tara's tierra

L'Abbe C and Excess

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.

Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf

"What we have been waiting for all our lives is this disordering of the order that suffocates us." --Georges Bataille, "Cruel Practice of Art"

When I think of reading Bataille, I picture myself up in the middle of the night, with a few candles lit in a living room with red walls, in the middle of a snowstorm. I find that I am the only person living in this weathered, wood-shingled mansion on a hill with an old fashioned elevator in it. I am wearing a heavy dark purple velvet robe and I am about to send a letter off that I will seal with melted wax and stamp with my initials. I am about to stamp what I think will be tDa onto the letter, and instead at the moment of the imprint, something else appears on my stamp, maybe jPl or sPm or sAm. I am not who I think I am when I read Bataille, and the way I think of the past is broken into a thousand pieces. It is liberating to walk among the shards of a broken vessel, instead of waiting for Benjamin's whole to reconstitute itself in a hopeful translation that recuperates and simultaneously rejuvenates the old.

The day is often suffocating. The idea of this day, another day, after yesterday, before tomorrow, a day. Such an ordinary day. And it ends in "y" every week. Will we ever change the name of the days? Will we ever have four days that are longer instead of seven? Will we ever not think in days? And then there are the bodies. Bodies moving around, desiring common shiny things that the bodies next to them desire. There is much judgment about the desires of others, and as I often find, an underlying jealousy of those who seem to desire things such as the imprint that ivy leaves on a wall after years of clinging, instead of the actual ivy itself. Bataille creates a space for an eroticism that destabilizes and disorders the surface. He thinks from the fleeting odd thoughts we have about wanting some kind of pain, or some kind of destruction, instead of thinking from the daylight thoughts of what is "socially acceptable" or "useful" or "progressive." He transgresses the limits of the "proper" or "worthy" and celebrates the despicable and abject, the sacrifice of productivity.

I remember this past summer thinking about the Angelus Novus of Benjamin, of this burst of hope that could somehow come out of History and lead us toward a future of endless progress. But maybe Bataille is right. Is empty ideology worth holding onto? Are we liberated in our moments of unproductive expenditure when we go into the dark and reach out for what haunts us in those moments of intense aloneness and introspection? As an individual, anarchism is seductive. But as a simultaneous product of community, I see anarchism as the force that makes me retreat, that makes me participate in some sense of collective "progress," only because I want to protect the place I retreat to, the place I go to put on my dark robe at night.

I'll meet you in the forest if you extend a hand. I have a wonderful fort, a thousand potions, and an endless supply of desire.