Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

Sacred Communication, or: Thinking Nihilism

Through Bataille

Ullrich Haase

To cite this article: Ullrich Haase (2010) Sacred Communication, or: Thinking Nihilism
Through Bataille, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 41:3, 304-318, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.2010.11006721

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2010.11006721

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

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 Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 41, No. 3, October 2010

SACRED COMMUNICATION, OR:

THINKING NIHILISM THROUGH BATAILLE
ULLRICH HAASE

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the
market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” — As many of those who did
not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost?
asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us?
Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? — Thus they yelled and laughed.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
What I teach … is an intoxication, not a philosophy: I am not a philosopher, but a saint, perhaps
a madman.
Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille has not only claimed to be the sole inheritor of Nietzsche’s
work, but as well that the only way to inherit Nietzsche is by becoming
Nietzsche, that the only way of understanding is to undergo the same
experiences. To lead the way by good example, he became Nietzsche in the
sense of becoming one of his most famous protagonists, that is, in becoming the
Madman of the Gay Science, who, consequent to the death of God, dedicates
his life’s work to finding a residue, a vestige of the sacred, as it begins to
become palpable on the background of the last passing of the Christian God.
While the notion of the sacred seems to place the discussion of religion on a
more generally religious level than that of Christianity — especially insofar as
Bataille everywhere shows the influence of the great social anthropologists of
the early 20th century — he still remains indebted to Christian thinking, insofar
as his thought continually returns to the Christian genius that has found in the
originary death of its God the highest promise of communication. Yet, insofar
as the religious is here understood on the basis of the sacred – as that notion that
grasps the idea of infinity as without fines, neither internally nor externally, as
it is thus pure continuity and timeless not in the sense of a full presence, but in
the sense of a ceasing of duration as such a limit – this promise resides at the
limit of the impossible, indicated only in a slippage towards death. It is thus
clear that the question of communication is no longer seen as an epistemological
problem, but as the question for the highest good: “communication is, without
doubt, the object of desire, that is to say, the beyond of being”.1 To see
communication as the good and the beautiful, as the Platonic e0pe/keina th=v
ou0si/av, thereby locating it within the problematic of the declination of Platonic
forms into the phenomenology of Western spirit, is to follow the Nietzschean
interpretation of nihilism as the history of the West. Bataille’s work is thus
Nietzschean in a much more essential way than just by sharing some

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 conceptions of his thought. And yet, Bataille is far from being Nietzschean in
one of the most fundamental senses — which will become progressively clearer
in relation to the question of communication: while with Nietzsche history
becomes the sole content of philosophy,2 Bataille seems to be drawn towards
the experience of a reduction of time to the epiphany of the sacred in the violent
disruption of discontinuity and its promise of absolute communication.
But here the question of communication is twofold: once it is a general
question of the community between human beings, once the question for the
nearness of two thoughts. Becoming Nietzsche means to enter into communi-
cation with Nietzsche, thereby reaching an understanding that, at least by intent,
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far surpasses the results of any hermeneutic labour and that exceeds all works
of commentary. On this level, Bataille can say that he is “the only one who
thinks of himself not as a commentator of Nietzsche but as being the same as
he”.3 On the other hand, what makes this communication possible as well makes
it impossible that he may call himself the only one, insofar as it excludes any
reference to the personal, to a singular being that can bear a name. “All beings
are fundamentally only one …. But at the same time that they are one, there
exists in each a personal obstacle annulling this identity” (OC VI 403). True
communication is thus, for Bataille, always bound in the contradiction of the
impossible, so that it is indeed impossible to become Nietzsche, or, in other
words, that in the desire for communication the human being bears on the
impossible. True communication is thus possible only in those moments of
excess in which nothing is communicated: “ecstasy, sacrifice, tragedy, poetry,
and laughter are the forms in which life measures up to the impossible” (OC VI
310).
And yet, becoming Nietzsche itself constitutes a Nietzschean moment,
namely that of an intense communication given in becoming all the names of
history, again in the double moment of being related to the philosophical
tradition and, by the same token, to the whole of humanity:
When speaking about Plato, Pascal, Spinoza and Goethe, I know that their blood flows within
mine — I am proud to speak the truth about them — the family is good enough not to have to
poetize or dissimulate; and thus I stand towards all that which was, I am proud of humanity, and
proud precisely in unconditional sincerity.4
And it is not by coincidence that this fragment, written in 1881, stems from the
same time as the first remarks on the illumination of the thought of the Eternal
Return of the Same, insofar as the latter is often presented by Nietzsche as a
religious faith, that is to say, as the promise of communication, without which
one would be condemned to a fleeting life in one’s consciousness (cf. KSA
9/503).
But, should we really go as far as claiming that what holds for Bataille’s
reading of Nietzsche should also hold for our reading of Bataille’s work? Does
one need to become Bataille to be able to understand Bataille? And we should

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 be clear that this is not a simple reformulation of the hermeneutic exigency to
make any text as strong as possible. What is at stake for Bataille is the question
of communication and, more specifically, of the literary community, so that
“becoming Nietzsche” involves the movement ad liminem of continuity. If that
is how we should read Nietzsche, then we can see that the condition for such
understanding is the vanishing of the particularity of Nietzsche in the very text
signed Nietzsche, the ability of the text to say, “but let us leave Herr Nietzsche:
of what concern is it to us that Herr Nietzsche has recovered his health?” (Gay
Science, KSA 3/347),5 which is to say, in turn, that this text has to speak the
truth (Ecce Homo, KSA 6/365). This is why the success of Nietzsche’s thought
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depends on what Georg Picht has called our reason to read Nietzsche, namely
that everything that Nietzsche has said has become true. But such a condition
we cannot impose on our reading of Bataille. Nothing that Bataille has said has
become true, which is not to criticise Bataille, but to see why nothing said in
these texts could even have become true. Consequently, one cannot become
Bataille and any attempt at doing so necessarily turns into a bad comedy.6 We
might put this point more positively, thereby approaching the theme of literary
communism. In opposition to Nietzsche, Bataille writes literature. Instead of
trying to find the truth, Bataille seeks what is proper to literature:
communication, as the good beyond being.

*
This is why today, more than ever, we have difficulties getting to grips with
Bataille’s “philosophy”, and, while his thought might not seek the truth, and
while his words thus cannot become true, the concerns of his thought are more
pressing today than they were even at the time of writing. The difficulty of
finding a mode of communication with Bataille’s text shows itself in the gap
opened between the philosopher and the saint or madman. Thus to speak with
Bataille against philosophy seems to be as meaningless as to speak against
Bataille for philosophy, thereby coming to rather similar conclusions, namely
that this is “just literature”, or, worse, a muddle of scientific analysis and the
language of mysticism.7 The reason, thus, why we read Bataille and find it
difficult to follow his argumentation is that it revolts against the contemporary
age in which the realities of life appear to us, incontrovertibly, to be determined
by the given, by facts or data.8 Surrounded by a reified Christian world, his
revolt against our scientific reality appears to us childish or even naïve, an
attempt best represented as literature, where we might still grant it some
validity, mainly because we experience literature today, on account of the very
same reflections, as removed from reality and facts, and thus not as essentially
relevant to our daily lives.
And, beyond Bataille’s analyses we might look towards his experiments; to
the Collège de Sociologie, or, even more so, to Acéphale, and point out the

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 impotence of such attempts to bring about any change of our modern human
condition. Bataille, it is claimed, was so naïve9 that he thought he could transfer
insights from social anthropology to a modern industrial world, in which things
have become too complex. For that reason his revolt against the increasing
privatization of life remains just this, a private episode recounted in biographies
as a strange oddity in the life of an otherwise quite reasonable man and leaving
hardly any more points for discussion besides wondering if he would or would
not have dared to go the whole way of sacrifice, thereby being led “into
disconnected and even stupid behaviour”.10
And yet, the reason for these difficulties in responding to Bataille’s work must
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be more substantial than this, considering that it seems easy to reduce his text to
an eclectic assemblage of traditional philosophical arguments. Thus the unknown
appeared not only in Kierkegaard’s text, while the centrality of the notion of
communication, exceeding the question of an empirical exchange of meaning,
can be traced back as far as Descartes. Bataille is thus in an order of thinkers,
whose reception has been much less problematic, at least insofar as the mastery
claimed by secondary texts is concerned. If we look to those thinkers to whom
he owes everything, namely to Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, we come to see
that his writings can neither be used as a critique of any one of these, while none
of their insights seem able to put Bataille’s thought into question. This is
certainly not because Bataille’s writings lack either seriousness, clarity or
coherence. On the contrary, they are endowed with these qualities to a sometimes
punishing degree. Instead, the problem that we are facing is given in Bataille’s
rejection of philosophy, that is, not on account of its historical ‘content’, but of
its communicative ‘form’. When Bataille says that he is not a philosopher, this
relates to the very form of thinking, to his understanding of the essence of
thinking itself. While one of these moments relates him essentially to Hegel and
Nietzsche, namely that he sees thought as essentially in motion, the other main
characteristic, while being reflected in certain moments of Nietzsche’s thought,
rather separates Bataille from all philosophy, namely its esoteric form. And this
esoteric form, insofar as it takes the form of inner experience, is quite different
from that which we can find, for example, in Benjamin, where it is founded on
the historical nature of thinking, that is, it recuperates the first point here made.
In other words, Bataille’s texts seek communication, they do not wish to
communicate. That is to say, it is not that once you come to understand them, you
will see, but that once you have seen, you will come to understand. This is the
meaning of Inner Experience, which is neither ‘inner’ nor can it qualify as an
experience. We can see this motion in Bataille’s response to Sartre’s critique in
Un nouveau mystique, where he articulates both these moments, that is, thought
as movement as well as its esoteric character:
That which I tried to describe in Inner Experience is that movement which, losing any possibility
to come to a stop, easily falls pray to the attack of a critique which believes it can arrest it from

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 without, because the critique itself is not taken by the movement. My vertiginous fall and the
difference that it introduces into the spirit, cannot be grasped by someone who has not
experienced it himself: that is why one can, …, surreptitiously reproach me for having arrived
at God, for having arrived at the nothing! But these contradictory reproaches just underline by
affirmation: I will never arrive [je n’aboutis jamais]. (OC VI 199)
Thus the conjunction of these two moments, however they might be justified,
indemnifies Bataille’s writing against critique. As he points out himself: “this is
why the critique of my thinking is so difficult” (ibid). While, for example, one
might say that the esoteric moment could be found, exemplarily, in St. Anselm’s
ontological proof, there the argument finally comes to a rest, in that it promises
the one who sees an infinite communion within the world. On the other hand, one
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might see the moment of never coming to an end, of a thought in infinitum rather
than ad infinitum in Nietzsche as a problem for the understanding — so far so
as agreeing with Rosenzweig that there is nothing left of Nietzsche’s philosophy,
except Nietzsche himself11 —, but the lack of an esoteric dimension still allows
Nietzsche’s work to stand up against such judgement. In reading Bataille we are
thus again facing the impossible: one would have to become Bataille to
understand Bataille, while in this endeavour reading Bataille is not of much help.

*
Suspending for a moment these reasons for which a critique of Bataille seems
not only difficult, but mostly meaningless, I will, while not being able to tell you
how to become either Bataille or Nietzsche, at least try to find some reasons
why it might be more appealing to become Nietzsche rather than Bataille. The
main points of difference between their works seem to me to be the following:
a) While Nietzsche aims at inheriting the philosophical tradition, for Bataille
it is a question of a revolt against the tradition, a revolt against any
subjection of thought to any end, which is to say, a revolt against thinking
itself, refusing any answer, any grasp of anything, leaving thought to be
only in its death or impotence.12
b) The paradigmatic image of the philosopher for Nietzsche is the teacher
understood as the physician of the soul. Insofar as thinking takes the form
of a Lehre, a doctrine or teaching, it is itself seen as a motion, a movement
that picks you up somewhere and leaves you somewhere else. Thinking is
thus an action rather than a theoretical reflection, an action driving towards
the realization of a historical truth, rather than an adequation of thought
and thing. Bataille, on the other hand, mistrusts such pedagogical
employment of thought, precisely because he sees action itself as servility
to ends. To write at all is thus for Bataille much more of a problem than it
is for Nietzsche, even though the critique of language motivating Bataille’s
unease is, again, taken from his reading of Nietzsche.13
c) “Nietzsche’s main shortcoming lies in having misinterpreted the opposition
of sovereignty and power”, Bataille writes (AS 453), which is to say that
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 the notion of communication, for Nietzsche still achieved in a motion of
self-overcoming, becomes for Bataille a state of dejection, of non-sense. It
is, then, as we have seen, only in the impotence of thought, in the sliding
towards death that sovereignty can be achieved.
d) While Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysical knowledge criticises this as
non-sense, as lack of direction and thus as nihilism, for Bataille it is this
experience of nihilism which allows for the sovereign moment. Thus
sovereignty appears as a possibility between metaphysics and its
overcoming, between theism and atheism, as a moment to be held on to. In
Klossowski’s words, “only the vacancy of the self responding to the
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vacancy of God would constitute the sovereign moment”.14 Where Hegel

speaks of an end of history, Bataille wants to extricate thought and
experience from time itself.
e) Consequently, while for Bataille the sovereign moment demands the
rejection of knowledge in favour of non-knowledge, understood as a new
situation in which the human being finds itself, for Nietzsche knowledge
itself is the highest affect, which is to say that while for Bataille all
knowledge is essentially related to homogeneous elements, Nietzsche
identifies the heterogeneous origin of knowledge.
f) From this there follows the most critical difference, which one might term
the Cartesian moment in Bataille’s writing. While for Nietzsche the
question of reason becomes itself one of nature, located within the task that
he calls the re-naturalization of the human being,15 Bataille affirms that
“reason can be limited only by itself”.16 The inability to leave the Cartesian
understanding of experience, which makes of any possible knowledge a
directed relation between subject and object, leads Bataille, in the same
way as it did Sartre, towards the conclusion that any empirical knowledge
has to take the form of mastery, so that there is no other way but concluding
“the necessity of leaving, in one way or another, the limits of our human
experience” (VE74).
g) But once that the field of experience is exclusively determined by the
subject-object relation, it becomes impossible to escape the position of
subjectivity. This is why, after all his critique of modern subjectivity,
Bataille has to return to it, finding the true subject in the contestation of the
empirical one. In sovereignty we will thus always come back to a subject
affirming itself in the face of objectification. This difference brings Bataille
closer towards Lévinas, the Anti-Nietzsche, where the primordiality of
ethics condemns the experience of the world to the servility of the possible.
h) Instead of exploding the subjectivity of the subject in a Nietzschean fashion,
Bataille thus makes Nietzsche cry the “cry of happy subjectivity” (AS 370).
i) Following again from here, it becomes clear that making of reason a
substance means for Bataille that the only way towards sovereignty is that

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 towards an end in time. This subject thus finds its fulfilment in a pure
presence. That is, Bataille will read Nietzsche’s prevalence of the future in
relation to Sartre’s interpretation of Heidegger, namely as projection of the
subject into its own future, that is, towards its possibilities. The impossible,
the rejection of utility, thus has to be founded on a denial of the future. The
impossible thus gains its value precisely with the refutation of the posse in
possibility. To throw oneself towards one’s ownmost possibilities must
mean, for Bataille, to reify oneself, to become subservient with respect to
other aims. Sovereignty is thus linked to the sacred moment, to death as a
return to the continuity of being.
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j) The nihilism that has become explicit with the death of God is, then, for
Bataille, nothing to be overcome, but rather opens up the chance of
sovereignty, whereas for Nietzsche the question is how to return to some-
thing; where Bataille embraces nihilism as the promise of a new
sovereignty, Nietzsche calls for the one who would make all his thought
incredible. Insofar as thought itself is for Nietzsche an action, Bataille has
to leave it behind, to arrest it in its being, as, for the sovereign operation, it
is necessary to “abandon the perspectives of action” (OC VI 21).
k) Finally one might then say that Bataille’s sovereign operation takes the
opposite direction to Nietzsche’s thought of authenticity, phrased in
reference to the doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same as “become who
you are”.
Looking at it this way it becomes rather questionable what it can mean for
Bataille to have “become the same as he”, Nietzsche. What for Nietzsche is a
thought in time becomes for Bataille a motion towards the end in time. What
for Nietzsche is the desire to overcome oneself becomes for Bataille the
operation of a Nihilation, stopping short of annihilation, in order to return to
(one)self. This is why, paradoxically, Bataille’s revolt against the alienation of
the human being into its private existence appears as a purely private expression
of his own life. While Nietzsche can still say, “but who cares about Herr
Nietzsche?” with Bataille we are constantly thrown back onto the private, that
is, towards the expression of a private revolt, a refusal of sense in order to
fathom, behind the everyday human being in its discontinuous alienation, the
continuity of l’homme entier. As he clarifies in these pages, this step towards
l’homme entier is possible only as a first step towards madness, which is to say,
is impossible.

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 *
To me the voice of Bataille appears to be absolutely authentic. The Egyptians were right to
make of the “authentic” intonation of the voice a necessary condition for the enunciation of any
truth whatever. It is very rare today to hear a human being speak with an intonation which would
simply be his, which would translate a personal experience.
A. Adamov
Sovereignty dissolves the values of meaning, truth and a grasp-of-the-thing-itself. This is why
the discourse that it opens above all is not true, truthful or “sincere”.
Jacques Derrida
The disorienting factor of my kind of writing is the seriousness which deceives its world. This
seriousness is not a lie; what can I do about the fact that the extreme of seriousness dissolves
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into hilarity?
Georges Bataille
Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics — our
sincerity!
Friedrich Nietzsche

Besides these essential disagreements between Nietzsche’s and Bataille’s

thoughts, there is, without doubt, a basis to Bataille’s claim that he has inherited
Nietzsche. This basis we may find in the notion of communication, developed
on the background of an interpretation of European nihilism. While the above
made clear that Bataille has not much time for the doctrine of the Eternal Return
of the Same, the idea of the Will to Power constitutes, it seems, the most central
part of his interpretation of Nietzsche. The notion of the Will to Power
characterizes the will in terms of its originary incompletion, that is, as desire.
And yet, as Nietzsche makes clear, this desire is not a desire for one’s own being,
that is, not a will to self-preservation. As Nietzsche says, a will to life makes not
much sense as it is life itself that here wills. The will thus drives beyond itself,
which is to say that its incompletion does not register as a demand for an infinite
and futural attempt of recuperating the self, but finds its most affirmative power
in self-overcoming. That is why Zarathustra addresses the question of
authenticity when describing the higher men as those who desire their own
downfall (cf. Zarathustra, KSA 4/16), while Bataille understands sovereignty as
the limit experience of being perched atop a common nothingness.
As we are here trying to follow the development of the notion of communi-
cation, what is of interest is this question of a common nothingness. In other
words, the question is that for a real difference between obvious terminological
differences. We have seen that the higher men move from being towards
becoming, while the sovereign operation moves from the world of action to
pure being; the first towards action, the second away from it; the first towards
knowledge, the second away from it. But what difference does this actually
make, especially bearing in mind that, as Bataille makes clear, the world of
utility itself strives towards the idea of presence. Knowledge and Non-
knowledge are thus fighting for the delimitation of the present, both in terms of

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 a reduction of time. This reduction of time towards continuity explains as well
Bataille’s reading of the Nietzschean Kinderland, as well as the puerile nature
of his erotic writings. The aim of eroticism is to return to our first sexual
emotion, to our first laughter, where the separation from the continuum is still
felt in some sense, where we are closer to l’homme entier than even at the
moment of death.17
It has already become clear that the notion of communication does not refer
to the idea of an information transfer serving the utility of understanding. To
18
escape the reduction to thinghood means essentially to escape the
characterizing traits of the thinking thing. The true and foundational notion of
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communication, preceding any possibility of trading information and preceding

even the possibility of idle chatter, concerns existence itself. It is thus an
ontological notion before it could take on a merely epistemological appearance.
In this sense we can see the question of communication at the centre of European
philosophy since Descartes, for whom the Meditations could have ended after the
second, were it not for the necessity to find an answer to the question of how
human beings can be said to communicate, so that the community of ideas can
be ascertained. Following him, Leibniz exclaims that had Descartes just thought
of pre-established harmony as the guarantee of ontological communication, he
could have solved his problem. Then, in Hegel we find the idea of absolute
knowledge as that of an absolute communication between evil and the beautiful
soul, between the real and the rational. And there is no doubt that Nietzsche also
thinks about communication when the lure of the Will to Power as knowledge
is described as the achievement of a self-sacrifice, an authenticity achieved in the
union with the world, the becoming other implied in the idea of knowledge as
the highest affect. Thus, the parallel with Nietzsche’s work cannot be said to
reside in the question of communication alone, but in that, first for Nietzsche
and then for Bataille, communication is possible only once understood in relation
to bodily, (in)carnate existence. Against Hegel Bataille thus argues that as long
as thought is risked on its own, it does not risk a loss, insofar as this motion turns
out to turn into its pure self-affirmation. In its absolute fluidity consciousness
fulfils its very essence, so that terror, the horror of annihilation, becomes that
element through which the human subject accedes to self-mastery and thus
becomes productive, can risk its life as something alien to itself. That life can
affirm itself against such negation is then possible only in that ruse through
which consciousness becomes subservient to ends, that is, appears in the form
of a dependent consciousness, that is, as enslaved. Indeed, having quoted above
that Bataille affirms the substantial interpretation of reason, consciousness is
unable in principle to negate itself, it is pure possibility, so that it is only in the
laceration of the body itself, in the bodily ek-stasis of the one held out into the
nothing, that communication can begin. This is why the way of sovereignty is
withdrawn from the world of labour, which is essentially related to the notion of

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 negation as understood through the notion of consciousness. Communication is
then not found in the running ahead of production, but in the severance from
productivity, not in a future, but in the ceasing of time, not in becoming, but in
being. Time is the medium of the activity of spirit, indeed, time is spirit itself,
while the body demands inaction, an opening not through temporal ek-stasis,
but by way of spatial laceration.19
Consequently, there cannot be a resolve of meaning in the identification of
good and evil, where evil, understood in Enlightenment terms as the existence
of matter, is lifted up and preserved in the ideal. Not being a good movement
of vertical transcendence, the sacred returns the human being to original
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continuity, thereby cancelling out all the progress in the projections of an

individual life.
Do not evil and sin lie at the basis of all communication? That is to say, the sacred. There is,
indeed, a bad sacred [un sacré maléfique] and a benevolent one. But, in any case, the sacred is
dangerous. The sacred is the fusion of beings substituting itself for their separation. (OC VI 395)
To understand the incompletion of the will in this way makes of Eros the
subservient movement of production, while turning Thanatos into the God of
l’homme entier, of the ‘complete man’, who is no longer complete in the sense
as one might find it in Sartre who thinks of death as the final preservation of all
achievement — as the moment following which nothing can be taken away
from me any longer — but as an absolute cancellation of everything, in death
most meaningless, as, for example, in sacrifice as the death that is no good for
anything. Such incompletion does, then, not so much bring up the will’s demand
for action towards the future, but demands inaction, the falling back onto itself.
MEN ACT IN ORDER TO BE. This must not be understood in the negative sense of
conservation (conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive
sense of a tragic and incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach. (VE 171).
Sovereignty thus is the desire for an absolute presence, and it is the same
desire that has travelled through the Hegelian system and there found its
solution wanting. In that sense, even though we have just seen Bataille’s
perversion of the Hegelian system, in a move reminiscent of Marx, his
understanding of desire remains Hegelian, not Nietzschean: “at the basis of
human life there exists a principle of insufficiency” (VE 172), but this
insufficiency can be overcome, if only in the moment of ‘the complete man’.
For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the incomplete is not equal to that which is
determined by a lack and there is thus no lack in the will, but pure exuberance.
What appears in Nietzsche as the innocence of becoming, Bataille sees as its
guilt, namely of having separated man from himself, reifying the human being
into a sign of its knowledge, while every man is being and knowledge and
should not be reduced to the latter.
And even though he goes into the opposite direction, the aim is still the same:
Sovereignty is “the power to rise above the laws which ensure maintenance to

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 life”. Thus the risk of death for the sake of the body. This is the strange
complexion, which leads to the paradox of the sovereign operation: “any cause
cuts one’s wings; the absence of causes condemns us to solitude” (OC VI 23).
But this is the problem of the ambiguity of the term communication. The
communication of aims and purposes, driving towards action, is already the
nihilistic movement of hiding from view the ontological separation that desire
wants to overcome.20
This is the reason for Bataille’s well known interpretation of Nietzsche,
concluding that evil is necessary for the good, that the good is unthinkable without
evil. To read the question of communication at the heart of nihilism thus means to
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realize that Christianity is this history of nihilism, precisely in that it has separated
good and evil beyond any hope for reconciliation, while Hegel’s overcoming of
this Christian deficiency by way of philosophical reason equally fails, this time
insofar as it makes a thing out of the communication once achieved. In Hegel’s
system there is thus the sudden appearance of sovereignty and, consequently, the
perennial feeling of its loss, inscribed in his system as the oscillation of memory
between past and present which presents the loss of their unity.

*
Upward — despite the spirit that drew [my foot] downward, drew it towards the abyss, the
Spirit of Gravity, my devil and archenemy.
Upward — although he sat upon me, half dwarf, half mole; crippled, crippling; pouring lead-
drops into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain. …
But there is something in me that I call courage: it has always destroyed every discouragement
in me. This courage at least bade me stop and say: ‘Dwarf! You! Or I’ …
But he has discovered himself who says: This is my good and evil: he has silenced thereby the
mole and dwarf who says: ‘Good for all, evil for all’.
Zarathustra
To silence the demands of reason or at least to keep them at bay either by way
of acephalic or bi- or polycephalic man, is, it seems, the imperative animating
Bataille as much as Zarathustra. While the former sees the head as representing
the servile functions, the latter represents the spirit of gravity as the nihilistic
element, as the mockery that robs any aspiration of its sense, which dissolves
the meaning of any particular deed into the logical meaninglessness of the
universal. Equally, both pervert the traditional relation between head and body,
being and becoming, thus negatively relating to Plato’s determination of the
human being as the half-way house between heaven and earth. Thus, to lose
one’s head, for Bataille, means to return to being by way of the repudiation of
all temporal becoming, to free oneself from all servility in the “puerile
unconsciousness of sacrifice” (TR 45). Zarathustra, on the other hand, in
confronting his archenemy, clears the way for further assent.21
In other words, following the death of God, both Bataille and Nietzsche think
through the modern schism between theoretical and practical philosophy no

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 longer as a theoretical problem, which could hence be healed by the work of
consciousness itself, but as resolvable only by way of the action of the body.
And yet, this acephalic moment of the human body, in which thought is
cleansed from its universal abstractions, does not designate a return of the
human being to animal life, or, to say this more essentially, it does not mean to
open Bataille or Nietzsche to the Heideggerian critique, namely of drawing the
meaning of human existence from an unreflected loan taken from biology, a
loan which would oblige both to their debt to an unquestioned and metaphysical
conception of life.
It is true, both Nietzsche and Bataille often seem to speak of the human being
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through comparison to animal life. Whether the human being inquires of the
cow the secret of her happiness, whether the thought of the Eternal Return of
the Same opens the decision between animal and Overman, or whether the
human being desires the continuity of life as such in animal sacrifice, these
discourses seem to redress the metaphysical determination of the human being
as the animal rationale, even where, in a turn to affectivity, this becomes the
animal with red cheeks.22 Yet it could easily be shown that Nietzsche’s
conception of life does as little borrow from biology as the doctrine of Eternal
Recurrence from modern physics. In any case, as long as Nietzsche speaks of
the human being he speaks of metaphysics, and metaphysics – whether
explicitly in the notion of the animal rationale, or implicitly in the repudiation
of the body in its mechanically determined existence – leaves the understanding
of the human being within such notions of biology, which has become even
clearer today with the developments of cognitive science and its old dreams of
capturing the truth of consciousness by way of a scientific understanding of its
“base matter”.
The case is more difficult with Bataille, as it here seems that the human being
essentially desires to become animal, to return to the continuity of life, where
the particular life exists in nature like water in water. In short, whether human
or animal desire, both would irreducibly desire presence. This identity of desire
seems to lie at the foundation of animal sacrifice, as the desire to redress the
injustice of individual existence. Furthermore, Bataille often dwells in
metaphorical expositions of a pseudo-scientific nature, for example, in using
images of base matter, of atoms and molecular movements, of the
communication between pipes, in order to clarify the very nature of
communication, while also proffering descriptions of borderline experiences, if
in terms of base materialism or low prostitution. Yet precisely the latter are
used by Bataille to get to the root of the paradoxical nature of human desire
and the impossibility given by the sheer fact, as Nietzsche calls it, of our low
descent, which we repudiate in horror. Indeed, rejection and horror of the
natural are the condition of humanity, to a degree that the definition of the
human as the animal with red cheeks already indicates the impossibility to

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 which its desire is due. Here again Bataille follows Kojève’s interpretation of
Hegel, which bases the entire interpretation of the Hegelian dialectics on the
irreducible difference between animal and human desire, translated here in
Bataille into the infinite separation between animal sexuality and human
eroticism. While the former never knows more than quantitative differences,
thus being able to withdraw into itself and thereby desire itself in continuity, the
latter desires this completion as its own satisfaction, which is to desire the
impossible, thus applying itself to the impossible, thereby revealing it rather
than giving expression to it (cf. TR 111). In the end it is thus clear that, both in
an ontological as well as an epistemological sense, “nothing, …, is more closed
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to us than this animal life from which we are descended” (TR 20).
From here one can see why neither Nietzsche nor even Bataille turn with the
confrontation of reason towards the somewhat irrational. In whatever way our
desire relates us to the idea of life itself, there is no way in which an
understanding of the poetic lie of animality can further our understanding of
human desire, and in that sense the human being is neither to be understood as
animal rationale nor as animal irrationale. The return to the body is thus not a
turn to the irrational, and that is why Bataille’s writings are endowed with
seriousness, clarity and coherence to a rather punishing degree, and it is equally
the reason why Bataille can still claim to be involved in ‘a science of
sovereignty’.
We have worked up to this point, namely to make the difference between
Nietzsche and Bataille on account of the nature of knowledge and the critique
of science. Both seem to agree that the problem of nihilism expresses itself in
the rational criterion reducing human desire to animal immediacy. Thus
Nietzsche, in The Convalescent, brings the animals praising the thought of the
Eternal Return of the Same into the vicinity of the Spirit of Gravity, while
Bataille similarly accounts for the question of knowledge as principally
homogeneous. In the same way as the animals speak to Zarathustra, without
being able to indicate his thought, Bataille seems to make the language of
science slide until it stops referring to a fulfilled presence of meaning in order
to indicate the sovereign moment. The sovereign moment is thus a presence
which no longer is present, a presence that is but the “disappearance of
duration” (TR 48). This sliding towards death corresponds thus to the sliding
of concepts towards non-sense, towards a sovereignty in which nobody governs,
towards an inner experience that is neither inner nor can qualify as an
experience, towards a knowledge in which nothing is known and a
communication in which nothing is communicated.
The meaning of a science of sovereignty thus remains rather questionable,
and it might not be too surprising that the Collège de Sociologie split exactly
along those lines, in that his collaborators, principally Michel Leiris, could no
longer see the meaning of such a science. If scientific knowledge is essentially

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 homogeneous, if a critique of science is thus impossible — in the same sense
as, for Bataille, a critique of Hegel is impossible — except as having its
meaning slide towards nothing, in the same way as the height of seriousness
slides towards hilarity, then this science will not be able to point towards its
object any more successfully than any force could, as a given datum, point
towards its Leibnizian monad. In other words, restricting the question of
knowledge to homogeneity means to remain within the restricted economy of
regional ontologies, foreclosing the ability to return to a philosophical science
from out of which the former could be put into question. And yet, as “the object
of any affective reaction is necessarily heterogeneous” (VE 142), such hetero-
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geneous knowledge is then possible only in the mystical thinking of primitives

and in dreams (VE 143). The difficulty with reading Bataille is thus not that he
has tried to “express a mobile thought, without seeking its definite state” (TR
11), but that he buys into the modern definition of knowledge, thus foreclosing
any critique of modernity, or, rather, leaving this critique to an expression of a
personal revolt, of a personal dissatisfaction with life that has to be delivered
from its exhausting boredom (VE 167). This resentment slipping back into
Bataille’s thought can then be seen as the reverse side of his inability to bring
the modern sciences into question, thereby opening a perspective onto an
overcoming of metaphysics. This latter stance has been taken by Nietzsche in
confronting the homogeneous modern sciences with a philosophical science
that has realized knowledge as the greatest affect.
Manchester Metropolitan University

References
1. Georges Bataille, “Notes on On Nietzsche”, in: Œuvres Complètes, vol. VI, p. 423, my
translation; “L’objet du désir, sans doute, est la communication, c’est-à-dire l’au-delà de
l’être”.
2. Completely subscribing to this thesis, it was first formulated by Georg Picht; “Nietzsche —
das Denken und die Wahrheit der Geschichte”, in: Merkur, 467, (Klett-Cotta) Stuttgart January
1988, p. 19; Engl. trans. “Thought and the Truth of History”, in JBSP, vol. 38, issue 1, January
2007, pp. 4-17.
3. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vols. II & III, New York: Zone Books 1991, p. 367
(from now on referred to as AS followed by page number in the text).
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fragment V 12 [52] “Nachgelassene Fragmente”, in: Kritische
Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin/New York (1967-
77) 1988, vol. 9, page 585, from now on referred to as KSA, followed by volume and page
number in the text, all translations mine.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, „aber lassen wir Herrn Nietzsche: was geht es uns an, dass Herr Nietzsche
wieder gesund wurde?”(KSA 3/347).
6. See, for example, Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, London: Routledge 1992.
7. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp
1985, p. 253. This essay constitutes one of the paradigmatic “misunderstandings” of Bataille’s
thought. Dissolving it in a cleverly dialectical way, all that remains of Bataille are unreasonable
contradictions. As sharp as Habermas’ discourse is, it never for a moment touches Bataille’s
thought. The same could be said for Sartre’s critique in Un nouveau mystique, which Bataille
describes as a text “dissected by an indifferent lucidity” (OC VI 196).

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 8. Thus even his defenders, like Michael Richardson, feel it necessary to agree surreptitiously
that “he got his data wrong”, as if to gain personal credibility in order to be able better to
defend him. Cf. Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille, London: Routledge 1994.
9. The childishness which Blanchot ascribes to Acéphale has quite a different meaning from that
given here, but is maybe as essential as to its impression. Cf. Maurice Blanchot, La
Communauté Inavouable, Paris: Minuit 1983, p. 33. It should be clear that it is in Blanchot
not a critique in whatever way, but taking up a characterization of Bataille himself: “this is
what gives the world of sacrifice an appearance of puerile gratuitousness”, Georges Bataille,
Theory of Religion, New York: Zone Books, 1989, p. 45; from now on referred to as TR in
the text.
10. Even to say that this is no longer puerile, i.e. does not recapture the ideal of the Nietzschean
Kinderland, remains in view of Bataille: “it is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of
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satisfying [the need expressed in the ancient forms of sacrifice], under conditions of present-
day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behaviour”, “The Jesuve”,
Visions of Excess, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p 73; from now on referred
to as VE in the text.
11. Franz Rosenzweig, “Der Stern der Erlösung”, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988.
12. It would be of interest here to follow the play between these two, apparently contradictory,
notions, which Bataille seems to value at the same time: virility and impotence.
13. Cf. OC VI 13, “Nietzsche ruinait la valeur efficace du langage”.
14. Pierre Klossowski, “Of the Simulacrum in Georges Bataille’s Communication”, p. 6.
15. Cf. Nietzsche, Gay Science, § 109.
16. “La raison ne peut être limitée que par elle-même” OC VI 24.
17. Cf. OC VI 201. Here one could thus find what so many readers have long desired in
Heidegger, namely to be able to accompany the discourse on death with one on birth, even if
it does not move in the desired direction.
18. Cf. AS 385: “Something different is at stake in Nietzsche: in Nietzsche man demands … to
escape from the reduction of being to thinghood”.
19. Georges Bataille, La Littérature et le mal, p.227 ; quoted from Robert Sasso, Georges Bataille:
Le Système du non-savoir, Paris: Minuit 1978, p. 154; “Le déchirement, l’anéantissement,
qu’est la communication souveraine”.
20. In this sense Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bataille seem to want the same thing: Will to Power
as a communication that transcends itself; the Einsprung in das Dasein in the ek-stasis of
time, and the ecstasy of Bataille as that which opens up the essence of communication.
21. Bataille attempts to dismiss this difference in a rather amusing style as a kind of ideological
problem, which insofar as it can be reduced, brings out the true Nietzsche. Saying that
Nietzsche, as a bourgeois, was condemned to an Icarian adventure (VE 37) allows him still
to become Nietzsche, while turning around the very meaning of such undertaking. Of all
images in the Zarathustra, that in Of the Face and the Riddle is best suited to illustrate this
critique.
22. Cf. Zarathustra, KSA 4/113. This definition has been taken up by both Sartre and Bataille,
demonstrating the essential nature of shame.

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