Sean Leftwich

25 March 2018

Using Uselessness

Art is useless, and always will be. The artist, however, chooses eagerly to wallow and slosh in the

mud of the unknown. For Georges Bataille, uselessness is a virtue, one to embrace in order to reject the

confines of structured, everyday existence, even if only temporarily in anticipation of returning from the

abyss. In this essay, I will delineate Bataille’s thought as it relates to intimacy, sacrifice, and art, accessed

through the self-imposed choice of self-infliction. These concepts, when unified, may ultimately serve as

a set of ethics for intimacy, artistic practice, and perhaps the act of living itself.

Uselessness pervades Georges Bataille’s thought, as he incessantly and purposefully introduces

paradoxes, counter-operations, and seeming contradictions into otherwise lucid discussions, removing the

utility of language itself in order to communicate concepts incompatible with rational thought. Seemingly

disparate words are linked together. Contradictions are lent unbowed certainty. The Acéphale is an idol of

this uselessness, with its head, a source of utility and knowledge, divorced from its body, and its

sacrificial blade destined to wound the being which wields it. One of Bataille’s most profound and

mystical experiences arises from the abandonment of this utility, in which he is blinded, divorced from

sight by his previously useful umbrella, as he says, “I negated these gray walls which enclosed me, I

rushed into a sort of rapture. I laughed divinely: the umbrella, having descending upon my head, covered

me (I expressly covered myself with this black shroud). I laughed as perhaps one had never laughed; the

extreme depth of each thing opened itself up – laid bare, as if I were dead.”1 That which was a previously

useful object, for deterring the rain or sun, fails in its utility, and closes on him, leaving him to revel in the

darkness, to maniacally laugh in the midst of the unknowing abyss, nearing close to the experience of

death. In order to further examine Bataille’s preoccupation with the useless, one must assess the stakes in

1
​Bataille, Inner Experience, 34
such a preoccupation. To actively reject utility and use implies a dissatisfaction with these structures.

Bataille seems to link usefulness to the rigid structures of adult, or perhaps modern, life, saying, “​as

adults, we ‘possess’ this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects.

It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and

wine.”2 Here, Bataille establishes utility as an overarching structure of daily life, one that humans have

built their very existence upon: making use of the Earth in order to improve conditions for themselves.

Perhaps now that many of these conditions are ideal, Bataille aims to challenge notions of utility, in order

to divorce them from daily life, in a time when usefulness is a preoccupation rather than a necessity. If

utility is the default mode of operation, Bataille perhaps instead aims to resist that default: instead opting

for a state of unknowing, in order to access the experiences that may arise from lack of knowledge, rather

than an abundance.

Sacrifice, when brought into the context of uselessness, is a cultural manifestation of the

destruction of utility. Bataille establishes sacrifice as an exercise of the human desire for destruction,

saying, ​“Caught in the trap of life, man is moved by a field of attraction determined by a flash point where

solid forms are destroyed, where the various objects that constitute the world are consumed as in a

furnace of light.”3 Through this, one can think of sacrifice as a destruction of use itself, the destruction of

solid form, removing the previous utility of the object in its destruction, instead offering the promise of

continuity among observers of the sacrifice. The practice is inherently useless, or perhaps even contrary to

habitual interests, as it destroys objects which may otherwise have a utility, whether it be animals

otherwise useful for food or resources, or even humans, destroying their social or physical utility as

beings, in order to achieve an alternative ecstasy, and to create a previously lost intimacy between the

desecrated and the beholders.

2
Bataille, Cruel Practice of Art, pg. 2
3
​Bataille, Cruel Practice of Art, pg. 3
 Intimacy, when coupled with violence, may begin as a troubling sentiment. The two seem to be

contrary, yet both intimacy and violence are acts of closeness. Both involve the relation between separate

individuals, and the violent or intimate closeness that arises from this relation. Bataille joins the two,

making them one, saying, “Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it is not

compatible with the positing of the separate individual.”4 To be clear, the violence Bataille speaks of does

not necessarily denote a physical violence, but rather a psychic, “elemental violence”5 of the self, a

violence done to the separateness between individuals. Intimacy, then, must always be intertwined with

this violence, as intimacy and eroticism must inherently engage in the destruction of boundaries between

previously discontinuous individuals. From this, one can posit intimacy, and violence by extension, to be

acts of cultivating uselessness. Eroticism abandons the utility of reproduction in favor of destroying the

self, rendering the self useless, shattering the previously “useful” and continuous self. Through this, one

can imagine an ethical mixing of intimacy and violence, one that promotes violence to separateness of

being, rather than bodies, and one that enacts rupture and violation to discontinuity rather than

psychology.

Here, sacrifice, violence, and intimacy intertwine, as Bataille says, “The individual identifies with

the victim in the sudden movement that restores it to immanence (to intimacy), but the assimilation that is

linked to the return to immanence is nonetheless based on the fact that the victim is the thing, just as the

sacrificer is the individual.”6 Through this, one can assert that for Bataille, both eroticism and sacrifice are

one and the same in their purpose. Both practices dissolve the discontinuous self through a physical or

psychic violence, uniting previously separate beings in continuity. “Both reveal the flesh,” Bataille states.

“Sacrifice replaces the ordered life of the animal with a blind convulsion of its organs. So also with the

erotic convulsion; it gives free rein to extravagant organs whose blind activity goes on beyond the

4
Bataille, Theory of Religion, 51
5
Bataille, Introduction to Eroticism, 16
6
​ Bataille, Theory of Religion, 51
considered will of the lovers. They are animated by a violence outside the control of reason…”7 The

“control of reason” Bataille speaks of seems to be the essence of utility. Use necessitates reason: a logical

connection between a source of utility and the object to be utilized. To abandon utility is to abandon

reason, to forgo the established pattern of action in favor of a behavior unaccepted, perhaps reviled, in

order to inhabit the freedom that behavior provides.

Uselessness seems to be essential to art, then. With no intrinsic monetary value, no resource to be

mined, no immediate logic to be found, art is inherently useless, and remains a human reaction to the

surrounding excess of use. In practice, to sit down and draw a picture produces the same result as sitting

down and staring at a wall: nothing of particular utility is created. One cannot enact change upon one’s

surroundings with a drawing (the paper could be used for kindling, but the image itself is ineffectual),

instead the drawing is often a product of those surroundings, transforming the surrounding, inescapable

utility into material uselessness. There are of course exceptions, and deliberate attempts undergone to turn

drawing into functional form, like the petroglyphs on Utah’s Newspaper Rock, depicting monsters to

warn of, animals to be found and skinned in the area, and wheels to construct or revere. Nonetheless, to

actively engage in a process of unknowing, of uselessness, when enacting artistic endeavors, is to simply

embrace the nature of the form.

A necessary undercurrent runs throughout the subjects previously described. A critical

commonality between art, sacrifice, and eroticism, is that of self-infliction and voluntary destruction. This

seems to be crucial to Bataille’s thinking, as he is often careful to delineate between murderous violence

between individuals and the consensual, voluntary violence that may occur between individuals, or among

the self. To self-impose uselessness is to castrate oneself of utility, to act as the Acéphale and decapitate

oneself from knowing, instead opting to revel in mystery and fruitful blindness. This runs throughout

Bataille’s thought, in that both sacrifice and rapturous eroticism are to be performed voluntarily. The

7
​Bataille, From Religious Sacrifice to Eroticism, 92
sacrificial object is not to be the subject of murder, but is instead to be a willing participant in the

dissolution of their own discontinuity. Likewise, the violent eroticism between individuals is to be

enacted willingly, promoting the relinquishment of control, mastery, and dominance, in favor of a

congruous destruction of separateness. Similarly, the artist is not forced to enact the uselessness of

artmaking, and instead makes art from the source of a self-inflicted, self-motivated desire. By rendering

oneself useless to the structures of rational life, the self-flagellator is free to construct and find continuity

or meaning outside and beyond these default structures of experience. As Bataille states, “Emotion that is

not tied to the opening of a horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only

offers us a compressed life.”8 (Cruel Practice 6) This compressed life seems to be the product of utility for

Bataille, as utility denotes permanent connections between objects and their uses, rather than the infinite

possibilities which he promotes.

All of these methods of uselessness seem to have a sort of profound utility for Bataille: the utility

of violent disruption of discontinuity in death, as death is that which utility aims to avoid. Through use,

humans generally achieve easier lives, less suffering, and the acquisition of resources that stave off the

inevitable force of death. Instead, sacrifice, eroticism, and art, all replicate the force of death that

fascinates Bataille, that which “[assents] to life,” and thereby affirms and enhances it, “even in death”9.

Sacrifice cultivates continuity between discontinuous individuals even in the destruction of life from the

sacrificial object, while eroticism disrupts the discontinuity of separate individuals through a certain death

of their separateness. On art, he says, “That is why we must linger in the shadows which art acquires in

the vicinity of death. If, cruel, it does not invite us to die in ravishment, art at least has the virtue of

putting a moment of our happiness on a plane equal to death.”10 Structure and utility are default,

permanent fixtures throughout daily life, while the aforementioned practices are exercises in fleeting

8
​ Bataille, Cruel Practice, 6
9
​Bataille, Introduction to Eroticism, 11
10
​Bataille, Cruel Practice, 6
escape, rushing towards death rather than oppressive rigidity, and Bataille recognizes this, referring to

sensuality, saying, “the breathless rush that sends us careening over is only temporary.”11

By utilizing the useless, and positioning the non-utilitarian practices of sacrifice, eroticism, and

art-making as exercises in destruction of structure, Georges Bataille’s aims seem to be towards an

alternative source of continuity in a discontinuous society. By exercising an unknowing, rather than

knowledge, one can reach experiences not previously allowed under structures designed towards utility,

endless use of the environment, and the positioning of knowledge as a goal. These self-inflicted,

self-flagellated exercises in non-knowledge, violent ecstasy, and uselessness are fleeting in a use-oriented

world, but remain as reprieves from the oppressive structure in which they inhabit, as a means of

inhabiting an alternative viewpoint, whether it be a maniacal blinded madman in the street or a child

untouched by the destruction of wonder. For Bataille, use is useless, and uselessness is useful.

11
​Bataille, Mysticism and Sensuality, 241