Pure Happiness The Project Against Itsel

Pure Happiness or Prelude to the Project against Itself: Bataille, Beckett, and Stein by Amy Ireland

A Beginning In French, to make or unmake sense is always to move in a certain direction.1 Likewise, this essay is not still. I have called it a prelude because it is a movement towards something rather than that thing’s completion, incompletion being a preferable condition in the terms of what I am about to discuss. This poses an immediate academic dilemma. In describing the unmaking of sense one must also make a certain amount of sense. This is a paradox that anyone, writer, artist, composer, or scholar, who makes it their task to represent the unrepresentable must confront and, in the very least, attempt to lessen. This lessening is what I am writing towards. The ‘project against itself’ as I have called it, borrowing from Georges Bataille, is an effort to understand just what it takes to stop making sense. The ramifications of Bataille’s thinking on literature are not as widely explored in Anglophone literary scholarship as they are, inevitably, in French, despite the fact that Anglophone writers, and I refer emphatically but not exclusively to those of the modernist era, were equally as entrenched in similar ontological and representational struggles as their French counterparts. Although Bataille’s thought often frames studies of writers such as Antonin Artaud, Maurice Blanchot or Pierre Klossowski, he is rarely, if at all, spoken of in conjunction with writers such as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett or Gertrude Stein.2 This essay attempts to explore a way in which this may be done with express reference to these latter two writers. The question of creating unnatural literary genealogies or disturbing the sediment of a culturally embedded critical tradition by pursing this line of enquiry is, I believe, voided by the subject matter itself which propounds the violation of all possible boundaries, the dissolution of formal or structuralist approaches and the erasure of all critical categories. In pursuit of the ‘project against itself’, one must be prepared to unthink thought and be willing to begin again and again, continuously, from scratch. This is the first of many possible beginnings. 1 An inbuilt and unavoidable pun: the French noun sens signifies both ‘sense’ and ‘direction’. 2 With he notable exception of Henry Miller, who features in a comparative study focusing on eroticism entitled Eroticism in Georges Bataille and Henry Miller. Gilles Mayné, Eroticism in Georges Bataille and Henry Miller (Birmingham: Summa, 1993).

‘It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in deceptive form. Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth’.3 – Georges Bataille 3 Georges Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 5.

The Problem with Making Sense Working on his ‘intellectual biography’, ostensibly a straightforward kind of text, Michel Surya wrote of his writing on Georges Bataille ‘it is only possible to read or speak about Bataille in an incoherent way’.4 Denis Hollier too, warns against the disingenuous act of writing on Bataille: ‘to speak on something imposes a form on it – because of a specific requirement of this type of discourse, one specific to discourse as such – from that moment on, it becomes an object of knowledge’. While for Bataille ‘writing is never more than a game played with an ungraspable reality’, ‘writing on is laboriously doing everything possible to grasp this reality’.5 Discourse, or ‘writing on’, is an Icarian gesture. The criticism levelled by Bataille at Surrealism in ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur’ holds equally well for discourse: the assumptions upon which it bases its ascent are illusory.6 One could equally call this gesture ‘Hegelian’. Bataille’s writing, on the other hand, refuses to take form. If it raises itself up it is only for the sake of descent: his incoherence is deliberately engineered. Bataille’s thought was never destined to be an object of examination. Rather it was to be philosophy’s deliquescence, a fall which brings the sky down with it. Of himself, Bataille wrote ‘I think the way a girl removes her dress. At the extremity of its movement, thought is shameless, even obscene.’7 To his contemporaries, notably Sartre, the Surrealists and the Christian existentialist Gabrielle Marcel, all of which engaged publicly with Bataille’s work, 4 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Kryzsztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 45. 5 Denis Hollier, Against Architecture, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989) 24, 25. Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1988), 47. 6 Georges Bataille, ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist’, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Sur in French signifies ‘over’ when used as a prefix and ‘on’ as a preposition. Thus ‘writing on’ also indicates ascent. 7 Georges Bataille, ‘Method of Meditation’, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) 80. ‘Je pense comme une fille enlève sa robe. À l’extrémité de son mouvement, elle est l’impudeur, l’obscénité même’. In the original French Bataille is playing on the ambiguity of feminine pronoun ‘elle’ which can be read to refer to both his thought and the girl. I have modified the translation sightly here to privilege the reading of thought’s obscenity, but the concurrence of both readings is intrinsic to the style of Bataille’s thought and should not be overlooked. Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, vol. V (Paris: Gallimard, 1973) 200.

the strange cut of his thought seemed somewhat unassimilable to modern ways of thinking. Sartre criticised his lack of system, Breton his obsession with excrement, and Marcel his renunciation of salvation.8 Bataille had a term for this unassimilability: his thought was ‘agiological’ or ‘scatological’ then ‘heterological’ (this latter term would come to displace the former two) - a waste product of human knowledge, its unassimilable shadow.9 ‘Heterology’, following the description Bataille offers in ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade’, ‘is opposed to any homogenous representation of the world, in other words, to any philosophical system. The goal of such representations is always the deprivation of our universe’s sources of excitation and the development of a servile human species, fit only for the fabrication, rational consumption, and conservation of products.’10 Knowledge is an act of appropriation, which has the goal of establishing homogeneity in the world. In appropriating (assimilating) knowledge works and is therefore servile. Excretion, on the other hand, undoes the act of appropriation, and by inserting the heterogenous waste into the homogenous realm of 8 Sartre, in ‘Un Nouveau Mystique’, Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947) accused Bataille of ‘syncretism’ and of lacking the support of a philosophical system built on ‘founding principles’. Bataille’s thought, he wrote, ‘does not construct itself, does not progressively enrich itself, but, indivisible and almost ineffable, it is level with the surface of each aphorism, such that each one of them presents us with the same complex and formidable meaning seen from a particular light.’ (149) Furthermore, in the context of the existentialist understanding of Being as ‘project’, Bataille’s Dionysian endorsement of ecstasy, sacrifice and laughter can only constitute ‘unusable experience’ for Sartre: ‘[T]he joys to which we are invited by M. Bataille, if they are not to be integrated into a fabric of new enterprises, or to contribute to the formation of a new humanity that would surpass itself by striving towards new goals, are worth nothing more than the pleasure of having a drink, or of sunning one’s body at the beach.’ (187) André Breton, retaliating against accusations of idealism, famously dubbed Bataille a ‘big-toe philosopher’ and ‘excrement philosopher’ and publicly condemned his fascination with the ‘sullied, senile, rancid, sordid, ribald, imbecilic’ aspects of experience in the Second Surrealist Manifesto. Second manifeste du surréalisme in Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: J-J. Pauvert, 1962) n1 218, 218. In a chapter entitled ‘The Refusal of Salvation and the Exaltation of the Man of Absurdity,’ of his Homo Viator trans. E. Craufurd (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) Marcel concludes that Bataille’s dismissal of salvation (for being a recuperative guarantee on experience) is driven largely by an unphilosophical ‘will to intimidate’. (200) For an account of Marcel’s criticism of Bataille’s Inner Experience see Stuart Kendall’s introduction to The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, xxv-xxvii. 9 ‘The science of what is completely other. The term agiology would perhaps be more precise, but one would have to catch the double meaning of agio (analogous to the double meaning of sacer), soiled as well as holy. But it is above all the term scatology (the science of excrement) that retains in the present circumstances (the specialisation of the sacred) an incontestable expressive value as the doublet of an abstract term such as heterology.’ Georges Bataille, ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade’, Visions of Excess, 102 n2. 10 Ibid., 97.

appropriation, creates a rupture. ‘In that way it [heterology] leads to the complete reversal of the philosophical process, which ceases to be the instrument of appropriation, and now serves excretion’.11 The abandonment and substitution of the names he gave to aspects of his thought is integral to Bataille’s ‘project’ (‘antiproject’ would be a more fitting term, but then this is point - terms do not do their old jobs of ‘fitting’ in Bataille) so much so that, that Jacques Derrida, in his ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’ appoints another term for it - ‘sliding’: both a linguistic and conceptual feint that seeks to ‘reintroduce […] the sovereign silence which interrupts articulated language’ (Bataille) while nevertheless remaining within discourse (and therefore not being silent).12 ‘Silence’ is an example of a sliding word. Its utterance forces language to appropriate that which is heterogeneous to it (silence, non-discourse) thereby creating an oscillation between two realms and two operations (these ‘realms’ are articulated in various ways by Bataille, the predominant denomination being the ‘possible’ and the ‘impossible’). In Bataille’s essay on De Sade, an image of ‘composite excretion’ illustrates the ‘alternating rhythm’ of this oscillation: ‘Verneuil makes someone shit, he eats the turd, and then he demands that someone eat his. The one who eats his shit vomits; he devours her puke’.13 Sliding, by deforming the terms of philosophy, and betraying both discourse and non-discourse, introduces a trembling that weakens knowledge from within.14 Derrida is of course investing Bataille in his own anti-project, however, the reading he gives here of Bataille’s sabotage of Hegel’s absolute knowledge via a perverse doubling of its terms is indispensable to perceiving the real singularity of Bataille’s philosophical position. It seems hardly necessary to insist that Bataille himself is no help. His terms are booby-trapped and his thought outruns us in a labyrinth where no Ariadne’s thread will unravel to reveal an exit. Let us turn instead 11 Ibid., Bataille’s italics. Jacques Derrida, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). ‘…some words! They exhaust me without respite: nevertheless, I will go to the source of the miserable possibility of words. There I want to find that which reintroduces – in a point – the sovereign silence that interrupts articulated language.’ Bataille, ‘Method of Meditation’, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 90. 13 Quoted by Bataille, ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade’, Visions of Excess, 95. 14 ‘This sliding is risky, risks agreeing to the reasonableness of reason, of philosophy, of Hegel, who is always right, as soon as one opens one’s mouth in order to articulate meaning.’ Derrida, Writing and Difference, 263. 12

to Hegel, whose thought inscribed a structure of an entirely different nature. In order to fall one must first ascend. History has ended. Such was the concluding pronouncement, delivered on the eve of World War II, of a lecture series given by Alexandre Kojève between 1933 and 1939 at the École des hautes etudes, Paris.15 Apposite as the timing may seem, history wasn’t ending with the war, it had, in fact been finished for a long time and the war was simple bringing some of the world’s lagging regions into line with the most advanced historical positions. ‘The universal and homogenous State’ and ‘the absolute Knowledge that reveals complete Man realised in and by this State,’ explains Kojève, ‘became - objectively - possible because in and by Napoleon the real process of historical evolution […] came to its end.’16 The historical evolution towards absolute knowledge was complete and its product was the very book the members of Kojève’s audience each had in their hands, the Phenomenology of Spirit. At the summit of the pyramid of his thought, Hegel himself had come to replace God, Hegel was the Sage of the Phenomenology: ‘By understanding himself through the understanding of the totality of the anthropogenetic historical process, which ends with Napoleon and his contemporaries, and by understanding this process through his understanding of himself, Hegel caused the completed whole of the universal real process to penetrate into his individual consciousness, and then he penetrated this consciousness.’17 Bataille recorded that he came out of Kojève’s lectures ‘bursting, 15 The future influence of Kojève’s interpretation can be gleaned from the seminar’s register, which aside from Bataille, includes such names as: Lacan, Queneau, Weil, and Merleau-Ponty. Kojève’s interpretation has (not unjustly) been accused of providing a metonymic reading of the Phenomenology in its privileging of the Master/Slave dialectic. Interestingly, Tony Corn points up the metonymic moves made in turn by Derrida (who focuses on the Herrschaft/sovereignty parallel) in his reading of Bataille reading Kojève’s Hegel. See Tony Corn, ‘Unemployed Negativity (Derrida, Bataille, Hegel)’, On Bataille, ed. and trans. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). The class lists are available as an appendix to Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 225-227. 16 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969) 139, 35. Kojève: ‘I read the Phenomenology of Spirit again, and when I reached chapter four I understood that it was Napoleon. I started my class. I didn’t prepare anything, I read and gave a commentary, but to me everything Hegel said seemed luminous […] he had indeed given the correct date for the end of history: 1806’. Interview in La Quinzaine literature, July 1986. Quoted by Surya, 188-189. 17 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 35.

crushed, killed twice over: suffocated and transfixed’.18 His feeling of suffocation is understandable. Since 1806, the night of the Battle of Jena, to be precise, we have lived in the ‘epoch of meaning’ (Derrida’s term) under the insomniac (or is it?) ‘vigilance of the Hegelian logos’.19 Discourse is Hegelian, for it is in and through his system that consciousness is realised and knowledge completes itself, through which the entire history of Western metaphysics is articulated and guided to its end.20 There is no outside to a totalising system in control of language: ‘philosophy, in completing itself, could both include within itself and anticipate all the figures of its beyond, all the forms and resources of its exterior; and could do so in order to keep these forms and resources close to itself by simply taking hold of their enunciation’.21 The system is inescapable. It appears to take account of, and appropriate by assimilation, everything in its sweeping movement towards absolute knowledge. Foucault, in his inaugural address at the Collège de France, speaking for the post-structuralist generation of the late ’sixties, would claim that ‘our age, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or through Nietzsche, is attempting to flee Hegel’.22 Language, especially philosophical language has arrived at a point where it cannot free itself from the logic of absolute knowledge. The logic of appropriation. The logic of the Aufhebung.23 Yet, both Derrida and Foucault identify a way out, and in both cases, it has to do with Bataille. Where Foucault locates in Bataille the ‘calcinated roots’ of a 18 Surya, Georges Bataille, 189. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 254, 252. 20 Absolute knowledge has taken place. ‘In this sense, within the metaphysics of presence, within philosophy as knowledge of the presence of the object, as the beingbefore-oneself of knowledge in consciousness, we believe, quite simply and literally, in absolute knowledge as the closure if not the end of history. And we believe that such a closure has taken place.’ Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. Allison and N. Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102. 21 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 252 22 Michel Foucault, ‘Orders of Discourse’, Social Science Information, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April, 1971): 28. This is clearly not a simple task; the difficulty of escape is later made plain: ‘We have to determine the exact extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.’ 23 ‘[P]hilosophical language is linked beyond all memory (or nearly so) to dialectics: and the dialectic was to become the form and interior movement of philosophy from the time of Kant …’ Michel Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression’, Language, CounterMemory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 40. 19

‘language stripped of dialectics’, that is, a becoming-literature of philosophy, Derrida sees the forebear of a ‘sovereign writing’.24 ‘Bataille’s language,’ declares Foucault, ‘continually breaks down at the centre of its space, exposing in its nakedness, in the inertia of ecstasy, a visible and insistent subject who had tried to keep language at arms length, but who now finds himself thrown by it, exhausted, upon the sands of that which he can no longer say.’25 Here Bataille’s incoherence plays a central role in the breakdown of the philosophical subject (in the model of the self-conscious totality at the pinnacle of Hegel’s system). By bringing language to its limit (silence, the unsayable) and thus giving presence to impossibility, this non-discursive writing splits off from philosophy to threaten it from a space inaccessible to it (from an inner void, from inside the limit).26 This is the space inhabited by the mad philosopher (Hegel’s double) who, in writing, undergoes a transgression of philosophical being and accesses, in this loss, a condition akin to the ecstatic sovereignty evoked, but carefully never defined, by Bataille.27 Foucault’s 24 Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 33, 41. Foucault’s imagery is just. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 262-277. As is Derrida’s choice of terminology, ‘sovereign’ being one of Bataille’s sliding words. 25 Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 39 26 ‘[T]he philosopher is aware that “we are not everything;” he learns as well that even the philosopher does not inhabit the whole of his language like a secret and perfectly fluent god. Next to himself, he discovers the existence of another language that also speaks and that he is unable to dominate, one that strives, fails, and falls silent and that he cannot manipulate, the language he spoke at one time and that has now separated itself from him, now gravitating in a space increasingly silent’. Foucault, Language, CounterMemory, Practice, 41-42. Bataille: ‘Drunkenness and meditation still have this in common: the vague effusions of each are connected […] to other determined effusions. The change in the object – erotic, comic – in drunkenness appropriately responds to the modification of the subject. This is limitless in meditation. The origin of the effusion is no less, in the two cases, the activity of the subject: in drunkenness, a toxin releases it; in meditation, the subject contests himself, hunts himself (capriciously, often even gaily)’. Bataille’s italics. NB. Bataille uses ‘meditation’ as term for what is also designated by ‘the sovereign operation’. See below. ‘Method of Meditation’, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 94-95. 27 Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 44. Bataille concludes ‘Method of Meditation’, a dysfunctional treatise on the sovereign operation, with this footnote: ‘Evidently, I was unable in the night to define what I call the sovereign operation. I described the play of complex elements, of still ambiguous movements, and the sovereign moments are outside my efforts. These moments are of a relative banality: a little ardour and surrender suffices […] To laugh to tears, sensually come to screaming, evidently nothing is more common (strangest is our servility when speaking of serious events after the fact, as if they were nothing). Ecstasy is close by: one imagines the provoking enchantment of poetry, the intensity of mad laughter, a vertiginous feeling of absence,

essay only reconfirms two suspicions already expressed by Bataille in 1961 in a letter to Kojève, and in Guilty, published the same year: ‘It is a question of situating at the very basis (or the end) of Hegelian thought an equivalence with madness’; ‘I should have, without being Hegel, been at first Hegel, and the means fail me’.28 Mad philosophy, incidentally, according to Kojève, is what supplants Western metaphysics at the end of history.29 In Derrida’s account Bataille indeed plays Hegel’s mad double. Through Derrida, Bataille doubles Hegelianism, shadowing Herrschaft (Mastery) with sovereignty, in order to betray it. The moment of betrayal takes place in a burst of laughter. Laughter marks the moment of detachment where philosophy and language unhitch themselves from Hegel, from the entirety of Western metaphysics, and go mad.30 This is the crux of Bataille’s peculiar ‘philosophical’ position: his detachment is the seed from which a mutation of modern epistemology has grown and Bataille seemed to sense the extent of his subversion. ‘What matters to me is the moment of but these are simplified elements, reduced to the geometrical point, in indistinction’. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 99, n12. (My italics: servility; mad laughter). 28 Bataille to Kojève, 2 June 1961, quoted by Surya, 190. Bataille, Guilty, 108. (I have favoured the translation given by Tony Corn in ‘Unemployed Negativity (Derrida, Bataille, Hegel)’, On Bataille, 83.) 29 ‘En fait, la fin du Temps humains ou de l’Histoire, c’est-à-dire l’anéatissement définitif de l’Homme proprement dit ou de l’Individu libre et historique, signifie tout simplement la cessation de l’Action au sens fort du terme. Ce qui veut dire pratiquement: - la disparition des guerres et des revolutions sanglante. Et encore la disparition de la Philosophie’. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) 435. [In fact, the end of human Time or History, that is, the definitive annihilation of Man proper or of the free historical Individual, means quite simply the cessation of Action in the strict sense of the word. In practical terms this means: - the disappearance of war and bloody revolutions. And also the disappearance of Philosophy’. [My translation: This section is not included in the English translation of Kojève’s lectures.] ; ‘As the threshold of post-history is crossed, humanity disappears while at the same time the reign of frivolity begins, the reign of play, of derision (for henceforth nothing that might be done would have the slightest meaning).’ Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 31. 30 Derrida: ‘To laugh at philosophy (at Hegelianism) – such, in effect, is the form of the awakening, - henceforth calls for an entire “discipline,” and entire “method of meditation” that acknowledges the philosopher’s byways, understands his techniques, makes use of his ruses, manipulates his cards, lets him destroy his strategy, appropriates his texts. Then, thanks to this work which has prepared it – and philosophy is work itself according to Bataille – but quickly, furtively, and unforeseeably breaking with it, as betrayal of as detachment, drily, laughter bursts out.’ Writing and Difference, 252.

detachment, what I teach is a drunkenness, this is not philosophy: I am not a philosopher but a saint, maybe a madman.’31 But what is so funny about Hegel? And how is it that laughter confronts Hegelianism from the impossible position of non-Hegelianism? The first joke is that, arising as it does out of dialectic of human history - the Master/Slave dialectic absolute knowledge (and the discourse it inhabits) is servile. Kojève gives the following explanation of the dialectic: At the start, the future Master and the future Slave are both determined by a given, natural World independent of them: hence they are not yet truly human, historical beings. Then, by risking his life, the Master raises himself above a given nature, above his given (animal) “nature,” and becomes a human being, a being that creates itself in and by its conscious negating Action. Then, he forces the Slave to work. The latter changes the real given World. Hence he too raises himself above Nature, above his (animal) “nature,” since he succeeds in making it other than it was. To be sure, the Slave, like the Master, like Man in general, is determined by the real World. But since this world has been changed, he changes as well. And since it was he who changed the World, it is he who changes himself, whereas the Master changes only through the Slave. Therefore, the historical process, the historical becoming of the human being, is the product of the working Slave and not the warlike Master.32 History and the journey towards true self-consciousness and knowing is propelled by the human desire for recognition (‘human history is the history of desired desires’).33 The ‘conscious negating Action’ is the Master’s willingness to risk his life for the sake of recognition in the ‘fight to the death’ that he enters into upon confronting this other consciousness, the Slave, who, fearing death more than he, submits to being ruled.34 It is the Master’s decision to face death rather than submit to another that makes him Master. However, the Master’s desire for recognition can never be fulfilled by the Slave who, retaining his animal nature through this subordination, does not ascend to self-consciousness and cannot thereby offer the desired recognition. The Master finds himself caught in an ‘existential impasse’, unable to fulfil his self-consciousness through the recognition of another fully 31 Bataille, ‘Method of Meditation’, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 93, n6. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 52. (Kojève’s italics) 33 Ibid., 6. 34 Ibid., 11-16 32

developed self-consciousness.35 Meanwhile, the Slave, fearful of being put to death, works for the Master, and in doing so he gradually changes the world around him and begins to recognise himself in these changes. Through work, the Slave develops an autonomous self-consciousness to which the idle Master can never ascend. Thus, knowledge at the end of the dialectic arises out of servility and work: ‘If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the history of the working Slave’.36 This condition of servility, of knowledge arising out of fearfulness of death, troubled Bataille immensely, as did the nature of the ‘fearless’ confrontation with death undergone by the Master. Something was rotten at the very base of Hegel’s pyramid. In Inner Experience he speculates on the origins of the closed system. Hegel, I imagine, touched upon the extreme limit. He was still young and believed himself to be going mad. I even imagine that he worked out the system in order to escape (each type of conquest is, no doubt, the deed of a man fleeing a threat). […] While yet alive, Hegel won salvation, killed supplication, mutilated himself. Of him, only the handle of a shovel remained, a modern man. But before mutilating himself, no doubt he touched upon the extreme limit, knew supplication: his memory brought him back to the perceived abyss, in order to annul it! The system is the annulment.37 No one can dig a grave with a shovel-less handle. Hegel’s system omits death, or rather, following Bataille’s reading above, has been created to cover death up. This is the second joke. When the Master gains his initial position of superiority over the Slave it is because he was prepared to risk his life rather than give in to the dominance of the other. Importantly, this risk is always made in the context of a guarantee that 35 Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20. Derrida sums up: ‘To stay alive, to maintain oneself in life, to work, to defer pleasure, to limit the stakes, to have respect for death at the very moment when one looks directly at it – such is the servile condition of mastery and of the entire history it makes possible’. Writing and Difference, 255. 37 Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 43. Denis Hollier’s stunning opening chapter exposes metaphorically the calculated displacement of death in Hegel’s system via an examination of his Aesthetics, exposing a determination to locate as the origin of art the Tower of Babel rather than the pyramid (a house for death) which better fulfils all the requirements he has given for the role, concluding ‘[t]he Tower of Babel has come to fill up the hole in the pyramid, a flaw that would have risked ruining this tomb of death that the Hegelian structure in its entirety is meant to be’. Against Architecture, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989). 36

death will not occur: ‘In order that the human reality come into being as “recognised” reality, both adversaries must remain alive after the fight.’ Without the recognition of his adversary, the conqueror’s subjectivity has no ‘truth’.38 A death, should it occur, is subsumed under the innocuous figure of ‘abstract negation’ which does not take place between humans (as the recognition which generates self-consciousness is cancelled) but ‘things’.39 Death, true death without reserve, has no place in Hegel’s system. ‘Abstract negativity’ is not the productive negativity of the dialectic where the false confrontation with death moves the process on to the next step. It is impossible, excluded, its emergence forever precluded by the operation of the Aufhebung: Hegel’s dialectical insurance against pure loss.40 Kojeve explains that - “To overcome dialectically” means to overcome while preserving what is overcome; it is sublimated in and by that overcoming which preserves or that preservation which overcomes. The dialectically overcome-entity is annulled in its contingent (stripped of sense, “senseless”) aspect of natural, given (“immediate”) entity, but it is preserved in its essential (and meaningful, significant) aspect; thus mediated by negation, it is sublimated or raised up to a more “comprehensive” and comprehensible mode of being than that of its immediate reality of pure and simple, positive and static given, which is not the result of creative action (i.e., of action that negates the given). Therefore, it does the man of the Fight no good to kill his adversary. He must overcome him “dialectically”.41 Thus, the Aufhebung, in establishing human consciousness and truth, also presides over meaning, it makes sense out of everything in its path by taking it up into the movement of the system, by giving it presence. The Aufhebung is, for Derrida, 38 Kojève elaborates: ‘if both adversaries perish in the fight, “consciousness” is completely done away with, for man is nothing more than an inanimate body after his death. And if one of the adversaries remains alive but kills the other he can no longer be recognised by the other; the man who has been defeated and killed does not recognise the victory of the conqueror. Therefore, the victor’s certainty of his being and of his value remains subjective, and thus has no “truth”.’ Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 8, 14. 39 Hegel: ‘… And the two do not give themselves reciprocally to one another, not do they get themselves back in return from one another through consciousness. On the contrary, they merely leave one another free, indifferently, as things. Their murderous action is abstract negation.’ Quoted by Kojève, Ibid., 14. 40 Considered untranslatable in English, Aufhebung indicates an overcoming which preserves that which it overcomes. It is sometimes rendered as ‘sublation’ in English texts. 41 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 15.

‘discourse itself’, the ‘slumber that engenders monsters and then puts them to sleep’ – the appropriation of monsters in the language of ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’.42 True death without reserve, being unassimilable to the dialectic whose negative is always productive, makes a hole in meaning. In Hegel’s system it is represented only by a lack. If the Aufhebung is the life force of discourse, then ‘to rush headlong into death pure and simple is thus to risk the absolute loss of meaning, in the extent to which meaning necessarily traverses the truth of the master and of self-consciousness.’43 Hence Hollier’s claim that ‘Writing on Bataille is thus intensifying death’s imposture, first by not recognising it, that is by taking it seriously (as if death, something that does not allow of being considered an event, could put an end to the play of writing), then by profiting from it’.44 Discourse as the motion of the Aufhebung represses its own impossibility. It hides the silence that lies on the far side of its limit by denying the possibility of not speaking, engaging furiously, as if by compensation, in a task from which it hopes to gain ontological support: the task of the copula. Things must be given presence in language, forms must be bestowed on the formless, and all that moves made still. In this great work of petrification all that is unexplained and unmeasured will be appropriated and rendered knowable so that at the end of history a grey universe will be known, completely and eternally known, to a grey philosophy. Against the impotent servility of absolute knowledge, against Herrschaft and its confrontation with a false death, Bataille tenders the notion of ‘sovereignty’ (Herrschaft’s mad double), which instead of mastering, discharges. Reason’s desperation to maintain its hold on reality has made it irrational. From Bataille, a burst of sovereign laughter. These jokes have made a mockery of the entire system. What once seemed ‘self-evident’ is shot through with comic implications.45 Derrida: 42 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 259, 252. Bataille, ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. De Sade’, Visions of Excess. 43 ‘The putting at stake of life is a moment in the constitution of meaning, in the presentation of essence and truth. It is an obligatory stage in the history of selfconsciousness and phenomenality, that is to say, in the presentation of meaning. For history – that is, meaning – to form a continuous chain, to be woven, the master must experience his truth.’ i.e.: he must not die. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 255. 44 Hollier, Against Architecture, 25. 45 ‘Often Hegel seems to me self-evident, but the self-evident is a heavy burden’. Bataille, Guilty, 96. Derrida opens ‘A Hegelianism Without Reserve’ with this quote, later to add - ‘Hegelian self-evidence seems lighter than ever at the moment when in finally bears down with its full weight’. Writing and Difference, 251.

‘What is laughable is the submission to the self-evidence of meaning, to the force of this imperative: that there must be meaning, that nothing must be definitely lost in death, or further, that death should receive the signification of “abstract negativity”, that a work must always be possible which, because it defers enjoyment, confers meaning, seriousness, and truth upon the “putting at stake”. This submission is the essence and element of philosophy, of Hegelian ontologics’.46 Sovereign laughter marks the exposure of the limit of meaning and an acceptance of what is beyond it. Let us look more closely at this term ‘sovereign’. What kind of action does it designate? Pursuing the effect of making present the impossibility of discourse within discourse - continuing to make thought slide, Bataille gives also sovereignty the names ‘inner experience’, ‘the extremity of the possible’, ‘meditation’, and ‘the comic operation’ (‘the change of words signifies the bothersomeness of using any words at all’’).47 The sovereign operation is not subordinate nor does it govern, existing outside of the discourse in which it uncomfortably registers its presence (sliding between the possible and impossible) it is not subject to hierarchy in any form. It ‘dissolves the values of meaning, truth and a grasp-of-the-thing-in-itself’.48 Just as the Aufhebung makes sense, sovereignty destroys it. ‘Sovereignty is the impossible, therefore it is not, it is “this loss”.’49 Yet, it is unrepresentable (Bataille italicises the copula). Sovereignty is invisible to discourse because it does not desire recognition. Confined within discourse we cannot see it, only its effects, hence Bataille’s consistent reference to it as an ‘operation’. From inside the possible, we can only perceive the impossible from the point where the possible reaches its limits. This is why Bataille, pursuing a sovereign non-logic, holds that at the limit of absolute knowledge one encounters absolute non-knowledge. Thus in Guilty he writes ‘the ultimate development of knowledge is questioning. We can’t endlessly defer to answers…to knowledge…and knowledge finally opens a void. At the summit of knowledge, knowledge stops. I yield, and everything’s vertigo.’50 An eruption of laughter is 46 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 257. Bataille, ‘Method of Meditation’, The Unfinished System of Nonknowlege, 94. I have used the translation given by Alan Bass in Derrida’s essay which emphasises ‘using any words at all’ rather than ‘whatever word it should be.’ Derrida, Writing and Difference, 274. 48 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 270. 49 Bataille, Conférences sur le non-savoir in Tel Quel, 10. Quoted in Ibid., 270. 50 Bataille, Guilty, 89. Bataille’s ‘questioning’ included his own confusion over what to do with unemployed negativity at the end of history – when Action (dialectics) has 47

‘perhaps even the final given of philosophy’.51 Here one recalls Foucault and Kojève’s prediction. Hegel cannot laugh at his own joke. Philosophy, because it is work and because it submits to reason, makes of laughter an object of reflection (in the manner described, for instance, by Henri Bergson against whose Laughter Bataille inaugurated his notion of a sovereign laughter) and by separating itself thus, cannot laugh.52 What philosophy slavishly builds, laughter dissolves in an instant.53 Laughter, like death a figure of pure loss, does not serve as an end to something else. As Bataille has made clear, and as Derrida reiterates (‘[a]s a manifestation of meaning, discourse is thus the loss of sovereignty itself. Servility is therefore only the desire for meaning’), the sovereign operation cannot be defined, but Bataille does offer to ‘situate it in an ensemble of apparently sovereign behaviours’ – all figures of expenditure (or ‘excretion’): ‘- intoxication; - erotic effusion; - laughter; - sacrificial effusion; - poetic effusion’ and ecstasy.54 Sovereign behaviour is always related to unproductive loss, which, in having no end but itself does not work, rather it destroys ceased. He wrote to Kojève in 1937 ‘If action (“doing”) is (as Hegel says) negativity, then there is still the problem of knowing whether the negativity of someone who “doesn’t have anything more to do” disappears or remains in a state of “unemployed negativity.” As for me, I can only decide in one way, since I am exactly this “unemployed negativity” (I couldn’t define myself with any more clarity). I admit Hegel foresaw this possibility, but at least he didn’t situate it as the outcome of the process he described. I think of my life – or better yet, its abortive condition, the open wound that my life is – as itself constituting a refutation to Hegel’s closed system’. Appendix to Guilty, 123. Hegel himself played cards. (See Corn, ‘Unemployed Negativity (Derrida, Bataille, Hegel)’, On Bataille, 90.) 51 Bataille, Conférences sur le non-savoir, Tel Quel, 10. Quoted in Mikkel BorchJacobsen, ‘The Laughter of Being’, MLN, 12.4 (Sep. 1987) 741. 52 ‘“Philosophy,” which “is work,” can do or say nothing about this laughter.’ Derrida quoting Bataille (from Conférences sur le non-savoir), Writing and Difference, 256. Bataille wrote of Henri Bergson’s short book ‘Laughter, like the philosopher himself, was a disappointment’. Regarding Bataille’s encounter with Bergson see Surya, Georges Bataille, 36-38. See also Henri Bergson, Laughter (London: Macmillan and Co., 1921). 53 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen stages a slapstick rendition of Bataille’s Hegelian mimicry in ‘The Laughter of Being’, MLN, 12.4 (Sep. 1987) - constructing first a parody of Hegel’s system with a false sovereignty at the summit, and then dissolving it in a burst of laughter. 54 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 264. Bataille, ‘Method of Meditation’, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge’, 94. In ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’, ‘excretion’ counters ‘appropriation’ and is related through social taboos (limits) to the heterogeneous. ‘The process of appropriation is thus characterised by a homogeneity (static equilibrium) of the author of the appropriation, and of objects as final result, whereas excretion presents itself as the result of a heterogeneity, and can move in the direction of an even greater heterogeneity’. Visions of Excess, 95.

what has been made by work, is unrepresentable, meaningless and – following Foucault’s characterisation of madness as the ‘absence of work’ – utterly mad.55 Derrida establishes the idea of a sovereign writing in relation to Bataille’s distinction between the restricted and the general economy in ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ and The Accursed Share.56 The economy of Hegelian discourse, that is, discourse itself, under the sign of the Aufhebung, has its corollary in the restricted economy ‘where the automatic reinvestment of surplus into the forces of production eliminates expenditure that is not ultimately acquisitive’.57 To the productive and accumulative forces of the restricted economy, Bataille opposes the destruction of the Chinook potlatch, using it as an anthropological basis for the general economy, an economy of expenditure.58 In the ritual of the potlatch, social prestige and recognition are gained through sumptuous acts of destruction, not the work of the fearful Hegelian Slave. Sovereign writing, situated on the side of non-meaning, communing with it across the limit dividing the possible from the impossible, destroying meaning by inscribing in it its sovereign excess, is the writing of the general economy. ‘It multiplies words, precipitates them one against the other, engulfs them too, in an endless and baseless substitution whose only rule is the sovereign affirmation of the 55 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, trans. Richard Howard (London: Routledge, 1989). Quoted by Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern, (North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 13. 56 Georges Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988). These are not the only texts dealing with the restricted and general economy, but they are exemplary. 57 Michèle H. Richman, Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 3. 58 The potlatch is a challenge issued in the form of a considerable gift of riches, offered with the goal of humiliating, defying, and obligating a rival who, in order to retain social prestige in the face of such an act, must respond by bestowing a more valuable or elaborate gift upon the challenger. ‘Most striking, however, is the value placed on the ritual consumption and destruction of virtually unlimited quantities of goods, tying a man’s honour and prestige to expenditure. To give, according to the rules of potlatch, is to destroy.’ Such a gift, a display of what one is capable of expending, solicits an even more excessive retaliation. Bataille gives the example of a Tlingit chief slashing the throats of his own slaves before a rival chief, who repays the potlatch with the slaughtering of a greater number of his own slaves. The excremental operation of destruction is expressed symbolically on ‘emblazoned coppers, which on the Northwest [American] Coast are the gift objects par excellence’ and ‘in Melanesia, the donor designates as his excrement magnificent gifts, which he deposits at the feet of the rival chief’. Richman, Reading Georges Bataille, 17. Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, Visions of Excess, 121, 122. See also, Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1966).

play outside meaning. Not a reserve or a withdrawal, not the infinite murmur of a blank speech erasing the traces of classical discourse, but a kind of potlatch of signs that burns consumes and wastes words in the gay affirmation of death: a sacrifice and a challenge.’59 The impossible is brought into play within the possible. Here we have two economies of meaning and two languages: one which guards itself against nonsense and one which accepts the risk. With the disavowal of Hegel’s selfevidence, an inversion of sense takes place. In ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, Bataille writes: Human life, distinct from juridical existence, existing as it does on a globe isolated in celestial space, from night to day and from one country to another – human life cannot in any way be limited to the closed systems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions. The immense travail of recklessness, discharge, and upheaval that constitutes life could be expressed by stating that life starts only with the deficit of these systems; at least what it allows in the way of order and reserve has meaning only from the moment when the ordered and reserved forces liberate and lose themselves for ends that cannot be subordinated to anything one can account for.60 What is meaningful is now the unreason of silence and excess. Out of the space of a transgression the mad philosopher laughs, and his laughter demarcates our territory: the blind spot. ‘In the “system”, poetry, laughter, ecstasy are nothing. Hegel gets rid of them in a hurry: he knows of no other end than knowledge. His immense fatigue is linked in my eyes to horror of the blind spot’.61 The unproductive expenditure of the general economy constitutes a kind of negativity that cannot be put to work by the dialectic. A space unknown to Hegel’s all-encompassing system is marked out by loss. This is the blind spot: a burst of laughter, a spurt of blood, an ink stain that effaces a writing in the throes of ecstasy. Being blind, language issuing from 59 Derrida, Wiring and Difference, 274. Bataille, ‘The Notion of expenditure’, Visions of Excess, 128. Bataille’s italics. 61 Through the blind spot the system inscribes its descent: ‘There is in understanding a blind spot: which is reminiscent of the structure of the eye. In understanding, as in the eye, one can only reveal it with difficulty. But whereas the blind spot of the eye is inconsequential, the nature of understanding demands that the blind spot within it be more meaningful than understanding itself … it is no longer the spot which loses itself in knowledge, but knowledge which loses itself in it. In this was existence closes the circle, but it couldn’t do this without including the night from which it proceeds only in order to enter it again. Since it moved from the unknown to the known, it is necessary that it inverse itself at the summit and go back to the unknown’. Bataille, Inner Experience, 112, 111-112. 60

this hole does not register the distance that separates it from an object of knowledge, it does not speak on. Philosophy is an eye, but Bataille’s breakdown of the philosophical subject (Foucault’s reading of Bataille) has rendered it blind. The unproductive expenditure (dépense) of the general economy suggests, by way of a certain sliding (the doubling of the French verb ‘to expend’ with another verb that does not formally exist – necessarily, because how can discourse say this?) the ultimate operation of Bataille’s thought and the foil to Hegel’s absolute knowledge: dépenser – to unthink.62 Hence the incoherence of Georges Bataille. Making Sense Unmaking Sense Having put Bataille’s thought into the philosophical context from which it constructs its poetics, it is the aim of this essay to explore the language posited by it – the language of the blind spot, a language that works towards its own ruin, and in ruining itself, ruins sense. A heterological discourse, posed between excretion and appropriation and constantly forced to negotiate between the possibility and impossibility of its existence. Here, language faces that which it cannot name, and for that which it attempts to name, the names do not stay still. Language, attached as it was to the ‘slavish consciousness’ of the dialectic suddenly finds itself breaking away from utility, becoming sovereign in its insubordination to neither project nor system. Instead of working, it laughs. Instead of forming the world, it deforms it - ecstatically. Heterological writing is a joyful practice: ‘Pure happiness is … the negation of language. This is, in the most senseless sense, poetry. Language, stubborn in refusal, is poetry, turns back on itself (against itself)’.63 Poetry, ‘in the most senseless sense’ harbours the potential of exposing language at its limit. But ‘[w]riting, thinking are never the opposite of work’ – writing can still always be writing on.64 When is language ‘poetry’, in the most senseless sense, and when is it discourse, in the most nonsense-less (Hegelian) sense? How can language be detached from the meaningful 62 In French, the prefix de- serves to negate a verb it is placed in front of. Thus dépenser (‘to spend’ or ‘to expend’) can also be read as the verb penser (‘to think’) plus the negating prefix dé, giving: dé-penser. To un-think. Collins-Robert, French-English English-French Dictionary (London: Collins, 1978). 63 Georges Bataille, ‘Pure Happiness’, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 224. Bataille’s italics. 64 Ibid., 225.

structures that support knowledge and seek to make sense of the world through identification, and made to laugh? Whereas Hegelian structures ascend (to the pinnacle of absolute spirit or knowledge), Bataillean forces move in the opposite direction, inscribing a lowering that culminates in declassification - after which there is no longer an up or down and no longer any reference point within which to situate direction or sense (sens). Bataille, who cited this passage frequently, undertakes to fulfil the prophecy of Nietzsche’s Madman: What were we doing when we unchained this earth from the sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?65 Hegel is dead. Bataille’s thought engenders a labyrinthine literary space through which one moves without orientation, nor the desire to find a way out. Many of his texts remain deliberately incomplete.66 The action of his descent can never be consummated because the mechanisms of classification have been eroded. His thought is like death: it liquefies. Beginning with the head. This essay, as academic practise, is forced to err on the side of discourse. But I will oppose its movement: as Bataille reminds us, it is no good simply to be unsystematic, a system must contain its own undoing.67 Bataille’s thought always penetrates and disturbs that which it encounters. In discussing Bataille, one goes 65 F. W. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1973, First published 1882/1887), §125. It is important to note that Nietzsche exerted an influence over Bataille equal to and against that of Hegel. See Denis Hollier, ‘From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche’s Absence’, On Bataille for a discussion of their roles in his thought. Here he quotes Bataille: ‘In the end, I accepted my extraordinary obsession with the names Hegel, Nietzsche; I laughed in vain – I could no longer become excited unless I accepted or pretended to imagine a fantastic composition which would confusedly link my most disconcerting steps with theirs’, 61. 66 Hollier: ‘incompletion in Bataille’s texts must always be considered as one of the constitutive gestures of his writing.’ Holler discusses the importance of incompletion in Bataille’s work at length in the chapter entitled ‘The Caesarean.’ Hollier, Against Architecture, 162. 67 ‘I’m struck by the organization in my writing – it’s so strict that after an interval of several years the pickaxe hits the same spot… A system precise as clockwork governs my thoughts (but I escape it endlessly in this incompletable work)’. Bataille, Guilty, 101. ‘[t]o leave the realm of the project by means of a project.’ (‘sortir par un projet du domaine du projet). Œuvres Complètes, vol. 5, 60.

down with him. The following sections will therefore trace the gradual debasement of language as it descends from the purity of a purely symbolic function to a grotesque materiality that babbles and oozes before it drops out the bottom of sense altogether and into a sovereign state of formlessness. The action of this descent will be propelled by a Bataillean doubling, which splits one term into two and descends the first term by the impetus of the second. In significative language’s defacement I hope to chart the growth of an ink stain as it extends towards the edge of a page; the limit of the space of language. It is important to acknowledge that Bataille cannot be theorised. To theorise Bataille would be to miss the point. Here I am proposing to foster a collusion between Bataille and two Anglophone writers, Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein, in order to explore how language can undo itself, for ‘[t]he inadequation of all speech … at least, must be said’.68 The dress goes up to cover the head that thinks, the eyes that see and the mouth that speaks. With the curtain rising thus, let us prepare to laugh at that which lies underneath. 68 262. Bataille, Conférences sur le non-savoir. Quoted in Derrida, Writing and Difference,

Against the edifice: Writing a labyrinth ‘Yes, from now on language has only one use – as a means for madness, for elimination of thought, for rupture, as folly’s maze, not a DICTIONARY.’69 – Antonin Artaud 69 Antonin Artaud, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 330. This is the translation given by Betsy Wing, in Denis Hollier, Against Architecture, 28.

Down below, lower, underneath, there is a mouth. It speaks from beneath the dress a low language. It vomits and spits and oozes words that are dangerous to the other mouth on top. It forms utterances ‘not as a sentence, but more precisely as an ink stain’ spluttering them from frothing lips, and where the froth falls, mandrakes begin to grow.70 In Documents, the artistic, ethnographic and literary review that he edited between 1929 and 1930, Bataille set out, via a series of provocative articles and an anti-architectural ‘Critical Dictionary’, to undermine the misguided idealism and hypocritical materialism dominating the thought of his contemporaries (the Surrealists and Marxists being especially at fault).71 Bataille’s introduction to the first issue laid out the journal’s aim as such: ‘We will, in general, be looking here at the most disquieting facts, facts our knowledge of which have yet to be defined. In these investigations, the sometimes absurd character of the findings or methods will, far from being concealed as happens when one obeys the rules of propriety, be deliberately underlined, both out of hatred of fullness and for humorous reasons’.72 What would emerge from this undertaking would become the foundation of both a 70 Georges Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers’, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 13. Michael Taussig, in an essay named after Bataille’s essay, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ writes of this intriguing myth: ‘Fact: For centuries in Europe it was said that where a man was hanged by the state a white flower might sprout from his ejaculated semen or urine. That flower was none other than the mandrake, and it came to called “the little gallows man.” […] According to one source the little gallows man could also arise from the froth that fell to the ground from the choking mouth of a hanged woman.’ Critical Inquiry, 30 (Autumn 2003), 121-122. Despite the dearth of historical confirmation, the idea that this kind of speech is feminine resounds nicely against the observation made by Steven Shaviro in Passion & Excess that ‘Recent feminist theorists have amply demonstrated the extent to which the allegedly neutral speaking subject of dialectics is implicitly male.’ Passion & Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory (Tallahassee: The Florida State University Press, 1990), 17. 71 Two articles were particularly vehement in relation to this aim. Bataille railed against the Surrealists’ idealism in ‘The “Old Mole” and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist’ (‘All claims from below have been scurrilously disguised as claims from above’) and the materialists hierarchical valuing of matter in ‘Materialism’ (‘Most materialists, even though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist’). Visions of Excess, 39, 15. On Bataille’s critique of materialism see ‘Georges Bataille: materialism inverted’ in Pierre Macherey, The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 72 Georges Bataille, introductory text to the first edition of Documents, 1929. Quoted by Macherey in, The Object of Literature, 115. The title ‘Documents’ is important in this respect as it suggests an examination of evidence. Each edition of the journal also included a proportionally large number of photographs which testified to the editing board’s desire that it be taken seriously as an anthropological and cultural artefact.

critique of language as well as Bataille’s critique of Hegel roughly a decade later. The allusion to ‘facts of our knowledge of which have yet to be defined’, the refusal to conceal improper findings, the hatred of fullness, and the derision of all this as comic, all foreshadow the burst of sovereign laughter that is guiding our investigation. Much of what is proposed in these articles bears directly on discourse itself and its relation (complicit or antagonistic) to a type of ontological project reminiscent of Hegel’s system and the type of knowledge it implies. In the articles where idealism and idealist poetics are most overtly attacked, Bataille explores and deconstructs a model of language he sees as inauthentic and unfit for the expression of the truth of human existence. The Language of Flowers and the Game of Transposition Bataille opens one such article, ‘The Language of Flowers’, with the following paragraph: It is vain to consider, in the appearance of things, only the intelligible signs that allow the various elements to be distinguished from each other. What strikes human eyes determines not only the knowledge of the relations between various objects, but also a given decisive and inexplicable state of mind. Thus the sight of a flower reveals, it is true, the presence of this well-defined part of a plant, but it is impossible to stop at this superficial observation; in fact, the sight of this flower provokes in the mind much more significant reactions, because the flower expresses an obscure vegetal resolution. What the configuration and the colour of the corolla reveal, what the dirty traces of pollen or the freshness of the pistil betray doubtless cannot be adequately expressed by language; it is, however, useless to ignore (as is generally done) this inexpressible real presence and to reject as puerile absurdities certain attempts at symbolic interpretation.73 To begin with, the title alludes to an eighteenth and nineteenth century Western European superstition purporting that flowers were the possessors of a secret universal language uniting nature with God. Michael Taussig, in an article of the same name, points out that although this language has its roots in secrecy, orientalist fantasies (as a language of the harem), and the occult, ‘the French language of flowers seems to have been more concerned with tabulation’, with classificatory tables of 73 Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ Visions of Excess, 10. My italics.

smells and colours betraying a preoccupation with system-building and the belief that divine wisdom can be made accessible through the methods of science and logic.74 The language that Bataille is proposing to unearth here at once marks a continuation and a rupture of this tradition. Nature, when subjected to more than just a ‘superficial examination’, reveals something more fundamental than what is routinely presented by human models of knowledge and appropriation. This ‘obscure vegetal resolution’ which lies in a pre-linguistic language of appearance (Bataille italicises this word several times throughout the article) ‘cannot be adequately expressed by language’, just as its inexpressible ‘real presence’ is foreign to the significative machinery that enforces the so-called metaphysics of presence. Its primitive and base immediacy discloses truths that exist prior to, and despite, the petrification and repression of a transposition into language, aesthetics or ontology. Bataille goes on to demonstrate the bankruptcy of the idealised flower. Its significative value is concentrated on the beauty of the corolla and relies heavily on a blindness cultivated towards the ugliness of its other parts: ‘even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centres by hairy sexual organs. The interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all the corolla’s petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft’.75 One must be blind too, to the ‘dirty traces of pollen’ on the petals and the corolla’s irreparable fragility, which ‘after a very short period of glory’, ‘rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering’.76 What Bataille is seeking to show here is that a repression of what is indecent and unacceptable is intrinsic to the smooth functioning of the significative machinery. It is also important to note the relationship claimed between knowledge and sight.77 Enough superficial observation; what of the depths? It is almost a universal given that an image of roots does not automatically arise to accompany the utterance ‘flower’. Idealisation is always an elevation. Bataille seeks to disrupt the ‘seductiveness’ produced by the ‘thrust from low to high’ of traditional idealism by 74 Taussig, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ Critical Inquiry,30 (Autumn 2003), 117. Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ Visions of Excess, 12. 76 Ibid., 13. In response to this article (and the growing animosity he sensed from Bataille), André Breton commented in the Second Surrealist Manifesto that Bataille ‘is surely not well’; for ‘the rose deprived of its petals, is still a rose.’ Second manifeste du surréalisme, in Manifestes du surréalisme, 219. My translation. 77 The use of the word ‘appearance’ (the original French is aspect) is deliberately dilated in this article in order to indicate the actuality of the thing itself, not just the visible components. See ‘Le langage des fleurs,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 173-178. 75

refocusing attention on the subterranean portion of floral anatomy (which has its analogue in the cast of his own thought) to reveal whatever truth lies in the flower’s real presence rather than its deceptive, symbolic one: [I]n order to destroy this favourable impression, nothing is less necessary than the impossible and fantastic vision of roots swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin. Roots, in fact, represent the perfect counterpart to the visible parts of a plant. While the visible parts are nobly elevated, the ignoble and sticky roots wallow in the ground, loving rottenness just as leaves love light.78 Bataille’s revalorisation of what is below, or base – the shifting of attention from the petals to the pollen stain, from a bright perianth to the dark roots – is a strategic move calculated to destabilise the innocuous universe of transposed experience. He insists we see all of it, especially what is hidden. ‘There is reason to note,’ he writes, ‘that the incontestable moral value of the term base conforms to this systematic interpretation of the meaning of roots’: what is evil is necessarily represented, among movements, by a movement from high to low’.79 The ideal flower par excellence is doubtless that famous phantasm conjured from low to high by Stéphane Mallarmé one rainy afternoon in 1896. This infamous formula of linguistic purification, an alchemic separation of the ideal from the material, has become somewhat talismanic for exponents of poetic idealism: I say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion where my voice casts every contour, insofar as it is something other than the known bloom, there arises musically, the very idea in its mellowness; in other words, what is absent from every bouquet.80 78 Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ Visions of Excess, 13. Ibid., 13. Given a moral context, Bataille’s preference for roots, and the notion that the movement from high to low is more authentic than that of low to high, does much to elucidate his reasons for framing his studies of literature against a relationship to evil. In the preface to the publication of these collected studies ‘Literature and Evil’, he would write: ‘These studies are the result of my attempts to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil – an acute form of Evil – which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us.’ Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), viiii. 80 Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Camridge, Masschusetts: The Belknap Press, 2007) 210. 79

Mallarmé’s flower of language, as opposed to Bataille’s language of flowers, is a ‘pure notion’ set free by way of a linguistic act, which, in naming, has distilled it from the ‘cumbersomeness of a near or concrete reminder’.81 Language is purged of its materiality as if it were something unclean, as if words were at risk of being contaminated by that which they name. Mallarmé’s flower has neither roots, nor calyx, nor corolla. It is completely absent. Because the language of transposition functions on an elevated plane, at one remove from material reality, a mediating space is opened up between the two planes by which, in its crossing, all that is disturbing or undesirable is eliminated. The duplicitous nature of this arrangement need not be understated. Bataille detested this ‘game of transpositions’ as he called it in the eponymous polemic written for the closing issue of Documents.82 ‘The Modern Spirit and the Game of Transpositions’ could be considered the journal’s swan song, striking back at the journal’s detractors and ultimately laying the blame for its demise on an unsympathetic and uncomprehending public caught up in this deceptive game. Here Bataille laments that idealism is the definitive inclination of the ‘modern spirit’, having ‘grown out of a misunderstanding that would normally be untenable without such a long transition’.83 Above all else, the article targets the disingenuousness of idealisation, for it masks the true nature of existence, especially when that nature is violent or impersonal. Bataille’s strategy is formulated along now familiar lines, and he makes his case by focusing on invisible or excluded elements, inserting them into the stillness of discourse in an attempt to set it trembling: We are far from the savages who, during times of enormous feasts, would hang the skulls of their ancestors on greasy poles, or thrust the tibias of their fathers into a pig’s mouth at the moment when the sacrificed beast is vomiting streams of blood. We too get a kick out of numerous tibias and skulls, human and animal blood runs everywhere around us. But we don’t know how to use blood or bones to break the 81 Ibid. Georges Bataille, ‘L’esprit moderne et le jeu de transpositions,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). 83 ‘Sous sa forme la plus accomplie, l’esprit moderne… s’est développé sur un malentendu tel qu’il devait normalement cesser d’être sans une bien longue transition’. Ibid,. 271. My translation. 82

regularity of the days which disappear before us like the contents of a badly made barrel.84 The guiding principle of transposition is always the transformation of the unknown into a part of the known. An assimilation. An appropriation. A pre-emptive defence against rupture. Transposition is, before all else, an act of homogenisation that seeks to circumscribe and contain a world that is anything but circumscribable and homogenous. At best, it is a register of naïveté; at worst, a violent repression of all that is liable to disturb the peace.85 Human existence has always been close to horror. The advent of World War I had so recently reinforced the existence of acts of such unspeakable violence and perversity that, for Bataille and his cohorts on Documents, any attempt to separate human existence from this horrible truth, no matter how harrowing, seemed an absurdity.86 Nonetheless, the evidence of rottenness and putrefaction is always cleverly hidden by way of the most banal and fundamental of human habits. Language separates itself from the stench of death; transposition is always a hygienic act: ‘Of such an image we only know the negative form, the soaps, 84 ‘Nous sommes loins des sauvages qui lors d’énormes fêtes suspendent les crânes de leurs ancêtres à des mâts de cocagne, qui enfoncent le tibia de leur père dans la bouche d’un porc au moment où le bête égorgée vomit son sang à flots. Nous aussi, nous jouissons de nombreux tibias et de nombreux crânes, partout le sang animal et humain coule autour de nous. Mais nous ne savons pas employer le sang ou les os à rompre la régularité de jours qui se perdent pour nous comme le contenu d’un tonneau mal joint’. Ibid., 272-273. My translation. The article was originally published accompanied by two photographs: a close-up image of dead flies stuck to fly-paper, and photograph of the interior of a mortuary chapel in the Church of Sainte-Marie-de-la-Conception, Rome, whose walls and ceiling are decorated with the bones of dead monks, the reference to numerous tibias and skulls is a reference to this image. 85 ‘symbolic transpositions have been proposed in all domains with the most puerile insistence. The specific character of the violent and impersonal emotions signified by the symbols was ignored with such thoughtlessness that for a long time it was difficult to choose between the alluring character of such naïveté and the inertia that is in fact represented by the deep interest shown toward the play of the transpositions’. ‘des transpositions symboliques one été mises en avant dans tous les domains avec l’insistence la plus puérile. Le caractère spécifique des émotions violentes et impersonelles que signifiaient les symbols a été méconnu avec une si grande inconséquence qu’il a longtemps été difficile de choisir entre le caractère séduisant d’une telle naïveté et la veulerie que représentait au fond l’intéret marqué pour le jeu des transpositions’. Ibid., 271-272. My translation. 86 On Bataille’s personal experience with the war, in which he was forced to abandon his paralysed and syphilitic father to face his own end alone during the 857 days of the German bombardment of the town of Rheims, see Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, esp. 16-26. And on the effect this had on his subsequent literary efforts, beginning with the suppressed text of 1918, ‘Notre-Dame de Rheims,’ see ‘The Architectural Metaphor,’ in Hollier, Against Architecture, 14-56.

the toothbrushes and all the pharmaceutical products whose accumulation permits us every day to escape (although only just) this filth and death.’87 A fear of dirt (of pollen, of roots) drives the act of transposition. Hollier, followed by Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, link this repression to Freudian neurosis and Bataille has already linked it to inertia, evoking the stillness that would mark out the petrified discourse of the system that he is struggling to undermine.88 In ‘The Modern Spirit and the Game of Transpositions’ Bataille specifically makes an example of art, but significative language, for being more fundamental and more pervasive, is the ultimate game of transpositions from which writing must be disentangled. The problem with significative language is that it is always, inescapably, a form of idealism. Signification is transposition on its most fundamental level. The Blind Spot Carl Einstein, in a Documents article along similar lines to ‘The Language of Flowers’, reveals how the poetic symbol ‘nightingale’ is nothing more than an elegant means to avoid saying ‘legs’.89 In his conclusion that ‘the nightingale can be classed 87 ‘De cette image nous ne conaissons que la forme négative, les savons, les brosses à dents et tous les produits pharmaceutiques don’t l’accumulation nous permet d’échapper péniblement chaque jour à la crasse et à la mort.’ Bataille, ‘L’esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. I, 273. 88 Neurosis: ‘Under what conditions can what must not be said be, nonetheless, said? How can perversion speak without turning into neurosis? What sort of process would permit the word to be produced as a perverse action?’ See Hollier, Against Architecture, 109-110, and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 54-55. Inertia: See note 85 above. The repression of the unhygienic is also the theme of the Documents article ‘Slaughterhouse,’ in which Battaile observes that: ‘In our time… the slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now, the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains and in which, subject to the ineradicable obsession of shame, they are reduced to eating cheese.’ Georges Bataille, ‘Slaughterhouse,’ in Encyclopædia Acephalica. trans. Annette Michelson (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 73. 89 ‘Save in exceptional cases,’ he writes, ‘no reference to a bird is intended. The nightingale is, generally, a platitude, a narcotic, indolent, stupid. […] Words are, for the most part, petrifications which elicit mechanical reactions in us’; ‘[t]hus what we call the soul is for the most part a museum of meaningless signs. These signs are hidden behind a façade of actuality.’ The article continues in such a manner, teasing out the allegory until

among the paraphrases of the absolute’ one cannot help but remark upon the resemblance posited here between language as ‘the game of transpositions’, and Hegel’s system.90 The nightingale is ‘the sign of an eternal optimism’, the optimism of eternal recuperation.91 In its repressive elimination of what is base, horrifying, or ignominious, transposition succeeds in regulating experience via a mechanism similar to the Aufhebung. No surprise then, that significative language too hides death at its foundation. Saying is founded on absence, or as Jacques Lacan put it, ‘The symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing’.92 Words and things are fated to a necessary division, and in the space between them hovers death.93 Hegel understood this relation all too well, writing in the Phenomenology of Spirit that, even at the moment of ‘Sense-Certainty’, the immediacy of the present instant is destroyed in the very act of saying ‘now’, and in the First Philosophy of Spirit, ‘The first act, by which it reveals the true nature of ‘nightingale’’s signification. It arises that ‘[n]ightingale can be replaced: a) by rose, b) by breasts, but never by legs, because the nightingale’s role is precisely to avoid designating them’. The word belongs to an inventory of ‘bourgeois diversions’, a type of language that endeavours to suggest the indecent while skirting it. ‘Allegory is, in fact, a form of assassination because it disposes of the object, robbing it of its literal meaning’. Hence, it is ‘cowardice that prevents people from using themselves in allegory’; this would be akin to literary suicide. Rather, ‘[i]t is defenceless animals, plants, and trees that get used.’ Such was the fate of the flower. Carl Einstein, ‘Nightingale,’ in Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. Dominic Faccini (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 66. 90 Ibid. The French word jeu emphasises this connection between the game (jeu) of transpositions and the ‘putting at stake’ (mettre en jeu) that sets up the conditions for the process of ‘dialectical overcoming’ in the Master/Slave dialectic. See Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 19. In being said, the object of an utterance is put at risk - but this is the false risk familiar to the proper functioning of the Aufbehung, not the risk without reserve of non-Hegelian discourse. 91 Einstein, ‘Nightingale,’ in Encyclopædia Acephalica, 66. 92 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), quoted in Shaviro, Passion & Excess, 16. Freud draws a similar conclusion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, while observing his grandson play what was to become known as the fort/da game. The child, throwing a spool amongst the bedding of his cot where it is out of view cries ‘fort!’ substituting a verbal sign for the absent object. Language can be seen to naturally arise from the negation of its object. 93 Only in the Balnibarbian city of Lagardo, described by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, is communication effected without a separation between words and things. Here, ‘many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which hath only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him’ Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Penguin, 1994), 203-204. See Peter Schwenger, ‘Words and the Murder of the Thing,’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn, 2001), 99-113.

Adam established lordship over the animals, is this, that he gave them a name, i.e. he nullified them as beings on their own account’.94 In ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, Maurice Blanchot paraphrases Hegel in a manner that somewhat betrays the shrewdness of his muted terms, liberating a little of the death that Hegel had hidden away: Hegel means that from that moment on the cat ceased to be a uniquely real cat and became an idea as well. The meaning of speech, then, requires that before any word is spoken there must be a sort of immense hecatomb, a preliminary flood plunging all of creation into a total sea. God had created living things, but man had to annihilate them. Not until then did they take on meaning for him, and he in turn created them out of the death into which they had disappeared.95 The uniquely real cat, like Bataille’s real presence of things, cannot adequately be expressed in language. The problem for Bataille is that no trace of the object’s sacrifice remains in the utterance. The transposition goes off without a hitch, and the death upon which it is founded disappears into a muted hush. ‘There remains a point that always has the sense – or rather the absence of sense – of the whole. Now a description, from the point of view of discursive knowledge, is imperfect, if, at the desired moment, thought does not open up through it into the very point where the totality that is annihilation is revealed.’96 Signification therefore always produces a blind spot, a residue of the transposition that must remain repressed in order for meaning to be maintained. Moreover, whatever is named is thereby assimilated into human knowledge via a crossing of the space that purges it of its problematic elements. Significative language covers the world like a blanket. It posits itself as an inexhaustible system without fault or lacuna. Even its ruptures, so long as they are signified, are recoverable by meaning. It is no good just to write about base things (as if that would reintroduce into discourse what it has so carefully expelled) for 94 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) quoted in Shaviro, Passion & Excess, 16. G. W. F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. and ed. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany, New York, 1979), 221, quoted in Schwenger, ‘Words and the Murder of the Thing,’ Critical Inquiry, 100. 95 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death,’ in “The Gaze of Orpheus” and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York, 1981), 42, quoted in Schwenger, ‘Words and the Murder of the Thing,’ Critical Inquiry, 100. 96 Georges Bataille, ‘Le non-saviour,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. XII, 284. I have used the translation given by Betsy Wing in Hollier, Against Architecture, 96.

transposition is an irreducible condition of significative discourse. Rather, the flower of language must be violated, one must insert into language what is base about language itself – silence, profanity, the materiality of sound and rhythm. The Aufhebung of signification must be jammed by something it cannot recuperate. ‘Significative language’ is a deliberate, although unwieldy term. All language is not transposition, because language can be used against itself to derail or expose its significative function. It can be un-significative; it can be significative but excessively so, so that it undermines the repressive mechanism of simple signification. Instead of slavishly working, language can be effusive, joyful, useless. Thus, we have the significative language of transposition, an exclusive, repressive practice which imposes an ideological limit on existence, and this other type of language: a language of stains and roots and dirt, a language accommodating of heterogeneity, the language of the blind spot. Bataille would demonstratively name it (among other names), by its effect, a ‘quack’, thereby avoiding bestowing on it an identity, preferring instead the materiality of sound, empty of reference and as yet, meaningless.97 The Transgression of Form ‘One flowering plant that stands out with regard to life and death’ writes Taussig, ‘is known as the mandrake or mandragora, said to be the most important hallucinogen in Western Europe and the Near East over two millenia’.98 Taussig’s emphasis on the hallucinogenic properties of the mandrake fortuitously positions it as representative of one of those ‘threatening and hallucinogenic’ forces in Einstein’s article ‘against which we defend ourselves with a superstructure of knowledge’.99 Nevertheless, its antagonistic position towards knowledge has less to do with its hallucinogenic influence than with the fact that its roots, when extracted from the ground, look ‘like a human being,’ and one which ‘lacks a head’.100 One would think 97 ‘Quack’ is the translation given by Allan Stoekl of ‘couac’ in the following sentence from ‘The Language of Flowers’: ‘No crack, it seems – one could stupidly say no quack – conspicuously troubles the decisive harmony of vegetal nature.’ ‘Faire un couac’, in colloquial French, means to make a mistake or play a bum note. Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers,’Visions of Excess, 13; ‘Le langage des fleurs,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. I, 177. 98 Taussig, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ 111. 99 Einstein, ‘Nightingale,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, 66. 100 So much so, in fact, that superstitious people would have it extracted from the ground ‘bathed several times a year and dressed in costly cloth or clothes and sometimes

this irresistible to Bataille, and he indeed lauds the mandrake’s ‘obscenity’ in ‘The Language of Flowers’.101 Furthermore, according to Taussig, the most potent mandrakes are said to grow beneath the gallows in the rich soil fertilised by the ejaculated semen and urine of the condemned.102 The mandrake therefore is a product of the excess that escapes death as the noose tightens. In terms of the Aufhebung, it is a manifestation, like laughter, of the unrecuperable excess that escapes the productive negation of the dialectic. The mandrake, then, is nature’s ‘Acéphale’, the headless emblem of a public journal and clandestine ‘secret society’ initiated by Bataille in 1936.103 Andre Masson’s drawing for the cover of the first issue of the journal portrays a headless human figure, naked with outstretched arms, very much in the manner of a parodic caricature of renaissance depictions of the harmonious relation between the proportions of the human body and the universe. In place of a stomach, a tortuous entanglement of entrails yields an image of disorienting excess represented by the structure of the labyrinth, in which spatial, as well as anatomical, oppositions deconstruct as they pass through. Hollier, taking his cue from Masson’s drawing, would use the labyrinth as an architectural metaphor for Bataille’s writing against what he saw as the pyramid of Hegelian thought. ‘Labyrinthine structure is acephalous,’ he writes, ‘antihierarchical (anarchic); one never moves ahead, rather even fed with food and drink twice a day’. At the moment of its extraction from the ground, the mandrake is said to shriek ‘like a person.’ This is the ritual described by Taussig for the mandrake’s extraction: ‘a black dog… is required to pull it out… and when the mandrake shrieks the dog falls dead.’ Taussig, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ 112, 113. 101 Bataille, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ Visions of Excess, 13. 102 Taussig, ‘The Language of Flowers,’ 121. 103 The better known College of Sociology, also founded by Bataille, constituted the theoretical counterpart to Acéphale, and among the many lectures delivered under its aegis (whose attendees included the likes of Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and Claude Lévi-Strauss) was one delivered by Roger Caillois on the theory of the secret society – which he saw as a sacred ideological virus intended to infect the profane social body. Regarding Bataille’s intentions for the Acéphale secret society, little is known apart from the fact that, like the journal, it was heavily inspired by Nietzsche. One point in an eleven-point program written by Bataille and delivered to its members, reads ‘Participate in the destruction of the world as it presently exists, with eyes open wide to the world which is yet to be.’ In a similar vein, ‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’ which prefaced the first issue of the journal Acéphale, urges its readers to ‘go beyond the world.’ For more information on the Acéphale secret society, of which information is predictably scarce, see Alastair Brotchie’s introduction to Encyclopædia Acephalica (London, Atlas Press, 1995). Also, Georges Bataille, ‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’ Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

one loses one’s head there. Losing one’s head opens prisons. […] Labyrinthine discourse is decapitated discourse, uttered by the absence of a head.’104 Bataille wrote an aphorism to go with Masson’s drawing: ‘Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison.’105 This analogy made via nature between language, the body and architecture, sets the scene for the important metaphorical role architecture would come to play in Bataille’s œuvre. It appears again in the instructions written by Bataille to guide members of the Acéphale secret society to the group’s meeting place: ‘On a marshy soil, in the centre of a forest, where turmoil seems to have intervened in the usual order of things, stands a tree struck by lightning. One can recognise in this tree the mute presence of that which has assumed the name of Acéphale, expressed here by these arms without a head’.106 An intriguing anecdote: at one of these meetings, the group had decided, so the story goes, to make a human sacrifice. A volunteer for the victim had been found, but none among those assembled that night in the forest were prepared to take on the job of executioner. In the end, a goat was sacrificed instead.107 Had Bataille deliberately 104 Hollier, Against Architecture, 64. Taussig follows suit: ‘like the mandrake, this image of the acéphale does not simply invert heaven and hell, but deranges their interdependence such that there is little possibility of dialectical recuperation or, for that matter, of redemption. […] Behind this lurks both the joy and despair of the realisation that, like language, reason is at best an approximation of reality that always exceeds the terms and schemes by which we organise it’. ‘The Language of Flowers, 121. 105 Bataille, ‘The Sacred Conspiracy’, Visions of Excess, 181. It is worth quoting the description of Masson’s drawing in full: ‘Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison. He has found beyond himself not God, who is the prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; he holds a steel weapon in his left hand, flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He reunites in the same eruption Birth and Death. He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster’. 106 Georges Bataille, ‘Instructions pour la rencontre en fôret,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 281. Translation given by Alastair Brotchie in Encyclopædia Acephalica, 15. 107 This story is confirmed by Acéphale members, Roger Caillois and Patrick Waldberg. Walderg gives the following account: ‘At the last meeting in the heart of the forest, there were only four of us and Bataille solemnly requested whether one of the three others would assent to being put to death, since this sacrifice would be the foundation of a myth, and ensure the survival of the community. This favour was refused him’. (Acéphalogramme, unpublished text quoted in Isabelle and Patrick Waldberg, Un Amour Acéphale, Correspondence 1940-1949, eds. de la Différence, 1992, 9) Quoted in Ibid., 15. Caillois gives the account which specifies the lack of a willing executioner as the reason why the sacrifice did not go ahead. Ibid.

woven this into his scheme, or was it just a fortuitous coincidence, that the train station at which those invited to this particular rendezvous were instructed to alight before venturing into the forest was called Saint-Nom (Saint Noun/Saint Name)? This analogy works because architecture, like significative language, is founded upon lack. Adolf Loos, in a forest perhaps not all that different from the one at Saint-Nom, gives us the following definition of architecture: ‘When walking through a wood, you find a rise in the ground, six foot long and three foot wide, heaped up in a rough pyramid shape, then you turn serious, and something inside you says: someone lies buried here. That is architecture’.108 Bataille was sensitive to this resemblance and perceived something of Hegel’s system, perhaps the greatest feat of architectural thought, in the microcosmic workings of language. Both grow out of a death which is then suppressed. Both function via a recuperative mechanism that assimilates everything into a totalising and meaningful version of human existence. Like Hegelian thought, architecture turns things serious. It does not appreciate laughter. At the end of history, man is an edifice. He is the prisoner of his own form.109 In the Documents article ‘Architecture’, Bataille first explains that social order is maintained by the fearful and commanding presence of monuments, churches, palaces, state buildings, prisons and museums in human space (‘these great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements’) only then to propose that architecture is the teleological culmination of human morphology.110 ‘Man,’ he writes, ‘would seem to represent merely an intermediary stage within the morphological development between monkey and 108 Quoted in Hollier, Against Architecture, xxi. During Kojève’s lectures on the Master/Slave dialectic (in which it was explained that man desires the recognition of another self-conscious subjectivity in order to fully realise his own self-consciousness), Bataille penned the following aphorism, which would eventually break away from Hegel and take on its own form in Bataille’s thought: ‘Man is what is lacking in man’. This particular phrase later appeared in the article, ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism,’ alongside this evident mutation, ‘People become excited trying to know if the prison came from the guard or if the guard came from the prison’ - a question of ‘radical insignificance.’ The prison that is man requires no guard. ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism,’ Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 45. 110 Georges Bataille, ‘Architecture,’ in Encyclopædia Acephalica. trans. Dominic Faccini (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 35. Many other Documents articles deal directly with the social repression of unsound or unclean elements by architecture. See esp.: ‘Slaughterhouse,’ and ‘Museum’ trans. Annette Michelson, in Encyclopædia Acephalica. trans. Annette Michelson (London: Atlas Press, 1995). 109

building. Forms have become increasingly static, increasingly dominant’. Therefore, ‘an attack on architecture, whose monumental productions now truly dominate the whole earth, grouping the servile multitudes under their shadow, imposing admiration and wonder, order and constraint, is necessarily, as it were, an attack on man.’111 The storming of the Bastille, the example given by Bataille in this article, entails an attack on man as a metaphysical category as well as a physical entity. It is clear then, that in order to escape language, too, one must lose one’s head. One way to do this is to laugh. Architecture, being the ‘true nature of societies’, is explicit in ‘the physiognomy of officials (prelates, magistrates, admirals)’ no doubt because these venerable examples are all of the kind who keep their mouths closed.112 In another Documents article published the following year entitled ‘Mouth’, Bataille contrasts a bestial alignment and use of the mouth (‘the mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals’ and ‘the most terrifying’ part) with the ‘narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe.’113 But this same mouth is capable, at times, of extreme effusion which rends the architectural façade and reverts the mouth to a repressed bestiality. Such is the case of convulsive laughter: ‘On this subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck so that the mouth becomes, as far as possible, a prolongation of the spinal column, in other words, it assumes the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals’.114 Man, who has raised himself up vertically, standing erect like a building, represses by way of elevation his biological origin in an animal state, characterised in turn, by its horizontal mouth-anus axis. This movement which opens the mouth up wide, but not to speak, restores the mouth-anus axis of the beasts and returns man momentarily to his less noble but more authentic origins. Both the body and language are simultaneously disarticulated in this one transgressive gesture. In Guilty, Bataille 111 Ibid., 35. Ibid. 113 Georges Bataille, ‘Mouth,’ in Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. John Harmon (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 62, 64. The appropriation/excretion dichotomy is obviously a guiding principle here. 114 Ibid., 62 112

would proclaim ‘My thought is anthropomorphism ripped to pieces’.115 And again in Documents, ‘There is, in every man, an animal thus imprisoned, like a galley slave, and there is a gate, and if we open the gate, the animal will rush out, like the slave finding his way to escape.’116 Non-dialectical Assaults: Formless and the ‘Nonpositive Affirmation’ of Base Matter Over his two years as editor, Bataille would continue to elucidate, via a conscientious misuse of Documents journal space, a heterological strategy for a type of writing capable of undoing language. This takes place as a performance rather than as an explanation, for transgression does not inhabit the same space as ideas - it shows itself only in their subversion. These strategies for creating quacks, for escaping the prisons of language and man, are operations, not theories. It is impossible to write on them. All one can do is try to write in spite of them. Rejected from the main body of the journal by members of the editorial board who were scandalised by Bataille’s provocative inclinations, certain of the more ‘heteroclite’ Documents articles were relegated to an internal section where they were supposed to be contained, thus preventing the contamination of the more venerable and serious articles on developments in art or ethnography.117 This ‘dangerous’ 115 Bataille, Guilty, 25. Bataille delighted in illustrating Documents with photographs of collapsing structures, notably, a toppling stone chimney in ‘Factory Chimney’, and the bursting walls of a prison in Ohio accompanying the article ‘Space’ which concludes with this line: ‘Obviously it will never enter anybody’s head to lock the professors up in prison to teach them what space is (the day, for example, the walls collapse before the bars of their dungeons)’. Bataille’s italics. ‘Space,’ trans. Iain White, Encyclopædia Acephalica (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 77. ‘Factory Chimney’ trans. Annette Michelson, Encyclopædia Acephalica (London: Atlas Press, 1995). 116 Georges Bataille, ‘Metamorphosis,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 60. 117 From early on, the Documents editorial board was divided on the question of what the journal’s exact nature should be. As publication continued, tension only mounted between two main factions: the first more daring and provocative group rallied around Bataille and were mainly ex-surrealists or Paris dada members, while the second group was more academic, chiefly made up of psychiatry or art history professors and museum curators. Unfortunately for Bataille, this latter group also included Georges Wildenstein, who was journal’s main financial backer. The new format was created after an article written by Bataille (concerning the grotesque representation of horses on ancient Gaulish coins) so outraged Documents co-founder, Pierre d’Espezel, that he called for the

section of Documents was known as the ‘Critical Dictionary’ because it openly criticised aspects of modern culture (not to mention aspects of the journal itself), and because it had the format of a dictionary, with each short entry addressing a specified subject: ‘Mouth’, ‘Nightingale’, and ‘Architecture’ all belonged to the Critical Dictionary. The interesting thing about this expelled element of Documents is that, although it was called a dictionary, it was perhaps the first dictionary to begin by denouncing the structure of dictionaries, opening as it did with the article ‘Architecture’.118 Bataille had chosen the dictionary form because it is one of the most obvious markers of literary architecture, representing totality and transposition in one. A dictionary is one of those objects that renders the system transparent. If one attacks a dictionary, one is attacking architecture on two scales: the scale of language and the scale of knowledge, both which combine to create the category ‘Man’.119 Other articles in the Critical Dictionary reinforce this refusal to treat man, even lexically, as a totality, and a list of its entries reads as a virtual dismemberment of the body: ‘Mouth’, ‘Eye’, ‘Big Toe’, ‘Spittle’, ‘Human Face’. Discourse, from now on, shall no longer have the whole in its sights, rather, it will cease to see, and a corrective discourse of the partial object will emerge to take its place.120 journal’s suppression. See Alastair Botchie’s introduction to Encyclopædia Acephalica. (London: Atlas Press, 1995). 118 Yve-Alain Bois, in his introduction to Formless: A User’s Guide, deems it ‘the most effective of Bataille’s acts of sabotage against the academic world and the spirit of system’, 16. 119 It is therefore not simply a taste for facetious humour that leads Bataille, under the entry ‘Man’, to give nothing at all by way of a definition but to provide instead two quotations, one from ‘an eminent English chemist, Dr Charles Henry Maye’, the other from a ‘Sir William Earnshaw Cooper’, both completely serious perpetrators (who did their computations, one is sure, with the mouth firmly closed) of ridiculous scientific calculations leading to equally comical conclusions. Dr Charles Henry Maye gives us man’s chemical value in French francs, and Sir William Earnshaw Cooper generously provides an arithmetical quantification of the ‘blood guilt of Christendom’ by adding up the daily count of slaughtered animals on which it feeds. ‘Man,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 56-58. 120 In 1925, Bataille’s psychoanalyst Adrien Borel, sent him a photograph of the Chinese torture of a Hundred Pieces. Taken in 1905, it showed a young Chinese man, Fu Chou Li, found guilty of murdering Prince Ao Han Ouan, in the process of being cut up alive. In the image, parts of his chest, his forearms, his lower legs had already been removed. The expression worn by Fu Chou Li is ecstatic. Bataille grew obsessed by this image and wrote about it often in his published and unpublished works. In Inner Experience: ‘The young and seductive Chinese man… left to the work of the executioner, I loved him… I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he

On the level of language, a dictionary’s value lies in its ability to eliminate doubts about meanings and to set forth a deceptively clean system of correlation between words and their referents, between language and reality - a reality, that is, commensurate with and never excessive of human consciousness.121 In fulfilling this role, a dictionary yields the comforting testimony of language’s cool grip on experience. It petrifies the universe. It is the ultimate book (as a condensation of knowledge) because it proposes a total identification of the universe through the relentless transposition of the unknown into the known.122 Furthermore, a dictionary by vocation, signifies completion. An incomplete dictionary is an aberration which betrays the denomination ‘dictionary’. The Critical Dictionary is just that: incomplete and completely unedifying. Rather than giving the definitions of words, its strategy is to give the kind of information that undoes those definitions. As a conventional dictionary it is useless and therefore, sovereign. Its form enacts a movement away from a totalising whole to sovereign non-identity. Instead of classifying, it declassifies. In the Critical Dictionary, all meaning, like all coherent structure, is at risk of being lost. Perhaps the most important article, because it occupies the place that would, in a conventional dictionary, be reserved for the entry ‘dictionary’, is that entitled ‘Formless’. This is the entry in its entirety: A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin’, 120. He would eventually obtain three more photographs of the event which he kept with him for his entire life. These photographs are published in Surya’s biography. In his chapter on these images, Surya quotes Bataille as saying ‘This photograph had a decisive role in my life’. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, 94. I should like to juxtapose it here with the aforementioned images of collapsing buildings. 121 A dictionary is the proof that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.6) or that ‘there is no language [langue] in existence for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified, it being an effect of its existence as a language [langue] that it necessarily answers all needs’. (Lacan, Écrits). Quoted in Shaviro, Passion & Excess, 4. 122 For a discussion of the book as a manifestation/condensation of the architectural drive, see Hollier, Against Architecture, 31-46.

or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.123 Formless is the name of an operation, it is nothing in and of itself and it has no identity. If anything at all, it is like laughter or spit. One can see it at work in the article by Michel Leiris immediately following Bataille’s ‘Formless’, appositely titled ‘Spittle’. Leiris discusses the hierarchy of organs in the human body according to the value attached to the activities they control: ‘eyes at the summit – because they would seem to be admirable lanterns – but the organs of excretion as far down as possible’.124 After the eyes, the mouth is the next most noble organ due to its role in the production of speech (Bataille has already pointed out in ‘Mouth’ that articulate language is a condition of human elevation to the vertical, architectural axis), but ‘spittle, on the hand, casts the mouth in one fell swoop down to the last rung of the organic ladder, lending it a function of ejection even more repugnant than its role as gate through which one stuffs food’.125 Formless deforms both structures and things by ‘bringing them down in the world’. But this is not all. In lowering the mouth, it lowers ‘man in general to the state of those primitive animals which, possessing only one aperture for all their needs – and thereby exempt from that elementary separation between organs of nutrition and secretion (to which would correspond the differentiation between the noble and ignoble) – are still completely plunged in a sort of diabolical and inextricable chaos’: this lowering culminates in a declassification.126 Formless dissolves the difference in which meaning is created. In this case, the distinction between the human and the animal is erased. Articulate language, which obfuscates the base operations of the mouth, is henceforth contaminated by these heterogeneous elements reintroduced by Bataille (and Leiris) in order to blow out the dialectic, that is, to overload the Aufhebung with an excess it cannot recuperate. The 123 Georges Bataille, ‘Formless,’ Visions of Excess, 31. Michel Leiris, ‘Spittle,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. Dominic Faccini (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 80. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. 124

appropriating action of naming is irreversibly sullied by the excretory action of spitting.127 In opposition to the vertical ascent of transposition, formless pulls what is elevated back down into the depths, liberating its repressed origins and then lowering it even more, so far down, so low, that it no longer even retains form and thereby falls out of the bottom of all dictionaries - of all structures. The task of formless roughly opposes the operation of the Aufhebung: instead of a mechanism that recuperates all aspects of existence into sense, it undoes sense by producing and valorising its excess, but ‘valorising’ it outside of any system that provides a framework in which value can be measured, because the formless, having no form, is necessarily non-hierarchical. What the articles of the Critical Dictionary are beginning to institute, is an expenditure, not a hoarding, of sense. Foucault inaugurates the term ‘nonpositive affirmation’ (picked up by Derrida in ‘A Hegelianism Without Reserve’) in ‘A Preface to Transgression’ in order to ensure that this ‘valorisation’ outside of any context of value it is not misunderstood as mere nihilism or negation, the latter, of course, being inextricably Hegelian.128 Bataille himself eliminates any sense of negativity in his reference to a ‘positive extravagance’ in ‘The Academic Horse’ and elsewhere, the ‘insubordinate characterisation’ of an ‘active base matter’.129 But Hollier, perhaps, puts it best when he contends that ‘in fact, this is all about something one can have no idea of. 127 Leiris published a poem (in Cahiers du sud) entitled ‘L’amoureux des crachats’ (the lover of spit) and dedicated it to Bataille. Haut Mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1943) 47. Quoted by Hollier, Against Architecture, 177 n18. 128 Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression,’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 3340. Derrida: ‘Now, the sovereign operation, the point of nonreserve, is neither positive nor negative. It cannot be inscribed in discourse, except by crossing out predicates or by practising a contradictory superimpression that then exceeds the logic of philosophy’. Writing and Difference, 259. See also 335 n15. ‘Transgression does not seek to oppose one thing to another…’ For Foucault, this sovereign, nonpositive affirmation opens up a forgotten space in philosophy for genuinely critical thought in which affirmation is not automatically equated with legitimation. 129 In 1938 Bataille wrote to Kojève: ‘Hegelian phenomenology represents the mind as essentially homogenous… Among the various objects of Hegelian description, negativity remains without a doubt a representation that is simultaneously rich, violent, and charged with a great expressive value. But the negativity I will speak about is of a different nature,’ the letter continues with a lengthy discussion concerning laughter and sexual activity. Holler, Le Collège de Sociologie (Paris: Gallmard, 1995), 61-82. Quoted by Bois in Formless: A User’s Guide, 68. ‘une extravagance positive,’ Georges Bataille, ‘Le cheval academique,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 160., ‘The Notion of Expenditure,’ Visions of Excess, 129.

Something that is “like nothing else”’, ‘is submitted to no model, does not reproduce any specific difference.’130 The type of matter we are dealing with here cannot be squeezed into a mathematical frock coat. The action of splitting and lowering on which the declassification of formless is predicated would also play a part in Bataille’s dedicated critique of materialism, equally guilty in his eyes of a disguised idealism as of its dalliance with dialectics.131 Within materialism itself he introduced a split, separating matter that could be idealised from matter which resisted idealisation. ‘Base matter,’ as he called it, ‘is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from those aspirations’.132 The action of lowering requires a fundamental scission of the term in question (i.e. mouth or flower) but this scission does not create a contradiction (fundamental to the progression of the dialectic), rather it creates an opposition which precludes any possibility of reconciliation. Dialectics, like dictionaries, reinforce homology, bestowing upon aspects of the world what Bataille terms ‘logical identity’.133 Base matter, by virtue of being in a state of ‘non-logical difference’ destroys homology with its unassimilable, nonsensical heterogeneity.134 It issues from the blind spot. It 130 Hollier, Against Architecture, 98. As mentioned above, Bataille found materialists to be guilty of the idealism they supposedly rejected. His clearest expression of this problem can be found in ‘Materialism,’ Visions of Excess. For an insightful reading of Bataille’s base materialism in the context of Gnosticism and Hegelianism, see Macherey, ‘Georges Bataille: materialism inverted,’ in The Object of Literature. 132 Bataille, ‘Base Materialism and Gnosticism,’ Visions of Excess, 51. 133 Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure,’ Visions of Excess, 129. Hollier: ‘Science, having glazed the world over with the ideal, eliminates any difference that is not logical, or reduces it to a specific difference […] Difference must be reduced, diminished, and string together by logic’. Against Architecture, 87. 134 Bataille: ‘matter, in fact, can only be defined as the ‘non-logical difference that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the law,’ ‘The Notion of Expenditure,’ Visions of Excess, 129. Hollier gives the following gloss: ‘Matter is inequality (it is not even equal to itself). Making it equal is to abstract an idea from its materiality. Expenditure, in fact, is an unequation. And materialism, as the thought of unthinkable expenditure, effects a rupture in relation to everything composing the system of equal exchange that holds sway over scientific discourse as communication (the transmission of information from speaker to auditor). Expenditure is not thinkable in terms of exchange or of communication: because it is not measurable (it is so huge that one can only be lost in it) and communicates nothing (it destroys structures of communication; it is no longer possible to recognise a message, a sender and a receiver in it’. Against Architecture, 92. And Bois puts any protest to rest: ‘One might believe that this transgression of the law leads back to the dialectic. Not at all: the law (the common 131

doubles the elevated or ideal possibility of matter with a heavy, base, matter (refocusing attention on roots or spittle) and in so doing ineradicably contaminates it. This notion of non-dialectical scission, or doubling, is hardly a surprising aspect among the movements of Bataille’s thought. The formless, as laughter, naturally incites doubling - so says Charles Baudelaire, making the observation, in ‘On the Essence of Laugher,’ that ‘Laughter is the expression of a double or contradictory sentiment; and it is for this reason that there is convulsion.’135 The effect of this scission is most palpable in ‘The Big Toe’ where Bataille points out that man owes his upright position to the role played by his big toe, although he would like to forget it.136 Despite the toe’s importance, ‘man, who has a light head, a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, regards it as spit, on the pretext that he has this foot in the mud’.137 The lower component of this division, because the elevated component arises out of it and is necessarily contaminated by it, always goes against the upward human tendency to idealise and pulls the elevated aspect back down to its level.138 This scission is non-dialectical because it destabilises the possibility of contradiction between the high and the low, in infecting the former with the latter, therefore rendering its ‘negative’ side unproductive.139 As in the article ‘Mouth’, it is the appearance of laughter which effectuates this lowering: ‘a spasmodic laugh reaches its highest pitch whenever its outburst results in man’s own measure) simply masks the fact that there are only crimes – or, as Bataille notes in “The Deviations of Nature,” that there are only deviations’. Formless: A User’s Guide, 71. 135 Charles Baudelaire, ‘On the Essence of Laughter,’ Les fleurs du mal et œuvres choisies. ed and trans. Wallace Fowlie (New York: Dover, 1963), 181-183. 136 Georges Bataille, ‘The Big Toe,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. John Harman. (London: Atlas Press, 1995). This article was originally published with a series of grotesque close-up photographs by André Boiffard of human big toes, lit so that they seem eerily disconnected from the foot. Other articles which demonstrate well the action of non-dialectical scission are ‘Rotten Sun,’ Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), and ‘Slaughterhouse,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. Annette Michelson (London: Atlas Press, 1995). 137 Bataille, ‘The Big Toe,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, 87. 138 ‘Although within the human body blood flows in equal quantities from high to low and from low to high, there is a preference in favour of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation.’ Ibid. 139 Hollier gives the following explanation of Bataille’s tactic in ‘The Big Toe’, emphasising the result produced by this scission in contrast to dialectical recuperation: ‘The whole is disarticulated by the article, provoking insubordination in the part, which then refuses to respect the hierarchical relations defining it by its integration into the organic system as a whole. It affirms the part in its fragmentary obscenity rather than effacing it by its integration into the finality of a beautiful and living totality’. Against Architecture, 78.

arrogance ending up sprawled in the mud, one can imagine that a toe, always more or less tainted and humiliating, is psychologically analogous to the sudden fall of a man, another way of talking of death’.140 The death of the object at the base of linguistic transposition is evoked by the big toe which is the basis of human elevation. It is a way of talking about death, a refusal of transposition and a model for a type of writing that releases the formless universe from the grip of significative discourse. Its perversion is equivalent to ‘silence’, ‘the most perverse of words, and the most poetic’ in the most senseless sense, because it is ‘a token of its own death’.141 Bataille reveals all that was repressed in the game of transpositions by means of a simple (sliding) pun, prefacing it with this caveat: ‘Heterogenous reality is that of a force or a shock’, in its revelation ‘one is seduced basely, without transpositions and to the point of screaming, eyes wide open: open at the prospect of a big toe’.142 All of sudden you see it, sticking out from behind the poetic veneer: behind the poetic foot there is another foot, a grotesque, and terrifyingly real, human foot. The Labyrinth In Bataille’s work, the project against itself will take on the formlessness of the labyrinth. One architecture deployed against another: ‘[one must] leave the realm of the project by means of a project.’143 Structurally, the labyrinth is the deformation of all that supports the conventional architecture of language and human anatomy alike. Inside its maze oppositions disintegrate. The traditional markers necessary for 140 Bataille, ‘The Big Toe,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, 92. Bataille, Inner Experience, 16. 142 Georges Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’ Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 143. ‘The Big Toe,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, 93. This tendency to idealise and prefer the elevated forms of things is, as has been shown, invariably founded upon the repression of some of its parts, yet if one delves deep enough, a desire for exactly these base and repressed parts is always evident, awaiting its liberation. The foot is unmistakably seductive. Bataille relates a tale of the Count of Villamediana, who started a conflagration so that he might have an excuse to carry off Queen Elizabeth and thereby touch her foot. In this story, the seductiveness of this base part of human anatomy is directly linked to the prohibitions surrounding it and the fact that, in touching the Queen’s foot (the Queen being ‘a priori an ideal being’) an ideal image is destroyed by virtue of what turns out to be ‘not very different from the stinking foot of an old tramp.’ This seduction of the untransposable returns to humanity something of its truth. Ibid., 92. 143 ‘sortir par un projet du domaine du projet’ Œuvres complètes, vol. V, 60. My translation. 141

the perception of up/down, left/right, forwards/backwards, distance/proximity, self/other etc., dichotomies have dissolved. The labyrinth is low space of the formless. Rather than an architecture of construction is it an architecture of loss. Masson’s Acéphale reminds us that inside the architectural prison of man there is a labyrinth, a repressed and base internal architecture. Bataille revisits this image in ‘The Big Toe’: ‘Man is fond of imagining himself to be like the god Neptune, majestically imposing silence upon his own waves: yet the clamorous waves of his viscera, in more or less constant inflation and upheaval, brusquely put an end to his dignity.’144 The labyrinth opens up the (non)space within which the category ‘man’ will forever be entangled in the category ‘animal’. In fusing with the beast that the labyrinth contains, man escapes his anatomy. ‘He is not man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster.’145 Contrary to ‘the project’ which ‘is the prison’ there is no escape from a labyrinth - for there is no desire to escape.146 The labyrinth has no identity, it is incomplete, and being incomplete, it has neither solution nor termination. Instead, it is an endless loss of self, an encounter with beasts, the maddening accumulation of beginnings. Here, we are within the ‘protected reserve’ of writer/monster described by Bataille in a letter to René Char.147 How then does one write this language against language? Against the architecture of significative language - which subordinates the material to the idea, to form - how does one write the language of the labyrinth? Nothing particular needs to be said. Outside of significative discourse the content of language is either unstable or absent. Rather, one must pay attention to operations: operations that deform; operations that make words slide; operations that assert the heterogenous matter of 144 Bataille, ‘The Big Toe,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, 90. Bataille, ‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’ Visions of Excess, 181. 146 Bataille, Inner Experience, 21. 147 ‘The modern writer can maintain a relation with productive society only by requiring from that society a protected reserve where, in place of the principle of utility, there reigns openly the denial of “signification”, the non-meaning of what is first given to the mind as a finished coherence, an appeal to sensibility without discernable content, to emotion so vivid that it leaves to explication only a contemptible share. […] Such perfect abnegation requires indifference, or rather, the maturity of a dead man. If literature is the silence of significations, it is in truth the prison whose every occupant wishes to escape.’ Bataille to René Char, On Bataille, ed. Allan Stoekl. Yale French Studies, 78 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 42. 145

significative language inside its limit. It is necessary to inaugurate a language of senseless sense.148 Writing towards the Impossible: Beckett and Stein Samuel Beckett, who once claimed that ‘language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused’, and whose work was often seen to express ‘a downright mockery of meaning and coherence’ seems a likely co-conspirator in Bataille’s plot against language.149 Like Bataille, he perceived that human experience existed in excess of its representation in language, that there is a ‘danger […] in the neatness of identifications’, and that writers needed to ‘recognise the importance of treating words as something more than polite symbols’.150 While Bataille wanted to remove the ‘mathematical frock coats’ of words, Beckett saw language as ‘a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it’.151 Despite the intensity of their disillusionment with language, both writers felt themselves compelled to write. The closing line of Beckett’s The Unnamable: ‘I can’t 148 Hollier extends Bataille’s explanation of this term (in ‘Pure Happiness’ n68 above): ‘To have a sense for Bataille, is to be constituted by that which negates one. Nothing is meaningful, nothing makes sense, until confronted by its negation […] A thing’s sense is the rupture of its identity, that which exceeds it, that by means of which it exceeds and is not itself but that which is beyond it, or its absence’. Against Architecture, 97. Bataille: ‘the nature of the mind means that the blind spot will make more sense than the mind itself,’ Inner Experience, 61. 149 Samuel Beckett, German Letter of 1937, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 171-172. Catharina Wulf, The Imperative of Narration: Beckett, Bernhard, Schopenhauer, Lacan, (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1997), 159. 150 Beckett once said to the critic Lawrence Harvey that ‘the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable’ because it ‘is so far from experience.’ Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic (Princeton University Press, 1970), 249. This is the opening line of Beckett’s essay on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Such neatness is soothing, ‘like the contemplation of a perfectly folded ham-sandwich,’ and the irony positively sliceable. Beckett goes on to lambaste Giambattista Vico’s ‘system’ of complete identification between philosophical abstraction and empirical illustration, a denunciation of structuralism complimentary to Battaile’s own. Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 19, 28. Although the comparison is often made, I believe Beckett’s views here to be more in line with Bataille’s than those of the early Wittgenstein, who sought a logical fit between language and experience. 151 The sartorial metaphor continues: ‘Grammar and Style. To me they have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentlemen.’ The kind who wear frock coats, no doubt. Beckett, German Letter of 1937, Disjecta, 170. Bataille, ‘Formless,’ Visions of Excess, 31.

go on, I’ll go on’, intones an eerie echo of Bataille’s Inner Experience: ‘These judgements should lead to silence yet I write. This is not paradoxical.’152 It is surprising, especially as both of them wrote in French, that more has not been said about the convergence of their thought regarding the practice of writing. Had Bataille lived long enough to read Beckett’s Worstward Ho, one suspects he would have seen something of his ‘project against projects’ in it.153 As it stands, Bataille, who died in 1962, missed out on this later, intensely minimalist portion of Beckett’s output, but he did live long enough to write a review of Molloy, published in 1951, in which he confesses to having worked for a short time on his own novel about a wandering tramp.154 Molloy, for Bataille, is formless.155 The very mention of Molloy sets language trembling as it strains to encompass that which it strictly should not be able to. Bataille expends more than a paragraph trying to say what is outside of discourse, the following representing only a small part of it: ‘What we have here is so assuredly the essence of being (but this expression alone, ‘essence of being’, could not determine the thing) that we need not hesitate: to this, we cannot give a name, it is indistinct, necessary, and elusive, quite simply, it is silence. This thing we name through sheer 152 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable in Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1959), 418. Bataille, Inner Experience, 39. 153 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1980). 154 ‘I remember having had a long talk with a tramp when I was very young. It occupied most of a night I spent waiting for a train in a small railway junction. He, of course, was not waiting for a train; he had simply sought the shelter of the waiting room, and towards morning he left me to prepare his coffee over his campfire. He was not exactly the figure I am speaking of, being quite a chatterer, more so than even me. He seemed satisfied with his lot and, as an old man, took pleasure in expressing his satisfaction to the boy of fifteen or twenty I then was. I listened in astonishment. Yet the memory I have of him, together with the incredible dread it still provokes, never fails to inspire in me the silence of a brute beast. (Meeting him so distressed me that a little later I began to write a novel in which a man who met him in the country killed him, perhaps primarily in the hope of acquiring the same animality as his victim.)’ Or in the hope of killing the dread that had been inflicted on Bataille by the tramp through the latter’s transposition into language? Georges Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence’, On Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 140 n1. 155 Molloy, like the strange female figure depicted in Edouard Manet’s Olympia (which forms the subject matter of Bataille’s article ‘Manet’) will come to fulfil a devolving role in representational language. See Georges Bataille, ‘Manet,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. IX. (Paris: Gallimard, 1978) in which he chides André Malraux for neglecting to ‘define what gives Olympia… its value as an operation’. 151. Translation given by Bois and Krauss in Formless: A User’s Guide, 15. Bataille’s italics. Manet’s Olympia and the storming of the Bastille are equivalent. See, Hollier, Against Architecture, 56.

impotence vagabond or wretch, which is actually unnamable (but then we find ourselves entangled in another word, unnamable), is no less mute than death […] This man – or rather, this being to whom, in employing such a word, we attribute being (a word he at once epitomises and, as it were, exhausts) – and hence language itself, suffers from an irremediable deficiency’.156 Nonetheless, according to his review, saying what cannot be said is just what Beckett is doing. And how? Because he is looking into the blind spot. What Beckett shows us in Molloy is ‘the most outrageous of all truths… reality in a pure state’, which is to say, reality at its most base and most fluid.157 A destitute and miserable reality that we are afraid of confronting because it threatens to engulf us. Although Bataille seems needlessly incredulous that Beckett might have been deliberately trying to achieve such effects, the notion that representation is a restriction placed on experience is hardly absent from the latter’s various writings on literature and aesthetics. In his dialogue with the painter Tal Coat, Beckett laments art’s confinement to the ‘field of the possible’, opining that any kind of transposition is equivalent to betrayal, even if ‘logically’ there is no other plane in which art can function. Reality in its pure state is formless: ‘there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express.’158 Bataille’s esteem for Molloy is connected to the character’s insight into this bankruptcy of significative language and the illusion it perpetrates. In Molloy’s world, one has the sense that namelessness is a natural state travestied by language’s imposition: ‘even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate… and so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names 156 Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence’ in On Beckett, 132. For the most part I have used the translation in the above volume, however at times when its phrasing seems to dampen what I perceive to be important aspects of Bataille’s thought, I have substituted it with quotes from the following: Georges Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence’ in Samuel Beckett, ed. Jennifer Birket and Kate Ince (London: Longman, 2000), 86-87 NB. In French (and Latin) ‘Mol’ means ‘soft,’ ‘malleable’, or ‘weakly delineated’ in regard to lines. 157 ‘Molloy shows us not merely reality, but reality in a pure state: reality at its most indigent and inevitable, the fundamental reality, which is always in front of us but which fear always separates us from, which we refuse to see and which we always strive to avoid being engulfed by’. Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence,’ On Beckett, 131. 158 Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues, Disjecta. ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 139.

but thingless names.’159 Beckett deliberately plays with the unbearableness of a system of signification that can only ever prove imperfect, a sentiment he expressed early on whilst working as an assistant for James Joyce during the writing of Finnegans Wake. In an essay on this subject, he compares the first phase of linguistic development (the Hieroglyphic phase) in Giambattista Vico’s tripartite evolution of human society to Joyce’s writing. Both are laudable because the aperture between a thing and its name is of the smallest possible degree, if it is there at all. Vico’s Hieroglyphic phase is characterised by ‘direct expression’ in which ‘form and content are inseparable,’ thus, ‘if a man wanted to say ‘“sea”, he pointed to the sea’.160 Likewise, in Joyce, ‘form is content, content is form […] His writing is not about something; it is that something itself’.161 The abstract sophistication of the English language been violated: here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Joyce evades the problem of this gap in significative language by making a thing of language itself. Beckett also discerns a specific type of movement in this writing; it possesses ‘a furious restlessness’ that is positively ‘purgatorial’. The essay is concluded with a comparison of Joyce’s purgatory to Dante’s in order to emphasise the labyrinthine thwarting of progression peculiar to the former.162 Purgatorial movement ‘is nondirectional – or multidirectional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back’.163 Against the petrification imposed on things by words, both Bataille and Beckett prescribe restlessness, the loss of sense that is also loss of direction. Speaking of Molloy’s amorphousness, Bataille writes: ‘Only an incontinent flux of language could accomplish the feat of expressing such an absence (an incontinence and a flux 159 Samuel Beckett, Molloy in Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. (London: Calder, 1959), 31. 160 Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,’ Disjecta, 25. 161 ‘Mr Joyce has desophisticated language. And it is worth while remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death. Take the word ‘doubt’: it gives us hardly any sensuous suggestion of hesitancy, of the necessity for choice, of static irresolution […] Mr Joyce recognises how inadequate ‘doubt’ is to express a state of extreme uncertainty, and replaces it by ‘in twosome twiminds.’ Ibid., 27, 28. 162 ‘In the one, absolute progression and a guaranteed consummation: in the other, flux – progression or retrogression, and an apparent consummation. In the one movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents a net advance: in the other movement is nondirectional – or multidirectional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back […] In what sense, then, is Mr Joyce’s work purgatorial? In the absolute absence of the Absolute. Hell is the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness. Paradise the static lifelessness of unrelieved immaculation. Purgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by the conjunction of these two elements.’ Ibid., 33 163 Ibid.

that are themselves equivalent to negation and also equivalent to the absolute absence of… “discourse”),’ and he bestows the following praise on Beckett: ‘it would seem as if the surrender of the writer, no longer content to reduce writing to the mere business of expressing his intentions, ready to respond to its intrinsic possibilities, albeit confusedly, in the deep currents that flash across the wavelike agitation of words, under the weight of a destiny to which he cannot help but succumb, leads of its own accord to the formless configuration of absence’. 164 These waves in words conjure a resurgence of the waves in the viscera that upset human dignity in ‘The Big Toe’. Both are a perversion of the labyrinth which disturbs the repressive, monumental architecture of the signified world. Befittingly, Bataille reintroduces his architectural metaphor to describe Molloy: This is not the manifesto of a movement, but rather the expression, among other things, of someone determined to expose a façade, signing the death warrant of a literature made of language, preferring a speech dishevelled by the wind and pitted with holes.165 Although beginning from the same point of departure as Joyce, Beckett would go on to do something quite different.166 Rather than an interpenetration of form and content, he would write towards the destruction of form and content all together, towards a wind-scuffed and hole-riddled ruin. In his hands, ‘the word is no longer the signifying factor, but rather the crippled form that death, in its indirect way, must inevitably take’.167 If ever a text was inscribed with the mark of its own impossibility, it is the indistinct, unedifying journey towards the best worst that is Wostward Ho. In this short but dense text Beckett engineers the relation of discourse to ‘absolute nondiscourse’ that Derrida identifies as a ‘sovereign writing’ in ‘A Hegelianism without 164 Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence,’ On Beckett, 132-133. Beckett makes a similar remark about Joyce ‘This elemental vitality and corruption of expression imparts a furious restlessness to form.’ Beckett, ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce,’ Disjecta, 29. 165 And continues it: ‘Language calcifies that calculated world which our culture, our activities, our very edifices make manifest in the domain to which we attach significance, but it does so at the cost of reducing our culture, activities, and habitations, to one and the same level’. Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence,’ On Beckett, 133. 166 As with Joyce, the problem of transposition will still play a central role. Beckett gives a hint of where this might take him in The German Letter of 1937: ‘On the way to this literature of the unword, which is so desirable to me, some form of Nominalist irony might be a necessary stage’. Disjecta, 173. 167 Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence,’ On Beckett, 133.

Reserve’.168 Against the servile desire for meaning, Beckett proposes a sovereign desire for ‘nohow on’. Worstward Ho presents a meditation on the act of writing itself, or perhaps more accurately, of writing un-writing itself. A voice with an unknown origin summons four figures into literary space: a kneeling figure in a black great coat; an old man and a child, seen only from behind (they have no fronts) holding hands, in coats and boots, plodding without receding; a head sunk on crippled hands, with clenched staring eyes, wearing a hatless black brim. In the conjuring up of these images, the imposition of form on a formless world perpetrated by significative language is exposed for what it is, a repression of silence and absence: ‘Say a body. Where none. […] A place. Where none. For the body to be in. […] Say ground. No ground but say ground’.169 Via a tactic of methodical subtraction (that counters the movement of Hegelian sublation), the voice sets about worsening these images, including that which, for a time at least, appears to represent the voice itself. This reductive obsession permeates all aspects of literary production. Plot is reduced to the incremental adjustment, and summoning and dismissal, of the four images, character to the disembodied voice, scenery or any idea of a literary world to an ‘almost void’ lit by ‘the dim’, and vocabulary to a tightly controlled lexicon which, by tricks of incessant permutation, feigns to be much larger than it is.170 Sentences are pared down to the smallest possible configurations, and the text begins with the forewarning of the monosyllabic statement ‘On’.171 This ‘on’ sets forth the inner movement of the entire piece, manifesting in a single word the restless impulsion and resistance to the petrification of signification that will characterise it. Worstward Ho is above all a horizontal text and with this exclamation of its horizontality, it opposes itself from the outset to the vertical axis of man, architecture and representation.172 Two processes of dismemberment run parallel throughout the text, dismemberment of the body (as parts of the figures are steadily subtracted) and dismemberment of the architecture of significative language (as words are broken up into smaller and smaller units, detaching and reattaching themselves to other words like errant organs or prosthetic limbs). Together they effectuate a redoubled transgression of form, thus extending the 168 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 270. Beckett, Worstward Ho, Nohow On, 89-90. 170 Ibid., 112, 113. 171 Ibid., 89. 172 See Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Gestalt,’ Formless: A User’s Guide. 169

assault on verticality and representation, and redrawing the architecture/body/language metaphor so intrinsic to Bataille’s thinking.173 To begin with, introducing the first body, the voice hesitates before reluctantly assigning it to the vertical axis. ‘It stands. What? Yes. It stands. Had to up in the end and stand […] Somehow up. Somehow stand […] No choice but stand. Somehow up and stand. Somehow stand […] Once lying. Now standing. That a body? Yes. Say that a body. Somehow standing’.174 Nevertheless, the pull of the formless proves stronger and the figure reverts to kneeling: ‘Kneeling. Better kneeling. Better worse kneeling. Say now kneeling. From now kneeling.’175 But all this is just a prelude to the fuller resistance to signification brought on with the bodies’ dismemberment. From their fullest forms, as described above, the four figures first lose their various accoutrements, such as the ‘hat’, boot-heels, boots, the bottoms of their coats and the stick, before the voice begins to subtract legs, hands, arms, eyelids, faces, and heads until ‘all gone save trunks from now. Nothing from pelves down. From napes up. Topless baseless hindtrunks.’176 Even the staring skull has lost its anterior half, reduced to a shard of bone, the ‘foreskull’ between the temples, which contains ‘One dim black hole’.177 173 Attacking the body is equivalent to attacking the logic of the vertical axis by which it is defined in the category of ‘man’. The vertical axis, which produces the conditions for the development of articulate language, is likewise the axis of representation and human space is divided so that it may be understandable from an upright, vertical, rather than horizontal, viewpoint. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, influenced by Gestalt psychology, notes the horror of the human face when it is shifted from its upright vertical orientation: ‘If someone is lying on a bed, and I look at him from the head of the bed, the face is for a moment normal. It is true that the features are in a way disarranged, and I have some difficulty in realising that the smile is a smile, but I feel that I could, if I wanted, walk around the bed, and I seem to see through the eyes of a spectator standing at the foot of the bed. If the spectacle is protracted, it suddenly changes its appearance: the face takes on an utterly unnatural aspect, its expressions become terrifying, and the eyelashes and eyebrows assume an air of materiality such as I have never seen in them. For the first time I really see the inverted face as if this were its “natural” position: in front of me I have a pointed, hairless head with a red, teeth-filled orifice in the forehead and, where the mouth ought to be, two moving orbs edged with glistening hairs and underlined with stiff brushes’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 252. 174 Beckett, Worstward Ho, Nohow On, 90-93. 175 Ibid., 95. 176 Ibid., 113 – 114. Grotesquely reminiscent of the torture of a Hundred Pieces. See n120 above. 177 ‘Now say the fore alone. No dome. Temple to temple alone.’ Beckett, Worstward Ho, Nohow On, 107, 114.

This transgression of bodily form is matched by the transgression of the architecture of language. Negating prefixes and suffixes such as ‘un-’, ‘mis-’, and ‘less’ play a prominent role in generating linguistic play as they attach and alter the meanings of one word after another, prefiguring, in this oscillation between positive and negative signifiers, the movement between the presence and absence of language ultimately charted by the text.178 In addition to this trafficking of organs, the already limited vocabulary only diminishes as the text progresses (one wants to say ‘gresses’ for the movement it describes is more the purgatorial movement of Joyce’s text than of any forward advancement) and its lessening is signalled by increased repetitions of monosyllabic words.179 The growing frequency of words like ‘ooze’ and ‘secrete’ confirm suspicions of lexical deliquescence. Meanwhile, short sentences give the impression of a vivisection, cuts made into the deathless representational homogeneity of language’s incarnation of experience. The aporia of pejorative superlatives such as ‘better worse’ bore holes in the veil of signification and the surprise that accompanies the irruption of the word which signifies signification (‘Meaning–meaning!–meaning the kneeling one’) demonstrates that it already has become out of place in this transgressive literary space.180 By way of this deformation of the vertical axis of the conventional architecture of representation and the body, the text reinscribes itself into the perverse architectural space of the labyrinth where ‘Back is on. Somehow on.’181 On the trajectory towards the worst word, the auto-mutilation of language and imagery momentarily eclipses another, more unnerving mutilation, the severance of the speaking subject. The voice enquires whose words it is speaking: ‘Whose words? Ask in vain. Or not in vain if say no knowing. No saying. No words for him whose words. Him? One. No words for one whose words. One? It. No words for it whose words. Better worse so’, and later ‘Worsening words whose unknown. Whence unknown. At 178 For example: ‘Unchanged? Sudden back unchaged? Yes. Say yes. Each time unchanged. Somehow unchanged. Till no. Till say no. Sudden back changed. Somehow changed. Each time somehow changed’; ‘Whence never once in. Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there’; ‘Said is missaid. Whenever said said said missaid. From now said alone. No more from now now said and now missaid. From now said alone. Said for missaid. For be missaid’. Ibid., 94, 92, 109. 179 ‘But but’; ‘said said said’; ‘now now’; ‘far far far.’ Ibid., 108 -110. 180 Ibid., 98. 181 Ibid., 109.

all costs unknown.’182 These words seem to issue from nowhere. They are mindless, things in-and-of-themselves and without origin. The voice too becomes a thing and not a namer of things. In the formless space of the labyrinth the subject/object divide is lost and no external consciousness steps in to fulfil the vacant role of signifying consciousness.183 The only possibility left open by the text is that the remaining foreskull, with its one dim black hole, is authoring these words. But this is inconclusive. However one may take it, an acephalic drive is at play, and the will to ‘unknow’ is voiced several times, not least in the punning perversion of ‘nohow’.184 ‘The practice of joy before death’, that sovereign burst of laughter at a ludicrous system, has its counterpart here too: No mind and words? Even such words. So enough still. Just enough still to joy. Joy! Just enough still to joy that only they. Only! Enough still not to know. Not to know what they say. Not to know what it is the words it says say. Says? Secretes. Say better worse secretes. What it is the words it secretes say. What the so-said void. The so-said dim. The so-said shades. The so-said seat and germ of all. Enough to know no knowing. No knowing what it is the words it secretes say. No saying. No saying what it all is they somehow say.185 These are the only exclamation marks in Worstward Ho and their absence elsewhere, including the text’s title and the bulk the Beckett’s prose, only serves to make this strange eruption of joy seem even more incongruous.186 But with the loss of a head, 182 Ibid., 98, 104. In the essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry,’ Beckett makes the connection explicit when he speaks of ‘the new thing that has happened, of the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object [or] the breakdown of the subject. It comes to the same thing – rupture of the lines of communication.’ Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry,’ Disjecta, ed. Ruby Cohn (London: Calder, 1983), 70. 184 ‘Know minimum. Know nothing no’; ‘Unknow better now. Know only no out of. No knowing how know only no out of’; ‘Know no more. See no more. Say no more,’ to say nothing of the desire to ‘fail the head said seat of all. Germ of all’. Beckett, Worstward Ho, Nohow On, 91, 92, 97. 185 This was one of the ways Bataille named the effusion that co-occurs with a sovereign will to self loss, perhaps inspired by the grin on the face of Fu Chou Li. See ‘Georges Bataille, ‘The Practice of Joy before Death’, Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) – originally published in Acéphale, and Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern (North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 46. Beckett, Worstward Ho, Nohow On, 105. 186 Many of his commentators (often when citing the Victorian novel Westward Ho! as a possible source for the title’s parody), have paused to remark upon the unexclaiming ‘Ho’ of Beckett’s title, for example: Enoch Bracter, ‘Voyelles, Cromlechs and the Special 183

laughter arises. Beckett wrote to Axel Kaun: ‘At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All.’187 Nothing could be more straightforward. ‘On’ also participates in a persistent pattern of aural and visual rhymes around which the vital elements of the text coalesce: know/void/ooze/joy/nohow/on. This o is rather like a hole (through which whistles the wind) in the ‘terrible materiality of the word surface’ and by virtue of this horizontal ‘on’ which pulls other linguistic elements out of the axis of signification, Beckett bored as many holes in language as he wrote ‘on’s.188 Writing ‘on’, of course, is the foil to writing on. Moreover, the inversion of the negating exclamation ‘no’ to constitute the deforming word ‘on’ makes a linguistic game of the principle behind nonpositive affirmation. Language can only fail to not represent. But its revolt against representation, as an act of automutilation, dismembers the architecture of representation and, in transgressing its form, performs the operation of the formless on both signification and knowledge. If the remark that meaning is unimportant and words are merely ‘what pharmacists call excipient’ made by Beckett to actress Billie Whitelaw (who had enquired about the meaning of the words she was to speak in Footfalls) is to be given any weight, it would be wise now to turn away from the words of Worstward Ho and focus instead on what it is they are ushering in.189 In the midst of all this worsening there are some things which must remain. The skull, the dim, the void and words ‘cannot go if not for good’.190 Between them they make up the ‘mere-most minimum’ (W)rites of Worstward Ho’ and Brian Finney, ‘Still to Worstward Ho: Beckett’s Prose Fiction Since The Lost Ones,’ in Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, eds. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (London: Macmillan, 1987) 167, 77. 187 Beckett, German Letter of 1937, Disjecta, 172. 188 He had planned this in advance: ‘As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through […] Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? An answer is requested’. Ibid. 189 Quoted by Martin Esslin, ‘Towards the Zero of Language,’ Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, eds. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur (London: Macmillan, 1987), 35. 190 Beckett, Worstward Ho, Nohow On, 103.

conditions for writing: the skull (whether or not it contains a mind is, of course, inherent to the textual play) and the words together generate significative language, and the dim provides the lighting that will give representation its substance, delineating objects so that they are separated from the formless void.191 The void is the most interesting of all. First, it is not ‘said’ but ‘missaid’ (‘Next the so-said void. The so-missaid. That narrow field. Rife with shades. Well so-missaid. Shade-ridden void. How better worse so-missay?’), second, it is ‘Of all so far missaid the worse missaid.’ and furthermore, its missaying is ‘unworsenable’.192 But what exactly does it mean for something to be missaid? As in Bataille’s example of silence, the void, as absence, cannot be represented by significative language which unalterably functions by bestowing presence. ‘Void’ can never be said, so it must be missaid. In its missaying, the void is still given presence by language, but it is a presence complicated by an absence. Without language, nothingness is nothing. With language, it can never be said. Missaying is thus the revelation of a representational paradox: language is required so that one may speak of its absence. The void comes into being with language, as language’s limit: ‘Never since first said never unsaid never worse said never not gnawing to be gone’.193 Missaying things places them in a liminal space between absence and presence that brings the two sides into play. The paradox cannot be dissolved by the operation formless, but it can be weakened through a continuous transgression of the divide that maintains it. This intention to missay is stated in Worstward Ho’s third line: ‘Say for to be said. Missaid. From now say for to be missaid’ and by the text’s end, the play of absence and presence has led to an inversion of terms, ‘Said is missaid. Whenever said said said missaid. From now said alone. No more from now now said and now missaid. From now said alone. Said for missaid. For be missaid’, effectuating a folding of the impossible into the possible which coincides with the attainment of ‘Nohow on’.194 Thus, the text’s final sentence ‘Said nohow on’ equally reads ‘Missaid nohow on’. Saying nothing is ineffective. Language must be mutilated, that is to say, missaid. This accounts for the aesthetic of the ‘best worst’ which gives the ‘on’ of Worstward Ho its pulsion. 191 Ibid., 91. Ibid., 101, 108, 113. 193 Ibid., 113. 194 Ibid., 89, 109. 192

For maximum effect, the void must be held at the level of ‘almost’, hovering between absence and presence, maintaining a state of ‘all but nothing’: ‘Void most when almost. Worse when almost. […] Better worse may no less than less be more. Better worse what? The say? The said. Same thing. Same nothing. Same all but nothing.’195 Almost, being neither ‘unlessable’ nor ‘unmoreable’ is the physico-spatial equivalent of the aesthetic ‘best worst'. It is also the product of missaying, and necessary to the upkeep of the liminal ‘narrow field’ along which the ‘on’ charts its course. Hence the ‘Unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void.’196 In sum, the ‘back is on’ movement of the ‘best worst’ sustains the ‘almost void’ with a language made restless by a constant oscillation between what can and cannot be said, all the time never saying nothing. A phenomenon perhaps best demonstrated by the following passage: Worse less. By no stretch more. Worse for want of better less. Less best. No. Naught best. Best worse. No. Not best worse. Naught not best worse. Less best worse. No. Least. Least best worse. Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say that best worse. With leastening words say the lest best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse.197 The movement of the entire text is reinscribed in its final two words. ‘Nohow on’ is not the name of a thing, but the name of a direction, which at the same time is directionless. ‘Nohow on’, like silence, is the inscription of an absence into presence, and like silence, it slides between these two poles. Crossing and recrossing language’s limit, restricting the field of its expression to this liminal zone that always confuses language’s presence with its absence. Furthermore, it is intensely comic, containing a pun with ‘know how on’. Here Beckett retells the Hegelian joke: absence is embedded in the knowledge that has risen from, and repressed, it. It is possible to rediscover the limen at one further level of magnification. Look closely at these final words. Together they contain three holes, or one hole three times. ‘Three pins. One pinhole.’198 The hole once for each syllable, one consonant apiece, each of which can only be sounded when formed around the hollow of the 195 Ibid., 113, 110. Ibid., 113. 197 Ibid., 106. 198 Ibid., 116. 196

vowel ‘o’. Otherwise they are just three pins – construction paraphernalia without a structure. In English, vowels without a structure of consonants to support them are only sounds, not words. Worse, they are animalistic sounds – cries, shrieks, or laughter – sounds that deform the mouth that utters them. Yet, ‘Nohow on’ cannot be uttered without its holes. The uncomfortable point that structure relies on what it excludes for its very being is shrewdly condensed into the smallest of linguistic elements. Meanwhile, three bursts of laughter in a row reveal an ellipsis. Gertrude Stein might call this ‘a whole steadiness.’199 Interpreting Beckett always seems somewhat of a criminal act. He is known to have expressed his abhorrence to being interpreted on many occasions, not least in the notorious letter to Axel Kaun when, riffing on the symbolist manifesto that is Baudelaire’s Correspondences, he complained that ‘in the forest of symbols… the little birds of interpretation… are never silent.’200 Just as Bataille adopted a way of writing that would produce incoherence, Beckett’s work is built to resist that same hermeneutic recuperation that turns everything to grey.201 This resistance to interpretation is testament to these texts’ intrinsic horizontality. For Gertrude Stein, whose unconventional work was initially, and perhaps still is, ‘extensively unread’ as a result of its hermeneutic resistance, there is no good in explanations either.202 Stein’s composition is explanation enough: ‘Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same.’203 Everything is not the same! The universe is full of deviations that are routinely suppressed in traditional modes of representation. Exegesis is just one more method of installing homogeneity. Repeatedly asked by members of the literary press to explain her work, Stein would respond with varying 199 Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Gordon Press, 1972), 26. Beckett, German Letter of 1937, Disjecta, 172. 201 See Enoch Brater, ‘Voyelles, Cromlechs and the Special (W)rites of Worstward Ho,’ Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama, for a discussion of the inaccessibility of Beckett’s work. 202 Sinclair Lewis’ unsympathetic criticism of Stein, in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973), 32. 203 Gertrude Stein, ‘Composition as Explanation,’ Selected Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1962), 520. Quoted in Rosmarie Waldrop, ‘Form and Discontent.’ Diacritics, Vol. 26, No. 3/4 (Autumn – Winter, 1996): 54. In this article Waldrop links a poetic emphasis on the horizontal axis of composition to ‘Steinian’ poetics. 200

degrees of comic irreverence.204 Explanation is irrelevant on two counts. One, because communication is impossible: minds can never meet, only touch; and two, the meaning of the greater part of Stein’s work lies in the materiality of language itself, with the connotative and denotative content of words playing a either a minimal role, or no role all, and it therefore cannot be discovered through the rigours of semantic interrogation.205 Stein’s writing is a writing of senseless sense, but in different manner to that of Beckett’s. The sense of her language is rendered senseless not in an incessant traversal of the limits of its absence but, rather, by its excessive presence. This destabilising excess manifests itself both semantically, in the paratactic proliferation of signifiers that sprout horizontally from one word to another following unspoken rules of assonant, alliterative, punning or visual rhyme; and materially, in the aforementioned use of words for their aural and rhythmic properties. The combined effect comes rather close to that ‘potlatch of signs’ described by Derrida as the movement of a sovereign writing.206 Stein’s poetry is unapologetically about ‘Melting and not minding’.207 In her hands, language becomes ‘a burst of mixed music’ – a staunch refusal to play the game of transpositions, in which ‘a sign,’ 204 A sample of some of these responses can be found in How Writing is Written. Here is Stein’s reply to a questionnaire sent to her by Jane Heap of Little Review: ‘I would much rather have written about Jane because I do appreciate Jane but since this is what you want here are my answers. 1. But I am. 2. Because I am I. 3. More of the same. 4. Anything. 5. Birthday. 6. 1. Weakness. 2. Nothing. 3. Everything. 4. Almost anything. 7. 1. What I like. 2. Hardly anything. 8. I like to look at it. 9. Not very likely or often. 10. I am.’ Gertrude Stein, How Writing is Written, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), 52. 205 ‘Nothing can be the same thing to the other person. Nobody can enter into anybody else’s mind; so why try? One can only enter into it in a superficial way. You have slight contacts with other people’s minds, but you cannot enter into them’. Stein, A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 34. 206 ‘It multiplies words, precipitates them one against the other, engulfs them too, in an endless and baseless substitution whose only rule is the sovereign affirmation of the play outside meaning. Not a reserve or a withdrawal, not the infinite murmur of a blank speech erasing the traces of classical discourse but a kind of potlatch of signs that burns consumes and wastes words in the gay affirmation of death: a sacrifice and a challenge.’ Derrida, ‘A Hegelianism Without Reserve,’ 274. 207 Stein, Tender Buttons, 40.

because it is often only a sound, ‘is the specimen spoken’, in which there is ‘no middle space in cutting.’208 The copula: a ‘charming and very charming is that clean and cleansing’ is made dirty in a delirious onanistic ‘something is something’ frenzy which makes a mockery of the logical difference it once bestowed on an unordered universe.209 For example: Anyone being one is one. Anything put down is something. Anything being down is something and being that things it is something and being something it is a thing and being a thing it is not anything and not being anything it is everything and being that thing it is a thing and being that thing it is that thing. Being that thing it is that thing and being that thing it is coming to be a thing having been that thing and coming to be a thing having been that thing it is a thing being a thing it is a thing being that thing.210 This effusion from A Long Gay Book describes its own inevitable conclusion: words become things; the universe de-forms. Such excessive acts of signification overload the recuperative machinery of sense so that, eventually, the mechanism undermines itself of its own accord. Stein exploits her discovery that ‘there is no such thing as putting [words] together without sense’ to stir up the sediment of significative language by inserting into it the suppressed infinity of its own possibility, and in doing so, effectively opposes a strategy of entropic fusion to the regulated discourse of accumulative petrification.211 Again, we encounter the labyrinthine disorientation that distorts form. Form, of course, relies on identity, which is to say, on the Hegelian principle of recognition. Entropic forces, by sucking out the intervals between points in space, eradicate the oppositions necessary to sustain conventional significative discourse and in deforming language thus, undermine the knowability of the world, hence a poetry of ‘not minding’.212 208 Ibid., 41, 40. Ibid., 9. 210 Gertrude Stein, A Long Gay Book, quoted in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 143. 211 Gertrude Stein, quoted in The Yale Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) xxii. For yet another take on the petrification of language see Georges Bataille, ‘Aesthete’ (from the Critical Dictionary), in which he writes about the ageing process of clichés. Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1995). 212 The opposite motion is Steinian as well (see below) and the distortion created by the elimination of space between intervals is just as effectively produced by the multiplication of the latter so that there are only intervals and no space. Stein gives us 209

On the subject of entropy, an instructive exercise would be to have Stein’s poetry assessed according to the tenets of information theory in order to ascertain its ratio of informational content to what is called ‘noise’. One suspects that the result would show a reading close to one hundred percent ‘noise’ for the more experimental of her works.213 This waste product of information is, in a Bataillean reckoning, a heterogenous intruder - the base matter of communication. Noise is a kind of lexical dust: both noise and dust carry out the operation formless in their relevant spheres. Like dust, noise, due to its heterogenous nature, is conventionally excluded from the signified realm. Bataille gives the following illustration of the literary exclusion of dust in the Critical Dictionary entry of the same name: ‘The storytellers have not realised that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spider webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses’.214 Meanwhile, the neurotic commitment to hygiene continues: when maids ‘arm themselves each morning with a large featherduster or even a vacuum cleaner, they are perhaps not completely unaware that they are contributing every bit as much as the most positivist of scientists to dispelling the injurious phantoms that cleanliness and logic abhor’.215 Stein’s writing is not hygienic in the least. It is conscientiously dirty. It is dirty because it places value in the materiality of language and joyfully asserts this materiality at the cost of more esteemed linguistic properties. (To ‘conceive’ is to some idea of this in Useful Knowledge: ‘Intervals stated stated intervals, readily stated stated intervals and very readily, stated intervals as some come at stated intervals. Plant and planted. In the north planted and plant it in the south plant it and planted. In the north planted and plant it in the south plant it and planted. In the north in the south in the north planted in the north planted in the south plant it in the south planted in the north plant it, plant it planted in the north planted in the south plant it in the north plant it in the north plant it. In the south planted, in the south planted, in the south planted in the south planted, in the south plant it in the north planted. Planted in the north’.Gertrude Stein, Useful Knowledge, (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), 33. 213 To continue the hypothetical measurement, a high ‘noise’ ratio would render the use value of Stein’s poetry so low that, within the framework of information theory, it would be virtually useless. Idle, insubordinate (although, all the time creating work for Bataille’s maids), it would eschew the condition of ultimate servility that is inherent to Hegelian discourse, and approach a state of sovereignty. Stein made the comic gesture of naming one of her more obscure volumes Useful Knowledge, although Donald Sutherland insists that ‘the word Useful is not altogether a joke.’ A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 144. 214 Georges Bataille, ‘Dust’ in Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. John Harman (London: Atlas Press, 1995) 42. 215 Ibid., 43.

recuperate sexual expenditure, just as the mechanism of transposition involved in thought recuperates everything to knowledge. Words that are only sounds are therefore analogous to un(re)productive ejaculation: they are filthy).216 It is dirty because, in shirking any sense of communicative responsibility, it prefers to generate dust and noise over meaning. And it is dirty because it often has a hidden erotic agenda, which it generates precisely in rubbing meaning up the wrong way, as in, in Tender Buttons: ‘A shallow hole rose on red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less. It shows shine.’ The noise of ‘ale less’, of course, making ‘Alice’.217 Mena Mitrano, tracing the appearances of the word ‘dirt’ throughout Tender Buttons, and focusing particularly on the passage ‘Dirt and not copper makes a color darker. It makes the shape so heavy and makes no melody harder,’ suggests that dirt ‘becomes a poetic name for Stein’s language’ within the poem.218 The implication in these lines that dirt, as a poetic force, makes things ‘darker’ and ‘heavier’, resonates with the contaminating and lowering action of base materialism. Stein reinforces this alignment of poetry with base matter and the formless in another section of Tender Buttons, where she poses an image of language as spit and then literally has language break down into a percussive excreation in which the word ‘noise’ is cleverly embedded: ‘real is, real is only, only excreate, only excreate a no since. A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since’.219 In making noise out of language, Stein creates a scission within language and proceeds to deploy the base side of the division towards the lowering of the elevated side. Signification is subordinated to sound and the gap that separates 216 All sounds are capable of filth – contrary to the impression given by the cautious scientific vocabulary of the seventeenth century (which elicits the following comment from Hollier) – ‘Particularly those sounds in a sentence that would elude the connections that the secondary process (that is, logical thought) would like to use for forcing them into a simple representative position, into being there only as a relay of meaning, to evoke something else. From the moment that a sound eludes theoretical transposition (escapes conceptual metaphor) the effect is filthy. The filth and waste are in fact everything not assimilated by the sense of the sentence.’ Against Architecture, 149. 217 Stein, Tender Buttons, 26. 218 Ibid., 13., Mena Mitrano ‘Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons”,’ Modern Language Studies, Vol. 28, No. (Spring, 1998): 96. 219 Stein, Tender Buttons, 58.

them is dissolved: ‘A sound, a whole sound is not separation, a whole sound is an order’.220 The singular type of realism Stein evolves throughout her writing responds to this formula, ‘real is, real is only, only excreate.’ The inexhaustible empirical urge she had inherited from William James during her years at Radcliffe, guided her attempts to eliminate, as far as possible, the gap between words and things.221 Her technique of ‘direct description’, which recalls, by way of more than just a name, the ‘direct expression’ of Vico advocated by Beckett in his essay on Joyce, required a type of description that, in approaching its subject from numerous perspectives, at successive points in passing time, kept step with temporality and revealed the flux of existence as it was - unsorted, multifaceted, and flattened against the page so that when it was read it would live again in time.222 Instead of writing about things, Stein strove to have her 220 Ibid., 36. On her early studies involving automatic writing and the evolution of her theory of Types see Michael J. Hoffman, ‘Gertrude Stein in the Psychology Laboratory,’ American Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1965): 127-132. 222 Stein’s work is frequently considered to be a literary counterpart to the cubism of her close friend Pablo Picasso (the European avant-garde was a standard reference point for critics until the nineteen-eighties when commentators such as Jayne L. Walker began to propose a reversal of the lens, looking outward from Stein’s texts rather than attempting to decipher them by tracing the paths of possible influences inwards) and many good arguments have been made for in support of this comparison. I will not comment here on whether or not this is a favourable way to examine Stein’s texts, however the comparison has been made, and I do see it fit therefore to mention the particular exception Bataille always made for works by Picasso in the midst of his articles condemning art. Picasso alone escapes the disapproval directed to other makers of ‘modern’ art in ‘The Modern Spirit and the Game of Transpositions,’ where Bataille declares: ‘We enter the art gallery as though into a pharmacy, looking for remedies nicely packaged for admissible illnesses’ (‘On entre chez le marchand de tableaux comme chez un pharmacien, en quête de remèdes bien présentés pour des maladies avouables’). Although his name only remains in the manuscript version of the article, the ignominy of Picasso’s distortions evidently pleased Bataille, for he made him part of the following assault against the hygiene of art collectors: ‘I defy any collector whatever to love a canvas [a Picasso] as much as a fetishist loves a shoe’ (‘je défie n’importe quel amateur de peinture d’aimer une toile [un Picasso] autant qu’un fétichiste aime une chaussure’). The point is to suggest a non-transposed, non-neurotic, perverse relationship to art. In ‘Rotten Sun’ he writes ‘academic panting more or less corresponded to an elevation – without excess – of the spirit. In contemporary painting, however, the search for that which most ruptures the highest elevation, and for a blinding brilliance, has a share in the elaboration or decomposition of forms, though strictly speaking this is only noticeable in the paintings of Picasso’. ‘L’esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions,’ Œuvres complètes, vol. 1., 273, 655 n3. ‘Rotten Sun,’ Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 58. 221

writing embody them. Hal Levy, taking notes on a lecture she delivered in 1935, noted down: ‘She has disciplined her mind to the point where she can concentrate on a subject until it, the subject itself, has taken form. Then, disassociating that mental unit from connotative words and meanings, she writes. She doesn’t write what her subject matter looks like. She doesn’t write how it feels. She doesn’t write about it, or at it, or around it. She writes it’.223 The overall effect of Stein’s realism is a perpetual present in which everything moves but time. Her writing is non-hierarchical and antihistorical.224 Donald Sutherland sees it as completely out of place in an era caught in the thrall of Hegelian or Marxist teleological schemas.225 The reason that Stein’s direct description is so formally distinct from the modes of conventional mimesis subsumed under the traditional appellation ‘realism’ is as simple as a notion of reality that admits, rather than excludes, its inherent heterogeneity. Bataille explains, in ‘The Deviations of Nature,’ another composition for Documents, how anomalies, aberrations, and deviations, in short – all that is abhorrent to the world in its representation of itself to itself – are either taxonomically excluded as belonging to the category of monstrosity, or absorbed and neutralised in the production of an acceptable homogeneity. In support of this point, he supplies the example of the composite photographs produced by Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century, in which a series of ‘analogous but different’ images of human faces are superimposed to create the image of a single face – the common measure and ideal of all.226 Ideal, because according to Georg Treu, in his 1914 study on 223 Stein, How Writing is Written, 7. Stein cites Cézanne’s ‘idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing’ as a catalyst in her stylistic development of what has often been perceived as flatness in her works.‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946,’ A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 15. Funnily enough, if we still believed in Hegel, we would have no trouble situating Steinian realism in the temporal twilight of history’s end (non-hierarchical inclinations aside, of course). 225 ‘What makes all of this very different from the nineteenth century is that the nineteenth century was still interested in causes and purposes and explanations. It was dominated, if not by evolution, under which everything, even if incomprehensibly, served some future purpose or other – contributed in some way to some far off divine event towards which the whole of creation moves at least by a sense of direction in history, whether Hegelien or Marxist or whatnot’. Donald Sutherland, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Twentieth Century,’ A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein. ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973), 151. 226 Georges Bataille, ‘The Deviations of Nature,’ Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 55. 224

composite photography, the composite image is always more beautiful than its component parts. Every individual harbours some kind of abnormality ‘and is, to a certain degree, a monster’: ‘On a practical level this impression of incongruity is elementary and constant: it is possible to state that it manifests itself to a certain degree in the presence of any given human individual. But it is barely perceptible’; ‘thus twenty mediocre faces constitute a beautiful face.’227 Bataille reinforces this notion by pointing out that if one were to do the same thing with ‘similarly sized’ pebbles, the result would be a sphere: ‘a common measure necessarily approaches the regularity of geometric figures’.228 One also detects the meddling interference of the ‘common measure’ in the ‘mathematical frock coats’ Bataille saw imposed on experience.229 Stein’s ‘direct description’, which is the force behind the composition of Tender Buttons, combats this notion of the common measure with a language that, by being attentive to each individual object in each of its individual moments, promises to reveal rather than repress the deviation inherent in each. Beneath the rhythmic copulation of passages such as the one given above from A Long Gay Book, in which logical difference is undone in the relation of everything to everything, there is another beat: a counter rhythm that nonpositively affirms non-logical difference in its insistence on the singularity of each moment. Listen: Anyone being one is one. Anything put down is something. Anything being down is something and being that things it is something and being something it is a thing and being a thing it is not anything and not being anything it is everything and being that thing it is a thing and being that thing it is that thing. Being that thing it is that thing and being that thing it is coming to be a thing having been that thing and coming to be a thing having been that thing it is a thing being a thing it is a thing being that thing.230 one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and 227 Ibid., 55. Ibid. 229 ‘Bataille, ‘Formless,’ Visions of Excess, trans. Allan Stoekl. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 230 Stein, A Long Gay Book, quoted in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 143. 228

one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one one and one and one and one…231 In the passage from which this last excerpt is taken, Stein is counting from one to one hundred, but in refusing the conventional method by means of which each digit is subsumed into its successors, she brings us the unique image and sound of each individual ‘one’.232 In other words, presenting the object of a description in terms of its unique existence in successive moments, she avoids the act of superimposition which yields the more pleasing, but less authentic, image of the common measure. When this technique, which looks rather mathematical when presented in terms of numerical figures, is applied to the flux of everyday reality, an egg, an umbrella, or a vegetable can be described something like this: VEGETABLE. What is cut. What is cut by it. What is cut by it in. It was a cress a crescent a cross and an unequal scream, it was upslanting, it was radiant and reasonable with little ins and red.233 MILDRED’S UMBRELLA A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss a restitution.234 EGGS. Kind height, kind in the right stomach with a little sudden mill. Cunning shawl, cunning shawl to be steady. In white in white handkerchiefs with little dots in a white belt all shadows are singular they are singular and procured and relieved.235 231 Stein, Useful Knowledge, 150-151. Do not be fooled by the apparent homogeneity of this unchanging string of ‘one’s. The deviation inherent in each beat is perhaps more noticeable in a comparison to the conventional form: one and one and one and one and one and one and one etc. one and two and three and four and five and six and seven etc. This numerical demonstration could be substituted for many of Stein’s exercises in ‘repetition’ (a necessary misnomer), however it is particularly instructive as it clearly charts the passing of time in a way that emphasises the notion of a continuous present moment. 233 Stein, Tender Buttons, 53. 234 Ibid., 13. 235 Ibid., 47. 232

With the lens that traditionally renders writing homogenous removed, every deviant form and its incarnating instant is documented and given value in-and-ofitself, without reference to a hierarchical framework.236 The result of this logic which says ‘a single image is not splendour’ and detects ‘a sign of more in not mentioned’ is the generation and celebration of an excess which manifests itself on all levels of the text.237 Each time ‘one and one and one…’ is said in the place of ‘one hundred’, a rebellion against form is taking place. As objects are exchanged into language they generate, like the sun, a superabundance of images, sounds, and words which obstruct the object’s crystallisation into its homogenous form.238 The articulation of significative discourse is the result of an implosion, and Stein, in revolt, attempts to explode the petrified forms of this articulation, to whip off the mathematical frock coats of words and expose, not a unified body, but a flood of distinctive and heterogeneous elements exploding out like an overstuffed sausage: ‘The kind of show’ that ‘is made by squeezing.’239 ‘A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS,’ the portrait with which Tender Buttons begins, is a poetic statement as much as a statement of the poem’s poetics: A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt colour and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.240 The opening sentence sets up three rough ‘pairs’: ‘a kind in glass’ and ‘a cousin’; ‘a spectacle’ and ‘nothing strange’; ‘a hurt colour’ and ‘an arrangement in a system to pointing’. Taking, as is often done, the ‘carafe’ which is a ‘blind glass’, to be an image of Stein’s language as a starting point, the rest can be decoded thus: Stein’s 236 ‘[T]he attribution of a real character to our surroundings is,’ according to Bataille, ‘as always, a mere indication of that vulgar intellectual voracity to which we owe both Thomist thought and present-day science.’ Georges Bataille, Human Face,’ Encyclopædia Acephalica, trans. Annette Michelson (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 102. 237 Stein, Tender Buttons, 12. 238 Bataille’s observation of the sun’s natural overproduction of energy would come to provide both a natural justification and constant reference point for his theory of expenditure (dépense), which has its fullest expression in The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988). 239 Stein, Tender Buttons, 21. (From the section poignantly entitled ‘OBJECTS’) 240 Ibid., 9.

language does not behave like ordinary language in that it does not provide a conventional mimetic reflection of what it is describing.241 Unlike a mirror, the convex glass of a carafe reflects an image by splintering and multiplying it, each refraction varying slightly depending on the angle at which it hits the glass. Because the reflections it generates are refracted, the carafe can never represent an object in its entirety unmediated by other visual ‘noise’, and in this, it is effectively ‘blind’. A ‘cousin’ of this ‘kind in glass’ is the mirror, which gives images as homogenous wholes and is symbolic of a tradition of mimetic realism. The refracting (visual) language of the carafe is a ‘spectacle’ while that of the mirror is ‘nothing strange’. Again, the former is ‘a single hurt colour’ (a line that Mitrano relates to the ‘dirt’ of Stein’s poetic language) and the latter ‘an arrangement in a system to pointing’.242 Following this line of thinking, the implications of the last two lines are easy to comprehend as an affirmation of what is to come next. This play between different articulations of glass thus provides a succinct deconstruction of the representational qualities of language, and sets the tone for the linguistic and semantic distortions that will come to characterise the rest of the poem. Furthermore, the juxtapositional structure of the opening line is configured around yet another Bataillean scission which pits, in the style of base materialism, a language allied to heterogeneity and materiality against its elevated counterpart.243 In sum, Stein’s ‘carafe’ language accentuates singularities, captures deviations and suppresses the generic element – which is to say that it works in the opposite way to traditional taxonomies. In light of this assertion, Tender Buttons can be read as a porous and volatile taxonomy, a de-forming taxonomy – a ‘kind in glass’ to the Documents Critical Dictionary, presenting, as does Bataille in ‘Mouth’ and ‘The Big 241 The carafe passage is interpreted by both Schwenger and Mitrano as indicative of Stein’s approach to language in Temder Buttons. Peter Schwenger, ‘Words and the Murder of the Thing’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Autumn, 2001); Mena Mitrano, ‘Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons”,’ Modern Language Studies, Vol. 28, No. (Spring, 1998). 242 ‘“Dirt… makes a color darker” also takes us back to the “hurt color” of the initial carafe and thus becomes a poetic name for Stein’s language, that which makes the shape of her text “so heavy” for those who read it without preventing them from hearing its melody easily’. Mena Mitrano, ‘Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons”,’ Modern Language Studies, Vol. 28, No. (Spring, 1998): 95. 243 The contention expressed in ‘DIRT AND NOT COPPER’ that ‘Dirt and not copper makes a colour darker. It makes the shape so heavy’ is played out for us here in the contamination and lowering the elevated term by the baseness of it low counterpart. Stein, Tender Buttons, 13.

Toe,’ an excessive vision of an unassimilable reality. It even contains an entry comparable, in an operational sense, to ‘Architecture’: A TABLE A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. It is likely that a change. A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall. A table means necessary places and a revision a revision of a little thing it means it does mean that there has been a stand, a stand where it did shake.244 Superficially, Tender Buttons possesses all the taxonomical requirements proper to a dictionary, encyclopaedia, or similar classificatory system. Stein seems to be providing some kind of domestic inventory, divided into three categories: ‘Objects’, ‘Food’, and ‘Rooms’. These categories (with the exception of ‘Rooms’ in which the architecture of headings begins to actively break down) are in turn divided into sub-categories, with titles such as ‘A BOX’, ‘A PIANO’, ‘A SHAWL’, ‘SAUSAGES’ etc, that appear to denominate the object involved in the descriptive passages they introduce. Like the Critical Dictionary, certain items have multiple entries and the excess of their repetitions only serves to undermine the authority of the overall structure.245 Nonetheless, the inferred relationship between a heading and the text that follows it is no guarantee of correspondence, and one can never know conclusively what the description is pertaining to. The parody of classificatory logic does not end here. Taxonomies are the arbiters of homogenous reality. Only a homogenous form can be represented by a name (i.e. by a common or proper noun). Cease dealing with homogenous reality and the necessity of naming disappears: the problem of language’s foundation on lack vanishes.246 244 Ibid., 26. It is somewhat treacherous, as has been explained, to over-interpret Stein’s words as I have done above for ‘A CARAFE….’ It is my intention to leave this passage to its own suggestiveness, save to point out the progression intimated from mirror (‘looking-glass’) to table, and to the stand taken against shaking. 245 Tender Buttons has double entries for ‘A BOX’, ‘MILK’, ‘CREAM’, ‘EATING’, and ‘SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE’, and triple entries for ‘POTATOES’, ‘CHICKEN’, and ‘ORANGE’ (not to mention multiple types of umbrellas). The Documents Critical Dictionary has double entries for ‘Spittle’, ‘Space’, ‘Angel’, and ‘Man’, a triple entry for ‘Metamorphosis’ and four ‘Eye’s. 246 Furthermore, in thwarting the normative authority of taxonomical logic, Tender Buttons contains an implicit criticism of hetero-normativity, which is redoubled in its subtext of coded images of homosexual desire.

Stein’s notorious aversion to nouns makes itself present in the most ingenious way in Tender Buttons, where she demonstrates how it is possible to say an object without uttering its name.247 In the poem’s descriptions, words tirelessly circle around their objects without ever displacing them. In reaction to the observation ‘What is the custom, the custom is in the centre’ Stein resolves to ‘Act so that there is no use in a centre.’248 Mitrano portrays the effect of these centreless evocations of heterogeneous reality thus: ‘Stein’s objects fade, drowned in the simultaneous impressions they generate the minute they cross the diegetic space of the text. In a description one must attribute a name, one must posit “identity or difference”. Stein suspends this rule by keeping the object before its name as long as she can’.249 The presentation of this manifesto against naming in dictionary-like form is irresistibly comic, and a trace of Stein’s laughter can be heard in the passage ‘EATING’: ‘Eating he heat eating he heat it eating, he heat it heat eating. He heat eating,’ which can be read as a consequence of the earlier passage ‘A TABLE’ which, in French, sounds a command that brings everyone to dinner: à table! 250 247 ‘People, if you like to believe it can be made by their names… generally speaking, things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns… As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known’. Gertrude Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ quoted in Walker, Jayne L.. The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), xiv. The censure of nouns also has to do with the creation of a restless language focused on verbs and participles. Stein makes the link between nouns and petrification in Hal Levy’s notes: ‘The English language has been thrust upon Americans. And it is wrong. As static and immobile as are the English, just so ever-moving are Americans. Here is a huge country. Not a mere island. Naturally people move. And they need a moving language. A language that can interpret American life. Noun and adjectives won’t express American life. They are too weak, too immobile. But verbs, adverbs, prepositions and the like, ah, they are moving, just as Americans’. Hal Levy’s notes on a lecture given by Stein in 1935, in How Writing is Written. ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), 8. Whence such wordplay as in ‘ROAST POTATOES. Roast potatoes for.’ Where and adjective disappears underneath a verb. Stein, Tender Buttons, 51. 248 Stein, Tender Buttons, 42, 63. 249 Mena, Mitrano, ‘Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons”,’ 89. 250 Stein, Tender Buttons, 56. ‘Gertrude herself was always giggling, an intellectual silver giggle, over her own stuff, sitting like a very wise Bodhisatva, legs crossed, in the Directoire sofa under her latest portrait by Pablo’. Arnold Rönnebeck, ‘Gertrude Was Always Giggling,’ Books Abroad, Vol. 18, No. 4 (October 1944): 4.

Against Edification: Philosophy’s Mad Double? Literature has become unbearable. In refusing sense it has revolted against the servility of Hegelian discourse and become sovereignly useless. The province of writing is now one of laughter, quacks, and ink stains. Perhaps it has become mad. Pierre Macherey, in The Object of Literature, makes the following interesting proposition concerning literature and philosophy: ‘Both projects appear to be defined by the same speculative experience: listening to a madman speaking, listening to a man whose way of speaking escapes conformist norms of ‘speaking properly’ and calls into question the normal, which therefore also calls ways of thinking into question. Could the writer be the philosopher’s madman?’251 With literature debased, could it act as the low term in a scission that divides literature from philosophy, and pull philosophy down? What kind of language does mad philosophy speak? Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s theory of délire, as he expresses it in Philosophy through the Looking-Glass, that is, as a type of mad speech made from an excess of sense rather than its deficit, would prove an intriguing lens through which such a debasement could be examined.252 Furthermore, the loss of self involved in this 251 In a passage that recalls the operation formless, Macherey goes on to observe that: ‘Literary writings exude thought in the same way that the liver produces bile; it is like an oozing secretion, a flow, or an emanation. All these terms evoke a continuous and gradual process which takes place insidiously at the level of a microscopic chemistry within the subtle parts of the textual organization and the cellular network that makes it up. The slowly accumulated speculative sap is stored and concentrated in inaccessible reservoirs of signification and therefore remains unnoticed for long periods; it is then disgorged, overflowing with intentions and surplus thoughts which make its manifestations excessive, even abusive. The alternating pattern of retention and discharge means that literary philosophy is always either in excess of or inadequate to its expression, which never adopts the regular form of a measured and reasoned argument whose effusions are tightly controlled. The same thing could be said without metaphors: insofar as it is inseparable from the forms of writing which actually produce it, literary philosophy is a form of thought without concepts that is not communicated through the construction of speculative systems which liken the search for truth to a form of proof. […] By producing such speculative effects, the work of literary writing opens up new prospects for philosophy, new fields of investigation that escape the strictly codified competence of professional philosophers. It reintroduces into the exercise of thought an element of play which, far from weakening its speculative content, encourages it, on the contrary to follow unknown paths. At this point, we begin to see the truly philosophical effect of literature, which breaks up all systems of thought.’ Pierre Macherey, The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 228, 232-233. 252 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, nonsense, desire. London: Hutchinson, 1985.

ecstatic way of speaking resonates with Bataille’s thought. Could the mad empiricism of Stein’s The Making of Americans as it was originally conceived be understood as délire?253 And have we really rid ourselves of Hegel – or is this all just a game? Evidently, there is much more to unsaid. But this is something for another beginning. Inconclusion Where are we now? What has happened here? Has anything been proven? Are we any wiser for what has just occurred? This is not an argument. What is it then? In ‘Method of Meditation’, and a Documents article entitled ‘Primitive Art,’ Bataille remembers his school days, when, instead of writing down his lessons in class as he was supposed to, he would smear the uniform of the boy sitting in front of him with ink. At other times, in order not to have to work, he would spend hours mimicking the act of writing, inscribing endless lines of scribble in his notebook.254 The funny thing is that this misbehaving child, on his stiff-backed chair in a drafty classroom at Épernay College near Rheims, had not the slightest notion that the mischievous gestures he was performing would come to symbolise and shape the work to which he would devote himself for the rest of his life, not to mention the work devoted to him by others. This image of the implements of writing rebelling against themselves neatly expresses the essence of the project against itself. Derrida 253 A diagnosis of madness is not as absurd as it first may appear to be. An unidentified reporter in The Science News-Letter, December 15th, 1934, speculates, along with the ‘Editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association’ and B. F. Skinner, as to whether Gertrude Stein deliberately chooses to write the ‘bewildering’ things she does, or if she is not rather suffering from a scientifically verifiable medical disorder: ‘Those familiar with such symptoms as automatic writing, palilalia, preservation and verbigeration are inclined to wonder whether or not the literary abnormalities in which she indulges represent correlated distortions of the intellect’. Gertrude Stein seems to have undergone a severe loss of self, there is no consistent speaking subject in her work, in which ‘there is seldom, if any, intelligent expression of opinion.’ ‘Mr. Skinner is convinced,’ the reporter concludes, ‘that this spontaneous automatic writing by Miss Stein is that of a second personality successfully split off from her conscious self, and unfortunately a personality without any background, intellectual opinions or emotions’.‘Writings of Gertude Stein Those of Woman Without Past,’ The Science NewsLetter, Vol. 26, No. 714 (December 15, 1934): 374. 254 Georges Bataille, ‘L’art primitif’ in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 252. ‘In those days I made my life difficult, because of not writing under dictation. The first words the teacher said used to form themselves docilely under my pen. I can still see my notebook as a child: soon all I did was scribble (I had to look like I was writing). Bataille, Method of Meditation, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, 85.

points out that sovereign writing, in the end ‘must assure us of nothing, must give us no certitude, no result, no profit. It is absolutely adventurous. It is a chance and not a technique’.255 The Critical Dictionary may tell us that ‘for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take form’.256 – Yet, academic practice, as it proliferates and multiplies ways of looking at the same texts, accreting and archiving its distortions, gives the impression that it is slowly multiplying itself into an excess which promises to deform the world it had originally set out to construct. In the dark corners of academic writing one may someday stumble upon the opening of a labyrinth woven itself from an Aridane’s thread. Instead of an argument, this is an act of getting lost. An ink stain. A burst of pure happiness which, losing its head in the labyrinth, hopes to steer the written world a little closer towards the impossibility of the formless. 255 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 273. ‘Technique’ is a reference to the way in which the Hegelian Slave transforms his world. 256 Bataille, ‘Formless,’ Visions of Excess, 31.

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