subject to reason.

In order to return to the relation of science—of “cold science”⁹⁰—to the human being, we must note that science—“the science that forces every possible phenomenon to conform to man’s reason” (OC, II, 404)—knows only one face of this being: the open face of the Homo sapiens. The exclusive treatment of this open face, which excludes the mask or a latent duplicity, like all examinations of the things of nature, stands in the perspective of utility and the elimination of that which threatens the system, that is, under the sign of its claim to power. Indeed, as Bataille remarks, “The open and ‘communicative’ face passes from one man to another the consciousness that true human life in the social order is just as substantial, just as real as the eternal fall of solid bodies: this face is, thus, the face of Homo sapiens sufficiently in the possession of science” (OC, II, 405). For the moment, these few aspects are enough to explain why science is not in the position to solve the question of man. It constitutes itself precisely through the exclusion of this question, through the rejection of the sensible, the subjective, the experienced, and the mask, just as philosophy develops its discourse through the exclusion of the particular, the fragmented, the deviant, and the useless. Science and philosophy are incapable of accounting for these things in their own systems: “Reason is a sick machine when it is forced to represent a passerby, the pavement, a shop as if they were nothing, and the pretended chain of causes as a totality annihilating its parts” (OC, II, 132). Or, as soon as we are dealing with a social fact: “The science that imagines the social fact cannot achieve its object if the latter, to the degree that science attains it, becomes the negation of its principles” (OC, II, 132). We have now reached the point where we must address the problem regarding the emergence of science. This examination of the constitution of science will allow us to situate the phenomenon of the mythical as well.

When we turn to the last two parts of the second section of “The Pineal Eye,” we find that science did not emerge from myth. In opposition to science, myth does not at all represent a temporally or logically prior formation that would be the roots of science as its origins. According to this description, which appears to be tied to the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions, they appear to be separated by a complete incongruence. But we cannot conclude from this that for Bataille logos assumes a position of priority against myth and mythology. To the contrary, he undermines this classical thesis or evaluation. If we could speak of a first instance from which science is to be derived, it could be only what Bataille calls “mysticism”:

Science, proceeding [which means that science derives itself, touches on, has a relation to, etc.] on the basis of a mystical conception of the universe, has separated its constitutive elements into two profoundly distinct classes: it has elaborated, through assimilation, its necessitous and practical parts, transforming them into an activity useful for man’s material life, a mental activity which up to that point had been merely the instrument of its exploitation. At the same time, it has had to brush to the side the delirious parts of the old religious constructions, in order to destroy them.91

This passage already contains the whole movement that occasions the constitution of science and myth. But what does mysticism mean for Bataille? The mystical conception of the universe from which science derives itself is precisely the kind of representation that we have already touched upon in our discussion of the concept of the universe: The universe appears in it as a whole, held together by a unity and by a unified principle, which is more essential, true, and present than all the parts gathered in it. The parts of the universe live off of and from the whole, which—although more abstract than them—guarantees their being: the parts depend on it and it controls them. As a result of this priority of the One over the whole of the parts, mysticism, according to Bataille, turns out to be an instrument of power that ideologically sanctions the subjugation and exploitation of humanity by a ruling class. This aspect is retained also by the science that replaces mysticism. Let us, for the moment, assume that mysticism comes first: its violent tearing apart, then, will mark the hour of birth of science and myth. Science constitutes itself by selecting from mysticism, which was an instrument of exploitation, the practical and useful elements, while rejecting the delirious and phantasmatic elements. Once again, we encounter here the same movement of the katabole that we have placed at the center of attention in our discussions of Schelling. The opposition between myth and science is built upon an expulsive, plunging, ground-giving movement. Just as we could not assume that the katabole for Schelling is the division of a prior unity or a first instance (since the katabole is the movement of separation itself that comes first), in Bataille’s case mysticism cannot be understood in those terms either. This point will be made clearer in what follows.

The expulsion, the forcing out, and pushing down become an essential part of the definition of the excluded. Indeed, “the strongest repulsion by science [that is, its expulsion, but also its violent repulsion] that can be represented is necessary for the characterization of the excluded part.”92 Only through the act of repulsion does the overthrown acquire its definition that retrospectively appears to be its proper quality. Conversely, science, as that which casts down, becomes what it is only through the katabole. Thus, we once again find the same definition of myth in Bataille that we have tried to read between the lines of Schelling’s text. This definition seems to correspond to what Schelling called “the unmythological,” which forms the ground of theogonic mythology that produces itself by way of the katabole. Consequently, from the very beginning, the term “myth” positions itself by Bataille in the blind spot from which philosophy has averted its eyes.

It therefore becomes apparent that Bataille’s recourse to the mythical is not a regression to a first instance, to something unmediated, or to an originary beginning. As it will progressively become clear what the excluded as overthrown implies, it will also become obvious that we can no longer assume here the existence of a Romantic interest in an original sensory, truly living, naïve, and fiery faculty of imagination. Everything that can be established as a qualification of the mythical—and let us recall that here we are talking about the delirious part of mysticism separated out and cast down by science—is only a result of the act of repression that must be compared to the affective cathexis of an obscene element, for the latter is cathected and obsessional only to the degree that it is excluded. As a summary, we could then say that myth is not unmediated; that it does not receive its determinations from itself or from a faculty of imagination that precedes the act of understanding; and that it can be understood only as the part of mysticism that was expelled by science and as a function of the katabole that constitutes science. This is also the reason why it can be thrown into the field once more against science.

Now, if the exclusion represents a prerequisite of the constitution of the mythical (in the same way as in the case of the obscene), then everything that was not formally excluded belongs to the domain tolerated by science: “So long as the formal exclusion has not taken place, a mythical statement can still be assimilated to a rational statement; the statement can be described as real and it can be methodically explained.”93 As a result, the mythical element loses all of the characteristics that could describe it as a really mythical one, or rather it does not yet possess them: “It enters, as in the case of revealed imperative religions, into various mystical groupings that have as a goal the narrow enslavement of impoverished men to an economic necessity: in other words, in the last analysis, to an authority that exploits them.”94 After the delirious elements that it contains have been deposited into the mythical, mysticism (from whose division science derives itself) is preserved in the form of a quasi-lower, harmless myth, whose goals of oppression are complementary to those of science. To put it differently, and this seems to be required by the concept of division, precipitation, exclusion, in short, by the katabole itself: Mysticism as a first is not really a first at all. For Bataille, it is more like a theoretical fiction through which the movement of the katabole, which does not start anywhere since it is always already at work, can be represented. It is, therefore, also necessary to think of the origin of mysticism. Mysticism is co-originary with science and myth; it is posited by the movement of the katabole. Just like science and myth, mysticism is the product of the dividing activity of the katabole, through which mysticism enters a structural relation with the other two domains, but in such a way that myth (which is cast down and thrown out) becomes the ground of mysticism as well as science, the abyss over which they rest. Contrary yet still complementary and interdependent, and even hierarchical (a classic relation of opposition dominates here in which one pole, science, has priority over the other, mysticism), they both have their foundations (individually as well as in their reciprocal relation) in myth, which has become their ground through its exclusion. We have encountered in Schelling the complex economy of these three terms (“mysticism,” “myth,” and “science”) under different designations and, consequently, also with a different meaning. In Schelling, it is mysticism in the form of the mysteries that is opposed to theogonic mythology, while the abysmal unmythological provides the ground for both. Furthermore, mysticism assumes a similar position in Schelling (as well as in Hegel) and in Bataille. Through a short examination of its definition, we can more clearly outline Bataille’s use of the term “mystical.”

For Schelling, the mysteries represent the esoteric essence of a completely exoteric and transparent mythology (and, as a result, they are the later creations, the products of its last developments): “The mysterious representations are always . . . products of the mythological, but toward the end of the process also of the consciousness that has come to realize its beginnings” (PM, II, 162). The knowledge that forms in the mysteries about the mythological process is such that it derives itself from the origin of mythology and refers itself to the causes of the process. This cause, as we have shown, was the dislocation of the originary One as well as of the substantial consciousness that was absorbed in it. The imagination of an undisturbed originary One, which is older than its own disjoining, is preserved and sublated in the mysteries. The mysteries, however, also know about its dislocation. The development of a fully diaphanous theogony, however, is possible only through the expulsion of the mystical, of the knowledge about the dark origins. It can attain its transparency only through this exclusion of the ground that is hidden and deposited in mysticism, of “the mystical conception of the universe,” as Bataille writes. Although it is cast down, this ground guarantees such a theogony’s life.

The situation is not that different in Hegel. He writes that if one confuses the mystical with the mysterious, we must nonetheless note that “‘the mystical’ is certainly something mysterious, but only for the understanding, and then only because abstract identity is the principle of the understanding. But when it is regarded as synonymous with the speculative, the mystical is the concrete unity of just those determinations that count as true for the understanding only in their separation and opposition.”95 In Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he writes: “Mysteries are in their nature speculative, mysterious certainly to the understanding but not to reason; they are rational, just in the sense of being speculative.”96 Mysticism and the mysteries, therefore, consist in a preoccupation with speculative concepts: the knowledge of concrete identity realizes itself in them. They are, therefore, for Hegel (and for Schelling as well) the origins of philosophy that begin to unfold in the polis as the hitherto secret institution becomes public.97 Mysticism, therefore, appears in Schelling as the knowledge about the origin as the primal One that must be expelled from theogony so that the latter can reach full transparency even if it derives itself precisely from this ground. In Bataille, it is science that excludes mysticism in this way in order to be able to unfold itself as an abstract and transparent system, although it shares with mysticism that already mentioned “mystical conception of the universe.” Based on the reference to Hegel, who perceives in the mystical the preoccupation with the speculative, we can gather that for Bataille mysticism precedes philosophy as well (if it is not even fully identical to it) inasmuch as philosophy is fully accomplished mysticism. The relation of science and philosophy, as it is developed by Bataille, could in fact be read in the following way: Science can establish itself only if it has begun to expel everything philosophical from itself. A “divorce between science and philosophy” prevails in which the latter takes upon itself the servile role of the ideological justification of sovereign science:

First of all, science has in fact broken away from philosophy, which appears to have suffered from this rupture and has tried to protect itself from the anger of science and to reconcile itself by spending its time with justifying it and thereby neglecting almost all other occupations: a new union resulted from this in which philosophy played the role of a zealous servant. (OC, II, 138)

The mystical conception of the world, its concept of a unified universe, “draws around this same globe the mystical wrapping of a can” in the service of science: a label or a wrapper that binds this world in the chains of the universal (OC, I, 192). In an analogous argument Nietzsche had already argued that the worldview we owe to “Socrates, the mystagogue of science,” “first spread a common net of thought over the whole globe, actually holding out the prospect of the lawfulness of an entire solar system.”98 These discussions should suffice to mitigate Sartre’s charge that Bataille was a new mystic.99 Not only did Bataille vehemently distance himself from what he called the “surrealist religion” (which he criticized for being a form of mysticism or a myth that is to be understood as a form of mysticism, and which he accused of being a form of “mental castration”¹⁰⁰); in fact, in the relatively late work Inner Experience, we can find numerous passages in which Bataille explicitly rejects this confusion of his approach with mysticism. The apparent proximity of Bataille’s work to mysticism comes only from the fact that he could perceive in early Christian mysticism certain aspects that, no matter how modestly, still appeared to offer solutions to the problems that had to emerge in his intended deconstructive work within philosophy and literature. Certainly, these problems were not Sartre’s. Perhaps the clearest explanation of Bataille’s strategic employment of certain mystical themes can be found in “Base Materialism and Gnosticism”:

I admit that I have, in respect to mystical philosophies, only an unambiguous interest, analogous in practice to that of an uninfatuated psychiatrist toward his patients: it seems to me rather pointless to put one’s trust in tendencies that, without meeting resistance, lead to the most pitiful dishonesty and bankruptcy. But it is difficult today to remain indifferent even to partly falsified solutions brought, at the beginning of the Christian era, to problems that do not appear noticeably different from our own.101

Mysticism and philosophy, on the one hand, and science, on the other, represent only apparent oppositions. They all feed on a mystical conception of the universe. Inasmuch as science legitimates itself with apparent needs that emerge from the material conditions of humanity (and that are merely those of the ruling or the servant classes), and it rejects, annihilates, and represses those needs that run counter to its imagined usefulness, it is like mysticism “an expression of human subordination.”102 The decisive opposition, therefore, is not to be located between science and mysticism but rather—corresponding to the Nietzschean opposition of the abstract and the mythical—between myth, on the one hand, and science and mysticism, on the other. This complex economy of the three terms must be kept in mind if we want to explain the subversion of science by mythological representation. This can save us also from the hasty conclusion that following an irrational philosophy and worldview, Bataille plays off myth against logos. What happens in Bataille’s text—and we will have an opportunity to show this in more detail—is an undertaking that, if you will, has unheard-of consequences.

At this point, we must address the necessity of a mythological anthropology. The question of its urgency is a result of the fact that it was necessary to describe “what the formless universe has accomplished by producing man rather than something else, how it has been led to this useless production and by what means it made this creature something different from all the rest.”103 Scientific anthropology is not in a position to answer these questions. This is why it is “necessary to abandon scientific anthropology, which is reduced to a babbling even more senile than puerile, reduced to giving answers that tend to make the questions put to it seem ludicrous.”104 Philosophical speculation must be rejected the same way as the impotent theories of prehistory: philosophical speculation because “obeying the movements of a guilty conscience, [it] almost always kills itself or timidly prostrates itself before science”;105 science because it is in a “deep slumber.”106 Neither can answer the questions, since each possesses a concept of logic that does not allow for these questions. In addition, the human being that they uphold as their object does not allow these kinds of questions either. We can, thus, deduce the necessity of mythological anthropology already from the name “mythological anthropology” itself, which we have examined in terms of its component words (with special emphasis on the term anthropos in the above definition), thereby showing that the logos in anthropology is bound to the law of the mythical (in the same sense that we speak of the “logic” of the dream—an analogy that we will have to return to later).

In fact, it is the status of the human being as a fragment and fragmented being in a universe not held together by a universio that requires the mythological representation of the human in a corresponding anthropology. The latter itself will also have to obey a fragmented and fragmenting logic in order to be able to represent it appropriately. The human being’s truncated, deviant, and useless being, which lacks a foundation in an already given fullness and presence, predestines the human to this kind of presentation:

When man seeks to represent himself, no longer as a moment of a homogeneous process—of a necessitous and pitiful process—but as a new laceration within a lacerated nature, it is no longer the leveling phraseology coming to him from the understanding that can help him: he can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chains of logic.107

At best, science can describe the anthropos that is most appropriate to its own concept of man, but it cannot represent it, because representation would also mean that man recognizes himself in it. This is possible only through mythological anthropology and representation, provided that these take upon themselves the “meaning” of the human and the “meaning” of life. Scientific anthropology has to give way to the mythological, since only the latter is capable of realizing “the inevitable and demanding brutality of an interrogation taking upon itself the very meaning of life.”108 The “meaning” of the human: to be a deviation, “the deviation of nature” inside a nature écartante (a deviating nature: a dissolving, dispersing, annihilating nature deviating from its own self), écartée (a nature displaced from the center), écartelante (a quartering nature), and écartelée (quartered nature). Mythological representation is therefore of the kind that, according to its concept, it turns toward what is expelled, cut off, and isolated, and it makes that into its object what we have called the abyss of expulsion: the katabole. Its primary concern is to represent the fragmentary and fragmented in its “proper lawlessness” incongruent to the law of the logos. Thus, in a sense, mythological representation looks the particular in the eye, which, however, is no longer a part of a whole but is in itself irreducible.

Mythological representation is the presentation of that which was violently expelled by the constitution of mysticism and science. But it is also a presentation in the sense that the expelled unsettles both of the domains and inscribes them into itself.

We have remarked that in spite of all appearances mysticism could not have been the first instance in which the division took place. If the mutual separation of myth, science, and mysticism is co-originary, if all three constitute themselves simultaneously through the katabole, then that which is being torn apart is nameless. Writing in the language of philosophy, which has rendered all names or the name itself subservient to itself, we cannot name this “first” instance. We quote here Bataille, who writes the following in a different context: “It is effectively indispensable for the solidity of the edifice on which our intellectual existence depends that a certain activity of the human being (as a result of moral liberty if you will) must be impossible to designate by any term” (OC, I, 233). This “first” cannot receive a name since it has no identity, and as a result it cannot even be designated by the highest and most singular word: being. Indeed, this “first” does not exist—it is not.

In our discussion of Schelling, nevertheless, we could show that the first—God and the consciousness fully absorbed in it, which first set in motion through the original dislocation the process from which theogonic mythology develops—can give itself over to fragmentation only if the power of the katabole is always already at work in it. Thus, it became clear that the blind spot of Schelling’s philosophy (and of philosophy in general) is to be sought not only in this “first” that is always already crossed out in its fullness and presence, but also in the concept of the katabole (itself). The katabole, however, is only a name for a movement, the movement of division, of throwing, of laying down the foundations. It can be named only if it is a moment at the service of the originary One. Schelling attempts to think the katabole by reducing it to a function. Yet the first—God and the consciousness fully absorbed in it, on which it could be dependent—is always already fragmented by the katabole. As a result, the katabole would be the first, so to speak, the element in which the threefold division of myth, science, and mysticism takes place. But again, the katabole cannot be such a first, since it is only a disjointing movement that has always already canceled its being. To be first would mean it is present to itself in undivided fullness. If we still want to think the katabole as a “first,” we can understand the movement of division and precipitation as a crossed-out first. “X Marks the Spot,” as the title of one of Bataille’s book reviews states (OC, I, 256–57). If we describe the transgression of the katabole in Schelling’s text as the “clearing” of the necessary blind spot of philosophy in which this transgression itself takes place, then the place where mythological representation carries out its operation is chasm. Corresponding to the namelessness of this place, mythological representation itself will culminate merely in a “tache d’encre” (an ink stain) or a “tâche d’encre” (a task to be accomplished through writing in ink). Indeed such representation is to be understood, to quote Bataille, “not as a sentence, but more precisely like an ink stain.”109

In the sections of “The Pineal Eye” that we are concerned with here, we immediately encounter a “first” movement, namely, that of the subversion of science through mythological anthropology and representation. The development of mythological anthropology presupposes not only the failures of scientific anthropology and of prehistory but also their coherent unfolding as discourses. The following can be said about the conditions of mythological representation: “Scientific consciousness is abandoned but only after it has been mastered” (OC, II, 413). The transition to mythological representation can take place only after the established sciences have been traversed and their knowledge has been appropriated. This inevitable involvement with methodological rigor, however, does not imply a subordination to the authority of science: “The will to submit all determinations to the exigencies of scientific consciousness does not in itself imply any interest in such an activity” (OC, II, 77). Bataille suggests, indeed, that this striving for scientific rigor serves here other than scientific goals: “This is acknowledged here in order to indicate honestly the preoccupations that perhaps survive in me—even when I am trying to set them aside temporarily—when I am trying to work scientifically.”110

The first act of the subversion of science consists of the seemingly simple reversal of the hierarchical relation of myth and science. We called it a “seemingly” easy task, since in the triad of science, myth, mysticism, the latter is subordinated to science, while the mythical is expelled. Since it is expelled, however, it is also subordinated to the latter as something inferior to superior science. It is this hierarchy that needs to be turned upside down.

The reversal of this hierarchy is achieved in such a way that we cannot call mythological anthropology and the representation that it brings about simply regressive. They do not reach back to something that existed before science (in a temporal or spatial sense) but rather to something that was co-created in the constitution of science as its other. Before science, there was effectively only mysticism. The goal of the reversal in question is the subjugation of hitherto dominant science by the excluded, precipitated, and suppressed elements. Bataille writes: “It is thus necessary to start by reducing science to a state that must be defined by the term subordination, in such a way that one uses it freely, like a beast of burden, to accomplish ends which are not its own.”111

While the subjugation and precipitation that science practices are servile to the degree that it serves merely utilitarian and life-sustaining goals, which according to Hegel belong to the spirit of the slave, the subordination of science in service of mythological representation should no longer obey the master-slave dialectic. The predicate of being servile must be ascribed to science, insofar as it stands in the service of the master who always depends on the slave. We will return to this problem later. At this point, we wanted only to point out that the suppression of science by myth does not represent a mere reversal that simply shifts the emphasis. Rather, as we will see (and the expression “to dispose of it freely” was already a clear sign for it), the reversal is only a first in a deconstruction in which science is to be inscribed into myth.

The point is not simply to throw away science and its method and to oppose it to something other, namely, to a discourse that could exist outside and next to science. If we were to abandon all capacity for methodological knowledge, we would lose contact with the “homogeneous world of practical life.” As a result, “the free play of intelligible images would lose itself and would dissolve fatally in a region where no thought and no word would have the slightest consequence.”112 The methodical process needs to be included in mythological anthropology and representation so that the destruction of the legitimate and lawful thinking of science does not turn into mere irrationality, into the opposite of ratio, which is still subordinate to reason. But the point of view of praxis also prohibits any simple way out of scientific discourse. A discourse merely turned into its opposite would condemn the mythological representation to inconsequence, and it would deprive it of any possibility to change anything in the domain of practical life or in the domain of science. Therefore, mythological representation will—after the reversal of the hierarchy is accomplished and the methodical thinking of science is brought under its rule—assign within itself a new function to science.

But how does this reinscription of science into mythological anthropology and representation take place? We have seen that myth is created through an exclusion or an expulsion. One could then think that science simply needs to be reintegrated into what it has cast down. The latter, however, so to speak, has no positivity: it does not represent a complete discourse with which we could confront science. To the contrary, that which has been cast down through the constitution of science opens up as an abyss in the movement of the katabole, of falling down, cutting off, and so on. But we can confront the movement of the katabole and the mythical only if we force science itself to push forth to the edges of the blind spot that constitutes it.

Abandoning science to itself, according to Bataille, would “blindly empty the universe of its human content” with the help of the exclusion that founds it, “inasmuch as its legacy as the first condition of existence was the task of dissipating and annihilating mythological phantasms.”113 The movement of the katabole must be used to circumvent the program of science and to limit its own course. Bataille holds that “it is possible to use it to limit its own movement and to situate beyond its own limits what it will never attain, that before which it becomes an unsuccessful effort and a vague, sterile being.”114 This means that the movement of the delimitation of science itself—through which it reveals itself to be a restricted and delimited form of proceeding—cannot be abstractly conjured away through an outside, since it is necessary that science itself trace its limits in order to open up in itself the blind spot into which it can then be inscribed. This considerably complicates the relation of myth and science. The opposition of the two can no longer be grasped as a simple antithesis since, on the one hand, science constitutes itself through the overthrow and casting down of the mythical, while, on the other hand, science also offers the possibility to constitute the mythical out of itself in such a way that it becomes possible to inscribe science within the latter. Nietzsche has staged these two operations—which are formally equal and yet are still different—in The Birth of Tragedy in order to render the relation of the theoretical and tragic worldviews more dynamic. We will quickly outline here Nietzsche’s approach in order to better understand what is happening in Bataille.

The death of the mythical—especially the extinction of its form in which the two forces of art, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, were reconciled—was introduced according to The Birth of Tragedy by Socrates, the archetype of “theoretical man.”115 With him, theoretical optimism, that “optimistic element in the nature of dialectic,” sets in,116 which is based on “the faith in the explicability of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.”117 “With the aid of causality,” this theoretical optimism presumes “to fathom the innermost essence of things.”118 In addition to this delusion, there is the belief that science can “correct the world” through knowledge and “heal the eternal wound of existence.”119 Caught in this illusion, science has the audacity to promise an “Alexandrian earthly happiness.”120 With this goal in mind, science, then, proceeds to destroy myth. The “audacious reasonableness” of Socratism comes from a weakening of the instincts, from a reversal of the creative instinct into those of the critic. Nietzsche writes: “Specifically, we observe here a monstrous defectus of any mystical disposition, so Socrates might be called the typical non-mystic, in whom, through a hypertrophy, the logical nature is developed as excessively as instinctive wisdom is in the mystic.”121 “The one great Cyclops eye of Socrates”—the eye of the theoretical man, which is no longer in the position to recognize the difference, the dualism of the drives that tear themselves apart on the primal ground—can no longer look into the Dionysian abyss with Apollonian delight: it negates and rejects the groundlessness of the abyss itself, which is not compatible with the optimism of a science that seeks to fathom the grounds of everything.122

Socrates himself, however, the empirical man Socrates, is a part of this machine that he himself set in motion; he is merely the “archetype” of theoretical optimism. “Anyone who, through the Platonic writings, has experienced even a breath of the divine naïveté and sureness of the Socratic way of life, will also feel how the enormous driving-wheel of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates, and that it must be viewed through Socrates as through a shadow.”123 This machine, however, sublates itself already in the person of Socrates. Fully under its control, he obeys it even where it begins to produce something like a “supplement” to itself. Inasmuch as Socratism represents merely a superfetation of the Apollonian, the latter calls for a reversal of the drives, that is, for the Dionysian, on which it remains dependent in spite of the superfetation. So it is not an accident that the only consideration of the limitations of his logical nature occurs to Socrates in his dreams, that is, in an Apollonian form. Toward the end of his life, Socrates even begins to play music.

The movement of the logical drive toward its other, however, needs to be developed from the logical drive itself. Socrates’s dream has already demonstrated that the limits and the other of the theoretical spirit appear to it in an Apollonian image.

Whenever the truth is uncovered, the artist will always cling with rapt gaze to what still remains as a covering even after such uncovering; but the theoretical man enjoys and finds satisfaction in the discarded covering and finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts. There would be no science if it were concerned only with that one nude goddess and with nothing else.124

Science and its activity of uncovering the ground, the lifting of Maya’s veil, presuppose that it can only remove layer from layer without ever being able to catch sight of the pure naked goddess. The passion theoretical man finds in the work of fathoming and uncovering the ground implies, therefore, precisely what it must deny in order to be able to assume this work with proper optimism. This passion—which wants to be eternal and without which even theoretical man would not seek truth—requires that the truth remain hidden, since passion can consist only in the simultaneous uncovering and covering of truth. With this, one of the hidden conditions of theoretical discourse has been exposed. In addition, the delusion of science displays the tendency to prepare its own reversal necessarily from itself, from its own inside. Science’s optimism is

a profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science again and again to its limits at which it must turn into art—which is really the aim of this mechanism.125

“Spurred by its powerful illusion,” science “speeds irresistibly toward its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points.”126 These points—or the holes punctured in the wrapper that science uses to surround things uniformly and that marks its own covering in uncovering—allow the unfathomable to shine through as the limit that is set for its task to allow being to become transparent to its very depth. The “noble and gifted” (that is, theoretical) man reaches

before the middle of his existence and inevitably, such boundary points on the periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When men see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail—suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy.127

Nietzsche called the “lust” for knowledge a profound and a sublime metaphysical illusion only because this illusion reverses in itself the “break with the unconscious metaphysics of its previous existence” from which it had emerged and on which it still depends for its vital energy.128 Even in science, the metaphysical drive, the originator of myth and tragedy as the forms of reconciliation of the dualistic drives, survives. “Even now this metaphysical drive still tries to create for itself a certainly attenuated form of transfiguration, in the Socratism of science that strives for life,” with the result that science in the end will once again turn itself into myth.129 But the crucial point is not only that science must evoke myth at the point where it confronts its own limits (akin to the way rationalism always needs irrationalism) but also that the inner progress of the theoretical work of uncovering, the universal casting of the net of concepts around the globe, leads it to this reversal. Nietzsche describes the two sides of this dependence of science on the mythical in the following way:

Hence the image of the dying Socrates, as the human being whom knowledge and reasons have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission—namely, to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the end—myth which I have just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose of science.130

The transformation of science into art as its necessary supplement involves much more than the common understanding of supplement as a correlative, the meaning employed even by Nietzsche. Myth and art are not just the entities that fill in the holes of the scientific system, with whose help science could achieve its full rounding off or completion. What appears in the form of the mythical in the holes on the edges of science, of logical conceptuality, in the holes that science encounters in its lust for knowledge, is the mythical that cannot be illuminated, that surrounds science from all sides, in which science is always already inscribed and in which it must always ceaselessly inscribe itself. Once science has repressed, annihilated, and cast down myth in order to be able to devote itself to life, it also produces by a necessity immanent to it a movement through which, bending around itself, it finally once again stares into the darkness of horror at the limit points of the periphery.

Just as for Nietzsche,131 for Bataille science, obeying a similar necessity, produces its other out of itself only to reinscribe itself in it once again. Here, however, science is set within clear limits. Required to trace its own borders beyond itself, it can accomplish this goal only in a formal manner. Bataille avers: “It is true that, posed in this way by science, these elements are still only empty terms and impotent paralogisms.”132 At best, what it can accomplish is to produce its other in itself, unexpectedly and in an unpredictable turn, in such away that it comes to doubt its own reason. It cannot fill in the empty terms and the unoccupied spaces—what we could call the “white spots”—that emerge on its borders. These empty spots similar to our blind spots, which appear to puncture science, can be freed from their mere formality only through writing, which engraves its letters into these white surfaces. Or they can be filled only with a mythologically experienced content.

After science has produced from within itself, at first only in a purely formal manner, the outer limits of another mode of “perception,” “thinking,” and “way of being” and has marked them in itself as empty places, it is now a question of grasping these empty places contentwise.

The task that Nietzsche and Bataille expected from science was of the kind that science could still solve with its own means, even though it led to paralogisms that undermined its integrity. Its authority began to falter at the moment when it had to acknowledge the failure of its work of uncovering: “Like all authority, science does not nor can it possess a diffuse existence. Like all authority, it exists only as concrete existence in a concentrated state in the form of a source of intense emissions. But the unique character of science degrades itself and disappears when its character of the active foundation of consciousness disappears” (OC, II, 435).

Once this aspect is lost, it becomes possible to apply science to ends other than its own, since it is no longer in the position to provide and ground its own goals. But how does this application happen? How are these empty spaces filled in?

It is only after having passed from these exterior limits of another existence to their mythologically lived content that it becomes possible to treat science with the indifference demanded by its specific nature, but this takes place only on condition that one has first enslaved science through the use of weapons borrowed from it, by making it itself produce the paralogisms that limit it.133

Bataille’s insistence on terms like “mythical,” “content,” “experience,” as well as the “system” that they form, raises the question of whether these terms still have the status of concepts and, thereby, still remain under the spell of philosophy. Content and experience appear to represent concepts that do not allow for any ambiguity, especially if they are supposed to fill in empty spaces in the edifice of philosophy. Content, as the opposite of form, means essence, meaning, totality, and so on, sheltered within it as in a container; while experience implies the subjective-sensuous experience of this content in its truth. Yet, from what we have seen so far, it follows that these terms do not function exactly this way. Let us read here a passage—in the highest degree classical, which means here irrationalistic—seemingly borrowed from Lebensphilosophie:

I have emphasized, and will continue to do so, that the phenomena I attempt to describe are lived by us. And they are not the only lived. . . . I think, in fact, that they constitute the essential of what is lived by us and, if you like, the heart of the existence animating us.134

“Lived,” “essential,” “the heart of existence”—all these terms suggest a truly sensible experience of a new unity, meaning, totality, fullness, and presence. But let us read on: “In other words, I believe that nothing is more important for us than that we recognize that we are bound and sworn to that which horrifies us most, that which provokes our most intense disgust.”135 In fact, what Bataille calls “content” (that to which experience and knowledge refer) is the movement of the katabole: the expelled, excluded, and cast down, as well as the movement of tearing apart, division, fragmentation that we have already discussed. The experience of the katabole—in other words, castration in a general sense, in short, the experience that the anthropos constitutes a tear in an always already torn-apart nature—can be only an experience of horror. Or, as Nietzsche writes, a “bad experience”: “I am of the opinion that only experience—experience always seems to mean bad experience?—can entitle us to participate in the discussion of such higher questions of rank [which means science or philosophy], lest we talk like blind men about colors—against science the way women and artists do.”136 Knowledge or experience is not the limited, calm subjectivity of the individual but the suffering of pain experienced by man breaching the principium individuationis: “At the very climax of joy [caused by this transgression] there sounds a cry of horror.”137 Experience designates here nothing less than the experience in itself of the originary contradiction.

As soon as these concepts are correctly presented, one can try to answer the question concerning the application of science from the perspective of mythological representation. Indeed, no other than the experiences of the primary contradiction, of torn-apart man in a torn-apart nature, emerge in the empty spaces that appeared inside science pushing onto its own borders. “Mythologically lived” means experienced as expelled and expelling, as the cutoff and the cutting off. The actual aim of the application of a thus unfettered science to mythological representation is the representation of these experiences. Mythological representation appropriates the material prepared by science and submits it to a movement that is no other than the mythological movement, in the sense that we have tried to understand this term by Bataille. As a result, this material becomes capable of representing the other of science.

Now that we have discovered the first condition of mythological representation in the subversion of science and its inscription in the latter, we can turn to the second condition: “The second condition is, first of all, only one of the forms of the first; here too science is utilized for a contrary end.”138 We have observed that the paralogistic subversion of science by itself in a way serves the purpose of unleashing it so that its materials and methods become usable for the representation of mythologically lived experience. The employment of the instruments developed by scientific discourse, therefore, serves the purpose of transposing into language the otherwise dumb mythologically lived experience. This experience is without a language and speechless with the cry of joy that turns into horror. In addition, in Bataille the mythical is also without language—just like Schelling’s unmythological—as it is the time of muteness and writing: at best, the time of the cry or of glossolalia. The transposition of the languageless into language—which cannot merely consist of giving a name to the nameless (or, in Schelling’s case, of sublating monosyllabism in polysyllabism)—and the subsequent conceptualization of the languageless must, in accordance with the requirement of an adequatio rei et intellectus, happen in such a way that the rupturing cry, through which speechless silence is only accentuated, also tears apart its presentation. This can be achieved only if the material of presentation itself is subordinated to the same law of tearing apart that structures lived experience. Spoken language, however, allows this only in a very limited sense, because of its linearity and the expiration of its materiality attributed to it by philosophy. The task in question, thus, necessarily falls to writing.

Since mythological representation cannot allow science and philosophy to reappropriate what is presented in it, it must maintain, in spite of the subordination of science to its goals, the original gap between the two kinds of presentation. It follows from our previous discussions that the objective here cannot be the expansion of science and its discourse in order to make it receptive once again to what it had excluded. In other words, the point is not to turn mythology into science or science into mythology. It would not be only illusory but the opposite of what Bataille tried to achieve to once again try to reverse the exclusion that constitutes science and myth. The dream of an undivided, complete, and unified form of knowledge and experience (the kind, for example, that surrealism dreamed up), which could be reclaimed through the abolition of the katabole and the opposition created by it, is out of the question. “The exclusion of mythology by reason is necessarily a rigorous one, on which there is no going back, and which, when required, must be made still more trenchant.”139 The split requires an even more decisive tearing apart in order to render the ideology of a return to a simple naïveté even less likely. In addition, mythology itself would not exist without its exclusion by science, while science and mysticism would be unthinkable without their opposition to myth. Any representation that dreams up the abolition of the configuration of the three opposing terms (“myth,” “science,” and “mysticism”), is itself a product only of the initial overthrow and precipitation of the mythical that appears in its romantically naïve transfiguration as an “Alexandrian earthly happiness” to science.140 Since, as Nietzsche says, there is “an eternal conflict between the theoretic and the tragic world view” that must be repressed by science and philosophy—otherwise they would not be able to achieve the idea of the full explanation of being and their self-foundation in identity and noncontradiction—the split between the two worldviews must be implemented against science and philosophy so much the more brutally.141 What opens itself up in the split—the vast down element, the movement of the katabole and castration—is a dualism that tears itself apart in many different ways and is “deeper” than science and mysticism, even “deeper” than what is generally called myth, and it is that in which this dualism is represented in an Apollonian transfiguration, as it were. This is why there is no other choice than “to overturn the values created by means of this exclusion; in other words, the fact that reason denies any valid content in a mythological series is the condition of its most significant value.”142 Thus, the revaluation of all values becomes the second condition of mythological representation. A third precondition must still be mentioned, at least briefly.

The question of whether a mythological method that could be opposed to the scientific method exists or not was first negated by Bataille. He writes: “By definition, there is no method, and verification takes place solely as it were for a form of nature; thus, it would be ridiculous to believe that everything is free” (OC, II, 414). Yet, even if the approach of the mythological representation is not to be equated with a method in the scientific sense, we still cannot conclude that everything happens in it arbitrarily. The first proof of this is the position granted to unfettered science within mythological representation. Furthermore, the sentence that we have quoted says that “verification takes place solely as it were for a form of nature.” By trying to explain this proposition, we approach the third condition of mythological presentation, its own proper lawfulness.

First, however, we need to define more precisely the term “form.” Without being able to explain here adequately already what freedom means for Bataille, we can at least refer to the fact that he understood the divergence of forms, for example, in the animal kingdom, as a formal consequence or an index of freedom in nature. As we can learn from the article “The Academic Horse,” the evolution of forms progresses in an alternating fashion, from horrendous and demented forms to higher and well-proportioned forms. The latter are always preceded by “primitive forms,” “as if a polluting horror was the constant and inevitable counterpart of elevated forms of animal life.”143 We can detect a movement in nature that brings forth a clear form from the turmoil of the chaotic sea of forms, to which at the same time another form is opposed that reverses this movement.

Nature, therefore, appears to be dualistic, an “alternating revolt.” Bataille holds that “nature, constantly proceeding in violent opposition toward one [extreme of an opposition], must be represented in constant revolt against itself: sometimes the fright of what is formless and indecisive ends in precisions of the human animal or the horse; sometimes, in a profound tumult, the most baroque and nauseating forms succeed one another.”144 The creation of the higher and clearer form happens—according to the Galtonian experiment introduced by Bataille in this context (the superimposition of different images of the human face until a beautiful face similar to Praxiteles’s Hermes emerges)—through the deletion of differences between the single individual forms. As a result of this eradication, the higher form becomes the embodiment of the academic, idealistic idea of beauty, the incarnation of the idea itself.

There is no reason to hesitate about pointing out that, as paradoxical as it may appear, the horse, situated by a curious coincidence at the origins of Athens, is one of the most accomplished expressions of the idea, just as much, for example, as Platonic philosophy or the architecture of the Acropolis.145

In “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” discussing the relation of form and matter, Bataille points out that the concept of form can be applied only to individual objects or individual organic entities: “form taking on the value of the unity of being and of its individual existence.”146 If we transpose this concept of form to the totality of things, we foster in an illegitimate manner a representation of a unified universe and an “abstract God (or simply the idea)” that, however, represents merely a “verbal entity.”147 This concept of form, the result of a process of reduction that discards all differences, cannot serve to describe the diversity of nature and to account for individual form. Bataille, therefore, opposes to the mere verbal entities, the linguistic words, what he calls aspects. According to him, words (as elements of philosophical analysis) signify only that which makes an “external action” possible on the signified and makes the signified available for the interests of power. Aspects, on the other hand, represent “what strikes human eyes”—they represent “capital decisions.” Bataille writes: “It would be easy to show that the word allows one only to consider the characteristics of things that determine a relative situation, in other words, the properties that permit an external action. By contrast, the appearance [aspect] would introduce the decisive values of things.”148 These aspects—which are substituted for words and philosophical concepts—surprise, strike, and dazzle the eyes (“the appearance mysteriously strikes human sensibility”) as they meet them darkly and strike them with darkness.149 The eyes are blinded by the aspects, because they perceive these aspects as “capital decisions” (decisions capitales), that is, also as decapitations. It is thus clear what the aspects represent of things in contrast to words, ideas, and concepts: that through which things differentiate themselves in and among each other; the distinctive traits through which, as we will see, things can be incorporated into phantasmatic constructions.

The concept of form therefore receives a new function. Emphasizing the differential aspect of things, form marks deviations. The essay “The Deviations of Nature” outlines what looks like a virtual dialectic of forms. The issue of the deviations of nature poses a problem that has always plagued philosophy: monstrosity. In spite of all the classifications that they are submitted to, these deviations remain “no less positively, anomalies and contradictions.”150 Bataille quotes here Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses (1561): “the monsters, the prodigies, and abominations through which we see the works of nature inverted, mutilated, and truncated.”151 Mentioning Galton’s experiment one more time, Bataille proceeds to a generalization of monstrosity, of the deviations whose most obvious expressions for him are monsters. Indeed, if classical form and ideas are only the results of an abstraction that erases all differences, then it is evident that before the form and the idea only deviations could exist. The “impression of elementary incongruity”¹⁵²—which can be observed on all things but can be defined only through the recourse to the absolutely monstrous due to its discreteness—reinforces the thought and experience that every individual form deviates from the fictive general norm: “Each individual form escapes this common measure and is, to a certain degree, a monster.”153 The connection between form and individual objects or living entities thus becomes plain. The individual cannot be reduced to a figure, which is only thinkable on the basis of the erasure of differences. Nature is broken up into a seething mass of differences that all differentiate themselves from and among one another and remain irreducible to one another. One could understand this differential definition of nature and its forms as a taxonomy, if the concept of taxonomy—in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century meaning—did not strive for the reconstruction of the plan of creation. The taxonomical effort is in fact an attempt to organize the diverse splinters of totality in such a way that the whole—which is either lost through world catastrophes or exists only in becoming—becomes (once again) transparent.154 Such an objective, however, is alien to Bataille’s project.

“Verification . . . solely as it were for a form of nature”: the sentence that we have used as our starting point can now be made clearer based on our discussions. Now, a method cannot be thought without a telos. Bataille’s idiosyncratic use of the taxonomy of the differences among individual forms, however, does not know a telos apart from its anticipated incorporation in phantasmatic constructions. It does not know a telos in the traditional sense, not least because the aspects, designating the differences of forms, mark the capital decisions of things, which undermine all possibility of abstracting from the particular.

The third condition of mythological representation, therefore, requires that the presentation should conform to the aspect and the law of difference. We refer here to point 15 of the outline that forms the basis of “The Pineal Eye.” Under the title “Analytic Interpretation of Myth,” we find the following: “It is perhaps useless to carry out an analysis that moves progressively from manifest to latent content. What needs to be analyzed above all are the relations of exclusion” (OC, II, 414). One could suspect that Bataille ignores here the role of the drive in the manifest contents of myth. As we will see later, however, this is not the case at all. With regard to its manifest content, myth represents, similarly to a dream, a compromise between desires seeking fulfillment and censorship. This compromise is to be analyzed as a play of exclusions. In fact, the analysis of these mutual exclusions does take into account the components of the drive, without which no exclusion would exist. We get the impression here that Bataille is interested in a structural analysis of myths of sorts inasmuch as he emphasizes precisely the examination of exclusions: the play of oppositions; the play that produces opposites within myth was certainly more important for him than a “depth analysis” in the Jungian sense.

Let us recall that Bataille did not want to reverse the violent separation and exclusion of myth through which science and mysticism constituted themselves, which he, rather, elaborated keenly and wished to preserve. This happened among other reasons because myth lives on this exclusion itself. The exclusion of myth from and by science did not mark only the hour of birth of myth: what myth represents in the Bataillean sense is still marked by the rejection of that which makes science into science—the principle of exclusion. Repressing the act of its own self-constitution, it plunges it into the mythical so that the mythical is to be identified in the highest degree with the principle of exclusion. This depicts myth, as one says in French, “en abyme.” Myth represents this principle of exclusion in such a way that, unlike what happens in science, in the mutual exclusion of the images that characterize it and in the differential definition and marking of these images, it is not capable of generating for itself either presence, or certitude, or security. In the course of our study we still need to further deepen this aspect that describes myth according to its specific structure.155

Having demonstrated here the necessity of relying on mythological representation in anthropology (inasmuch as it has for its object a shattered and broken being that belongs to an equally fragmented nature), due to the insistence of the principles of exclusion and difference, we can now turn to the proper structure of this representation. This structure is necessarily phantasmatic. Bataille, indeed, speaks of “the necessity to restrict oneself in anthropology to things other than science or philosophy to start with, and to represent things by phantasms” (OC, II, 413).

2

The Logic of Phantasm

This kind of picture thinking is from the start not strictly logical, but still it is more or less logical.

—Friedrich Nietzsche1

In order to advance the subversion of philosophy and scientific discourse and to force them to produce the very paralogisms that delimit them, according to Bataille, one needs to introduce “a lawless intellectual series into the world of legitimate thought.”2 This series that does not at first obey any laws is a chain of “intelligible images.”3 As we will see here, the image belongs to what discourse allowed to fall by the side in its self-constitution and becoming, what it had to expel in order to achieve its transparency. The element precipitated by the katabole returns as something foreign to scientific speech, a stranger that scientific discourse is no longer capable of recognizing as a moment of its own becoming as a result of the transformation that it underwent through the downfall. In the light of conceptual thinking, which tolerates images at best in a diaphanous form, this stranger will disturb science and philosophy, shatter their peace, and provoke in them both productions and reactions that emerge from the language of the concept in a protean manner and entwine it with their rank tendrils: the phantasms.

1. The Nocturnal Pit and the Realm of Images

Let me say . . . that the hole in question will be the hole of truth, it being understood that truth is not only what comes out of the well, but also the well “from which it comes out,” as much the one as the other and, in fact, both at the same time. The head winks in the direction of wisdom and philosophy, which are both a bit lethargic. Not just any head, but the one which Athena places on her chest as a third breast, to instill fear: Medusa’s head, which she had severed.

—Bernard Pautrat4

So let us now turn to the concept of the image. What we have said about myth, with some reservations, also applies to the image. As an ornament or an adornment, as the sensible representation of thought and of the intelligible, the image has always possessed for philosophy a contentious legitimacy. Yet it was precisely this status that could at times lead also to its renewed privileging, since the sensible image of represented thought could be played off against the abstraction of the concept. This reversal, however, took place in the same way as the turn toward myth in Romanticism, that is, under the dictate of logos to recover a promise of fullness that it had itself lost in the process of its growing abstraction. At least since Plato’s dialogue about the state, the image is “far removed from truth.”5 With regard to true being created by the demiurge as a creator of essences, the imitating creator (in this case, the playwright and the painter) behaves as someone who does not copy the essence (the concept itself) but only its appearance. He produces only shadow images and not what exists in truth. Furthermore, as an art of shadows, every imitating art is subjected to the law of deception. It dissimulates essence and addresses itself to the part of the soul that remains foreign to reason.

But in comparison with the mere intuition of appearance, the image formation that takes place in representation constitutes a step forward. Let us, for example, recall Schelling:

The adoration devoted to unformed, inorganic masses untouched by the work of human hands is more ancient than all the images and belongs fully to the earliest times. It was in lifeless solidity and pure massiveness (in which form is still lacking or appears to be accidental, and even internally the spiritual most often shows itself dead or darkened) that it was most possible to believe at the time in the presence of a God that is closed in itself, resists all spirituality, and insists on materiality. (PM, II, 293)

The rigid platonic opposition between the original image (eidos) and the copy, the shadow image, or the illusion (eidolon) has already become more fluid for Schelling, insofar as he conceives of both as moments of a process of progression.6 The step toward pictorial representation that consciousness risks in prehistory, as Schelling remarks, implies a liberated “consciousness fully conscious of its object” (PM, II, 564). To this consciousness, which freely posits its images (“images openly showing everything”), therefore, also correspond different gods who are no longer objects of nature and who need pictorial representation: “Only what is conceived in and lives in Spirit as pure thought can be again presented through a truly spiritual creation” (PM, II, 652). Schelling, however, leaves no doubt that these images are only moments in the process of the reconstitution of unity: a process that in the end should necessarily render every pictorial representation superfluous in the total and absolute presence of the One and the consciousness in blissful unity with the One.

The same movement is carried out by Hegel in a similar fashion. In order to explicate the status of the image in Hegel, we will rely on his Jena Philosophy of Nature and The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. In both works, the discussion of the image falls within the domain of subjective Spirit, and within this domain it follows the presentation of the soul and consciousness or, respectively, self-consciousness. As long as the Spirit is the immediate totality of the soul and consciousness, the discussion of the image belongs to psychology, which has for its object the Spirit as such. In its immediacy, however, the Spirit must sublate the form of this immediacy in order to be able to realize itself as the concept of its own proper freedom. The Spirit carries out its own sublation in three steps: these are the three moments of the theoretical, practical, and the free Spirit. Theoretical Spirit itself is again divided into intuition and representation. Hegel unfolds the problematic of the image in the development of the Spirit through the three moments of representation: recollection (as Erinnerung or internalizing memory), imagination, and finally memory (as Gedächtnis). The productions of the Spirit that consciousness, which is “the identity of the I with its other only in itself,” takes for its object, “are governed by the principle of all reason that the contents are at once in themselves existing and are the Spirit’s own in its freedom.”7 On the level of theoretical Spirit, where the discussion of the image occurs, the Spirit posits the reasonable as its own. In particular, this happens in the following way.

While intuition relates in an immediate fashion only to a single object and, therefore, represents “material knowing,” and the object appears only as mine in itself, representation is to be understood as an activity that withdraws the object from its singleness, in that it refers it to a universal and posits it as mine for itself.8 In representation as recollection, this happens insofar as intuition interiorizes, as a result of which the intuition in its mere being becomes mine: “We have, therefore, at this stage a content which is not only intuitively perceived in its immediacy, but is at the same time recollected, inwardized, posited as mine. As thus determined, the content is what we call image.”9 Since the Spirit represents for itself its own intuition in recollection, the object that belonged to it in intuition only in itself now becomes for the Spirit its own. The image is “Being as mine, as sublated.”10 But since in this interiorizing representation intelligence withdraws “the content of feeling” into its own interiority, the image is also liberated from “the immediacy and abstract singleness” of intuition.11 Once it is included in the universality of the I, the image loses the “full determination proper to intuition.”12 The imperishable component of the content, a result of its sublation in the image—which is itself released from the time and place in which the intuited initially stood—can be gained only “at the expense of the clarity and freshness of the immediate individuality of what is intuitively perceived in all its firmly determined aspects; the intuition, in becoming an image, is obscured and obliterated.”13 The resulting transitional nature of the image shows itself furthermore in the process in which Hegel piles up those definitions of the image that Western philosophy has always relied on to think it.

With the definition of the image as that in which intuited being exists as mine, interiorizing memory becomes an agency of the mere storage of images. Although the content of intuition has become mine through recollection and image-formation, as long as intelligence is Subject, the image remains still external to it, only formally belonging to it, because it is, as Hegel writes, “still not thought, still not raised into the form of Reason.”14 Only when this exteriority becomes determined does the image come fully into the possession of intelligence.

Before this takes place, however, intelligence is merely an “unconscious pit” in which the recollected intuition, the image, is stored. It is this “nocturnal pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images and representations,” but, as Hegel writes, “I do not as yet have full command over the images slumbering in the mine or pit of my inwardness, am not as yet able to recall them at will.”15 What the image is, its definition, announces itself through the anticipation of its appropriation by the intellect. So far, the image was only the property of the Spirit, which, however, does not yet dispose of it, does not yet possess it. “It is stored in the Spirit’s treasury, in its Night. The image is unconscious, i.e., it is not displayed as an object for representation.”16 Stored in the nocturnal pit, the treasury of unconscious, slumbering images is an undifferentiated, undivided mass of images. Here the Spirit is likewise unconscious and asleep. It is only a simple self and, thereby, remains undifferentiated, because it has not yet brought itself as an object before representation.

The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity—a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here—pure Self. . . . We see this night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [From his eyes] the night of the world hangs out toward us.17

What this pit and this night hides in its treasures is the intuition obscured by the image through recollection. Thus, as intuition loses its freshness and clarity through internalization and the becoming-mine of being, the pit becomes even darker. The night, the sleep of reason, breeds monsters,18 which Hegel describes in the following terms: “In phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly”;19 and “no one knows what an infinite host of images of the past slumbers in him; now and then they do indeed accidentally awake, but one cannot, as it is said, call them to mind.”20 The intuition remembered in the image, as we have seen, has become isolated “from the external place, time, and immediate context within which the intuition stood.”21 The result is that in dreams and phantasmagorical representations images can shoot forth randomly in arbitrary places and sink back again without coming to a halt. Since their awakening, and subsequent intuition, occurs within the darkness of the pit itself, the latter remains as unconstrained as the images. The images enter into the full possession of Spirit only as they become again temporally determinable and localizable. The pit—der Schacht, whose older German form Schaft originally meant “measuring rod”—needs to be measured, if the pit, the depth, the abyss is not to remain the measure of the immeasurable.

It is, therefore, necessary to define the exteriority and the abstraction of the image in order to separate and differentiate it from intuition and the simple night into which it had been sunk. This is carried out by the intelligence as it beholds the image and makes it into its object. Only in this way does the image become the property of intelligence, independent from external intuition, and available for the Spirit. From this moment on, the Spirit recognizes the interiorized image as its own. This illumination is also what lights up the pit and the night of the self.

The manner in which the images of the past lying hidden in the dark depths of our inner being become our actual possessions is that they present themselves to our intelligence in the luminous, plastic shape of an existent intuition of similar content, and that with the help of this present intuition we recognize them as intuitions we have already had.22

The power of imagination is instrumental to accomplish the appropriation in question. Its power consists of the ability to “to draw images out of this Night or to let them fall away.”23 The imagination is what in general first determines the images that acquire their definition in it. Hegel expresses this in the Encyclopedia in the following way:

At first, however, [the imagination] does no more than determine the images as entering into existence. Here it is only reproductive imagination. This has the character of a merely formal activity. But, secondly, imagination not merely recalls the images existent in it but connects them with one another and in this way raises them to universal representations. Accordingly, at this stage imagination appears as the activity of associating images. The third stage in this sphere is that in which intelligence posits its universal representations as identical with the particularity of the image and so gives the former a pictorial existence. This sensuous existence has the double form of symbol and sign, so that this third stage comprises the symbolising and the sign-making fantasy.24

We should understand the faculty of the imagination as the power of the intellect that, by having the stock of images at its disposal, informs (einbildet) the latter with the content that is particular to the intelligence insofar as in itself it is already a concrete subjectivity, and, that, in this manner, is, in these images, “recollected determinately into itself.”25 The content of the intellect, which, at first, is only anticipated, impregnates the images, as a result of which the stock of images in turn informs and gives shape to this content. The images, therefore, serve the purpose of the depiction and visualization of the property and the interiority of the Spirit, and it is only in this sense that they ultimately possess reality and a right to exist. As expressions of something universal, they lose the exteriority that they still had notwithstanding their appropriation as mine. This overcoming of their exteriority is not achieved through the unification of the image and the universal, but is achieved only if the universal representation proves itself “to be the substantial power over the image” and subjugates the image as something accidental, turns itself into its soul and becomes for itself in it, recollects itself, and manifests itself in it.26

However, the representations of the universal and of the image produced by the power of the imagination are still syntheses, since the material in which the interiority of the Spirit is imbued stems from the intuition. Since it is a compromise rather than a concept, the intuitive nature of the image will be gradually eliminated through the symbolic and sign-producing fantasy. Only in the sign will the universal representation be free from the concrete content of the image (as a result of the arbitrary relation of the signified and the signifier). But it is in linguistic signs, that is, in the word and in sound that represents “the fulfilled externalization of self-announcing inwardness,” and through its nonsensual nature alone, that the transition from representation to thinking truly takes place. This transition is made possible above all by the name, the linguistic sign par excellence. Hegel writes: “The name, when we understand it, is the simple image-less representation. It is in names that we think.”27 The diversity and the sensory aspect of the image are shrouded and obliterated in the name: the name is the being of the image. The realm of names—which corresponds to the awakening of the Spirit—is detached from the realm of images. From here on

the world, nature, is no longer a realm of images internally suspended (aufgehoben), having no being. Rather, it is a realm of names. The realm of images is the dreaming spirit, concerned with a content lacking all reality, all existence. Its awakening is the realm of names. Here we have a division: Spirit is [only] as consciousness; only now do its images have truth.28

With the realm of signs and names, the products of the imagination cease being syntheses. Fantasy becomes the center point in which the internal and the external perfectly overlap. The images can be dropped from representation, which is now liberated from and purged of the materials of intuition and proves itself to be in and for itself. In its fully accomplished form, representation is the power to pull out images from the night at will and to entrust them once again to the pit. What is sublated in the realm of signs and names is what the Spirit projected into them, and what they were supposed to bring to sensible expression. That which the Spirit projected into them were universal representations, which it construed based on the reciprocal relation of images among themselves. The common element, represented by the self-acting intelligence, was the subjective nature of these universal representations. The circle of this sphere is thereby closed: “In names, we actually first overcome intuition, the animal aspect, as well as space and time.”29 What representation drops by the wayside in its fully accomplished form, what it throws back into the nocturnal pit, is this “animal aspect.” Inasmuch as the latter served as a moment of the becoming of the Spirit, it is a waste product, caput mortuum. The pit, however, is the Golgotha of the Spirit.30

We can, therefore, say that for Hegel the image, thought in the system of all the actions of intelligence, still stems from the immediately determined being of intelligence lacking in Spirit, that is, from intuition. It is the image that shows and reveals that the content intuited by intuition is mine. The form in which true essence presents itself, however, is still of a material nature, inappropriate for and alien to the Spirit. In the imagination, this form is elevated to the level of intelligibility and stripped of its nature inappropriate for the Spirit. Through the symbol and the sign in particular, a mediator in which form and content mutually determine each other is created in name-giving language. The image, therefore, appears in hindsight as an unfortunate synthesis, as a compromise only between the particular and the universal.

To sum up: On the path of the becoming of Spirit, we can distinguish three definitions of the image: (1) as the product of the dreaming Spirit, which allows it to rise from and then disappear again in the unconscious pit of the simple self, the night of nature; (2) as a compromise between the universal and its material illustration; (3) and, finally, as the spiritualized image freed from all strangeness and alterity sublated in names and in language.

If we now turn to Nietzsche, we will be able to show that he uses these three aspects of the image in The Birth of Tragedy and his texts on rhetoric. However, his definition of the image tries to tear it out of its stance and standstill as a moment of the Hegelian process. Henceforth, the image ceases to be the untrue middle and gains a dimension of irreducibility that no longer yields to Hegelian dialectical fluidification. What Hegel designated as the true middle point (the overlap of the inside and the outside produced in symbolizing and sign-producing fantasy), and here we are touching on the third point in our discussion of the image, are for Nietzsche the concepts that have lost their original metaphoricity like used coins in circulation and have now been worn down to empty abstractions. It is, therefore, necessary to unfold this Nietzschean definition of the image, because it will be significant with regard to what is of interest for us in Bataille.

Nietzsche’s concept of the image—closely related to his concept of myth, which is composed of images—situates the birth of the image in the gap that divides the duality of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The image tries to bridge the abyss that separates the two principles, and therefore it must first be defined as a middle just as Hegel did.

The opposition with which The Birth of Tragedy opens is that “between plastic art as the Apollonian, and music as the Dionysian art.”31 While the Dionysian world of art is intoxicating, the Apollonian emerges as a beautiful illusion from the dream where “there is nothing unimportant or superfluous.”32 Its shapes and forms, which are experienced and suffered, are clearly drawn, and their function is to present life as worth living: “Apollo, the god of all plastic energies [bildnerische Kräfte], is at the same time the soothsaying god. He, who (as the etymology of the name indicated) is the ‘shining one’ [Scheinende], the deity of light, is also ruler over the beautiful illusion [Schein] of the inner world of fantasy.”33 Illusion, as the reconciliation necessary for life, is also the light of truth, provided that the latter is in the service of life. This aspect of the enlightening illusion is the hallmark of the Apollonian image.

Dionysian art, on the other hand, is devoid of images: it is symbolic. Under the spell of the Dionysian, the Apollonian principium individuationis is shattered. Man and nature are once again united. The Dionysian unity of man and the primordial One unleashes “the collective release of all the symbolic powers”: “The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement.”34 The highest form of symbolism, however, is Dionysian music: “the general mirror of the universal will.”35 Music speaks from the heart of the convulsive primordial unity, from the abyss, whose dissonance is a “mother tongue.” Nietzsche calls this art form symbolic, in full agreement with the classical concept of the symbol, since the sensible material in which the Dionysian universal expresses itself is related to the universal that needs to be expressed.

A further determination of the image derives from the symbolic expression of the antagonistic drives at the heart of things. The Dionysian artist, himself immediately fragmented by his ecstasy in eternal suffering, “produces the copy of this primal unity as music, even if we could justly call this a repetition of the world or its second cast.”36 But, under the influence of Apollo, “the imageless and non-conceptual reflection of the primordial pain in music . . . now produces a second mirroring as a specific symbol or example.”37 This happens when Apollo approaches the visionary Archilocus sunk into a slumber “on the high mountain pasture, in the noonday sun,” and “touches him with the laurel.” Upon this touch, “the Dionysian-musical enchantment of the sleeper emits image sparks, as it were.”38 The works of Apollo, which are “symbolical representations born of music,” are comparable to parables and consist of a “discharge,” or “imitative fulguration of music in images and concepts.”39 If we understand music as the image of “the eternal primal suffering, the sole ground of the world,” as the reflection of the eternal contradiction, then the discharge of music in images is “mere appearance of mere appearance.” The “radiant floating” of the world of images born in the dream thus amounts to the “demotion of appearance to the level of mere appearance.”40 Now, with the mirror of mere appearance, Apollo protects himself as well as the Dionysian visionary from “becoming one and fused” with the primal ground of the world: “With the immense impact of the image, the concept, . . . the Apollonian tears man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process.”41 The image, therefore, positions itself protectively between “immediate perception of the highest world-idea” and the “uninhibited effusion of the unconscious will” in Dionysian music and the visionary who tears himself apart.42 Since the image discharges and fulgurates the first appearance of the reflection of the primal ground, it dissolves the latter’s destructive, life-negating power in beautiful appearance. Thus, the mediating image is characterized by the functions of discharge, relief, and deception: assuming the form of a beautiful appearance and a dream, of art and myth, the image becomes the cure against the deathly poison of the Dionysian witches’ brew.

But how does the image (the myth) relate to music? As opposed to music, the images are always external: Although they symbolize the essence of music through their brightness, as beautiful appearances they deceive us about what music actually bears witness to. The bright mirror images are masks, “necessary effects of a glance into the inside and terrors of nature; as it were, luminous spots to cure the eyes damaged by gruesome night.”43 This brightness obscures vision and, thereby, averts the danger of being blinded by the abysmal night. Like myth, it is a “bright image which healing nature projects before us after a glance into the abyss.” Nietzsche writes: “The brightest clarity of the image . . . seemed to wish just as much to reveal something as to conceal something. Its revelation, being like a parable, seemed to summon us to tear the veil and to uncover the mysterious background; but at the same time this all-illuminated total visibility cast a spell over the eyes and prevented them from penetrating deeper.”44 Although music does not need the image or the concept, it nevertheless tolerates both. The only possible relation between music and image is such that music bears the image: “Even if we agitate and enliven the figure in the most visible manner, and illuminate it from within, it still remains merely a phenomenon from which no bridge leads us to true reality, into the heart of the world. But music speaks out of this heart.”45 As a shadow image (since it is an Apollonian creation) that puts itself protectively in front of music and as a bridge that actually refuses to bridge, the image can be relieved of its deceptive function only by becoming “the vehicle of Dionysian wisdom.”46 Although “language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena,” the Dionysian truth can, nevertheless, still touch the image in a specific way so to make it sound with the result that it by itself becomes music.47 This way, however, the Apollonian deception is interrupted as well, and the image ceases to be the barrier that blocks the glimpse into the abyss.

The transformation of the image into sound becomes possible when the Apollonian function of discharge, or relief (the production of mere appearance), itself appears as one possible function of the Dionysian, that is, “the eternal primal suffering, the sole ground of the world.”48 Indeed, as “eternally suffering and contradictory,” this dismembered and dismembering force needs the ecstatic vision of its redemption.49 If the world in its empirical existence itself constitutes only a representation or a vision of the primal unity (as reflection of the eternal contradiction), “we shall then have to look upon the dream as a mere appearance of mere appearance,” as the most extreme appeasement of primal unity.50 The exemplification, the singularization in the image and the allegorical in accordance with the Apollonian principle of individuation, the valorization of the “delicate boundary” of the dream, and the beautiful appearance become expressions of the primal unity itself, once it becomes, for a reconciliatory moment, the vehicle of the truth of the Dionysian rather than a barrier against it, in order to finally become dismembered again by the power of the Dionysian that bears it.51 This takes place (for an equally short moment in history) in the images of the tragic myth in which Apollo and Dionysus appear reconciled. Music, in this case, becomes the force that begins to interpret the image that music calls for. Nietzsche avers: “Dionysian art therefore is wont to exercise two kinds of influences on the Apollonian art faculty: music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian universality, and music allows the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance.”52 Only here does the image become the kind of center (Mitte) that bridges the gap and the abyss. The bridge, however, remains an image—an image that gives sensible form to Dionysian truth through Apollonian artistic means and, thereby, represents its true symbolic expression. This image—“the symbolic expression” of the “unique Dionysian wisdom” of music—is the tragic image that, as a fragmented bridge, therefore, reproduces, although within delicate boundaries, the original rupture, the convulsive primal ground.53 The fulgurating image that becomes light and emerges from the abyss is split and hit by the lightning itself. It is a bridge that is not the center that would make a sublation possible.

Even if all this smells “offensively Hegelian,” as Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo, in spite of the theme of reconciliation and the apparent dialectical mediation, the differences from Hegel should not be overlooked.54 What needs to be emphasized first is the valorization of the dream and mere appearance in the service of Dionysian truth, this world of images that Apollo allows to spring forth from the abyss. This world does not sublate the abyss in the sphere of language and the concept, since the latter, as Nietzsche says, is fully incapable of expressing the essence of music. Unless language itself becomes music.

Although the images are compromises between the Dionysian universal and its material representations, which arise from the primal ground split in itself and not from the night of the simple self, in tragic myth they lose their deceptive and obscuring function in relation to the universal that, in Hegel, required their overcoming and sublation in the name. Even though the tragic image is outlined within delicate Apollonian boundaries and in keeping with its disguising function that qua image and allegory belongs to it, the image is, at the same time, also called upon to pull aside the curtain in order “to behold the primordial image behind it.”55 The primordial image, however, is not an intelligible concept. The tragic image calls for the tearing apart of the latter, because it is already torn apart in itself. The goal is not to go to the back of the visible world of images in order to make visible the true and undisguised essence behind it but to allow the primordial image of tearing apart to shine through as an image.

For Nietzsche, just like the realm of signs and names for Hegel, the image is the center point insofar as in themselves split images are adequate expressions of the primordial One even in their form. But the image is not a mediator insofar as it would represent a reconciliation: nothing comes to a rest in it, not even for a moment. As far as its form is concerned, all it represents in a beautiful manner is the chasm of reconciliation. What it allows us to see is not the two principles in perpetual conflict—the Dionysian and the Apollonian, which constitute the primordial One as an eternal contradiction—only their primordial image. Therefore, the image cannot be thought as a compromise of, in themselves, imageless forces. As an image, it is different from the primordial image. In its own proper independence as a deviation, it also possesses something like a logic that, however, can only be called more or less logical.

2. The Hybrid Offspring

You will grant me that the one that is introduced by the experience of the unconscious is the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture.

—Jacques Lacan56

These censored wishes appear to rise up out of a positive Hell.

—Sigmund Freud57

Our attempts to define the image as a deviation, as a middle irreducible to the terms of a contradiction that is nevertheless not the result of sublation, now require as a further explanation a discussion of the Freudian concept of the image or those entities composed of images like the dream and fantasy. Turning to Freud, we will once again encounter the same metaphors and definitions that we have highlighted in Hegel and Nietzsche. Although more ambiguous than in Nietzsche, this return testifies also to the difficulty of theoretically grasping these equivocal formations.

In the course of our work, we designate the fantasy formations as phantasms, even if this term does not appear in Freud. Although the consequences of this renaming cannot be pursued here in more detail, at least it must be mentioned that the term “phantasm” has the advantage that it eliminates from the very beginning the negative connotations attached to the words “fantasy” and “imagination” in everyday usage when they are opposed to reality. On the other hand, “phantasm” also marks the incongruity of fantasy formations with what is called in philosophy the faculty of imagination.58 It is essential not to confuse the two because, on the one hand, the Freudian psychic apparatus displays some similarities with what happens in the Hegelian sphere of the becoming of the Spirit and because, on the other hand, Hegel and philosophy in general treat “imagination” and “fantasy” as synonyms. To the extent that a coherent demonstration cannot be carried out here, and in what follows we will only treat the difference between fantasy and imagination in a limited fashion, the reference to “phantasm” is to suggest by way of a tour de force, as it were, an at least terminological displacement at work in Freud against Hegel. We must now, therefore, briefly examine Freud’s theory of the image and fantasy.

Conceptual thinking—since it belongs to consciousness (which itself represents a late achievement)—is opposed to thinking in images as well as to the “logic” displayed by compositions of images. The former (conceptual thinking) emerged in the context of spoken language from archaic systems of expression and their languages and writings. The claim that thoughts were originally images is inaccurate, since thought, consciousness, and spoken language constitute a system prior to which there could be only forms of expression that, as unconscious mental acts, are by no means to be confused with thoughts no matter how primitive the latter might be. Freud remarks: “Now our thoughts originally arose from sensory images of that kind: their first material and their preliminary stages were sense impressions, or, more properly, mnemic images of such impressions. Only later were words attached to them and the words in turn linked up into thoughts.”59 If Freud can write that the dream thinks primarily in visual images, and he can at the same time refer to Fechner’s claim that the scene of the dream is different from that of the representations of waking consciousness, then that which the dream and fantasy formations accomplish must be qualitatively different from what we call thinking. The accomplishment of the dream consists of the production of a scene on which something is seen, shown, put on display, something is exhibited and imagined, and that is reexperienced in a hallucinatory way.60 The Freudian expression “unconscious mental acts,” therefore, describes the situation more definitively than “unconscious thoughts.”

The fact that the dream or the phantasm combines representations, or ideas, with hallucinations implies that the images that contain these products “are more like perceptions . . . than they are like mnemic presentations.”61 Freud can, thus, claim that the contents characteristic of dreams merely “behave like images.”62 Fundamentally, images as well as ideas and memories, indeed, are still elements and activities that, according to their proper definitions, belong to the domain of conscious thought. Conceptual thinking is structured in such a way that the images still belong to it as its opposites, a fact that Freud accounted for by speaking of “verbal images.”63

The activity of thinking in the proper sense—through which “the waking mind produces ideas and thoughts in verbal images and in speech”—cannot simply be attributed to unconscious mental acts that lead to dreams and fantasy formations.64 In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud has clearly emphasized that the dream uses conceptual thinking, residual language, and words in the form only of “the day’s residues,” that is, as the material for dreams on which the unconscious mental acts are carried out.

The image characteristic of the dream and the fantasy, therefore, should not be confused with the image as we know it in awaking state. As we will show here, it represents a third position in relation to the concept and its corresponding expression through an image.

In our pursuit to elucidate the specific nature of the Freudian concept of image, we will now turn to the question of symbolism. According to Freud, the symbolism of dreams and fantasies (which cannot be explained by way of association in the course of the work of interpretation), that is, the typical images that Freud defines as “similes” (which are neither arbitrary nor do they necessarily follow a natural connection between the interpreted and the interpreter), bear witness to an “ancient but extinct mode of expression of which different pieces have survived in different fields.”65 As Freud suggests, the symbolic relation is the “residue of an ancient verbal identity” between things “which were once called by the same name as genitals” and the genitals themselves. If this is so, then the symbol as simile (which emerges in an area different from that of the archaic form of expression as a substitute for the symbolized whose place it represents) does not replace the original symbolized but rather something different, which needs to be distinguished from the old verbal identity as well as from what it means according to antique and popular techniques of the interpretation of dreams and their catalogues of symbols, an art that, as Freud says, consists in interpreting, as it were, “at sight [gleichsam vom Blatt weg übersetzen].”66 If the symbols were all originally sexual symbols, and if they almost always appear in the dream as such, even though the dream and fantasy formations are different from the “basic language,” the connection between the image as dream element and the desire or drive cannot be overlooked.67 If there existed between the symbols and sexuality originally an intimate link, and if a “toning-down of representation by symbols into other kinds of representation” did in fact take place, then we can also understand the lack, the loss, the difference (in every sense of the word) by which the symbol or the image is made up in this intermediary region of the dream or the phantasm.68

Let us remember that the manifestation of the drive is neither an object of consciousness (it is present in consciousness only as “the idea that represents it”) nor an object of the unconscious (the drive is unconscious only as the ideational representative, as Vorstellungsrepräsentanz).69 Consequently, the symbol and the image are suspended between pure animality and pure consciousness and always represent only the lack of the object (the drive as well as the object of the drive).70 The symbol and the image signify the presence/absence of the genitals, or they bear witness to or produce their presence/absence. As merely representable, the genitals are both present and absent. The structures of either/or, both/and, and/or characterize both symbol and image. Due to this structure, they are suspended in the middle as different and distinct from the lost or desired object that they represent. In this sense, the image does not denote some kind of a sensible fullness, as appears to be the case for the kind of image that, on the level of consciousness, is opposed to the empty concept. To the contrary, it replaces, misplaces, and distorts both the drive and the desired object in their pure animality as well as their objectification in consciousness. The image as the suspended middle, therefore, appears to be irreducible to animal verbal identity, to the biological aspect of the drive (which, as such, does not fall within the domain of the psychological), or to consciousness (which uses the image and the symbol in a toned-down form and is merely a later product of the unconscious). Although the image and the symbol are undoubtedly compromise formations between two domains, they nevertheless do not allow themselves to be completely reduced to them—a point that still needs to be explained more precisely.

Freud’s hypothesis of an archaic “basic language” leads to the conclusion that the dream and the fantasy formations, and also the image that belongs to both of them, appear to be regressions: “We call it ‘regression’ when in a dream an idea is turned back into the sensory image from which it was originally derived.”71 When the resistance of consciousness opposes the progress of a thought, the latter is attracted by unconscious “memories possessing great sensory force.”72 The regressive path of thought thus leads to the dissolution of its “fabric” in the “raw material” of memory traces that originally formed the basis of the thought itself.73 Whereas in the waking state “this backward movement never extends beyond the mnemic images,” the joining of the thoughts dispersed in the raw material with the memory traces produces hallucinatory perceptual images.74 Although, on the one hand, the dispersed and repelled censored desires make possible “the cathexis of the system Pcpt. in the reverse direction, starting from thoughts, to the pitch of complete sensory vividness,” on the other hand, they are also attracted by “memories couched in visual form and eager for revival.”75

The dream-process consequently enters on a regressive path, which lies open to it precisely owing to the peculiar nature of the state of sleep, and it is led along that path by the attraction exercised on it by groups of memories; some of these memories themselves exist only in the form of visual cathexes and not as translations into the terminology of the later systems. In the course of its regressive path the dream-process acquires the attribute of representability.76

It is thus clear that the transformation of thoughts into images that becomes possible only in the course of regression at the same time also represents a return to their pictorial raw materials: it is the dissolution of the signs of consciousness in what they emerged from (this is the case when the dream gives back to words, “which originally had a pictorial and concrete significance, but are used today in a colourless and abstract sense,” their “former, full meaning”) as well as the reactivation of memory traces that were never turned into abstract signs through the process of abstraction.77

The regressive retranslation of signs and thoughts into images, the regression to the apparatus of perception that they presuppose, is therefore also a regression to something that as a visual cathexis has never been subjected to a translation into signs. These visual cathexes form a part of that which cannot be dissolved in the opposition of consciousness and the natural basic language: they are part of what Freud calls “inadmissible to consciousness [bewusstseinsunfähig].”78 For the time being, this is all we will say about the concept of the image, as it can be examined separately from the actual formations in which it appears. Leaving the question of the dream aside (although we will have more to say about its law), we will now turn to phantasms.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud still groups the products of fantasy together with those of daydreaming. They appear there as moments of the secondary revision of the dream, which contributes to its unification, provided that the material of daydreams is already part of the dream thoughts and merely needs to be carried over into the dream content by the secondary revision. Henceforth, “the phantasy is treated in general like any other portion of the latent material.”79 Just like any other dream material and dream thought, in the dream the fantasy is subjected to condensation, displacement, and representability. But Freud also presupposes the existence of unconscious fantasies. He acknowledges their existence in the following passage: “But just as there are phantasies of this kind which are conscious, so, too, there are unconscious ones in great numbers, which have to remain unconscious on account of their content and of their origin from repressed material.”80 Yet he decides to avoid discussing them, “because the introduction of this particular psychical element would have necessitated lengthy discussions on the psychology of unconscious thinking.” With regard to the relation of these unconscious fantasies to the dream, we can say that, unlike conscious fantasies, they are not used by secondary revision belatedly to cement and smooth the facade of the dream. Rather, they belong to what Freud calls “dream-thoughts.” He writes: “The point is not that dreams create the phantasy, but rather that the unconscious activity of the phantasy has a large share in the construction of the dream-thoughts.”81 Yet having first understood the dream-thoughts as results of completely normal mental activity, the hypothesis of unconscious fantasies forces him indeed to restrict his original assumption. For among the dream-thoughts, as they came to light during the interpretation of the dream-content, there are in fact “a number of quite abnormal processes of thought.”82 The assumption of the unconscious activity of phantasy, which greatly participates in the formation of dream-thoughts, leads to the discovery that in the unconscious “the most complicated achievements of thoughts are possible without the assistance of consciousness,” and due to their complexity they fundamentally distinguish themselves from the achievements of consciousness.83 Thereby, the unconscious, as well as the activity that constitutes it and produces the unconscious fantasy, “is the larger circle, which includes within it the smaller circle of the conscious.”84 At the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, therefore, Freud must pose the question of the reality of unconscious wishes, that is, the reality of the unconscious itself, of the ideational representatives of the drives (which replace the representations of the drive), and of the unconscious fantasies. Neither material reality, nor mere imagination, they represent a third intermediary reality: a psychic reality. Since the latter is neither subjective nor objective, it is a dimension irreducible to either of the two.

As soon as this psychic reality manifests itself in consciousness in the form of a dream, a fantasy, or senseless images (which consciousness does not want to recognize as material reality and cannot objectify for scientific knowledge), consciousness will treat it as something alien that penetrates it like an indissoluble heterogeneous core: “In this case long-repressed memories and derivatives from them which had remained unconscious slipped into consciousness by a roundabout path in the form of apparently meaningless pictures.”85 Consciousness denies for these images—which consist of ideas that “seem to emerge ‘of their own free will’” just like associations in the course of the cure—any reality as past memories or intuitions and, not remembering them, does recognize them as its own.86

Let us further examine this “reality of sorts” so that we can define more clearly its central position as well as the law that characterizes this middle region.87 First, we must once again remember that from the perspective of consciousness and rational thinking, the activity of fantasy and its images must necessarily appear to be regressive:

The diversion of interest from the tasks of real life, the existence of phantasies in the capacity of substitutes for unperformed actions, the regressive tendency which is expressed in these productions—regressive in more than one sense, in so far as there is involved simultaneously a shrinking-back from life and harking-back to the past—all these things hold good, and are regularly confirmed by analysis.88

In the diversion of the libido from actual conflicts and reality, through its hallucinated images fantasy creates a compensation for a renunciation of pleasure. Yet this compensatory character does not fully exhaust the phenomenon of the formation of the phantasm. Even if for Freud the sources of the drive—to which the fantasies owe their very existence—are beyond doubt, it still remains “to be explained why the same phantasies with the same content are created on every occasion.”89 This content belongs to the past and, referring back to the past, the fantasy mobilizes infantile scenes. These infantile or primal scences, however, do not always have to be true and actually experienced. Freud, therefore, finds himself in a predicament, since he must attribute a proper reality to these primal scenes that, as a rule, appear to be fantasized. The fact that the etiology of fantasy formation proves that the primal scenes are not necessarily based on real childhood experiences also conforms to Freud’s observation in a letter to Fliess that “there is no ‘indication of reality’ in the unconscious, so that it is impossible to distinguish between truth and emotionally-charged fiction.”90 Rejecting the Jungian concept of the “retrospective fantasy” as well as any explanation based on mere delusion, Freud (apparently) had no other choice than to resort to a phylogenetic heritage in order to account for the origin of phantasms. The three essential and, in fact, only possible contents of the fantasies are “observation of parental intercourse, seduction by an adult and threat of being castrated.”91 Regardless of whether it is based on a real memory or not, the fantasy of seduction “is usually employed by a child to screen the autoerotic period of his sexual activity.”92 The fantasies with the help of which the adult conceals to himself the subject matter of the history of his childhood are analogous to the formations of legends by means of which a people covers up its forgotten prehistory. This equation of the forgotten prehistory of peoples with the early childhood experiences that might never have occurred makes it necessary for Freud to assume the existence of primal fantasies. As primal experiences of humanity (which according to Freud really did happen) anchored in inheritance, they are the foundation of the reality of the dreams and their phantasmatic formations. This way the primal scenes acquire also the status of something that has been at one point experienced.

The events and experiences inherited from prehistory—which Freud evokes when the reality of infantile experiences cannot be established—become the origins of phantasms. Thus, all later experiences and impressions come under the influence of specific patterns that structure the phylogenetic heritage. Freud observes that “all that we find in the prehistory of the neuroses is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors.”93 As “precipitates from the history of human civilization,” the phylogenetically transmitted experiences are like “schemata, which, like the categories of philosophy, are concerned with the business of ‘placing’ the impressions derived from actual experience.”94 It is the fantasy that attempts to process the suffered experiences under the influence of these hereditary schemata. The latter possess an “independent existence” analogous to the “instinctive knowledge of animals.” Freud conjectures that

if human beings too possessed an instinctive endowment such as this, it would not be surprising that it should be very particularly concerned with the process of sexual life, even though it could not be by any means confined to them. This instinctive factor would then be the nucleus of the unconscious, a primitive kind of mental activity, which would later be dethroned and overlain by human reason, when that faculty came to be acquired, but which in some people, perhaps every one, would retain the power of drawing down to it the higher mental processes.95

In addition to the compensatory function that regression exercises on the infantile past in order to seek out compensations in the face of actual conflicts, and in addition to the veiling effect that falls to the fantasies, for example, to conceal the child’s autoerotism, the other kind of compensatory activity of the fantasies consists of revising the actual material of experience, filling in holes, and substituting for the missing context with the help of independent, hereditary schemata. Yet Freud concludes his discussion of the real value of traumatic experiences or primal experiences with a non liquet. It is actually indifferent for analysis whether the fantasies are based on really experienced events or developed in accordance with hereditarily acquired schemata that structure individual experience, since what produces the latter is just as real as factual experiences. Indeed, Freud regards it “as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted.”96 The objection stems from the insight that the phylogenetic explanation poses insurmountable limits to therapy.

However, the fact must be clearly emphasized that the discussions of ontogenesis and phylogenesis, of really experienced primal scenes or hereditarily determined primal fantasies, all stem from the question concerning the origin of phantasms. Freud could grasp this origin only in genetic terms, as an event that actually did occur once. Laplanche and Pontalis, in particular, have made the same observation:

But, and here is the third current, the development of Freudian research and psychoanalytic treatment display at the outset a regressive tendency towards the origin, the foundation of the symptom and the neurotic organization of the personality. If fantasy is shown to be an autonomous, consistent and explorable field, it leaves untouched the question of its own origin, not only with regard to structure, but also to content and to its most concrete details. In this sense, nothing has changed, and the search for chronology, going backwards into time towards the first real, verifiable elements, is still the guiding principle of Freud’s practice.97

This applies equally to the primal fantasies, since according to Freud, transcending both individual and universal experience, they are connected to events from human history that did happen once and are preserved as memory traces. Yet the thesis of the primal scene and the primal fantasies also makes the explication of phantasms possible, since it allows us to think their autonomous existence independently from an event that occurred sometime in the past. Regardless of whether the foundation of fantasy formation is phylogenetic or real experience, the combination of the laws of the unconscious with the schemata that structure every possible event, like pregiven philosophical categories, allows for the opening of a phantasmatic space that no theory of origins can account for. If in spite of all the individual variations always the same fantasies emerge, if there are thus “typical” fantasies, “it is because the historical life of the subject is not the prime mover, but rather something antecedent, which is capable of operating as an organizer.”98 Indeed, according to Laplanche and Pontalis, the reality of the phylogenetic inheritance, which represents the conditioning beyond of every phantasmatic entity, is “a reality which, as Freud insists, has an autonomous and structural status with regard to the subject who is totally dependent on it”: “Beneath the pseudo-scientific mask of phylogenesis, or the recourse to ‘inherited memory-traces,’ we should have to admit that Freud finds it necessary to postulate an organization made of signifiers anteceding the effect of the event and the signified as a whole.”99 Yet the structure of the primal fantasies is not to be understood in the sense of purely transcendental schemata, since as Laplanche and Pontalis observe, “The original fantasy is first and foremost fantasy.”100 What could be grasped as a transcendental structure cannot be separated from the phantasm, since this structure is itself phantasmatic. Furthermore, and this is a decisive point, the content of the phantasm refers primarily to the question of the origin, and does so in an essential manner. The question of origin is its primary object. Laplanche and Pontalis write: “In this content, in their theme (primal scene, castration, seduction . . . ), the original fantasies also indicate this postulate of retroactivity: they relate to the origins”; or “in other words, the origin of the fantasy is integrated in the very structure of the original fantasy.”101 We conclude from this that the question concerning the origins of the fantasy itself represents a phantasmatic question, a question that only the structure of the phantasm makes possible. Similarly, the phantasm holds all the possible answers to this question. Whatever turns out to be the answer to the question of origins—real, imaginary, or even transcendental—the answer is always programmed by the phantasm.

The object of the primal fantasies is the origin. As Freud claims, every individual fantasy formation, which possesses the status of a “theory,” stands in the service of a search for the origin.102 Since the primal fantasy is a fantasy just like the individual fantasies that derive from it as they find their schemata performed in it, it represents the irreducible layer of the “symbolic” that cannot be fully dissolved in the opposition of the real and the imaginary. On the contrary, primal fantasy is a “quantity” that makes possible both the real and the imaginary with the help of the schemata that constitute them. As we have already suggested, however, the layer of the symbolic schemata is not transcendental in a philosophical sense. Neither is it a structure independent from the real and the imaginary in an ontological sense. In fact, it possesses the characteristics of both reality (in the sense of psychic reality) and the imaginary (inasmuch as it consists of theory formation). In other words, the layer of the symbolic is itself a phantasm, a “primal fantasy.”

What we said about the image in Nietzsche—that as soon as the curtain is raised provides a view of the two contrary drives, which, however, reemerge only in the shape of a “primal image”—can be repeated here in connection with Freud. Indeed, the search for the origins of the concrete fantasies, which could be understood primarily as compromise formations between contrary drives in mental life, brings to the surface the irreducible moment of the phantasmatic, since it does not reveal the extra-phantasmatic origin of fantasies but rather only a primal fantasy (of the origin).

In this sense, we should understand the phantasm as the hybrid derivative in the general meaning of an offspring that constantly deviates from the stem and makes every genetic genealogy impossible:

Among the derivatives of the Ucs. instinctual impulses, of the sort we have described, there are some which unite in themselves characters of an opposite kind. On the other hand, they are highly organized, free from self-contradiction, have made use of every acquisition of the system Cs. and would hardly be distinguished in our judgement from the formations of that system. On the other hand they are unconscious and are incapable of becoming conscious. Thus qualitatively they belong to the system Pcs., but factually to the Ucs. Their origin is what decides their fate. We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people. Of such a nature are those phantasies of normal people as well of neurotics which we have recognized as preliminary stages in the formation both of dreams and of symptoms and which, in spite of their high degree of organization, remain repressed and therefore cannot become conscious.103

Based on the “communication” between the systems of the Cs. and the Ucs., these highly organized derivatives are composite formations that undermine the clear separation of the two systems: “Study of the derivatives of the Ucs. will completely disappoint our expectations of a schematically clear-cut distinction between the two psychical systems.”104 So is it too daring to assume that the explanation of the phantasms as derivatives of the communication between the two systems (whose clear separation they cancel out and whose differences they obscure) is already inscribed in the primal phantasm: in the phantasm that poses the question of the origins? If the primal scene contains the observation of the real or hallucinated parental intercourse through which the subject posits for itself an origin in a phantasmatic manner, it is also the scene of the irruption of sexuality from the outside into the interiority of the subject and of castration in a broader sense. Thus, the phantasm is precisely the structure that inscribes the question of the origin in the always already impure difference. If the systems of the Cs. and the Ucs. could be at first thought as different from each other, their communication now shows, on the one hand, that they are impure (just like the primal scene in which the mother castrates the father and, therefore, possesses the phallus without actually having it), and, on the other hand, that the offspring produced by this communication deviates from the stem and, as a composite product of the two systems, it contains in itself the impure difference. It is the denial of this difference in itself and in the two systems that makes the question of the provenance of this offspring possible. “Study of the derivatives of the Ucs.,” therefore, “will no doubt give rise to a fundamental dissatisfaction,” which represents a disappointment with the foundation: the hybrid offspring is without an origin.105

The symbol designates the presence and absence of the genitals. It represents a lack that it simultaneously veils and reveals. Since it is absent, the object of the symbol, the genitals, can be presented only in a hallucinatory manner and therefore remains in an irreducible middle between absence and presence. The structure of the symbol, the symbolic, is necessarily of the same nature. It is imaginary, since its structure can be grasped only as a primal fantasy. Yet it is also real in the sense of a psychic reality, and it opens up to the repetition compulsion to constantly resume the search for the origin of sexual difference, castration, and so on. It is a place of endless substitutions. According to its form, the symbolic already possesses all the characteristics of the things that it makes possible as concrete fantasies. As primal fantasy, it is an origin; as impure difference (as a hybrid offspring) it affects pure difference. It is, as it were, a hole that fills in a gap and, therefore, assumes the form of castration.106

As the core of the unconscious analogous to a primitive mental activity, the symbolic invades the consciousness of the subject like a foreign body in the form of the primal fantasy and its corresponding further fantasies. If the discovery of sexuality is an exogenous experience that the child undergoes in the primal fantasy (contrary to the biological-genetic explanation provided by Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality), if the experience of the origin, sexual difference, castration irrupts into the psyche of the child from the outside and tears open its arguably always already mythical unity and purity (as it is suggested by the Three Essays), we can conclude that the symbolic structure of the primal fantasy represents a heterogeneous core within the subjective that is irreducible because it possesses the structure of difference. According to Freud, “We must presume . . . that the psychical trauma—or more precisely the memory of the trauma—acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must be continued to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.”107 What Freud says here about the trauma that causes hysteria also applies to the irruption of the primal scene or the primal fantasy. As a foreign body that appears to come from the outside as it divides subjectivity and shatters its integrity (which it has always already shattered, although the subject disavows this process for the sake of its self-constitution), this core that assumes the shape of a primal image of difference cannot be mastered since the subject along with its drives is already subjected to its law. The symbolic structure of the primal fantasy that simultaneously poses and dissimulates the question of the origin compels the subject to its self-discovery. Indeed, the above-mentioned core is irreducible because the dissolution and sublation of these phantasmatic formations (like those of the dream) necessarily encounter “mute” elements like typical symbols and fantasies.108 The retranslation of fantasies and dreams comes to an end at the point where it encounters the unknown, what Freud calls “the dream’s navel,” which is a “tangle” that cannot be unraveled, in other words a “final” image of the origin: the image of the navel that represents the process of attachment, cutting, and tying off.109 It is the image of an opening, a crack, a threshold, and it must not be overlooked that our glimpse of the phantasm itself takes place through a crack, a hole, and above all a window.110

For our purposes, however, it is still necessary to discuss yet another aspect of this problem: the relation of the phantasm to language. Let us first recall that the analytic situation is primarily linguistic in nature. Unlike daydreams and screen-memories, the phantasms that are articulated through language in this situation are not given in advance: “It is also the result of analysis, an end-product, a latent content to be revealed behind the symptom. From mnesic symbol of trauma, the symptom has become the stage-setting of fantasies.”111 The daydreams and screen-memories are given insofar as they are already linguistic in nature and that they are already in some way articulated. The possibility of the linguistic articulation of the phantasm, however, requires an elaboration of its relation to the act of articulation and speech.

According to Freud, language and words belong to the Cs. and Pcs. systems. What distinguishes a conscious from an unconscious presentation is precisely that the former is linguistic. Inasmuch as Freud separates the Wortvorstellung (word-presentation) from the Sachvorstellung (thing-presentation) of objects, the difference between conscious and unconscious ideas consists of the fact that “the conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone”:

The system Ucs. contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and true object-cathexes; the system Pcs. comes about by this thing-presentation being hypercathected through being linked with the word-presentations corresponding to it. It is these hypercathexes, we may suppose, that bring about a higher psychical organization and make it possible for the primary process to be succeeded by the secondary process which is dominant in the Pcs. Now, too, we are in a position to state precisely what it is that repression denies to the rejected presentation in the transference neuroses: what it denies to the presentation is translation into words which shall remain attached to the object. A presentation which is not put into words, or a psychical act which is not hypercathected, remains thereafter in the Ucs. in a state of repression.112

Yet, just as “being linked with word-presentations is not yet the same thing as becoming conscious, but only makes it possible to become so; it is therefore characteristic of the system Pcs. and of that system alone,” the Ucs. system does not exclusively consist of thing-presentations and memory traces of experienced and perceived objects, acts, or scenes. Along with these, the Ucs. system also contains word-presentations as “residues of perceptions of words”: “Word-presentations, for their part too, are derived from sense-perceptions, in the same way as thing-presentations are.”113

Laplanche and Pontalis are right to remark that in his first drafts of the problem of the phantasm, Freud analyzed the role of acoustic perception with special emphasis:

Without placing too much importance on these fragmentary texts, in which Freud seems to be thinking more particularly of paranoid fantasies, one must consider why such a privileged position was accorded to hearing. We suggest there are two reasons. One relates to the sensorium in question: hearing, when it occurs, breaks the continuity of an undifferentiated perceptual field and at the same time is a sign (the noise waited for and heard in the night), which puts the subject in the position of having to answer to something. To this extent the prototype of the signifier lies in the aural sphere, even if there are correspondences in the other perceptual registers. But hearing is also—and this is the second reason to which Freud alludes explicitly in the passage—the history of the legends of parents, grandparents and the ancestors: the family sounds or sayings, this spoken or secret discourse, going on prior to the subject’s arrival, within which he must find his way. In so far as it can serve retroactively to summon up the discourse, the noise—or any other discrete sensorial element that has meaning—can acquire this value.114

Whatever else this primacy of hearing over seeing might involve, what concerns us most here is that perception also leaves behind word-perceptions. Based on Freud’s claim toward the end of The Interpretation of Dreams that the perceptual residues of the word-presentations in the unconscious are not sufficient to make the thing-presentations conscious, and therefore another cathexis or quality must be conferred on them in order to achieve this goal, we can conclude that, in view of the regression that takes place in the dream, the word-presentations in the Ucs. system are “word-images.”115 In other words, what the dream accomplishes—as soon as it drags the abstract concepts down to something like their original metaphorical and visual meanings—consists of the fact that “word-presentations are taken back to the thing-presentations which correspond to them.” Freud remarks: “When regression has been completed, a number of cathexes are left over in the system Ucs.—cathexes of memories of things. The primary psychical process is brought to bear on these memories until, by condensation of them and displacement between their respective cathexes, it has shaped the manifest dream-content.”116 In addition, “It is true in general that words are treated in dreams as though they were concrete things, and for that reason they are apt to be combined in just the same way as presentations of concrete things [Dingvorstellungen].”117

In the Ucs. system, which contains memory traces of perceptions, image (perceptual residue) and word (what is heard) are in a fluid state in relation to each other. The primary process acts on them without any difference. The word no longer functions here as an expression of thought, as a concept, but as something similar to a visually perceived content. It serves the purposes of presentation and is attached to a scene along with its corresponding thing-presentations, that is, to the primal scene, the primal fantasy, which remains unconscious. In the Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud writes that phantasms are produced by an unconscious linkage of experienced and heard things.118

The perceptual residues, the traces of visual and auditory experiences, represent the first act of transcription or “writing down” (Niederschrift) of the perceptions, which, as Freud notes, consists of “signs of perception” (Wahrnehmungszeichen): “Pcpt.-s. is the first registration [Niederschrift] of the perceptions; it is quite incapable of being conscious and is arranged according to associations of simultaneity.”119 In other words, since the traces of visual and auditory experiences retained in the unconscious in the form of perceptual signs coincide with their inscriptions, thing-presentations and word-presentations exist here exclusively as signifiers. In fact, Lacan uses the Saussurean term “signifier” to translate the Freudian Wahrnehmungszeichen.120 Thing- and word-presentation behave in a differential manner in the unconscious: they refer to each other without mutually denoting each other (otherwise nothing would stand in the way of the becoming conscious of unconscious cathexes); they are, therefore, linguistic in constitution but only in the sense of what a “writing down” produces: as letters.121 The unconscious primal fantasies that emerge from the linkage of visual and auditory signifiers can be made conscious in the analytic situation only because due to their characteristics as signs and signifiers they already possess linguistic traits. Yet this linguistic aspect must be understood correctly: The simultaneity and, as it appears to us, equivalence of the visual and the auditory in the unconscious makes impossible every overestimation of spoken language as a fully transparent discourse for the mind. What the phantasms reveal in the analytic situation is more like a text woven simultaneously of words and images (even if the latter are already linguistic in nature).

To put it differently, the signifying structure of the phantasm composed of images and words—which, as such, is kept in the unconscious by primary repression or repression in general—can never completely avoid censorship as the passage to consciousness and language, so it can never become fully transparent in a linguistic articulation. In fact, “the primal repressed is a signifier.”122 The reason why in the end the analysis of phantasms can always bring to light only a primal fantasy is the same as the one that always prevents the signified from ever catching up with the signifier. The movement, rather, is reversed: it is the signifier that crosses the threshold of consciousness in the form of the fantasies and continues to exert its effects there as a foreign body irreducible to consciousness or language.

Insofar as in the technical language of linguistics the Saussurean term “signifier” designates the acoustic image (“the sensory part”) as well as the written characters, the letters (since writing is the “tangible form” of these images) in opposition to the concept or the signified, in light of our discussions from now on we will use “signifier” and “image” as synonyms.123 The signifier—which, on the one hand, is material and sensory in nature and, on the other, represents a mere differential feature, a trace, a cut, a mark—has the same characteristics as the image as we defined it here. The same way that the signifier as the dimension irreducible to spoken language penetrates the signified like a foreign body and transgresses the bar of meaning (about which we will have more to say later), the phantasmatic image that cannot be removed or mastered by language irrupts into the discourse of philosophy and science, which believes itself to be transparent. In order to prove these points, we will now once again return to Bataille with these discussions in mind.

3. The Inclination of the Chain of Images

Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and all the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does this resemble a product of the fantasy, for if it were such, there should be some place where the illusion and reality can be divined.

—Friedrich Nietzsche124

You are aware, I said, that when the eyes are no longer turned upon objects upon whose colors the light of day falls but that of the dim luminaries of night, their edge is blunted and they appear almost blind, as if pure vision did not dwell with them.

—Plato125

Since we have already traced Bataille’s valorization of the particular in opposition to the universal and the universal system, it is now time to tackle a new opposition: that between “intelligible images” and “intelligible signs.”126 According to Bataille, intelligible signs serve exclusively to distinguish different elements from a utilitarian perspective. If we want to shatter the systematic order of science and philosophy, first we need to transition “from a general concept that intellectual mechanisms empty out of meaning to an irrational particular symbol” (OC, II, 132). When Bataille speaks of “symbolic interpretation,” for example, in “The Language of Flowers,” he does not mean the commonplace symbolism associated with this title but rather the kind of symbolism that was discovered by psychoanalysis, among other places in The Interpretation of Dreams.127 What is connected to a symbol in dreams is in fact not predestined to become a component of a symbol either by natural connection or from a utilitarian perspective: “In fact, it is almost always an accidental parallel that accounts for the origin of the substitutions in dreams.”128 The arbitrary arrangement of “juxtaposed elements”—whose “objective value of appearance” is neglected by symbolic representation because they are not present within the process of symbol formation—attests to the agency of wishes, drives, and desires, which is to be held responsible for symbolic compromise formations.129

If we can even identify a destabilizing displacement of the relation of the components that become interconnected in what is generally called the process of symbolization—a displacement that, according to Bataille, is already at work in nature where the corolla of a flower is much more developed than the organs of reproduction, the pistil and seeds—the reason is that the latter also already tries to turn away from functional and purposive rationality. This displacement carried out by traditional symbolization, however, still serves the purposes of an idealization: the flowers, for example, represent the human ideal of love, while the corolla represents a young girl.

In the process of symbolization, the operation of displacement encounters its limit through this idealization. The wish or drive that underlies every displacement, however, is capable of transgressing the very limit that it itself produces, since through a backward-turning displacement it returns to the “original squalor” of what was first idealized.130 The process of symbolization is, therefore, twofold: First, it projects an ideal (for example, that of love), and, second, it transgresses this ideal and drags it down into the dirt again, thereby “introducing . . . this nauseating banality: love smells like death.”131 According to this definition of symbolization, which by way of a displacement brings about the ideal with the intention of immediately turning it into an “indecent and glaring sacrilege,” the symbol or image staged by symbolization will have to be described as a tragic sign: as the “laughable duel” of a “tragicomic opposition,” it represents the drama of death.132 The symbol or the image, therefore, must be understood as divided in itself, as analogous to the drives that produce it. Its elements are the results of an arbitrary and violent unification and not the consequences of a contract, as its Greek etymology might suggest. The two elements that constitute the symbol refer to each other only in the sense that they mutually transgress each other. This is why the symbol should be understood as the transgression of a limit, as a deadly and violent cut. No wonder, then, if the symbol attests to emotions that fatally disturb every ideal, idea, or system. But, as Bataille notes, “The specific character of violent and impersonal emotions that symbols signify has been misunderstood.”133 Therefore, “only unbridled symbolic thinking escapes from the representation of the endless determinism implied by the policing mechanisms of rational thought” (OC, II, 128). In the process of the valorization of the particular, which as something irreducible is supposed to shatter the universal, the systematic, and the ideal (in order to be incorporated into a fragmented nature), the symbol itself obtains at first the status of such a particularity: “the value of a symbol being unquestionable since it is simply a fact” (OC, II, 129). The examples that Bataille throws into his text, which are mostly erotic in nature, represent precisely such particular facts that, as always concrete transgressions of the law and the universal, assume the characteristics of the singular and, therefore, take on a symbolic value: on the one hand, they are symbols of transgression, of a transgression of a limit; on the other hand, they are also symbols in the sense that, in their facticity and tragicomic aspect, they break through this order only symbolically. Consequently, it is also necessary to overcome the particular, the subjective, and the personal.

However, after the transgression of the concept through the irrational, particular, and arbitrary symbol is accomplished, it becomes necessary to connect the individual images “in some system of relations,” in other words, to undertake the presentation of a world “as a whole.” The program for this additional step is laid out in the following passage:

If it is possible to relate this activity [of transgressing in erotically repugnant ways the law] to a new order of determinations external to the ideological system of consciousness, this new order nevertheless is above all the indissoluble image of disorder, without which the idea of disorder would be merely an illogical abstraction. Since rational thought cannot conceive of disorder or freedom, and since only symbolic thought is capable of it, it is necessary from the very beginning to move from a general concept that intellectual mechanisms empty out of meaning to an irrational particular symbol.

A further reflection allows one to pass again from this arbitrary symbol to a representation of the world on a general level. (OC, II, 132)

Therefore, we cannot oppose to the system an empty disorder as a mere counterpart of order. Only the structured image of a disorder woven of a number of irreducible symbols and images can prevent its reabsorption into the ideological system. Consequently, it is a mythological sequence, a series of intelligible images, that is to say, a phantasm that is to be projected into the homogeneous world of science and philosophy. As foreign bodies injected into science and philosophy, the phantasms force both spheres to produce their own paralogisms and their own phantasmatic formations. As Bataille writes, these foreign bodies represent “facts as insignificant as the production of a series of images.”134 What disturbs science is not so much the content of these images but their articulation, their apparent disorder, their unbearable arrangement, as well as the fact that they represent merely an operation (the transgressive dimension of the violent metonymical unification of their components: a fatal cut). Just as in the case of the picture puzzle of the dream that does not reveal the latent dream-thoughts, we should not read these images for their “pictorial value” alone. According to Freud, “If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error.”135 The sequence or chain of images possesses a corroding function, since in the eye of reason they are nothing but useless child’s play. At the moment of its self-constitution, reason necessarily casts off play, image, and everything else that is ambiguous. Since reason fortifies itself against them, rejects them, and casts them down, in its eyes they become something lowly, unreasonable, irrational, and meaningless. But precisely as a result of their precipitation, the production of images, play, ambiguity, and so on gain a new significance and an unprecedented charge. The rejected elements are strengthened by the cathexes in the pit of the unconscious that are bereft of any possibility of becoming conscious. Of course, we also have to add to this the burden of repression carried by the cast-down elements: counter-cathexis. This is why Bataille can write that “the fact that reason denies any valid content in a mythological series is the condition of its most significant value.”136 Since only what reason allows to be verbalized as language does in fact possess meaning and sense, through a “simple imageless representation” and the disappearance of the materiality of the sound, whatever is senseless and meaningless as such will become an image or a signifier.137 The signifier represents that which does not yet carry meaning and is likewise only a carrier of meaning (according to classical philosophy), and asa signifier must also remain forever meaningless and insignificant. Cast out by reason and sense, however, the signifier as such gains a certain virulence, and if it is smuggled back into them, it gives rise to rampant fantasy formations that emerge as regular composite formations as soon as reason or consciousness compulsively tries to grasp the meaningless in words.

In order to drive reason, philosophy, and science beyond their own limits, what is required is merely the injection of the signifier, the image, or the primal scene into that which keeps the signifier in a slavish dependence on the signified. Without the repressive signified, the signifier would not acquire this virulence, which is thus a function of the former. Only a reason under threat, one that is founded on a katabole, an exclusion, a casting down, can speak (at least here) of the imperialism of the signifier. The signifier, the image, the symbol, which irrupt into reason like foreign bodies, are by no means servile, enslaved carriers of meaning but tragic images that attest to the symbolic order, which itself only presents the law of castration.

So when Bataille inquires after the “material conditions of the phantasm” (OC, II, 416), this question should not be understood exclusively in the genetic sense: for what forms the material base of a phantasm (and Bataille provides the following examples: the vertigo experienced at the edge of an abyss, a quick turning of the head, the sight of the behind of a gibbon, etc.) is itself only a part of the staging of the phantasm. Once again, the question concerning the origin of the phantasm is inscribed in its own scene. Therefore, the genetic question is impossible, as, furthermore, Bataille’s critique of the Freudian concept of phylogenesis makes it unquestionably clear. The material conditions of the phantasm, therefore, have to be explained structurally, that is, in terms of the structure of a conception of matter that still needs to be defined or, more precisely, in terms of what Bataille calls material.

The phantasms produced by science or philosophy after the injection of their repressed and cast-down elements owe their existence nonetheless to the return of the repressed. This also applies to the free construction of arbitrary phantasms (“this arbitrary phantasm, freely constructed” [OC, II, 416]) that Bataille develops later and that spring from the confrontation of the homogeneous world of knowledge with the heterogeneous element of the signifier. Bataille writes: “Starting from these two principles [the two presuppositions of mythological representation], and supposing that the first condition, which requires a scientific knowledge of the objects considered, has at least to a large extent been met, nothing stands in the way of a phantomlike and adventurous description of the universe.”138 The arbitrary phantasms, as it were, anticipate the falling ill of science due to its constitutive repression.

But let us go further in the description of the origin of phantasms. Bataille labels the description of the ghostly and adventurous aspects of human existence a “conception—and at the same time [an] obsession.”139 The obsession reveals the desire, the drive “to provoke necessary reversals and rifts” in traditional discourses. The disruption of these discourses has nevertheless only a chance to succeed when the drive attaches itself to “intact symbolic forces” (OC, II, 133). What these forces are, we will see later.

Besides the meanings of concept, comprehension, abstraction, generalization, judgment, idea, and so on, the term “conception” in French also has the meaning of fertilization and birth.140 Similarly to German mysticism (for example, in Böhme and Paracelsus), which presupposed the “identity of organic conception and the conception of an idea,” Bataille conceives of the phantasm as having been born from the intercourse between the drive and consciousness (thought).141 In a sense, the phantasm matures in a matrix, until it is pushed out and projected. For Bataille, ideas and concepts apparently do not know this organic procreation and generation, inasmuch as they represent the result of a process of abstraction. But if we take the organic metaphors further, the births of reason and understanding are painless births that produce only lifeless, scrawny, and weak offspring. The phantasms, on the other hand, the offspring of the tragic intercourse of image and concept, the unconscious and consciousness, which should represent adventurous, ghostly “life,” long for a birth appropriate for this life: “From the first, myth is identified not only with life but with the loss of life—with degradation and death. Starting from the being who bore it, it is not at all an external product, but the form that this being takes in his lubricious avatars.”142 Life—represented by myth and the phantasm in such a way that they must assume it in order to be able to represent it so that this presentation itself can partake of “life”—as we have already seen, is not to be confused with the irrational concept of life that is opposed to the barren and empty concept within metaphysics without, however, putting metaphysics into question. Neither should it be equated with the life of the concept that shares its origins with metaphysics. Rather, it is the loss of this life proper to philosophy, the life of the concept, in other words, a life marked and torn open by death that looks death in the face. The Spirit finds itself in this state of absolute fragmentation. But being all torn up, it finds itself as phantasm in a state of fragmentation that cannot be sublated. The phantasm tarries with death and, without flinching, looks the negative in the face. Just like the Hegelian Spirit, it tries to grab hold of death and tries to bear it, however, not in order to preserve itself in it but rather with the intention of wasting itself away in it. Although it stares at the Medusa head of the “tremendous power of the negative,” it gives up the fixed nature of its self-positing and does not assert itself through becoming frozen in pure immediacy. It does not succumb to “the magical power that converts it into being.”143 Consolidation, becoming-fixed, and their dissolution are moments in the becoming of the Spirit, which achieves its being through this reversal with and against the negative. The phantasm, however, that looks the death of life in the face, does not preserve itself in it. It allows death to penetrate it in such a way that it also sacrifices its potential being. Accordingly, the difference from Hegel’s concept of the life of the Spirit would be that life is understood by Bataille as an unreserved dissolution and ejection (déchéance, déchet) that does not allow any sublation. The very thing in which it could be sublated itself has the structure of the expended and the expending. The phantasm, as the product of self-representing life, is an ejection of the life that wastes its own being. The metaphysics of life, death, and the domesticated negative (as moments in the becoming of the Spirit) falls (déchoir, choir) at the instant when the phantasm, as conception and birth, ejects a premature infant, a monstrous fetus that did not mature into the ripe fruit of the idea, a stillbirth, in short. Aborted fruits produced by the intercourse of “life” and thinking, the phantasms lead a ghostly and adventurous life.144

The phantasm is born, in-fanté. The stepping outside of the body (in whose matrix and material it was created and raised), its violent departure and abortion that tear the body apart, takes place through a crack, “par une fente,” “the crack of the buttocks.”145 Nocturnal pit, abyss, hell! This is also the “crack in the chamber of consciousness” that opens up the view to the greedy, insatiable, and the murderous, to “the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers.”146 The crack (fente) in whose opening the phantasm unfolds itself as an intermediate or interference product of “life” and consciousness, this crack that the phantasm as a hybrid composite formation represents in turn, affects the phantasm in such a way that it itself appears broken and split (fendu) in itself. As a nonplace in-between, suspended between the actual places of the inside and the outside, it is an irreducible middle that corresponds most accurately to what it is supposed to represent, since it is itself a crack, a division, and a being that is in-and-for-itself not by itself. So the question emerges whether the concept of representation is still applicable here at all? And the same goes for the concepts of adequatio and homoiosis. Let us repeat:

When man seeks to represent himself, no longer as a moment of a homogeneous process—of a necessitous and pitiful process—but as a new laceration within a lacerated nature, it is no longer the leveling phraseology coming to him from the understanding that can help him: he can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chain of logic, but he recognizes himself, instead—not only with rage but in an ecstatic torment—in the virulence of his own phantasms.147

Born through a crack (“Infanté par une fente”), the phantasm tears apart the phraseology of philosophical homogeneity that tries to cover up and smooth over the crack. Thereby, homogeneous discourse catches a glimpse of its opposite: the pit or the abyss, above which it rests “as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger.”148 The phantasm, however, does not content itself with the representation of the abyss. Rather, it is the irruption of what had been thrust into the abyss and reemerges in the chambers of consciousness, that is, an operation of transgression. It is precisely this in-between of the crack where consciousness and the abyss interact with each other and change into each other. At the same time, however, it is already an image, a first representation of this operation that can discover its own presentation only in a torn-up image.

The image of this tear that the crack in which it was conceived gave birth to, that is, the phantasm itself, therefore, also has a disturbing function in opposition to the reassuring and ascertaining presentation of philosophy. As Bataille submits, the mythical form is “blinding . . . , insofar as it is not a simple representation, but the exhausting consumption of being.”149 The eye of philosophy is blinded by it. This eye is also a crack between inside and outside and, thus, lends itself particularly to phantasmatic representation. Let us remember the nocturnal pit that opens up, according to Hegel, when we look a human being in the eye: within it, “the night of the world hangs out toward us.”150 Nevertheless, from the time of Plato up to the present, the eye has been the privileged organ of philosophy, without which there would be no theoria. In order to briefly introduce the speculative myth of knowledge as theory and its fundamental relation to the ideal organ of the eyes, we will refer to the creation story of Timaeus in which, on behalf of the creator of the world, after the gods have created the head, that is, “the most divine part of us and the lord of all that it is in us,” the first tools of sensation they create are the “eyes to give light.”151 As it is explained in Republic, the eyes are “the most sunlike of all the instruments of sense.”152 Now Plato approaches the eyes in Timaeus from the perspective of the “greatest benefit”:

The sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit for us, for had we never seen the stars and the sun and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. . . . And from this source we have derived a philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man. This is the greatest boon of sight.153

“For sight is [indeed] the keenest mode of perception vouchsafed us through the body,” since it allows the apprehension of being through light.154 As Hegel argues, “Whatever else may be said about light, we cannot deny that it is absolutely weightless, not offering resistance but pure identity with itself and therefore purely self-reposing, the earliest ideality, the original self of nature.”155 The act of seeing, “viewing” in the light, thea,

is also the supreme apprehending, the grasping of Being. The look reaches as far as the highest and farthest remoteness of Being; simultaneously, it penetrates the nearest and the brightest proximity of fleeting appearances. The more radiantly and brightly fleeting appearances are apprehended as such, the more brightly does that of which they are the appearances come to the fore—Being.156

The idea of Being comes to light in the ideality of light itself, and it is apprehended by the eye. The idea, “the envisioned outward appearance, characterizes Being precisely for that kind of vision which recognizes in the visible as such pure presence.”157 In other words, for knowledge as theoria. By contrast, in the case of mythical form—and let us emphasize here that we are talking about form and not content (for, indeed, if the myth is capable of blinding, it is because its form is not a simple representation)—what is at stake is the status of the eye itself as the highest, most sunlike organ of knowledge and theoretical discourse. In mythical form, the eyes of philosophy and theory are blinded; Being, which came to presence in the idea, is exhausted, while the idea itself is aborted in a phantasmatic stillbirth. The mythical form exhausts Being, destroys it by draining it like a well (é-puiser). It empties out, desubstantializes even its concept, of which we could say that it is the most abstract and the emptiest, until Being itself becomes a bottomless pit. As such a pit within a pit, as the truth that lies in a well, the mythical form must force Being to walk itself to death, to empty and to lighten itself.158 Thus, the highest category that guarantees Being to everything else, the most certain thing for the eyes under the sun (namely, that something is), becomes powerless and sentenced to a ghostlike existence in the pit of the phantasm.159

Based on these discussions (the birth of the phantasm from the crack, the divided nature of images, and their dividing effects), we can already see why the phantasm must consist of a series of images, what Bataille calls “a mythological series” and “a series of images.”160 The images of the phantasm are not only infinitely divided and hollowed in themselves; they are also divided and separated from each other.161 Hegel had already highlighted the manifold nature of the image and defined the power to bring forth the images from the night of the self and then allow them to fall back again as “free arbitrariness . . . to dismember images and to reconnect them in the most dissociated manner.”162 The side-by-side existence of images is disjunctive. In Bataille’s text, the conjunction “as” (comme) primarily serves to connect the individual images. De la même façon, comparé, and so on are adverbial and conjunctive functions that serve the same purposes.

After the verb to be is emptied out, after the copula “is” no longer guarantees “total identification” (“with the aid of the copula each sentence ties one thing to another”), and after no eye is present anymore to perceive the totality of the whole in one comprehensive glance (“all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth”), the copula turns into copulation: “a vehicle of amorous frenzy” with the result that although the copulating sentences or clauses, the comparisons, the identifications, and attributions still mean the same things as before, now (and this is important) they do so “in a deceptive form.”163 In a form, therefore, that not only is deceptive but also represents a deadly circulation.

This comme—“as,” “als,” “qua,” “η”—that possesses a similar copulative function, and that serves to establish an identity, produces an attribution, and strives for a metaphorical comparison, however, is “by a kind of absolute privilege, the form of ontological discourse itself.”164 In Bataille, just as in Nietzsche, the comme, or the wie, becomes the thing that breaches the presence of that which needs to be defined in an attributive or metaphoric manner, since, on the one hand, the conjunction “as” allows opposites to cross over into each other and, on the other hand, and this is the most important point, the comparative term parodies and weakens the compared. This is the first function of the comme in the texts that we are analyzing here.

The second function of the comme is directly related to the production of the chain of images and their movement as a discontinuous series. In order to be able to define this function more precisely, we need to return to Freud one more time. What Freud says in The Interpretation of Dreams about the interpolation of an “as if” in the formation of dreams, and mostly in their narration, also applies to the comme as we have analyzed it here. First, Freud suggests that the “as if” leads to interpolations and additions to the contents of the dream and so it appears to be a work of the censoring agency or the secondary revision:

The interpolations are easy to recognize. They are often reported with hesitation, and introduced by an “as though”; they are not in themselves particularly vivid and are always introduced at points at which they can serve as links between two portions of the dream-content or to bridge a gap between two parts of the dream. They are less easily retained in the memory than genuine derivatives of the material of the dream-thoughts; if the dream is to be forgotten they are the first part of it to disappear, and I have a strong suspicion that the common complaint of having dreamt a lot, but of having forgotten most of it and of having only retained fragments, is based upon the rapid disappearance precisely of these connecting thoughts.165

In the analytic situation these “connecting thoughts”—the work of secondary revision and the additions to the dream by the censoring agency that connects with each other disconnected fragments—reveal

the fact that no material connected with them is to be found in the dream-thoughts. But careful examination leads me to regard this as the less frequent case; as a rule the connecting thoughts lead back nevertheless to material in the dream-thoughts, but to material which could have no claim to acceptance in the dream either on its own account or owing to its being overdetermined.166

Let us hold on to the elusive shape of the “as if” for a moment. Perhaps the material that it conveys is in fact without its own value, yet inasmuch as the “as if” is related to the “just as” and plays an at least similar if not identical role, it represents a relation that is constitutive of the dream-work. Freud writes: “One and only one of these logical relations is very highly favoured by the mechanism of dream-formation; namely, the relation of similarity, consonance or approximation—the relation of ‘just as.’ This relation, unlike any other, is capable of being represented in dreams in a variety of ways.”167 In this sense, the relation of the “as if” (the comme of which we have spoken) is both the linguistic agency that connects the fragments of the dream or of the phantasm, an ephemeral connection that once again dissolves itself in order to leave behind the discontinuous aspect of the fragments (the images), and at the same time the agency that unstrings the metaphors in the movement of transference, in short, that causes the transition from image to image. Here we touch upon the problematic developed by Derrida of a generalized metaphoricity without an original, as well as the power of the signifier highlighted by Lacan whose products represent metaphors and metonymies.168

With this transference, with the comme, on the one hand, the rampant production of images gets under way and the images begin to follow each other in a series in which every image aspires to explicate and to supplement the previous one, even if it is endlessly separated and differentiated from it and occupies the following position in the chain. On the other hand, since no image is a copy, except of the previous image (of the primal image and the primal scene), and consequently it cannot call any signified its own, we must think the element that precedes an image as a signifier that, by way of the comme, constantly pushes its signified in front of itself without ever catching up with it.

Thus, in spite of all the linking and unlinking, the images merely stand next to each other in the series, without a relation to each other in the sense of a law of legitimate thinking. As Bataille suggests, “To this arbitrary phantasm, freely constructed . . . we can juxtapose, as a natural development, the already described products of the latent and stifling delirium of human lives on the surface of the earth” (OC, II, 416). The unfolding of the chain takes place in the same way as a natural development! That is, in the same way as the development of the discontinuously and differentially defined structure of nature, nature as deviation! Thereby, the unfolding of the phantasm in the chain of images obeys a “law” that is itself phantasmatic: the law of generalized phantasmatization.

Freud showed that the relations of similarity, consonance, and the sharing of common attributes—in other words, the relation of the “just as”—“are represented in dreams by unification.”169 What condenses itself into a unity (which in spite of the side-by-side relations defies the law of contradiction) as composite formations, as the interferences of contradictory desires, cannot hide the irreconcilability of its elements.

In the context of these discussions, a specific metaphor used by Bataille is of special interest for us since it appears to grasp in a unified fashion the already mentioned structures of the image, the signifier, and the chain of images driven by the latter. The important point is that it is a metaphor and not a concept. It is an image that already obeys the “logic” of the thing that it tries to present. In the exhaustion of this metaphor, all those aspects that censorship and desire joined together will fan out again. We will thereby see that the multiplicity of this image cannot be subsumed under a concept. The partial and delirious etymologies and homophonies that we will pursue will contribute to the same purpose.

The metaphor in question is that of the specter. It appears in a passage that includes an already discussed Hegel reference, so we will repeat it here in its entirety:

For if the affective violence of human intelligence is projected like a specter across the deserted night of the absolute or of science, it does not follow that this specter has nothing in common with the night in which its brilliance becomes glacial. On the contrary, a spectral content only truly exists as such from the moment when the milieu that contains it defines itself through its intolerance toward that which appears in it as a crime.170

In Bataille’s text, the quoted passage is tied to the proposition that a mythological series becomes capable of signification only if reason has branded it senseless. Once again, the fact is highlighted that significance or the primacy of the signifier presupposes precisely the very prohibition that science and philosophy use against it in order to preserve themselves. The efficiency of the signifier is a function of this milieu into which it once again irrupts as the excluded element and that it contaminates in such a way that it encounters an overdetermined intolerance (since the signifier breaks into the proximity of the signified—into its middle, its sphere, and center—like a sacrilegious foreign body).

The above quotation leaves no doubt that the attempted deconstruction of ruling discourses will turn out to be violent. It is the violence of the oppressed and the outcast, which, invested with an affective charge, once again penetrates the homogeneous, orderly world of ideal transparency, a transparency that the latter obtained only by rejecting the violence (the principle of the katabole) through which it came into existence. Therefore, what breaks into it once again becomes the image of its own irreducible violence that has become foreign to it. What returns violently and disturbs the illusion of the self-foundation of homogeneous discourses is an irreducible difference and its power to always differ from and defer every possibility of self-foundation. When metaphysics relegates the differing and deferring to the abyss that it, thus, believes to have mastered as a ground, the differing becomes for it interminably abysmal. In the eyes of metaphysics and “philosophical consciousness [that] could be compared to the sensitivity of the eye, which does not tolerate anything foreign in itself,” therefore, the foreign element (the signifier) must be understood as violence in general: as an affective act of violence (PM, II, 103).

Let us now turn to the metaphor of the “specter.” The common meaning of specter is ghost or wandering dead. In addition, Littré also lists the following meanings: “Physics: ‘spectre solaire’ or simply ‘specter,’ oblong image composed of the vivid colors of the rainbow, resulting from the decomposition of white light traversing a glass prism. Pathology: a disturbance of vision often called muscae volitantes (‘flying flies’) or floaters.” About the meaning of spectrum, the Robert has the following to say: “juxtaposed images forming an uninterrupted sequence.”

Based on this information, we can see that the specter is in a relation to death, but it is not death itself. It possesses a disappearing, ephemeral existence, more dead than alive. Furthermore, the specter is a being tied to the night. The physical meaning underlines the imagelike character of the specter as the result of the decomposition and refraction of sunlight. Therefore, the specter must have something to do with the disintegration and decomposition (Verwesung) of the sun (the intelligible sun, the truth). The latter appears as the presupposition of the formation of a chain of linked images. Furthermore, the specter is something that affects the eyes (the most sunlike among the organs of sense) and simulates images for them that swarm and confound them like a cloud of mosquitoes. With regard to its etymology, specter comes from the Latin spectrum and specio. We call spectrum an image in the imagination, a silhouette, a vision; while specio describes seeing an object. The Greek equivalent of the Latin term is eidolon, a figure or an image. A specter is, then, an image perceived by the imagination or phantasy. As an eidolon, it is a shadow image that passes by like a shadow in the allegory of the cave and represents the discontinuous decomposition of what once was supposed to be a unity (the idea of the Good and Truth by Plato in the cave penetrated by light through a crack in the ceiling).171

Let us then continue to read the above-mentioned passage and concentrate on the word glaçant: in the deserted night of the absolute, the éclat of the specter is described as “devenu glaçant” (becomes glacial). Glaçant means congealed, congealing, frozen, icy, ice cold. However, glaçant also contains glace, which means mirror. From the two meanings, we will retain first the meaning of the mirror. There exists in French another word for this in an adjectival form that also appears in this context: spéculaire. The word comes from the Latin specularis and speculum, which have the same roots as spectrum and specio. Spéculaire means mirrorlike and is an adjectival variation of spéculum (mirror). The specter, as glace or spéculum, would then be spéculaire in the same sense as the word is used in Latin to describe certain minerals (for example, selenite) when they can be broken down into thin, transparent layers that reflect light. But the specter is spéculaire also because the mirror has always counted as the paradigm of the vain production of images.172 The mirroring aspect of the specter thereby fixates the idea of a discontinuous dispersion of images, which is also amplified by the fact that the individual images mutually mirror each other in an infinite regression like a hall of mirrors. Thus, the meanings that need to be brought into play are specter, spéculaire, perhaps even spectaculaire (inasmuch as the image is also presentation, representation, and staging), spéculatif (which like all others derives from specio), and finally also specus (Latin for cave, grotto, tunnel, pit). For in Plato’s allegory, the tied-up prisoners perceive the shadow images in the cave; and in Hegel the phantasmagorical images emerge from the nocturnal pit only to disappear once again: the bloody head and the white shape.173 Is this white shape a ghost (a specter)? Is it the bloody head, the severed Medusa head, the manifold image, around which the symbols of lack proliferate like the snakes?

In the passage under discussion here, affective violence passes through the night of the Absolute like an icy ghost. In our attempts to protect Bataille’s critique of philosophy and science from charges of irrationalism, it needs to be emphasized that the éclat of this affective violence—its flash, its luminosity, but also its fragmentation—does not by any means possess the warmth of those affects, emotions, or feelings that we might assume to be present in it insofar as it turns against the coldness and the aridity of the Absolute. Nor does the flash of the images that are projected into the desert of the Absolute have any of the luminosity, color, and comforting quality of the images that one summons up in philosophy as a remedy to cure the abstractions of reason. Furthermore, the images or words, which are hurled into it as things and signifiers, do not make the solitude and gloom of the Absolute any brighter. “If someone speaks, it gets lighter”: this formula, which tries to alleviate the fear of darkness (which is the desire to see in the darkness), is powerless here because that which speaks in the night of the Absolute is language and not speech (or discourse).¹⁷⁴

Bataille does not oppose the warmth of affect and violence to the coldness of the abstract and the Absolute. On the contrary, what irrupts within it is a frost even icier than the coldness of understanding and reason. The frost of this affective violence congeals the coldness of reason as well as the coeval dream of sheltering homeliness. Just like affective violence, the chain of images is also icy and freezing. As the tool of the deconstruction of the Absolute, in no way does it replace the analytic rigor of understanding with the intuition of imagination and its images.175 To the contrary, for Bataille (if we play on the meanings of specter, glaçant, spéculaire, etc.) the image is characterized by an analytic coldness and sharpness that far transcends those of reason. Since the image no longer has anything in common with the immediacy of philosophical intuition, representation, or the faculty of imagination, the movement of the images presents a dispersive, discontinuous process of splitting. The world of images as such, provided that we can still speak of totality here, is groundless, split, ambiguous, elusive, fragmented, and endlessly mirrored in itself. In other words, it is a perverted speculation.

The content projected into the icy desert of the Absolute reaches out into the latter really only if it commits an outrage upon its container. What it has in common (commun) with the environment into which it is hurled is similar to (comme) a crime. It is a sacrilege, which results from the fact that this content usurps the violence that constitutes the order of the container that considers itself to be the true content. A sacrilege also because the projected content uses the transparency of the signified in order to drive the signifier into the signified. From the perspective of truth and the true content, this operation can appear only irregular, perverse, and plain false. No wonder, then, that Bataille defines “spectral characterization” as “free falseness.”176

In order to recapitulate what we have argued so far, we could say that the structure of the phantasm is that of a chain of connected yet sharply distinguished, constantly multiplying images that groundlessly mirror each other. However, the question of how these images separated from each other are connected still remains open. While Bataille spoke of a series, we introduced the category of the “chain” borrowed from Hjelmslev, who writes that “when we hear a spoken text, we find that it consists of signs and that these, in turn, consist of elements proceeding in time—some come earlier and some later. The signs form chains, and the elements within each sign likewise form chains. . . . The signs, or the elements, are related to one another in the chain.”177 We are, however, dealing with a written text, with a two-dimensional construct, with a spatialization, the same way that the subject that we are discussing here is a space into which chains of images are hurled. The series and the chain suggest a linear succession of images, an unfolding or unstringing, a direction for the construction of images. In what follows, we need to examine if this also holds true for the sequences of images of the phantasm.

The projection of the chain of images into the night of the Absolute should be understood as a lightning-quick sequence, procreation, and multiplication. Bataille speaks of a “fleeting troupe of phantoms [troupe fuyante].”178 Phantoms hard to grasp, shadow images of the phantasm, in other words, an army that is not any easier to grasp than the hole (trou) that opens up in it. They are fleeing ghosts, no doubt, fleeing along a vanishing perspective in which the lines do not meet in a center point, in which everything (the hole) is in flight, and escapes the eyes.

All this suggests a linear, straightforward sequence. But perhaps these paths are not so straight after all, especially if the destination of the movement could be a hole. Perhaps the succession follows detours (curves), since the end goal does not allow itself to be reached, if, indeed, the phantoms represent a “fleeting troupe.”

In “The Metaphor of the Eye,” Roland Barthes describes the chain of metaphors from The History of the Eye in the following terms: “[The subject of a novel] can also pass from image to image, so that its story is that of a migration, the cycle of avatars it traverses far from its original being, according to the tendency of a certain imagination which distorts yet does not discard it.”179 The word avatars comes from Sanskrit and means descent or downfall (the common meaning of avatars is accident, misfortune). Avatars, a word that Bataille uses quite frequently, therefore, with regard to the problem of the chain of images means an inclination, a downward drift, whereby the chain of images, so to speak, follows the slope of a particular fantasy.

But if the chain of images obeys a certain inclination, it is not rectilinear, so the question can be raised if it is not, rather, circular. Before we try to answer this question, let us examine the movement of the substitution of images in the Freudian theory of the formation of the series. This theory can be read in at least two different ways. On the one hand, Freud suggests a conception according to which the series can be infinite; on the other hand, we find an interpretation that prescribes a necessary end to its unfolding.

We will start by citing a passage in which Freud mentions the unlimited nature of the substitutions. It discusses an example from the love life of man: a series of concrete object choices in which the passionate attachment repeating itself is always of the same nature, “each an exact replica of the others” whereby “a long chain of them is formed.” Freud writes:

If we are to understand the love-objects chosen by our type as being above all mother-surrogates, then the formation of a long series of them, which seems so flatly to contradict the condition of being faithful to one, can now also be understood. We have learnt from psychoanalysis in other examples that the notion of something irreplaceable, when it is active in the unconscious, frequently appears as broken up into an endless series: endless for the reason that every surrogate nevertheless fails to provide the desired satisfaction.180

Thus, here the series of substitutions is endless. It does not follow an inclination, and it does not have a downward slope. In comparison with each other, all the surrogates are equivalent substitutes for something irreplaceable in the unconscious. The proliferation of the surrogates is the sign of the unattainability of the irreplaceable. As is well known, what cannot be substituted for is not the empirical, concrete mother in the flesh but her primal image, in other words, the name of the mother.181 No substitute can catch up with the primal image of the mother (the phantasmatic mother), since this image as that which cannot be substituted for is precisely the primal image that underlies the long and endless series of all substitutions. But is the structure of the primal image such that every substitute, every secondary phantasm, is necessarily unlimited? The proliferation of the dream suggests this much since even if its structure is restricted to a few types, the abundance of its images appears to be endless.

The supplementation of the “unsubstitutable,” therefore, must be understood in such a way that the sense or the meaning of the substitute formations and the surrogates always escapes them and can never be attained. They can never reach their meaning since the unsubstitutable is the infinite inclusion of all images and surrogates that never comes to a halt. The unfolding of the images would be, then, made possible by the structure of the primal image (for example, the phantasm of the mother). It itself, however, can never be reached, since it provides only the schema for the substitutions, while as a concrete phantasm it is always already a substitute among others in the series that it opens up. If the mother were the signified of all signifiers, the latter would constantly push the signified in front of themselves, perpetually forcing it to postpone itself as meaning and as an accomplished goal. This interpretation of the line of flight of the images echoes questions that Derrida addressed to structuralism’s exclusive concern with the horizontal surface-structure of meaning as opposed to the richness of meaning constituted by the “book” that is above all “volume”:

And that the meaning of meaning (in the general sense of meaning and not in the sense of signalization) is infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to signifier? [The indefinite reference of a signifier to another signifier?] And that its force is a certain pure and infinite equivocality which gives signified meaning no respite, no rest, but engages it in its own economy so that it always signifies again and differs?182

The above-described movement of the formation of the series—which is necessarily discontinuous and never reaches the signified, nor can it ever be reached by the signified, since this would be possible for the signified only in the shape of another signifier, of a new image or an additional substitute through which the signified would become yet another image among others in the series—does not fall under the movement of Aufhebung: the signified is an absence that cannot be substituted for, not even by itself, and this makes it into a signifier. As paradoxical as it may sound, this has to do with the fact that the signified is the substitute for the unsubstitutable; the unsubstitutable, however, is the movement of the signifier. No signified can control this movement. Jean-Michel Rey writes:

It is precisely the substitute, as it is constructed in Freudian theory, that obliterates to a great extent all logic of mediation, that is to say, every logic dependent on Aufhebung . . . to the degree that the substitute functions as an asymptote in relation to a desired yet forbidden object (which is a proper name like the mother), an object whose most important trait is that it is taken over by others that form an always necessarily discontinuous series.¹⁸³

The fact that during free association about the materials of the dream we encounter dream-thoughts that are translated by the dream-work into the language of the dream does not constitute an argument against the already discussed unattainability of what cannot be substituted for. For these are precisely the thoughts that circle around the unsubstitutable that emerges in the web of dream-thoughts as “the navel of the dream,” much like the tail of a comet that disappears in the night. As Nietzsche remarked, “Even the clearest figure always had a comet’s tail attached to it which seemed to suggest the uncertain, that which could never be illuminated.”184 In addition, we must also consider that the dream-thoughts are the products of analysis, so they in fact appear to be analogous to phantasms in psychoanalytic conversation. Hence also their concrete relations that Freud constantly refers to. The dream is based on a text: this text, however, the tissue of the dream-thoughts as it is transformed by the dream-work into the manifest dream content, is not an original.185 As Freud says, no transcription takes place during the translation. But if the dream is not preceded by an original, then only the translation exists and there are not any pure dream-thoughts independently of this translation. They are already translated: “Thus, when we say that an unconscious thought is seeking to be translated into the preconscious, what we have in mind is not the forming of a second thought situated in a new place, like a transcription which continues to exist alongside the original.”186 A translation without an original—and as such, it does not sublate the original. Since there is no transcription, there is no original either. What takes place is a translation of a translation that always already possesses the structure of a translation. The latter represents the only possibility to think the unconscious desire that underlies the chain of substitutions.

In an individual case, this chain is at most limited by the available symbolic elements. In such a case, all the permutations of a limited number of signifiers are played out: “We see here that, even at the individual level, man can find a solution to the impossible by exhausting all possible forms of the impossibilities that are encountered when the solution is put into the form of a signifying equation.”187 We have already mentioned that the endless series limited by the exhaustion of available signifiers represents only one side of the Freudian notion of the movement of substitute formations. If the substitute formations are indeed a “distorted substitute” for the “genuine material” of “what is unconscious in the dream” to which we need to “come nearer”188 (and let it be clearly emphasized one more time that the “genuine material” is nothing other than the translational structure of the dream-wish), then it appears that the “natural” sequence of the series of images in fact strives to move in a particular direction. In its unfolding, the chain of surrogates, whose direction is defined as “forcing a way through into the perceptual systems,” appears to approach the unsubstitutable.189 We will try to show this in a few passages of Totem and Taboo.

In this context, it is the concept of displacement that is of interest to us. As Freud shows in The Interpretation of Dreams, the concept denotes one of the four aspects of the dream-work as a work of translation. What is being displaced are the compromise formations (fixed ambivalences) produced by condensation between an unconscious desire (or an “instinctual desire”) and a substitute object or act. Freud writes: “The instinctual desire is constantly displaced in order to escape from the impasse and endeavours to find substitutes—substitute objects and substitute acts—in place of the prohibited ones. In consequence of this, the prohibition itself shifts about as well, and extends to any new aims which the forbidden impulse may adopt.”190 Since the instinctual desire is defined as an (attempted) transgression of its complementary prohibition, it should be understood as the movement of displacement (itself), that is, as the movement that incessantly displaces and defers every possible satisfaction. All this is in full agreement with what we have been arguing so far. Yet the passage continues with the following: “Any fresh advance made by the repressed libido is answered by a fresh sharpening of the prohibition.”191 Sharpening here means a quantitative anticathexis, a mobilization of greater quantities of energy against the proleptic drive. According to Freud, this is so because psychopathology and ethnopsychology show that the displacement of the actual compromise formations between unconscious desire and prohibition escalates and comes ever closer to the forbidden action: “It is a law of neurotic illness that these obsessive acts fall more and more under the sway of the instinct and approach nearer and nearer to the activity which was originally prohibited.”192 Here everything depends on the status of this so-called prohibited activity. Is it an activity that can be in fact empirically realized, or is it of a phantasmatic nature so that its realization is forever denied? The latter appears to us to represent the only conceivable Freudian solution. That onto which the sequence of compromise formations could displace itself would be, therefore, the primal phantasm as the origin of all the chain of substitutions. But does the irruption of the primal phantasm into consciousness put an end to the chain of signifiers? Or is this “catastrophe” yet another shape assumed by the primal phantasm, this time making the whole organism into its image? “There is no other way to conceive the indestructibility of unconscious desire—given that there is no need which, when its satiation is prohibited, does not wither, in extreme cases through the very wasting away of the organism itself.”193 Is this wasting away of the organism necessarily the end of the substitution of signifiers? Or is it not perhaps precisely a new beginning? When the wasting away of the body and the exhaustion of the ego become an image in a text? When the squandering of the body and its innermost self becomes a moment in a mise-en-scène?

In Totem and Taboo Freud claims that the taboo (the ambivalent fixation of a prohibition and an instinctual desire to transgress it) propagates itself like a contagious illness, namely, through touching. “Behind all these prohibitions there seems to be something in the nature of a theory that they are necessary because certain persons and things are charged with a dangerous power which can be transferred through contact with them, almost like an infection.” And somewhat later, “The strangest fact seems to be that anyone who has transgressed one of these prohibitions himself acquires the characteristic of being prohibited—as though the whole of the dangerous charge had been transferred to him.”194 Relying on Freud’s statements here, we could venture the thesis that the displacements of the compromise formations between the prohibition and the drive (the images, the signifiers, etc.) are produced by the fact that the images in a text are overtaken by a phantasmatic force that makes them into elements within a “process” of continuous acceleration of fantasizing, as soon as they come into contact with the signifier that pushes them in front of itself. This then is how the metonymical series of the phantasm are created. The image of the dismembered body would be merely one of these images—in a text!

The inclination of the phantasm or of a phantasmatic text would, therefore, consist of depositing itself in a body in order to drive it apart. If we understand this inclination in a spatial sense as descent, then it is a downward inclination toward what Bataille calls “le bas” or “le tout bas”: this absolute depth, complete low is the world of archons, the acephalous gods Bataille discusses in “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.” The acephalous gods who, as we will still need to show, represent matter are precisely the images of dismembered bodies that the substitutions of the series are rushing toward. If the dismembered body represents one of these primal images that sets in motion the chain of images, and if the series is once again inclined toward an approximation of this image, with regard to the movement of the chain, we are dealing with a form of circulation. With the dismembered body, a circle closes itself but only to unroll itself once again.

Thus, the series of images should be understood as a round dance of images, similar to that of the alleged epileptics of Saint Vitus’s dance, which Jules Michelet describes with the following words: “As if carried on by one same galvanic current, the sick caught each other by the hand, formed immense chains, and spun and spun round till they died.”195 Circularity? Eternal repetition? In any event, this is the return of the chains of signifiers to their origin, which they thereby reproduce by approaching its image once again in order to be able to start over again.

According to Lacan, the law of the signifier is its circular repetition: “For we have learned to conceive of the signifier as sustaining itself only in a displacement comparable to that found in electronic news strips or in the rotating memories of our machines-that-think-like-man, this because of the alternating operation at its core that requires it to leave its place, if only to return to it by a circulating path.”196 But what kind of a circle is this, whose beginning and end can fall on any surrogate for the origin through the inscription of its engine into its own orbit? What kind of a circle is this that, therefore, has no center since the center is also inscribed in its circuit, and whose function can be perceived once again by every substitute for the center? What kind of a circle is this whose formation is perpetually deferred by the absence of a center? Whose periphery, moreover, is engraved with images that are at the same time substitutes for other images that precede them but from which they nevertheless remain always different even if they are equivalent? “The only thing that counts is the principle of substitution, circular and infinite. The fragments are the same: they are all worth nothing.”197 The circle of the chain of images, therefore, is a circle riddled with holes, whose periphery is fragmented and provides no prospect on anything, unless it is prospect on repetition, that is, its repetition as difference.

The inclination that the phantasm follows represents, as Barthes writes, “the tendency [pente] of a certain imagination,” and “its ‘avatars,’ since they must be absolutely imaginary (and no longer simply ‘invented’), can be only the imagination itself.”198 What else could the imagination be than the movement of the signifier in its repetition?

The phantasm, which appears to have its origin in a primal phantasm, in a headlong rush precipitates itself in the endless displacement of its products in order to create the images of the dismembered body. We have already mentioned that this image is only a sign among others (even if it is not just any random sign) in the text that we are reading here. We have tried to show that the primal phantasm that initiates the movement can be grasped only in the shape of an image (which is similarly not just any image), and it joins itself lock, stock, and barrel to the very chain that it supposedly founded. Thereby the theory of the phantasm that tried to account for the unstringing of the surrogates and substitute formations is itself rolled on to the circle, just like all the argumentative formulations that try to define the eternal return in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.199

We claimed that the image of the body as a dismembered body is only an image that joins the series of other images in a text. But how about the body of the text that we are dealing with here, which initiates this infernal circuit of the circulation of signifiers? As one might have guessed, the body of the text is also dismembered. No longer a well-structured organism, as Aristotle expected discourse to be, the body of the text has neither a head nor a center around which it could organize itself in a harmonic order. The text (itself) (is) acephalous. Hence even the body of the text is pulled into the circular movement in which not only the individual signifiers but also complex formations like phantasms rotate. To name a few of them: “The Pineal Eye,” Story of the Eye, and the “Solar Anus.”

We described the movement of the signifiers, images, and phantasms as a circular rotation, as a circle without a center, as a circle riddled with holes. But also as a circle that does not encircle any fullness, and the only thing that it has in common with Hegelian circles (if anything) is the form of the circle.

We allowed this circle to emerge from the projection of the chain of images. Let us look up in Littré what “projection” means:

1. Action of throwing, hurling a heavy body. . . .

4. Term describing perspective. Representation or appearance of an object on a plane.

5. Geographical term. Name of diverse forms of flat representations on paper of our globe or some of its parts.

We can see based on this small number of definitions that, if we relate them to the problem of the chain of images, the perspectival projection of the chain of images onto a plane produces a circle. “Perspectival” means that the movement of the signifier is projected onto a flat plane from the perspective of an eye. What if, however, this perspectival eye is limited by the specific direction of the point of view that allows it to catch sight of the circle? What if the form of the movement that is projected here as a chain of images is merely an anamorphosis of the circle and becomes a circle only from a specific angle?200

What I want to suggest here is that the rotation of the chains of signifiers and phantasms that bear witness to a discontinuous circuit can become a circle only from a specific perspective, namely, that of the philosophical and metaphysical eye. Although the movement of the chain of signifiers represents a circle that is riddled with holes on its periphery and that displaces its substitutes around an absent center (a movement that appears to be endless), this movement nevertheless remains circular.

We stop here for a moment. In Bataille’s text the term “projection” forms a chain with other signifiers that we will examine in the appropriate places. This will put us in the position to further dislocate the circular shape of the movement of the chains of signifiers.

3

The Signs of the Phantasmatic Text

Before continuing the dislocation of the circular aspects of the movement of the chain of images, we will take up another set of problems with the hope that we discover in them certain elements and operations at work that will allow us to describe more precisely the structures of the series of substitutions.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, the shattering of scientific and philosophical discourses is tied to the introjection of an element foreign into these discourses that compels them to become literally deranged, that is, to produce the very phantasms that distort them through their defense against the intruding foreign body. The phantasmatic chain of images functioned as these foreign bodies. However, it cannot be overlooked that in Bataille’s texts, especially in “The Pineal Eye,” there exists another complementary operation by means of which the discourses of science and philosophy are cracked as far as their characteristic elements of meaning are concerned. As is well known, traditional discourse understands itself to be constructed from linguistic signs. In a controlled exchange of preferably diaphanous signs (especially mathematical and linguistic signs), a particular meaning or truth is supposed to be communicated as clearly as possible.

But the phantasmatic text is also linguistic in nature, and consequently, it also works with a certain kind of sign. Using the texts of “The Pineal Eye” as a pattern, now we need to show not only that the concept of the sign is subverted by the substitution of concepts and signs through images that we have been discussing so far but also that its displacement occurs on the level of the sign itself.

1. The Anagram of the Sign

When she finally caught sight of us, the surprise seemed to restore life to her face. She called, but we couldn’t hear. We beckoned. She blushed up to her ears. Simone, weeping almost, while I lovingly caressed her forehead, sent her kisses, to which she responded without smiling. Next, Simone ran her hand down her belly to her pubic hair. Marcelle imitated her, and posing one foot on the sill, she exposed a leg sheathed in a white silk stocking almost up to her blond cunt. Curiously, she was wearing a white belt and white stockings, whereas black-haired Simone, whose cunt was in my hand, was wearing a black belt and black stockings.

Meanwhile, the two girls were jerking off with terse, brusque gestures, face to face in the howling night. They were nearly motionless, and tense, and their eyes gaped with unrestrained joy. But soon, some invisible monstrosity appeared to be yanking Marcelle away from the bars, though her left hand clutched them with all her might. We saw her tumble back into her delirium. And all that remained before us was an empty, glowing window, a rectangular hole piercing the opaque night, showing our aching eyes a world composed of lightning and dawn.

—Georges Bataille1

Let us recall that Bataille defined the phantasm as “the free play of intelligible images.”2 So far we have neglected the intelligible aspect of the image. In the customary sense (as in Hegel, for example), images are creations of the intellect, that is, of representation by which the intuited object is posited as mine by memory. This was possible only because intuition was understood not merely as “sensuous consciousness” but already as a “consciousness filled with the certainty of Reason whose object is rationally determined and consequently not an individual torn asunder into its various aspects but a totality, a unified fullness of determinations.”3 If we could speak of intuition in Bataille, it would have to be denied this moment of rationality. Furthermore, its object (the intuited object) would not represent a coherent fullness. To put it in Hegelian terms, does this mean that in the system of the becoming of the intellect Bataille remains stuck on the level of sensuous consciousness?4 Certainly not, since the proper meaning of sensuous consciousness consists of the fact that although “it relates itself to the immediate individuality of the object, an individuality sundered into a multiplicity of aspects,” it is nevertheless a “quite abstract certainty of itself” even if so only in a fully unmediated way.5 Yet, in the case of Bataille, what becomes united in the strange composite formations that are the “intelligible images” is, because of its very dividedness, anything but solid. Apart from the fact that in the combination of the image and intelligibility into “intelligible images” the images are the torn and in themselves divided entities that we have already described, as specters they are also identical with the shadow images and illusions proscribed by philosophy ever since Plato. Thereby they become the products of the intellect described by Nietzsche as the “master of deception,” which for him stands in the service of intuition:

That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts.6

Depending on where one puts the emphasis in a reading of “intelligible images,” we have two possibilities:

1. They are images produced and apprehended by the intellect rather than the senses. Paradoxically, then, emphasizing intelligibility attests to their opposition to the concepts that are intelligible but in contrast to the intelligible images have suppressed their pictorial aspects with the help of their abstractions. There is, therefore, no easy opposition between image and concept, metaphor and abstraction. Rather, the effectivity necessary for the fragmentation of scientific and philosophical discourses will be provided only by an image that displays an excess of analytical coldness and sharpness through its intelligibility, without which the deconstruction of logos would remain a vain undertaking.

2. Although they are intelligible, they project the whole material, linguistic, perceptual, and sensible dimension into the transparent world of logical concept formations.

But what should be of interest to us is the combination of the image and its intelligibility, the unification of two heterogeneous orders. As is known, it is the faculty of the imagination (the determinant of the images and the location where they receive their definitions) that accomplishes the linking of the universal representations of the intellect with the particularity of the images. It is this combination accomplished by the imagination that produces symbols and signs. However, according to the classical definition of the sign, which in contrast to the symbol has freed itself from the actual content of the image, some external material freed from the universal representation of the intellect arbitrarily ties itself to the latter.7 This arbitrary joining of a sensible image with an intelligible content forms the foundation of the Saussurean theory of the sign as well. The corresponding terms are the signifier and the signified, which together make up the sign. Does this mean that we are dealing with signs when Bataille speaks of those “intelligible images” hurled into the night of the Absolute? Inasmuch as for Hegel signs need to be sublated in names, that is, in language, since the materiality and the externality of the carrier of the concept represents an incongruent element for the concept, we could argue that the intelligible images are in fact the supposedly overcome signs that are thrown back into the night of the Absolute with the hope that the materiality of the signifier might become a foreign body for the Absolute. But then the intelligible element that attaches itself to the sign, the universal representation of the intellect that Hegel describes as something foreign to materiality, should also appear to the Absolute as something inassimilable against all sublation. But this solution is not satisfactory for us, since it amounts to an underestimation of the metaphysical meaning of the concept of the sign as well as of the digestive, or assimilative power of absolute knowledge, which itself is one of the “signs of this vulgar intellectual voracity to which we simultaneously owe Thomism and contemporary science” (OC, II, 182).

If the intelligible images in fact are to exercise this disturbing function that we have attributed to them, then, as a result of the specific meanings that the two terms received here and the affiliation of the intelligible images with the phantasmatic chains, the relation of the image and intelligibility must represent something completely different from, if not a full reversal of, the classical and the Saussurean relation of meaning.

In order to show this, in what follows we will continue to treat these composite formations as signs, and we will temporarily posit, like Saussure, that the image corresponds to the signifier, and the intelligible to the signified. By retaining this terminology, we might be able to determine what happens to the concept of the sign and the sign itself in the phantasmatic text. This also puts us in the position to elucidate the problem of significance (signifiance) and signification (signification) and their origins in the phantasm.

In order to define the relation of the signifier and the signified in the phantasmatic sign, in the sign of the phantasm, let us first read a few passages from the tenth section of “The Pineal Eye” that bears the meaningful title “The Bronze Eye.” I will quote here first the scene with which the section begins (and that, with regard to its topography, corresponds to the sacrificial scene of the previous section):

The little girls who surround the animal cages in zoos cannot help but be stunned by the even-so lubricious rear ends of apes. To their puerile understanding, these creatures—who seem to exist only for the purpose of coupling with men—mouth to mouth, belly to belly—with the most doubtful parts of nature—propose enigmas whose perversity is barely burlesque. The girls cannot avoid thinking of their own little rear ends, of their own dejecta against which crushing interdictions have been leveled: but the image of their personal indecency, conveyed to them by the parti-colored, red, or mauve anal baldness of some apes, acquires, through the bars of the cage, a comic splendor and a suffocating atrocity.8

And a few lines later, “All it takes is an idiotic ape in his cage and a little girl (who blushes at seeing him take a crap), to rediscover suddenly the fleeing troop of phantoms, whose obscene sniggers have just charged a rear end as shocking as a sun.”9 We cannot pretend to discuss a passage like this in all its complexities. This would be possible only if we were to drop the red thread that we are intended to follow here whether we like it or not, and that (a fact that cannot be overlooked) even if it leads through the labyrinth of thoughts, produces nothing else but this labyrinth itself, which is without any exit. On the one hand, we follow this thread—“the tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth”—so that we can pretend to satisfy the demand for science.10 This demand dreams of comprehending the whole in one glance. The eye, however, the eye that watches over the text that we are discussing here, the “bronze eye,” is a fecal eye that denies us any exit out of the labyrinth that resists all possible totalization.11 On the other hand, the fact that we indeed do want to follow a thread protects us from taking the detours of those “who are keen on calmly buying their spools of thread in order to overcome the delirium of the convulsionaries” (OC, I, 624).

First, let us stage only the dramatis personae. The little girls and the attraction that they succumb to in the described scene attest to that early interest in sexuality that Freud attributed to these small creatures: their beauty is a “mask of ruined immodesty,” a counter-mask to those of “irrevocable ugliness” and the “beauty that conceals nothing.”12 The significance of these little girls becomes the most obvious when Bataille speaks about the ugliness of Picasso’s and Dali’s paintings: “All it takes is to imagine suddenly the charming little girl whose soul would be Dali’s abominable mirror to measure the extent of the evil. The tongue of this little girl is not a tongue but a she-rat. And if she still appears admirably beautiful, it is, as they say, because black blood is beautiful, flowing on the hide of a cow or on the throat of a woman.”13 The ape, on the other hand, belongs to Bataille’s philosophical bestiary. Concerning the ape, let us limit ourselves to only what is absolutely necessary here. Distinguishing the ape and the gorilla from the academic animals like the well-proportioned horse, Bataille writes in “The Academic Horse” that these “animals with unspeakable morals and ugly beyond compare, but also grandiose apparitions, staggering wonders, thus represent a definitive response of the burlesque and frightful human night to the platitudes and the arrogance of idealists.”14 We need to now solve the riddle that poses itself to the little girl who stands staring in front of the bars of an ape’s cage while the idiotic animal is doing its business. She is standing in front of a cage (the word comes from the Latin cavus, which means hollow), in front of a cavity or a cave but also a pit. She is separated from the space of the ape by bars (les barreaux) that consist of individual rods (barres). These bars are set up like a prohibition and block her access to the ape. They assign to both of them their proper places. The ape, especially when he is dressed as a woman, has something to do with the division of space into allotted places. But his function is still not exhausted by this task:

I should, moreover, prefer not to refresh the memory of persons who interest themselves, professionally or for the want of something better to do, out of confusion or for a laugh, in the behaviour of that scallywag at odds with society: to wit, how is it that, under our modestly averted eyes, space breaks all obligatory continuity? Without one’s being able to say why, it seems that an ape dressed as a woman is not merely a division of space.15

We will soon encounter what is beyond the division and attribution of space. But first let us define the second prohibition that this scene displays: it is directed at the little girl’s own body. An oppressive prohibition is directed against her own (propre) little behind that must remain clean (propre) as well as her own excrement of which she can dream (songe) only in her fantasies.

The setting, thus, stages a double prohibition: a prohibition that distributes places, and another one that concerns bodily regions and activities. The transgression of the first ban would, then, consist of embracing the apes, “who seem to exist only for the purpose of coupling with men—mouth to mouth, belly to belly—with the most doubtful parts of nature.” This transgression of the prohibition, however, does not take place as a result of the assignation of places: it remains a mere dream. But something else does take place: a transgression in the shape of a backward reference, a symbolic kickback of a reference (signifiance) from the defecating ape to what is forbidden for the little girl. At the sight of the ape, the girl’s own behind is stricken or charged with the same obscene ridiculousness that characterizes an ape’s bottom. This is the symbolic transgression of the first ban. It takes place by way of “the image of their [the girls’] personal indecency” that the ape’s behind conveys on them.

At first glance, we could say that the transgression of the second prohibition consists of the girl’s blushing as the displacement of repressed erotic qualities into the head.16 But still more decisive is the fact that the charge is followed by a discharge tied to a change of place: the walk to the outhouse (Abort):

She drifts away, pressed on by a need; she trots in an alley where her steps make the gravel screech and where she passes her friends without seeing their multicolored balls, which after all are well designed to attract eyes dazzled by any riot of color. Thus she runs to the foul-smelling place and locks herself in with surprise, like a young queen who, out of curiosity, locks herself in the throne room: obscurely, but in ecstasy, she has learned to recognize the face, the comic breath of death.17

This change of place and displacement from the place where the ape sat locked up (a place that shows some affinity with a cave or a pit) occurs in the direction of the outhouse very similar to this place, since it is also a pit or a cavern: an equally foul-smelling place like the cage of the ape. Surprised by herself, she locks herself up in this place—a place that surprises her, and that shocks her (as, at the same time, she also blasphemes the throne, the symbol of power, yet another term for the lavatory in French)—beside herself for having dared to transgress the law that concerns the lower parts of her body.

Needless to say the described scene does not present a theory of signs in the strict sense. Nevertheless, in accordance with the logic of the phantasm, a subversion of the classical concept of the sign is at work in it, a staging of a “theory” (in the sense that phantasms are “theories”) of the movement of significance that inscribes itself in the phantasm in accordance with the law of presentability. In order to demonstrate this point, we will now examine all the elements that we have highlighted here from the perspective of their relations to the concept of the sign.

We need to remember that ever since Saussure the sign has been understood as the unity of the signifier and the signified. The two form a hierarchical relation: Separated by a bar, the signified reigns over the signifier, which is thus relegated under the line. This whole constitutes a sign.

What else then could the ape, le singe, be than an anagram of le signe, the sign? An anagram consists of the transposition of the letters in a word through which a new word is created. The word anagram derives from the Greek ana, which means reversal, turning around (renversement), and gramm, which comes from graphein, means writing. The ape is, therefore, a reversed sign, a riddle that poses itself to the little girl: an anagram. The reversal happens when the ape begins to ape (singer), when it imitates and thereby parodies the sign. Our ape is also called a “singe idiot”: certainly an idiotic ape, but also an idiotikon, an idiotism, that is, a linguistic peculiarity that cannot be translated into another language, like the literality that is untranslatable into the language of signs.

The ape is separated from the girl by bars and beams, just as the noble side of the girl is protected by a bar from its lower counterpart. We have already indicated that the bar stands for a prohibition. Now, in the Lacanian usage of Saussurean terminology, in an attempt to appropriate linguistics and its theory of the sign for psychoanalysis, the bar that for Saussure marks the relation of the two components of the sign in fact signifies the symbolic blockage of the repressed.18 As Lacan notes, “The major theme of this science [linguistics] is . . . based, in effect, on the primordial position of the signifier and the signified as distinct orders initially separated by a barrier resisting signification.”19 In the Lacanian algorithm of the sign the signifier thus stands above the line. By putting Saussure’s concept of the sign upside down in order to make linguistics fruitful for an understanding of the unconscious, signification is fundamentally tied to the transgression of the dividing line, to the incursion of the signifier into the place assigned to the signified below the bar. Just as the ape as the anagram of the sign represents its reversal, the Lacanian algorithmization too leads to the destruction of the classical concept of the sign. In the following some of the resources provided by Lacan’s inverted conception of the sign will therefore be instrumental in determining the sign in the chain of the phantasmatic images.

What takes place in the scene that Bataille describes corresponds to the transgression of the prohibition instituted by the blockage of the bar. As a result of the double prohibition, the transgression is also twofold. If we understand the ape as the anagram of the sign, as untranslatable literality, as letter and written sign, in Lacan’s terms, then the ape is also the signifier forced behind the bar. The girl, on the other hand, would be in the position of the signified. As soon as the defecating ape is seen behind the bars, his image (the repressed signifier) hurls itself against her as “the image of [her] personal indecency.” However, if we understand the little girl also as a sign in which the elevated parts are separated from the lower parts through a resistance, we can recognize her blushing as a transgression of the bar as well. In this case, however, the transgression occurs by way of the irruption of the lower and repressed regions into the higher parts of her body.

With the transgression, with the incursion of the signifier into the signified, something of the repressed is allowed to signify (Deutung), to point at, or gain significance. However, since the transgression of the resistance does not annihilate, or sublate the bar—indeed, Lacan suggests that “its resistance may be other than dialectical”—the signifier remains only in significance (the girl blushes only, and she merely dreams of apes; the ape represents a riddle or a rebus for her); but no signification (Bedeutung) of the signifier yet comes about in such a way that the signifier would become meaningful, that is, the signified.²⁰

As Roland Barthes writes, the meaning of a sign, its signification, is a process of concurrence: “it is the act which binds the signifier and the signified, an act whose product is the sign.”21 But according to Lacan, the signified escapes this act of concurrence as it glides along the dividing bar. While “the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by deploying its dimension in some sense before it,”22 and while the signifier constantly points toward the signified, the subject, and meaning (in the form of dreams and phantasms), the gliding signified closes itself off to the irruption of the signifier (and the unconscious), and thus it refuses signification.

The bar ensures that in spite of the incursion of the signifier into the place of the fleeing signified (or of the subject in Lacan’s theory), the process never reaches a complete concurrence: such a concurrence, by the way, would represent only the “puerile comprehension” of little girls who daydream that apes exist in order to hug humans—mouth to mouth, and touching the most questionable parts.

When the threshold of consciousness is crossed, what takes the place of the signified that slips away is therefore a signifier without signification. But if the signifier points to that which is banned under the bar as the signified, meaning, and the conscious subject, and if it constantly tries to find its way to the signified, then the signifier—inasmuch as it is to be thought from the perspective of the bar as the agency of resistance and repression—represents that which assigns locations: places separated from each other. Lacan writes: “The signifier is thus the difference of places, the very possibility of localization. . . . It does not divide itself into places, it divides places—that is to say, it institutes them.”23 But what places does the signifier divide? Answering this question also means solving the riddle of the anagram. In the scene that we are concerned with, these are the places that are, on the one hand, assigned to the little girl and, on the other, to the ape. The two places are clearly separated from each other by the bars. These are, then, the places instituted by the signifier and the prohibition that correspond to sexual difference where, as Freud observes, the distinction between the two sexes is the “only suitable definition” that we can provide of the meaning of the “sexual.”24 But the prohibition that produces the difference by dividing the places also serves the purposes of a disavowal of sexual difference (and, therefore, of castration). Consciousness or the signified in the sign flees from its recognition, from the meaning, or signification of significance, so that it will not be unavoidably split by the irruption of difference. There are two prohibitions and two disavowals at work here: on the one hand, the experience of the sexual difference (ape/girl); on the other hand, the experience of the bisexuality of the self.25

If the signifier irrupts into the field of the signified, if it succeeds in bringing to a halt the gliding of the signified along the bar, a punctuation (ponctuation) occurs “in which signification ends as a finished product.”26 Just like the theory of the “point de capiton” that Lacan describes as mythical, this finite and limited production of meaning is also mythical.27 Thus, no real adequation between the signified and the signifier is ever possible, because even if the latter irrupts into the former, this can only take place punctually, in a finite fashion, in the shape of an image, a shadow image this time produced by the signified in order to escape full concurrence, to prevent the initiated process of meaning, the becoming-meaning, that threatens the signified. In the place of the signified, therefore, an image, another signifier, appears.

Thus, two movements that mark the impossibility of full meaning, the impossibility of the identity of what is meant and the process of meaning, need to be distinguished: on the one hand, in the place of the signified fleeing from the signifier a perpetual substitution of signifiers takes place; on the other hand, a substitution of the signified through a signifier occurs at the moment when the signified is punctuated by the irruption of the signifier.

With this the meaning of Bataille’s evocation of “the fleeing troop of phantoms” becomes clear, which are produced by the reversal of the sign (the signifier) as soon as it is seen “on the other side of the bars of a cage”—phantoms, or ghosts, whose perversity, as Bataille writes, is barely less burlesque than the change of scene to the lavatory. For both movements (fleeing and changing locations) are functions of the signifier that can never coincide with the signified. The two movements of substitution could be described with the help of the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy as defined by Lacan. The figure of metonymy (word follows word) describes the chain of fleeing ghosts, and the phantasms that pursue the fleeing signified at the moment of the breaching of the bar. The trope of metaphor (a word in place of another word) describes the change of place, the going to the lavatory, the paradigmatic movement that occurs at the moment when the signifier intrudes into the signified and there produces a punctual image. Or, relying on Freud’s terminology, we could say that the distortion is the result of condensation and displacement.

When Bataille describes the little girl’s experiences at the cage of the ape and subsequently at the outhouse as decisive and significant, when he attributes the function of producing meaning to these movements constitutive of experience, an unprecedented reversal takes place in accordance with the inversion of the sign. In fact, he tries to think or put to work here a kind of meaning and sense that subverts the classical concepts of meaning and sense, which Lacan has shown to be perpetually adrift. Indeed, the fact that the signified and signifier never coincide and that the signifier always distorts the signified, literally becomes the sense itself—a sense “bloody to the letter” (OC, I, 156). The punctuation of the signified by the incursion of the signifier, the division of the signified as a result of the perpetual transgression of the signifier, brings forth those “decisive facts” that at first could only appear to us as empirical regressions but that must now be understood as meanings irreducible to the customary definition of perpetually fleeing meaning. Meaning does not emerge in the face of a variegated color combination,28 but in the face of the obscene blaze of colors of an ape’s behind as a transgression of sense. Bataille remarks: “What science cannot do—which is to establish the exceptional signification, the expressive value of an excremental orifice emerging from a hairy body like live coal, as when, in a lavatory, a human rear end comes out of a pair of pants—the little girl achieves in such a way that there will be nothing left to do but stifle a scream.”29 The meaning that flashes up for a moment here—the moment of an éblouissement, the dazzle of the transgression of the signifier, of the splitting of the signified and the subject, in ecstasy, in being beside oneself—is that of death presented through the figure of the face: “the face, the comic breath of death.”30 Death is to be understood here as the punctually experienced factum of an encroachment,31 as the experience of the power of the signifier and difference that thwarts every concurrence and adequation in the traditional sense.32 Death, therefore, also stands for the acceptance of sexual difference (and bisexuality), which defers every dream of identity in inexorable distortion. Death, finally, is to be understood furthermore as the inclusion of the subject in the species through sexuality: “Sexuality is, indeed, the single function of the living organism which extends beyond the individual and is concerned with his relation to the species.”33 Or even as the suffering of an “entirely impersonal meaning” (OC, II, 128).

Let us briefly recapitulate our points so far. In the signs anagrammatically inscribed in the text, we have found what henceforth we want to call the sign of the phantasmatic text: a reversed sign. It only ever appears in the text as an image in accordance with the phantasmatic “theories”: it is always already staged, and only this way is it effective.34 It cannot be removed from this stage and be defined in a positive way.

The anagrammatic sign, which dissolves the concept in an image and takes on the form of the ape, is therefore only a figure or a myth of the “sign” that characterizes phantasmatic discourse. In spite of the particular and differentiated character of the phantasmatic sign that does not presuppose anything universal, it still makes it possible to simulate something like a system. Indeed, a way out of this singularity toward a “representation of the world on a general level” (OC, II, 132) is to be found that would represent a system that ties together into a web the punctually experienced meanings and experiences of the transgression of the subject whose meaning is “entirely impersonal.” We will now try to simulate this system, which, in accordance with what we have seen so far, must be a middle ground between order and disorder, universe and chaos without being at the same time of the order of a dialectical reconciliation.

If what we have ventured to say so far appears to be far-fetched—although the scene analyzed at the beginning provides us also with the means to develop something like a “theory” of the phantasm that accounts for the movements of these formations—what follows here will incur the same judgment even more so.35 Even though up to this point we moved always already within the phantasm, our text, in accordance with the deceptive function of the phantasm, could display nonetheless some similarities with a theoretical discourse. From this point on, however, as we want to start constructing, if ever so briefly, the system of the phantasm, the “hard core” of which we still have not yet penetrated, we have to reach back to a more comprehensive scene that, by taking it seriously, will no doubt undermine all our credibility.

It is not a mere accident that this scene once again features an ape as its protagonist. Representing the stage of the genesis of species, the scene in question describes the life of the ape in the forest before becoming human. Apes represent an intermediary position in the process of the elevation of animals from the horizontal to the vertical:

When the arboreal life of apes, moving in jerks from branch to branch, provoked the rupture of the equilibrium that resulted from rectilinear locomotion, everything that obscurely but ceaselessly sought to throw itself outside animal organism was freely discharged into the region of the inferior orifice. This part, which had never been developed, and was hidden under the tails of other animals, sent out shoots and flowered in the ape; it turned into a bald protuberance and the most beautiful colors of nature made it dazzling. The tail, for a long time incapable of hiding this immense hernia of flesh, disappeared from the most evolved apes, those that carried on the genius of their species, in such a way that the hernia was able to blossom, at the end of the process, with the most hideous obscenity.36

What should be of interest to us here is the problem of the loss of equilibrium. With the appearance of the apes, who do not clearly belong either to the vertical or the horizontal and, therefore, live their lives in-between these two dimensions, the equilibrium that still characterized “the pretty and almost baroque lemur” collapses.37 In comparison with quadrupeds, the gait of the ape is discontinuous, and Bataille evokes their movements “from branch to branch” as their act of trespassing against the continuous gait: “The movement from branch to branch that determined the semivertical stance of apes implied, on the contrary, a movement of discontinuous displacement that never permitted a new harmony, and it developed little by little a manner of being and at the same time a monstrous appearance.”38 Their every movement bears witness to a bizarre instability, “a never-composed agitation.”39 This milieu, this intermediary place or non-place between heaven and earth, between the horizontal and the vertical, lacks a center, a fixed focus, that could make the harmony of respective opposing forces possible. As a result, these forces manifest themselves here also in a way that destroys the equilibrium. Bataille writes: “The obscene blossoming of their bald, haloed anuses, bursting like boils, is thus produced in a system denied any center of gravity and without resistance—perhaps because, there as elsewhere, the least rupture of equilibrium suffices for the liberation of the indecencies of nature, with the most shameful obscenity.”40 The concept of beauty also depends on that of the equilibrium, that is, on the harmoniously balanced form and its movement.41 Beauty is derived from the well-balanced and well-proportioned gait of the beings that live either in the horizontal or in the vertical (the flight of birds counts as a special case here). It is based on the balanced play of contradictory forces of nature that compose a stable and continuous order. According to this order, its center displaces itself uniformly in a clearly horizontal movement. As Bataille remarks, “It would probably be easy to study the more or less regular displacements of the center of gravity in the walking or running of various animals, and to show that what is called the beauty of forms is only an attribute of the continuous modes of displacement in which the equilibrium of the body in movement permits an important economy of force.”42 The equilibrium is a result of the conservation and reservation of forces within a well-measured and calculated economy. As is known, the concept of equilibrium originated in classical mechanics that still did not yet know the thermodynamic concept of entropy, according to which natural processes follow a specific direction. If equilibrium indicates a restricted economy of forces, the concept of entropy implies a general economy characterized by an unreserved expenditure. Entropy leads to a decrease in energy through which a chaotic state of matter is reached (OC, II, 514–20). The development of such an economy of expenditure is the objective of every one of Bataille’s texts. The intermediary status of the movement of the apes, which concerns us at this moment, is inscribed in this set of problems.

The loss of equilibrium in the semivertical is significantly aided (if not induced) by the loss of the tail. The word tail in French as well as in German colloquial speech also means the male organ. The same goes for Italian, as Freud demonstrated it in “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”: “A tail, ‘coda,’ is one of the most familiar symbols and substitutive expressions for the male organ, in Italian no less than in other languages.”43 With the tail, the equilibrium is also gone. It is lost with the detumescence, but above all with castration, that is, through the acknowledgment of sexual difference. With them, the narcissistic identity and contentment, the cathecticized center, breaks into two. The restricted economy and its circular motion around a fixed center that arranges everything around itself in an equilibrium come to an end with them. It bursts the phallocentric whole, and the fragments are scattered in a no longer cohesive movement. The once-centered forces are now released again in an irreconcilable rivalry (the Freudian “contest between visual images”⁴⁴) in an economy in which expenditure replaces centered accumulation. Bataille writes: “Thus the disappearance of the free caudal appendage with which, more than anything else, human pride is commonly associated, in no way signifies a regression of original bestiality, but rather a liberation of lubricious and absolutely disgusting anal forces, of which man is only the contradictory expression.”45 The French word for tail, queue, comes from the Latin cauda (coda), which, according to Meyer and Corssen, derives from the Sanskrit skauda: the root ska means to cover, raise, erect. The French adjective for queue is caudal and denotes among other things the ending of a musical movement or additional verses in certain forms of poetry. Without further pursuing the Sanskrit root of the word (which designates an erection, a self-elevation, or an overlap), playing with the sound of the words, which is more important for Bataille than any strict etymological derivation, through the adjective caudal we could connect the word queue to the Latin caudex and codex. A caudex is also something that raises itself, like a tree trunk or a stem in general. As codex, metonymically it refers to a book (since the ancients originally wrote on wooden boards covered with wax), as well as a ledger, the principal book of expenses and incomes, and so on. In addition, the codex is also the book of laws, the collection of laws, therefore a system of signs, a key, or as we say today, a code. The code as the established law of encryption is the principal book that makes it possible to codify and decode every other book. The code, although it is only an appendage as a tail, thus emerges as the center and dominates discourse in such a way that it becomes a well-proportioned organism that possesses not only a head and toes but also a head and a tail. Finally, it also provides order, that is, the readability, the balance, and the equilibrium of discourse.

Therefore, along with the equilibrium the code also collapses. With the loss of its tail, the anagrammatic sign, the sign of the phantasmatic text that presents itself as an ape, therefore, sacrifices the appendage, the “little one,” the appendix, the code. It sacrifices the appendage that elevated itself to the level of the law (of meaning) as the phallus. The loss of the supplement that inflated itself into a transcendental signified leads to the fall of the center that guarantees the order and readability of a text. The sign of the phantasmatic text is, then, a castrated and castrating sign. The signifier that transgresses the bar of the sign and intrudes into the signified (into its place) allows the equilibrium and, thereby, also the equivalence of the signified and the signifier to collapse in favor of the signifier that cannot be sublated in any meaning. Its movement, therefore, writes a text in which the unstringing of metaphors and metonymies can no longer be deciphered in the customary way. The equilibrium that is supposed to exist between a text and its meaning according to the requirements of philosophy and science but also of traditional literary theory are thus brought down. What remains is a castrated and castrating phantasmatic text to which no meaning in a traditional sense can be ascribed but that (negatively) possesses an unheard-of kind of meaning insofar as it returns as the expelled and the rejected.

Through its return, through its repeated incursion into the transparent discourse of philosophy and science, it compels the signified fleeing from it to carry out its own annihilation either through splitting itself or through a perpetual withdrawal, in other words, to produce the very phantasms it is trying to escape and with which, although it is something that it itself produced, it can never coincide. The meaning of the phantasmatic text rests on the fact that the signified “recognizes” itself only as the appendage of the signifier.

In the previous chapter, we tried to define the strange circle that, in comparison with the “degrading chains of logic,”46 cannot be understood either as a circle simply created by the inclination of the chain of images or as a circle dominated by a full center. Inasmuch as it was still a circle, it produced itself only through the anamorphosis of an ellipse whose two centers became the center of a single circle through a specific perspective. In addition, its periphery appeared to be discontinuous and perforated by holes as a result of the virulent (“the virulence of his own phantasms”⁴⁷) and winding path of the phantasms. In our discussion of the signs of the phantasm, we could highlight the duality of two locations separated by a bar. The transgression of the signifier that leaves its place in order to break into the signified allowed us to think the discontinuous realization of the chain of images. The power of the signifier forces the signified to permanently distort itself in order to add to the chain a sign, or an image in the unfilled holes, in the erratic sequence that we have described. But in the transgression of the bar, which seems to form a circle following the inclination of phantasms, a certain virulence appears of which we can ask whether it is not also a shattering of the circular movement, whether or not it is the result of an anamorphosis. The economy of expenditure developed by Bataille with, but also against, Mauss performs this bursting open of the circular movement.48

We have to turn now to some other aspects of the phantasm. Although the effect of the phantasm, strictly speaking, cannot be separated from its meaning (taken in its Bataillean sense), nevertheless we want to examine the latter since it broaches and breaches the question of repetition. This way we can pose the problem of the dynamics of the chain of images.

2. Remorseless Patricide

Consider the word remorse. Remors, mordeo, mordere. La Mordida! Agenbite too . . . And why rongeur? Why all this biting, all those rodents, in the etymology?

—Malcolm Lowry49

His suppressed rage against his father was what had constructed this series of pictures with their understandable allusions.

—Sigmund Freud50

It is possible in all freedom to be a plaything of evil if evil itself does not have to answer before God.

—Georges Bataille51

The collapse of the equilibrium in a space in which it is no longer possible to establish a footing or a ground, in a space in-between heaven and earth, unleashes the liberation of the previously reconciled, equal, and uniform forces that were suppressed by the phallus, the law, and the code. With the loss of the center of gravity, the equilibrium and the balance of the motives that define the free will are followed by an unequal freedom.

If we now turn to the “emancipatory character” (OC, II, 413) of the phantasm, we must first define this unequal freedom in a negative fashion. Is this the “empty freedom” that Hegel mentions that consists of the arbitrary will to pull forth images from the nocturnal pit only to throw them back again, that is, “to dismember [these] images and to reconnect them in the most dissociated manner”?52 Is it the kind of freedom that we can enjoy undisturbed by averting the external constraints of reality through the activity of fantasy, as Freud writes, as in a “reservation.”53 In his day, Bataille reproached the surrealists (especially Breton) precisely for such “empty freedom” as an avoidance of reality in favor of a tolerated, harmless, if not wholly obligatory and official mythology. In “The Castrated Lion,” we find the following:

The dreadful awareness that every human being has of mental castration almost inevitably translates, under normal conditions, into religious observance, since such a human being, fleeing in the face of grotesque danger yet retaining the taste for existence, transposes his activity into the mythical domain. Because by so doing he regains a false liberty and has no difficulty portraying virile men, who are only shadows, and in consequence complacently confounds his life with a shadow, even though everyone today knows that the liquidation of modern society will not turn into water as it did at the end of the Roman Empire in the face of Christianity. With the exception of a few rather unappetizing aesthetes, no one any longer wants to be buried in blind and idiotic contemplation, no one wants a mythical liberty.54

Thus, the concept of freedom might in the end be inadequate to describe the effectivity of the phantasm. Bataille, however, still uses the word since it is not necessary to understand freedom as a false pretense or an avoidance of reality. Thus, free is not to be understood “in the poorest sense of the word (where liberty is only impotence).”55 Freedom, the way Bataille uses the term, is tied to something horrifying (Entsetzliches) that displaces (ent-setzt) the one whom it affects and unsettles his thinking and the order of his thoughts.

I do not believe that I could search for a more decisive outcome than that of tying the most shocking freedom to the necessary development of thought. . . . In addition, I must forewarn that there is no means available by which to imagine the possibility of a success similar to those of other systematic efforts in the sense that freedom cannot cease to appear hostile to every conceivable collective human consciousness. (OC, II, 131)

This form of freedom—which is not to be confused with the one that manifests itself in the daydreams averting external constraints, or the one that emerges in systematic thinking through the subordination of the particular to the universal—does not rely on anything: it resists every “normal conclusion of every intellectual activity” and leads to “revolting paths” and, consequently, to fear. Thus, no exhilarating and light-footed freedom is being aimed for here. Rather, it is indissolubly tied to and delivered over to fear:

As I am writing now, in spite of all the vulgar insolence I might be disposed to, I would rather acknowledge that I am afraid: the term “freedom,” which presupposes a childish or oratorical enthusiasm, is first of all deceptive, and it would be even less of a misunderstanding to speak of all the things that provoke fear. Fear, which is the foundation of customary regressions, can also be used as a sign of liberation and of orgasm. (OC, II, 131)

Freedom tied to this aspect of the fear that it provokes, and to the fear that in turn gives birth to freedom in “the anguished search for what causes shame, for what was missed and despicably concealed,” needs to be strictly distinguished from the one that causes “classical and noble terror, everything that could be hijacked to benefit respectable poetic emotions” (OC, II, 131).

In “The Academic Horse,” Bataille still defined freedom in purely formal terms as deviation and refused to grant it only to the human being. If this freedom is understood as a deviation from the norm, as the capability to bring forth new forms, then the animal world must be granted this freedom all the more insofar as every species represents “a gratuitous choice between innumerable possibilities” that bears witness to the “freedom of the obscure decision in which the essential quality of these beings can be found.”56 In the face of the diversity of the deviations of form in the animal world, the freedom to deviate claimed by man becomes downright ridiculous. So much then about the formal definition of freedom.

The definition of freedom based on content can be best gleaned on the opposition between human dignity and the ambiguous feelings of humans toward wild animals:

For in the presence of illegal and essentially free beings (the only real outlaws) the stupid feeling of practical superiority gives way to a most uneasy envy. . . . There are so many animals in this world, and so much that we have lost! The innocent cruelty; the opaque monstrosity of eyes scarcely distinguishable from the little bubbles that form on the surface of mud; the horror as integral to life as light is to a tree.⁵⁷

The beastly, the animalistic, and the cruel constitute the deviation that is opposed in a decisive manner to the poor freedom of which the human being is so proud. Only through them is it possible to determine on the level of content what freedom can be. Only the metamorphosis of a man into an animal, inasmuch as there is an animal slumbering inside every human being, can realize this freedom as unprecedented distance and deviation.

The obsession with metamorphosis can be defined as a violent need—identical, furthermore, with all our animal needs—that suddenly impels us to cast off the gestures and attitudes requisite to human nature. A man in an apartment, for example, will set to groveling before those around him and eat dog’s food. There is, in every man, an animal thus imprisoned, like a galley slave, and there is a gate, and if we open the gate, the animal will rush out, like the slave finding his way to escape. The man falls dead, and the beast acts as a beast, with no care for the poetic wonder of the dead man.58

With regard to its content, therefore, freedom consists in an essential manner of the brutish blasphemy of everything elevated, noble, and holy. The highest animalistic need, however, is sexuality, the conceivably most fatal inclination. It manifests itself as a violation of the rules through “a series of facts that form themselves without conscious ideological determination,” and represents “the living domain of freedom” (OC, II, 128). Bataille writes: “I do not distinguish freedom from sexual freedom because depraved sexuality is the only kind produced independently of conscious ideological determinations, the only one that results from a free play of bodies and images, impossible to justify rationally” (OC, II, 131).59 The liberating effect of the phantasm rests on its immediate connection with sexuality: the two mutually condition each other. Of course, not in the sexuality generally called normal, but in sexual aberration, that is, in horror, consternation, torpor produced by deviation from the norms and transgression of human dignity and the law. In all these cases, the deviation of sexuality is no longer assimilable by reason:

Except for the phantasms brought into play in sexual aberration, nothing actually exists anymore in any accessible domain whose image would be vivid enough to allow thought to escape from the reductive representations of reason. But if these phantasms intervened, it would be impossible to react after the fact and make things return to order without recourse to the distorting processes that bring to mind the surgical procedures of anesthesia due to their complications and cowardice. Thus, for a long instant, completely heterogeneous and frighteningly inassimilable elements can be tied to thought developing itself under conditions that it cannot avoid. (OC, II, 133)60

The freedom of the phantasm does not merely consist of opposing every order like an animal, or of hurling back into the system of reason in altered form the heterogeneous element that has been expelled from it, or of resisting every necessity:

Human life is exhausted from serving as the head of, or the reason for, the universe. To the extent that it becomes this head and this reason, to the extent that it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts servitude. If it is not free, existence becomes empty or neutral and, if it is free, it is in play. The Earth, as long as it only gave rise to cataclysms, trees, and birds, was a free universe; the fascination of freedom was tarnished when the Earth produced a being who demanded necessity as a law above the universe. Man however has remained free not to respond to any necessity; he is free to resemble everything that is not himself in the universe.61

As a result, the freedom of the phantasm consists also in the ability of man of sacrificing himself as man, in other words, to eject from himself those homogeneous elements that constitute him as an identical being. The gesture of self-sacrifice consists of the expenditure of that which, in contrast to a general economy of dissipation, is accumulated, appropriated, internalized in a restricted economy and whose preservation guarantees identity. In “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” Bataille describes the sacrifice of the own, the proper, and the self in the following terms: “The one who sacrifices is free—free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim, to vomit his own being just as he has vomited a piece of himself or a bull, in other words free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself, like a gall or an aissaouah.”62 The freedom of self-sacrifice, the vomiting out of the self, is a freedom that cannot be sublated.63 In contrast to the institutionalized sacrifice that takes place in a magic circle (as in the “rites of liberation,”64 for example), in which the sacrificial animal and the sacrificer become superseded in a higher sphere through the mediation of the sacrifice, which guarantees the continuity of the human and the holy (God), Van Gogh abused the freedom found in sacrifice since he “carried his severed ear to the place that most offends society.”65 Thus, self-sacrifice breaks out of the magic circle as the first step toward the higher level of the holy and shatters this circle into what cannot be sublated in it: the irreducible heterogeneous element that is only known by sublation as the mastered abyss over which it believes itself to be safe.66

In self-sacrifice an alteration of the individual occurs: the name “man” can no longer be granted to the being that sacrifices itself. The freedom that first appeared only as an individual manifestation, as a particular act that blasphemes the universal in a “brutish” manner, ceases, with the entry into the domain of the heterogeneous (like that of the brothels in Van Gogh’s case) to be individual. “Freedom, inasmuch as it was conceived at its origins in an arbitrary fashion, ultimately assumes a completely impersonal meaning” (OC, II, 128). Freedom, thereby, gains a quality analogous to that of the phantasm and, representing the outcome of the transgression, becomes part of a un-system of heterogeneous elements. The liberating effect of the phantasm, the freedom inherent in it, that opens the un-space of the un-system, does not, as Bataille says, assume a material form (only the individual phantasmatic facts bear witness to this system). It has only a textual structure, similar to that of the unconscious, that can never become conscious in its entirety (inasmuch as it can be thought as a totality at all). Consequently, this freedom can never manifest itself in “full” materiality: Bataille describes it as “mythological freedom” (OC, II, 39). As a phantasmatic and mythological freedom, in accordance with the meaning of these terms, it is the movement of a texture inscribed in an un-book, that is, a book that has been freed of its booklike character and has ceased to be a comprehensive totality.

If this freedom of the phantasm is the freedom that brings down the book, the code, the law, the phallus, and the center, as it expresses itself irrevocably in a transgression that infinitely repeats itself, it is then also the freedom that dares to kill the father: the father who enslaves his son, the master who enslaves his slave. To make this point, we will now have to interpret the following lines: “A phantasm responds like a master and not like a slave: it exists like a free son after a long suffering under an iron rule, diabolically enjoying and without any remorse for killing his father; he exists freely and does not reflect anything but wild human nature” (OC, II, 415–16).

1.

Let us start by reading the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave together with the Freudian theory of the murder of the father—reading them together, but not combining them together, as if such a unification were possible.

The problem posed by the master and the slave, as it is presented by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit and later in the Encyclopedia, belongs to the sphere of the constitution of self-consciousness that, as an intermediary step between consciousness and the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, through the elevation of certainty to truth realizes reason, that is, the concept of Spirit. If consciousness represents this particular stage in the becoming of Spirit, at which the “I” has merely one external object as such, then it is consciousness in the form understanding (the intellect) that already prepares the leap into self-consciousness. This, however, happens “only when the object has been internalized into the ‘I.’”67 The internalization consists of the object becoming inwardly as apprehended appearance, that is, the object is determined in the same way as the “I” and its various determinations become “the appearance of a self-existent inner being.”68 This way the “I” can perceive in the object that is no longer distinguished from it “the counterpart or reflex of its own self,” and it can internalize it, making itself in it into an object of abstract identity, freedom, and pure ideality.69 This abstract, immediate, and isolated self-consciousness, however, is still intermingled with external reality. Hegel contends: “As thus determined, self-consciousness is the certainty of itself as merely being, in the face of which the object has the determination of something only seemingly independent, but is in fact a nullity. This is appetitive self-consciousness.”70 As the next step, self-consciousness turns the object into an “ego absolutely independent of me and opposed to me.”71 As a result, the destructive and selfish desire along with its satisfaction is sublated in a process of mutual recognition. The struggle for recognition ignited in this sphere contains the whole problematic of the master and the slave whose outcome (and sublation) gives rise to universal self-consciousness, that is, the concept of Reason, of Reason as Idea. Universal self-consciousness, according to Hegel, is “the affirmative awareness of self in an other self: each self as a free individuality has its own ‘absolute’ independence”:

This unity of consciousness and self-consciousness implies in the first instance the individuals mutually throwing light upon each other. But the difference between those who are thus identified is mere vague diversity—or rather it is a difference which is none. Hence its truth is the fully and really existent universality and objectivity of self-consciousness—which is Reason.72

The systematic difficulty of our attempts to read Hegel and Freud together consists of the fact that the struggle for recognition between master and slave and their subsequent reconciliation only outlines in an anticipatory fashion the sphere of universal consciousness, which later, in the shape of the sphere of the objective Spirit, will become the true place for the problematic between father and son. Indeed, only the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness in universal self-consciousness “forms the substance of ethical life, namely, of the family, of sexual love (there this unity has the form of particularity), of patriotism, this willing of the general aims and interests of the State, of love towards God.”73 In addition, the problem of murder, that is, of the struggle taken to its most extreme, does not have a place in the sphere of ethical life, insofar as the father and the son behave with each other as reasonable beings and free persons. The son shows himself to be worthy of recognition “by overcoming the natural state of his self-consciousness and obeying a universal, the will that exists in and for itself, the law; he behaves, therefore, toward others in a manner that is universally valid, recognizing them—as he wishes others to recognize him—as free, as person.”74 Indeed, as we will see, on the level of the life-and-death struggle for recognition between master and slave the fight is already settled, since “the fight for recognition pushed to the extreme here indicated can only occur in the natural state, where men exist only as single, separate individuals.”75

Another obvious difficulty arises from the fact that in Hegel’s philosophy the struggle for recognition between master and slave completely ignores incest and the role of the woman. Like the three great monotheistic religions, Hegel’s system is based on a particular concept of genealogy that tries to secure “the irreducible predominance of the phallic line, of the law born of the father” through a disavowal of incest and woman.76

What should immediately stand out for us as something that we must not lose sight of is the fact that in the passage by Bataille that we are discussing here an analogy exists between the phantasm and the enslaved son. As we have already intimated, the following discussions of this passage will take place in the context of the definition of the liberating character of the phantasm. However, Bataille’s analogy between the phantasm and the enslaved son forces us to go into, on the one hand, the dialectic of master and slave and, on the other, the relation of father and son. Only then can we return to our starting point.

Therefore, we will first try to highlight the entanglement of the two groups of themes in Bataille. For Bataille, in relation to the slave or the son, the master or the father is characterized by an “imperative sovereignty,” superiority, and supremacy:

Superiority (imperative sovereignty) designates the entire set of striking aspects—affectively determining attraction or repulsion—characteristic of different human situations in which it is possible to dominate and even to oppress one’s fellows by reason of their age, physical weakness, legal status or simply of their necessity to place themselves under the control of one person: specific situations correspond to diverse circumstances, that of the father with regard to his children, that of the military leader with regard to the army and the civilian population, that of the master with regard to the slave, that of the king with regard to his subjects.77

For Hegel, the relation of master and slave is characterized by a one-sided recognition. This must be the case since in the struggle for recognition life is essentially more important for the slave than freedom. The master, who risks his life, finds his individual being-for-itself in the slave looking up at him. What Hegel writes about obedience and the subjection to the law of the master in essence also applies to the relation of father and son in the sphere of ethical life:

The quaking of the single, isolated will, the feeling of the worthlessness of egotism, the habit of obedience, is a necessary moment in the education of all men. Without having experienced the discipline which breaks self-will, no one becomes free, rational, and capable of command. To become free, to acquire the capacity for self-control, all nations must therefore undergo the severe discipline of subjection to a master.78

Regardless of their natural characteristics and personal qualities, which could justify their authority, imperative sovereignty is conferred on the master and the father above all by a specific place in a genealogy: father, master, king, god, logic, and so on. This unquestionably phallic genealogy—which, according to Bataille, finds its exemplary expressions in the monumental (in pyramids or obelisks), that is, in what is lasting and permanent—tries to secure “the presence of the unlimited sky on earth, a presence that never ceases to contemplate and dominate human agitation, just as the immobile prism reflects every one of the things that surrounds it.”79 The institution of immobile laws, the master, and the father serves to fix and bring “the deleterious movement of time” to a standstill through which a linear, genealogical, teleological history becomes possible:

The mocking universe was slowly given over to the severe eternity of its almighty Father, guarantor of profound stability. The slow and obscure movements of history took place here at the heart and not at the periphery of being, and they represent the long and inexpiable struggle of God against time, the combat of “established sovereignty” against the destructive and creative madness of things. Thus history endlessly repeats the immutable stone’s response to the Heraclitean world of rivers and flames.80

As a result, in relation to the son, the father incarnates universality, the law, and prohibition:

In the most crushing way, the contradiction between current social conceptions and the real needs of society recalls the narrowness of judgment that puts the father in opposition to the satisfaction of his son’s needs. This narrowness is such that it is impossible for the son to express his will. The father’s partially malevolent solicitude is manifested in the things he provides for his son: lodging, clothes, food, and, when absolutely necessary, a little harmless recreation. But the son does not even have the right to speak about what really gives him a fever; he is obliged to give people the impression that for him no horror can enter into consideration.81

The Bataillean thematization of the relation of heterogeneity and homogeneity emerges in this context of the problem of mastery. Although its implications underlie the whole work, we will touch upon this set of problems only in passing.82 The fact of the father’s mastery over the son and the master’s over the slave is founded on the wholly other being of the master and the father. This heterogeneity cannot be established rationally because it rests merely on the wholly other nature of the master. This proposition, however, would need to be relativized and differentiated provided that reason, on the one hand, belongs to the domain of the homogeneous, and on the other, has its foundation in something heterogeneous, like the position of the father/master, namely, in logos, which itself represents a link in the already mentioned genealogy.

The slave and the son are homogeneous in comparison with the master and the father in that they circulate around their imperative heterogeneity, and under their mastery, they work on nature with the help of science, which founds the homogeneity of phenomena, and thus make the latter subservient to them. Yet the heterogeneity of the master/father does not stand in mere opposition to the homogeneity of the leveled society of working slaves and sons; neither does it represent a contradiction “with regard to the rational domain of the common denomination and the equivalent”: “The heterogeneity of the master is no less opposed to that of the slave. If the heterogeneous nature of the slave is akin to that of the filth to which his material situation condemns him to live, that of the master is formed by an act excluding all filth: an act pure in direction but sadistic in form.”83 In contrast to the imperative heterogeneity of the master and the father, in contrast to the structure of the homogeneous that eliminates every difference, the lowly heterogeneity of the slave and the son is formed from the expelled and inassimilable element.

Inassimilable by the domain of the homogeneous and the purity of the imperatively heterogeneous, for Bataille the slave and the son belong to the domain of the expelled and the impure. What distinguishes them is the already mentioned fever, the desire for the horrible as well as for dissipation and destruction. To elaborate on what drives the slave and the son, a detour through Bataille’s understanding of “lived experience” is warranted. In the essay written with Raymond Queneau, “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic,” Bataille outlines a dialectic of the real that, relying on the analyses of Nicolai Hartmann, tries to articulate the logic of “lived experience.” Against Hegel and Hartmann, who either define nature as the fall of the Idea so that “the impotence of Nature” (insofar as “it preserves the determinations of the Notion only abstractly”) sets the limits of the philosophy and the dialectic of nature, or restrict the dialectic to that of the master and the slave, or to the class struggle, Bataille attempts to think a new dialectic of nature.84 This dialectic does not find its exemplary terrain in mathematics, as is the case for Engels, who unsuccessfully tried to found historical dialectics on the dialectic of nature, but rather in the particular psychic representation of nature, that is, in lived or experienced nature. In order to develop the dialectic of nature, therefore, Bataille does not solely rely on the dialectic of the class struggle but harks back in particular to psychoanalysis, which presupposes the transposition of nature (in the form of the somatic sources of the drive) into its psychic representations: “In fact, the phenomena for which psychoanalysis accounts can be reduced in the final analysis to drives whose goal is expressed in psychological terms but whose source is of a somatic nature. There is no question here of a matter-spirit dualism; the objects of dialectical investigation represent only the most complex products of nature.”85

Now the drive as represented and experienced nature represents a first domain in which the dialectic of nature can be demonstrated, that is, a dialectic in which the categories of “lived experience” can be applied to “the understanding of nature.”86 However, the paradigm in which this experience and its simultaneous categorization can be developed successfully is not the relation of master and servant whose sublation, as we have seen, gives rise to the sphere of ethical life in the first place, that is, the sole sphere in which the problem of the father and son can pose itself, but paradoxically, the relation of father and son in which, according to Bataille, and contrary to Hegel, the master-slave dialectic prepares itself. Now, just as for Hegel, for Bataille the dialectic can be demonstrated in nature also only singularly, in individual cases, that is, as far as he is concerned, only where the subject experiences nature as represented nature. Bataille writes:

For example, no opposition of terms can account for the biological development of a man who successively is an infant, an adolescent, an adult, and an old man. On the other hand, if one envisages the psychological development of the same man from a psychoanalytic point of view, one can say that the human being is first limited by the prohibitions that the father sets in opposition to his urges.87

It is, therefore, the prohibition with which the father strikes nature, the drives, the lowly, and the animalistic, that allows specific domains of nature to become significant and endows them with a role of negation. In the sphere in which the struggle for recognition takes place, this repressed nature is not sublated. To the contrary, it is the pure repressed and expelled that returns in this sphere and lends, according to Bataille, a far greater severity to the fight between master and slave than in Hegel.

The opposition of the lowly heterogeneous, on the one hand, and the imperative, imperial heterogeneous, on the other, implies the negating power of the repressed that then manifests itself (in the relation of the father and the son, the master and the slave) as a death wish:

In this precarious condition, he is reduced to unconsciously desiring the death of his father. At the same time, the wishes he directs against paternal power have their repercussions on the son’s personality; he tries to bring castration down on himself, just as he brings on himself the shock of his death wishes. In most cases this negativity of the son does not express the entire real character of his life, which offers at the same time numerous and contradictory aspects. It is this negativity, however, that poses as a necessity the son’s taking the place of his father, which he cannot accomplish without destroying the very negativity that had characterized him up to this point.88

The dialectic of the Oedipal situation portrayed here, however, has nothing disturbing about it. The fight between father and son expires in the overcoming of the Oedipus complex: The death wish is followed by self-punishment or the challenge of castration by the father; and, finally, the negation of negation secures for the son the same paternal role. The negation of negation leads to a loss of the self and elevates him above “the selfish individuality of his natural will,” as Hegel puts it with regard to the slave.89 The reconciliation with the father consists of the elevating sublation of the son from the sphere of the lowly heterogeneous to that of imperative heterogeneity. We have already mentioned that the prohibition that underlies castration, like the prohibition of incest according to Lévi-Strauss, is one of the major preconditions of exchange. The prohibition put on autoeroticism and the prohibition according to which only the father is entitled to the mother first make possible exogamous libidinal object-cathexes through which the circulation of the sexes and bodies emerges: “In fact, [the castration complex] plays a similar role to that of the ‘incest taboo’ in the field where the exchanges between different signs like ‘words,’ ‘women,’ and ‘goods and services’ are instituted, since it can be retranslated very simply in a similar form by the term ‘the interdiction of auto-eroticism.’”90 The castration wish, therefore, must be understood as a guarantor, an accomplice of the castrating father, in short, as a constitutive moment demanded of the son (corresponding to the father’s subterfuge), so that he can be sublated in the phallic lineage. Rosolato writes:

Secondary identification and castration place the father and the son in the same line of descent. Inasmuch as it is surpassed, castration becomes symbolic: not every lack leads to it, since it has to support itself in the subject. A universal law that applies to the son as well as to the father no longer designates the latter as the creator of the Law but rather as its representative, since he himself experienced it through his own castration, by way of a desire freed from the demand that maintains the lack in himself.91

The overcoming of castration, therefore, consists of the recognition of the father’s metaphorical role. Castrating yet himself castrated, he makes the secondary identification possible through which the son’s sublation into the patriarchal genealogy is completed. Now if the father is only a metaphor of the law, his death not only implies that he is castrated as well, but above all the death of the Father, that is, the primal father, the symbolic father, who by assuming the death wish directed at him releases his son and the son’s son in the phallic genealogy. Rosolato has highlighted in exemplary fashion this death of the idealized father as being the precondition of the Oedipal triangle as well as of the problem of the phallic genealogy inherent in it. This death that the idealized father takes upon himself is, indeed, the condition of the bond between father and son, without which there could be no genealogy. The idealized father, as dead or murdered father, takes upon himself his death so that his son can deal with the death threat of his own son and resolve the dual opposition between father and son in the genealogy:

By suspending the threat to his son, he opts for a law: more precisely, the law of an order, of a succession of generations in death. By means of the sacrifice, reminder of the Dead Father, and precisely to the degree that the latter is accepted as the Law itself in a relation to death (and not like the idealized father, an arbitrary author and executor of the law), Abraham enters the order of the fathers, who have death on their side, in relation to their son. He accepts this succession and refuses to abolish Isaac, which was a possibility for him. He admits this new generation that he could have destroyed, rejected, or denied. He recognizes Isaac. . . . He accepts that Isaac can nourish the same death wish toward him.92

It is obvious that the assumption of the death threat or the death wish becomes possible only through a corresponding initial transformation of the idealized, which also means punitive father: “The jealous and angry God becomes the God of the alliance between generations. The God who corresponds to the Idealized Father transforms himself into the Dead Father: he takes upon himself death at the moment when Isaac’s sacrifice is suspended.”93 So, does the murder of the father and the problem of castration merely represent for Bataille the reinstatement of the law that was made possible by exchange and the phallic transmission of the imperial or imperative paternal genealogy? Is the murder of the father and the threat of castration or, respectively, the self-castration of the guilty son only a harmless mimetic repetition that does not follow through to the bitter end? What we have seen so far seems to confirm this assumption. In fact, the relation of the repressed and the repressing, the lowly heterogeneous and imperative heterogeneity, negation and affirmation, conceived in the sense of the dialectic discussed here, does not allow any other solution.

But before taking up this question again with the intention of outlining an other answer, let us return to the Bataillean presentation of the master-slave relationship. We will first quote a passage that shows that Bataille knew the Hegelian theory of the struggle for recognition quite well:

The human spirit for Hegel, inasmuch as it is the starting point of philosophical consciousness, does not exist independently of the circumstances among which it produces itself. Two modes of existence, the master and the slave, oppose each other in an essential way. When Hegel describes human life, he represents this fundamental opposition and the different forms that it assumes. But at the origin of Marx’s teachings, we find not only Hegelian philosophy in general but the dialectic of the master and the slave in particular. Hegel represented the slave and not the master as the one who is supposed to become human. He discovered in work the principle of the liberation of the slave. (OC, I, 388)

This paragraph is taken from a manifesto of Contre-Attaque, in which Bataille announced the prospect of a pamphlet under the title “The Hegelian Dialectic of Master and Slave as the Foundation of the Phenomenology of Spirit and Marxist Doctrine.” This work scheduled for 1936 was never realized. The manifesto that we are dealing with here is an occasional piece, a fact that partially explains its lack of rigor. The quoted passage also bears witness to the kind of anthropological interpretation of the master-slave chapter that Alexandre Kojève gave in his lectures on the Phenomenology.94 Although Kojève attributed to this chapter a disproportionately significant role in the text of the Phenomenology, this should not preoccupy us here. We will, rather, quote another passage in which Bataille underlines the importance of work for Hegel:

In the first movement, where the force that the master has at his disposal puts the slave at his mercy, the master deprives the slave of a part of his being. Much later, in return, the “existence” of the master is impoverished to the extent that it distances itself from the material element of life. The slave enriches his being to the extent that he enslaves these elements by the work to which his impotence condemns him.95

This passage comes from an essay written in 1935–36 entitled “The Labyrinth.” Bataille connects here the fight for “existence” with a movement that can no longer be called dialectical since, oscillating between two poles, it does not allow for any sublation.

The contradictory movements of degradation and growth attain, in the diffuse development of human existence, a bewildering complexity. The fundamental separation of men into masters and slaves is only the crossed threshold, the entry into the world of specialized functions where personal “existence” empties itself of its contents; a man is no longer anything but a part of being, and his life, engaged in the game of creation and destruction that goes beyond it, appears as a degraded particle lacking reality.96

Thereby the fight for “existence,” for self-consciousness through recognition, becomes “a tragic and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach.”97 Work, however, which represents both for Hegel and Marx the precondition of the emancipation of the slave, is shown to be farce, a cunningly delayed promise that is never realized.

The greatest part of activity is subordinated to the production of useful good, no decisive change seeming possible, and man is all too inclined to make his enslavement by work an insuperable limit. Nevertheless, the absurdity of such an empty existence still induces the slave to complete his production through a faithful response to what art, politics, or science demand of him to be and to believe; he finds therein the fulfillment of his human destiny.98

Science is under the spell of a similar illusion. The domain of science, production for the sake of production and accumulation, which is also the domain of work, is that of homogeneity. But not only the slaves, “the ruling-slaves,” that is, the masters also fall prey to this domain. Breton and Bataille wrote the following in 1935: “The Croix de feu, the governing bodies, and their patrons are slaves at the service of the party and capitalism, at the service of forces that they cannot master, forces that dominate them and condemn them to impotence. . . . The time has arrived when the world must get rid of the ruling-slaves, the blind who are leading the miserable masses today to the abyss” (OC, I, 384–85). As long as the fight remains a struggle about “existence,” self-consciousness, the recognition of the master by the slave, the slave by the master, and the slave by the nature that it works on and in which he intends to rediscover his own alienated self, the struggle will be a mere parody of a struggle: a tragic comedy. Although the slave is in the position to work his way up to self-consciousness, to enrich his own “existence” and to impoverish the master’s, in this process he does not accomplish anything other than the being, the self-consciousness of imperial and imperative totality. Mastery is transferred to the slave, but nothing has really changed since the new master remains a slavish master, just as the master used to depend on the slave: “Being can complete itself and attain the menacing grandeur of imperative totality; this accomplishment only serves to project it with a greater violence into the vacant night.”99

The revolutionary role of the son, the slave, the proletariat cannot consist of replacing the slavish master by a slave that has become a master. It must exclusively consist of the abolition of mastery as such, of the explosion of the dialectic of the master and the slave. First of all, this requires that we give up the slavish method that the slave and the proletariat relied on in order to work themselves up to become masters. These methods, like the power of the proletariat, only helped the bourgeoisie to power. Indeed, the proletariat’s “violent revolutionary impulse, generated by accumulated rage, has on each of these occasions been used by bourgeois and liberal leaders, who have exploited insurrection to seize power.”100 The already discussed passage of the manifesto from Contre-Attaque contains a footnote that states the following about the role assigned to the slave working on nature in the process of his emancipation: “The actual relation of master and slave tends to reverse itself dialectically” (OC, I, 388). Does this mean that the role that the slave used to play now falls to the master? Or is the master now the slave since he stands in the service of a homogenizing heterogeneity, that is, the abstraction of capital? Does the prior role of the master now fall to the slave, not because he recovered his alienated self through his work in nature but because he represents the absolute opposite of imperative heterogeneity? The following passages suggest the latter interpretation. The first passage is a quotation from a manifesto of Contre-Attaque: “We declare that the time has come not only for the individual but for EVERYONE to act as MASTERS” (OC, I, 396). The next passage comes from another manifesto of the same journal: “The time has come for us all to act like masters and to physically destroy the slaves of capitalism” (OC, I, 382). Is this then simply a reversal of emphasis? It is true that certain aspects of the quoted materials, due to their stubborn repetition, do in fact suggest that things will not stop at the level of this simple reversal: for example, the rejection of work as a negative power that would raise the slave above the master; the definition of the master as a slave; the call for the physical elimination of the master and the annihilation of every function of mastery. But in order to show that Bataille does not merely stop at this simple reversal of the relation of master and slave, after this detour through Bataille’s political commentary from the 1930s, it is now necessary to turn to his later writings, which were mostly published in the journal Acéphale (1936–39).

2.

We have already mentioned that the attempt to read Hegel and Freud together is tied to the systematic difficulty of accounting for the position of the mother, feminine representation, and the problem of incest in the struggle for recognition between master and slave that Bataille grounds in the father-son relationship. The omission of these moments does not appear to be accidental since it helps secure the phallic continuity of the genealogy. Bataille, however, directly confronts us with the omitted problem: “God, kings, and their sequels have interposed themselves between men and the earth—in the same way that the father stands before the son as an obstacle to the violation and the possession of the Mother.”101 For the slave, therefore, the earth is put under the same prohibition as the mother desired by the son. The same way that incestuous desire and the hatred of the father, the death wish, necessarily invoke feelings of self-punishment and symbolic castration in accordance with the law of the dialectic (through which secondary identification makes the sublation of the son into the phallic genealogy possible), in the relation of the master and the slave the desire to possess the earth becomes a means for the slave (a means, however, prescribed to him by the master) to work himself up to become a master and to include himself in the genealogy of masters. Work must be understood, then, in the sense of a symbolic castration that stands in the service of mastery and of securing the function of mastery in general. And in fact we find that Bataille understands work, production for the sake of production and accumulation, in exactly this way: “The economic history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth.”102

In the Phenomenology we read that, as self-consciousness, the slave relates to the thing only in a negative way, which therefore retains some of its autonomy. As a result, the slave cannot be done with it to the point of annihilation. “He only works on it” and cannot become “lord over the being of the thing and achieve absolute negation of it.”103 As a result of this inability, the slave’s consciousness and the slave’s work on things in the form of “unessential” action stands in the service of the master. As Hegel remarks, “What the bondsman does is really the action of the lord,” since, in work as mediation with the thing, the master enjoys the thing deprived of its independence. In the process of work’s elevation to being essentially a doing of the master, however, the other side of work shows itself. Although the master enjoys the thing that has been deprived of its independence by the slave for the master, he lacks that side of independence that is not sublated for him to be able to fully enjoy it. By contrast, by forming the object and holding his desire in check, the slave finds in the formed object the “being-for-self” that properly belongs to him. In opposition to the master, of whom Hegel writes in the Encyclopedia that he “was not yet truly free, for he was still far from seeing in the other himself,”104 the self-consciousness of the slave becomes in-and-for-itself through this recognition of himself in the work. Thus, work at first stands in the service of the master, who gets to enjoy the object produced by the work of the slave. But in a second movement, work becomes the slave’s means of elevating himself to a master and of obtaining in-and-for-itself the self-consciousness that escaped the master. But since “it is only when the slave becomes free that the master, too, becomes completely free,”105 work (as the slave’s work) proves itself to be still in the service of the master, of the slave who has become a master, of the master dependent on the slave.¹⁰⁶

Consequently, the work on the earth is disappointing since it leads only to the perpetuation of mastery, to a subjugation to useful labor. Furthermore, the slavish function of work in service of the master and mastery—a service that even the slave who has become a master cannot avoid—is simply to bring forth products for destruction: “Men do not know how to enjoy the Earth and her products freely and with prodigality; the Earth and her products only lavish and liberate themselves in order to destroy.”

The incandescent reality of the Earth’s womb cannot be touched and possessed by those who misunderstand it. It is the misunderstanding of the Earth, the forgetting of the star on which he lives, the ignorance of the nature of riches, in other words of the incandescence that is enclosed within this star, that has made for man an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death. As long as men forget the true nature of terrestrial life, which demands ecstatic drunkenness and splendor, nature can only come to the attention of the accountants and economists of all parties by abandoning them to the most complete results of their accounting and economics.107

The constitution of the society of exchange, the restricted economy of accumulation, the perpetuation of phallic genealogy rest upon the concealment, the forgetting, the misrecognition, the repression of the feminine. Its elimination is the necessary precondition of patriarchal and phallic domination. In order to reintroduce the feminine into this configuration, Bataille resorts to its mythical figuration. Therefore, it is the opposition of Earth and Heaven, of the chthonian and uranian worlds, as well as the tragic play of these oppositions that will preoccupy Bataille here:

Among the various oppositions that maintain the existence of men under the harsh law of Heraclitus, none is truer or more ineluctable than the one that opposes the Earth to the heavens, to the “need to punish” the dark demands of tragedy; on one side are constituted the aversion to sin and the light of day, glory and military repression, the imprescriptible rigidity of the past; on the other, the grandeur of auspicious nights, of avid passion, of the obscure and free dream.108

At the moment when the master/father (in the shape of Zeus) subjugates to himself the chthonian gods, the dualism, and along with it the tragedy, of the two mythical opposites is brought to an end. Yet, as Bataille emphasizes, “the Earth as mother has remained the old chthonian deity, but with the human multitudes she also tears down the God of the sky in an endless uproar.”109 The chthonian god remains a perpetual threat for the god that wants to secure the phallic genealogy through the exclusion of the feminine. Inasmuch as the securing of the manly genealogy is one of the attributes of the god that brings time to a standstill, it will also be challenged by the upheaval of the chthonian gods: “On one side a constitution of communal forces riveted to a narrow tradition—parental or racial—constitutes a monarchical authority and establishes itself as a stagnation and as an insurmountable barrier to life.”110 God, the phallus, the logos, the self-contained principle, all fall with the breakdown of the sequence of generations, the linearity of time, the bursting open of the universe into infinity. This fall once again reopens the scene of tragedy. If the exclusive and excluding God represents the breakdown of dualism, the ripping open again of the opposition makes “life itself—LIFE, IN OTHER WORDS, TRAGEDY”—once again possible.111 The following makes it clear that tragic existence is theatrical in nature:

In no way does the theater belong to the uranian world of the head and the sky: it belongs to the world of the womb, to the internal and maternal world of the deep earth, the dark world of chthonian divinities. The existence of man does not escape the obsession with the maternal bosom anymore than the obsession with death: it is linked to the tragic insomuch as it is not the negation of the damp earth that produced it and to which it will return. (OC, I, 493–94)

The theater, the womb of the chthonian mother, is the night of the labyrinth, in which the tragic play of life and death is presented. It is the scene of the wound: every new life rips open a new wound, the death of the mother anticipated by the newly born life: “The new life forms itself only in the mother’s default and bleeding withdrawal; a new life at the very least is a first step toward a killing” (OC, I, 565).112 This circular movement that brings death represents the time of tragedy that interrupts linear time. While god is merely an “old man-king who does not want to die, the most profound and the most senile negation of time” (OC, I, 645), “the wild immensity of time that remained the mother of man” (OC, I, 647) represents the time that progresses in self-repeating cycles and in which (and here Bataille invokes Heraclitus) every moment exists only to the degree that it obliterates the previous moment, its father (OC, I, 466). “The eternal return could also be considered as a projection of the maternal womb” (OC, I, 645), as Bataille suggests. The proximity of this conception to Nietzsche’s philosophy does not need to be discussed here any further: it is obvious. Let us merely recall that at the time of the composition of these ideas Bataille wrote several articles on Nietzsche for the journal Acéphale in order to defend Nietzsche’s philosophy from its reception in fascist Germany. The same context gave rise to his translations of a few fragments by Heraclitus as well as a few passages from Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.

We have insisted here on this tragic image of the world—in which the one-headed phallic god is brought down and in which linear time and the continuity of generations are broken (Bataille describes it as the “night of the labyrinth” in which “death and life tear each other apart like silence and lightning” [OC, I, 494])—because through its ceaselessly closing and reopening cycles it represents the scene in which the murder of the father has to be thought. It is a murder through which the original dualism is restored against the imperial rule of the father-god.113 It is a murder that allows the play of tragedy to flare up once again and helps restore the rights of this universe, which had become annihilated by the monolithic severity of the one principle, the one origin, and linear rigidity. With the beheading of the one-headed god, the irreconcilable struggle of irreducible contraries breaks out once again: “Universal existence, eternally unfinished and acephalic, a world like a bleeding wound, endlessly creating and destroying particular finite beings: it is in this sense that true universality is the death of God.”114

3.

Let us return to our discussion of the passage that we have undertaken to comment on here. We found there that the phantasm speaks like a master and not like a slave, and that it exists like a son who, after a long period of rearing under his father’s control, enjoys the father’s murder diabolically and without remorse.

We can immediately infer from the quoted passage the discursive specificity of the phantasm: it represents a linguistic formation; it speaks. As something spoken (or written), it tries to answer to, respond to, and refute the master-slave problematic. As a discursive formation, the phantasm speaks the language of a master who became one by freeing himself from his subjugation to another master. Does the phantasm speak the language of a slave that became a master? The language of a slave who came to occupy his master’s place by disposing of his oppressor? As our discussions of Hegel might have made clear, for Bataille the slave cannot simply become a master who relies on the slave and who, therefore, is a servile master. We are, thus, called upon to highlight the difference once again, this time, however, on the text of the Phenomenology itself. At the same time, the remorseless patricide that the emancipated slave enjoys diabolically will require a detour through the Freudian theory of the murder of the father. But first, let us start with Hegel.

In the chapter devoted to the master-slave dialectic, we will first examine the problem of death: already in the “Preface” death is introduced as the power of the negative that we have to look in the face and tarry with. The mobilization of life, risking and gambling with the natural, animalistic being of man becomes an unavoidable necessity in the master-slave chapter as self-consciousness constitutes itself in a struggle for mutual recognition. On the other hand, this risk that needs to be assumed is also a function of the struggle for recognition, which aims for the sublation of the natural immediacy of the other in order to overcome the self’s own animalistic nature in a recognized, free self-consciousness.

The two interacting consciousnesses are first “natural and corporeal” subjects “existing in the manner of a thing which is subjected to an alien power.” At the same time, they are also “completely free subjects and ought not to be treated as only immediate existences, as merely natural things”:115

Therefore, men must will to find themselves again in one another. But this cannot happen so long as they are imprisoned in their immediacy, in their natural being; . . . freedom demands, therefore, that the self-conscious subject should not heed his own natural existence or tolerate the natural existence of others; on the contrary, indifferent to natural existence, he should in his individual, immediate actions stake his own life and the lives of others to win freedom. Only through struggle, therefore, can freedom be won; . . . at this stage, man demonstrates his capacity for freedom only risking his own life and that of others.116

This life-and-death struggle, however, cannot have a deadly outcome; otherwise the very purpose of the struggle, recognition, would be lost. The point is merely to bring one’s own and the other’s life into a deadly danger in order to posit natural existence as something negative and void. In the Encyclopedia, we read the following: “either self-consciousness imperils the other’s life, and incurs a like peril for its own—but only peril, for either is no less bent on maintaining his life, as the existence of freedom.”117 The physical death of the other or of the self is only “the abstract, therefore rude, negation of immediacy”: it annihilates the contradiction or produces a higher contradiction that makes all recognition impossible. “Death certainly shows that each staked his life and held it of no account, both in himself and in the other; but that is not for those who survived this struggle,” since this “trial by death . . . does away with the truth which was supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally.”118 The struggle must thus be conducted in a way that both subjects striving for self-consciousness “prove [bewähren] themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle.”119 In the German original, Hegel italicizes the verb bewähren, the term translated above as “to prove”: in other words, both subjects must be mutually provoked, but at the same time they also have to protect themselves (the German term for which is bewahren). To a certain degree, therefore, the outcome of the struggle is decided from the beginning, since what is at stake in the struggle in which the two consciousnesses mutually risk themselves is not physical death but, in a manner of speaking, a spiritual death due to the lack of recognition. The life-and-death struggle is merely a mock fight, not a real duel but a mere pretense. It is certain from the very beginning that “life is as essential [to self-consciousness] as pure self-consciousness.”120 Moreover, the potential incapability to really defy death and look it in the face is only the slave’s problem: his servile dependence on life allows the struggle to conclude in favor of the master. As a result, “because life is as requisite as liberty to the solution, the fight ends in the first instance as a one-sided negation with inequality [that is] the status of master and slave.”121 The slave’s dependence on life is a chance for the master who exploits it in order to find his own being-for-itself by being recognized by the slave. We said that the struggle is a mere mock fight because the two consciousnesses facing each other at the beginning are not equal: one subject is always already a master; the other always already a slave. Thus, the master can safely enter into the merely apparent danger since the slave is ill prepared for the fight from the very beginning. The inequality existed from the start. The Phenomenology says the following: “The lord relates himself mediately to the bondsman through a being [a thing] that is independent, for it is just this which holds the bondsman in bondage; it is his chain from which he could not break free in the struggle, thus providing himself to be dependent, to possess his independence in thinghood.”122 The subjects entering the struggle are master and slave from the beginning: the master can therefore count on the fact that the slave will not really risk either his own life or the master’s life; he can pretend to really risk his life since he is always already certain that he has nothing to lose and, to the contrary, that he can once again survive the always already won struggle.

The feigned death, the trial (Bewährung) of the struggle, is essential for its result: the mutual recognition of the two self-consciousnesses and the development of the subjects who are still caught in their bodily naturalness. It is only the pretended possibility of death that can ensure the birth of the human being’s spiritual existence in contrast to the animal. In “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,” Bataille examined the ambiguity of this process and debunked it as a comedy. Although, he adds, “at least it would be a comedy if some other method existed which could reveal to the living the invasion of death. . . . For Hegel, satisfaction can only take place, desire can be appeased only in the consciousness of death.”123 Death can be experienced only as feigned, since really experienced death, the real consciousness of death, would also be the death of this consciousness: “In order for Man to reveal himself ultimately to himself, he would have to die, but he would have to do it while living—watching himself ceasing to be. In other words, death itself would have to become (self-) consciousness at the very moment that it annihilates the conscious being.”124 But if the self-exposure to the danger of death and looking death into the face cannot (or may not) be the experience of the negative itself as natural death, then there is also no magical power anymore that would turn the consciousnesses into the being of self-consciousness. To be more precise, self-consciousness is also only feigned since animality is sublated only “symbolically.” It is self-consciousness only in the sense that it allows the power of the negative to affect it only apparently. Absolute self-consciousness is impossible since facing death and tarrying with it amount to its own death.

This is not an insignificant fact for Bataille, since he tries to think precisely this impossibility by expanding the blind spot that in the Phenomenology corresponds to this impossibility into the scene of a tragic struggle that demonstrates the impossibility of Hegelian self-consciousness on the father’s and the son’s deaths. Operating in this blind spot means to work on the abortion of universal self-consciousness and the Idea of Reason. For the interpretation of the passage from Bataille quoted at the beginning, it is then also necessary to consider the mediating function of work in the process of the slave’s becoming the master. But first let us pick up once again the thread that we have dropped for a moment.

The slave raises himself to become a master insofar as the latter represents for him the objectification of self-consciousness in the form of a being-for-itself. This happens by way of the mediation of work. Fearing the master, the slave works on the independent thing and realizes outside of himself this independence that he is lacking first in-itself in the created objects, which can subsequently become beings for him when he finds himself again in his alienation. The subjugation culminating in work externalizes the negation of the natural independence of the thing, a negation that he did not risk in the struggle with the master and that now becomes the precondition of his own self-consciousness. Bataille’s slave, however, behaves quite differently. He does not rebel against the master inasmuch as crippled by fear he would work himself up with his cunning reason, only to remain subject to the slavish cunning of the master’s reason even there where the master is elevated into true freedom and universal self-consciousness by the emancipated slave. He does not become master through the cunning of work, which is the cunning of slavish reason that is still under the spell of the master’s reason, but by killing the master/father.

What consequences does this murder have on authority? The slave’s occupation of the master’s place irreconcilably reopens the contradiction between the natural and the spiritual. For with the fall of the master, the possibility of the being-for-itself of self-consciousness also collapses, which is a constitutive moment in the Hegelian becoming of self-consciousness in-and-for-itself. With the annihilation of the incarnation in the master of self-consciousness’s being-for-itself, it also ceases to exist for the slave. Thus, every possibility of sublation is eliminated.

The Bataillean slave risks his life in a completely different way from that of both the Hegelian master and slave. In addition, the slave that kills the master/father also relinquishes the possibility to work on nature. Indeed, the work on nature, on things and objects, the slavish work that is the result of the slave’s servile dependence on life as much as on the master’s oppression, stands in the service of the slave’s (and the master’s) self-preservation, in the preservation of his natural and animalistic existence:

This status, in the first place, implies common wants and common concern for their satisfaction—for the means of mastery, the slave, must likewise be kept in life. In place of the rude destruction of the immediate object there ensues acquisition, preservation, and formation of it, as the instrumentality in which the two extremes of independence and non-independence are welded together. The form of universality thus arising in satisfying the want, creates a permanent means and a provision which takes care for and secures the future.125

With the master’s murder, work is also brought to an end. Since the slave is no longer compelled to work on nature by his fear of the master, his own survival (both as slave and as master) is threatened: no future presents itself to him.

The Bataillean slave interrupts the “desire held in check” and the created object’s arrested “fleetingness.”126 As a result, he loses the enjoyment of his own products, an enjoyment once made possible, on the one hand, by the work of his own individual will and, on the other, by his self-recognition in the created object. Not caring about and in fact risking his own animal existence, instead of enjoying the products of his work, their appropriation, and his newly formed independence, for Bataille the slave that has become a master enjoys the murder of the master/father. It is then clear that enjoyment of the slave who kills his master is not only the freedom from his slavery but above all the freedom from his own mastery. By killing the master, on the one hand, and no longer working on nature, on the other hand, he forgoes all possibility of recognition. With this murder, he squanders the possibility of constituting himself as self-consciousness.

Looking death in the face through the murder of the master, he squanders the possibility of the self-consciousness that we have defined as fictive (but for that reason not any less powerful for the purposes of mastery), and, as we will see, he thereby takes his own death upon himself. The diabolical enjoyment of the phantasm, the son, and the slave consists precisely in the experience of absolute self-consciousness in the moment of its very annihilation. The phantasm lasts only for this single moment, which is at the same time also the moment of consternation: the phantasm dissipates itself and delivers itself over to death. The phantasm is this intermediate area that opens up in the gap, in the blind spot of Hegelianism, as an impossibility to be philosophically thought.127 A veritable logocide takes place with the murder of the master and the father.

The enjoyment of the father’s murder in Bataille is to be understood as the diabolical squandering of the possibility of becoming master, as the prevention of the realization of universal self-consciousness. The murder of the father, however, also makes it impossible to become a father and to carry forward the phallic and logical genealogy—something that we will have to discuss in some more detail. As a result of the murder, the son/slave obtains an immediate enjoyment of the earth/mother (without the detour of work), an immediacy that dismembers and kills him like a tragic womb. To put it differently, the son that murdered the father remains suspended, fatally wounded in a tension of extremes, in an immemorial in-between between life and death, in the “utter dismemberment” of the Spirit,128 and in a self-consciousness confounded with the experience of death. This is the privileged instant of sovereign self-consciousness.129

But did not our discussions up to this point suggest precisely that the dissipation and loss of self-consciousness are aspects of sovereignty? For sovereignty is to be distinguished from mastery, which it seems to resemble to a tee, in that once it attains it, it does not hold on to it. In his article “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” Jacques Derrida has clearly defined this decisive difference that arises from Bataille’s merely simulated repetition of Hegelian conceptuality:

Simultaneously more and less a lordship than lordship, sovereignty is totally other. Bataille pulls it out of dialectics. He withdraws it from the horizon of meaning and knowledge. And does so to such a degree that, despite the characteristics that make it resemble lordship, sovereignty is no longer a figure in the continuous chain of phenomenology. Resembling a phenomenological figure, trait for trait, sovereignty is the absolute alteration of all of them.130

Sovereignty may (and can) not be treated fully independently of dialectics and lordship. It does not present a concept that could be simply opposed to lordship from the outside: “In doubling lordship, sovereignty does not escape dialectics. It could not be said that it extracts itself from dialectics like a morsel of dialectics which has suddenly become independent through a process of decision and tearing away. Cut off from dialectics in this way, sovereignty would be made into an abstract negation, and would consolidate ontologies.”131 As a repetition of the master-slave dialectic, sovereignty has to be understood as the difference that emerges from the expenditure of the slavish essence of lordship. Through this difference, sovereignty escapes the process of the labor of the negative that works to produce universal self-consciousness. Along with the obtained state of mastery, sovereignty also sacrifices the meaning that the movement of the negative brought with itself as soon as it violently found its way into the sphere of the master. This happens when sovereignty once again expends the self-consciousness produced by death kept in check along with the mastery connected to it. In other words, it happens when sovereignty eludes the presentation of the meaning of the negative and of fully mastered death. Indeed, “it does not suffice to risk death if the putting at stake is not permitted to take off, as chance or accident, but is rather invested as the work of the negative. Sovereignty must still sacrifice lordship and, thus, the presentation of the meaning of death.”132 It is then obvious that sovereignty is not an identity, and neither does it guarantee an identity. In fact, it is a non-identity, although not as an abstract negation externally opposed to the movement of the Phenomenology, whereby it would still belong to it, but as an absolute non-identity that is “gained” through the mimetic repetition of the Hegelian discourse. Derrida writes: “At stake in the operation, therefore, is not a self-consciousness, an ability to be near oneself, to maintain and to watch oneself. We are not in the element of phenomenology.”133 As a result of the simulation of its “becoming” through the stages of the master-slave dialectic, as a result of its “extraction” from the inside of this movement, there is no symmetry between sovereignty and mastery. The production of sovereignty attests to a certain disproportionality. This barely graspable difference breaches sovereignty in its potential identity:

In order not to govern, that is to say, in order not to be subjugated, it must subordinate nothing (direct object), that is to say, be subordinated to nothing or no one (servile mediation of the indirect object): it must expend itself without reserve, lose itself, lose consciousness, lose all memory of itself and all the interiority of itself; as opposed to Erinnerung, as opposed to the avarice which assimilates meaning, it must practice forgetting, the aktive Vergesslichkeit of which Nietzsche speaks; and, as the ultimate subversion of lordship, it must no longer seek to be recognized.¹³⁴

Hence Bataille’s conclusion in his “Method of Meditation” that it is “this useless, senseless loss that is sovereignty.”135 With the sacrifice of its identity, of its aspects as moments in the labor of the negative and in the becoming of meaning, sovereignty also interrupts discourse insofar as the latter constructs itself around meaning: “In sacrificing meaning, sovereignty submerges the possibility of discourse: not simply by means of an interruption, a caesura, or an interior wounding of discourse (an abstract negativity), but, through such an opening, by means of an irruption suddenly uncovering the limit of discourse and the beyond of absolute knowledge.”136 What becomes visible for a moment in this opening, although it remains ungraspable and inconceivable, is the beyond of absolute knowledge that the latter excluded from itself at the moment when it discursively sublated negation as the power of death from the perspective of work and in a horizon of meaning. This beyond is the condition of possibility of absolute knowledge: it is absolute nonknowledge (non-savoir), as Bataille writes, the un-ground from which and above which absolute knowledge elevates itself to mastery. Thus, Derrida can point out that “far from interrupting dialectics, history, and the movement of meaning, sovereignty provides the economy of reason with its element, its milieu, its unlimiting boundaries of non-sense. Far from suppressing the dialectical synthesis, it inscribes this synthesis and makes it function within the sacrifice of meaning.”137 Thus, expenditure and the general economy to which expenditure belongs (in contrast to the restricted economy in which negation and negativity only partake of the servile work on the becoming of meaning) are not this un-ground (itself): they only refer to it. The un-ground (itself) is not. It has no being. It merely flashes up for a moment as the impossible.

4.

Beyond endless, mutual verbal destruction, what else remains but a silence driving one to madness in laughter and in sweat?

—Georges Bataille138

Let us once again devote our attention to the son who kills the father. In our previous discussions, we emphasized the necessity of the dissipation of mastery so that the father’s murder does not become once again a moment in the becoming of phallic genealogy, of self-consciousness, and finally of Spirit. In other words, the dissipation in question is necessary so that the father’s murder won’t be sublated.

In order for this murder not to remain merely a desire for greater fullness and power, it must be wrenched away from the sphere in which, weakened and without sovereignty, it represents a moment in the becoming of Spirit. Bataille writes: “The impersonal and unconscious desire of the subjects—the desire for the castration and impotence of the king—seems to have been expressed only in the form of purely symbolic rituals and especially in the form of myths, legends—such as the myth of the castrated Uranus or the legend of the mutilated king, the roi méhaigné of the Breton romances.”139 However, if this murder is to be “real” rather than merely “symbolic,” the opening in which it can take place and be observed must be fixed for a moment. This opening comes into view if we follow the symbolic step by step and also work one step at a time against the alteration that leads to the exploitation and sublation of the symbol in the teleology of the becoming of self-consciousness. This opening is the blind spot, the split, but also the open window of the phantasm through which one observes the phantasmatic scene. Since it belongs to the phantasm, this window is a fleeing frame, and the moment one believes to have gotten hold of it, it is no longer what it used to be. Bataille avers: “Only a very poor kind of humanity represents the world according to the measure of an immobile ground and a stationary window: the frames enclosing a fixed object, a poorly monumental face, speak to this sort of diminished humanity. But it is true that the ground, the frame, and the window find themselves under the power of the Earth that revolves in the Sky” (OC, I, 567). As soon as it is immobilized, the opening to the un-ground of absolute knowledge makes it appear as a ground. The revolving and shifting window, however, does not provide a calm, discursive, and meaningful view. Its movement explodes every attempt at enclosure and every stabilizing act of framing. What appears in it for a moment and threatens to break up the square of the frame is expended and left behind by the rotating movement of the window as something congealed into a phantasmatic image. With the overcoming of the image, however, the phantasm also collapses as an opening onto the un-ground. In fact, with the phantasm—with the structured swarm of images that appears to us to be the nonspace manifesting itself within the rotating frames in which science and philosophy are inscribed without their knowledge—we have in front of us only one shape, although the sovereign shape of the un-ground. This is a shape that escapes every ontology due to the circular movement of the phantasm. And since it is not only what is seen through the opening (even before it is fixated) but the opening itself (the window always opens up already within the phantasm) that eludes us, the possibility to think the un-ground through the concept of the phantasm also falls through.

Therefore, what is going to be precipitated as phantasm in what follows is a view of the un-ground that has always already been superseded and sacrificed. In a manner of speaking, we are lagging behind an always already dead figure. Thus, in this repetition of the “Bataillean” phantasm, which is a necessary moment of representation, it is impossible to determine any figures or concepts. Taken by themselves, these figures do not mean anything at all. As a result, the only thing that remains is to follow the movement of sovereignty that has already slipped away from the images in which it presents itself. In addition, what also remains is the repetition of this movement in our own text so that it does not congeal in any proposition: “The sovereign operation engages these developments: they are the residues of a trace left in memory and of the subsistence of functions, but, insofar as it takes place, it is indifferent to and mocks this residue.”140 We must, therefore, once again tie these figures for a moment to the sovereignty that has already escaped them, only to let them drop again thereafter.

This expression of violence does not, however, go far enough; these sentences betray the original impulse if they are not linked to desires and decisions which are their living justification. Now, it is obvious that a representation of madness at the summit can have no direct effect; no one can voluntarily destroy within himself the expressive apparatus which links him to his fellows, like bone to bone.141

And later, “He who expresses himself must therefore pass from the burning sphere of passion to the relatively cold and torpid sphere of signs.”142 Why not instead keep quiet then if the undertaking to follow the traces of sovereignty must necessarily fail? The answer is, only so that we can utter the impossibility, practice the failure or a failure in order to set aside a lowly failure, the attempt to become master, from the higher failure of sovereignty that must erase its traces as it dissipates its own mastery. In order to be sovereign, first the sphere of mastery must be reached. This implies that the movement of the phantasmatic text follows the dialectic of discourse step by step. The phantasmatic text must allow itself to be expressed, represented, and fixed. It must simulate meaningful discourse before it can once again abandon meaning and its own self along with meaning to the abyss. Bataille notes: “For if he must truly become the victim of his own laws, if the accomplishment of his destiny truly requires his destruction, if, therefore, death or madness has for him the aura of celebration, then his very love of life and destiny requires him to commit within himself that crime of authority that he will expiate.”143 In its original context, this quotation that we have applied to the phantasmatic text actually refers to the murder of the father, the murder of the master and of God. It was Bataille’s attempt to equate the phantasm and the rebellious slave that made this application possible, which describes the movement of the struggle for mastery and its simultaneous expiation in the logocidal phantasmatic text.

But, as we have said, this movement also describes the fate of the murderer of the father. In the following passage, his head is at stake:

But if the generality of men—or if, more simply, their entire existence—were to be INCARNATED in a single being—as solitary and abandoned, of course, as the generality—the head of the INCARNATION would be the site of inappeasable conflict, of a violence such that sooner or later it would shatter. We can hardly conceive the intensity of the storm or of release attained in the visions of this incarnate being. He would look upon God only to kill him in that same instant, becoming God himself, but only to leap immediately into nothingness. He would then find himself as before, a man as insignificant as any passerby, but with no possibility of rest whatsoever.

He would surely not content himself with thought and speech, for inner necessity would constrain him to live out his thought and speech. An incarnated being of this sort would know a freedom so great that no language could reproduce its movement (the dialectic no more than any other).144

With this murder of the father, the murderer’s head becomes the dark labyrinth, the scene of the tragedy, in which the dismembered body screams to the skies. A monster who must kill and accept his own death, the father’s murderer is an acephalous figure: “God’s murderer cannot have a head” (OC, I, 645). His crime is directed against the father’s or the master’s head, a crime that he can atone for only with his own head. With the acephalous, the empire of the chthonic gods flashes up for a moment: the empire of acephalous or, what amounts to the same, polycephalous gods. As an acephalous god, the father’s murderer who dissipates his own mastery belongs to the earth and the mother. Like Dionysus, he is a son of heaven and earth. But above all, he is the son of the earth who, in the dualism of forces, was impregnated by the fire of mastery: “Thus, the god was born of a lightning-torn womb.”145 Yet this god sacrifices the fire of mastery that he received by beheading his father as well as himself. Descending into the split body of the mother, he lowers himself to the degree that he becomes one of the chthonic gods who are older than heaven and earth: the archontes.146

Bataille describes the archontes in “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” as the absolutely deep and low, as the figures of absolutely deeply sunken and fallen matter: as irreducible matter, as a crossed-out (since acephalous) arche beyond all dualism. In this essay, they are described as absolutely “outlawed and evil forces.”147 As absolutely low matter, they are “external and foreign” to the traditional opposition of spirit and matter (of heaven and earth, father and mother), on the one hand, because they do not represent matter defined by reason and Spirit, and on the other, because they are not to be understood as “superior principles.”148 In fact, matter constituted in this way refuses every “borrowed authority.” This is manifest from the acephalous figurations of Gnostic archontes, “in which it is possible to see the image of this base matter.”149 Therefore, this matter can no longer function as a principle or as an imperial idea. Bataille submits: “Having had recourse to archontes, it does not appear that one has deeply desired the submission of things that belong to a higher authority, to an authority the archontes stun with an eternal bestiality.”150 As the absolutely low, the archontes are not able “in any case to ape a given authority.”151 Bataille describes the absolutely fallen matter refusing every authority in the following way: “In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not be simply the absence of light, but the monstrous archontes revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action).”152 Insofar as matter is the condition of possibility of the classic dualism of heaven and earth, Spirit and servile matter, even the earth as it functions in the traditional opposition appears as a creation of the archontes. Bataille notes that “the creation of the earth, where our repugnant and derisory agitation takes place, [must be attributed] to a horrible and perfectly illegitimate principle.”153 Therefore, the earth should not be seen as the product of heaven, as it is in the profoundly monistic Hellenic-Judeo-Christian tradition, “whose dominant tendency saw matter and evil as degradations of superior principles.”154 The archontes represent as matter a thoroughly illegitimate principle that does not (or cannot) claim to be an arche. This origin, which is older than the origin known by Judeo-Christian philosophy, is crossed out provided that it is a split origin differing from itself. This origin is through and through dualistic. This dualism, as Bataille writes, is “not emasculated,”155 which means that it is a dualism in which the poles are not organized hierarchically in such a way that one of them would suppress the other. As a crossed-out origin plowed through by opposing forces, through its own creative activity it can give life only to dualistic constructs, such as the hierarchical opposition of heaven and earth, master and slave, father and son. Its own creations are hierarchically structured, since as the principle of evil, as absolute evil, it needs the even deeper collapse of that which, as the elevated and powerful, is brought down by the activity of the low.

The father’s murder finds its acephalous figuration in the empire of the archontes, that is, in the absolutely low matter.

5.

Lest bridled by religion you suppose

That the earth and the sun and the sky, sea, starts, and moon,

Divine in substance, must be everlasting,

And therefore think that, just as the Giants did,

We all shall pay for our tremendous sin

Whose doctrines breach the battlements of the world

Or snuff the brilliant sunlight in the sky,

Slandering immortal with mortality.

—Lucretius156

As we have seen, the son who kills the father commits the crime of authority in order to subsequently atone for it through his self-decapitation. He usurps the father’s place to appropriate his power and mastery and then expends it. In other words, the son must strive for “more power” against the father. He must want the father’s prerogatives, independence, self-sufficiency. Indeed, it belongs to the essence of the will to power to always strive for greater power. Heidegger describes this, discussing Nietzsche, in the following way:

For the essence of power is to be master over the level of power attained at a particular time. Power is power only when and only for as long as it is an increase in power and commands for itself “more power.” To halt the increase of power only for a moment, merely to stand still at one level of power, is already the beginning of a decline in power. Part of the essence of power is the overpowering of itself. This overpowering belongs to and springs from power itself, since power is command and as command it empowers itself to overpower the level of power it has at any time.157

What does the will’s will to go beyond itself consist of? According to Heidegger, it consists of the preservation and increase of power. But this is not to be understood quantitatively: “Quantitative accumulation” indicates “a mere ebullition, eruption, and raging of blind urges and pulsions. Will to power then looks like an ongoing occurrence that rumbles like the inside of a volcano and threatens to erupt.”158 Therefore, the overpowering and the elevation of the will to power can consist only of this will willing itself. Thus, the “more power” that power wills is only the reflection of power in itself that secures for it its powerfulness and power through its self-empowerment: “However, empowering to the excelling of oneself means that empowering brings life to a stand and an autochthony, but to a standing in something that, as excelling, is in motion.”159 In addition, “This enduringness [Beständige] is however turned into a permanence [Ständige], i.e., into that which is [steht] constantly [stets] at one’s disposal, only by its being brought to a stand [Stand] by having set it in place.”160 According to Heidegger, for Nietzsche the overpowering of power and the will consists of the securing and bringing about the enduring, the remaining, the being and existence of the will to power through its willing of itself. Although what is brought to a stand is supposed to be simultaneously becoming and moving as the primal ground of life, “Nietzsche wants Becoming and what becomes, as the fundamental character of beings as a whole; but he wants what becomes precisely and before all else as what remains, as ‘being’ proper, being in the sense of the Greek thinkers.”161 Putting it this way, Heidegger has no difficulty including Nietzsche in metaphysical thought. Indeed, the enduring that the will to power wants in its overpowering aimed at the preservation of power ties the will to the permanence of every being as becoming and motion. The will thus stands in the service of securing its own enduring as well as that of the being that represents itself in the will.

But Nietzsche’s discussions of the problem of power are as ambiguous as Heidegger’s reading is one-sided. To say the least, he misunderstands the ambiguity of the concept of overpowering that he relies on. Undoubtedly, the striving beyond itself of power as the securing of its own enduring is one aspect of the will to power. As Bataille observed, “Nietzsche demanded of those who uphold the explosive value of tragedy that they become dominating.”162 Yet the definition of becoming master as a reinterpretation already unsettles Heidegger’s quite Hegelian notion of the sublation of power in overpowering. As Nietzsche writes, “All events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.”163 The overpowering of power, its self-empowerment in order to stand in itself, can be understood by Nietzsche also only as the crime of authority. Furthermore, we must note that the interpretation that replaces the superseded level of power does not lead to its sublation on a higher level but to its obliteration.

Certainly, in Nietzsche “at the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings forth fruit,” we find the “sovereign individual.” Yet this individual is completely detached from this process. He thereby gains “his own independent, protracted will,” and “this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures.”164 Although this independence and mastery over himself enable the sovereign individual to gain mastery and control, as a result of his detachment from the process, his elevation above the process that produces him, every exercise of this power is disabled. The sovereign individual, absolutely foreign to humanity, is disempowered by his overpowering: it is beyond its own power; his self-mastery necessarily leads to overpowering, that is, in the broader sense of the word, to a disposal of his mastery. This is why he is a tragic individual:

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men.165

The overpowering of power in the individual who obtained mastery is consequently also an act of “unselfing,”166 but not in the ascetic sense that Nietzsche exposed as the complacent self-sacrifice based on ressentiment against life and the sovereign individual.

The grand style of the sovereign individual consists of “being master of one’s good and bad fortune alike,”167 while the disempowerment consists of the dissipation of power and command. Thus spoke Zarathustra of self-overcoming: “An experiment and hazard appeared to me to be in all commanding; and whenever the living commands, it hazards itself. Indeed, even when it commands itself, it must still pay for its commanding. It must become the judge, the avenger, and the victim of its own law.”168

The movements of overpowering and disempowering and of the squandering of mastery in sovereignty outlined here apply to the self-emancipating slave as well as to the text tampering with logos, into which the emancipation of the slave inscribes itself. Therefore, it appears that in our interpretation we have done justice to the passage by Bataille that we quoted at the beginning of this chapter, except for a residue, however, that we ignored and thus apparently fell into its trap as a real nuisance and scandal. This nuisance can be no other than that of remorseless patricide. In what has so far been written here in relation to this patricide, the loss of the obtained mastery in sovereignty, and the “unwillingness” to occupy the father’s position, certain words stood out: sacrifice, atonement, expiation, words that unavoidably make us think of guilt, the guilt that underlies penitence and without which self-sacrifice appears to be unimaginable.

Let us therefore turn to the theory that clearly highlighted the connection between guilt and the crime against the father, that is, the Freudian hypothesis of the murder of the primal father by his sons. Without being able to present this “hypothesis, which may seem fantastic” in its full complexity, we still want to single out certain aspects that should be of immediate interest for us.169

According to the Freudian hypothesis, the excluded sons kill the primal father who maintains an exclusive possession of women so that they can enjoy the mothers and the sisters. This undertaking leads to the institution of the incest taboo by the sons in order to prevent the demise of the new form of organization that emerged from their alliance. With this prohibition, however, they sacrifice the very reason that led them to kill the father. The institution of the incest taboo and the renunciation of the desired women represent the first victory of the dead father over his sons. This first identification with him—after they have appeased their death wish directed against the despotic father, and after the tender feelings created by the feelings of guilt have gained the upper hand—is soon followed by another. Regretting the murder of the primal father, they create a “surrogate father,” the totem animal, in order “to allay their burning sense of guilt, to bring about a kind of reconciliation with the father.”170 Henceforth, in the form of his surrogate, the father is spared. This prohibition is allowed to be transgressed only in the feasts of remembrance so that the original identification with the father can be renewed in the common meal, the prototype of the new organization of the sons.

The Freudian hypothesis is essentially based on the assumption of ambivalent feelings toward the father:

They hated the father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual drives; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. It did so in the form of remorse. A sense of guilt made its appearance, which in this instance coincided with the remorse felt by the whole group. The dead father became stronger than the living one had been.171

With the prohibition of incest and the institution of a father-surrogate, they attempt to preempt the repetition of the fate of the father.172 At the same time, however, this brings into being a “revived paternal authority”:

There was one factor in the state of affairs produced by the elimination of the father which was bound in the course of time to cause an enormous increase in the longing felt for him. . . . Thus after a long lapse of time their bitterness against their father, which had driven them to their deed, grew less, and their longing for him increased; and it became possible for an ideal to emerge which embodied the unlimited power of the primal father against whom they had once fought as well as their readiness to submit to him.173

Hereafter the surrogates of the murdered father assume the shapes of god, king, state, and the great leader. As Freud points out, “The revenge taken by the deposed and restored father was [thus] a harsh one: the dominance of authority was at its climax.”174 The institution of these surrogates rapidly gaining in authority in fact stood in the service of the sons “in order to unburden themselves still further of their sense of guilt.”175 Indeed, they represented a form of self-punishment or castration by the father whose authority was challenged. As Freud explains, “Every punishment is ultimately castration and, as such, a fulfilment of the old passive attitude towards the father.”176

The Bataillean son, by contrast, is different from the sons in Freud’s theory of the primal father because he does not nourish any tender feelings whatsoever toward the father. From the Freudian perspective, therefore, he would be the kind of son who completely repressed his love for the father in order to be able to kill him, but perhaps also the kind of son who wants to repeat the primal murder at the end of the process since the rule of the father-surrogate has become unbearable in a way similar to that of the archaic situation. The repetition of the murder is in fact a decisive feature of the father’s murder.

If we retain the thesis of the original ambivalence toward the father, we must also accept that the tender emotions had to be repressed. But the question emerges: Why is the son supposed to love the father at all?

Let us examine what Freud says about the sons’ feelings toward the primal father: “The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers.”177 It is not obvious why the sons are supposed to love this father, especially since he also repudiated them in his intolerant exclusive rule. An envied model by all means since he controls the desired women, but why should this father then become an object of tender feelings?

Let us first recall that there is no reason why a child should love his younger siblings. Speaking of the relation of children to their brothers and sisters, Freud remarks, “I do not know why we presuppose that that relation must be a loving one.”178 Just like the siblings, the father is a rival standing in the son’s way. There is no respect for him at first. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes the following:

The obscure information which is brought to us by mythology and legend from the primeval ages of human ages of human society gives an unpleasing picture of the father’s despotic power and of the ruthlessness with which he made use of it. Kronos devoured his children, just as the wild boar devours the sow’s litter; while Zeus emasculated his father and made himself ruler in his place. The more restricted was the rule of the father in the ancient family, the more must the son, as his destined successor, have found himself in the position of an enemy, and the more impatient must he have been to become ruler himself through his father’s death. Even in our middle-class families fathers are as a rule inclined to refuse their sons independence and the means necessary to secure it and thus to foster the growth of the germ of hostility which is inherent in their relation.179

In prehistoric times, nothing indicates the presence of the son’s tender feelings for the father. The natural seed of hostility that Freud speaks about lies in the fact that the son’s first sexual feelings are directed at the mother; therefore, the father is the first object of hate as a rival. Thus, the presumed ambivalence in the son’s emotions appears to be divided between the father and the mother in such a way that the mother is exclusively an object of love while the father is exclusively an object of hate. As far as the father is concerned, however, it appears that “emotional ambivalence in the proper sense of the term—that is, the simultaneous existence of love and hate towards the same object” is not given from the beginning.180 In Totem and Taboo, Freud writes:

We know nothing of the origin of this ambivalence. One possible assumption is that it is a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life. But it seems to me quite worth considering another possibility, namely that originally it formed no part of our emotional life but was acquired by the human race in connection with their father-complex, precisely where the psycho-analytic examination of modern individuals still finds it revealed at its strongest.181

Another question that Freud hesitates to answer in an unequivocal manner is that of matriarchy and the great mother-goddesses. He tends to displace matriarchy into a time in which the sons had already killed the father but none of them was strong enough to assume his original role. Matriarchy, therefore, appears as a precursor to the patriarchal order. But we read the following about the mother-goddesses: “I cannot suggest at what point in this process of development a place is to be found for the great mother-goddesses, who may perhaps in general have preceded the father-gods.”182 If the time of the mother-goddesses coincides with the time of matriarchy, they should follow the murder of the primal father but precede the father-gods who consolidate the patriarchal order as father surrogates. But what if the primal mother preceded the primal father? Let us recall that the child’s primary identification is with the mother (with the phallic mother, on the one hand, because the child is the phallus for the mother; on the other, because originally the father and the mother are not separated by the child). Freud, however, writes that “an individual’s first and most important identification” is that “‘with the parents’; for before a child has arrived at definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes, the lack of a penis, it does not distinguish in value between its father and its mother.”183 This primary identification, however, is also the phase of the disavowal of the difference (inside and outside are not yet distinguished) that could disturb the identity of the mother (parents) and the child. Rosolato remarks:

The relation of primary identification with the mother establishes itself in the form of an identity as if every felt or perceived difference involved a correction by identification: the “self” of the child, perturbed by difference, resolves itself in an other “self” that surpasses this difference, averting it but all the while retaining an unknown trace of it. Everything happens as if the identity of satisfaction initiated the identity of being.184

In order for the primary identification to be maintained, the child must separate the negative aspects of the mother (when she does not comply with the child’s desire) from her. This negative side is constituted by that which is foreign in relation to the identity of the mother and the child and in accordance with the primal feeling of hatred; as Freud says, it is expelled and projected outward.185 The splitting up of the mother in whom the good parents were blurred into the clearly distinguished parents, before any knowledge of sexual difference, leads to the creation of the father’s place as that of everything foreign and external. Thereby what is good can still be projected onto the mother, while everything that is perceived to be evil in the mother is displaced onto the outside as the place of the hated father.

Originally, the object of emotional ambivalence is the phallic mother. Due to the creation of two places (an inside and an outside), the feeling of ambivalence also becomes split in such a way that a one-sided attribution of love and hate to these two places becomes possible. This configuration remains in place until the phallic phase. A secondary identification with the father (which will be discussed in more detail), a result of the Oedipal triangle and the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, is required to produce the first feelings of love toward the father. Only then do both parents become objects of emotional ambivalence. Before the time of the Oedipal situation, in which the father is experienced exclusively as a rival and a stranger, tender feelings toward him are unimaginable. It is also obvious that the death wish that accompanies the thoughts of the father up to that point is not limited by guilt.

Yet neither the murder of the primal father by the sons nor the death wish directed at the father by the child can bring them into the possession of the mother. Just as the sons were not strong enough, the inadequacy of the child’s development stands in his way, and it requires instinctual renunciations (what Freud called Triebverzicht). Whatever the reason for this renunciation of the drive might be, it represents a passively suffered narcissistic wound and castration. The castrated son’s secondary identification with the castrating father serves the disavowal of castration, inasmuch as in contrast to the mother the father does possess the phallus (which also amounts to disavowal of the father’s castration). The secondary identification with the father and the tender devotion to him produced by the identification extinguish the death wish that accompanied his thought up to that point. At the same time, these tender feelings also necessarily bring into play feelings of guilt about the original hatred.

With regard to the feelings of ambivalence, this means that although it is original, in the beginning it only has the mother (or the phallic mother) for an object from whom, in order to be able to keep possessing her untouched (in an idealized form), a part has to be split off, which becomes the object of hatred, the father. The substitution of father surrogates, which follows the period of the death wish directed against him and the sons’ ever-intensifying longing for him, can thus be explained on the basis of this secondary identification that produces the feelings of guilt as well as the disavowal of castration.

The remorseless patricide that Bataille talks about can be illuminated against the background of these elaborations. If we accept uncritically the Freudian theory of stages, we could locate this remorseless patricide in the time that stretches from the oral to the Oedipal phase, since this period still does not know the secondary identification that will produce with an iron necessity guilt, remorse, and father-surrogates in order to disavow the act. This patricide is, in a certain sense, only punctual, since remorselessness, just like the diabolical enjoyment of the act, would apply only to the moment of the murder. The punctuality, the ephemeral duration of the instant, would coincide with what we have said about the sovereign act. Yet this determination is not fully sufficient to describe the latter. Equally necessary is the squandering away of the mastery obtained by the father’s murder. If we take into consideration what we have said so far, what does the casting down of the thus gained mastery consist of?

If we accept that the son’s tender relation to the father first emerges with the secondary identification in order to undo (or assimilate) the effects of castration through the disavowal of the death wish against the father and in order to be elevated into the phallic genealogy through the reacquisition of the phallus, then we must also assume that in the case of the Bataillean phantasm the son fully accepts the death wish against the father as well as his own castration. As a result, he cannot take over the up-to-that-point uncastrated father’s position. A further consequence of this acceptance is that here no guilt or remorse develops that would lead to the proliferation of father-surrogates.

But what does it mean to accept castration? Is such acceptance only a sign of interiorized remorse and guilt that the individual must exert upon himself in accordance with talion law as a retaliation for the deed that he had committed? “The law of talion, which is so deeply rooted in human feelings, lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by the sacrifice of another life: self-sacrifice points back to blood-guilt.”186 This expiation through self-sacrifice and self-castration is supposed to lead to an “atonement with God the Father,” the father who was the object of the crime, in order to secure the phallic genealogy. But we have already seen that this is impossible for Bataille.

Therefore, we should try to think in terms of another concept of guilt that is not preceded by remorse over the accomplished act. In order to do this, we will return to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. There Nietzsche asks the following question: “But how did that other ‘somber thing,’ the consciousness of guilt, the ‘bad conscience,’ come into the world?”187 Nietzsche tries to counteract the “moralization of the concepts guilt and duty, their being pushed back into the bad conscience” and to define them as the late creations of the “intermediate age” of humanity.188 This is the time of the “animal-man made inward and scared back into himself” who invented bad conscience “after the more natural vent for his desire to hurt had been blocked.” This man is “the creature imprisoned in the ‘state’ so as to be tamed,” who lightens his subjugation by developing “guilt before God.”189 In Nietzsche’s words,

He apprehends in “God” the ultimate antithesis of his own ineluctable animal instincts; he reinterprets these animal instincts themselves as a form of guilt before God (as hostility, rebellion, insurrection against the “Lord,” the “father,” the primal ancestor and origin of the world); he stretches himself upon the contradiction “God” and “Devil”; he ejects from himself all his denial of himself, of his nature, naturalness, and actuality, in the form of an affirmation, as something existent, corporeal, real, as God, as the holiness of God, as God the Judge, as God the Hangman, as the beyond, as eternity, as torment without end, as hell, as the immeasurability of punishment and guilt.190

And Nietzsche continues with the following:

[It is] the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for; his will to think himself punished without any possibility of the punishment becoming equal to the guilt; his will to infect and poison the fundamental ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt so as to cut off once and for all his own exit from this labyrinth of “fixed ideas”; his will to erect an ideal—that of the “Holy God”—and in the face of it to feel the palpable certainty of his own absolute unworthiness.191

Denouncing the moralization of the concept of guilt as a late creation, at the same time Nietzsche also attacks the concept of utility to which punishment is supposed to bear witness. He writes: “Punishment is supposed to possess the value of awakening the feeling of guilt in the guilty person; one seeks in it the actual instrumentum of the psychical reaction called ‘bad conscience,’ ‘sting of conscience.’” As Nietzsche points out, the utility of punishment and guilt is a subterfuge by the rulers (the priests, for example) to secure their rule. Indeed, the moral conception of punishment and guilt is not conceivable without presupposing the existence of God the father or the master as well as the willing or compelled subjugation of man by these entities. According to Nietzsche, the origin of the concept of guilt is essentially alien to the moral explication of guilt that we have just rehearsed. He asks: “Have these genealogists of morals had even the remotest suspicion that, for example, the major moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its origin in the very material concept Schulden [debts]?”192 Those who transpose the moral concept of guilt into the origins of morality are “guilty of a crude misunderstanding of the psychology of more primate mankind.”193

Throughout the greater part of human history punishment was not imposed because one held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, thus not on the presupposition that only the guilty one should be punished: rather, as parents still punish their children, from anger at some harm of injury, vented on the one who caused it—but this anger is held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit.194

The idea of an “equivalence between injury and pain” is rooted in the “contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the idea of ‘legal subjects’ and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade, and traffic.”195

The punishment that in this context functions as the compensation for an injury is precisely what held back the development of the moral concept of the feeling of guilt: “If we consider those millennia before the history of man, we may unhesitatingly assert that it was precisely through punishment that the development of the feeling of guilt was most powerfully hindered.”196 In this age, the punished person was in no way considered to be “guilty” but rather “an instigator of harm” like “an irresponsible piece of fate.” The motivation behind the act is fate, and fate is also the act of compensation that strikes the instigator of harm: “And the person upon whom punishment subsequently descended, again like a piece of fate, suffered no ‘inward pain’ other than that induced by the sudden appearance of something unforeseen, a dreadful natural event, a plunging, crushing rock that one cannot fight.”197 Now, what is significant for us is that, according to Nietzsche, “the relationship between the present generation and its ancestors” functions in a similar way in the prehistory of humanity:

Within the original tribal community . . . the living generation always recognized a juridical duty toward earlier generations, and especially toward the earliest. . . . The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists—and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.198

Inasmuch as this debt can never be paid off in a satisfactory manner, inasmuch as the accorded advantages are immeasurable, the debt grows immeasurably with the suspicion of the insufficiency of repayments:

The fear of the ancestor and his power, the consciousness of indebtedness to him, increases, according to this kind of logic, in exactly the same measure as the power of the tribe itself increases, as the tribe itself grows ever more victorious, independent, honored, and feared. . . . If one imagines this rude kind of logic carried to its end, then the ancestors of the most powerful tribes are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god.199

With this god, then, the moral feeling of guilt and bad conscience makes its beginning.

The Nietzschean genealogy of the interiorized feeling of guilt that shares so many similarities with Freud’s account, nevertheless, also displays decisive differences from it. By designating the relationship of exchange as the foundation from which punishment emerges as an equivalent for a suffered injury, Nietzsche appears to have grasped only the kind of situation that Freud described through the organization of the sons who killed the father and in which the prohibition of incest laid down the foundations of exchange. But in the material sense that Nietzsche based it on, we must understand guilt as a payment or compensation directed at the dead ancestors. Indeed, it seems to us that the Nietzschean contract theory is also based on a patricide: this alone can explain the iron logic by which the power of the father is increased into infinity.

What is decisive, however, is that Nietzsche does not need the moral concept of guilt in order to produce this movement. In accordance with the law of symmetry, equation, and equivalence, which is not to be confused with the law of talion, one generation responds to the sacrifice (the death) of the previous generation with a counteraction that is, then, trumped by the dead generation through the granting of a new advantage, similar to the transactions in a potlatch ceremony. Every increase that arises from a sacrifice offered to the ancestors will add to their power so that it increases to the same degree that the present generation becomes stronger. Even for Nietzsche, the father is all the stronger when he is dead, and he grants to his sons advantages inasmuch as he accepts his own death like a sacrifice, thereby making the genealogy of his lineage possible.

In comparison with Freud, however, the movement progresses in Nietzsche in a reversed sense: To the degree that the sons become stronger, their debt to the dead father also increases. At the peak of their power, they face a monstrously immense father figure that only then leads them into a guilty subjugation in the moral sense to the immeasurable deity. Here no longing whatsoever for the father occurs, which based on the feelings of guilt and remorse of a son who disavows his castration brings about absolute authority of the father, but the latter’s possession of a power that has become unbearable. In other words, it is the burden produced by the possession of the phallus. Perhaps we could understand this as a ruse of the dead father that opposes yet also complements the Freudian idea. Instead of castrating the son so that the phallus can be bestowed upon him in secondary identification, in Nietzsche the primal father presents the son with the phallus from the very beginning through the acceptance of his own death, so at the peak of his power the son finds himself in a state of dependency since he has to repay this gift. This movement, just as in Freud, could then also be interpreted as the revenge of the murdered father.

In sum, debt in the material sense, which is not based on bad conscience or remorse, increases the power of the phallus and mastery with an iron necessity in such a way that it is projected back onto the beginning of the lineage. As a result, the moral guilt of the castrated son who has lost his independence emerges, and he tries once again to regain possession of the lost phallus through an identification with God the father. Our recourse to Nietzsche, therefore, has revealed merely yet another ruse by the father, who through his own self-sacrifice knows how to awaken his son’s remorse, and to be called back to life in order to prove his power over his lineage. If the crime, the murder of the father, is also an unaccountable act, like an act of fate suffered by the sons, just like its punishment, which represents something unpredictable, the mythological “logic” that governs the crime in question nevertheless leads to a situation that is not different from that which is the outcome of a responsible act and presupposes that the subject could have acted differently. In whatever way we look at the concept of guilt, whether in a material or moral sense, the production of guilt shows itself without exception to be a ruse of the dead father to secure his dominion over his line of succession.

Thus, we need to find a way out of this dilemma if we want to be able to think the Bataillean remorseless patricide. We need to examine whether it would be possible to wrest the Nietzschean concept of guilt from its opposition to morality so that it could be thought as a condition of possibility for the patricide in question beyond this opposition.

Nietzsche emphasizes that with the death of God and the demise of the faith in a Judeo-Christian God, the basis of the moral feeling of guilt also declines: “Indeed, the prospect cannot be dismissed that the complete and definitive victory of atheism might free mankind of this whole feeling of guilty indebtedness [Schuld] toward its origin, its causa prima. Atheism and a kind of second innocence [Unschuld] belong together.”200 Does this victory over guilty indebtedness toward the origin apply also to the ancestors or only to the Judeo-Christian God? It is clear that atheism does away with the guilty debt toward the master-God projected back into the origin as causa prima. The state of second innocence would then coincide with the innocence of the times when the equivalence between act and guilt was defined by the relation of exchange and when punishment descended upon the individual as an unaccountable act. Nietzsche writes the following about the Greeks, whom he considered to have lived in such a state of innocence: “In this way the gods served in those days to justify man to a certain extent even in his wickedness; they served as the originators of evil—in those days they took upon themselves, not the punishment but, what is nobler, the guilt.”201 In a sense, the time of innocence is suspended between two patricides: on the one hand, between the murder of the father that in Nietzsche we had to locate before the order of exchange and the Freudian murder of the father that gave rise to the society of sons; and, on the other hand, a still pending but implicitly already committed patricide in the present. But shouldn’t we instead try to conceive the time of innocence as situated between the different aspects of the first patricide developed by Nietzsche and in turn by Freud? As we have seen, this patricide is characterized by a double assumption by the father of his death and a double ruse, which produces two different kinds of guilt: the debt immanent in the exchange relation, and the guilt that corresponds to remorse. Could the time of innocence lie between both?

Now, since our primary objective is to conceptualize this remorseless patricide, we must redefine the concept of debt that characterizes the exchange relation (which is free of any implications of remorse) and that, like the Freudian concept of guilt, necessarily leads to the omnipotence of the father at the end of the process, in such a way that it interrupts for a moment the genealogy, mastery, and function of the phallus.

The act, the crime against the father, must also be deprived for an instant of its nature as a moment (in the Hegelian sense). Generally, an act like this is called a sin. But, as Nietzsche writes, “it would be terrible if we still believed in sin.”202 Another concept of a sinful act must be opposed to sin in the Judeo-Christian sense. For Nietzsche, this is the active sin of Hellenism that defines the state of innocence:

The best and highest possession mankind can acquire is obtained by sacrilege and must be paid for with consequences that involve the whole flood of suffering and sorrows with which the offended divinities have to afflict the nobly aspiring race of men. This is a harsh idea which, by the dignity it confers on sacrilege, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the fall in which curiosity, mendacious deception, susceptibility to seduction, lust—in short, a series of pre-eminently feminine affects—was considered the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan notion is the sublime view of active sin as the characteristically Promethean virtue. With that, the ethical basis for pessimistic tragedy has been found: the justification of human evil, meaning both human guilt and the human suffering it entails.203

Active sin, the sacrilegious attack on authority, is identical with the tragic plot following on the heels of tragic guilt. Tragic action in the Bataillean sense is an assault on the power of the mythical father, the usurpation of his place that plunges the son along with the father into the abyss.204 The dissipation of mastery immanent in tragic action carried out by the son who overthrows the father leads to a momentary breakup of the interconnection of guilt. In this rupture something becomes visible for a fleeting instant into which the movement of genealogy inscribes itself. What flashes up for a moment is the figure of fatality, necessity, and repetition. Indeed, the phallic genealogy and its authority are effective only as a result of an always repeated overthrow. However, it cannot completely assimilate into itself this overthrow of which it cunningly makes use for its own purposes, since it implies an absolute challenge to authority as such, that is, not only its slavish but its absolute negation.

Remorseless patricide is inscribed in the movement of repetition. It is the repetition of this repetition, and while the phallic principle is maintained by it, it cannot control it. Yet, as Nietzsche intimates, such repetition is also beyond guilt. He writes: “It would be terrible if we still believed in sin: whatever we will do, in countless repetitions, is innocent [unschuldig]. If the thought of the eternal return of all things does not overwhelm you, it does not make you guilty: but there is no merit in it either, if it does.”205 In-nocence as Un-Schuld is the nondialectical middle between the Nietzschean and Freudian concept of guilt. It does not refer to some romantic naïveté but to a tragic rupture. It is the negation of guilt only in the sense that it is the guiltless acceptance of the necessity of repetition.

A murder considered to be guiltless in the traditional sense (which would not force the son to squander his newly acquired position) would be directed at a father who refuses to accept his death in order to make the genealogy possible. It would be the murder of a father who does not employ any ruses. The slaying of a father who absolutely opposes his own death would also prevent the repetition of this act. Furthermore, such a father would not need to die or accept his own death, since as an uncrafty father he would not be subject to the power of repetition made possible by this ruse, that is, by its crafty employment to become father. Yet, without the craft of cunning, without being inscribed in the movement of repetition, the father is not a father. This craftiness, however, is also his weakness: it reveals his dependence on the structure of repetition that he can exploit only with the intention of asserting (Behauptung) himself against the son. Although the father also accepts his death, unlike the son who decapitates him and deprives himself of the power of his own mastery, he is, however, not sovereign since with this acceptance the father merely intends to perpetuate his own power.

The repetition of the act against the murdered father is necessary not only because the son develops a longing for the lost father out of guilt and remorse and yearns for father surrogates, but also because, on the one hand, with the overthrow of the father only one father is disempowered (the chain of father surrogates is endless), and on the other, and this is even more decisive, this innocent (un-schuldige) act is the repetition of repetition and can be thought only as such.

Let us also point out that the Bataillean remorseless patricide does not in any way imply the disavowal of the Oedipal situation; rather, it presupposes it. Inasmuch as secondary identification represents the overcoming and sublation of the Oedipal situation, Bataille opens up a space within this triangle through the squandering of the paternal function and the function of mastery that inscribes the scene of the production of meaning (the continuation of authority) into this unmasterable repetition. In the broken-up triangle, there exists not only in-nocence (Un-Schuld) but also non-sense (Un-Sinn).

It is a non-sense that for a short moment—but for a sovereign instant—postpones and defers the process of becoming-father. The moment of non-sense that flashes up in the open split of the triangle is at the same time also the phantasm perceived through the window that encircles the window and the triangle.

For “killing for pleasure” would only be a literary provocation, and the most inadmissible expression of hypocrisy, if consciousness were not driven by it to a point of extreme lucidity. The awareness of the fact that the pleasure of killing is the truth, charged with horror, for one who does not kill, can remain neither obscure nor tranquil, and it forces life into an unlikely, frozen world, where it tears itself apart.206

The Bataillean patricide is not an anti-Oedipus.

6.

If the series of father surrogates and its determinate postponement is the result of the feelings of guilt and remorse, the chain of substitutions must necessarily lead back to its origins in a circular fashion. It must recover this origin in the Freudian sense, or using Nietzschean language, it must raise it to a higher power. We have seen that the structure of the phantasmatic chain of images may also be circular even if only from a specific perspective. Now, the phantasmatic images that are altogether transgressive father imagoes also form a circle—a circle that almost resembles the one initiated by the murder of the primal father and in the center of which the DEAD father emerges, around whom the substitutes revolve until they reinstate his power, that is, until the circle concentrates itself in the full center of authority—yet the center of this circle is dislocated provided that the crafty death of the father is betrayed and the circulating imagoes no longer obey the logic that leads back to the beginning. Therefore, it is an exploded circle that points toward its borders as the uncontrollable element of its movement.

Remorselessness in the form of in-nocence presupposes the phallic circle: the cycle of guilt, revenge, and mastery. Yet this remorselessness is indicative only of the movement of repetition itself, which is usurped by the center, by the father, by the phallus and logos in a restricted economy of utility and preservation of mastery. The barely perceptible difference between in-nocence and guilt, sovereignty and mastery, lies in their respective relationship with repetition. In-nocence and sovereignty reveal repetition in a deathly shape that makes every presence or plenitude of the father forever impossible—a repetition to which he can submit only by way of a ruse if he wants to secure his authority. In-nocence and sovereignty, on the other hand, renounce this ruse and introduce the squandering of mastery and authority. The sacrifice of authority that the son represents as an acephalous figure also implies the renunciation of the ruse of reason. His act cannot but appear to be nonsensical in comparison with that of the crafty father, who accepts his death, and functions as the presupposition of the parousia of meaning.

The act of the son who kills his father without any remorse is repetition in its deathly form. Against the ruse of the father who employs repetition specifically for the purposes of mastery, the son repeats the fatal repetition and drives the purposeful repetition to its abysmal borders. All this is already inscribed in the term “remorseless patricide”: sans remords. The remorseless slaying of the father is a murder that ceaselessly thwarts his play: sans rémora, without delay, without ever allowing the father any respite. At the same time, this murder is also permanent, since it has always already taken place and it keeps occurring again and again. It is a death that cannot be repeated in the sense that repetition is purposeful and useful for mastery, and in the sense that meaningful repetition is always already shattered by its senseless variety. Such a death also inscribes in itself the bite, the revenge, the blood curse, the blood-guilt, which it repels by constantly repeating it. It inscribes it as the morsure du sang or of sens in that senseless repetition is also the “certain” death of meaning and blood, in other words, mort sûre du sang, mort sûre du sens.

The incessantly repeated patricide whose remorselessness culminates in the acceptance of guilt in in-nocence—in the enjoyment of this murder—is the “guarantee” that the son’s act thwarts the advent of meaning in relation to his crime, as well as the constitution of meaning in general that such an advent would make possible.

4

“Hegel against the Immutable Hegel”

The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself.

—G. W. F. Hegel1

Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?

—Friedrich Nietzsche2

My efforts recommence and undo Hegel’s Phenomenology.

—Georges Bataille3

1.

It should be obvious by now that Bataille’s polemic is above all directed against Hegel. From the first essays onward in Documents (1929), Bataille’s literary and essayistic production is a critique of Hegel even where he is not explicitly mentioned.

Undeniably, at first Bataille knew Hegel only from secondary sources. According to Raymond Queneau, the first encounter with Hegel can be traced to an article by André Breton (in 1923) in which Hegel, who was barely known in France at that time, is mentioned.4 The two books, however, that were the most important for Bataille’s reception of Hegel were Jean Wahl’s La conscience malheureuse dans la philosophie de Hegel (Unhappy Consciousness in Hegel’s Philosophy, 1929) that he mentions in a review of a special issue of Revue philosophique devoted to Hegel, and Émile Meyerson’s Explanation in the Sciences (1922), which is an attempt to rehabilitate the Hegelian philosophy of nature.5 The additional sources of Bataille’s knowledge of Hegel remain more or less uncertain; what is certain, however, is the influence that Koyré’s and later Kojève’s lectures, which he regularly attended, had on Bataille. According to Queneau, at the École pratique des hautes études Bataille followed Koyré’s lectures from November 1932 until the summer of 1934, first on Nicholas of Cusa and then on Hegel’s philosophy of religion in his early writings. From 1934 to 1939, he attended Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.

No matter how indirect Bataille’s knowledge of Hegelian texts might have been, especially as it was mediated by Kojève’s teachings, this fact did not prevent Bataille from criticizing Hegel in a fundamental way. As Derrida remarks, “In his interminable explication with Hegel, Bataille doubtless had only a restricted and indirect access to the texts themselves. This did not prevent him from bringing his reading and his question to bear on the crucial point of the decision.”6 Therefore, we will try to work out in more detail Bataille’s relation to Hegel.

The first essays in Documents display an apparently uncompromising anti-Hegelianism primarily directed against Hegelian panlogism, against the omnipotence of a reductive system. In the context of these attacks, and to a certain degree parallel with them, Bataille criticizes the monument and the architectonics that represent for him the kind of rigid authority that curbs every rebellious impulse of the particular. He writes: “Thus great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements.”7 We have already explained that the obelisk and the pyramid are monuments of this nature, in which time stands still and the presence of authority is instituted on earth, and which serve to “dominate human agitation, just as the immobile prism reflects every one of the things that surrounds it.”8 Monolithic architecture represents the indomitable center around which human dust circulates peripherally.9 A centripetal force issuing from the center keeps the periphery in orbit and organizes all of its elements in a balanced system. This center that organizes social life in public spaces in the form of monuments (like the obelisk) has an equivalent in the philosophical system: God or the Idea. The Idea as the product of an abstraction of the concrete definitions of an object possesses the kind of uniformity and balance that characterizes geometrical figures.10 The Ideas around which systems are organized must exclude (or disavow) everything that does not conform to such geometrical uniformity. Furthermore, in order to secure their continued existence, they must try to assimilate everything that can be found on the periphery:

All that which condenses and quickens on our Earth is thus marked by avidity. Not only is each complex particle avid of infinitely available solar energy or of remaining free earthly energy, but of all the accumulated energy in the other particles. Thus, in the absence of radiation, in the cold, Earth’s surface is abandoned to a “movement of the whole” which seems a movement of general consumption, and whose salient form is life.11

The centripetal movement that issues forth from the Idea as the center of plenitude, through which everything is included and devoured by the system, leads to the homogeneity of the system that does not know an outside or anything heterogeneous to itself: “And the idea has over man the same degrading power that a harness has over a horse; I can snort and gasp: I go, no less, right and left, my head bridled and pulled by the idea that brutalizes all men and causes them to be docile—the idea in the form of, among other things, a piece of paper adorned with the arms of the State.”12

The constraint of the system, which is the result of an imperial Idea installed in the center, makes every intellectual construction into a prison. Bataille submits: “The great constructions of the intellect are, finally, prisons.”13 Their guardians are the philosophers, the masters of ceremonies of the abstract universe, who determine how something is supposed to behave under all circumstances. But the master of ceremonies par excellence is Hegel. In the essay “The Obelisk,” in the section entitled “Hegel against the Immutable Hegel,” we read the following about Hegel himself, inasmuch as history has already come to an end for him: “Even Hegel describing the movement of Spirit as if it excluded all possible rest made it end, however, at HIMSELF as if he were its necessary conclusion. Thus he gave the movement of time the centripetal structure that characterizes sovereignty, Being, or God.”14 The implication here is that Hegel’s philosophy as a philosophical system, in which Spirit is elevated from a simple should-be to being the Idea, is a system of mastery that only admits a slavish negativity in the service of the constitution of the becoming of meaning. Bataille, therefore, writes that “the Hegelian doctrine is above all an extraordinary and very perfect system of reduction.”15 He opposes every systematizing force, but especially Hegel’s apparently complete system, with “the non serviam that the human brute opposes to the idea.”¹⁶

What these systems are incapable of assimilating due to their monolithic architecture, they reduce or subjugate; and what they must overthrow or repress to preserve their homogeneity are, for example, “psychological processes distinctly at odds with social stability.”17 We have already mentioned that Bataille opposed the particular to the universal as something irreducible. The particular, in the Bataillean definition of the word, does not yield to the “intellectual voracity to which we owe both Thomist thought and present-day science.”18 The particular opposes the system through its disproportion and improbability. Nevertheless, as Bataille admits, a system like Hegel’s is not so naïve as to have overlooked this eventuality: “This last disproportion has already found some expression in the abstract. It is understood that a presence as irreducible as that of the self has no place in an intelligible universe, and that, conversely, this external universe has no place within my self except through the aid of metaphor.”19 But what does the abstract expression of the disproportionality between the universe and the particular self mean? For Hegel, the abstract self, and the abstract in general, represents something isolated that has been torn out of its context. For Bataille, however, who plays off precisely the isolated aspect against the unity of opposites, the abstract represents a form with which the homogenizing system tries to think the inassimilable. The abstract is the form of expression of the system in which the unobjectifiable can be objectified. For example, nothingness, the infinite, and the absolute are expelled from the system as “total waste,” even though they are attempts to appropriate the inappropriable. The form of abstraction—in which all this takes place and that is at the same time incongruent with the system, so it is expelled—produces the compulsion to which philosophy and science must yield, the compulsion to always begin again in order to cope with the unobjectifiable that cannot be homogenized, even though this movement keeps producing abstractions. However, inasmuch as this inassimilable element in philosophy necessarily carries as an abstraction the mark of totality and totalization (in the form of nothingness, the infinite, and the absolute), it should not be confused with that which its abstract and metaphorical expression actually represents.20

As a result, Bataille tries to provide a concrete definition of the irreducible to the extent that he projects the particular, above all in the form of the self, into the system. Referring to a nineteenth-century photograph of a wedding party, Bataille writes the following in “Human Face”:

But we attribute greater importance to the concrete expression of this absence of relation. If, indeed, we consider a character chosen at random from the ghosts here presented, then its apparition during the discontinuous series expressed by the notion of the scientific universe (or even, more simply put, at a given point of the infinite space and time of common sense) remains perfectly shocking to the mind; it is as shocking as the appearance of the self within the metaphysical whole, or, to return to the concrete, as that of a fly on an orator’s nose.21

But Bataille’s intention is not to play off this abstract figure, the moment of the self in Hegel’s philosophy, against the system in an immediate fashion. Determined in abstract fashion, the heterogeneous element (which can, thus, enter into the homogenizing system under this quality, although only to be immediately eliminated again) remains in solidarity with the system. Rather, Bataille’s concern is the fly as the concrete shape of the “irreality” of the self that is supposed to be included in philosophy. This self is unreal because, according to Bataille, the real represents an “association” that philosophical systems confer on their objects as an attribute. This fly, by the way, that provided the occasion for André Breton to fiercely attack Bataille in the “Second Surrealist Manifesto” (which makes it clear that Bataille’s disagreement with Hegel is also aimed at Breton’s panlogicist, mystifying use of Hegel), that sits on the nose of the orator, who is no other person than Hegel, represents the disturbing element that keeps returning with inexorable obstinacy even if it is brushed away by the hand of the orator.22

If we remain on the level of the system, if we yield to the law of discourse, and if we subjugate ourselves to the clearly distinguished, hierarchically ordered levels of reflection, then all contradictions are dissolved, liquefied, and liquidated:

The concrete forms of these disproportions can never be overstressed. It is all too easy to reduce the abstract antinomy of the self and the nonself, the Hegelian dialectic having been expressly conceived for this sort of sleight of hand. It is time that we take note that rebellion at its most open [which is a reference to Dadaism] has been subjected to propositions as superficial as that which claims the absence of relation to be another form of relation. This paradox, borrowed from Hegel, was aimed at making nature enter into the order of the rational; if every contradictory appearance were given as logically deducible, then reason would, by and large, have nothing shocking to conceive. Disproportions would be merely the expression of a logical being which proceeds, in its unfolding, by contradiction.23

Consequently, “the savage opposition to all system” led Bataille to rely on the concept of improbability borrowed from modern science in order to be able to deepen, against Hegel, the lack of a relation between two objects in such a way that the dissolution or liquidation of the two poles becomes impossible.24 The logical contradiction in the Hegelian dialectic implies a mutual reflection of the opposites in each other so that, for example, the Fichtean contradiction of the self and the nonself necessarily contains in itself its reconciliation. Improbability and disproportionality, on the other hand, mark the absence of every relation between irreconcilable contradictions:

The notion of improbability is irreducibly opposed to that of logical contradiction. It is impossible to reduce the appearance of the fly on the orator’s nose to the supposed contradiction between the self and the metaphysical whole (for Hegel this fortuitous appearance was simply to be classed as an “imperfection of nature”). If, however, we attribute general value to the undemonstrable character of the universe of science, we may proceed to an operation contrary to that of Hegel and reduce the appearance of the self to that of the fly.25

No matter how arbitrary it may appear, we will have to explain more precisely this approach, “which may pass for a merely logical trivialization of its converse operation.”26 Let us first recall one more time that Bataille does not stop at the opposition between the irreducible particular and the universal. This opposition represents merely one step in the polemic against Hegel. There is absolutely no glorification of the individual or the self here in the sense of a full identity. If we contrast Bataille’s approach with Hegel’s discourse, it becomes obvious why Bataille does not stop at the simple disproportionality of irreducible opposites. The self as an abstract expression of something heterogeneous is, as the homogenizing form of its assimilation by the system, a moment of this system. Yet, as Bataille also notes, “Emerging in universal play as unforeseeable chance, with extreme dread imperatively becoming the demand for universality, carried away to vertigo by the movement that composes it, the ipse being that presents itself as a universal is only a challenge to the diffuse immensity that escapes its precarious violence, the tragic negation of all that is not its own bewildered phantom’s chance.”27 As it becomes clear here, there is no doubt that the “production” of the heterogeneous, of something irreducible that is not absorbed by the system through its abstract form of expression (a production that at the same time amounts to the loss of the heterogeneous, since only a system can capture and fix it), takes place by way of and through the Hegelian system. What for Hegel represents only a moment of the system as an abstract self is initially privileged by Bataille on the basis of its universal claim so that, carrying this mark, it sheds its abstract form and appears as the ephemeral existence of an improbability, of a fly, of the irreducibly concrete. Only in this way and by performing a similar movement on the universal (which, upon the “empty abstraction” of its first positing, is thrown back into the empty night of the world, into the fragmented universe that we already discussed) can Bataille avoid the permanent danger of relapsing into either the abstract opposition of Kantian philosophy or into its sublation by the Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, as Bataille remarks, “These two principles dominate the uncertain presence of an ipse being across a distance that never ceases to put everything in question.”28

The respective movements are the following: the insistence on the opposition of the particular against the fullness of an in-itself rounded universe and against absolute knowledge; the usurpation of all reality through the initially abstract form of the self, as a result of which the universe becomes an “empty abstraction”; the inclusion of the self (which has become completely concrete in its isolation) in a fragmented universe, through which the self acquires the irreality of an ephemeral existence, of a fly, as it were, within a shapeless whole. The movement whereby the abstract self raises itself against the closed whole and constitutes itself as a being—incidentally, an arrogated fullness that it cannot sustain even though it longs for it (“‘being’ is, par excellence, that which, desired to the point of dread, cannot be endured”)—must be deconstructed not only because it would thereby become a moment in the Hegelian sense (a larger circle in a smaller one) but also because the instability of the fragmented comprehensive whole into which this movement of usurpation inscribes itself simultaneously undermines the illusion of every being and produces it at the same time (as narcissistic illusion for example): “This extreme instability of connections alone permits one to introduce, as a puerile but convenient illusion, a representation of isolated existence turning in on itself.”²⁹

The instability of the totality of all relations in which the self is involved explodes from within its illusion of being a privileged being. Therefore, it is no longer possible to claim that the greater circle is represented and reflected in the smaller circle of the self, since the fragmented universe can no longer be thought as a circle due to the irruption of the split universe into the illusionary circle of the rebellious self that forever disperses its fullness. What remains after the reciprocal fragmentation of the self and the universe are not realities misconstrued as moments or abstractions that were overlooked by the Hegelian system but unreal elements of the nonplace of infinite particularization into which the play of abstraction and concretion of the Hegelian dialectic inscribes itself as an attempt at mastery.

As we have seen, the particular expels from itself the movement that deludes it with the ephemeral illusion of being and fullness in self-reflection. This, however, is only possible if, posited as something abstract, the particular rests on the misrecognition of that which has always already sundered, namely, the fragmented universe. On the other hand, the particularized whole can reflect itself in itself as a unity only under the condition that it excludes again the particular that resists every movement of unification.

The Hegelian dialectic is a tragic undertaking because it is a perpetual failure. But Bataille’s attempt to reach the beyond of the restricted logic of the dialectic through its actual movements are tragic in a far “higher” sense, since this abysmal beyond can be positively experienced only through failure.

2.

In spite of its implicit consequences, what we have said so far about Bataille’s debate with Hegel could be understood as merely a critique of Hegelian panlogism, the closed nature of his system, and the reductive work of his machines. Even if it were possible to restrict this critique as a radical rejection of Hegel to a particular period of Bataille’s oeuvre (which appears to be rather doubtful), unlike what Queneau suggests, this period could not have come to an end with the essay “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic” (1932) that the two coauthored but instead with “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” (1930).

In this text, Bataille confronts Hegelian Idealism with his own concept of materialism. We have already explained how the term “matter” functions in Bataille’s thought: material and materiate is the absolutely low that rejects every authority and escapes the substitution of the Idea in a simple reversal of the classic opposition of spirit and matter. In order to be able to think the absolutely low, Bataille relied on the world of acephalous gods in Gnosticism. Under the influence of Koyré and Wahl, Bataille considers Gnosticism (as well as German mysticism) to be one of the sources of Hegelian philosophy. He writes: “Now Hegelianism, no less than the classical philosophy of Hegel’s period, apparently proceeded from very ancient metaphysical conceptions, conceptions developed by, among others, the Gnostics, in an epoch when metaphysics could still be associated with the most monstrous dualistic and therefore strangely abased cosmogonies.”30 In Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, Wahl highlighted Jacob Boehme’s powerful influence on Hegel that Bataille also evoked: “That is to say that one finds in the speculations, which are the embryo of the Hegelian system, the gnosis and the theories of Boehme, the Grimmigkeit that Boehme speaks about, the torment of things which is the source of their existence, of their quality (Qual, Quelle, Qualität).”31 This understanding of Gnosticism as a wild materialism, as a doctrine of the absolutely low and evil that is not responsible before any god—provided that it does not represent the outcome of an overthrow by a pure divinity against whom it committed an offense but the overthrow and precipitation that is the very movement of the katabole (itself)—Bataille could also have borrowed from Wahl, although the works of Hans-Christian Puech, Eugen de Faye, and Wilhelm Bousset were more decisive for Bataille’s knowledge of Gnosticism. Indeed, Wahl remarks:

Eckhart’s theology and Boehme’s speculations came to blend with the Lutheran experience of salvation. Far from believing that the philosophy of Hegel is purely a rational philosophy, we would say that it is an effort toward the rationalization of a background that reason cannot attain. Despite what Hegel sometimes says to us, there are no purely transparent symbols of reason. Light shines in the darkness. The symbols exist—of an opaque and resistant existence—upon which lights come to be projected, lights that make the symbols burn with a somber glare.³²

Bataille very clearly perceived the salvation historical aspect of the Gnostic construction and its hierarchical dualism: the archontes, the absolutely low and evil, can remove even God to such a distance that his existence becomes doubtful, yet this existence remains a presupposition of the Gnostic systems. In the Gnostic systems, the archontes are fallen angels who necessarily refer to the principle that overthrew them. The archontes, the entities of evil, do not possess any metaphysical reality—they represent a mistake. The same holds for their sacrilegious act against the one God. Koyré defined the nature of evil in his essay on Sebastian Frank in a manner similar to that of Gnosticism: “Evil is . . . an aborted attempt, ein unnützes Conat, and its foundation is an error but not a doctrinal error, not the error of ignorance. Rather, it is a moral error, an erroneous action of the will.”33 Since Gnosticism itself is a disorganized conglomerate of philosophical and mythological modes of representation and must, furthermore, be understood as the syncratic product of a mixture of overlapping cultures, which produces seemingly arbitrary borrowings from very diverse domains such that it cannot become a unified formation, Bataille is at liberty (a freedom that thus remains tied to the Gnostic mode of representation) to borrow from it whatever he needs for his own definition of the “concept” of matter. In addition, we should also note that “the protean character of this agitation” that characterizes Gnosticism led to contradictory interpretations: “It is true that even with Gnosticism things were not always so clear-cut. The fairly widespread doctrine of emanation (according to which the ignoble creator god, in other words the cursed god—sometimes associated with Jehovah of the Bible—emanated from the Supreme God) responded to a need for a palliative.” And Bataille continues: “It is true that the supreme object of the spiritual activity of the Manicheans, as of the Gnostics, was constantly the good and perfection: that was the way in which their conceptions in themselves had a pessimistic meaning. But it is more or less useless to take these appearances into account, and only the troubled concession to evil can in the end determine the meaning of these aspirations.”34 Thus, Bataille ignores the diverse currents of Gnosticism as well as their equally diverse interpretations. He does not take into consideration the affirmation of a principle opposed to the absolutely low archontes. Rather, he exclusively restricts himself to the idea of the absolute abominable nature of the low, which must remain incommensurable with every reduction to a higher principle. According to Bataille, the dualism that interests him in Gnosticism can no longer be deduced in its lower pole from the higher one. Thus, this dualism is not dichotomous in the strict sense, since what is called the absolutely low, evil, matter, or the archontes in this dichotomy is “something” that must be thought as the beyond of good as well as of evil, which, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, is the result of a fall from the good, and that, therefore, remains dependent on it: “In fact the opposed existence of an excellent divinity, worthy of the absolute confidence of the human spirit, matters little if the baneful and odious divinity of this dualism is under no circumstances reducible to it, without any possibility of hope.”35

If it is in fact true (which, however, is not so sure) that the Gnostic and mystical worldviews represent the embryo of the Hegelian system, then Hegel in fact bore it to the full term. His system should then be understood as the wandering through or as the path of the seed of light from its fallen state in nature through the layered spheres of the archontes all the way to the Absolute Spirit. But this would be a specific form of Gnosis that acted as a model here, which is different from the one to which Bataille resorted. The attempt to rationalize a ground to which reason cannot extend itself is tied to a salvation historical interpretation of Gnosis, in which the negativity of error, of matter, and of the archontes stands in the service of the becoming of the seed of light. This is how Bataille understands the function of negativity in Hegel: “Since the Hegelian doctrine is above all an extraordinary and very perfect system of reduction, it is evident that it is only in a reduced and emasculated state that one finds there the base elements that are essential in Gnosticism. However, in Hegel the role of these elements in thought remains one of destruction, just as destruction is given as necessary for the constitution of thought.”36 Therefore, if for Hegel even the negative incurs this slavish dependence on the Idea that progressively extricates itself from matter; if the contradiction that attests to the labor of the negative is thought teleologically with regard to its sublation (which constitutes what Bataille calls “the providential character of contradiction”), then in Hegel’s philosophy negativity remains a residue that owes its origins to the sublated elements of the Gnostic and mystical traditions. If we take into consideration this tradition despite the subdual that the negative suffers in Hegel, a disturbance in the Hegelian system becomes visible that points beyond the system. We will quote here the final sentences of Wahl’s book about unhappy consciousness:

Without doubt in order to triumph over this Romanticism itself from which he started, Hegel will transform the Begriff into a kind of Aristotelian entelechy, or rather he will try to bring about a synthesis between the mobility of the concept and the immobility of form. However, we can discover some of these primitive elements in his thought that are still alive and, in our opinion, constitute the greatest part of its value, even if they threaten to collapse the framework of the system. For they might perhaps be more valuable than the system itself.37

Here Wahl is alluding above all to the theological writings of the young Hegel in which reconciliation is imagined only as a tragic reconciliation that, in the very least, slows down the development of the system. This is the time when Hegel exposed himself to the power of the negative seemingly without any reservations. The emphasis on the untamable disturbance of the negative (which was supposedly expressed by the Gnostic and mystical systems) as the concealed source of the Hegelian system is important for Bataille because it reveals the ordeal of the system. Even as it is subdued into slavery, negativity keeps working on inexorably in the apparently seamless edifice and becomes the cause of a disturbance that shakes the system in its tectonic structure. Moreover, the negativity mastered through work does not lead to sovereignty but to slavish mastery and to slavish absolute knowledge, whereby, according to Bataille, the attempt at systematization turns out to be a failure with respect to the negativity that needs to be sublated. But what purpose does the system serve? Why did Hegel hold his ground against the power of death? “For him the basis of human specificity is negativity, which is to say, destructive action. Hegel indeed recounted how, for several years, he had been terrified by the truth as his mind portrayed it to him, and how he thought he was going mad. This period of extreme anguish comes before the Phenomenology.”38 Bataille introduces here a number of fundamentally psychological biographical reasons to explain Hegel’s flight from absolute fragmentation into the system:

Hegel, I imagine, touched upon the extreme limit. He was still young and believed himself to be going mad. I even imagine that he worked out the system in order to escape (each type of conquest is, no doubt, the deed of a man fleeing a threat). To conclude, Hegel attains satisfaction, turns his back on the extreme limit. Supplication is dead within him. Whether or not one seeks salvation, in any case, one continues to live, one can’t be sure, one must continue to supplicate. While yet alive, Hegel won salvation, killed supplication, mutilated himself. Of him, only the handle of the shovel remained, a modern man. But before mutilating himself, no doubt he touched upon the extreme limit, knew supplication: his memory brought him back to the perceived abyss, in order to annul it! The system is the annulment.39

The fear of the negative, the incapability of looking death in the eye and tarrying with it, leads to the “reversal” into “being” with the result that consciousness has brought the negative (death) “as it were, behind [its] back.”40 This is the true “magic power” that the system consistently carries into effect. In a review of Wahl’s essay “Hegel et Kierkegaard” (1931), Bataille suggests yet another biographical reason that, this time, concerns Hegel’s position in the university system. Hegel here deems it necessary to eliminate those elements that in the very beginning (that is, at the time of the theological writings of his youth and mythical religiosity) already set the limits of any system from the inside:

The young Hegel was profoundly religious and, as such, an irrationalist: in a manner of speaking, he posed in advance the limits of his later enterprise and signaled his repugnance for a philosophy that would enclose everything in one system. Even in 1810, after the Phenomenology of Spirit, he writes about this subject in a letter in the most ambiguous fashion: “I am,” he writes, “a schoolmaster who has to teach philosophy and maybe this is why I believe philosophy to be susceptible of becoming an edifice as regular and as teachable as geometry.” (OC, II, 299–300)

But these reasons that lead to the formation of the system and the repression of the negative are all external reasons without any immanent necessity. Bataille first became aware of such an immanent necessity to repress the negative for a blueprint of philosophy as a system through Kojève’s teachings. Queneau says of the turn brought about by attending Kojève’s lectures that their significance for Bataille was that they allowed him “to define himself not only in opposition but, in a sense, also in solidarity” with Hegel.41 Indeed, the recourse to the Gnostic and mystical traditions as sources of the Hegelian thought allows Bataille to stigmatize the reductive function of the system as well as to bring to light a crack, a tear, and a restlessness constantly at work (which is not the restlessness of the concept) within the system that, like an immense apotropaion, keeps the power of the negative in check and enlists it in its service. The fact that this crack exists in the Hegelian system, and despite every attempt at the enslavement of the negative, it is the face of death itself (even if only in “the Calvary of absolute Spirit”⁴²) that stares at us from the system that wants to represent life can, at first, be documented through the following two quotations from Bataille: “This period of extreme anguish comes before the Phenomenology but several years after one of his pupils who had doubtless understood him better than the others, leaving his class with a sense of oppression, wrote that he believed he had heard Death itself speaking from the podium.”43 The following quotation refers to the two years immediately before the Phenomenology. It makes clear that although the fully rounded system pushes the negative to the side, in the interstices of the system the negative still manifests its power:

Evident lack in pride in the stubbornness of wanting to know discursively to the very end. It seems however that Hegel was lacking pride (was a servant) only on the surface. He had no doubt a tone of one who irritatingly gives out empty promises, but in a portrait of him as an old man, I imagine seeing exhaustion, the horror of being in the depths of things—of being God. Hegel, at the moment when the system closed, believed himself for two years to be going mad: perhaps he was afraid of accepting evil—which the system justifies and renders necessary; or perhaps linking the certainty of having attained absolute knowledge with the completion of history—with the passing of existence to the state of empty monotony—he saw himself, in a profound sense, becoming dead; perhaps even his various bouts of sadness took shape in the more profound horror of being God.44

Before I examine Hegel’s figure as it was reflected in Kojève’s teachings, a figure that is already anticipated by our discussions so far, let us first turn to Bataille’s essay co-written with Queneau, “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic.”

3.

Queneau says the following about this essay which was first published in 1932 in La critique sociale:

The general theme of the article implies a reversal of the idea that the authors had formed earlier of Hegel. What counts as a reduction now is not Hegelian panlogism, but the materialist dialectic. Hegel is now seen through Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, which are beginning to become known in France at the time, so he now appears as a “non-reductive” dialectician in relation to whom the vulgar dialectic of communism is devalued.45

The essay starts with a positive approach to the dialectic both in its Hegelian and its Marxist form. Against the critique that had been directed at the concept of the dialectic in general, the two authors stress that “by removing the dialectical method from proletarian ideology, they removed the blood from the body.”46 The central concern of the article, however, is the attempt to grasp the dialectic as essentially historical. We have already mentioned that Bataille and Queneau highlighted Hegel’s difficulty to ensure the movement of the dialectic in nature. The two authors define nature here as the field of the objects of the natural sciences. The attempt to base the dialectic on the clay feet of the logic of a contradiction anchored in nature was again picked up by Marx and Engels after Hegel with the intention of thinking the dialectic as a universal law. But no later than by 1885, by which time Engels is already aware of the fact that the negation of negation cannot be demonstrated in nature, this project appears to have failed. In nature, at best, it is only possible to establish the interdependence of phenomena that, however, does not exhaust the concept of the dialectic: “If it is only a matter of recognizing diversity in identity, or identity in diversity, if it is only a matter of admitting that what is diversified does not necessarily remain identical to itself, then it is useless and even imprudent to invoke the authority of the Hegelian dialectic.”47 But this is not all: since, from the perspective of the history of ideas, the origins of the Hegelian dialectic do not so much lie in Heraclitus, Plato, or Fichte but much rather in Gnosticism, and Neoplatonic and German mysticism, it is a form of thought that does not coincide with exact science. Furthermore, the representatives of the experimental and exact natural sciences since Hegel have established the incompatibility of their constructions with the dialectic. Accordingly, “science must do as much as possible without the intervention of an element that is as foreign to it as is systematic contradiction—and in fact it was possible to do without it.”48 The incompatibility of the dialectic with the methods of the natural sciences rests on the fact that the dialectic describes a whole area that can appear only in the natural sciences as a foreign body: as a ghost similar to that other ghost from which the Hegelian dialectic is derived. Both authors conclude that “it is no surprise that the thought of these phantoms as assimilated and adopted by Hegel is not applicable to the domain of natural science.”49

Bataille and Queneau try to support this critique of the dialectic of nature as universal law (which is supposed to provide the foundations for the historical dialectic of class war) by reference to Nicolai Hartman’s 1931 article “Hegel et le problème de la dialectique du réel” published in Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Their point is not to reject the dialectic in and of itself. On the contrary, they want to assign to it its own unique sphere of validity composed of particular historical phenomena against the compromising attempt to secure it experimentally and scientifically. Hartmann comes in handy for them since he considers the dialectic to be at work only in particular phenomena like the master-slave relation and class war. Thereby the dialectic becomes the law of motion of a science exclusively concerned with the historically real, what was earlier defined as expérience vécue.

Thus, the dialectic rests on experienced historical reality. The object of this dialectic is society, and it can prove itself only on this object. But this way it also ceases to be a natural science in the strict sense and comes closer to what is known as sciences morales et politiques (Bataille and Queneau draw on Plekhanov here). To a certain degree, then, it represents the humanities as the Geisteswissenschaften.

Hartmann’s analyses—the particularization and exemplification of the dialectic, of the concept of contradiction and negativity based on historically experienced phenomena—provide an occasion for Bataille and Queneau “to analyze themes posed only by recent developments of science.”50 However, the sciences that we are talking about here are no longer sciences in the conventional sense. In these sciences—like Freudian psychoanalysis, Durkheimian and Maussian sociology and anthropology, and so on—the criterion of verification and falsification is that of subjective reconstruction. Furthermore, these sciences provide just as many paradigms in which the dialectic can prove itself as a movement on a particular experience. This is how Bataille and Queneau want to counteract the petrification of the dialectic into a universal natural law. With the help of particular examples provided by science, not only is the dialectic shown to be the logic of historical experience but the concept of the dialectic is also saved with all its moments: “We pretend to come to the rescue of this fossilized materialist dialectic, and we propose to enrich it and to renew it by sowing the better seeds of bourgeois thought: psychoanalysis (Freud) and sociology (Durkheim and Mauss).”51 Now what is decisive for us is that, precisely because of the refutation of its scientific derivation, the attempt to ground the dialectic in historical and lived experience leads us back to Bataille’s dialectic of nature as a dialectic of forms outlined already in the essays of Documents. As we have seen, however, this nature is always experienced by the individual or by society as particularized nature that can no longer be approached through universal laws or concepts:

Not only has the domain of nature not been abandoned for phantoms that would be absolutely heterogeneous to it, but the question remains whether a mode of thought founded neither directly on the study of nature nor on a work of pure logic but, as in the example we have just seen, on a lived experience—whether a mode of thought that seems to be directed by the very structure of the one who thinks is not susceptible to being applied, at least to a certain extent, to the understanding of nature.52

Thus, to a certain degree, Bataille returns to the Hegelian dialectic of nature. At the same time, however, certain things did happen along the detour, so the obtained result is no longer identical with the criticized starting point. Nature—no longer the domain that anticipates the becoming of Spirit, nor exclusively the domain of universal laws or the privileged object of the natural sciences—has transformed itself into a phantasmatically experienced nature that, in accordance with the law of the phantasm, is a fragmented nature. Although Hegel did not look at nature in his philosophy of nature as a natural scientist (which is more or less the case for Engels) and saw it as a first expression of Spirit, Bataille’s similar approach does not by any means imply that nature would represent a stage in the becoming of Spirit for him as well. The concept of lived experience that Bataille uses to approach nature is not identical with the concept of experience in the Phenomenology.

Two additional points need to be emphasized. As we have seen, the critique of Engels’s attempt to place the dialectic on scientific foundations with the hopes of proving it to be a universal law of the world served to grasp the dialectic historically as the movement of history itself. It was in this context that Bataille and Queneau proposed an “enrichment” of historical-dialectical materialism with the help of certain bourgeois sciences: psychoanalysis and anthropology in particular. However, their application in the sense of historical materialism is not that easy. Bataille writes in “A propos de Krafft-Ebing”:

Introducing the theories of Freud is an operation that cannot in any form take place without injury and damage: it can only be done honestly by people who do not recoil from the work of demolition. In this sense, it is possible to say that the Bolshevik leaders who banished psychoanalysis from Russia a decade ago were right in their own ways. To the degree that they have no taste for the dull diet of eclecticism, those who pretend to apply psychoanalytic facts to the study of social processes do not have the right to claim to represent historical materialism. (OC, I, 293)

Psychoanalysis and historical materialism cannot be joined together in an eclectic fashion. In order to link both, it would be necessary to shake materialism—to the degree that it is founded on an ahistorical, universal natural law—as well as criticize psychoanalysis, which must be questioned as individual or ego-psychology. The same goes for the application of Durkheimian and Maussian anthropology and sociology, which showed that primitive societies cannot be explained with the thesis of “bartering as a primitive form of exchange”: “In this respect, things represent themselves today in such a way that a conception radically contrary to that of Bernstein appears to impose itself: economic interpretation is most easily applicable to the modern period” (OC, I, 294). If the traditional apparatus of historical and materialistic theory appears to be threatened by the contributions of bourgeois sciences, if these innovations represent positive achievements, then historical materialism must not avoid them. To the contrary, it must promote itself as well as these sciences through a critique of the foundations of bourgeois science.

It is necessary to emphasize this point since, and we will return to it later, Bataille conducts his disagreement with Hegel through the perspective of a concept of materialism, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, which shake themselves to their own scientific foundations through their mutual intersections. Such a disagreement with Hegel can no longer simply be called negative: Hegel is in no way a victim of an attack. The contact of particular “scientific” discourses with the Hegelian text will, rather, disturb his philosophy in such a way that it brings forth from within itself what it cannot master: one Hegel exceeds the other. What takes place in this debate with Hegel and the simultaneous shattering of the invoked scientific discourses is not the birth of a new science resting on reinforced foundations but rather the “birth” of what we have called phantasmatology.

By now it is clear that Bataille makes an attempt to break the particular out of the classic opposition of the particular and the universal, the concrete and the abstract, knowledge and absolute knowledge. As a result of this recasting of the particular, the Hegelian concept of contradiction, and of the negative in particular, receives in Bataille a certain sharpness unforeseen by Hegel. Not even the negation of the negation advocated by Bataille and Queneau, as an essential moment of the dialectic, can hide this fact. Indeed, both authors contended that “without this ‘negation of the negation’ the dialectic loses its practical value in the realm of society.”53 The negation of the negation is the movement of sublation itself. But what does negation of the negation mean for Bataille?

Class struggle, which we cite as our most important example, is characterized first of all by the fact that the positive term, capitalism, necessarily implies the negative term, the proletariat; secondly, the realization of the negation implied in the second term implies, in turn, and with the same necessity, the negation of the negation (in this way the revolution has, at the same time, a negative and a positive sense).54

Although the negation of the negation—the revolutionization of social relations that takes place through historical praxis and leads to the sublation of contradictions—sublates the proletariat in its simple opposition as a result of the negation of the positive term (capitalism) and the simultaneous negation of the negation inherent in the positive term (as the proletariat), whereby the practical reconciliation of the contradiction is posited, in view of what we have said so far, we are tempted not to define this reconciliation as a sublation of contradiction and negativity. For unlike what is the case in Hegel for whom its result is always something positive, the negation of the negation can produce something radically negative, provided that the negation of the negation is the practical negation of the necessity that drives the proletariat into the role of negation and compels it (in accordance with the ruse of the master) to dispose of the master in order to take over his position and, thereby, to uphold the function of mastery. The negation of the negation produces something absolutely negative when the proletariat squanders in a sovereign fashion the mastery that it has obtained through a calculation that defies every logic.

This calculus—that is no longer one—might appear to be abstruse. And to a certain degree it is in fact so, inasmuch as the Hegelian dialectic that Bataille works with here is merely parodied. Indeed, in spite of this parody, the critique of the Hegelian dialectic outlined by Bataille and Queneau, their attempt to think its concept historically, remains tied to Hegelian thought to the degree that they formally repeat the triad. As they write, if the contradiction of the negative and the positive in the natural sciences is irrelevant, then

very different are the examples that we consider truly valuable, in which negativity takes on a specific value. Now it would be easy to show that as a group the fundamental dialectical themes of the Marxist conception of history belong to this second category, and that their profound originality, and at the same time their practical importance, consist precisely in the fact that they introduce into tactics a constant recourse to negative forces or actions, not as goals but as means demanded by historical development.55

Thus, this negativity is clearly Hegelian. Not an end in itself but a means (something mediated), it represents the slavish means that works on the sublation of the opposition. The negation of the negation becomes the final goal of the process in which the opposites are sublated in unity and fullness. So at the end of history the negativity that drives this process and exhausted itself as a means can also be abandoned.

Yet we read the following in “A propos de Krafft-Ebing,” an article that appeared a short time later also in La critique sociale: “The dialectic movement can make only the forms of the opposing terms disappear but not the opposition itself” (OC, I, 292). In order to sustain the continuity of the contradiction, the uncontrollable restlessness of the negative (an undertaking through which the previously engaged negation of the negation must be once again subjected to the power of negation), Bataille refers to Hegel himself, who writes the following about Kantian ethics in section 60 of the Encyclopedia:

But if this contradiction [between the harmony of the opposition of the subjective and the objective in ethics] appears to be disguised by adjourning the realization of the Idea to a future, to a time when the Idea will also be, then a sensuous condition like time is rather the reverse of a reconciliation of the contradiction; and the corresponding representation of the understanding, an infinite progression, is immediately nothing but the perennial positing of the contradiction itself.56

In this context, Bataille holds up the same reproach against Hegel that the latter directed against Kant of a moral and metaphysical harmonization of contradictions, namely, of liquidating contradiction in absolute knowledge. Of course, Bataille does not understand absolute knowledge as “the perennial positing of the contradiction itself,” but necessarily as that which tries to stall the contradiction and the power of the negative in a solution not any less harmonious than Kant’s. For the time being, let us identify here only the theoretical aspects that point toward the direction of an irreducible negativity that is not domesticated in a slavish manner. Bataille is fully aware of his proximity to Hegel here: his concept of the negative is only possible to think through that of Hegel’s—he presupposes him. In accordance with the Kojèvian anthropological interpretation of the Phenomenology, Bataille writes the following in a lecture composed for the Collège de sociologie: “Hegelian method seems to have penetrated deeply at least into our dark regions. Hegel himself attached very great importance to what I describe as the heart of our existence. For him the basis of human specificity is negativity, which is to say, destructive action.”57 For Bataille, the unconscious discovered by Freud represents the core of this negativity that resists every phenomenological description. In addition, it also preempts every systematic presentation. Consequently, although Hegel might have anticipated this absolute negativity, he might have experienced it firsthand; nevertheless, it appears in his system only in a mastered form as abstract negativity that works toward its own sublation in absolute knowledge. Only when it is reduced to abstract negativity can absolute negativity become systematically the engine of the production of meaning:

Hegel, thus, by no means carried out the decisive act that I have called into question. But the critique that can be made of Hegel from the point of view I occupy is not limited to that. Whereas it is true that Hegel turned expressly in the direction in which the essential can be discovered, it does not follow that the immediate method of investigation at hand could have allowed him to give a true and correct description of facts. Only the intervention of objective science as it has been carried out for several decades by sociologists and psychologists has permitted the remarkably precise apprehension and representation of something that, remaining heterogeneous to the conscious mind, could not be apprehended and represented in Hegel’s mind except from the outside. Perhaps what Hegel described is actually only the shadow projected through the conscious region of the mind by a reality that, as unconscious, remained unknown, or very dimly known by him.58

Thus, the entities responsible for bringing about the existence of an absolutely negative attitude that puts an end to every circular and accumulative production of value and, in a figurative sense, of meaning are, on the one hand, the contributions of sociology and anthropology (for example, in the customs of potlatch), and on the other hand, the achievements of psychoanalysis (which showed to what extent the unconscious exceeds the system of consciousness and which amounts to a negativity that the ego cannot grasp or conceptualize). Through this negativity Bataille considers himself to be in a position to question the Spirit (which was understood by Hegel in an essentially homogeneous manner) in its systematic seclusion.

Hegelian phenomenology represents the mind as essentially homogeneous. On this point, recent data on which I rely agree in establishing a formal heterogeneity among different regions of the mind. It seems to me that the marked heterogeneity established between the sacred and the profane by French sociology, or between the unconscious and the conscious by psychoanalysis, is a notion entirely foreign to Hegel.59

The negativity that Bataille has in mind is foreign to Hegel since it plays itself out in the back of the self and the system. The negativity mastered by the system, however, cannot disavow its origins: katabolically removed from the system, it leaves behind its traces in it. For example, the countless reversals and turns, the metaphors of what is behind the back, which obey it without their own knowledge, bear witness to absolute negativity.

Yet, at first sight, it appears as if, through a recourse to the empirical matter examined by psychoanalysis and sociology, Bataille had evaded a traversing of the Phenomenology and, therefore, fell back on a form of empiricism. Indeed, he wrote that “it would make no sense then for us to limit ourselves here to repeating or interpreting the Phenomenology of Mind as Kojève does magnificently, moreover, at the Hautes Études.”60 However, the empiricism expressed by the facts made available by psychoanalysis and sociology is only a springboard from which one can perceive the cracks of the Hegelian system that attest to a negativity unacknowledged by Hegel: “Among the various objects of Hegelian description, negativity remains without a doubt a representation that is simultaneously rich, violent, and charged with great expressive value. But the negativity I will speak about is of another nature.”61 It is this negativity that makes the Hegelian system tremble insofar as, despite all the attempts of taming it, it remains inscribed in the negative. Although it is enclosed and completed, with the irruption of this negativity the system begins to move again as it leaves its tectonic immobility and is once again delivered over to the Heraclitean river and the Nietzschean movement of the eternal return.

4.

Let us briefly recapitulate, and let us try to understand what we have tried to work out, as it were, in an underhand manner in the previous three chapters. I say “underhand” because besides commenting on, explaining, and interpreting Bataille’s texts, we have endeavored to develop the components of the structure of a phantasmatology to which Bataille’s mode of writing appeared to yield and that manifests itself in different versions in Bataille’s works.

It was necessary to displace the three consecutive terms—“myth,” “image,” and “sign”—whose applications in Bataille’s texts we have tried to demonstrate, from their positions in Hegelian thought where they possess the status of “moments” or ideational contents (except for myth, which is not at all considered to be a concept by philosophy) as members of a whole that reflects itself in totality in them. In the section devoted to myth, it became clear that the essential issue of our concern was the relation between the universal and the particular, the objective and the subjective, the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the abstract. As is known, for Hegel the reconciliation of these opposites culminates in absolute knowledge. This is where Spirit accomplishes itself as self-conscious Spirit. It is the circle returning to itself that, presupposing its own beginning, rediscovers itself in it at the end of the process. In absolute knowledge as the self-consciousness of the Spirit, every individual moment is assembled and sublated so that Spirit can possess itself in science. The concrete universal (Allgemeine) in the shape of absolute knowledge or, using Bataille’s language, the universal (l’universel), is the negation of the particular inasmuch as the particular in its singularity hic et nunc is abstract negativity. We have seen in the chapter on myth that Bataille tried to detach the particular from its determination as a moment of a universality and strove to turn its abstract negativity into absolute negativity so that it would henceforth resist every sublation in a universality. Irreducible in its negativity, the particular explodes the universal, which then dissolves itself into a particularized universe that can longer be thought as a fragment of a presupposed or an anticipated whole. Taking up the problem of the particular and the universal, Bataille modifies both in such a way that their sublation in concrete universality, in science, in absolute knowledge becomes impossible. To put it differently, he is trying to prevent the natural maturation of the universal and everything that this concept of the concept implies in order to initiate its premature miscarriage and abortion. The aborted fruit of this action is myth in the Bataillean sense, in other words, that which philosophy as science and absolute knowledge excluded and plunged into the abyss from the very beginning. With this abortion, philosophy and science (this time in the sense of the natural sciences) are once again reintegrated into their beginnings, although they no longer recognize it as their own because they are sustained by its repression, overthrow, and katabole. Relying on Bataille as well as on Schelling, we have shown that this origin cannot be thought as a principle, as an arche, or as a ground.

We carried out a similar movement in our discussions of the concept of the image, which for Hegel is a moment of the subjective Spirit as the mediating instance between the soul and consciousness. Bataille’s objective was to think the image in its irreducibility, which makes its sublation through the sign in the language of the concept (and thereby in the element of the Spirit) impossible. This deconstruction was supposed to lead to the deferred and aborted maturation of the Spirit, whose aborted fruit is the perfectly divided image as an opening upon the phantasm. The discussion of the concept of the sign took place in a similar direction. In the section entitled “Remorseless Patricide,” dominated by the problematic of the master and the slave or, to put it differently, by the becoming of self-consciousness, we established that Bataille took on this problematic with the intention of blocking the becoming of self-consciousness. Furthermore, we argued that the sovereignty of the father’s murderer who expends his mastery delivers him over to a tragic disunity of which we can now say in hindsight that it cannot be subsumed under the Hegelian concept of unhappy consciousness, which still represents a moment of the system. Now the arrangement of this series of abortions is quite remarkable: it proceeds through the absolute Spirit, the becoming of the Spirit, and the becoming of self-consciousness. From the perspective of the system of the Encyclopedia, this series bears witness to a reversed teleology: at every one of these steps, we find that Bataille plays off the purportedly sublated element against the synthesis of the contradiction in which it is supposed to be reconciled with its opposite. Thus, the Hegelian system is dismantled step by step, and it is virtually stripped and cleared away layer by layer from the end toward its beginning. But does this reversal of Hegel, the opposition to the Hegelian system staged by Bataille, which brushes the system the wrong way, as it were, amount to a negative teleology, that is, to a movement that still obeys teleology and remains tied to the Hegelian system?

The concluding chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit might at first suggest that this assumption is justified, which would turn Bataille’s method merely into a reversed mimesis of the becoming of Spirit and therefore into one of its moments. In fact, the Phenomenology argues that absolute knowledge can be completed only as a circle returning to itself, in other words, only if it returns to its beginnings at the end. This necessity to once again undergo the steps traversed by Spirit also applies to absolute knowledge itself as the result of sublation.62 What applied from the beginning, namely, that Spirit must externalize itself, also holds true for the Spirit that possesses itself in absolute knowledge. It must sacrifice itself once again in its interiorizing recollection (Erinnerung), however, with the self-evident difference that Spirit here recommences on a higher level. Hegel notes: “So although this Spirit starts afresh and apparently from its own resources to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher level that it starts.”63 In order to really possess itself, absolute knowledge must yield to a reversed teleology. Absolute knowledge must return from its end results to its beginnings through the actual steps of its becoming. But is this backward movement of absolute knowledge identical with the one that we have tried to demonstrate in Bataille? For Hegel absolute knowledge returns to its beginning with the help of Er-Innerung (internalizing recollection). But that which Spirit recollects is already sublated in it and interiorized by it. The higher level from which it undertakes the backward movement makes a repetition of the need to master the power of the negative superfluous. What Spirit recollects as the steps and spheres of its own becoming in its attempt to repeat its being present-to-itself is already internal and freed from its opposition and negativity. The movement inherent in absolute knowledge is thus a repetition that must be distinguished from the Bataillean counteraction, because in its regression it does not encounter anything irreducible anymore to the process. It is merely a descent to an earlier level that does not have to submit itself once again to the labor of the negative.

With its first deconstruction, however, the Bataillean counteraction has already rejected the absolute knowledge that for Hegel represents the fixed starting point of the backward movement to the beginning and that remains the telos of the whole movement. The first irreducible instance resulting from the abortion of absolute knowledge is the domain of the mythical, which is heterogeneous to the Hegelian system. Although Bataille clears the system away one step at a time as he produces new irreducible elements, which, as we have seen, do not by any means coincide with the moments of immediacy or abstraction on the particular level, the heterogeneous elements “obtained” this way do not relate to each other in a hierarchical manner. The perfectly divided image, the anagrammatic sign, and sovereignty are by no means moments that would be sublated in myth. The determination to be a moment is missing in them since the clearing away of the respective steps and spheres of Spirit does not lead to the discovery of already existing but overcome elements. Rather, the backward movement produces irreducible elements that are incongruent with every process. As we have seen, the irreducible element that Bataille identifies with myth, which is the product of the deconstruction of absolute knowledge, does not coincide with what philosophy, and especially Hegelian philosophy, calls myth: it is not the thoroughly ambiguous source of philosophy but a domain incongruent with it that it excludes from itself at its own constitution and that encircles it all the more powerfully. If we traverse philosophy or science (both stricto sensu and in the Hegelian sense), we encounter only the traces of the mythical. They manifest themselves, for example, in the form of unmediated, simple, and abstract negativity, as what Bataille calls “total waste” (déchets totaux). The Hegelian system represents only the attempt to sublate these abstract total waste products—which are always already belatedly overcome beginnings—step by step into absolute knowledge. As a result of the teleological process, these waste products are hierarchically organized in the sense of a natural hierarchy. The absolute knowledge that recollects itself in itself passes through the same hierarchy only in a reversed direction.

In stripping away the levels of the system, Bataille brings forth the irreducible elements that defy every sublation and no longer can be thought as moments of a teleological process. However, if the deconstruction of the system takes place in a reversed order but without situating the “obtained” irreducible elements in a reversed hierarchy, then the question of the nature of their relations to one another emerges. If they do not represent moments or members of a however negative whole, if they are not circles that depict a larger circle in themselves, then in what kind of a relation do they stand with one another? Does a term like “myth” not suggest that the perfectly divided image, the anagrammatic sign, the tragic disunity must be elements of it? Does not the image, for example, already represent the myth as a whole en abyme? Undoubtedly, the perfectly divided image, the anagrammatic sign, and the tragic disunity are the same thing as the myth. Furthermore, the myth possesses an image-like structure, while the image in turn attests to a mythological form of representation. All this cannot be overlooked, but what is decisive in the end is that the myth is not a rounded whole like complete knowledge but a split whole and a deferred totality, and by the same token the image does not mark a self-enclosed sensible fullness as it is fragmented in itself. Thus, the myth reflects itself in the perfectly divided image only to the degree that one scattering or dispersal cuts into another. One tearing apart mirrors another without the hope that myth could once assemble in itself the perfectly divided image, the anagrammatic sign, and the tragic disunity as a comprehensive unity. Such an assemblage would produce only another even more drastic tearing apart.

But let us try to think the relation of the irreducible element “obtained” through the regressive decomposition of the system in yet another way. We have said that the irreducible element produced in the process of dismantling absolute knowledge can no longer be sublated in or returned to absolute knowledge. This, however, represents only one meaning of irreducibility. For if we ask the question how irreducible elements must relate to one another, we can only answer that they are also irreducible to one another even if they simulate the appearance of a system. It follows from this second meaning of irreducibility that the particular fruits of thought that have been driven out of the sphere of Spirit and have been aborted can only be placed side by side and next to each other without the prospect of this sequence ever constituting a whole. Something like the plenitude of the repressed can never be thought. Plenitude exists only in and for absolute knowledge. Myth, the image, and tragic existence, on the other hand, cannot give birth to fullness.

We maintain that the irreducible elements relate to each other in an incommensurable manner: their structure—as that of a juxtaposition of or joining together of elements without, however, supplementing a lack in that to which they are added, that is, as the succession of differences only—is therefore no other than that of the phantasm. Out of consideration for representability, we had to fixate the phantasm as if it functioned as a concept. But against the background of our discussions, it also emerged that it itself had to be added to the series that it had to account for and had to conceptualize. Therefore, we can only say—and this assertion is already about to slip away from us—that the phantasmatic structure of the heterogeneities produced in the dismantling of the Hegelian system is nothing but the system’s unbridled boundary that constantly threatens to exceed it and into which the system inscribes itself, although the system itself produced it katabolically in the process of its own becoming. This boundary attests to what is OTHER, the difference and the deferral (the différance) that is presupposed by every self-constituting system as its UN-GROUND, a boundary that forever delimits every fullness and every system. In other words, this structure of difference and deferral that marks the phantasm is tied to the movement of repetition, an assertion that should not be surprising in light of our discussions of the remorseless patricide.

What still remains to be determined is Hegel’s relation to Nietzsche.64 We have seen that at the end of the Phenomenology Hegel bent absolute knowledge back into its beginnings. Undoubtedly, this renewed descent of the sublated attests to the power of the negative that leaves behind its traces even in absolute knowledge: inasmuch as absolute knowledge assembles in itself every moment of its becoming, the negative is preserved as a moment. As a result, absolute knowledge is compelled to repeat the process endlessly in an infinite recollection, if it wants to accomplish fullness through completion. The negative manifests its unbridled power through this unavoidable bending backward into the beginnings. It prevents the realization of the absolute peace of absolute knowledge as the goal of the Spirit to be present to itself at the end of history. The already bygone, overcome, dissolved, and sublated elements repeat themselves in the system, although only in recollection as already interiorized oppositions. As Bataille would say, the repetition takes place only in an emasculated form. It remains, however, that even if repetition in this form is only a kind of apotropaion against the REPETITION, it betrays the trace of the latter. In its impossibility to arrive at complete peace with itself and to be present to itself, Spirit resorts to such repetition as a means (Mittel). Absolute knowledge is compelled to repeat the movement of repetition that appeared to have been overcome by internalization and the recovery of the externalized alienated elements. Thus, repetition emerges as the negativity unmastered by absolute knowledge to which it remains exposed forever.

In order to identify the connection between Nietzsche and Hegel or, to be more precise, to locate the point where Bataille drives Nietzsche into Hegel, let us read the following longer passage:

Even Hegel describing the movement of Spirit as if it excluded all possible rest made it end, however, at HIMSELF as if he were its necessary conclusion. Thus he gave the movement of time the centripetal structure that characterizes sovereignty, Being, or God. Time, on the other hand, dissolving each center that has formed, is fatally known as centrifugal—since it is known in a being whose center is already there. The dialectical idea, then, is only a hybrid of time and its opposite, of the death of God and the position of the immutable. But it nevertheless marks the movement of a thought eager to destroy what refuses to die, eager to break the bonds of time as much as to break the law through which God obligates. It is manifestly clear that the liberty of time traverses the heavy Hegelian process, precisely to the feeble extent that Socratic irony introduced into this world an eternal Being imposing man. . . . Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its shell is to a bird contentedly absorbing the substance within.⁶⁵

We have already remarked that the system, the universe, absolute knowledge represent for Bataille a monolithic formation rammed into the ground like a petrified beam of sunlight. The life that circulates around this formation peripherally reflects itself on its prismatic surface whereby the flow of time, of becoming, and of death appears to be restrained. The centripetal force that emanates from the center and casts its spell on everything circulating around it coincides with the voracious nature of the center to create being, fullness, immutability, and immobility. The center can assume diverse forms that relate to each other in a hierarchical manner. As Bataille observes, “In closing off ever more tightly the world about him so as to represent the sole principle of existence, [the human being] tends to substitute his constitutive avidity for the sky’s obvious prodigality; he thus gradually effaces the image of a heavenly reality free of inherent meaning or demand, replacing it with a personification (of an anthropomorphic kind) of the immutable idea of the Good.”66 A simple No cannot be held against the unavoidable activity of centralization that seeks to find a standstill in a yet-to-be-achieved fullness. Such a No would remain an abstract negation that would represent only the other, always already subdued side of the system. Thus, to begin with, it is necessary to affirm this drive toward fullness, completion, and the constitution of being. As we have already pointed out, without this affirmation we could not expect any practical (and theoretical) consequences from deconstruction. In “Bataille, Experience and Practice,” Kristeva has clearly underlined the necessity of this step: what is necessary at first is a thetic moment, a stasis, an affirmation of what is to be negated. If we define, following Bataille, the compulsion of the system and absolute knowledge in a manner immanent to the system (but also in an anthropological fashion) as a desire for ever more power, then the first stasis can consist only of wanting power and a lust for absorption pursued to the very stars: “There is but one way out: it is in vain when a being responds no to its nature, and, since it is in search of power, it can only say yes to the power that it needs in order to be. To flee is ridiculous; one must go rather to the full limit of power.”67 The will for more power is, indeed, the requirement for overpowering the system and absolute knowledge. Apparently nothing stands in the way of the will for more power, for more coherence, for an ever-more-concentrated collection of the moments in the system. But we have also seen how in the Phenomenology at the very moment of its consummation science must once again descend into its moments. However, this descent as a repetition of alienation has sunk to the level of a moment in Hegel. Although absolute knowledge cannot fully control repetition and must yield to its necessity, the system admits it only as a slavish means in the service of the becoming of Spirit. Bataille, on the other hand, radicalizes this descent: “By degrees, a more and more complex movement of group composition raises to the point of universality the human race, but it seems that universality, at the summit, causes all existence to explode and decomposes it with violence.”68 As Bataille emphasizes, the bursting apart of universality, concrete universality, and the complete system has several reasons. The centrifugal force that attracts all the moments toward the center is capable of achieving this only by sacrificing the fullness of what circulates around the center. Therefore, the elements that must be subsumed under or around the center undergo a certain emptying out: “Because of the composing attraction, composition empties elements of the greatest part of their being, and this benefits the center—in other words, it benefits composite being.”69 Reduced to being shadows, the elements enter the system as moments: the complete fullness of the center is, therefore, at the same time complete emptiness.70 With the compulsion toward greater if not total gathering of all moments made possible by the fact that the elements that have to be subjected to the system become moments (which happens through the fixation of one aspect of the elements and the katabolic precipitation of all the others), with the total evacuation of the highest peak of being, the domain of the expelled, of the borders of being, of the irreducible element that Bataille called the heterogeneous is also extended. The drive toward fullness leads to the emptying out of the system, to the production of negativity within fullness, and to the creation of the domain of negativity that encircles the system from the outside.

Here Kojève’s influence on Bataille is quite obvious since Kojève suggested that death, the power of the negative, the ideal endurance of which defines the transition from the animal to the human, threatens to turn at the end of the process, that is, in absolute knowledge (after the complete detachment of every particularity from its hic et nunc), into really animalistic death. And, to the extent that Kojève provides an anthropologistic interpretation of Hegel, this means in fact the end of the system and the end, or death of anthropos.

The Selbst—that is, Man properly so-called or the free Individual, is Time; and Time is History, and only History. (Which, furthermore, is das wissende Werden, “the knowing becoming” of the Spirit—that is, in the final analysis, philosophical evolution.) And Man is essentially Negativity, for Time is Becoming—that is, the annihilation of Being or Space. Therefore Man is a Nothingness that nihilates and that preserves itself in (spatial) Being only by negating being, this Negation being Action. Now, if Man is Negativity—that is, Time—he is not eternal. He is born and he dies as Man. He is “das Negative seiner selbst,” Hegel says. And we know what that means: Man overcomes himself as Action (or Selbst) by ceasing to oppose himself to the World, after creating in it the universal and homogeneous State; or to put it otherwise, on the cognitive level: Man overcomes himself as Error (or “Subject” opposed to the Object) after creating the Truth of “Science.”71

This sublation and dissolution of man in the homogeneous system of the state and science (a death of anthropos that, although it cannot be confused with animalistic death, skirts such a death nevertheless in a dangerously close manner) do not come to a halt with the human being alone but also apply to the system of science itself in the Hegelian sense of the term. Completely detached from nature, from history, and the “Calvary of the absolute Spirit,” science is petrified into something “lifeless and alone.”72 On this level, the system appears as the death of the system itself, and only the mastered form of repetition in the shape of internalizing recollection protects it from this fate.

If we wrote that Bataille radicalizes the descent of the system into its moments, we meant to say that the collapse of the system does not take place in the form of recollection itself, since the latter serves the system merely to escape its deathly fate. Indeed, the radicalized descent of the system as Bataille’s decomposition and the clearing away of the hierarchically organized spheres make it clear, is of the order of an explosion of the system into its heterogeneous elements. Indeed, the resting in itself, this standstill of the monolithic system at the climax of its completion, which in its absolute emptiness reveals the power of the negative, provokes another kind of emptying out of this formation than that of recollection, namely, a collapsing into itself, an implosion by which it becomes dissolved from within itself into the domain of the repressed and the heterogeneous. Bataille writes:

From the very fact that they had become, for the mass of tranquilized lives, increasingly useless, empty, and fragile shadows, the figures stand under the threat of collapse and thus reveal, far more thoroughly than in the fearful obsession of the past, the despairing fall of lives. They are no longer obstacles to the lost obsessive “sensation of time,” but are instead the high places from which the breakneck speed of the fall is possible: and the high places themselves topple, to ensure a total revelation.73

Thus, being, or the system can complete itself—it must in fact reach fulfillment and obtain “the menacing grandeur of imperative totality”—but only to be plunged back into the empty night with all the more violence.74 As a result of the internal emptying out, which is congenital with the internal fulfillment, the equilibrium is disturbed, which causes the convulsion of the system whose very foundations begin to sway as the result of the ceaseless fall of what cannot be assimilated. Bataille remarks: “Existence in avidity attains, when fully developed, a point of disequilibrium at which it suddenly and lavishly expends; it sustains an explosive loss of the surplus of force it has so painfully accumulated.”75 At the same time, the general direction of meaning itself is changed, or, to be more precise, a reversal of meaning takes place, since the telos of meaning can be only its own fullness. Since for Bataille meaning and utility are the results of assimilation, the expenditure of the forces contained by the system leads to the loss of meaning and utility. This squandered meaning, its breakdown and collapse into itself, opens upon the myth or the phantasm, which must be defined as the general economy into which the restricted economy of the constitution of meaning and the production of utility are inscribed.

The specific displacement to which Bataille submits concepts like phantasm and myth must be kept in mind when we read that “WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS.”76 Here everything depends on the adjective “ferociously [farouche].” Let us read the following passage that prepares the inscription of the collapse of meaning and the collapse of the system into (or in) the phantasmatic or mythological text: “The great unitary constructions are only the warning signs of a religious upheaval that will push life’s movement beyond servile necessity.”77 The passage where this inscription becomes perhaps the most obvious runs as follows:

Renouncing the avaricious malice of the scapegoat, being itself, to the extent that it is the sum of existences at the limits of the night, is spasmodically shaken by the idea of the ground giving way beneath its feet. It is in universality (where, due to solitude, the possibility of facing death through war disappears) that the necessity of engaging in a struggle, no longer with an equal group but with nothingness, becomes clear. THE UNIVERSAL resembles a bull, sometimes absorbed in the nonchalance of animality and abandoned to the secret paleness of death, and sometimes hurled by the rage of ruin into the void ceaselessly opened before it by a skeletal torero. But the void it meets is also the nudity it espouses TO THE EXTENT THAT IT IS A MONSTER lightly assuming many crimes, and it is no longer, like the bull, the plaything of nothingness, because nothingness itself is its plaything; it only throws itself into nothingness in order to tear it apart and to illuminate the night for an instant, with an immense laugh—a laugh it never would have attained if this nothingness had not totally opened beneath its feet.78

At the climax of its completion, the collapse of the system into itself begins in the form of a caving in. This fall was already inherent in the descent of the Hegelian system into its moments. But here recollection served the purpose of the reappropriation of the moments and thus represented a moment in the process of the becoming of absolute knowledge itself. For Bataille, on the other hand, with the completion of the system the opposition is not sublated. To the contrary, at the peak of its self-completion the system has also produced its own opposite. It finds itself in opposition to nothingness, in contrast to which the system becomes a particularity in spite of all its universality. In this sense, the monumental system, the fully achieved universality, and the consummate fullness are only playthings of this nothingness against which they distinguish themselves by apparently mastering it. The necessity to descend into the moments, the necessity of the repetition of the process on a higher level, however, attests to the unbridled power of that which did not allow itself to be conceptualized, that which made this activity possible in the first place through its exclusion. Yet the two opposites that constitute the contradiction, universality and nothingness, are still congenital: the one presupposes the other. In order to subject this rigid opposition to repetition, in other words, in order to interject Nietzsche into Hegel, the opposition must be dissolved, thus ostensibly repeating in a mimetic fashion the Hegelian movement of the negation. Universality—as the bull, the plaything of nothingness and an unequal opponent for nothingness—becomes a partner in a game with nothingness. This game, however, is not staged for the purpose of winning. The bull as a monster—that is to say, as a bull that hurls itself into the abyss—tears the abysmal nothingness apart in order to sacrifice himself in it. To put it differently, the system of absolute knowledge that has obtained its fullness tears itself apart in its collapse as well as the nothingness that became its other in this opposition. The following monstrous configuration thus begins to come into view, that of a particularization in extremis, an endless convulsion—the delirium of the universe. “The Eternal, the Father, Logic, who guaranteed the immutable truth of the ground is dead: so man discovers that he is abandoned to the delirium of the universe” (OC, I, 567). This explosion in the collapse of the universal into the nothingness dispersed by the fall is not a one-time occurrence. It repeats itself and risks everything for the repetition to take place. Bataille tried to describe this movement through a series of oppositions: centrifugal and centripetal force, current and countercurrent, organization and disorganization, “everlasting deification and undeification” (Nietzsche), integration and disintegration, destruction and creation. But this in every respect classic opposition of terms should not mislead us. We must mention here Hegel’s critique of the opposition between attractive and repulsive forces. This critique—which holds that the two forces have meaning only in their mutual obliteration, although they are only meaningful in their opposition—brings into focus what Bataille described as nothingness. Hegel writes: “The oneness of what are essentially beings for themselves is only nothingness itself; there is no matter, no true reality being posited here, only a limit, the nothingness and the being of the opposed terms.”79 For Hegel, the completely empty nothingness of this limit, which is defined as the simultaneity and proximity of beings that exist for themselves, is the monstrous nothingness of the indifference of the universal and the particular, or, since this must inevitably appear to be still Hegelian, it is the nothingness of the particularizing space in which unity and its opposite mutually undermine each other. The completely void nothingness, the limit, and the margin are the kind of monstrosities of thought that are excluded from the discourse of philosophy from the very beginning as something worthless. Philosophy knows nothingness only as part of an opposition by which it is reduced to being a moment. The oppositional pairs, even those of Bataille, are distributed over these tamed oppositions in which the hierarchically higher element constantly sublates the lower one. Here they can unfold in a circular fashion, refer to each other, and alternately bring each other into action. Within this circular reproduction, the forces that mutually sublate each other yet strive to preserve their own independence produce the circular movement around the center that they presuppose. This center represents the “fixed point . . . the oneness of the two in which they are themselves dissolved along with every opposition.”80 But the difference and the limit, the empty nothingness of the opposing forces and their being, their difference and their oneness are the persistence of the periphery of the circle within its center and in the field controlled by the center. To inscribe the circles in higher circles, as attempted by Hegel, merely obstructs the problem in order to solve it, since the persistence of the border of the delimited field eventually reveals its unmastered power once again, that is, at the very moment when absolute knowledge must bend itself back into itself in order to appropriate its own limits. As we already know, this takes place through internalizing recollection: the task of the latter is to secure the starting point while it dislocates and sublates it belatedly through a movement that turns the inside into an outside and the outside into an inside in accordance with a process of eternal rumination.

There is no escape from the circular movement of the Hegelian or the Bataillean oppositional pairs. And since all the detours once again necessarily lead back to the starting point that also incorporates the end point, the system that reaches its completion in absolute knowledge needs to question its own limits (the negativity of the limit imposed on self-sufficient fullness that constantly escapes the process of appropriation and self-affection) only to the degree that the repetition and the recollection of its moments force themselves upon it against its will. There is no way out of this closed, in-itself circulating system of intertwined circles. It is, in fact, a form of naïveté to seek a way out that amounts to the desire to repeatedly fold this way out back again into the self-sufficient circle. As Bataille writes, “It is likely the absence of an exit, the impossibility of discovering a path that does not return to its starting point after a detour that does not ever mislead us, only by deliberate foolishness” (OC, II, 89–90). Or this fragment of a sentence: “from the inside of the narrow circle that delimits human possibilities today, the short incursions outside (lasting only a very short time) and the recourse to outdated forms, situated from the very beginning within the scope of possibilities are . . .” (OC, II, 426). The attempted escapes are naïve because they represent only incursions and excursions into an outside that is always already an inside. By contrast, outbursts might perhaps be able to provide a glimpse of the other—outbursts whose violence reveals that they are not grounded in the starting or the end point of absolute knowledge. Bataille writes:

It happens, it is true, that due to a repressed rage, due to a subdued disgust, we prefer to play a vague indifference with blank eyes, even when, for example, we find ourselves on an intellectual plane, the only one that still represents the distant possibility of ineluctably smashing in the windows, and consequently the only plane on which it is repugnant for everyone when someone proceeds without any regard to the already established positions. (OC, II, 84)

The operation of the outburst, the breaking of the windowpanes (or the cornea of the eye of a horse: vitre), is not merely an affective-emotional act; it is intellectual in nature. The only possible way out, however eccentric, consists of breaking the mastery at the heart of every intellectual endeavor that believes to have sublated the affective dimension. With regard to what is at stake here, this means that only when it is shown in a discursive manner that “the summit of elevation is in practice confused with a sudden fall of unheard-of violence,” can it become plain that the fullness of the circle and the center are simultaneously nothing.81 For this, however, an excessive intensification of the elevation, that is, of the movement of sublation, is necessary in opposition to its well-tempered Hegelian form. Only in this way can the unthought aspect of the starting point repeat itself at the climax of elevation, namely, as the arbitrariness of the beginning unmastered by rules, the completely void nothingness, the difference and the limit that had to be excluded as objects unworthy of philosophy. What makes it clear that this repetition cannot be a return to the origins is that it was precisely the origin that had to dispense with the nothingness through the katabole so that an upsurge could begin through the moments of a system. Thus, repetition ceases to be a recollection or the bending backward of a result into its own beginnings. Repetition is neither conditioned by a reflex nor reflexive.

What can it, therefore, mean that Bataille had tried to introject Nietzsche into Hegel? Let us first recall the circumstances that led Nietzsche to the discovery of the idea of the eternal return: “That day I was walking through the woods along the lake Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me.”82 Encountering the pyramidal monolith as the emblem of the will to halt the limits of catastrophe, the idea overcomes Nietzsche, the Heraclitean idea, as Bataille writes, of the “deleterious absurdity of time.”83 But to the degree that this figure of the eternal return describes the circularity of all becoming and fading away, Nietzsche himself remains caught inside the metaphysics of the circle. In spite of their proximity, this fact did not escape Bataille: “Nietzsche was condemned by circumstances to imagine his break with conformist ideology as an Icarian adventure. The urge that obliged him brutally to reject bourgeois tawdriness and conventional morality did not come from below, from the submerged upheaval of the human masses.”84 Only because, as in Zarathustra, all these figures and representations of the eternal return resist their unification in one image (thus the power of time manifests itself in the negation of its own representations) can the feast of the return to lifeless dust occur before every representation. Therefore, the Hegelian system as an attempt at mastering time has a close resemblance to the powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei. The objects that turn into dust through their erosion are the moments subverted by time (negativity), which are the building blocks of the system: “For it is the foundation of things that has fallen into a bottomless void. And what is fearlessly conquered—no longer in a duel where the death of the hero is risked against that of the monster, in exchange for an indifferent duration—is not an isolated creature; it is the very void and the vertiginous fall, it is TIME.”85 For Bataille, therefore, the return is no longer the revolution of one of the extreme poles into another opposing pole. It is not a duel between an individual risking his life and another, not a duel between absolute knowledge and negativity, in which the simulacrum of the descent into oppositions already dissolved into moments occurs always only within a fixed identity, but rather the opening through the outburst onto the vertiginous fall of time or the uncontrollable power of death. The return of death, the absolute restlessness, is the un-ground that always already consolidates the circle of dualized and dueling opposites (which are caught in the process of construction and demolishment) as fixed representations of its own self in order to bring about the downfall of this circle in an endless movement of substitutions, which will themselves suffer the same fate.

The attempt to think the power of the subversive force of absolute negativity beyond its definition as work produces once again a figure that can resist its precipitations only for an instant. The return, thus, appears to be only a name for nameless negativity. As particularized space the power of the negative is un-space; as particularized time it is un-time. As a result, the power of the negative and of death—which (in itself) marks both the Hegelian system and its collapse as well as all the perishing figures through which the power of absolute negativity names itself—is no longer graspable. Rather, the power of the negative is a “doing” that defers every representation (Repräsentation) and re-presentation (Vergegenwärtigung) on the level of textuality and forever postpones its own presentation (Darstellung). In the erosion of words, names, and oppositions, every operation, especially that of sublation, only the power of the negative repeats itself.

It was precisely this deferral of repetition, the un-time and the un-space that it makes visible in its repetition, that we have called initially and necessarily only provisionally the phantasm.

5

Phenomenology and Phantasmatology

The light, the brilliance of the appearing which permits vision, is the common source of phantasia and of the phainesthai.

—Jacques Derrida1

The three stages of the “faithful” reconstruction of the consecutive steps in the becoming of Spirit presented in a reversed order and their simultaneous deconstruction as moments and spheres of absolute knowledge appeared to us so far as Bataille’s attempt to inscribe Hegel’s system in a space-time dis-continuum that philosophy cannot master although it itself co-created it. Such an undertaking, however, presupposes an even more intimate proximity to Hegel than the one we have highlighted up to this point: an at first simulated agreement with every premise of the system or, more specifically, with what is called phenomenology.

Therefore, it is no surprise that we can discover in Bataille the projected plan of a phenomenology, a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness”—the title that Hegel gave to the first edition of the Phenomenology. Bataille writes the following in a lecture written for the College of Sociology: “Why should I not admit, in fact, that it is possible that I am creating a phenomenology and not a science of society?”2 Bataille’s agreement with Hegel is primarily the result of their mutual rejection of the methods of science. Both Bataille and Hegel equate the Kantian concept of experience that underlies science (the reproduction of empirical intuitions under the guidance of the concept of the object) with the limited nature of natural consciousness. The experience of the object suppresses the subjective moment in that which as object stands against the subject. Thus, for Hegel and Bataille it is the phenomenon that occupies the position of the object, which secures the possibility of experiencing the subjective aspects of the objective. Bataille writes: “Quite the contrary, I have emphasized, and will continue to do so, that the phenomena I attempt to describe are lived by us. And they are not only lived. A moment ago I used the term ‘essential.’ I think, in fact, that they constitute the essential of what is lived by us and, if you like, the heart of existence animating us.”3 As the term vécu (lived) indicates, experience coincides here with the post-Hegelian concept of lived experience. But an exclusive interpretation from the perspective of Lebensphilosophie would overlook the specificity of the Hegelian concept of experience that Bataille is trying to appropriate for his own purposes. For Hegel, experience does not by any means designate the merely subjective experience of the human subject. Rather, and above all, it refers to the self-experience of Spirit as historical self-affection in the reappropriation of its alienation. The self-experience of Spirit is an experience of its phenomena as moments of its becoming. As subjectivity, Spirit externalizes and alienates itself in its phenomena, which are then reappropriated and recollected once again as its own in the process of experience. Spirit is not the natural consciousness of the particular individual but absolute subject. The object of the science of the experience of consciousness is the experience of Spirit as it appears to itself: “Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience.”4 Thus, the Hegelian concept of experience is significantly different from the traditional empirically determined concept of experience. It describes the transition from one object to another. For if the first object is the “being-for-consciousness of the first in-itself,” in the movement of science this relation itself is objectified.5 The naturally given object is replaced by another object that is the result of a process of becoming: “From the present viewpoint, . . . the new object shows itself to have come about through a reversal of consciousness itself.”6 Since what first appeared as the object for consciousness sinks “to the level of its way of knowing it, and since the in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the in-itself” (as the concept of reversal makes it clear), “a new pattern of consciousness comes on the scene as well”: “But it is just this necessity itself, or the origination of the new object, that presents itself to consciousness without its understanding how this happens, which proceeds for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness.”7 Only from the perspective of absolute knowledge can Hegel assert (for us) that with the becoming-for-consciousness of the first in-itself a new and this time true object would in fact emerge for consciousness behind its back. However, the reversal of consciousness that creates this new object by allowing the first one to go under is not for consciousness: in spite of the reversal (which turns into an object its first experience of an object), consciousness itself remains for itself a natural consciousness and its immediacy is not sublated for it. Behind its back, however, absolute knowledge has always already determined its turning toward a new object as movement and becoming without the natural and immediate consciousness ever becoming conscious of how this happens to it. In away, absolute knowledge has always already cheated this consciousness out of its immediacy by defining the object of consciousness as an in-itself, that is, as an object that itself requires a further reflection upon its relation to the first object, so that in a second, true object the relation of consciousness to the in-itself can become for it a new shape of consciousness. The sinking down of the first object, of the in-itself, through the reflection of consciousness upon the singularity of its immediate intuition implies an annihilation of the immediacy of the first experience that the sublation into another shape of consciousness cannot hide. Without this abandonment of immediacy—without the determination of immediacy as a moment—which can unsettle only the abstract unity of natural consciousness, neither the process nor the movement could get under way. We must add that the determination of natural consciousness as abstract unity represents an always already belatedly accomplished anticipation of absolute knowledge, an appropriation that has already determined in advance that something as an abstract unity must become a concrete unity. Thus, experience for Hegel is the self-affection of the absolute subject through the self-appropriation of its phenomena, the constitution in the process of becoming of a presence posited as absolute knowledge, which might very well be mediated but is nevertheless an unbroken presence. As a concept inspired by the philosophy of life, the concept of lived experience that we assumed to be present in Bataille’s term vécu calls for precisely such a kind of fullness. But does the “subjective experience,” “man’s recognition of himself,” employed by Bataille indeed have this meaning of fullness?8 The insistence on the immediacy of lived experience and the experienced would seem to confirm this suspicion. Yet, as, for example, Bataille’s book Erotism proves, the immediacy of experience is a figure that Bataille borrowed from his dialogues with Hegel but also turned it against him. Bataille submits indeed that “in Hegel’s mind the immediate is bad, and Hegel would certainly have identified what I call experience with the immediate.”9 In order to explain in more detail this turn against Hegel that manifests itself in the strategic use of immediacy, we need to highlight some other aspects of the term vécu. Like the Hegelian concept of experience that presupposes a reversal or turning around of consciousness, that is, an annihilation of consciousness as natural immediacy, the Bataillean concept of the vécu, “subjective and immediate experience,” also implies an unsettling of immediate consciousness. But apart from the fact that here we are dealing with a shattering rather than with a reversal of natural consciousness, the Bataillean operation is also triggered by something other than the Hegelian reversal, namely, the analysis of the unconscious, unconscious mechanisms, and the repressed. Bataille attributes a mediating role to psychoanalysis to open the way for the return of the expelled back into consciousness, whereby the latter is subjected to an alteration. The expelled element cannot be experienced or lived in an immediate fashion: for that an alteration, a shattering of consciousness in its identity (as natural and immediate) is necessary. Bataille remarks:

Doubtless, having discerned the force of active repulsion by experiencing it—at least in memory—it was possible for me to describe its external effects. And these effects are plain enough and significant enough for me to be able to claim to have finally attained biology’s objectivity. I have no doubt, however, that I would have perceived nothing if my thought had not, at the beginning, followed a process that is entirely foreign to that of a biologist’s thinking, namely, the analysis of lived experience.10

Therefore, what Bataille calls experience presupposes, just like its Hegelian equivalent, an alteration of consciousness. Although he calls this experience immediate, immediacy does not come first. On the contrary, as Bataille holds, “our lived experiences may be considered to a certain extent to be fabricated.”11 The immediacy of the experienced is to a certain extent mediated. The same is true for the process that makes the experiences possible: the alteration of consciousness is also mediated. Bataille writes: “Movements of repulsion would not have been able to enter the realm of consciousness, therefore, without detours.”12 He then adds: “Therefore, I was thinking ahead when I described them as being immediately apparent. My being able to put forward this idea was due to an abnormal conscious perception subsequent to scientific discoveries assimilated throughout the course of a life devoted in part to systematic knowledge.”13 Nevertheless, the mediated immediacy of the experienced—which was made possible by the alteration of consciousness through its shattering by the expelled, the repressed, and the other of consciousness—no longer coincides with the abstract unity of natural consciousness, which is supposed to be sublated in the self-consciousness constantly anticipated by absolute knowledge. For what Bataille calls experience merely imitates the Hegelian movement of the reflection of self-consciousness, with the difference, however, that the bad immediacy that was expelled, allowed to fall and sink down, returns on the level of self-consciousness (that is itself shattered or, as we have said, aborted). On the level of this “self-consciousness,” then, the annihilation of the abstract unity of natural consciousness is no longer for us but for it. What it experiences when it turns to what happens behind its back (the expulsion, the letting fall down) does not produce a new, true object (the reflection on the manner of its immediate intuition), but rather incorporating into itself the fallen element, through this experience, it prevents the deception through which a unified self-consciousness could become possible. As a result, consciousness reaches on the level of what Hegel called self-consciousness, the state of absolute fragmentation. This consciousness, just like self-consciousness, is also a result of becoming, but it did not undergo this becoming from the perspective of a full presence that came into its own without the knowledge of this consciousness. It is a consciousness that forever blocks the possibility of the total transparency of consciousness in a self-consciousness (but also in itself) through the taking in of the repressed. With the integration of consciousness with what had to be expelled (if it is to be negated as abstract unity so as to be able to pass over into a concrete unity), the mediation that can only be thought theologically and teleologically also loses its power to generate stages and moments. The Bataillean concept of experience, therefore, cannot be called either mediated or immediate. And it is certainly not a mediated immediacy. Derrida holds: “Now, if in its major moments, interior experience breaks with mediation, interior experience is not, however, immediate. It does not pleasurably consume an absolutely close presence, and, above all, it cannot enter into the movement of mediation, as can the Hegelian immediate.”14 Thus, this Bataillean experience that is neither immediate nor mediated ultimately escapes the grip of phenomenology. Although it is “obtained” through the traversal of the stages of phenomenology as a residue produced by but never fully mastered by phenomenology, this experience cannot be sublated. Bataille remarks:

In other words, what I am attempting presupposes that revealing the unconscious is possible, and by definition, the unconscious is placed beyond the reach of phenomenological description. It has been impossible to have access to it except through methods that are scientific. These methods are well known: We are talking about sociology of primitive peoples and about psychoanalysis, disciplines that certainly raise many difficulties in the register of method, but which cannot be reduced to phenomenology.15

Bataille plays off science against Hegel’s phenomenological method, which has shown that it cannot account for mere experience. But it would be a mistake to believe that consequently Bataille valorizes the Kantian concept of experience over Hegel’s. The sciences that we are talking about here—ethnography and psychoanalysis—can no longer be grasped by the Kantian concept of experience. Moreover, their object is heterogeneous to knowledge and consciousness. According to Bataille, “Psychoanalysts are reduced to bending the scientific principle in an exceptional manner: Their method is communicated only through subjective experience—every psychoanalyst having first to be psychoanalyzed since objective understandings are clearly insufficient.”16 The same applies to the ethnologies of Lucien Lévi-Bruhl, Durkheim, and Mauss. For what is seeking to gain access to consciousness here—the unconscious, strange practices, the mentality of primitive societies—can be received only by a shattered consciousness. The experience of this other, in turn, prevents the reunification of the dislocated consciousness of the perceiving subject.

In contrast, regardless of how deeply it penetrated the experience of the negative, Hegelian phenomenology only managed to reach the edge of the heterogeneous: “something that, remaining heterogeneous to the conscious mind, could not be apprehended and represented in Hegel’s mind except from the outside. Perhaps what Hegel described is actually only the shadow projected through the conscious region of the mind by a reality that, as unconscious, remained unknown, or very dimly known by him. . . . Hegelian phenomenology represents the mind as essentially homogeneous.”17 If the phenomenological method thus turns out to be incapable of “simply describing apparent lived experience,” of accounting for the experience of the negative and the heterogeneous, the reason is that experience or lived experience already implies the apprehension of the negative (itself) that was made possible by the shattering of the homogeneous and unified structure of the subject.18 This negativity, however, must be excluded by the phenomenological method. But inasmuch as the experience of this negativity presupposes a subject already fragmented in this process, and inasmuch as that which is experienced proves itself to be in its appearance the subjective other of the subject (although the unified structure of this subject is already exploded), the phenomenological method might perhaps still be capable of accounting for this experience unknown by natural consciousness. Bataille thus muses: “So it seems that I had scarcely any grounds for impugning the phenomenological method just now. And, indeed, that would be the case if the lived experiences I speak of . . . could be compared with common experience.”19

But there are other even more significant reasons for Bataille’s insistence on a modified phenomenological method whose object is absolute negativity. First let us remark that Hegel called experience “the phenomenal as the phenomenal.”20 Experience attests to Being as it appears in appearance. What presences in presentation is the mere appearance of Being. Yet, as Heidegger has shown, the appearance of the unconcealed rests in phainesthai as “the appearance that shows itself.”21 The absolute subject that Hegel calls Spirit appears in it. Light itself presences in the light of its appearance. The process of this self-affection and this appearance of light presents the self-experience of light. Inasmuch as Spirit is primarily the subject and not the object of phenomenology, it experiences itself in the process of its sublated appearances as absolute transparency. In fact, the word phaino, the root of phenomenon, means in its active form to bring to light, allowing to appear, to shine, to glow, to glare; in its passive form, it means to be born, to begin, and so on. At the same time, however, phaino also represents the root of phantasia and phantasma, which refer to a representation or an image, an appearance, a vision, a sign sent by the gods, an omen, a miracle with or without a vision, a ghost or a spirit. Thus, the phainesthai and the phantasma are bright, since a bright light springs forth from both of them. But the question emerges whether that which appears in the phenomenon is in fact the same thing as that which comes to light in the phantasm. Whether the light of the phantasm is capable of disturbing that of the one of phenomenology.

Let us briefly outline what makes fantasy unique in contrast to the imagination (whether productive or reproductive imagination). Kant calls fantasy the faculty of the imagination that produces arbitrary images that are taken to be either internal or external experiences. These fantasies, which do not seem to be following any laws, should not be confused with empirical experiences. Hegel follows the same path when he perceives in fantasizing an isolation or a separation of the different modes of cognition such as intuition, representation, and recollection. Thus, it belongs to the nature of fantasy to defer the definition of these modes of cognition as moments. Fantasy produces the dismembering of the modes of cognition in question as a result of which its creations become necessarily one-sided. However, this definition of fantasy as a dismembering force that makes everything one-sided is older than Kant or Hegel. It goes back as far as Plato, for example, in his reflections on art. In The Republic, far removed from every truth, the artist makes a copy of the object prepared by the carpenter for the purpose of actual use and in accordance with the imitation of an Idea, but he can re-create only a fraction, a shadow image, or a perspective (phantasma) of this Idea. This single perspective, this one-sided view of the Idea already imitated by the carpenter, displaces the Idea, its immediate presence, into an image that captures only an arbitrary or even a completely superficial aspect. This one view, this one-sided perspective (even in the Nietzschean sense) characterizes the activity of the fantasy that dismembers the Idea. In light of this tradition, then, the phantasm is the displaced presence of the Idea as it appears in this impure element that causes the displacement or the deferral of the presence of the Idea. What appears in the phantasm is a light in which only an image, a mirage, a shadow image of the truth comes to light.

We can discover even in Bataille a condemnation of the image and the fantasy that is tied to this tradition. A fragmented world of individual insufficiencies gives rise to a precipitous production of fictions that bear witness to the forgetting of Being. Bataille asks: “But what is the meaning of these painted and written phantoms, invoked to make the world in which we wake a little less unworthy to be haunted by our idle lives? Everything is false in images of fantasy. And everything is false with a lie that knows neither hesitation nor shame.”22 However, this condemnation does not criticize the image and fantasy because of their one-sided perspectival displacement of presence, but because these fantasy formations suggest a dreamlike, self-sufficient reality. In addition, because these dream formations try to eradicate the particularity and the dismemberment of the subject that produces them in perfectly rounded fictive creations. If the Greek meaning of phantasia (image) is “coming to the fore” or “coming to presence,” then we can also say that what the philosophical tradition finds objectionable in the image and fantasy (the spontaneity of its creations, the fragmentation of the modes of cognition, the perspectival one-sidedness) is accepted in Bataille by the fully particularized subject (whose totalizing and synthetic view is exploded perspectivally so that it produces only a fragmented whole of images) in the phantasm.23 It imagines (bildet sich ein) its creations, the one-sided images that can no longer be assembled into a whole, whereby it gets hold of the “truth” that is only the truth, the presence, of a being dispersed in its very essence. If what shows itself and shines in appearance is light, if in the final analysis only the light is present in the light of the phainesthai and the phantasia, then what appears in the brightness of the phantasm as a phenomenon can be only a splitter of light. At the same time, this light, in which only fragments come to light, must itself be fragmented.

This is the light of phantasmatology, a phantasmatology that is the product of the deconstruction of phenomenology. In the light of phantasmatology, phenomenology necessarily appears fragmentary. Insofar as the eye is the organ of enlightenment, the organon of theoretical sense that underlies phenomenology, we may assume that phantasmatology does not leave this highest of all organs or its relation to light untouched.

Phenomenology presupposes the definition of the eye as the theoretical organ. In the Hegelian system, the discussion of light and the sensory organ belongs to the domain of the philosophy of nature, the weak link in the chains of circles. Didn’t Hegel himself highlight the difficulty of demonstrating reason in nature? Therefore, the necessary dislocation of the eye from its privileged position, the deconstruction of light in its ability to make its own transparence appear, would thus require the traversal of Hegel’s philosophy of nature. Thus, the three spheres of Hegel’s philosophy that Bataille dismantles would have to be prefaced by a fourth sphere. For Bataille, the stage where this step takes place is the Dossier de l’oeil pinéal. Yet it necessarily follows from everything we have said so far that the analysis of this “concrete” phantasm is just as unlikely to put us in the position to uncover a positive law that would once and for all explain to us what phantasmatology is.

The dispersal of nature (of its concept) would merely repeat one more time the movement of absolute negativity, however, yet with the significant difference that what prepares itself in nature as light and sight is prevented from ever reaching its maturity.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 130.

2. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 256.

3. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:528.

4. See Gasché, “The Witch Metapsychology.” We also need to mention here a work that has been published in the meantime that—although written from a different perspective—discusses Bataille’s obsession with the pineal body in a way with which we are in agreement: Hollier, Against Architecture. See also Limousin, Bataille.

5. Can we begin a foreword to a work this way, by disavowing the personal, but also in part, the methodological and epistemological motivations that gave rise to it? Why not, indeed? As Hegel writes, “Many turnings are necessary, however, before Mind frees itself in coming to consciousness” (The History of Philosophy, 35).

6. During a seminar that I conducted in the department of Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at the Freie Universität Berlin in the summer of 1972, I completed most of this work on the Dossier de l’oeil pinéal.

7. Finas, La crue, 14.

8. To define these texts as literary would only amount to a submission of the work to a “departmentalization of the Spirit,” which is the work of philosophy and the institutions sustaining it.

9. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 58–59.

10. See Bataille’s essay “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist” (Visions of Excess, 32–44). See also Hollier, Against Architecture.

11. Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis,” 12:111.

12. Finas, La crue, 19.

13. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 268.

14. “Subjectivity is first encountered in life, which is the opposite of extrinsicality. The heart, liver, eye are not independent individualities on their own account; the hand, severed from the body, decays. The organic body is still a whole composed of a multiplicity of mutually external members, but each individual organ subsists only in the subject, and the Notion exists as the power which unites them” (Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 210.)

15. “Moreover, so much of music as is adapted to the sound of the voice and to the sense of hearing is granted to us for the sake of harmony. And harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself, and rhythm too was given by them for the same reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways which prevail among mankind generally, and to help us against them” (Plato, Timaeus, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 1175).

16. Smell and touch, which have always been considered by philosophy to belong to the lower sense organs, also have to be brought into this praxis of reading. For example, consider the following statements: “SCENT OF WORDS.—Every word has its scent; there is harmony and discord of scents, and so too of words” (Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, 7:255). Also, “How do I find the ‘right’ word? How do I choose among words? Without doubt it is sometimes as if I were comparing them by fine differences of smell” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 186).

17. Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, 2:418. [All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. Trans.] Subsequent parenthetical citations to Oeuvres complètes will be shortened to “Oc.” Roman numerals refer to volume numbers; arabic numerals designate page numbers.

18. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 372.

19. Ibid., 373.

20. Lacan, Écrits, 294. See also the following biblical passage: “For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths” (2 Timothy 4:3–4; The Holy Bible, 230).

21. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” 18.

22. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 373.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 555.

25. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 81.

26. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 267.

27. See also Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye”; and Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression.”

28. Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, 10:221.

29. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 5.

30. Ibid., 71.

31. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 510.

32. In order to highlight the connection between the dismembered body of a text and the dismembered body of the reading (and writing) subject and the problem of pleasure, we will quote here only the following passage by Serge Leclaire: “One could say that just as the organic order tends to reduce the tensions of differences according to a program of ideal homeostasis, so the order of pleasure tends to valorize the sensible interval by which this same-and-other-body opens onto the absolute of jouissance” (Psychoanalyzing, 50.) See also Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text.

33. In the English translation, this quotation is translated in the following footnote: “‘(1) A mental act which is spontaneous and as it were automatic; (2) an invalid and irregular association of ideas.’—N.B. In French (and similarly in German) psychiatry ‘délire’ has the meaning of a delusional state” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:59).

34. Ibid., 5:529.

35. See also the following passage: “Take up any political newspaper and you will find that here and there the text is absent and in its place nothing except the white paper is to be seen” (Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 15:139).

36. Just like the blatant differences between the components of hybrid words, and just like the deceitful etymologies built upon homophonies, the empty places and, respectively, the “black lines” bear witness to the insistence of pleasure: “To produce pleasure, in sum, something like a perceptible rift must appear; an interval, a difference, a nothing has to open up that can, for the space of an instant, offer an empty reflection of the absolute of jouissance, a moment in which tension is annulled or, better yet, in which the terms that maintain the interval of difference are effaced” (Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing, 47).

37. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 142.

38. See Koyré, “Note sur le langue et la terminologie hégéliennes.”

39. Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, 1:52. In subsequent parenthetical citations, references to Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie will be shortened to “PM.” Roman numerals refer to the volume numbers; arabic numerals designate page numbers.

40. Kristeva, “Bataille, Experience and Practice,” 249.

41. Ibid.

42. Finas, La crue, 10.

43. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 31.

44. See also Hollier, Against Architecture, 128; and Ferenczi, “On Obscene Words.”

45. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 129.

46. “Again, this is not the end of philosophy, but rather, the end of the philosopher as the sovereign and primary form of philosophical language. And perhaps to all those who strive above all to maintain the unity of the philosopher’s grammatical function—at the price of the coherence, even of the existence of philosophical language—we could oppose Bataille’s exemplary enterprise: his desperate and relentless attack on the preeminence of the philosophical subject” (Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” 42).

47. Bataille, Waldberg, and White, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 51. Translation modified.

48. Ibid., 51.

49. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:531. Translation slightly modified.

50. Bataille, “The Mask,” 63.

51. Ibid., 64.

52. Ibid., 67.

53. Sollers, Logique, 254.

54. Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing, 54–69.

55. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 188. See also Aristotle, Topics, 23–25.

56. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 128.

57. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 211.

58. See Plato’s Cratylus, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 467.

59. See de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

60. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 274.

61. French children have until recently learned to read with this sequence of syllables. In more general terms, it designates the elementary rules of any enterprise.

62. Freud, “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis,” 23:205.

63. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 17:72.

64. Freud, “Outline,” 23:205.

65. Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” 242–43.

66. Leiris, “Du temps de Lord Auch,” 29–84.

67. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 85. See also the following passage: “I stretched out on the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the Milky Way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky” (Bataille, Story of the Eye, 56).

68. See Plato’s Philebus, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 1086–1150.

69. Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 9.

CHAPTER 1

1. Aristotle, The Metaphysics, 380–81.

2. Herder, “Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769.”

3. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, 88.

4. Bollack, “Mythische Deutung,” 67.

5. We accept here this reversed relation between myth and logos as a strategic working hypothesis because of the limitations imposed on us by our work with regard to this problem. The examination of the authors of Romanticism and German Idealism, however, renders the relation between myth and logos much more complex and requires a differentiation that the binary opposition of the two terms does not allow. This insight will appear in our discussions of Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie.

6. Bollack, “Mythische Deutung,” 71.

7. Ibid., 73.

8. Ibid., 99.

9. Ibid., 94–95. See also the following passage from Jean-Pierre Vernant: “But it is fair to say that throughout Greek tradition—whenever, that is, it does not simply ignore myth—the attitude is the same and myth is seen in one of two ways: either it expresses in a different, allegorical or symbolic form the same truth as logos expresses directly or, alternatively, it conveys what is not the truth—that which, by its nature, lies outside the domain of truth and which consequently eludes knowledge and has nothing to do with speech articulated according to the rules of demonstration. Plato often appears to reject muthos utterly as, for instance, when in the Philebus (14a) he writes of an argument, logos, which, being undermined by its own internal contradictions, destroys itself as if it were a muthos; or when, in the Phaedo (61b), he has Socrates say that muthos is not his affair but that of the poets—those same poets who, in the Republic are exiled, as liars, from the city. However this same Plato himself grants an important place in his writings to myth, as a means of expressing both those things that lie beyond and those that fall short of strictly philosophical language” (Myth and Society, 212–13).

10. “Now those of the school of Hesiod and all those who, as theologians, only considered what is plausible to them in this connection, and made little of us. For by making the gods the principles and deriving everything from the gods, they say that those who do not eat nectar and ambrosia are born mortal. Clearly these words were comprehensible to them as well, and yet it is beyond our grasp what they had said about the use of causes” (Aristotle, The Metaphysics, 68; translation modified).

11. Bollack, “Mythische Deutung,” 101.

12. Vernant, Myth and Society, 124.

13. Bollack, “Mythische Deutung,” 95.

14. Vernant, Myth and Thought, 379–80.

15. Ibid., 372.

16. Herder, “Journal,” 356.

17. Ibid., 357.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 351.

20. Ibid., 433.

21. Ibid., 438.

22. Ibid., 454.

23. Ibid., 466.

24. Ibid., 438–39.

25. Schelling, “Über Mythen,” 15–17.

26. Ibid., 16.

27. Ibid., 23.

28. Ibid., 32.

29. Ibid.

30. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, 85.

31. Ibid., 87. Translation modified.

32. Ibid., 70.

33. Ibid., 71.

34. Ibid., 72. Translation modified.

35. Ibid., 82.

36. Ibid., 64.

37. Ibid., 82.

38. Ibid., 83.

39. Ibid. Translation modified.

40. Ibid., 87.

41. Ibid., 88.

42. Ibid., 90.

43. Ibid., 88. Translation modified.

44. See also PM, II, 670–71.

45. Nemesis, God, and the law of the world are different names and facets of the very same thing: this way the ambiguity and indeterminacy itself is displaced onto God and not only onto man’s supra-historical primal consciousness of God. We will not explain here in more detail why the divine being is not annulled but “only suspended” in the tension of its potentialities and is required to “really set itself into the act” (PM, II, 91). We will only mention that the reorganization and the reversal of these potentialities make up the divine life itself, and the being of the world that exists outside God is “only the suspended being of God.” The life of God is based on “the divine art of dissimulation, which in appearance affirms what it intends to negate, and vice versa, negates as appearance what it intends to affirm” (PM, II, 91–92). God in himself, suspended in the tension of his potentialities, sublates divine being even if, as Schelling assures us, only temporarily. He steps into the external alienation of the world in order to create himself as God. What the primal consciousness does—in that it does not preserve God in his potentiality but, to the contrary, really wills the possibility of the reversal—is staged by God himself. The whole system of concepts that Schelling will use regarding “the reemergence out of potentiality”—which represents the transition to mythology and which he does not want to be understood as a fall (PM, II, 147)—characterizes God’s stepping outside himself as well. We mention this here only to make it clear that God himself is divided in himself by the same chaos with which, according to Hesiod, mythology begins. That his unity must remain continually suspended and forever pending is evident. The possibility of mythology is always already inscribed in the concept of the monotheism that Schelling places at the beginning and, therefore, in the concept of God as well.

46. For the problem of the immemorial, see Schelling, The Ages of the World.

47. An arche, however, which, as a detailed reading shows, always already contains its difference and, therefore, makes possible its crossing out.

48. Since so far we have talked about only dislocation and displacement from the inside to the peripheries, we will have to return to this contrary movement in more detail.

49. Schelling must have sensed this difficulty, since the release of God into his possibility by a free decision is an attempt to tackle this problem.

50. For an exhaustive discussion of Metis, see Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence.

51. Hesiod, Theogony, 19, 33.

52. Schelling solves the problem that she is a daughter of the Titans and does not come from Zeus’s line of gods by borrowing from Hesiod the idea that she receives this role belatedly from Zeus.

53. Obeying Gaia’s and Uranus’s advice, Zeus swallowed her.

54. It remains to be seen in what way Schelling’s Philosophie der Offenbarung approaches this goal. This question, however, goes beyond the limits of the present work.

55. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 42.

56. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 14.

57. See also Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus.

58. See Herodotus, The Histories, 24; as well as Plato’s Cratylos, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues.

59. See also Derrida, Of Grammatology; as well as PM, II, 546.

60. See also PM, II, 546.

61. We list here the most essential meanings of katabole from Passow’s Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache: (1) To throw down, downwards, downstairs; to push down; to plunge; to hurl; (2) to sow seeds in the ground; (3) to violently throw down, tear down, demolish, destroy; (4) to bear witness, to take a deposition, certify in writing; (5) to forget, throw away, reject; (6) to butcher (a sacrificial animal); (7) to lay down the ground, found, begin, open, start, endow.

62. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 39.

63. Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” 18:273.

64. We should remember here the actual androgyny of the god who surrounds himself primarily with women.

65. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 47.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., 42.

68. Bollack, “Mythische Deutung,” 96.

69. Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” 156.

70. “[Bataille’s] theoretical writings . . . and the anthropological and political studies both link and dissolve the themes of ideological, religious, or scientific systems. These two sides of Bataille’s written productions proceed by affirming theoretical, conceptual, and representational positions. But they negativize and relativize these affirmations” (Kristeva, “Bataille, Experience and Practice,” 247.) See also Barthes, “The Outcomes of the Text.”

71. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 79–80.

72. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 143.

73. For the French concept of homme, see OC, II, 231, 238–39. We should also consider an analysis of the Greek homoios and its relation to the concept of homoiosis. For such an analysis, see Hollier, Against Architecture.

74. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 79–80.

75. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 168.

76. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 31.

77. Since the human being is a superfluous and useless creature, we could think that it is nature or the universe that is subordinated to usefulness, and this is how the human being distinguishes itself from everything else. But as we will see later, the concept of usefulness and utility describes only particular practices of social organization of man.

78. See the fragment, Bataille, “Lorsque M. Meyerson . . .” (OC, II, 167–69).

79. Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volumes Three and Four, 50.

80. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 47.

81. Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volumes Three and Four, 100.

82. “The universe must be splintered apart; respect for the universe unlearned; what we have given the unknown and the whole must be taken back and given to the closest, what’s ours” (Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 140).

83. We can detect here the perpetual displacement that Bataille performs. Only an attentive pursuit of this gliding can save us from a judgment like Sartre’s, according to which Bataille’s scientism distorts his thought. A judgment like this is based on a faith in science itself as well as the already mentioned belief that there is such a thing as a thought that could exist in itself outside of textual movements. As the end of the fragment on Meyerson shows, Bataille does not make use of the instruments of science in order to think more clearly. On the other hand, we have seen with the examination of the concept of improbability that a scientific term is first bent back and forth before Bataille uses it to structure a given problem.

84. We will return to this term, which is explained in Bataille’s text “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” in OC, I, 220–26.

85. We examine this movement (which leads in Bataille’s text through the privileging of the isolated individual above the system to a “systematic” inscription of particularities and of the particular in a law) in more detail in our chapter on symbolic thinking.

86. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 53–56.

87. Bataille, Waldberg, and White, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 43.

88. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 10.

89. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 114.

90. Ibid., 116.

91. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81–82.Translation modified.

92. Ibid., 81.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid.

95. Hegel, The Hegel Reader, 173.

96. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1:79.

97. “The turning point that came when the philosopher emerged as distinct from the magus is characterized by this divulging of a religious secret, this extension of a reserved privilege to an open group, and the publicizing of a hitherto forbidden knowledge” (Vernant, Myth and Thought, 385–86).

98. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 96.

99. Sartre accused Bataille of mysticism in “Un nouveau mystique.” Alexandre Kojève has raised the same objection against Bataille, namely, that he is a mystic since he wants to speak the unspeakable. In his letter to Bataille from July 28, 1942, he wrote: “Wisdom . . . is implicitly present in your work [Inner Experience]. But it is only an implication. If you were to make it explicit, you would speak the way I do and would be a wise man. . . . If you do not make it explicit, you are but a philo-sopher. And that is exactly what you are. So I wish you could move from potential to the act, from philosophy to wisdom. But for that, you would have to reduce to nothingness that which is nothing, which is to say, you would have to reduce to silence the mystical part of your book.” In addition, see also the letter from July 10, 1950: “Furthermore, your attitude has never appeared to me to be ‘absurd.’ I have even thought about writing a book about silence, and you are one of the reasons for this future book. Not that there is anything new about ‘discursive silence,’ but you are the only one I know who practices it” (“Lettres à Georges Bataille,” 67). And the letter from December 19, 1950: “I am more and more convinced that the only possible attitude with regard to that of the ‘Hegelians’ is your attitude of ‘silence.’ Of course, inasmuch as history is not yet finished, we are obliged to speak of silence. But in the end, everything you say relates to the possibility of overcoming even ‘total’ (that is, circular or true) discourse” (68).

100. Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 28–29.

101. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 46. For a discussion of mysticism in Bataille’s later works, and its differentiation from Christianity, see OC, I, 553.

102. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 80.

103. Ibid., 79–80.

104. Ibid., 80.

105. Ibid.

106. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 114.

107. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 80.

108. Ibid.

109. Ibid., 12–13.

110. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 82.

111. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 80–81.

112. Ibid.

113. Ibid., 81.

114. Ibid.

115. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 110.

116. Ibid., 91.

117. Ibid., 106.

118. Ibid., 112.

119. Ibid., 109.

120. Ibid., 111.

121. Ibid., 88.

122. Ibid., 89.

123. Ibid., 88–89.

124. Ibid., 94–95.

125. Ibid.

126. Ibid., 97.

127. Ibid., 97–98. Translation slightly modified.

128. Ibid., 137.

129. Ibid., 138.

130. Ibid., 96.

131. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has argued in “The Detour” that in his writing on rhetoric Nietzsche overcomes the romantic longing still at work in The Birth of Tragedy: “For, fundamentally, what rhetoric destroys is the very possibility of continuing to speak the language of The Birth of Tragedy. That is, a certain ‘rhetoric’ (of course, unaware of itself as such) does this, a use of language that never ceases to doubt language itself and that assumes it possible to exceed within language the limits of language. It is less a question of style . . . than of the status or province of language. What rhetoric destroys is in reality the possibility of returning to myth. It reveals that any ‘return to myth,’ however vigilant one may be (and whatever may have been, in this case, the distance taken from romanticism, from F. Schlegel or Schelling), is in fact a return to allegory, to the philosophical use and interpretation of myths. Therefore, no new mythology is possible, no mythology, in any case, that philosophical discourse could imagine as being prior to itself. . . . Myth is rhetorical” (34).

132. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81.

133. Ibid.

134. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 114.

135. Ibid.

136. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 311.

137. Ibid., 40.

138. Ibid., 81.

139. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81.

140. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 111.

141. Ibid., 106.

142. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81.

143. Ades and Baker, Undercover Surrealism, 238.

144. Ibid.

145. Ibid.

146. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 45.

147. Ibid.

148. Ibid., 11.

149. Ibid.

150. Ibid., 55.

151. Ibid., 53.

152. Ibid., 55.

153. Ibid.

154. See also Foucault, The Order of Things.

155. Bataille rejected every attempt at systematization with the same decisiveness with which he repudiated the methodical approach in mythological representation. The mythological method cannot be systematic: “There is . . . only one way of judging it, which is to exclude every systematization” (OC, II, 414). Mythological representation is not in itself systematic, nor has the analysis of myth (which examines specific myths) anything systematic about it. But since we must take a stance on myth and cannot avoid passing judgment on it, the comparison with aesthetic judgment forces itself upon us: “—the impossibility of judging the value [of a myth] other than by way of a satisfaction similar to that provided by works of art” (OC, II, 415); “the analogy between aesthetic judgment and the judgment on mythological thought is pushed to the point that mythological thought excludes systematization as much as in a work of art” (OC, II, 414). Bataille’s explanations regarding this point are anything but clear. Of course, it would be necessary to connect these passages with particular Kantian arguments. However, in order to preempt from the very beginning any misunderstanding of what Bataille means by aesthetic judgment, we have to remember that this judgment manifests itself in that Bataille wants to “squeal like a pig” (in front of a painting by Dali [Visions of Excess, 28]) and writhe convulsively in front of the work of art. As the notes in the context of this discussion show, myths (whose value in a sense is judged only aesthetically) acquire a specifically political brisance in a concrete historical situation. The emphasis on the unsystematic aspect of the work of art and the aesthetic judgment, as well as of myth, is directed against particular philosophemes, ideologies, and scientific knowledge.

CHAPTER 2

1. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 41.

2. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 80.

3. Ibid.

4. Pautrat, “Nietzsche Medused,” 159.

5. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 823.

6. We cannot go into more detail here about the fact that eidos itself is always also image and primordial image—provided that the translation is actually appropriate.

7. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 184. Translation modified.

8. Ibid., 192.

9. Ibid., 202.

10. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 86. Translation modified.

11. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 203.

12. Ibid. Translation modified.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 204.

15. Ibid., 204–5. Translation modified.

16. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 86–87.

17. Ibid., 87.

18. Bataille must have known these passages from Kojève’s 1932–33 lectures by the time he wrote “The Pineal Eye”: he explicitly mentions them in his 1955 essay “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice” and describes them as Romantic.

19. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 87.

20. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 205.

21. Ibid., 203.

22. Ibid., 205.

23. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 87.

24. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 208. Translation modified.

25. Ibid., 209. Translation modified.

26. Ibid., 210.

27. Ibid., 214, 220. Translation modified.

28. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 90.

29. Ibid., 90.

30. We should, of course, keep in mind here that in Greek, Golgotha is referred to as “the place of the skulls.”

31. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 100.

32. Ibid., 34.

33. Ibid., 35.

34. Ibid., 40–41.

35. Ibid., 107. For a discussion of the difference between symbol and image in Nietzsche, see Jacobs, “Der stammelnde Text,” 1152–79.

36. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 49. Translation modified.

37. Ibid. Translation modified.

38. Ibid., 49–50. Translation modified.

39. Ibid., 50, 55.

40. Ibid., 45. Translation modified.

41. Ibid., 50, 128.

42. Ibid., 128.

43. Ibid., 67.

44. Ibid., 68, 139–40.

45. Ibid., 129.

46. Ibid., 75.

47. Ibid., 55.

48. Ibid., 45. Translation modified.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 35. Here Nietzsche writes: “But we must also include in our image of Apollo that delicate boundary which the dream image must not overstep lest it have a pathological effect (in which case mere appearance would deceive us as if it were crude reality).”

52. Ibid., 103.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., 726.

55. Ibid., 139.

56. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 26.

57. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:176.

58. See also Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.”

59. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:180–81.

60. Ibid., 110.

61. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:50.

62. Ibid. Emphasis added.

63. Ibid., 51.

64. Ibid.

65. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:166.

66. Ibid., 167, 186.

67. Ibid., 166.

68. Ibid.

69. Freud, “The Unconscious,” 14:177.

70. The function of hallucination (of the image as lived experience) is to make possible the real experience of this lack and to restore the possession of what had been lost through this reality-effect.

71. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:543.

72. Ibid., 547.

73. Ibid., 543.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid., 543, 546.

76. Ibid., 573–74.

77. Ibid., 407.

78. Ibid., 615.

79. Ibid., 493.

80. Ibid., 493, 492.

81. Ibid., 591–92. Translation modified.

82. Ibid., 592.

83. Ibid., 593. Emphasis in original.

84. Ibid., 612. Translation modified.

85. Ibid., 619.

86. Ibid., 4:102.

87. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:368.

88. Freud, “Infantile Neurosis,” 17:53.

89. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:370.

90. Bonaparte, Freud, and Kris, The Origins of Psycho-Analysis, 215–16.

91. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:459.

92. Ibid., 370.

93. Freud, “Infantile Neurosis,” 17:97.

94. Ibid., 119.

95. Ibid., 119–20.

96. Ibid., 97.

97. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” 15.

98. Ibid., 17.

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid., 18.

101. Ibid., 19, 18.

102. “Like myths, they claim to provide a representation of, and a solution to, the major enigmas which confront the child. Whatever appears to the subject as something needing an explanation or theory is dramatized as a moment of emergence, the beginning of a history” (ibid., 19). The theory of the phantasm is itself phantasmatic. The only difference is that it is not a theory between quotation marks and, as Freud explains in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it relies on the figurative language of science.

103. Freud, “The Unconscious,” 14:190–91.

104. Ibid.

105. Ibid. In order to support this claim, what we have said so far would have to be related to the obvious privilege that “The Unconscious” grants to pre-consciousness. Furthermore, we should also note that Freud extends the domain of fantasies over the entire psychic apparatus: besides the fully unconscious primal fantasies, there are pre-conscious fantasies that can become conscious, as well as fantasies that are consciously constructed like the daydreams. No psychic agency is free from fantasies.

106. In order to corroborate what we have said, we refer here to what Freud writes about the structure of the phantasm: “Such were his tenacity of fixation, . . . his extraordinary propensity to ambivalence, and (as a third trait in a constitution which deserves the name of archaic) his power of maintaining simultaneously the most various and contradictory libidinal cathexes, all of them capable of functioning side by side. . . . So it was that his [the Wolfman’s] mental life impressed one in much the same way as the religion of Ancient Egypt, which is so unintelligible to us because it preserves the earlier stages of its development side by side with the end-products, retains the most ancient gods and their attributes along with the most modern ones, and thus, as it were, spreads out upon a two-dimensional surface what other instances of evolution show us in the solid” (“Infantile Neurosis,” 17:118–19). Based on this quotation, we can identify the following traits: fixation, that is, the tenacity that leads to the perpetual return and repetition of the form as well as the content of the phantasm; ambivalence, that is, the construction of composite formations, and conjoint middles, etc.; the simultaneity of the different and contradictory; and the expansion into the area of the non-simultaneous. These characteristics coincide with those of the system Ucs., as they are enumerated by Freud in “The Unconscious.” We could also add to this list timelessness. In addition, we should mention the transformations of the logical relations (which Freud discusses in The Interpretation of Dreams), the significance of the subject in phantasmatic constructions (“A Child Is Being Beaten”), and the meaning of the temporal form of the present, etc. In the inhibition of all logical developments, through the predominance of proximity over succession, and through the conjunction of opposites into composite formations, the dream and the phantasm proceed in an essentially differential way. This becomes most obvious in the case of compromise formations.

107. Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 2:6.

108. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:150.

109. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:525. Some other images that regressive analysis encounters include, with regard to the origins of society, the murder of the primal father. In addition, we need to emphasize that Freud described his theory of the drive as a mythology. See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 18:56.

110. See also Leclaire, “Fantasme et théorie,” 62. In addition, consider the following passage: “The tearing of the veil was analogous to the opening of his eyes and to the opening of the window” (Freud, “Infantile Neurosis,” 17:101). It should not be overlooked—and this is quite significant for everything that is to follow—that the hole through which the phantasm is perceived belongs to the phantasm itself and forms a part of its mise-en-scène.

111. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” 14.

112. Freud, “The Unconscious,” 14:201–2.

113. Ibid., 202–3.

114. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” 18–19. In this context, we also need to mention the “accidental noise” discussed by Freud in “A Case of Paranoia,” 14:270.

115. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:616.

116. Freud, “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams,” 228.

117. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:295–96.

118. See also “Draft M,” in Bonaparte, Freud, and Kris, 206.

119. Ibid., 177.

120. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 46.

121. See also the essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in Lacan, Écrits, 412–44.

122. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 176.

123. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 67, 15.

124. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 87. Translation modified.

125. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 743.

126. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 10.

127. Ibid.

128. Ibid., 11.

129. Ibid.

130. Ibid., 12.

131. Ibid., 12–13.

132. Ibid., 13, 12.

133. Ades and Baker, Undercover Surrealism, 242.

134. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 74.

135. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:277.

136. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81.

137. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 220. Translation modified. See also Hegel: “[Consider] Logos, reason, the essence of the thing and of speech, of object (Sache) and talk (Sage)” (Hegel and the Human Spirit, 90).

138. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 82.

139. Ibid., 74.

140. Conception comes from the Latin conceptio and concipiere: to understand, originate, conceive (become pregnant), represent, imagine, grasp, etc.

141. Koyré, Mystiques, spirituels, alchimistes, 98.

142. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 82.

143. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 19.

144. See also Gasché, “L’avorton de la pensée,” 11–26.

145. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 77.

146. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 80.

147. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 80.

148. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 80.

149. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 82.

150. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 87.

151. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 1173.

152. Ibid., 743.

153. Ibid., 1174–75.

154. Ibid., 497.

155. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:808.

156. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two, 196.

157. Ibid., 167.

158. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 48.

159. We can see here why Bataille’s version of deconstruction is more radical than all the irrational attacks against logos and reason that are constantly being conducted in deconstruction’s name. It is not only more radical, more daring, but also on the border of the impossible—a concept that Bataille himself discusses: “Nevertheless, the introduction of a lawless intellectual series into the world of legitimate thought defines itself at the outset as the most arduous and audacious operation. And it is evident that if it were not practiced without equivocation, with a resolution and a rigor rarely attained in other cases, it would be the most vain operation” (Visions of Excess, 80).

160. Ibid., 81, 74.

161. This can be proved based on the analysis of the concrete individual images, in case the operations we have carried out so far on the terms with which we have tried to describe the phantasm are not sufficient.

162. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 87.

163. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 5.

164. Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, 33. For other discussions of the status of the comme, see Freud, New Introductory Lectures, 22:38–70; as well as Rey, Parcours de Freud, 150.

165. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:489.

166. Ibid.

167. Ibid., 319–20.

168. See “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 207–72. See also the essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in Lacan, Écrits, 412–44.

169. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:320.

170. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81.

171. See also the chapter “Plato’s Hysteria,” in Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman. In addition, we need to mention that the scene of sacrifice described at the beginning of section 9 of “The Pineal Eye” reads as follows: “Solar light decomposes in the high branches” (Bataille, Visions of Excess, 85). The fantastic and phantasmatic process of the scene of sacrifice first emerges with this corruption and decomposition of sunlight in the spectrum.

172. See also Plato’s Republic and Timaeus, in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 736, 1174.

173. Consider also the following meanings of spéculum mentioned in the Littré: “Surgical term. Name given to instruments used for expanding the entrance of certain cavities so that the interior state of the organ becomes visible, either directly or through the reflective surfaces of these instruments.”

174. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:407.

175. The “Oldest Systematic Program” of 1796 demanded that philosophy become aesthetic and mythological so that it can truly become the philosophy of Spirit as a “mythology of reason” (“The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,” 162). In Bataille, on the other hand, philosophy should become mythological so as to abort Spirit and the ideas that it unites as well as the Romantic longing for sensibility. Herder wrote that the eye is “the coldest and most philosophical of the senses. It demands that objects be presented before it; these appear only alongside one another, and that is how they are to be observed also” (Selected Writings on Aesthetics, 227). Although in Hegel the eye and sight are sublated in the ear (and by Herder, in emotion), they are nevertheless preserved. In Bataille, however, the eye is “sublated” in the sense that it is blinded: as the razor in Andalusian Dog slits open the split that provides it a view onto the night so widely that it becomes something like the torn-out eyes of Hermes, an eye that stays wide awake until it sees into the heart and the innermost core of death (see Visions of Excess, 17). Lautréamont remarks: “He who sleeps is less than an animal castrated yesterday. . . . I have lived ceaselessly with the sockets of my eyes gaping” (Les chants de Maldoror, 223–24). Although staying awake—a metaphor Bataille often uses—is only a protective means of avoiding castration, what is supposed to be banned here is castration during sleep that man cannot look in the eye. According to Bataille, the “mental castration” during sleep that was practiced by surrealists, “this swollen abscess of clerical phraseology,” is only to be retained as a deterrent “to discourage young people from castrating themselves in their dreams” (The Absence of Myth, 28).

176. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81. As part of a planned eleventh section of “The Pineal Eye” devoted to “The Metaphysical Consequences of Mythology,” Bataille began to outline a “philosophy of falseness.”

177. Hjelmslev, Language: An Introduction, 32.

178. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 87.

179. Barthes, Critical Essays, 239.

180. Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 11:168, 169.

181. See also “Saussure avec Freud,” in Rey, Parcours de Freud.

182. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 25. The sentence in brackets is missing from the English translation.

183. Rey, Parcours de Freud, 143.

184. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 80.

185. See also Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,4:320. The mere fact that the dream-thoughts represent a texture already bears witness to their nature as signifiers.

186. Ibid., 610. Translation modified.

187. Lacan, Écrits, 432.

188. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:114.

189. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:596.

190. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 13:35. Translation modified.

191. Ibid., 35–36.

192. Ibid., 36.

193. Lacan, Écrits, 431.

194. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 13:25.

195. Michelet, La sorcière, 126.

196. Lacan, Écrits, 21.

197. Engelstein, “Zigzag,” 1077.

198. Barthes, Critical Essays, 239.

199. Pautrat, “Nietzsche Medused,” 159.

200. For a discussion of anamorphosis, see Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art.

CHAPTER 3

1. Bataille, Story of the Eye, 33–34.

2. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 80.

3. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 199.

4. Ibid., 158.

5. Ibid., 199.

6. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, 90.

7. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 212.

8. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 86–87.

9. Ibid., 87.

10. Ibid., 5.

11. In French, “couler un bronze” means to defecate.

12. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 27.

13. Ibid., 27.

14. Ades and Baker, Undercover Surrealism, 238.

15. Bataille, Waldberg, and White, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 75. Translation modified.

16. See, for example, Ferenczi, who evokes “the tendency to blushing (the erection of the entire head) on the part of the maiden who represses sexual excitement” (Thalassa, 14).

17. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 87.

18. For more about the way this usage plays out in detail and its implications, see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Title of the Letter.

19. Lacan, Écrits, 415.

20. Ibid., 417.

21. Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 48.

22. Lacan, Écrits, 419.

23. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Title of the Letter, 42–43.

24. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:303.

25. This might appear to be an overinterpretation, insofar as we are dealing with the butt of an ape and a little girl, an anal displacement, and, thereby, a veiling of both differences. But the displacement to the anal is still ambiguous, a simultaneous recognition and denial of difference. The fact that this ambivalence is not accidental and that it marks this recognition needs to be discussed in more detail.

26. Lacan, Écrits, 682.

27. Ibid.

28. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 87.

29. Ibid., 87.

30. Thereby, the term “lived experience” receives an additional dimension in opposition to those we have already discussed.

31. The metaphors of anality provide for the experience of death its proper expression in the shape of the agency of the signifier. As we have already mentioned, every theory is a presentation that obeys the laws of the unconscious. We could refer here, for example, to what Freud says about the writing down of a dream: The choice of words still obeys the presentation of the dream and still forms a part of it. This also applies to every theory of dreams: “In neither, however, does the efficacy of the unconscious cease upon awakening. Psychoanalytic experience consists in nothing other than establishing that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field” (Lacan, Écrits, 427–28).

32. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:413.

33. The sign defined in this way—the anagram of the sign—is contrary to the traditional concepts of the sign and the image. Following Guy Rosolato, we could also call it a symbol, since he understands the symbol and the symbolic as the law that constitutes the sign as well as the image in their unequivocal referential functions: “By opposing the sign to the symbol, it is possible to attribute to the first the imaginary that congeals in breaking with the symbolic . . . thus aping (singe) the symbolic” (Essais sur le symbolique, 116). Rosolato’s concept of the phantasm, however, does not coincide with ours, since for him the phantasm is an escape from the symbolic. But since the symbolic needs the imaginary (as well as the phantasmatic), and vice versa, we could also develop in Rosolato an interplay between the symbolic and the phantasmatic: “The real is produced by this scansion [which stems from the fact that the symbolic requires and enables the subject’s recognition] and by that which reproduces itself between the imaginary and the symbolic, the osmosis between signs and symbols: to tell the truth, they go together” (118).

34. We are not in the position to decide whether we recovered these movements with the help of Lacanian linguistics (and thereby to certain degree overpowered or excessively forced Bataille’s text, which, however, should lead us to remark that not even the most faithful interpretation is without such a violent forcing open), or if we simply discovered the Lacanian destruction of the Saussurean theory of signs already prefigured in Bataille’s text.

35. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 88.

36. Ibid., 87.

37. Ibid., 76.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. See also Bataille’s critique of this concept of beauty in his essay “The Academic Horse,” in Ades and Baker, Undercover Surrealism.

41. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 77.

42. Freud, “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” 11:85.

43. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 4:324.

44. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 88.

45. Ibid., 80.

46. Ibid.

47. See also Gasché, “Heliocentric Exchange,” 100–117.

48. Lowry, Under the Volcano, 227.

49. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:619.

50. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 49.

51. Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, 87.

52. Freud, Introductory Lectures, 15:372.

53. Bataille, The Absence of Myth, 28–29.

54. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 81.

55. Ades and Baker, Undercover Surrealism, 237.

56. Bataille, Waldberg, and White, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 60.

57. Ibid.

58. “The lost, the tragic, the ‘blinding marvel,’ possessed in one’s innermost being, can no longer be met anywhere but on a bed” (Bataille, Visions of Excess, 228).

59. See also the notes in the second volume of the collected works, where Bataille, on the contrary, speaks of a “short instant” (OC, II, 428).

60. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 180.

61. Ibid., 70.

62. Bataille insists on the secondary character of expiation in contrast to the primary aspect of the alteration of the person.

63. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 71.

64. Ibid.

65. See also Bataille, “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice.”

66. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 158.

67. Ibid., 159.

68. Ibid., 164.

69. Ibid., 166–67.

70. Ibid., 170.

71. Ibid., 176–77.

72. Ibid., 177.

73. Ibid., 172. Translation modified.

74. Ibid.

75. Rosolato, Essais sur le symbolique, 62.

76. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 145.

77. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 175.

78. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 216.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid., 117.

81. See also Gasché, “The Heterological Almanach.”

82. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 146.

83. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 1:23.

84. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 113.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid., 112.

87. Ibid., 112–13.

88. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 175.

89. Nassif, “Pour une logique du fantasme,” 258.

90. Rosolato, Essais sur le symbolique, 41–42.

91. Ibid., 68.

92. Ibid., 66.

93. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

94. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 171.

95. Ibid., 171–72.

96. Ibid., 171.

97. Ibid., 224.

98. Ibid., 176.

99. Bataille, “Toward Real Revolution,” 34.

100. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 200.

101. Ibid.

102. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 116.

103. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 176. Translation modified.

104. Ibid.

105. “The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman. This, it is true, appears at first outside of itself and not as the truth of self-consciousness. But just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is; as a consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 117). See also the following passage from Derrida: “It is this dissymmetry, this absolute privilege given to the slave, that Bataille did not cease to meditate. The truth of the master is in the slave; and the slave become a master remains a ‘repressed’ slave. Such is the condition of meaning, of history, of discourse, of philosophy, etc.” (Writing and Difference, 322).

106. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 201.

107. Ibid., 205.

108. Ibid., 201.

109. Ibid., 205.

110. Ibid.

111. See also OC, II, 652.

112. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 135.

113. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 201.

114. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 171.

115. Ibid., 171–72.

116. Ibid., 172.

117. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 114.

118. Ibid., 113–14.

119. Ibid., 115.

120. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 173.

121. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 115.

122. Bataille, “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,” 287.

123. Ibid., 286–87.

124. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 174.

125. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 118.

126. “The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity—here we would have to say an expenditure and a negativity without reserve—that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process of a system” (Derrida, Writing and Difference, 259).

127. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 19.

128. “And the instant—the temporal mode of the sovereign operation—is not a point of full and unpenetrated presence: it slides and eludes us between two presences; it is difference as the affirmative elusion of presence” (Derrida, Writing and Difference, 263).

129. Ibid., 256.

130. Ibid., 261.

131. Ibid. 260.

132. Ibid., 264.

133. Ibid., 265.

134. Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 284.

135. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 261.

136. Ibid., 260–61.

137. Bataille, “Nietzsche’s Madness,” 43.

138. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 131.

139. Bataille, Unfinished System, 93.

140. Bataille, “Nietzsche’s Madness,” 44.

141. Ibid.

142. Ibid., 45.

143. Ibid., 43–44.

144. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 206.

145. We will not go any further into the fantasy of descent implied here or the phantasm of self-generation. We reserve this discussion for another place.

146. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 48.

147. Ibid., 51.

148. Ibid., 50, 51.

149. Ibid., 49.

150. Ibid., 50.

151. Ibid., 47.

152. Ibid.

153. Ibid.

154. Ibid.

155. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 162.

156. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 175.

157. Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volumes Three and Four, 153.

158. Ibid.

159. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 179.

160. Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volumes Three and Four, 156.

161. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 206. Translation modified.

162. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 513.

163. Ibid., 495–96.

164. Ibid., 231–32.

165. Ibid., 316.

166. Nietzsche, Werke, Vol. 12, 415.

167. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 226.

168. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 13:141.

169. Ibid., 144.

170. Ibid., 143.

171. Ibid.

172. Ibid., 148.

173. Ibid., 150.

174. Ibid.

175. Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” 21:185.

176. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 13:142.

177. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 4:250. The presupposed love of siblings is perhaps not the best example since it occurs later in the development of the child than the emotions toward the father. Nevertheless, the example proves that there are emotions that are not ambivalent: the child hates his or her siblings since he has more reason to hate than to love them.

178. Ibid., 256–57.

179. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 13:157.

180. Ibid.

181. Ibid., 149.

182. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 19:26.

183. Rosolato, Essais sur le symbolique, 36.

184. See also Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 14:135–40; as well as Freud, Schriften aus dem Nachlass, 17:151.

185. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 13:154.

186. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 498.

187. Ibid., 527, 25.

188. Ibid., 528.

189. Ibid., 529.

190. Ibid., 528.

191. Ibid., 498–99.

192. Ibid., 499.

193. Ibid.

194. Ibid., 518.

195. Ibid., 499.

196. Ibid., 518.

197. Ibid., 524–25.

198. Ibid., 525.

199. Ibid., 527.

200. Ibid., 530.

201. Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, 2:582.

202. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 71.

203. “The Hero of tragedy must suffer. . . . He had to bear the burden of what was known as ‘tragic guilt’; the basis of that guilt is not always easy to find, for in the light of our everyday life it is often no guilt at all” (Freud, Totem and Taboo, 13:156).

204. Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, 2:582.

205. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 210–11.

206. See, for example, the following passage by Kristeva: “In this sense, the sovereign operation consists of traversing Oedipus by representing Oedipus and what exceeds it. But if Oedipus is the constitution of the unwary subject as knowing subject, the sovereign operation consists of traversing Oedipus by means of an Oedipus surmounted by Orestes. . . . The traversal of Oedipus is not its lifting, but its knowledge.” In addition, “The sovereign subject is one that knows itself as subject to the extent that it knows the Oedipal limit; it doesn’t surpass it without postulating it as a limit and not as an end in itself. . . . Like the fictional theme whose unity is always plural and fading, or like the contradiction, charged with eroticism, that confronts the presence of the subject with its loss in the heterogeneous, the sovereign subject refuses all positions, all fixations. This trans-Oedipus, as opposed to an anti-Oedipus, only takes on a position in order to engage in revolt” (“Bataille, Experience and Practice,” 250, 51–52).

CHAPTER 4

1. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 492.

2. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 120.

3. Bataille, Inner Experience, 80.

4. Queneau, “Premières confrontations avec Hegel,” 694.

5. For the review, see OC, I, 299. This special issue of Revue philosophique contains, among others, the following articles: Jean Wahl, “Hegel et Kierkegaard”; V. Barsch, “De la philosophie politique de Hegel”; as well as the famous essay by Alexandre Koyré, “Note sur la langue et la terminologie hégéliennes.” In addition, see also Koyré, “Les études hégéliennes en France.” Here Koyré presents the history of Hegel’s reception in France until 1930.

6. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 253. See also Hollier: “As for Hegel, Bataille knew only those texts of his that Kojève discussed” (Against Architecture, 14).

7. Bataille, Waldberg, and White, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 35. See also the essay “L’apocalypse de Saint-Sever,” in OC, I, 164–70.

8. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 216. See also Hollier, Against Architecture.

9. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 215.

10. Ibid., 55.

11. Bataille, “Celestial Bodies,” 77.

12. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 24–27.

13. Ibid., 27.

14. Ibid., 219.

15. Ibid., 52.

16. Ibid., 24.

17. Bataille, Waldberg, and White, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, 35.

18. Bataille, “Human Face,” 18.

19. Ibid., 18–19.

20. See also Bataille, Visions of Excess, 96.

21. Bataille, “Human Face,” 19.

22. See also Bataille, Visions of Excess, 39–41.

23. Bataille, “Human Face,” 19.

24. Ibid., 19.

25. Ibid. Translation slightly modified.

26. Ibid., 20.

27. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 174.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 45–46.

31. Wahl, “Mediation, Negativity, and Separation,” 12.

32. Ibid., 12–13.

33. Koyré, Mystiques, spirituels, alchimistes, 64.

34. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 46, 47, 48.

35. Ibid., 47.

36. Ibid., 52.

37. Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience, 194.

38. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 116.

39. Bataille, Inner Experience, 43.

40. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 55–56.

41. Queneau, “Premières confrontations avec Hegel,” 699.

42. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 493.

43. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 116.

44. Bataille, Inner Experience, 109–10.

45. Queneau, “Premières confrontations avec Hegel,” 697. See also Bataille: “The new contributions of bourgeois thought are not any more negative than those that Bogdanov and the anarchists tried to use. The elements that among others psychoanalysis or German phenomenology contributed to the sum of human knowledge are positive elements: some of the contributions of psychoanalysis are even implicitly revolutionary” (OC, I, 293).

46. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 105.

47. Ibid., 109.

48. Ibid., 106.

49. Ibid., 109.

50. Ibid., 112.

51. Queneau, “Premières confrontations avec Hegel,” 697.

52. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 113.

53. Ibid., 108.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 113–14.

56. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, 91. Translation modified.

57. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 116.

58. Ibid., 117.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 493.

63. Ibid., 492.

64. Similarly, the relation of Kierkegaard and Hegel should also be examined in this context: “In a certain sense, the Hegel-Kierkegaard dilemma accomplishes and pushes to the extreme the dilemma implied in Hegelian thought itself” (OC, I, 300).

65. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 219.

66. Bataille, “Celestial Bodies,” 77–78.

67. Ibid., 78. Translation modified.

68. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 175.

69. Ibid., 176.

70. We must note that if Bataille characterizes here the individual moments that are subsumed by the system with “être,” as full being that they subsequently lose in the system, this does not at all imply that they originally possessed this being as being-with-itself; on the contrary, it refers to an apparent fullness that comports itself in a relative fashion in relation to the system. In addition, inasmuch as they are affected by the drive to completion, the same movement is repeated on the individual elements as that which happened to the system.

71. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 158–60.

72. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 493.

73. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 217.

74. Ibid., 176.

75. Bataille, “Celestial Bodies,” 78.

76. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 179.

77. Ibid., 198.

78. Ibid., 177.

79. Hegel, Jenenser Logik, 3.

80. Ibid., 2.

81. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 58.

82. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 451.

83. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 220.

84. Ibid., 37.

85. Ibid., 222.

CHAPTER 5

1. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 81.

2. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 114–15.

3. Ibid., 114.

4. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 55.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 56.

8. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 115.

9. Bataille, Erotism, 255.

10. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 120.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., 121.

13. Ibid.

14. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 273.

15. Hollier, The College of Sociology, 115.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 117.

18. Ibid., 115.

19. Ibid., 120.

20. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 110.

21. Ibid., 147.

22. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 179, 225.

23. Heidegger, Nietzsche. Volumes Three and Four, 29 .

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Index

Abraham, 197

Abyss, 68, 75–76, 90, 94, 99, 119–23, 145, 148–50, 154, 216, 245, 250

Acephalous, 59, 70–71, 164–65, 205, 216–18, 236, 246

Adrastea, 42

Anaxarchus of Abdera, 11

Anthropology, mythological, 79–80, 93–97, 110

Apollo, 71–72, 98–99, 106, 119–24, 299n51

Archilochus, 120

Ariadne, 11, 151, 171

Aristotle, 19, 27–31, 36, 87, 165, 249

Artaud, Antonin, 14

Aspect, 107–9

Athena, 50, 112

Baader, Franz von, 13

Barthes, Roland, 24, 158, 165, 176

Being, human, 8, 80–81, 93–94, 103, 115, 182, 188–89, 208, 269, 294n77

Bernstein, Eduard, 255

Blanchot, Maurice, 20, 80

Boaistuau, Pierre, 108

Boehme, Jacob, 146, 246

Bogdanov, Alexander, 314n45

Bollack, Jean, 28–29, 31, 77

Bousset, Wilhelm, 246

Breton, André, 78,185, 199, 239, 242

Castration, 69–76, 103, 135–36, 145, 181, 185, 196–97, 223, 226–27, 304–5n175

Child, 16–9, 32–33, 144, 301n102

Chronos, 62, 69–71, 224

Creuzer, Georg Friedrich, 35

Cusa, Nicolas of, 239

Cybele, 69

Dali, Salvador, 172, 297–98n155

Death wish against the father, 196, 201, 222, 226–27

Delirium, 11–13, 272, 289n33

Derrida, Jacques, 7, 9, 25, 69, 152, 160, 211, 213, 239, 277, 282, 309–10n105

Descartes, René, 1–2

Detienne, Marcel, 293n50

Dialectic, 194–95, 252–54, 256–57

Dictionary, 4, 14, 17, 24

Difference, sexual, 176–78, 181, 225

Dionysus, 71–73, 98–99, 119–24, 217

Dream, 125, 128–29

Dreamwork, 12–13, 152, 161–62

Dualism, 81–82, 106–7, 203–5, 217–18, 246–48, 276

Durkheim, Emile, 253, 255, 282

Ear, 7–9, 138–39, 288n20, 304–05n175

Eckhart, Meister, 246

Economy of expenditure, 7, 21–24, 182, 188, 212

Engels, Friedrich, 194, 252, 254

Etymology, 13–14, 39, 153–54, 182

Event, immemorial, 43, 46–47, 52

Experience: historical, 253–54; lived, 78, 86, 103–4, 278–83, 300n70, 307n30; of nature, 194–95

Eye, 7–11, 19, 108, 121, 141, 149–51, 154–55, 166, 171, 285–86, 302n110, 304–5n175; pineal, 1–4, 11

Fantasy, 124–25, 129–37, 141, 145, 284, 301n105

Father, murder of, 190, 197–206, 209–11, 213–14, 216–17, 221–37, 262, 272

Father/son relation, 191–98, 201, 218–19

Faye, Eugen de, 246

Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 125

Feminine, the, 191, 201–4

Ferenczi, Sandor, 306n16

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 243, 252

Finas, Lucette, 6

Fliess, Wilhelm, 131

Form, 106–8, 150, 186; mythical, 150

Formlessness, 80–81, 107

Foucault, Michel, 16

Frank, Sebastian, 247

Freedom, 106, 184–89, 192, 206, 210, 216, 247; mythological, 189

Freud, Sigmund, 3, 11–12, 18, 21, 69, 72–73, 124–40, 144–45, 151–52,159, 172, 178, 181–82, 184–85, 190–91, 206, 221–27, 230–31, 233–36, 253–55, 258, 301n102, 301n105–106, 302n109, 302n114, 304n164, 307n31

Gaia, 293n53

Galton, Francis, 107–8

Gnosticism, 246–48, 250, 252

Guilt, 113, 189, 205–6, 221–48

Hamann, Johann Georg, 13

Hartmann, Nicolai, 194, 253

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2–4, 13, 18, 23, 27, 34–36, 80, 90–91, 97, 113–19, 123–25, 147, 149–50, 154, 156, 165, 168, 170, 190–91, 201–212, 220, 233, 239–46, 248–86, 287n5, 303n137, 304–5n175, 313n5, 315n64

Heidegger, Martin, 5, 37, 81, 83, 219–220, 252, 283

Heraclitus, 193, 203–5, 252, 260, 275

Herder, Johann Gottfried, 27, 31–32, 34, 304–5n175

Hermes, 21, 304–5n175

Herodotus, 56–59, 60–61, 73

Hesiod, 42, 49, 51, 60, 73, 291n10, 293n52

Heterogeneity/homogeneity, 193–94

Hjelmslev, Louis, 157

Homer, 49, 60, 74

Husserl, Edmund, 252

Image, 58, 111–37, 141, 144–66, 177, 261; intelligible, 168–71; and music, 120–23; primal, 159–60, 164; and thought, 125–26; tragic, 123, 145

Images, chain of, 144, 150–53, 155, 157–66, 183, 236

Imagination, 33, 35, 89, 116–18, 124, 170, 284

Immemorial other, 51–53

Improbability, 81–85, 243–44, 295n83

Infinity, wild, 73, 74

Interpretation, 21, 307n34

Isaac, 197–98

Jehovah, 247

Joyce, James, 14

Jung, Carl Gustav, 109, 131

Kant, Immanuel, 244, 257–58, 277, 282, 284, 297–98n155

Katabole, 49, 52, 60–76, 88–90, 94–95, 98, 193, 105–6, 110, 145, 154, 246, 259, 261, 265, 268, 274, 294n61

Kierkegaard, Soren, 315n64

Kojève, Alexandre, 198, 239, 250–51, 258–59, 268, 295n99, 299n18

Koyré, Alexandre, 239, 246–47, 313n5

Kristeva, Julia, 14, 267, 313n206

Lacan, Jacques, 9, 124, 140, 152, 164, 174–78, 307n34

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 297n131

Laplanche, Jean, 133–34, 138

Laughter, 2, 271

Lautréamont, Comte de, 304–5n175

Leclaire, Serge, 19

Leiris, Michel, 24

Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien, 282

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 196

Life, 147–48, 204, 207, 217

Light, 149–50, 283–86

Lowry, Malcolm, 184

Lucretius, 218

Luther, Martin, 246

Marx, Karl, 198–99, 252

Mask, 86

Master/slave dialectic, 97, 190–94, 198–202, 205–13, 309n105

Mastery, 30–31, 96, 193–94, 200, 211, 227, 245, 274

Materialism, 246

Matter, 15, 146, 164, 217–18, 246–48

Mauss, Marcel, 184, 253–55, 282

Medusa, 71–72, 112, 147, 156

Metis, 50, 73, 293n50

Meyerson, Emile, 81, 239, 295n83

Michelet, Jules, 164

Monster, 108, 115, 271–72, 275

Mysteries, 73–75, 90

Mysticism, 87–94, 96, 105, 146, 295–96n99, 296n101

Myth, 13, 53, 77, 87–88, 101, 104, 109–10, 119, 147, 149, 260–64, 291n9; and logos, 28, 31, 33–34, 36–37, 79, 87

Mythological: anti-, 53–55, 62; un-, 54–56, 59–60, 62–66, 88

Mythology, 13, 28–37, 71, 73, 79–80, 105; the other of, 55–56, 62–67, 73–76; as theogonic process, 38–52, 54, 59–66, 88, 90–91

Name, 117–18, 123

Nature, 2–3, 39, 53, 85, 94, 106–8, 142, 153, 194–95, 252, 254

Nemesis, 41–44, 49, 56, 292n45

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 9, 11, 16, 18, 20–21, 26, 32, 52, 71–72, 74, 77, 92, 98–103, 105, 111, 119–23, 134, 141, 151,161, 169, 205, 212, 219–221, 228–236, 239, 260, 265–66, 271–72, 275, 284, 297n131, 299n35, 299n51

Orestes, 313n206

Origin, 134–37, 218, 274

Otto, Rudolf, 37

Otto, Walter, 37

Paracelsus, 146

Particular, the, 20, 84, 94, 109, 141, 143, 239, 241, 256, 260–61, 272, 295n83

Pautrat, Bernard, 121

Pelasgians, the, 56–60, 63–64, 66

Phantasm, 79, 110–11, 124–27, 129, 131–37, 140, 144–66, 168, 205–11, 214–15, 265, 270, 276, 284–85n102, 301n106, 307n33; and enslaved son, 191–92, 205; and language, 137–38; and sexuality, 187

Phantasmatology, 2–4, 6, 23–24, 256, 260, 285–86

Phenomenology, Hegelian, 277, 282–85

Philosophy, 25–26, 28–31, 33, 35–36, 52, 73–76; barbaric, 76; the other of, 52–53, 68–69

Picasso, Pablo, 172

Pindar, 42

Pit, nocturnal, 115–19, 144, 149, 156, 172–74, 184

Plato, 1–2, 11, 13, 28–31, 36, 56–57, 80, 82, 87, 99, 107, 112, 141, 149, 155–56, 169, 252, 284, 304n172

Plekhanov, Georgi, 253

Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 133–34, 138

Power, will to, 219, 267

Praxiteles, 107

Psychoanalysis, 18, 255

Puech, Hans-Christian, 246

Queneau, Raymond, 194, 239–40, 245, 250–54, 256–57

Reading, 6–13, 19, 21, 25, 188n16; psychoanalytic, 18

Reason, 81–83, 87, 144–45, 190–91

Reik, Theodor, 9

Repetition, 4, 20, 184, 234–37, 263, 265–276

Representation, 113–14, 118, 148–49; mythological, 93–97, 104–10, 146, 297–98n155; phantasmatic, 110

Rey, Jean-Michel, 160, 304n164

Rosolato, Guy, 196–97, 225, 307n33

Sabianism, 56–63, 66–67

Sacrifice, 188–89, 217, 221, 227, 232, 236, 239, 272, 304n171

Sade, Marquis de, 52, 75

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 78, 92, 295n83, 295n99

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 140–41, 170–71, 174, 307n34

Scene, primal, 131–33, 136–37, 145

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 13, 18, 32–34, 37–77, 80, 88, 90–91, 95, 104, 112–13, 261, 292–93n45, 293n46, 293n49, 293n52, 293n54, 297n131

Schlegel, Friedrich, 297n131

Science, 69, 75, 77–78, 85–91, 96–98, 100–103, 194, 199, 252, 255, 269, 282, 295n83

Scream, 104–5, 118

Self-consciousness, 53, 190, 202, 207–12, 261–62, 281

Sign, 117–18, 123, 128, 167–171, 174–84, 261, 307n33

Signifier, 141, 145–46, 152–54, 157, 160, 164, 175–79, 183–84

Simplification, 15–16, 78

Socrates, 2, 10, 92, 98–99, 266

Sollers, Philippe, 18

Sovereignty, 192–93, 211–13, 215–16, 229–21, 313n206

Specter, 154–57, 169

Symbol, 36, 116–18, 120–21, 126–27, 134, 136, 142–43, 246, 307n33

System, 240–45, 258–51, 259, 268–71, 297–98n155

Text, 11, 14, 17, 19, 158, 161, 163, 165, 183, 221

Theater, 204

Theory, 9–10, 23, 99, 105, 134, 149–50, 174, 307n31

Time, 39, 44–45, 56–57, 81, 204–5, 275–76

Tongue, 7–8, 11–12

Tragic, the, 105, 122–23, 143, 147, 203–5, 208, 211, 220, 233–34, 245, 249, 262, 312n203

Triangle, oedipal, 196–97, 226, 235, 313n206

Truth, 28–29, 33–36, 38, 48–50, 64–65, 100, 112, 122–23, 167, 285

Universe, 80–85, 87–88, 92–93, 107, 146, 188, 241, 245, 261, 272, 294n82

Urania, 61–62, 69

Uranus, 69–71, 214, 293n53

Van Gogh, Vincent, 188–89

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 30, 293n50

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 30

Violence, 154, 156–57, 215, 274

Wahl, Jean, 239, 246, 249, 250, 313n5

Work, 202–3, 209–10

Writing, 5, 10, 13–15, 17–24, 58, 76, 102, 105, 140

Zenon of Eleus, 11

Zeus, 50, 70–73, 203, 224, 293n52–53

Cultural Memory in the Present

Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 1

Alessia Ricciardi, After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi’s Italy

Daniel Innerarity, The Future and Its Enemies: In Defense of Political Hope

Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture

François-David Sebbah, Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition

Erik Peterson, Theological Tractates, edited by Michael J. Hollerich

Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism

Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, Second Edition: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson

Yasco Horsman, Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo

Jacques Derrida, Parages, edited by John P. Leavey

Henri Atlan, The Sparks of Randomness, Volume 1: Spermatic Knowledge

Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution

Djelal Kadir, Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability

Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory

Jeffrey Mehlman, Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life

Jacob Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh: An Introduction to Egoanalysis

Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy

Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonialization, Politics

Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism

Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought

Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay

Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture, edited by Charlotte Fonrobert and Amir Engel

Lambert Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory

Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology

Freddie Rokem, Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance

Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community

Vilashini Cooppan, Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

Josef Früchtl, The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity

Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner, eds., Re-Figuring Hayden White

Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History

Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith, eds., The Rhetoric of Sincerity

Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem

Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson

Alexandre Lefebvre, The Image of the Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza

Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity

Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas

Marcel Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable

François Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions

René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1959–2005

Richard Baxstrom, Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia

Jennifer L. Culbert, Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment

Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics

Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World

Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature

Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present

Esther Peeren, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond

Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses

Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties

José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age

Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy

Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature

Sara Guyer, Romanticism After Auschwitz

Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy

Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life

Bella Brodzki, Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory

Rodolphe Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy

Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film

Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison

Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory

Michael G. Levine, The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival

Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding German Change in Berlin and Beyond

Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality

Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage

Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies

David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors

Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories

James Siegel, Naming the Witch

J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting

Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul: On Justice

Richard Rorty and Eduardo Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty

Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine

Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception

Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art

Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China

Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience

István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism

Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger

Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art

Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary

Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire

Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue

Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber

Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida

Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing

Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting

Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul

Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible

Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany

Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis

Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes

Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity

Beate Rössler, ed., Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations

Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses

Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy

Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena

Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks

Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann

Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

Dorothea von Mücke, The Rise of the Fantastic Tale

Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism

Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape

Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology

Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics

Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction

Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy

Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given That: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy

Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Thought

Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction

Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–1998, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg

Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: The Latin American “Boom” in the Neoliberal Marketplace

Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Cultural Instruments, Mutualities, and the Fictive Imagination

Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media

Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Re-Describing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. and introd. William Rasch

Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays

Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity

Gil Anidjar, “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab-Jewish Letters

Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils

F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation

F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation

Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert)

Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts

Hubert Damisch, A Theory of/Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark: (One of Hegel’s bon mots)

Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics

Jan Patočka, Plato and Europe

Hubert Damisch, Skyline: The Narcissistic City

Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers

Richard Rand, ed., Futures: Of Jacques Derrida

William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation

Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality

Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine

Kaja Silverman, World Spectators

Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation: Expanded Edition

Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans in the Epoch of Emancipation

Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan

Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy

David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity

Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation

Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge

Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition

Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin

J. Hillis Miller / Manuel Asensi, Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading

Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism

Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning

Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art

Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin

Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia

Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy

Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation

Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion