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To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth
Based on what we have already seen in this paper, Bataille can never accept the moralist's claim, distancing us from the purveyors of evil, no matter how attractive it is to join hands at a particular moment of victory over an oppressive enemy. It would be inconsistent for him to specify a particular set of disagreeable behaviors and state that they aren't human, that they aren't ours. Even at this point, standing in the ruins, the main point would be to obstruct our all-too-ready inclination to find ways of denying the cruelty at the heart of us all; to interfere with our desire to attribute all cruelties to the monstrous one or the aberrant few. For hypermorality, this cruelty is precisely what we need to take into account of ourselves, rather than to deny it as the evil of others.
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How is this to be done? Bataille faces a serious dilemma that a contrast between his hypermorality and Aristotle's morality helps to show. The goal of morality is to take virtuous behaviors into account, to make them part of our lives by learning through habituation to enjoy right behaviors with respect to our pleasures and pains. Aristotle says that it is the job of "legislators [to] make the citizens good by forming habits in them, . . . and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one" (1941, 952, 1103b). He continues saying that "the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them badly bad" (1941, 955, 1105a). As he puts it, "We assume . . that . . excellence tends to do what is best with regard to pleasures and pains, and vice does the contrary" (1941, 955, 1104b). How do we become excellent? We begin with instruction by role models, who demonstrate the praiseworthy behaviors and the rule to follow in practice until we follow it automatically, internalized as part of our second nature of moral character. Such learning is by imitation of those who delight in shunning the wrong pleasures, who delight in withstanding the right pains. Such imitation is difficult but noble and good, making us excellent.
In contrast to these virtuous displays serving Aristotle's purposes of moral instruction, what about the kinds of spectacles or displays Bataille proposes with his hypermorality? Whereas Aristotle's are displays of virtue, Bataille's would be closer to displays of vice. Whereas the former invite imitation of the right relations to pleasure and pain, the latter would invite imitation of morally wrong relations. In the former case we have a heroic role model. In the latter case, the role model would be closer to the opposite, to the traitor, the practitioner of vice; the role model would be closer to Sade. Hence, finally, whereas in Aristotle, the learner easily accepts the identification with the role model and wants to continue to imitate his/her virtuous pursuits and aversions, in the latter case, such identifications would have to be tenuous at best, always fraught with ambivalence and would even be unacceptable. In this sense, Bataille's hypermorality proposes that we witness ourselves as we can never accept ourselves. In the sacrificial spectacle, we witness ourselves far removed from the Aristotelian model, closer to vice than virtue, closer to evil than good, closer to the other's pain than to his or her pleasure. For Bataille, only by witnessing ourselves in this way (as we are) do we begin to take into account the cruelty that lies at the heart of us all.
