The Anthropology of Exit: Bataille

on Heidegger and Fascism*

STEFANOS GEROULANOS

To critique Martin Heidegger is a difficult operation. It means that one

accepts at least the bulk of Heidegger’s conception of Being and wants to push this
conception further. To some extent it means that one wants to rethink Heidegger’s
“ontological difference,” to radicalize his antisubjectivism, and to escape from the
limitations of his worldview. And, politically, it can also mean that one wants to
evade or go beyond Heidegger’s Nazism, beyond the philosophical anthropology
that his political theology entailed, beyond the stigma associated with it. I want to
demonstrate that in the mid-1930s, Georges Bataille did exactly this.
At some point in the period 1934–37, Bataille scribbled some twenty 13.5 by
21 cm pages that he titled “La Critique de Heidegger: Critique d’une philosophie du
fascisme.”1 He collated these pages onto larger, thinner sheets, corrected them, and
marked them as an appendix, but did not attach them to another text.2 At stake in
this draft is a number of issues paramount to our understanding of Bataille’s contri-
bution to interwar thought. Here, Bataille joins a “spiritual exercise” aiming to undo
social homogeneity with an ontological, anti-Hegelian appreciation of insufficiency
and escape, and also with a theologico-political analysis of modernity and fascism.
Seeking to grant “Cartesian rigor” to his search for emancipation from homogeneity,
Bataille turns to a non-Hegelian, non-Heideggerian “Being outside,” which, not con-
tent with discrediting nonphenomenological interpretations of contemporary
politics, moves to attack what he sees as phenomenology’s conformity with modern
* I would like to express my gratitude to Hent de Vries, Christian Pinawin, and Anson Rabinbach
for their help throughout; Guillaume Fau of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for his help at the
Fonds Bataille; and Jeroen Gerrits, Nils Schott, Martin Shuster, and Joyce Tsai who helped me to
improve and clarify the final version of this text.
1. Georges Bataille, “Appendice: Critique de Heidegger,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF),
Département des Manuscrits Occidentaux, Fonds Bataille, 4.XXVI–bis. Hereafter cited in the text as CH,
with references first to the BNF’s pagination, then to the present edition’s. Citations of Bataille’s text are
given here without the crossed-out passages.
2. As far as the dating of the text is at issue, not only are the issues Bataille raises specific to this peri-
od, as I will try to show, but the relatively clear script looks like that of Bataille’s other texts and letters
from the same period, whereas his wartime and postwar handwriting is more fluid and harder to deci-
pher. In the Fonds Bataille, the manuscript of “Critique of Heidegger” is filed with the proofs of the
1952 article “Le passage de l’animal à l’homme et la naissance de l’art.” In their content, terminology,
and style, the two essays bear no resemblance; it is unlikely that their filing is purposeful.

OCTOBER 117, Summer 2006, pp. 3–24. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
4 OCTOBER

profane uniformity. Though Bataille flirts quite openly with fascism, for the first and
perhaps only time he also explicitly advocates an exit from homogeneity, indicating
that fascism paradoxically reinforces the profane uniformity it purports to overcome.
Bataille does all this under the guise of a study of Heidegger, whom, despite
occasional references, he never otherwise granted explicit pride of place in his
philosophical writings—and whose name in this text he mentions only twice (one
of these instances being in the title). Nevertheless, he subtly takes notions like
“Being,” the “pure ego,” and “intention” as starting points for an interrogation of
modernity. He then turns against them to decry the phenomenological “monde
de l’homogénéité” as stranded in the very immanence it conceptualizes. Incapable
of recognizing the world’s genuine allure and real misery, dependent on and
symptomatic of hollow social and theologico-political demands, Heideggerian
phenomenology for Bataille reduces existence to desolated orderly equivalence.
Before approaching the more complex philosophical problems Bataille raises,
especially questions of life amid homogeneity, of the exit from Being and from the
political anthropology of modernity, the present essay situates “Critique of
Heidegger” historically, seeking to consider the two philosophers’ relations to fas-
cism and explain how Bataille understood and criticized Heidegger’s thought—in
particular why he picked Heidegger as representative of fascism.

Bataille and Fascism

The association of Bataille with fascism has been a matter of considerable

debate, most of it pointing to his peculiar role in antifascist milieux. This is not the
place to retrace or replay that debate; still, the problem is significant, because
Bataille’s political equivocation sets up his analysis and colors his identification of
Heidegger with fascism. To quote Zeev Sternhell, “fascism had a fascination for men . . .
for whom any attempt to transcend bourgeois mediocrity and democratic flaccidity
was highly praiseworthy.”3 That Bataille shared this fascination has given much ammu-
nition to Bataille’s detractors, who argue that his nonconformism played an active
role in the delegitimation of the Third Republic.4 Some contemporary cultural histo-
rians have echoed Jean-Paul Sartre and other critics in arguing that Bataille’s
philosophical anthropology relied on a strategy of (a) articulating human experience
on the basis of vitalist or mystical postulates, and (b) providing a consequent critique
of bourgeois secularism (a critique ex definitione hostile to liberal democracy and
socialist utopia) that rivaled fascism in its reactionary aims and substance. Some fur-
ther argue that Bataille’s claims on heterogeneity evince a hidden pro-Nazism that is
supposedly part and parcel of postwar critiques of liberal humanism.5

3. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1986), p. 220. Sternhell does not mention Bataille.
4. See Daniel Lindenberg, Les Années souterraines 1937–1947 (Paris: Découverte, 1990).
5. Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004),
chap. 4. It is worth noting that in his critique of Bataille’s “mysticism,” Sartre accuses Bataille of not
The Anthropology of Exit 5

Supporters respond that Bataille never collaborated with the occupiers and
that his fascination with fascism’s aestheticized and sacralized politics by no means
amounted to support for a Nazi takeover. They point to the sobriety with which he
described fascism’s capacities,6 to his defense of Nietzsche against Nazi appropria-
tion,7 and to his heated rejections of the French radical right in Contre-Attaque and
in his own notes.8 Indeed, Bataille did not resemble French fascists: he was no
nationalist, no anti-Semite, no antimaterialist (a vitalist qua supermaterialist if any-
thing), and hardly a supporter of moral rejuvenation. He did not move in fascist
milieux, like Marcel Déat, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, or Robert Brasillach. For his
more careful defenders, this ambiguous investment points first of all to the failure
of the democratic imaginary in the 1930s, but also marks Bataille’s attempt to
imagine modernity as a tragic clash between classical rationality and an inner,
unruly, excessive humanity. Unless kept in suspension, such a clash leads to abdica-
tions of sovereignty in favor of fascist projects,9 yet such suspension also leaves
Bataille open to charges of “antifascist fascism,” “superfascism,”10 even an “arche-
fascism” resembling Heidegger’s or Ernst Jünger’s.11 Bataille’s ambivalence toward
war, his assertion that fascism was a “perfectly rational” successor to republican-
ism, and his contempt for democracy’s destruction of the “being of societies” (CH,
p. 3; p. 27) all question the leftist credentials of his call to use fascist means against
fascism—a call that Bataille himself would come to regret.12
Of interest in “Critique of Heidegger” is Bataille’s theologico-political analy-
sis of modern democracy and his rejection of fascism as illusory and insufficient.
In this regard, his 1930s work recalls other contemporaries not fully committed to

understanding Heidegger. See Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p.
156; trans. Situations (New York: Braziller, 1965), p. 145.
6. For example in his 1934 essay “Fascism in France,” in Rebecca Comay, ed., “Bataille: Writings
from the 1930s,” Alphabet City 4/5 (1996), pp. 50–61.
7. Bataille, “Nietzsche et le National-socialisme,” in Sur Nietzsche (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), pp. 231–32;
trans. “Nietzsche and National Socialism,” in On Nietzsche, trans. B. Boone (New York: Paragon House,
1992), pp. 172–73.
8. Bataille, “En attendant la grève generale,” in Bataille, Oeuvres complètes II: Écrits posthumes
1922–1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 254, 264. Hereafter cited in the text as OC, with roman numer-
als following for the volume.
9. Denis Hollier, Absent without Leave (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 82–83.
10. Superfascism is the term used by self-exculpating Surrealists disavowing Bataille and their own
role in Contre-Attaque. See Bataille, “Among the Surrealists,” Alphabet City 4/5 (1996), p. 61.
11. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe uses “arche-fascism” when writing of Heidegger in “The Spirit of
National Socialism and its Destiny,” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political
(London: Routledge, 1997), p. 149.
12. Maurice Blanchot, “Les Intellectuels en question,” Le Débat 29 (March 1984), pp. 19–20. The
philosophical significance of Bataille’s political disengagement is recounted in Peter Connor, Georges
Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 147. It is impor-
tant to reject the claim that Bataille helped delegitimate the Third Republic: to assign such responsibil-
ity to a pornographer-mystic-philosopher who had only published a few scattered essays misses both
the problems and the very real strength of the Third Republic. Recent historical works have also ques-
tioned the significance of the intellectual delegitimation of the Third Republic (e.g., Julian Jackson,
The Popular Front in France [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], chaps. 3–5).
6 OCTOBER

a political cause, in that it is concerned less with a critique of democracy per se

than with the contestation of the primacy of secular/liberal/positivist motifs in
European Spirit. Such condemnations of existing democracies often mingled with
attacks on claims of nineteenth-century science or on the Enlightenment potential
for barbarism—in a sense they sought to save a spirit of autonomy by rejecting
democracy. In the context Bataille was among the first to analyze fascism’s sacraliza-
tion of politics, its inversion of the Augustinian idea of the City of Man, and its attack
on the claims of modern individualism.13 He identified fascism’s “overcoming” of
profane democratic reality with a political Unhappy Consciousness that replaces the
good God with the Chef-Dieu (“God-Leader”). The attention paid to themes like sover-
eignty and freedom in “Critique of Heidegger” further expresses Bataille’s hostility
toward democracy, the regime that he accuses of obliterating them in favor of a soci-
ety composed of (and constructing) undifferentiated, unself-conscious subjects.

Heidegger:“Philosopher of Fascism”?

That Bataille refers to Heidegger in the 1930s is curious; that he does so using
the tag “philosopher of fascism” is remarkable. Sticking to Heidegger’s own account
in the “Letter on Humanism” (1946), historians of his French reception have gener-
ally treated only the 1940s as the coming of age of French Heideggerianism,
recognizing (a) a misbegotten, “anthropological” wave starting in the early 1930s
and culminating in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; (b) the postwar political debate in
Les Temps modernes and other journals (1944–47); and (c) the more felicitous and
supposedly more rigorous approach that begins in the late 1940s, with Jean
Beaufret, Jean Hyppolite, and others, and that becomes an important influence
on poststructuralism.14
The above interpretation sees the 1930s as little more than an opening to
these later developments, and notes the appearance of Emmanuel Levinas’s book
on Edmund Husserl, Alexandre Kojève’s Hegel seminar, and Henri Corbin’s trans-
lation of “Was ist Metaphysik?” (“What Is Metaphysics?”) in the journal Bifur as
setting up the anthropological first phase. This schema underplays both the rea-
sons (epistemological, scientific, religious) that brought attention to Heidegger
among philosophers in the first place and the considerable transformations in
philosophy of science, religion, and humanism that ensued. At the heart of the
turn to Husserl and Heidegger is a generational paradigm shift that repudiated
the positivism, intellectualism, and neo-Kantianism of older French thinkers.
Attention to their work came from a young, little-established group of thinkers

13. Bataille, “La structure psychologique du fascisme,” in OC I, pp. 346–48, 354–56; trans. “The
Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 143, 154–56.
14. See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001); Ethan
Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
2005); and Bernard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983).
The Anthropology of Exit 7

who taught either outside of Paris (Wahl until 1936, Canguilhem), at the slightly
marginal École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Koyré, Kojève, Bachelard), or simply
not at university level (Marcel, Levinas, Sartre). Many of these thinkers were
immigrants from the Soviet Union, had a German formation, and felt little enthusi-
asm for the previous generation in academic French philosophy (Alain, Bergson,
Brunschvicg, Meyerson, etc.). For these foreigners, as for their French contemporaries
like Sartre, Maurice de Gandillac, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology
provided until-then unimaginable grounding force of epistemological rigor. For
example, echoing arguments by Gaston Bachelard and Koyré, the (later) Hegelian
philosopher Kojève did not hesitate to argue in 1931 that Heidegger’s distinction of
Dasein (“Being-there”) from Vorhandensein (“presence-at-hand”) made possible, for
the first time, a philosophical understanding of scientific transformations, especially
of the observing/observed systems distinction in Heisenberg’s interpretation of
quantum mechanics.15
Already in 1928, Sartre had met the Japanese philosopher Count Kuki
Shūzō, who, during a short séjour in Paris, first mentioned Husserl and Heidegger
to him,16 long before Raymond Aron famously pointed to his martini glass and
fantasized about the effect of phenomenology on Sartre.17 For foreigners who,
like Kuki, had studied at least in part in Germany, phenomenology (especially
Heidegger’s, but also Husserl’s and Scheler’s) provided the crucial distancing
mechanism against the elders’ Kantianism, especially insofar as it accompanied
the new, antipositivist philosophy of science of Bachelard and Koyré, and philo-
sophically grounded protoexistentialist approaches toward immanence and the
role of metaphysical investigations.
It is also said that few knew of Heidegger’s Nazism until the postwar commu-
nist attack on it provoked the famous quarrel in Les Temps modernes (1945–47).18
Nonetheless, it is now evident that the political debate began in the 1930s: Levinas
would later recall first hearing of Heidegger’s Nazism from Koyré before 1933; he
“took the news with stupor and disappointment, and also with the faint hope that
it expressed only the momentary lapse of a great speculative mind into practical
banality.”19 Also prior to 1933, Arnaud Dandieu noted the affinity between Nazism

15. See my “Le réalisme sans fondement: Physique quantique et phénoménologie au tournant des
années 30 (Wahl, Bachelard et Kojève),” in Frédéric Worms and Giuseppe Bianco, eds., Jean Wahl
(Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm/PUF, forthcoming 2006).
16. See Heidegger, Unterwegs der Sprache (Tübingen: Neske, 1959), pp. 85, 89; trans. On the Way to
Language (London: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 1, 6; and his interview in L’Express, October 20, 1969, p.
171. See also Stephen Light, ed., Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1987).
17. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Force de l’age (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 141; trans. The Prime of Life (New
York: Paragon Books, 1992), p. 112.
18. See Janicaud, Heidegger en France 1, chap. 3; and Kleinberg, Generation Existential, chap. 5.
19. Emmanuel Levinas, “Comme un consentement à l’horrible,” Le Nouvel observateur, January 22,
1988, p. 82; trans. in Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989), p. 485. Nevertheless, a review by either
Koyré or Levinas defended Heidegger, in 1933, from Hans Driesch’s accusation of a “mysticism of the
irrational” (Revue philosophique 116 [1933], pp. 290–91).
8 OCTOBER

and Heidegger’s thought and popularity in a text for the Revue d’Allemagne.20 In an
astonishing 1934 formulation, Gandillac paralleled Ernst Cassirer’s compliant
comportment toward Heidegger at the 1929 Davos debate to “the succumbing of
the German people to the Führer’s magnetism.”21 Paul Nizan dismissed André
Malraux’s arrangement of solitude, politics, and anxiety in La Condition humaine
(1933) as derivative of Sein und Zeit (1927) and its worrying politics.22 In 1936, La
Nouvelle revue théologique published a book review that spoke of a shared understand-
ing of Heidegger as “the metaphysician of Nazism.” 23 And in 1938, Jean Wahl
opened his philosophy course reprising Einleitung in die Philosophie, Heidegger’s
own 1929 course, by expressing his displeasure with Heidegger’s public function
in Nazi Germany (the 1933–34 Rectorate), a function that politically tainted his
philosophical call for inner “Führerschaft” (“leadership”) through Being-toward-
death.24 Working on Heidegger’s 1928–29 course, Wahl told his students, would
dispense with this more recent problem. It is not excessive to claim then that this
sensitivity to the political question appears to have been common currency in the
group surrounding Koyré and the 1931–37 journal Recherches philosophiques, the
group whose former members shaped Heidegger’s early reception and after 1945
came to share a highly critical approach to him.25 In general, these thinkers
scorned his embrace of Nazism, working to “improve” his thought and explicitly
associating him with fascism. Among those close to Koyré, Bataille was the first to
assign Heidegger the altogether different tag of “philosopher of fascism.”

Bataille’s Claim to Philosophy

How much did Bataille know of Heidegger’s thought and politics—and from
what position could he call Heidegger’s a “philosophy of fascism”? In his 1946
review of Levinas and Wahl’s contributions to existentialism, Bataille wrote:

20. Arnaud Dandieu, “Philosophie de l’angoisse et politique du désespoir,” Revue d’Allemagne 60

(1932), pp. 883–91. Cited in Hollier, A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989), p. 895.
21. Maurice de Gandillac, Le Siècle traversé: souvenirs de neuf décennies (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), p. 134.
22. Cited in Jean-François Lyotard, Signed, Malraux (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), p. 164. Nizan had been the editor of Bifur, in which Corbin’s translation of “What Is
Metaphysics?” appeared.
23. Henri Thielemons, “Existence tragique: la métaphysique du nazisme,” La Nouvelle revue
théologique 6 (1939), pp. 561–79.
24. IMEC Fonds Wahl, Dossier Heidegger, Chemise “Heidegger,” p. 6. See Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe
27 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996) and Wahl’s 1945 reprisal of this course, interesting especially for its dis-
tortions. Wahl, Introduction à la pensée de Heidegger (Paris: LGF, 1999).
25. In addition to Levinas’s elaborate critiques of Heidegger, see Wahl’s Vers la fin de l’ontologie
(Paris: Éditions de l’Enseignement Supérieur, 1956), where Wahl asks whether the question of Being is
not after all a question mal posée—Koyré’s objections to inviting Heidegger to Cérisy in 1955, and
Kojève’s March 1968 interview (Quinzaine Litteraire 1–15 [June 1968], pp. 18–20), where Kojève, asked
why he no longer sought out philosophers, replied “Philosophers? Who? . . . Heidegger? You know that
Heidegger, as a philosopher, turned out really bad.”
The Anthropology of Exit 9

In Heidegger, the authentic appears as a consciousness of the authentic;

it is apparently no more than the nostalgia for rare authentic moments
which occur in a life of professional studies given over to the knowledge of
the authentic. This life does not seem to be dominated by a terrible
passion: one cannot be surprised by a slippage, which is not necessary but
possible, from the authentic to Hitlerism. What dominated Heidegger
was doubtless the intellectual desire to reveal being (being and not exis-
tence) in discourse (in philosophical language).26

Responding here to those who would classify Heidegger as an obscurissime counterpart

to Sartre,27 Bataille throws out the whole existentialist dimension of Heidegger’s work.
His condemnation echoes those leveled at Heidegger by the nonorthodox early gen-
eration (Kojève, Koyré, Levinas, Wahl) from the 1930s. It is original in that, written in
1947, it recalls neither the postwar Heideggerian/Sartrean claim of having tolerated
Nazism to defend the university from it, nor the Marxist retort that Heidegger’s
Nazism was existentialism’s true face. Rather, it argues that Heidegger’s misdirected
project toward authenticity turned to fascism because it forsook passion for knowl-
edge. Even when he writes that among contemporaries “only Heidegger commands
admiration,”28 placing him in a Heidegger/Marx/Hegel pantheon, Bataille again
expresses serious concerns with Heidegger’s intellectual search for the authentic.29
Still, Bataille’s 1930s texts give rather unsure signs of his interest in phenom-
enology. His literary output (especially Le Bleu du ciel [1935]) does not echo the
encounters with nothingness to be found in Malraux, Nizan, and other contempo-
raries. Yet, his most significant reference is a footnote to “The Psychological
Structure of Fascism,” where he notes that “the absence of any methodological
considerations . . . will not fail to astonish and shock those who are unfamiliar with
French sociology, modern German philosophy (phenomenology), and psycho-
analysis.”30 He later recalled having read a draft of Corbin’s French translation of
“What Is Metaphysics?,”31 a text he found seductive, and, echoing Koyré’s intro-

26. Bataille, “De l’existentialisme au primat de l’économie,” in OC XI, p. 285; trans. “From
Existentialism to the Primacy of Economy” (1947), in Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 161. Italics Heidegger’s.
27. Alphonse de Waelhens, “L’existentialisme de M. Sartre est-il un humanisme?,” Revue philosophique
de Louvain 44 (1946), p. 293.
28. See “Hegel dans le monde présent: Préface à l’oeuvre de Kojève” in BNF Fonds Bataille IV.25, §4,
pp. 33–35, citation p. 33 (see also p. 30); see also BNF Fonds Bataille, env. 18, p. 145. A version of this
“Preface to Kojève” was published as “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” in Deucalion 5 (Neuchatel:
Baconnière [être et penser], 1955), pp. 21–44; trans. “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,” in Fred Botting and
Scott Wilson, eds., The Bataille Reader (London: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 279–95.
29. The high regard may have been mutual. In the 1950s, Heidegger apparently called Bataille “la
meilleure tête pensante française.” However, according to a 1962 letter by Bataille to Jerôme Lindon,
Heidegger was mistaking him for Blanchot. See Bataille, Choix de letters 1917–1962 (Paris: Gallimard,
1997), pp. 582–83.
30. Bataille, “La structure psychologique du fascisme,” p. 339, n. *; “The Psychological Structure of
Fascism,” p. 160, n. 1.
31. Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1960); trans. “Qu’est-ce que la
10 OCTOBER

duction, “on equal footing with life”;32 and in January 1934, Bataille read Sein und
Zeit.33 His comprehension can be traced to the two interrelated institutions
responsible for phenomenology’s early diffusion: the École Pratique des Hautes
Études and the journal Recherches philosophiques. From 1931 to 1933, Bataille
attended courses by Koyré at the EPHE, notably “Relations Between Science and
Religion in the Sixteenth Century”; two courses on Nicolas of Cusa; and a course
on the young Hegel—whom Koyré engaged as the conclusion of his history of
German mysticism.34 As is well known from 1933 on, Bataille became a regular in
Kojève’s famous seminar on Hegel’s Religious Philosophy,35 from which he inher-
ited Kojève’s mix of Hegel and Heidegger.
Koyré’s teaching during this period systematically contextualized the develop-
ment of science within the history of religious and mystical thought, relativizing its
positivist and progressivist fantasies by seeing it as derivative of a metaphysical and reli-
gious background.36 Later to influence Thomas Kuhn and a wide array of European
thinkers, Koyré had a controversial aura in the 1930s.37 Koyré argued that experimen-
tation in science proves metaphysical presuppositions rather than discovering natural
laws,38 and he went on to suggest that Galileo’s detractors had legitimate reasons for
dismissing his work, because its cosmological significance was unsubstantiated from
their Aristotelian viewpoint, indeed disruptive and nihilistic. Koyré also produced a
minor stir in arguing that the story of Galileo’s Tower of Pisa experiment was untrue,
merely a positivist legend.39 This treatment of theology and mysticism as a ground for

metaphysique?,” Bifur 8 ( June 1931), pp. 7–32. Hereafter cited as WM from the English translation in
Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
32. Bataille, “L’Existentialisme,” Critique 41 (October 1950), p. 83. Bataille recounts the rejection of
Corbin’s translation by the Nouvelle Revue Française (blaming Julien Benda) and argues that Corbin
chose Bifur because it was not an “aging” journal (like Revue philosophique).
33. “Chronologie,” in Bataille, Romans et récits (Paris: Pleiade, 2004), p. cvi.
34. See Alexandre Koyré, De la mystique à la science: Cours, conférences et documents 1922–1962, ed.
Pietro Redondi (Paris: EHESS, 1986), pp. 41–42; Bataille, Romans et récits, pp. civ–cv; and Rodolphe
Gasché, System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille (Bern: Peter Lang, 1978), p. 300.
35. Bataille’s notes from the seminar (BNF, Fonds Bataille, 8B, 13D, and env. 16) are numerous and
occasionally quite different from those used by Raymond Queneau in the publication of Kojève,
Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947; Paris: Gallimard, 1968). The title of Kojève’s course, often over-
looked, is central to his approach, and to the way in which he, Bataille, and Koyré often treated reli-
gious, metaphysical, and social arguments as coextensive. Bataille refers to some of the thinkers he had
studied under Koyré (Nicholas of Cusa, Boehme, and so on) in his text with Raymond Queneau,
“Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic,” in Visions of Excess, p. 109.
36. Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 11–13. See also De la
mystique à la science, pp. 35–43.
37. See the criticisms of Koyré in Aldo Mieli, “Il tricentenario dei Discorsi di Galileo Galilei,”
Archeion 21 (1938), p. 281, cited in De la mystique à la science, p. 35; and Thomas Kuhn, “Alexandre Koyré
and the history of science: On an intellectual revolution,” in Encounter 34, no. 1 (1970), pp. 67–69. For
Koyré’s influence, see the Festschrift Mélanges Alexandre Koyré, 2 vol. (Paris: Hermann, 1964); and J.-F.
Stoffel, Bibliographie d’Alexandre Koyré (Florence: Olschki, 2000), pp. 99–127.
38. This point has led to extensive quarrels in the history of science. See Michael Segre, “The Never-
Ending Galileo Story,” in Peter Machamer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 403–5.
39. Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée scientifique, pp. 213–23. See also De la mystique à la science, pp. 36–37.
The Anthropology of Exit 11

science is reflected in Kojève’s foundation of philosophy on religion (and religion’s

perpetuation via sublation), and is paramount for Bataille’s linking of science to
repressive uniformity and his privileging the sacred over the profane.
Koyré was influential in other ways as well. In the early 1930s, he started an
extensive discussion of Galileo and modern science with his former teacher
Husserl.40 He sponsored the first translations of Heidegger, introducing Corbin’s
translation of “What Is Metaphysics?” and publishing, in the first issue of Recherches
philosophiques, a translation of “Vom Wesen des Grundes” (“On the Essence of
Ground”)—which in the French context served as an explicit critique of Kant and
positivism, and which pointed to a novel conception of reality, existence, and
truth. Founded in 1931 by Koyré and two colleagues from the EPHE, and later
coedited with Wahl and Bachelard, Recherches philosophiques was specifically geared
toward an “overcoming” of the previous philosophical generation. It included
phenomenological essays (often in translation), reviews of a range of contempo-
rary studies, and startling debates on metaphysics and the philosophy of science.41
Among its contributors were also Raymond Aron, Georges Dumézil, Bernhard
Groethuysen, Kojève, Gabriel Marcel, Sartre, and Leo Strauss, all of whom were or
became major figures in their own right. Bataille contributed to the journal a first
Kojèvian version of “The Labyrinth,” which was published right next to Levinas’s
“On Escape” and an essay on Hegel by Karl Löwith.42
These figures and connections are significant to Bataille’s case for a number
of reasons. First, they contextualize and bear out his claim to be speaking as a
philosopher. They suggest a semiacademic context in which Bataille learned about
phenomenology and conversed with philosophical contemporaries whom he
rarely wrote about. They also visibly influence his work, e.g., his presentations to
the Collège de sociologie, his occasional politico-philosophical treatments of sci-
ence, and especially his 1943 Inner Experience. They point to a casual personal circle
where he could discuss his approach—at the Café d’Harcourt after Kojève’s semi-
nars, with Corbin, Kojève, Auguste Queneau, Simone Weil, and sometimes also
Koyré and Levinas.43 And they also locate him in an intellectual matrix, centered

40. Edmund Husserl, “Briefwechsel,” in Husserliana III: Briefwechsel Teil III (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1994), pp. 355–62. See also François de Gandt, Husserl et Galilée (Paris: Vrin, 2004).
41. The journal’s role was recognized abroad, notably in a review written by Raymond Aron for the
Frankfurt School’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937), pp. 417–20.
42. Bataille, “Le Labyrinthe,” in Recherches philosophiques 5, no. 6 (1935), pp. 364–72; trans. “The
Labyrinth” in Visions of Excess, pp. 171–77. Hereafter cited with references first to the French and then
to the English. The text was reprised under the same name in Inner Experience, without the first two
pages, which essentially repeat Kojève’s interpretation of the master-slave dialectic. See Bataille,
L’Expérience intérieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), pp. 97–110; trans. Inner Experience (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 81–92.
43. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève (Paris: Grasset, 1990), p. 363. Regarding the nonconformist
politics of this group, it is significant to note that Kojève and Corbin translated Henri de Man’s L’idée
socialiste (Paris: Grasset, 1935). This hardly saddles them with de Man’s later path—at the time, the
book had been publicly burned in Germany, and in France those favorably citing de Man’s work
included influential figures like Jacques Maritain. It does, however, strongly indicate an interest on
their part in unorthodox, revisionist Marxism.
12 OCTOBER

around Recherches philosophiques, that was marked by specific investments in the

early Heideggerian corpus and strong rejections of Heidegger’s politics. Since
Koyré had told Levinas of Heidegger’s political involvement in the early 1930s, it is
unlikely that others in this group would not know about it.

Intellectual Matrices and the Conceptual Foundations of Bataille’s “Critique”

Three texts from the 1930s underscore Bataille’s politico-philosophical con-

cerns and introduce “Critique of Heidegger,” clarifying some of its ambiguities:
“The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (1933), “The Labyrinth” (1936), and the
“Dossier Hétérologie” (1935–36).

a. Homogeneity (Society, Science, Metaphysics, and Sovereignty)

“The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Bataille’s classic study of fascism’s

claims to overcoming democracy, parallels “Critique of Heidegger” thematically—
at times even word-for-word, as in these two passages describing their shared
treatment of money and social homogeneity:
From the immediate life that is imposed on me first of all as money,
acquired, to be acquired, or expended, in accord with measurable acts,
I do not retain here more than the form, which is to say the equiva-
lence, established between things, acts, products, and signs of things,
acts, and products. (CH, pp. 6–7; pp. 28–29)44

The common denominator, the foundation of social homogeneity and

of the activity arising from it, is money, namely the calculable equiva-
lent of the different products of collective activity. Money serves to
measure all work and makes man a function of measurable products.45

Both texts identify democracy with homogeneity (the erasure of difference and
tension) and describe society as torn between authority and an opposite. In
“Critique of Heidegger,” this opposite is anarchy, which democracy, in “The
Psychological Structure of Fascism,” fends off through adaptation:
. . . write briefly, saying that it could be shown that society is torn
between authority and anarchy. Disappearance of the being of societies
with democracy. (CH, p. 3; p. 27)46

44. The passage also evokes Bataille’s “La notion de dépense,” in OC I, pp. 302–20; trans. “The
Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess, pp. 116–29.
45. Bataille, “La structure psychologique du fascisme,” p. 340; “The Psychological Structure of
Fascism,” p. 138.
46. Bataille considers “the metaphysical question of the nature of societies” in numerous texts of
the period, notably “Rapports entre ‘société,’ ‘organisme,’ ‘être,’” OC II, pp. 295, 297–99.
The Anthropology of Exit 13

In practical terms, the function of the State consists of an interplay of

authority and adaptation. The reduction of differences through com-
promise in parliamentary practice indicates all the possible complexity
of the internal activity of adaptation required by homogeneity . . .
depending on whether the State is democratic or despotic, the prevail-
ing tendency will be either adaptation or authority.47
Democracy’s destruction of the Being of society opens up a range of problems, first
among them the opposition between sovereignty and homogeneity. Bataille does
not further discuss the evocative issue of authority;48 at stake here is the sovereignty
(or lack thereof) of the individual in the midst of social tension and homogenized
existence. Insofar as such sovereignty is threatened by political uniformity, this is
reflected in scientific and metaphysical terms. Bataille’s claims concerning science
come on the heels of contemporary philosophers and philosophers of science,
notably Recherches philosophiques contributors Bachelard, Kojève, and Koyré. In his
L’Athéisme (1931), scientific writings, and Hegel lectures,49 Kojève specifically used
Heidegger’s treatment of world to set up homogeneity as a force aiming at the era-
sure of man’s difference from the realm in which he exists—and which he
unsuccessfully seeks to overcome by investing in figures of authority and meta-
physical power.50 “Critique of Heidegger” echoes these concerns and clearly
invokes (a) Heidegger’s approach to intentionality, scientific reduction, and the
meaning of world in “On the Essence of Ground,” available since 1932 in Recherches
philosophiques,51 and (b) Bachelard’s “psychoanalysis of objective knowledge”—a set of
antipositivist arguments that Bachelard saw as the theoretical consequence of Hans
Reichenbach’s and Werner Karl Heisenberg’s indeterminisms, and which he also
first presented in Recherches philosophiques.52 Bataille’s use of repression in “Critique of

47. Bataille, “La structure psychologique du fascisme,” p. 342; “The Psychological Structure of
Fascism,” p. 139.
48. On the issue of authority, Bataille cites Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in “The
Psychological Structure of Fascism,” p. 160. See the discussion in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in The Freudian
Subject (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 270, n. 37. See also Kojève’s 1942 La Notion
de l’autorité (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).
49. Kojève’s work on science is little known. After a dissertation on Soloviev, directed by Jaspers
(Alexander Koschewnikoff, Die Religionsphilosophie Wladimir Solowjeffs, University of Heidelberg, 1926),
Kojève studied for several years under Koyré and wrote L’idée du déterminisme, as well as, in 1929, a math-
ematical and philosophical treatment of the concept of world (“Zum Problem einer diskreten ‘Welt,’”
BNF Fonds Kojève, Boite IX). In that text, the homogeneity of space is repeatedly addressed as a philo-
sophical and mathematical issue. Similarly, Kojève approached finitude through a mathematical con-
ception of the infinite in L’Athéisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), pp. 201–4. See also Kojève, Introduction à
la lecture de Hegel, p. 217; for Kojève’s studies, see De la mystique à la science, pp. 27–29, 41–46, 50–52.
50. Kojève, L’Athéisme, pp. 95, 106–10, 126–30.
51. Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” first translated into French as “De la nature de la cause,”
in Recherches philosophiques 1 (1931–32), pp. 83–104; hereafter cited as EG, from the English translation
“On the Essence of Ground,” in Pathmarks.
52. Gaston Bachelard, “Noumène et microphysique,” Recherches philosophiques 1 (1931–32), p. 55.
Bachelard expanded on these issues in other reviews for Recherches philosophiques, and in his La Formation de
l’esprit scientifique (Paris: Vrin, 1938); trans. The Formation of the Scientific Mind (Manchester: Clinamen,
14 OCTOBER

Heidegger” nods to Bachelard’s language, rather than Freud’s. Here, science is

homogenizing; it tends to erase individual intention:

Plane of intentionality in the world of science

(indifference of the limit where science represses intention) (CH, p. 3; p. 27)53

Bataille’s subsequent presentation of homogeneity as a quasi-scientific issue also

bleeds over into metaphysical kinds of questioning. Assuming the hostility toward
positivism of figures that influenced Bataille (Bachelard, Heidegger, Kojève, Léon
Shestov), his reference to science as “homogeneous” can be said to carry the pejora-
tive inflection that “metaphysical” has for Heidegger, and heterogeneity directly
parallels “the nothing” as Heidegger posits it in “What Is Metaphysics?”: science for-
gets that “only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves
objects of investigation” (WM, p. 95). Central also to Kojève’s influence on Bataille’s
“tableaux hétérologiques” (OC II, pp. 177–204) and his “Critique of Heidegger” is
the thought of understanding man as a being fundamentally grounded in and
bound by the straitjacket of immanence, a being at least contrasted to the image of
transcendence and heterogeneity (a topic that also invokes Heidegger’s question of
authenticity). But while Kojève emphasizes the inaccessibility of the heterogeneous
in atheist modernity, Bataille (with Heidegger) tends to the inaccessibility and illu-
sion of an other to be found in society, and seeks to think man against the scientific
erasure of such an other. Secular existence is homogeneous and uniform, painless
and boring; as such, it is also politically impotent.54

b. Sovereignty beyond Homogeneity (An Answer to the Question: “What Is Being”?)

“Critique of Heidegger” and “The Labyrinth” extend this issue to a prob-

lematization of the limitations of Being. Complicating the contrast of sovereignty
to homogeneity, “The Labyrinth” argues for an alternative conception of the rela-
tionship between Being and the individual. Well in step with a large number of
texts from Recherches philosophiques that seek a concrete ground for philosophical
inquiry, “The Labyrinth” attacks sufficiency and consistency as limitations in life and
existence. Bataille pretends to subsume Kojève’s master/slave conflict; then,
implicitly founding insufficiency on Kojève’s understanding of desire, he turns it
into a key to ontology from which to criticize completeness and the desire for it:
At the basis of human life there exists a principle of insufficiency. In
isolation, each man sees the majority of others as incapable or unwor-
thy of “being.” . . . The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested

2002). As mentioned already, Kojève agreed that the Heisenberg interpretation of quantum physics called
for a new philosophical anthropology in his L’idée du déterminisme (Paris: Livre de poche, 1990).
53. Italics mine.
54. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, pp. 145–48.
The Anthropology of Exit 15

by every other. . . . A burst of laughter or the expression of repugnance

greets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight through which my
profound insufficiency is betrayed. . . .55
This last sentence turns Kojève’s desire for recognition on its head: rather than
merely show a structural failure built into desire, social existence betrays every
being’s ontological lack—and only a radical retreat from society (“a burst of
laughter . . . ”) can allow human life a respite, i.e., a positive acceptance of this
lack. This near absolutizing of insufficiency as a dimension of existence further
disrupts Kojève’s assumption that desire only matures in its failure to confront
death, in its subjection to slavery. Still, Bataille’s implicit target here is Heidegger:
without a proclamation of insufficiency as a central factor in all existence, Being is
nothing but immanence reducing the individual to shared uniform sociality. This
is to say that, for Bataille, Being is not something I have access to, but instead what
makes me unable to fully participate in (or reduce myself to) the community
made up of human others. Bataille continues:
Being in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want—
outside of me. It is a clumsy man, still incapable of eluding the
intrigues of nature, who locks being in the ego. Being in fact is found
nowhere and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to be
divine, at the summit of a pyramid formed by the multitude of beings,
which has as its base the immensity of the simplest matter.56
Disparaged as a mystical celebration of existential breakdown,57 this relationship
between Being and the individual can be better described as a codependence aim-
ing to disrupt the harmonious immanence of secular, scientific, uniform boredom:
Bataille’s treatment instead opens up a different ontology, for which Being is
“ungraspable” because both “my” insufficiency and the excessive presence of “my”
immanence in the world require that Being be impossible to simply place or con-
trol. To approach the question of Being is not merely to pose it, but to link it to a
flight from self-sufficient “human reality,” from Being as it presently is, from any
answer to the question of Being that celebrates its reality.

The Text

Insofar as it echoes such treatments of homogeneity, sovereignty, Being, and

tumult, “Critique of Heidegger” fits well in the period 1934–37, and uses terms

55. Bataille, “Le Labyrinthe,” p. 365; “The Labyrinth,” p. 172.

56. Ibid.
57. Gandillac concurs with Sartre that Bataille’s tone was reminiscent of the mystics, in Le Siècle traversé, p.
255. Kojève also wrote to Bataille on September 28, 1942, that Inner Experience is “certainly not worse, also not
better” than books by two Christian mystics he had been reading. Published in Kojève, “Lettres à Georges
Bataille,” Textures 70, no. 6, pp. 61–64. See also Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, esp. chap. 1.
16 OCTOBER

largely absent from Bataille’s writings preceding or following this period. The text of
“Critique of Heidegger” gives careful and clear indications of Bataille’s approach to
three central problems: (a) the critique of Heidegger’s thought, (b) the discussion
of fascism and Heidegger in the context of the anthropo-theological foundations of
modern politics, and (c) Bataille’s evocation of an exit from modern reality, in
terms clearly evocative of Levinas’s work from the period. My aim in this more
analytical section is to show: first, that Bataille credits Heidegger with permitting
a sort of reenchantment of the world, i.e., with opening up a thinking unbound by
the limitations of classical ontology, which reduces man to homogeneous subjec-
tivity, and second, that Bataille also accuses Heidegger of closing this world in an
illusory quest for authenticity, rather than recognizing the fundamental tumul-
tuousness and pain of Being. In this light, Heidegger’s philosophy comes to
resemble fascism’s promise. Both seek an overcoming of bourgeois, profane limi-
tations, but in the same gesture, show this call to be misdirected, and indeed
destructive of the very otherness they purport to reveal anew. And third, it is in
rejecting this call that Bataille turns, with Levinas, to seek a more radical exit from
existing thought and Being.

a. Bataille and Heidegger

“Impossibility of existing for oneself—which is to say: dying—Heideggerian

transcendence” (CH, p. 3; p. 27). This linking of death to transcendence foregrounds
the two thinkers’ shared concern with finitude and relates this interest to their hostil-
ity to inauthentic social homogeneity. But as an explicit reference to Heidegger, it is
misleading. Coming early in the text, the reference gives no indication of the signifi-
cant difference between their respective approaches to Being—a difference that
concerns us here, and that ultimately explains the above quote.
Whereas in Heidegger the ontological difference downplays the role of world
in the appropriative contrast of Being and beings, Bataille proceeds to locate Being
in contradist inct ion to both beings and the world. Here, he attacks two of
Heidegger’s philosophical moves: first, he turns Dasein into le moi, the ego, “the I,”
my ego;58 second, he conceives world as single and not centered around the ego.
Here, “my ego” is absolutely singular and formless, a sort of empty and undirected
core specific to the being that I am. Clearly evocative of Husserl’s pure ego,59 le
moi is distinct from the world and unaffected by its process of determination. As
the origin of intention, le moi is also what demonstrates a/my specific being’s
insufficiency—its failure to get satisfaction in and from the world. Bataille’s argu-
ment on insufficiency specifically attacks Heidegger’s claim that, because of

58. Throughout this essay and the translation, I have translated Bataille’s le moi as the ego. See foot-
note 6 of the translation.
59. Husserl, Ideen I (Husserliana III) (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976); trans. Ideas I (The Hague: M.
Nijhoff, 1982), §§47–55. See also the fourth of Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationen (Husserliana I) (The
Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973); trans. Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960), §§30–33. By 1931,
Koyré, Levinas, and G. Pfeiffer had translated Cartesian Meditations into French.
The Anthropology of Exit 17

Dasein, beings always appear manifest as a whole (EG, p. 120). The antisubjectivist
critique of subjective sufficiency suggested here by Bataille’s “ego” is precisely a
consequence of the rejection of this wholeness.
The second attack amplifies the first. In Being and Time, “world” plays on the
ambivalence between (a) the world in general and (b) an individual Dasein’s world,
the realm of its existence. This ambivalence can thus insist on a codependence
between Dasein and the world. That is to say, it is never clear where the limits of
Dasein’s world lie, if world specifically surrounds this Dasein and, in a sense, “belongs”
to it, or instead world merely forms the ontic domain in which Dasein finds itself.60
Instead Bataille highlights the very contrast of the world to the ego and the failure of
each to comply with the demands of the other (intention versus determination,
insufficiency and desire versus homogeneity) (CH, pp. 9, 11, 15; pp. 30–32).61
Heidegger would object to this treatment of world and Being as spatial or anthropo-
logical: “World is not a mere regional title used to designate the human community
as distinct from the totality of natural things; rather, world refers precisely to human
beings in their relations to beings as a whole” (EG, p. 120). Nevertheless, in Bataille’s
eyes, it is Heidegger who is too Kantian, despite his critique of Kant (EG, pp.
115–19), because he emphasizes world as something encompassing men and the
entirety of their relations and thus does not sufficiently demarcate the world as a bat-
tlefield for the intentions and insufficiency of my ego against those of others, as a
realm from whose restrictive forces man continually seeks to escape (CH, p. 11; p. 30).
Given that, for Bataille, Being delineates the subject’s insufficiency amid the
interplay of ego and world, it is revealed precisely where the determination and
intention of each fails to reach and dominate the other. Being is outside me, out-
side my formless ego, to be contrasted to me and world alike.62 In a sense, Being is
what happens when the torn ego clashes with the world—and thus Being can be
expressed or recognized as love, chance, tear, or tumult. Thus, moreover, Bataille
can define the ego, the world, and Being as seeking to escape from each other, as
passing through each other “like liquid through one’s fingers” (CH, p. 4; p. 27).
This difference of approach is the basis of Bataille’s critique: because phe-
nomenology does not adequately present this clash, it contributes to the world of
homogeneity. Having already noted the “totalizing” aims of Heidegger’s Being,
Bataille proceeds to criticize other concepts like intentionality, existence, and
anxiety as contributing to the loss of sovereignty. For example, intention (taken
from Husserl and from Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Ground”) is not specific to
my individual formless ego but becomes instead what restricts and standardizes it
(paraphrasing Heidegger, a “restrictive but positive” delimitation [EG, p. 109]).
Bataille treats it as a component of the homogeneous world: “In intention, the ego
progressively loses its individual character and finds itself carried to a universal

60. Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 142.
61. See also “Le Labyrinthe,” p. 366; “The Labyrinth,” p. 177.
62. This approach closely recalls Heidegger’s use of the mine in certain sections of Division II of
Being and Time.
18 OCTOBER

value that makes it escape from the strictly ego form of the ego. It is, nonetheless,
only through intention that the formless ego becomes self-consciousness (CH,
p. 15; p. 32). If intention comes to terms with the world through the very process
of determination that exhausts the ego, it is crucial to note that Bataille also sees in
this process the advent of self-consciousness (CH, p. 9; p. 30). Self-consciousness forces
homogeneity upon the pure ego, but also makes possible my interaction with the
world before me, my recognition of my submission to the world and of the possibility
of a flight from this world. Bataille can thus find in Heidegger both the ground for
and the limitations of an exit from standardization and material degradation. His
approach to “the lusterless employee” (CH, p. 9; p. 30) recalls the more pejorative of
Heidegger’s descriptions of das Man, emphasizing—in terms evocative of existen-
tialism—the need for self-consciousness that can lead to this “exit.” But if Heidegger
helps us see the malaise, anxiety (Heidegger’s “way out”) is merely a substitute for
old, noble, failed values (CH, pp. 2, 16; pp. 25–26, 33), and fails to engage the tear in
me and between me and the world (CH, p. 3; p. 27). It fails to emancipate the indi-
vidual, it gives a false and unself-conscious aura of individuality while accepting that
this life is by and large bound by and lost in society. Rather than break with the mis-
ery of homogeneity, it makes individuals believe in their own (false) transcendence.
Bataille elucidates his opposition to the implications of anxiety in the coda of his
1935 The Blue of Noon, where narrator Troppmann presents a band of Hitler Youth
playing music:

The sight was obscene. It was terrifying—if I hadn’t been blessed with
exceptional composure, how could I have stood and looked at these
hateful automatons as calmly as if I were facing a stone wall? Each peal of
music in the night was an incantatory summons to war and murder. . . . I
saw them, so near me, entranced by a longing to meet their death, hallu-
cinated by the endless fields where they would one day advance.63

The “obscene,” “terrifying” scene can be closely identified with the picture of anxiety
as well as with “Critique of Heidegger’s” reference to “the first accents” of “this new
Being” as vulgar (CH, p. 16; p. 33). It also contrasts starkly with the earlier climax, in
which Troppmann and Dirty/Dorothea make love in a cemetery, emphasizing the
difference between the authenticity of the musicians facing the blue of noon as they
“long to meet their death” and Troppmann’s escape into a world of sex and death. It
br ings back the issue of the overt reference to Heidegger in “Cr it ique of
Heidegger,” the impossibility of existing for oneself (CH, p. 3; p. 27). “Against this
rising tide of murder,” Bataille insists on the very impossibility of dominating the
world by existing for oneself, that is to say by looking death in the face (CH, p. 3;

63. Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel (Paris: Pauvert, 1957), p. 205; trans. The Blue of Noon (New York:
Consortium, 2002), p. 126.
The Anthropology of Exit 19

p. 27).64 Turning thus against the illusory character of “Heideggerian transcen-

dence,” Bataille notes in the opening of his text that it is not just anxiety, “but also
the tumult, and the impression of being torn” that mark Being and that aid a being
to become self-conscious (CH, p. 2; p. 26).65 Bataille’s search for a new nobility that
constructs self-sovereignty in internal tumult and in the midst of external servitude
demands a solitary, subjective, and social overcoming of homogeneity. Anxiety,
which provides an impossible fantasy of heterogeneity in the face of death (WM,
p. 89), and which fails to recognize that life is but a way of dying that maintains the
subject’s self-sufficiency and its desire to dominate the world, underplays the sub-
ject’s attempts to distance itself from the exigencies of the world.
Accordingly, it is internal tumult and tear that serve as guides to the limits and
meaning of Being, to the complexity of becoming self-conscious (CH, pp. 9, 15;
pp. 30, 32) in homogeneity, inasmuch as they lay bare the irreducible discrepancy
between ego and world, as they form the “place” of my self-conscious attempt at
an evasion of this world. These two concepts are particularly significant as imma-
nent critiques of Heidegger’s treatment of freedom as ground (EG, p. 129), of
freedom as a fundamental opening of the abyss (EG, p. 127; WM, p. 91) and as a
constrictive setting of one’s world (EG, p. 122). For Bataille, genuine freedom is
not a condition of the possibility of existence (as in Heidegger), but what posits
the ego as both torn internally and autochthonous with regard to external submis-
sion (CH, pp. 4–5; pp. 27–28). Bataille charges Heidegger with empowering the
homogeneous world by presenting people as human ready-to-hands, or tools with
fantasies of authenticity, whose only experience beyond homogeneity (anxiety)
can be nothing more than what reveals their life as a continuous function, rather
than what reveals their existential distance from the functional role they play in
society. For Bataille, once they serve no further purpose than to balance their
intention with reality’s expectations and demands, individuals “lose” their Being.
Freedom is with sovereignty, with the tumult and therefore with ungraspable
Being: like them, it does not mark man’s everyday existence. And like them, it
points out its opposition to all such existence and their status as counterpoint to
what presents itself as human life “that is imposed on me . . .” (CH, p. 6; p. 28).

64. Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” p. 33; “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,” pp. 286–87. This cri-
tique, one of the most widely shared obsessions of mid-century French literature and thought, recurs
throughout the work of Levinas, Blanchot, Leiris, Kojève, Bataille, Malraux, Beckett, and others. What
these texts have most in common is a question: given that the moment of “looking death in the face,” the
experience of death, is itself impossible, what distinguishes Being-toward-death from other “exceptional”
moments? Do we know death except through the death of others? Kojève dedicated some beautiful
pages to the problem in L’Athéisme (pp. 122–29), citing Jean Giraudoux’s Amphytrion 38 (L’Athéisme,
p. 224, n. 76). These questions are extensively addressed in Jacques Derrida, Apories: Mourir—s’attendre
aux ‘limites de la vérité’ in Le passage des frontières: autour du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1994),
pp. 334–36; trans. Aporias (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 74–76; and Paola
Marrati, “Dasein’s Life,” Genesis and Trace (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 142–76.
65. This is referring to “What Is Metaphysics?,” pp. 88–89.
20 OCTOBER

b. Democracy, Fascism, Political Anthropology

“Critique of Heidegger” contributes further to our understanding of Bataille’s

political ambiguity. It introduces the political problem by writing that with democ-
racy, “the Being of societies disappears” (CH, p. 3; p. 27)—that democracy
facilitates a homogenization of society unseen in classical and other modern
regimes. This involves a certain ontologism that needs to be distinguished from
organicism, which Bataille repeatedly rejects.66 Emulating Heidegger’s according
of Dasein to nonhuman entities (e.g., Volksdasein), Bataille’s “Being of societies”
transcends (or sidesteps) the everyday politics involved in democratic decision
making, announcing instead a role for such Being in the politics of life, capable of
forming life and humanity. But in contrasting life and Being to the reduction of
man to a function—pointing to “what happens when life frees itself from degrada-
tion” (CH, p. 2; p. 26)—Bataille shows how the tear in the ego may result in an
experience of freedom qua happiness in the midst of servility: “In the moment
when I write, I breathe with all my strength, and I breathe free. Free in the world
where my submission is nevertheless required, how could [being] free have here any
meaning other than happy?” (CH, p. 5; p. 28). Bataille can hence imagine a role for
political reality: to not reduce Being to a politically founded ontological uniformity.
If the values of a nobility that exceeded ordinary life are dead (CH, p. 12; p. 31),
then the way out of a decadence that Bataille unquestioningly equates with misery
may lie with such “new being.” If Being is “totally new” (if Bataille accepts
Heidegger’s claim to having dethroned traditional ontology, and the political
implications of this claim), then new, different political formations can be
expected. Bataille’s ambivalence toward fascism rests on this point: “Certainly, this
is a totally other way of being that is proposed to existence, and thus one should
not be surprised that out of this new fermentation that enters the world and that
the world had not yet made possible—the first accents are of an almost insur-
mountable acidity” (CH, p. 16; p. 33). Some imaginary nonliberal politics may
bring about such change, yet existing forms of fascism apparently do not see
beyond use value, and the symbolism and spiritualism they invoke is but window
dressing, like the fascinating and horrible Hitler Youths of The Blue of Noon. To put
it differently, while fascism asserts a break with democratic, bourgeois reality, it
wipes away the tumult that is fundamental to the individual, and hence destroys
his Being. Fascism uses the heterogeneous it evokes to further reinstate and
impose homogeneity.
Bataille’s opening to some sort of reenchantment of the world, to a life
beyond good and evil, to Being as chance, finds its hopes dashed by “insurmount-
ably acidic” accents of this “new fermentation.” Like Heidegger’s philosophy,
fascism invests in an imagined redemption that might conceivably found a new

66. See Bataille’s notes from Kojève’s Hegel course: “la société est donc bien un être au sens du
mot . . . mais l’appeler un organisme n’a pas de sens” (BNF Fonds Bataille, 8B, 15). This note mirrors
Bataille’s discussions of the être composé at the Collège de Sociologie (OC II, p. 295).
The Anthropology of Exit 21

way but does not: tumult, tear, inner division are all wiped out by fascism as weak-
nesses. When Bataille thus turns to advocate an exit from this politics and
philosophy, his main target is modernity’s secular anthropology, not democracy,
which is itself too poor to understand fascism, just as pre-phenomenological
thought is too limited to adequately critique Heidegger’s ontology. The hope that
the political can construct a Being or life beyond and in contrast with political
being is everpresent in “Critique of Heidegger”; this beyond can easily be identi-
fied with Bataille’s discussion of chance.67
This is why, for Bataille, Heidegger’s is a philosophy of fascism. Heidegger
provides the foundations for a thinking that moves outside and beyond the degra-
dation and limits of modern homogeneous reality, presumably identified here as
those of inauthentic existence (das Man). Yet like fascism, he does not allow the
real discrepancy between an individual’s existence and his world to manifest so as
to allow for genuine freedom amid servility. Heidegger thinks up an escape from
the oppression of inauthenticity of modern life, but also because of his destructive
illusion of authenticity and heterogeneity, he renders real escape impossible.

c. Bataille and Levinas

The pairing of Bataille and Levinas at first strikes the reader as unlikely. Yet it
seems they knew each other, and Bataille once cited Levinas’s “Reflections on the
Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1934) as the only useful piece written on Nazi ideology.68
“Critique of Heidegger” also shares theoretical concerns with Levinas’s De l’évasion
(On Escape, [1935]).69 In particular, their advocacy of “exit” (CH, p. 9; p. 30) aims
beyond the traditional post-Kantian, positivist framework, while also turning against
the Hegelian and Heideggerian advances, so as to insist on the failures of any philos-
ophy that does not form, in its very foundations, the desire of the subject to escape
the world in which it finds itself, the existence whose limits it must forever face.
Read as a reaction to the economic and political instability of the French
mid-1930s, Levinas’s “De l’évasion” (published in Recherches philosophiques next to
Bataille’s “The Labyrinth”) presents a quasi-romantic protest against the malaise
of bourgeois modernity (E, p. 50)—a demand for a flight from a society perme-
ated by financial disaster and its culture of sociopolitical insecurity. Politically, the

67. Bataille later noted that this hope was crushed by World War II (Sur Nietzsche, p. 124; On
Nietzsche, p. 84). He first subtitled On Nietzsche as “Will to Chance,” a motif he consistently identified
with the escape from restricted economy.
68. Emmanuel Levinas, “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlerisme,” in Levinas, Les
Imprévus de l’histoire (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994), pp. 23–36. Bataille’s reference is in “Nietzsche et les fas-
cistes,” in Acéphale, January 21, 1937; trans. “Nietzsche and the Fascists,” in Visions of Excess, pp. 192–93.
69. Levinas, “De l’évasion” in Recherches philosophiques 5 (1935-1936), pp. 373–92; republished as De
l’évasion (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982); trans. On Escape (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2003), hereafter cited in the text as E. In his introduction, Jacques Rolland remarks on the affinity
between Bataille and Levinas (E, p. 80) and correctly notes “a rift inscribed in Being” in Bataille,
though he does so in terms and with conclusions that differ from the analysis given here.
22 OCTOBER

text is unremarkable, mixing reactionary modernism70 and antibourgeois noncon-

formism with the claims that “every civilization that accepts being—with the tragic
despair it contains and the crimes it justifies—merits the name barbarian” (E, p. 73),
and that “Western philosophy, in effect, has never gone beyond this” (E, p. 51). As
in Bataille, the call to escape follows from recognitions of a “malaise” in self-
sufficient life and the bankrupt ontology justifying it. Levinas radicalizes escape to
formalize the insatiable need for an escape in and from the purity of Being: while
escape as such is necessary, semiempirical, philosophical, literary, and other sorts
of escape are inadequate and unsatisfactory. Thus Levinas considers and puts
aside: (a) Heidegger’s philosophy and a mysticism of Being (E, pp. 51, 54); (b) lit-
erary criticism (E, p. 52); (c) romantic aversion to “lowly realities” (E, p. 53); (d)
escapism from the servitude imposed by the thereness of the body (E, p. 53); (e)
Bergson (E, pp. 54, 70); (f) transcendental/religious solutions (E, p. 51) and
claims to the infinity of Being (E, p. 69). Moreover, he rejects the possibility that
escape is just (g) a movement-toward, a gesture with a destination (E, pp. 53–54);
(h) nostalgia for death (E, p. 54); (i) a search for pleasure or intimacy (E, pp. 52,
65), ( j) creativity as imitation of “the Creator” (E, p. 72); or finally, (k) a thinking
of nothingness (E, p. 70). Despite their character as formal indications of escape,
these “applications” or “instances” are no more than indices of the existent’s need
to exit its Being. Levinas grants this need affirmative traits: it marks the fleeing
from self-sufficiency (E, p. 54) and thus is “liable to break up our bourgeois exis-
tence” (E, p. 53), which is insatiable, irreducible from the point of view of the
subject (E, p. 53). Escape is excendence, the subject’s movement toward transcen-
dence amid a groundless homogenizing reality that has rendered genuine
transcendence impossible and meaningless.
Bataille identifies with this radical “sense of revolt,” particularly its lack of
direction or justification: “The aspiration to something wholly other is stronger
than the need to justify the will to flee” (CH, p. 2; p. 26). Exit must emphasize
improbability, indeterminacy, the failure of intention and science. Bataille again
approaches phenomenology at the point where intention doubles back into itself
and “my” presence is “revealed” by the failure of my intention to reach its target:
Effectuation of the exit {§} What happens when life frees itself from
degradation. Not only anxiety, but also tumult, and the impression of
being torn. The I am there: the region of I am there where existence
takes place (in the existential sense). This region protects from a
determination or an intention. Nevertheless, this fact distinguishes
itself from intention, because it conflicts with itself when achieving
intentional form. Yet it cannot exist without intention. The ego is
thus only revealed by intention, albeit too much—and in its develop-
ment, it is further revealed by the critique of the intentionality of

70. Jeffrey Herf’s term is inexactly applied, but nonetheless useful. See his Reactionary Modernism:
Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
The Anthropology of Exit 23

the ego, by the support of improbability, by a betrayal of all intention-

ality. (CH, pp. 2–3; p. 26)
Insufficient being cannot bind itself to its reduced modern manifestations, cannot
come to agree with a determined existence amid intentionality. In its critique of
intention, this passage encounters Levinas’s analysis of nausea and shame (E, pts.
V–VI). Like Levinas, who rejects Bergson’s élan vital for its formal posteriority to
Heideggerian Being and its irrelevance in a world where Heidegger has “come to
pass”—Bataille uses Being and the ego in a manner that clearly indicates his dis-
tance from pre-Heideggerian ontology, and his critical engagement with the
ontological difference. His play between my ego and the world does not allow “me”
to escape the world, but joins this juxtaposition with a language of freedom and
submission (a rhetoric Levinas never resorts to). Ego and world seek to escape from
themselves and from each other: it is only the regime of determination, intention,
and knowledge that rejects the possibility of such a double escape: freedom comes
without a literal revoking of the world’s yoke (CH, pp. 4–5, 16; pp. 27–28, 33).
For Levinas, Being, whose introduction “already looks like an escape” (E, p.
57), is the proper ground on which escape becomes possible and indeed neces-
sary: it is only the coming to pass of Heidegger’s thought that makes a genuine
escape or “excendence” possible. Escape is at once a movement beyond Being and
a consequence inherent in the basic structure of Being—which is precisely why it
is virtually impossible to “achieve.” In other words, it too demands (at least) a dou-
ble movement: a philosophical paradigm shift into Heideggerian ontology and a
recognition of this ontology as a prison. Bataille would agree: like excendence, his
exit involves precisely the impossibility of an opening of the strictly speaking
homogeneous to heterogeneity—to the sacred, etc. There are two main differ-
ences, however. First, for Bataille, exit has an empirical character—that it is linked
to intimacy, sexuality, ecstasy, expenditure, and so on. Particularly so, because
unlike Levinas, Bataille sees life, the claim “I live” (and “I sense”), as indispens-
able, and the more his work approaches a thinking of death, the more it becomes
fascinated by its recoil from death, by the perseverance of life in tumult. Bataille’s
vitalism is not a pre-Heideggerian residue, but precisely an attempt to provide
some sort of only partially empirical “texture” to fundamental ontology, to avoid
Heidegger’s emphasis on the authenticating function of death in favor of a
respect for laughter, ecstasy, and so on—and, a step further, for sovereignty. If, in
“The Labyrinth,” Bataille largely limits himself to a thinking of insufficiency, “nondis-
cursive existence, laughter, ecstasy” resulting from divergences between concept (or
project) and Being, in “Critique of Heidegger,” escape from Being suggests a move
into a totally other conception of Being, world, and life (CH, pp. 6, 16; pp. 28, 33).
The second main difference extends from the first. Rather than rejecting
instances of exit as insufficient, Bataille largely subsumes them in his call for an
exit, even as he affirms that the need for exit will still be present even under dif-
ferent polit ical and philosophical grounds. Unlike Levinas, “Cr it ique of
24 OCTOBER

Heidegger” does not deny escape a certain application in the sociopolitical realm.
Though at the time the options were likely to disappoint, Bataille engaged in
openness to new demigods (Hitler included) as much as he formulated a reclaim-
ing of limits of life—ecstasy and laughter—for the subject. Bataille’s exit is not
necessarily allied to a move away from the totalizing collapse of subjectivity on the
subject, but to a call for a contrast of subjectivity to the world and to heterogene-
ity (or claims thereto) within society and modernity. While exit does not have a
necessary, manifest content, it does nonetheless claim for itself a specific terrain in
and against individual desire and self-sufficiency. This terrain may be that of Being
as defined in Bataille’s conception—Being as outside me, outside my ego—as
Bataille only partly allies this modified version of the Being/beings opposition
with his heterogeneity/homogeneity distinction. In an argument and a tone remi-
niscent of Levinas’s De l’évasion, Bataille’s exit counters the phenomenological
reduction and Heidegger’s ontological difference not by seeking to escape the
social misery or existential anguish his thought shared with Heidegger, but instead
by rejecting Heidegger’s opposition to a radical tear in existence, his advocacy of
authenticity in the showdown of existence and death. Whether exit is an exit into
being or even an exit from precarious Being, the crux of the “Critique of
Heidegger” is a call to think the ontological difference differently.
This attack on Heidegger is indicative of a nuanced 1930s French reading of
the latter’s early texts, but also indicative of the two trends, existentialist and anti-
humanist, that the reception of Heidegger would take up in the 1940s. In Bataille’s
text, what might be called French phenomenology accepts Heidegger as a privileged
interlocutor, while objecting to what it perceives as a trend in his and Husserl’s
thought toward a theory of formalized subjectivity insensitive to the density of indi-
vidual life. Instead, for Bataille, the celebration of the clash between ego and Being
establishes subjectivity, the fundamental nonequivalence between different lives,
and the subject’s claim to Being (CH, pp. 2–5, 8; pp. 25–28, 29–30). Bataille’s con-
fusion of ontological with social and psychological categories, of Levinas’s need to
take leave of Being with a defense of life in stifling social circumstances, is fundamen-
tal to existentialism’s development. But it is also central to understanding why
neither resistance originating in social causes (in Sartre) nor onto-theological
kinds of escape (as in Marcel’s writings) would by themselves suffice for Bataille’s
generation during the peak of existentialism in the 1940s—and why this genera-
tion (Bataille above all) would emphasize its mistrust of political humanisms
against existentialism and Marxism. Bataille echoes here a politics of existential
rejuvenation that situates him squarely in an antidemocratic camp, yet he also
snubs the claims of Heidegger and fascism to authenticity through finitude. In
rejecting the primacy of the ontological difference and of Heidegger’s approach of
Being, Bataille aims not only for a different, less politically troubled conception of
Being, but also for a thinking, shared with Levinas, that upholds the possibility, or
fantasy, of becoming other, of exiting, of escaping everything that still is.