by Jared Bly
On the occasion of the publication of the second volume of Bataille’s Critical Essays, which collects previously untranslated texts by George Bataille, Jared Bly interviewed its editors, Benjamin Noys and Alberto Toscano. The interview covers Bataille’s complex relationship with fascism, the relationship between heteronormativity and the sciences in his work, the status of the “lacerating image” in a mediatized world, and the significance of thinking through the “instant” in the context of predominant future-oriented thinking.
Jared Bly: You both have wide-ranging theoretical interests, diverging and overlapping in many important ways and addressing the themes of accelerationism, fanaticism, vitalism, fascism, literature, communization, and the philosophy of race, inter alia. How did you each come to Bataille and how did you end up collaborating on a project involving his work?
Benjamin Noys: I had a long-standing interest in Bataille dating back to my undergraduate days and postgraduate research. That interest was driven by the ways in which Bataille’s work combined themes that would be influential on twentieth-century French thought, notably a thinking of difference, his own heterodox materialism (what he called “base materialism”), and a left politics. Since my early work on Bataille, however, I have pursued a more critical path in reflecting on contemporary European philosophy. It was at the invitation of Alberto that I returned to Bataille and the editing of these volumes.
Alberto Toscano: Like Benjamin, I encountered Bataille as an undergraduate. Alongside Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, Bataille’s Erotism prompted me to study philosophy in the first place. Although that moment feels both chronologically and ideologically quite distant, my theoretical formation began in the ambit of “left Nietzscheanism” (hardly an original experience, no doubt). I never lost my interest in Bataille or the intellectual and political worlds with which his thinking intersected, but unlike Benjamin I never worked on him. It was in the context of my recent research on fascism that I turned back to his writings of the 1930s to ponder whether the concepts of heterology and sovereignty could be projected onto the present (my conclusion was that they are more useful to foreground the disanalogies between interwar fascism and contemporary authoritarianisms). And then, invited by the Chilean philosopher Ricardo Espinoza Lolas to co-edit and contribute to a Spanish-language volume on the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s work, I decided to explore more systematically the speculative triangle formed by Hegel, Kojève, and Bataille in an article later published in Qui Parle.
It was in the context of these investigations into Bataille’s writings on fascism and Hegel that I realized that there was a notable lacuna in English-language translations of Bataille, namely the articles largely published in Critique, the journal that he founded and edited from 1946, as collected in two volumes of his French complete works. Critique’s commitment to an international and trans-disciplinary mapping of postwar intellectual production through the medium of review articles also opened up a different perspective on Bataille as an editor, reviewer and “intercessor” (to borrow a term from Deleuze) for a multiplicity of figures and currents of thought. Hence this was not just a view onto a different Bataille than the mystic (Guilty), the “pornographer” (Story of the Eye), or the anomalous systematizer (The Accursed Share) but also a hopefully intriguing and estranging cross-section of postwar European intellectual life.
JB: Aside from his theories of eroticism and transgression, Bataille is perhaps best known as a very peculiar theorist of fascism. He lived and worked through both the interwar and wartime periods in France, placing him at the intellectual front lines of the real struggle against fascism. Despite his overt repudiation of fascism, Bataille has also been accused, namely by the Frankfurt School, of a theoretical complicity with this political ideology or of at least somehow verging on offering a fascist worldview. Given the recent election results in the United States, as well as the triumphant rise of right-wing parties in Italy, France, Hungry and elsewhere, do you think that Bataille’s thought holds relevance for the struggle against fascism in the current conjuncture? Does Bataille help us theorize what fascism is, and does he give us tools with which to combat it?
AT: With regard to the Frankfurt school, many Bataille scholars have challenged Jürgen Habermas’s critique of Bataille in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), which belongs to a broader identification of a Nietzschean “left fascism” as a dangerous malady to be cured by a recovery and amplification of the Enlightenment project—a polemic anchored in the German public sphere of the 1970s and 1980s. It is worth noting that, in his capacity as librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Bataille made his own contribution to the legacy of the first generation of critical theory by safeguarding Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and manuscripts on Baudelaire (recently published under Giorgio Agamben’s co-editorship). It is also amusing to note the references to Bataille in Benjamin’s correspondence with Theodor Adorno, which do not reference any complicity with fascism but point to what both see as the fanciful character of Bataille’s atheology and philosophy of history. Adorno wrote to Benjamin, on reading the journal Mesures in 1938: “In the same issue [as Roger Caillois] Bataille rails against the Lord God once again. If only it had some effect.” Writing to Horkheimer about the Collège de sociologie and the Acephale group and journalin the same year, Benjamin wrote of the “secret history of humanity” advanced therein, one “dominated by the struggle between the monarchic, static, and here that means Egyptian principle, and the anarchic, dynamic, actually destructive and liberating process of time, a struggle which Bataille sees expressed now in the image of an infinite and precipitous ruin, now in that of an explosion.” Again, there was no sign that Benjamin discerned fascist proclivities in Bataille.
It is certainly true that, to employ the terminology of the historian Carlo Ginzburg’s critical study of Bataille and the Collège, the author of Blue of Noon demonstrated “ambivalence” and “fascination” in his writings on fascism from the 1930s; in other words, he approached that political phenomenon from the standpoint of a “sacred sociology” attentive to questions of community, communication, contagion, and heterology. But we also need to confront the fact that Bataille—like André Breton, with whom he briefly joined forces in the group Contre-Attaque, and many surrealist, Trotskyist, and libertarian communists—recognized the weakness of liberal and popular-frontist responses to fascism’s rise. That was the context for his efforts to win the energies of mass intoxication, and even of sacrifice and myth, away from the black and brownshirts.
Now, to my mind, while reconstructing Bataille’s account of fascism—its place in his theory of expenditure and his own fragmentary efforts to articulate a radical anti-fascism—remains a worthwhile pursuit in the domain of intellectual history, his own contribution to contemporary debates lies perhaps more in allowing us to further discern the disanalogies between German Nazism or Italian fascism and the movements and ideas of the contemporary far Right. At least this is what I briefly tried to argue in my Late Fascism, namely that today’s fascistic politics bear a rather weak heterological or even “utopian” charge. No doubt, it could also be argued, as Adorno did in his account of fascism’s “phony fanaticism,” that to overestimate the “religious” dimension of excess and communion in the movements of the modern right—Nazism and Fascism in primis—is already a mistake, the sign of an insufficient appreciation of the inroads made by reification and a kind of baleful rationalization of the social psychology of fascism’s followers and even its militants.
JB: Throughout his career, Bataille was a persistent and stalwart defender of Nietzsche against fascist readings and appropriations of the latter’s work. In the last thirty years, a number of highly critical books have been published in the Marxist tradition, including Geoff Waite’s Nietzsche’s Corps/e as well as, more recently, Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. How do the texts in this volume help us sort of out Nietzsche’s political legacy and impact on the present state of philosophical knowledge production?
BN: The first essay in the first volume we edited is titled “Is Nietzsche Fascist?”, and Bataille answers with a clear “no.” For Bataille, Nietzsche is opposed to antisemitism, antagonistic to German nationalism, and above the petty concerns of politics. This reading renews Bataille’s arguments from the 1930s that Nietzsche’s thinking was too mobile and excessive for Nazism and fascism to appropriate it (see “Nietzsche and the Fascists,” 1937). It is interesting that, in that earlier essay, Bataille notes Lukács’s position that Nietzsche was a precursor to Nazism and fascism. While recognizing that Lukács’s analysis is “refined and clever,” Bataille already proclaims Nietzsche’s thinking and choice of identifications (Cesare Borgia) as beyond good and evil. Bataille is also dismissive of Lukács as compromised by living in Moscow, setting a tone of criticism that others took up (notably Adorno and Susan Sontag).
Bataille’s claims for Nietzsche as a thinker of the innocence of becoming and thus beyond good and evil do not stand up to extended scrutiny in light of the patient philological work of Losurdo and others. Bataille becomes part of the rehabilitation of Nietzsche in the postwar period and a practitioner of what Losurdo calls “the hermeneutics of innocence”—those readings that absolve Nietzsche of his politics. In particular, after Lukács and Losurdo, we should understand that Nietzsche’s attacks on antisemitism and German nationalism were often driven by a disgust with mass politics and “democratic” appeals. Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism, as Georg Brandes had it (a judgement endorsed by Nietzsche), tried to stand above populist appeals but not above reactionary themes.
There is nothing in these volumes to suggest that Bataille departs from or problematizes the Nietzschean matrix that structures much of his thinking. The emphasis on excess, the fascination with the human sacrificial rituals of the “Aztec” people, and his concern with the erotic all carry the strong echo of Nietzsche’s emphasis on the Dionysian. Certainly, these volumes attest to Bataille’s attempt to negotiate the complexities of Cold War politics in ways that resist simplistic reductions, but they do not significantly consider the role of Nietzsche or Nietzschean thought. The obvious and distinctive counterexample would be Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason (1952). While marred by its Stalinism, Lukács’s book does present a powerful case for how the Romantic anti-capitalism of Nietzsche is significantly compromised by its relation to later fascist and Nazi thinking. We can only imagine a more significant encounter between Bataille and Lukács than the limited one which did take place. As it was, Bataille would remain a powerful advocate of a Nietzschean thought seemingly purged of, or “transcending,” politics.
JB: Benjamin Noys mentions in his Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000) that there is a latent philosophy of the image in Bataille’s thought, which extends back to his work in Documents and to his more sustained engagements with Surrealism. Many of the texts collected in these volumes pertain to artists such as Picasso, Goya, and Da Vinci and even to the status of the poetic image. How do these newly translated texts develop or extend Bataille’s philosophy of the image?
BN: It is interesting how Bataille’s intellectual life is bookended by a concern for writing with and on images. In the 1920s and 1930s this takes the form of his dissident Surrealism, and particularly the project of Documents, a journal concerned with the intersections between images and thought. Bataille’s own contributions to the journal and its “Critical Dictionary” combined writing with images that themselves provoked thought. Bataille’s last significant work, written in parallel with the texts in our third volume (1952–1961), was The Tears of Eros (1961). This work focused on images that evoked Bataille’s tragic concept of eroticism, not least of which was the infamous image of the “Chinese torture victim,” on which Bataille had long meditated.
The texts on artists in these volumes continue Bataille’s concern with what we could call the “lacerating” or “lacerated” image, but in a more discursive mode. These texts are usually reviews and thus always situated in debate and dialogue with existing readings. Bataille does emphasize that excess remains vital, and he even defines Picasso’s political painting Guernica as political because it is excessive. This suggests an alternative politics that pushes through aestheticization to a concern with the human and nature in all its forms. Bataille’s remarks on how Goya’s increasing turn to the rational might have actually led to Goya’s fascination with the extreme, the impossible, and the loss of meaning might also stand for Bataille’s postwar attitude as well.
JB: The motif of the sacred and its conceptual opposition to the profane is undoubtedly a central concern throughout Bataille’s entire oeuvre. Volume 1 of Critical Essays is no exception, evoking this category in many of the articles. You allude in a footnote (xii n19) to how Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer contests Bataille’s understanding of this concept and subsequently dispels what he sees as the “ambivalence of the sacred” by demonstrating how the appropriation of this category by early twentieth century anthropology speciously endows it with a religious valence, thereby occluding its originally political function. Agamben even notes how this distorting transmission ends up “compromising Bataille’s inquiries into sovereignty.” In light of Agamben’s genealogy of this category, how should we understand Bataille’s use of this concept? Is there a way to think Bataille’s concept of the sacred without falling into the confusion that Agamben highlights?
BN: There is certainly a need to interrogate the sacred, although we could also ask questions of Agamben’s alternative in his inquiry into sovereign power as abandonment. Bataille certainly inherits problems of the sacred and social cohesion through Durkheim, the French anthropological tradition, and this tradition’s equivocal relation to the revolutionary heritage of the French social and political order. Bataille does regard the sacred as providing a form of communal integration that is paradoxically founded on the threat of dispersion and ruination. This is visible in the scene of sacrifice, in which the unity of the group is achieved through the destruction of the victim even though the sympathetic identification with the victim simultaneously threatens the coherence of the group. Bataille, in his interest in contagion and communication, is concerned with how the sacred and its promise of unity might overflow into forms of disintegration and disruption. Of course, for Agamben this is to remain within the circle of the ambivalence of the sacred.
What is particularly interesting in these writings is Bataille’s focus on the contemporary world. The project of the journal Critique was one oriented to grasping its present as a complex totality. In terms of the sacred this involves shedding some of its nostalgic dimensions for a concern with the ways in which the sacred is present and absent in modernity. It is here that literature and especially the novel become vital, which would culminate in the collection of essays Literature and Evil (1957). The novel is a space in which the sacred appears. Bataille’s postwar writings provide a fascinating laboratory of experiments in thinking this ambiguous appearance of the sacred, not least in writers like Camus and Beckett. The banality of literature offers a sort of secularized sacred—in the figures of Beckett’s tramps, for example. This treatment of the tramp rewrites the figure of Agamben’s “homo sacer,” of life on the verge of death, away from some of the more extreme pathos with which Agamben invests that figure. It also suggests an ethical demand, one around happiness, that Bataille saw in the work of Camus, as the demand to live in relation to the sacred as a community and way of life.
JB: The first volume of Critical Essays contains a text entitled “What is Sex?” that, as you detail in your introduction, demonstrates how the perspective of genetic science actually destabilizes the ideal fixity of the categories of sex and gender. As you point out, this maneuver is highly counterintuitive insofar as it is typically the quasi-phenomenological categories of lived experience or even Lukácsian praxis which supposedly provide the lever to break through the reification imposed by capitalism’s technoscientific attitude. How do the texts in these volume further address Bataille’s relationship to science? In what way do you think an essay such as “What is Sex?” might positively contribute to current debates about the politics of gender and sex?
BN: Jean-Paul Sartre, in his essay “A New Mystic” (1943), chided Bataille for his scientific pretensions and argued that Bataille’s scientism resisted phenomenological insights and turned people into things. Bataille, however, saw a relation to science as critical and hoped by founding the journal Critique to encourage a broad critical discussion of science. His friendship with the physicist Georges Ambrosino, influential on Bataille’s writing of The Accursed Share (1949), was also a sign of the need for such a dialogue. That said, we could suggest that, while Bataille did invoke the need for an integrated totality of knowledge, he struggled to give this a philosophical basis in his postwar writings. The tension that Sartre pointed out between experience and science would not be resolved. It is, however, worth noting that Sartre’s attempts at phenomenological totalization in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) also foundered on the passage from the individual to totality.
In terms of the discussion of gender and sexuality, there is the image, which has a significant degree of truth, of Bataille as prophet of a Romantic transgression who celebrates the link between sex and death in a fusion beyond the limits of the social order. While Bataille’s thinking is not, overall, necessarily structured by heterosexuality and allows for a non-heteronormative reading (e.g. in Leo Bersani’s The Freudian Body or “Is the Rectum a Grave?”), his thinking specifically on gender and sexuality can be heteronormative. The essay “What is Sex?” then appears as a provocative alternative that engages a science at odds with this heteronormativity. Bataille’s own challenges to the integrity of the normative gendered body through excess might also then go beyond the limits of this particular imaginary. While we certainly have the problem of science’s subordination to capitalism, we also have the adventure of a science that offers possibilities of transformation that capitalism restrains or tries to limit to existing norms.
JB: In the introduction to the first volume, you synthesize Bataille’s thought as “a neutrality based on excess and the instant” (xxix) and similarly speak of a “denial of the future” (xxvii) characteristic of this attitude. Yet the aforementioned essay “What is Sex?” demonstrates how Bataille’s thought—following Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx—functions to substitute fixed, ideal entities with material processes. How does your characterization of Bataille as a thinker of the instant square with the typical picture of Bataille as a theorist of process, of Nietzschean becoming, and indeed of communication?
AT: This is a thorny question about the most speculative dimensions of Bataille’s postwar thought. It is certainly true that Bataille will attend, throughout many of these articles, to the materiality of social and, in the case of “What is Sex?”, biological change. Moreover, as we also tried to foreground in our introductions, when it comes to political and geopolitical issues (but also to history or sociology), many of the writings in Critique are marked by a kind of “realism.” It is as though even—or especially—a philosophy and morality oriented toward excess must first tarry with the facts; a paradoxical system of non-knowledge must give the established knowledges their due.
Now, I take “the instant” to belong, along with “sovereignty” and “expenditure,” to a broadly Nietzschean constellation of names for the experience of the non-identical. In this sense, just as the event is not antithetical to becoming—on the contrary—so instant and process are not antinomic categories. That said, Bataille is also not a dialectical thinker, strictly speaking, and neither is his thinking of the instant or moment as a site of sovereign loss and expenditure “sublated” into a “higher” realism nor does his thinking of process and materiality pass over into an ethic of excess without futurity. Rather, what we encounter in many of the essays that we have collected is an effort not just to think but to live across these divergent registers of value, thought, and theoretical practice without imagining any ultimate resolution.
I was particularly struck by this formula from his 1947 article “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” where Bataille writes: “I will say that humanity is beautiful and admirable only to the extent that the instant possesses and intoxicates it, but this does not imply on my part any neglect of a duration which the instant consigns, from beginning to end, to a vanishing splendor.” What we witness in the essays of the immediate postwar period, during the very genesis of the Cold War, is a sui generis, even quixotic effort on the part of Bataille to combine a politically and economically realist estimation of the balance of forces and historical tendencies in the wake of World War Two with the hypothesis that it is possible to draw from the seemingly irrational dimensions of “inner experience” the resources to think a possible new political and even anthropological order, one diagonal to the contrast between a “free world” under American hegemony and the Soviet bloc. Bataille’s effort to sketch out a novel conception of neutrality is willfully “unpolitical” (in a sense elucidated by Roberto Esposito), self-consciously “tragic,” articulated from a position of inaction, and evidently formulated in counterpoint to Kojève’s Hegelian interpretation of the “end of history.” While I do not think that it provides any clear compass for the present, I believe that it represents a notable effort to construct an ethical and philosophical response to the Cold War—one that will also inform Bataille’s unfinished work on The Accursed Share.
JB: Whether it is the work of the mature Lukács or that of Adorno, Horkheimer or Marcuse, the concept of reification in critical philosophy indexes immediatism and the bourgeois subjectivist isolation that occurs whenever the commodity form colonizes the social world. In characterizing Bataille as a thinker of the instant, how does his thought resist succumbing to reification, or how is it different from the phenomenon criticized by Lukács and others? If Bataille’s thinking in these volumes indeed skirts reification, then what is the social or class content that informs this theorization?
BN: Bataille’s post-war thinking does not engage directly with the notion of reification as the structuring principle of capitalist society. His resistance to the reduction of human and nature to things through a thinking of excess is, however, directed against this reification, as well as the principle of identity more generally (in this case Bataille remains close to a thinker like Pierre Klossowski, and his aim of a liquidation of identity). In Lukács’s terms, Bataille would be another instance of a Romantic anti-capitalism, but it should be noted that Lukács recognized this tendency in his own early work, too. Lukács’s self-criticism of History and Class Consciousness also drew attention to his own tendency to conflate reification, as capitalist commodification, with a more general objectification, as the human production and transformation of nature and society. There is a similar tension in Bataille, who conflates historically specific forms of alienation and reification with fundamental forms of human self-production. Of course, Bataille’s emphasis on consumption, which aims to correct thinkers like Marx and Lukács, also risks leaving him unable to explain modern forms of alienation and reification rooted in production (as Gillian Rose pointed out in her Dialectic of Nihilism).
Bataille’s thinking of the instant is involved in similar problems, especially as it tries to grasp the relation between the moments of rupture and totalization. While the instant attempts a mediation of these categories, its fragmentary and momentary character means that it does not result in a true mediation. If we wanted to characterize this in class terms, then it would not be difficult to see it as a petit-bourgeois reflection detached from immediate forms of labor but unable to synthesize knowledge out of this position of distance. However, we might remember Sartre’s quip that “Paul Valéry is a petit-bourgeois intellectual, but not every petit-bourgeois intellectual is Valéry.” What remains interesting are the contradictions of Bataille’s position and the expression of those contradictions. We could also reflect on the relatively isolated position of Bataille and the cloistered communist culture of the postwar period in France. The instant, Bataille suggests, should replace the concept of contradiction, but then the difficulty remains that this leaves us without a moment of resolution and thus passage from the instant to totality.
JB: Your introductions to the first two volumes highlight the relevance of Bataille’s thought for many timely political issues, including gender, colonialism and the threat of fascism. One important issue that seems absent is the topic of ecology and the ongoing climate crisis. On the one hand, Bataille’s theories of contagion, community and communication, as well as his attempt to inaugurate a general economy beyond the predominant productivism of political economy could all presumably contribute to a renewed ecology along similar lines as the thought of Deleuze and Guattari has in recent decades. On the other hand, your characterization of his thought as one of a “neutrality based on excess and the instant” (xxix) could be read as a sophisticated theoretical description of bourgeois climate denialism and, in general, as the spontaneous ideology which acts as a social bulwark against collective mobilization vis-à-vis our present ecological challenges. Do Bataille’s thought and the newly translated texts in these volumes help us think about or even address the climate crisis? Does Bataille’s relation to science in these volumes help us address this problem?
AT: I think that behind the formulation “excess and the instant” we should not ultimately discern overproduction and a reckless emphasis on the present, but rather something like the exuberance and expenditure of the festival—in keeping with Bataille’s anthropological references (which are, of course, deserving of critical scrutiny in their turn, not least in the effort to generalize the potlatch ceremonies of the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest into a global heuristic). Since he incorporated most of his early Critique writings on questions of expenditure into the first volume of The Accursed Share, it is to that text that one should probably turn if one intends to (re)construct a thinking of ecology, global temperature rise, or sustainability from Bataille (Allan Stoekl explored some of these issues in Bataille’s Peak, and there is a growing literature, especially in French, on Bataille as a precursor of “degrowth”). The question is whether a general economy that is also a speculative energetics and a kind of energetic anthropology can ground a perspective on the climate emergency. My sense is that it is ultimately impeded from contributing to a critical viewpoint on our present “overshoot” precisely because it seeks a general theory not of capitalism, but of “economy.” The consequence of this is to posit what is, in the final analysis, a pseudo-concept of “energy” that would treat the exertions (industrious, erotic, festive, etc.) of human beings, on the one hand, and the material effects of capitalist production (as measured inter alia by concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere), on the other, as somehow univocal or homogeneous. I think that such a monism, even if oriented toward the rupture or heterology of excess and the instant, does not contend with the historical, ontological, and material break wrought by capitalism and presumes that we can use the same categories to analyze individual or group human behavior and the effects of the mode of production at scale. Take this passage from “The Last Instant” (1946):
Life needs energy to reproduce itself, but it normally harnesses more than is necessary for its maintenance and reproduction. Thus it has an excess available to it that cannot entirely be absorbed by a growth which is itself limited in advance, and moreover constantly subject to pauses, when excess energy abounds endlessly and must be expended but can never be expended usefully in its totality (usefully: that is to say, in the service of accumulation, of growth of the means of producing more energy). This is how, in various forms, human beings are led to expend certain quantities of energy that cannot ultimately be directed to ‘the service of anything or anyone else’ and have real meaning only in the instant—quantities of energy that are sovereignly squandered. (Vol. I, 64)
While the idea of sovereign expenditure, of an active refusal of socio-political utility, remains in many ways compelling, I do not think that it can be translated into a materialist ecology and an ecological politics, not least because it takes us in the regressive direction of positing the Anthropocene rather than what scholars like Andreas Malm and Jason W. Moore have termed the “capitalocene” (and, in Françoise Vergès’s important supplement, the “racial capitalocene”).
But perhaps there is an element of Bataille’s speculations about sovereign and servile social energies that may be suggestive today. I am referring to the fact that, rather than criticizing a kind of “presentism” (as we might today in objecting to a climate denialism that disavows the future in the form of the catastrophically predictable consequences of today’s—and yesterday’s—actions), Bataille is deeply skeptical about the effects of a utilitarian thinking articulated around the future. This is where the “ethical” dimension of his sovereign hyper-morality comes to the fore, as when he writes in the crucial essay “Existentialism and the Primacy of the Economy” (1947) that “the loss that comes about in unproductive expenditures is indeed a loss if one wishes to call it that, but not in the negative sense of the word: here or there it may slow down desirable accumulation, but the energy is lost to the advantage of the present instant. And the present instant is, whereas the future is not” (vol. I, 209–210).
But whether we are dealing with the capitalist imperative of profit or the sacrifice of the present for the sake of the future carried out by communist states, it is the depreciation of the present and the instant—in their experiential or emancipatory dimensions—which poses the crucial political and anthropological problem. This also explains why Bataille wants to explore the possibility of “a science that takes an overall view of the surges of explosive expansion of energy-producing systems across the surface of the globe” (“The Paradox of the Gift,” vol. II, 49–50) in view of a renewed thinking and practice of the gift. Bataille even presents the need to prevent another, potentially final, global military conflagration in these terms: “the question of war is intimately bound up with this gift obligation, as the excess of energy that is not distributed in gift giving will inevitably be distributed in the form of bombs” (49). But what might it mean to reinvent such an inherently non-capitalist, unprofitable economy under capitalist conditions? Bataille’s effort to approach the Marshall Plan in this vein is both weirdly fascinating and profoundly flawed, as it tries to glean from that momentous stratagem of imperial hegemony some kind of self-transcendence of American capitalism.
JB: What future lines of political, social and philosophical inquiry do you envision for the study and deployment of Bataille’s thought, both for you and, perhaps, for others? How do you see Bataille’s thought and, in particular, the texts of these volumes figuring into your own future intellectual development?
BN: We hope these volumes serve as a contribution in making more of Bataille’s work available in English, especially work of a different character, more sober and rational, than his Anglophone image might project. This places our work alongside the recent publication of Bataille’s alternative draft of The Accursed Share, The Limit of the Useful (2022). It also builds on the long and extensive work by translators and editors in making Bataille’s work available and accessible. We hope that these volumes stimulate debate about Bataille’s postwar positions and consideration of this “other Bataille,” who continues his primary concerns in another form.
It is not difficult to borrow Nietzsche’s characterization to describe Bataille as “untimely” (as I did in my Critical Introduction). We think the relevance of Bataille’s work might lie in the challenge to think him as both timely and untimely, in both his moment and ours. Therefore, we can consider Bataille’s place in French postwar life of the late 1940s and 1950s alongside his reception today in the wake of the movements that most visibly claimed him, notably “poststructuralism.”
In terms of my future work, I am concerned with placing Bataille in relation to Lukács and the postwar debate about realism that Lukács initiated. In this way Bataille, as the figure of the continuation and development of a “left Nietzscheanism,” needs to be subjected to an intensive critical analysis.
AT: Beyond our work on the third and final volume of the Critical Essays, I would like to further explore Bataille’s conceptualization of the tragic in the context of a broader inquiry into the relationship between politics and tragedy. Bataille is of course deeply marked not only by the Nietzschean “invention” of the Dionysiac but also by Kojève’s reflections on Hegel’s philosophy of tragedy, as we can glean from his wonderful essay on Johann Huizinga and play (collected in vol. II of the Critical Essays), where he writes, “the sacred or the tragic have only the semblance of deep seriousness. Only work is profoundly serious in the way that judges and bailiffs are. As far as they are able, the judge and the bailiff eliminate those elements of chance and caprice which in tragedy—even real tragedy—retain a horrible, indisputable sense of play” (320). Bataille’s tortuous effort to sketch out an “unpolitical” notion of neutrality and his sustained reflections on the question of war—to which we devote some of the introduction to the second volume—are also connected to this tragic dimension of his thinking and deserve further exploration in their own right, in the context of a philosophico-political history of both the early Cold War and its potential contemporary resonances. For, as Bataille writes in 1949 in “World Government”:
Humanity is now, in a sense, pregnant with a catastrophe that threatens the whole Earth at once: never before had the whole human race found itself in the situation of the passengers and crew of an ocean liner—entirely united as danger looms. [ . . . ] It is a new fact of our times that it is no longer merely grubby but pointless to wish to save only oneself. (vol. II, 8–9)
Benjamin Noys is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester (UK). His most recent works include The Matter of Language (Seagull, 2023), Crisis and Criticism (Brill, 2024), and Envisioning the Good Life (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Alberto Toscano is the author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso, 2023), Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull, 2023) and Communism in Philosophy: Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri (Brill, 2025). He edits the Seagull Essays and Italian List series for Seagull Books and is a columnist for In These Times.
Jared Bly teaches philosophy and the humanities at Villanova University. His research focuses on Marxist Aesthetics as well as anti-colonial and development studies. Jared is also the translator of several books and articles from French, including texts by Gilles Deleuze, Patrick Vauday, Elie During and Emile Bréhier.
Cover image: Muscles of the Back (1746), Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty, public domain, Philadelphia Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons.
