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DOI: 10.1353/com.2014.0000
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SEAN P
. CONNOLLY
Georges Bataille, Gender, and Sacrificial Excess
Excess cannot be philosophically founded, since excess exceeds foundation: excess is the very thing for which being is,
first and foremost, beyond all limits. Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda
here are likely few authors for whom the concept of excess is more singularly significant than Georges Bataille (1897–1962). All throughout his diverse writings, which include political and philosophical essays, fiction, poetry, and letters span-ning more than three decades and twelve volumes of collected works, “excess” is a notion characterizing everything from his mystical ontology in works like Erotism to his spectacularly graphic erotic fiction in works like My Mother and Story of the Eye. Indeed, his multivolume work he Accursed Share presents a veritable cos-mology and world history of excess, tracing the ineluctable operation of useless consumption or “unproductive expenditure” throughout human history and civili-zation, which is to be found principally in those perennially prodigal human ac-tions with no greater purpose, like play, art, luxury, and even religion. For Bataille, these forms of wasteful activity represent not only desirable pursuits for humanity, but indeed the purpose and ultimate end of all human endeavors, representing even the defining element of human identity itself. “Man is the most suited of all living beings,” he writes, “to consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy offered up by the pressure of life to conflagrations” (Accursed Share37). he prodigal waste of one’s own excess energy and resources, therefore, finds its natural conclusion in the expenditure of life in the assent to exceed even life itself, above all, in death. It is for this reason that “life’s intimacy,” he writes, “does not reveal it’s dazzling consump-tion until the moment it gives out” (heory of Religion47).
excremental waste. As he explains in an oblique reference to Freudian dream sym-bolism in his 1933 essay “he Notion of Expenditure”:
Jewels must not only be beautiful and dazzling . . . : one sacrifices a fortune, pre-ferring a diamond necklace; such a sacrifice is necessary for the constitution of this necklace’s fascinating character . . . When in a dream a diamond signifies ex-crement, it is not only a question of association by contrast; in the unconscious, jewels, like excrement, are cursed matter that flows from a wound: they are a part of oneself destined for open sacrifice. (Visions 119)
Having been delivered from what he terms a “restricted economy” of conservation, exchange, growth, and accumulation, luxury represents a form of expenditure that occupies what he terms a “general economy” of gits, prodigality, expenditure, and excess. hus, luxurious excesses possess an inherently sacrificial character. “his is so clearly the precise meaning of sacrifice,” he writes, “that one sacrifices what is useful; one does not sacrifice luxurious objects . . . Depriving the labor of manufac-ture of its usefulness at the outset, luxury has already destroyed that labor; it has dissipated it in vainglory . . . To sacrifice a luxury object would be to sacrifice the same object twice” (heory of Religion 50). Once delivered into a general economy of wasteful excess, therefore, the sacrificial object cannot be reappropriated into a restricted economy of usefulness and productivity, despite the usefulness implied in its manufacture. Such would contradict both the very purpose of the sacrifice itself and the object’s destructive transformation into useless excess.
THECOMPARATIST
sometimes even with the sacrificer. All the differing elements that enter into ordi-nary sacrifice here enter into each other and become mixed together” (“Sacrificial Mutilation” 69; Mauss 101).
In this “mixture,” sacrifice to the god is also therefore a sacrifice of the god as Mauss himself notes: “the notion of sacrifice to the god developed parallel with that of sacrifice of the god” (Mauss 90). he life given in sacrifice is the very same life taken away in a perpetual, paradoxical, and undifferentiated excess of life and death communally shared by all. hus Mauss’s insistence on identifying the exe-cutioner with the victim and his observation that “the death of God is oten by suicide” (Mauss 84). Sacrifice, for which the sacrifice of the god is the quintessen-tial expression, reveals life itself to be an essence common to man and the divine, executioner and victim, and, ultimately, individual and community. Sacrifice is the death of one life for life itself, of death for one common life, a communal life, re-vealing the result of all sacrifice to be always ultimately somehow self- sacrificial. As the paradigmatic death of the god suggests, both life and death, utility and waste, self and other, paradoxically possess the very same condition of possibility in sac-rifice, which achieves a shared life through a shared death. Sacrifice always implies, therefore, self- sacrifice, and therefore a paradox that lies at the heart of all identity for Bataille, whether it be the identity of god, the group, or oneself.
As the analysis above would suggest, the political consequences of Bataille’s notion of sacrifice are paradoxical and complex. As Jesse Goldhammer has shown, sacrificial excess not only challenges the principles of liberal individualism and utilitarianism, but also those of economic justice and redistribution (Goldhammer 22). As a fundamentally “useless practice,” he rightly claims that sacrifice is not po-litically “progressive” or “constructive” for Bataille; its “violence and destructive-ness ontologically tear individuals apart, allowing them to forge unique communal bonds with other similarly sundered, anguished human beings . . . Bataillean sacri-fice challenges human beings to confront and test the limits of their communities and being” (Goldhammer 23). Yet it is precisely this testing, challenging, and con-frontation—in short, this transgression—of individual and social limits that has made Bataille so significant not only to the French Let and its intellectual history, but also to gender studies and its politics.
many previously explored avenues for study of Bataille’s various modes of identity critique, yet their consequences remain largely unexplored in the context of queer theory. In what follows, I will examine the manner in which sacrifice in Bataille presents a critique of identity and, secondly, illustrate the particular consequences of this critique for gendered identity as found in his essay and fiction writing. For Bataille, the feminine is an exemplary figure for this critique, precisely because it illustrates where and how Bataille paradoxically both establishes and confounds the limits of gendered identity itself. In other words, the feminine is a privileged category not only for Bataille’s figuring of gendered difference, but also its disfigu-ration. In addition to examining the unexplored link between sacrifice and queer critique in Bataille, I would like to highlight Bataille’s significance for a potential rapprochement between feminism and queer studies.
THESELFANDSACRIFICE
To briefly recount the analysis above, then, sacrifice in Bataille is ultimately always a form of self- sacrifice. As such, sacrifice presents a critique of personal identity. Given that self- sacrifice is the conditio sine qua non of both life and death in (Ba-taille’s) account above, sacrifice both precedes and exceeds God and man as the guarantor of all life both human and divine, life that comes at the cost of life’s own deadly donation. hus does the proverbial death of God—with all its Nietzschean implications—come to overturn for Bataille the dualisms between life and death and—for Bataille—identity and difference. Citing Mauss again in his “Sacrificial Mutilation” essay, Bataille explains that sacrifice “breaks the habitual homogeneity of the individual” and thus allows access to the “heterogeneous,” the divine other-ness that individuality habitually hides. In essence, personal identity itself is already self- sacrificial, a fact revealed through sacrifice itself in the same manner as Mauss’s sacrificial executioner and victim, who commonly (he writes) “go beyond them-selves.” In other words, they both exceed themselves, as “selves,” in and through sacrifice. “he one who sacrifices is free,” he explains, “free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim . . . in other words free to throw himself suddenly outside of himself ” (Visions70). Like the god’s “suicidal” sacrifice of himself to himself, so does the identity of executioner and victim arise and dissolve, even arise through dissolution, in the ecstatic liberation of sacrifice. Sacrifice exceeds all individual gods and men in the revelation of a common con-tinuum of life and death.
When the man- god appears and dies both [à la fois] as rottenness and as the re-demption of the supreme person, revealing that life will answer avidity only on the condition that it be lived [être vécue] as the me that dies [mode du moi qui meurt], he nonetheless eludes the pure imperative of this me: he subjects it to the applied (moral) imperative of God and thus gives the me as existence for others, for God . . . (Visions133)
As the passage suggests, sacrifice overturns the customary conditions under which self- identity (the moi) is traditionally understood. Far from an amalgam of at-tributes that presumably comprise an essence, sacrifice reveals the prior depen-dence of “living identity” on the negativity of death and divine otherness (“for others, for God”); sacrifice both ruins (“rottenness”) and redeems (“redemption”) the identity of the “man- god,” who is manifested and dies both at the same time (“à la fois”). he life of this being is conditioned upon its death, which is the more fundamental “mode” of selhood (“le mode du moi”) than the one that follows the imperative of being a living self “pure and simple” (“the pure imperative of this me”), a self that would deny or avoid death. Instead, through death, sacrifice makes a git of selhood (“gives the me”) to a communal otherness, indeed a divine other-ness. Sacrifice as such conjoins not only executioner and victim as per Mauss’s claim, but indeed all personal identity, insofar as the sacrificial death, in its ex-cess, is shared communally. Being common to all and particular to none, sacrificial death implies, as Bataille elsewhere writes, a “sacrifice in which all are victims.” Not only therefore is all sacrifice ultimately a form of self- sacrifice—indeed the sacri-fice of selhood itself—but the process of self- sacrifice seems to follow a dialectical structure wherein two become simultaneously, and paradoxically, both one and none: victim and executioner, life and death, self and other. his structure evokes what might be called a “negative dialectics,” or perhaps more simply a “desublima-tion,” wherein the synthesis of many makes, or rather “unmakes,” a common excess of shared life and death.
highlighting the insistence of sacrificial death of individuality in dialectical unity. “Actually” writes Bataille, “the problem of Hegel is given in the action of sacrifice. In sacrifice, death, on the one hand, essentially strikes the corporeal being; and on the other, it is precisely in sacrifice that ‘death lives a human life’” (“Hegel” 18). “Death living a human life”—an expression borrowed from Alexandre Kojève—constitutes humanity at the threshold between life and death, indeed the very threshold ex-posed in and by sacrifice itself. In sacrifice, life dies—but this is hardly different from the “lived death” of mortal existence. he simultaneous potential to live or die—indeed live through death or experience death in life—is the “human” syn-thesis that one must recognize to achieve true human self- consciousness. A man is “killed by his own negativity” writes Bataille, “but for him, thereater, there will be nothing let; his is a creative death, but if the consciousness of death . . . does not touch him before he dies, during his life . . . the death awaiting him will not give him a human character” (“Hegel” 20). In sacrifice, indeed self- sacrifice, the experience of death threatens self- loss, yet this sacrificial loss, as a “creative death,” also regains the recognition of true human identity. A human self, as a mortal self, always ex-ceeds itself.
Human identity conceived as sacrificial loss necessarily implies a challenge to all categories of personal identity, including those that pertain to gender and sex. In his essay on Hegel, humanity, life, and death are represented as neutered universals belonging indifferently to both men and women. Nevertheless “humanity” as such is hardly singular or universal at all; with sacrifice as both the condition of living and dying, human identity already implies otherness and a multiplicity of possible identities: victim, executioner, self, other, god, man. As particular forms of personal identity, gendered and sexed identity in Bataille are likewise multiple, indeed one might say queered, at the threshold of self- sacrifice.
SELF- SACRIFICE AND SEX
Two subtle negotiations must be made to respond to this question. he first concerns conceiving gender in Bataille as a degree of subjectivity, rather than as a kind of subjectivity. he second concerns the means and ends of Bataille’s critique of the subject, specifically as it relates to his notion of sacrifice as a form of self- differentiation. Provisionally, it will suffice to say that gendered identity in Bataille is itself provisional, permitting for tentative differences between masculine sub-jects and abject femininity, between potent and impotent men, between holy and whorish women that, to varying degrees, commonly herald the sacrificial space of eroticism in which these become a veritable excess of possible genders and sexu-alities. Ultimately, I argue that queer identity in Bataille concerns the inherently excessive and self- sacrificial quality of identity itself in Bataille, however appar-ently “virile” or “feminine.” As I argue below, the concept and function of sacrifice in Bataille offers an unexplored entry point into the queer qualities of his work. As a form of self- differentiation, sacrifice and sacrificial experiences demonstrate that, for Bataille, gender and sexual identity are not one. he excess implied in sacrifice always exceeds the limits of gender, sex, and sexual identity.
In this way, the implications of sacrifice for gender extend recent discussions in queer and feminist scholarship on Bataille, especially as presented in the work of Shannon Winnubst and Zeynep Direk, who examine the complex implications of Bataille’s eroticism for sexual identity and difference. Much like erotic experience, sacrifice challenges the ostensible sexism and heternormativity that does typify the characters we see in Bataille’s work. We may consider in his fiction, for example, the (sexist) centrality of male narrators and their contrasting female counterparts, like Madame Edwarda, Simone in Story of the Eye, or Pierre’s mother in My Mother. Men seek women, and women seduce men into sex, violence, and transgression. Men are typically the virile subjects of erotic experiences, and women typically the taboo objects of erotic desire. In this vein, we might recall Bataille’s sexist asser-tion in Erotism: “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostituasser-tion is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude. In so far as she is attractive, a woman is prey to men’s desire” (Erotism 131).
How might one, then, negotiate the prevalence of sexist heteronormativity in Bataille’s work with the simultaneous and starkly contrasting ambiguities his work also presents for personal identity, whether male or female? To begin, it must be said that heteronormativity in Bataille does not describe a single, unified state of sexual or gendered identity opposed to another. Rather, heternormativity reveals a more ambiguous, prior form of queerness inherent to identity itself that comes to reveal a spectrum of genders and sexualities that polarizes the masculine and the feminine, albeit without dividing them. For example, Bataille’s conceptions of “virility” and “femininity” both ironically challenge heteronormative identity.
of heternormative difference with statements like the following (my translation): “I can capture the self in tears, in anguish (I can even endlessly [à perte de vue] prolong my vertigo and find myself only in the desire of another—of a woman— unique, irreplaceable, dying, in all things similar to me)” (85). As usual, Bataille grasps self- identity paradoxically in experiences of self- loss like anguish, eroti-cism, and death; yet such self- discovery through self- loss conjoins immediately with the desire of “another,” a woman, who is completely “similar” to him. At once Bataille posits a difference between male and female identity while claiming that self- recognition itself imbricates self and other, man and woman. Otherwise stated, Bataille paradoxically asserts that, in death and desire, “I am other than who I am,” or more subtly “I am gendered other than my gender,” simultaneously challenging and reproducing heteronormative difference in the self- realization of a queer dif-ference within. Redoubling the queer ambiguity of self and other in this declara-tion of self- discovery is the phrase “desire of another” (désir d’un autre), which may ambiguously suggest in this context both Bataille’s desire of another—i.e., desire for a woman—or another’s desire for him, a woman’s desire. In this way, just as Bataille’s declaration here therefore challenges or queers the boundaries of (male) subjectivity, so does it make possible by implication a desirous female subject, an-other who desires “him.” hus in the same movement does Bataille pose and sub-vert heteronormative identity, betraying varying possible degrees of masculinity and femininity within the same desiring subject.
heroically overcome through her. Instead she represents a dreamy portal to destiny, a gateway between the real and transcendent, life and mortal destiny, much like the one sought in self- sacrifice. Staring at the woman is not enough for the man to capture his destiny and achieve true virility; however, this would remain only “an aesthetic emotion” without the “will to possess her and make true what her appari-tion had seemed to mean.” It is only when this feminine figure of fate, this femme fatale, is “conquered or lost” that the “fugitive image of destiny” becomes realized, and “ceases to be an aleatory figure and becomes reality determining fate” (Visions 230). he fulfillment of the man’s virility lies in conquering or losing the woman, whereby she becomes the reality of human destiny—i.e., his own “virile” destiny.
As Bataille explains later in the essay, this virile, erotic pursuit of the feminine figure of fate is analogous to transgressing the limit that separates the profane from the sacred, making it tantamount to a form of transgression and sacrifice:
Secrecy, in the domain where [the sorcerer’s apprentice] advances, is no less necessary to his strange procedures than it is to the transports of eroticism (the total world of myth, the world of being, is separated from the dissociated world by the very limits that separate the sacred from the profane). (Visions 233)
On the one hand, therefore, virility is a condition seemingly particular to the mas-culine subject and his (heterosexual) desire; he is the one who pursues, loves, and dies, self- sacrificially embracing destiny through the erotic and fateful pursuit of the feminine. On the other hand, however, virility goes unrealized without the feminine, which provides a gateway to this destiny both figuratively and in fact. While “virility” seems to represent the “human” fulfillment of what is paradigmati-cally a heterosexual male subject (through its divestiture in virile self- sacrifice), virility is possible only on the condition also of a fateful feminine presence to be “conquered” or “lost.” he sorcerer’s apprentice does not realize his “virile” des-tiny without the presence of the feminine; yet this presence, paradoxically, he can “realize”—or rather “unrealize”—only in absentia, in the fateful sacrifice of self.
queerly both, and neither, masculine and feminine. In the virile and erotic pursuit of self- sacrifice, there is a mobile divide not only between life and death, but also between man and woman, the masculine and the feminine.
SACRIFICIALSELF- DIFFERENTIATION
he sacrificial threshold between life and death, therefore, is kin to the threshold at which personal identity is created and undone, including heteronormative identity. Along this threshold, Bataille’s work evinces a veritable excess of differing males and females, masculinities and femininities, which the mobile limits of hetero-normativity ambivalently constrain and enable. Given that heterohetero-normativity and queerness both commonly exist in Bataille, they should be understood as repre-senting differing degrees of the subject’s (self- )sacrificial self- differentiation. Sacri-ficial self- differentiation is analogous to sexed and gendered self- differentiation, or queerness. he degree to which a human subject is “queered” is the degree to which it is self- sacrificial, broaching experiences of eroticism and death. he degree to which it resists sacrifice, conversely, is the degree to which it is a subject that es-chews experiences of eroticism and death. Queerness arises in Bataille when char-acters and subjectivity transgress the sacrificial limits of life and death, selhood and otherness. Such moments reveal a high degree of sacrificial self- differentiation, an attribute more strongly tethered to Bataille’s female characters and represen-tation of femininity. It is in this way that the feminine is “exceptional” in Bataille. “One knows” writes Bataille in the History of Eroticism, that (my translation) “the ancients identified the possession of a woman with sacrifice. Concerning this, I cannot fail to insist on the fact that women are, more than men, the center of eroti-cism. hey are the only ones that can completely dedicate themselves to it [s’y con-sacrer]” (Œuvres VIII 337). Heteronormativity, in contrast, exhibits a lower degree of sacrificial self- differentiation, and is more closely linked to Bataille’s more timid and anxious male narrators, if not men lacking “virility.”
be understood as provisionally different degrees of sacrificial self- differentiation. In other words, sexed and gendered differences are provisional differences in de-grees—not kinds—of subjectivity and self- sacrifice. Whereas Bataille’s men and masculinity provisionally err on the defensive side of a stable subjectivity, women tend toward self- sacrifice and the sacred realm of complete otherness, abjection, and absence. As Bataille famously writes in Madame Edwarda:
his God, for all that, is what? A public whore, in no way different from any other public whore . . . God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God: in the sense of common everyday being, in the sense of dread, horrror and impurity, and, finally, in the sense of nothing. (Edwarda 142)
As this passage suggests, God, otherness, eroticism, and nothingness are provision-ally feminine things, whereas the subjective experience of these, as revealed by the anxious narrator of this story, is characteristically masculine. In contrast to the “ravishing” Edwarda (L. rapere, “to seize,” “to take away”), the male narrator anx-iously reflects upon her fearful absence: “I was alone, as if face to face with a black rock. I trembled, seeing before me what in all this world is most barren, most bleak” (Edwarda 152).
Besides explaining the prevalence of heteronormativity in Bataille, these dif-fering degrees of self- difference explain the controversial exemplarity of women as well. he gender divide seems intimately related to a divide provisionally particular to women before or beyond men and their desires. In Bataille, women always tra-verse the sacrificial threshold between life and death with a facility foreign to men, making them figuratively embody, or rather disembody, the bivalence character-istic of sacrifice itself. In a short essay, critic Phillipe Sollers accurately notes that Bataille’s women signify
. . . the compromise that humanity establishes between prohibition and trans-gression, a compromise which, through marriage, is transpierced by the possi-bility of erotic violence; not only does she assume the role of (pure) mother and (impure) animal, of respect and the violation of respect . . . but she lends her consistency to a structure of exclusion within which a resistant milieu—a stage (scène)—may be constituted in terms of its potential reversal. (Sollers 89)
women such that, in the end, self- sacrificial self- differentiation queers all gendered difference. his result is especially apparent in Bataille’s erotic fiction. If queering is the effect of sacrifice on gender, however, and women in Bataille are more inti-mately linked to sacrifice, it follows that women and feminine identity are provi-sionally “queerer” than men and masculine identity—even though such queerness, as shown above, ultimately obscures the heteronormative difference that gives rise to femininity and masculinity themselves. In other words, women exemplify sacri-fice insofar as they are the primary provisional gender that “ungenders” itself, that queers itself, and becomes the gender that “is not.” Becoming so compels the desire of men—i.e., a desire that compels an analogous inner- lack and openness—setting them along the path of self- sacrifice, which queers them in turn. With both genders commonly lost in erotic self- sacrifice, they exceed all heteronormative difference, yielding to a queer shared sacrificial self- differentiation.
THESEXUALITYOFSACRIFICE
Literary illustrations of this process can be found throughout Bataille’s narrative fiction. he female characters provide the transgressive portal to eroticism, death, and the sacred that the solitary man, “lacking the lack” of a woman, conquers and loses. Bataille’s feminine characters and characterization of the feminine initially offer privileged access to this otherworldly space where subjectivity is lost and the sacred is found in self- sacrifice. he figures of presence and absence as a result mark gendered difference in Bataille; whereas men are present, women are fre-quently absent, if not absence itself figured in the form of death. Male characters approach the feminine as they approach death, a death that seems to fulfill their prior “human” fate while also apparently feminizing their male character.
In Madame Edwarda, for example, a nameless and impotent male narrator enters a brothel in Paris in search of a prostitute and finds the mysterious Edwarda, whom he approaches with ambivalent feelings of fear and wonder, as she is God. hese sentiments are no less equivocal than Edwarda herself, who, he explains, con-stantly disappears and is yet always “sensibly absent.” hough he desirously follows her through the night, he cannot broach her without sensing his own absence and self- loss, which he morbidly describes as a “shattering” (se briser), “sickness” (être malade) and “decomposition” (décomposer). Edwarda is essentially constituted, or de- constituted, as the night itself; she becomes a vortex, an absence, a black hole, one the male narrator cannot fill. “Edwarda, something alien,” the narrator says, a statement juxtaposed against the image in the next sentence: “above our heads, a starry sky, mad and void” (Edwarda 152).
former red- light district of North Paris, embodies a threshold analogous to that Edwarda herself, who crosses the realms of life and death. On the far side of the archway, the narrator explains, is the “deathly darkness” (l’obscurité de mort), “ab-sence,” and even “emptiness itself.” With a seductive back- step, Edwarda traverses threshold, disappearing into what the narrator calls “the nothingness of the arch” (Edwarda 153). hough he follows her in frenzy, eager to embrace the “season of agony” and “suffering” by passing into the emptiness; he wants to “go farther, as far as the ‘emptiness’ itself.” Yet he is anxious and apprehensive, remaining “over-whelmed” or “condemned” (accablé) before the portal and “sinking into despair.” While he hesitates before the absence that would consume him and render him lost, Edwarda crosses the arch and “loses herself ” (se perdre), only to be found later by the narrator on an empty terrace. As if woken from sleep, she turns to the nar-rator and asks him, in a “lifeless” voice, “Where am I?” (154). Whereas the narnar-rator finds Edwarda, Edwarda herself is “lifeless,” absent, lost in the night. As this ex-ample illustrates, the difference between male and female characters in Bataille is less one of kind than of degree; Edwarda can “go further” than the narrator. She goes there where the narrator cannot; she is lost where he is found. Analogously, while the narrator continually describes the presentiment of absence, death, and loss, Edwarda actually achieves this absence; indeed, she is this absence. She is “less than a phantom, less than a lingering mist” (153–54).
Yet the distinction between masculine presence and feminine absence becomes less clear in moments of erotic encounter. he absence and ecstasy Edwarda per-sonifies infects the male narrator, who cannot desire or possess her without a com-mensurate experience of sacrificial self- loss. When Edwarda first commands the narrator to kiss her, for example, he hesitates out of embarrassment but then pro-ceeds, provoking an uncanny feeling of absence and vacuity:
I was shaking; I looked at her: motionless, she smiled back so sweetly that I shook. At last, reeling, I sank down on my knees and feverishly pressed my lips to that running, teeming wound [plaie vive]. Her bare thigh caressingly nudged my ear, I thought I heard a sound of roaring seasurge [bruit de houle], it is the same sound you hear when you put your ear to a large conch shell. In the brothel’s boisterous chaos and in the atmosphere of corroding absurdity I was breathing (it seemed to me I was choking, I was flushed, I was sweating). I hung strangely suspended, quite as though at that same point we, Edwarda and I, were losing ourselves in a wind- freighted night, on the edge of the ocean. (Edwarda 150)
of a conch shell. Yet this emptiness does not solely belong to Edwarda; the narrator too poses his “lips” to her “wound”—i.e., her “lips”—and the sound of her thigh, that of a conch shell, fills his ear. With his mouth to her wound, her shell to his ear, it would seem that orifice meets orifice, emptiness meets emptiness, creating a greater “queer absence” between them both that, in the confusion of the bordello, becomes even more vacuous in the “wind- freighted night on the edge of the ocean” where they are both “losing themselves.” Edwarda’s absence and vacuity becomes indistinguishable from the narrator’s own, with his morbid feeling of self- loss, sus-pension, and suffocation in the bordello. he figures of the seasurge and conch shell further metonymically link Edwarda, with her “wound,” to the abyssal sea, if not also to the vacuity of the narrator’s mouth and the figure of night as well. And this his shared loss, experienced between the twin abysses of night and sea, mouth and wound, echoes the lesson eroticism teaches in the Preface, and in turn Edwarda’s assertion that she is God: “God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God . . . in the sense of dread . . . and, finally, in the sense of nothing” (Edwarda 142). As this passage illustrates, in the erotic and sacrificial space of self- loss, the dif-ference between the narrator and Edwarda, the masculine and feminine, becomes evermore “lost,” rendered into a queer space of nothingness where gendered iden-tity is not.
Similarly, in his “Prostitution” chapter of Erotism, Bataille offers one of his more controversial and well- known sexist claims. He asserts that prostitution is the logical result of what he calls the “feminine attitude.” I repeat the example given above: “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude. In so far as she is attractive, a woman is prey to men’s desire” (Erotism 131). In other words, while women typically withhold, men typically pursue, and the classic amorous project for men therefore becomes the discovery of the conditions under which the woman will surrender herself to the man. Yet, for Bataille, by restraining eroticism to a restricted commercial exchange, modern prostitution represents a degraded form of what was formerly a religious matter in the practice of hierogamy. his latter form constitutes “true” or “sacred prostitution” for Bataille because its purpose is religious rather than economic. In-deed, such prostitution represented a form of sacrifice. Religious prostitution dis-rupts the profane world of commodity exchange and instead approximates sacri-fice as a divine self- giving: “With prostitution, the prostitute was dedicated to a life of transgression. he sacred or forbidden aspect of sexual activity remained ap-parent in her, for her whole life was dedicated to violating the taboo” (Erotism 133). Given the dis- identificatory, self- differential practice of sacrifice elaborated above, there is an implicit challenge made to the heterosexist logic that undergirds his ac-count of prostitution here, however.
of desire, as Bataille mentions in his essay “he Object of Desire and the Totality of the Real,” is “the universe or the totality of being” and, as such, indivisible into distinct (gendered) parts. Moreover, such an object of desire conjures the desire “to be consumed and to lose oneself without reservation. Now, the object of my desire does not truly respond to it except on one condition: that I awaken in it a desire equal to mine” (Accursed Share111–12). hus, the sacrifice and transgression im-plied in prostitution for Bataille broaches an annihilation in which the identity of the woman—if not gendered identity itself—is lost in erotic self- surrender to the object of desire. Yet this desire is not only the man’s own; ultimately a desire equal to his must be awakened in the woman he so desires. hough Bataille emphasizes the sacrificial quality of the feminine, sacrifice is ultimately not uniquely feminine in this example; the man, too, “gives himself up,” if not by surrendering property, at least by his desiring and in performing the erotic act itself. In religious prostitution, therefore, both man and woman engage in a self- sacrifice that compromises their identities as man and woman, although the woman prostitute heralds this compro-mise before the man’s approach. She provisionally embodies a degree of sacrificial self- lack that the man lacks himself. he self- sacrificial eroticism of prostitution, by ultimately dissolving the limits of gendered identity and difference, therefore, transport men and women together into a queer realm of desire in which gendered identity is undone in a shared sacrificial self- differentiation.
DIALECTICOFSEXUALSELF- DIFFERENTIATION
death and delirium either coupled, or soon followed, with exultations of delight and desire. At this point, the heteronormative model of the first stage becomes compromised. he abject woman becomes an object of desire, and the male subject realizes that his identity becomes a false guise for his own inner- otherness or self- differentiation, which surfaces through contact with the woman he desires. his is characteristic of the object of desire itself, which Bataille writes in the History of Eroticism is (my translation) “essentially another desire. he desire of the senses is the desire, if not to destroy oneself, to at least burn and lose oneself without reserva-tion” (Œuvres VIII 97). hrough contact, the woman thus transforms from a hetero-geneous excess into what Jacques Lacan might call the “extimate object” (objet ex-time), the Other that also lies within the bounds of identity, being both exterior and intimate. Erotic contact with the feminine thus not only transcends masculinity into femininity, subject into abject, but it also manifests an immanent alterity—an “inner- woman,” as it were—that is akin to death itself. Such is the kinship among femininity, death, and eroticism, which broaches self- sacrifice and otherness by both encroaching within and hollowing out the limits of personal identity. he narrator of Madame Edwarda provides an illustration of this paradoxically imma-nent interiority and exteriority:
My anguish resisted the pleasure I ought to have sought. Edwarda’s pain- wrung pleasure filled me with an exhausting impression of bearing witness to a miracle. My own distress and fever seemed small things to me. But that was what I felt, those are the only great things in me which gave answer to the rapture [l’exstase] of her whom in the deeps of an icy silence I called “my heart.” (Edwarda158)
he narrator’s own inner anguish, distress, and fever, reinforced by the use of per-sonal and possessive pronouns (I, me, my), are the response to the rapturous ec-stasy of her, i.e., Edwarda herself, whom he suggestively, and “silently,” calls his “heart.” Her ecstatic “outside” is also his “inside,” tracing both the inside and outside of the narrator’s dissolving identity. Femininity and woman occupy the space of the narrator’s own self- differentiation, making them both figures for self- sacrifice par excellence. he link between the immanence and transcendence of the feminine already betrays the undoing of the limits that trace male subjectivity, thus queering the provisional gendered difference between them.
turn, can be understood as opposing poles of the sacrificial threshold between life and death.
he concluding pages of Madame Edwarda exemplarily illustrate the narrative
movement between 1- A and 2-B. he category of the “human,” which arises also in
“he Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” reappears at the conclusion of Madame Edwarda and
implies the fusion of different (sexed) identities (1- A) under a universal category
that soon reveals itself to be hardly universal at all, or at least “universally different.”
As in “he Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the male narrator presents a pursuit of the
“human” attained at the cost of death, which in its turn suggests a potential
multi-plicity, or excess, of narrators through a recursive framing structure that ambiguates
the identity of narrative voice. While author Pierre Angelique (Bataille) writes the introductory essay, an unnamed narrator—from whom Angelique distances him-self—tells the fragmented story itself, which concludes with the intervention of parenthetical metacommentary indiscernibly belonging to either Angelique or the
male narrator, or even perhaps a potential third unknown voice. his parenthetical
aside is itself peppered with a series of parenthetical statements and a single foot-note—itself containing a parenthesis—that reprises the theme of humanity. In this footnote, this recursive, vertiginous narrative structure “ends” with ecstasy and God, which have a curious relationship to humanity:
I said “God, if He knew would be a swine.” He (He would I suppose be, at that particular moment, somewhat in disorder, his peruke would sit all askew) would entirely grasp the idea . . . but what would there be of the human about [it]? Be-yond, beyond everything . . . and yet farther, and even farther still . . . HIMSELF,
in an ecstasy, above an emptiness . . . And now? I TREMBLE. (Edwarda159)
his enigmatic note recalls the narrator’s earlier comment concerning his painful
desire: “I consented to suffer, I desired to suffer, to go farther, as far as the
‘empti-ness’ itself, even were I to be stricken, destroyed, no matter” (Edwarda153). In his
incessant advances toward Edwarda—i.e., God, the supreme “emptiness”—he
experiences pain and suffering precisely due to a growing sense of self- absence
akin to self- sacrifice, exemplified above in the form of ellipsis. Yet this absence, in the form of divine transcendence (“beyond, beyond everything”) and “empti-ness,” also represents a certain “human” fulfillment, the realization of the human;
it is the answer to the question “what would there be of the human about it?” hat
which “grasps” the “human” in God is His, or rather Her, inherently ecstatic and transcendent nature that embraces the “emptiness” of a radical negativity, not
un-like Bataille’s “virile” man in pursuit of his feminine fate. his “humanity,” in turn,
dread . . . and, finally, in the sense of nothing” (Edwarda142). Noticeably, Angelique and the narrator’s overlapping voices and similar statements in the text commonly
imply the trace of the self- differentiation also figured in the form of “Madame
Ed-warda,” understood as both the character and the literary text itself. Conceived as a series of recursive predicates, to be “human” in Madame Edwarda, therefore, is to be [that which transcends itself [in sacrificial death [like God [who is woman [who is nothing]]]]]. Equally, a “man,” like the narrator or Angelique, is a “man” insofar as he is [“human” [insofar as he transcends himself [in sacrificial death [like God [who is woman [who is nothing]]]]]]. Both of these statements parallel the recur-sive framing structure of the text itself, with its preface, proverbs, narrative, ellipses, and notes, which all vertiginously circle around the void lying at the center of them
all: Madame Edwarda. hey also illustrate the dialectical process of sacrificial self-
differentiation described above, which might otherwise be called desublimation.
CONCLUSION
In Bataille, women and femininity are oten exemplars of self- sacrificial death,
eroticism, and excess. hrough contrast with male characters and the masculine,
they structure a heteronormative, albeit provisional, sexual difference from men
who, as narrators, illustrate a more stable subjectivity and a lesser degree of
sacri-ficial self- differentiation. his gives rise to Bataille’s sexist heteronormativity. Yet
the man’s heteronormative desire for women hews the path toward self- sacrifice, which is first figured as sacred ambivalence but finally so in the form of self-
differentiation, recounted both in silence and in the excess of narrative voices. Such
self- differentiation reveals itself to be the same formerly specific to the feminine,
first revealing the “extimacy” of femininity within masculine identity, but finally the prior self- sacrifice that conditions all identity, whether male or female, mascu-line or feminine.
Such is the double- bind of Bataille’s women and femininity. Since they are pro-visionally “nothing,” i.e., that which “is not,” there where they “are not,” they cannot and do not provide an exclusive or totalizable category under which identity can
be securely assumed. he feminine is also somehow not feminine as that which is
largely self- differentiating, self- sacrificial, and non- identical. As such, however, it
is impossible to ultimately oppose the feminine to men or the masculine—or in-deed to anything else—since that to which it would be opposed is always already included by its inherent sacrificial non- identicality, which is also to say its excess
of possible identities. By differing from itself, and thus compelling self- sacrifice
exceeds itself, differs from itself, in a queer space where gender and sex, male and female, are never one.
Bluefield State College
NOTES
1 Shannon Winnubst’s recent edited volume Reading Bataille Now (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2007) provides two significant contributions to queer studies on
Ba-taille. Winnubst’s own essay in the volume “Bataille’s Queer Pleasures: he Universe as
Spider or Spit,” demonstrates how Bataille’s work liberates sexuality from a restricted, heternormative, and utilitarian economy of reproduction and situates it instead in a gen-eral economy of desire. Such an understanding of sexuality, she claims, can be politically useful as a form of critical resistance to the logic of sodomy laws. In the same volume,
Zeynep Direk, in her piece “Erotic Experience and Sexual Difference in Bataille,” also
considers Bataille’s implications for gendered identity by placing him in dialog with Luce Irigaray’s feminist thought. She holds that Bataillean sovereignty and
communica-tion can be paired with Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference through a shared concept
of immanence. his immanence, in turn, provides “the possibility of sexed
communi-cation beyond sexual identities,” and thus a ground for thinking of sexuality “beyond
the binary division into heterosexual male and female.” In a 2011 edition of Nottingham
French Studies, Lisa Downing and Robert Gillet argue that George Bataille anticipates
queer theory before its time in “Georges Bataille at the Avant- Garde of Queer heory?:
Transgression, Perversion, Death Drive.” Finally, he Centre for the Study of Surrealism
and its Legacies at University of Manchester similarly advanced these discussions with
a seminar in June 2010 examining Bataille’s significance for queer theory and queer
per-formance art.
2 hough this list is by no means exhaustive, I am referring in particular to the following:
Hélène Cixous, Prénoms de personne, wherein Cixous situates the feminine within a gen-eral economy of expenditure and loss; Andrea Dworkin, Pornography, who denounces
the misogynistic violence that accompanies the sexual act in Madame Edwarda;
Suzanne Guerlac, an excellent analysis of how women, as erotic objects in Bataille, en-able (Hegelian) dialectical recognition in a manner that destabilizes male subjectivity and desire; Amy Hollywood; Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, in which Kristeva ref-erences Bataille’s proposition that the interdiction can never fully bar the abject or, for that matter, the feminine; Judith Still; Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Pornography, Gender and
the Avant- Garde: Bataille’s Story of the Eye” and “Bataille in the Street: he Search for
Virility in the 1930s.”
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