The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel by Robyn Marasco

Author:Robyn Marasco
Format: epub
Tags: PHI040000, Philosophy/Movements/Critical Theory, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2015-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

If chance is, for Bataille, the richest of notions, this is for the havoc it wreaks on human projects, on being as project, and on any philosophical system that posits the pursuit of a project as the highest expression of freedom. Even those thinkers from whom Bataille took philosophical nourishment—Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, to name the most important—failed to exploit the richness of chance to the extent that they pinned their fortunes to projects. Spirit, Communism, Will to Power—each of them variations on a more fundamental theme, of directing feverish passion toward specific and often practical ends, of displacing desire for interests and freedom for necessity, of gathering the disordered elements of human existence into a coherent set of reasons, motivations, and explanations, of subordinating the eruptions of chance to the reign of knowledge. Chance sends projects into ruin, leaving their architects to despair. Chance rips our designs to shreds. But chance, says Bataille, also restores to the human condition that play-element, without which knowledge, community, and the sacred are scarcely possible. The human being becomes sovereign, in Bataille’s idiosyncratic and shifting sense of that term, only as the dice are falling.

Given Bataille’s aversion to projects and disdain for use-values, it is no small difficulty that part of my project involves putting his texts to use for political thinking.1 In particular, I aim at deciphering the paradoxical formula he names the “will to chance” and elaborates in the 1930s and 1940s as fascism takes hold of Europe. Here the difficulty lies not simply in making sense of Bataille, of writing that often induces silence and ideas that seem to conspire against their transmission, but in making political sense of Bataille.

Though his legacy looms large in literary circles, in aesthetics and visual culture, among scholars of sexuality, and even in some quarters of critical anthropology and religious studies, Bataille figures marginally in social and political theory—and, perhaps, for good reason. Notwithstanding his prominence in radical intellectual circles in Paris before the war, his consistent efforts to clarify the tasks of social science, his distinctive contributions to critical theory, political sociology, and philosophical anthropology, and his influence on a later generation of French thinkers,2 we are still not quite sure what to do with Bataille. His prose is cryptic, though no more so than other “continental” thinkers in regular rotation. Substantial portions of his complete works remain unavailable to English readers, but even his translated texts have received scant attention from those trained to think and write about political ideas.3 Politics were not his exclusive concern, for his interests were as eclectic and far reaching as his day job as a librarian and archivist at the Bibliothèque Nationale would suggest. But Bataille was attracted to revolutionary ideas and drawn in the 1930s to the uprisings of the Popular Front and the eruptions that take place in the streets and among the poor. Though he is not a theorist of democracy per se, and though he is a fierce opponent of democracy in

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