Rowan G.

Tepper
April 27, 2005

Bataille’s Negative Dialectic of Desire:

Immanence, Time and Eschatological Desire

If we are to speak of Georges Bataille’s thought on desire in

terms of influence and the historical traditions from which he borrows,

we must first note that Bataille stood at the crossroads of the Greco-

Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, as well as that of the traditions

of ontological and eschatological desire. In epigraphs he quotes from

Theresa of Avila and Alexandre Kojeve and throughout his writings can

be found numerous discussions of Hegel and Nietzsche. While Bataille’s

account of desire refuses to conform strictly to either the ontological

or the eschatological model, it is evident that his is a primarily

eschatological account, bearing more similarities to the Christian

mystics than to the Platonic tradition, despite appearances to the

contrary.

To be sure, a cursory reading of Bataille might leave one with

the impression that desire is, for him, not only ontological but rather

radically so. In so far as anguish and loss are constitutive elements

of this account of desire, a surface reading would indicate that not

only is desire for that which is lacking but instead that desire, being

desire for the impossible, cannot overcome this lack. This

misconception is shown for what it is by means of a closer look at the

structure and movement of Bataillean desire.

In the introduction to Erotism, Bataille writes:

We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation

in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure but we yearn for

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 our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us

to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along

with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should

last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking

us with everything that is. (Erotism 15)

This lost continuity is for Bataille to be found exemplified in the

manner in which animals exist in continuity with the world, with no

knowledge of transcendence. This parallels the judeo-Christian

conception of the prelapsarian edenic world. Much like in the judeo-

Christian myth, desire, for Bataille, aims at the restoration of this

prelapsarian state.

By contrast we may see how Bataille’s interpretation constitutes

an inversion of the Hegelian dialectic. The endpoints are reversed. We

begin as subjects with objects and desire entreats us and impels us to

fragment this identity until we arrive at pure experience, and more

radically, at pure inner experience – which re-establishes this lost

immanence of the world. This lost immanence can be construed as the

godless analogous to the god of the mystics. In Erotism, Theory of

Religion, and The Accursed Share Volume II, we may find explicit

statements to this effect; however, it is key to see how we first

depart from this state of immanence and how we may return to it, in

order for it to be seen how this desire is eschatological in nature.

Death is the only manner in which immanence is materially

restored (Erotism 13-17, Theory of Religion Chapter 3, “Sacrifices,”

The Accursed Share Volume II 79-86, Tears of Eros, etc) However, death

itself destroys the self who dies and as such permanently annuls desire

in its fulfillment. However, for Bataille some portion of desire’s

satisfaction is its own desiring, so despite desire’s remaining fixed

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upon the horizon of death, means by which this desire can be fulfilled

had to be devised. The first and simpler form produced to address this

difficulty constitutes the sacrifice and the second, more complex form

constitutes eroticism. This forms, like the idea of slipping ‘slipping’

words introduces in Inner Experience (Inner Experience 16), permit a

slippage between the profane, day-to-day world of things into the

sacred immanent world, much as ‘slipping’ words such as the word

‘silence’ introduces a slippage from discourse to pre-discursive

reality.

Bataille’s immanent, sacred world is the same as what a world

consisting of mere sense-certainty would be for Hegel. I cannot

emphasize enough that by contrast to Hegel, we initially find ourselves

in a world of already constituted subjects and objects; Bataille’s

dialectic must operate in reverse. Here the subject is initially given

as absolutely existent and the world given as nothing. In the

Discussion on Sin, held in 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Hyppolite

tag-team Bataille on the issue of negativity and nothingness. In his

responses to their questioning, we may see Bataille’s position in

contrast to Hegel. In response to Hyppolite’s questioning, Bataille

responds “In relation to this ego, there exists an absence of this ego,

which one might call nothingness if one so desired and toward which

desire doesn’t exactly carry us as though it were toward an object,

since this object is nothing, but as though toward a region through

which the beings of others appear.” (Discussion 50) He continues to say

“I simply wanted to indicate that nothingness can be found at any point

in the experience, and nothingness is always the annihilation of being,

the point at which being annihilates itself.” (50-1) This is to say

that this nothingness is at once the fundamental character of the world

beyond us, but it is also a medium to be traversed by desire.

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 In a hypothetical first experience of this nothingness we

experience a horror vacuii and in order to contain this caustic

nothingness set up prohibitions, limits and taboos: regions beyond

which it is forbidden to go; limits determining where beings end and

nothingness begins. These are the great prohibitions on murder, incest

and derivatively all sexual prohibition. Bataille sees in the relation

to death the common denominator in all forms of prohibition and taboo,

because the traversal of being into nothingness always puts the

integrity of the self at risk. Prohibitions and taboos as it were set

up ‘safety zones’ beyond which to be is simultaneously to risk not

being.

Once again, in this same experience the world of subjects and

objects is initially posited on the grounds of time operating according

to its own course (and aiming at its own annulment in permanent).

Without passing time there can be no subject-object distinction.

Bataille writes in Theory of Religion:

The objective and in a sense transcendent (relative to the

subject) positing of the world of things has duration as its

foundation: no thing in fact has a separate existence, has a

meaning, unless a subsequent time is posited, in view of which it

is constituted as an object. The object is defined as an

operative power only if its duration is implicitly understood.

(46)

Thus, transcendent objects are constituted in view of their use – this

food in front of me only becomes an object for me in view of preserving

it for later consumption; without view to the future it is immanent to

me in that I eat it immediately and its meaning is only manifest in the

nutrition I derive from it not from reflective knowledge of its value

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as object. Thus, time without view to future preservation or use

induces the opposite movement.

We may now see the first stage in the movement of desire, which

in the case of the sacrifice delivers us to immanence (however, in

terms of erotic desire this is only the first half). In order to reach

its object desire must cross nothingness to find its negation in some

other. This negation is carried out through the transgression of a

prohibition, i.e. in the case of the sacrifice the prohibition of

murder. This transgression is also known in the form of sin outside of

the festival of sacrifice. In the ‘Discussion on Sin’ Bataille notes

that all transgressions, all traversals of the nothingness constitute

sin and it is the identification with the object that transforms sin

into ecstasy, carnal eros into divine eros. (Discussion 53). In the

sacrifice the object is annihilated in death, but at the antecedent

moment, the sacrificer and the spectators identify with the object and

experience its death vicariously and achieve ecstasy. However, after

the festival, the subject takes over the nothingness of the world into

itself as guilt and sin. We find the same structure in erotic desire in

the paradigmatic example of sex without love. The subject finds the

object of desire amid the nothingness of the world. In order to achieve

ecstasy with this object, it becomes necessary to break down the

boundaries of individuation so that subject and object may lose

themselves. This is achieved through the negation of the nothingness in

the transgression of sexual prohibitions. The self and other identify

with one another in transgression and achieve ecstasy. At this

juncture, however, they turn away from one another and desire is left

opened onto the void and the self takes on this nothingness in the form

of anguish. “Anguish is an effect of desire that by itself and form

within engenders a loss of being.” (Guilty 92) Time first betrays us by

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producing and insisting on the stability and duration of subjects and

object, and then betrays us again by negating ecstasy and the object of

desire.

The second betrayal, however, is not as it seems. In betraying

us, time, like Janus, shows its other face and shows itself to be the

motor driving the dialectic and more generally as that which produces

the lack of desire. And properly Janus-like, time will also show itself

to bring about the return of prelapsarian immanence through the desire

of the beloved. At the first stage the self is not fully lost; ecstasy

is achieved but is un-repeatable and incomplete; in the first stage

immanence is revealed as immanence to me as a heterogeneous being. I

have pure external experience, but am left short of pure inner

experience and absolute immanence.

Anguish, as the negative moment in desire, plays a crucial role

in this second stage. In Inner Experience Bataille writes:

In anguish, there appears a nudity which puts one into ecstasy.

But ecstasy itself (nudity, communication) is elusive if anguish

is elusive. Thus ecstasy only remains possible in the anguish of

ecstasy, in this sense, that it cannot be satisfaction, grasped

knowledge. (Inner Experience 52)

Thus, prior anguish is the condition of possible for ecstasy, and the

anguish that initially permits ecstasy in the first form is the horror

of death. Anguish in the second stage, however, is the anguish of

desire.

It is in the second stage that the figure of the lovers becomes

the dominant one and in which the eschatological nature of desire

becomes fully clear. It is also in this stage that ecstasy results in

pure immanence without subject or object and pure inner experience. In

the first instance, here we have two anguished desires, desiring one

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another’s desire. The other chosen here by the self is absolutely

unique and irreplaceable and the significance of this uniqueness is

amplified by the fact that the improbability of by chance meeting such

an other and that the other should desire the self is so high as to be

effectively an impossibility. Bataille writes in On Nietzsche that “In

love, chance is first sought out by the lover in the beloved. Though

chance is also given as the two meet. In a sense the love uniting them

celebrates a return to being…” (On Nietzsche 74) Moreover, in an

earlier essay entitled “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Bataille writes

more emphatically “Simple coincidences arrange the meeting and

constitute the feminine figure of destiny to which a man feels bound…

the value of this figure is dependent on long term obsessive

exigencies, which are so difficult to satisfy that they lend the loved

one the colors of extreme luck” (VOA 230) The improbability infinitely

valorizes the beloved.

This may seem at first glance tangential. However, it is

crucially important; the affirmation of chance and luck in the

selection and meeting of the beloved is at the same time an affirmation

of time in its second face.

Chance in us takes form as time (loathing the past). Time is

freedom. Despite the constraints that fear erects against it…

Time is chance insofar as requiring the individual, the separate

being. (ON 114)

Time makes ‘what is’ occur in individuals… chance is the

individual’s duration in his or her ruin. (134)

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 The combination of exceeding love and the desire to lose

(actually the continuous state of this loss) IS TIME AND IS

CHANCE. (130)

Time brings about the chance appearance of the beloved and permits the

beloved to slip from the world of things into the sacred. Time has

already brought us to anguish and now time brings the object of desire.

My beloved arrives by chance and at a given time always in the future

until her arrival.

The impossible coincidence of anguished desires desiring one

another permits ecstasy to erupt through erotic transgression. These

transgressions enable a loss of self to ensue because in anguish we

have already put ourselves into question and revealed nothingness

within us. By virtue of this prior laceration of our beings the force

of transgression is redoubled and permits me to identify with my

beloved at the same moment at which she identifies with me. Since we

have both already been de-centered in anguish, this reciprocal

identification results in an ephemeral fused state neither in the lover

nor in the beloved, but in the world which is then revealed as

continuous with the lovers.

If the being that I embrace has taken on the meaning of the

totality, in that fusion which takes the place of the subject and

object, of the lover and the beloved, I experience the horror

without whose possibility I cannot experience the movement of the

totality. There is horror in being: this horror is repugnant

animality… [this] does not repel me… on the contrary, [I] thirst

for it; far from escaping, I may resolutely quench my thirst with

this horror… for this I have filthy words at my disposal, words

that sharpen the feeling I have of touching on the intolerable

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 secret of being. I may say these words in order to cry out the

uncovered secret, wanting to be sure I am not the only one to

know it; at this moment I no longer doubt that I am embracing the

totality without which I was only outside: I reach orgasm (The

Accursed Share Volume II 118)

In this loss of self and fusion with my beloved, I experience a ‘death’

that both is and is not mine. Our separate existences have temporarily

died in the embrace. Thus the link between death and eroticism here

becomes clear and the moniker ‘la petit mort’ becomes all the more

poignant. However, as my beloved turns away in the afterglow of

eroticism, I am thrown back into my heterogeneity and anguish.

In fusion and ecstasy is a pure inner experience of immanence.

The world is not immanent to me, but rather I and the world am in

immanence to one another. It is this immanent unity with the world that

Sartre and Hyppolite, the good Hegelians that they are, cannot seem to

wrap their minds around. In the final result, the distinction between

interiority and exteriority breaks down. What is important here is the

fact that this inner experience of immanence, the totality of the real

that is the object of desire comes only out of the future and through

the intercession of the beloved. My beloved means the world to me,

quite literally. Only through her can I experience the profound

intimacy of the world. It is always only through the desire of an other

for my desire that comes about through the whims of heterogeneous time

that brings desire to its fulfillment. Thus, corresponding to

Bataille’s atheology we have in his work an eschatology of desire.

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