Dlgs 2020 0399

Bataille and Deleuze’s Peculiar Askesis:
Techniques of Transgression, Meditation

and Dramatisation
Janae Sholtz Alvernia University
Abstract
This article explores the ethical imperative to dramatise in the work of
Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, two of the most radical thinkers
in twentieth-century philosophy, as a peculiar kind of askesis. Whereas
askesis is often associated with asceticism or self-denial, in the sense of
self-regulation and abstention, Bataille and Deleuze advocate training
the self towards intensification of the liminal and extreme (disruption
rather than composure), which can rather be understood as a denial
of self – its dissolution or laceration. Few attempts have been made to
compare their work, even though both share a commitment to resisting
the closures that bind our desires and inhibit our full participation in
and confrontation with the ebbs and flows of an impersonal, immanent
life. Through careful consideration and comparison of their work, I
argue that both offer important methods for engendering modalities
of ecstatic being characterised by sensitivity to immanence, which have
important ramifications for our ability to address phenomena of ethical
indifference and resist the constrictions of social control mechanisms
that decimate our political imaginations and inhibit our resolve to invent
a different future. In the final sections, I interrogate the differences in
their invocation of affect and art.
Keywords: Bataille, Deleuze, askesis, dramatisation, transformation,

liminality
Deleuze and Guattari Studies 14.2 (2020): 198–228

DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2020.0399
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs
Bataille and Deleuze’s Peculiar Askesis 199
1. Introduction
Georges Bataille was hugely influential for twentieth-century thought
and played an important role in French intellectual life of the 1930s
and 1940s. Prominent intellectual, critic and theorist, and, perhaps
most famously, writer of profound and profane literature, he is
known for founding several important journals and literary groups.
He collaborated with figures such as André Masson, Jean Wahl, Jean
Rollin and Pierre Klossowski through the secret society Acéphale, was
among the co-founders of the anti-fascist group Contre Attaque (1935),
co-founded the influential Collège de Sociologie (1937–9) with Michel
Leiris and Roger Callois, and founded the literary review, Critique
(1946). These collaborations attest to the collective nature of exchange
and wide dissemination of ideas of which he was a part.
Philosophically, his unrelenting insistence on the ambiguities and
excess of life and on the irresolvable moments of contradiction in
thought inspired artists, philosophers and generations of critical theory.1
His work presents philosophy with the challenge of thinking thought
as an interminable metamorphosis, and it has been described as an
‘inescapable labyrinth’ (Noys 2000: 2) structured by configurations of
irresolvable oppositions and paradox (Libertson 1977). It is noteworthy
that these characterisations could just as easily be made of Gilles
Deleuze, for whom thought is generated through confrontation with
the unthinkable,2 and sense is incessantly bound to nonsense and
paradox. Arguably two of the most radical thinkers in twentieth-century
philosophy, their philosophical practice has been to address the most
aporetic and irresolvable tensions at the heart of philosophical thought,
not to seek resolution but to remain within their generative fray. Perhaps
this seems an unlikely pairing, given what is often considered Deleuze’s
dismissal of Bataille as simply ‘a very French author’ with ‘a mother
within, a priest beneath, an eye above’ (Deleuze thinks that Bataille’s
linkage of perversion and transgression amounts to the reinstallation
of transcendence and piety at the heart of philosophy – a dirty ‘little
secret’) (Deleuze and Parnet 1977: 47); Deleuze’s criticism of Bataille
concerns his particularly French literary proclivities, where transgression
is linked to unconscious sexual perversion and, thus, subsumed under
the Oedipal schema. Yet, I am interested in Bataille, the philosopher,
whose main prerogative seems to me to be, like Deleuze, the elaboration
of an ontological commitment to experiencing paradox, as a method
of provoking creativity and thought. I will argue that despite Deleuze’s
acerbic, albeit brief, remarks, the adjoining of respective modes of
200 Janae Sholtz
exploring the limits and the paradox of existence itself provides a

fruitful encounter that constitutes, as Deleuze himself insinuates,3 a more
nuanced and needful concept of transgression.
One particular example of their similar commitment to paradoxicality
is their negotiation of the space of human subjectivity as simultaneously
essential and inessential. Bataille, for instance, insists: ‘How little the
self matters!’ (2011: 45), while Deleuze and Guattari wryly claim: ‘the
self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities’
(1987: 249). Yet, this ‘necessary illusion’, as Nietzsche would say,
is a nodal concept from which both thinkers launch their critiques
of philosophy and common life, and reflects the overriding theme
of an inescapable tension, a vivifying and simultaneously crippling
impossibility, as the possibility of actually experiencing life in its
fullness. This kind of intellectual athleticism explains why language
becomes, for both, a radical and scorching poetics, and life, a dramatic
aesthetics. Rather than a mad affirmation of excess and immoderation,
I find that their philosophies advocate a kind of firm and sober,
though strangely paradoxical, askesis. For both, the recognition of our
existential condition demands the paradoxical necessity of systematically
dismantling the ‘Self’, and both philosophers describe a process
of methodical self-discipline as well as the development of certain
techniques to provoke said transformation – although, as we shall see,
the force of sobriety is considerably stronger in Deleuze. Intriguingly,
askesis for both Bataille and Deleuze can be read through the concept
of dramatisation, which will be associated with a radically jarring
meditative exercise for Bataille and intensification, or ‘spiritual ordeal’,4
for Deleuze. This helps us understand the particular sense of askesis
that, from a preliminary perspective, seems incongruous to them both:
whereas askesis is typically associated with traditional hallmarks of
asceticism, self-denial in the sense of self-regulation, Bataille and Deleuze
advocate disciplining the self through meditation on (and dramatisation
of) the most intense or extreme, which can rather be understood as
a denial of self through its dissolution. Thus, this paper explores the
ethical imperative to dramatise in the work of Bataille and Deleuze, as
a peculiar kind of askesis that requires sustaining intensity rather than
eschewing it. As we shall see, dramatisation is a process of intensifying
experience in a way that leads to the transformation of the subject, a
transformation towards a greater communion with the outside (Bataille)
or with the plane of immanence and its virtual potentialities (Deleuze).
Throughout, I elaborate on the similarity of their ontological visions, the
centrality of dramatisation for their projects, and their understanding
of the liminal status of subjectivity. The aim is to contextualise their

techniques of self-discipline in light of these ontological and existential
concerns. Though the essay does act as a comparison, the bulk of the
discussion is focused on explicating Bataille’s thinking with regard to
the necessity of lacerating or dissolving the subject and how he conceives
dramatisation as accomplishing this process, in order to definitely make
the case for what I have referred to as the ethical imperative to dramatise.
Deleuze is more explicit about this imperative, and I am interested in
illuminating what I take to be a less well traversed path in Bataille studies
in order to draw connections to Deleuze’s endorsement. The final section
addresses their similarities and contrasts as they appear in relation to
aesthetic practices. But to begin, I offer some brief remarks concerning
the lineage and resurgence of askesis in contemporary philosophy. This
next section will highlight the way that Bataille and Deleuze draw from
both classical forms and Christian traditions, while also distinguishing
their uptake from contemporary counterparts.
2. The Many Forms of Askesis

The philosophical retrieval of ancient notions of askesis, at least
for continental philosophy, has been largely associated with Hadot’s
existential study of spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy (1995) and
Foucault’s designation of ‘care of self’ as the foundational principle
of freedom (1988, 1997), while in the American context, Nussbaum’s
account (1994) of the therapeutic effects of askesis has catalysed interest.
In each case, they are interested in the relation of askesis to conversion
or self-transformation and refer primarily to the Hellenistic/Stoic origins,
as Hadot claims, when philosophy was a way of life.
For the Stoics, conversion concerns the proper orientation of the soul,
which is bound up with a cosmology of divine rationality that secures the
possibility and aim of synchronicity between nature and the human. God
is identified with an eternal reason (Diogenes Laertius 1925, book 7:
lxviii) and matter (the cosmos) is structured in accordance with its plan.
Thus, there is little distinction between the divine and nature; the cosmos
is divinely ordered, and the Stoic aim is to rid ourselves of impediments
that bar our coincidence with this order. To attain this goal requires
intense discipline of those elements in our nature that are contrary to
this rational order and the elimination of the false beliefs that arise from
the disorder that they cause.
Consequently, askesis in Hellenistic/Stoic thought includes the
cultivation of an attitude of detachment and indifference towards
202 Janae Sholtz
worldly events (that which we have no control over), regulation and

elimination of the passions, adherence to rational order of the universe,
and self-transcendence towards coexistence with this divine rational
order. The practices of askesis include intense concentration on the
present moment (prosochē) and different meditative practices and
theoretical contemplations, as well as rigorous study meant to cultivate
proper character and lead to spiritual transformation.
In her analysis of these three contemporary figures who take up Stoic
askesis, Antonaccio observes that what all three of their interpretations
lack is the adherence to the cosmological assumptions of ancient
philosophy (2012: 139). This is an important claim, because, as
Davidson (and Sellars 1999) notes, ‘one of the most distinctive features
of [the Hellenistic] care of the self . . . is its indissociable link with
this cosmic consciousness [divine rational order]’ (Davidson 2014: 129).
According to Antonaccio, Nussbaum advocates a pragmatic askesis
that focuses on the finite and socio-political dimensions of the human
condition rather than aspiring to the purity of a transcendent reason,
and thus her view of ancient askesis is that we should not seek to
transcend passion altogether but look within our human condition – a
critical therapy of the passions rather than their elimination in service of
aligning with pure and transcendent reason. Foucault’s aesthetic askesis
is highly subjective with no governing (metaphysical) norms, instead
operating through critical assessment of the repertoire of social and
ethical practices culminating in a self-fashioning and re-envisioning of
social life. Lastly, Antonaccio claims that Hadot, though committed
to adopting a cosmic perspective, does not adhere to the metaphysical
foundation found in Stoicism (2012: 138–9).
Both Bataille and Deleuze take the necessity for correspondence
with the cosmos seriously, and this is both what brings them into
closer alignment with their Stoic predecessors than these others, and
simultaneously marks the beginning of their divergence (in terms of
the particular interpretation of the nature of the cosmos), giving rise
to their respective peculiar forms of askesis. Bataille, like Foucault, is
concerned about the social and civic aspects of human existence, but in
a very specific manner – he is concerned with the fundamental religious
impulse that he views as seminal to the foundation and organisation
of human life and community, and this impulse leads him down the
path of a particular metaphysical question: ‘What is life?’ Likewise,
although there is undoubtedly resonance between Foucault’s ‘aesthetics
of existence’ and Deleuze’s linkage of ethics and aesthetics (see Surin
2011), Deleuze grounds his understanding of human existence in the
discussion of impersonal and immanent cosmic life. This is one of the

reasons that I find the reference to ancient forms of askesis (especially
the Stoics) to be so compelling for understanding Bataille and Deleuze.
Even if their exercises concern practical activities and day-to-day life,
the impetus lies in the need to comprehend and align oneself with the
larger metaphysical reality. Bataille and Deleuze offer an alternative view
of the cosmos, one not grounded in divine rationality and not subject
to transcendent ordering. Thus, both Bataille and Deleuze continue in
the Stoic tradition of producing cosmic awareness/consciousness, yet, to
some extent, invert the Stoic properties of the cosmos, a claim that will
be addressed subsequently.
Moreover, Bataille and Deleuze are also inheritors of the long
tradition of askesis that developed through Christian history, and the
difference between Bataille and Deleuze can perhaps be understood
through the divergent trends one finds therein. For instance, Hadot
traces a path from the Hellenistic tradition of askesis through medieval
philosopher/theologians such as Augustine and Ambrose and the early
monastic tradition, to the classical theism of St Ignatius of Loyola, who
brings a renewed emphasis on the element of self-discipline, prefacing his
tome with this aim: ‘to conquer oneself and regulate one’s life without
determining oneself through any tendency that is disordered’ (Ignatius
1914). Ignatius says that ‘it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent
to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free
will and is not prohibited to it’ (ibid). Thus, the emphasis on self-
discipline, indifference to worldly things, and self-denial remain constant
features, tempered with theistic piety, contemplation of Christian sin,
and the suffering of Christ. Much of this lineage centres on the aim
of transcendence to another world, a desire that issues in quite literal
destructive effacement of the body (severe self-discipline, to the point
of self-flagellation and starvation) or concentration on suffering and
fleshly unworthiness. Significantly, St Ignatius is a crucial touchstone for
Bataille, who understands Ignatius’ insistence on the contemplation of
the broken and suffering body of Christ as a paradigmatic experience
of the communication of ecstasy (one that he later replicates with
more immanent examples of the pinnacle of suffering) (Stoekl 2007:
69–71). Given this influence, we can better understand why, for Bataille,
communication requires engagement with the violent transgression of
bodily, psychological and social boundaries (Irwin 1993: 121) and
perhaps also why Deleuze criticises Bataille for being a sad pope
(indebted too much to the suffering of Christ) focused solely on
the sad passions. It is important to note that though Deleuze is
204 Janae Sholtz
aware of, and as some have argued, influenced by Christian mystics

and their spiritual exercises, he remains allegiant to the Stoics, for
whom self-discipline does not take this destructive bent – they advocate
transformation through mental regulation of the passions but not the
sheer denial of or disgust towards the body. What we find in Deleuze is
a similar emphasis on intensification of experience, yet one that expands
the purview of what can constitute such a moment. This distinction
also serves to underscore the more explicit emphasis on sobriety that
pervades Deleuze’s writings on becoming and transformation, in A
Thousand Plateaus for instance. There, intensification requires a certain
cautiousness and even mindfulness – not to go ‘too far’. You have to,
as Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘keep enough of the organism for it to
reform each dawn’ (1987: 160), a process of patient and momentary
dismantling (161).
Further, in The Hermetic Deleuze, Ramey traces an alternative
lineage of askesis through the medieval hermetic tradition, claiming
that their main purpose was to provoke a mystical knowledge of an
infinite divine that would have been seen as heretical to those focused
on the Trinity and the priority of the existential Christ (Christian
orthodoxy).5 The hermetic tradition derives from Hermes Trismegistus,
who ‘taught that the knowledge of the cosmos was the source of all
spiritual, personal and collective transformation’ (Ramey 2012: 26).
The lineage of this tradition through medieval and renaissance theology
held that the purpose of philosophy was to be a realignment of the
cosmological and individual brought about through spiritual ordeals – a
slight transformation of the language of spiritual exercise which
gestures towards the peculiarity of Deleuze’s askesis. Now, like the
Stoics, Deleuze understands ethics in light of developing an appreciation
for the cosmic whole (or, as Deleuze would rather, the univocity of
being or ethics of the event) (see Sellars 1999; Sholtz 2020). Unlike the
Stoics, for whom this knowledge was predicated on elimination of
passionate distraction and the elevation of our rational selves, the
hermetics proposed spiritual ordeals that included the mantic and
alteration of states of being, and quite importantly, developed a sense
of ‘an infinite or unbounded cosmos’ (Ramey 2012: 51) which is
more in line with Deleuze’s perspective. Deleuze’s understanding of
the cosmos, in terms of immanent cosmic forces as a continuous
unfolding and dynamic, illuminates Deleuze’s particular focus on
bodily experimentation and exploration of extremes. Deleuzian spiritual
exercises (ordeals) are meant to bring us into contact with a cosmos
of immanent forces and intensities – hence his ‘equation of ethics and
immanence’ (Cull 2011: 46–7) – rather than first principles, divine

rationality or the infinite as transcendent:
Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical . . . it implies
a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are
not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These orders belong to the order
of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and
excess. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41)
Deleuze’s peculiar askesis will thus emphasise the intensification of

experiences rather than indifference to them, and because of his
immanent metaphysics, these will be techniques of disorientation,
discontinuity, displacement and disruption, not as conduits to revelation
of a spiritual realm but as revelation of immanent cosmic forces. In both
Stoicism and hermeticism, the emphasis on developing a cosmological
view through the process of expanding (or even overwhelming) the
self is retained, and to understand both Bataille and Deleuze’s askesis
requires a greater consideration of their metaphysical views, both of
which constitute a deformation of that very term given their eschewal
of traditional transcendence.
3. Immanent Life and the Centrality of Dramatisation

Underlying both Bataille and Deleuze’s philosophies is a concept of
impersonal, indomitable immanent life, flowing like an undercurrent
that simultaneously defines and contests human existence, and for both,
philosophy concerns challenging the limits of human experience, in
order to bring us closer to a genuine encounter with this immanent life.
Bataille writes: ‘Life is never situated in one particular point: it passes
rapidly from one point to another, like a current or a kind of electrical
stream . . . I am and you are, in the vast flux of things, only a stopping
point favorable to a resurgence’ (2014: 97–8). Likewise, Deleuze’s pure
immanence (or what he calls ‘a Life’) is characterised as a continuum
of singularities and intensities that precede individuality, where ‘what
is common is impersonal and what is impersonal is common’ and
‘immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself’, a
‘singular essence’ characterised as ‘pure power and even bliss’ (Deleuze
2001: 14, 27, 30).
Bataille’s philosophy (and life) is a testimony to experiences that
rupture the artifice of the isolated subject, and these experiences
provide the possibility of what he calls ‘profound communication’,
which is a visceral exposure to the outside that is shared as precisely
206 Janae Sholtz
incommunicable, an alterity beyond words (Mitchell and Winfree 2009:

11–14), that is, this level of impersonal, indomitable life. This ek-
stasis made possible through inner experience verges upon something
like a religious experience, while remaining deeply embedded in the
immanent conditions of existence. Likewise, Deleuze conceptualises the
dismantling of self as a method for engendering a greater awareness of
pure immanence described above.
Inner experience (Bataille) and counter-actualisation (Deleuze) are
the names that each uses for the process of dismantling the self.
Bataille’s inner experience is itself a paradoxical term, because ‘inner’
does not mean something like the immanence we might associate with
Husserlian phenomenology, but instead indicates the experience of
the rupture of the artificial boundaries of self and the possibility of
radical transgression. Inner experience is an experience of the self as
dispersed within a greater communion with that which is radically
other – mute and excessive, yet vitally and overwhelming real. Bataille’s
obsession with engendering these types of experience confirms his desire
to expose or illuminate a general economy of life beyond the limits
of our rationally structured understanding, a reality that moves in
tandem but also in excess of (and threatening to) our bounded energies
and psychic limitations. According to Bataille, dramatisation is a key
methodology for producing this inner experience. It is, in fact, because of
this impossibility, this incongruence between ourselves and Life, that we
must dramatise. As Bataille says, ‘If we did not know how to dramatize,
we would not know how to get out of ourselves’ (Bataille 2014: 18).
In Logic of Sense, Deleuze develops an account of counter-
actualisation, which opens thought to the manifold processes of
differentiation, energetic flows and intensities that exist in any given
event and which therefore underlie and inform the composition of our
‘self’. Counter-actualisation is a process of re-energising potentials, as
a kind of anti-production, which would parallel Bataille’s desire to
elaborate a new economy of liberated, unproductive expenditure and
energetics. Echoing Bataille’s formulation of the ontological priority
of a general economy constituted by energetic expenditure and excess,
life, for Deleuze, is characterised by an oscillating movement between
stratified systems (organisms, substances) and ‘a surplus value of
destratification . . . an aggregate of consistency that disrupts orders,
forms, and substances’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 336), and counter-
actualisation is connected to the possibility of encountering this life at
this fuller, cosmic level. In order to counter-actualise, Deleuze suggests
that the subject has to first counter-actualise (or dismantle) itself, a
process of dissolution of the subject’s identification as an impermeable

self-sufficient entity, which offers an interesting resemblance to the
necessity of inner experience for engendering the more profound
communication that Bataille envisions. Significantly, Deleuze’s concept
of dramatisation is also central to both his ontology and to counter-
actualisation, as practice that opens the subject to an experience of
the immanent Event.6 In Logic of Sense, the paradigmatic form of
dramatisation seems to be the meditation on the duality of death,
as both an existential fact and an impersonal event, which issues
in the dissolution of the subject and the opening of subjectivity to
immanence. Though, as I will argue, dramatisation has a wider purview
and can be applied to all manner of events, opening the subject to
a wider experience, the repetition of the event and their concurrent
intensification is essentially the crux of experimentation that Deleuze
claims loosens our imprisoning habits and moves us beyond ourselves,
that is, transformation.
Counter-actualisation and inner experience reveal that the human
condition is to live the tension of an impossible yet necessary liminal
boundary, as each requires an impossible task to remain enough of a
subject to be able to commune with an immanent plane of being that is
only possible to reach through the dissolution of the self. In other words,
inner experience and/or counter-actualisation are challenging, almost
impossible, tasks, requiring mental effort and discipline that actually
have to be strategised and expressly focused – askesis. In order to clarify
this statement, we must consider what necessitates these methods or
practices of dissolution and this will require a discussion of Bataille’s
diagnosis of the human condition.
4. The Human Condition – the Liminality of the Subject

One of the threads that animates the projects of both thinkers is the
concept of liminality, which, taken from its Latin root (lı̄men), suggests
a threshold. More than merely a limit, it is a space of passage, where
limits are delineated and potentially transgressed. Bataille expresses
the need to soberly consider the possibilities implied in liminality,
that is the inexorability of transgression taken to its most radical
limit – the impossible, the unknowable, the sovereign moment – as a
technique of self-discipline, which transforms the self. Deleuze considers
the limits of our thought, the unthinkable and the imperceptible, to
be those motivating factors that inspire thought it self. His edict of
experimentation is predicated on the idea that we must go to the
208 Janae Sholtz
extremes, the limits of what we think and do, in order to ‘launch new
rhythms which energize our thinking and multiple the possibilities in
our worlds, [sweeping] us outside of pre-coded strata, deterritorialising
us and preparing us for new becomings’ (Sholtz 2015: 170). One could
say that Bataille and Deleuze are both concerned with limit-experiences
as part of their askesis, but more specifically, Bataille situates the issue of
limitation and transgression at the heart of the human condition. Thus,
it is not a matter of indulgence but necessity that we consider the ways
that liminality conditions our experience, in order that we can expose
ourselves to that which is beyond the limit. Why? Transformation
through traversing the limit is life, while stasis through adherence to
limits is a restriction of the infinite potentiality that both thinkers
assume.
4.1. Bataille’s Account of Liminal Subjectivity

Bataille explains the human experience as conditioned by two
economies: the general economy and the economy of utility or work.
The general economy is that of expenditure, loss and excess, while the
economy of utility is characterised by accumulation and preservation.
Bataille inverts the priority of these two economies, where life is most
fully characterised by the former, and the preservative, accumulative
economy is only a precursor to the greater energetics of flow and
expenditure. From this perspective life is always rushing towards death,
but death is really just the expiration of singular organisms, which
are merely way stations within the overflow of life, or immanence.
Limitation and transgression are essential components of the interaction
between the general economy and the economy of utility: utility demands
order, rules and boundaries, while the general economy creates an
exigency towards excess, which manifests in us as a desire to transgress
or surpass limits.
The human condition is fundamentally paradoxical in that we
participate in both economies and feel the dual necessities of excess
and preservation as an irresolvable tension. Thus, transgression is,
ultimately, not something that we do, but something that we are;
it is our unavoidable conditionality. Recognition of this paradoxical
condition is essential for understanding Bataille’s critique of rationality,
discursivity and subjectivity, but it is also fundamental for understanding
the development and practices of human communities.
Given the exigency towards excess, which from the perspective of
the need for preservation would be a pure violence, Bataille perceives,
in human history, the need for organised transgression; this, coupled

with taboo, makes communal life possible (Bataille 1986: 65), and
without it, greater forms of violence, such as war, would ensue. Bataille
identifies the festival, linked to ritual and sacrifice, as a primitive outlet
for transgression, a place where violent urges can be celebrated yet
contained. The community can quell or expiate its violent tendencies
and unify itself through the exaltation in the momentary release. In
other words, festival and the celebration of limited transgression found
therein is a feature of the economy of utility itself. Thus, transgression is
ineluctably tied to the notion of the limit or order, and is complicit the
maintenance of order. Yet, Bataille is interested in developing a practice
of transgression that is not reintegrated into the body of the community
as a means to shore up its productivity, moving beyond an economy of
production to an economy of unproductive expenditure, from limited to
unlimited transgression.
Though our awareness of transgression is developed through its
complicity with the preservative mode of utility, the thought of
transgression can become a meditation on the nature of limit itself.
Bataille writes: ‘The pinnacle of being stands revealed in its entirety only
through the movements of transgression in which, though founded on
the development of awareness through work, at last transcends work
in knowledge that it cannot be subordinated to it’ (Bataille 1986: 276).
Bataille develops his account of transgression in Erotism, and one must
understand his thinking on transgression and the logic of the limit here
as heavily influenced by Nietzsche. The death of god necessitates a new
understanding of the limit, wherein transgression is no longer linked to
the transgression of a transcendent limit. Eliminating the possibility of
an ultimate limiting agent or force calls into question the essentiality
of all limits, and thus opens us to the possibility of the nature of
the limit as unlimited. The logic of the limit, as an unlimited relation
with transgression, implies several significant things for Bataille: first,
transgression illuminates the both the inescapability of limitation as well
as the inessentiality of all limits. Second, it serves as the occasion to
contemplate the very notion of impossibility, as transgression implies
its own impossible completion. As Foucault has pointed out, the
limit is unsurpassable (infranchissable), because in its passage, the
limit disappears (see Foucault 1977, 1984). Moreover, transgression,
in the sense of a total escape, represents the impossibility that is,
finally, identified with death (Libertson 1977: 1017). Therefore, we
must understand Bataille’s unlimited transgression in a very particular
way – not as a desire for complete or total destruction of limits, but
210 Janae Sholtz
as a search for methods to sustain a perpetual mode of transgressivity

that, moreover, tarries with this inherent possibility of impossibility.
Bataille refers to this as an experience of the extremity of the limit, whose
modality is an oscillating movement, which continually pursues the limit
in its perpetual, receding displacement.
Now, this paradoxical structure illuminated by the logic of
transgression is a predicate of subjectivity itself. The self is what
Libertson calls the unicity of a paradoxical closure, which refers us back
to a basic ontological opposition. Survival is a struggle to subsist directed
against the general economy, where the general economy’s axis is death.
The self is an enclosure of excess, for the sake of survival. This is the
paradoxical point in Bataille’s conception of subjectivity: this struggle
against excess that incarnates integrity is animated by the same excess.
Closure is a modality of that which is irreducible to closure (the general
economy), a regional enclosure of the general economy circumscribed
as an illusory self. Therefore, closure is not essential, but a constant
movement needing to be shored up. This situation brings the concepts
of excess and closure into the intimacy of a mise en jeu (Libertson 1977:
1004–5). Bataille refers to this as glissement between excess and closure,
and this is the basic modality that defines the human condition. As we
shall see, it is first opening up this transversal relationship between excess
and closure and then remaining with it that becomes the peculiar form
of askesis in Bataille’s work.
Bataille’s writings express a desire to explore and illuminate this
tension, based in part upon the recognition that profane, mundane
life (utility) constantly covers over and represses it for the sake of
maintaining the stability necessary for preservation and work. He says:
‘I don’t want to reduce, to assimilate the ensemble of what is to an
existence paralyzed by servitude but to the wild impossibility that I am,
that cannot escape its limits, or stick to them’ (2011: 21). The problem
is that our very existence, as discrete individuals, impedes the possibility
of a greater congress with life, in its mode of excessive fluidity and
abundance:
The stabilized order of isolated appearances is necessary for the anguished

consciousness of the torrential floods that carry it away. But if it takes itself
for what it appears to be, if it encloses itself in a fearful attachment, it is
no longer the occasion of a laughable error; one more withered existence.
(Bataille 2014: 98)
Thus, Bataille’s paradoxical ‘goal’ is to go to the extremity of

the possible, to experience unrecoverable transgression, which would
suggest escaping the limits of the self that act as protective, yet isolating
barriers. The contestation and exploration of limits and nothing else,
no salvation, remains a perpetual movement between and within these
limits, leading to an experience, as Bataille says, of ‘the profound lack of
all true stability’ (Bataille 2014: 95), which exposes (or shatters) the idea
of an intact or whole subjectivity such that the very experience leads to
the recognition of the vast flow that surges beyond and comprises the
self (Noys 2000: 51). In other words, the only goal that can possibly
circumvent the economy of utility is to unwork ourselves by confronting
the nature of our own finitude, the possibility of our impossibility, which
opens us to a possibility of experience beyond the limit, that of excessive,
impersonal life. There are experiences that offer a glimpse of this tension,
the glissement that exposes us to our finitude: laughter, ecstasy, torture,
anguish, eroticism. In each case, Bataille identifies the tendency of these
modes of being to shatter the internal boundaries of the self, to reveal
the fundamental impotence in our bid for completion or totality – that
impossibility lies at the centre of our being.
Yet Bataille constantly expresses frustration because all of the liminal
moments to which he refers, where bare existence or excessive life reveals
itself, are ephemeral: ‘I [can] never remain there’ (Bataille 2014: 48),
and this thwarts the possibility of a perpetual transgressivity. These
instants are in themselves unsustainable, or risk being assimilated into
utility by attempting to make ‘sense’ of them or by arresting them in
language or discourse. Moreover, every action would be limited either
by recuperation into a project or by death, that is, ‘the consciousness
of death (and the liberation that it brings to the immensity of beings)
would not be formed if one did not approach death, but it ceases as
soon as death has done its work’ (ibid.: 100).
4.2. From Liminality to Inner Experience

Given that glissement, this oscillating rhythmic modality, is a
fundamental condition of ipseity, Bataille locates the possibility of
unlimited transgression, which we must understand as perpetual
transgressivity, in what he calls inner experience. ‘Inner experience
responds to the necessity in which I exist – and human existence
within me – to challenge (question) everything without acceptable rest’
(Bataille 2014: 9). The intensification of this transgressive movement
that characterises the self as such is at issue, and it is most clearly
recognised when all activity is stripped away and one meditates on
what is given in inner experience: ‘lucidity resulting from the absence
212 Janae Sholtz
of action’ (Bataille 2011: 192, n.5). This is why Bataille’s development

of inner experience is accompanied by an emphasis on meditation,
that is, the self-disciplining of the mind.7 It is an explicit meditation
on this glissement, which is to say the incessant movement that
unlimited transgression suggests – namely that there is no dénouement,
only speeds and slownesses, intensifications and relaxations of this
general movement – that allows one to grasp this as a figure of
glorious expenditure without assimilating it back into the consumptive
economy. Clearly, this description bears a distinct resemblance to
Deleuze’s emphasis on the underlying, incessant vacillations on the
plane of immanence – the negotiations between movement and rest,
change and constancy, are present in the constant negotiations between
deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Ontologically speaking,
movement – constant variation, elemental flux – is fundamental for
Deleuze, with points of constancy or stability brought about through
Refrains (repetitions of assemblages of corporeal and incorporeal
elements) as more or less temporally permanent way stations. Yet, in
order to gain awareness of this level of reality (immanent becoming),
Deleuze comes close to positing something like the ‘lucidity resulting
from the absence of action’ through his description of nomadology.
Nomadology is characterised, perhaps counterintuitively, as a ‘voyage
in place’. Deleuze further clarifies that ‘to think is to voyage . . .
[characterised] neither [as] a measurable quantity of movement, nor
something that would be only in the mind, but the mode of
spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 482). This awareness, or manner of being attuned,
also seems to happen through a relation, an oscillation between the self
and the non-self.
Returning to Bataille, we come to the experience of extremity most
intensely through meditation on this inner movement. In order for this to
happen, inner experience itself must be attuned in a particular way: ‘the
mind attentive to inner movement only gains access to the unknowable
depth of things: by turning to an entire forgetting of self’ (Bataille 2014:
115). Bataille outlines a strategy: (1) the mind must become attentive,
which is why Bataille advocates meditative practice and silence. It is
in this silence ‘where the self slips away’ (Hegarty 2000: 100) and the
noise of excessive life surges in. Much like John Cage’s understanding
of silence as the opening of a space of ambient sounds – silence is a
plenitude that sweeps us beyond ourselves (Cage 2011: 22–3) – Bataille
offers us a concept of silence characterised by the noise or cacophony
of catastrophic life that becomes intensified when we silence ourselves
(Hegarty 2000: 101). (2) These inner movements must be provoked by

something that shatters or lacerates the isolated enclosure of our ‘being’:
‘you could not become the mirror of a lacerating reality if you did not
have to be shattered’ (Bataille 2014: 98). In other words, something has
to wrest us from our everyday awareness, which is circumscribed by the
products of utility, and, ironically, turn us away from our concentration
on ourselves. (3) This provocation has to somehow be sustained, as it
is our comical condition that our own desire will be to deny and reject
this experience – to opt for the succour of stability and servility (Bataille
2014: 118).
At the same time, Bataille insists that laceration must not prevent
reflection (inner experience) from taking place, this awareness of
glissement. Bataille says that ‘the laceration should only be reflected,
and leave the mirror intact’ (2014: 99). In other words, we cannot
literally lacerate or shatter ourselves to the point of destruction, but must
somehow effect a laceration to which we can become audience. This
paradox of the necessity of self-dissolution and minimal self-preservation
also animates Deleuze’s work, as he is fascinated with the idea of a
kind of existential/philosophical brinkmanship – we must deterritorialise
ourselves, but ‘not too much’ (thus the shared theme of liminality).
As Brintnall claims, Bataille ‘seeks a nonsuicidal disappearance of
the subject’ (2015: 57), which is, as aforementioned, reminiscent of
Deleuze’s imperative that, in dismantling the self, one must leave just
enough behind that one can rise again in the morning (Deleuze 1990:
157–8).
Bataille likens laceration to a contagion, whereby our limits are
breached (or permeated) by experiences that are inassimilable. Largely,
these experiences remain outside of the order of rationality and discourse
and resistant to sense-making, and, commonly, Bataille invokes the
domain of affective and aesthetic experience when attempting to
convey this thought. Now, when I say aesthetic experience, one has
to understand, rather than aesthetic disinterestedness or distance, a
place of stark confrontation and communicability. Bataille, by invoking
photographic images depicting real instances of the most horrific
nature and unthinkable cruelty, challenges the thin line between the
aesthetic and the real. Bataille’s seeming obsession with particularly
gruesome and shocking images is indicative of his belief that ‘cruelty
and violence are ineradicable features of human life’ (Bush 2015:
39). Generally, we attempt to avoid such realities by mentally placing
them outside of civilised life, as anomalies or exceptions, but Bataille
recognises this eschewal or denial as an indication of our subjection and
214 Janae Sholtz
servitude, while the affirmation of them indicates a rejection of authority

and a move towards sovereignty that denies even the privilege of the
self.8
Bataille’s examples suggest that it only the greatest intensities, raw
and tormented affects, that destroy the order and composure of an
enclosed being and return us to the incessant flow of immanent being.
Yet the impossibility of our situation is thus that we can never go to
these affective extremities ourselves, to become a sacrificial object, to
suffer pain or torture to the brink of death, otherwise we are cut off
from experiencing them. Deleuze struggles with this paradox as well,
recognising that you ‘you don’t [or can’t] reach the BwO, and its plane of
consistency, by wildly destratifying’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 160).
It is in this context that Bataille wants to invoke the aesthetic as a kind
of naked exposure that arrests us and places us before the extremities of
our existence, without the finality (or impossibility, rather) of complete
annihilation.
One might remember the Syrian boy with the red shirt, face down
and drowned on the beach, and the overwhelming reaction of the
international community. That shocking and raw image lacerated our
public consciousness, if for a brief moment in the onslaught of events
and images that followed. In a way that no words, no pleas from
activists and no rational arguments by politicians could affect us, this
image opened us onto the immensity of the darkness in which we live.
Yet, there is a phenomenon of closure that is indicative of our public
temporality. There, the hyper-saturation of images and affects has, in
effect, desensitised us to the most horrific events. We cannot seem to
make anything from our momentary shock; the psychic wounds heal as
quickly as they are had. The appeal to the aesthetic can be powerful;
however, it alone is not enough.
Likewise, Deleuze often resorts to the mediating figure of the artist and
his/her expression of suffering, cruelty or intensity. As Cull observes,
Deleuze contemplates how we might mediate experiences of extreme
intensity or ‘pure lived experience’ through works of trailblazers like
Artaud and Fitzgerald, whose sufferings placed their whole bodies and
beings at risk. We can, so to speak, start in the middle, by recognising the
planes of consistency invented through the artist’s intensities, in order to
launch further explorations/experimentations of our unknowns (2011:
46). But, just as for Bataille, appeal to the aesthetic will not be enough.
For Deleuze, there is constant awareness that the artist/artwork can
only indicate a path, a plane of consistency, that has to be taken up
and intensified, ‘opening the body to connections that presuppose an
entire assemblages’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 160). If aesthetics is

central to ethics for Deleuze, it is, as Surin claims, because it is a method
of invention, one that surpasses passive reception or mere assessment
(2011: 143). In both cases, what seems to be centrally important is
that these encounters must ‘go beyond knowledge’ (148), to make an
indelible mark, a cut, that affects us enough to instigate a creative
transformation. This is how the aesthetic becomes ethical.
5. Bataille’s (dis)Solution: Dramatisation

This is where dramatisation as a mode of askesis enters the discussion.
Bataille theorises a programme of dramatisation operating through
certain practices of intensification and mental visualisation, which propel
the dissolution of self. In other words, dramatisation combats the closure
of public temporality and holds open a space in which the searing
light of pain and suffering, the torturable body, can have its effect.
He offers two definitions of dramatisation: (1) dramatisation as the
means by which one can attain states of ecstasy or ravishment, to ‘get
out of ourselves’ (Bataille 2014: 17–18) through intensification; and
(2) dramatisation as ‘the will not to limit oneself to the statement, to
oblige one to feel the chill of the wind, to be laid bare. Hence [it is]
nondiscursive sensation’ (20). The first suggests that dramatisation is
related to the laceration or shattering moment that is necessary for
the opening of the enclosed self, but through the repetition of the
moment, dramatisation constitutes another temporality, non-linear or
even atemporal (in Deleuzian language, Aion as opposed to Chronos).
In Guilty, Bataille speaks of his process of lacerating or shattering
of the enclosure of self, which he calls intense ecstasy, as a kind of
mental visualisation: ‘on the wall of appearances, I projected images
of explosion, of laceration’ (Bataille 2011: 29), and he suggests that
this mental visualisation can be occasioned through the conscientious
contemplation of certain external images: ‘when an image of torture
falls before my eyes, I can, in my fear, turn away. But if I look at it,
I am outside myself . . . The sight – horrible – of torture opens the sphere
that enclosed (or limited) my personal particularity, it opens it violently,
lacerates it’ (30). Thus, Bataille suggests that the image operates through
contagion and force, and by conscientious repetition (as a form of
askesis).
Bataille’s method of dramatisation is most notably derived from the
spiritual exercises of Ignatius and the practices of Christian mystics
who would seek to identify with Christ’s sufferings – by imagining and
216 Janae Sholtz
internally dramatising Christ’s crucifixion in order to pass into affective

commiseration and become closer to God. The qualification that Bataille
makes in the previous quote, that one must choose to really look at an
image rather than dismiss it, should be understood with this in mind.
The kind of intention implied therein is of the same calibre as a spiritual
exercise, though without recourse to any kind of salvation. Whereas
Christian dramatisation is supposed to make the supplicant more aware
of the overwhelming power of transcendent God, the quintessential
image for Bataille, a photograph of the Chinese executioner cutting off
the legs of a visibly suffering, live victim, is a depiction of such torturous
cruelty and violence that it is practically unbearable and without relief.9
He writes: ‘the world evoked by this straightforward image of a tortured
man photographed . . . is, to my knowledge, the most anguishing of
worlds accessible to us through images captured on film’ (Bataille 1989:
205). Bataille suggests that methodical viewing and contemplation of
such images, as forms of askesis, quite literally shatter the boundaries
of the viewer, who enters into a kind of affective contagion with the
pure violence of the image itself. Tarrying with this image of torture, its
senseless cruelty and excess, forces a confrontation with the impossible,
and this dramatisation of pain and violence, of which no sense can be
made, breaks the bonds of discursive thought (Brintnall 2012: 6).
This is not a matter of sick pleasure for Bataille, or, as some have
implied, a fetishising affirmation of victimisation (Bush 2015: 44).10 Yet,
for Bataille, these experiences are not about producing fascination or
pleasure, but instead about provoking an ethical response, to awaken
and sustain a feeling of the intolerable from which we cannot escape.
This next quote clarifies what is at stake: ‘What counts is the alteration of
the habitual order, in the end, the impossibility of indifference’ (Bataille
2011: 28). For Bataille, the image must be the kind of provocation
that makes it impossible to maintain the disinterested gaze. Remaining
intensely concentrated on a reality of intolerable suffering confirms
the overwhelming insistence on the anguished pain of the other which
demands a response, yet for which it is impossible to respond. His return
to this image throughout his life suggests its nature as unable to be
assimilated, the inability to make sense of the profound affect that it
represents.
Therefore, dramatisation is more than just an initial laceration; it is
the intensification and meditation on the image in order to maintain
the opening of our being. What is necessary is a profound, lasting
laceration – one that does not immediately reclose. Remember that
Bataille has already identified the impossibility of experiencing bare
existence as a fundamental condition of our necessity for closure. These

instants are impossible to maintain; they are unsustainable moments.
Bataille says, ‘I can only touch the extremity through repetition’ (Bataille
2014: 48). Moreover, Bataille specifies dramatisation of a very specific
kind. This is not dramatisation in the sense of acting out; ‘dramatisation
becomes entirely general only by making itself inner’ (18). It becomes
general by abstracting from the individual meaning or specificity of the
image to the pure experience or affect produced by the image and the
inner laceration that it effects.
Thus, inner experience plays itself out as a drama, a dramatic
repetition, which is to say an amplification of the wound/laceration of
the isolated self that can occur through the initial images or experiences
of sacrifice, ecstasy, torture. Bataille suggests that this is more than just
multiplying overwhelming images: ‘Concentration is necessary; the point
of ecstasy is not reached in its nudity without painful insistence’ (Bataille
2014: 238). Dramatisation is thus an inner repetition of the image that
sustains the initial provocation, the laceration, through concentration. In
describing the process of inducing this ecstatic laceration, Bataille says,
‘First I had to create the greatest silence in myself’ (Bataille 2011: 29),
and Bataille’s discussions of meditation, most notably in his ‘Method of
Meditation’, suggest a practice of emptying the self, similar to that which
occurs in the practice of yoga. We can surmise that this is a method
of preparing, opening a space so to speak, for the communication of a
violent otherness brought about by explosive images, and, as we have
already suggested, it is a necessary accompaniment or integral part of
dramatisation.
Indeed, meditation is situated amongst an ensemble of sovereign
behaviours, according to Bataille: intoxication, erotic effusion, laughter,
sacrificial effusion, poetic effusion – these behaviours are effusive in that
they demand muscular movement of little importance and consume
energy without any other effect than a kind of interior illumination
(Bataille 2001: 94). In these behaviours, effusion is obtained through
a modification in the order of objects (poetry changes the level of
image, sacrifice destroys beings, etc.) With meditation, the subject herself
is modified; the subject contests purely herself, with no reference to
exterior means or the sphere of activity. In meditation, this modification
is limitless; it accesses the pure form of modification.
The second sense of dramatisation underscores that inner experience
is a non-discursive, affective event, and that dramatisation requires
attentiveness to affect – meditation also plays a role here, in that the
silence and stillness of the meditative state makes us aware of key states
218 Janae Sholtz
that would otherwise go unnoticed: ‘If we live under the law of language
without contesting it, these states [these states of inner experience] are
passing within us as if they never existed (Bataille 2014: 14). That
the image provokes an affective experience is important to Bataille’s
project to access a mode of being that is informed by unproductive
expenditure, the general economy rather than that of utility. The
image demands our attention, forces the viewer to enter into the
suffering of another, and Bataille describes the encounter as the feeling
of being prostrate, unable to look away. This affectedness signifies
passivity rather than activity, a kind of anti-production rather than
voluntarism, which would be problematic in that it would countermand
Bataille’s imperative to remain outside of a productive, goal-oriented
economy.
6. Deleuze, Dramatisation and the Thought of Death

Now, I will turn to two points of convergence between Deleuze and
Bataille’s characterisations of the dissolution of the Self that underscore
the proximity of their intuitions. First, Deleuze develops his own account
of dramatisation, most explicitly in ‘The Method of Dramatisation’,
but also in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense. Deleuze sees
dramatisation as providing access to impersonal, immanent Life, an
ontological commitment that I have already indicated as underlying both
philosophies. Just as transgression has an ontological status in Bataille,
dramatisation, for Deleuze, is defined as an ontological process (part
of the process of differentiation which governs all the emergence of
beings within the plane of immanence). This has led me to emphasise
that transgression is not primarily something we do, but rather
something we are (conditioned by); this same relation exists in Deleuze’s
work concerning dramatisation.11 Second, both formulate methods for
dissolving subjectivity, modelled on the notion of the spiritual exercise
(meditative practice) as necessary for this communication to happen,
and both rely on the invocation of affect within this process. Deleuze
also relies on the liberating effect that affects, blocs of sensation
most paradigmatically produced through artworks, can have on the
subject. It remains to be seen whether their understandings of the
place of art in this process as well as the specific power of affect are
commensurate.
Deleuze’s concept of dramatisation is often associated with theatre,
and, in fact, Deleuze uses this trope himself to describe philosophy
as a whole. This would seem to create distance between Bataille’s
understanding of dramatisation, as an inner intensification of images,

and dramatisation as a kind of outward performance, which implies the
presence of many actors or players. But, if Deleuze’s dramatisation is
akin to theatre, it is in the sense of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, which is
interpreted by Deleuze as a point of access to an entirely inhuman field
of unrelenting and unsympathetic forces – a theatre of immanent forces,
where the drama plays itself out upon and through us and not because of
our subjective intentions. Dramatisation is a performance only in that it
is a repetition of effects which come to us from the outside – in a similar
fashion that the image, or disturbing affect, is an external prop for the
transformative moment that shatters the internal boundaries of the Self
in Bataille.
In other words, dramatisation is a philosophical practice, but it
is conditioned on the autopoetic process of dramatisation at the
ontological level. As a practice, it is a selective repetition of the
event, which is like the inclusive plenitude and overflow of the general
economy. The effect is to make visible or liberate virtual potentialities
of the event, and the imperative is to affirm the intensive differences that
populate any event. The deliberate repetition of the event, which is to
say ‘making the event one’s own’, is a way to animate the forces that
lie dormant within the event, which is to counter-actualise or liberate its
virtual potential – making us aware of the immanence flowing through
our regularly hypostasised existence.
Implicit in Deleuze’s concept of dramatisation is an imperative
to counter-actualise ourselves as a necessary precursor to entering
into processes of dramatisation or engaging on the level of affective
interaction on the plane of immanence, similar to Bataille’s insistence
that the ecstatic experience can only happen through the shattering
of the subject. One way that this counter-actualisation is brought
about, according to Deleuze, is through intensifying and complexifying
the thought of death. Focusing on death in Deleuze may seem
counterintuitive, since Deleuze is not nearly as preoccupied with death
as Bataille. In fact, this might seem to be one of the glaring differences
between the two – Bataille, thinker of death and Deleuze, thinker
of affirmation and life. But, given the emphasis in Deleuze’s own
philosophy on the Stoics, who counselled habitualising this thought,
perhaps this connection is not as surprising as it seems, and may
justify my identification of Deleuze’s treatment of death as a spiritual
exercise. Perhaps most persuasive in this regard is the fact that, for
Deleuze, the thought of death is centrally related to the nature of the
event, thus functioning in a similar way to the Stoics in inducing a
220 Janae Sholtz
greater awareness of the nature of universe/reality: ‘Each event is death;

double and impersonal in its double’ (Deleuze 1990: 152). There is
both a personal and immediate present (actuality) of the event and an
impersonal and eternal (virtual) component, which makes death ‘not
simply an event among other events’ (ibid.), but that event which inheres
in every event – indicating that which is actualised and that which will
always remain beyond actualisation and to come.
Deleuze emphasises the ambiguity or doubleness of death in both
Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, teasing out the ways that,
in the former case, it acts as a catalyst for the dissolution of the subject
and, in the latter, opens us to the infinitude of the event. Crediting
Blanchot, Deleuze characterises these two faces of death: death as a
mortal wound, which has an extreme and personal relation to me, and
death that has no relation to me, incorporeal, infinitive and impersonal
(2000: 151–2). Contemplating the incommensurability of these two
constitutes a method of cracking the self, provoking a ‘radical reversal
. . . [That] loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power’
(1994: 112). This is because the thought of this incommensurability
constitutes a passage from the self to the eternality of the Event: ‘the
“they” of impersonal and pre-individual singularities, the “they” of the
pure event where it dies as much as it rains’ (Deleuze 1990: 152).
Personal death is something that we experience empirically as
diminishment or annihilation of a particular I, or ego. By contrast,
impersonal death represents the ‘liberation and swarming of little
differences in intensity’ (Deleuze 1994: 259) and is related to what
Deleuze refers to as the transcendental instant. Deleuze links it to the
presence of zero intensity or the body without organs, where zero
intensity is understood as a state of afflux or immobility, which signifies
neither the growth nor diminishment of intensity, but instead fullness
or plenitude (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 329–30) – like Bataille’s
luxurious excess. To clarify, if intensity increases through capture and
blockage and decreases through cancellation of intensities through their
expression, to approach zero intensity would suggest the eradication
of all blockages, a space of pure passage. But this space would also
signify the inclusion rather than the eradication of what would be free
intensities. In light of this, we can understand that the impersonal face
of death ‘refers to the state of free differences when they are no longer
subject to the form imposed upon them by an I or an ego’ (Deleuze
1994: 113).
One can consider this ‘thought’ as a meditation that constitutes a
form of glissement, an oscillation similar to Bataille’s image of the
confrontation between the restricted and general economy. The passage

to the second form of death is necessary for approaching the true
nature of the event – its infinite variation; it is through this that we
recognise individual identity as a limiting expression of the event. The
limits of the Self are surpassed by recognising that the transcendental
instance implies a more general regime of passage (general economy),
where decomposition and dis-organisation (expenditure) as forms of
death apply to the nature of the model itself, rather than to any one
experience. For Bataille, death is a form of sovereign communication,
because of its very resistance to figuration and finality (Hegarty 2001),
which challenges the limits and stability of the subject. In other words,
the confrontation with death is, for Bataille, also connected to the
dissolution (surpassing) of self and passage to that which is outside of
human temporality.
The dissolution of self is a perpetual undertaking, and has to be
repeated (dramatised) as an initiating gesture for thought to begin again
and again, in the same way that Bataille must constantly provoke inner
experience through the meditation on the image in order to ‘get out
of himself’, to communicate or initiate a passage between self and
immanent Life. As James argues, the passage from the personal to the
impersonal is at the heart of Deleuze’s ethics, as it is through this passage
that we gain a sense of continuity: ‘The self becomes lost in death
as its distinguishing marks fade and disappear, but in this erasure all
deaths connect, because now they all express the “one dies” free of their
recognizable personal differences’ (2011: 174). By recognising that the
personal is merely a limiting expression of the infinite and eternal event,
we are able to find continuity and resonance with this more expansive
whole. As James so eloquently puts it:
A personal death is an end. It is a final destruction and passing away.

Impersonal death is a living on through participation in a cycle of dying
. . . The collection of marks defining us as this selfsame person disappear
in death . . . but the singular events of each death and the ways in which
we confront them, the suppressed howl of fear, comforts extended through
a gentle parting, remain as potentials to be expressed anew in future deaths.
(2011: 173)
In other words, the impersonal side of death reflects the eternal doubling
of the particularity of every event. That ‘one dies’ is thus both unique, yet
open and ever-changing (174), the thought of which leads us further into
open communication with other events – setting the stage for counter-
actualisation. In other words, this loosening from the subjectivity and
222 Janae Sholtz
individuality is necessary in the larger schema of being worthy of the

event, in order to counter-actualise, to select more from the event
and create something new or transform the realm of the actual: ‘The
more it clings to its personal individuality the less well it resonates, for
then it struggles against its communication with all others through the
impersonal medium’ (175).
This example of dramatisation as a meditation on death is a
paradigmatic one for Deleuze but certainly not comprehensive of the
kinds of objects/events that can be dramatised. In this Deleuzian
example, it is the sheer recognition of the fact of a perpetual and
undeniable outside that provokes the beginning of this glissement, and
the implication is that there are other methods of placing ourselves in
the fray, opening ourselves to this outside, because, for Deleuze, the
outside is really the infinite potentialities of the Virtual that insist in
every event. Every instant includes the passage towards death – which
signifies that impersonal death operates by a different temporality than
the present tense of personal death. Impersonal death is a part of every
and all events:
Every transition from a greater to a lesser intensity, or from a lesser to a
greater, involves and envelops the zero intensity with respect to which it
experiences its power as increasing or decreasing. Death is thus felt in every
feeling, experienced ‘in life and for life’. (Parr 2010: 64)
Thus, impersonal death is ceaseless and always to come, a futurity that

liberates us for future potentials. Therefore, the process by which the
thinker dramatises is available at every instant, in any place whatsoever,
and can be felt through our confrontation with different affective
encounters. The thought of the infinite can just as soon be provoked
by the confrontation of bodily limits (experimenting with what a body
can do) or by a self-disciplined intensification of any event – Deleuze and
Guattari are famously fascinated by Henry Miller’s claim that one can
even become drunk on water (1987: 286). Moreover, rather than being
stimulated by horror, it seems that the Deleuzian subject enters into
this process in an affirmative mode. Significantly, this is exactly where
Deleuze marks the difference between Bataille and himself, criticising
Bataille for his commitment to what Deleuze unsympathetically refers
to as the sad passions. The difference between Bataille and Deleuze that
is revealed by this particular method of shattering the subject is that
Deleuze has widened the scope of what can count as an intervening
medium – the project is to make one’s very existence an intensified
aesthetic experience, a work of art.
7. Experimentation as an Aesthetico-ethical Imperative

And although Deleuze’s particular spiritual exercise – the thought of
death – invokes a thought rather than an image, it would be a mistake
to assume that Deleuze is merely interested in mental phenomena – first
and foremost because Deleuze does not accept this pure division of mind
and body. Even when speaking of the thought of death as a catalyst
for the dissolution of the self, the thought itself thrusts the thinker
into a necessary encounter with a very real, very material beyond;
becoming a body without organs is not just a thought experiment, but
involves the real immersion of the body into the process of dissolution
through active experimentation with different and new encounters.
Thus, Deleuze opposes an idealist view of thought and its origin: thought
occurs through interaction with the ‘outside’, through provocation from
external bodies (affects), which is why Deleuze so adamantly advocates
the practice of experimentation.
Second, Deleuze does not understand affect to be an emotive or
mental state of an individual, but, rather, affects are themselves blocs
of sensation, material forces that have the power to affect other bodies.
Being affected, which is the catalyst for the provocation of thought, is
the reverse side of this coin, but no less embodied. In this respect, affect
operates as the in-between in Deleuze’s philosophy. Affects engage the
body and, thus, they do have the potential to put the body at risk. This is
not to say that Bataille is less an advocate of or engaged with processes
of experimentation that absolutely put the body at risk. One could
also argue that even in meditating on images such as the one discussed
herein, there is a certain bodily comportment that is absolutely crucial in
order to generate the intensity necessary for the subject’s laceration. Yet,
Deleuze’s emphasis on experimentation and engagement also involves
the imperative to invent – to invent new forces and create new blocs of
sensation, through the mutual capture that happens between encounters,
which are then released upon the world as weapons of transformation.
This is the sense of existential aesthetics to which I have referred.
This leads me to one final consideration, that is, the significance
of the creative act and the artwork for Deleuze. First, I would like
to look at Deleuze’s particular choice of artworks, especially with
respect to the image, and examine whether this indicates a distinction
in how Bataille and Deleuze address the driving force of the affect
itself. Whereas Bataille gravitates towards the photograph, with its
depictions that challenge the division of art and realism, Deleuze focuses
his discussion of the visual image on painting. Let us take, for instance,
224 Janae Sholtz
Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope, which arguably presents a parallel to

the themes that Bataille has highlighted through his choices of image.
Deleuze’s pronouncement, in relation to Francis Bacon’s paintings of
the screaming pope, that it is as if ‘the entire body escapes through
the screaming mouth’ (Deleuze 2005: 12), suggests that the aesthetic
engagement is less about confronting the realities of a real sacrificial and
tortured body as it is with the way that the image allows the viewer
to enter into the level of intensity that underlies the image itself. The
merit of Bacon’s work, for Deleuze, is that it wrests the affect from
what is local in the subject, or rather it escapes into pure immanence,
jettisoning subjective boundaries through deformation of form and
mingling of monochromatic intensities. Two things are at stake here:
(1) the difference between affects of actual instances of suffering and
tortuous pain indicating, for Bataille, ecstatic break, or what Deleuze
often refers to as the pure affect, which detaches from its empirical
examples to reflect movement or passage of force and intensity itself – the
violence of sheer sensation; and (2) the shift in orientation that this first
difference indicates, between what one could call Bataille’s emphasis on
intolerability to Deleuze’s emphasis on impossibility.
Though both Bataille and Deleuze’s meditative or spiritual practices
are linked to the shattering of the subject, it seems relevant that Deleuze’s
spiritual exercises reveal affinities with the Stoics, who contemplated
the inhuman and impersonal nature of the cosmic order in order to
recognise their own insignificance, rather than those of St Ignatius, which
bring the meditator into a more personal relationship with suffering
and sacrifice of the lived, human body. I want to connect the former
to the idea of impossible, and the latter with that of intolerability.
Ethics becomes radically unhinged from addressing human subjects, for
better or worse, and becomes situated at the brink of livability for
the human subject, where it is the milieus, intensities and connections
between assemblages (that include equally the inhuman, the animal, the
inorganic and the organic) which become the focus of becoming and
transformation.
This difference, I think, indicates a further shift between Bataille
and Deleuze – that Deleuze radicalises the parameters of the ethical
experience towards the impersonal. Not incidentally, this move towards
the impersonal is also indicated in the first difference indicated: that
between affects as instances of particular modes of human suffering and
affects as indicative of pure forces and intensities. Deleuze infamously
rejects the category of the possible, because it represents a prioritisation
the Actual (‘possibilities’ only appear from that which already is).
The possible is ‘an image of the real, while the real is supposed
to resemble the possible’ (Deleuze 1994: 211–12). The impossible,
by contrast, refers to the Virtual – that is, the impersonal event.
Deleuze’s aesthetic-ethical imperative is to invent by counter-actualising
(liberating) more of the infinite, impersonal Event. Opening ourselves
to the infinite horizon of the cosmic is a matter of engaging the
virtual potential within the Event, rather than remaining bound by
the possibilities of the actualised present. We must invent our future
rather than be transfixed, or merely moved, by the intolerability of the
present.
8. Conclusion
For both Bataille and Deleuze, this is a question of how we should
live our lives – an ethical imperative. For Bataille, askesis is a way to
get us out of the economy of utility, so that our lives can become
fuller and more in tune with the excessive life that provides sustenance
for our highest desires for religiosity. For Deleuze, philosophy needs
non-philosophy in order to proliferate kinds of thinking, in order to
create new concepts rather than merely repeat the dead husks of the
past: the future is at stake. The question is, what kind of future do
we want? Given the condition of our contemporary world – that is, the
prevalence with which affect has been appropriated and captured by
the mecanosphere of capitalist consumption – we have further need of
Bataille’s unflinching sensitivity to affective life and unwillingness to
look away or to desensitise ourselves from horror, pain and suffering
in order to be ethical. Likewise Deleuze’s emphasis on encountering
the pure affect as a transformative experience that wrests us away
from the mundane modes of social capture within which we generally
are immersed. What seems more impossible today than resisting the
present and imagining a different future? We are thus in need of all
of these – sensitivity, creativity and resistance. The greatest contribution
that Bataille and Deleuze make through their peculiar forms of askesis
is illuminating the fact that an immense amount of self-discipline is
required in order to open oneself to the excessive. Askesis, rather than
a form of self-denial (i.e. abstention from pleasures or passions), can
mean the fortitude to undergo immense intensifications of life, and, in
fact, it is these moments of overflowing plenitude that move us beyond
the desiccated husks of our individuality towards the possibility of
greater empathetic consideration of others and/or greater communion
with cosmic otherness.
226 Janae Sholtz
Notes
1. Figures such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy were
particularly inspired by his enigmatic concept of sovereignty.
2. Ramey contends that Deleuze is influenced by philosophers such as Spinoza,
Hume and Leibniz, insofar as they are inspired by a certain unthinkable notion of
the infinite. While this may have prompted scepticism for these moderns, Deleuze
addresses it as a positive problematic, that is, generative or provocative (2012:
11–13).
3. “‘Transgression” a concept too good for seminarians under the law of a pope or
a priest’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1977: 47)
4. This is the term that Ramey uses to describe the experimentation with extremes
that is the catalyst for transformation in thought advocated by Deleuze. In each
instance, spiritual ordeal, experimentation or dramatisation is meant to carry
us beyond ourselves, beyond what we think a body can do and beyond what is
thinkable.
5. Nicolas Cusa, for example, meditated on the paradoxical status of Christ, but in
terms of the coincidence of the finite and the infinite, as a way of engaging the
paradigm of creation as a whole (see Ramey 2012: 44–7).
6. Dramatisation is a central component of Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of
ontological process; it becomes a key component of Deleuze’s ethical imperative
to be worthy of the event (see Sholtz 2016).
7. Bataille intended The Method of Meditation (1947), Inner Experience (1943,
1954 [2nd edn]), Guilty (1944) and On Nietzsche (1945) to be collected under
the title La Somme Atheologique.
8. See Bush (2015) for a (not uncritical) account of Bataille’s invocation of violence
and cruelty as means of self-affirmation and liberation; Bush is wary of the
ethical a significance that Bataille imports to spectacles of cruelty, as perhaps
self-indulgent at the expense of victimising others.
9. Lingchi, death by a thousand cuts, is a form of execution in which the victim is
kept alive, while methodically sliced into pieces. The limbs are typically severed
first, so as to minimize blood loss to keep the victim conscious for a longer
period. A series of photographs depicting Lingchi were published in Bataille’s
Tears of Eros.
10. Some have also viewed Deleuze’s referencing of Artaud’s madness to develop the
ideas of thought without image and the BwO (body without organs) as indicative
of opportunism and exploitation (see Cull 2011: 52).
11. The following discussion of dramatisation, dissolution of the self, and death is
derived from my article, ‘Dramatisation as Life Practice: Counteractualisation,
Death and the Event’ (Sholtz 2016).
References
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Bataille and Deleuze’s Peculiar Askesis:

Techniques of Transgression, Meditation

Janae Sholtz Alvernia University

Keywords: Bataille, Deleuze, askesis, dramatisation, transformation,

Deleuze and Guattari Studies 14.2 (2020): 198–228

exploring the limits and the paradox of existence itself provides a

of the liminal status of subjectivity. The aim is to contextualise their

2. The Many Forms of Askesis

worldly events (that which we have no control over), regulation and

discussion of impersonal and immanent cosmic life. This is one of the

aware of, and as some have argued, influenced by Christian mystics

immanence’ (Cull 2011: 46–7) – rather than first principles, divine

Deleuze’s peculiar askesis will thus emphasise the intensification of

3. Immanent Life and the Centrality of Dramatisation

incommunicable, an alterity beyond words (Mitchell and Winfree 2009:

process of dissolution of the subject’s identification as an impermeable

4. The Human Condition – the Liminality of the Subject

4.1. Bataille’s Account of Liminal Subjectivity

in human history, the need for organised transgression; this, coupled

as a search for methods to sustain a perpetual mode of transgressivity

The stabilized order of isolated appearances is necessary for the anguished

Thus, Bataille’s paradoxical ‘goal’ is to go to the extremity of

4.2. From Liminality to Inner Experience

of action’ (Bataille 2011: 192, n.5). This is why Bataille’s development

(Hegarty 2000: 101). (2) These inner movements must be provoked by

servitude, while the affirmation of them indicates a rejection of authority

entire assemblages’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 160). If aesthetics is

5. Bataille’s (dis)Solution: Dramatisation

internally dramatising Christ’s crucifixion in order to pass into affective

existence as a fundamental condition of our necessity for closure. These

6. Deleuze, Dramatisation and the Thought of Death

understanding of dramatisation, as an inner intensification of images,

greater awareness of the nature of universe/reality: ‘Each event is death;

confrontation between the restricted and general economy. The passage

A personal death is an end. It is a final destruction and passing away.

individuality is necessary in the larger schema of being worthy of the

Thus, impersonal death is ceaseless and always to come, a futurity that

7. Experimentation as an Aesthetico-ethical Imperative

Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope, which arguably presents a parallel to

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