Chicago, 6 November 2005
Bataille and the Writing of Sacrifice
language communicates the excessive movement of the subject’s expenditure, and dramatizes the sacrifice of the author.
In “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh” [“La Mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh”] Bataille discusses, from the interdisciplinary perspective of a psychoanalyst-sociologist-mythologist-philosopher (as if dancing from position to position, never maintaining a singular reference point – exceeding disciplinary boundaries), cases in which subjects undergo a crisis that results in auto-mutilation. He links such acts to the spirit of sacrifice. Civilization defines itself in relation to the barbarity of “savage” peoples who engage in the practice of sacrifice. To be modern is to abstain from any such practices, but Bataille notes a return of the repressed:
It is not less striking that, in our day, with the custom of sacrifice in full decline, the meaning of the word, to the extent that it implies a drive revealed by an inner experience, is still as closely linked as possible to the notion of a spirit of sacrifice, of which the automutilation of madmen is only the most absurd and terrible example. (67)
This example (in the spirit of surrealism) is to shake us from the stasis of conventional representation/s. Van Gogh provides us with a challenge to the egoistic confines of rationality. Bataille does not want to reduce these examples to the knowable; rather, they open thought to a thinking of the “necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself” (67). Such a consciousness invites thought to escape the subject through a
(70). Through this ek-stasis, sacrifice breaks down the barriers between self and alterity. Sacrifice communicates this drive felt as inner experience. The cogito does not here isolate itself in auto-gratification; the I that thinks collapses its position of closure and stands outside itself in the ecstasy of a finite transcendence. However, throughout “Sacrificial Mutilation” Bataille remains situated in a position of observation, looking at extreme cases of insanity. One senses the power unleashed in sacrifice, but this power remains with the other.
The first sentence of “The Jesuve” [“Le Jesuve”] communicates the interior experience of the sacrificial power overwhelming the subject, in which the subject is radically exposed, opened as if through a wound to the ecstatic: “I have acquired over what happens to me a power that overwhelms me” (73). What happens to the subject is an overcoming of subjectivity. The going under of the subject is an overcoming of the subject’s limit and isolation. Returning to the question of sacrifice, he notes:
(74). The word “comrades” suggests a sense of community is central to his concerns. Bataille describes the way in which he conceived of the “pineal eye”:
I imagined the eye at the summit of the skull like a horrible erupting volcano, precisely with the shady and comical character associated with the rear end and its excretions. Now the eye is without any doubt the symbol of the dazzling sun and the one I imagined at the summit of my skull was necessarily on fire, since it was doomed to the contemplation of the sun at the apogee of its brilliance. (74)
He tells of how he had taken this exercise of the imagination to the point of belief in the inevitability of the phenomenon as an evolutionary fact.1 Bataille insists that “I was not
insane but I made too much of the necessity of leaving, in one way or another, the limits of our human experience” (74). How are we to understand this confession of making “too much” of this necessity? Perhaps he took this movement as too violent in its excessiveness. But why, then, communicate this with the intent to provoke, or, did he not publish this essay because of this polemic? The movement operates through scientific knowledge breaking into speculation and then pushed to religious fervor, at which point he suffered bliss: “my imagination did not go on without giving me horrible brain transports, accompanied by an intense satisfaction” (77). The experience is felt as intense ambivalence. The “brain transports” are both horrifying and gratifying. The movement is sacrificial; an auto-mutilation in which rational consciousness is expended, exploding
1 This conception of the pineal gland as the seat of transcendental consciousness
through the top of the skull (creating an acephalic consciousness in which the Sun is no longer an object which blinds the subject).
He concludes “The Jesuve” with a description of an experience that overcame him at the Zoological Gardens of London. The site of an ape’s anal projection “overwhelmed me to the point of throwing me into a kind of state of ecstatic brutishness” (78). Here we can see how although the writing describes an ecstatic experience, what is written remains the writing of an “I.” This memory triggers off a writing of sacrificial violence, which remains an expression of the writer’s imagination in that what is written is not descriptive or prescriptive but provocative:
I cannot imagine the enormous anal fruit [. . .] other than as an ignoble skull that I would smash with an axe blow, a rattled grunt deep in my throat. The axe blade would sink into this imaginary skull, like the cleavers of butchers that split in two, in a violent block struck on the block, the sickening heads of skinned rabbits. (78)
The text appears, at moments, to be confessional, writing by a subject who constructs the text around memories in which that subjectivity slips away (but not a disappearance) into ecstasy. Consciousness is focused on the exterior object at which violence is directed. Bataille does not write of a heavenly vision that lifts the subject into transcendental contemplation of the divine object. Homogeneity breaks under the explosive force of the heterogeneous.
of logic, but he recognizes himself, instead, not only with rage but in an ecstatic torment – in the virulence of his own phantasms” (80). The identity founded on rational consciousness is no longer valid. Rather than this ordered stasis, consciousness achieves self-recognition paradoxically through losing itself in the projection of images encountered in inner experience. But it is an exterior object that accesses the alterity of the inner experience. That which is most repulsive to the ego provokes a disturbance that carried consciousness outside itself: “undergoing, without being overwhelmed, the attraction of the most repulsive objects” (80). The subject remains, but recognizes its finitude through transcendence, no longer taking itself as absolute.
inner experience provoked by the unity of the object of erotic attraction and the object of violent repulsion. The touch does not result in synthesis but in rapture. The subject exposed to this sacrifice is drawn into its excessive movement. This scene consumes the subject through which a spectral projection is conjured in the free falseness of uninhibited mimetic play: “it was not a mere carcass that the mouth of the Englishwoman crushed her most burning, her sweetest kisses, but on the nauseating JESUVE” (86). The writing subject is reconstituted through this impossible memory that breaks from its remembrance (again, a break in language – the descriptive scene in interrupted by the indescribable). The binary oppositions posted (as the subject observes these objects) are staged as an initial dialectic (male/female, human/animal, mind/anus, sun/dirt), which does not result in an Aufhebung, for this negativity is non-appropriable. The subject does not render a meaning to the other, reducing it to sameness; rather, the rational order of signification collapses into a mimetic chaos in which identities shift and meaning dissolves. The sacrifice of the gibbon is the death of meaning. The subject is thrown into an abyss of non-knowing. It is here that language is experienced in its essence. We are most aware of language - we most sense its immediacy - precisely when it escapes us. Ellipses do not indicate an omission or suppression of language, but language exceeding itself (the language of ecstasy).
staging. The mimetic distance of the reader is three-folds removed from the inner experience. The reader looks at Bataille looking at the sacrifice. Does the subject that reads the subject that collapses collapse as well? We look on like Pentheus, masked in the other’s identity, in danger of being dismembered and consumed. The danger is in the imaginary, but this does not make it any less real. The danger is the threat to identity, to the transcendental security of the subject constructed in the onto-theo-logical tradition. Literary contact is perhaps the most dangerous in that what is at stake is language, therefore signification. This communication threatens to spread like an infection and destroy the homogeneous order of the static subject. Bataille writes sacrifice as a significatory crisis, unleashing the energies denied by the anthropologos of the onto-theo-logical tradition, providing us with an exemplary case of modernist excess.
Works Cited
