Schizogenesis

by
Georges Bataille
Translated by Rowan G. Tepper
Translation of La Scissiparité (1949)
Translation is essentially an act of reproduction, and every translation is marked by the degree to which it
simultaneously differs and remains identical to the original. Even that most elementary of reproductive acts is no
exception: the duplication by division of certain single-celled organisms signified by the title under which
Schizogenesis was originally published in French, La Scissiparité, necessarily introduces difference in the
preservation of sameness. Accordingly, I decided against translating the title literally as “Scissiparity” and have
opted instead for the neologism “Schizogenesis,” so as to better convey the philosophical and metaphorical sense
in which Bataille employed the term in several contemporaneous and connected texts, such as The Accursed
Share and the epilogue to On Nietzsche. The title and the term suggests doubling, twinning, doppelgangers and
split personalities, while signifying philosophically a critical moment in which continuity and discontinuity,
immanence and transcendence, the self and the other (self) emerge out of an undifferentiated superposition in a
process of bifurcation.1
Although this text was originally published without introduction in the spring 1949 issue of Les Cahiers
de la Pleiade, Bataille's manuscripts and correspondence indicate that Schizogenesis was written as a prologue to
a longer work, which can be none other than L'Abbé C (and, after a fashion, the récits comprising La Haine de la
Poesie, Story of Rats and Dianus). The two thus illuminate one another: it is clear, then, that Charles and Robert
C. are not, in fact, twins – they are, on the contrary, one and the same person. Schizogenesis depicts at once the
genesis of two distinct perspectives and personalities, and at the same time their immanence, their
(dis)continuity.

Rowan G. Tepper
11 November, 2012
Philadelphia

1 One can find philosophical expositions of Bataille's concept of schizogenesis in the unpublished manuscript version of
the philosophical epilogue to On Nietzsche (Oeuvres Completes Tome VI, pp. 441-453), and especially his 1956 essay,
“L'erotisme ou la mise en question de l'etre” (1956) in Oeuvres Completes Tome XII, pp. 395-413.
 I

Possessed by rage and enraged.

My head? A nail, a new-born nail newly born.

I cry. No one hears me. The opacity, eternity, empty silence – mine, of course.
Screaming out, I suppress myself: this conviction is worthy of praise.

I'll eat, d..., write, laugh, fear death, and grow pale at the thought of nails being turned back.

II

I'd like to take hold of an unyielding idea of myself, to raise my furrowed brow into the air, denying the
odor of death.

I'd like to forget the imperceptible slippage of myself into corruption.

I'm nauseated by the sky whose blinding sweetness has the obscenity of a “girl” going to bed.

I imagine an attractive prostitute, elegant, naked and dispirited, with her piglet-like gaity.

A festive sun flooded the room. I shaved myself clean before a mirror bordered with an ornate gilded
frame. Standing up, I turned back toward the orb of the sun, but the mirror reproduced its image before
my face. Who am I? I ought to have had the strength in me to trace clearly the letters of my name and
today's date upon the sun-lit window: there, I should have stopped thinking and laughed at it all the more.
Am I but an effect of the mirror's duplicity, the illuminated immensity, and of this too easy relation with
myself ?

I ought to have a sublime idea of myself: for that, I have the necessary strength. I equate love (bodies
touching indecently) with the limitlessness of being – with nausea, the sun, and death. Obscenity reveals a
moment flowing into a delirium of the senses.

It is what within my character that is least often called out (but, at last): the side gustave (or pig).
 III

Letter from the author to Mme E...

Received a telegram from the Monsignor:

“Success. Hurry. Difficult situation.”
I gazed at myself at length in the mirror and I'm afraid I'll burst out laughing.
The duplicity [dédoublement] of the Monsignor irritates me almost to the point of losing my head.
What it lets me catch a glimpse of it is the ground of things, which is decidedly a lie.

Letter from Mme E... to the author

...finally, my throat has closed up. Your words have placed me in the most nerve-wracking state I've ever known. At
moments I burst out laughing. And I imagine that, from now on, this insane laughter will never cease. It does,
and at that very moment I have the painful yet voluptuous feeling of being caught in a trap, like a rat...
 IV

Met Mme E... in Paris. We left the next day for Rome, where we awaited the Monsignor. Monsignor, or
rather...

Opera. Loud music. Much liquor.

In the morning, falling, sharp knife in hand, I cut open my finger. M me E... laughed loudly to see me fall,
but the abundant blood and her laughter heightened the feeling of awkwardness. I brought the discomfort
to an end with a smile: I was pleasant, loose and adorable: she, sly, pale and willfully indecent.

If intelligence is feminine...

... I would want that mine would, in a resolute movement, resemble an impious woman.

A conjugation of corporeal words exists which ends in a comical song.

I'll sing to the shame of the banquet table :

Ravadja la moukère
Ravadja bono

and, in spite of me, outside of me, the violence of the song rebounds:

Soak your ass in a bowl of stew,

You will see if it is hot or cool.

If she did not go all the way to ravjada, this impious woman would not have so resolutely illuminated the
force of decay, neither would it have been so resolutely beautiful: the rot and ray of the sun. But it is my
way of loving Mme E..., of laughing and, finally, of reasoning.

Alexandrette visited at two o'clock. I trembled (the liquor from the night before?). It seemed hateful like
the little fly-cages, which as a child, I filled with disgustingly living insects. It was gone and we remained,
Mme E... and myself, in the desert of f..., in a grandiloquent movement, exposed to the hostility of the stars.
Less than two hours later we departed on the train to Rome.

Music from last evening sprang into my head. To cry, to vomit – happy! Disheveled streams. Courtesy of
Mme E... Bare-shouldered, well educated, but such indecency!
 V

Today, when I make love the feeling that my pleasure must inevitably come to an end – that I will die
without having been satisfied – doesn't rob me of it. It came to me like a dream, during that happy excess
burning pleasure itself annuls: I imagine a time when I would no longer possess the means to renew it. I
lacked the feeling of the festival's exuberant luxury, the puerile malice and laughter that is equal to God! It
is true, this power itself is in decline: it is of the same nature as sorrow. Abandon myself to my moods?
Rather, I give myself up to the impossible, and I come like a dying monster.

Rome, a taxi-cab, Mme E...Violent lightning of an electrical storm. Rain and moonlight in white streets of
tragicomedy: pines, delights and indolence.

I accept life on one condition.

To be carried by the theatre chorus through sublimity, eternity, lies, singing at the top of my lungs.

Bought a wolf for Mme E... Thirsty for insolence, I was the one who threw the Monsignor's parties.

I'm intoxicated in strange ways.

Singing with the masses, except for the old and grey.
Ten thousand eyes in the night are the starry sky.

The more anxious the man, the happier the man.

Invoking death, he cries:
– Satiate your comical knives, sharpen them on the teeth in which they are held –

The woman partly disrobed (profoundly indecent, as I've said): her nakedness to the degree of death, death
to the degree of her nakedness.
 VI

Village idiot!

The sole measure of my design exists before the casings and the counterfeit (the part that I'd completely
adopted to reunite, in the night – without saying more – what occupies us). That it is necessary to go far... To
be a star and disgrace the heights of the skies. Hearing nothing, neither cries nor discourse in the solitude
of the sky. I called the Monsignor on the phone.

And we, we arrive within an hour.

Alpha, Beta (thus we distinguish among the actors, the descendents of a duplication [dédoublement]), Mme E...
and me.

Like me, Mme E..., naked in the taxi, drunk without alcohol, and laughing as though deaf:
– But who spoke to you? Alpha? Beta?
The confusion gave her features a slow, voluptuous convulsion.

The prelate descended the stone staircase toward us, hands extended.
Mme E..., impatient, said to him with a girlish laugh:
– Bonjour Beta!

When Mme E... said to “Bonjour Beta” to him, what struck me (I feel as happy here at the foot of the sunlit
staircase as the panels where, like spicy little dishes, trussed and robed goddesses pay sly homage to
pleasure) was the vulgarity of my friend. Bowing, she kissed the priest's ring, and this humble movement
like the instant before her coarse laughter called out her animalistic nature. I recalled what one does not
usually see in Mme E... other than the “girl.” In this unreal luxury I became all the happier, for such a true
poverty responded to my passions.

Without transition the moment became serious.

Suddenly I knew that at the top of the staircase, in an obscene disorder, I'd see the other side [of the world].

I understand that, in spite of their agreeable appearance, they remained disposed to more debauched
vows in this palace of tragedy, which seemed empty because its threshold is no longer bloody, because the
dogs of Jezebel had already crossed it taking flight.
What struck within this palace - as though in a sudden theatrical blow - was the hatred of men that they
shared. The top of the monumental staircase that the Monsignor and M me E... laughing, climbed, did not
attract me only as though it were the threshold to a dreadful kingdom. I could not prevent myself from
seeing in contrast - to Mme E...'s triumphal moment, her high waist and her audacious airs, a lady ennobled
by the stone framework - the image of a stone woman. Not that I then saw anything more than a royal
entrance. I didn't see my friend on the terrace, in blood, in mud, in the unworldly noise of the crowd. (The
roof does not suggest a crushed body but brings about vertigo.)

Rarely, my friend's desire took me in a more bestial manner. I'm satisfied by a certain warmth that, in a
sense, is frozen and frigid. I felt like a crowd at a stoning, perspiring hatred.
Which cannot wait for an instant.
Mme E... rapidly crossed the threshold.
Alpha opened the door after two knocks.