Politics, Writing, Mutilation. The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge by Alan Stoekl (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s sensitivity” and “ hysteria” ) which the texts appear to accept passively but, in subversive ways, resist. Some common themes emerge: an individual, as opposed to a collective point of view; a pervasive consciousness o f being seen as well as seeing; a sense o f dispossession and the struggle for self-possession; a tendency toward self-aggrandizement and self­ exoneration; the use o f theatrical metaphors. These themes and other common features are not, however, sufficiently brought out in the conclusion. Gelfand does not hide her personal preferences: she finds, for example, the “ flesh and blood” narratives o f Sarrazin much superior to the abstract speculations o f Huré. But the personal judgements enhance, rather than detract from, the scholarly presentation. The bo ,k succeeds in presenting a little-known and important body of writing in a sound and original perspective. M a r y A n n F r e s e W i t t N orth Carolina State University Alan Stoekl. P o l i t i c s , W r i tin g , M u t i l a t i o n . T h e C a s e s o f B a t a i l l e , B l a n c h o t , R o u s s e l, L e ir is , a n d P o n g e . Mpls: Univ. o f Minnesota Press, 1985. Pp. xix + 159. This important book is about the cruel duplicity characteristic o f a certain intellectual rigor. In texts written during the first half o f this century by writers whom he convincingly presents as precursors of current post-structuralism, Allan Stoekl emphasizes the deter­ mination to acknowledge forces that are indispensable—yet ruinous—to thought. Such audacious resolve turns the mind savagely upon itself. The impulse to affirm the necessary but poisonous contribution o f violence, sacrifice and death to rational processes—the impulse to recognize the “ excess” destructiveness that agitates in language—defies all systems employing negativity in the service o f some positive end such as knowledge, or the State. Or justice. The thoroughly honest intellectual—lest he betray the inexhaustible purposelessness in thinking which is exactly what drives him to combat servitude— is apt to prove a detestable traitor to the rational program, the goals and just cause of the insurgent oppressed, his political allies. Bataille, for example, was liable to find himself at least partially in complicity with the spectacular irrationalities o f fascism. Stoekl dwells on multiple variations o f this double bind; he consistently underscores treacherous thought that splits and turns against itself, accusing and tormenting itself, demanding its own sacrifice. He indicates the lacerations in the auto-mutilating works of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge—works without which it would be hard to imagine those o f Derrida or Foucault. But Stoekl is also on the lookout for the “ utopian” or “ neutral” areas in the writing he discusses: for points where irreconcilable conflict is, in one way or another, cancelled. In Bataille’s novel Le Bleu du ciel, dizzying contradictions are excrutiatingly experienced by the narrator who, as a writer, is irrepressibly insolent and as a Communist laughably useless, who passionately worships the wild wastefulness o f the indomitable Dorothea and is reduced to helpless silence before flags brandished by Nazis— flags as red as Dorothea’s blood-red dress. But in Blanchot’s 1943 novel L e Très-Haut, such collisions between the passion and transgressiveness of language on the one hand, and specific forms o f political power and defiance on the other, are present, Stoekl holds, only as that which the novel’s inexorable movement purges. Finally all that subsists is “ the reflexive question o f language itself” in the neutral space of its juncture with death. Indeed, this “ stripping” or the par­ ticular historical and political elements o f the writer’s double bind is a process Stoekl dis­ cerns in Derrida’s reading of Bataille (and o f Blanchot); he sees a comparable move when Foucault apparently consigns the perturbing enigmas he analyzes in Roussel, Blanchot...