by Georges
Bataille
--I.--
You must know to begin with that
every thing that shows a face to the world also has one that's hidden. There is
nobility in your face: it has truth in its eyes, which you use to seize the
world. But your hairy parts--those beneath your dress--are no less true than
your mouth. Secretly do these parts open onto the world's filth. Without them,
without the shame that is always linked to their use, the truth ruled over by
your eyes would be stingy at best.
Your eyes open out upon the stars and
your hairy places open up to... This immense ball upon which you live as if
crouched and beaten down bristles itself up here and there in the night in the
form of mountain ranges. High atop its snow-covered peaks is the starred
emptiness hung. But from one peak to another hangs always some gaping abyss in
which now and then a falling rock is heard to echo. The clear bottom of these
gaping holes is called the austral sky, whose [sharp rumbling] responds to the
darkness of the boreal night. In the same way, some day, will the stench of
humanity be for you the herald of [the most stunning of joys].
Now, in everything recognizable by
you, must your madness be able to perceive the reverse. It is time that at the
very bottom of your being you reverse the world's sad, insipid image. I want
you already lost in those depths in which, from horror to horror, you'll work
your way slowly to the truth. A fetid spring drips from your body's softest
crease, a tiny but invincible river. In fright you push yourself away. You
distance yourself from your own filth. Hah! Were you only, for an instant, to
follow this your desperate wake--FOR AN INSTANT--your unbridled nudity would
open to the sweetest fruits of the flesh.
Don't look for peace or rest. This
world out of which you came, this world that you are, will give itself to
nothing but your vices. Without a deep perversion at the very core of you, you
would resemble no one so much as the amateur climber sleeping off his fatigue
fifty meters from the summit--you'd be nothing but a dull weight.
What you must know secondly, then, is
that no kick is worth being sought if it is not in itself the seeking of kicks
itself. The pursuits to which you have been led by your youth and beauty are
not much different from those denounced by priests. What else would the life of
a voluptuary be were it not open to any way the wind blows, open, in short, to
the void of desire? In a manner more true than the steadfast monk, any old
bitch drunk with pleasure proves the vanity of all pleasure. Or rather: the
warmth she feels in getting her little taste of horror is nothing if it is not
the means to desiring greater and greater horror.
Not that you shouldn't be wise in
your research. The vanity, the uselessness of pleasure is at the very heart of
things. But--and here is the catch--one will never attain to the full rigor of
this fact if one knows it to be true from the very beginning. And so: the realm
of first appearances is the sweet softness to which you must abandon yourself.
I ought to explain to you now that
the difficulty raised by this second point ought not to discourage you. It is
truly the tight little common sense or rather the bald and blind moral
self-righteousness of your ancestors that caused them to flee everything that seemed
"useless" or unprofitable. We can now see clearly the kind of lives
to which their practicality led. All is vanity, all a snare, God himself is
nothing but the exasperation of a void if we only begin to engage ourselves
upon the paths of desire. But desire--desire itself remains in us even as it
were in defiance to a world that ceaselessly hides away those objects it seeks.
Desire harbors in us like laughter. We make a harsh mockery of the world in
stripping off our clothes. And what is this mockery if it is not the giving
over of ourselves to the desire for greater and greater desire?
This is the unintelligible destiny to
which we've been handed over by our very refusal to accept destiny (or at least
by the unacceptable character of destiny). We can do nothing but throw
ourselves into the pursuit of those signs associated with the void, at the same
time desire's own upkeep. We subsist only at the crest of things, pulling
ourselves up atop an endless succession of wrecks. The least giving way would lead
us into the insipidity of mere pleasure: in short, ennui. We breathe free only
at the furthest bornes of a world where bodies open up and out--where the
nakedness desired is an obscene nakedness.
In other words our only possibility
is THE IMPOSSIBLE. You are under the sway of desire, which spreads apart your
legs and exhibits your dirty parts. [The moment desire died--and along with it
all possibility of pleasure--you'd cease to feel the interdiction against this
your position.]
No longer seeking pleasure, and
renouncing all attempts to see in such an obvious trap either a cure for or
escape from our sufferings, you would no longer be left empty-handed by desire.
To do otherwise would be to succumb to a dull, moralizing prudence. Little more
would remain of you than an empty form, withdrawn from the game. To the extent
that you are annoyed by even the idea of mere PLEASURE, to this extent will you
abandon yourself to the flame that is DESIRE. No longer can you ignore what
sort of cruelty is necessary for you: without making a decision of unjustified
audacity, you wouldn't be able to withstand the bitter taste in the mouths of
those others who end up the jaded victims of their thirst. Your wisdom will
tell you to stop short. But only a thrust of health, of madness, can maintain
in you the dark flame of desire that in every way burns beyond the weak and
furtive flickering of orgies.
In this labyrinth that comes with the
game, where error is inevitable and must ever be renewed, nothing less will do
than the navet of a child. Of course no good reason can be found for you to be
nave, any more than one can be found for you to be happy. Yet you must have the
audacity to persevere. The extensive effort demanded of you by the
circumstances is obviously draining, but you haven't the leisure to feel
drained. Were you now to fall under the sway of sadness, you'd be little but a
dropped card, a wasted chance. A singular gaiety, neither feigned nor false,
the gaiety of an angel is needed under pleasure's anguish.
One of the harsh ordeals reserved for
those who stop at nothing doubtless concerns the necessity that prods them to
express an unspeakable horror. But at the same time this horror inspires only
laughter in them, and they have even sought it out only so as to laugh, or
better yet: so as to revel in its dark sting. What's more, you shouldn't be
astonished if they appear to be succumbing to calamity precisely at the moment
they reach their goal. Such is generally the ambiguity of things human. The
certainty of horror leads all the more quickly to joy if this joy is purified
of all reservations. In me everything dissolves in a piercing and voluptuous
rage for life that only despair can express. This definitive powerlessness to
grab hold, this inexorable necessity to put walls around nothing, could
anything withstand it but a child's ingenuousness?
What I hope from you exceeds wise
resolution as does despair or the void. From the excess of lucidity you must
seize childishness, which forgets it (caprice, which annihilates). The secret
of life is without a doubt the guileless destruction of everything that would
destroy in us the taste for living. It is childhood defeating without words all
the obstacles opposed to desire; it is the frantic and unrestrained pace of the
game; it is the secret of all childhood hideouts, the hiding places where as a
little girl it came about that you lifted up your dress...
If your heart is pounding, think upon
a child's most obscene moments.
With a child, different moments are
separated--
Dirtiness without a childish shame,
games without a child's joy, ingenuousness without the thoughtless reflex by
which it is characterized in children--all of these are but comedies staged by
adulthood's reductive seriousness. Health, on the other hand, maintains
childhood's burning flame. The worst impotence coincides with the domination of
seriousness.
Naked breasts and the obscenity of
your sex have the power to bring about that which as a little girl, able to do
nothing, you could only dream.
Battered by frozen despair, by the
majestic horrors of life! At exasperation's end. Today I find myself at the
edge of the abyss. At the limit of disaster and an intolerable happiness. At
the very peak of a vertiginous height I sing a HALLELUIAH: the purest, most
dolorous you could hear.
Calamity's solitude is a halo, a veil
of tears with which you will be able to cover your dog's nakedness.
Listen to me. I speak softly in your
ear. But don't misunderstand my soft tone. Go out into the anguished night,
naked, go to the place where the path turns.
Press your fingers into your moist
folds. It will be sweet to smell upon you the viscous, bitter scent of
pleasure: the damp, stale odor of flesh made happy. Voluptuousness contracts
the lips burning to open out onto anguish. The wind upon the small of your back
makes you feel more than naked as you quake and quiver with the cartilaginous
snap of your spine--that snapping which makes the whites of your eyes roll up
to fill the voids between your eyelids.
In a lonely forest far from your
abandoned clothing will you hunch down carefully like a she-wolf.
Lightning with its fierce stench and
pounding rain are the companions of anguish and obscenity.
Get up, and flee: childish,
abandoned, howling in frightened laughter.
Excessive voluptuousness, kindling
the heart in its flames--devastating, it obliges one to hardness. Desire's
furnace provides the heart with an infinite audacity.
Coming until you can come no more,
revelling yourself to death, you swerve your life around and away from the
boundaries set up by the faint of heart.
The passions do not favor weakness. Asceticism
is a soft repose compared to the feverish roads down which you are led by the
flesh.
Imagine now the horizons that will
open up with this calamity. For you there will be no conceivable refuge. What
awaits you? Hunger, cold, cruelties, captivity, a death without aid... Imagine
the sufferings, despair, destitution. Do you think you'll escape your undoing?
Before you is only the accursed desert. Hear the cries to which no one will
ever respond. Don't forget: from now on you are the bitch battered by the
wolves' fury. This bed of misery is your country: your only true country.
Serpent-haired furies are in every
way pleasure's companions. They will accompany you by the hand--pouring more
alcohol down your gullet every three steps of the way!
The calm of a convent, asceticism,
peace of heart--all these propose themselves to those unlucky ones who are
haunted by the need for escape and shelter. But for you no escape is possible.
Alcohol and desire abandon you to the ravages of winter.
[The convent would take one out of
the game, but one day did the nun burn to spread her legs.]
In a sense the cultivation of
pleasure is a tepid and cowardly thing. Pleasure seeks out its appeasement.
Desire on the other hand is eager never to be dormant.
The phantom of desire is necessarily
two-faced. That which presents itself as desirable is masked. Sooner or later
the mask falls, unmasking anguish, death, the annihilation of the perishable
being. In truth, you aspire to night, but you must follow a detour and love figures
capable of being loved. The possession of pleasure heralded by such desirable
possession of figures is quickly reduced to the disarming possession of death.
But then death cannot be possessed: it dispossesses. That is why the space of
voluptuousness is the space of deception. Deception is the basis and final
truth of life. Without an exhausting deception--at the very moment your heart
is weakest--you could never know that the burning desire to come is the
dispossession of death.
... Desire and love get mixed up.
Love is the desire for an object [measuring up to the totality of desire].
A senseless love has no sense unless
it lead to a love yet more senseless.
Love has this requirement: either its
object escapes you or you escape it. If it does not flee you, in fright must
you flee love.
Lovers find each other on condition
that they tear each other apart. Both one and the other must have a thirst for
suffering. For them must desire desire the impossible. If not, desire would go
dormant, it would die.
Cease all misrecognition of WHO YOU
ARE. How can you expect to be humiliated while at the same time held to
accosting others with a face that is not your own?
You always could go along with
propriety, then revel in the esteem of the humiliated. It would be easy to
value those sides of you by which you could work towards a falsification
without bounds. It would matter little to know whether you were lying or not.
You'd meet the dull servitude of the many with your own servitude, walling up
your existence against the passions. In these circumstances, you'd be known as
Mme N... And I'd hear much talk of your qualities...
You must choose between two paths:
either you are commended as one of their own, one of that herd of a humanity
founding themselves upon their horror of man; or you open yourself to desires
exceeding the received limits.
Were you to follow the first path,
you'd soon be worn down in fatigue...
But really, how could you forget the
power you hold, that power to cast within you your being itself into play?
Consider that excess of blood that boils in you here beneath the grey sky. Can
you any longer keep it in dim disguise beneath your dress? Would you suffocate
any longer that cry of rage and excessive voluptuousness--that cry that others
have reduced to the dull niceties set forth by their cowardly propriety?
Drunken with shame would you be any less FASCINATING than night's own
nakedness?
Only the intolerable joy of allowing
your dress to slide away can begin to measure up to the immensity...where you
know you are lost. Immensity, like you, has no dress, and your nakedness, that
loses itself in immensity, has the simplicity of the dead. Herein does your
nakedness expose you IMMENSELY: you shudder, you are torn up with shame,
immensely does your obscenity cast you into the game.
(Silent, naked, is it not the
intimacy of the universe to which you are opened by your intolerable vertigo?
And is it not a slipshod, unfinished universe yawning there between your legs?
A question without response. But you yourself, opened without your dress to the
infinite laughter of the stars, could you now imagine that the distant void is
any heavier than that unavowable intimacy disguising itself in you?)
Splayed out, your head hung back,
eyes burning adrift in the milky eddies of the night sky. Abandon to those
stars...your body's sweetest flow!
Breathe in the sulphurous odor--a
burning, naked breast--of the Milky Way: the smooth purity of your haunches and
back sends your thoughts tumbling through endless space.
Conjunctions of those naked
caterpillars we call our sex, baldnesses and pinkish lairs, whispering tumults,
fish-dead eyes: these long whoops of laughing rage are the moments that
correspond in you to the depthless fissure of the sky...
What is the importance of this text
for me? At the time I translated it--now many years ago--I was more an admirer
of Bataille than I am today. Nonetheless, there is something essential in this
text, something I would relate to Walter Benjamin's Kabbalism in its negative
theological aspects. But Bataille's writing is something otherwise as well.
Bataille was writing what he called "atheology." He had earlier
completed and published *L'Experience interieure*, his "Somme
atheologique," this designation being the charged negative of St. Thomas'
title *Summa theologica*.
If there is a swan song of the modern
West's "atheological" vision, it is this text, or such texts as these
from Bataille. The atheological vision finds its swan song here rather than in,
say, the texts of a writer like Samuel Beckett. (Or rather: those latter texts
are perhaps the *geriatric* side of the modern West's nihilism: a side that
concerns me hardly at all.)
I do not mean with these remarks,
however, that Bataille's *Halleluiah* had only a kind of historical importance
for me. That is not my point. That was not true at the time of my translating
this text, nor is it true now. I feel, in fact, very close to Bataille, and
this closeness is not merely a matter of history. For as his is a love burning
in the aggravated void left by an absent God, mine is a love burning in the
disjunction between a God all too present and a fallen world deaf to His
presence, a fallen world whose very inertia has cast it off from love and joy
and thrown it into a black and electric despair. The necessity of my love puts
it somehow close to Bataille's love, though it's perhaps true that this
closeness isn't as essential as our distance from each other. Or is it?
What separates me from Bataille is
certainly crucial. What to me could be more crucial? Bataille's despair, his
insistent despair, though it may be seen as being more manly than Christian
faith, is in fact the result of a deafness--an insistent deafness that is a
refusal near to madness. Bataille's refusal may perhaps be understood as
similar to Ivan's refusal in the Grand Inquisitor chapters of Dostoyevsky's
great novel. They are perhaps refusals of a similar order. It is ultimately the
refusal to sing *Halleluiah* (Hebrew: "Praise be to Yahweh!"), a
refusal in Ivan Karamazov's case based on the suffering of children, and
perhaps in Bataille's case as well.
Yet Bataille has here entitled his
text *Halleluiah*. What are we to make of that? Obviously it isn't merely irony
that led him to such a title. It is at the very least provocation, and probably
it is more even than this. Bataille's is a writing that deals with the most
serious things, that deals with them in the register of what he called
"atheology," but that deals with them even so.
Eric Mader-Lin
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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