Analogies

But if Bataille’s affect differs from Nietzsche’s on the level of theology/atheology, his point could not be more rigorously identical to a point Nietzsche makes about the limits of language.

Our words fail us, invoking the inevitable vulgarization that occurs each time we open our mouths.

The argument is not unrelated to Heidegger’s argument (and it is important to add that I am persuaded to take Heidegger’s claim that he is not talking about God when he attempts to raise the question of Being) regarding the inappropriate reduction of the divine that is risked when one undertakes, as many commentators do, to identify God with Being.

Parallels between Bataille and Nietzsche continue for as Nietzsche mocks as we see above, however indulgently, the Christian God’s insistence on / demand for love, Bataille transforms this feminine/Jewish/oriental divinity, to the prostitute once again: needing it, wanting it.



In a text contemporaneous with the notes made in his Sur Nietzsche, Bataille writes

Blameless, shameless. The more desperate the eroticism, the more hopelessly women show off their heavy breasts, opening their mouths and screaming out, the greater the attraction. In contrast, a promise of light awaits at the limits of the mystical outlook. I find this unbearable and soon returned to insolence and erotic vomit — which doesn’t respect anybody or anything. How sweet to enter filthy night and proudly wrap myself in it. The whore I went with was as uncomplicated as a child and she hardly talked. There was another one, who came crashing down from a tabletop — sweet, shy, heartbreakingly tender, as I watched her with drunken, unfeeling eyes. (The Guilty, 1944 [La coupable])

Similarly, Bataille has his Madame Edwarda tell us/tell his protagonist Pierre Angelique thereby fascinating/horrifying/disgusting him (the point for Bataille is that all these go together) as she displays her genitals as luridly as only an exhibitionist or someone playing a role, and of course and to be sure, she plays the character Bataille writes her to play: the role she plays is of someone whose livelihood depends upon calling forth desire, just so that in the bad faith of the moment our hero can report his virtue/his virility as asking, as Pierre Angelique would have to ask,

“‘Why’ I stammered in a subdued tone ‘are you doing that?’ ‘You can see for yourself,’ she replied, ‘I am God.’”

It is important that we have here the pure demi-vierge, the angelic man, the one who, like Nietzsche, never has any choice, and on the other side, we have the whore’s desire. She will be to blame: everything he does, he will do in response, to please her. And in the end, she only gets what she deserves.

















After all: and here one conveniently forgets the monetary exchange, an odd bit of forgetting for a scholar of the very economic basis of excess and who tells us that he pays before “going upstairs” in a bordello, she “asked” for it.


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