The Sunday of the Negative: Reading Bataille Reading Hegel

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. “Even if he has lost the world in leaving animality behind, man has nonetheless become that consciousness of having lost it which we are, and which is more, in a sense, than a possession of which the animal is not conscious,” Bataille, AS I, 133. 2. Cf. Bataille, E, 7, and Heraclitus, Fragment XXVII, from The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, trans. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3. Hegel’s criticism of what he calls the “Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity” (i.e., Kant, Fichte, Jacobi) or more generally, the philosophies of the understanding (including Descartes and Enlightenment philosophy in general) and their corresponding empirical sciences, is relentless. In brief, he sees them as proceeding from a fixed opposition of subject and object, which they fail to adequately (dialectically) overcome, rather subsuming the given “objective” data under the unity of subjective law. Thought is thus reduced to subjectivity, which dominates, but does not really know, objectivity. It is thus not true knowledge. On this basis he as well views the sciences as blind, for in asserting knowledge as subjective and human, they disclaim the ultimate source of knowledge—God. We shall give this further consideration below. On the “Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity,” see Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977). 4. Cf. Bataille, G, 14–27, and 147–61 where, for instance, he claims that “Desire . . . is avid not to be satisfied,” 51. 5. The reference to the Anaximander Fragment and its modern traces was brought to my attention by William Desmond in his Speculation, Cult, and Comedy (Albany: State University of New York Press,1992), 200 ff. The quotation above is found here. 6. Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 611. Reference cited from John W. Burbridge, Hegel on Logic and Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 33. 7. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 172. 223 Notes 8. Bataille, G, 25. 9. Cf. Bataille, AS 3, 203–18. 10. Bataille, LE, 72. 11. Bataille, “Un-knowing and Rebellion,” October 36, 86. 12. Phillipe Sollers, “Intervention,” in Bataille: Communications, Interventions (Paris: 10/18, 1974), 10. 13. Bataille, N, 157. 14. Cf. J.-L. Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Bourgois, 1986), which is an extensive reflection upon Bataille’s thought. 15. “Bataille suffered from lack of recognition. The dynamic and influential thinking of the last twenty years [1965–85, C.G.] owes so much to him (and paradoxically owes so much of its influence to him) that we ourselves find it difficult to believe in that lack” (Denis Hollier, “Introduction” to Bataille’s Guilty, x). Jacques Derrida claims that a number of his texts “(particularly ‘La double séance,’ ‘La dissémination,’ ‘La mythologie blanche,’ but also ‘La pharmacie de Platon’ and several others) are situated explicitly in relation to Bataille, also explicitly putting forth a reading of Bataille,” in Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), n.35, 105–106, author’s emphasis. See as well the “Introduction” to Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1–23. 16. Bataille’s infamous Histoire de l’oeil (Story of the Eye) was written around 1928, but was written under a pseudonym, Lord Auch, and privately published in a collection of pornographic novels. The bizarre little text, “The Solar Anus,” was written in1927 but not published until 1931, illustrated with etchings by André Masson who, coincidentally, would later lose an eye. 17. Anecdotal evidence from the thorough biography by Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: la mort à l’oeuvre (Paris: Séguier, 1987) has Bataille living a rather bohemian lifestyle, at one point lodging in the studio of Klossowski’s younger brother—Balthus. For Bataille’s response to Breton, cf. “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist,” in VE, 32–44. For a history and analysis of the dispute between Bataille and Breton, cf. Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge , 1994). 18. The various groups I am discussing here, as well as the manner in which he coalesced Marxism and primitive anthropology into fascism, shall be given further treatment below. Cf. Chapter 2.2, “Unholy Alliances,” 90 ff. 19. Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Les Èditions de Minuit, 1983), 27. 20. Bataille, “The Practice of Joy Before Death” in VE, 239. The...