Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (review)

Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin. Peter Tracey Connor. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 198. $34.95 (cloth).

The success of Peter Connor's Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin derives in no small part from his awareness that anyone choosing to write about Bataille in English has a special responsibility to come to grips with "the arbitrariness of 'cultural chronology' that has been a major factor in the creation of the Bataille that we know today" (14). For some time, Bataille's thought has been frequently applied in English language literary and cultural studies by scholars who neither read it in the original French nor claim to know the breadth and depth of his work. This applied Bataille tends to be some version of the poststructuralist Bataille--the Bataille of Barthes, Blanchot, Foucault, Sollers, Kristeva, Derrida, Baudrillard, or Nancy--filtered through the translations that are available. The problem is that the sheer volume of his writing exceeds, and therefore complicates, the account of his thought offered by the critical common knowledge. A divergence between the Bataille of theory and the Bataille of history has resulted. Connor's book joins a number of other recent books on Bataille in English that seek to remedy this situation with careful readings of his writings executed within the intellectual and historical context of his period.¹ Connor's book distinguishes itself as both an excellent overall introduction to Bataille and an elegant piece of research into a specific, and very important, aspect of his thought: its relationship to mysticism. The book is clear, rigorous, and thorough in its exposition, and refreshing in its readability.

The book succeeds as both introduction and specialized investigation through its insightful core claim, which is that the paradoxical nature of Bataille's relationship to Christian mysticism--his "willful rejection of its semantic [and religious] history" in order "to appropriate its power as a concept" for the purposes of "contesting" the authority of rational knowledge--has contributed decisively to the "delay" in the assimilation of his thought (54, 125, 15). Indeed, claims Connor, our understanding of the "relation between mysticism, politics, and morality in Bataille's writings" has been "limited" and "skewed" by the terms in which Sartre, in his savage review of Bataille's most 'mystical' book, L'expérience intérieure (1943), initiated debate on the writer's paradoxical adoption of the "mystical lexicon" (22, 15, 54, 56). Thus Connor proceeds through three main chapters with detailed, lively textual explications demonstrating how and why Sartre misunderstood Bataille's thought, focusing in particular on how the two thinkers' respective understandings of terms such as "philosophy," "mysticism," "language," "action," and "morality" differ. He grounds his defense of Bataille in a wealth of intellectual detail from the period, so that we learn how the term "mystic" resonated among French literary intellectuals of the first half of the century, how Bataille found in the writings of various Christian mystics a "linguistic predicament" that he then employed to criticize the repression of "non-knowledge" in 1930s French interpretations of Kant and Hegel, and why Bataille's writing, despite initial appearances, ought to be construed as ethically and politically committed (16-23, 27, 49, 132-3, 151).

The elegant economy of the book's structuring claim also brings a few liabilities, however. The apologetic nature of the claim limits Connor's ability to be critical of Bataille, while its singular focus on Sartre prevents him from pursuing insights that emerge from Bataille's interactions with other interlocutors. Taken together, these two drawbacks suggest that, in areas where Sartre was not Bataille's best opponent (because of Sartre's own intellectual limitations), an apologetic return to their debate obscures certain key aspects of Bataille's thought in its relationship to mysticism. Nowhere are the limitations of Connor's argumentative structure more apparent than in the section from which he draws his title: "The Mysticism of Sin: Bataille versus Sartre...