Georges Bataille Is The Dead Man
Marie’s Sovereignty “All it takes is to imagine suddenly the charming little girl whose soul would be Dali’s abominable mirror…” If I had to imagine Bataille’s “charming little girl” she would be the blonde, demonic child that appears at the end of Fellini’s short film Toby Dammit. An incarnation of Satan holding a large white ball that is really Toby’s head lost in a wager. She would bear the names: Simone, Marcelle, Lazare, Dirty, Eponine, and of course Marie.
How does one explain Georges Bataille’s body of work, which like all bodies, physical and metaphorical, is assumed to be unified but contains on the one hand the jerking off of an encephalitic dwarf and on the other a critique of the Marshall Plan?
Perhaps it is necessary to reconstruct the image of the “body” of the work. In Bataille’s case we could begin by severing the Cartesian head that thinks with a “clear and assured consciousness of that which is useful in life.” The body of the work no longer a seamless whole, composed of a series of discourses revealing a full positivity but a body like the image of the Acephale; headless, sacred heart in its right hand, dagger in its left, self-mutilating, a labyrinth of entrails, the skull of genitals. The bowels are a labyrinth where food finds its soul to be shit. The night is a labyrinth where Marie…
What gender is Bataille’s excess? What sex?
About Story of the Eye Roland Barthes says “the erotic theme…is never directly phallic.” And Michel Leiris writes concerning the novel’s erotic activity; “innumerable possible permutations in a universe so little hierarchized that all is interchangeable there.” Bataille replaces the strictures of gender, sexuality and hierarchy, with the orgy of metaphoric chains and their inexorable combinations; eye/egg/testicle.
For example, Simone’s vagina transforms from the sex organ which Marcelle and the narrator adore, to the mouth that devours the bull’s testicle, and then to the socket for the priest’s eye that is the sad gaze of Marcelle. Vagina/mouth/ eye socket. All of the elements of the story go through these changes and experience the random mutations of the basic metaphor. Always in threes, like a perverse parody of the Holy Trinity. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Eye, the Egg and the Holy Testicle. The hierarchy of gender, the dominance of the phallus broken by metaphor, by a new and obscene grammar.
The Dead Man raises the question “What gender is Bataille’s concept of sovereignty?” But gender is a poor word when speaking of sovereignty. Gender is a social construction, a figure created by the work of discourse. Bataille’s notion of sovereignty is told in the story of Marie’s escape and transgression initiated by Edward’s death, by his sacrifice. It is the sacrifice of Edward that opens the possibility of sovereignty and the sacred. Bataille reveals the conditions of sacrifice; “The victim dies, thus the witnesses participate in an element which his death reveals. This element is what it is possible for us, along with religious historians, to call the sacred. The sacred is precisely the continuity of being revealed to those who fix their attention, in a solemn rite, on the death of a discontinuous being.” The Dead Man records Marie’s night of sovereignty, her “practice of joy before death.” Her useful and everyday world crumbles away, replaced by a life rushing headlong towards death and silence. Along the way towards death there are preparations with drunkenness, debauchery, and the “little death” of orgasm. Burning with “la part maudite,” the excremental, and the heterogeneous, Marie recaptures a life which has been forgotten, repressed by a limited economy of accumulation, equivalence and utilitarian project. The memory of this sovereignty would be something like the memory involved in the phantom limb of an amputee.
In The Dead Man Bataille mixes mortality and dark burlesque; the death rattle, orgasm and wail of laughter combine to create a total abjection. Thus it is a sacred text. It is also a Hegelian text. Or rather a text that wrestles with Hegel’s imperial system. If Marie is the character of sovereignty then the Count embodies Hegel’s concept of Herrschaft. A laughable, deformed figure that deserves our respect and derision much like Hegel’s system.
(Above is the introduction I wrote for the Ediciones La Calavera edition of Georges Bataille’s The Dead Man under the pseudonym Lord Ouch.)
Here is a u2b doc on bataille. And here is an interview.
