The Maze of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, and Kant

The case of Kant's Critique of Judgment offers a powerful example of the radical disruption of the metaphysical text, enacted by Bataille's major сoncepts. The analysis of the metaphor of economy in Kant, Bataille and Derrida suggests the crucial importance of Bataille's general economy—as the economy of loss—for deconstructing the Kantian conception of genius and the whole scheme of taste—as an economy of consumption—and inscribing a complex interplay forces that the general economy is designed to account for. Once however taste, art and the economy of genius can no longer be inscribed through the restricted economy of the metaphysical text, the question of genre and style of a different inscription—a general economy—acquires a crucial significance. Bataille's own discursive practice can be seen as an exemplification of such a different—plural— style. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol12/iss2/5 THE MAZE OF TASTE: ON BATAILLE, DERRIDA, AND KANT A rkady Plotnitsky University of Pennsylvania If Bataille's confrontation with Hegel can be seen as central to his thought and writing and has become a relative commonplace (albeit a productive one), Bataille's references to Kant are only casual. I shall not, however, argue the significance of Kant in Bataille's discourse in specific (let alone textual) terms. Rather, I want to explore what can be seen as a Kantian moment in Bataille, as it appears within the historical and conceptual closure that, according to Derrida, defines Western philosophical discourse, or theoretical discourse, or even discourse in general. Indeed it is far from self-evident that this closure can be subsumed under the rubric of the Occident, however convenient or comfortable that demarcation might appear. That Kant influenced Bataille is best illustrated by Bataille himself in a passing remark in "The 'Old Mole' and the Prefix Sur in the words Surhomme [ Superman] and Surrealist": ". . . it was necess ary to endow antinomies in general with a mechanical and abstract character, as in Kant and Hegel."' This coupling of Kant and Hegel is familiar to the point of triviality. It is far less trivial and far more significant, however, that this coupling and this unity are, to a considerable degree, conceived of by Bataille in terms of a historical and conceptual closure of metaphysics, the closure on which our discourse must depend, even when it is aimed at undermining the power of metaphysics and philosophy. 2 The concept of closure, furthermore, includes a crucial idea of the necessity-psychological, social, cultural, historical, perhaps even political-of metaphysical thinking. Indeed, the phrase immediately preceding the one just cited defines the philosophical closure of language: ". . . for human vocabulary continues everywhere to maintain throughout a faithful memory of fundamental categories" (Visions, p. 35).