L'Abbé C is Georges Bataille's first enigmatic novella and relates the story of twin brothers (or two halves of one person?) -- Charles and Robert. Charles is addicted to vice, both drinking and devious sex, while Robert is a devout priest who by all appearances is wed to morality. However, as the odd somewhat "untold" story unfolds, we learn that things are not as they seem and in fact Robert is on the brink of madness because of his depraved sexual appetites for Eponine, a promiscuous libertine who likes to take to the drink and the boudoir, especially with brother Charles. Although the story iteslf is not full of explicit details, Bataille creates a dark, eroticized environment through his writing and perhaps most abstractly through the "filth" that Charles finds lying on the ground one day. This "filth" is not specified or named, but rather is an ephemeral, oblique presence symbolizing the moral decay and perverse desires of both the brothers:
When I got outside the sun was just coming up and, as I passed in front of the house, I saw at my feet, under her window, a piece of stinking filth. I tried to imagine what lunatic had deposited it there and wondered what bizarre motive he might have had. (But the act itself was consistent with a complete disintegration) (98).
Bataille goes on, through the narrator of Charles, to point out the unsaid (the secret, as Yerushalmi would say of Freud) that is always covered by writing itself:
My narrative doesn't quite measure up to what one expects such a book to be. Far from emphasizing that which is its purpose, it somehow conceals it. If I do get around to saying what is most important, if I insinuate it, if I speak of it -- it is, ultimately, just to leave it further in the dark (131).
A few weeks ago I was discussing Archive Fever with a friend of mine and our professor. The archive, a place as well as a law, is distinguished by a death drive -- the desire to repeat itself, to eradicate itself, to undermine its own existence. It is also characterized by the secret which it conceals, the answer to an unanswerable question that is whispered, insinuated, hinted at by partial traces of, in this case, "filth." I just started reading Gilles Deleuze's Masochism, which includes Masoch's novel Venus in Furs. All these authors -- Masoch, Sade, Derrida, Bataille -- are dealing with the excessive desire to go beyond the limits of language, the limits of coherence, the limits of what can be uttered out loud. They conceal the originary secret of our own depraved appetites, while dancing around it, archiving its outcomes.
Right there on that line between what we say (and repeat, and repeat, and repeat) and what can never be said is where our desire lives.
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