Rustle in the Bush

Bataille Notes:

1. What makes a Community be Stewart Kendall:

• Don’t forget the relationship with Sade. These notes are following the Acid Horizon Bataille in Context group’s syllabus. So now here we have the milieu of 30’s France. Order 120 Days of Sodom
• Bataille is searching for a philosophy which does not ‘shrink in the face of horror’, Kendall describes the face of this horror as Nietzsche’s Death of God (Reminder to look at Klossowski), negation of the Dadaists (Leading up to the movement through and around Surrealism), and the capitalist rape during colonisation

The idea here is that pre WWII bataille is concerned with looking at the principles of economy, expenditure, and regulation of production (Without war, says Kendall. What that means I am yet to know) as it regards a division between the individual (And his revolt i.e. irresponsibility; moving towards his friendship with Camus) and with social responsibility. 

Sade is a necessary figure who through his philosophy demonstrates a kind of marvelous fear of living life as full as one can, and this is what is the horror of liberty. 

These attitudes shift more towards themes of war, eroticism, and a cosmological understanding of the economy of energy through expenditure. 

All living beings are given more energy than is necessary and therefore the unique problem of life is luxury, or unproductive expenditure. This creates a problem for the principle of utility, and the common assumptions that it usually engenders in human (Alive) thinking, as well as our social relations. -Luxury is what is not necessarily necessary- TAS will appear only after WWII though he worked on it for many years.

Three volumes of TAS:

Vol 1: Started as ‘Notions of Expenditure’ ‘Celestial Bodies’, and work on Aztecs/Mauss

Vol 2: Started as notes and a book project, ended up being History of Eroticism and is an Ur-text to Eroticism

Vol 3: Sovereignty Started as collection of essays on Camus’ morals and politics heavily including The Rebel

Therefore there are 2 major contextual situations for Bataille’s argument: (1) The debate over the viability of COmmunism in French postwar society and (2) To what extent Communism is a Humanism

Bataille and Camus: 

Camus > Brenton and Sartre (Though he likes Surrealism in utero).Kendall poses the thesis the Camus and Bataille were almost ‘sister Nietzscheans’ at this time. My phrase. Camus assertsa principle of happiness a la Nietzsche, and Bataille is put on the side of Sade and ecstasy.

Effect of European political thinking. Facism, socialism, or communism, there would be no ‘straight’ capitalist democracies in political discussions between war.

Next part focuses on bataille’s shifting views of communism. Read ‘Extinct America’. Oh cool, more Marixsts groups :-l . This time it’s France’s history though so i guess it’s cool for now. The Democratic Communist Circle.

Bataille’s critique of communism:

 The utilization of equality, homogeny and destroying the individual. “It does so logically: conditions of absolute equality forbid the (Hegelian) process of recognition through which individual identities are internally established and externally differentiated”(Pg.52) Good through line.

The discussion turns to sovereignty in which the feudal age givres an example of the monarch as an ideal for man, and under communism since there is no ‘recognized’ sovereign Bataille identifies this with an idealization of a completely ‘equal’ classless society, the shadow of the bourgeoisie; a life of decadence and luxury, the transcendent sense of machinery. “The demand for the production of an ideal must first however fulfill the ideal of production.”(Pg.54).

Bataille sees this as a renunciation of the free growth of the sovereign as they are objectified to a two fold utility. Capitalism and Communism are sister economies in that they attempt to subordinate the seat of labor under the ‘need’ for production, and distort production to a point where the useless expenditure from the view of the aristocrats of the past is seen as bad, where the twin C’s look to create a ‘responsible accumulation of wealth’. I think this has to do ith what Nietzsche creates with his master/slave dialectic, and the stuff by Mauss that I havent read yet. I think that it is his relationship to Sartre that distances himself from communism at this time, as well as the new reports from the USSR, and this is all documented in the essay as well.

Communism as the ideal of the West’s current bankruptcies. The giver is sublimated for an ultimate kind of pity (Christianity). 

Bataille and Nietzsche: I’m not really going to summarize this because I’ll be diving into Nietzsche again soon. I enjoy the nod to Rimbaud ‘I is Another’ and the use of it to describe Bataille’s relationship with Nietzsche.

However, the essay hits a fantastic turn when it says that his thought is Nietzschean but his argument is from Sade. This is where he diverges from Deleuze. Bataille thinks Nietzsche doesn’t pursue sacrifice enough (Though who but he gave Bataille the legs on which he walks?)

“ The Will to Power, in Nietzsche’s terms, expresses itself against resistances; but, for Bataille, the will to power extends itself in expression.” B’s N is right to say that the will to power is extended into expression, but Deleuze emphasis is on a pluralism which always had breached the sovereignty of the individual. The Will to Power doesn’t just express itself against resistances, it’s what Deleuze draws from Foucault: Resistances are immanent to power relations. Resistances are tricky, they fold in on themselves, become deceptive and saturated with forces of nihilism (Domination of sad passions/reactive forces). Bataille is strange though and I’m excited to learn more about his notion of subjectivity. I don’t know a lick about his thought concerning the difference.