The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (review)

Eleanor Kaufman,The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, xii + 224 pp.

The art formerly known as "theory" has, in the face of adversity, undergone remarkable changes. Its discourse no longer runs towards the commonplace (difference, the postmodern, alterity, etc.), but trickles through the cracks and crevices of hidden influences, rumored allusions, secret loyalties, and curious coincidences. The resistance to theory or theory's own paranoid entrenchment--depending on one's point of view--has not only anecdotalized its pursuits, but, more substantially, afforded theory and its defenders a cultist sensibility. Eleanor Kaufman's study of a nexus of French intellectual friendships betrays a familiarity with theory's peculiar fan culture. Who hasn't wondered what exactly caused the falling-out between Foucault and Deleuze in 1977? (The factual answer can be found in a footnote on page 178; the theoretically informed take on it weaves through chapter 4.) It is Kaufman's achievement, however, to have put the cultist point of departure to good theoretical use, shunning the usual blueprints and predictable recipes. The last years have seen their share of studies devoted to the anxious "influence" of hegemonic intellectuals, French hospitality to unsavory German thinkers, the long march and Damascus of Tel quel, and altogether too many attempts to squeeze as much French thought as possible into a single month of the year 1968--and keep it there.

Kaufman avoids the pitfalls both of biographical speculation and historicist contextualization. She makes clear from the very beginning that the constellation of proper names given in the subtitle of her book doesn't refer to a homogenous network of personal interactions and allegiances, that it indeed "transcends generational and institutional boundaries." Bataille and Klossowski, the oldest members of the group here assembled, met through the Collège de Sociologie, a gathering of thinkers who, as Denis Hollier has shown, not only made the desubjectivizing intensity of emphatic communities an object of study but exemplified it in their own practices and group dynamic. Hollier's seminal study of the Collège comes closest to serving as a model for Kaufman's project, as her introduction acknowledges. Yet while she shares his interest in tracing, as he puts it, "the transition between system and anecdote," her carefully plotted nexus is constiuted not by social, or even institutional, contacts. Rather, it is marked by a radical divergence of social practices--from Foucault's interventionism to Klossowski's semi-private "théâtre de societé" in the Cour de Rohan to Blanchot's equally legendary reclusiveness. What gives her study its remarkable coherence is the emphatically textual instantiation of the friendships between Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, and Klossowski. In this respect, The Delirium of Praise is devised as a genre study, the genre in question being that of the often excessively laudatory essay, or encomium, defined by what appears to be an uncritical and hyperbolic stance, epitomized in Foucault famously and very generously signing over the 20th century to his friend Deleuze (1).

The book is structured as a roundelay, that is, as a series of five studies of separate friendships. These form a chain in which each interlocutor introduced in one chapter is in turn paired off with another in the next, thus presenting five succinct case studies of twosomes and their exchanges of encomia. The roundelay begins with and circles back to Bataille, about whose work Kaufman is by far the least enthusiastic. (In general, the reader needs to be encouraged not to pass over the endnotes, as they contain some of Kaufman's strongest assertions, such as her frank dismissal of Bataille [189]). But it is Blanchot's friendship with Bataille through which Kaufman establishes her focus on genre. As Blanchot's own reflections on friendship reveal, the laudatory essay cannot be taken as a simple manifestation of supposed "personal" closeness. The praise these friends have for one another is not the expression of an...