Unsaying Non-Knowledge: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Writing

Georges Bataille’s writing seems to teethe with something utterly foreign to the discipline of philosophy. In this paper, I investigate what Jason Wirth calls’ Bataille’s “mad game of writing” in order to show that Bataille’s bizarre writing style is actually an extension of his ethical and philosophical commitments. Bataille’s writing attempts to produce a state within the reader rather than simply transmit information. I trace the justifications and roots for such a writing from his own system, as well as showing how such a style of writing has its roots in Kantian aesthetics and in Hegel’s Phenomenology. I live by tangible experience and not by logical explanation. I have of the divine an experience so mad that one will laugh at me if I speak of it. I enter into a dead end. There all possibilities are exhausted; the “possible” slips away and the impossible prevails. To face the impossible — exorbitant, indubitable — when nothing possible any longer is in my eyes is to have an experience of the divine --Inner Experience How should, rather how can, one approach the work of Georges Bataille? Though exhilarating and refreshing, Bataille’s writing seems to resist philosophizing in any rigorous way: he makes wildly contradictory claims throughout his texts, peppers bizarre aphorisms and graphic accounts of sexual escapades and alcohol abuse throughout otherwise carefully argued essays, and seems to delight in the abuse of language rather than the science of argumentation. Bataille’s “mad game of writing” resists the very discipline within which it is situated (“The Dark Night” 129). This mad writing, however, is not an idiosyncratic form of expression of an otherwise unremarkable philosophical project. Rather, it serves a critical function and is a necessary consequence of Bataille’s ethical commitment to the critique of a mode of subjectivity he terms “project.” Project, broadly speaking, is a mode of being-in-the-world in which we experience the world and the things that populate it as distinct from ourselves and as defined by their use. The division of the subject and the object introduced by project degrades the object by making it valuable only to some higher end, and degrades the subject. In entering the Res Cogitans (2013) 4 Brewer | 117 2155-4838 | commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans world of project, the subject “puts off existence” indefinitely (Inner Experience 46). The present becomes valuable only insofar as it is relatable to a future to come. Thus, to live in project, for Bataille, is “not to die but to be dead.” (46). In response to this, Bataille attempts a performative writing capable of enacting, rather than describing, a unification of subject and object. He does this by bringing the reader to maddening experiences of aporia that call into question the apparatus of discursive reason and that provide an opening for the unification of subject and object. In this way, Bataille radically undermines the classic conception of what it means to do ethics or to act ethically and undertakes a writing that would not just describe, but would perform, enact, and breathe. This analysis will require a close reading of Bataille’s thought, beginning with the intimacy of animality and the critique of project. Once the outline of Bataille’s thought and critiques have been traced, I will turn to Kant and Hegel to find the roots of Bataille’s commitment to the sovereignty of experience, and to track intimations of the possibility of a writing that would enact thought.