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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The ‘Will to Truth’ -- and Woman

Nietzsche apotheosizes the ‘will to truth’ counter our purer expectations as the will not to be deceived, thus he connects truth with a woman, exposing the desire for truth as a desire like any other.



Thus Nietzsche asks “What really is it in us that wants ‘the truth’?” and carries the erotic resonance of the question to the issue of questioning as such, reminding us, fully cognizant of the invocation of the sphinx, of Oedipus who himself searched himself, taking counsel from no one and after winning his fortune, finally found his own fatal answer to the question, “Who really is it here who questions us?”

In an examination of conscience drawn from Kant’s moral philosophy and thence conveyed to Freud via Nietzsche himself as the locus of the unconscious in us, we can never know if it is “the question concerning the problem of the value of truth” that steps before us, or if we ourselves all-too-unknowingly have “stepped before this problem? Which of us is Oedipus here? Which of us Sphinx?” (BGE §1)

Supposing, what if, truth were a woman?

Nietzsche's supposition is provocative and a great deal of winking and no small amount of feminist preening has been expended in reaction. As such, however, Nietzsche’s question reveals less about the femininity of truth than the masculinity of its seekers.

Thus with Nietzsche’s contention that truth be regarded as a woman one has no choice but to bring a case against the suitors of or aspirants to truth and that is the point we need to make, and yet and always forget to make — and as soon as this lecture is over, for some of us already and even now, we are back to thinking as we usually do, which means that we are back to taking the standard reader’s view, the standard thinker’s view, which is of course thoroughly sexed as Nietzsche reminds us: “all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists” prove themselves both male and incompetent.

Philosophers to a man, all of truth's suitors, have been way too, all too clumsy.

Nietzsche’s philosopher, this does not surprise us, is supposed to be a man, just as Bataille’s reader is supposed to be a man.

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In Bataille, as in Sade, as in Lacan, what fascinates us is only talk...

And of course, or probably, no theorist "gets this point," after Bataille, that is
to say, after Lacan himself that is, better than Žižek.

Squared.

What fascinates us is only talk.  

Again: in Bataille, as in Sade, as in Lacan, and this Žižek exploits to a degree that is now marvelously well-known, what fascinates us is only talk, the very idea of the very idea...  With Bataille we speak explicitly  (this is to say: directly) of things Nietzsche only expresses with allusion to ancient mysteries.
In other words, Bataille eroticizes Nietzsche.

Not that Nietzsche lacks his share, assuming there is always such.... 

(and just this when it comes to the gentlemen is rather problematic to assume) ...

Still, still and despite the
fact that men, heterosexually disposed do not regard themselves as objects for women, for the other, to be assessed and judged and so on, Nietzsche has been eroticized, posthumously, a tad homoerotically (for this changes nothing of the above heteroerotic point), and ergo falsified, including, when imposed on his person a certain phallicization, rather as if, certainly this would have been true, Nietzsche were not nearly muscular enough for our fantasies for him.

In this case, the metonymy of the image, despite its profoundly erroneous dimensions, speaks to us: in Nietzsche not as the Übermensch but as "superman" in the 1907 bookplate by Alfred Soder for Friedrich Berthold Sutter, Der nackte Nietzsche im Hochgebirge, which also has been featured as the cover for one key book on Nietzsche and his overall historical reception not to mention blogs and Facebook pages.  

This has also been done more conventionally not with Nietzsche himself but still more from the viewpoint of the subject as such for whom an object, this would be truth, or life, or eternity as Nietzsche also personalizes this speaks to us.  

Thus I am reminded of a the cover of a Hollingdale translation depicting the Sphinx not in stone but in, as it were, soft-porn, almost Vargas girl detail with the one key exception that the sphinx, being a sphinx, was not smiling, lacked a Vargas-girl cream complexion (to the middle-Eastern contrary) and had lidded eyes rather than open, inviting eyes.

 “Supposing truth to be a woman — what then? Is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women?” (BGE, Preface)

NB
-- because it has to be said --
the reference to a "Vargas girl" is to the Peruvian artist, Alberto Vargas (9 February 1896 – 30 December 1982), and not, and this not is here fairly significant, to the sixties 'chanteuse,' Chavela Vargas (b. 1911) ...

Where Vargas girls are rather like Frank Frazetta men (nb, again, and always, not boys, and note that Frazetta, for his own part, does a mean Alberto Vargas), Chavela Vargas --- who set the pattern in many ways for k.d. lang, if and to be sure hailing as she does from the Mexico south of the US much rather than the Canada north of the US.



Where, as Nietzsche reminds us, the south always is far more threatening, more dangerous (Goethe knew this), this also means, alas, that we tend not to take account of it.

Alberto Vargas offers us an iconic pattern, echoing so many others who had done so already with the cello and its form, and its voice, sexualizing the outline of the guitar.



And, indeed, Chavela Vargas herself repeats this image.

Chavela Vargas went from the (in retrospect) amazingly easy-to-do, as in not really all that, after all, mindfuck of gendercossings in the sixties to the greatest of transgressions, getting old and singing old, all a challenge to the image of the Dionysian vitality of music.

Aging is the thing, as Nietzsche also reminded us, that counts for us as an offense against our metaphysical dreams, as aging, like, becoming, procreation, death is what life is.





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