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Carolyn J. (Carolyn Janice) Dean - Introduction - Diacritics 26:2Fri Oct 03 2003 00:40:41 Europe/Copenhagenfile://localhost/Volumes/Arkiv/DownLoads/Carolyn%20J_%20(Carolyn%20Janice)%20Dean%20-%20Introduction%20-%20Diacritics%20262.htmPage 1
Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Diacritics 
26.2(1996) 3-5
[Proj…[Searc…[Journals][This Journal][Contents]
Introduction
Carolyn J. Dean
. . . even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but anoccasion for misunderstanding?--Georges Bataille,
The Accursed Share
At the current juncture in the history of studies "on Bataille,"admiration and indebtedness havegiven way to admiration constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desirefor accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through these inevitablecritical shifts, symptoms of an immeasurable debt to a writer from whom we have necessarilytaken distance. It is also an occasion to ask about our own investments in the renewedproduction of Bataille.During his lifetime (1897-1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a"pornographer" and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among someintellectuals, for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker. Since his untimelydeath, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jürgen Habermas, this former librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, editor of 
Critique,
author of covertly circulated erotic booksand other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French intellectuals leading from"Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida" [Habermas 14].
1
Bataille's remains are locatedin the posthumanist pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical,psychoanalytic, and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and MauriceBlanchot; he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a prizewinningbiography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being unknown.But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom many critics identify, yet hiswork is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes (but not always) in the interests of preserving itsinsights. Critical work on Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of 
dépense
(expenditure), hismysticism, his attraction to the sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends,viscerally if implicitly, to identify with Bataille's refusal to be hard in the conventional sense--hisrepudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its association with moral resolve. In 1945,Bataille wrote that he was the "contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels fromthe shore, because in fact . . . I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could notice the one whois dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is something altogether different, one can haveit to one's heart's content. . ." [
OC 
6:358]. In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: "Bataille's cogito, thus,reads: 'I sink therefore I am'" [Hollier 138]. In other words, Bataille was no proponent of asink-or-swim philosophy, but of "the hard desire to endure"--words he wrote to describe VincentVan Gogh, whose self-mutilation was, from Bataille's perspective, the necessary precondition of his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the self, a project that entailsyet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in the storm: Bataille insisted that creationrequired symbolic castration rather than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of those who volunteer heroically for the rescue mission ("Heroism," he said, "is an
[End Page 3]
 attitude of flight" [
OC 
5: 347]). As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille's mostrelentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the self-shattering of the phallic body.The sacrificial constitution of the man who would sink--for this Bataille was giddily embraced after 
 
Carolyn J. (Carolyn Janice) Dean - Introduction - Diacritics 26:2Fri Oct 03 2003 00:40:42 Europe/Copenhagenfile://localhost/Volumes/Arkiv/DownLoads/Carolyn%20J_%20(Carolyn%20Janice)%20Dean%20-%20Introduction%20-%20Diacritics%20262.htmPage 2
his death. By 1990, when
Yale French Studies
devoted a special issue to him, the embrace wasequally enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those theorists whodid not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue with the ego-dissolving sublimity of fascism. After all, some of his friends and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutinyfor their anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the editor of thatspecial issue insisted on Bataille's "ethics" of sacrifice. He claimed that Bataille held "onto thepossibility of an ethics" through a paradoxically "incessant repositing of the ethical" [Stoekl 2, 5].This account of Bataille's ethics avoids the problem that the ethics of sacrifice in Bataille's workturns out to be identical to the sacrifice of ethics. This reading resurrects Bataille as a man of principled equivocation. To the extent that some recent accounts of Bataille directly or indirectlytransform his performative renunciation of ethics into a substantive declaration of the ethical, theymistake the performative dimension of the text for an ethical position.In order to defend Bataille's insistence on the perpetual sacrifice of the stable meaningembedded in phallic virtues and bodies (his contention that meaning is historically contingent andinternally unstable), his friends now transform aporia into the aim and summit of analysis. Byidealizing aporia, this reading hypostatizes it. Isn't this elevation to a privileged place in thepantheon, this restoration of manly principle and lucidity, exactly the sort of "position" that Bataillewould have found unbearable?But how to preserve Bataille's critique except as an aporia? Cynical feminists never doubted thathis admirable repudiation of phallic virtue was but another stage in the history of "man." Nowshorn of his illusory armor--war, beginning with the Great War that so traumatized Bataille, wasno occasion for glory--he refashions virility as self-loss, embraces castration in his quest for self-restoration. The pain is there, but tragic manliness still reserves the prerogatives of manhoodfor itself. Other critics are justifiably disturbed by Bataille's proximity to the politics of self-dissolution, all the while rightly insisting that aporia is not a figure for suicide (you sink so youcan swim and vice versa--the point is not to drown). But when hard decisions have to be made,equivocation--since aporia implies the impossibility of taking a position--is not a tenable posture.Perhaps Bataille's insistence on equivocation, his refusal to ask (as he made so clear in a letter toRoger Caillois in 1946: "morality . . . to what end" [
Lettres
137-38]) would eventually becomeunbearable for a generation bearing the legacy of genocide. Perhaps his insistence on self-lossas a form of self-recognition would, after repeated atrocities committed in the name of the nation,become suspect. What, after all, was Bataille for? What was he against?If he did not want to relinquish the privileges of manhood, he
was
against phallic hardness. Thisopposition is more of a critical accomplishment than it might seem, especially in light of the factthat Bataille's longing to unbind the phallic self is the very desire that has rendered him suspect.After World War II democratic men sought to sustain the virtues of hardness even though theNazis had celebrated the same quality. In his 1943 Posen speech, Heinrich Himmler praised hismen for being "hard" and scandalously linked hardness to the "integrity" required of massmurderers. But antifascists interpreted fascists as soft--Theodor Adorno, we recall, said that the"tough guys are the truly effeminate ones. . . ." This claim has plausibility except for its theory of causality, in which homosexuality and femininity more generally account for fascism. Extremehardness disguises extreme softness; as Adorno put it, "Homosexuality and Totalitarianismbelong together" [46]. To
[End Page 4]
be evenhanded, then, to be judicious and ethical andmake the right decisions, requires just the right amount of hardness and, moreover, requires aworld of balanced men who never sink, know when to swim against the stream and when to float.But by what historical miracle are such men produced if not by the fantasy of a world without thelongings ascribed to women and those "women" masquerading as men? Bataille's work is anunequivocal reminder that this ideal manliness is no miracle, but a cultural fantasy. Hiscomplicated relationship to fascism notwithstanding, Bataille was no fascist. He was simply notman enough.
Carolyn J. Dean
is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of 
TheSelf and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject 
(1992) and
Sexuality and Modern Culture
(1996).
Notes
of 00

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