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“…leur anachronisme devient flagrant”: Georges Bataille, aristocracy, and writing in the interwar period

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the critical role of aristocracy in Georges Bataille’s 1928 short novel, Story of the Eye. It begins by examining several of his interwar articles, highlighting the centrality of figures like the Marquis de Sade, medieval knights, and Nietzsche’s noble masters in Bataille’s critiques of bourgeois capitalism, nationalism, and fascism. The paper goes on to demonstrate that aristocratic elements introduce these same critiques into Story of the Eye. Considering manuscript variants as well as the first published edition of the book, the paper recovers allusions to contemporary socio-political issues of interest to Bataille at the time, including the conditions for proletarian revolution and the rising pressures of far-right ideologies in France and across Europe. Finally, it addresses the distinction between Bataille’s explicitly political writings and his literary texts, arguing that the ironic and tragic representation of aristocracy in Bataille’s early fictional work helps him create a writing practice that engages in socio-political critique while avoiding some of the polemics and pitfalls of interwar intellectual discourse.

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Notes

  1. Michael Halley, for instance, attributes the “last eye” of the story to Don Amandino (1995, p. 291), as does Patrick French (1999, p. 95). Denis Hollier similarly disregards the importance of the character of Sir Edmond, accidentally refering to him as “Sir Stephen” (1997, p. 79). Hollier does make an extended argument for Bataille’s “Don Juanism” in his novels Histoire de l’oeil and Le Bleu du ciel (written in 1935), but misses the larger aristocratic picture in which Don Juan and the Commander are only a part.

  2. “… je violais, chaque jour, nouveau personnage, une Simone également métamorphosée, surtout vers midi en plein soleil et sur le sol, sous les yeux à demi sanglants de Sir Edmond” (OC I, 1970, p. 69).

  3. According to Blanchot, Bataille himself “turned out to regret the pages he had written on ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’ a piece that might lend itself to more than one reading” (Blanchot 1984, p. 20). Klossowski eventually expressed the reservations he shared with Walter Benjamin about Bataille: “It is undeniable that the deep temptations of fascist cynicism had an influence on his particular genius” (quoted in Monnoyer 1985, p. 187). Benjamin reportedly told Klossowski that the Collège de Sociologie was “working to the advantage of fascism!” (quoted by Giorgio Agamben 1988, p. 115). In an interview with Elizabeth Rudinesco, Derrida has said, “Rereading these texts by Bataille today in another way, I wonder whether, despite the difference he indicates between mastery and sovereignty, this latter word does not still maintain an extremely equivocal theologico-political tradition, particularly in the sacrificial logic that Bataille takes up in this context. Later I would use this lexicon in a much more prudent fashion” (Derrida 2004, p. 94). See also Hollier's Absent Without Leave (1997), chapter 6: “On Equivocation Between Literature and Fascism,” and Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (1986).

  4. “Human life… cannot in any way be limited to the closed systems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions. The immense travail of recklessness, discharge, and upheaval that constitutes life could be expressed by stating that life starts only with the deficit of these systems; at least what it allows in the way of order and reserve has meaning only from the moment when the ordered and reserved forces liberate and lose themselves for ends that cannot be subordinated to anything one can account for” (1985, p. 128).

  5. “C’est la constitution d’une propriété positive de la perte […] de laquelle découlent la noblesse, l’honneur, le rang dans la hierarchie…” (OC I, 1970, p. 310).

  6. To my knowledge, Bataille’s first published use of the term “sovereignty” appears in the essay “Sacrifices” (manucript 1933) (1985, p. 132; OC I, 1970, p. 92). For his extended discussion of the subject, see what was intended to comprise part three of The Accursed Share, subtitled Sovereignty (written in 1953–1954, unpublished as such. Collected in OC VIII 1976, pp. 243–456).

  7. The clearest articulations of this dynamic appear in the lectures given to the Collège de Sociologie in 1938 by Bataille and Roger Caillois, “Attraction et répulsion I & II,” as well as “L’ambiguité du sacré” (1995, pp. 120–168; pp. 364–402). However, Bataille approaches the question earlier, in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism.”

  8. “Le monde hétérogène comprend l’ensemble des résultats de la dépense improductive […] Ce sont […] les nombreux éléments ou formes sociaux que la partie homogène est impuissante à assimiler: les foules, les classes guerrières, aristocratiques et misérables, les différentes sortes d’individus violents ou tout au moins refusant la règle (fous, meneurs, poètes, etc.)” (OC I, 1970, p. 346).

  9. Bataille was never a member of the French Communist Party, and his engagement with Marx’s philosophy was complex. For his most sustained discussion of Marx, see The Accursed Share III—Sovereignty.

  10. Bataille addresses the co-optation of revolutionary energies in many works through the thirties; for sustained discussions of Marxism specifically in this period, see “The Old Mole and the Prefix ‘Sur’ in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist” (“La ‘vieille taupe’ et le préfixe sur dans les mots surhomme et surréaliste”) (circa 1930 [1985, pp. 32–44; OC II, 1970, pp. 93–109]) and “The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic” (“La critique des fondements de la dialectique hégélienne;” orig. 1932 [1985, pp. 105-115; OC I, 1970, pp. 277–290]).

  11. “L’idéalisme révolutionnaire tend à faire de la révolution un aigle au-dessus des aigles, un suraigle abattant les impérialismes autoritaires, une idée aussi radieuse qu’un adolescent s’emparant éloquemment du pouvoir au bénéfice d’une illumination utopique. Cette déviation aboutit naturellement à l’échec de la révolution icarienne châtrée, l’impérialisme éhonté exploitant l’impulsion révolutionnaire” (OC II, 1970, p. 96).

  12. This argument is present in most of the essays I discuss in this article, including “The Use-Value of D.A.F. Sade” and “The Notion of Expenditure.”

  13. “il se situe dans les entrailles du sol, comme dans les entrailles matérialistes des proletariens” (OC II, 1970, p. 97).

  14. “…les hautes classes disposent à peu près seules des idées, c’est-à-dire des formes les plus élévées de la vie humaine” (OC II, 1970, p. 98); “… les mouvements du cœur humain, introduisant leur immense désordre et leur vulgarité avide dans les bouleversements historiques, se produisent seulement à l’intérieur du prolétariat, dans les masses profondes vouées aux agitations démesurées” (OC II, 1970, p. 99).

  15. "… la phase post-revolutionnaire implique la nécessité d’une scission entre l’organisation politique et économique de la societé d’une part et d’autre part une organisation antireligieuse et asociale ayant pour but la participation orgiaque aux différentes formes de la destruction, c’est-à-dire la satisfaction collective des besoins qui correspondent à la nécessité de provoquer l’excitation violente qui résulte de l’expulsion des éléments hétérogènes. Une telle organisation ne peut avoir d'autre conception de la morale que celle qu'a professée scandaleusement pour la première fois le marquis de Sade” (OC II, 1970, p. 68).

  16. See L’Erotisme (1957; OC X, 1987, pp. 7–270). For a discussion of the relation between “érotisme,” “communication” and literature, see Halley, “A Truth for a Truth: Barthes on Bataille” (1995).

  17. “[J]e n’aimait pas ce qu’on appelle les ‘plaisirs de la chair,’ parce qu’en effet ils sont toujours fades… la débauche que je connais souille non seulement mon corps et mes pensées, mais aussi tout ce que je peux concevoir devant elle, c’est-à-dire le grand univers étoilé qui ne joue qu’un rôle de décor” (OC I, 1970, p. 45).

  18. Indeed, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, Bataille’s preoccupation with the experience of lovers blocks his ability to fully understand the ontological structure of community. Although for Bataille the lover relation is an ecstatic encounter with exteriority and alterity that undermines individual subjectivity, according to Nancy this dyad limits Bataille to thinking in terms of subject/object dialectics. Though he comes close, for Nancy Bataille cannot conceive of a shared community between Daseins, or non-subjects, as long as he continues to imagine tragic lovers isolated from the public world. See The Inoperative Community (Nancy 1991).

  19. Bataille concludes “The Use-Value of D.A.F. Sade” with a reflection on contemporary black Americans: “It is only starting from this collusion of European scientific theory with black practice that institutions can develop which will serve as outlets…for the urges required today by worldwide society’s fiery and bloody revolution” (1985, p. 102) (“C’est seulement à partir de la collusion d’une théorie scientifique européene et de la pratique nègre que peuvent se développer les institutions qui serviront définitivement d’issue […] aux impulsions qui exigent aujourd’hui la Révolution par le feu et par le sang des formations sociales du monde entier” (OC II, 1970, p. 69)]. See also his article “Black Birds” (OC I, p. 186). For an excellent consideration of Bataille’s appropriation of exotic or non-western cultures, in this case as regards his fascination with Chinese torture, see Hayot’s The Hypothetical Mandarin (2009, pp. 219–230).

  20. For the aristocratic origins of bullfighting, see Mitchell’s Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting (1991).

  21. “Ce qui caractérisait Granero parmi les autres matadors, c’est qu’il n’avait pas du tout l’air d’un garçon boucher, mais d’un prince charmant très viril et aussi parfaitement élancé” (OC I, p. 52).

  22. See, in particular, the Collège seminar of February 19, 1938, “Le pouvoir” (1995, pp. 168–198). Although originally written by Roger Caillois, it was delivered and presumably elaborated upon by Bataille. Caillois’ conception of this figure of the “roi qui meurt” is heavily indebted to both J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough and Georges Dumézil’s Ouranos-Varuna. For a brief but helpful commentary on the distinction between Bataille and Caillois’ notions of this figure, and their respective intellectual influences, see Hollier’s foreword to “Le pouvoir” in Le Collège de Sociologie.

  23. “Un cri d’horreur immense coïncida avec un orgasme bref de Simone” (OC I, 1970, p. 56).

  24. “Père, Patrie, Patron, telle est la trilogie qui sert de base à la vieille société patriarcale et aujourd’hui, à la chiennerie fasciste” (Pamphlet for a meeting on January 5, 1936. Reprinted in OC I, 1970, p. 393). Contre-Attaque held meetings and disseminated pamphlets between 1935–1936. See also “The Use Value of D.A.F. Sade” (1985, p. 93; OC I, 1970, p. 56).

  25. “Les déchaînés du passé sont les enchaînés à la raison; ceux que n’enchaîne pas la raison sont les esclaves du passé […]. Et cependant la vie n’exige pas moins d’être délivrée du passé que d’un système de mesurements rationnelles, administratives” (OC I, 1970, p. 464).

  26. “But in a democratic society (at least when such a society is not galvanized by the necessity of going to war) the heterogeneous imperative agency (nation in republican forms, king in constitutional monarchies) is reduced to an atrophied existence, so that its destruction no longer appears to be a necessary condition to change. In such a situation the imperative forms can even be considered as a free field, open to all possibilities of effervescence and movement, just as subversive forms are in democracy… The possibility of fascism… depended upon the fact that a reversion to vanished sovereign forms was out of the question in Italy, where the monarchy subsisted in a reduced state. Added to this subsistence, it was precisely the insufficiency of the royal formation that necessitated the formation of—and left the field open for—an entirely renewed imperative attraction with a popular base. Under these new conditions… the lower classes no longer exclusively experience the attraction represented by socialist subversion, and a military type of organization has in part begun to draw them into the orbit of sovereignty… it is not surprising that, given the choice between subversive and imperative solutions, the majority opted for the imperative.” (“The Pyschological Structure of Fascism,” 1985, p. 158).

  27. “La nécessité propre des formes subversives exige que ce qui est bas devienne haut, que ce qui est haut devienne bas, et c’est dans cette exigence que s’exprime la nature de la subversion” (OC I, 1970, p. 368).

  28. To my knowledge, the term “communifying nucleus” (“noyau communifiant”) appears for the first time in lectures given at the Collège de Sociologie, especially “La sociologie sacrée et les rapports entre ‘société,’ ‘organisme,’ et ‘être’,” by Bataille and Caillois in 1937.

  29. This argument is implicit in “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” but is made more explicitly in the Collège de Sociologie lecture “Le pouvoir,” originally written by Caillois but delivered in his place by Bataille (1995, pp. 196–198).

  30. See “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (1985, p. 149).

  31. “Je jugeai prudent de déguerpir en prévision de la colère de mon père misérable, type accompli de général gâteau et catholique” (OC I, 1970, p. 23).

  32. “… colonel de cavalerie patriote et ancien compagnon de Déroulède.” BNF Manuscript (cote N.a.fr. 26623); cited in Bataille 2004, p. 1034n1.

  33. “Vos frères d’Alsace et Lorraine,” he reads, “séparés en ce moment de la famille commune, conservent à la France, absente de leurs foyers, une affection filiale jusqu`au jour où elle reviendra y reprendre sa place” (1907, p. 335).

  34. “Dormez en paix, pères de la Patrie, vos fils continueront votre tâche, et soyez tranquilles, ces fils ne seront pas ingrats, et quand le jour viendra, si lointain qu’il soit, ils rapporteront sur vos tombes les rameaux sanglants de la victoire” (1910, p. 17).

  35. For the argument placing Déroulède at the origins of twentieth-century nationalist (and, ultimately, fascist) thought, see Zeev Sternhell, “Paul Déroulède and the Origins of French Nationalism.” Sternhell does attend to the specificity of Déroulède’s own thought, admitting that his was a “nationalism that is nationalist before it is rightist,” though it eventually “merged with the Right, once the latter had made it an essential part of its doctrine” (1971, p. 70).

  36. “The fatherland is a natural society, or what amounts to exactly the same thing, a historical one. Its decisive characteristic is birth. One does not choose one’s fatherland—the land of one’s fathers—anymore than one chooses one’s father and mother” (Maurras 1937, p. 278; cited in Carroll 1995, p. 84).

  37. “…certain qu’on me chercherait partout ailleurs que là” and “… ayant écrit le mot [to his family] avec la plus grande légèreté et non sans rire, je ne trouvai pas mauvais de mettre dans ma poche le revolver de mon père” (OC I, 1970, p. 23).

  38. “Sir Edmond déployait dans ces circonstances une ingéniosité pleine d’humour: c’est ainsi que nous parcourûmes la grande rue de la petite ville de Ronda, lui et moi en curés espangnols, portant le petit chapeau de feutre velu et la cape drapée, fumant avec virilité de gros cigares…” (OC I, 1970, p. 69).

  39. According to Bataille, the name conflates the English address for God and a friend’s tendency to abbreviate the expletive, “aux chiottes!,” a juxtaposition that evokes the blasphemously parodic idea of “Dieu se soulageant” (OC III 1971, p. 59).

  40. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi argues that Bataille, along with the other members of the Collège de Sociologie, adopted an anti-aesthetic, and therefore anti-literary, position during the interwar years (2011, p. 192). I am suggesting that despite his attacks on modern “littérature” (for instance, in “L’apprenti sorcier” (1995, pp. 308–313), the character of Sir Edmond testifies to his enduring interest in the unique social powers of literature.

  41. “…implorerait en gémissant, il implorerait en mourant: ses larmes, dans cette lourde apothéose, seraient authentiquement des larmes de sang!” (OC X, 1987, p. 240).

  42. Bataille here cites Apollinaire’s collection of Sade’s works. Jane Gallop has shown that the will reproduced by Apollinaire is truncated, and in fact finishes with, “except for the small number of those who did try to love me up to the last moment” (Gallop 1981, p. 14).

  43. “Sade parle,” he says, “mais il parle au nom de la vie silencieuse, au nom d’une solitude parfaite, inévitablement muette” (OC X, 1987, p. 187).

  44. “Comme je me flatte que ma mémoire disparaisse de la mémoire des hommes” (cited in OC IX, 1979, p. 244). Absent Without Leave: French Literature under Threat of War is the title of the English translation of Denis Hollier’s very illuminating work on interwar French writing, Les Dépossédés: Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, Sartre.

  45. “La communauté sanguine et l’enchaînement au passé” (OC I, 1970, p. 462).

  46. Zarathustra, quand les regards des autres sont rivés aux pays de leurs pères, à leur patrie, Zarathustra voyait le PAYS DE SES ENFANTS. En face de ce monde couvert de plaies, il n’existe pas d’expression plus paradoxale, ni plus passionnée, ni plus grande” (OC I, 1970, p. 463).

  47. On Maurras, Bataille says, “National Socialism is less romantic and more Maurrassian then is sometimes imagined” (1985, p. 189) [“Le national-socialisme est moins romantique et plus maurrassien qu’on l’imagine” (OC I, 1970, p. 458)].

  48. “univers… de rire, de ravissement ou de sacrifice” (OC I, 1970, p. 465).

  49. “L’opération souveraine” (OC V, 1973, p. 223). See L’expérience intérieure (1943) and Méthode de méditation (1947).

  50. “Blanchot me rappelle que but, autorité sont des exigences de la pensée discursive” (OC V, 1973, p. 67).

  51. “L’opération souveraine, qui ne tient que d’elle-même l’autorité – expie en même temps cette autorité… elle n’est qu’impuissance, absence de durée, destruction haineuse (ou gaie) d’elle-même…” (OC V, 1973, p. 223).

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    Genevieve Amaral

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Amaral, G. “…leur anachronisme devient flagrant”: Georges Bataille, aristocracy, and writing in the interwar period. Neohelicon 42, 129–144 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-014-0265-6

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