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To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille

College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth

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In Literature and Evil, he twice refers to this alternative ethics as his "hypermorality" (to capture both senses of an excess of morality and a morality of excess). In hypermorality, we do find the traditional moral values, but now as strangely (in both senses of uncannily and comically) set alongside other, antithetical, sacred-gift values. Bataille's hypermorality juxtaposes Kantian respect on the one side with the excesses of the Marquis de Sade on the other. In this way, hypermorality can simultaneously present the survival value of ordinary "moral" morality, while ranking this moral morality as a deficiency or lack. In Literature and Evil he says, "The moralist condemns the energy which he lacks" (1973, 76). And in his culminating work, entitled either Death and Sensuality or Eroticism in its two English editions, he further elaborates on morality as such a deficiency or lack, specifically in that, The man who admits the value of other people necessarily imposes limits upon himself. Respect for others hinders him and prevents him from measuring the fullest extent of the only aspiration he has that does not bow to his desire to increase his moral and material resources. Blindness due to respect for others happens every day.... Solidarity with everybody else prevents a man from having the sovereign attitude. The respect of man for man leads to a cycle of servitude that allows only for minor moments of disorder and finally ends the respect that their attitude is based on since we are denying the sovereign moment to man in general. (Bataille 1962, 167)

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A brief digression here will be helpful in capturing the fuller meaning of this passage. One could argue that on the surface, there is nothing entirely unique about the criticism of morality making us servile. According to this and many other passages in Death and Sensuality, the problem with morality is a lack of efficacy with respect to the absolute aspirations of human life, which

Bataille labels as "sovereign" as opposed to merely subservient aspirations. Of course many philosophers and moralists before Bataille already contend that the highest good, whatever name it is given, is difficult if not impossible to achieve. Plato, Spinoza, and Kierkegaard are three obvious examples of philosophers envisioning steep existential ascents.

Bataille is hardly different from these and other philosophers in his assertion that sovereign aspirations can be realized only at great, even ultimate expense, and that our everyday approaches to the good cheapen it by trying to make it more accessible. Many philosophers have protested along the lines that "user-friendly" approaches to the good completely miss the mark, since to reach the good is something fundamentally difficult. The "user-friendly" approach will deceive and debilitate rather than enable anyone in pursuit of the highest goals in life. The epigraph from Kierkegaard at the beginning of this paper takes note of this problem in protesting that "ethics . . . must not permit itself to be distracted by the babble that it is useless to require the impossible" (1980. 17). Could these words not suit Bataille as well, if they were slightly modified to say, perhaps, that we "must not permit [ourselves] . . . to be distracted by the babble that . . . [the break with servility is] impossible"?

To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille

College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth

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