A Story of Rats

Abstract

Although Georges Bataille (1897-1962) wrote only uncompleted theoretical texts on “abjection” that remained unpublished during his lifetime, he remains a key, if often hidden, figure in the contemporary discourse on abjection, forming one basis of Julia Kristeva's seminal, psychoanalytically informed work in The Powers of Horror. Inspired by Bataille's anti-systematic thought, this paper eschews linear argumentation in favor of an abject mode of writing that sketches obscure associative connections between two stories of rats: Bataille's novella The Impossible (with its “Story of Rats”) and Freud's case study on the “Rat Man.” In doing so, the paper takes up Pierre Klossowski's formulation of the “simulacrum,” advancing the idea that Bataille's “abjection” is simulacral—not a closed, well-delineated concept, but a notion that always opens up beyond itself, forever slipping, spilling, and shifting, thereby performing the very action of abjection. Bataille's performative simulacrum of abjection is read in relation to his notion of the “formless” as elaborated by Rosalind Krauss, as well as Kristeva's theorization of “abjection.” This investigation of notions of abjection and the formless generates associations and meditations on possibilities for thinking and performing abjection in the wake of Bataille.

Notes

1 Freud famously connects anal eroticism and money. For an elaboration of this connection, see Sándor Ferenczi (1994).

2 The ‘rats that come out of our eyes’: what to make of this image of the eye – that organ of supreme lucidity – expulsing vermin? Pineal eye … rotten sun … an icarian fall … desublimation … debasement … a vision of excess … 

3 Sylvère Lotringer raises this matter in his interview with Julia Kristeva, ‘Fetishing the abject’ (Lotringer and Kraus 1999: 15–35). See also Hal Foster et al. ‘The politics of the signifier II: A conversation on the “informe” and the abject’ (1994). This conversation is treated below.

4 Compare to Kristeva's ‘subject in process’ (Kristeva 1998: 133–78).

5 One might consider, on this point, Giorgio Agamben's problematic and reductive reading of Bataille's theory of sacrifice in relation to victims of the Holocaust and the lingchi torture (Agamben 1995: 112–15).

6 The above pages are excerpted from Bataille's essay ‘The use value of D. A. F. de Sade’ (1985).

7 Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Helen Molesworth are the discussants.

8 In this section, all boldfaced quotes are drawn from ‘The politics of the signifier II’ (1994).

9 See ‘The sacrificial mutilation of Vincent Van Gogh’, where Bataille rejects the hypothesis that religious automutilations and other ablations are motivated by a ‘desire for hygiene’ (1985a: 68).

10 For a discussion of the proximity of these terms that has animated some of the ideas here, see Hegarty (2006).