06/03/2021
[NOTE: This essay is very key to my current understanding of things, especially when it comes to capitalism and identity (in the metaphysical sense, not in the sense of identity politics)]
The erotic act is the blindspot of capitalist society. It is the wound in its lacerated structure. Capitalism cannot reveal that its stable forms are predicated on GOD (taboo, prohibition, the erasure of the erotic). In other words, like God, capitalism cannot for a moment reveal that it is not absolute, that it is not a totality, that it is not completion par excellence. In this sense, capitalism is like the Hegelian system. But we Batailleans reveal all blindspots! We kill God, and kill ourselves. A will-to-expenditure is the movement of all beings circulating within the universe (the general economy), it is our movement!
The erotic is darkness. This means that the erotic, which is darkness, “is the fiercest expression of conflict” without resolution.[1] The darkness, which is the erotic, can have no resolution, it cannot resolve, because “to resolve is finally to dominate and conserve meaning through exclusion”.[2] The erotic is the place of radical meaninglessness and thus it cannot exclude, but is rather that which is excluded. The social order is of the high, and it must exclude the erotic which is of the base.
When we speak of Bataille’s concept of meaninglessness (non-meaning), one mustn’t think of it as the opposite of meaning. Rather, the conventional binary of meaning/non-meaning “it itself always only a product of this radical meaninglessness”.[3] For Bataille, meaning is a “temporary concentration of energy, generating certain systems, frameworks or theories which, according to the laws of general economy, are ultimately never able to confront or assimilate their inevitable outside, the outside of meaning and sense, and therefore fall short of their intended aim of sufficiently explaining the world”.[4] It is Bataille’s concepts of excess and expenditure that escape the movement of becoming “new and stable configurations of meaning and truth”.[5] Excess surpasses the reduction of becoming a foundational basis.[6] “Bataille’s use of words and notions such as infinity, radical meaninglessness or expenditure, are themselves highly unstable and paradoxical constructs which cannot easily be subsumed within the categories of conventional logic or oppositional thinking and thus come to signify contestation”.[7] Bataille’s radical meaninglessness escapes these movements towards foundation building because it doesn’t try to explain the universe. Rather, it recognizes the formlessness that is the universe.
Eroticism does not resolve but (capitalist) society, which is founded on taboo, does. It is society’s resolution that rationalizes the erotic act out of existence.[8] The erotic act is assimilated and becomes the erotic transaction, it becomes the imperative element that allows the homogeneous society to constitute itself without threatening itself. The erotic/sexual act is replaced by “sexual transaction”.[9] This social prevalence of sexual transactions is what allows the capitalist system to keep subjects in line by restricting desire. Capitalist society must restrict desire because desire is the desire for the totality, the desire for dissolution, the desire for expenditure. Julian Pefanis is right when he, looking at Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of how capitalist society excludes symbolic exchange, notes that “[i]n a way the schema [(look at the image below to see what ‘the schema’ is)] is remarkably familiar since when taken as a totality, it appears to be a reworking of Bataille’s model of the general economy”.[10] Pefanis also notes that Baudrillard “privileges the term beyond the (vertical) line of exclusion” within the schema (see image below to see what ‘the schema’ is).[11]
It would therefore not be wrong to say that this is what Bataille’s “schema” (of the categories of restricted economy, homogeneous society, and general economy) would like diagrammatically:
Homogeneous (capitalist) society must exclude that impure heterogeneity (expenditure) which it cannot assimilate. If desire goes towards this excluded category then it must be restricted, assimilated, and homogenized. Capitalist society uses this imperative element of erotic transaction (which Ken Hollings calls ‘sexual transaction’) to “reguate desire within a régime of production and consumption, giving it value by finally transforming it into work and exchange”.[13] Identity is imposed on us as we, as desiring subjects, are domesticated within the capitalist order which is this aforementioned regime of production and productive consumption. But expenditure, which escapes logic and metaphysics (and therefore the law of identity), threatens to erupt and destroy the stable order of capitalism via the laceration and disfiguring of identity. Expenditure and excess reveal the truth that ‘A is not A’ like the law of identity says, but rather ‘A is only A when it is beyond A’ or, in other words, using the analogy of God, God is only God when He goes beyond Himself.
The identity which capitalism violently imposes upon subjects “is constructed out of exchange and conservation, manifested in the deployment of commodities and energy, in which the act and transaction must inevitably oppose each other”.[14] It is the opposition of the erotic and the capitalist commodification of the erotic that is key here, because it allows us to unlock many other parallels. Essentially the structure of the aforementioned opposition is impure heterogeneity contra pure heterogeneity, and as we know Bataille, if he can even be said to “support” anything or “take the side” of anything, supports and takes the side of the impure heterogeneity. This means that Bataille would support anarchism (impure heterogeneity) over fascism (pure heterogeneity), dispelling the common accusation that Bataille is a fascist. The implication of the first opposition of the erotic and the capitalist commodification of the erotic also dispells the common accusation that Bataille is a capitalist as well.
Eroticism is this violence, this darkness, which ruptures the socially imposed identity of the capitalist order. I think it would be pertinent to look at Benjamin Noy’s explanation of the subversive image and its latent violence within it.
Noys explains that the photograph of a wedding is a representation of civilization and thus is a subject to the possibility of “rupturing”. Noys reminds us of Sigmund Freud’s analysis of civilization in Civilization and its Discontents. For Freud, “[v]iolence is present within what presents itself as civilized non-violence”.[15] Noys notes that Bataille agrees with Freud that “the progress of civilization demands the increasing violent repression of our violent and sexual drives”.[16] Thus, the photograph of a wedding is represented as civilized via the violent repression of the “violent non-civilized attitude”. This also means that the photograph as an image has the possibility of being split open by the violence which it represses.[17]
So what is the state of the subject who no longer has identity imposed upon them? The state of the subject is nakedness.
Nakedness follows the logic of base materialism because when we are naked “our being is laid open before the material reality of the body: but this body is no longer the idealized flesh handed down to us by a history of representation” [emphasis mine].[18] We are no longer the ideal but base when we are naked. The thought of being naked makes me laugh! I laugh not from joy but from horror; “his laughter is the sign of aversion, of horror”.[19]
It is this thought of presenting oneself naked in front of the other that is terrifying. Thoughts of rejection, of repulsion make me tremble. Those aforementioned thoughts throw me into a state of anguish which I cannot describe.
In nakedness, the naked flesh is the undoing of identity, but it is not non-identity, it is rather that identitylessness that allows for the binary of identity and non-identity. It is not non-identity because one still is but only when they are not. Thus, it is the imposition of identity that “converts our skin into a boundary which both contains and conceals us”.[20] Because the naked body is like death, it is also like putrefaction which “shows the body in disorder and sets itself against the rigid structures of socially regulated behaviour so violently that these structures will inevitably collapse”.[21] Flesh, though, is like the subversive image. It always contains a “violence” in it. Capitalism cannot deal with flesh, it can only deal with bones; “[s]ocial codes and discourse can accommodate the bare bones stripped of all flesh and can even endow them with a certain power”.[22]
“Desire throws identity into turmoil”.[23] Desire is thus a desire for communication because communication is the loss of identity, not in the sense of non-identity, but in the sense of the expenditure of the identity of the subject and subjectivity itself. Desire is therefore a desire for evil too, because it is within communication that evil and good become indiscernible.[24]
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. “Madame Edwarda,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse, 123–143. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012.
— — — . “My Mother,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse, 13–119. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012.
Engelbert, Lynn Hughey. Georges Bataille: An Epitome. Leeds, UK: Kismet Press LLP, 2017.
Hollings, Ken. “In the Slaughterhouse of Love,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse, 180–196. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012.
Kennedy, Kevin. Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature. Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, LLC, 2014.
Noys, Benjamin. Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London, UK: Pluto Press, 2000
Pefanis, Julian. Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
References
[1]: Ken Hollings, “In the Slaughterhouse of Love,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 180–196 (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012), 182.
[2]: Ibid.
[3]: Kevin Kennedy, Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2014), 27.
[4]: Ibid., 28.
[5]: Ibid.
[6]: Georges Bataille, “Madame Edwarda,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 123–143 (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012), 130.
[7]: Kevin Kennedy, Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2014), 28.
[8]: Ken Hollings, “In the Slaughterhouse of Love,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 180–196 (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012), 182.
[9]: Ibid.
[10]: Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 77.
[11]: Ibid.
[12]: Ibid.
[13]: Ken Hollings, “In the Slaughterhouse of Love,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 180–196 (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012), 182.
[14]: Ibid.
[15]: Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction, (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2000), 21.
[16]: Ibid.
[17]: Ibid.
[18]: Ken Hollings, “In the Slaughterhouse of Love,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 180–196 (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012), 185.
[19]: Georges Bataille, “Madame Edwarda,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 123–143 (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012), 124.
[20]: Ken Hollings, “In the Slaughterhouse of Love,” My Mother, Madame Edwarda, the Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, 180–196 (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012), 185.
[21]: Ibid., 186.
[22]: Ibid.
[23]: Ibid., 191.
[24]: Lynn Hughey Engelbert, Georges Bataille: An Epitome (Leeds, UK: Kismet Press LLP, 2017), 109.
