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SubStance 29.2 (2000) 101-104



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Book Review

The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille


Bataille, Georges. The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille. Trans. and with Intro. by Mark Spitzer. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1998. Paper: 140 pages.

The publication of Mark Spitzer's version of the poetry of Georges Bataille only serves to remind this reader how well English language readers of Bataille would be served by an adequate translation of this and other still untranslated poetic writings by Bataille. In an adequate translation, Bataille's poetry should occasion rich debate among poets, philosophers and historians of religion, not only for its violent and sexually explicit language, but as an aid to understanding his challenging thought, a point of entry into his sometimes arcane technical language, and a means to understanding the personal and historical context and orientation of Bataille's work as a whole.

Georges Bataille came late to poetry--he did not write a poem until he was 44--and he came to it simultaneously with his maturity as a writer and a thinker. He wrote most of his poetry between 1942 and 1945 while writing the three volumes of La Somme athéologique, all of which include poetry. As a totality, Bataille's oeuvre includes writings that seek to define the possible world, to describe things as they are, works like La Part maudite (1949). It also includes writings that seek to elude the possible, to evoke what he calls the impossible. Bataille's poetic outpouring answered the force of this necessity, as he says, rather than any discursive project, that of poetry included. For Bataille, writing poetry meant writing against poetry, against beautiful words, against lyricism, against sentimental effusion, against carefully crafted observations or insights, psychological or otherwise; it meant writing against nature, against positive, constructive or discursive thought, even against language itself. Bataille published a volume entitled La Haine de la Poésie (Minuit) in 1947, which, reedited and under a new title, L'Impossible (Minuit, 1962), proved to be the final volume Bataille would see into print.

Significantly, Bataille's relationship to poetry at once mirrors and serves as a helpful key to understanding his relationships to both Surrealism and Existentialism. Where Surrealist poetry is often light, lyrical, and effusive toward its goal of making unconscious desires come to life, Bataille's poetry is rigorous, classical, and considered in its function as a method of meditation, [End Page 101] a turnkey to delirium, to ecstasy. Where Sartrean Existentialism rejects poetry in favor of prose for its greater capacity for political engagement, Bataille rejects such engagement, claiming that poetry and indeed all literature must plead guilty, must admit its freedom, and be written against social constraint, progressive or otherwise. Bataille's poetry, then, should be read against the dominant artistic and intellectual trends of his era.

Bataille's textual mentors in poetry made for strange bedfellows: Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and the poetic writings from the history of mystical meditation. From the mystics, Bataille's poetry took up the functional capacity of meditation; his writings were at once the product and the path of his inner experience. From Rimbaud, he resumed a spirit of revolt, of rebellion and a fluidity of generic distinction, of direct and indirect address, of mockery and pathos à l'extrême. From the Poésies of Lautréamont, Bataille developed his senses of rigor, of premiers principes hors de discussion, and most importantly, of juxtaposition whereby meaning could be created out of elements that were, in themselves, contradictory: poetry and a commentary on poetry in L'Orestie (1945), for example.

Unfortunately, Bataille's poetry, a distillate and generator of inner experience, is all too easily misunderstood or dismissed as mere depravity, as obscenity for obscenity's sake. And Bataille's poetry is difficult: it is at once simple and hermetic; it is base to the point of vulgarity and even revulsion, yet abstract, metaphysical, often syllogistic; it is at once plain, boring, and yet graphic, shocking, violent. Its range is deliberately limited, rigorously circumscribed and claustrophobic, but its effects are, at times, inspired, shattering, and...

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