Category: Bataille

Alexander Irwin’s Saints of the Impossible is a thorough, engaging book, at once sympathetic to the authors under discussion – Bataille, Weil – but also critically independent of them. I think that it is this independence that troubles me, since they are authors, as Irwin shows us, who sought not only to communicate a message, but to ‘be the message: to put into reader’s hands a text consubstantial with the writer’s own self, to live a life crafted as a vehicle of poetic, spiritual and political meaning’.

To be the message – to write, for that message to be ‘revolt’, in Weil’s case, and never, she says ‘the exercise of power’; like Bataille, she realises what Irwin calls a ‘literary sainthood’ – transmitting an attitude, a ‘style of existence, an orientation that perhaps cannot be  precisely verbalised, but whose emotional atmosphere the "addressee" absorbs (by "contagion", as Bataille would have it) though the hagiographic text’.

To write as a saint – to consecrate one’s life in writing – both writers call on their readers to do something similar; both write, then, the equivalent of Ignatious’s Spiritual Exercises. Inner Experience is a kind of self-martyrdom, a ‘written performance of the text’, as Irwin calls it, but it is essential to understand that it aims at results – at a kind of conversion of the reader that can happen only insofar as the reader in turns lives the experience the book incarnates.

How extraordinary that this book, Bataille’s first full length publication by a major publisher, comes out in the early years of the war! ‘The date on which I begin to write (September 5, 1939) is not a coincidence. I am beginning because of the events, but not in order to talk about them’: the first line of Bataille’s Guilty, which followed Inner Experience into print. What, then, does he talk about? Mystical experience, apparently – a kind of inner war (even if the notion of interiority is called into question), wherein Bataille writes ‘with my life‘, keeping open what Irwin calls ‘a laceration of consciousness’ – a ‘wound’ Bataille offers others ‘as the basis of an obscence and "intoxicating" communication’. And it is this wound that he offers as an alternative to the civilisation that has revealed itself in the real war around him. A wound – a style of living, of writing, a ‘mystico-literary self-stylisation’, as Irwin calls it, whose writing has taught him, ‘I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman’.

A saint, a madman – it would take such a non-philosopher to show how the war was also a response to this wound (not Bataille’s, of course, but one that constitutes human existence); that what appears to be politics has, in fact, a religious and aesthetic dimension. All this Irwin explores these topics thoroughly and fair-mindedly; I read the book greedily, all at once, but I remained troubled, too by the author’s very ability to situate Bataille and Weil within a tradition.

Irwin writes of a long French tradition in which the writer is upheld as an exemplar – as ‘sacred’. The example of Pascal, for example, whose work underwent a revival in the 1920s, Iwrin tells us, particular by way of Bataille’s friend Chestov, combines literary brilliance with a quest for salvation. The post-Romantic avant-garde had comprised its own tradition of holy figures – Rimbaud, of course, as both poet and seer, but also Sade, in whose work several of Bataille’s friends were interested, as well as Poe, Baudelaire and others. At the same time, in the 20s and 30s, the Surrealists produced books like Nadja and Paris Peasant, in which they presented their own meanderings around Paris, their encounters and experiences as a kind of template of Surreal existence.

Literary self-stylisation, then, was a commonplace in the Paris in which Bataille and Weil wrote. In the same period, it was assumed quite widely, and in very disparate camps that political turbulence had spiritual roots; religious and aesthetic discourse were immediately relevant to the concerns of interwar France. Come the second world war, and Bataille’s retreat to ‘mystico-literary self-stylisation’, to a solitary written performance after a turbulent decade working alongside others in various avant-garde groups, does not seem, in this context, so surprising.

His work issues from a tradition; the revival of Pascal, the avant-garde canonisation of Sade and Rimbaud, the minutely rendered accounts of their life by prominent Surrealists – but why does this trouble me? There are writers I would like to think cannot merely be contextualised by their times, but seem to contextualise it in turn; writers who do not simply belong to history, to the great procession of events, but who send history strangely off course. Writers, then, that come at me from another angle – that are not part of the world and the account of the world I recognise.

It is as if they spoke from a higher, wilder place – that, from some promontory above the storms they write by the light of the most distant stars. And that they reach me – that their books found me, that I came across them, one after another, as stepping stones that would lead to a place behind the world, as though you could pull open a curtain and disappear. And I have felt that to read them was always secret, sacred – that their books demanded to be kept apart and away from others.

But from Irwin I understand that I am only a convert – or that what I want is to be converted, for reading to also become a kind of self-stylisation. And that I stand in a long line of those who want to be converted – reader-believers, and readers who want to believe most of all in a power of a certain kind of writing … and that, like them, I share the great naivety that there is an importance to writing beyond that of writing – that, as Bataille thought, his inner war made him the most qualified of all to understand the secrets of the outer one that raged about him.

It is difficult not to conclude that, beyond its challenge to specific forms of political oppression, Weil’s and Bataille’s cultivation of sainthood marks a virulent contestation of the human condition as such. That such a generalised feeling of outrage could surge up among people living an ‘epoch deprived of a future’ is stil perhaps understandable.

But we, who hope to have a future still before us, may judge the ‘attraction to the impossible’ celebrated by Bataille and Weil as sheer romantic hubris. We may see here an effort to cloak with exalted words what is at bottom a puerile refusal to soil one’s hands with the inevitably messy, frustrating business of merely ‘possible’ politics and ordinary, ‘unsacrificeable’ existence.

And yet, and yet … Why is it I think Bataille and Weil should be approached only by another writer-saint? Why do I dream idly of a book written at the level of their thought, their life, their writing?

Capitalism is deathless: it does not know death, or at least, death does not touch it. Yet we will all die. An illegal immigrant is beaten to death – but how does this alter the American Dream? Floods wreck Bangladesh – but how does affect the ideal of a world market? These ideals arise from the body of capital, facilitating its movement. The existence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the G8 summit only propagate these ideals. But unlike the codes which governed the pre-capitalist world, they do not mean anything. Capitalism has already destroyed all codes.

The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society…. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away , all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…

We know it well: changes in means of production means workers are perpetually de- and reskilled; capital moves in real time from one place to another; production and consumption are continually revolutionised in view of the desire for profit, for surplus value, upon which capitalism depends and makes us depend.

What is to be done? Rethink the revolution which allows the ongoing revolution upon which capitalism thrives. Engage the crisis upon which capitalism depends.

A fundamental instability of meaning is built into capitalism from the start. Values are stripped away by capitalism insofar as they are unbound from traditional structures; the danger, however, is that they are replaced by the values of the market: with the value of work, the value of money. Constant movement: labour power is unbound from a particular conjunction of resources and bound again by others. If there is always a turbulence, a revolutionisation that is constitutive of capitalism, it is one whose movement is regulated. What is it regulated by? That process through which various factors of production (money, skills, technologies, raw materials) are conjoined into order to extract a surplus, a profit. This is not a simple reification.

As measure of value, money comes to supplant all other values; as a means of access to goods and services, it remains even when all other values break down. You tell yourself you do not desire money for its own sake, but for the goods and services to which it proves access. But the financial market does not seek those goods and services, but only money, since it is the means of access to more money. Money is sought in the financial market as sheer investment potential; its value is measured not in terms of particular assets, but of rates of speculative return. Beyond any financier or investor, capitalism desires and desires its own increase. As indebted or enthralled labour, we are enmeshed in the impersonal operation of capital.

We are mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital. Our future is wagered because of what capital owes to itself. How do we resist? How do we retrieve another meaning of time, of money? It is never a question of returning to the security of older values. A derangement has already occurred; the circulation of capital escapes the coded, despotic system whose inhabitants obey a model signal. The task is to engage the revolution itself insofar as it implies a gap or an interval. But what can compete against money?

Capitalism is deathless. But says the philosopher to the rich and the powerful: even you will have to die. We are all mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital. Our future is wagered because of what capital owes to itself. Capitalism is like a cell whose DNA is damaged and which spreads cancerously from a particular tumour. A normal cell in an adult grows and divides only to replace a worn out or dying cell, or to repair an injury. With cancer, cells continue to grow and divide; cancerous cells are those which have forgotten how to die. Spreading to other parts of the body, they grow and replace normal tissue. Cancer, metastatising, is deathless, but there is the paradox that it will eventually kill the host body and thereby kill itself. Cancerous cells will die even as they do not know death. And capitalism will die with its host body when the ecological limit is reached.

Then how to awaken to ecological catastrophe? To the misery of those who merely try to subsist amidst the storm of finance capital? To the apocalypse that has already happened? Perhaps death opens its eyes in us. Perhaps there is an experience of suffering upstream of any other experience. What faculty permits this? What shaping category, what transcendental? Philosophers will suggest that they have a special relationship to death. It’s the oldest story: Plato tells it, but so does Heidegger. Live as close to death to possible, Socrates advocates. Relate yourself to your death, Heidegger says. But what of the catastrophe which has already happened?

Bataille:

Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later – it has the power to contest everything at the instant that it takes place, to summon everything, to render everything present. The crucial instant is that of death, yet as soon as the action begins, everything is challenged, everything is present.

It is a question of death, of establishing a relationship to death in life. But now death is not the inevitable that awaits each of us such that, by relating ourselves to it, we can lift ourselves from the hoi polloi and reclaim our possibilities and impossibilities for ourselves. There is not enough time. Instead, before I gather myself up – before, that is, I am gathered to myself such that it would even be possible to write of Da-sein, there-being – there is the experience of catastrophic loss, expenditure, sacrifice. The death of the other person is this sacrifice.

We live events according to a double relation. As that which can be borne and mastered, even if this is difficult, by relating it to a particular end; but then also as that which escapes end and employ. Then the latter is the interruption of the project and of the power which would enable me to relate myself to my death. The ability to comprehend, bear, master, but fundamentally, the ability to be able, depends upon the ‘I can’, upon the modality of possibility which enables the opening to the future. And when this ability fails us? When, in sacrifice, there is no temporality upon which the human being might be projected? When, that is, there is no one there, no time and no place to be-towards-death? When the death of the other awakens us?

Perhaps there is a way of experience this death. Of living it in turn. And perhaps this provides a way of rethinking the general equivalent upon which the value of money depends. There is another capital, an experience of a giving. No longer is the monetary sign substituted for the thing that is sacrificed. There is no general equivalent which can fix the value of money in relation to its referent. The desire to create surplus value is defeated for as long as the time of the project is sacrificed – for as long as there is nothing upon which the human being is projected.

Common presence: a system, a non-system of exchanges so marked by loss that nothing therein would hold together and that the inexchangable would no longer be caught and defined by the desire for profit. It is as though the currency we most trust, the general equivalent which mediates all value, transformed itself into the inexchangeable. ‘Fire is an exchange for all goods’ Heraclitus writes; it is the exchange which ruins exchange, which replaces the value of money with the sacrifice of money. There is a celestial currency which has value only insofar as it is catastrophic.

The gods to whom we sacrifice are themselves sacrifice, tears wept to the point of dying.

Poetic genius is not verbal talent (verbal talent is neccesary, since it is a question of words, but if often leads one astray): it is the divining of ruins secretly expected, in order that so many immutable things become undone, lose themselves, communicate.

Remembering the question from the last blog, asked with respect to Bataille: what does the poet sacrifice? This, perhaps, is the wrong question, for the slipping word is not merely a strategy among others in the poet’s armory. Even if it is a question of writing of this silence or this forest, it is still not a question of making this word or that slip, but a slippage of the whole of meaning, of the economy of sense. This, of course, counts only for the Bataillean poet, who is unconcerned with literary reputation. This is the poet who would sacrifice sense itself, and sacrifice herself just as sense is sacrificed.

I wrote – crudely, quickly – of a component of language which refuses to allow itself to be taken up into the idea. The philosopher, perhaps, regards it as only the remnant of language – a kind of appendix or vestigial tail (this is a characiture …). But for the poet, it is, this same richness, the very richness of language, it is what cannot be removed from language; it is the plenitude which remains when language is no longer employed to make sense (sense and non-sense must be thought together, sense opening against a background of non-sense and non-sense struggling in turn to present itself in its withdrawal as the ‘richness’ in question …)

It is this material element, which, in the articulation of sense, allows language to sacrifice itself, which the poem offers to the sacrificial fire. The ‘matter’ of the word (the vestigal tail, the remnant …) is the poet’s fuel. It is akin to the wicker man or the potlatch which, through its destruction, points to the world which burns within our world (towards our burning world …). If Bataille writes of a ‘sovereign silence’, this is not the silence one might see and not say. It is not a question, here, of ineffability. A sovereign silence arises from the interruption of the struggle between sense and non-sense.

Heraclitus associates what he draws the logos close to a kind of cosmic fire, which periodically scorches the cosmos only to let it be reborn again, like those tribes who slash and burn the forest in order to renew the fertility of its soil.

Let’s say I am the Bataillean poet who writes the word fire (I admit, I haven’t clarified this at all …) The sentence slips. The poem, transforming itself into a thing, would enter the flames, giving itself up, yielding itself to the flames. A blazing poem, pure sacrifice. A blazing incarnation of thought without determinable content: a thinking born and killed over and again in the crucible of the poem.

For a moment, then, it appears the poem is the salamander who lives in the flames. What is sacrificed? The dream that the poem can reach pure immediacy – that it can achieve, by itself, the silence, the forest … It is not, then the immediate which commits itself to sacrifice, but the dream of recapturing the world in the poem. It is mimesis, understood crudely as the representation of the world, of the shackling of language to a shackled understanding of the world. Then the Bataillean poet is the enemy of the novelist whose ambition is to represent the world back to itself. One might say this: at some level or another, the novelist fears the poet – for in the poet’s words, the novelist knows there is a flame which might leap across to the pages of his own book. Bataille’s poem is on fire. It is not the torch that would illumine the night, but the night itself that burns. And Bataille? The salamander in the flames. The one who lives from his death, his continual dying.

Set the novel aflame. Watch five hundred pages crinkle and burn. The poem has been awoken in the novel. A poem that is language, that is the matter, the dregs of language, which has been set aflame. Nietzsche: Night itself is a sun.

Perhaps it is possible to write of an autopoetry – of a fire which is always burning in the words one normally pushes around like coins. It is as though the currency we most trust, the general equivalent which mediates all value, transformed itself into the unexchangeable. ‘Fire is an exchange for all goods’ Heraclitus writes; yes, but it is the exchange which ruins exchange, which replaces coin with the destruction of coins, where the coin is valuable because it destroys itsely. Autopoetry – because sacrifice is automatic, because it is ongoing and the poem is only one site of the great sacrifice that the world also is.

It is said whoever sees God dies. The poem turning itself towards the immediate comes face to face with what sets it aflame. Face to face? But the poem does not have a face which could bear the face of the burning world. Heidegger says somewhere when we walk through a forest we walk through the word forest. The Bataillean poet, as she walks, awakens a conflagration in the ideal trees. The forest is burning – not the real forest, with its shade and its brightness: it is the word forest that is on fire. But the fire spreads from the world to the page and then from the page of the poem to every page in every books …

Holderlin: ‘Now come, fire’. Come, then, in the poem which puts fire to the names in order to reveal an experience which burns at the heart of the flames. Heraclitus allows that physis itself is fire; that beings burn in the light of what withdraws as they come to presence. To which one might say: everything that exists is sacrificed at every moment. Further: there is only sacrifice. What there is is sacrifice. And perhaps the word ‘is’ is sacrificed (it is there the poem lives, opening up a difference in the ‘is’ and as the ‘is’ …)

Hear the roaring of the logos, and know the fire which burns in all things. What does the poet sacrifice? The world, the poem – but isn’t the poet herself sacrificed (but then it is not a question of the poet’s accomplishing anything – doesn’t sacrifice begin as soon as everything begins? Doesn’t a poem – or the movement of a sacrificial poetry – burn within the most sober sentence? And in the place of the poet (occupying her place), do you, the reader, burn in turn?

Perhaps this is how Bataille’s Inner Experience gives itself to be read (this is how what there is gives itself to be experienced in its pages)…. Thus, as for Heraclitus, the cosmos is killed and reborn from fire, but now it is the fire of the poem that is the crucible from which everything dies and rebegins. Blanchot: ‘I am alive. No, you are dead’.

Among various sacrifices, poetry is the only one whose fire we can maintain, renew.

If I have known how to produce the silence of others within me, I am, myself, Dionysus, I am the crucified. But should I forget my solitude …

The poet sacrifices, Bataille writes in Inner Experience, but what is it that is sacrificed? A first answer: that of which shthe poet would speak; the world, in its presence, its immediacy. Think of the word silence (this is Bataille’s example). The poet celebrates a silence she remembers – a singular silence, which belongs to a particular time and place. But to write of silence is, in one sense, to lose this it; ‘the word silence is still a sound …’

Compare it to a performance of Cage’s 4’33″. Of course, what Cage gives us is a singular silence, the silence of this auditorium, of this orchestra before this audience? 4’33″. is not made of the sound, but of silence; here, silence is another kind of sound; something resounds even when the musicians do not play. Is Cage’s ruse open to the poet? Might one write a poem called Silence and leave the page blank? Or must poetry be made of words?

If the poet cannot do without words, or if words are in some sense important to the poem, then one can only indicate silence by way of words. To invoke the materiality of the word, the heaviness of language, may not be to lament the awkwardness of matter, as Hegel lamented the heavy obscurity of Egyptian statuary, from which form had yet to free itself. True, these are heavy images, but it is the weight of language – its rhythms, its sonorities – which are perhaps the poet’s chance.

For the one Bataille calls a philosopher, this heaviness is an obstacle; classically, the philosopher attempts to leap over the idiom of a natural language in order to write of the thing itself. The philosopher’s doctrine elevates itself above its expression; language is a medium, the tool which subordinates itself to the delivery of the message. Rhythm and sonority – the material of language – are, from this perspective, just so much static and noise. And for the poet? Perhaps it is possible the poet might the poem answer the presence of that silence by deploying the rhythmical and sonorous properties of words. But isn’t this, once again, to have lost the silence of which one would write, or at least, to have regained it in a manner which can only disappoint?

What does the poet sacrifice? A second answer: the dream that language would be merely the outward garment of thought. Poetry rebels against the instrumental notion of language, its subordination to the order of signification. Isn’t naming – poetic naming itself something more than signification? To indicate, to point – but towards what? To the silence which has already been lost?. But this is still too simple. Rather, to the distance between the immediate and the mediation which appears to occur through language. ‘Appears to occur’: because it is not clear that silence is mediated when I call it ‘silence’ – or at least that such mediation is not a loss of that silence, a deafening roar. The word silence is too noisy. But isn’t silence, for this reason, Bataille asks, ‘the most poetic’ of words (16)? ‘Most poetic’ because it reveals both the limits of one conception of language (signification), disclosing what lies, in language, beyond a servile representation of the world. Here, we have passed beyond the question of the ineffable.

The word silence undergoes a kind of slippage. It slips in the sentence. And through that slippage, by means of it, Bataille can attend to the ‘incessant slippage of thought’; this is how, through language, he can attempt ‘the project of abolishing the power of words, hence of project’ (22). The movement of mediation is interrupted. The slippage of the word has released another experience of language and, perhaps, an experience of a thinking which does not mediate or abstract. A strange thought: to open, a sovereign silence by means of poetry (‘by means of’ … surely this is wrong).

A sovereign silence? This is no longer silence which awaits mediation through language, nor indeed what is mediated in the word silence. A silence of discourse – or, better, a silencing of what subordinates language to signification, to the articulation of sense. To attain a sovereign silence is to make contact with a reader such that, in that reading, there is a break with the demand which governs signification, that is, the subordination of the world to the demands of the project, to identity, to unity.

Ordinary language, let us say following Bataille, is servile. But then, because the poetry is composed of the same words as ordinary language (even if signification is suspended), it cannot help but fall back into the regime of sense. The poem can appear to be an edifying work. Can the Bataillean poet – the one who struggles towards a sovereign silence and whose poetry might be said, for this reason, to be itself sovereign – avoid this fate? But the Bataillean poem is made of words; even if it does more than signify, it also signifies; it signifies nonetheless and therefore must bear the risk of falling back into servility. This means the sacrifice of discourse in the poem is never pure; it cannot happen once and for all. It is necessary to begin and rebegin – to read, to write over and again …

Sacrifice, sovereignty, the disobedient. Perhaps this is a struggle which occurs ceaselessly, at the edges of sense. A secret battle which reveals itself only for those who cave hears to hear what presents itself even as it disappears (presents itself in disappearance, as what withdraws, as an indication) in the rhythms and sonorities of our words, in laughter and tears?

It is not a question of severing ordinary language from poetic language, because this is already to forget laughter and tears. Might one hear a sovereign silence in a kind of irony that is quite different to the one Socrates and Kierkegaard employ in order to allow their readers to discover the truth, the hidden truth, by themselves? Imagine, instead, an irony which does not seek to recover truth, a madness by which words dissolve into a laughter which carries them in another direction: the contagious giggling of children, the buffoonery of Dostoevsky’s underground man.

And perhaps, too, there is a thinking of sacrifice – no, that is the wrong expression – a sacrificial thinking which attempts to bear within itself the sovereign silence towards which the Bataillean poet struggles. Here, I remember Artaud’s early letters to Rivere (I do not have them to hand). One finds in those pages a suffering-thinking, a thinking which is suffered, passively undergone (but the word ‘passive’ is too simple …). A thinking which cannot help but sacrifice itself, which is mired in suffering and cannot lift itself from the crucible of the instant.

Here is a summary of key events in Bataille’s life and writing during WWII.

Our protagonist: Georges Bataille, born in 1897, author, by the outset of the war, of Story of the Eye (published pseudonymously), The Solar Anus and Sacrifices. His lover, Colette Peignot, known as Laure, died in November 1938. Bataille frequents brothels and strip clubs in this period, and is involved with several women. His secret society, Acéphale, continues to meet; Laure’s tomb becomes another sacred site for Acéphale. He lives in a flat in Saint-Germain-en-Laye which he had taken with Laure. In this period, he also begins ‘The Manual of an Anti-Christian’. Bataille feels he is being deserted by his friends. His great communal experiments have come to nothing; he is alone. In 1938, learns to practice yoga.

1939
The last issue of Acéphale, the review linked to the group, is published anonymously in June under the title ‘Madness, War and Death’, two years after the previous edition. All of its contents were written by Bataille, including his first ‘mystical’ pages: ‘The Practice of Joy before Death’.

Guilty begun 5 September 1939. Bataille is reading Angela of Folingo, the Liber visionum.

The date I start (September 5, 1939) is no coincidence.

Alongside Guilty, Bataille drafts what will become, many years later, The Accursed Share.

On 2 October 1939, he meets Denise Rollin-Le Gentil, who is 32 and married with a young son, Jean. Surya writes, ‘She was beautiful, a beauty that would be described as melancholy if not taciturn. She spoke little or, for long periods not at all’. She joins him at his flat in October; thereafter, Bataille will spend time in her flat at 3 rue de Lille.

1940
Part of Guilty published as ‘Friendship’ in the Belgian journal Mesures.

Bataille meets Maurice Blanchot, who is about to publish Thomas the Obscure and the long essay How is Literature Possible? (Animadab would follow in 1942 and Faux Pas, a collection of articles, in 1943.)

1941
Madame Edwarda written September to October and published in 1941. Begins ‘Le Supplice’, the great central section of Inner Experience, immediately after.

Autumn 1941 sees the commencement of two discussion groups organised by Bataille in Denise Rollin’s flat. They consisted of readings of passages of Inner Experience, which Bataille was writing at the time. The first group includes Queneau and Leiris. Blanchot belonged to both groups. The meetings were, according to several participants, essentially a debate between Bataille and Blanchot. The meetings last until March 1943.

1942
Bataille is diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He contracted it originally as a young man in an army bootcamp. For eight years, however, it has been dormant; eventually (in 1962), it will kill him.

Bataille completes Inner Experience during the summer of the same year. At that time, he is staying with Marcel Moré’s mother at Boussy-le-Chatêau. It is published by Raymond Queneau, an old friend of Bataille’s with whom relations have lately cooled.

He stays in a village called Panilleuse with Denise Rollin.

He writes The Dead Man.

Bataille’s illness leads him to lose his job with the Bibliothèque Nationale.

‘Nietzsche’s Laughter’ published in Exercice du silence, Brussels.

Denise Rollin leaves Paris for Drugeac; Bataille follows her, accompanied by his daughter Laurence, 10, and by his old friend André Masson and his wife Rose. Towards the end of the year, Bataille moves out of the flat he had shared with Laure. He takes a new flat in Paris at 259 rue Saint-Honoré in December (Paris VIII).

Gives the lecture ‘Socratic College’ (note that the date given in the Oeuvres completes is incorrect) which sets out a proposal to organise his discussion readings on a more programmatic basis. This move is rejected by the participants. In Inner Experience, he gives a summary of discussions that arose with Blanchot, presumably in the discussion groups.

There are three principles; experience will:

– only have its principle and end in the absence of salvation, in the renunciation of all hope
– only affirm that experience itself is the authority (but all authority expiates itself)
– only be a contestation of itself and nonknowledge.

This is nicely summarised by Stuart Kendall, one of the editors of The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge:

Their initial proposals were three: they held to the rejection of all hope for salvation, indeed all hope of any kind, the acceptance of experience itself as the only value and authority, and the recognition that experience meant self-expiation.

1943
Inner Experience is published. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness are published in the same year.

In March, moves to 59 rue Saint-Étienne in the village Vézelay with Denise Rollin and her 4-year-old son. His daughter, Laurence, now 13, moves with them. The house is ramshackle; the village austere. Between March and October, Bataille embarks on an affair with the Canadian born, half-Russian and half-English Diane Kotchoubey, an admirer of Inner Experience. She is 23, and has a 3 year old daughter. Diane Kotchoubey and Denise Rollin apparently are joined for a while with Bataille in a ménage-a-trois.

Bataille finishes Guilty in May 1943. In the same month, ‘Nom de Dieu’, a text written by the Surrealists, argues Inner Experience evidences a simple minded idealism.

Blanchot reviews Inner Experience in Journal des débats in May.

Sartre publishes a long, unfavourable review of Inner Experience in Cahiers du Sud. Bataille’s reply is found what will be published in 1945 as On Nietzsche.

Bataille splits up from Rollin after returning with her to Paris. Kotchoubey had already returned to Paris. Bataille finds lodgings with the painter Balthus through Pierre Klossowski, and spends the winter at Balthus’s studio at 3 cour de Rohan. Bataille is at real risk from Kotchoubey’s husband.

1944
He regularly meets, as he is accustomed to do, with friends like Leiris and Queneau. He co-writes a film script, now lost. His co-author leaves the following record of Bataille’s appearance:

A very handsome face, a gentle voice, a very abstract way of moving in space, at once present and absent. When he spoke about the most everyday things, the impression he gave, without being aware of it, was that he was about to impart something of the utmost importance.

He publishes Memorandum, a collage of Nietzsche’s later writings. 

Bataille keeps the diaries that will comprise a large part of On Nietzsche.

In March, Bataille gives the lecture, ‘Discussion on Sin’, based on the ‘Summit and Decline’ section on what would be published as On Nietzsche. Sartre, Klossowski, Blanchot and many others present. Here, Bataille meets Sartre for the first time. The men meet on several occasions thereafter.

In April 1944, he leaves the studio, moving out of Paris to the rue de Coin-Musard in Samois, near Fontainebleau, close to the house Diane Kotchoubey was living in. He visits her by bike. At the time he is often alone and miserable.

Marcel reviews Inner Experience more or less favourably. But he accuses Bataille of complacency and self-satisfaction.

Guilty is published.

Bataille is very ill in this period. He writes Julie. He also begins to write poetry, mostly at Samois. Some bear witness to his love for Diane Kotchoubey. He publishes Alleluia, a collection of poems, apparently reply to the questions she asked him (so Surya).

In October, he leaves Samois for Paris, taking a flat at 16 rue de Condé. He spends winter 1944-1945 there.

1945
In early 1945, Bataille leaves Paris for Vézelay, where he will live for several years with Kotchoubey, who had left her husband. He will remain there until 1949.

On Nietzsche published.

Blanchot commences an apparently largely epistolatory affair with Denise Rollin, which will continue until her death in 1978.

Just after the war, the journal Fontaine publishes extracts from ‘Method of Meditation’ under the title ‘Devant un ciel vide’, ‘Before an Empty Sky’. Alongside this text, Bataille is also writing the fictional texts that will appear first as The Hatred of Poetry and, later, as The Impossible. He befriends Giacometti, Michaux and Merleau-Ponty and begin editing Critique. The Hatred of Poetry appears in 1947.