I Myself Am War: Bataille’s Heraclitean Meditation

Stuart Kendall

Today we are again getting close to all those fundamental forms of world
interpretation devised by the Greek spirit through Anaximander, Heraclitus,
Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras – we are growing more Greek
by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts,
as it were: but one day, let us hope, also in our bodies!
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 419.

What is this war at the heart of nature?

The Thin Red Line (dir. Terrence Malick, 1998)

“I Myself Am War”: the first sentence – or perhaps the subtitle – of the last text in the last
issue of the journal Acéphale. The text is a “meditation” that appears as the sixth and final in a series of
similar pieces – preceded by an introduction – collectively titled “The Practice of Joy Before Death”.
This final text carries the singular title: Heraclitean Meditation. But what does this claim – “I myself
am war” – mean? And what makes it “Heraclitean”?
The context of the claim – the last issue of the journal Acéphale – is of course significant.
Acéphale had effectively been the house organ of an eponymous secret society, founded by Georges
Bataille and a few co-conspirators in 1936. Three previous issues of the journal had appeared: “The
Sacred Conspiracy” in June 1936, “Nietzsche and the Fascists” in January 1937, and “Dionysus” – a
double length issue – in July 1937. Along with Bataille, the contributors included Pierre Klossowski,
Jean Wahl, Jean Rollin, Roger Caillois, Jules Monnerot, and André Masson, whose illustrations gave
the publication a great deal of its force. Only Bataille, Klossowski, and Rollin participated in the secret
society, and of them, Klossowski, only during its first year, and Rollin, mostly from a distance, since he
lived in Barcelona for much of this time.
The final issue of Acéphale stands somewhat apart. Two tumultuous years separate its
appearance in June 1939 from the previous issues. Those issues had been published by Guy Lévis
Mano, whose catalog essentially defined avant-garde literature in France between the wars. The final
issue carried the address of a bookstore, the Galeries du Livre, but it was otherwise all-but
anonymous: its articles unsigned. This issue carried a subtitle – “Madness, War, and Death” – that
summarized the three pieces comprising its contents: one commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of
Nietzsche’s “tragic” descent into madness, another offering “unequivocal affirmations” about war, and
finally, “The Practice of Joy Before Death”: six meditations concluding with the “Heraclitean
Meditation” beginning “I myself am war”.

I MYSELF AM WAR

I imagine human movement and excitation, whose possibilities are limitless:

this movement and excitation can only be appeased by war.
I imagine the gift of an infinite suffering, of blood and open bodies, in the
image of an ejaculation cutting down the one it jolts and abandoning him to an
exhaustion charged with nausea.
I imagine the earth projected in space, like a woman screaming, her head in
flames.
Before the terrestrial world, whose summer and winter order the agony of all
living things; before the universe composed of innumerable turning stars, limitlessly
losing and consuming themselves, I can only perceive a succession of cruel splendors
whose very movement requires 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.
I imagine myself covered in blood, broken but transfigured and in accordance
with the world, both as prey and as a jaw of TIME, which ceaselessly kills and is
ceaselessly killed.
There are explosives everywhere that perhaps will soon blind me. I laugh when
I think that my eyes persist in demanding objects that do not destroy them. (VE 239)
In the secret society Acéphale, and as the titles indicate, texts like these served purposes of
meditation. A short note accompanied a similar text that Bataille sent Isabelle Waldberg in 1939,
explaining some of the methods related to their use:
 Here is a text for meditation. You should shut yourself off as tranquilly as possible,
create a void within yourself, give yourself up completely, while remaining seated,
though without letting your body go slack, let your mind go and, first, breathe deeply,
attempting to let yourself be possessed by the silence. This could become a real torpor.
You shouldn’t read the text but recall it to yourself slowly. (AS 536)
In “The Practice of Joy Before Death”, Bataille explains that the texts included therein are “less
exercises strictly speaking than simple descriptions of a contemplative state or of an ecstatic
contemplation.” (VE 236) The texts are thus both retrospective – recollections of images and figures
of imagination that accompanied ecstatic meditational practice – and prospective – images and figures
described with the intent to provoking ecstatic states, if not necessarily bringing them about directly.
They function as part of a practice that might provoke ecstatic states among the adherents of the
group. And the provocation of ecstatic states was in fact their purpose.
In a letter to Patrick Waldberg from this same period in 1939, Bataille proposed taking the
meditations and ritual practices of the group farther into mystic experience:
In particular, I think that it is time that we all begin to go to the ends of mystic
experience, which is demanded by the erotic experience of a human being who does
not sink. All of the preventions that you might have don’t resist the experience itself.
At the point at which we are, it is out of the question that we do not do everything
that is possible to burn like fire. (AS 541)

§ Affect

The adherents of Acéphale, led by Bataille, intended nothing less than the invention of a new
religion, a new structure of myth and ritual, capable of shaping the affects of contemporary humanity
and thereby imposing a new binding structure on contemporary society from within its midst, starting
with the very bodies of its members.
In the Collège de Sociologie, founded in the year following Acéphale, Bataille pursued the
exoteric aspects of this project – studying the structural form of societies – while Acéphale itself
pursued its esoteric aspects – the study and practice of mythic thought and ritual practice upon the
bodies of its adherents as both individuals and members of a community. Acéphale proposed a
revolution in the body of society via a revolution in the affects of its adherents.
The full elaboration of the myth of Acéphale and the ritual practices of the group lies beyond
the scope of this paper. For now, I am concerned with one figure, one problem as it relates to this body
of thought and practice: war.

§ War

In a letter Bataille wrote to Roger Caillois on October 9, 1935, during the organizational
phase of the communal endeavor that preceded Acéphale, the group Contre-Attaque, Bataille, with a
dark humor, remarked offhandedly: “I also now hope that this misfortune will offer us the occasion to
experience the degree to which the essential things still derive from the god polemos…” (AS 152; see
Lettres à Roger Caillois, 51)
Polemos: war. More specifically, for the Greeks, war against foreign powers rather than war
waged within one’s communal group. Polemos describes essentially an international conflict rather than
a civil war. Bataille’s dark wish would of course prove prophetic.
During the second half of the 1930s, in France, the possibility of war presented two types of
questions, some existential, related to the ever-mounting inevitability, indeed the imminence of yet
another war, others effectively essential, related to the meaning and scope of war, the question of war
itself. What exactly are we speaking of when we speak of war? What are the various types of war and
how might they be relevant to these reflections? What motives and limits distinguish civil war from
war between nations or rather conflict with a foreign or external enemy versus an internal one? What
is the difference between war and revolution? Could war provide the transformative spark for social
revolution as it had in Russia in 1917. At a different level, what is the nature of the experience of war?
What distinguishes the experience of war for the conscripted soldier from that of war for the
mercenary; war for the civilian, the patriot or the protestor? How in short do models of conflict frame
our participation in and experience of the modern state?
In the letter to Roger Caillois quoted earlier, Bataille lists, among the various committees that
he sees as essential to the success of Contre-Attaque, one devoted to the “struggle against the war.”
(AS 153) The letter, in other words, betrays very nearly the full paradox of Bataille’s views on war: on
the one hand, the view that “the essential things derive from polemos”, and, on the other, unequivocal
opposition to war. This paradox circumscribes a tragic vision of human life: war is inevitable, but war
is also inevitably horrible. A further paradox of war emerged across the twentieth century, and perhaps
more so even in our own times: war can also all but unimaginably distant, disengaged, and even boring.
In his book Man and the Sacred, Roger Caillois offered a contrasting view. War for Caillois
provided the modern equivalent of the archaic festival.
War well represents a paroxysm in the life of modern society. It constitutes a total
phenomenon that exalts and transforms society in its entirety, cutting with terrible
contrast into the calm routine of peacetime. It is a phase of extreme tension in
collective life, a great mobilization of masses and effort. Each individual is torn from
his profession, his home, his habits, and lastly, his leisure. War brutally destroys the
circle of liberty that everyone preserves for his own pleasure and respects in his
neighbor. It interrupts the happiness and quarrels of lovers, the intrigue of the
ambitious, and the work quietly pursued by the artist, scholar, or inventor. It
impartially ruins anxiety and placidity, and nothing exists that may not be taken away
by war, whether creation, pleasure, or even anguish. No one can remain apart from it
and busy himself with another task, for there is no one whom war cannot employ in
some fashion. It needs all energies.” (Caillois, Man and the Sacred, 165-66)
War, in short, offers modern society an opportunity to violate its taboos – the opportunity to
squander immensely, not just things, but money, and human lives. War is an orgy of waste.
Caillois appended these reflections to Man and the Sacred for its second edition, published in
1949, a decade after the first. Reading it one should remember that Caillois himself suffered World
War Two only in exile, in Argentina, where he made himself useful writing anti-Nazi propaganda.
Nevertheless, Caillois’ view of war as a modern festival may in fact and oddly enough be overly
optimistic. Bataille views the problem with additional levels of nuance. If Caillois committed himself
to the idea that “there is no one whom war cannot employ in some fashion”, Bataille admitted, with
chagrin, that was his life itself testified to a form of “unemployed negativity”. (Guilty, 111) The war
ultimately liberated Bataille from useful activity. In Inner Experience, he put it flatly: “The war put an
end to my ‘activity’ and my life became all the less separated from the object of its search.” (Inner
Experience, 95)
 Moreover, conflating war with utility, as Caillois does, offers a nightmare vision of war: a
nightmare not of glorious unchecked expenditure but of cold calculation. Bataille: “The wars of the
twentieth century gave the impression of an increase of unleashed fury. But however immense the
horror may have been, this furious violence was measured: it was an ignominy perfected through
discipline! … The wars of our century have mechanized war; war has become senile. The world finally
gives in to reason. Even in war, work becomes the guiding principle, its fundamental law.” (The Tears
of Eros, 143)
War, in other words, and in Bataille’s view, has become the opposite of the festival: a
catastrophic orgy of expenditure and waste without the pleasure and freedom of release. The problem
of excess energy – what Bataille called the accursed share – remains to be solved. Another passage
from The Tears of Eros states Bataille’s fundamental position squarely: “Unless we consider the various
possibilities for consumption which are opposed to war, and for which erotic pleasure – the instant
consumption of energy – is the model, we will never discover an outlet founded on reason.” (The Tears
of Eros, 149) If expenditure itself is unreasonable, finding an outlet for expenditure founded on reason
presents a paradox. Such is the challenge of Bataille’s thought.
Despite the paradox, Bataille’s thought was also unremittingly, even obsessively consistent. As
noted above, his political activities in the 1930s were directed by these same concerns, toward finding a
mode of communal organization that might foster expenditure without war. A program piece for
Contre-Attaque written in December of 1935, proposed oriented the group as being a “movement
entirely devoted before anything else against the war”. (AS 188)
And yet, several meetings convened by Contre-Attaque were focused on the question of war.
The question “Are you for or against the war?” was the focus of one such meeting in April 1936. (AS
287) The relationship between war, civil war, and revolution was another persistent problem (see AS
284 ff). Ultimately, as these and other questions deepened, Contre-Attaque foundered. Acéphale
emerged from its ashes.

§ Acéphale at War

As a secret society, as noted, Acéphale proposed a “sacred conspiracy”, a religious conspiracy

rooted in an experience of the sacred, which is to say, of ecstasy, both communal and individual,
derived from meditations on the myth of Acéphale and related figures and themes. Rites of initiation
were held in tandem with the seasons in the groove of an oak tree that had been struck by lightning in
the Marly forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just outside Paris.
“The Sacred Conspiracy”, the program piece, if not manifesto of Acéphale, written at the end
of April 1936, began with quotes from Sade, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. The quote from
Kierkegaard left little doubt about the orientation of the group: “What looks like politics, and
imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement”. (VE 178)
The body of the text was even more insistent: “WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS and, to the
extent that our existence is the condemnation of everything that is recognized today, an inner exigency
demands that we be equally imperious. What we are starting is a war.” (VE 179)
Whereas Contre-Attaque proposed a movement that was before all else, anti-war, Acéphale all
but began with a declaration of war. The target of that declaration was stagnant, traditional, Christian,
capitalist, democratic society, which, in France in the 1930s had become all but hopelessly weak and
ineffective, moribund, politically if not socially invalid.
The members of Acéphale would ultimately elaborate a statement of values in the form of a
list of eleven “aggressions” – counter-propositions to the values of traditional society (AS 464; OC II:
385-6). They arrived at these propositions through a process of group discussion and reflection and by
writing an “inner journal” of the group, wherein members submitted memoranda on topics and
experiences relevant to the concerns and activities of the group. The public lectures of the Collège de
Sociologie were another vehicle for the development of these thoughts. Bataille even delivered a
version of “The Practice of Joy Before Death” as a lecture in that forum on June 9, 1939. Finally, the
journal Acéphale provided another quasi-public venue for the evolving views of the group. The pages of
Acéphale leave little doubt as to the influences on and orientation of the group, Nietzsche foremost
among them, but also Sade, Kierkegaard, and, through Nietzsche’s reading of his work, Heraclitus.
This body of influences can obviously help us understand Bataille’s “Heraclitean Meditation”:
“I myself am war”.

§ War in Nietzsche
 War figures prominently, even fundamentally, in Nietzsche’s thought, amid a broad range of
other forms of contest, conflict, strife, struggle, or agon.1 The derivation of this line of Nietzsche’s
thought is complex, commingling Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and, not least, Heraclitus.
For Nietzsche, as he remarks in The Will to Power, “Life is a consequence of war, society itself
a means to war.” (WtP § 53) “One must learn from war,” he says, “to associate death with the interests
for which one fights – that makes us vulnerable.” (WtP § 982) War, for Nietzsche – though also
crucially for Heraclitus – is among the properties that constitute the reality of the world: “change,
becoming, multiplicity, opposition, contradiction, war.” (WtP § 584)
In Acéphale, another remark from Nietzsche’s Will to Power provoked extended analytical
consideration in prose but also a kind of validation for the place of war and other types of conflict in
the texts of the meditations. In a note from 1880-1881, Nietzsche remarked: “Wars are for the
moment the strongest stimulants for the imagination, now that the ecstasies and terrors of
Christianity have lost their virtue.” (Nietzsche, La Volonté de puissance, ed. Wurzbach (Gallimard,
1937), bk. 4, § 69) (See Bataille, OC II: 392-99.)
Though Nietzsche’s views on war derive from multiple sources (Homer, Pindar, Heraclitus,
etc.), Bataille seems to have been most impacted by the thought of Heraclitus, particularly in
Nietzsche’s own, occasionally creative interpretation of that thought. Bataille does not reference
Homer or Pindar, whereas the name of Heraclitus, as we have seen, figures in one of his most
significant texts, “The Practice of Joy Before Death”.

§ Heraclitus

Heraclitus does not appear of the surface of Bataille’s work until the period of Acéphale. At
that point, in August 1936, Bataille borrowed the volume of Nietzsche’s Werke containing
“Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks” from the Bibliothèque Nationale and ultimately even
included a translation of one section of that book devoted Heraclitus in the second issue of Acéphale,
published in January 1937.2
Despite the absence of direct reference to Heraclitus in Bataille’s writing prior to that point,
the influence of the Greek thinker is nevertheless present in key ways.
 The list of books that Bataille borrowed from the Bibliothèque Nationale from 1922 to 1950
assembled by Jean-Pierre Le Bouler and Joëlle Bellec Martini tells us a great deal about the
peregrinations of Bataille’s intellectual interests. Relevant to this discussion, the list reveals that
Bataille did not seriously engage the thought of Heraclitus until the fall of 1927. He had begun
reading Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in 1922, Freud in 1923, Hegel and Mauss in 1925, Sade in 1926,
and, in 1927, Heraclitus. He seems to have come to Heraclitus through Hegel. On August 7, 1927,
Bataille borrowed Hegel’s Logic, and, at the end of that month, on the 24th and 26th, his Lectures on the
History of Philosophy. Bataille returned the Logic on October 20th but that same day borrowed books
on Greek philosophy in general and Heraclitus in particular. He borrowed seven titles by or about
Heraclitus between October 20th and November 2nd.3 Some of these books would be returned in
December, others in January 1928, when he also returned the volumes of Hegel’s Lectures on the
History of Philosophy. Bataille’s interest in Heraclitus, in short, occurred in a crucial burst in the late
fall of 1927, during which he read Heraclitus in French, English, and German (including the Greek
text), but also, and significantly for our purposes, alongside or perhaps more accurately through
Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s interpretations of the work. The chapter on Heraclitus in Hegel’s Lectures on
the History of Philosophy seems to have been the text that precipitated Bataille’s interest in the Greek
thinker.
This period was a foundational one in the development of Bataille’s thought. Both The Solar
Anus and Story of the Eye date to it. This was the moment during which Bataille also began to
elaborate the myths of the Jesuve and the Pineal Eye that would occupy his thoughts for the next
several years and provide the basis for his approach to the problem of base materialism as well as his
notion of expenditure. His encounter with Heraclitus was undoubtedly among the precipitating
factors in this decisive deepening and expansion of his thought.
We should nevertheless be careful not to overstate this point. As noted, the Greek thinker’s
name would not appear as an overt reference in Bataille’s work for another ten years. His influence on
Bataille’s thought is clear enough, but that influence passes without clarifying remark. This too
however is point that should be taken lightly. Though Bataille would later write insistently, “nothing is
more foreign to me than a personal mode of thought” (Guilty 96), he nevertheless also rarely advertises
his influences either directly or fully, particularly in his early writings.
 Bataille’s first substantial reference to Heraclitus is found in the brief note with which he
introduced the section from Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks included in Acéphale.
Bataille observed:
Because Heraclitus perceived the law in the combat of multiple elements, in fire the
innocent play of the universe, he appeared to Nietzsche as his double, as a being of
which he was himself a shadow. If Heraclitus ‘lifted the curtain on the greatest of all
dramas’ – the play of destructive time – the question of the drama itself became the
subject of Nietzsche’s contemplation and his passion, through the course of which, the
vision, charged with fear, of the eternal return, appeared to him. (OC I: 466)
This note is telling in a number of ways. It focuses our attention on the elements of
Heraclitus’ thought that were crucial for Bataille – “the combat of multiple elements … fire
[as] the innocent play of the universe”, the problem of time – but also for the play of masks it
establishes: Heraclitus as Nietzsche’s double, as Nietzsche effectively was Bataille’s: a
procession of mirrors.
Needless to say, the other members of the secret society Acéphale shared Bataille’s fascination
with both Nietzsche and Heraclitus. In a note from the fall of 1938 that formed part of the “internal
journal” of the group, Pierre Andler stated flatly: “We know which world we adhere to: that of
Heraclitus and Nietzsche.” (AS 500)
Nevertheless, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale refer to Heraclitus directly on only
a few occasions. Typically these references continue the affiliation of Heraclitus with Nietzsche and
tragedy.
In “Nietzschean Chronicle”, published in Acéphale 3-4 (July 1937), Bataille links Heraclitus,
through Nietzsche, to a commitment to life, which is to say, in his words, to tragedy.
Under the various oppositions that maintain the existence of men under the harsh law
of Heraclitus, none is truer or more ineluctable than the one that opposes the Earth to
the heavens, to the ‘need to punish’ the dark demands of tragedy; on one side are
constituted the aversion to sin and the light of day, glory and military repression, the
imprescriptible rigidity of the past; on the other, the grandeur of auspicious nights, of
avid passion, of the obscure and free dream – power is given to movement and, in that
 way, whatever its numerous appearances may be, it is torn from the past and projected
into the apocalyptic forms of the future. (VE 205)
In “The Obelisk”, published in Mesures 4:2 (April 15, 1938), Bataille extends this conjunction
of Heraclitus, Nietzsche and tragedy:
Tragedy, like a festival given in honor of horror-spreading time, depicted for gathered
men the signs of delirium and death whereby they might recognize their true nature.
This happy yet somber receptiveness of life was answered by the aggressive vision of
Heraclitus. Nietzsche said that this vision was the equivalent of an earthquake,
robbing the earth of its stability. He described it in images that he used ten years later
to describe the death of God, images of a total yet brilliantly glorious fall. Thus in the
death of God, whose whirlwind tears everything from the past, we find once again this
‘nostalgia for a lost world’ which so painfully riveted the eyes of Nietzsche on Greece
in the tragic era. (VE 218)
Here Bataille is referring to Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks wherein Nietzsche writes
of Heraclitus: “The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual,
which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing
thought. Its impact on men can most nearly be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when
one loses one’s familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth.” (Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic
Age of the Greeks, 54)
For Bataille, Nietzsche’s shattering experience of the death of god forms the centerpiece of the
modern experience of tragedy and Bataille links this experience to Nietzsche’s meditation on
Heraclitus.
In order to represent the decisive break that took place – freeing life from the
humilities of fear – it is necessary to tie the sundering vision of the ‘return’ to what
Nietzsche experienced when he reflected up on the explosive vision of Heraclitus, and
to what he experienced later in his own vision of the ‘death of god’: this is necessary in
order to perceive the full extent of the bolt of lightning that never stopped shattering
his life while at the same time projecting it into a burst of violent light. TIME is the
object of the vision of Heraclitus. TIME is unleashed in the ‘death’ of the One whose
eternity gave Being an immutable foundation. And the audacious act that represents
 the ‘return’ at the summit of this rending agony only wrests from the dead God his
total strength, in order to give it to the deleterious absurdity of time. A ‘state of glory’ is
thus deftly linked to the feeling of an endless fall. It is true that a fall was already a part
of human ecstasy, on which it conferred the intoxication of that which approximates
the nature of time – but that fall was the original fall of man, whereas the fall of ‘return’
is FINAL. (VE 220)
In short, for Bataille, both the thought of the eternal return and the death of god are linked to
a Heraclitean vision and both provoke a “state of glory”, in short, ecstasy.
Bataille’s references to Heraclitus on these points are remarkably consistent. Among them,
briefly, a very concise note: “Heracliteanism: the sensation of an earthquake and the fall into empty
space in the Nietzchean experience of the death of God.” (OC II: 391)
But some other references to Heraclitus are less direct. Perhaps foremost among these,
references to Heraclitus’ understanding of war as both a psychological, political, and cosmological
concept.

§ Heraclitus on war, conflict, and cosmos

Heraclitus’ remarks on war, death, and cosmos are well known:

One must realize that war is shared and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to
pass (and are ordained) in accordance with conflict. (Kahn LXXXII)

War is father and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has
made slaves, others free. (Kahn LXXXIII)

The name of the bow is life; its work is death. (Kahn LXXIX)

Gods and men honor those who fall in battle. (Kahn C)

 Homer was wrong when he said ‘Would that Conflict might vanish among gods and
men!’ [Iliad XVIII.107). For there would be no attunement with high and low notes
nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites. (Kahn
LXXXI)

In the end, as in the beginning, for Heraclitus: … all things are one (Kahn XXXVI).

Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from
all things one and from one thing all. (Kahn CXXIV)

Conflict is the tension that binds opposites; war the state that circumscribes that
tension. All things are bound by this state and its laws.
In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche summarizes this material
powerfully:
“The strife of opposites gives birth to all that comes-to-be; the definite qualities which
look permanent to us express but the momentary ascendancy of one partner. But this
by no means signifies the end of the war; the contest endures in all eternity. Everything
that happens, happens in accordance with this strife, and it is just in the strife that
eternal justice is revealed.” (55)
Nietzsche’s summary also situates this thought in cultural context as not only
cosmological but also social and political.
“It is a wonderful idea, welling up from the purest strings of Hellenism, the idea that
strife embodies the everlasting sovereignty of strict justice, bound to everlasting laws.
Only a Greek was capable of finding such an idea to be the fundament of a cosmology;
it is Hesiod’s good Eris transformed into the cosmic principle; it is the contest-idea of
the Greek individual and the Greek state, taken from the gymnasium and the palaestra,
from the artist’s agon, from the contest between political parties and between cities –
all transformed into universal application so that now the wheels of the cosmos turn
on it.” (55)
 Nietzsche’s summary makes it clear that this idea – cosmos bound by conflict – operates on
many distinct levels: at the level of the individual, the social, and the natural, or, we could say,
ecological or environmental.

§ Conflict, cosmos and the individual in Bataille, or Bataille with Heraclitus

As its title, “The Threat of War”, indicates, the second article in the last issue of Acéphale
addresses the problem of war directly. The piece offers six unequivocal affirmations on war and death.
The first of them begins emphatically and in what we can recognize as a Heraclitean mode: “Combat
is the same thing as life.” (OC I: 550) In keeping with Bataille’s thought more generally, the forth
affirmation denies the “utility” of war: “War cannot be reduced to an expression and a means of
developing some ideology, even bellicose: on the contrary, ideologies are reduced to the role of a means
of combat. A war surpasses in every particular the ‘words’ that are spoken in contradiction when it
occurs.” (OC I: 551) The experience of war cannot be captured in words nor circumscribed by any one
meaning. This thought anticipates the notion of inner experience, as Bataille, later developed it, as an
experience that “reveals nothing and cannot be the basis of belief or set out from it.” (Inner Experience
9)
Bataille also addressed the problem of war directly in a chapter of an early version of The
Accursed Share that he wrote alongside the texts from the last issue of Acéphale and the first sections of
Guilty in 1939 and 1940. There he was again explicit about the complex nature of war. He began the
chapter ambitiously: “I want to show that there is an equivalence between war, ritual sacrifice, and
mystic life: it’s the same play of ‘ecstasies’ and ‘terrors’ wherein man links himself with the play of the
skies.” (OC VII: 251) The ecstasies provoked by religiously inspired ritual sacrifices and found in
mystic experience are, for Bataille, equivalent to the experience of war as war is to these experiences.
Later in that same chapter, Bataille clarifies the manner in which man can, through sacrificial acts, as
he says, “link himself with the play of skies.”
Sacrifice is a free activity. A kind of mimeticism. Man places himself in the rhythm of
the universe. And as it is solely a question of miming the Universe, there is no call to
there go quickly, where the passage narrows. On the contrary, one can accentuate the
anguish. Since one must pass through there, and nothing is pressing, there is nothing
 but to push things to the end, to delay them in such a way that the laceration rings
over all life. Religious life is a deepening of the conditions of life and of spasm. (OC
VII: 255)
This notion of the placing oneself “in the rhythm of the universe” is crucial for Bataille. The
ecstasies of war, religious sacrifice, and mystic life are all means of either simply finding oneself or
intentionally placing oneself “in the rhythm of the universe”. Significantly, war and religious sacrifice
are both social acts, while mystic life, though supported by communally held beliefs, typically testifies
to the experiences of an individual.
This chapter from the draft of The Accursed Share reflects on these coincidences, this linkage,
analytically, we might say from the outside, based on Bataille’s interpretation of Ernst Jünger’s book
Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (1922) (which Bataille read in French translation, La Guerre, Notre
Mère (1934)). In Acéphale, he approached them from the inside, as a mode of communal practice, and
a vehicle of meditation.
Among the earliest texts related to the meetings of the secret society Acéphale, one finds the
text of the following “memento”, written sometime during the spring of 1937:
From now on, your joy will be trampled under foot and will degrade
your rest, your sleep and even your sufferings.
Remember that the truth is not stable ground but the movement
without respite that destroys all that you are and all that you see.
Remember that
The truth is in war
You should not stop before recognizing yourself as a man carrying in
himself a rather great hope demanding every sacrifice.
This memento will now show you that can no longer expect peace for
yourself. (AS 352)
This is of course a Heraclitean vision of instability, ceaseless change, war, and destruction. It
looks forward to the “Heraclitean Meditation – I myself am War” but also to Bataille’s observation in
Guilty, that his method of meditation, “signifies violence done to habits of relaxation.” (Guilty 25)
Another meditation on “joy before death” from two years later, in 1939, is perhaps even more
explicit in connecting the individual, death, and the cosmos:
 I understand Acéphale as violence
I understand his sulfur fire as violence
I understand the tree and the wind of death as violence

I AM JOY BEFORE DEATH

The depth of the galaxy is joy before death

I imagine myself carried away in the spinning vertiginous explosion
My head flies off in splinters. My body stands up in a world of violence
My laughter reverberates in the depths of the festival of the galaxy
I imagine the silence of my death in the lost silence of the galaxy
The violence of Acéphale carries my death into the inconceivable festival of the galaxy
(AS 539)
This text is entirely consistent with that of the “Heraclitean Meditation”, where the
practitioner, imagines him or herself, “covered in blood, broken but transfigured and in accordance
with the world, both as prey and as a jaw of TIME, which ceaselessly kills and is ceaselessly killed.”
The “Heraclitean Meditation” is Heraclitean because it is turns on a view of war in which self,
society, and cosmos are aligned in ceaseless conflict and ceaseless change.
Paradoxically, this is a view of war that substitutes the immediate satisfactions of individual
ecstasy for those of social or political catastrophe. It is a view of war, in other words, that is opposed to
war. It substitutes the instant consumption of energy – through ecstatic inner experience – for
political conflict, as Bataille would later suggest, in The Tears of Eros and other writings (see The Tears
of Eros, 149, as noted).
In Bataille’s life and thought, these reflections reach a kind of culmination in pages of Guilty:
No one takes on the war as madly: I am on the only one who can; others don’t love life
with as torturous a drunkenness, cannot recognize themselves in the shadows of a bad
dream. They know nothing of the pathways of a sleepwalker who passes from happy
laughter to endless excitement. … I won’t speak of war, but of mystical experience. I
am not indifferent to the war. I would voluntarily give my blood, my weariness, what’s
 more, these moments of savagery to which we submit ourselves near death . . . But
could I forget my ignorance for a moment? Forget that I am lost in the corridor of a
cave? This world, a planet, and the starry sky are only a tomb for me (in which I don’t
know if I am suffocating, crying, or changing myself into a kind of unintelligible sun).
A war cannot illuminate so perfect a night. (Guilty 10)

Prey to this paralysis, I slowly arranged my being across the earth and sky. I am “the
tree pushing its roots into the earth”: as much solidity as slowness. There are hours in
which I submit to the necessity to feel this dark growth within me, binding,
accumulating its forces. The greatest power is countered by a feeling of increased
fragility… I wanted to take this on myself. Sitting on the edge of a bed, facing the
window and the night, I practiced, determined to become a war myself. The passion to
sacrifice and the passion to be sacrificed were opposed within me like the teeth of two
gears, gripped at the moment the drive-shaft starts moving. (Guilty 13)
These paragraphs reveal the man alone with his meditations rather than the combatant in the
streets or the member of a community, together in the wood. But they stand-in for each of these other
modes of practice.
The war of Acéphale, Bataille’s war, was ultimately an internal conflict, an attempt to reconcile
individual life with the mechanisms and processes of the universe, to live at the measure of the
universe, to catch oneself in the snares of its time and space, its tensions and conflicts, among one’s
fellows, in ceaseless change, between earth and sky. In a note from Guilty, the book Bataille began
“because of the events [the war], but not to speak of them” (Guilty 9), he put forward the view that war
is only another mode or moment of normal life:
War is only a more charged moment of tragic meaning than normal time; it forcefully
expresses an agitation that nothing will appease—ever. Every political denial—
external or internal—is only the disguise under which is hidden the kind of burning
anguish that ceaselessly demands change and destruction. (Guilty 169)
War brings this tragic meaning to the surface of life, makes it visible, but it does not appease it
or eliminate it nor is it the only means of discharging these energies, for either individuals or the
socius. In opposition to the bellicose rhetoric that all but inevitably leads to war, perhaps Bataille’s
remark to Patrick Waldberg still holds true: “At the point at which we are, it is out of the question
that we do not do everything that is possible to burn like fire.” (AS 541)

September 29, 2017

Bibliography
Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 12 volumes (Gallimard, 1970-1988).
–, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minnesota Press, 1985).
–, Guilty (1944) (SUNY Press, 2011).
–, Inner Experience (1943) (SUNY Press, 2014).
–, et alia, L’Apprenti Sorcier. Ed. Marina Galletti (Éditions de la Différence, 1997).
Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Ed. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge, 1979).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873) (Gateway, 1962).
–, The Will to Power (1911) (Vintage, 1967).

Notes
                                                        
1
On this topic, see for example Yunus Tuncel, Agon in Nietzsche (Marquette University Press, 2013)
and Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
2
The excerpt in questions did not include the entirety of Nietzsche’s reflections on Heraclitus, only
one section from Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. See Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age
of the Greeks, chapter 8.
3
The books in question are follows:

October 20, 1927

Théodore Gomperz, Les Penseurs de la Grèce (F. Alcon; Laussanne, Payot, 1908) 3 vols.
Ferdinand Lassalle, Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos (Berlin: F. Duncker, 1858), 2
vols.

October 21, 1927

Pierre Bise, La Politique d’ Héraclite d’Éphèse (F. Alcon, 1924)
Albert Rivaud, Le Problème du devenir et la notion de la matière dans la philosophie grecque (F. Alcon,
1905)
Richard Oehler, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Vorsokratiker (Leipzig: Dürrischen Buchhandlung, 1904)
Heraclitus, The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus “on nature” Trans. G.T.W. Patrick
(Baltimore: N. Murray, 1889)

November 2, 1927
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker ed. Hermann Diels (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhanglung, 1903).
He borrowed this book again the following year.