Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939

299 Pages·1985·5.915 MB·English

by  Georges Bataille

Theory and History of Literature
Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse

Volume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics
Volume 2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Volume 3. Hans Robert Jauss
Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics
Volume 4. Peter Bürger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Volume 5. Vladimir Propp
Theory and History of Folklore
Volume 6. Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich,
and Wallace Martin
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
Volume 7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
2nd ed., rev.
Volume 8. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Volume 9. Erich Auerbach
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Volume 10. Jean-François Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition: À Report on Knowledge
Volume 11. Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory:
Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought
Volume 12. Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction
and the Power of Fiction
Volume 13. Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin:
The Dialogical Principle
Volume 14. Georges Bataille Visions of Excess:
Selected Writings, 1927-1939
Visions

of Excess
Selected Writi ngs,
1927-1939

Georges Bataille
Edited and with an Introduction by Allan Stoekl
Translated by Allan Stoekl,
with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr.
T heory and History of Literature, Volume 14

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
English translation and Introduction copyright © 1985 by the
University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
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Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Twelfth printing, 2008.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bataille, Georges, 1897—1962.
Visions of excess.
(Theory and history of literature; v. 14)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Bataille, Georges, 1897-1962—Translations, English.
I. Stoekl, Allan. II. Title. IIL. Series.
PQ2603.A695A27 1985 844'.912 84-20973
ISBN 978-0-8166-1280-2
ISBN 978-0-8166-1283-3 (pbk.)
This translation presents selections from
Georges Bataille’s Oeuvres complétes, 2 volumes,
© J.-J. Pauvert, for “Histoire de l’oeil,” and
o Editions Gallimard, 1970, for the rest of the volumes.
The University of Minnesota
is an equal-opportunity
educator and employer.
Contents
Introduction Allan Stoekl Ix
I (1927-1930)
[Dream] 3
The Solar Anus 5
The Language of Flowers 10
Materialism 15
Eye 17
The Big Toe 20
The ‘‘Lugubrious Game’’ 24
Formless 31
The ‘‘Old Mole’’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words
Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist 32
Base Materialism and Gnosticism 45
The Deviations of Nature 53
Rotten Sun 57
Mouth 59
Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh 61
The Jesuve 73
The Pineal Eye 79
The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade 91
II (1932-1935)
The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic 105
The Notion of Expenditure 116
Sacrifices 130
The Psychological Structure of Fascism 137
Popular Front in the Street 161
III (1936-1939)
The Labyrinth 171
The Sacred Conspiracy 178
Nietzsche and the Fascists 182
Propositions 197
Nietzschean Chronicle 202
The Obelisk 213
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 223
The Practice of Joy before Death 235
The Sacred 240
The College of Sociology 246
A Commentary on the Texts 257
Index 267
Acknowledgments
I would like first to thank my collaborators on this project, Carl R. Lovitt, who
contributed his translation of ‘‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’’ and
Donald M. Leslie, Jr. , who translated ‘‘The Old Mole.’’ In addition Carl pains-
takingly went over most of the translations, checking them against the originals,
catching omissions and errors, rewriting awkward sentences, and making a large
number of valuable suggestions. Don also read a number of translations and
made useful suggestions. This project could not have been completed without
their assistance.
[ am also grateful to Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich of the University of
Minnesota Press, for their enthusiasm and encouragement at all stages of the
project; to Virginia Hans, for her excellent copyediting; and to my friends
Michele Richman, Denis Hollier, Ralph Flores, and Mark Conroy, for their
interest, advice, and criticism.
Finally I thank Leah Larsen, without whose acuity, moral support, and love,
I would long ago have quit this lugubrious game.

Introduction
Allan Stoekl
I
Georges Bataille was born in 1897 and died in 1962; thus he was the contempo-
rary of André Breton (1896-1966) and Louis Aragon (1897-1982), among
others. Raised in and around Reims, Bataille experienced a difficult childhood
at the hands of a paralyzed and blind, syphilitic father. (At least, so he tells us
in the closing section of the novel Story of the Eye (I, 76-78)'—in the absence
of a biography of Bataille, the details of his life that we mention here, details
that we should perhaps take with a grain of salt, all come from his own writings.)
Bataille and his mother abandoned his father on November 6, 1915, as the
Germans approached the area of Reims. Bataille’s father, now insane, died
shortly thereafter.
Bataille had already revolted as much as he could against his father’s rule;
he had quit his high school in 1913 (VIII, 459) and had embraced Catholicism—
his father was not religious and died refusing the priest (I, 59-61). From this
Catholic period (summer 1918) dates Bataille’s first published writing, a pam-
phlet honoring Notre Dame de Reims, the great cathedral nearly destroyed by
German shelling (I, 611-16).2 In this piece, Bataille foresaw a rebirth not only
of the cathedral, but of the Christian spirit that made its elevation possible. In
1920, however, Bataille lost his faith, this time for good.
Despite his earlier dropping out of school, Bataille eventually became a good
student. He prepared for, and was admitted to, the prestigious Ecole des chartes,
where he was trained as a medievalist librarian. After a year in Spain, where
he first witnessed bulifights and perhaps saw the enucleation of the eye of the
x J INTRODUCTION
matador Granero on May 7, 1922,° Bataille obtained a position at the Biblio-
thèque Nationale in Paris, which he held until 1942 (when he was forced to leave
due to ill health).
Bataille’s thesis as a medievalist was an edition of L’Ordre de Chevalerie, a
medieval romance having to do with the investiture and teaching of knights (I,
99-102). A little later in the decade (1926-28) Bataille published articles on
numismatics in Aréthuse, a review devoted to art and archeology (I, 108-51).
At the same time, though, Bataille was living a kind of second life (which,
as we will see, nevertheless had important connections with his official career
as medievalist). In 1924 he had met Michel Leiris, a kindred spirit who soon
became associated with the surrealists (VIII, 170-72). Bataille himself was far
from being a calm and orderly librarian. In 1926 he wrote a book entitled W.
C. (later burned by him, although its first chapter, devoted to his heroine Dirty,
has been preserved as the opening section of Blue of Noon),* which had a cover
decorated with the sketch of an eye peeping out of the neck-hole of a guillotine
and which bore the subtitle The Eternal Return. (The first page also carried the
lines of a music hall song: ‘‘God, how the corpse’s blood is sad in the depth
of sound.’’) According to Leiris, one of the book’s few readers, it contained an
account of Dirty and the narrator having an orgy among fishseller’s stalls; the
later chapters, again according to Leiris, juxtaposed an ‘‘aristocratic luxury”’
with the lowest vulgarity.® It was, in Bataille’s estimation, a book ‘‘violently
opposed to all dignity’’ (VII, 460) and eventually caused Bataille to undergo a
psychoanalytic cure. One of his friends, Dr. Dausse, taken aback by the ‘‘viru-
lence and obsessions’’ of W. C. and ‘‘The Solar Anus’’ (1927), arranged for
Bataille to be treated by Dr. Adrien Borel (who two years later, in 1929, treated
Leiris as well). _
As can be seen from the dream fragment with which this collection begins
(recorded as part of his cure), Bataille’s obsessions were in many ways directly
related to Oedipal terrors, perhaps even more Oedipal in that his father was
blind. Bataille felt that by August 1927 the cure had done away with ‘‘sinister’’
and apparently violent episodes that threatened him (and perhaps others)—but
fortunately it had not done away with the ‘‘intellectual violence’’ (VII, 460) that
he would continue to explore for the rest of his life. In fact these obsessions in
many ways are the animating force behind Bataille’s heterodox ‘‘theory,’’ which
he began to elaborate after 1927. (We do not intend to imply, however, that
Bataille’s obsessions as theory are simply reducible to a putative ‘‘origin’’ in
neurosis or psychosis, and thus can be simply dismissed. Indeed Bataille’s
theory itself would tend to make problematic any such naive causal model.)
André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, had an aversion to Bataille. Leiris
had told him about W. C., and, on the basis of what he had heard, Breton dis-
missed Bataille as an ‘‘obsessive’’ (VIII, 173). Bataille had translated some
medieval nonsense poems for La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, but Breton was
not at all interested in extending the collaboration.