04/16/2021
Introduction
Modern political discourse is saturated with identity politics. Almost no political position has been able to free themselves from it. Liberals and many leftists are proponents of identity politics, and even the detractors of identity politics such as conservatives and others even find themselves enveloped in it too. The right is not free of identity politics like most suppose it to be. On the “far-right”, right-wing fascists, nazis and the like, we see a return to identity politics and specifically an extremely essentialist strand which views certain identities as superior to others. The right-wing ideologies which are not associated with the category of the “far-right” also do not escape this. For example, hoppeans, those who follow the theories of the anarcho-capitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, put forward an essentialism which says that homosexuals have a higher time-preference when compared to heterosexuals.[1] Rothbard also openly supported “racialist science” as “an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors” after reading The Bell Curve.[2] The left’s relation to identity politics is much more diverse. Some marxists reject categories of identity as nothing more than a bourgeois diversion from class politics. Other leftists are leftists only because of identity politics. For example, many advocates of racial identity politics are anti-capitalist not because of capitalism’s many negatives but rather only because of its negative racialized effects. When we look at post-leftists, we can see that, for the most part, they reject identity politics as a negative of the left. The Stirnerite strand of post-leftism and post-anarchism just rejects identity as “spooks” or essentialist categories.
The goal of this essay is to line out what Georges Bataille thinks about all of this. What would/does Bataille think about identity politics? What would/does Bataille think about class reductionism? These are all questions this essay seeks to answer.
This essay will be innovative as I have found very little, if not no literature regarding Bataille in relation to identity politics and class reductionism.
Identity
Introduction
Bataille seems to have a non-existent relation with identity politics and the theoretics that accompany it (with the exception of queer theory and minorly feminist theory, but a relation to critical race theory seems almost non-existent).
So why is there such a lack of work on Bataille and identity politics? Though this is a weak response, I think I would have to chalk it down to his obscurity.
Bataille, to my knowledge, rarely, if ever, talks about the issues of identity politics. So, this will be more of me “cross-applying” his concepts to the issues of identity politics.
I come into the scene of identity politics with no dispositions unlike my contemporaries (Finn, Abtin, Leo, and others). I am not here with a disposition to critique. I come here to clarify what Bataille would/does believe in terms of identity politics.
Another point of departure from my contemporaries will be the fact that I will not treat identity politics as a single whole for the entirety of this essay. My contemporaries, especially Finn and Leo, come into the realm of identity politics, not only with the disposition of critique, but also with a disposition of negligence. My contemporaries do not come to see identity politics as a very diverse discourse, rather, they group all identity politics into one. They see no difference between feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, critical race theory, fat studies, etc. They see only this grand abstraction of ‘identity politics’. I will attempt to be much more thorough with much less material to work with. So far, I have tried to best understand that which I am analyzing, and I’m not going to just disregard identity politics as liberalism from the start.
So, let us begin!
Heterology and Disability: A Bataillean Analysis of the Subject of Disability Studies
I think a proper place to start this critique is going to be that of disability studies and its subject matter.
The only material I could find which looks at disability studies and Bataille is a book called Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions.[3] Bill Hughes says that Bataille’s work on heterology could have been written as “a manifesto for disabled people”.[4] Heterology is the science of that which is heterogeneous. Its object of study is heterogeneous matter. It is in this way that one can, following Hughes, logically conclude that within our current society disabled people are treated like heterogeneous matter, in fact, in the eyes of our homogeneous, useful, and productive society, disabled people are heterogeneous matter. They then function within society like heterogeneous matter.*[5]
Disabled people are treated like shit (heterogeneous matter) within our present-day society.
The division of heterogeneous matter into that heterogeneous matter which the system can recuperate, “fix” (homogenize) and make useful and then the heterogeneous matter which is completely irrecuperable, “unfixable” (unable to be homogenized), and completely useless has an odd similarity to how disabled people are treated by our present-day society. Hughes sees that our current society has two primary social responses to disabled people: 1. correction and 2. elimination.[6] These two primary social responses to disabled people are almost exactly the same as the two primary social responses to heterogeneous matter.
Heterogeneous matter is prohibited and seen as lesser to that which is homogeneous. Disabled people are invalidated and seen as lesser to that which is not disabled.[7]
I need not continue with the parallels. The picture I’m painting should be clear: Bataille not only exposes the logic of homogeneous society and its treatment of heterogeneous matter but also, with his science of the heterogeneous, which is heterology, provides methods to combat this (which I will get to later on). If we can combat the way homogeneous society treats heterogeneous matter, we can also combat the way disabled people are treated in our current society.
A Bataillean Analysis of the Subject of Feminist Theory
Though the amount of comparative literature on Bataille and feminist theory isn’t an astounding amount, it is better than a single sentence (which is all there was when comparing Bataille and disability studies).
Out of all the ‘theoretics of identity politics’, Bataille has his most complicated relationship with feminism… splendid.
Bataille, over the years, has been accused of misogyny and sexism. The question this section of my overview of Bataille and identity politics tries to answer is this: are these aforementioned accusations true?
So let us begin with the latter question: are these aforementioned accusations true?
First, is Bataille a misogynist and sexist? Some view Bataille’s fiction to be misogynist but this is clearly not the case (see Chris Vanderwees’s essay titled Complicating Eroticism and the Male Gaze: Feminism and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye). The part of Bataille feminists have critiqued the most is his work Eroticism. Sean P. Connolly in, what I consider, a groundbreaking essay titled Georges Bataille, Gender, and Sacrificial Excess, addresses the accused sexism of Bataille’s Eroticism. For Connolly, Bataille’s conception of femininity, which almost all feminist critics of Bataille have as their object of critique, actually CHALLENGES heteronormative identity.[8] Connolly notes that in Inner Experience Bataille “at once traces and erases the limits of heterormative difference” and then he puts forward a quote of his own 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)’”.[9] Here Connolly notices that he refers to the woman as similar to him.[10] Connolly extrapolates the implications of the quote better than I can:
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 difference within. Redoubling the queer ambiguity of self and other in this declaration 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, another who desires ‘him.’ Thus in the same movement does Bataille pose and subvert heteronormative identity, betraying varying possible degrees of masculinity and femininity within the same desiring subject. It is remarkable to note how often in Bataille sexual differences advance a concept or experience that undercuts the very sexual differences upon which it is based.[11]
Connolly continues in his exposition, critiquing the idea that Bataille’s ‘virile man’ makes him a misogynist. Connolly says, “[t]herefore, if the feminine is understood as an absence in Bataille — a vacuous realm of desire, fate, and heroic, self-sacrificial death — so too is, therefore, the virile man”.[12] The “self-sacrifice for virility is… the self-sacrifice of virility”.[13] I must apologize for just quoting Connolly, but I didn’t want to make an appeal like I did with Vanderwees. Really just go read the rest of Connolly’s groundbreaking essay, I cannot do it justice. I think it is safe to say that because, for Bataille, the masculine and feminine not only overlap but also are not set nor stable, Bataille is not a sexist nor a misogynist.
Bibliography
Connolly, Sean P. “Georges Bataille, Gender, and Sacrificial Excess.” The Comparatist 38, no. 1 (2014): 108–27. https://doi.org/10.1353/com.2014.0000.
Hughes, Bill. “Civilising Modernity and the Ontological Invalidation of Disabled People.” Essay. In Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, 17–32. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Rothbard, Murray N. RACE! THAT MURRAY BOOK. Lew Rockwell, December 1994. https://web.archive.org/web/20110622125548/https://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch75.html.
thevoluntaryist. “Understanding Time-Preference vs Being Homophobic: Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Battle With The PC Gatekeepers.” Hive. Hive Blog, 2019. https://hive.blog/libertarianism/@thevoluntaryist/understanding-time-preference-vs-being-homophobic-hans-hermann-hoppe-s-battle-with-the-pc-gatekeepers.
References
[1]: thevoluntaryist, “Understanding Time-Preference vs Being Homophobic: Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Battle With The PC Gatekeepers,” Hive (Hive Blog, 2019), https://hive.blog/libertarianism/@thevoluntaryist/understanding-time-preference-vs-being-homophobic-hans-hermann-hoppe-s-battle-with-the-pc-gatekeepers.
[2]: Murray N. Rothbard, “RACE! THAT MURRAY BOOK,” RACE! THAT MURRAY BOOK (Lew Rockwell, December 1994), https://web.archive.org/web/20110622125548/https://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch75.html.
[3–4]: Bill Hughes, “Civilising Modernity and the Ontological Invalidation of Disabled People,” in Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 26.
[5]: *(Within THIS SPECIFIC PART of THIS essay (other essays could use the following two terms interchangeably) DO NOT confuse ‘heterogeneous matter’ with ‘base matter’ as, following Noys’s and Land’s interpretations of base matter, I can not say that disable people are or are like base matter, as base matter “is” the ‘non-domesticated noumenon’, the fanged noumenon, the noumenon unbound).
[6–7]: Bill Hughes, “Civilising Modernity and the Ontological Invalidation of Disabled People,” in Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 17.
[8]: Sean P. Connolly, “Georges Bataille, Gender, and Sacrificial Excess,” The Comparatist 38, no. 1 (2014): pp. 108–127, https://doi.org/10.1353/com.2014.0000, 114.
[9]: Ibid., 114–115.
[10–11]: Ibid., 115.
[12]-13]: Ibid., 116.
