Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (review)

Peter Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 198 pages.

Peter Connor's Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin is three books in one: a sure-footed analysis of Bataille's notion of "inner experience" and its distinction from experiences of mystical transport, an equally astute appraisal of a central conception of language, morality, and politics for contemporary critical thought, and a vivid implied history of the reasons why literary theory is practiced and resisted today. Anyone interested in one of these topics will profit from this elegant and concise book. Bataille's books, Connor points out, have been consumed with equal passion and reciprocal disrespect by academic readers who "see Bataille as a critic of systems of knowledge," and a second contingent that is as cultishly devoted to its author as tenured Batailleans but reads Bataille because his work "insists dramatically on the priority of experience" (41-42). This experience, Bataille's non-academic readers contend, withers in academia and is nullified in scholarly or, to use the term hurled by Bataille at Heidegger's oeuvre, "scholastic" debates. Instead of taking sides in these turf wars, Connor cooly presents a third way of reading Bataille. The notion of "inner experience," Connor shows in a stunningly transformative reading, is only partly accounted for by reading Bataille's texts the way academics like it: slowly, closely, and with an insatiable hunger for moments of resistance to understanding that will not dissolve into the text's larger argument. To grasp what Bataille means by "inner experience," Connor emphasizes that we must also recognize what academics, by training and by disposition, are unlikely to do: that these moments will remain empty of significance. The Bataillean text rewards its readers by developing in them the ever more perplexing art of enduring the process of reading without the Hegelian sustenance of truth, knowledge, meaning, and significance. To read Bataille properly, then, means to renounce some of the academic practices of reading and writing by which the recognition of moments of non-significance is transformed, via dialectics and self-awareness, into a hermeneutic triumph. Or, at the very least, where the diagnosis of such breakdowns metamorphoses into a university career.

Connor shows that in its challenge to such practices of reading Bataille's work cannot be spun off, like an unprofitable subsidiary or kooky relative, into the library's special collection where mysticism, pornography, and other transgressive subjects are stowed out of sight. Because Bataille insisted on an experience that cannot be accounted for philosophically and yet resides within, rather than on the outside of, every effort of understanding, the challenge posed by Bataille to philosophy touches on the discipline's conceptual premises. The "inner experience," Connor further explains, was not limited to salaried thinkers and devoted contemplators but available "to the lowliest and least cultured human beings" (46). Bataille's challenge to philosophy, we are thus made to understand, touches upon the question of "what is" in general. In order to recognize the serious limitations both of the philosophers' critique and dismissal of Bataille's writings and his fans' indiscriminate enthusiasm for what they frequently regard as a kind of subversiveness without purpose, Connor's study of the role of mysticism in Bataille's work proves indispensable. As a quasi-Bataillean perk, Connor also reveals that many of the objections currently raised against literary theory originate or coincide with the venomous criticisms first leveled at Bataille's oeuvre.

Bataille's "inner experience" is not the same as mystical experience; it has nothing to do with the notion of the "ineffable." "Bataille's deepest conviction is that language can and does communicate even the most interior of experiences" (3). This corrective assessment of Bataille's work constitutes one of Connor's central points. It may surprise or even disappoint readers who have relied on the notion of "ineffability" and assimilated Bataille as part of their critical ancestry in order to...