Content provided in partnership with
To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth
Analogous to this kind of value-system, a morality may be regarded as a system of exchanges with the aim of maximizing excellence in living. As such, a morality values actions and intentions as better or worse in the name of right and wrong. We ordinarily assume that an action is wrong simply if it violates the system of moral rules (the Ten Commandments, for example) and right if the rules are upheld. Given this assumption, to do the right thing is analogous to using the stockpicking system correctly. On this level, when morality tells us what to do, we are either right or wrong, depending simply on whether or not the rules are obeyed.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
But Bataille's Nietzschean morality demands that we evaluate the value of the moral value-system itself, the success or failure of the system generating the rules. Those who trade equities know not to stand by a set of rules that loses money. A value-system may sometimes have to be abandoned. For Bataille, the same is true for a dysfunctional set of moral values. Yet our moral system that sets the standard of value for our behaviors has been subjected to no standards of evaluation. We need to abandon the assumption that the rules of morality are absolute, productive in all contexts, and beyond dispute. We need to make it possible to employ so-called "immoral" values when these have life affirming effects, and to suspend or transgress "moral" values when these serve a sufficient life-affirming purpose.
The key is to recognize ourselves as the extreme beings we are. Bataille sees human life as beyond the limits set by morality, as desiring nothing less than the wild, destructive, celebratory excesses by means of which we are granted ecstatic gifts. We produce acts of violence in part because they have a supreme value for us, even though the thought of such acts as having supreme value is always laughable and almost always denied. A typical day betrays little in the way of a lust for outrageous excess. However, for Bataille, a typical day reveals only a part of our being. According to Literature and Evil, just as certain insects, in given conditions, flock towards a ray of light, so we all flock to an area at the opposite end of the scale from death. The mainspring of human activity is generally the desire to reach the point farthest from the funereal domain, which is rotten, dirty and impure. We make every effort to efface the traces, signs and symbols of death. Then, if we can, we efface the traces and signs of these efforts. (Bataille 1973, 48)
In other words, there is a radical duality at work in our lives, although traces of this duality are ordinarily effaced. For Bataille, there is first the fundamental value of the unacceptable and second the unacceptability of this first fundamental value, i.e., the overwhelming need to efface the value of the unacceptable along with every trace of it as a value in our lives. He contends that both the left and right poles of this duality are mainsprings of human selfrecognition. With the right pole of effacement, we suppress the awareness of the left pole, of the presence of our own destructive desires. He acknowledges that the resulting self-conception does fit us to the extent that "the being which we are is primarily a finite being (a mortal individual) . . . [with] limitations [that] are no doubt necessary" (1973, 50).
