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Abstract
This article examines how Georges Bataille, one of the celebrated precursors of the postmodern death of a linguistic subject (the subject of the signifier), is also a Nietzschean, pre-Freudian thinker who offers us an account of the birth of an affective subject (the subject of mimesis). If critics still tend to recuperate Bataille within a “metaphysics of the subject,” the present article shows that the central concept of his thought (i.e., “sovereign communication”) needs to be reconsidered in the light of his debt to Pierre Janet’s “psychology of the socius,” an interpersonal psychology that transgresses precisely this metaphysics. In line with contemporary theoretical developments, Bataille’s account of the birth of the subject out of the laughter of the socius offers us a theoretical model to rethink the foundations of subjectivity in relational, mimetic terms.
Notes
I would like to thank Salah el Moncef and Angelaki's reviewer for their insightful comments and suggestions. Of all my socii, I am especially grateful to Michaela Lawtoo and Kim Lawtoo for providing, on a daily basis, the affective source of inspiration for this piece. This essay is dedicated to them.
1. Such a disagreement can be traced back to the earliest and most influential readers of Bataille. Michel Foucault, for instance, in “A Preface to Transgression,” affirms that Bataille's transgressive thought involves a “shattering of the philosophical subject” (43). Jacques Derrida, in “From Restricted to General Economy,” while also emphasizing the de-centering movement at work in Bataille's text, argues that “[o]ne could even abstract from Bataille's text an entire zone throughout which sovereignty remains inside a classical philosophy of the subject” (267). And Jean-Luc Nancy, in La Communauté désœuvrée, writes that “perhaps Bataille did not have a concept of subject”; and specifies that “at least up to a point, the communication that is in excess of the subject is related to a subject, or it erects itself as a subject” (63; my trans.).
2. See the special issue of Diacritics, “Georges Bataille: An Occasion for Misunderstanding” (26.2 (1996)).
3. Bataille's conception of “communication” should not be confused with a linguistic exchange between subjects – though poetry is a manifestation of sovereign communication. For Bataille, communication is predicated on heterogeneous, affective experiences that are, as he says, “impossible” to convey through language. As he puts it in La Souveraineté: “communication is never the object of discursive knowledge, but is communicated from subject to subject through a sensitive emotional contact [contact sensible de l’émotion]: it is communicated in laughter, tears and in the tumult of festivities” (VIII: 287–88). These Dionysian experiences are “sovereign” in the specific Bataillean sense that they are outside the sphere of work (or “slavery”), are rooted in the “instant,” are characterized by high levels of emotional “squandering,” and “transgress” the distinction between self and other. I have commented on the Nietzschean and Hegelian implications of Bataille's notions of “sovereign communication” elsewhere; see Lawtoo, “Bataille.”
4. Patrick ffrench's After Bataille, one of the most important recent interventions in Bataille studies, shares my investment in reinscribing Bataille's thought back to the sphere of bodily affects and in uncovering, via a genealogical approach, the theories that already inform his thought. More specifically, ffrench and I share the conviction that Bataille's early thought is characterized by a theoretical emphasis on the power of “immediate emotional contagion” (After 4) – a theoretical approach we both partly inherit from Borch-Jacobsen's account of a “‘bottomless’ ‘pre-subjective psychology’” (qtd in After 45). One of my claims is that though less visible in his second period, questions of pre-subjective, mimetic affects continue to run, like an undercurrent, through Bataille's corpus as a whole.
5. Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes (12 vols.). Unless specified otherwise, translations are mine. Volume and page numbers are given in the body of the essay.
6. I take the concept of “subject” from Bataille himself, but we should be careful not to confuse his own idiosyncratic understanding of the concept of “subject” with traditional philosophical definitions. In Bataille's textual economy, “subject” is far from indicating a foundational substance, seat, or subjectum that is unitary, centered on itself, and predicated on the distinction between self and other, interior and exterior. As he explains it in La Souveraineté: “We live in a world of subjects whose exterior, objective aspect is always inseparable from the interior” (VIII: 284). And after identifying the notion of “subject” with the one of “sovereignty” (“the subject is, for me, the sovereign”), he adds: “the state of mind of the sovereign, of the subject, is communicated subjectively to those for whom he is sovereign” (VIII: 287). If I retain the notion of “subject” it is in order to gesture beyond the subject, towards an impersonal, intersubjective communicative dynamic of “sensitive emotional contact[s]” that is at the heart of Bataille's conception of sovereign communication.
7. Who Comes After the Subject? is the title of an influential collection of essays where a panoply of French philosophers commonly associated with poststructuralism and more or less directly indebted to Bataille – from Blanchot to Derrida, Deleuze to Nancy, Borch-Jacobsen to Lacoue-Labarthe – meditate on the future of the category of “subject.” In this essay, I extend a mimetic line of inquiry opened up by Borch-Jacobsen's conception of “identification” and Lacoue-Labarthe's conception of “mimesis.” Both concepts, as Lacoue-Labarthe aptly puts it, gesture towards “the process whose task – probably untenable – is to account for the birth of the subject” (204). What follows is an attempt to account for this “untenable,” mimetic task via the filter of an “untenable,” mimetic thinker.
8. That Bataille understands “affect” in mimetic, psychological terms is confirmed in other essays of the same period. In “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” for instance, Bataille accounts for the “force” of fascist sovereigns, and their will to power over the masses of soldiers thus: “‘affectively’ refers here to simple psychological behaviors, such as standing at attention [garde-à-vous] or marching in step [pas cadencé]” (I: 359). Affect, for the early Bataille, is thus mimetic in the sense that it is based on reflex, automatic reactions that implicate the subject in the psychic life of the other. Even in his later period “affect,” for Bataille, continues to be understood in these immanent, “psycho-mimetic” terms.
9. See, for instance, Hollier, “Beyond”; Lawtoo, “Bataille”; and Warin, who devotes an entire book to the Nietzsche–Bataille connection.
10. See Lawtoo, “Nietzsche” esp. 681–84.
11. See Gauchet.
12. Patrick ffrench is right to stress that Bataille's account of the psyche is “fundamentally non-Freudian,” and his emphasis on the importance of immediate affectivity does much to clarify Bataille's thought (14). Yet his claim that “Bataille's emphasis on affect sidesteps the issue of the unconscious and of subjectivity” needs to be qualified (14). The fact that Bataille sidesteps the Freudian notion of the unconscious does not mean that the unconscious does not play a part in his conception of subjectivity. Bataille, in fact, continues to operate within a pre-Freudian, psycho-physiological tradition of the “reflex unconscious” which has so far largely gone unnoticed in literary studies, but, as historians of psychology have pointed out, was still prevalent in the decades around the turn of the century. On the question of the unconscious, the most reliable historical reference is Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious, esp. chapters 1–5. I discuss at length the links between pre-Freudian psychology and Modernism (including Bataille) in a recently completed study titled The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism, Mimesis and the Pre-Freudian Unconscious.
13. See Richman 59.
14. Janet is not a well-known figure within literary studies as yet, but in the wake of Ellenberger's historical reevaluation of Freud's fundamental debt to Janet (Discovery chapters 6 and 7), theorists are beginning to turn towards this much-neglected figure. As the philosopher Ian Hacking puts it in Rewriting the Soul: “Janet was flexible and pragmatic, while it was Freud who was the dedicated and rather rigid theoretician in the spirit of the Enlightenment” (195). Freud's focus was on a “higher Truth about the psyche”; “he aimed at the true Theory to which all else had to be subservient” (196). Anticipating this critique, later in his career, Bataille will also define psychoanalysis as a “pensée abstraite” (VIII: 18).
15. Caillois is particularly interested in Janet's psychological research in “legendary psychasthenia,” a mimetic pathology that generates as one of its major symptoms a feeling of dissolution of the boundaries of subjectivity. See esp. 111–13. For a critical evaluation of Caillois’ take on mimesis, see Hollier, Les Dépossédés 55–71.
16. See Surya 330 n. 3.
17. All translations of Janet's texts are mine.
18. See Tarde.
19. See Meltzoff and Moore 9–12. Neurophysiologic studies have recently located the presence of “mirror neurons” that are automatically triggered by the visual movements of others with whom the subject relates. See Gallese.
20. Bataille specifies in a note that “[i]n a meeting at the Collège de sociologie, Roger Caillois … expressed a reserve on the meaning of this line. It is possible to translate it: ‘start, little child, to recognize your mother through your laughter [par ton rire]’ but also, ‘by her laughter [à son rire]’” (V: 389–90).
21. Bataille's account of the birth of the subject may seem, at first sight, reminiscent of his contemporary Jacques Lacan, who in a celebrated essay also emphasized the role of mimetic, identificatory mechanisms in the formation of the ego (see “Le Stade du miroir” 93–100). Critics have emphasized the similarities between these two figures previously (see Dragon and Dean), and quite rightly so given their common theoretical sources (Kojève included). And yet if we focus on Bataille's and Lacan's respective accounts of the role of mimesis in the formation of the subject (or ego) a fundamental différend needs to be signaled. Lacan emphasizes the role of specular mimesis (or “identification”) in the process of subject formation (94), but, contrary to Bataille, he rejects the centrality of an affective mimesis (or Einfühlung) in the process of formation of the ego. Thus, he states:
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It is this captation of the human form by the imago, more than an Einfühlung demonstrably absent during early childhood [une Einfühlung dont tout démontre l’absence dans la prime enfance] which dominates the entire dialectic of the child's behavior in the presence of the other [semblable] between six months and two years. (“Agressivité” 113)
22. Even in his later period, Bataille continues to rely on Janet's psychology. For instance, in a note to the introduction of Inner Experience, he writes: “Then I started reading Janet, imagining it necessary to use his subtlety in order to go further” (V: 430).