DEATH, A SURREPTITIOUS FRIENDSHIP

Abstract

This article explores the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille through a close reading of their thought on death and dying. An intellectual and personal friendship, both conceived of death as an “impossible” space and “limit-experience” that not only constituted human subjectivity, but could also puncture it, leading to joy through deindividuation. This could only occur indirectly – for Bataille, via the sacrifice, eroticism, drunkenness or laughter – and for Blanchot, via literature. This line of thinking leads to varying formulations of sovereignty at odds with the prosaic world of use-value. Proceeding first through their friendship, this paper then explores this thinking death through the contexts of French Hegelianism, Kojève and Heidegger. While holding much similar, the paper argues that Bataille’s transgressive, embodied and deindividuating visions of death present a form of community that was overlooked by Blanchot subsequently, with consequences for theories of community and collective power today.

Keywords:

• death
• sacrifice
• Bataille
• Blanchot
• Kojève

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I would like to warmly thank Christian Kerslake for his comments and suggestions on an earlier draft, and Salah El Moncef for his help in the editorial process.

1 Works by Bataille and Blanchot have been abbreviated for ease of reference – see bibliography.

2 In Seminar VII, Lacan would later describe this as the morality of state power: “‘Carry on working, work must go on.’ Which, of course, means: ‘Let it be clear to everyone that this is on no account the moment to express the least surge of desire’” (318).

3 Comprising Guilty (1944, but begun first), Inner Experience (1943) and On Nietzsche (1945), and arguably also Madame Edwarda, an erotic novella (1941) dealing with similar project to rearticulate the sacred amid the death of God, through transgression. ffrench and Nancy (Inoperative Community 17) present this project as marked by a withdrawal from politics, but the historical facts of Paris’s disruption by war, and Bataille’s recuperation in the countryside from tuberculosis, were decisive.

4 Or what Derrida calls “undying as différance” (in IMD 95).

5 On Kojève and Bataille’s friendship, see Kleinberg 65–66.

6 Decisive for Lacan’s mirror phase, and Sartre on knowledge, power and relationality in Being and Nothingness.

7 Foucault wrote of the “bureaucrats of the revolution” in his Preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (xii).

8 Hollier (College of Sociology 86) notes that the letter was drafted two days after Kojève presented his end of history thesis to the College of Sociology.

9 Its original title had been Friendship (L’Amitié) until Queneau, Bataille’s editor at Gallimard, intervened (ffrench 40).

10 Corbin published the former in 1931 on Bataille’s recommendation. On Bataille and Heidegger, see Comay 77; on Heidegger in France, and Sartre, see Janicaud 25–36 and Kleinberg 69–71. I can find no textual evidence for Esposito’s peculiar claim that Heidegger “considered Bataille to be the greatest French philosopher of his time” (113).