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S.-Afr.Tydskr.Kult.-Kunsgesk. 1989,3(4)
Georges Bataille s interpretation
o
Nietzsche: The question
o
violence in
Surrealist art
H
anse van Rensburg
Department History of Art, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002 Republic of South Africa
Received January
1989 ;
accepted April 989
In
this study the response to Nietzsche in the writings of Georges Bataillc
in
France in the
1930s as
well
as
some
aspects of
his
influence on the approach to Nietzsche
in
Surrealist art, is discussed. The question of the meaning
of violence
in Surrealism
is
examined. Some references to violence
by
Bataille, Andre Breton, and Salvador
Dali following the Surrealist crisis of 1929 are considered. The question of violence is considered in relation to
the resistance to
Fascism in
the French art world
in
the 1930s. Lastly the question of mythological violence is
considered in terms of Bataille's criticism of Marxism and his adoption of a Nietzschcan a-political stance in the
late 1930s.
Die reaksie op Friedrich Nietzsche in Georges Bataille se geskriftc in Frankryk in die 1930's, sowel as aspekte
van
sy invloed op die ontvangs van Nietzsche in Surrealistiesc kuns word ondcrsoek. Daar word gckonsentreer
op die vraag na die betekenis van geweld in Surrealisme. Verwysings na gewcld deur Bataille, Andre Breton en
Salvador Dali wat volg op die Surrealistiese krisis van 1929 word oorweeg. Die vraag na die aard van geweld
word ondersoek teen die agtergrond van die weerstand teen Fascisme
in
die Franse kunswcreld van die 1980's.
Laastens word die begrip
van
mitologiese geweld ondersoek
in die lig
van Bataille se kritiek teen Marxisme en
sy beklemtoning van Nietzsche se a-politiese standpunt.
ietzsche and Surrealism
The
term 'Surrealist' was used for the fist time by
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) in the introduction
to his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias in 1917. Apollinaire
explains the 'drame surrealiste' as the recognition of a
reality
constituted
by the higher creative powers
of
the
imagination, using
the French
preposition
'sur' (on,
upon,
towards) as a prefix.
As
a variation
of
the
French
translation of
'Ubermensch'
into 'Ie
surhomme',
1
Appollinaire's adoption of the term reflects his interest
in the work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900).
2
Consistent with the function
that
Nietzsche affords to the prefix 'tiber' (over),
3
Surreal
ism, in Apollinaire's postulation, is neither merely a
symbolical
or
a representative reality,
nor
is it an
imitation of reality. Surrealism, instead, is defined in
terms of reality as a creative sphere, 'a complete
universe with its creator. In other words nature itself and
not only the representation of a small fragment of what
surrounds
us
or
what
once
took
place.,4
Georges
Bataille
(1897-1962) still acknowledges the association
between
the term Surrealism and Nietzsche's 'Ubermensch' in an
essay with the title 'La vieille taupe et
Ie
pretixe Sur
dans les
mots Surhomme
et
Surrealiste'
in 1930.
5
Despite
the conspicious evidence of Nietzsche's
presence in Surrealism, the question of his influence
on
Surrealism remains a largely neglected field of study.
The French
cultural world in the
era
of Surrealism,
included such specialists of Nietzsche's work as
Antonin
Artaud (1896-1948),6 Andre Malraux (1901-1976),7
Georges
Ribemont
-Dessaignes (1884-1947),
8
Georges
Bataille, Francis Picabia (1879-1953),9
Andre
Masson
(1896-1987)10
and
Max
Ernst
(1891-1976).11 Various
other artists showed a
keen
interest in Nietzsche's work.
Of
interes t in this study , is
the
response to Nietzsche in
the
writings of
Georges
Bataille in particular, and the
role he played in formulating aspects of a French
approach to Nietzsche in
the
1930s. The work of Bataille
itself had recently become the subject of renewed studies
in various disciplines. This was partly stimulated by
the
acknowledgement of the significance of Bataille's
influence by the philosophers Michel
Foucault and
Jacques
Derrida.
Bataille's writings
on
Nietzsche in
the
1930s also anticipates the
return of
Nietzsche's
work to
a
central position in the
French
philosophical stage in
the
1960s. This influence is reflected in the studies on
Nietzsche by eminent philosophers such as Foucault,
Jacques
Derrida,
Gilles
Deleuze and Jean Granier.
The
French
revival of Nietzsche in the 1960s also includes
significant contributions by Pierre Klossowski
(born
1906) and Jean Wahl (1888-1974)12
both
of whom were
closely involved with Bataille
and
his interest in
Nietzsche in
the
1930s. The
work
of
Bataille,
too,
assumed a significant position
in
French thought since
the 1960s. In contemporary antihumanist literary
criticism
of Derrida,
or
Julia Kirsteva, Bataillian images
of violence have
become common
metaphors used
to
disarticulate the concept of the rational stable self, and
to establish an alternative concept of 'subjectivity in
flUX .13
It was particularly through Allan Stoekl's translations
of a variety of Bataille's writings, including his writings
on
Nietzsche in the 1930s,
that
key aspects of
Bataille's
thought had recently become accessible to the English
speaking world. 4 Stoekl's critical studies of Bataille
had
also contributed significantly
to
an appreciation of
Bataille in English academical circles.
15
In Art
History
the response
of
artists such as Ernst,16 Masson,17
and
Picasso
l8
to images from Bataille's writings was noticed
by various commentators. t is Rosalind Krauss, how-
ever, who has suggested in a recent essay that Bataille's
influence
on
Surrealist artists often
exceeded
that
of
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Andre
Breton (1896-1966) in the years immediately
following the so-called Surrealist crisis of 1929,
and
the
publication of the second
Manifeste du Surrealisme
in
1930.
19
The Surrealist crisis of 929: Violence
n
the literature on Surrealist art, a dominant role
is
generally afforded to
Andre
Breton,
who once described
Nietzsche as what I detest the mos t .
2
This may partly
explain the relative neglect
of
Nietzsche s influence
reflected in histories of the movement. Artists and
writers, interested in Nietzsche s work in the French
cultural world
of
the 1920s and 1930s, had often dissoci
ated themselves from the official circle of Surrealism
around
Breton, or
were
sooner or
later excommunicated
by Breton.
The
notable exception
is
Max
Ernst
who
pursued an interest in Nietzsche, retained a friendship
with Breton, as well as a carefully restrained participa
tion in the Surrealist circle.
t is only in reference to the
art
of Ernst that Breton has occasionally acknowledged
Nietzsche s importance to Surrealism.
21
But Bataille,
Malraux, Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) and
Picasso,
for instance, never belonged to the official circle of
Surrealism; Ribemont-Dessaignes,
Artaud
and Picabia
soon
abandoned the Surrealist circle, while Joseph
Delteil (1894--1978), Michel Leiris (born 1901),
Georges Limbour
(1902-1970), Andre Masson and
Salvador Dali (1904--1989) were all denied by
Breton
at
one
point
or
another. These artists all expressed an
interest in Nietzsche.
More
than mere coincidence, the dissociation between
the interest in Nietzsche
and
official Surrealism signifies
crucial questions in French cultural and ideological
thought
of
the era. As Bataille was to show, Nietzschean
thought,
and
the
adherence
to a Marxist course
proclaimed by Breton, remain essentially incompatible.
Furthermore, the problematic of the interest in
Nietzsche in the Surrealist era, is largely qualified by the
question of the nature of violence in French thought and
art, and its relation to the resistance to Fascism in France
in the 1930s. t
is
Georges
Bataille who was to pursue an
attempt
to differentiate between the nature
of
Nietzsche s Dionysian aesthetic
of
destruction
and
re
creation, and the
nature
of Fascist violence.
Violence is a distinctive quality of Surrealist art in the
1930s. The meaning of Surrealist violence can neither be
separated
from its revolutionary aims, nor from the
threat
represented
by the Fascist adoption of Nietzsche s
'Ubermensch' as a superman-image of
the
Aryan race.
On the other
hand,
violence, on a metaphorical level,
also signifies the creative process
of
destruction, re
evaluation, re-creation and the determination of an
alternative aesthetic in Surrealist art. Designated by
Nietzsche s Dionysus-figure, violence, cruelty, brutality,
sacrifice, sacrilege
or
hubris, perversion and subversion
are central questions in the Nietzsche-image in French
art in the Surrealist era.
Associated by Nietzsche with a pre-consciousness in
Die Geburt der Tragodie
(1872), the Dionysian refers to
389
deeper strata of consciousness, also called
'nature',
which are the source
of
all life, consciousness and
creativity. The Dionysian finds expression in the
Apollonian principuum individuationis
or
conscious
ness, which to Nietzsche is a necessary layer of illusion
over the substrata of nature. Creativity, for Nietzsche, is
the continual re-emergence
of
the Dionysian through
'Rausch',
ecstasy, frenzy
or
rapture,
forever re
arranging the structures
of
Apollonian thought. t is
worth noticing that Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), being
a central source for Surrealist ideas, was associated with
Nietzsche s views
of
the unconscious and the supra
individual in the Surrealist review Minotaure in 1933.
22
Nietzsche does not so much
denounce
Apollonian
thought, but attempts to re-affirm the exigency
of
Dionysian nature. He insists
on
the destructive and re
creative nature of the Dionysian-Apollo relation. t
requires that Apollonian thought is never to
be
codified
into 'truths', systems of logic, or the structures of
reason.
Consequently he opposes all cultural structures which
uphold the codification
of
Apollonian illusions, such as
science, or religious
and
political dogma. Furthermore,
Nietzsche asserts the multi-layered dimensions of reality
which can never
be
commensurated by any system
of
thought or rational augury. Considering the system
atizing of thought as debilitating to the excessive
opulence
of
reality, he affirms, instead, all possible
occurences of life :
'The word Dionysian means ... an ecstatic
affirmation of the total
character of
life as that
which remains the same, just as powerful, just as
blissful, through all change; the great pantheistic
sharing
of
joy and sorrow that sanctifies and
calls good even the most terrible and
questionable qualities
of
life; the eternal will to
procreation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence, the
feeling of the necessary unity of
creation
and
destruction. 23
Violence in Surrealism, as a response to Nietzschean
thought, was first formulated in terms
of
the
Dada
heritage of nihilism.24 George Ribemont-Dessaignes
whose interest
in
Nietzsche stems from the
Dada-period,
could initially see Dionysian violence as a simple
means
of revitalizing social structures. n an essay
In Praise
o
Violence
published in 1926, Ribemont-Dessaignes
writes a soliloquy of the virtues of violence as a process
of
destruction and re-creation:
Nothing is lost
sooner
than violence ...
War or
revolution is all right;
between
two
bombs
nothing keeps man from dreaming
of
his
armchair ... An
epoch
of violence has just ended
- we do not
mean
the war,
but
the
one
which
assailed all the moral defe nces. 25
However, three years later
Andre
Breton
had
clearly
formulated his aim
of
pursuing a Marxist revolution
through Surrealist transgression. This became clear
during the Surrealist crisis
of
1929, which came to a
head
with the meeting at the
Bar
du Chateau in March 1929.
The
crisis was largely due to
Breton's attempt
to have a
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document signed in which members of the Surrealist
group were required to subscribe to a unified commit
ment to the promotion of the Marxist cause. Rejecting
Breton's 'dogmatism', Ribemont-Dessaignes walked out
of the meeting and wrote in a letter to Breton:
J strongly opposed the style you have adopted,
... and the badly organized (or efficient, if one
adopts a commissariat de police viewpoint)
ambush concealed under the Trotsky pretext
,26
During the Surrealist meeting at the Bar
du
Chateau,
Bataille, who refused to participate, was severely criti
cized by Breton, a criticism
that is
partly repeated in the
Manifeste du Surrealisme.
27
Breton's second Manifeste
du Surrealisme was completed shortly after the meeting
at the Bar du Chateau and published in December 1929.
Violence
is
a central theme in the manifesto, and Breton
writes:
'Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a
tenet
of
total revolt,
...
it still expects nothing
safe from violence. The simplest Surrealist act
consists
of
dashing down
the street,
pistol in
hand,
and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull
the
trigger, into the crowd.,28
Breton was criticized from various sides for his views
of violence
after
the publication of the manifesto. A
pamphlet,
n Cadavre was published in 1930, by a group
outraged
by Breton's treatment of
them
since
the
meeting at the Bar
du Chateau.
n Cadavre included
critical contributions against Breton by Ribemont-
Dessaignes, Georges Limbour, Michel Leiris, Robert
Desnos and Georges
Bataille.
Late in 1929 or early in 1930 Bataille completed an
article as a response to Breton's attacks against him in
the second Manifeste du Surrealisme. In the article 'La
vieille taupe
et
Ie prefixe
sur
dans les mots
Surhomme
et
Surrealiste ', Bataille refers
to
Breton's
image of the violence of shooting into a crowd, and
writes:
That
such an image should present itself so
insistently to his view proves decisively the
importance in his pathology of castration
reflexes: such an extreme provocation seeks to
draw
immediate
and brutal
punishment
... when
bourgeois society refuses to take them seriously
and to
take up the
challenge they offer
...
the
Surrealists have found the destiny they were
seeking ... For
them
it was never a question of
really terrifying: The intrinsic
character
of the
bogeyman they play
is
sufficient, for they are
eager to play the role of juvenile victims,
despicable victims of a general incomprehension
and degradation. 29
Furthermore, Bataille criticizes
Breton
for
the
pres
ence of a metaphysical idealism in the Manifeste du
Surrealisme. This idealism, according to Bataille, finds
expression in Breton's view of violence.
Breton's
formu
lation of violence,
therefore,
implies a denial of what
Bataille calls
the
principle
of
sovereignty. Sovereignty,
Bataille's alternative term for Nietzsche's concept of
S.-Afr.Tydskr.Kult.-Kunsgesk.
1989,3(4)
'Ubermenschlichkeit', is differentiated from idealism:
'Man
is his own law, if he strips himself bare in
front of himself. The mystic before God has the
aspect
of
a
subject. Who
strips himself bare in
front
of
himself has the aspect of a
sovereign. ,30
Bataille, who refused to attend the meeting at the
Bar
du
Chateau because there were 'too many fucking
idealists,3l in the Surrealist circle,
interpretes
Breton's
view of violence as particularly idealistic: 'Servile
idealism rests precisely in this will to poetic agitation,
...
a completely unhappy desire to turn to upper spiritual
regions.
d2
Bataille also identifies an emphasis on the idealistic
aspects of Nietzsche's thought in the Surrealist response
to his work
'At
the heart of Nietzsche's demands lies such
flagrant disgust for the senile idealism of the
establishment ... so spiteful towards the hypoc
risy and the moral shabbiness that presides
over
current
world exploitation -
that
it
is
imposs
ible to define his work as
one
of the ideological
forms of the dominant class ...
(but)
Nietzsche
was condemned by circumstances to imagine his
break
with conformist ideology as an Icarian
adventure ... the same double tendency
is
found
in contemporary Surrealism, ... which main
tains, of course, the predominance of higher
ethereal values clearly expressed by the addition
of the prefix
'sur',
the trap into which Nietzsche
had already fallen with
Surhomme .
m
This criticism reflects Bataille's earliest interpretation
of
Nietzsche. It typifies an image
of
Nietzsche
at
a time
when the emergence of Marxism as a predominant
ideology, superseded
the
Nietzscheanism of
the
Dada
circles.
George Grosz
(1893-1959) for
instance,
had
expressed a similar criticism of Nietzsche in 1925.
34
Furthermore BatailIe's criticism
is
aimed at the arrival
of
Salvador Dali in Breton's Surrealist circle, and Dali's
popular image
of
idealistic Nietzscheanism - what
Bataille terms the 'bogeyman' syndrome in the Surrealist
circle.
Salvador Dali is an immediate sensation
after
his
arrival in Paris and his entering of
the
Surrealist
group
shortly after
the
Bar
du
Chateau
meeting
of
March
1929.
Dali, who called himself 'the Nietzsche of the
irrational',35 indicated
that
he was associated with
Nietzsche right away
after
his arrival in Paris in this 'truly
Nietzschean' period of his life.
36
Although Bataille
does not refer to
Dali in the essay 'La
vieille taupe et
Ie
pretixe Sur dans les mots
Surhomme' et Surrealiste''',
his private notes of this
period identify Dali as a source of some aspects of his
criticism of Surrealism.
7
Shortly after his arrival in Paris
in ]929, Dali attracted considerable
attention
with the
exhibition of his painting Le feu Lugubre .
8
In re
sponse, Bataille
adopted
an incomplete essay
on the
inferiority complex into a criticism of
Dali's
painting.
Echoing his criticism of the idealistic interpretation
of
Nietzsche in
the
Surrealist circle, Bataille's essay 'Le
Jeu Lugubre is explicitly directed against Dali's 'servile
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nobility, this idiotic idealism
that
leaves us under
the
spell of a few comical prison bosses'.
39
Idealism in
contrast to 'sovereignty', according
to
Bataille, has an
imprisoning effect on the mind - a metaphor that he
constantly uses in his private notes on the controversy
with
Breton
in 1929.
4
Idealism, therefore, implies an
alternative aspect of violence. This, according to
Bataille, can be identified in the intellectual despair of
the laceration
of
form in Dali's painting, the 'sudden
cataclysms, great popular manifestations of madness,
riots, enormous revolutionary slaughter ... idiotic
idealism.
41
Bataille denies any dimension of creative violence in
Dali's painting, and claims:
'Intellectual despair results in neither weakness
nor
dreams, but
in violence ... t is only a
matter
of knowing how to give vent to one's rage;
whether one only want to wander like madmen
around
prisons, or whether
one
want
to
overturn
them
... This is said without any critical
intention, for it
is
evident that violence, even
when one
is
besides oneself with it,
is
most often
of sufficient brutal hilarity to exceed questions
about
people. My only desire ... is
to
squeal like
a pig before his canvases.
42
In his essay 'Le bas materialisme et la gnose' of 1930,
Bataille proposes the concept of the
preponderance
of
matter, as a denial of idealism, of 'an abstract
God
(or
simply the idea), and abstract matter; the chief guard
and the prison walls'.
43
n order to motivate an
alternative foundation for the dismemberment of form in
Surrealist art,44 Bataille turns in this essay to Gnostic
sects and Gnostic art objects with its primitive
rearrangements of
human
form. Bataille's insistence of
the preponderance of matter in Gnostic art, also echoes
Nietzsche's view of Dionysian art as a physiology of art.
In the essay 'Le
Jeu lugubre ',
Bataille criticizes
Dali's expression of idealistic violence in particular
painting. n the essay 'Le bas materialisme et la gnose',
violence is given significant new direction in terms of
Surrealist
art,
by linking it with mythological thought.
Dali responds in his essay The Stinking Ass' in 1932:
'(Materialism) adapts itself so readily to the
violence of images, which materialist thought
idiotically confuses with the violence of reality
...
What have in mind here are, in particular,
the materialist ideas of Georges Bataille, but
also, ... all the old materialism which this gentle
man
dodderingly claims to
rejuvenate
when he
bolsters it up with modern psychology.'45
The differences around the question
of
violence,
apparently, remain unresolved in the years immediately
following the Surrealist crisis of 1929, but
it was Bataille
who was to pursue the question of the meaning
of
violence. Breton's references to violence in the second
Manifeste du Surealisme in
one
sense, look back at the
unrestrained pleas for revolutionary violence in the
Futurist manifestoes of the previous decade.
Yet Breton
clearly defines violence in terms of a Marxist revolution,
with the expressed aim of agitating a proposed bourgeois
391
establishment. This
is
particularly formulated in the
journal Le Surrealisme au service de l revolution
founded by Breton as the new official mouthpiece
of
the
Surrealist circle after the meeting at the
Bar du
Chateau
in 1929.
Dali's revolutionary aims at the time
are
less certain,
at least as far
as
his interest in Nietzsche's concept of
Dionysian violence is concerned. Dali did not support
Breton's Marxism, and his interest in Nietzsche
is
clearly
at variance with that
of
Bataille. Bataille's identification
of an idealistic approach to Nietzsche by
Dali,
is of some
interest in terms of the objection to the Fascist inter
pretation of the philosopher's work. In his lectures
on
Nietzsche after 1936, Martin Heidegger was
to
formulate
a similar criticism against the idealistic interpretation of
Nietzsche in Germany, claiming
later that
it was his
personal contestation of the Nazi
interpretation
of
Nietzsche.
46
Dali was accused of being a Fascist by Breton in 1934.
In February of that year,
Breton
called for a Surrealist
meeting to cross-examine Dali on allegations of his
Fascist sympathies, and of being an enemy of the
proletariate.
n
his own defence, Dali explained at the
meeting that The Nietzschean Dionysos
accompanied
me everywhere like a patient governess and soon I could
not help noticing that he was wearing a swastika
armband,.47
Claiming that the use
of
swastikas in his paintings was
a-political and merely an expression of his paranoiac
critical method,48 Dali writes:
'Dali, the complete Surrealist, preaching an
absolute absence
of
aesthetic or moral con
straint, actuated by Nietzsche's will to power ,
asserted that every experiment could be carried
to its extreme limits ... But Breton said No to
Dali.,49
What Bataille terms
the
violence of idealism
of
'comical prison bosses,50 in Dali's approach
to
Nietzsche
corresponds partly to aspects of the Fascist inter
pretation of Nietzsche that Bataille was to oppose in his
writings after 1933.
51
However, at the time
of
the
Surrealist crisis Bataille was still
adhering to
the
revolutionary aim of Marxist ideology, and his criticism
of Nietzsche in the essay, 'La vieille
taupe
et Ie prefixe
Sur dans les mots
Surhomme et Surrealiste''',
is
to
a
considerable extent a Marxist objection.
In
the early
1930s Bataille's interest in Nietzsche was well estab
lished, but not yet fully integrated and formulated. t
is
only through his growing disenchantment with Marxism
and the growing threat of Fascism
that
Bataille was to
formulate an approach to Nietzsche in terms
of
political
questions, and the question
of
violence.
After
the
Surrealist crisis, figures such as
Delteil,
Leiris, Limbour
and
Andre Masson, who were ex
communicated from the Surrealist circle, formed a
group
around
Georges Bataille. Bataille founded the journal
Documents in 1929, in which he published the criticism of
Dali's e jeu Lugubre
as
well as the article on
gnosticism and the physiology
of
matter. In returning
Bataille's criticism in 1932,52 Dali, however, failed to
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realize that Bataille had given the theme of violence an
important new direction in terms of Surrealist art.
Rather than stressing the ideological aims of revolution
ary violence, Bataille transposes the theme
of violence to
a metaphorical level
of
primitivism and myth, thus
introducing into the theme of violence the question
of
creativity and the meaning of creative violence. This
pursuit
is
continued in
other
essays in
Documents
and
the
journal published a variety of well-illustrated articles
on
archaeology, anthropology, studies
of
primitive
objects, ritual sacrifice,
and
primitive art. With
contributions by authors such as Bataille, Limbour,
Robert Desnos (1900-1945), aud Michel Leiris who was
a professional anthropologist, Documents played a
leading role in the revival of primitivism
and
mythological themes,
and
also became an
important
visual source for Surrealist art in the 1930s.
Bataille s own contribution
to Documents
included the
essays Oeil , Le gros orteil ,
L
Apocalypse
de
Saint
Sever (1929), and Soleil
pourri
(1930) which were all
particularly
important
as sources for visual art in the
1930s,
and
were responded to by artists such as Alberto
Giacometti,
Andre
Masson
and
Pablo
PicassoY
Bataille
also published essays
on
the Marquis de Sade and sa
dism,54 sacrificial mutilation, the metaphorical meaning
of parts of the human body and its forms in art, meta
morphoses, deviations from nature; primitive art, and a
variety
of
aspects of primitive cultures.
The
journal
closely reflects Bataille s interest in Nietzsche s concept
of Dionysian violence as an expression of primitivism,
and
in his various essays Bataille lays a metaphorical
foundation for his
later
theoretical work
on
Nietzsche.
The journal Minotaure a luxurious variant
on
the
lines laid down by Documents appeared for the first time
in June 1933.
In Minotaure
the groups
of Breton
were
moving in closer collaboration than ever before, and
Minotaure published essays by Bataille, Desnos, Leiris,
Limbour, Masson, as well as members of the Breton
circle.
The
title
of
Dali and Luis Bunuel s film
L Age
d Or
(1929) was initially considered for the journal, but
it
was Bataille and Masson who persuaded others to
accept the title
Minotaure.
Masson writes: Not only
in
its title was
Minotaure endebted
to Bataille for it was
infused with his spirit, especially in its beginning .
Minotaure continued to explore the theme of primitive
violence established by
Documents
and Albert Skira,
co-editor
of
the journal, writes in the introduction of the
first issue in 1933, that the title Minotaure was chosen
because of the aggresive
and
Dionysiac character of
the
myth,.56 Thus
Minotaure
through the efforts
of
Bataille,
established what was to become a central myth
in
Surrealist art, a myth essentially related to Nietzsche s
aesthetics of destruction and re-creation.
Bataille and Communism n the early 193 5
From
late 1931 to early 1934 Bataille was involved in an
anti-Stalinist Marxist review,
La Critique Sociale
edited
by Boris Souvarine.
Other
participants
on
the editorial
board were Leiris, the philosopher Pierre Klossowski,
translator
of
some of Nietzsche s work into French and
S.-Afr.Tydskr.Kult.-Kunsgesk.
1989,3(4)
also
brother of
the artist Balthus (Klossowski de Rola,
born 1908); as well s the political photographer Dora
Maar.
Participation in La Critique Sociale represents the high
point of Bataille s Marxist involvement, and in the
journal he defines the notion
of
violence repeatedly in
revolutionary terms as an expression of class struggle.
In
the essay
La
notion
de depense
(January
1933) Bataille
sees revolution as the liberation
of
the need of the
lower classes to
expend the
ruling classes in an
orgiastic social revolution. In
an
essay entitled
La
structure psychologique du fascisme
(November
1933),
Bataille explores the problematic
of
fascism as a ruling
class sustained by the idealism
of
authority
s an
unconditional principle situated above any utilitarian
judgement .
He
considers conditions of violence such as
excess, delirium, madness,57 as a means of breaking the
laws
of
the ideal of authority and commensurability
of
Fascism. Bataille s approach to violence in these essays
is
related to the anthropological writings
of
Marcel
Mauss,58 but there also appears some echoes of his
interest in Nietzsche s Dionysian pnmlhvlsm in
Bataille s opposition to Fascism, and the essays look
forward to Bataille s Nietzsche et les fascistes of 1937.
Although Bataille still supports revolutionary aspects
of
Marxism, the essay La structure psychologique du
fascisme , as well as an essay La critique des
fondements
de la dialectique hegelienne (March 1932), already
depart from the
orthodox
Marxist dialectic, and lays a
foundation for his subsequent distinction between
Nietzsche and Fascism
on
the
one hand, and
Nietzsche
and
Communism
on
the
other
hand.
Politically
the
early 1930s are characterized by the
emergence
of
a threat
of
Fascism,
represented
in
the
ideologies of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.
During
an
international congress against Fascism in Paris in 1933,
the French Communist Party became manifest s the
dominant force in the French anti-Fascist movement.
The government of the French Radical Party fell from
power early in 1934, and a long period of political crisises
and uncertainty ensued. Strikes, violence,
and
clashes
between French Fascists and Communists
broke
out in
February 1934.
The
French
Front
Populaire, and
alliance of
the
Communist Party
and
the non
Communist Socialist
Party,
eventually assumed control
in the elections of March 1936. A new government was
formed in
June
1936.
The
close ties
between
Surrealism
and
the Communist
Party were
ruptured
when Breton
and
Paul Eluard
(1895-1952) were expelled from the Party in 1933.
However, when violence
broke out in
Paris in 1934,
Breton still called for a unified Communistic stance in
opposition
to
Fascism. A document
to
this effect, Appel
ala lutte was signed by members of the Surrealist group
in February 1934.
9
The signatories included Surrealist
members such as
Breton,
Eluard
and
Ferdinand Leger
(1881-1955), as well as non-members such as Malraux,
Leiris, and Dora Maar.
Bataille founded the group
Contre
Attaque late in
1935, a
group
which included, of all people, Andre
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Breton. Bataille used a hall in the Rue des
Grands
Augustins for meetings of the
Contre Attaque.
The hall
was later made available to Picasso for the painting
of
Guernica.
Bataille read a speech 'Front Populaire dans la rue' at
the first meeting of Contre Attaque in 1935, calling for
the
support
of
the
Communists against Fascism. He
emphasized force, agitation, and violence against
Fascism
to
such an extent that it implied the exclusion of
political and doctrinal debates. By the time
the
speech
was published in
the
only issue of Cahiers de Contre
Attaque
in May 1936, Breton and the Surrealist contin
gent had already dissociated themselves from Contre
Attaque. Breton accused Bataille of 'sur-fascisme' 60 an
allusion to Bataille's unpublished 'La vieille taupe et
e
prefixe
sur
dans les mots Surhomme
et
Surrealiste'
of 1930.
n
later years, Bataille did not deny that
there
was a certain 'paradoxical fascist tendency' in
Contre
Attaque,
and even in himself at the time.
6
Although Bataille still supported the Front Populaire
early in 1936, he suddenly abandoned Communism after
the Front Populaire had come into power in the elections
of March 1936. Disillusioned by a mass who has no
interest in political theory, he also rejected, subsequent
Iy, any hope
in subversive violence with a revolutionary
aim. Instead Bataille turned to the notion
of
the role
of
marginal groups in a revolutionary society, originally
advocated in his essays on Gnosticism, madmen,
knights, and sects
of
heterodox Christian mystics
published in Documents. Instigated by the collapse of
Contre
Attaque, Bataille rejected a Marxist ideology
altogether, and pursued in its place an a-political stance
based on the examination of the meaning
of
mythologi
cal structures of thought in Nietzsche's philosophy. The
question of violence was henceforth to be emphasized in
terms of the meaning of creativity in a given community.
Bataille s writings on Nietzsche after 1936
Shortly after the Spanish civil war broke out in April
1936, Bataille visited
Andre
Masson in Tossa in Spain
where the latter was living
at
the time. In Spain Bataille
and Masson planned an organization and a
journal
that
was
to
be dedicated to Nietzsche, as well as to the
opposition of the Fascist interpretation of Nietzsche
elsewhere in Europe. The name Acephale, based on a
mythological race of headless people without a leader,
was adopted as a metaphorical indication of Bataille's
new political direction. As a result
of
the risk of Fascism
encountered in Contre Attaque, the Acephale-group
was resolved not to become involved with political
power
or
any official political party.
Acephale was a private and secret sect which was
closed to the public, although the journal was intended
for public distribution.
At
the
same time Bataille started
another
project
known as the College de Sociologie, a
series
of
public lectures on studies
of
such human
tendencies as
the
Acephale-group hoped
to
spark
through ritual activities. Participants in Acephale
393
included Bataille, Masson, Klossowski, Jean
Wahl,
Georges Ambrosino and Jules Monnerot. The College
de Sociologie was centered around Bataille, Callois and
Leiris.
The
first issue of
A
Cf?phale dedicated to the idea
of
the
'sacred conspiracy', was published in June 1936.
An
essay on Nietzsche, entitled 'La conjuration sacree',
written in Spain by
both
Bataille and Masson, intro
duced the first issue of Acephale. The essay
expounds
the
purpose of the Acephale-group, which were later re-ca
pitulated by Masson as the aim to 'unmask the religious
behind
the
political'. 62 Masson also designed
the
cover
for the first issue of Acephale, a depiction
of
the head-
less Acephalic being, based on Masson's drawing
of
Dionysos of 1933.
63
The
second issue of Acephale dedicated to Nietzsche
and the pre-classical Greek philosopher Heraclitus,
appeared
in
January
1937. Bataille published an intro
ductory essay on Nietzsche, and translated a section
from Nietzsche's lectures on Heraclitus in the
'Philosophie im tragischen
Zeitalter
der Griechen' for
this issue. Bataille also published his important essay
'Nietzsche et les fascistes', and Pierre Klossowski
published an essay 'Creation du Monde' about
cosmological aspects
of
Nietzsche's thought. Max
Raphael's essay 'A propos du fronton de Corfou', which
attributes the revival of pre-classical
Greek architecture
to Nietzsche's influence, was reprinted in this issue. This
study had already
appeared
in the first issue
of
Minotaure
in
June
1933.
The third and fourth numbers
of Acephale appeared
as
a single issue in July 1937.
The
issue
is
dedicated
to
Nietsche's figure of Dionysus, and the Nietzsche
inspired philological study, Dionysos: Mythos un Cultus
which was published by Walter Otto in Frankfurt in
1933. Jules Monnerot appealed for the substitution of
scientific truth with
the
mythical truths of Nietzsche's
Dionysus in an article entitled 'Dionysos
philosophe'.
Bataille offered a review
of
Karl
Jasper's
Nietzsche:
Einfuhrung in das Verstiindnis seines Ph ilosophierens,
published in Berlin in 1936. Bataille also published an
important article, 'Chronique nietzscheen' on the
Dionysian mysteries. Masson included four drawings of
Dionysus from his
Sacrifices
of 1933, in this edition
of
Acephale.
An article on Nietzsche,
the
symbolism of the obelisk
and the myth of the labyrinth by Bataille, was published
with the title 'L'Obelisque' in the journal Mesures in
April 1938.
The
last issue
of Acephale
did not
appear
until July 1939. Bataille published
the
essays 'La folie de
Nietzsche' and 'La pratique de la joie devant la mort' in
this issue. In the latter essay the question of violence and
the meaning of creative violence was directly linked to
the threatening world war. The war broke out a month
later, in August 1939.
n
his attack against Fascism in 'Nietzsche
et
les
Fascistes', Bataille refers to Nietzsche's criticism of anti
Semitism, in order
to
dissociate him from the Nazi
interpretation of his work in Germany. Bataille criticizes
Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche (he calls her Elizabeth
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394
Judas-Forster) for 'selling' her brother's work to the
Nazis because
of her
own anti-Semitical feelings.
Bataille shows that during Hitler's visit to the Nietzsche
archives
in
1933, Frau Forster-Nietzsche had presented
him with anti-Semi tical texts by her late husband
Bernard Forster, pretending that the texts were written
by Nietzsche.
Bataille also analises
the
propogandical use
of
Nietzsche's work by Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg,
Mussolini,
Alfred
Baumler in his 'Nietzsche, der
Philosoph und Politiker'
of
1931, and Emmanuel
Levinas
in
his 'Quelques reflexions sur la philosophie de
l'hitlerisme', published
in
Paris in 1934. Bataille
criticizes the various interpretations
of
Nietzsche for the
idealism of a proposed 'higher' reality, and concludes:
'Fascism and Nietzscheanism are mutually
exclusive,
and
are even violently mutually
exclusive, as soon as each of them is considered
in its totality ... Insofar
as Fascism values a
philosophical source, it
is
attached
to
Hegel
and
not to Nietzsche.,64
In his essay
'La
critique des fondements de la
dialectique hegelienne' of 1932, Bataille
had
still
attempted to reconcile the Hegelian dialectic with
Nietzsche's notion
of
Dionysus. His disillusionment with
Marxism, however, also implies a change of attitude
towards Hegel, and
in
'L'obelisque'
of 1938, Bataille
claims: 'Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its
shell is
to
a bird contently absorbing the substance
within,.65 t became necessary for Batialle to confront
any dialectical
movement,
no
matter
how transgressive,
with a Nietzschean intervention. Showing that both
Marxism
and
Fascism find a philosophical foundation in
a Hegelian dialectic, Bataille, instead, turns towards
Nietzsche's non-dialectic materialism, which he inter
pretes as essentially a-political: 'This Dionysian truth',
he claims, 'cannot be an object of propaganda'.66
Consequently Bataille opposes the Fascist use
of
Nietzsche's work for
the
purpose of violence and war
propaganda, and claims
that
Nietzsche's metaphores
of
war are essentially in conflict with the literal interpre
tation
of Nietzsche by the Fascists:
'War, to the extend that it
is
the desire to ensure
the
permanence
of
a nation, ...
is
the
demand
for inulterability, the authority
of
devine right .. .
opposing the exuberant power of time .. .
National and Military life are present in the
world to try to deny death by reducing it to a
component of glory without dread. 67
Fascism, consequently, represents to Bataille the
suppressive forces
of
commensurability
and
inulterabil
ity and is signalling, therefore, a time of cultural decay:
'When
communal passion
is
not great enough
to constitute
human
strengths, it becomes
necessary to use constraint and to develop the
alliances, contracts,
and
falsifications that are
called politics. 68
Art,
according to Bataille, constitutes a significant
aspect of the incommensurable heterogeneous 'excess'
that
he requires for a vital community, and is, in
S.-Afr.Tydskr.Kult.-Kunsgesk. 1989,3(4)
particular, threatened by Fascism. Describing his era as
a time of a crisis of conventions, art, according
to
Bataille, has the additional aim
of
transgressive violence
against the constraining forces of the military ideal
of
commensurability. Violence, however,
is
now clearly
defined in terms
of
mythological 'excess'. Quoting partly
from Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragodie
69
Bataille
writes:
'Military sovereignty, tying existence to the past,
is followed or accompanied by
the
birth of free
and liberating sacred figures and myths,
renewing life and making it
'that
which frolics in
the future' ... The Nietzschean audacity de
manding for the figures it creates a
power
that
bows before nothing - that tends to break down
old sovereignty's edifices of moral prohibition
- must not
be
confused with what it fights ...
The very first sentences of Nietzsche's message
come from realms of dream
and
intoxication .
The
entire message
is
expressed by
one
name:
DIONYSUS ... (in other words,
the
destructive
exuberance
of
life).
7
The Dionysian aesthetic of destruction and recreation
is
identified by Bataille as a most vital attempt to break
out of the constraints of commensurability. Following
Nietzsche's Dionysus, Bataille saw it as an essential aim
of ACI?phale to
regenerate
heroic and orgiastic rituals,
the rebirth of 'living' myths and the touching off in
society of the primitive communal drives leading to
sacrifice. Violence, then, is identified as the re-creative
violence of a Dionysian aesthetic.
Myth,
as Bataille
states in
'L'apprenti
Sorcier'
is
the
way
open
to man
after the failure of science and politics, to reach the
lower 'chthonic and essential' drives: 'Myth ...
is
the
frenzy of every dance: it takes existence to its boiling
point : it communicates to it the tragic
emotion
that
makes its sacred intimacy accessible. m
As an exclusive sect, the Acephale-group participated
in rites such as meetings in a 'sacred' place near a tree
struck
by
lightning, a point
of
intersection between lower
'chthonian forces' and 'falling higher forces'. 72 These
rituals, which anticipates in a
sense the Happenings
of
the 1960s, led to conflict when
there
was the possibility
of
a human sacrifice to be
performed.
The
speculations
were brought to an
end
by the objections
of
particularly
Roger Callois,73 and the anthropologist Michel Leiris
who accused Bataille of misinterpreting ancient rituals.
Although Bataille and Andre Masson called themselves
'ferociously religious' 74 ACI?phale celebrates
the
most
primitive roots of religiosity
rather
than any
meta-
physical conception
of
religion.
75
In publications, Bataille
continued
an
approach to
myth that was already familiar in his writings for
Documents in the early 1930s. In Acephale, however,
Bataille proposes Dionysus as acephalic man and as
Nietzsche himself, as a basic orientation towards myth.
Pursueing the metaphorical structures already prevalent
in his publications
in
Documents Acephale explores
aspects of the myth of Dionysus in particular, such as the
image of the Minotaur, the labyrinth, Ariadne, ecstatic
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love, ecstatic violence, sacrifice, metamorphosis,
dismemberment,
etc.
However,
recourse
to
myth
in
Bataille's
writings
cannot be separated from the political
background
against
which
he wrote.
Bataille's Acephalic
being remains
an
alternative for
what he sees
as the
'monocephalic'
or
single-headed nature
of a
Fascist
community.
Acephale represents a
headless,
or,
con
versely,
a
policephalic
or
many
headed
community.
76
It
is in the plurality of the
many-layered
or
un-unified
community that Bataille finds prospects for the
accomodation of the 'excess' of myth and the
Dionysian
spheres
of
existence.
Bataille's
explorations
of Nietzsche's
Dionysus, and
the
violence
of
the Dionysian aesthetic of destruction
and re-creation,
reflects an essential
influence on, and
interaction
with, central aspects
of French
art
in the
1930s. What Breton in the 1930s still disparagingly refers
to
as
the
'my
he
nietzscheen', 77
becomes
a
dominant
theme in the art of the Surrealist era, and it
is
not
until
1942 that Breton
acknowledges
the
need for
a
Surrealist
myth, and the
relevance
of Nietzsche
to
Surrealist art, in
the
American journal View.
78
Bataille's writings
is a
relevant continuation of the
Surrealist interest
in Freud
and the unconscious
in the 1920s,
and Bataille plays
a
dominant role
in the development of
the interest
in
Mythology in French art in the 1930s.
The
theme
of
violence
in
Surrealist art,
expressed in
revolutionary terms
in the Surrealist
circle
in the 1920s,
is
pursued and integrated into a more comprehensive
conception in
Bataille's writings, uniting an aesthetic
and the
political
problematic of the era. Bataille is not
necessarily an
initiating influence
in
the Surrealist
interest
in the
works of Nietzsche.
79
Bataille's inter
pretation of Nietzsche evolves from a literary and artistic
response
to
Nietzschean metaphors
in
the
1920s,
for
instance
in the art of
Max
Ernst and Andre
Masson.
It is
in Bataille's writings, however, that the Surrealist
interest
in
Nietzsche
is
eventually the most
efficaciously
formulated.
References and otes
1.
See the discussion by 1.M. NASH, The nature
of
Cubism;
A study
of
conflicting explanations - Postscript: The
Nietzsche
of
Cubism', Art
History
Vol. 3(4), December
1980, p. 442.
2.
For
Apollinaire's interest
in
Nietzsche, see
C. GRAY, Cubist Aesthetic Theories (Baltimore, 1953),
pp. 35-69. Also see
my
essay, H.
lANSE
VAN
RENSBURG, 'Picabia and Nietzsche', S Afr l Cult Art
Hist. Vol. 1(4), December 1987, pp. 362-363.
3. It should be noted that the term 'Ubermensch' was first
translated into English as 'Superman'
in
the first complete
translation
of
Nietzsche's works into English, edited
by
Oscar Levy and published in
1911
(re-edition New York,
1964). This mis-translation, which reflects the
consciousnesses
of
an era rather than any dimensions of
Nietzsche's thought, was for instance also adopted by
Bernard Shaw
in
his play
Man and Superman
early
in
the
century. This term, finally discredited by the
supercelestial comic-strip hero Superman, jumping over
395
buildings with Louise Lane in his arms, had been
superseded by the more correct translation
'Overman'
in
recent translations
of
Nietzsche's work.
4.
G.
APOLLINAIRE,
Oeuvres completes de Guillaume
Apollinaire (Paris. 1965-1966), Vol. 1.
'L'Enchanteur
pourrisant, suivi des les mamelles de Tircsias de Couleurs
du Temps', pp. 609--611. English quotation from
1
GUICHARNAUD,
Modern French Theatre
(London,
1975), p. 280.
5. GEORGES
BATAILLE, 'La
vieille taupe et Ie pretixe
Sur dans les mots Surhomme et Surrealist e' (1930).
English translation in GEORGES BAT
AILLE, Visions
of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, (Minneapolis,
1985), The
Old
Mole and the prefix Sur in
the
words
Surhomme (Ubermensch) and Surrea list ', pp. 32-45.
6.
Artaud's
concept
of
'Le Theatre
et
la peste'
is
significantly
influenced
by
Nietzsche's Dionysian principle. See A.
O.
VIRMAUX, Artaud: Unbilan critique
(Paris, 1979),
pp. 220 225.
7. D.
BOAK, Andre Malraux
(London, 1968), pp.
180
214, argues that
the
most central aspects
of
Malraux's
theoretical work were decisively influenced by Nietzsche.
8. See R. DELAUNAY.
'Projet
de Couverture',
Litterature
Vol. 3(18), Paris, March 1921, pp. 1-7.
9. See
my
essay H.
lANSE VAN RENSBURG,
'Picabia
and Nietzsche',
S.Afr.J.Cult.Art Hist.
Vol. 1(4),
December 1987.
10. See
my
essay H.
lANSE
VAN
RENSBURG, 'One
night
on Montserrat: Religious ecstasy in the art
of Andre
Masson', to be published.
11. Sec my essay H
lANSE
VAN RENSBURG, 'Max Ernst,
the hundred headless woman and
the
eternal return',
to
be
published.
12. Sec
A.D.
SCHRIFT,
Nietzsche and the question of
Interpretation: Hermeneutics Deconstruction Pluralism
(Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985).
13. See
C.
DEAN, 'Law and sacrifice: Bataille, Lacan, and
the critique of the subject ,
Re-Presentations
13, Winter
1986.
14. Allan Stoekl translated Bataille's Visions of Excess:
Selected Writings
1927-1939 (Minneapolis, 1985);
Story
of
the Eye
(London, 1979);
Blue
of
Noon
(London, 1978).
15. A. STOEKL, 'The Death of Acephale and the will to
change: Nietzsche in the texts
of
Bataille',
Glyphs
Baltimore, Vol. 6, 1979; A.
STOEKL, Politics Writing
Mutilation; The Cases of Bataille Blanchot Roussel
Leiris and Ponge (Minneapolis, 1985).
Other
significant
English commentaries on Bataille are M.
RICHMAN,
Reading Georges Bataille; Beyond the Gift (Baltimore,
1982) and
C. DEAN,
'Law and sacrifice: Bataille, Lacan,
and the critique
of
the subject , Representations 13
Winter 1986. The latter essay considers violence in
Bataille's writings as a critique
of
a Cartesian concept
of
subjectivity. against the background
of
the French
Psychoanalytic movement in the 1930s.
16. W. SPIES, Max Ernst Collagen: Inventor und
Widersprach
(K6In, 1975).
17. D. A.
BIRMINGHAM,
'Masson's Pasiphae : Eros and
the unity
of
the cosmos',
Art Bulletin
Vol. 69(2),
lune
1987.
7/23/2019 Bataille Nietzsche Surrealism
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396
18. R.
KAUFMANN,
'Picasso's crucifixion of 1930',
Burlington Magazine
Vol. 111(798), September 1969; L.
GASMAN, Mystery Magic and Love
n
Picasso 1925-
1938 (Michigan, 1983).
19. R.
KRAUSS, 'Corpus Delicti', published
in R.
KRAUSS
J. LIVINGSTON,
L Amour fou: Photography and
Surrealism
(New York, 1985).
20.
ANDRE
BRETON,
quoted
by
C.
LANCHNER, 'Andre
Masson: Origins and development', published in W.
RUBIN
c.
LANCHNER, Andre Masson
(New York,
1976) p. 86.
21. See
my
essay H.
JANSE
V
AN RENSBURG,
'Max Ernst,
the hundred headless woman and the eternal
return',
to be published.
22. J.
FRO
IS-WITTMANN,
'L'Art
Moderne et
Ie
principe
du Plaisir',
Minotaure
Vol. 1(1), June 1933, pp. 68-69.
23. F.
NIETZSCHE, The Will to Power
(Translated by W.
Kaufmann, New York, 1968), paragraph 1050, p. 539.
24. See my article H. J. VAN
RENSBURG,
'Picabia and
Nietzsche',
S.Afr.1.Cult.Art Hist.
Vol. 1(4), December
1987.
25. G.
RIBEMONT-DESSAIGNES, 'In
Praise
ofViolencc',
The Little Review
(London) , Vol. 11-12, Spring and
Summer 1926, p. 40.
26. G.
RIBEMONT-DESSAIGNES,
Letter to A. Breton,
12
March 1929, after the Surrealist meeting at
Bar
du
Chateau, March 1929.
Quoted in
M.
NADEAU, The
History
of
Surrealism
(London, 1968), p. 158, note
5.
27. For a general review
of
the conflict between Breton and
Bataille, see M.
NADEAU, The History of Surrealism
(London, 1968), pp.
160 172.
28. A.
BRETON,
Manifest du Surrealisme La Revolution
surrealiste
December 1929. English translation by
R.
Seaver and
H.R.
Lane
in
A.
BRETON, Manifestoes
of
Surrealism
(Ann
Arbor, 1969).
29.
GEORGES
BATAILLE,
'La vieille taupe et
Ie
pretixe
Sur dans les mots Surhomme et Surrealiste '. The
article was accepted for publication
by
the journal
Bifur
in
1930, but
Bifur
was c10scd down before Bataillc's article
could appear
in
print. However, the responses of amongst
others Breton and Dali suggest that copies of the article
were available for them. (See note 57.) The article was
published for the first time
in
Tel Quel
in 1968.
An English
translation
is
published
in GEORGES BATAILLE,
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939.
(Minneapolis, 1985),
The Old
Mole and the prefix
Sur in
the words Surbomme (Ubermensch) and
Surrealist ', pp. 39-40.
30.
GEORGES
BATAILLE, quoted by
A. MASSON,
'Some notes on the unusual Georges Bataille',
Art and
Literature
Vol. 3, Autumn and Winter 1964, pp.
108-109.
31.
GEORGES BATAILLE,
letter to
Andre
Breton, March
1929, quoted
by
M.
NADEAU, The History
of
Surrealism
(London, 1968), p.
156.
32.
GEORGES BATAILLE, 'La
vieille taupe et
Ie
pretixe
Sur dans les mots Surhomme et Surrealiste''', English
translation published in
GEORGES BATAILLE, Visions
of Excess: Selected Writings
1927-1939, (Minneapolis,
1985),
'The Old
Mole and the prefix Sur in the words
S.-Afr.Tydskr.Kult.-Kunsgesk. 1989.3(4)
Surhomme (Ubermensch) and Surreali st ', p. 41.
33.
GEORGES BATAILLE, 'La
vieille
taupe
et Ie pretixe
Sur dans les mots Surhomme et Surrealiste
' ',
English
translation published in GEORGES
BATAILLE, Visions
of
Excess: Selected Writings
1927-1939, (Minneapolis,
1985), 'The
Old
Mole and the prefix
Sur in
the words
Surhomme (Ubermensch) and Surrealist ', pp. 33-36.
34. G.
GROSZ,
in
G. GROSZ
W.
HERZFELDE,
Die
Kunst ist
n
Gefahr
(Berlin 1925), English translation
quoted
in
H.
JANSE
VAN
RENSBURG,
'Picabia
and
Nietzsche',
S.Afr.J.Cult.Art
Hist, Vol. 1(4),
December
1987, p. 364.
35.
SALVADOR DALI, Diary ofa Genius
(London, 1966),
p.23.
36. SALVADOR
DALI, Diary
of
a Genius
(London, 1966),
p.22.
37.
GEORGES BATAILLE, Oeuvres completes
(Paris,
1970), Vol. II 'Dossier dc
la
polemique avec
Andre
Brcton', p. 421.
38.
SALVADOR DALI,
leu
Lugubre
1929, exhibited at the
Galerie Goemans, November 1929.
39.
GEORGES BATAILLE,
'Le
Jeu lugubre' ,
Documents
8, December 1929, English translation published in
G.
BAT
AILLE, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-
1939 (Minneapolis, 1985),
The
Lugubrious
Game',
p. 28.
40.
GEORGES BATAILLE, Oeuvres completes
(Paris,
1970), Vol. II 'Dossier de
la
polemique avec Andre
Breton',
pp. 421-422.
The
double
entendre
also refers to
a confrontation that Dali had with thc Spanish prison
system before his arrival
in
Paris. Thc occurence, which
became part
of
Dali's reputation
in
Paris,
is
related
in
SALVADOR DALI,
Diary
ofa
Genius
(London,
1966),
first section.
41.
GEORGES
BATAILLE,
'Le
Jeu
lugubre ',
Documents
8, December 1929, English translation published in
G.
BAT
AILLE, Visions of Excess Selected Writings 1927-
1939, (Minneapolis, 1985),
Thc
Lugubrious
Game',
p.28.
42.
GEORGE S BATAILLE, 'Le Jeu
lugubre''',
Documents
8, December 1929, English translation published
in
G.
BATAILLE, Visions of Excess; Selected Writings 1927-
1939, (Minneapolis, 1985) ,
The
Lugubrious
Game',
pp.
24
28. Dali refused reproduction rights
of
his painting
for the publication of the essay.
43.
GEORGES
BATAILLE,
'Le bas materialisme et
la
gnose',
Documents
2(1), 1930. English translation in
G.
BATAILLE, Visions
of
Excess: Selected Writings 1927-
1939, (Minneapolis, 1985). 'Base Materialism and
Gnosticism', p, 45.
44.
GEORGES BATAILLE, 'Le
bas materialisme et la
gnose',
Documents
2(1),1930. English translation
in G.
BATAILLE, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-
1939, (Minneapolis, 1985), 'Base Materialism and
Gnosticism', pp. 49-52.
45.
SALVADOR DALI, 'The
Stinking Ass',
This Quarter
5(1), September 1932, also published in L.R.
LIPPARD,
Surrealists on Art
(Ncw Jersey, 1970), p. 98.
46.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER,
'Spiegelgesprach mit Martin
Heidegger',
Der Spiegel
Vol. 23, 1976, p. 204.
Heidegger's lectures on Nietzschc were published as M.
7/23/2019 Bataille Nietzsche Surrealism
10/11
S.Afr.J.Cult.Art
Hist. 1989,3(4)
HEIDEGGER, Nietzsche, 4 volumes, Berlin, 1961).
37.
SALVADOR DALI,
Diary ofa Genius, (London, 1966),
p.25.
48. Dali formulates paranoiac-cr itical activity as the
spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon
the interpretive-critical association of delirious
phenomena .
SALVADOR DALI,
La Conqui3te de
L irrationel, lecture in Brussels, June 1934. English
translation published in SALVADOR DALI, The Secret
life
of
Salvador Dali, (London, 1968), p. 418. The method
is partly based on Nietzsche s concept of Dionysian
Rausch .
49.
SALVADOR
DALI,
Diary
of
a Genius, (London, 1966),
p.30.
50. See discussion note
38
above.
51. See
in
particular GEORGES
BATAILLE,
La structure
psychologique du fascisme , La Critique sociale, 10
November 1933; and Nietzsche et les fascistes ,
Aeephale, 2, January 1937; English translations in
GEORGES BATAILLE, Visions of Excess; Selected
Writings, 1927-1939, (Minneapolis, 1985), The
psychological structure of Fascism and Nietzsche and the
Fascists , pp. 137-161, and pp. 182-198.
52. See note 44 above. Despite his criticism of Bataille, Dali
acclaims Nietzsche as the source of his own interest in
myth
and
legend. See G.
LASCAULT,
Eine
Scheherazade des Klebrigen z den Texten von Salvador
Dali , published in I.F.
WALTER,
Salvador Dali:
Retrospektive 1920-1980, (Munchen, 1980).
53. For Giacometti s response to Bataille s images of
primitivism, see R.
KRAUS,
The Originality
of
he Avant
Garde and other Modernist Myths, (London, 1986), pp.
76-85. Masson s response to Bataille
is
discussed
in
my
essay
H.
JANSE VAN RENSBURG, One night on
Montserrat: Religious ecstasy in the art of Andre
Masson , to be published. Picasso s response to Bataille is
discussed in H. JANSE
VAN RENSBURG,
Picasso s
Vollard Suite and a Dionysian view of art , to be
published, and H JANSE VAN RENSBURG, Picasso s
Ariadne,
light in the Surrealist labyrinth ,
to
be published.
54. The interpretation of
the
work of Sade is a further point of
controversy between Bataille and Breton in 1929-1930.
Once again a smear
of
faeces painted
in
on the pants of a
figure in Dali s The Lugubrious Game is part of the
controversy.
55. ANDRE MASSON, Some notes
on
the unusual Georges
Bataille , rt and Literature, Vol. 3, Autumn and Winter
1964, p. 111.
56. A.
SKIRA,
Introduction, Minotaure, 1 June 1933. Freely
translated.
57. GEORGES
BATAILLE, La
structure psychologique du
fascisme , La Critique Sociale, 10, November 1933,
English translation in GEORGES
BATAILLE,
Visions
of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, (Minneapolis,
1985), The Psychological structure of Fascism , pp. 142-
45.
58. See M. MAUSS, Essai sur Ie don, form archaique de
I cchange , Annee sociologique, 1925. Mauss
is
acknowledged in GEORGES BATAILLE, La notion de
depense , La Critique Sociale, no. 7, January 1933, p. 15.
397
Nietzsche s influence is later acknowledged in G.
BATAILLE,
Chronique nietzscheen , Acephale no.
3-4,
July 1937.
59.
Appel
a la lutte , 10th February 1934, see M.
NADEAU, L Histoire du surrealisme et documents
surrealistes, (Paris, 1964), pp. 381-386.
60. GEORGES
BATAILLE,
Oeuvres completes, (Paris,
1970), Vol.
1,
notes, pp. 640-641.
61. GEORGES BATAILLE, Oeuvres completes, (Paris,
1970), Vol. 7, Notice autobiographique (1958), p. 461.
62. A. MASSON, Some notes on the unusual Georges
Bataille , rt and Literature, Vol. 3, Spring
and Winter
1964,
p.
107.
63. See the discussion in my article H JANSE VAN
RENSBURG, One night on Montserrat: Religious
ecstasy in the art of Andre Masson , to be published.
The
drawing
Dionysos
of 1933 appears in A. MASSON,
Sacrifices
(Paris, 1936) with an introduction entitled
Sacrifices , by Bataille.
64. GEORGES BATAILLE, Nietzsche et les fascistes ,
Acephale, 2, January 1937, English translation in
GEORGES
BATAILLE,
Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings. 1927-1939, (Minneapolis, 1985), Nietzsche
and the Fascists , pp. 185-186.
65. GEORGES BATAILLE, L obelisque , Mesures, 4(2),
15 April 1938, English translation in GEORGES
BATAILLE,
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-
/939, (Minneapolis, 1985),
The
Obelisk ,
p.
219.
66. GEORGES BAT AILLE, Chronique nietzseheen ,
A cephale
, 3-4, July 1937, English translation in
GEORGES
BATAILLE,
Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927-1939, (Minneapolis, 1985), Nietzsche an
Chronicle , p. 210.
67.
GEORGES BATAILLE,
Propositions , Acephale, 2
January 1937, English translation in
GEORGES
BATAILLE, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-
/939, (Minneapolis, 1985), Proposi tions , p. 200.
68. GEORGES
BATAILLE,
Chronique nietzscheen ,
Acephale,
3-4, July 1937, English translation in
GEORGES BATAILLE, Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927-1939, (Minneapolis , 1985), Nietzschean
Chronicle , p. 203.
69. See F. NIETZSCHE,
The Birth
of
Tragedy,
(Translated
by F. Golffing, New York, 1964) paraf. 1, pp. 22-24.
70.
GEORGES BATAILLE,
Chronique nietzseheen ,
Acephale,
3-4,
July 1937, English translation
in
GEORGES BAT
AILLE,
Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927-1939, (Minneapolis, 1985), Nietz schean
Chronicle , p. 206, emphasis by Bataille.
71. GEORGES BATAILLE, L Apprenti sorcier , Nouvelle
Revue Francaise, 298, July 1938, English translation in
G.
BATAILLE,
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-
1939, (Minneapolis, 1985), The Sorcerer s
Apprentice ,
p. 232. This
is
Bataille s only article
to appear in
Nouvelle
Revue Francaise
before the war, which was the leading
intellectual review at the time. Bataille s article appeared
along with Michel Leiris Le Sacre dans la vie
quotidienne , and Roger Callois
Le
Vent d hiver ,
signaling to the public the activities of the College de
Sociologie.
7/23/2019 Bataille Nietzsche Surrealism
11/11
398
72.
GEORGES BATAILLE, Oeuvres completes
(Paris,
1970), Vol. II, 'Instructions pour la recontre en foret',
pp. 277-278.
73. R. CALLOIS,
'The
College de Sociologie : Paradox
of
an active Sociology',
Sub-stance,
Vol. 11 12, 1975, pp.
61-64.
74. M. LEIRIS, letter to Georges Bataille, 1939, published in
GEORGES BATAILLE,
Oeuvres completes, (Paris,
1970), Vol. II, pp. 454-455.
75. See my article
H lANSE VAN RENSBURG, 'One
night
on Montserrat: Religious Ecstasy in the art of Andre
Masson', to be published.
76.
GEORGES
BATAILLE,
'L'obelisque',
Mesures, 4 2),
S.-Afr.Tydskr.Kult.-Kunsgesk. 1989,3(4)
15
April 1938, English translation in GEORGES
BATAILLE, Visions
o
Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-
1939, (Minneapolis, 1985), 'The Obelisk', pp. 219-220.
77 ANDRE BRETON,
quoted
by
W.
CHADWICK, Myth
in Surrealist Painting,
(Michigan, 1980), p. 2.
78. ANDRE BRETON,
'The
Legendary Life of Max Ernst,
preceded by a brief discussion on the need for a new
Myth',
View,
Vol. 2(1), May 1942.
79
More detailed explorations of the response to Nietzsche in
Surrealist art, and Bataille's interaction with and
influence on Surrealist art, will be presented in
forthcoming articles.