Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (review)
Lewis, Stephen E.
Modernism/modernity, Volume 8, Number 2, April 2001, pp. 354-356 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2001.0030
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by Columbia University at 10/15/12 8:24PM GMT
M O D E R N I S M /
m o d e r n i t y
354
Challenging the prevailing psychological interpretations of his famous 1927 essay on thetruncated rationality of industrial capitalism, “The Mass Ornament,” Koch relates the notori-ously opaque notion of the surface developed by Kracauer to the ideas contained in a book he sympathetically reviewed at the time, a 1926 study on the philosophy of science by Paul Oppenheim. Serving “to reveal information on history,” the surface manifestations of mass cul-ture evident in the dancing limbs of the Tiller Girls no less than the crowds gathered in a sta-dium provide a “graphic, spatialized” means by which historical temporality can be depicted (30). Anticipating ideas on language and representation that Kracauer would later develop in his posthumously issued (and dazzlingly prescient) History, The Last Things Before the Last
(1969), “The Mass Ornament” reveals yet another instance of his predilection for spatial thought. Together with Miriam Hansen, Koch underscores that his objection to the “muteness” of the mass ornament, “its inability to read itself,” is grounded in the lack of an accurate vantage point from which its unwitting participants might adopt a position of critical distance.1
Koch reads Kracauer’s most famous book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), less as a deterministic theory of psychological dispositions than as a “social psychology with roots in a cultural anthropology” (80). She interprets him as a sophisti-cated theorist of film and subjectivity, a precursor in vital respects to the Althusserian theories of ideological interpellation that emerged in the 1970s. Especially persuasive is Koch’s discus-sion of his exchanges with Erwin Panofsky on the nature of visual content and motifs. Many times I found myself wishing for more immanent critique of the concepts she explicates. Writ-ing “the idea Benjamin and Kracauer pursue is that the epoch inscribed its signature in the surface of all the phenomena it spawned,” she never suggests whether she finds the Hegelian implications of such a claim tenable (72). Reading her book is a powerful reminder of the cen-trality of Weimar’s intellectual legacy to the many unresolved questions with which cultural historians and theorists still wrestle.
Note
1. Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56 (Spring 1992): 65.
Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin.
Peter Tracey Connor. Baltimore,
Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 198. $34.95 (cloth).
Reviewed by Stephen E. Lewis, University of Chicago
book reviews
355
this situation with careful readings of his writings executed within the intellectual and historical context of his period.1 Connor’s book distinguishes itself as both an excellent overall
introduc-tion to Bataille and an elegant piece of research into a specific, and very important, aspect of his thought: its relationship to mysticism. The book is clear, rigorous, and thorough in its exposition, and refreshing in its readability.
The book succeeds as both introduction and specialized investigation through its insightful core claim, which is that the paradoxical nature of Bataille’s relationship to Christian mysti-cism—his “willful rejection of its semantic [and religious] history” in order “to appropriate its power as a concept” for the purposes of “contesting” the authority of rational knowledge—has contributed decisively to the “delay” in the assimilation of his thought (54, 125, 15). Indeed, claims Connor, our understanding of the “relation between mysticism, politics, and morality in Bataille’s writings” has been “limited” and “skewed” by the terms in which Sartre, in his savage review of Bataille’s most ‘mystical’ book, L’expérience intérieure (1943), initiated debate on the writer’s paradoxical adoption of the “mystical lexicon” (22, 15, 54, 56). Thus Connor proceeds through three main chapters with detailed, lively textual explications demonstrating how and why Sartre misunderstood Bataille’s thought, focusing in particular on how the two thinkers’ respective understandings of terms such as “philosophy,” “mysticism,” “language,” “action,” and “morality” differ. He grounds his defense of Bataille in a wealth of intellectual detail from the period, so that we learn how the term “mystic” resonated among French literary intellectuals of the first half of the century, how Bataille found in the writings of various Christian mystics a “linguistic predicament” that he then employed to criticize the repression of “non-knowledge” in 1930s French interpretations of Kant and Hegel, and why Bataille’s writing, despite initial appearances, ought to be construed as ethically and politically committed (16–23, 27, 49, 132– 3, 151).
The elegant economy of the book’s structuring claim also brings a few liabilities, however. The apologetic nature of the claim limits Connor’s ability to be critical of Bataille, while its singular focus on Sartre prevents him from pursuing insights that emerge from Bataille’s inter-actions with other interlocutors. Taken together, these two drawbacks suggest that, in areas where Sartre was not Bataille’s best opponent (because of Sartre’s own intellectual limitations), an apologetic return to their debate obscures certain key aspects of Bataille’s thought in its relationship to mysticism. Nowhere are the limitations of Connor’s argumentative structure more apparent than in the section from which he draws his title: “The Mysticism of Sin: Bataille versus Sartre” (114–27).
The section focuses on the 5 March 1944 “Discussion on Sin,” an intriguing event attended by an impressive audience of Christian and secular intellectuals that took place as part of a series of lecture-discussions on religious and theological topics in the Paris apartment of the Catholic banker, intellectual, and friend of Bataille, Marcel Moré. Connor describes the event as “a clash between the exigencies of the vita activa and the vocation of the vita contemplativa,
between the in-the-world philosopher and the alleged mystic”; he further writes that “the Chris-tian contingent had requested that Bataille clarify his position on the question of ethics,” and that during the discussion segment of the event, “Bataille [was] coerced, notably by Sartre, into disambiguating, as far as possible, his thinking on morals” (119).
M O D E R N I S M /
m o d e r n i t y
356
length to the text Bataille circulated among the participants prior to the event, pointedlyad-dressing key issues in his paradoxical relationship to Christian mysticism from the sophisticated and challenging point of view, at once philosophical and theological, that characterizes Daniélou’s extensive writings. Published in volume six of Bataille’s Œuvres complètes with the rest of the “Discussion sur le péché,” Daniélou’s text is not difficult to find. Moreover, its pertinence to the topic is clear: textual evidence shows that he played an important (though repressed) role in Bataille’s thinking about inner experience and sin.3
The absence of Daniélou and those like him from Connor’s account can be felt at both the micro- and macrolevels of his argument.4 At the level of details, there is the rather preposterous
way in which Sartre, in the “Mysticism of Sin” section, functions implicitly as the spokesman for Christianity. On the larger plane, I regret Connor’s missed opportunities to test Bataille’s theo-ries about, for instance, the nature of Christianity, or the essence of the confessional mystical experience, against the arguments of interlocutors who, unlike Sartre, held nuanced under-standings of the relationship between mystical experience, mystical theology, and philosophy, and who were thus capable of genuine theological thinking (110–4, 118–122, 55–8). Connor himself concedes Sartre’s inadequacy as an interlocutor when he notes that the philosopher’s use of the word “mystic” betrays a lack of basic familiarity with the mystical tradition, or when, in the course of describing the Bataille-Sartre impasse over the power of language to signify the aporias of reason, he remarks, “on this point it no longer seems useful to trace the sallies of the polemic” (26, 126). The apologetic structure of Connor’s otherwise excellent book thus be-comes a liability when it leads him to treat Bataille’s theories (e.g. of “the sacred,” of “project” or “reason” or “discursive thought,” of “sovereignty”) as unproblematically true, foundational ac-counts of reality. Fortunately, the book also points to the surest way out of the problem: further critical recovery of the intellectual context in which Bataille’s thought took shape.
Notes
1. Examples include Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (New York: Routledge, 1994); Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave: French Literature Under the Threat of War, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
2. On the origins and form of the “Discussion,” see Marcel Moré, La foudre de Dieu (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 8, 214; Jean Daniélou, “Et qui est mon prochain? (extraits),” Digraphe no. 86–7, 128; François L’Yvonnet, “Entretien avec Maurice de Gandillac, autour de Marcel Moré et de Dieu Vivant,” Digraphe no. 86–7, 93–6.
3. See the notes to Le coupable and Sur Nietzsche, respectively, where Bataille evokes private conversations with Daniélou in the period 1941–3, during which he was composing the volumes that form the ‘mystical’ Somme athéologique (Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes. 12 volumes. Paris: Gallimard, 1971–88, V, 543; VI, 397).
