Bataille 2 (approaching Sade)

I shouldn’t make promises about what I’ll write or when I’ll write it, since I’m so incredibly bad at keeping such promises. I would be too ashamed to admit how I’ve spent most of the past week – suffice to say, very little of it went to reading or writing. My lapses of discipline become more and more frequent and last longer and longer. I keep hoping that this time I’ll recover my discipline and my will will hold, but perhaps I’m an inherently weak willed creature. Well, nothing for it but to write what I can and when I can. I’m going to use this entry to start getting thoughts on Sade in order for a paper I have to write – was supposed to finish months ago… actually one of two papers on Blanchot, though I’m bringing Bataille into this one (and it’s the other one that makes the project sort of unpalatable and keeps getting me desperate to procrastinate). Anyway… I wrote a little on the first two essays in ‘literature and evil’, and introduced some of the main dichotomies – present verse future, self-indulgence verse discipline, etc. There are long passages in Bataille that seems so concisely and intelligently formulated that there seems to be little or no point in writing about it – it can’t be paraphrased without some loss – everything is equally important, nothing is repeated and the economy of language is admirable. It already is analysis and doesn’t need to be analyzed and at times it seems so evidently elegant, simple and true that I couldn’t possibly take issue with it (at times and in passages). I mentioned that he associates love and death. For Blanchot two general human imperatives often come into conflict – the desire to extend life and the desire to make it more intense. He claims that that making life more intense does not necessarily oppose lengthening it, though it can’t be done without an element of danger. For him the safe, the practical and the orderly (which he generally seems to equate with the Good – no discussions of selflessness or sainthood here. These apologists of evil, especially in that generation explicitly or implicitly make the Good the same as the Bourgeois [an admittedly vague concept itself] and want to claim saints in the same category as artists and madmen. They are excessive, and therefore, in a sense, evil. They seem, though Bataille doesn’t discuss them, on the side of intensity rather moderation). The social order, in trying to create longevity equally opposes death and the individual moment. People who try to explain humor and laughter always make asses of themselves – Bataille sees them as a toying with destruction in order to make light of them, master or withdraw from them, temporarily take away their sting (I think Bergson writes something like that as well – I forget his theory). This is clearly applicable, if at all, only to very specific instances of humor and totally unsatisfying. Likewise, Bataille talks somewhat unconvincingly about human sacrifices. He cites the theory that the purpose of a sacrifice is to bind a society together (he doesn’t name specific people who hold or defend this theory, but I think I remember Durkheim’s theory of religion being along these lines – in a religion what is always worshipped, in a sense, is the community… sacred fear is partly fear of falling outside the collective which gives the individual strength, meaning and protection. The more extreme the collective experience – the tighter the bonds created – group fear and collective enemies create cohesion, as I suppose, would extraordinary collective accomplishments). For Bataille cohesion created by human sacrifice would be an after effect rather than the purpose. The purpose would be to test the limits of endurance (he points out that some people had to sacrifice their own children – think of Iphigenia). The greatest counter to death is to experience it, or as the French say, to ‘live it’. I don’t think Bataille ever uses the term catharsis, but he does mention the theater as an ancestor of the human sacrifice. Human life being limited, the problem of evil for Bataille consists of brushing up against, testing and crossing the limits. It is a desire for the impossible. Which still doesn’t bring me to Sade or Blanchot…