A Short Critique of Existentialism and a Note on Aesthetics

06/03/2021

In Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist, Paul Hegarty gives a few comments on existentialism which we can extrapolate into a critique.

For Georges Bataille, sovereignty is outside the domain of project, of tasks. This is problematic because “[i]n existentialism … the task is for the individual to ‘make his or herself’, and this taks subordinates the individual”.[1] Existentialism’s rejection of sovereignty is what makes it servile. In its servility, existentialism reduces the subject to a thing and in doing this alienates the subject. Existentialism is therefore also a rejection of expenditure and an endorsement of project. Existentialism is thus nothing more than, I want to say, the complete opposite of Bataille’s system(?), contra Bataille’s system.

Aesthetics is a part of the restricted economy because it is art restricted to a certain realm.[2] The idea of a ‘Bataillean aesthetics’ then becomes questionable and problematic, but Hegarty says that if a Bataillean aesthetics does it exist, then it would be an aesthetics that “would valorize art that aspired to destruction”.[3] In other words, a Bataillean aesthetics is an aesthetics that has art dissolve itself in inner experience.

Bibliography

Hegarty, Paul. Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Inc, 2000.

References

[1]: Paul Hegarty, Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Inc, 2000), 71.

[2]: Ibid., 130.

[3]: Ibid., 131.