Bataille, Conceiving Death

Love and Death

Much is made in contemporary philosophy, particularly that which
emanates from, or shadows phenomenology, of the place of death in
questions of subjectivity. Death has become the privileged site, which is
also a non-site, where writers such as Heidegger, Levinas, Bataille,
Derrida and Blanchot can exercise their conceptions of a subjectivity
that is not at home itself— that is other than its self. More
to or for
recently, Simon Critchley and Gillian Rose have sought to address the
questions raised by such thinkers with regard to death, mourning, and
the (im)possibility of 'my' death.1 Writers labelled feminist, such as
Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva and Le Doeuff have provided the initial bases
from which it has now become a commonplace to state that writers
such as Bataille, and the others listed above, are simply reiterating a
masculine view of philosophy that is a denial of the feminine, or of the
maternal, or of birth.
In this article, I wish to outline the thought of Bataille as it circles
around death, and in moving through his notion of abjection, arrive at a
place from which to argue that Bataille pre-empts or exceeds this par-
ticular criticism with regard to his fixation on death and, finally, that he
establishes, possibly despite himself, a position absolutely in opposition
to masculinist thanatographies such as that of Freud. Such an approach
is only possible after 'French feminism'—the texts of Bataille becoming
retrospectively pre-emptive. Even to look at Bataille in this light is to
sanction retrospective readings which result in the now commonplace
'always already', in that Bataille's importance as a writer is founded only
on the importance attributed by other well-known theorists (Derrida,
Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Nancy, Cixous...) who bring a
sense of having 'always come after Bataille'.
I wish to argue that in Bataille, the figure ofdeath a figure that un-
does itself as other, that undoes the Subject, that undoes figuration
—

whilst con-figuring serves to show the operation of the economy of

—

Bataille's thought, how we might read it, and how this can pollute our
deconstructions. In other words, death is the figure because it appears
(in order) to resist figuration in being against figuration, yet only as a
—

result of being figured, we end up, perhaps, saying more, and less, than
'it's really about writing', whilst never straying from it being nothing
174 Paragraph
more.2 Below are two readings of death or non-existence, in Bataille.
—

Both seek to note when Bataille's overall logic goes against itself, in or-
der to take what occurs outside this logic as the point of interest —
not
because this is where the real truth lies, but because in looking at what is
outside the general operational logic of the text as 'that which is out-
side' and therefore an integral part of what it is not (the inside), whilst
not excluding the principal logic, we see the functioning of a dualistic
logic in Bataille.
The two deaths are: death as other as not-Other, wherein death is the
exclusion without essential distance; Woman as Object, as a version of
Death, and this despite Bataille's theory not suggesting this, and his fic-
tion largely not enacting it. This despite' is the point of interest; rather
'

than taking this as proof of'what Bataille really thinks', we can allow the
'despite' to function as such, that is, as a means of perversely linking
ideas. From this, and a consideration of his notion of abjection, we end
up with a despite as answer: despite Bataille's theory and fiction presag-
ing 'French feminist' thought, despite the failure consistently not to
have Woman/Death as other, at his least reflective, he produces a posi-
tion which has Death and Woman as other when read through the
which then, despite itself, becomes outside and
—

'errors' of the texts —

other to male death/female life.

Death is a continual concern for Bataille, from the earliest writings, to

the last fizzles in and around The Tears of Eros, and arguably sits at the
centre of his notion of the general economy (one of waste and excess
rather than the accumulation and saving of modern capitalist econ-
omy), as death can be seen as 'the ultimate term of possible
expenditure'.3 Bataille's notion of death is an empty version of Hegel's:
it is negativity, but one that cannot be recuperated, even if all our actions
can be seen as attempts at such a recuperation. Death is the loss that de-
fines our existence as individuals, as sexual reproduction is absolutely
caught up with the death of the individual, as, unlike amoebae, there is
no continuity of Being from one organism to the next.4 Death, then, is
as much part of the inherent wastefulness in nature as life. Death seems
to us like the most wasteful form, but for Bataille, such a conception is
to be left behind (not ignored or overcome): 'the luxury of death is re-
garded by us in the same way as that of sexuality, first as a negation of
ourselves, then in a sudden reversal as the profound truth ofthat
— —

movement of which life is the manifestation' (AS, 34-5). Is death then

in some way the truth of Bataille's system? At points it recalls
Heidegger's notion of 'Being toward death', but as with many of
 Bataille, Conceiving Death 175

Bataille's notions, the whole issue of centrality is open to question even

as it is posed. Bataille argues that 'it will always be possible to show that
whichever primordial fact gets priority presupposes the existence of
another one' (AS, II, 82).5 This is important when we think of primacy
—
Bataille is already signalling that there can be no such thing (despite
or because of the assertion of originality), therefore death cannot be the
raison d'etre, any more than any other supposed fact.
When death figures in early writings such as 'Solar Anus' ('beings
only die to be born'),6 the primacy of life, and our supposed horror of
death and our fear of loss of self, are overturned to become something
that does not transcend the individual so much as lose the individual in
a generalized excess. Instead of Hegel's mastery of death, we see that 'in
the fact that life and death are passionately devoted to the subsidence of
the void, the relation of master/slave subordination is no longer re-
vealed, but life and void are confused and mingled like lovers, in the
convulsive moments of the end'.7 Instead of giving in to death, accept-
ing it at a distance, as the distancing that structures Being (Heidegger),
death is to be embraced, as 'it appears that no less a loss than death is
needed for the brilliance of life to traverse and transfigure dull exis-
tence'.8 Death is not only not first, it is not the privileged non-first (the
Other) either. The embracing is not because death is so marvellous, but
because it is everywhere as that which links the individual to every-
thing else (what Bataille later calls the general economy): 'I can only
perceive a succession of cruel splendours whose very movement re-
quires that I die: this death is only the exploding consumption of all that
was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my own
life demands that everything that exists, everywhere, ceaselessly give
itself and be annihilated' (ibid.). Bataille is not arguing from the per-
spective whereby the universe only exists in one's own mind, but from
that whereby even we, pathetic individuals that we are, feature in the
ceaseless process of death and destruction. This linkage of the individ-
ual, through death, to others, to the general economy, is what is pursued
in Bataille's connecting of the erotic with death, which is a step further
on from that where sex is linked with death, the difference being that
the embrace of death signals an economy of intersubjectivity —
one
where subjects are lost as lost as death, rather than because con-
—

fronted with death (which for the male writer is often confused, in the
heterosexual reading, with being confronted with the other). In Eroti-
cism, Bataille uses the term 'continuity' to designate both the state of
shared existence that comes from asexual reproduction and the attempt
to get beyond individuality through sacrifice, erotic activity, laughter,
176 Paragraph
drunkenness and so on (11-25). These attempts interest him because
'eroticism opens the way to death. Death opens the way to the denial of
our individual selves' (24).
The History of Eroticism, the second volume of The Accursed Share,
starts by stating that it is 'a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of
horror', one emerging from 'a system of thought exhausting the totality
of the possible' (AS, II, 14). From Bataille's writing about death as part of
the system of general economy, it also emerges that death is not neces-
sarily literal death. That this should be allowed to emerge, rather then
serving as a limit from the start, informs the subsequent analysis of death
in this volume. In other words, death is continually allowed by Bataille
to figure as real death, and only gradually does this perpetual, incessant
figuring turn on itself so that we have 'death'. Real death (or 'real
death') must remain present in the system for it to remain more than a
set of metaphors.
Hegel sees real death as being at the origin of humanity's self-con-
sciousness (this being, initially, consciousness of death), and the rest of
time is the struggle to master death. Communal existence is also cen-
tred around death, and the two combine in the form of architecture.
According to Denis Hollier, for Hegel, 'architecture is something ap-
pearing in the place of death, to point out its presence and to cover it up:
the victory of death and the victory over death'.9 For Bataille, however,
this is precisely the problem: our society is this fearful covering up of
death (whereas the Aztecs, for example, exposed death in the sacrifice
at the top of, rather than inside, the pyramid).10 In the second volume
—

of The Accursed Share, he argues that all society, all individual existence
(as opposed to the restricted economy of modern individualism)
emerges from this fear of death, and that this fear is at its most creative
when it approaches death.
At the same time as humanity is drawn toward death, it pushes it away
this repulsion is what defines humanity. Repulsion is the key word, as
death is not simply a negativity, something that happens to the subject,
—

but something that, even when it happens to someone else, provokes

disgust. Humanity is defined by its 'repugnance for death' (AS, II, 63).
This is hardly a novel or shocking statement, but death is specifically
part of what repels us because we repel it, and arguably the (primordial)
object of disgust (and only in becoming human does death constitute
something disgusting). Humans also have a horror of all that threatens
their unitary existence: excretions, filth, loss of control through drunk-
enness, eroticism (61-2). More than this, we also have a horror of life, as
at some level we are aware of life as a by-product of death, so much so
 Bataille, Conceiving Death 177

that 'we might think, ifneed be, that living matter on the very level we sep-
arate ourselves from it is the privileged object of our disgust' (63).
All such disgusts are caught up within taboos, in a relation where it is
impossible to ascertain whether the taboo creates the disgust, or re-
sponds to it. For Bataille, however, death really is at the heart of the exis-
tence of taboo, with loathing of death the source of'loathing of decay,
which is not physical as it is not shared by animals' (79), as it is the line of
demarcation between human and other and is the crossing of this line,
hence the 'universally human character of the problem of obscenity'
(54), even if contra Freud and Levi-Strauss,for example, there is no par-
ticular taboo that is universal.11 Death is also 'at the beginning'insofar as
its appearance coincides with labour and utility —
this is what makes
death a problem for the individual, as the individual conceives of his or
her self as something to be maintained, preserved and developed (82).12
Death very rapidly becomes the site of prohibition, and takes two
principal forms: both murder and 'contact with corpses' are forbidden
(79). It is not the metaphysical difficulty of impending death that creates
this fear, as this arises from an awareness that life is an accident between
waste and decay, with only waste and decay in between. As Bataille
notes, 'life is a luxury of which death is the highest degree' (85) and
'moreover, life is a product of putrefaction' (80), so death and decay are
linked to conceptions of our birth and origin. This is supposed to ac-
count for our fear of menstrual blood, for example. Here, as elsewhere, it
is striking how far Bataille goes down a road attacking preconceptions
only to launch into a rampant restatement of tired cliches about
'woman' as other, as death. He simply does not question the taboos
around 'woman'. This is why Kristeva provides such a successful gloss
on Bataille and Mary Douglas when she deals, in Powers of Horror, with
the patriarchal conception of taboo it completes the logic already
writers.13
—

underway these two

in
The all-pervasive absence or denial of death through prohibition is
why it is to be approached, and also why we have an attraction as well as
repulsion towards death and all that threatens our identity, such that
'eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death' (Er,
11). Death and eroticism remain charged with danger, and create an-
guish in individuals as their individuality falls away (AS, II, 100).14 But
as with Hegel's 'facing up to death',Bataille does not limit the notion of
death to actual biological death; it comes to include all that undoes the
individual so that the introduction, or irruption, of death into life al-
lows life to become exuberant (99). Erotic activity, for example, must be
carried out intensely (otherwise it is just sex), as 'if the sensations do not
178 Paragraph
have their greatest intensity, it is possible for us to isolate objects on the
field of the totality' (118-19). By totality, Bataille does not mean the
kind of ideologies that account for everything, but the amorphous
sphere beyond subjects, and beyond a simple subject/object divide.
Even if death is not real, there is no reduction ofthe experience of ap-
proaching death (we can never attain death in this Bataille is with
—

Heidegger). If we are instructed that to 'live life to the full' we must

'embrace death', what do we gain? Nothing, except the awareness of
some impossibility, but what will have happened is the following: 'the
embrace restores us, not to nature (which is itself, if it is not reinte-
grated, only a detached part), but rather to the totality in which man has
his share by losing himself.For an embrace is not just a fall into the animal
muck, but the anticipation of death, and the putrefaction that follows it.'
(119) There is no why, however, and there can be only 'virtual'replies to
'why?'; there can be the project of approaching death, as it enhances
subjectivity, but this project is lost at the moment it is attained, whether
in actual death or in death-like experience (non-experience). Note also
that the only 'return' is to something that is necessarily lost, again and
again. Eroticism, then, is one direction waste or excess can take that in-
volves death (itself waste, excess), yet Bataille also hints at another level
at which death can be approached a level that really is metaphorical.
He argues that fiction, if written intensely, can stimulate the anguish
—

and loss ofselfthat other actions can induce directly, with the difference
that 'an object fascinates in sacrifice —
or in literature [an object]
which is not ordinarily present in horror or anguish' (107, translation
—

modified). In other words, we are attracted to something, as well as hor-

rified by it, whereas outside of these settings, it would simply horrify us.
In fact, at this point, Bataille seems to be suggesting that literature or art
are the only way we can actually approach that which is 'outside', as he

goes on to state that 'we want to be intoxicated with vertigo, and the
image of the fall suffices for this' (109). The last thing we want is really
to die, as this would end all further encounters with death, loss, luxury
and so on. Whilst this last aspect is his partial justification for what is in
effect a fairly thin model of catharsis, the question remains as to how far
something like art, with its inevitable distance from viewer, reader or
listener can induce effects of loss of self. If anything, Bataille could be
taken as saying that while we might want to control death or 'the other'
through powerful art, in actual fact death will always elude us, and then
occur, dissipating us. What can never occur is that will and conscious-
ness subsist at the point of'intensity'.
 Bataille, Conceiving Death 179

Abjection
The passage of death and revulsion of death into its substitutes or surro-
gates (in art, sacrifice, eroticism) is something that does not always
occur, and must in any case be ensured continually. Once again, there
are hints at a Freudian economy of homeostasis,but a detailed consider-
ation of this passage shows that while it is not incompatible with
psychoanalysis, it is something beyond Freud.15 The particular idea that
stands for this transitional state of horror (one which can become
permanent) is abjection. The key essay is 'Abjection et les formes
miserables' (abjection and the forms of wretchedness), but the term
features elsewhere in Bataille, and the concept is certainly present at
many points.16 One of its later appearances, in the second volume of
The Accursed Share, indicates that all life could be seen as a premonition
of abjection, when Bataille writes: T will rejoin abject nature and the
purulence of anonymous, infinite life, which stretches forth like the
night, which is death. One day this living world will pullulate in my
dead mouth.' (70)
The most well-known exponent of a theory of abjection is Julia
Kristeva, in her Powers of Horror, but essentially the theory is already
present in Bataille, in a way that always already counters the will to es-
tablish the Proper, whether or not attainable, inherent in psychoanalysis
(and in fact Kristeva's book often pushes against the limits of psycho-
analysis). For Kristeva, the notion of abjection is all about transition,
liminality (crossing borders of subject and object), and enforced transi-
tion. For Bataille, it could be that life is just such a transition (as in the
above quote). Bataille is often seen as valorizing states that others regard
as terrible, pointless or ridiculous, but it is important to reject this view
in favour of a more subtle equivalent. Following on from his view of
Sade as a shocking, dangerous, unpleasant phenomenon, but a necessary
one, he too categorizes phenomena such as death, encounters with
corpses, excretions, objects of horror, etc., not as things to be embraced
willingly, but as things that must be addressed in their horror. There
even seems to be a negative Utopia a sense that another universe
—

might not make such demands. This one, however, does; much as we try
to exclude what horrifies us, this exclusion creates the necessity
(and/or desire) to approach what threatens. In this sense, Bataille is to-
tally opposed to Freud's models of curing or mediating neurosis; there
can be no final exclusion that does not create another excluded that will
're'-surface. Abjection is the term around which Bataille accounts for
this double movement of exclusion and intrusion.
180 Paragraph
The corpse is at the start of abjection as a fearful relation to otherness,
but logically speaking, it is perhaps abjection that makes the corpse
seem threatening, as 'the exclusion of what is rotten is constitutive of
man, and understanding this must be taken as the base for the under-
standing of man himself (OC, II, 439n). The corpse, then, could be seen
as the focusing device, rendering a formless horror certain as recogni-
tion of the putative and inevitable loss of self arises. But we can go fur-
ther back and find the origin of abjection to be always lost. Abjection
'has an absence as its origin: it is simply the inability to assure with
enough force the necessary act of excluding abject things ([an act]
which constitutes the foundation of collective existence)' (219). This
absence is to be read in two ways: first, that there is no set origin for it;
second, it is the absence that creates abjection (for example, absence of
life in the corpse).
The notion of abjection surfaces in other early essays, and if we were
to include all the times Bataille writes about what has been
marginalized as disgusting the list would never end, but there are cer-
tain key references. In 'The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade', mention is
made of a 'corps Stranger' (92, 94, 101) as that which the body seeks to
control and excrete, thereby ensuring its distancing through a tempo-
rary ingestion (his example is the coprophagy in the 120 Days of
Sodom).]1 Elsewhere, abjection is mentioned in the context of'attrac-
tion and repulsion', and this leads into the consideration of how abjec-
tion takes on a properly social character.18
In 'Abjection et les formes miserables', Bataille argues that abjection
does not exist only for the individual, but that it has a social dimension,
resulting from class exploitation. He argues that the wretched condi-
tion the lower classes find themselves in is a result of their deprivation
(as Engels had also argued). This abjection, however, is not something
that can be solved simply by reorganizing society, as the terrible condi-
tion of the working class (and their exclusion) is self-perpetuating (OC,
II, 219). The middle class excludes its repulsive other, the working
classes, but the working class is unable to expel its misery, and therefore
it remains abject. In one sense, Bataille is very much writing a nine-
teenth-century vision here, but in another, we could look at the way in
which today working-class culture is vilified (or at how an underclass,
or non-working class is vilified by the self-righteous working class), and

argue that the process of exclusion and repulsion is still active.

From this point, Bataille has a tendency to link the classes excluded
by capitalist society to phenomena such as eroticism and sacrifice, as
things that resist the mundanity and utility of the homogeneous
 Bataille, Conceiving Death 181

bourgeois world, but what he does not do is to recommend a willing

embrace of awful conditions what is abject is fearful, nasty, dangerous
—

and so on, and has its own perverse attraction, but not because what was
low is now to be thought of as high (acceptable, right, proper).
For Bataille, the least harmful of existences consists of the expulsion
of what is abject, on a regular basis, via a certain approaching (again, a
suggestion of catharsis). For example, he argues that 'primitive societies'
do not have the abject, as they are able to exclude it, through their ritu-
als (OC, II, 437n.). This seems a contradiction,for surely it is the 'primi-
tive' society that has more of a relation to what Bataille is calling the
abject, as it, for example, does not hide away its dead in the way that we
do. Bataille appears to be arguing that it in fact repels the abject on a
more continuous basis than 'modern' society but isn't it the latter
—

that truly abject that has excluded so much, that there are more
is in it
things that create a sense of abjection? Perhaps the answer lies in the
perception of abjectness the 'primitive' society does not remove the
—

abject phenomena, but does remove its abjection, whereas the modern
society does the opposite.
Abjection, then, emerges from the horror of the corpse, whilst also
causing this horror at some indefinable moment of origin. It then
spreads out to encompass all the margins of both individual and society
so that abjection resembles closely the waste of the general economy.
Such a moment of gathering occurs in the fragment 'En effet la vie
humaine...' (in practice, human life...),19 where Bataille posits the
following:
In practice the expended human life consists ofthe exclusion of every base, abject
or filthy element, but does not exclude them out of existence: on the contrary, ex-
clusion creates the positive value through which access to violent, affective reac-
tions becomes possible. In sexual life, abject elements, even when denied, have the
determining role in erotic attraction, and from this example, we can see that the
value.of such elements rests on the always latent possibility, that ofthe transforma-
tion of repulsion into attraction. (OC, II, 163)

Death and the Feminine

It has become almost truism, in what is called French feminism, that
a
'masculine' philosophy centres on death, and seeks to embrace death
instead of life and birth.20 As Annie Leclerc, in Parole de femme, notes,
'Death. Death. Death... For if desire is the only thing on their lips, their
hearts harbour only dreams of death.'21 On the basis of Bataille's
182 Paragraph
conception of death, he certainly seems to figure as part of a profoundly
masculine project, which would reinscribe mastery where it suppos-
edly loses it. If Bataille gets beyond the phenomenological idea of
overcoming, or living through death, he is arguably still within the orbit
of a desire to control, insofar as woman comes to stand as part of the
other for man. Ifshe is a site that can be known, despite being other, and
she features as a form of death, then all Bataille's attempts to not flee or
know death will fail.
Throughout Powers of Horror, Kristeva insists on the link between the
abject and the maternal ,/or the male, even if, logically, there is no reason
for women not to be part of (subject to) abjection in the same way.22
The linkage receives its most forceful formulation when Kristeva os-
tensibly discusses abjection in the context of the Old Testament:
'mother and death, both abominated and abjected, slyly build a victim-
izing and persecuting machine at the cost of which I become subject of
the Symbolic as the Other of the Abject'.23 Instead of the mother being
part ofbirth and creation, male 'creativity' relies on the mother becom-
ing an instrument of death or castration, while at the same time her sub-
jectivity is removed. As the other of Man, Woman occupies the
non-place of death, and death is the domain of Man. Margaret
Whitford, writing on Irigaray, argues that for the latter 'woman is used
by the male imaginary to deflect or mediate the death drives of men (...),
there are no social/symbolic forms which mediate their death'.24 Death
is the preserve of men, and that preserve is Woman. For Cixous, Bataille
takes Hegel a long way from his portentous view of death, but is not to-
tally removed from 'the (Hegelian) schema of recognition, [where]
there is no place for the other, for an equal other, for a whole and living
woman'.25
There is another, more superficial level at which the issue of death
becomes a problem for feminism, this time of another, more traditional
variety, and that is in the question of violence against woman in por-
nography. Andrea Dworkin is forceful in her attack on Bataille, among
many others, for contributing to a culture of violence against women.
As both Susan Rubin Suleiman and Judith Still have pointed out,
Dworkin has missed the subtlety of Bataille's fictions, and replaced it
with her own, more pornographic version.26 In any case, we need to
consider whether this question is related to the other, 'deeper' question
about masculine metaphysics. For Dworkin, it is not just Bataille who is
to blame, but his readers, who are complicit in his construction of 'a
meaning of sex which is death'. Furthermore, this real meaning that sex
is supposed to have for the male writer, and for those complicit with
 Bataille, Conceiving Death 183

him, leads to several forms of annihilation for the woman: 'in some
cases, the death is literal. In some cases, it is the annihilation of female
will.'27 For this to be the case in Bataille's fiction requires a very selective
reading, where often it is the male narrator who is to suffer, and who is
barely present in the text.28
In addition, Bataille's theoretical writing could be advanced as sup-
port for the contention that everyone should behave excessively, should
lose control, reason and even life. As we can see, for example in the pas-
sage from 'Abjection' quoted above, all subjects are essentially insignifi-
cant. The attack on humanity as a whole implicitly contains an attack
on existing humanity, part of which would be the presumption of the

predominance ofmale subjectivity (none ofwhich prevents Bataille, on

occasion, from using 'man' in an absolutely unreflective way). I would
argue that while logically this is Bataille's position, in what is written,
across both the theory and the fiction, woman remains as man's other.
For this reason, we cannot simply dismiss the argument that Bataille's
use of violence and death is in some way masculine, even if a
'deconstructive' reading reveals precisely the non-necessity of such a
limitation on the gender of the Bataillean subject.29
Having laid out the potential critique that awaits Bataille with regard
to sex, we need to recall that, for him, the erotic is always part of death,
of excess, in that it entails a loss of self. Certain passages of the second
volume of The Accursed Share demonstrate how 'woman' is envisaged
within this economy. Woman, for Bataille, tends to be the place where
birth and death combine, since both are limit experiences for a human
individual, and both have to do with the erotic. According to Still, 'the
anguished juxtaposition and attempted fusion of seemingly distinct
entities (...) evokes on some level what are problems for us all: sexual
difference, loss of meaning, death',30 but this notwithstanding, there are
moments when the death of the 'I' seems predicated on a sexual differ-
ence wherein the male starts from the position of subject, whilst the
female always occupies the position of object (Er, 90, 130-1, 143). In
much of Bataille's fiction, this is not the case for the protagonists, who
are often women without having to stand for Woman', and who seem
to have at least as much possibility as the male characters of losing their
subjecthood in excess.
Women, then, seem to be privileged with regard to access to the
realm of the erotic, or death. Significantly, Bataille writes that women
are to be found at the 'centre of eroticism'in a way that men are not (AS,

II,436n.).They also have a more proximate relation to birth and death,

as a result of this, which means that if'life is a product of putrefaction'
184 Paragraph
(80) then women are within such an abjection. Women also constitute a
particular form of object for the (male) subject: 'a naked woman, young
and pretty, is doubtless the exemplary form of the object' (137). Bataille
specifies that women are regarded as objects (139), but this does not
prevent him from accepting that this being regarded as 'object' effec-
tively entails being the object. Combining this statement of women as
object with their status within death, eroticism, etc.,means they are spe-
cifically not objects, but constitute the 'male abject'. Woman 'opens
onto death' (153) through her beauty, which brings on the 'little death'.
In Madame Edwarda her cunt is 'the bared wound'.31 In La Tombe de
Louis XXX the narrator opens 'your'legs 'like a book where I read what
kills me'.32 In notes to The Dead Man woman is 'the mask of death'.
My Mother brings many of these issues together. The Sun, death, the
narrator's mother, God all come together. The mother declares that
she wanted to bring her son into the world ofdeath and corruption, and
—

T wanted to lead you into my death'.33 In My Mother, she is all: subject

and what lies outside the subject. The son is nothing. At one level, it is a
woman who is central here as agent and as death/object, but at another
level, is she not, when written into subjecthood,just the crowning mo-
ment of masculine sublimation, a way of controlling fears about
death/castration? This would be a comical way of reading Bataille, even
if at some level, this seems to be akin to what he believes —
the last
thing Bataille can be accused of is having an unconscious all is on the
surface. However, could this not be the sublimation? In that case, we
—

would have to ask why the balance between horror, death and sex never
moves to resolution
—
in the fictions, there is no mastery of the situa-
tion for either male or female actors. If we for a moment attribute some
validity to the claims of psychoanalysis, we would have to recognize
that psychoanalysis is the limited, restricted economy to Bataille's gen-
eral economy of sex and death: it is psychoanalysis that is the sublima-
tion, the defence mechanism, built on the belief in solid identity (for
male subjects) ,34 Returning to the mother in My Mother,we can perhaps
read her more as an absent subject —
she is the one with a subjectiv-
ity/identity to lose. The son is only losing what was not there (more or
less of a less?). Moreover we recall that the world of'death and corrup-
tion' is the better (as worse) one for Bataille.
To summarize, Bataille's fiction, at its most pornographic, is not
reliant on the death or annihilation of women (the prostitute, however,
is accorded this dubious honour as she is, as a subject, dead (45,11,143)).
Women, however, or 'Woman', do have a privileged relation to death
and the erotic, which at times veers on making them the means to his
 Bataille, Conceiving Death 185
end, his ending, his death, little and otherwise. The cunt is certainly a
particular non-place, the place of death and this surely can only be
—

from the point of view of a subject who is not the woman in question
(necessarily male only if we accept heterosexual psychoanalysis) and
who, in Bataille's fiction, is male, so that the passage to the erotic or
death is the woman, for the man, rather than for the woman as well.
Beauty is also the province of the woman alone, and although this could
be accepted as a way of describing how Western modern culture sets
about defining beauty, it is odd that Bataille, who normally roams
widely for his examples, simply accepts this view (Er, 143-4). Paradoxi-
cally, beauty then comes to be part of abjection, something to be
destroyed (many ofBataille's heroines 'attain' a state of debauchery that
could be described as abject, in the usual use of the word).
I would argue that there is no definitive answer to the position of
'Woman' relative to death in Bataille's writing, and when seen in the
light of what Bataille terms sovereignty (the sovereign individual 'is
completed in NOTHING' (AS, III, 204, translation modified)), it may
be that even the problematic aspects of women seeming to be part of
'his death' make women the more likely to accede to conditions like
sovereignty. Bataille specifies that there should not be a means by which
we can become sovereign, as it is better to be sovereign (273); this being

sovereign is impossible, so woman cannot serve as the means to become

sovereign. The outside that woman inhabits for man removes her from
the need to have a project for sovereignty, but perhaps it removes the
possibility of losing such a project (an existence oriented around means
and ends) in seeking to attain loss. Is she able to get to 'the beyond of
utility [which] is the domain of sovereignty' (198, translation modified)
if she 'is' already there? In any case, sovereignty does not seem to be an
issue for women, and in the neglect of her sovereignty, she actually be-
comes the figure (that is not a figure, but emptily immanent) of sover-

eignty in Bataille.
In 'Solar Anus', one of Bataille's early texts, we see the premonition of
the paradox that occurs within sovereignty, the passage from mastery
(or sovereignty as usually understood). In 'Solar Anus' we read that: T
want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will
have been able to say: you are the night. (...) The solar annulus is the in-
tact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently
blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the
night.'i5 Death, rape, anal sex as the final possibility of mutual destruc-
tion—
what could be seen as more 'problematic'? It is absolutely legiti-
mate to question Bataille's imagery, his focus on the female body as a
186 Paragraph
site of male subjectivity, but we should always ask how this fits into the
general economy, the position of death within (or as) this economy, the
place and function of eroticism, and how the individual loses their indi-
viduality in extreme behaviour. It is man that has further to go to 'attain'
this loss of self, due to the relative subjectivities that Bataille implicitly
assigns to men and women. Woman is death is the other is excess all —

the standard positionings of death-obsessed masculine philosophy —

and in this positioning exceeds not just the male subject who would re-
alize himself across the void of Woman, but exceeds as paradoxical sub-
ject, as sovereign, as absent.
Absent again —
what then has changed? If death is not the Other, to
be feared, avoided, absented then to be absent, to be in (as opposed to
—

just being) this death is to 'be'other, which in Bataille's terms, is as far as

we can be. Do we then stop (which would risk leading us to conclude
that maybe Dworkin is right, and women have simply been valorized as
'the low')? To stop would be to affirm: to go against, rather than em-
brace death, which is movement. Perhaps what Bataille does is to open a
non-site for a subjectivity that has crossed,because perpetually crossing,
the moment our taboos installed difference as constitutive of identity
(including sexual difference as a function of controlling eroticism in the
form of sexuality), that was co-incidence with the exclusion of death.
This circling, this figuring, is always crossing: the transgression a return
for the first time. Not beyond. Already too far.

PAUL HEGARTY
University College Cork

NOTES
1 See Simon Critchley, Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Literature and Philoso-
phy (London, Routledge, 1997) and Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law:
Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1996). Both writers attempt to move the question of death from being simply
the portentous other that structures what we take to be self-presence and in-
troduce, or emphasize, the idea of process through death(s), as opposed to
death as an endpoint or punctuating as if it were an endpoint.
2 In an exhibition that she curated in Paris, Julia Kristeva has also dealt with
this 'theme' of figuration as that which is to exceed figuration, in the form of
art based on images of decapitation, veiling, distortion of the face. See Visions
capitales (Paris, Reunion des rnusees nationaux, 1998).
3 Georges Bataille, 'Attraction and Repulsion II: Social Structure', in The Col-
lege ofSociology (1937-39), edited by Denis Hollier, translated by Betsy Wing
 Bataille, Conceiving Death 187

(Minneapolis,University ofMinnesota Press, 1988),pp. 113—24 (p. 123,trans-

lation modified). The principal book-length works by Bataille discussed in
this article are the following: The Tears of Eros, translated by John Connor (San
Francisco, City Lights, 1989); The Accursed Share, translated by Robert Hurley
(New York, Zone Books, 1991), hereafter AS; Eroticism, translated by Mary
Dalwood (London, Calder and Boyars, 1987), hereafter Er.
4 See The Accursed Share, p. 32 and Eroticism, pp. 12-15.
5 Compare Heidegger's 'death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of
Dasein and 'that about which one has this anxiety [i.e. death] is simply
Daseins potentiality-for-Being'. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,
translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford, Blackwell, 1962), p.
294 and p. 295. For Heidegger, death is definitive in its unattainability, thus
making it inherent and essential. Arguably Bataille strays into this terrain, but
not willingly.
6 Bataille,'Solar Anus', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927—1939, trans-
lated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Lesliejr (Minneap-
olis, University ofMinnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5—9 (p. 7).
7 Bataille, 'Sacrifices', in Visions of Excess, pp. 130—6 (p. 133, translation modi-
fied).
8 Bataille, 'The Practice of Joy Before Death', in Visions of Excess, pp. 235—9
(p. 239).
9 Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, translated
by Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1989), p. 6.
10 For Bataille's rendering of the relationship between death and architecture,
see 'Architecture', 'Slaughterhouse' and 'Museum', translated by Paul

Hegarty, in Neil Leach (editor), Rethinking Architecture (London, Routledge,

1997), pp. 21—3. See too 'The Obelisk'in Visions of Excess, pp. 213-22. For a
further consideration of the role of building in the construction of Being, see
Jacques Derrida, 'The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's
Semiology', in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago,
Chicago University Press, 1982), pp. 69-108.
11 On lines ofdemarcation between human and other, it is also worth noting the
line between human and animal, broken in eroticism and moments where
conscious control of the organism fails or is broken down. Taboos often take
the human/animal line as a key site of prohibition (see The Accursed Share,ll,p.
53 and p. 90 and Bataille, Theory of Religion, translated by Robert Hurley
(New York, Zone Books, 1988), pp. 17-25). On the issue of death as origin,
on whether there is in any real sense an origin to humanity, Bataille responds

by writing that 'the only way we have to envisage the event is to do so as if

things had taken place within the limits of a very short, virtually indivisible
time span' (The Accursed Share, II, p. 73). It becomes possible to see that death
is, on the one hand, definitively 'the start of it all' and, on the other, that it is
unknowable in its originality this phenomenon being of the type that is
called 'originary' in acknowledgement of this difficulty or impossibility.
—
188 Paragraph
12 On the question oftaboo as such, it is to be noted that, for Bataille, taboo is in-
evitable but there is no set form (The Accursed Share,p. 29). In '17 janvier 1938'
he specifically attacks Freud's Totem and Taboo, saying that only one of its
chapters is any good, and that even that chapter gets the 'primitive' relation to
death wrong. See Bataille, CEuvres completes, 12 vols. (Paris, Gallimard,
1970—88), II, pp. 281-7 (p. 286), hereafter OC. The precise reason for the in-
compatibility of Freud and Bataille can be see in statements by Freud such as
the following: 'psychoanalysis has revealed that the totem animal is in reality a
substitute for the father' (Totem and Taboo, in The Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, XIII, edited by James Stachey (London, Hogarth Press,
1958), pp. 1-162 (p. 141)). Freud is unwilling to countenance a way of think-
ing that differs from the model based on universalizing the two parent, patri-
archal family. For Bataille, such a unit can only be a belated rationalization of
taboos on eroticism and sex. (On the play of taboo and transgression in the
'institution of marriage' see Eroticism, pp. 197—222.) Bataille's exoticism is
perhaps too open to what he believes to be other ways of thinking, but which
are, however, still being processed via Western categories (he still uses the
'primitives' as a source of knowledge for 'us').
13 Paradoxically, whilst questioning the primacy of death in Blanchot, Gillian
Rose brings us back to something like a notion of utility in death, of death as
foundation of utility. See Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 101-23.
14 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by L. S.
Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982); Mary Douglas, Pu-
rity and Danger, An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London,
Routledge, 1991). The main distinction between Bataille and Kristeva is per-
haps that for Bataille taboo is primarily a category, and only secondarily a
form, including patriarchy.
15 Such a conception, where death, sex, birth and anguish all merge is arguably
very masculine/heterosexual, and could conceivably be accounted for by
psychoanalysis's (masculine/heterosexual) belief in the 'castration complex'.
Bataille seeks no resolution or 'substitution' the prohibition must con-
tinue to pose a threat: 'only the horror of prohibition keeps one in the an-
—

guish of temptation' (The Accursed Share, II, p. 96).

16 Much ofBataille's writing on death can be compared with Freud's Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, (Standard Edition, XVIII, 1955,pp. 7—64). I would argue that
Freud's model is precisely part of the restricted economy that is humanity's
attempt to control what is other, fearful or disgusting. Bataille's model is one
where tension is to be maintained or heightened, not dealt with.
17 'Abjection et les formes miserables', in Bataille, Q3uvres completes, II, pp.
217-21 and pp. 437n.—439n. Miserable contains the sense of misery as both
sadness and grinding poverty, and also the sense of something foul or nasty.
18 This concept features in Mona Hatoum's work Corps Stranger (1994) in which
a video shows us the endoscopic camera she inserts in order to make a passage

through her body.

 Bataille, Conceiving Death 189
19 See 'Attraction and Repulsion II'; 'Attraction and Repulsion I: Tropisms,
Sexuality,Laughter and Tears',in Hollier (editor), The College of Sociology,pp.
103—12; see too '17 janvier 1938'.
20 Bataille, CEuvres completes, II, pp. 163-4.
21 For obvious examples where this is the case,see G.W. F.Hegel, The Phenomen-
ology of Mind, translated by J. B. Baillie (New York and London, Harper and
Row, 1967), Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on
Phenomenological Ontology translated by Hazel E. Barnes (London, Methuen,
1972) and Heidegger, Being and Time. For the critique of philosophy 'in the
masculine' as being based on death and Freudian death drives, see Luce
Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill (New York,
Cornell University Press, 1985), Helene Cixous, 'Sorties', in Helene Cixous
and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 63—132, Kristeva,
Powers of Horror and Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by L. S. Roudiez (New
York, Columbia University Press, 1987).
22 Extract in Toril Moi (editor), French Feminist Thought: A Reader (Cambridge,
MA and Oxford, Blackwell, 1987), pp. 73-9 (p. 77).
23 For a careful analysis of gender and sexual positionings within, and outside of,
abjection, see Judith Still, 'Horror in Kristeva and Bataille: Sex and Violence',
Paragraph, 20 (1997), 221—39. This essay also stands as a powerful and concise
rendering of the relationship contemporary feminisms (can) have with
Bataille. See also Still, Feminine Economies: Thinking Against the Market in the
Enlightenment and the Late Twentieth Century (Manchester, Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 1997).
24 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 112, translation modified.
25 Margaret Whitford (editor), The Irigaray Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991), p.
159. See also Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the
Aesthetic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992) for a consideration
of the largely male production of images of dead women.
26 Cixous,'Sorties', p. 79.
27 See Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London, The
Women's Press, 1981),pp. 167—74,for a summary of, essentially, the 'dirty bits'
of Bataille's Story of the Eye. For her critique of this 'reading', see Susan Rubin
Suleiman, 'Pornography, Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's Story
of the Eye', in Nancy K. Miller (editor), The Poetics of Gender (New York, Co-
lumbia University Press, 1986),pp. 117—36.Both Suleiman and Still ('Horror
in Kristeva and Bataille') insist, nonetheless, on the need to consider the overt
(explicit) content in Bataille's fiction, as well as its philosophical, theoretical
and literary components.
28 Dworkin, Pornography, pp. 175—6.
29 This is notably the case in Story of the Eye, where Simone instigates the
trajectory into extreme eroticism that is presented to us by the male narrator.
190 Paragraph
See Bataille, Story of the Eye, translated by Joachim Neugroschal
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982).
30 See Still, 'Horror in Kristeva and Bataille', pp. 229—30, for discussion of how
such a process can appear in Bataille's Madame Edwarda (for which see Bataille,
My Mother; Madame Edwarda; The Dead Man, translated by Austryn
Wainhouse (London and New York, Marion Boyars, 1989) ).
31 Still, 'Horror in Kristeva and Bataille', p. 233.
32 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 150, translation modified.
33 La Tomhe de Louis XXX in Bataille, CEuvres completes, IV, pp. 151—68 (p. 161).
and p. 366n.
34 Bataille,My Mother,^. 133, translation modified.The most comical rendering
of a psychoanalytic reading is provided by Bataille himself, in what can only
be seen as an exceeding of the 'psychoanalytic scene', in the text 'Coinci-
dences'which accompanies Story of the Eye and is supposed to serve as its ex-
planation. In this text the narrator, presumed by most to be Bataille himself,
describes himself as terrified and fascinated by his blind, pissing, shitting fa-
ther (p. 70). He is also afraid that his mother might kill him (p. 73) and at one
stage joins her in a pool of water, having crossed swamps to be there (p. 74).
'Coincidences' renders psychoanalysis risible through its literalness.
35 Bataille, Visions of Excess, p. 9.