Georges Bataille: The Death of the Self and the Labyrinth

We proceed to the theme of death in Bataille's early writings with three short pieces from the 1930s, all in the collection Visions of Excess:

"Sacrifices" (p. 130)
"The Labyrinth" (p. 171)
"The Practice of Joy before Death" (p. 235)

You can find the Bataille text in the Google folder linked at the BOTTOM of this description (also the Zoom link) -- scroll all the way down 👇

Alongside the weekly discussions, we're starting Bataille's novel Blue of Noon (now available in the Google Drive). We'll read it individually over several weeks, then dedicate a meeting to it (date TBA).

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.

Tentative schedule
Apr 5: Bataille's base materialism: The flesh, the earth and the solar
Apr 12: Bataille's ontology: The labyrinth and the death of the self
Apr 19: Bataille's 'logic': On heterology
Apr 26: Bataille's ethics of excess: Chance, myth and the erotic

Future topics:

• Bataille's aesthetics: the rift with Surrealism
• Blue of Noon
• Personal sovereignty and inner experience
• Erotics and the 'logic' of transgression
• Bataille and/vs Deleuze
• Foucault's "A Preface to Transgression"
• Hegel, the negative and general economy
• Derrida's "From Restricted to General Economy"

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ABOUT THIS GROUP
This is a reading group of several texts of Georges Bataille with a focus on his philosophy of life. 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 as you approach him, especially if this is your first experience with French philosophy.

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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 THIS WEEK'S TEXT
In these pieces Bataille offers us a philosophical-existential exploration of death. There are clear links to Heidegger's analytic of finitude in Being and Time, especially the intimate connection between death, time, and the singularity of the self. Bataille, however, goes beyond existential thought by bringing in the libidinal notion of matter: a move not found in Heidegger or Sartre. Merleau-Ponty, for his part, takes up desire and sexuality in his work but sidesteps the question of death almost entirely. Death for Bataille opens the possibility of an immanent life, a celebration of desire, affect, flesh, and sensuality in the glory of their material being.
Bataille’s point of departure is the singular, unique self of each individual. The genesis of the self, he claims, is absolutely improbable: it cannot be reduced to a scientific mechanism or a calculus of genetic probabilities. Each self is irreplaceable, and mortality is the aspect that realizes this singularity in time. As Heidegger puts it, the self has its own unique death to die, one that no one else can die for it. "The me that dies” is the self's uniqueness projected in the dimension of time.
Bataille’s account of death has clear borrowings from Hegel as well. A positive, given being of any kind is inevitably submerged in a horizon of the negative, or what is called the void, the abyss, or nothingness. The self is no exception. Its positive being as a thinking and acting ego is ruptured by a relation to the self's eventual annihilation. Beyond thought and practice, indeed beyond consciousness itself, the me that dies reveals being as catastrophe: the inexorable sliding of everything that is in the direction of the void. Here we have a strong hint of the Heideggerian being-towards-death, the “ownmost” possibility of human existence. Alongside all the possible futures one can choose, there is the one uncanny possibility that marks the inevitable limit of each human existence. It is the paradoxical possibility of “no longer being able to be there,” or in other words the closure of all other possibilities. As existing, we encounter death with existential immediacy; moreover, we are anxiously tempted to evade this encounter. “Homogeneity” is Bataille’s broad term for such evasions, among them scientific system, moral law and religious beatitude.
The experience of the me that dies suspends the objective time of successive moments and reveals temporality in its ecstatic dimension. Unlike the eternal equanimity of scientific time, ecstatic time is charged with the foretaste of death. It is pervaded by the urgency of an unfolding catastrophe, whose intensity amplifies existence to excess and reveals the fullness of life's glory. The time of the me that dies discloses the purity of a universal love that is not bound up with metaphysical dogmas. It is true, in places Bataille does describe ecstasis with language resembling that of Catholicism, which he had renounced in the early 1920s. But he is explicit that the lightning flash of ecstasis is not a transcendence to some beatific realm or any kind of divine contemplation. On the contrary, what is exalted is material, affective life itself—the immanence of desire, the intensity of feeling, the radical possibilities of such experiences as the erotic, the poetic, the tragic, the comedic, the mythical. In each case, the dialectical contradiction of experience is never lost on Bataille, and hence he never allows materiality to sublimate into a spiritual substance.
Some questions:

• How successful is Bataille in synthesizing the theme of mortality from Heideggerian phenomenology with the theme of the libido from Freudian psychoanalysis? Is this a fruitful way to try to understand the Frenchman?
• Unlike Heidegger and Deleuze, Bataille insists on preserving a dialectical method, a sort of radical, aestheticized Hegelianism. Is this to the benefit of his thinking, or does it make him less relevant and less interesting than other 20th century philosophers?
• What is the role of love and universality in Bataille’s thought? After all, these notions tend to be associated with unity, harmony and idealism, not with his ecstatic and even violent approach. Does Bataille redefine the meaning of love and universality?

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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)

Zoom link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81251109319?pwd=R3hVQ2RqcVBvaHJwYnoxMFJ5OXJldz09

Art: Ballerina in a Death’s Head (1939) by Salvador Dali