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To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille
College Literature, Winter 1999 by Itzkowitz, Kenneth
The problem with equating Bataille and Kierkegaard is that the depiction of sacrificing the low for the high suggests a more conventional moral position than Bataille puts forth, one where sacrifices are understood as good, in the name of a greater good, whether we reach this good or not. This is precisely the position Bataille sets out to resist, however, and not only because, as he puts it, "we do not possess the excessive store of strength necessary to attain the fulfillment of our sovereignty" (1962, 167).
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The problem is more one of the value or direction of our exertions than of their strength or brute force. Some of our exertions are good but others are evil. Sovereignty actually takes us in the latter direction, with our sacrifices authenticated but in the name of something other than the good, perhaps something not higher but lower. Bataille's own words to this effect are that "Evil-an acute form of Evil-has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality"' (1973, unpaginated preface). Indeed, his view is that our ultimate aspirations will be misunderstood unless we see them less on the side of good than of evil. When he calls for a hypermorality, he demands we recognize that in fully accounting for ourselves, the prohibition of evil aspirations does not suffice.
Here Bataille invokes Sade to represent sovereign aspirations as entirely gratuitous, what Bataille calls "the need for an existence freed from all limits" (1962, 162). Sade is an exemplar to show us that we have such aspirations. What we can see in him, says Bataille, "is the ruinous form of eroticism. Moral isolation means that all the brakes are off; it shows what spending can really mean" (1962, 167).
One thing such spending shows, according to Bataille, is that "pleasure is . . . close to ruinous waste" (1962,166), with "[e]rotic conduct. . . the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting" (1962, 166). In this view, we regularly engage in behaviors that actually amount to an extravagant exercise in "squander[ing ourselves] . . . to no real purpose" (1%2, 166). Moreover, these include both sexual behaviors as well as others far more extreme, Brutality and murder are further steps in the same direction. Similarly prostitution, coarse language and everything to do with eroticism and infamy play their part in turning the world of sensual pleasure into one of ruin and degradation. Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. As remote as we can: that is hardly strong enough; we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason. (Bataille 1962, 166-67) The purpose of offering a series of such strong, disturbing characterizations is not to dismiss ordinary moral values but to supplement them, to say that such values are not enough for us. At the same time that we outlaw and condemn all of these ruinous squanderings, our sovereign aspirations demand them. The list includes brutality, murder, prostitution, swearing, sex, infamy, ruin, degradation, and finally treason. These are activities we must prohibit, activities we cannot allow ourselves to participate in, but which at the same time identify who we are. Hypermorality instructs that while we cannot take up such behaviors, we cannot not take them up either. We cannot not squander ourselves in these and other ways, many of which are offensive of mention to ordinary morality.
