Bataille and Mysticism: A "Dazzling Dissolution"

Amy Hollywood

Diacritics 26.2, Summer 1996: 74-87.

Within Georges Bataille's texts of the late 1930s and 1940s, in particular those later
brought together in the tripartite Atheological Summa, he repeatedly suggests that his
primary models for writing and experience are the texts of the Christian and non-
Western mystical traditions (often represented, in Bataille, by women's writings) and
those of Friedrich Nietzsche. 1 Inner Experience opens with evocations of Nietzsche,
and the final volume of the trilogy, On Nietzsche, is "devoted" to his work. References
to mystical writings occur throughout Inner Experience and Guilty, and significant
portions of both texts can be read as providing "guides" for inner experience
analogous to the "itineraries" of Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Teresa of Avila (d.
1582) or as spiritual daybooks like those of Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. ca. 1275).
These models are, I think, the key to understanding Bataille's own writing strategies in
the Atheological Summa. 2 Despite their apparent divergence, moreover, Bataille
insists that mystical and Nietzschean texts reflect and are constitutive of the same
experience and writing practice.
Like both Nietzsche and the mystics, Bataille's "antigeneric" writing mixes
genres and styles within and between texts. 3 Throughout the course of his career,
experience and writing are in a constant state of movement, flux, or chaos (to echo
Bataille's self-description in On Nietzsche). The Atheological Summa encapsulates
within what purport to be three unified books the diversity of genres and styles that
run throughout Bataille's corpus as a whole. They contain ample quotation of
Nietzsche's texts and those of the mystics--undigested hunks and fragments of these
allusive writings 4 --together with philosophical reflections, confessional meditations,
diary fragments, letters, and, at the end of On Nietzsche, a set of six brief historical
and theoretical appendices. Anything broaching traditional textual commentary is
reserved for the margins of these nonbooks. Like many mystics, particularly women
who were denied access to the traditional genres of sermon, biblical commentary, and
philosophical or theological treatise, and like Nietzsche, who eschews and subverts
traditional genre distinctions, Bataille comments and critiques through practice rather
than exposition. Although Bataille acknowledges the oddity of his coupling the
mystics and Nietzsche, he also rigorously defends it, arguing for a mystical and
ecstatic experience in Nietzsche's work. 5 As I hope to show, Bataille's [End Page 74]
experience of the failures of mysticism and of Nietzsche speak to each other and lead
to Bataille's necessary apostasy as his true discipleship.
Repetition of the divergences between Bataille and the mystics, first stated by
Bataille himself in Inner Experience, has become something of a commonplace, yet
his claims have not been sufficiently explored or challenged. So, for example, Alain
Arnauld and Giséle Excoffon-Lafarge unproblematically assert that despite all
proximities between Bataille's texts and those of the mystics, they differ in their aims
or aimlessness. Michel Surya joins a host of other scholars whose primary concern is
to demonstrate (against the insinuations of Sartre, made now almost fifty years ago)
that Bataille was not a Christian. Whereas the mystics' path ends with the divine
encounter, Bataille renounces all objects, aims, or end for his quest and his desire. 6
Most importantly, he rejects all idealism and any hope for salvation. Bataille himself
insists on his divergence from the Christian mystics in Inner Experience and Guilty.
At the same time, his citations and mimings of central texts from the Christian
mystical tradition show that what fascinates him within these writings is precisely the
moment in which the soul desires "to live without a why," embracing the suffering of
hell--understood as the absence of/from the "object" of desire--as desire. 7 In a move
later echoed by Jacques Lacan, Bataille claims that some medieval mystics attained
that beyond of which he writes, but without knowing anything about it: "Exuberance
is the point where we let go of Christianity. Angela of Foligno attained it and
described it, but didn't know it." 8
Commentators follow Bataille in resisting his identification with the mystics,
then, whereas Nietzsche is a less troubling model for Bataille and his readers. In fact,
Bataille's more forthright statements about his debt to Nietzsche can help us
understand his relationship to mystical texts. The claim is repeatedly made--by
Bataille and his interpreters--that Bataille does not comment on Nietzsche as a
disciple or student might on the texts of a master, but rather attempts to live what
Nietzsche himself lived, to experience that which gave rise to Nietzsche's writings.
Nietzsche's text engenders a writing that is itself an experience. This is most explicitly
the case in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which like the gospels of the New Testament and
many mystical treatises is a transformative text meant to bring about the experience of
conversion described within it. Yet this implies the text has an aim, as all practices and
acts do according to Bataille; Zarathustra's fifth gospel thereby subtly misses the pure
aimlessness of inner experience.
In Beyond Good and Evil and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche enjoins those who would
understand him to read slowly, like philologists. Bataille attempts, in the preface to
On Nietzsche, to specify how he reads Nietzsche and, by implication, how the reader
should approach Bataille's own texts. I think he also gives us a picture of how he read
the mystics:
You shouldn't doubt it any longer for an instant: you haven't understood a
word of Nietzsche's work without living that dazzling dissolution into totality. Beyond
that, this philosophy is just a maze of contradictions. Or worse, the pretext for [End
Page 75] lies of omission (if, as with the Fascists, certain passages are isolated for
ends disavowed by the rest of the work). 9
Mystical works often open with similar instructions for reading. So Mechthild
of Magdeburg begins The Flowing Light of the Godhead with the claim that it must be
read seven times if it is to be comprehended, and Marguerite Porete warns that those
who approach her Mirror of Simple Souls armed with reason will fail to achieve the
liberation that the book describes and enacts. In showing us how he reads Nietzsche,
Bataille echoes mystical texts, again suggesting the interplay between the textual
practices of these seemingly divergent figures.
The parallel with Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Angela of
Foligno goes even further, however, in Guilty. Guilty is drawn from the journals or
notebooks that Bataille kept from the opening of World War II (September 5, 1939)
through October 1943. To this text, published in 1943, Bataille added in 1961 an
introduction and a text from 1947, "Alleluia." Inner Experience, published first and
placed at the beginning of the Atheological Summa, was written from the winter of
1941 through the summer of 1942. This complicated textual history is another of the
many parallels between Bataille's work and those of late medieval Christian women
mystics. In addition, I will argue, they share commonalities in their look, apparent
lack of structure, mixing of genres, and use of contradiction or paradox. 10
Guilty (like Inner Experience) is aphoristic, or, more aptly, fragmentary. It has
been compared, justifiably, to the Pensées of Pascal and the aphoristic writings of
Nietzsche [Surya 405]. But perhaps there is another source, suggested by Bataille
himself in the opening pages of Guilty:
The date on which I begin to write (September 5, 1939) is not a coincidence. I
am starting because of these events, but not in order to speak of them. I write these
notes, incapable of anything else. It is necessary for me to let myself go, from now on,
to the movements of freedom, of caprice. Suddenly, the moment has come for me to
speak without detour. //
It is impossible for me to read. At least, most books. I don't have the desire.
Too much work tires me. My nerves are shattered. I get drunk a lot. I feel faithful to
life if I eat and drink what I want. Life is always an enchantment, a feast, a festival: an
oppressing, unintelligible dream, adorned nevertheless with a charm that I enjoy. The
sentiment of chance demands that I look a difficult fate in the face. It would not be
about chance if there was not an incontestable madness.
I began to read, standing on a crowded train, Angela of Foligno's Book of
Visions. 11
[End Page 76] [Begin Page 78]
Bataille follows these fragments with passages transcribed from Angela's
Book. Not only do these transcriptions run throughout Guilty, but as Michel Surya has
pointed out, central aspects of Bataille's own practice of inner experience have direct,
although uncited, parallels in Angela's. 12
More importantly for my purposes here, the practice of writing in Guilty
parallels or even mimes that of medieval mystical women like Angela of Foligno and
Mechthild of Magdeburg. Although there are generic similarities between Mechthild's
Flowing Light of the Godhead and Angela's Book, Guilty more closely resembles the
former. It's unlikely that Bataille knew Mechthild's work, yet I think that a comparison
between them is enlightening as Mechthild displays in more marked form important,
although obscured, features of Angela's book that are mimed (consciously or
unconsciously) by Bataille. Both Mechthild and Angela wrote what are probably best
called "confessions" in the tradition of Augustine (Surya includes the Confessions in
his list of possible models for Bataille's work). However, the radical difference in the
nature of Augustine's, Mechthild's, and Angela's experiences lead to a very different
set of writing and rhetorical practices within their deployment of the genre, to the
point of making the women's works unrecognizable to many as "confessions." Instead
modern scholars have, until recently, insisted on reading them as diaries or journals--
immediate outpouring of the woman authors' experience. (This is particularly odd
given the variety of forms in which the material appears in texts like Mechthild's;
there are poems, dialogues, visions, prayers, as well as more traditional prose
exposition.) 13 Existing versions of Angela's Book give little evidence for her "writing"
practice, because it was transcribed for her by a male cleric (and they both insist he
didn't quite get it). Although there is some evidence for the mediating hand of male
priestly authority in Mechthild's work, it keeps its fragmented form and the
unresolved dialectic of its structure--what Caroline Walker Bynum refers to as
"oscillations between alienation and ecstasy." 14
Aside from the visual similarities between Mechthild's and Bataille's texts,
engendered by their fragmentary form and their mixture of diverse genres ("Disorder
is the condition of this book; it is unlimited in every sense"), 15 they also share a
concern with the process of writing and of the relationship between writer and reader
that place their texts within the tradition of the Confessions even as it distances them
from Augustine's practice within that complex genre. The Flowing Light of the
Godhead and Guilty are not [End Page 78] journals or diaries as commonly
understood, because they are written for an audience on whom the text desires to act.
It is this confessional aim, moreover, that brings together the diverse materials making
up their texts (as opposed to the relative, albeit hardly complete, homogeneity of
Augustine's). Mechthild opens with the claim that the soul's experiences recounted
within the book are made through her to all of Christendom. Bataille begins with
similar clarity--soon to be effaced--about the pedagogical purpose of his writing. "As
simply as I can, I will speak of the paths by which I found ecstasy, in the desire that
others will find it in the same way." 16 This aim, however, is bound to sacrifice itself,
for the pathless ecstasy he seeks cannot be given an itinerary. One side of the paradox
enacted by Bataille's text can be located here, for although he envisions a reader on
whom he wishes to act, the very desire to act is called into question by inner
experience. Bataille is insistent on this point; "I hate sentences. . . . What I have
affirmed, the convictions that I have shared, all of this is laughable and dead; I am
only silence, the universe is silence." 17
Later he makes a more characteristic claim about the reader and with it about
his text.
What I write differs from a diary/journal in this: I imagine a man, neither too
young nor too old, neither too subtle nor too sensible/practical, pissing and shitting,
simply (cheerfully). I imagine him (having read me) reflecting on eroticism and the
putting into question of nature. He would see then what care I have taken to lead him
to the decision. There's no use giving an analysis: he evokes the moment of arousal--
naive, but ambiguous, unconfessable. He is putting nature into question. 18
Only a writing that puts itself, the writer, and the reader into question can lead
to inner experience. This becomes clearer when we look to the other major
interlocutor within the confessional tradition (and the other noninterlocutor of
Bataille's communications).
Augustine's Confessions, Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light, and
Angela of Foligno's Book are addressed not only to the human reader, on whom the
text hopes to work a transformation, but also to God, before whom the human author
stands "confessing" her life, sins, and the glory of God reflected in it. This seems to
mark the point of greatest divergence between their work and Bataille's. Yet the story
is complicated. Throughout the Confessions, Augustine speaks as a human being to a
transcendent God. Mechthild's use of voice is more complex. When in the first person,
the text speaks more often as God than to God; those moments when the soul is
shown speaking to God (and God to the soul) are put in third-person allegorical and
dramatic form, thereby achieving a distancing effect and undercutting the text's
autobiographical or journalistic form. I have argued elsewhere that these rhetorical
strategies are a function of Mechthild's lack of traditional authority as a woman within
medieval Christianity. She takes this subordination to its limit, negating herself so
fully that the self is lost and becomes that place in and through which God speaks.
Paradoxically, Mechthild's work attains divine authority in her very act of self-denial.
There are moments in the text, moreover, where Mechthild [End Page 79] pushes this
self-negation to the point where salvation itself is denied. Other women, like Angela
of Foligno and Marguerite Porete, will push even further to the negation of the divine
being itself. 19
 Bataille's relationship to a divine or sacred other within Guilty is also complex.
Nietzsche argues in On the Genealogy of Morals that there is no simple atheism, or
that simple atheism is really a kind of idealism in that the atheist still believes in truth.
Bataille's relationship to God and to the sacred must be located within this dilemma.
Guilty can be read as an attempt to enact that freeing of the sacred from God
described by Bataille in his introduction of 1961.
It seemed to me that human thought had two terms: God and the sentiment of
the absence of God. But God being the confusion of the sacred (the religious aspect)
and reason (the instrumental aspect), he has a place only in a world where the
confusion of the instrumental and the sacred becomes the basis for reassurance. God
terrifies if he is no longer the same thing as reason (Pascal, Kierkegaard). But if he is
no longer the same thing as reason, I am before the absence of God. 20
The sacred is nothing, and it is the absence of God, in the sense that God is
understood as that which gives reason, order, coherence, and meaning to human
existence. The sacred is that which lies beyond meaning, instrumentality, and reason--
and hence beyond God. It lies beyond salvation. When Mechthild, Angela, Marguerite
Porete, or Meister Eckhart claim that the soul no longer cares for heaven or hell, they
also seek this beyond of which Bataille writes. Bataille recognizes this, but claims that
the Christian mystic moves beyond God without knowing it. Yet what does it mean to
know that you are in the realm of the unknowable? The crucial distinction Bataille
tries to make between himself and the mystics seems finally to collapse.
Elsewhere, Bataille calls this nonplace beyond "the impossible," thereby
clearly raising the other aspect of the paradox structuring Guilty. What does it mean to
write (to) the impossible? Moreover, for Bataille human beings are themselves this
impossible paradox, making the dilemma of the human addressee and that of "the
impossible" one. This is first enacted in Bataille's text through the correlation of the
writing self and God. In a section entitled "The Lure of the Game," Bataille returns to
the question of the "object" of desire and of ecstasy. "THE OBJECT OF ECSTASY IS
THE ABSENCE OF RESPONSE FROM THE OUTSIDE. THE INEXPLICABLE
PRESENCE OF MAN IS THE RESPONSE THAT THE WILL GIVES ITSELF,
SUSPENDED OVER THE VOID OF AN UNINTELLIGIBLE NIGHT. THIS
NIGHT, FROM ONE END TO THE OTHER, HAS THE IMPUDENCE OF A
HOOK."21 Bataille refers here to hooks that used to be placed on the incline of roofs;
these hooks held up poles that kept snow from sliding off the roof. Bataille is
fascinated by this hook, which he associates with chance. The philosophical
reference--one that runs throughout Bataille's writings--is to the question [End Page
80] articulated by Nietzsche at the end of On the Genealogy of Morals: "why man at
all?" Guilty's meditations on chance particularize this question. As Surya notes,
Bataille not only questions the meaning of his own existence and that of human
existence (why live in the face of death?) but also continually brings himself face to
face with the sheer contingency of his own existence as the individual he himself is.
Chance is the hook on which existence falls. It is without meaning and offers no
answer other than its own sheer facticity. The abruptness and impudence of this
facticity, the absence of response in the response, is/engenders ecstasy. 22
Bataille continually plays on the relationship between the absence of God and
the contingency of the self. He insists that religion is that place in which everything is
put into question. God, the confusion of the sacred and reason, represents an attempt
to answer the question and to elude the hook. But, Bataille claims: "I don't believe in
God: from an inability to believe in myself." Or conversely, "God is dead: he is so to
the point that I can't make his death understood without killing myself." 23 It is not
only that the death of God brings the self face-to-face with the inevitability of its own
death. For Bataille, the death of God has not been understood or experienced until the
death of the self has been. Because one cannot experience one's own death, then,
Bataille suggests that God will never be entirely dead. Yet the self must be put into
question in order to move toward an experience of the absence of God. Moreover,
Bataille claims that the self has always already put itself into question insofar as it
attempts to communicate. The attempt to communicate--writing--puts itself into
question by refusing the answer. Whereas, "[t]he God of theology and reason never
puts himself into play," Bataille insists that "[w]ithout end, the unbearable me, that we
are, plays itself; without end, "communication" puts it into play." 24 We return, then, to
the imaginary other to whom Bataille writes. The attempt to communicate to another
the way to ecstasy puts the self into play, destabilizes the sacred, and leads to the
lacerations of ecstasy.
The question now becomes why communication puts the self into play or into
question and engenders the experience of the absence or death of self and the absence
or death of God. Here Bataille evokes the paradoxes of writing elaborated further by
Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. 25 The first evocation seems merely banal:
"History," Bataille writes, "is unfinished. When this book is read, the smallest
schoolchild will know how the war turned out. At this moment when I write, nothing
can give me the knowledge of that schoolchild." 26 Like Nietzsche, Bataille claims
here to love his ignorance of the future--and its fundamental unknowability. By thus
invoking the absent--yet-to-be-born and hence fundamentally mortal--other, Bataille
evokes his own death. Writing is an attempt to inscribe presence (transparence) that is
always predicated on absence; the absence of the other to whom one writes and the
absence of the self to that addressee. [End Page 81]
The penultimate section of the main body of Guilty is entitled "La volonté"
("Will/Willpower"). Bataille here ties the problem of death to the paradox engendered
by human beings' desire to write so as to transform the other and the fact that this
transformation itself denies all intentionality. As in "The King of the Wood," Guilty's
final section (before a series of appendixes, of course), Bataille condenses the
paradoxes that have been enacted throughout the text. After evoking the radical
nothingness and unthinkableness of my death, Bataille writes that "[t]o write is to go
elsewhere. The bird who sings and the man who writes deliver themselves." 27 They
deliver themselves to death in the going elsewhere and yet also attempt to escape
death through the act of writing, the inscription of an always already absent presence.
The one who will receive this writing is no longer a man who can be imagined
(pissing and shitting);
I do not write for this world (surviving--intentionally--that world from which
war has emerged), I write for a different world, a world without respect. I don't desire
to impose myself on it, I imagine myself being silent there, as if absent. The necessity
of effacement to the point of transparency. I do not oppose real strengths or necessary
connections: idealism alone (hypocrisy, lies) has the virtue to condemn the real
world--to ignore its physical truth. 28
Bataille is caught here in his own paradox: how to reject idealism, which
refuses the real world and its physical truth, while speaking to a world different from
that one full of idealism, lies, and hypocrisy in which world war is inevitable
(according to Bataille's political analysis throughout the 1930s). Bataille's strategy,
like that of the mystics, is not to avoid the paradox, nor to attempt to resolve it, but to
embrace it and force the reader to think it in all its contradiction. Only in this way, the
text suggests, can the physical world be that other world to which Bataille speaks
silence.
Furthermore, if to write is to go elsewhere and to encounter death (to speak
silence), it is also an attempt to stay alive (to speak). "The Death of the King" refers to
the death of Dianus, the priest of Diana and he under whose name Bataille first signed
fragments of Guilty. According to legend, Orestes is the first Dianus, a criminal who
gains power over the woods (the woods of nemo--nothing) through a second crime,
the murder of his predecessor; he rules awaiting his own murder. This is the place
from which Bataille writes.
I am inhabited by a mania to speak, and a mania for exactitude. I imagine
myself to be precise, capable, ambitious. I should have been silent and I spoke. I
laugh at the fear of death: it keeps me awake! Battling against it (against fear and
death). //
I write, I do not want to die.
For me, the words "I will be dead" aren't breathable. My absence is the wind
from outside. It is comical: pain is comical. I am, for my protection, in my room. But
the tomb? already so near, the thought of it envelops me from head to
toe. // [End Page 82]
Immense contradiction of my attitude!
Has anyone ever had, so gaily, this simplicity of death?
But ink changes absence into intention. 29
Whereas in the passage cited above Bataille stresses the absence that always
already haunts writing, he here emphasizes the other side of the paradox encompassed
in writing. To write a book, Bataille repeatedly reminds us in Guilty, is to participate
in instrumentality; to use language in the attempt to accomplish an end: "to change
absence into intention." 30
The paradoxical problem of Guilty is how to write (a) desire (without object)
aimlessly or how to write without end and without a why.
I couldn't find what I am looking for in a book, still less put it in a book. I fear
courting poetry. Poetry is a drawn arrow. If I have aimed well, what counts--what I
want--is neither the arrow nor the target [le but], but the moment when the arrow is
lost, dissolves into the air of the night; until the memory of the arrow is lost. 31
The significance of this becomes clear when we juxtapose Bataille's critique of
the Christian mystics with his insistence on Nietzsche's failure. Where the mystics err
insofar as they refuse to err--to do without an end for their speech and experience--
Nietzsche's fault lies in his abrogation of communication. If the great prophet of
aimlessness seeks an ideal with which to overcome the ascetic, as some argue (and is
constantly suggested and then subverted in Zarathustra), then for Bataille Nietzsche
capitulates to the ascetic ideal. Yet Nietzsche suggests that any attempt at
communication is in service to the ascetic ideal. Bataille insists, however, on his
communion with Nietzsche in the writing of On Nietzsche, thereby suggesting that
other modes of communication are possible through writing experience and textual
activity. 32 Only through this writing practice is the sacred released from the ideal and
the God to which it is still in part held captive within Nietzsche's work. Taken as an
answer to the question of the meaning of being, Nietzsche's [End Page 83] writing
capitulates to the ideal. Taken as a process of writing (and reading) and as a putting
into question of the self (both that of the writer and the reader), it communicates. 33
In an important essay on Bataille, Nancy argues that Bataille's writing is "a
sacrifice of writing, by writing, which redeems writing" [334]. Reading Bataille with
his mystical models helps us to unpack this evocative phrase and to suggest why, for
Bataille, the sacrifice and redemption of writing by writing are necessary, and how
they are effected by the contradictions within and fragmentation of his texts. Writing,
for Bataille, is always an attempt to force language to enact what it communicates. In
describing Bataille's writing practice, Nancy coins a term--exscription--through which
he attempts to describe the mechanisms by which Bataille's texts point outside
themselves to an experience that is constituted in the very act of writing. The parallels
with Eric Blondel's work on Nietzsche and with contemporary studies of the linguistic
strategies of apophatic mysticism are striking. As in Nancy's work, these analyses
demonstrate how insistence on the materiality of the text through which the practice
of writing is inscribed leads--not to a stultifying idealism, as some oddly insist--but
rather to a recognition of the interpenetration of world and writing in the production
of a textual experience of desire without limit, without end, and without aim. By
exacerbating the paradoxes of writing a desire without object and without aim,
Bataille creates a text in which inner experience is (for him and perhaps also for the
reader who knows how to read) "attained."
By emphasizing the practice of writing and with it the materiality of the text,
moreover, the dangers in Bataille's elision of the object of desire--and hence, it would
seem, with that which marks and maintains normatively defined gender difference--
might be averted, while the positive gains that can come through such an elision are
retained. For Bataille's writing suggests that desire taken to its limit subverts not only
genre but also gender, leading to what has been called in another context (a reading of
Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls and Meister Eckhart's sermons) "the
apophasis (unsaying) of gender" occasioned by "living without a why" [see Sells]. For
Bataille this occurs in that he is "virile" and "lacerated" or insofar as Madame
Edwarda as lacerated is divine. If Bataille's text is still marked by gender difference
and gender hierarchies, as Susan Suleiman argues (I don't know yet if I agree), he has
failed in his own project [see Suleiman]. Success, however, would also be unattractive
for many feminist thinkers, who argue that sexual difference can be elided only at the
expense of women. I am suggesting, however, that Bataille merely subverts the
normative association of sexual difference with the nature of the desired object. There
is good reason to believe this move might be necessary and salutary for women, while
not itself leading to a neglect of material bodies and our multiple differences. If
Bataille places importance on the materiality of the text as it inscribes a practice of
writing, might not the materiality of the flesh also be a source of recalcitrant desire, a
desire that refuses to be limited to any object while also refusing to become such an
object for the other?

Amy Hollywood teaches in the Religion Department at Dartmouth College. She is the author
of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart
and is now writing a study of mysticism and sexual difference in twentieth-century French
thought, tentatively entitled Sensible Ecstasy.

Notes

This essay is part of a larger project: Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism in Twentieth-

Century French Thought.
1. Nietzsche's work had been important for Bataille since the 1920s and was part of
his movement away from Christianity. While Bataille seems to have read ascetic,
meditational, and mystical works during his Christian period and after, the word
mystique("mystic" or "mystical") does not appear in his work until the later 1930s [see
Surya].
2. The complete argument will need to show divergences between Bataille's writing
practices of the '20s and '30s and those of the Atheological Summa.
3. For Bataille's work as resisting generic constraints, see Sollers.
4. A later text, The Memorandum, is made up only of citations from Nietzsche's work,
almost like a florilegia of Nietzschean writings.
5. I speak to the religious issue here. More needs to be said about the relationship
between Nietzsche's obvious misogyny and his "feminized" style. See, for example,
the essays collected in Paul Patton, Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory; and
Peter J. Burgard, Nietzsche and the Feminine. I think that reading Nietzsche with and
through Bataille may help elucidate these issues.
6. See Bataille, OC5: 15-17;Inner Experience 3-5 and passim; Arnauld and Excoffon-
Lafarge 26-30.
7. The phrase "living without a why" is used by Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268),
Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), and Meister Eckhart (d. ca. 1327). The reference to
preferring hell to divine gifts is found in many mystical texts, including those by
Mechthild, Marguerite Porete, and Angela of Foligno. For full citations of texts and
discussions of some of them, see Hollywood. Michel Surya shows the importance of
Angela of Foligno for Bataille and the miming of Angela in his meditations on "Cent
Morceaux" [375-77].
8. "Le point où nous lâchons le christianisme est l'exubérance. Angèle de Foligno
l'atteignit et le décrivit, mais sans le savoir" [OC5: 259].
9. "Qu'on n'en doute plus un instant: on n'a pas entendu un mot de l'oeuvre de
Nietzsche avant d'avoir vécu cette dissolution éclatante dans la totalité; cette
philosophie n'est en dehors de là que dédale de contradictions, pis encore: prétexte à
des mensonges par omission (si, comme les fascistes, on isole des passages à des fins
que nie le reste de l'oeuvre)" [Bataille, OC6: 22]; On Nietzsche xxxi-xxxii.
10. I think there are also commonalities on the level of sentence structure, itself often
fragmentary [see Nancy, "Exscriptions"].
11.
La date à laquelle je commence d'écrire (5 septembre 1939) n'est pas une
coïncidence. Je commence en raison des événements, mais ce n'est pas pour en
parler. J'écris ces notes incapable d'autre chose. Il me faut me laisser aller,
désormais, à des mouvements de liberté, de caprice. Soudain, le moment est venu
pour moi de parler sans détour. /
Il m'est impossible de lire. Du moins la plupart des livres. Je n'en ai pas le désir. Un
excés de travail me fatigue. J'en ai les nerfs brisés. Je m'enivre souvent. Je me sens
fidèle à la vie si je bois et mange ce qui me plaît. La vie est toujours l'enchantement,
le festin, la fête: rêve oppressant, inintelligible, enrichi néanmoins d'un charme dont
je joue. Le sentiment de la chance me demande d'être en face d'un sort difficile. Il ne
s'agirait pas de chance si ce n'était une incontestable folie.
J'ai commencé de lire, debout dans un train bondé, le Livre des visions d'Angèle de
Foligno. [OC 5: 245]
Note the truncated and fragmentary sentence structure.
12. Bataille's descriptions, in Guiltyand Inner Experience, of his contemplation of the
photographs of a Chinese torture victim directly echo Angela's accounts of her
contemplation of Christ's cross.
13. This claim goes together with a number of standard assertions about the nature of
women's writings--i.e. that it is more spontaneous, immediate, more often in the first
person and hence autobiographical--almost all of which are false. See Hollywood;
and, for the modern novel, Lanser.
14. The closest thing to a structuring paradigm for the book is the constant interplay
of presence and absence in the Song of Songs. "Alleluia," the final appended section
of Guiltyis described by Denis Hollier as Bataille's rewriting of the Song of Songs
[see Hollier].
15. "Le désordre est la condition de ce livre, il est illimité dans tous les sens" [OC5:
264].
16. "Aussi simplement que je puis, je parlerai des voies par lesquelles je trouvai
l'extase, dans le désir que d'autres la trouvent de la même façon" [OC5: 264].
17. "J'abhore les phrases. . . .Ce que j'ai affirmé, les convictions que j'ai partagées,
tout est risible et mort: je ne suis que silence, l'univers est silence" [OC5: 277].
18. "Ce que j'écris diffère en ceci d'un journal: j'imagine un homme, ni trop jeune ni
trop âgé, ni trop fin ni trop sensé, pissant et crottant, simplement (gaiment), je
l'imagine réfléchissant (m'ayant lu) sur l'érotisme et la mise en question de la nature: il
verrait alors quel souci j'avais de l'amener à la décision. Inutile de donner l'analyse:
qu'il évoque le moment de l'excitation naïve, mais louche, inavouable: il met la nature
en question" [OC5: 355]. Early in the text Bataille makes it clear that it is not
addressed to his friends or intimates, but to those he does not know and who will be
alive after his death.
19. For examples, such as the dialectic of all and nothing in Porete or Eckhart's prayer
that God free the soul from God, see Hollywood.
20. "Il m'a semblé que la pensée humaine avait deux termes: Dieu et le sentiment de
l'absence de Dieu; mais Dieu n'étant que la confusion du SACRÉ (du religieux) et de
la RAISON (de l'utilitaire), il n'a de place que dans un monde où la confusion de
l'utilitaire et du sacré devient la base d'une démarche rassurante. Dieu terrifie s'il n'est
plus la même chose que la raison (Pascal, Kierkegaard). Mais s'il n'est plus la même
chose que la raison, je suis devant l'absence de Dieu" [OC5: 240].
21. "L'OBJET DE L'EXTASE EST L'ABSENCE DE RÉPONSE DU DEHORS.
L'INEXPLICABLE PRÉSENCE DE L'HOMME EST LA RÉPONSE QUE LA
VOLONTÉ SE DONNE, SUSPENDUE SUR LE VIDE D'UNE ININTELLIGIBLE
NUIT; CETTE NUIT, D'UN BOUT A L'AUTRE, A L'IMPUDENCE D'UN
CROCHET" [OC5: 320].
22. My hesitation in word choice here raises a crucial question about the kind of
claims made by such texts. Does Bataille think that the process of reading itself is the
ecstasy, or that it is capable in certain conditions of engendering it? Similar questions
have been raised about the claims of mystical texts [see, for example, Sells]. This
concern with the hook is at the root of Bataille's fascination with the moment of
inception, and also with eroticism as the realm of chance.
23. "Je ne crois pas en Dieu: faute de croire en moi." "Dieu est mort: il l'est au point
que je ne pourrais faire entendre sa mort qu'en me tuant" [OC5: 282, 327].
24. "Jamais le Dieu de la théologie et de la raison ne se met en jeu. Sans fin,
l'insoutenable moi, que nous sommes, se joue; sans fin, la 'communication' le met en
jeu" [OC5: 328].
25. See, for example, Blanchot. For an early and important formulation by Jacques
Derrida, see his "Signature, Event, Context."
26. "L'histoire est inachevée: quand ce livre sera lu, le plus petit écolier connaîtra
l'issue de la guerre actuelle; au moment où j'écris, rien ne peut me donner la science
de l'écolier" [OC5: 261-62].
27. "Écrire est partir ailleurs. L'oiseau qui chante et l'homme qui écrit se délivrent"
[OC5: 359].
28. "Je n'écris pas pour ce monde-ci (survivance--expressément--de celui d'où sortit la
guerre), j'écris pour un monde différent, pour un monde sans égards. Je n'ai pas le
désir de m'imposer à lui, j'imagine y être silencieux, comme absent. La nécessité de
l'effacement incombe à la transparence. Rien ne m'oppose aux forces réelles, aux
rapports nécessaires: l'idéalisme seul (l'hypocrisie, le mensonge) a la vertu de
condamner le monde réel--d'en ignorer la vérité physique" [OC5: 360].
29.
La rage de parler m'habite, et la rage de l'exactitude. je m'imagine précis, capable,
ambitieux. J'aurais dû me taire et je parle. Je ris de la peur de la mort: elle me tient
éveillé! Luttant contre elle (contre la peur et la mort). //
J'écris, je ne veux pas mourir.
Pour moi, ces mots, "je serai mort," ne sont pas respirables. Mon absence est le vent
du dehors. Elle est comique: la douleur est comique. Je suis, à l'abri, dans ma
chambre. Mais la tombe? déjà si voisine, sa pensée m'enveloppe de la tête aux
pieds. //
Immense contradiction de mon attitude!
Personne eut-il, aussi gaîment cette simplicité de mort?
Mais l'encre change l'absence en intention. [OC5: 365]
30. It is worth remembering at this point that Bataille had some trouble completing
books. By 1939-41 he had finished only two, both published anonymously--The Story
of the Eyeand The Blue of Noon. Other than that, he had produced only essays and
aborted plans for books.
31. "Je ne pourrais trouver ce que je cherche dans un livre, encore moins l'y mettre.
J'ai peur de rechercher la poésie. La poésie est une fléche tirée: si j'ai bien visé, ce qui
compte -- que je veux -- n'est ni la flèche ni le but, mais le moment où la flèche se
perd, se dissout dans l'air de la nuit: jusqu'à al mémoire de la flèche est perdue" [OC5:
340]. This is the place to locate Bataille's own poems in relation to his Hatred of
Poetry (The Impossible).
32. Eric Blondel begins to demonstrate a similar twofold movement with Nietzsche's
texts [see Blondel].

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