Georges Bataille : On the Philosophy of Georges Bataille

354 Pages·2012·19.83 MB·English

by  Végso

georges bataille

Cultural Memory
in
the
Present
Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

GEORGES BATAILLE
Phenomenology and Phantasmatology
Rodolphe Gasché
Translated by Roland Végső
Foreword to the English edition
by David Farrell Krell
stanford university press
stanford, california
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
English translation, Foreword, Preface to the English Edition, and Introduction
© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All
rights reserved.
Originally published in German (Peter Lang) under the title System und
Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille © 1978, Rodolphe Gasché.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gasché, Rodolphe, author.
[System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille. English.]
Georges Bataille : phenomenology and phantasmatology / Rodolphe Gasché ;
translated by Roland Végső.
pages cm. — (Cultural memory in the present)
“Originally published in German under the title System und Metaphorik in der
Philosophie von Georges Bataille.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-7606-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8047-7607-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Bataille, Georges, 1897–1962—Philosophy. 2. Phenomenology. I. Végső,
Roland, translator. II. Title. III. Series: Cultural memory in the present.
PQ2603.A695Z67413 2012
848'.91209—dc23
2012006357
Contents
Foreword, by David Farrell Krell ix
Preface to the English Edition xvii
Introduction: Subsidiary Developments 1
1 Mythological Representation 27
1. Reversal, 27—2. Displacement / Ecstasy, 38—
3. The (First) Katabole, 52—4. “X Marks the Spot,” 77
2 The Logic of Phantasm 111
1. The Nocturnal Pit and the Realm of Images, 112—
2. The Hybrid Offspring, 124—3. The Inclination of the
Chain of Images, 141
3 The Signs of the Phantasmatic Text 167
1. The Anagram of the Sign, 168—2. Remorseless
Patricide, 184
4 “Hegel against the Immutable Hegel” 238
5 Phenomenology and Phantasmatology 277
Notes 287
Bibliography 317
Index 325

Foreword
by David Farrell Krell
During the 1930s and 1940s two readers of Nietzsche were preparing
lineages that would generate the major part of what has come to be called,
in the English-speaking world, “Continental Philosophy.” Martin Hei-
degger (1889–1976), lecturing on Nietzsche’s notions of eternal recurrence
of the same and of will to power—as art; as knowledge, science, and tech-
nology; and as the culmination of the history of nihilism—was opening
the phenomenological movement to elements that his teacher, Edmund
Husserl, never dreamed of entertaining. Heidegger was reading Nietzsche
against the backdrop of the entire history of Western metaphysics. He
was taking seriously Nietzsche’s claim that his thought was the inversion
of Platonism and that it upset value-structures that had dominated meta-
physics since its inception. Meanwhile, in Paris, then hiding out in vari-
ous locales during the Nazi Occupation, Georges Bataille (1887–1962) was
reading Nietzsche for a very different reason. He was reading Nietzsche,
he said, in order to prevent himself from going mad. An odd therapy, a
bizarre therapist, considering the final ten years of Nietzsche’s life. Yet it
was clear to everyone, as it was to Bataille himself, that he wanted and
needed to pursue Nietzsche’s sense of Dionysian ecstasy to the very verge
of madness.
If Heidegger created a lineage that devoted itself to dismantling and
reinterpreting the entire history of metaphysics, Bataille fathered a lineage
that devoted itself to a phantasmatic philosophical anthropology, sociol-
ogy, psychology, and genealogy of morals. One thinks of Foucault, Lacan,
and Maurice Blanchot, all of them readers of Heidegger but also ignited by
Bataille; one thinks also of Gilles Deleuze, seriously allergic to Heidegger
but rapt to Bataille. It is difficult to find thinkers who take Heidegger and
Bataille with equal seriousness, thinkers who acknowledge both lineages