PhD thesis The Anglo-American Reception of Georges Bataille

297 Pages·2016·1.78 MB·English

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Eugene John Brennan

PhD thesis

The Anglo-American Reception of Georges Bataille:
Readings in Theory and Popular Culture

University of London Institute in Paris
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I, Eugene John Brennan, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my
own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been
indicated in the thesis.

Signed: Eugene Brennan

Date:
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Acknowledgements
This thesis was written with the support of the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP).
Thanks to Dr. Anna-Louis Milne and Professor Andrew Hussey for their supervision at
different stages of the project. A special thanks to ULIP Librarian Erica Burnham, as well as
Claire Miller and the ULIP administrative staff. Thanks to my postgraduate colleagues
Russell Williams, Katie Tidmash and Alastair Hemmens for their support and comradery, as
well as my colleagues at Université Paris 13. I would also like to thank Karl Whitney. This
thesis was written with the invaluable encouragement and support of my family. Thanks to
my parents, Eugene and Bernadette Brennan, as well as Aoife and Tony.
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Thesis abstract

The work of Georges Bataille is marked by extreme paradoxes, resistance to systemization,
and conscious subversion of authorship. The inherent contradictions and interdisciplinary
scope of his work have given rise to many different versions of ‘Bataille’. However one
common feature to the many different readings is his status as a marginal figure, whose work
is used to challenge existing intellectual orthodoxies. This thesis thus examines the reception
of Bataille in the Anglophone world by focusing on how the marginality of his work has been
interpreted within a number of key intellectual scenes.
The original contribution of this thesis is as the first work to consider the popular
reception of Bataille, including a range of original research, in comparative analysis with his
academic reception. The popular cultural manifestations of Bataille examined here are not
merely considered simplifications of the work’s complexity. They amplify the tensions and
contradictions we encounter in many academic readings. This thesis highlights the
performativity of Bataille’s work by examining his importance for entirely opposing and
conflicting intellectual scenes. It argues against readings which idealize the ‘uncorrupted’ text
and similarly argues that Bataille’s work does not ‘belong’ to any one cultural space, while
simultaneously arguing for a specific ‘internal conflict’ which lends Bataille’s work its
impact.
The introduction contextualises Bataille’s initial reception in France. The first chapter
traces the initial dissemination of his work in English through popular publishing. The second
chapter examines his reception through academic theory and argues that while his thought
was partially depoliticized in translation it was re-politicized in different guises. The third
chapter examines a historical scene of reception largely opposed to ‘theory’. The fourth
chapter examines his place within British music journalism, and develops the tensions
between ‘history’ and ‘theory’, and between the political and anti-political, encountered in
the preceding academic readings.
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................. 8
Chapter Outlines ............................................................................................................................... 13
Critical Context ................................................................................................................................. 18
Editorial Considerations .................................................................................................................... 19
The Reception of Bataille During His Own Lifetime ....................................................................... 21
Base Materialism and Deconstruction .............................................................................................. 24
Increasing Intellectual and Personal Isolation................................................................................... 27
‘Un nouveau mystique’ ..................................................................................................................... 30
‘Inconnue’, ‘méconnue’, ‘malentendu’… ......................................................................................... 33
‘Célébration Posthume’ .................................................................................................................... 35
The Disputed Surrealist Legacy ........................................................................................................ 38
Reading Practices: Against the ‘Nudity’ of the Text ........................................................................ 45
CHAPTER ONE - BETWEEN LIBERTARIANISM AND RESTRAINT: COUNTER-
CULTURAL READINGS .................................................................................................................. 49
Early Reviews ................................................................................................................................... 50
The Olympia Press ............................................................................................................................ 57
Censorship and Pornographic Literature in America ........................................................................ 64
The Literary and the Pornographic: Reading Bataille after Sontag .................................................. 67
Cultural Provocation and the Libertarian Context ............................................................................ 73
‘The Orgiasts’ ................................................................................................................................... 75
Translations ....................................................................................................................................... 79
Bomb Culture:Libidinal Politics and Counter-Cultural Disappointments ........................................ 89
Curtains: A Shift in Counter-Cultural Readings ............................................................................... 96
Close Readings: Death, Mourning and Inner Experience. ................................................................ 97
Further Problematizing the Relationship Between Sexual liberty and Liberty ............................... 104
CHAPTER TWO - INFORME, CONTAMINATION, PURITY: OCTOBER’S RE-READING
OF MODERNISM THROUGH BATAILLE ................................................................................. 112
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 112
A ‘Generalized Contamination’ – Derrida’s Bataille...................................................................... 114
Equivocations on the ‘Political’ – Tel Quel and the ‘Logic of Succession’ ................................... 117
Subtle Subversion ........................................................................................................................... 121
Internal Externality ......................................................................................................................... 122
French Theory in America .............................................................................................................. 125
The Beginning of October .............................................................................................................. 127
Rosalind Krauss and the First Readings of Bataille at October ...................................................... 130
Dissemblance and the Dispute with Didi-Huberman ...................................................................... 135
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Logics of Separation ....................................................................................................................... 138
Contested Modernisms .................................................................................................................... 146
Bataille’s Modernism: ‘Neither form nor content but…’ ............................................................... 149
Modernism as Crisis of Self-Expression ......................................................................................... 153
Chapter Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 157
CHAPTER THREE – ‘UN BATAILLE DIFFÉRENT’: THE HISTORICAL TURN .............. 160
Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée and the Origins of the Historical Turn ................... 162
The Historical Turn in Anglo-American Academia........................................................................ 166
‘Un Bataille différent’ ..................................................................................................................... 169
The Social and Ethical Imperative .................................................................................................. 170
‘La communauté était un mot alors ignoré du discours de la pensée’: The Impact of Nancy on the
Historical turn ................................................................................................................................. 174
The Return of Hegel ........................................................................................................................ 177
Escaping the ‘End of History’ ......................................................................................................... 184
Hauntology: Mourning Lost Futures ............................................................................................... 186
A ‘Passion for the Real’: Bataille ‘Beyond Language’ ................................................................... 197
Separation and Fetishisation: Bataille Consistently Set Apart ........................................................ 203
CHAPTER FOUR - ‘ENTRYISM’ AND ‘MARGINALITY’: EXPLORING A COUNTER-
TRADITION OF UK MUSIC JOURNALISM .............................................................................. 208
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 208
A Selective Prehistory of Post-punk ............................................................................................... 212
Post-Punk Politics: ‘Time To Wake Up’ ........................................................................................ 215
The Turn to Europe ......................................................................................................................... 217
‘Theory’ and ‘Music’: the renegades’ critique of Cultural Studies ................................................ 218
‘The Violence of the Sacred’: The Birthday Party.......................................................................... 223
‘The Dionysian Spirit’: Hoskyns and Reynolds.............................................................................. 226
‘The Ethics of Violence’ ................................................................................................................. 227
The Anti-Political............................................................................................................................ 230
‘Marginality’ and ‘Entryism’: A New Chasm Between the Underground and Overground .......... 233
The Abjects ..................................................................................................................................... 235
The Origins of the Abject ............................................................................................................... 238
‘Abject Pop’ .................................................................................................................................... 241
Fetishizing the Abject: Chris Bohn, David Keenan and Nocturnal Abjection. ............................... 242
Depoliticizing the Abject: The Critique of Kristeva ....................................................................... 250
Nick Land’s Politics of the ‘Outside’ ............................................................................................. 251
Land’s Epistemology: The Fetish for Primary Processes ............................................................... 253
The ‘Passion for the Real’ in Academic and Popular Readings ..................................................... 255
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Alternatve readings of Bataille by Simon Reynolds: Deconstructing the ‘Darkside’ ..................... 261
Closing Reflections on Marginality ................................................................................................ 268
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 271
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 278
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Introduction

Readers of Georges Bataille have often highlighted their particularly conflicted position,
commenting upon a text that is characterised by its resistance to both reading and
commentary. As well as challenging the stability of meaning in language, Bataille’s writing
challenges any stable notions of authorship. As Jean-Luc Nancy has remarked, ‘“Bataille”, is
nothing but a protest against the signification of his own discourse.’1 As Nancy highlights,
‘Bataille’, to a certain extent, signifies the absence of authorial presence. In this sense, the
gathering of his writings, many unpublished, unfinished, and written under pseudonyms,
under one collection of Œuvres complètes seems like a contradiction and betrayal of the
writings’ attempts to subvert authorship. Bataille’s writing, however, never stops turning over
the question of its own betrayal. His two major projects, La Part maudite and the unfinished
La Somme athéologique, seek to communicate ideas which appear largely antithetical to the
written, discursive means through which they are communicated.2 La Part maudite is a
critique of political economy which argues for a reconsideration of social life on the basis of
excess waste. However, by productively expending energy through the means of writing a
book he was betraying its very message of nonproductive expenditure, as he noted in the
preface: ‘Un livre que personne n’attend, qui ne répond à aucune question formulae, que
l’auteur n’aurait pas écrit s’il en avait suivi la leçon à la lettre, voilà finalement la bizzarrerie
qu’aujourd’hui je propose au lecteur.’3
Similarly, the non-discursive experience of the sacred sought in L’Expérience
intérieure is contradicted by the persistence through discourse and writing. However, the

1 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Exscription’, Yale French Studies, 78 (1990), p.62.
2 La Somme athéologique was a project for a collection of texts which explored the paradox of religious atheism.
At one point the project was planned to consist of ‘I. L’Expérience intérieure, II. Le Coupable, III. Sur
Nietzsche, IV. Le Pur Bonheur, V. Le Système inachevé du Non-Savoir’. See Georges Bataille, Œuvres
complètes VI (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p.362. Further references to the twelve volumes of the Œuvres complètes
will be abbreviated to OC.
3 OC VII, p.21.
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tensions generated by such contradictions are a central part of the appeal and challenge of
Bataille’s work. As Maurice Blanchot noted in the essay ‘L’Expérience intérieure’ (1943),
‘Sans la volonté angoissée qui lutte contre le discours, sans le recours à des techniques qui
dégagent la sensibilité de l’action où elle est prise, l’homme arrive difficilement à une mise
en cause véritable et il s’éparpille dans une recherche oisive où il ne traque que son ombre.’4
This is why, for Blanchot, Bataille’s book ‘est la tragédie qu’il exprime’.5 The intensity and
difficulty of Bataille’s thought partially derives from the ‘angoisse’ encountered in the face of
such paradoxes and contradictions.
Many of the strongest readings of Bataille’s work develop specific approaches to the
internal conflict and ‘angoisse’ of the text. Philippe Sollers, for example, considered the
paradoxical nature of Bataille’s thought under the image of writing confronting its own
limitations as a sloped roof in which the negation of linguistic meaning was accompanied by
a simultaneous reaffirmation of language.6 The text thus appears to point in two opposing
directions. Following Foucault’s landmark essay ‘Préface à la transgression’ (1963), Sollers
argues that the strength of the transgressive experience derives from the tensions generated
by such limits.7 Such tensions and contradictions in Bataille are not limited to the linguistic
however. The internal conflict of his work has been described by Denis Hollier in more
epistemological terms as a dualist materialism, a certain attitude of thought characterised by
its resistance to system and homogeneity, while Allan Stoekl has described Bataille’s thought
on more political and social terms as ‘bicephalic’, in that it can simultanesouly lead in
completely opposing directions, both social and asocial.8 The two opposing directions which

4 Maurice Blanchot, ‘L’Expérience intérieure’, Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p.52.
5 Blanchot, Faux pas, p.52.
6 See Philippe Sollers, ‘Le Toit’, Tel Quel, 29 (1967), 24-45. Reprinted in Logiques (Paris: Seuil, 1968) 164-
197, and L’Écriture et l’expérience des limits (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 104-138. See chapter one for further
discussion of this essay.
7 See Michel Foucault, ‘Préface à la transgression’, Critique, 195-6 (1963), 751-69.
8 See Denis Hollier, ‘Le Matérialisme dualiste de Georges Bataille’, Tel Quel, 25 (1966), 41-61, and
Allan Stoekl, ‘Introduction’ in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
1985), p. xxiii.
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Peter Tracey Connor highlights in Georges Bataille and The Mysticism of Sin (2003) are the
philosophical and the mystical. If Bataille’s thought refuses the authoritative closure of the
former with its often problematic separation between thought and experience, it also refuses
the potential quietism and deferential theology of the latter. Any approach which reads
Bataille according to one specific perspective or another will end up with a partial and highly
diluted interpretation of his work. Similarly, however, as Connor highlights, any approach
which attempts to read Bataille as ‘oscillating’ between the two also misses the point.9 There
is not a ‘balance’ or ‘synthesis’ between two opposed perspectives. Reading Bataille, rather,
requires what I describe as a ‘methodological excess’, demanding the co-existence of
apparently incompatible perspectives which are in fundamental conflict with one another and
do not simply resolve into a synthesis.
Readers of Bataille have often been sensitive to such contradictions and challenges
posed by his text. But any one reading of his work is unavoidably compromised to some
extent by its situation within a reading economy, against a backdrop of a complex history of
reception. This thesis examines the Anglo-American reception of Bataille’s work through
popular and academic readings. The thesis asks how has his dissident status and the internal
conflict of his work been received and reconstructed across a number of key intellectual
scenes. It shows how Bataille’s reception has been characterised by repeated attempts to
justify, rescue and intellectually realign his work.10 The defensiveness of many readers
towards Bataille takes place within a reading economy partially generated out of the
complexities and controversies of the initial reception of his work during his own lifetime.
The secret society Acéphale (1936-1939), for example, represents one of the strangest

9 Peter Tracy Connor, Georges Bataille and The Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003), p.46.
10 In this respect, as Francis Marmande has noted, Bataille’s own reception has parallels with Bataille’s rescuing
of Nietzsche from associations with fascism and Nazism, with readers often aligning themselves with Bataille
with a similar intensity and defensiveness as Bataille did to Nietzsche. On this point see Francis Marmande,
’Sous le soleil noir de la poésie’, Lignes, 1 (2000), p.30.