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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a central figure within twentieth-century French avant-garde circles, yet the importance of his work for the study of religion is only beginning to be recognized. Between the First and Second World Wars, he not only edited journals (Documents, Acéphale) and engaged in literary and political movements, but also organized (together with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris) the College of Sociology, which attempted to bring the sociological methods of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss to bear on the study and pursuit of the sacred. Throughout his work of the 1930s, Bataille sought to reintroduce the sacred into modern industrial, secular societies, which, he argued, believed in God only insofar as they equated God with reason. For Bataille, the power of the sacred lies in its ambiguity and violence. Sacrifice and expenditure mark the antithesis of the instrumental rationality of modern bourgeois society; through sacrifice, then, new sovereign communities might be engendered. Religious questions, for Bataille, were irrevocably political. He thus attempted to theorize and to create a community without authority, one that might counter the authoritarian movements coming to dominate much of Europe in the 1930s.
1 See Taylor, Mark C., “The Politics of Theo-ry,” JAAR 59 (1991) 1–37Google Scholar ; Webb, Stephen, Blessed Excess: Religion and the Hyperbolic Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) 59–88Google Scholar ; Amy Hollywood, “Bataille and Mysticism: A ‘Dazzling Dissolution’,” Diacritics 26 (1996) 74-85; and Alexander Irwin, “Saints of the Impossible; Politics, Violence, and the Sacred in Georges Bataille and Simone Weil” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1997).
2 This formulation, however, only becomes clear in texts written after the war, particularly the 1961 introduction to the second edition of Guilty and the posthumously published Theory of Religion. See Bataille, Georges, Le Coupable (Paris: Gallimard, 1961Google Scholar ); and Theorie de la Religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1973Google Scholar ). For translations of these texts, see Bataille, Georges, Guilty (trans. Bruce Boone; Venice, CA: Lapis, 1988Google Scholar ); and idem, Theory of Religion (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Zone, 1992).
3 This claim is suggested most famously by Jean-Paul Sartre in a review essay that will be discussed below. See also Raymond Queneau's claim that in writing Guilty, Bataille did not “want to have anything more to do with politics” (quoted in Surya, Michel, Georges Bataille: La Mort a I'oeuvre [Paris: Gallimard, 1992] 499Google Scholar ). For more on this issue, see Irwin, “Saints of the Impossible,” chs. 2 and 4.
4 “I1 m'est impossible de lire. Du moins la plupart des livres. Je n'en ai pas le desir. Un excès de travail me fatigue. J'en ai les nerfs brisés. Je m'enivre souvent. Je me sens fidèle à la vie si je bois and mange ce qui me plaît. La vie est toujours l'enchantement, le festin, la fête: rêve oppressant, inintelligible, enrichi néanmoins d'un charme dont je joue. Le sentiment de la chance me demande d'être en face d'un sort difficile. II ne s'agirait pas de chance si ce n'était une incontestable folie.
J'ai commence de lire, debout dans un train bondé, le Livre des visions d'Angele de Foligno.
Je recopie, ne sachant dire à quel point j'ai brûlé: le voile ici se déchire, je sors de la brume ou se débat mon impuissance” (Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completès [12 vols.; Paris: Gallimard, 1973] 5. 245; idem, Guilty, 11). Although I will give page numbers for both the French and the English, the translations are my own.
5 “[J]e souffre de ne pas brûler à mon tour au point de m'approcher de la mort si près que je la respire comme le souffle d'un etre aimè” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes 5. 246; idem, Guilty, 12).
6 See Hollier, Denis, ed., The College of Sociology: 1937-39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 333–41Google Scholar ; and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” in idem, Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) 143-88. These charges are echoed by Jacques Lacan's assertion, in the seminar of 1972-73, that “the mystical is by no means that which is not political.” (Lacan, Jacques, Feminine Sexuality [ed. Mitchell, Juliet and Rose, Jacqueline; New York: Norton, 1985] 146Google Scholar ). I think that this entire section of the seminar is an homage to Bataille.
7 Bataille himself uses mysticism as a charge against the surrealists in his earlier writings (Oeuvres Completes, 1. 219).
8 “Angèle de Foligno parlant de Dieu parle en esclave” (ibid., 5. 251; idem, Guilty, 16).
9 “Aucune limite a partir d'un rire assez violent” (Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, 5. 251; idem, Guilty, 17).
10 This move parallels Bataille's earlier attempt to differentiate a sovereign community without authority from totalitarian demands that one sacrifice individual autonomy before the authority of the state. For Bataille, community must involve a dissolution of the self and his or her sovereignty with and as the whole. See Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess (ed. Stoekl, Allan; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) 116–29, 137-60.Google Scholar
11 “J'entends par expèrience interieure ce que d'habitude on nomme expérience mystique: les états d'extase, de ravissement, au moins d'émotion méditée. Mais je songe moins à l'expérience confessionelle, à laquelle on a dû se tenir jusqu'ici, qu'à une expérience nue, libre d'attaches, même d'origine, à quelque confession que se soit. C'est pourquoi je n'aime pas le mot mystique” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5.15; idem, Inner Experience [trans. Leslie Anne Boldt; Albany: SUNY Press, 1988] 3).
12 “Je ne sais si Dieu est ou n'est pas, mais à supposer qu'il soit, si je lui prête la connaissance exhaustive de lui-même et que je lie à cette connaissance les sentiments de satisfaction et d'approbation qui s'ajoutentennous à lafaculté de saisir, un sentiment nouveaud'insatisfaction essentielle s'empare de moi” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 126; Inner Experience, 107-8).
13 Bataille suggests in his preface to the book that readings of Inner Experience should focus on Part 2, “The Torment,” and the final brief section, which contains two poems (“Gloria in excelsis mihi” and “God”); only these were “written with necessity” rather than with “the laudable concern of creating a book” (“écrites nécessairement. … J'écrivis les autres avec le louable souci de composer un livre” [Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 9-10, idem, Inner Experience, xxxi]). “The Torment” offers an account of inner experience, and “Post-Scriptum to the Torment (or the New Mystical Theology)” describes the methods used to attain it (although Bataille insists that no method alone can promise inner experience). Given the more explicit debt to Angela in the latter, I will focus my attention on that text here. I believe, however, that Angela is crucial to all of Inner Experience and Guilty.
14 Bataille generally cites the Book through the 1927 edition and translation of M.-J. Ferré (Sainte Angèle de Foligno, Le livre de l'expèrience des vrais fidèles [trans. M.-J. Ferré; Paris: Éditions E. Droz, 1927]) which gives the Latin text facing a French translation. In the portions cited by Bataille, this edition and translation do not substantively differ from the critical edition of Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti on which Paul Lachance's recent English translation is based.
15 Chapter 1 tells us there will be thirty steps or transformations and gives the first twenty. This is followed by a long digression (chapter 2) in which the scribe tells the readers how he has come to take down Angela's account of her experiences. Chapters 3 through 9 give seven supplementary steps, beginning with the twentieth, briefly described in the earlier section. The total number is then twenty-six rather than the expected thirty.
16 For the critical edition and a modern English translation, see , Angela of , Foligno, II Libro delta Beata Angela da Foligno (ed. Thier, Ludger and Calufetti, Abele; Grottaferrata: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985Google Scholar ); , Angela of , Foligno, Complete Works (trans. Paul Lachance; Mahway, NJ: Paulist, 1993)Google Scholar.
17 For the complex textual details, see Catherine Mooney, “The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno's Revelations,” in Matter, E. Ann and Coakley, John, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) 34–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 This debate is crucial for any attempt to analyze Angela's book in terms of gender. See Mooney, “The Authorial Role”; Lachance, Paul, The Spiritual Journey of the Blessed Angela of Foligno according the Memorial of Frater A. (Rome: Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1984Google Scholar ); and Jacques Dalarun, “Angèle de Foligno a-l-elle existé?” “Alia Signorina”: Mélanges offerts a Noëlle de La Blanchardière (Rome: École francaise de Rome, 1995) 59-97.
19 Insofar as mysticism and the figure of the mystic are gendered feminine for Bataille, recognition of the highly mediated nature of Angela's text is crucial.
20 “[Q]ui n'a que l'inconnu pour objet” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 120; idem, Inner Experience, 102).
21 “.qu'avoir son principe et sa fin dans 1'absence de salut, dans la renonciation à tout espoir,
.qu'affirmer de l'expérience intérieure qu'elle est l'autorité (mais toute autorité s'expie),
.qu'être contestation d'elle-même et non-savoir” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 120; idem, Inner Experience, 102).
22 “Sainte Angèle de Foligno dit: ‘Une certaine fois, mon âme fut élevée et je voyais Dieu dans une clarté et une plénitude que je n'avais jamais connue à ce point, d'une façon aussi pleine. Et je ne voyais là aucun amour. J'ai perdu alors cet amour que je portais en moi; je fus faite le non-amour. Et ensuite, après cela, je le vis dans une ténèbre, car il est un bien si grand qu'il ne peut être pensé ou compris. Et rien de ce qui peut être pensé ou compris ne l‘atteint ni ne l'approche (Livre de l'expérience, 1. 105).’ Un peu plus loin: … L'âme voit un néant et voit toutes choses (nihil videt et omnia videt), le corps est endormi, la langue coupée. Et toutes les amitiés que Dieu m'a faites, nombreuses et indicibles, et toutes les paroles qu'il m'a dites … sont, je l'aperçois, si au-dessous de ce bien rencontre dans une tènèbre si grande que je nemetspas monespoir en elles, que monespoirne repose pas sur elles (id., 106)” (Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, 5. 122; idem, Inner Experience, 104; the passages cited are from idem II Libro, 354, 358; idem, Complete Works, 202, 204).
Another turn in the screw of translation: Bataille's English translator, Leslie Anne Boldt, makes some telling alterations and mistakes in just these passages, all designed to stress Bataille's “atheism” and hence to remove from Bataille all taint of Christianity (i.e. “Nothingness” for “neant” and “above” for “au-dessous”). Bataille substantializes “nihil” and Boldt further reifies with her decision to capitalize nothingness,
23 Bataille takes up the relationship between mysticism and eroticism in a number of postwar texts, including Erotism: Death and Sensuality (trans. Mary Dalwood; San Francisco: City Lights, 1986); and idem, The Accursed Share, vol. 2: The History of Eroticism (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Zone, 1991).
24 “I1 est difficile de dire dans quelle mesure la croyance est à l'expérience un obstacle, dans quelle mesure l'intensite de l'expérience renverse cet obstacle” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes,5. 122; idem, Inner Experience, 104).
25 See Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, 5. 122-23; idem, Inner Experience, 105.
26 “O néant inconnu! (o nihil incognitum!)” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 122; idem, Inner Experience, 104). For the passage in Angela's work, see II Libro, 734; Complete Works, 315-16.
27 For Sartre, Bataille's hypostasization of nothingness as the divine itself marks his return to the kind of dogmatic mysticism he claims to eschew. See Sartre, “Un nouveau mystique,” 179-88.
28 This part of the book and its organization should be compared with Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman (trans. Gillian C. Gill; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985Google Scholar ). The partly failed experience reads like a kind of nature mysticism, ecstasy before scenery, if you will. Bataille's digressions are an attempt to clarify the distinction between contemplation of the point and this kind of more amorphous experience.
29 “Nec recordor, quando sum in ilia <tenebra>, de aliqua humanitate vel de Deo homine nee de aliqua re quae formam habeat, et tamen omnia tune video et nihil video. Et discedendo me vel remanendo me ab isto iam dicto, video Deum hominem; et trahit animam cum tanta mansuetudine, ut dicat aliquando: Tu es ego et ego sum tu. Et video illos oculos et illam faciam tantum placibilem et cum tanta aptitudine, ut amplexetur me. Et illud quod resultat de illis oculis et de ilia facie, est illud quod ego dixi quod ego video in ilia tenebra, quod venit de intus, et illud est quod me tantum delectat quod narrari non potest. Et in isto Deo homine stando anima est viva; sed illud de tenebra adhuc trahit animam multo plus quam istud de Deo homine sine comparatione” ( Il Libro, 362; Complete Works, 205; I have used Lachance's translation).
30 For a theological elucidation of Angela's work, see Lachance, Spiritual Journey.
31 This would be similar to the relationship between suffering with Christ in his humanity and being divine with God articulated by the thirteenth-century beguine mystic, Hadewijch. See , Hadewijch, Complete Works (trans. Mother Columba Hart; New York: Crossroads, 1980).Google Scholar
32 A central and unresolved issue lying behind this paper is that of the relationship between experience and language, in particular that between mystical experience and language. I assume here that mystical texts attempt to engender certain kinds of experience in the reader, but much more needs to be said about the philosophical implications of this view and about how texts engender experience. See Sells, Michael, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).Google Scholar
33 This suggests further the importance for Bataille of thinking about God as a projection of human desire. The point is not that God is “merely” humanity, but rather that this process of projection is necessary to attaining inner experience.
34 “Je dirai ceci d'obscur: l'objet dans l'expérience est d'abord la projection d'une perte de soi dramatique. C'est l'image du sujet. Le sujet tente d'abord d'aller à son semblable. Mais entrê dans l'expérience intérieure, il est en quête d'un objet comme il est lui-même, réduit à l'intériorité. De plus, le sujet dont l'expérience est en elle-même et dès le debut dramatique (est perte de soi) a besoin d'objectiver ce caractere dramatique. …
Mais il ne s'agit là que d'un semblable. Le point, devant moi, réduit a la plus pauvre simplicité, est une personne. A chaque instant de l'experience, ce point peut rayonner des bras, crier, se mettre en flamraes” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 137; idem, Inner Experience, 118).
35 “Quadam vice cogitabam de magno dolore quem Christus sustinuit in cruce et cogitafcam de clavis illis, quos ego audiveram dici quod clavi illi de manibus et pedibus eius carnem portaverunt intus in ligno. Et desiderabam videre vel saltern illud parum de carne Christi quod portaverunt clavi in ligno. Et tune habui tam magnum dolorem de ilia poena Christi, quod non poti stare in pedibus, sed inclinavi me et sedi et inclinavj caput super brachia mea quae proieceram in terra, et tune ostendit mihi Christus gulam et brachia” (II Libro, 192-94; Complete Works, 145-46).
36 “De toute facon, nous ne pouvons projeter le point-objet que par le drame. J'ai eu recours à des images bouleversantes. En particulier, je fixais l'image photographique—ou parfois le souvenir que j'en ai—d'un Chinois que dut être supplicié de mon vivant. De ce supplice, j'avais eu, autrefois, une suite de représentations successives. A la fin, le patient, la poitrine écorchée, se tordait, bras and jambes tranchés aux coudes et aux genoux. Les cheveux dressés sur la tête, hideux, hagard, zébré de sang, beau comme une guêpe” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 5. 139; idem, Inner Experience, 119).
37 “Lejeuneet séduisant Chinois dont j'ai parlé, livre au travail du bourreau, je l'aimais d'un amour où l'instinct sadique n'avait pas de part: il me communiquait sa douleur ou plutôt l'exces de sa douleur et c'était ce que justement je cherchais, non pour en jouir, mais pour ruiner en moi ce qui s'oppose à la ruine” (Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, 5. 140; idem, Inner Experience, 120). His identification is not with the sadistic torturor (God in earlier formulations?), but perhaps a masochistic identification with the tortured person (if we take the passage to be disavowing only sadism, not every pleasure). This suggests that to disavow God is to disavow sadistic pleasure. Yet, what is the masochist without the sadist—merely a victim of chance?
38 I am tempted to write that which one cannot ruin literally, one ruins symbolically, but that begs the question of the reality of the torture victim's suffering and death. Bataille, unlike Angela, does not desire his own death, but is his desire to live within its breath dependent on the death of the other?
39 “[Q]uod ego peterem eum quod faceret mihi istam gratiam, scilicet quod, quia Christus fuit crucifixus in ligno, me crucifigeret in una ripa vel in uno vilissimo loco vel in una vilissima re; et quia non eram digna mori sicut fuerunt mortui sancti, faceret me mori magis viliter et cum longa morte. Et non poteram cogitare ita vilem mortem sicut ego desiderabam” (II Libro, 144; Complete Works, 128; see also II Libro, 206-8; Complete Works, 150-51).
40 “De tormentis vero animae, quae a daemonibus sustinebat, nullam sciebat assignare similitudinem aliam nisi de homine suspenso per gulam, qui, ligatis manibus post tergum et velatis oculis, suspensus per funem remansisset in furcis et viveret, cui nullam auxilium, nullam omnino sustentamentum vel remedium remansisset” (II Libro, 338; Complete Works,197). This is just one of many similar images of abjection found throughout Angela's Memorial (see II Libro, 144, 206-8, 242, 302-4; Complete Works, 128, 150-51, 162-63, 184-85).
41 We should not forget, however, that Angela's book was recorded by a scribe who translated her words into Latin. Similar translations by male scribes of women's texts suggest that this emphasis on the external suffering and asceticism of medieval women may be a hagiographical trope rather than an accurate reflection of mystical experience. In this reading, Angela's suffering body might be seen as an “object” onto which her readers can project themselves. See Amy Hollywood, “Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographers,” in Mooney, Catherine, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42 At this point, I am just using translation of relics as an analogy with which to think through Bataille's relationship to Angela. Given the centrality of communication to his work, however, and his insistence that communication depends on laceration and woundedness, there might be deeper connections between translation as the removal of a saint's relics and translation as communication. To make this argument, I would need to explore the disanalogies, for medieval translatio refers to other movements not seemingly dependent on death or laceration.
43 Alternately, and more hopefully, Patrick Geary suggests that the body of the saint possesses meaning only insofar as it is surrounded by or embedded within a narrative. A bone is just a bone until it is named as that of a saint and thereby given religious, thaumaturgic, political, and economic significance. Hence the importance of translatio narratives in which the remains possessed by a particular community are identified, and the story of the translation authorizes links with a saintly person. Yet from Bataille's perspective, one might ask whether such authorizing narratives are not attempts to place the lacerated human body back into discourse and the realm of project, precisely the antithesis of the ecstatic. The meaning Bataille wishes to communicate or translate is self-authorizing and without end or aim (hence without meaning?). See Geary, Patrick, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 5–9.Google Scholar
44 The question then becomes why bodily and linguistic transgression are so crucial at these divergent historical moments.
45 Although his desire to dissolve the self is itself a form of asceticism.
46 “Le mouvement antérieur à l'extase du non-savoir est l'extase devant un objet (que celuici soit le point pur—comme le veut le renoncement aux croyances dogmatiques, ou quelque image bouleversante). Si cette extase devant l'objet est d'abord donnée (comme un possible) et si je supprime, apres coup, l'objet—comme la ‘contestation’ fatalement le fait—si pour cette raison j'entre dans l'angoisse—dans l'horreur, dans la nuit du non-savoir—l'extase est proche et, quand elle survient, m‘abîme plus loin que rien imaginable. Si j'avais ignoré l'extase devant l'objet, je n'aurais pas atteint l'extase dans la nuit. Mais initié comme je l'étais à l'objet—et mon initiation avail représenté la pénétration la plus lointaine du possible—je ne pouvais, dans la nuit, que trouver une extase plus profonde. Dès lors la nuit, le non-savoir, sera chaque fois lechemin de l'extase où je me perdrai” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 144; idem, Inner Experience, 123—24). The last line suggests Bataille's affinity with Marguerite Porete, whose text he did not know. She argues that the movement through the “object” can be surpassed.
47 “des images d'explosion, de déchirement” (Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 269; idem, Guilty, 32). I have here used Boone's evocative translation.
48 Note Bataille on the much discussed “ineffability” of mystical experience: “It is easy to say that one cannot speak of ecstasy. There is in it an element which one cannot reduce, which remains ‘beyond expression’, but ecstasy, in this respect, does not differ from other forms: I can have, can communicate the precise knowledge of it as much—or more than—that of laughter, of physical love—or of things; the difficulty, however, is that being less commonly experienced than laughter or things, what I say of it cannot be familiar, easily recognizable” (Bataille, Inner Experience, 123; idem, Oeuvres Completes, 143-44).
Although this passage suggests a distinction between experience and language that con-firms Derrida's critique of Bataille, I am not sure that this “irreducible” something is not very close to that which Derrida writes of in his work on translation. Derrida focuses on the loss that occurs in the movement between and within languages. Bataille maintains experience as a category, yet he never claims that one can escape the confines of language. Rather, language/communication and experience are inextricably linked, and so he needs new forms of communication to engender new (or at least uncommon) forms of experience. The link suggests another reason for using the category of translation in thinking about Bataille.
49 Many would read this as a gendered conception of communication and the imaginary wholeness of the self, in which any openness is conceived as a wound. Irigaray compellingly makes this critique, although in relation to Lacan rather than Bataille. In response, she at-tempts to articulate a conception of fluid subjectivity that does not understand openness as a wound. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, and , eadem, Sexes and Genealogies (trans. Gillian C. Gill; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993Google Scholar ). Although I find much in this reading compelling, I wonder what to do with the emphasis on woundedness within medieval women mystics like Angela. Does one read this solely in terms of their complicity with a masculinist religion? Or are there other issues aside from sexual difference playing into this account of subjectivity? In the case of Bataille, for example, I think that thereis a historically specific dimension to his emphasis on violence and laceration. The context of war clearly pervades Bataille's texts.
50 Angela's hope for a future life may lie behind her desire to die, pointing to the gap between her experience and Bataille's. It could be, however, that Angela truly desires dissolution in a way unmatched by him.
