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Abstract
The recent publication of a new translation of On Nietzsche invites renewed consid-
eration of one of Georges Bataille’s most intriguing and complex texts. This work
was originally situated within La Somme athéologique, Bataille’s unfinished project for a
set of texts exploring the paradoxes of religious atheism. These texts are often
consumed with a religious fervour and seem far from the explicitly political consid-
erations of Bataille’s anti-fascist texts in the 1930s, or from the more measured
analytical tone of The Accursed Share. However, as some critics have suggested,
these texts have a political significance of their own. This review essay will thus
consider the tensions between Bataillean perspectives which put more weight on
either the ‘political’ or the ‘religious’ as modes of analysis. It begins with an analysis of
On Nietzsche before moving to a broader thematic discussion of religion in several
recently published texts related to Bataille. The central question posed in the latter
half of the article is the following: how can Bataille’s thought be deployed to theorize
the religiosity of contemporary capitalism?
Keywords
Georges Bataille, capitalism, excess, Nietzsche, politics, religion
La Limite de l’utile
Georges Bataille,
preface by Mathilde Girard
Paris: Éditions Lignes, 2016
On Nietzsche
Georges Bataille,
trans. Stuart Kendall
New York: SUNY Press, 2015
Capitalisme et djihadisme
Michel Surya
Paris: Éditions Lignes, 2016
These ethical poles are not states of being but rather moral orienta-
tions. This is because the ‘summit’ is seen as synonymous with the impos-
sible. We cannot exist in any extended state of ‘limitless’ expenditure. The
summit names a desire for the impossible, which always ‘slips away from
us’ (p. 50). Just as the summit is ultimately the inaccessible, the exhaus-
tion of ‘decline’ is inevitable. We strive for one and strive to avoid the
other. The consequences of this slippery conception of morality are that
it cannot be defined without being betrayed. Bataille notes of Nietzsche
that ‘with just cause he thought that one cannot define something that is
free’ (p. 166), and the same applies to Bataille’s work here. The freedom
of the summit is bound up with its elusiveness and instability. To defini-
tively situate it would irrevocably compromise that promise of freedom.
The form of the book On Nietzsche itself thus reflects the incomplete
nature of the morality of which it speaks. It is not a programme for a
new moral order but an invitation to the reader to discover hypermor-
ality immanently. It does not necessarily propose an entirely new order of
the real but attempts to punch holes in the already existing order of the
real.
On Nietzsche was written during the final months of Nazi occupation
of France in 1944. It was the final publication of Bataille’s Somme athe´o-
logique. Many critics have expressed frustration and disappointment with
subsequent work, more sober, with much less of the religious fervour
found throughout the Somme athe´ologique. The reception of Bataille
has often been divided between those, such as Nick Land, who celebrate
the excess and rhetorical animus of Bataille’s earlier work, and those,
such as Jean-Luc Nancy, who have a more ‘sober’ reading of Bataille,
particularly based on an engagement with Bataille’s postwar critical read-
ings. This split in how Bataille has been read has a special relationship to
the theme of sacrifice. Bataille’s valorization of sacrifice appeared to
reach its zenith in 1939 when, in an exceptionally strange moment in
French intellectual history, he expressed his desire to enact a human
sacrifice as part of the secret society Acéphale. His texts from the
period reflect this belief in sacrifice. From that period onward, his atti-
tude towards sacrifice was often more tempered, even implicitly critical.
The logic of sacrifice implies a communion with death, a philosophical
monism and a nostalgia for presence. By contrast, many of Bataille’s
later texts more often stress the ultimate impossibility of such commu-
nion. The themes of the impossible and of the irresolvability of worldly
tensions come to have greater prominence in his thinking, bound up with
a generally more cautious critical attitude.
‘S’il est vrai que Bataille avait alors quitte´ l’ambition de former une
communaute´ et souffrait l’abandon de ceux qui l’avaient, avant guerre,
accompagne´, La Limite de l’utile semble contredire l’hypothe`se qu’en
entrant dans l’expe´rience inte´rieure Bataille ait ce´de´ sur ce qui faisait
pour lui le sens (mortel) d’une communaute´. (p. 19) [If it is true that
Bataille had then given up on the ambition to form a community
and suffered the abandonment of those who had accompanied him
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
before the war, The Limit of the Useful seems to contradict the
hypothesis that in entering into inner experience Bataille had
ceded on that which constituted for him the (mortal) meaning of
a community’].
Until our times, there had only been a single historical example of
the sudden formation of a total power, namely, the Islamic
Khalifat . . . Just like early Islam, fascism represents the constitution
of a total heterogeneous power whose manifest origin is to be
found in the prevailing effervescence. (1985: 153, referenced by
Surya, p. 47)
Note
1. Translations throughout the text are my own.
References
Bataille G (2016) La Limite de l’utile. Paris: Éditions Lignes.
Bataille G (2015) On Nietzsche. New York: SUNY Press.
Bataille G (1985) The psychological structure of fascism. In: Visions of Excess:
Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Biles J and Brintnall K (2015) Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study
of Religion. New York: Fordham University Press.
Goux JJ (1990) General economics and postmodern capitalism. Yale French
Studies 78: 206–224.
Surya M (2016) Capitalisme et djihadisme. Paris: Éditions Lignes.
This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section,
‘Bataille and Heterology’, edited by Roy Boyne and Marina Galletti.