“I am only an empty irritation”
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience
Perhaps, on being confronted with the history of philosophy, it is a reasonable reaction to simply shrug. After all, what do these old dead writers have to offer us beyond some kind of perpetual slew of questions. If we want to live our lives, what are these densely worded tracts on metaphysics supposed to do for us, beyond plunging us into a kind of unending whirlpool of uncertainty in which all answers become questions and questions only proliferate into queries and investigations. An imaginary individual, upon being waylaid by the philosopher, asks why they should care if they will gain nothing, if it will not help them attain a number of things they value, like happiness, satisfaction or even knowledge; all that’s there, they might protest, is an invitation to a profound dissatisfaction, a story without a beginning middle or end in which all mysteries only provoke, never solve. It is, it might be argued, little better than picking intellectual scabs, making problems worse by giving into the indulgence of impulse. Philosophy, surely, is nothing more than an infinitely proliferating itch, and conventional wisdom would hold that we should stop scratching it.
Now assume that these protests are addressed to George Bataille, (in)famous thinker, scandalous bohemian, medievalist, pornographer and accused mystic. It is of course impossible to tell, but I imagine these accusations drawing out a laugh. For one thing, the sentiment is one that Bataille might well sympathise with as a wilful outsider, someone who found himself at odds with the rising tide of existentialism in France at the time he was writing, and so at odds with the most popular intellectual current of his era. One Jean-Paul Sartre famously proclaimed his work in a review of Inner Experience as “the new mysticism” and referred Bataille to psychoanalysis (to which, it’s interesting to note, he had already subjected himself). Bataille surely had no particular stake in defending the canonical integrity of philosophy. On the other hand, where he would strongly diverge from the anonymous interlocutor above is in the rejection of this impossibility, the wish to step around and reject the paradox it implies. For while Bataille presents himself as one of a long line of anti-philosophers, or, if we are to lightly poke at this proclamation, a philosopher against philosophy, he was never one to shy away from irritation and anguish, to simply reconcile the universe, sit back and relax. His thought, in fact, can be read as an attempt to communicate the point of non-communication, think the blind-spot of thought, a task perhaps not unfamiliar to the history of philosophy, and one which requires us to face the paradoxical elements of the philosophical project head on rather than awkwardly skirting around them. Bataille, in particular, endeavoured to be impossible.
To be impossible. To sense without knowing, to know without sense. We seek to become the universe, and in this Bataille most explicitly seems to refer to his encounter with Hegel (or, more aptly, Kojeve’s Hegel), and his famous statement “Hegel did not know the extent to which he was right”. Geist, the totality of it, was a horror to Bataille, and much of his thinking on Inner Experience can be seen as an attempt to reclaim the unknowable from the looming claws of the Hegelian monstrosity he saw before him. He answers;
“The endless chain of known things is for knowledge only the completion of itself. Satisfaction rests on the fact that a project of knowledge, which existed, has come to its end, is accomplished, that nothing remains to be discovered (at least nothing important). But this circular thought is dialectical. It entails the final contradiction (affecting the whole circle): circular, absolute knowledge is definitive nonknowledge. Assuming that I were to effectively attain it, I know that I would know nothing more than I know now.”
In a kind of intoxicating dramatisation, Bataille suggests that Hegel stumbled onto something in his thought that he shrunk back from in horror, that the completion of his system of knowledge implied by itself a kind of nonknowledge, what Bataille refers to as ecstasy, a kind of self-referential anguish from which Hegel took recourse in an attempt at harmonious integration with the already existing world. The question is not “why do I know” but “why is there what I know”, tied up with the movement of the self from the shadows to the light of Plato’s cave, the revelation of knowledge from the darkness of unknowing. What Bataille rejects is not so much the progression of knowledge in the self, but the reduction of the self to knowledge, the flattening of the subject to rational agent in the world, for whom knowledge is the ends of everything. Rather, he reverses this movement into one in which nonknowledge, the domain of experience, is the end of knowledge, in which the completion of thought slips away as soon as it is attained. Anything else, Bataille will say, would “demand that knowledge be the goal of existence and not existence the goal of the known.”
It is here that the problem of Philosophy comes fully into frame. Philosophy, the “love of knowledge” valorises knowing in an obvious sense, but to what ends? Again, why is there what I know? Bataille’s inner experience, in drawing back to the sensation of experience itself, reverses the traditional exaltation of knowledge as the grand acquisition of an anguished existence. To exist is both to know and not to know, and in fact we find here that to know is not in any way to transcend existence, there is no salvation here, the ascetic who deprives themselves to reach extremes through an exalted wisdom will never save themselves. The philosopher, perhaps, will not save themselves by completing the system of thought in a neat circle; the blind spot of experience from which thinking might seek to escape remains inexorably, blinking and uncaring. There is a parallel to psychoanalysis here in Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. It suggests, much to our chagrin, that something lingers beyond our knowledge that acts upon us, that we are fundamentally compromised in our yearning for completion by existing in the world, and that this existence might not be fully accessible from the vantage point of the subject, a copernican shift in which the ego (Ich/I) ceases to be the centre of knowing, and becomes partly subordinated to an Id (Es/It). Rather than some kind of salvation in the waters of knowing selfhood. Philosophy is, after this, castrated, rendered impotent by its own search for the limit, in which the self is lost, in which we find the unknowing of ecstasy, eroticism, experience, and the completion of thought dissipates time and time again, a great Itch, an empty irritation.
This insufficiency reaches to the heart of the matter of thought and its undoing. It is what Bataille will find in the image of the labyrinth. “Being is nowhere”, a radical uncertainty in which being is not contained in the self but can be projected where we wish. In a sense, he re-imagines the allegory of the cave yet again, in which, given the freedom to leave, one of its occupants might try to seek the transcendence of an exit, completing their being in the world, only to find themselves led in circles, from illusion to illusion, unable to complete the circuit as they succumb to exhaustion. The path we take “to the heights” is only one of many the labyrinth offers, and each time the pursuit of knowledge, rather than completing itself, proffers as its end the night of experience, that shapeless blot in which experience lies, and which renders us insufficient before the paradoxical transparency of inner experience. It is here that we might find a double implication in Bataille’s exhortations to lose ourselves. It is not only to lose the self, surrender the subject in a Bacchanalian blindness, it is to lose ourselves in the labyrinth, the maze of thought, the point at which we fail to comprehend, and must make a decision. This decision precedes the night, the black hole of nonknowledge at which silence reveals itself, and at which the mystics, ascetics and clerics might promise the moment of salvation. But here again this salvation is absent, we find only a yearning that cannot be sated.
This is where Bataille and Lacan seem in silent dialogue. The “principle of insufficiency” he refers to as a fact of existence seems in many ways to echo the subject as lack of Lacanian theory, presenting a subject which cannot and will not be whole, and exists only as something open to them world. The labyrinth emerges here, at the point of disorientation. Benjamin Noys writes;
“The reason that we must become lost in the labyrinth is that Bataille’s labyrinth is not only a space in which we become disoriented but it is also a disoriented space.”
In this way, it is only in the moment Ariadne’s thread breaks, in which we are ourselves disoriented and reeling, that we can experience the labyrinth. The path itself is broken and indirect, so any recourse to straightforward directions leads us astray, any direction must itself break, take the indirect route. In this, Bataille mirrors Lacan’s famous explanation regarding the real, and access to the image via Hans Holbein’s painting of the Ambassadors. Just as we can only access the form of the smear at the bottom of the image through indirect means, clarity for Bataille is forever compromised. This occurs early in his work, prominently in his writing on the subversive image, in which the motif of the blind spot can be found, mirroring his later critique of reason and thought via the impossibility of ultimate clarity in vision. For Lacan, the gaze is blind, which distinguishes it from the eye and even intrudes upon it, a lurking, unaccounted for element that persists in our looking, and looks back at us. We could say that this manifests in many ways for Bataille, not simply in his repeated reference the diseased, punctured, obscured and compromised eyeball, vision as the violent point at which an object intrudes upon the eye, but in his concepts/motifs of the formless and impossible.
The reason I will claim that this is more than a simple resignation of understanding, and more akin to a psychoanalytic attempt to get to grips with what is repressed or displaced or the philosophers blueprint of thought, is that the formless in Bataille is always in-form. By this, I mean that rather than simply surrendering to a kind of stereotype of relativist thinking, in which anything can be anything and understanding recedes into chaos and impossibility, the impossible and the formless (Bataille uses other terms elsewhere I won’t go on to list) are always already present in form and possibility. The subversive image, we could say, is the latent violence that is present in the gaze, that lingering formless object, or, we could say, thing, that threatens to burst through our eyes, disrupts our vision and intrudes upon our attempt to contain reality through rational exposition. In psychoanalysis this is the role taken by the unconscious, and perhaps more specifically the Freudian Id (es), or perhaps, and here I sketch out a further possibility for my own ends, the Thing. The main distinction between Bataille and Lacan in this respect might seem obvious, but it is worth iterating; Bataille, unlike Lacan, was not committed to either the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis or its clinical practice, and in this respect what we find is a playing with conceptual vocabulary that often appears to steadfastly refuse a reduction to the logic of castration everpresent in psychoanalysis. While there is absolutely a kind of back and forth going on here, its a discussion in which Bataille is committed to a conceptual heterogeneity, for better or worse, that Lacan cannot allow. We could provocatively suggest that Bataille was prefiguring what Deleuze & Guattari would eventually become known for.
To reduce Bataille to some kind of Proto-Deleuzo-Guattarian, however, also does him a disservice as a thinker. If there’s something that draws me to his thought it is precisely that he usually only appears in footnotes and citations of other thinkers, and recedes into the background as a serious thinker in his own right. Maybe this is part and parcel of the broken thread with which he leads us through the labyrinth, the disorientation of the Bataillean space, to remain somewhat behind the curtain. The reason perhaps that he is often reduced to a thinker of excess and limits, even as his relentless pursuit of the limit recedes later in his work, is that this remains the aspect of his thought most immediately reconcilable to a graspable logic, an equation. Running through this excess however, is his wilful concern with avoiding precisely this kind of reduction, thought as a series of platitudes. This might have been some of what he saw too in Nietszche, and why he provocatively identified with him, this will to become impossible and exist nowhere, to elude the pinning of language and thought to a single mast. The Thing, then, can be used to represent this impossible smear that intrudes upon our attempts at the clarity of the whole, the break in the totality that allows it to be. It is not only the blind spot that obscures, but drives vision and thought. In the same way that Lacan will exhort the openness of desire to the Other, Bataille posits the radical insufficiency of thought, the nonknowledge at the centre of the labyrinth, as something that perpetually wounds our attempt to complete being, a wound which stays open, a. mutilation from which we attempt to speak.
As tempting as it might be to cite Bataille as an influence on later thought and leave it at that, there is a case to be made for the importance of his thought less as a stepping stone towards the poststructuralism of Derrida or Barthes, and more in direct conversation with it, something that, if we are to stage this dialogue, reinforces our reading of both in untapped and productive ways. Could it be that in Bataille’s impossible labyrinth, in his radical insufficiency, we can find something lacking in those he went on to influence, those who borrowed from his thought? If anything, this is a case waiting to be made by those who have yet to make it. A return to Bataille that, rather than drawing the world around a Bataillean framework of trangression and excess, tries to take the trajectory of his thought as an attempt to get to grips with problems that we remain hopelessly entangled within. It is, perhaps, to think not in the tradition of Bataille, but in his formless potential.
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