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To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth
The epigraph to this article from Literature and Evil says that we won't recognize ourselves for who we are until we see ourselves as condemned, which Bataille considers his main point (1973, 25). But the failure to recognize ourselves has an alarming implication, that we may be headed in the direction of self-destruction, and that we are actually driven in this direction by our need to produce our own final condemnation. Bataille gives us reason to pause to wonder whether we are blundering towards self-annihilation beneath the amazingly resilient image we have of ourselves as good. Do we have sufficient motive to avoid proceeding violently and negligently, to the very moment of our own demise? To not have to go all the way to self-destruction, we need to show and know ourselves outside of the house of the good, to recognize ourselves for who we are also as evil, as condemned. But when we remain complacently within this house or realm, Bataille's dialectic of selfrecognition remains for the most part unknown. From within the house of the good, it makes little sense to alter the image of the human to include the necessity of evil. Indeed it seems like an irrational or frivolous act to do so, as stated in The Accursed Share,
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Minds accustomed to seeing the development of productive forces as the ideal end of activity refuse to recognize that energy, which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly (without return), and that a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect than the squandering of profits. To affirm that it is necessary to dissipate a substantial portion of energy produced, sending it up in smoke, is to go against judgments that form the basis of a rational economy. (Bataille 1988, 22)
Under the image of the sovereignty of the good, all expenditures will be thought to be potentially valuable and useful. We lack the recognition of squandering and evil as having fundamental value, of ourselves as condemned. For Bataille, such a lack of self-recognition amounts to a dangerous refusal that moves us in the direction of having to condemn and destroy ourselves. We may have to go so far as to produce an apocalyptic spectacle of our condemnation, to witness the final end itself, in order to bring our dialectic of selfrecognition to completion. Can we come to show/know ourselves short of producing the moment of self-completion that in this case would be sadly irrevocable? We encounter in Bataille's writings the problem of knowing ourselves as the condemned without having to become the destroyed. With what forms of experience will we achieve such rare and unusual self-knowledge?
II. BATAILLE'S HYPERMORALITY: AN ETHICS OF SACRIFICE
If the only goal of ethics were what is useful or productive in the sense Bataille contrasts it with nonproductive or wasteful squandering, then in dismissing our ordinary moral values on grounds of their utility or productivity, Bataille would be dismissing ethics itself. He would be dismissing the possibility of an ethics- the project for an ethics-of his own. There would be no ethical ground for his dismissal of morality as tied to the productive and useful; there could be no other moral values on which his dismissal of the productive good as the dominant moral value could stand. In other words, there would be no way for us to see him striving to make our lives or anything else better. He would have to be seen as wanting to make everything worse.
