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5. Bataille and Altizer: The Sacrificial Background of Postmodern Religious Theory
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5 BATAILLE AND ALTIZER ThE SaCrifiCiaL BaCkGroUnD of PoSTMoDErn rELiGioUS ThEory ■ What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science For decades the “postmodern” has been defined as indefinable, but that lack of definition is more a sophistical dodge than a commitment . Let us define it as the lightning storm of the twentieth century that at last became lyrical. That century is now past, but its atmospheric conditions remain with us. Nietzsche himself prophesied an era of wars and upheavals, climactic shifts in the terrain of values and thought. Postmodernism has given song to those shifts. Like the angel appearing to the apostles in prison, it freed philosophy and culture from what Fredric Jameson has called the “prison house of language.” Or it tortured the shape of the prison itself beyond recognition. The era of postmodernism, conceived by Nietzsche long before its actual historical parturition, found its signature in the economy of signs and the fragmentation of discourse , first fully exploited in the style of the aphorism. It is no coincidence that the two “levelers” of the philosophical modern terrain— Nietzsche and Wittgenstein—wrote in fragments and aphorisms. But we cannot truly comprehend our present circumstances without considering the sublimity of the storm, the harnessing of the S O U R C E S 90 power of the aphorism to disclose, not difference, but ecstasy and excess. All postmodern “strategies” of theorizing, therefore, begin in a strange sense with the writings of Georges Bataille. Bataille should not be read as a “philosopher” by any stretch of the mind. Nor is he simply some curiosity within belles lettres, an avatar of the obscene who happened to draw attention, like ancient Theravada Buddhist techniques of meditation, to the reality of body fluids. Bataille’s calculated ribaldry and brutality are no different from Derrida’s marginal glosses. They are intended to focus on the alterity generated by all writing. In that sense such theorizing turns out to be, as Žižek has emphasized, merely the final florescence of the modernist project. If the ultimate aim of modernism was pure self-referentiality and the thorough transparency of the creative process itself, then postmodernism fills out the transition. Language no longer speaks from its own bellows. The text talks to itself. It sheds all pretension beyond its own visibility and materiality, gaping with full clarity at its own lesions and anomalies. The Logical as Lyrical Yet that is not all theory has ever been about. Nor is it exactly what Bataille was about. We must read Bataille’s journal of the lightning storm, the strange epic of a scrivener, the prank of poetic selfmortification that he named Le Coupable, or simply Guilty in English. The work commences with the Nazi assault on Poland. “The date I start (September 5, 1939) is no coincidence. I’m starting because of what’s happening, though I don’t want to go into it. I’m writing it down because of being unable not to.”1 The scribbling is more than some spirit-infested “automatic writing.” All that is happening, Bataille writes, “takes place in a fiery penumbra,” an utterly tangential condition hovering above the landscape of awesome and impending devastation. “I won’t speak of war, but of mystical experience.”2 It is “blameless, shameless.” For days into the war, and as his nomadism and flight from the encroaching chaos take on an ethereal familiarity, Bataille meditates upon those themes that have haunted his imagination since he abandoned Catholicism for the adventures of the avantgarde : the grand inspiration of sacrifice and whoredom. These themes struggle toward the very lyricality that will later become the “language ” of the postmodern. “Instead of avoiding laceration I’d deepen it.”3 Laceration and ecstasy—the excess of differentiation—are conjugate with each other. The drive of rhetoric all along has emanated from the delight of nihilation, against what Derrida would later term [44.213.99.37] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:33 GMT) B ATA I L L E A N D A LT I Z E R 91 the “logocentrism” of Greco-Christian universalism, the redoubts of ontotheology. Libertinism is simply the ugly stepsister to a metaphysical particularism, Deleuze’s univocity or “logic of sense.” It all concerns the abdication of language. “A few Christians have broken from the language world and come to the ecstatic one. In their case, an aptitude has to...