On Bataille's On Nietzsche

Sakrale Huren u. Batailles Kriegstagebücher

Bataille's Nietzsche

Bataille begins his On Nietzsche by invoking Nietzsche as his companion: save “for a few exceptions, my company on earth is mostly Nietzsche...” The association (which could not but be one-sided) ends with an ellipsis stylistically underscoring Bataille’s claim, borrowed from Nietzsche as it is, and the personal reference Bataille claims is likewise taken on a life-loan, a life-line for Bataille, who writes, here catching a signature or a riff that runs through Nietzsche’s writings, particularly in evidence where Nietzsche himself ties his own loyalty to his own Schopenhauer as Educator (who writes as Nietzsche says as if for Nietzsche as a reader just and only because Schopenhauer writes for himself and alone).

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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 story of a poor soul insatiated and insatiable in love "

Bataille for his part does not invoke Eros so much with respect to Nietzsche’s fairly clear claims for Greek tragedy and orgiastic frenzy (and it is hard to get clearer than that) but and much rather with respect to the ecstasies of mysticism, that is of religion and thus with regard to the supernatural and the natural. Bataille thus illuminates Nietzsche’s description of nature, indeed his anti-Malthusian, anti-Darwinian constatation of nature as chaos and as unmeasured.





Analogy fails and if we remember our theology, we are talking of the divine, the divine conjoined with the erotic dimension, and rudely too: “We address him by name — he is the God of Abraham and Jacob. We treat him just like anybody else, like a personal being ...’ ‘So he’s a whore?” < Bataille, On Nietzsche >






This is the story told by Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and elaborated upon by Nietzsche as he makes a comparison between the God of love and the deep belief held by women of his times and arguably by many women today: “that love can do everything — it is the prejudice peculiar to her.” (BGE §269)






Bataille too catches the riff Nietzsche goes on to follow, comparing women’s expectations with regard to love to the divine relation to love as such, to the God of love and his commandment of love.




Thus Nietzsche has an edge and very few commentators find it and still fewer follow it. The point is a complicated one.


“Alas,” as Nietzsche goes on to write,

anyone who knows the heart discovers how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is — he finds that it destroys rather than saves! — It is possible that under the holy fable and travesty of the life of Jesus there is hidden one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most craving heart, that never had enough of any human love, that demanded love, that demanded inexorably and frantically to be loved and nothing else, with terrible outbursts against those who refused him their love; the story of a poor soul insatiated and insatiable in love, that had to invent hell to send thither those who would not love him — and that at last, enlightened about human love, had to invent a God who is entire love, entire capacity for love — who takes pity on human love, because it is so paltry, so ignorant! He who has such sentiments, he who has such knowledge about love — longs for death! — (BGE §269)

This aphorism proves Nietzsche’s aspiration to say more in a single aphorism that others say (or do not say) in a book. Yet Bataille is faster and more quotable by far: “God is a whore like every other whore.” < Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality > Nietzsche, if anything, goes easier on God, as Nietzsche prides himself on having the indulgence of the nobility he describes for slaves, even for a deity who takes the guise of a slave, an immortal as a mortal being.


Nietzsche, if anything, goes easier on God, as Nietzsche prides himself on having the indulgence of the nobility he describes for slaves, even for a deity who takes the guise of a slave, an immortal as a mortal being.





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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.

Women, if they are reading at all take all this and more in stride: making allowances for and reading and seeing from a man’s perspective. Women are, as de Beauvoir reminds us, uncannily good at this: an oppressed group dispersed among the oppressors, an oppressed group that takes the perspective of the oppressor and thus sidesteps any chance at the dialectic, subversion, revolution, and not at all coincidentally, excludes anything like consciousness or awareness.

women are not a minority, like the American Negroes or the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth. Again, the two groups concerned have often been originally independent; they may have been formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps they recognised each other’s autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger. The scattering of the Jews, the introduction of slavery into America, the conquests of imperialism are examples in point. In these cases the oppressed retained at least the memory of former days; they possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a culture. -- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Proletarians say ‘We’; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude.-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Perhaps the problem is, as Nietzsche complains with uncanny insight in his The Gay Science when he speaks of the tendency of women to play at being themselves, playing the role of the image of themselves, for men, even intimately, especially intimately. The problem, as Nietzsche sees it is that they play themselves as and for the subject that they do not opt themselves to be but instead Das sie sich hingeben, that they play-act at yielding or giving themselves, even when they “yield themselves.”

See for further discussion, Babich, “Nietzsche and Eros Between the Devil and God’s Deep Blue Sea: The Erotic Valence of Art and the Artist as Actor — Jew — Woman,” Continental Philosophy Review, 33 (2000): 159-188. Link here to ->->>Fulltext.

Voir aussi: « Nietzsche et Eros entre le gouffre de Charybde et l’écueil de Dieu: La valence érotique de l’art et l’artiste comme acteur — Juif — Femme. » Trad. De Isabelle Wienand. Revue Internationale de Philosophie. 211/1 (2000): 15-55.




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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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