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Par-del la posie: Blinding Immanence and theSystem:
Poetry and the Unknown in Georges Bataille'sCritique of Hegel and Kojve
1. Hegelian reflections in fun-house mirrors.
The echoes of Alexandre Kojve's voice, delivering his famed lectures on
Hegel at the Sorbonne, from 1933 to 1939, are still with us, like a ringing in the
ear. Likewise, Jean Hyppolite's translation of Hegel's Phnomenologie des
Geistes, published in 1939, is still readily available; only in recent years have
new translations appeared. Moreover, both Kojve's Introduction la Lecture
de Hegel and Hyppolite's Gense et structure de la Phnomlogie de l'esprit de
Hegel, published merely a year apart,1 remain among the most influential
interpretations of Hegel, not only in France, but the world over. It would be an
interesting and time-consuming endeavor to articulate a full genealogy of their
influence; however, such an effort is beyond the scope of this essay.Nevertheless, the broad diffusion and popularization of their respective
readings have distorted the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and his thought to a point
beyond recognition. Unrecognizable, now, the distorted Geistof Hegel haunts
contemporary thought as a spectral image cast through one of these lenses.
Moreover, Kojve's rather sensationalistic reading, which projected the
development of spirit in the Phnomenologie onto the screen of History, has
been so powerful that the seductive power of his reading has had such
dramatic effects as to restart the 'locomotive of history.'
The influence of these two interpretations of Hegel has played a larger
role in the history of contemporary philosophy; both Kojve and Hyppolite
1 Kojve's lectures were collected/transcribed by Raymond Queneau and were published in asecond edition, including Kojve's annotations, in 1947; Hyppolite's Gnse was published in1946.
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introduced elements of Heideggerian phenomenology into their readings of
Hegel's Phnomenologie. Both constructed historical readings of the
Phnomenologie most directly from Kojve's predecessor at the Sorbonne, his
fellow migr Alexandre Koyr, as well as the contributors to his journal,
Recherches Philosophiques. What is most important here is the turn toward
phenomenology, in its contemporary incarnation, and the surreptitious
introduction of the Heideggerian conception of language as the 'intelligibility of
being-in-the-world... expressed in discourse. The totality of significations of
intelligibility is put into words.'2 This influence is attested to in Kojve's lectures
by the overtly Heideggerian terminology he used when speaking of language;
for instance, in his infamous, protracted footnote regarding the 'end of history,'
in which he writes 'The definitive annihilation of Manproperly so-called also
means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict
sense... there would no longer be any [discursive] understanding of the World
and of the self.'3 Hyppolite's interpretation of Hegel's concept of language is
relatively more faithful to his text, but is also inflected with the idea of
Discourse in Heidegger. For instance, he writes, 'The function of language is
precisely to say the I, to make the I itself a universal. Thus, language is a
moment of the spirit; it is the logos, the middle term of intelligences... That
universal self-consciousness which results from the alienation of the specific
self is precisely what is to be realized. And language alone can realize it.'4 Thus,
in both trajectories, language is inextricably bound up with intelligibility, the
meaningful world, individuality and mediate understanding.
Among the auditors of Kojve's lectures, Georges Bataille was, by all
2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, SUNY Press, 1996. 34,
p. 151.3 Alexandre Kojve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. Ed. Allan
Bloom, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1980. p. 160n. Hereafter, IRH.4 Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 403.
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accounts, among the most consistently in attendance. Although Bataille
maintained a close friendship with Kojve, he was hardly the uncritical Kojvian
that he has frequently been charged with having been.5 Such arguments
neglect first of all the issues Bataille raised in a letter written to Kojve, a mere
two days after the latter's lecture of December 4th 1937. Furthermore, the
assertion that Bataille 'considered himself a Kojvian as much as a
Nietzschean and perhaps more,'6 is problematic in light of the position from
which Bataille critiques Hegel, and even more so in light of a series of
'Propositions,' written at some point prior to 1952, which speak for themselves:
'1. Circular thought is the only plausible thought. To be of one's own time is
quite simply to be a stooge. 2. But circular thought must begin not from a
proposition but from the ignorance that precedes it, and it culminates in non-
knowledge as well. 3. All mystical positions are shortened circles, therefore the
movements of non-knowledge are intellectually short. 4. My position is the
one that is opposed to Hegel-Kojve as 2 and to 3 as Hegel.'7 He thus
indicates that his understanding of Hegel was not one of a doctrinaire Kojvian,
but rather that of one who had come to read Hegel closely through the
mediation of Kojve. It is my intent, in the present essay, to elucidate the
central role assigned to language and poetry in Bataille's criticism of Hegel. It
will be seen that Bataille was ultimately most critical of Hegel's actual position
on language, and that the central axis of his critique of both Hegel and Kojve
is their reliance upon the mediations of discursive language and closure of the
system of knowledge. Moreover, consideration of the Science of Logic will
5 This assertion is made, for instance, in Allan Stoekl, 'Recognition in Madame Edwarda', inBataille: Writing the Sacred, Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 77-90.
6 Stoekl, 'Recognition in Madame Edwarda', p. 77.7 Georges Bataille, 'Aphorisms for the System', The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge,
Trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.p. 167. Hereafter: US.
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ultimately shed light on Bataille's particularly courageous challenge to Hegel's
system courageous, for the outcome is known in advance.
2. Bataille's Game: Ungraspable Reality.
Across the cover of the first edition ofL'Exprience Intrieure (Gallimard,
1943), there appeared a band bearing the words:par-del la posie, or, in
another language, beyond poetry.8 These words, along with those printed upon
an insert in the 1943 edition (OC-V 422/IE 169),indicate a privileged position
occupied by poetry in Bataille's thought, despite the fact noted by his
biographer, Michel Surya; that prior to the publication ofL'Exprience
Intrieure, 'Bataille had never had recourse to poetry (except as a teenager,
none of which was published: of all the genres he took stock of, poetry
remained the one he neglected. Not only did he neglect it, he violently opposed
it.'9 This is to say that Bataille's writings on poetry and, by the same token,
literature, above all do not take their object as uncritically given, and neither
does he valorize poetry and literature, tout court, but rather a particular use of
language manifest in specific situations. Above all and from the beginning,
Bataille's perspective closes off the possibility of making poetry or literature
into transcendent, distinct objects of study; instead, they are given the
privileged capacity to bring forth the indistinct, the unknown and the immanent
by means of language. This, perhaps, may be that which is indicated by the
phrasepar-del la posie: that poetry and literature are privileged insofar as
they point beyond mere language, a beyond which is not to be awaited, but
rather to be experienced in the blinding flash of a moment
8 Georges Bataille, InnerExperience, Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany: SUNY Press, 1988, p.83. Hereafter: IE. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Compltes V: La Some athologique, 1, Paris,Editions Gallimard, 1973, pg. 422. Hereafter: OC-V. Both Bataille's Oeuvres Compltes and
English translations, where they exist, shall be cited throughout. Where an Englishtranslation does not exist, translations are mine.
9 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, Trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski andMichael Richardson (New York and London, Verso, 2002, pg 322
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It is uncertain how one might situate the passage that follows the phrase
par-del la posie in terms ofL'Exprience Intrieure and numerous other
theoretical and literary pieces, written during the nineteen-forties. There is a
quite marked shift in Bataille's thought, of which L'Exprience Intrieure was
the first expression that was published under his own name. For this and other
reasons, we may read these words printed on this insert and those inscribed on
the band of the volume, as more than mere ornamentation. The text of the
insert begins as follows:
We are perhaps the wound, the sickness of nature.
It would be necessary for us in this case and moreover possible,'easy' - to turn the wound into a celebration, a strength of the sickness. Thepoetry in which the most blood would be lost would be the most forceful. Thesaddest dawn would announce the joy of day.
Poetry would be the sign announcing the greatest ruptures. (OC-V 422/IE169)
In the original manuscript ofLe Coupable, we find nearly identical lines,
crossed out,dated January 24th, 1943, concluding the penultimate chapter of
the book, La Chance (OC-V 554). Furthermore, the word blessure used in the
same sentence as 'nature' directs our attention to Bataille's letter to Kojve of
December 6th, 1937, which is reproduced in an edited form as an appendix to
Le Coupable.10 It is thus not at all surprising that the text of the insert
concludes with a meditation on Hegel:
Beyond (Au-del) all knowledge there is non-knowledge and he who would
become absorbed within the thought that beyond his knowledge he knowsnothing even were he to have Hegel's inexorable lucidity within he would nolonger be Hegel, but a painful tooth in Hegel's mouth. Would a sick tooth alone be
missing from the great philosopher?(OC-V422-3/IE 169)
He thus begins with the open wound in nature that we are, following Kojve's
reading of Hegel; in which the negativity of desire is at once a manque d'tre, a
loss of being, a wound in nature, but at the same time expresses itself in action
10 Georges Bataille, Guilty, Trans. Bruce Boone, Venice & San Francisco, The Lapis Press, 1988.pp. 123-125. Hereafter: G. Georges Bataille, OC-V, pp. 369-371 & 562-565. The uneditedletter can be found in Georges Bataille, Choix de Lettres, Ed. Michel Surya, Paris, EditionsGallimard, 1997. pp. 131-136.
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through the negation of given nature.This is a poetics announcing a rupture,
but what rupture? It is the final paragraph that designates that beyond into
which poetry irrupts: the non-knowledge that is beyond knowledge, beyond
Hegel. It seems, therefore, that this obscure passage attaches not to
L'Exprience Intrieure as an isolated work, but to the phrasepar-del la
posie, itself, and as such brings into play other texts that were to appear
under the aegis of this phrase,11 in particular, Le Coupable and La Haine de la
Posie (re-published in 1962 under the new title L'Impossible).
This is to say that the beyond to which poetry points is the unknown, that
which is excluded in and expelled by Hegel's system. The reference to Hegel
designates that this unknown is not some knowable phenomenon that could,
with time, become known and expressed in the discourse of the Wise Man at
the end of history. It is rather that which lies beyond the limits of discursive
existence, which Michel Foucault writes, 'follows from the actual penetration of
philosophical experience in language and the discovery that the experience of
the limit... is realized in language and in the movement where it says what
cannot be said.'12 To put it briefly, the poetry of which Bataille writes does not,
and cannot, submit to formal definition or description. One might approximate
by saying that it is nothing but the self-transgression of language aiming to say
that which is irreducible to discourse. This would be correct, but reductive
nonetheless. According to Bataille there is, rather, a radical heterogeneity
between the reality and language, but at the same time, between the world
and language there is a covert complicity: language, even literary or poetic
language, is, in the first instance structured such that every 'existence is linked11 In notes associated with the manuscript ofMthode de Mditation, from 1945-6, we find one
of Bataille's earliest plans for the republication of a number of his writings under the generaltitle Par-del la posie. (OC-V, 459-60)
12 Michel Foucault, 'A Preface to Transgression' in Language Counter-Memory, Practice, Ed.Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 51. Hereafter PT.
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to language. Each person imagines, and therefore knows of his existence with
the help of words. Words come to him in his head loaded with the multitude of
human or non-human existences with respect to which his private existence
exists. Being is mediated in him through words, which can only arbitrarily give
themselves to 'autonomous being' and only profoundly as 'being in relation
to'(OC-V 99).
Such a role is not explicitly assigned to language in the Phnomenologie,
but rather more so in Hegel's Science of Logic, wherein he writes
Now the middle term whereby these extremes are concluded into a unity isfirst the implicit nature of both, the whole Concept that holds both withinitself... [second] ...since in their concrete existence they stand confrontingeach other, their absolute unity is also a still formal element having anexistence distinct from them the element... in which they enter into externalcommunity with each other... the middle term is only the abstract neutrality,the possibility of those extremes... In the material world water fulfills thefunction of this medium; in the spiritual world, so far as the analogue of sucha relation has a place there, the sign in general, and more precisely language,is to be regarded as fulfilling that function. (SL 1583)13
But in the same movement, according to Bataille, words 'are themselves
reduced to the state of evasions [of experience]; such is the work of discourse
in us. And this difficulty is expressed in this way: the word silence is still a
sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would
be necessary to no longer speak'(OC-V 25/IE 13). To speak the word silence
is to break it, and thus with experience; we avoid the unsettling effects of
actual experience through language and thought.
3. The Law of Language
Before it becomes possible to properly discuss the poetic use of
language, we must examine the concept of language at work, and in a larger
context. As has already been mentioned, language is inextricably bound up
with the world to such a degree that they are to a large extent structurally13 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, Trans. A.V. Miller, New Jersey, The
Humanities Press.
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homologous. Bataille writes: 'Words we use them, we make use of them the
instruments of useful acts. We could in no way have anything of the human
about us if language had to be entirely servile within us. Neither can we do
without the efficacious relations which words introduce between men and
things'(OC-V 156/IE 135). Language thus mediates existence, but it does so in
a specific modality: language is in the first instance used for instrumental ends,
as an accessory to, or substitute for action. Thus language is fundamentally
structured by its subordination to instrumental action and which orients
language toward projects. Of this Bataille writes:
Action is utterly dependent upon project... discursive thought is itself engagedin the mode of existence of project. Discursive thought... takes place withinhim beginning with his projects, on the level of reflection upon projects.Project... is a way of being in paradoxical time: it is the putting off of existenceto a later point.(OC-V 59/IE 46)
Thus language is given structure and form by virtue of our engagement
in the everyday world of action and projects. Insofar as we have situated
Bataille's theory in terms of Hegel, the term Action ought to evoke the term
Negation, by virtue of Hegel's definition of action as the negation of given
being. Such negating action is the mediation that gives rise to language as
such, and which according to Hegel results in 'language as the existence of
Spirit. Language is self-consciousness existing for others, self-consciousness
which as such is immediatelypresent, and as this self-consciousness is
universal... It perceives itself just as it is perceived by others, and the
perceiving is just existence which has become a self'' (PS 652).14 Which is to
say that insofar as language mediates our existence, and language is
structured by instrumental action, such linguistic existence dispossesses us of
everything irreducible to language and which is not in service of some deferred
14 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A. V. Miller, New York,Oxford, 1977.
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goal. Moreover, the thrust of Hegel's text is that by means of such language
self-consciousness for selfand for others is unified in the universal I.
We must continue a bit further into Hegel's text, for the paragraph that
follows sheds light upon the linguistic calcification of the self:
The content which language has here acquired is no longer the perverted, andperverting and distracted, self of the world of culture... [it] is law and simplecommand, and complaint ... Language, however, only emerges as the middleterm, mediating between independent and acknowledged self-consciousnesses; and the existent self is immediately universalacknowledgment... The content of the language of conscience is the self thatknows itself as essential being.... Universal self-consciousness is free from thespecific action that merely is... and this is made actual in language. (PS 653)
This is to say that language as the law of action ceases to require action on the
part of the self, but instead, action has already been aufgehoben into
language. Thus language becomes the language of law; the law of language,
which then constitutes universal self-consciousness by virtue of its having been
interposed, as a middle term, between independent and acknowledged self-
consciousness. Further, it was not at all by chance that the preceding citations
are situated within the Phnomenologie immediately preceding the transition
from Spirit to Religion, for Bataille writes 'Morality only touches this system [the
empire] at the border where law is integrated. And the connection of one and
the other is the middle term by which one goes from the empire to the outside,
from the outside to the empire.'15 To cite Hegel once again, 'Order, which is the
merely external determinateness of objects, has passed over into the
determination that is immanent and objective; this is Law'(SL 1572).
Language is thus submitted to the law of mediation, which is the law of
useful action and the acquisition of knowledge. This is to say that language has
always already internalized the structures of action, project and deferral.
However, Bataille's entire theoretical apparatus is predicated upon the15 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, Trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Zone Books, 1989, p.
68.
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transgression of this law, in order to recover that which is lost in discursive
existence. What is lost? Bataille writes that 'there subsists in us a silent,
elusive, ungraspable part... We can only attain it or have it at our disposal on
certain terms. They are the vague inner movements, which depend on no
object and have no intent.' It is these interior states, not exterior objects, to
which discursive thought is so woefully inadequate. Discursive thought, he
continues, through a 'language which, with respect to the others, has the sky,
the room, to which it can refer and which directs attention towards what it
grasps is dispossessed, can say nothing, is limited to stealing these states
from attention'(OC-V 26-7 /IE 14). Thus, at another point he writes 'If we live
under the law of language without contesting it, these states are within us as if
they didn't exist. But if we run up against this law, we can in passing fix our
awareness upon one of them and, quieting discourse within us, linger over the
surprise which it provides us'(OC-V 27/IE 14-5).
But neither running up against the law nor bringing these states to
attention is at all the same thing as contesting the law. But what would such a
contestation be? Foucault notes that the term 'contestation' had been defined
by Maurice Blanchot, Bataille's life-long friend, following whom Foucault gives
the following definition:
Contestation does not imply a generalized negativity, but an affirmation thataffirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity. ...contestation is the act whichcarries them all to their limits and... to the Limit where an ontological decisionachieves its end; to contest is to proceed until one reaches the empty corewhere being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being. (PT 36)
What then would constitute a contestation of the law of language, of discursive
thought? Bataille fully recognizes that if language serves as such a middle
term, and 'each person imagines, and therefore knows of his existence with the
help of words'(OC-V 99/IE 84), then it is not through a negation or abolition of
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language that the law may be contested. The truth is that there is no way out.
We have only language with which to contest language, and contestation itself
becomes a project:
The way out? It suffices that I look for it: I fall back again, inert, pitiful: the wayout from project, from the will for a way out! For project is the prison fromwhich I wish to escape (project, discursive experience): I formed the project toescape from project! And I know that it suffices to break discourse in me; fromthat moment on, ecstasy is there, from which only discourse distances me the ecstasy which discursive thought betrays by proposing it as a way out,and betrays by proposing it as absence of a way out. (OC-V 73/IE 59)
And it is only experience that can ground such a contestation. For Bataille
writes, 'words designate poorly what the human being experiences'(OC-V 50/IE
38), and yet it is impossible to designate otherwise except with words. There
must therefore be, if experience is to be communicable, a use of language able
to articulate experience without effacing it in submission to the laws of
discursive language. Bringing inner experience to language can only take place
in the form of a project, but the expression of such experience that defies the
ordinary use of words carries language to a limit. The key, here, seems to be a
matter of turning project against itself, turning language against itself, for he
writes: 'Nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what. It is such
man being entirely so through language which, in essence, with the exception
of its poetic perversion, is project. But project is no longer in this case that,
positive, of salvation, but that, negative, of abolishing the power of words,
hence of project'(OC-V 35/IE 23). After the necessary discussion, we will again
return to this poetic perversion of language.
4. Middle Terms: Hegelian Language
The unsettling images and middle termsto which poetic emotion has recoursetouch us easily. If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of thefamiliar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselveswith it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (oncedissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached toobjects which link them to the known.(OC-V 17/IE 3)
Par-del la posie: we begin to get a sense for what this phrase signifies.
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The beyond to which poetry impels us is the unknown expanses of interior
experience that are closed off by discursive language and thought. And yet: if
contestation means to carry its object to its limits, to the Limit, if poetry is not
to fall into the mere formalism and aesthetics of 'poetic facility, diffuse style,
verbal project, ostentation and the fall into the worst: commonness,
literature... the same old rut'(OC-V 63/IE 49), it can only do so by first carrying
the law of language to its limit, and this means overcoming Hegel by his own
means. That is, Bataille must expose that 'there is in understanding a blind
spot... [for] the nature of understanding demands that the blind spot within it
be more meaningful than understanding itself,' which is, Bataille continues,
that 'even within the closed completed circle (unceasing) non-knowledge is the
end and knowledge the means. To the extent that it takes itself to be an end, it
sinks into the blind spot. But poetry, laughter, ecstasy are not the means for
other things. In the 'system,' poetry, laughter and ecstasy are nothing'(OC-V
130/IE 110-1). This is to say that if, with Bataille, we argue that the Hegelian
system always returns to the non-knowledge of sense-certainty, knowledge and
language serve as means to that end, and are only secondarily mistaken for
ends in themselves. They have always already been mere middle terms,
bridging the gap between one form of non-knowledge and another.
This phrase, middle term, begs further explication. It appears only
intermittently in Bataille's texts and yet seems to occupy a central position with
regard to the possibility of non-discursive language and thought. The phrase
appeared in a similar context at least twice in Hegel's Phenomenology; once as
already cited 'Language, however, only emerges as the middle term, mediating
between independent and acknowledged self-consciousnesses; and the
existent self is immediately universal acknowledgment;' and again, in an
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earlier stage, in that of culture, once again providing order for language and
thought: 'unity is broken up into two... sides... the unity appears as a middle
term, which is excluded and distinct from the separated, actual existence of the
sides; it has, therefore, itself an actual objective existence distinct from its
sides, and has reality for them'(PS 509). These middle terms thus function to
establish a linguistic order and, moreover, a linguistic order that isand more
real, absolute and universal than its operands in their prior, disordered state.
In 1437-8 of Hegel's Science of Logic, we find middle terms explicitly
defined in a manner similar to Hegel's predecessors: they are defined as the
mediate term of the logical syllogism, i.e. in this very rudimentary example, A
-> B -> C, B serves as the middle term. Hegel, however, goes on to claim that
'everything rational is a syllogism... [and] if reason is supposed to be the
cognition that knows about God, freedom, right and duty, the infinite,
unconditioned, supersensuous... the first question still remains, what it is in all
these objects that makes them rational'(SL 1437). Regardless of our position
regarding the premises of this argument, it is instructive to follow Hegel's line
of thought into the next section. Here Hegel continues to write that 'the
essential feature of the syllogism is the unity of the extremes, the middle term
which unites them, and the ground which supports them... The expression
middle term is taken from spatial representation and contributes its share to
the stopping short at the mutual externality of the terms'(SL 1438). More
generally speaking, for Hegel, middle terms constitute the unity of the
particular and the universal, and hence, Bataille is indeed correct to speak, as
he does, of God, Language and Reason as exemplars of middle terms, for, from
the standpoint of the believer, they serve to establish an enduring unity of the
individual and the universal.
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It does not suffice to explicate the Hegelian definition, but, we must also
pass by way of Alexandre Kojve's reading of Hegel to gain the full sense of
Bataille's usage, for Bataille's conception of discourse presupposes that the
following has been achieved.
If man is truly and fully satisfied by what is... he himself ceases really tochange. The only desire which he can still have if he is a philosopher isthe desire to understand what is and what he is, and to reveal it throughdiscourse. Therefore Man... is definitively satisfied by the adequatedescription of the real in its totality which is given by the Science of the WiseMan... (IRH 192)
Consequently, the middle terms have become fully realized insofar as absolute
knowledge has been achieved, and would then mediate and give order to
experience itself. This is so because, with the achievement of Absolute
Knowledge, the unity of opposites becomes self-evident.
In Bataille's version, middle terms are the means by which man attempts
to bring order to the seething chaos that existence is, and in order to establish
and guarantee selfhood, coherence, and autonomy. He writes with unusual
clarity in a fragment appended to the second edition ofLe Coupable: 'human
existence relies on a middle term... For when we grasp ourselves... we perceive
our confusion and the deep dependence in which a confused nature holds us.
Hence the necessity to relate to ideal middle terms, such as God or
reason.', which are 'middle terms in this sense that each is related to
confusion of some kind and to a graspable order inside the confusion'(OC-V
376/G 129). Thus middle terms are so because they transform the confusion of
existence into discursive order. Thus, it is no surprise that Bataille continues to
write 'Reason is language opposing general forms and common measures to
things, or at least to a confused nature; it is language opposing logical order to
chance' (OC-V 378/G 131).The result, however, is ambiguous because
confusion and chance cannot be completely removed from human existence,
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even through the linguistic mediations of Reason and God. It is thus no surprise
to read what follows:
Man has doubled real things and himself with words that evoke them andsignify them and outlive the disappearance of the things signified. Put intoplay in this way, these words themselves make up an ordered realm, adding,to precisely translated reality, pure evocations of unreal qualities, unrealbeings... For the formless consciousness of things and oneself there issubstituted reflective thought, in which consciousness has replaced thingswith words. But at the same time that consciousness was enriched, words calling to mind both unreal and real beings took the place of the sensibleworld.(OC-V 378/G 131)
But before the increase of autonomy resulting from this substitution of
language for reality can exert any emancipatory power, 'man is led by
language to situate this autonomy in a (logical and unreal) middle term, but if
he gives reality to this unreality becoming it himself (incarnating it) the
middle term he utilizes becomes in turn nature itself'(OC-V 380, G 133). As
soon as middle terms double reality with words, emancipatory possibilities are
put into play, yet the nature of language itself leads us to believe that all words
have such reality that they supersede the sensible world itself. This includes
the middle terms themselves they are included as the condition of possibility
for linguistic reality as such. It is also important to note that in the same
fragment, Hegel is frequently referenced, and in one particular instance
explicitly challenges Kojve's reading. 'The identification of Hegelian reason
with man is precarious and equivocal'(OC-V 380/G 132), and continues to argue
that this identification would only be possible if Kojve's reading of Hegel was
correct, and states that, of this he would only 'retain the basics' that is, a
certain logic of the middle term.
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote: 'I am afraid we are not yet rid of
God because we still have faith in grammar.'16 And it is evident that the middle
terms we have been discussing, God, Reason, etc. came to be believed
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Viking Portable Nietzsche, Trans. by WalterKaufmann, pg 483
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because they provide a grammar that purports to be equally applicable to
language and to the world. Following Paul De Man, under the sway of such
middle terms, 'grammar stands in the service of logic which, in turn allows for
the passage to the knowledge of the world... the continuity between theory and
phenomenalism is asserted and preserved by the system itself.'17 But, he
continues to say that this grammatical organization of both language and world
'leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by
grammatical means.'18 The residue of indetermination here is specifically the
imaginative capacity granted by the linguistic reduplication of the world. If not
for the fact that these middle terms operate solely in the interest of creating
order out of confusion, the capacity to signify non-existent entities would
readily undo the grammatical illusion of an ordered world. There is, also, as it
were, another role played by middle terms, to which we will return shortly.
At this juncture, two paths diverge when we attempt to throw off the
tyranny of reason and language over experience. We will briefly discuss the
first of these, which constitutes a temporary restoration of a lost immanence
with the world by means of sheer negation: this would be L'Exprience
Intrieure and the negative knowledge it attains. We will then proceed to
discuss the second, wherein the perversion of language in poetic and literary
language serves as an initial rupture that points beyond language, and back to
the world itself. This second path will also illuminate the means by which
Bataille turns the middle term of language, in its poetic form, against Hegel,
illustrating how the moment of rupture in poetry can also be the rupture of the
closed system.
In the first case, Bataille begins with the statement that 'ipse and the17 Paul De Man, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986. p.
14.18 Ibid, pg 15
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whole stand opposed, while the I and God are like beings'(OC-V 134/IE 116).
Bataille's term ipse refers to that part of the self that exists before the
constitution of the I by the mediation of discursive reason, while the whole
indicates the totality of being, also prior to the operations of discursive reason.
Ipse and the whole are therefore heterogeneous, ipse exists as if alien to the
world. Moreover, ipse only becomes I and convinced of an ordered world by
virtue of the middle terms God or Reason.19 In this instance, it is possible in
silence for 'ipse and the whole together slip away from the clutches of
discursive intelligence (which enslaves); the middle terms alone are
assimilable,' subsequently, ipse can renounce reason, 'casting the middle
terms into darkness, in a single and abrupt renunciation of itself, attain the
irrationality of the whole (in this case knowledge is still mediation between
me and the world but negative: it is the rejection of knowledge, night, the
annihilation of all middle terms, which constitute this negative mediation)'(OC-
V 134-5/IE 115).
This is the means by which ipse approaches the extreme limit, as
'existence successively strips itself of its middle terms: of that which originates
in discourse'(OC-V 135/IE 116). But what happens here? Without Reason, God,
or any middle term, this experience is mute and results in anguish. At this
point, ipse gains definitive non-knowledge of the whole and loses him/herself.
But in doing so, ipse has fallen short of contestation ipse simply negates and
does not bring anything with it to the Limit: ipse's experience is devoid of
content. Thus the subtitle to this section ofL'Exprience Intrieure is aptly
given: Tale of a Partly-Failed Experience.
19 A fragment appearing in the appendix to Le Coupable makes the equivalence of God andReason absolutely clear: Christianity is only a crystallization of language... If you assumeman and language as doubling the real world with another world... then Christianity isnecessary. (OC-V 382/G 134)
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5. Beyond Poetry: A Sacrifice Beyond Words
Par-del la posie: beyond poetry: sacrifice; and beyond sacrifice? I
repeat Bataille's claim that 'the poetry in which the most blood would be lost
would be the most forceful.' And to this question, the response: to whose blood
does this refer? It has been noted that the phrase 'writing in blood' evokes
Nietzsche, and nothing could be closer to the mark. The section ofL'Exprience
Intrieure in which poetry is discussed at great length bears the simple title
Nietzsche, and in which, Bataille thematizes this going beyond of poetry in
terms of sacrifice, beginning with a citation, in its entirety, of an aphorism fromBeyond Good and Evil. This highlights the importance of the phrase, par-del la
posie,for,if one consults the French text it bears a striking resemblance to
title of the French translation of Nietzsche's book: Par del la bien et le mal.
However, at this point, we must proceed according to a certain measure of
method. We begin with that which lends poetry its power.
The citation with which the preceding section opened, however, asserts
that poetry too must have recourse to middle terms if it is to be a means by
which the bonds of discourse might be loosened. Let it not be mistaken: neither
poetry nor literary language are panaceas for our discursive entrapment: they
are modalities of linguistic expression, but are neither thought nor experience.
Moreover, once written, poetry and literature lose much of their disruptive
force and become assimilated canonized. However, it is of particular interest
that poetry, not only has recourse to middle terms, but also constitutes and
operates as a middle term: in L'Impossible we find Bataille's most brazen
assertion regarding this: 'Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the
unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is
a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown
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painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun'(OC-III 222/IE 163).
What can this signify? Does this not mean that poetry masquerades as a
radical force, but is in reality only conservative? The answer must be
provisionally be in the negative: for, poetry has power insofar as 'It never
dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are
charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link
them to the known'(OC-V 17/IE 5). And insofar as poetry is a middle term, it
does not entirely detach words from discourse; by the same token, poetry can
touch us readily, and can make use of what we referred to as the emancipatory
power of language: the capacity of language to signify both real and unreal
beings, which marks a double aspect and allows it to avoid total reduction to
instrumentality. Furthermore, in relation to this ambiguity, Bataille writes in
L'Impossible : 'Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of
discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a
kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the death of the
logical world'(OC-III 222/TI 163). Which is to say that poetry can, rather than
domesticate the unknown into knowledge, instead it permits the unknown to
slip unnoticed into language, and, once it has gone beyond poetry and slipped
into the 'discursive real,'20 it can proceed to blind reason and incinerate logic.
It is not by chance that the brief passages recently discussed were drawn
from the final pages ofL'Impossible, the first edition of which was to be among
the volumes intended to be republished under the title ofPar-del la posie,
and are on pages immediately preceded by a page bearing only the words 'tre
Oreste' (OC-III, 215 / TI 155). They become particularly important in light of a
brief passage from L'Exprience Intrieure, in which Bataille writes: 'in the face
20 'Post-Scriptum 1953' (US 205)
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of this time which undoes us, which can only undo what we want to
consolidate, we ourselves have the recourse of carrying a heart to be
devoured. Orestes or Phedra, who have been ravaged, are to poetry what the
victim is to sacrifice'(OC-V 169/IE146). Such mythical references seem to bear
some significance within Bataille's theoretical texts, for in the introduction to
the 1954 editions of both Le Coupable and L'Exprience Intrieure, he writes:
'To introduce the first edition ofLe Coupable, I wrote these words, whose
meaning related to an impression I had in 1942 - that I lived in the world like a
stranger... Someone who called himselfDianus wrote these notes and died. He
(ironically?) thought of himself as guilty. The collection appearing under this
name is a completed work'(OC-V 239/G 5). The myths of Orestes and Dianus
thus have something to tell us about poetry and reality: that is, in the first
instance, we might now read 'with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the
infinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world'(OC-223/IE
164), as indicating that the total collapse of one's world is both the prerequisite
and consequence of writing. In the second instance, ought we not read
Dianus's death as a sacrifice completing the effect of having experienced the
impossible, having gone to the limits of the possible, to the effect of completing
his words with the silence of death? Moreover, after his death, in Dianus, it is
Pre A. who speaks, and whose voice and character slowly merges with that of
the dead Dianus thus, in L'Orestie neither D. nor A. speak, for the wound has
closed with 'une reconstitution l'auteur'(OC-III 511).
Furthermore, it is within the pages ofL'Impossible that the mythological
double signification of the name Dianus finds full expression, for his death
expresses but one myth of Dianus, the king of the woods, high priest of Diana.
The other, however, does not carry an element of sacrifice along with it, for
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Bataille explains in a preface or introduction to Le Coupable that was never
used, that the name Dianus is another name for Janus.21 It is then scarcely
surprising that L'Impossible constitutes a performance of the simultaneously
double and unitary, and in this context, it is relatively easy to understand how
poetry can at once be a middle term, like all language, and at the same time
introduce the chaos of the unknown into speech.
We are thus faced again with the questions of language: in what sort of
theoretical framework can Bataille at once exalt and denigrate the literary and
poetic uses of language, and moreover, if beyond designates the limit
between exaltation and denigration, how is this manifest in particular literary
or poetic manifestations and not others. The following passage from
L'Exprience Intrieure speaks most clearly to this problematic:
What one doesn't grasp: that, literature being nothing if it isn't poetry, poetrybeing the opposite of its name, literary language expression of hiddendesires, of obscure life is the perversion of language even a bit more thaneroticism is the perversion of sexual function. (OC-V 173/IE 150)
Let us read this closely. The person designated by the indefinite one in the
first sentence is the writer, himself, in his sacrifice of himself or of poetry. Next,
we read that, literature is nothing if it is not poetry, which on its face would
indicate outright that literature is always poetry, however, given Hegel's
influence, the signification of the word nothing can hardly be taken at face
value. Now, if poetry is then the opposite of its name
(frompoiesis), then
poetry is not creative, but rather destructive; then, if literary language is a
greater perversion of language than the perversion of sex in eroticism, but also
expressive of hidden desires, of obscure life, its perversity is structurally
homologous. Thus the perversion of language in literary language is evidently
that it does violence upon itself, sacrifices itself and its world. And this is the
21 Referring to the publication of L'Amit in April 1940, he later wrote: 'Le nom choisi commepseudonyme est celui d'un grand dieu latin, de Janus ou Dianus, qui rpondait alors l'atmosphre religieuse mais paradoxale o je vivais.' (OC-VI 369)
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terror, of being left with nothing more to say and with no means to say
anything, is moreover, also the terror occasioned by the desire to sacrifice
oneself!
Now this is perfectly consonant with what we have already said. Here we
may pause to note that our provisional definition of literary language as
language that does violence upon itself and, which does not stop with
language, might be sufficient to rupture the closure of Hegel's system from
within. For, if literary language turns back upon itself and sacrifices itself, while
in the same movement, it smuggles the unknown in the back door of the real,
does this not violate Kojve's proof by circularity?
If Hegel's thought cannot be surpassed by thought, and if it does not surpassthe given real but is content to describe it (for it knows and says that it issatisfied by what is), no ideal or real negation of the given is any longer possible.The real, then, will remain eternally identical to itself... A complete and correctdescription of this real will therefore be universally and eternally valid.... Now, thecircularity of the Hegelian description proves that it is complete and hence correct: foran erroneous or incomplete description, which stopped at a lacuna or ended in animpasse, would never come back upon itself. (IRH 194)
Would this not create an impasse, one which would never let the system come
back upon itself? Especially insofar as the impasse grows upon the soil of
existence itself. It remains true, however, that no real or ideal negation of the
given is entailed here. It is rather that it is the unknown real that intrudes first
into discourse, and then beyond. And this intrusion is perpetual, for Bataille
writes, explicitly disputing Kojve: 'Desire, poetry, laughter, unceasingly causelife to slip... from the known to the unknown. Existence in the end discloses the
blind spot of understanding and right away becomes completely absorbed in it.
It could not be otherwise unless a possibility for rest were to present itself at a
certain point'(OC-V 130/IE 111).
In short time, we shall return to complete Bataille's critique of Hegel. But
let us first answer the question raised at the beginning of this section, which
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aims to address those enigmatic words with which we began. In whose blood is
the most forceful poetry written? This time we should place the emphasis on
the syntagm, 'the most blood would be lost. From our previous discussion, it is
quite evident that a true poet, in Bataille's eyes, sheds either his own blood or
the blood of his poetry. However, we have left sequential time out of joint and
have neglected yet to present Bataille's simple definition of poetry, that is, as
the sacrifice in which words are victims... we tear words from their [servile]
links in a delirium'(OC-V 156/IE 135). Then we are given a concrete example: of
what happens when words are torn from servility and 'enter into a poem, they
do so detached from interested concerns. For as many times as the words
butter, horse are put to practical ends, the use which poetry makes of them
liberates human life from these ends'(OC-V 156/IE 135). Moreover, this
detachment from discourse grants words the facility to express the
nonexistent, a facility drawn from the very nature of discursive reason as a
middle term; only this time, poetry redresses the abuse of language that is
discourse. Consequently, the unreal order of reason dissolves for a time into
the reality of the poem, which merely expresses some unknown, but real,
possibility. He continues: 'No doubt I have barely enunciated the words when
the familiar images... present themselves, but they are solicited only in order to
die. In which sensepoetry is sacrifice, but of the most accessible sort. For if the
use or abuse of words, to which the operations of words oblige us, takes place
on the ideal, unreal level of language, the same is true of the sacrifice of words
which is poetry'(OC-V 157/IE 136).
In a movement that parallels the movement of the quoted Nietzsche
aphorism, this is but the first rung of poetic cruelty, a sacrifice of words, 'the
path followed at all times by man's desire to redress the abuse which he makes
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of language, it takes place, as I said, on the same level. Or on those parallel
of expression'(OC-V 170/IE 147). At this point, the sacrifice only operates on the
level of language and does not yet extend beyond poetry, it does not change
us yet, we are not yet in play. However, poetry remains a crucial moment.
Without it, poetry and literature would remain an idle privilege and an
accumulated and accumulating mass of knowledge. In a sense, were poetry not
to proceed further, in contrast to Adorno, 'It may [not] have been wrong to say
that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.'22 We are fortunate that
there is more power to the sacrifice of words than mere absurdities. Reaching
this first rung, one is impelled to go further, because: 'Among various
sacrifices, poetry is the only one whose fire we can maintain, renew... What is
essential is that on its own, the desire for poetry renders our misery intolerable:
certain that the sacrifice of objects is powerless to truly liberate us, we often
experience the necessity for going further, right to the sacrifice of the subject.
Which of itself can be of no consequence, but if the subject succumbs, it lifts
the weight of eagerness its life escapes avarice. The one who sacrifices, the
poet, having unceasingly to bring ruin into the ungraspable world of words,
grows quickly tired of enriching a literary treasure..'(OC-V 172/IE 149)
Thus, by means of a 'feverish contestation of poetry'(OC-V 158/IE 137) we
ascend to the second rung of poetic cruelty, of which we have already spoken,
in brief, with regard to those mythical figures whom Bataille evokes. Now the
writer will spill his blood in the name of poetry, 'by virtue of the misery of the
sacrifice (in this respect the same is true of poetry as of any sacrifice
whatsoever), it causes a slipping from impotent sacrifice of objects to that of
the subject. What Rimbaud sacrificed is not only poetry as object but the poet
22 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Translated by E.B. Ashton, New York: Continuum Press,1999, pg. 362
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as subject'(OC-V 454-5/IE 208). A movement is thereby completed, for Bataille
notes: 'the strangest thing about this movement ... is that it contains the
secret of poetry. Poetry is only a havoc-which restores. It gives to time, which
eats away, that which a dull vanity removes from it; it dissipates the false
pretenses of an ordered world'(OC-V 170/IE 147).
We thus return to our point of departure, except that the unknown has
been invested with desire, through successive sacrifice, which invests a power
in the middle term of poetry to once again shine forth as 'the unknown painted
in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.' At this point, the pinnacle of poetry
and therefore literature, the writer or poet is dissolved, whether literally or
figuratively, into anonymity, freeing language from a referential bond that is
beyond the mere signification of words. The secret of poetry comes to light
after the personal relevance of the communicated experience is dissolved. With
words and images freed from reference and the logic of creation, the erstwhile
poet stands at the brink of ascending to the final rung of poetic cruelty.
Unsatisfied by the 'way [that] poetry adds to the determined effusion... the
particular faculty of disordered images to annihilate the ensemble of signs that
is the sphere of activity'(US 93),the poet, then, enters a state of
desoeuvrement. If, then, the middle terms of discourse (Reason, God) have
been used to abuse the world in the same way as they have been used to
abuse language and ourselves, one further sacrifice is required: 'The supreme
abuse which man ultimately made of his reason requires a last sacrifice:
reason, intelligibility, the ground itself upon which he stands man must reject
them, in him God must die; this is the depth of terror, the extreme limit where
he succumbs'(OC-V 155/IE 134). Thus, they must be sacrificed as one by the
poet with nothing left to say or do. They must be sacrificed, not in the name of
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nothingness (as it was in Nietzsche's aphorism), but in the name of the
unknown, death and silence.
This sacrifice, of course, can only come to pass after the (provisional) end
of the history that has made it necessary. With the illusions of a discursively
ordered world, it is both Reason/God and the artificially closed Hegelian system
that must be put to death. What differentiates this third, highest sacrifice from
the previous two, is that the sacrifice does not spare the one who performs the
sacrifice, who is 'in the anguish before an incomplete world, incompletable and
forever unintelligible, which destroys him, tears him apart'(OC-V 179/ IE 153).23
Just before this point Bataille again cites Nietzsche: this time, it is the tale
of the madman from The Gay Science.The poet who has managed to sacrifice
reason itself has nothing left to do or say.
The sacrifice of reason is to all appearances imaginary it has neither abloody conclusion, nor anything analogous to that. It differs nevertheless frompoetry in that it is total...(OC-V 170/IE 155)
The poet has thereby overcome the opposition between ipse and world, insofaras the separation effected by the middle terms in discourse is overcome in a
total sacrifice: a sacrifice that began with poetry and went far beyond poetry.
The poet has gone beyond Reason, and this is the truepar-del la posie, for
even if this sequence of sacrifices collapses into insignificance, and, for one
moment, poetry and literary language have overcome Reason. They have
overcome reason by doing violence to language, by acknowledging poetry as
not the creativepoeisis of a knowing subject, but rather the transgressive
movement by which language 'continually breaks down at the center of its
space, exposing in his nakedness, in the inertia of ecstasy, a visible and
insistent subject who had tried to keep language at arms length, but who now
23 In notes connected to On Nietzsche, in volume 6 of Bataille's Oeuvres Compltes, we findsimilar language used to describe the impact of Kojve's lectures on Hegel: 'le cours deKojve m'a rompu, broy, tu dix fois.' Oeuvres Compltes Volume VI, Paris, EditionsGallimard, 1973, p. 416.
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finds himself thrown by it, exhausted, upon the sands of that which he can no
longer say'(PT 39).
What is it that can no longer be said? It is the two words I and God,
for Reason is no longer there to guarantee the order of things. Moreover,
Bataille writes of the consequences of the final sacrifice, beyond poetry:
If one proceeds right to the end, one must efface oneself, undergo solitude,suffer severely from it, must renounce be recognized: to be as though absent,insane over this, to undergo things without will and without hope, to beelsewhere... I publish it knowing it in advance to be misread... Its agitationmust end, must remain hidden, or almost hidden... without honor. It and I wecan only sink to that point in non-sense. Thought ruins and its destruction isincommunicable to the crowd it addresses itself to the least weak. (OC-V171/IE 155)
Assuming that he truly proceeded to the end, it does not now seem
extravagant that Bataille claimed in his 1937 letter to Kojve: 'I think of my life
or better yet, its abortive condition, the open wound that my life is as itself
constituting a refutation of Hegel's closed system'(OC-V 369/G 123). For in this
letter, after having renounced the recognition of others, he writes of himself
that 'when the man of 'unemployed negativity' doesn't find in the art work an
answer to the question he himself is, he can only become the man of
recognized negativity. He has grasped that he is no longer employable. But
since this need can't be deluded indefinitely by the deceptions of art, at one
point or another it will be recognized for what it is: negativity without content
(OC-V 371/G 125).
Beyond all knowledge there is non-knowledge and he who would becomeabsorbed in the thought that beyond his knowledge he knows nothing evenwere he to have within him Hegel's inexorable lucidity would no longer beHegel, but a painful tooth in Hegel's mouth. Would a sick tooth alone bemissing from the great philosopher? (OC-V 422/IE 169)
It is not only the reflexive violence done upon language by itself that
breaches the closure of the system, but the reverberations of poetry beyond
poetry break the middle terms, which served to guarantee the system's
circularity and to ensuring the completion of knowledge. It is when the blood of
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words, of the subject, and finally of Reason itself have at last been drained,
that poetry announces the rupture of the system from within that ends its
ceaseless circulation. Having touched upon the impossible, Bataille recognized
himself first as unemployed negativity and then as negativity without
content. Thus, like the unemployed poet whose final sacrifice is that of
Reason, Bataille's negativity without content transforms language and
discursive thought into 'the servant of experience... [and] Non-knowledge
attained, absolute knowledge is no longer anything but one knowledge among
others'(OC-V 69/IE 55).
'I fail, no matter what I write, in this, that I should be linking the infinite
insane richness of possibles to the precision of meaning. To this fruitless
task I am compelled happily?'(OC-V 51/ IE 38) Poetic language does not
'work,' but makes work grind to a halt. All this demonstrates the ephemeral
power of language to go beyond itself and expose that which is beyond
knowledge, those experiences that defy reason. Moreover, poetry, insofar as it
goes beyond mere belles lettres, displays the Janus-face of all reality and
language. And although rupture seems only possible in brief moments, there is
yet a reason to write, for discourse always needs to be interrupted by
experience, experience that is communicable only in words, which have to be
continually torn from discourse, 'even more than this is that other, the reader,
who loves me and who already forgets me (kills me), without whose present
insistence I could do nothing, would have no inner experience. Not that in
moments of violence of misfortune I don't forget him, as he himself forgets
me but I tolerate in me the action of project in that it is a link with this
obscure othersharing my anguish, my torment, desiring my torment as much
as I desire his.' (OC-V 76/IE 61)
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la fin, it may be said, provisionally, that Bataille's reading of Hegel was
anything but a regurgitation of Kojvian themes, but was, instead, a long and
sustained meditation on language that cannot be subsumed by the discourse
of the Sage. As early as L'Exprience Intrieure, Bataille had already
outstripped his teacher in his confrontation with Hegel, and yet he retained
certain derivative concepts, albeit in highly modified forms. However, on issues
of language, and the centrality of middle terms,24 he could not have gone
further from his master. His struggle with the bonds of language led him...
...Par-del la posie: to the forgetting of poetry.
24 See (SL 1569-1572) on the central individual/body as middle term this aspect of