“Le plus beau récit de notre temps”: Bataille's Ethics of the Literary and the Erotic

Abstract

Contrary to a prevalent caricature of his work as misogynistic, femininity can be found in Georges Bataille's work as difference that interrupts the self-presence of the subject. His approach to “virility” reveals an understanding of desire that unsettles rather than reinforces masculinity. Attending to Maurice Blanchot's surprising description of Madame Edwarda as “le plus beau récit de notre temps,” Bataille's story can be read as exceeding its inspiration in the thought of G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger, opening the possibility of an attention to the literary and to femininity that is necessary to his account of alterity. This awareness of the specificity of literary expression suggests a reformulation of the ethical; the literary formally implies ethics rather than merely illustrating specific dilemmas. An extended comparison with Pierre Klossowski's reading of the Marquis de Sade reveals a divergence in the writing of the feminine body that allows an ethicized eroticism, eliminating the alibi of purity.

Keywords:

• alterity
• Georges Bataille
• beauty
• Maurice Blanchot
• eroticism
• ethics
• femininity
• G. W. F. Hegel
• Martin Heidegger
• Pierre Klossowski
• Marquis de Sade

Notes

1. Roland Barthes discusses the difficulty of disciplinary distinctions in Bataille's work (157).

2. In the years 1918–19, Bataille's main readings were from Rémy de Gourmont's Le Latin mystique, a collection of Catholic texts intended to inspire revulsion and disgust for flesh and sexuality. He also intended to enter seminary and become a priest during this period (Surya 27). The surrealist group with which Bataille was sometimes aligned would have found these interests quite conservative and conformist. Allan Stoekl reads Madame Edwarda as essentially turning on a ritual substitution of the elements of the Catholic mass, with the goal of establishing an altered form of Hegelian recognition (“Recognition in Madame Edwarda” 78). In my view, this emphasis on religion and on recognition falls short of the extremity of the experience described in the narrative. Although Stoekl's identification of the Eucharist as a foundation for the structure of the narrative is significant, his reading places the narrative more or less within the bounds of Hegel and Catholicism, whereas I read the story as calling into question the premises of those discourses.

3. See, for example, Benoîte Groult, who argues that Bataille and others who link sexual desire to death and filth speak from a male perspective that essentially aims to dominate the female body (68–69).

4. For Duras, see Adler 214; for Mishima, see Mishima 9–20; for Kundera, see Kundera; for Godard, see In Praise of Love; for Cixous, see Cixous and Clément 157; for Ahwesh, see Ahwesh 133; for Tsukamoto, see Tsukamoto; for Björk, see Heath.

5. Madame Edwarda made a significant impact on the conception of psychosis held by Jacques Lacan. For an account of Lacan's reception of Bataille's ideas and an alternative reading to that of Lacanian psychoanalysis, see Ryder, “Inner Experience Is Not Psychosis” 94–108.

6. Some comparison with Emmanuel Levinas's approach to ethics and to death can be pursued. The sound-image of the seashell is exactly the one later mentioned by Levinas as indicative of what he calls the il y a, an existence that precedes birth and exceeds death. The story was written in 1941, six years before Levinas's De l’existence à l’existant, which first formulated the concept of the il y a as distinct from Heidegger's es gibt, was published (De l’existence à l’existant 15–16). Levinas appealed to the experience of the seashell as an illustration forty years later (Levinas, Ethics and Infinity 48). Similarly, Levinas appears to have himself recognized a similar link between the erotic encounter and the il y a, when he writes that “[à] côté de la nuit comme bruissement anonyme de l’il y a, s’étend la nuit de l’érotique” (Totalité et infini 289).

7. Bataille read Heidegger closely and sharply criticized his thinking as a philosophy of fascism. For elucidation of Bataille's position with regard to Heidegger on the questions of literature, death, and ethics, see Ryder, “Bataille against Heidegger” 71–85.

8. In this, he anticipates Lacan's rebuke to the partisans of “l’affranchissement naturaliste du désir” (12).

9. The one character with something like this role, Lazare in Le Bleu du Ciel, is intriguing to the narrator for her purity, but in an entirely desexualized way (OC III: 402).

10. The name of Lazare's erotic foil in this narrative, Dirty, makes this obvious (OC III: 385)

11 For this reason, Carolyn J. Dean's reading of Bataille's view of sexual difference, which revolves around castration, is somewhat unconvincing (243). Although Dean makes an important contribution in her attention to Bataille's thought exceeding the subject, she relegates him to the prejudices of the intellectual milieu of his time in a manner that reading of his works can call into question.