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Jean-Michel Heimonet - Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism - Diacritics 26:2 Fri Oct 03 2003 00:43:31 Europe/Copenhagen

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Copyright 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights

reserved.Diacritics26.2 (1996) 59-73

[Proj [Searc [Journals] [This Journal] [Contents]

Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism

Jean-Michel Heimonet

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It is always relatively surprising to see how the great minds of an era manifest a kindof blindness when it comes to judging their peers, whether one is thinking of Balzacas the reader of Stendhal or Gide as the reader of Proust. This is undoubtedlybecause any truly forceful mind is also a mind so obsessed and fascinated by itsown way of apprehending the world that it can admit no other system of reference,no other range of values than its own. From this point of view, "A New Mysticism,"the article that Sartre devoted in some bad faith to Bataille's Inner Experience whenthe book was published in 1943, should be accorded a prime place in the annals ofgreat literary misunderstandings. There is no doubt that the brilliant philosopher of

Being and Nothingness commits a strange blunder--strange, at least, for anintellectual of his stature--with respect to the conceptual sacrifice by which Batailleseeks to reveal and, at the same time, cast out modern man's nostalgia for thesacred. But is "blunder" the right word? Because everything in the book proceedsnot as though Sartre had not understood, or badly understood, but rather as thoughhe had pretended not to understand the true stakes that in turn are revealed andconsumed by this impossible book. The harshness of his critiques, the vehemenceof tone--poorly tempered by a forced irony--instead prove that Inner Experience hadhit home, at a level unusual for intellectual polemics. Struck to the core, Sartrereacted. This explains why "A New Mysticism" is a "boomerang" text, or a revealingone, in the photographic sense, being more valuable for what it tells us about itsauthor than for what it teaches about the object being criticized. It is a text in whichthe reader has to read what is not said, "between the lines," seeking the cause forthe text's often flagrantly unjust and indeed petty and truistic assertions, in itsdefense system, or, to borrow a term from the field of psychoanalysis which Sartreso abhorred, in the author's "denials." To put it clearly, is not the presence of thesacred, this unknowable and virulent sacred, which seeps out of every part ofBataille's book, through the cracks and tears in its "form" and the paradoxical gapsin its "content," also the presence that ceaselessly haunts, with its shadow anddisturbing light, the thinking of the last great philosopher-monster?

In his didactic concern to be convincing, Sartre divided his article into three parts,the first two dealing respectively with "form" and "content," the third functioning as averdict. Viewed fifty years later, such a division applied to a text as anti-academic asInner Experience might seem comical. It points, however, to the seriousness being


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accorded in Sartre's text to knowledge as organized within the academy and to theinstitutional function of the academy. From one end of the text to the other, Sartreacts as censor and judge, pitilessly pointing out, with the derisive scorn of thespecialist, the philosophical naivet of "Mr. Bataille," particularly his rapid andunprofessional reading of Jaspers and Heidegger, which Bataille knew only intranslation [see "NM" 194]. Sartre's superior mandarin attitude explains why his firsttask had been to divide literary and philosophical history into two "frames of mind."

Although original, Bataille's style and writing already had their place in a "tradition,"which is that line from Pascal to the surrealists, by way of Nietzsche, made up ofwriters anxious to express (themselves), writing down their[End Page 59] thoughtsas they come, helter-skelter, in the exalted illumination of the moment, even beforebeing located and fixed within the design of an argument. In modern writers, thistradition had become even more intensified. Disregarding the classical writerlyvalues of restraint and modesty, the writer seeks to express not only his mind butalso his body and its living reality, to establish with the reader a sort of "carnalpromiscuity." Thus we get Breton, who does not hesitate in his novels to confide"the most puerile details" of his personal life. This tendency, which Sartre describesas "exhibitionist," is equally characteristic of Bataille. However spiritual the "ulcers"

and the "scars" he reveals with a certain delectation as testimonial to human misery,the impetus that continually animates his writing is the desire to bare himself, toachieve a degree of existential authenticity and depth, stripped of convention.Finally, the religious element in which Inner Experience is immersed is even moreclosely allied to Nietzsche's style in Ecce Homo orThe Will to Power; there is thesame "breathless disarray," the same "passionate symbolism," the same "propheticpreaching tone" [176]. One might as well say that what the representatives of thistradition share is apathicuse of thought and speech, the power of an unbridledaffectivity, which leads them to scorn "the serene craft of writing" [177]. In hisrelation to this tradition, already suspect for its irrationalism and vitalism, Bataille

embodies excess. He takes the tradition to its most fierce and in the same movegets out of it. In Pascal, and even still in Nietzsche, passion is restrained inargumentation and organized thought; in Bataille, on the other hand, passionliterally blows apart the frame of discourse: "feeling is everywhere," "at thebeginning and at the end" [177]. But what Sartre finds really outrageous is that thisfeeling is still speaking: it is not at all meant to resolve itself in shouts or in silence. Ifone is to believe Sartre, Bataille "hates" language; he hates it as a kind of screeninterposed between thought and life, posing an obstacle to living, immediate andsufficient expression ("Mr. Bataille would like to exist here and now, whole andimmediate" [178]). To satisfy this "hatred," the strange goal ofInner Experience will

become the sacrifice of words, but--so as to make the torture perfect--to sacrificewords by using words themselves, by burning them, dispensing them heedlessly, so

that language is compelled to say that which goes beyond language [see 179]. 1

This interpretation, which posits a language holocaust, paradoxically intended toregenerate language by confronting it with its other, with the ineffable of passionand will, is not exactly Sartre's interpretation but rather more our own. Sartre, for hispart, is divided and ambivalent in his attitude toward this sui generis sacrifice ofdiscourse. At the outset, he sees nothing (or does not want to see anything) otherthan a technical problem, a literary game, one of those "exquisite irritations" that anauthor might impose on himself as a challenge and stimulus to his writing. Or, since

his aim is to disparage Bataille, Sartre describes this sacrifice of words assomething like the handicap a billiard player voluntarily takes on, all the better toshow off his skill, by "tracing squares on the green felt[tracer des cadres sur le tapisvert]" [180]. In other respects, one is inclined to wonder to what extent the purpose


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of this technical observation is to reassure, a little bit in the way one might sing orjoke to disguise one's anxiety.

From start to finish Sartre has alway remained a classical writer, one for whomlanguage is not a problem but a simple instrument, accessible and compliant, forthe transmission of a message. In this light, Sartre's literary work--his plays andnovels--is only the reworking of the philosophical theses it serves to popularize.What is shocking about the form ofInner Experience is that it casts doubt onto thereassuring conception of language as instrument. The "slippery sentences" withwhich Bataille stretches and suspends the meaning of words shatters Sartre's visionof a coherent and intelligible world [see 118]; such sentences, responsible fordrawing the reader into the "ineffable" as if into [End Page 60] a trap where reasonfounders, are the product of a monstrous and, at the least, explosive mix of psychicproceedings. Bataille does not limit himself simply to exalting passion but goesfurther by wanting to make it live with its opposite, with that which, in the usualeconomy of speech, is supposed to exclude passion--or at least to extinguish it. Asearly as the foreword, the author ofInner Experience informs his reader of hisintention to arrive at "a synthesis of'rapture'and 'rigorous intellectual method,'" of

"'emotional knowledge'" and "'rational knowledge'" [177]. Repeating the foundinggesture of romanticism, he commits the logical heresy of mixing "poetry" and"philosophy." Again Sartre sees in this only a "circle"--vicious in all its points--wherediscourse keeps going around and around crazily without coming up with anythingpositive [179]. It is no less true that this self-sacrifice of language offends his tastefor a stable truth, one that is reducible to a concept. In addition one should notmisunderstand the meaning of the "praise" at the end of the first part of the article.The magnanimous professor Sartre finishes up by conceding to the pupil Bataillethe innovative aspect of his writing. In spite of "a little hollow emphasis and someclumsiness in the handling of abstraction, Inner Experience is, according to Sartre, a

contribution to the rejuvenation of the art of the essay, the form of which seemed tohave been fixed since Voltaire. But what is this appreciation worth in the wake of acritique denouncing the incompetence (the unprofessionalism) and the vacuity ofthe book? Moreover, Sartre himself is quick to take back what he has justconceded. For, as he says, "form is not everything." Which is a way of saying thatform is nothing if not the most superficial, the most playful, and, because of itsartifices, the least trustworthy aspect of discourse, the part that is used (by Bataille)to cover up the nothingness of the "content," which finally is the only thing thatmatters [185].

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The entire second part of Sartre's essay, which concentrates on the examination ofthis "form," will be to demonstrate the essentially perverse and noxious character ofInner Experience. As heir to the Enlightenment, and on his way toward Marxism,Sartre reproaches Bataille for having God survive his own death, and for inventing,by way of a detour through a critical approach pushed to its limits, a new form ofreligion, independent of dogma, rites of worship, and a church, and all the moreimpossible to exorcise since it is based, as in Kierkegaard, on lived experience--inthe sense in which German phenomenology uses the term Erlebnis [see 189]. Asrudimentary as it seems, this strategy is not lacking in efficiency. Once the cardinalstakes underlying experience have been uncovered, the issue for Sartre becomesnot just removing or invalidating these stakes but, in a much more perfidiousmanner, turning them back on themselves, in such a way that each thesis, once


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stripped of the mask of its "form," will appear, with respect to its "content," as theopposite of what it declares.

Bataille defines inner experience by opposition to traditional mysticism; the sacredthat is revealed is not tied to the attainment of transcendence but results insteadfrom the exercise of the critical faculties, through the infinite questioning of thoughtand language. To counter this, Sartre will have to prove that Bataille is a "real"mystic, not simply a "devout Christian" but a Christian "ashamed" of being aChristian [183, 217], whose so-called "sacrifice of words," conducted by means of"nonknowledge," is only an ingenious rhetorical effect intended to disguise the"totalitarian" character of his discourse [see 182].

In the same way, Sartre will show that this verbal sacrifice, which results in"de-sacralizing" the subject, bringing it down off its pedestal, reducing its power andits will "to be everything," is in reality nothing but the obverse of erecting the subjectas sacred; it is the art of turning an "auto-da-f" into an "apotheosis" [214]. From thebottom of his abjection Bataille remains above, looking down on common humanity.As an "edifying [End Page 61] narrative," his work is the story of a "second

descent": returning from an "unknown region," he "descends again among us" todrag us along in his fall [183].

Finally, Bataille's desire to "lose himself," the exigency of a universal"communication" with the rest of the world, is contradicted by the hierarchical andelitist vision ofInner Experience. An adept of "the doctrine of pain" [dolorisme] [217],Bataille does not write, as he claims, for an audience of his "equals" but for his"zealots" [zlateurs], for the "apprentice mystic" (one might say "sorcerer"), who, ashe does, values suffering and torment for their own sake as supreme [181].

Looked at in detail, each of these criticisms by Sartre is without interest. It is morerelevant to point out the motive for their tendentiousness. This motive, as we havealready seen, is based on contradiction. Bataille utilizes the "techniques" ofphilosophy to narrate a spiritual "adventure" alien to its framework, alien to thenature of its knowledge and to the scope of its aims [see 190]. In this regard, it iscurious that Sartre is unaware, or pretends to be unaware, of "heterology," thatscience of the sacred set free from the church, which Bataille developed in severalarticles at the beginning of the 1930s, in particular, "The Idea of Expenditure" ["Lanotion de dpense"] and "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" ["La structurepsychologique du fascisme"]. Sartre's is indeed a feigned ignorance, since hisreferences to the ritual ofamok, to the ceremony of potlatch, and to the

"effervescence" of festivals are enough to show that Sartre is familiar with the textsof Bataille relevant to the critique of usefulness and to the analysis of the fastuary,unproductive aspects of expenditure [see 212]. In a thinker who boasts aboutknowing everything, this omission serves strategic goals, showing that it is easier toforget rigorous and philosophically irrefutable texts than to refute them. And all thebetter if covering up the theoretical premises underlying experience allows Sartre toreduce experience to a moment of pure illumination, an instant of affective ecstasy,which is valuable only to the person who has undergone it.

We should recall that heterology, the science of "unexplainable difference," as

Bataille himself defined it [OC1: 345], proceeds according to the negative methodthat is specific to the mystic. Like God, heterogeneous reality cannot be defined bywhat it is, by the enumeration of its predicates or of the positive qualities that makeit up. It is possible to speak of this reality only in an indirect way, by a methodical


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enunciation of everything that it is not, of those elements that absolutely resistintellectual solutions. One is dealing here with absence, or the cognitive void; with"nonknowledge," which suggests plenitude; with words stumbling over that whichsurpasses them, pointing to that which is beyond words. Between such a methodand the classical mystical approach, there is, however, an essential difference thatSartre refuses to see. While mystic discourse is a passive discourse modeled onamplitude of feeling, heterology remains, in fact, a science, hence, an active

discourse, in that it can encompass (without ever attaining) its ineffable object onlyafter having exhausted all the resources offered by human knowledge and mind.Whatever his detractor says, Bataille's discourse is not the product of an"anti-intellectualism" [180], but rather of a hyperintellectualism, with all the hyperboleand spiraling self-reflection [mise en abyme] of critical thought at its mostdemanding and most strenuous.

As for situating this "new mysticism" in a tradition, it is not exactly the traditionevoked by Sartre that should be retained. Whatever Sartre says, classical writerssuch as "Pascal" or "Montaigne," or (why not) "Epicurus," even though their writingis characterized by looser argumentation and the effort to convey an immediate

impression, cannot serve as reference points. The reason for this is simply a matterof cultural chronology, because the problematic of language as the only medium ofhuman experience did not appear in their time with the acuity and the urgency that ithas taken on for us. The awareness of a disturbance inherent to language isspecifically modern; it marks, in the history of ideas, the very birth of modernity. As asacrificial operation resulting from the [End Page 62] deploying of contradictionsand from the crisis of discourse, Inner Experience belongs to the much more recenttradition of European romanticism.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, when orthodox religion was brought down

in ruins by the rationalist critique and by its own compromised relationship to earthlyinterests, thinkers had already posited a "poetic function of language," being whatJakobson would define a hundred and fifty years later as that sui generis quality ofliterary language, where the accent is put not on the referent, but on the "messageas such," taken in for "its own sake," where "word is felt as word, and not as thesubstitute for the named object." It is this autotelic character of language, languageas an end in itself, that Novalis uncovered in his famous Monologue. In its mosthuman dimension, language does not serve as a vehicle for a set of contents, as apiece of information or a message that may be useful in a goal-oriented world.Language is intransitive: one does not speak in order to say "something specific,"but "simply to speak." As the privileged medium of authentic communicationbetween self-aware beings, the poetic word constitutes "a world in itself, for itselfalone," in which words follow the example of "mathematical formulas," "playingexclusively among themselves, expressing nothing if not their own marvelousnature" [Novalis OC2: 86]. Inspired by the philosophical idealism of Fichte, thisverbal exercise corresponds to a displacement of the sacred; it represents anattempt to express the need for a transcendence freed from the churches. This isthe displacement designated by the untranslatable German term Weltfrmmigkeit:to produce the sacred out of nothing, starting from the sole resources of the mindtaking itself for its own object in a kind of language inflation. This autotelic vocationof discourse exhausting and expending itself in eternal questioning is equally at the

center of the project that Frederic Schlegel undertook to compose a "grammaticalmysticism." In his novel Lucinde, this mysticism takes the form of an infinitereflection and circling back of thought on itself: "Thought presents the uniqueattribute that, after itself, it more willingly takes on as its object whatever it may think


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about endlessly." And, in a perfect movement of spiritual autarchy, Schlegel couldconclude that it is "in its own quest that the human spirit finds the secret it has setout to seek" [209-11].The same idea of an absolute birth of the sacred, arising exnihilo solely from the play and conflict of spiritual forces, is also found in the text ofan article by Bataille published in 1939. The "great quest" on which the modernmind and modern art has embarked since the advent of romanticism is anexpression of the sense that the sacred is missing in a world submitted to the goals

of utilitarian reason: "It seems in retrospect that art, no longer having the possibilityof expressing whatever comes to it from the external world as incontestablysacred--romanticism having exhausted the possibilities of renewal-- . . . could nolonger continue if it did not have the strength to arrive at the sacred moment on itsown resources"; "aware of the created elements in what it had always added to theworld . . . , [art] could turn itself away from all past or present reality and create outof itself its own reality" [OC1: 561-62].

Common to romanticism and modernism, this intellectual "mystique" is based on anidentical principle, that ofinternal contradiction, out of which came Hegel's fortune.Long before the dialectical approach had become the prerogative of philosophy,

had Novalis not written that "all production is accomplished by the union ofopposites"? And in writers associated with early German romanticism(Frhromantik), the strategy of irony, based on the systematic exercise of paradox,aimed to demonstrate the inadequacy of linear thought. The function ofironyis to"torture" discourse, to empty it of positive content by pressing it up against a blindspot, a symbolic no-man's-land that simultaneously reveals to the discourse its ownfinitude and its beyond. From the intertextual point of view, the principle of"nonknowledge" that gives Inner Experience its rhythm is the twin of what Novaliscalled nscience, according to which all true "knowledge" is only the ephemeralresidue of an "ignorance," where the insatiable quest undertaken by the mind to

push beyond its limits will necessarily take any knowledge ["Pollen" 221]. [End Page63][Begin Page 65]

This tradition is the one that Sartre refused to take into account, for the simplereason that it upset his intellectual horizon, more precisely his vision of a world thatcan be reduced to History. Contradiction as practiced by the romantics differs in factfrom Hegelian dialectic, as Marx would later appropriate it, in the fact that there isnoAufhebung, that the contradiction goes beyond (or infringes upon) the epiphanyof a third term where the conflict of oppositions would be resolved and validated. Sofor Marx the contradictions that undermine bourgeois society must necessarily openout onto the "great eve" of the revolution and the victory of the proletariat. In thenegative dialectic that informs Inner Experience, the conflict of oppositions takesplace rigorously in the other direction. It is no longer centrifugal but centripetal; itgoes not from the subject toward the external world but from the ego toward theinteriorized world. Working at the level of language, this spiritual conflict is a conflictfor its own sake; circumscribed within the limits of consciousness andrepresentation, it plays the role of a catalyst intended to disturb, and hence to solicitdiscourse and throw it back into the enigmatic labyrinths of an endlessself-sustaining questioning. For the engaged thinker that Sartre always wanted tobe, this gratuitousness--Bataille called it "sovereignty"--of language, isunacceptable. Compared to the true dialectic, which aims to produce History by the

surpassing of contradictions, experience is reduced to a narcissistic game. FromHegel (Sartre thinks), Bataille retains only the idea that "reality is conflict," but, likeKierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Jaspers--all three under suspicion for being


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romantics--he suppresses the "moment of synthesis," considering that conflict is"without solution." By offering the vision of a "man who creates himself as conflict,"not through externalizing his decisions in the historical world but through theexacerbation of his internal tensions, Bataille committed what in the eyes of an"intellectual of the left" appeared as the worst of philosophical and political crimes:he substituted "tragic" for "dialectic," that is, the hyperconsciousness of the splitbetween subject and object, or between consciousness and the empirical world, for

the resolution of that split in action [see "NM" 188]. Finally Sartre's critique goes wellbeyond Bataille's book and uses it as a vehicle to criticize the romantic idea ofBildung, that is, to invalidate the power that idealism confers on the Ego to inventitself and its own world out of the depths of interiority, in an autarchic manner,without recourse to the external world of the senses. The absoluteness of the Egoand of the world is criticized for two correlative reasons. At first Sartre sees onlynarcissism evolving into egocentrism. Sheltered within its interiority, the Ego issuesa challenge to the "void," to the absence of meaning in its surroundings; sanctifiedby its revolt the Ego becomes the "unique" one, the all-powerful negating subject ofthe real [see 194-95]. But this totalitarian narcissism also takes on another, itsworst, meaning: it is synonymous with "uselessness." Inner experience, as Bataille

sees it, refuses to participate in the practical and empirical side of human life;resolutely interior, it does not produce a political plan capable of changing the world.In other words, it lacks didacticism as much as it lacks efficacy. This will be Sartre'sconclusion. By not deigning to "involve himself in the thick of new undertakings soas to contribute to building a new humanity that will surpass itself toward newgoals," the anguishes of "Mr. Bataille" will remain "un-usable," in a kind of "ecstaticfainting" that is in no way different, as far as the future of human collectivity isconcerned, from the "pleasure of drinking alcohol or sunning oneself on the beach"[228].

With a ten-year lead, the article in Situations heralds the polemic that will set Camusagainst Sartre at the moment of the publication ofThe Rebel[L'homme rvolt].The same argument Sartre had used to disparage Bataille's "mysticism" would nowbe applied to Camus's "metaphysical" revolt, a revolt not against injustice ortyranny, that is, in and for history, but against the human condition. Unlike thesituation of the slave who rises up against his enslavement, the metaphysical rebelis motivated by a rising up of his whole being against the absurdity of his condition;like the subject in Bataille's description of inner experience, the rebel's awakening toconsciousness and dignity comes as a result of[End Page 65] a "conquest" over"nonmeaning." In the absence of a specific obstacle, which would have material

form in the world of facts, revolt, writes Camus, "creates nothing." Existing before"every action, it contradicts purely historical philosophies in which value isconquered [if it is conquered] after action" [28, 32, 38, 365]. As one knows, thesovereignty and/or the absoluteness of this revolt being exercised for its own sakeand against the "void," with no hope of producing, in any tangible form, some

Aufhebung, is very precisely what Sartre and Jeanson found intolerable.

The point of this polemic is to specify the radical antagonism between Sartre andBataille concerning the role of the intellectual in society and, hence, the form andnature of the language of the intellectual. Among all the texts that Bataille wrote onthe question of engagement, few have the decisive clarity of those he devoted to

defending Camus against the editorial board of the journal Les temps modernes.Arguing against the interventions of Sartre and Jeanson, who reproached Camusfor the Icarian aspect of his position--that of the "beautiful soul" soaring overhistory--Bataille objected that during the period when Stalin was taking up the relay


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from Hitler in the race to horror, the only profoundly human attitude no longerconsisted in makingHistory but in "revolting against it" [OC11: 232]. This revolt

joined up with Camus's revolt in that it excluded action--or, what amounts to thesame thing for the intellectual, taking sides in words. To "revolt against history" infact means to refuse to play its game, to refuse to supply it with new programsunder the pretext of changing it; all this in order to distance oneself from history andto take a good look at it, questioning with an ever-sharper conscience the ways in

which it drove "the human species to suicide." In a word, a revolt against historymeans to oppose and to substitute reflection for action, to question the real insteadof plunging into it in the illusion that one is in control of it, as Sartre and Jeanson didwhen they took the worn-out schemas from class struggle and traditional Marxistideas and applied them to the crisis at hand [234]. This being said, Bataille does notdisguise the fragility of his position, in particular the risk of having it confused with a"foolishly verbal attitude" [232]. We have to recognize, however, that in 1952, at thebeginning of the Cold War, such a position was not lacking in courage or relevance.It heralded particularly the democratic idea now prevailing of a universal communityfounded on public debate. Historical crises and violence will not be fundamentallyresolved by action but rather by dialogue among the aware. Beyond theory, the

revolt against history comes out of an ethics, from a general human attitude towardthe dangers and trials of existence. And since man is reciprocally, and mostindissociably, historical animal/symbolic animal, this ethics remains entwined withand in language. A fact that brings us directly back to Inner Experience.

The unity of the book is to be found in its debunking trajectory, the intellectual"torture," which Sartre mocked, to which the subject submits in order to rediscoverthe other. Moved by the desire to be "all," to be "God Himself," the self measures itsfinitude by going "to the farthest possible reach of the human," inasmuch as thisreach corresponds to the extreme end of consciousness/conscience [conscience]

and of language [OC5: 19]. As long as it remains human, revolt is objectively limitedby the necessity of proceeding according to the law of signs and representation.The practice of this law reveals to the practitioner the two cardinal virtues ofdiscourse in the domain of moral meaning and ethics:

1. The insurmountable distance that separates desire, as an aspiration to totality,from its delayed translation into signs and symbols (the gap in which the Ego learnsto laugh at what is most important to it is exactly what romanticism means by irony).

2. The fact that this distance is linked to the presence of a medium thenecessary/universal character of which restores the subject to its proper level andplace: to the level and place of others, within the limits of the circle constituted bythe totality of conscious beings with whom it must communicate each time it ismanifested as human. [End Page 66]

It is with these two necessary and universal attributes of the medium of languagethat inner experience leads to the dissemination of the Ego within the enclosure ofsigns that it has tried to break out of, and to its communication with the rest of theworld. Several passages in the book--which Sartre is careful to cite--consider theexcessive practice of discourse as the strongest and the most tenuous bond thatattaches, indeed alienates or even "condemns" the Ego to the other--doing so even

in spite of the Ego's desire to dominate the other."The third element, thecompanion, the reader that moves me, is discourse. It is he who speaks in me, whomaintains in me the discourse which lives for his sake."And further on: "The subjectof inner experience, wherever it may reside . . . is the consciousness of others" [75,


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76].

It is necessary to differentiate between two types, or rather two regimes or twoqualities, of discourse. Because it is not sufficient simply to speak or write, in orderfor the ethical function of discourse to be revealed. Ethics, or what one mightotherwise call the sui generis limitation on desire, appears only to the degree thatlanguage has stopped being an instrument, when there is no longer any way forlanguage to be used as a means aimed at expressing the interests (the "contents")of a so-called subject that existed before language. In order for the ethical functionto intervene,discourse, taken to its extreme by the play of contradictions, has toturn back on itself, has to revert to its own mystery as well as to the mystery of anendless questioning in the course of which the former user of discourse mustexperiment with the objective synonymy between "nonknowledge" and "nonpower."This synonymy, the harsh fact that thought neutralizes action, totally escapedSartre. He did not understand that the wrenching opposition between theself-sanctifying desire of the subject and the self-sacrificial reality of its practicerepresented the specific ethical dimension ofInner Experience. "Contradictionerupts (writes Sartre) in the condition of the subject thus torn between two opposing

demands": the wish to be everything, to be "on top," and the necessity in which thesubject is obliged, as a practitioner of excessive discourse, to lose itself in themultitude and dissolve into the totality of signs and conscious beings [see "NM"203]. It is precisely this state ofbeing torn that constitutes the reason for being, orthe "content by default" of inner experience; it is what teaches the subject thehuman tragedy of the split between desire and duty, between liberty and morality,or, as Bataille writes, between "putting into action and putting into question" ["mise

en action et mise en question"], 2 as with two poles between which one has tooscillate indefinitely without ever resolving to jump into history. This circularmovement of a consciousness that has relinquished the power of shaping the world

according to its desire or ideal is a further prolonging of the romantic tradition. It isthe actualized expression of the founding idea of idealism as Fichte described it inThe Science of Knowledge, which shows that "everyone is enclosed in the uniqueand large unity of pure spirit," inside a "circle" that "the finite mind can enlargeinfinitely, but the boundaries of which it cannot cross." A true pragmatist, Sartretranslates this spiritual obligation--that man must go through life meaningfully, thatman can exist fully only in representation--as a "vain struggle," a "battle lost before itis waged." Self-probing and communication among consciousnesses are for Sartreonly forms of disengagement, an "escape plan" allowing the subject to pull awayfrom History ["NM" 203]. And in fact when one bases existence and freedom, as

Sartre does, on the concept of thepro-ject, as the ability to externalize and turnvested interests into concrete reality by means of action, the "principle ofexperience"--that is, Bataille writes, "escaping the domain of the project [End Page67] through a project"--cannot be anything but unacceptable, indeed aberrant [see204]. This principle is, however, the ultimate form of the "revolt against history," aprinciple that sets the practical project of imposing one's will on the world againstthe completely different project of breaking out and getting beyond this control.

In the attempt to escape the linear time of History, which is also the time in whichprojects are reified and accumulated, Bataille appears to Sartre as the last scion ina "family of minds" of a "mystical or sensualist" type, from Epicurus to Gide. Beyond

any chronology, what the members of this family have in common is their aviddesire to live "immediately and completely" by substituting for the "well laid-out life,"the course of which is determined by the project and its attributes, such as


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"utilitarian memory" and "reasoning reason," the "immediate life," in which thesubject exists intensely, on the edge of time, and at the peak of the "ecstatic"moment [216]. Obviously for Sartre all this is only an illusion or an illumination. Thebelief in the instantaneous to be found in Proust or Kierkegaard is, according toSartre, impossible because it is alien to the ontological and anthropological reality ofthe "Ego," which is "temporal in its very being . . . , [and] needs Time to realize itself"[199]. These two visions of time and life, "well laid-out" and "immediate," rightly

contrasted by Sartre, correspond indeed to two forms and, therefore, two ethicalsystems of discourse. On the one hand, there is linear discourse, didactic andheavy, the vehicle of a project, of a philosophical thesis or of a political choice thatcan only be realized in the historical process; on the other hand, there is circulardiscourse, an interrogative dialogue that takes place among conscious beings, inwhich the expenditure and the exhaustion of meaning act as a limitation on desiresthat have become powerless to achieve their ends, unable to plant themselveswithin their own solid representations in the expectation that History will somehowfulfill them.

By mentioning the College of Sociology, that organism which during the 1930s had

taken on the study of the presence of the sacred in the modern world, Sartre mighthave been remembering the way in which Bataille had collided with the "Hegelian"ideas of Alexandre Kojve. Against the ultrapragmatic Kojve, for whom theindividual is fundamentally alienated in History but constrained to take part in it andfind some resolution there or else be condemned to remain a "beautiful soul" boredto death in its own pure interiority, Bataille opposes the irreducible force of a"negativity without employment." At a time when any expenditure of human energyin "acting" or "doing" could not but be complicitous with collective suicide, Batailleclaims for the sake of his own revolt and negativity the liberty of living at the marginof History, without letting himself be absorbed by its mechanism. "The open wound

that is my life," he wrote in his famous letter to Kojve, "constitutes by itself therefutation of Hegel's closed system." Under these conditions, writing is presented asthe ultimate result, the ultimate method of "doing," which allows the clear-mindedindividual to escape having to decide between the alternatives, largely viewed, ofunemployment and crime. This does not mean that the activity of representing is asolution or an end in itself. Bataille specifies that his personal negativity "had givenup its usefulness only after the moment in which it no longer had any use: this is thenegativity of someone who no longer has anything to do and not that of someonewho prefers to speak" [OC5: 369-71]. This negativity, however, when confrontedwith itself, and in the absence of a pro-ject or goal that might be worth anything, is

far from passive. It continues to act in the form of a criticalwork that is executed inand for consciousness by interrogating the process that drives it back into idleness."Negativity emptied of content" (as Bataille calls it), the energy of which is inscribedin discourse and writing, no longer has to justify action, as it must in Sartre, butinstead functions as a mode of reflecting on the meaning and limits of action. It thusbecomes the privileged organ of human responsibility and commitment. This criticalfunction of negativity restored to writing is exactly the goal (the "project") that innerexperience takes on in order to produce itself: "Inner experience answers to thenecessity [End Page 68] that I face--and all of human existence with me--of puttingeverything in question" [OC5: 15].

3

In his critique ofInner Experience, Sartre confuses two textual aspects that are


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mutually resistant. On the one hand, its style, where the authenticity of the text lies,and the symbolic charm by which its words acquire universal meaning; on the otherhand, its didacticism and its engagement on the level of a so-called "content,"according to which the text is supposed to provide answers that can be applied inthe world of achievable ends. With a belatedness that is surprising in regard to thetheory of his time, Sartre does not seem to understand that the "content" of a text isfound above all in its "form": the strategic treatment applied to the language within

which this text is produced.

On the ideological level, it is significant that this utilitarian conception of writing bearsa resemblance to the communicational theories of Jrgen Habermas. Like Sartre,Habermas bases his critique of the romantic and modern tradition--in which hewould situate Bataille--on the two criteria ofcontradiction and circularity. For this heborrows from the linguistic pragmatics of K. O. Apel the concept of "performativecontradiction," which serves to designate every speech act in which "thepropositional content contradicts the affirmation" [Moral Consciousness andCommunicative Action 80, translation modified]. According to this criterion the"discourse of modernity"--the paradigm of which can be traced from the earliest

German romantics to the theoreticians of the 1960s (Bataille, Foucault, Lacan,Derrida . . .)--is defined as a narcissistic or reflexive discourse, which the systematicsearch for and use of contradictions for their own sake condemns to "go around incircles" without ever producing any positive content. In this type of discourse,Habermas explains, the aesthetic or philosophical value of a work does not comeout of the harmony between "form and content," "external and internal," "individualand society," but is due to the maintenance of an infinite, self-sustaining tension inthe absence of an answer and to "the necessary failure of an impassioned searchfor identity" [Philosophical Discourse of Modernity112, translation modified]. It is nocoincidence that this analysis aims equally to denounce the "mysticism" of modern

discourse ever since the time of the romanticism of Iena with its dangeroustendency to reject the "conquests of Western rationalism" [Philosophical Discourse121, translation modified].

By evoking the "rather grotesque" attitude that consists in "playing around with theecstasy of religious and aesthetic inspiration" [366], Habermas echoes Sartre. For,as Sartre sets out in his article in Situations, it is just as much Bataille's "religiosity,"his faith in an unspeakable, unsayable, and unrepresentable real, that isscandalous. Once the end of knowledge has been attained, far from arriving at theconclusion (as Goetz does in Sartre's play The Devil and the Good Lord) thatheaven is empty, the practitioner of inner experience persists in his error and raisesthe stakes. He does not make the "vow that was expected of him," that is, "thatthere is no transcendence." Instead of "discovering man," he throws himself into"rediscovering God" ["NM" 218]. Again Sartre prefers to ignore the distinctionBataille makes at the beginning of the book between "confessional experience,"where the revelation of transcendence constitutes a "haven," a gratifying resultwhich compensates the practitioner for his efforts, and his own critical experience,which, "reveal[ing] nothing . . . can neither provide the foundations for belief norleave belief behind" [OC5: 15, 16]. As we have pointed out, the critical radicalism ofthis experience, which, being "born of nonknowledge stays there" indefinitely [15],leads to the humiliation of the subject, from whom is wrested all power to materialize

his desire in action. Now it is precisely toward the support of such power, chargedwith carrying out [End Page 69] the positivity in meaning, that the utilitarianpragmatism of Sartre and Habermas leans, toward the possibility for man--usingHeidegger's words--to install himself as "lord over ' individual being [tant].'"


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It may be said that just as Sartre wants to "make History" by refusing to waste hisnegativity in a textual game, he also wants power. It is rather ironic, then, that the"mysticism" he denounces in Bataille applies just as well to a certain aspect of hisown work. With this difference, however: if Bataille's mysticism is practiced in pureloss, since it results in the desanctifying of the subject, Sartre's mysticism is orientedinstead toward tangible assets accumulated with the aim of sanctifying the subjectand turning it into a being superior to most men. Take Nausea, for example, thatphilosophical novel only poorly disengaged from surrealism (from "surrealistsorcery" as Sartre now calls it) ["NM" 211]. When he sententiously criticizes themanner in which Bataille "pushes away the reassuring constructions of reason in thename of 'the Ego's experience'" and reproaches him for his "strangeness" regardingthe world [192-93], Sartre seems to forget that several years earlier he himself hadmade a few twists in the relation between words and things, between rational andreal, between lived experience and its representation in the order of discourse, thefundamental theme ofNausea [La nause].

If in 1943 Sartre had become the herald of the "pro-ject" and of the "well laid-out"

life, where the individual acquires an identity by participating in collective history, thesituation ten years earlier was different. Roquentin's problem is, in fact, Time.Reluctant to search for the truth of existence in Monsieur de Rollebon's past or inhis own travel memories, he comes to this conclusion: "A man is always a storyteller. . . ; he tries to see his life as if he were telling it. But one has to choose: to live or totell" [La nause 62]. Putting things into words, into the chronology of discourse orstory, is only a convention, an artificial order meant to disguise the contingency ofwhat is and what happens, and to provide man with the illusion of control.Roquentin's energy will then be devoted to the attempt to escape time, to cross thethreshold of linear time where life, like the old woman he sees from his window,

limps along in place, in the absence of all novelty, project or story: "This, then, istime, naked time, which comes slowly into being, which makes us wait, and when itcomes, you feel sick because you realize that it was there all along. . . . It is atarnished newness, with the bloom faded, the new that can never surprise" [51].What is interesting is that this flight of Roquentin from linear time remains very muchin the "beautiful soul" style; his escape is procured for him through a means that theauthor of "A New Mysticism" would deem narcissistically idealistic: through art. Firstmusic, then literature. The jazz melody, "rag-time," possesses the magical virtue ofsubstituting a necessary sequential chain of notes for the "flaccid" time of existence.Like the perforated roll in a hurdy-gurdy or a player piano, the melody "crosses ourtime from one part to the next," "tears it from its dry little points" [39], and "like ascythe, slices the insipid intimacy of the world" [243]. Indeed what is taking placehere is an inner experienceand not simply a distraction or entertainment. When thesinger's voice "rose up in the silence," "crushing our miserable time against thewalls," "something happened"; Roquentin takes possession of the world again, and,at the same moment, of his own body: "I felt my body harden and the Nauseadisappeared"; "my glass of beer . . . becomes hard, indispensable," the client's headpossesses "the obvious, the necessity of a conclusion." Stranger to history and tolinear time, "there is another time" [30]. Roquentin doubtless knows that music"does not exist" [243]; it is no less the supra-natural or supra-existential agent of anek-stase that snatches him away from the Nausea, from the entrapment and

partisanship of things. One could say the same thing of those "perfect moments"that he struggled to concoct during his life with Anny. Bataille himself was notdeluded in this, since he notes in his article "The Sacred," about the very notion of


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"instant" in mystics, that "J.-P. Sartre, in Nausea, had already spoken of "perfectmoments" and "privileged situation" in a meaningful way" [OC1: 560]. And indeed,for[End Page 70] the Sartre of 1935, everything points to believing that there issomething "beyond meaning," which is the very definition of the sacred. Each crisisof nausea begins with the gap between words and things, the consciousness of aprofound inadequation between concept and lived experience. Reality surpasseslexicon (that is, the norm), either from above or from below. Sometimes things are

endowed with "a funny little meaning that surpasses them" [190]; sometimes theyremain just the opposite, "above all explanation" [183]. But these two extremes joinup again to circumscribe an ineffable space of meaning, resistant to intellection.Thus, at the moment of the main crisis in the public garden, as Roquentin is facingthe chestnut tree, each aspect of the root represents an excess, is "too much" withrespect to what can be said about it. Like Adolph's suspenders, which "were notpurple," the root of the tree "was notblack," Roquentin remembers. "Shady" andindeed forcibly "unnameable" things are apprehended according to an approachspecific to the mystic: by negation, by depleting or sacrificing language in order tocheck off everything that things are not. "Black?I felt as if the word were deflating,being emptied of its meaning. . . . Black?The root was not black, black was not

what was on this piece of wood--it was . . . something else [183]. This "somethingelse," or, as Bataille would put it, this "inexplicable difference," where "the truesecret of existence lies" [190], is in a book--of which the actual book, Nausea, woulditself be the sketch--and it is in a book where Roquentin will undertake his quest forthat secret. In the same ways that "the Jew and the Negress" have been "saved" (inthe very religious and even very Christian sense of the word saved, "washed fromthe sin of existing") by music [246-47], Roquentin will be saved by writing. But payattention: not just any writing. The book will only be redemptive, so that its authorcan "look back on his life without repugnance" [248], if it remains distinct from everyother book written before. To be so, it ought to be "another species of book": a

"story," of course, but not "a history book," such as the one in which Roquentin gotsidetracked by wanting to "resuscitate M. de Rollebon"; and especially not a"narrative," an artificial (that is, linear) book, constructed with a view to organizingexistence. This book about nothingstrangely recalls the Capital Book of Flaubert orMallarm; like this Book, which, in Its form and in Its content, has not been "soiled"by any worldly, that is, prosaic, element, its value and power of salvation are drawnprecisely from the fact that, being beyond the power of the human mind, it cannotbe written. In the tradition of idealism, as with the inaccessible Grail, its purpose is totranscend the intolerable, dull opacity of chaos and to exist as pure aspiration, as anindeterminate tendency toward some supreme point where it would be possible to

absolve existence. This iconoclasticbook should be understood to suggest thatthere is "behind the printed words, behind the pages, something that would notexist, that would be above existence" [247, my emphasis]. Finally, we have seenSartre criticizing the spiritual egotism and megalomania that led Bataille to sanctifyhimself and place himself above his contemporaries. But the quest for the heightsseems also to characterize Roquentin himself. The hero ofNausea in factpossesses the essential traits by which Bataille defines the "heterogeneous" being,the individual whose unclassifiable or unusual ontological caliber causes him tostand out among his fellow men [see OC1: 348]. From this point of view, Roquentinis clearly a special being, defined by a nervous temperament and special powers.Excluded from collective emotions ("I wondered, for a moment, if I were not going tolove people. But after all, it was their Sunday, and not mine" [81]), he is presentedas a sorcerer or a magician. In the gallery in the Bouville museum, he gives himselfover to an exorcism, an "unbewitching" in front of the portrait of Jean Parrotin--an


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operation that he will repeat with the statue of Imptraz symbolizing the bourgeoisorder: "When one looks straight and directly at a radiant face (Roquentin observes),after a while, the radiance disappears." At first the image of Parrotin resists, but,little by little, under the powerful stare of his enemy (an enemy who is not, or not

just, a class enemy but an ontological adversary), it liquefies and dissolves. Soon,nothing subsists any longer of the [End Page 71] haughty personage but "flesh . . .defenseless, bloated, drooling, vaguely obscene" [128-29]. A shaman, Roquentin is

also a prophet. Looking out over Bouville, the modern Babylon infested withphilistines, he foresees its apocalypse. This vision is again the prerogative of abeing superiorto most men: "How far I feel from them, from the height of this hill. Itseems to me that I belong to another species" [220]. And indeed, human space isdivided into two warring categories; on the one side, there is the One, Roquentin;and on the other, everyone else, middling humanity lumped together and uniformlydespised as "they" or "them" [see 221]. On the one side, the supreme wise man,who has succeeded in piercing the "secret of existence"; on the other, those whoneither know norsee, the "bastards" [salauds], as the book calls them. "As for them,they are completely wrapped up inside, they breathe this nature and they don't seeit, they imagine that it is outside, twenty leagues from town. But as for me, I see it,

this nature, I see it . . ." [221].

It is well known that thirty years later Sartre will publish his self-criticism. "I wasseeing things," he writes in The Words [Les mots]. His first novel, in sum, would nothave been anything but an error of youth, that of a man in a hurry to exist restlesslyand as quickly as possible. "I succeeded at thirty years of age in this one thing:writing in Nausea--very sincerely, you can believe me--about the unjustified andprimitive existence of my fellows and putting my own existence beyond question"[Les mots 210]. Still, this confession remains questionable. Like most of hischaracters, Sartre is himself a "crab"; an author "with two faces." With one, he sets

about to dissipate the ether of thought and to recycle metaphysics into the generalcurrent of History; with the other, unknown to himself, indeed, even in spite ofhimself, his preoccupations lead him into the arcane reaches of the unthinkable.One can find this dichotomy also in The Devil and the Good Lord, the most positive(or antimystical) play of Sartrean theater, since, dealing with the "relations of manwith God," or the relations of "man with the absolute," it claims "to replace theabsolute with history" [Thtre de situations 272, 274]. Both agent of and guinea pigfor this substitution, the character of Goetz is not unequivocal. He too has two faces.If for Nasty, the political leader of the peasants, Goetz has become "anyone," afterhis conversion to history, for Hilda, by contrast, who knows him deeply and

intimately, he remains fundamentally and irreversibly other, heterogeneous anddifferent from other men: "You will not ever be like them. Neither better nor worse:other" [247]. The entire didactic content of the play rests on Difference, whichmakes of Goetz a special and distinctive being, without any possible reversal orconversion. The question is one of a primary order, a question to which Sartreobviously does not reply, being himself the cause of this alterity: why can Goetz benothing but excessive, above or below other men, but never on the same level,never on the same footing?

Like Hegel, who betrays his romantic youth by wrapping Mind in the Prussian state,

Sartre quickly forgets the initial title, Melancholia, 3 of his first novel: the sickness of

"beautiful souls" smitten with the absolute. In the course of a university and literarycareer crowned with success, he cauterized his worry by erecting a perfect systemof philosophical and political rationalization that would scarcely upset certain writings


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of his later years. This was also his way of forging a fail-safe moral philosophy.When he reproaches Bataille for his "two hundred pages of trumped-upconsiderations on human misery" ["NM" 221], Sartre is speaking as the spokesmanof History. Sympathetic to Marxism and bard of the class struggle, he fulfills the roleof the great figure (very French) of the intellectual of consequence, that is, "of theleft," whose engagement, like that of Goetz, will be felt "among men." But one isforced to acknowledge that recent political developments have not borne him out.

With the collapse of the Marxist empire, this last [End Page 72] decade will haveproved that History could in no way "replace the absolute," for the obvious reasonthat History is itself an absolute. And of the worst kind: a sacrifice where it is nolonger words but people who are the victims. It is not enough to strip the Absolute ofthe mantle of Reason in order to stifle its avid demands. Even when one seeks tocompel metaphysics to "go down into the cafs," it still remains metaphysics, with itsdual effects, often perverse, beneficial, or cathartic in one arena, injurious orideological in another. If one admits that the quest for the sacred or the absoluterepresents an anthropological need in man, Bataille and Sartre are the spiritualembodiments of two divergent paths, one centripetal, the other centrifugal. The firstrevolts againstHistory, the second wishes at all costs to make History. One looks for

the absolute in writing, in the mise en abyme and the critical exercise of individualconsciousness; the other looks for it in action, or in what takes the place of actionfor the intellectual, the guiding of collective consciousness. These are in fact theonly two forms, diametrically opposed and antagonistical, of engagement bydiscourse.

Translated byEmoretta Yang

Jean-Michel Heimonet, Professor of French at the Catholic University of America,has published several books on Georges Bataille and the topicality of "romantic"

thinking, including Politiques de l'criture (1987) and Politiques du symbole (1994).

Emoretta Yangwas graphics editor of Diacritics and assistant curator of Asian art atthe Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. She works free-lance from her home inLudlowville, New York.

Notes

1. In his essay on Manet (1955), Bataille gives a negative definition to "sacred":"That which, being only beyond meaning, is more than meaning" [OC11: 157].

2. This movement described by the term mise, where the self-subject puts itssovereignty into play, appears in the last pages ofGuilty, which Bataille wrote during1943-44, after the publication ofInner Experience. "Mise en action and mise enquestion are continually opposed, the one as acquisition for the benefit of a closedsystem, and the other as rupture and imbalance in the system" [OC5: 385].

3. We should, however, note that this change of title, substituting the profane termnausea for the more romantic one ofmelancholia, was not originally Sartre's idea. Itwas suggested by Gallimard [see Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l'ge 292, 308].

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: SUNY P,


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file:///Volumes/Arkiv/DownLoads/Jean-Michel%20Heimonet%20-%20Bataille%20and%20Sartre%20The%20Modernity%20of%20Mysticism%20-%20Diacritics%20262 htm Page 16

1988. Trans. ofL'exprience intrieure. Paris: Gallimard, 1954.

________. Oeuvres compltes. 12 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1970-88. [OC]

de Beauvoir, Simone. La force de l'ge. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

Camus, Albert. L'homme rvolt [The Rebel].Paris: Gallimard, 1951.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. The Science of Knowledge. Trans. A. E. Kroeger.Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1868.

Habermas, Jrgen. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans.Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990.

________.The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick Lawrence.Cambridge: MIT P, 1987.

Novalis. Oeuvres compltes. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

________. "Pollen." Les romantiques allemands. Paris: Descle de Brouwer, 1963.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Le diable et le bon Dieu[The Devil and the Good Lord]. Paris:Gallimard (Folio), 1972.

________.Les mots [The Words]. Paris: Gallimard (Folio), 1983.

________.La nause [Nausea]. Paris: Gallimard, 1983.

________

. "Un nouveau mystique [A New Mysticism]." Critiques littraires (SituationsI). Paris: Gallimard (Ides), 1975. 174-229. ["NM"]

________.Un thtre de situations. Paris: Gallimard (Ides), 1973.

Schlegel, Frederic. Lucinde. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1971.

[Citations are to French text editions. Quotations from cited French texts have beendirectly translated from the original texts.]

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