Spinal Catastrophism by Thomas Moynihan

Author:Thomas Moynihan [Moynihan, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2019-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Bataille described existence as ‘a durable orgasm’.1 Both Reich and Bataille saw in the orgasm the ultimate relapse into undifferentiated plasma, yet Bataille was far clearer as to where this led: death. For Bataille, existence itself is synonymous with ineluctable expenditure, a fact betrayed by orgasm, sleep, laughter, and death—reversions from upright rectitude to bestial relapse and wanton disbursement, these are all stations on the inevitable downward route to ‘zero’. And, given the postural significance of each of these actions, Bataille was inevitably drawn to Spinal Catastrophism.

Like Blumenberg, Bataille relates uprightness to the origins of mythology, and, like Freud and Ferenczi, he formats the ‘progressive erection [from] quadruped to Homo erectus’ as a deviation from coprophiliac anality. Bataille fixates upon half-upright monkeys, who, he delectates, expose their ‘anal projections’ like ‘excremental skulls’. Inasmuch as their knuckle-dragging existence is some kind of ugly ‘halfway house’ between horizontal and vertical modes of carriage, primates are cast as some kind of partway antithesis on the stepwise ascent to mankind’s upright ‘nobility’: a dialectical step between horizontal and vertical, the monkey is awkwardly diagonal.2 (Primate posture thus inhabits a kind of uncanny valley—from which Bataille derives much titillation.) Nonetheless, by way of necrotizing the Renaissance cliché of orthograde ‘dignity’, Bataille locates in man’s spinal realignment merely a more refined lasciviousness—a more violent voluptuousness. To wit, he pinpoints ‘Two Terrestrial Axes’: the ‘vertical’, which ‘prolongs the radius of the terrestrial sphere’ as axis of libertine escape, lorded by ocean tides and plants (which ‘flee’ the earth to sacrifice themselves ‘endlessly’ to the Sun’s downward onslaught); and the ‘horizontal’, domicile to beasts and ‘analogous to the turning of the earth’. ‘Only human beings’, Bataille notes, ‘tearing themselves away from peaceful animal horizontality’, have ‘succeeded in appropriating the vegetal erection’, surrendering themselves to exquisite upwards collapse towards outer space’s solar enormities and fluxions.

Kant had linked the terrestrial-spinal axis to self-orienting rationality, but for Bataille the excremental effluence of the simian anus is merely rerouted upward—‘blossoming with the most delirious richness of forms’—in the ostentatious bulbing of the sapient cranium, a most exotic and wanton flower. The surging gradient of expenditure migrates from digestive-horizontal slope to the more intensified zenith-realm of intelligences. And yet, as Bataille notes, this upward-thrusting ‘liberation of man’ is somewhat end-stopped or bottlenecked by the skull’s right angle. Like the swell of a kinked hose, the perpendicular brain-cap is a ballooning instability. Along with Reich and Ferenczi, Bataille notes that in laughter, coitus, and torment this blockage in the solar-spinal surge is relieved: we assume free-flowing continuity with celestial potlatch. He wrote that ‘human life is bestially concentrated in the mouth’:

Terror and atrocious suffering turn the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible, an extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals.

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