Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 359-361

Peter Tracey Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000; 198 pp.; ISBN: 080186268X (hbk.); LC call no.: B2430.B33954 C66; $39.00

Georges Bataille may well be the coolest librarian ever, though Borges also presents himself as a serious contender for this decidedly peculiar palm. Still, even if you don't love Bataille's rapturous, rupturous theories, or his frankly hilarious dark and dirty pornographies, you still must give the man props for his amazing powers of everybody-meeting. Bataille is Forrest Gumpian in his sheer ubiquity, if bereft of the jingo-tarded Yankee-doodling acephaly. In his capacities as an editor of many journals, he published the Frankfurt Schoolers and Deacons early on. He was excommunicated from the Surrealist circle by no less an authority than Pope Breton, and you've got to be way in to get that kicked out. He rescued Benjamin's glorious, fragmented opus of mall-rat flânerie, "The Arcades Project," from certain destruction. He drafted a series of delectably bleak epistles to Kojève, following the latter's celebrated lecture series on Hegel, identifying himself as precisely the leftover negativity, loitering about unemployed, now that we have reached the End of History. This sense of superfluity isn't mere slackerism avant la lettre on Bataille's part: the counterintuitive thesis that waste and excess are our real economic issues drives his three volume look at the dismal science, "The Accursed Share." This work covers practices ranging from potlatch to the Marshall Plan, and there is nary a dull moment, as Bataille turns classical economic notions, like the Mathusian spectre of scarcity, utterly on their balding pates. More's the pity that Georges didn't stick around long enough to see his theories made flesh in the form of the self-lavishing imperial CEO, with his golden toilet brush and cashmere shower curtains, and our declarations of pricey perma-war against entities that cannot be warred away, like terrorism and drugs. We are well practiced in the Bataillian arts of waste, squander, and excess — look upon our Hummer H2 assault vehicles, ye mighty, and despair!

Of course, not everyone is as enamoured of Bataille as your humble correspondent. Connor certainly seems to be, since he cedes the bulk of his text to Bataille, and lets the sources do the talking. Sartre, however, is not a big fan of Monsieur Bataille. In one of the most fascinating sections of his book, Connor looks at a very nasty review of Bataille, where Sartre alleges that Bataille is nothing but a new mystic. He also dismisses Bataille as obscene, and irrational. Connor contends, I think rightly, that Jean Paul gets his knickers in an almighty twist because Bataille's embrace of irrationality and excess imperil the grounding reason, and thus [end page 359] the political programme, of existentialism. The endless do-it-yourself-ing of existentialism is a project, and Bataille is no fan of the project. Sartre seems to take umbrage that a blasphemer like Bataille dares profane the holy mysteries of philosophical terms, the precisely defined words that are reason's doxa. For example, he takes Bataille to task for an inappropriate use of Heidegger. This last criticism damn near made me laugh myself new holes, given the way that a speed-fuelled Jean Paul plays fast and loose with big B Being in his book on that and the other thing that is no thing and is not. I mean, you can't call that thing faithful to Marty, even by Simone's standards for adultery. Sartre harshing on Bataille for being a mystic and obscene is pretty rich and creamy considering that Jean Paul was — eeeww — a celebrity, and the author of the truly obscene essay, "The Hole." For those of you that have missed this little gem, allow me to nutshell it for you: ladies are slimy holes. Men, avoid the slithery suck of slimy holes. This makes me feel grody in a way that Bataille's many pornographies do not, even though he fills said slimy hole with an eyeball, and has it weep urinous tears on an altar.

Connor's study swabs some of the pejorative venom off of Sartre's claim, staking out a middle position between mysticism-as-epithet and Derrida's contention that Bataille is no mystic. Derrida makes this claim in his most excellent essay, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without reserve," where he contends that Bataille is more Hegelian than Hegel, for seeing the irrationality and death that cannot be delivered unto the dogmatization of dialectics, the blind spot of unreason even the most systemic of systems cannot recoup. It certainly suits Jacques' purposes to make it clear that this is not achieved by means of a flight into the mystic, but as Connor rightly points out, Bataille was no stranger to the twisted rictus of the suffering saint. Bataille refers to the transports of mystics like Theresa of Avila, and John of the Cross, and Connor contends, Neoplatonists like Plotinus and Dionysius the Pseudo-Aeropagite, the great negative theologian, namer of God, and plotter of angelic hierarchies.

Of course, the rub with the latter dudes, more so than for the saintly visionaries, is the status of the body. For Platonisms, neo or no, the fall into matter is the original sin, and the meatbag the prison of the immortal and incorporeal soul. Bataille is an intensely, insistently embodied thinker, and many of the post-structuralists who follow him, like Foucault and Deleuze, will also turn their attentions to the meatbag, if in different ways, with his baldness looking at pastoral and institutional care, and my favourite guy turning endlessly to affect. In Bataille, the limit experience may transcend the bodily, but it certainly starts there, in a paroxysm of .sex or violence or madness or poetry. Connor's opening example is a [end page 360] good instance of this beginning with the body. He writes of a photograph from the collection of images in "Tears of Eros," Bataille's last work, of a victim suffering the "Torture of the Hundred Pieces," which is exactly as fun as it sounds. How different is this howling, opiated, bloodied, limbless torture victim, in his state of ecstatic transport, than a pincushiony-with-pricks Saint Sebastian, or my namesake Saint, who I believe met her end in boiling lead? Martyrdom is masochism, and most of the accoutrements of erotic discipline and punish, your s-and-m-inalia — the bridle and the whip, pace Dante — hail from the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

One would also do well to remember that Monsieur Bataille, before succumbing to the charms of the Biblio, monked it up for a spell with those most angelic contemplators — Anselm's brethren — the Benedictines, and then considered donning the collar. He is sort of like an ass-backwards Augustine, starting with the faith and ending up, in old age, whoring about Carthage with a cauldron of unholy lusts seething about his ears. Of course, Connor does not put the thesis quite so reductively as your humble correspondent, but then he has a whole book, and I just have this teensy little review. Connor also calls upon God-bothered sufferers of ecstasies, like Bataille's beloved Rimbaud and Nietzsche, to situate Bataille's mystical tendencies. Perhaps the best summation of Connor's argument comes from Bataille himself, when he writes that the desire for ecstasy can't exclude method. While Bataille abhorred sappy mystical humanism, he longed for a state of wildness, where man was not humiliated by work and a God that was more work, hypostatized. Though Connor does discuss Bataille's reverence for Sade, there is certainly way more mysticism than sin in this scholarly and studious book. Connor puckishly refers to Bataille as the pornographer of the cogito, a sort of Rene DesCartes after dark. The Cartesian project is a Story of the I, too, but Bataille's version, excessive and mystifying though it may be, makes for a much better read, thanks to all the skin and the sin.

laura penny

King's College, Halifax