Violence and Representation in the Works of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris

Leiris’s À cor et à cri (With hue and cry), and Bataille’s L’Expérience intérieure and Le Coupable are self-reflective works that focus on the deep-seated anxieties at the core of writing. Their investigations have both a personal element, as their recourse to psychoanalysis suggests, and a historical significance if we consider them in the context of the evolution of European thought in the first half of the twentieth century. This was the period that followed the discovery that truth could no longer be founded upon the traditional reference points of religion (God), philosophy (idealism) and politics (the bourgeoisie).¹ In the arts, the unfastening of traditional values had already begun to shape the works of painters such as Picasso and Masson and writers such as Lautréamont and Jarry, who combined the search for new ideas and techniques with the rejection of established beliefs. There emerged also an interest in the turmoil associated with nightmares, delirium and crimes of passion. With the onset of the surrealist revolution, however, there emerged the need to justify the fascination with violence. This was done with reference first to the flourishing human sciences but also to the philosophy of Hegel as it was introduced to a young Parisian audience by Alexandre Kojève in particular. Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel gave the concept of negativity a new anthropological dimension in that it now signified death, not in the common sense of mortality but as the structuring force that gave meaning to all human endeavors. The introduction of Hegel in the French intellectual scene and the growing interest in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud in the shadow of two World Wars meant that a systematic examination of the destructive impulses in humans could no longer be avoided. How was it possible to invent a new humanity if one did not first seek to destroy old values and beliefs and the people who upheld them? The question of violence thus posed as an intellectual project, it is not surprising that it informed the literary pursuits of post-surrealist writers such as Bataille and Leiris.

Beyond the historical context and the psycho-sexual make-up of the two writers, the above discussion points to the way in which violence informs art, writing, and more generally, representation. The starting point is the proposition that representation itself is steeped in violence. Recall that Plato founded his Republic on the premise that in order to preserve the order of truth, it was necessary to expel the poets and artists. Friedrich Nietzsche later attacked Plato for his dismissive attitude towards the arts. For Nietzsche, the arts stimulate life rather than corrupt it; they enable the search for truth rather than hinder it. It is no surprise that Nietzsche’s manner of “philosophizing with a hammer,” by which he attempts to demolish rationalist philosophy, was emulated by modern artists and thinkers. In more recent times, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe suggested another way of pitting the arts against philosophy. The doubling of thought that permeates philosophical texts as a result of the inherent ambiguity of the speaking voice, such as one finds in the “I” of Plato/Socrates and Nietzsche/Zarathustra, demonstrates philosophy’s surrender to the law of mimesis. Mimesis returns therefore to haunt philosophy, which becomes caught up in its rhetorical ruses as it is drawn towards the abyss of non-sense that it seeks to avoid. What Plato, Nietzsche and Lacoue-Labarthe show in different ways is that art has always appeared against a backdrop of conflict, and that it is precisely its proximity to conflict that allows it to defend its claims to truth. By showing how this conflict is framed discursively, this study aims to situate the writings of George Bataille and Michel Leiris in the area where the violence that governs art’s relation to truth is at its most potent.

Why discuss Bataille and Leiris together? Their published correspondence confirms what acquaintances knew all along, namely that there existed between them a bond that was strong enough to survive the worst...