Category Archives: la revue de georges bataille

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WHY YOU SHOULD READ KAFKA BEFORE YOU WASTE YOUR LIFE by James Hawes

IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.

A Review of EXCAVATING KAFKA, also known as WHY YOU SHOULD READ KAFKA BEFORE YOU WASTE YOUR LIFE (James Hawes) by Joseph Suglia

My goodness!  Kafka was an onanist!  Alert the presses!  James Hawes’s “revelations” in Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life aren’t particularly “revelatory”–any self-respecting “Kafkologist” knows that Kafka subscribed to Der Amethyst, a literary and aesthetic journal that Hawes finds “pornographic.”  And I don’t need James Hawes, failed novelist, to demystify Kafka’s allegedly “saintly” image for me.  Milan Kundera did that himself many years ago–not that I am an admirer of Milan Kundera.

Has it never dawned on Hawes that perhaps Kafka was a subscriber to Der Amethyst because it contained contemporary avant-garde literature or because Franz Blei published that journal–Franz Blei, who ALSO published Kafka’s own Betrachtungen?  (Parenthetical question: Does Hawes TRULY know German?  There are very few references here, and they are largely to English-language texts.)  And has it never dawned upon the author that Kafka perhaps did NOT see masturbatory possibilities therein?  I am reminded of one of my best friends, who happens to be gay and who collects heterosexual pornography, which he finds intriguing from an aesthetic, political, and cultural perspective.  Did Hawes find STAINS?

And so the philistinic and moralistically hypocritical James Hawes equates Der Amethyst with Penthouse, Blei with an “Edwardian Larry Flynt,” Octave Mirbeau and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch with back-room, dime-store pornography, Gustav Klimt with Girls Gone Wild, and a familiar passage in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers with Kafka’s Die Verwandlung–as if he were the first person to see the resemblance.  Oooooo… Werther imagines himself turning into a May beetle (Maikäfer)…  Gregor Samsa imagines himself turning into a vermin (Ungeziefer)…  Ooooooooooo…  What a revelation!  Ooooooooo…

Instead of engaging with the form and meaning of Kafka’s writing, Hawes, failed novelist, grubs about in Kafka’s life, which is the pitfall of most Kafka scholarship.  Only a few philologists have insightfully commented on Kafka–Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Corngold.  Hawes, predictably, focuses upon the tabloid aspects of Kafka’s life.  And so Hawes, while pretending to present Kafka as a man of the world, merely reinforces the dreary, pseudo-moralistic cliches about Kafka, who is often mistyped as a “dark and lonely masturbator.”

James Hawes, now older than Kafka was when he died, releasing all of his envious venom on a great writer, is the true pornographer.

Joseph Suglia

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WHY I CAN’T STAND GEORGES BATAILLE / BLEU DU CIEL / THE BLUE OF NOON by Georges Bataille

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.

“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.

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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: