The Human by John Lechte

Author:John Lechte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Bataille and animality

We recall that continuity (overflowing of boundaries, particularly that between self and other) in communication is also important for Bataille’s understanding of eroticism and other states of what Bataille, in Inner Experience, calls ‘rapture’ (ravissement), or intoxication, states, such as anguish, ecstasy, laughter, horror and repulsion, silence, poetry, sovereignty, sacredness and death. Heidegger would not disagree with this assessment and would probably add ‘boredom’, ‘captivation’, ‘absorption’, ‘transposition’/‘transposibility’ [versetbarkeit], melancholy and indeed, ‘moods’, ‘tonalities’ or stimmungen in general. But the difference between the human and the animal, Heidegger says, is that the animal never comes out of its state of captivation, while the human never remains in moods for more than a given period – or at least the human has the potential to cease being in a mood. This is why human activity is a comportment that is ‘world forming’, while that of animals is ‘behaviour’ and exemplifies a ‘poverty in world’.

For Bataille, communication is also comportment rather than behaviour. For, with the exception of death, it is possible and necessary to waken oneself from it.

We saw in Chapter 5 that Bataille’s later theory of animaltiy to be found at the beginning of his Theory of Religion (1994) posits animal life as one of ‘immediacy or immanence’ (1994: 17), so that ‘the animal is in the world life water in water’ (24). Ultimately, then, Bataille’s view does not escape the ‘anthropological machine’ that Agamben speaks of, where the human–animal and animal–human couple participates in the play of power. Nor does he differ from thinkers from Descartes to Heidegger with his notion of immanence and the animal as continuous with its environment and without language or reason.

For Heidegger, the animal can never effectively and in its own right participate in politics, while for Bataille, political engagement can take the human back to its original animality through transgression, a transgression perhaps manifest in revolution.

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