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To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth
Yet, at the same time, Bataille's own writings never fail to emphasize the primacy of what is harmful to us, of what is neither useful nor good, of what is beyond our mere finitude. Throughout Literature and Evil, for example, he repeatedly affirms the destructive behaviors and dark values that must come at the expense of survival needs. Mere survival is the necessary but insufficient condition of striving to live a full life. To live fully actually means to live at the expense of future survival, to completely waste ourselves, blind to all consequences.
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Along these lines, Literature and Evil argues that to live life really means nothing less than that we don't "flee wisely from the elements of death. . . [but instead] enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid" (Bataille 1973, 50). To live fully we must shun wisdom; in living fully we laugh even at death itself, in the awareness that "When we enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid . . . we really live" (1973, 50). When we achieve "a heightened consciousness of being," we burn, because only "by going beyond . . . these limitations which are necessary for . . . preservation. . . [are we able to] assert. . the nature of . . . [our] being" (1973, 50).
The first chapter of Literature and Evil similarly contends that "Death alone-or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in time-introduces that break without which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy" (Bataille 1973, 13). This is because for every individual, "an irreducible, sovereign part of himself is free from the limitations and the necessity which he acknowledges" (1973, 16). Indeed, in the same chapter, Bataille celebrates the desire for self-ruin as a divine or sovereign inspiration, as one taught to us by religion, Greek tragedy, and the great books. In his words, The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consideration of the future. Divine intoxication . . . is entirely in the present. (Bataille 1973, 9)
The main point, for Bataille, is that the dark forces that drive us towards ruining ourselves cannot be dismissed-these forces are a crucial part of who we are. Concomitantly, we suffer from a problem of self-recognition, of not knowing ourselves for who we are. This failure to know ourselves does not limit our dissoluteness and ruinousness, only our self-knowledge as such. The selfimage of ourselves as good prevents our acknowledging the problem of the surplus of energy that must be squandered, as the problem of who we ourselves are beneath and beyond that of the irrational atrocities that particular individuals commit. Our prohibitionist morality deals with evil only after the fact, without taking into account the prior, fundamental value disruption has for our lives.
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