On the Poverty of the Attempt at a Critique of Georges Bataille

06/04/2021

There is a fundamental presupposition when one critiques Georges Bataille as something like a capitalist, fascist, sexist, etc., and that presupposition is that he has a position to critique.

At the basis of Bataille is a methodological principle of contestation. Bataille undoes himself before critique can capture him as an object to be critiqued. Now, this reading of Bataille doesn’t make an object out of Bataille as a critical reading does, because this reading acknowledges the paradoxical nature of Bataille: the project to escape project. Bataille has a position without a position or a position which undoes all positions.

All these negative, critical, and reductive interpretations of Bataille try to put Bataille to work within a position “in order to redefine Bataille’s affirmative gestures in their own negative terms”.[1] In this light, one can see Bataille’s position, and that is the non-position of expenditure which is affirmative as it is the opposite of the productive negation that is work. Bataille can therefore be described not in order to put him to work, or to characterize him, but to identify with him?

Steven Shaviro gives the example of Sartre’s attempt to critique Bataille by putting him in the position of holding that a being of excess goes towards (desires) expenditure, towards nothing. But of course this is problematic because Shaviro recognizes that “expenditure is a movement that is precisely irreducible to any conception of the labor of the negative, and that Bataille’s non-negative definition of desire is not simply an inversion of the negative”.[2] It can also be noted that for Bataille, isolated beings are beings that are insufficient.

Bibliography

Shaviro, Steven. Passion & Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1990.

References

[1]: Steven Shaviro, Passion & Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1990), 78.

[2]: Ibid., 78–79.