Wollin on Bataille and Left Fascism

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T H E I N H E R IT A N C E OF T H E G E R M A N R I GH T

LEFT FASCISM: GEORGES BATAILLEAND TH E GERMAN IDEOLOGYRichard Wolin

How does o ne keep from being fascist, even (especially) when o ne believesoneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and ouracts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out thefascism that is ingrained in our behavior?Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-OedipusIt [is] simply dishonest to praise piously the dimension of the h eterogeneousin the writings of on e of th e great w riters of th e centu ry . . .wholly deletingthe most unassimilable fragment of his oeuvre.Jeffrey M ehlman (with reference to Maurice Blanchot), inLegacies of Anti-Semitism in France

IIn an essay that has often been considered a touchstone for th e multifariousdebates during the 1980sover the m erits of modernity vs. postm odernity,Jiirgen Habermas brands French poststructuralism as a type of youngconservatism. His remarks - which a re far from uncontroversial - ead asfollows:

The young conservatives embrace the fundamental experience of aestheticmodernity - the disclosure of a decentered subjectivity freed from allconstraints of rational cognition and purposiveness, from all imperatives oflabor and utility - and in this way break out of the modern world. Theythereby ground a n intransigent antimodernism through a modernist attitude.They transpose the spontaneous power of the imagination, the experience ofself and affectivity, into the remote and the archaic; and in manicheanfashion, they coun terpose to instrumen tal reason a principle only accessiblevia evocation: be it the will to power o r sovereignty, Being or the Dionysianpower of the poetic. In France this trend leads from Georges Bataille toFoucault and Derrida. T he spirit [Ceist]of Nietzsche tha t was reawaken ed inthe 1970s of course hovers over them all.Th e epithet young conservative has often been m isconstrued by critics.

Since Habermass characterization of the poststructuralists occurs in thecontext of a d iscussion of neoconservatism as a political force in the UnitedConstellations Volume 2 , No 3, 19%. 0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 19%. Published by Blackwell Publishers.I 0 8 Cowley Road, Oxford O X 4 I J F , U K and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, M A 02142, USA.


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398 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996States and Europe during the 1980s, it has often been assumed that heconsiders the aforem entioned French theorists as neoconservative-whichis of course far from true.2 Instead, his comparison refers to a group ofright-wing - n tru th, eithe r fascist or proto-fascistic -German intellectualswho played an enormously influential, subversive role in the waning yearsof the W eimar Republic. Am ong their nu mber one would have to include:Ernst Junger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Ludwig Klages, ErnstNiekisch, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, and the members of the Tat( T h e D e e d ) ~ i r c l e . ~f equal importance is the fact that there aresignificant aspects of the philosopher Martin Heideggers critique ofmodernity that bear profound affinities with their doctrine^.^ One couldbest summarize the role played by Germanys so-called conservativerevolutionaries by saying that they contributed decisively t o th e spiritualpreparation for G erm an National Socialism. I t was their withering critiqueof modernity, their indictment of the purportedly Western ideas ofreason, liberalism, individualism, constitutionalism - n sum, of a decadentand moribund bourgeois Zivilzkation (that had, moreover, been graftedunwillingly upon German Kultur by th e victorious allies at Versailles) -t h a tdid much to undermine intellectually what little support remained forGermanys fledgling democracy in the late 1920s and early 1930s.It is worth pointing ou t that H abe rm as is not alone in having perceivedth e intellectual affinities betw een the critique of reason tha t was fashionablein the concluding years of Weimar and contemporary French theory.Manfred Frank has also remarked on the striking conceptual parallelsbetween the two curre nts in question. A s Frank observes: Postmodernismand antimodernism perfidiously join hands. This is also the case withlogocentrism: [Ludwig] Klages and the new anti-intellectualism [Geist-feindlichkeit] of our day agree in the affect against the achievements ofWestern rationality. Throug h the allusion to Klages, Frank alludes t othe telltale fact tha t the ter m logocentrism -t h a t lamen t against which hasbecome the hallmark of Derridas deconstruction - was itself coined byKlages in his work of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Der Gezkt alsWidersacher der Seele (The Intellect asAntagonist of the Soul). According toFra nk, th e theoretical position shared by poststructuralism an d the G er m ancritics of civilization in the 1920swas that rationality and reason, which thepost-enlightenment tradition perceived as a balm for the ills of humanity,represent instead the primary source an d origin of those very ills.To spea k of intellectual affinities between Germanys young conservativesand the French postmoderns, while suggestive, as yet tells us relativelylittle. There could indeed be more substantive differences between thesetwo groupings than similarities. Prima facie, their respective politicalleanings could not b e mo re opposed: w hile the proto-fascism of the Germancritics of reason and civilization is plain, their French counterparts would@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 19%


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Geo rges Bataille and the Ger ma n Ideology: Richard Wo lin 399seem to be the authentic philosophical heirs of the spirit of May 6fL6Assuch, their theories incline toward a philosophical anarchism that isresolutely anti-statist. The embrace of an authoritarian state, as practicedby the G erm an young conservatives, would in their case be something verydifficult t o imagine.And yet, the aforementioned parallels between German right andFrench left intellectual milieus come into focus if we consider the figurewho is generally recognized as the major theoretical forebear of post-structuralism, Georges Bataille. Bataille: by day the unassuming librarianat th e Bibliotheque Nationale specializing in medieval collections; at night,mystic, occultist, heretic, novelist, libertine and champion of erotism ;founder of a secret society (AcCphale, or head-less), as well as thefamed C ollege of Sociology; antagonist an d occasional ally of AndrC Bretonand the surrealists (though m ore often the former); mem ber of the avant-garde anti-Stalinist group, La Critique Sociale, founded by BorisSouvarine; and (of greatest interest from the standpoint of the presentinvestigation) co-founder of the short-lived anti-fascist group Contre-Attaque, which made no secret of its desire to fight fascism via theemployment of fascist means; Bataille, who, according to contemporaryand kindred sp irit Pierre K lossowski, w anted abo ve all to cre ate a religionwithout god. 7Th e assimilation of Batailles texts beca me a rite of passage for an entiregeneration of French intellectuals who w anted to break decisively with th ehumanistic implications of Sartrian existentialism; a generation thatwanted, above all, to have quit with Sartres antiquated modernism: thatis, with h is valorization of subjectivity, the individual, freedo m, a nd aprogressivist philosophy of history. T his was the generation of structuralistsand poststructuralists that included (among Sartres contemporaries)Claude LCvi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, as well as their renownedsuccessors, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard. BothDe rrida an d Foucault ha ve bequeath ed passionate early texts in which theircoming to grips with Batailles legacy proved t o be a form ative experienceof the highest order.8 In sum , Bataille (1897-1962) represents t he crucialtransitional figure from o n e generation of French cultural radicalism to thenext. A s on e critic has ob served , Batailles influence has been pervasive onthe present generation of radical critics and writers in Paris. . . .T he logicdeveloped by B ataille . , . links th e twenties context to a later generationof radical critics, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, JacquesDerrida, and the Tel Quel group.9Like Germanys young conservatives, Bataille came of age in theinterwar period that witnessed a radical disillusionment with Europeancultural ideals. For this generation, on either side of the Rhine, it was asthough the carnage of the First World War had turned Nietzsches@ Blackwell Publishers L td . 1996


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400 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996apocalyptic prophecies concerning the adven t of Euro pean nihilism - heprocess whereby th e highest Western cultural ideals devalue themselves-into a reality. Germanys longstanding resistance to the values of ademocratic political culture are w ell known. With its humiliating defea t inthe G reat W ar, the free acceptance of such un-German, W estern idealsbecame even more difficult, so great was the blow to its collectivenarcissism. Instead, on the Right, a cultural consensus was rapidlyestablished that was in full accord with Nietzsches denunciatory verdict:Christianity, democracy, socialism, positivism - all were life-denyingexpressions of a moribund civilization that had forsaken a heroic ethos infavor of bourgeois timorousness and mediocrity. This accounts for thesituation of Germ an political culture in the aftermath of World W ar I thatfacilitated the triumph of a proto-fascistic, conservative revolutionaryreading of Nietzsche- reading that was vigorously endorsed and purveyedby virtually all of the young conservatives, from Spengler to CarlSchmitt.*Did th ere exist a parallel set of historical conditions across the Rh ine thatmight account, mutatis mutandis, for an analogous antipathy am ong Frenchintellectuals to the values of a democratic political culture? Given thelongstanding French attachment to republican ideals, dating back at leastto Year I of the Revolution (1792), one would be tempted to offer a lesspessimistic verdict. However, such conjectu re would be misguided. Thoughthe Third Republic spanned some sixty-eight years, it could hardly bedescribed as a model of political stability. The threat of a monarchistcounterrevolution haunted the nascent republic until 1875, when aconstitution was finally promulgated. The decade of the 1880s witnessedboth the m enace of Boulangism - legitimate precursor of the fascist massmovements of the tw entieth century - s well a s the publication of EdouardDrumonts enormously influential La France juive, a work that easilysurpassed in anti-Semitic virulence anything that had been produced to d atein C entral Eu rop e. In the following decade occurred the Dreyfus affair- heveritable turning point for the development of twentieth-century Frenchpolitical culture. It became the event that caused notables on both e nds ofthe political spectrum to line up on either side of the still much unlovedrepublic; a milestone in French political life of such enduring culturalsignificance that some forty years afte r th e colonels rehabilitation, asCharles Maurras was convicted of treason by a French military courtfollowing World War 11, he could only cry out: Cest la revanche deDreyfus!Equally important, however, was the fact that the affair set a fatefulprecedent for the political manipulation of anti-Semitic sentiment inmodern politics. As Ha nn ah A rendt remarks, It [anti-Semitism] had beentried out previously in B erlin an d V ienna, by A hlwardt an d Stoeck er, by@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


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Georges Bataille and the Germ an Ideology: Richard Woli n 401Schoenerer and Lueger, but nowhere was its efficacy more clearly provedt h a n i n F ~ a n c e . ~It was in the afterm ath of Dreyfuss rehabilitation tha t So rel conv erted fromsocialism to the proto-fascism of the Action Franqaise - an oscillation inpolitical loyalty that would prov e prototypical for a great many tw entieth-century political actors. In the estimation of Sore l, once th e socialists hadrallied to the aid of the Republic, their ultimately non-revolutionary,reformist essence stood unmasked for all to see. This unheroic embrace ofthe spirit of parliamentarianism was something of which the legendaryrevolutionary syndicalist wanted no part. The Maurrasians greeted Sorelwith op en arm s. Bo th they and th e syndicalists, who in 1911united to formthe Cercle Proudhon, were convinced that democracy was the greatesterror of the last century, and that if one wishes to preserve and toaugment the moral, intellectual and material capital of civilization, it isabsolutely necessary to destroy th e dem ocratic institution^"'^ -which wereviewed by bo th Right a nd Left as a political vehicle employ ed by big capitaland the bourgeoisie to suppress the interests of French workers. The fluidalliance of S orelians and M aurassians -of Left and Right -would becometh e pro totyp e for m any similar political crossovers of the interwar period.Th e Cercle Proudhon purveyed an authentic national socialism some tenyears in advance of its better known G erm an variant.In France, such tendencies would come to fruition in the avowedlynational socialist Faisceau founded by Georges Valois in the mid-twenties. T h e time for action - a keyword for Fren ch fascism -was nowripe, and th e Faisceau was established t o m eet this challenge. It was in itspassion for avowedly fascist ideals and means that the Faisceau came tooutstrip, at least temporarily, the Action Franqaise -with its antiquarianmonarchism and its quaint literary pretensions - among French rightists.Valoiss political aims - a total revolution that would be a negation ofthe whole political, economic and social philosophy of the nineteenthcenturyI6-would a de cade later culminate directly in th e infamo us derivefasciste of B ergery, D k at, an d D o r i ~ t . ~h e Faisceau was o ne of th e firstfascist groupings openly to recognize th e essential kindredness of Bolshevismand fascism (her e, to o, M ussolinis political biography - ot t o ment ion theinspiration provided by his pseudo-heroic march on Rome -was crucial):both were reactions to the plutocratic spirit that had taken hold of thenations of Eu rop e; both proclaimed a new spirit of militarism and struggle -in the words of the de corated veteran Valois, the law of the comb atant -that would leave the languorous comforts of a decadent bourgeois socialorder far behind.Observing the underlying kindredness between these two nominallyopposed ideological camps, Zeev Sternhell has remarked: All authenticfascists in the following twenty years [i.e., from 1925 on] behaved in a@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


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402 Constellations Volume 2 , Number 3, 1996similar manner. Up to the Second World War, and often during the waryears themselves, their hatred of bourgeois Europe was stronger than theiropposition to communism.8 Thus, in the latter years of the ThirdRepublic, Left and Right alike felt a distaste for the lukewarm and werefascinated by the idea of a violent relief from medi~crity.~et, theideological groundwork for this intertwining of political extremes had beenlaid years before. Proudhon and Ptguy were icons for the syndical Leftand the neo-monarchist Right alike because they had addressed, in theirvery different ways, the limitations and frustrations of parliamentaryrepublicanism that had occupied the thoughts of earlier generations aswell.20It was the same ideological kindredness- one which well reflects thefundamentally antiliberal tenor of European social thought of the period -that was captured by Drieu La Rochelles felicitously titled 1934 classic,Le Sociulismefasciste.21A moribund bourgeois democratic polity, character-ized by individualism, divisiveness, predatory economic conditions, lack ofpatriotism, etc., was to be replaced by a new authoritarian regime-Fascism- organized along corporatist lines. Socialism would insure that harshlyexploitative economic relations, predicated o n the dominance of inter-national finance capital, would be mitigated in a way that took into accountthe economic rights of the French lower middle classes. The petit-bourgeoissocialism of Proudhon, astutely lampooned by Marx, also forms a cruciallink (thus, it was hardly an accident that the 1911 merger of rightists andleftists in France decided on the name Cercle Proudhon). Here, too, theparallels between French fascism of the interwar period and the fraternal,contemporary German fascist orders - he National Bolshevism of ErnstNiekisch, the left wing of the Nazi Party (the wing headed by the Strasserbrothers that took the socialist component of National Socialism quiteseriously), not to mention Jungers fascination with the total state asembodied in the Soviet five-year plan - are far from fortuitous.

I1The 1930s were crucible years for Bataille as a writer and engagedintellectual. It was a period of maturation in which he displays remarkablebursts of creative energy which found their way into novels (L e Bleu deCiel), essays that remain today exemplars of French cultural theory (LaNotion de dtpense, La Structure psychologique de fascisme, Le Valeurde usage de D. A. F. de Sade), and the establishment of legendary avant-garde cultural groupings such as Counter-Attack, the College of Sociology,and Actphale. And yet, unless one appreciates the extent to which theThird Republic - and, more importantly, the Enlightenment ideals forwhich it stood - had been intellectually delegitimated during this period,@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 19%


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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 403culminating in grave political assaults from both left a nd right, o n e will behard pressed to understand the field of cultural-political options thatpresented themselves t o Bataille at this specific historical conju ncture .O n e of the intellectual traits that ties Bataille most closely to theGerman young conservatives is his affect against the universal - anattitude that leads directly t o a valorization of affect as such against theuniversal.22 Heidegg er (whose determ inate ties to G ermanys youngconservatives I have sought t o portray elsewhere) can remark in all candor:Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorifiedfor centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought; a statementthat could be taken as emblematic for an entire generation of Germanintellectual^.^^ I t is the same Heidegger who would observe in the mid-1950s: Bataille is today the best thinking m ind in France.24 T h e

conservative revolutionaries proffer a quasi-existentialist endorsement ofaffect, life, and experiential immediacy versus what is mediated andreflexive. These anti-intellectual intellectuals (recalling Franks allusion toGeistfeindlichkeit) associate reason with calculative thinking orinstrumental reason tout court. On this basis, the aims of reason in itspractical employment (Kant) - easons role as an arbiter in t he dom ainsof political jud gm ent , mora lity, and law - re similarly rejected o u t of hand.In B atailles understanding, th e dialectic of enlightenment promotes thevalue-ideals of a homogeneous society: a totalizing vision of seamless orde rthat cannot help but repress the vitalistic cosmic forces of irregularity andchaos from w hich nearly everything of cultural interest derives. I n the 1930stherefore, Bataille can state, laconically and une uivocally: It is time toabandon the world of the civilized an d its light.2In Speng ler, to o, the Enlightenm ent glorification of theoretical thoughtserves only t o alienate hum anity from th e healthy naturalness of immediatelife, as yet unsundered by the quintessentially modern mindhody dualism.T h e essential problem may b e traced back t o an intellectualist civilizationwhich has fallen under the spell of the unconditional monarchy of theeye. As he observes in the spirit of Bataille:

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The animal microcosm, in which existence and consciousness are joined in aself-evident unity of living, knows of consciousness only us the servant ofexistence. T he animal lives simply and do es not reflect upon life. Owing,however, to the unconditional monarchy of the eye, life is presented as thelife of a visible entity in the light. . . . Instead of straight, uncomplicatedliving, we have the antithesis represented in the phrase thought andaction.26Only forms of human expression that are non-conceptual, such as music,could break up the steely tyranny of light, Spengler continues, thusperpetuating a legacy of German Kulturkritik privileging the non-@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


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404 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996intellectual, intuitive properties of musical experience deriving fromSchopenhauer and the young Nietzsche. In lieu of such a monumentalcultural reversal of the relation between the theoretical and thesensual, argues Spengler, we are condemned to endure the fatalhegemony of visual thought, of the sovereignty of theMoreover, the cultural attitudes of both Spengler and Bataille are linkedby an aesthetics of violence that is highly characteristic of the frontgeneration. In a key passage in The Decline of the West, Spengler,depicting the life-world of blood and instinct that had been repressed bythe Faustian spirit of modernity, observes: War is the primary politics ofeverything that lives and so much so that in the de ths battle and life areone, and being and will-to-battle expire together.2 Similarly, for Junger,War is an intoxication beyond all bonds. It is a frenzy without cautions andlimits, comparable only to the forces of nature.29Bataille (the meaning ofhis name in French should be recalled), too, is convinced, that conflict islife. Mans value depends upon his aggressive strength. A living manregards death as the fulfillment of life; he does not see it as a misfortune.. , , I MYSELF AM WAR.30 As Jay observes in this connection: on adeeper level, the war [World War I] seems to have exercised a certainpositive fascination [on Bataille]. For it is striking that many of Bataillesobsessive themes would betray an affinity for the experiences of degrada-tion, pollution, violence and communal bonding that were characteristic oflife in the trenche~.~In the worldview of both Bataille and that of German young con-servatives, war plays an essential, positive role. It serves as a means ofdissolving the principium individuationis: the principle of bourgeoissubjectivity, on which the homogeneous order of society - a world ofloneliness and fragmentation - depends. For, according to Bataille, thegeneral movement of life is . . . accomplished beyond the demands ofindividual^."^^ It is in precisely this spirit that he celebrates the non-utilitarian nature of combat or war as a type of aestheticist end in itself:Glory . . . expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of measurelessexpenditure of energy, which the fervor of combat presupposes. Combat isglorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment.33For thesame reasons, Bataille eulogizes those premodern wamer societies inwhich ure, uncalculated violence and ostentatious forms of combat heldsway. For under such conditions, war was not made subservient to thevulgar ends of enterprise and accumulation, as is the case for modern-dayimperialism, but served as a glorious end in itself.Yet, in the early 1930s, it was precisely this aestheticist celebration ofviolence for violences sake, or war for wars sake, that Benjaminviewed as the essence of modem fascism. As he remarks in a well knownpassage:

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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 405Fiat ars - ereat mundus, says fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expectswar to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has beenchanged by technology. . . . Mankind, which in Homers time was an objectof contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience itsown destructionas an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics whichfascism is rendering a e ~ th e ti c. ~ In Batailles though t w ar serves as th e harbinger of a cultu ral transfigura-tion in which the primacy of self-subsistent subjectivity w ould be replacedby the values of an unavowable or ecstatic community: that is, acommunity that would no longer be governed by the goals of a visualculture - transparency, self-identity, etc. - but instead, those of self-laceration, difference, an d finitude. In fact, this Bataille-inspired program

of an ecstatic community has been quite explicitly carried forth andexplored in the political writings of Maurice Blanchot (L a Communautkinavouable; 1983) and Jean-Luc Nancy (La Communautk dboeuvrke;1985).Via his theory of general economics - which stands opposed to therestricted, rational-purposive orientation of a capitalist economy -Bataille, too, embraces a type of vitalism. In The Accursed Share, forexample, h e sp eaks confidently from th e standpoint of the exuberance oflife, of the exuberance of living ma tter as a whole.36 Y et, his is less aphilosophical vitalism than that of a theorist of culture who allows himselfto be guided by a certain anthropological romanticism: by a tendency toproject anachronistically contemporary societys need for wholeness andunity upon premodern forms of life that are on this account viewed in aquasi-utopian light.Batailles understanding of the prospects for a return of the sacred isrelatively pluralistic. T h e revitalization of any one of a number of rites andoccult practices tha t have been summ arily banned by the rise of modernitysinstrumentally rationalist culture (Weber) will do. Thus, in Bataillestheory of expenditure (dkpense), war is only one of a number ofpossibilities for radical cultural transgression; other possibilities include:luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments,gam es, specta cles, arts , perve rse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genitalfinality) - ll of these are , according to B ataille, activities which, a t leastin primit ive c ircumstances, have no end beyond t h e m s e l v e ~ . ~ ~Yet, in addition to his endorsement of varieties of non-purposive ritual,Bataille is of sorts a disciple of negative theology. As a counterweight tomodernity he is in favor of generalized profanation: any practice thatfurthers the end s of a general rather than restricted economy (whereeconomy is anthropologically defined in terms of the general circulation

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406 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996of persons, goods, and symbols) will do. All instances of profanation thatgratuitously disrupt the smooth functioning of productive consumption -the reign of the Tuuschprinzip- ar e eagerly welcomed. He nce , in Batailleswork the heterogeneous (along with sovereignty) can best be definedex negativo: as whatever stands opposed to or helps to undermine ourmodern cult of the homogeneous: contem porary capitalism and its anod ynecultural analogues (such as art for arts sake), which know no wantonexpenditure, but instead adhere to the bourgeois principle of equivalentexchange.However, as a result of the ethos of transgression that is propagated inBatailles work - a quasi-aestheticist valorization of transgression fortransgressions sake - one encounters serious normative lacunae. Onemight even go so far as to say, echoing Tony Judt, that aspects of Bataillesthought a re redolent of a more general and long-standing vacuum at theheart of public ethics in France, the marked absence of a concern withpublic ethics or political morality.38 I have already spoken of his work asan unsurpassable normative point of reference for much of post-structuralism. Here, anti-normativism itself becomes normative,insofar as rejection of the norm becomes itself a source of normativity. Inrecent years, as poststructuralists have begun meditating on t h e problem ofhow one would go about constituting a non-totalitarian political comm unity- communautk inavouable (Blanchot) or dksoeuvrke (J-L. Nancy), as it hasbeen called - it is, unsurprisingly, to Batailles work that they haveimmediately turned.39 Y et , as Bernard -Henri LCvy has cautioned inrelation to this avowedly illiberal, new organicism or communitarian-ism:

Organicism. Naturalism. Refusal of universal values. Denial of values purelyand simply. . . . It is on these bases, on this mute foundation, that onedeploys a cover of horror that is more somber and infinitely more clamorous.. . . I will have attained my objective when I have succeeded in convincingthat fascism is no t in the first instance barbarism; that is it not essentially andto begin with the apocalypse; that it does not always and of necessity meanstorms of iron and blood. Instead, it is in the first instance a type of society, amodel of community, a manner of thinking and of organizing the socialbond.40It is precisely Batailles ecstatic model of community, his manner ofthinking and of organizing the social bond, that I wish to call intoquestion. It is a model that, fundamentally and undeniably, seeks toestablish th e normative basis of social action on an aesthetic founda tion. Assuch its guiding ethos would be an aesthetics of transgression. Bataillesecstatic community would also be an aesthetic community: it would be acomm unity in which th e type of social action th at would be valued above all

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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 407would be action that yielded no return, action that - n the manner of artfor arts sake - had no end beyond itself.In the last analysis, the celebration of transgression for transgressionssake remains unn uanc ed, unqualified, an d uncritical. In lieu of a conceptualarticulation of how on e would begin t o differentiate betw een, shall we say,salutary and retrogra de instances of transgression, we ar e left with an etho sof shock, rupture , and disrup tion, purely an d simply. In essence, Bataille -and those wh o have followed in his footsteps - eeks to ground an ethics ofpostmodernity in an avant-garde cultural practice that draws heavily onprecapitalist forms of social life, precisely those forms that have beenscorned and tabooed by the process of modernization. Indeed, the verydesideratum of an adequate conceptual articulation of Bataillesqueconcepts such as sovereignty, heterogeneity, expenditure, and soforth would am ount to a contrudictio in adjecto. In Batailles sense , th e verycall for principled legitimation would stand convicted a priori of indebted-ness to the logic of productive consumption, to the values of a societypredicated o n instrumental reason and equivalent exchange.Such considerations return us to Habermass claim concerning theaffinities between poststructuralism and the young conservatives. Bothtranspose th e spontaneous power of the imagination, th e experience of selfand affectivity, into the rem ote an d the archaic; an d in Manichean fashion,they counterpose to instrumental reason a principle only accessible viaevocation: be it the will t o power o r sovereignty, Being or the Dionysianpower of the poetic. In other words, both ground an intransigentan t imodern ism through a modern is t a t t i t~de .~

I11In order to appreciate the pivotal position Bataille occupies in theintellectual life of twentieth century France one must view his work inrelation t o th e legacy of Mausss and Durkh eims theory of religion.It was M ausss work tha t directly s pu rred Batailles own fascination withthe notions of sacrifice and the gift. For it was the practices of ritualsacrifice and gift-giving that would form the basis for Batailles own majorconceptual innovation during the 1930s and 1940s, innovations thatculminated in this theories of waste and of the accursed share (fapartrnaudite).In his M oral Con clusions to The Gi ft, Mauss offers a poignant en treatyon behalf of the world we have lost. He suggests how greatly our modernsocial relations have been impoverished by the substitution of a rationaleconomic system for a system in which exchange of goods was not amechanical but a moral transaction, bringing about and maintainingpersonal relationships between individuals and groups.42T he integrity of@ Blackwell Publishers Lid. 1996


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408 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996the mdral side of exchange has been systematically decimated by the whollyimpersonal reign of commodity production in modern societies, lamentsMauss, in an anthropological pendant to the Marxian critique of politicaleconomy. For in premodern circumstances, where the economy was not yetentirely divorced from its embeddedness in the religious life of thecommunity, economic action, or the exchange of goods, still preserved aparamount moral function; that is, it continued to play an essential role inthe maintenance and reproduction of social cohesion or group solidarity.Conversely, under circumstances of modern capitalism, there arises asociety of pure competition- an economic bellum omnium contra omnes -in which the natural bases of social solidarity have been frayed to the pointof collapse. As Mauss observes in a spirit of fin-de-sikcle Kulturkritik:

It is only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into aneconomic animal. . . . Homo oeconomicus is not behind us, but before us,like the moral man, the man of duty, th e scientific man and th e reasonableman. For a long time man was something quite different; and it is not so longnow since he became a machine - a calculating mach ine.43This proto-Weberian lament concerning the fragmentation of modern life isaccompanied by an unweberian valorization of those premodern com-munities where the totality of life remains relatively intact. In suchcommunities, economic life was never specialized and one-sided. Instead, itrepresented a total social phenomenon, incorporating religious, aesthetic,legal, moral, as well as economic aspects. Such societies betray an economiceffervescence which has little about it that is materialistic; it is much lessprosaic than our sale and purchase, hire of services and speculations.44 nsum, whatever their failings and limitations may be, they display a well-roundedness and balance that is woefully lacking in their moderncounterparts, governed as they are by the single-minded pursuit of utilityand profit.. They exude a robust social health that is singularly wanting insocieties dominated by the division of labor. In a passage that would havesignificant repercussions for many subsequent anthropological critiques ofmodernity- rom Bataille and LCvi-Strauss to Baudrillard and contemporarypostmodern ethnography - Mauss places special emphasis on the well-developed aesthetic sensibility that permeates social life in such societies:

the dances performed, the songs and shows, the dramatic representationsgiven between camps or partners, the objects made, used, decorated,polished, amassed and transmitted with affection, received with joy, givenaway in trium ph, the feasts in which everyone participates - ll these . . . arethe source of aesthe tic emotions as well as emotions aroused by interests.45Mausss vivid descriptions of sacrifice, potlatch, gift-giving and othersteadfastly non-utilitarian forms of ritual were clearly the most important

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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 409sources of Batailles own theory of expenditure, his notion of societysinterest in varieties of nonprod uctive consumption. Ye t, in a sense that isfar from trivial, Mausss conclusions are unproblematical in a way thatBatailles are not. For Mauss seeks merely to restore an elemen t of balancein an advanced industrial society whose relation t o non-instrumental formsof social interaction has become tenuous to non-existent. As such, onemight say that Mausss position serves as a welcome and salient correctiveto the debilitating one-dimensionality of these societies.Batailles own stance is in fact quit e different. His critique of modernitysees itself neither as a palliative nor as a mere corrective, but instead as atype of (non-Heg elian) supersession, on e which would b e in keeping withthe idea of t r a n s g r e ~ s i o n . ~ ~n effect, Bataille appeals for a total breakwith the logic of modernity. He calls into qu estion n ot only the narrow nessof its econom ic terms, but its status as a form of life: h e rejects its cultural,political, legal, ethical, and aesthetic aspects. His theory tends, therefore,toward a totalizing diagnosis of modernity that, for this reason, bears keysimilarities with t h e Zivilisationskritik of the G erm an conservative revolu-tionaries. Both they and Bataille share an ethos of total criticism. Bothbelieve that since the shortcomings of the modem age can neither beremedied piecemeal nor from within, only an ethos of total contestationwould be appropriate.Batailles stren gths as a Zivilisationskritiker ar e manifest most clearly in histransfiguration of the anthropolitical motifs one finds in Durkheim andMauss. W hat is lacking in civilization is that which in prem odern societiesmade life most valuable: proximity to the sacred, which, one might say,accounts for th e difference between life lived with intensity and m ere life.The keywords Bataille uses to refer to this exalted state in which theprinciple of individuation collapses and man is able to transcend his(modern) isolation and loneliness are immanence, intimacy, innerexperience. H enc e, Batailles tremen dous fascination with those m om entsof experiential intensity or transcendence where the barrier between thesacred and th e profane is breached. Fo r him such mom ents are epitomizedin the eminently non-utilitarian acts of sacrifice a nd gift-giving.Yet, they ar e not l imited to such acts. There a re other forms of violentpleasure that assist equally in overturn ing the reign of utility. F o r the latterproduces only tepid, moderate forms of pleasure, which pertain either tothe acquisition of goods o r to t he frankly timorous, negative definition ofpleasure as a minimization of pain. According to Bataille, conversely,hu m an society [has] an interest in considerable losses, in catastro phe s tha t,while conforming to well-defined needs, provoke tumultuous depressions,crises of dread, and, in the final analysis, a certain orgiastic state. Suchinstances of cataclysm and destruction represent paradigmatic instances of@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 19%


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410 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996nonproductive expenditure. As such, they give vent to the satisfaction ofdisarmingly savage needs which subsist only at the limits of horror. In allsuch instances, the accent is placed on a loss that must be as great aspossible in order for that activity to take on its true meaning.47For onlysuch an uncompromising emphasis on loss would serve as an adequateprophylactic against the temptations of accumulation- hat is, against thetimorous productive consumption of goods. As Bataille observes:

Everything that was generous, orgiastic, and excessive has disappeared; thethemes of rivalry upon which individual activity still depend develop inobscurity, and are as shameful as belching. The representatives of thebourgeoisie have adopted an unobtrusive manner; wealth is now displayedbehind closed doors in accordance with depressing and boring conventions.. . . Such trickery has become the principal reason for living, working, andsuffering for those who lack the courage to condemn this moldy society torevolutionary destruction.

Thus, in trying to maintain sterility in regard to expenditure, in conformitywith a reasoning that balances accounts, bourgeois society has onlymanaged to develop a universal It is in passages such as thesethat Batailles profound identification with Nietzsches lament concerning amodern age in which the heroic values of agon, struggle, risk, and crueltyhave all but vanished becomes undeniably clear.These reflections lead us to the problems endemic to Batailles uncriticalemployment of Mausss ethnographic accounts of sacrifice and the gift. ForBataille the glory of these two forms of ritual lies in their gratuitousness: aspractices they are totally removed from the ends of utility or productiveexpenditure. They give expression to those moments when society revels inloss qua loss. Most importantly, however, they entail a transfiguration ofthe profane or the everyday that borders on apotheosis: he (or she) who issacrificed crosses over the line separating the sacred from the profane.Henceforth, she (or he) becomes a demigod and is permitted to dwellamong the gods. The profane world is, for Bataille, a thing-world, asphere of life overly beholden to mundane considerations of use. There weare primarily immersed in a cycle of fate: that of the production andreproduction - with little solace or consolation - of mere life. Sacrificerestores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, renderedprofane. In fact, all religion is purely a matter of detaching from the realorder, from the poverty of things, and of restoring the divine order. Whenviewed from the standpoint of nonproductive consumption or generaleconomics, acts of destruction (sacrifice, potlatch, war, violence, etc.) havean ennobling role to play. For destruction serves to emancipate both objects

and persons from the profane considerations of use. As Bataille remarks,Destruction is the best means of negating a utilitarian relation . . 490 Blackwell Publishers Ltd . 1996

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Georg es Bataille and the Germ an Ideology: Richard W olin 411Hence, the real benefit of sacrifice or gift-giving lies in the fact that itproduces a restoration of intimacy: a kind of proximity to the sacredreminiscent of Heideggerian Nuhe (nearness to Being). As Batailleexplains:T h e victim is a surplus taken from the m ass of useful wealth. And he can onlybe withdrawn from i t . in o rd er t o be consu me d profit lessly, and thereforeutterly d estroyed . On ce chosen, he is the accursed share, destined f or violentconsu mp tion. Bu t the curse tears him away from the order ofthings; it giveshim a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, theprofundity of living beings. . . . This was the price m en paid to es cape theirdownfall and rem ove the wei ht introduce d in them by the avarice and coldcalculation of the real orde r . %Yet, in his celebratory discussions of sacrifice, potlatch, and so forth,Bataille fundamentally misconstrues the historical and contextual para-meters of such ritual practices. O n e could even go so far as to say that, in acertain measure, Batailles understanding of these phenom ena succumbs toa type of primitivism: he decontextualizes the cultural practices heanalyzes in order the better to incorporate them within his own theoreticalagenda of his own critique of modernity. H ere, Bataille seeks nothing lessthan an an thropology tha t will itself provide a living- nd orgiastic -mythto overturn, through its experience on a collective level, modern sterilebourgeois society. 51Bataille chooses to view sacrifice and gift-giving in the first instance asgratuitous, non-utilitarian, or, as he puts it, having no ends beyondthemselves - but this is far from the case. While he is correct incharacterizing such practices as unrelated to the production of wealth, theyare very much oriented toward the reproduction of existing relations ofpow er . Th e a ct of hum an sacrifice as practiced am ong the A ztecs redoundsto th e credit of th e sacrificer(s): it reinforc es existing relations of authority,viz., the authority of those w ho a re empow ered to commission a sacrifice(in this case, th e priests an d aristocracy). It provides those in autho rity with

a quasi-divine power to preside over life and death. In this sense, it ismisleading to claim that sacrifice has no end beyond itself.A n an alogous criticism may be mad e of Batailles discussion of potlatch -the public, demonstrative destruction of wealth - and gift-giving. Onlythose who possess great wealth can in reality afford to destroy it.Con sequently, th e option t o engage in potlatch does not exist for th e poorerstrata of such societies.52 Ac ts of potlatch are no less implicated in thereproduction of an existing social hierarchy. A t issue is th e reinforcement ofthe social status or prestige of the o ne wh o destroys his or her wealth. Inalmost all cases, those who practice potlatch are drawn from the upperstrata of society. Those who must witness the potlatch are in effect@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


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412 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996humiliated: they are vividly reminded of their lowly rank in the socialorder.The same, of course, is true of the practice of gift-giving. The gifts inquestion a re not freely bestow ed, as it were, with n o ulterior en d in view.Bataille seizes on the aspect of gift-giving that serves his purposes. For,strictly speaking, gift-giving is not an e con om ic transaction. It is neith er a nact of barter, nor does it aim a t the enhancement of social wealth. Instead,with the gift it is social relations amo ng persons that a re in the first instanceat issue. But the types of social relations a t sta ke a re relations of power.W hen given in accordance with social ritual, they always com e with stringsattached: unless the gift can be returned in kind, its social function is tohumiliate the recipient. In fact, the entire object of gift-giving as a socialritual is to derogate a nd sha me the recipient by virtue of his o r her inabilityto return a gift of equal value. Gift-giving, too, then must be classified as aritual practice that is in n o sense gratuitous or free. F ar from being a n end initself, as Bataille claims, it is fully implicated in the production andreproduction of social power.Such insights ar e amply confirm ed in th e writings of M auss as well as inthose of other ethnographers. To quote Mauss:

But the motives of such excessive gifts and reckless consumption, such madlosses and destruction of wealth, especially in these potlatch societies, are inno way disinterested. Between vassals and chiefs, between vassals and theirhenchmen, the hierarchy is established by means of these gifts. To give is toshow one s superiority, to show that one is something more and higher, thatone is magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to facesubordination, to become a client and subservient, to become mit~ister.~

IVBatailles conceptual orientation is far from sui generis. T h e key positionshe adopts: the excoriation of liberalism, parliamentarianism, autonomoussubjectivity, the spirit of enlightenment criticism, and, more generally,reason,his impassioned dismissal of the intellectual animus that groun dsFrench republicanism, as well as his positive com mitment to so me form ofecstatic community - all harmonize with a mode of non-conformistcultural criticism that was profound and widespread in France in the1 9 3 0 ~ ~t is, moreover, a discourse concerning whose terms thinkers onboth Right and Left sides of the political spectrum stand in markedagreement. It is a discourse well attuned to a political climate that wasbecoming more and more favorably disposed toward the goals of asocialisme fasciste (D rieu L a Ro chelle), or of a left fascism; a politicalorientation which, far from emerging unexpectedly and ex nihilo, haslongstanding roots in specific French intellectual and cultural traditions. It@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 19%


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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 413was a trajectory of French political culture - one tha t led from thephilosophers of counterrevolution (Maistre, Bonald, etc.) to Proudhon,Drumont, Boulanger, the anti-Dreyfusards, Sorel, Valois, Drieu - hatwould culm inate in the infamous experim ent of Vichy.

Bataille had no personal truck with Vichy; nor, however, was he arbsisfant.Instea d, h e spen t the war y ears (as one is accustomed to saying inthe German context) in inner emigration, preoccupied with literaryconcerns, composing his Summa Atheologica. As one observer hasremarked: All the texts written [by Bataille] during the war years . . .translate into a profound need to disengage himself.56 Here, themo tivations for his retrea t from p ublic life were certainly as much personalas intellectual. In the years immediately preceding the war, he enduredboth the tragic death of his lover, Laure, as well as th e dissolution of theCollege of Sociology, the now legendary gathering of French intellectualsthat Bataille had founded in 1937 with Roger Caillois.Nevertheless, if we take a look at the political positions espoused byBataille during the 1930s, the motif of left fascism takes on a vivid anddisquieting reality.To begin with, there is telling circumstantial evidence. Bataillesbiographer, Michel Surya, has stated that when he began work on his book(Georges Bafaille: La Mort h loeuvre [Paris: Seguier, 1987]), many of hisinterviewees -Batailles contem porarie s included - ssumed quite naturallytha t Bata il le was a fas c i ~ t . ~More damning still are the remarks of the left-wing anti-Stalinist, BorisSouvarine, in whose journal, La Critique sociale, many of Batailles keyessays from the 1930s app eared . In his preface t o th e 1983 republication ofthe review, Souvarine makes the startling claim that Bataille was a fascistsympathizer; and that, m oreover, if hed had t he courage of his convictions,he would h ave rallied to th e cause.*Surely, Souvarine overstates his case.59 Ye t, t he deep er o n e probesBatailles political convictions and allegiances in the 1930s, the moredisconcerting is the overall picture that emerges.

Here, the analysis must begin with an examination of Batailles essay,The Psychological Structure of Fascism, often rightly hailed as atheoretical breakthrough in our understanding of the mass psychologicalappeal of m odern authoritarian rule. Y et, th e essay also contains a barelyveiled admiration for the vitality and energy of the existing fascist states,especially when contrasted with the decadence and inertia of the con-temporary European democracies.Bataille purveys a critique of parliamentarianism that is as zealous asanything one finds in the work of Carl Schmitt. Parliamentary decision-mak ing, he claims, partak es wholly of the order of the homogeneous. It aimssolely at co-optation, the elimination of difference. As such, it is purely@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


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414 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996instrumental and serves primarily to suppress the breakthrough ofheterogeneous elem ents that threaten to explode the normative bases of thegiven economic and political order. As Bataille observes, in a strikinganticipation of Jean-Franqois Lyotards association of consensus andterror: The reduction of differences in parliamentary practice indicatesall the possible complexity of the internal activity of adaptation required byhomogeneity.60Bataille can perceive n o fundam ental differences betweenthe conduct of political and economic life in modern democratic societies,insofar as both are examples par excellence of homogeneity - his despitethe fact that discussion aims at mutual understanding, whereas economicactivity is goal-oriented an d utilitarian .61Given this curt d ismissal of the institutional bases of democracy, it comesas little surprise that Bataille glorifies the role played by fascism in m odernpolitical life as a type of breakthrough of the heterogeneous. For Bataille,the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence.Op posed t o democratic politicians, w ho represent in different countries theplatitude inherent to homogeneous society, Mussolini and Hitler imm edi-ately stand out as something other.62What he admires about these men and the movement they represent isthat they embody a force that situates them above other men, whichaccounts for their sovereignty. Yet, he also esteems greatly theirthoroughgoing antagonism to law: the fact that laws are brok en is only themost obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascistaction.63 H ere, the parallels w ith Schm itts critique of bourgeois legalpositivism are of course profound. Both Schmitt and Bataille view theinstitution of law as the consumm ate embo diment of the spirit of bourgeoisrationalism. It symbolizes everything they detest abou t the reigning socialorder: its prosaic longing for security, its unrevolutionary nature, itsabhorrence of transcendence, its anathematization of the vitality andintensity one finds in the exception (Schmitt) or transgression(Bataille). M oreover, for B ataille the system of law merits especially harshtreatm ent insofar as it signifies a type of consecretion of the profane ord erof things; as such, it stands as an impediment to contact with theheterogeneous o r the sacred.Bataille concludes his endorsem ent of fascist politics with the followingencomium: Heterogeneous fascist action belongs to th e e ntire set of higherforms. It m akes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted andnoble and tends to constitute authority as an unconditional principle,situated above any utilitarian judgment.64 As opposed to the bourgeoisorder of life, which, with its utilitarianism an d its legalism, merely sanctifiesthe prose of th e world, fascism offers a new political aesthetic, the retu rn ,as it were, of an aesthetic politics: a type of politics that reintroducesthe long lost elements of charismatic leadership (in Batailles terms,0 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 415sovereignty), violence, and martial glory. It is, moreover, a politics thatfacilitates a great emotional cathexis between leaders and masses, a pointwhich Bataille emphasizes repeatedly. For one of fascisms great attribute sis tha t it clearly dem ons trates what can b e expected from a timely recourseto reaw aken ed affective forces - orces capable of guaranteeing a measureof collective solidarity , which have been banished from a society in whichthe division of labor and rationalization reign supreme. In sum, fascismserves to reintroduce a type of ecstatic politics into the forlorn anddisenchanted landscape of political modernity, a politics that aims at thecreation of a quasi-Nietzschean ecstatic com munity.H ere, it is well worthwhile to recall th e remarks of Bernard-Henri LCvycited above: [fascism] is in the first instance a type of society, a model ofcommunity, a manner of hinking and of organizing the social bo nd .6sForit is the restoration of th e affective energies an d intensities associated with atype of com mu nitarian social bond prevalent in prem odern societies that isin so many respects the guiding thread of Batailles intellectual oeuvre. Hispreoccupation with sacrifice, the sacred, and, lastly, the possibilities forcultural renew al emb odied in fascist political action, a re comprehen sible inthese terms alone. As one commentator has appropriately remarkedconcerning Batailles a ttem pts to view fascism as a contem pora ry reincarna-tion of the sacred or heterogeneous:

the worship of Otherness which underlies [Batailles] concept of the sacredinevitably leads to an acknowledgement of the attraction historical fascismexerts through the mana of its leaders. The category of the heterogeneous, asBataille defines i t , contains so much that is nature rather than historythat its repeated application to manifestations of fascist power quite clearlyproduce a mythification. . .&In his analysis of the cultural origins of fascism, the philosopher ErnstCassirer makes an analogous point. Basing his work on Malinowskisresearches among the Trobriand islanders, he shows that for purposes ofeveryday problem-solving, common sense and natural ingenuity areemployed. Only under extraordinary conditions, he continues, wherenatural knowledge falls short, are supernatural means invoked: those ofmagic and o the r rites that ar e intended to influence higher powers in orde rto bring ab ou t th e desired result. Acco rding to C assirer, This descriptionof the role of magic an d m ythology in primitive society applies equally wellto highly advanced stages of mans political life. Thus, when modernsocieties expe rience grave crises in which th e traditional m eans of problem-solving appear inadequate (Cassirers historical point of reference isGermanys Weimar Republic), they, too, have recourse to the irrational

means of political myth and charismatic leadership - n the Germ an case,the myths of the superiority of race and of the charismatic leader who@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


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416 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996triumphs, not by dint of intellect and skill, but by virtue of having beenendowed by the forces of destiny with superior powers. Cassirer followsDurkheim by explaining such myths as a type of collective wish-fulfillment:they represent the ideational projections of the community, and thus a typeof imaginary resolution of social problems that cannot be resolved via triedand true empirical means. As Cassirer explains, In all critical moments ofmans social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythicalconceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the timehas come for myth again.

The call for leadership only appears when a collective desire has reached anoverwhelming strength and when, on the other hand, all hopes of fulfillingthis desire, in an ordinary and normal way, have failed. At these times thedesire is not only keenly felt but also personified. . . . The intensity of thecollective wish is embodied in the leader. The former social bonds - aw ,justice, and constitutions - are declared to be without any value. What aloneremains is the m stical power and authority of the leader and the leaders willis supreme law.Cassirers cautionary sentiment applies well to Batailles conviction that areturn of the cult and cult ritual would represent a restorative balm vis-i-visthe centrifugal tendencies of political modernity. Moreover, the tendencyto valorize unreason - madness, myth, the heterogeneous, and so forth -that we have observed thus far in Batailles work are only accentuated in hiswritings of the late 1930s. Only myth reflects the image of a plenitudeextending to the community in which men gather, remarks Bataille in a1937 text; he goes on to praise the violent dynamic belonging to [mythwhich] has no other object than the return to a lost totality.@The members of AcCphale, the secret society Bataille founded in 1937and conceived along the lines of a medieval religious order, viewedthemselves as a type of Nietzschean cultural vanguard charged withpreparing the way for a more generalized return of ritual practice. Althoughits members were sworn to secrecy about its rites, it is generally

acknowledged that animal sacrifices were practiced and that the idea ofhuman sacrifice was seriously contemplated. The intellectual program ofthe College of Sociology was quite explicit in its call for a return to variousforms of premodern religiosity as an alternative to the restricted economythat dominated spiritual life in the Western democracies.A rehabilitation of the concept virility - a virtual obsession in thewritings of the French fascist literati of the 1930s (Drieu La Rochelle,Robert Brasillach) - figured prominently in the many texts authored byBataille and co-founder Roger Caillois. Caillois concludes his 1937inaugural text The Winter Wind with the following chilling, fascistoidprophesy: an irreversible cleansing takes place in nature . . .: there is a

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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 417rising wind of subversion in the world now, a cold wind, harsh, arctic, oneof those winds that is murderous . , . and that kills the fragile [and] thesickly, one that doe s not let them get throu gh the w inter.69 In a fascist erain which the N ietzschean theory of rank o r hierarchy had com e into itsow n, and in which th e Nazis would lay th e groundwo rk for the final solutionvia their winter-wind-like euthanasia program (resulting in the deaths ofsome 100,000 persons), such remarks quickly lose all their innocence. Insuch a political climate Caillois could recommend without shame that thenew cultural vanguard - he mem bers of the College - regard the rest ofhumanity less as their rightful equals than as the raw material for theirventures. 70Many of Batailles own interventions and political prescriptions duringthis short-lived gathering of sorce rer apprentices (Kojeves characteriza-tion of th e College) were n o less problem atic. His first symp athies for fascistItaly date d from a 1934 visit t o R om e, w here he viewed a famo us exhibitionof the Fascist Re volu tion. In a letter t o Raym ond Qu eneau , he effusivelypraised Italian Fascisms morbid inconography - mortuary symbols, blackpennants, an d deaths heads. In a February 1938 College lecture onPo wer, h e openly praised the sym bolism of Italian fascism in th e form ofth e fasces as seen on every locomotives belly; in t h e Ge rm an and Italianfascist regimes alone was the Christian tradition threatened without anydanger of relapsing into tragedy, o r, as Bataille expressed it, m ourningfor the dead king. The lictors axe or fasces was an ancient Romaninstrument for beheading subjects and thus, in Batailles view, worked topreserve the sovereignty of the consuls and praetors. A kindred admirationfor th e collective energies unleased by fascism wo uld play a key ro le in th econcluding passages of his 1935 novel, Bleu de Ciel.Finally, in January 1939, Bataille delivered a lecture at the College ofSociology on Hitler and the Teutonic Order. A society of orders -inspired by the knightho ods of the medieval Stundegesellschaft, in which thevalues of hierarchy, glory, conquest, and the sacred remained unimpugned-w as, after all, the model tha t Bataille and Caillois sought to emu late withthe C ollege. This was a mo del that had been revivified o n a m ode rn, secularbasis by E urop es young fascist regimes. F ollowing W orld W ar I- hat is, inan era when all hopes for an outright restoration of ancien regimeprerogatives had become anachronistic - he concept of fascist dictatorsh ipbecame a European-wide rallying point for counterrevolutionaries anddevotkes of th e ancien rkgirne.Batailles lecture of January 1939 has, conveniently, not been preserved.One can only speculate on its probable tendency and content - as doesDenis Hollier wh o suggests an imp ortant link with Alpho nse d e C hateau-briants pro-Nazi 1937 work, La Gerbe des Forces - a text about whichCaillois writes admiringly. There, Chateaubriant speaks admiringly of the@ Blockwell Publishers Ltd. 19 %


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41 8 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996new German elite paramilitary units or Ordensburgen. Patterned after theancient orders of chivalry, they produce the strong men whom the world,as much as Germany, needs today to revolutionize contemporary society.Suffice it to say that it is probably to the advantage of Batailles intellectuallegacy that the text of this 1939 lecture remains mislaid.In a 1971 interview Caillois described the mission of the College asfollows:

It was concerned with conducting philosophical research, but philosophy wasin a way only a facade or a form, the real project being to recreate the sacredin a society that tended to reject it. We thought of ourselves as sorcerer-apprentices. We had decided to unleash dangerous movements . . 71It was a program that, however, collapsed in dramatic fashion with the

onset of war. For it was then that the untenability, if not the bankruptcy, ofth e cultural program of a return of the primitive stood transparent for allto see. For in the eyes of Bataille, Caillois, et al., the world war had in effectbrought such primitive energies directly to bear on modern Europeansocieties, and the unprecedented carnage that had been the main result wasundeniable. Thus, according to Caillois: The war showed us the inanity ofthe attempt of the College of Sociology. The dark forces that we haddreamed of unleashing had been freed on their own, and their consequenceswere not those that we had expected.72

VThere remains one chapter in the saga of Batailles forays into the headyworld of the Parisian cultural avant-garde that has yet to be told. It is acrucial episode, for it illustrates Batailles transition from the Left to theRight side of the political spectrum.In the aftermath of his three-year involvement with Souvarines LaCritique sociale, Bataille was able to form an alliance with formerantagonist Andre Breton. Just a few years earlier, Bataille had in amarxisant spirit characterized Breton and the surrealists as decadentaesthetes utterly incapable of even the possibility of contact with the lowerc ~ a s s e s . ~ ~In the fall of 1935 Bataille founded a new group called Counter-Attack,in which Breton had agreed to participate. To be sure, the intellectualdifferences separating these two titans of the cultural avant-garde remainedcavernous. Breton had concluded his Second Manifesto of Surrealismwith a rather cursory dismissal of Bataille as an excremental philosopher,owing to the latters manifest obsession with scatological themes.74Breton,who was medically trained, uncharitably went so far as to characterize

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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 419Bataille as suffering from a pathological disorder in need of a cure. But thiswas the era of the Popular Front, which served as the pretext for manyreconciliations among former political antagonists.In the light of this background, it will perhaps come as a surprise to noone that the lifespan of Counter-Attack proved mercifully brief. Its mannerof dissolution, however, is of no small interest from the standpoint of ourtheme. In the spring of 1936, Breton and the surrealist faction withdrewabruptly from the group, accusing Bataille and his supporters of embracinga sur-fascisme- a superfascism paralleling Nietzsches advocacy of thesurhomme or superman.

It seems that the admiration of fascist methods-primarily with respect tothe ethos of unbridled transgression that was so prominent in the fascistregimes embrace of an aesthetics of violence - evinced in Batailles essaysof the 1930s had come to the fore in a way that proved profoundlyembarrassing to Breton and those allied with him. In Batailles view, thefascist revolutions in Italy and Germany were alone successful in challengingthe existence of the democratic spirit. They alone had replaced the decrepitvalue-system of bourgeois society with a new collective mythology - arestoration of myth that was so avidly desired by the belief-starved masses.This telltale flirtation with a left fascism- an avowed endorsement offascist methods for left-wing political ends -was apparent from the groupsinaugural manifesto of October 1935, Contre-Attaque: Union de lutte desintellectuals rkvolutionnaire. Here, Batailles views played the majorformative role. To wit, a sanguinary fascination with revolutionary violenceoccupied a distinct position of prominence: one of the groups resolutionsemphasized that in order to insure public safety (le salut publique) anuncompromising dictatorship of the armed people was required. Europespolitical destiny would be determined by the creation of a vast network ofdisciplined and fanatical forces capable of exercising one day a mercilessdictatorship. And in conclusion, the admiration for fascist methods wasexplicitly invoked: The time has come for all of us to behave like mastersand to physically destroy the slaves of capitalism . . .we intend to make useg f the weapons created by fascism, which has known how to make use of theFundamental human aspiration fo r affective exaltation and fanaticism. 75The stress on revolutionary violence, on emulating an ethos of mastership,:he celebration of affective exaltation and fanaticism, of the emotional;ide of mass politics that contemporary fascism had been able to exploit soyell - ll represent key aspectsof the ideology of left fascism as propagatedy Bataille at this time. As Allan Stoekl has remarked: Effervescence, theubversive violence of the masses, the baseness of their refusal to enter intojoring discussions-all these things, then, without a clear and correct (evenf boring) theory behind them, could easily be reversed into fascism, as3ataille quickly became aware.76 n the context at hand it is of more than

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420 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996passing interest to note that the notion of a revolt of the masters(Herren-Aufstand) was on e of the key ideas of Erns t Jiingers prophetic,conservative revolutionary classic, Der Arbeiter (1932) 77Henri Dubief , a former member of Counter-Attack, has describedBatailles political thinking circa 1935 in th e following terms:

Persuaded of [fascisms] intrinsic perversity, Bataille affirmed its historicaland political superiority to a depraved workers movement and to corruptliberal democracy. . . . There is an inevitable movement from anguish tointoxication over fascism. At this moment there were re flections of the fascistexperience among Georges Bataille and his friends. Later, the influence ofHitlers neopaganism was patent in the case of AcCphale.*It was the publication of a one-page manifesto entitled Sous le Feu des

Canons Frangais that precipitated the break between the two factionsdom inated by Bataille and B reton. Breton had been listed as a signatory tothe docum ent without prior consultation. Th e tract began with a condemna-tion of the Soviet Union, whose anti-revolutionary nature had beenrevealed as a result of its increasing willingness to en ter i nto alliance withthe corrupt victors of 1918 - the bourgeois democracies (the Franco-Soviet cooperation treaty had just been signed). It concluded with thefollowing provocative claim: We are against rags of paper, against theslavish prose of the chancellories. . . .We prefer to them, come what may ,the antidiplomatic brutality of Hitler, which is m ore eaceful than theSuch forthright praise for Hitler prese nted itself as a m ajor em barrass-ment for the surrealist faction (which, in addition to Breton, includedBenjamin PCret and Pau l Elua rd), w hich promptly resigned.Even though in the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Bre ton , in a dadaistspirit of Cpater le bourgeois, had openly celeb rated the virtues of randomviolence - The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into thestre et, pistol in hand , a nd firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger,into the crowd. Any one who has not d reamed of thus putting an end to the

petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-definecplace in th e crowd with his belly at ba rrel level - here were certain limit!beyond which he refused to follow Batailles fascination with so-callecheterogeneity. This hesitancy certainly pertained to Batailles advocacy ofascist heterogeneity.Batailles fascination with fascism was consistent with a position he hatarticulated for som e time, and on e which is epitomized by the epithet leffascism. Like his brethren on the German right, Bataille was fullconvinced of the bankruptcy of both bourgeois democracy as well as thcommunist alternative - which, in his view, under Stalins reign had ceaseto be an alternative. Like the G erm an young conservatives, he too sougt

slobbe ring excitation of the diplomats and politician^."^r

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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 421out a third way beyond the discredited paths of socialism and liberal-ism.*It was a view he had articulated as early as 1934, though the text inquestion, Fascism in France , remained unpublished until some eightyears after his de ath. H er e, to o, B atailles estimation of fascisms historicalimport is remarkably positive. In no unce rtain term s, he views it as a forcethat is capable of restoring the two elem ents that were so sorely lacking inpresent-day European society. Both were quintessentially Durkheimian:first, the dimension of collective solidarity that had dissolved with thetriumph of a society governed by the division of labor; second, thedimension of ritual-induced myth. In other words, confronted with abourgeois social order that was on the verge of disintegrative collapse,fascism represe nted the sole source of social integration capable of healinAccording to Bataille:the lacerations that were rending the contemporary capitalist world.85

Th e antagonisms expand from o ne day t o the next and become too acute forsociety to survive without reabsorbing them. Today, fascism represents thenecessary labor of reabsorption. It is natural that in the West the workersmovement, which is today moribund and miserable, and which only knowshow to d o battle against itself, should be liquidated and disappear, since it didnot know how to win. Perhaps there is n o longer room for anything el se o n theearth other than societies transformed along the lines of monarchy, unified asmuch as the will of o ne man can be - hat is, room for great fascist societies.83In re trosp ect, B ataille himself was quick to acknowledge the insalubriousnature of his political proclivities in th e pre-w ar period. In a series of self-critical reflections com posed later in life, he avows to having succumbed toa certain paradoxical fascist tendency during his Counter-Attack days.@* * *

Th e historical motivations behind the em ergence and triumph of Europeanfascism a re certainly com plex. M oreo ver, they d iffer signficantly accordingto specific national contexts. For example, the central aspect of Naziideology, the doctrine of race, has n o parallel in the case of Italian fascism.Mussolini, in keeping with his attempt to stress specifically Italiantraditions, always emphasized - often, by way of superficial appeals toHegel, as mediated via the writings of Gentile - he preeminence of thestate. Such emphasis was foreign to th e worldview of National Socialism, inwhich, conversely, the state was often perceived as a bureaucraticimpediment to th e authenticity of the movement.B ut th ere are also specific features that th e E uro pea n fascist movementsof the interwar period have in common, and a consideration of these willhelp to give a better sense of the underlying historical affinities between@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 19!%


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422 Constellations Volume 2 , Number 3, 1996them and Batailles theoretical program in the 1930s. For Batailleslegendary fascination with fascism was neither episodic nor accidental.Inste ad, it betrays the way in which he sought to give intellectual expressionto certain dom inant tendencies of the age; mo re specifically, it indicates theway in which he sought t o articulate a widely shared anticivilizational etho sthat was part and parcel of the fascist sensibility, both left and right.85Thus, one of the generic features of fascism as a political movem ent wasits attempt to roll back the achievements of the French Revolution - oefface the political legacy of the ideas of 1789. This was a desideratumexpressed unequivocally by Goebbels, who, with reference to Hitlersaccession to power in January 1933, summarily op ined: The year 1789 ishereby eradicated from history. In a similar vein, the historian KarlDietrich Bracher, commenting on the counterrevolutionary origins ofEuropean fascism, has observed: The intellectual forerunners on whomNational Socialism drew in the development of its Weltanschauung wereprimarily ideologists fervently opposed to the ideas of democratic revolu-tion, human rights, freedom , and equality.86 In a similar vein, Z eevSternhell has correctly associated the import of European political anti-Semitism with th e ideology of counterrevolution. For with th e emergence ofpolitical anti-Semitism in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, theobsession with the evils visited upon European culture by world Jewrybecomes inextricably intertwined with a broader historical agenda: thedesire to reverse the tide of democratic revolution; a wish to plug thefloodgate of egalitarian sentiment by virtue of which Jews emerged for th efirst time a s the political equals of their Euro pea n Christian counterpart^.^^While Bataille would certainly agree with Bebels characterization of anti-Semitism as the socialism of fools (the re ar e no traces of anti-Semitism inhis work) his affinities with the ideologists of counterrevolution come to thefore precisely in his antipathy to the ideas of 1789.Finally, much has been written abou t the corollaries between fascism andirrationalism, much of it highly conjectural an d superficial.88 t would ofcourse be lud icrous to assert th at every historical position that radically callsinto question the preeminence of reason would at some level exist in asymbiotic relation with forces of political reaction, let alone those offascism.Nevertheless, it would be equally misleading to deny that one of thecentral ideological tenets in the theory and practice of fascism entails arejection of reason and all that that concept has come to representhistorically. In Escape from Freedom and other works Eric Fromm hasdefined the fascist personality type in terms of a regressive charactexstructure which yearns to be released from the demands of the egcautonomy. The demands of individual autonomy are felt to be overljburdensom e t o the weak eg o structures produced in an er a of post-libera@ Blackwell Publishers Lrd. 1996


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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 423capitalism, in which socialization via large-scale organizations has becomethe rule. Social psychological regression takes the form of a defensiveembrace of those on togenetically earlier com pon ents of the self, the id andthe superego. Th e superego is of course embodied by the fascist leader, whosanctions the masses longing to act out long repressed libidinal urges.Hence, one of the primary mechanisms of escaping the demands of egoautonomy is an immersion of self within the social collective - a type ofsocialization common to both fascist and prem odern collectivities, and o neto which Bataille was distinctly attracted. In Group Psychology and theAnalysis of the E g o , Freud offers the following apposite observationsconcerning the regressive psychological tendencies enjoyed by th e group ,which has come to play such an increasingly significant role in modernpolitical life. The group

respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which itregards merely as a form of weakness. What it demands of its heroes isstrength, or even violence. It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear itsmasters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a de ep aversionto all innovations and advances and an unbounded respect of tradition.To sum up: when individuals com e togethe r in a group all their individualinhibitions fall away and all the crue l, brutal and destructive instincts, whichlie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up tofree gratifications. 789In light of Freuds analysis of the problem of group psychology, which hasyielded such great fruits for our understanding of the mass psychology offascism, the basis for Batailles infatuation with proto-fascist methods ofsocialization become app aren t. For such m ethods allow unimpeded accessto a realm of socially prohibited instinctual expression - disappearance ofinhibition, the emergence of cruel and destructive instincts, a sado-masochistic celebration of violence and mastery - on whose untrammeledrelease so much of Batailles thought qua philosophy of transgressiondepends. Of course, the idea of uninhibited instinctual expression is farfrom being inherently fascistic. Instead, on ly when this release of previouslypent-up libidinal urges is explicitly tied to the avowedly regressive, sado-masochistic traits - as the work of both Fromm and Freud on grouppsychology suggests - does the character type associated with theautho ritarian personality arise.Batailles often uncritical glorification of elements and forces that havebeen repressed over the course of civilization - of everything that isheterogeneous o r accursed - also accounts for his troubling affinities withwhat Max Horkheimer has described as the revolt of nature: theregressive channeling of anticivilizational urges underta ken by t he authorit-arian political regimes in our e ra g 0@ Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996


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424 Constellations Volume 2, Number 3, 1996Many of the complex cultural-political motifs I have sought to elaboratein th e preceding account -motifs which p ertain both t o th e idiosyncracies ofa French political context a s well as th e larger civilizational crisis afflictingEurope - have been brought to the fore in a recent book by Daniel

Lindenbe rg, in which th e auth or felicitously summ arizes the trajectory ofBatailles development in the 1930s. Beginning w ith a quote from Counter-Attack - The democratic regime, which finds itself in mortal contradic-tions, cannot be saved - Lindenberg continues:This is the credo that Bataille will develop, without ever distancing himselffrom it, from 1934 to the declaration of war [in 19391. . . . Democracy isagainst nature, and the convulsions of our epoch prove this by demonstratingthe true immutable and eternal nature of societies. . . . The politicalBataille of the pre-war years wagered on a violent proletarian revolution,then on Hitlers new order in order to found a new tradition, to reestablishthe rights of a tragic community. . . .But this does not prevent the fact that,as Jean-Michel Besnier has observed, the refusal of history, the exaltation oforigins and the valorization of mythology remain inscribed in the officialphilosophy of fas~ism.~

NOTES1. Jiirgen Habermas, Die Moderne: Ein unvollendetes Projekt in Kleine PolitischeSchriften I-IV (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 444464. The essay originated as a lecturedelivered by Habermas on the occasion of his receipt of the Adomo prize awarded by thecity of Frankfurt on September 11,1980. It has appeared in English in New German Critique22 (Winter, 1981) under the title, Modernity vs. Postmodernity, 3-14; as well as in TheAnti-Aesthetic, edited by Hal Foster, under the title, Modernity: An Incomplete Project(which of course corresponds to the original German). The reference to sovereignty is ofcourse an allusion to Bataille.2. For an example of such confusion, see John Rajchman, Habermas Complaint inNew German Critique (Spring, 1989). See my response to Rajchman, On MisunderstandingHabermas, New German Critique (Winter, 1990): 139-154.3. There is a substantial literature on this political grouping in German, but relatively

little in English. Schmitts membership has been the object of some controversy. For one,unlike the others who worked as writers or Pulizisten, Schmitt was a highly successfulacademic and jurist. For the terms of this debate over Schmitts role among the Weimarintelligentisia, see my essay, Carl Schmitt: the Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and theAesthetics of Horror, Political Theory 20: 3 (1992): 424-447. For a different view, see J.Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist fo r the Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1983).4. I have explored these filiations in my book The Politics of Being: The PoliticalThoughtof Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). See especiallychapter 2, Being and Time as Political Philosophy.5 . Manfred Frank, Die Grenzen der Verstiindigung: Ein Geistergesprach zwischenHubermus and Lyoturd (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 20.6. For substantiation of this claim, one should consult the important book by Luc Ferryand Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties (Amherst: University of Massachusetts

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Georges Bataille and the German Ideology: Richard Wolin 425Press, 1990).The original French title of the book, La Penste 68, is of course much morecongenial from the standpoint of the argument Ive just made.7. CrCer un e religion, voila ce quil voulait. Une religion sans dieu. Cited in Bernard-Henri LCvy, Les Aventures de la Libertk (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 170.8. See Jacques Derrida, From Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianismwithout Reserve, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University ofChicago, 1978), 251-277; Michel Foucault, A Preface to Transgression, Language,Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29-52. Derridasattitudes toward Bataille are less unequivocally positive than are Foucaults.9. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard, 1988), 125, 127.See also the important number of the journal Critique (1963; the journal was founded byBataille in the late 1940s), Hommage Georges Bataille, which contains contributions byFoucault, Derrida, Barthes, and Philippe Sollers.10. See Friedrich Nietzshe, European Nihilism in The Will to Power, trans. W.Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 9-82: What does nihilismmean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; why? finds noanswer (9). See also, Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard, 1979).

11. Hans-Ulrich Wehlers The German Empire remains one of the best historical accountsof this resistance. Wehlers argument concerning a German Sonderweg was called intoquestion by Geoff Eley and Robin Blackbourn in The Peculiarities of German History(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). The critics of the Sonderweg thesis have yet toexplain how, if Germanys path to modernity was so normal, the 12 year detour ofNational Socialism and then Auschwitz could have been possible.12. See Stephen Aschheim, The Nietzsche Reception in Germany (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia, 1993).13. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958), 108.14. DCclaration, Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon, Jan.-Feb. 1912, 1.15. See Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley:

University of California, 1986), an indispensable guide to the ideological genesis of theFrench right: There can be no doubt: in large part, the emergence of the Faisceau was dueto the deep need for action felt by the younger generation in the old ligues, and for thatreason the fascist movement represented a danger both for the Action Fragaise and for theother national ligues, headed by the oldest - Dbroulkdes Ligue des Patriotes (101). Interms of its actual practice, the Faisceau sought to promote a convocation of the EstatesGeneral with the end in view of establishing a true corporative state.16. Cited in Ibid., 96.17. See Philippe Burrin, La Dkrive fasciste: Bergery, Dt at and Doriot (Paris: Editions du18. Sternhall, Neither Right Nor Left, 97. In this context, too, one must distinguish19. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 19441956 (Berkeley: University of20. Ibid.21. Drieu La Rochelle, La Socialisme fasciste (Paris: Gallimard, 1934).22. A Honneth, An Aversion Against the Universal, Theory, Culture and Society 2: 3(1985).23. See R

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Wollin on Bataille and Left Fascism

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