Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought by Stronge Will

Author:Stronge, Will
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

8

‘The Only Real Outlaws’: Animal Freedom in Bataille

Oxana Timofeeva

Man, despite appearances, must know that when he talks about human dignity in the presence of animals, he lies like a dog. For in the presence of illegal and essentially free beings (the only real outlaws) the stupid feeling of practical superiority gives way to a most uneasy envy.1

Georges Bataille’s writings can be defined as philosophy or as anti-philosophy, but one thing is absolutely certain: his theories of eroticism, sacrifice, sovereignty, inner experience and so on are deeply and dramatically embedded within the European philosophical tradition. His works might present a kind of bridge between classical metaphysics and contemporary theory understood in a very broad sense, from post-structuralism and deconstruction of the twentieth century to today’s posthumanism and the variety of new materialisms. From the classical there are, for instance, binary distinctions, which he constantly makes between the general and the restricted economies, between sovereignty and slavery, between human and animal beings, between the profane and the sacred worlds, within the sacred between left and right, and within sovereignty between power (sovereignty in a traditional sense, feudal sovereignty, etc.) and freedom, etc., and from the contemporary the subversive character of these very oppositions. As Benjamin Noys accurately objects to the idea of Joseph Libertson that ‘A multiplicity of dual oppositions structures Bataille’s system’,2 these oppositions do not construct but rather deconstruct the system: ‘These dual oppositions and Bataille’s “system” are undone by his thinking through of these oppositions by their instability.’3 According to Denis Hollier, Bataille’s attitude, rather than referring to the metaphysical tradition, ‘can be portrayed as dualist materialism’,4 which is an ‘impossible attitude’ opposed to both idealist and materialist reductionism of the whole complexity of being and beings to one single principle.

One such binary distinction drawn by Bataille throughout his writings so obsessively that it effectively undermines itself is the human–animal distinction. Nowadays an extensive critique of anthropocentrism and of the anthropocene in contemporary theory takes as its target the classical metaphysical model of the predominance of humanity over non-thinking, non-speaking and non-working animals that were excluded from the domain of reason, logos, language, truth, law and so on. From Aristotle and Plato, through Kant and Hegel, to Heidegger and Levinas, a ubiquitous tendency of philosophical ‘maltreatment’ of animality in the hierarchy of beings (and of reproducing such hierarchy in general) is now laid bare, and the very possibility of such a distinction, on which this hierarchy was based, is perfectly compromised. In this regard, Bataille’s position, both political and philosophical, is uniquely interesting. On the one hand, he seems to be the one who ends the chapter of thinkers of the past, preoccupied with making this essentially metaphysical distinction between animals and humans. On the other, he can be considered as precisely the one who breaks with this current.

Bataillian animals and beasts are permanent residents of the heterogeneous realm. They come from another world, populated by things that radically differ from those we think we know and those we think we can know as reasonable, calculable, scientifically approachable and commensurate.

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