Russell Potter

English Department
Colby College
rapotter@colby.edu

 

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, vols. II and III, tr. Robert Hurley. Cambridge, MA: Zone, 1991 (1992).

 

Pefanis, Julian. Heterology and the Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

 

The reception of Georges Bataille, as Julian Pefanis observes, has been belated in the English-speaking world– and not only because it has been so slow to be translated. Until quite recently, Bataille has remained a shadowy figure; in a memorable metaphor Pefanis compares him with “a large dark body, maybe a black hole, whose presence in the heavens has been discernable in the erratic orbits of the visible planets: Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, and the rest” (42). Pefanis notes the groundbreaking importance of the collection Visions of Excess (1985); since then no fewer than seven new translations have appeared, including Inner Experience, The Tears of Eros, The College of Sociology, Guilty, Theory of Religion, and the first volume of The Accursed Share.¹ Yet while Bataille’s texts may be said to have finally “arrived” in the Anglophone world (as the recent special issue of Yale French Studies on Bataille attests), there still remain a number of important texts whose full impact has yet to be felt–and of these, none is more massive than the final share of La Parte Maudite. Bataille did not fully complete this work, and died when only the first volume had appeared; the Gallimard editors (and Hurley) have made the best of what was left, but the result remains massive, sprawling, redundant–and brilliant. And, of all the black holes in the Bataillean sky (and indeed l’anus solaire precedes the “black hole” in the genealogy of the imagined universe), the last two volumes of what Hurley translates as The Accursed Share loom largest, the intensity of their gravity almost suffocating.

 

Such holes can swallow their authors whole; some incomplete magnum opus or another serves as the tombstone of many a writer–and none more fittingly than Bataille. Yet, if the lightness of his short essays, the delirious play of his pornographic novellas, are less in evidence here, there is nonetheless a compensatory and strangely lucid air of finality, an air reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo; here the author weaves his own shroud, and ends by crumpling beneath it. To the very last, Bataille embodied what he called “the practice of joy before death,” and in its final sections the text burns and poisons with delight, like the half-eaten pages of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy in the mouth of the venerable Jorge in Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

 

No doubt there are other metaphors of depense with which one could hail this volume, but the question remains: What hole in the celestial void–that is, in the historical genealogy of post-modernism–do these translations of The Accursed Share (along with Bataille’s other works) fill? And, now that the penumbra of Bataille has lightened somewhat, what influence will it have on current re- theorizations of the postmodern? These are questions that Julian Pefanis sets out to answer in Heterology and the Postmodern, but before embarking on a critique of his work, a closer look at the final books of The Accursed Share is in order.

 

Unlike writers such as Baudrillard, for whom for whom the inheritance of depense leads to “the extermination of signs” (Pefanis 30), Bataille still maintains the question of expenditure from within functioning historical economies. The question of the reality-value of the structures he investigates is moot for Bataille, as it is for Foucault; both follow the Nietzschean dictate that a culture’s supposed or ostensible motives are as valuable (if not more valuable) for a genealogical inquiry as its actual ones (supposing indeed that they could ever be determined). Even if his ultimate destination is the “end of history” (190), Bataille begins with historically specific moments and cultures, in order to pinpoint the deeper structures of which they are symptomatic.

 

This process began in Volume I (which appeared in 1988 in a translation by Hurley that forms the companion to this book), where Bataille demonstrated the crucial role of sacrificing or destroying the excess produced in any economy through a series of expositions–not only on the Northwest Coast Indians’ potlach, but also on the sacrificial rites of the Maya, the territorial imperative of early Islam, and the massive monasticism of Tibetan Lamaism. In each case, Bataille locates the excess, the “accursed share” (la parte maudite), with the dispersal of which these otherwise widely varying cultures have had to cope. A society can do many things with its excess; it can throw it into refuse pits, it can expend it in endless war, or it can disperse it with a massive movement of non-production (Tibetan monasticism). The decisive move of capitalism, even against feudalism (in which Bataille as a medievalist recognizes the sheer bulk of both inefficient labor and non- productive expenditure), is to re-invest this excess in growth–that is, in the production of both greater means of production (and consequently a still larger excess).

 

That such a practice eventually seems as bizarre and cancerous as it does is a credit to Bataille as an historian. For all the surreality of his articulations of transgression and expenditure, they are grounded in history to a degree that few of his theoretical followers have matched. Yet what remains, after Volume I, is an open question: what might these historical lessons mean at the postmodern moment, either at the juncture where Bataille’s text ends (the increasing cold war tensions between the U.S. and U.S.S.R) or now, now that the historical contest between capitalist accumulation in the name of an (always postponed) individual sovereignty and socialist industrialization (in the name of a collective anti- sovereignty) has suddenly collapsed. As Bataille himself says at the close of Volume I, “if this tension [between Soviet communism and capitalism] were to fail, a feeling of calm would be completely unwarranted; there would be more reason than ever to be afraid.”²

 

From this problematic, Volume II, “The History of Eroticism,” constitutes an unexpected and somewhat diffuse detour. In it, Bataille attempts both to subjoin the question of the erotic into the larger question of the economic and to offer a historical genealogy of eroticism. Bataille begins by recounting in more pointedly economic terms Levi-Strauss’s structural models of incest and exogamy. The ban on endogamy can then be seen as a barrier against “accumulation,” just as exogamy is regarded as the “expenditure of resources” (56). Bataille also stresses, as a fundamental gesture, the importance of opposition to and distance from nature to the constitutive structures of humanity. As beings who are aware of death and for whom sexual acts are choices (rather than the function of instincts), taboos and strictures on sexuality are constitutive of humanity itself, humanity as opposed to nature. Eroticism, then, marks a return to the abhorred nature–or at least an attempted return, since the nature to which it returns is opened only through the licit illicitness of transgression, and is neither total nor sustainable. Eroticism, furthermore, is placed outside the economy of the ‘useful’; it does not serve a social function, or indeed any function at all; its nature is ‘sovereign’ (in the special use of this term as defined by Bataille; see below) and fundamentally opposed to society and the State.

 

Humanity, for Bataille, is constituted both by the taboos and strictures which establish society (not excluding the transgressions which at once violate and reaffirm them) and by its excess, which demands a commensurate expenditure of resources. On an individual level, eroticism is the ultimate form of this expenditure: it destroys the dualism between subject and object and marks the violent return of “totality” (113). It, too, has a politics, which are contrary to the interests of the state; Bataille’s figure here is the Sade of “Limitless Expenditure”; the subject “breaks away from all restraints” and annihilates form.³ Eroticism, then, is the individual technic of sovereign values, of values which Bataille opposes to utility, and as such it offers a postmodern ethos; “the consciousness of erotic truth anticipates the end of history” (190)–which for Bataille depends upon the eradication of inequalities of resources and status which produced “history.”

 

The question of how, on a social level, such a development might be possible provides the impetus towards a re-articulation of “sovereignty,” which is the subject of Volume III. By “sovereign,” it should be noted, Bataille designates something rather different from the ordinary connotations of the term, in a manner similar to Nietzsche’s “noble.” Like Nietzsche, Bataille both embraces and disavows the class connotations of his chosen term. The sovereign, for Bataille, is the domain of non-utility and non-objectivity; it is the useless, it disdains use, and it scorns the (bourgeois) world of “things.” It chooses the present rather than the future; the transgressive rather than the obedient; its domain is excess, the realm of the accursed share.

 

Bataille’s sovereignty is thus a mobile and circulating loss, eternally returning at the edge of value/utility. For, as he himself observes, this theory of the Sovereign as the useless treads on the edge of its own contradiction. If the sovereign is both “no-thing” (that thing whose use value = 0) and yet at the same time crucial (in that it alone can oppose the society of commodity accumulation), its uselessness at once becomes useful, even necessary. By its very structure it undoes itself at the very moment when its value becomes evident. The text of The Accursed Share itself enacts this mobility gained at the price of loss; like a thread in Penelope’s loom, each small section undoes and re-does the question of the sovereign.

 

In the feudal order, sovereignty has already begun to unravel, insofar as the monarchs have traded full sovereignty for power over the world of things.⁴ Nonetheless, the monarch’s role as the paradigm of subjectivity remains paramount; the subjectivity of the individual subject, rather than being directly available, is always mediated through the visual recognition of the monarch. Nonetheless, the sovereign is in principle inalienable, and the subject can always recall her/his share of the sovereign. This, for Bataille, is the revolutionary moment, when “the subject assumes in himself, in himself alone, the full truth of the moment,” and the paradigmatic subject of this kind is Sade. What this might mean on a collective level remains unarticulated, however, and Bataille does not offer any direct models as he did in Volume I. What he does instead is to embark upon a rather abstract, and yet prescient analysis of Stalin’s rationales for socialist industrialization. For Bataille, Soviet society is the medium in which the question of the sovereign will be resolved, for “today, sovereignty is no longer alive except in the perspectives of communism” (261).

 

This statement may come as something of a surprise to those who would categorize Bataille with the sort of “ludic” postmodernism that takes its cues from Nietzsche rather than Marx.⁵ Yet Bataille is quite serious; like Marx, his historical progression begins with tribal and feudalistic structures, and recognizes the capitalistic turn as a deviance from all previous historical norms. Bataille’s difference–and a significant one it is–is that unlike many theorists of Marxism, who prefer to think of Stalin as a kind of bad dream, Bataille looks directly at the economic structures of communism under Stalin as a starting point for his theorizations.

 

Bataille emphasizes at the outset the historical surprise of Lenin (and, later, Mao Zedong):

 

Socialist revolutions, carried out by militants who quoted Marx as their authority, succeeded in countries with an agrarian or feudal social structure. (265)

For Bataille, this demonstrates that it is the revolt against the old sovereignty of the feudal order that enables revolution, and not at all the revolt against the bourgeois. In fact, as Bataille ironically observes, there have not yet been any revolutions of the kind Marx predicted, where the proletariat of an industrialized nation has seized power from the bourgeois:

 

I wish to stress, against both classical and present-day Marxism, the connection of all great revolutions, from the English and the French onward, with a feudal order that is breaking down. . . . All those that overthrew a regime started with a revolt motivated by the sovereignty that is implied in feudal society. (279)

 

[14 Soviet communism, however, has a difference that fascinates Bataille; while it did not destroy an established bourgeois order, it continually opposed itself to that order on an international scale, constituting what Bataille calls the “world of denied sovereignty” (291). Unlike bourgeois societies, which by dedicating their excess resources to the increment of the forces of production in the name of accumulation, Soviet communism demanded an ever swifter and mightier increment, what Stalin (quoted by Bataille) called the “unbroken expansion of production . . . without booms or crises,” yet made precisely in the name of renouncing the sovereign share in order to create an undifferentiated society (293).

 

Thus Bataille sees Soviet communism aiming to renounce alienation–yet not the alienation of “labor value” decried by Marx, but the alienation of sovereignty itself. For, had this society succeeded, it would have marked not the destruction but the return of sovereignty:

 

If every man is destined for complete non- differentiation, he abolishes all alienation in himself; he stops being a thing, or rather he attains a thinghood so fully that he is no longer a thing . . . a thing is alienated (partial); it always exists in relation to something else. . . .

 

Bataille nonetheless seems to sense that such a society will be difficult to produce, especially when, as with later Soviet communism, the moment when full subjectivity (which is precisely an economicphenomenon) might be reached must be continually put off in the name of increased production. Yet Bataille declines to judge communism from what he calls his own “comic bourgeois” society, a society which attempts any antics to avoid sacrifice: “No one on this side of the curtain is in a position to give lessons to those whose lot was to put everything at stake” (360). In the end, bourgeois society and communist society both debase the ‘sovereign,’ as they both (though for opposed reasons) place their greatest emphasis on accumulation; Bataille is therefore not comfortable with either. His models of society, for all their attractiveness, are reluctant–out of principle, one supposes–to answer the question “where do we go from here?” In response, Bataille admits that he has only “banalities”: we must “affirm, against all opposition, the unconditional value of a politics that would level individual resources” (189). How we might work towards such a goal will not be the concern of Bataille, for whom such things would be merely useful.

 

Bataille concludes Volume III with a series of apparently unrelated articles under the heading “The Literary World and Communism.” Their titles–“Nietzsche and Communism,” “Nietzsche and Jesus,” “Nietzsche and the Transgression of Prohibitions,” and “The Present Age and Sovereign Art,” signal a strange and yet premeditated return to Nietzsche as the paradigmatic figure of the sovereign. Indeed, in a moment of uncanny lucidity, Bataille states simply, “I am the only one who thinks of himself not as a commentator on Nietzsche but as being the same as he” (367). Like Bataille, Nietzsche “refused the reign of things,” and along with it the notion of human beings as “a means and not an end” (367). Even Jesus figures in the equation; Bataille sees the New Testament as a manual for sovereign existence, and even the Nietzsche of The Antichrist as but a return to a sovereignty the institutional church had obscured under the whips and chains of ressentiment.

 

In his final pages, Bataille begins to sound something like a Zarathustra himself; critiquing Thomas Mann’s statement that “who takes Nietzsche literally is lost,” he cites Jesus’s “Who tries to save his life shall lose it” (401). The loss, even of one’s own subjectivity as such, is for Bataille the condition of life, the underlying force that drives eroticism, laughter, and writing itself. The only danger is that the sovereign loss, loss for its own sake, might be diverted into a loss for something (for God or for Country, or for greater gains in the future). Against this danger, Bataille offers his ‘text for nothing,’ his shout, his festival of depense.

 

That Bataille’s greatest strength is a negation–albeit a negation that exceeds itself and is figuratively transformed into an affirmation (as with Nietzsche’s ‘active nihilism’)–makes the question of his legacy equally accursed. Like Nietzsche, Bataille is at once everywhere and nowhere; he provides a spur, an incitement to discourse, without supplying either a dogmatic structure (Freud’s Oedipus) or an overriding goal (Marx’s proletarian revolution). It is this dilemma that faces Julian Pefanis, who in attempting to construct a genealogy of postmodernism by charting the influence of Bataille finds himself continually obliged to construct a more unitary–and a more useful–Bataille than either Bataille’s texts or Pefanis’s own theorizations of heterology would seem to offer.

 

Pefanis could nonetheless have made the necessary connections himself, constructing not so much an account of postmodernism but an instance. That he does not hardly makes his text invalid, but it does make it less valuable. To borrow Teresa Ebert’s distinction, Pefanis is more a “theoretician”–a cataloguer and applier of theory–than a “theorist”–one who, through her/his very act of writing, undertakes to actively (re)theorize the questions s/he addresses. Nonetheless, among theoreticians, Pefanis is unusually acute, and he has traced lines of influence through the theorists whose texts he considers that are suggestive and provoking. As indicated above, he takes Bataille as his central text, positing it as the mediator between Kojeve’s Hegel and the Nietzschean turn taken by French philosophy after the war (supported and encouraged in particular by Foucault and Deleuze). Pefanis later extends this argument, asserting that Bataille also stands as a medial text between Mauss’s account of The Gift and both Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s constructions around the question of exchange.

 

At the onset, Pefanis states that he wishes to mobilize these theorizations of exchange in order to model some form of ‘resistance’ to the ‘logic of consumer capitalism'(the phrase, as well as the question, is Jameson’s), and to critique the notion of postmodernism as a complicit dead-end offered by Felix Guattari, who decries the loss of confidence in the notion of “emancipation through social action” and denounces the philosophy of Baudrillard and Lyotard as “no philosophy at all” (7). Exactly how these two questions relate to one another is not made clear, but Pefanis launches into a litany for a ‘postmodern science,’ whose genealogy he traces to Alexandre Kojeve (whose students, among them Sartre, Lacan, and Bataille, could each in his turn be seen as pivots in the articulation of the postmodern). It is Kojeve, reading Hegel’s account of consciousness and desire in the Phenomenology of Mind, who first prophesies the “end of history” (12). The end will be possible because consciousness need no longer be founded upon “slavish” labor, but upon a new possibility. It remains for Kojeve’s students to articulate this possibility, and Pefanis is no doubt correct in asserting that Mauss’s The Gift provided the initial impetus for its articulation. In the question of exchange, of giving and receiving, Bataille developed his model of the “accursed share,” just as Lacan worked this same question (by way of a retournement of Freud) into his own theorizations of desire.

 

Pefanis’s next chapters, on Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard respectively, pick up on this movement, and situate Bataille as the text behind postmodern models of exchange, difference, and desire. His reading of Bataille is a lucid one, although somewhat limited (it reads somewhat like a review of Visions of Excess), and while its posing of the question of the reception of Bataille is astute (as noted above), its analysis of Bataille’s theorizations of depense are rather more tenuous. Pefanis notes Bataille’s “Nietzschean turn,” towards the loss of subjectivity, and links it to “the problematic of writing and death” in Klossowski and Blanchot. Yet this connection is abruptly dropped (it is the only reference to Blanchot in the entire book), leaving a central question of the inheritance of Bataille dangling.

 

Pefanis does engage, however, with The Accursed Share, and provides a compelling account of Bataille’s model of sovereignty. Pefanis zeroes in on the question of class, and in so doing identifies the underlying gesture from which Bataille’s “sovereign” derives:

 

Bataille struggles to strip sovereignty of its ideological associations with the bygone aristocracy without delivering it to a heroic bourgeois individual, since it is precisely this sovereign subject which Bataille aims to annihilate by reserving it for a type of mystical experience of limits--of the poetic, the erotic.(48)

 

Yet by suggesting that the sovereign “annihilates” the “sovereign subject,” Pefanis conflates Bataille’s radical anti-utilitarianism with the move against the unitary subject instigated by Freud and Lacan. Bataille does not posit such a unitary subject; indeed his ‘sovereignty’ is a mobile and fluid state incapable by its nature of cohering in a given individual, at least for long. It is not the subjectivity of the bourgeois that Bataille calls into question–it is a given for him that it is already questionable–but rather that subject’s relation to society, which is not obliterated but secured through the “experience of limits.”

 

Nonetheless, Pefanis makes some suggestive connections between Bataille and recent anthropological work–work which vindicates his insistence that the question of the economy was always one of coping not with scarcity, but with superabundance (an idea, incidentally, which Bataille probably took from Nietzsche).⁶ Marx, notes Pefanis, based his models on an “anthropology of scarcity”–and there is a case to be made, as he suggests, that this positing of primordial lack has motivated both ethnocentric anthropology and progressivist thought (51). Yet rather than link this perception, as he might, to questions of global political economy, Pefanis retreats to a digression on Kant, and concludes his chapter by declaring, somewhat vaguely, that “Bataille’s method and practice . . . ineluctably concern a meta-discourse on writing” (58).

 

Having brought Bataille from the position of someone who, at least apparently, had something to say about society, to the position of a ‘meta-discourse’ (heterology), Pefanis is able to move with relative ease to the work of Baudrillard and Lyotard. There are links here, to be sure– but there are also profound disjunctions. No doubt one of the reasons that Guattari is so suspicious of Baudrillard and Lyotard is that they are both writers who mark a turn away from the question of the socius, and towards a far more meta-discursive position. However one may construe Bataille’s politics (and some may say that he had none), he writes, as does Guattari, surreal discourse that grows from the analysis of “real” social structures, a discourse which Bataille could call sociology. To move from Bataille to Baudrillard and Lyotard without addressing this difference (except in a relatively familiar re-hash of Baudrillard’s spin on Plato’s question of the real vs. the ideal), is jarring.

 

One of the central questions of the Bataillean text, that of political economy, can serve as an indication of Pefanis’s approach: The potlach, with its economy of conspicuous loss, is chosen by Bataille over the kula, the model of ongoing exchange, and this too is the choice of Baudrillard. Yet as Pefanis observes, Baudrillard refuses altogether to think of the potlach as an “economy” (29), seeing in it instead the “extermination of signs,” whereas Lyotard scorns the entire model as an exercise in the romantic valorization of an artificially constructed “savage.” As a consequence, Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange is static, a model of signification for “after the end of the world.” Lyotard, for his part, returns to Freud without stopping to leave an offering at Bataille’s shrine, producing in The Libidinal Economy (Pefanis’s central text) an enigmatic, playful exegesis that abandons the question of the social almost entirely. Such ambivalence– one could even call it indifference–over the inheritance of Bataille characterizes many of the texts of both Baudrillard and Lyotard. This ambivalence does not seem to trouble Pefanis, who (despite his repeated accolades of Bataille) appears to become progressively more interested in Freud and Lacan.

 

Pefanis would have liked, it seems, to offer a genealogy of postmodernism which would “account” for the question of exchange in such a way that one could re-join Baudrillard’s and Lyotard’s constructions of exchange to Jameson’s meditation on resistance to consumer capitalism. Yet in the end, this desire remains unfilled, breached as it is by a Lacanian irruption (a reading, compelling at first but eventually allegorized to death), of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “The Fauna of Mirrors”). The “mirror people” lie in wait, visible only in the depths of the mirror, constrained (on account of an ancient defeat at the hands of the Yellow Emperor) to mimic us in this world. Yet one day, in revenge, they will return, and conquer, and throw off the slavery of mimesis. The mirror people, Pefanis seems to want to say, are Baudrillard and Lyotard–and surely Lacan as well–and in this sense they have already arrived, and we are them (insofar as we see ourselves in them it is/we are false, trapped in a power ploy, an allegory of meconaissance). Yet this reading of Borges via Lacan offers no grounds upon which the question of resistance can be framed, because it has already placed in abeyance the question of material social relations. In the funhouse of postmodernism, one never knows if there is actually a riot going on or not–it could be only a simulation; indeed to Baudrillard it is already a simulation. Such is “ludic” postmodernism at its worst, and while one could accuse Bataille as well of playing this game, at least for him the stakes were real. In the end, Pefanis seems more akin to Baudrillard and Lyotard than to Bataille, whose text is founded upon an insistence on the political (and on using lived social relations as a model) to which Pefanis, along with many of the more “ludic” postmodernists, has developed something of an allergy. From this position, the question of “resistance” is moot–but only because ludic postmodernists have declared it so.

 

In the final analysis, Pefanis’s book is too dense for most undergraduates; the histories it articulates will only be intelligible to those already familiar with them. Nonetheless, for those interested in these histories, it offers an elegant and at times brilliant retournement of its own. Bataille’s book, on the other hand, while even more useless, is of tremendous value. Robert Hurley’s text preserves (as have his previous translations of Bataille) both the unrelenting care and the reckless audacity of Bataille’s prose, and Bruce Mau’s impeccable design–as always with Zone books–renders the physicality of the volume a delight to hand and eye.

 

Notes

 

1. The full citations for these are as follows: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1985); Inner experience (Albany: State U of New York P, 1988 [translation of L’Experience interieure]); The Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988 [translation of Larmes d’Eros]); The College of Sociology (1937-39), ed. Denis Hollier, tr. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988 [texts by Georges Bataille, et al.; translation of Le College de sociologie]); Guilty, tr. Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1988 [translation of Le Coupable]); and The Accursed Share, Vol. 1, tr. Robert Hurley (NY: Zone Books, 1988 [translation of volume I of La Parte maudite]).

 

2. Bataille, The Accursed Share I:188.

 

3. See the essay, “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” Visions of Excess 91-102.

 

4. “What made royalty contestable . . . was that the sovereign end, which royalty was meant to embody in the eyes of the subjects, became, never more scandalously, a means for the very individual it was meant to transfigure” The Accursed Share II&III: 320.

 

5. See Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Theory/ Pedagogy/Politics 29-30 n.1, for a summary of this dichotomy, which has been most forcibly articulated by Teresa L. Ebert.

 

6. Nietzsche declares in The Gay Science, section 349, that “in nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant, but overflow and squandering, even to the point of absurdity.” The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufman (NY: Vintage, 1974), 292.