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To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth
Yet in our lives there are also limits. It is unlikely that Bataille would applaud Manson for the same reason he ultimately rejects Sade. They are both indiscriminate; they both go too far. "Continuity is what we are after," Bataille confirms,
but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sade's aberration exceeds that limit. (Bataille 1962, 13) In other words, our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To actually approve of our own self-destruction goes too far. Later on in Death and Sensuality, Bataille continues,
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Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Juliette should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are bound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. (Bataille 1962, 179-80)
This passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's ethics. Usually Bataille writes on behalf of the violence that remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate this transformative violence. There is always ample motive to produce the experiences of sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions.
Yet self-preservation is also a fundamental value for Bataille; there is also ample motive to resist the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in the second of the above passages, we must condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too far. In another passage he speaks of our need "to become aware of . . . [ourselves] and to know clearly what . . . [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly disastrous consequences" (1962, 181). It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that we are most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway, albeit inattentively.
In the end, hypermorality asks us to encounter our aspirations to evil, to join in what Bataille calls "complicity in the knowledge of Evil" in order to construct what he calls a "rigorous morality" (1973, unpaginated Preface). What does it mean to encounter such aspirations, to join in such complicity? Bataille's hypermorality requires that, as a culture, we appreciate the value of becoming more active in our productions of violence.
From his earliest writings to his latest, Bataille always bemoaned the decline of the practice of sacrifice in the modern world, beginning in the West, and he always believed that such a decline only obscures our productions of violence, rather than doing away with them or the needs from which they stem. Two closely related discussions of this appear in his early essays "The Jesuve" and "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,' where Bataille suggests that the decline of the practice of sacrifice has been far less than a blessing for us. He argues that the production of violence continues, the danger of this production continues, although in the most unrecognizable forms.
