l(x)
;lttttL llurrutrt
Mclrrcci, A. (I()ti()), Nontuds ol t.hc l)esent,l.otttltttt: lttttlttrs.
I'irlcrrrirrr, O. (l9UU), 'l'hc Saxual ()ontract, (ltrntrritlgc: I'r,litv.
(l gtlq),'l'hc Disordcr o[ Woman, Cambridgc: l'olity.
l'}lrillips, A. (lqql), Iingcndering Demouacy, Cambridgc: l'olity.
Itawls, J. (197 l), A T'heory olJusrice, Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.
(1985), 'Justice as fairness: political not metaphysical', in Philosophy and
l\thlic Affairs |4, 219.
( I 987), 'The idea of an overlapping concensts'' Oxford Journal of Legal
Sttulics 7 (l), l-25.
(1989),'The domain of the political and overlapping consensus',
^lezo
Yorh Uniaersitg Law Reaiew 64 (2),233-55.
Sandcl, M. (1982), Justice and the Limits of Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
!flcher, S. (1991), Return to Freud, Cambidge: Cambridge University Press.
Yrrung, A. (1990), Femininity in Dissent, London: Routledge.
Young, I. (1990), Justice and the Politics of Dffirence, Princeton: Princeton
Univcrsiry Press.
Zizck, S. (1989), The Sublime Object of ldeologt, London: Verso.
6
d.
After the Law
NICK LAND
There are peculiar difficulties associated with any philosophy of law, due
in large part to the inevitability that any attempt at a transcendent
evaluation of law finds itself enacting a parody of iudicial process. Ever
since the trial of Socrates (if not already with the fragment of
Anaximander), philosophy has affrrmed its vocation only insofar as it has
fantasised a supreme tribunal: an ultimate court of appeal or ideal form of
justice. The vindication of Socratism is inextricable from a retrial, both
exculpation and counterlitigation, the forum of which remains the unstable zssze of metaphysics. As for its 'own' or 'inner' law, logic has never
been anything other than the distillation of juridical procedure, the
abstract form of inclusion or non-inclusion of a case under a law (species
under genus), which has been predominantly thematised as judgment'
although a language of propositions has more recently risen to prominence.
Philosophy and iudicial authority find themselves bound together in a
discourse upon real legitimation. Appearances (cases) are to be judged
from the perspective of a generic reason at a superior level of reality,
identified in the premodern period with an ideality whose final term is the
intellect of God. Aristotle consummates a categorial - accusatory * sense
of form, and the Augustinian collision of Platonism with Judaeo-Christian eschatology and Christian logos has only entrenched this complicity.
This chapter cuts into two episodes or intersections of the occidental
juridico-philosophical complex, in an attempt to dramatise the broadest
tendency of its process: that of collapse towards immanence, or evaporation of the transcendent. There is nothing peculiarly occult or mysterious
about such a tendency, since it finds its most highly accelerated phase in
our contemporary marketisation of social transactions: the phased transition from traditional theopolitical authorisation ot legitimacy to aL imper-
sonal, cybemetically automated fficiency. The commodity 'form' is a
transmutational matrix, and not a static (synchronic) order of economic
liberalism. Insofar as capital is still interpreted Platonically - according to
l02
Nich I.arul
lcgilirnirtiorr t:rito'i:r llrcrc is an ()vcrr puraclox or corrtradiction cmcrgent
in this procc:ss, ir purirckrx whosc disappcarancc is c1'litomiscd by the figure
ol'(icrrrgcs llataillc, wl-ro ollcrs un operational dcscription of law. Bataille no
Iongcr offers a juridical procedure of any kind, but only a tactics of
recoding that convcrgcs upon the outside of human history (where
everything functions without respecr or legitimacy).
Those seeking to defend the human management of social processes
(where 'man' speculatively unites with the God of anthropomorphic
monotheism) can have no project but to restore a history whose ideal
sense would reconnect with the meaning of the lVest, such as those
proffered by Plato, Aquinas and Hegel. Such restoration is a modernist
aspiration which strikes me as incredible. To drag Plato and Bataille
before the tribunal ofphilosophy has ceased to be anything but entertainment, yet I dedicate this text to the few remaining political animals of
the planet Earth, as an experiment in the tenacity of philosophy, or as a
jest.
PLATO AND THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES
Plato's Apologt is initiated by submission to the political, in which civic
obedience and justificatory discourse are fused. Rebellion is not Socraric,
and the principle of authority - or right to judge - is never radically
interrogated; only its source is in question. In attempting to contest the
charge that he 'makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger' (Plato,
1969, p. 47), it- is not long before Socrates invokes the 'unimpeachable
authority' (Plato, 1969, p. 49) of Apollo, and narrates the journey of his
disciple Chaerephon:
one day he actually went to Delphi and asked this question of the
god - as I said before, gentlemen, please do not intemrpt - he asked
whether there was anyone wiser than myself. The priestess replied
that there was no one. (Plato, 1969, p. 49)
To interpret this statement as a submission of evidence would be to efface
the fracture line between the sacred and the profane across which Socrates steps. It is precisely the resistance to evidentiality that lends to this
message its oracular force, and the paradoxical gesture at the heart of
Socrates' defence is that of deploying the privilege of the unknown on
behalf of knowing.
The mystery of the oracular message is registered within the order of
judgment as an underinterpretation. The priestess's words require translation, beyond that of their reworking into verse that occurs at Delphi
itself. They pose a problem that can be construed as exegetical, as an
insuffrciency of commentary and resolution. $7ords are oracular precisely
insofar as they suspend intelligence, whether in the sacred abandonment
to unknowing which is their source, or in the profane detour of philosophy
Aficr thc I.uro
l0)
that becomcs thcir destination. Socratcs' rliscoursc is thc sitc ol'u crossing
from inspiration to anticipated wisdom.
It is not only words of the Delphic oracle that are at stake here, since
they resonate with the more intimate counsel of Socrates' 6ut,1-t <ov or
'spirit'. I-ater in the Apologt, we are told by Socrates that:
I am subject to a divine.or supernatural experience, which Meletus
saw fit to travesty in his indictment. It began in my early childhood
- a sort of voice which comes to me; and when it comes it always
dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me
on (Plato, 7969,p.64)
The interference between the sacred and the profane, the unknown and
knowing, is in its sacred sense a gateway opening onto death, and in its
profane sense a hesitation: intemrption as the edge of time or as a delay
within time, death as the outside or as the deferred, the threshold of death
as a brink or as a moment. Later in the Apologt, Socrates reports that 'I am
now at that point where the gift of prophecy comes most readily to me: at
the point of death' (Plato, 1969, p. 73). This remark connects strangely
with the earlier comment that
I soon made up my mind about the poets roo: I decided that it was
not wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of
instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who
deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what
they mean. (Plato, 1969, p. 51)
Poets and prophets explore the zero-degree of judgment, a zone at the
edge of the great zero that Socrates tentatively sketches, but only rarely
approaches. His own sense of 'preparation for death' is the path of
wisdom rather than intoxication, aligning himself with a knowing that is
compared to its inadequate instances, rather than succumbing to the
unknowing beyond comparison beside which all knowing is inadequate.
Comparing himself to his fellows, Socrates elaborates the oracle as
suggesting that 'I am wiser ... to this small extent, that I do not think I
know what I do not know' (Plato, 1969, p. 50). This is the edge of the
unknown, but always there is the gesture of recuperation to knowing, to
judgment, to the tribunal, justice and authority: 'real wisdom is *re property
of God, and this oracle is his way of telling us that human wisdom has litde
or no value' (Plato, 1969, p. 52). If human wisdom has little or no value,
where do the dogmatic asseftions about God and his wisdom stem from?
\Why should ftey be urrsted? Is not *re figure of God indistinguishable from
the claim *rat we know it is knowledge that matters, that the unknown is
something we know, something we can populate with our feverish
anthropomorphisms? Does Socrates not exhibit God as the eclipse of
religion, the surrender of lmowing as a submission to . . . knowing? It is thus
that religion is buried beneath the icon of a supreme judge.
104.
Nitk I.uttd
'l'lrc ligurc ol'Socrirtes, as skctchccl lor us lry I)luto ltis aclvocatc is
lhat ol'phikrsollhy orr trial. It is in crossing this juclicial thrcshold that
phikrsophy comcs to clclight in thc voluptuousitics of pcrsecution. Yet the
drama of Socratcs' condcmnation distracts from the more far-reaching
proccss whcrcby philosophy succumbs to the order of the courtroom, and
with this process Socrates is deeply complicit. He could even be said to
lravc lbrged a new alliance between knowledge and condemnation, as well
as bccoming the first philosophical case.
IIow could one imagine anApolog,t for a Herakleitus, an Empedokles,
or a Parmenides? To whom would they be attempting to justify themsclves? To the people? The thought is absurd. For what does the opinion of
thc people matter? It was precisely as an escape from the opinion of the
pcople that philosophy emerged! To philosophise and to ignore popular
opinion are scarcely differentiable. If the Presocratics speak in terms of
cosmic justification - as Anaximander already does - it is as a concession,
in ordcr that the people will at least understand the surpassing of human
judgment, if not that by which it is surpassed. The harsh 'justice' of fate is
thc ironisation of human litigation, and not its inflation to the absolute
(monotheism).
'With Socrates, things are different. Philosophy becomes dialectical;
which is to say justificatory, political, logical, plebeian. Truth is identified
with irrefutability, evidentiality and educated belief, beginning its long
subsidence into the forms of human credence, as if its acceptability were
ir-r any way a criterion.
'l'he Apologt focuses a multiple interweaving of death and judgment.
'l'hcrc is first of all the sense in which death fulfils judgment in the
scntcnce of death, even if this is an injustice - or misjudgment - such that
Athcns is condemned in the tribunal of the Platonic text, whose judgment
in this case becomes a massively influential precedent. There is a nesting
of iudgments; that of Socrates, that of Athens and that of Plato, with each
lcvcl subsuming the antecedent one as an item or case to be judged.
Judgment is the subsumption of a case under a principle or law. It is
classificatory or categorising, according to a discursive order which is
simultaneously juridical and logical. The very word 'category' is derived
liom the Greek word Xarqyopoq, or accuser. Judgment is thus an image
of thought, and Plato's entire philosophy can be read as an appeal to a
highcr court) as an obsessive retrial, as well as a counteraccusation against
Socrates' executioners. The democracy which sentenced Socrates to
clcath is not merely vilified by Plato, it is also categorised within a
taxonomy of political forms, brought to an ulterior site of judgment and
includcd within an expanded system.
A second integration of judgment with death is suggested at this point.
Il'Athens misjudges Socrates, it is because it misjudges death and the
A.f tr:r thc Itno
IO5
dcath scntcncc, by construing dcath as a punishrncnt. Death is judged
from the perspective of a restricted arena that of the Athenian court and
democratic polity - which is subordinate in principle, logically and
juridically, to a tribunal that includes such an arena as a case) item or
species. It is in this way that Plato comes to interpret sensible existence as
a specification of intelligence; as a restricted forum demarcated within the
total field of intelligibility. peath is a boundary which isolates sensible
intelligence from the general system of knowing, the species from the
genus, the case from the principle of Idea. The juridical advantage of the
philosopher - qualifizing him to rule in an ideal republic - is that he 'frees
his soul from association with the body (so far as is possible) to a greater
extent than other men' (Plato,1969, p. 109). Death is no longer being
thought as a consequence of judgment, but as its justiSring condition.
Judgment is disqualified by its specification to sensibility, since the
sensible instance or case is comprehended by the superior generic order of
the ideal, which is unrestricted by the sensible limit of death.
In its migration through a succession of bodies, the soul crosses and
recrosses between life and death, passing in and out of restricted spaces,
although never escaping the irreducible atom of self. One might accept
Socrates' depiction of life as the phase during which the soul is 'chained
hand and foot in the body, compelled to view reality nor directly but only
through its prison bars, and wallowing in utter ignorance' (Plato, 1969,
p. 135), and still want to insist that the soul is a cage which is even more
insidious, constricting and wretched than the body. The soul is the
fantasy of a separation from death that persists in death, a kind of
corporeal telepresence by which the body projects its servile categories
into the unknown. But this is to internrpt Socrates' account.
The thought of knowledge as a recollection reaching beyond birth is
most fully developed in the Phaedo, where the complicity between his
conception of death and that of an adequare tribunal is emphatic. The
approximation to wisdom under the specifications of life can only be a
preparation for death, an anticipatory harmonisation with the escape
from sensible existence:
If at its release the soul is pure and carries with it no contamination
of the body, because it has never willingly associated with it in life,
but has shunned it and kept itself separate as its regular practice - in
other words, if it has pursued philosophy in the right way and really
practised how to face death easily: this is what 'practising death'
means, isn't it? (Plato, L969, p. 133)
According to the judgment of death, by which all human judgments are
judged, only the philosopher is just, because only he recognises the
specificity of all sensible judgments, and their subsumption within a
higher genus of wisdom: 'no soul which has not practised philosophy, and
IO6
Nich Lund
is not absolutely purc whcn it lcavcs thc body, may attain to the divine
nature; that is only for the lovers of wisdom' (Plato, 1969rp. 135). The
strongest expression of this though is probably to be found in an earlier
passage from the Phaedo:
the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set
our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead, and not in our
lifetime. If no pure knowledge is possible in the company of the
body, then either it is totally impossible to acquire knowledge, or it
is only possible after death ... (Plato, 1969, p. 111)
This introduces a third integration between judgment and death,
through which Socrates decides against the sacred and in favour of the
profane, because death is to be judged. This is to say that death is only to
be an issue from the optic of knowing, from that of the philosopher orwise
judge rather than *re poet or the visionary. Here we arrive at the most
mysterious and fateful twist in Socrates'interpretation of the oracle:
to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise
when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not
know" No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the
greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as
though they were certain that it is the greatest evil; and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be
ignorance most culpable. This, I take it gentlemen, is the degree,
and this is the nature of my advantage over the rest of mankind; and
if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbour in any respect, it
would be in this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what
comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it.
(Plato, 1969, p. 60)
By interpreting contact with the unknown as the deferral of iudgment by
the subject, translating the positivity of sacred confusion into the negativity of epistemic uncertainty, Socrates initiates the proper history of the
West. The Socratic sophism runs: either one already knows death (since
it is only the cessation of life), or death is a higher knowing. Death is either
the extinction that makes it nothing except what life knows of it, or the
immortaliry of the soul that preserves knowing in death as entry into
knowledge of the Ideas. If death is the unknown, it is only insofar as we do
not know that there is nothing to know; but, were there an unknown other
than as a hidden or forgotten knowledge, it would still only be what we
already know as the end of knowing. This is Socrates' own reading of his
claim to be conscious that he does not know: a repression of the unknown.
Vhile ultimately retuming the problem of death to knowing (philosophy to sophism), this passage is not wi*tout its sceptical openings. Most
importantly, it suggests that the conception of personal mortality is an
icon of death that must be ironised from the perspective of unknowing. In
AJier thc Luto
llYt
this way, the optic of the court is nrorlcntarily rcluscd, ancl dcath priscd
away from its punitive sense. Socrates mocks thosc who act as if 'thcy
would be immortal if you did not put them to death!' (Plato, I 969, p. 6ti).
The court is no more capable of judging death than judging Socrarcs,
since it is in both cases ignorant as to its own ignorance, and thercfirrc
iconic. It lacks even the sf ace of the question, having satisfied itself overhastily with an arraybf pseudo-knowledges or unexamined opinions that
substitute for difficulties. As Socrates interprets things, the Athcnian
court, having judged the punishment as incompetently as the defendant,
accidentally rewards an innocent man, rather than persecuting a guilty
one. Death has been judged badiy, but Socrates does not conclude liom
this that it escapes judgment; it is rather that it requires a more appropriate tribunal: a philosophical forum open to the perfect evidence of thc
intelligible, uncluttered by the deceit and confusion of the sensible worlcl.
It is this conjunction of philosophy with death - philosophy as the fair trial
of death which avoids precipitate condemnation - that completcs thc
inversion of the Athenian trial. It is no longer that death confirms thc
judgment of the city; instead, it carries the philosophical dialectic frrrwards to its destination:
Ordinary people seem not to realise that those who really apply
themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and ol their
own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is truc,
and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives,
it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes
for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward.
(Plato, 1969, p. 107)
IfSocrates is in part an ironist and an iconoclast, he is also a zealot and
a dogmatist. He disrupts one trial in order to replace it with another,
mocks human judgment in order to replace it with divine judgmcnt,
subverts sophistry in order to replace it with a higher sophistry, and
disengages himself from this world only to bind himself more tightly to
another; to 'the unseen world' (Plato, 1969, p. 136) or 'the next worlcl'
(ibid., p. 179), to the realm of that which 'is invisible and hidden from our
eyes, but intelligible and comprehensible by philosophy' (ibid. p. 137).
Socratism is the mobilisation of unknowing on behalf of knowing; subordinating irony to dialectic, confusion to judgment, and the sacred ro a
subtilised profanity.
There is a sense in which Socrates already floats a fourth * and far more
corrosive - integration of judgment and death, according to which death is
the suspension of judgment. Death is a problem that intemrpts the judicial
process, switching it into a dialectical detour which prolongs the path beforc
arrival at a verdict. Resisting sensible evidentiality, death contesrs thc
conventional procedures of its trial. Typically enough, Socrates moraliscs
lon
Alitr tltt L,trt,
Nit,h Lund
this issuc into a firrcc, asking whcthcr clcath is good or cvil. Nevcrtheless,
death suspends justicc in a hcsitant unknowingness) even if this is onry a
dialectical vacillation berween pre-established alternatives. For Socrares,
death is recuperable to judgment, in a movement by which it is transcended by the idea; but this retum of intemrption to due process is not
without its limit.
In The Acutrsed Shure ,Ilataillc ttut lirrcs rr rrturrbcr ol'social rcsp()r1scs t()
the unsublatable wave of scnsclcss wr"lsllgc wclling up bcncath hunrtn
endeavour, which he draws from a varicty o{'culturcs and cpochs. 'l'hcsc
include the potlatch of the sub-Arctic tribes, the sacrificial cult ol thc
Aztecs, the monastic extravagance of the Tietans, the martial ard.ur .f
Islam, and the architectural debauch of hegemonic catholicism. Relbrm
christianity alone - gttuned to the emergent bourgeois order - is basccl
upon a relentless refusal of sumptuary consumption. It is with protestant-
BATAILLE AND THE TRIAL OF GILLES DE RAIS
lfhereas Plato is a midwife of the profane, establishing the intellectual
coordinates of a transcendent reason that will dominate the juridicophilosophical discourses of post-Hellenic societies for two millennia,
Bataille is driven by a passion for (and from) the sacred to explore the
most extreme formulations of a philosophy of immanence. In a broadly
Nietzschean fashion, he interprets law as the imperative to the preservation of discrete being. Far from expressing a transcendent ideality, law
summarises conditions of existence, and shares its arbitrariness with the
survival of the human race as sovereign autonomy (an expression that
Bataille seeks to exhibit as an oxymoron). The word which Bataille
usually employs to mark the preserve of law is ,discontinuity,, which is
broadly synonymous with 'transcendence', or the space of judgment.
Discontinuity - read immanently or genealogically - is the condition for
transcendent illusion or ideality, and precisely for this reason it cannot be
grasped by a transcendent apparatus; by the interknitted series ofconceptions involving negation, logical distinction, simple disjunction, essential
difference, etc. Discontinuity is not referred in the direction of a separated
or metaphysical realm, but in that of a precarious distance from death: a
space of profane accumulation that is iuxtaposed messily with the sacred
flow into loss. Religion is thus exrricared from theology in order to be
connected with an energetics or 'solar economy', according to which the
infrastructure of discontinuity inheres in the obstructive character of the
Earth, in its mere bulk as a momentary arrest of solar energy flow, which
lends itself to hypostatisation. When the silting-up of energy upon the
surface of the planet is interpreted by its complex consequences as rigid
utility, a productivist civilisation is initiated, whose culture involves a
history of ontology and a moral order; persistent being and judgment.
Systemic limits to growth require that the inevitable recommencement of
the solar trajectory scorches jagged perforations through such civilisations. The resultant rupfttres cannot be securely assimilated to a
metasocial homoeostatic mechanism, because they have an immoderate,
epidemic tendency. Bataille writes of 'the virulence of death, (1982, p.
70). Expenditure is irreducibly ruinous because it is not merely useless
but also contagious. Nothing is more infectious than the passion for
collapse.
IO()
ism that theology accomplishes itself in the thoroughgoing rationalisation
of religion, marking the ideological triumph of the good, and propclling
humanity into unprecedented extremities of affluence and catastrophe. Ir
is also with Protestantism that the transgressive outlers of socicry arc
deritualised and exposed to effective condemnation, a tendency whicl-r
leads to the explosions of atrocity associated with the writings of tlrc
Marquis de Sade at the end of the eighteenth century and, almost thrcc
centuries before that, with the life of Gilles de Rais.
Bataille describes his 1959 study of Gilles de Rais as a tragedy, an<J its
subject as a 'sacred monster', who 'owed his enduring glory to his crimcs'
(Bataille, 1987, p. 277). The bare facrs are quite rapidly outlined. Gillcs
de Rais was bom towards the end of the y ear 1404, inheriting the .forrunc,
name and arms of Rais' (ibid., p. 345) due to a complicated dynastic
intrigue involving his parents, Guy de Laval and Marie de craon. Evcn by
the standards of his times and rank, de Rais dissipated vast tranches of his
wealth with abnormal extravagance; in Bataille's words, 'he liquidatcd an
I
i
i
{
immense fortune without reckoning, (ibid., p. 279). At the battlc of
Orl6ans, he fought alongside Jeanne d,Arc, ,acquiring renown as ,,a truly
valiant knight in arms" which survived right up to the point of his
condemnation to infamy' (ibid., p. 35D.It has been suggested that thc
two warriors were friends, but Bataille expresses reservations about this
hypothesis (ibid., p. 356). On 30 May 1431, Jeanne d,Arc was burnt by
the English. In the years 1432-3, de Rais began ro murder children" FIis
preferred victims were males, with an average age of eleven years, thcrc
was occasional variation in sex and considerable variation in age (ibid., p.
426). At least thirty-five murders are well established, although thc
number was almost certainly a great deal higher; the figures suggestcd at
his trial ranged up to 200.
In a somewhat inelegant passage from this study, Bataille recapitulatcs
the (quasi-weberian) general economic background to his researchcs:
rfe accumulate wealttr in the prospect of a continual expansion, but in
societies different fuom ours the prevalent principle was the conrary
one ofwasting or losing wealth, of giving or destroying it. Accumulated
wealth has the same sense as work;wealthwasted or destroycd in tribal
podarch has the contrary sense of play. Accumulated wcalth has
lt0
Nith Lttrul
nothing but a subrlrdinatc valuc, but wcalth that is wasrcd or
destroyed has, to the eyes of those who waste it, or destroy it, a
soaereign value: it serves nothing ulterior; only this wastage itself, or
this fascinating destruction. lts presez, sense: its wastage, or the gift
that one makes of it, is its final reason for being, and it is due to this
that its sense is not able to be put off, and must be in the instant.Rut
it is consumed in that instant. This can be magniflcent those who
know how to appreciate consumption are dazzled, but nothing
remains of it. (Bataille, 1987, pp.32l-2)
The tragedy of de Rais, which Bataille extends to the nobiliry as a whole,
was that of living the transition from sumpruary to rational sociality. He
was dedicated by birth to the reckless militarism of the French aristocracy, which Bataille summarises in the formula: 'In the same way that the
man without privilege is reduced to a worker, the one who is privileged
must wage war' (ibid., p. 314). He is emphatic on this point: 'The feudal
world ... is not able to be separ4ted from the lack of measure [d6mesure],
which is the principle of wars' (ibid., p. 316), and also: 'primitively war
seems to be a luxury' (ibid., p. 78). That honour and prestige are
incommensurable with the calculations of utility is an insistent theme in
Bataille's work, as pertinent to the interpretation of potlatch among the
Tlingit as to the blood-hunger and extravagance of Europe's medieval
nobility. The context of Christianity and courrly love should not mislead
us here.
The paradox of the Middle Ages demanded that the warrior elite
did not speak the language of force and combat. Their mode of
speech was often sickly-sweet. But we shouldn't fool ourselves: the
goodwill of the ancient French was a cynical lie. Even the poetry
that the nobles of the XIVth and XVth centuries affected to love
was in every sense a deception: before everything the great lords
loved war, their attitude differed little from that of the German
Berzerkers, whose dreams were dominated by horrors and slaughter. (ibid., pp. 303-4).
For Socrates, war is understood as civic duty: a preservative function of
the city. $(rhen the ciry wages war, it is to be judged as a moral act,
following the dictates of reason to a greater or less extent. This is the
dialectical image of war, fostered by the Church, and exercising a fascination over Hegel (not to mention post war American administrators).
There is a principle of commensurability that binds military and judicial
violence, permitting both to follow from a logically orchestrated procedure of political judgment. Bataille's suggesrion is quite different, since
his figure of war is a zone of disappearance) a passage to the unknown,
through which the city communicates with its ultimate impossibiliry. It is
not that war is treated as a metaphor by Bataille (any more than by
A.ftar tht: I.uw
ltl
Nietzsche), but rirthcr that all hisroricrrl rrntl intclligit>lc cviclcncc is a
metaphor for war as an cncrgc:tic ltrrrctiorr ol'dcath (dcsccnt to thc
unknown = degree zero). \War cxccccls jutlgrncnt, since evcry judicial
apparatus is a petrified war, just as cvcry'case'of war is a domestication
politicised, utilitarianised, clausewitzeanised. At the end of war there is
only senseless death, where judgment counts for nothing.
The feudal aristoqacy held open a wound in the social body, through
which excess production was haemorrhaged into utter loss" In part, this
wastage was accomplished by the hypertrophic luxuriance of their leisured
and parasitic existence, which echoed that of the Church, but more
important was the ceaseless ebb and flow of military confrontation, into
which life and treasure could be poured without limit. De Rais embraced
this dark heart of the feudal world with peculiar ardour. Bataille writes of
his entire - his maci - incamation of the spirit of feudalism which, in
all of its movement, proceeded from the games that the Berzerkers
played: he was tethered to war by an affinity that succeeded in
marking out a taste for cruel voluptuosities. He had no place in the
world, if not the one thar war gave him. (ibid., p. 317).
He continues: 'Such wars required intoxication, they required the vertig()
and the giddiness of those that birth had consecrated to them. war
precipitated its elect into assaults, or suffocated them in dark obsessions,
(ibid., p. 317).
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the epoch of feuclal
warfaring reached a crescendo, due to exactly the same processes that
were leading to its utilitarian reconstruction. power was being steadily
centralised in the hands of the monarchy, and changes in military technology effected a gradual shift in the social composition of the military
apparatus. In particular, Bataille points to the way in which the development of archery supplanted the dorninant role of heavy cavalry, and to the
fact that with the increasing importance of arrows and pikes came an
accentuation of military discipline. war became increasingly rationalised
and subjected to scientific direction. This evolution was not rapid, but dc
Rais was personally touched by it. The battle of Lagny in 1432 wasthe last
to plunge him into the heat of conflict, after which his position as a
marshal of France - which he had occupied since July l42g detached
him from the military curting edge. Bataille's interpretation of thesc
tendencies is emphatic:
[A]t the instant where royal politics and intelligence ahers, the
feudal world no longer exists. Neither intelligence nor calcuration is
noble. It is not noble to calculate, not even to reflect, and no
philosopherhas been able to incamare rhe essence of nobility. (ibid.,
p. 318)
$Var is progressively disinvested by the voluptuary movement passing
Nith I.Luil
I t:,
tlrrough tlrc nobility, incrcasirrgly bccorrring art ittslrunrcnt of rational
statccrali, calculatingly rnanipulatcd by thc sovcrcign. A process was
undcr way that would lcad cventually to thc tightly regimented military
machines of Rcnaissancc Europe, led by professional officers and directed
by their operations in accordance with political pragmatics. Bataille
considers this transition from warlord to prince to be crucial in de Rais's
CASC:
To the eyes of Gilles war is a game. But that view becomes less and
less true: to the extent that it ceases to be predominate even amongst
the privileged. Increasingly, therefore, war becomes a general misfortune: at the same time it becomes the ztork of a great number.
The general situation deteriorates: it becomes more complex, the
misfortune even reaching the privileged, who become ever less avid
for war, and for games, seeing in the end that the moment has come
to lend space to problems of reason. (ibid., p. 315)
I(rhere the Church erected cathedrals in a disfigured celebration of the
death of God, the nobility built fortresses to glorifii and to accentuate the
economy of war. Their fortresses were tumours of aggressive autonomy;
hard membranes correlative with an acute disequilibrium of force. $Tithin
the fortress, social excess is concentrated to its maximum tension, before
being siphoned off into the furious wastage of the battlefield. It was into
his fortresses that de Rais retreated, withdrawing from a society in which
he had become nothing, in order to bury himself in darkness and atrocity.
The children of the surrounding areas disappeared into these fortresses,
in the same way that the surplus production of the local peasantry had
always done, except now the focus of consumption had ceased to be the
exterior social spectacle of colliding armies, involuting instead into a
sequence ofsecret killings. Rather than a staging post for excess, the heart
of the fortress became its terminus; the site of a hidden and unholy
participation in the nihilating voracity which Bataille calls 'the solar anus',
or the black sun.
The words 'no philosopher has been able to incamate the essence of
nobility' are a concise anti-Socratism" There is no nobility in judgment or
accusation) but rather an impoverishing separation from the inarticulacy
of death. It cannot be a matter of a retrial therefore, as if a higher
judgment were to redeem a victim of injustice: de Rais is almost perfectly
indefensible. No case could be more clear-cut. Perhaps one short passage
will suffice in lieu of detailing these monstrosities. Early in his study,
Ilataille remarks:
His crimes responded to the immense disorder which inflamed him,
and in which he was lost. \We even know, by means of the criminal's
conf'cssion, which the scribes of the court copied down whilst
listcning to him, that it was not pleasure that was essential. Certainly
AJttr tht' Itttu
lll
hc sat astricle thc chcst ol't lrc viclirrr lrrrtl irr that li,rshion, playirrg wit h
himself [se maniant], hc woultl spill ltis spcrm upon thc dying onc;
but what was important to him was lcss scxual enjoyment than thc
vision of death at work. Hc krvcd to look: opening a body, cutring a
throat, detaching limbs, he loved the sight of blood. (ibid., p. 278)
AnApologtfor de Rais is an atisurdity. He cannor be justified, and picking
over his case can only bea nauseous reaffrrmation of profane justice, or a
vertiginous descent into the madness of the sacred. Among the problematic features of this passage, for instance, is the fact that it slices violently
across the terms of Bataille's writings, where the prevailing sense of ,work,
is exactly that of a resistance to death. He describes work as the process
that binds energy into the forrn of the resource, or utile object, inhibiting
its tendency to dissipation. This difficulty is exacerbated by the central
role allocated to vision in Gilles's atrocities. $7ork constrains the slippage
towards dearh, but it conspires with visibility. Scopic representation and
utility are mutually sustained by objectivity, which Bataille undersrands
as transcendence; the crystallisation of Things from out of the continuum
of immanent flow. There is a vinual inanity to Gilles's aberration,
therefore, which is attested by the fact that it is not the taste or smell of
death that he seeks, but its sight, or representation.
Is not de Rais, at this moment, portrayed as an experimental Socrates,
as an autonomous subject who would open a tribunal, collate evidence,
judge a death that he transcends? !flhere is the military furor, the blackout intimacy with death, through which an unsupportable separation is
collapsed into solar immanence? It is not merely a case that judgment
stumbles upon here, but a ruinous metaphor for itself.
De Rais on trial is only Socrates becoming Baconian, which is why the
'object' of Bataille's text is the sumptuary current of feudalism - that
which was unsocialisable by precommoditocratic civilisation - and not
the accused person through which this movement found an outlet. Death
has no representatives, which is to say that crime has no real subject.
There is only the sad wreck whom Nietzsche calls 'the pale criminal,, de
Rais at his trial for instance, terrified of Satan, separated from his crimes
by an unnavigable gulf of oblivion. The truth of such criminality, ar once
utterly simple and yet ungraspable, is that evil does not survive to be
judged.
The profound criminality that Bataille sometimes names 'transgression' is not merely culpable or antisocial behaviour, insofar as this latter
involves private utility or the occupation by a subject of the site of
proscribed action. It is rather the effective genealogy of law, operating at
a level of community more basic than the social order which is simultaneous with legality. Transgression is only judged as such in the course of a
regression to a prehistorical option which was decided by the institution
I 14
Nick Land
of justice. At this point, the sedimentation of encrgy upon the crust
of the
earth becomes normatively reinforced by an affirmation of social persistence. Nietzsche explores exactly this issue in 9 of the second essay
ofhis
$
Geneahgt of Morals, in which he describes the primitive response
transgression:
to
'Punishment' at this level of civili zationis simply a copy, a mimus, of
the normal approach toward a hated, defenceliss, prostratea enemy,
who has not only lost every right and protection, but is also deprived
of all mercy; vae aictis as the right of war and festivity of victory, in
all its ruthlessness and cruelty - from which it is clear why war itself
(including the warlike cult of sacrifice) has provided ari the yorms
under which punishment has emerged throughout history.
(Nietzsche, 1981, p. gl3)
$Var is irreducibly alien to a collision of rights, so that it is war
that bears
down on the one who violates right as such. Transgression is not
a
misdemeanour, even if this is the necessary form of its social interpretation. It is rather a solar barbarism, resonaht with that of the Berzerkers,
and of all those who fathom an abysmar inhumanity on the battlefield,
becoming derelicted conduits of the impossible. There is no tragedy
without an Agamemnon, or some other mad beast of war, whose nemesis
preempts the discourse of the juridical institution, and
whose death is
thus marked by a peculiar intimacy, even though it is never commensurable with propriety. For we would not recognise this war that comes
from
beyond the city and after the law, this movement without essence
or
precedent which is perhaps arready guiding us, a movement
without
utility, ideology or motivation, forsaking melodrama for the true violence
of the insidious; of infiltration, subversion, larval metamorphosis and
phase-change. After the raw, across the line of unknowing,
wiere tribunals count for nothing, Socrates is silent, and accusation is
dissolved into
the sun. De Rais is merely the botched and humane anticipation of
a
tragedy which is no longer ours:
Tragedy is the impotence of reason. ... This does not signify
that
Tragedy has rights against reason. In trurh, it is not porJiUt. fo,
,
right to belong to something contrary to reason. For how could a
rightbe opposed to reason? Human violence however, which has
the
power to go against reason, is tragic, and must, if possible,
be
suppressed: at least it cannot be ignored or despised. It is in speaking
of Gilles de Rais that I come to say this, for he differs from ,lr thor"
for whom crime is a personal matter. The crimes of Gilles de Rais
are those of the world in which they they are committed, and these
ripped throats are exposed by the convulsive movements of such
a
world. (Bataille, 1987, p. 319)
After the Luut
l15
ooNCl.USl()N
In its virtual truth, law has already disappcarcd from the Earth. what
remains of 'law' is a dissolving complex consisting of relics liom political
sociality, nostalgic media-driven theatre, and pre-automatised commodification protocols. All apqeals to a 'criminality' irreducible to the impersonal consequences of sociaupsychological pathology have degenerated
to the level of televisfon evangelism. Among the educated, 'freedom, has
lost all its christian-metaphysical pa*ros, to become the stochastic market-
intervention pattems of desolidarised (contractually disaggregated)
populations. The legal suppression of the sex and drugs industries, for
instance, is increasingly exhibited as an overt farce perpetrated by the
economically illiterate, and leading only to perverse effects such as the
growth of organised crime, the cormption of social institutions, deleteri-
ous medical consequences and a rapidly growing contempt for the
legislature, iudiciary and police by groups whose consumption processes
are incompetently suppressed. The post civilisational pragmatism of
immanence to the market (anonymous resource distribution) reiterates
its own juridical expression as an increasingly embarrassing archaism,
presenring law only by functionalising legality in terms that subvert its
claim to authority. As domination loses all dignity, the stare becomcs
universally derided, exhibited as the mere caretaker for retarded sectors of
behavioural management.
It is in the context of such runaway immanentisation. that the contemporary cult of the 'serial killer'- prefigured by Bataille's portrait of de Rais
- is to be understood. The psychopathic murderer is both the final
justification for law and the point of transition from evil to pathology from
the criminal soul of political societies to the software disorder of commodity-phase population cybemetics. Bataille's Gothic aesthetic cannor
hide the distance traversed in two-and-a-half millennia of erratically
developing 'Socratism', or rationalistic desolidarisation. r0fhile plato,s
socrates is a judge because he might have been a criminal Bataille,s de Rais
is an economic control malfunction.
REFEREN C ES
Bataille, G. (1987), Oeuares Compldtes, vol. 10, paris: Gallimard.
Nietzsche, F. (1981), werke,vol.3, Frankfun am Main: ullstein Materialien.
Plato (1969), The Last Days of socrares (transl. Tredennick), Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
The translations from Bataille and Nietzsche are my own.