Vicious circle

More than usual, i'm going to have to accept a certain level confusion and incoherence talking about a couple of books about Nietzsche. First a couple of words about the book that isn't the subject of this entry - that I don't really mean to talk about, not here, not yet. Earlier in the summer I read Bataille's 'On Nietzsche', which is a baffling book of which Nietzsche is more the theme than the subject. Occasionally in the book Bataille mimics Nietzsche, adopting his style, especially through aphorisms. Occasionally he interprets and explains Nietzsche, sometimes he argues with him, often he develops his own idea at length, ideas that are related to Nietzsche tangentially or not at all (when they aren't in direct opposition to Nietzsche - though Nietzsche is held in reverence above all other thinkers and writers). Parts of the book are a sort of journal, in which he's chronicling his daily life near the end of the second world war, amid strange evacuations and dislocations, much of it focusing around an affair with an unnamed woman, who's probably someone else's wife, an affair that doesn't seem to have a possible future. The books not fresh in my mind, and I'm not sure what the value of it is. I was planning to go back to it once I've read another book of Bataille's that might help me make a little bit more sense of some of his central ideas. I'm not sure why I bring the book up exactly, except to make a distinction between two different sorts of difficulty. Finishing Bataille's book, I would have found it difficult to write much, except, of course, focusing very specifically on certain illuminating passages, because the book is mystical and obscure. I've just finished Klossowski's book 'Nietzsche and the vicious circle', and I know I'm going to be a bit jumbled, and that my understanding isn't quite what it should be just because it is the sort of dense, difficult work that needs to be read through a few times carefully, whereas I only had time for a single quick read-through. It does seem to me to merit all the praise and attention it's received over the years - it is the product of decades of writing on Nietzsche - it influenced and was influenced by just about everyone. I don't know how much you know about Klossowski... Polish... he comes out of the College de sociologie, along with Bataille, Leiris and Certeau. He wrote a couple of well-known and strange novels, and of course his book on Sade. That Bataille actually got Klossowski started on Nietzsche shows through, perhaps, in his interest in embracing chance - making chance necessity and placing that near the heart of the eternal return. A certain closeness to Deleuze comes about in the interest in the relation of forces (I know there was a sort of cross-fertilization there. Deleuze's book on Nietzsche comes out in the early sixties, and the actual book version of the vicious circle comes out near the end of the same decade, though Deleuze had read Klossowski's earlier essays, which were subsumed by the book, and he was heavily influenced by the vicious circle in some of his later writing).
Anyway, at the heart of the book is Nietzsche's revelation of the eternal return at SIls-Maria, and the texts that are most carefully pored over are posthumous fragments (there's also a certain amount of correspondence brought in - the published works are taken into account, but kind of secondary... I think I'm going to jus sort of list off some of the main things that he draws out of Nietzsche's writing:
- the self is a sort of meeting point of a multiplicity of impulses... in previous posts we have begun to touch on thought in relation to language and whether there is anything prior to language... here thought is largely a translation of impulses into language (or codes of everyday communication). Image turns into idea turns into concept. Before language comes a tonality (which is a slightly unexpected translation of Stimmung, though 'mood' does lose some of the musical resonance of the German), or an intensity..
- All that happens and all we do derives from the meeting of and conflict between competing impulses. Impulses and energies have no goal or aim beyond themselves, they mean nothing. They cannot, however, just endure, remain... energy is always in movement and always aims to increase.
- Consciousness needs a goal or an aim, and must interpret its own impulses in such a way that they are given one - one that would correspond to the further excitation and increase of that impulse.
- The various strengths of different impulses determines which ones will win out, the self is not a separate and stronger arbiter that can change this and make decisions about it, it is a result of impulses, that interprets, and can choose to will what is already a necessity.
- The eternal return of the same is an event that stands for everything that can ever happen and ever has happened - it is embracing the entire set of all possibilities (numerous but finite), including those that have led to the formation of the self that recognizes the eternal return. It is the recognition that the eternal ebb and flow of impulses that constantly circles in on itself is without meaning or end, and that life requires it constantly be given a meaning through fabulation... it is possible logically and theoretically to believe in determinism, but in order to live it is necessary to act as though will and choice exist (and on some level to believe it)
- Recognition of the eternal return must be forgotten, and rediscovered. The words, the signs of the experience can persist but the actual experience of recognition can't.
- there are two ways an impulse can develop (here my distortion and confusion is definitely picking up pace and things that don't belong together are getting mixed together)... there's a vertical development of the individual impulse being strengthened... the cultivation of the individual/ the exception, of intensity... or the horizontal gregarious flow that strengthens the group at the expense of the individual (sort of like entropy, except not). Here I really should stop, since I'm aware I'm veering off course. I'm not sure I should be talking about impulses here where all the discussion of the cultivation of the exception at the expense of the norm cuts in, where society should exist for the individual rather than the other way around. To be honest, discussions of Nietzsche's thoughts on health and sickness, on conspiracy, on real masters verse apparent masters, those things are straightforward and easy to follow in Klossowski's book, but what's most important and most interesting really are the most difficult aspects - and I know I'm only starting to unravel the actual explanation of the eternal return - each moment being in a sense the goal of the whole, the need for fabulation, etc. I hoe I get a chance to come back and clarify the whole thing before long... but I'm pretty sure it won't happen before Christmas, and even then, I know there's other stuff I kind of have to read. I'm horribly behind where I'm supposed to be, and I'm stuck in a system that puts a premium on quantity of things touched on rather than depth of understanding (though had I made use of my time this summer, I could have devoted a month to understanding this one thing or something else really well, rather than simply goofing off and not doing anything productive at all - the system maybe a bit perverse, but I guess it does actually aim at both - massive quantities balanced by a few things that it is assumed that you will pay more attention to, which is somewhat sensible. It's my own fault I've spent a lot of time not working in any way shape or form - surface or depth).

The accursed share

Over the weekend, I read Georges Bataille's 'the accursed share'. Bataille is always fun to read. There is nothing obscure or difficult about his prose. He has a nice style. He's bright and lucid and interesting. This particular book has fun discussions of human sacrifice among the aztecs, the thirteenth Dalai lama, potlatch in North American native American tribes, etc. etc. All the same, it was a bit of a disappointment. It wasn't as revelatory as 'literature and evil'. I already knew the basic argument, and i expected his development of the argument to take me unexpected places, but no, it was mostly what I thought it was. Other people seem to have gone further with it, and Bataille himself adds interesting stuff to it in later writing.
He starts with the premise that economics errs by trying to isolate economic activity from everything else in life, and he sets out to create a 'general economics'. Wealth is similar to energy in natural organisms or organic systems... I realize I'm going to end up presenting a lot of this kind of short hand, because it's familiar enough to me that it often doesn't feel like it needs to be spelled out. You'll remember, maybe, that when I was talking about 'literature and evil', I already talked about the opposition between spending and accumulating... according to Bataille, in some societies spending is a positive good in opposition to bourgeois society since the reformation and particularly since the industrial revolution. So in feudal society, nobles were expected to ostentatiously waste wealth and working was a base activity. According to Bataille, the creation of wealth always leads to a certain excess that needs to be destroyed. Wealth can be invested and put toward the creation of more wealth, but expansion always has its limits (and he puts this in parallel with the balance of creation and destruction in nature, the eventual satiety of ecosystems, the inability of organisms to grow indefinitely or make use of everything they consume - thus the need for excretion). There's a definite Malthusian element in the whole argument as people are considered as a resource, and he uses this dynamic to discuss human sacrifices, and the world wars that destroyed so much of what was created and accumulated through the industrial revolution. Drinking, wasting time, anything that doesn't produce is an expenditure. For Bataille, Cathedrals and all of the adornment of Catholicism is sacred precisely because it is pure expenditure, because it is ostentatiously not for a pragmatic purpose (and wastefulness contributes to the sacred nature of sacrifices as well).
Before continuing with his argument, I will make an aside and point out that there is a sick and irrational belief in western society (and not just in Western society) that growth is always necessary and good. Even if the increase of population isn't always seen as a positive good (balancing the recognition that the world is getting overpopulated and the desire to have a large enough younger population to support the aging population), it is always seen as a tragedy if we do not continue to grow quickly enough. As labor can be made more efficient, it is not thought that this should necessarily lead to everybody working less and enjoying more leisure time with the same amount of goods, instead it is believed that we should produce more goods as the only possible way to keep employment at a reasonable level, and we should make sure that we get people to consume those goods. We need ever larger markets so we can keep people working... and why? We're increasing the strain on the environment, not making ourselves happier (people are more stressed out - women are working as well as men, and they are both working long hours. who needs it?).
Anyway, that's related to Bataille, but not something he is saying. He takes it more or less for granted that all things tend to try to expand until they are confronted with an excess that needs to be released. An example he doesn't bring up, at least not on an individual level is the ultra-successful business men who become philanthropists, and start devoting a large amount of there energy to spreading largesse, to unburdening themselves of what they had initially worked so hard to accumulate - sometimes at the expense of some of the people they later try to help. (I'm not claiming that all successful philanthropists did something shady to acquire their fortunes, that many aren't inspired by pure altruistic motives, or that when they start devoting time to spending they aren't continuing to accumulate - this last part generally goes without saying - but it does seem to be true that for many, spending becomes as important as earning... and the spending often seems more of a sacred task than the earning ever was).
Anyway, I'm not going to go through all the societies and examples Bataille gives to show how this works. I just want to jump ahead to the ending which is sort of the strangest part of the book - because it was written at the height of the cold war, and it deals with the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It would be possible to read part of the section dealing specifically with the Soviets as apologetic, since he to some extent rationalizes things like collectivization (all the while admitting that the process was brutal and inhuman, just not incomprehensible - incomprehensible not being the same thing as 'right' or 'good' of course). He goes to some length to point out the success of the soviets in developing a backward economy that in no way conformed to the sort of society that Marx thought could become communist - he points out that the Russians won Stalingrad before the Americans had made their presence felt in Europe. He also points out the logic of denying the individual in the name of the collective - opposing freedom with justice... in other societies excess was not systematically channeled toward the members of society who were in want (internally or externally). After a passage talking about war again, Bataille shifts to talk about the Marshall plan, and he more or less comes out with a very European view of the Soviet Union as having a healthy influence on the U.S. For the purposes of winning the loyalties of the rest of the world away from the Soviets, the U.S. ends up making the most positive, productive use of its excess of any society ever. Bataille clearly does favor the U.S., but doesn't desire a victory for either side (not that he says this quite so bluntly), For me it is kind of inevitable that in reading something like that I do think of the fact that there was no marshall plan for eastern europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a lot of the checks on the worst excesses of capitalism fell away completely in the nineties (not that it hadn't started with Reagan), and there was no more need for America to show a moral rather than just a material superiority of capitalism - not that the eighties and even earlier hadn't been filled with channeling money to brutal regimes in South America and shamelessly destroying the environment - I'm not really sure that things changed all that much, but still...
I could add all sorts of speculation, but for some reason these sorts of theories always start to seem less compelling to me once they are turned toward world politics. The connections between pure expenditure and the sacred were interesting, as were the more ethnographic or focussed discussions of various societies, countries and religions - and, of course, it was interesting to take the basic idea and use it to shed new light on Weber and the protestant ethic - the sudden moral imperative to accumulate and not to waste that went along with the iconoclasm of the early protestants, etc.

Bataille 3 (Proust and Sade)

Do you actually read multiple new entries in the order in which they were added as opposed to in the order in which they appear? I suppose it would be good to create a style in which order of ideas doesn't matter... but, to continue with 'Literature and Evil', Bataille remarks that Proust is one of the least naive writers imaginable, and yet if you take the unpublished writings of his youth, some ten years before 'la recherche', you can find assertions that Bataille calls 'aggressively naive'. He includes the following quote, "it is this that moves us in 'the Phaedo'; when following Socrates' argument we suddenly have the extraordinary feeling of hearing a line of reasoning whose purity is unaltered by any personal desire, as though Truth is superior to everything else, because, in effect, we perceive that the conclusion Socrates will draw from this reasoning is that he must die." This is coming from a man whose later work will form one of the most adamant arguments ever made against the existence of a disinterested will to truth - who expounds at length on the fact that only desire can drive a search for the truth, and it is never just a desire for Truth for it's own sake (which, as I've already pointed out, is an idea that can be extracted from 'the Symposium' as well). Proust's naivete, by the way, comes as no surprise to anyone that has read any part of 'Remembrance of things past' (well, unless it was just the final volume maybe), since throughout, the narrator is constantly at great pains to show just how naive he once was, how the path to his final revelation was anything but straight, how it was built on the formation, loss and reformation of countless illusions and dead ends, how there is no direct or economical ways to learn the things he learns (as Deleuze explains, t is all a giant lesson in semiotics - things in themselves are not accessible, only signs which tell us about them. Those signs are like a language and you must go through a long grueling process in order to learn to read them). The particular sort of advocacy of falsehoods that the older Proust embraces makes no sense without the earlier aggressively naive devotion to the Truth (think in this regard of the young Nietzsche, devoted as he was to Schopenhauer).... at least this is, as I understand i, Bataille's reason for including this quote at the beginning of his Proust chapter. His entire discussion of Proust centers around a relatively minor event in 'Swann's Way'. A father is devoted to his daughter - is practically his only concern in life. The daughter is a lesbian, and had her lover living with her in her father's house. Though the father's devotion to his daughter was undiminished, sadness and worry about his daughter's position/ behavior sent him to an early grave. The father is shown in an extremely positive light - his devotion is thoroughly selfless, and we eventual discover that he is the greatest artist in the whole of Proust's work. After the father's death, the daughter and her lover profane the father's picture while making love. The explanation given is that because of the ban relating to the daughter's desires, she felt a constant guilt attached to pleasure, and it seemed that only the guilty and the wicked had access to pleasure. THough the daughter continued to love and admire her father, in order not to have guilt toward him ruin her enjoyment of the relationship she was having, it was necessary to embrace her guilt and think of Evil as itself pleasurable. She no doubt reproached herself for the act afterwards - had she not cared about her father the symbolic act of profanation would have had no interest for her... and of course, Proust himself had a mother who worshipped him and was deeply upset by the gay lover he had living at home with him or her - Proust's father being already dead at that point.
I think I've recounted all of that to you before... in a sense, that discussion doesn't relate so well to Sade, as I can't imagine him being a pure young idealist before going bad - though maybe I'm wrong. In a sense it very much does, as a genuine denial of the existence of Good and Evil, which is admittedly sometimes found in Sade, makes everything else he writes senseless. Have I said all this before in this blog? I fear I might have. I should also point out that in Sade it isn't 'Evil' so much as 'crime' that is prayed, and the existence of laws (divine, human and natural) that is generally discussed. As Bataille points out (so does Blanchot), it is extremely odd to speak of, or think of Sade's books as dangerous, since in order to be dangerous they would have to make crime seem attractive, and invite emulation, whereas in general Sade's books are calculated to awake disgust in the reader. For a person to be turned on and excited by all the mutilations killing, necrophilia and so forth that fills Sade's books, they would have to be unusually sick... (entry breaks off here, unfinished - perhaps to be finished one day?)

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…