Georges Bataille's Critical Essays 1 1944-1948

 From "A Morality Based on Misfortune: The Plague" (1947):

Camus's example shows how one may start out from a revolt-based morality and slide back quickly into a depressed one.

This is because a morality founded upon passion, upon an irreducible part of ourselves, is often accompanied by bad conscience: how are we to avoid feeling guilty, certain as we are that we are concealing the face of Caligula within ourselves? No one is in any doubt, the power associated with the unleashing of passion is a fearsome danger for possible life. What is ordinarily missed is that the even is not then the product of passion, but of power. Even in Caligula one could not say that the evil was profound, since his capricious acts rapidly destroy his power—and he knows it. Evil is what is done by the SS in the concentration camps; it is what acquires power by killing and, by killing, increases the power of the regime it serves. One cannot even say exactly that evil lies in power (otherwise there would be evil in tigers); evil lies in the fact that passion has grown servile, has placed itself in the service of a legal power that can only exert itself coldly. Pure passion is naturally in revolt and never wants legal power; generally, it does not even have power as its end but ruin, excessive expenditure rapidly destroying power.

*

From "From Existentialism to the Primacy of the Economy" (1947):

The word profit jars, admittedly, if used in connection with the present instant, but that incompatibility reveals precisely what governs the narrowness of economics: the narrowness of the language of knowledge, which is not able, as a general rule, to reckon with the present. In discursive language, the present is the poor relation (or whipping boy): what has meaning only for the present has, in reality, no meaning; what has value only for the present is not useful. An immense State has ascribed to itself the purpose of emancipating human beings once and for all, but that seductive end has led it, in a privileged way, into the clutches of logic: since the present instant has meaning only in a way that runs counter to logic, en entire people is subject to an actual heightened servitude, which, as a consequence, does not count, in the name of a nonexistent emancipation, which, as a consequence is the very meaning of servitude. And indeed, when it comes to the strenuous effort currently stirring the world, who could set the perfect impotence of the instant against it? I shall confine myself to showing that unproductive expenditure, drawing its meaning from the current instant, is seldom, as we imagine, wastage; as a general rule, it has the positive value of art. Living creatures are so constructed that, as they expend themselves, their excess of energy radiates out: the effect of this is the brilliance that attracts us, above and beyond the needs that are satisfied. Art is precisely this positive squandering of energy; it is an economic fact and the economy gives it a—theoretically measurable—value as soon as it accepts the sense of the present.

*

From "The Sexual revolution and the Kinsey Report" (1948):

This deserves precise formulation:

'Animality' or sexual exuberance is the element within us which prevents our being reduced to things.

'Humanity,' on the other hand in its specificity in working time, tends to make us into things, at the expense of our sexual exuberance.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more