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[M]y efforts recommence and undo Hegel’s Phenomenology. —Georges Bataille, Inner Experience The account of Hegel’s reception in the last century is a history unto itself: from being perceived as just another Romantic long since dismissed by the advance of the human sciences, to his resurrection by the revolution-inspired Marxists and their revival of interest in a dialectical world view; from his elevation in the middle of the century as the father of all things modern, to a renewed attempt to bury him under the all-encompassing webs of structuralism .1 But whether he is being praised or diminished, it is above all his system itself that has posthumously absorbed a barrage of punches. Koyré, just one example, remarks, “the Hegelian ‘system’ is dead, thoroughly dead”; “the recent efforts to revive Hegelianism have, in our opinion, only managed to demonstrate, once again, the sterility of the ‘system.’”2 This type of pronouncement is nothing new. Writing about the reception of Hegel’s thought only thirteen years after his death, biographer Karl Rozenkranz remarked, “one would have to be astounded by the vehemence with which it is attacked precisely by those who declare it dead.”3 His system is often viewed as totalitarian , threatening to depersonalize the individual by turning one into a universal abstraction, to dissipate the concrete individual by absolving one from concern with the existential dilemmas a finite individual must face to assert one’s genuine individuality, such as Kierkegaard posits. The system may also be comforting, particularly insofar as it eases the pain of isolation, smoothes the rough oppositions that leave one in a state of alienation, forgives one’s faults by explaining them as part of the process of development, and allows one to feel that one is right, for one is a legitimate piece of a larger whole. Yet the voice whispering in the ear of modern humanity will not stop insisting that I, a trifle, am more legitimate than the whole—a tear capable of drowning the ocean. And then the individual subject is but a step away from being 25 ONE Beyond the Serious seized with the tormenting feeling of being imprisoned, no doors anywhere, the fluid whole becoming a suffocating swamp. Are we to assume that Bataille is but another link in the chain of postHegelian philosophy—from Feuerbach to Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer to Nietzsche —that affirms the cry of a terrorized subjectivity in the face of its dissolution into the universal? To an extent, this link is inevitable: his thought contests the idealist tendency to anaesthetize the pain of finitude. His is a philosophy of the subject that trembles in anguish before the facticity of death, it is the thought of a profoundly earthbound subject that cannot escape the sting of mortality and singularity. Yet the situation of Bataille’s subject is closer to that of a subject that wants to lose itself in the whole, to dissolve its singularity, but owing to the nature of its subjectivity, cannot. Or more accurately—at least as concerns the issues in this chapter—Bataille addresses the tension of a subject that fears the inevitable, and acts so as to avoid it, and that same subject nevertheless compelled to look that which it fears in the face—a confrontation that will lead to an altogether different employment of its powers of action. The first task at hand, however, is to establish the field of play for this confrontation, to see why it is Hegel who has drawn the boundaries. This endeavor shall bear affinity with an insignificant incident Bataille relates to us, that of a ladybug that has alighted on a piece of paper containing the blueprint of Hegelian architecture: She stopped in the Geist column, where you go from allgemeine Geist [universal spirit] to sinnliches Bewusstsein (Einzelheit) [sensory consciousness (individuality )] by way of Volk, Staat, and Weltgeschichte [the People, State, and World History]. Moving along on her perplexed way she drops into a column marked Leben [Life] (her home territory) before getting to the center column ’s “unhappy consciousness,” which is only nominally relevant to her.4 Wandering from concept to concept with chance as her guide, Bataille posits that this insignificant life—unaware of the compulsory movement of the structure over which it treads—is able to inflict wounds on the completed world of the system. “Why Hegel?” Because Bataille’s method of thought with its wandering ladybug-logic is the experience of life itself, and “I think of my...

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