Georges Bataille's philosophy of life

This is a reading group of several texts from Georges Bataille with a focus on his philosophy of life. See below for a tentative reading schedule and for some notes on Bataille. Check back here later for the specific topic and reading for this week.

Georges Bataille stands out as an eclectic, fascinating and controversial figure in the world of French letters. A contemporary of Sartre and Lacan, he combined ideas from diverse disciplines to create a unique position that he labeled 'base materialism' and which could equally be called 'ecstatic materialism'. Keeping outside the academic mainstream (he worked as a librarian), Bataille writes at the intersection of multiple disciplines including philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, mythology, and mystical theology. His works develop a libidinal economy, offer a critique of fascism and embrace marginal experiences in the style of the French poets. He is a formative precursor to the post-structuralist philosophers of the '60s -- and may well be more relevant in our time than ever.

We'll start with Bataille's early writings on Nietzsche and make our way through his important concepts over a number of weeks. We'll aim to understand Bataille's thought on its own terms as well as to place him in the context of the German thinkers that preceded him and the French philosophers who followed his lead. In view of Bataille's early relationship with Surrealism, the referenced artworks will spotlight this movement.

Note: Bataille's texts, while philosophically important, discuss difficult themes such as mortality, the unconscious, eroticism, primeval social practices, etc. Keep this in mind, especially if this is your first experience with French philosophy.

Tentative reading Schedule
Feb 15: Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche
Feb 22: The psychological critique of Fascism
Mar 1: Bataille's Dionysian materialism
Mar 8: On chance, myth and the erotic
Mar 15: The notion of unproductive expenditure
Mar 22: Personal sovereignty and inner experience

You can find all readings in the Google folder linked at the BOTTOM of this description -- scroll all the way down 👇

Please take the time to read and reflect on the reading prior to the meeting. Everyone is welcome to attend, but speaking priority will be given to people who have read the text.

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GROUP RULES

• Please spend 1-2 hours per week reading and preparing for the discussion.
• Keep your comments concise and relevant to the text.
• Please limit each comment to a maximum of 2-3 minutes. You're welcome to speak as many times as you wish.
• Virtual meeting courtesy: let's not interrupt each other and keep mics muted when not speaking.
• We'll focus the discussion with key passages and discussion questions. Be sure to bring your favorite passages, questions, comments, criticisms, etc.

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A FEW NOTES ON GEORGES BATAILLE
Much of the philosophical value and fascination of Georges Bataille lies in his eclectic reading of the European ‘masters of suspicion’, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Bataille borrows important concepts from each, while resisting the rationalistic and orthodox readings of these thinkers prevalent in his time. From Nietzsche he takes the distinction between the Apollonian/celestial and Dionysian/chthonic regions of experience. This distinction sets him up for a highly original investigation into the sacred in modernity. As a key originator of the “return to Nietzsche” in France, Bataille staunchly resists fascist appropriations of Nietzsche’s thought. In the process he develops the notion of heterogeneity, a precursor to the problematic of difference/différance central to the 1960s.

From Marx, Bataille adapts the analysis of production. As Marx shows, labor — the class that performs it, the energy it expends and the matter it works on — has always been a repressed dimension of social life. This is because precisely labor holds the key relation of domination and exploitation in society. Yet Bataille steers clear of orthodox readings of Marxism that ultimately issue into its Stalinist, totalitarian corruption (what has been called ‘right-wing’ or ‘reactionary’ Marxism). But how to preserve Marx's materialist insights without falling prey to a worship of use value and a repression of the individual? Also steering clear of easy humanist solutions, Bataille offers the innovative notion of unproductive expenditure: a loss of economic energy expended strictly for its own sake, as in the practices of sacrifice and potlatch. Bataille finds in this ‘principle of loss’ a general economic axiom that governs the human energetic system on both the social and the individual level. He argues that the ‘restricted economy’ of production, exchange and consumption that we all participate in is in fact subordinated to the ‘general economy’ of unproductive expenditure. In brief, he proposes an economic, sociological and essentially materialist way to think of the absolute, that is the unconditioned or the end in itself, as a sovereign process of loss for its own sake.

Here Bataille’s Freudian lineage also comes to the fore. Much of his work is an exploration of the Freudian unconscious and its dual drives of Eros and Thanatos. Bataille takes the Freudian death drive with utmost seriousness. He resists, like Lacan later would, the rationalistic reading of Freud offered by ego psychology, which sees the goal of psychoanalysis as a comfortable adaptation to reality that maximizes well-being. Instead, Bataille is drawn to the ‘speculative’ element that pushes Freud’s thought ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ and into an uncanny domain. It is this domain of the beyond, the ecstatic and the sacred that Bataille articulates throughout his career through means as varied as dream analysis, surrealist art, secret societies, political activism, fiction, poetry, eroticism, mythology, mystical meditation, philosophical writing, etc. Among other things, his work offers an innovative understanding of the erotic and of myth, pointing to both as antidotes to the existential malaise of modernity.

Some questions we may ask in the course of discussion:

Do Bataille's 'irrationalism' and his emphasis on the ecstatic constitute a viable philosophical position? Does he achieve his task of resuscitating life from the nihilism of modernity?

Philosophers have long conceived of the absolute and unconditioned in idealist terms (Platonic Ideas, Kantian self-consciousness, etc). What is the value of Bataille's materialist and energetic theory of the absolute? Can such a theory be divorced from specific practices of enacting the unconditioned?

Bataille identifies the existential problem of modernity, but he seems to part ways with phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Sartre. How does Bataille's notion of the ecstatic compare to Heidegger's ek-stasis? How is the Bataillean sovereign individual distinct from Sartre's radically free consciousness? Is Bataille really that different from his more famous contemporaries, and if so what differentiates him?

It's not difficult to see many post-structuralist concepts foreshadowed and anticipated in Bataille. For example, difference, the marginal, delirium, the exorbitant, the abject, jouissance, etc. Should we therefore think of Bataille as a post-modernist avant la lettre? What does the philosophy of the 1960s bring that Bataille himself isn't able to think -- in other words, what are the limits of Bataille's thought?

What can we learn from Bataille for our time of crisis, armed conflict, multipolarity and the renewed rise of fascist ideologies?

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Join the Facebook group for more resources and discussion:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/755460079505498
If you have attended previous meetings, please fill out a brief survey at this link: https://forms.gle/tEMJ4tw2yVgnTsQD6

All readings can be found in this Google folder:[ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VPRdvZYmUKBY3cSxD8xC8sTYtSEKBXDs](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VPRdvZYmUKBY3cSxD8xC8sTYtSEKBXDs)

Art: Don Quixote and the Chariot of Death (1935) by André Masson