Bataille

The limit stays.

Expenditure against utility.

Sovereignty is the instant that serves no end.

Bataille (1897–1962)

Message

Transgression does not abolish the limit. It suspends the taboo without suppressing it, and so confirms the sacred it crosses. Eroticism is the assent to life up to the point of death: discontinuous beings aching for a continuity they can touch only by risking the boundary that makes them persons. Against the restricted economy of work, project, and usefulness, a general economy overflows; the accursed share must be spent in festival, sacrifice, luxury, or war. Sovereignty is not mastery. It is the instant that serves no end. Inner experience is a mystic path whose summit is non-knowledge. God is the name of an absence the expenditure addresses. Sartre’s project is servile, a usefulness smuggled back into freedom.

Content

Story of the Eye (1928) is the fictional laboratory. Inner Experience (1943), Guilty, and On Nietzsche are the war trilogy of non-knowledge. The Accursed Share (1949) is the economics. Erotism (1957) is the summa of taboo and transgression. The reviews (Documents, Acéphale, Critique) are the public form of a thought that also needed a secret society.

Presentation

Two speeds. The summas proceed by distinction and example, almost pedagogical. The war books proceed by rupture, fragment, and a first person that does not survive its own claim. He refuses the treatise where the treatise would be a project.

Method

A collage that he then subjects to one rule. Durkheim and Mauss give him the sacred and the gift. Kojève’s Hegel gives him the end of history, which he answers with laughter and useless expenditure. Sade gives him the outrage, which he corrects: the limit must remain. The mystics give him the path, which he runs with no God at the end. Freud’s death drive is used and not obeyed.

Summary

He is the founder. Sade wanted the limit gone. Bataille’s message is that the limit is the condition of the crossing, and that the subject who crosses does not return as a worker, a citizen, or a project.

What shaped him

People: his blind, syphilitic father, whose deathbed is the scene he never finishes; Laure; Colette Peignot; Leiris, Caillois, Klossowski; Kojève’s seminar. Place: Billom, Paris, the cave paintings he helped show at Lascaux’s moment. Formative experiences: a lost vocation for the priesthood; psychoanalysis; the Acéphale group, a headless conspiracy that failed to become an act. Cultural events: Surrealism, which he breaks with Breton over the base and the unclean; the Popular Front and the threat of fascism, which drive the Collège de Sociologie; the Occupation, during which inner experience is written because action has become either servile or empty.

Quotes

“Eroticism is the assenting to life up to the point of death.”

Transgression “opens the door into what lies beyond the limits usually observed, but it maintains these limits just the same.”

“I think as a girl takes off her dress.”

The accursed share is the excess that must be spent, without profit, or it spends us.

Sovereignty is “to enjoy the present time without having anything else in view.”

Inner experience is “the opposite of action,” and it reaches “non-knowledge.”