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To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille

College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth

The two opposing values "good and bad," "good and evil" have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of years; and though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long time, there are still places where the struggle is as yet undecided.... [T]here is perhaps no more decisive mark of a "higher nature" . . than that of being a . . . battleground of these opposed values.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

The more ideal ethics is the better. It must not permit itself to be distracted by the babble that it is useless to require the impossible. For even to listen to such talk is unethical and is something for which ethics has neither time nor opportunity. Ethics will have nothing to do with bargaining....

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Soren Kierkegaard,

The Concept of Anxiety

This is the point of my book. I believe that man is necessarily put up against himself and that he cannot recognise himself and love himself to the end unless he is condemned.

Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

Kenneth Itzkowitz is associate professor of philosophy at Marietta College. He has written mainly on issues of continental value theory, ethics, and violence at the end of metaphysics.

I. A SACRIFICE OF ETHICS: BATAILLE'S SQUANDERING SELF

It would be pointless to deny that most illegal violence is abhorrent or immoral. At the same time, however, given the violence of the life of our culture, we need to understand immoral violence more deeply than any blanket condemnation of it will allow. Beyond our condemnations, we need to recognize that the acts we most prohibit are paradoxically also the very ones we most celebrate.

A foremost proponent of this need is the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. Relying on a notion of excess energy and the problem of its expenditure, Bataille argues that the transgression of law is what he calls an accursed yet ineluctable part of our lives. We make laws in the name of prohibiting acts of violence, yet the problem of the expenditure of an excess of energy requires behaviors that violate the very same rules we cherish and intend to uphold.

The commentator Jean Piel took note of how Bataille managed "to view the world as if it were animated by a turmoil in accord with the one that never ceased to dominate his personal life" (1995, 99). Here, the fact of an individualin-turmoil reflects the surplus of energy disturbing life in general, rather than a moral deficiency for which an individual can be held accountable. For Bataille, an individual's wasteful behaviors are ultimately reflections of the problem of the surplus of solar energy. Piel put it this way: "The whole problem is to know how, at the heart of this general economy, the surplus is used" (1995, 103).

How should the surplus of solar energy be used? Bataille contends that this surplus is never extinguished and that its expenditure always leads towards the commission of violence. The surplus of energy is accursed and finally cannot serve us productively. The accursed excess confronts us with the problem of how to expend energy when this results in usages that cannot made be useful. Thus the production of violence has a value for us as those condemned to the realm of non-productive expenditures. We undoubtedly deny this value, as Bataille notes, when "Under present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to giftgiving, to squandering without reciprocations" (1988, 38). Nonetheless, as Bataille puts it, "the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander" (1988, 29). When this impossibility of useful expenditure is ignored, then we fail to recognize ourselves on the deepest level, as who we most fundamentally are.

Against this failure and in the name of a kind of inverted Hegelian selfrecognition, Bataille calls for the transgression of our prohibitionist moral values. We need an ethics of squandering goods, of squandering what is good, in recognition of an overabundance over and beyond all others, i.e. an overabundance that can only, at best, be squandered. He writes, life suffocates within limits that are too close; it aspires in manifold ways to an impossible growth; it releases a steady flow of excess resources, possibly involving large squanderings of energy. The limit of growth being reached, life . . . enters into ebullition: Without exploding, its extreme exuberance pours out in a movement always bordering on explosion. (Bataille 1988, 30)

As living lives that must enter into ebullition, we find ourselves fundamentally committed no more to moral righteousness than to immoral outpourings of energy, to sudden and violent outbursts exceeding all rational considerations. The protests of moralism are secondary and never responsive to Bataille's questioning of morality: "Supposing there is no longer any growth possible, what is to be done with the seething energy that remains?" (1988, 31). We are told by reason and morality to do what is best, which is to prohibit behaviors that are nonproductive or harmful. Our morality identifies the right with the useful and productive, with whatever makes us better. Bataille, however, argues against this morality and for the requirement of useless, nonproductive, violent outpourings of energy-a requirement for what he calls "a draining-away, a pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case" (1988, 31). These violent, nonproductive outpourings, according to Bataille, are required of us all as living beings regardless of whether or not we take the responsibility to manage and arrange their occurrence in our lives. At issue, for Bataille, is energy in excess, energy as an excess. As an excess, such energy must be discharged explosively in outpourings that, in the end, are inevitable.

To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille

College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth

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