IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.
WHY I CAN’T STAND GEORGES BATAILLE
by Dr. Joseph Suglia
I discovered Bataille at the age of eighteen. Here was a French Nietzschean who wrote strident essays and excessively explicit novels. What was there not to like? Throughout my eighteenth and nineteenth years, I read the oeuvres of Bataille, alongside the works of Heidegger, Derrida, and many others.
Around the age of twenty, my relationship with Bataille underwent a change. I could no longer stand to read his writings.
La Littérature et le Mal (1957) destroyed my love for Bataille. The book is almost unreadably silly. Bataille argues, with the most incredible casuistry, that literature and evil are the same. Literature evades collective necessity. Evil evades collective necessity. Both literature and evil evade collective necessity. Therefore, literature IS evil. However, this does not seem to imply, according to Bataille, that evil is literature.
This is a bit like saying: A duck is not a zebra. A chicken is not a zebra. Therefore, a duck is a chicken. However, a chicken is not a duck. This is the logical fallacy known as affirmative conclusion from a negative premise or illicit negative.
“Hegel, la Mort et le Sacrifice” (1955) troubled me, as well. I had read enough of Hegel to know that Bataille was making intellectual errors, was misinterpreting Hegel.
Bataille’s misinterpretation of Hegel may be summarized thus: Human beings sacrifice the animal parts of themselves in order to become fully human. Nowhere does this statement appear in the Gesammelte Werke of Hegel. Hegel writes instead: [Der Geist] gewinnt seine Wahrheit nur, indem er in der absoluten Zerrissenheit sich selbst findet. When he writes that the Spirit finds itself in a state of absolute shreddedness, Hegel means that the human mind exteriorizes itself as an object and restores itself from its self-exteriorization. The human mind is both itself and outside-of-itself at the same time. There is no sacrifice of the animal for the sake of the human.
In L’Érotisme (1957), Bataille’s thesis is that death and eroticism issue from the same source, and many of his arguments are unforgettably convincing. But his opening argument is both banal and irrelevant: Bataille contends that the relation between sex and death is apprehensible at the microbiological level: When the ovum is fertilized, it is demolished. The ovum “dies” in order to form the zygote.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the phenomenology of eroticism, nor does it have anything to do with the phenomenology of mortality.
Last month, I read as much as I could endure of the fragments collected in The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge. These are the incoherent screechings of a lunatic.
* * * * *
THE BLUE OF NOON: A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
According to Georges Bataille’s autobiographical note, Le Bleu du ciel (“The Blue of the Sky”) was composed in the twilight before the occupation of Vichy France.
The descending night darkens these pages.
Dissolute journalist Henri Troppmann (“Too-Much-Man”) and his lover, Dirty give way to every impulse, to every surfacing urge, no matter how vulgar. Careening from one sex-and-death spasm to the next, they deliver themselves over to infinite possibilities of debauchery. A fly drowning in a puddle of whitish fluid (or is it the thought of his mother, a woman he must not desire?) prompts Troppmann to plunge a fork into a woman’s supple white thigh. The threat of Nazi terror incites a coupling in a boneyard.
Their only desire is to begrime whatever is elevated, to vulgarize the holy, to pollute it, to corrupt it, to bring it down into the mud.
By muddying whatever is “sacred,” they maintain the force of “the sacred.”
As a historical document, Le Bleu du ciel is eminently interesting. It offers unforgettably vivid portraits of Colette Peignot (as Dirty) and the “red nun” Simone Weil (as Lazare).
It is also the story of a man who is fascinated with fascism and the phallus, of someone who loves war, though not for teleological reasons. It is the story of a man who celebrates war on its own terms, who nihilistically affirms its limitless power of destruction.
As the night spreads, the blue of the sky disappears.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO READ MY MASTERPIECE TABLE 41:
The interview is my favorite part. do more interviews.
Pingback: The Collected Essays and Squibs of Joseph Suglia | drjosephsuglia
Pingback: SELECTED ESSAYS AND SQUIBS by Joseph Suglia | Selected Essays and Squibs by Joseph Suglia
Pingback: Selected Essays and Squibs by Dr. Joseph Suglia | Selected Essays and Squibs by Joseph Suglia
Pingback: Selected Essays and Squibs by Dr. Joseph Suglia | Selected Essays and Squibs by Joseph Suglia
I came to read Bataille novels as a teen and it was fascinating as evil. The end of my journey with him was when I found myself trying to decypher “L’abbé C.” as just an elaborated silly joke based on a pun (L’abbé chiant sous les pas d’Epone”. I couldn’t get to anything conclusive and left it. Later I tried to read “La notion de dépense” and in spite of its very impressing style (beauty of the devil) it didn’t seem to make much sense. So I read Mauss on Potlatch which in turn didn’t convince me. This was at the time I understood all the sickness of modern intellectualism, down to Debord.
Sometimes you’re happy to be an uneducated worker.
Pingback: Selected Essays and Squibs by Dr. Joseph Suglia: A Table of Contents | Selected Essays and Squibs by Joseph Suglia
Pingback: Selected Essays and Squibs by Joseph Suglia: Table of Contents | Selected Essays and Squibs by Joseph Suglia
Pingback: Table of Contents: SELECTED ESSAYS AND SQUIBS by Joseph Suglia | Selected Essays and Squibs by Joseph Suglia
TL;DR.