The Seduction of Unreason by Richard Wolin

Author:Richard Wolin [Wolin, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691192352
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2018-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Cassirer’s cautionary remarks shed light on Bataille’s conviction that a revival of the charisma and myth would serve as a salutary counterweight to the centrifugal tendencies of modernity. The veneration of “unreason”—madness, myth, and the heterogeneous—that we have observed thus far is only enhanced in Bataille’s work of the late 1930s. “Only myth reflects the image of a plenitude extending to the community in which men gather,” remarks Bataille in 1937. He goes on to praise “the violent dynamic belonging to [myth which] has no other object than the return to a lost totality.”72

The members of Acéphale—the secret society, modeled after a medieval religious order, Bataille cofounded in 1937—viewed themselves as a Nietzschean cultural vanguard charged with preparing the way for a more general political upheaval. Although its members were sworn to secrecy about its rites and practices, it is generally acknowledged that they practiced animal sacrifice and that the group seriously contemplated the idea of human sacrifice. The College of Sociology’s program called for the return to various forms of premodern religiosity and community as an alternative to the impoverished spirituality of the West.

A rehabilitation of “virility”—a virtual obsession in the writings of the 1930s fascist literati (Drieu La Rochelle, Robert Brasillach)—figured prominently in the texts authored by Bataille and college cofounder Roger Caillois. Caillois concluded his 1937 inaugural lecture, “The Winter Wind,” with the following fascistic prophesy: “an irreversible cleansing takes place in nature . . . there is a rising wind of subversion in the world now, a cold wind, harsh, arctic, one of those winds that is murderous . . . and that kills the fragile [and] the sickly, one that does not let them get through the winter.”73 In an era of concentration camps and goose-stepping troops, in which the Nietzsche’s doctrine of “rank” (Rang) and “breeding” (Zuchtung) had come into its own—an era in which the Nazis laid the groundwork for the Final Solution via their winter-wind-like euthanasia program—such appeals quickly forfeit their innocence. In a similar spirit Caillois recommended to his fellow collegians that the new cultural vanguard “regard the rest of humanity less as their rightful equals than as the raw material for their ventures.”74 During his self-imposed Argentine wartime exile, Caillois would flirt with similar “dangerous” notions in the Communion of the Strong (Communion des Forts), in which he celebrates the “hangman” and the “sovereign” qua objects of horror and veneration. By virtue of their unquestioned social authority as well as their proximity to the “sacred,” argues Caillois, these two figures ensure a level of social cohesion that liberal democracies have to their great detriment squandered. Yet, as Meyer Schapiro pointed out in an insightful review, by singing the praises of a “super-socialized” society predicated on the authority of a virile and sadistic spiritual elite, Caillois “contributes to the intellectual conditions for a reactionary political power,” one in which intellectuals themselves would no doubt play an extremely “sinister” role.75

Bataille’s own political prescriptions during this short-lived gathering of “sorcerer apprentices” (philosopher Alexandre Kojève’s description of the college) were no less problematic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.