Abstract

Georges Bataille was desperately searching for a way to resist the normalizing ideologies of the twenties and thirties, and to parry the threat posed to "the spirit of revolt," which had constituted the most radical and best part of avant-garde political culture, in Bataille's view. In the thirties, these forms of revolt were in the process of being dismantled, a fact illustrated by the cooptation of surrealism to the market place in Paris, and the destruction of modernism in Germany. ;Bataille held that society was shaped by the value its members ascribed to death and eros. Bataille's criticism of bourgeois, communist, and fascist societies, therefore, stressed the way in which they responded to the horror of death, loss, and suffering, on the one hand, and ecstatic eroticism, on the other. Each sought, in different ways, to create taboos to repress the experience of death and replace them with highly normative, sadistic and repressive values that crushed any spirit of revolt and transgression. On the one hand, under fascism, the majority transferred their own frustrated erotic feelings onto the leader. By submitting to his will, the fascist gained a small degree of erotic empowerment, but at the cost of repressing his or her erotic instincts; these repressed instincts were then transferred into sadistic aggression directed against groups and movements like the Jews and modernism. On the other hand, in bourgeois societies, death and eroticism were repressed and denied by the governing class. Signs associated with repulsiveness and horror then were morally, politically, and economically censured in the name of normative values. ;To the extent that the communists accepted the ideal of the suppression of all suffering and loss , it, too, fell into the same normative way of thinking as bourgeois liberalism, and would simply replace class oppression with Stalinism. Bataille set for himself the task of finding the proverbial third alternative. He associated death with explosive eroticism that exceeds and destroys normative limits set by taboo, convention, and education. In the thirties, Marxism, though not Stalinism, still retained a destructive and transgressive aura vis a vis bourgeois society for Bataille. One of the things Bataille tried to do, therefore, was to enlist Marxism to this Bataillean world of transgression. ;In a world where "revolt" seemed less and less permitted, Bataille tried to salvage the flotsam of the anti-institution spirit. To the extent that we still hold to the efficacy of this spirit of revolt, are the problems of bourgeois normalization and fascist sadism, which Bataille noted, still festering among us?